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

Pete Mockaitis

Marshall, welcome back.

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

This is indeed me, the human Marshall version.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

That is coming.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay.

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

Zero.

Pete Mockaitis

There you go. Cool.

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah. Okay. Cool. All right.

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

On top of that.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

Give it feedback.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. You’re like, “No.”

Marshall Goldsmith

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

Okay, sure.

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

You can’t beat it.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

Well, you need to train it.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

By the way, equally good.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

That’s right.

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

Daily questions.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

Very similar principle.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis
Now there is a challenge.

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

All right.

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

Scott, welcome back.

Scott Young

Oh, thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Scott Young

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Scott Young

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

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

Scott Young

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scott Young

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

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

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

Scott Young

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Scott Young

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Scott Young

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

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

Scott Young

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Scott Young

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Scott Young

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Scott Young

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

That’s the top takeaway from this interview.

Scott Young

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Scott Young

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Scott Young

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Scott Young

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Scott Young

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Scott Young

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Scott Young

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Scott Young

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

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And a favorite book?

Scott Young

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Scott Young

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

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite habit?

Scott Young

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Scott Young

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Scott Young

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Scott Young

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Scott Young

Oh, yeah, thank you for having me back.

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

Eduardo Briceño
Great to be here, Pete. Thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to hear some of your insights and wisdom that you’ve captured in your book, The Performance Paradox: Turning the Power of Mindset into Action. But, first, I want to hear, talking about growth mindsets, wow, is it, in fact, true that you did not have any prior public speaking experience before you did your TEDx Talk?

Eduardo Briceño
That is true. And I would have never thought, I mean, becoming a public speaker, which I do now, it just didn’t even cross my mind growing up or in my young adult life, but I had started an organization, MindsetWorks with Carol Dweck and Lisa Blackwell, and a board member encouraged me to go out and have people get to know me and know who I was.

We were evangelizing growth mindset, and she thought that as part of that, I needed to kind of become a leader in the industry, and people needed to know who I was. So, I actually thought, “Hey, I don’t have time. I have so much work to do. I agree with you,” but when Carol Dweck was asked to do a TEDx Talk, she couldn’t do it.

So, then we decided, and I thought, “That would be a good opportunity to put a lot of work into 10 minutes. I can do 10 minutes. I can work really hard to prepare a great script and deliver it.” And so, I worked really hard with Carol and with others, and I was so nervous during those 10 minutes. I, the whole time, looked at the back wall and the lights and not at people’s eyes because I thought that I would just blank out if I tried to figure out what people were thinking.

So, that was my first public speaking experience was that TEDx Talk. And then that became pretty popular. It’s being over 4 million times now.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Yes, far more than the most TEDx Talks, and it’s featured prominently on the TED proper website. Well, it’s funny, I just rewatched that, and you didn’t look that nervous.

Eduardo Briceño
Yeah, I don’t know, that was surprising to me. I went on the stage, and I thought, “Okay, I’m prepared. I’ve done everything I can. And now, what’s going to help my performance is to relax. I know I’m not going to look at people, so I had a plan.” And that helped me be relaxed, and I was more relaxed than I would have thought.

And then, a few years later, four years later, I did another TEDx Talk that became a TED Talk, and that also has been viewed over 4 million times. And that was the basis for the book that I wrote, The Performance Paradox.

Pete Mockaitis
So, tell us, what’s the big idea in the The Performance Paradox?

Eduardo Briceño
The performance paradox is the counterintuitive fact that if we fixate solely on performing, our performance suffers. So often we’re really encouraging ourselves and others to just focus on executing, doing the best we know how, trying to minimize mistakes, and that hurts our performance. That is the counterintuitive fact, that is chapter one, is the problem, and the rest of the book is about the solution, how to overcome that problem.

Pete Mockaitis
And could you elaborate on the pathway? How is it that doing the same thing and trying not to make mistakes makes our performance worse?

Eduardo Briceño
Yeah. So, the best way to understand this is if we kind of step out of our everyday context and look at people who are fantastic at what they do, in domains where performance can be objectively measured, so sports, chess, performing arts, incredible acrobats. If you think about how an acrobat, for an example, what they do, when we see them perform, they do these incredible acrobatic things, they do it beautifully, and they rarely make mistakes.

And we tend to kind of have this vague idea that the way they became so good is by spending a lot of hours doing that thing that we are seeing. But actually, the way they become so good is by doing something very different from what we’re seeing. When they are behind curtains, at the gym or at the studio, they are making a lot of mistakes, they’re missing the timing a lot because they’re focused on what they haven’t mastered yet, they’re focused on the next level of challenge, and the show is always evolving.

And so, it’s the time they spend in what I call the learning zone, which is when they’re focused on improvement that allows them to build their skills and to be so excellent in the performance zone. Same thing in sports, if you’re playing a championship final, you’re having trouble with a move, you’re going to avoid that move during the match. But after the match, you go to your coach, you say, “Coach, I have to work on this move,” that’s a very different activity and area of attention than what we do during the match.

And what often happens for a lot of us is that we spend most of our time, if not all of our time, in the performance zone, just trying to get things done as best as we can, trying to minimize mistakes, and that works okay when we’re novices because we’re so bad, we don’t need great learning strategies to get better. But once we become proficient, we stagnate, we don’t continue to improve, and we think the reason is we can’t improve, that’s a fixed mindset, but the reason really is that we’re not engaging the learning zone.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s a really great distinction because I think some of the folks would say, “Well, of course, I’ve seen myself get better the more I do a thing. That’s sort of self-evident in my own experience.” And I love what you had to say there, like, “Well, yes, that works just fine when you are really clueless.”

Eduardo Briceño
Yeah, and it is amazing that we do learn that by experience. If I want to start to play tennis, I could go into the court and just play tennis with a friend, then I will get better. And so, we learn by experience that that’s the way to improve but then we stagnate once we become proficient, and then we conclude that we can’t get better. We develop a fixed mindset when we haven’t developed the skills and the habits in order to continue to improve and become excellent.

Like, if you look at an Olympic gold medalist, they’re the best in the world but they will then engage in deliberate practice to go beyond what they can do to continue to get even better. They don’t just play games and matches.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Eduardo, in a way, this is really haunting, as I think from a meta perspective of just podcasting. I think that was accurate for, maybe, I don’t know, several hundred, I don’t know, 300, 600, some number of hundreds of episodes, I think I got better just by doing more episodes and talking to folks. And then I have had a little bit of a sense of stagnation here.

And I thought it was just in my head, and I’ve heard people say, it’s like, “Oh, wow, you were pretty good when we started, and now you’re amazing.” I say, “Well, thank you. I appreciate that.” But I have felt like, “I don’t think I’m actually getting better at this,” and that just makes sense. Like, “Well, before, just doing it more times was sufficient to help me get better. And now, that is no longer sufficient to help me get better.”

And so, to use your terminology, if I were to enter the learning zone as a podcaster host, interviewer, what might be some activities I do other than just simply do one more episode?

Eduardo Briceño
Well, I have some ideas I can share but you know a whole lot about learning. So, tell me, what do you think you might do to get better?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think it’d be closely listening to some episodes and making some notes in terms of what I might have done differently. I think it could be closely observing some of the finest interviewers around to see what they’re doing. Ask for feedback and perspective from either coaches or masters of the craft, or listeners, it’s like, “Hey, Pete, I’ve heard you hundreds of times, and I have some thoughts.” But pete@awesomeatyourjob.com, lay them on me. Lay them on me, I’m listening. Thank you.

So, those are some things that leap to mind there.

Eduardo Briceño
Absolutely. Those are great ideas, and they are different than just doing episodes, and they don’t take a lot of time. And so, the great performers, whether athletes or others, they do watch their videos. Like, Beyonce watches videos of her performances after she performs, and identifies what to change and shares notes of that with her colleagues.

At ClearChoice Dental Systems, they do dental implants. They have video cameras in their consult rooms so that the people who work there, when they’re interacting with patients, after their consult, for the patients that agree to this, that agree to be recorded for this purpose, they can watch the videos afterwards and go to a particular part of the conversation that they were working on and watch themselves, and kind of think about what they can do differently and how what they tried work or didn’t work.

And one thing that they say that I love is that…sometimes when we receive feedback, feedback is amazing, feedback, I think is the most powerful learning-zone strategy in the workplace but, sometimes, especially for some people, when we receive feedback, we might reactive defensively and think, “This person doesn’t know what they’re talking about, or they didn’t really see what I saw,” but what they say is that video always tells the truth.

So, if you listen to your recording and reflect on it, and it doesn’t have to be the whole thing, it can be just how you started the recording, or how you end it, or a particular part of it, then that’s a fantastic way to think about, “Okay, like what can I do differently next time?” And one key thing, when we’re going about our work, is in order to improve, we have to change. Like, we can’t improve and not change.

So, if we do the same thing today than we did yesterday, we’re not going to get better, so we have to always be thinking about, “What is something that I can try differently?” And for that, like you said, we can observe experts, whether they are other podcasters, or we can read books, or listen to podcasts to get ideas, and identify, “Okay, what can I try differently?” and then feedbacking whatever form, like you said, is a fantastic, fantastic powerful strategy.

Pete Mockaitis
Another fun thing about that, the notion of that distinction there, is that when you’re new doing anything helps you get better, then you have to get precise. It seems like that’s analogous to what happens in physical training as well. It’s like when you’re out of shape, walking anywhere, lifting anything improves your fitness but then, at some point, that’s just not going to cut it.

Bringing the groceries from your trunk to the kitchen isn’t going do, and we need to get sort of more precise with a deliberate practice and learning in terms of, “I’m going to need to lift this level of weight this many times, in this kind of emotion in order to get an adaptation because the easy gains have already been grabbed.”

Eduardo Briceño
Absolutely. And there’s another benefit to that, which is that when we are kind of just doing and exploring an idea, an activity, and tinkering with it, just kind of doing it, we can play with it, we can try it out, we can see if we would enjoy it. And that is really important because it kind of doesn’t make sense to engage in deliberate practice and put a lot of effort into improving into something that we are not going to enjoy and that is not important to us.

So, early in our process, kind of trying an activity, playing with it, tinkering with it, is a way to improve but also it’s a way to explore whether it’s something we want to do and get better at.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I already love this stuff in terms of, “Yeah, ooh, what are some fun ways I could spend some more time in the learning zone? And what might I be doing while I’m there?” I suppose, fundamentally, in order for anyone to have any motivation whatsoever to spend some time in the learning zone, they have to believe that learning and growth is possible, and so you spend much time sharing the wisdom of the growth versus fixed mindset. For folks who are not as familiar with that, could you give us, like, the super quick crash course?

Eduardo Briceño
Yeah, absolutely. So, for those who have heard of the term growth mindset, I ask you to think about what it means to you. What do you think it means? Because when we ask what it means, even for people who have kind of been tinkering with it for a long time, people often say things, like, “It’s working hard or it’s persevering, or even is having a positive attitude, or is being open-minded.” And a growth mindset is none of those things.

A growth mindset is a perspective about the nature of human beings, specifically it’s the belief that people can change, that we can change and that other people can change, that our abilities or our qualities are malleable, that we can develop them. And the reason that’s important is that lots of research has shown that when we believe that we can change and that others can change, then we do the things that are necessary in the learning zone in order to improve, if we know how the learning zone works, which is another key component.

But if we don’t believe that we can change, then we’re never going to do anything to change, we won’t change, and we will confirm our fixed mindset. Similarly, if we believe that somebody else can’t change, we’re not going to share any information with them that they can learn from, so they won’t know to do anything, they won’t change, and that will create a self-fulfilling prophecy and confirm our starting belief.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, the opposite of a growth mindset is a fixed mindset, to believe that rather than things being changeable and growable, that, “Hey, you’re either good at this or you’re bad at this.” Like, “I’m just not a math person,” whatever. I’d love to get your perspective. Sometimes maybe I’m a little sleep-deprived, maybe a little stressed, and I’m interacting with something that’s tricky. I’m thinking like assembling furniture, and I get frustrated, and I feel like I’m stupid, or like I’m a loser, and I don’t like feeling that way.

And I know from all this stuff, like, “Oh, Pete, it sounds like you’re engaging in fixed mindset-type thinking, a type evaluation of this stuff,” and I’d rather not. I guess I’m curious, if we’re generally on board, like, “Yeah, growth mindset, that’s real. I generally believe that,” and yet we find ourselves drifting into thought patterns that sound more fixed mindset-y, any pro tips for how we can, I don’t know, install the growth mindset all the more deep down in our operating system so it’s alive and well and kicking and dominating?

Eduardo Briceño
So, the first thing is to acknowledge that we all experience a fixed mindset some of the time, just like you described, and a fixed mindset is part of being human. We see sometimes some abilities as fixed, or some people as fixed, and that is normal. And the really important thing to do is to notice it, like you are, and saying, “Oh, I am thinking that I can’t get better at this right now.”

And we might react with an emotional response right away, but we can observe it, let it kind of put a little bit of distance, pause a little bit, and think about, “Can I get better at this?” or, “Can I examine my mistake, to learn from my mistake?” or, “What different strategy can I use? What learning-zone strategy can I use to get better at this?”

And so, pausing, noticing our fixed mindset, and thinking about, “What can I do in the learning zone in order to improve if that’s something that I want to do?” It doesn’t mean that we should try to get better at everything. It means that whatever we do want to get better at, we can figure out what strategies are effective for that and engage in those strategies.

Pete Mockaitis
So, if I’m assembling furniture and it’s not going well, I can choose to be, like, “This is not an area, an endeavor of activity or skill that I am going to choose to really invest big in and master. I can just let that go, and that’s fine.” And, at the same time, if it’s like, “If I feel…” Well, maybe this is a broader question for all sorts of learning activities. When you’re in the midst of doing something that is hard and not going well, and you’re screwing up, and you’re frustrated, and you feel dumb, what should we do?

Eduardo Briceño
Well, say that you’re in the situation you described, that you’re trying to assemble furniture, you’re getting frustrated. You said you’re sleep-deprived, you’re tired. You can think about that maybe in the moment, if you can, maybe pause. But, at some point, when we reflect, we can think about, “First of all, what is most important to me? Why am I assembling furniture? Is that important to me? Like, is it that I want to have a beautiful home? Or, is it that I want to kind of update my couch? And why am I trying to do that? Am I trying to foster a feeling of kind of calm in my home? And how can I get better at that?”

So, sometimes what happens is that we get frustrated with mid-level goals or low-level goals, like assembling furniture, that might or might not be important to you. Sometimes we can quit at those things if that’s a better way to achieve a higher-level goal, like achieving calm, or achieving an uncluttered space, if that’s important to you.

Or, sometimes that might be the right way. It might be, “I can get better at assembling furniture, and that’s something that I want to do. It’s going to make me feel good.” But part of the answer might be, “Okay, I am sleep-deprived. Like, should I be changing my sleeping habits? Should I be going to bed earlier? Should I approach my mornings differently?” So, what is leading to my challenge right now rather than only focusing on the immediate challenge, thinking about, “What’s most important to me and what are different ways that I could get better at that most important goal?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, in so doing, you’re learning about something. You’re making some learnings and improvements on a thing that’s even more important and broader-reaching.

Eduardo Briceño
Yes, sometimes people associate growth mindset with grit or being persistent, which there’s definitely a close association, but it doesn’t mean that we need to be gritty around everything we’re doing. It means we want to be gritty and most growth-minded about the goals that we most care about, and so we need to identify what are those goals.

There’s something in psychology called the hierarchy of goals, which is like a pyramid. And at the top is what we care most about, and at the bottom is our low-level strategies around the things we do. And so, to go up the pyramid, we ask why we care. And to go down the pyramid, we ask how. And we want to be most gritty and most growth-minded about the highest-level goals because, then, our answer and how we get better at those things might be different than what we’re currently attempting.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool to get a broad perspective and not get too fixated on something that maybe doesn’t matter all that much. Okay. Well, when it comes to mistakes, you say these can really propel our growth, and you’ve categorized four kinds of mistakes. Could you lay these out for us?

Eduardo Briceño
Yeah. So, I think most of us have a sense that we can learn from mistakes but, first, most of us don’t realize how important mistakes are. So, when we are in our mid-20s, the way the neuroplasticity in our brain works changes. Before our 20s, our brain changes based on experience. We walk around the street, we observe things, and our brain is reconfiguring.

In our 20s, the brain doesn’t do that as much from then but the main way that we can drive our neuroplasticity and become smarter and more capable is actually by making mistakes, is by when the brain makes a prediction, and that prediction turns out to be wrong, that’s the main way that we can proactively elicit our own neuroplasticity. That’s how important mistakes are.

But, on the other hand, so mistakes are really important, but also, mistakes lower performance. Great performances are performances where we don’t make a lot of mistakes. Like, right now, you and I are having a conversation, it’s a conversation about learning so I’d be comfortable making mistakes but, in general, like we want to not say things that are not true and not make mistakes if we are performing for others, to try to add value to others.

And so, how do we reconcile that, that mistakes are valuable but, also, they lower performance? And so, I unpack four different kinds of mistakes. That’s what chapter five is about. And so, the first, there’s the stretch mistakes, which are the mistakes that we make when we are trying to do things we haven’t mastered yet, when we are in our learning zone. And those are mistakes that are super valuable, we want to be doing a lot of those mistakes. We want to elicit those mistakes, not by trying to do things incorrectly but by trying to do things that are challenging.

But we want to try those things when mistakes are not going to create a lot of damage. So, the second type of mistake is the high-stakes mistakes, which are the mistakes that would create a lot of damage. So, if we are driving a school bus, we don’t want to make a mistake. If we’re in charge of a nuclear plant, or if we’re packing a parachute, we want to do what we know works and minimize mistakes. And that’s when we’re in the high-stakes mistakes, we want to get into our performance zone and sometimes not worry about learning at all because the stakes are too high.

The third type of mistake is the sloppy mistakes, which are when we do things that we already know how to do, and we should’ve known better. And often when we make these mistakes, first of all, often they’re not that important or they might not be important at all, and I think these mistakes can bring kind of joy and humor to our lives. Like, if I spill a smoothie all over my shirt, and I’m home, I can either choose to get upset or I can laugh about it, and I can take a picture of it and send it to my family and friends, which is what I often do.

And so, I think mistakes can bring joy and humor to our lives, but sometimes sloppy mistakes do cause damage. And so, we can reflect on, “How can I avoid the sloppy mistake in the future?” And often, when we reflect on that, the answer is there are ways to foster more focus or to change our systems and tools in order to avoid those mistakes. I could change where in my desk I put the smoothie so that I don’t spill it, for example.

And the final kind of mistakes is the aha-moment mistake, which is when we do something as we intended but we then realize it was the wrong thing to do because we have an aha moment. So, for example, my wife might be upset about something, I might calm and try to console her, and problem-solve with her, and then I might learn that she didn’t want me to problem-solve. She just wanted me to empathize and to be there with her.

And so, I did what I meant to do but I realized it was the wrong thing to do. And aha-moment mistakes are precious. When they happen, we need to just learn from them, reflect on them, and extract their precious gifts, but we can’t proactively elicit aha-moment mistakes so much, although we can, by soliciting more feedback, but the stretch mistakes are really what we can proactively drive by doing things that are challenging and changing the way we do things.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fun. And it is so true that the sloppy mistakes can bring joy and humor to our lives. In fact, I don’t think this Twitter exists anymore, which is a darn shame. But this theme exists, like, on Reddit and some places, that you had one job. And it’s just all about just ridiculous mistakes. Like, one of my favorites was the SpongeBob SquarePants episode description, like on Netflix or something, but they had this really dark murder mystery description, and then the caption is like, “Oh, I must’ve missed that SpongeBob episode.” And it just tickles me something special.

And, yes, that is fun, and we can celebrate that. And, particularly, I think that learning zone/performing zone distinction is so handy there in terms of, “Oh, yes, we’re learning now. and, boy, that is goofy and hilarious.” Well, you and I, we’re both friends and fans of Mawi Asgedom. Shoutout, episode number one. And I remember we were trying to name a company that we had started together by just combining words. And I think one of them was so just goofy, Dolphin Secrets, so I just made these memes out of that because it’s goofy, and that’s okay.

And I think, well, you lay it on me, is it fair to say that when we can laugh and be relaxed, and take joy and humor and lightheartedness about mistakes, will that actually help us learn faster and better?

Eduardo Briceño
Yeah, because we can observe them better, we can talk about them better, we can also avoid kind of getting triggered and having, like, a fear, an away-reaction from them. So, absolutely, in general, positive emotions help us learn. Like, sometimes, stress can be helpful, too, especially if it’s not chronic or like super high, but positive emotions can help us engage in the learning process.

And, at the end of the day, again, what is the highest goal? I think, for me, a highest goal is, like, happiness, fulfillment, and appreciation. I want to appreciate life. I want to enjoy life. So, not only is laughing about mistakes helping me learn, it’s also helping me enjoy life, which is even more important.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, anything else when it comes to learning that you want to help distinguish, clarify, myth-debunk, things that we should know when we’re in the learning zone to get the most out of it?

Eduardo Briceño
Well, there are a lot of things we could talk about. One is that sometimes we think about growth mindset or learning zone as something that is about the individual quality, is about us fostering the beliefs and the habits in our brain and in our bodies to be motivated and effective learners.

And there’s a lot of truth to that but we are social beings, and so we need to build cultures and teams and relationships where we can engage in the learning zone together because, at the end of the day, these beliefs about whether people can change are highly influenced by each other, by the people who are around me. What messages are they sending? What behaviors? Are they acting like lifelong learners or are they acting like know-it-alls? That affects my beliefs and it affects my habits.

And so, we need to kind of talk about these things with our colleagues, and think about, “Is the learning zone something that we’re doing well or not doing well? Can we get better? What do we want to work on?” and do it in collaboration because, at the end of the day, we learn a lot better in collaboration with others than on our own. More brains think better than one brain. We have different experiences, different skills, different tactics, different tools, different perspectives, we can see things from different angles, we can give and receive feedback.

And so, what I would encourage people to think about is what habits can you work on as you’re on your own, but also can you bring others into your process and build relationships that are going to lead to better learning and better performance.

Pete Mockaitis
Fantastic. And can you walk us through the growth propeller concept?

Eduardo Briceño
Sure. The growth propeller are the five elements that each of us can think about continuing to develop in order to become fantastic learners and performers. So, picture a propeller with three blades, and in the center of the propeller, the axis, there are two components: our identity and our purpose.

And in terms of our identity, sometimes in terms of a fixed mindset, we might see ourselves as fixed in a particular way, like, “I’m just a natural parent,” for example, “And that’s part of my identity,” “I’m a flawless athlete,” or, “I’m a natural athlete.” And that can get in the way of learning. But what we can do, and what’s most important around the identity, is to develop the identity of being a learner, being somebody who evolves over our lives, and it’s always continuing to change. So, once we can incorporate that into our identity, we’re a lot more effective as learners.

In terms of purpose, having a reason why we do things, why we care about improvement and performance, is really important because both learning and performing involve effort. And so, why are we going to spend that effort? Why do we care? So, developing that purpose as an individual and with our colleagues is something that is necessary in order for us to become great learners and performers.

The three blades are, one is our beliefs, the other ones are habits, and the other one is our community. So, in terms of beliefs, a really important belief that we’ve talked about is growth mindset versus fixed mindset. Another belief is transparency. We learn and perform a lot better when we make our thinking transparent to others because, then, they can give us feedback, they can learn from what we’re thinking.

And so, the fact that transparency is something we want more of, and we want to share more of ourselves, is something we can kind of think about. Also, agency, “To what extent do we have influence over our world rather than are we victims of the world?” is something else to think about in terms of beliefs.

In terms of habits, sometimes we think about growth mindset as something that is about learning from mistakes. So, when we make a mistake, “Do we learn from them?” That’s a very reactive or responsive habit. What I would encourage people to think about is, “Can you develop more proactive habits where changing is the default?” So, what are you doing every day in order to drive your own change and your own evolution?

And, for me, an example, a very simple example that is really powerful for me is, every morning, I remind myself of what it is that I’m working to improve, and that just primes the growth mindset. I am looking for opportunities to do that throughout the day, and it’s super powerful. And then, in terms of community, we need to build trust, we need to build a sense of belonging, and we need to work on collaboration rather than competition in order to both kind of learn and perform.

And so, the growth propeller is chapter seven, and it talks about those five components. And so, the part of the community blade is about the relationships we have with others. So, part two of the book, chapters eight through twelve, is about how we do that in our workplaces, how we build teams in organizations, that make learning the easy default.

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

Eduardo Briceño
Well, I would just mention I really appreciate your podcast, Pete, and just your focus on learning, the workplace, makes the world a better place. It’s awesome to be on the podcast a second time. So, thanks for all you do.

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

Eduardo Briceño
Yeah, the quote I have at the bottom of my email is, “The self is not something one finds. It’s something one creates,” by Thomas Szasz.

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

Eduardo Briceño
Sure. There are many. One is, there’s a meta-analysis from Harvard that looked at 62 research studies that looked into, “How much medical doctors improve in their patient outcomes the more years of experience they have in the profession?” And what they found is that, on average, medical doctors got worse over time. Their patient outcomes became worse because they were so busy in the performance zone, seeing patients, diagnosing, prescribing, and most of them, on average, don’t engage in the learning zone on a regular basis.

And so, as a result, they forget information that’s relevant to infrequent diagnoses, for example, and that decreases their performance. But, of course, there are some doctors that do get better over time. But this points to the difference between experience and expertise. Experience is something we just get by doing an activity a lot. And expertise is something that we build through the learning zone, and that can happen at any age.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Eduardo Briceño
Favorite book, Mindset by Carol Dweck really changed my life. The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama changed my life as well. I’m reading a wonderful book right now, it’s called The Clan of the Cave Bear, which is about prehistoric humans. It’s super interesting.

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

Eduardo Briceño
I love Roam Research. It’s a second-brain tool, whereas my knowledge management system tool, there’s a lot of other second-brain tools now. And I also love Otter. When I listen to podcasts, I download the MP3 and I upload it to Otter which transcribes it, and I listen to it through there. And what I love about that is that I can highlight kind of gems in the conversation. And after I listen to the episode, I can kind of do something with that. Either put it in my knowledge management system or send it to somebody else who would appreciate it, for example.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Eduardo, that is walking the talk. That is hardcore and I love it. Thank you. And a favorite habit?

Eduardo Briceño
Well, I mentioned one of reminding myself every morning of what I’m working to improve. Before that, the first thing that I do every day is my most treasured habit, and it is just expressing gratitude for the things that I deem most important, which is life, health, love, and peace. Noticing one of those things that are in my life and in the world just puts me in a great emotional state and makes me grateful to be alive and for what is.

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

Eduardo Briceño
If we fixate on performance, our performance suffers. That’s the performance paradox.

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

Eduardo Briceño
So, my monthly newsletter is on my website, which is at Briceño.com, my last name, dotcom. I’m also active on LinkedIn. And my book is called The Performance Paradox: Turning the Power of Mindset into Action. I worked really hard the last three years to write all the things that we talked about today. So, that’s another way to learn more about my work.

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

Eduardo Briceño
My challenge would be to, “Can you engage in the learning zone a little bit more with others? Could you start a conversation with your colleagues about whether you want to continue to progress in your learning zone habits together and what you want to work on next, that you can bring other people into collaboration with you to learn and perform and accelerate that over time together?”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Eduardo, this has been a treat. I wish you much good learning and performing.

Eduardo Briceño
Thank you so much, Pete. It’s been great to speak with you.

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

Abby Marks-Beale
Thanks for having me, Pete. Much appreciated.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about speedreading with you. We’ve only covered this like once or twice before out of nearly 800 interviews. So, I know there’s much more goodness to share. But I want to start with hearing you say you used to hate reading. What’s the story?

Abby Marks-Beale
So, I think a lot of people feel that way, that when you’re in elementary school, it’s like so great that you can read some fiction and stories are great. And then you get into middle school and high school, and they make you read these nasty textbooks that aren’t fun, there’s no pictures or not many pictures, and things that you have to learn.

So, I got turned off to reading at about that time. I used to love it until I was like in seventh grade, and then it just wasn’t fun anymore. And then I hated it until after college. And it was the kind of thing that was like I never understood why anyone in their right mind would read a newspaper on a regular basis. And I was just averse to reading. Period.

And so, I majored in Spanish in college, which helped because I could read word by word, and it was okay. And so, the comprehension part and such was just a very different animal at that time. So, yeah, I used to hate to read but I learned through a job that I got soon after college, having my degree helped to get this job, that this is not hard to do. This is something that can be learned, and it’s just a set of strategies, strategic things that people can do to become better, smarter, more effective readers.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so I’m intrigued, when it comes to we can be better, stronger, more effective, faster, can you maybe lay out, like what’s possible in terms of just for normal professionals as opposed to, I don’t know, I’m thinking about memory champions or world record speed readers? Like, what could be possible for us in terms of, “Well, hey, I’ve been reading my whole life and I’m going fine”? What are we missing out on?

Abby Marks-Beale
So, you think it’s going fine but for some people it’s not. It’s like, “I know how to read but I don’t like to read.” There’s this thing that I talk about called your reading attitude. Everybody has one. It’s kind of like…and I say fill in the blank with this, “I am a blank reader.” And I start off all my programs that way, and it basically, if you can put in the word, like, “I am a good reader,” “I’m an avid reader,” “I’m a voracious reader,” those are all like really good positive terms, and that means that reading is something that you will do and you find it valuable, and it doesn’t waste your time, and it typically doesn’t make you fall asleep, and you don’t re-read a lot.

But others that put in the words like, “I’m a bad reader,” “I’m a slow reader,” “a distracted reader,” any of the words that are more negative means that they look at reading like the plague. It’s like, “It’s going to waste my time. It’s going to be boring. I’m going to fall asleep. I’m not going to understand it. I’m going to have to re-read.”

And so, what I aim to help people understand is that they can be much more confident about who they are as readers just by having some strategies. And even if they think they’re really good readers, which they probably are, they can still learn a few more because we haven’t had training since elementary school, pretty much. Most people haven’t taken classes or upgraded their skills. It’s like, “Here’s the words, folks. Go at it.” And that’s pretty much what they gave to us, and then we had to figure out how to manage the reading workload from there on.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I guess I’m thinking about my own story. I think I’m a fine reader. I enjoy reading things. Sometimes I do need to re-read or I do seem slow, to my own judgment, I guess. I don’t know. I haven’t timed it recently. And so, tell us, just what is possible? What sort of benefits or magic is on the other side of mastering this skill?

Abby Marks-Beale
The Rich Habits Institute, did a study about reading habits of the wealthy. And it talks about, and I’m just going to read to you a couple of the percentages. Eighty-six percent of the wealthy loved to read, 85% of the wealthy read two or more educational books every month, 88% of the wealthy read 30 minutes or more each day, and 63% of the wealthy listen to audiobooks or podcasts during their commute to work.

So, for any of your audiences thinking, “Oh, how can I make more money at what I do?” the more that you read, and I encourage more nonfiction, things that are going to make you better at who you are and what you do, that those, when applied, are going to be incredibly helpful for your life and your career. So, I agree that the more that you read, I think, the tendency to make more money is definitely there.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s good. Thank you, Abby.

Abby Marks-Beale
It’s about feeling more confident about who you are as a reader, if you need that. It’s about having certain strategies to apply. So, some people think that when you learn how to read faster, everything has to be read fast but that’s not true. It’s about creating a gear shift. And I use this concept of five gears, and I show my hands.

So, imagine your hand, you look at your hand, on your hand you have five fingers, which are basically five gears, and gear one is your thumb, and gear two is your pointer finger, three, four, and five appropriately, keep going. So, that’s five gears. Most people are stuck in gears one and two because they don’t know how to get into gears three, four, and five. So, it’s about becoming more efficient, more effective, depending…

Like, if you’re reading something you’re very familiar with, you shouldn’t be in gear one or two. You should be able to get into, minimally, three, and definitely possibly four, depending on why you’re reading something and what you need it for. And so, it’s about… I call it active, mindful, and conscious. Those are the three things that I don’t think readers are when they read. They’re like, “Oh, here I am, my eyes are going to hit the page, and I’m going to hope that I understand what it says.” And it’s very much a conscious process, at least the way that I teach it, and the way that I do it, and the people that learned from me do it.

it’s not going so fast that you don’t understand or, as Woody Allen said, “It’s reading War and Peace in five minutes, and it’s a book about Russia.” That’s like the worst quote and I use it all the time because I hate it but it’s something that people can relate to.

But I want to give you my definition of speedreading because it’s different than other people that teach speedreading. So, it’s a set of active, mindful, and conscious strategies that allow you to get what you need quickly from any reading material in an efficient and an effective manner. So, it’s not about going so fast that you don’t understand. That’s called speed-looking not speedreading. And so, it’s being efficient and effective, active, mindful, and conscious.

Pete Mockaitis
And can you define what is your one, two, three, four, five?

Abby Marks-Beale
So, there’s different speeds. It’s basically gear one and two, they’re anywhere from about 100 to maybe 250-300 words a minute. That would be gears one and two. And then gears three, four, and five are anywhere from like 300-350 all the way up to 1250-1500 depending on what you can do. So, that’s not like wicked fast, although for some people it sounds that way. And the average reading speed of most people that haven’t had training is around 250.

So, if you think about, okay, if they’re in gear one and two, that’s around 250. Then if they could get into gear three, four, or five, they could easily go the other way, which could be 800 or 1000 words per minute when appropriate using certain strategies. So, it’s about using the gear shift, just like your car, like sometimes when there’s traffic, you got to slow down. And when it’s on the open highway, you can go into fifth gear. It’s about knowing what’s on your radar, what’s in front of you, what do you need to know, how much do you already know.

Like, okay, for example, I work with lawyers or doctors sometimes, and I teach them how to read better and faster, I say, “Look, I’m not a lawyer, I’m not a doctor, you guys know you have background knowledge that I don’t have. We could sit down with the same study,” they’re reading a study, or they’re reading a legal document, and they’re going to read it probably faster with much better comprehension than I will because I don’t have the background knowledge. You need to have the understanding of the vocabulary, of the concepts, the structure. They have that, which I don’t.

But put them into my world, reading educational material, reading speedreading material things, like I know how to get through that stuff a lot better and faster than they probably can. So, it’s about your background knowledge, too.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then, well, quadrupling the reading speed sounds magically enticingly powerful in terms of what might be possible for just like slamming through an email inbox, or looking through reports, or doing research. Being able to pull that off four times as fast can mean going home early, or having time to do more fun, strategic work, or the people development stuff that is being neglected. So, are you saying that it is, in fact, possible via practice and strategy to read at four times the average speed, if we’re 250, to go to 1000 plus without losing comprehension?

Abby Marks-Beale
As long as you have, number one, the background knowledge, you know what it’s talking about, you’re familiar with it, and, number two, that you’re using the right strategy for the right reason. And so, two things I want to say. One is that in order to get into those gears of four and five, what you’ll find is that you have to use a tool.

And the tools that I talk about are using your hands or a card to read but you have to find something to put on, either your screen or your paper, that’s going to help you track your eye movements because your eye movements, they get tired just going across the lines and back to the beginning, and across the line and back to the beginning. But if you have something moving on your page or on your screen, you’re able to follow it much faster.

And, for me even, to get into those higher gears of four or five, I have to use my hands or a white card to read with. And so, that, for some people is just really uncomfortable because they’re not used to doing it, and I explain that, yeah, it is uncomfortable at first, but once you get the habit, you’re sold on it because that is how you get to those higher gears.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that sounds easy.

Abby Marks-Beale
It is.

Pete Mockaitis
I just get a notecard and move it fast, and that’s all you got to do, Abby. Is that what we’re saying here?

Abby Marks-Beale
So, yes but, yes but, the white card, this is my favorite thing to share with people. It’s called the white card method. It’s taking a blank white card or the back side of a business card that’s blank, or a blank piece of white paper, like that, just as I’m seeing it, not everyone is seeing that, but, yes, a blank white card. And if you have like a magazine, newspaper, a book, whatever in front of you, most people would put that card underneath the line that they’re reading, and they would put it below.

And it’s just a natural thing because when we’re learning how to read, that’s where you would put it because you want to leave exposed what you’ve just read so that if you feel uncomfortable, you can go back and re-read it. But as the adult reader, the more skilled reader, you’re blocking where you’re going and leaving available what you’ve already read, which means you can go back. It’s something called regression. You don’t want to go back and re-read things.

So, to use the card effectively, it must go above the first line that you’re reading so it pushes you down and it blanks out or blacks out what you’ve already read so the tendency to go backwards is a whole lot less. You can still pick up the card if you lost your place but it’s really meant like, “Here, let’s keep it going, let’s go straight down,” and it’s very, very effective.

Pete Mockaitis
Interesting. Okay. So, I’m not cutting out a window pane but rather I’m blocking that which I have already read and bringing it down and…

Abby Marks-Beale
You’re covering what you’ve already read and leaving open what you haven’t read.

Pete Mockaitis
So, that means the notecard border edge margin is above my line, my active line.

Abby Marks-Beale
Correct. Yes. You got it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, tell me, all I gotta do is get my card, put it at the top, bring it down at a pace four times what I normally do, and, bam, I’m speedreading and that’s all it takes?

Abby Marks-Beale
It’s not necessarily just go four times. You build to that. You start wherever you start, you have a starting point, and then you try that strategy as well as there’s other strategies I teach called keywords and phrases. So, how do you pick up all those words that you’re going over pretty quickly with your hands or a card.

And so, being able to know that one word at a time is not the most efficient, but finding the bigger, more important words in the text is important, finding phrases, groups of words that form thoughts. Imagine throwing thoughts back to your brain at one time instead of one word at a time. The brain loves that. It’s just that it’s about active, mindful, conscious strategies. You stay awake when you read now because you’ve put yourself into a thinking place. I call it a quiet place.

You’ve set yourself up for learning or reading success. You could learn all this stuff in my program, put yourself in a really noisy place, it’s going to be really hard to focus. But if you can get your environment the way you like it to get the concentration you need, then you add all these different things. It’s magical. And it doesn’t mean laying in bed, I hate to say.

It’s like sitting up at a desk or a table, a place that we’ve been conditioned to work. It could be kitchen table. Your work desk may not be the best unless you’re reading webpages because there’s too much to do at your desk. There’s the phone, and there’s email, and there’s to-dos that pop up, and dingers and whatever. It’s like you want to move to a quieter place if you can.

For those that work in offices, go to a conference room or a cafeteria off hours. For those that are entrepreneurs and work from home, just get out of your office to a quieter cleaned-off desk, table, kitchen table, dining room table, but avoid the LA-Z-BOY chair unless you don’t really care if you get too comfortable.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then with these phrases, does that mean…I’ve heard the term subvocalize, which means I am reading each word inside my mind’s ear, like your bio, “She has taught thousands to build reading confidence and competence through the knowledge of simple yet powerful active reading strategies.” So, am I not doing that when I’m rocking at the 1000 plus words per minute level?

Abby Marks-Beale
Subvocalization, first of all, know that a lot of people have it because we’ve learned, at least here in the United States, that we’ve learned to sound it out, hear it in your head, called phonics, that’s how we’ve learned. And so, when you learned how to read, they didn’t tell you by the time you had a good sight vocabulary about seventh or eighth grade that you don’t need to do that anymore, and so you just kept doing it.

And so, we have this mental whispering that goes on in the head, and it’s hard to get rid of completely, so I tell people, “Don’t expect it to be gone but the faster you read, the less you can do it because you can only read about 150 to 200 words a minute out loud quickly.” And if you’re reading at 250 or 300 even as your base level, you’re not reading every single word. And so, you’ll read less, mentally whisper less the faster you go, and as long as you’re understanding what you’re reading, it doesn’t matter.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so that’s just kind of mind-blowing in terms of…

Abby Marks-Beale
Yes, it is, isn’t it?

Pete Mockaitis
…that if I am reading but I’m not hearing each word in my head, although I talk kind of fast and I read words in my head fast when I talk, so I think I am probably around 250-ish. Average sounds about right. I’ve tested it back in the day, and I think it’s been about the same for a good long while. So, then I guess I’m a little, I don’t know, spooked.

My vision is like I’m on a treadmill and I’ve crank it faster than I can really handle, and I’m like, “Ahh.” And so then, I guess I’m wondering, would I, in fact, be able to comprehend, remember, retain stuff that I’m flying through if I’m not saying each word to myself?

Abby Marks-Beale
The short answer is yes, and this is where the active, mindful, conscious stuff comes into play. Like, if you’re going so fast that you’re not getting it, then you got to slow down. It’s about understanding you have gears that sometimes you need to slow down either because of the content or because of where you’re at in that moment of time.

If you’re really stressed, you had a hard commute to get to work, or you just had a fight with your spouse, or you’re dealing with something going on and you’re just really distracted, that can affect it too. So you have to have the most ideal mindset, which is…well, okay, I’m going to back up for a sec because this is something that, over the past 20 years, I’ve been teaching this stuff over 30 years.

But over the past 20 years since we’ve had computers and phones, that people have learned how to multitask but haven’t re-learned how to mono-focus. And so, it’s so hard for people who are so busy, and especially type A personalities, even people like me at times, to just stop and just read because they’re thinking about so many other things.

And so, by learning how to calm the mind, be it through mindfulness techniques like meditation, yoga, tai chi, breathing practices, something that can center you will greatly benefit your reading. So, I feel like that’s important to mention because we’re so twitchy with all the stuff that we have to look at.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Got you. So, we’re just entering that tunnel of focus and it’s like all that is in my consciousness is this text and away we go. Okay. And I guess I’m curious, is there a place you might recommend? If I want to really take this for a spin, I’m going to get out the notecard and rock and roll, is there a place I can go to readily check my reading comprehension? I’m thinking about Standardized Test from my youth. Reading Comprehension was a section. So, how might I assess my comprehension and check that out to see if, yup, I am really blazing so fast I don’t even know what’s going on anymore?

Abby Marks-Beale
So, I think the first thing to know is that it’s important just to know what your speed is to begin with. And, of course, people read ideally for comprehension. So, even if you don’t have ten questions after what you’ve read, you can still get your speed. I do have on my website a place where you can take a speed test just so that you can see what your reading speed is.

But if you’re looking for speed with comprehension, one of my books 10 Days to Faster Reading has ten readings in it with ten questions, so that’s a place that you could read and answer questions. Just don’t look back at the reading to get your answers. And there are a few other timed-reading exercises. I would bet if you Google them, you’d probably find them.

I know teachers can use them in high schools. Some do in college-level courses as well where you can get readings with questions. I had one from Jamestown Publishers. I used to teach when I did high school or college. So, you can get books like that if you wanted. You might even find it online as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. All right. Well, so we’re jumping around a little bit. So, we talked about the notecard, and you also talked about word clusters and…

Abby Marks-Beale
Keywords.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there something to do there with the keywords? Or what am I doing when I’m using the keyword method?

Abby Marks-Beale
So, in some ways, it’s hard to just describe. You really have to see it. However, what a keyword is, is basically any word that’s about three letters in length or longer, and it usually gives you the most meaning of a sentence. And so, it’s almost like picking out from a like a 12-word sentence, maybe seven or eight of those words that make sense. But by doing that, what you’re doing is actively consciously looking for the more important words, which keeps you more awake and alive and on task more than daydreaming.

So, daydreaming, regression, and subvocalization are the three evils, if there were such a thing, to reading. And so, mind-wandering is one of the things that happens when you go too slow. And so, by having a strategy, you will tend to daydream less, first of all, which is helpful. And then by learning how to find keywords, you’re going to be able to read almost…it’s just like newspaper headings. It’s just like a headline, that’s what I’m looking for, a newspaper headline. And it’s just like, “I get it. I don’t need all those other words because I got it through these bigger words that are more important.” And you see the other words. You’re just not stopping your eyes on all those words.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I hear you and I know what you mean about needing to see it. As I’m looking at my note draft starter outline questions, which I flexibly refer to and suppose to march through. I’ve got, “What are your best practices for people trying to get into speedreading?” And I’m seeing in many of these words, “What are your” don’t need them; “best practices” that’s big; “for people trying” we’ll take the trying; “to get into” okay, “speedreading.” “Best practices” “trying” “speedreading” like those keywords are maybe a little under half of the total words, and I get the gist of what this question is about.

Abby Marks-Beale
Yes, correct.

Pete Mockaitis
So, okay. Very cool.

Abby Marks-Beale
So, I just pulled out, I was looking for some reading material next to me. So, I have a copy of my book that came out Speed Reading: A Little-known Timesaving Superpower. Just opened up to squeeze the margin section, just opened it up. I’m just going to read like two, three lines and keywords.

Abby Marks-Beale
And just see if this makes sense to you even though you’re not seeing the other words. “Reading newspaper column quite different reading email. Not just content different, also column width. Average newspaper column, six words across. Average email anywhere 18 to 25 words across. I jump from end one line to beginning next. Much longer email than newspaper makes it hard eyes read. Find the next line accurately.”

Does that make sense at all to you?

Pete Mockaitis
It does. Well, it’s funny, like I’m already jumping the implications, like, “Oh, maybe if the email is wide, I should like shrink the window so that it’s more manageable and it squeezes that in a bit.”

Abby Marks-Beale
Yeah. And not saying it out loud, obviously, by doing it internally, you’ll go a lot faster than if you do it out loud. But it’s about getting good at just finding those bigger words, and that takes a little bit of play and experimentation, but once you get good at it, it’s very helpful for some people, especially people that subvocalize every word because then…and even English as a second language learners find that this is a very helpful tool for them so they don’t have to read every it, that, to, the, to, and, for, if because they look at those words as if they have to all be processed the same way and they don’t.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, beautiful. Thank you.

Okay. So, we talked about getting in the right mindset and maybe it’s some breathing practice or mindfulness or a distraction-free space where it’s just the text. We talked about looking at the clusters of words and then the notecard, starting at the top, and then scooting on down to cover what we have already read and put it at the top of each line, and not needing to subvocalize, and we can rock out at four times the speed without losing comprehension with practice. That’s exciting.

Abby, tell us, what are some of your top do’s and don’ts that we haven’t covered here? It sounds like there are some more tools with regard to margin use. What’s the story here?

Abby Marks-Beale
So, there’s a lot. There are so many different pieces of this whole concept. I think, probably, one of them is about the purpose that a lot of people when they sit down to read, they don’t really know why they are reading what they’re reading, and, even more importantly, what do they need to get from it. And the reason I say that is because there are times when you’re going through something where it’s like, “Why am I reading this? It’s not going to meet my objective,” but it’s there so you feel like you have to read it.

And so, when you know that you’re not going to need it, you can skim over it. I teach people how to effectively skim. You can skip it without guilt and just say, “I read this because I read the rest of it because that was what I needed, and I didn’t need that piece.” And I give an example of, let’s say, you wanted to read about, I don’t know, like chocolate. Like, you’re reading a book on chocolate. That’s a good one. You want to know about different kinds of chocolate and where they’re made, and blah, blah. But then there’s a chapter that just talks about one maker of chocolate, Belgian chocolate, and you’re like, “Nah, I don’t really like Belgian chocolate. It doesn’t really matter.”

And so, there’s like a whole chapter, 12 pages on this one person, and you’re like, “You know, I’ll do a quick skim and find if there’s anything really interesting here but I’m not going to spend a lot of time because it doesn’t interest me, it doesn’t float me in some spiritual way, personally or professionally.” So, you become very selfish, I think, when you read active, mindfully, and consciously because you don’t want to spend time on things that aren’t worth your time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That’s good. And I heard it said somewhere that if you can determine in one minute that a 30,000-word book will be of no value to you whatsoever, then it’s as effective as you having read all 30,000 words in that one minute.

Abby Marks-Beale
That’s a great one. I like that. I agree. I agree 100%.

Pete Mockaitis
Fair enough.

Abby Marks-Beale
Yeah, I agree.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. Well, what else are the top do’s and don’ts you’d put forward?

Abby Marks-Beale
So some of my other favorite things, that reading on screen, which is the bane of so many of our existence, there are some really cool apps. I demonstrate them when I do webinars and I like to share them whenever I can. One is called BeelineReader.com. B-E-E-L-I-N-E Reader.com. And so, you go into, like you’re looking at, I don’t know, Fortune magazine or Vanity Fair, whatever, online, and you’re reading an article. There’s all these videos and pop-ups and things that are just like distracting you, and it’s so frustrating.

And when you put BeelineReader onto your computer, it can do really two things. Number one is it color-codes the lines so that it’s easier to read. So, it goes from black to red, red to black, black to blue, blue to blue, black to black, so it’s easier to find the next line. But then when you do this thing called activate in clean mode, it takes out all the ads, all the pop-ups, and it puts the article in basically standard-length lines all the way down the page in the colored texts.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool.

Abby Marks-Beale
It is like the coolest app, and I use it all the time when I’m reading longer articles, like, “I don’t want to read with all that stuff flashing at me.” And so, I think it’s like $9, $10 a year to have that on my browser.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool.

Abby Marks-Beale
Yeah, it’s a really cool thing. I like that a lot. And then another one that I like and I tell people about for learning how to process words faster, is to get the free app of something called Spreeder, S-P-R-E-E-D-E-R. The free app of Spreeder, you can copy the words that you have on that article, just copy them, and paste them into Spreeder and you can force-feed it to you at different speeds. And so, one word at a time, you can set it up. You play with it. It’s fun and it’s free. And it’s another way to get the eyes and brain used to communicating faster. It’s just one of my favorites.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool.

Abby Marks-Beale
Yeah, a lot of cool things.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d love to get your take when you’re focused in and reading fast, are you more or less tired afterwards? Because, on the one hand, I can see, “Oh, man, I’m draining mental resources because I’m just going bananas in terms of fully dialed in and focused and slamming through so quick.” Or, is it like, “Hey, by being completely absorbed in that which I was doing, it is actually sort of like a flow state rejuvenator”? Or maybe it just varies person by person. What’s your take on this?

Abby Marks-Beale
I think it’s both. I do think it’s a flow state rejuvenator. Definitely, when I’m reading something that is very interesting or something I really want to learn, and I sit down at a desk and I have it in front of me, and I’m using my hands or a card to read with, and I’m really dialed in with it, then when I’m done, I’m like, “Wow, that was so good.”

Like, I read a book on an airplane. I went down to Florida last week and I just read half the book on the way there, and half the book on the way back, and I’m like, “Wow, that was awesome. It was so good.” I didn’t feel tired from that at all. But if you read too slowly and you don’t have a purpose, it’s very draining because you’re sitting there trying to learn it, you’re trying to understand it, and it doesn’t really work.

And you can get so much more done when you have that purpose in mind. And, obviously, you don’t want to read it unless you’re a night person. I don’t know how people read at 10:00 or 11:00 at night unless they’re really night owls because that’s like the last thing I want to do. I read like a couple pages and it’s my nightcap to go to sleep.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. And that’s a great illustration of the gear system. It’s like, “I’m chilled out, I’m lying down. I’m not looking for max speed, max wisdom. It’s just like here’s a soothing thing that’s a bit interesting.”

Abby Marks-Beale
Or, “I’m at the beach. I’m on vacation. I don’t really want to read so fast,” or, “Maybe I do because I love the book and I want to read fast.” It’s always a choice once you have those five gears in place.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, we talked about screen reading, there’s a few tools right there for us. Anything else you recommend, like maybe just shrinking the windows to get the width or margin in a certain spot? How many words or inches should I be going for? Because I got a big old screen here and I can resize this window anyway I want. So, what would be optimal for my speed if I am not going to leap over to BeelineReader or Spreeder? How do I think about my windows and my line width?
Abby Marks-Beale
So, some people like the six words per line that are a part of like a newspaper column, and if you like that and you find satisfaction reading quickly across those lines, then get your screen to six to eight words per line. Otherwise, if you look at like emails, it could be anywhere from 18 to 25 words per line, and if that’s comfortable for you, you could do that. But if it gets to be a lot more than that, the eyes have a really hard time tracking all the way across those lines, and then back accurately to the beginning of the line.

And so, you can use, I’m sharing this really special with you, Pete, just so you know.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you.

Abby Marks-Beale
Is that you can use your screen like the white card. So, you take the text that you have in front of you, line it up to the top of your screen, like if there was a ruler there or just the top of your webpage, and you use your scrollbar, hopefully your mouse can do it one click or two lines at a time. And so, as you click it on your scrollbar, the lines go up into the “black” just like covering it up with the white card, so you’ve adapted the white card to the screen. Does that make sense in how I described that?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s very easy, yeah.

Abby Marks-Beale
Okay. And so, it’s another way to use the white card but on a computer screen or a Kindle or whatever.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s clever, yeah.

Abby Marks-Beale
It’s just easier to use that way.

Pete Mockaitis
And my mouse likes to make giant leaps when I click it but I could just use the down arrow and bo-boom, bo-boom.

Abby Marks-Beale
You can use the down arrow. You could also change the settings of your mouse just for reading purposes. It can be one line at a time when you go in your settings, so that’s another way to do it.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. Well, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Abby Marks-Beale
Oh, there are so many other things but I think one of them is about creating a manageable or a quality reading workload instead of a quantity. I think a lot of people have stuff stacked up be it on their computer, or on paper, on their desk, on their nightstand, in their bathroom, in their backpack, whatever. There are so many different things, places that they have stuff. And after a while, it’s just like, “What am I going to get to next? I don’t even know.”

And so, by really evaluating what you have in your pile, and so I’m going to give this to you, too, because you’re a nice guy and I know the people, they would like it. And so, it’s a quick four-step process, so if you have a lot of stuff to read and you’re like, “I know there are stuff there that I don’t want,” and you put it in there six months ago, six years ago, and you just never got to it.

The first thing you do is kind of put it all together and then put a number on it on a scale of zero to ten. Zero is, “Totally worthless, totally not worth my time. Yuck, I hate it,” to a ten, “This is like the best thing ever. I love this. I can’t wait to get to it. It’s so good.” And so, you rank it on a scale of zero to ten, and anything over six, you put in one pile, anything under six, you put in another pile. The stuff under six, you recycle, get rid of, don’t need it, don’t want it, it leaves right now, it’s not worthwhile to use, so get rid of it.

And then what’s left, you think you’re done but you’re not. Now you have to say, “Well, how much time do I have to read on a regular basis?” If you only read five minutes a day, get rid of a lot of your stuff because you’re just not going to get to it if you’re just thinking you will. So, making more time to read is really important but then managing, “How much time do I read with what I have in my pile?”

So, you want to read things that are of value to you, things that float you spiritually, personally, professionally, and then make sure that you make the time to do it because that’s how you get a pile that’s under control. You don’t want to have boxes and boxes or bookcases and bookcases of things you’ve never read. That doesn’t help. So, it’s about being attracted to your reading workload instead of repelled.

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

Abby Marks-Beale
I think, actually, I have two. One of them is, “Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right.” That’s by Henry Ford because sometimes I have stinking thinking, so it does help quite a bit. And the other one is “There has to be a better way.” That’s another quote. I don’t know. I say that. I don’t know who says it but I always think just when I think things aren’t working, like, “There’s got to be a better way. There’s got to be a better way.”

Pete Mockaitis
That makes me think of, I think, there are some infomercial pitch man, at least that’s how…my wife and I say that to each other. We do it in a British accent, in a slow informercial-ly voice, “There’s got to be a better way. Well, there is, Abby. Buy my product.”

Abby Marks-Beale
I like that. That’s good.

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

Abby Marks-Beale
So, I quote this study, it’s called the Ebbinghaus Curve of Forgetting. It’s E-B-B-I-N-G-H-A-U-S in case anybody wants to look it up. And, basically, when you read something today without any active, mindful, conscious strategies, you’re not going to remember more than 10% of it three days from now unless you talk about it, re-read it several times, or experience it in some other way.

And so, by becoming more active, mindful, and conscious to begin with, you remember 50%, you don’t remember just 10. You remember 50% or more because of the intention. And so, I love this Ebbinghaus Curve of Forgetting, and so you need to repeat and re-read and experience with other people.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you.

Abby Marks-Beale
Yeah, you’re welcome.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Abby Marks-Beale
I’m going to say that one of my favorite books is called Yoga and the Quest for the True Self by Stephen Cope. He’s a person that I followed at Kripalu Center for Yoga & Meditation. It’s a really good book.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool?

Abby Marks-Beale
BeelineReader. I think BeelineReader is my favorite tool for sure.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Abby Marks-Beale
Favorite habit for me is probably doing exercise that feels good and doesn’t cause pain, which is like I’m a swimmer so I swim laps and walking and yoga, but I don’t like things like lifting weights because they cause problems for me. Yeah, just things that don’t cause pain.

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

Abby Marks-Beale
It’s more what I quote to them. It’s kind of my tagline, that, “The road to knowledge begins with a turn of a page.” It was a fortune that I found in a fortune cookie when I decided to start my business in 1988, and so I keep that. It’s just to me very powerful. “The road to knowledge begins with a turn of a page.”

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

Abby Marks-Beale
Yes, thank you, to my website at RevItUpReading.com, R-E-V-I-T-U-P Reading.com. And there’s the free test that you can take, the speedreading test. There’s also a free sneak peek which will allow you one module, which actually introduces the phrasing concept in my favorite exercise called discipline your eyes. You can get all that for free. So, I encourage people to go check that out.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Beautiful.

Abby Marks-Beale
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Abby, this has been a treat. I wish you much luck and fun reading.

Abby Marks-Beale
Thank you. You, too. I read a lot. It’s your turn.

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

Barry O’Reilly
Yeah, no, it’s a pleasure to be here, Pete. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to hear your wisdom about your book Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results. Could you kick us off by sharing a key thing that you’ve unlearned that has proven quite valuable in your own career?

Barry O’Reilly
Yeah. Well, even writing the book is probably one of the best examples. I have a solid history of D minuses in English literature through school. I’m dyslexic. I think if I told my teacher that I managed to write one book, never mind two, that they wouldn’t actually believe me. So, it was kind of, for me, one of the big unlearning I had to have is actually how to write a book.

And as conventional wisdom, I always say that writers sort of sit there by a roaring fire with a perfect velvet jacket on and a glass of wine, and just like tearing out pages and pages of content. Believe me, I tried that but it didn’t work for me.

Pete Mockaitis
Too hot?

Barry O’Reilly
Yeah, not too good. And, yeah, I would sit there for hours just with writer’s block and I couldn’t quite get the words on the page, and it was really frustrating because I felt like I was doing everything, the tips that people told me. And it’s a real challenge. So, then I started to think about, for me, “Well, how can I sort of reframe what I’m looking at? My existing behavior is not working, so, therefore, I need to unlearn. I’m not getting the outcomes that I’m aiming for writing whatever it is, 10,000 words, 10,000 words a day. Whatever I’d set myself.”

So, I started to actually think about, well, reframe my thinking away from just typing as the only way to create content, and I actually started thinking about content. It’s actually really like creating a book is content. And there were suddenly many ways to create content. Typing is just one of them. So, I started to think about other ways to create content. I could record it. I could speak it. I could interview. I could have someone help me.

So, I landed on the idea of actually talking because that was the most natural way for me to share my stories. And what I did is I got a journalist to interview me. So, we would write down, like some bullet points that I wanted to cover in each chapter, and a journalist would interview me, and I would just tell stories about what the chapter would be about. And we would record it and transcribe it using an AI transcription service.

So, we’d speak for 45 minutes, and I’d get in the region of 20,000 words, record it and get a copy of it in text very, very quickly. And the journalist would then sort of go through that copy, edit it really fast, and send me like this sort of early version of a chapter that was sort of relatively raw but it was edited. And it gave me something to react to. It’s like an MVP or minimal viable product or chapter.

And, suddenly, as I would read through it, then I’d be like, “Oh, no, that doesn’t need to go here,” and I’d remember things I’d forgotten to say. So, we got into this iteration really fast. And that literally got me there. I actually unlearned how to write a book by learning how to speak about the ideas that I wanted to talk about.

And the product of that is Unlearn. And then, yeah, many people are often surprised when they realize when I say I didn’t write hardly any of it. I spoke most of it and I got somebody to work with me, and an AI to transcribe it, edit it, and ship it.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. That’s cool. So, you unlearned the notion of what writing a book looks like. And in so doing, you found an approach that worked for you, and that’s beautiful. Well, tell us, when it comes to zooming out a little bit and broadly speaking about people and unlearning, any other big surprises or aha discoveries you’ve made while researching and putting together Unlearn?

Barry O’Reilly
Well, the notion of unlearning was the thing that probably struck me the most. So, the first book I wrote was Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale. It was part of our recent series, or the lean series, and it was more successful than I could’ve imagined, to be honest. And when we released that book, a lot of, sort of medium to large scale enterprises or scale of startups were sort of saying, “We’re not a startup. We’re actually scaling our business, so what do we need to put in place to make us successful?”

And, suddenly, I was in the room with like Fortune 500 executives or startups in Silicon Valley that was scaling rapidly to work with them, to help them grow and innovate their businesses. And I was fortunate to spend time with these people, some of the most competent talented people you could ever hope to meet. And what I kept discovering was that while learning new things was hard, what was even harder was letting go of their existing behavior, especially if it had made them successful in the past.

So, the unlearning even in itself was a big aha moment for me, is that the real skill is not learning new things; it’s actually recognizing when your existing behavior and thinking is actually limiting your success, and then how do you find ways to adapt or innovate yourself to meet the sort of changing market or situation that you’re in.

And that was really my big inspiration for sort of writing Unlearn and the stories and the examples and so forth that are captured sort of within it, and have just sort of been really the things that have driven me on continuously to sort of do this. And for many people, it’s interesting because unlearning is sort of an act of, if you will, sort of vulnerability. You have to sort of say that, “What I know is actually limiting my success, and, really, I have to sort of shift out of it.”

And for many people, that’s very difficult because their success is tied to their behavior. Their behavior and actions are tied to their identity. You’re asking someone to change their identity, in a way, and that is extremely difficult for people.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you maybe walk us through an example that illustrates the unlearning process that would be helpful for professionals looking to become all the more awesome at their jobs?

Barry O’Reilly
Yes. So, probably sort of one of the classic examples that I cover in the book is working with a senior executive from a Fortune 100 bank, and she took over the role or went into the role, and everywhere she went, first day, people just kept asking her to make decisions, everything from what direction should the company go in, right down to what paperclips they should order. Every single person was just turning to her to say, “What do we need to do here? What do we need to do here?”

And, for her, that was a signal. She was like, “There’s a decision-making problem here. I shouldn’t be worried about what paperclips we’re ordering. That should be people are confident and inspired enough to do that. Like, why is everything from paperclips right through the company direction landing on my desk and everyone freezing?”

Now, the process for unlearning is it’s a three-step process. It’s first about this recognition to unlearn, identifying or diagnosing where your existing behaviors are not working. In fact, the way I defined unlearning is it’s a process of letting go, reframing or moving away from one’s useful mindset and acquired behaviors that were effective in the past but now limit our success. So, it’s not forgetting, removing, or discarding your knowledge or experience. It’s the conscious act of letting go of outdated information and making space for new information to come in to inform your decision-making and action. So, the first step is a diagnosis.

So, straight away, this executive could diagnose that nobody was making decisions, and that is not the outcome that she was aiming for. She wanted to have a high-performing organization where people could take responsibility and have an accountability to make decisions at the appropriate level, depending on the decision to be made. So, that was a signal for her.

And so, I sat down with her, and I got her to say, “Well, let’s describe it. Let’s describe what success would be. If this is the behavior that needs to be unlearned, how could we talk about division or the objective or the outcome you’re aiming for the people would be achieving?” And I got her to sort of write a story about it, write a vision statement for what would be true in the world if they had unlearned this challenge.

So, she wrote down things like people would be making safe-to-fail decisions, that they’d make small decisions to understand. If they had to make a big decision, they’d break it into smaller parts and learn along the way what works and what doesn’t. And this sort of learned helplessness to make decisions would be removed, and all of her direction would be what success is and why it matters. None of her direction would be how to achieve it. The teams would offer opportunities on how to do that.

So, writing this sort of story, it gave her these sorts of outcomes that she talked about, the learned helplessness disappears, her direction of what success is and why it matters. She wouldn’t be saying how to achieve it. And, straight away, we wrote those down in an unlearning statement that would basically say, “The company would’ve unlearned when 100% of her direction is what success is and why it matters. Zero percent of her direction is how to achieve it. Zero percent of people displayed this learned helplessness when making decisions.”

So, suddenly, she had sort of had this statement that would encapsulate this unlearning of decision-making as a problem within that company, and she actually shared this with a bunch of her team to sort of for them to understand as like what would be success criteria for unlearning it. And then the next step is to sort of re-learn. It’s like getting people to try new behaviors to try and move towards these objectives or outcomes that we’ve described.

And so, I always get her to sort of like pick one of these outcomes that she originally had described to sort of focus on. So, there was the learned helplessness, how to achieve a decision, or what success is and why it matters. And we picked actually that this one, zero percent of her decisions would include how to get there.

So, she took this sort of very bold sort of stance. And I often say to people, “If you want to re-learn, it actually means you have to do something uncomfortable,” and people mostly write down like simple things that they would try that they’re used to, like just be quiet for a moment, or don’t be the first to speak when someone offers a problem, or let all the team speak before she did.

But the one she chose was even more uncomfortable. She said she wasn’t going to make any more decisions. So, if someone came to her and asked her to make a decision, her immediate reaction would be, “What do you think?” So, introduce this tiny little new behavior. Now, you can imagine when you’re a Fortune 100 executive, and you sort of announced that you’re not going to make any more decisions. It would cause panic across the company.

But the way that we made it sort of safer, rather than just sort of never make a decision again, she was just going to try it for one day. So, for one day, make it sort of safe-to-fail, she’d think big but start small about trying to conduct this new behavior of not making decisions, and asking people what do they think.

And this is sort of the moment that we call a breakthrough. So, a breakthrough is literally when you start to get this new information, new behavior, new action, and the results that actually give you a feedback statement that you should keep doing what you’re doing or do something different. So, literally, she went into work, I think it was on a Tuesday. I think it was a Tuesday. And every time one of her team came in to ask or to make another decision on something, she sat there and said, “That’s interesting. What do you think?”

And what that did was something really magical. It allowed her to learn. It allowed her to learn about the people and what help they might need. Because some people, when she asked somebody, “What do you think?” would freeze, would be sort of “Ah, I don’t know. I really need you to make this decision. I don’t have enough confidence or control to do it.” So, she could realize straight away that person would need coaching.

But other people, when she asked, “What do you think?” would say, “Well, we’ve got three options. We can do option A, and here’s the pros and cons of that. We could do option B, here’s the pros and cons. Here’s C and pros and cons. I think we should do C, and here’s why.” So, instantly, she could go, “Great. Let’s do C,” because she could see the rigor and the thinking that her team had actually performed, and it gave her confidence to say, “Right, that’s the direction we should try. Let’s do it.”

So, this simple act of just not making a decision and asking people to sort of say what they think sort of revealed all these insights about who is able to make decisions and should be encouraged to make more, versus who was hesitant to make them and needed coaching and support to sort of get there. And instantly then, she just gets this uplift in performance because once she starts doing that, all her teams start replicating that. And then, suddenly, you’ve got this big performance improvement where you can start to eradicate decision-making problems.

So, that’s an example of a sort of unlearning statement and going through the diagnosis of decision-making, the re-learning of actually thinking big and starting small, defining outcomes, and taking a small new behavior, which was not to make decisions, and ask people what they think. And then the breakthrough was seeing this insight or learning from the team about who could respond well and who needed help. And that sort of informed her to keep doing, and that’s literally the cycle of unlearning.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, thank you for that story. That’s really cool. And I’m curious, as we zoom into individuals listening here, are there any key questions or prompts you find super useful to surface, to highlight, to assess, to diagnose, “Aha, I may have an outdated or suboptimal belief or practice or mentality that I would do well to unlearn”? Like, what’s sort of the canary and the coal miner, some key indicators that I should be on the lookout for?

Barry O’Reilly
Yes. And the simple question many people that ask is, “How do I know what I need to unlearn?” And to diagnose, there’s a set of questions that I ask people. It’s basically getting you to think, “Is there a situation where you’re not living up to the expectations of yourself? Maybe there’s somewhere you’re not achieving just sort of outcomes that you desire. Maybe you sort of tried all the things that you can think of and you’re not getting a breakthrough. Or, maybe there’s a situation that you’re avoiding altogether because you just can’t think, ‘How am I going to tackle that?’”

These are all the sort of signals that your existing behavior is not working. So, not living up to your expectations, not achieving the outcomes you’re aiming for, situations you’re avoiding or struggling with, or maybe you’ve tried everything that you can think and you’re still not getting a breakthrough. I’d even ask you that, Pete, and you probably can come up with four or five answers straight away. And these are all signals that our behavior is not actually helping us achieve the outcomes that we’re aiming for. And, therefore, we have to unlearn, we have to try something different.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And as you’ve seen a lot of workplaces, are there some common examples that pop up again and again and again in terms of, “Oh, these are some things that would be great to unlearn”?

Barry O’Reilly
Yes. So, I think like risk-taking is always a big one, like people’s risk aversion, getting comfortable with being uncomfortable, trying new things, being willing to fail. These are all decision-making. It actually comes up quite a lot. These are sort of like the commonalities, I guess, that I hear from a lot of people, is how to help them sort of get those breakthroughs, is trying new things that they’ve never done before.

A lot of it is about, I think, when people perceive that there’s risks for both personal and perception, that if they try something and it doesn’t work, how they’d be perceived. That one really comes up a lot, I think.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s juicy. And so then, if I was working on that, how might you help coach me through that emotional stuff?

Barry O’Reilly
Yeah. Well, first of all, it’s just a recognition, people diagnosing that that’s the heart of the issue. Most people sort of write it up as, “My boss won’t let me do something,” or, “We’re stuck in the status quo. We’re struggling to do new things. We don’t innovate in my business.” Like, a lot of people would sort of deflect it off to company not allowing them to do things.

And a lot of it is sort of then helping people recognize, well, first of all, you have agency and you can try. So, how do we make it safer for you to try? Or, you feel safer that if you fail, how you’ll be perceived? And one of the mantras in the book was this notion of thinking big, start small and learn fast. So, it’s important to have a big aspiration or big outcome that you’re aiming for because that allows you to sort of shift your thinking and your behavior, potentially, to get there.

But the way when you’re trying to make big changes is you don’t take big leaps. You take small steps and learn your way through. So, when somebody has a big idea to change their business, what I often say to them is, “Right. Well, write down that big idea.” Amazon has a famous practice where they get people to write press releases to describe what the world would be like if their product was in the market in two to three years’ time, what would be fantastic about it.

Now, with the way that they start is they don’t do a huge big project. They start small. They run some experiments with small customer bases to see what works and what doesn’t, and then sort of grow it from there. So, what I often say to people is if you have a big idea to change the way your company works, don’t expect that you can walk up to the CEO and get millions of dollars of funding and a new team, and then just sort of start working on it.

Do something small to start testing if that idea is going to work. Pick maybe one or two customers and sort of show them a very naïve version of the product that could work or could not, and get feedback and show that it’s working or not. And even if it doesn’t work, it’s okay. You will have learned something from those one or two customers about what success could be or what’s the right product that they’re looking for and iterate it.

So, these are the ways that you can think big and start small, to start tackling uncertainty and be successful as you try new ways of working new products, etc. And so, that’s what we do most of the time is just coaching people how to think bigger but start smaller so they can learn what works and what doesn’t in a safe-to-fail manner. And once they sort of get into that habit, then they’re able to take on these more audacious goals as they sort of see success moving towards it.

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

Barry O’Reilly
No, I think, like the message from me always with this is, like I experienced that I’ve got to unlearn stuff all the time. It’s tough sometimes to recognize the actual reason you’re not being successful is yourself, that you can’t get out of your own way. So, I think a bit of humility, a bit of not trying to beat yourself up too much when you’re not getting the success, I think, is quite important, and recognize that a lot of this is a sort of journey, a learning journey, if anything, a constant iteration and experimentation on yourself. And if you see it like that, it can be a fun journey to go on rather than beating yourself up along the way when things don’t work.

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

Barry O’Reilly
One of my favorite ones, and people will have to buy the book maybe to find out what chapter was this one, is that something always gives up. Either the problem gives up or the person gives up. But if the person doesn’t give up, ultimately, you’ll get the breakthrough that you’re looking for.

And that was really interesting for me as a notion to sort of think about. It is a little bit of a battle of wits between the problem you’re trying to tackle and the person, or yourself, trying to tackle it. And, really, half of the way to succeed is to keep showing up. If you just keep showing up, something will give. Either the problem will sort of give and you’ll get past it, and, hopefully, before the person gives up because then the problem wins. So, that’s always motivated me to keep being persistent and to keep showing up, and I really enjoyed that quote.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. And how about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Barry O’Reilly
Well, I think my favorite example in the book is Serena Williams, and her story is just purely phenomenal. She’s sort of an against-the-odds story. And also, the success that she had and continues to have is sort of totally unheard of and a total outlier for the sport that she plays in. She actually is getting better as she gets older, which is sort of unheard of. Most tennis players retire at the age of 27. She’s 40 and she’s still competing at the highest level, getting to finals and being successful. So, yeah, really a fantastic story that I open the book with, and would highly recommend people check her out.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Barry O’Reilly
It’s called Maverick, and it was basically written about a small little factory in Brazil where the CEO, who took over, whose son who took over from his father, started using all these contrary methods to manage people that were much more about empowering people rather than the typical, let’s say, corporate institutional management techniques, and they had massive success. So, I highly recommend people check out that book. It’s one of my favorites.

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

Barry O’Reilly
I like the Shure SMB mic. Sounding good when we’re on podcasts, I think that’s one. One thing I learned, I think, through the pandemic especially, is that it’s really important to have good sound when you’re communicating because when the sound is bad, it makes it harder for people to listen. When you’ve got good sound, it makes it easier for people to listen and more of the information goes in. So, yeah, get a great mic. That would be my tip for people.

Pete Mockaitis
Agreed. And a favorite habit?

Barry O’Reilly
At the moment, well, there’s two. One is making a really nice coffee in the morning when I wake up. That’s definitely, that’s my special time. And then exercising as much as possible. I think one of the things I really learned as well, especially as I work in a venture studio called Nobody Studios, and I work with a bunch of biohackers. And this idea of like persistently improving your whole, both like mental activity, like doing exercises like this, reading, writing, etc. but also the physical aspect of how important it is to exercise and sleep.

We’re actually working on a sleep company at the moment, and it’s just been fascinating to me to realize and learn how important sleep is to our actual performance, in general. So, now I’m somebody who…I used to stay up and think I could get by on six hours of sleep at night, but now if I don’t get eight, I get angry at myself. So, it’s been really interesting to learn some of these habits.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Barry, now you got me curious about, if you’re allowed to disclose, what’s the sleep company and what transformational insights have you gleaned thus far?

Barry O’Reilly
Well, the first one is how important sleep is. I think most people sort of undervalue how important it is. It’s the most restorative process that we have, so no surgery or amounts of vitamins or supplements are going to improve your wellbeing as much as sleep. So, it’s actually one of the most important things that we have to do.

So, yeah, some of the habits that I have had to unlearn was like going to bed late, or a routine to actually optimize when you do go to lie down to sleep, that you get the maximum sleep, that you can get a high-quality sleep at that. And it’s everything from the triggers, simple things that people might say to you, like don’t drink coffee, or don’t have high amounts of sugar, or don’t let your body be in a stress state when you go to sleep because you actually can have negative sleep, which hurts you more.

So, all of these things have been really fascinating to sort of learn and discover. And, yeah, if you follow our venture studio, Nobody Studios, you’ll see the sleep company when we launch it to the public in the next couple of weeks. I’m pretty excited about what it’s going to do.

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

Barry O’Reilly
Well, I think just even the word unlearn. It seems to be one of these provocative words that people go, “Yeah, that’s it. That’s exactly what we need to do. We don’t need to learn more things. We need to unlearn some things.” And I think it’s been a fascinating way to connect with people in terms of the interest area, or a way to describe something, or a notion that many people have felt but weren’t able to put word on it. So, yeah, I think unlearn, that’s it. It’s a fun one. Let go of past success to achieve extraordinary results. It’s all in the title.

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

Barry O’Reilly
Yes. So, I’m pretty much Barry O’Reilly on every social platform you can imagine, or BarryOReilly.com. And if you’re interested to follow our studio, we’re at NobodyStudios.com. Go check us out on the web and similarly on most social media platforms.

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

Barry O’Reilly
Yeah, just think big, have a big bold aspiration that you’re aiming for, that something you think could change, but start small. What’s the first small step you can do to start moving towards it? And you’ll learn fast what works and what doesn’t. So, that’s my message to everyone.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Barry, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you much luck with Unlearn and all your adventures.

Barry O’Reilly
Thanks very much. Thanks for having me, Pete.