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

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
David, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

David McRaney
Thank you so much for having me. This is so cool to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m excited to talk about your book How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion. But, first things first, David, we got to know about your stint as a strong man in the circus.

David McRaney
How in the world did you even know this? I feel like I’m on Hot Ones. That’s one of those deep cuts. I was at a Renaissance Fair a couple of years, it was right before COVID, and I’m a giant dude. I’m 6’2” and they were like, “Hey, do you want to…? We need a strong man,” they pointed right at me, and I was like, “Sure, I’m into it.”

So, I got up on stage, and it was one of those acts where they…you have an acrobat climb up your body and then stand on your shoulders, and you have to hold them up, and they juggle flaming objects back and forth with their assistant who was inside a shopping cart that’s slowly rolling away. And I had to do all sorts of acts. It really was hard because I was like, “If I messed this up, one of us is going to be horribly injured. I’ll be covered in fire.”

It’s a Renaissance Fair in Louisiana, so it’s just going to be a YouTube video. It’s not like there’s going to be medical attention that’s going to rush over to our aid. It’s going to be one of those things that people share online and say, “Don’t do that.” So, that’s what I did. It was fun. I’m into it.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow. So, that’s pretty high stakes and it sounds like there wasn’t a lot of prep. You just launched right into it.

David McRaney
Yeah, it was fun. I was wearing a full kilt and I just was in the mood to do weird stuff at a Renaissance Fair, so that speaks to my character, in general. Yeah, I’m down to do crazy stuff if it seems like there’s going to be a good story involved. So, I finally get to tell it. I think this is the first time I’ve told anybody this outside of my immediate friends and family.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, we’re honored. Beautiful. Well, thank you for sharing, and I think that really does set a great foundation somehow for the topic to come. Let’s talk about how minds change. And could you kick us off with a particularly surprising or counterintuitive or fascinating discovery you’ve made about us humans and our brains and persuadability while putting together this book?

David McRaney
One is the idea that humans are flawed and irrational, which I used to talk about all the time.

And the other is that some people are completely unreachable and unpersuadable, which I also used to say. I talk about it in the beginning of the book. I was at a lecture once, and someone asked for my advice on reaching out to their father who had gotten into a pretty deep conspiracy theory, and I, at the time, this was years ago, said, “I don’t think you have any hope here. This person isn’t willing to change their mind,” and I never felt good about that. I never liked that answer.

And then I witnessed the incredible shift in public opinion and attitudes towards same-sex marriage and LGBTQ issues, in general, in the United States, leading to the Supreme Court decision. And, interested in that, I started investigating it and found my way to the work of both Tom Stafford and Hugo Mercier, who are in the book, and who had been on my podcast, and who I, at this point, know them well enough to be able to chitchat.

Hugo Mercier has a great book called The Enigma of Reason which I highly recommend, and is an explanation of the interactionist theory of human cognition, which is his work with Dan Sperber. The simplest explanation of that is humans, we evolve over time to reach consensus towards common goals, common courses of action to share worldviews, to be more effective in groups.

And we have these two cognitive mechanisms underlaid by biological mechanisms: one is reproducing propositions and one is for evaluating propositions, and they work differently. And, oftentimes, we’ll find ourselves in environments where we’re only producing arguments, often we’re doing it in isolation, and it’s different from evaluating arguments.

And then that combines with what Tom Stafford has, put forward in a new model. Called The Truth Wins theory. Everyone who wrote books about this sort of thing, there was sort of a new hotness in the world of pop science, which were humans are irrational and flawed.

And so, the idea that the same reason we lock our keys in our cars and send emails to the wrong person, scales up to climate change and things like that, most of that research, even though it was done with lots of people, those people were researched in isolation. And that means we were looking at what an individual does and how an individual comes up with solutions to problems or reasons for thinking something or justifications and so on. And, yeah, individuals do that in a very biased and lazy way but if you give people the opportunity to approach those same things as a group, you’ll get a much better outcome.

And so, those two things together were the first sort of torches in the distance that I’d walked toward as I moved through all sorts of on-the-ground reporting with activists and cults and pseudo-cults and conspiracy theory communities and experts who study all these things, leading up to the arc of really shifting my view on not only how minds change, whether or not it’s through persuasion, but also how persuasion actually could work in a way that actually brings results.

So, that all sums up into one big epiphany for David McRaney, which is I don’t think anyone is unreachable anymore. I don’t think anyone is unpersuadable. I think that the frustration we often feel when we are approaching someone who doesn’t seem to want to change their mind or resist deeply, that frustration is better directed at ourselves for not approaching them in a way that would help them arrive at a different conclusion or see things differently.

In the book, I use the metaphor it’s like trying to reach the moon with a ladder, and when that doesn’t work, assuming the moon is unreachable. I think you try to reach out to people who disagree with you or see things much differently than you using improper approaches and techniques. You might assume they’re unreachable, but you just need to change the way you go about doing things. So, that’s my long-winded, super giant answer to your great opening question. Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
Fundamentally, why do we humans tend to believe some things and not others? I was intrigued when you mentioned, you got cults and conspiracy theorists. I watched the documentary Behind the Curve about the Flat Earth stuff.

David McRaney
Oh, yeah, I got to help with that a little bit, yup.

Pete Mockaitis
And that was intriguing. And I’m just so fascinated as to why is it that some of us will accept some things and reject other things and like what’s that about?

David McRaney
Behind the Curve, that’s great. I didn’t know that I contributed to that documentary until someone told me that I was in the credits.
it also led to, of all things, there was a festival in Sweden that was similar to South by Southwest, and they invited me and Mark Sargent on stage to talk about his Flat Eartherness, and I used one of the techniques in the book on stage, although I wasn’t really that good at it. Like, I’m much better at it now.

But that’s a side story that came out of that documentary. I loved that documentary. One of the reasons why this is something that’s difficult to get your mind around is that some of the same assumptions that lay people, like ourselves, would make in this, even though we have all this experience with people we’ve tried to argue with over the years, are the same assumptions that scientists made when they first started studying this in earnest in the 1940s.

In the 1940s, they were trying to understand propaganda. They’re trying to understand, they were worried about what the Nazis were up to with propaganda, and the United States was trying to figure out, “Should we fight propaganda? Should we make propaganda? What works? What doesn’t?” And there were already social scientists who were interested in marketing and advertising and messaging and all that kind of things, and they ended up making this thing called Why We Fight.

You can watch it on YouTube. It’s this very long American propaganda piece that opens up with the Nazi propaganda, and says, “Look at this. This is bad. And why are we fighting this war?” And it says, “Is it because of this?” And they show all these places getting bombed and tanks rolling through, and they say, “No, no, no.” And then, eventually, they show the Statue of Liberty and the Magna Carta and stuff like that, and say, “This is why we fight. Torches of freedom that are being snuffed out around the world.”

And they had this whole idea, “We’re going to show this.” They showed it to the President. The President was like, “This is so good, I want this in every theater in the United States.”

And they went to bootcamps and things like that and showed them the film, and they measured the impact of it. And what they discovered there is something that we all often discover when we try to get people to see things our way. We throw a bunch of facts at them, a bunch of links, we tell them to go watch these videos, read these books. And what they found, there were these misconceptions that they were worried about.

One was that the war would be over in a couple of weeks, that the German military was very small, that the UK wasn’t doing a very good job of defending itself, we were just coming in to save them. They wanted to get rid of these misconceptions. And they found that the film did a great job of doing that. It did correct people’s incorrect beliefs. The facts in their mind were updated but their attitudes were not changed in any which way whatsoever.

All their opinions going in about the war, things like it’ll be over in this amount of time, or their negative or positive evaluation of things, no change. And that led to a new wing of research into persuasion in which we started to actually think of categories of mental constructs that were separate from one another. Attitudes aren’t the same as beliefs. Beliefs aren’t the same as attitudes. Then you have values and norms and opinions, and these things are interchangeable terms and we’re just kind of talking in our lay language, but they are not interchangeable when we start trying to divide them into mental constructs.

So, what often happens when you’re trying to change someone’s mind, and it’s not working out for you, is that you hear them present a claim or a proposition or an idea, and you try to change one aspect of it instead of the other aspect, which is actually driving their eagerness to present this to you.

What often happens is someone will say something, “I think the President is a great president,” or, “I think the President is a bad president,” whoever that may be, and you try to change their mind about that. It feels like you’re trying to change a belief. But what you’re really trying to change there is an attitude because they’re telling you their positive or negative evaluation of the person. And though there may be beliefs involved, there’s a sort of assumption that, or it could be anything.

It could be climate change, it could be fracking, it could be gun control, it could be whether the Earth is flat. We often believe it’s the facts that led to our feelings on the matter. Like, we’re Gandalf or something, we go to the bottom of our castle and we go to the scroll room and read all the scrolls, and then finally you hold up a finger, and you go, “Hmm, this is what I believe about blah, blah, blah.” It feels like we did that sort of contemplation.

But what usually is taking place is the person has a very strong emotional reaction to this that is a combination of motivations and drives and attitudes that come from experience, they come from their social group that they feel aligned with, they come from maybe motivations like “My job or my reputation.” And then that leads them on a search for evidence that will support the feeling that they have, and that’s motivated reasoning in a nutshell. They’re looking for reasons that will justify the foundational state that they’re in, that we don’t usually recognize is that foundational state.

So, when you approach someone at the level of their conclusions and your level of your conclusions, you’re really asking them to interpret evidence based off of your feelings and your attitudes and your emotions. And if the end goal in that is, “I’m right and you’re wrong,” and then their goal is to prove that, “No, no, I’m right and you’re wrong,” there’s very low chances of that actually getting anywhere, versus a conversation in which, “Hey, I notice that we disagree on this. I wonder why we disagree,” and then you investigate almost as a team to try to solve the mystery of where your disagreement starts.

And in that, you may find that there’s sort of Venn diagram of overlapping attitudes and values, and you can find something in there that will shift both of your opinions at the end of the conversation. So, that’s my very long answer to your question. And why do we resist? Because, evolutionary speaking, it’s dangerous to change your mind if you don’t need to but it’s also dangerous to not change your mind if you should.

So, either one of those outcomes could lead to you getting eaten or not having enough food to survive the winter, so we’re very careful about going through assimilation and accommodation, sort of the two mechanisms of changing our mind. We do this so carefully, considering all these possible motivations that turn it into a risk-versus-reward scenario, and we sort of evaluate the risk of it, and the risk just simply outweigh the rewards in a lot of situations for a lot of people.

Pete Mockaitis
Whew, yeah, so much there. So, when you talked about Mark Sargent and risks, I remember there’s a piece toward the end of that documentary Behind the Curve in which he said, “Oh, I couldn’t leave Flat Earth now if I wanted to.” Like, all of his entire social network and reputation is sort of built around this. And so, yeah, we have a whole boatload of reasoning there that you’re motivated to, to kind of find and dispute, it’s like, “Well, this experiment, it didn’t work out this way because of this.” And so, it’s like even a spot where it’s very difficult to accept evidence to the contrary of his beliefs because of what that will cost him. So, that’s the spot. That’s intriguing.

David McRaney
And the person may not know why they believe this or feel so strongly. If you want to put it in terms that actually fit what’s going on, like, “Why do you feel that pseudo-emotional thing of certainty? Why, when you see this news story, do you accept it unquestionably versus when you see this news story you feel skepticism and then another person has a completely inverted response to that?”

And you take something like vaccines. Like, I spent a lot of time with anti-vaxxers, before COVID anti-vaxxers, and spent time with the people who studied the CDC response and why it wasn’t working with MMR vaccines, the people who were against it often would say they’re afraid that it causes autism. If you asked that person, “Why do you not want to get your child vaccinated?” they may produce as a reason for you, “I fear that it may cause autism, and I’ve read all the stuff and I really believe it, and so I’m not getting my child vaccinated.”

That’s likely not the actual reason. That’s their justification for not doing it, but the reason they’re not doing it is so deep they may not even recall the beginning of their quest to find evidence to justify it. There are so many things that go into that. Usually, all the research suggests that there’s sort of a moral slide or setting in that person where they’re thinking, “This takes away my agency. I’m fearful of institutions. I don’t trust governments and medical institutions.”

“I don’t have a lot of knowledge about these foreign liquids, and they seem kind of disgusting to me in some way, and they’re scary. And you can take all of that and put it into a syringe, and put a needle at the end of it, and stick it into my child without my ability to say no,” that’s really what’s motivating them. That’s the strong negative attitude toward all of that.

Then they’ve gone on a search for, “What supports this strong negative attitude? Ah, yes, this autism thing. I totally accept that. That is a good reason for me to feel this way. It really justifies it.” And then when you get into a discussion with them and you might be presenting your evidence and they’re presenting their evidence, they’re saying to you, “This is why I believe this.” But that’s not actually why they believe it. That was some sort of justification they found later. So, they’re actually going in the reverse direction of the processing that was there.

And this is what we do in every domain when things are uncertain, ambiguous, scary, anxiety-laden. You know what I mean?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. And I like that little listing that you gave in terms of these are the domains in which that occurs.

And then what’s tricky is when it’s so…yeah, you said it’s scary. Let’s hear those lists again. It’s scary, it’s ambiguous. What are some other ingredients that are right…?

David McRaney
Yeah, there’s uncertainty in there. There’s also we don’t know what we don’t know, so there is a large pocket of ignorance as to how any of this work but you don’t really know that you don’t know those things, but you do feel some sort of uncertainty because of it. There’s also uncertainty of outcome. It’s ambiguous as to what’s happening and there’s all these anxiety triggers in there. Anyone is anxious over having something put in their body that they did not themselves…like, we’re not involved in the creation of it.

And then there’s all these agency problems, like, “You’re taking my ability to determine…you’re taking something away from me when it comes to the care of my child. You’re also doing something to me. I’m not the one holding the syringe.” There are dozens of things in there. And there’s just the general fearfulness of institutions.

There’s nature nurture here. Some people come into the world already somewhat fearful in that way, and then life experiences compound that. Some of those are very reasonable. There may have been things that happened in their lives that they have a really good reason to not trust the government/medicine/so and so and so.

And I advocate in the book for cognitive empathy for those, like, “This person has no choice but to feel that way, no different than you have no choice but to feel, if you’re on the other side of it, you can imagine the question being directed at yourself, which is, ‘Why are you so trustful of all this?’ And it might be difficult for you to articulate why you so readily go, ‘But I trust this. I trust science. I trust doctors.’ And that’s what you should offer to them as well. They may not really be able to articulate why they feel that way.”

Pete Mockaitis
I think you’re nailing it here because I find myself really stuck in the middle with regard to that domain of sort of trust authorities, distrust authorities. Like, I’m thinking about times when I had to get my roof replaced. And so, I was having a hard time getting any roofer to show up, it’s like, “Darn it. I’m just going to call a dozen right now, and one of them is going to show up.” Well, four of them showed up. They gave me completely different perspectives, and I thought, “Wait a minute. You’re the roofing experts, I know nothing of roofs, and I’m supposed to make the call on which one is correct and which one is incorrect. That’s tricky.”

All right. Well, so we’ve laid the groundwork in terms of what’s up with minds changing and not changing. Can you lay it out for us then, ideally with some cool stories and examples, what are some workable strategies we can use to persuade folks? And I’m thinking particularly in professional context as we’re being awesome at our job here. So, lay it on us, how is it done?

David McRaney
So, in the beginning of the book, I go, I hang out with 9/11 truthers, conspiratorial communities. I go hang out with deep canvassers who are activist groups in Los Angeles that go door to door, knocking on doors and change people’s minds about wedge issues in about 20 minutes.

I spent time with the researchers in NYU who studied the dress, which helped me understand the nature of disagreement at the level of neurons, and there’s all sorts of stuff. And Westboro Baptist Church. I visited Westboro Baptist Church, talked to people who left, went to their Valentine’s Day Sunday services, and also went to the building across the street that protest them regularly, the Rainbow house.

One of the things that I found in all this, people who have techniques that actually work and have techniques that are supported by research, most of them had never met each other and weren’t aware of each other, and most of them had never actually looked into the science behind what they were doing. They were just doing a bunch of A/B testing and going with what worked and tweaking what didn’t.

I thought of it kind of like if you wanted to make an airplane, like before airplanes were invented, and you were trying to make something that flew, no matter where you were in the world, or what you made it out of, it would pretty much look the same because we’re dealing with the same physics and the same planet.

Persuasion techniques that really work all look about the same and work the same way because brains work pretty the same way in this dynamic, and that’s because we’re all sharing the same DNA that’s using the same proteins to make the same brain structures that were all influenced by natural selection and so on. That leads to me, if I was going to give you something that I feel that demonstrates this well, I would use street epistemology because I think it’s the easiest one to understand up front and it helps you understand the others really well, and you can apply it in a business setting, in a workplace really easily.

The first thing you need to do if you want to change somebody’s mind, my step zero in all this is ask yourself, “Why do you want to do that?” I find there’s a lot of value in introspecting as to why it is important to you to persuade someone one way or another. Try to make sure that you do have, at least believe you have, the moral high ground, the ethical high ground, or you are factually correct, and then investigate as to whether or not that is so before you enter into this space.

Then try to determine what it is that you want to change on the other side. Is it a belief, is it an attitude, or is a value? A belief is an estimation of something being true or false, a fact-based claim. An attitude is an evaluation of positive or negative, good or bad. And a value would be, “Where should we put this in the hierarchy of things that we are willing to put our time, money, and effort into?”

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like important or not important.

David McRaney
Right. So, establish that first, and then you’ll be much better off as to which one of these techniques works best. Street epistemology works really best when it’s a fact-based claim, like we use for anything. So, the order of operations goes like this. First, build rapport. Rapport is important because we are social primates, and the thing that we care about even more than our own mortality is whether or not our reputation is at stake in any dynamic.

If you communicate anything to the other person that can be interpreted as “You should be ashamed for thinking, feeling, or believing X,” that’s the end of that conversation. You are now in a place and a category of them, or you’re just considered a dangerous person who might get them ostracized or might get them canceled or something that, in effect, nobody wants to be on the end of that dynamic. So, you may not intend to do it, you may not have that in your heart, but it’s very easy to get somebody to feel that way. It’s very easy to communicate it, and you may actually do feel that way. You need to make sure you establish rapport.

The same way, like I’m sure we all have friends that we can go have drinks with, and we don’t agree with half of the things they think about the world but it’s okay, they’re our friends. Like, they’d go on our zombie survival apocalypse squad even though we don’t agree with them on everything. And we might even see the same movie and they’d have it and we love it, and we’re okay with that because we have that trust as social primates. So, you need to establish that up front. Do what you have to do.

If you have a relationship with that person, like it’s your parent, or your family member, or someone in your job who you’ve sort of had a lot of bad conversations with over the years, it may take a while to build that rapport. You might not be able to start this process until you’ve had a couple of meetings and hangouts where that rapport is re-established. So, it’s vital that that’s there first, otherwise they’ll stay in what psychologists call the precontemplation stage. They’re not going to engage in the act of processing the message you’re going to deliver until they feel like they can trust you. They need to feel that they can disagree with you and nothing bad will happen. So, that’s kind of up front.

Now, that’s very easy with strangers. You can establish trust very quickly with strangers, and then you can be transparent, be open, ask their consent, and say, “I’d like to explore this topic with you. I’d like to hear what you think about it. I’d like to kind of figure out where you’re coming from in all this. And if that’s okay with you, you may even change your mind by the end of this conversation. If you’re alright with it, would you be willing to have this conversation with me?”

If they agree to all that and you’re transparent, you just ask for a very specific claim. If it was, “I believe the Earth is flat,” that’s what you would say, like, “Give me a specific claim,” and they’d say, “Well, I believe the Earth is flat.” Once you get that claim, repeat it back to them in their own words. They may tell you all sorts of things, they may be very elaborate, and you need to try to repeat it back in a way that shows you really do understand where they’re coming from.

This borrows a little bit from the “Feel, Felt, Found” method of approaching people. It also borrows from all sorts of therapeutic models but it’s important to reflect, to paraphrase and reflect back what they’re telling you. If they say that you’ve done a good job and they’re satisfied, now you need to clarify their definition.

Like, some people, you may be talking about something like the government, and you think you’re talking about the same thing because you might have like a civics textbook idea of what governments are, and their idea of the government is maybe completely different. They may think that’s like a smoke-filled room where they divide the country up and all that sort of thing. So, you want to make sure you have the same definitions, and then use their definitions, not yours.

And then after that, this is the crucial moment, you need a numerical measure of their competence or their certainty, zero to 100, zero to 10, something like that, where all the way on one end is absolute certainty, and all the way the other end is zero certainty. This is important for a couple of reasons. One, if it’s a contentious issue, like gun control, or at the job, there could be something that’s happening too that there’s a lot of emotions wrapped up in it, they may know that by telling you where they’re on that scale, it could cause you to think poorly of them. It’s important for them to tell you on that scale, and then your reaction to it isn’t, “Oh, my God, what’s wrong with you?” So, that’s important.

The other thing is this is the way we’re going to encourage metacognition because this is a tool for exploring. You can just try this right now. Like, let me think of a movie. Like, the last Avengers movie, like, “Where would you put yourself on a scale, like from one to ten, how much you liked that movie?” And then, it’s weird, like if you asked somebody to put a number on it, like you start to feel yourself thinking about it in a different way.

You might’ve, just before, said, “I liked it.” But if I asked you, like, “Yeah, but how much, like one to ten, zero to ten?” You say, “A seven.” It feels different. It feels like a totally new thought that you hadn’t had before but that’s important.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, there’s more effort, for sure, like, “Well, seven is not as good as The Dark Knight. I mean, come on. But I mean you know…”

David McRaney
“Yeah, where would you put yourself on The Dark Knight?” “Oh, I would say that’s a nine. It’s not perfect but it’s a nine.” Like, “So, where’s the Avengers then if that’s a nine?” Like, “Oh, well, I mean, it was good. I enjoyed it. Seven, six, seven. Seven, six,” you can feel that process is taking place. You can do it with any topic, “What do you feel about this new policy we’ve put in at work? Like, from one to ten, like ten it’s the best thing it ever was; one, we should never have done it.” “Well, you know,” and they start having that reaction. Or, it could be about a contentious wedge issue, like, “What do you feel about vaccines or gun control?”

So, once you have that number out there, then you want to ask, “What reasons do you have to hold that level of confidence?” or, “Why does that number feel right to you, basically?” And this is when you hand off this conversation to the other person. This is the part that allows all of us to work because no longer are you trying to copy and paste your reasoning into them. You’re evoking their reasoning out into the world, which may have never happened to them before. This is maybe their first chance to actually have a true opinion about it.

So, you ask for their reasons, like, “Well, I feel that it’s a seven because this, this, this.” That may not be the actual reason, like we covered earlier. That doesn’t matter. It’s just important they’re thinking about it in that way. And then once they’ve put a reason out there for you to discuss, ask, “What method are you using?” You don’t have to worry at this point. I’m telling you broad strokes here, but you want to ask in a very natural way, “What method are you using to arrive at that as a good reason for having that number?”

So, you can already feel, this is a three-dot chain. You have a number, you have a reason, “What’s the method?” And you ask it in such a way that you are easily guiding that person backwards all the way back to foundation. And then, hopefully, like in the best cases, the most sudden changes, the things closest to a complete flip happen, where a person realizes they weren’t using a very good method or good epistemology to like sort out the reason.

And that’s it. from that point forward, just repeat all three of those over and over again, especially the method part. Listen carefully, be a nonjudgmental empathetic listener, summarize, repeat, and help them sort it out. Just be a guide to help them sort through all of that. And when you reach a point where it feels natural, you can wrap up and wish them well. You may have to do this several times but just engaging a person in that way almost guarantees that they will see the issue differently than they saw it before that conversation.

Which, seeing something than they did before, is changing their mind, but moving at your attitude one way or the other is changing your mind, and moving your certainty up and down is changing your mind, and moving your idea of what is and is not important is a way to change your mind. And all those things can take place in this particular framework.

Pete Mockaitis
Whew, that’s beautiful. Well, David, could you roleplay and see in action right now?

David McRaney
So, that’s the method. Some conversations, like the one we’re having, like the character you’re presenting is a person who you can tell when there are moments when like they’re admitting to themselves maybe they haven’t considered this very deeply, or they’re admitting to themselves they’re using epistemologies that aren’t very rigorous, but usually at that point, a person starts to feel a little bit of reactance and they don’t want to lose face in front of the other person. They need time to think better on their own and let it flourish, let it blossom inside of them.

The key thing is to never get into an argumentative frame, and that’s what I was avoiding at every step of the way. So, they typically want to have three conversations with a person, and they do. They often keep up with them. I think they spreadsheet it out, they make sure they do contact them again. And on an issue like this, where if you’re the street epistemologist, if you’re not a climate expert, you’re avoiding talking about facts anyway, you have to admit to yourself that there are good points on the other side, and you have to bring those points forward.

But the idea is to establish a good dynamic in which we’re both trying to kind of figure out, “How would we understand this thing?” or, “Are we using good ways? Are we parsing the data well? Are we actually using news sources? Are we experts?” And I hope some that some of that was coming through in the conversation.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Well, thank you. Yeah, that is handy in terms of, indeed, at no point you’re like, “You really are going to get us all killed, right? Oh, so you’re climate denier. That’s what you are. Okay. I have all I need to know about you.” So, yes, so non-argumentative and it does, indeed, feel open. And I guess as I reflect on this conversation, it’s refreshing and it’s different from, I guess, what you see in politics on both sides. It’s just like, “The other side is very bad and wrong and evil, and what we need to do is to demolish and defeat them,” is the vibe you get when you look at US political discourse in 2022.

David McRaney
Yeah. I used the dress in the book to demonstrate what the dress some people saw as black and blue, some people saw it as white and gold, but you had no choice in the matter. Like, that’s just what your brain resolved it to be. And if you got into an argument with someone about, “No, it’s this way. No, it’s the other way,” you’d never get an opportunity to have the kind of conversation where you could ask, like, “I wonder why we see it differently?” or, “I wonder why other people would see it differently than you?” which opens you up to this introspection and also this sort of critical-thinking frame of like, “Hmm, I do wonder what is the nature of disagreement?”

And some little voice inside you says, “Oh, yeah, I could be wrong about this,” or, “Oh, yeah, it’s difficult to be certain of anything, and there are reasons why people think, feel, and believe things.” And with the dress, it was because the more exposure you have to sunlight, the more time you spend in the daylight or you work around windows, the more you assume when something is overexposed, is overexposed in the blue side of the spectrum, and the more time you spend around incandescent light, which is mostly yellow light, the more you assume something is overexposed in the yellow side.

So, the picture itself was very ambiguous as to what it was overexposed but it was ambiguous as to what was causing the overexposure. And so, a person’s experiences with different kinds of light sources determine what they subtracted from the image resulting in two completely different ways of seeing that thing.

But the same thing takes place in politics or even an issue like climate change, like we were discussing. All the experiences that person has had up to that moment, this is an issue that’s uncertain and ambiguous and requires some expertise to understand. So, to come to any kind of conclusion on it, you’re going to have to use something that comes from your priors.

In the character you were communicating to me just now, this person was using ideas of trust. This idea of where the money goes. Like, that’s something that you can understand. That’s something you can use to determine whether or not I feel very strongly about this. But one of the parts of the technique is, that comes from motivational interviewing, is always ask the other person if they’re a five, why are they not a four. Or, if they’re four, why are they not a three.

And what happens often is that they have to present an argument for not going that way. And then you take that argument and that’s what you pump your energy into, into giving them the ability to articulate, “Oh,” and usually they’ll go up. What I didn’t do is ask you where are you on the scale again because that’s usually how you measure that you had some sort of effect.

But it didn’t seem, in that particular conversation, that the person on the other side was ready to re-evaluate because the thing that was coming to the fore was, “Oh, I’m not an expert. It will be difficult to become an expert in this, and I haven’t read a lot about this. And so, therefore, my opinion isn’t really on a strong foundation.” And that needs to mature in the other person before you would take it to the next level.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. And I liked how, I guess, we also determined that if I have skepticism associated, or the character has skepticism associated with monied interests, then that really could be an interesting point in terms of, “Hey, get a load of these people who walked away from tons of money by going to the other side.” It’s like, “Oh, huh. So, there are some folks who made this call based on convictions that caused them something. That’s sort of persuasive.”

David McRaney
Or, you could go with oil and gas companies, or politicians that are supportive of them, they have vested interests, and so the conspiracy could be on the other side, if there is something like that afoot. Or, there are just human activity that’s based more off like, “I need to stay rich and have a nice car and live in a nice house.” So, you could always take that because that’s more like that’s the fundamental attitude, that’s the fundamental anxiety, that’s the fundamental skepticisms at play, and it’s something that could be applied on either side of this dynamic, of this issue, and could move a person from a four to a five, or at least put them into this state.

The street epistemologist, they often say like their goal is not to change the other person’s mind. Their goal is to encourage that person to use critical thinking, or encourage that person to examine how they come to certainty at all. If they happen to change their mind in the conversation, that’s one thing but that’s not what they’re really attempting to do. It’s just sort of a happy happenstance, if it does happen. It’s more about, “Did I encourage that person to think in a new way about this particular issue?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, David, thank you. So much good stuff. Let’s hear about some of your favorite things now. Can you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

David McRaney
It’s attributed to Mark Twain. He probably didn’t say it, like most things attributed to Mark Twain, “It’s not what you don’t know that gets you in trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” I like that one a lot.

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

David McRaney
One of my absolute favorite studies is this coin flip experiment done by Tversky. Kahneman-Tversky, one of their old ones. You have a person flip a coin, you tell them you’ve flipped the coin, it’s all on paper, and you say you flip a coin, “If it comes up heads, you win $200. If it comes up tails, you lose $100.” And that’s the situation, and then you divide people into two groups.

One group, you tell them the outcome of the coin flip and you randomize it, and then you ask them, “Would you like to flip the coin again under the same conditions?” And everybody chooses to flip it again. And you ask them why, they say, some will say if it didn’t come up in their favor, they’ll say, “I need to flip the coin again to win back the money I lost.“ And if it did come up in their favor, they say, “I need to flip the coin again because I’m ahead and I can risk it.”

So, either way, they come up with a justification for flipping the coin a second time. However, in the other group, you don’t tell them the outcome of the coin toss. And if you do that, nobody chooses to flip the coin a second time, which is incredible because we already know from the other group, it wouldn’t matter which way it comes up. You would’ve chosen to flip it.

But if I don’t give you the information required to justify flipping it a second time, you won’t do it because you can’t do it, because there’s a mountain of evidence to suggest we don’t make the decision that is “best.” We make the decision that is easiest to justify. And if we’re denied the opportunity to justify, we just won’t make a decision.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and it’s not fun. It’s like nothing is going to happen if I tell you to flip the coin again, so.

David McRaney
I’m assuming you did or didn’t win the money but I’m not telling you yet till you flip it a second time. And most people just say, “Well, I don’t want to do that.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

David McRaney
Fiction, I love Joe. It’s a really good Southern fiction from Larry Brown. It felt like the South of my childhood, but also it felt like the things that I’d noticed and felt about the people I’ve lived around. They were in there in a way that I’d never felt before in a book, so it’s great and I still love it.

And nonfiction, I always tell people to get, if you’re interested in this world that I talk about, start with Incognito. It’s a really great book by David Eagleman, talking about how the conscious part of our existence, of our organism is only a small part of what the brain does. It’s kind of the stowaway on the Titanic, whereas, the rest of the stuff we do is we’re unaware of it. But here, recently, and I mentioned it earlier, something that’s just been humongous for me as far, as nonfiction goes, is “The Enigma of Reason.” It’s not an easy read but it sure will change the way you see yourself and other people.

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

David McRaney
I love Notability on the iPad. It’s become a super tool for me because I have to read a lot of studies, and I used to keep them in legal boxes, and then mark them up with a pen, and then have to have labels and all that kind of stuff. Now, I use Notability. I just import the PDF, I mark it up, it goes into a category. It’s in buckets, I can refer to it at any time.

And if you just want to take regular old notes, it’s incredible because you can manipulate the notes like you would with like Photoshop or something, and you can cut things out, paste them, enlarge, embiggen, you can speak directly into it, and it dictates it, you can circle things, and then turn it into, a handwritten, into texts in a type.

And I use it in interviews now because I connect a lavalier mic to my iPad, and I take notes while the other person is talking to me. And if I want to go back to the document, if I touch my note in any place, wherever that note is at, it moves the audio to that part of the conversation. It’s an incredible tool. It’s really, really force-multiplied the way I do my job.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

David McRaney
Well, I lost a hundred pounds over COVID, and the habit was tracking calories. The reason I did that, I did a lecture and somebody in the audience, or somebody who watched it on YouTube commented, they said, “I don’t know why you would listen to this guy about anything when he’s a fat dude.” So, it’s like, “I’m not going to listen to critical-thinking advice from a guy that can’t eat right.”

Obviously, it hurt my feelings but I also was like, “Fair enough. So, I should probably apply something to this from the world of what I do.” And I asked a couple of experts just on the side after interviews, and tracking your calories religiously was something that kept coming up. And I got an app, it doesn’t really matter what app you use, but the habit is to, like everything, like you put a little creamer in your coffee, add it. Every single little tiny thing you put in your body goes in there.

It is astonishing how overboard your calories are without your realization of it. You just really kind of have this intuition that, “Eh, that wasn’t that bad,” when you would go over the line pretty easily. Changed everything for me. I was able to lose 100 pounds using that technique.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that seems to connect and resonate with folks; it’s Kindle book highlighted and retweeted, etc.?

David McRaney
Well, in the most recent book, a lot of people, the early interviewers I talked to you about, debates have winners and losers, and nobody wants to be a loser. So, the most important thing is to have a conversation where you try to get at, “Why is it do we disagree on the issue?”

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

David McRaney
All of my stuff and my podcast is under You Are Not So Smart, YouAreNotSoSmart.com, and that’s the name of the podcast. How Minds Change is just the name of the book, and you can find information about everything I do, from lectures to consulting, to books and everything else at just DavidMcRaney.com.

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

David McRaney
Yeah, it’s a thought experiment that my friend Will Storr created, and it goes like this. Ask yourself, “Are you right about everything?” And some people are going to say yes. That is a whole issue you got to work on, my friend. But let’s assume you’re like the rest of us, and you say, “No.” If the answer is no, ask yourself, “What are you wrong about?” And if the answer to that is, “I don’t know,” ask yourself why you don’t know and how you would correct that. I think that’s useful in any job.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. David, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you much luck with your book “How Minds Change,” and all you’re up to.

David McRaney
I appreciate it, man. Thank you for all your patience and for your participation and your willingness to get into weird territory. I think that’s fantastic.

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.

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

Katy Milkman
Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to learn how to change once and for all. You’ve literally written the book on this and I can’t wait to hear your insights.

Katy Milkman
Well, I’m excited to share.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, maybe to kick it off, could you share maybe what’s maybe one of the most surprising, fascinating, counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made about us humans doing behavior change while researching the book How to Change?

Katy Milkman
That’s a great question. I love starting with that question. Probably it’d be a study I ran at Google that had the most counterintuitive finding to me. And it was a study where, actually, my collaborators and I were trying to figure out if we could create more durable habits around exercise in people if we got them to build really consistent routines, which is what our read of the habit literature suggested makes habits sticky, like, “Always at the same time of day, I’m really, really grounded in that routine and now it becomes like second nature to me.”

And if we could build that, we thought, then we sort of let go and we’d see these lasting habits. So, we ran this experiment with Google employees where we basically, for a month, gave them rewards for either visiting the gym at the same time of a day, a consistent time that they’d said was ideal for them, or for any time, whatever they wanted. So, about half of their visits ended up being at a consistent time but the other half were all over the place.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, one group was rewarded only when they went during the time they said and the other was rewarded regardless?

Katy Milkman
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Katy Milkman
We actually varied the size of the incentives so we got variance in how often people went, and we basically ended up with two groups who went the same frequency but in different patterns. One is going very consistently, the other is more variable when they go. And then the question was, “What happens at the end of this month?” And we were sure, we knew, it was going to be the people who had that consistent routine, and we were wrong.

And what we found out is that the reason we were wrong is not that we had our model completely messed up, it was true that the people who had been really consistent in their exercise who would basically train to be automatons, the same time, same time each day. Those people actually were a little more likely to keep going at that same time, but if they didn’t make it to the gym at that time, they didn’t go at all.

And the folks who had built a more flexible habit ended up with a more durable habit because they went a little less often at that magic time, it was the best time each day for them, but they went at other times too, and at that they went more. And that was really surprising to us that, it turns out, and I write about this in the book, I call it the power of elastic habits. I really expected, from everything I’d read, that those consistent cues would be critical to durable habit formation but what we found instead was that it bred rigidity, and that if you’re going to get something done, you need to be flexible, and just say, “I’m going to do it no matter what,” not, “I’m going to only do it under this narrow set of circumstances.”

So, I think that’s really interesting and it was a really important takeaway and counterintuitive to me. Although, now it makes sense, in hindsight I can see why that’s important but it’s not what I expected. And we surveyed professors of psychology in all the top universities, and 80% of them also were surprised. They predicted strongly, “Oh, yeah, that consistency, that’s what we know about habits. Consistency breeds habit,” and it’s just not what we found.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Wow, that’s striking. And so, well, there’s one gem right there, so thank you.

Katy Milkman
You’re welcome. That’s a great opening question.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, let’s zoom out a little bit in terms of, okay, your book How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be. Can you lay it on us sort of the big idea or key theme or thesis associated with this work?

Katy Milkman
Yeah, absolutely. So, the key idea behind this book is that there’s a lot, of course, of great books and a lot of great knowledge out there about how to change and, yet, it’s not getting us where we want to be for the most part. People are still looking for these kinds of books, still trying to figure it out, a lot of us aren’t where we want to be. And one of the things I have found in my career, devoted to studying this topic of where change comes from, is that I think part of the problem is we often don’t focus on what is actually obstructing change for a given individual, for a given challenge or a given goal they’re trying to achieve, and tailor the solution to that obstacle.

We sort of grab one of those big ideas off the shelf that sounds sexy and appealing, like, “Set big audacious goals and then break them down,” or, “Build a really tiny habit and piggyback.” Like, there’s all these ideas that are out that are appealing but they won’t work if they’re not solving for what’s holding you back.

So, that’s kind of the big idea behind the book. There’s all these different things that can be barriers to change, whether it’s, “I don’t enjoy doing the thing that I need to do to change,” or, “I keep forgetting to do the thing and flaking out because I’m too busy and it’s just, I can’t prioritize it,” or, “I’m having trouble getting started,” or, “I don’t have the confidence to change. I don’t believe I really can and that’s holding me back,” or, “My peer group is not showing me the ways to do it and is a bad influence.”

Like, what is the challenge and the solution then will be different. And we can make more progress if we actually diagnose what’s standing in the way, and then use the best science to solve that specific problem. And I see this all the time in my work with companies, that they have some behavior, “We want get people to save more for retirement,” or to get their flu shots, or to be more productive. Like, let’s just grab from this bag of tricks from behavioral science and we think we’ll be able to slap a solution on it, but if there isn’t an understanding of, “Well, why aren’t people saving? Why aren’t they productive? What’s holding them back?” that is matched to the solution, we don’t get very far.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s resonating a whole lot. I’m getting chills in terms of like there’s much truth here.

Katy Milkman
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
So, in a way, it seems like self-evident, “Well, of course, you should figure out what’s the challenge and address it.”

Katy Milkman
It does seem self-evident.

Pete Mockaitis
And, yet, we don’t.

Katy Milkman
It’s astounding how often we don’t, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, can you lay it down, lay it on us then, what’s maybe the menu of categories of obstacles and the best practices for deconstructing or addressing those obstacles? And then, maybe even before we go there, how do we go about identifying it and zooming in on it very well? Because, for example, when you say, “Why don’t people save?” like, “Well, I just don’t have enough money. I don’t have any spare money to save. I guess we’re done.” And so, it’s like, “Well, no, not quite. I think we got to dig deeper.” So, yeah, let’s start there. How do I identify, like, what’s the crux of the obstacle here?

Katy Milkman
I think the answer is probably most people will recognize themselves and a specific problem when they see these different discussions.

So, for example, I mentioned it’s not fun. That’s a really common one. I don’t know if that’s not a super common one for retirement savings. Most of us aren’t like, “I want it to be fun to save. And I find it dreadful and dreadfully unpleasant in the moment to do it.” That’s more like exercising or eating right or really focusing at work instead of scrolling social media. But that’s a category of obstacle.

Another category of obstacle is, “I don’t see how I can do this. This doesn’t seem doable.” I think that’s a big one, and retirement savings is actually is like, “Wow, it doesn’t feel feasible.” And that can come down to confidence, it can come down to what you’ve seen other people like you accomplish, and how, if you’ve learned their techniques and skills for doing it.

Another category can be, as I mentioned before, just flaking out, like, “There’s just a lot going on and I can’t get this to the top of the list, and I keep spacing it when it’s time to actually setup the 401(k).” So, it depends on which one you see yourself in, and I think it’s not like a category of problem, it’s always the same answer for different people. For some people, savings is also about procrastination, like, “I mean to do it but tomorrow I’ll get around to do it,” and then tomorrow never becomes today.

So, I think the goal of the book is that the reader will be able to see themselves as they see the classes of challenges and see what the solutions are. And there really are some experimentation individuals have to do, like, “Oh, I thought this was right solution for me. I tried it. Oops, I had diagnosed my barrier wrong. Really, that wasn’t what was holding me back. It wasn’t that I wasn’t going to the gym because I thought it was incredibly unpleasant. It was that I just hadn’t made the time to do it with the right people and I didn’t have the right social network and the right structures.”

So, there’s different problems for different people even for the same outcome, there are some commonalities.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so then it sounds like one way that you diagnose kind of like the core obstacle is you try something and you realize, “Hey, it turns out that wasn’t it at all. Okay.”

Katy Milkman
That’s one way. Hopefully, I think that will be one way. I also think another way will be looking, for the book and even for this conversation, and seeing yourself in the challenge. So, I do think people will be able to self-diagnose if they just give a little thought. I think normally that’s not the prompt we get. Instead, we get a solution, like, “Here’s your solution. This is going to work for you because it works for lots of other people,” instead of some thought about, “Why is it that I can’t motivate myself to do X.” And often, introspection is going to be enough. We’re not that hard to understand when we look internally in a lot of cases.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so let’s say that if I am thinking about, “Hey, what’s my obstacle?” and then what I come up with is something lame, like, “No, I just don’t have enough time”? Like, what does that really mean and how do we get deeper?

Katy Milkman
Yeah. Well, “I don’t have enough time” isn’t the kind of obstacle that the book is about because that’s not an internal obstacle. So, the book is really about how are you holding yourself back. “I don’t have enough time” is an external obstacle, like the way you structure your life needs to change. And I think you’d get some ideas about that once you’ve read the book about, “Oh, okay, does that mean you really don’t have enough time or do you just need to restructure yourself and your life differently?”

But the book is more about, so, if you’re like, “I don’t have the resources,” that’s a different kind of challenge than, “I can’t get myself to and I need to find a way to get myself to do something differently.” Does that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I hear you. And I guess maybe you’re kinder than I am to our imaginary interlocutor here. I guess when I hear “I don’t have enough time” I guess I just don’t buy it as my default.

Katy Milkman
Oh, yeah. And it can also be like, “I don’t have a priority to do this.” So, the book is not to convince you that you need to change. The book is for someone who has a goal, they want to achieve it, they haven’t been able to get there, or maybe they haven’t tried yet, they’re ready to try, and it’s going to offer the best science has for them about how they can set themselves up for success.

It doesn’t guarantee success by any stretch changes really, really hard but, hopefully, I think my career has been devoted to understanding what is the best knowledge out there, what’s the best science out there on how we can change, and I’ve tried to put it all in one place so that, for someone who’s motivated and ready to give it a shot, it’ll give them the best chance available.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you. And I think that precondition right there says it all in terms of, like, if you’re really motivated, “I don’t have enough time” is probably not going to be what you say is your obstacle because, by definition, you think it’s important enough to make some time, and it might just be tricky to actually figure that out in a calendar, like, “No, for real, where do these 30 minutes actually emerge from?”

Katy Milkman
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
So, maybe can you lay it on us, perhaps like the top three obstacles and some of your favorite solutions to those obstacles?

Katy Milkman
Sure. Okay, I can give you one that I love because I’ll probably pick on ones where I have done the most research personally which doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the most important ones but they’re the ones I find most interesting.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Katy Milkman
So, one of them is impulsivity, and I’ve touched on this a little bit already and things I’ve said, which is like people are wired to look for instant gratification and to dramatically discount things that are good for us in the long run, which is why it’s so hard to drag yourself to the gym and eat that healthy food when there’s a pizza right next to it or a brownie calling your name, stay off social media, study for a test when there’s more exciting options that, even though you know clearly what’s good for you in the long run, is just not fun to do in the moment.

And I think one of the really interesting things research has shown is that people, generally, when they face a challenge like this to motivate themselves to do something that’s not that enjoyable in the moment but that’s good for them in the long run, our inclination is to just try to push through and look for the most effective way to achieve our goal.

So, if we’re, I’m going to go back to the gym, but there’s lots of places you can think about this, if you’re choosing to work out at the gym, most people are like, “I’m going to do the most effective workout on this first trip to the gym,” as opposed to an alternative, which would be, “I’m going to do the most fun thing I can do. I’m going to do the Zumba class. It’s not going to burn as many calories per minute maybe but I’m going to enjoy it.”

Same thing with healthy foods. We look for the basket of foods that’s most sinless as opposed to a healthy food that we actually enjoy eating. Or, you need to study and do work, like do you try to set up an environment where you’re really going to actually enjoy it? Maybe there are some people around that you’re studying with, or you’re in a coffee shop that you like, and you get yourself your favorite drink and you feel great. Or, are you just going to try to do it in distraction-free environment because that’s the most effective?

So, most of us think effective, and what research shows is we’re actually better off trying to do the fun workout, eat the tastier, healthy food even if it’s a little worse for us, and study in a way that’s a little less effective but more fun if we want to persist because we’re so wired for that instant gratification. We won’t push through, we think we will, but we won’t, if it’s not fun.

So, I think that’s a really important insight and it actually is really related to some work I did early on in my faculty career on something that’s a very specific solution to this. I call it temptation bundling. And the idea is only allowing yourself to enjoy some indulgence that you look forward to but maybe you shouldn’t indulge in too much, some guilty pleasure, while simultaneously doing something that’s good for you and productive so that now you start to crave.

Maybe it’s trips to the gym to binge-watch your favorite TV show, or trips to the library because you’re always going to pick up your favorite Starbucks Frappuccino en route, or folding the laundry or home-cooked meals because you’re listening to your favorite podcast at the same time. So, if you can temptation bundle, suddenly, this thing that was a chore, actually becomes something you look forward to.

And I’ve studied this and show that it can help people exercise more, and found in my own life, of course, that it also is very effective for solving all sorts of dual self-control challenges. So, in general, a principle is, make it fun, and then temptation bundling is one tool to do that, and the obstacle is when something isn’t instantly gratifying, and because of impulsivity, therefore, you aren’t making progress on it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I love it. And that just seems like a game-changing insight distinction right there. Because of our impulsivity, don’t go guns blazing for the most effective path, but rather the most enjoyable path if what you want is consistency and persistence, like, that’s huge. Thank you.

Katy Milkman
That’s beautiful, yeah. And I only gave you one, you asked for three. I was like, “I have to breathe in here.”

Pete Mockaitis
You’re allowed to breathe. Your temptation for breathing can be bundled to more insight, Katy.

Katy Milkman
I will breathe while giving insight, okay. A second one that I like, is actually, I’ll call it the getting-started problem. And that is even though we want to do something, or motivated to do it, like finding the moment where you’re like, “Okay, and now I’m going to take action. I’m going to do something. I’m going to do something about it. This is the moment action is beginning.” It’s hard to get over that hump from visualizing it to doing it.

And I had this really interesting conversation with one of the HR leaders at Google about a decade ago when I was visiting and presenting. It’s actually as a precursor to doing the gym study I mentioned earlier on habits, I was telling them about some of my other work on nudging better decisions, helping people through use of behavioral science, make better choices at work about everything from enrolment in 401(k) plans to getting flu shots, you name it.

And this question was, “Okay, Katy, totally sold. We should be using behavioral science to encourage more productivity at work, more use of health and wellness programs, more retirement savings. But is there some optimal time to encourage that change? Is there some moment when people are particularly likely to hop on the bandwagon if we offer up tools that will help?” And I thought that was such a fascinating question and I didn’t know of any research that really addressed it so it ended up guiding my work for the next several years.

And what I immediately thought of, which came to mind, for you, too, when I posed that question was New Year’s. We all know that at the beginning of a new year there’s like this huge boost in people’s enthusiasm for starting resolutions. Forty percent of Americans set some sort of resolution. Many of them fail but they at least give it a shot which is more than we can say for many other times of the year. And I wondered, and my collaborators and I wondered, too, like, “Is there something bigger going on there? Is it just New Year’s or are there moments like that? And why New Year’s?”

And what we realized is, of course, there’s this like, it’s a social construct now, there’s norms around it, but part of it, what’s going on, is that at these moments, like New Year’s, that feel like a breaking point in life, we step back and think bigger picture, and we also feel some sort of dissociation from our past failures, because, “Oh, like, that was the old me last year, and the new me has a clean slate and I’m going to be able to do the things that were tough before and that seemed insurmountable.”

So, that sense of a clean slate and identity shift, boosted optimism, the tendency to step back, actually arises at a lot of moments in our lives that basically serve as chapter breaks in the way we structure our narrative. So, there are small ones like the start of a new week. There are big ones, celebrating a birthday, moving to a new job or a new city, becoming a parent. All of these moments turn out to make us feel like we have a clean slate and a new beginning, and people are more likely to do things like create goals on goal-setting websites, search for the term “diet” on Google, go to the gym, at these moments, and so I think that’s really interesting.

So, my team has studied specifically temporal landmarks, so moments that actually don’t involve a change in our lives but there’s also research that’s shown when you move to a new place, you move to a new job, those moments are productive times for change because, literally, you have a clean slate. You don’t have old bad habits to fall back on and you have an opportunity to build and structure new routines and not walk by the Dunkin Donuts on the way to work on this new commute.

And so, whatever it is that has been tripping you up, you have that clean slate in addition to the psychological clean slate. So, in that sense, I think the obstacle there is, “How do you find the motivation to get started?” And our research points to looking for these moments that have fresh-start resonance as jumping off points, and also nudging other people to notice them.

So, we found, for instance, if you just mark your calendar with the first day of spring on it and give you an option, like, “When might you want to start getting reminders from us to pursue a goal you’ve been meaning to get around to?” and March 20th is labeled first day of spring. Now, it triples your excitement about getting reminders to start your new goal in that day than if we gave you a calendar without labeling March 20th the first day of spring.

So, we can do, and we ran a study where we invited people, thousands of people who weren’t saving adequately for retirement, to sign up for our retirement program at their employer to start setting aside a portion of their paychecks in retirement savings. And everybody got an identical offering, you could start saving right away or you could delay a few months. But some people that delay, we labeled, and it corresponded either to a birthday or to the start of spring, and we said, “Do you want to start saving after your next birthday? Do you want to start saving at the start of spring?”

So, we’re literally making an apples-to-apples comparison because everybody is getting that same offering but some people don’t have it labeled for them as their birthday. It just says in three months. And we see a 30% increase in savings over the next eight months when we’ve invited people to start saving after those fresh start dates.

Pete Mockaitis
I was just going to ask, Katy, so not only do we have more enthusiasm to start but the proof is in the pudding. They actually do it afterwards.

Katy Milkman
Well, I do think a really important note is that, in that case, we set ourselves up for success because it’s an auto…it’s like a self-fulfilling thing.

Pete Mockaitis
You flip the switch once to do it, yeah.

Katy Milkman
Yes, and those are the best things to do at fresh-start moments because the motivation wanes and that’s why so many New Year’s resolutions fail. So, it only solves one problem, which is getting started, and the rest of my book talks about how you solve all the other problems so you stick to it and actually get somewhere with your goals. But if you can put it on autopilot, how about if that’s my third answer, but it’s not a super original and it is a super powerful one.

Anything we can put as a default so that it is just self-perpetuating, that’s a huge win because an obstacle to change is laziness, but you can turn it on its head and make it into a solution if you set defaults, like in that moment of motivation, you sign up for the retirement savings plan on January 1st, and now it’s going to just kick in. You’d have to actually lift a finger to change it and, goodness knows, you’re never going to. Or, cancel all of your subscriptions that you don’t really need, one day a year, when you’re feeling motivated after your birthday. Those are the kinds of things that can sort of be gifts that keep on giving. Or, signing up for an educational program or subscription of some sort that’s really valuable. Those also can carry you forward and sort of have like riptide-like effects.

So, if you can use that moment, when you’re feeling motivated to do something and lock in a change that will continue, that’s really valuable.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is cool. So, let laziness work for us if you can somehow shift it such that the default of doing nothing benefits you, then that’s awesome.

Katy Milkman
Exactly, which is what happens when you sign up for a savings program once, that just keeps going. Or, when you enroll in school, I mean, you still have to show up, but you’re going. It’s hard to get out. Like, the path of least resistance is to go for the thing that you’ve put a down payment on.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s great. Well, Katy, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about a couple of your favorite things?

Katy Milkman
No, this has been so…you’ve asked such good questions. I feel like I’ve been giving you really long and detailed answers, like highlights of the book.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I love them.

Katy Milkman
So, I’m excited. Thank you for the great questions.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, maybe I’ll give one more. What should we not do? And maybe something counterintuitive, like, “Hey, I’ve heard I should do this, but maybe I shouldn’t.”

Katy Milkman
I’m not a big fan of setting like really big audacious goals, like that model, and just assuming that will carry you forward, because without actually getting into the nitty-gritty structures, like I do think people try to think about a north star huge objective and that having that could be really valuable, and I think it can be distracting, it could be overwhelming. There’s also research showing that if you make too many, set too many goals, and then plan for each of them, that’s really demotivating because you can’t do it all and you sort of throw up your hands and give up.

So, I think sort of too big and distant and dreamy and not broken down is bad, and too many objectives that you do break down and plan for is bad. Like, focusing on one thing at a time, that’s a little bit of a stretch but it’s doable and you can plan for it, and then you can use these tactics to help you is the right way forward.

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

Katy Milkman
Is it “Well done is better than well said”? Is that Ben Franklin, I believe? I like that one.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure thing. And how about a favorite book?

Katy Milkman
My favorite book is Nudge by Thaler and Sunstein, and that actually has a new edition coming out later this year which I’m really excited for. Though, I’ll also say, my second favorite book, and it’s really close, is Influence by Bob Cialdini. I know you’re a big fan too.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

Katy Milkman
I assign both of those books, by the way, to all of my MBA students at Wharton. I love them and read them every year, and they’re just classics and truly wonderful and have changed the way I think about the world.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite habit for you?

Katy Milkman
That’s interesting. I wouldn’t call it a habit. Can I say a favorite behavior?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Katy Milkman
Because habits have this very narrow definition in academia where we’re like it’s on autopilot. Okay, so like a favorite behavior or this thing I do, which is I choose to work with people I really, really admire and enjoy spending time with so that work for me is a treat intellectually but also socially. And I feel really lucky to have the privilege of being able to choose who I collaborate with. And so, that has made my career tremendously fun, and I think it’s part of what’s helped me be productive and successful in my career as well.

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

Katy Milkman
My website which is KatyMilkman.com. It has all sorts of information about my book How to Change, about my podcast Choiceology, I have a newsletter called Milkman Delivers, which is a name that I was shying away from but my MBA insisted I had to go with, and about my research.

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

Katy Milkman
I would say one of the biggest takeaways from all of my research on behavior changes that, and we sort of started here, it’s super important to expect that there will be things that don’t work out, that if you are too rigid in your expectations of yourself, if you set up habits that are too rigid, if you set up goals that are too rigid, and let yourself be discouraged when things don’t work out according to plan, and don’t push through, you just won’t get very far.

And in change, anticipating setbacks and being prepared for them, having a backup plan, is just absolutely critical. Even in habits, we found that it was critical to be flexible and build flexible habits. So, it’s “I’ll always…” not “If only…” kind of habit. And I think that’s critical to everything. It comes up again and again in my research, how important it is to find ways to get back up after you’ve fallen down, and to be expecting that that could happen and planning for it.

So, my words of wisdom would be don’t let yourself be discouraged too easily, expect that there’s always setbacks. But on the path forward, it’s, hopefully, two steps forward and one step back, and just be prepared for that and set yourself up for success when you hit those roadblocks.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Katy, this has been a pleasure. Thank you. I wish you lots of luck with the book and all the ways you’re changing.

Katy Milkman
Thank you. So lovely to chat. Thanks for having me on the show.

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

Michelle Weise
Great to be with you, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, as I was reading all about you, one thing that I found, I guess, touching or moving or wanting to touch up on for a moment was we’ve spoken with some people who have worked and written books with Stephen R. Covey, and it was just sort of beautiful to hear some memories of that great man and teacher who’ve lived on, and, likewise, I wanted to hear a bit from you, to start us off, about working with Clayton Christensen. What’s something folks should know about him and who he was when you were collaborating with him?

Michelle Weise
He was one of the most generous people. He would always kind of make you feel like you were the most important person talking to him at that moment. And, it’s funny, I had a lot of folks who would see him speak at large events and they could sense his sort of folksy tone from him and his kindness, and he would say these beautiful things, and people would turn to me and say, “Is he really that nice? Is this for show?” and it really wasn’t.

He was sort of rooted in that way. He was driven by a really intense faith. He was a Mormon. At his funeral, it was kind of amazing to hear the incredible amount of service he did on the sidelines. And that just sort of…that feeling of just kindness and generosity that was emanating from him, I think it just showed through every action.

And, for me, it was life-changing to work with him directly and to write with him and to learn from him, and to go very deep into the theories of disruptive innovation and sort of see where he would get frustrated with kind of the misuse of his theories. And everything I learned about storytelling, I learned from him.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s beautiful. Thank you for sharing. And so, oh, yeah, we’re going to be doing a little bit of storytelling, I suppose, here about your insights associated with long life learning. I keep almost saying life-long learning every time, it probably happens to you a lot with your collaborators here. So, well, hey, let’s go meta for a second. Michelle, tell me, how can we tell this story most effectively?

Michelle Weise
Yes, so the reason why we’re getting tripped up on long life learning is we’re so much more familiar with this concept of life-long learning that we should be constantly learning how to learn throughout our lives. What I tried to do in this book was to move us into action. I was just noticing a lot of inertia around this concept because we know we need to reskill throughout our longer more turbulent work lives. But where is the actual infrastructure to sort of take these on and off ramps, in and out of learning and work, or do both at the same time and not have it feel so painful?

And so, for me, this mental shift comes through this concept of a longer life. If we extend our life spans, which we know since 1840, we’ve tacking on three months of life to every single year since 1840, so our life spans are just definitely extending but so are our work lives. When you look at early Baby Boomers and how long they’re staying in the workforce and how many job changes they go through by the time they retire, it just helps us kind of snap us into attention, and to say, “We have to start building a better functioning ecosystem in which we can access the education and training we need in order to thrive in the labor market.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And that thesis seems to just make sense as a natural implication of living longer and such. So, could you maybe share with us something that’s surprising or counterintuitive as a discovery that you’ve made along the way as you’re putting this together?

Michelle Weise
Yes. So, I have been doing a lot of research on the future or work, and what I noticed in a lot of the literature and the analyses out there by chief economists as they’re trying to sort of forecast all the different kinds of ways in which jobs are going to become obsolete or this industry will become decimated by these technologies, what I realized was this kind of intense focus on the “it”, or the things or the jobs, or the tasks and numbers.

And so, what I realized is if we actually kind of move away from thinking about the future of work to the future of workers, and all of us having to somehow kind of move through this learn-earn, learn-earn cycle, to me it kind of helped surface some of the most intractable issues and barriers that we need to solve for today.

So, what my book does is it really actually elevates the voices of people who only have a high school degree, who are constantly being overlooked for work they could actually perform, and noticing where the barriers kind of coalesce. So, these concepts that I come up with around better career navigation, or better wrap-around support services, or more targeted educational pathways, or more integrated learning and earning, and more fair and transparent skills-based hiring practices, those aren’t just coming from me thinking what we need to do. It’s really kind of trying to gather all this qualitative data.

We did over a hundred hour-long in-depth interviews with folks to sort of sass out, “Where do people keep kind of bumping up against pain points?” And if we designed this future system better, then all of us are going to actually end up benefiting. It’s the same idea of the curve cuts that we did when we kind of created the Americans With Disabilities Act.

When you’re cutting into the curve and you’re making a sloping curve, you’re not only helping folks who are disabled who need to use a wheelchair, but you’re helping mothers pushing strollers, or FedEx delivery folks with their dolleys, you’re helping runners, cyclists, skateboarders. It’s this idea of universal design. But when we want to target our focus, because it just seems like this huge, expansive challenge, we focus on the people, the future of workers.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Okay. Well, so then, as we got a lot of workers listening right now, can you sort of frame things up for us a little bit in terms of…? So, you make a point that the old model of, hey, there’s education, then there’s work, then there’s retirement isn’t what we should be relying upon going forward. Can you expand upon that?

Michelle Weise
Yes. So, just the notion that we could have one or a handful of jobs and retire in comfort, that’s already become sort of a quaint notion. And when you look at the amount of job changes that people are experiencing by the time they retire, folks are already going through, on average, 12 job changes by the time they retire.

And so, as we think about that longer more turbulent work life that is shaped by rapid advancements in technology, we can only extrapolate from there, “Wow, we may have to somehow entertain 20 or 30 job changes by the time we retire. And so, how in the world are we going to navigate that when one is just so difficult to navigate?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, lay it on us, how should we navigate these optimally?

Michelle Weise
Yes. So, I think the perfect illustration of what’s not working today is when we look at what the pandemic has shown us, which is when retail and hospitality were just completely decimated as industries, we had no way for people who were in those customer service roles or those frontline worker roles to actually transfer their skills from retail or from hospitality into something totally different but to identify their kind of transferable skills.

And I think, all of us, we believe that we have really important kinds of skills. Those transferable skills that can help us port our assets from one specific area to another. But, in general, when you think about the job market, we think about it in such a linear format. We kind of, if we start off in retail, or if we start off in office admin, when we think about advancement, we think within that line of work. It’s harder for us to sort of think about moving beyond that industry that we started in.

And the reason why we feel that way is because that’s what employers tell us, right? The employers want to see exact work experience in hospitality to move you up to a manager role. We don’t have ways of validating other kinds of experiences. So, one of the key solutions for us that are exciting for us to anticipate, and we already see these different kinds of AI-powered platforms.

What they’re doing is they’re helping us surface maybe some of our hidden skills. The skills that aren’t necessarily recognized by a formal credential, like a degree or a certificate or a certification. And what they’re doing is, as we’re typing in, I used to be a barista, that signal of the barista helps the platform actually surface, “Oh, did you know that folks who were baristas they have these specific competencies and skills.”

So, there are ways in which these platforms can not only help us surface our own skills but then help us envision pathways where we might actually be 75% of the way there towards something in human resources, or 85% of the way there towards something in advertising and marketing. We just didn’t know it; we couldn’t envision it for ourselves.

So, these kinds of tech-enabled platforms are interesting kinds of seeds of innovation to look at that might help us not only kind of validate our own skills whether we’ve acquired them through taking care of our own families or through work experience, and also understand the kinds of gaps we might have to fill in order to move into these other opportunities.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s really interesting when you mentioned that if you’re a barista, you can very well have under the surface like all of these skills that you’re applying there. And that reminds me of a previous guest we had, Todd Rose, talking about dark horses and how what might seem like completely different skills are actually, if you zoom way in, super similar in terms of, “Oh, actually, well, you’re using your hands to shape these things into other things so that they fit. Those are similar.” Much like, “Oh, you are optimizing a manufacturing production schedule is sort of like solving a puzzle over in the realm of math or physics or something that, who would’ve known, those are quite common or quite complementary.”

Michelle Weise
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, these platforms you speak of, how do we get our hands on one? So, can I go to some website right now and it’s going to tell me all my hidden skills?

Michelle Weise
So, that’s one of the challenges. There is like a free one off of Emsi called Skills Match where you can start to surface and kind of build a resume using these technologies. But this is one of the challenges and this is what I’m trying to point out in my book is that there are hundreds of thousands of innovations and solutions out there. The problem is for any normal person to understand where to go, like if we’re suddenly laid off, we don’t know who to call, where to go, who to talk to.

There are so many of these solutions out there but they’re not knit together in a way that’s easily understandable and navigable for any person. It’s not that we need a whole slew of new innovations. We need these things to become just more accessible so we can understand and comprehend how to navigate this who to go to for, “How do I know that when I pick this learning experience, a future employer is going to validate it and understand what it means? And how do I know precisely which skills I need to acquire? And which school actually offers those three competencies? I don’t need a degree, maybe. Maybe I already have a degree. I don’t want to go back to school full time. How do I get just what I need in order to move on?” And that’s one of the challenges.

But there’s a bunch of these groups, like Skyhigh, FutureFit. And what they’re doing right now is they’re more B2B, they’re more working with enterprises and trying to help them get a better understanding of who’s in their workforce. Because a lot of companies, and it’s very odd to think about it this way, but most companies don’t actually know what their people can do.

They know job titles, they know names. They don’t have a real granular sense of the skillsets, the competencies, all those hidden talents that folks have. So, that’s where these innovations are starting is trying to help employers be less wasteful, not always recruit externally, but look at the talent that they have right in front of them, and think, “Maybe I could actually take 30% of these folks and build their skills in X, Y, or Z technique or strategic goals for the future.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s exciting, and, indeed, it just seems like a huge opportunity that’s just waiting to be plucked. A great manager would know a lot of what their team is capable of. Yet, how is that information captured, collected, and transmitted elsewhere? And one of the incentives for doing so, you’re like, “No, Michelle is a rock star. She’s working for me. Get your hands off. I don’t want you to snag and do a completely different function.”

Michelle Weise
That is a real challenge within the companies. Yeah, this kind of like zero-sum game of, “Oh, if you take my person, you’re hurting me versus helping the company.” It’s hard to get out of that mindset.

Pete Mockaitis
Totally, unless you have sort of a widespread culture and reciprocity and such so that you say, “Hey, you know what, there’s give and take, I might lose Michelle for a couple months, but I’m going to get Phil who’s amazing and fills another role that we really need,” so there’s that trust there that can be handy.

Well, now, you just got me dreaming big, Michelle. I remember I once, I don’t know if I’m going to do this or not, but I hope someone is doing this. But when you talked about the high school folks who did not have diplomas and yet are capable of doing so much but it’s hard for them to sort of prove that. I kind of imagine just like forming this whole business where we just sort of like assess the crap out of people in terms of like all of these batteries of things because I come from strategy consulting and we did case interviews, and I found that that was a pretty excellent means of identifying if some folks have a particular set of skills. And so, that’s one kind of a test for one set of skills.

Likewise, there’s many tests for many other skills. Wouldn’t it be cool if folks could go to some sort of facility for a week or something and get a rundown on all their skills in a language that firms could read and understand, and then open up opportunity for people as well as savings for the companies? It seems like someone should have invented that. Maybe it needs to be me or maybe that’s in the works. But, Michelle, give us your take on to what extent does that exists, a means of identifying and appreciating hidden skills so that companies can save money and not have to hire the Harvard grad, and professionals who don’t have the degree can see some cool opportunities?

Michelle Weise
Yeah. So, what you’re identifying when you’re talking about seeing how someone responds to a case study is you’re testing their problem-solving capabilities, you’re trying to see, “What kind of systems-thinking, critical-thinking capabilities do they have?” I was just talking to a colleague who used to work at Arthur Andersen and they had this very open-question format where they would do the same things where they’d be trying to assess out someone’s sense of initiative and collaboration and these more fuzzy things, but trying to see how they talk about this in the context of solving a problem.

The good news is that there are these innovators who are working on new kinds of ways of assessing curiosity, problem-solving, all these really important kinds of skills that we know are going to be deeply valuable in the future of work. Because as we think about the rapid advancements of AI and how intelligent these AI are, where it’s not only able to read, drive, see, but it’s also able to write poetry, it can paint Picassos. It’s getting scary how far these technologies are sort of infiltrating our lives. What is our human advantage? What is our competitive advantage when we compare ourselves to these machines who can usually do some of this work far more flawlessly than we can? And it comes in these human skills.

So, places Imbellis and Mursion and all these different groups are trying to figure out ways to test out someone’s problem-solving capabilities where you’re on a computer and you’re thrust into this setting where you’re in this natural environment in the mountains and something is dead in front of you, and you need to kind of poke it and look at it, sort of see what is going on, and you’re trying to figure out what happened.

And so, on the backend you have psychometricians kind of figuring out what all those clicks mean, what are you doing when you’re putting these two datasets together. So, there’s really interesting ways in which groups are trying to democratize the process, and say, “We’re looking for the best problem-solvers in the world. If you can kind of solve this problem, this is really exciting.” And it makes me think of what you’re talking about with Todd Rose’s concept of the dark horse.

One of the most valuable assets that we will bring to the table is our ability to take concepts from seemingly unrelated domains and make them make sense in the context of the problem we’re trying to solve. So, InnoCentive, as an example, this was a platform that was created partly because at Eli Lilly, these chemists and scientists couldn’t figure out a problem so they posted it online and they found out that a lawyer could actually solve the problem using his sort of different kinds of contextualized expertise to help them figure out a way forward. Or, when they tried to figure out how to create more efficient ways of solving for oil spills in oceans, it was actually a pastry chef who talked about the process of making chocolate mousse and how that might actually help us think through how you remove oil from water.

And this is all, I’m totally stealing this from David Epstein’s book Range, but it’s this idea of, “How are we going to cultivate not only problem-solvers but people who can display that sense of range?” And it doesn’t always come from a four-year college degree. We don’t always get that real intensive interdisciplinary learning that we probably should. And, for me, for the next steps for higher education, that is a real opportunity for them to kind of break down silos across disciplines and departments. But, as we think about those skills that are going to make us most valuable, it’s going to be those kinds of hidden ways of thinking about problems.

Pete Mockaitis
So, let’s hit that for a minute there. So, AI can do a lot, and right now we’re very much evaluating humans being able to draw from different disciplines and putting them together. So, What are the fundamental kinds of principles or distinctions that…? Like, we think human brains are going to be able to do this better than machines even 20 years from now. What are those things? It’s not playing chess or Jeopardy, but what is it?

Michelle Weise
I think probably the most helpful way of thinking about it is when I talked to an executive from Apple who, he actually went to Stanford for a mechanical engineering degree, but as part of his general curriculum he took a class on ethics. And he mentioned that that class is probably one of the most valuable classes he had while he was an undergraduate, because when they’re producing technology, new technologies, new products, the thing they have to think about is, he called it sort of volume impact repercussions, where they have to think of second-, third-order effects of what they’re building, because, in an instant, millions of people are going to be leveraging whatever it is they are producing. And so, they really have to kind of anticipate forward and think, “What are all the ways in which this can go wrong?”

And if we think about where we are today with social media, we didn’t do enough of that. We didn’t extrapolate enough far forward. And when you hear the co-founders of a bunch of these different social media companies, you hear them say, “I didn’t think that this is the way that it was going to be used.” But this is what humans do bring to the table when we sort of bring ethics and judgment and values, and try to think forward.

And this also has implications on the kinds of people you bring around the table to do that sort of analyses. It has to be a diverse group. It cannot just be young white male undergrads kind of thinking about this problem. It has to be a diverse group of folks kind of thinking about those volume impact repercussions. So, I think those real skills in exercising judgment are going to be critical, that we can’t rely on the AI to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, second-, third-order things. And I guess that makes sense to me in terms of like as I think about things that are like playing chess or Jeopardy or even like composing or painting, it’s sort of like they’re all kind of bounded in a way in terms of find the right answer, or the right move, or apply a principle of color or sound.

Michelle Weise
Right, they’re finite. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Versus saying, speculating as to what social media and how it will impact us with widespread adoption. That does seem harder to stick inside code. Anything else that we humans do great?

Michelle Weise
So, a couple of years ago, Amazon had tried to leverage AI to diversity their hiring processes, and they thought maybe AI could do a better job than humans. And so, they kind of built out this new system, the AI started kind of going through the diverse set of applications. And then it was the humans kind of watching and seeing the output to sort of identify, “Huh, kind of strange that so many of these folks are named Jarod. Or, a lot of them played lacrosse.”

And they started to realize, “Oh, my gosh, we’ve trained the AI on flawed data.” They kind of looked at their existing talent pool. They tried to sort of say, “These are the senior leaders at our company that do great work.” But what they did was they trained the AI to search for people that looked and sounded exactly like their existing leadership, and that is not a way that you diversify your talent pool.

And so, it took humans to kind of notice and sort of exercise some judgment to say, “Wait, something is wrong. Interrogate it. Look deeply, look into the data,” and sort of say, “Oh, okay. We’ve got a problem here.” Because the AI will only just kind of repeatedly get smarter and smarter with the data that it is trained on. And we see this also happening, unfortunately, in the legal system where we’re developing sentencing structures based on deeply inequitable past data of how we’ve punished people.

So, we need this kind of deep-thinking humans for the future who have enough domain expertise to be able to question the AI because we cannot just let it…the crazy thing is that most companies…

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Jarod is in here. Whatever you say, robot.

Michelle Weise
Yeah, most companies like don’t know if they can trust their AI right now. I have a statistic in the book where they are not comfortable auditing the sort of their existing AI.

Pete Mockaitis
Not comfortable auditing it?

Michelle Weise
Yes, so this is from an Accenture study that basically fewer than a third of companies surveyed have a high degree of confidence in the fairness and auditability of their AI systems, and less than half have similar confidence in the safety of those systems. So, we’re so reliant on these technologies and yet we don’t fully trust the algorithms that undergird them.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I buy that even in a very easy example. I think about machine-generated transcription, which, I mean, that’s existed for 20, 30, 40 years and yet it’s still not great. I don’t know. If you have 98% accuracy, okay, that sounds really impressive, but that’s really still like three errors every minute. And so, in this conversation we’d have a hundred or two, and so I wouldn’t call that good.

And so, anyway, I just find that, I don’t know, not to be quite grouchy, but I’m a little skeptical myself in terms of maybe eventually it will be awesome but right now I’m not super impressed, and maybe I just haven’t been looking at the right places to blow me away.

Michelle Weise
No, what you are pointing out is what this MIT economist named Daron Acemoglu calls so-so automation. So, like when we think about just the rise of ATMs in the last few decades, what’s interesting about an ATM is that it is far better than a so-so technology because it actually completely made obsolete the role of a person counting money because it could do it really well.

And we don’t actually have a lot of technologies that we’re building today, the transcription one is a perfect example, or the robots that we use in warehouses where we have to depend on people as pick-and-packers to be able to sort of get the thing out of the robot’s sort of treasure trove and put it into a box.

So, we’re creating technologies that are just so-so. They’re not great enough to completely obviate a certain task. And, as a result, we’re not creating enough forms of truly creative labor. Because when ATMs kind of took over, what was fascinating to see is the sort of burgeoning of the services industry in banking. It wasn’t that people just became useless, it’s that they actually transferred their skills into different domains.

Here, what we’re having is a lot of kind of unfulfilling what researchers called ghost work. It’s this kind of interstitial stuff that we have to do on the backend even when we’re training AI. You have tons of people, these mechanical turkers who are working for cents on the dollar, who are identifying all the photos that are coming up from the AI to say, “That’s a face. That’s the same face as that one. That’s a body part. Ooh, that’s not a body part we want to show.”

Pete Mockaitis
“That’s a cat. That’s not a cat.” Right?

Michelle Weise
Exactly. And, “Not a hotdog. A hotdog.”

Pete Mockaitis
Silicon Valley.

Michelle Weise
But we have a lot of terrible work that’s emerging because of that not-great-enough technology. Right now, we’re in this awkward phase where we’re not creating enough forms of creative labor.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Michelle, these are a lot of interesting ideas. I’d love it if we could sort of zoom in here now for the professional who are maybe in their 30s or 40s who got a lot of work left in their career before retirement, likely. So, what’s our game plan in terms of learning the right stuff effectively and well and keeping our careers moving in a great trajectory?

Michelle Weise
Yes. So, I think one way forward is, unfortunately, for us as job seekers, a lot of the burden rests on us, and a lot of the financial risks also rests on us to make these decisions on our own. But moving into the future, what we really need to see and what, I think, will signify the kind of company that we want to work for are the ones who stop this kind of dis-investment in training their existing workforce and start to realize, “I have all this talent within. How do I help them acquire the skills they need to be successful?”

And I think the most powerful indicator of a company that is truly invested in us as job seekers are the ones that tell us, “You don’t have to do this on your own. We’re not going to just dangle tuition assistance or tuition reimbursement dollars and say, ‘Hey, we’re glad that you would like to advance your education. Go do it on your own time on top of everything else you’ve got going on in your lives.’”

The most competitive forward-thinking companies are going to realize that the workplace is really the classroom of the future. And I’m not talking about on-the-job compliance training, risk mitigation work, like sexual harassment training. I am talking about real new skills-building activities. So, it’s critical that the company not only identifies really transparent internal mobility pathways for you and for us, but it also has to be very explicit about carving out time in the flow of the workday for you to acquire those skills because it’s not fair for us to have to somehow squeeze it in on top of stitching together multiple part-time jobs, or all our caregiving activities. It’s too hard to just kind of stack that on top of everything else.

So, I think the things that we need to look out for the future are the companies that are truly invested in our reskilling and upskilling who kind of figure out ways to make that learning bite-sized, or for an hour a day, or an hour a week where we can be doing this in the flow of work. And, also, for educational institutions and providers to be able to modularized their learning in ways that’s more accessible where we’re not always bending to the sort of linear structure, the college or the university, but that it’s much more flexible and easily consumable.

Pete Mockaitis
And that’s a beautiful world that I’d love for us to live in. And I guess part of why this podcast exists is that we’re not there, and it is a little bit of a do-it-yourself proposition for a lot of folks these days, and fair or not, pleasant or not, stressful. So, let’s talk to the professional who’s in an environment that’s not so enlightened with regard to offering some great learning opportunity, and let’s say even, hey, they’re a little mercenary, they’re just going to go take it, “At 11:00 a.m., when there’s no other meeting on the calendar, I’m just going to do me some learning.” What are some of the top resources you’d recommend to them? I’m a huge fan of LinkedIn Learning myself, but what else would you say in terms of, “All right, you got an hour. You’re going to do some learning,” what are some of your favorite places to go?

Michelle Weise
So, one that I talk about in the book is called GLEAC. And what they do is they make this kind of mobile-friendly learning apps where they just take minutes and they have folks, for instance, who are customer service or retail folks in Prada stores, as an example, where they’re building up their reflection and communication of this kind of human skills that they’re developing where they’re exercising their judgment. And they are these bite-sized learning applications that a worker can kind of leverage while they’re working.

Another one would be Mursion that I’m kind of really interested in.

So, we tend to think of executive coaching as reserved for people kind of mid-level managers and up. What Mursion enables us to do is practice those really important human skills in a low-stakes environment. So, giving feedback, receiving feedback, these really critical skills for success in the workforce but we generally only practice them in a high-stakes environment, when we actually have to give someone really tough feedback or when we’re receiving it from our bosses.

And, generally, I know whenever I do this, I leave the conversation sort of thinking about all the different ways in which I could’ve done it better. And this environment actually has avatars in front of you, and the quality of the imagery is good enough where you can notice different people’s nonverbal cues, and you hear their voices change, and so you have to be responsive in that moment.

And it’s actually this kind of interesting AI-powered platform that’s puppeteer-ed by one human also in the background, where the human can play the role of like six or seven different people with different voices and different characteristics. And so, it gives you that chance to practice negotiation, all these different kinds of skills that we need to get better at because the fascinating thing, just in general, with human skills is even though we’re human, we’re not very sophisticated at them. We actually have to practice these skills. And just because we take a LinkedIn Learning class on empathy, we’re not somehow going to become more emotionally intelligent just from taking that one class. We have to figure out ways to practice this. So, those are the kinds of innovations that I’m excited about.

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

Michelle Weise
One thing that might be important for job seekers to know about is the existence of different kinds of alternative learning providers kind of outside the traditional realm of colleges and universities. I think most people have heard of these things called coding bootcamps where you go and you get pretty savvy in web development or frontend development and you do this for 6 to 12 weeks, you pay $20,000 out of pocket, and maybe you get this great job.

Those have typically kind of been more geared to folks who already have a degree, sort of more affluent who can actually afford to pay out of pocket. But there are these interesting other set of providers that I call on-ramps where they do this kind of really important human skills-building work but they also help learners get skills in healthcare, advanced manufacturing, cybersecurity, data science, enough to get hired by.

There are amazing stories of a US Postal Service worker becoming a quality assurance engineer for Facebook through this data science immersive program. And what they’re doing is that they’re actually stitching together that kind of career navigation with a very precise educational pathway with a direct connection to an employer.

And so, there are these kinds of opportunities available. It’s a matter of trying to, again, it’s back to us as the individual job seekers, the burden is on us to kind of find some of these. But a really interesting example of another one is one called Climb Hire we know that Salesforce administrators, they are a job that are in demand, that are in high demand. And so, what they’re doing is they’re building these skills but they’re also embedding social capital building into the learning process where they’re helping folks, who may not have the best professional networks, learn how important it is to build relationships, build professional networks.

And when a person actually gets a job at a company, as a Salesforce administrator, the onus is on them to refer and bring someone else into the company from Climb Hire because the CEO realized from LinkedIn data, as an example, that people are nine times more likely to get a job through a referral so they’re helping job seekers and learners really build this skill because it is something that you kind of have to learn how to do unless you’re sort of born into an incredible network.

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

Michelle Weise
So, you heard me talk about David Epstein who wrote Range, and he talks about deep learning, but he says, “The most effective learning looks inefficient. It looks like falling behind.” And I love this quote just because I think when we think about all the ways in which we are kind of channeled and incentivized to achieve, we’re always measuring through this kind of testing that is actually not measuring what matters.

And if we were actually to sort of really understand what kind of learners and that kind of deep learning in folks, it would actually look like failing. And I think that’s, I don’t know, that’s important for us to know.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite book?

Michelle Weise
Probably Beloved by Toni Morrison.

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

Michelle Weise
I have one of those keyboards that are split into two and kind of at an angle.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, me too.

Michelle Weise
I have some tendonitis, so.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. I’ve got the Freestyle2 from Kinesis.

Michelle Weise
That’s what I have.

Pete Mockaitis
But you got the tents going. I didn’t get the tents. I just got the split because I’ve got, I guess, some wider shoulders and so I always found that I was…Yeah, so I like being able to stretch out and be me without having to crunch them in.

Michelle Weise
Yeah. I have the same exact one, the Freestyle2. Underneath you can flip out the thingies.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s right.

Michelle Weise
You know what I realized, I think I pressed the delete button so much that I actually really kind of hurt my wrist and needed to re-shift my posture.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think that there’s something beautiful hiding in that. Perhaps it’s revision, commitment to excellence, iterating, learning, that meta stuff there.

Michelle Weise
Yeah, nothing you write is golden.

Pete Mockaitis
Not at first anyway. And how about a favorite habit?

Michelle Weise
Oh, walking.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget you share that you’re kind of known for, people quote back to you a lot?

Michelle Weise
Oh, I think maybe because I learned this from Clayton Christensen, one of the most powerful parts of the theories is when you see something that looks less than, our immediate kind of reflexes is to sort of scorn or disparage it or to dismiss it as, “Ah, it’s not an important innovation to pay attention to,” but Clay always said it could be just good enough. And that is something that I try to convey to folks. When we have that very human reflex, when we perceive newness as danger, that might be actually the precise time where we need to take a beat and look at the thing more carefully.

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

Michelle Weise
I’m always available through Twitter and LinkedIn @rwmichelle or I have a website called RiseAndDesign.io.

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

Michelle Weise
I think, in general, it’s still this concept of collaboration. I think we, generally, just because of the way we trained from K-12 on through college, it’s so often kind of this notion that things are a zero-sum game, where if you’re winning, I’m losing. But in this concept of kind of long life learning, there’s no winning list. And so, how do we actually change our behavior instead of always sort of trying to be the leader? How do we actually make sure we’re collaborating in truly distinctive ways? I think that’s something that I think about a lot. It’s a hard behavior to turn to given the way that we’re trained.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Michelle, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you lots of luck in your long life learning.

Michelle Weise
Thank you. You, too.