KF #27. Resourcefulness Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
Tania, welcome!

Tania Katan
Pete, thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited. We’re pushing record right away because we noticed that there’s something unique about us, or noteworthy, I should say, about us. You and I, we talk differently and we are also super into being creative and doing creative things. Is there a thing at play here, Tania?

Tania Katan
Totally. The reality of it is we were all actually born creative period. And, unfortunately, based on systems and well-meaning or less well-meaning parents and teachers, all the creativity was sort of, like, slapped out of us on our wrist. We were taught to kind of follow the rules and not think differently and all this.

But there is actually a study that proves that zero- to five-year-old kids are creative geniuses, which, means we’re born to think divergently, come up with infinite solutions or ideas for any problem or prompt. And then at 10 years old, that drops off to 50%. And then at 15 years old, we just can barely get out of bed and be creative. And then by the time we’re full-grown adults, all the creativity is gone unless we choose to cultivate it.

But the good news is that we were born with it so we can get it back. But I do like your enthusiasm for you and I being extraordinarily creative. Clearly, we’ve been stretching our muscles for a long time.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, you know, but I guess, if I may, and maybe I’m grasping at straws or trying to find something that’s not there, but I think there’s really something to that, that notion of we start creative and it’s beat out of us in all kinds of little ways, and we’ll dig into it.

And so, I think, perhaps, you and I, both have just doggedly refused to allow the world to wring the weirdness from us and how we choose to express ourselves. And so, we’ve held on to a bit of a unique flavor in how we express ourselves, as well as the capacity to continue pumping out a lot of ideas.

Tania Katan
Totally. Well, the good news is, guess who caught up with us weirdos? Forbes. You know it’s over. But, in all seriousness, about a year ago, Forbes said that the most important skill that we all, and by we, I mean, the workforce needs to learn and have, is creative thinking for the next four years. So, us suckers who double down on our weirdness and awkwardness and silliness and play, we’re the ones shining right now.

And that, I mean, Pete, I would be curious about your background. Like, my background ended up being, I went to theater, I did improv, all that kind of stuff. But it was because it was my natural instinct and I couldn’t fit into any other box. Like, I tried so hard. I was like, “I want to be straight. I want to have straight hair. I want to do like everything.”

And just my nature was such that I didn’t have any other option, but it did take a long time, quite seriously, and quite honestly for the workforce to catch up with what me and my parents thought were cool attributes about being creative and coming up with cool and interesting ideas. It took a while for me to find my place and for me to convince companies that, maybe, hiring me because I don’t fit in will be valuable to your bottom line and top line. And that took a long time.

And what for you? Were you just like, “Hey, I’m cool and quirky and weird and Pete, and hug me. Hire me”?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s funny how, like, oh, wow, there’s a lot I could go into, and some of it I have with therapist and others. But I did, I was into some theater in high school. It was just sort of fun, and I liked doing it. And I guess I just like performing in the stage, in general. And then when I was in high school, I thought, “I want to be a motivational speaker. That’s the job I want for myself.”

Tania Katan
You did?

Pete Mockaitis
I did. So, I was reading the book Speak and Grow Rich when I was like a 16-year-old. Like, “How does one become a professional speaker?” So, I was digging that, having fun with it. And I did an improv intensive course once just for fun. It was so funny, I was told that I’d really mellowed out. Some mentioned I’d really mellowed out a lot, and they liked that.

And it’s funny, I did not like that. I wanted to be un-mellow. But I think it’s funny how it is beaten out of us. It could be explicit or subtle. Like, there was a string of times I got dumped. I had some girlfriends, things seemed like they were going awesome, and then I just got dumped, and it wasn’t quite clear why. And it could be any number of things.

But what I managed to piece together from the little things they did say, was because some of them even said, it’s like, “Hey, no, I think we’re great one-on-one but, like, in group settings, it’s like a little off.” It’s like, “Oh, I’m too weird for you that I embarrass you.” It’s like that’s what I’m gathering, right? It’s like I am entertaining and amusing like a comedian, like, “Ha, ha, this is fun. I like this guy.” But it’s like, “Oh, but actually, I’m associated with you publicly, and that’s kind of uncomfortable.”

Pete Mockaitis
So, yeah, or then, like very subtly, I recall…well, I just recently bought a house, and it’s funny, I remember I was with a buddy, and I was helping him move, because he was also buying a house, and he said, “Hey, well, I’m going to the closing. I mean, I don’t know, you could keep boxing my stuff or you could join me at the closing.” I was like, “Hmm, joining you at the closing sounds much more fun.”

And so, I was intrigued because I’d never seen this before. I’d only seen like the episode of “The Office” where Michael Scott closes on his condo. And so, I was into it, and I was like, I had like young, childlike enthusiasm and excitement for the experience. And it’s funny, they asked, “Oh, can I get you…?” like the realtor or the closing agent or a title person, someone asked, “Oh, can I get you some coffee or anything?” And I said, “Oh, yes, please. I want the full experience.”

And, like, my buddy who I was with, he’s like, “Come on, man, don’t be weird.” And I think that’s the messaging. It’s usually fairly subtle, not like a heartbreaking dumping, but it’s like, “Hey, so like kind of just sort of be more like normal and not like you. And that would be more comfortable for all of us, please.”

Tania Katan
I love it. Pete, so, basically, what you’re saying, in essence, a couple of things. Well, one is you have been a creative trespasser your entire life, and me, too.

Pete Mockaitis
I suppose I have.

Tania Katan
So, I, basically, have been you in a parallel lesbian universe.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear it all the time, Tania.

Tania Katan
Yeah, I’m like you, only lesbian. But in all seriousness, I was the one who was like, “Buddy…” and I would say things that people wouldn’t say, and people would either laugh, crack up, or be totally embarrassed and everything in between. And at some point, they realized, “Wait a second, I want to be funny or I want to speak up, whether it’s like hanging out or in a meeting or all these spaces in between.”

And I think people started to see me as like, “Well, how do I get some of that? Like, how do I do it my own style?” And I’m like, “Ooh, what’s emerging here?” And then when I went into the workforce and, ironically, I didn’t study a book to be a motivational speaker. I was actually writing a book at 16, and a motivational speaker came to our high school, and I can’t believe that bastard.

We were in, like, a super impoverished school. We were like just a bunch of poor kids, and this guy comes in with an over, like, a cartoonishly large can that said, had printed on it, “Success comes in cans, not in can nots.”

Pete Mockaitis
I’m inspired.

Tania Katan
And then, wait, and then proceeded to talk about, like, “If you aim too high, you’re going to miss. If you aim too low, you’re going to miss. But if you aim right in the middle, that’s where success is.” And so, my message was, “Oh, so, if you aim for mediocrity…” Like, that’s what you teach poor kids, “Aim for mediocrity.”

But somehow through all of that, and through me in the same way that you couldn’t help yourself from being funny, and by funny, really, I’m guessing we pointed out obvious things or two things that seem sort of weird and stuck them together, and made new meaning. People were like, “Yeah, I want in on that, too.” By nature, again, we just get all the playfulness, all the creativity, all the fun sort of, like. beaten out of us in all these systems, and especially as adult people.

And again, this is where we are right now where everybody needs this stuff. So, at some point, I’m like, “What is this thing that I’m bringing to teams and companies? And are there other people bringing it to this level of joy that makes us want to contribute more or makes us want to bring literally our whole selves to work and we feel safe? What is it?”

And I’m like, “Oh, my gosh, it’s creative,” but we’re bringing into spaces where it’s not invited, but it’s desperately needed. And now that people have experienced it, they can’t live without it. Okay, creative and trespassing, that’s when you sneak shit in that doesn’t obviously belong. But then now it’s invited in through the front door many times. I mean, sometimes it’s not, but here’s where we are. We are basically kings and queens of the nerds. And I’m happy about this anointment.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, so trespassing, I really like that. So, that’s the title of the book, Creative Trespassing: How to Put the Spark and Joy Back into Your Work and Life. And so, trespassing, like, it wasn’t invited or asked for, and it kind of seems like it doesn’t belong, frankly, “But now that you’re here, okay, we’re kind of seeing that it’s nifty.”

And that’s interesting then in terms of, so our unique flavor of expression, you and I, it resembles that of a child before it’s been beaten out. And, I guess, is the connection then, because we’re more free to explore weird, wacky, unconventional things, some of them end up being very useful innovations along the way?

Tania Katan
Yeah, and also in that, though, is the practice of doing that. It’s not just like we wake up one day after having all the creativity taken away from us, or a lot of it, because of systems and people and all that jazz, and then we believe it. We believe all this sort of default crap of like, “Oh, I’m not good enough,” or, “I’m not smart enough,” or, “I’m not funny enough,” or, “I don’t belong here,” or whatever.

And then you and I, clearly, have maintained the practice of believing like, “Huh, if I double down on everything that I’ve got, which is creativity, ability to come up with weird ideas quickly, and also not to feel ashamed or threatened by others if the ideas are wrong, to take risks and generate more ideas than not in order to get to something.” That’s interesting.

And, in fact, I was just giving a talk at Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and one of the things in my book, and that I engage this audience in is, I said, “You know, why don’t you come up with, find a problem that nobody’s looking to solve, that nobody’s looking to solve in the world? It could be local, it could be small.”

And that in itself was a trigger for people to be like, “Wait, I can just look for something that I wasn’t told to look for? I can look for something that might be invisible and kind of bring it to life?” And I had people partner with people who didn’t know each other. So, it was this older woman and this young kid, they’ve faced each other and they did the, you know, what could they solve.

And then afterwards, I’m like, “Okay, so what did you do?” And they’re like, “Well, there’s a really great restaurant in Santa Barbara, but they’re really garlic-focused and a lot of people go there for dates. So, the problem is, is you don’t want to, like, make out with somebody if you got garlicky breath. So, we’ll plant a mini garden, like a little flower box of parsley right outside the restaurant, have some colorful scissors so people can cut parsley on their way out, eat them and they don’t have to worry about garlic breath.”

Now this seems sort of like simple, but it’s actually brilliant. I mean, it’s genius. It’s like a really great idea. They had three and a half minutes to come up with this solution. And they did. And there were other people who figured out how to clean oil from the beaches, how to grow wine grapes in the sea, like all of these things.

And so, I think the first part of that is to give ourselves permission, which obviously you and I have been doing for a long time, to sort of stretch our creative muscles, trust our instincts, and be prepared to take risks and be wrong a lot. Who cares, right? Like, in the pursuit of that one sort of solution, you have to have wild, weird, outlandish ideas, and see what comes out of them.

It’s not like be perfect right out the gate. That’s ridiculous. That’s not prototyping. That’s not innovation. That’s sort of the antithesis of that.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and it’s interesting. Let’s talk about that emotional notion of being beat down. It’s funny, sometimes when I’m brainstorming or whatever, I have zero offense whatsoever. I provide an idea and it’s just like shot down summarily and robustly. Often, that will bother me not at all. It’s like, “Well, hey, I’ve got 20 more, so next. Let’s go.”

But other times, it hits hard, in terms of it feels personal, like a rejection of me and myself-ness. And I don’t know where the distinction is. Maybe it’s about self-expression as opposed to ideas that feel a bit removed. But, help us out, if the world is going to beat us down, and sometimes we won’t care, and sometimes we will, how do we take it and keep on trucking?

Tania Katan
Well, first of all, I’ll give you and everyone who’s listening the gift of a question, which is, “What if?” What if…? So, the minute we kind of engage this question, what if it allows for possibilities beyond this time and space? What if kind of softens the blow or lowers the stakes of, like, “I need to be responsible to come up with a solution to solve the problem of lack of women in technology.”

What if it’s, like, “What if we decided to look at something differently? Like, what if we decided to come up with the wrong answer? What if we decided to launch a campaign in outer space? Like, what if?” So, there’s something about this question that I always give to people, I’ve had it in my back pocket since I went to theater school, that lowers the pressure and the taking it personally, and making it about yourself.

It’s like a gentle punting of a question into the ether, and maybe a solution will come. Even your voice goes up an octave when you ask “What if?” as opposed to like, “Okay, here’s my solution.” And also, it decenters. It’s not about you. It’s not like, “I have an idea. I have a solution.” It’s like, “What if…?” It offers it up to everyone.

So, I think that taking it out of yourself, decentering you and our egos in our brains, and allow it to sting. It does sting. I remember coming up with the idea for, “It Was Never A Dress,” which I don’t know if you’ve seen, but I’m sure your listeners have, and they can envision in their mind’s eye, you know, the bathroom lady, the symbol? And so, she’s wearing, what is she wearing, Pete?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now I know better. She’s wearing a cape.

Tania Katan
Oh, come on. Gosh, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I’ll play along. Oh, she’s wearing a dress, Tania. She’s wearing a dress.

Tania Katan
Thank you for playing. We have some lovely party gifts for you, Pete. Right. So, I came up with this idea in a meeting and, literally, to your point, there were people who were like, “That is the dumbest idea ever in our team meeting.” And some were like, “That’s the best idea,” and everything in between.

And, to me, the moment that I took that personally was when I knew it was such a good idea, I was willing to fight and push for it to be in the world. That’s when I took it personally. But before that it was like, “Well, here’s some ideas. Let’s see what happens.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I hear you. By saying “What if,” it is, it’s not about you. It’s not about your ideas, your contribution, your smarts, your worth, your value to the team, yada, yada. It’s like, “Hey, we’re just going to play a game here and we’re going to step into this world, and we’ll kind of see what happens when we play around here.

Tania Katan
Totally. You remind me of a phrase that I loved so much and nobody ever uses it, but I bet you do, Pete. Spitballing. And when I think about spitballing, I think about saliva leaving your mouth in an ungraceful way, and just like shit kind of getting messy and all over the place. And so, thinking about spitballing as a way to just kind of like, “Eh, you know, if a little spit gets somewhere, it doesn’t mean it’s not about perfection. It’s actually the minute I open my mouth. It’s about messy imperfection.” Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Well, so sometimes, when we’re talking about creativity on How to be Awesome at Your Job, a listener will think, “Well, you know, I’m not really in one of those creative-type jobs.” Do you have a response to that? And how can we think about creativity impacting all humans and workers?

Tania Katan
Yeah, so, really, there have been studies to prove that we are all creative. There’s one, and for those people who say that, they probably have a lot of constraints in their job. Maybe, like, “I don’t have time. I don’t have a budget. I don’t have a team.” I’ve been that person many times. And there was a seminal study by Patricia Stokes with rodents, rats. And she took two groups of rats; they each had a bar they had to push.

One could use both paws. One group could only use one paw. And the group with two paws just pushed the lever, pushed it, pushed it, pushed it, and fine. The group with one paw, they pushed the lever, they pushed the lever, and they are, like, hold up. Then they pushed it behind their back, then between their legs. They came up with hundreds of ways to push this freaking lever.

And the point was that, when we have constraints, we actually are more generative. We come up with more creative ideas. So, my challenge to those people who are like, A, “I’m not creative,” you were born that way. It’s your birthright so let’s tap back into it. And, B, constraints actually foster creativity. And creativity is, literally, just coming up with infinite ideas and solutions for any problem, challenge, obstacle. Period.

So, there’s two C’s of creativity. There’s the big C, which is like, “I’m a painter,” or, “I’m a playwright,” or, “I’m a choreographer, and that requires training and maybe some innate ability.” But the little C is we can come up with infinite solutions and ideas, and that’s within us. So, constraints, so I dare you to take these constraints.

There’s actually an exercise I give in Creative Trespassing, which is come up with like the positive opposite of this sort of problem that’s ailing you. So, I don’t know, Pete, who have you had on your show that’s like, “Ah, creative? I work at a call center”? Or, I don’t know, what do you, or what kind of person or industry are you talking about?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think you nailed it in terms of the constraints, in terms of if a person feels constricted as though they don’t feel they have the authority or resources or autonomy to go invent a new approach to whatever, it’s sort of like, “Well, hey, the processes have been established, and my role is to execute them.” Like, that’s kind of the vibe or context where they’re coming from.

Tania Katan
Well, I’ll tell you, I’ll give you an example from the art world, which is where everybody gets their goodies. There is an artist named Meg Duguid, and years ago she just wanted to open a gallery, right? She had met all these cool artists from around the world, and she’s like, “I live in Chicago. I want to bring all these artists in.” And then she went to look for a gallery.

And guess what? It’s very expensive, she’s not making much money, and this is her dream, and she doesn’t have investors. She’s not friends with VCs or whatever. And so, she had a choice. She’s like, “I could just let my dream go away, or I could find a creative way to deal with these constraints of no money, no space, no patrons, nothing.”

And so, she started Clutch Gallery. And it’s, literally, she has a…do you know what a clutch purse is? It’s like 10 inches by 10 inches, and hers is sort of hard shell. And she has, if you open it up, there’s rotating exhibitions in there. There’s, like, really tiny, she had a painter who had to do like, half-inch scale paintings. She had a performance artist who had to figure out a way.

So, the point is that, instead of giving up on her dream of owning a gallery, she decided to make it 10-inch by 10 inches. And if you call her, she’ll come with the gallery and meet you anywhere, like a coffee house or on the streets or whatever, and she’s showing art of people that she admires around the world.

And then they have the constraint and challenge of “How do they make their work fit within 10 inches and 10 inches?” And these are people who show in massive museums or galleries that are more typical. And I just thought that was the best way. I had some engineers come up to me after I gave a talk at Uber, and they’re like, “We want to start an innovation lab. But we don’t have money or buy-in or anything.” And I’m like, “Why don’t you get a clutch, okay?”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s where it all starts.

Tania Katan
That’s where it all starts, yeah. And we’re laughing, and whenever I share this with people at Fortune 500 companies, they laugh, and then they’re also like, “Yeah, actually, I guess I do have some less obvious resources that would be really interesting and actually fun to activate and play with.” And that’s real innovation, not bullshit like, “Oh, I’ve got a ton of money and a whole team.” I’m sure you know, anybody who’s done anything that we admire was not necessarily done with a whole team and a lot of money.

Pete Mockaitis
And what’s really interesting about, it is creative in so far as it is novel, like certainly, like that hasn’t been done before. But then interesting implications sort of unfold from that, like, there is one clutch and she has it.

And so, like, if folks who are into a unique, cool, arty experience, if you have a money problem, may very well be, it’s like, “Well, shoot, how am going to get all my art friends together? And if I want this gallery to come to our event, well, now there’s a supply constraint so there might be a substantial fee associated with it.” It’s like, “You want the clutch? Yeah, well, your fancy friends, that’s going to be $800 for me to truck it on the L over to you there.”

Tania Katan
I like how you went to scale and capitalism in, like, one beat. Man!

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure. Yeah, thank you.

Tania Katan
I like that. I like it a lot. Nice transition. So, yeah, but that’s just like saying, “Oh, somebody came up with a project management SaaS we can’t come up with anymore,” right? But the cool thing is when somebody comes up is first to market, whether that’s a clutch with a miniature painting show in it, or a software as a service, and it becomes a North Star for everybody else to tap into.

Like, “Okay, how am I going to use my unique voice, brand, style, tone to connect with my intended audience in a positive way. What’s my clutch? What’s my clutch? Ooh, hashtag, I see a new campaign. #WhatsMyClutch.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, it’s really interesting. You mentioned, like a software as a service project management piece, and it’s like, “Oh, well, that’s already been done. There are multiples.” And yet I’m just thinking, I see so many variants, and they’re kind of fun. I’m thinking randomly about the CARROT Weather app.

Tania Katan
What? I don’t know that.

Pete Mockaitis
It’ll give you attitude. You could choose from several personalities and how you want it to tell you about the weather, from professional to friendly, to snarky, to homicidal and overkill. So, it brings that fun to a very mundane activity, like, “Oh, what’s the weather? There’s plenty of weather apps. Well, if you want your weather app to have some attitude, you’ve got CARROT Weather,” and it has a boatload of users. It’s really taken off.

Tania Katan
Well, because what it’s done and that, to me, is the ultimate expression of creativity. Just taking something that’s seemingly mundane, or every day, or overlooked, and actually turning it on its head or upside down or inside out so that it can really engage people in a fun, uplifting, and positive way. Really, I mean, that’s what we need in all industries in all areas.

You’re reminding me of this, my side hustle in which I don’t get paid, but I’m turning to you to understand how to commodify and scale it, sir. But which is, whenever I’m on hold with like the bank or any kind of institution, which is all the time, they always have their hold music. And so, I decided to start doing dance and performance with the whole music and just videotaping myself, and sharing it with anybody who’s had to be on hold, and it’s so much fun.

And so, it turns something that’s not only just mundane, but actually frustrating. And sometimes when I’m haven’t had a nap, just downright irritating, I become the nasty carrot, more like a gourd, I feel. And, yeah, and so it’s taken something that I have to do, that we all have to do, which is engage with customer service in a way that’s sometimes, and oftentimes, not enlivening.

And it all starts with the canned music, and turn it into a performance or dance even if it’s just for myself, especially if it’s for my friends, and we can all enjoy it a little bit more. So, I love the CARROT.

Pete Mockaitis
Now that is fun. And I want to talk about some additional examples of that because it’s your subtitle, “How to Put the Spark and Joy Back into Your Work and Life.” Let’s talk about some mundane dimensions of work life.

Let’s say answering emails and participating in, we’ll say, Zoom meetings, that you know they’re not the most interesting and maybe not the most essential, but, nonetheless, you’re expected to be there. And there’s probably a few minutes that are actually really necessary for you out of the 60. So, how might we bring a little bit more of that zest to these experiences?

Tania Katan
Well, first of all, I consider this one-inch by one-inch frame in our camera as a stage. It’s not this sort of, like, passive participant. We can engage with this as if we’re as a speaker, as a motivational speaker. I give a lot of talks on Zoom. And so, if you are conducting the meeting, then I would recommend that you start with seeing the space as an active, alive, performative one, not performative work, but more performance-based.

So, for example, Pete, if we were just entering a Zoom meeting, and I was “running it,” I would say, “Okay, Pete, our meeting today is creativity. We’re talking about creativity. So, you know what? Let’s start with something creative. We’re going to leave the frame and we’re going to count to three on our own. One, two, three. And when we get to three, enter the frame in a new way. You ready? Let’s do it.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Tania Katan
“Okay. We’re going to leave the frame. Bye.” Okay, so, look, here’s the deal. A lot of people forget thought and form, right? The thought is, “Why have we all convened? What’s the theme? Why are we here?” And if it’s about creativity or innovation, a lot of these meetings we’re having are for a reason and we forget about it. We get just perfunctory and, like, we check off the bullet points on the agenda.

0And I’m here to tell you that connect what you’re talking about to the actual form in which it takes. So, don’t start a meeting about innovation by saying, “Okay, who has the notes from the last meeting? Hey, Pete, can you hear me? Can you hear me?”

I mean, why wouldn’t you engage people with the substance that you’re trying to sell, to commodify, to champion as, like, “This is our vision and mission.” And yet, it’s the first thing to go away when we sit down at a meeting or when sometimes we engage in practices that we think are like less interesting.

Having that connection to what we do and why we do it is so important. And I don’t think it should be left out of anything. It needs to be brought into everything. And I promise you, it’ll change culture and it’ll change your mindset and change how fun Zoom meetings are.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, no, that’s fun. I’m imagining, when you talk about the little camera square as a performance space, like a stage, well, I‘m imagining from “Arrested Development,” Tobias Fünke, you know, placed aside his artist’s smock to adorn his director’s hat or whatever, you know, get props, get silly with it. And that’s kind of fun.

I want to hear your take on email. You reminded me of some things. I’ve only done this a few times. I guess I was that desperate, like, “I need to do these emails and I really, really don’t want to.” I put on a headset, which kind of helped because I was doing some dictation to speak a little bit. But more so, I was pretending to be the character Chloe from “24,” talking to Jack Bauer about some very urgent situations as I was quickly typing away on the screen, because that’s what Chloe always did.

And it was life or death, terrorism, you know, big high stakes, just to put a little bit of juice into the email processing. And that kind of worked. I’ve also tried timings, like, “Oh, it’s a race. Let’s try and get 100 by these many minutes or whatever.” So, I’d love your hot take on how do we bring some more spark and joy back to email processing.

Tania Katan
So, I love that you created a whole meal out of your persona to sit down to respond to emails but you’re not responding in their vernacular or like with their language. It’s Pete responding, but you’re giving yourself that urgency and excitement of being the character.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, but if I don’t answer these emails, the terrorists are going to win.

Tania Katan
So, you’re holding yourself hostage.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, well, put some duct tape on your mouth, “Hmm, hmm.”

Tania Katan
I’ll approach it from another way, which my clients, who I worked for like big tech companies, like Expedia and stuff like that, and they have to construct the most boring emails to people who have not read anything that they were supposed to read, in a way in which suggests, like, “I’m sure you read the 20-page reports. And here’s blah blah blah.”

And so, what they do that is really exciting, is they just throw in an Easter Egg, because not everybody has tapped into that. So, it’ll be all about like the new version of, you know, whatever, the new release of the technology, and they’ll throw in like a few Easter Eggs from Star Trek or whatever film or TV show, to see if they’ve read the thing they should have read.

And if they do then, they get bonus points. And the person who’s on the other end gets excited, they’re like, “Okay, I’m going to read that because I know there’s going to be some Easter Eggs in there.” I’ve never tried that, but I’m going try adapting. I feel like my persona is just so I’m always performing in relation to that. I love that. I’m going to start using that. I’ll hashtag, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure. I’m on it. Thank you.

Tania Katan
I’ll TM you. I love that. That’s such a great way, is to like put on the hat of whatever character you think is sort of weird and wily and wonderful, and get all the high-pressure stakes that they have in their situation, and respond to an email about the next team meeting. I think that’s great.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool. Fun. Well, is there anything you do when drudgery enters your work life? What are your personal practices for spicing it up?

Tania Katan
Well, first of all, this is really practical spice and it’s a tomato. I feel like you had a carrot. I should bring some vegetable-fruit to the table. And the Pomodoro method, I know this sounds sort of boring, but this is the best thing that I’ve given to all my clients. It’s a time management. It’s a constraint. So, basically, it’s started with like a tomato timer, but set a timer for 15 minutes, 20 minutes, and get done what you need to get done. And when the timer goes off, you take a break.

You dance, you work out, you breathe, you jump up and down, whatever the hell you want. You drink a coffee, and then you set it again. So, creativity isn’t always like, “I’m racing against time in, like, a larger sense.” Sometimes it’s all about, like, “I give myself this constraint so that I can approach what I’m doing in a way that’s, like, doesn’t beat me down, feels kind of fine. And I can move on to the next thing that’s actually more fun for me.”

So, I know that’s not sexy, but tomatoes can be sexy sometime, time management can be sexy, because it allows us to do the things that we really love to do. Thus, the gift of AI, I’ve got to say. I mean, that’s where, if you really want to be developing your creative muscles, let something else do the boring tasks. Boom!

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, when it comes to AI, I would love to hear your pro tips, do’s and don’ts. I mean, I think we’ve seen AI really go both ways in terms of a worker has used it to be more effective and efficient, and a worker has used it to embarrass themselves royally because these citations or legal cases don’t exist, or they let it sort of do all. They actually let it do the fun parts for them. So, help us out, what are your do’s and don’ts for AI in helping us have more fun and creative goodness in our work?

Tania Katan
Okay. Here’s the deal. I did a thought experiment. So, I was an early adopter with ChatGPT, and you can’t forget the learning part of machine. It’s machine learning. So, it’s what you’re feeding it and what we’re all feeding it, whether we’re feeding it burritos or like Twyla Tharp, you know. It’s getting a lot of stuff in its pie hole, and that’s part of the process.

But for me, early on, with ChatGPT, I realized, what AI won’t do is it won’t write 50 shitty pages in order to get to that one line that you’re like, “Oh, my God, I thought my book was about this, but it’s really not about that.” It’s not process-oriented, it’s a process-er. And we are process-oriented and we are driven to have those moments where we doubt we could write the book, we doubt we could write the code. We doubt it.

And in the doubting, we dig in deeper and then we find a totally different way to do it, a way that isn’t a pattern that is less obvious. And that’s the beauty of us being human beings.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, agreed. So, then is there anything you think it’s handy for?

Tania Katan
So, I find it really effective and efficient for the stuff that slows me down as a creative, right? Making the bullet point list, organizing thoughts and ideas into a clear form that I can take to a company that I just met with. And I’m like, “Here.” I met with them, I’m like, “I can help you tell your story in all these different ways, engage your audiences.”

And then I get home and I’m exhausted. I don’t want to sit down and make a proposal that’s cogent. So, I’ve really worked with ChatGPT and helped it nail down the tone, and do the hard stuff. That’s what it’s there for, is to do the stuff that is boring to me. That’s why I love it so much. And also, and in fairness to this processor that is kind of gleaning and gathering all kinds of information, because I’ve fed it so much over the years, it can be kind of a thought partner.

I guess I think about it as like a very high achieving intern. It’s not, like, it’s shabby ideas, to your point. It can come up with creative ideas, but that’s based on years of me sort of showing how I think, how I feel, how the people I work with think and feel. And so, it can be really good, like an intern who’s like, “Hey, Tania, I have a really good idea.” And I’m like, “Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s good. It’s super good.”

The tone isn’t there yet, but that’s my job. That’s what I delight in is the creative crafting of that, of the messages. So, I think it’s a good thought partner, first drafter, and definitely great with the tedious tasks that us humans shouldn’t be doing.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, and it’s intriguing. Tedious tasks, in some ways, to get philosophical, it’s a bit in the eye of the beholder insofar as an attorney might delight in crafting a contract that seems, oh, so thorough and risk-mitigating and comprehensive. Or, maybe they hate it, too, Tania. I’m not sure.

Tania Katan
Yeah, but, no, conversely, to your point, Pete, so if that’s your creative output is the sort of the tasks and the focusing in on the details, then you’re training it to come up with the creative ideas that you’re feeding into it.

And maybe those ideas aren’t perfect, but maybe within the realm of the people that you’re engaging with, that those are like really radical ideas that you can explore together as humans and see if they work. Test them out.

So, use them for the opposite, the person who’s expressing or sort of stretching their creative muscles all the time, desires to use it for.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, tell me, any final thoughts, tips, do’s and don’ts about creativity and joy?

Tania Katan
There are no don’ts. It’s do’s. Creativity is the new job security. Pass it on. Really, I mean, in all seriousness, back to the full circle to the Forbes quote, I mean, they’ve literally doubled down. In four issues, they’ve written about how important creative thinking is for knowledge workers, because AI will be able to do everything we can do and faster.

And if we don’t cultivate our creative thinking, if we don’t get back to our birthright of being creative individuals who can solve any problem, accept any challenge, and even turn ourselves into a character that has high-pressure stakes in order to answer emails, we’re going to be out of a job. And I don’t want us to be like that. We’re the ones who created AI. So, let’s wield the power of technology rather than it dragging us around.

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

Tania Katan
Maya Angelou all the way, “People will forget what you did, people will forget what you said, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

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

Tania Katan
The Patricia Stokes study on rodents and creativity and constraints.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Tania Katan
Yeah, Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart. That’s my favorite, When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chödrön, all the way. It’s a good read anytime, especially now.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Tania Katan
An espresso cup.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Tania Katan
Laughing.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that people quote back to you often?

Tania Katan
God, no. What people say is, “Oh, Tania, I love what you said. Can you say it again?” And I say, “No. Whatever comes out of my pie hole is there for you to use or throw away immediately. There’s no in between.”

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

Tania Katan
TaniaKatan.com, T-A-N-I-A Katan.com.

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

Tania Katan
Lower the stakes. Take some risks. Do it in places and with people you feel safe first, and then expand the circle, and then expand the circle even more until it’s so big that every place is a place for you to take risks and find some joy, and double down on being a creative human.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Tania, thank you.

Tania Katan
Thanks, Pete.

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

Joey Cofone
Hello. Hello. I am psyched.

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

Joey Cofone
Surprise.

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

Joey Cofone
Watching it the whole time.

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Wow, what a guy.

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

Pete Mockaitis
That is beautiful.

Joey Cofone
Yes.

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

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

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

Joey Cofone
Yeah, it was good.

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

Joey Cofone
Thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Two percent.

Joey Cofone
Two percent. Nailed it.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent.

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joey Cofone
I was just going to say that.

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

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

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

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

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

Joey Cofone
Correct.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joey Cofone
So am I.

Pete Mockaitis
No kidding?

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

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

Joey Cofone
I would say movie.

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
“Master of Orion.”

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
So, eight humans on the planet who…

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

Pete Mockaitis
“Breaking Bad.”

Joey Cofone
“Breaking Bad.” Walter White.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joey Cofone
Miyamoto.

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

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

Joey Cofone
Go for it. Let your weird out.

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

Joey Cofone
And see how people react?

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

Joey Cofone
You scoot next to him?

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

Joey Cofone
That is ridiculous. I like it.

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
All right, let’s do it.

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Create?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Mm-hmm.

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

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you.

Joey Cofone
Thank you, Pete.

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
You open and you stay flat.

Joey Cofone
I do stay flat. Patented, yeah.

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

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

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

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

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

Joey Cofone
Coffee. Is that fair?

Pete Mockaitis
Sure.

Joey Cofone
Love coffee.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leidy Klotz
Thanks for having me, Pete. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into the wisdom you’ve put forth in your book Subtract. So, why don’t we kick it off by you telling us the story of your epiphany that occurred with Legos?

Leidy Klotz
Yeah, the epiphany courtesy of my three-year old at the time, so I was playing Legos with my son and the problem that we had was that we were building a Lego bridge and it wasn’t level. And so, one of the columns was shorter than the other column. I turned around behind me to grab a block to add to the shorter column. By the time I had turned back around, my son had removed a block from the longer column. And that right there in front of me was this kind of thought process that I became interested in. And we’ve since done tens thousands of hours’ worth of research, studying and trying to figure out what was going on there.

But what was really helpful for me with that moment with the Legos, with my son, was that I’d always been interested in less, kind of this end state of things that are better because there’s less to them. But what he helped me see in that moment was this act of getting there, subtracting, and he also helped me see it in a very tangible way, in a way that I could actually go around and even show other people and describe my thoughts to other people. So, that proved really helpful as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s cool. Yes, three-year olds, I’ve got one as well and they teach you much. So, that’s wild how that sparks such a long journey, and it’s cool that we don’t stop there with a nice little metaphor. You got a boatload of research now to back it up. So, can you tell us then, while that’s kind of an interesting way to think a little bit differently, what’s sort at stake or the benefits associated with pursuing subtracting as opposed to adding?

Leidy Klotz
Fundamentally, what’s at stake here is that it’s a basic option that we have to make things better. Whether we’re creating a Lego structure, or whether we’re trying to improve our daily task list, whether we’re trying to improve the thoughts that are in our head, we can add things to them and we can also take things away.

And what I did in that moment was I didn’t even think about taking away as an option, and I would’ve added and moved on, never even considering if I wanted to subtract in that moment if not for being shown the other way by my son. And so, that’s the problem. The problem is that we’re not considering the options. The problem is not that less is always better. In fact, I quite like adding, but I think that anytime that we’re systematically overlooking a basic way to change things, that’s a problem.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly, yeah. Doubling our options sounds handy for sure. Could you share with us maybe some cool case studies in terms of professionals who’d done some subtracting and seen some really cool results and benefits?

Leidy Klotz
So, the downside is that we systematically underuse it. The upside is we don’t have to, and because everybody else is systematically underusing, there’s kind of additional power in taking things away. This is an untapped opportunity. And so, I think you see it everywhere really. So, one example is the craft of good presentations. I know you’ve had some people talking about that on your podcast before.

But, like, one of the elements of a good presentation is that all the kind of unnecessary stuff is stripped away. Edward Tufte, who’s this guru of information design, talks about maximizing the information to ink ratio, which basically means stripping away any ink that is not adding to your message. And so, that’s something in PowerPoint presentations, or posters, or any kind of visual displays, but obviously you can see the same thing in editing, so editing writing, also editing podcasts. I’m sure you’re going to take out some of the stuff that I say here today.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, not much. Not much.

Leidy Klotz
So, that is a very powerful subtraction that improves the overall product by taking away. So, that’s subtracting in kind of the information way. I think, on a personal level, and I’m certainly not the first person who has thought of this, but thinking about what you can stop doing, especially at work because at work we’re so inclined to show competence, and this is one of the reasons that we tend to add, I think, is because adding shows competence. But reminding ourselves, “Hey, one of the ways to make your work life better is to stop doing marginally useful tasks so that you have more time for the really useful ones.”

So, forcing myself, when I’m doing my to-do list, also thinking about, “Okay, what’s on my stop-doing list for the week?” And it’s critical that it can’t just be things that you’re going to say no to. It has to be things that you’re already doing, and now you’re going to stop doing them. That’s an actual subtraction from your calendar.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s like saving money, like if you buy something that’s 30% off, you haven’t really saved money. But if you remove something, like, “You know what, I don’t even use that thing. Cancel that subscription.” Okay, now you’re saving some real money. So, that’s cool. And I’m curious, now             you’ve got a boatload of science and research behind it. Could you share with us what are some interesting insights, experiments, and results there that have taught you something about how we humans tend to operate and how we might operate better?

Leidy Klotz
Yeah. So, building from the bridge with my son, we did have one Lego-inspired study here, and basically you could solve this Lego study. There was a platform that was protecting a mini figure, and the task was to try to stabilize the platform so that you could balance a brick on top of the platform without crushing the mini figure. And, basically, you could solve this by removing one block and kind of letting the platform set down, or you could solve it by adding eight blocks and stabilizing it that way.

So, in this case, with the bridge it was like either/or. Either way could be a viable solution. In this case, it was obvious that taking away was better. We even incentivized people, and said, “Hey, every block you add, you have to pay for, but if you don’t add blocks, you can keep more of the money that we gave you up front.” And people still, overwhelmingly, kind of defaulted to this way of adding.

And so, what’s interesting about that is it shows not just that we tend to add but also that it’s a problem, like we tend to add even when subtracting would serve us well. And, of course, when people noticed or were told that, “Hey, this is a subtractive option,” they said, “Oh, geez, I wish I did that.” So, that was evidence that people were systematically overlooking it.

And we did this in a lot of different contexts. For me, the most convincing study paradigm was these grids that we created that you could just play on a computer screen. Because the argument could always be, “Well, that’s just what people do with Legos. This doesn’t mean we’re systematically doing it. It just means we add when we’re playing with Legos.”

But the grids on a computer screen are an entirely new task for people, and the way we set that up was there was a matrix, and it was basically divided into four quadrants. And the task people had was to make the quadrants symmetrical from left to right and from top to bottom. And we put extraneous marks in one of the quadrants. So, the way to solve it was to either to remove those extraneous marks from one quadrant or add the mirror marks in three other quadrants.

So, again, as with the Lego protecting the mini figure, subtracting was the better option, and people systematically overlooked it. And with these grids, there was no kind of preconceived contexts or preconceived ideas that people could bring to the task, so it was pretty good evidence that this is something we’re systematically doing.

Pete Mockaitis
in some ways, it’s funny. With like leveling a bridge, I guess I think about like leveling a table. It’s a lot easier to put a little shim under there than it is, like, “Oh, let me whip out the saw and just kind of shorten one of these legs.”

So, in many contexts, adding is easier. Adding, you mentioned, can reveal competence, like, “Oh, wow, you must know a lot of things because look at all those slides you made there.” And so, there’s a little bit of a nudge or bias there. Any other big explainers as to why do we humans do this?

Leidy Klotz
There are a lot of reasons. The first four chapters of the book is that there’s biological, cultural, and economic forces that have us doing it. And I think one useful distinction here is that there’s this basic oversight where we don’t even think of the option, and then there’s all kinds of reasons once we do think of the option, why we wouldn’t even pursue it.

So, your example of, and I certainly agree with, like cutting a leg off a table, that’s harder. But the assumption there is that, “Okay, we considered it. We thought of that option and we chose against it because it was harder.” That’s logical. That’s not a problem. Basically, what’s going on in the cognitive process, the reason we overlook it is because we add and then move on, we basically say, “This satisfies.” So, we say, “This is a good enough solution and I’m moving on without considering other options.”

And then, from there, there’s evolutionary reasons why that might be happening. You mentioned competence. We think of competence as a very work-related thing and it’s maybe a modern thing. I was surprised, doing the research, just how deeply rooted this desire to show competence is. This is why bowerbirds build their ceremonial nests to attract a mate.

So, if you’re not familiar, these birds build these really great nests. The males build the nests, the females go around and look at the nests, and then they decide which males to mate with based on which nest they like the best. And then the females go and make their own nests to shelter the kids. So, these nests serve no other function than to say, “Hey, the bowerbird who built this nest is effective at interacting with their world.”

And so, we all have this biological desire to show competence. So, when I have 800-file folders saved for this research that we did, none of which that are ever going to see the light of day, part of that is this kind of innate desire to show competence through adding things. And so, that’s a strong why. I think there’s cultural reasons, of course. Then cultural and economic reasons that kind of come together.

If your country is being measured on Gross Domestic Product, anything that you add to the economy is going to be seen as a positive even if it’s a jail or something that’s bad. And then if your company is working on kind of quarterly earning reports, that can incentivize adding stuff to show that you’re doing more and to show that there’s increasing streams of revenue coming in.

So, I think there’s economic incentives, cultural incentives, and biological incentives, and they’re all kind of reinforcing each other.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And I guess I’m also thinking about that corporate example reminded me of it seems like sometimes if you’ve got a really great thing going in terms of like a product and process, and it’s like you could just keep doing that all day, it’s sort of like, “Well, hey, the team is getting bored.” It’s like, “We’re getting bored doing this thing that’s working perfectly over and over and over again, and making lots of profits. So, how about we do a new thing?” I think that can happen too.

Leidy Klotz
Yeah. And I think that’s what I like about subtracting. I’m that kind of person. I want to do and I don’t want to kind keep doing the same thing over and over. And subtracting is an action, so it’s like, this is different than just kind of sitting back, kind of minimalism, or even laziness, or just getting stuck in a rut. It’s like, “Hey, we want to change. We want to improve this thing. We want to try something new. Why is it that we only think about things we could add?”

Because the other way to break out of rut, if you’re that organization that’s been doing the same thing over and over and over again, it’s like, “Hey, let’s cut out half of what we’ve been doing and really focus on the other half,” and that would be a change. Again, I’m agnostic on whether you should add or subtract, but to not consider the option is the problem.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. You mentioned the research reveals some stuff about how we can get our brains to swim against the current, go against the grain, and do more subtracting. Tell us, how do we go about making that happen?

Leidy Klotz
Yeah, and one of the things we’re trying to show with the research, we’re trying to find with the research is whether people weren’t even thinking of this. And so, we would try things to get them to think of it, make them more likely to think of it, and one of the things we tried was cues. So, with the grids, for example, we gave people a cue that you could add or subtract to solve the grid pattern, and that increased the rates of subtracting, which would be like, “Okay, big deal, you gave them a reminder and they were reminded.” But it didn’t increase the rates of adding.

So, what that showed was that the reminder was bringing new subtractions to mind but for adding it was redundant with what people were already thinking. So, it was really useful for our research but also really useful as a how-to. And so, I think one thing is you have a reminder that you can add or subtract, or add and subtract, to solve things, but it’s really important, we didn’t find any evidence that that reminder would kind of carry over from one study to the next, so you have to put those reminders close to where you’re making the decision. That’s why when I’m doing the stop-doing list, I’m forcing a reminder that subtracting is a way to improve my calendar.

One of the things on your sheet, you talked about your listeners, and you talked about them being interested in thinking, and you put a reminder on there about thinking involves generating and selecting ideas, which is beautiful because it’s like that’s a reminder that adding and subtracting can be used here in our thinking process and actually mimics something that I talk about in the book, which is that evolution generates and selects to make progress. So, having those reminders at the point of when you’re making the decisions or when you’re trying to make the improvements is really important and supported by the research.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Okay. so we’ve got some reminders up front. Maybe, could you share with us some of the coolest examples of subtraction in terms of someone did some subtracting and then they saw great results? So, you mentioned you’ve got your stop-doing list. What are some things that you’ve chosen to stop doing and the cool fruit that’s come from that?

Leidy Klotz
Email.

Pete Mockaitis
Nice. Stop doing email.

Leidy Klotz
I haven’t stopped completely but I think just forcing myself to be disciplined with doing it one time a day, and so I positioned that stop-doing as like stop these intermittent email checks. And what’s interesting about that, of course it has this amazing effect where I’m not distracted throughout the day, but it also led to decrease the stream of my email. Because part of the problem with me getting so many emails was me sending so many emails. So, every time I spam my graduate students with, “Hey, did you see this article?” then I’m distracting them, they’re feeling a need to respond, and then I have like distracted people working with me, plus I have six new email responses in my inbox the next time I go to check.

So, that email discipline, that stop-doing, has actually led to cascading subtractions. Another personal one that’s really helpful is kind of just unplugging when I exercise. And, again, like gathering knowledge is just so precious. I listen to podcasts, I read voraciously on Wikipedia, but I had been kind of using my exercise time as like, “Okay, can I catch up on the news while I’m running on the treadmill, while I’m listening to a podcast?” and it wasn’t giving me any time for my brain to kind of like synthesize things and think about what’s really important to select. So, those two are kind of personal ones that are work-related.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, certainly. And even if they’re not work-related, I’d love to hear what are some cool subtractions you’ve seen in action?

Leidy Klotz
Yeah, one of my favorites is the balance bike. So, you said you had a three-year old.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right.

Leidy Klotz
Do you have a balance bike?

Pete Mockaitis
I don’t.

Leidy Klotz
You don’t. Oh, man, so this is the value that I’m providing right now to you, Pete. They’re these miniature bikes that don’t have pedals and they allow the kids to ride them like a Flintstones car basically. So, the kid balances on the bike and then just pushes, propels it with their feet. And what’s amazing is that the kids learn how to balance within like 30 minutes to an hour of walking around on this. So, very quickly, they can reach really high speeds as like a two-year old on this bike.

And what’s amazing about is that, well, the power of it, I think, is it gives kids like two extra years of bike riding, which I think is a very delightful thing. I’m disappointed that we didn’t have them when I was growing up. And also, the innovation there is removing the pedals. People have been thinking about better bike design for a hundred years at least, and there’s been a lot of profit to be made, and people added training wheels. We added connections from the kids’ bike to the grownup bike. We made fatter tires, fatter tubes. And it took all this time for somebody to think, “Hey, what if we subtract the pedals? What will happen there?”

So, I think that’s a beautiful example in the physical world. And then an example I used in the book is Bruce Springsteen. He’s a prolific artist, obviously, but one of his albums is Darkness on the Edge of Town, and it’s one of his most critically acclaimed albums. And what’s really unique and noticeable about that album is that he really stripped things down. And so, one, he stripped on the number of songs on the album. He recorded like 50 songs during that time period and only a few of them, a dozen or ten, made it onto the album. And he stripped away some really good songs that became hits for other artists.

But then the music itself is very stripped down. So, the wording is sparse and the music is compact and powerful. And what’s cool about that is that he subtracted but, also, he kind of showed competence by subtracting because it’s not that we can’t show competence by subtracting. It’s just that you need to probably do more of it for your subtracting to stand out. And so, everybody, when they heard this album, and if you’re a Bruce Springsteen fan, if you’re listening to his albums, you’re like, “Well, this is different.” Even if you don’t know why it’s different, you’re like, “This is different. Something happened here.”

And so, in the subtraction that he persisted with there led to this kind of innovative change in how music was made. So, whereas, the balance bike was a physical example, the subtraction in his music is a very kind of ideas/words and music example.

Pete Mockaitis
And I had also heard that married couples that don’t have a TV in their bedroom have more sex. So, I don’t know if we’re going to go here today. And so, I think that’s an interesting example and it sort of makes sense, like, “Hey, well, our focus is on each other as opposed to that large eye-grabbing device on the wall.”

Leidy Klotz
That’s such a beautiful example. And it’s really annoying to be doing these podcasts after writing the book and thinking like, “Oh, I wish I could’ve used the TV-sex example,” would’ve been way better than the example I used in the book to illustrate this principle, which I’m about to say, which is so often when we’re trying to improve a situation, like we think about what incentives we can add. So, it’s like, “Okay, the goal is like let’s have more sex. And so, can we put in mood lights?

Leidy Klotz
You get the idea. There’s a lot of things, a lot of incentives we could add for having sex. And then we often overlook the barriers to the behavior we’re trying to produce. And so, in this case, the barrier is that TV, what’s interesting with this and the argument that people make, and like Kurt Lewin, the founder of social psychology, said, “There’s two ways to change a situation. One is to add incentives and the other is to remove barriers.” And he said, “Removing barriers is actually the good way because it relieves tension.”

So, imagine if you add the incentive, well, you still got the TV there. So, it’s very clear that the incentive might work but if it doesn’t work, there’s still this kind of you’ve got the incentive plus you’ve got the TV, and you haven’t actually relieved the fundamental tension in the system. Whereas, if you stripped away the TV, you’ve actually relieved tension in the system. The example I used in the book is an iPad with a kid. So, it’s so close to the example but it’s so much better than the example I used.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, if you go with the iPad and the kids, so if you…

Leidy Klotz
So, the behavior in that case is I’m trying to get my kid to spend time not looking at the iPad when he comes home from school. And so, one thing you can do is say, “Hey, if you don’t use the iPad, you can have a cookie,” that’s the incentive version. And, in this case, if he doesn’t, so it may work. He may eat the cookie and be happy and never think about it, or he may want to watch the iPad still, which increases his frustration because now he’s not getting a cookie because he’s watching the iPad. So, you’ve increased the tension in the system. Whereas, kind of the equivalent of removing the TV is just removing the iPad from the kid’s view and hopefully he doesn’t think about it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that notion of removing the view, I think, is huge because while it’s true, it’s so funny because I just want to take a photo of the adorable thing my child is doing. And then when I get out my phone, it’s like, “Ooh, can we play the pre-school games?” It’s like, “I just want to take a picture. This is going to be like three seconds.” And so then, we now have a bit of a, “Well, hey, no. We did that earlier,” you’ve got that whole thing.

And so, could you expand upon that in terms of some things that maybe we just want out of view and how we get them out of view? I imagine there’s like social media, news, distractions, and there’s some apps you can use to block those or shut them off. What are some maybe creative ways you’ve seen this put into practice?

Leidy Klotz
Yeah, to get them out of view. That’s, essentially, what the email was doing, the not checking the emails, but also the email reminders. I’ve got my good friend Ben who worked with me on the research. He’s like, “I got to figure out how to turn off my email reminders.” And this is like four years into the research together, which is like this is kind of forced, automated adding that’s distracting you throughout the day, so things like that come to mind.

Pete Mockaitis
I heard that there’s a study that they challenged folks to turn off all of their phone notifications for like a week or something, and then they followed up with them like a year later, half of people continued to live that way, like, “Now it’s so much better. Thank you.” And so, it’s striking how that is good. I have seen they’ve actually made…my buddy Jackson, shoutout Jackson, has, I think, it’s called a lite phone and it doesn’t have much. You can make phone calls, you can do texting, maybe a little bit more. It has like a Kindle-style screen, and that’s on purpose. So, you can’t get a bunch of apps and all the distractions that they incur because it’s just not available, or that temptation.

I guess now I’m thinking about like tempting circumstances, like alcoholics, or overeaters, or anyone, or gambling. There’s many number of ways you can just make sure you’re not in the presence of those things, which lead you down there. But I’d love to hear, I guess I’m just so intrigued by this because if people have that hardwiring, like, “More is better and I want more,” what are some maybe surprises you’ve seen in terms of it turns out that subtracting this thing was actually awesome?

Leidy Klotz
We talked a lot about the disadvantages that subtracting faces, like the systematic, “Oh, it doesn’t show competence,” and we don’t think of it. One of the systematic advantages is that when you subtract something, you’re left with the new situation plus whatever you took away. So, like the donut holes is the example I used in the book here just to illustrate it. It’s like it took forever for somebody to realize you could cut the middle of the round wall of dough and make it cook more evenly, and you could spread more stuff onto it. And then it took even longer for somebody to realize, “Hey, this thing that we just took out is actually like another source of revenue.”

And so, this applies in a lot of ways. If you think about divestment is another thing I talk about in the book, which is like, “How do you, not investing in things that are kind of counter to your values?” So, this was really powerful in helping bring down apartheid in South Africa, for example. It’s like, “Okay, let’s stop investing in the companies that are operating in South Africa, propping up this system that nobody thinks is good.”

And when you divest, you take the money out and you’ve still got the money. You can do something with it. You can go put it somewhere else. It’s the same, going back to your example of the people in the business who are like, “Okay, we’re working along really well, and we like what we’re doing. What can we do differently? What can we add?” If you add, you’ve got this existing situation plus all the stuff you’ve added, the activities you’ve added, so you’re still at capacity or beyond capacity. If you take something away, then you’ve got the new improved situation, which is like you’re streamlined-focus plus you’ve got this effort that is now unaccounted for and you can devote to something else.

So, I think it makes sense when it’s explained to you but it’s also a little counterintuitive when we think about subtracting. We often overlook the fact that you can reuse the thing that you took away. Whereas, if you add, you’ve got nothing left over.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, whether it’s money or time or attention or energy, you got it.

Leidy Klotz
Yeah, time is a big one.

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

Leidy Klotz
No, I think the key thing is across ideas, objects with the Lego bridge, and then our day-to-day situations. So, the ideas one, that’s for people who like to listen to podcasts and for people who like to think about how they’re going to be better at their job. We spend a lot of time kind of accumulating information and we often overlook, like, “Okay, how do I streamline my mental models? What am I kind of grounding my ideas in that I may not believe anymore that has been shown isn’t actually the way that I think it is?” And so, spending the time streamlining our mental models is a really powerful use of subtraction and very overlooked.

Pete Mockaitis
Streamlining our mental models, so that’s like specifically identifying the, “I don’t believe, think, accept, agree with this thing anymore.”

Leidy Klotz
Yeah. And prioritizing, so it’s like, “Yeah, this thing is true. I listened to it but It doesn’t warrant the same attention as these kinds of four core things that are in my mental models.” The intentional version of synaptic pruning, which is our brain has evolved to do naturally which is like the connections that get used, get reinforced and strengthened, and when we sleep, it kind of prunes away the connections that aren’t being used to leave more room for the connections that are being used. So, our brain does that on its own for all the parts of the brain, but it also is something that we can do, and say, “Hey, this is not something that warrants the same amount of attention as some other ideas that are really, really critical.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Leidy, could you share with us a mental model or two that you have pruned away as the years have gone by?

Leidy Klotz
This is a slightly embarrassing one to share but I think if people are honest with themselves, I think a lot of us felt the same way. So, if you think about the systemic racism, I remember last summer the first time systemic racism came up in a department meeting, everybody, myself included, some people were verbally like, “Whoa, we’re not racists.” And I was probably thinking that but not articulating it, smart enough to not articulate it, but I think that’s certainly a mental model that shifted this notion that I knew the playing field wasn’t level before. I knew that always but just kind of the degree to which it was not level, and the fact that there can be systemic racism with me not being racist.

It required learning a little bit of new stuff but it also required subtracting some of my deeply held beliefs about how the United States operates for people. And so, I think that’s one very important one that has shifted for me recently.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Well, now, can you share with us a favorite quote?

Leidy Klotz
Perfect, and we didn’t cover it yet, and it relates to subtraction. So, Lao Tzu has this great quote that’s attributed to him, that’s, “To gain knowledge, add things every day. To gain wisdom, subtract things every day.” I love the quote because it’s a great reminder that we talked about being important, but it’s also evidence of the fact that we’ve been overlooking subtraction for a long time because this is a two and a half millennia-old quote, and it still rings true and counterintuitive today.

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

Leidy Klotz
One that I really like that I find myself talking about a lot is actually Ashley Whillans, who’s at Harvard, and Liz Dunn, who’s at the University of British Columbia, they do a lot of work on time and happiness, and they’ve got this great study that shows that people who spend money to save time are happy.

And they show it, one reaction to that study is like, “Well, yeah, that’s because they have money to spend on like housekeepers.” But they show it on a population of millionaires but they also show it in people who are working on like minimum wage. And they do that by kind of giving them money and setting up a controlled experiment where certain people spend the money in one way, and certain people spend money the other way.

So, it’s a really cool study. It’s really powerful. And it ties into subtraction here because what you’re essentially doing when you spend money to save time is you’re like not only are you not doing something, which we see is hard for competence, it’s hard when you say, “Okay, I’m not going to do this task anymore,” but you’re actually paying for it now. You’re not going to do it plus you’re going to pay somebody else to do it. So, it’s a hard thing to do but the research shows that people who do do it are happier, so it’s really a great research and also very practical.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, man, Leidy, that reminds me of back in the day when I had roommates who did not work from home, and I was doing a lot of coaching, I found my laundry was kind of piling during busy season, and I was like, “Well, I mean, this is good money per hour from the coaching. Am I just supposed to stop and do laundry? But am I going to wear dirty clothes? What are my options here?”

And so, even though I was working from home, and there were like eight laundry machines on the first floor of this apartment building, I paid someone to come in and do my laundry. You can have a laundry service, Leidy, but then they don’t put in your drawers and closets. And so, I felt a little silly and decadent but I kept looking at the spreadsheet, I was like, “I will make more money and have clean laundry by paying someone else to come do this for me but I don’t want to feel, like, I’m so rich, I’m too good to do my laundry.” I had this mental block but I did it and I loved it and my roommates made fun of me but I didn’t care.

Leidy Klotz
Yeah, that’s a great example. That’s the exact feeling that I have when I do it, it’s like, “Who am I to be this guy who hires a whatever?” but, yeah, it’s exactly that. Number one, the money that you’re making, and then when you’ve got kids, it’s the free time that you’re losing. This is like an hour of my kids’ life when he actually thinks I’m cool. I don’t want to lose that. So, yeah, you’ve given us a really good way to overcome that, and Whillans and Dunn talk about this, it’s like, “Think about the value of your time.” And then, also, another reason that’s kind of hard to do because, yeah, you feel snooty.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite book?

Leidy Klotz
I’m biased towards the ones I read recently, but Alison Gopnik has this great book called The Gardener and the Carpenter. It’s about parenting and the cognitive psychology of parenting. But she’s a psychologist plus a philosopher which I think is the perfect combination for parenting, and it’s just an amazing parenting book.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s great. Well, I was just reading No-Drama Discipline by the authors of the The Whole-Brain Child, and now I’ve got this one. Thank you.

Leidy Klotz
Yes, I like The Whole-Brain Child too. And if I can plug one other author, Eduardo Galeano. I love his stuff. He’s an Uruguayan guy who writes kind of this amazing blend of history/his opinions/fiction, and it’s like unlike anything you read before, and it’s really amazing.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Leidy Klotz
Favorite tool. This is an embarrassing one – Wikipedia. I use it a lot. It’s just so amazing. We talk about this information to wisdom thing, and the amount of work that people have done to make Wikipedia. It’s not my last stop in doing research, but it’s often my first stop because things are organized around subjects instead of in isolated journal articles. So, it’s an amazing tool for me.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I love Wikipedia for when I’ve been out of the game for news for a while, and there’s an article about the latest development in a thing, I was like, “Well, what was this thing?” And then you go to Wikipedia, and you read a four-minute piece, and it has like 180 references, you’re like, “Oh, I’m glad I didn’t read 180 news articles. I’ve read this synopsis. Thank you.”

Leidy Klotz
Yeah, you’re right. I hadn’t thought about that but that’s a great kind of way to subtract information and still get the same benefit. It’s like just wait a couple weeks if it’s important and it’ll be on Wikipedia. And not only that, but it’ll be summarized so you don’t have to go get the 180 different viewpoints. You can get it all in one spot and distill it for yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
Totally. And a favorite habit?

Leidy Klotz
Exercising is really important to me, and unplugging when exercising, we already talked about. So, yeah, just physical exercise to kind of strengthen my mental performance. Also, just because it’s enjoyable but the more I progress in my career, the more I realize how instrumental it is in my mental performance too.

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?

Leidy Klotz
“Less is not a loss,” is kind of a counterintuitive thing from the book. So, yeah, it is what it sounds like but oftentimes we don’t subtract because we perceive the end state as being a loss. And what we’ve talked about in all of these cases are subtractions that actually lead to something better, but it’s still really easy to kind of conflate the two. And so, this reminder that less is not always a loss seems to be really helpful for people.

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

Leidy Klotz
Twitter is great. I’m @Leidyklotz. And I like interacting with people especially people who have read the book. It’s really fun to hear their thoughts. One of the cool things about the book, in my mind, is that it brings up kind of people’s experiences from all walks of life, so it’s incredibly rewarding for me to hear, like I told the Bruce Springsteen story earlier.

I talked to this guy in Germany who’s writing an article about the research for Germany’s version of MIT Technology Review but he also talked to me about these Johnny Cash American recordings. He’s like, “It’s just like what you’re describing with Bruce Springsteen.” So, now I have like six CDs, well, six downloads on Amazon to listen to from Johnny Cash that were sparked by my book. And then he shared with me and it’s made my life better. Very selfish authorship here. It’s like, “What benefit can readers give me from reading?”

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

Leidy Klotz
Yeah, add and subtract. So, don’t overlook this basic option to make things better.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Leidy, this has been fun. I wish you much enjoyment in all of your subtracting.

Leidy Klotz
Thank you. You, too, Pete.