Learning Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
Nelson, welcome!

Nelson Dellis
Hey, thank you. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to talk about becoming more of an everyday genius. You are a six-time memory champion. Could you tell us one of your most amazing feats of memory ever?

Nelson Dellis
Let’s see, I’m most proud of having memorized 10,000 digits of pi. That was a good one.

Pete Mockaitis
10,000 digits. Wow! Now that sounds like a record to me, I don’t know.

Nelson Dellis
Oh, it’s not. Although, you know, if we’re talking about how many digits someone has used their memory to store, it’s many tens of thousands. The unofficial record is, like, a hundred K, but the official record is 70,030. Yeah, both are insane.

Pete Mockaitis
That is wild. How does a person do such a thing?

Nelson Dellis
Well, first you have to have the desire to do such a thing. I’ve known of people who have done it without really much of a technique other than brute force repetition and a lot of time. That sounds horrible. And I would ask the question, “How?” That sounds crazy.

But those who are more well-versed in memory techniques would look at numbers and have some way of converting them into more meaningful things, things that are easier to visualize in your mind than these abstract symbols. And then encoding it all into some elaborate story that connects them in order.

And that is the basics of memory techniques in a nutshell, honestly.

Pete Mockaitis
So now I remember reading a book about this in terms of, like, each digit becomes a letter or sound, like one becomes T or D, and two becomes N and so forth. Is that what you’re talking about in terms of making them more meaningful?

Nelson Dellis
That’s one of the methods. With abstract symbols like numbers, for example, the system is to, yes, convert it into words that, then, you can visualize, right? You look at numbers, it’s maybe hard to visualize them, maybe not individually, like, if I see a seven, I can visualize a seven or seven things.

But if you are talking about a huge sequence of numbers, there’s only 10 different digits. So if there’s a lot of digits, you’re going to get a lot of those repeating. So it’s hard to think of, like, “Oh, I’m picturing a seven, then I’m picturing an eight, then I’m picturing a seven.”

It would be easier if you could collect groups of numbers and then have images preset for certain combinations. So instead of saying, I don’t know, 124, I see Michael Jordan, maybe, you know, that would always encompass with one and two and a four together, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, okay. So, like, he’s number one, and his number is 24. So he’s one, two, four.

Nelson Dellis
Yeah, you’re not too far off. My system is a little…

Pete Mockaitis
Wait, wasn’t he 23? Wasn’t 23 his number? And I’m not a sports guy.

Nelson Dellis
Exactly, No, no. So 024, the 24 is Kobe Bryant. That actually was his number. So all of the 24s, this is the way I do it. There are different ways to do it. Some might argue that my way is a little more complicated, unnecessarily, but it works for me.

Anyways, so 024 is Kobe Bryant. So all the 24s, things that end in 24 are shooting guards in the NBA. So 124, I made Michael Jordan because, you know, after Kobe, he should be number one, right? Yeah, and then I just go through a bunch of different NBA stars there for the 24s.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that was fun. So then you’ve taken some time in advance to construct this whole rubric.

Nelson Dellis
Language, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s like a Nelson only. It’s pure custom, what does 24 mean to you? What’s one-four mean to you?

Nelson Dellis
Yeah. And that’s the most important part about coming up with visuals to remember is the more meaningful they are to you, the more rich they are with associations to you, the better they’re going to stick.

So, yes, somebody could learn my system. And, again, this is, yes, a pre-learned system so that when I’m encountering numbers in competitions or day-to-day life, I have a way to look at them and already have something set up to visualize instead.

But it is maybe not advised to take my system and learn it as is because there’s going to be a lot of images for numbers that mean nothing to you. Like, I have my personal friends in there. I have characters from books and shows that I’ve enjoyed throughout my life.

Some people might have never seen those shows, you know. Or, basketball, maybe nobody cares about basketball. And while you could, I guess, learn to visualize Michael Jordan, but why not choose something that’s, you know, you like to visualize or that’s easy for you to visualize?

Pete Mockaitis
But I think that speaks to a principle. Well, you tell me, a potential principle in terms of, if something is deeply meaningful and emotionally resonant to you, it is more memorable. Yeah, sometimes, people say, “Pete, you have the most amazing memory that you remembered this thing.” And I was like, “Well, no, that thing was very important to me in that moment of my life,” versus, I guess, for everyone else, was just like, “Yeah, whatever.”

Nelson Dellis
Yeah, exactly. Our brains are designed to remember novel things that stick out, and then the stuff that’s every day, commonplace. Like, it decides usually to drop that information. It treats it like noise.

And if you think kind of evolutionarily way back when, our brain was designed to remember these novel things, because it usually was tied to survival, right? Like, “This plant here has this pattern on it,” visual, “if I eat this, I will die because it’s poisonous with this pattern on it,” right? So simple things like that.

Nowadays, there is so much information, I think our primitive brain doesn’t do a very good job of isolating the things that are actually important because it’s not so tied to survival anymore, versus things that are noise.

Even though you may have the intention of you’re completely interested in this thing, your brain might be not so convinced, you know? And so it doesn’t stick, even though you’re paying full attention to it.

So it does start with things that you’re more interested in, that are paying attention to, tend to be memorized better, but it’s a complicated world out there, and our brain is trying to figure it out.

So if you can tap into kind of its evolutionary traits, which is we remember pictures that are associative and filled with sensory information and are meaningful, those are the things that you’re going to remember.

A great example is like, think of 9/11, right? We all remember where we were, what we were doing, sometimes even what we ate that day, what we were wearing that day, what somebody said that day, and that’s because that day was all of those things.

It was memorable. It was emotional, terrifying, scary, and it was out of the ordinary, for sure. We saw things on TV that we will never see in our lives probably, so it sticks out. Versus, you know, last Tuesday, what did you do?

Probably went to work. Did the exact same thing you usually do. Maybe a slight variation here and there, but nothing to the effect of something that dramatically different.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so we learned, your subtitle is “Hacks to Boost Your Memory, Focus, Problem Solving, and Much More.” We talked about a hack for numbers, which is kind of interesting.

But I’m guessing for your person who is interested in becoming awesome at their job, memory contests are not their job, but you’ve got some goodies for us. Tell us, what’s sort of your main message or big idea in the book, Everyday Genius?

Nelson Dellis
Yeah, so the main point of the book is that I believe that there are plenty of mental abilities that we can train and learn that are associated with genius. And in the process of learning them and mastering them, you tap into that and could even convince yourself that you have a higher intellect, that you are genius, or can tap into genius from time to time.

What I learned over the years doing the memory thing, I didn’t have a background in memory techniques. I had an average memory, but I learned about them. I trained them obsessively, to a point where I could win these competitions and do break records and such. But it wasn’t a gift I was born with.

And that was always an amazing thing that, “Oh, wow. I thought memory was a fixed thing. And that super smart people had good memories and dumb people had bad memories,” right? But it’s not like that. It’s memory is a skill. And that was a huge thing for me to kind of unlearn.

And then, over the years, doing 10,000 digits of pi or 20 decks of playing cards in an hour, crazy feats of memory, people will throw out that label of genius just because they don’t understand it or don’t think it’s possible.

And I hate that. I’m not a genius. Like, I’m just like anybody else. I just have a skill that I learned. And I could teach you how to do this skill, and the person down the street, how to do this skill.

So genius is definitely a subjective term, ultimately, you know? People use it very flippantly. If they see something that looks smart, you consider someone smart, but that might not be the end of the story. Someone might not actually be as smart as you think. They just showed some quality of intelligence in a moment, in some situation. but I think we all can kind of uncover that.

And that’s what the book explores, the different pockets of mental abilities that can be taught and learned if you spend a bit of time on them, or understood how they worked. And then you can have some fun with it, right?

You can do it for show. You can do it for improving your life. You can do it to just be a better person. It’s up to what you what you want to do with it, but we all have access to it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you lay out a few core skills of genius. Can you share those with us?

Nelson Dellis
Yeah, so I started the book off, the first half of the book kind of laying this foundation, which, and again, this is largely my opinion, but I think many people might agree that memory is a cornerstone of genius.

I think if you have a good memory, you can do a lot with that to do some genius kinds of abilities. So that’s talked about at the beginning of the book. And in tandem with that, long-term learning, better study tactics. So being able to take your memory and use it for the long-term.

Reading faster. I think if you can read more, that’s how you learn more. That’s how you learn more about the world. So if you can consume more written content, more books, you can increase your knowledge base.

I also talk about focus and attention. So if you can master the ability to hone in on something when it counts and to block out distractions, you, of course, can put more efforts into learning things or outputting more, right?

And then, using those foundational techniques, I go into more nuanced parts of genius. Social genius, like how to interact with others around you. Mental calculations, so being able to calculate with numbers faster. Creativity, problem solving, even in the last chapter, it’s a little woo-woo out there, but intuition.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, well, that’s a lovely lineup. Well, let’s hear, when it comes to, let’s talk about memory and social at the same time, if I may. How can we do a better job of remembering people’s names and faces?

Because I think that can make a huge impression in terms of like, “Oh, wow, like that person, he remembered my name and he said it to me. He seemed happy to see me.” It’s just like it skyrockets your likability real quick. So give us some hacks for this one.

Nelson Dellis
I mean, Dale Carnegie said that the most interesting person is the most interested person. And I think there’s nothing more than, bigger than, or showing more interest than if you remember somebody’s name. And it’s just a little memory trick, right?

And it’s such a small thing, it’s just this little word, sometimes a longer word, but a word that represents this person, but it’s so powerful and so meaningful. So I treat it as this very special, delicate thing that a person can present to me.

And I want to know this thing. I want to store it in my mind because I know how powerful it could be. And so memory techniques will serve you perfectly for this situation. And, again, tapping into what I mentioned about the numbers, you’re taking some piece of information. It’s not a number this time. It’s this word, this label of a human that’s in front of you, and turning it into a meaningful picture.

And so what that typically means is you hear a name, hopefully, maybe, but sometimes maybe not, it reminds you of something. Maybe a person you know, close to you, or a celebrity, or someone, an athlete, whatever has that same name. You can think of that person. There’s a picture suddenly in your mind for that name now.

Or, maybe if you don’t, maybe if you can take a syllable, the first syllable of the name, or a couple of the syllables, and those individual atoms of the name, maybe come up with a picture, create a picture for you. Like Nelson, maybe you think of Nelson Mandela, okay?

Maybe you don’t, maybe you’ve never heard the name before. So what could you do? Well, Nell, Son, okay, maybe Nell makes you think of like a nail, like a hammering nail. And then Son, sun in the sky.

So both are pictures, right? Either Nelson Mandela, even maybe Nelson from the Simpsons, if you’re a Simpsons fanatic, he’s a character on the show, or you have this image of a nail being driven into the sun. So that’s a representative thing for the name. That’s a little more tangible than this collection of letters that’s somewhat abstract.

The next thing is to find a way to always be able to reliably pull it back when you need it, pull it out of this person when you have to call them that name to remember it. And that’s where this other part of memory is super important, which is how we organize and store information.

There are methods to do this, and we don’t really think about it when we try to remember something. But one of the techniques, and this applies for names, is anchoring it to something that will be helpful to retrieve it.

And for names, it’s the person. The person is who’s going to show up, whether it’s online in the form of a picture or in front of you at a party. They are the one that shows up, and at that point is when you usually have to remember their name, right?

So you can attach it or anchor it to a physical feature. I think that’s the best way to do it because you’re usually looking at the person in the face, so why not choose something that you notice on the person’s face?

So whether it’s a big nose, like a five o’clock shadow, a big forehead. I’m just pointing out my flaws here. But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t even have to be a flaw. It’s just whatever you notice. Maybe they have pretty eyes or like a little dimple or a little wrinkle, whatever.

And you could come up with a story or some kind of way to attach the image to that feature. The weirder, the better, the crazier, the better, but that’s what makes it memorable, unforgettable.

So if I imagine Nelson Mandela jumping off the edge of my huge nose, the next time you see me and my big nose, you’re going to think, “Oh, there’s Nelson Mandela jumping off his nose. Nelson.” You say this all in your mind though. You don’t say this out loud. You can get into some trouble there.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, talking about getting into trouble, I’m wondering, like if I did choose your five o’clock shadow, and then you showed up clean-shaven, like am I out of luck, like, “Oops”?

Nelson Dellis
Yeah, I would lean towards not choosing things that could change but, again, yeah, somebody could get a facelift, too, and then what do do, right? But I honestly think that the technique is really good for in the moment, getting the information in your mind quickly.

And then a big part of being able to remember it, say, the next time is a bit of review. So when you’re learning the person’s name and interacting with this person and talking to them, or you’re perusing around the party, like schmoozing, learning other people’s names.

When you come back or say goodbye to that person, or maybe you look around the room and you see that person, tell yourself, “Okay, this person, that was Nelson, okay,” you review. Like, we need to review things to remember them for the long term.

The technique I just said is very good for getting information in your mind quickly, and it often imprints for quite a while. But if you truly want to remember names for a long time, you have to be super intentional about all of it. You have to review it.

I do a tremendous amount of review for the people I meet. I’m a different story because, as a memory champion, of course, everybody expects me to remember everybody’s name. So there’s a lot more riding on me remembering a name than most people.

But I keep, like, a name journal, so when I meet people after the event or the party or whatnot, the meeting, I always keep track of the mnemonics, and the names, and the people and the context of those people, and I review that from time to time.

And some of those people in that book, I will never see again. They’re just filling up pages in my name book for no reason. But in the off chance I bump into one of those people, and I can say their name months later, years later, it’s so powerful, right?

They’ll think like, “Wow, that person remembered me? Whoa, I must have made an impression,” or, “What an interesting person. Wow! It shows a lot that he thought about me,” and who knows what they’ll think, but it’s usually a good thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Very good. Well, now can you give us a hack for just learning better, in general. Like, I’m trying to pick up a skill, whatever that might be. It’s coding. It’s AI. It’s copywriting. I’m trying to figure out some new stuff.

Nelson Dellis
So now you’re getting into the process of learning, right? And so to learn, obviously you got to have techniques to remember things quicker. That helps. The review part is so much more important because, if you truly want to know something to your core, it needs to be almost automatic, right?

So there’s this idea of two kinds of memory. There’s declarative memory, where you can pull things out, think about it, and then declare it. Kind of like remembering somebody’s name. And then there’s procedural, which is another fancy way of saying muscle memory.

So let’s take the example of remembering somebody’s name. This is a good example. When I’m learning somebody’s name for the first time, I’m using this technique, right, to store their name. And then, when I see them, I’m going to have this effort to kind of collect it, to declare it.

But there’s a point where, let’s say, you know, you just started this job, you started working with this one person, you learned their name using a technique, and you use it every day, and they become close to you, you become friends. You’ve worked together for five years.

In five years, let’s say you are very close to this person, you know this person’s name, you don’t have to declare it anymore. They are Bob instantly. Like, it’s part of you. You don’t even have to think about it. Like, think about your siblings and your mother, like you know their name. You don’t have to pull it out of your brain. It’s just there, right?

That’s procedural. It’s something that’s rehearsed so much that you just know it, right? So the goal is, with long-term learning, whether you’re learning a language or some programming language, you want to get it to a point where you don’t have to sit there and get it out of your brain.

But there will be a point at the beginning where that has to happen. That’s just how our brains work, unfortunately. So the question is, “How do we hack getting things from our declarative, which is always the first step, into a procedural process, into muscle memory?”

And, unfortunately, while declarative has tons of little hacks, all these little memory techniques, and that’s what all of chapter one is about, the procedural isn’t as easy to hack. The best strategies we have are active recall. So actively trying to access the information in our mind.

So by closing your eyes, and you don’t have to close your eyes, but just to prove the point further, you know, when you’re trying to get the information out, the more you access it, the more you kind of fire those neurons, those connections, the better it’ll become automatic.

And that shouldn’t be a surprise to many people, right? The more you do something mentally, the more automatic it becomes. You strengthen those neural pathways and then it becomes more automatic.

But a lot of us, when we study, we think about it wrong, right? We think we have our notes in front of us and we just look at it again and again and again. And you feel like you have this sense of familiarity with the information. You’re like, “Oh, yeah, I’ve got it.”

You’re going even through it and you’re maybe even ahead of where you’re reading saying, “Yes,” and saying it before you read it. But that’s not active recall because you have the information in front of you. It’s not true declarative, right?

So if you can put that information away and struggle to get it out, which it always is a bit of a challenge, but that’s where the magic happens, right? When you do that active recall, go through that process of the nitty-gritty of pulling it out, that’s where you are building these neural pathways, strengthening these neural pathways to procedural.

Space repetition, so there’s plenty of studies around this where, if you are doing everything, studying for something all in one session, well, yes, you could use memory techniques and it might work for the short term. In the long term, you will forget more of it.

Our brain likes to work on things for a little bit, take a break, and then come back, because I guess there’s that, in that moment when you come back to it, you do have to kind of struggle with it to get it back to where it was. And I think that repetitiveness of, or that repeated action of going back to it, almost starting a bit more from scratch is where you strengthen those neural pathways again.

And then the last tip on that is something called interleaving. So if you can, in a study session, let’s say, interleave, in a similar set of what you’re studying, different kinds of things.

So let’s say if you’re studying for a language, and you do a lot of problems or questions or quizzes or testing yourself on verb conjugations, and then maybe you just do straight up vocabulary training, and then maybe, I don’t know, you study basic phrases or something like that.

They’re all different, right, but they all have to do with you learning language. But if you can go in between and kind of alternate, maybe every 15, 20 minutes, that is proved to be better than just studying for one big chunk of time, say, verbs, right?

So we found that if we switch up the task, but keeping it in the same domain, actually we learn better. And I think it’s a similar principle to space repetition. But, yeah, it’s a tedious process to learn. But if you understand how to hack the brain in that sense, you can learn more efficiently and faster.

Pete Mockaitis
And what’s interesting with active recall, in some ways, you need a little bit of a prompt in terms of like, “What is that thing I’m retrieving?” And so, I suppose there’s many ways you can do this. Like, people use flashcards, or I guess now with AI, you can just say, “Hey, this is what I’m trying to learn. Ask me questions now, one at a time. Go.” And so then you’re practicing the active retrieval.

But I’m hearing you that the key point there is I’m not looking at the thing. I am hiding, I’m covering up the thing, and I am depending on my ability to pull it out from the depths of my memory.

Nelson Dellis
Yeah, that’s better for learning, and there’s different ways to do it. As you mentioned AI, you know, it’s proven to be, or increasingly been proven to be detrimental to our memories because we’re doing a lot of cognitive tasks, using the tool rather than ourselves.

But, I think, as a sparring partner, as a coach, or a quizzer, I think it could be super powerful because it can give you all sorts of ways to do that active recall. Another great method, I don’t know if it was invented by him, but it’s been coined as named by him, it’s the Feynman method.

So Richard Feynman was a legendary physicist who was really well-known for being able to explain things, complicated things, in physics really well. And the technique is, basically, when you’re learning something, try to explain it to somebody else in the most basic way possible.

And as you explain it, you’ll quickly find out what you truly know and don’t, and it’s a way of kind of refining the weaknesses and strengths of what you’ve studied. And, again, it’s active recall in disguise.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s cool. Well, now let’s hear about focus in terms of just being able to hunker down and do stuff.

Nelson Dellis
Well, in this day and age, it’s extremely difficult to focus, and so I feel like a big part of finding how to pay attention to something is figuring out what are the points of distraction for you, and being ruthless in kind of eliminating them preemptively.

Thinking about there’s, like, this planner in your mind that says, “Okay, in the future, Nelson needs to focus on this. So I’m going to make sure that, when he’s working, the distractions are at bay.”

And there’s plenty of tips on how to do this. It depends on what is the source of your distraction, but, oftentimes, it’s the internet or your phone or some device. So blocking that in some case, maybe going analog during a session, putting your phone out of sight while you work on a task.

The goal with paying attention, you want to have this deep work at your disposal. And oftentimes, we’re really doing what’s called shallow work, where we’re like low value, low focus tasks that don’t really push you forward, like you’re checking your email, you’re responding to messages. You’re not doing the deep work that you need to do, the deep focus.

And it often comes to your environment. Like, put yourself in a place isolated and work on this problem or thing that you need to get done, and you’ll have tremendous focus on that thing.

Another thing is we get tired, especially nowadays, where we’re so used to being stimulated all the time. It’s not our faults. Devices around us are designed to distract us as their main purpose.

And so, if you can put these things at bay, but also train your mind to work for longer and longer periods of time without being interrupted or needing to kind of satisfy yourself with dopamine hits somehow, so there’s this idea called a Pomodoro technique, where you can set a timer, preferably an analog timer so you don’t have your phone near you, but for 20, 25 minutes.

And the idea is that you work intensely for 20, 25 minutes, and that’s doable, right? If you can say that to yourself, “I’m just going to work hard, focus on this one thing, nothing else for 20 minutes,” and then you get a five minute break to do something mindless.

And then you dive in back again. Do another Pomodoro session for maybe 20, 25 minutes again. And you can stack these, and then every maybe three or four, you can take a longer break.

And it turns out it’s a lot easier to get work done. And, oftentimes, you maybe get started with 20 minutes, and you end up working for an hour because you just needed to get started.

So, oftentimes, the focus thing is a trained ability. And the more you work on it and the more you set yourself up to have success without getting distracted, the longer you’ll find that you can focus on things more intently. And when you can do that, you can get more work done, you can have better memory, read more, all those things.

Pete Mockaitis
Now I’ve heard with this, it’s cool, we can practice, we can get better and better. I’ve heard that the quote, “human limits”, given ultradian rhythms, is something like 90 minutes. Like, you probably need a break by then.

Although, occasionally, I don’t know, every once in a while, I get uber fascinated by something and it goes way longer. So what’s your take on this one?

Nelson Dellis
I agree. I mean, I think we all will get burned out at some point. And so I think, over time, I think prepping for that eventual mental deterioration in the session by breaking it up, it’s like in a workout, you have a lot of reps to do. It’s tempting to just get them all out of the way, but you might crash pretty quick versus breaking them up early into sets of 10.

Something that seems too easy, but you could do 10 at a time, and you could almost never stop, right? So I think the same kind of idea applies mentally that, even though it seems like, “Oh, I’m going to get an hour and a half of studying in,” it might be better to break that up into multiple shorter sessions so that you can actually be productive, fully productive, really not mentally fatigued for longer, and make more progress that way.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And this speed reading, how much of that is a real thing?

Nelson Dellis
Yeah, I’m careful about that term, and even though I call the chapter’s title “Speed reading,” I quickly changed it to “Focus reading” because I am aware of some of the associations or the connotations with speed reading.

There’s a lot of history in scam-y programs and bogus claims of people being able to speed read thousands of words per minute. The average person is somewhere between 300, 400 words per minute.

And so what my chapter is truly about is learning how to optimize or make your reading more efficient, and having the skills to be able to turn up the dial of your speed and to turn it down, right, because not everything needs to be speed read or read fast.

There are going to be things you just need to drink right and chug, versus like a fine wine where you’d rather smell it, take a sip, enjoy it, maybe even go back and have another glass, you know?

So I think reading is really up to what the person is trying to get out of it, and being able to kind of work with how they know their mind works and how to read better, and remember what you read better using some basic strategies.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And what are the strategies?

Nelson Dellis
Well, there’s a big part of, again, paying attention, so putting yourself in the right frame of mind to read, having an intention to read. A lot of people want to read a lot of things, but they just pile up books.

So being more intentional about getting through the books you’d like to actually read, which means making time for it. There are so many things that we spend time on that do not advance us in our books.

And if you can just make it more of a thing that you purposefully do every day, whether that means you have to carry a book around with you all the time, I always do that, or you have always got a book by your bedside or on your desk, and you take five minutes here, even just to get like a little chapter out of the way.

You’re always reading in some form. It’s like what you do. Just like maybe you’ve made working out an exercise just as important in your life. Reading should be as well. And I think there are so many benefits to reading. So it’s hard to tell me that maybe that’s not a good thing to read so much.

There are some other more physical, tangible techniques. For example, if you want to increase your reading speed, some suggestions in the book are, if you use some kind of pointer, I know it sounds very infantile, but what happens to most readers is, if they don’t have some kind of guide, they’re often subject to their eyes bouncing around the page or backtracking a lot.

So if you can have some pointer, whether it’s your finger, a pencil, a spaghetti noodle, I don’t know.

Pete Mockaitis
Uncooked, yeah.

Nelson Dellis
An uncooked spaghetti noodle, to guide your eyes across, you’ll find that you backtrack way less, if at all, and you can make more progress through the pages, the chapters that you’re trying to go for.

Another thing to keep in mind is that, when we read, we don’t read every single thing. Our eyes are constantly jumping in what’s called saccades. And if you look at somebody, for example, if you look at someone on a train looking outside of the train, you’ll see their eyes are like jumping, jumping, jumping, jumping.

That’s because it’s kind of trying to track the moving landscape. And even though the person looking out the window doesn’t feel like their eyes are like jumping like that, that’s just naturally what our eyes do. And we do it when we read as well.

And so what you can do, since we don’t need to read all the words, we’re actually skipping around a lot because we can cluster words, we can actually see things in our peripheral as well, and oftentimes we can piece together clumps of words, like just by context, right?

We know what’s going to come next, so do we actually need to read the word? Sometimes we aren’t, even though we feel like we have to. So what you can do is play around with this. I like to draw some, with pencil, some margins inside. Maybe, like, you can start kind of shallow, so maybe a half inch or an inch on each side of the page.

And then as you’re guiding yourself, you just stay between those lines and you realize that, “Oh, shoot, I’m not reading the outskirts of each line of the page. Like, I’m maybe missing hundreds of words per page if I do that,” but you still can remember and read what is on the page partly because peripheral is picking up on that, but also again, context, you can figure it out.

And so if you can even narrow that further, you find you’re just, like, reading a very central narrow part of the page, you can still read the page. It’s really fascinating and fun to play around with.

And this is just to train you, right? Like I’m not saying go through all hundreds of pages of your books and put margins. But if you can train a little bit, this purposeful practice, again makes you better, this training, you can get better at doing that kind of automatically without having to guide with your finger all the time and write these margins in there.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Nelson, tell me, what are some of the top hacks that absolutely most professionals could benefit tremendously from adopting that we haven’t already covered?

Nelson Dellis
I’m a big fan of the chapter on intuition. I know it’s a less of a thing that you can kind of hold and, like, purposefully grasp in your mind the results. But I think there’s some kind of intangible thing to it where people can recognize that it’s doing something for them or not.

And so that whole chapter is about tapping into kind of, like, this gut feeling and how to listen to it better and to hone it better for things that don’t necessarily seem like they’re in your vicinity to make decisions on or perceive.

And I know that sounds a bit out there, but there are techniques out there to hone that. And I don’t want to get too deep into it because it gets a bit weird, but I think the short of it is to listen to your intuition more.

Not that it’s always correct, but if you do listen to it more and open up to it, you’ll find that it often has something important to say, whether it’s about a deal you’re about to say yes to, or some turning point in your life, or the people that you hang out with.

I think if you listen to them, you get those bouts of intuition. I think you get more information about the world, and then you can have more at your disposal, right, more information. I think about what’s happening around you can only be better.

So I’m really happy about that chapter in the book. And I encourage people to kind of explore that a little more.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I think that there’s a lot to that in terms of intuition. I don’t know the neuroscience, but I think I’ve heard, or at least my hot take is that our advanced brain nervous system has just oodles of associations all over the place from all of our experiences. And sometimes it’s not yet conscious.

Like, I could not articulate why I’ve got a weird feeling or a bad feeling about this contract or this deal. And yet, there’s something to it. And I like what you said. It’s not necessarily correct, like, “Oh, absolutely, trust your guide every time. It’ll never lead you straight.” I don’t think that’s true.

But it is surfacing information, and I think it’s funny. It’s almost like, well, I’m thinking about, we had Joe Navarro, the FBI agent who does body language stuff. And I think he said it well, in terms of like, you can’t like prosecute someone based on, like, a body language situation, like, “Judge, jury, there you have it, you know? He crossed his legs at the wrong time. He’s guilty of sin.”

But what you can do is say, “Hmm, this thing right here seems worthy of additional investigation, additional resources. Let’s go search the apartment of his mom. Oh, and what do you know? We found the key item there because we listened to those clues from from the body language.”

And, likewise, I think that when you listen to your intuition, and say, “Hmm, something about this deal feels off. I’m just going to run it by a lawyer.” And the lawyer says, “Oh, my gosh, this is a terrible deal. Look at all the things you have to do, and almost nothing that they have to do. Do not sign.” It’s is like, “Oh, okay, well, it was good move that I checked my intuition.”

Or you might talk to multiple trusted advisors, and said, “Ah, yes, it could feel sketchy. But, in fact, that is just how this whole industry operates, so you got to choose. Are you down with that or are you not?”

And then I think it really can be a valuable tool or indicator to point you into where we’re going to dig deeper.

Nelson Dellis
Yeah, and I think, more than anything, our brains are very logical and rational, and we tend to always think with that, and I think that’s great. I mean, we should be logical about the real world and information around us.

But our brain isn’t always, like, what we think logically. It’s not always getting it correct, you know? There are many things that can alter what we think is correct, and the brain is not quite getting it correct.

So I think this mix of having a well-founded logic in life, but also using intuition when it needs to and listening to it more often, again, not necessarily to make the decisions, but to maybe factor in as part of your decision-making can really make a difference in how you navigate your life or your job, how to be awesome at your job.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. Well, anything else you want to share before we hear about your favorite things?

Nelson Dellis
Yeah, no, I’m so happy with this book. I always talk about memory, and over the years, I’ve just been always fascinated by the brain, clearly. And I’ve kept little notebooks of all these cool tricks, mental tricks that I’ve been taught or stumbled upon because of my memory explorations, and it’s all in this book.

And I’m so over the moon about this book. And I think it’ll help a lot of people. And it can be fun, it can be serious. You can use it in so many different ways. And so I hope people go and check it out.

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

Nelson Dellis
This is always changing, but this one has always stuck with me, and it’s by Albert Einstein, who I talk about a lot in the book. and it’s that, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

And I’ve always loved that because, especially coming from him, you know, you’d think like of Einstein, he just knows so much. That’s how he figured everything out, but he actually figured everything out his staple discoveries from just imagination exercises.

And oftentimes, silly ones that, like, broke the boundary of what you’re supposed to think about, I guess, for some physics examples. And that’s how innovation came about for him. And I think that’s, in general, how innovation comes out is by bending the rules, which can only happen in your imagination.

And so I think if you think that way, that it’s more valuable to have these imagination, visualization skills, which you can train and practice, it’s often more important than what you know.

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

Nelson Dellis
Yeah, I’m a bit biased, but I was a part of a study at Washington University in St. Louis, where they were, you know, there’s been memory studies forever, and people have been subject to fMRI scans to look inside the brain, but they’re largely uncomfortable machines to sit in for very long.

So, typically, studies in the past have taken a lot of large quantity of people in the machine for very short periods of time, and kind of taking averages. They’ve never really done in-depth long hours in the machine study.

So they took me, how many hours did I do? It must’ve been at least 15 to 20, maybe more. And then they have maybe 10 controls, who also volunteered. I don’t know who these people were. They must’ve been incentivized, somehow.

But anyways, the results are finally, they were published this year, and they’re trying to get it published in some well-known journals. But, ultimately, what came out of it, there’s a few things that came out of it, but one of the most striking or kind of, I don’t know, controversial, but against what most people might’ve thought is that the hippocampus for most people is where the magic happens with memory.

There’s a lot of activity when somebody is using their memory. And for a lot of the tasks they had me do in the machine, it showed a very different structure, that I’m actually not using, well, I am using my hippocampus, but I’m using more of my brain, that the pathways and the parts of my brain that I’m using when I’m memorizing is completely different than the normal person.

And this is trained, right? So the ultimate finding of the paper is that memory training literally rewires your brain. And that’s always been said, you know, anecdotally, but now there’s proof.

This is literal proof that anybody can change the way their brain works. And also that memory doesn’t fully work the way we think it does because how can Nelson here be memorizing all these sorts of crazy things, and it’s not through the conventional systems that we see when people use their memory.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Nelson Dellis
I’d have to say Godel, Escher, and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool?

Nelson Dellis
My brain, seriously. You know, it might be easy to say, like, “Oh, I have this app for this, and then I use tech or AI for this.” But, honestly, my favorite tool is my brain, and I really try to use it whenever I can, even though there might be an easier way, more efficient way. I don’t want to lose the ability to use my brain and to think.

And I feel more terrified than ever in modern day, just because I feel like we’re losing the ability to think. We’re outsourcing it so much that I don’t know what our future looks like, honestly. So I’m loving my tool in my head that I’m purposefully using to keep it strong and to fight the trend.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Nelson Dellis
My favorite habit is just always working out early in the morning. The first thing I get out of bed, and I do some intense exercise, that, to me, I don’t even, I mean, yeah, it’s just what I’ve programmed myself to do. And if I don’t get that done, my day just is shot. When I get my workout in early, it’s just sets the tone for productivity throughout the day.

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

Nelson Dellis
Yeah. I mean, I think it’s using your memory, being intentional about memory, and understanding that the memory is something that can be worked on. If you say to yourself that, “I don’t have a good memory. I forget names. I’m just that person who is forgetful,” yeah, sure, you’re going to be that person.

You get to decide what your memory is. And I find that’s the most profound thing people get out of my talks or my content is that the brain is malleable, and that nobody has a bad memory. They just have untrained memories. And that’s usually the nugget that changes a lot of their perception on what their brain is capable of.

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

Nelson Dellis
Best is just to go to my website, NelsonDellis.com. You can find everything about me there, my books, my coaching, memory coaching, my YouTube channel. A lot of content out there teaching how to do this stuff, and, yeah, exploring my books. But NelsonDellis.com, you’ll find it all.

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

Nelson Dellis
Yes, use your brain more. I know it can be challenging right now, and oftentimes, you use it and you’re maybe let down, but it’s, again, it’s plastic. It can be molded. It can be trained. So the more you use it, the stronger it gets. So give it a shot. You won’t regret it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Nelson, thank you.

Nelson Dellis
Thank you so much.

Pete Mockaitis
Pat, welcome back!

Pat Flynn
Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m super excited to dig into the wisdom you’ve got for us in your latest book, Lean Learning: How to Achieve More by Learning Less, which is almost blasphemy here on How to be Awesome at Your Job – learning less. Pat, explain.

Pat Flynn
Yes. Well, it’s about learning the right things, not everything. And here’s what I mean by that. We all grew up, or at least I did, thinking that the more information you knew, the better. Because with more information, you were more powerful, you were more useful, you had more utility, right? And that was the case for such a long time until now, because now we have access to all the information that we could ever need and beyond.

However, we are still fine-tuned to absorb information as if it were scarce, right, as if it were a scarce food source. We see it, we’re like, “Ooh, let’s get that. And get more food and more food,” because it’s a survival sort of mechanism, right?

But now we’re at this buffet line of information. And not only are we stuffing our plates full of everything and everything that we may or may not need, we’re also getting force-fed stuff into our throats from algorithms and other things that believe they know more than we do what we need, and that we’re all seeing that and experiencing that on all these platforms.

So, lean learning is really about learning from the right resources at the right time for the right things, trading just-in-case learning for just-in-time learning, as I like to call it. And it’s how I’ve been able to accomplish a lot of different things across many different fields in such a short period of time.

And I believe that this is where we need to go when it comes to figuring things out, not by trying to figure out literally everything there is to know about something before taking action, but choosing action over information and using that action to actually give us the right direction to move forward.

Pete Mockaitis
Boy, there’s so much there. Thank you, Pat. it’s so funny. Well, when it comes to just-in-time learning, this phrase I’ve been familiar with for some time, and it’s kind of meta, actually, because here you are Pat Flynn on me, Pete Mockaitis’ podcast, talking about lean learning and just-in-time learning.

And, in fact, the most just-in-time learning experience of my life was going to your Pat Flynn podcast tutorial, YouTube playlist, watching a video and then doing exactly what you said. And then watching the next video and doing exactly what you said, it’s like, “Okay, on RSS feed. All right. Let’s see. So, Pat says this. Okay. Let me fiddle. Oh, hey, I got an RSS feed. Okay. Cool.”

And so, literally, step by step, I was learning seconds before doing the thing that I needed to do to achieve the thing I was trying to achieve.

Pat Flynn
Right. Case in point, exactly. And this is the thing about lean learning. It’s figuring out what your next step is, learning about that, trying to fight the urge to learn everything and feeling like a fear of missing out, right? The FOMO really plays a role here with trying to learn everything, because everybody’s talking about all these new things and dah, dah, dah, you don’t want to get left behind.

But, really, it’s about trusting the process and understanding that, when it comes to step two or step five or step 10 down the road, that there will be resources for them when you need them. You don’t need them now, though. And that’s really hard to say no. Saying no is really the strategy for a lot of this stuff.

It’s similar to Elle from “Legally Blonde,” who was played by Reese Witherspoon, who chose and had the discipline to say no to going to the fraternity parties so she could study for the bar exam, so that she could go to Harvard and see her ex-boyfriend there. If you’ve ever seen “Legally Blonde,” you know what that means. If not, you probably have no idea what I’m talking about.

But, anyway, discipline is a part of this as well, honoring what you put on your calendar, honoring the idea that there are resources out there that they’re going to be there for you when you need them, but you don’t need them all right now.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s really interesting to note that we do have this compulsion toward more information. And I think I noticed this the most during COVID because it’s, like, we all wanted information. It’s, like, there was some uncertainty, which is true whenever you’re doing something new, but there’s uncertainty there, it was high stakes, and we didn’t know what the heck was going on.

But CNN and others were all too happy to continue providing you with whatever they had, any expert from any place, they’ll be there, they’ll be talking. And I think we saw that in terms of, like, the viewership of news was way up during that time. And yet, science will also suggest that hearing about spooky, unpleasant things continuously for hour upon hour upon hour is not great for our productivity or our mental health.

Pat Flynn
No, no, this is why I don’t watch the news. It is meant to hold your attention. It’s a lot of negativity that just kind of like makes you feel like, “Well, okay, the world’s going downhill, so I might as well go along with it,” versus, I try to surround myself, when it comes to inspiration around people and items that are positive.

However, even though that can be great, it can also work against you, too. Yes, there is such a thing called over inspiration, not just an overwhelm of information, but an overwhelm of inspiration. And this is why I, when I sit in the car, this might sound weird, but when I tell you why I do it, it might not sound as weird anymore.

But when I’m in the car, I don’t have anything playing. I don’t have the radio playing. I don’t have any music. I don’t have a podcast playing like I had for years. I always thought that if I had a spare moment in time, I had to insert something new that I had to learn that I may or, again, may not need at that time just so that I was feeling productive. If I wasn’t doing that, I wasn’t setting myself up for success. Automobile university as they call it.

Now I keep it silent because it gives me what I like to reference as shower time. If you know shower time and you have shower thoughts, you know that those are some of the moments in your day where you have the best ideas, you’re able to think, and because there’s nothing else to do in there, you’re taking a shower, so there’s literally nothing else to do.

So, I like to have “shower thoughts” in my car, and it gives me time to decompress. It gives me time to go deeper into thought about things that I’m already thinking about versus getting over-inspired by this new, fancy, shiny thing that everybody else is talking about. We don’t have that time anymore because everything is being filled in with extra small more endorphin-related things.

So, that has been a key as well to allow yourself to go deeper by saying no to these other things even though they are not necessarily all negative.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. So, it’s kind of like the trade-off or opportunity cost is present there such that we may well be better served in some minutes, having some silence, some processing, some synthesizing, some creative, “Aha! Eureka!” moments, as opposed to more information because we may very well have plenty already.

Pat Flynn
Correct. Yes, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
And I was going to ask, you almost already answered that. I think sometimes we’re learning not necessarily for the purpose of taking action or implementing, but we’re learning because learning is, in and of itself, fun, interesting, enjoyable.

Pat Flynn
It feels good. It feels like you’re making progress, too. If you’re reading a book and the book is about a topic you’re interested in, oftentimes, it feels like you’re already making progress even though you’re just absorbing information.

But what often happens after you finish that book? You forget most of it and you maybe not ever take any action on it. Versus, what if you read a book like this? You read a chapter on taking the next step and then you just put the book down and took the next step, right? And then what?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, and I think what you’ve already done here is we’ve accomplished a real good, a thing to be aware of, it’s like, “Wait a second. Am I…? What am I doing here?” I think just, like, triggering that awareness, that mindfulness, that presence of, “What am I doing here?” is very powerful.

Pat Flynn
Yeah, one of the chapters in the book is called “Un-automate Everything.” We’ve automated too much. I mean, similar to, like, if you automate all the subscriptions that you have from Netflix to whatever, you’re going to realize that you’re spending $400 a month on stuff you don’t even use anymore.

Same thing happens with where we put our time. We’re automating, “Oh, yeah, sure. I’ll just listen to a podcast because I’m in the car now. Just because that’s what I always do.” But you’re not realizing the “cost” of that, if you will. We are automating a lot of things that we should be thinking about.

So, what I like to do is just kind of declare bankruptcy on where our time goes and start over, and then start only placing things into your life that you want to learn about, that are only related to the things that are right there in front of you, that you want to learn about.

Knowing, again, that you can always go later, creating compartments of time to focus and learn and go deeper into those things, realizing that, okay, you’re going to reach that endpoint to then be able to make a decision whether or not you want to continue or not. I mean, probably the first example of this in my entrepreneurial career was how I wrote my first study guide for my architecture website.

I didn’t know everything about writing and publishing a study guide. In fact, in doing the research on figuring it out, all that stuff, I got overwhelmed. And that’s what most people do. It’s, “Yes, I want to start a business. Let me think of all the things I need to do now from incorporation to marketing, to content creation, to social media. Oh, my gosh, I’m overwhelmed. I’m not going to do anything.”

So, when I wrote my book, I knew that I’d, at least, have to have something written. So, besides the design of it, the formatting of it, the marketing of it, the how I was going to even technically sell it, I put that all aside for what I knew the first step was, which was to just get everything onto paper or, at least, in that sense, Microsoft Word is where I wrote that.

And then 77 pages later, a couple weeks later, I had something, something that I didn’t have before. And then I was more motivated than ever to keep going because I was making progress. I needed to know now how to take this thing that was just a long essay-looking thing into a format that was usable with blank spaces to write in and workbooks and all this kind of stuff. Great.

I found a YouTube video at the time that showed me how to format a Word document to have it be horizontal and some more landscape, if you will, and look nice. So that’s what I did. It took a day and that’s it. So now I had the final product, the PDF file. I was like, “Okay, cool. Now I need to sell this.” I’ve never sold anything online before. I had a website, but I never sold anything. I didn’t know how to do this.

A question that is a guiding question in the book that I always ask myself, and I recommend people to ask when trying something new is, “If this were easy, what would it look like?” That question comes from Tim Ferriss and it’s guided me so much and it guided me back then. And I found, from a person who had already sold stuff before online, the answer.

It was a tool called E-Junkie, which doesn’t exist anymore, but there’s a lot of tools that are similar now where you can upload a product, get a button in exchange and put it on your website so that when a person clicks on that button, they pay and that thing gets sent to them automatically. I set that up in half a day. I was much further ahead by taking it piece by piece and learning as I was going.

And, finally, then I was like, “Okay, now I need to learn how to write a sales page because I need to convince people who are on my website to click that button and buy my study guide about this architecture exam I was selling.”

I’d never written for copy before. I never figured out how to try to convince somebody to buy something based on words I was saying. There were entire schools dedicated to copywriting. My first inclination was to go to one of those, but $18,000, no, I don’t have the time and/or money to do that.

It’s funny how we often think that, in order to do a business, for example, you have to go to business school and you have to do all these big things that cost a lot of money. But again, if this were easy, what would it look like? I was recommended a book by a friend of mine called Moonlighting on the Internet by a guy named Yanik Silver.

And he said, “Pat, you don’t even need to read the book.” And I said, “Then, why am I buying it?” “Well, there is an appendix in the back of the book. It’s a Mad Libs-style sales page. You can just put your product in there. You can put your benefits and the features of your product, and you’d have it.”

That was the sales page I used, from that book, literally Mad Libs-style, that I used for seven years that helped me earn over a million dollars off of that e-book. And, again, not from learning everything and outthinking myself, but by taking it one step at a time and learning from the right resources at the right time from the right people.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, now that’s really cool. So that question, “If this were easy, what would it look like?” is a useful question because it shifts your brain from wherever you were, “Let’s go to copywriting school,” into imagining the easy things. And, sure enough, “Oh, I guess, when you go down that road, you discover, oh, there is a resource, there is a tool, there is a person, there is a something, that has already done a lot of the hard work for me, and I can just piggyback off that goodness.”

Pat Flynn
Yeah, they’ve already made the mistakes that I would have made if I had just gone down this path myself. They have mentorship opportunities to help me get it right. They have podcast episodes, whatever it might be, right? You can find those resources when you need them, because they are there. They’re everywhere.

Pete Mockaitis
And I want to clear up a little bit. I think if, tell me what’s your take on this one, Pat. If we know full well, “I am learning something for the purpose of my own entertainment. And I know that this is not productive and this is an alternative to playing, playing a game of Pokemon, or this is an alternative to watching a Netflix TV series. What I’m doing is…”

Let’s see, I just discovered a new YouTube channel, Kurzgesagt, in German. So, the word is German, it just means, like, “in short.” And it’s just like, it’s been over a thousand hours making these animations, explaining stuff. I was like, “Wow, where has this been on my life? This is so fascinating.”

And so, if you know, “I am learning as a form of entertainment, and that’s what I’m doing. I’m not entertaining any delusion that this is a productive means of driving forward achievement of some objective or goal is,” is your take is, like, “Yeah, that’s cool. As long as you know what you’re doing”? Or, is your take, “Oh, no, no, that’s still working against us”?

Pat Flynn
I say have fun with it. Have fun with it. Enjoy it. In fact, there’s an exercise in the book that helps you understand which parts of your life you are putting your time into, whether it be something vocational or something hobby-like or maybe a waste of time. It’s called the inspiration matrix to see where, in fact, you’re putting your time in.

For most entrepreneurs at least, who I speak to, they have zero things in the hobby box. They are not putting any time into things outside of their work because they’re so entrepreneurial and career- focused, where it’s very important to have other things and hobbies. For example, for me, it’s fishing.

And for me, fishing is an escape. It’s to get back in nature. It’s a way to remove myself from all the entrepreneurial stuff and the emails and all the things I need to do, and the meetings. And it just gives me breath. It gives me space so that I can go back into it even better. And I love that. And I’m learning about that. I’m obsessed with learning about fishing.

But it’s far enough removed from my entrepreneurial stuff that it’s not going to get in the way of, “Oh, I should do this over here instead,” and kind of derail the plans that I initially had or the tiny experiments that I’m working on right now, right?

However, that being said, I still use lean learning in my fishing. In fact, I want to be efficient in my fishing because I only get to go maybe three or four times a month, and I want to make sure that I’m maximizing my opportunities when I cast that bait. In fact, I use a strategy that I talk about in the book called force function to recently learn something in fishing.

So, there is a particular fishing lure called a jig. It’s a large hook with some like skirt-like material on it and you kind of move it up and down. And it’s a very hard bait to fish because it often, just, it’s hard to utilize and you can go hours without getting a bite. But when you do, typically, you can catch bigger fish and it’s just much more fun when you do, when you get a strike because you kind of like really, really set the hook, but it’s difficult.

So, I remember for the longest time, I always wanted to catch a fish with a jig, and I would cast a jig on and cast it out there and get nothing for like 20 minutes, and I go, “Yep, see? I’m not good at this. So, I’m going to put it away and go back to my old reliable drop shot rig, which I’m way more confident in,” and I’ll get fish. And I’ll say to myself, “Yep, I’m not a jig fisherman. I’m never going to be good at it.”

But one day, because I, again, really wanted to learn how to do it, I went out on the boat and I brought nothing except jigs. There was literally nothing, no other kind of fishing that I could do other than jig fishing. So, started the day, went 20 minutes like I normally do, and started to question the whole thing, “Oh, my gosh, I’m terrible at this. I’m never going to get a bite on a jig. I’m going to go cast something else. Oh, wait, I can’t cast something else.”

“I’m forced to just fish with this. What am I going to do, go home? No, I’m out fishing, like a good day of fishing. Even if I don’t catch anything, it’s still a good day of fishing.” Hours go by, I get nothing. And then, finally, in the afternoon around 3:00 p.m., I finally get a bite. I didn’t land it, but I felt something on the other end, and I knew it was a fish.

And by the end of the day, I ended up getting two fish, and now that’s my go-to bait because I forced myself to do it. And that’s a lean learning strategy because we often will walk away from those things that are a lot harder, things that we’ve never done before, just to go back to our comfort zone. But sometimes you need to get forced to do those things and add a little bit more pressure to get the results you want.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Pat, let’s dig into some of these, the top tools and strategies that folks are finding most transformational inside your lean learning philosophy. Lay them on us, what do you think has been the most powerful for folks?

Pat Flynn
Yeah, so force function is definitely a big one. We’ll just kind of continue that conversation. Now, if you’re not fishing, maybe you want to, for example, learn a language. That reminds me of an episode of a show that Tim Ferriss did back in the day. It was on Apple TV, but it’s no longer in existence.

He did a show where he was trying to quick-learn certain things. And in order for him to learn how to speak Tagalog, which is the Filipino language, or the main Filipino language, there’s many dialects, but he ended up booking an interview with a Filipino news channel that was going to be conducted in Tagalog.

And he had a certain amount of time to just learn how to get it done because that date was coming, right? And that’s a great force function. Having a publisher tell you that, “You have a due date for your manuscript” is a great force function to have you get up and start writing.

Having a presentation at a certain date in front of a crowd at a conference is a great force function to help you learn how to become a better public speaker because you’re going to, there’s only a limited amount of time to tell yourself, “No, I can do it later. I can do it later.” No, you can’t. You have to do it now, right? So, that worked really well.

Another method of speed-running skill acquisition that I love is called micro mastery. It’s taking this big thing that you have that you’re doing and finding small little components of it that you can get better at that you can then stack on top of new things that you focus on for limited periods of time.

Going back to public speaking, a great way that I learned to become a public speaker was not just getting booked on a stage, but it was actually micro mastery, where I’d go into different presentations really hyper-focusing on one thing that I wanted to do better than anybody else and better than I’ve ever done before.

There’s a million things to do with public speaking to get good as a professional speaker from how you open, how you project your voice, where you stand on stage, what do you do with your hands, what do you put on the slides, how do you end, how do you pause, like all those things. There are so many.

But by focusing on, for example, just, “How do you start? What are the first words that come out of your mouth?” Let’s watch a hundred different TED Talks, but let’s just watch the first 30 seconds of each of them to see which ones have the best opening and how I can kind of learn from that.

Let me get training from other public speakers on how to open a show or open a presentation like that. And you can micro master that and, therefore, every future presentation you do, you’re going to have that skill. I got to the point where I was micro mastering what I do with my hands.

I was watching TED Talks and just watching people, “What do they do with their hands?” And they make these big grandiose gestures in moments that have big points to be made. And sometimes they go really small and kind of bring their hands closer to their body when they’re being more vulnerable. These are things that I learned only by absorbing and learning in a hyper-focused fashion, maybe two weeks at a time.

It reminds me of my buddy who is an ultra marathon runner. I called him up one day and I was like, “Hey, what are you doing?” And he’s like, “Well, I got a camera crew over at my house.” The ultra marathons are crazy. He runs like 15 miles a day just for fun. I think he’s crazy. But these marathons that he runs are like 50 miles or more.

And he had a camera crew at his house who had one of those super-duper slow-motion cameras who was filming the contact of his heel to the ground. He wanted a slow-motion footage of what his foot was doing to grab the angle of attack and all these other words he was throwing at me to, like, just get incrementally better at how he hits his heel on the ground when he’s running.

But when you think about it, it’s like, “Okay, well, that’s just like one moment in time,” but across 50,000 steps, I mean, that adds up to huge differences over time because he’s, again, a high performer and a high-caliber runner. He wants every little advantage that he could get. And so, he spent about two weeks focusing with, like, physics people. Again, it was way beyond what my understanding of all this stuff.

But he found the right angle of attack and the right way to run so that he could save a little bit more breath and time, and dah, dah, dah, so that he could just get seconds back over the course of many, many miles.

And that’s just a cool demonstration of just, like, what happens when you take a small moment in time, focus on something, a little micro thing inside of the thing that you’re doing that’s much bigger, and that then becomes a part of you so that you can kind of become a master at it over time by continually stacking those skills.

To finish up, we can go the opposite direction. I like that, instead of thinking about the micro, we can think about going bigger. And a lot of times, going bigger is very scary, but you can go bigger just for a small period of time to get really, really big results that will last a lot longer. And this takes me back to when I used to row. I used to row at Cal where I went to school and I was on the lightweight rowing team on crew.

And one thing that you do when you’re in a race to get ahead of the other boats is, yeah, you could just kind of run your race and kind of just pull fast as you can. But in order to kind of sprint ahead of a boat next to you, you implement what’s called a power 10. And that means the coxswain will offer the command, the coxswain sort of the small person on the boat that kind of commands the rowers.

And he’ll say, “Okay, power 10 in three strokes, two strokes, one stroke. Go!” And for 10 strokes, and just 10 strokes alone, the rowers on the boat will give it their all. Just 10 strokes. Somehow you find extra energy to offer. For just 10 strokes, it’s not forever. If you were to go hardcore all out for the rest of the race, you’d pass out, right? It’s too much.

But if you kind of just coasted and just kind of merrily went along, you would be beaten. So, in order to get ahead, you, every once in a while, offer a power 10. And in your life and in your learning, whatever it is you’re doing, you can do a power 10 of sorts.

If you’re podcaster, for example, like you and I are, Pete, a power 10 metaphor, or example, would be like, “Okay, well, I publish a podcast every single week. However, this one week in September, I’m going to call it marketing week. We’re going to have a podcast every single day of that week. And we’re going to promote it. We’re going to hype it out. It’s going to take a lot of extra work.”

“It’s going to be a lot of extra energy, but just for a period of time to get better results because we’re going to have more people listening, more people downloading. We’re going to create a whole event around it. We’re going to have a special guest. They’re going to promote it. All this stuff happens. And now we can see bigger results because we’ve inserted additional effort and pressure for a limited amount of time.”

Think about a hackathon. When coders go into a hackathon, again, it’s like, “Okay, 24 hours, you’re going to code something new that you’ve never coded before. Great. Go, get the Red Bulls, the Monster drinks, the pizza. You’re up for 24 hours.”

And that’s how a lot of the coolest, different pieces of software have been built because they focused on it for a short period of time, additional pressure, additional focus for a period of time. And then you go to sleep for two days to make up for it. But this is how you can get ahead much faster.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, so much good stuff there. And I’m thinking that the force function can even feel sort of low stakes. It’s, like, you’ve got a gym buddy, like they’re going to be at the gym, and so it’s not the end of the world if you don’t show up but there’s a human being, you know, a friend is like, “Dude, so I’m here and you’re not. What the heck?”

Or, just sort of any kind of accountability, a regular meeting with another human factor, there’s some forcing goodness there. And I love that example of the of the feet hitting the ground for the runner because, as you’re trying to think about, “Well, huh? Well, if I’m being lean with my learning, what’s really, really worth learning? Oh, maybe it is things that are done thousands of times over.”

We’ve had guests talk about how transformative improving your typing speed is for the professional because you do a lot of typing, and so that’s the case. Or, talk about the coders, sometimes they’ll go deep into creating a tool which will save them, “Oh, this will save me, like, three minutes a day, times hundreds of days, oh, that’s worth a few hours making that tool. That’s going to pay off rather handsomely.”

Pat Flynn
Yeah. We tend to think of getting better as just like doing the thing over and over again. And, yeah, you can get a little better by doing it over and over again, but think about the way that a band conductor makes their song better in the band. They don’t just play the same song a hundred thousand times to get better. They stop when something goes wrong, and they go, “Okay, trombones, that run that you just did there sound a little mushy. Okay, trombones, just the trombones, play those eight measures. Go.”

They hear it, and go, “Okay, we need to do this one at a time.” Again, breaking it down, “Okay, Jimmy, you play a run until you get it right. Okay, good. Now, Max. Now, Janine. And then now let’s all do it together. And now we can move past that because we micro mastered that. We can move past it now and work on the next part that might need help or the next part that might need to improve.”

Such a perfect way to start improving and it’s not by just doing it over and over and over again. It’s finding the one little thing that needs help, mastering that and, over time, those things can add up.

Pete Mockaitis
There’s also a forcing function built in there because if all the band members are aware that this could happen to them, they’re going to want to bring their A-game so that they’re not zeroed in on and embarrassed in front of everybody.

Pat Flynn
Yes. Additional pressure is required. Yet, most of us want to live in this little comfort zone where nothing ever happens. So, finding additional pressure works. You were talking about physical fitness and having a gym partner. I have a trainer. His name is Jeff. He lives in Columbus, Ohio. I live in San Diego. He’s going to call me on FaceTime at 7:30 p.m. this evening. Whether I’m in my garage or not, I’m to be ready for it because that call is coming.

And that alone is enough for me to go, “Okay, I’ll put my shoes on. Let’s go.” And then I do it. And then when I’m in it, I’m fine. But I just need that encouragement and knowing he’s going to show up there for me, which is what I pay him to do, is great.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’d love to hear your take, as folks who are jazzed about your lean learning approach and start going down this pathway, are there any mistakes or watchouts or pro tips you’d offer to folks?

Pat Flynn
Yeah, I mean, probably the biggest pro tip is you can’t do this alone. We were just talking about the importance of other people, but even finding other colleagues who are going through it with you, not necessarily a mentor or even accountability partner, but just other people who are doing it with you so that you can kind of inspire and feed off of each other’s energy. Those things are important. You speak the same language, right?

And then, of course, if you can, finding a mentor or a person who can take you under their wing or, at least, show you the ropes. Whether you have to pay for that or not, it is definitely worth it because they’ve gone down those paths before.

Another big mistake is this, again, this idea of, because we’re so socially connected, it’s very easy to see a lot of things in front of you that may be interesting, desirable, you know, bright, shiny objects, right? The draw is, well, we want to see that because everybody else is talking about it. It’s just human nature, so we can’t feel bad about that but we have to learn how to deal with it, the FOMO, the fear of missing out.

For a while, there was a tactic called JOMO, to battle this joy of missing out, which I think is just false. You kind of just kid yourself when you say, “Yeah, I’m happy that everybody’s talking about that and looking at that, but I’m not.” That’s just not real. The answer, however, is close to JOMO. It’s J-O-O-O, which is joy of opting out.

It is you saying to yourself, “I see that, I acknowledge it, and I choose not to spend time there because I’m going to recommit to the things I’ve already said yes to.” The joy of opting out. That is a proud recommitment that you’re making. The sort of plus one here is that you’re still going to go, “Yeah, that’s there, and I may need it.”

So, here’s the trick. You can put it away for later. Find a Notion folder or an Evernote folder or just a For Later folder of sorts and put it in there. And I guarantee you, 99% of the time, you’re never going to go back to those things. It’s just a mechanism for you to move forward from it. And what’s funny is, by the time you probably, if you do need those things, there’ll be another better, more relevant, and more recent resource for it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that reminds me of when you’re decluttering, you know, getting rid of stuff, like, “Oh, but I’ve got fond memories of this thing. And then maybe someday it could be useful.” I think my wife taught me this trick, it’s like, “Well, if you have good memories of it, you can take a picture of it on your phone and then you can look at the picture of it and enjoy those memories, and then get it out of the house.”

Pat Flynn
Yeah, the same memories. Yeah, I mean, that one’s a hard one for me as a collector at heart, a collector of Pokemon cards, it’s hard. It’s like, “Well, I kind of like this card. I’m going to keep it even though I should probably sell it, whatever.” But, yeah, if this sparks a joy, right, that’s the other sort of filter. And those filters are great. I think filters are really important. And again, the whole point is just be conscious about where you’re putting your time and effort, not just go through life in automation mode.

The other thing I’ll say is teaching. Teaching is a great way to learn. I had a friend of mine who lived in Hawaii, and he was wanting to learn how to play the ukulele. And, of course, Hawaii is the place to learn how to play the ukulele, right? So, we hired this really like grandmaster ukulele player who, after first few lessons, you know, he taught him a few chords to get started with.

And then the teacher told him, “Okay, now you teach it to your son.” His son was like 10 years old. And my friend was like, “Wait, no, I’m not qualified to teach. I just know like three chords. First of all, you’re the teacher, you’re supposed to teach me. You want me to teach my son?” And he’s like, “Yeah, because when you teach your son, you’re going to have to figure out a way to explain it that you will never forget.”

And he was like, “Oh, okay.” So, he taught his son and he learned these chords and was showing him how to play these chords and was explaining it in a way that a 10th grader or a 10-year-old could understand. And then, therefore, it was absorbed into his mind and he would never forget those chords, and he could move on to the next lesson from there.

You learn so much by teaching. It’s kind of meta because, even writing the book Lean Learning forced me to distill the way that I learn and approach things in a way that was more easily digestible for people who could pick up the book and read it and/or listen to it.

So, I actually learned even more about creating vocabulary around this, about finding the frameworks that would be memorable, which made it even easier for me to begin to understand them, which made it easier for me to now, again, talk about them in a podcast like this one. So, you don’t have to be the expert to teach.

In fact, many people would rather learn from somebody who’s just gone through a process versus the person who’s spent 40 years removed from the front lines of that thing and they’re now at a podium at some university speaking through many people versus being in it themselves. So teaching is a great, great way to learn.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. All right. Well, now let’s hear about some of your favorite things super quick. Can you give us a favorite quote, Pat?

Pat Flynn
There’s a few quotes that come to mind, “You can have everything in life you want, so long as you help other people get what they want.” It’s a Zig Ziglar quote. My son rolls his eyes because I say it so often when he hears me say that, but he knows it, and he sees it come true. So that’s one.

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

Pat Flynn
There was some research out of, I believe it was Ohio State University, I wrote about this in my book. There’s a lot of controversy around the idea of sharing your goals. And there was a study done a long time ago about the idea that, “Well, you know, if you share your goals publicly, you’re actually less likely to achieve them.”

And I think Derek Sivers from CD Baby was the first one to talk about this really publicly in a TED Talk a while back. He said, “If you speak your goals out loud in a social setting, like on social media, you are less likely to accomplish them.”

And the reason is because you are already getting those feelings as if you did accomplish them. People are saying, “Yeah, you got this. Good job. You can do it. I know you can do it.” You start to already feel good about it before you even take the first action. However, I think, in 2014, there was a secondary follow-up to this study that said, “No, that’s actually not true. It just depends on who you share your goals with.”

Yes, if you share your goals publicly to people who you don’t even really know or care about, you care about your audience, but you don’t really care about them from heart to heart, well, then, yeah, that’s true. You’re not going to achieve your goals because you’re getting those feelings.

However, if you were to share your goal to a mentor, to somebody who is a teacher, or who is going to be keeping an eye on you, accountability partner, but especially a mentor, you are many, many more times likely to do it because you don’t want to that person down.

There’s a loss aversion that happens. You don’t want to let your mentor down who you said you were going to do something for. And that study was really interesting because it kind of is the right sort of happy medium between sharing your stuff publicly but also not sharing it at all. Sharing it with a mentor or trusted person who you care deeply about.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Pat Flynn
Favorite book, as of late, would be Buy Back Your Time, Dan Martell. And there’s another good book that’s not out at the time of this recording, but maybe by the time this is published, maybe not. September 2nd is the release date. My good friend Chris Ducker is about to publish a book called The Long-Haul Leader.

And it does speak to this idea of, you know, instead of optimizing for scale and for rapid growth and all these things that we kind of grew up kind of trying to be, especially an entrepreneur with the hustle culture and faster and sacrifice everything for all these things, it’s more about the idea of optimizing for peace, for longevity, for both mental and physical health.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool?

Pat Flynn
Favorite tool, Poppy AI. I do use AI as a tool to help me get to the point of service to my audience faster. I never copy and paste from AI or just tell it to do something for me. However, I do use it to help me with my research.

If I have a lot of inputs and I need to understand these inputs much faster, I can go through Poppy AI to bring YouTube videos, social posts, other comment sections into one place and then start to analyze them in a more visual way. Other tools can do and accomplish those same things, but Poppy AI has been out of this world and has saved me so many hours of time.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Pat Flynn
Favorite habit is, before I buy something, I ask myself, “How would I feel if I bought this tomorrow?” That’s been fun. It helps. I’ve probably saved a lot of money, but also felt better about the purchases I make as a result of that filter.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s like, “Will I be disappointed if I didn’t have it yet?” versus, “Probably fine. Maybe let’s just find out.”

Pat Flynn
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you’re known for, a Pat Flynn original quote?

Pat Flynn
“I would much rather live a life full of ‘Oh, wells’ than a life full of ‘What ifs.’”

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

Pat Flynn
SmartPassiveIncome.com or, of course, my book Lean Learning, available wherever books are sold – Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc. And I’m at @PatFlynn on social media.

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

Pat Flynn
What’s the one thing you could say no to right now that would help you get better at your job?

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Pat, thank you.

Pat Flynn
Thank you so much for this.

Pete Mockaitis
Anne-Laure, welcome.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into your wisdom associated with Tiny Experiments. You do a lot of research and put together these tools in a practical, applicable way, which is kind of what we’re into. Can you tell us any super surprising and fascinating discoveries you made as you were doing the research and putting this stuff together?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
To me, the most surprising thing was how many of the decisions we make at work or in life, in general, are actually following automated scripts that we kind of copy-paste from other people, and a lot of them are useful. You don’t want to overthink every single decision, and sometimes someone has done the thing you want to do in a way that makes sense for you to just copy, right? But a lot of these copy-pasting that are happening are happening subconsciously. So, that was interesting to me to just notice the number of decisions we make that are not truly our own decisions.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, they just come from whatever is around us, huh?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Exactly. We’re social creatures and we learn from observing others, which, again, is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is actually worth it taking sometimes a second, especially for big decisions, asking yourself, “Where is this choice coming from? And am I making this choice based on what I actually want to do and explore and achieve with this particular project or area of my life? Or, am I just automatically copy-pasting what someone else has been doing?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, good to know. And can you tell us, in terms of the folks you’ve worked with doing these tiny experiments, any really cool or especially inspiring stories that leap to mind of folks who did the stuff and saw cool results?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Yes, a lot of people I worked with start experimenting in their jobs, and, for me, the most amazing thing is when they manage to get other people around them, their colleagues, to experiment with them. And so, I’ve seen people now who literally run tiny experiments together as a team, and every month they have a one-hour meeting where they catch up and they say, “Okay, what is the thing you’ve been trying this month? What did you learn? What can we learn as a team?”

And because of that, it’s also created this psychological safety, where it’s completely okay to start something new and say, “I’m just running an experiment. I don’t know where this is going. I’ll report back in one month and we’ll see what happens.”

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. Okay. So, then the subtitle of the book, Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World. So, could you paint that contrast or distinction for us, the experiments versus goal obsession? And what’s kind of like the vibe or the feel of these two different worlds?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Yes, I think visualizing it is helpful to understand the difference between kind of the status quo in terms of how we approach our ambitions and the alternative that I describe in the book. So, the mental model we tend to use when you talk about success at work and in life in general is the mental model of a ladder, in the sense that you have a series of steps you’re supposed to go through in a specific order, and when you’re done with a specific level, you can go on to the next level.

It’s a little bit like this very linear video game where you just collect all of the points and the artifacts and then you’re allowed to go on to the next level. And this kind of assumes that you already know where you want to go, that you have this very specific outcome, this very binary definition of success, whether you get there, yes, success, or you don’t get there and that’s failure.

The alternative to this linear model is a more circular model, a loop, cycles of experimentation. And so, that’s why I contrast the linear goal-setting approach to the experimental goal-setting approach. And in that case, instead of focusing on this very specific outcome that you want to achieve, you think like a scientist. You start from more of a hypothesis, a research question, and you ask yourself, “What might happen if I tried this thing, this particular action, this particular way of approaching a challenge?” You collect data, and based on that data you make decisions.

And what’s great is that in a world that keeps on changing, that’s fairly uncertain, you’re not clinging to that illusion that you know what the world is going to look like in three, four, or five years. You can just trust yourself that if you keep on iterating, collecting data, and experimenting, you’re going to grow, you’re going to learn, and you’re going to evolve with the world.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, could you give us an example of a specific domain in which we may often tend to approach in a goal ladder way? And then what that looks like in practice in the alternative tiny experiment way?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
I’ll take social media. I think this is something we’re all using, and whether you’re using it at a personal level or at work, maybe. This is something we’re all familiar with. So, the linear approach to growing an audience on social media would be, “I’m going to get to 10,000 followers by the end of the year.” That’s the linear approach. You have a specific end goal and you’re going to work really hard to get there.

The experimental approach is to say, “I’m going to post twice a day until the end of the year, and then I’m going to see where we’re at, at the end of the year. I’m going to look at where we’re at, what worked and what didn’t, and based on that, for my next cycle of experimentation, I’m going to tweak, I’m going to iterate and improve my process.”

And, again, you might not necessarily hit those 10,000 followers by the end of the year, but that’s the same as with the linear goal, actually. So, that hasn’t changed, but it’s your approach, your mindset that has completely changed. One of them is a lot more experimental and not focused on the outcome, but more focused on the process.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, understood. And so then, could you share with us a cool story of this in action, in terms of someone really did see some amazingness unfold when they did it this way?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
I think one of my favorite examples is someone in the Ness Labs community that decided to, they wanted to grow their professional network, and that’s something that can feel quite fuzzy, right? How do you grow your professional network? And a lot of people might end up attending. We’ve all been at those work events or conferences where we’re not quite sure what we’re doing here.

And so, what he did is that he designed an experiment where he said that, “For the next three months, every Monday, I’m going to reach out to someone on LinkedIn, someone whose work I admire, someone I heard on a podcast, or maybe I read their newsletter, or I saw something interesting they were working on, and I’ll just say, ‘Hello, and can we grab a virtual coffee?’ and that’s it.’”

And so, the great thing again is that you’re not trying to get to a specific outcome. The only kind of like measure of success is, “Are you doing the thing or not?” And so, every Monday, he sent that cold message on LinkedIn and he had a little tracker for it, tracking yes or no, and he ended up connecting with a lot of people. Some of them became collaborators, working on projects. And so, that was a project, a tiny experiment that happened in the past six months.

And so, long term, I don’t necessarily know what’s going to happen with that particular experiment, but I can already imagine that this is going to lead to a lot of interesting work. And it will also create a bit of a safety net for this person where, even if things end up not really working out with their current job, they’ll have now a stronger, better professional network they can reach out to you in case they want to actually start and do something else.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. And I like that as I’m imagining just sort of the mental, emotional, I don’t know, groove, vibe feeling of approaching the tiny experiment mindset. It’s a lot more pleasant in terms of, if it were a linear metric, gold, obsessed kind of a situation, like, “Ugh, I’m not getting enough meetings on the calendar. Aargh, what’s wrong?” you know?

As opposed to, if it’s a tiny experiment, it makes it more like a game, it’s just, “Oh, this is kind of fun. Oh, let’s see what happened. Oh, it’s time to check in on my LinkedIn account. Did it have any cool responses?” And then just that whole energy is more pleasant. And along the way, I imagine, in my own experience, that results in more creative, flexible, smart ideas along the way, as opposed to when you’re just like mad and frustrated it’s not working the way it’s supposed to.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Yes, absolutely. Because when you’re experimenting in this way, also whenever you see that, I don’t know, maybe it’s been two weeks in a row, and you didn’t get a lot of replies, what a scientist does when they’re faced with unexpected results, they don’t say, “Shame, I’m such a bad scientist. I’m terrible. I’m a failure,” right? They just look at the results and they ask themselves, “Huh, that’s interesting. What’s going on here? And what might we want to try or explore or experiment with?”

And so, just using again that experiment of reaching out to people, whether on LinkedIn or other social media platforms, you could say, “You know what, this week, actually I’m going to tweak the language a little bit, or maybe I’ll add a little like photo of something that I think is fun or interesting, and I’ll be a little bit more creative with the way I design these outreach messages.” Because again, as you said, you’re not just really trying to get to that specific outcome. You’re just experimenting.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, you’ve mentioned that we have some harmful beliefs about success. Can you unpack some of those? Like, what are some of the most harmful, why are they harmful, what should we have instead, and how do we just reinstall our belief systems?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
I think, to me, the most harmful one is thinking that we know where we’re going and what we will want in a few years. And also associated with this, with linear goals also, is the idea that if we get to a specific place, if we achieve a particular milestone, whether it’s a promotion or anything like that, then we’ll be happy. It’s this “if, then” feeling of, “If I achieve this, then I’ll be happy.”

This is called the arrival fallacy, and a lot of people experience this, where you do get to that place of success where, defined in a traditional sense, and you realize that, “I’m still the same person. My problems are still here, and I’m not necessarily much happier because I’ve achieved this goal.” What a lot of people end up doing when they find themselves in this situation is that, instead of questioning the approach to goals and success, they just figure that, “Oh, it probably wasn’t the right goal,” or, “I’m just going to find another one. I’m going to try and climb to the next rung of the ladder.”

And that’s very harmful because you find yourself on this kind of like treadmill, trying to find what is the next success you’re going to chase in order to finally be happy. And again, and there are studies asking older people about their regrets. A lot of them actually regret having a lot of this, you know, really focusing on this linear path of success in their career instead of exploring it a little bit more.

And so, connected to the first one that I mentioned, this idea that you think you know what you want, whenever you take a step in a direction and you start having more experience, acquiring more skills, connecting with new people, you become a different person. And so, your goals and the direction you want to go in and your ambitions are going to evolve, and that’s a feature, that’s not a bug. So, I think embracing this is actually a lot less harmful than trying to resist it and trying to stick to a fixed plan.

Pete Mockaitis
The arrival fallacy. I don’t think I’ve heard the phrase but I know of the concept and I think it’s so powerful and dangerous in terms of, “If I just,” fill in the blank, you know, “…get the promotion,” “…get married,” “…have a child,” “…earn X dollars, then I’ll be happy. Everything will be fine, and all my problems are solved,” and it’s not true.

It’s funny how we have our doubts. I think it was John Green, who wrote The Fault in Our Stars and some other novels, was on The Hilarious World of Depression podcast, and I thought it was so perfect. He said that he was talking to a wealthy person, and he said, “Boy, if I just owned a whole plane instead of this fractional lease situation.” It’s like, “Oh, man, you’re still in it. You haven’t figured it out yet. That’s not how it works.”

And so, tell us, if folks have their doubts, like, “Okay, easy for you to say. Easy for you to say, Anne-Laure, but I don’t know,” anything that you can share to disabuse folks of their arrival fallacy?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Yeah, I still experience it, so I want to clarify that it is really not about completely getting rid of it because it is such a deeply ingrained psychological mechanism that you’re always going to fit. And what’s interesting is that the more you are dissatisfied with your current situation, the more likely you are to cling to that arrival fallacy that if only you had this one thing, everything would be better.

So, what I really recommend is not that you’re trying to get rid of it, but just catching yourself when that happens, noticing that you’re doing that, that you’re really hoping, and that you’re going to be happy only if you achieve that one thing, and then trying to bring yourself back to a more, this is what I call having a more experimental mindset rather than this linear mindset, where we feel like, “If only I can climb and I can get to that next level, I’ll be happy.”

Bringing yourself back to that experimental mindset, reminding yourself that this is just a giant playground for you to try new things. You have no idea what’s going to happen. You actually have no idea what’s going to make you happy. A lot of people discover sources of happiness in their life, not because they had a perfect vision of what that would look like, but because they put themselves in lots of different situations, talked to a lot of people, discovered new perspectives, got outside of their comfort zone and tried these new things, and then they experienced that happiness.

And it’s almost like a surprise, you know, it’s like, “Oh, wow, I love this. I don’t know, I love water skiing,” or, “I love hosting workshops,” or, “I love mentoring,” or, “I love all of these different things.” And there’s no way for you to know if you don’t try different things.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s fascinating how what we think we will enjoy or not enjoy is often wildly wrong.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
I remember one of my all-time favorite consulting projects was working to help out call centers for an insurance company, and I was like, “Wow, that sounds boring. Call centers and insurance. Eugh!” And yet, it was the coolest thing because it’s sort of like, “Oh, wait. The work we’re doing is improving the call center employees’ experience, which is improving the attrition and retention rates, which is improving customer satisfaction, which is improving profitability.”

And it was just like, “Everybody is winning here, and it feels really good. I like this kind of people transformational type stuff more so than what seemed more fun, interesting, and sexy on the front end.”

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Yes, exactly. And so, I think this is really why, whenever you’re faced with something like this, same as you. If I saw this on paper, I would think that this is the most boring job. And I think that’s why it’s important to really approach those opportunities and saying, like, “I’m not necessarily going to…” If there is a little bit of curiosity, and this is really the compass that I use, right?

If there’s at least a little bit of curiosity, it might be worth saying, “Okay, let me just give it a try. Let me treat that as a time-bound experiment and let’s see what happens.” And again, you kind of start from a hypothesis. And, in that case, your hypothesis might be, “This is going to be so boring. I’m going to hate it.” But this is a hypothesis, “I don’t have certainty. It’s a hypothesis. So, now let’s test the hypothesis.”

And it might be that you were correct, that was really boring, and good. Now you know. Now you have confirmed your hypothesis after running the experiment. Or you might be wrong, and that’s the beautiful thing about having this experimental mindset, is that a scientist, when they’re wrong, they’re actually really happy about it because they learned something new, they feel like, “Oh, I stand corrected. I had this hypothesis, but the data is showing something else, and that’s amazing. I just discovered something new.”

In the case of those personal experiments, that means you discovered something new about yourself, about your work, about the world, and that’s actually pretty cool.

Pete Mockaitis
That reminds me, I think it was an Adam Grant’s book, Think Again, he was talking about interviewing, might have been Daniel Kahneman, or some illustrious, you know, thinker, researcher, who said that he loves it when he’s wrong, which is kind of surprising because most of us think, “Oh, no, I feel embarrassed. You know, oh, I was wrong. I feel dumb and stupid. I should have known better.” And he said, “I love it when I’m wrong. That’s the way I know that I’ve really learned something.” And I think that’s a beautiful reframe right there.

And so, speaking of reframes and good feels, good vibes, you’ve got a section about holistic self-regulation, which sounds handy. So, let’s say we’re in, Anne-Laure, we’re like, “Okay. All right, we’re going to do some experiments. We’re going to see what happens,” and we’re in the midst of them, and yet things aren’t going the way we would like, or prefer, or we’re experiencing some frustrations, disappointments, messes, disasters, whatever, how do we engage in holistic self-regulation?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
I like to describe it as a little dance. So, the issue a lot of people are kind of like facing, and especially if they’re doers, high-agency people who just want to fix the problem, is that they might just bypass looking at the actual emotion and the response, and just try to find a solution and fix the problem and the source of the disruption.

And what I really recommend doing is just not doing that, not rushing, taking a moment to go through the first step of that little dance, which is to engage with the emotion, to understand the subjective experience. And I recommend a tool that psychologists call “affective labeling.” It’s just a fancy word to really say “naming your emotions.” It just means naming your emotions.

There’s a lot of research showing that, by just taking the time to name your emotion, you’re going to be able to process it much better. So, what’s the emotion? So, as you said, things are not going as planned, right? Is it worry about whatever other consequences there are going to be because this thing is not working? Is it maybe fear of being judged by your peers or your manager, who might be looking and feeling like, “Oh, wow, she didn’t do that very well, or she made a mistake”?

Is it anxiety because you know that you’re supposed to present the result or something like that tomorrow and obviously the data is not what you thought it would be? So, what is the emotion? Affective labeling, naming the emotion, and that’s already going to help you process it. Only once you’ve done this, you can go on to the second step of the little dance, which is dealing with the actual consequences.

And so, basically, you dealt with the emotion at this emotional level, and now you can go at a more like mental cognitive level where you’re dealing with the actual problem. And, again, there’s research showing that you’re going to be able to do that much more effectively if you process the emotions before. So, those are the two steps. The first one is really processing the subjective experience and then dealing with the objective consequences.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, I hear that those are very different processes and thoughts that you’re having, and I could see how you may…well, you tell me, what kind of trouble do we get ourselves into if we kind of do both at the same time or skip to the second part and don’t do any labeling?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
So, the problem if you just jumped into solving the problem is that you’re not going to realize how your current emotional state is probably going to impact your judgment, and so you’re probably going to make decisions that are driven by those emotions, whether that’s the fear, the anxiety, the worry, and you might, for example, cancel tomorrow’s presentation because you feel like it’s not ready because that’s driven by the fear of being judged or the anxiety or whatever. Or you might make any kind of like rushed choice that you think is rational but is actually driven by the emotion. So, that’s the big risk.

And then the other one is just that, you know, your podcast is called How to Be Awesome at Your Job. If you stay stuck in just processing the emotions, and you don’t deal with the consequences, you’re probably not going to do a great job. So, at some point, you do need to move on to dealing with the actual consequences.

But, in general, the challenge I’ve seen for most people is not the dealing with the objective consequences, it’s that they skip the emotional processing, they don’t do the affective labeling, and they try to solve the problem straight away when they’re still in that state of fear or anxiety or just that stress state.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s funny, you said “affective labeling” and at first, I heard you say “effective labeling” like, “Oh, I do a really good job of labeling it.” So, I’m curious, there are different typologies, I guess, in terms of how many emotions we humans experience, and I guess there’s the “Inside Out” movie, or others, that might say we have seven emotions. But lay it on us, how do we know if our affective labeling is effective labeling? Is it just like, “I’m feeling angry. That’s that”?

Or, I’m thinking about Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication. They’ll say things like, “Oh, I’m feeling angry because my need for respect, I don’t feel, is being met here,” which I found pretty handy. It’s like, “Okay, if there’s like an emotion and then perhaps a perception of a cause or need being unmet,” is pretty handy. When do you consider the affective label feeling done? Is it when I am chilled out a little bit about it, I’m not as worked up? Or it’s when I’ve said one word, “Angry”? Or, when am I ready to move on?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Yeah, so this is really the emotional regulation part where it’s really about paying attention to how you feel in the moment, and sometimes actually just saying, “Oh, I’m so angry. I don’t know.” Maybe a contractor didn’t deliver something on time or whatever, “I’m just, I’m so angry or I’m disappointed.” Like, already, like, just in those few minutes of conversation, I think we’ve mentioned six or seven different ones. So, actually, angry is good if that’s what it describes, right? But if, after saying this, you still feel like, “Oh, there’s something else,” you can still go and dig a little deeper, and, “Okay, I’m angry but why? What is the underlying emotion underneath this? Okay, oh, it’s that.” And you will, by doing this, like those different layers of affective labeling, you will progressively feel calmer, and being able to re-engage at a cognitive level because you have dealt with the emotions. So, that’s one part.

The other part is that, sometimes while dealing with the actual objective consequences, you might have emotions that pop up again depending on what you discover, what you’re trying to solve. Let’s say that you’re trying to solve a problem and you discover that the only reason why this entire thing is happening is because one of your colleagues forgot to do something you told them to do. And so, again, like you might have an emotion that comes up. You go back to the first step of the little dance, process that, and then deal with the consequence.

So, there’s a term in psychology also called metacognition, which is the ability to observe your own thoughts, your inner landscape, and this is something that you can practice. And at the beginning, it might feel a little bit like, “Oh, what am I doing? I am angry,” those words. But after a while, when you’ve done it for a while, it will become very natural to go through those steps of the dance and going back and forth between the two.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And when you mentioned the underlying stuff, in a way, this is dangerous for me because I am very curious and could examine something for long, long stretches. But let’s say, “Okay, I’m angry about the contractor not doing the thing right,” okay. And you say, what would be the step associated with getting out the underlying stuff?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
So, again, it’s only in that specific context, it’s only doing as much affective labeling as is needed for you to be able to then move on and deal with the objective consequences in the moment. If, and that can happen, you realize that there’s something actually quite juicy or interesting in terms of your own cognitive or emotional patterns while you’re doing this, or maybe after a while you notice that every time a certain type of challenge arises at work, you have the same type of emotional reaction, it might be worth digging deeper, but this should happen in a different kind of modality.

So, for some people, it’s journaling, for some people it’s talking therapy, you know, whatever it is, where you have more space to explore this. Affective labeling is more of an in-the-moment tool to do just enough emotional processing that you’re able to think clearly again, that you can then deal with whatever problem you’re facing right now.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, I hear you. So, with the contractor situation, we might say, “Okay, I’m angry because he did the thing wrong, and this seems like a pattern, and that folks think they could just take advantage of me because I’m so nice,” or whatever. And so then, the goal is not to dig into, you know, “Why am I broken?” or, “What’s wrong with people in the world today?”

But rather say, “Oh, maybe there’s a pattern there associated with perhaps I need to be more assertive or establish boundaries or expectations more candidly, assertively, proactively in my interactions with folks. But we could just sort of note that and park that for my journaling time or therapy time or whenever I’m having a nice long walk, and that would be interesting to dig into.” As opposed to, “Stop everything. Emergency inspection must happen now before I, you know, ask for a partial refund or whatever it is I need to do.”

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Yes, exactly. And this is what’s really nice, is that in that way, you can actually just note these things and make sure that they don’t remain unexamined, and so you still will do that work outside of the current situation, like professional situation you’re in, but you’re also helping yourself make better decisions in the moment. So, it’s helpful as a tool to self-regulate in the moment, and as a tool also to notice patterns that you might want to explore deeper at a later moment.

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

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Honestly, your questions were amazing, so I’m good.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, shucks. Thank you. How about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
It’s been attributed to Viktor Frankl, but it’s actually much older than this, and it’s, “In between stimulus and response, there is a space. And in that space lies our freedom.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Anne-Laure, I got to say, you’ve piqued my interest here because, fun fact, that is the most cited favorite quote amongst How to Be Awesome at Your Job guests, but you brought an extra wrinkle to it, it’s like, “Oh, it has history pre-Victor Frankl.” Do you know the tale? Can you tell us?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Well, I went in that rabbit hole, but there, basically, we don’t know who said that first, but there are lots of different versions of it. They’re very, very close in much older books, and Victor Frankl is the one who made this version famous, and the one I quoted is his version. But it’s very, very old actually. And so, that’s interesting, is that this idea that we have this little space of freedom is quite old. I have an entire footnote about this in my book.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
There’s a recent study that shows that the systems that are activated in the brain are the same for impulsivity and curiosity. And I find it fascinating because that has a lot of implications for how we navigate the world and distraction and creativity and all of that. So, that’s one of my favorite studies at the moment.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I can relate to that. It’s like, “I need to know everything about this now.”

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s really dangerous for me. I have to keep lists and guardrails and rules for myself. And a favorite book?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
That would be How We Learn by Stanislas Dehaene, who is also a French neuroscientist, and it’s a very short book, but it teaches you how your brain learns anything in childhood and adulthood, and it’s very helpful to understand how we navigate the world.

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

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
I use a note-taking tool called Roam Research, and it’s a bit of a weird, non-linear thinking type of tool where you can connect all of your ideas in little bullet points. And most people who look at my notes think that it’s a complete mess, but it’s helped me write a book and complete a PhD. So, I’m so grateful for this tool.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Going for daily walks.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Become the scientist of your own life.

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

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Go to NessLabs.com to subscribe to my newsletter, and look up Tiny Experiments anywhere books are sold, or go support your local bookshop by ordering it there.

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

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
I want to ask them, “What will be your first tiny experiment?”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Anne-Laure, thank you. This is fun.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Thanks for having me.