Tag

Learning

Sep 28

1184: How to Know When to Quit with Lindsay Crouse

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Lindsay Crouse reveals the surprising signs that your grit may be working against you.

You’ll Learn

  1. How purposeless endurance keeps you stuck
  2. How small acts of quitting can make bigger decisions better
  3. Why we’re so afraid to quit–and how to get over it

About Lindsay

Lindsay Crouse is an independent producer and journalist and author of The Case for Quitting: The Surprising Benefits of Opting Out. A 15-year veteran of The New York Times, her Emmy-nominated work on women’s sports brought widespread change to the industry, including maternity protections for elite athletes sponsored by Nike. 

In The Times’s Opinion section, she wrote and commissioned widely read essays and produced hundreds of short documentaries, including commissioning The Times’s first Academy Award-winning film. A life-long competitive distance runner, she graduated from Harvard College, and lives in New York City with her family.

Resources Mentioned

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Pete Mockaitis
Lindsay, welcome!

Lindsay Crouse
Thanks so much for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about quitting. Could you kick us off with a particularly surprising and fascinating discovery you made while putting together your book, The Case for Quitting?

Lindsay Crouse
I think, for me, the biggest insight, I’ll just start by saying, like, I am somebody who approached this book by having embraced a life where I did not like to quit.

I think, in hindsight, I think I feared quitting more than I let myself admit and just kind of clung behind this idea that perseverance is inherently noble. It is inherently the moral and correct thing to do in nearly every situation, and that all champions, truly believe, truly persevere by not stopping, like, that is how they succeed.

And so, I think, I really became convinced, over the course of reporting this and from talking to a lot of people who walked away, that quitting is a companion action to perseverance. It is actually an agent of perseverance.

And if you just stick your head down at every obstacle that you face and you don’t recognize futility or you don’t recognize that your energy might be better suited elsewhere, you are the one that loses in the end. And that, to me, was a surprisingly novel epiphany.

Pete Mockaitis
Quitting is a companion to perseverance. A companion as in it helps you persevere more, or a companion as in these things go together like peanut butter and jelly?

Lindsay Crouse
The former. I think if we’re going to achieve our potential, we really need to get better at quitting. And that means understanding the difference between productive hard work versus the performative kind or work that’s pointlessly hard, like, meaningful struggle versus suffering that keeps us stuck, healthy versus harmful persistence.

You need to be able to quit the parts of perseverance that are bad for you in order to be able to go, you know, potentially further than you want to, than you were going if you just stayed on the path that you were on.

And so I really became convinced that quitting is often a courageous first step to finding something better.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, could you share with us a fun story that illustrates all this?

Lindsay Crouse
I’ll give you the story of the woman that I open with. She’s a marathon runner whose story kind of overlaps with my own. Her name is Keira D’Amato, and she, for the longest time, all she wanted was one goal, which was to become an Olympian. And she threw everything that she had at this goal. And she got really close.

Like, she would routinely finish on the podium at NCAA’s, which is the national championships for track in America. So, obviously, somebody like her who is incredibly perseverant has used that attribute to get to where she was, she’s going to keep going. After college, she started training, she put everything again into the school of becoming an Olympian.

And, obviously, what came next was she got injured. And so she didn’t want to believe that. And she just kept training and training. And soon the sport that she loved became something that she started to dread. And that happened to me as well. I’m also a competitive marathon runner.

And I realized that, over years, I just started getting injured so much and just kind of, you know, instead of stopping and resetting and letting these injuries kind of fix themselves, I would just, like, ice my shin bone into submission under my desk, and it didn’t work.

And then after about five years, I started to realize, like, I hadn’t even hit a starting line, so I’d, effectively, quit as well. And that’s what Keira did. And instead of continuing to train, and obviously she was devastated, but she just moved on, finally, she let go.

And she got a regular job. She started a family. She started to disentangle her identity from this goal and this way of life that she’d had and kind of built her whole life around. And then she started to come back slowly, like after maybe like a decade or something.

And then she realized, A, talent doesn’t disappear but too much perseverance can kill your talent, and it can definitely kill your drive, and she just kept going. And, this time, there were no expectations, no way of actually assessing success, because the goal wasn’t to win anymore. The goal was to just explore and figure out what she could do.

And she got faster and faster and, ultimately, started actually beating some of the athletes who had single-mindedly devoted their careers to their sport. Ultimately, she wound up setting the national record in the marathon for women, which, to me, was just such an exciting and truly compelling example of how quitting can actually help you succeed.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes, that’s quite lovely. It’s not so much she found a totally different thing but, you know, returned to the first thing and came out even better. You said a haunting line, “The thing you loved, you’ve come to dread.” That’s heavy, and I think something many of us can relate to. How does that love turn into dread?

Lindsay Crouse
I think that can really start to happen when we’re persevering in the wrong way. And this can often happen when we really, really care about something. Like, this is why I wrote this book, in fact. It’s for incredibly perseverant people and hardworking people who believe that hard work and never giving up is the only key to success.

And, in fact, if you persevere when you’re failing or when you’re actually just working so hard that you no longer enjoy what you’re doing and it’s starting to diminish your ability to do that thing well, the only way to reset, or the only smart way, really, is to quit, to stop, to pivot, potentially, and then, ideally, regain momentum when you’re ready to come back.

And persevering at something that is failing or that is not working or that you are dreading, it’s just draining and it doesn’t work. But that’s what I was talking about in the beginning of this interview when I was saying that working pointlessly hard does not succeed.

But momentum is energizing and that’s where perseverance really matters and follows through. But I think we don’t always know the difference or we’re not able to recognize it at the time.

Pete Mockaitis
Persevering at something that’s draining, it just doesn’t work.

Lindsay Crouse
Yeah, it’s just diminishing returns. It takes your energy, it makes you miserable, and, worse, it keeps you from investing all of that energy and work in something that actually might succeed.

Entrepreneurs know this, athletes know this. I mean, this is what champions understand, but I think, for us, we just think of quitting as this blanket negative action and that’s what I’m hoping to correct with this book.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you give us some pro tips on distinguishing? If any of us are thinking, “Uh-oh, there’s something that I love that I’ve come to dread,” what are some good signals to know, “Ahh, that might mean it’s time to quit,” as opposed to, “Oh, well, you know, you just need a little bit of a rest,” “Oh, actually, that’s depression,” “Oh, actually, that’s some other need in life is getting trampled upon and left unmet”? How do we kind of disentangle the complex inner life as we make these decisions?

Lindsay Crouse
Yeah, I’ve been really frustrated by this in the past, like before I wrote this book, because it always seemed like the answer to “Should I quit or keep going?” was just, “It depends,” and that is so frustrating because it’s like, “Okay, well, it depends on what?”

And, I mean, I think the way that I’d finish that sentence now is the knowing whether to quit or persevere. It depends on the reasons why you’re continuing. And so you just need to understand, “Are you continuing because you love what you’re doing, regardless of the outcome?” So, obviously, for like the intrinsic action of whatever you’re doing.

Or, “Are you continuing because you’re afraid of confronting what might happen if you stop?” And I don’t think we’re taught to ask ourselves those questions enough. It’s often just the answer is, “Persevere. Like, do not relent.”

And so I think if someone’s asking this themselves, “Should they continue or should they quit?” you know, particularly, if they’re pursuing a specific goal, one way to think about this, about whether to persevere or to quit is by assessing your progress.

So are you continuing despite the fact that, instead of getting closer to your goal over time, you’re actually getting farther away? Did you keep moving the goalpost of what it would take to abandon the quest?

Like, do you keep telling yourself, “If I just finish this deadline, if I just file this paper, if I just hit this number, it’s just never enough”? I think when you realize that you’re asking yourself those questions, those are probably times when it actually might be wise to quit. This is not just a setback anymore. This is you grinding with no outcome.

Another thing that I get into in this book that I found really interesting is there’s a lot of neuroscience these days, a lot of research that shows that our brains actually signal futility to us a lot more than we realize. This is true in small animals called zebrafish that scientists are studying to learn more about how and why we quit.

But a lot of humans have learned to suppress those quitting cues, obviously, with our grit and our heroic perseverance. So I think one way to tell, to think about, you know, if you’re facing, if you’re not at this crossroads, but you’re trying to decide, like, “Okay, is this a setback or should I just stop?”

And one way to think about this doesn’t involve much thinking at all because your brain is actually telling you and you already know.

Pete Mockaitis
These neuroscience futility cues, what are they? What do they look like, sound like, feel like when they’re happening?

Lindsay Crouse
So these are called glia. These are small cells in our brain, it’s at a lab called Janelia, which is in Northern Virginia outside of DC, and there’s a neuroscientist there named Misha Ahrens, who’s doing a lot of research on these zebrafish and around how they encounter futility.

So zebrafish, they’re really small, tiny animals. They need to know how to quit in order to survive. And traditionally, they live in these rice paddies in the river Delta of the Ganges in India. And so if they get swept out to sea, that’s devastating for them. They will die. So they need to understand what to do in a current.

And so, in these labs, the zebrafish are made to believe that their effort is failing, and these glia in their brain will actually tell them to stop. And so we have the same, humans have the same mechanisms in our brain, but we suppress those urges. We might call that grit or, you know, something that a champion might do.

But, actually, we should stop as well. Like, when we’re being swept back by a current, the smartest thing to do is stop, save your energy, and wait for a moment or find a path where all of this energy might succeed instead.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Okay, that’s great for these fish. Pretty clever stuff going on there. So our stop signals, outside of water, what are they?

Lindsay Crouse
Well, one way to think about whether to persevere, or to quit if you’re trying to measure your effort over a long period of time, is to consider – I mean, this sounds really obvious – but is your effort working?

If you look back over the past five or 10 years, are you getting closer to your goal or are you getting further away? Optimism. We’ll often tell ourselves, “Oh, we’re actually just one swing away,” when we’re actually much further.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And what’s interesting is quit, I suppose, can occur in a micro sense or a macro sense.

Lindsay Crouse
Yes, that’s exactly right.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, if someone is in business, it’s like, “Hmm, you know, this business just isn’t growing, yeah, year after year.” And so we could quit in terms of, “We should dramatically change the approach that we’re using to acquire and retain customers.” Or we could quit in terms of, “Sell this business. Get out of here. This is not for me.”

So I’m thinking there are some subtleties, some nuance, some master-level ways to think about. How big a quit are we talking here?

Lindsay Crouse
Absolutely. I mean, I think that’s 100% right. There’s sort of micro quitting where it’s looking almost doing like a curation of our lives, and excavating the things that are holding us back or kind of weighing us down.

I mean, I think a lot of us, especially the older that we get, if we don’t do that, we’re living with patterns and behaviors and even routines and things that were established by a 20-year-old or even someone younger, even when we were children.

And I think it is a really healthy micro-quitting behavior to, you know, especially as we start to get tired or get frustrated or simply just kind of, I don’t know, experience malaise. We often think that we need to add more to our lives in order to improve them. But, actually, and there’s a lot of research here as well, that the solution, when we do have a problem, is actually to take something away.

And so this, I think, is an example of micro-quitting where you can inventory your life and kind of look at the clutter, like, “Is it digital clutter? Is it schedule clutter? Is it clutter in your home almost?” And it is sort of quitting to throw that stuff away or discard it or end it.

But then, of course, there is that macro-quitting which is very different. It’s taking a path that you’re on and pivoting to something else. But I think, often, doing those kind of micro-quitting exercises can help you build the muscle to make those bigger decisions down the line.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like the notion of clutter a lot, metaphorically here, because I think there is a lot of emotional overlap associated with these concepts. I’ve gone through this many times, I guess, every time I’ve moved, and then a few more times after that in terms of, “Let’s really see. Okay, do I really need to take all the stuff with me to the next place? Really?”

And so we go through the closets. Like, “When was the last time I wore that? Wow, you know, I think it’s almost a year ago.” It’s like, “So, obviously, it’s not, you know, a top garment choice for me. It’s not a go-to by any means.” And yet, it feels sort of hard to let go of it.

And, I mean, I’m a semi-tidy person, you know, ups and downs. It doesn’t look like an episode of “Hoarders,” but it’s also not, you know, a masterpiece that Marie Kondo would be proud of. And I’m just sort of, I’m in the middle, with regard to my clutter and tidiness.

And yet, though I prefer, you know, tidy, clear space, it is a bit emotionally challenging to say goodbye to any number of items that aren’t doing much for me, “But, oh, I kind of like them and I might use them someday.”

Lindsay Crouse
Yeah, so I think, in that case, I would just kind of, I mean, there’s a lot of things you have to tell yourself that you don’t want to necessarily hear, but the past is gone. Like, you cannot recover what you’ve already spent. All you can do is look forward and think about, “Will this thing make me happy in the future?” not, “How will I feel without it?”

And stepping away or like letting go of an object or a place or a thing or even a relationship, just because you spent so much time in it, that  doesn’t mean that you should continue to do it. Stepping away from something that’s bad for you prevents that loss from actually getting bigger.

And I think you could ask yourself, like, if you were starting over today, would you still keep this thing with you? Again, like, often, that’s an answer where we would say, “Absolutely not,” but we don’t ask ourselves that question, and that’s sunk cost holding us back.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that is an excellent de-cluttering question. It’s, like, “Would you buy it again today? Or, even, if you’re at a garage sale and it was a nickel, almost free, would you still pick it up?” So very handy in the clutter world versus, and the other dimensions as well.

So I think what’s intriguing here is, I think, that this might be a tendency in all of us. You tell me, Lindsay, you’ve done the research, that I went right for the hard, complex, tricky, intricate, disentangle-y kinds of questions with regard to quitting.

But sometimes a friend and guest of the show, Kwame Christian, says fear masquerades in many forms and sometimes this is one of them, in terms of there might be complex quitting questions, but I imagine some of them are actually intellectually easy but emotionally hard.

So could you just shine a real bright spotlight on that for us to really, you know, prick our consciences or our souls to say, “Uh-oh, yeah, I think I’ve been avoiding this”?

Lindsay Crouse
Yeah, so, I’m happy to talk about this idea of, well, I think what really holds us back from quitting often, and this is so obvious, but it’s fear, right? We’re afraid. And I think that fear can be paralyzing. And it’s important to recognize, like, that’s smart. Like, this is our brain protecting us. We naturally hate uncertainty.

And, again, that actually means that you’re wise to not want to just kind of, like, flagrantly quit everything. And also, look, you are a hard worker. You don’t just kind of leave things behind easily.

But I think, again, that makes us feel like quitting is this moral failure at times when it is actually the smart choice. So, usually, our fear around quitting, it involves judgment that we made the wrong choice, that we are going to regret what we’re doing. And so, ultimately, this fear really proves unfounded.

And I think we fear two different things. We fear the critiques of others, judgment from other people. And there’s a bias called the spotlight effect that observes that we often think about ourselves as going around with this imaginary, like, light on us, like we’re under an imaginary spotlight. And that means that we assume a lot of, like, the other people around us are paying a lot more attention to us than they actually are.

And so for this book, I talked to an actress, and she quit her career after she noticed that all the other actors around her were actually putting their lives, their actual lives on hold to pursue this dream that they no longer really believed in just because, as she put it, they told everyone in their tiny hometown that if they quit, they were going to be a star, and they just couldn’t seem to let go. Obviously, she felt this pressure, too.

And then she did quit. I mean, she really wanted to stop pursuing this dream. She’d made it, but it was time to stop. And it turned out, when she told everyone, like her friends and family, that they all thought the same thing, that they thought when she headed out to Hollywood like a decade or something before that, like, “Sounds great. We support you.”

And so I think that just means that that fear of other people judging us, we just need to accept that the people that really care about anything, that no one cares. And the people that really do care about us, they’re going to be fine.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s great. Most people don’t care and those who do will be supportive. So there you go.

Lindsay Crouse
Exactly. And then, of course, we also fear judgment from the scariest judge of all, which is ourselves, and that comes down to regret. Like, what if we regret our decision to leave? But research also shows that this fear is unfounded.

Over the long course of our lives, what we really regret is inaction, decisions that we didn’t make. And quitting is, ultimately, a decision. It’s a bold act. And what we regret in the long course of our lives is, like, being too afraid to act, too afraid to change, like being too timid.

And so I think, again, if you’re listening to your instincts, most likely when you’re looking back when you’re 80 or 100 or whoever knows how old we’ll be, you’re going to be glad that you acted and didn’t wait longer.

And I think that’s the other thing that’s really important to think about quitting and became very persuasive to me. What we should probably fear the most is failing to decide because, then, we’re bouncing these decisions to our five- or 10-years older selves, and we’re leaving those versions of ourselves with the same hard questions and even harder stakes, because it doesn’t get easier to leave. We just get older.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and you have less time to adjust, you know, rescale, etc., to the new world, post-quitting.

Lindsay Crouse
Yeah, the stakes go up, and it’s harder to leave. And, again, that sets us up for even greater regret down the line.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, also, you’ve got a number of fun terms and definitions. Let’s hear about purposeless endurance. Could you paint a picture for what that looks like so we might be able to better recognize it within ourselves?

Lindsay Crouse
Yeah, so this is kind of like grit for the sake of it. I mean, another way, I think, to think about it is just kind of like bad work. We think about hard work as just being inherently virtuous, but we can just grind and grind, and almost use that work as a way to distract ourselves from the fact that we’re not actually going anywhere but we feel like the work itself is valuable.

And I think there a number of costs to this. Obviously, the cost of grinding really hard, I don’t like the word burnout, but you can’t grind really hard forever. But, also, you’re grinding with this idea that there is going to be a finish line, and that it is all going to stop, and that it is going to get you somewhere. And work for the sake of work, it doesn’t necessarily work.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So we’re enduring, but it’s purposeless in that there’s no purpose. And yet, we’ve almost affixed, superimposed a purpose, like, “Hard work is virtuous in and of itself because it makes me disciplined or gritty or virtuously holy or moral or, in some way, desirable and admirable because I’m hustling, I’m grinding, I’m exerting effort, and that is to be celebrated.”

Lindsay Crouse
Yeah. I think society bombards us, men and women alike, with inspiration to keep going and go harder and do more. And we can almost use this idea that we can keep going as a proxy for believing that we should. And, yeah, this is purposeless.

And I think the other thing that does is it helps us, or it encourages us, to ignore the costs that pile up while we’re busy doing all this heroic but also purposeless endurance. And so you really have to take yourself out of this. And, I mean, it’s such a simple question, but you could even just ask yourself like, “Why am I still doing this?”

And if you find yourself just reaching for the answer, “Because I can,” as opposed to, you know, a better reason, that would be an example of purposeless endurance.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Very nice. And then on the flip side, there’s a Finnish term. Can you pronounce it for us, S-I-S-U? What does this mean?

Lindsay Crouse
Sisu, yeah. I’m probably saying it wrong, but, yeah, so Finland is the happiest country in the world, according to these studies, like year after year after year. And one reason, if you talk to Finnish people, like one attribute that really sets themselves apart is this idea of Sisu.

The idea that Finns can endure any obstacle that comes their way, grimly, obviously. But they will get through it. And so I talked to this Finnish scholar, her name is Emilia Lahti – and she talks about how there are actually different kinds of Sisu. I mean, this is obvious, but there’s good Sisu and bad Sisu.

And good Sisu, obviously, is resilience. Like, this is where we put perseverance in it. Like, this is how we think of perseverance and what we actually want it to get us, which is like when we face a setback, we can push through it.

But then there’s also harmful Sisu where you just find yourself grinding and grinding. It’s not getting you what you want. And, meanwhile, you’re expecting others to do the same. It’s almost like that reliance on yourself even when it’s not working.

And what bad Sisu does is it keeps us from understanding that we could actually go around the boulder. We don’t just have to push through, that there are better options. Like, bad Sisu can actually make us feel more helpless about how we approach problems and make us think that the only option is to push through when there are better ways to get what we want.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, it’s funny, a good Sisu, bad Sisu, Finland, I can’t help but think of a sauna.

Lindsay Crouse
Yeah, absolutely. Totally.

Pete Mockaitis
It is sauna, you know? Sometimes it’s good, and it’s, “Oh, yeah, this is really…hmm, this is just what I needed, you know? This is relaxing. It’s just melting away the tension.” And then there’s, like, “I got to hold on for 20 whole minutes.” And it’s just brutal at the end, and it’s like, “Is that really beneficial for anyone? I don’t know.”

Lindsay Crouse
Yeah, like, “What did this get me?” And, yeah, I don’t get into sauna, specifically, in the book, but I think that’s exactly the right thinking. It’s just, like, “Why am I still…? Like, if I’m pushing in the sauna to the point of, you know, potentially passing out, like, why am I still doing this? Like, has it flipped into, you know? It has something that was fundamentally good for me, flipped into something bad?”

I mean, I think, for me, that’s actually the driving theme of this book, especially for somebody like me who does enjoy extremes, right? Like, I love to push as hard as I can and to, ideally, succeed. But I think it’s this idea that our strengths can also be our weaknesses.

And if our strength is this, like, amazing ability to endure, that can become a weakness. It can start to take us down. And I think your sauna analogy is exactly that. Like, you want to do something that’s good for you, you want to push in that sauna, and experience the rejuvenation that it gives you, and then you stay in so long that you actually come out more depleted than when you went in.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. I want to get your take on – in a way, we’ve sort of been, this has been in the background for this whole conversation – the notion of sunk costs. I learned about that in finance, like, “Oh, the sunk cost fallacy. Pay no mind to that.” And yet, we do. It looms large for us. Do you have any pro tips on, well, first, defining that for folks who are unfamiliar? And, two, how do we get over it and think right?

Lindsay Crouse
Yeah, well, so a sunk cost is money or time or effort that we already put into something that we can never get back. And it will keep us in bad jobs, it’ll keep us in bad relationships, it’ll keep us pushing at projects just because, again, this idea of fear. We don’t want to lose what we already put in, especially, and understandably, when we don’t know what we’re going to get in its place.

And so, again, I think if you don’t know, if you’re confronting a situation where you’re finding yourself continuing, if you ask yourself, “Why am I continuing?” and the answer is that, “I’ve already put so much into this,” you just need to tell yourself, like, “The past is gone. And if I stay, what I’ve invested, that loss is only going to expand.”

And, again, if you think about yourself in 10 years or 20 years from now, that person is only going to have to deal with even greater stakes, but probably greater reasons why they need to leave.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, Lindsay, as we’ve been talking, you’ve dropped a couple of these real gems in terms of, “These are terrible reasons to persist.” So could you, perhaps, as almost like a grand finale of a fireworks show, give us in rapid fire, multiple terrible reasons to persist, how we tend to vocalize it to ourselves, “So I’ve been doing it for so long, I’ve missed it so much because I can, because I can stick it out,” all bad reasons to persist? Lay some more on us.

Lindsay Crouse
I think you just gave us some really good ones. Well, I think this idea that rest is only for the person who is beating you is one that I’ve had for a really long time, especially as I was training for a marathon. This idea of just one more, and it’s this idea of the arrival fallacy, right?

That if you achieve your goal, you’ll finally be happy, like, that will finally be it. And then you find yourself bereft and so you just want, “Just one more.” If you start telling yourself that, you’ve probably grown into this cycle where achievement and striving is actually becoming a little bit of an addiction. And you need to ask yourself, like, “What would it take for me to be satisfied and stick with that?”

One thing that – this isn’t exactly probably what you were asking – but one thing that I found incredibly persuasive in the course of writing this book, I mean, again, a lot of these things are obvious, and our intense conviction around perseverance keeps us from noticing.

But this idea of the law of holes, where if you find yourself in a hole, the first rule is that you have to stop digging. But we don’t do that. Like, if we’re in a hole, our commitment to succeeding, we escalate and we just dig harder. And so this idea that, like, if you are in a hole, you have to stop.

The second rule is that you’re in a hole and you need to get out. But, yeah, there are so many things around quitting and perseverance where they’re so obvious and yet there’s something around our culture that keeps us from believing.

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

Lindsay Crouse
No, this is great.

Pete Mockaitis
Could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Lindsay Crouse
Yeah, I’ve always thought that TR quote about, “The credit goes to the man that’s in the arena.” It was my high school yearbook quote, and I’ve always been really inspired by people who try.

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

Lindsay Crouse
I think Ellen Langer’s research around mindfulness has always been really fascinating for me. She was a professor that I had when I was in college. And there was one study that she did around, it was like this aging hotel. But it was this idea that framing and how you think about your life can actually make your life true.

And so there was one study that she did where she sent a bunch of really elderly people to, I want to say it was like a 1950s resort. And basically, the elderly people basically were put back in a context where they were in their 20s.

And in this study, they actually started to become younger. It was, literally, rejuvenating for them. And I thought, when I heard about that, it just made me think, “Where in my life can I reframe things that I think have to be this way? And how much control, like how much mindfulness do I have over, I guess, almost like determining my own fate?”

It was this idea, it was incredibly empowering that we have more control over our reality than we sometimes believe.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Lindsay Crouse
It’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which I always like.

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

Lindsay Crouse
Pen and paper.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Lindsay Crouse
Running. Distance running.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks as you talk about quitting?

Lindsay Crouse
This idea that perseverance can work against us.

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

Lindsay Crouse
I’m on Instagram, @lindsaycrouse. I have a website, LindsayCrouse.com, And you can buy my book, The Case for Quitting, wherever books are sold.

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

Lindsay Crouse
Don’t just continue and persevere because you can.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Lindsay, thank you.

Lindsay Crouse
Thank you. It’s great to be on.

Sep 03

1178: How to Stand Out and Get Hired in the AI-Powered Job Market with Emily Durham

By Podcasts No Comments

Emily Durham reveals the smarter approach to job-hunting.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why “medium is more” when it comes to networking
  2. The keys to opening the door for opportunities
  3. Why AI-generated resumes work against you

About Emily

Emily Durham, better known as Emily the Recruiter, is a recruiter turned career coach and content creator. On her popular social media platform and her podcast, Clock In, she gives real-world advice to help people thrive in their careers. Her work has been featured on Good Morning America, BBC News, in the Globe and Mail, and more. She lives in Toronto.

Resources Mentioned

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Pete Mockaitis
Emily, welcome!

Emily Durham
Thank you so much for having me. I’m so jazzed to talk all things work.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I am jazzed to talk as well about how we clock in, which is a clever little twist.

Emily Durham
Why thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
I guess, you know, clocking in and locking in. Okay, nice. So, boy, the universe of job hunting is full of myths, BS advice. I’d love it if you could give us, right at the top, any counterintuitive goodness that you think we all just need to know, set the record straight up front.

Emily Durham
Oh, I love that. We’re doing no BS right away. I think we need to dismantle the idea that more is more. So applying to more jobs does not necessarily yield more interviews. Reaching out to more people doesn’t necessarily yield really high-value mentoring relationships.

And I think in a world where the economy is rough, friends, we know this, we’re preaching to the choir. It’s easy for us to take advice online that tells us just to double our output, to double our results. And that really isn’t the most strategic way to go about these things.

So we definitely can get those better results and more interviews and get further ahead at work, but the idea that you got to do six times more isn’t always the best. Sometimes we just need to re-strategize, not double down on what’s not working.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So the more is more is false.

Emily Durham
False.

Pete Mockaitis
And that is not the right move. Well, then if more is not more, then what what is more?

Emily Durham
Yes, I wouldn’t say less is more, but let’s say medium is more. I’m fine with that. The idea that, for example, when you’re job-hunting, and you’ll hear this from people all the time, you scroll on TikTok, there it is, they’re telling you just to apply to more jobs.

But the reality is the challenge today isn’t that you need to apply to more jobs. And it’s not that you’re not applying to enough. It’s also not usually that your resume needs a total facelift. It’s often that our resumes aren’t getting opened at the same rate or in the same ways that they previously were.

So, for me, when I’m thinking about the right strategy to get noticed, yes, have a strong resume, yes, apply for great jobs, and use most of the time that you would have spent applying to those next two, three, four hundred jobs, and really over-index on strategic networking.

I’m talking, not reaching out to recruiters on LinkedIn, reach out to the people who are currently in the position that you want, people who are likely to have less inbound messages for those networking chats, going to small scale, like teeny tiny industry local events.

I’m, you know, a Toronto resident. We’ve got organizations like TechTO, Women in Tech Sales Toronto, where you’re able to network on a really small scale and build those meaningful relationships to get you those referrals.

And I know this sounds like a lot more work. It is, but if we just shift, you know, the four hours we’re going to spend a week job-hunting to it being three hours networking, one hour applying, usually that’s going to get you a little bit further ahead.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly, that makes sense to me. And I’ve even heard that more might not even be not more, but it could be, in fact, less. How’s that for a clear sentence? What I mean is if you apply to more places, you could actually, in the automated applicant tracking systems world, be doing yourself a disservice because they’re like, “Oh, they already applied here at Facebook or Amazon or whatever. So we’re just going to not pay attention to this one.”

Emily Durham
I do think there’s a lot of fear-mongering with how AI does and doesn’t influence the application process. Like, the reality is – how do I say this nicely? – and maybe I don’t have to.

People can profit off of, you know, making us very scared of how AI is influencing the applicant process. You’ll see people offering sketchy courses who’ve maybe never worked in careers or AI. So I think it’s always important to consider the source to an extent, of course, the more you apply for high-volume jobs, even if a person, you know.

When I was an active recruiter in tech, if I saw a candidate applying to five different jobs with different job descriptions, to me that reads, “You don’t know what you want, or you don’t know what your aligned skill set is.”

But from an AI perspective, it drives me crazy when I hear people say, “I need to AI-optimize my resume and apply to the right jobs on the right AI.”

Like, there is no way to know in a concrete manner how much a company is or isn’t leveraging AI in the top part of your funnel, so when you’ve just applied for a job. Every company is at a different stage, which is why I’m so big on the networking. The one thing we know for certain right now is people’s opinions still matter.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Well said. Okay. Well, so your book, Clock In, can you tell us what’s the main idea, the big picture message here?

Emily Durham
Definitely. Clock In is an incredibly practical book. So think of it as a step-by-step guide to doing everything from figuring out why you want the job that you want, if you want that job, and most importantly, how to actually get there through the practical stuff like the resume writing, the LinkedIns, the networking, but also those more social skills, “How do you communicate and advocate for yourself while at times dealing with difficult people?” So it really takes you that full journey.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That sounds handy. Well, tell us, this job market, some would have you believe there are no jobs, we are in dire straits. You can apply to hundreds and you will hear nothing back. Others, I’ve seen get jobs real quick. What’s going on?

Emily Durham
Like, I’m not going to sit here and tell you that things are peachy. Like, I’m not going to be your uncle at the Thanksgiving table asking you why you’re still job-hunting.

The reality is the market is very hard. Job creation is not booming at the pace that has been projected. In fact, in many states and in many countries, it is flat or on a decline. But I think the messaging here is we need to control what we can control.

I, fundamentally, disagree with the fact that there are no jobs. There are less jobs. There are jobs that are not paying adequately, but there are some jobs available. Where I really like to kind of push people to think through is, number one, “Would a portfolio career be something that could be valuable for you?” Meaning, is balancing contract work, is being self employed, having side gigs, side hustles?

We’re seeing Gen Z pick up a lot of this. Something that can be beneficial, like, to your career overall. but there are jobs available. And I think it has to be a shift less of the what, like, “What jobs are there?” into the, “How do I get recognized for, yes, the more limited jobs, but jobs that do exist?”

And the people getting hired quickly are, oftentimes, especially right now, like, “Take a shot every time I say this,” or like, you know, “Go sip your coffee.” They’re the people who know someone who works at the company. Those are the people who are getting ahead quickly or have a built-in brand presence.

Maybe they post very actively on LinkedIn. They’re active in their community and they’re able to phone a friend and say, “Hey, I’m looking for a gig,” or, “Hey, I saw this job posting.” So that’s really the differentiator.

But I might underline is there are less opportunities that are as exciting and as sexy, and perks of some of these jobs have not been as appealing as they were in years prior, but things always level out because they always do, and we have to focus on what we can control, which is getting what we’re able to get.

Pete Mockaitis
That makes good sense, if I may, when you say it’ll level out, it always does. And I’m wondering, the AI tech bro hype masters would say, “No, no, this time, it’s completely different because the AI is fundamentally reshaping blah, blah, everything.” What’s your read on that in the recruiting world?

Emily Durham
So I think of this often because a lot of the headlines about a year ago were telling us that 98% of jobs are going to disappear with AI.

First thing I have to say is these are all predictions. I think sometimes we hear these predictions and we think that they are like Bible, that it is the truth and it’s 100% going to pan out that way. There’s no way to confirm or deny how much change and what that change is going to look like.

We know AI is reshaping work. It already is. We know that many roles are being eliminated, but we also know that, as many experts are predicting mass job loss are predicting even larger job creation.

And the relationship to AI is a complex and loaded one. I’m not saying that we need to be, “Rah! Rah! AI” in any capacity. But I do think we have seen in history so many waves of the workforce being revolutionized and many industries dying, but ultimately to give birth to other ones.

So I try to lean on the side of optimism until we have all of the information that we know new jobs will, in fact, be created. But we also know that a lot of organizations who’ve reported mass layoffs attributed to AI have not truly replaced full human jobs with AI.

What they’ve done is tried to cut costs to up AI investment, but they’re not truly replacing the roles. And I think that nuance can help us understand where we’re currently at in the cycle. We are not in a space right now where Susie’s job is gone because a robot is fully doing Susie’s job. Like, that is not the headline, I think, people need to be taking away.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And many folks who have done layoffs because of AI have hired them right back, it’s like, “Oopsies!” And well said with regard to we can’t take any prediction to the bank because, fundamentally, no human being knows what’s going to happen, even if they have a very compelling YouTube thumbnail and graphic and strong words with capital letters sometimes.

Emily Durham
Oh, with an underline and then it’s, “Do you want to save your job? Buy my AI-powered course.” And you know what? God bless them.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. We got it. Okay. Well, so let’s get into some of the particulars of your approach, but could you first maybe give us a fun success story of someone who did just what you recommended and what happened for them?

Emily Durham
Oh, my gosh, can I give you the best success story ever, because it’s literally my mom. I share this all the time. I think this is, like, the coolest thing in the world. So my mom had worked at the same organization for 20 years. Like, she did the old-school, “I’m staying at this company forever.”

Ultimately, that company ended up selling, and her role got dissolved and she wasn’t ready to retire. So she truly was like, “Well, AI is here. I’m screwed. I’m just learning how to, like, canoodle with this. I’m not going to be able to bring this into the workforce. And who’s going to want to hire a woman in her late 50s?” To which I said, “A smart person is definitely going to want to hire someone with incredible experience.”

So we spent the time doing the table stakes stuff, you know, uploading the resume and making sure the LinkedIn was up to date. But, really, what we focused on was leveraging her previous connections. And I think that was like a mental unlock moment where my mom was like, “Well, I don’t know anyone. It was only the people I worked with.”

And I was like, “Yeah, girl, people who know you’re incredible.” So reaching out to those former connections, reaching out to people who were still with the company, happy clients she had were, contractually, that was a comfortable thing that she could do.

And really just having an honest and vulnerable conversation about where she was at, within seven days, which I will say is kind of bananas quick, she landed an incredible role, work from home, fully remote, doing the stuff that she loves in account management. So leaning into that network, even if you’re not proactively networking necessarily is game-changing.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. And the vulnerability piece, I think, is pretty key. Because I’m imagining all kinds of folks that I’ve been a client of, and I just, like, generally, have positive thoughts about. I think about SERVPRO, the restored situation after some water damage and they were great.

And some of the specific folks there, if they called me out of the blue in six years, I’d say, “Oh, hey, Chandler, what’s up? Oh, okay, you need a job situation? Huh. All right. Well, I don’t know a ton about construction matters, but, yeah, let’s chat about it and see what I got in my LinkedIn, etc., you know?”

And I think I would be quite willing to do that and, in fact, I would feel a bit honored and flattered to be asked.

Emily Durham
One hundred percent. And I think this is where networking, like old-school networking tells us, which, in many ways, is still efficient and helpful, that you need to be having a chitchat with someone once a month and it’s formal and it’s structured. And that works at times.

But networking is also like running into someone at a housewarming party, hitting it off, and it’s just adding each other on LinkedIn for a rainy day. This is a bit of an aside, but there’s a wonderful gal who works in the main lobby of a gym that I go to.

She is incredible at what she does. She deals with very difficult people. I’ve walked by her dealing with big personalities. And a couple weeks ago, she reached out to me and was like, “I got to get out of here. Do you know anyone hiring in customer service?” And I was like, “Girl, for you, the freaking world.”

And I think there’s just a power in leading with that vulnerability, having an honest conversation. And we live in a world where more people than not have been impacted by layoffs. So if that is the situation you’re in or you’re worried about layoffs, you have the space to have that conversation with infinitely less stigma than maybe 10 years ago.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I like that a lot. And I guess there’s a silver lining here with all the uncertainty and the spookiness that I would imagine, and maybe you’ve got hard numbers of outreach results to prove it.

But I would imagine there is a general generous receptivity upgrade amongst folks on the receiving end of such messages, like, “Yeah, I hear it’s rough and I’d like to help, but I don’t know how or where or whom. And here, this lands in my world. Cool. It looks like I can do something to make this spooky world brighter.”

Emily Durham
Yeah, I think there’s an uptick, and this is totally anecdotal, in the receptiveness of a warm lead or a warm connection. So a friend of a friend, or the barista you know at the coffee shop, or the mechanic that helps you with your car.

I really find, in a world where AI and technology has become so paramount and is the headline of almost everything that we’re reading, ultimately, people will always crave connection. And a personal recommendation means so much more in a world where everyone’s cold outreach on LinkedIn sounds the same because ChatGPT wrote it.

So I do think the cold outreach, we’re in a place where it is much more difficult to get a response, but that’s why that warm outreach, whether it’s local events, asking a friend of a friend.

I feel like I keep dropping these random antidotes of just people in my life, but it is that season. My little cousin had texted me and she’s like, “Do you know anyone who works in ‘Insert her industry here’?”

And I, at first was going to go through my LinkedIn and thought, “Why don’t I text my group chat with my girlfriends? Like, surely, someone knows someone.” And they did. So sometimes it’s just enough to reach out to a couple of pals and say, like, “Do any of your cousins work in aerospace engineering?” Like, quick question.

And sometimes the answer is yes. And it’s just finding these low-lift ways to network that don’t feel as structured and formal can help us get a little bit further.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, certainly. So that seems to be a huge theme is network, network, relationships, warm intros, make all the difference. So you said there was a bit of an unlock or a shift for your mom. Can you maybe speak directly to folks who, if they have some resistance here, what’s their resistance and how do you respond?

Emily Durham
Yeah, I find the resistance with networking often comes from us feeling like we’re burdening other people. And when you resist reaching out or asking for help, first of all, you are robbing yourself of an opportunity for your own career, which you already know as you’re listening to this.

But I think, sometimes, we forget how much it means to someone to be able to help. Because, especially if you’re reaching out to someone who’s, you know, at least mid-career or above, they, at some point, have ran into layoffs, career hardships, the need for support. They have been the person asking for help.

And you had even mentioned, like you’d be honored to get a phone call from Chandler. And I think we often see ourselves as bigger burdens than we are. People, by nature, I believe, want to help. And when you hold yourself back from that, you hold yourself back from opportunity.

And if the altruistic emotional side does not make you feel inclined to reach out and ask for these conversations, let me ask you this. When you cash that check at the bank, are you going to care that you had to reach out to 10 people on LinkedIn or are you just going to be happy that you got the referral?

My guess is you’re just going to be happy you got the referral. So we don’t need to like the things that we do. We don’t need to like the networking. We just need to do it. And sometimes that’s what it takes to get paid.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that is a nice reminder that, and in other ways, you kind of have to pick your flavor of unpleasantness.

Emily Durham
Choose your hard.

Pete Mockaitis
Because you could not do that. Would you like more months unemployed? And maybe you would. Yeah, you’re having the time of your life and you got the savings to support it. Okay. Maybe you’re not in a rush. Okay. Well, rock and roll then.

Emily Durham
Definitely. And I think, too, is that’s why I recommend starting with the people you know, whether that’s in-person, friends, family, friends of friends, just to get that ball rolling and you’ll realize how you’re not a burden. You’re not going to be received like you’re inconveniencing people.

People also have the opportunity to say no or to ghost you if they don’t have the capacity. So people have autonomy to handle how much they do or don’t help. But I really believe, by default, especially people you already know, they want to help.

And, a little friendly reminder, if you’re reaching out to folks who are working at a company you want to work at, y’all do know there are referral bonuses, right?

Pete Mockaitis
All right. We do forget those.

Emily Durham
Yeah, like, you know, for some companies, especially if you’re in, like, the tech banking consulting space, and mid senior role is between $2,000 to $6,000 for the referrer. You’re literally saying, “You can get paid if I get hired.”

So I also think, like you need to remember there are websites like Fishbowl where there are entire job platforms where people are auctioning off referrals, where you can literally purchase someone to refer you to a company. It is financially in the benefit of the person working at the organization for you to get hired.

So just try to remember these little things. And if that doesn’t help, you need to act more than you think. Just do the damn thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Wait, I was unaware that you could purchase referrals into a company until this very minute. Thank you for that tidbit.

Emily Durham
We’ll write that one down.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, I suppose, and I guess refer means something different in every context. Sometimes I think that there is an implied, you know, endorsement or vouching for a person.

And I guess different companies probably have their own things set up differently with regard to what they’re asking their employees to do when they provide a referral. It might be just literally just mean contact information, or it might be a strong kind of a endorsement. Is that accurate? I’m just speculating here.

Emily Durham
You are 100% spot on. So there’s really two kinds of referrals. One is a systems-based referral, which is where the company has a website or an internal form where you would simply say, “Hey, I know Susie. This is her LinkedIn. This is her contact information,” and maybe they’ll prompt for a couple of examples of times you’ve worked with Susie.

After that gets submitted, often Susie’s profile has a nice little star next to it that indicates it’s a referral. Now that’s great because, oftentimes, people run additional data and reports to make sure that referrers, or the referrals rather, get contacted quickly. They don’t sit in that black hole quite as much.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean that your profile is getting reviewed first or really getting reviewed at all. It just guarantees that when they look at your profile, there’s this nice little bonus. But a warm interpersonal endorsement, to your point, is that other end. And that’s what I want us shooting for.

This is where someone, yes, refers you in the system, but then sends a message over Slack, that says, “God, I worked with Susie. She was awesome. Met her at this event. You know, here’s bibbity bobbity boo. Absolutely adored her.” That’s where someone makes a personal connection and goes out of their way to find you in said system.

So although both are great, that real personal connection that really can be established quickly, it doesn’t need to be like a months’ long relationship, that’s the moneymaker.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m thinking about I had a buddy who went deep into, like, an interview process. I don’t know, maybe like interview seven or eight, and it sounded like, you know, he was going to get this thing, and it was exciting.

And then he did not, and it was disappointing and surprising. And they said, “Oh, hey, sorry. You know what? A referral came in kind of at the last minute.” And I was scratching my head a little bit, it was like, “Okay, I know referrals are useful, but, like, at this point, you’re seven, eight interviews in.”

Emily Durham
That’s an executive referral. That was someone’s SVP saying, “You need to hire my nephew.” A hundred percent.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Okay, so the word referral in this context is not a heads up, “But I think this person’s great,” but rather a, “This person from on high has been decreed to be very special.”

Emily Durham
Yes. And most companies, it really depends on your company culture. Most companies a referral is a suggestion. It’s just saying, “I endorse them. You do what you got to do. I’m not influencing your hiring decision.”

But I’ve worked at and worked with companies where a referral from a certain level and above, especially once you start touching C-suite, is like, “All right, well, someone better cook up a job because Billy is getting hired. So we got to find him a home.”

Pete Mockaitis
Which I find fascinating. As a naive idealist who would like organizations to be meritocratic and have people who are awesome at their jobs doing necessary work, it’s kind of a sad comment that this happens unnecessarily.

Emily Durham
Yep, and more than we think.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. But, all right, that’s reality. All right. Okay, so network, network, network, referrals make all the difference. Any top do’s or don’ts you recommend when we’re doing the outreach game?

Emily Durham
Okay, I’ll start with the don’ts because I love to lead with negative and then we’ll be nice and fluffy and positive. Please don’t have AI write all of your outreach. It is so painfully obvious, it comes off very cold, very insincere, and by virtue, you’re going to sound exactly like everyone else, which is the opposite of what we’re trying to go for.

Please don’t place high expectations of response rates, meaning for every 10 to 11 messages that you send, especially on a platform like LinkedIn, expect maybe one response.

And the more senior you get, the less likely you’re getting that response, which is why I’m a big believer in shoot directly for the level you’re looking for or the manager of what you’re looking for versus going to HR or an SVP or someone on that more senior chain of command, depending on where you’re at in your career.

You also don’t want to immediately ask for a favor. Like, please, oh, my goodness, do not reach out and say, “Hey, I need a referral,” or, “Hey, I need this.” No matter what your true intention is, your message needs to say, “Hey, I’ve been really interested in careers at…” insert their company.

“I saw…” insert a few things they listed on their profile, maybe how long they’ve been at said company, their academic background, “I’d love to hop on the phone with you for 20 minutes to learn more about your career if you have time. If not, I’m more than happy to message online whatever is best for you.”

The goal isn’t to ask for the favor. The goal is to get into contact with them. Ideally, in a 15- or 20-minute phone call where you have that honest conversation, wink, wink, nudge, nudge. It’s not too honest.

You’re going to be asking two or three questions to them specific to their career, asking, like, “You know, what skills do you wish you had before you moved into this role? Any advice for someone looking to get into this company?” Really use this as a chance to learn from them. And then at the end you have a strong call to action.

And that’s where you say, “I saw this role posted. Do you know who’s running the hiring process?” You’re not asking for a referral, but you’re asking for a referral. They’re going to say, “Oh, yeah, it’s Susie from this team. I’ll connect you.”

Or, if they don’t know the person or perhaps they’re not hiring, you can plug in a different call to action. Maybe it’s, “Is there anyone in your network that you think would be worthwhile connecting me with? Is there anyone you’d be comfortable on your team that I chat with to learn more about this position?”

So you ask these questions that sound soft but get you the same result so you don’t come off as pushy. That’s my, like, big do. That’s the big flow I would follow.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that a lot. Don’t come across as pushy and I’m thinking about some of the research our guests have done with regard to people not wanting to say no when directly asked, specifically in sort of a live phone call context. So they might just say yes and then do nothing for you because that’s less socially uncomfortable for them.

But I’ve been in that position where, you know, I’ve let them know, it’s, like, “They will not interview anybody who has less than 3.5 GPA. So I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but, you know, you can close this door and go elsewhere and good luck.”

Emily Durham
Well, the honesty goes a long way, but I do think, if you’re getting the sense there’s apprehension on this phone call, send that follow-up email. All it is is a thank you. You reiterate the ask, and that’s really all you can do.

And, again, that’s why like the conversion of how many people you speak to, to how many referrals you get, is ultimately a small number. And that is unfortunate. And I wish there was a better way. There kind of isn’t, right? There isn’t necessarily a better way.

So just getting in the flow of, especially if you’re actively job-hunting, maybe it’s one call a week. Like, that might be enough for you to get in at the right company sooner than later.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, super. All right. So we’ve talked relationships, relationships, relationships a lot. Outside of that, what are the top things you recommend folks do and don’t, again?

Emily Durham
On your resume, please, for the love of goodness gracious, you need more data than you probably have. I can’t tell you how many resumes I see that are, like, either AI slop or so long-winded in their messaging that there is no data to actually communicate the outcome.

And with a lot of the organizations who are using AI to screen these resumes, they’re often pulling AI summaries of your resume in the system. So it’s a quick paragraph that lives next to your name that’s summarizing what you’re working on. And data, oftentimes, makes it in there. So it’s so important to have that data. From a human lens, you’re also able to scan that and see that quite easily on a resume.

I would also say, when it comes to the interview, in an age of everyone reading off of scripts that were written by little teeny weenie LLMs, I want you to be a person. I want you to bring a personality to the interview.

Small talk at the top of the interview. When they ask how you are, give them a little something-something, “I’m great. I just made this new baked beans recipe. I’m awesome. I just did…” insert a neutral thing you can chit-chat about to break the ice. That is something that so many people are missing right now. And it’s feedback I hear from companies I work with all the time.

And when it comes to actually being on the job, this might be like corny old-school advice, first couple months is dedicated to being a sponge. Learn as much as you can. The next couple of months is dedicated to fixing as much as you can.

And, really, the theme of being great in your career is going out of your way to be a kind person, set those boundaries so that you don’t burn out and operate with a lot of humility. Because I will say the companies that I work with, there is a concerning lack of humility, both on the job and in interviews.

Because we’re so supercharged by AI and having the answers, it’s really hard for us to admit when we need more training or when we don’t understand. And I think that is such a valuable superpower. It’s really about that human element. That was so much.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now you said scripts. Maybe I just need to stop being so surprised, but are you telling me candidates show up with an LLM-written script in their interview and proceed to read it from the paper verbatim?

Emily Durham
What if I said yes and, and the kids have taken it further? Okay, so you’ve got that. That’s like a thing that’s 100% happening.

Pete Mockaitis
This happens, like, semi often?

Emily Durham
Oh, I would argue, and this is data I’m making up, I would probably say depending on your industry, 40% of the time. This is like standard where they’ve got like their pre-prepped bullet points, they’re chatting with you on Zoom, eyes float to the right, we’re now reading a script.

What’s also happening is there are now tools available that plug into your Zoom or whatever platform you’re using, and it is using AI to transcribe the question the interviewer is asking while automatically generating the correct answer in front of you in a teleprompter. And that is happening at an astronomical rate as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, then on the flip side though, you’ll have interviewers who are AI avatar robots saying…

Emily Durham
Gives me the heebie jeebies.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like, “Tell me about a time that you worked on a team in collab.” What? And so it really is like a dystopian “Black Mirror” like situation. Part of me thinks that the world will figure out, any week now that that’s way dumb and to stop doing it. But part of me thinks, “No, the short-sighted efficiency hounds might really double down on this.”

Emily Durham
There was a really interesting thought piece that came out on this, talking about how experts, and they cited no experts, so Lord knows who’s they’re referring to.

But basically how the hiring system is so broken because companies are over-indexing on the use of AI. In response, candidates are, too. Got to fight fire with fire. I’m never going to blame the candidates. But it has basically made first-round virtual interviews meaningless because it’s, essentially, like AI versus AI.

So what some companies have started to do is increase the amount of in-person interviews, because obviously that blocks out some of this. But they’ve also bumped up the amount of live case study or hackathon-style interviews, like circa Silicon Valley 2011.

So I do think we’re going to start to see a rise of like the live case study need to be in-person watch-you work interview, which is crazy because that’s so much more labor for free.

But I do think that bubble has got to pop at some point because it is, when people say an interview is a conversation between two liars, it’s now yes and they’re both like WALL-E the eye robot.

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

Emily Durham
I think that’s all the big stuff. The only thing I like to leave people with is the market is tough, but so are you. So please try to be mindful of what your for-you page looks like. Do not allow yourself to doom scroll into the belief that you are not capable of growing in your career today. You can. We just need to adjust the strategy.

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

Emily Durham
My go-to favorite quote all the time, it’s a bit of a cheesy one, which is, “Be scared and do it anyways.” I’m a big believer in doing before you think. And sometimes you make mistakes and you learn quickly, and other times you stumble into great people or career paths that you didn’t expect.

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

Emily Durham
Another one that I actually just posted about a couple of days ago was specifically a study around how women, the curvier or less thin or “standard-size bodied” they are, the more time they spend at work trying to find outfits to conceal their bodies, and it actually occupies brain space at work.

So women will get up and get dressed and automatically have to think about how they can conceal a body to not be perceived as showing said body part or somehow being sexualized in the context of wearing something like a button-down top, as simple as that may be.

So I find that absolutely fascinating, how bodies, especially, you know, bodies that can be racialized or looked at through the lens of gender, are already things that are conditioned into people getting ready for work. It’s like labor that starts before the clock starts.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Emily Durham
I haven’t finished it, but I’m quite excited by it, is Strangers. It’s going viral right now, which is a sign that Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage. It’s by Belle Burden. I’m only like a third of the way through, but it is a memoir about her relationship, and it’s fascinating.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool?

Emily Durham
I’m a Copilot girl. As much as I talk about AI, I do think that the reality is we need to learn how to leverage it to stay competitive with what we do. So I’m big on my Note-Taker function in Copilot so that I don’t have to draft any meeting summaries. I’m really anti-meeting summary right now.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Emily Durham
I would say doing my makeup. And as silly as that sounds, that is my, like, me time. And I wake up, make my coffee and do my makeup, and I feel like it resets my nervous system before I even check my phone. Like, those are the first two things I do. It’s coffee, makeup, and then I deal with the real world.

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

Emily Durham
I think it’s that all of our jobs, ultimately, are made up and we float on a rock. And all the career advice in the world is fabulous. But, at the end of the day, when all of our lives flash before our eyes, I surely hope 80% of it isn’t you at a cubicle. I hope it’s you with the people you love. So act accordingly.

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

Emily Durham
You can find me on Instagram and TikTok, as well as YouTube at Emily The Recruiter. And you can check out my book and my podcast, which are both titled “Clock In.” If you miss me, everything’s going to be hot pink, so surely I’ll be easy to find.

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

Emily Durham
I think this is the week where you talk to a stranger and ask a stranger for a favor. It could be as small as feedback on how you performed in a meeting or a question about their career. Let’s get used to building community again. And when you ask people for favors, you open up the door for them to do the same.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Emily, thank you.

Emily Durham
Thank you. 

Jun 01

1157: How to Improve Processes, Remove Friction, and Accelerate Innovation with Jon McNeill

By Podcasts No Comments

Tesla’s former President Jon McNeill reveals the five-step framework behind one of the world’s fastest-growing companies.

You’ll Learn

  1. What most miss when designing processes
  2. How to identify outdated requirements that slow things down
  3. Why automation should be your LAST step

About Jon

Jon McNeill is the CEO and Co-Founder of DVx Ventures. With a track record of founding and scaling companies, Jon has led teams that generated tens of thousands of jobs and delivered multi-billion dollar returns for investors.

Previously, Jon served as President at Tesla, where revenue grew from $2B to $20B in under 30 months, and later as COO at Lyft, helping double revenue and take the company public. He currently sits on the boards of General Motors, Lululemon, Asurion, CrossFit, and Stash.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Pete Mockaitis
Jon, welcome!

Jon McNeill
Thanks. Nice to be here, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to discuss The Algorithm and I’d love it if you could kick us off with a story you shared, which I found riveting, in which when you were just getting started at Tesla, even actually before you had the job, you took it on yourself to tackle a project. Could you tell us the story?

Jon McNeill
Yeah, I was talking with Elon about joining Tesla and I kept saying to him, “I think you need a big company guy to come in.” And he said, “No, that’s exactly what I don’t need. I need a fellow entrepreneur.” And I said, “Well, I want to make sure I can be helpful to you. So, like, what’s your biggest problem right now?”

And he said, “We have a demand problem.” And I said, “Okay, like frame that for me. They’re public companies. So what’s your commitment to the street this quarter?” He said, “Roughly 12,000 cars.” And I said, “How are you doing so far?”

It was about a month into the quarter. He says, “It’s a month into the quarter. We’ve sold like 2,500 cars, short of 3,000 cars.” I’m like, “Oh, now I understand your demand problem. You’re going to miss your quarter. Let me go to work on that and see if I can help.”

So I went to, just in the travels with my own business at the time, I went to eight different cities over the course of about 10 days. And I went into eight different Tesla stores and did what I was told was the pinnacle of the sales process and sales funnel, which was taking a test drive.

And the whole idea was that people would come in, they would get in an electric car for the first time, hit the accelerator. And the accelerator in an electric car is way different than a gas car. It’s instant torque to the wheels, and so you take off like a rocket. And so a lot of people experience that. And then they can’t stop thinking about it until they’ve got a car.

So I went in eight stores, I did a test drive. And then, oddly, like a few days later, I hadn’t heard from any of them. So Elon had put me in touch with his head of sales ops. And I called him and said, “Like, am I blacklisted in the system or something? I used eight different email addresses so people wouldn’t know who I was. And people don’t know who I am anyway. And I’m not getting any callbacks. Why?”

And he looked in the system, he’s like, “No, you’re not flagged or anything.” I said, “Can you do me a favor? Can you tell me how many test drives you’ve given in the last 30 days that haven’t been followed up?” And he’s like, “Sure, give me, like, an hour. I can go run that.”

So he calls me back in an hour, and he said, “Nine thousand, 9,000 test drives, no callbacks.” I said, “Well, congratulations. You’re going to miss your quarter because you haven’t called anybody back. And no wonder you’re so far short of orders.”

So then I said, “Can you shut off a store rep’s ability to take any new leads until they’ve called all of their previous test drives back?” He said, “Yeah, I could do that.” I said, “How fast?” He said, “Globally? I could do that in a few hours.” I said, “Awesome. Do it, because we got to force-change, like, super fast or, otherwise, you’re missing your quarter.”

So he does it. Calls me back the next day, he’s like, “You won’t believe the orders are flowing in like crazy.” And I said, “Yeah, because you’re just calling people back. It’s the easiest thing ever. You’re asking for the order.” And then it dawned on me that I didn’t work for Tesla yet. And so I kind of gulped, and I said, “Hey, I got to call you back, because I got to call Elon and beg for forgiveness.”

So I called Elon and said, “Hey, look. Here’s the situation. You’re demand-challenged. Here’s what I found out. You’ve done 9,000 test drives with no callback. And so here’s what I did about it. I was on the phone with your head of sales ops and we shut down any new leads into the system until everybody called their previous test drives back.”

And I said, “But I got to ask your forgiveness. I was acting like this was my company because I’m a CEO in my day job. But this is not the company I’m the CEO of. You are. This is your company. And I did something and I didn’t even ask your permission. And I’m really sorry. I got to apologize.”

And I didn’t know it because we were just getting to know each other. But I had this long period of silence on the other end of the phone line, and I thought, “Oh, my God, what have I done?” And it seemed like forever. It was probably 60 or 90 seconds of just dead silence.

What I’ve learned since is that’s how Elon processes. He, like, shuts off all other sensory input and just thinks. And so I was about to ask him if he was still there, and he hopped on and he said, “You know what? That’s exactly a rational decision, and I’m so glad you made it. I think you’re going to fit in here just fine.”

And that was the last hurdle. I said, “Well, I think I’ve proven myself I can be useful. So I think I’m ready to sign on, too.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s a lovely story on many dimensions. But when I reflect on it, what I’m stuck with is, “All right, Tesla, great, great brand, tremendous company, tremendous leaders, lot of smarts there.” How is it that we find ourselves in a situation where one of the most fundamental things one can do in a sales operation – call people back – isn’t happening?

Jon McNeill
I think I see this over and over again. People look at a lot of data and miss the obvious. And when you just go and see a process with your eyes – this is going to sound completely old-fashioned – but it’s actually the case.

Like, I believe that the strongest analytical instrument you have as a leader are your eyes and ears. And if you go to the front line and eat your own dog food and experience the product or the process for yourself, you’ll often see exactly what’s wrong. But unless you know the exact piece of data to look for that would give you the clue, you don’t know that.

And so this is a complete hack I’ve found in leadership is just go to the front line, go experience the process yourself. You’ll understand really rapidly exactly what’s wrong. And it doesn’t always work, but it works a lot of the time. And this was an example of that.

So a bunch of really smart people looking at data missed it because they didn’t leave their offices. And my encouragement to people, and those people, as I then became their leader was, “You’re going to leave your office at least one day a week, and you’re going to go to the front lines because you’re going to see stuff way faster than the data will show you. And, hopefully, we’ll miss a lot of these potential big divots in our plan if you do.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s tremendous. We had Marina Nitze on the show, who was the CTO for the United States VA, and that was one of her core recommendations, is follow the thing all the way through the process and then you’ll say, “Oh, that’s why it’s taking forever because so-and-so is waiting for something to be faxed. Well, let’s stop that. All right, now we know. Understood.”

All right. Well, so then zooming out a bit, your book, The Algorithm, any particularly surprising or fascinating discoveries you’ve made in your career or while putting together the book that you’re putting forward here?

Jon McNeill
I think this is, like, I had gone into Tesla having been a student of the Toyota Production System and Lean, and what I found was those frameworks were awesome for incremental improvement and optimization, but not awesome for quantum growth.

And so what we tried to distill in The Algorithm, this was the whole team at Tesla and, really, the leadership team that came up with this framework, was to distill a framework for quantum growth into some digestible steps that we could push to the edge of the organization.

And the edge could start to innovate super fast, because that’s what doubling a business every eight months at scale requires. And that’s exactly what the team was pulling off. They were doubling a business every eight months.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So the classic Toyota manufacturing, Lean, Kaizen, Kanbans, etc., is great for your small incremental growth and you’ve got a whole another thing for hyper growth. And can you unpack sort of basically what is the algorithm?

Jon McNeill
It’s a five-step process that we used on a weekly basis to drive innovation. And this is used at Tesla. It’s used at SpaceX. And I think, as leadership experts or academics go to study Elon 20 or 30 years from now, and ask the question, like, “What made this guy such a successful entrepreneur and industrialist? Like, what was it?” I think they’ll come down to this, like, weekly cadence of deploying this framework, because that’s exactly what he does.

He determines the one or two issues that are existential to the business. In other words, the two things that could kill you if they don’t come true. And then he just devotes his time to that. He delegates everything else to the team. And so you have great agencies as a leader because you’re running the business and he’s really working on two existential issues, but he’s doing it on a weekly basis.

And what that does is that keeps the organization innovating on a weekly basis. So if you’re doing that every week, you’ve got 52 opportunities to build advantage versus your competition. And that’s exactly what that delivers.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so could you maybe walk us through a couple examples of, all right, grab existential issue and then work through the steps?

Jon McNeill
So I’ll take you through one to make this super simple. So the first step is question every requirement. Second step is you delete every step and you simplify. The third is you optimize. The fourth is you speed it up because no process can get faster and have high quality with speed unless it is like optimized, so that’s a test. And then you automate last, which sounds kind of nuts especially coming from a technical company or Silicon Valley company to say automate last, but I’ll kind of illustrate that.

So let me start with the first, the negative example. So we started to prepare for Model 3 production. And the idea of the teams was, “We’re going to have a fully automated line, the most automated manufacturing line ever in the history of automobiles.”

And so you might remember this phrase, “We’re going to build the alien dreadnought,” or, “the machine that makes the machine.” That was this whole era. And so teams went to design the Model 3 production line in digital simulation. Today they would call it a digital twin. And they designed all the machines, the flow, the conveyors, the people, everything. They didn’t lay it out manually and do it manually first.

And so when we were down to the wire in terms of, “We got to produce Model 3s because we’re going to be out of cash if we don’t,” they went to start that line, and the line wouldn’t work for a thousand reasons. There were major, major mistakes that were made in that digital SIM.

And digital SIMs usually don’t work because they can’t think of everything. And cars were falling off the conveyors, falling off the line. And that then led to a radical step, which was one of the leaders, Jerome Guillen, said, “I’m actually going to scrap this whole process and build a tent outside. And we’re going to do what we should have done from the start. We’re going to build cars by hand.”

And so we started, over the weekend, building Model 3s by hand. And we simplified the entire process because we didn’t have conveyors, we didn’t have a lot of the machines that were necessary, and we did the bare essentials to produce that Model 3.

So we simplified the process, we deleted all the unnecessary steps, we didn’t have the luxury, really, of having many steps. And then we started to optimize the process, and we started, we produced 50 cars a week, and then we produced 100, and then we produced 500. And the goal was to get to 5,000. And we kept creeping up, creeping up, creeping up by optimizing the process and applying speed to it.

Once we finally had the process nailed, then we automated at the very last step and moved from the tent back into the factory. We had rebuilt the factory production line by this time so that it could actually produce cars.

And when we went to do the postmortem, we said, “How would we have avoided this? Number one, we automated first, not last, and it almost killed us. We did not run the process manually first. We did not delete a bunch of steps. We did not optimize the process. We automated before we had done any of that work, and we almost killed the company.”

So it was, really, at the end of Model 3 production, that the algorithm came together, and we said, “Here are the steps we’re going to follow from here on out. When we go to launch a new product, when you go to invent a new product, we’re going to follow these steps.”

And so that’s an end-to-end example of how not to do it, but then it led us to a framework of how to do it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So maybe digging into each of these in some detail, with “question every requirement.” I have a feeling many of us, it doesn’t even occur to us to question the requirements because the requirements, they’re just like the air we breathe or the water we swim in. It’s like, “Well, this is just how it is.”

So could you maybe surface for us some prompts, or some examples, or some perturbations so that we can identify some requirements that maybe need to get questioned?

Jon McNeill
So when we started to sell cars online, we figured out it took 64 clicks to sell a car, but 44 of those clicks were in the financing process. And that’s because a loan doc or a lease doc for a car has 12 pages of paragraph after paragraph after paragraph. You’ve got an initial sign, all this stuff.

And so a question on requirement step that we did was I took that loan doc to our general counsel at the time, his name’s Todd Maron. I said, “Todd, out of these 12 pages, I need to get rid of some clicks. Can you tell me how many of these paragraphs are a requirement of law or regulation?” He came back about 24 hours later and he said, “None.”

I said, “Well, how does a 12-page document exist then?” He said, “It’s the result of a bunch of well-meaning corporate lawyers at banks trying to protect their client. And so they insert paragraphs for all these uncertainties or these edge cases that could come up to protect the bank.”

But he said, “None of these are required by law or regulation. And, actually, the bank has case law on its side. Like, they don’t need all this stuff because if somebody cheats in a certain way, that’s already been decided by case law. So it’s not like you need to make somebody acknowledge something that the courts have already acknowledged as being out of bounds.”

So I said, “Todd, you’re telling me we could have a one-paragraph loan or lease that says, ‘Here’s the price of the car, here’s the interest rate, here’s the term, and here’s the monthly payment?’” He’s like, “I’m telling you, you can do that.”

Nobody in the industry had questioned whether or not the loan doc or the lease doc should exist. We were just crazy, silly enough to make that, to raise that question. We discovered something that none of our competitors had discovered, which is you didn’t need to put customers through a 44-click process. And as you know, if you had to buy anything on Amazon, and it took 44 clicks, you’d probably opt out a lot. And that’s true in e-comm, and it’s certainly true when people are buying a $100,000-car online.

So we went to talk to banks to see if we could get anybody to go along with us on this one-click loan release, and we got the door slammed in our face by everybody, even though they would intellectually acknowledge that they didn’t need all these paragraphs.

They said, “I would never take the risk of doing this. I would never take the career risk of going to my CEO and suggesting we do this.” Finally, we found a very enterprising CEO at US Bank, and he said, “We’ll do it. In fact, we’ll talk to a CrossTown digital bank called Ally. They’ll probably do it too. We’ll take your loans, they’ll probably take your leases, and we’re off to the races.”

All that started because we questioned why a 12-page loan doc had to exist. And that’s probably the clearest example or the best prompt I can give you on questioning requirements. There’s a lot of stuff that nobody ever questions and takes as a given. If you question that stuff and it turns out it’s not a given, now you’ve got an advantage.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that a lot. And I’m thinking about, well, the phrase that comes to mind is checkbox marketing, or really checkbox anything. If your mindset is, “Well, that’s just what’s done. It’s just what needs to happen.” And I’m thinking about, well, I have a one-page guest release form.

And I think lawyers tend to want to put a lot of intense, you know, things in there. It’s like, “I own all of these forever, no matter what.” And I think, “Well, actually that’s not the vibe I’m trying to put out there when I’m just meeting somebody. I’m just sort of like, ‘Hey, you and I are both cool to do what we want to do with this thing, okay? So no pressure, it’s all good.’” And that’s kind of what I’m trying to convey.

So it was not the default. We had to shift and adjust and then it is, well, it’s much smoother because then I don’t have a lot of people say, “Whoa, whoa, hold on, buddy. What, what is this? I don’t know. Wait. Time out. I got to talk to my lawyer. I got to talk to my agent. I don’t know if we can do this, you know?”

No, that just about never happens because it’s very quick and it’s simple and it’s handy. And I liked that example because the law, in particular, feels like something that’s immovable, like, “Oh, ‘legal’ said, we just have to have that. And end of discussion. It was like, “Oh, well, maybe legal would be willing to have a follow-up conversation and see what can be done here.”

Jon McNeill
Totally. And it takes a certain mindset. So, like, Todd, as a leader of the legal teams was willing to come along on that journey with me and question requirements, and that’s pretty rare in that kind of a leader in that function, but he was super commercial and business-oriented.

And so he would start that journey without having a bunch of hesitation. Like, he’d say, “Yeah, let’s go, like, look into this and see if this is really true and if we really need this.” I don’t experience many general counsels like Todd because they largely go into that career to mitigate risk. And so that’s where their position starts.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, and as a point of curiosity, I mean, I understand frictions and clicks are, you know, undesirable. They slow down the behavior you want, and this is cool and convenient and nice and pleasant to have fewer clicks.

But, you know, Jon, really, lay it on me, is a few dozen clicks for signing an initialing a hundred thousand dollar vehicle enough to move the needle so that folks are like, “You know what? I wanted that Tesla, but this is too much effort. I’m done with this document. I’m abandoning my cart”?

Jon McNeill
It happened a lot, and when we eliminated it, the opposite happened. People started to buy like crazy online, and our digital sales went through the roof, which is because it’s just science. In e-comm, clicks equal anti-conversion. So you get rid of clicks and your conversion rate goes up. It’s just math.

So this is why when you get to the cart in Amazon, the search bar disappears. They want to take away any potential click that you’re going to do other than hit order, because they know how hard it was to get to that point and how hard it is to get you to actually click the order button.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and I believe they’ve litigated the one-click ordering.

Jon McNeill
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like, “No, this is ours, we own it, no one touch it.” And it’s like, “Very touchy,” and because the stakes are huge.

Jon McNeill
Because of that, because it’s powerful. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, can you chat with us about deleting the steps in the process?

Jon McNeill
Yeah, so here’s another example, and Elon actually cut a little video in this early on, but he had taken on this challenge in manufacturing where there was this separator between the battery and the car. And so it’s basically along the floor of the car.

And we could not produce this separator, big piece of plastic. We couldn’t produce it to save our lives. It was warping and it wouldn’t fit right, etc. And so this is one of the chapters where he’s literally sleeping in the factory trying to solve this problem.

And, eventually, he asked the team, “I got to talk to the engineer who spec’d this part. Who spec’d the part?” And the closest people around are the battery people, and they said, “Oh, it’s the auto dynamics team. They wanted a noise dampener in between the battery and the passenger compartment.”

So he grabs the guy that’s the head of the auto dynamics team, and said, “Why did you spec this part?” He said, “I didn’t spec the part. It was the battery team. The battery team told us they needed a heat shield between the battery and the passenger compartment.”

He’s like, “I was just with the battery team and they said it was you, not them.” He said, “Give me the name of the person who spec’d this part.” So they go look for the name. And it turns out the name of the person that spec’d the part was a summer intern that didn’t even work at Tesla anymore.

Elon had spent weeks in the factory trying to solve this problem, all for a part that didn’t need to exist. And so, at that point in time, “We said, nobody claims ownership of this ‘requirement.’ So we’re going to delete it out of the car. And, therefore, we’re solving a whole production problem that was holding us up.”

And you will find, over and over again, that there are steps you can delete from your sales process, from your delivery process. And the hack to finding those is, essentially, map your process on a wall with a bunch of sticky notes. Then have your team go circle those steps that the customer pays you for. It turns out there’s very few of those.

They don’t pay you for the order sheet. They don’t pay you for the PO. They don’t pay you for, in our case, the bill of lading. They don’t pay you for all this stuff. And the things they don’t pay you for are immediate candidates for deletion, because you’re doing those for internal reasons, and you’re creating cost for internal reasons.

Now some of the stuff is necessary to track dollars and cents. I totally get it. They don’t pay you for accounting. They don’t pay you for tax. I get that. But there are a bunch of steps you can cut out when you start to say, “Hey, the customer really doesn’t pay us for this. And we don’t really get anything out of it. So why are we doing this?” And those are good candidates to delete.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Well, I was curious, did Elon get on the phone with the intern? Like, “Hey.”

Jon McNeill
The intern didn’t even work there anymore. Like, didn’t even work there.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, mean, hunt him down wherever he is.

Jon McNeill
He was like, “I don’t need to waste time talking to the intern, like, it’s gone.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So then simplify and optimize.

Jon McNeill
Yeah, so once you delete steps, now you’ve got way fewer steps. So you’ve got a simplified process and now you can start to optimize that process and make it go faster and faster and faster and faster. It’s a little bit like starting any skill, whether that is playing a musical instrument or a sport, where you start and you’re like, “Man, I can’t go very fast.”

And then you practice and practice and practice, and it turns out you get faster and faster and faster because you get more and more efficient and optimized. And that’s the idea here is you keep speeding the process up and speeding it up.

Now you’re still in manual mode. So you’re learning a bunch about what’s causing, what’s getting in the way of speed, and the stuff getting in the way of speed is usually a quality issue. And so you eliminate these quality issues. And then once you’ve got the target speed achieved, now you know you’re optimized and you can then start on automation.

Pete Mockaitis
A quality issue in terms of something needs rework or is outside of the spec we’re looking for?

Jon McNeill
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And then with the acceleration, so there’s practice. What are the other drivers of accelerating?

Jon McNeill
Mainly, it’s putting speed goals that are double the current speed. So you say, “I want to either double the output at current speed or I want to double the speed at current output,” either one of those works in my book, just try to double.

And it starts to reveal, “Oh, here’s all the things that are in the way of doubling. So maybe we can delete more steps. Maybe there are more requirements that we should question. Or, maybe there’s a better method.”

And as you do those, then you start to identify, “Ah, there are a bunch of things that we didn’t see at first that we now see now, that we can either delete or simplify to help us speed this process up.”

Pete Mockaitis
So the doubling of the speed is not so much a, “Hey, it turns out we can just double the speed, it’s all good.” But rather, it’s sort of like a magnifying glass to identify, “Oh, that’s what’s holding down the speed doubling.”

Jon McNeill
Totally. There’s this great series of scenes in the Hulu series, “The Bear,” which is about this super high-end restaurant in Chicago. And it’s turned from a roast beef cafe with the same team in the back that is now trying to earn its Michelin star.

And there’s a woman that’s at the pasta station, and she has two minutes once an order comes in to cook pasta. And she starts at five minutes. And then she does things like she portions each serving of pasta in a little plastic container. So she’s pre-portioned.

And she starts to do multiple boiling water pots to drop the pasta into so she can do more than one at a time. And then she’s got a saucier step that she realizes, if she preheats the sauce, it meets the pasta at the right time, she can speed it up. And she gets the process down from five to two and a half minutes by just eliminating all these steps, but she’s still not at her two minute target.

And then the sous chef, who really runs the kitchen, comes over and is just helping her. They have a busy night. And so the sous chef comes over and does a few things that experienced chefs know to do. Bam! Bam! Bam! Order comes out in a minute and a half.

And the woman who is at the pasta station says, “I’ve been working this problem for like 90 days and I got it from five minutes to two and a half. And you walk over and you do it in a minute and a half.” And she’s like, “Yeah, I’ve done this before. So just watch me and you can see the extra steps you can take out of your process to make yourself faster.”

That’s what we’re talking about is just optimize, optimize, optimize until you get to a really different output than you’ve had before.

Pete Mockaitis
And then the final step is automation.

Jon McNeill
Yeah, and then you can automate it. Because automation is like wet cement. When you put it around a process, it sets up really hard and you got to get jackhammers to get rid of it. So you don’t want to automate until you’ve really got the process nailed. Otherwise, you’ll be suffering with the cement that’s already solidified the current process where it is.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So now, as we were talking about this with the restaurant example and manufacturing examples, I’d love to change gears a little bit and hear about, let’s say there’s someone who’s in the middle of an organization and their output is not physical, but, nonetheless, there is a process that’s cranking out something on the other end. Could you give us an example in that domain of working through those steps?

Jon McNeill
Yeah, so, like, whether you’re producing software or whether you’re producing marketing or you’re producing financials, I think the same steps apply. If you step back and say like, “Hey, look, I produce financial statements for the business,” or, “I produce a budget for the business.”

If you step back and say, “Okay, let me just map the process that we use today to do that. And maybe I should question some base assumptions here. And do we have to do all these steps? Like, are all these things really required?”

And so an example of that is Tesla, when I joined, was doing standard annual budgets. And the senior management team and the CEO would set the target for sales, and the target for gross margin, the target for cash flow. And so these annual budgets were being done in the way they’re done at almost every company.

The challenge was we were doubling the business every eight months. And so, like, if you’re trying to project out a budget for a year, it was horribly inaccurate by, like, month three, because things were changing so fast. So all that was essentially wasted effort, all that planning and budgeting.

So we asked ourselves a question, like, “Time is super, super valuable in this company. How could we improve this process? And rather than going through a big planning cycle every year, what actually needs to get done?”

And where we ended up was, we questioned the requirement of having a year budget. It turned out what we did was we had quarterly budgets because the business was moving on a quarter basis, not a year basis, and we would have these rolling four quarter budgets.

We would spend less than two days setting targets in the budget because it was only going be good for a quarter. So you didn’t want to spend a week of the quarter, a huge chunk of the quarter doing it. And that finance team evolved a whole different way to do financial planning and budgeting.

And they did it, not on an annual basis, but a quarterly basis. They did it on a rolling basis, and they just used the key inputs that everybody was looking at in the business anyway, “What’s the sales rate? What’s the production rate? What’s the margin?”

And we can build a budget off of that, and rather than taking the whole company’s time planning, we’re just going to keep rolling this and rolling this, and we’re absorbing everything that we’re learning from the market as we double.

And so you can apply this whether you’re sitting in a finance department or a marketing department or a sales department. You can apply these principles to your advantage, too.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Jon, tell me, any final top tips, do’s or don’ts, for folks looking to implement this stuff?

Jon McNeill
As we talked about, like one of the principles that is a complete hack is eat your own dog food. I learned this from Sam Walton in his book, Made in America, where he would tour stores on a weekly basis to find out what the customer wanted that they didn’t have, what they had too much of that the customer didn’t want, and what were the things that store managers were doing that were super good that he could spread across the company.

And I learned from that and started to see that, “Oh, he’s onto a complete hack.” Like, if you use your own product, if you experience the customer experience, you’re going to see all kinds of areas of improvement. And if you teach your people to see it before you, they’re going to move even faster than you can.

And so I would say, like, the secret hack is go experience your own product and use it. We even went so far at Tesla to have a rule that you couldn’t present product in a PowerPoint. We didn’t want to see, like, some rendering or rendition. We wanted to see the real thing. So if you’re presenting product, you had to do a live screencast onto the screen so we could see the product, we could play with the product, and we could see how it actually worked.

I was with a group of bank executives a few months ago. I asked them to raise their hand if they actually use their own bank’s consumer app. No hands went up. And I said, “I could have guessed that because I’m a consumer of two of your banks, and your app sucks.”

“It’s so bad that if you used it, you wouldn’t live with yourself for another day without fixing it. You would call up the head of engineering and you say, ‘We got to fix this, this, and this.’ But you don’t use it.” So the organization gets the sense that nobody cares. And if you can live with it, they can live with it.

And eating your own dog food changes all that. It creates an immediate feedback loop to the top and it allows you to set the bar of acceptability with your organization.

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

Jon McNeill
I think this whole approach is about simplicity, and so I love the Mark Twain quote, “I would have written you a shorter letter if I would have taken the time.” It speaks to how hard it is to simplify. Humans, I think, we are naturally complicators. We’re not natural simplifiers, and it actually takes work to simplify.

And I love that quote, because it reminds me, each time I read it, of the fact that simplification is work. It’s super valuable and rewarding work, but it’s work.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And can you point to a favorite study or experimental or bit of research?

Jon McNeill
I think, if you want to understand AI and the current version of AI that we have with LLMs, the best piece to read is the original DeepMind paper.

Pete Mockaitis
“Attention Is All You Need”?

Jon McNeill
Yup.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Jon McNeill
Favorite book would be, I’ve got two right now, one is The Goal, which taught me a completely different way of looking at business, by Eliyahu Goldratt. And the second is Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara. I think it applies to every business. It’s so good.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool?

Jon McNeill
Reading. Like, if I could answer the question that way, I’d start every day reading for an hour and a half, and I read variety of things. I read books, I read, obviously, the news. I read Twitter, I read Reddit, Hacker News sometimes. Reading for me is a tool.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share with teammates, audiences, that they quote back to you often, a Jon original?

Jon McNeill
We had the standard for service at Tesla that gets quoted back to me, it got quoted back to me today actually, and that is, “Make them talk about you at dinner tonight.” Do something that is so awesome that they’re going to talk about you at dinner tonight.

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

Jon McNeill
I’d point them, you can find me at DVX.ventures.

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

Jon McNeill
Become a simplifier and you’ll stand out.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Okay, Jon, thank you.

Jon McNeill
You bet. Thanks, Pete.

Apr 16

1146: How to Reclaim Your Focus and Unlock Your Genius with Memory Champion Nelson Dellis

By Podcasts No Comments

Memory champion Nelson Dellis shares simple techniques to upgrade your thinking to genius level.

You’ll Learn

  1. The core skills behind genius-level thinking
  2. How to learn faster and better using one powerful tool
  3. Why you shouldn’t write off your intuition

About Nelson

Nelson Dellis is a six-time USA Memory Champion, two-time Guinness World Record holder, Grandmaster of Memory, keynote speaker, and world-renowned memory coach. He teaches at the university level, holding degrees in computer science and physics, and is also an accomplished mountaineer with four Mt. Everest expeditions. 

Beyond the classroom and the mountains, Nelson has medaled in international competitions, contributed to remote viewing research on stock prediction, and even played on a professional card-counting Blackjack team that won over $100,000. He shares his passion for unlocking the mind’s potential with over 300,000 YouTube subscribers, where he makes complex skills practical, fun, and accessible to anyone willing to train their brain.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

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.

Apr 06

1143: How to Build a Career that AI Can’t Replace with Aneesh Raman

By Podcasts No Comments

Aneesh Raman guides you on how to use AI and turn it into a competitive advantage.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why you shouldn’t see AI as competition
  2. How to make the most out of AI in your workflow
  3. What AI can’t replicate–and how you can double down on it

About Aneesh

Aneesh Raman is the chief economic opportunity officer of LinkedIn, where he works with leaders across societies and sectors to shape the global response to the historic changes hitting work. 

Previously, he served as senior adviser on economic strategy and public affairs to the State of California, led economic impact at Facebook, worked as a presidential speechwriter, and was a war correspondent. 

A graduate of Harvard College and a former Fulbright Scholar, he serves on the boards of the College Futures Foundation and Shanti Bhavan Children’s Project

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Pete Mockaitis
Aneesh, welcome!

Aneesh Raman
Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to hear your insights about AI and economic opportunity. Could you maybe kick us off by sharing what’s the most surprising or counterintuitive thing you’ve discovered about us career professional folks and AI?

Aneesh Raman
Ooh, it’s a big one. It’s an existential one that we have internalized this diminished sense of self as humans at work across the industrial age. When AI broke out, what now three, four years ago, immediately, there was this great fear.

Immediately, the conversation was, “We’re done. We’re at the end of the road for humans at work. We’ve got this thing that can beat us at these things. It’s going to beat us at those things next. It’s going to beat us at everything soon.”

And I just sort of, like, intrinsically, didn’t believe that. I was starting from a place where, for a long time, I had thought the labor market did a horrible job matching talent and opportunity, indexed on pedigree signals like your college degree, “Where did you work?”

So I just knew there was so much human potential out there that had been blocked out or locked out of economic opportunity all over the world. And so I just didn’t believe that humans were done. I kind of felt like we hadn’t even begun yet.

And the more I sort of thought about it, the more our CEO and I talked about it, what led to the book was this realization that humans are more than we’ve been at work for a couple hundred years now. For a couple hundred years, we have been about one thing above all else – efficiency.

And we sort of told ourselves a story that the knowledge economy moved us out of the industrial age, of people working on factory floors on assembly lines. But it didn’t. Even if you were with a laptop in an office, you were doing more, better, faster, more, better, faster, more, better, faster. Everything was about efficiency and productivity.

And we had derided almost these skills that make us, us. We called them soft skills. We said they were nice to have, not must have. And all the math worked in terms of the industrial age and what the economy valued in terms of technical and analytic abilities.

But I think what’s been most surprising to me is that AI is forcing us to reassert ourselves because it is going to out-machine us, it’s going to out-efficiency us. And yet, our human brain, which is I think still the most incredible object in the known universe, it’s been around for tens of thousands of years, long before the steam engine arrived, and the industrial age descended upon us.

And so we’re going to pull from these strengths that we’ve had for millennia, that we talked about in the book, and it’s going to be a moment to reassert ourselves and our capability, I think.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, wow! These are big ideas.

Aneesh Raman
Welcome to my brain.

Pete Mockaitis
“Internalize the diminished sense of self.” My goodness. You know, it’s funny, I was just chatting with Claude last night because I think the First Lady was with a robot doing an education event. And I was like, “Oh, can that robot finally load my dishwasher for me? And when can I buy one?”

And so, I was looking at that, and it said, “Oh, this robot is impressive because it could figure out how to fold a towel with just 80 hours of video.” I was like, “Oh, well, my five-year-old figured out how to fold a towel in about four minutes of instruction with a hug.”

So, yeah, I’m with you, our brains are spectacular. But, yeah, there are some domains in which we are being out-efficienced by the AI.

Aneesh Raman
Yeah, and I think that’s okay. It’s not okay right now because it’s causing a massive disruption to work. It’s changing the rules of the game, which are hard to manage if you’ve been playing the game the old way and you’ve done everything right and, suddenly, you know, old math won’t solve new equations. But I think it’s an opening for people that see it.

We were never meant to be machine-like. We were never meant to spend our days doing the work of efficiency and more better faster, more better faster, more better faster. I mean, at one point, as we were reporting in the book, you know, thinking about those people on assembly lines who are fastening that one widget over and over again, or the knocker uppers that we talk about, the people who their job was to shoot peas at windows to wake people up as this sort of human alarm clock.

I looked up and they were just at this coffee shop, four people sitting next to each other, on their laptops, just slamming through emails. And it just connected for me that this is all still ever been efficiency work. And so, I think the real opportunity we talk about in the book is to see this as a big change to everything, to be understanding of the fear that that’s going to cause, because the human brain is wired to fear change. It is not wired to get exponential change. We are in a moment of exponential change.

But then act despite that fear, push past it, because while it’s understandable, it’s also unhelpful. And if you start using these tools and using them not in ways that then just take all the work out of your day, but start to take away the stuff that’s mundane, routinized, efficiency work, free up time to do more cool things with these tools, to learn new things in new ways, to build new things in new ways.

And then to open up space to do the things we uniquely do, to give yourself time to think critically, to think about ethical implications of what you’re building if you’re an engineer, to spend time brainstorming or partnering with other humans.

The turning test started us down this path of AI versus human, and then it beat us here, it beats us there. But that’s not where the story goes. There’s no innovation. There’s no growth if it’s just all about AI. Humans are illogical. We’re unpredictable. What works for us requires someone to be us, to be human, to in-tune that.

So, really, the test we should be doing is human versus human with AI, versus humans with AI, because we always do the coolest stuff together. And that means think about yourself five years ago, think about yourself today, “What are you doing that’s new and better and energizing that you couldn’t do without these tools five years ago?”

And in the book, we talk about an easy way to start this. Put your job title aside. It doesn’t matter if you’re a CEO. It doesn’t matter if you’re a senior director. It doesn’t matter if you’re the newest hire at a company. Your job title is irrelevant for the purposes of this exercise.

Every week, you do about a dozen tasks, list them down, and then you’re going to put those tasks into three buckets. The first bucket are tasks that AI can now do or can soon do. So coding is in there, quick summary, quick analysis, first draft of content, meeting notes, like all that stuff’s in bucket one.

Bucket two is stuff you’re doing with AI that’s new. It’s not just additional stuff that you’re putting in bucket one. It’s, “Are you learning something new with AI?” “I’m on marketing, I got to talk to the sales team. They speak a different language. How do I close that expertise gap in what I’m trying to pitch them?”

Are you building something new? “I have to present. What’s a cool image I could associate with this idea? A video? How do I make this land in a more visceral way to the people I’m trying to convince to back this project?” So that’s bucket two.

And then bucket three is, with the time you’re saving in bucket one, with the cool new stuff you’re doing in bucket two, what are gyou doing that’s uniquely you? And that starts with what’s uniquely you as a human, your ability. We have the five Cs in the book, but with those, think critically, “What’s an ethical implication of what we’re doing?”

But then are you spending new time with people to try new things, to test something out as a partnership, to get advice on how to pitch something. And as you sort of move the tasks of your job away from bucket one towards bucket two and bucket three, you’re adapting your job. You’re redefining your job.

We have a statistic at LinkedIn, 70% of the skills for the average job will have changed by 2030. Now, the old way that disruptions hit meant that, at some point, in six months or a year, your boss, your boss’s boss would come to you and say, “Here’s how your job has changed by 70%.” Because old disruptions from the steam engine to electricity to the internet, they played out over years and they came top down.

This one is different. Your boss actually doesn’t really know how your job is supposed to change. Their boss doesn’t know how their job is supposed to change. CEOs are trying to figure this out at an organizational level. So we get to change our jobs now. We get to start figuring out where these tools come in and then what that opens up in bucket two and three, not just because we’re human, but because we’re us.

We have a chapter in the book, “No One Beats You at Being You.” That’s where it’s going, is that you’re going to shift your job and then re-center your career around your unique curiosities and capabilities.

Pete Mockaitis
No one beats you at being you. And it’s funny, I’m thinking about, you know, so me here now, here we are having a podcast about professional skills development, and there are a lot of places where you can get such things.

And it’s interesting how, if I talk to an AI about such a matter, I might get the answer, and it might be quick. And yet, it is not as satisfying, complete, thorough, giving rise to new ideas and connections, the way hearing a full blown conversation between two folks on a matter is. And I think that that really resonates.

Aneesh Raman
And I think that it’s really important. Yeah, I’m glad you’re saying, because right now there’s this sort of idea to AI or not AI, as if it’s binary. And if you AI, you’re doing everything AI. If you’re not, you’re rejecting it for righteous reasons, and that’s where you’re at.

And in the book, we have the story of Neil Pretty, whom really, he embodies this idea that you need to use AI, but you cannot misuse it, nor should you overuse it. And Neil starts using this tool to help him prepare for different presentations, and he overuses it and realize it doesn’t sound like him and it’s not going to distinguish him. And he dials it back and he uses it differently.

Instead of asking it to tell him what to say, it says, “What would this CEO say about what I said, or this academic? Give me 12 reactions to what I think.” And then he would use that to even get better at what he was going to say that would have taken much conversation with many people ahead of a meeting.

So you can overuse AI. And MIT has done cognitive scans and come up with this term cognitive debt. Like, if you’re sitting at work and your boss asks you something, you copy and paste it in the tool, then you copy and paste the answer back and send it to your boss, you might be doing efficiency work more efficiently.

But if you run into your boss a week later, and they’re like, “Hey, that was a great idea. How did you think of that?” you might not even remember that exchange because your brain is not tracking it, and you will have brought no critical thinking to it. So that muscle is atrophying. So you got to make sure that you are using this tool to do better things yourself. You cannot outsource to it.

Pete Mockaitis
So in the universe of more, better, faster efficiency work, how would you suggest is the contrast? If I’m thinking efficiency work AI stuff is in the land of more, better, faster, what is the land of our humanity?

Aneesh Raman
This is the first time someone’s asked me that. Because what’s crazy is we had to define what makes us us. We had to define what makes humans unique in the arena of work.

It turns out not much work had been done around that. As you started talking to neuroscientists, behavioral psychologists, behavioral economists even, when I’d ask like, “Who from companies or from the world of work comes and talks to you?”

One neuroscientist said, “Not many. Like, athletes will come because they want to push their brain to the limit. The military will come because they can’t hire from another military. Hedge funds will come because they want a cool like summit speaker. But you were not getting incoming from everyday practitioners of work.”

But now the mind is going to the center of work, not the machine. And so what does it all lead to? You know, in the book, we identify the five Cs that we think are at the core of human capability – curiosity, compassion, creativity, courage and communication. Those are what we offer up at the intersection of our IQ and EQ of our consciousness and conscience.

Then we say there’s some habits we all need – resilience, adaptability, handling hard well, failing fast, learning quick. And we sort of bundle it all into this idea of being entrepreneurial in our habits and in our thinking. And we know that in saying that, we lose a lot of folks who think being entrepreneurial means starting a business, and that is not for them.

Paul Cheek from MIT, who’s a professor on entrepreneurship there, has an amazing definition for it. “Entrepreneurialism,” he says in the book, “is doing more than is reasonable with the resources you have.” So every one of us every day has a task, has a project, has something we’re doing at work, what’s more than is reasonable that we could do with these tools and with others with the resources we have?

And then what that leads to is a flip. Instead of more, better, faster, I think we’re doing new, bigger, bolder. We are creating a whole bunch of new ideas, a whole bunch of new ways for businesses to grow, a whole bunch of new businesses to go after, a whole bunch of new areas from climate to healthcare to all sorts of stuff that we could create technology for businesses to address, at the local level for just a community, or at the country level, or at the global level.

So, to me, “more, better, faster” becomes “new, bolder, better” and not just in terms of work. Like, I think if we do this right, and it isn’t just us as individuals. Institutions need to completely redesign the systems of work from employment to education, entrepreneurship.

But, ultimately, we get to better work for each of us, better work for all of us, better defined by just more human work, more fulfilling, more high value, more impactful. But that all leads to greater prosperity and progress because of this sort of innovation explosion, this entrepreneurialism that can take root.

Pete Mockaitis
And to these notions of efficiency work versus newer, bolder stuff, I’d love your hot take on these AI layoffs. I mean, some say, “Oh, well, that’s just AI washing. They over-hired, interest rates are worse. It makes a better story for Wall Street to say, ‘Oh, it’s because of AI efficiency.’” But others say, “Oh, no, no, no. Sure enough, one person can now do what things that previously require two, three, or four, and thus it makes sense to shed those jobs.” You’ve got an interesting vantage point. What’s your take on this?

Aneesh Raman
I mean, we’re seeing jobs get added, one million plus jobs around AI. That’s not just the sort of like hardcore engineering jobs. That’s also the data centers. We know sectors are hiring, like healthcare. Look, there’s these two truths we have to hold at once that are somewhat inconsistent.

The first truth is we know at the other end of all of these moments of disruption from technology, we generally see an increase in employment, and the Fed is out there sort of repeatedly with that. Jobs change, new jobs emerge. MIT has a stat, 60% of employment in 2018 didn’t exist in 1940. Creator wasn’t a career 10 years ago. Data scientist wasn’t a job 20 years ago. So we, generally, do see employment go up.

That happens after a messy middle where a lot of lives get upended and it’s really hard for people. But we do see employment go up. That sort of thing one, truth one. Thing two, truth two that contradicts that is we’ve never been here before in terms of this technology. It is fundamentally different in terms of what it’s able to do.

And I think predictions are unhelpful right now. Anyone with absolute certainty about what’s happening to a job category or to all jobs or to jobs in this sector, let’s see how it turns out in five or 10 years. Like, I think it’s just impossible for anyone to know with certainty anything absolute.

The one thing we do know, to contradict myself a little, is the only thing that matters right now is what we believe, and what we choose to do, and what decisions we make, and what steps we take. And that is true for us as individuals. It’s true for us as organizations. It’s true for us as societies. It’s true for us as humanity.

If we decide that worse is more likely, and we make decisions that make worse more likely, worse is more likely. If we decide that better is more likely, and we make decisions that make better more likely, better is more likely.

So in terms of where employment goes, there’s so much in the air. I mean, we’re going from an old world to a new world of work. There’s so much macroeconomic muckup that’s going on on interest rates and geopolitics. Every company is going through its own moment of business transformation.

Some over-hired and now they’re managing that. Some are built with an org chart for stability, order, predictability. That isn’t going to help you innovate, be agile, and grow. They’ve got to manage that. There’s no one truth to everything that’s happening.

And so I think for folks who are looking for a single answer, who are looking for someone to tell them what to do, who are looking for an off-the-shelf playbook as an individual or as a company, like, that’s not this moment. It’s not like back when it was like everyone get a CS degree or bootcamp certificate in coding if you can find one, because that’s the ticket.

There is no “it” right now, but that’s it. We’ve all got to start to figure this out on our own, use these tools, and with these tools start to understand our own unique interest, capabilities, where those could go, where we would pitch ourselves across a broader set of job opportunities that we might, otherwise, have looked at. And I think that’s what we’ve got to do is look. It’s a metacognition sort of moment.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. But you do have some interesting data. 85% of people are in jobs where AI can automate at least a quarter of routine tasks. Can you tell us a little bit about that data and what sorts of things we’re seeing automated now with AI?

Aneesh Raman
A big thing we’ve been trying to push people on is to look at jobs as a set of tasks, not as titles. A good example of how not to do it, I would say, is looking at software engineers. And for a bit coming out of the gate with AI, everyone said that title describes all software engineers in one way, and that one way is that they code. And as AI got better and better at coding, it became, in that line of argument, intuitive that software engineers were done.

We’ve actually seen recent data where the hiring for software engineers is going up because as AI is able to do more coding, more companies want to build tech, so they’re hiring. And the job of software engineer was never limited only ever to coding.

Some of those jobs, entry level jobs, even middle, they were, but the job doesn’t have to be just that. In fact, as AI is able to do coding, it shifts to reviewing the code, or talking to customers, or having those conversations about ethical implications of what’s being built. It’s the same three buckets and things move.

ATMs are a good example, we talk about in the book. When ATMs hit in the late ‘70s, everyone thought bank tellers were done. We have a quote from the New York Times. It basically says bank tellers are done. Bank teller jobs, like, doubled between that moment and 2010, and they doubled because you had more banks opening so you needed more tellers because ATMs allowed it. The job of the bank teller shifted to being more about relationship banking.

Now, there were some debate over whether the quality of the job went up, but in an absolute term, you know, the jobs went up. They came down after that because of the iPhone and the smartphone and all the banking we’re now doing. But you couldn’t have predicted that in the ‘70s.

So that’s all to say our data doesn’t look at job titles. It looks at jobs. It looks at the tasks people are doing. And it says, if you are in a job where a lot of your job is that bucket one, that’s worth knowing. That doesn’t mean that entire job is going away. And it doesn’t mean you are done at work. It means you’ve got AI coming for well over 50% of the jobs in that task. So you want to start on your own moving tasks in your day to day to bucket two and bucket three.

And if you do that, don’t worry about the job category or the job title you have. That’s all secondary now. It used to be job title mattered first because you’d reverse engineer from it. Job title matters last now because we’re going to be reshifting work.

And so depending on your number, and you don’t need us to tell you this data, you can do an evaluation of the tasks in your job and look at where you’re heavy. Anyone who is heavy in bucket one, okay, what do you got going in bucket two and three? How can you build out from that?

If you’re in a job category that feels really volatile, okay, what are the transferable skills you have across two and three that could take you into other job functions or job categories? But it’s not an overnight, everything is done end of day sort of thing. It’s a step-by-step incremental of, “How do I manage this change sort of thing?”

Pete Mockaitis
And we had a really good chat with Jeremy Utley, who suggested shifting perspective from AI is not the oracle with the answers, but rather like a collaborator, a teammate, and that’s been pretty helpful. I’d be curious to hear, for those whose AI use is limited to sort of an enhanced Google or enhanced Bing, where do you think are the most promising opportunities, like, “Hey, go do this right now with AI, and you’re going to see some cool career benefits”?

Aneesh Raman
This is another one where there’s no one answer for everyone. I’m sorry to tell folks. Like, you’re going to have to go to the gym. You’re going to have to try things out, test things out, and figure out what is the high value of AI for you.

It could be learning new things. It could be building new things. It could be coaching you on new things. You got to keep trying the tools. Like, to your point, I think too many folks either are afraid of AI and don’t want to touch it. Or, if they’re using it, they’re using it just for a better search.

We have five Cs I talked about, and curiosity matters most right now as individuals. And the first place to start is be super curious about these tools, because their capabilities are changing every day. It’s almost like a skill of tool dexterity.

I use multiple tools every day. Every once in a while, I shift to the dominant tool. I use them for all sorts of things. Every week, I’m trying to push a new task out to the tools so that I’m constantly testing what new things that I’m working on can it help with.

It helped with writing at first, and then that pushed me to realize, “Okay, I got to focus on how I elevate what I can get help with on the research or first draft side. But also how do I spend more time doing in-person communication?”

So I started studying, like, theater actors who have it down, who know how to command a room, command energy. What can I learn from them now that my bucket three is going to be more of this? Right now, I’m using the tools for a lot of coaching. I want to send this email. I’ve told the tools what I’m working on, which is sending less emails that are less lengthy with less ideas to people like Ryan, who I can bombard with ideas.

And so it’ll say like, “Hey, you just got yesterday, like take a day off,” you know, like stuff like that. So it’s not so much about the tool capability. It’s what is the human capability you’re working on in that moment? Because we’re all going to want to keep growing right now in new ways, which is fun. It’s hard, but it’s fun.

And then you’re going to use the tools differently based on what you’re working on. If you’re just doing search, that’s an issue. So the easiest way to do it is find the hardest part of your tomorrow. You got something at work tomorrow that you’re not looking forward to, that is either monotonous and drudgery or complicated and a hard conversation you got to have, or you’re suddenly going to have to come up with an idea and you’re bit freaked out about that.

Whatever is your hardest thing tomorrow, start going to the tools and asking them how they can help you with that. And they might not be able to help you. Okay, that’s like a good example of a tool that isn’t there yet, or a task that isn’t there yet, but they’ll give you something. And that’s the sort of rhythm you want to get in.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, could you give us some fun examples of folks who saw some really great tactical good things flowing from tools into what they’re up to tomorrow?

Aneesh Raman
My favorite from the book, probably, I mean, they’re all stories of individuals who are using these tools to get jobs, keep jobs, and change their career, build businesses, like, all of it. But Jonetta Gresham is in her 50s, and because of her age, she came to AI with, in her words, a “Hell, no to AI,” mindset, because she had seen Terminator and Terminator 2 and Terminator 3, and really felt like this was a robot apocalypse come to life.

Again, she had a task at one point, which was to get her resume ready. And she used a tool to just help her do that. And she was blown away at how the tool helped her articulate skills that she had and better organized experience that she had in a way that made her so much more employable for the job she was going after.

And so that sort of opened up her eyes to like, “Okay, maybe this can help me.” And a little bit later, she was taking an IT certification course. And she is someone who, in various moments of education, didn’t feel like she was being taught in the way that she would like to learn, in the way that her brain process information, and in the way that would feed her curiosity.

So she told the tools to help her learn all the stuff she had to learn in the ways that she likes to learn, with stories, with analogies. The tools did that, she passed the test, she got the certification.

It can personalize against your needs in a way that no technology has before. It can close learning gaps. It can close entrepreneurial gaps or building gaps. You just got to get in the rhythm with it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that a lot in terms of, if you’ve got a laser focus on, “This is the thing I need to go learn,” and then how can the tool facilitate that, I found that rather handy. Like, I found myself getting in the Mac OS Terminal bash command line, and I don’t know what I’m doing, but it’s like, “Hey, if you want to, you know, do this automatic downloading of stuff, you’re going to need this tool.”

So I was like, “Go to GitHub,” it’s like, “Okay, no, you’ve already lost me.” And so I say, “Explain it like I’m five.” And it’s really funny, it’s like asking the robot to go to a store. It literally explains it like I’m five. But that was very handy. And I’ve heard that theme from a number of people.

It’s, like, they know a little something about the domain that they’re after or looking to enter for perhaps the first time, but not nearly enough to actually achieve anything. But with this sort of mega-crutch, they’re saying, “Oh, okay, I can kind of fake my way through step by step.” And then afterwards, like, “Oh, hey, I guess I know how to do this now. How about that?”

Aneesh Raman
Yeah, we’ve got a great story of a guy named Diego, who’s in Texas and is trying to push for rural entrepreneurship with AI to really inspire more folks to realize they can build businesses. Often, folks who couldn’t afford to go to college for whom entrepreneurship is, as he calls it, this permissionless path, this ability to go build your career on your terms.

And he has a great line, which is, “We are no longer limited by what we know. We are only limited by what we can think to ask.” And just imagine what that means for all people all over the world who have access to these tools, who hopefully have electricity and AI infrastructure.

But you’re only limited by what you can think to ask. All of us as humans are innately curious about things, wildly different things. That’s what’s amazing. We all have different perspectives, different things that drive us. But imagine now having this tool that can sort of feed that curiosity and help us align it with the work we do and the impact we want to have and the purpose we want to bring to our jobs.

That’s where you start to get excited. I think we are collectively doing a horrible job telling that story and making it clear, that hiding in plain sight is this thing that is going to make all of our jobs more interesting and more fulfilling, and all of our efforts lead to greater impact for good in the world.

And that’s now on us to try and reset that story and that conversation, which is like the big reason we did the book.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that, “What you can think to ask.” Have there been some power questions that you found transformational?

Aneesh Raman
I think a lot of it is, right now, for folks around, “Where do I start?” or, “What do I do about? How do I think about AI? How should I use AI? When should I not use AI?” You can just dump that in as a voice memo into one of these tools, and it gives you a start. It gives you something to react to.

Again, it doesn’t give you the answer. It gives you an option. And it’s your job to push back on it or to pull from it, and then try and learn something here. Ask it to challenge your thinking over there. One of the things we talk about in the book is like the, I think, it’s a hundred to one rule.

I mean, “You pick your number, but give me like 80 versions of something,” and then you react to which of those you like. And then you can start to think about why and build from that. Or, “Give me the five best arguments against the thing that I think is true about what I’m going to do tomorrow.”

That’s where I think people are really starting to get good results from it. Not, “Give me the answer,” but, “Give me a way to get to a better answer.”

Pete Mockaitis
And I like what you’re saying with regard to the challenging is because it seems like that’s the default setting is sycophancy in these AI tools. It shows me a study. I was like, “Wow, that’s very compelling.” I was like, “Do we think this is real?” It was like, “Actually it has all the hallmarks of being a fraudulent paper mill submission.” I was like, “It’d be nice if you proactively shared that.” But, yeah, to ask it to do the challenging is great.

And you said voice memo and I think that’s a brilliant hack right there in terms of not just the one sentence, but the five minutes of verbiage can make all the difference.

Aneesh Raman
And you can just dump it all in and it’ll organize it. I know someone who does a call with AI every day. They do the chat functionality because you can also, without having to type in or do a voice memo, you can literally converse with these tools.

And they go out for a walk, and they just talk about everything on their mind, “I’m like thinking about this, I had a hard conversation with this person.” And over time, what these tools start to have is longitudinal data on us. They aren’t another person. They are just a collection of insights and knowledge that’s out there. And then, increasingly, if you give it context and give it info, insights, and thoughts on us over longer and longer periods of time.

And so in these conversations, the tool will start calling out, “Hey, you’ve talked for a few times now about wanting to learn more about neuroscience, or how that’s going to relate to work. Here are some, like, podcasts you might want to listen to.” Or, “I’ve noticed, like, anytime you have to have a conversation that’s tough, and it is how you end your day, it really upends your day. Like, have you thought about making those conversations happen at the start of a day?”

It starts picking up on stuff for us that we might miss in the day-to-day of just life being busy. So the key thing is, like, this is a tool that is the easiest technology humans have created for humans to use. It is literally like just talking to someone else at the most basic level. You don’t have to go learn AI. You just have to, like, sign up for a free tool or watch a couple of free videos on it, and then just start using it.

Pick a thing. It can be an exercise plan, a meal plan, or something at work, a project, or a set of tasks you’ve got going, and just start using it. Like, it’s sitting there for any of us to use. So you got to just start using it and keep using it but don’t outsource to it. Use it to then start building you into a better person.

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

Aneesh Raman
I think it goes back to your opening question. Like, it has been surprising how we have internalized a diminished sense of self, and yet it is a reality. And so the biggest thing I would tell people is, like, what matters most right now is your belief in yourself.

You’re going to have to bet on yourself. That’s the future of work and then push your leaders, and we’re pushing them, to build systems that make that bet pay off. But the thing that starts it all is going to be that you believe in yourself and you’re going to bet on yourself. And that’s going to take some work because we are all coming out of an era for work that wasn’t about betting on yourself.

It was turning yourself into whatever the job description needed, whatever the job category needed. So it’s going to be a flip for your brain. The good news is, and there’s a great book, Tiny Experiments, a bunch of them on neuroplasticity and how we can rewire our brain to become a different person.

The good news is you got a human brain and it is able to be rewired and you can become a different person. You can get to belief. You can get to a place where you know exactly how and why you’re going to bet on yourself, but it’s going to take some work. But that’s where it starts. That’s what I would say.

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

Aneesh Raman
I like the, “Some men see things as they are and ask why. I dream of things that never were, and ask why not.” That drove me for a while. I think, right now, it’s more “Be curious, not judgmental.” I think it gets appropriated to Walt Whitman.

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

Aneesh Raman
Mine, I mentioned at the MIT one, 60% of jobs in 2018 didn’t exist in 1940. That’s just like a good number for us to keep in mind.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Aneesh Raman
A bunch of them. My favorite hits at a certain moment in life, that sort of like hits me deep as it relates to this conversation, Sapiens. I read that in August 2023, GPT had gone global the prior year, and it is a brief history of humankind.

And so it just helps you have a sense of, like, how incredible the human brain is, but just also how much has happened across millions of years when we all focused on a few hundred years. So that really widened my perspective.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Aneesh Raman
Copilot, I’m using it a lot because I work at LinkedIn. My co-author is working on Copilot. So it’s kind of a default because I can go tell someone if there’s something we should make better out of it. But it can really give me good advice on, “Should I send this email?” or, “What am I overspending my time on?” because it’s got my calendar, it’s got my email, it’s got the team’s messages. So, for me, right now, because a lot of my growth is growth I want to do at work, it’s been helpful.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Aneesh Raman
This is probably controversial, because I don’t know if people would say this. My favorite habit is small talk, actually. I love small talk. I think every human is like a documentary unto themselves. There’s this great word, sonder, that I won’t do it justice, so people should look it up. It’s a word someone made up, I think, five, 10 years ago. But it’s that every human around you is living a life as complex and interesting as your own.

And that’s true across human history, or at least since we’ve had the brain we have with the ability for complex thought that we have. So I find small talk just amazing. I love meeting new people and just, I’m sure I’m awkward about it because I ask like deep questions sometimes really quick, but I just, like, love learning about people.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that people really connect and resonate with and quote back to you a lot?

Aneesh Raman
Hard things are hard. That’s a good one. You know, at one point, someone asked me, “What’s been the hardest part of your career?” And I was like, “You know what? All of it.” And I did it kind of, like, begrudgingly. And then as stuff has stayed hard in just figuring this story out, I revisited, you know, when I worked for President Obama, he had a “Hard things are hard” plaque on his desk because at certain moments when legislative victories were hard fought, people would remind each other hard things are hard.

And that just has led me to become a real believer in the bigness and value of hard. I have, like, an ode to hard things. It’s got, you know, quote from a stoic Marcus Aurelius, who’s like, “The obstacle is the way,” to “Hard things are hard,” to Carl Lassen, the Duke women’s basketball coach who has a viral video that’s amazing about how the whole thing in life is, “How do you handle hard well?”

Roger Federer had a commencement speech a few years ago about the mastery of hard things. Nvidia CEO Jensen was at Stanford Business School and said, “I wish upon you pain and suffering,” because his point to these Stanford Business students was, “You got to build resilience and you got to go through hard for that.” So, yeah, hard things are hard. I think I’ll take that.

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

Aneesh Raman
LinkedIn. The sleeper functions on Linkedin, I think, that people don’t know enough about is you can follow people without connecting to them.

You can go follow folks and they’ll be in your feed. So I am, I’d say, regularly, every three months, unfollowing some people where my curiosities have moved somewhere else, following new people who are talking about the things that I’m newly curious about.

So follow me until you get bored of me. Follow others. All the people in the book are on LinkedIn. And then the book, Linkedin.com/opentowork, that’s where you can go find out about the book.

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

Aneesh Raman
Bet on yourself. Find your way to betting on yourself and you’ll be okay.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Aneesh, thank you.

Aneesh Raman
Thanks for having me.