Learning Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
Pat, welcome back!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pat Flynn
Correct. Yes, exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool?

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

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

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

Pat Flynn
Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Pat, thank you.

Pat Flynn
Thank you so much for this.

Pete Mockaitis
Anne-Laure, welcome.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Thanks for having me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Yes.

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Going for daily walks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Manu, welcome.

Manu Kapur
Thank you, Pete. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m so excited to talk about learning and failure, and you are a master of failure. I mean that in the best possible way. And so, I’d love it if you could kick us off with you sharing a tale of one of your personal, or professional, most productive failures.

Manu Kapur
You know, looking back, I think it started very early on in my teenage years when I wanted to be a professional soccer player, and it’s a story I tell. It only makes sense looking back, as I said. My coach used to have a philosophy of training, strengths training, where he’ll say, “You’ve got to push your body, you’ve got to do your push-ups and your pull-ups and your sprints and everything to failure, until you really buckle, until you really can’t, and then you push a little bit more, as long as it was safe.”

And his idea was, you know, good things happen on the other side of failure. You really have to push it to know what it feels like to be there. And it’s only after that, when you give the body a chance to recover, and the nutrition and rest, it comes out stronger on the other side. And that, at the time.

We used to really hate that training, but as a metaphor for, not just a metaphor, now a science for just learning and growth, whether it’s strengths training or learning, it’s something that has inspired me for many years.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. And science, indeed. I’ve dug into those papers that powerlifters and bodybuilders look at. And, yes, progressive overload is absolutely the name of the game in strength training.

Manu Kapur
Super compensation, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And you’re saying this same principle is applicable in many domains of learning growth improvement.

Manu Kapur
Exactly. It’s the idea of bringing the system to rupture, to failure in a safe way, and then allowing it the chance and the support and the feedback and the resources to adapt and grow so that it comes out stronger from where it started. Yeah, we see this in a number of systems. In fact, it was the subject of one of my TED Talks recently as well, “How failure drives learning” in many different scenarios, in many different contexts.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, please share with us some other examples because I think some might say, “Well, yes, of course, that is just how the interesting biology of muscle fibers happen to work.” How is that working in other domains?

Manu Kapur
You know, if you just look at language itself, if I ask you to think about happy words or positive words, you may be able to start rattling off a few words. Now, if I ask you to think about negative words, negative emotion words, not only would you be able to rattle off faster, which also means that you will rattle off a lot more. And language itself has preserved this idea that negative emotions, things that are not happy or fun, they’re more salient because they convey more information for survival that we need to learn.

Because if you went out and you survive and you came back and you’re happy and fun, it’s really good, but it doesn’t help you learn or grow in any way. It’s only when you fail at something, you learn something and you develop a vocabulary for it. And conveying that vocabulary for how you felt, how you failed, and how you came out of that, that becomes very critical. So, it’s captured in a language as well but also, like I said, in biology and strength training.

In memory, for example, we see the similar effect. It’s when you introduce people at a party, for example, we often say, “Hi, I’m Manu. And you are?” and you would say, “Pete.” I often tell people you should not do that at all. You should say, “Hi, would you like to guess my name?” And you guess my name, a random name, right? You can say, “Oh, are you Mark?” I’d say, “No, I’m Manu.” And then when I say, “May I guess your name?” I’ll say, “Are you John?” And you’ll say, “No, no, I’m Pete.” You see, even a random failure of just guessing your name will help me remember your name more. I’m more likely to remember your name than if you were to just tell me your name.

Pete Mockaitis
Now that’s fascinating right there, it’s this completely contrived situation. And so, I’m curious, in terms of scientific literature, like, just how pronounced is this effect? Do I get, like, a little bit of a bump, like “Oh, I’m 3% more likely to remember a name?” Or is it like night and day?

Manu Kapur
It is a significant bump. I mean, I have to go back to the literature to look at the effect sizes, right? But it is a significantly strong effect that if you practice this method, it’s called retrieval practice, or a failed generation effect. If you’ve practice this, you are likely to strengthen what you’re trying remember over time.

In fact, the idea is you should allow, and here it gets even more interesting, is if you want to strengthen the memory of something, you should allow some forgetting because forgetting increases the chance that when you try to remember it, you will fail to remember it fully, and that failure to retrieve it fully actually gives you a better encoding when you learn to correct-think.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you know what is so amazing about what you’re saying is that this just happened to me last night. And this is the most small-scale example, but my wife asked me to open up the Waterpik, the water-flossing oral hygiene device. It has a reservoir of water on it, and it’s kind of tricky to remove it, and so I kept trying to remove it, and I was like, “Ah, shoot, I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on.”

And then she reminded me, she was like, “Oh, well, last time you did this, you said you were surprised. You thought you had to pull it one way, but you actually had to pull it the other way.” And I was like, “Wow, I have no memory of that,” but then I did it, and I was like, “Well, sure enough, that’s exactly right. I had to pull it down instead of out, or to the right.”

And then that experience just felt so novel and resonant to me, in terms of, like, “Wow, she remembered how I failed last time and I didn’t, and it’s just, like, this experience of being reminded in this way makes me…” I just have a feeling, we’ll see what happens in the years to come, but I am pretty sure this is locked in my brain now, the second time, how I’m going to open up this Waterpik.

Manu Kapur
That’s a really great demonstration from your life where you forgot how you did it, because you could do it at one point in time, you could remember it, you forgot how you did it, and then you failed to do it the second time around, but when somebody told you that “This is how you did it,” now the charge, now the encoding is even stronger. So, again, this idea that failure to retrieve something actually increases the strength of your memory, provided you get the correct thing, is really powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, can you share with us some other surprising discoveries here?

Manu Kapur
Then we go into the idea of, if memory can be improved by a failed retrieval effort, then can we go beyond memory? So, we’ve looked at, or researchers have looked at in tutoring situations, for example, people tutoring, tutor-tutee sort of interactions.

And they found that tutors tend to give a lot of explanations about how to solve the problems, and so on and so forth. But they found that the same explanation would have an effect on learning only if it comes at a point in time where the tutee is stuck in their efforts. So, if you’re a tutee and you are proceeding, you’re not stuck in your problem-solving efforts at all, and I give you an explanation of the correct explanation of the concepts required, you’re not likely to learn that at all.

It’s only when you get to a point of impasse, of getting stuck, that’s when you, if the explanation is timed at that point in time, that’s what leads to learning. So, it almost seems like that we need to be in the state, a cognitive state, or even an affective state, where we are stuck or we have failed to remember something or to do something, and if at that time somebody reminds us or somebody gives us the correct explanation, that’s when we learn really powerfully.

And in productive failure, we’ve taken that to the next level, where if you’re learning anything new from the get-go, how do you design for failure intentionally in this early learning process so that you can then bootstrap that failure for learning from an expert later on?

Pete Mockaitis
Wow, that is really cool. And it resonates in terms of when you’re stuck for a while, and then you hear the information, it seems like an epiphany, a revelation, an “Aha!” so much more high stakes, as opposed to someone just laying out the whole pathway, like, “Well, this is the basics of physics,” or whatever subject it is.

Manu Kapur
Exactly. And the reason that doesn’t work is, to understand something deeply, you need to be able to see “What is the underlying structure? What is so critical here?” So, imagine if you’re watching a movie, right? Say, it’s a very entertaining, very engaging movie. Now, if the person sitting you is an expert director, unless, I don’t know whether you make movies or not, how expert you are, but, say, you’re a novice at making movies.

Now, you come out of the movies and I ask you, “Did you see the same movie as the director?” Chances are, no, you did not. The director sees things that are right in front of you, right? It’s not that you were not engaged, you were not entertained, your attention was all there, the stimulus was right in front of you, yet the expert sees very different things from a novice. The expert sees the deep structure that the novice is just not able to see, because seeing is a function of what you know, not just a perceptual exercise, right?

And so, this is one of the reasons why experts just telling what they know, even in a very entertaining, very structured manner, is still not sufficient because what an expert sees in their presentation is not what a novice is seeing. And, therefore, the first job of learning something new is actually not to be told what the correct thing is. The first job is to preparing yourself to be in a state where you can then learn from.

The same explanation is very important, but getting into a state where you can process that information, see what is critical, and then code it properly and more deeply, that is even more important. And that’s what failure does, and that’s the whole system that we’ve designed.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, when you say preparing yourself to get into a state, I mean, it sounds like we just have to enter that state, is I guess we have many words in our vocabulary for it. It’s sort of like frustration, aggravated, stuck, like, “This doesn’t make any sense. Aargh!” I mean, it sounds like, well, you tell me. Is there a sweet spot in terms of, I guess, you don’t want to get utterly enraged that you quit and stomp out of the room? Help me out there.

Manu Kapur
So, let me take you through a thought experiment. Suppose I give you a task and you’re able to do it successfully, are you learning anything new other than knowing that, yeah, you’ve mastered this, you’ve done something successfully? So, I give you an even harder task, say, you’re able to do that too. You’re still not learning anything new. You’re just applying what you know.

I have to give you a task that is so hard, or just hard enough that you’re not able to do, and that’s when I know that you’ve entered the learning zone because failure gives you a signal that, “Here is something I cannot do. With all the capabilities that I have, I’m entering the failure zone. And in this zone, I’m bound to struggle, I’m bound to get anxious at times, but I can also try different things, different ideas, different solutions, and so on and so forth. And all of this is actually what prepares me for learning from the expert or a common resource later.”

So, getting in this state is really important, and knowing that these emotions, and normalizing the struggle in this state, is the norm, basically, it’s the expectation that helps you persist in that learning zone, so to speak. But you’re also right, it cannot be so hard that you just give up. So, there is like that Goldilocks zone where it is hard that you can’t do it by yourself, but it’s not so hard that you just give up, and you have to be in that zone.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, then tell us, how do we intentionally enter into experiences, or design it to be that way? So, it sounds like the wrong way, or old way, or non-Manu enlightened way is to just have the expert pontificate, and say, “Hey, here’s all the steps.” Or you can read the instruction booklet, and say, “Okay, this is the guide. I do A, then B, then C.” But then the superior way for retention and really learning growth is “I get in there, I feel stuck and frustrated, and then I absorb some brilliance.”

So, I’m wondering, so let’s say I want to learn how to make my first app. I want to figure out what’s up with these programming languages. So, maybe I, rather than just reading the book or watching the YouTube video, like, “Hey, here’s how to program Python,” or whatever, I would want to just kind of, following these principles, just give get up in there, and then get stuck, and then try to get the specific answer to what I’m stuck with?

Manu Kapur
Yeah, so it’s basically trying multiple ways of approaching that problem. So, try to design, maybe the app is too big sort of a construct. Maybe some aspect or a feature that you maybe you scope it down, maybe an email capture, or a visit capture feature, or you want to build an AI algorithm into it, whatever that thing is.

The important part is you try to design not one but different ways of putting that feature in place and then try to see whether there is a canonical way or there are more expert ways to sort of design those features. But, again, here I must say that if the goal is for you to be able to deeply understand how to do those things and why they work the way they do, then you need to do productive failure.

But if your goal is just achieving that it happens without necessarily understanding it so, then you do not need productive failure. Because the effect of productive failure is on deep learning and transfer and creativity. We are not always in situations where we need that. So, this is a personal thing that everybody has to ask, or a teacher or a trainer has to ask, “Is this something that people really need to deeply understand? Or is this something that is so procedural that we just need to get it done?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I think that’s very helpful for organizations as well, and just your whole life, in terms of, “Is my goal to become excellent at assembling IKEA furniture? Is that a thing that’s important to me?” So, in the domain of IKEA furniture or anything, maybe that sparks a bigger question of, “Is this even something we should be doing?”

And if it is something, so in a way, that’s almost kind of one key consideration is, “Well, if it’s something we want to be doing, it may make sense for us to learn a ton and be utter masters and have a deep, excellent competence in this thing. Or it might be something that we just want to be okay at and we’ll do it in-house fine. Or it might be something we don’t care at all about having that knowledge. Let’s totally outsource it.”

Manu Kapur
Exactly. Exactly. And that’s the distinction I mean between you want just high performance without understanding, just get the job done. So, there are many things at work and life we can just do, and do it to a certain level that we are happy with, and that’s it. But there are other things that we have a learning goal attached to it, the things we deeply want to master and understand and so on and so forth. And it’s only for those things that you may want to enter the failure zone and struggle and persist and then learn from an expert later on.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, then give us some more perspective on how we design such a situation up front.

Manu Kapur
So, for example, in, say, in schooling situations, whether you’re designing a course for somebody or something to learn, as we already established, if this is something they want to deeply understand, you don’t want to tell the person exactly what the thing is, and so quantificating doesn’t work. So, the first thing you want to design is, you want to design a task or a challenging activity that is beyond the learner’s skillsets and abilities.

You need to have a sense of where the learners are in terms of their knowledge and skillsets, and you want to design this problem-solving activity or a task that you want to give them that’s beyond that, right? But you also want to design them in a way that’s very intuitive. It should be intuitively accessible so that learners or people can try multiple approaches.

So, think at work, maybe you’re given a challenging project where you’ve never managed such a project before, and then you work with your team to strategize or design different approaches to getting this project done. But because this project is beyond your skillsets and abilities and beyond your team skillsets and abilities, chances are all the approaches or solutions or strategies that you develop are going to be either not going to lead to success or they will just be suboptimal in that way.

But giving people a chance to be in that space, and design that space and be in that space where they can explore different strategies, even if they don’t work, I think that is key. Also what this key is to tell people that it’s okay not to be able to get to the correct solution, because the goal of this learning task is the preparation, not the solution. And the more people explore different ideas and strategies and solutions, the more they are prepared to then learn from the experts.

So, it’s designing the space in that way that helps you then learn from the expert. And you can do this as a teacher, as a parent, as a trainer, as a manager, and so on.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d love it if you could really paint a picture for just the sheer efficacy of this stuff. I want to hear about this meta-analysis of I the 50+ studies that showed students who were taught productive failure methods saw some really cool academic gains. Can you share with us what was that study’s findings? And paint a picture of sort of a beautiful scenario of these principles all used in practice and being amazing.

Manu Kapur
So, the context of the meta-analysis in learning experiments, in mathematics, and science and so on and so forth, so the context is an education context, so let me concretize. Suppose you’re trying to learn math. I don’t know how you learned math in your school but my teacher would come in and say, “Today, the new concept we’re learning is blah. Let me tell you what this concept is. Here’s the explanation. Here’s the formulation. Here are some examples, and we work through examples. Now it’s your turn to apply those examples and solve problems.” And that’s how you learn.

And this is a method that’s called direct instruction. You don’t know something, I tell you exactly what it is, and I explain it to you very clearly what it is, and I give you problems to solve. And this is the dominant way that even current educational practice actually runs. Now, in productive failure, we went into classrooms and say, “Well, before you teach somebody something, let’s design problem-solving activities based on productive failure principles where students are given a chance to explore solutions to a problem.”

And we know that the solutions they will generate will not be the correct one. We even tell students that “It’s okay not to be able to get to the correct one, that’s not even the point, but try different ideas, just try different approaches, and then we will teach you.” So, it’s like instead of going straight into the instruction, they first do generative problem solving, and then the teacher comes in and teaches.

So, we can put these methods side by side and say, “Okay, if you learn from one method or the other, and you conduct an experiment study where you equalize the time, the same teachers teaching for the same time using the same materials, and so on and so forth, so you create a nice experiment where you can compare and then people learn through these two methods. And in the end, you test them on different kinds of knowledge.”

So, we particularly tested them on three types. One is the basic knowledge, which is, “Do you understand the concept? Can you remember it? Can you apply it to solve problems that you’ve seen in the class?” And then, also on conceptual understanding and transfer, your ability to take what you have and apply it to novel contexts, which is really the holy grail of learning, is to take what you know and apply it to novel contexts. And then we compare these two groups of students in terms of how they do.

And we find that even though both methods are very good at developing basic knowledge, foundational knowledge, students who learn through productive failure actually develop deeper understanding of the concepts that they are trying to learn, that they learned, and their ability to creatively or adapt the knowledge that they have to solve new problems in novel contexts, that actually is significantly better.

Now, imagine, this is just one study that shows this, and how scientists proceed is they say, “Oh, this is one study. Let me try to replicate it.” And the logic of replication is that “I’m going to prove you’re wrong.” So, now they try to replicate it, and say the attempt to replication failed. They find the same effects that, roughly, as I found. So, now there are two studies.

Say, another person comes in, a new lab tries to replicate it, and again the attempt to fail fails. And over time, you get a series of studies, each trying to you know fail the basic hypothesis and they fail to do so. So, over time, you have many studies who have failed to fail the basic hypothesis. And that’s when scientists start to say, “Ah, because of this vast magnitude of studies in different contexts, in different countries, trying to explore the same experiment or similar experimental effect, that there’s something there now.”

What we call truth is really an attempt to fail has failed. And that’s what a meta-analysis does. It aggregates findings from all the studies that have tried to compare over the years, and those are the 50 study, 160-odd experimental effects, and we aggregate it and analyze that, and said, “What is the average effect across these multiple studies in the world for productive failure over this other method, the dominant method, direct instruction, and how strong is that effect?”

So, we found a positive effect in favor of productive failure. As I said, they understand better and they transfer better, they’re more creative. But how strong it is? Now, we found that if you learn with a good teacher for a year, and say the unit gain in your knowledge is, say, X, then if you learn using productive failure, on average your knowledge gain is 2X.

Pete Mockaitis
Twice? Okay. Double.

Manu Kapur
But if productive failure is carried out really well, because it’s a method, right, some teachers carry it out much better than others, if it’s carried out really well, then you can go up to 3X. And that’s a very, very strong effect in education, in learning situations, that you can do, that you can have this kind of an effect on learning. And so, that’s the evidence-based, that’s the research, the empirical-based, for example, for this body of research, and we know that it works.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, triple your learning feels like a headline, Manu. All right, we’re getting somewhere. So, could you really paint a picture for a specific classroom educator approach situation in which we see, “Wow, here’s this, all these productive failure principles and philosophies put into action masterfully”? What’s that really look like?

Manu Kapur
Well, that design itself is called productive failure. So it has certain features. So, A, it has to be beyond our current skillsets and knowledge. You should not be able to solve the problem using what you know. That’s one very simple feature that it has to have. B, the problem should admit multiple representations, multiple solutions, multiple strategies. It should not have a single answer or single way of approaching it. So, it has to have that multiplicity.

It has to have contrasting sort of cases. So, don’t just give people one example, one case to work with. Give them contrasting cases. An example in this situation and in that situation, data about this, say, football player compared to data about another football player, the performance of this company versus performance…so always work with contrasts in these cases. Again, design these contrasts in ways that some things are the same, other things are different, so that you can direct attention to what you want people to attend to.

Keep the computational load very low so that you know people are really working with the conceptual basis, not trying to compute things all the time. And, yeah, so, again, this is not a like a prescriptive set of features, it is still a design activity. So, even with this set of features, people can generate many different kinds of tasks. And so, the more you get trained in using these features to design tasks, the closer you get to the kind of a productive failure task that really works.

Now once, say, you have a task ready or it’s working really well, you need to design interaction around those tasks. So, if I give you the task to solve, you may say, “Oh, I think this is my solution. This is one solution I have.” “How do I facilitate your exploration in that task?” So, there’s a very simple two-step exploration scheme, or facilitation scheme. So, I will, in the first instance, I’ll come to you and say, “Oh, this is your solution? Can you please explain it to me?”

Just the idea, just asking you to explain your solution to me is likely to trigger thoughts in you for other ways of doing it. We’ve seen this in our research. So, because the goal is multiple solutions and strategies, just asking somebody to explain often triggers them to explore something else as well. Second, sometimes people are really sure that this is their method, or this is the solution, and they’re quite convinced that it might work, even though from an expert standpoint it doesn’t.

That’s when you need to sort of get them into a habit of hacking their own thinking. What do I mean by that? It’s like when somebody says, “This is what my solution looks like.” After I ask them to explain it, I say, “Can you think of a situation where your own solution is not going to work?”

Pete Mockaitis
I like that.

Manu Kapur
So, it’s creating the counterfactual, and developing a habit to hack your own solution and say, “This is when it does not work.” Because it’s easy to say, “Oh, I developed it, it works.” It’s much harder to develop the habit of finding a situation or a context where it does not work. And just between these two, if you do this facilitation really well, you really help people either generate more solutions or understand the limits of their own solutions, even if they don’t work, most likely.

And all of this is then carried out in what I call an envelope, a social surround, within which people have to be told certain expectations, norms. Those are part of the design as well. And here’s the idea that the expectation is that you will not be able to solve the problem. The goal is not for you to be able to solve the problem correctly. The goal is really, “Can you generate multiple approaches, solutions, ideas, strategies for solving the problem? And don’t worry about getting it right.” Very explicit messaging.

Because if people think that they have to solve the problem correctly, they give up. The sweet spot is very, very narrow. But if people are told, “Look, we don’t even expect you to solve it because you don’t have the knowledge. But the idea here is, generate different ideas based on what you know,” then I think people can go a little bit more, so that sweet spot becomes a little bit wider. People can persist a little bit longer. They can deal with their anxiety and frustration a little bit longer, because, “You know, yeah, I’m not expected to solve it anyway, but let me give it a few shots. Let me give it a few tries.”

But these norms and expectations have to be set and persisted with over time so that people can do this. And when people have, you know, they’ve done the exploration, people have generated multiple ideas, and then they are now ready to receive instruction or receive expert knowledge, and that’s how it all comes together. That initial failed exploration becomes productive because an expert comes and assembles it all together.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And could you share a story of, perhaps, one of the most brilliant, beautiful implementations of this that you’ve witnessed?

Manu Kapur
I think, sometimes, I’ve seen it in the classrooms, for example, when teachers do it really well, and you often see it in what the kinds of ideas the students produce. So, I remember a math classroom where, when we tried this and the teacher was really good, and she was also a very experienced teacher who had been working with us for a while, and after the problem-solving phase of productive failure where students are generating the solutions, I went up to a student, and said, “So how do you feel?” and the student said, “Oh, I feel like a mathematician today.”

And it’s astonishing because, he could not solve the problem correctly, and still the remark was that, “Oh, I feel like a mathematician today.” And this is so true because one of my colleagues is a mathematician, and he’s one of the top mathematicians in the world, and he told me, “You know, 95% of my efforts at solving problems are failures.” Ninety-five percent.

And he says, “But if I don’t have them, I’m not able to get to the correct solutions. I’m not able to get to the correct answers. 95% of the things just don’t work out, but they are the backdrop, the launchpad for me to then think about the things that can actually work.” And so, there’s something in how we just get to the really breakthrough ideas, real creativity, real innovation, and the path through that is failure, otherwise, we won’t get to it. And we’ve applied the similar dynamic, and sometimes it works out beautifully in the classrooms as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Boy, I like that a lot, “I feel like a mathematician today,” seems to really convey a sense of, “Oh, I am really wrestling with the kinds of issues and concepts and considerations that a real professional grapples with, and I’ve gained an understanding of that.” And I feel like I had that moment recently after the election. I learned all about these predictive prediction marketplaces, like PredictIt and Polymarket and Kalshi.

Manu Kapur
Prediction markets, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And I was like, “Whoa, this is wild!” So, I went into that rabbit hole, and so I’m thinking about, like, risks and probabilities, and bid-ask spreads, and I’m learning all these things. And then I had that thought, like, “I feel like a trader today because,” and though I’m not, I’m just some amateur schmo, but it’s like, “Those are the kinds of things they’re thinking about every day in terms of, ‘Oh, how much risk am I taking on? Is this appropriate? Da-da-da-da-da.’”

Manu Kapur
Exactly. Exactly. And this is the part of mathematics we don’t expose our students to. They learn a mathematics where a teacher just comes and pontificates and tells them, as though math is, people who do mathematics always know the solutions to all their problems, and it is far from the case. In fact, how people do mathematics is exactly how we can learn mathematics, provided we can design these failure-driven sort of problem-solving activities for students, and then teach them the concept.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, you’ve got a great turn of a phrase, “motivational hacking.” How do we do that?

Manu Kapur
So, being in this zone where you’re trying things is not easy, right? And there are a few motivational hacks that help you persist in this problem-solving mode where you’re trying different things and things are not working out. First is the sunk cost fallacy. And that is the idea that if you’ve invested time and effort into something, you tend to stick to it even if it’s not working.

Now in general parlance, it’s not a good thing because then we continue to stay in losing strategies longer than we should, we continue to stay in bad relationships longer than we should, and so on and so forth. So, in those situations, it’s not good.

But in a learning situation, where if you’ve given a problem, if you’ve tried multiple strategies, you’ve put in the effort, that’s a good sunk cost, and that actually has motivational benefits. That’s the first. Just putting in the effort to solve something keeps you in the game because then you want to know how to solve it correctly. So, the sunk cost is a very good motivation from a learning standpoint and productive failure designs for that.

But before that even, like, how do you get started even, right? And that is the idea that if you want to learn, or basically if you want to solve a problem that may seem very, very daunting, the idea is to take the first step. And suppose I do, for my exercise, I do swimming. On some certain days, I’m just not motivated to enter the pool. It’s just too much. I’m too tired, I just don’t feel like it. But I know I must, I want, I must go.

So, I tell myself on those days, “I’m going to enter the pool and I’m just going to do one lap, and that’s it. If I can just manage one lap today, that’s my goal. It’s a success. Normally, I do 20, but today I’m just going to do one.” And guess what happens after the first lap? Do I just come out? No. “I’m in it? Okay, let’s do more, right?”

So, again, I just hacked my motivation by convincing myself that if I just get out, after taking the first step, I’ll be totally fine. When, in fact, once you’re in it, you’re in it, you continue. So that’s the second. Take the first step or find a way to make just the first step your goal. Then there is the goal gradient effect. You find that the more you do, the more laps you do, the more you want to do it, the more you want to reach the goal.

So, there’s like a gradient effect. It’s just not linear. So, effort actually pays off. And when you’re really near, and that’s the fourth one, when you’re really near, the last lap, we actually derive, we somehow seem to find this extra motivation to just get to the completion. So, we want to complete, and you will notice that. You find this second wind, extra energy. The last leg is always people want to complete. And that’s called the completion effect.

And so, these are the four sort of kind of motivation, how motivational hacks that people can do, to take the first step, to go on the goal gradient, to get to near the completion, and then the sunk cost comes in because then you want to really know, “Why didn’t my work, why didn’t my methods did not work? What is the correct method?”

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

Manu Kapur
Did we talk about the mechanisms, the activation, awareness, affect, and assembly, the four A’s?

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s do it. Let’s cover it.

Manu Kapur
So, I call them, like, the underlying mechanisms of productive failure, and there are four umbrella mechanisms. There are sub mechanisms as well, but the four umbrella mechanisms, and they are the four A’s: activation, awareness, affect, and assembly. So, activation is the idea that if you want to learn something new, you need to activate your own knowledge so that you can process this new information.

If I start speaking in, say, Mandarin, and you have no knowledge about Mandarin, you can’t understand anything. So, new knowledge always requires prior knowledge to connect with and make sense. So, the more I can activate relevant knowledge in a learner, when you’re learning something new, the better they are prepared to learn that thing. And failure does a very good job at activation because it makes you try different things, different strategies, and that activates all the relevant knowledge. That’s the first A.

The second is what activation does. It shows you the limits of your own knowledge. You’ve tried multiple things, and they did not work or did not work optimally. You know the limits, “Here’s what I can do.” So, there is an awareness of a gap between what you know and the expert. That awareness itself is a very important mechanism. Having that awareness is a really important mechanism for learning because what that does is it creates an affect.

And by affect, I mean your motivation to find out what the expert knows, your interest in the solution, your orientation towards when the expert explains. You’re really oriented to understand why mine did not work, not just to see what the expert is saying, but really understand why mine did not work.

And also, the affect has emotions involved, and we talked about struggling and anxiety. And we found in our studies that sometimes negative emotions can have positive effects on learning, and other times not all positive emotions are positively associated with learning. So, it’s good to experience in a small dose, in a safe way some of these emotions around struggling and anxiety in a safe way because they can have positive effects on learning.

And affect encapsulates all of these sorts of constructs of interest, engagement, motivation, persistence, and emotions. So, you get into this affective state. So, your knowledge is activated, you’re aware of a gap, and you are in an affective state which is ready to learn. If at that point, an expert comes and assembles it, just shares with you, “Okay, what did you do? Let’s see why it did not work. Let me compare it with this other thing. Why that worked, why that did not work. Let me compare it with the expert strategy,” and slowly build up the canonical knowledge, the correct way or the correct ways of approaching those tasks or problems.

Assembly, that’s the fourth A. That’s what makes the whole thing click. So, activation, awareness, affect, and then assembly. That’s the science behind why intentionally designing for failure and then harnessing it for assembly works, makes failure productive.

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

Manu Kapur
Well, one of my favorite quotes is from my dad, actually, and it only makes sense looking back. He used to say, “Your ambition should always exceed your talent.”

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

Manu Kapur
Oh, those I have several, and one of the ones that I’d like to give examples are of children playing with toys. And here, and I also talk about that in the book, is people have studied how children play with toys in experiments where, suppose you’re a group of children and they’re given a new toy, and says, “Here’s a new toy. Would you like to play with it? And just play as you like.” So, they just see how children play with those toys.

And to other groups of children, they give the same toy, and they say, “It’s a new toy. You have not seen it or played with it. Let me show you how to play with it.” So, they learn from an adult how to play with the toy, and then they’re given the toy and then they play with it as they like. And then people experiment, scientists examine, “What are the differences between these two groups. Who’s more engaged with the toy? Who’s more inventive in playing with the toy? Who creates strategies to discover how the toy works?”

And, invariably, people find that it’s the first group, which was not shown how to play with the toy, who’s actually more interested, more engaged, more curious, inventive, and finds strategies to play with that toy. And this is the part that I really love because it means that our ability to explore and tinker and fail is built into us from the get-go. And that’s one of the reasons why… you may think of play with tangible toys as one thing, but knowledge is conceptual play. So, a big part of productive failure is “How do you bring conceptual play to start with, followed by instruction?”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Manu Kapur
I would say one of my favorite ones is Shantaram.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Manu Kapur
Oh, making my bed.

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

Manu Kapur
Well, my online presence, so ManuKapur.com. If you want to learn about the book, it’s ProductiveFailure.com, or search on Amazon. I’m on LinkedIn as well, mainly, and also on Twitter or X, and Instagram. Or watch my two TED Talks.

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

Manu Kapur
Change mindsets. I think that’s the biggest thing that I want people to think about or take away in terms of our conversation today. That if you change your mindset, that if you don’t learn to fail, you will fail to learn and grow.

Pete Mockaiti
All right. Manu, thank you for this. I wish you many productive failures.

Manu Kapur
And you. Thank you so much, Pete.