Learning

Pete Mockaitis
Matt, welcome.

Matt Beane
My pleasure. I’m delighted to be here. Thanks for the invite.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to learn how I can save human ability in an age of intelligent machines.

Matt Beane
I think we all should be, and I’ve been trying to be excited for a good long while now. So glad to be here and chat about it.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. Well, kick us off, you know, there’s a lot of chatter about AI all the time. Can you maybe tell us something that is surprising, counterintuitive, kind of over- or underappreciated in the field since you really know what’s going on and the rest of us are just parroting the Wall Street Journal and New York Times?

Matt Beane
So, the core, the middle third of The Skill Code, the book, talks about a threat that I discovered initially in robotic surgeries. I was studying how you learn how to do that thing and how that’s different from how you learn how to do the good old-fashioned method of surgery, one way or another, and dear listener, trust me, I’m not going to get any more graphic than that.

But the short story there that I found really, really fast, standing in operating rooms at the top teaching hospitals around the world, is that intelligent technology in that case, AI-enabled robots, the AI there was very mild compared to what we’re all dealing with now, but it was there, that that was fantastic in many ways for productivity, for quality. A surgeon said it was like bumper bowling compared to traditional surgery, and it’s really true, actually.

When I’m in the operating room, it’s pretty amazing, especially when somebody’s really good at it. And novices, residents, would show up, help set up the robot, help attach it to a patient. They get a little bit of hands-on experience, and then they just sit down and watch for a four-and-a-half-hour procedure they’d be lucky to get 15 minutes of time on task because the robot allowed that surgeon to do the whole job themselves.

And that right there, I’ve spent the next nine and a half years looking into whether or not this is a generalizable problem and, dear reader, it is. That’s the whole point of the book. This is cutting across all sectors of the economy that I could find. I’ve been across more than 30 different kinds of occupations, different technologies, organizations, and so on now.

It turns out that we are needlessly, I think in many cases, sacrificing novice involvement in the work on the altar of productivity. That’s the basic deal that we’re striking right now, whether it’s with generative AI, whether it’s with robotics, many different kinds of technology now. And the short reason as to why is that that tech allows that expert to just do more, better, faster, some combination of those things, and part of the way you get there is you need less help.

Novices are, by definition, slower and make more mistakes, and they take coordination costs, mentoring and so on. It takes effort, time, attention. And so, in the short run, organizations love that deal, experts love that deal because, even if it’s a 5%, 8% productivity increase, you’re in more control. Experts love using their expertise. So, it’s attempting short-run target, and that’s the sort of hidden problem in the economy right now.

The best analysis I’ve been able to do, I think that is literally a trillion-dollar problem for the economy, it’s just that it shows up with a lag. You’re only going to find out a little later when those novices aren’t ready for duty.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Matt, there are so many, so many ways we can go with this. First, I think it’s beautiful in that.

You’re highlighting something that I’m really not hearing anywhere else. It’s, like, we are missing out on the opportunity for novices, apprentices, to do the initial helper, low-skill work, because at the moment, that’s kind of what AI is okay at. Like, I will say, “Hey, AI, give me 20 potential titles for this podcast episode.”

Matt Beane
You got it.

Pete Mockaitis
They’re still not as good as my team, just saying. Thanks, team. You’re awesome. But it does give me a little spark. It’s like, “Okay, that’s a good phrase. I’ll take that phrase and work that into something else that we got. Okay.”

Matt Beane
Yep, and that translates into, not always, but often the default deal is a little bit less struggle for that person who is trying to give you that feedstock. A little bit less complexity they have to deal with. In the lingo of the book, this is the skill code that’s up front. There’s three basic components to healthy skill development.

One of them is challenge, “Are you working close to but not at the bounds of your ability?” You do that, you’re literally sweating, you’re not doing as well as you could, but that’s where we learn mostly. It’s uncomfortable. It’s not fun. The middle one’s complexity, which is, “Are you not just getting a task done, but are you engaging with the broader universe of tasks you’re embedded in?” The other people’s jobs around you, the other technologies, asking broader questions, not just focused. That’s going sort of broad where a challenge is more deep.

And then human connection, human relationships, warm bonds of trust and respect between human beings. Those three things, you take that subtle, small, in your case, “just help me along a little bit” deal, which by the way is a much nicer version of what’s generally going on out there. You’ll just do it yourself in many cases if you can. Then all three of those things take a hit, but not for you. It’s for that next person trying to work up the chain.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And now you say this is a trillion-dollar problem. I’m curious what industries or professions do you think it’s going to hit the most hard? And, selfishly, are there any sort of market investment opportunities we should be exploiting, Matt? That’s what it’s all about, right?

Matt Beane
Yep. I’ll give you the one I care about most, which is to say there’s a huge potential upside here, yeah. So, you can sort of short the market. There are plenty of places where you should expect things to be more readily automatable with these technologies faster. And this fits in, I’ve got a piece in Harvard Business Review coming out in two or three weeks, or maybe a month on this.

Anything that is remote work right now means you don’t have to use your body to do it. In other words, it’s “Receive some information, process that information, communicate about that process, and send a changed work product off,” but it’s all digital. That’s a lot more straightforward for these kinds of technologies to handle, especially if it doesn’t involve multimodal data, just like text.

Some folks will lose their jobs there and that’s a serious issue for those affected. We should care about it. But they’re going to see, most folks are going to see a ton of job change. Like, what it means to do my job is going to radically change for that person who could entirely be remote versus somebody who has to show up and use their body for something. So you can go looking there, and you can look in places in the economy where the exposure to these technologies and the potential upside of using them is really high and concentrated in a job. A colleague of mine, Daniel Rock, who’s at Wharton, he recently, with co-authors at OpenAI, published a paper that maps this exposure across the economy. And if you want to make a smart bet about where there’s going to be the most change, look at those places.

The upside, though, is the one that I wrote the back third of the book about, basically, which is we like to romanticize this master-apprenticeship relation as if it’s somehow the peak of what humans can do in terms of transferring and developing skill, and we’ve relied on it for literally 160,000 years, so it ain’t broke exactly, but it can suck. And could it be better?

I think I’m very convinced, I’m trying to build technology like this now, that we can use the very technology that’s part of the insult to build new systems that, in fact, make that connection richer, better, more flexible than it ever was before, so that skill development functions better and from now forward than it ever could have in all of human history.

Companies that try to figure that out, reconfigure their systems so that just by using it, you’re nudged towards healthier skill and you get your productivity, that company’s going to kill. I mean, that’s such a great story. So, anyway, I think there’s opportunities in both directions.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that sounds really cool. Could you paint a picture for what that looks like? And is that happening somewhere right now?

Matt Beane
It’s funny, you should ask, only a few folks have asked. I am now CEO of a startup called SkillBench. In about a month, we’re going to come out and put up a stealthy website or whatever. But we are building a technology that helps an organization see this joint optimization problem based on rich data from inside their own firm.

Like, think of those as two dimensions. You’ve got productivity that comes out of AI, like, “How much juice are we getting out of this stuff?” By the way, it’s going to be less than you expect. We can show you that.

Pete Mockaitis
I think that’s my vibe, yeah, impression.

Matt Beane
Yeah, but it’s not none, and sometimes it will be negative, but seeing what that is, is actually not trivial. But we frame it as a joint optimization problem, and we get data that will help you show, “Fine, you get plus one utils productivity-wise out of implementing AI. You’ve bought your 20,000 licenses like everybody else. What’s the simultaneous interdependent effect of that on the human capital, the people who repeatedly have to do that job that now involves AI? Are they getting up-skilled or down-skilled? Are they more or less motivated? And are they more or less connected with each other?”

You know, these kinds of things, we’re building a tool to automatically help organizations just get a live dashboard of that so that they can figure out, “Do we like the trade-off that we’re making?” In some places they will, and that’s fine, right? Sometimes it’s the right thing to do to sacrifice building human capital for sake of a giant productivity gain, if you’ve got one. But right now, you just said it, I think, earlier, maybe three, four minutes ago.

It’s not a problem you’d ever really heard of that this is a joint optimization problem. There’s this trade space between how much productivity boon are we getting out of this thing. Oh, but that’s also interrelated with what happens to the humans that are left in that job after we change that job. Sometimes it’s great, sometimes it’s up in both territories, in both categories.

But it’s like driving with no rear-view mirror. Organizations are not in the habit of gathering data on that second one at all, or interrelating them two together. So just getting a window on what the heck is going on in that trade space is what we’re doing. But there are numerous firms out there trying to build technology to use AI, for instance, to make better, high-quality, briefer matches between an expert and a novice on a specific project.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Can you zoom into a particular industry, like how we’d see that in practice?

Matt Beane
A good instance is in chip design, one firm that I recently got some data on. Basically, when you’re trying to lay out a new chip, the state of the art in the last, say, 10 years or so is you’re going to use automated software to sort of do this optimization problem of mapping out where all the different components go on that chip.

And so, increasingly, over those last 10 years, basically that junior engineer, who would have been sort of sleeves rolled up over a diagram and doing math that contributes upwards to that senior engineer, who’s doing the block diagram and laying things out, they’re just going to have less opportunity to play in that interaction of designing that chip. They might do some isolated analysis, and actually, the dynamic’s very similar in investment banking.

Well, it turns out that that is not true for all chip projects, for all types of components at all phases of the game. So, in fact, if somebody is a junior engineer, and they’re working on power optimization, that part of the problem, like, “How do I make sure there’s the right amount of power going to this certain amount of the chip?” maybe the chip that they’re currently working on, they would just lose out on that opportunity.

But, in fact, there’s somebody in a fab in Jakarta right now who is working on a chip that could use a little manual help because it’s an ASIC, for instance, which is just a custom piece of silicon as opposed to something you’d produce, mass produce. Well, in the world that we inhabited before this kind of information was available, no human could know that for this one- or two-week window, there’s a senior engineer in Jakarta who could use the help of a junior engineer in upstate New York.

But now you can get that real time work data and say, “Hey, no, this is not done. The capabilities here are underbaked.” But there are firms that have realized, “Oh, this is some sort of problem I got to manage, and maybe there’s a way to make better sort of work-related matches as opposed to just matches across a hierarchy.” That’s the old school way of doing it, that many firms are still deploying, and that’s not bad, but it’s just very coarse.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I hear you. And with regard to, when you mentioned these things, like surgery, investment banking, chip making, which by the way, I read the book The Chip War. Extreme ultraviolet lithography is the most complicated thing I’ve ever heard of, and it blew my mind, which is actually a shoutout.

Matt Beane
It is pretty incredible, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Book recommendation there. But that really does paint a picture in terms of, at the at the highest level, yeah, there are some expertise that’s pretty high stakes – life or death, millions or billions of dollars, huge factory waste or safety matters – that, “Yeah, we’re going to be super careful associated with having a senior person and then a novice apprentice kind of learning under them and doing some work as they’re developing those skills.”

And, yes, it does seem kind of spooky that we could find ourselves in a place where those lesser experienced people don’t have the opportunity to do that thing anymore. And so, I’m curious, if some of us are already starting to find ourselves in that position, what should we do?

Matt Beane
First of all, in order to take effective action to address this problem, you got to know what an effective solution looks like. Like, “What would it look like if things were good for me, or the people that report to me, or the people that are in my profession, for building skill?”

There hasn’t really been a lot of proliferation of different views about what skill is, how you build it, and so on, and big theories that, sort of, “First, you do this, then you do this, then you do this, then you do that.” And I just realized this book was not going to be able to do that. Like, there are too many different ways of working now, different technologies and so on, different modalities of interacting.

But the raw ingredients, sort of like, and I use a DNA metaphor, that’s what’s on the cover of the book, if I could give you the amino acids of skill development, and they’re going to show up in different combinations in your setting, they’re going to show up in different sequences, different emphases. But for each one of those three things – the challenge, the complexity, the connection – I give you a 10-point checklist in the book.

You can immediately go look at your work scenario and say, “All right, how healthy is challenge for me? How am I doing on this, like, 10-point quiz? How healthy is complexity? How healthy is connection? And if it’s not great, then I, at least, know how and why it might change, because each one of those items is a specific set of interactions.”

For instance, in challenge, your challenge is healthiest when you have an expert nearby who can help you deal with the frustration that comes with not performing at your best. You can struggle on your own. You can get really far. A lot of autodidacts have shown us, like, you don’t really necessarily need someone to build skill but you need them to get superb progress towards skill.

And if you have an expert around who can help frame the difficulty you’re embedded in, in a broader context, like you want to be able to hit a fastball at major league speeds, well, the first goal is, “Why don’t you just try to even make contact? Like, forget about a fair ball. Get up and try to do that, and then you hit a foul ball, and instead of going, ‘Good job, dummy. That’s a foul ball,’ they can say, ‘Okay, you can hit a foul ball in the major leagues. Tomorrow we’re going to work on…’” right? They can sort of help you put that in context.

So, that’s just one tiny little micro example. That, I hope, the first three chapters can help anyone, in any role, in any job, look at that situation and say, “Is it healthy or is it not?” The next move that’s peppered throughout the book is, “Okay, assume in some cases, in some part of your life, in some part of your organization, this has been good or is currently great, what is it that is allowing for things to work well over there that’s not working well over here?”

Like, “The job I had last year, I was learning so much. Now, not so much.” What was happening back then that you could port? Or if you’re a manager in an organization, “Fine, skill development’s great over here. Why is it?” Because the job rotation program is so annoying. It turns out that rotating people through different jobs, no one likes that, and it is incredibly beneficial for your skills and career development. It gets you engaged with that complexity thing I was talking about in the middle of those three Cs.

So, lots of notes, angry notes, like, “I have to rotate through yet another function.” It’s like, “Yeah, you do.” And the job of the leader then is to say, “This is actually really critical for your career and it is no fun. So, I’m right there with you on it and we’re definitely doubling down on that,” that kind of thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, understood. So, it’s not so much, necessarily, that the wise expert mentor person has to be pouring forth, necessarily, expert nuanced insight wisdom, so much as they just have a bit of a broad perspective associated with, “Yeah, this sucks, it’s uncomfortable, it’s unpleasant in these ways, and also it’s useful.” And just that, in and of itself, is a huge value because the learner is able to then persist through the frustrations and rock and roll.

Matt Beane
Yep. And then, you know, I mean, technologists, people who are building these technologies that are currently enabling all this new potential productivity, and in some cases actual, they have a big choice about like how do they want to design their tech, how do they want to sell it. There are ways of doing that, the default ways, that will appeal to this monetary productivity-oriented logic that’s deeply embedded in business and firms, and they can win. And yet that doesn’t have to be that way.

I have a post on my Substack called “Don’t Let AI Dumb You Down.” And in the back third of that post, there are specific changes you can make to ChatGPT through its custom settings to have it nudge you towards more skill while you’re getting productivity out of it. It’s very straightforward. The interface is available, but that takes every single user doing that for themselves. That’s no way for the human species to win.

Like, OpenAI or Anthropic or Google, if they just made a few tweaks to that UX, anybody at the end of the day would be mildly annoyed, maybe more, by the technology because it keeps asking, “Do you know any other human beings you could connect with about this skill, rather than just me?” And it’s like, “No, I don’t want to debrief this interaction.” “No, I don’t want a harder version.” “No, I don’t want to try it myself.”

But if that’s the option, how many people, if it was turned on by default, would turn it off? Some, but a whole bunch of other folks, millions probably, would just know more about musicology at the end of the week for having used ChatGPT, or have made connections with other human beings in their local area.

This happens to me. Like, I am now connected to a rocket enthusiasts club in the Santa Barbara area because we all like to watch the rocket launches out of Vandenberg Air Force Base, and I just went into ChatGPT, asking for some code to predict when they were going to land the boosters back here in Santa Barbara. And because I had configured it that way, it said, “Is there any other human being locally you might connect with about that?” I’m like, “Oh, yeah, good one.” So, the tech, just so much power in the hands of the folks rolling this tech out, so it’s such easy changes.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really intriguing, this notion of these little nudges and how just transformational their impact can be. Like, 401k savings, it’s like, “Well, the default is this much is deployed into your 401k savings.” And people say, “Okay,” which is wild. You know, it’s like, “This is your money.” It’s like, “All right, sure, 8%, cool. Oh, you said, okay, nine? All right, nine, sure.” It’s like, “Whatever.” Like, most people just sort of roll with that default, and that’s interesting.

It’s funny, I have a calorie-tracking app, and I just changed the default to like, “Just assume that I burn fewer calories naturally.” Like, the threshold at which it turns green versus red is now different. And I know, I know I set it up to do that, and yet it does nudge me, it’s like, “Okay, maybe I’ll have a healthier snack so I can stay green because I want it.”

And so, that’s really clever how if we’re engaging frequently with ChatGPT or some of these things, if we can make the default setting to be one that nudges us in positive ways, we will benefit. And it’s funny, it’s sort of like, “Yes, I know talking to other people is generally a cool thing,” but it doesn’t occur to you in the moment. Likewise, it’s like, “Yes, I know I could look at the manual to figure this out.” I was like, “But, actually, yeah, maybe I will. I’d do that.” Because it said it, I was like, “Yeah, actually, maybe I’ll learn something else if I get the whole PDF manual of this appliance that’s giving me trouble right now.”

Matt Beane
Exactly. And, in fact, to the opposite, I lay out in the book, like there’s many cases where we grab for the manual and that hurts your skill development. It turns out that with, and in the book, I cite the research on this, that reading the manuals can be hazardous to your health of your skill. Basically, folks do it too soon, too early. We front load all kinds of explicit knowledge and learning into school, into work, formal training classes, checklists, SOPs, all this kind of stuff, when it’s generally better to get the minimally sufficient amount of explicit information and then just dive in the pool.

And then, after you’ve had a good struggle and a stroke and managed to get heaving and scuffing up to the edge of the pool, then somebody could say, “You want to learn a little bit about strokes now?” Humans are better at learning that way. So, a system like this, if you asked for the PDF, it could say, “You’re a little early in trying to deal with it. How about you just try a little harder? It’d probably be better for you.” I mean, it wouldn’t do that, because people would say, “No, go to hell, give me the PDF.”

But there are ways of doing that where, if you, as the user, specify, “Here’s my trade zone between getting my productivity,” and it’s like your 401k contribution. By the way, the returns on your skill are much better than the returns you will get by putting money in a 401k. So, if you set that slider, “So today I want to be pretty darn annoyed and learn a lot,” or, “I want to be not annoyed at all and not learn anything,” that’s your choice. But the technologists can make that available to people is the point. Like, that’s just a huge missed market opportunity, from my point of view.

Pete Mockaitis
And you say we can go ahead and do it ourselves. Is there a magic copy-pasted thing you recommend we shove in there? Or how do we get it done?

Matt Beane
Yes. I boiled down the entire book into two short paragraphs that I dumped into the custom instructions in ChatGPT, and that is in the bottom third of that post on my Substack. Substack is called WildWorldofWork.org, and the post is called “Don’t Let AI Dumb You Down.” I can send the URL after we’re done. But, yeah, the literal contents of those boxes, even as of today, I keep updating it whenever I make changes, is sitting right there.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, cool. And so, that’s nudged you to go meet some rocket people and has some other good impacts on your life as well?

Matt Beane
Yes, absolutely. And, you know, if I I’m perfectly candid, and most of the time, the thing says, “Hey, if you want more challenge, what about this? If you want more complexity, what about this? And how about some human connection?” And I wave it off 90% of the time, 94% of the time something. I could go get the data. And it’s always there though and I don’t not notice it.

And, by the way, what I have put together is the most basic ham-fisted, ridiculously coarse approach to this problem so it’s helped me. Yes, I have, for instance, I’ve learned a bunch more about coding because it itself suggested that I leave, you may have seen this yourself if you’re doing the sort of work where ChatGPT, or Claude, is generating code. You can turn a radio button on where you can watch that code getting written.

And it writes it at reasonable, it’s like 2x human speed or something, 2.5x, which is like listening to a podcast, you can track. And so, I’ve learned some stuff about coding just by watching, too. Like, I wasn’t ever a professional coder. I took some classes in graduate school. It had been 10 years for me or so since I’d tried to write any code to do anything, and now, kind of casually use code to solve problems. But you don’t learn anything about that if you just let the machine do its thing and take the output.

So, leaving that window open is a way where I just am like, it’s like pair coding, by the way, the best learning about how to code comes from sitting physically side-by-side with somebody where they’re coding and you’re watching and you’re chatting through the problem, that kind of thing. The best coders at Google are pair coding, side-by-side.

Anyway, this is all just one guy’s semi-random, I mean, fine, I wrote a book on the topic, and I know some stuff, but, come on, the world can do better than one guy. Like, we have to take wholesale effort. We have a huge opportunity to nudge all of humanity in a healthier direction on skill while getting crazy cool new things out of AI.

Pete Mockaitis
And it makes you wonder kind of about everything that we allow to be done for us, and like, “Is this trade-off worth it? And is it worth it every time? The dishwasher washes my dishes. Thank you, dishwasher.” But, in some ways, it can be kind of mindful, cathartic, Zen-like, just hot soapy water, physically cleaning some stuff, and sometimes that’s the right answer.

Likewise, the calculator or the GPS or anything that does anything for us, yeah, it productively accomplishes that thing faster. Cool. Thanks. But there may very well be times and places when I’d say, “No, no, autopilot. I want the control.” And it is enriching me in a skills development kind of a way and some other ways because I have wrest back control.

Matt Beane
Yes, exactly right. And it’s not obvious where you win by giving up the tech and in what ways you give it up. There are other cases, by the way, let’s be real clear, where by using the tech in its fullest capacity, you are going to build ridiculously more skill than you would have otherwise. So, in fact, there’s a win-win there where you were like just stabbing for productivity, and because you get to skip some stuff that is actually repetitive, annoying, you get to deal with the cool complex parts of the problem.

And so, we don’t pay a price at all. In fact, you learn a whole bunch more, “Oh, but maybe I’m sacrificing that novice’s involvement. Gosh, darn it, there’s no free lunches there.” So, it’s not just an optimization problem for me, Matt Beane, or you, Pete. It’s like, “I’m winning, but what about the people around me? What about the people who want to come up the ranks?”

It’s really, that’s a tall order to ask any one expert to be looking out for their own results and seeing that, in fact, if they don’t actively do something to support that novice, that person is out to sea. Whereas, in the past, to cycle, I skipped way past it in the beginning, like the traditional mode of doing surgery is a lot like doing lots of kind of work, which is, if you and I were doing it and you’re my mentor, there are four hands required for that job.

Like, somebody’s holding that patient open while the other person is doing something inside of them and that takes four hands. So, I can be at the shallow end of the pool, so to speak, if you decide I’m not really ready, but I’m not doing nothing. I’m on task the whole time. And so, that radical shift is the difference.

Like, that kind of shift as we’ve used new technologies to automate small parts of the work, the calculator for instance in accounting, that wasn’t such an extensive chunk of the work that the junior accountant was left hung out to dry. In minor ways, but that they were making up for by other forms of involvement. That’s the intensity and the pace of the change is really the main thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, if we could maybe think outside of AI entirely, when it comes to acquiring skills, we’ve laid out some of these fundamentals, the challenge, the complexity of the human connection, are there any particularly underrated do’s and don’ts you think that make a world of difference as we’re trying to develop skills?

Matt Beane
So, number one, when you are not performing at your best, when you are not having fun, and you are struggling to the point where you might be sweating and really can’t hear if somebody’s talking to you, like, you’re totally focused, that’s the domain where you’re appropriately challenged and will be learning the most.

So, it’s not a space that, you know, the minute you tell this to anybody, you’re like, “Yeah, there was that time where I kind of got a years’ worth of learning in four hours because everything was riding on me doing a good job. I did not do a great job, but, hey, I did it, and now I know how I can handle that situation, right?”

So that challenge, we, in many ways, have unintentionally created a sort of, the world of work has become a bit of a padded playground a little bit on this front. Like, being uncomfortable and real struggle is a status threat, like, you don’t look like you’re doing so hot, and so maybe you’re going to avoid doing that in front of people when you want to maintain an impression kind of thing. Or there are policies that will literally keep you away from challenge and so on.

Anyway, challenge is no fun, and it is absolutely necessary, and an expert, by the way, can really help you eat a lot more challenge than you could on your own. So having somebody there who can, if you can throw a flag to ask for help, or who can give you some key guidance at key points, there’s ways of amplifying, you know, eating even more of it. That’s one.

The second sort of counterintuitive one has to do with the complexity bit, which is getting your job done faster because of technology allows you, unintentionally, to skip by a whole bunch of collateral work and understanding that’s necessary for you to not have fragile or brittle skill. So, I did some research in warehousing, for instance, recently, and the people who really were good managers of their area were good because they knew about things like seasonality in the business. They knew about different vendors that they were using for staffing.

They knew about the technology, like the taping machine, and why that thing is rickety and how to shim it so that it doesn’t shake the packages too much as they go through. These are not things that you should be paying attention to in your job, but these people not only tried to get good at being a manager of a small group, but they wanted to understand more and more of the different jobs, different work, other skills that were connected to it so that when a shock came, for them, it was like, “Oh yeah, it’s wintertime, big jackets come through the building. We got this. Here’s what we do.”

And, usually, the way to do that is do not, first, go to the rulebook, do not, first, try to explain to a newbie in detail everything to expect. Give them the least information they need to get out on the field and try. So that’s kind of the opposite. Corporate training is show up. What’s the first thing you do? New employee orientation and training.

And that just front loads a bunch of concepts and knowledge into people’s heads that usually is just going to melt away, and then, at worst, they’re going to be clutching the rulebook while they’re out there for the first week trying to do whatever, instead of just trying to pay attention, do a good job and learn.

And the last one is that we write off human relationships as if they are somehow unconnected to how we build skill, and in particular, like trust and respect between human beings, when, in fact, it’s the main event. Like, number one, nobody’s going to give you a chance to build skill unless they trust and respect you, at least a little bit. So, if you’re not earning that, you don’t get to play. So, there’s an access bit.

But the other part is motivation. Like, I can point to the places in my career, but, also, it’s clear in the research. The reason you’re motivated to build that skill is because usually there’s somebody around whose trust and respect you want to earn, like you have a manager or an expert you work with, and you want to do a good job and you want them to recognize and see it, and say, “Hey, that was good.” Or, you know, “That was good, chef, and don’t do that again,” right?

You’re getting real feedback from somebody and you want a better chance to do something cooler next time, and so you’re going to work extra hard. You’re going to get up early in the morning to do a good job because of that human connection, not because of some, like, “I want to be competent,” abstract goal. Those are things that are important, of course, but like, un-divorce human relationships from your skill, like, they’re bound together.

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

Matt Beane
I’ll go for one that has been oriented my career for a long time, which is “The future’s already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.” People attribute that to William Gibson, a famous sci-fi writer, and he, it turns out, fun cocktail party fact, does not remember saying that, and thinks he never said it.

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

Matt Beane
The Milgram experiments with people’s willingness to obey an authority figure and administer potentially lethal shocks to somebody across a divide.

Obviously, that study has been debunked in a number of ways and so on. But seeing that as a 12-year-old kid, the video, I was just shown that in a class, woke me up to you can do research about this stuff, and, “Dear, God, people will do what for what reason?” Like, that just really just woke me up intellectually in a way that few pieces of research since have done.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Matt Beane
Well, the one I tend to go off about still, a couple years after reading about it, is one called There Is No Antimemetics Division by an author with no vowels in it, QNTM. They prefer to remain anonymous. I’ll leave it at that, because that book will, if you are into sci-fi at all, that will literally melt the head off your body. It is incredibly creative. It’s fantastic.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Matt Beane
That’s got to be sitting in the morning, almost every single morning, with my wife having coffee before the day starts. That’s sort of a sacrosanct thing that she and I have established over the last, like, 15 years.

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

Matt Beane
Yeah, “We’re sacrificing learning on the altar of productivity.” It’s one that I came out with for my TED Talk, and that’s one that I hear back a fair number of times, yeah.

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

Matt Beane
MattBeane.com. M-A-T-T-B-E-A-N-E.com. That will get you access to the book. It’ll also get you access to the Substack that I mentioned before. If you want the latest rulings coming out of my brain, that’ll take you to Twitter or X, whatever you want to call it, but it’s all there, sort of a central hub.

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

Matt Beane
Yeah. So, just figure out for yourself what kind of deal you’re making with AI around productivity, and what it might be costing you or others around you in terms of skill. It could be great, bully for you, and then your job is to help other people figure that out, but it probably isn’t. Go take a second look.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, Matt, thank you. I wish you all the best.

Matt Beane
Thank you very much. I appreciated the opportunity.

Pete Mockaitis

Marshall, welcome back.

Marshall Goldsmith

Very good to see you again. Thank you for inviting me.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, it’s good to see you again. I’m seeing a familiar backdrop. I remember you invited me to your home last time, and that was super cool. But I think this joke maybe has already been done before, Marshall, but if you’ll forgive me, I have to ask. Is it actually you, the human being Marshall Goldsmith, I’m speaking to?

Marshall Goldsmith

This is indeed me, the human Marshall version.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Okay. Because I’ve used the Marshall Bot, the AI situation that we’re talking about, and I didn’t think it could do a video of your face yet. Is that accurate?

Marshall Goldsmith

That is coming.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay.

Marshall Goldsmith

Now, the sequence of events is text first, then voice, then video, then video and multi languages, and then, ultimately, the metaverse.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay, yeah. You have a very clear pathway but let’s back way up to the beginning. So, all right, Marshall, we got a MarshallGoldsmith.ai. What’s the story here? What’s that about? Why? Tell us everything.

Marshall Goldsmith

I’ve always wanted to give away all that I know to as many people as I can. And I’ve done a pretty good job of it, yet I’ve tried to figure out some technology to make this work. I have pretty much 20 years of abject failures to my credit. I tried things like interactive videos, you know, $3,000 clunky boxes that weighed a ton and didn’t work. I mean, I have tried so many things with nothing but failure until the last year.

So, just in the last year, in hindsight, by the way, we had a whole group of people trying to figure out how to do this. It was really like having a hundred monkeys in a room waiting to type the Gettysburg Address. It wasn’t going to happen. We tried and failed. It wasn’t going to happen. So, what happened is now, after the advent of this new technology, it is mind-blowing. And not only is what I thought it would be, it’s about a hundred times better than I thought it would be.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay, cool. Well, so the technology to, as I’ve experienced it, I go to MarshallGoldsmith.ai, which all listeners can do right now. I can type in some questions or things and it will give me a response. And I can even play your voice, to hear your voice doing that response. So, that’s kind of fun. And so, tell me, how does this differ from, say, ChatGPT?

Marshall Goldsmith

Well, a couple of ways. First, everything that is a computer bot is biased. Let me give you what I mean by that. Let’s say you ask a question, “What is leadership?” A simple question, but there are 30 different definitions. My old mentor, Dr. Paul Hersey taught me, he said, “Look, always use an operational definition. Never say it’s the right definition. Just say it’s your definition. There are many ways you can find words. Don’t get into semantic contests.”

Well, when you use Marshall Bot, it’s my definition, so at least you know whose opinion you’re getting.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. So, duly noted, fair enough. Every AI bot will be biased in one way or another. With the Marshall Goldsmith.ai, we know it is biased in all the ways Marshall Goldsmith is biased.

Marshall Goldsmith

And my bot has no political opinions. No political opinion, no medical advice, and no financial advice. So, mine is programmed just to give you advice about people issues or things I may know something about. Anything else that’s outside of my bailiwick, boom, it doesn’t talk about.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I actually really appreciated that. I’ve asked it several questions and it says, “I apologize, apologize.” It double apologizes. Maybe that’s a quirk or a bug, “But this question is outside of my expertise. As an executive coach, I am only able to answer questions related to my life teachings and books.”

I was really having fun with it. It was like, “Hey, who calls you every day with those questions? And what are they?” It’s like, “My friend Jim Moore asked me these daily questions.” Okay, cool. It’s like, “Hey, did your daughter win Survivor?” “Well, my daughter, Dr. Kelly Goldsmith, was a contestant. She got far but didn’t quite win.” It was like, “Okay. All right. This is sure enough.”

Marshall Goldsmith

Ask it. Ask it why I wear a green T-shirt every day.

Pete Mockaitis

You know, I remember looking at your closet, there’s like a dozen green shirts.

Marshall Goldsmith

“Why do you wear a green polo shirt every day?” ask it that, “Why do you wear a green polo shirt?”

Pete Mockaitis

Let’s do it. Let’s do it. And, guys, you can have the same fun at home at MarshallGoldsmith.ai. Marshall Bot is thinking, ellipsis, “The New Yorker Magazine wrote a story. Larissa MacFarquhar noted you always wear a green polo shirt. You didn’t do that, but that’s what you remembered. Now they expect it from you.” Okay, that’s fun. Well, so we got a thing. Maybe we got a thing, it’s different in that the training dataset is not the whole internet, it’s just your stuff, like your books, your blogs, your articles. This is what it was built off of. I don’t know, am I in there? Is the interview? Like, I interviewed you, would our source material be there?

Marshall Goldsmith

Answer is I don’t know. Let me tell you, though, what it does do that I had not planned and only started doing like a month or two ago. My daughter wanted to trick it, so she said, “Aha, how is utilitarian philosophy related to your coaching?” I don’t know what utilitarian philosophy is. It gave this brilliant answer.

You can ask it, “How is Islamic philosophy, Buddhist philosophy anything related to my coaching?” it’ll answer it. So, what it does is it actually does peruse the internet, yet it puts everything through the filter of what it knows about me. Then it answers it in my voice in a way that is pretty much 100% what I would say. And, by the way, in about five seconds. This is mind blowing. This is not, by the way, what I expected. It’s way better than what I expected.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Cool. And I see that the tech platform underlying this is from a company Fractal.ai. Do we know, what are they working with? Do they have their own model? Or is it Gemini? Or is it…?

Marshall Goldsmith

I don’t know. Let me tell you, I’ve been a very unusual sequence of characteristics that makes this possible. Not too many people have their own sophisticated AI computer bots. So, this is reasonably unusual, number one. Why? For four reasons. One, I got a lot of followers. So, I’ve got 1.5 million followers on LinkedIn. Well, you give away everything you know, if you don’t have any followers, guess what? No one cares. You give away. Nobody cares.

Number two, I’ve got a lot of content. You really need a lot of content to make this work. If you have a tiny amount of content, it’s not really worth it. Number three, I’m willing to give it away. So, not too many people have a lot of followers, a lot of content and want to give it away. And then, number four, I’ve got some nice people at Fractal that are writing big checks to pay for it.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, okay. Cool. So, you part with zero dollars in order to have this capability.

Marshall Goldsmith

Zero.

Pete Mockaitis

There you go. Cool.

Marshall Goldsmith

On the other hand, I don’t charge anything. And they don’t charge anything. Now, let me tell you another thing I love about this. There isn’t some trick door. See, normally when you get something for free, it’s like, “Well, yes, you can get this for free. Yeah, if you spend just a little bit more, you go through the magic door and you get…” you know, there’s always upsell. What I love about this is there is no upsell. The only trick is there isn’t a trick. It’s actually free. You’ve been using it, right? It’s free.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, so then tell me, in terms of if a person just wants to get some value from this, and it’s just, “Hey, I got a question about leadership, whatever. I’m just going to drop by MarshallGoldsmith.ai, and then just ask it.” And that’s sort of how you envision it being used? That’s that.

Marshall Goldsmith

Anyone in the world that wants to. Ultimately, by the way, ultimately in multiple languages.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah. Okay. Cool. All right.

Marshall Goldsmith

It’s not there yet, but ultimately the goal is video and multiple languages.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, so now as compared to, if someone were to straight up hire you as a client, you are their executive coach, and so you’ve got many famous CEOs from across the years who have been your clients.

Marshall Goldsmith

Either, number one, they’ve got to be running a huge nonprofit that does good or, number two, they’re writing a nasty check.

Pete Mockaitis

Certainly. So, right there, we got some savings and better access, so there’s some advantages. But how would you compare/contrast the experience one would have, having you, the human being, coach extraordinaire, Marshall Goldsmith, versus MarshallGoldsmith.ai?

Marshall Goldsmith

MarshallGoldsmith.ai is an information and knowledge bot. It’s not really a coaching bot as such. It’s information and it’s knowledge through the prism of me. That’s really what it is. Now, when I coach people, yeah, you’ve seen me, I just give people crap all the time, you know, I make fun, I’m a terrible coach. Although I get ranked number one coach in the world, God knows why.

But anyway, I always give people a hard time, joking around with them, having fun. I mean, the bot is a bot. It doesn’t tell jokes too much and it doesn’t have some wacky personality, and so it’s probably not as funny as me, and it also doesn’t ask questions as much as me. What it does is it’s not really designed to be a coaching bot. It’s designed to be an information and knowledge sharing bot.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Understood. So, in a way, it’s going to give me something that’s a little bit more customized and on target above and beyond to, say, a Google search, better than Google searching your archives of stuff. I’m getting better…

Marshall Goldsmith

And better. Number one, better, and, two, it’s a pain in the butt. Let me give you some real examples. And as, you know, I can always mention names of my clients. One of my clients is Dr. Patrick Friis. Now, Dr. Patrick, I am a volunteer for him because he’s running the Rady Children’s Hospital. I don’t charge him lots of money, so little kids get…little kids don’t get health care. That’s kind of tacky. So, his is all free, but he’s merging with another children’s hospital, so they can have one of America’s largest children’s hospitals, right?

He asked me, “What’s it like to be a co-CEO? What’s good about it? What’s challenging about it? What ideas do you have?” But that’s a hard question. There really aren’t many co-CEOs. Now I’ve met a few. Some are very successful, like KKR. Most aren’t, right? Most aren’t. And I asked Marshall Bot. The thing had a brilliant answer. No offense to me, it was a much…I agreed with it all, but it was more detailed and thoughtful than my answer.

Then he said, “Well, that’s really good. How about this issue of setting boundaries? That seems very important with the other co-CEO.” Boom! He goes into great detail about that. It was amazing. Then he asked me anything I’d like to add to it. Well, I kind of threw in a little something. I think he tried to make me feel good, “Oh, Marshall, your comment is good. Your comment is good.” I don’t think I added very much. I mean, I think, really, if you had a contest, it versus me, it wasn’t close. Its answer was way better than my answer.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. So, when it comes to digging up relevant information, it can do that way quickly and way thoughtfully. When it comes to having a rich two-way back-and-forth question dialogue leading somewhere, it just doesn’t have that capability.

Marshall Goldsmith

That’s not what it does. For example, it’s not going to look at you and say, “Okay, why are you sending that for? You know, why are you trying to show off?” I fine my clients $20 every time they start a sentence with no, but, or however, right? So, I talk to them, and my client said, “But, Marshall…” I said, “That’s free. If I ever talk to you again, you say no, but, or however, I’ll fine you $20.” He said, “But, Marshall, 20.” “No, 40. No, no, no, 60, 80, 100. We lost $420 an hour and a half. At the end of the hour and a half, we said, thank you. I had no idea.

I was talking with another client who’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars, right? Hundreds of millions. He’s 53 years old. He’s good-looking, healthy, got a nice wife and three good kids. He’s not happy. You know what I told him? “Raise your right hand, repeat after me. My name is Joe and I’m an idiot.” I said, “You’re an idiot. What is wrong with you? If 99% of the world were listening, they’d be like, ‘What a fool!’ And they’re exactly right. You’re an idiot.” You know what he said? “Thank you.” Marshall Bot is not going to do that.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Understood. So, we got a clear distinction there. So, then, well, I’m curious, thinking broadly about this AI stuff, do you imagine there will be other bot implementations of knowledge bases kind of on the scene emerging in the future?

Marshall Goldsmith

Oh, yeah. I would imagine pretty much everybody’s going to have to do this. I mean, every corporation is going to have to do this. They’re going to have to have their own AI bot of sorts. And I’ll tell you one thing I know that they don’t know. They don’t know how hard it is. I’ve put hundreds of hours into this thing already. This is a lot of work. And it’s easy to do. It’s hard to do right.

Pete Mockaitis

Now the hundreds of hours, I mean, are we counting the time, like writing all those books that you wrote that go into it? Or are we talking about on top of that?

Marshall Goldsmith

On top of that.

Pete Mockaitis

What does that consist of? Like, what were you doing to make that come to fruition?

Marshall Goldsmith

Give it feedback.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. You’re like, “No.”

Marshall Goldsmith

Marshall Bot, I can change the answers. I ask it a question; it gives an answer. Parts I like, I keep; the parts I don’t like, I get rid of. Now, let’s say, if you ask it a question, but maybe it doesn’t have an answer, like somebody asked me, “How is your coaching related to, oh, I think Nietzsche’s philosophy or something?” Well, it didn’t know.

All I have to do then is go to ChatGPT, and say, “How’s my coaching philosophy related to that?” and then it gives an answer because it knows who I am, “How’s Marshall Goldsmith’s coaching philosophy related to that?” It’ll give an answer. On the other hand, I don’t always like all the answer. So, the part I like, I use that to teach my bot. The part I don’t like, I just get rid of. So, I’m using the other bots to train my bot.

Pete Mockaitis

Alrighty. And so, now that you’ve been through hundreds of hours of this, it sounds like you’re pleased with what it’s outputting. Do you still have to say, “Hmm, not quite right? I got to tweak this some more” from time to time?

Marshall Goldsmith

I would see this as a never-ending project. This is legacy for me. I’m 75. I’m going to be dead anyway. I’m just giving everything away. What am I saving it up for, right? I’m just giving everything away to people. My goal is just do a little good here. So, this, to me is, as long as they’re willing to support this, I plan on doing this as long as I can.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, do you have any pro tips on asking questions effectively? Or, I guess, the kids might call it prompt engineering to get excellent output.

Marshall Goldsmith

That is hugely important, because, for example, you might ask it a question, and you think, “Well, gee, I really wish it elaborated on point B.” You just need to learn to ask it to elaborate on point B.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay, sure.

Marshall Goldsmith

But if you don’t know that, you don’t know it. So, prompt engineering is very important. and sometimes you do need to be patient. Like, I recently did a test, and somebody did it and they didn’t get exactly what they wanted. I just re-did the wording just a little bit, they got exactly what they wanted. So, sometimes you do, it’s like anything else that’s new, you have to tinker around with it a little bit.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And tell me more, any other top best practices, worst practices, do’s and don’ts for asking bots questions well?

Marshall Goldsmith

Here’s the problem. Let’s say, “Why don’t people do what they know they should do?” Well, often the idea is they don’t understand it. That’s seldom the case.

If you look at my research, I did a research study called “Leadership is a Contact Sport” with 86,000 people. Anyone’s interested, send me an email, Marshall@MarshallGoldsmith.com and I’ll send it to you.

Eighty-six thousand people. The problem is the theory. They all went to exactly the same course. And then I measured, “How much follow-up did you do after the course?” The people that did no follow-up might as well have been watching sitcoms. It was a total and complete waste of time. And the people that did lots of follow-up got a lot better, “Well, you know, I learned.” No one got better because they went to the course. You got to do something.

Well, the advantage the coach has is the coach reminds you to actually do something, follows up with you, and make sure you’re doing something as opposed to just knowing a theory. From a theory point of view, I can tell you, in terms of if you’re a coach or advisor, do not compete with Marshall Bot. You’re not going to win. Look, I got to rank number one coach and number one leadership thinker in the world. I can tell you. I cannot even get close to competing with this thing. Well, no offense to the rest of the world, if I can’t get close, you can’t either.

Pete Mockaitis

Got you. You can’t come close to competing with it in terms of offering good content answers.

Marshall Goldsmith

Exactly, knowledge. I mean, you can’t get into a knowledge contest with this thing, you’re not going to win.

Pete Mockaitis

It’s got to like the AIs who can crush it in chess or Jeopardy, the knowledge contests. Well said.

Marshall Goldsmith

You can’t beat it.

Pete Mockaitis

As opposed to the accountability emotion stuff because a lot of times, in my experience, a great coach, part of what they bring to the table is just their observation. It’s like, “Hey, I see that you seem to like your energy just kind of dropped there. What’s going on there?” And then you surface something.

Marshall Goldsmith

I’ll give you another one. One person, the first time I met him, he’s introducing himself, so I’m taking notes. After an hour, I said, “Well, I’m now going to read you six times, in the past hour, when you pointed out to me how smart you were. Six.” I read them all back to him, and he was so embarrassed, he goes, “Oh.” I said, “Oh, you’re really not an ass. You’re a really nice guy. You just spend a lot of time proving how smart you are.” This guy had an MD and a PhD. His whole life was proving how smart he is. So, it’s just hard to stop. Well, the computer bot can’t do that.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, I’m curious, so if listeners are thinking, “Wow, I or my team or my organization needs to make our own bot,” can you offer some pro tips, some do’s and don’ts for the creation of your own bot?

Marshall Goldsmith

First, don’t. Don’t assume that technology people can do this for you. It doesn’t matter how good they are. They cannot do this for you. I’ve learned as human beings ask questions in a thousand different ways, and you got to sit there and give this thing feedback. And if your customers are asking it a question, you got to make sure that it’s a good answer.

Let’s say you go to ChatGPT, you say, “All right, what awards have Marshall Goldsmith won?” A simple question. I’ll say, “Give me 20.” Well, 10 of them, I’ve actually won. Five of them are awards I didn’t win. And then the next five, they’re not even awards. It just makes it up. Then I say, “Okay, give me 20 more.” Then it makes everything up. It just starts making stuff up.

Well, you can’t have a business, say you’re in a hospital, you can’t have something representing you making up stuff. You got to have somebody check to make sure this stuff, is it sane here, so it’s not giving you crazy advice. Well, I mean, it might be mildly humorous if ChatGPT or Gemini does that crazy stuff. It’s not mildly humorous if it’s your hospital.

Pete Mockaitis

Absolutely. And so, it seems like, in certain contexts, you might just have to have a human right there intercepting everything. It’s like, “Ooh, that sounds good. That sounds not good.”

Marshall Goldsmith

Well, you need to train it.

Pete Mockaitis

Right. Well, upfront training, and then maybe even real-time interposition.

Marshall Goldsmith

Oh, yeah. You’ve got to ask it question after question. I would say after X number of months, you probably don’t have to have a human there because after, say, six months, most of the questions that are going to be asked have been asked I’ll give an example, “How is humor related to your coaching?” Okay, I never wrote about that. It gave a great answer. The potential of this is amazing.

On the other hand, it’s hard work to do right because humans do not ask questions as you want them to. They kind of ask whatever question they feel like asking.

And also, you got to watch it because people will try to trick the bot, just like you did. They’ll try to get it to talk about politics, or controversial things, or stuff it shouldn’t talk about. Well, you can’t do that in a hospital setting. You just can’t do that, or in a medical setting, or in a corporate setting. You can’t have this thing making mistakes.

From my experience, you got to have to have real content experts do the training, not technology people. Because if you get technology people only, that’s when it goes off the rails because they don’t understand the customer.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, that’s good. All right. Well, Marshall, let’s have some fun with this. I was going to ask about your favorite things, but I might ask Marshall Bot each of the favorite-things questions, and then have you comment on the extent to whether that was accurate.

Marshall Goldsmith

It may or may not have any idea how to answer these questions.

Pete Mockaitis

We’ll say, “Can you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?” I’ll give you the Marshall Bot answer and then you can give me your answer.

Marshall Goldsmith

Okay, I’ll be curious. Yeah, mine would be “What got you here won’t get you there.”

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Marshall Bot says, “Successful people become great leaders when they learn to shift the focus from themselves to others.”

Marshall Goldsmith

By the way, equally good.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And can you tell us about a favorite book?

Marshall Goldsmith

Favorite book, yes. Favorite book, “Old Path, White Clouds” by Thich Nhat Hanh. Second favorite book, “The Wizard of Oz.”

Pete Mockaitis

“Old Path, White Clouds” it is. All right. Okay. Let’s say, can you share with me a favorite study or experiment or piece of research?

Marshall Goldsmith

Well, I don’t know if I’d call it a favorite, but one I quote all the time is the marshmallow research. And I quote that, talking about what you should and shouldn’t do. I’m not sure Marshall Bot would interpret the same question as the way I did, but see what it says.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s right.

Marshall Goldsmith

It might say “Leadership is a Contact Sport,” by the way.

Pete Mockaitis

It said you used a series of six active questions that participants answered every day for 10 working days.

Marshall Goldsmith

Yeah, that one. That’s a good study, too. Yeah, it’s from the magazine Dialogue.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, now I got to know. What were those questions or what happened?

Marshall Goldsmith

Oh, well, here’s what happened. Every day, I have people answer six active questions. My daughter, Kelly, taught me about active questions. They all begin with the phrase, “Did I do my best today?” So, everything, like employee engagement is a passive question, “Do you have clear goals? Do you have meaningful work?” Nothing wrong with it. But then it gets people talking what’s wrong with them. Nobody says, “What’s wrong with me?”

The active questions say, “Did I do my best?” so you can’t blame someone else. So, the six questions are, number one, “Every day, did I do my best to set clear goals?” Number two, “Every day, did I do my best to make progress or achieving the goals I set?” Number three, “Every day, did I do my best to be happy?” Number four, “Every day, did I do my best to find meaning?” Number five, “Did I do my best to build positive relationships? And did I do my best to be fully engaged?”

So, rather than blame everybody else for your lack of engagement and meaning in life, you start blaming yourself. You take some responsibility. People that ask themselves these questions every day, huge, get better at almost everything.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Thank you. And now can you name a favorite tool you use that helps you be awesome at your job?

Marshall Goldsmith

I would guess if you have to say something, it would be customized 360 feedback.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Marshall Bot says, “Feed forward.”

Marshall Goldsmith

There you go. Even better. I told you Marshall Bot is better than me. That was a better answer than my answer.

Pete Mockaitis

And how about a favorite habit, something you do that helps you be awesome at your job?

Marshall Goldsmith

Daily questions.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Marshall Bot said feed forward again. All right, sure. And then I ask about a resonant nugget, a quote of yours that really connects, resonates with folks, and they repeat it back often, Kindle book highlight it, retweet it, etc. What’s a Marshall original gem that you’re known for?

Marshall Goldsmith

“To help others get better, start with yourself,” or, “What got you here won’t get you there,” of course.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Yeah. We’ve got something similar, “One of the most important actions or things that a leader can do is lead by example. If you want everyone else to be passionate, committed, dedicated and motivated, you go first.”

Marshall Goldsmith

Very similar principle.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch with you, where should they find you?

Marshall Goldsmith

Marshall@MarshallGoldsmith.com. And to get to Marshall Bot, it’s all free. Just MarshallGoldsmith.ai.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Cool. And then I would say, do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at the job?

Marshall Goldsmith

If anybody asked Marshall Bot 500 questions within the next five days, send me an email and I’ll personally spend a half hour time coaching you.

Pete Mockaitis
Now there is a challenge.

Marshall Goldsmith

Now the record so far on that challenge, one person did ask a thousand questions. But whatever date you air, five days after that, if somebody sends me a note, say, at Marshall@MarshallGoldsmith.com, and says, “I asked Marshall Bot 500 questions within the five days,” I’ll spend an hour just talking with him.

Pete Mockaitis

All right.

Marshall Goldsmith

That way, it’s also great for me because I learn out their experience. See, that’s another way I’m learning. I challenge people to do this, and the ones that ask a lot of questions, and we talk. And, obviously, they’re very serious, they want put in that much time.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, beautiful. All right. Well, Marshall, this has been fun. Thank you. And I look forward to having more enjoyable conversations with Marshall Bot.

Marshall Goldsmith

Thank you so much. Greatly appreciate you inviting me to talk with you.

Pete Mockaitis

Scott, welcome back.

Scott Young

Oh, thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I am excited to hear wisdom from your book, Get Better at Anything. Tell us, any particularly surprising or fascinating discoveries you made as you’re putting this together? You’ve been in the learning game for a while. So, tell us what’s new and fresh and interesting for you in terms of learning about learning?

Scott Young

Well, I mean, it’s funny because I wrote a book and I talked to you about it probably about five years ago, Ultralearning. And after I wrote that book, I’m like, “Well, I’m not going to need to write another book about learning.” And as I started digging deeper and deeper, and more and more into the research, I was like, you know, there’s a whole new book here, there’s a whole new set of ideas. And so, basically, this entire book was me including things where I was like, “Oh, that’s neat, I didn’t know that,” or, “Oh, that’s surprising,” or, “That’s useful and no one had ever explained that to me before.”

So, I think when you write these books, you’re also writing for yourself, in a way. You’re writing kind of like, “What did I wish I knew before I read hundreds of books and hundreds and hundreds of papers and this kind of stuff?” Like, what would have been nice for someone to be like, “Oh, here’s a summary of what you need to know.” And so, I mean, that was the starting point for writing this.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, with that, let us know something particularly surprising, useful, and never before explained to you.

Scott Young

Well, so I think one idea, and this is one that I opened the book with and I think is very important, is the idea that how we learn from other people is an extremely important component, not just in our own individual ability to improve, but the ability for entire groups of people, communities, even fields to improve.

So, the story that kind of captured my interest and got me started writing this book was actually about Tetris. Now, Tetris is a game that came out a little over three decades ago and when it came out it was a sensation. People are obsessed with it. They’re playing it hundreds of hours a week. They’re hallucinating falling blocks. But if you look at the people’s scores by the best people who are playing the game, the people who were playing back then are nowhere near as good as like 12- and 13- year-old kids are today.

And the reason why is because back in the day, if you were learning how to play Tetris and you were trying to figure it out yourself, maybe your brother’s older friend knew a technique and you could learn and copy from them but, otherwise, all the players were essentially disconnected. And now we live in the internet age, and you can see live stream videos of exactly how people are doing it, detailed explanations of the strategies, how you move your fingers, everything like this. And the result has been sort of an explosion in performance.

And I was really sort of drawn to this story, not only because Tetris is kind of a funny out of the box example, but also because of how clearly relevant that is for how we learn things in the workplace, and how we learn things in our professional lives. It’s so much of the knowledge that is needed to perform well is locked inside the heads of a few experts. And if you don’t have access to it, if you don’t have the ability to learn from other people, that can really delay and stall your own progress.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, Scott, yes, I love that part of the book about Tetris, because I have in fact watched the Tetris Classic World Championships a few times and am really fascinated by how, yes, the young folks today in Tetris are heads and shoulders above previous champions in terms of their skill. And your point about how, with YouTube and streaming and such, we can really see what are the best folks in the world doing. And as a result, they are advancing much more quickly.

And by contrast, I would say at the very highest level of, say, chess, that has not been as much of a phenomenon, from what I can gather with Magnus Carlsen arguably being better than Bobby Fisher and others of the world champions historically. But, in a way, chess was well documented for centuries in terms of, “Here are the best games of the best players and they’ve been around for quite a long time.” Whereas Tetris and other domains of knowledge, it’s more of a recent phenomenon that, “Oh, hey, we can all see what the best players are doing in great detail all the time.”

Scott Young

Yeah, I think for chess, part of the thing is that it really lends itself to being documented through text. And I think that’s why you have such a rich history of, like, famous games were played 200 years ago and this kind of stuff. I think the technology needed to document elite-level chess play has existed for a really long time. So, of course, there is performance improvements. And I do think that the arrival of like really good computer chess has changed the game too, because there’s just things.

So that’s, like, not a technological innovation that I’m talking about here, but it is an area that I think explains why some of the better players maybe are better than a generation or two ago is that you can have Stockfish search through the space of possible moves and do research on opening positions and stuff in a way that you had to use the human brain to do until very recently.

So, I do think that there are some innovations there, but obviously a major difference between Tetris and chess is chess is like a discreet game where you move each piece, and you can just write it down and that’s all you need to know about the game. You can do it by correspondence via letters. Whereas Tetris, because it is this human software interaction, you need to know tons of details that are not just about, like, this is where this block went, but the exact timing of certain button presses and these kinds of things.

And that, I think, the ability to witness that, the ability to document those aspects of play, they just weren’t around in the early ‘90s. It was very hard. So, you had people like Thor Aackerlund, who figured out a really good way to press the buttons, but he was the only one who knew it, and so everyone else was doing something else, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s well said. And it’s funny, I have heard murmurs that amongst, say, unrated players at chess tournaments, they say, “Oh, watch out, the unrated players showing up at chess tournaments are now phenomenal because they’ve been using Stockfish to analyze their games and say, ‘Oh no, see that game you just played? These are actually the very best moves you could have played.’” And so, they’re learning faster.

So, by the time they actually show up on a measured event, it’s like, watch out, unrated players of today are just obliterating unrated players of yesteryear. So that’s, in a way, intriguing, maybe not the very highest championship levels, but at the, in many ways, advances in technology are improving the ability of folks to learn because they could readily see what is optimal.

Scott Young

Yeah, and I think it’s easier to sort of document these phenomena in areas like chess and Tetris where performance is quite objective, it’s measurable, and we have details on, like, what the best people are doing. But I think for that reason, it’s very important to think about these in the kind of softer, squishier context that we usually live in, like, writing a book, for instance.

I was just reflecting on the fact that when I got into writing my first book, that, essentially, if you don’t have a bunch of friends who’ve already published books, the world of traditional book publishing is just completely opaque. It’s just something that very few people understand, people don’t understand how it works, and there’s lots of people that’ll waste years of their life going down a path in writing a book or trying to pursue that as a career, that it’s just a total dead end without realizing it.

And so, I think this is the sort of phenomenon of how can you get access to, “Well, this is what the best practices are. This is how you perform this skill. This is sort of the template,” so that it doesn’t necessarily make you the best Tetris chess player author in the world, but it gets you so much faster up to that frontier. And I think that is just a huge factor in whether or not you’re able to get better, whether you have to reinvent the wheel or whether you’re getting the blueprint given to you.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, I love that notion there, “Are we getting the blueprint from the best performers in the world? Or are we wasting years of our life pursuing dead ends to really polarize and extremify the ends of it.” And I remember when I was in the early days of podcasting, I went to the Podcast Movement Conference, which is awesome. And folks were like, “How do I grow my podcast? How do I grow my podcast?” And I too wonder that.

And then it became very clear, the answer, according to all the best podcasters in the world, to grow a podcast is to be a guest on other podcasts. Like, that’s the thing you do. Like, it’s not about Facebook ads or tweeting really clever things. It’s be a guest on a lot of other large podcasts and be amazing, so people say, “Wow, I should check that person out.”

And I remember it was kind of an eye-opener for me. It’s like, “Huh, all these top people just keep saying the same thing. Whereas I thought out here, a variety of answers.” And then I shared that with a couple other people, they said, “Yeah, that is the thing I keep hearing.” And it makes sense in hindsight, and I’ve seen success with it myself, but if you’re just sort of taking your best guess or Googling something, you are very likely to end up with dozens of paths when, apparently, one is the very best.

Scott Young

It’s funny, I just want to like to keep pulling on this game analogy that we’ve been using, which maybe I’m stretching it too far. But the basic idea in a lot of games that are played competitively is that there’s this idea of a meta. And the meta is not really like the game itself, but sort of the higher-level understanding of what’s the best practice.

So, in chess that would be like, “What are the openings that are popular? What are the responses that are popular?” So, if you’re a good chess player, you’re going to know, “Oh, that kind of thing was something people did 40 years ago, but most people do this now.” And pretty much any game you can think of has this kind of meta layer.

But the truth is that the same is true in your career, the same is true in your professional life, that there is a kind of meta, there is a sort of, like, what you were saying is that the meta, at least at that point in time of how do you grow a big podcast was, well, you got to be a guest on other people’s podcasts. And I have been doing this sort of, you know, I started out blogging, I have a newsletter, I’ve been doing this for like almost two decades.

And the amounts of changes to the meta as like, “This is the way you build an audience. This is what you do to build a business, this kind of thing.” They’ve turned over, like, five or six times and you always spot people who are very good at picking up this meta. Now, maybe they’re not like the smartest person in the world.

Maybe they don’t even have like, you know, it’s not like this person just has really high raw intellect or this person is the best possible writer, the best possible content creator, but they have a really good understanding of the meta. They have a really good understanding of what is the best practice, what’s working right now, and they’re able to just leapfrog other people in their field because they have that understanding.

And so, that’s something that I’ve really taken to heart in thinking of a lot of skills, because often we take this kind of academic model where we think about like, “Well, the main thing for succeeding in school or for learning is your raw brain power,” but it may be the case that it’s more your ability to connect with other people and to sort of figure out what this sort of best practices is for a field that maybe the smartest people in the room, if they don’t have those connections, maybe they don’t know.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, that’s super. And so, you’ve laid out three key factors, the See-Do-Feedback. Can you unpack a little bit of this broadly?

Scott Young

Yeah, so the See is kind of what we’ve already been talking about, “How do you learn from other people?” And the book kind of documents both sort of how enabling this is, like a lot of the cognitive science showing why this matters so much, as well as some of the obstacles, like, “What makes it difficult sometimes to learn from other people?”

Do is obviously practice matters to get good at anything. You don’t just get good at something by watching someone. You don’t get good at podcasting by reading how to make a great podcast online or just listening to podcasts. You have to do it a lot, and same with all skills. But importantly, the kind of practice matters.

And so, there’s a lot of research showing what practice does and what it doesn’t do. And the thing is, is that, a lot of times you can spend years, maybe even decades, working on a skill, continuing to do the same things, and you don’t get that much better at it. You don’t actually improve that much. So, I think a firmer understanding of what practice is actually doing, what it helps with, and what it doesn’t help with is very important if you want to make progress and not waste a lot of effort.

And then, finally, Feedback is important because it’s not enough. We don’t just get things perfectly the first time. We need corrective information from the environment, from coaches, from our own performance, our own interactions with the environment that we care about. And so, there’s a lot of information about how you can finetune feedback to accelerate your growth.

Pete Mockaitis

Lovely. Well, so let’s hit this mystery. What does practice do for us? What does it not do for us?

Scott Young

So, the basic idea, and I mean, there’s a lot of things to unpack here, but when we practice something over and over again, one of the things that’s going on is that we are making the skill more automatic. To use an example, let’s say we’re typing on a computer. And if you start typing and you decide you don’t get a proper instruction, you’re doing the hunting and pecking, you’re using the two fingers, you’re looking at the keyboard.

If you keep doing that, it will become more automatic, more effortless, a little bit faster. So, you will be on some kind of practice curve where you’ll be getting slowly, slowly better over time. There’s lots of studies showing exactly the shape of that curve, and you do continue to get better, but it gets slower and slower and slower over time. So, in the beginning you show this sort of steep part of the learning curve and then it flattens out and flattens out and flattens out.

So, if you’ve been doing it for 10 years, you may not even notice getting much better at it, even if you keep doing it, but, and this is really important, the hunting and pecking strategy never just spontaneously evolves into touch typing without deliberate effort. So, what the practice is doing is it’s kind of ingraining a habit. It’s ingraining a way of doing things deeper and deeper.

Now, in reality, we often, when we’re doing things, we don’t do things perfectly consistently all the time, so there is a chance to improve, to try new methods and work things out. But it shows how, what we were talking about with the learning the best practices, that if you don’t kind of get in the right ballpark, someone doesn’t teach you, “Okay, this is the home row, put your fingers on here. This is how you move to hit the keys,” then all the practice in the world may not transform you into using the right proper technique.

And so, I think that a lot of what we’re doing when we’re practicing is this sort of dialogue between like, “Am I using the right method? Am I using the best practices? And am I getting enough repetitions? Am I getting enough, like, realistic feedback in order to actually ingrain this skill and make it automatic for me?”

Pete Mockaitis

That’s cool. And what’s intriguing is that some activities, feedback is really built in. And I think if we’re playing a game, for example, it’s like, “Oh, hey, I won. Oh, hey, I got more lines than I got before. That’s great.” Or, I’m thinking about, one of my favorite podcasts is Darknet Diaries, and so we talk about hackers. And so, it seems like they kind of get obsessed with the thing, like, “Huh, I wonder if there’s an exploit here? Let me try it. No, it didn’t work. Let me try again. Let me try.”

And so, in some activities, there’s automatic feedback built right in, and in others, I think about podcasts, they’re not. Like, you could go hundreds of episodes and not hear much, or that would tell you to, “Ooh, do what you did last time. That’s amazing,” or, “Stop doing what you did. That wasn’t working so well.” So, how do you think about means by which we get that feedback integrated well?

Scott Young

I think I would even add to that point, because even when you are getting feedback in that kind of environment, it’s not always helpful. I had a conversation with someone about standup comedy and they were talking about, “Well, you’re getting all this feedback from the audience.” Like, why do some comics, they’ve been around for, like, 10 years and they’re just not getting funnier?

And it’s because, well, whether someone doesn’t laugh or laughs at your joke, that can kind of tell you, “Okay, say it this way and not this way.” But again, it’s not going to give you the full space of possibility. If you’re just not funny, if none of the things you’re saying are funny, it’s not going to give you, like, “Well, this is the joke you should have said,” right? You’re just going to be like, “Well, I guess they don’t like me.”

And so, I think that’s true of a lot of creative professions. Like, you write the book and it doesn’t sell, I mean, that is feedback, but, like, what does it tell you? Like, it could tell you, there’s like a million things that could be wrong, right? You don’t actually know. And so, I think for these kinds of complicated domains, this is one reason why we want to try to enhance the feedback that we get.

So, one of the chapters in the book, I talk about how in a more narrow context, this is the context of making judgments. This is not a complicated skill, like writing a book or producing a podcast, but something where you are just making a judgment, like, “Do I hire this person or not hire them? Are they going to turn out or they’re not going to turn out?” Or, if I’m a parole officer, “Will this person commit another crime? Or are they going to behave themselves when they’re out on bail?” and these kinds of things, these kinds of decisions.

And they find that people who have extensive experience have lots and lots of confidence, which is consistent with their idea that their decisions become more and more automatic. They don’t hum and haw over them. They get more and more confident, but they don’t actually get that accurate. And you can make like fairly simple models using spreadsheets that reliably outperform them.

So, in these cases, I think some of the ways that you can augment your feedback is, well, if it’s a kind of creative profession, it’s something where you are, there is some sort of practice, it’s good to have a coach. It’s good to have someone who can look at what you’re doing and offer advice. I would much rather have a good editor read my book and offer feedback than, like, a hundred random readers. I would much rather have a good business coach tell me what I should be doing with my company rather than just 15 product complaints.

I also think that having a brain trust or having a group of people where you can do work, share it with each other, and then offer feedback, advice together can often be very helpful, not because any one of those people knows more than you do, but because they’re better able to integrate information. So, if there was some glaring flaw with what you did and you missed it, it would be much less likely that a group of, like, five or six people would miss it. And so, that’s another way that you can enhance that kind of feedback for those sorts of pursuits.

Pete Mockaitis

Lovely. Well, I’d love to dig into a couple of particular examples for putting these principles into action for learning different things. But, first, could we have maybe your four-minute-ish version of a rundown of your 12 maxims of mastery?

Scott Young

So, the 12 maxims is “problem-solving is search.” I cover the basic theory of like how people solve problems. And this is this idea that we solve problems by searching for a solution in a space, like going from a start to the end point in a maze. And we do that using methods and knowledge that we’ve built up from experience.

The second chapter is “creativity begins with copying.” This is the idea that creative progress is not opposed to copying. It’s not like originality and copying are the antitheses of each other, but that creativity builds from acquiring past knowledge, from mastering methods from the past. “Success is the best teacher” is the idea that the way we build motivation and interest in a subject is by building up successes and having the right foundation of skills so we know the building blocks of how it works.

“Experience makes knowledge invisible” is the next one, and this one is about how, as you gain more experience in a subject, your own explicit understanding of how it works often recedes into the background. And so, this means that when we’re learning from other people, often we have that kind of tension of, like, “How do we learn from this person when, for them, it’s just obvious?” And so, we have to try to use techniques to surface what is obvious to them, but is not obvious to us. That’s the See chapters.

Do, “I have difficulty” has a sweet spot. This is about finetuning the right level of difficulty and finding a practice loop where you go between seeing examples, doing your own practice, and getting feedback. “The mind is not a muscle.” This is based on a lot of research showing what exactly improves with practice and sort of contrary to the assumption that a lot of people have that, if you just do practice, it’s going to make your mental muscles broadly stronger. That’s probably the wrong way to think about how the mind works. A better way to think of the mind is that it’s like a collection of tools built out of knowledge. And so, you need a lot of different gadgets, a lot of different tools to get the job done.

The next one is “variability over repetition.” This is an idea about variable practice, about how practicing with variations in terms of what you’re doing. So, mixing up what you’re practicing, practicing different concepts, putting things side by side, tends to make our learning more robust and our skills more proficient. And then I have “quality comes from quantity,” which is covering Dean Simonton’s work on creativity, showing that as creators reach the sort of frontier of their field, they tend to have about an equal ratio of hits to misses for their creative work, which shows that if you want to have more hits, then you need to make more work.

And so, this has, I think, profound implications for once we get to sort of the edge of doing our field where we’re regularly producing work, finding ways that we can kind of consistently focus on creative output can make a bigger difference than trying other kinds of strategies. I talk about “experience doesn’t reliably lead to expertise,” which is what we talked about before about this idea that with judgments, lots of experts of different stripes show kind of poor predictive ability, and it’s because they don’t get reliable feedback.

“Improvement is not a straight line” is about unlearning and about fixing bad habits and the sort of necessary work of correcting mistakes that inevitably arise in our early performance. And then I have “practice must meet reality,” which is about the idea of engaging in the situation that you’re working in, so not just practicing in the classroom, but getting out in the real world and doing it.

And then, finally, “fear fades with exposure,” where I cover a lot of the research on the neuroscience of anxiety and how exposure to situations that give us anxiety that we’re afraid of, that have not strong danger, we’re not very likely to get supremely hurt, actually cause the fear response to subside. And this is a very important factor if we want to tackle skills that maybe are a little daunting for us.

Pete Mockaitis

Lovely. Well, thank you for that rundown, Scott. So, I’d love to get your view when it comes to finding these super experts. It seems that having lots of years of experience isn’t necessarily the top credential or qualifier to say, “Oh, this is the expert, the master I should be seeing, learning from.” How do you recommend we determine who are the true exemplars, the providers of best practices that we ought to emulate?

Scott Young

Well, so I tend to view it a little differently. So, my thinking is not so much that we want to find that one perfect paragon of virtue that we want to follow, but that we want to look at the community that’s at the frontier. So, if I were looking at embarking on a new field, I want to switch into academia and start publishing. I’m not going to just like find, well, who’s the superstar academic and what they’re doing? Rather, I’m going to find people who are sort of broadly successful in this field, and I’m going to want to meet and interview with a lot of them and see what they’re doing.

Because I think the communal understanding of how a field works, this kind of meta, is often surpassing any individual person. And so, I think that’s one of the real lessons of the examples, like Tetris and these other environments, that the sort of the group can be smarter than the individual. And so, if I wanted to become, you know, I use the example of Octavia Butler, science fiction writing, and how attending workshops was really, really pivotal for her becoming successful professionally, it wasn’t so much that, “Oh, there’s just one person who knows what it is.”

But when you’re in an environment where you’re with a bunch of other people finally who are all doing the same kind of thing, you can learn from each other and you can stitch together an understanding of that field that maybe any individual person doesn’t have all the pieces, all the answers.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s good. And I think that’s kind of exciting or fun for your own learning process as well. It’s, like, if you interview five people, it’s like, “Well, holy smokes, they have their own eccentricities, idiosyncrasies, unique little things, like rare talents that I could ever hope to emulate maybe here or there. But these five people are all kind of saying three of the same things. Like, here’s a theme, a pattern that’s popping up again and again and again. Okay. Do we know it?”

Scott Young

Well, kind of a weird analogy, but the thing that I think about is that they did these studies with overlaying transparencies of people’s faces. And if you overlay a bunch of people’s faces, the net result is a more attractive face than any individual person’s face. This is just averaging out all the features. And I kind of think the same way about understanding a field, is that any individual person is going to know some of the things that are important, but they’re also going to have weird pet theories and idiosyncrasies that just don’t matter at all.

And so, if you just interview that one person, you’re going to be like, “Oh, well, the key to being a successful writer is to, like, work in a basement and, like, not have any light, or the light is bad.” Or, I’m trying to remember which author it was, but she like would lock herself in a hotel room naked or something like that. It’s just like, “Okay, that’s how I’m going to write.”

Pete Mockaitis

That’s the top takeaway from this interview.

Scott Young

Yeah. Now, those little details are going to average out over time as you talk to more people. And especially if you’re in this sort of group environment, and what’s going to emerge is like the things you talked about where it’s like, “Oh, yeah, the strategy for building your podcast is going on other people’s podcasts.” And it’s like, “Oh, okay, that’s the thing that I need to be focusing on.” So, I think we’re talking about this in this kind of, like, professional context, this meta of the profession, but, I mean, this is true even of particular skills, particular subjects.

If you’re learning a language, for instance, and you just talk to one speaker, maybe they have little like quirks in the way they talk that are not very generalized. But if you talk to a dozen people, that kind of broader overlapping imitation, you’re going to average out at, like, “This is how people from this area talk.”

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, so let’s put it to practice, let’s say a couple of learning scenarios. Let’s say I want to learn how to generate more great leads for a service business. I’ve got a sales person who’s rocking and rolling, who when we talk to people, boy, the close rate is phenomenal, but we want more people to be booking those meetings with him, and I want to learn, “How do I make leads rain forth? What is the better approach?”

Scott Young

Yeah, the first place for starting with that would be, like, find kind of people who have similar service businesses and what are they doing to get leads because, again, there’s going to be some kind of, among the business community, among the industry, there’s going to be some kind of meta understanding of, like, “What are people doing to generate leads? What are the strategies that are working? What things don’t work?” And chances are there are some things that you’re doing right and some things that you’re missing out on, that other people are doing this and you’re not doing it. And so, getting to that frontier is the sort of first step.

And so, if you’ve already spent a lot of time in a field, you know lots of people, again, maybe that gap is, like, there’s only 10% of the things you’re not doing. But if you’re new to an industry, or if you are shifting into field, or the field’s rapidly changing because of technology or new opportunities, maybe there’s lots of things that you’re missing out on. So, that’s the see part and that’s very important.

The next part is doing the practice. So, you have to make those calls, you have to make those efforts, you have to learn from those attempts that you’re doing to generate leads. So, I think often being able to document what you’re doing and making sure that you’re making enough efforts in that regard. And then getting feedback, obviously, seeing what works, what doesn’t work, and being able to measure that precisely often makes a big difference.

Especially in business domains, that’s one of the big things is that people have gut feelings about what works and what doesn’t work. And then you show them the numbers and then you’re like, “Oh, okay. I actually have a bit of a different picture now because I have data on it and not just feelings.”

Pete Mockaitis

And that’s great. What I find interesting is maybe in all fields, I think overconfidence is a general human bias, which is just fascinating me lately. But let’s just say you may very well talk to some experts in marketing who will tell you, with great confidence, conviction, certainty that, “Oh, this ad is garbage. This is the way to go. Forget that platform. This is the thing.” And what really is the ultimate arbiter of truth in this domain is the results generated as opposed to the guesses of the results that will be generated.

Scott Young

Well, I think when you are in, like a direct marketing kind of business or any place where you’re fairly close to the feedback, like your efforts, the things you’re doing fairly directly lead to some kind of material consequence, I think that kind of keeping that tight practice loop with the feedback is so important. And I think pretty much anyone who’s quite successful in that business is very data driven. They’re very much driven based on like, run a lot of tests, see what works, run a lot of tests, see what works.

I think where you get into trouble is when there’s a much longer lead time between your taking action X and you’re getting some results, and maybe there’s all these complex intervening factors and so you can’t do that. Like, we were talking about publishing a book for instance, you don’t get to iterate as fast, maybe publishing a book. And so, that’s when you’re sort of maybe relying a little bit more on what is best practice, what are some of these things as opposed to just getting that direct feedback and learning directly from your mistakes.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, let’s say we got a professional and they are noticing this frustrating trend. They’ll say something in a meeting and there’s not much of a response. And then someone else will say almost the same darn thing, Scott, and folks are like, “Oh, yeah, that’s a great idea. Let’s move on this.” Like, what’s going on here? And they would like to be the person who, when they say things, it is listened to, it has weight, gravitas, it is acted upon instead of brushed aside or ignored. How might we learn such a thing, Scott?

Scott Young

Well, I think it also depends on what the skill is that you’re trying to learn because why are you being dismissed? Why are you being overlooked in the meeting? I know that some of that can just break down to, like, raw communication skills. Like, if you’re whispering, “Maybe we should do this, this kind of thing.” Or, if you’re saying it confidently, those things can make a difference.

But I would say, from my personal experience, being in meetings and doing some of these things, some of the things that are even more important is not only the stature of the person who’s giving the thing, if someone is widely seen as being like the expert on X and they give advice. Like, if I go to a doctor and they tell me, “Oh, you need to be doing this, taking this medicine,” versus my buddy, Steve, or something like that, who read some websites, I’m going to listen to the doctor and not Steve.

And so, sometimes the thing that you’re trying to improve is not even a skill at all. It’s just trying to, like, “How do I position myself so that I can be seen as credible when I’m offering advice here? What is my track record, what’s this? Or what’s the sort of evidence I’m bringing up? What’s the kind of like things that I’m using to argue my favor?”

So, if maybe I don’t have that, “I’m the Wizard of X, and I have all this great track record so everyone listens to me on this,” do you have the data? Like, if you’re trying to make a proposal for it and you’re like, “You know what, we’ve shown that it’s going to improve efficiency by this amount, and this is how we know this,” it’s like, “Oh, this person did their homework.” That can make a big difference too.

So, I think anytime you’re encountering difficulties, anytime you’re encountering kind of roadblocks, it’s very important that you have the right mental model for what the problem actually is because if you think the problem is you’re not being confident enough, but everyone else thinks the problem is, “Well, you’ve only been at this firm for one year, and I don’t trust what you have to say,” then it’s a different kind of problem, right?

Pete Mockaitis

Absolutely. I think that’s, in many ways, perhaps a step zero. It’s, like, before we go off on a quest to learn a thing, let’s make sure that the thing we’re learning will lead us to the result that we’re after.

Scott Young

Yeah, like the way that I opened the book is talking about problem solving, and like the big thing about solving a problem is that you have to be working in the right problem representation. There’s the famous nine dots puzzle, which is like a grid of nine dots. And the question is, like, “Can you draw four lines without lifting up your pencil to do it?”

Now, I know if you haven’t done it before, you can Google it and see what it is and take a look at it. But the reason that people fail the problem is not because the solution is, like, impossible or it’s really hard. It’s because you and your head eliminate the possibility that would allow you to solve it. So, it seems impossible until someone shows to you, like, “Oh, I didn’t know you could do that.”

And so, a lot of the problems that we face in our work and our lives, we fail because we set up the problem the wrong way, we use the wrong language, we use the wrong mental model to describe the problem, and then we get into an impasse. So, like, as I was saying, you always have to sort of interrogate those assumptions you have. If the assumption you have is that, “Well, people aren’t listening to me at the office because of X,” it could be true, it could be the right answer, but if that assumption is wrong and then you spend a lot of time working on it, you might not see results.

And so, with any kind of business problem, any kind of professional problem you have, that’s the first thing is to just be like, “What are the assumptions that I already have? What are the ways I have of representing the problem that maybe exclude the real solution?”

Pete Mockaitis

Scott, what are your pro tips for when we’re learning a thing and we’re feeling frustrated, irritated, annoyed that it doesn’t seem to be going well? It’s like, “I keep producing junk, failing, messing up, and it’s an unpleasant sensation.” How do you think about that process?

Scott Young

So, I like to think about every emotion that we experience has been something that has been evolved in our brain to send us some kind of message. And so, frustration, this experience that you have when you’re learning things and it’s not working, is really we’re kind of banging our head against the wall. We’re trying something and it’s not working.

And when we’re trying something that’s not working, we’re kind of resorting to this process of, like, assuming we’re continuing to work on it, this kind of like trial and error, figuring things out. And depending on the problem, depending on how many possible combinations of things we could do are, this can lead to just us getting stuck. And this feeling of frustration is like, “Okay, you could waste a lot of time here before you get it, maybe you should give up, maybe you should try something else.”

And so, my feeling of whenever I encounter something which is really frustrating, the first thing I ask myself is, “Do I have the prerequisites? Like, do I have the background knowledge that I should have in order to get to this?” So, if I’m struggling with sort of a programming problem, I would look at like, “Well, do I actually have the fundamental skills to solve this problem? And can I sort of go back a step and learn those and then go back and tackle it?” That kind of stepping back and figuring out what’s missing, I think, is a very important prerequisite for a lot of skills.

The second thing is “How do I finetune the difficulty?” So, if we’re doing practice, if we’re doing efforts where we’re trying to learn from our mistakes and work on things, there are so many little levers, so many little knobs that we can make it a bit easier. And if we’re feeling, “This is extremely frustrating, we’re not making much progress,” dialing those knobs back, kind of hitting that difficulty sweet spot is going to be more productive.

So, again, if we’re like really struggling with writing a novel, maybe we should write a short story. If we’re struggling with writing a short story, maybe we should write like the outline, or maybe we should just write the introduction. And these kinds of little tweaks that you can make can all be ways to change the difficulty of your practice so you’re not feeling like you’re overwhelmed and frustrated.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Now, could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Scott Young

So, I like this quote, even though when I was doing the research for it, it’s like possibly apocryphal. So, if we can just take that in mind, and this is possibly apocryphal quote, but it’s from Ernest Hemingway, where he said, “We are all apprentices at a craft which no one will ever master.” And I like that idea. I like that idea of, that we are sort of always working and striving towards getting better at something, but never quite reaching it, never quite feeling like we’ve just got it under our grasp.

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite study, experiment, or bit of research?

Scott Young

I think one of my favorite that I covered in the book was John Sweller working on some research showing that people could solve problems without learning how they solve the problem. And that one I talk about in the chapter on the copy leading to creativity and just how there is a benefit of seeing examples, seeing how other people do it. And in some circumstances, it’s more beneficial than trying to solve the problem yourself.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And a favorite book?

Scott Young

The one that I think stood out to me most, that I enjoyed most, while I was doing the research for this book was Stanley Rachman’s Fear and Courage, where he talks a lot about the research on fear and anxiety and things that I think are very important for our own psychological well-being but are often not well understood.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Scott Young

Honestly, I really like just using Word documents and writing things out. I think writing is an extremely powerful tool that is underused. We try to keep too much in our heads.

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite habit?

Scott Young

I think writing daily is very important. I think if you’re in any kind of creative pursuit, doing some amount daily is helpful for continuing to keep that axe sharp.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Scott Young

I think maybe the main thing that people take from my work is the idea that anyone can learn anything if they go about it the right way. And I think that’s something that is sort of a central ide a in my work and something that people talk about.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Scott Young

Yeah, so they can check out my website at ScottHYoung.com, and they can get the book, “Get Better at Anything,” wherever they want to get their books, Amazon, Audible, any of those places.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Scott Young

Yeah, so I think I would ask people to figure out what’s something that you’re really interested in getting better at, and try to find one thing that you could do to make it better, whether that’s seeing from other people, seeing something that they’re doing that you could try to incorporate into your practice, or some way you could tweak how you’re performing it to get a little bit better.

Pete Mockaitis

Lovely. Well, Scott, this is fun. I wish you many fun learning adventures.

Scott Young

Oh, yeah, thank you for having me back.