Thinking Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
Anthony, welcome!

Anthony Klotz
Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to chat with you. You are undercover famous. Is that maybe the term we can use?

Anthony Klotz
Yeah, it’s definitely undercover, low key, yeah, whatever synonym you want to use.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, you are the man who coined the term, “The Great Resignation,” which is kind of wild.

Anthony Klotz
Yeah, I mean, it still strikes me as wild and we’re coming up on almost exactly five years since that initial article came out and went viral, and it still strikes me as strange and surreal.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I understand there’s really some misconceptions as to what the heck that phrase even means. So let’s hear it straight from the horse’s mouth. What do we mean by that term and what is its relevance for career folk?

Anthony Klotz
Yeah, so the Great Resignation was a prediction back in May of 2021 that there would be a spike in resignations in the US workforce, really the global workforce, but mainly centered on the US. And in the months following May, pretty quickly starting in June, we saw this wave of resignations, fairly historically high.

But it’s important, there’s a caveat there, that, really, we only started tracking resignation numbers closely in the US in 2000, so we don’t have the whole history there. But, yeah, turnover, quitting, resignations, whatever you want to call it, spiked and stayed elevated at historically high levels for almost two years into 2023.

And then it tailed back down, and it continued to tail down to where we are today, which is a rate of quitting in the economy that’s lower than it was before the pandemic, but not by too much. And so even though it feels like we’re in a pretty sluggish job market right now, it’s more active than a lot of people think.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. Okay, so we’ve got 25-ish years of data here, and so we’ve seen some ups and downs. And so does that mean, now we’re kind of in a normal-ish band of resignation levels?

Anthony Klotz
We’re on the low side of normal, but we’re in that range of normal, for sure, on the lower end of it. I was going to mention, you asked about some of the misconceptions around the Great Resignation, and I think the biggest one that maybe continues to this day is that the prediction was that people would leave the workforce entirely.

And my prediction was largely that people would quit. And when people quit, the vast majority of the time it’s to find another job in the same industry or something related. We did see higher levels of people taking career breaks, of people starting entrepreneurial ventures, of people doing early retirement.

Yeah, but, in general, it’s when people leave jobs, they’re, of course, switching to another role somewhere else.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And you’ve done some real deep research into this phenomenon. Your book’s called Jolted: Why We Quit, When to Stay, and Why It Matters. So tell us, what’s a particularly surprising and fascinating discovery you’ve made as you dug into this stuff?

Anthony Klotz
It’s just how close all of us are to quitting our job. And that doesn’t mean we’re always thinking about it or we’re always wanting to quit or anything negative like that. But we tend to, both as academics, as leaders, as workers, tend to think that quitting is a fairly rational process that slowly accumulates over time and slowly.

Maybe your discontentment with your current role increases or the appeal of these alternatives that you have to your current job increase over time, and you make this rational decision to move on. And that’s true about half the time.

But what we found is about the other half of the time, the decision to quit can be traced back to a single event. And these events, these jolts, can be big or small, they can come from our personal lives, they can happen in our professional lives, but they move the quitting process along sometimes fairly quickly.

Sometimes they move us along to where we’d like to quit, but we can’t. And sometimes they should be nudging us to leave and we completely miss them. But going back to your question, it’s that, and I think this is part of why I predicted the Great Resignation was this understanding of how these events work.

And, of course, the pandemic was several of these jolts wrapped up into one. And that’s somewhat surprising to me when I first learned it and to a lot of individuals, just this one event, how it can change our relationship with work and shape the arc of our career.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you expand on that? How is this event that…? It’s funny, I think many of us would like to forget entirely, so apologies to resurface this. But how has the pandemic shifted our overall perspective on work?

Anthony Klotz
Yeah, so, like I mentioned, the pandemic had several different types of jolts wrapped up all into one, and I’ll mention a few of them. One of them was, of course, that for many people, work became different and more difficult in a short period of time.

So if you were a frontline worker or a healthcare worker, all of a sudden, your job maybe became more dangerous or completely changed. And when our job tasks change, for some of us, that comes at a point where we’re already not sure about our job and then, all of a sudden, it changes and that pushes us over into wanting to change what our job is.

For others, like healthcare workers, it also increased the level of burnout, so, “All of a sudden, this event changed my work in a way that it’s more difficult, led to higher levels of burnout.” Many of us experienced switching from working in person to working remotely, and we all reacted to it a little bit differently.

Some people, really enjoying it, some people not so much. And then, finally, there’s the pandemic being a health threat. And so for many individuals, or probably most individuals, at some point, it caused us to take a step back and think, “Is this the end of the world? Am I going to make it out of this?”

And when we think those big existential thoughts, we think about the way that we’re spending our time. And how we spend a lot of our time is at our jobs. And so these changes to how we work, these increases in burnout, this switch in the place that we were working, and then finally these big existential thoughts are different types of jolts that lead us to stop and rethink our relationship with work.

Now, hopefully, the pandemic, this is a once in a very long time event that we don’t have to go through again. But getting back to your question, there is some evidence that it has permanently changed many people’s relationship with work.

And this goes back to a question that’s asked in the United States on this general social survey every two years. And it’s been asked every two years since 1972. And the question is, “If you came into all of the money that you needed to live as comfortably as you want for the rest of your life, would you keep working?”

And this is called the lottery question. And it’s been asked every two years, and pretty consistently, about 70% of Americans say, “Yes, I would keep working,” which is somewhat impressive, and it shows that most of us see the value that work could have in our lives.

But what’s interesting is when you look at that 70% has been sort of flat as a board with a little bit of fluctuation from 1972 to 2018 before the pandemic. And so a little bit of a side note to this is this thought that nobody wants to work anymore or that less and less people want to work. The data don’t really support that, with one exception.

Coming out of the pandemic, it dropped from just over 70% to 62%. And so that equates to 10 to 20 million Americans who are, if you extrapolate that out to the country, who are answering that question differently.

And, keep in mind, they were answering this question during the Great Resignation, which was one of the best labor markets for employees, for workers that we’ll ever see. And yet, more people than ever were indicating that, “If I struck it rich, I’d be done with work.” And that number has stayed in this sort of 65% range, five points lower, you know, millions of Americans lower than the 70%.

And so what that suggests is the pandemic years and the tumultuousness that it caused in the world of work, and the thinking, and the jolts that it caused, there’s some percentage of the population now who have permanently changed the way they view work. And I think that’s going to be part of the lasting legacy of that period of time.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m intrigued about that question. They would continue working if they won the lottery, but do we have the clarity on would they continue working with their current employer or role or doing…? Because, I guess, this is what researchers do. We get definitional in terms of, I imagine, I wouldn’t sit on the beach continuously, but I would probably make some changes in what I was doing. I’d keep this podcast going because it’s fun and awesome, talking to peeps like you. So do you have some detail on that?

Anthony Klotz
So that’s a fantastic follow-up question. And it’s a question that I didn’t think of at first, and then somebody suggested it to me, and it really changed the way I thought about this question. So after I had learned about this lottery question, I would ask my student audiences, executive audiences, professional audiences this question and see how many hands go in the air. And it’s always around 70%.

You’re asking Gen Z, Baby Boomers, it’s always around that 70% mark. And that’s usually an eye-opener for people. And then I was asking that question during a masterclass that I was giving once up in Idaho, at Idaho State University a few years back after the Great Resignation.

And one person gave the follow-up question that you gave, they said, “Okay, okay, that’s great. Ask it again, but ask how many people would keep working at their current job if they struck it rich, if they won the lottery.”

So I’d asked the first question and seen the 70% response rate. So I asked again, “How many of you, if you won the lottery, would keep working at your current job?” It dropped below 10%. So I haven’t collected big data on this, but every time I present this now, I ask the two questions.

And it’s a little less consistent on that second question depending on the audience, but it always drops from this like 70%-ish down to 10 to 20% of people who would keep working. And, to me, there’s this really powerful lesson there that the majority of people see the positive side of what work can do for their lives.

Like, in general, want to work and see a positive version of work out there that they would really enjoy doing. That is not the version that most people are getting in their current job. So there’s this gap there between what we think work could be for us and our wellbeing and our happiness and our sense of meaning in life, and then what we’re actually getting.

And you mentioned you would keep doing this awesome podcast. So I asked people who say they would keep working even if they won the lottery at their current job, “What are you doing? What’s your profession?”

And it’s almost always something in the entrepreneurial realm or something that they’ve clearly chosen that really is their passion. And so, you know, “I always knew I wanted to be a chef and that’s what I pursued,” or “I always wanted to be a chef, but then I went and I was an accountant for 30 years, but then I circled back and went back to being a chef.”

So it’s these really deliberate choices people have made that align with their interests or that give them a great deal of autonomy, which is like entrepreneurship, having a fantastic podcast, being able to have the kind of impact that you want on the world.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you know, that’s heavy. It’s almost kind of sad that it’s so low. I mean, we all got bills to pay, sure, but… So, this is funny, my wife, she gave me a hat, a hat out of nowhere, and it said, “Ever since I was little, I’ve always wanted to turn unstructured data into actionable business insights.”

Anthony Klotz
Perfect hat for you.

Pete Mockaitis 
It’s a lot of words on a hat. and it’s sort of funny, like, “Ha, ha, ha, that’s the joke. No one wants that when they’re little. They want to be an astronaut or a firefighter or something.” And yet, sure enough, when I was in high school, I did want to be a strategy consultant. And then I did that, and it was fun, you know? I wanted to make some adjustments to that career path, which I did, entrepreneurially.

And it really hits home for me that I’m a bit of an anomaly here, like, to actually go after it with this kind of purpose, and then for it to work out.

Because you might think you want to be a lawyer, and be like, “Oh, shoot, this isn’t what I wanted. Oopsies!”

Anthony Klotz
That happened to me.

Pete Mockaitis 
So I guess it’s not only that you’re autonomously pursuing the thing, but the thing ends up being the match that you hoped it would be.

Anthony Klotz
Yeah, that’s exactly right. When I started out of university, I had grown up in a family business in logistics. I got my degree in logistics. I thought, “I’m made to do this. I’m good at it,” got good grades, and then went to work for General Mills in their manufacturing plants in logistics, and was terrible at it and didn’t enjoy it.

So it was like, in theory, this is what I was put on this earth to do. In practice, not so much. So I switched over into management, into operations, and that was a somewhat better fit. But, yeah, I mean, I think there is this experimentation that goes on.

And, yeah, probably for a number of people who are saying, “If I won the lottery, this is what I would do.” Some percentage of them would find, if they made that switch, it’s actually not what they want to do.

I mean, this is part of the rough thing about being humans. We’re terrible at forecasting, you know, what’s going to make us happy. And it’s not until we actually experience it, that we see if our affective forecast lines up with how we’re actually feeling when we do it.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Okay. Well, so you’ve painted a stark picture for us. So I would love for you to unpack a little bit of the big idea associated with Jolted. You say we don’t so much super rationally and gradually come to the conclusion that, “Ah, yes, it would, in fact, be optimal for me to exit now.” What is going on?

Anthony Klotz
Most of us in our day-to-day work lives are on a bit of autopilot where we’re trying to be successful in our jobs, have a nice life outside of work, pay the bills, enjoy time with friends and family, and so forth. And these jolts come along and disturb that.

And so jolts are these moments where we question what’s going on with our relationship with work, “Am I on the right path or am I not?” And these can be really confusing. And you’re not really sure what to make of it.

In the book, I talk about, you know, that jolts are sort of everywhere in the modern work world, and there’s six different types of jolts that we’ll experience over our career. And so the problem is these can be really useful signposts to tell us maybe we do need to make some changes to the arc of our career.

But often, when they appear and sort of snap us out of this autopilot, we’re not sure how to respond to them. We get stuck in a bit of a rumination loop. Maybe we give them too much credence and we end up moving towards the exit door too soon. We just don’t really have a system to process them when they happen.

And so what I advocate for in the book is being more deliberate about realizing that, “Hey, look, these events, we don’t know what they are, we don’t know when they’re going to strike, but they’re coming, and they’re going to make us question our relationship with work. And that can sort of lead us down a path to make a suboptimal decision about our career and our happiness.”

Or, if we’re a little bit more prepared for them and we have a bit of a system, not a super strict system, but a system for dealing with them, we can treat them sort of appropriately when they arrive and make a much clearer and better decision about what we should do with them.

You know, part of the punchline here is that a lot of these events that cause us to rethink work should really be dismissed. And if you just walk away from them for a little while, they’ll go away naturally. And I think part of the challenge of the modern work world is we are able to take action pretty quickly when we have a moment where we think, “I don’t know if I want to work here anymore.”

Well, you know what? Almost right away, you could mass apply for hundreds of jobs in that moment right then. You can go on social media and burn bridges really, really easily. This wasn’t the case, I’ll just say, 50 years ago.

When something really terrible happened on a Tuesday, you’d think, “You know what? I don’t know if I want to work here anymore. Maybe this weekend I’ll get out. I’ll get out my resume and freshen it up, or I’ll go look for a new job. But by the time the weekend gets there, you realize, “Oh, that was just a bad Tuesday. No big deal.”

Here, you know, nowadays, we’re in a position to take action right away and make career changes that we may end up regretting. And, let’s face it, the research is clear that almost the majority of career moves end in some form of regret, not complete regret, but some form of regret.

And so understanding these jolts and how to respond to them at an appropriate level, I think, is critical for staying level-headed in our day-to-day work lives and to also be really intentional about crafting a career that brings us what we want.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think that’s one tremendous takeaway that could really alter a life trajectory right there, Anthony, in terms of, like, “When some bull crap goes down and you’re thinking, ‘I’m out of here,’ hold on for a moment.” Duly noted.

Anthony Klotz
Well, in terms of being really powerful advice, doing nothing, it’s kind of a hard piece of advice to sell. But, again, these these jolts, these moments are fairly common, and I think the more that we have the news coming to us while we’re at work, the more that we have social media in our lives, the more we have these moments where we think, somebody else is getting a better deal, there’s better options out there, and so all the more reason why doing nothing as a first option is a good option.

Now a lot of these problems that you experience or that a jolt signifies some sort of real problem with your relationship with work, some of them don’t go away with time. And if you get to the weekend or you’ve decided, you know, for me, like about every six months at the start of the year, and then midway through the year, I sort of sit down and think through the past six months and what have I experienced at work and how am I feeling.

In that way, over the course of time, as I experience problems with work, instead of having to deal with them right away in the course of my working week, working day, I can sort of tell myself, “Come June, I’ll sit down and I’ll think through these.” And I might even write on Post-It notes and set them aside to think about then.

In that way, when it comes to that time when I’ve batched those jolts together and I can think through them, I can realize a lot of these don’t matter anymore. This was just something that mattered in the moment, but didn’t really matter.

But there’s probably a few of them that maybe I’ve written down a few times that signal, “Something is off here and I need to address it.” Now that doesn’t mean quitting. That means addressing it. And there’s a number of ways that you can address problems at work without quitting.

And so that’s sort of the next step. You experience a jolt, it reveals a problem with your relationship with work that time isn’t healing, then you have to take some more action. Doing nothing won’t cut it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you mentioned six types of jolts. Could you maybe give us the two-sentence-ish definition of your six types of jolts with maybe an example so we can get our arms around, precisely, “What is Anthony thinking when he says the word jolt?”

Anthony Klotz
Yeah, so six types of jolts, and I’ll give you a warning. The first five are negative, and that’s because of this positive-negative asymmetry effect we have, where, as human beings, we’re hardwired to pay much more attention to negative events than positive events.

And that’s for good reason. Negative events signal something is wrong, and we need to attend to it. Whereas, positive events are more like, “Keep going. Things are going well.”

So the first type of jolts is direct jolts, and these are negative events that happen directly to us at work. So the most common ones are, of course, failure, or experiencing mistreatment, or interpersonal strife. But these jolts can also be really subtle as well.

So we’re increasingly seeing that small acts of incivility, like being treated rudely or being ostracized, like, you find out that your office has a group chat that you’re not on. That has a pretty strong effect, a pretty strong signal that you’re not part of this group. So direct jolts, negative events that happen directly to us at work.

The next type are collateral jolts. These are events, often negative, that happen to those around us at work and reverberate and have effects on us. A simple one would be witnessing mistreatment. Even though you’re not the victim, it can have an effect on you that makes you think, “I don’t know if I want to be in a workplace like this.”

But the most common type is turnover contagion. So when we have a friend who quits, it’s sort of a triple whammy for us. Our workday becomes less bright because our friend is gone. We probably have to pick up some of their work in the interim, and we wonder where they’re going. Like, “Are they getting a better deal?” So those are collateral jolts.

Maybe my favorite kind of jolts, and they were the ones when I learned about them, I was the most surprised, are honeymoon jolts. So there’s this statistic that surprised me that the most common year for quitting across all years of your employment is year one.

And we tend to think, “Year one? That’s when people are the most committed and the most excited about their jobs.” But honeymoon jolts, you know, during the recruitment and selection process, we form this idea of what that job is going to be like.

And honeymoon jolts happen when we’re in the first year and we realize, “Wait a second, the way I thought this job was going to be in terms of the schedule or the pay or whatever it may be, is not lining up with reality. And I took this job under maybe false pretenses,” or we perceive that we do. So those are honeymoon jolts.

You know, moving outside the workplace, there’s crossover jolts, which are negative events that happen in our personal life that make us rethink, “What am I doing at work?” And anybody who’s had a health scare or a family member or friend who’s had a health scare has experienced those.

And then, finally, for negative jolts, there’s remote jolts. And we’re increasingly seeing that negative events that happen on the other side of the world that you hear about can have this sort of effect on you because they often call to mind the preciousness and the scarcity of life and make us think, again, these big existential thoughts, like the pandemic did of, “How am I spending my time?”

There’s a little bit of research that shows that this is especially likely to happen if the event on the other side of the world happened to a group of individuals who you identify with in whatever way that could be.

And then last, but not least, are happy positive jolts. So, sort of counterintuitively, the good things that happen in life can also lead to us quitting. Not as often, but this is because when positive events happen to us, they open our minds.

We tend to start to think, “I can achieve more than I thought I could. I’m on a roll here. This is great. I could take on more things.” And you have this open-minded positivity at the same time that your resume has just gotten more impressive than ever, perhaps, because you just had a promotion or some accomplishment at work. Of course, they can come from wonderful events in our personal lives as well.

So, like I said, jolts are everywhere. They’re common. We’re going to experience many of them in our careers. And the key is to be ready for them, and then manage them appropriately when they happen.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So what is the ideal or optimal or appropriate way to deal with a jolt beyond doing nothing?

Anthony Klotz
Yeah, well, we already talked about the first one, right? Do nothing and wait and see if it goes away on its own. Now, obviously, and it goes without saying, for egregious jolts, that might not suffice. In my dissertation research, I talked to one worker who said they had a toxic boss, but the worker themselves, they had thick skin.

And so the boss could insult them, you know, whatever, it didn’t bother the worker. They were happy to do their job. But the boss noticed this, “I’m not getting under that person’s skin.” And so one day they went one step deeper. They didn’t insult the person. They insulted the person’s daughter to really get…

Pete Mockaitis
My goodness.

Anthony Klotz
And it worked. The worker said, “I took my keys off my belt, set them on the desk, and walked out the door,” which we call impulsively quitting. So that’s an example of where this do-nothing strategy is not a good one. There are times where, if you can, perhaps impulsive quitting is the right thing to do if you’re in a really bad situation.

But most of the time, the next step is to say something, to speak up. And this sounds again pretty simple, but it’s amazing how many exit interviews that I’ve been in or that I’ve talked to leaders and they say in exit interviews, one of the most common things that happens is the person says they’re leaving because of this reason, that they really can’t stand their work schedule, or they need a little bit of pay bump.

And so they’ve gone out and got another job because they’re not getting it here, and they didn’t ask for it first, or the leader didn’t hear it when they did ask. And so it’s pretty critical… Often as workers, we don’t have the power in the work relationship. The leader has the power, or the organization has the power.

So it’s easy for us to think, “Why would they give me a raise? Why would they change my schedule in this way?” And so we don’t speak up. But if you’re going to move down the path of, “I want to solve problems, or else this may make me leave the organization,” it’s really important that you, at least, give the organization a chance to fix it.

Not only because they may surprise you, but what’s also useful is, if you do continue to move down the path and you do end up quitting, you’ll do so in the knowledge that you tried to fix this problem. You gave them a chance to do it. And that will actually lower the odds of regret down the road, “Maybe I shouldn’t have quit. Maybe they would have fixed that.” No, no, no, you know, because you asked.

I talked to one worker who was in a really bad situation, and I guess this is similar to the prior story, but they were working closely with a coworker interdependently, and the coworker was really abusive. And one day, the abuse got to a point where the worker said, “I can’t take this anymore.” And this person worked in a hospital, and they said, “This is harming my wellbeing. I’m going to quit even though I like this job because I can’t work with this person anymore.”

And they walked around the hospital, and on their walk, they found a random empty office. And they had this thought and they went to their boss and said, “I just walked by this empty office. Can I just move out of where I am near this person and move into this random empty office?”

And I think there’s a lot of bosses who would say, “No, you can’t have some special office in the corner.” But this person’s boss said, “Yeah, you know what? Sure, that’s fine.” And this person was completely surprised, moved their stuff over into this new office, and is now like, that was like three years ago, and they’re now happier than ever in their job.

And so it’s just an example of, like, even if you think it’s wild, ask, especially for medium performers and high performers, the companies do not want to lose you.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Well, I am vibing with that and I’m thinking back to, boy, I think of him often, it’s my buddy, Muhammed Mekki, back in Episode 346 in 2018, he said, “All the time, you don’t get what you don’t ask for.”

And that was his observation, is that in almost any context, you do not suffer reprisal, like it rarely hurts to ask. I’m sure there’s counter examples out there and maybe some of these toxic bosses that you’re mentioning here.

But, yes, it rarely hurts to ask. And at worst, I think you’ll get just a little bit of a, “Oh, man, this guy, huh? Can you believe it?” And then you move on and that’s over. So you may well be surprised. You get a cool office space. Any number of things can be opened up to you if you just ask.

Anthony Klotz
Yeah, and the research does show that, yeah, a lot of the time these positive outcomes can happen just by asking. There’s also some research that shows, in organizational settings, when you ask for something, you’re much more likely to get it if you frame it in a way that it doesn’t just benefit you, but it, of course, benefits other people or benefits the organization.

So, like, “I need Saturdays off,” “I need a $10,000 raise,” “I need,” “I need.” You’re better to take 10 minutes and say, “How do I frame this such that it doesn’t just benefit me, but here’s why it benefits the company, here’s why it benefits my colleagues, here’s why it benefits, it makes my boss’s life easier?” Something like that, like a little bit of sweetener that really increases the odds of the medicine going down successfully.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I like that a lot. And I’m thinking about, I think there was a famous book about fundraising called Asking. Well, you’re going to know the answer now, it was like, “You know, the number one reason prospective donors do not give to a nonprofit organization…?” Can you guess, Anthony?

Anthony Klotz
Because they’re asking what’s in it for them?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, they weren’t asked at all. No one asked them, it’s like, “Hey, could you support this cool work we’re doing?” It’s like, “Oh, that was not on my radar. But now that you asked, that does sound pretty cool.” So you got a real crack at it.

Anthony Klotz
Yeah, that’s spot on.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. Okay. So ask. So maybe do nothing, maybe ask. What are some other top tips?

Anthony Klotz
Yeah, so after you ask and you find out what is, and let’s say it doesn’t go well. Let’s say that you’ve identified this problem with your relationship with work. It’s draining your well-being. It’s draining your positive energy, and you ask and try to make some changes proactively or reactively. It doesn’t work.

Then it’s time to think about, “Okay, is this a sustainable situation?” And maybe it’s sustainable and you think this is just a bad part of my job, but it’s okay because the good parts outweigh it. And so part of, I think, as you start into this process, it’s important to weigh up the positive sides of your job.

And there’s the obvious positives like, “Hey, I’ve got a nice office. I’ve got this amount of pay. I work with friendly people.” But also thinking about the goodwill that you’ve built up over the years, because that won’t carry with you if you move into a new organization.

So as we work in an organization for a while, things tend to get easier for us because we’ve built this sort of goodwill with the people around us when we can get things done. So really being honest about the positives and the negatives of your situation.

Now if you find that you’re in a situation where, “I can’t leave this job,” for whatever reason it may be, then I think that takes you down a different path than, “I can leave this job.” So for much of our working careers, most of us are in a situation where we can’t just up and leave right away.

And it could be this term is called embeddedness, like how embedded are you in your job and your community. And it could be like, “Look, this is the only engineering firm in this town that I’m in, and my family is never going to leave this town. So this is it for me, so I can’t leave,” versus, “Yeah, I’m in this metropolis with all sorts of engineering jobs and I can go remote and whatever it may be,” then you have a much lower level of embeddedness and you’ve got options.

But if you’re in this situation where you’re in huge problem with your relationship with work that can’t be fixed and you can’t quit, which I think many people are in this situation right now, then it makes sense to think about, “How do I reduce the size of work in my life in a way that doesn’t cause negative repercussions back on me?”

And so this is why the term quiet quitting, I think, went viral, right, three years ago, is thinking about, “How do I lean back a little bit from work such that I can dedicate my time and energy to pursuits outside of work?” and that could be anything from just well-being to a side gig or whatever it may be, or dedicate more time to try and find an alternative.

And I talk about, when you want to shrink the size of work in your life, when you want to lean back a little bit, it doesn’t make sense to do that in the core of your job, your core job tasks, because that’s going to lead down a negative path.

But I think most of us, if we’ve been in a job for a little while, we find this phenomenon called job creep happens, where we slowly take on more tasks, we slowly do a little bit of extra here and there. And not through anybody’s fault, our job becomes sort of bigger than we meant it to be.

And so then it’s time to do a little bit of landscaping and say, “What are the parts of my job that I’ve taken on, that I’m doing, that really don’t add much to me, to the organization, that nobody would notice if I quit doing, that I could delegate these tasks to someone else?”

And so it’s really about job crafting, about rightsizing your job to say, “How can I make this sustainable because I’m stuck in this situation for now?” So I think that’s the next move after speaking up, is maybe saying, “I need to lean back and see if maybe this job is actually fine if it’s just a nine-to-five job and not with all of this extra attached to it.”

Pete Mockaitis
And I guess I’m curious about the other side of all this in terms of we’re not jolted and we are on autopilot, and yet, we would totally stop working if we won the lottery. Do you have any prompts or questions or approaches where perhaps we need a jolt to cause us to evaluate what’s up and see if we’re, in fact, where we ought to be?

Anthony Klotz
Yeah, that’s interesting. There’s some old research where some researchers studied, “How do people and why do people become entrepreneurs?” And there’s this narrative of entrepreneurship as sort of a very proactive, positive career move that people make, that breaking free from the corporate overlords and becoming an entrepreneur.

But when they looked into it, they found that most people end up as entrepreneurs as a result of some negative event, some failure or something like that. And when they talked to the entrepreneurs, they were like, the entrepreneurs were like, “Look, I was stuck in inertia. I was stuck on autopilot, and I needed these layoffs to shake me out of it.”

And they’re, essentially, saying, “I needed these jolts in order to live the life I wanted to live.” So I think you can self-jolt perhaps in a couple of ways. And one I already mentioned, which is saying, “Every year or twice a year, I’m really going to sit down and take a hard look at my relationship with work, the trajectory of my life. Is it moving toward my version of the good life as much as I want it to?”

The other thing I would say is having some sort of partner who really challenges you, to have that meeting with them every six months. And the two of you, and who knows, it could be your romantic partner, it could be a friend, it could be a therapist, you know, sit down and say, “Let’s really question, take a critical look at my relationship with work. And do I need to make a change or not?”

And so I think you asked a great question, there are certainly times that entrepreneurship research would suggest that there are life pivots out there that we should take. And if we can self-jolt into them, for some of us that would make sense.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Anthony, tell me, any final things you want to mention before we hear about your favorite things?

Anthony Klotz
The only final thing I would say is after this sort of leaning back or shrinking the size of work in your life, I mean, if that doesn’t work, or if you have the option to quit, then I think it is time to quit. This is why jolts do lead to a lot of quitting.

And I would just say, you know, especially for people early in your career, which was me at one point, like, nobody really teaches you how to quit or gives you advice on how to quit. More and more today, we’re seeing employees boomerang back to their former employers. And that only works if you resign in a way that’s largely positive.

And so there’s a lot of, I would say, online content showing the upsides of burning bridges as you leave organizations, and I think that’s probably quite overstated.

Pete Mockaitis
Upside?

Anthony Klotz
I think a lot of people are saying that it’s somewhat… there’s a lot of videos that make it seem like it’s really cathartic to have a marching band play as you quit your job, bake your boss a cake that says, “This is the worst job I’ve ever had.”

And these are hugely entertaining, as your laughter is suggesting, but as you might imagine, I’ve done a lot of research on how people quit their jobs, and there’s several different ways that people do quit their jobs.

And you can imagine that from a career standpoint, the positive styles of resigning make the most sense. And there are a few rare instances in which I would say it’s okay to burn bridges, but those would be very, very rare.

My research shows that about 10% of people engage in some form of dysfunctional behavior on the way out, some form of bridge-burning. That sort of behavior is probably only warranted in like 0.1% of quitting.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I guess, if anyone needed to hear that now, you’ve heard it from the expert on the matter. Don’t get a marching band and a dramatic exit. Maybe, like, if your career move is into a viral video creator and you’re getting a kickstart with the marching band, but almost never.

I think, yeah, I mean, that was my impression is that, yes, this video is entertaining, but it is not a optimal life approach. That’s what I think the imagination is for. Enjoy imagining doing that, but don’t actually do it.

Anthony Klotz
Yeah, go ahead and type up that email and then delete it, what you really want to say when you quit, yeah, but don’t actually say it.

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

Anthony Klotz
There’s a quote by George Mallory when he was trying to hike up Everest, and people wanted to know why he was doing it. And I won’t get this quote exactly right, but he essentially said, “There is no reason. We just do it for the sheer joy.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And can you share a favorite study, or experiment, or bit of research?

Anthony Klotz
Yeah, there’s a study, Greenberg 1990, where somehow this researcher talked a manufacturing company that was doing pay cuts into letting him manipulate the way that they deliver those pay cuts, which we wouldn’t even be allowed to do anymore for ethical purposes.

But it showed that just in very small ways, the way that leaders deliver negative messages have huge implications for whether employees steal and quit after a negative announcement, like a pay cut or a layoff.

Just doing it with compassion and care versus doing it in a very perfunctory style makes a huge difference for how negative news is received and reacted to by workers. It’s just a really powerful design.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Anthony Klotz
I like dreaming and reading about travel. So probably The Log from the Sea of Cortez by Steinbeck, where he’s tooling around Baja Mexico, the Sea of Cortez, and making all kinds of fun discoveries with his buddies. That sounds pretty good.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Anthony Klotz
In the evenings, usually about an hour before I go to sleep, I put away the screens and go for a walk, usually with my partner. But being away from screens, going for a walk, definitely contributes to a good night’s sleep, which then kind of has a more positive effect, a nice little cyclical positive effect.

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

Anthony Klotz
I would point them to email, for one. Anybody can reach out to me at my UCL email, which is easy to find, or I’m at AnthonyKlotz.com or LinkedIn, of course.

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

Anthony Klotz
If you’re looking to be awesome at your job, I would recommend challenging yourself to say, “When these jolts come, I’m going to set them to the side for the moment. I’m not going to ruminate on them, give them more energy than they need. And I’ll revisit them every three months or every six months.” So that would be the challenge.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Anthony, thank you.

Anthony Klotz
Oh, it’s been a pleasure, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Kyle, welcome!

Kyle Austin Young
Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about success and numbers, two of my favorite things, Kyle.

Kyle Austin Young
Good for you. This is a good fit.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, right. Well, could you start by sharing with us a particularly surprising and fascinating discovery you’ve made as you are putting together this opus, Success is a Numbers Game?

Kyle Austin Young
I think one of the biggest surprises to me was I feel like I’ve been able to stumble into why we see so much failure in our world, why we have stats floating around that nine out of 10 businesses fail, that such a vast majority of people who set New Year’s resolutions, ultimately, won’t accomplish them. We hear that most mergers and acquisitions fail to create lasting value for shareholders. Why does that happen? Ultimately, I think that a lot of people are falling into a really specific thinking trap, and I’ll explain it in the context of an example.

Let’s say that you’ve set the goal of trying to run a marathon, and you hire a running coach who says, “I can get you there, but there’s three things you’re going to have to do. I need you to eat, sleep, and train exactly how I tell you to. I’m going to give you a regimen for each of those three things. And if you do all three of them, you’ll be ready on race day. If you don’t, you’re not going to be able to successfully run such a long distance.”

So, in this goal, we’ve learned that there’s three things that have to go right for us to get what we want. And I think when humans set goals, we instinctively try to get a sense of what’s going to be expected of us, what’s going to be required for us to achieve success. I think that’s something we do naturally. I think we also check in with ourselves and ask the question, “Do I think I can do each of those things?”

In this case, “Do I think I can eat, sleep, and train the way that I’m going to have to?” And we try to get a sense of that. I’m going to layer some numbers on it to illustrate where the thinking trap often occurs. Let’s just say that we think it’s 70% across the board, 70% chance I’ll eat the way I’m supposed to, 70% chance I’ll sleep the way I’m supposed to, 70% chance I’ll train the way that I’m supposed to.

This is where the trap happens. A lot of people fall into this error of averaging. We try to consider what’s going to have to go right in order to get what we want, and if we feel good about the individual prerequisites, we feel good about the goal as a whole. And, intuitively, that makes some sense.

If we feel good that we can eat the way we’re supposed to, sleep the way we’re supposed to, train the way we’re supposed to, then why would we not feel good about our ability to run a marathon if it’s the product of these three behaviors, these three disciplines?

But in reality, we can’t average, we have to multiply if we want something that’s mathematically sound. And if we multiply 0.7 times 0.7 times 0.7, we find there’s only a 34% chance that we’re going to be ready on race day. We don’t know where we’re going to slip up, but the odds are we’re going to drop the ball in at least one of these three areas.

And I think that was the most surprising discovery for me writing the book was when I took it outside of the context of my own consulting work and into the world at large. And I think it’s an explanation for why we see so much failure in our world. In this example, we only need three things to go right. And we feel pretty good about each of them individually.

Now, imagine how many things have to go right for a business to be successful, for a merger to be successful, for a public policy to be successful. We start to understand how we can quickly experience a lot of failure if we’re not doing everything that we can to optimize our odds.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that a lot. I was literally multiplying in my head as you were speaking like 34%. And, yeah, that is an eye-opening paradigm shift that illuminates a whole lot. And I’m thinking about this applies to just buying something. Like, if you have a lot of criteria for, let’s say we’re talking about food, “Okay, I want to eat healthy. Well, okay, well, it has to be organic and it has to be gluten-free and it has to have, you know, at least a third of its calories from protein.”

And then it has, there’s like two foods. There are two foods in the universe of food that meet my criteria. And it’s like, “Well, I’m not asking for too much,” but when you’re asking for all of those things at the same time, and most things don’t have any of your individual boxes checked, when you aggregate it, yeah, you narrow the field in a hurry.

Kyle Austin Young
It’s a good parallel and it explains or illustrates how important it is to try to design really straightforward paths to the things that we want. A lot of people are trying to wing it, “Oh, I’ll figure it out as I go,” but every time we add a new prerequisite to our success, we can dramatically reduce our odds of getting what we want.

So, it’s important to do what, I call it creating a success diagram, but write down, “What’s the goal? What’s everything that has to go right in order for me to achieve it?” and that’s the beginnings of having the ability to tinker and try to make sure that we’re optimizing to make this as streamlined as possible, because if we’re adding in steps that we could make work around with a better plan, we’re ultimately hurting our odds of getting a good outcome.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, it’s interesting when you spoke with the 70-70-70, you know, I’m a former strategy consultant from Bain and my brain just goes that way. I have a feeling, though, Kyle, you and I may be in the minority in this universe. Can you maybe get us oriented to your numbery probability worldview, if that doesn’t come naturally for folks?

Kyle Austin Young
Yeah, let me give you an example that has no numbers whatsoever, okay? So, when I first graduated from college, again, here’s a no numbers example, I wasn’t super excited about the entry-level positions that I was seeing. I wanted something more engaging, something more demanding, something with more responsibility, something with better opportunities for growth and career acceleration.

So, I did something really audacious. I was 21 years old, had a bachelor’s degree from the University of Oklahoma and I applied to be the product development director at a growing health organization. And, were I to win this position, I was going to be the boss for people who were in their 50s, 60s, 70s. Again, I’m 21. Some of these people have PhDs, master’s degrees. They’re experts in their field, and I’m applying to be their boss. So, a little bit audacious, but I got the interview, and I wanted to make the most of it.

Pete Mockaitis
No kidding.

Kyle Austin Young
So, at that point, what I did is I engaged in a habit that I call thinking negative. Most of the time when we’re pursuing big goals, people encourage us, “Think positive. Don’t worry about what could go wrong. If it’s meant to happen, it’ll happen,” or, “You’ll cross that bridge when you come to it.” I think that’s really, really bad advice.

I understand it. The fear is that if we identify these risks, maybe we’ll be so discouraged that we won’t move forward. I believe we have an opportunity to use our creativity to systematically de-risk our goals. So even at this time, before I was consulting, this was when I was just trying to get my first job out of college, I tried to identify, “What are the potential bad outcomes that could happen instead of what I want?”

And the reason for that is we can understand probability similar to how we traditionally understood matter. We pretty much all heard the phrase that, “Matter can’t be created or destroyed. They can just be transferred and rearranged.” And that’s true when it comes to probability. The odds of all the different outcomes that could happen add up to 100%.

So, if we want to make a good outcome more likely, we have to make the bad outcomes less likely. And one of the most straightforward ways to do that is by thinking negative, identifying the bad outcomes, and trying to reduce the risk of those things coming to life.

So, in the context of applying for this really important position, something that had the opportunity to really accelerate my career, I identified three potential bad outcomes. The first was that maybe the hiring squad would reject me because I looked so young and they were concerned there’s just no way that someone so young could lead this team. You know, understandable.

Well, what could I do in response to that? I couldn’t change my biological age, you know, I couldn’t do the Captain America thing and take the superhero.

Pete Mockaitis
Put a white beard disguise.

Kyle Austin Young
Yeah, well, that’s literally, half of that is what I did. Half of that is literally what I did. I was 21 years old. I looked like I was even younger than that. So, in preparation for the interview, I grew a beard and it just made me look several years older. It didn’t make me look as old as the people I’d be managing, but it at least took the edge off. I didn’t walk in looking like a little bitty kid.

So that was just a creative solution to try to de-risk that potential bad outcome. In the book, I call them PBO, another PBO that I identified was they might not want to hire me because of how flimsy my resume was. I didn’t have a lot of experience. I was fresh out of college. Again, I couldn’t change that. I couldn’t go out and get years of experience in preparation for this interview. But I could try to redirect the conversation.

And so, what I did is before the interview, I typed up a plan for all of the ways that I was going to try to reinvent and optimize this department. It became so thick that I had to have it spiral-bound, it was a book, and I took it with me and gave it to everybody I interviewed with.

And when they would ask me questions about my past, about my resume, I would just redirect it to become a conversation about the future, about the plan that I had for this department. And it, ultimately, took a lot of the pressure off when it came to not having a lot to show in terms of prior work experience.

The third potential bad outcome I realized, this is the last one I’ll give an example of, was that there was concern that I might not fit in with the existing team members. They might reject me thinking, “How is somebody young going to get along with these people who are so much older than he is? These people who are his parents’ age, his grandparents’ age, how is he going to be able to manage them effectively?”

So, what I did was a little bit creative. I asked an existing team member if the department had read any books lately, and she recommended a few different titles. And so, I went out and read all of them. And what that gave me the ability to do was speak this team’s language. I knew about their goals. I knew about some of the frameworks they were using and considering. I could make inside jokes.

I ended up in a group interview at one point where it was me and several other candidates who had gray hair, much older than I was, much more experienced, probably much more qualified. And I was running circles around them because I knew exactly what the team was up to. I made a joke at one point. There was a book out called The Whuffie Factor. It was about how brands can win social capital.

And somebody on the team presented an idea and I said, “I think that could bring us a lot of whuffie.” And I remember looking around, the other candidate’s eyes are bugging out of their heads, like, “What did he just say? What is he talking about?” But the existing team members were all laughing. They knew exactly what I meant.

So, at the end of all of this, I got the job. I became the product development director for this health organization at 21 years old. It all started by identifying what was going to have to go right. In this case, it was pretty straightforward. I just needed the offer. I already had the interview. But what could go wrong? What were the potential bad outcomes that could sabotage me getting what I wanted?

I identified three. I used my creativity to try to take as much risk out of them as I could. I tilted the odds in my favor and I walked away with a good outcome. I would later be laid off from that job, laid off from my next leadership position, and that’s what inspired me to start consulting. It was the diversification that it brought. But it was certainly something that set my career on a very different track than it would have been if I’d started in one of those assistants to the marketing manager roles.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Kyle, that is a heck of a story. And I imagine that the people hiring you must’ve been scratching their heads, like, “Who the heck is this guy? Where did he come from? Are we crazy to actually consider this? But, like, we all saw the same thing. He was saying a lot more smart stuff than the other people. Nobody else had a spiral-bound opus master plan for what to do. So, in a way, it seems crazy to hire him, but another way, it seems crazy to not hire him.”

Were they open with you about this?

Kyle Austin Young
Oh, that’s exactly what happened.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, Kyle, “Here’s where we’re coming from, man. Here’s the deal.”

Kyle Austin Young
I got a call from one person, I think, it was kind of unsanctioned, and it was just him saying, “Obviously, we can’t offer you this job, you’re 21, this makes no sense.” But then I, just listening to him talk himself out of it. And so, I just sat there and it was about 30 minutes of him trying to talk himself out of voting to hire me.

I got an email from the CEO the day after that interview where there was a group interview. I just bumped into him in the hallway and, again, I’m crazy. So, I said, you know, “Hi, I’m Kyle. Here’s one of my spiral-bound plans for turning around the product development team,” and gave it to the CEO of the organization.

The next morning, I woke up to an email from the CEO, who I wasn’t really supposed to have even seen that day, and I thought, “Oh, this can’t be good.” And he said, “In my entire career, you’re the most prepared candidate I’ve ever seen.” And so, there’s this line in sales, I’m not a salesman by trade, but there’s a line that, “Selling is overcoming objections.”

And I see probability hacking as a similar discipline. Essentially, we have something that we want to happen, reality has some objections to that because our goal comes at the opportunity cost of all these other potential outcomes, and it’s our job to kind of sell life on the future that we want, try to overcome these objections, take these risks off the table, and make it where our path is the path of least resistance.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, boy, you know, Kyle, this is a very exciting conversation. I feel like this whole body of work, this collection of ideas, has tremendous flexibility and power and implication. What comes to mind for me is, like, the 80-20 principle. Like, that’s just, like, eye-opening, game-changing, a wide array of things. And, boy, when you get it, things can be so transformative, it almost can feel like magic.

And so, boy, there are so many implications to this, but one I’m thinking about is that you got to get pretty specific, and you got to get pretty somewhat focused on a narrow-ish set of priorities. Because, Kyle, I mean, you can’t make a spiral-bound plan and read everybody’s favorite books for 20 interesting job opportunities. You got to kind of narrow the playing field in order to go all in on that thing and create unheard of results.

Kyle Austin Young
I think that’s true. I think that, in that specific example, had I been applying for 20 jobs that I wanted as bad as I wanted that product development director job, there could have been some challenges. Now, I would, in a friendly way, counter and say that I think some emerging technologies are making that more possible than ever.

We now have tools that can help us create proposals much more quickly than we could when I was applying for my first job out of college. We now have tools that summarize books for us and give us the opportunity to digest the key insights from a piece of content a lot faster than we would have, otherwise.

But, yes, you’re absolutely right that it starts with a goal. It starts with getting really clear on what you want, and, in that context, you then have the opportunity to optimize your odds. One of the reasons why I think that’s really important also is when it comes to asking for advice. I’ve, historically, this sounds arrogant, but I’ve historically been kind of opposed to asking for advice, and it’s not because I think I know everything, not by a long shot.

But what I found is a lot of people’s advice is unapplicable in ways that sometimes can even be confusing. And I’ll tell you a story about that. One time, I was considering taking on this new consulting client and it was going to be a huge retainer, lots and lots of money. But this was also just a notoriously difficult person. It was going to be a really stressful engagement if I chose to take it on. And I wasn’t sure what to do.

So, I decided to reach out to some peers and colleagues and ask them what they thought. And, originally, I was really frustrated because it almost split down the middle. About half of them told me, “Take the money,” and about half of them told me, “Why would you want the stress?” And at the time, I just thought, “How am I going to be able to make heads or tails out of this advice?”

And, finally, I noticed a trend. And the trend was that the people who I asked who had significantly less money than I did, almost unanimously said, “Take the job. Make the money. Why would you not?” And the people who I asked who had a lot more money than I did, almost unanimously said, “Why would you enter into such a stressful contract just in exchange for a paycheck? You don’t need that money. Go make it somewhere else.”

And what that taught me was these people weren’t really giving me advice in the context of what I wanted, in the context of my opportunities and limitations. They were giving me advice from their own context. The people who wanted money told me, “Go get the money,” and the people who wanted to avoid stress told me, “Go avoid the stress.” But that wasn’t really something that accounted for my priorities.

So, I encourage people to create a success diagram, which includes everything we’ve talked about. What’s the goal? What’s everything that has to go right for you to achieve it? For each thing that has to go right, what are the things that can go wrong?

And what’s powerful for that is it creates a context. It creates a context that allows me to ask other people for advice because now we’re on the same page. It creates a context that allows me to collaborate with other people who might be participating in the project. I can now delegate, I can brainstorm, I can say, “Here’s what we’re pursuing, here’s what has to go right, here’s what could go wrong.”

“Kevin, what can you do about this risk over here? Felicia, what can you do to help us take the risk out of this other potential bad outcome?” We now have the ability to have a shared text and, ultimately, it makes us a lot more effective when we’re pursuing big goals.

It also just gives us a way to store information. So, just as you mentioned, as the context changes, as we get new information, we have a place to put it where we’re constantly getting smarter over time and we can get that focus that you described.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Kyle, this is such good stuff. Walk us through the whole thing in depth. So, we’re talking about the diagram. You just keep talking.

Kyle Austin Young
Well, you know, ultimately, what I teach in the book is I think that there’s been this cultural narrative that there’s two types of people who succeed. People who are really talented, connected, privileged, and people who get lucky. I don’t think that’s a very good understanding. It doesn’t take probability into account at all.

I think there’s four paths to success. I think some people succeed in spite of really bad odds because they get lucky. I tell the story in the book of Norma Jeane Dougherty. She’s working at an aviation munitions factory during the war when a photographer comes to take pictures for a military magazine. He notices how pretty she is.

He says, “Would you be interested in potentially having a career in modeling, be on some magazine covers?” She says, “Sure.” Quits her factory job, has a successful modeling career, and then, ultimately, has a really successful acting career under the stage name Marilyn Monroe.

Now, that’s a cool success story. Good for her. But if you met somebody who is an aspiring actress, would you reverse-engineer Marilyn Monroe’s story?

Pete Mockaitis
“Here’s what you got to do. Just get discovered on your job and then…”

Kyle Austin Young
“Step one, we’re going to need to get you a job at an aviation munitions factory because that’s what Marilyn Monroe did.” No, you wouldn’t. She, undeniably, achieved enormous success, but she did that, overcoming really bad odds. She got lucky, right?

So that is one of the paths through which people succeed. And it’s important to acknowledge that because it explains some of the success stories in our world that people have had such a difficult time reverse-engineering. It might not be as obvious as Marilyn Monroe, but there are stories where we’re out there, you know, “Oh, every CEO drives a blue car. Buy a blue car and you’ll be a CEO.”

No, you won’t. That’s unrelated. There’s no causation there. They just like blue cars. It has nothing to do with that. So, it’s important to understand that some people are succeeding through luck. It’s important also to understand that we have the opportunity to experience more luck in our lives when we recognize that you don’t always have to beat the odds, sometimes you can play them.

One way that you can overcome bad odds is through the power of multiple attempts. I interview entrepreneurs for the book, like Apoorva Mehta who founded Instacart. Instacart experienced enormous growth during the pandemic because people were at home, they couldn’t go to the grocery store, and grocery delivery was in exactly the right place at the right time.

I think it was, don’t quote me, I could find the number, I believe he said it was a $9 billion increase to their valuation. Just absolutely remarkable what they were able to achieve. So, you hear that, you think, “Wow, how could anybody be that lucky to be in exactly the right place at the right time?”

Then you learn that Apoorva Mehta started over 20 businesses before Instacart. And you think about these numbers in our heads that nine out of 10 businesses fail. Well, we would expect a couple of his businesses to be successful. Maybe not nine billion in ten months, but, all of sudden, these odds have changed because of the power of multiple attempts.

In the book, I also talk about Thomas Edison. Thomas Edison was in a race to develop the first practical incandescent lamp, and he’s, ultimately, competing for this really valuable patent that could change the trajectory of his career, but he’s not the only person trying to do this. All of them are struggling to find a filament that can get hot enough to glow without catching on fire or snuffing out, not being worth the effort.

What he did that was different than these other inventors, was he experimented with 6,000 different plant materials, and he ultimately finds that carbonized bamboo, which would not be my first guess, is this nearly ideal filament for what he was looking for. He gets this patent. It helps him achieve enormous success in his career. So, some people are succeeding because of the power of multiple attempts, and I give some examples of that.

Other people are succeeding because they choose to, very intentionally, pursue goals where their odds are good. And I think there’s a lot of wisdom in that, too, to recognize that we have areas of strength, and that because of those areas of strength, we have an opportunity to choose goals that are more likely to succeed. And then success tends to beget success in other areas.

I give the example in the book of people who want to play in the National Basketball Association, just to illustrate how our attributes can change our odds. If you’re shorter than six feet tall, and the average US male is 5’9″, I’m 5’11”, so I’m under six feet tall, then your odds of playing in the NBA are one in 1.2 million. So that’s terrible odds. Terrible odds.

But here’s what’s really interesting. If you’re between six feet tall and six foot three, your odds go up to one in a hundred thousand. If you’re between six four and six seven, it’s one in eight thousand. Between 6’8 and 6’11, 1 and 200. And this is what knocks people over if you happen to stand over 7 feet tall, if you’re over 7 feet tall, your odds of playing in the NBA are actually 1 in 7. One out of every seven people over seven feet tall is playing in the National Basketball Association.

Pete Mockaitis
The rule of seven.

Kyle Austin Young
At least in the United States of America, yeah, you’d line them up. And that’s pretty incredible to think about, that as we just got incrementally taller, our odds changed and changed and changed. And by the end of it, we went from one in 1.2 million to one in seven.

So, there’s real power in taking stock of, “What are the areas where we do have strength? What are the areas where we do have advantages? They might not be the goals that we’re most excited about right now, but could pursuing some of those goals lead to opportunities down the line?

You know, I’m really thankful to have this book deal. One of the things that made that possible was, first, writing for sites like Harvard Business Review and Forbes. Those were smaller accomplishments, but they brought bigger accomplishments within reach.

And then the fourth path to success is what we’ve described. It’s probability hacking. It’s taking the odds we have, thinking negative, identifying bad outcomes, and using our creativity to ultimately make those odds better.

In some ways, we can layer those onto the other three paths. We can use it to get lucky more often. We can use it to reduce the number of repeated attempts that we might need. We can use it to make more goals, things that actually look pretty good from an outlook standpoint. So that’s more or less how I think about this.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so thinking about your second chapter, “Understanding Your Odds,” I mean, you had a delightful bit of research there about the NBA. How does one go about knowing the odds given, by definition, the future is not completely knowable? So, I mean, I could just make up some numbers in a spreadsheet, but how do I get those?

Kyle Austin Young
It’s a fair question, and I’m very transparent about the fact that this is going to be an estimate. You have to kind of choose between two different realities. You can turn to base rates, which don’t typically take your individual attributes into account. They’re normally a guess. Often, odds are dramatically misreported. Some of the things that, you know, considered understood to be absolutely true aren’t even close to that.

I bring in a couple of news headlines. Here’s three. These are real-life headlines published by actual news outlets. One of them is, “Texas man survives one in a million chance of being struck by lightning.” Another is, “One in a million chance, Salado couple’s car struck by lightning.” Another is, “The odds of getting struck by lightning are one in a million. Wednesday, it happened three times in Wichita.”

One of those stories actually features a quote from an emergency room doctor affirming the idea that your odds of being struck by lightning, actually the exact quote is, “Your chances of being struck by lightning are roughly one in a million.” But according to the National Weather Service, the actual number for the average American is one in 15,300.

It’s not one in a million, not even close to one in a million. The closest I could come to explaining that one in a million number is that’s roughly your odds in any given year, but it’s not your odds over the course of a lifetime.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think you’re being generous, Kyle. I think no one really thought about it. They just say, “It’s really rare, so we’ll call it one in a million.”

Kyle Austin Young
Yeah, sure, it’s a one in a million thing. We love the number one in a million. It’s one in a million. I give the example. I share a short story that’s about someone who dies in a tragic bicycle accident. It’s fictional, but the phrase one in a million comes up. And, okay, sure, dying in a bicycle accident, one in a million. Surely, right, I mean, that has to be so rare. According to the National Safety Council, one out of every 3,546 Americans will die in a bicycle accident.

So many of these numbers that are circulating in our world are just made up. They’re misreported. They don’t take our individual attributes into account. Sometimes they’re weighed down by people who made bad decisions.

When we think about the odds of a new product succeeding when it’s released to the market, there are rates for that based on research. But then you think about projects like Bic for Her, which was a line of writing pens that were marketed to have a thinner barrel to fit a woman’s hand.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, women need that.

Kyle Austin Young
Yeah, women need a thinner pen so that they can write effectively. And this product got laughed out of the market, pretty quickly discontinued, but there were significant investments made to release this product.

And so, when you think about that, if they were to just do even a little bit of keyword research, I give some examples in the book, they could find pretty quickly that no one was looking for pens for women. That wasn’t a desire. There were people looking for a lot of other types of pens that could’ve been potentially a better opportunity if they were to release a product in that space.

And so, base rates are also weighed down by people who made decisions that you probably wouldn’t make, right? We look at how many failed products there are. Well, we found that the number one cause of failed product releases, according to some data by CB Insights, is a lack of, they call it no market need. It’s just a lack of demand.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, nobody wants the thing.

Kyle Austin Young
Yeah, nobody wants the thing. So now we’re thinking about, “Well, base rates say that most of the products that get released failed.” Okay, but is that because people are releasing things that they never took the time to validate at all? If I take the time to validate demand for my product or service, my odds are very different.

So, ultimately, you ask the question, “Where do these numbers come from?” And you have to make a choice. You can turn to base rates, which have a number of flaws, or you can estimate. And what the leading forecasters in the world do is they will typically try to break big predictions about world events into smaller ones.

Instead of saying, you know, “What are the odds of this war happening?” they’ll say, “What are the odds that this country experiences an affordability crisis while this other country experiences a surge in nationalistic pride?” whatever the case may be. They try to break it down into the component parts, the ingredients that could lead to a conflict like that or to a good outcome, depending on what they’re predicting.

And when we break that down in the context of our goals, I find that we have an opportunity to make predictions that can be, in some ways, an antidote to overconfidence. If we go back to that idea of running a marathon, we need to eat, sleep, and train according to specific regimens for 90 days, what’s the base rate that says whether Kyle will stick with his diet for 90 days? I mean, I’m Kyle. Like, there’s no statistician running the numbers on that.

So, to some extent, there is an expectation in the context of these very individualized and personal goals that we’re going to have to make some estimates. But by breaking them down into the component parts, and then being informed by base rates, letting them challenge our assumptions, I think we have an opportunity to deepen our understanding of how likely we are to get what we want.

And again, beyond that, by probability hacking, by using our creativity to take the risk out of these goals, we have an opportunity to improve our odds of success. And that’s what I think can change our lives.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m curious, do you have any rough numbers for starters that you like to hang your hat on or base level assumptions? Because, for example, when I’m considering a business initiative, it’s like, “I have no idea if this thing is going to work out.” It’s like, “But it seems like a good idea to me.” But historically, you know, the slight majority of “seems like a good idea to me” things did not work.

So, my base level assumption is like, “There’s a 30% chance that this thing will work out.” And then I like to see, “Okay, well, given that,” this is why I think you and I are simpatico. It’s like, “Well, given that, is it worth the time and money to embark upon this risky path, knowing there’s a less than one in three chance it’s going to work out?” And it’s like, “Well, heck, yes, it is because the upside is so substantial within. Well, then game on, let’s do it.”

So, I found that quite helpful, it’s just like put that in a spreadsheet and mapping it out. So, 30%, it’s a little bit arbitrary, a little bit made up, but it’s kind of based on my own experience, so there’s more than nothing in terms of the evidence supporting it. So, do you have any rules of thumb, guidelines, numbers that find their way into your estimates often?

Kyle Austin Young
Sure. I’m not a financial advisor. I can’t give investing advice, but I can say that I tend to be more risk averse than most people do. I hate losing money. I just almost can’t stand it. So, I want to be pretty confident that a goal is going to be successful.

And how do I get a sense of that? Well, I create a success diagram and I try to look for gaps in my thinking. I, then, again, have a context for asking for advice. I can go to people who know more than I do and say, “Are there bad outcomes I’m not considering or bad outcomes that I’m not taking seriously enough? Is there a more straightforward path to what I want?”

The thing that I find encouragement in. There are two things, actually. One is, you mentioned earlier that this isn’t really intended to just be a step-by-step framework, that that’s part of it, but it’s really a way of thinking and a suite of tools that we can use situationally.

Sometimes we might want to leverage the power of multiple attempts. Other times we might want to create a success diagram and try to do everything we can to minimize the risk of potential bad outcomes. We can do that in real time at every step in the process.

So even if we need to pivot, even if we think we need department manager A’s approval, it turns out we’re going to need department manager B’s approval. Great. What are the reasons that that person might reject what we’re, ultimately, offering?

So, there’s an opportunity to do this work as we go and improve our odds. And the knowledge that I have the ability to do that is one of the things that gives me confidence that even when uncertainty arises, even when unexpected speed bumps get in my way, I know how to change my odds, and that’s something that I find encouraging.

The other thing, though, is I encourage people not to think of our goals necessarily as pass/fail. Even if we don’t accomplish the original outcome, we can sometimes accumulate assets and resources that can be repurposed.

In the book, I tell the story of this group of friends who, I believe they just left jobs at PayPal when they don’t, I’m pretty sure it was PayPal. I’m not 100% positive. They decided to start this new dating website at a time when the internet was much younger or much newer, and it was difficult to upload content to the internet. It just wasn’t something that many people had the tools or the skills to do.

And one of the ways this dating site planned to differentiate itself was it was going to make it really easy for people to upload a video introducing themselves, and then put themselves in a position to meet people who might want to go on a date with them. And that was a pretty clever differentiator at that time.

The challenge was they just couldn’t get people to do it. It was a time when it was a new tool, privacy concerns were a little different back then, the idea that I was going to upload a video of myself to the internet for strangers to watch to consider whether or not they wanted to go on a date with me, that sounded crazy. Now we put content of ourselves online all the time, but that was a concern.

So, ultimately, this dating website fails. But this group of entrepreneurs didn’t give up on the idea. They instead stopped and asked the question, “What assets and resources have we accumulated through the work that we’ve already done?” And one of the biggest things was they’d use their programming skills to develop this incredible tool for uploading videos to the internet, something that was really difficult to do at the time.

So, they pivoted a little bit to a new goal, which was, “What if we started a website where anyone could upload videos about anything they wanted to?” And they call it YouTube. They end up selling it for one and a half billion dollars, and it becomes this thing that changes their lives. And so, you asked the question, “At what number is something a go for me?”

Well, I’m more risk averse than most people are, but I know I can change my odds over time. And I also don’t necessarily view failure the exact same way, because I know of a failed dating site that made over a billion dollars.

And so, I think there’s typically opportunities when we have a success diagram to be able to collect, or rather remember and process, “Here’s all of the resources that we’ve been able to get our hands on as a result of the work we’ve done.” We’re not finishing where we started, even if we’re not finishing where we wanted to.

Pete Mockaitis
So good. Well, so, Kyle, we’ve said the words success diagram a few times here. Can you tell me, literally, pen to paper, what does my success diagram look like?

Kyle Austin Young
Your success diagram starts with the goal you want to accomplish. That’ll go on the right side of the page. And then you will make a list leading up to it of the steps that are going to have to be achieved in order to accomplish it or the things that have to go right. Sometimes it’s not linear per se. Sometimes it’s just, you know, the ingredients in success, like in that training for a marathon example.

It’s not that we’re going to eat a certain way, and then we’re going to sleep a certain way, and then we’re going to train a certain way. In reality, it’s that we’re going to be doing three things simultaneously that we’ve been told can lead to success. So, there is a template.

This will get better over time, but I wanted to give people something because it’s a question I get a lot. If you go to SuccessDiagram.com, there’s a free template that you can just print. You don’t have to buy my book or anything like that. You don’t even have to give your email address. It just makes it really easy for you to fill in, “Here are some of the critical points on the path to my goal. Here are some of the things that might go wrong.” So, that’s something you could certainly take a look at. It’ll be helpful for you.

I know that podcasting, you know, it’s a little bit tricky with an audio discipline to paint a word picture for you, but I typically draw a circle for everything that has to go right. I write the thing in the center of the circle, one at a time, goals at the end of the list, and then beneath each thing that has to go right, I just make a list of the potential bad outcomes that could ultimately sabotage my success.

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

Kyle Austin Young
I want to talk about my favorite things.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, let’s do it. Can you start with a favorite quote?

Kyle Austin Young
You know, one of the real privileges of writing this book was I got the opportunity to interview Jack O’Callahan who played for the U.S. Men’s Olympic Hockey Team in 1980 during the “Miracle on Ice” when the United States beat the Soviet Union, this very unlikely victory.

He has this, I wouldn’t call it a quote, they used it as a quote in the movie version, but he says that he doesn’t remember exactly what was said by his coach Herb Brooks in the locker room before the game.

But he says he remembers leaving the locker room to take the ice with the impression that what his coach had said was, or tried to communicate, was, “If we played these guys 10 times, they would probably beat us nine times, but they aren’t going to beat us tonight.”

And that’s a quote that means a lot to me, because it acknowledges that we often are up against goals where our odds aren’t very good, but through the power, in my opinion, of multiple attempts, we have the opportunity to persist, achieve success, and then dramatically change our odds on subsequent pursuits.

And if we go into each one of those, recognizing that we’re going to fail maybe even more than we succeed, depending on how audacious the goals we’re pursuing are, but this mindset, “They’re not going to beat us tonight, that we’re going to do everything we can to make this the time that we ultimately find success,” I think we put ourselves in a powerful position.

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

Kyle Austin Young
I’ve already mentioned this one, but I think that one of my favorites is just the story of Thomas Edison because what I love about his story is a lot of people have this idea of kind of decision overwhelm, that, “If there’s too many options, we’re going to be paralyzed and we won’t know what to do.” I can understand why people would feel that way.

What I think the opportunity is when we’re making decisions like that is we just need to find a standard to measure the ideas against. And in his case, it was just, “Which one of these filaments glows the longest without burning out or without catching on fire?” And that allowed him to sift through 6,000 different ideas, and it wasn’t overwhelming. He just had a stopwatch. It’s just, “Which one of these accomplishes the goal?”

And so, I think a lot of people who are struggling to weigh their options and make a decision that they’re proud of are doing that because they haven’t really defined what success looks like. If we know what success actually looks like, we can hold our ideas up against it, and, all of sudden, it becomes a lot easier, in my opinion, to identify the one that makes the most sense in our context.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Kyle Austin Young
I’ll tell you book that I think pairs really well with mine. It’s a book by a friend and colleague, Dr. Ron Friedman, it’s called Decoding Greatness, and he takes the idea of reverse engineering and brings a framework to it. It’s basically, “How can you take great work, completed by other people, and use it to improve your own performance?”

And I think it’s a really nice pairing with my book because, ultimately, if you have a framework for learning how to do things that comes from studying others, and then you have a framework for improving your odds of success, then I think you’re in a pretty strong position.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Kyle Austin Young
A favorite habit for me is thinking negative. I’m sorry to be an Eeyore, but I think that the idea that positive thinking is an antidote to risk just doesn’t make any sense, the idea that I can somehow wish something into existence. I think there’s tremendous value in focusing on what we want.

I think there’s tremendous value in that sense of kind of manifesting what our intentions are because when we’re really clear on what the goal is, it helps us sort through the information that we experience in life. We know who to talk to at a networking event. We know which news headlines to pay attention to and which might not be relevant to us. So, I totally value and appreciate the level of focus that I think is implied there.

But for me, tell me how if I’m training for a marathon, positive thinking is going to keep it from raining on a day when I need to run, to tell me how wanting to run a marathon is going to prevent shin splints? It just doesn’t work like that. We have the opportunity to think negative, identify the things that could go wrong, and use our creativity to systematically de-risk our goals.

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

Kyle Austin Young
Probably you don’t have to beat the odds. Well, sometimes you don’t have to beat the odds. You only have to play them. Obviously, there’s goals where that doesn’t apply. I talk about the story of someone trying to graduate from college, and some people have better odds at that than others do.

And it wouldn’t make sense for someone with bad odds to enroll in four different universities and hope that they’ll complete one of the four programs. So, there’s certainly exceptions to that. But in many goals, one of the most reliable ways to overcome bad odds of success is through the power of multiple attempts.

Can I tell one last story very quick?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

Kyle Austin Young
In the book, I talk about Ben and Jerry’s. Ben and Jerry’s was this upstart organization that wanted to enter into the really crowded industry of ice cream sales. And at that time, and also today, the best-selling ice cream flavor in the world is vanilla. It’s really hard to make a vanilla ice cream that’s so much better than everyone else’s that they leave their favorite ice cream brand and come over to your company, right?

So, they decided to do something different. They said, “We’re going to try to make exotic new flavors that no one’s ever heard of before. And it’ll be so provocative that people will say, ‘Well, I’ve got to try that.’ And if they like it, we’ll be the only place they can get it because no one else has these crazy flavors that we’re dreaming up.”

But that’s an unreliable strategy, at least in the context of one attempt. It’s hard to guess what bizarre ice cream flavor enough people are going to like and want to actually try. So, what they did is they entered into a model where they knew that failure was going to be a big part of it, and they resolved to celebrate those failures.

And so, if you ever go to the Ben & Jerry’s factory in Waterbury, Vermont, I’ve been personally, outside, they have what they call the flavor graveyard, and it has actual headstones with these little funny epitaphs for failed ice cream flavors that they’ve had over the years. They have over 300 discontinued flavors of ice cream.

But recognizing that that was going to be part of the game is what allowed them to, ultimately, uncover classics that made them the best-selling ice cream brand in America for many years.

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

Kyle Austin Young
If you want to grab a copy of the book, you can do that pretty much anywhere – Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Target, directly on the Penguin Random House website. If you want to learn more about me, you can go to my website, KyleAustinYoung.com.

But if you want to connect, then find me on LinkedIn. That’s been one of the fun surprises about this journey is, at first, I wasn’t asking for that specifically, but people would find me on LinkedIn after some of these interviews and reach out. And it’s been a lot of fun to have those conversations. So now I’m just trying to shorten the path to that. If you have any questions, send me a message.

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

Kyle Austin Young
I would encourage you to try to create one success diagram for a goal. I would encourage you to try to see what it looks like. You’re not going to have all the facts, and, in some cases, that means you won’t want to rely on predictions that would come out of it, but you’re now going to have a tool that allows you to collect information, add it over time.

And when you create diagrams for various goals that you’re considering, you can start to make decisions around which one makes the most sense in your context. In so many cases, when people are trying to prioritize a goal, they’ll sometimes ask the question, “Which one aligns most with my values?” or, “Which one sounds like the most fun?” or, “Which one do I think will bring other opportunities within reach?” All those are great questions.

But if we aren’t stopping to also consider our odds of success, then why does it matter how much alignment there is if the goal’s almost certainly going to fail? I think that we need probability to have a seat at the table. Certainly, there’s goals like curing cancer, where even when the odds are bad, we need to keep trying to do it.

But in the context of our careers, I don’t see any reason to invite that level of risk. Let’s find the goals that are most likely to have a good outcome and then ask questions like, “Where is there the most alignment?”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Kyle, thank you.

Kyle Austin Young
Thank you.