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900: Six Mindsets For Thriving in Uncertain Times with Charles Conn

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Charles Conn shares how to be strategic and make breakthroughs when things are uncertain.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How talented people unknowingly self-sabotage
  2. The simple question that leads to clever breakthroughs
  3. How to communicate your ideas so people will care

About Charles

Charles Conn is an investor, environmentalist, and entrepreneur. He is co-founder of Monograph, a venture firm, and was previously CEO of the Rhodes Trust in Oxford. He is Board Chair of Patagonia and sits on The Nature Conservancy European Council. He was founding CEO of Ticketmaster-Citysearch, and was a partner at McKinsey & Company.  He is a graduate of Harvard, Oxford and Boston Universities.

He is co-author with Robert McLean of Bulletproof Problem Solving: The One Skill That Changes Everything, published with Wiley in 2019, a best-seller now in six languages, and The Imperfectionists: Strategic Mindsets for Uncertain Times, 2023.

Resources Mentioned

Charles Conn Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Charles, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Charles Conn
It’s great to be here, Pete. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into your wisdom and the book, The Imperfectionists: Strategic Mindsets for Uncertain Times and general problem-solving wisdom you have to share with us but, first, I’m curious, so you’re the board chair of Patagonia. I’m imagining that you’re an outdoorsy person then. Is this fair to say?

Charles Conn
Yeah, my big passion is to spend time outside.

Pete Mockaitis
Are there any particularly memorable tales of outdoor adventures that leap to mind?

Charles Conn
Yeah, I have explored on several occasions the very upper regions of the Skeena River in British Columbia which runs almost the entire length of the province, and goes from these incredibly beautiful mountains, all the way down to the sea. That one is deep in my heart.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. And have you ever had any brushes, close encounters with death in your adventures?

Charles Conn
Yes, on several occasions, once involving a landslide and also, in northern Canada, this time on a lake called Mistassini in northern Quebec, and a couple times in boats.

Pete Mockaitis
Hotdog. And what does that do for you, like, internally and how you view the world and your priorities?

Charles Conn
That’s a good question. I think it sharpens you up on what’s important and makes you focus on not all the little things that are the day-to-day but on the bigger things that actually matter.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think we’re talking about something that matters a whole heck of a lot in terms of strategic mindsets and problem-solving. Could you kick us off by sharing a particularly surprising or counterintuitive discovery you’ve made about mindsets and problem-solving and such while putting together The Imperfectionists?

Charles Conn
I think perhaps the one that’s hardest for people to get their own heads around is to be comfortable with the idea of collective intelligence or outsourcing wisdom, whether that’s outsourcing it to ancient wisdom, or outsourcing it to artificial intelligence swarms. It’s very hard for people to think that they don’t have everything inside themselves. But, of course, we don’t and we can’t.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now, what I find counterintuitive is that people find that counterintuitive, that’s so meta. Maybe I’m humble or just a dummy but I’m thinking, “Of course, I don’t have the answers.” And, in a way, that’s kind of a relief. I’m not on the hook, on the spot, expected to. Can you dig into this mindset a little bit?

Charles Conn
Yeah, I think what happens in big organizations, and you’ve worked for fancy consulting organizations, people, over time, sort of overcome that natural humility that you just described and begin to think that their organizations can do remarkable things. And it’s that idea that… you remember Enron, they thought they were the smartest guys in the room.

And that kind of idea, like the arrogance of thinking, “We’re the smartest guys in the room, and, therefore, all of the pieces of the solutions to the problems that we’re trying to solve can be found here,” is a fundamental delusion that especially talented people tell themselves.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, good to know that that is widespread. And I guess that kind of hits me interestingly because I’m thinking about, boy, there was a quote. I got to get this guy on the show. I think he was in the Bush cabinet, he said, “Some people are more certain of everything than I am of anything.” That is exactly how I feel all the time because people will say things with such definitive language and tone of voice and use the word obviously, it’s like, “Oh, it’s obvious.”

And I was like, “I don’t know. I’m not so sure that that’s the case.” And, occasionally, they’re just dead wrong. And so, I’ve sort of had to, in my mind, mentally attach a disclaimer to all things being shared in general casual conversation.

Charles Conn
And don’t you find, as we get older, that instinct to humility should get stronger and often it doesn’t?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think so.

Charles Conn
And that’s what makes someone boring, right, that they’re confident that they know everything there is to know and they’re not open to new mindsets and new ways of seeing things, new lenses.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And I think about just how many times I’ve been dead wrong about things, so it’s, like, I have evidence to suggest that it’s quite probable that I may be mistaken about something, especially with my first impressions pre-research.

Charles Conn
When we’re young, we often have that kind of confidence, never in doubt, occasionally correct. Hopefully, the world gives us the evidence that you just described. Usually, it does.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Okay, so there’s something surprising that popped up. Could we maybe zoom out and hear kind of the big picture or the thesis behind the book The Imperfectionists: Strategic Mindsets for Uncertain Times?

Charles Conn
Yes. So, here’s 30,000 feet on it. There’s always this sense that the world’s getting faster and faster, and now it really is. There’s objective evidence with the amount of new data that’s being produced every day, the impact of artificial intelligence, computational biology, robotics. It’s a blur. And no young people today can look at their parents or their grandparents’ careers and think, “I will have something like that.”

This idea that you could gather a body of knowledge, in high school or university, and then put that to work over 40 years, if it ever really did hold, certainly doesn’t hold now. And that creates a feeling of anxiety and anomie, and you see this a lot in young people. There’s an epidemic of anxiety and also depression because of that sense that we’re unmoored.

And my sense is that, instead of looking for perfection so that we know all of the moving parts and we can confidently solve the problems in our lives, that we should actually let go of that idea, and we should lean into the risk and uncertainty that the world is delivering up to us by using some mindsets that actually tame that or make sense of it for us. So, that’s the 30,000 feet of what the book is about.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, there’s so much great stuff to dig into here. So, let’s hear about the anxiety and depression coming from a sense of being unmoored. Can you expand on that?

Charles Conn
Yeah, I think the way we’re all taught to think about our lives, and companies are taught to think about strategies, to think that there’s a structure out there that you can understand, markets have structures, lives have structures, and that there are agents that operate within this structure. And if you do some thinking about what their incentives are, you can actually deduce what the right strategy for you is. That’s a very standard model of strategy sometimes called structure conduct.

And I think the world that we operate in now, that structure is changing so quickly that understanding the rules or dynamics of how agents will behave in those fluid structures has diminished or gone out the window. And that leaves many people who are looking for structure conduct rules feeling anomie. And in the businesses that we all operate in today, compared to the past, you don’t even know who the disruptive entrant is going to be to your nonprofit or to your business. Maybe one of these super competitors like an Apple or an Amazon who you don’t even think of as operating in your sphere.

And I think that creates a kind of a feeling of uncertainty in a world that’s changing quickly that makes many people freeze, paralyzed, or makes other people leap before they look, both of which are pathological responses to uncertainty.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And just a definition check for anomie. What does this word mean?

Charles Conn
So, anomie is this sister to entropy, the idea that we’re lost in a world where there’s no meaning and no touchpoints or milestones.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, I can see how depression or anxiety, might be in the sense of, ‘Oh, this is solvable but I just can’t so I guess I’m no good” is one direction versus anxiety, like, “Ahh, there’s nothing to hold on to.”

Charles Conn
“I don’t know what to do.”

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s freaky. Okay.

Charles Conn
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
And so then, you say if we let go of this notion and that there are structures, this is solvable, etc., that we can feel liberated from that.

Charles Conn
That’s right. It doesn’t mean we just sort of lean into anomie. It means we actually have some tools that are well within our capabilities to make sense of this faster-moving world. The fact that we don’t have simple structure in conduct doesn’t mean there isn’t structure in content. We can actually learn the game that’s being played. It’s just the rules are changing and it’s unfolding quickly so we need an orientation toward uncertainty and change, which helps us gather information to make good decisions and to be successful even when things are changing quickly.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so this sounds super beneficial, we can let go of some of that anxiety and depression. And what are some of the other benefits associated with mastering these skills and mindsets?

Charles Conn
So, I think you said mastery, and I think a feeling of mastery, even in a world when things are changing, a feeling, a quiet confidence that even when things are changing, you can actually chart a course that makes sense, not a course without mistakes because mistakes and learning from mistakes are a critical part of this framework for getting comfortable operating in this world of change.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And could you share a cool maybe case study of someone who felt some of these challenges and adopted some new approaches and saw cool results?

Charles Conn
So, I think the very most important mindset will sound incredibly obvious but I think it’s actually really profound, which is curiosity. Humans are pattern recognizers when we’re young. We look for patterns that help us make sense of the world. And then, as we get older, we become pattern imposers so that we can make sense of confusing things.

The problem with pattern imposition is we often get it wrong. This is what Daniel Kahneman wrote about when he wrote about all the cognitive errors that humans do in Thinking, Fast and Slow. If we can stay curious even as we get older, we can actually be open to learning in this world that’s going faster and faster. And I’ll give you two little case studies.

One is Nespresso. So, everybody knows what Nespresso is. It was created by Nestle, which is one of the world’s biggest food companies, the biggest producers of coffee. Nestle had a young engineer, his name was Eric Favre, and he happened to be with his wife visiting Rome. And he was standing there thinking he wanted a coffee, and he noticed that there were a whole bunch of coffee shops in Rome, and only one of them had a queue out the door.

And instead of thinking, “Well, I don’t want to stand in that queue. I got to go with this one,” he said, “I wonder what’s going on here? Why are people queueing outside the door?” And the name of the coffee shop was Sant’Eustachio, so he waited in the queue, and he went inside. And there was this whole barista in there called Eugenio. And he thought the machine was broken so he was pumping the espresso machine and putting extra bars of pressure into everybody’s coffee.

And the result was this incredible thick crema on the top of everybody’s coffee, and that’s why people were waiting. And Favre’s curiosity didn’t stop there. He obviously enjoyed the coffee, but he went away and he thought, “I wonder how we can make that, give people that experience, that actual experience of being in a Roman coffee shop in their home?”

And he tinkered and experimented, he was actually a rocket scientist, and he figured out how to create pressure via the machine, what we now think of as a Nespresso machine and a Nespresso capsule, so that you can produce that wonderful thick crema in your coffee at home. It took eight years to do it. Nestle gave him the time and the space to do it, and he created a business that does about 10 billion a year in revenue, all from curiosity.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. And I think that line, that really is where the rubber meets the road when it comes to curiosity. It’s like, “Are you impatient, in a rush, need to do what’s latest and loudest and now, now, now? Or are you like, ‘Hmm, what’s that about? It’s going to take more time and maybe be kind of annoying but let’s go with it, see what happens here’?”

Charles Conn
Right. And in this world, this feeling of anxiety that we’ve got to just to keep our nose at the coal phase, we often let those experiences pass by, and those are the experiences that give us insights that actually give us that feeling of mastery and confidence when things are changing quickly.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so then, when it comes to the mindset of curiosity, what do we do with that sort of actionably, “Just be more curious”?

Charles Conn
Well, yeah, so that doesn’t sound right but the truth is we can put it into practice by stopping to notice. And that thing, as kids, we always ask the question “Why?” In fact, there’s all this research, kids ask something like a hundred questions an hour. It’s incredible. And what they’re doing is trying to find patterns that make sense.

And when they eventually learn how to tie a shoelace with a double bow, that problem is solved and they become a pattern imposer after that, “This is how we tie a shoe,” they learned an experiment of how to tie their shoe. How can you leave open that childlike way of asking why. Eric Favre stood there on the cobblestones of Rome, and asked, “Why?” And I do think curiosity can be as encouraging, or spurring curiosity can start with putting questions when we see phenomenon that we don’t immediately impose a pattern on.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, we just ask why about anything and everything that pops on up.

Charles Conn
Everything, especially stuff that’s anomalous. So, we tend to look at things that are anomalous, and we put them into the bucket of not an important datapoint because it doesn’t confirm something that we wanted to confirm or that’s natural to confirm. Or, we bucket it very quickly into, “I guess they’re short a barista there, and that’s why there’s a queue.” We use the wrong framing because, and you said it, we’re impatient creatures.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, once we ask why, I guess then the next step is to try to see what’s going on.

Charles Conn
Yeah. Another great case study, which I wouldn’t go into in detail, is how instant photography was invented. Edwin Land, now a famous chemist, was walking around Sante Fe, New Mexico, with his daughter, and he was taking pictures with his conventional film camera. And his little daughter, Jennifer, pulled on his sleeve, and said, “Let me see the picture, daddy.” And he knelt down and he said, “Oh, well, that doesn’t work because we’re exposing a film emulsion to light, then we send that to the drugstore.”

And he stopped himself, and he realized, like, “No, why can’t we see the picture?” And it was his curiosity, instead of just brushing his daughter off, that led him to spend the rest of the day walking around Santa Fe, thinking, “I wonder if I could make the pictures appear instantly.” And he was working with a patent attorney that night, that very night, to develop what we think of as the Polaroid instamatic camera.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Okay. So, we got curiosity. What’s next?

Charles Conn
So, the next one, I think, is really important. It’s kind of a sister idea is one we call occurrent behavior. Occurrent behavior means what actually happens in the world as opposed to what you wish would happen or think will happen, and for us it means an experimentalist approach. You can see why that’s a cousin to curiosity.

It means instead of accepting existing datasets, you actually create your own data. When you were a Bain consultant, and I was a BCG consultant, one of the first things that they tell you when you started a new piece of work or study or a case, it’s called different things in different places, is you’d look out for the existing datasets that you could purchase or rent so that you can begin to immediately draw insights, but everybody has access to those purchasable datasets, and they don’t represent whatever current reality is because they were collected before.

And an experimentalist or a current behavior mindset says, “I wonder if we can test or taste the market ourselves,” and you can do this in any part of your life, rather than accepting what exists to see if you can generate your own perspective. So, occurrent behavior is trying it. And I think we think of that a lot when we think of internet companies.

So, in internet companies, we think, “Oh, you can just try interface B or interface A, and you can see which one generates more traffic or more revenue.” But you can do this kind of thinking in any business. One of my favorite crazy examples is SpaceX. Whether you’re a fan of Elon Musk or not, what he’s done in only 15 or 20 years with SpaceX is incredible. You had NASA for 60 years sending parcels into space, including people, and during that entire time, they didn’t drive down the cost curve.

In a period of only 15 years, because he was willing to relentlessly experiment, going from sending three or four missions into space a year, which is what NASA was doing, to sending 15 or 20 missions into space a year, which is what SpaceX has been doing, and each time trying something new, including using technologies from the automotive industry, like heat shielding, using innovations like using a basket or a net to catch the nose cone, which is an expensive part that you might otherwise lose, they’ve been able to drive down the cost curve by about 95%, so cutting the cost of sending a kilogram into space from 50,000 to just over 2,000.

It’s remarkable. And it shows that even in the ultimate of heavy industries, experimentation can lead remarkable results.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And when you say experimentation, I’m thinking SpaceX, they’ve had a number of things explode, and I guess that’s part of it.

Charles Conn
Right. And I think this is part of imperfection. Obviously, unplanned disassembly, which I think was the term that they used in a hundred-million-dollar mission is an extreme example of what sometimes comes at a cost. Experiments come with a cost. But there were 20 different things, according to the commentary by SpaceX at the time, that they were trying to experiment with in that launch, and that they learned from, and that they’ll improve from.

In any of human enterprise with relative low cost, in this case, it was relatively high cost, we can generate new data that gives us a better sense for how the world is actually unfolding.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, this is sparking some cool connections. We had Suneel Gupta on the show talking about being backable, and he said one thing that makes you phenomenally persuasive is you have an earned secret. It’s, like, you know something that other folks don’t know, and one of the best ways to do it is just do those experiments.

And then it speaks to fundamental problem-solving process, whether we’re in uncertain times or not so uncertain environments, just that hypothesis-driven thinking approach that we’re into in consulting, is so huge. It’s like, “What must be true for this to be a good move or workout? And then how do we test that?”

And so, just for funsies, could you share with us a couple really cool examples of means of experimenting and testing that are accessible to the typical professional in the midst of problems they bump into?

Charles Conn
So, one is an old story from some friends of mine in McKinsey, which is another firm that I worked at, who were trying to solve a really difficult problem when they were working with the Federal Reserve, which is, “How do you count money?” And this is in the days before counting machines, so in the late ‘70s, they were actually counting money by hand, and they would double and triple count the big bundles of hundred-dollar bills and twenty-dollar bills, if you can believe it, and they thought that that was a far more accurate approach than any other approach.

And one of these clever consultants said, “Hmm, seems like a slow and error-prone approach,” because they would often do tests and find that the counts were off, “Why don’t we weigh the money?” which was a crazy idea. But with a very accurate scale and money at a particular humidity, so specific gravity, weighing is much more accurate than counting, and they were able to demonstrate that.

And I think that’s just one of those really cool little examples, which is exploring your curiosity by doing a mini experiment, in this case, weighing the money, led to kind of a breakthrough how the Federal Reserve thought about counting money. Later on, that was bypassed by great counting machines, but I just think that’s one beautiful example.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fun and it reminds me of my favorite TV show ever, Breaking Bad, in which they all have to weigh the money, the stacks of it in the storage facility.

Charles Conn
Oh, dear, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
That is a good one. I’d also love your take on experiments about if we have to predict the future. And so, for example, one of my favorite encounters of one of my failures in using good hypothesis-driven thinking was I was exploring making an investment – this was back in the day – in a magazine that went to producers of TV and radio shows, because I wanted to sell a book and associated speaking services, but the price tag for that ad was sort of substantial for me at the time, and I was like, “Oh, is this going to work out?”

“At the end of the day, am I going to recoup more money than I invested in this thing?” And that’s all based on the responsiveness, both of the producers and the consumers listening or watching? I was like, “How can I even know?” And so, I went in the wrong direction, as a consultant, I was like, “Well, let’s just assume this, and this, and this, and this, and this, and make a spreadsheet.” I’m just making up numbers, and I was like, “Well, those numbers seem reasonable. Let’s go for it.”

And it was a total bust, I very much regret that investment. And then months later, I got a phone call from someone, who said, “Hey, Pete, I noticed your ad in this publication. Can you tell me how that worked out for you?” I was like, “Oh, not well, but what I should’ve done is what you’re doing. I had a whole content info of all these people who bought the ad and I could’ve just given them a ring, and say, ‘Hey, how did this work out for you?’ and then I would’ve known and saved some money.”

Charles Conn
And that’s one of those great problem-solving techniques, which is called Occam’s razor, which is a 15th century idea, which is the best solution to the problem is usually one that requires the least assumptions. And you could’ve started with that approach, which is the simplest one right in front of our nose.

And we often, especially clever people, and I think that’s what’s amazing here, is that these techniques are not to help ordinary people behave like clever people. These are techniques that help clever people even more because we’re the worst pattern imposers, the people who are very confident about their abilities.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, Occam’s razor or with this book, I think it was called Obvious Adams, the idea was, “Hey, just do the obvious thing in business and it will take you really far,” which, in some ways, is I think is best about AI. And there was a Wall Street Journal article about AI coming up with creative business ideas more so than ten MBAs.

I’m a little skeptical but, either way, I’ve heard elsewhere, it said that AI tends to give you the most obvious answer because it’s like picking the words that are next to other words around this thing, large language models. But that in of itself is super helpful, it’s like, “Oh, yeah, let’s do that obvious thing. That’s pretty handy. Let’s go ahead and do that.”

Charles Conn
I think that’s right. Basic large language models that are trained on the internet, which is the junkyard of HTML that is the internet, are likely to give pretty obvious and not creative solutions. I do think AI trained on better databases, and particularly the kind of underlying databases, can actually generate surprising and sometimes creative outcomes because it isn’t looking to impose a particular pattern. It isn’t working with a set of assumptions the way you and I often do.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Okay. Charles, well, we talked about curiosity, occurrent behavior, experiments. Is there another key mindset or piece we should dig into?

Charles Conn
So, the other mindset that we think is really powerful, we call dragonfly eye. And the analogy of the dragonfly eye is because they have these incredible compound eyes that have all these different lenses, more than 30,000 lenses, and a couple of different types of receptors that allow them to see almost 360, and also allow them to see spectra of light that no human can see.

We don’t really know how that insect experiences the world but we like this idea, when you’re problem-solving, of making sure to test different perspectives than your own. And sometimes people will call that perspective-taking, so maybe that would be a simpler way of putting it. When you’re solving a problem, remember to step out of your shoes because your shoes are the shoes of the organization that you’re working in, and your particular set of beliefs about how your organization competes in the world.

So, what we’d encourage people to do is see the problem through the eyes of others. So, that might be your suppliers, it might be your employees, it might be from one of your existing competitors, or it might be a perspective like an incipient or potential competitor, and we think that’s a particularly useful lens. So, trying your problem on through the perspective of others, which is a relatively straightforward thing to do, you can workshop this, gives you insights that other people just don’t have. And I’ll give you an example, this one that I love, and done by a friend of mine, is Invisalign.

So, you’re familiar with Invisalign, which are these clear braces that have just taken the orthodontic world by storm over the last 20 years or so. Were those invented by an orthodontist?

Pete Mockaitis
I’m guessing not, but I don’t actually know. Lay it on us, Charles.

Charles Conn
You got it. So, why not? There had been various forms of braces around since actually the time of the pharaohs but the kind of metal tracks that we have today have been around for something like 70 or 80 years. Why is it that orthodontists who get paid so much money to put those tracks on didn’t think of these clear progressive teeth corrections that Invisalign thought of?

It was thought of by two students at Stanford Business School. One of them was a kid who didn’t have the money to get braces until he was in his mid-20s, actually at business school. He was noticing how awkward it felt to have braces as a mid-20s person. He also noticed that, when he got his braces off, that if he forgot to put his retainer in for a couple of days, when he put it in, it hurt, and then it stopped hurting.

And what he noticed, therefore, was that his retainers were also moving his teeth, and he and his colleague, who’s called Kelsey Wirth, thought, “Huh, I wonder if you could do 3D printing, using a hard clear plastic like this retainer, that would move people’s teeth just like the ugly braces do.” They were taking the perspective of a brace patient, or braces user, not the perspective of an orthodontist who was just looking for the technical teeth correction.

With a different lens, they ended up creating a business, a very difficult to do because no one wanted to support them in dentistry, but eventually they got a school of dentistry to help them do the engineering. They got some engineers at Stanford to help them do the 3D printing, and they created a business that’s worth $20 billion market capitalization today, and have totally democratized orthodontics. It used to be just a small group of people who made that money. Now, any dentist can fit it.

So, I think it’s an incredible insight. It came from seeing things through a different perspective that other people didn’t think, and it’s one of the most powerful ways that you can improve your own life, which is to stop and see things through a different perspective.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I get with the Invisalign story that it was an atypical perspective that we wouldn’t expect it to come from. And so, in practice, if we’re trying to take other’s perspectives, how do you recommend we do it? We just ask, “Hey, any ideas for how to correct teeth?” Or what’s the process?

Charles Conn
I love workshops and maybe you do, too. I love getting people in a room. One of the most powerful things you can ever do is get your customers in a room. Never understand why people don’t do that, and whether you work in a nonprofit or for-profit organization, you can bring the people into the room who you’re trying to provide services to, and ask them, “How do you see my product?” and listen to what they’re saying.

Now, sometimes that doesn’t work when the products super breakthrough. In this case, they wouldn’t have told you that they wanted Invisalign. What they would’ve told you is how awkward they felt getting braces, how painful it was getting braces, how they couldn’t wait to get their braces off. So, imagine the original Sony Walkman. A focused group wouldn’t have created the Sony Walkman, they didn’t have it in their minds to do so.

But asking people how they wanted to consume their music, which was increasingly mobile, actually could’ve created the Sony Walkman. And I think that’s the kind of insight that comes from stepping outside your own pattern imposition framework, and thinking about whatever the problem is from the eyes of others.

Pete Mockaitis
I think that’s well said there. What is the Henry Ford quote – “If we ask the customers what they wanted, they’d say they wanted faster carriages,” or something like that. And so, some would say, “Oh, well, customers don’t know. You’ve got to figure it out for them.” But I think that what you’re saying is, within that, it’s like, “Well, you’re getting at something. If the customers say that, then, well, that can spark some things to go forth and innovate.”

Charles Conn
Customers know their pain points and customers know their druthers even if they couldn’t conceptualize the Walkman or Invisalign. So, I’ll give you one more example. The biggest player in cloud computing isn’t IBM, and it’s not Microsoft. Why? Because they didn’t get the idea first. Someone else got it first. And the people who got it first was Andy Jassy at Amazon, and he got it first because he saw something they were doing internally for their own computing power.

And he realized, “What if we could offer this by the minute or by the byte instead of having people have to create their own server farms? What if we rent this capacity?” And, of course, that’s where the idea of cloud computing came from. He saw things through a different perspective. They developed something internally, and then he thought, “Huh, I wonder if there’s a business here?”

Pete Mockaitis
And that’s exactly what happened with me, as well with podcast production. So, that’s cool. All right. Well, then can you give us some views on when it comes to the notion of being an imperfectionist, or embracing imperfectionism? Can you talk to us maybe a bit about the emotional hang ups? Or how do we make that journey, so it’s like, “Oh, yeah, now I’m just totally cool making lots of mistakes, and being totally imperfect”? That could be quite a leap for some.

Charles Conn
Yes. So, I think the overarching mindset is imperfection or imperfectionism, and that really brings together all of the mindsets, two we haven’t talked about, or we talked about briefly, collective intelligence and show and tell, together with the ones that we have talked about. The overarching idea is to go ahead and lean into risks, and I think this is the emotional thing that causes people either to freeze, “I better wait till things are more stable,” or to just like, “Ahh, jump,” and you could look at Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, and think, “Hmm, he probably should’ve thought about that a little harder.”

I think the way to get over the emotional either paralysis or impetuousness is to think about what things you can do – so curiosity, dragonfly perspective-taking, or experimentation – that you can do that are relatively quick, relatively low cost, and relatively low consequence when it goes wrong.

So, if you had those three things, “I can get feedback quickly, it doesn’t cost me too much to make this experiment, and the consequences of it going wrong are relatively modest, I can lean in and learn more about the game that’s being played, see the structure,” and, again, we can’t count on some historical structure, “see the structure that’s in the current game, and look at the behavior of the players that’s in the current game. That gives me information and allows me to be more confident about my next step even if what I did originally has some failures in it.”

I’ll give you an example because it’s always better to bring things to life, and it’s another Amazon example. So, Amazon is now a big player in what we call consumer financial services. They have something like a 24% share of all the transactions that occur online because people use Amazon Pay even when they’re not on the Amazon site. How did that happen?

Well, did Amazon use its giant balance sheet to buy a huge bank or consumer finance company? Nope, they didn’t. Well, why? So, what they did instead is, starting around 2008, they made a couple of little investments in fintech companies, they hired a team from a failed fintech company, they tried to build their own version of what was then called Square, which was a little payment device, which is now called Cube, and they bought some IP.

Almost all of those specific steps that I’ve just described ended in failure, meaning they no longer exist today, but each of those things built their understanding, built their skillset because they brought in people, and built their capabilities, ultimately, to become a competitor. And that allowed them to climb kind of an invisible staircase to be competent enough to begin to do the things in consumer financial services that they’re now known for, ultimately including an Amazon credit card and Amazon Pay. They did small low-consequence steps that, when apparently failed, actually helped build their capabilities and their confidence to become a real competitor in the space.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. Well, Charles, I really geek out at all the stuff. I love problem-solving and decision-making stuff. I think it’s just massively leveraged powerful skill that makes a world of difference in terms of if there’s a thing to learn, or to really invest in, it’s probably this and several organizations said, it’s like, the top skill for the decade or century that we’re in.

What I find interesting and intriguing is that sometimes in episodes where we’ve covered this, I see the data that my dear listeners aren’t as jazzed about this as I am, or so it seems, in terms of, “Huh, I thought this was one of the most killer episodes ever,” and then the download and engagement numbers are, like, modest, like, “Oh, yeah, it’s all right.”

And so, I scratch my head a little bit, but my leading hypothesis is that people say, “Well, yeah, I know I got tons of problems solved. I got lots of answers, and it doesn’t seem to go anywhere when I share them with my collaborators and colleagues in the organization.” So, I’d love to hear, you got Chapter 6: Show and Tell, Storytelling to Compel Action, what are your pro tips for when we’ve got a great solution ready to pop into the world, make its debut? How do we lead other people on board with that?

Charles Conn
What a great segue and setup. Yeah, no matter how good a problem-solver you are, on your own, you won’t make any change in the world. And I think it’s almost an icon, the brilliant person laboring by themselves without recognition or understanding, and I think that exists for a reason, which is the independence that allows some people to come up with brilliant ideas and solutions that are out of the norm doesn’t necessarily make them compelling to others.

And we love to go back to this very simple concept you did as a kid, probably in kindergarten or first grade, which is show and tell. And the way to bring people on board with your idea is to, literally, think about, “How would I show and tell this?” And sometimes smart people think, “Well, I’m going to give them the data. I’m going to give them a graph that tells them what the output is.”

What we’ve learned is, in a world where there’s more and more data produced every day, in a world of polarization that we live in today, that people don’t trust information the way they used to anymore. So, to break through with your idea, is actually much more difficult than it’s ever been before. And the critical insight here is to speak to people’s hearts, not just their minds. So, when you construct your stories, think about what people’s values are.

And I’ll give you an example here, which is if you’re in the nature conservancy, you want people to change their behavior about how they interact with the natural world. You could do that just by pointing out that we’re destroying the world, the temperature is going up, and species are dying. But people often don’t pull their Subarus over to the side of the road and change their behavior unless you talk about something they really do care about, which is, for example, their kids.

And even people who have very different political perspectives love their kids, and you can use something like that as a common ground to begin to build the story for change, which people will actually sign up for. And one of the reasons The Nature Conservancy has been quite a successful conservation organization is that it has incentives when it comes to telling stories that speak not only to the facts but also to the values that people care about.

Pete Mockaitis
So, that story can sound like, “Don’t you want your children to be able to enjoy these beautiful spaces? Or you want them to not live shorter lives because of pollution?” like that sort of thing?

Charles Conn
Better yet a demonstration. Sure, what you just said makes sense but what about a demonstration? So, I’ll give you a physical demonstration done by The Nature Conservancy. They were trying to convince wealthy donors that they should invest in building shellfish reefs in estuary areas because estuaries are where fresh water comes out, but there’s often pollution in that fresh water. And when it gets mixed with the saltwater, this is where a lot of creatures grow up in estuaries. This is where we create some of the biggest environmental crises.

If you put in oyster reefs, for example, or rather shellfish reefs, those tiny creatures that are inside the shells actually are filter feeders, and they filter out a lot of the toxins and pollution that comes out of estuaries. What the Conservancy did in one famous presentation in Australia is they put 17 10-liter buckets at the back of the room stacked in a beautiful pyramid.

So, everyone came into the room, and the first thing they noticed is these 17 beautiful green buckets stacked in a pyramid. Even before they said anything, they had the audience’s attention, the philanthropists’ attention, “What’s going on here?” And they said, “Do you know that each oyster filters 170 liters of water a day and cleans that as much as those 17 10-liter buckets holds each day?”

And by using that physical demonstration and tying it in, again, with values that people cared about, clean water for their kids, that demonstration opened up people’s wallets in a way that a PowerPoint presentation never could.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s fun, as I imagine the philanthropists, which I’ve done on a very tiny scale, is you get excited, like, “Wait, one oyster and all that water? Well, that sounds just like a kill on return on investment. Where do I write the check?”

Charles Conn
Exactly. So, here’s another example. Richard Feynman, he’s speaking before the Space Shuttle Disaster panel, and he thinks that the problem is with the O-rings because the launch was done at a low temperature. And he could’ve presented a table of data showing that O-rings fail at lower temperatures, which is true. What did he do? He had a glass of ice water on the desk in front of him, and an O-ring in his pocket.

He took out the O-ring, held it in the water with a little clamp that he purchased at the hardware store next door, and then he twisted the O-ring to show that it deformed and then cracked at that lower temperature, the temperature of ice water. Well, no one will ever forget his testimony. Even though he had a Nobel Prize and could’ve used all kinds of data, what he did was a short demonstration that grabbed people.

And if you want your ideas, after you’ve done your clever problem-solving, if you want your ideas to have currency, if you want your ideas to break through in the world that’s a blizzard of ideas, think about how you would do show and tell.

Pete Mockaitis
I love it. Well, if you could just give us a few rapid-fire bullets of examples. So, we’ve got the ice water O-rings. We’ve got the big buckets of water. What are some other ways that we show stuff visually that’s powerful?

Charles Conn
Well, there are some famous graphics in history that I always go back to. So, you know that there’s a famous nurse called Nightingale, Florence Nightingale. Very few people realize that Nightingale was also one of the best statisticians of her day, and she drew this thing that’s now sometimes called a rose crescent diagram to show the impact of, basically, the filthy conditions during the Crimean War in the middle 1800s.

And she showed that way more soldiers were dying from the bacterial infection of their wounds, or bad water, than were actually dying from bullets. And she did that by showing this amazing graphic that’s famous to this day, that grabbed everybody’s attention. She could’ve written 150-page or 250-page finding but that single graph convinced the British military that they needed to upgrade the public health facilities that were in the hospitals in Crimea, which eventually led, by the way, to a public health revolution back in the home country, Britain, because Queen Victoria paid attention to what was going on in Crimea.

And we don’t know this for sure, but apparently met Florence Nightingale. That’s a person who figured out show and tell, and she changed the world. That’s how we get public health. Not just a nurse, someone who changed everything.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, Charles, tell me, anything else you really want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Charles Conn
Yes. So, I’ll give you one more, which I think, in the world we live in today, we talked about it very briefly at the beginning, but think about collective intelligence whenever you’re trying to solve a problem, and where you can outsource incredibly great ideas that will help you solve your problem. There are platforms like Kaggle which allow you to bring in other people’s ideas for a small amount of price money, maybe an AI algorithm, maybe an AI swarm.

The Nature Conservancy used that very effectively to create a program called FishFace that allows computer recognition aboard boats to identify which fish are endangered species and should be put back in the water, and which fish are okay to eat. They didn’t have that capability internally at The Nature Conservancy so they outsourced it for $150,000 price via Kaggle.

That’s just one of thousands of good ideas that come from bringing other people’s expertise inside your organization even when you’re full of clever people. And so, that would round out the six mindsets that I think will give people confidence that despite the pace of change, and all the terrible things that are happening in the world, that we can step into that risk and confidently navigate our way.

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

Charles Conn
Einstein is famous for saying if he had an hour to spend solving a problem, he’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the nature of the problem, and five minutes solving it. So, he was a predictably clever guy, I think we can all agree, but there’s so much benefit that comes from thinking through your problem from different perspectives before you run off and try your favorite technique. So, that’s one of my favorite quotes.

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

Charles Conn
Yeah, I think the research behind the book called The Selfish Gene, which was a book published by Richard Dawkins in the late ‘70s, is the most concise encapsulation of how evolution works, which is this powerful engine that’s behind everything in the world today, including how humans compete with each other.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Charles Conn
I think my favorite book is probably E.O. Wilson’s Biodiversity which sort of naturally flows from the Dawkins book. Biodiversity comes from the impact of how evolution works.

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

Charles Conn
I actually love old-school woodworking tools. So, my personal favorite tool would be a woodworking plane. I think it’s amazing. They’ve been around for 3,000 years.

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

Charles Conn
Climb the stairs.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you, they retweet it, they Kindle book highlight it?

Charles Conn
Yeah, I think the thing that I’m hearing back now is around curiosity, which is people are thanking me for awakening them to their own curiosity and to the wellspring that comes from asking the question why.

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

Charles Conn
Yeah, so you can find me on LinkedIn, or you can find both the books I’ve published on LinkedIn, or you can find them on Amazon, or any other great booksellers. We also have a website which is called TheImperfectionist.org, or BulletproofProblemSolving.com.

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

Charles Conn
Yeah. So, don’t be afraid to lean into risks using relatively low cost, relatively reversible moves. You may make some mistakes but you’ll learn tons.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Charles, thank you. This has been so fun. I wish you lots of fun problem-solving and imperfection results, and, yeah, thanks for taking the time.

Charles Conn
It’s been terrific. Thanks so much for having me, Pete.

889: Deploying Your Unique Problem-Solving Strengths with Cheryl Strauss Einhorn

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Cheryl Einhorn provides tools to improve your decision-making skills.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The key to countering bias in decision-making
  2. The five Problem Solver Profiles–and which one you are
  3. How to work with different types of decision-makers

About Cheryl

Cheryl Strauss Einhorn founded Decisive, a decision sciences company that trains people and teams in complex problem solving and decision-making skills using the AREA Method. AREA is an evidence-based decision-making system that uniquely controls for and counters cognitive bias to expand knowledge while improving judgment. Cheryl developed AREA during her two decades as an award-winning investigative journalist writing for publications ranging from The New York Times and Foreign Policy Magazine to Barron’s and The Stanford Social Innovation Review. Cheryl teaches at Cornell University and has authored three books Problem Solved, A Powerful System for Making Complex Decisions with Confidence and Conviction, about personal and professional decision-making, and Investing In Financial Research, A Decision-Making System for Better Results about financial and investment decisions. Her new book about Problem Solver Profiles, Problem Solver, Maximizing Your Strengths To Make Better Decisions, was published in March 2023 by Cornell University. Learn more by watching her Ted talk and visiting areamethod.com.

Resources Mentioned

Cheryl Einhorn Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Cheryl, welcome back to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Cheryl Einhorn
Thank you. So good to be here with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m excited to talk about your book, Problem Solver, and get some more insights into problem-solving goodies. But one problem I understand you’ve been working to solve for years is the perfect spice cookie. What’s the story here?

Cheryl Einhorn
Oh, I’m always experimenting. They say that cooking is an art and baking is a science, so that means that you can keep experimenting until you find what you think is just right.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, when you say spice cookie, what spices are we talking about here?

Cheryl Einhorn
Oh, I really throw in the kitchen sink. I like a lot of ginger. I think ginger is, like, this secret ingredient. And then a little bit of cayenne and all sorts of nuts thrown in so you get really good texture.

Pete Mockaitis
Do you go with the spice ginger or the powder ginger? Sorry, not spice, the fresh ginger or the…yeah.

Cheryl Einhorn
No, no, I like the fresh ginger. I like the fresh ginger, and I think something that people don’t appreciate enough is that you actually don’t have to peel it. The peel is actually good for you.

Pete Mockaitis
No kidding?

Cheryl Einhorn
So, I do recommend cleaning that first, but make sure that you leave that on.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you’ve already blown my mind about one minute into the interview, so this bodes well for the future. You don’t have to peel your ginger. Who knew? Okay. Well, talking about your book, Problem Solver, any particularly extra-surprising or fascinating or counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made about problem-solving while putting this together?

Cheryl Einhorn
Well, absolutely, because what the research talks about is that there are five dominant ways that people approach their decisions, and that each of these different decision-making archetypes, I call them problem-solver profiles, and that’s why my book is called Problem Solver, each of them has some beautiful strengths but each of them also is correlated to a couple specific cognitive biases.

Those mental mistakes that can impede clear thinking and, therefore, each of them is actually optimizing for different things in their decisions. And if we can learn about which problem-solver is ours, we can better understand why we engage with our decisions in the way that we do, what kind of information do we think is important for making a decision, and we can also learn how to make better decisions with others based on understanding the other problem-solver profiles that are not our own.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Cheryl, this is exciting stuff and I’m eager to almost just dive in, table format, what’s the archetype, what are they optimizing for, what’s their strengths, what’s their bias. But maybe before we get to that level of meat, could you first share what’s at stake in terms of if we are great at problem-solving versus just okay at problem-solving, if we really know our archetype and we’re dialed into it versus we are just blissfully unaware of that knowledge?

Cheryl Einhorn
I think it’s a great question. The only thing that we truly have agency over in our lives are our decisions. And so, our decisions are the data of our lives. If we feel confident as decision-makers, if we have conviction that our decisions can move us forward into our good future, we can have a greater sense of wellness and of resilience. We can take on bigger challenges, and we feel like we can move through our day more easily.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Do you have any cool stories of someone who learned some of your stuff and was able to upgrade their decision-making, problem-solving to see some cool results?

Cheryl Einhorn
Well, absolutely. My company, Decisive, we work with decision-makers around the world. And what we’ve found is that, as we begin to work with almost anybody, whether it is somebody who would like to help their aging parents find the right house or housing accommodation as they age, or whether it is somebody who’s thinking about starting their own business, as people learn their problem-solving skills and feel better about what actually is a quality decision-making process, they feel better about themselves, and they feel like they can reach their goals and their dreams.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. Any particular goals and dreams reached that was super inspirational?

Cheryl Einhorn
Well, we recently worked with a team that had been together, a senior leadership team, at an organization, a big international company, and what they had found is they had been working together for so long that they had sort of fallen into certain habits and patterns where they had some preconceived notions about who they can work well with, and who they kind of wanted to go around.

And by working together to uncover these problem-solver profiles, they now really felt like they could reduce their friction and work better together because they understood why each person was approaching a decision a certain way, why they were asking the questions they were. They weren’t being sluggish, or slow, or confrontational, but they needed to understand certain parts of the process in order for them to feel confident in the decision that they were making, and it really amplified and reignited what this team could do together and for the company.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Cheryl, I’m curious, in terms of our direction here, do you think it would be worthwhile to provide a refresher on the AREA Method for those who missed our first interview or do you think we can jump right into the archetypes?

Cheryl Einhorn
I’d be happy to give a refresher. So, AREA is an acronym for my system of complex decision-making that uniquely controls or counters cognitive bias so that we can expand our knowledge while improving our judgment. And, basically, it’s an order of operations where the A, absolute, gets up close on the target of your decision, the R, relative, then puts that decision into the broader context and collects information from related sources.

E, exploration upgrades your research beyond documents to identify good people and ask them great questions, it’s interviewing. Then AREA exploitation is a series of creative exercises to test your evidence against your assumptions. This is a new piece of decision-making which really helps you to strength-test your decisions.

And then the final A, analysis, helps you think about failure, which is so important because if you can identify how and where your decision could fail, you can shore up and prevent that weakness and also have a signpost to tell you when something is going awry in the execution phase, and when you might need to make a new decision.

So, that is just a brief summary of the AREA Method as an end-to-end system for complex problem-solving that includes all of the different perspectives, and really helps you to end up with a decision that has a good chance of succeeding.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cheryl, that’s lovely. Thank you. So, we’re all situated there. And now, okay, so we talked about cognitive biases a couple times. Now, I am familiar with this term and I find them so fascinating. I, one time, in my prior home in Chicago, had this beautiful poster, the Cognitive Bias Codex. Maybe you’ve seen it. It’s got a brain in the middle, and then it’s just nicely sorted, like all these cognitive biases.

I think they’re, like, over 150 into segments. It was lovely but it didn’t successfully make it through the move but we’ll link to that in the show notes for anybody who wants to buy this beautiful piece of art. But what is a cognitive bias?

Cheryl Einhorn
So, basically, it’s a heuristic. It is a mental pathway, a way of thinking that actually can help us to make the many small decisions that we have during the day but that don’t go away when we’re solving for complex problems. Let me give you a couple examples of things I think we all do. One is the liking bias. We tend to overweight information that comes from somebody that we like. Or the planning fallacy, which is even if we’ve done a task before, we may believe that it can be done faster than actually the number of steps and the time that it takes.

Or, another one is the confirmation bias where we look to confirm a favored hypothesis instead of thinking about disconfirming data which has far more diagnosticity. So, those are just a couple of examples of how we sort of move through the world to help us go a little faster but they don’t necessarily help us to really be present in the moment to think about the decision that we’re actually facing on its own.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s good. That’s good. And I pulled up the image of the Cognitive Bias Codex in terms of it has categories, like, “Why do we have these shortcuts? Well, it’s sort of unclear. What should we remember? We’ve got too much information. We can’t make enough meaning out of something and we crave meaning. Or, we got to act fast and we can’t analyze every tidbit.”

Cheryl Einhorn
Our brain likes to conserve energy and it likes to take these shortcuts, and it definitely allows us to multitask. If you’re in the supermarket and you know exactly where the box is in the cereal aisle that you want to get, you can also be on the phone and maybe thinking about something from earlier in the day. So, you can be doing many things, but by reducing that cognitive load, it’s also not actively thinking through whatever it is you’re facing.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. All right. So, lay it on us, these archetypes. We’ve got the adventurer, the detective, the listener, the thinker, the visionary. I guess that’s alphabetical. Is that how you like to, the sequence you like to move in or should we go at it? What’s your order of preference?

Cheryl Einhorn
That’s perfectly fine. One is not better than the other. As I said, they each have beautiful strengths but each of the problem-solver profiles are optimizing for different things in their decisions. So, the adventurer is a confident decision-maker, and he or she really favors making a lot of decisions. And there’s an underlying optimism bias to this because if they make a decision and it doesn’t work out the way they want, guess what? They always can make a new decision. And so, this is really a great person to have in your friend circle, in your colleague circle. They really help to make sure that you continually have momentum.

The detective, that’s what I am, this is a slower and more evidence-based decision-maker. For me to make a decision, if you don’t come to me with data, I really have trouble hearing you. I want you to substantiate it. And that has an underlying confirmation bias to it, which is that I can find the facts that I need to be able to share with you why my hypothesis is the correct one. And so, this is somebody, when you really want to be able to prove it, the adventurer can help you find the data that you need.

The listener is a relational, collaborative, inclusive decision-maker. And for this kind of a problem-solver profile, they have an underlying liking bias. They tend to have a trusted group of advisors, and they tend to overweight information that comes from those people, and they are people-centered. The thinker is your slowest decision-maker. This is somebody who really likes to explore their options. This can have a kind of frame blindness to it because they tend to look at the options against each other, which can circumscribe how they see and understand the problem.

And then the visionary is a creative open-ended decision-maker. This is somebody who has an underlying scarcity bias. They overvalue things that are original and things that maybe have not actually been on the table in the discussion, and that can also make them seem off-topic. And so, what I think you can see is that each of these different problem-solver profiles value different parts of decision-making.

And in order to make better decisions, alone and with others, you can really rapidly build trust and increase the speed of your decision-making by knowing the problem-solver profiles of the people who you’re making decisions with so you can come to them with what it is that they need to be able to discuss their decision.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so let’s do a rapid recap there. So, the adventurer is optimizing for what?

Cheryl Einhorn
Forward momentum.

Pete Mockaitis
Forward momentum. And their cognitive bias is?

Cheryl Einhorn
Optimism bias.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And then the detective, they’re optimizing for?

Cheryl Einhorn
Data.

Pete Mockaitis
And their bias is the confirmation bias.

Cheryl Einhorn
That’s correct.

Pete Mockaitis
And the listener is optimizing for what?

Cheryl Einhorn
Collaboration, cooperation.

Pete Mockaitis
And their bias is what?

Cheryl Einhorn
Liking bias.

Pete Mockaitis
Uh-huh. And the thinker, likewise?

Cheryl Einhorn
The thinker is somebody who wants to understand their options, and a bias that would be associated might be the relativity bias.

Pete Mockaitis
And how do we define the relativity bias?

Cheryl Einhorn
Relativity bias is like the frame blindness. They see the world in a relative, “This versus that,” over a…

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, right. Option A versus option B.

Cheryl Einhorn
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And, finally, the visionary?

Cheryl Einhorn
The visionary is creative and really optimizing for originality. And one of the biases associated for them would be the scarcity bias. And in my book, I go through this in much more detail and I give you lots of what I call cheetah sheets. Can I describe why I call them cheetah sheets?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Cheryl Einhorn
So, the cheetah, while she’s the most fearsome hunter and can accelerate up to 60 miles per hour, her hunting prowess is actually from her deceleration, and she decelerates up to 9 miles an hour in a single stride. That gives her agility, flexibility, and maneuverability. And that’s what you need in quality decision-making.

And so, throughout all of my books, Problem Solved, on personal and professional decision-making, which introduces the AREA Method, Investing in Financial Research, about business, financial, and investment decisions, and this newest book, Problem Solver, I have cheetah sheets throughout which are worksheets that help you be a more agile and flexible decision-maker.

And each of these worksheets allows you to take the skill that you’re building and, basically, plug it right into your day. It gives you a series of questions that I ask that, as you answer them, help you to really be able to use the tools and the skills of each of these problem-solver profiles.

Pete Mockaitis
Nifty. All right. And I’m curious, do you have a sense of what proportion of people are adventurers versus detectives versus listeners?

Cheryl Einhorn
So, so far, I’ve collected information from well over 5,000 people. And for the people that take the problem-solver profile, we do have the largest group as thinkers. And I have been thinking about why that might be, and one of the things that occurs to me is the thinker is going to be very open to taking a quiz to help them to self-identify how they make decisions. They want to understand. The option for them is between the ears. They want to know the why.

An adventurer might hear about the problem-solver profiles on a podcast like this, and say, “I don’t need to take the quiz. I know I’m an adventurer.” Again, that forward momentum and the different ways that people are thinking about how they make their decisions, and the time to the decision.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And perhaps, to make it all the more real and concrete, could you walk us through a problem to be solved, or a decision to be made, and how each of the five archetypes would approach it?

Cheryl Einhorn
Yeah, one thing that I think is, in all of our common experience, might be going out to dinner with the five problem-solver profiles. When you get the menu and the adventurer looks at the menu, sees something on the menu that speaks to her, and she can put the menu down. She doesn’t have to read the whole menu because it’s not about all options. It’s about picking the first one that seems good to her.

The detective looks at the menu, notices that one of them has olives, loves olives, and thinks about, “Okay, based on that specific ingredient, that’s a dish that I’m probably going to like.” The thinker looks at the menu, and thinks about, “Well, what else have I had today? How do I want to balance out my diet for the day?” and maybe thinking about all of the eating that he or she has done as she looks at the menu to pick the dish.

The listener may be waiting to hear what all her friends order because she wants to hear what they think sounds good as well. And the visionary looks at the menu, likes the dish that has the olives, but looks at another dish and sees that the sauce might be better on that particular dish, and create something of her own. So, just from that example, I think you can see, again, that these different problem solvers are either skipping to decision-making or staying in problem-solving from very different vantage points.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now, I have my own guess, but I’d love for you to diagnose me. When I’m looking at a menu, I find what I most often after is I want to be full and satisfied in a very efficient way per calorie while also experiencing deliciousness and novelty. So, I am looking at every option, and I’m sort of crossing them. I look at every option, and I eliminate every one until I’m left with perhaps two or three finalists.

And sometimes one just pops off because, hey, someone else is eating the other one so we’ve got the variety. And other times, I will, I’ve asked this question many times to wait staffs, like, “Which one is heartier? Or, which one is the most delicious and unique in your opinion?” And so, yeah, I guess I really am kind with everything. I’m all about optimizing experience relative to the criteria and values that matter most to me.

Cheryl Einhorn
Well, first, just the sheer amounts of things that you’re thinking about, and that you’re weighing against each other – hearty, savory, new, what does the waiter think – oh, my goodness, this sounds like a thinker to me. You’ve really got a lot going on. And while you can certainly have elements of listening, and elements of novelty, you’re not optimizing for forward momentum.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s true.

Cheryl Einhorn
The pace of the decision doesn’t matter to you as much as making the right decision according to the criteria that you’ve identified.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fun. And when I do want it to go fast, I use the Chipotle app because I’ve already done all the thinking, and this is the exact bull that I want.

Cheryl Einhorn
And that’s very exciting to the thinker. The thinker, having it be like the three bears just so, that’s important. And that is in part why the thinker is such a slow decision-maker because the thinker has huge loss aversion. They are not optimizing for the best possible outcome. They are optimizing to mitigate the downside risks.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s true. I have had moments in a restaurant where I have intense regret, like, “I absolutely should’ve ordered what you had ordered.” And I regret having made the choice that I did.

Cheryl Einhorn
And that is something that really plagues the thinker. And regret is an emotion uniquely about our decisions, and it’s a very difficult decision. It’s a very difficult emotion.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, let’s say we are resonating with a particular archetype, or we take the assessment. Well, first of all, let us know, what is the quick and easiest way we can learn what our archetype is?

Cheryl Einhorn
Well, you can go to App.AreaMethod.com and you sign up for it, and you can take the problem-solver profile. And then you can learn more about it and how to use it by reading Problem Solver, my new book which goes through how to really put it into practice, or, obviously, by getting in touch with me, and working with me to help you and your team, or your family, or your friends, in making decisions using this new knowledge.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, let’s say we’ve got a sense for, “Okay, I’m a thinker and I’m working with an adventurer,” just for example, what do you think are the key implications in terms of, “So, now how do I live my work life differently with this knowledge?”

Cheryl Einhorn
Well, you have a really asymmetric risk-reward between these two because the adventurer wants the forward momentum, and the thinker wants to understand the why and to explore the options. And so, in a way, this can be just a wonderful group together because they’re really thinking about the problem differently.

And if you understand that, the adventurer then doesn’t have to feel frustrated that the thinker really needs to know that he or she has understood the why and the options, and the thinker doesn’t have to look at the adventurer, and say, “Why is this person in such a rush?” And together, you can really use each other’s strengths to make a decision that you both can feel good about.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, tell us, any other top tips or implications that we should bear in mind as we explore this stuff?

Cheryl Einhorn
Yeah, I think this is transformative. First, I don’t think that we really think that much about intellectual diversity, and the fact that the different problem-solver profiles are optimizing for different things means if you can bring in questions from all five of the vantage points, you can have a much more fulsome understanding of the problem that you’re solving.

And you also no longer, as I was mentioning, need to denigrate how other people approach their decisions. Somebody is no longer hasty. They are optimizing for forward momentum. And somebody is no longer sluggish or too slow, for instance, like the thinker. This is somebody who really wants to make sure that they’re mitigating the downside risks.

And so, I think it can give you a really beautiful appreciation for these different ways that people problem-solve and reminds you that your way is not better. It’s just different.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so I’d like to delve into that a little bit in terms of I can understand the style and process can be neither better nor worse, just different. I suppose I’m wondering about if someone has a capacity as an officer, executive, director, agent of an organization, whether it’s government, or nonprofit, or corporation, like, “To maximize shareholder wealth” is the sacred, I guess, oath of executives of publicly-traded corporations, according to my finance curriculum from the University of Illinois.

So, in that world, in some ways it seems like what is to be optimized for is kind of the part of the job description, if you will. And so, from like a results perspective, I guess not so much from a process perspective, so just wrestling with that, how do you think about these matters?

Cheryl Einhorn
All of these problem-solver profiles are excellent leaders and bring very different kinds of energy to their leadership. So, all of them can be very successful no matter where they are in the for-profit or the nonprofit world.

But just like when we all were going to school and we needed to figure out how to succeed for a particular teacher, when you’re working with different problem-solver profiles, you will have an easier time building trust, strengthening the relationship, and making more successful decisions together if you have a window into which of the problem-solver profiles they are.

Pete Mockaitis
Alrighty. Cheryl, any final thoughts before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Cheryl Einhorn
No, I just think that this is absolutely transformative. In my own life, as I have applied this, I never would’ve imagined how this was able to help me with relationships, both new and ones that I’ve had for my entire life. So, I think it’s an incredible piece of research, and I really hope that it can help other people in feeling better about their own decisions, but also very much in making decisions and having good relationships with others.

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

Cheryl Einhorn
Yeah. So, one of my favorite quotes is, “If you think you can, or if you think you can’t, you’re absolutely right,” which I think was said by Henry Ford. And this is really about you putting in some of your own motivation and your own effort, and it’s this idea that the agency that you bring to something is what really can help you to succeed.

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

Cheryl Einhorn
I’ve got a favorite study or piece of research, which is this research study about teachers, that the most success that the students have is, in part, by having a teacher who really believes in them. And I would think that this would be true outside of the world of education, that having somebody who really believes in you helps to give you incredible motivation and resiliency.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Cheryl Einhorn
One of my favorites is The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin. He is a former chess champion and also a champion in the world of martial arts in what’s called push hands.

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

Cheryl Einhorn
I would say that one of the things that I use is this idea of not leaving before you leave. When I finish something, or get up from the day, or finish a meeting, I stay with whatever that topic is for a few minutes after to sum up my thoughts and make sure that I can re-enter well.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Cheryl Einhorn
Well, I think it’s the same idea of not leaving before you leave.

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

Cheryl Einhorn
I think it’s this idea that there’s two kinds of learning – there’s knowledge and skill. And, for me, decision-making is a skill, which means I can teach you those skills and they can be yours.

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

Cheryl Einhorn
I would point them to my website, which is AreaMethod.com. And there, you can learn about my books, and my research, and my articles, and get in touch to work together.

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

Cheryl Einhorn
Yeah, if you can invest in your decision-making, it can unlock everything that you’re doing, personally and professionally.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Cheryl, thanks for chatting, and good luck with all your decisions.

Cheryl Einhorn
Thank you so much for having me today and for this conversation.

882: Setting your Future Self up for Success with Dr. Hal Hershfield

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Hal Hershfield discusses how to make–and stick with–better decisions to enrich your future self.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why you should build a relationship with your future self
  2. How to motivate yourself to do the hard things now
  3. The key to creating lasting habits

About Hal

Hal Hershfield is a Professor of Marketing, Behavioral Decision Making, and Psychology at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management and holds the UCLA Anderson Board of Advisors Term Chair in Management.

His research, which sits at the intersection of psychology and economics, examines the ways we can improve our long-term decisions. He earned his PhD in psychology from Stanford University.

Hershfield publishes in top academic journals and also contributes op-eds to the New York Times, Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, and other outlets. He consults with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, many financial services firms such as Fidelity, First Republic, Prudential, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, and Avantis, and marketing agencies such as Droga5. The recipient of numerous teaching awards, Hershfield was named one of “The 40 Most Outstanding B-School Profs Under 40 In The World” by business education website Poets & Quants. His book, Your Future Self: How to Make Tomorrow Better Today, will be published in June.

Resources Mentioned

Hal Hershfield Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Hal, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Hal Hershfield
Hey, thanks so much for having me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to dig into some of the wisdom in your book, Your Future Self: How to Make Tomorrow Better Today. But, first, I wanted to hear from you, could you share one of the best and one of the worst decisions that you’ve personally made on behalf of your future self?

Hal Hershfield
That’s a good one, ooh. Okay, the easy answer there is marrying my wife. That’s got to be the obvious one.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, she’s listening. It’s the obvious one, yeah.

Hal Hershfield
Yeah, so I don’t know. Should I come up with another answer?

Pete Mockaitis
I’ll count it.

Hal Hershfield
Worst decision, oh, man, it’s like there’s so many to choose from there. Okay, worst decision is more of a sort of perpetual thing and not one specific decision. But I tend to be really bad at taking care of small tasks. I procrastinate on them and it is regularly bad for my various future selves.

Pete Mockaitis
Is there a category of task that gets procrastinated all the time?

Hal Hershfield
Oh, yeah, anything with regards to administrative, filling out receipts, or like submitting a claim for insurance, or putting in my car registration. There are sorts of things that requires some amount of work, I don’t know why. I know why. I know why. I don’t like doing them. I always find them, sort of I’m worried that I’m not going to fill it in right, and then I just keep pushing it off.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. And then sometimes, I don’t know what this says about me, I’m frustrated that the system isn’t easy. In a world of apps, and iteration, and cost and improvement, and our technology and processes, and web forms, and apps and stuff, it’s like, “Wait, seriously, I got to mail you a check? I’m going to print something out or…really?”

Hal Hershfield
Game over. As soon as it says, “Print this out,” it’s like game over because the chances that the printer at my office or the printer at home will work is considerably low.

Pete Mockaitis
Or, do you have the paper? Do you have the ink? And what I love is that Amazon is super customer focused. I now notice when I try to print a return label, it said one of the options was, “We’ll print it for you and mail it to you in four business days for 50 cents.” I don’t remember, the price was pretty good. It’s like they know. They know that printing a label is too much for me.

Hal Hershfield
It’s such a sad comment but it’s so true. And I love it, remove the friction. Make it easier.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so I’d love to hear, while putting together and researching the book Your Future Self, any really surprising or extra-fascinating and counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made in the research?

Hal Hershfield
Yeah, I actually think one of the more counterintuitive parts that I came across in researching the book was the idea that we can experience what’s known as hyperopia. And what that means is, well, in my research, I focus on what’s called myopia, when we’re too sort of tunnel-focused, we have tunnel vision on the present. Hyperopia is when we reverse that. We focus so much on the future that we miss the present. And the irony there is that, in doing that, we end up making things worse for ourselves in the future as well. And that was a bit of work that really surprised me. I hadn’t really thought about that possibility before.

Pete Mockaitis
Can you give us an example?

Hal Hershfield
Have you ever had a gift certificate for a restaurant and you’re just waiting for the perfect opportunity to use it?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

Hal Hershfield
And you’re doing it because you’re thinking, “I really want to maximize this, and I want this to be good for…so that future version of me that gets to go there,” and you wait, and you wait, and you wait, and it closes. That is hyperopic. But there’s obviously more serious versions of that. There are versions of that, in fact, with our professional lives where we tell ourselves that we’re taking care of tasks, we’re doing things because that’s good for the future. And we somehow end up prioritizing the urgent over the important.

It’s like a version of this because we’re telling ourselves that we’re doing something, we’re doing something good for the long run, but, in reality, we maybe sort of shortchanging ourselves and actually making things less good for ourselves in the long term because we’re not focused on the big, important things that will actually move the ball down the field for ourselves. And that’s true both professionally and personally.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, it sounds like maybe we’ve already touched on it, but, zooming out a bit, how would you put forward the main big idea or core thesis of the book Your Future Self?

Hal Hershfield
Yeah, sure. So, I think the core thesis of the book is that there are different versions of ourselves that exist over time, and, in some ways, we think about our future selves as if they are other people. And that’s okay so long as we focus on the relationship that we have with that other person. And so, the book is really aimed at understanding the relationships that we have with our future selves, and then figuring out how to improve them so that we can do things that benefit us both in the future and now.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we talk about relationships. Are there some categories or archetypes? Does anybody hate their future self, like, “My relationship with my future self is my future self is my nemesis”? Or, what’s the palette or menu of choices for how that relationship can be?

Hal Hershfield
Right. That’s a fantastic question. Empirically, I’ve never asked people, “Do you hate them?” That said…

Pete Mockaitis
That’d be sad.

Hal Hershfield
It would be really sad if somebody said that. In my research and the research that others have done, we sort of treat the relationship with a future self the same way that you would treat our relationships with spouses, partners, close friends, which is to say that there’s varying degrees of distance. I can have a friend who I know, maybe they’re in my group of friends that I see but I’m not really that close to them. They exist but I don’t really connect to them.

All the way down to I can have that best friend, the person who I spend…want to spend all my time with, or my spouse, or my kids, or my aging parents. I would say that the spectrum of relationships goes from a stranger who’s sort of you see them, you know they exist but you don’t really connect to them, and don’t really know them, all the way to a person with whom you feel a great degree of emotional connection.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, this is all intriguing from a thought experiment kind of a world. But could you lay it on us in terms of what’s at stake, what are the implications of getting this relationship right versus not so right?

Hal Hershfield
Sure. We’ve looked at a variety of different things, so one thing we know the people who are more connected to their future selves, they’ve accumulated more assets over time.

Pete Mockaitis
Financially.

Hal Hershfield
Financially-speaking, exactly. We know that people feel more connected, they report greater subjective health. We found that they’re less likely to endorse unethical business practices. In other words, this is another sort of tradeoff. If I feel a lack of connection to my future selves, doing something that might financially benefit me right now but I could suffer some consequences later, well, maybe that’s okay. I’m not really thinking about later.

Other researchers have found that people that are connected to their future selves, they do better in school, higher grades, and even experience greater amounts of life satisfaction and meaning in life. I should say there’s always other factors and variables that play across these different studies. We’ve tried hard, and others have tried hard, too, to sort of isolate, and say, “Well, even in the face of things like age or education, do these relationships bear out?” And, sure enough, they seem to.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so when you talk about this connection, what does that maybe look, sound, feel like in terms of our internal dialogues when we have a good rich connection to our future selves versus the non-desired alternative?

Hal Hershfield
It’s a really fascinating question that you raised because it’s not, I should say, we don’t ask people, “What does that conversation look like?” Most likely, they’re so much more idiosyncratic behavior and answers that could be given. I don’t really know what the answer would be but here’s my suspicion. I suspect that a conversation with a future self who I care deeply about is going to look more like the way that I think about and treat the people in my life who I really want to care for and take responsibility for.

The same way that you might feel about your spouse if you’re really connected to them, or the same way that you might feel about your kid, or, even I could think about the workplace, a co-worker that you really appreciate, or even an employee that they’re sort of under you but you still take an interest in their wellbeing. That’s the type of connection or relationship that we might see when we see a high degree of overlap between current and future selves.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. And now I’m thinking about how, recently, this isn’t an earth shattering story, but I felt the implications. Sometimes, maybe most of the time, my desk is not the tidiest, and so I’ve accumulated LaCroix cans and more, and papers and all over the place. And so, it was a Friday, I took some time, like, “I’m really going to clean this up really well,” and so I did.

And then, Monday, I came in and I was surprised. I had forgotten my office desk had been cleaned by me in the past, and I said, “Oh, how delightful.” It’s like I was surprised. And the word relationship really does ring true here, I was like, “Well, thank you, past me. I really appreciate you cleaning up that desk because it’s just actually a joy to come into the office and behold this clean desk. I’m in a good mood and I appreciate me for having made that happen.”

Hal Hershfield
It’s a little gift from past you.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Hal Hershfield
Yeah. I love that.

Pete Mockaitis
So, it was cool.

Hal Hershfield
I love that.

Pete Mockaitis
And yet, most of the time, though, I don’t have that relationship in terms of, like good or bad, I don’t know. Like, you step on the scale, you look at the mirror, and go, “Ugh, past self, you really should’ve been watching the calories a little more, or hitting the gym a little more, or watch the diet when you get a check-in with the doctor.” It doesn’t even occur to me to think about past self in that relationship kind of a way.

Hal Hershfield
Yeah, you know, it’s funny. I can relate to that. There are so many of those times where we’re sort of not thinking about all the different actions that we have and how they add up. The annual physical is a great example of that, when you say, “Oh, your cholesterol is a little high.” It’s like, I cannot recall the number of times that I ate in a way that probably wasn’t good for my cholesterol, but, in those moments, I’m not thinking about how each one of those kinds of sums up to the sort of worst whole.

But then, on the flipside, the gift from past self, it’s like I had this experience pang. I think I must’ve paid for a rental car going to a friend’s wedding, completely had forgotten, I go up to pay for it, and they’re like, “You already paid for it.” I’m like, “Well, who paid for it? Like, that guy, the past me? Like, what a sucker, but I’m glad he did it.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. Or, just sort of like accounts that accrue. I’m thinking about back when I was consulting, there was a benefit where you could use pre-tax dollars to fund your mass transit cards. Invariably, these things just accrued to large sums because I completely forgot, like they’re sort of taken out of a paycheck.

And when people go off to business school, they’d say, “Hey, well, I’m going to Harvard. I’m not going to be in Chicago anymore. I’ve got a card with $300 of mass transit value, and I’m going to sell it at a discount.” So many of those emails, actually, in my time there. And so, yeah, you just autopilot, forget, and sometimes that works in your favor.

Hal Hershfield
Yup, 100%. Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
I’d love to hear do you have any cool success stories or inspiring case studies associated with folks who were able to upgrade their relationship to their future self and then see cool things emerge as a result?

Hal Hershfield
Yeah, actually, one of my favorite success stories, it was really funny. This was, oh, gosh, pretty deep in COVID, and I got this random email, and it’s from a high school kid, Enmal was his name. And he basically reaches out and says, “I’ve got to tell you, I went pretty dark during COVID.” I think he was like a high school junior, and when it started, he was having all of his classes at home and he’s not seeing his friends. And he says, “My diet basically consisted of ice cream and Chick-fil-A and Fruit Loops.” I forget which cereal it was but nothing super healthy. No offense to any of those companies, of course.

Pete Mockaitis
The Fruit Loops marketing brand manager is listening and enraged at you, Hal.

Hal Hershfield
Let me walk that back. Generic fast-food restaurants. And he ends up gaining 30 pounds, and he said, “I came across some of your research, and I decided to try to put it into practice.” And he said, “I went online and I printed out like an ideal-looking picture of myself, skinnier.” He used some sort of, I don’t know which technology he used to make himself look a little skinnier and healthier. He said, “I printed that, I put it in the bathroom, and I put it on the fridge.”

And he said, “Looking at that, basically, like wherever I was in the house, kept reminding me of the version of me I wanted to get back to and the version of me I wanted to become.” And it wasn’t that he just cut back on those foods. He also started exercising, etc. And he said in the span of several months, he ended up losing that weight. I forget the exact amount of time. He’s a high school kid so I think he’s probably able to gain and lose weight a little bit easier than the rest of us.

But I was really inspired by him because he was trying to consider a version of his future self who he wanted to become, and I think that sort of forced him, or prompted him, or kept him, held his hand along the way to do the things that he needed to do to get there.

Pete Mockaitis
That is excellent. Well, my key takeaway from that is to find a website that lets me visualize buffed Pete and take a look at that image, see what that does for me. And so, that’s cool in that it made it very real, concrete, visualizable, like, “Oh, okay,” as opposed to amorphous, like, “Oh, the future me is something off in space or in my imagination as opposed to something I could potentially behold with eyes visually.” That’s cool.

Hal Hershfield
Yeah, and I think that’s right because, to some degree, if I say, “Think of a future Pete,” there’s probably a lot of different images that could arise there. And you might be able to create sort of an average of them, sort of an amalgamation of them, but this specific image is vivid, and that can be a pretty strong motivator for behavior, “Now, I’ve got like an actual version of me, I’m thinking about looking at.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so could you lay it on us, are there some other actionable approaches we can take to do a better job at making prudent decisions and actions in the present that benefit our future selves?

Hal Hershfield
Yeah, absolutely. So, I’ll mention a couple. The marketing professor in me, of course, is saying, “You have to buy the book to find out all of them,” but I’ll mention a couple. So, there’s a category of strategies that involve trying to bring the future self closer to the present. One of those things, of course, is vividly visualizing the future self.

That doesn’t have to be just through apps. There are these apps that do age progression pretty well. But we can also try to get people to write a letter to their future self, and then write one back from that future self. It’s a really cool activity because it forces you to not only think about the future, but then to sort of go into the future and look back to now, which is, ultimately, putting yourself in the shoes of your future self, seeing the world through their eyes. That’s a vividness-enhancing exercise.

There are other strategies, though, that don’t involve necessarily trying to bring the future self closer but rather involve making the present, or rather making present-day sacrifices easier. So, what I mean by that is that every time I talk about these sorts of optimal behaviors, sometimes it’s hard to do them because it feels like all that you’re doing is sacrificing. It’s like, you right now that’s got to experience the pain for future use gain, which is it’s not a great situation to be.

And if you think about the relationship analogy that we talked about before, it’s like now you’re always the one sacrificing, future you is always the one benefitting. That’s not great. So, we’ve explored different ways that we can make present day sacrifices feel easier. One of my favorites is something that we call temporal reframing. I think there’s probably other terms for this, but the general idea is that I chunk something down into smaller and smaller parts.

I’ll give you an example of this. My collaborators and I, we worked with a fintech bank, a fintech company, this is an app designed to get people to save, and we asked people if they wanted to sign up for an automatic savings account, and some people got the message that they could sign up for $150 a month account, and other people got a message saying they could sign up for a $5 a day account. Now, it’s the same amount of money, of course, five bucks a day is 150 bucks a month. Four times as many people signed up when it was framed as $5 a day. I think it’s just an easier sacrifice to make.

Other researchers have found that that same sort of temporal reframing can get people to volunteer more, to do more volunteer hours. Rather than 200 hours total, how about four hours a week or whatever it is? We can sort of break it down in different parts.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, yeah.

Hal Hershfield
Now, one of the other strategies that falls under this sort of bucket of making the present easier is, I don’t know what the right term is, I like to call it sort of like attack the side, not the core. Janet Schwartz, she’s a friend of mine, she’s a behavioral scientist, and she had this, I think, such a clever idea. She was going to Coney Island one summer with her friends, and it was right after New York started doing the calorie labeling on menus.

She goes there and she goes to get the hotdog and a side of fries. Like, what else are you going to do when you go to Coney Island, of course? And she sees that the fries are about 1100 calories, which is I think quite high.

Pete Mockaitis
And doesn’t even fill you up.

Hal Hershfield
That’s right. And no one goes there for the…I mean, you don’t go there for the fries. You go there for the hotdog. So, she and her friends said, “Wow, that’s a lot. How about we split the fries and we each got a hotdog?” And she starts thinking, “Wait, there’s something to this.” If you have a goal of, I don’t know, in this case, cutting down on your calories, you could do it in a painful way of cutting back on the thing that you love, or you could achieve the exact same thing by cutting back on something that’s much more peripheral.

It would be ridiculous if she got the fries and a third of a hotdog. And so, she actually worked with a restaurant where they put something like this in their plates, where the cashiers offered the restaurant patrons the option to get a half of the scoop of fried rice. They can get their full order of orange chicken or whatever it is that they’re getting but you want to take a half of the side. You pay the same amount, which is crazy.

And about a third of people say, “Yeah, I’ll do that,” which is so interesting because it suggests that that’s a strategy that people, I think, might warm to. So, again, that’s all about making the present day sacrifices easier. And then there’s a third sort of category of practical strategies, Pete, that I call staying on course.

This is where you, essentially, say, “Okay, you know what, there’s this version of me right now, there’s a version in the future who’s going to want to look back, and say, ‘Hey, I did the thing, I ate healthy, I was productive at work, I saved money,’” and then there’s the guy in the middle who is going to screw it up, the guy who, “I say I’m going to get up tomorrow and go for a run,” and that guy tomorrow morning who’s going to say, “I can’t do it. I got to sleep in.”

And so, this third category of strategies basically says recognizing that there’s all those tensions there, let’s figure out what we call commitment devices, strategies where we can put sort of guardrails on our behavior so that we don’t screw things up. So, one website called stickK.com, that’s with two Ks. Do you know this one?

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve been there but I don’t think listeners do, so lay it on us.

Hal Hershfield
Yeah, and it’s basically this website where I can put in my goal. Let’s say I want to work out three days a week, 30 minutes at a time, and then I’ll say, “Who’s going to follow up with me? It’s going to be you, Pete. And, oh, I’ll give you my credit card, and I’ll give it the name of an anti-charity.” Well, we don’t have to get political but an organization I don’t want to donate to. How does that sound?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, just for example, we might say guns. Some people might be pro-gun, some people might be anti-gun. And so, you can imagine your dollars flowing in the direction you don’t want it to go, just to make it clear for folks, yeah.

Hal Hershfield
There you go. That’s really good. Or, you could say Trump versus Biden, right? Some are on either side. Now, you’re going to call me at the end of the week, and you’re going to say, “Hal, did you do it? Did you work out three times?” And I’ll say, “Pete, this week was tough. I only worked out twice.” And you’ll say, “Okay, good to know.” You’re going to click no on my account, and instantly 200 bucks is going to go toward that charity, that organization, that I don’t want to donate to. That’s a pretty strong motivator.

Now, I’m not saying I won’t mess up but it might make it a lot harder for me to stay in bed a little bit longer if I know doing so was going to cost me possibly hundreds of dollars and not towards some charity that I wanted to donate to but toward one I don’t want to donate to. And there’s other versions of this. There are all sorts of levels of commitment devices which I get into the book. But the key here is picking something that is a strong enough punishment to deter the behavior that we don’t want to do but not so strong that I don’t sign up for this to begin with.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. And to that point about it not being too strong, it’s funny, I’ve chatted with folks about stickK.com, and they said, “You know, I think that’s a really effective motivator but the anti-charity is so evil to me. Like, I don’t even feel morally okay with setting that structure up in my life.” And so, my wife and I, we were joking, and we were saying, “Well, huh, as a thought experiment, what is something that would hurt to give money to and yet doesn’t feel morally problematic?”

And I think we found some, like, super ritzy country club. So, it’s like, “They don’t need our money. They don’t need it. Like, who knows what it’s going to go to, like polishing golf balls? I don’t even know what they would do with extra money. They don’t need it. But it wouldn’t be evil for them to get it.”

Hal Hershfield
It’s so good because it’s not morally reprehensible. That’s so good.

Pete Mockaitis
It just feels really bad for them to get it.

Hal Hershfield
There’s another version of this that doesn’t involve a financial punishment. It’s a product called the Pavlok.

Pete Mockaitis
We interviewed that guy, yeah.

Hal Hershfield
Oh, did you? That’s fantastic.

Pete Mockaitis
Maneesh Sethi, back in the day.

Hal Hershfield
Yeah, that’s awesome.

Pete Mockaitis
I tried one. It’s not comfortable.

Hal Hershfield
Oh, did you? Yeah, I had a student who told me he just has the hardest time getting out of bed. And putting this on, basically, the more you snooze, I forget what his setting was, but it’s like if he snoozed more than a couple times, he’d start getting shocked by this thing to get him out of bed.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like a rubber band around your wrist but more unpleasant. But, again, that same principle holds, it’s like, “If the shock is so unpleasant, and you have to push a button to administer it to yourself, then you may not do it.” So, I like the automaticity and I like the third-party bits, but, in a way, that’s part of the fun. It sounds like you have a lot of examples in the book.

It’s to think about, “Well, what works for you based on is it so repugnant you can’t even countenance doing it? Okay, well. then maybe something else. But is it so minor, you don’t even care? Like, okay, well, you got to crank it up.”

Hal Hershfield
Right, exactly. It’s funny, I have this thing now, in writing the book, I ended up talking with this guy, Dave Krippendorf, who founded this company. It was originally called Kitchen Safe, and basically a little box you put in the kitchen. There’s a little electronically timed lock on top of the box. He designed it for people to put away their snack food. You can time it anywhere from a minute to 10 days.

So, my kids’ Halloween candy, whatever it is, I pop it in there, I’ll set it for 12 hours so I don’t touch it tonight. Well, he found that so many people were using it for so many things other than snacks, that he renamed it the kSafe, from Kitchen Safe to kSafe. He sent me one, and Pete, I use it for my phone, I have to admit, it’s not like we have dinner with our kids every night.

But a couple nights a week or whenever the schedules work out, it’s such a bad distraction when I have it at the table, “Oh, I just need it to change the music,” or, “I just need it to…” whatever. It’s just there. And then before I know it, I am checking Twitter, or my email, or something that is like totally meaningless. I think this is probably relatable, I assume. Tell me this isn’t just me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Hal Hershfield
So, I throw my phone in there, I’ll set the timer for two hours. Let’s say we have dinner at 5:30, it’s put in there for 7:30 or whatever. I know that sounds like a very early dinner but our kids are little. And it’s amazing because it completely removes the temptation, like it’s not even when I get up, I’m like, “Oh, I see my phone. I should check it.” It’s like it’s just not there so I don’t even worry about it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and it’s cool. That’s really cool. And maybe it’s a video game controller or any number of things: snacks, phones.

Hal Hershfield
Video game controllers is a great example. I love that.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. So, the commitment device, so it takes a bit of you out of it, and that’s really handy. I wanted to get your take. I love it when you drop these numbers in terms of with the temporal reframing, with the five bucks a day versus 150 a month. We have a 4X lift in intake. And then a third of the people opted to go for half of the fried rice.

To the fried rice point, I’ve just got to mention, once when I was looking at my calories pretty closely, I was at a Cheddar’s and so I made my order, and then just randomly they brought out this honey biscuit thing, and I said, “Oh, what’s this?” And they said, “Oh, yeah, it’s a honey biscuit. It has this and this and this, and it’s on the house. It’s just a thank you for being here.” I said, “Oh, wow.”

Hal Hershfield
On the house. On the house means the calories don’t count, right?

Pete Mockaitis
So, I said, “Oh, wow, that’s great. Thank you. Could you take it away?” He was like puzzled, I was like, “Yeah, I’m just concerned I might eat it.” And so, he did, and that was cool. And then BJ Fogg, he talks about tiny habits. He was on the show. And he, was it chips or Noah’s bread, he would just fill up on bread if he was at the table, and so he just rehearsed his line with a smile, “Oh, no bread for me. Thanks.” It’s like, “Don’t put this on the table. I will eat it.”

Hal Hershfield
Yeah, it’s so good. The bread one is so good. One of the things I talk about in the book is, about five years ago, I got diagnosed with celiac, and it’s been so interesting because I was also one of those people, especially in social situations where my social anxiety was dialed up just a little bit, I would find myself just eating all of the things that were out that I wasn’t even hungry for, but just eating. And it’s often the sliders, the bread, the whatever.

So, all of that stuff is now off the table for me. And it’s really interesting because it’s almost like there’s this giant kSafe walking around with me when it comes to carbs like that. And so, when I’m at a restaurant, I’m not even tempted by the basket of bread because it’s like I know I just can’t eat it. But it’s like psychologically, “What are the shifts that we can make to make that happen?”

And I love the BJ Fogg example of, like, “None for me, please.” It just makes it automatic. It’s a habit. That’s great.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. That’s good. Well, so we talked about a number of commitment devices. And, ah, yes, I wanted to ask, when you dropped these numbers, 4X on the temporal reframing, a third people opting for half of the fried rice amount, any other sort of eye popping numbers in terms of, “Huh, this little intervention makes a world of difference”?

Hal Hershfield
Yeah. Well, it’s funny, I get cautious with eye popping numbers in social science because they always say, “Was that real?” So, I’ll say, “Look, the temporal reframing, the 4x difference, I thought that was 30% versus 7%. That’s pretty big.” We have another study that’s coming out, or should be out any day now, where we worked with the Bank of Mexico, 50,000 customers, half of them get access to these aged images of themselves, and half don’t, and they’re all getting these messages that they should save.

And the folks who do, they’re 16% more likely to make a contribution to their account. So, when you say, “Was that eye popping?” I don’t know if that’s eye popping per se, but what I find exciting about this is that if I can get 16% more people to do anything when it comes to behavior, then that can really add up and compound over time.

You think about that for voting, or taking care of your teeth or your health, or, in this case, making a contribution to your retirement account. That really can add up and compound in ways that are really beneficial over time.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m also thinking about sort of general decision-making. When it’s not a matter of discipline, but rather just considering options, is there a way you recommend taking into account our future selves in the decision-making process?

Hal Hershfield
I think that is such a good question. It’s funny, because so much of my research has been focused on “How do we relate to our future selves? How do we connect to them?” and so on. But I don’t think the answer here is you should talk to them and think about them all the time. I think that, well, first off, we’re going to start ignoring them. Secondly, I just don’t think it’s sustainable.

So, I think that there’s probably some sort of balancing act here, and I wish I could say to you, “The research says this is the amount of time you should talk to your future self, and this is the amount of time that you shouldn’t.” We don’t know that. And, in all honesty, if I were to do that study, I’m sure there would be so many sorts of individual differences there. For some people, it makes sense to talk more, and some people less.

Here’s what I will say, though, my suspicion is that when it comes to big decisions and things that, once you decide, there’s some sort of automaticity that will carry out over time. So, like signing up for a savings account, signing up to work with a nutritionist or a career coach or whatnot. For those sorts of decisions, I think it may make a lot of sense to really try to step into the shoes of your future self, and think about how this action will impact that person.

For the everyday ones, things like my credit card, my eating habits, whether I get up and exercise or not, for those types of decisions, that’s where I think the world of habit formation becomes much more relevant, but I want to say that we should start, before we can even start going down the path of habit formation, it makes sense to have that conversation with our future selves and strengthen that bond with them so that, “Now, I can, essentially, get the ball rolling, and get the process started to do those things that will, ultimately, benefit me later, but also now.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And I’m curious, is there an overwhelming category of activities, or domains, or responsibility where people undercount their future self?

Hal Hershfield
Wow, that’s great. So, not that I know of, I can’t say, “Oh, there’s this one thing.” It’s easy to point to the different domains that sort of we know pop up all the time. So, under-saving and overspending, overeating, not exercising enough, those are the ones that sort of come up. And, in fact, if you look at the goals that people put forth on stickK.com, a lot of them have to do with exercising and eating behaviors.

I think there’s another one that maybe doesn’t come up as explicitly but it’s still relevant is time expenditures, “So, how I divvy up my time for the things that feel good right now in the moment versus the things that will last and give me benefits and wellbeing and positivity and joy over time?” And, as an example, to get concrete, I don’t know if you have this, but I have the thing that come up a lot for me is know I should call one my buddies, a friend I haven’t seen in a while just to catch up for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, or even set aside a night to go out and get drinks or dinner or whatever.

But in the moment, it almost feels better to just not do it. I can go do the thing I was doing, or be on Instagram, watch an episode of Succession, or whatever it is that I’m watching. And there’s like a little present moment bump from just kind of being lazy and ignoring that phone call or the plan-making. But the reality is, over and over and over again, those decisions will be bad for my relationships. Those expenditures of time will take away from the time that I get to spend with people that I might genuinely care about.

And here’s the real irony, if I sort of get over that initial little discomfort, and reach out and call my buddy, or set up a plan to have dinner with them, and that’s true, by the way, for our spouses and our other family members, too, those things are good for the long run but they’re also good for now, too. Like, I haven’t once felt one of those phone calls with an old friend, and said, “Oh, I wish I hadn’t done that.” Normally, a good use of time.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Thank you. All right. Well, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Hal Hershfield
Oh, no, I think you asked so many good questions. This is great.

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

Hal Hershfield
I’m not sure if it’s actually like a famous quote or not, but it’s something that one of my mentors told me, “You can’t get what you don’t ask for.” And I love that in the sort of negotiation context.

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

Hal Hershfield
Favorite experiment or bit of research is probably work on what’s known as the End-of-History Illusion. I talked about it in the book but it’s the basic idea that I can recognize that I’ve changed from the past to the present, but I somehow think that my rate of change, or my rate of progress, will slow from now unto the future, that I’ve somehow arrived at who I am. This is work by Jordi Quoidbach, and Dan Gilbert, and Tim Wilson. And I think it sheds some really interesting light on how we sometimes do a disservice to our future selves by not recognizing the ways in which we will change moving forward.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Hal Hershfield
I love the book A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. And it is all about different sort of friends but some of whom are connected, and some of whom aren’t, and the sort of these various little interconnections that exist both within a certain group in New York City, but then also over time. This is from, like, 10, 12 years ago. And it’s just sort of a fascinating examination of the web of connections that exist between the people we know now as well as from the past and to the future.

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

Hal Hershfield
Evernote. I don’t know if that’s the type of tool that you’re looking for.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Hal Hershfield
But being able to have sort of my notes everywhere, wherever I am, is super useful for me because there’s always things that are popping up, and then anytime I’ve told myself, “I’ll remember that thing later,” I pretty much never do. And so, being able to jot it down quickly and have it, assume everything else is super important for me.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Hal Hershfield
My wife and I started to plan out the meals that we’re going to have, whatever it is, on Friday or Saturday, more or less for the rest of the week. And it has drastically decreased the tension involved around what should we have for dinner every night, and drastically increased my efficiency and productivity the rest of the week because I don’t have to spend that time thinking about, “What are we doing for dinner?” I just look at the little sheets, say, “Oh, that’s what we planned out.”

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

Hal Hershfield
Yeah. So, one of the key nuggets that I think people sort of quote back to me often is it’s really more just the big idea that there can be this future self, this salient future self that can exist in the future. I’ve heard a lot of people say to me, “I haven’t thought about things that way, and it gives me sort of a person to consider, and then also an optimistic take on where I’m going through time.”

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

Hal Hershfield
Yeah, you can go to my website HalHershfield.com. Everything about my research and my book and whatnot is there. You can find me on LinkedIn or Twitter as well.

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

Hal Hershfield
Yeah, I would say one final challenge for folks who are looking to be awesome at their jobs is to consider not the tradeoff between now and later, but to think about the harmony between now and later. So, think about the things that you are doing at work and at your jobs that will benefit you now, and may not benefit you in the future, but then also switch the focus. Think about the things that you can do right now that will provide benefits both now and later. And then consider how you’re spending your time in those different pursuits.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Hal, this has been a treat. I wish you and your future self much luck.

Hal Hershfield
Hey, thanks, Pete. I appreciate it.

877: Why Small Decisions Matter—and How to Make them Better with Richard Moran

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Richard Moran makes the compelling case for why we should take the small decisions in life more seriously.

You’ll Learn:

  1. One word to purge from your vocabulary.
  2.  The simple trick that makes making decisions easier.
  3. How to use your gut effectively.

About Richard

Richard A. Moran is a Silicon Valley-based business leader, workplace pundit, bestselling author, venture capitalist, former CEO and college president. He is best known for his series of humorous business books beginning with the bestselling, Never Confuse a Memo with Reality, and is credited with starting the genre of “Business Bullet Books.”

His body of work includes 10 books about using commonsense in business. He is the host of the CBS syndicated radio program, “In the Workplace.” Rich has appeared on CNN, NPR, and most major media outlets. He continues to work with organizations to help them make better decisions and is an “influencer” on LinkedIn where he is a regular contributor.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

  • BetterHelp. Make better decisions with online therapy. Get 10% off your first month at BetterHelp.com/awesome.

Richard Moran Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Richard, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Richard Moran
Thanks, Pete. I’m happy to be here today.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, we’re happy to have you talking decision-making in your book Never Say Whatever: How Small Decisions Make a Big Difference. Could you maybe kick us off with one of the trickiest or most interesting decisions or decision-making processes you’ve ever witnessed?

Richard Moran
Sure. Well, in the book, I interviewed a lot of people about how they make small decisions, and my books is not about huge decisions in our lives. It’s about the thousands of small decisions that we’re making every day. And I asked some people, “How do you make these small decisions?” And I got all kinds of interesting answers. Everything from some people, one guy said he turns over the Magic 8 Ball until he gets the right answer, you know, the toy, the Magic 8 Ball. Some people ask Siri, “Hey, Siri, what should I do about this?” But those are sort of the outliers. What most people do is say things like…

Siri
“Make a note. Define happenstance. And set a timer for 20 minutes.”

Richard Moran
Sorry, there she is.

Pete Mockaitis
Actually, that’s perfect.

Richard Moran
Yeah, she actually, there she is. She does everything.

Siri
It’s okay, Rich.

Richard Moran
Stop, Siri. Most people use simple things like pros and cons and if-then scenarios and things like that. The book is about small decisions, and in my research, I found that there’s like 3500 small decisions that we make every day, and all of them matter. If you don’t make any single one of them, your little world on that day might go sideways.

Pete Mockaitis
Thirty-five hundred, so, geez, that’s like three or four a minute of consciousness.

Richard Moran
Yeah. Well, think about it, in the research, they did the simple test of the decisions that you make when you go out to lunch with a colleague, and they found that there’s about 350 decisions that you make when you go out to lunch – where to go, where to sit, leave your jacket, take your jacket, lettuce, tomato, mayonnaise, sourdough, wheat. You get the idea.

But every time you say, “Whatever” to any of those decisions, you’re likely to get just the sandwich that you don’t want. So, all I do is highlight that every time you say the word ‘whatever’ bad things might happen. And this might be the easiest interview you’ve ever done because all I want your listeners to do is stop saying, “Whatever.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Richard Moran
As simple as that. I’m the evangelist to kill one word – whatever.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so tell me, while you were putting together this book, any interesting, surprising discoveries?

Richard Moran
Yeah. Well, I interviewed leaders as well as men and women on the street. And what I found is that there’s a simple solution for curing the ‘whatevers.’ So, if someone says ‘whatever’ to you, I’ve discovered that effective leaders, effective people in their jobs, say, “Tell me what that means. Okay, I get that you said whatever. Tell me what that means. Does that mean you don’t care? Does that mean you want me to make the decision? Tell me what that means.” And the simple response to whatever of someone saying, “Tell me what that means,” is really helpful.

And then, on the other side, when people say, “Well, how do I stop saying whatever?” I found that leaders do a simple thing, and that is they are always clear about what their intentions are. So, the example that I’ve used that seems to resonate is if your intention is to lose weight, you make decisions about being on a diet. If your intent is to stay in shape, you decide to take the stairs, not the elevator. If you intend to stay married, you make decisions that will keep your marriage alive.

So, I know those are very simple and very simple kinds of examples but clarifying one’s intent is not as easy as it sounds. So, what I want people to do is think about what your intent is for a day, or for this job, or for this project, or “For my career.” What’s your intent? Because then the decisions are easy. If your intent is not clear, then the decisions are hard, are less easy, and you’re likely to say, “Whatever.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so it sounds like you’ve nicely segmented a few categories of what whatever can mean. Can you break those down for us?

Richard Moran
Yeah. Well, there’s lots of definitions for whatever. And it’s funny because as I talked to people about the book, the nuances of how they say it resonates like, “Whatever,” or, “Whatever,” and each one means a different thing. So, it usually means, “I don’t care,” you know, “Whatever, I don’t care.” But it could also mean, “You make the decision for me, and I’ll blame you later.”

It could also mean, “I’m helpless,” or it could be a dismissive term. Like, an example so often it’s used is, “Honey, what do you want for dinner?” “Whatever.” Well, that’s a dismissive way to avoid a decision. It can mean, “I hate you.” It can mean, “I’m going to fill this little space of air up with a useless word.” In the book, I found about 20 different definitions, and all of them are bad except for one.

And the one definition that works is, “Honey, I love you, and I’ll do whatever it takes to win back your affection.” But other than that, it’s not benign. It’s sort of a toxic word. Often, people have compared it to the F word. And the F word has a lot of meanings, too, but it can be benign, and whatever is not. It’s toxic, especially in the workplace where people are paid to make decisions. Everyone is paid to make decisions at work.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, then tell me, if a small decision comes up, and we really are indifferent, what do you recommend we do or say?

Richard Moran
Pick one.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Richard Moran
If you’re indifferent, then I can see someone saying, “Well, they’re both good, so I’ll take this one. I’ll pick this one.” How many times have you been in a restaurant or anywhere, and whatever projects an indifference, which usually projects…? Indifference is one thing, and that might be okay. But usually, the word projects a sense of you being a slacker, or you just being indifferent means lowering, “I don’t care.” And there’s a difference between indifferent and “I don’t care,” but it’s very slight.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, tell me, you’re right. It seems like this isn’t easy. You tell me, Richard, master radio person, if that’s the big idea, and we’ve already got it, where should we go?

Richard Moran
Well, Pete, I can tell you some stories about how I got onto the work.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Richard Moran
So, it’s a classic case. I was in a big-time consulting firm, giving a presentation about…it was actually about operator centers, and people were going to lose their jobs depending on how the decision went. And as I relayed all the options, the CEO at the time said, he raised his hand and said, “Whatever.” And I said, “That’s not one of the options.”

So, I wanted him to pick one and then he wouldn’t. So, what he was really saying was, “You make the decision for me, Mr. Consultant, and I will blame you later,” which, of course, he did. And the word came to be people assume that teenage girls are ones that say this word. Remember the movie “Clueless” with Alicia Silverstone, where she would raise her fingers in a W and everybody would go, “Whatever”? Well, that’s how it started, but it’s not teenage girls who say it alone. It’s everyone who says it.

Now, for some people, it could be a shrug of the shoulders, it could be raising your eyebrows or rolling your eyes, it could be the middle finger, it could be a lot of things. But every time you say that, it’s turning into a decision that you’re avoiding. And I’ve learned in the research also that the decisions that we don’t make are the ones that create regret in our lives.

So, when people say, “I should’ve gone to graduate school,” or, “I could’ve been a manager,” or, “I would’ve been more successful had I…” you know, the should’ve, could’ve, would’ve are all part of the whatever syndrome that you didn’t make the decision. And what the research again shows is that the decisions that we did not make are the ones that we regret.

So, think about that every time you’re not making a decision, you’re regretting it, and that’s not helpful. It’s not good. And it even affects our personal lives when we can, in our dealing with our partners, and our children, and our parents, the whatevers are just toxic where you should be intentional, and you should be trying to do something with your decisions, and not blowing them off. It’s as simple as that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, if we do have sort of a fear or an avoidance going on with decisions, how do you recommend we improve that mental space?

Richard Moran
Well, there is, I call it the FOBO, the fear of a better option, “I want to take the high school cheerleader to the prom but, in the meantime, I’ve got this other…” So, the better options usually don’t appear, and so make a decision based on what you know. There’s also, and I love this rule, it comes out of Bain, the consulting firm, that they call it the two-minute rule.

And that is, whether you’re an organization or an individual, the decision that you make, are likely to make in the first two minutes of being faced with it, is probably the same decision that you’ll make if you suffer over it for a week. So, make the decision quickly, in that way, if it’s not the right decision, you can always go back and change it.

So, the two-minute rule is something that is really something that can affect our getting out of the whatever syndrome, so it’s a good rule. And I think it also applies to the regret. So, if you don’t make the decision quickly, and you’re probably going to have regrets about not making them later. And, Pete, there are so many books written about decision-making. There are hundreds of books that include pivot tables, and spreadsheets, and all kinds of flux capacitors and String theory, who knows what.

This is not complicated. What I want people to do is understand that the small decisions are the ones that matter, so please make them. I’m not suggesting that anybody go into a big decision, like a career move or marriage or something, and treat it like it. Those are not small decisions, and require all the analyses and thoughtfulness that they should. I’m just talking about the small decisions and how important they are. As simple as that.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, we have the small decision, and we have any number of reasons we don’t care to make it, we want to blame someone else. We are open to any number of things. We’re a little bit scared of the implications. Walk us through, we got two minutes to make a small decision. What do you recommend we do to make a small decision greatly in two minutes?

Richard Moran
Well, a lot of people say, “I’m just going to use my gut,” which is fine. Gut is fine. Everybody points to Steve Jobs as he always made gut decisions. Well, gut decisions are fine if your gut is informed. Steve Jobs could make gut decisions because he had years of product design and understanding what worked. So, your gut decision in the first two minutes could be the right way to go if your gut is informed.

If it’s not, then you need to do simple things like, as I said earlier, just make a list of pros and cons, make a list of “If I do this…” Do an algorithm, “If I do this, then this will happen. If I don’t do this, then this will happen.” And we’re constantly doing that in our head anyway, so use those simple techniques that have seen to work over time.

What I find is that people, when they don’t make these small decisions, they pile up. Email is the best way. Think about email. Every morning, we all have hundreds of emails. What do we do the first thing? We delete the ones that are easy. We delete, delete, delete. So, out of the hundred emails, there’s 50 left. Ten of them are hard, and those are the ones that we might not make decisions about.

We wait until later in the week, and on Friday, those 10 decisions are now 50 decisions that are not momentous but that’s what causes decision fatigue. We all have decision fatigue right now about what to wear, what to watch. So, it’s a good way to avoid decision fatigue is just by making the decisions when you’re faced with it.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, that’s interesting because I had conceptualized decision fatigue as a consequence of making too many decisions, it’s like, “Oh, I’m so fatigued from doing pushups or running. I’ve done so many pushups or ran so many miles, I’m now fatigued.” But you posit that, “No, it comes from not making the decisions.”

Richard Moran
It is, yeah. You’re faced with it and you don’t make it, so, all of a sudden, you’re burdened, you’ve got the weight of the world on your shoulders because you’ve postponed all these decisions, and now you have to make them all, and they’re harder if you wait. So, I think both can work, both are possible, but what I’m suggesting is that when you don’t make a decision, they pile up, and then you get sick and tired of making them all.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, and it’s certainly more overwhelming and unpleasant to face an inbox in the hundreds than in the dozens.

Richard Moran
Yeah, and they do, as we all know, they do pile up. And the hardest ones are usually the ones that we don’t make decisions about.

Pete Mockaitis
Indeed.

Richard Moran
So, that’s what I’m trying to get your listeners to avoid.

Pete Mockaitis
You’ve got a turn-of-a-phrase, “action follows intent.” How does that apply here?

Richard Moran
Well, it’s something when I talked about earlier about clarifying your intentions, and then your actions and your decisions are much easier to make. And when people think about intentions, especially in the corporate world, they think about visions and missions, or the intent of Google is to provide information to the world in a good way, and do no harm.

But what I’ve discovered is that people have their own intentions. And one of the guys I interviewed for the book, who was so fascinating, his name is John Bullock, he’s in Kansas City, or he’s in Lawrence, Kansas, and he is both an episcopal priest and a very successful lawyer. And he has a personal mission statement which just clarifies his intent, and it’s to help people.

So, every day, his intention is to help people, and then he makes all his decisions along those lines. And I’m not doing him justice, but it was a beautiful thing when I heard it, because he made all of his small decisions every day because his intentions were so clear. And it works. For him it really worked. So, that’s what the actions follow intent is all about, and make the intentions clear.

Pete Mockaitis
Do you have any other perspectives on the self-awareness, the clarity of intention, or articulations, examples of that, that just make a world of difference in aiding our decision-making?

Richard Moran
Yeah. Well, the other thing I learned, besides actions follow intent, is that good decision-makers are self-aware, that they know in their heart of hearts what they really want to do and they make decisions accordingly. And I think good leaders are self-aware, and good leaders are able to make decisions. So, an example I use, I was a CEO of a company, and I knew that I am not good at numbers, I’m not good at details. Believe it or not, there are CEOs who are not good at those two things.

But I am good at sales, I am good at communicating, I am good at building relationships. So, I’m self-aware enough that I could make decisions so that I surrounded myself with people who are good at numbers and good at details, and it just made the organization way better the fact that I was self-aware enough that I could make decisions like that. And as I talked to leaders around the world, they’re all self-aware. And that self-awareness allows them to make better decisions. Simple, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s say we do have some clarity of self-awareness and intention, and we are inspired, we are not saying whatever, we’re taking on decisions, we’re making them in two minutes frequently or less, are there any traps or pitfalls within this world that you’d highlight for us to avoid?

Richard Moran
Yeah, one is that you make decisions based on what you think other people want, and that’s an easy pitfall. Another is that you don’t take risks with your decision-making. And a lot of the good leaders made risky decisions. Let me put it another way, they were not afraid to make what they would term as a risky decision.

Another pitfall is that lots of times we all have to make decisions when all of the options are bad. And I see that happening right now in the tech world. Or, leaders are making decisions based on, “Should we run out of money or should we lay off people?” Both of those options are bad, but you still have to make one. Delaying that decision is going to mean bad things, both bad things are going to happen.

So, I see people really delaying decisions and not making them when the options that are available are all bad. So, put it all together, and it just adds up to success. Personal satisfaction, career success is all based on the ability to make all those small decisions.

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

Richard Moran
No, I think, as you said, Pete, the whole book is in the title, Never Say Whatever, and I think we covered it.

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

Richard Moran
Yeah, I have it right here. Let me find it. And it’s by one of my favorite authors, it’s by Arthur Miller. Well, I have two quotes, actually. The Arthur Miller quote is, “One can’t forever stand on the shore. At some point, filled with indecisions, skepticism, reservation, and doubt, you either jump in or you concede that life is forever elsewhere.” And the other quote I like, it’s by anonymous, is, “I used to be indecisive. Now, I’m not so sure.” So, don’t be indecisive. But I like those two.

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

Richard Moran
Well, I love the Cornell research that talked about the small decisions that we make every day, and that’s one that discovered how many decisions we make, and brought it down to lunch. So, it’s fascinating when you think about it. And there’s also a lot of research that I found interesting in doing the book, and that is how many big decisions people identify in their life.

And how many times have we heard somebody say, “Oh, I’m faced with so many big decisions”? Well, the truth is, and this is out of a lot of research also, that there’s 10 or 12 big decisions in our lives, 10 or 12. And that includes things like your career, where you live, who you marry, your faith, what about children. It even gets down to whether or not to have a dog.

So, people think that there’s all these big decisions hitting them all the time. There’s not. Those big decisions are few and far between because they’re so few. It’s all those small decisions every day that are what are so important.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Richard Moran
My favorite book is a recent book, and it’s out now by an Irish author, and it’s called This Is Happiness and it’s a coming-of-age story. I bet a lot of your readers don’t know about it, or listeners don’t know about it, but it’s just lyrical about what’s important and about how we all transform from young into a mature person. It’s a great book, This Is Happiness.

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

Richard Moran
My favorite tool is a hammer. In fact, I love hammers so much I have a large collection of hammers. Because how frustrating is it when you have something that needs to be hammered and you can’t find one? So, I have a lot of hammers. That, of course, implies that I treat everything like a nail, and that might be true. When the only tool you have is a hammer, you do tend to treat everything like a nail.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Richard Moran
My favorite habit is getting up early, and greeting the day with a smile, and say, “It’s going to be a great day, and my intentions today are to make it so.”

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

Richard Moran
Yeah. Well, what I’ve discovered is that, as I’ve talked about the book and the word whatever, I’ve described as an earwig. I’ve put a bug in their ear, and now I’ve ruined their day because every time they say the word, they shiver because they know they shouldn’t be saying it. So, I’m putting earwigs in everybody’s ears, that don’t say whatever. And instead of it’ll be annoying, now it’ll be like the theme song from “Cars” or “Kids” or something. It’ll really be annoying.

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

Richard Moran
I have a website, it’s RichardMoran.com, and I do look at it, and I do respond. And I’m active on LinkedIn. Yeah, I’m very responsive. I am really trying to help people be more successful.

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

Richard Moran
Well, it’s easy. This is an easy one about stop saying whatever. Make those small decisions. That’s my challenge.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Richard, it’s been a treat. I wish you much luck in all your decisions.

Richard Moran
Thanks, Pete. It’s been great to talk to you.

872: How to Get Unstuck and Break through Any Problem with Adam Alter

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Adam Alter says: "Action above all."

Adam Alter reveals the secret to breaking yourself out of any rut.

You’ll Learn:

  1. When it pays to lower your standards
  2. The question to ask for better insights
  3. The essential skill to accomplish your goals

About Adam

Adam Alter is a professor of marketing, and the Stansky Teaching Excellence Faculty Fellow at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He also holds an affiliated professorship in social psychology at NYU’s psychology department. In 2020 he was voted professor of the year by the faculty and student body at NYU’s Stern School of Business, and was among the Poets and Quants 40 Best Professors Under 40 in 2017. Alter is the New York Times bestselling author of two books: Drunk Tank Pink and Irresistible.

Resources Mentioned

Adam Alter Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Adam, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Adam Alter
Thanks for having me, Pete. Good to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about your latest book, Anatomy of a Breakthrough: How to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most. But, first, I was really digging your TED Talk about screens, and I’m curious if, in the time that has elapsed, if you’ve discovered any other fun, interesting tactics or approaches to reduce phone time.

Adam Alter
I have been trying to acquire as many physical objects as I can that track my phone, so there are all sorts of interesting little cookie-jar type things that work for phones quite effectively. So, you put a little, that have timers, you could put a countdown on them, and say, “I don’t want to use my phone for the next hour,” and they trap your phone. I didn’t really talk about that in the TED Talk, that was a few years ago now, but I find those physical barriers very effective.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. So, the trap cookie jars, just leaving it elsewhere. I’m curious, so if you’re at a restaurant, where is your go-to hiding spot?

Adam Alter
So, my kids are small, they’re five and seven, so when we go to restaurants, we don’t really have any screens at all. We try to keep our phones either in the car or we try to keep them under the table in a bag somewhere, so I don’t have a great hiding spot for the phone. I certainly don’t bring the cookie jar into the restaurant. That would be a little unorthodox but we’re pretty good about keeping the phones as far away from the table as possible.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s talk about your book, Anatomy of a Breakthrough. I’m curious if there are any particularly surprising or eye-popping discoveries you’ve made while putting together this book.

Adam Alter
That’s a good question. There are a few. One of the really fun things about this book was that I did a huge amount of research into how extremely successful people, A, have got stuck in the past, and, B, how they’ve managed to find breakthroughs. And some of the stories, I found very surprising. Let me just pick one of them.

There’s a fantastic story about Lionel Messi, the soccer player, who I think is the best player today, and he’s one of the greatest players of all time. And the very interesting thing about Messi is that he is known for being extremely anxious, and so much so that early in his career, some of his coaches said to him, “I don’t know if this is going to be right that you’re going to be a professional because you’re obviously struggling with emotional consequences of playing high-stakes matches.”

And what he ended up doing was he established this really, really interesting technique where he would get on the field, and for big matches, for small matches, he spends the first three, four minutes of the game not moving. Basically, he ambles around, he barely moves. All the other players, the other 23, sorry, the other 21 players are darting around, and he’s basically still.

And he spends these minutes doing two things. One, he calms down. He has a sort of series of mantras that calms himself down, but the other thing he’s doing is he’s developing a strategic advantage because he’s watching all the other players in a way that no other player does, and learning how they’re interacting with each other, who seems to have a hidden injury, who’s connecting particularly well with a particular teammate, and then he uses that, he deploys in the remaining 85+ minutes of the game.

And he’s never scored in minutes one and two of any match, but has scored in every minute from three on, which shows you how he’s really, essentially, not a player on the field until minute three or four. And what I found totally fascinating about that is, A, here is the, what I would consider to be the greatest soccer player of the day, who’s stuck, he really was dealing with a major sticking point, but he found a tremendous breakthrough.

And that breakthrough, what’s so interesting about it is that it’s paradoxical. Instead of doing more to get unstuck, most of us kind of flail, he does less. And I found a lot of that kind of Zen-like do more to do less, do less to do more, there were some really interesting ideas that came up as I was researching for the book, and that was one of them.

Pete Mockaitis
That is intriguing. And that practice, it’s so cool in that, well, a lot of times performance anxiety issues boil down to we’re being self-conscious, “Oh, I hope I don’t screw up. I hope I don’t mess this up,” all that kind of chatter inside the head. And when your goal is to see, “All right, what’s the deal here with all these players?” it’s really quite the forcing function of the opposite of thinking about yourself and how you’re operating there.

Adam Alter
Yeah, because I think if he spent those few minutes just thinking about his heart rate, and saying, “Well, how’s my heart beating? Am I sweating? Am I nervous?” that would be counterproductive. But what’s brilliant about that strategy, as you’ve said, is that it’s outwardly focused. It gives him a task, it gives him something to do, and so he’s not just kind of biding his time.

He’s doing something that’s very valuable for the long run, but that also, because of its nature, it’s a little bit more cerebral instead of being something where you move around, it’s something that kind of calms his body down. He’s not really getting his heart rate up the way the other players are earlier on in the game.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, thank you. Well, now, let’s maybe zoom out a bit and hear about the main thesis of Anatomy of a Breakthrough. What do you mean by breakthrough? And what do you mean by unstuck? And what’s the big idea here?

Adam Alter
Yeah, so the kinds of sticking points I’m talking about are protracted ones. These are ones that last often months, years, in some cases, decades, or even entire lifetimes. So, I’m not really interested in the sort of trivial daily frustrations that we all deal with. I’m interested in the bigger sticking points that we actually also happen to deal with pretty much universally.

And I’m especially interested in the ones that are susceptible to strategic intervention. In other words, there’s something we can do about them. There are a lot of things that cause us to be stuck but we don’t have a lot of say in, we don’t have much that we can do about. During the early days of the pandemic, for example, a lot of people felt stuck, but if you were physically stuck in a particular location, and you couldn’t travel because of government regulations, that’s just how it was. There wasn’t much you could do about that, and I don’t think that’s especially psychologically interesting.

What’s interesting to me is that the vast majority of cases of this kind of protracted stuck-ness are cases where there’s something you could if you knew what to do. People sort of say to themselves, “I know there’s a way out of this. I just don’t know which direction to pour my energy.” And so, that’s what this book is. Essentially, it’s a sort of roadmap for what I call finding breakthroughs.

The breakthroughs are essentially what’s on the other side of whatever it is that’s your sticking point, getting over the hurdle, getting past the mire that’s in front of you that’s preventing you from moving forward. That’s what the breakthrough is. It’s the sort of flipside of being stuck.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. All right. Well, so how is it done? Are there some core principles? You mentioned heart, head, and habit.

Adam Alter
Yes, there are. Exactly. So, you’ve just listed the three sections that talk about the interventions. I actually start the book by talking about the idea that it’s surprisingly common for us to get stuck. I say it’s universal, and often people hide how stuck they are from the world, and as a result, we see a lot of success stories that make us feel a little bit inferior.

So, I talk a lot in the beginning stages of the book about licensing ourselves to be stuck in the first place, and that then segues into the first section of interventions that focus on the emotional consequence of being stuck because humans actually are well-designed, well-engineered to get unstuck physically. If you’re stuck or trapped in a particular place, your first instinct is to kind of fight, it’s to flail. And that’s very useful if you’re physically trapped.

There are these really interesting stories every now and again of people finding hysterical strength, is the term for it, when they lift up a car and somehow free themselves. Now, unfortunately, we get confused between that kind of stuck-ness and the stuck-ness that’s emotional or mental, and we give that same kind of flailing response to these situations, and it doesn’t do much good for us.

So, the first thing, really, is to calm down and to accept where you are, and then to start thinking about what the best strategies are. So, the second section starts to deal with those strategies. That’s a section called head, and that’s really about what goes on inside your head as you’re trying to get unstuck, and I suggest a whole range of different sort of strategies that we can use to either find creative breakthroughs, or breakthroughs in financial sticking points, or business sticking points, or relationship sticking points.

And then the last section of the book, which I think is probably the most important, is habit, which is the argument that it’s great to think about emotions and it’s great to think about strategy but, ultimately, you can’t get unstuck if you don’t act. And so, that last section is about action. And, in fact, the last chapter is titled “Action Above All” because I think privileging action when you’re stuck is the most important thing to do.

And I talk about how, when it feels impossible to act, you can act despite that sense that there’s nothing that can be done. So, that’s a sort of roadmap of the roadmap itself.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, could you give us some examples of success stories, interventions that could be particularly helpful for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs? I’m thinking about procrastination. I’m thinking about difficult office relationships. What are some of your faves?

Adam Alter
Yeah, one of my faves is it’s from the last chapter of the book. I was just talking about this idea that action above all is really important, that you’ve got to act. And Jeff Tweedy, the front man of the rock band Wilco, who’s also a writer, sort of all-around renaissance man, has talked a lot about the idea that it’s exhausting being someone who has to be creative and thoughtful every day for decades.

And some days you wake up and you don’t want to do the job. And it doesn’t matter whether your job is as Tweedy’s is, to write music and books, or whether it’s some other thing that requires that you bring your best self to the workplace. And so what he sort of described is if you absolutely have to be creative and you don’t want to be, one of the things you can do is you can lower your threshold as low as possible, right down to the ground.

Normally, we’re perfectionists, we want to do good work. He says the best thing to do when you first start is to say, “Anything is better than nothing.” He thinks of it as pouring out the bad ideas. And so, he says to himself, if he’s writing a particular, say, music track, he might say, “What’s the very worst musical phrase I could write right now?” And then he spends 15 minutes working on the worst musical phrases he can come up with.

Now, because he’s very good at his job, it’s very easy for him to do that. Most of us can do a bad job at the thing we’re good at or the thing that we spend a lot of time at. And even if that action is not itself useful, it’s sort of like moving sideways, it does two things. It shows you that you can move, that you’re not, by definition, stuck if you’re moving, but it also sometimes can grease the wheels for further action. It sort of shows you how to act. It shows you that you can act. It signals that you are someone who is capable of acting.

And, by contrast, if you’re coming up with bad ideas, sometimes that illuminates good ones. And so, he talks often about the fact that those first 15 minutes may be wasted but they often pave the way for many, many hours of much stronger work. He talks about it as though the crystal-clear water of creative ideas has a layer of muck on top of it. And once you pour out the muck, the good crystal-clear water is there, and the ideas pour forth.

And that’s, I think, absolutely true about general sticking points in the workplace. You just have to act, and the best way to act is to lower your expectations and standards, at least temporarily.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I like that a lot in terms of even if you, sure enough, produce nothing that feels good at all on that day, you’ve at least kept the habit, which I view as an asset in and of itself, alive and moving as oppose to, it’s like, well, getting momentum in the opposite direction, momentum towards nothingness.

Adam Alter
Yeah, and rumination as well, because what ends up happening is, if you’re not acting, you’re thinking. Sometimes thinking is very valuable and, actually, you should think for a long time before you act. But if you’re at the point where, more than anything, thought is not going to rescue you, you really need to do something.

And it’s funny, because people don’t have that instinct. Their instinct is, “If I don’t produce something phenomenal right now, it’s just not going to be good enough.” But very, very often, it’s even mediocre products that end up freeing us. So, when you hear stories, you hear George R.R. Martin who’s writing the Game of Thrones books, or the Song of Ice and Fire books, he’s talked about the fact that he’s sometimes stuck for a decade.

Now, you can imagine how high his standards must be. And, as a result of that, unless he cranks out these passages that rival his best work, he probably continues to feel stuck. And I think if I were going to be his personal consultant, I don’t know if he’d ever want one or if he’d ever take me seriously, the first thing I’d say is, “Write a hundred really terrible pages if you have to, because behind that will be some good stuff,” and that’s what Tweedy and others, and not just Tweedy, many other creatives have found.

Pete Mockaitis
That sounds really cool for creative work. And as I think a little bit about my own experiences there, sometimes I feel, it’s like, “Oh, you know what, young kids and get good sleep, having this or that, I’m just slightly sick,” whatever. It’s like I’m clearly not at my best, and I know it. And I also don’t want to do the thing, so there’s sort of a double whammy there.

And so, it’s very easy for me to delude myself to saying, “Well, you know, it’s probably not going to be worthwhile anyway, so maybe just skip it.” And yet I’ve found that when I really put it to the test, that I have actually had, sometimes, breakthrough excellence above and beyond average in sort of a tired funk state. And I don’t know whether that’s true, how we explain that. Maybe, in some ways, there’s benefit associated with, I don’t know, like slap-happy condition, like when things are hilarious.

It’s like different brain portions are operating, and sometimes that works out better, and sometimes it just unmasks the lie that you’ve been saying to yourself.

Adam Alter
Yeah, one of the key axioms in the book is that if you spend, say, a thousand days doing the same thing, you’re trying to find some sort of nugget of gold, maybe it’s a creative output, maybe it’s a good song, whatever it is, it doesn’t have to be creative work, but let’s say, you do your job for a thousand days. It’s actually very, very hard at the beginning of each day to predict whether it’s going to be a good one.

There’s a lot of research that suggests this. Sometimes this happens in lots of domains. It happens with athletic pursuits as well. You often think, “Oh, I had eight hours of sleep, it’s going to be a good day,” and then it turns out not to be. Other days you had three hours of sleep and you’re hung over, and you produce your best work.

And I give this talk to freshmen at NYU sometimes where I show them the four emails over the last 15 years that changed my professional life. They were these random emails that arrived, that, for example, introduced me to the world of book-writing, or to a kind of consulting that I now do. And with each one, I was convinced that this was a nothing, I was like, “Ah, I don’t have time for this nonsense. I’ve got all these other things that I’m worried about working on.”

And, ultimately, I ended up saying yes, and sending the follow-up email. But alongside those four emails that changed my life, I don’t know, 25,000 that did nothing for me, and you just don’t know when those moments will come up. So, I think you’re right about establishing the habit because you want to be in the game when those good things do happen. It’s like being in the stock market on those few days when there’s a big bump. You don’t want to be out of the game, and I think that’s true for work, in general.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we’ve talked a little bit about procrastination. I’m curious about sort of interpersonal relations that can feel stuck, like, “Oh, my boss or my colleague is a jerk, or I’m not good enough. They criticize everything I do. I just don’t want to be around them. They’re toxic,” kind of fill in the blank. When a relationship feels stuck, any cool stories or tactics there?

Adam Alter
Yeah, it’s a very different kind of situation when it’s a relationship that’s essential. That’s one of those kinds of stuck-ness, it’s where you may not have control over who your boss is. Then you have to try to figure out what you do have control over. And sometimes you have some control, sometimes you have very little control.

What you do have control over often is this question of whether, when things are really dire, this is the right either position for you at that particular company, or that particular organization, or whether perhaps you should jump ship, find something else. That’s always a question that’s worth asking, and certainly it’s worth exploring whether there are other options. If things really are that dire, that’s something worth asking.

But one of the really interesting ideas that, I think, if it’s not a truly toxic relationship, there are just people in the workplace who don’t get along. If it’s a toxic relationship, that’s problematic, and there needs to be a remedy put in place, often distancing or moving to another position, if possible. But when the relationship isn’t quite toxic, but perhaps the interactions are not all that fruitful, there’s some hopeful research that suggests that the kind of creative conflict that you have at work and in other situations is actually very good, or can be very good, as long as it’s not deeply emotionally aversive.

There’s fantastic work, for example, looking at how Pixar has come up with some of its best ideas and its best films, and its Academy Award-winning films, and a lot of them have happened where the producer, the one who’s most famous for this is Brad Bird. He will put someone, sort of a cat amongst the pigeons, he’ll bring someone in to cause creative conflict or general conflict. And you’ll have all the animators in Pixar who are famous for spending a huge amount of time getting the fur just right so it looks like fur, the water just right so it looks like water, and so on.

And these people will be brought in to, say, they’re storytelling experts, they’ll come in and say, “No one cares about the fur and the hair and the water. If the story is not compelling, you’ll lose them in five minutes. They’re not going to go away saying, ‘That story sucked but how about that fur.’ That’s not the way movies work.” And sometimes, these conflicts, if you can reframe it as a kind of challenge and you can rise through it, it could be very productive. But, again, if it’s toxic, that’s obviously not the recipe.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. The fur, boy, I had the exact same thought when I was getting a little too into audio editing, and seeing just what’s possible in terms of removing every errant thump or pop or hiss. And then I saw, I think it was iZotope who’s showing off their audio software, and I was like, “Wow, that is so amazing how they’re able to remove the wind in that scene.” I was like, “What movie is that?” And then I went over to IMDb, and people were just, like, trashing the movie for just being so terrible.

Adam Alter
Trashing the film, right.

Pete Mockaitis
And I was like, “Yeah, but nobody mentioned how they did an amazing job removing the wind sounds in that scene.” So, yeah, fur and wind, that’s exactly true.

Adam Alter
It’s easy to miss the point, right? It’s nice to have those black sheep, and they’re occasionally telling you, “Hey, you’re not paying attention to the right thing.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so I loved your example of Lionel Messi there. Anything else in the zone of people and their emotions, if it’s depression, if it’s anxiety, if it’s just they feel stuck in the sense that it is just hard to handle business with the stress and the emotions and the overload and overwhelm in their lives?

Adam Alter
Yeah, there is an excellent story, and this one is more about being a good leader, although it applies also to just working with other people in general. This is a story about the jazz pianist, the giant Herbie Hancock. And when Hancock was up and coming, he was a young pianist, he was trying out or he’s auditioning for Miles Davis’s band, and Miles Davis was terrifying to other musicians.

He would get on stage and he would shout at them, and he would tell them they weren’t doing the right thing. He was known for being a perfectionist and for knowing exactly what he was looking for. And even if you were very talented but you happened, in that moment, not to be giving him what he wanted, he would tell you, and he would do it publicly sometimes.

So, Hancock went in to an audition at Miles’ house, at Davis’s house, with some of the biggest jazz musicians of all time, I mean, the most prominent, the most impressive, the most technically gifted, and Hancock tells this story of walking into Miles Davis’s house, and all these musicians are there. He’s terrified because of the moment of the whole thing, but he’s also terrified of Davis and the fact that he’s going to shout at him. And he’s a young guy, he’s kind of concerned.

And they start the audition, and about five minutes in, Davis picks up his trumpet and he throws it on the couch, it looks like with disgust, and he goes upstairs, and they don’t see him for the next three days. And Hancock was convinced he’s blown the audition, “If Miles isn’t even there, how could this be going well?” But he starts to loosen up, he’s like, “How many chances in my life am I going to get to play with these giants of the jazz world?”

He starts experimenting, he gets a little bit expansive, played some great stuff, he’s happy with himself. At the end of the third day, Davis comes down the stairs, and he picks up his trumpet and he starts playing with the band again. And Hancock’s kind of confused, and he goes over to Davis at the end of the day, and he says, “I thought I’d lost you. You went upstairs after five minutes.” And Davis said to him, he often had this kind of Zen-like sayings, he basically just said to him, “I was on the intercom, man, and I heard everything, but I knew you wouldn’t play properly if I heard it live.”

So, he knew that. Even though he was this incredible hard ass, he knew that there were times when he has to take the pressure off, and that his musicians wouldn’t give him the best if he was there putting the screws on the whole time. And I think there’s something, obviously being a toxic leader who shouts at people on stage is bad, bad, bad, but the fact that Davis had this ability to recognize in Hancock that kind of nervous energy that could be produced or applied in the right direction under the right circumstances was, I think, something that a lot of leaders miss.

It’s really important to know when to push, and to say, “I expect a lot from you,” and it’s also really important to know when to give people space and safety to expand into their roles, especially when they’re young or when they’re early in a job. And I love that story because I think it’s a very, very powerful idea in terms of how to be a leader.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now, thinking about some of the head stuff, are there any magical mental phrases or reframes that are handy that come up again and again?

Adam Alter
Yeah, I think so. I think one of the things we do is we are often striving for genuine radical originality. That’s true in creative work, it’s true in the workplace, it’s true in businesses. It doesn’t matter what sort of work you do, you’re always trying for something new. And I think we put a big premium on newness, on novelty.

And radical originality is a myth. It’s this idea that there are certain things out there that are really new and different from everything else, and that’s just not true. There are a lot of great examples of this kind of myth. Bob Dylan is often pointed to as the kind of radical original voice of the 20th century, but when you go back, even Dylan himself said, “That’s not true. I was borrowing from all these different traditions.” And you can find the DNA of all sorts of other work in his songs.

It’s just very, very hard in any world to find this genuine originality, and, unfortunately, when we strive for it, it’s a little bit like striving for perfection. It makes us feel stuck because we can’t quite reach that standard. So, a much better thing to do that tends to be quite useful is what is known as recombination. This is when you take two existing things that are themselves not new, and you make some new product by combining them, by bringing them together.

And there are some amazing examples of this in business, in music, in art, in filmmaking. And one of the things I’ve done over the last 15 years or so that I find very useful is, any time I see a good idea, is I’ll put it down in this document that I have that’s now hundreds of lines long, and what I’ll occasionally do, if I’m stuck, I’ll go in and say, “Let’s look at idea 37 and idea 112, and let’s see. Can they be combined in a way that is new?”

And it’s a great exercise because it kind of makes you a little bit creatively limber but, also, if you’re ever stuck, just think about two things that you like that are interesting that haven’t been combined, combine them and you’ve got something that’s new, it’s a recombination. It’s a great way forward.

Pete Mockaitis
So, in your document that’s hundreds of lines long, it’s anything you saw that you thought was cool or a good idea of any domain.

Adam Alter
Yeah, that’s one version.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, can you give us a couple examples, like, you’re in the grocery store, you’re like, “Oh, that looks tasty”? Or, what are some lines?

Adam Alter
Yeah, so here are two lines. One line is I teach a case to my MBA students on a little alarm clock called the Clocky. I don’t know if you know about this clock, but when it rings, to stop you from hitting the snooze button, it’s on wheels and it runs away from you, and it runs around the room. So, you’ve probably heard of this. It’s a clever little alarm clock.

So, when I first heard about this, about maybe 15 or 20 years ago, I thought it was really clever. No, it’s probably 15 years ago. So, I put it in the diary, it’s in that document, and it sat there for a long time. And then a number of years later, I was writing about how we could stop ourselves from binge-watching too much Netflix or too much of whatever video platform is your poison.

And I was wondering, “Could you somehow marry this Clocky idea to the binge-watching that we do?” which, by the way, the way we binge-watch and why we binge-watch, it’s a brilliant piece of product engineering, that the next episode automatically plays, so I thought that was a very clever idea used a little bit nefariously.

And so, I took these two ideas, and one thing that I now do is if I don’t want to binge-watch, I don’t have Clocky because Clocky is a bit random for this purpose, but that kind of same principle of making it hard to hit the snooze button, I will set an alarm, put it in a different room of my house for, say, an hour and a half later. In that way, if I’m watching Netflix, I have two episodes in and I don’t want to watch a third, I timed the alarm to coincide with the end of the second episode. I have to get up and go turn the alarm off to continue watching.

It’s not like I cannot watch anymore, but it’s a good way to minimize the likelihood that I’m just going to sit there in a stupor, not moving and let the next episode play, and that’s been very effective for me. So, that’s just one example, a very personal one.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we have an example, Clocky, like it is necessary to move in order to shut the thing off. So, okay, nifty. So, I guess I’m wondering, in the course of just living life and capturing ideas, it’s just anything you think is clever in any domain?

Adam Alter
Pretty much. I’ve got different versions of the document. So, there’s a document that is called book ideas, and that’s like any idea that I think is interesting enough that, at some point, I might explore it for a book, to write a book about it, and see whether it’s thick enough and interesting enough to form a book. And there are a hundred of ideas in there, and that would be lifetimes of book-writing, so I won’t do many of them but it’s a useful exercise.

I’ve got one for research that I do as an academic, like the kinds of projects I want to do. And then I’ve got this sort of generally cool and interesting ideas document which sometimes comes up in consulting or speaking engagements. I’ll bring some of those in if I think they’re useful. And often they form the basis of case studies for teaching.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. In your book, you’ve got a section called 100 ways to get unstuck. Could you share one or two or three extra fantastic ways to get unstuck that are broadly applicable, highly powerful, provide a good ROI, and that we haven’t covered yet already?

Adam Alter
Yeah, absolutely. I think experimentalism. Experimentalism is a philosophy that makes adults more like children. So, the way this works is, you know, kids ask a million questions. I have a five-year-old and a seven-year-old, they don’t stop asking questions about everything, and they’re learning at an incredible rate because they don’t take anything for granted. No common wisdom is common wisdom to them. Everything has to be pushed and prodded. They’ve got questions for everything.

And we lose that somewhere between childhood and adulthood. We start to assume things are the way they are for a good reason, or at least we don’t really question it. Experimentalism is this philosophy, the sort of child-like philosophy of saying, “Is this really the best way things could be?” And what you find is many of the most successful people in all sorts of domains are chronic experimentalists. They question everything, or if there’s a particular area that matters to them, they specifically and sharply question all sorts of assumptions in that domain.

A really good example of this was an Olympic swimmer named Dave Berkoff who swam for the US in the ’88 and ’92 Olympic games. He was a backstroke swimmer but he wasn’t as tall or as broad shouldered as a lot of the backstroke swimmers. He didn’t have the same kind of natural talents as some of the other swimmers did. But what he did have was he was an experimentalist. He was incredibly curious.

He tried a whole lot of different techniques, a whole lot of tweaks, and his coach encouraged that in him. He ended up discovering a special technique that became known as the Berkoff blastoff, where he would go under water and stay under water for almost a full lap of the pool. And it turned out that that made him about 85% faster. And he broke world records that way until other swimmers caught on. He still ended up winning other medals because he was continuing to experiment.

But it’s a great illustration of how we take so much for granted, and often it’s deviating from the herd by experimenting that produces really interesting insights.

Pete Mockaitis
I dig it. Okay, experimentalism. What else?

Adam Alter
I think I also really like the idea of exploring and exploiting, as these two basic approaches to growth and change. So, exploration is this period of time, where, let’s use sort of the hunter-gatherer approach. Imagine you’re on the plains, you’re a prehistoric person, you’re trying to find food. Exploring is when you say, “I don’t know where to even begin. I’m just going to try all sorts of different areas of the pasture in front of me. I’m going to go far. I’m going to go close. I’m going to go left. I’m going to go right. I’m going to try everything.”

After you do that for a while though, you might decide to say, “Well, there’s a little patch over here that seems promising. I’m going to spend all my time on that patch now. I’m going to exploit that patch for all it’s worth.” And that’s a really good metaphor for what we can do in the workplace. So, exploration, if you think about a painter like Jackson Pollock, Pollock became very well known for a certain style of painting – drip painting.

But before he did that, he tried five or six or seven other techniques for about five years, and then he hit on this drip technique, and he was like, “This is me. This is for me. This is my thing.” After exploring those other options, he switched into exploit mode, said no to anything that wasn’t about drip painting, and became an absolute expert in this one thing that he owned.

And it’s a great lesson, and actually, it turns out that when you look at the best periods in people’s careers, they almost always follow a period of exploration, followed by a period of exploitation. So, go broad and wide, say yes to everything, be an omnivore, consume whatever you can consume, try everything. But then at a certain point, you’ve got to say, “Well, what was the best of that?” And then you go deep in that thing and say no to everything else. You are single-minded. You say no to almost everything. And that is the recipe for the best creative and really professional outcomes, in general.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Any others?

Adam Alter
Yeah, there are plenty of others, there are hundreds. Let me try and pick which one I like best to hit off. All right, here’s a good one. I really like this one. There is an idea known as the creative cliff illusion. The creative cliff illusion is this illusion that our creative ideas are best when they first arrive. So, for example, if I say to you, “Come up with ten slogans for this particular company. Here’s a product, give me your best slogans for the product. Imagine we’re trying to sell as many as we can.”

You ask people, “Are your first five slogans going to be best or are your 15th to 20th slogan that you come up is going to be best or better?” And almost everyone has this instinct that the good stuff is easy to come by, which is the first stuff, it just kind of stumbles out. And then it gets hard, and then it’s probably kind of clunky and it’s not very good.

It turns out that that’s the illusion, that there’s a creative cliff, that our creative ideas fall off a cliff. The early stuff turns out to be trite and boring and that’s what everyone else is thinking, too. If you can push against the difficulty of that next phase when it stops being easy, that’s when you start to have divergent thinking. When you get a little bit idiosyncratic, you think about things in a way that makes you different from everyone else.

And so, the quality of ideas gets better if you can sit with that discomfort with further attempts. And so, that, I think, is a really profound idea because we often associate hardship with badness. But, in this case, it’s the hardship that signals or heralds the good things that are about to come.

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

Adam Alter
I’ll say one more thing. There’s a really interesting idea called teleoanticipation. Teleoanticipation is very important when we think about long-range goals, which is when we tend to get stuck, something that you’re doing for a long time, whether it’s a physical pursuit, like a marathon, or whether it’s something at work, like a project that takes six months or a year or five years to complete, or a long artwork that you’re working on that takes a long time to complete, or whatever it is.

Teleoanticipation is a term that basically means forecasting the end. And it’s a really important skill because it means that proportioning your energy, your creative energy, your physical energy, such that you have just enough to reach the final point. The best way to run a marathon is to collapse right after the finish line because then you’ve put everything in. Sometimes people put in too much a little bit early, and then they collapse before the finish line.

One of the best skills we can learn is to be better at teleoanticipation, to knowing how to proportion our energy so we don’t come out the starting blocks too fast either physically, when we’re doing a marathon, but also intellectually and creatively, when we’re doing creative tasks. It’s very, very important to know how to pace yourself. And it’s a skill that’s worth learning.

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

Adam Alter
I think, because so much of what we’ve discussed has been about creativity, I like the idea, this goes back to Henry Ford, the idea that instead of thinking about how to create a better horse and buggy. I can’t remember the quote itself, but we need to think about creating something altogether different, and that’s where the car comes in.

So, instead of trying to perfect something and make these little tweaks to it along the way, think about whether there’s a completely different alternative altogether. And that’s what the car did. It, essentially, changed the way we travelled altogether. So, even an inferior car was better than the best horse and buggy you could come up with.

And that goes a long way to that experimentalism idea that I mentioned earlier, that sometimes the very best version of what everyone else is doing is not as good as this new thing you could be doing. Even in its infancy as it’s half-formed, it could be a better way to do things. And so, I think that’s quite powerful.

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

Adam Alter
One of the pieces of research that I really love is this anthropological work that Bruce Feiler, a writer, he’s done, where he went around the United States and interviewed people about change, and found that on average, every roughly five to ten years we experience what he calls a life quake.

A life quake is a massive change. It can be something we invite into our lives. It could be something that we have no control over. It can be good. It can be bad. Things like birth of a child, death of a loved one, divorce, change of job, change of career, moving to a new country, and so on. And because those are universal, we all tend to have five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten of them in our lifetimes. It suggests that we need to be very nimble in the face of these changes.

And that’s why you essentially need a roadmap for these moments when you feel stuck in the face of this kind of change, because what you were doing in the past perhaps won’t serve you quite as well in the future.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Adam Alter
It’s summer, and every summer I read Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth. It’s a book that sort of explores the idea of good times, and the transience of good times, like a summer. That’s my favorite time of the year. And the book is essentially about this period in a young guy’s life that is bounded. It ends when the summer ends, and he goes back to college.

And I think one of the really nice insights there is that it’s so important to kind of leach out the very best from these periods, and make sure that you capitalize on them to the extent possible. I think we often look back on periods of our lives, and say, “Well, that was amazing, and I really miss it.” But one of the things that I do a lot in my research, and what a lot of my research focuses on, is on, “How do you, in the moment, extract as much juice as you can from that particular situation rather than looking back in the future and saying, ‘Oh, that was really nice. I wish I could have more of it’?”

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

Adam Alter
A favorite tool I would say is, I travel a huge amount, and I have a digital notepad. It’s called a Remarkable, and it goes everywhere with me. If I only have one thing with me when I travel, which happens sometimes, it’s my Remarkable because that’s where all those ideas go. I’m constantly hoovering up ideas and trying to make sure I don’t forget them.

I always worry about this, actually. I do a lot of my thinking when I’m running. And then when I get home, I’ve forgotten what I’ve thought about. But the Remarkable is a great tool because it goes everywhere. It seems like an endless capacity, and I use it constantly.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Adam Alter
A favorite habit is running, I would say, four times to five times a week for 30 or more miles a week. I’ve been doing that for long enough now that I can call it a habit.

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

Adam Alter
Yeah, one of the things that I talk about a bit is the question of how we should structure the work week, which is obviously very relevant to work. And some of the first research I did that made me interested in what I do is in whether we should have a five-day eight-hour-a-day work week of 40 hours, a four-day ten-hour-a-day work week of 40 hours, or a three-day 13-hour-and-20-minute work week, which is also 40 hours.

And the research that I did suggests that three-day work week is the best one. And I think a lot of people find that a little surprising. They imagine 13 hours of work, and they’re overwhelmed by it. But, also, that gives you four days of the week when you can do other things. And that’s something that I hear talked about quite a lot.

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

Adam Alter
They can find me on LinkedIn, they can find me on Twitter, and they can find a lot of information at my website, AdamAlterAuthor.com.

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

Adam Alter
Yeah, I think action above all. I think do something ASAP, I would say today, tomorrow, whenever you can carve out a few minutes. If there’s something that’s been making you feel stuck, where you haven’t been able to make as much headway as you’d like, lower your threshold down, say, “It doesn’t matter whether I do a really bad job at this,” liberate yourself to do a poor job, but just do something in the general direction of the thing that you’re trying to achieve. And I think you’ll find that just that feedback you get from having done that is itself good medicine, and it pushes you in the right direction as you move forward.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Adam, this has been a treat. Thank you. I wish you much luck and many fun breakthroughs.

Adam Alter
Thanks so much for having me, Pete.