Thinking Archives - Page 12 of 20 - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
Doug, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Doug Hall
Well, thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into your experiences and tips when it comes to creativity, innovation, but first I want to hear about an adventure you took to the North Pole. Not Santa Claus, but the real North Pole. What’s the scoop?

Doug Hall
Well, yeah, okay. Okay, make sure people understand this. There is no Barbara Pole like you saw on Bugs Bunny at the pole. It’s an imaginary place that you can only tell by GPS. You spend days travelling to get to a place that looks just like every other place you’ve been three or four weeks.

A number of years ago I got this idea to join an expedition that was recreating Admiral Peary’s last dash to the Pole. I’m a big fan of Admiral Peary. There’s a hierarchy of people on the trip. There’s people that have done Everest and this. In fact, it’s called the horizontal Everest, the Pole is.

You do a training trip, where you go through all this stuff and everybody kind of gets their job. I was one of the tenderfeet as they say. In fact, I did a book called North Pole Tenderfoot that would tell the story about this. But I was a tenderfoot. I didn’t even get to be cook. I was the pot washer, which, let me tell you, at 40 below, pot washer is as low as it gets on the totem pole. But I was just excited to be able to get on the expedition.

So, in typical fashion, I kind of went over the top and we do work with top corporations around the world. We’ve been doing it for many, many years. I called in a whole lot of friends and we raised, I don’t know, a million dollars or some crazy amount of money for a charity focused on helping parents inspire their kids. It was in the early days of the internet. We had all these students and we had classes for them. It was just a ton of fun.

It’s an incredible experience. The North Pole, it’s unbelievable. The beauty and the sun’s up nonstop. You’d think it’s kind of like this white on white thing; well, it’s not because you’ve got all these blues and these whites and the shades and it’s unbelievable.

Now in a white out, you can’t see anything. It pretty much messes with your head. They called it …, the Arctic devil gets in your head. I went through it a couple of times, folks I was with went through it a couple of times, where you just basically lose it.

But as Paul Schurke, who led the expedition, from up in Ely, Minnesota, Wintergreen Lodge, says, he says, “It feels so good when you stop.” You go, “Jesus, that’s pretty weird. Why are you doing it?” Because it feels so good when you stop.

But there is a lot of truth to it because when you have pushed yourself in whatever it may be, whether it’s mountain climbing or biking or people that are into extended racing, when you push your physical body far beyond – you get to reasonable, you get to unreasonable, you get to “I’m going to die,” you get to “This is ridiculous,” and you can keep going, it gives you a strength that when you’re sitting there in your cubicle or in this room looking at stupid PowerPoints and they’re telling you the world’s ending, you go, “Eh, you ain’t seen nothing until you’ve gone for a swim at 40 below 0. You just don’t even have any idea.”

There is a level setting. There is a great gift of the Arctic or any of those things, I’m not just saying the Arctic, that when you’re willing to push yourself, it gives you that sense that no matter what it is, you can do it. You can do it because you’ve seen worse. You’ve seen worse.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, it’s funny as you were sharing that notion ‘It feels so good when you stop’ and mentioning Ely, Minnesota, I’m reminded of a Boundary Waters canoe trip I took, which took us through Ely, Minnesota along the way. It was at times it was just like “What are we doing?” You’ve got these gigantic packs of 50 plus pounds on front and back of you, so 100 total pounds and a canoe above your head and you’re just walking that way for a mile.

Doug Hall
And bugs.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Doug Hall
Bugs that will carry you away.

Pete Mockaitis
The canoes above our head, we’re walking, and then the branches are scratching the canoe and it sounds like an alien screaming in surround sound in your ears. It’s like, “What did we sign up for?” But it really did, it felt amazing when we sat down. It’s like, “Oh, now we’re just going to hang out with campfire and eat some food,” and it was glorious.

Doug Hall
Ely is the end of the road. It’s the end of the road. The road ends at Ely. It really is. But the Boundary Waters are glorious. You haven’t lived until you’ve gone dog sledding up there in February. That’s where we went and did training trips.

I laugh at all this talk about the border, wherever you feel, I don’t really care. But they talk about the border and it’s like in the Boundary Waters, “Oh, you’re in Canada. No, now you’re in the US. Now you’re in Canada. … US.” It’s like whatever.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Tell us, what is the Eureka Ranch all about?

Doug Hall
Well, we’re inventors. We’re professional inventors. I started it back in ’86. I’ve been doing it a long time. Helping people open up their minds to – the slogan, I guess, is ‘find, filter, and fast track big ideas.’ People get caught and if you don’t innovate, you die, but it can be hard to shake it up.
We’ve historically been the go-to people. I’m talking Nike, Walt Disney, America’s big, big companies. When they have a really big problem, they come to us to invent a breakthrough. It’s usually a patentable breakthrough or service or system and crazy stuff like that.

That’s what we did for many, many years until about five years ago. Ten years we started, but really five years, we got serious about it. I got to a point in life where I said, “It’s really cool that I can invent this stuff, but wouldn’t it be even cooler if I could teach other people how to do it?”

We created this new field of academic study called innovation engineering where we teach people how to find, filter and fast track. It’s great to come up with a cool idea. It’s awesome. That eureka moment, to use the phrase, is awesome. But to inspire and educate and to teach someone else to do it, it’s 100x. It’s not even close. It’s so cool when people can believe they can. It’s amazing.

Pete Mockaitis
That is cool. Yeah. I want to dig into just where do you start with that. You unpack some of this in your book Driving Eureka, but would you say that there is – you’ve got those F’s there, could you walk us through that? Is that the best sort of point of entry?

Doug Hall
Yeah, that will work because that’s basically the element. People have different things in their head. In fact, I was talking with Maggie Nichols, who’s the CEO of the ranch, just before we got on. And she was talking about she just had a conversation with a client for a big company and she was talking about how we’re going to work with her people and we’ll have people there.

She says, “I got the feeling that—” in this case it was a gentleman – “he didn’t believe his people could do it, that they could create an idea.” He didn’t believe. At its most fundamental I think people don’t think that they can create ideas.

But then you ask them the next question, which is, “Well, what’s your system for creating ideas? In other words, your company has accounting practices.” “Well, what do you mean?” “Well, I mean is it just you get on the rooftop in a lotus position and wait for lightning to hit? What do you do? How do ideas get created?” “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

They don’t have a system for finding ideas. They don’t have a system for doing it. There’s methodical ways that you can go through to do it.

First off they go, “We don’t have any ideas.” Then you get the ideas and then they go into a panic. They go, “How am I going to figure out which one to do?” I’m like, “Well, we can do the math. Figure out how much they’re going to sell and do some research.” “How am I going to figure out—” They don’t actually trust themselves. What they’re really saying is they don’t trust themselves to pick the right idea.

We’ve built systems. There’s, in fact, a whole college course on that exact subject, just like there is on creating ideas.

Now they’ve picked the idea and now they go, “Okay, now I’ve got the real problem. How am I going to make it happen because my organization has never done anything like this?” That’s the big difference from this book, Driving Eureka, versus my earlier book. This is my seventh book. A lot of my books – Jump Start Your Brain – were about the creating of ideas or Jump Start Your Business Brain, creating and evaluating ideas, did that.

This book takes you from front to back. It’s about how do I make the ideas happen so that I don’t kill them in the process. That fast tracking is by far the hardest part of the whole thing. But you can’t even have that conversation when you don’t have an idea to begin with.

It’s like you peel back the onion. They say, “Well, I need an idea.” Then you give them the idea and they go, “Now I can’t pick it.” Okay, now you pick. “Now I can’t do it.” It’s like, yeah. That’s why we said it. That’s really the reality. It’s not that people can’t do it. It’s just they’ve never been taught. They’ve never been taught.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. Well, so I’d love it if, let’s hear a little bit about each of them. What are your favorite pro tips, best practices associated with the finding and then the filtering and then the fast-tracking?

Doug Hall
I’m not going to tell you my tips because it’s like opinions, everybody’s got them.

Let me talk to you about data because all of the things that we teach and the reason we were able to get this as a new field of academic study and get it accredited and teach it on campuses and we’re about to expand to a whole lot more colleges and you can get degrees in it—is we had data because in the popular press world you can do anything you want, but universities you get peer-review and that.

From a data perspective to create ideas, we found that there’s 6,000 teams were evaluated in the process of inventing ideas.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m enmeshed in the story now and I want to get fully oriented. Where are these 6,000 teams from and what are they doing?

Doug Hall
These were 6,000 teams over three years from companies small, medium, and large. I funded a study and I had two PhDs and myself. I’ve got a couple honorary doctorates because of this research, but I don’t have a real one. I graduated with a two point something in chemical engineering.

But what we did is we measured the teams in the act of creating ideas. Every 40 minutes we would ask them a series of questions, every 40 minutes. Then when they would create ideas, we would take the ideas, take the names off them, type them up and we would score them on the quality of ideas they were. We just did this over and over and over and over again.

We had this huge list of questions. I got them to answer the questions. They would answer, sometimes before they came, they would answer 200 questions. The only way I got away with it is I said, “If you don’t answer it, it could mess up the project.”

Pete Mockaitis
I’m wondering how do you get this compliance from these people? They don’t owe you anything.

Doug Hall
It’s easy. They’re afraid they’re going to get fired.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Doug Hall
It’s ….

Pete Mockaitis
Innovation is important to us here. Don’t disappoint Doug. There’s some more alliteration for you.

Doug Hall
… boss. They would answer the questions. We studied it. What we found is that the creation of what we call “meaningfully unique ideas” comes from stimulus, sight, sound, smells, patent things, research data. Ideas are feats of association. You have these two pieces of stimulus, you put them together and you create a new idea. You had to feed the brain.

Pete Mockaitis
Any two, huh?

Doug Hall
Yeah. There’s more science to it. I’m simplifying it for the purposes here. There’s actually six areas that you can do it. There’s a real science to this. But basically ideas are feats of association. You have to bring the right stimulus in the room. That will cause a reaction.

Now, that reaction is dependent on our world view, how we look at the world. We call it diversity. The more you have people who look at the world differently, who would see that same stimulus, but see it from a different direction in a different way. It’s not additive. It’s not multiplicative. It’s literally an exponential kick in the number of ideas that are invented and high-quality ideas.

Stimulus and diversity are bringing people that look at the world different than you do.

Pete Mockaitis
I love this. Just so our listeners really will go here, what is the rough citation that we can hunt down to link in the show notes for some of this data?

Doug Hall
It’s all in my books. It’s all in the books. The stuff that we’re talking about right now, this is in Jump Start Your Business Brain. It’s all – the studies are explained. Everything’s explained right in there.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So diversity, exponential kick. I’m right with you.

Doug Hall
That’s the potential. But there’s a gating for it. There’s a negative. This took a long time to figure out. In fact, I wrote a book and I had to do a new edition to correct it because I was wrong because what we found truly was the issue was not a positive, but it was a negative, which was it’s divided by the fear.

The greater our fear – you have stimulus and diversity in the numerator and then at the bottom you’ve got fear. As fear goes up, the number of big ideas goes down. It was amazing as their fear levels went up, which, by the way, I’ve been tracking – since the 90s I’ve been tracking this. We measure every team and we measure the people. We call it our raw materials. It’s where their heads are at.

The fear levels have gone up and up and up. That’s why it’s getting harder and harder and harder to do big ideas. It is much harder today than it was ten years ago and I have the data to prove it because people are scared to death that they’re going to look stupid, that they’re going to be dumb.

I’m the no whining guy, so there’s no whining about it. We’ve had to adapt and change our systems over and over and over again to account for the fact that the people coming in are not in a good place. It’s pretty ugly out there as an employee.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Doug, tell me, what’s behind this increasing fear?

Doug Hall
Well, some of it’s the economy. If you track it, what happens is every time there’s been a big dip in the stock market, 2000, the different times when it’s dropped, it jolts up again.

I was with some government people in D.C. We were working with the Department of Commerce on some stuff. I showed them my chart. They pulled out a chart, which involved investors’ confidence dimensions and retirement was also there.

They said what’s happening is their hypothesis was before 2000, the stock market was booming. It was going crazy. Then when it drops, everybody looks up and says, “Oh my God, I’m not going to have enough money for retirement.” They become more conservative. They pull back in because they don’t want to mess up. It’s the old, “I’ve got five years before I retire, so I don’t want to do something that’s going to get me in trouble.”

Pete Mockaitis
So they pull back not just with their investment.

Doug Hall
It’s a Boomer thing. It’s a Boomer thing. It really, really I think is a very big Baby Boomer thing, me being one of them, who they’re just playing not to lose instead of playing to win many of them are. I understand it. They’re concerned. They’re concerned.

Pete Mockaitis
Let me make sure I’m capturing everything you’re saying because it’s so fascinating. That investment chart, that was pointing to their investment behavior.

Doug Hall
Their courage. Yeah, their courage. Their courage on investments just dropped.

Pete Mockaitis
I see and you’re seeing the exact same thing in terms-

Doug Hall
I’m seeing the fear drop and we laid them – and they weren’t perfect, but it was like – it was fascinating that – you’re sitting in a room, the office, your boss has got a problem. He says, “Okay, let’s get everybody in the conference room.” He says, “Anybody got any ideas?” We call this the brain draining or the suck method of creativity. Nobody’s got anything. He says, “See, I told you they weren’t very creative.” Well, for Christ’s sake, with a gun to your head, it’s kind of hard to think big thoughts.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah and the scene that you’re painting there in terms of saying, “All right, anybody got any good ideas?” it’s already like, “I’m pretty sure if I say something, you’re going to not embrace it with delight.”

Doug Hall
That’s right. That’s right. We’ve had to go to a long pace. But what we find is that when you teach people – we have a fundamentals course that we teach and they can take it there, they can take it online. When you teach them, it’s like their eyes open up and they go, “My God, that is how ideas happen.” We show them how to do it. Then they believe they can.

The interesting thing about this is as I’m saying this, I can see in the thought balloons, because I’m old and I’ve been doing this for a long time, is that people are thinking that I’m just talking about ideas at the start, but the truth is that’s only ten percent of what I’m talking about.

Because the problem we found – remember I said in the fast tracking to market problem – the reason for that problem is you have to do problem solving because when you try to put the thing together, it doesn’t work like you thought. The service doesn’t work like you thought. Financial, the budget doesn’t work. You have to keep pivoting and problem solving.

We have a tendency to think it’s the Big Bang. If I just have a big idea and hand it to people, a miracle can happen. That’s not what the problem is. 90% of it is in development, which is having the courage and confidence to pivot, adjust and adapt as you manage the problem.

The data says – this is amazing – when an idea goes into development, so you’ve done all this work to get this idea, and then the idea comes out. I have two separate studies that show – and one was from a Fortune 20 company – they valued what the idea was worth due to sales forecasts at the beginning and at the end of their development process. On average they lost half the value during the development process.

I told them, I said, “See, your development is like hospice. It’s like you’re the killing zone.” The chief technology officer, she did not think that was a funny joke. But I said, yeah. What are you going to do? Start with ideas that are twice as good at the start because you know you’re going to kill half of it? It’s nuts. It’s nuts. But we think that we can just do it.

When you’re doing something that’s truly new that’s going to make a real difference, you have to keep reinventing. That’s why you have to enable innovation within everybody because the product supply person, the finance person, the production – everybody is going to have to be doing it, which is the reason why small businesses are often times much more successful with innovation than big companies.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, this is fascinating stuff. I’d love to hear your take then, so fear has increased, so how are you counteracting it?

Doug Hall
Our work is all based off of the work of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Are you familiar with Deming?

Pete Mockaitis
Right, yeah, quality and such.

Doug Hall
Yeah. He’s the guy, went to Spain after World War II. He came back to the US, worked at Nashua Corp. My dad was there. That’s when I learned about it.

He says, “94% of the problem’s the system, 6%’s the worker.” Our work – Innovation and Sharing’s subtitle is System Driven Innovation – is to give people work systems and tools to enable them. Rather than going in and trying to tell a person, “Buck up, man. Have courage. Have courage.” They’re like, “Yeah, whatever. That will last me about ten minutes.”

Instead what we do is we give them systems to enable them to do rapid research or we call it “fail fast, fail cheap,” quantitative research, so they can test things and they can test option A, option B, and option C. We give them systems to allow them to improve their ideas, artificial intelligence systems that literally will read a description of that idea and give them advice to make it better.

It’s like, if you were going into war and you were just walking out with a slingshot, you probably wouldn’t have a lot of courage. But if you’ve got the tools and the systems around you and the equipment and the right training to do it, then you can have a lot more confidence. It’s the same thing here.

People are sent into battle to create ideas with nothing. By changing the systems around, and the systems research, systems for collaboration, systems for project management, on and on and approaching it as, it’s not the person that’s the problem; it’s the system, total transformation. That’s the only way we found to give them genuine courage, not just motivational crap.

Pete Mockaitis
Now Doug, how can I get my hands on some AI that’s going to tell me how to improve my idea? That sounds like fun.

Doug Hall
What we did is – I’m a big quantitative tester. We’ve tested over 25,000 ideas. I said I’m old. We did this ridiculous content analysis to identify them. I have these incredible rocket scientists, young people that work for me, who took all of the information on what had happened and had the computer do machine learning and read the thing and literally come up with a way to do it. It’s in the software package that students get as part of the courses that they’re doing.

Pete Mockaitis
But if I wanted to use it, how can I do that?

Doug Hall
We’d have to get you to take the course.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, how can I take the course?

Doug Hall
I’ll send you a think so that you can do it.

Pete Mockaitis
Is it available for the public to-

Doug Hall
Yes, it is. If you go to EurekaRanch.com, it’s there for you to sign up for.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, perfect. All right, so we talked about the finding. Can we hear a little bit about the filtering?

Doug Hall
What we found as we started to work on this is we had to think about this from the perspective of the end user. We tend to look at ideas from our perspective with regards to all the things that we’re scared about as opposed to what’s in it for the end customer.

By customer, it could be the external portion or if it’s a system innovation, so you’re changing the way you manufacture something or do something within your organization, then it may be another department or another group of people.

When we gave structure to it, what we found was – and this came out of some of the analysis of the concepts of what made ideas work or not work – is it was a pretty simple premise, which is you start with who’s the customer and what’s their problem. Then, what are you going to promise them to address their problem, and then what’s the proof that you can do the promise to solve their problem. Problem, promise, proof, it’s that simple.

Pete Mockaitis
Doug, you’re a master of alliteration.

Doug Hall
Well, because it becomes memorable. It’s all to try to drive it – because we want to get it into the people. We don’t want them memorizing it.

But if you start from that perspective, you get people driven to a perspective. We know that with – a gazillion things and a lot of them are in the Driving Eureka book like, for example, if you are specific with your promise, so you say, “It’ll make you twice as fast,” or “It’ll cut healing time in half,” you put a number in it, your odds of success when you do that innovation go up some 52%, not 5 or 10%, 52%.

We’ve got all kinds of findings like that, that we give people. Now they’ve got an ability – in fact, sometimes clients complain and say, “Well, we get a lot of high scores,” I said, “Well, that’s because you’re following what you were taught.” Marketing is not magic. It’s pretty simple. People are pretty selfish. They want to know what’s in it for them and they want to know proof that you’re going to do it. “Here’s my problem. What are you going to do for me? How do I know it’s going to work?” and that’s it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. When you’re using that from a filtering perspective, I guess I’m imagining, okay, I’ve got 100 ideas. What the heck do I do? What’s really worth pursuing? How would I enact the problem, promise, proof concept? I guess in some ways I don’t quite know how good my solution is until I really ….

Doug Hall
That’s why you’ve got to use research. That’s why you’ve got to do research. You have to write it up first in that structure because now when it’s in that structure, a customer can give you their perception of what they think they would do. That written – we call it a concept – that written concept is your first prototype.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Doug Hall
Assuming they like that, then you might make a physical, a works like prototype and they might test that and you can see that, but you start off with the cheapest prototype in the world, which is just a collection of words. By getting it in that format, now the customer can evaluate it and then give you data. We’ve got a whole pile of data systems. It’s so fast and cheap these days to do the testing. It’s really, really easy to do it.

Again, but these are systems if you’re not familiar with, as they say, read the book. There are ways to do this and you’ve got to learn how to do this. You can start to evaluate ideas and you can know what it is. You can even use that data to forecast what kind of impact it’s going to have, whether it’s how much it’s going to save or how much more you’re going to sell or whatever it might be.

Pete Mockaitis
Could you maybe just give an example of okay, we had an idea and we’re going to write it out in terms of problem, promise, proof, and then what happens when we’re presenting that to people?

Doug Hall
What you do is you put the idea together. You’d write it up. You can test it in a bunch of different ways. You can test it on the internet. You can do it in about an hour usually you can get a statistical sample. To be able to do that costs you maybe 200 dollars to do it. You can do it in person.

I’ve got a crazy whiskey company. We make whiskey really fast. We have the time compression approach. We can make luxury whiskeys in about 40 minutes. We’ll make a product. We might take it out to a bar and we have people taste it and see how likely they are to buy it, how new and different it is, aftertaste, taste, what they think of it. Then we take those results, we turn around, flip it and do it again, do it again, do it again, do it again until we get it great.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Then for the problem, promise, proof, what would some of the sentences be associated with that whiskey?

Doug Hall
The whiskey would be “Does it frustrate you that great, super smooth whiskey costs a ridiculous amount of money?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, Doug, I’m outraged.

Doug Hall
Well, now for the price of a premium whiskey, you can get luxury whiskey taste. The reason you can do that is because our new time-compression technology replicates seasons of barrel ageing, doing it in minutes instead of dozens of years.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So you want to get a sense then – put that in front of a lot of people. If they say, “Okay, well, whatever,” versus, “Whoa, I want it now,” is sort of what you’re gauging?

Doug Hall
Yeah, so people went nuts. Let me just show you how this evolved. They thought that was really cool. Then we started to play with it and we said, “Okay, maybe we can sell the product for 35 dollars. That’s a great price.” But I said, “What would it take to make so that at 50 dollars they would go ‘That’s still a great deal’?”

We tried a whole lot of different things and come to find out we stumbled into the technology allows us to make whiskey one bottle at a time, so truly do custom whiskey. People can come to a tasting and we can literally make their personal whiskey. I said, “It’s 50 dollars.” They said, “It’s a deal,” to have their own whiskey.

We’ve got mass market products we sell at 35 and custom whiskey where you come and literally go through and craft your own personal whiskey. You can use your own wood. You can use an old world or a new world. You can mix your grains together and you can literally make your own personal whiskey. People kind of went nuts. In the research you can see kind of different comments and different things and the group that went the most crazy about it – weddings.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Doug Hall
People want to have their own whiskey for their wedding. In fact, we’ve got people flying to Cincinnati. He’s like, “Can I just make my own whiskey for my wedding? I’ve got to have my own whiskey for my wedding.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. All right. Now let’s talk about the fast tracking here. You say there are some holdups and hospice. The value gets cut in half. How do we prevent that from happening?

Doug Hall
Okay, so the first thing is you’ve got to embrace a learning mindset and a cycle of learning. Deming talking about plan, do, study, act, not check, but study. There’s a difference. But he was very big about cycles of learning.

You have here’s what you’re trying to do, the plan to do. What’s your hypothesis?  Study is did it work or did it not achieve the goal and why. Then act, what are you going to do. Most of the time you go around again.

The key is you’ve got to build a culture where these rapid plan, do, study, act or fail fast, fail cheap cycles can be done with quantitative data and not done in months, not done in weeks, but in days or hours. If you’re able to do those rapid cycles, then what happens is – the reason why the value goes down is you compromise. You basically give up and compromise.

Pete Mockaitis
You’re saying, “Maybe this is only going to work for our consumer segment and not the business segment as well.”

Doug Hall
That’s right. As opposed to saying, “No, let’s rethink it. How can we change the idea to make it really work for all those folks?” That’s the iterative process. You’ve got to embrace that cycle of learning mindset of never-ending learning.

But when the idea’s locked and it doesn’t matter even though that square peg doesn’t fit that round hole and they say just get a bigger hammer, that’s stupid. Sadly, that’s what we tend to do now because you’re seeing if you change the idea, it’s seems as a sign of weakness that you didn’t really have confidence in the idea. That’s just nuts. It’s nuts.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Agreed, agreed. Well, this is a lot of good stuff here. Tell me, you said you didn’t want to just give tips because you wanted to give the hard scientifically-proven, validated suggestions, which I love and I think is excellent, so tell me within this, are there a couple approaches that there’s just a whole lot of great science behind it in terms of you’re saying, “Pete, when you’re trying to get creative, innovative, definitely do this and definitely don’t do that?”

Doug Hall
Okay. The first thing you have to do is you really have to agree specifically how you define what an innovation is. You’ve really, really got to come up with that definition. Our research has found – we define it, I mention it briefly, meaningfully unique, which is how likely somebody is to buy it and how new and different it is. We actually weight those 60% on purchase and 40% on new and different.

That measure is most predictive. When you know that they have to not only like it, but it has to be different than what they’ve seen before and you have that clarity that allows you do the testing, it allows you do the research, and it gives you an objective measure to go do it. You’ve got to agree on a definition.

There’s an academic article that went out about that. It’s referenced in the Driving Eureka book. You have to have that. That’s what you’ve got to have. You’ve got to have an agreement on what is innovation and what is not so that you’re not just debating, “Oh, I think it’s innovative,” “I think it’s not.” Come on. We need a number here.

What to not do, what you really have to be careful about doing is you can’t outsource this. I’m a guy who people come to outsource to. I’m saying it. In the old days, they would hand me the money, I’d go away, come back and I’d go, “Dee dee, here it is!” Now I work with their team because you don’t get buy in. That outsourcing, not invented here, will kill any idea. I don’t care if you get the Jesus-walk-on-water system, it’s going to be dead.

You have to enable your team and they’ve got to become part of the process. We can bring in expertise and we can do that kind of stuff, but we’ve got to give your people some education. We’ve got to bring them together and you’ve got to do it. If you try to outsource this, it’s just going to fail. You may get some shiny thing that you like, it will never ship. It’s never going to ship.

You’ve got to believe in your people. You’ve got to invest in your people. I know it’s too urgent. I can’t just teach. If you want to teach them, we can teach them. They say, “….” Okay, so that’s fine. We will teach and we’ll put them some topspin so to keep them going, but don’t outsource it. You’ve got to believe in your people.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That’s great. Those are some strong do’s and don’ts. Tell me, anything else you really want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Doug Hall
The big thing is you’ve got to believe folks. This is the best of times. There’s a tendency right now, people to say, “Oh my God, this is changing. This is changing. Millennials are this. … this. Gen X is this. Boomers are this.” No, no, no.

The digital world and this planet that we’re on right now, the opportunities globally are just amazing and the technologies enable it. Best of times, worst of times, it’s up to you to decide what that is. I think it’s the best of times if you’re engaged. If you’re not engaged, then retire. Go to the golf course and sit there for a while or something. I don’t know what the hell you’re going to do. But this is the time. But you’ve got to be learning. You’ve got to get in the game.

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

Doug Hall
Well, related to that is one of mine is a Ben Franklin quote. It will be carved on my tombstone because it means so much to me. Franklin said over 200 years ago, “Up sluggard, and waste not life. In the grave we’ll be sleeping enough.”

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. How about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Doug Hall
Well, it has to be the whiskey. 72 cycles in 7 days to make the initial discovery. Just yesterday we made another discovery. As we’re managing this interaction between the wood and the interaction of the wood and the alcohol, there’s so much more to learn. It’s just amazing. It’s just absolutely amazing.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. How about a favorite book?

Doug Hall
I’m sitting in my library that has probably over 1,000 books in it. Picking one from the others is quite a challenge, but I would probably say Copthorne Macdonald’s work, Toward Wisdom. Esoteric book. A guy who’s passed, but who – a lot and who – this is amazing.

He’s a bit of a philosopher, wrote about wisdom. In one of our computer systems, some of the intelligent systems that can predict success of ideas, reading his philosophy gave us the breakthrough to double the accuracy of the model. It was amazing. Just an incredible thinker. Copthorne Macdonald, Toward Wisdom.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. How about a favorite tool, something that helps you be awesome at your job?

Doug Hall
It would be the ThinkStormer. We’ve got this new thing that the team has come up with that just blows me away. It’s called ThinkStormer. It’s a software that enables individuals, not your team, not your company, but for you to think quicker, faster, smarter. They’ve just figured out how to take all the tools that the big companies use and made it so an individual can use it. We use that as part of the education stuff. It’s just an amazing thing, an amazing thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. How about a favorite habit, something that helps you be awesome at your job?

Doug Hall
Exercise. Intense exercise, 2- 300 calories and at a good pace. Every time I’m in exercise mode, and I go into it and out of it, but if you want to make your mind work, you’ve got to make your body go.

Pete Mockaitis
You said 2- 300 calories, you mean that’s the amount of burn that you’re seeking to get from that session?

Doug Hall
Yeah. I use the Apple watch and measure active calories, which is above your staying alive kind of thing. 300 is great for me if I do that, which is kind of an intense 45 minutes for me at my age to do it. 200 minimum I have to do. If I don’t do it, I swear, the mind is better. The mind is better.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with readers, listeners, clients?

Doug Hall
When I sign books over the years, ‘be bold and be brave’ is probably the fundamental. When I write that, I don’t mean to tell people that you need to go to the North Pole. I just mean wherever you are, take another step out there. It’s not going to be as bad as you think. Life’s meant for living.

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

Doug Hall
There’s the Eureka Ranch site, but DougHall.com. In fact, let’s do something special just for the listeners of this. If they go to DougHall.com/VIP, so D-O-U-G@D-O-U-G-H-A-L-L.com/VIP, There’s a thing they can sign up for. We’ve got a one-hour audio summary. There’s also on all the platforms there’s the ten-hour audio book. You can get that if you’re on any of those. But there’s a one-hour audio summary. You can get that for free.

I’ve also got an assessment you can take, which is based off a lot of the data I’ve been talking about measuring people that literally can show you where you are. It’s positive. It doesn’t beat you up. It’s all confidential. You can do it. If you go to DougHall.com, you can get all of that stuff.

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

Doug Hall
“Up sluggard, and waste not life. In the grave we’ll be sleeping enough.” Dr. Franklin had it right.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Doug, this has been a ton of fun. Thank you for sharing the goods and good luck in all of your discoveries.

Doug Hall
Thank you much. Thank you much. It’s been fun. You make it very fun. I do a lot of these as you would expect in these days and the professionalism and the whole way you do this, it’s appreciated. I’m just going to say that from my perspective, it’s appreciated.

Pete Mockaitis
Shane, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Shane Parrish
Thanks Pete. Glad to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Boy, I think there’s so much cool stuff that we can dig into together. I want to maybe just start, maybe this is a quick and easy question because the answer might be no comment, but are you at liberty to reveal anything cool you were working on for Canada’s Communications Security Establishment with the cyber defense initiative thingies?

Shane Parrish
Wouldn’t it be so awesome if I was allowed to say what I actually did or the impact that we had, but no, unfortunately, I can’t. I’m not at liberty to say that because I don’t want to end up in jail.

Pete Mockaitis
Fair enough.

Shane Parrish
I think is just the reality of the situation. Or we could pretend, like I could do a nice segue and then I’d just stop talking and you’d be like, “Oh, we had to cut that out for the safety of the listener. We didn’t want to put you in jeopardy.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. That’s good. I’m just going to assume for your street cred and for my own fun imagination that it was like game-changing, life-saving, intense hacker excitement movie stuff.

Shane Parrish
Hey man, I cannot confirm or deny any excitement that happens inside the government.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, maybe one that’s more acceptable for public consumption is let’s hear a little bit about your enthusiasm for Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet’s partner there, and the story behind the name of your blog, Farnam Street.

Shane Parrish
Yeah. I went back and did my MBA in, I think it was 2008. I realized that we were learning just from the textbook. This is how sort of Farnam Street started. Bear with me here for a second.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure.

Shane Parrish
As we go through this. I was sitting in strategy classes. About three weeks in we’re doing this case study, some Eastern European airline and what the owner should do and what they shouldn’t do. I just thought a) the audacity of us sitting in a classroom deciding what the owner should or shouldn’t do, but it was very clear to me that they wanted an answer and the answer corresponded to the chapter that we read in the textbook. They didn’t really want the outside thinking that was going on.

All these other groups got up and said, “Oh, become the low-cost provider,” because that was the strategy that we were reading about that week. Our group got up there and we’re like, “We didn’t think we could actually become the low-cost provider because of X, Y and Z.”

The teacher at the time, the professor I guess, just said, “You didn’t do the work.” Our group leader, who wasn’t me, stood up and was like, “We did the work. You can’t put it on a PowerPoint and all of the sudden you magically become the low-cost provider. You actually have to think through like how do you become the lost-cost provider. Are those reasonable options or are they not?”

He started working through all this thing. It was this really interesting back and forth. He ended up quitting, leaving the MBA program.

Pete Mockaitis
Is he a dot com billionaire now? Just got to know.

Shane Parrish
No. He was super successful to begin with. He went back to running his super successful business. But he quit on the spot in the middle of the argument with the professor.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow.

Shane Parrish
He’s like, “If this is the education I’m getting, I might as well just go home,” and he left and never came back. You hear those stories and you’re like I actually know somebody who did that.

But as he was leaving, he packed up his bags and he was waiting in the cafeteria for a taxi and I ran into him. I was like, “You know what really struck me as odd? None of that seemed foreign to me. But how did we take such a different approach to this problem than everybody else seemed to take?” He mentioned Charlie Munger.

I had heard of Munger before I think probably back in ’97 or ’98 when I was in high school. But I hadn’t really thought about it. I went back to my dorm room that night and instead of doing my homework I looked up this Charlie Munger and started reading all about him and Warren Buffet.

I was like oh my God, this is way better, way more interesting than my textbook. It seems real in a way that my textbook couldn’t be because it wasn’t trying to distill the world into one simple thing. It was like it’s complex and you need to understand a whole bunch of basic concepts and latticework them together. Then you might have an idea or a better understanding of how the world worked.

That very night I created a blog, which was called 68131.blogger.com, which is-

Pete Mockaitis
Catchy.

Shane Parrish
-the zip code for Berkshire Hathaway.

Pete Mockaitis
There you go.

Shane Parrish
68131, the US zip code for Berkshire Hathaway headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska on Farnam Street. We don’t own that domain anymore, but that was the original sort of incarnation of Farnam Street.

The reason I used 68131 was because I didn’t think anyone would type in 5 digits. At the time URLs were words or sayings or whatever, but nobody would type in this. I didn’t want to password protect it. It was completely anonymous because here I am working for an intelligence agency writing a blog that’s sort of public. It would be even more weird if it was private. I just five numbers, five digits.

Then started connecting what I was learning, so started just keeping a list of the things that I was learning and the things that I was connecting. I found I wasn’t doing homework anymore; I was just doing this. I was diving in head over heels into Berkshire Hathaway, reading annual letters.

There’s a saying sort of that goes around the internet and people who are in the know with Buffet and Munger sort of, which is if you read the annual letters to Berkshire Hathaway, it’s better than an MBA. I think in my personal experience, I learned a lot more reading those letters than I did sort of going through my MBA. I learned a lot more about business. I learned a lot more about technology. I learned a lot more about ethics.

I thought it was a really sort of valuable way to spend my time. My grades didn’t decline interestingly as I spent less time on school because the formula for what the teachers wanted was pretty clear.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. Then that’s a really cool story. I think it’s funny that you were initially trying to be kind of discreet and blown up to have like a million pages a month.

Shane Parrish
This is so weird. Fast-forward five years and there’s like people trying to figure out who’s behind this anonymous blog. We have not that many readers at the time. I was like, oh my God, this is becoming a thing. If they uncover that it’s me or something, it’s going to look super weird, so I put my name on it in 2013. I think that was the year where we changed the domain to FarnamStreetBlog.com.

Now it’s FS.blog, so it’s super easy to type in. We realized that a lot of people over the world spell Farnam a lot differently, so it’s just FS.blog now.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s smart.

Shane Parrish
Now we have like 200,000 sort of weekly subscribers to our email.  I don’t know how it happened because we didn’t advertise anything at all. It’s all been word of mouth.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. That’s cool. Well, you’ve got some really high-quality stuff there. It’s almost dangerous how engaging and interesting and just I want to be there for hours of time.

Shane Parrish
I appreciate it. We get a lot of emails going like, “I just killed a weekend on your website.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, better there than Netflix I guess.

Shane Parrish
It’s like a rabbit hole. It’s like, “Oh my God, why haven’t I found you ten years ago?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, it’s great stuff. How would you in short form articulate what are you all about over there at Farnam Street and the podcast, The Knowledge Project?

Shane Parrish
Just using timeless knowledge to sort of create better humans, like how do we improve our self in a non-self-helpy sort of way. We want to make better decisions, but we also want to live a more meaningful life. Why do we have to be bound into one of those categories? How do we create a better version of ourselves every day?

What do we need to learn to think about problems differently? How do we need to reflect on our life to live a more meaningful, deliberate and conscious life? And how do we develop better relationships with people, not only with others and our spouses and our family and our kids, but with ourselves? What do conversations with yourself look like? How do we be more positive in the way that we talk to our self? How do you put that under one umbrella? You can’t really, so we just call it Farnam Street.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. I’m resonating and vibing totally with what you’re saying, timeless knowledge, a better version of yourself. We totally have healthy overlap. We’ve had overlap with the guests too, Annie Duke, Chris Voss, etcetera. I’m digging it.

I really want to dig deep into decision making because that is a shared passion area for us. I think we can cover some goodies. I’d love if you could maybe start broad and general and get real precise and tactical. In your observation of the human condition, where do you find that most people, most often end up making mistakes when it comes to their decision making?

Shane Parrish
They’re subconsciously making mistakes. We just have this view of the world that we think is correct. If other people disagree with us, well, they must be wrong because if they’re right, then that means we’re incorrect. Our ego sort of kicks in at a subconscious level.

It doesn’t want us to be wrong; it wants to protect us because being wrong is labor intensive for your brain. You have to think through why you were wrong and what you were wrong about. You have to update your views. All of that sounds like a lot of work, so your brain, “Eh, we really don’t want to do that.”

I think how do we get to that point is a very interesting sort of way that we make incorrect decisions. If you think about it, we start school very young and we go through. We learn a wide variety of things from art and music and science and math to literature and humanities.

Increasingly as we get older, we narrow that. High school becomes a little bit more focused and then university or college becomes a lot more focused. Then you get out in the workforce and it’s increasingly narrowing, narrowing, narrowing.

Usually when you’re a junior person in an organization you don’t get to make too many decisions that are outside of your specialty. But you pass three or four years, you get a promotion or two and all of the sudden, you find yourself maybe your mid-20s, late 20s, early 30s, whatever range that is, you’re doing a job that you weren’t really hired for, that has less to do with your specialty than you ever sort of would have imagined when you were doing college or university.

You’re required to make decisions, but you view the world through this lens of your specialty because that’s all you’ve ever known. Life is busy. You have family. You have kids. It’s really hard to develop sort of a multi-disciplinary education yourself. You don’t even know that you’re missing it.

When you’re thinking about problems, when you’re seeing problems, you just frame it so narrowly. You think about it so myopically through your one lens that you can’t see the world through other people’s views. You’re only using one lens, so you’re not really getting a firm view of reality. You’re getting your view of reality through your eyes, but not necessarily through a more accurate view of what’s actually happening, which would require a whole bunch of different perspectives.

I think that that’s probably the leading cause of how we sort of trick ourselves because we’re only looking at it through our lens. We’re not looking at it through a more holistic lens or, if you want, a toolbox of lenses, where we can just pull them out, look at the problem this way and be like, “Oh, that applies. That doesn’t apply.” Then we start to see a lot better in terms of what’s happening.

The other sort of prime reason I think we make sort of suboptimal decisions is just timeline. We’re super busy. We’re super stressed. There’s a lot of anxiety in the world. There’s a lot of stuff going on in the world. We sort of just want to solve something. We don’t want to think about it again. We sort of want to turn off our brain. Our brain wants to optimize for energy conservation.

We’re full of stress. We’re full of anxiety. The day is long. We’ve got a lot of stuff to do. Then we find something that just solves the immediate problem and we latch onto it. Oh, we can finally relax. Our brain is like, “Great. We solved the problem. Next.” We don’t think through like what other problems did that create? What’s that going to look like in ten months, ten weeks, ten years? What other problems is that going to create?

We know that when we’re inside an organization because that’s when somebody’s ramming a solution down your throat that’s going to solve the immediate problem, but create a host of other problems. Sometimes those problems are less than the problem we’re solving, but often the problems that that  comes with are even more.

Then you think about how the stories that we get promoted in organizations, like the stories that we tell not only ourselves, but we tell others. It’s like, “Oh, I solved this problem,” but you never talk about the problems that you avoided. You never talk about the problems that you created when you solved that problem. I think it’s just a very narrow sort of view of how we view ourselves and how we protect ourselves and sort of the timelines that we use when we make decisions.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s just a powerful question right there that I haven’t really chewed on much, which is “Okay, how does this solution creating other problems and am I okay with that? Are those better problems?”

I’m thinking, when you talk about the short-term solutions, it’s so funny. Recently I found myself like I just have a messy desk or drawer or surface. I’m just like, “I’m tired of this mess,” so I put a lot of the things in trash or in storage containers elsewhere that I just put them elsewhere. It’s just like, “Am I really better off?” Another day will come where I need that thing and I’m going to have to go and dig it out.

Shane Parrish
Yeah. Although, alternatively if you don’t use it for the next year, you know you could probably get rid of it.

Pete Mockaitis
Totally. Yeah.

Shane Parrish
But often, that’s what we’re doing, right? We’re solving – we call this second order thinking, which is sort of like you’re solving the first problem, but you’re creating a host of other problems at the second, third or fourth layer. I think you just want to start thinking at a deeper level where you can sort of see if I do this – there’s a ecologist called Garrett Hardin, who interestingly enough, his research was sponsored by Charlie Monger.

He wrote a book called Filters Against Folly. One of the things that he mentioned in that is the three laws of ecology was just to ask yourself “And then what?” You can never do merely one thing. Just remember that. You can’t do anything in and of itself. There’s always a consequence or a repercussion or an impact or however you want to think of that terminology.

He used to ask himself “And then what?” If you’re in a meeting and you’re thinking – that is the only question that you need to think about to change your timescales a little bit. It’s three words. It’s super powerful and it has the ability to change the conversation in the room.

Pete Mockaitis
I love that question. I’ve heard of it more so in the context of avoiding temptations. It’s like, “Oh my gosh, I want to eat that whole tub of ice cream.”  “And then what?” It’s like, “Yeah, you’re right. I’ll feel terrible and be fat. I’m not going to do that,” so problem avoided proactively.

Shane Parrish
Ice cream though is so good, so tempting.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d love it if maybe you could sort of make this all the more real if you could share maybe an instance or a favorite example you have in terms of, “Hey, we solved a problem and then we created some bigger problems.” Do you have sort of a poster child example of this?

Shane Parrish
Well, here’s a business example that may seem a little bit esoteric, but everybody might resonate with.

We used to have a pop-up box on the website. We used to have a pop-up box for everybody who showed up and it would show up every time you showed up. The first sort of consequence of that is we had a ton more email subscribers to Farnam Street. We were getting exactly – first order we were getting the metrics we wanted. We were adding 4,000 people a day or something. It was crazy.

The second order consequence of that is it drove up our cost because we pay per person on the email list. Then we started looking at the numbers and the open rate, the click-through rate, the engagement of those people was way lower quality than if we added a little bit of friction to sign up for our email list.

Maximizing for one variable, create a host of other problems. Now we have a problem where we have low reader engagement. We’re having that because we didn’t think through sort of the second-order consequence.

Or an example that probably resonates more with people is “I’m hungry.” “Well, eat a chocolate bar.” But if I eat a chocolate bar over and over again every time I’m hungry, I’m going to end up fat, out of shape. It’s going to have a whole bunch of health consequences. It’s going to have relationship consequences. It’s going to have consequences about how I talk to myself. That’s just ways that we can sort of think through. And then what?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. I want to hit now the multi-disciplinary multiple lens view of things. I imagine there are an infinite potential number of ways you might segment the types or names of lenses out there. But I’d love it if you could maybe give us perhaps just a few different or contrasting or varied lenses that are very unlike each other and very useful when you start looking through things through each of these lenses successfully.

Shane Parrish
Right. We call lenses – the terminology that we sort of use on the website is mental models. They are sort of how we think and how we understand the world. They shape what we think is relevant in a given situation and what we think is irrelevant. We’re using them all the time, whether we’re conscious about them or not is a different story. These mental models or lenses are how you simplify complexity.

Mental models are really – or the lens – is just a representation of how something works or how something looks through somebody else’s eyes. You can think of this, if you want to think about a lens, we can think of the psychological term perspective taking.

If you’re sitting in a meeting and there’s five people around the table and they’re all from different parts of the organization, one way to look at the problem through a different lens is to mentally take the perspective of each person in that room and sit in their seat. What does the problem look like from their perspective? What do they care about? What are they optimizing for?

That gives you a different lens. That’s a very powerful lens if you think about it. It doesn’t come from any sort of discipline. It’s just putting yourself in somebody else’s shoes.

Some of the ideas that we use as mental models or lenses into seeing a problem or thinking better, so there’s different ways to see the problem and then there’s different ways to think through the problem or think about the problem or how you see the problem.

“The map is not the territory” is a great example of a lens that we can use that will add clarity to a situation or insight to a situation. The map is not the territory a map is not reality. Even the best map that we have, even the most detailed map that you can sort of find is imperfect. It’s a reduction of something else.

If it were to represent with sort of like perfect fidelity what it was trying to represent, it wouldn’t be a reduction. It wouldn’t be useful. We need to reduce these things to keep them in our head. They can also be sort of snapshots or points in time. They don’t tell the whole story. They could tell us something that existed before, but doesn’t necessarily exist today.

If you think of a business context, you can think of an income statement as a map, a balance sheet as a map, a strategic plan as a map. It’s useful and it helps us, but it doesn’t necessarily tell us what’s really going on. Do people believe in the strategic plan? Well, that’s part of the terrain. Are all parts of the organization working towards it in harmony, in lockstep? Well, that’s part of the terrain too. But if we just look at the map, we don’t see that.

Pete Mockaitis
I’d love some additional examples of maps there. That was the first thing that came to mind for me was financial statements. What are some other maps that are sort of simplifications or representations of territory that we look at often?

Shane Parrish
Well, think of dashboards, how a lot of people run organizations. They run on this sort of green, yellow, red dashboard. That becomes a map. If everything’s green, you think everything is okay, but it doesn’t actually tell you how people are feeling. It doesn’t tell you sort of how engaged people are. It doesn’t tell you if you’re working towards the right goals. It just tells you that here’s what the map looks like. It doesn’t tell you if the environment has changed.

I think once you start to see things through a map territory problem, it becomes really interesting to think about. Where we’re reducing things to deal with them in our head, but it doesn’t tell us what’s really going on.

Email is another example. You might have 32, which is what I have right now in my inbox, 32 emails.

Pete Mockaitis
Not bad.

Shane Parrish
Like, oh my God, that’s not bad at all, but it doesn’t tell you what those emails are actually about or how much work they are. If we assume that each email – we naturally have this map of what an email sort of takes or looks like. Maybe it’s five minutes to respond to, so you’re like, “Oh, he could be done that in a day at most.”

But those 32 emails in my inbox are there because I’ve procrastinated on them or they might take hours and hours to respond to or they might be projects that have been ongoing that I owe something significant to. That number, that heuristic is just a map about how things are and how they look. We instantly infer that map through our own lens.

Another sort of example of a different type of mental model that we might think about for math is multiplying by zero. We all learn this in, I don’t know, grade three. Any reasonably educated person knows that if you multiply something by zero, no matter how large the number is, it goes to zero. But it’s true in human systems, too.

If you think about trust, you violate somebody’s trust, you go to zero. If you think about value proposition in a business, you can think about it as additive or multiplicative. You go to a restaurant and you have really good food. That’s really additive. If the food is terrible though, it becomes multiplied by zero. Or you go to the bathroom and it’s dirty, you’re never going to go back.

There’s certain things that can happen that you never want to happen if you’re a business owner. There’s certain propositions in your value chain that will just cause people to never come back. Those are multiplied by zero.

If you think about it, it’s a really interesting lens where you just go back to zero with that customer. If you think about the world today, people share that information with other people. It’s not even going to go back to zero, it’s like they’re going to tell other people, so it’s sort of like a really negative thing.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. I’m digging this. We got multiply by zero, the map is not the territory.

Shane Parrish
Sure. What about chaos dynamics, which is another one that we sort of talk about on the website, which is sensitivity to sort of initial conditions. In our world, small changes and initial conditions can have massive sort of downstream effects. This is the sort of proverbial sort of Butterfly Effect, where a butterfly in Brazil flapping its wings can cause a hurricane somewhere else.

We think about that as something that’s like, “Oh, that’s a great story,” but we don’t think of it in terms of how we live, which is how do we always have this baseline where we can accommodate multiple conditions?

One of the ways that small changes to initial conditions can cause catastrophic loss are mortgage rates increasing. If you’re tight on the finances or you’re over levered on your house, a small change in interest rates can cause you to go back to zero. That’s just an example of sort of how we can think about that. But it’s a way that people don’t necessarily think about problems.

These are lenses or tools that you put in your toolbox and then you walk through a problem and you sort of look at it through these lenses. If you look at it through all of these lenses, it’s sort of like layering tracing paper one on top of each other and each part has a different part of the end image, but when you layer them all on top of each other, you can see the whole thing.

Pete Mockaitis
That is a cool picture. As you visualize this in your mind’s eye, is there a particular picture that your layers of tracing paper are making?

Shane Parrish
Well, I was thinking actually like the way that I normally phrase it is, it’s walking around a problem in a three-dimensional way. You have a situation or a problem or a challenge or a struggle and to understand it, you sort of have to walk around it in a three-dimensional way. Another way to phrase that was tracing paper. I sort of got lost in this whole like oh, I’m explaining this in a different way than I’m normally explaining this.

Pete Mockaitis
I really liked it. I was visualizing an image of pandas, for the record, if anyone cares.

Shane Parrish
Well, you can think of – there’s the elephant story, right, where there’s these seven blind men. I think it’s seven. But they all each put their hand on a different part of the elephant. They don’t know it’s an elephant. They just, “Oh, this is like a stool leg,” and “This is,” whatever. They don’t actually put together that it’s an elephant. What you want to be able to do is step out of … and see the elephant.

That brings us to maybe the biggest sort of mental model of them all, which is Galilean Relativity. You can think of it as physics. We all learn this. I think at some point, we’ve all learned this. If I ask you “How fast are we moving right now?” You’d probably say zero, right? I’m sitting in my chair at my desk. I’m not moving at all.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Shane Parrish
But we’re moving at what? 20,000 miles an hour around the sun.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Shane Parrish
Right. You don’t feel it. The reason you don’t feel it is because you are in this system and you only see yourself in the system that you’re immediately around.

The way that I learned it in physics, the way that I assume everybody learned this in physics, but maybe that’s not the case, is you’re on a train with a ball. You’re holding it. You’re standing in the middle of the aisle. The train’s moving at 60 miles an hour. How fast is the ball moving? Well, relative to you, the ball’s not moving to you. But relative to somebody watching the train go by, it’s moving at 60 miles an hour.

How do we step outside of our system, almost like seeing yourself as an actor, how do we take ourselves out of the situation so that we can see the situation more accurately than what it actually is?

Pete Mockaitis
I actually like that notion of being an actor because I’ve found that if I actually really – I guess it’s just perspective taking – but I step into the roles of different folks, like “Okay, how would-“ you just fill in the blank. It doesn’t matter. How would Beyoncé, how would my uncle, how would my wife think about this, approach this? What would she be concerned about? Suddenly new ideas come to light, like, “Oh, that’s brilliant,” just because I decided to be someone else in my brain for a little bit.

Shane Parrish
Yeah. I think if you think about perspective taking, that’s stepping outside of your system, if you think about how do you improve your relationships with anybody else, just step outside of yourself and see the world through their eyes. It will change the vocabulary. It will change the questions you ask. It will change what you want to talk about.

It will have an exponential impact on not only your relationship with other people, but your problems will seemingly become a lot smaller. You’ll have more free time and you’ll have less anxiety.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m sold.

Shane Parrish
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s a good combo.

Shane Parrish
And it’s free. Wait, I’ve got to bottle this stuff and sell for it like 10,000 bucks or something.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you’ve got a decision journal and a thinking cap, which I thought were pretty cool products to offer on your blog. I’d like to hear a little bit about the decision journal and how one can go about improving their decision-making skills day after day in the course of living life.

Shane Parrish
Well, we all make a lot of decisions and those decisions have an impact over time. But we rarely sort of reflect in life. We rarely reflect on relationship decisions. We rarely sort of reflect on decisions we make at work, to invest money, to not invest money, to do a product line, to not. We convince ourselves that we’re right. By not reflecting, we limit the learning capacity that we have. We limit the learning opportunity that we have in those situations.

We have a thinking cap. We give it away to all of our Learning Community members for free. We just send them an email saying, “Hey, you won a free hat. Thank you for supporting us.” But it’s really symbolic. It’s symbolic of the approach that we want to take to not only living life, but to making better decisions and just being a really awesome person, which is how do we cue people to reflect more often.

I personally think the world would be a much better place if we reflect a little more. But reflection is really the key to learning. When you think about how organizations sort of go through the process of learning from mistakes or how we go through learning from the mistakes of others, it’s not normally about reflection. It’s normally about give me your lessons learned.

Lessons learned aren’t necessarily reflections. Lessons learned are the result of reflections, but we really want to know what questions people are asking themselves. How are they learning to think better? Are they beginning to see their weaknesses? Do they make the same mistakes over and over? What sort of feedback – this is where a decision journal comes in – what sort of feedback are they giving themselves?

A lot of people don’t want to talk through their decisions at a really raw and vulnerable level with other people for a variety of reasons and I get it, but you can do it with yourself. You don’t need other people. The way that you do it with yourself is you have a decision journal. If you Google decision journal, I think we’re the number one sort of hit. We’ve offered a template online. We’ve worked with Special Forces around the world.

We’re developing the second sort of version of our decision journal right now. We created this sort of alpha product, if you will, if you want to think in software terms about what does a basic decision journal look like. Will people use it? How do they use it, which is the most important feedback we can get.

Now we’re incorporating – we’ve had that out there for about seven – eight months and now we’re incorporating the feedback and we’re coming up with sort of like the next version of the decision journal.

But really, that’s what it is. You’re just thinking through problems at a different level and you’re trying to give yourself clear, unambiguous feedback. You don’t want to be able to convince yourself that you were right when you were wrong.

I think that so often we trick ourselves later or the data is not clear or we think we should have done something we didn’t do or we didn’t do something that we should have done. But unless we wrote it down at the time, we don’t remember what information we actually had, what information we considered relevant when we were making the decision.

How are we expected to get better when we know that our mind is going to trick us? What are we predicting is going to happen? What decision are we making? What …. That would be the very essence of the decision journal, but we want to get a little more specific than that. What variables do you consider relevant in this situation?

Then when you evaluate your decision six months later in the privacy of sort of protecting your ego, you can start to cue, “Oh man, you know what happened? I was right, but I was right for the wrong reasons.” That’s a very powerful realization because it allows you to learn.

Pete Mockaitis
I think one of the coolest things that I dug about the decision journal in perusing is the mental/physical state checkboxes. I’m energized. I’m relaxed. I’m angry. I’m anxious. Can you talk a little bit about the role of your emotional/physical states in thinking and decision making? Is there an optimal state for different kinds of decisions or how do you think through that?

Shane Parrish
Just think about it like when’s the last time you made a super amazing decision when you were angry?

Pete Mockaitis
I told them off and it was awesome.

Shane Parrish
Yeah. Well, you feel good in the moment, but then you’re like, “Oh my God, what am I – that’s not me. That’s not who I am.” That’s the common sort of – I don’t want to say excuse. That’s the wrong word. But that’s the common reaction people have to when they do something. They type up this nasty email and they send it and then they feel good for about 30 seconds and then the next day they’re like, “That’s not who I am. That’s what I thought in that moment because I was so emotional.”

When you’re emotional, you don’t think clearly. That’s part of being emotional that you don’t think clearly. That doesn’t mean emotions are bad; it just means that you have to account for the emotions or time of day that you’re making decisions.

It tends to be, the data that we’ve collected, unsurprisingly you don’t need advanced AI from Google to tell this, but people make worse decisions when they’re more emotional. But people also tend to make better decisions, more complicated sort of analysis in the morning than in the afternoon because your brain is tired in the afternoon.

Again, your brain is optimizing for laziness at all points in time. Thinking is hard work. Thinking through a problem at a second or third level is hard work. Trying to predict which variables matter and how they interact is hard work. Trying to pull out a mental toolbox of lenses and see the problem through other people’s eyes or step out of the system that you’re involved in so you can see yourself as an actor is hard work.

You’re more likely to make better decisions in the morning than you are in the afternoon. That doesn’t apply to everybody, but I think that’s a fair generalization.

When you’re making a decision, if you’re using a decision journal, it can just be a prompt that “Hey, I’m really upset right now. Maybe I’m going to make this decision tomorrow instead of today,” or “Maybe I’m not going to send this email right now. I’m just going to sit on it until the next morning,” which is usually good advice for emails after four that can – where you’re worked up and you just have to type something because you need to get it off your chest.

It’s fair to get it off your chest, but it’s probably not indicative of who you are or who you want to be or who you aspire to be. I think that we can become better versions of our selves by sort of tracking where we are emotionally and matching that to what we’re doing.

If we’re in a bad mood, we probably don’t want to be making business decisions about the direction of our company. We probably don’t want to be sort of making any rash emotional relationship decisions. We want to tone down. Maybe we’re just deciding what to watch on Netflix or we’re deciding what book to read or we’re deciding – we want to keep those decisions pretty minor and maybe closer to the vest and in ourselves, so we’re not affecting other people.

Pete Mockaitis
I like the tip about the email and holding off for a bit. I’m reminded of historians have talked about Abraham Lincoln and his letters that sometimes he’s really mad at a general during the Civil War and so he would be writing that up and then wait a moment or a day and say, “You know what? I’m not going to send that.” It’s pretty cool that historians found all these extra letters that had a lot of heat.

Shane Parrish
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Then he’s like, “You know what? Eh, this is one is going to be heated and it’s going to go out and this one’s going to be heated and it’s never going to see the light of day.”

Shane Parrish
Isn’t that like an example of timeless wisdom there?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Shane Parrish
What’s changed is the technology or the availability and the reach. We could always do emotional things. We’ve been able to do that since we were probably like cavemen.

But now instead of one person or maybe our small tribe, we can reach a whole organization or the whole world on the internet by sending a tweet we don’t want to send or sharing something on Facebook that won’t look so good in the morning or saying something that somebody else that we might feel in the moment because we’re blinded to the complexity of other people, but isn’t really indicative of who they are and says more about us than anything.

I think it’s reflecting on those, catching our self and reflecting on that is how we sort of change behavior and become a better version of our self.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s excellent. Well, Shane, tell me, is there anything else that you’d like to share about decision making or anything you think folks who want to be awesome at their job just really need to know before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Shane Parrish
Yeah, I think it’s tough to get advice from other people because what works for other people doesn’t necessarily work for you. What we’re looking for usually when we consume information is we’re looking sort of for the silver bullet, the easy fix, the if I only do these four things, I’m going to get a promotion or – I would just encourage people to be cautious about that.

Anything that’s so easily acquired or so easily available is probably not going to be a source of real or lasting wisdom. You’re going to have to do some work. The work is sort of taking ideas and digesting them in yourself. How we do that is through reflection. Most people have a hard time with that.

I think that setting aside time to think, not only about you, but about the life that you’re living and the life that you want to live and how you can bridge that gap or how you can be a better version of yourself or even just sort of rubbing your nose just a little bit in the mistakes you make.

Not to the point where you’re telling yourself terrible things or your self-talk is negative, but to the point where you’re acknowledging that you could have done better and that you will do better in the future and accurately diagnosing what it is that you did that you want to do differently next.

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

Shane Parrish
My favorite quote comes to me from a friend of mine, Peter Hoffman, who sent me this quote a long time ago by Joseph Tussman, which is – I’m going to try to remember here – “What the people must learn if you learn anything at all is that the world will do most of the work for you provided you cooperate with it by identifying how it really works and aligning yourself with those realities. If we don’t let the world teach us, it teaches us a lesson.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, you could chew on that for a while.

Shane Parrish
Isn’t that powerful?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Shane Parrish
It’s just like everything. There’s another really good one I got from Peter as well, which I think is super telling. It was actually about Peyton Manning, but it doesn’t matter who it’s about. It was “most geniuses, especially those who lead others, prosper not by deconstructing intricate complexities but by exploiting unrecognized simplicities.”

We all grab onto this esoteric knowledge as if it contains some sort of key, but really it’s going back to the basics and understanding the basics at a different level that gives us more meaningful, more timeless insight into the problems.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. Do you have a favorite study or experiment or a bit of research?

Shane Parrish
No. Common stuff is all great, but I’ve kind of gotten away from research a lot in the last decade or so, so I would say pass on that one.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Shane Parrish
My favorite book, the one that’s probably impacted me the most is Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. Interestingly enough, the first time I picked it up, I almost chucked it out a window. I was in university I think and I was told to read it. I just found it impenetrable. I don’t know if it was the translation or what was going on.

But then I picked up the Hays translation I think when I was 25 – 26 and I started reading about it and contextualizing it, which is also super important when you’re reading. But for me it just hit me at the right place at the right time.

It’s a book that I’ve gone back to often and sent to people when they’re going through some things. I send it to friends who work in professional sports and get fired or send it to people struggling with something.

It’s not sort of like an advice book. It’s more how to conduct yourself. It’s a bit of stoicism in the sense that you only control some things. You don’t control everything. If something bad has happened, and you need to move on.

But it’s not done in a way that a book like that would be written today. It’s done in a way that you’re reading the leader of the free world effectively at the time, who’s on the frontline with the Gauls I think, putting his life on the line. The guy can literally do anything he wants with impunity and he’s trying to become a better person. I think that there’s something inspiring and there’s something that we all see parts of us in that. We feel like we can handle anything after reading that.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. How about a favorite tool, something that helps you be awesome at your job?

Shane Parrish
My iPhone. That is my favorite tool. It’s the only thing that I use relentlessly.

Pete Mockaitis
Are there any noteworthy apps or-

Shane Parrish
Probably not a good example, but-

Pete Mockaitis
It comes up often. Are there any special apps or things you do with the phone that’s super useful and maybe distinctive?

Shane Parrish
Oh no, it’s all basics for me. It’s mostly I just try to keep things super simple. I use Twitter on my phone. I’m just going through it now. The alarm. Yeah, I just – I don’t know. Fortnite is on there, so I can play with the kids.

Yeah, it’s sort of like the one thing that’s – I was thinking about this today. Apple has this really – maybe this is a sidetrack so cut me off if you don’t want to talk about this – but it’s not just Apple, it’s your phone. Technology is becoming closer to you as a person. You put things in your ear. You have your phone in your pocket. You wear a watch. It’s so close to you and it’s so important.

It’s really interesting how people view technology and what shapes what they use. I use my phone all day to talk on the phone, to interact with people, sometimes to email. I use it for tickets, use it for ordering food. The variety of sort of tasks that you can do with it is ever expanding. It’s the one thing where I think if I lost it, it would just instantly need to be replaced.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah and the closest of technology. The days of chips and things being inserted into us on a wide scale really don’t seem so crazy or faraway nowadays as they did a decade ago.

Shane Parrish
Oh yeah, it will be so interesting to see what’s happening. I think people are starting to try to put standards around this. There will always be – not always, but it will pay to defect if you are a nation that agrees to this. If you’re the sole defector and you can modify your genes or you can do something that gives you an advantage – it’s going to be a really interesting sort of game theory.

AI is going to be the same way, not only within a country, but sort of if you look at it as a global ecosystem, where the small countries that are reasonably uncompetitive on a natural resources basis can become super competitive when it comes to computer code, almost asymmetrically so.

If we put standards around what good and bad AI looks like, those are our standards. Is there a worldwide standard and what if you disagree from that? If you have 99 countries out of 100, so to speak, sign up for climate protection but one country defects and they defect in a meaningful way and they overcompensate for those other 99, it doesn’t really make a difference.

I think it’s going to be a really fascinating world to watch this play out. Are we going to have sort of wars over this stuff? I don’t know. It’s going to be interesting.

Pete Mockaitis
Indeed. Do you have a favorite habit?

Shane Parrish
Sleep.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh yeah.

Shane Parrish
That’s the only thing I’ve sort of focused on a lot more recently is just trying to get sleep. But really I started turning off my computer at nine at night now, which is super good. Then I do a lot of my reading in the morning instead of at night.

Pete Mockaitis
Is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks? You get it retweeted or repeated back to you frequently?

Shane Parrish
No, I don’t think so. Pretty boring guy.

Pete Mockaitis
I’ll just say they’re all hits. It’s hard to single one out is how I would interpret that.

Shane Parrish
I like your generous interpretation much better than mine. Everybody who knows me would just be like, “No, you’re pretty boring.”

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

Shane Parrish
You can go to FS.blog, sign up for a weekly newsletter. It’s a full of the most interesting things that I read on the internet. You can go to @FarnamStreet on Twitter, that’s F-A-R-N-A-M Street. Then that’s the best way to get in touch. Hit reply to any of our emails if you have any questions.

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

Shane Parrish
Yeah, I think that the single biggest – two big changes. I’m going to give you two sort of calls to action. Two big changes make a meaningful impact in whatever you’re doing.

At every decision meeting, ask yourself, “And then what?” The second thing is before every big decision, go for a 15 minute walk and just you, just by yourself and just think about that problem. Don’t think about how you’re going to communicate it. Don’t think about anything other than that one problem and try to walk through it.

Focus on one thing for 15 minutes. That’s an eternity in this day and age. But work up to 30 minutes. That would be my goal. But just focus on the problem for 15 minutes. Try to think through it from different angles. Think through it from different vantage points. What does it look like? What does it look like from everybody else’s perspective? What does it look like if I’m an actor in this and I’m watching this play out?

I think that you’re going to make dramatically better decisions. The impact of those better decisions, it won’t be felt tomorrow, but if you do that for six months, you do it for a year, all of the sudden you’re going to have fewer problems, you’re going to have less stress at work, you’re going to have better results and you’re going to feel better. That’s a deadly combination.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Shane, this has been such a treat. Thanks for taking the time and good luck with Farnam Street and all your adventures.

Shane Parrish
Thanks Pete.