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people are actually stuck in relationships and jobs financially stuck becoming much lonelier as a species but there is a way to get unstuck and we're going to find out right now Adam alter New York Times best-selling author and psychologist this episode is for people who are stuck in their careers relationship or any aspect of life and how to become unstuck the career model for how we live our lives professionally is broken as you specialize you have less Variety in what you do and there's a massive Rising loneliness and depression and anxiety and part of the reason for that is we don't share our stuckness and they also have no idea how common it is so what is the relationship between perseverance or knowing when to quit research basically shows that it's a good idea to persevere beyond the point where you say this is hard and I feel stuck how long you should do that is another question and the best example of this is an idea known as the creative Cliff illusion and it's this illusion where you that's when the good stuff comes if you persevere how do you teach someone to be that kind of person there are two things one thing is I remember reading about the studies where people would rather take an electric shock than to sit idly on their own it's a brilliant study they've tried it already so they know it hurts but it's so reversive to just sit with our own thoughts for even half an hour two-thirds of them go and start playing with this machine so what we found is that we don't pay enough attention to what will be good for us and that's often when we get stuck what we need to do then if you want to be able to get unstuck quickly the best thing you can do is have you ever been stuck are you stuck in an area of your life right now I think you are and I say that because I think to some degree we all are some of us more than others and that is exactly why I had to have this conversation with Adam alter the guy that literally wrote the book about being stuck and how to know if you are and maybe most importantly of all how to get unstuck Adam is a master of what he calls the art of the Breakthrough which is really looking at why some people fail why they get stuck and why others don't he's also
a genius when it comes to marketing and psychology he's the professor of marketing and psychology at one of the top schools in America he kind of just knows why people do what they do and how to help them do something else how do we know if the decisions we're making in our life right now in all the areas of our life are the right decisions or the wrong decisions Adam has scientifically backed answers to all of these questions he is refreshing he is positive and he is full of just as many important questions as he is valuable life-changing answers I feel so much richer for having this conversation with Adam and I know you will too enjoy [Music] from an academic standpoint who are you I am a professor of marketing and psychology so I'm very interested in business but also interested in the psychological side of it so how do consumers behave how do they think what do they buy how do they spend their time and money and other resources I'm incredibly interested and curious about all of your books specifically this book here anatomy of a breakthrough and also your your first book drunk tank pink because this book helps people to get unstuck why did you decide to write a book called anatomy of a breakthrough and you know what writing books takes a huge amount of time and effort and you're a man that has many things he could be doing so why was this so important that you chose to write about it it's something that I've been thinking about in some form or another for years literally I'd say 25 years I I I've been stuck a lot in my life and so even before I became intellectually interested in the topic it was a factor that had had a big effect on the way I was living my life and I wanted to understand whether there was maybe a road map that I could present to other people that would help them get unstuck but I think the real answer is there was some research that I was doing in I think this would have been in about 2005 and I found this really interesting cultural difference in how people anticipate or expect change in the world and so what we found is that people in the west people in places like the US
Canada the UK Australia New Zealand they tend to be blindsided by change so if you give them five days in a row and you show that it's been rainy for five days or sunny for five days they anticipate that that's going to continue and they think the same about the stock market and other other variables that can shift or stay the same but but if you do that with people in East Asia Japan South Korea China when they see a pattern that's gone a particular way for a while they think that it's about to change and what that does is it means that they're much more Nimble in the face of change whereas in the west people tend to be blindsided by it and it makes us especially slow at coming to grips with the idea that the world's changed and we need to Pivot in order to get unstuck can you give me you know the the most popular examples of being stuck that my listeners now could relate to yeah I've been running this survey for about five years on people all around the world asking them with that definition of stuckness are you stuck in some way and I find that people usually within about 15 seconds start typing a response which means that stuckness is very top of mind and their responses vary so some of them are financially stuck they want to be able to save or they want to be able to earn more money some of them are stuck in relationships some are stuck in jobs a lot of them are stuck quite narrowly in Creative Pursuits like I'm trying to learn this piano piece I'm trying to learn this new art technique I'm a filmmaker and I can't come up with creative ideas I'm a business person and I can't figure out what my next venture should be so there's a there's a very broad range and I find that almost everyone in at least one respect with a bit of time comes up with something they say I'm stuck in this way and then they can express it is there a trend in who's getting stuck more often yeah so I have a pet Theory I think um the kind of career model for for how we live our lives professionally is broken for most people I think what happens is as you specialize you're supposed to get more and more narrow in what you do and you have less Variety in what you do and that's how you get stuck is by doing the same thing every day and there's a huge amount of evidence for that in all sorts
of different areas Actuarial science for me at least very quickly put me into that little pigeonholed spot where I felt I was getting trapped and it was only going to increase and so the thing I've done ever since is to try to create as much Variety in my professional life as possible because then if you don't like aspect number one but you have nine other aspects to your job you can go and do that for a little while and so bouncing around I think is critical for getting unstuck often very smart people get very very interested in very narrow topics and that's that's essentially the definition of a PhD is you spend a huge amount of time becoming an expert in a very narrow area and I think that's fine for a PhD itself but if you're going to make a whole life out of doing that I think if you're a Restless intellectually curious person you're going to get stuck really fast you almost become a victim to being good at something in life don't you because you get promoted and promoted and promoted up in that direction and your label whatever it is doctor dentist lawyer becomes reinforced by your own success at that thing and you can get 10 years down the line at something and go how the [ __ ] am I living next to the office I'm a lawyer it's doing law 14 hours a day what happened to that violin I used to play and we become you're right we become really narrow individuals and when you think about what a human is we're so multifaceted especially when we're younger yeah we're doing all of these things it's a real shame I also think what happens is you get promoted and it does get narrow but it also changes so the thing that you were really good at is no longer the thing that you're doing and a lot of what happens in promotion especially professionally is you become a manager and you manage people who do the thing you love instead of doing the thing you love and so that's how you get stuck as well is by by being promoted out of the thing that got you passionate about what you were doing and being told no instead you're going to watch other people do the thing you love now you suddenly have to be a people manager which some people like doing but a lot don't and so that's also inherent in the kind of professional models that we have in hierarchical organizations
this happens by I guess in part by being a bit unconscious about what you want yeah and you just kind of take what you're given so you take the promotion and you take this and you take the the relocation to this place and how do we prevent that happening I I think that's the job of people who write about these subjects right and that's kind of what I saw as as the mission for this book was to try to say you know if you don't want to be stuck or if you want to be able to get unstuck quickly there's a set of questions you can ask yourself and let me just lay them out for you here they are in fact the last thing in the book is a hundred ways to get unstuck it's just a digestion of all these ideas and I think those are questions that people don't often ask themselves you're right there's a sort of accidental way that we live our lives and we take what's given and if someone says here's a promotion you hear that word and you grab onto it and you you write it as far as you can but um I think it's it's easy to be a little bit mindless about where your life takes you and and sometimes that's fine but in a lot of cases it's not and book tries in in the book I try to distinguish those cases from from each other like when should you let life lead you and when should you be a little more purposeful on that exact point I've mulled over the last couple of weeks this idea that there's kind of two narratives that Prevail in our lives kind of two instructors one of them is this external narrative it could come from your parents or society's expectation of you taking that promotion or thinking that that job is a admirable job for you to take so you take it that's the external narrative then the other narrative if I can call it that is how you feel yeah and I think we're we're conditioned to care more about that external narrative because the rewards seem to be more aligned with the external narrative than like how you feel because if people really were orientated by how they felt in that job in that relationship in that City whatever in that course at University um they would make significantly different decisions but we always it's
almost like we've tuned out of that yeah I I think the problem is that humans don't know how they feel in isolation as well if I took you and put you in a room for a week and said you can have food and water and you can have your thoughts and I took you out of after a week and said so what are you thinking like what's real what's not real what do you believe what are your preferences and values you'd struggle it's there's a lot of really interesting evidence that if you isolate humans they don't really know what to do with themselves so those external forces that there's a kind of permeability between what I'm feeling inside my head and thinking and what these other forces are suggesting to me so I think I think it's totally true that we don't pay enough attention to what will be good for us separate from what other people think we should be doing but I also don't even think many of us know the answers to those questions not all the time but about a lot of things like I know deep somewhere I know that I love to draw that I mean I'm at peace when I'm drawing and painting I haven't done that for a really long time I'm too busy to your point of being too focused but I know that that's something that preference wise I love doing but then the question should I make my career and my life about that the only way I knew how to answer that was by speaking to lots of people who said it's very difficult to become an artist here's the path it's probably going to be hard to make any money so keep it as a hobby but but knowing just based on my feelings what to do I wouldn't have known what to do as a young person and so I think that's that's part of the problem is that it's not just that we're silly for kind of paying attention to others it's also that I don't even know if we know in isolation without those inputs what the right kinds of paths are you said about putting me in a room and leaving me with my thoughts that sounded like hell it does yeah and as you I remember reading about the studies where people would rather take an electric shock than to sit idly on their own yeah and they tested people and they said would you rather take an electric shock or sit here for a couple of minutes on your own
and people took it's a it's a brilliant study I mean the way they set it up is brilliant because they get you to sit in this room and they do it with men and women they're mostly college undergrads and they say to them you're just going to be sitting here for half an hour there's a little machine in the corner it delivers electric shocks they've tried it already so they know it hurts it doesn't feel good and they're told you know you can sit with your thoughts or you know the machines there if you want to go and use it which is a bizarre thing to say to people and they sit there for a while and time passes and uh the vast majority of them go I think it's two-thirds of them go and start playing with this machine it's so aversive to just sit with our own thoughts for even half an hour that we need stimulation even if it's negative stimulation and you wrote a book about this this subject matter about addiction and screens and all of these things this sort of incessant need for distraction that we seem to have developed what was your biggest sort of takeaway in learning from that process of putting that book together the biggest thing for me was I'd always imagine that addiction and the need for this kind of stimulation was a sort of personality thing like you you either have that personality or you don't but I became absolutely convinced by not only by the book and what I was researching but by understanding how many of us fall prey to these devices that this is universal it's just about being human that if you know how to push the right buttons in a human you can turn that human as you can with rats and monkeys and other animals into into a bit of a fiend for whatever the thing is that it needs and the people who design the platforms that we use are so good at that job and they have so much data to to perfect what they've done that ultimately the platforms they design for us are are like crack they're very very difficult for us to resist you talk about in drunk tank pink how people behave differently when they're in the presence of others and I found that really really curious could you just give me a flavor of the some of the studies and insights you gained from
that because that kind of links to what you're saying there about how living behind screens might Decay our Humanity a little bit Yeah well I think part of it is just that the best versions of ourselves come out when we're around other people um we are much much more likely to be civil and decent to other people when they're around when we see them and when we spend time around them that kind of shared social Space is really important it's also really interesting when we're around other people um we we tend to default to the thing that we are most like likely to do in any moment so there's a lot of good evidence with this like if you if you take a champion cyclist you put him or her on a bike a stationary bike that person will go faster in the presence of other people than alone and there's something about this kind of they call it latent energy this is a very old psychological study that talks about latent energy that is liberated from us when we're in the presence of other people so if you're trying to learn something new you know you imagine you're in class at school and there's a teacher who's staring over your shoulder that's terrible because we don't really know how to take on board new information we're just overwhelmed by the cognitive load of that experience but if it's something you're good at you will be extra good at it in front of other people there's something about being energized by others so if I work out with someone then I'm more likely to You'll lift more you'll run faster and so on yeah pretty reliably in that book as well um before we get on to being unstuck there were some other things that I found really curious I was Keen to ask you about um this is your that was your first book drunk tank pink you see how our names have a huge bearing on our outcomes across various facets of our life yeah that's quite it's quite shocking to me because my name is something that we don't choose and it seems to be so simple and slightly irrelevant yeah yeah it's it's true I mean there are lots of different ways names influence us um one of these little demonstrations that I do when I give talks on this
subject is I'll I'll present the letters of the Roman alphabet the 26 letters that we we understand to be the letters in the English language and I'll ask people to think about their three favorite letters and then I say now put your hand up in the room if one of those at least was the first letter of your first name middle name or last name and almost every hand goes up so these are letters who has preferences for letters it's a bizarre thing to have to answer but we do and it's because this that these letters are such a strong expression of who we are it's a it's a part of our ego that's contained in the letters of our name and so even that alone shows the power of names over us that they are such a strong reflection of who we are and our identity uh so that's the first thing and you find interesting effects from this actually if you look at the Hurricanes that we name in the U.S or that you name around the world in other places you get much more donation Aid if the hurricane name matches your initial so they found that when Hurricane Katrina came through and devastated New Orleans people whose names began with a K donated way more than people whose names didn't begin with a k the same for a whole lot of other hurricanes with other initials the other big thing is the ease with which people can pronounce your name so that seems to have a really big effect on all sorts of outcomes if people can pronounce your name there's this kind of sense of familiarity it's if that's the the breaking of the ice happens over that first pronunciation of your name obviously the easier it is to say the name the less anxiety you have about it I guess the more smoothly that breaking of the ice goes and there's a lot of evidence from some of my own research we looked for example at how quickly people rise up through Law Firm hierarchies how quickly do they become partners and there's a period in the middle of careers in like the about the 10th to the 20th year of a career for a lawyer where there's a premium you're much more likely to become a partner several percent more likely to become a partner earlier if your name is pronounceable and I think what's what's happening there is if I'm a partner at a firm and there are
a lot of young Associates and I'm trying to put together a team if there's someone with a name that's easy to pronounce and someone whose name I'm anxious about pronouncing I don't know how to pronounce it I will default to the one who's easy to pronounce I'm not trying to be rude about it but in that moment it just seems easier it's the path of least resistance and that's how humans act much of the time is there not an element of um discrimination and Prejudice associated with that because I think if a name was easier to pronounce it's probably familiar it's therefore probably culturally popular they're probably like me you know like a Jack or like a Stephen but if it's a a name that I've not seen trying to figure out causality here it could be because they're foreign you know my mother I always think about this my mother's from Nigeria and she could have given me like a traditional Nigerian name right but she called me Stephen and I think you know I was also born in Botswana in Africa um I think had she called me something else my life probably would have been quite different in all honesty and I worked for four years on phones doing like telesales yeah and when you call up and your name is Stephen in the UK and you sound like I do yeah I think any Prejudice someone might have had because of the color of my skin or where I'm from um vanishes is there any evidence to support that yeah so there are two things one thing is absolutely the Prejudice that goes along with having a foreign sounding name uh and there's evidence for example in the United States there's a study where thousands of CVS were mailed out and applications for jobs either with a traditionally white name or a traditionally black name as we think of them in the United States based on the demographic naming Trends and especially for the ones that were kind of in the middle of the pack not especially strong and not especially weak there's a huge premium to having the traditionally white name so there's a lot of prejudice that goes on with naming but also in the studies we did we went out a partial out this specific effect of fluency of how easy it was to pronounce so we restricted our analysis
in the one case to just white lawyers who were born in that particular country and so you find the same effect even there that the white lawyers with white names that were easier to pronounce tended to do a little bit better but you're right I think a huge part of it is prejudice and discrimination what about our environment our surroundings how does that have an impact on how we're feeling in our behavior from from what you learn writing your first book yeah so I focused a lot on uh physical environments things like natural environments the power of nature to to replenish Us in general which which sounds like a kind of non-scientific idea but there's a huge amount of science to this idea that if you happen to spend a lot of time in urban environments and then you go to a place where you have say a running stream or win through the leaves on a tree or something like that it's deeply replenishing it it has all sorts of amazing psychological and emotional effects I was also very very interested in the effects of of the weather and of colors around us and how those shape our our experiences of the world so there's a some of it's not all that surprising but uh you see even in baseball matches in the United States when the game is being played on a warmer night there is more aggressive behavior you see huge rises in crime things like that on hot nights um and then with colors you know that's really the centerpiece of the book I'm colorblind so I've always been fascinated by color but the title of the book drunk tank pink is specifically about this color that is used to paint the inside of jail cells in some places and it's a color that's supposed to pacify people it's like this bright bubble gum pink color and they've found quite a lot of evidence for the last 30 or 40 years now that there's something about this color that does seem to calm people down at least initially pink it's bright bubble gum pink yeah and it sedates people briefly and then they go then there's a backlash effect but yeah oh really yeah they found that if you leave people in there for too long apparently there's a backlash yeah hitchhikers should wear red yeah this is uh this is a research looking at how how essentially
attractive we are to other people depending on the colors we're wearing um and the the early studies were done on online dating platforms where you have the same picture of a person and you you photoshop the shirt they're wearing this is true for men and women and it doesn't matter whether they're trying to attract men or women but there's something about the color red in particular that's really attractive to humans and actually to other animals too um and when you see the color red it inspires a kind of approach oriented behavior so where you might have passed that person by if you're thinking about dating apps and you're swiping there's something about the color red that's that slows you down and attracts you and in the context of hitchhiking it has a similar effect especially when you you have a heterosexual male driving and you have a woman wearing a red shirt you get a very strong effect so if I'm trying to find a girlfriend or a boyfriend you're saying make sure they're not wearing red make sure they're not wearing red well if they're wearing red you've got to ask yourself am I attracted to the red shirt or am I attracted to the person whereas if they're wearing another color it's much more likely to be an unbiased unvarnished opinion of them but if I want to attract the opposite oh if you want to attract wear red yeah okay that's useful to know yeah I am not single but um yeah oh but even for your partner this is probably why Conor McGregor's has this famous saying where he says it's red panty night all right so when he wins a fight he I think he said it on the microphone to Joe Rogan he said oh it's red panty night tonight which means that him and his wife are going to be intimate yeah yeah but red is always for whatever reason in society been seductive hasn't it's always been as it relates to lingerie I wonder if lingerie sells are more in red than others quick one before we get back to this episode just give me 30 seconds of your time two things I wanted to say the first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning in to the show week after week means the world to all of us and this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have
imagined getting to this place secondly it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started and if you enjoy what we do here please join the 24 of people who watch this channel regularly and have hit that subscribe button means more than I can say and if you hit that subscribe button here's a promise I'm going to make to you I'm gonna do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future we're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to and we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about the show thank you thank you so much back to the episode so getting getting to the topic of being unstuck then which is what the anatomy of a breakthrough is all about what does it feel like when someone is stuck so how do I know if I'm stuck what is there an emotional sort of you know sensation yeah it's an interesting question so it's it's subjective you know if you're Stucky you can feel it because you could be in the same situation and not feel stuck I'll give you a good example of this I had a conversation with Malcolm Gladwell who was telling me about his dad who is a math professor and his dad was trying to solve a math conundrum for 30 years by external definitions he was stuck for 30 years because he couldn't solve this math puzzle which is a common experience for math professors I imagine but he loved it he didn't think of himself as being stuck that for him was the process that was why he went to work and why he kept doing what he was doing and so you know I if I thought about being stuck in something and not making meaningful progress objectively for 30 years the idea drives me crazy but for his dad for Malcolm's dad that that was something that was really appealing he really enjoyed that process and so I think a lot of of dealing with being stuck at first is getting your head around what it means to be stuck and figuring out that usually it's not as big a deal as it seems it might be and once you come to grips with the emotional part of it you can usually bring some sort of strategies and actions to bear and and to start to move yourself I'm convinced of that and that's that's why I wrote the book because I think there is a way to get unstuck in almost every case
what is the in your view the relationship between perseverance becoming unstuck or knowing when to quit yeah I mean there's a there's an amazing cottage industry on both sides of that spectrum of books that are being written that I think are excellent books that make the case for for both of those ends of the spectrum you've got Angela Duckworth's grit which is all about sticking through and and continuing on and I think anatomy of a breakthrough leans in that direction and then you've got Annie Duke who wrote the book quit which is about quitting the fact that we've got so many options all the time most of us why would you keep doing the thing you're doing if it's not working out for you you should probably do something else now they're both very sophisticated thinkers they wouldn't say you should always persevere or always quit but it's a great question how do you know when you are stuck that it's time to persevere versus time to quit and I think it's worth thinking about a the opportunity cost so what are you leaving behind is there something else that's very obvious that would be an easy thing to jump to that would require leaving behind the thing that's making you stuck and if that idea seems really appealing as it did for me when I was doing Actuarial science and wanted to jump away from that then you should probably consider moving on but the the research basically shows that almost always it's a good idea to persevere beyond the point where you say this is hard and it's not feeling good and I feel stuck how long you should do that is another question I think one of the the guides that should should be useful in determining that is to ask yourself if there's an end state that I'm trying to approach am I getting closer to it across time you know if I'm I'm learning a new skill is the Delta between where I am and where I'd like to be shrinking over time the gap between those two shrinking or is it staying the same or is it even getting larger and if it's staying the same or getting larger then I'm probably not getting closer and that's that's a good a good indication that I should probably quit it's time to move on I've thought a lot about this and in my last book I wrote a chapter about quitting and I was trying to
figure out why I appear to be quite a good quitter I'm well known for quitting school my first company my second company um university after one lecture and this is the quitting framework I try to draw up okay I'm gonna just slide it across the desk and please ask me if you've got any questions so there's two kind of routes you can get on the quick framework is it are you thinking of quitting because it's hard you're running a marathon it's the last mile of the race it's hard but it's worth it yep so if it's hard and it's not worth it quit if it's hard and it's worth it stay the course um going down the other side it's that could be a relationship a place you're living the job you have as an actuary whatever yeah um so so this this framework seems to me unassailable in other words there's nothing I can't imagine that anything here could be disagreed with because it makes total sense and it's nice and Broad it's it's nice and Broad right yeah you can imagine any situation being folded into it I the other thing I quite like about it is that uh this distinction between it's just hard and it sucks is is very Central to a lot of the ideas in in my book and I think if something sucks it's emotionally unrewarding and you hate it and you're grinding through it most of the time you should quit and and you have here this one limb to your model that says if you can make it suck less continue on very often yeah right talking to your boss right exactly and so there's there's Great Value in asking that question but uh it's just hard part I'm focusing on because a huge part of this book is about how hardship is the first step in making something good yeah good stuff happens when things are hard and because we're human and we have been evolutionarily I don't know pinned into the situation where hardship is seen as a problem like we're using too many resources don't do something that's harder than it needs to be we're very used to that it's not true about everything we do but it's true about enough things that we misinterpret hardship or hardness for being a problem whereas in many domains the good stuff only happens almost every time after it gets hard
um in in many domains for human growth and otherwise in your book you talk about how you know you kind of debunked the idea that young people um start the best most culturally valuable companies we tend to think that it's like 21 year olds in their bedroom that are starting all the great tech companies for example but you show that a couple of failures is actually seems to be correlate with success yeah and there's a you know that whole section felt like a bit of narrative shift yeah I mean it was it was a it was a big thing for me that um you know one of the ideas that's very prominent in my field is this availability heuristic it's this idea that you pay a lot of attention to what's most available in the world this is an old idea from uh from Danny Kahneman and amosversky behavioral decision researchers and um the thing that we see a lot of is very successful young people because they're interesting they're fascinating stories so you you you're interested in them and a lot of the biggest companies I think are run especially tech companies by quite young CEOs or people who began when they were young and so we fixate on them and they're available in our minds we see documentaries about them we read about them all the time but they're they're vanishingly rare and so what you find is that the the age to begin a company if you want to maximize success if you look at the age of the CEOs who tend to be very very successful we're talking like mid-40s that's The Sweet Spot mid 40s even into 50s and the the thing that distinguishes a 22 year old from a 45 year old is as you said partly failure that by the time you're 45 you've doubled how long you've been alive you've had a lot of time to fail and to come back from that and so if you're still creating companies you've learned something along the way but also your life is deeply Rich at that point in a way that it isn't necessarily as a 22 year old you've got a lot of other stuff going on good stuff and bad stuff maybe and maybe complicated stuff but all of it is kind of adding a spice to
the mix that I think makes your ideas thicker in some way and and makes you I think better at making certain calculations that maybe when you're younger you don't have all the information for and so that's what you find who's more creative young people or middle-aged people or old people it's interesting so young people and I'm thinking especially about kids because I have a five-year-old and a seven-year-old um they are phenomenally creative and in part they're creative because they don't accept anything they're curious about everything my kids will not ask a question without a follow-up or five or ten or Twenty follow-ups right nothing is okay until we've explored it to the ends of the Earth and that's amazing and that's why kids learn so much so quickly they take nothing for granted there's no such thing as common wisdom to a kid right you can say everyone does it this way and they'll be like why but you say that to an adult most of us say oh okay we assume that what's the done thing the way the herd is behaving is that way for a reason even though often it's just accidental or it's just the easiest thing or whatever and so I think very very young people are tremendously creative because they push back a lot but one of the really interesting things for me in this book is that I found people from Young adulthood all the way through to very old adulthood um very later in their lives who are experimentalists by Nature they take nothing for granted and they constantly question and so they are way more creative because they ask more questions but then they then they say okay so here are 10 options how do I know which one's the best I'm going to inhabit each one for two months and then you know in in two years I'll know the answer and they they do this serially and some of them become Olympic athletes even if they don't physically have the stature for it because they're so good at finding new techniques I talk about one of them in the book some of them become business Titans because they say that everyone else is doing this thing and assuming it's right here's a different thing that's way better and I know that because I've tried all the other options
and and they they end up being really successful because that Curiosity that you have in childhood when you carry it over into adulthood it's kind of like a superpower and so I I think um it's more about the questions you ask than your age I I couldn't agree more and it's one of the most the things I I constantly am trying to figure out how to get my team when you said to me that there's a group of there's a certain type of person that just continues to keep asking why is the age I was like can you introduce me yeah because I'd love to hire them because that's exactly you think about what Innovation is at its core and it's that that reject that kind of rejection of convention yeah and that harder road which is to try and reason up from first principles per se yeah um you mentioned an athlete yeah who are you referring to yes there's an athlete Named Dave burkhoff he was a an Olympic athlete in the 1988 and 92 games uh 88 in Seoul and 92 in Barcelona he's a backstroke swimming swims 100 meter backstroke and then some of the medley races and I spoke to him for a while on the phone to understand his experiences because he um he he doesn't look like a lot of other backstroke swimmers they tend to be very very tall the average world record holder is six three to six four so quite tall he's about 5 10. which is a big difference in in professional Avenues if you're thinking about it Olympic athletes and um when he was when he was a student in the mid 80s he was at Harvard which is not a place you really go if you're going to be a champion swimmer it's a place you go for intellectual experiences but it's not the best athletic School generally speaking but he had a coach there who encouraged him to be curious to ask a lot of questions and burkhoff was naturally like this so he he would say to his coach why would I why do I need to swim that way like why don't I try like 10 other ways to swim let's tweak my technique in all these different ways and see what works best and what he ended up doing was he discovered that you swim about 80 I think it's like 88 faster when you're fully submerged under the water than when half of your body is above the water and half is below which makes total sense from a physics perspective but most backstroke swimmers
the way they swim is they push off the wall and the minute they do that their body starts to fight for oxygen because they're under the water and so your instinct is to pop up as quickly as possible but if you can train yourself to deal with the oxygen deprivation you stay underwater for longer and you swim much faster so burkhoff developed this technique called the burkhov blast off it was known as where he would swim underwater for the first 40 meters of a hundred meter race so 40 percent of the race almost half of the almost a full lap of the Olympic pool and then he would come up there and then he would keep swimming and he broke World Records he wasn't the best swimmer in terms of his physique but he was the best swimmer strategically and he had spent years experimenting to find this technique and then of course all the other athletes saw the same thing and they started doing the same thing and so it became more competitive but in the interim he won gold medals at two Olympic Games he won a bronze he was the world record holder multiple times so you know that questioning led someone who in certain respects at least physically shouldn't have been the world record holder to be just that the question I ask is how do you teach someone to be that kind of person how do you teach someone to be more experimental and to be more Curious and to ask why more because just from my observation from what I've seen over the last I don't know 10 years in business and I think about all the teams I've had and all the people we've hired which is more than a thousand some people just have it yeah some people just have a almost like a cognitive but default towards being curious about the possibility of a better way and then some people regardless of how many times you you ask for that behavior or you might ride it on the wall or you might say that it's our values they just don't naturally demonstrate that Curiosity yeah I mean there's an individual difference variable that you're describing that's real and and with every construct when we talk about a desirable human trait there's going to be variance right creativity uh addictive personality and so on all of these things are going to vary on a
spectrum some things that are educable you can you can sort of teach them you can make people better at them so if you're at a three out of ten you can become a six out of ten or maybe even a seven out of ten uh this curiosity question though I think and I say this as an educator I think it can be taught and I think that's essentially what we try to do a lot of the time that's my course I teach a marketing course it's maybe three months long if you only come out of that course with one thing it's to know the right questions to ask you know if you're in a business and you're trying to promote a product or an idea or to create a new product I want you not necessarily to know the answer but at least to know what the questions should be and so I think it's the job of Educators the job of books the job of whatever information you get in the world to train you in that direction and so if I were going to say there's one thing we should train people in a business context you know if you have a new employee it's certainly the on on the job stuff is important you know like learn the skills that are important to this specific job if there are technical skills but the most important General skill know the right questions to ask and constantly ask so here's one way you do that is you say I want you to to look at this thing whatever this thing is um it could be it could be your framework that you showed me the quitting framework I would take everyone who I'm considering hiring and as a diagnostic tool I'd have them look at it and say tell me one thing that's not right with the framework or that you think could be improved do it again now give me a second thing what about a third thing and if they can't do it the first time coach them through it work work through it with them but don't just do it with your framework do it with find 10 ad campaigns say imagine you're the chief marketing officer at this company what's one thing you could do differently that maybe isn't better but at least is worth asking let's ask that question and and if you do that enough times everyone becomes more Curious it becomes the Habit that's the way you interact
with the world so I think it to a large extent can be taught that's the that's kind of the thing I I was reflecting on is do you have to even tell someone to look at the framework and then find something better because I'm in search of the person that looks at the framework and goes Steve I found something better those people are amazing they are they do exist they do exist and I found some of them and that's that's Dave burkhoff right no one said to him you have to question whether the way everyone swims the back stroke is the best way uh and I found a few people like that but they are vanishingly rare there aren't that many of them who really make that their kind of life's philosophy experimentalism as a philosophy but there are some a lot of them actually end up going into Academia and into science because they want to know they want to know the answers yeah they just want to know they're curious to the ends of the Earth but for the rest the other 99 of people who aren't like that I think you can lift them all up from a three out of ten four out of ten to a seven or an eight maybe not a nine or a ten but if your whole Workforce is people who are seven or an eight out of ten on curiosity it's much better than having the most theater three so I think you can move the needle a little bit and those that small minority tend to provide so much value for the less experimental majority yeah you know like because I I think about we have this group and all of my companies called Ever Changing landscape and the whole point of the group is when we see something changing in the world or you know might be a new update to a platform or something within our industry has changed it could be an update or a feature or whatever take it from where you've seen it and just share it with the rest of the company and you see in these groups that we have that it's really a small cohort educating everybody else so let's say there's 100 people in the slack Channel yeah I'd say there'd be five people that were super prolific and there'd be 15 that were kind of you know yeah kind of doing it and then you know then it'd be another 30 25 that do it sometimes and then there's kind of a
solid 50 that don't ever do it and they don't seem to have that sort of Natural Curiosity I always think as a CEO I need to like find more of that five percent because the the disproportionate value they can add by finding as I said to you before recording this podcast just a tiny tweak that changes our trajectory is profound here's here's my advice on that I think I think you're exactly right about the distribution and we see this in a lot of cases uh I talk in the book about the 80 20 rule the Pareto Principle that most of the gains come from the small minority and so on and we know that like if you're a business often the vast majority of your sales come from the tiny minority of customers and so on so we know this is true and in the Casio where you say 50 of people are not doing the work on the slack Channel you could break that 50 down into I think two broad groups there's one group that's just the way that kind of person approaches life is to just not be very motivated and there's nothing there's not much you can do about that part right if they come to work because they see it entirely as an extrinsic reward for their time that they come and they get paid and that's just what they're doing and it's a day job you're never going to teach them to be curious but there is a group of people in that 50 and I I think it's probably sizable especially at a company like one of your companies those people want to be better they want to do a better job at this they maybe don't have the skills today but if you show them they will latch onto it and they will get better at it and it's the the most important thing you can do as a as a leader in organizations is to not just find the people who are talented versus not talented but to find the people who don't yet have whatever you would consider to be the talent and to separate them into those who really want to be their talented ones and those who just actually don't care that much they're just there to do the bare minimum and that's where I think you're pouring your your attention and education into that that first set of people who are motivated is key do you think you can teach someone to be curious about
something because I wonder you know people go home and they choose what they watch on YouTube and what they read about yeah and what they consume on Netflix that kind of seems to be the purest indication of what they're actually curious about the stuff they they dealt lean into in their free time so we've got some people in our team even here that are you know here now that when they go home they're learning about cameras and how to shoot video video and all those kinds of things um and then you might have someone in the same team that goes home and just wants to watch keeping up with Kardashians you know it's soft it's quite obvious I think everyone could agree that the the first person who has a Natural Curiosity towards the subject matter outside of their professional Pursuits is going to achieve more in their professional Pursuits so could you and you know I have to pref have to provide some Nuance here that it doesn't matter if someone goes home and watches keeping up with Kardashians they'll be useful in other ways because they'll be getting sort of creative insights outside of the industry like you said but I do believe that those that are curious about the thing they do professionally will go the furthest yeah so I think with curiosity in general if you like if I I don't know much about cameras I just have my phone and I use it as a camera that's about all I know I just push buttons and so I'm not that curious about them but if you give me let's say the most educated camera Consumer in the world is at 100 if you take me from zero percent where I am now to 10 or 15 percent I then know enough to start to develop curiosity part of the problem with being a novice is you don't even know what's interesting about the thing like if you if you don't drink red wine and then you at some point you start drinking you're like oh there are different varietals that's interesting oh even within that varietal it turns out there's a difference between Napa and burgundy or whatever and as you get more knowledgeable about the subject the nuances become interesting to you because they mean something like I I this happens with music all the time like if you love a kind of music
especially if it's the kind of music that most people don't listen to you try to show someone else that music and you play your two favorite songs they'll be like they both sound the same it's the most frustrating thing as someone who likes something a lot who's really passionate and it's true for art and movies and whatever else so everyone's like yeah whatever it's like it's same same it's all just part of the genre but once you develop a taste for it and you get curious and you get into it that's when you start to see the real life of it and so I think you're the job of someone who wants others to be curious about a topic or to develop Curiosities is to make them not the zero percent to make them at the 10 or 15 or 20th percent that then prompts them to want to figure out the rest because you don't get there from zero you talk about maximizing and satisficing you believe there are two outlooks on success this is part two of your business um your book The the heart section and it there seems to be some kind of through line between experimenters and non-experimenters and maximizes and satisficing yeah satisficing yeah that's right yeah so this this idea it's an old idea it's about 70 years old now but it's the idea that um broadly speaking when you make decisions or make choices you can be either a maximizer on one end of the spectrum or a satisficer a maximizer is someone who says about everything I need the very best I need to spend a lot of time and energy figuring out the best I need to produce the best if I'm choosing what food to eat or what job to have or whatever everything's got to be the very very best I'm going to maximize I'm going to make it as good as it can possibly be and I'm going to bring the resources required to make that happen satisfices of people who say you know there's a level that's good enough it's not perfect but it gets over the bar and it's going to be a different bar for different things if it's an important thing the bar gets raised and it'll it's lowered for less important things but as soon as I find an option that's good enough I'm going to take it and then move on with my life and then there are people who are kind of in the middle who say about some
things like my partner that I choose or if I'm going to choose what job to have or which which country to live in those are really important whether to have kids those are important questions I'm going to maximize on those everything else not that important at least relatively speaking I'm going to just find a good enough option and what you find is that people who satisfy us tend to be much happier oh [ __ ] not at no the the key is to I mean if you maximize on everything I think it's paralyzing the key is to know when to maximize and so if you satisfy us a lot of the time and say let's be honest I don't need to status to maximize on everything then then you're that's the way to do it is to know to be able to distinguish between the two so if you're a chronic maximizer about absolutely everything there's a lot of evidence that you're likely to get stuck on small unimportant things depression is that um a trait of maximizes yeah absolutely High achieving yeah I mean so what what ends up happening is it's the same as perfectionism that's basically what it is it's the it's the choice-based version of perfectionism where you never live up to your own standards which on the one hand produces very good things because you're always looking upward and trying to get better on the other hand it's paralyzing and exhausting and to live your entire life that way in every aspect of your life is problematic Mo gauna who came on this podcast talked about how we're happy when our expectations are met and we're unhappy when our expectations are unmet and from what I ascertained from what you said there maximizers have such high expectations that they're often unmet which causes unhappiness yeah accurate 100 yeah that's exactly right my thesis my um PhD thesis was on expectations and on on how important it is when expectations deviate from or when when reality deviates from expectations it's almost never about the objective thing you know like two people could have exactly the same thing and feel totally happy one could feel totally happy with it the other could be devastated by it it's all about what you're used to what you expect how high your standards are
so I I think that's that's a very powerful human element in in these calculations when you're talking about experimenters these are people that go in search of nuances and ask why our experimenters typically maximizes because on the other side of the coin satisfices um they kind of accept it so they might be the people that would accept convention conventions answer for as being yeah I'll just do what has always been done yeah I think so I think there's some overlap but the thing about the people that I found were experimentalists constantly asking questions it was rarely about trivial things it's not like they went and said I'm going to go to the supermarket today and get a chocolate and I want to experiment I want to I want to eat every chocolate in the supermarket over the next year so that I know for the future which one's the best they don't do that they say hey I'm a swimmer I want to be an Olympian how do I get to be an Olympian I'm going to maximize the hell out of that and so it's it's about finding something that's really important to you where it's worth being an experimentalist but it would be paralyzing to do that with every aspect of your life I I think it certainly wouldn't work for me life crises um we're talking about age a second ago and I've got a I've got two friends I've got one friend that's 29 and another friend that's 39 and they're going through what appears to be on the surface of Crisis yeah and when I read your book about how you call it the nine ending crisis yeah it all made sense what is that yeah so this this is some research with a colleague of mine Heller hirschfield who's also a very good friend at UCLA and when we were he was at NYU at the time we we went we were sitting in his office and I said to him you know um I ran a marathon when I was 29. I've never run another one I but I ran one at 29 and I remember thinking I have to show myself as I approach 30 that there's meaning to my life and purpose I need a big goal I need to train for something and I thought that was a really interesting human instinct like it was a very productive one I ran a marathon which was not a bad thing but
we were talking about and he said to me it seems like maybe at these ages where there's a nine at the end of your age and you're looking down the Specter of a new decade that it pushes you to kind of audit your life you ask yourself is my life meaningful is it what I want it to be are there gaps that I need to fill is there something I need to do and so we started to find these big data sets that had some evidence where we could see what ages people were at and looking at their decisions and we found all sorts of really interesting behaviors when people were 29 39 49 59 you get this big rise in Marathon running so I wasn't the only one there's an over-representation of marathon runners especially first-time marathon runners who have a nine at the end of their age if you were already a marathon runner you run your fastest marathons in general when you have a nine at the end of your age um there's also some stuff that's not so good so you see a massive rise in infidelity so we found evidence that there's an over-representation of people at those ages who are seeking out extramarital Affairs you even see a rise in suicide so that doesn't mean everyone who's got a nine end at their a nine uh ending age is at risk of that but it shows in general that we we sort of hunt for meaning and so the midlife crisis idea that maybe when you approach 40 there's going to be a big crisis there that may be true but we also found this kind of cyclical decade every decade you get this this sort of miniature nine ending crisis I was the in the best shape I've ever been in my life when I was 29. that was the year that was the year I got closest to having all eight ABS 30 has it been great not as great so I was wondering as you said that if uh what happens when the year after you know if 29 is often some of our most productive achievements or Affairs yeah does that means 30 40 50 is when we we chill a little bit it varies a little it's funny so what you see is it's sort of like a wave and the peak of the wave is at nine but there are some people who it only Dawns on them when they actually hit the zero ending age some people it starts at the eight ending age it's really when you get to like
34 35 36 44 45 46 right in the middle of the decade when you see the the trough for all of these kinds of behaviors we're sort of most in our lives and doing our thing and not really questioning as much which I mean we found that fascinating that that just the accident that we happened to count using a base 10 system means that every 10 years we we Zoom back and ordered our lives in this way it's such an intro because it doesn't the number is such a an irrelevant thing in the context of your physiological Health your metabolic Health but symbols symbols matter and you talk about symbols in your first book as well yeah and we don't appreciate how much symbols sway our life in fundamental ways do we yeah no that's right that's true and and I think you know even these numbers are symbolic they have symbolic meaning for us it's something when you say I'm in my 30s it's different from saying I'm 28 or 29. even if it's just a year apart or even a few days apart and it's the same with what it means to be in your 40s it's symbolic for a time of life and and certain expectations about what that time of your life is supposed to be and so I think that's what happens we talked about expectations that you you're suddenly in your 40s or your 50s or your 60s and then you say what does that mean and where here is where my expectations are I should have the following things maybe a certain amount of money a certain career status maybe a partner maybe kids and then do you have those things and if you don't then you get this kind of acting out Behavior some of it productive that tries to remedy the problem perhaps you try to get fit and run a marathon but sometimes for some people it's not very productive Behavior I know this more than most because I started in business at 18 and you can imagine um when I was on BBC News night and they introduce you and he's only 18 years old my business is making zero money yeah but they were just blown away because of expectation of what an 18 year old should be doing and then I had that throughout my career and he's only 25 and he's got a thousand and he's only 20 and then he's only 29 and then it's stuff Stephen is an entrepreneur
and I'm like listen one day has changed and suddenly no one's Introducing Me by my age he was 29 and 30. the expectations of a 29 year old running a business and how big that business might be and how many team members and revenue versus the 30 year olds you go huh you better be a billionaire or else we're not going to mention his age I'm in my early 40s and it's the same thing as an academic you know if you're a professor in your 30s that's you're young and then you hit suddenly one day you're 40 and they're like ah yeah you're a professor whatever when you wrote about symbols in your first book what were some of the most sort of surprising things in terms of how powerful and inspirational they are with us to us without us even knowing uh well you know as a marketing Professor I'm very very interested in how symbols play a role in branding and in conveying ideas really succinctly I think that the the simplest way to convey an idea is with an image and the images that are the most powerful are often in symbolic form a lot of them are very negative images that we get from symbols they're associated with ideals that we don't like for example um you know like uh something like a swast sticker is a it's a terrible symbol the way it's used or has been used for the last almost 100 years now um but the amount of meaning that's conveyed in those symbols is is tremendous um and so it's there's a there's a sort of terrible power to symbols they can shape behavior in all sorts of ways one of the studies I did um looked at people who were religious versus not religious and then showed them a religious symbol and then asked them to do a behavior that was either going to be done honestly or dishonestly we were essentially measuring whether they were going to behave honestly and for those religious people seeing that symbol kind of clicked something for them and they became much more honest so in general they might have had an honesty level of 50 but you show them that symbol even subtly in the environment around them and suddenly they become much more honest so these these things are constantly swimming around us and and gently nudging our
behavior in different directions it almost reminded me a little bit of the um the thing you wrote about in that book about how when people are shown a picture of eyeballs at like a free snack bar where they can take what they want they're much more honest about their decisions because eyes again in a way are a symbol yeah they're a symbol of the tribe maybe yeah of being watched of feeling like you're being watched I there's um there's some really interesting evidence from this uh looking at um using eyeballs to get people to behave better so if you have an image of a pair of eyes looking at you just disembodied just the eyes you don't see any of the rest of the face you find that people behave much more honestly they're much less likely to steal something you see shoplifting rates go down the the best use of it though I think is if you say you're a chocoholic you love chocolate but you don't want to be eating it but you also want to have a little bit around every now and again one thing you can do is you can have a little cupboard in your in your kitchen where the inside of the cupboard you put a mirror and that's where the chocolate lives so you open it up and every time you reach for the chocolate you have to stare into your own soul and so the eyeballs whether they're yours or somebody else's just just having to look at yourself not just metaphorically but literally as you do something it brings out your better angels and there's a lot of evidence for that in in various psychological studies one of the things that stands in the way of acceptance is this question which a lot of people ask when they get stuck which is or when they have a life Quake which is why me why did this happen to me yeah and that relinquishes our sense of personal responsibility it makes us a victim to to the situation um which we might objectively be a victim however you want to Define it to a situation but it doesn't seem to be conducive with um getting out of it no it doesn't and you know the interesting thing is if you go to people who are at the end of their lives they're on their Death Beds and they know that the end is near and you say to them did you ever have a why me situation did it did
something happen in your life at any point where you had cause whether you did or not you had cause to say why me you know this felt unfair hundred percent of them will say yes that's another case where we feel isolated in those moments we're like why me the implication of that is it's me but not someone else their turn will come we will all have these moments that are really hard to deal with some of us have had them already some of us will have more of them in the future but they are Universal and so the the best thing you can do I think in those moments is to just kind of recognize that it's okay to be sad and pissed off and to struggle with them but also there's some comfort in knowing that actually this is just what it is to be human everyone has these moments you're not unique in responding that way and you're not unique in experi in experiencing that situation in the first place it's privileged as well as you write about in your book it's a privileged response to have yeah that you don't see across other cultures as readily yeah it's privilege and it also I think reflects the sense of agency we've got from becoming essentially masters of our worlds in ways that were not true for most of human history you know we as science and medicine goes we're living longer we're generally a stronger species we can do a lot of incredible things we can move spacecraft to other planets you know it's it's ridiculous the number of things we can do and so as a result of that we kind of assume that that's the kind of control we should have over every aspect of Our Lives if we can do big things that are amazing why can't we do small things that are amazing and uh that's not the way the world works and we mistake that General sense of human control over the world especially as we move away from religion and become more more secular we develop that sense of privilege and I think cultures that that don't have that to the same extent or that's still Hue to religion more strongly you have much more of a recognition that hey to some extent I'm kind of at the mercy of whether it's the gods or however you want to describe it and that makes you more open to the idea that you don't have control is that less westernized culture so cultures with less money yes
that's what that's why the privileged aspect comes into it because I think the West where we are more expectations again isn't it it comes back to almost everything yeah it's a huge huge part of The Human Experience we all need to lower our expectations or have realistic ones yeah yeah there's going to be so many people that are listening that are that realize that you know they objectively realize that life comes in seasons and but the the difficulty comes is when one of those Seasons ends yeah and we kind of resist the ending and a lot of people I think will feel stuck when a seasonal chapter of life one of those life Quakes you know I guess the start of a life quick I guess is one when one of those Seasons ends knowing from a intellectual from a strategy standpoint how to deal with it in that moment because when a season of life ends there's so much uncertainty and fear and you you can't always see the season to come um and that's where a lot of those feelings come from he talked about acceptance being a key um path forward but is there anything else I really want to make sure we've completed that is there anything else that we can do to ex to be better at transitioning from one season of life to the other yeah I so I love this philosophy from uh the the rock musician Jeff Tweedy the front man of the band Wilco who's also a writer he writes he does music he's a renaissance man um he talks about that feeling of being stuck and and sometimes it's in transitions but also it's it's when you're chronically being forced to come up with new ideas if you're a creative and I think this applies to to Transitions to new periods as well he talks about this idea that you know for decades he has had to wake up and his bread and butter is to come up with creative songs and to write good passages that will then become part of a book that is asking a lot of people but what he does is he recognizes that Above All Else action is going to move him forward when you feel stuck action even if it's slightly sideways it may not be exactly where you want to go but the mere fact
that you're acting gives you feedback that you're not stuck that you're moving in the right direction and so he talks about Lo at least temporarily lowering your expectations to the ground and so he talks about pouring out the bad ideas if he's writing a song he'll say what's the worst musical phrase I could write right now or what's the worst line for this book let me come up with three of the worst lines ever and that's easy to do because you have no expectations it's not maximizing or satisficing it's just like the bare minimum and when you do that you get the ball rolling you show yourself that you're not stuck and so then what follows that as he describes it is the good stuff that's when you get your good ideas because the you you know the wheels are being greased and you're moving forward and I think that's true in transition periods that we spend a lot of time agonizing there's a lot of dealing with the emotions which is fair there's a lot of time strategizing but just acting is tremendously liberating even if the action itself doesn't bring measurable rewards in the short term I was thinking as you're saying that the con within the context of dating so you've just come out of a horrific divorce you're sat at home on your own you can't even remember how to date yeah and you're going to try and find someone that is as appealing as the the person that's just dumped you or divorced you and they're hard to find so you just procrastinate you kind of sit in the misery and that's where you feel stuck yeah if I apply the philosophy you've just said to bad ideas first what I'd actually do is I'd just go on a date yeah and I'd say listen this is not going to be the husband but we're going to start getting some practice and we're going to start getting out there and putting my makeup back on and whatever and getting out there into the market and you take you take a bad date just to get the ball rolling it's accurate yeah I mean a lot of people do that that's that's the philosophy of the rebound right that uh oh yeah yeah but but I think that's right I mean I think from the perspective of the person who's been dumped the re we always think about the rebound from the perspective of the person who suddenly discovers they're
the next the next option yeah yeah you know that's not a good sign yeah but if you are the person who's trying to get back out there I think that's a really great thing to do and it doesn't have to be a romantic date it's just like go do something you know you're gonna you'll wallow for a little bit which is fine but the best thing you can do is to as I said move sideways moving forwards might be going on more dates to try and find the next person it's not time for that yet it's time to just go and go to a movie go and see a rock band like do whatever it is you like doing just so you're not doing nothing just act and action one of the great things it does especially when you're you're ruminating and you're thinking about how bad and tough things are is action is a phenomenal distraction like when you're acting you're not thinking as much and so it's it's worth doing just to be doing something that's why people rebound isn't it but it also gives us a sense of meaning and purpose which is often the thing that the rejection has robbed us of so me going out and having a one-night stand don't no I don't advise it I don't I'm not against it but I don't advise you I have no opinion on one night stands um going out and getting having a one-night stand maybe there is the reason I feel rejection is because I'm telling myself a story that I'm unlovable or unwanted and going out and getting evidence that someone is interested in me can help with the the pain of the rejection and it's the same within work if you've been fired from a job yeah maybe you're telling yourself a story about your you know your self-worth and just going out there and doing some work even if it's volunteering somewhere could be help ease the rejection because the rejection often is just a story isn't it yeah I mean I think that's right I also think The Human Experience is essentially bouncing like a ping pong ball from one thing to the next where the next thing you do is trying to capture whatever feels like it's missing from the last thing and actually a lot of relationships when people jump from relationship to relationship are about
exactly that it's like when you when in a relationship ends you think about what was the thing that was missing in that one like Why didn't it work and you fixate on that with the next person now there may have been some great things about the last person you forget to focus on retaining those in the next person and so then you're missing something different in the next person that you go to after that and so this is what we do in jobs this is what we do in how we spend our time in Pursuits in um in dating we're constantly trying to create a thing that feels like it's missing because humans by Nature just focus on deficits on losses on the negatives and so that sort of propels us forward what's the better approach um I mean you know the explicit one is the sort of gratitude approach in saying what's working like that's the flip side of this is to say whether it's about a relationship or a job what were the best five things about that relationship that I would want to retain in future if you don't ask yourself that question it biases the decisions you make thereafter and I think it biases them in a way that's really unproductive it's going to be true if you jump to a new job move to a new country or city or town any change it's worth asking what do I not only what didn't work and do I want to fix but also what did work and do I want to retain the best way to get unstuck is to simplify the problem as much as possible that way you can identify what the sticking points are I call this simplifying of the complex a friction audit what did you mean by that yeah so over the years I've I've met people who need much less time to make sense of complicated situations knowing what's not important it's good to know what's important but I think a lot of us can do that what's really hard is being able to say subtract that subtract that subtract that this is the thing this is the Nugget the kernel this is what I should be focusing on and so that's that's the idea of of kind of the importance of subtracting and there's a great book called subtract by Lighty clots that's on this exact topic the friction audit itself is a sort of philosophical version of
that idea where in business in particular I do a lot of business Consulting that works on on this this friction audit process and I spent a long time with companies that ask the question how do we how do we sweeten the deal you know how do we make the product better more attractive how do we stand above the crowd and I started to realize that the return on investment to doing that is often minimal and it's expensive to do that and it's really hard to do that in a competitive marketplace where everyone's doing the same thing but where you get your massive return is not by focusing on making the carrot more attractive it's by removing the stick that stops people from doing what you'd like them to do maybe it's interacting with a customer service rep maybe it's buying maybe it's making a particular choice maybe it's understanding information whatever it is if you weed those out you sand them down so there's no longer friction there you see tremendous rises in conversion often for almost no cost it's just a matter of asking that particular frame of question and going through that friction audit process and that friction audit process I guess it starts with that question which is like what's getting in the way yeah you can ask yourself that you can ask your team that question yeah we probably don't ask ask our teams that question enough just generally in business which is because we're always thinking about you know things we can add Maybe um something we can buy yeah equipment we could buy someone we could hire yeah I mean I when I think about this certainly for teams it works really well I also think for individual lives everyone if you ask them this is really liberating I like to do this sometimes what are the three things in your life right now that cause you the most friction it could be interactions with a certain person it could be commuting if you if you're traveling a lot it everyone's got a different answer to the question but imagine that those three things you could just eradicate from your life right now how much better would your life be and people often say like wait like a hundred percent better it'd be my life would be double as good as it is
now and so the next thing is to say well that's a massive return on investment if you can't eradicate them that's fine but at least sand them down minimize them shrink them to the extent possible that's where you should devote your resources so really really powerful intervention for individual lives but I think also as you said in the workplace as well such a good habit to have asking that question frequently not just to yourself but also just to the people you work with yes because you get such surprising answers when you ask these questions also to to your partner or to your friend your close friends there's nothing better than being asked that question if someone asks you that the the degree of caring if if they actually seem like they want to be able to help that will melt any barriers between you and another person if you if you genuinely say what are the three things right now that feel like they're the hardest most unpleasant things and how can I help you you fix them is a tremendously uplifting connecting experience it made me reflect as you're saying that on that is it the 61 rule in aviation have you heard that uh yeah I think I know what you mean where if you're one degree off for every x amount of miles you travel yeah you'll miss the airport by 60 miles or something like that yeah so just one degree in deviation from the path which could be anything that's causing friction in your relationship at work and whatever you're doing means that you'll miss the airport by 60 miles for every 100 miles you travel or something like that yeah and it kind of shows how one small unaddressed friction point in your life could make you miss miss the Target in such a significant way and by checking in by doing the friction audit frequently hopefully we can make sure we we stay on course in our lives I think about that a lot with my relationship because quite honestly if I'm if I'm away on business or I'm just getting caught up in my life and I don't do a bit of a friction order in our relationship you know you get a couple of weeks in and I look over at her in the kitchen and something's wrong yeah I don't know what's wrong
but something's wrong and it's always because I haven't done we haven't had like a conversation in a while about like something yeah we haven't checked in yeah I think it's it's huge I actually talk about this in the book that 61 idea um oh so you know what it is because I like I like destroyed it there no no no no no no so I don't talk about it as the 61 but I talk about the the Y2K bug that people were worried about around the turn of the century to 2000 there was this concern that all these computers would crash because they all had the two-digit uh number associated with the year so in 1999 it said 99 but when we ticked over to 2000 it went zero zero and a lot of computers would think it was 1900 instead of two thousand this was a concern that planes would fall out of the sky and nuclear power plants would explode and all this but they first identified this problem in the in the 60s it was a guy at IBM named Bob bema and I think it's bemer or bema who um who was like hey we should figure this out like it's not a big deal yet but I think computers are going to be big they're going to be a lot of them around by the year 2000. let's deal with this in the 60s where it's easy to re reprogram the few computers we have let's make it a four digit number or do whatever we need to do in the end governments in the 90s spent billions of dollars because that one degree off in 1960 that no one bothered to correct ended up being the 60 by the time we got to the year 2000 so these these little things that niggle that we don't deal with end up getting worse and worse and worse and it's so true about relationships they compound negatively against us the first my favorite book I ever read when I started reading more was I think it's I think it's called Jeff Olson the slight Edge he talks exactly about that how about the things that are easy not to do like saving five pounds or brushing your teeth um other things that end up compounding against us all for us in our lives and having the most significant impact um because we ignore those things we don't think they're important yeah um and that's why I think of friction order
it's not it's not a waste of time it's often sweating the smallest things that Garners the biggest results yeah as you know they're a sponsor of the podcast and I'm one of the investors in the company my relationship with Hill started with the ready to drink range which I have here in front of me on the table why did I choose to drink this first and foremost convenience I'm not the type of person that wants to spend a huge amount of time whisking or mixing things together and I don't typically have a huge amount of time during the day and there are some days not always but there are some days where because of the limited amount of time I have the choices that I would ordinarily reach for aren't necessarily the most healthy choices they're certainly not nutritionally complete so as soon as I discovered who all existed because of a wonderful guy who worked one of my teams in Manchester walked past me wearing a heel t-shirt I inquired what it was he told me what it was and then I bought the ready to drink bottles into the office it was a game changer for me and it meant that on those days where I'm tempted to reach for Less nutritionally complete options or less healthy food options I have something right underneath my desk in the fridge that I can reach for that allows me to remain in line with my health and nutrition goals and Tesco have now increased their listings with hewell so you can now get the RTD ready to drink in Tesco expresses all across the UK career hot streaks yeah this I I Love This research these these researchers were asking this question is there something if we look at the course of thousands of careers in different areas creatives business people and so on scientists can you predict when we're going to have the best periods in our careers that's basically what they're asking they call this a hot streak you know like when you if you're an academic and you publish your five most high impact papers or if you're a filmmaker and you have five films that are seen as your Canon when is that going to happen can we predict that is there a way to manufacture that if I'm a filmmaker or a scientist and they they identify these two processes that need to happen in precisely this
order one of them is is known as exploration and in Exploration you go far and wide you basically you have a default of yes which means that when someone comes to you with an opportunity you're like yeah sure why not I give a talk to freshmen at NYU and they should as freshmen that time in your life you should be an Explorer you don't know what you're going to end up doing with your life you could stumble on something wonderful you should say yes to everything and uh during this phase you know they they talk about Jackson Pollock the artist who ended up developing his drip technique that he became famous for before he did that he spent a number of years trying five or six different other techniques Peter Jackson who made the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films and became you know a Titan for those films he was doing horror and all sorts of other stuff before that these were their exploratory periods but at some point that yes default has to become a no default where you say hey I've been trying these different things I've been exploring it's time to exploit that's the second phase and during that phase you say hey of those five or six things I was exploring this one looks like it has the most promise I'm going to pour my heart and soul into that thing for a little while and see what comes of it so for Jackson Pollock it was the drip painting for Peter Jackson it's these big Epic Fantasy films and what happens then is you've considered the options you pick the best one and then you make them Absolute most you can make of it you squeeze all the juice out of the orange and that's when those successful hot Street periods arise when you go Broad and then you go really narrow and then when you feel stuck again you go broad again and then you go narrow and you expand and you contract throughout your life professionally and I think personally as well that's that's I think a path to a good life so people that might have been doing the same thing for a couple of decades or a decade I'm probably not gonna stumble across a career hot streak because they're missing that experimentation and that
exploration yeah I think that's right and you know the best evidence for this for me at least personally was um when I give this talk to the Freshman I show them the four emails that I've got in the last 20 years that changed my life and my instinct I actually show them I redact some of the information but I show them the images of these emails that arrived in my inbox and I remember with each one when they arrived I was like I'm so busy I there's no way I can do this it would be an email from someone saying for example before I wrote my first book an agent reached out and said I just read a piece about some of your research I think there might be a book in this what do you think my first my first instinct was like I don't have time for this I I'm so busy I'm a first year professor but I was in this exploratory period so I ended up saying yes totally changed my professional life I have a few others that are like that and those four are sitting in a pool with thousands that went nowhere but if you don't have that yes default for a certain period of time you're never going to find those four gold nuggets in that that otherwise kind of silty mess and so I think it's a really important default to have at certain times in your life we talked before we started recording about some of the subjects that you love talking about and creativity was one of them when we think about creativity a lot of people think about this the process of coming up with a new idea and um by trial and error I've tried to figure out the conditions which allow me to come up with my best ideas what I've I mean I've got a couple of hypotheses around when I'm you know when I'm at the gym I seem to come up with all my best ideas or um when I have space yeah but the process of coming up with an idea if I was to if you were advising me as a consultant on how to get my teams to think of better ideas or to come up with our best ideas what would you what would you advise us to do yeah so here's a long-term strategy that I think is really valuable that I've used and I've found very helpful I have several documents that are about 20 years old one of them is called research ideas one is called book ideas one is called
teaching ideas and every time I see anything that's even remotely interesting to me that's related to one of those I put it in one of those documents depending on what it is like for teaching ideas it'll be a great ad campaign that I want to share with my students if you do that for 20 years that document gets really really long and so my documents now those are some of them are I think like 40 or 50 pages long just line after line of links and ideas and short descriptions of things that I've come across that are useful if I go back to that it does two things one thing is it shows me over time what I'm interested in because sometimes it's hard in the moment to say I don't know what am I generally interested in but I have a 20-year record of what I'm interested in the other thing it does is it allows you to do what I think of as the best the single best reproducible process for coming up with creative ideas which is called recombination so I have this illusion that the best ideas are radically original that they stand on their own they're different from anything that came before they are Paradigm shifts Everything Changes but even when you when you look at those ideas that seem that way and you interrogate them and you trace them back far enough they are almost always a combination of old ideas or a recombination so the the best example of this that I came across and I talk about this in the book is um when you ask musicians who is the most original musician of the 20th century one of the most common responses is Bob Dylan but if you look deeply Dylan certainly had a lot of elements that seemed like they were different from what other people were doing but he himself has said oh yeah I was borrowing from this tradition and that tradition and the folk tradition and this artist and that artist and then when you look at the DNA of his music there's so much evidence for what came before it's true in business ideas as well one of the things I asked my students to do is um come up with a radically original idea in business that you've seen tell me about a company that's doing something radically original and then I'll say they'll come up with something and then I'll say all right tell me what
is similar to that that came before it and they can always come up with something so is it radically original or is it just a new combination of elements that existed before and I think that if you have this long document randomly pick idea three and idea 12 and see if you can combine them and there you might have a business or an idea that's useful we could also do that collectively I guess as a as a team and as a company we can create a an internal ideas document which everyone can kind of contribute to in terms of if we're thinking you know ways to make ways to make this podcast or one of my businesses more successful just dumping in ideas that we're kind of on the someday shelf yeah um when we revisit that document in the future we can go okay so we were trying to find a way to get listeners to share the podcast more and oh someone found a tool over here that does something else for this part of the building maybe we could combine these two things and use that to share the podcast more here's a tweak to that I think that's a great idea but if you make it a collected document people are going to feel like the ideas have to be a certain level of goodness to share them okay so start alone everyone has their own document and then you combine it at some point ah nice that's much better for in general that idea of brainstorming is the first step great if you do it on your own you never want to start by thinking in a group group is going to start alone yeah people converge they're scared yeah all of those things do you do much of that do you do much of um sort of corporate Consulting yeah quite a lot what typically tends to be the symptoms or the challenge that corporations are typically stuck with yeah so I mean not all the Consulting I do is about being stuck specifically but that's often a way of framing why you would get a consultant in right there's something you want to change and you want to fix it so you very very often it's a company that's experienced a change in situation like the cost of our raw materials has gone up what do we do now or there's a thing that we needed and we can't get that anymore or the legislation has changed and the
government now doesn't let us do this key part of what we used to do so a lot of it ends up being quite operational when it's about stuckness it's like how do we pivot how do we figure out a way around this situation um but the the Consulting briefs are incredibly Broad and Vary which is again why I love it so much because no two gigs is the same pivoting then yeah there's a lot of pivoting and a lot of figuring out how to change and also what what doesn't need to change I think often the instinct is yeah I did some work with a company that makes denim jeans and they were like well Cotton's just gone up dramatically in price and so as a result it's more expensive to make our genes what do we do and they're like we need to just overhaul the whole process I was like I don't know I don't think you do I think what you need to do is frame the rise in price in a way that people don't bulk and run away you know you've got a long strong strong relationship with a lot of customers over time you have a strong brand identity and so on so no don't throw the baby out with the bath water let's just figure out how we can sell the idea that maybe things are just a bit more expensive now and and against a backdrop where everything's more expensive now so often it's about minimizing change as it relates to these hundred hundred ways to get unstuck do you have any any that are your your favorite all that people are seemed to be most receptive to that are maybe more on the original side of things some of them are very narrow and specific like case studies that I talk about but a lot of them are sort of Concepts like the idea that when things get hard that's when creativity begins like you've got to let things get hard and we're not creative until we struggle is is really important it's very liberating because the what it does is it takes the naive theory of what it is to struggle to be creative it turns it on its head and says hey you're going in exactly the right direction it's the hardship that Heralds the good stuff so if it's not hard yet that's the problem you've got to keep going until it gets there um and I a lot of people find that quite
liberating I've been playing around in the notes of my phone with this idea I was trying to find a way to put up my stories over the last two days and like I'd got to this point about how the the Rarity of the amount of people that overcome the challenge is a directly correlates to the Rarity of the rewards behind the door so when you when something is sorry the level of difficulty is a signal of how many people gave up at that exact moment yeah and then logically if you pursue and overcome the difficulty you'll get through that door fewer people got the rewards behind that door and you're seeing a very very similar thing yeah you're right it helps you reframe what difficulty is difficulty isn't a a signal to to turn back it's a signal that if you keep going the rewards just got greater yeah and I also think it's a question of how difficult is this for other people right so being creative is hard it's it's hard for everyone even really good good creatives are they get to a point where it's kind of gets gets difficult because you're trying to come up with something out of whole cloth that's new yeah and so that's not easy for anyone yeah if there's something that most people can do really easily and you're struggling with it that's very different from doing something that's hard and persevering through that hardship so I think it's always important to ask in the background am I by finding this hard is that just like part of the course of doing this thing or am I finding it hard because I should be putting my mind and attention elsewhere maybe I'm just not very good at this thing and I would be better at spending my time doing something else is there anything else in your work because you're you're such a multi-faceted guy you mean you've written about a variety of different subject Matters from how screens are um harming us and our addiction to these mobile devices to um your first book which sounds a lot on sort of cognitive biases and psychology and then this book about getting unstuck in all the psychology around that is there anything else that we we should have talked about that you
think is valuable to my audience my audience or a group of people that are trying to get better in their lives they're trying to get unstuck trying to get close to their potential yeah I'll say one thing I've been doing a lot of research lately on on Nostalgia on the concept of nostalgia um I I think in many ways it's the most powerful backward facing emotion we have that as you get older you you start to miss things that are no longer existing in your life that you loved at the time and that you think back on really fondly and sometimes you even misremember them and you think of them as better than they actually were at the time but it's an incredibly powerful emotion and um one of the things we've been finding in this research is that the things that make you nostalgic are often at the time what you think of as kind of mundane routines like I I really miss grad school I went to Princeton and loved it and had a great five years there but I don't miss the like momentous events I don't miss graduation I don't miss ceremonies I don't miss these big culminations I miss the really mundane stuff I miss walking this one path that I used to take in the summer between my dorm room and the office and I did it hundreds of times if I could just do that walk one more time and so I think there's a kind of message there that we often mistake these momentous things that we go through for being like what life is really about but actually a lot of it is the kind of mundane routine stuff that's every day and the reason I like that idea so much is because it suggests that um you can ring tremendous value out of things that might seem trivial or not that important if you recognize that like it's changed the way I live my life I cultivate so many little routines out of every day because I know when I look back that's the stuff that's going to really feel full of reward and meaning I think we try too hard sometimes to make everything bigger and better and more kind of emotionally explosive and so that's uh I've always found that at least since discovering that it's been a really powerful idea for me I think about that you just think about Nostalgia relationships I've had companies we've been in and you know
worked in for many many years and you look back at the the early days you go I wish we could have that again but it's but you can't I can't quite easily put my finger on exactly what what it was other than of excitement yeah you know a couple of moments where I have flashbacks of good moments we had but there's nothing to say we can't create those little good moments of celebrating together in a bar yeah now and I mean there are three components to well-being there's anticipation before something happens there's momentary when it's happening and then there's retrospection after it's happened think about a trip you take if you're really excited for a trip I'm going to Europe this summer and I'm very excited about it a particular trip that I'm going to be taking and I think our job as humans in sort of respect of all the time and energy we put into living Our Lives is try to maximize across those three kinds of well-being the sum of those three so the fun stuff book it in as early as possible so you start enjoying it today before it's happened and then in the moment which tends to be very brief right the moments themselves are brief most of the value comes in thinking back for the hopefully decades that come afterwards so you're saying get your phones out yeah yeah exactly just spend every minute on your phone take a photo of everything yeah spend the whole time at Coachella just videoing just videoing it you don't actually want to experience it you just want to look back on it yeah it's fantastic advice thank you Adam so much for your time we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question who they're going to be leaving it for I don't get to see it until I open the book foreign that's been left for you is what is one belief or behavior that has positively impacted your life in the past 12 months so I've spent a lot of time over the last few years critiquing Tech and that's what a lot of my work has been about because I think it's it's technology generally and Screen based Tech we spend a lot of our time on it and I don't think it always brings us the rewards we'd hope
um and my instinct when I first discovered generative AI chat GPT and and the other models that are proliferating was similar with sort of this this negativity it's going to steal jobs it's going to be problematic um but I I sort of adopted a more experimental mindset and I've started using it more and I've started using it more than anything as a kind of brainstorming partner it's like instead of having a Brain Trust of 10 very smart friends who all think a bit differently about something chat GPT is like billions of people all thinking differently about things and you can keep asking it hey give me another idea give me another idea imagine that one's wrong let's tweak that so I think what's changed for me is um I am trying to embrace these external things that are changing around us a little bit more because my natural instinct is to say let's preserve what's so special about being humans and try to Stave off all of that infringing effect that comes from uh from from these changes but I I'm finding that very rewarding because I'm finding the good I can still say no to the bad but I'm finding a lot of good I think there's a bit of a hangover from the social media era yeah and how that played out where there was this new technology we all rushed into it thinking it was um all positive and as the experiment played out we realized that there were there are unintended consequences yeah so I think we've come into this real next technological shift with the unintended consequences mindset I think that's right I think that's exactly right and and I think the the pendulum shifts I remember when I was was uh talking to people about the last book irresistible about screens and a lot of them were like this is 2013-14 they were saying things like but everyone loves Tech like why would we even consider the problems why would you write a book about that it's a storm and a teacup the idea that people would were not criticizing Tech 10 years ago in the way they are now especially screen Tech surprises a lot of people but I had way more pushback early on and then in the the say three or four years that followed the pendulum swung
the other way to critiquing and I think now hopefully we're kind of leveling out a little bit but I think you're right there is a hangover from the the social media era I think I'm quite scared about AR I mean we use it in our businesses but um I think the social media era has has maybe rightly made us think before we go all in about consequences and it's funny seeing the debates in Congress and with the CEOs taking place before a lot of this stuff has been built and deployed now yeah whereas with social media we've got 10 years in or 15 years in and we were like oh my god so let's do run the studies now and see the impact it's having it's interesting we're going to see how that plays out yeah are you writing another book you thinking about a subject yeah I'm always thinking about stuff um as I said I've got this document with like 100 book ideas I'd need to live 100 lives to write them all but uh I'm I'm pretty focused on this one now and some other things but I will I will start thinking about the next book proposal soon Adam thank you thank you for writing such an incredible book and if you do end up writing another book I'll be I'll be the first to buy it because this book is phenomenal all your books are phenomenal because they're so accessible but they're confronting subject matter that is so as you say has such broad appeal um where there doesn't appear to be solid clear answers yet and I also love authors like yourself that don't take a binary approach to things because life isn't binary in any in any regard and so being nuanced in um and personalized I think is is what you do so well but um is what it's also what people love so much and you're a fantastic talker you're a fantastic at conveying ideas so if you ever want to start a podcast you know I'd certainly download it thank you so much Adam it's an honor to meet you thanks Steven it's been great thank you [Music] oh [Music]