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could you do me a quick favor if you're listening to this please hit the follow or subscribe button it helps more than you know and we invite subscribers in every month to watch the show in person no one ever teaches us how to deal with negative emotions that's the big problem i think i've watched daniel pink's videos as a way to inspire me for years the world is littered with people who have a decent amount of innate talent who didn't put in the work here's the thing about us human beings we stink at solving our own problems we fear that when we share our stakes our vulnerabilities our regrets people will think less of us the fact that those regrets stuck with me for 10 years that's telling me something real courage is staring your regrets in the eye and doing something about them we are on this planet for a vanishingly small amount of time and you're not using that time wisely the best way to improve is to so without further ado i'm stephen bartlett and this is the diary of a ceo i hope nobody's listening but if you are then please keep this to yourself [Music] daniel yes you've um you've lived a really remarkable life and obviously the the most remarkable thing that from my perspective that i've seen from your i don't know the last 20 years of your life is you became a person who's really remarkably good at communicating and understanding um complex ideas and then conveying them in a way which is really engaging is there anything and i was i was looking through your childhood as much as i possibly could it sounds creepy right is there anything from your early years that when you look back set you up to become the man you are today are there any moments or experiences or traumas dare i say yeah well i mean thanks for that thanks for that nice compliment um i'm probably the worst person in the world to psychoanalyze me but um i would say if there's anything is and it just shows you in some ways the circumstances of birth i happened to live in a part of the united states that had one of the best public library
systems in america i lived walking distance to an excellent public library and i lived a bus ride away from a giant downtown cavernous cathedral-like library and so i spent an enormous amount of time as a kid in libraries i always loved reading i always loved words i always loved books and my hunch and it's just a hunch steven is that had the circumstances of my birth been different had i been born in another city or another country you know maybe i would be just a really excellent dentist but at some point you became this al gore speech writer and i look at when i look at people's skill stacks you can sometimes point at the thing you're really looking for the quite unique but complementary skill right and for me it's all well and good knowing a bunch of stuff being it but being able to communicate that intelligence in a way that's engaging and compelling is a very unique part of your skill stack which is probably the reason why your books do so well your ted talk was a smash hit and everything in between where did that skill come from you know i i i don't know i think a lot of it comes but i think it comes from perhaps from two things okay one of them is something that i feel like a lot of other people don't do which is think about things from another person's perspective what do they understand what do they know what are their reference points i think that's extraordinarily important it's something that i learned how to do probably a little bit later in life the other thing i mean is work for instance i give you so so for my books for instance i will do multiple multiple drafts of every chapter i will read aloud every chapter to my wife often multiple times what's even worse my wife will read chapters aloud to me so i can hear it to try to essentially make every word that i write fight for its life that is that word has to look at me and say i deserve to live before i knock it out and so i think that that simplicity and conciseness that come just from effort are really the key
and that's so evident especially in the book that i just read which is the power of regret your new book and even harry who read it as well in my team when he walked into my office about an hour ago he goes he's very very succinct with his points i think harry said there's like no fluff thank you harry yeah that's my goal truly and why is that important because i hate reading fluff myself i mean you know truly stephen i want to write books that the kinds of books that i want to read and what i what i don't like is when i read a book and it is let's say 60 000 words long and there's 4 000 words of ideas in here it's like hey why don't you just write me a 4 000 word article there's so many nonfiction books i think that would be twice as good if they were half as long and so i try to make it as lean as possible and make it as fluff free as i possibly can and okay let's start then with the some of the things that you've written going back to 2001 sure free agent nation why did you write that book well you know i think you might if you want to see a theme emerging here you'll see the theme that all researchers me search and so how did i how did i how did i become a how did i write free agent nation i i went and started working for myself this is like 1998-99 and i noticed that a lot of people were doing it was the first stirrings of that i thought it was something big going on and i decided to write about it by traveling around just the u.s and interviewing people who had gone out on their own saying i think this is going to be a bit this is an emerging big deal and that a lot of people are going to work this way and we better understand what it means how it happened what the implications are one of the key themes in that book that i i found particularly i mold over that's the thing that i stopped on and i was thinking a little bit about is this idea that persistence trumps talent what do you mean by that here's the thing the world is littered with people who have a decent amount of innate talent who didn't put in the work and the people who really flourish are the people who show up and they show up the next day and they show up the next day and they do their
work and they don't get freaked out by setbacks and they show up the next day and the next day and the next day they're consistent they are they are tenacious and they just worry about each day doing the work and to me that is how the best creators are the best business people are the best contributors of any kind are if i had if i sat around and waited to be inspired to write i don't i wouldn't write a syllable you know i show up to write because that's my freaking job and that's how you create stuff you show up and you and you work and you show up and you work and so when i was starting out in writing i looked around and i noticed that there i felt like there were people who were more innately talented than i was definitely but i had to decide no one's going to outwork me it's so funny because i obviously agree i'm going to play devil's advocate here but yeah because the thing that i always try and get to the heart of when i talk about consistency and persistence and i i've seen your examples about compounding returns yeah as it relates to finance etc is why aren't some people persistent i know there's many many factors yeah is it self-belief is it is it not being intrinsically motivated by the task itself and doing it for the wrong reasons is it a combination of all these factors i think that it's a combination of all of those factors i think it's i think it starts at a pretty high level i think part of it is that is that people don't know they actually believe the opposite that talent is more important than persistence and so they believe they're talented and they think that great things will happen to them simply because of their status as a talented person so they're wrong at like a meta level right the other thing is that um i do think that part of it is a miss of of intrinsic motivation uh but it's it's different um it's intrinsic motivation not because every day is joyful uh but because every day is necessary and every day is at least somewhat meaningful you know and so there's an adage that being a professional is showing up
um to do something you love even on the days you don't feel like doing it and and that to me that to me is is is the key like like i like writing some days but not every day some days it's a gigantic pain in the ass some days it's really really hard but i have to show up and do the work that day too and that's what being a professional is it's showing up and doing the work even on the days where you know what i'm not that into it today in the self-development community i think that there's been this growing feeling that you can like wake up in the morning say some nice things in the mirror i'm gonna be a millionaire i'm amazing and then life will somehow bring about all of these wonderful things that you've manifested and honestly when i when i hear people talking about manifestation i feel quite in the in the in the cultural context they're almost like spiritual cultural context and personal development they do i it's almost comical and i i am i feel sorry for them and their chances of achieving any of those things what's your view on manifestation in the like i'm not talking about setting yourself a goal and then going after it i'm just like just kind of like fluffy say it to yourself write it in your notebook and then it will happen type stuff i don't know and have you seen that am i just i mean you know they're yeah i'm i'm skeptical i'm skeptical now we there is some now there's some interesting stuff there's some interesting research on this question that we can go to because i always like things that are evidence-based and i haven't seen a lot of evidence that manifestation is a is a winning technique my view is like if it works for you you like it god bless you go for it do it just but you're still going to need to show up to work um but there's some other very interesting research um uh in what's called uh in certain kinds of self-talk okay so what you're talking about in in some ways is self-talk so how do we talk to how do we talk to ourselves and there's some interesting research
showing that if you say to yourself before a big encounter you can do it you got this okay so let's say i'm going to pitch a new book i can say to myself you got this you're going to crush it no that that's actually better than not doing anything okay that kind of self-talk but it's not the best thing you can do the best thing we you can do is something known as interrogative self-talk interrogative self-talk where you turn it into a question now the manifestation people hate that all right but instead what you say is can you do this and if so how can you do this and if so how you ask a question rather than make that bold assertion and now here's the interesting thing questions by their very nature elicit an active response or you know i ask a question you ask me a question my my my wheels have to turn but we ask ourselves a question the wheels also turn so if i say to myself let's say i'm pitching a new book can you do this well yeah i can do this because i've pitched books before but this time i have to think about it because harry over there there's never liked an idea that i want so i got to make sure that i really focus on harry last time i talked too much and listened to poorly so i gotta chill out a little bit what am i doing i'm rehearsing i'm preparing i'm practicing and that's actually more muscular than the nominally muscular thing of you can do it you got this which is not terrible so um so that's my view on that's my general view on on manifest on manifestation manifestation without work is a is delusion yeah okay but um manifestation with work isn't the worst thing in the world and self-talk rooted in evidence especially interrogative self-talk can be really smart drive that was the the gateway piece of content that um put me onto your work specifically the ted talk me and my girlfriend watched it uh together and we weren't planning on watching it i think i clicked on it and then it was so engaging and delivery that it held us for the entire i think it was about 20 minutes yeah wow and it's done some 10 million views and then there's been you know i saw the
illustrated version of it which i think is done 18 million views it's crazy the numbers on that um the base premise of that is obviously kind of debunking this thesis we had about how to motivate people and keep them engaged in work and you you are certain you prove that autonomy mastery and purpose are a much more compelling formula sure that journey of writing that book and um going on yeah the journey of doing the research how did it change your view on how to keep employees engaged and if you i don't know if you if you build companies now but on how to treat people because i came away from it thinking i understand but what are the things i can do now as a employer to to make sure that the team you see around me today are motivated sure yeah sure so so what it so again i can summarize i can i can summarize the that book it looks at about 50 years of science in what really motivates people but i can summarize the main point very very simply which is this there's a certain kind of motivator we use in organizations psychologists call it a controlling contingent motivator again let's go back to simplicity that's a lot of syllables let's just call it an if then reward right makes a lot more sense if you do this then you get that if you do this then you get that 60 years of science now tells us that if then rewards are actually pretty good for tasks that are simple to do and that have a short time horizon human beings love rewards you dangle a reward in front of in front of anybody myself included you've got their attention been in that very narrow way but if then rewards the science tells us are less great for more complex tasks with longer time horizons tasks that require judgment creativity discernment conceptual thinking and the reason is the same if then rewards narrow our focus for a lot of tasks particularly the tasks that most people are doing most creators are doing most people in the creative economy are doing you want to have a more expansive focus and so so we got to get rid of that way of motivating people for the bulk of things that people are doing today and what the research tells us is you got to pay people fairly and pay people well
you got to pay people fairly and pay people well and then you want to offer as exactly as you say some autonomy some some control some sovereignty over what you do how you do it when you do it where you do it mastery which is a chance to get better at something that matters to make progress and meaningful work and a sense of purpose do you know why you're doing it are you making a contribution are you making a are you making a difference so we can talk in a more granular level about what specifically to do did you ever figure out from your research why autonomy mastery and purpose why they are the things that motivate us and keep us most engaged in work why why those things it's a great question and and it's a question that i think is embedded in that work that most people don't see embedded in there because that's who we are as human beings we are innately autonomous i'll give you give you an example the best example go find me a two-year-old anywhere on the planet she's going to be self-directed she's going to be resisting control she's going to be engaged and interested and curious about stuff that's autonomy she is going to want to get better at something she's going to want to learn and grow that's who she is right two-year-old why why is this why am i doing this why am i doing this for you it's the same thing that's who we are that's why these things are so important they're part of what it means to be human and so that's why they're so powerful and i think what's interesting stephen is that for a long time in organizations of any kind but certainly the the business most businesses today certainly the business that you've built what you have for a long time we've had to run organizations that went against the grain of human nature because that was efficient that efficiency was the highest thing and the only way to achieve efficiency was actually through some mechanisms of control by saying ah it doesn't matter why we're doing this just freaking do it all right so control and and um and those kind of those are very very tight measurements those tight
uh mechanisms now i think the best businesses the best organizations go with the grain of human nature that's the key that's why these things are so powerful because it's part of who we are and organizations that build contacts that go with the grain of human nature are going to be better they're going to be better places to work because people aren't going to be miserable but they're also going to be more effective i guess so i get the autonomy point right i understood mastery what does that mean it means that people have an innate desire to get better at stuff to learn and to grow i'll give you an example think about i mean the most mundane example any weekend anywhere here in london in washington d.c where i live what are you gonna have you're gonna have people who are playing musical instruments on the weekend why are they making any money off of it no are they planning for a career as professional musicians no why are they doing it because they like it and it's fun to get better at qatar it's fun to get better at violin in my neighborhood in washington dc there is a big soccer field a big soccer pitch about two blocks away why on weekends are those things swarmed with guys my age running around in shorts are they going to be playing professional soccer no are they going to get famous as soccer players no why do they like it because it's interesting because it's fun because i like getting better at it that's why that is an innate part of what it is to be human human beings innately want to learn and grow now here's the thing i think that's our nature this is important i think that certain institutions can change the default setting on that nature i think that when we ship all right let's think about human beings as products all right the default setting of human beings is autonomy master and purpose i am convinced of that i think that sometimes in school or other kinds of experiences that default gets flipped and people learn compliance they stop caring about
mastery they care they don't care as much about why but i think that is because the context that they're in has thwarted their natural their natural state and what's the consequences of when that dial is turned and they become compliant and because that must be them going against their human innate wiring so there must be a consequence of that right i think the consequence is dull misery in some cases i think the consequence is under performance and i think that there is a significant meta-consequence that people aren't reckoning with which is that we are on this planet for a vanishingly small amount of time and you're not using that time wisely and at a certain point in your life you're going to say oh my god i totally messed up and you know one of the things you see let's take autonomy for example the thing about these words stephen is that they're they're they're abstract so so a way that i try to think about abstract questions sometimes is to think about what's the opposite of a concept so let's take the opposite of autonomy help us understand the opposite of autonomy is control human beings have only two reactions to control they comply or they defy that's it i mean in some ways the history of human civilization is that human beings trying to control other human beings they comply until they can't take it anymore and they defy but if you're building an organization do you want people who are perfectly compliant you want some compliance and certain things but you don't want people who are 100 compliant all the time they're not going to do great work you want people who are defined no you want people who are engaged and the way that human beings engage is by getting there under their own steam the way that human beings engage is through self-direction and then the last point about purpose yeah when people think about purpose especially i think younger generations they always think about trying to save
the world or doing something which is going to help others it's a really weird thing that's happened to these this to my generation where we all want to like we all i don't know whether we want to save the world or whether we want to be seen as someone that wants to save the world it's i'm not sure if it's virtue signaling or if it's an innate desire i'm not either i think that there is a lot of virtue signaling there and let me social media let me tell you yes let me tell you about let me tell you about purpose though because and forgive me i might owe you some money because i didn't get it quite right on that book drive what i've discovered since is that purpose is not one thing it's two things and it goes exactly to the question that you're asking so one kind of purpose is what i like to think of as capital p purpose large p purpose and that is what you're talking about i'm feeding the hungary i am solving the climate crisis whatever and there's no doubt in the in the research that that's that can be a very powerful motivator that people who are animated by that sen that kind of purpose do good work that's that's very very clear but day to day it's hard to get that every single day it's hard to get that kind of purpose on wednesday and thursday and friday and then show up again the next it's hard to get that every single day now it's still important and but this is what i missed there's a second kind of purpose that i call small p purpose and that's just making a contribution right capital p purpose is making a difference small p purpose is making a contribution did you help a teammate get the product out the door did you help this customer resolve its problem there's a great piece of research i love this out of harvard business school where they had a cafeteria in boston and in the cafeteria you know the customers went through the line in the cafeteria putting food on their trays and being served food but the people cooking the food were in the back you couldn't see them the cooks couldn't see the customers and the customers couldn't see the cooks so these researchers rigged up an ipad just like the one you
have in front of you that allowed the cooks to see the customers and what they were measuring and this is forgive me for getting in the weeds here this research but what they were measuring the dependent variable was not whether the cooks were satisfied with their jobs when they saw the customers they were measuring the customer evaluation of the food and so the question they were asking is when the cooks can see the customers does the quality of the food change customer ratings of the food change and the answer was yes customer satisfaction went up 10 percent when the cooks could see the customers even though the customers couldn't see the cooks really yeah so that's what i'm talking about here so those cooks back there they're they're not feeding the the the hungry i mean people are hungry because it's lunchtime in boston but they're not feeding people who are destitute what's going on here that cook looks at somebody moving through the line and says well wait a second another human being is going to eat my cheese omelet so wow i i know why i'm doing what i'm doing it's not changing the world but it's affecting one person's life so i'm going to up my cheese omelette game 10 and and i think that that small p purpose is extraordinarily important and so again purpose is not one thing it's two things and for organizations listening or for anyone in a team i guess that the key takeaway i had then is how can i make my teams more connected to the impact they're having with the work they're doing because if i do that then their work will improve and they'll find more meaning and purpose in their work and they'll yeah can i can i give you a couple of ideas so one so so one thing is that is i think woefully underused our testimonials and things we we often we use companies use testimonials from customers in an outward-facing way for marketing they should use them as an inward facing way to motivate employees so if i see if i'm working for a um
let's say i'm working for a software company and i am working on a team of of of coders and i never i very rarely see customers i'm just working on my part of the code and as part of this team but i start seeing letters from someone who said oh my gosh this this software transformed my life it made me run my business a lot better oh my gosh this software was so incredible it allowed me to it the efficiency was so great it allowed me to hire three new people showing the individuals those letters it reminds them of the impact of what they're doing so that's one very powerful thing to do the second thing as a leadership technique and something i've been doing i don't have the kind of operation that you do but i work with often like networks of people on projects and things like that is this is again going back to the simplicity i like interventions that are quick and cheap and actionable okay not well go take my eight-week course on autonomous leadership you know that's i don't or on purpose-driven leadership you know here's here's a here's a simple technique which i've been doing for probably eight or nine years each week try to have not try do have each week have two fewer conversations about how and two more about why when we're leading people we tend to over index on how conversations and we don't realize it so we say okay all right here's how you make that sales presentation okay okay here's how you deal with that customer and just twice flip it just change it stop yourself i mean i literally stopped yourself so when you say here's how stop yourself and say here's why we're making that sales presentation here's why we're dealing with that that vendor just twice a week and what you'll see it becomes habitual it becomes habitual you have more you have more why conversations how conversations are still important but you sprinkle in a few more y conversations and you almost always see an uptick in performance that's really really fascinating um berta and my team who's actually sat
over there um one of the things she suggested doing was we added a section to our company chat just called impact and we we did that so in the impact chat it just shows feedback from people that listen to this podcast perfect and all that enjoy our content or whatever else and it's a really you're right it's a really nice feedback loop because it's very easy to slip into the the belief that this is actually just a bunch of numbers we see on the screen a million people listen this week or two million people and that's good that's useful yeah but it doesn't it doesn't hit like hearing jenny who was going through a divorce and was really suffering with her mental health and then she listened to a certain episode which actually sometimes it's interesting because it might be a certain episode that might not have had as many listeners another one and to hear that that episode just impacted one person in such a profound way really does provide a huge sense of meaning to the whole kind of digital you never get to see who we're impacting you know we're the we're the chefs in the kitchen that never get to see the food being consumed right exactly exactly that's it yeah it's such a small thing but i think it's had such a significant impact and the thing is we it's interesting we do it already you see you know you the sales people in any kind of company are toting around these customer testimonials in an outward-facing way so yeah shine a few of them shine a few of them inside and again these are these are we don't have to we don't have to reform and change everything we don't have to pull up the roots entirely we know how to do these things and by starting small and establishing them as habits and and and regular practices they are transformative quick one as the seasons have begun to change so has my diet and um right now i'm going to be completely honest with you i'm starting to think a lot about slimming down a little bit because over the last couple of probably the last four or five months my diet has been pretty bad um and it started to show a little bit really over the last two
months i go to the gym about 80 of the time so i track it with 10 of my friends in a whatsapp group and this tracker online that we all use together we call it fitness blockchain and i'm currently at 81 percent um so 81 of the days i've done a workout in the last 150 days right so i'm going to the gym about six times a week that's been a little bit impacted by the derivatio live tour but i'm trying to stick to it and so one of the things i'm doing now to reduce my calorie intake and trying to get back to being nutritionally complete and all i eat is i'm having the heel protein shake thank you hill for making a product that i actually like the salted caramel is my favorite i've got the banana one here which is the one my girlfriend likes but for me salted caramel is the one one of the things you said there um as you as you finished that piece was was for me the point about why instead of how was also a really good piece of sales advice right and you wrote a book about sales to sellers human 2012 you wrote that book um when you write a book i know because i've written one myself not written as many best-selling ones as you have or as many as you have but even the journey of writing the book changed me because you do so much research that you you absolutely it almost seems like it does more for you than it does the reader but um what did you learn about sales that you took away and that stayed with you for the rest of your life from writing that book i mean so much on both like the the big picture and on the and on the tactical level so so one thing is that you know the the thesis of that book is the sort of the animating ideas of that book are that like it or not we're all in sales so to some extent i'm selling right now i'm not necessarily selling a book i'm selling saying hey i have something interesting i'm making these claims and i think they're more right than wrong and you should believe them all right so no money changes hands but that's a form of sales all of us are doing that when we're leading people we're selling when we're dealing with our kids we're
selling all you know but the thing is which most people haven't realized is that sales has changed more in the last 10 years than the previous 1000 because everything we knew about sales sales sales has come from a world of information asymmetry where the seller always had more information than the buyer in all commercial transactions since the beginning of civilization the seller had more information than the buyer this is why we have the principle of buyer beware buyer beware is entirely the result of information asymmetries where the seller has more information than the buyer the buyer doesn't have any choices and the buyer doesn't have a way to talk back that's how commercial transactions were since there were commercial transactions and then boop ten years ago it all flipped because now we have something closer to information parity and most people haven't wrapped their minds around what a significant change that is and to me it's not a difference in degree it's a difference in kind and so to sell today where we're in this landscape where we're selling all the time and we're doing it in this remade landscape calls for an entirely new approach and what's caused that that shift is it because of the internet yeah totally and you can find out anything about what you want to buy reviews that you know absolutely absolutely if you look at say even buying a car in the united states in the last 15 years um you know literally 15 years ago you go into a car dealer that car dealer knows more about toyotas more about camrys more about cars than you ever will all right buyer beware now literally the last car we bought i mean my wife walked into the car dealership with the factory invoice price of the car hello i know how much you paid to to purchase this car for yourself and i know what the going margin is for dealers in this area therefore but that's true in everything it's true in b2b it's true in in hiring um you know i i early in my life i took a couple of jobs that were really stupid to take and if had there been something like linkedin or glassdoor i would have known in advance what a
hell hole that those places were you know and so you know and so so this world of from information asymmetry to information parity is is huge and and it calls for a different set of skills um the skills of again simplicity if you look at the research right and you pound on it for a year trying to make sense of this research you find that there's three key principles and they start with a b and c that was basically that was luck um attunement which is can you get out of your own head into someone else's head hugely important buoyancy um you know from from being an entrepreneur that when you're selling anything you're getting rejected all the time one seller told me that he says i live in a sea i live in an ocean of rejection so buoyancy is how do you stay afloat in a notion of rejection and then clarity is how do you go from solving existing problems to identifying hidden problems because here's the thing problem solving as a skill totally overrated because if your customer or prospect knows exactly what its problem is they don't need you very much they can figure it out themselves where do they need you more when they don't know what their problem is or they're wrong about their problem so this premium has shifted from problem solving to problem finding can you surface problems can you identify hidden problems um and then also just think about information it used to be that the very nature of expertise was that expertise meant you had access to information nobody else had now everybody has the information so instead of being a good information access you have to be a good information curator a very different set of skills can you see the big picture can you synthesize can you simplify can you find the hidden patterns um you can you know detect what's really going on beneath the welter of information and so these are the skills that matter most in any kind of persuasive job which is all jobs interesting it's it's i was thinking about the importance of being being a bit of a chameleon
when you're talking about empathy and being able to find out what the unknown unknowns about their challenges and stuff like that there is okay so let's let's go to a tournament here for a second so a two minute is perspective taking um can you can you get out of your own head and see things from someone else's point of view and there are some really really good science behind that what it shows is that actually being a chameleon is helpful and in this in this regard you've all we've heard okay so let's let's let's talk about this is like the first cousin of manifestation okay okay so it sounds like bs but this one isn't it's mimicry mimicry so let's say okay i'm gonna i'm coming in to make a sales call on steven i'm gonna sell you my you know you know lifetime subscription to rutabagas or something like that all right and i'm looking to see how you're sitting and i'm saying okay you're sitting like this yeah and then and then okay here are his hands classed like that and then like you're smiling and then maybe you lean back in your chair and i mirror okay and you're told to do that it seems like complete bunk uh-uh there is a pile of research showing that the ability to chameleon like that to reflect back people's words and gestures is powerful not as a way to [Music] deceive people but as a way to understand where they're coming from that is the way we understand where people are coming from is in some ways to inhabit them fully by appropriating their gestures in language and so this is one of those and there's a really famous paper by adam golinski at columbia university about the advantages of chameleons in negotiating being able to shift your colors shift the way you do things um in order but again not to deceive to understand um and so there's some really powerful research in that one of the best things you can do is again i mean i see i keep coming back to the theme that you sort of struck at the beginning which is simplification is a lot of times especially in technical sales so we get in the weeds here a
little bit the reason technical sales people go awry is they use their own specialized lingo in their own specialized language because they love it and it makes them feel proud and they feel like it makes them experts and the customers and prospects have no idea what they're talking about and the customers and prospects use simpler less precise language but you should use the customer's language rather than your own when you use even even something like i hear i remember being in one circumstance where somebody was talking about trying to sell somebody something i was talking about kpis key performance indicators the person clearly did not know what a kpi was they didn't know the difference between kpi and kfc and you know and and i'm like okay like let me i think i need to intervene here and say okay keep performing kpi is key performance indicator but had that guy not done that he would have completely lost the person he was trying to persuade because he wasn't using he wasn't using that person's language he was using his own specialized lingo super interesting i was thinking then as well as you said that when you're talking about mimicking about a technique that's really proven to work when i'm in conflict resolution with my girlfriend which is if i repeat what she just said back to me it seems to defuse the situation remarkably so she says because usually when people have arguments it's kind of you're not listening to them and you're not being listened to so you're just kind of shouting on repeat like a broken record but one thing that i've learned over the last i think six months that when we do have a an issue and it's clear that she doesn't feel heard if i just say to her i'm gonna like i don't know how i say i usually say um can i just repeat back to you what you said so i'm so i'm clear that i understand it the broken record thing stops but but part of it also is that it's that's also that's not i think i think sometimes we position these kinds of things as as tricks yeah but when you say what she
said you better understand what she means yeah exactly it's not a trick it's actually an act it's an act of perspective taking and i'm not doing it to trigger yeah yeah yeah yeah i'll say i just want to be clear babe this is basically how you feel you're saying that and the minute i do that she goes yeah and that's it and then she'll listen to my response because i think she now feels understood and i think there's kind of synergies with what you're saying with me oh there's no there's no there's no question but that's basically this is one of the areas where people go awry they have a hard time getting out of their own head and seeing things from someone else's point of view it's something we're not innately great at it's something that i'm not innately great at it's something that i've really really worked on i think it's central in any kind of persuasion and it's it's obviously huge in any kind of in any kind of writing because i'm dealing with this vast army of people who i don't even know i can't even see i can't you know the the scary part is that if i am not attuned and if i don't take people's perspective in a book i can't see them shrink their face and look confused i've lost them forever you also talk a lot about pitching and pitching is a huge part of yeah i mean pitching is everything yeah you know to get people to come on this podcast sometimes we have to pitch and to get you know someone to want to date you you're doing a pitch to raise investment i pitch so what have you learned about the art of someone that's good at pitching and a good pitch okay this again you asked earlier what this taught me this this line of research taught me and one of the biggest things it taught me was about what i'm about to drop on you which is that i had gotten pitching completely wrong right there's some really interesting research out of stanford and out of uc davis where they followed around movie producers who were going to studios to pitch and they were they actually recorded these pitches a few
hundred of them i think and looked to see which were successful and which were not and the most important criterion the most important thing was was the following is was that the people who were successful looked at the people that they were pitching as partners all right and so instead of so i used to think pitching was like this kind of song and dance like i do a little tap shoot and they like take out their checkbook no what you what you that's not the response that i mean that's great if you get that response you don't get that response the response you want is this hey that's interesting have you thought about x y or z that the goal of pitching is to invite in the other side as a collaborator that's the key for any kind of pitch uh at a at a macro level and that's totally changed the way that i pitch i pitch in a much more collaborative way in the past when i was younger i you know had this elaborate dog and pony show in my head thinking that if i executed that performance perfectly i would get a cent and that didn't happen i remember it just reminded me of a time when i was running social training i remember pitching to we just launched in america and i was pitching to i think it was uber for their global account and um one day late at night i was looking at the email thread and i saw at the bottom of the email thread that we called ourselves people salespeople and i remember thinking like is that should we really be calling ourselves sales p people all like should we be calling ourselves because in the us i think people call themselves like partnership manager because the the term sales it's kind of like i don't know if it's giving the game away but it sounds transactional like i'm trying to give you you know so what do you think about that should we be changing our titles to like something else such an interesting question so i intentionally because this is sort of the way i like to do things i intentionally put the word sell in the title of that book because that's what we're doing but i faced some
resistance because what i did some survey research in the u.s showing that when you ask people when you think of the word sales or selling what's the first word that comes to mind and people had all these horrible words pushy sleazy pressure easy pressure um so it has a bad association so but i i wanted to try to win back the word probably didn't do it that successfully but for years i don't think people like being sold to i mean i think one of the interesting trends i see is is when they is referring to those folks as customer success they're we're in customer success i want someone to help me succeed yes oh that's good news we use that in our company in san francisco at the moment we have a customer success manager and that's in fact all of our terminology is your job is to get customers from the door to success so that's good to know and we did actually kill the the sales title yeah i think that i i think customer success is better than sales i think that account executive is sounds like someone trying not to say sales yeah and their job is to retain you yeah yeah and the other thing that really like stood out to me and i i didn't delve further into it because i wanted to explain it was this this story about the blind man with the sign and the sign said i am blind and when it changed from i am blind to it's springtime and i am blind people donated more to this homeless man yeah yeah that's a story that's not a study yeah okay so yeah yeah yeah but the idea is is that the idea is is that we need we need context and and in some levels we need a why that is um that p that people said that the fact that he was the fact that he was blind is significant and there was some degree of empathy but when people were reminded that it's springtime in new york city and he couldn't see anything that changed the emotional tenor of it and this is this is this is the thing about about about stories that we sometimes miss is that we sometimes think about oh should i go with the story i should
go with facts and the answer is yes because stories are facts in context delivered with emotional impact so adding that it's springtime is a fact because it was springtime it's a fact we added a fact but what you also did is you enriched it with context and delivered it with some emotional impact and that's what made it persuasive i literally think the reason why my company was successful and my company grew from like zero people to 700 in about six years was because from and we never had a sales team ever until the point i resigned like last year and i say this to entrepreneurs when i meet them all the time can you give me one piece of advice i'm starting an agency business i'm trying to win clients my one piece of advice was from day one i told stories and the story that i told when we started in 2014 was um we are the social media illuminati we're the kids that decide what all the kids talk about and i would go around the world and the country showing this presentation which showed that we could make anything the number one trending topic in 30 minutes and it was all this story and i never ever in my life felt like there was one occasion where in that six years i pitched to anybody i was just this storyteller it was my full-time job go around and tell stories that make people feel uncomfortable to the point that they think we've got a power that they need so when i when i meet entrepreneurs these days my singular piece of advice is like please never pitch if you get a chance to speak on stage [ __ ] graphs right don't try do everything don't no one cares about your [ __ ] business but find a story and it's funny in my last three years at social chain every single presentation i did no matter what this stage was no matter if there was 15 000 people in obama was on stage or if it was 20 people i opened up with the same thing which is i walked out and went and that's exactly why she stopped talking to me she put the phone down and told me she would never talk to me ever again that's the first two lines i say i don't say hi my name is steve and i'm from social chain and then people sit on the
edge of their chairs and they start with this story about my mum which is incomplete exactly till the end exactly because so and i i think that's so unappreciated because and i almost don't want to say it because now i'm like my life's going to get harder because everyone's going to but it just works so well for me and but this is this is this is this is true for everything i mean one of the things that you want to do as a writer is you want to keep people turning the page and what the way a way to keep people turning the page is to say what's going to happen next so you you lead with those two sentences i'm like okay what's going on and what's going to happen next yeah that's all i want to know yeah exactly now if you don't have something at the end that makes the customer's life better all you have is a you know you're you're a you're a wandering minstrel telling stories you're not a business person but if you have something that can land with an impact that can transform that person's life then you then you win and then your other book before we get on to your new book when timing is a science not an art i was i was really reading through all of the the summary pages of that book um and i was reading about chronotypes which i thought was a really interesting concept that there's because it kind of challenges a lot of the conventional thinking my understanding of chronotypes please correct me if i'm wrong here is that different people are motivated and awake and alert and do their best stuff at different times in the day is that accurate or is it slightly different no that's exactly right i'm motivated they're motivated in part the motivation comes from the fact that there are some people who naturally wake up late and go to sleep late naturally there are some people who it's biological right there's some people who naturally wake up early and go to sleep early and then there are plenty of us in the middle and what the distribution tells us is that about 15 of us are very strong morning people larks naturally get up early and go to sleep early about
20 of us are very strong owls we naturally wake up late and go to sleep late and about two-thirds of us are in the middle and the this our chronotype changes over time somewhat so little kids very very lucky wake up early start running around like crazy people from the get-go teenagers as you might remember in general have a big shift toward lateness we you know parents think teenagers are being lazy when they're sleeping in when in fact they're actually their bodies are changing teenagers have a move to a late chronotype from about age 15 to age 25 or so and then over time most of us go back to general luckiness but about one in five of us naturally wake up late and go to sleep late and a lot of those people are really disadvantaged in conventional work situations i feel like you're talking about me oh is that is that you yes okay so okay so here's else here's what else we know about about uh evening chronotypes they test higher on intelligence tests oh now you're just no because they test higher on creativity they're also more likely to go to prison yes okay yeah so all right so it's a mixed bag yes all right but but but the problem is is that this is why a disproportionate number of owls become self-employed because conventional work structures don't work very well for them facts my my best friend said to me when i was 18 he said you're either going to go to prison i'll be a millionaire and i and i'm i'm fundamentally unemployable i can't get up well so the reason why i wanted to talk about this was because i always thought i was bullshitting myself i thought i was just an unorganized mess but i genuinely like to wake up late and i like to go to bed at 3am okay or 2am if you know on a good day but i like what time do you typically wake up i go to the gym at midnight oh my god i work out for an hour and a half at midnight like pretty much every day okay and i wake up maybe 9 30. okay so what time do you typically go to sleep maybe 2 a.m three yeah and you
wake up a wedding nine nine nine thirty okay so because i have to because you have to but if you were to let us but what if you you might sleep until ten oh yeah i'd go if if if it's the weekend yeah oh just go eleven yeah yeah so so this is you're clearly you're clearly an owl and here's the thing it's like 20 of us are that way and one of the disadvantages is that a lot of the kind of life-hacking advice says you got to get up at 4 30 in the morning and win the day you got to get up at 4 30 in the morning and meditate for an hour and then free journal for a half an hour and then you know do high-intensity interval training for a half an hour and then read three newspapers in six different languages so that yoga meditation show up so when you get to your desk at 6 30 you are you know and hey some people can do that i'm not one of those most people can't do that i don't you know for me you know i'm i'm not um i'm not an owl at all but i'm not a very strong lark i'm kind of in the i have the i have the most common chronotype there is which is that i'm slightly larky i'm not a full-fledged lark but i lean toward that earliness and the key for me is going with that do you know the problem for me my girlfriend wakes up at 6 a.m and she i swear she's up at five but she she gets out of bed at about 6 a.m and she's super early she sleeps she goes to bed at 10 p.m and i was like what am i going to do with this this is there there are differences between you know average differences between between men and women women in general are larkier than men what's interesting is that um as men age they become larkier so maybe as you get older they'll have more confidence together is there a like a prehistoric or a uh like an ancestral reason why we have these different chronotypes and sleeping patterns i mean i think we can make an argument for it i think we can make an argument for uh an evolutionary reason for some of these things which is that um certainly there's an evolutionary argument for why people between 15 and 25 roughly have a
dramatic shift toward lateness and i think it's because in what you know imagine we're we're evolving on the savannah all right and it's night time there's not there's not electricity there's no illumination you need people to guard what's going on and so the people who were able to stay up late people who were young and fit and able to stay up late were actually incredibly valuable so they were respected they were nourished and so forth and so theoretically those genes then got passed along in the population so that the rest of us 10 000 years later teenagers and people in their 20s end up having evening end up having even chronotypes there's also just something to be said for it's also it's also a very very interesting form of cognitive diversity that we sometimes overlook so what you see is that our performance changes significantly within a day so all times of day are not created equal we tend to think that's the case but um generally what happens is that we're that that two-thirds of us forget about the owls for a second do better on analytic work heads down um focus kind of work we do better on that kind of work early in the day rather than later in the day owls do better later in the day rather than earlier in the day and so um but at the same point you you some i'll sometimes do better on some of the creative tasks a tad earlier not always and people like me who are right kind of in the middle will often do better on creative tasks a little later in the day because our mood is up but our vigilance is down so that gives us some kind of mental looseness but that's one reason that i write in the morning interesting um and it's something that i did something that i became even more dedicated to once i did the research on timing that's so interesting i i definitely am i feel more creative and i feel better equipped to better able to express myself specifically with podcasts and stuff like that if there's slightly later in the day yeah so i i my conversations are much much better if i have them after
lunch than they are if i do them in the morning it makes i mean makes perfect sense if you're an hour and so the idea here is what i don't like with owls is that we no no what i don't like the way that album treat it is that we we try to we put the onus on the people with these evening chronotypes to adjust when it should be that organizations are adjusting to them because you're loot you're losing one-fifth of the talent pool so interesting and i always find myself actually doing my work in the evening so during the day i don't even endeavor to do my work i do it when everyone else has gone in it's about six seven eight nine at night class after the gym yeah classic owl behavior ugh i need to get an owl necklace um so you wrote this book the power of regret yes and i mean you know that the title in and of itself is challenging because people don't perceive regret to be a thing that one should seek power from or that i mean it's not a positive thing to have regrets in life according to culture i guess my first question is why of all the things that you could write about and you told me you've got some google file of all these book ideas you have why did you have to write a book about regret because um i was dealing with some regrets of my own i'm at a point in my life where i suddenly looked up and i have mileage on me which is kind of shocking but i also have some mileage ahead of me and i want to be able to use it well and when i look backward i've realized that i had some regrets and what i found is that despite what exactly what you're talking about this idea that we have in culture that oh never talk about regrets regrets are bad they make you weak no regrets no regrets forward thinking positive um that when i talk to people about my regrets they leaned in they were interested and they wanted to share theirs and so i'm so glad you pointed that out because i didn't go with a more
elliptical side door title i wanted to put that word regret in big blue letters on the cover to challenge people and try to reclaim this word because regret is our most transformative emotion if we treat it right in the book you talk about various types of regrets what were the types of regret that inspired you to write this book you said you had your regrets there yeah well i mean i had so the well it was really reckoning with these regrets so i'll give you one regret that i had um uh which is i mean i had plenty of them which was um regrets about kindness uh when i was when i was younger when i was uh in in in primary school and secondary school and in um um university and even beyond um a lot of the regrets that i collect and i collected a huge number of regrets i had a lot of regrets about bullying people regretting bullying other people i was never a bully um but there were many many times when i was younger where i saw people being excluded not being treated right being left out and i knew i saw it and i knew it was wrong and i didn't do anything and that bugs me to this day it bugs me to this day really hell yeah yeah i mean i have yeah it still bothers me even talking to you about right now kind of my cortisol level has spiked a little bit and the here's the thing about regret so i could say i could take that and say no regrets no regrets never look backward always look forward okay that's a really bad idea or i could say oh my god i am the worst person in the world i am just horrible and that's debilitating that's an even worse idea what i want to do is actually listen to those regrets because regret does two things for us it clarifies and it instructs so the fact that those regrets stuck with me for 10 years 20 years 30 years that's telling me something it's telling me what i value it's telling me i actually value kindness
that something that's important to me and as i think about that i think well who do the people who are the people i admire a lot of the people i admire are kind people people who treat others well so it's clarifying and it's also instructing me what to do next now this is mundane but it here's the thing if i'm ever at a if i'm ever at a social gathering or any kind of gathering and i see you know sometimes there are people like clump together talking and every once in a while you see people sort of left out on their an island of their own i always reach out pull that person in and that is a consequence of being embarrassed and regretful about letting people be left out earlier in my life so regrets clarify what val what matters to us and they instruct us on how to do better why use a couple of examples in the book like you know angela angela jolie her quotes and stuff like that why don't why are we living in a culture where we don't ever want to admit we have regrets what is it about humans where the idea of having a regret is such a negative thing it's it's it's several things i mean part of it is is that regrets aren't fun they're aversive right they don't feel good all right they clarify and instruct and we might want the clarification and the instruction but you got to have a little bit of the pain to begin with so that's one thing second thing is that no one ever teaches us how to deal with negative emotions that's the big problem i think is that and so what happens is when people especially younger people feel a negative emotion they think oh my gosh there's something wrong there's something wrong with me i'm broken what's what's uh this camp this everybody else is so pi everybody else is so positive i must there must be something wrong with me when in fact they're just human beings and the other the third thing i think is that you alluded to this earlier is that it's a very we have become a very performative culture we have a culture where we're performing all the time rather than being authentic
and we like to perform courage so when we say no regrets that is play acting courage real courage is staring your regrets in the eye and doing something about them interesting and there's something there's something about i guess this is like a wider point i wanted to ask you about the book um which was people don't seem to like and i talk about this a lot in this podcast because it's something that i know one reason i talk about is because i know it's kind of slightly triggering but i also think it's kind of true which is people really don't like taking responsibility for their outcomes in life interesting point and now this sometimes this gets a little bit political or whatever i'm really not a political person um but i've noticed this trend of people not liking responsibility that not liking to be attached to their outcomes unless they're good outcomes right so if it's success we achieve something great that was me if something goes wrong that is uh the political party in charge that is someone else's fault etc etc and i i as i was reading through this new book of yours that theme kind of it felt like much of the reason people don't like to own their regrets is because then they have to own the responsibility and we're like shitty at that it's a good point because here's the thing regret requires agency okay it's a difference between regret and disappointment disappointment is hey things didn't happen and it wasn't my fault regret is your fault and you have to face that now here's the thing but when you do that this is the thing that bugs me is that when you do that when you face it first of all it's a lot easier than people think second it's a lot more beneficial than people think let's go back to some research again there's there's 70 years of research on this question about regret what it shows us is this i'll give you a small example let's say you're negotiating you're negotiating and you're in negotiation and let's say you make a first offer and
it's not a great first offer okay if you then think about that negotiation and consciously think about what you regret in that that negotiation you invite the negative feeling remember regret doesn't feel good you invite it you do better in the next negotiation you see this in problem solving i'm trying to solve a problem ah i didn't do it that right let me actually think about what i regret in that problem-solving exercise invite the negative feeling you do better in the next one strategy same thing over and over again what you see is that when we deal with regret properly when we think about it when we think about regret as a message as a signal it is a powerful force in doing better in making better decisions and being better problem solvers and finding greater meaning in our life it is a powerful it's an elixir if we deal with it right the problem is we don't know how to deal with it right so some of us ignore our regrets we put our fingers in our ears all right then others of us when we can't do that any longer become debilitated by it we wallow in it those are bad ideas both what we want to do is we want to think about our regrets we want to confront them and do something about them and there's a systematic way to do that and if we learn how to do that teach people how to do that they're going to be way better off that i was thinking about a particular friend of mine when you're saying that specifically on the point of regrets debilitating somebody and i was thinking about this one friend i have and i know the prospect of them really ever taking responsibility or admitting their regrets if i feel like they're they're a little bit too fragile in the i don't know the self-esteem whatever it might be to invite negativity you call it like inviting the negative feelings so what they do is like a self-defense mechanism is constantly um obfuscate their sort of responsibilities in any situation and the prospect of like thinking about things they regret i know they would put their fingers in their own run off so tell me what is the systematic sort of process for me having a conversation
with that person to get them to not be crippled by the prospect of inviting negative feelings because i think they would fall into the trap of wallowing in their own uh deficiencies as opposed to being motivated by it yep uh because they haven't been they haven't been taught how to do it well right okay so so so let's think about three broad steps think of it as inward outward forward inward out forward so inward and this goes to exactly what you're talking about how do we think about ourselves and our regret so a lot of people like the people you're talking about just want to boost their self-esteem all right the evidence again on self-esteem it's pretty good self-esteem is totally overrated especially when it's unhinged from any real accomplishment now self-criticism i love self-criticism there's just not a lot of evidence that it's very effective right the middle way is something known as self-compassion self-compassion it's a term pioneered by kristen neff who's a psychologist at the university of texas in the u.s it sounds a little gooey self-compassion but here's what it says treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt the reason your your friends want to boost your self-esteem is if they actually heard their self-talk it would be lacerating and vicious the way we talk to ourselves is so brutal and so cruel we would never talk to anybody out anybody that way right and so here's the thing it's like that old joke where a guy goes to a doctor's office and he says doctor it hurts when i do this and the doctor says don't do that all right don't do that treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt treat yourself with the same kindness you treat somebody else recognize that your mistakes and missteps are part of the human condition all right think about my regrets about kindness i've collected regrets from thousands of people around the world believe me i'm not that special there are plenty of people with regrets about kindness and also recognize that any single mistake or misstep is a moment in your life it doesn't fully define your life so that's
the reframing inward now what else you can do and here's the thing we're totally wrong on this talk about it disclose it disclosing isn't unburdening i'll give you i mean i as you know from reading the book i put up a website called the world regrets survey with two tweets i got 15 000 regrets from people in a hundred countries it's crazy why because they want to talk about it re disclosing isn't unburdening the other thing again let's go back to negative emotions and how we deal with them emotions are blobby they're amorphous they're abstract that's why positive emotions feel so good and negative emotions feel so bad so with negative abortions writing about your regret or talking about your regret converts that blobby abstraction into concrete words which are much less menacing so that's that's the second so so express hour and then finally you gotta draw a lesson from it okay and and here's the thing about us human beings we stink at solving our own problems we're terrible because we're too close we're too unmeshed in the details so what you should do is actually get do some techniques known as self-distancing and so for that you can do things like it's got sounds goofy talk to yourself in the third person you're deciding what to do how to respond to a regret don't say what should i do say what should steven do some good evidence of that other kinds of things and talk to yourself out loud either way either way any kind of self-talk like talking to yourself in the third person is actually advantageous there are other things you can do you can imagine having a conversation with yourself 10 years from now because i have a pretty good sense from analyzing all these regrets what i'm going to be concerned about 10 years from now and it's not going to be whether i bought a blue car or a great car it's not going to be whether i had pizza tonight for dinner or hamburger it's going to be other things and then another way to draw a lesson is the single best decision making tool that i know which is that you're faced with the decision about what to do ask yourself
what would i tell my best friend to do when people you give people people come to me saying oh dan i don't know what to do well what would you tell your best friend to do oh that's easy i you got the answer right there so express inward treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt express outward make sense of it through disclosure and language and extract a lesson from it by getting some remove and it's very simple it's very it can be very habitual and it is a way to transform these negative emotions into positive forces quick one as you might know crafted are one of the sponsors of this podcast and crafted are a jewellery brand and they make really meaningful pieces of jewellery the really wonderful thing about crafted jewelry is it's super affordable it looks amazing the pieces hold tremendous meaning and they are really well made i think i've worn this piece for almost a year it hasn't broken hasn't changed color because it's really really good quality and it costs roughly 50 quid people will be surprised when they hear that they'll probably assume that all of my jewellery is like solid gold and cost thousands and thousands of pounds but what's the point when you can achieve the exact same effect from a piece of jewelry that's high quality and costs 50 quid that's why i buy crafted counterfactual thinking yes really interesting topic that i was uh delving into your book and nothing chapter three and this idea that people have more if onlys than they do at least right in their life and the example that you gave and i i'm thinking about the graph on in chapter three in my head is about bronze medalists and silver medalists i find that really compelling can you talk a little bit about counterfactual thinking and how we can live um better more motivated lives by kind of yeah well it's something that it's counterfactual thinking is something that human beings do sometimes you know for all of our flaws our brains are freaking amazing we can do all kinds of things we can travel back and forth in time we can imagine things that never happen is our storytelling capacities are a very part of our essential part of our cognition
and counter factual thinking is just imagining what the word says events that run counter to the existing facts and so there's some interesting evidence from the olympics if you show people photographs of olympic medalists on the metal stand without showing them the metals they receive themselves what you'll find is that gold medalists look really happy not surprising they've just won a gold medal however you know who else looks really happy bronze medalists bronze medalists are usually beaming silver medalists they often don't look so happy even though they finished second in the world here's what and it's all about counterfactual thinking the bronze medalist is doing what's called a downward counter factual imagining how things could have been worse and so she says well at least i didn't finish in fourth place like that shmo over there who's going home without any medal at all the silver medalist does what's called an upward counter factual she imagines how things could have been better ah if only i had um pedaled a little bit harder if only i'd taken that turn a little bit faster i would be a gold medalist here's the thing regret is an upward counter factual it begins with it only if only blah blah blah at least make us feel better but they don't make us do better if onlys make us do better make us feel worse and they help us do better they make us do better by making us feel worse that's the thing it's this here's this this is why we have a problem with it in order to get the instruction you need a little bit of discomfort you need a little bit of pain and and and what's interesting about us and this is the thing as you exactly as you say we are much more likely to counter and if only than at least we're much more likely to do counter-factual thinking that makes us feel worse than feel better why are we masochists no because we are programmed for survival and regret is part of our cognitive machinery by imagining how things could
have been better and even in dealing with a little bit of that pain we improve in the future that's how we learn it's how we grow but in the world of social media where every time i open up instagram i engage in upward counterfactual thinking because everyone's life is better than mine yeah that's maybe a little bit too much feedback for a stable mental health it's like let's go back to the joke the doctor says you go to the doctor doctor it hurts when i do this and the doctor says don't do that you know so i mean i mean um here's the thing we know a lot about this we know a lot about social comparison um in the research and social comparison in general makes people feel worse and so what you should be doing the best way to improve is to compare yourself to your previous self that's the best kind of counter factual thinking that's the best kind of regret so if i go let's go back to my kindness regret i have a kindness regret not because oh my god my friend bill was kinder than me and he posted on instagram his all of his acts of kindness that's who cares i regret about kindness because i wasn't as kind as i could have been but current me is kinder than old me and that's progress and that brings meaning to our lives yeah it's really tough isn't it in this day and age to have a smaller context of comparison and i guess as you say the most the healthiest and the fairest um context of comparison is actually just like am i better than yesterday or the month before absolutely but here's the thing if people started sharing their regrets on instagram i think it would be trans i think it would transform the conversation well again i i've collected regrets now from 18 000 people in 109 countries just by putting up a website people want to share their regrets and the thing is when people and here's the other thing that we mistake this is important for leaders too we
fear that when we share our screw-ups our mistakes our vulnerabilities our regrets people will think less of us there's 30 years of research telling us in general not in every case but in general they think more of us okay let's play a game they admire our courage they admire our authenticity yes sir you said um it would be a much better world if everybody shared their regrets so let's share our regrets i'll go first we'll do three each you've given one already so you're getting to think of two okay um my first regret would actually be something and it's the first thing that came to mind is something you kind of you alluded to there which is um moments where i didn't practice enough enough empathy and i reacted without empathy so especially being an employer over the years um of course there's days where you are busy or you are trying to solve a bunch of other problems and your empathy slips in moments and i think those are the things that i still have as lasting regrets and you know it's funny when you told me about the story about being bullied someone being bullied and you not you seeing them being excluded but not necessarily speaking up about it and i played devil's advocate to say really really i would i thought of a kid i thought of a kid and i've and it's funny because i remember a couple of months ago thinking about him in my office and it's been 20 years and i still remember that kid being bullied for having like black nail polish and being you know wearing all black and having long hair and being a little bit different to the rest of the guys and i still think about i still worry about where he ended up yeah and about how i at the time because i was trying to fit into was definitely not stopping it yeah i'm not saying i was leading the charge but i was definitely not stopping it and that's funny that that stayed with me for 20 years that tells you something what does it tell me it tells you what you value you know think about all the things that happened 20 years ago that you have no recollection of yeah okay but that stays
with the fact that it's this regret stays with you for 20 years is a signal it's a signal it's telling you you know what i value kindness i value embracing people who might be different and it's also instructing you as a leader as a friend as a human being to say i'm gonna do a better job next time that's why it's valuable if you plugged your ears and said i don't care about that if you didn't have if we're not having this conversation you might not you might understand less what you value and you might be actually a less kind person in the future that's how a regret is transformative and you don't seem too traumatized by having this conversation i'm not no i'm not prioritized by it yeah that's my point it's like it's it's like we're completely over indexed on how threatening it is that the the specter of it is we we find quite threatening but once we disclose it we're fine and and also people don't think less of us that's because because what just happened here is the power of the power of regret i shared a regret with you you didn't think less of me for that i don't think all right and then and then what happened is like it triggered you to share another to share a similar regret which he said wait a second i have a regret like that maybe i'm not such an oddball and and i don't think less of you for for doing that i actually admire your willingness to share it with your legions of listeners that you have this that this seemingly you know um this person with this seeming ideal life this titan of the universe this guy who's on dragon's den is like has a regret about something 20 years ago and being uncan unkind i think that's actually powerful you know and so this is this is why we should be talking about our regrets here we go oh okay so um another regret that i have you tried to get out of that no i wasn't joking i'm joking um so um um so
i did something called a failure resume uh oh yeah i read about it a few yeah a few years ago where i listed my professional failures and screw-ups and there were plenty of them and my one and what i realized is that a lot of my big regrets and here's what it is it's like i have committed to projects okay i'll give you an idea so i have a regret about a business that i try to start with um taking some of the ideas and drive and turning it into like a training business and it was a total flop complete disaster and i realized the reason was is that i don't want to run a training business that's not what i want to do with my life and yet i did it i was i had the wrong motivation and i yeah i had the wrong motivation and i wasn't fully committed to it and as a consequence it flopped and so that is a regret now i could say oh no regrets no regrets every business you know a lot of business fails but for me the lesson is don't take on projects you're not fully committed to period and you know there's an old adage i think it's derek sivers the guy who founded um cd babies that i try to adhere to now which is that if it's not a hell yes it's a no yeah and and that's that's an important that's an important lesson so i have this flop in my past and and i regret it but what i really regret is not the flop itself but the decision-making screw-up that i had underneath it and that regret and the lesson you garnered from it will be is going to be a tremendously informative thing if you're if you have the humility the self-awareness exactly to confront it write it down and hold out in fact exactly right exactly exactly okay so i think you owe me one okay so i was thinking about thinking a little bit about what my next one would be and i think my next one is it's an ongoing regret interestingly it's actually one that i'm aware of and haven't corrected which is my relationship with my family like i'm well aware whether it's from sitting here reading the studies whatever else or even brony wears thing where she
interviewed people on their death bed and asked them their number one regret before they died i'm well aware that one of my big regrets in my life will be not being closed to my family but i'm not seeming to do a ton about it i'm like inching over the if you know if you looked at my my the effort i invested in my family it's definitely going in the right direction but just way too slow okay and my my my parents my dad in particular is not getting any younger he must be seven years roughly about 70 years old now and i know i'm going to regret it i know i'm going to regret it my dad is gone i regret it now but i don't seem to be shifting my behavior um as much as i should be because it's almost like i'm waiting for the day when it's too late it's a weird thing it's a really weird thing so that's a big ongoing regret that i anyone been listening to well call your mom like i'll call you dad but i just i seem to struggle with it for a number of reasons so yeah okay so one of the so in all these regrets that i collected around the world there were four core regrets that people had one of them was that regret right there connection regret which is the regret if only had reached out and its regrets about relationships not only about romantic relationships mostly not about romantic relationships about the full spectrum of regrets of relationships in our lives and i have so many stories so many around the world where people they want to reach out it's going to feel kind of awkward and the other side's not going to care so they wait a little longer now it's even more awkward and they're not going to care and too many times it's too late and the door closes fully and that is a regret that does not go away that does not go away so be right back well here where's my phone a few pieces of advice here all right and again as with all as always this advice is rooted in the research so let's talk about feelings of awkwardness we feel
like it's going to be awkward there is a pile of evidence showing when we do something like this it's way less awkward than we think all right second we think the other side's not going to care we're wrong about that the other side always cares and so um so i'll give you i'll give you a trick though all right here's what you do if you're wavering and you shouldn't be but if you're wavering make a phone call to the stephen of 20 of 10 years from now stephen2032 what does steven 2032 want you to do oh [ __ ] yeah so no comment we're done yeah when we're done i think we know what to do really interesting i think sometimes as well ego can play a role in it maybe not so much with family sometimes with family yeah the ego is always seems to be very concerned with victory and yeah you know and that seems to get in the way we we are completely over indexed on our feelings of awkwardness and that's also part of it because it's a little awkward it's a little awkward yeah it is a little awkward but here's the thing get over that push past the awkwardness again piles and piles of research on this we see it with some work on giving people compliments sometimes we don't especially at work we don't give people compliments because think oh they're going to think it's creepy and they're not going to care and it's going to be awkward nope people appreciate compliments we say bosses say oh i don't know if i should thank people because it seems gratuitous and they're not going to care uh no they like it you know um we're completely over indexed on awkwardness we think everybody is watching us and rating us like you know figure skating judges oh you know like your dad you're gonna you're gonna call your dad and your dad is gonna like oh that was a six no your dad's just gonna be psyched that you called you know and so and so that's and so so that's what it is i i gonna call my father within an hour of this podcast finishing okay that's my birth but you owe me another i do you know what i have a regret and this is something i'm wrestling with right now can i ask you a question yeah when you
tell me the regrets does it make you feel uncomfortable in any regard a little bit yeah because your body language changes yeah yeah no it makes me feel it makes me feel it makes me feel a little bit uncomfortable so it is mine yeah and that's okay because but here's the thing initially but it's a great observation i i would think i'm not watching my own body language but my guess is that once i discourage it i'm cool yeah yeah it's it's all yeah but it but here's the thing it's a little bit aversive but the thing is don't run from that just deal with it because once you disclose it it's it's fine so one regret that i have is that um i this is going to sound weird i mean it won't sound weird to you because you've done this is that i regret never having built something with a team that is more than a single product you see what i mean something that is more enduring something that that is in a book yeah well something that is that is more of a an organism that lives on that and that and that has a greater wider impact so whether i don't know what that is whether it's a non-profit or a business or anything like that but i've always been think i've always been sort of more artisanal rather than even inching towards something even more industrial and i regret not taking on that challenge now here's the thing i got time and so i'm thinking about that now the other hand the other thing to think about is like is that something that i really want to do and it might not be but that sort of bugs me a little bit it bugs me a little bit that is you know i i i'm i i'm proud of all the books that i've written and i'm proud that i created these things but they're all just one-offs that is you can stack them all right here
every about 20 years of work you can put between my two hands right now it would be interesting part of me thinks god i wish for something bigger i wish it were out there more in the world it's really interesting it makes me ask why like than a book books are seen as something that live on beyond the author right huge tremendous impact yeah but maybe it's i don't know some people tend to be intrigued by the thing that they didn't do so entrepreneurs are thinking i wish i wrote a book and maybe authors are thinking maybe i wish business you know what i mean it's like they say basketball players want to be rappers and rappers want to be basketball players so i don't know maybe but it's but it's possible to be it's possible to be it's possible to be both so that one that one doesn't linger with me as much as the as the others i haven't have another regret about and this is you know it's pathetic i just can't believe i'm not fluent in another language yeah yeah same yeah i mean just pathetic and uh you know and i've and i've like i've studied french i've studied japanese i've studied spanish and i'm not fluent in another language that's pathetic now if i had now again even the way i'm talking about it is not good because if you if okay here you go i'm violating my own rule here so i said pathetic right if you had told me um you can't speak another language i would not have said that's pathetic stephen but i say it's myself so what i should do is treat myself with kindness rather than contempt and look for ways to move forward but the good part of all of this is that you know for me i'm at a point in my life where again i got mileage behind me but i got some mileage ahead of me so i can do something about these regrets what i don't what worries me are people who get further along and the clock runs out that's a terrible place to be i don't want to be there okay my last regret my last regret is again an ongoing one which i seem to kind of it doesn't it doesn't burden me but it's definitely something that i have on a daily basis it's just my health decisions so
every day every week i probably consume a little bit too much sugar that i don't actually want to need to consume it's not doing anything for me it feels like a lack of discipline so and also i think i'm gluten free so every time i eat bread or pass or anything like that i have to suffer the consequences for about two days and i do it over and over again because i love bread and pasta but i pay the price every single week it's like this ongoing battle with like who i want to be and my what you know what my body wants me to do and what i end up doing that seems to be a rolling recurring regret and the pandemic taught me that our health is like our first foundation which is funny because you described this as a foundation right right um and i realized during the pandemic that there's this tectonic plate that sits under everything i've built and achieved in my dreams and my relationships which is my health and if you take away that tectonic plate in fact i have nothing so i got really obsessed about not obsessed but i got really focused on my health and i even went and did a health check for the first time ever in my life for no reason a full body two thousand pound health check because i really wanna what did you learn nothing i haven't i'm a perfect specimen of health the doctor said stop eating so much salt and i was like [ __ ] how do you know that so but other than that it was all good but yeah yeah yeah but i think the solution there a solution there is is to um don't depend on willpower depend on your environment to change your choice architecture so yeah you know if you order food from the grocery store order food first of all order food after you've eaten and then make sure you order food without added sugar yeah and you talked about habits earlier on i understood like what my habit cycle was so there was a drawer over there full of sugar and i videoed myself pouring it into the bin great and i replaced it with like healthier options so when i go through the cycle now perfect i've interrupted
the cycle perfect the types of regrets we have something you talk about a lot in the book and you identify this difference between genders as well which i find really interesting but one of the things as well you say which i think is a really important point for people is that people end up regretting the things the opportunities they didn't take versus the ones they did absolutely that's a really guiding principle for our lives right i think so i mean you see this especially as people age there aren't a huge number of demographic differences in regret but one of the biggest ones is that when we're younger we tend to have about the same number of action regrets and inaction regrets the same number of regrets about what i did and what i didn't do but as we age inaction regrets take over and i think there are a few reasons for that i think i mean one of them is that if we have an action regret we can sometimes resolve it or undo it if i hurt somebody i can apologize and maybe that can extinguish it a little bit but what really nags at us over time is what we didn't do regrets of inaction um and i think that there's a le i think there's a lesson in here which is that i feel like human beings we should have a slight bias for action we have a slight bias for action that that when in doubt act um and one of the things that i've learned not through this research but just through living is that a lot of times we try to figure everything out and then act and that's hard because we can't figure everything out but that acting is a form of figuring it out and so taking small steps and having a bias for action i think is is generally healthy life advice and and consistent with avoiding those big regrets when you're 70 or 80 saying oh if only i had traveled if only i had started a business if only i had reached out to people who are now gone yeah i am i was reflecting then as you're speaking about the advice that i've shared on this podcast before about barack obama him saying that when he had the big decisions he faced in his life like taking up bin laden or whatever he would get to 51 percent and then make the decision and be at peace and i reflected on that from my business
perspective because over time i'd learned that the consequence of like procrastination was tended to be much worse than the consequence of like trying failing and then going back to the drawing board right right it was because the time wasted in procrastination sometimes you waste two years thinking about doing something right whereas you could have ran the experiment in three months and found out the answer to yes or no and um and so yeah i think in my companies like over the years i tried to create this but as you call it the bias of action where we would set really diligent time frames and then we'd also be at peace with the consequences we wouldn't reward the teams based on the outcome we'd award them reward them or incentivize them based on doing the experiment exactly exactly exactly and this is i think that's actually really important because one way that i think about the world is sort of in in sort of through an economic lens which is like what is overvalued and what is undervalued okay so almost like like assets right so if you to me the planning as an asset overvalued acting as an asset undervalued um certainty as an asset totally overvalued experimentation as an asset undervalued and that and then when we think about that we just sort of okay let's let's think i'm going to buy what's cheaper and sell what's more expensive experimentation is just the for me is the everything uh you know not even i mean we talk about that word so much here you wouldn't believe but the reason why i use you see here today this podcast is number one in the apple charts at least number two on spotify because of rogan but number one is literally because i think we as a team um have a culture of experimentation where we like look forward to it and always as we we call say around here trying to find the one percent marginal gain somewhere right it's like try when the music you walk in if we make it house music try changing the temperature and see the impact that has and that that kind of thing this whole podcast
the setup of it you're looking at the the lighting everything can we find a one percent somewhere and those one percent compounding over time in our favor will they have a significant impact in it it always has in my life so it's my religion now uh experimentation is a good religion and and i wish in our schools we taught people better we did a better job of teaching people just the overall scientific method because that's how we should approach especially in business that's how we should approach our lives we should say what do what does scientists do we want to think like a scientist what do the scientists do they have a hypothesis they test the hypothesis they run a randomized controlled trial let's try a let's try b oh wow a is a lot more effective great i know that now now let's run another and that's not and that's how we should be thinking about it but we have this notion especially in business that to be in business you have to be this omniscient creature who's all-knowing and is infallible and that's really really dangerous and going back to your point about drive the principles which are most conducive with experimentation are that you got it autonomy mastery that's a great great point that i hadn't actually even made that connection until just now that's a great point that threaded through experimentation is you got to have some self-direction the whole point of experimentation is to get better that's mastery and you have to have a purpose behind it great point and then this difference between genders you described so men tend to regret they care more and women tend to regret more than men fa have family regrets yeah yeah those were not massive differences those those are not massive differences but they were they were present they were they were they were present it's one of the demographic one of the demographic differences the other thing which i didn't doesn't come up in in my own research but that there's some existing academic research one gender difference is um to oversimplify but not by much is that is on sexual regrets so men tend to regret the people they didn't sleep with and women tend to regret the people they did sleep with really yeah makes perfect
sense rings true you the failure resume thing when i when i saw that in the i think it was the seven points in the book about things to try um it felt quite depressive the idea of creating a resume of i mean on the surface yeah if i said to a friend of mine listen what you want to do is write down all the things you failed at yeah in a long list yeah it feels quite depressive because you don't stop there right you put that in one column if you stop there yeah you're totally right it'd be a total downer but what you do is you put those failures and screw ups and mistakes in one column in the next column you list the lesson you learned from it and in the third column you list what you're going to do next time but without those next two columns yeah it's an exercise in self flagellation but but it's an exercise in introspection and improvement if you explicitly find a lesson from it and then commit to taking action that that that benefits from that lesson and as this book goes off into the world now what is the impact or the shift in perception that someone listening to this podcast now or someone that picks up the book in the bookstore and what is that shift in perception you're you're hoping as the author to create or inspire what i want to try to do is reclaim this emotion of regret and show people that it's not a badge of shame it's actually a potent and powerful part of their life if they if they deal with it well that everybody has regrets regrets make us human and if we treat them right if we're grown-ups and think about them they can make us better and if we do that you end up with this cascade where people we normalize certain kinds of negative emotions and we have have this cascade where we're more open talking about it and people get better and better and better it's a brilliant book and it's a brilliant book because as someone that doesn't love reading books to be honest i like listening to stuff um as harry said it's fluff free so you know that every second or minute
invested in this book returns a minute of value as opposed to you trying to hit a publisher's word count which i see a lot of the times because i end up reading a lot of books when i do this podcast so thank you for writing a very important book one that's very challenging because it does debunk a conventional form of thinking that regret is this awful thing that we have to hide from and conceal and i think in getting people to be more open about the regrets as you've seen from our conversation here you inspire and you also liberate people from the [ __ ] that is weighing them down or making them feel inadequate in certain ways and it creates a culture of transparency and authenticity which as we all know is good on all bases of life to be open in yourself and to be living in line with yourself so thank you for writing such a brilliant book i hope everybody goes and gets it because it's one of the books that i'm really really glad i read irrespective of the fact that you were coming here so thank you we do have a closing tradition on this podcast which is the previous guest writes a question for the next guest and i don't get to see what it is until i open the book okay they've got great great handwriting okay interesting if there was one singular idea that had the most profound impact on your life what would it be brackets what's the first thing that comes to mind okay the first thing that comes to mind the first thing that comes to mind is a concept um from originally from i think john rawls who was an american philosopher that is known as the birth lottery the birth lottery and here's what it is that too often we look at our situation in life and we don't realize how much of it is the circumstance of our birth and that's true when things go south and it's true when things go well so i'm a case in point i [ __ ] lucked out how did i luck out
because i was born in america after world war ii and my parents both had university educations and i'm a white man and i'm straight and i won the [ __ ] lottery okay and if i didn't do something with my life it would be pathetic now here's the thing suppose that i were born same me but i was born in a village in guatemala in 1850 i might not have lived to be 30 years old how about if i go back even further in time sorry is okay so you can see by looking at me i have glasses on i have terrible vision all right i can't see like like like like i asked my ophthalmologist what is my vision in numerical terms and she says you're legally blind okay so imagine if i were born 400 years ago there's i'd be a dead man all right and so a lot of times our circumstances are the product of this birth lottery and when we realize that we actually can use our privilege as a force for good but we can also have empathy for people who didn't who didn't win the birth lottery and actually try to create a world in which everybody has a fair chance it weirdly unfortunately can also create a bit of entitlements in some people absolutely if they don't realize it that's my point yeah absolutely it's like so so you know so you look at some people it's like oh i work for everything i have and that's true you did work but the thing is you won the bird lottery you also won the birth lottery you had a you had a huge advantage you know and and you look at you look at people who are you look at people in this country or any in in in the united states who are immigrants particularly if they were forced out of their uh out of their home country and how to remake a life in a place where they didn't speak a language that you know i didn't have to do i didn't have to do that and um and you look at people one of the things that i've discovered over time is you know even things like what you look at it look like as a form of a birth lottery like in america as like a a tall
straight white man i walk into a room nobody immediately says oh he doesn't know what he's talking about oh he's here because of special privilege right if i were a if i were a woman if i were a person of color if i were disabled if i were gay they would say wait a second i don't know and so and so now that now does that mean that again it's sort of like i mean i haven't thought about this it's sort of like dealing with regret okay so i could ignore that saying oh no no birth lottery that's nonsense blah blah blah blah blah or i can say oh my god i deserve to be punished because of this or i can say let's think about it what do i do i have an obligation to use my privilege as a force for good and i have an obligation to make the world fair and that's what i do with it amazing thank you so much daniel for your honesty it's uh tremendously inspiring and uh thank you for your time today you're someone i've followed for a long time so it's a real honor to sit here with you i have so enjoyed this conversation i really have thanks for having me amazing [Music] [Music] [Music] you