The Science of Success Podcast

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Stay Social While Staying Distant - How to Strengthen Your Network During COVID-19

Lace Gilger
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In this episode, we explore the science of networks and human relationships, uncover how people you’ve never met have a huge impact on your life, and look at how we can respond effectively to the COVID-19 pandemic with our guest David Burkus.

David Burkus is a best-selling author, speaker, and associate professor of leadership and innovation at Oral Roberts University for over 10 years. He is the bestselling author of four books, most recently the Audiobook Pick a Fight: How Great Teams Find a Purpose Worth Rallying Around. David’s work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, USAToday, and more. David has been ranked as one of the world’s top business thought leaders by Thinkers50 since 2017.

  • Get good ideas out of the ivory tower and drag them into the corner office. 

  • Don’t make life-changing decisions based on a sample size of one. 

  • The difference between what we think and what research actually says

  • We delude ourselves into thinking our results are the result of our own performance and skill much more than they actually are. 

  • Our results are much more driven by teams and people we surround ourselves with. 

  • You are NOT the average of the five people you spend your time with. 

  • “The three degrees of influence” - everyone you are connected to, and everyone they are connected to all have an influence on you and your life. 

  • A friend of a friend of a friend has an impact on your obesity rate, your habits, your happiness, and your career. 

  • The Framingham Heart Study - studying 30,000 people to understand what causes heart attacks… lead to some incredible understandings of networks.

  • People you don’t know have a statistically significant impact on your health and happiness.

  • We don’t know WHY the three degrees of influence phenomenon exists. 

  • We need to re-frame networking... no one likes going to networking happy hours.

  • Meeting random strangers is one of the least valuable ways to network. 

  • The two BEST things you can do to maximize the value of your network

    • Develop a system to check-in with people (weak ties) on some kind of regular basis

    • It’s much better to grow your network through the “Friend of a friend” than meeting strangers cold. Help people get connected. Build new connections through existing connections. 

  • Which weak ties should you re-ignite? What friends and lose connections in your network should you reach out to?

  • “No reply needed, I know you’re busy right now."

  • You don’t need to have something on your calendar to reject someone’s request to meet, just say you don’t have the “capacity" to do it.

  • What are the lessons we can learn from the global response to COVID-19

  • Ask yourself “what are we fighting for?"

  • The big question we must ask ourselves is - what do we do when this is all over? What is normal? What looks like normal?

  • America is the most polarized we’ve ever been… perhaps this crisis can bring us together. 

  • “The ally fight” - here’s who we are helping

  • “The revolutionary fight” - changing a norm

  • The best leaders in history don’t cast a vision, they put everyone else’s vision to words. 

  • Ask yourself 2 simple questions:

    • What do we do as a business?

    • How does what you do help us do that?

  • Collect stories that convince them they are in the right fight. 

  • “Job crafting” and cognitive reframing:

    • The tasks you do - do you do them differently?

    • Your relationships both internal and external - how does the work that you do help their fight?

    • Cognitive reframing…  

  • People are more motivated when they hear CUSTOMERS and people who are AFFECTED by the work via their stories - than hearing the CEO said the company mission for the 1000th time. 

  • Company culture is about:

    • Stories.. stories that get shared about the way you served a particular customer. 

    • Rituals...

    • Artifacts..what artifacts do people encounter on a daily basis that reinforce the culture?

  • Homework: By the end of the day, scroll all the way to the bottom of your text messages and say hi. 

  • Homework: If you are in a leadership role, now is the time to start asking your people

Thank you so much for listening!

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Episode Transcript

[00:00:04.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:11.8] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success; the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the Internet with more than five million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries.

In this episode, we explore the science of networks and human relationships, uncover how people you’ve never met have a huge impact on your life and look at how we can respond effectively to the COVID-19 pandemic with our guest, David Burkus.

Are you a fan of the show and have you been enjoying the content that we put together for you? If you have, I would love it if you signed up for our e-mail list. We have some amazing content on there, along with a really great free course that we put a ton of time into called How To Create Time for What Matters Most In Your Life. If that sounds exciting and interesting and you want a bunch of other free goodies and giveaways along with that, just go to successpodcast.com. You can sign up right on the homepage. That’s successpodcast.com. Or if you’re on your phone right now, all you have to do is text the word smarter, that’s S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222.

In our previous episode, we discussed how to ask better questions, shared lessons from solving some of the world's most interesting challenges and talked about why you need to think about the job to be done with our guest, Bob Moesta.

Now for our interview with David.

[0:01:36.2] MB: David Burkus is a best-selling author, speaker and Associate Professor of Leadership and Innovation at Oral Roberts University for more than 10 years. He's the best-selling author of four books, most recently the audio book, Pick a Fight: How Great Teams Find a Purpose Worth Rallying Around. David's work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, USA Today and much more. David has been ranked as one of the world's top business thought leaders by Thinkers50 since 2017.

David, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:02:04.4] DB: Oh, thank you so much for having me.

[0:02:06.0] MB: Well, we're really excited to have you on the show today. One of the things that I really like about your work is similar to what we focus on here at Science of Success, you have a big focus on having evidence-based research and applying things from science and research and actually making them really applicable, which I think is just such a great perspective and something that not enough people are doing today.

[0:02:29.5] DB: Oh, no. Thank you. This show, you guys are speaking my language, right? We were on that crusade from a long, long time ago. The way that I always describe it is I'm trying to get good ideas out of the ivory tower and drag them into the corner office, where nowadays the co-working space, or the spare bedroom, wherever work is getting done in 2020’s economy. We're trying to drag those evidence-based ideas into that to let you be able to do your best work ever.

[0:02:52.1] MB: It's such a great perspective and it's something that literally informs the mission of this entire podcast, because I feel there's so much – to me, research and science and evidence, it may not be a perfect foundation for knowledge and there's certainly flaws and things get revised and that stuff. To me, if you're going to look for some foundation of truth to build your understanding the world on, it’s a pretty darn good place to start.

[0:03:15.4] DB: Yeah. I mean, I agree. The thing that has always boggled my mind is how much we tend to latch on to the inspiration and motivation that comes from one person's story. Those are great. I mean, they make great movies and that thing, when we hear the rags to riches stories or those things. In psychological literature, which is my background or in any science, we would call that a sample size of one. You really shouldn't be making life-changing decisions based on a sample size of one.

Once you zoom out, I mean, the thing that I don't think a lot of people realize is that you can read the biography of a famous CEO, or you can read a study of 200 different CEOs, some of whom became famous and some of whom failed, compare the successes to the failures. Ironically, more people want to read the sample size of one than want to read that paper, but there's a whole lot more insights in that one that's looking at 200 different CEOs.

[0:04:04.7] MB: Totally true and such a great perspective. Meta studies and looking at bigger datasets is a critical component of really trying to actually understand reality, as opposed to just deluding yourself, or looking at a story that has survivorship bias and all kinds of other things baked into it.

[0:04:19.3] DB: Yeah, absolutely. Even just the idea that if you go to that person, like one of the analogies I use sometimes and I don't like this at all because I'm a Philadelphia Eagles fan, but the analogy I always use is if you had to learn football, would you call Tom Brady, or would you call Bill Belichick? I mean, obviously if the only person that'll talk to you is Tom Brady, great. But I don't want to learn from him, right? I want to learn from his coach. Even though his coach is an out-of-shape guy who hasn't been on the football field for anything other than coaching for decades, right? [Inaudible 0:04:47.4] mind, because he's studying multiple different players. He's studying beyond even his team. Sometimes he's doing it quasi-legally. He's studying lots of different things, and so he has a much better perspective than the person on the field.

We have this celebrity or hero-worship culture, where most people I think would actually want to hear it from Tom and that's a huge mistake. I would much rather train with the person that made Brady Brady.

[0:05:11.3] MB: At a high-level, what are some the biggest meta takeaways that you've been able to pull out of academia and really make very applicable that are evidence-based to improving yourself and being successful in life and then business?

[0:05:24.8] DB: Yeah. I mean, I think the biggest one and probably if there were a through-line through all of the different books, every book that I've written has tried to say, here's what we think, but here's what the research actually says. The big unifying thread through a lot of them has to do with teams. I don't know if this is a Western thing, an American thing, but I sense that it's actually a global thing, that we really tend to believe that our results are just the result of our own performance and our own skill far more than they are.

I mean, everything from creativity and innovation to your health, to your success in life is usually a result of the team that's around you. Some of this has been in that motivational speaker, right? We pay lip service to the idea that oh, you're the average of the five people you meet. Most of us never really act on that. First of all, realize that it goes way bigger than five. It's also not the idea that those people just push you. It's the idea that information flows through those people to you. The way that you see the world and the decisions that you make is dependent on those people in your team, but we tend to prize that solo idea a lot. The world and your success, all of it runs on teams.

[0:06:27.9] MB: That's a really good insight. You touched on one of my favorite findings and then things that you shared in your work when you mentioned that you're the average of a lot more than just five people that you spend your time with. I'd love to explore that topic just a little bit deeper.

[0:06:40.9] DB: Yeah. A lot of this comes out of my book Friend of a Friend. I'll tell you the most nowadays the way that it's worked, I get out a lot of hate mail from – this quote is originally from Jim Rohn and I actually have no problem with the quote. I wrote a Medium article, maybe two years ago about how he's wrong. I get a lot of people mad at me, because if you search for the Jim Rohn quote now, my article is the third thing you see. We get a lot of traffic to it and then I get a lot of people that are angry at me.

The truth is it's much bigger than that. We've known this for about 20 years now. 15 to 20 years, these two researchers Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler. It’s actually really fun. Nicholas Christakis has become one of the trusted voices as we navigate this COVID-19 pandemic crisis, because he's a network scientist. He studies how networks work.

One of the things that he and his co-author, James Fowler, found is that they call it the three degrees of influence. Yes, the people that you're closest to influence you. It's not just the five that you're closest to. Everyone you are connected to influences you and not just there. Everyone they're connected to influences you and everyone they're connected to. Your friend of a friend of a friend, right? Three degrees of separation or as they call it, three degrees of influence, still has an effect on everything from your obesity rate, or your level of physical activity, whether or not you have destructive habits like smoking or drinking, your happiness level, your career, all of those things are influenced by the community that you're a part of, not just the five people you’re interacting with most, right?

By all means, the research to support the idea that mastermind groups and really trusted teams are important and they help you in your success, but you also need attention to if you're going to invite someone to be an influence on your life, you should probably pay attention to what community you're pulling them out of, because that community is going to have an influence on you, whether you know it or not.

I mean, candidly as a parent, this is something we instinctively know, because when we're deciding who we want our kids to hang out with – We're not judging the kid. The kid doesn't know anything. We're trying to learn as much as we can about the parents. That's one degree of separation, or the community. It sounds really snooty for me to say this, but come on, we all do it because we all realize that that kid is going to influence my kid, but he's going to be influenced by those parents, so do I like those parents and that determines whether I'll let my kid hang out with him. We know that as parents. Very few of us act that way in our own life though, which is a big problem.

[0:08:57.9] MB: So interesting. I want to hear a couple of the stats, because there's some amazing – the level of impact is truly astounding, even on people who were a friend of a friend of a friend, or three degrees of separation away from you.

[0:09:08.6] DB: Yeah. Specific to the studies that Christakis and Fowler have done, there's three that I think are most interesting and I hinted at them. The first is obesity rate. To back up, if you will, because this is one of the few shows where I can get super nerdy like this. What Christakis and Fowler did was they used data from this thing called the Framingham Heart Study. My wife is a physician, we know all about the Framingham Heart Study because it's how we figured out what causes heart attacks basically.

Medical researchers in the New England area chose Framingham Massachusetts and set up shop there and studied basically the entire town, 30,000 people and counting have been a part of this study. We're almost three generations now. What it is is they basically recruited volunteers in that town and checked in with them on a regular basis. Not an annual physical, but multiple times a year and they took a lot of health data, right? The body weight and whether or not you smoke and cholesterol levels, blood pressure levels, all that sort stuff.

They also took a lot of social data. They didn't know what they were going to do with it. They just collected it. They asked questions like, “Who would you go to if you had an emergency? Who do you interact with the most?” All of these questions that Christakis and Fowler realized they could use to create a model of the network of the community of Framingham Massachusetts.

Because the study at the time that they found this data had been going on for 30 years, they could actually build a model that would change, that would progress. They could see the way new connections were made or people moved out of the community and all that stuff. It's actually really cool. If you're listening and you want a really fun thing to Google, Christakis has a TED Talk where he shows the video. You can also find the video on YouTube of this network changing in real-time.

Now they've got this network of people that are connected to each other and they've got the health data, so they can study how those two things interact. Their first finding was that your friends make you fat. I mean, you know what he said? We said it before. It sounds rude to say it. If you were around people who are obese, you have a statistically significant likelihood of becoming obese in your future. This is not correlational data. This is causal, because we're watching it develop over 30 years. We can see the link.

The same thing with smoking rates. Actually, the rates were cessation. Is that how you say it? Cessation of smoking. If you were around people that are non-smokers, you are more likely to quit smoking. If you're around people that do smoke, you're not going to quit in that 30-year period of time.

My favorite and this is where I get nitty-gritty on even percentages is was of happiness. There were questions in there. They actually used a survey. It's the reverse. They used a survey meant to figure out what the rates of depression were, but there were four questions in this larger, I forget how many questions, it’s either 10 or 12. There are four questions that have been used as a proxy for happiness or life satisfaction questions.

What they found is that if you are surrounded by people that are happy with their life, you are more likely to be happy with theirs. Your friend of a friend of a friend, so someone three degrees of separation, if the majority of those people that you don’t know, that you haven't met yet, but you have three links back to you, if the majority of them say that they're satisfied and happy with their life, you have a 6% greater likelihood to say you're happy with yours.

This sounds weird if you're not into the research. You're like, “Oh, big deal. 6%. That's nothing.” Well, it's actually a huge deal. There's very few things that can decrease your happiness or your chances of being happy by 6%. For example, if I gave you a $10,000 raise tomorrow, really a nice thing to do actually in today's current environment. I'm going to give you extra money. If I gave you a $10,000 raise tomorrow, that would only increase your chances of saying you're happy with your life by about 2%.

We've got three times. I mean, you really can't in the data say $30,000 worth of happiness, because it doesn't really work like that, but it's pretty close to that. We've got a massive, massive impact on your happiness that would take tens of thousands of dollars to buy just by the people that you are around.

Similar studies, I haven't dove into the research but, Christakis and Fowler, that research got picked up by a lot of different people. Literally if you google three degrees of influence, you will find all sorts of teams of researchers finding this to be true in so many different areas. It's fascinating

[0:13:00.3] MB: It's so crazy that people who in many cases you've never even met, who are friends of friends of friends of yours actually have a impact on your health. You made a really key point a minute ago, which is this isn't just correlation. It's actually a causal relationship as well.

[0:13:16.0] DB: Yeah. This is not a cross-sectional study. It's a longitudinal study, if we're going to get to nerdy terms. Cross-sectional is when I just do a screenshot capture, right? Here's what it is on this specific day. The longitudinal research allows you to build that model, watch it change and you can – now it's not as strongly causal as say, double-blind placebo-controlled study, like we do in medicine or something like that. You really can't do that study. This is as causal as a social network, or even an economic study can be, because you're watching it develop over time, which I think is huge.

The other thing I should say is what I find really funny about this phenomenon of the three degrees of influence is we don't know why yet. There's about four different theories of why this three degrees influence thing is – The best that I've ever heard explained and it was explained by Christakis is the idea that it's about norms. If you think about the bodyweight thing, what's an acceptable amount of weight to carry around your waist? What's an acceptable portion to eat in a meal? You're subtly influenced by watching the people around you and that shapes your norms and your senses of abilities.

We haven't proved that yet. That's just the leading theory. We still don't know why it is. I mean, I think it goes back to before we were civilized people. We are a tribal people, even from the beginning, and so it just makes sense that we take our cues about things from the people around us. What we don't realize is that if we're doing that, the people around us are also doing that, which means they're taking the cues from people we don't see, which really means to be honest with you, we need to start seeing them. We need to be able to explore that fringes of the network. We need to realize it's not our network. It's the network and we're just a part of it.

[0:14:46.9] MB: So interesting. I want to take this concept of network science and let's zoom that out a little bit and apply it to the current climate that we're interacting with. As we record this, we're right in the midst of the COVID-19 outbreak and this episode will most likely go live while it’s still happening. I'm really curious from that perspective. What do you think about this and how are people looking at it?

[0:15:09.9] DB: Yeah. I mean, there's a couple different things. Like I said earlier, my wife is a physician, so there's the sheer shock of how devastating this thing is and I don't want to make light of that in any fashion. From my world and my background, the last two books that I worked on, one was on networking and one was on how do you bond a team through that sense of purpose? Both of them were seeing play out in real-time. Here's what I mean; one of the biggest arguments that I made in Friend of a Friend, which came out in 2018 was that we need to reframe networking.

None of us want to go to those networking mixers, those unstructured events. We don't want to mix it up at the conference, right? Barely anybody stays for the happy hour at the end of the conference. We all think, “I need to escape back to my hotel room and check e-mail.” We don't want to do it anyway. There's a small group of people, let's say 10% of the population, the mega extroverts that like to do it and the rest of us like to hate those people. Just being totally honest.

The good news is that when you look at the act of networking, the verb of networking from a network science perspective, you find out that's not all that effective anyway. It's actually a better strategy to do two things really well. If you do them really well, you can skip any of these unstructured meeting strangers events.

The first is developing a system to be checking in with people on a regular basis, what we would call checking in with your weak ties, or dormant ties. These are specific terms. We're all really good at checking in at our strong ties, the people that we see every day, the people that we live with, the people that we work with, the people that we’re friends with. We're really good at checking with those people. Some of it happens by accident. Those people influence us more than anyone else.

The problem is we also think a lot alike, because of everything we've been talking about; the closer they are, the more they influence you. When you want new ideas, new information, new referrals to meet new people, if you go through that group, you end up having a very homogeneous network, because everybody thinks alike, acts alike, etc.

I mean, there's research and I covered in this the book that we are not a country of red states and blue states, or even red cities and blue cities politically. We are a country of red neighborhoods and blue neighborhoods. On the county or zip code level, people are segregating by that, which I think is fascinating because nobody – I mean, I guess around election cycle, we put the signs. Well, I don't, but some people put the signs out on their front lawn.

It's actually little things. If you drive a Ford F-150, I have a pretty good idea of who you're going to vote for in November, right? If you drive a Subaru, I have a pretty good idea of who you're going to vote for in November, right? We pick up on these little things and we chase that comfort. The people that are close to us and the people that they could potentially introduce us to, that's more of the same.

Your weak ties, the people you know but you don't really know all that well, you don't see them all that often and your dormant ties, which are people that you knew for a time, but for some reason or another, they fell by the wayside. These are your college friends, your former co-workers, those people that just life happens and you don't see them as often. They're a potent source of new information, new ideas, new opportunities, new referrals, because they're somewhere else in the giant network connected to a different group of strong ties. You get the opportunity to go through different from them.

Now why I think this is a really – I'm optimistic in that regard of networking is that this is actually a really good time to skip the meeting strangers thing, because you can’t, right? The events are canceled. We're all at home. This is a time to reach back to those weakened, dormant ties. The number one objection I normally got for two years when I would say you need to reach back out to those people we haven't talked to anymore – I mean, Matt, can you guess what the number one objection to, “Hey, Matt. You should be reaching out to the people you haven't talked to in a year or two years?” What do you think the number one objection is?

[0:18:37.9] MB: Hmm. Don't have the time?

[0:18:39.1] DB: Don't have the time. I mean, that's one and we have all of them. One more. One more.

[0:18:42.5] MB: I don't know what I would talk to them about?

[0:18:44.0] DB: Yeah. It's just so awkward, right? What am I going to say? I don't know what to do. I don't know what to say, and so I'm just not going to do it. I started calling it the clock of awkwardness, or the stopwatch of awkwardness, right? You talked to somebody and then the stopwatch starts. The longer you go, the more awkward it is the next time you reach out to them.

The crisis that we’re in literally affects everyone. I was on a Zoom call yesterday with someone in South Africa. We were talking about how South Africa is handling it. The day before, I was talking to somebody in Australia and we were talking about how Australia – Anyone in the world is at least thinking about this crisis, which means that it is totally appropriate to send an e-mail, or a text message, or even a phone call to anyone in that dormant tie category and just say, “Hey, I was thinking about you today and I wanted to check in. How are you holding up?”

You can even pro-offer help or anything like that, but just the act of saying, “Hey, wanted to check in and see how you're doing,” is a little touch point that can turn into a bigger conversation. Obviously, if they want to do it, right? If they don't want to talk, then that's fine. You can't bring everyone back into your circle. Now is the one time that all 7.7 billion people on this planet have a reason to reach back out to each other, to send goodwill to each other and it won't ever be seen as awkward, because why wouldn't you check in on the people that you care about?

In a weird way, that actually gets me encouraged that this thing that I've been telling people to do for a number of years now, pay attention to those weak and dormant ties and reach back out to them is something we all have the potential to do. Like you said, the first objection you gave me was don't have time. A lot of us have that time now as well.

[0:20:15.2] MB: Such a great strategy. I want to make sure I caught both pieces of this. You said the two best things you can do, one is to check in with people with your weak ties on a regular basis. What was the second thing?

[0:20:26.2] DB: Ah, yeah. I never got to it. Sorry. I got on my little rant about how now's the best time to reach back out to them. The second thing is that it's much better to be growing your network through the friend of a friend than meeting strangers, which is why the book is called that. I call that your one degree of separation, your hidden network, your friend of a friend, whatever you want to call it.

I think now is actually a pretty good time to be not only checking back in with those weak and dormant ties, but being generous with your network and potentially introducing people that are in your sphere of influence to each other and then also asking for introductions, or pro-offering introductions, that idea of getting people connected. That's more a time function than anything else.

The number one reason introductions between two people don't necessarily work is that we try and make them and we run out of time to follow up and they never actually have that chat. Now is a pretty good time to do it. We were talking about before recording, I'm overwhelmed at this point with it, but it's encouraging because it means people are doing it. I'm getting invited to these Zoom or Skype happy hour conversations on a almost daily basis, which is basically the smart people are doing it this way. I'm going to reach out to 10 people and say, “Let's get together on Friday at 4.”

I know that some of them know each other and I know that some of them don't, but I'm trying to create that community, trying to create those introductions for people. Now is a good time to do that as well. Like I said, this is the same one, when the book came out that I was arguing. If you do those two things, reach back out to your weak and dormant ties and then try and build new connections through your existing connections. You'll find that that's so effective that you don't have to worry about meeting strangers, which is great because it's really hard to do right now.

I mean, there are some people that are taking this time and using it to send cold e-mails to Mark Cuban to try and get his attention, which was wrong before the crisis and is definitely wrong now. That idea of trying to just cold outreach and convince people, or going to that networking meetup and trying to meet everybody, it didn't work all that effectively then, it's even less effective now. The two strategies you can use are the ones you should have been doing anyway. Weak and dormant ties and going to that one degree, that friend of a friend introduction piece.

[0:22:25.3] MB: I want to come back to the Zoom happy hour thing, because there's a question about that that I'm really curious around. It applies well beyond that, but we can use that as a specific example. How do you think about saying no in the context of networking, social engagements, that kind of thing and how do you think about which weak ties are the ones that you should reignite?

[0:22:46.2] DB: I mean, I'm not actually all that choosy. I'm going to answer in reverse order. I'm not all that choosy on which ones you should reignite. There are some people in your life, there are definitely some dormant ties, people you haven't talked to in two years and there's a very good reason you haven't talked to them in two years, right? We're not talking about those people.

Pretty much anybody else, it's worth doing. In my mind, there are all sorts of software now and things you can do to build a habit and say, “Oh, it's been 90 days since you talked to this person, or it's been six months since you talked to this person.” Reach back out. I don't like that, because I don't find it as organic. My goal for people is when they pop into your head for whatever reason, you should reach back out to them, right? I sent an e-mail today to some people, I would call them weak ties. We almost did some business together, but then we didn't for various good reasons. I'm not sour about it. Just didn't work.

They're in Seattle and I was reading a story about how Seattle is handling the COVID crisis and I thought, “You know what? I should check in with them.” I sent an e-mail to two of them and just said, I mean, literally exactly what I was encouraging people to say is, “Hey, I was thinking about you today, because I saw this. I just wanted to check in and see how you're all doing. If I can help in anything, let me know, etc.”

Actually, what I often do with these people too is I write, “No reply needed. I know this is a rough time.” People reply anyway. The reason I write ‘no reply needed’ is I want them to know I don't have an agenda. I'm just legitimately checking in and trying to send them well wishes. If they have the time, I'd love to talk to them. If they don't, no worries. I'm not offended by that.

In that is actually the answer to your first question too, which is so much of this right now I think is a function of time and whether or not you have the capacity. When we all suddenly watched our entire late March and April calendars just reset and every out appointment was cancelled and all that stuff. Some people, probably the mega extroverts, because they were going to go into with people withdrawals in this situation.

Some people started organizing a lot of this stuff right off the bat just naturally, which is great and super encouraging. For some of us, it created a problem of time now. I have too many things to do between my live-streamed yoga class and my Zoom happy hour and homeschooling my kids. I have too much stuff to do now, so I have to say no.

I think time is really the function that most people ought to be using for no. The weird thing is we think that when we decline an invitation because we don't have time, we need to specifically have something already on our calendar at that time in order to legitimately reject the request. I don't do that. I got to give a caveat here, because this is a Science of Success Podcast. I don't have data for this. This is all anecdotal what I'm about to say.

What I've taken to doing is I will say, “I'm so sorry. I don't have the capacity to make that work in my schedule right now.” I could have nothing on my schedule for that afternoon. I just would feel overwhelmed that I needed some downtime, right? That's what I mean when I say capacity. I'm not really blaming, like I can't do it right now because I'm booked, because that only works if you're not booked.

What I often say is I can't do it, because I don't have the capacity to do it right now. Then either pro-offer, like we could circle back a little bit later or something else. That's the polite way that I've learned to decline people. To be honest with you, if that came from as soon as I was an author getting all sorts of requests to like, “Hey, would you write this unpaid piece for our newspaper article to promote your book?” At first, you do it because you want the book out and then people keep offering and eventually, you have to be like, “No, I don't have the capacity to write that much stuff. I just don't.”

I've learned over time, again no data. This is a sample size of one, so I'm breaking my own rule here. That's what I've learned is when you're turning people down, don't lie and you don't even have to say, “I'm booked.” You can say, “I don't have the capacity to do it,” which is highly dependent on the individual person what your capacity is, so it's never a lie.

[0:26:13.1] MB: I love that strategy and really the permission to say just because you don't have a meeting on your calendar, doesn't mean that you don't have the attention, the time, the energy, whatever to take that meeting is a great – really, really great mental model or heuristic to think about that.

It reminds me of a story, one of my favorite little anecdotes from Tim Ferriss is he talks about he has the time for his mom to call him for one minute every hour, but he doesn't have the attention to deal with that. It's the same principle in some sense, but I really like that word ‘capacity’, because it's a great way to simultaneously give yourself permission to say, “Okay, just because I don't have a meeting at 3:00 doesn't mean that I can just take this call or take this meeting that's going to distract me and draw me away from what I'm really trying to focus on.”

[0:26:59.5] DB: If you're the type of person that can get away with being like, “No, because I don't want to,” then great. That works really, really well. I think that offends more people than it doesn't. It's basically saying the same thing, right? The reason I don't want to is 99% of the time, it's not because I don't like the person inviting me, it's because if I do that, I realize that I'm going to over stretch myself, or I'm going to have to give something else up or whatever. I've started leaning on that word capacity pretty profusely. I found that I've never gotten, “Oh, come one. I know you’re free this afternoon.” I've never gotten that. I've just gotten a, “Yeah. Yeah, I totally understand. A lot of us are stretched,” and that works really well.

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[0:29:23.8] MB: I want to zoom out even further and talk about some of the broader social implications and lessons that we can extrapolate out of dealing with this whole crisis.

[0:29:34.7] DB: Yeah. I think this is a massive time where we're seeing – we were talking right at the top about how that big misconception around individual talent, your results are the result of your just individual strengths and weaknesses, knowledge, skills and abilities, whatever. Really, it's a function of the team. We've never seen that at this global level.

The other reason I'm almost – I don't want to say encouraged, because I'm not encouraged. People are dying. It's not that type of thing. But I'm inspired by our ability to meet that challenge, because I don't know that we've ever seen a truly global – I use the term fight, because the most recent book is called Pick a Fight, but we've never seen a truly global struggle. The results of it have actually been amazing.

The way that communities and countries are sharing data and working together and collaborating on stuff, I mean, the thing that really made this apparent to me was in the initial days of this crisis, if you follow the whole thing, let's say. I mean, started before this, but let's say Jan 1, people started seeing what was going on in China and going, “Oh, this is pretty serious.” Most of us at that point were still, “This is pretty serious. I hope they find a way to recover.”

Most of us weren't thinking about ourselves and our own country until late February, early March. Even then, we weren't taking it seriously. Then around mid-March when we truly realized that this is something that could kill millions of people, we started seeing borders come down, even though they were closed. Travel-wise, they were closed. Information-wise and collaboration-wise they were open like never before.

We started seeing people doing research on – I mean, there's no cure for a virus, but people doing research on what medicines could lower the symptoms faster and get people in recovery faster. Normally, I mean, you know this because this is the academic community. Normally, you don't want to get scooped, so you do your research and you hide it and you play it really close to the chest, because you don't want anyone with this.

Instead, we saw doctors and researchers creating websites to post their paper and going, “We don't have time for peer review in the hidden world of journals. Our peer review will be putting up a website and letting you look at our data. If it helps, you could do it.” That's how we found what medicines we should be using and all that stuff.

We're seeing companies that have manufacturing capacity, but don't manufacture what's actually needed, re-learn and even work with each other. The thing that I think is the craziest is Ford Motor Company working with GE and 3M, which are two other major manufacturing things. Ford going, “We have the capacity to produce ventilators, but we don't have the know-how.” 3M and GE being like, “Oh, we have the know-how here. Let’s figure out how to do it together to create more ventilators, which is something that we desperately need.” We're seeing this on such a huge level.

Ironically, this is the main thesis of the book that I came out with a month ago. Now, I have to say I did not predict this at all and my evidence of that is that I published this book as an audio book only on the assumption that leaders, just like that our podcast listeners are also audio book fans and that they would prefer to read this on their commute to and from work, that no one has anymore because no one's commuting to and from work.

Not the best medium, but the message is about how when there is a global threat, when there is a global struggle or a need for reformation or revolution, really disparate communities find a way to bond very, very quickly. There's a ton of research out there about team building and that stuff and all of it is about working together and better understanding, etc. None of it really paid attention to this fact that if you can point to a threat and you can say that thing is an evil in the world that will affect us all if we don't work together, humans have always actually been good at putting all of those differences aside in those moments and working together. We've seen it throughout history.

I don't know that we've ever seen it on a global level like this. Even World War II was half the world fighting the other half of the world. Humans do that all the time. The other thing that I saw that was encouraging, it made me want to write Pick a Fight, is that we know about purpose, we know about start with why, we know about why we need to be purpose-driven companies, or people, or all that stuff, but how you define purpose is really, really vague.

The argument in Pick a Fight was that if your people or you can answer the question, what are we fighting for? Even if you don't use fight language ever, but if I ask you that question and you understand what I mean and can give me back an answer, then you have a sufficiently inspiring, actually motivating purpose. If you have something other than ogro revenue or shareholder value or something like that that doesn't motivate people. This isn't again one of those examples, where the entire world old is united in one global purpose, because if you ask anybody, I mean, literally I don't think people frame it like this as often, but if you thought about it for three seconds, if you're staying at home, if you're not listening to this in the car this week like you normally do because you're working from home, you are engaged in this fight to save the lives of your fellow humans. We are all fighting for this.

Even if it doesn't feel like it. Even it feels like only doctors and nurses and people making ventilators are fighting, we're all fighting together by this. You are literally motivated to do that work of staying home. I mean, Tiger King on Netflix helps, but you're motivated to stay home because you see it as this is this thing that we are all fighting together and we need to overcome. We need to put up aside all of those differences. If it means stay at home, it means stay at home. If it means mask up and get to work, it means that. We're all motivated and inspired by that, because we all have this purpose that meets that what are you fighting for litmus test.

[0:34:40.5] MB: Yeah. Great insight. There's a couple different avenues I want to explore coming out of that. Ine of the most interesting things that I was looking at and I don't know if this directly applies to your work, but I think it's worth getting your perspective on. I saw some research recently that was talking about how you hear these people talking about the collapse of society and the probability of that – could that happen, all this stuff. Actually saw a really interesting study that was talking about during times of crisis, humans actually become more pro-social and band together. It's really the opposite of that doomsday scenario. The reality is that these are the exact times that we stick together and we team up and we support each other.

[0:35:19.2] DB: Yeah. I mean, you almost always see, natural disasters tend to be the ones that are the most pro-social, because in those situations there's no one to blame. This is actually one of the points we put out in the book. In normal times, your fight can't be you against some other competitor, because that doesn't actually motivate people. I mean, it does, but it motivates them to act unethically, or in anger, or things that aren't actually overall productive.

We tend to see that in natural disasters where we would predict, “Oh, there's going to be this and that.” In reality, people act more pro-social. Now that's not everyone, right? In hurricane situations, there is still looting because there are some jerks there. There's a whole lot less than they should be.

I live in the middle of the country where that's been the big thing since this whole stuff started is people are stocking up on guns and ammo. I'm like, “Guys, you're not going to need that.” If you're really worried about people breaking into your house, put a sign that says, “We're in COVID-19 quarantine,” on the front of your house and no one will break in, right?

[0:36:10.5] MB: That's good insight.

[0:36:12.5] DB: In reality, what happens throughout history when we feel whether it's attacked, like September 11th, I think it was Hirohito. I'm bad in my history on this, but after the Pearl Harbor attack in World War II, it was either the emperor or was General Hirohito have said we have awakened a sleeping giant. Because what they didn't realize was that now these people feel even more threatened, and so they are going to bond together even more.

We almost always do that. I mean, this was the impetus for Pick a Fight was I was upset that we talked about that as a, “Huh. Isn't that interesting?” What we don't say is that while we understand the importance of purpose and of having a good why and having a cause and a mission and a vision and all of that stuff, we're not actually leveraging that bigger thing which is we as a people love to fight for a just cause. We'd love to fight for something to remove an evil in the world, even if it's an evil that hit us and we come back late down.

What's the Tony Stark line from Infinity War, right? We're not the defenders. We’re the Avengers, so we need to go and actually avenge this. We act that way. Sometimes we're the defenders and sometimes we're the avengers. Whenever those negative events happen, that is our natural response is, that pro-social behavior.

Again, there's biological reasons or sociological reasons we could talk about us as a tribal creature for, but I just think it's because one of our huge underlying motivations is that we want to make an impact in the world. When we're in times of crisis, it becomes easier for people to see what that impact they can make is, and so they do it.

[0:37:44.3] MB: What are some of the – and you touched on one or two of these already, but I want to explore deeper some of the lessons that we can learn and start to apply as leaders from both this global response to the pandemic and also from all the work and the research that you did for Pick a Fight and your other work.

[0:38:02.4] DB: Yeah. I think the big thing that we need to be asking is what do we do when this is over, right? As we're recording this, this is the time to talk about it. For the first couple of weeks, I get it. Every leader, every team leader, everyone was trying to figure out how this thing was going to reset their lives. We're at a point now where we have a pretty good hand. I can't tell you what's going to happen, but it feels like things are settled. We have a plan of action. Life's not going to go back to normal tomorrow, but we can look a few months out and see things going back to normal.

The big question for leaders is do we want to go back to normal, right? We've seen the way that this outside crisis and we saw this September 12th, 2001 was the best day to be an American. I mean, the tragedy that happened the day before was horrible. It was horrific. The way that we were bonded on that 12th was amazing. Unfortunately in lack of a threat over 20 years, we've now moved back into we're the most polarized we've been well in 20 years, right?

I'm not saying the prescription is to hope for another crisis or another attack. I think the prescription for leaders is to use that ability to influence and inspire to point to some other crisis in the world. On an international level, there are a host of global crisises, yeah, that's the way to plural that, that we could go after. Even in your own company. One of the things I've been encouraged to see is as I was writing the book, I was working with a couple different companies, large and small, really just stress test these ideas before I put them out there in the world. So many of them have come back and actually said, in this time we redefined our fight, or we double down on it.

One of my buddies is an entrepreneur that runs a chain of personal training studios in Canada. Just like there as here, every gym, every person, all of it is closed. His entire business is forcibly closed. No mistake he ever did. If you asked them before what are we fighting for, we're fighting to get people healthier, we're fighting to keep people alive, because we know that actually, even in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, we know that if you are relatively healthy, you are at much less risk, right? We're fighting to keep people alive through health. That didn't change when the government forced their gyms to closed.

In a matter of a week he said, “You know what? We're still fighting the same battle. How do we fight it in this current environment? All we have to change is our strategy. We don't have to change our fight.” Within a week, they had pivoted to this entire system where if you were a former client, you can still get on and work personally with your former trainer that you just do it over distance, over video call, etc., right? Because they were still willing to fight.

That's I think the big thing for leaders, if you had a good answer to that question, what are we fighting for? Then what you need to be worried about is how the strategy changes because the environment changes, but the fight doesn't change. If however you're like a lot of organizations, I mean, 8 out of 10 people in the world are disengaged or actively disengaged in their job, so there's a lot of organizations that might say they have a purpose or a mission statement, but really don't have a fight. Now is the time to point to that thing.

I outlined a couple different templates of fights in the book. I think the one that works the best for a lot of organizations is either the ally fight, which is what things like Ford are taking advantage of now, here's who we helped by continuing to exist. Or the revolutionary fight, which is this is a norm that our industry has accepted and we refuse to accept that any longer. Those are two that are really, really solid for refocusing people's attention on bigger things. It's not about market share or profitability. It's about changing the environment to bring more justice to it, or to bring a better outcome for our customers, our clients, whatever it is. It's about changing that.

I mean, it's literally a revolution. I think now is the time as we're looking to the rest of this year and to the future, to pull that lesson back and go, “Yeah. My people have known what it is to help fight for something now, so I need to point to that bigger fight moving forward.”

[0:41:45.6] MB: If you feel you don't have a fight, how do you start to think about one?

[0:41:51.9] DB: Yeah. I have to answer this on two levels. There's a leadership level and the individual level. On the leadership level, one of the grand ironies that I found is that what you – it’s not just enough to say, “I don't think we have a fight.” You might actually be better off in that situation. The bigger problem is thinking you have a fight and realizing that your people think they're fighting a different fight, right? You think that you do a good job.

This is a big misconception about leadership in general. Leaders don't cast a vision. We talk so much about that; casting a vision and getting buy-in on the vision and mission. The smartest leaders in history don't do that. What they do is put to words the vision that people already had, right? Martin Luther King gave an amazing speech to the Million Man March about his dream, but the 600,000 people that tuned in to hear, what they actually heard was their dream. He just put it to words.

I really don't like that it's called the ‘I Have a Dream speech’, because literally what he's doing is he's saying everybody's dream. he's finding a way to put it – Well, not everybody, but everybody was their dream. He's finding a way to put it to words. Your biggest thing in my opinion is to look at what resonates with your people. There's a bunch of different ways to do it. There's activities that we can do to do it or whatever.

The quick-and-dirty is this, find some time over the next two weeks to ask everybody on your team, pull them aside for 90 seconds. Tell them they're not in trouble. This isn't a pop quiz. Your job doesn't depend on this answer. Ask them two really simple questions, what do we do here? What business are we in? What do we do? Then how does what you do help us do that? What you'll find is that depending on their answer, they’ll either talk about how your company exists inside the industry, or how your company exists with customers, or how it plays against competitors and all of those things are going to give you a hint at what template, like I was talking about the revolution and the ally fight, what template you can use.

If they talk a lot about the industry and how they're different from the industry, then what will probably resonate most with them is that revolutionary fight. If they talk a lot about the customers, then it's probably the ally fight. Your job at that point isn't to come up with your own vision, it's to put to words that vision that they already have. Then after that, it's to collect stories that convince them that they are fighting the right fight. You don't have to keep spouting the vision.

I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've rolled my eyes, because I've worked for a company where the senior leaders are great at saying the mission statement and no one else remembers what it is. We hear it, we roll our eyes, because we know it would be different in 18 months when they read a different book. You know what I'm talking about. We've all been there. Your job shouldn't be to do that. Your job should be to collect the stories that tell people they are in the right fight. That's on the leadership side.

On the individual side, it's actually the same questions, but what we call in the psychological literature, this is referred to as job crafting. It's that cognitive reframing. You want to pay attention to three different areas in the work that you do, the actual tasks that you do. Do you do them differently than other people because you found a better way to do it? That might be a little mini-revolution. Are there some that you do and they totally drain you?

You might even think about taking them off of your list, because you don't see how they answer that question what do we do here and how does what I do help us do that? You also want to look at your relationships. Not only customer relationships, but the people that you work with that would be your internal customers. Can you see a real through-line about how the work that you do helps their fight maybe?

Then lastly, there's that cognitive reframing, which is really flows out of the tasks and relationships piece and is really about that idea of okay, if I look at these different templates and I look at what I do and who I do it for, what's the best way that I can reframe that? The best example of cognitive reframing is that John F, Kennedy line where he is touring around NASA and he talks to the janitor and he says, “Oh, so what do you do for NASA?” He says, “Oh, I'm helping put a man on the moon.” He is, because he's helping feed into that system. He's done a great job of cognitively reframing what he does. The task didn't change, the people didn't change, but the way he thinks about it didn't change.

Again, depending on if you're in a leadership role and you have the ability to do that survey and set, here's what I think we're fighting for, you definitely need to be doing it. If you don't have that, or you're a solopreneur or something like that, then we just need to look at it that individual level and how can we job craft in so that we feel the work that we do answers the flight that we're called to fight.

[0:45:48.7] MB: Great piece of advice. I want to come back to the idea of collecting stories to help convince people they're in the right fight. Because you touched on something that is very common phenomenon in the workplace, which is somebody reads a business book and then they come in and the mission is this. Then six months later, it's a new mission, etc. How do you avoid that mission creep, that purpose creep, the shifting sands and really stay focused on the fight?

[0:46:13.2] DB: Yeah. Well, I mean, so first of all, you stay focused on the fight. This actually makes me a little sad. If I can nerd out for a bit, one of the mega professors of our generation is Adam Grant, right? We know him as the give-and-take guy. We know him as the originals guy. There was a study that he led on I think it was something to the effect of the salience of purpose, or the salience of mission. Basically, it looked at whether or not employees of a company were more motivated by hearing their leader talk about what they did, or were more motivated by hearing customers of the organization talk about how that company helps them,

and you know where I'm going with this. It wasn't even close, right?

We are naturally more motivated when we hear it from people who are directly affected from our work, than the people who are leading our work. I think the big thing there is either staying on mission all the time, or stop. It's not your job to say the mission all the time. Then that'll help fight mission creep right off there. Your job is to affect company culture. If you run an organization that is large enough to where you don't directly touch every employee, they don't directly respond to you, then you need to rely on company culture to shape their behaviors, not your own charisma.

I mean, there's a bunch of different research on company culture, all sorts of different models and that stuff. I'll boil it down to this. It's about stories and rituals and artifacts. Stories are exactly we've been talking about; the stories that get passed around about the way that you serve that one customer. The nerdy example and it's a little outdated, but there's this example about Nordstrom, which is a huge customer service company and they tell this story about a person who came in and wanted to return his tires.

Then because customer service is super important, the Nordstrom employee said, “Yeah, yeah. How much did you pay for them? We’ll refund your purchase.” Nordstrom doesn't sell tires. They're not Sears, right? They just sell clothes and a couple other luxury department store goods, but he did it anyway because that would have been what satisfied the customer. That's what I mean when I say stories. Or that story of the person that's been anything, that's been positively impacted by your fight.

Artifacts are those visual images, those physical things that you can point to that really help convey that sense of mission. One of my favorite companies in the universe is the WD-40 company, not just because I love their products, but because they have been really focused on if you ask them what they're fighting for, they'll actually say each other. They've been really focused on we just happen to sell WD-40, but our real reason for existence is to create a community and a culture where everybody can thrive.

They use the term ‘tribe’. Depending on where they are, what offices – I mean, they’re a global company. They have usually first-world, or aboriginal, or there's a teepee in the front of their home office, which is cultural appropriation, but you get what they're going at, because they're using all these visuals to reinforce the idea of try. That's artifact.

The last thing is rituals. What are those little things that we do? I have a good buddy of mine that runs a minor, minor, minor, minor, minor, minor league baseball team in Georgia called the Savannah Bananas. Their big fight is they're fighting for the fans, because baseball is basically ripping off fans. The tickets are too expensive. You get nickel and dime, you get in there, the game itself is boring. They have this little ritual where they say they stand for their fans.

If you went in in the normal week and you walked into the box office to buy tickets or something like that, every employee that sees you walk in will stand as if you're the president, or a Supreme Court justice or something like that. Just a little ritual, but it reinforces that idea of what we're fighting for.

That's your real job as a leader. It's not to get up there and bloviate and spout this thing. This is where I think the era of casting a vision has dealt us wrong. It's not about your own charisma at that point. If you run an organization that's large enough, it's about how do you collect stories, how do you determine what artifacts people are going to encounter on a daily basis and what are the rituals we can use to reinforce that idea of this is what we're fighting for. That is what builds up company culture and that is your real job as a leader.

[0:49:53.5] MB: Fantastic advice. We've touched on a number of really valuable strategies, ideas, insights, etc. What would be one action item that you would give to listeners to take some concrete action to implement, one of the things we've talked about today?

[0:50:09.6] DB: Yeah. I'll give you two, because we’ve talked a lot about this networking piece in a world of COVID and we talked about the purpose piece. The first on the networking side is by the end of the day and the easiest way to do this actually, take your smartphone if you've got one, if you got a dumb phone, you could still do this, but it's easier. Open your messages app, your text messages app, scroll all the way to the bottom, because if you didn't know this already, it's sorted by frequency of interactions.

The person you haven't talked to in the longest is right there at the bottom of all of your messages. Send that person a text message and just say, “I was thinking about you today. How are you holding up in the midst of all of this?” Just say that and see what they say back. It will probably provoke a larger conversation and it'll be great to catch up with that person. If it doesn't, do it again on the next most one until you get that.

Now is the time to be doing that, because first of all – I don’t want to say we all have the time, because our capacities are different, but we will all receive that message as a beneficial message, as a non-awkward message, so now is the time to do that.

On the leadership side, if you are in a – or on the purpose side, if you are in a leadership role, now is the time to start asking your people. Just the one-on-one randomly, ask one of them. Every time you're on a call with them this week, ask one of them to stay and just throw them that 90-second question. “Hey, what do we do here then how does what you do help that?” If you're not in a leadership role, that second question is the more important. What do we say our purpose as a company is and then how does what I do help that?

You may have never actually thought through that and that's actually all you need is to figure. The fancy term in the research literature for this is ‘task significance’. All you really need to do is draw that line between the work that you do every day and the person who's helped from that. That's often enough to increase your productivity, your motivation, your inspiration, even just your general feeling of well-being as a result of doing that. Now we've got a little bit more capacity in our schedules to do that deep reflection. Ask yourself that question. How does what I do help with that larger organizational mission?

[0:51:56.9] MB: David, where can listeners find you and all of your work online?

[0:52:01.7] DB: Yes. I'll tell you, if you're listening to this and you've been listening to this all the way through, then the single best place would be the show notes for this episode. Scienceofsuccesspodcast.com. Matt and his team do an amazing job with details of this whole interview, but then also all the links. I mean, my last name is really hard to spell and weird and didn't you're not going to pull over and type it in anyway. Just double tap the cover art, right? Or go to the show notes for this episode, because you already love Matt's work and I'm there. I hope you do, because I hope we keep this conversation going, but that's probably the one best place on the entire interwebs if you're listening to this. That's the best place to connect with me.

[0:52:33.4] MB: David, thank you so much for coming on the show, sharing all this wisdom, some great advice and some really interesting insights.

[0:52:40.5] DB: Oh. Thank you so much for having me.

[0:52:42.1] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an e-mail. My e-mail is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s M-A-T-T@successpodcast.com. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener e-mail.

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