FTA - The Godfather of Influence, Dr. Robert Cialdini

In this episode we discuss an old trick palm readers use that you can leverage to get people to do what you want, why persuasion does not lie just in the message itself, but rather in how the message is presented, what the research reveals about why the context matters as much, if not more, than the content itself, why you shouldn’t ask people for their opinion but instead ask someone for their advice, how small differences that seem trivial make a HUGE impact on human behavior, and much more with Dr. Robert Cialdini.

Dr. Robert Cialdini is the president and CEO of INFLUENCE AT WORK. He is the multi best selling author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way To Influence and Persuade, and his most recent book Influence, New and Expanded: The Psychology of Persuasion​, available this May. He is also currently a Regents Professor Eremites of Psychology and Marketing at the Arizona State University. Commonly referred to as “The Godfather Of Influence” Robert’s work has been featured around the world with clients such as Twitter, Microsoft, London Business Forum, SXSW, and more.

We discuss:

• How very small differences can have very big effect on human behavior.

• How researchers boosted their response rate from 29% to 77.3% with one simple question

• How can a photo change your ability to solve problems more effectively?

• How to create a state of mind in your recipient that makes them more open to your request!

• This one trick palm readers use that you can leverage to get people to do what you want

• The Power of persuasion does not lie just in the message itself, but rather in how the message is presented

• How did a small change in communication greatly affect the United Kingdom's tax collection.

• Context matters as much as or more than content

• How can you ethically leverage the concepts of pre-suasion?

• One thing you can do to hack job interviews using this simple tactic

• Why you shouldn’t ask people for their opinion but instead ask someone for their advice

• Ask yourself “What is it about my message that will make it most wise for people to say yes to it”

• Is it possible to use pre-suasion on ourselves?

• How changing a simple image can greatly improve your ability to solve problems.

• "Tell me what you’re paying attention to, and I'll tell you who you are"

• And much more!

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

Commit Action pairs you with a dedicated accountability coach whose sole job is to give you clarity on what needs to get done and the accountability to make sure you do it.

Our coaches help you eliminate overwhelm, destroy self-sabotage, lock in laser focus and help you get more done in a few days than most people do in a month.

This January, Commit Action membership includes a 6 part digital workshop to optimize your plans for 2021! Learn how to lock in goals hard-wired to avoid self sabotage, then put them into action with our productivity coaching.

Dial in your optimized 2021 game plan. Double your productivity in 30 days. No will power required.

Use coupon code “ScienceNewYear” at checkout to receive a $100 discount on your first month of membership!

Want To Dig In More?! - Here’s The Show Notes, Links, & Research

General

• Robert’s Website and Wiki Page

• Influence at Work website

• Robert’s LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook

Books

• Influence, New and Expanded: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini (Pre-Order May 4, 2021)

• Robert B. Cialdini’s Amazon Author Page

Misc

• [Website] Influence at Work

• [Book] Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini

• [Book] Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade by Robert Cialdini Ph.D.

• [SOS “Weapons of Influence Series”] Series Playlist

• [SOS “Weapons of Influence Series”] Why An Almost-Empty Cookie Jar Is More Valuable Than A Full One

• [SOS “Weapons of Influence Series”] Why Co-Pilots May Ignore Instinct and Let A Plane Crash

• [SOS “Weapons of Influence Series”] Why Ugly Criminals Are 2X As Likely To Go To Prison

• [SOS “Weapons of Influence Series”] Why You Should Always Ask the Guy in the Blue Jacket for Help

• [SOS “Weapons of Influence Series”] The Power and Danger of a Seemingly Innocuous Commitment

• [SOS “Weapons of Influence Series”] How To Triple the Rate of Your Success With One Simple Question

Episode Transcript

ANNOUNCER: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet, bringing the world's top experts right to you. Introducing your hosts; Matt Bodnar and Austin Fabel.

[00:00:21] AF: Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet with over 5 million downloads and listeners like you in over 100 countries. I'm your co-host, Austin Fable, and today we have an absolutely incredible interview from the archives for bringing it back, the godfather of influence himself, Dr. Robert Cialdini. This was a truly major turning point in the show. Matt and I had both been and still continue to be huge fans of Dr. Cialdini and his work. His book Influence was actually the first real personal development/nonfiction book I'd ever read. It was the catalyst for me getting interested in this world and a lot of the things we discuss in this podcast. His interview was incredibly relevant. His story is impactful and we had a great time speaking with him.

But before we dig in, you knew it was coming, are you enjoying the show and the content that we work very hard to put out every week for you? If so, there are two incredibly easy, yet very impactful things you can do for Matt and I. First, leave us a quick five-star review in your podcast listening platform of choice. It's going to help other people find the show just like you. You're going to be doing your part to help impact lives. And we thank you. Next, go to our homepage at www.successpodcast.com and sign up for our email list today. As I'm sure you know by now, our subscribers are the first to know about all the comings and goings of the show, but you also gain access to exclusive content you won't find anywhere else.

Now, are you on the go? That's fine. Sign up for the email list just by texting the word SMARTER, that's S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44222 and you'll be signed up immediately today. Now, if you haven't already, check out last week's episode with Gay Hendricks and Carol Klein. We dig into how you can create more conscious luck in your life. Find yourself in the right place at the right time more often. And some of the real life stories behind finding and creating your own luck.

Now in this episode we interview our incredible guest, Dr. Robert Cialdini. Dr. Cialdini is the president and CEO of Influence at Work. He is the multi-best-selling author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion and his latest book, Pre-suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade. He is currently a Regents; Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University, commonly referred to as the Godfather of Influence, as I mentioned earlier. Robert's work has been featured around the world with clients such as Twitter, Microsoft, London Business Forum, South by Southwest and more. This is a truly incredible interview. Like I said, a turning point for the show. No question about it. Without further ado, here's the interview with Dr. Robert Cialdini, the godfather of influence himself.

[00:03:01] JM: Bob, welcome to the science of success.

[00:03:03] RC: Thank you, Matt. I’m pleased to be with you and your listeners.

[00:03:08] MB: We’re incredibly excited to have you on here today. I’m sure, many long time listeners will be familiar with you and a lot of your work. I want to focus on your new book, Pre-Suasion. We’ve talked — We’ve done a whole series on the show about the principles of influence and how vital those are. Tell me a little about how did you go from the six principles of influence to the concept of pre-suasion?

[00:03:33] RC: It took me a long time. It was 30 years between the writing of the book Influence and Pre-Suasion, and the truth is I never had an idea big enough to compete with the impact that influence had had. I didn't want to plan to push next to this tree that influence had become. I wanted to wait until I had another seed for a tree, and that didn't arrive until the idea for persuasion.

Opposed to Influence, which covers what best to build into a message to get agreement, pre-suasion describes the process of gaining agreement with a message before it's been sent, and although that may seem like some form of magic, it’s not. It's established science.

[00:04:23] MB: Tell me a little bit more about that idea. How can we get someone to buy into an idea before we’ve even presented it to them?

[00:04:31] RC: There is a key moment that allows a communicator to create a state of mind in recipients that is consistent with the forthcoming message. It's the moment in which we can arrange for others to be attuned to our message before they encounter it. That's a crucial step for maximizing desired change.

For example, in one study, when researchers approached individuals and asked for help with the marketing survey, only 29% agreed to participate. If the researchers approached the second sample and preceded that request with a simple pre-suasive question, “Do you consider yourself a helpful person?” Now, 77.3% volunteered. Why? Because when they were asked before the request if they were helpful, nearly everyone said yes. Then when the request occurred, most agreed to participate in order to be consistent with the recently activated idea of themselves as helpful people.

[00:05:41] MB: That’s fascinating, finding — Basically, more than doubles the effectiveness by simply asking a question which leverages the commitment consistency tendency.

[00:05:51] RC: Right, and there's a further study that shows that it's not simply getting people to make a commitment publicly. It's getting them to reflect on a particular trait that they might have. In another study, people were asked to try a new soft drink. Somebody walked up to them on the street, handed them a flyer that asked them to try a new soft drink. To do so, they had to give this stranger their email address. Under those circumstances, only 30% were interested in doing that. If at the top of the flyer there was a question, “Do you consider yourself an adventurous person?” Now, 55% gave their email address to a stranger so that they could access something new. What these researchers did was put people in touch with their adventurous side simply by asking the question, and then people behaved in a way that was congruent with that adventurous side.

[00:07:05] MB: I believe you’ve talked about in the past how you used to be a palm reader, and this is similar to the lesson that fortunetellers and palm readers used to get people to sort of agree with what they're about to say.

[00:07:18] RC: Exactly. I learned how to be an amateur palm reader, and I tried using the system in various ways to see how accurate it really was and I found that it wasn't any good at all at describing who people were, what their fortunes were. It was very accurate at getting people to reflect on a particular aspect of themselves, that I could claim I saw in their palm.

For example, supposed I was reading your palm and I bent back your thumb and I said, “Matt, I can tell from the resistance here that you are very stubborn person. If somebody tries to push you in the direction that you don't want to go you're going to push back.” You might do more than just refuse, you might do the opposite out of resistance and reactants.

What that will do is send you down a memory shoot of the times when you were, indeed, stubborn and resistant and you will say to me — You’ll hit some instances and you’ll say to me, “Yeah, that's right.” That's who I am.”

Now if instead I bent back your thumb, very same thumb, and said, “You know, Matt, I can see that you're actually a flexible individual. You're willing to change your mind if you encounter information to suggest that you've been wrong in the past.” That will send you down another different memory shoot where you will encounter times when you were flexible and you will look up to me from that palm that I'm reading and you'll say, “That's right. That's who I am.”

I can get you to focus on a particular trait or capacity that you have, and as result, make you more likely to think of yourself as that kind of individual. There's an old saying that; tell me what you're paying attention to and I'll tell you who you are. If you're always watching sports on ESPN, I can tell that you’re a fan. If you're always reading gourmet magazines, I can tell that you’re a foodie by what you're paying attention to.

Well, with the new behavioral science tells us is that getting you to pay attention to something doesn't just reveal who you are, it makes you who you are in that moment. I can make you a flexible individual. I can make you a stubborn individual by what I focus you on first.

[00:10:24] MB: It's fascinating, and even when you're saying those examples, as you’ve said it, I sort of felt myself almost in a reaction just starting to think about all the time that I've been stubborn. Then when you switched to flexible, I started thinking about, “Oh, yeah. All these times I’ve been flexible,” and then I caught myself and I was like, “Hold on, I'm getting primed to think about these things.”

[00:10:44] RC: Right, and that's the trick that palm readers use, but it's now something that is available to communicators to move us in various directions. We have to be very careful. When we encounter a message, not simply to look inside the message for evidence of the persuasive strategies of the communicator, we have to ask ourselves what happened just before I received that message.

I’ll give you an example, there was a study done of an online furniture store that specialized in sofas. For half of their visitors to their website they sent them to a landing page that had as its background wallpaper fluffy soft clouds. For the other half of the visitors, they went to a landing page that had small coins, pennies, as the landing page depiction, background depiction. Those people who saw the clouds then rated comfort as more important in buying a sofa than before. They then searched the site for comfort related information and they preferred to purchase more comfortable sofas.

Those were sent to the background landing page of small coins, pennies, rated cost as more important in their decision of buying a sofa. Search the site for price information and preferred to purchase inexpensive sofas, and when they were asked afterward, “Did those clouds or coins make any difference in your choices?” They laughed. They said, “Of course not. I’m a freestanding entity. I decide based on my personal preferences of who I am and what I want.” They didn’t recognize that the clouds and the coins changed who they were and what they wanted in that moment.

[00:13:09] MB: I think you’ve raised two really, really important point, and I wanted to dig into each of these. One sis this idea that the importance, the notion that the persuasion doesn't necessarily lie just within the message, but rather the context of the message is presented in the things that happened before the message. Then the second thing you just brought up, which I think is vital and really underscores how important, how powerful, and sometimes how insidious this can be, is the idea that people consciously have no awareness of the fact that they're being primed to think these certain ways and make certain decisions based on what they would consider consciously to be completely irrelevant factors.

[00:13:50] RC: Exactly. I’ll give you another example. A study was done in France where they went to a shopping mall and had a very attractive young man walk up to young women who were strolling along through the halls of the shopping mall. He stopped them, gave them a compliment and asked them for their phone number so he could call them for a date later.

Under most circumstances, his success was dismal, where they were passing various kinds of stories. Only about 13% of the time did he get a phone number, even though he was selected to be very attractive movie star looks kind a guy, but if they were passing one particular kind of shop, his success doubled. It was a flower shop, because flowers are associated with romance and not one of these young men when asked afterwards recognized what had happened to them.

[00:14:54] MB: That reminds me of another example, which I think tell me if this is the same sort of psychological tendency, but I think it was when people were purchasing wine in a wine store, if they put on German music, it was like 70% of the purchases would be German wine. If they put on French music, 70% of the purchases would be French wine, and yet when they asked consumers if the music have any impact on the wine purchase, everyone said that it had no impact on then.

[00:15:19] RC: Exactly. Right. This is a dangerous stick of dynamite that we have now in the idea of pre-suasion. That's why we have to be so ethical about the use of this. We have dynamite. We can people in our direction and they won't even recognize it. We have to be very careful that we take the ethics and their interests into account as communicators. On the recipient side, we also have to be very careful that as recipients of this information we don't dismiss the context in which the information was presented.

[00:16:06] MB: That gets back to the first point I talked about, which I want to dig into a little bit more, the idea that the message itself is not were all the persuasion takes place, and it can take place around the message or before the message. Tell me more about that phenomenon, that notion.

[00:16:21] RC: Yeah. Remember the idea from back in the 70s, the medium is the message? This notion that the channel in which you send the message can be a message itself. If you meet somebody face-to-face, versus you call them on the phone or you send them an email, that's a message itself that you've taken the time to meet with them face-to-face rather than send them an email. The message is partially the medium.

What we've learned since then is that not only is the medium the message, the messenger is the message. Sometimes, simply establishing one's credibility as a communicator, as an honest and informed a broker of information can be enough to be the message. It's often the case that people say yes to something simply because of the credentials of the communicator. There was a sort of alarming study that was done that measured brain activity when people were given communications about a particular economic decision that they could make.

When it was just sent to them by an unknown communicator, those sectors of their brain associated with cognitive analysis lit up just as you would expect. When they were told that the communicator was a distinguished professor of economics at the University of Chicago, their analysis sectors of their brain shut down, they flat-lined. Instead, another's sector of the brain lit up which had to do with attribution of responsibility for messages. Who is this person essentially?

The messenger was the message, the context. Before there was even a message sold the audience. There is another way in which we can think of it. The multitude is the message. Not only is the medium the message, or the messenger the message, the multitude is the message. If a lot of other people are doing something, that's an indication that it's the right thing to do before you have even encountered the message.

For, example in the United Kingdom, they have a problem with people who pay their taxes late and they send them message, the tax office, that says, “If you don't pay in a certain time, here will be the consequences,” and they get about 68% of the people responding by paying their taxes after getting that message.

If instead they say the great majority of UK citizens do pay their taxes on time, now this goes to 73%. If instead they go even further and say, “The great majority of taxpayers in your community pay their taxes on time,” it goes to 79%. Learning what most others are doing is a message itself. All context to the content of the message that is yet to come.

[00:20:21] MB: The word context, that’s a great way to kind of succinctly capture this notion, which is the idea of the context matters as much, or maybe more than content in many cases.

[00:20:32] RC: Often, more than content.

[00:20:35] MB: How can we leverage some of these principles? Let’s think about for those who are operating kind of ethically in a sound way, how can they leverage these principles to influence people in the way that they want to?

[00:20:50] RC: Let's take the workplace as an example. Suppose you're applying for a job and there is a meeting that you have with an evaluator. Sometimes it's a team of evaluators, sometimes just a single person, and you go in and what we've always been taught to say is, “I'm very happy to be here. I want to answer all of your questions that you would have for me. Here’s I'm going to suggest we do.” We also say, “But I’m curious. I have a question for you. Why did you invite me here today? What was it about my resume that was attractive to you?” Here's what they will do, they will begin by focusing on your strengths. The context for the interview will be your strengths. That will be the starting point for the interview. They will search your resume. They'll say, “Well, it's because your credentials are what we want, or it's because your values that you indicated fit with our value statement.” That will be the launching point now. You’ll also be informed about what it is that they think is most important. You’ll be able to build on that.

I have an acquaintance who claims he's gotten three straight better jobs in a row using this tactic. Okay. Now let's say you got that job and you've got a new initiative that you want to develop, but you know you need they buy-in of a colleague of yours to send this idea forward. You approach that person, maybe give that individual a draft or a blueprint of your idea and ask for that person's advice. That's a mistake, not to include this individual, and you ask for that person's opinion. I'm sorry. I meant to say a a pin. You ask for that person's opinion. It's a mistake to ask for that person's opinion because when someone is asked for an opinion, that person takes a half step back from you and goes inside intra-specs and separates. Instead, if you change one word pre-suasively and ask for that person's advice rather than opinion, that individual takes a half step toward you psychologically, sees him or herself as a partner in this process.

The research shows that person will now become more supportive of your idea than if you ask for an opinion. There's a saying; when you ask for someone's advice, you're usually looking for an accomplice. Here’s what the behavioral science says. If you get that advice, you usually get that accomplice, and that's what you want when you want something forward in an organization.

Okay, and then one last thing. Now let's say you've got a meeting to present your idea and it's got a particular budget and you have figured out the budget so that it will be $75,123 to accomplish your idea, to get it launched, and what you typically do is to reduce that to 75,000. You round it off to $75,000. That's a mistake, because if you say — Research shows, if you say 75,123, people assume that you have done your homework. You have figured this out. You are knowledgeable about the pros and cons of the budget. You've got it down to the dollar. Even though it will be more money by $123, then $75,000 figure, people will be more likely to accept that budget under those circumstances.

I saw another study recently, remarkable. Back the UK, again, with the tax office. They got this idea, “Hey, let's tell people that the majority of taxpayers pay on time.” They sent one message that said nine out of 10 of the people in your community to pay their taxes on time. For another group, they sent a message that said 88% pay their taxes on time. The 88% message got twice as much tax payments because it was a precise number, rather than a rounded one that seemed like it was pulled out of the air. That's one thing you can do before you even begin, begin with a budget. Put it at the top of your proposal that has a precise number rather than a rounded one.

[00:26:34] MB: It's fascinating and I think it can't be overlooked that the small differences that seem so trivial to someone who’s not consciously applying the principles of influence, the principles of pre-suasion, they seem so irrelevant and yet they make a tremendous impact on human behavior.

[00:26:53] RC: You're precisely right about that, man. I'll tell you something how I decided to write this book, pre-suasion. I had been seeing studies in the research literature suggesting something like this, but I haven't really put it together till one day there was a knock at my door. I answered it to find the man who was asking me to contribute to a cause. After school programs for children in my district whose parents were working, who would have to get child care for them and so on. We would have education opportunities for them after school.

He didn't show me any credentials to indicate that he was from the school district and I hadn't heard that the school district was initiating such a program, and yet I gave him more money than I would've given to someone from the United Way or the Cancer Society that I normally give. After I closed the door, I remember thinking to myself what just happened here? I realized it wasn't the content of what he said. It was the context. He did something first that made me want to give money to this cause. He brought his seven-year-old daughter with him and was focused on children, and children's issues, and children's needs, and children's challenges. He put me in touch with that side of myself that became top of mind now and made me who I was in that moment, and I thought to myself, “Oh, there's a book here.”

[00:28:49] MB: That’s fascinating, and I think those are some great examples of how just by being a little bit conscious of it by thinking ahead and saying, “How can I set up my environment, or the presentation of the context for this particular piece of information to make it more effective?” There are so many lessons and strategies that can come out of that.

[00:29:10] RC: Yeah. I think the way to do it in an ethical fashion is to say to yourself as a communicator,” What is it about my message? What dimension of my message? What feature of it? What aspect of it will make it most wise for people to say yes?” That's what I should put. That concept is what I should put at top of mind in my audience before I send them the message. Something that will cause them to focus on a feature of what I have to offer that makes it wise for them to choose it.”

If we go back to that furniture store, that online furniture store example. If the best thing about the furniture at this store is the price of it, that's then pennies should be the first thing people encounter. Even though the more comfortable furniture may produce a bigger profit margin for the store, to be ethical they should not put clouds on their background wallpaper. They should put pennies, because their strength is the value, their low-cost. That's where we should send people if we’re going to use this ethically.

[00:30:47] MB: I’d love to look at another angle of the concept of pre-suasion. Is it possible — And what are some ways that we potentially could apply pre-suasion to influencing ourselves?

[00:31:01] RC: Yeah. This is really a good question, because it's what I think I've been able to use it for since I started thinking about this. Here's what I've done. If I have a task that requires me to be very thoughtful, there is a particular image I put at the top of my computer screen that research shows increases the likelihood that people will solve a difficult problem correctly. It's an image of Rodin’s The Thinker.

Research showed if you give business students, business school students a set of difficult problems and you asked them to solve those problems with a variety of different images, a nature scene and so on, the kind of thing you usually have as your screensaver or your background wallpaper. That's not as successful as if you give them an image of Rodin’s The Thinker. They actually solve 48% more problems correctly. We can do this to ourselves. We can put ourselves in a state of mind that is congruent with the goal of our message.

There's another study that shows that if you want people to expend a lot of energy in a task, persist at it and be energy driven with this task, show them a picture of a runner winning the race and that will increase their performance on that kind of task. What I do now is depending on the goal I have for a particular task, I choose an image that's congruent with that goal and put it there on the corner of my screen as I perform the task. We can do that.

[00:33:10] MB: That’s a great and such a simple strategy to implement that everybody listening could immediately put in place right now to sort of prime themselves with just the smallest thing in their environment to help them move towards whatever they're trying to achieve.

That said, what is one really simple piece of actionable advice you would give, almost as a form of homework to our listeners for them to implement some of the concepts we’ve talked about today?

[00:33:36] RC: Here’s a very simple thing. Very often, when we want people to move in a particular direction, we want them to change. It requires change. Here's what the research shows. If we ask them for change on a Monday or Tuesday will be more successful than if we asked them on a Thursday or Friday.

If we asked them for change on the first or second day of the month will be more successful than if we asked them on the last day of the month, or second to the last. Why? Because at the beginning of things, change is in — It's something new. Something has just changed, and change is in the air.

There's a study, for example, that showed that armed forces personnel here in the United States are often asked to contribute to a retirement plan so that when they retire they will have a good amount of money available to them and they’ve been resistant to that as a rule, except at one time after they have just changed locations to a new base. Then they become significantly more open to the idea of doing something new, of getting away from their old habits and moving to something new.

If as communicators we are interested in getting change, we can increase the likelihood that people will change in our direction by picking the right time. Once again, the context, rather than the content of our message is vitally important.

[00:35:32] MB: Where can people find you and your books online for people who want to do more research and dig in and learn more?

[00:35:40] RC: Yeah, probably the best place is on our website, influenceatwork.com, that's all one word influenceatwork.com, and they can get access to our books, our videos and so on, and opportunities for speaking or consulting, training, those kinds of things are available.

[00:36:05] MB: Bob, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all these incredible wisdom. We are huge fans of you and your work and it's truly been an honor to have you on the Science of Success today.

[00:36:16] RC: Thank you, Matt. I enjoyed being with you. It was a good set of questions, I have to say!

[00:36:21] 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 email. My email 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.

I'm going to give you three reasons why you should sign up for our email list today by going to successpodcast.com, signing up right on the homepage. There are some incredible stuff that’s only available to those on the email list, so be sure to sign up, including an exclusive curated weekly e-mail from us called Mindset Monday, which is short, simple, filled with articles, stories, things that we found interesting and fascinating in the world of evidence-based growth in the last week.

Next, you're going to get an exclusive chance to shape the show, including voting on guests, submitting your own personal questions that we’ll ask guests on air and much more. Lastly, you’re going to get a free guide we created based on listener demand, our most popular guide, which is called How To Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide by signing up and joining the email list today. Again, you can do that at successpodcast.com, sign up right at the homepage, or if you're on the go, just text the word “smarter”, S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44222.

Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes because that helps boost the algorithm, that helps us move up the iTunes rankings and helps more people discover the Science of Success.

Don't forget, if you want to get all the incredible information we talked about in the show, links transcripts, everything we discussed and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can get those at successpodcast.com, just hit the show notes button right at the top.

Thanks again, and we'll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

The Truth About Sleep - And How It Can Save Your Life with Dr. Matthew Walker

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Listen To The Episode

Show Notes

Video - 4 Scientifically Proven Paths To A Perfect Night Sleep

The Sleep Deprivation Epidemic - Why You Should Sleep More

Links and Additional Research

Episode Transcript

Are you tired? If your answer is yes, it would seem relatively straightforward to assume you're not getting enough sleep.

It’s one of the most important things you can possibly do for yourself.

Improve. Your. Sleep.

You’re going to spend a large portion of your like sleeping. And that’s a good thing! Getting more sleep not only allows you to wake up well rested each morning but also prevents disease and can lead to a longer (and happier) life overall.

Did you know that routinely sleeping less than 6 hours a night can increase your risk of cancer by 50%? After just one night of less than 5 hours of sleep Natural Killer Cells (which fight cancer cells) drop by 70%! After just one night!

Sleep isn't just about rest. It's about the body repairing itself, doing maintenance so to speak. Unfortunately, what has been discovered over time (and discussed in this book) is that, if you lose sleep, taking a nap, while it takes the edge off, it doesn't replace the sleep lost during the night.

Our ability to fight disease (including cancer) and obesity may be directly tied to not getting enough restful sleep. Pills don't help either. Yes, they knock you out and make it easier to fall asleep but they lack the restorative power of natural sleep and, in fact, some sleeping pills can increase your risk of cancer.

Knowing this, it must change the way you think about the old saying “I’ll sleep when I’m dead”… because ironically adopting that mindset will get you there quicker.

Do you find that you wake up feel groggy or angry? Do you reach for the snooze button 1, 2 or even 3 times each morning? Or, do you hop right out of bed ready to tackle the new day?

What about at night? Do you struggle to fall asleep? Tossing and turning seemingly unable to count enough sheep to get to bed. Or, are you out like a light when you pull the covers over yourself?

If you want to literally improve every single aspect of your life and wake up feeling refreshed and rested each and every night this interview is for you.

To get started NOW, download our free guide below and learn 5 super simple and easy ways to maximize your sleep starting tonight!

In this episode we discuss everything you ever wanted to know about sleep. We examine the findings from hundreds of studies across millions of people and pull out the major findings about how vitally important sleep is, the global sleep loss epidemic, the stunning data about sleep and productivity, the simplest and most effective evidence based strategies for getting better sleep and much more with Dr. Matthew Walker. 

Dr. Matthew Walker is Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Founder and Director of the Center for Human Sleep Science. He has published over 100 scientific studies and is the author of the book Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams. Which is currently the #1 Amazon Bestseller in Neuroscience . He has been featured on numerous television and radio outlets, including CBS 60 Minutes, National Geographic Channel, NOVA Science, NRP and the BBC.

Show Notes

• Global sleep loss epidemic - the average American sleeps only 6.5 hours per night

• Sleep has slowly been eroded by our society over the last 60 years

• Sleep is vital and essential from an evolutionary standpoint - you can’t just lop off 25% of the necessary sleep you need

• Studies across millions of people show one clear thing - the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life

• If you sleep less, you will be dead sooner, lack of sleep kills your more quickly

• Lack of sleep is a major predictor of “all cause mortality” including cancer, Alzheimers, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, depression, and suicide

• Hard science shows why a lack of sleep is tremendously bad for you

• Sleep has an image problem, we stigmatize sleep and think its lazy and slothful - people wear lack of sleep as a badge of honor to be celebrated

• Less sleep does not equal more productivity

• The 5 clear truths of sleep research and productivity

• Under-slept employees take on less challenging problems

  1. They produce fewer creative solutions

  2. They exert less effort when working in groups (slacking off, social loafing)

  3. They are more likely to lie, cheat, and engage in deviant behavior

  4. The more or less sleep that a CEO has had, the more or less charismatic they will be

• Chronic exhaustion cost most first world nation 2% of the GDP - 411 billion dollars lost each year to a lack of sleep

• The research is very clear that under-slept individuals are not as productive or successful

• The evidence is resoundingly clear - cutting on sleep makes you less productive and less creative and less effective

• After being awake for 21 hours, you’re as cognitively impaired as someone who is legally drunk

• The two principle types of sleep - REM sleep and non-REM sleep

• The different stages of sleep - the 4 stages of REM sleep

• Hard science shows that deep Sleep is critical to clearing toxins out of your brain

• Sleep is like a sewage system for your brain - it cleans all the toxins and debris out of your brain

• The less sleep you have, the higher your probability of getting Alzheimers

• Different cognitive systems in your brain also work during sleep - its like saving files to a hard drive, you have to sleep to get the save button

• The emotional circuits of the brain are changed and modified by sleep - the amygdala (which controls fight or flight) is regulated by the pre-frontal cortex

• Lack of sleep can have a serious negative impact on your emotional health

• Sleep reboots body systems as well - not just the brain

• Deep sleep is one of the best blood pressure medications you can imagine

• Deep sleep regulates insulin levels and blood glucose levels

• Sleep is also essential for the reproductive system

• Sleep boosts testosterone and lack of sleep makes you 10 years older from a testosterone standpoint

• Appetite, weight, food consumption are all regulated by sleep - lack of sleep makes you eat 300-550 more calories per day, and makes you eat more high sugar and high carb foods

• Sleep also has a profound impact on the immune system - one night of 4 hours of sleep will drop natural killer cells (body cancer fight cells) by 70%!

• The link between lack of sleep and cancer the WHO recently classified night shift work as a probable carcinogen

• Sleeping 5 hours per night makes you 200-300% more likely to catch a cold than someone sleeping 8 hours a night

• There is not a SYSTEM or PROCESS in the body/brain that is not impacted by sleep

• The most striking omission in the health literature today is that sleep is not at the center of the health conversation

• 3 key ways sleep improves your learning

• Is it wise to pull an all nighter? What does the research say?

• The “memory inbox of the brain” (hippocampus) and how sleep is vital to creating and storing memories

• Sleep is vital both BEFORE learning and AFTER learning to store and save new memories and solidify them into the architecture of the brain

• Sleep replays information and strengthens memories

• Sleep provides a 3x advantage to problem solving compared to an equivalent period being awake

• "The 6 Unpopular Tactics for Getting Enough Sleep"

• Carve out enough time and make sleep a priority - carve out an 8 hour window to sleep every night

  1. This is the #1 thing to do - regularity is KEY - go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time, no matter what

     1. Sleeping in late creates “social jetlag” which has serious negative consequences - regularity of sleep is key

  2. Keep the temperature cool - keep your bedroom 68 degrees - your body needs to drop its core temperature 2-3 degrees to fall asleep

  3. You can hack this by taking a hot bath before bed

  4. DARKNESS is key to producing melatonin. Phones, screens, blue light etc trick the brain into thinking its day time and shut off melatonin production

  5. Reading on a tablet 1 hour before bed shifts your melatonin production 3 hours later!

     1. Use blackout shades

     2. No screens 1 hour before bed

  6. Do NOT stay in bed if you’ve been in bed longer than 20 minutes. You brain is a very associative machine - being awake in bed trains the brain that it’s OK to be awake in bed. Get up, go to a different room, read a book in dim light, no screens, no eating. And only when you feel sleep return to bed, and you will re-learn the key association between making the bed about sleep

  7. Some people don’t like this idea.

     1. Meditation is a great way to get yourself to fall back asleep. The studies are very clear, very well done that meditation can help improve sleep.

  8. No caffeine after noon and avoid alcohol in the evenings.

  9. Caffein prevents deep sleep

     1. Alcohol fragments your sleep and makes your wake up much more, leaving with un-restorative sleep

     2. Alcohol blocks dreams and REM sleep

• Sedation is NOT sleep. Knocking out your cortex is not natural sleep.

• You could be A FAR BETTER VERSION OF YOURSELF mentally, cognitively, physiology if you just got more sleep

• Current sleeping pills are “sedative hypnotics” that do NOT productive naturalistic sleep, and do not get the benefits of sleep

• Sleeping pills have a far higher risk of death, cancer, infection

• CBTI - cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia is just as effective as sleeping pills in the short term, but much more effective long term

• Melatonin can be a useful tool to time the onset of sleep

• Does napping work?

• There is no such thing as the sleep bank - you can’t accumulate a debt and then hope to cash in on the weekend - sleep doesn’t work like that

• Napping can prevent you from falling asleep and staying asleep! Be careful!

• How does GABA impact your sleep?

• Sleep is a remarkably complex neurochemical ballet

The Sleep Deprivation Epidemic: Why You Should Sleep More 

Do you ever pull an all-nighter to cram for a test, but still fail? Maybe you work 60-hour weeks but feel like you’re getting nowhere. Unfortunately, developed nations are suffering from a sleep deprivation epidemic, but science can help us see the reasons for getting a good eight hours every night.

 A common saying you hear is, “You can sleep when you’re dead!” But recent sleep studies have shown us that less sleep means our lifespans shorten and our quality of life will decrease too. Unfortunately, our society pushes us to sleep less and work more, so we need help shifting our social perspective.

It turns out, that our relatively recent attempt to shorten the amount of sleep we get runs into a lot of problems against the million-year-old necessity that mother nature has put in place. The 20-25% decrease we’ve imposed on ourselves has led to an increased likelihood of developing every major disease that kills us in the developed world.

Elucidating Sleep Science

“I think part of the problem, perhaps, is that the science of sleep is actually not being adequately communicated to the public and I think it’s people like myself who are to blame.” – Dr. Matthew Walker 

Dr. Matthew Walker is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at UC Berkeley, founder and director of the Center for Human Sleep Science, and author of Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams. His belief is that sleep science is not understood by the public, which was part of his motivation for writing Why We Sleep.

Many people appear to be proud of how little they sleep. However, the list of problems linked to a lack of sleep include Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes, depression, bipolar disorder, and suicide, among other mental health conditions. With this information in hand, it’s necessary to remove the stigma on getting a sufficient amount of sleep (about eight hours).

Dr. Walker set out to write a book of reasons why you should sleep, rather than rules. He addresses the relationship between sleep and productivity, citing laboratory and workplace studies that have provided him with five clear truths.

Five Facts About Sleep-Deprived Workers

“It’s very clear that under-slept individuals are not going to be successful.” – Dr. Walker

1. They take on less-challenging problems.

2. They produce fewer creative solutions.

3. They exert less effort when working in groups.

4. They are more likely to lie, cheat, and engage in deviant behaviors.

5. Less sleep means less-charismatic leaders.

He also notes that a recent report demonstrated that chronic exhaustion and fatigue (due to a lack of sleep) caused most first-world nations to lose about 2% of their GDP (that’s $411 billion for the U.S.). “If we solve the sleep deprivation problem in the U.S., we could almost double the budget for education, and we could make huge in-roads into the problems we have with healthcare,” he adds.

Dr. Walker shares an analogy to represent the current nature of an office workplace by comparing it to a spin class: “Everyone in the office looks like they’re working hard, but the scenery never changes – there’s never any forward progression in terms of momentum with productivity and creativity.”

Finally, he ends his evaluation of workplace attitudes by observing how their attempt to optimize the efficiency of every system stops at the human level. Where the budget, taxes, hardware, and software are all effective, there’s no focus or understanding of a human’s cognitive or physiological capacities and their necessity to reboot and recharge.

Sleep: The Human Recycling Period

“There really isn’t any system within your body, or process within the brain, that isn’t wonderfully enhanced by sleep when you get it or demonstrably impaired when you don’t get enough.” – Dr. Walker 

Dr. Walker informs us that we need eight-hours of sleep after 16-hours of wakefulness; and after 20-21 hours of being awake, we are as cognitively impaired as someone who would be legally drunk behind the wheel. So what exactly is happening when we sleep?

Sleep is simply divided into rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, where we dream, and non-REM sleep; while non-REM sleep is further divided into four sub-stages. Each stage performs different yet necessary functions.

When we are awake, we are essentially in a form of low-level brain damage. Thus, one of the functions performed during the deepest stages of non-REM sleep is to clear out the metabolic toxins that have been built up in our brain. This is done through our brain’s glymphatic system (similar to our body’s lymphatic system). While asleep, this system’s performance increases by 200-300% relative to when we’re awake. (This process is known to remove a toxic protein called beta-amyloid, one of the leading candidate causes of Alzheimer’s disease.)

Sleeping also improves our learning in at least three ways.

1. Sleeping prepares our brain: A lack of sleep leads to a 40% deficit in our ability to make memories.

2. Sleeping ‘saves’ information: While asleep, we transfer information from our short-term to long-term memory. Like hitting the ‘Save’ button, it prevents us from forgetting memories.

3. Sleeping strengthens our memories: Sleep interconnects new memories together and interconnects it with pre-existing memories. This creates an updated associative network of memories.

Dr. Walker comments on the third point, “That’s the reason that you can come back the next day having extracted and divined creative novel solutions to previously impenetrable problems that you were facing.” While simple problems benefit from focused thought, complex problems benefit from non-conscious thought, such as that which occurs during sleep. It’s because of this function that nearly every language has a phrase similar to “sleep on a problem,” and not to “stay awake on a problem.” He ends with the analogy, “It’s essentially informational alchemy that occurs overnight.”

The emotional circuits of our brains are also modified during sleep. Our amygdala is reconnected to our prefrontal cortex when we get a good night’s sleep, which puts a brake on our emotional gas pedal. When we are deprived of sleep, the connection is severed, which essentially makes us all emotional gas pedal and no brake.

The benefits of sleep don’t end at the brain; there are many physiological systems that are rebooted during sleep as well. Deep, non-REM sleep is one of the best forms of blood pressure medicine, because it slows your heart rate. It also releases a variety of restorative chemicals and hormones, including a growth hormone that restores the cells in your body.

Sleep regulates your metabolic system, specifically insulin levels. In fact, studies have shown that one week of five-six hours of sleep a night will disrupt a person’s blood sugar enough to classify them as pre-diabetic. This illustrates the crucial role sleep plays in regulating the metabolic system.

A lack of sleep is known to age both men and women by a decade in terms of wellness and virility by disrupting the reproductive system.

Appetite regulation and food consumption are directly affected by sleep. Sleep deprivation causes in imbalance in leptin, which tells your brain when you’re satisfied with your food, and ghrelin, which tells your brain you’re not satisfied with your food. This causes you to eat 300-500 more calories a day. Not only do you eat more, but you’re also more likely to reach for starchy carbohydrates and high-sugar foods, while avoiding high-protein foods.

One night of four-hours of sleep will drop your cancer-fighting immune cells by 70%. The link between sleep-deprivation and cancer is so strong, that the World Health Organization recently classified night-time shift work as a probable carcinogen because it disrupts our sleep rate rhythms.

Five-hours of sleep per night the week before you get your flu shot will reduce your body’s antibody response to less than 50%, rendering it largely ineffective. Similarly, with five-hours you are 200-300% more likely to catch a cold than someone who gets eight-hours of sleep.

According to Dr. Walker, “All lack of sleep is, perhaps, a slow from of self-euthanasia.”

How to Fall Asleep Fast and Sleep Better

“I think what we know is that: Without sleep there is low energy and disease, with sleep there is vitality and health.” – Dr. Walker 

Dr. Walker begins to share five tips (and their explanations) for how to sleep better. These five tips all follow a primary, overarching requirement: Carve out an eight-hour, non-negotiable sleep window every night.

1. Go to bed and wake up at the same time.

Regardless if it’s a weekday, the weekend, or a holiday, always wake up at the same time. Even if you have a bad night of sleep, just make sure you fall asleep early the following evening. Sleeping in late causes “social jetlag” where you feel tired in the evening and drift forward in time; this has deleterious consequences to your health and sleep.

2. Keep it cool.

Keeping your bedroom around 68°F (18.5°C) is optimal for most people. This is because your body needs to drop its core temperate 2-3° to initiate sleep. If your feet get cold, then you can wear socks. Also, a hot bath before bed causes mass vasodilation (more so than a hot shower); this pulls your blood near your skin’s surface, plummeting your core temperature.

3. Keep it dark.

Darkness releases melatonin, a vital hormone for the onset of sleep. Too much light inside the house (or from LED screens) before bed will trick your brain into thinking it’s daytime, shut off the production of melatonin, and prevent sleep. Dim your lights by turning half of them off in the evening, avoid LED screens in the last hour before bed, and use black-out curtains.

4. Get up if you’ve been awake in bed for longer than 20-minutes.

Whether you’re trying to fall asleep or wake up, you must get out of bed if you’ve been lying awake for more than 20-minutes. If not, then your brain creates the association that your bed is about being awake, rather than asleep. If you’re trying to fall asleep but can’t, then go to another, dim room and maybe read a book (but avoid eating and screens). Only when you’re sleepy should you return to bed; that way you fall right asleep and recreate the association that beds are for sleeping. Dr. Walker, a hard scientist and skeptic, even suggests meditation, citing its support from clinical trial data and his recent conversion to the practice himself.

5. No caffeine after noon and no alcohol in the evenings.

Even people who claim that caffeine doesn’t affect them because they fall right asleep suffer from less-deep sleep. When they wake up, they don’t feel as refreshed, then reach for an extra cup in the morning, thus building a cycle of dependency and addiction. If you don’t stop at noon, then certainly after 2:00pm. Alcohol, on the other hand, sedates your cortex (effective knocking out your brain). This causes un-restorative sleep by waking you up multiple times throughout the night. It also blocks your REM sleep, which is critical for creativity and memory processing as well as emotional and mental health.

A common trap for people to fall into is thinking, “Well, this is how I am now at this age.” But this perception of yourself prevents you from realizing that you can be a far better version of yourself, mentally, cognitively, and physiologically, if you simply start getting enough sleep.

This trap can easily occur as a result of excessive or improper caffeine consumption. It isn’t until people come off caffeine that they start to feel the benefits that normally come from high-caffeine use. “It’s like wiping a fogged window, and you can start to see clearly through it,” Dr. Walker comments, attributing the improvement to a full, restorative night of sleep. 

How to Deal with Insomnia

            “There are no sleeping medications that we have currently that produce naturalistic sleep.” – Dr. Walker

Sleeping Pills

Dr. Walker goes on to address the question of sleeping pills. He explains that the current class of drugs one will be prescribed are called ‘sedative hypnotics.’ Just like alcohol, these sedate (or knock out) your brain. The sleep you get on sleeping pills is not the same as natural, healthy sleep.

Additionally, these pills are associated with a far higher risk of death, cancer, and infection. Though these links have not be confirmed as causal or merely associational. He goes on to inform us that that people don’t necessarily need them, and there is a safe, non-pharmacological alternative which is just as effective: cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBTI).

With CBTI, the benefits to your sleep are just as powerful in the short-term, but they also continue long-term as you maintain the practice. Sleeping pills, on the other hand, produce rebound insomnia, where your sleep is just as bad (or worse) once you stop taking them. (People should revisit these issues with their doctor if they’re interested in alternative treatment.) 

GABA

GABA is the principle, inhibitory neurotransmitter of the brain; it works like a red light for your neurons, telling them to stop firing. Most sleeping medications work by targeting the GABA system, though their blunt nature is incapable of properly mimicking the complex neuro-chemical and neuro-physiological ballet that occurs during sleep.

Melatonin Supplements

Next, Dr. Walker discusses the uses of melatonin supplements. While they don’t actually help a young, healthy person with a stable sleep schedule, they’re great for helping someone adjust to a new time zone. By taking it 30-60 minutes before you want to sleep, it can help reset your body’s internal clock and counteract jetlag. He also notes that if people take melatonin and they feel that it helps (even if it doesn’t), then they should continue to do so.

Napping

Many people think that, if they don’t get enough sleep, then they can just “catch up” on it later, either with a nap or by getting more sleep at night. Dr. Walker states, “Sleep is not like the bank. You can’t accumulate debt, then hope to pay it off at the weekend. There is no credit system.”

However, if you are sleep-deprived, then you can nap and overcome some of the basic sleepiness. Your reaction times improve a little, but you don’t overcome the higher-level cognitive issues, like decision-making, learning and memory, and focused attention. He goes on to discuss a futile tactic he sees in his students that he calls ‘sleep bulimia.’ This is where they get too little sleep during the week, then try to binge sleep during the weekend and make up the deficit.

He uses an analogy to describe a negative aspect of napping: Throughout the day we build up a chemical pressure in our brain, a sleepiness pressure, due to the build up of adenosine. The more you build up the sleepier you feel; and after 16-hours of wakefulness, you should fall right asleep and stay asleep for eight-hours, thus releasing the sleepiness pressure. However, when we nap, it’s like we open a valve and let a little of the pressure out. This makes it harder for us to sleep well at night, either by struggling to fall asleep or stay asleep.

Echoing the placebo affect associated with melatonin supplements, if you can nap regularly and sleep well at night, then keep napping. Otherwise, you should avoid napping and build up that sleepiness pressure until you fall asleep at night.

Action Steps for a Good Night’s Sleep

To finish off, Dr. Walker suggests a simple self-improvement test: Give yourself one week of eight-hours of sleep a night. Determine if you feel better when you get eight-hours of regularly scheduled sleep versus a random schedule of five-hours one night, then six-hours the next, and so on. Then ask yourself, “Did that experiment work? Is it in my favor? Do I feel any better? Do I notice that improvement?”

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

What interferes with your happiness?

I know better than most that your thoughts and feelings aren't always true and can hold you bak from achieving your goals.

That's why I'm excited to share with you our sponsor, BetterHelp. BetterHelp is offering 10% your first month when you go to www.betterhelp.com/sos and sign up.

BetterHelp isn't self-help, it's professional counseling. You'll get timeline and thoughtful responses from counselors and can schedule weekly video or phone sessions. All without ever having to enter a waiting room.

BetterHelp can provide you with professional counselors who are specialized in depression, anxiety, stress, relationships, grief, and much more.

Try them today and get 10% off your first month by going to www.betterhelp.com/sos!

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

[Book] Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker
[DVD] Memento
[Twitter] Matt Walker
[LinkedIn] Matthew Walker
[Website] Sleep Diplomat

Why We Sleep (14min)

• The incredible benefits of getting enough and the terrible side effects of not getting enough. 

• The Brain and The Functions of learnings and memory. 

  • Sleep after learning is essential and like hitting the “save” button after learning. We also now know that it’s important even before learning. 

  • Without sleep the memory circuits become blocked up.

• Examine The Hypothesis of the All Nighter

  • 40% deficit in the ability of the brain to make new memories without sleep.

  • Brain activity is shot almost entirely after sleep deprivation. 

    • He describes it as like Memento the movie. (Great movie BTW)

• What is it that causes people to get good sleep and how does it affect our brain?

• What in sleep causes these benefits?

  • As we get older our memory gets work but our sleep does as well and they are related.

• Sleep is critical for your emotional and mental health

  • On less sleep these areas of the brain become irrational. 

  • Video of a subject illustrates this point. - Subject goes from angry to laughing then back to base in about 20 seconds. 

  • Without sleep you can’t take your foot off the emotional gas pedal.

• Sleep deprivation is correlated with depression and almost every psychiatric disorder. 

• The body relies on sleep as well.

  • 75% reduction in NK cell activity even after one bad night of sleep. Immune system will be shot. 

  • Lack of sleep and cancer has been shown to have a strong relationship. 

Matthew on CBS This Morning (6min)

• ⅔ of Americans do not get their full recommended 8 hours of sleep. 

• Every disease in developed nations is made worse by lack of sleep.

• Short Sleep = Shorter Life

• Brain - builds up a toxic buildup in the brain.

• Body - No immune system and activities stress chemistry leading to heart disease and cancer. 

• ALL RESEARCH BASED

• Naps - A double edged sword. Sleep is not like the bank, you can’t accumulate debt then pay it off as you go about your day. 

• Sleeping Pills - These are bad!

Secrets of the Sleeping Brain (1hr 41min)

• Long video that goes deep into some of the topics covered above. 

• Love the concept that we’ve hit on before that sleep actually allows you to integrate in ideas and learnings into what you’ve been doing prior. 

The Sleep Deprivation Epidemic (6min)

• Sleep is one of the most important aspects of our life and yet it is increasingly neglected in twenty-first-century society, with devastating consequences. Award-winning professor of neuroscience Matthew Walker provides a fascinating insight into why it is vital we start taking sleep seriously.

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the Internet; bringing the world’s top experts right to you. Introducing your hosts, Matt Bodnar and Austin Fable.

[00:00:19] 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 bring back one of our all-time greatest interviews from the archives and share everything you ever wanted to know about sleep, with one of the world’s pre-eminent sleep experts, Dr. Matthew Walker.

This is seriously one of my favorite podcasts that we’ve ever done. Matthew Walker’s work is truly important and impactful. Now more than ever, I think we all need to understand the power of a good night’s rest. 

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 shared insightful lessons from selling over a 1,000 companies, what really matters when you’re building a business, how to grow companies and what mistakes to avoid if you want to exit big with our previous guest, Michelle Seiler Tucker.

Now, for our interview with Matthew

[00:01:54] MB: Today, we have another fascinating guest on the show, Dr. Matthew Walker. He’s a professor of neuroscience and psychology at UC Berkeley and a founder and the director of the Center for Human Sleep Science. He’s published over a 100 scientific studies and is the author of the book, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, which is currently the number one Amazon bestseller in the neuroscience category. He’s been featured on TV, radio, including CBS’s 60 Minutes, National Geographic and much more.

Matt, welcome to the Science of Success.

[00:02:26] MW: It’s a pleasure to be on Matt. Thank you for having me.

[00:02:28] MB: Well, we’re very excited to have you on here today. I’d love to begin the conversation and talk a little bit about – as I think you’ve called it the sleep deprivation epidemic, and what happens to us when we don’t get enough sleep.

[00:02:43] MW: You’re right. There is currently a global sleep-loss epidemic. This is sweeping developed nations. It’s been underway for probably about 60 or 70 years. We know from surveys back in the 1940s that the average American adult was sleeping 7.9 hours a night. Now we know that number is down to 6 hours and 31 minutes during the week for American adults.

Back in my home country, not much better. It’s 6 hours and 49 minutes on average people are sleeping. Japan seems to be the worse; 6 hours and 22 minutes. I just give you those numbers to reaffirm first this pernicious erosion of sleep that has happened over the past 70 or 80 years as truth. But also, just to take a step back, I think we have to realize that it took mother nature 3.6 million years to put this necessity of 8 hours of sleep in place.

Then we have come along, and in the space of blink of an evolutionary eye; 60, 70 years we’ve locked off maybe 20%, 25% of that sleep amount. How could it not come with deleterious consequences? I think it’s been proudly confirmed that we are in a global sleep-loss state of deficiency, or an epidemic as the CDC and the World Health Organization have called it.

What are the consequences though? Because if it’s not doing us any harm, then why worry? If only that were true, there is demonstrable harm that is underway because of the sleep-loss epidemic. We can start at the big 30,000-foot level and make it a very simple statement based on epidemiological studies from millions of people. That is the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life. Short sleep predicts all-cause mortality.

I think that classical maxim that you may have heard. You can sleep when you’re dead. It’s always struck me as ironic, because if you adopt that mindset, we know from the evidence that you will be both dead sooner, and the quality of that now shorter life will be significantly worse.

If you dig down a little deeper you can say, “Well, if a lack of sleep kills you more quickly, then what is it that is killing you more quickly?” It seems to be just about everything. Every made disease that is killing us in the developed world has causal insignificant links to a lack of sleep. That list currently and tragically includes Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes, as well as numerous mental health conditions; depression, bipolar disorder and most recently and sadly, suicide as well.

I think we’re really now starting to understand not just how deathly a lack of sleep is and the current weight of our sleep deprivation, and that elastic band of sleep deprivation can stretch only so far before it snaps. But with also understanding from hard science exactly why a lack of sleep produces such disease, sickness and ill-health within the brain and the body.

[00:06:03] MB: It’s amazing and it’s so important to think about why sleep is so vital. Yet, in today’s society it seems like there is more and more of a push to sleep less, work more, hustle more, do more. How do we combat that?

[00:06:22] MW: There is. I think currently, sleep has an image problem in society, because more often than not, we seem to stigmatize sleep and we suggest that people who are getting sufficient sleep and I actually choose my words quite carefully there. As being lazy, as being slothful, those who get maybe 7 or 8 hours of sleep a night.

People I think are – or some people, I should say. Not all, but some people are perhaps quite proud of the fact of how little sleep that they’re getting and where it almost as though it’s a badge of honor to be celebrated. It’s sad, because for all of the reasons that we’ve just discussed, it’s an ill-advised mentality to expose.

It’s also strange, because if we don’t always have that opinion. I don’t think any of us would look at an infant sleeping during the day and say, “Gosh, what a lazy baby.” We don’t do that, because we know that sleep at that time of life is absolutely non-negotiable. It’s fundamentally necessary. But if you look at the evidence somewhere between infancy and now even childhood, not only do we abandon this notion that sleep is necessary and important, but we give it this terrible stigma.

I think that attitude has to change, and there are many ways in which it has to change. I think part of the problem perhaps is that the science of sleep is actually not being adequately communicated to the public. I think it’s people like myself who are to blame. I’m a sleep scientist, a professional sleep scientist for 20 years now.

I can’t go around wagging the finger at people if people have not been educated by the science that the taxpayer dollars have funded. That was part of the motivation to write the book that I didn’t feel as though there was a book after that gave people a blueprint manifesto of all of the real hard science of sleep.

There are lots of books out there that you can buy about the quick fix, these are the 10 rules to better sleep, or – I got nothing against those types of books, but for me I felt it was important because my sense is that people don’t respond to rules. They respond to reasons rather than rules, and I wanted to give and write a book of reasons for why you should sleep, rather than rules for how to sleep.

[00:09:00] MB: I want to dig a little bit more specifically into some of the negative implications or maybe the flipside of why sleep is so important for certain activities. For somebody who – let’s contextualize this maybe within a framework broadly thinking about, if I want to get more work done people often say, “All right, I’m going to sleep less,” or, “I’m going to pull a all-nighter,” or, “I’m going to cut down on my sleep so I can be more productive,” how does that usually pan out? What does the science say about doing that?

[00:09:31] MW: It doesn’t pan out very well. In fact, the opposite is true; we now know that less sleep does not equal more productivity. There have been lots of laboratory and workplace with these, and they give us five clear truths. Firstly, underslept employees tend to take on less challenging work problems. In other words, they opt for the easy way out. Underslept employees actually produce fewer creative solutions to work problems that they’re facing.

They also actually exert less effort when working in groups, and we’ve done some of these work. They essentially slack off. It’s what we call social-loafing. They write the tale of others and try to claim their hard work is their own.

We also know very interestingly that underslept employees are more likely to lie, cheat and engage in deviant behaviors, such as falsifying a claims, receipts, etc., and it’s a scaling function; the less sleep that you have, the more likely you are to lie and be deviant.

What’s also interesting is that it scales the business hierarchy all the way up to the top. We know that the more or less sleep that a business leader has had, the more or less charismatic their employees will rate that business leader.

Even though the employees themselves know nothing about how much sleep that business leader has had. They can actually see it in the expression of the behavior of their leader. You can then actually scale that up from those that have low-level studies, all the way up to the high-level studies. There was a recent round report, an independent report that demonstrated that chronic exhaustion and fatigue due to a lack of sleep caused most first-world nations about 2% of their GDP. For the United States, that’s 411 billion dollars that we lose each year due to a lack of sleep.

If you can just think about that, if we solve the sleep deprivation problem in the US, we could almost double the budget for education and we could make huge in-roads into the problems that we have with healthcare. Or we could just flat out give people remarkably high tax rebates, simply by solving the sleep-loss epidemic.

I think in response to your question, it’s very clear that underslept individuals are not going to be successful. It’s a little bit like, if you think about your workforce and you’re forcing them to come into work every morning, early and leave very late, so no one is getting enough sleep, it strikes me a little bit like a spin class at a gym.

Everyone in the office looks like they’re working hard, but the scenery never changes, there’s never any forward progression in terms of momentum with productivity and creativity. I think we need to change our attitude in the workplace regarding sleep. The evidence is very clear there.

[00:12:37] MB: Especially around the creativity and the productivity aspect of that. It makes me think almost about the – an applied version of the 80-20 principle, where it’s not necessarily just more hours of work equals more output, but it’s really vital to have quality work, where you’re creative, where you’re bringing a fresh perspective and a well-rested mind. That’s when you really produce value. That’s the 20% that produces 80% of your results. All the busy work and the hustle and muscle, if you don’t get enough sleep, you’re not going to be able to really be incredibly productive.

[00:13:17] MW: I think that that’s very true. Is there a way that we could actually break the classic praetors of 80-20 law that’s common throughout nature and it’s applied to human beings as well? By way of manipulating sleep, could we actually force it to be that it’s 30% or 40% of your workforce that returns now 80% or 90% of the productivity by way of sufficient sleep.

It’s just coming down to the very fact that what is the recycle rate of a human being? I think people have failed in the workplace to actually face this question and ask it. It’s surprising, because people in the workplace are wonderfully astute at trying to squeeze every ounce of effectiveness and efficiency out of all of their systems, be it the budget, be it the tax, be it the hardware, be it the software.

I think we forget about the biological organism at the heart of most companies, the human beings themselves. We have to ask, “How long can an individual be awake before they decline and decline significantly in the productivity, efficiency and effectiveness?” We now know that that evidence, you need 8 hours of sleep, 16 hours – after 16 hours of wakefulness, the cognitive capacities and the physiological capacities of the body starts to decline dramatically in after 20 or 21 hours of being awake. You are as cognitively impaired as someone who would be legally drunk in terms of driving behind the wheel.

There really is a recycle refresh rate of a human being, and we know that and it declines dramatically once you get past that 16. What I’m suggesting there is not 16 hours of work. I’m suggesting that this 8, 9-hour work span, then people need that downtime and they need to get that 8 hours of sleep to reboot and refresh.

[00:15:17] MB: What’s actually happening during that recycling period?

[00:15:22] MW: Well, we know firstly that there are multiple different stages of sleep that we ebb and flow in and out of, throughout a full 8-hour phase. Those different stages of sleeping, the two principle types of sleep, I should note that probably most people are aware of, or what are called non-rapid eye movement sleep, or non-REM sleep, and rapid eye movement sleep or REM sleep, which is the stage principally from which we dream.

Non-REM sleep actually has several sub-stages to it, stages one through four, increasing in the depth of sleep. By the way, it always strikes me as funny that scientists are not a very creative bunch. We have these four stages of deep non-REM sleep, and all we could come up with was stages one through four. Let’s set that side for a second.

We know that all of those different stages of sleep perform different functions end up all necessary. To come back to your question though, exactly what is happening at night? Well, let’s take deep non-REM sleep for a start.  The deepest stages of non-REM sleep. That stage of sleep is actually critical for essentially clearing out all of the metabolic toxins that have been building up in your brain.

Now that may sound a little bit hand-waving, but is actually very hard to get science from animal studies. When we are awake, we are essentially in a form of low-level brain damage. That’s what wakefulness is. We produce a variety of metabolic byproducts as a result of all of that waking brain cell combustion that we’re doing.

It is during sleep at night when we clear that away. What is clearing that away? Well, it turns out that we made a discovery, which is a sewage system in your brain. Now you have a sewage system in your body that you’re probably familiar with called the lymphatic system. But your brain also has one, it’s called the glymphatic system after the cells that produce it or compose the system called glial cells.

That sewage system within the brain, glymphatic system, is not always on, at least not in highest flow capacity. It’s only during sleep and particular deep sleep at night where that cleansing system of the sewage network actually kicks in to high gear. It increases by maybe 2 to 300% relative to when we’re awake.

Why is this important? Well, one of the metabolic toxins that the glymphatic system clears away as we sleep at night is a toxic protein called beta-amyloid. Beta-amyloid is one of the leading candidate causes of Alzheimer’s disease. This is why we know that people who are not getting sufficient sleep across their lifespan are at a far high-risk probability of going on to develop Alzheimer’s disease. The less sleep that you have, the less clearing away of that toxic byproduct. That’s one-way, general way that we know that the brain gets essentially a refresh.

We also know that different cognitive systems and networks within your brain undergo a restoration. For example, we know that learning in memory systems get overhauled. We take information that we recently learned and we transfer it from short to long-term memory during sleep, which is actually like hitting the save button on new memories, so it prevents you from forgetting by cementing and solidifying those memories into long-term story sites.

We also know that there is a clearing out of your short-term memory reservoir. It’s perhaps a little bit like shifting files from a USB stick, so that when you wake up the next day, you have this renewed capacities to start learning and acquiring new facts and information all over again. That’s a more specific way in which the brain actually gets an overhaul at night during sleep.

We also know that the emotional circuits of the brain are changed and modified by sleep. There are deep emotional brain sensors, very old evolutionary centers specifically a structure called the amygdala, which controls the vital flight response. That structure, the amygdala is normally regulated in us higher order primates, human beings specifically, by a part of the brain that sits just above your eyes called the prefrontal cortex, which acts a little bit like the CEO of the brain. It makes very high-level executive top-down control decisions.

When you had a good night of sleep, that part of your frontal lobe has been reconnected to your deep Neanderthal amygdala fight or flight center of the brain. It just regulates it. It’s a little bit like a break to your emotional accelerator pedal. When you don’t get enough sleep, that connection is actually severed and there’s a consequence. You become almost all emotional gas pedal and too little frontal lobe regulatory control brake.

There are many different ways in which sleep generally and very specifically seems to regulate our brain. I could also speak about the different ways that sleep actually reboots multiple systems within the body. That’s certainly the ways in which it refreshes your brain.

[00:20:46] MB: I want to dig into learning productivity and the emotional aspects. But before we do, tell me briefly about the physiological and the body reset aspects of sleep as well.

[00:20:58] MW: Firstly, we know that deep non-REM sleep that we described is perhaps one of the best forms of blood pressure medication that you could ever imagine. It’s during that deep sleep that your heart rate actually drops, your blood pressure will lower. There are a variety of restorative chemicals and hormones that are released, a growth hormone in particular to actually restore the cells within the body. It’s fantastic for the cardiovascular system.

We also know that it regulates your metabolic system, specifically it regulates insulin levels. If you’re not getting sufficient sleep, your blood glucose actually starts to become disrupted. There are [inaudible 00:21:40] now that are taking healthy people with no signs of diabetes. And after one week of five to six hours of sleep a night, their blood sugar is disrupted so profoundly that their doctor would subsequently classify them as being pre-diabetic. That’s how critical sleep is to maintaining the metabolic system.

We also know that sleep is essential for another one of the major systems, the reproductive system. Here I’ll speak frankly about testicles, because we know that men who are routinely getting just 5 to 6 hours a night have significantly smaller testicles than those who are sleeping 8 hours or more.

In addition, men who report getting just 5 or 6 hours of sleep each night have a level of testosterone, which is that of someone 10 years their senior. In other words, a lack of sleep will actually age you by a decade in terms of that aspect of wellness and virility. We see very similar impairment in equivalent reproductive hormones and health, of course by a lack of sleep. It’s not just males who are disrupted in that way.

There are a variety of systems within the body. It also regulates appetite and weight and your food consumption. We know for example that those individuals who are not getting enough sleep will have an imbalance in the two hormones that control your hunger and your food intake. Those two hormones are called leptin and ghrelin.

Now leptin sounds like a Hobbit, I know, but trust me they are actually real hormones. Leptin is the hormone that tells your brain you’re satisfied with your food. You’re no longer hungry. You should stop eating. Ghrelin is the antithesis of that. Ghrelin will actually signal to your brain that you are not satisfied by the food that you’ve just eaten, that you are still hungry and that you should eat more.

People who are put on a regiment of just 5 or 6 hours of sleep for one week will have a mocked reduction in leptin, the hormone that says, “You’re fine. You’ve eaten enough, you can stop eating. You’re not hungry.” A mocked increase in the hormone ghrelin, which tells you, “You’re not satisfied with your food. You’re hungry and it’s time to eat more.”

That’s why people will actually eat somewhere between 3 to 500 calories more each day when they’re not getting sufficient sleep. You should also know by the way, it’s not just that you eat more, but what you eat is non-optimal when you’re sleep-deprived. Without sufficient sleep, you actually reach for the heavy-hitting starchy carbohydrates, as well as high-sugar foods and you stay away from the protein-rich foods. In other words, you’ll find yourself reaching for another slice of pizza rather than leafy greens, kale and beans.

It’s not just that you eat more. It’s what you eat that is also detrimental too. I hope that gives people just a little bit of a few brush strokes in terms of the bodily consequences. The one that we probably haven’t mentioned though, which is perhaps most impacted is your immune system. We know that one night of 4 hours of sleep will drop critical anti-cancer fighting immune cells called natural killer cells by 70%, which is a truly remarkable state of immune-deficiency, which happens very quickly within just one night.

Secondly, we also know that the link between a lack of sleep and cancer has now become so strong that the World Health Organization recently classified any form of night-time shift work as a probable cause energy. In other words, jobs that may induce cancer, because of a disruption of your sleep rate rhythms.

We can look to more benign things too. We know that if you’re getting just 5 hours of sleep in the week before you go and get your flu shot, you will only produce 50%, or in fact, less than 50% of the normal antibody response, rendering that flu shot largely ineffective.

Finally, know that if you’re getting just 5 hours of sleep a night, you are 2 to 300% more likely to capture cold, than someone who is getting 8 hours of sleep a night. This was a remarkable study where they quarantined people in a hotel and they had tracked how much sleep that they were getting in the week before. Then they flushed up the nose of all of these individuals; the flu virus. Then in the next few days they looked to see how many of those individuals succumbed to the flu, how many got infected. Then they bucketed them on the basis of how much sleep that they had in the week before, and that’s how they were able to come to that conclusion.

There really isn’t any system within your body, or process within the brain that isn’t wonderfully enhanced by sleep when you get it, or demonstrably impaired when you don’t get enough.

[00:26:58] MB: What a powerful statement. I mean, just that sentence alone really succinctly summarizes the fundamental conclusion that the science is in across nearly every spectrum of the body, the brain, etc., that sleep is incredibly valuable. That 8 hours of sleep specifically is really critical.

[00:27:18] MW: I think it is. I think what we know is that without sleep, there is low energy and disease. With sleep, there is vitality and health. The sleepless epidemic is perhaps the greatest curable disease that no one is really talking about, or effectively trying to solve. I would simply say that the lack of sleep is both the most striking omission in the health conversation of today. All lack of sleep is perhaps a slow form of self-Euthanasia.

[00:27:49] MB: I want to dig back into the relationship. Let’s touch on learning and memory. Tell me a little bit more about the work you’ve done and some of the research around how sleep can improve learning and memory.

[00:28:02] MW: Sleep actually is beneficial for memory in at least three ways that we’ve now discovered and this is the work that we’ve been doing, or some of the work that we do at my sleep center.

First, we know that you need sleep before learning to essentially prepare your brain; perhaps a little bit like a dry sponge, ready to initially soak up new information the next day. We did a study where we tested a very simple hypothesis. Is it wise to pull the all-nighter? Is it a good thing, or a bad thing?

We took a group of individuals and we either gave them a full night of sleep, or we kept them awake throughout the night. Then the next day, we wedged them inside an MRI scanner and then we have them try and learn a whole list of new facts as we were taking snapshots of brain activity. Then we tested them to see how effectively that learning had been.

Firstly, what we found is that when we put those two groups head to head, there was a 40% deficit in the ability of the brain to make new memories without sleep, and just a frame that in context it would simply be the difference between acing an exam and failing it miserably. What we went on to discover from the brain scans however was why the brain was failing to lay down those new memories.

There is a structure in our brains, on the left and the right side called the hippocampus. You can think of the hippocampus a little bit like the memory inbox of the brain. That it’s actually very good at receiving new memory files and holding on to them initially.

When we looked at that structure in those people who’d had a full night of sleep, we saw lots of healthy learning-related activity. Yet, in those people who were sleep deprived, we actually couldn’t find any significant activity whatsoever.

It was almost as though sleep deprivation had shut down your memory inbox as it were and any new incoming files. They were just being bounced. You couldn’t effectively commit new experiences to memory. If people would like to just understand what that means in terms of the hippocampus, I’m sure many people listening have probably seen the movie Memento. In that movie, that gentleman has damage to the brain and specifically to the structure of the hippocampus. From that point forward, he can no longer make any new memories. It is what we call in neurology, densely amnesic.

That part of his brain was the hippocampus and it is the very same structure that your lack of sleep will actually attack and prevent your brain from actually laying down and placing those new memories into a fixed state within the brain. That’s the first way that sleep is good for learning a memory.

You also need sleep not just before learning, but also after learning, but for something different now. Sleep after learning will essentially hit the save button on those new memories. It will essentially solidify those memories into neural architecture of the brain. As we mentioned before, it actually will transfer those memories, almost like packets of information being transferred across the network, from a short-term vulnerable storage site to the more permanent long-term storage center within the brain, which is called the cortex; this wrinkled mass that sits on top of your brain.

That means that when you come back the next day, those memories are protected and safe and you will be able to remember, rather than those memories being vulnerable to being overwritten or lost, for example to the ravage of time. Which mean, that they are ultimately forgotten.

We also know a little bit about how sleep not only transfers memories during sleep, but even strengthens those memories. It’s during sleep that the brain actually replays the information that you’ve recently learned. These are studies done in humans, but also in animals they were actually placing electrodes into the brains of rats and they were having them run around a maze.

As they were running around the maze and learning the maze, all of these different brain cells which fire in a specific signature pattern, which was essentially the imprinting of a memory and it adds different tones to them. It would sound a little bit like “babababam, babababam, babababam.” The brain is imprinting this memory as the rat is running around the maze.

Low and behold, what happens is that when you then let the rats sleep, but keep recording and keep eavesdropping on the brain, what do you think reemerges? It’s exactly the same pattern, “babababam, babababam.” The rat is replaying those memories. What’s incredible however, is that it’s actually replaying them at somewhere between 10 to 20 times faster. Rather than “babababam,” it’s actually, “brrm, brrm, brr, brrm, brrm.” It’s this high-speed fidelity replay. We think that that actually helps score the memory trace into the brain in a strengthened manner, almost like etching on the surface of glass. You’re really strengthening that neural circuit. That’s sleep after learning to strengthen individual memories, and I guess essentially future proof that information within the brain.

There is a final third way that sleep actually helps memory that we’ve discovered, which I think is perhaps most exciting. Sleep doesn’t just simply strengthen individual memories. It’s that strengthening of individual memories by the way that happens during deep, non-rapid eye movement sleep, or dreamless sleep.

Sleep also then actually interconnects those new memories together and interconnects new information with all of your pre-existing back-catalog of autobiographical stored information. Essentially, what sleep is doing and this is actually the work of rapid eye movement sleep of dream sleep, is that you’re starting to collide information together within the brain. This is a bit like group therapy for memories.

What you awake with the next morning is a revised mind-wide web of information within the brain. It’s a new associative network, or at least not a radically new associative network, but it’s an updated and it’s a modified associative network. That’s the reason that you can come back the next day having extracted and divine, creative novel solutions to previously impenetrable problems that you were facing.

It’s probably the reason – I mean, now know this, for example that sleep will actually provide almost a three-fold advantage in problem solving relative to an equivalent time period spent awake. That science is now very well, I think rendered and described.

There probably is a reason that you’re never told to stay awake on a problem and in every language that I’ve inquired about to date, that phrase sleeping on a problem seems to exist. It seems to transcend cultural boundaries. It’s a phenomenon that is common across the globe. I should also note by the way that we – the British, we say you sleep on a problem. I believe and please correct me if anyone knows this, but I believe the French translation is a little closer to you sleep with the problem, rather than you sleep on a problem. I think that says so much about the romantic difference between the British and the French. I’ll digress before I lose my British passport.

[00:35:54] MB: That’s great. Yeah, that’s a funny anecdote and probably true. I’ve seen the phrase creative incubation and some research around creativity, and some of the science behind what you’re describing. To me, it makes so much sense that the more you give the brain the ability to something, and when you come back to that problem, you’re going to be much more creative. You’re going to be much more effective at solving.

[00:36:20] MW: That’s right. It’s not just sleep, by the way. If it’s a complex problem, simple problems tend to benefit from deliberative focused thought. But complex problems, problems where there are maybe 10, 20, 80 different variables and you could think of this as something very crass to you. What type of knife or fork set do you buy? This may be just three or four different variables. Versus, what type of card do you buy, where there is maybe 16 different features of variants that you have to choose between.

Well, the more complex a problem is, the more benefit there is to actually stepping away and stopping consciously thinking about it. That’s where the non-conscious brain seems to go to work. It seems to be able to distill amounts of information that we just can’t consciously juggle all up in the air at the same time when we’re awake. It’s just too much for a working memory.

If you’re to think of perhaps what the extreme version of that non-conscious processing would be, you would probably design a system that looks very similar to sleep. That’s exactly why sleep provides those creative benefits. It’s essentially informational alchemy that occurs overnight.

[00:37:42] AF: This episode of the Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at BetterHelp. That's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P. You'll get 10% off your first month by going to BetterHelp. Once again, that's betterhelp.com/sos today for 10% off your first month.

Let me ask you, what interferes with your happiness? Is there something preventing you from achieving your goals? I know there have been plenty, plenty of times, getting too far into my own head has gotten in my way. Limiting beliefs, thoughts of doubt, it can all build up inside you and become paralyzing, or cause counterproductive behaviors to form. BetterHelp will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist.

You'll get timely and thoughtful responses, plus you can schedule weekly video, or phone sessions all without dealing with one of my least favorite things ever, the waiting room. It's effective and more affordable than traditional online counseling and financial aid is available. Licensed professionals are on-staff, who specialize in things like depression, stress, anxiety, relationships, trauma and even more. Plus, everything you share is completely confidential.

In fact, so many people have been using BetterHelp, they are recruiting additional counselors in all 50 states right now. If you want to start living a happier life today, as a listener, you'll get 10% percent off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com/sos. Join over 1 million people taking charge of their mental health. Again, that's betterhelp.com/sos for 10% off your first month today.

[00:39:33] MB: I want to segway now and get into strategies for sleeping more effectively. We’ve talked at length about how important sleep is both from avoiding a tremendous amount of negative consequences, but also in producing a myriad of positive benefits. Tell me about, for somebody who maybe has trouble sleeping, or just in general, what are some of the basic interventions that we can implement in our lives to sleep better?

[00:40:01] MW: These tips I suppose, and again, I’m not just going to tell you the rules. I won’t just try and explain the reasons for each of these rules. I do warn people that some of them are probably not necessarily desirable. It makes me very unpopular, but here they are.

The first overarching rule of course, is that you just have to carve out an 8-hour non-negotiable sleep opportunity every night. It sounds crass and it’s sounds hokie, but I do this in my life as well. I’m not just saying this because I’ve just written a book and I want to practice what I seem to be preaching. But it’s from a very selfish perspective, because I know the evidence so well. If you knew the evidences I do, which and I hope people will do after reading the book, you just wouldn’t do anything different. I don’t want to short a life, I don’t want a life filled disease and pain and sickness and suffering. That’s why I do give myself a non-negotiable 8-hour opportunity every night.

Once you’ve got that in place – I don’t think it’s insurmountable. People are doing wonderful things in terms of actually committing non-negotiable time to exercise, and people are trying to eat more healthily. I don’t think sleep is a lost cause in this regard.

Once you’re getting that opportunity, then I think there are five things that you could do. If there is one thing that you do from all of these tips, it is these; regularity. Go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time, no matter what, no matter whether it’s the weekend, or the weekday. Even if you had a bad night of sleep, still wake up at the same time the next day. Accept that it’s going to be a bit of a tricky day. But then just get to bed early the following evening and then you will reset.

Because if you sleep in late for whatever reason, you’re not going to feel tired until later that following evening, and you start to drift forward in time and it’s called social jetlag. That has marked deleterious consequences to your health and to your sleep. Regularity is key.

The second is temperature. Keep it cool. Keep your bedroom around about 68 degrees is optimal for most people, which is probably colder than you think, or about 18 and a half degrees Celsius. The reason is this, that your body needs to drop its core temperature by about a 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit in order to initiate sleep. That’s the reason that you will always find it easier to fall asleep in a room that’s too cold, than too hot. Because at least the cold room is moving your brain and body in the right thermal direction, that it actually wants to go to for sound and healthy long sleep.

Try to keep your temperature in the bedroom cool. Wear socks if you get cold feet. Some people complain about this, so it’s okay to wear those socks, but keep the bedroom cool. Another way that you can exploit this hack is actually to take a hot bath before bed, or a hot shower. The bath is better if you look at the evidence.

Most people think that when they have a hot bath, they get into bed, they’re nice and warm and that’s what lets them fall asleep more easily. It’s actually the opposite. When you get into a bath, all of the blood comes from the core of your body out to the surface, that’s why you get that rosy glow. It’s what’s called mass vasodilation.

Once you get out of the bath with all of that blood near the surface of your skin, you have this huge massive thermal dump. You get this evacuation of heat from the body, which plummets your core temperature, and that’s why you’ll fall asleep more quickly and more soundly.

The third tip is the light, and actually darkness more specifically. We are actually a dark-deprived society in all first-world nations. You need darkness to allow the release of a critical hormone called melatonin. Melatonin will time the normal healthy onset of sleep. If you’ve got lots of light inside of the house during the evening, and especially if you’re looking and staring at those LED screens from phones, tablets, laptops etc., that will actually fool your brain into thinking it is still daytime and it will shut off melatonin, so you won’t be releasing melatonin.

There were studies done where they had people reading on an iPad for one hour before bed. If I was doing that here in California, their data demonstrated that my release and peak of melatonin didn’t happen, or were shifted by three hours forward in time. I would essentially be close to Hawaii in terms of my internal clock timing to sleep, rather than California.

Keep it dim. You can turn down half the lights in the house in the evening. You don’t need all of them on the last hour before bed. Also stay away from screens in the last hour, and try and use black out curtains, that can actually be very helpful.

The fourth tip is not to stay in bed if you have been awake for longer than 20 minutes. This applies to whether you’re trying to fall asleep, or whether you’ve woken up and are trying to fall back asleep. The reason is this, your brain is a remarkably associative device. If you are lying in bed awake, it quickly learns that being in bed is about being awake rather than being asleep.

You need to break that association. After 20 minutes or so, if you haven’t fallen asleep, get up, don’t get too stressed, go to a different room and in dim light, perhaps just read a book, no screens, no eating. Only when you feel sleepy should you return to bed. In that way, you will actually relearn the association between your bed being about being asleep, rather than being awake.

I would note that some people actually don’t like the idea of getting out of bed. It’s dark. Maybe they’re warm and maybe it’s colder in the rest of the house. I understand that. Another way to try and help you get back to sleep that has good proven clinical trial data behind it is actually meditation. I’m actually quite hard know a scientist, and when I was looking into this evidence as I was writing the book, I was really quite skeptical.

The studies were very clear, very well done, some of them out of Stanford here just down the way from me. So much so that I actually started meditating myself and that was seven months ago, and I’m now a regular meditator. If I’m traveling going through jetlag, for example and struggling with sleep, I will actually use a meditation relaxation practice.

The final tip is the one that really makes me deeply – well, deeply unpopular, just generally as a person anyway, but this is the one that really makes me unpopular with people. No caffeine after noon and avoid alcohol in the evenings. Forego and I kept and I’ll explain both. 

Everyone knows of course that caffeine activates you. It’s a class of drugs that we call a stimulants and it can keep people awake. What people may not know however is that for those people who say, “Well, I can drink an espresso after dinner and I force sleep fine and I stay asleep.” That may be true. However, the depth of the deep sleep that you have when caffeine is swirling around within your brain during sleep is nowhere near as deep as if you had not had that cup of coffee in the evening.

As a consequence, people wake up the next morning. They won’t fee refreshed or restored. They don’t remember having a problem falling asleep or staying asleep. They don’t equate it with the cup of coffee they had the night before. But now they find themselves reaching the two cups of coffee, or three cups of coffee in the morning, which essentially is building a dependency and addiction cycle. That’s the issue with caffeine and that’s why the suggestion is stop caffeine midday and certainly after 2 PM.

Alcohol is probably the most misunderstood drug when it comes to sleep. Alcohol is a class of drugs that we call the sedative hypnotics. Sedation is not sleep. Many people will say, “Well, I nightcap, I have a quick whiskey and it puts me to sleep. It’s great.” It’s actually not true. What you’re simply doing is you’re sedating your cortex, you’re knocking out your brain essentially. You’re not getting into natural sleep.

Then there are two more problems with alcohol. Firstly, it will fragment your sleep so you will wake up many more times throughout the night, which leaves you with what we call unrestorative sleep. The final thing is that alcohol is one of the best chemicals that we know blocking your dream sleep, your REM sleep, which is essential for not just creativity and that associative type of memory processing that we spoke about.

REM sleep is also critical for emotional and mental health. It is during REM sleep when we provide our brain a form of emotional first aid, and you won’t be getting that if you’re blocking REM sleep by way of alcohol. Those would be the five tips to better sleep and hopefully they help some folks. I’m also happy to speak a little bit about sleeping pills. They’re also misunderstood, but those would be for most people the five tips that I would offer.

[00:49:28] MB: Great advice. I try to implement as many of those as possible. One of the things, specifically caffeine is something that I used to drink at my peak. About a cup of – I mean, a pot of coffee a day. Now I basically don’t consume any caffeine. When I do, I limit myself, no caffeine afternoon. Maybe one cup of tea is the maximum. I’ve noticed a huge impact on that impact in my sleep. Sorry, were you going to say something?

[00:49:55] MW: Yeah. I’m just going to say, I mean it’s immensely wise and it’s one of the problems with a lack of sleep is that you quickly reset your perception of your effectiveness and your health. You just think, “Well, this is how I am now at this age.” Not realizing that you could actually be a far better version of yourself, both mentally, cognitively and physiologically if you were just to start getting sufficient sleep.

I think many people fail to realize that with caffeine especially that it’s only when they come off caffeine do they really start to feel both the benefits of all of the side effects that normally come with high caffeine use, but especially the benefits on sleep. It’s like wiping a fogged window and you finally can start to see clearly through it.  That’s the benefit of a full restorative night of sleep.

[00:50:46] MB: I have a couple short questions all around specific sleep strategies or tactics. Let’s start with – you touched on sleeping pills. Tell me about sleeping pills. Do they work? If so, why or why not?

[00:51:00] MW: There are no sleeping medications that we have currently that produce naturalistic sleep. The current class of drugs that you will be prescribed are called sedative hypnotics. Again, as we mentioned with alcohol, sedation is not sleep. The sleep that you have when you’re on sleeping pills, if I were to show you the electrical signature of your sleep if you would come to my laboratory, it would not be the same on sleeping pills as it would be if you’re just having naturalistic healthy sleep. That’s the first thing.

The second thing, and I go to great lengths and a whole chapter in the book to discuss this, is that people are probably not aware of the risks of sleeping pills. They have not been communicated to public adequately. Firstly, we know that sleeping pills are associated with a far higher risk of death. They’re also associated with a significantly high risk of cancer and infection.

Now, we don’t yet know if this is causal versus simply associational, but what I wanted to do is to try to get that information out to the public, so they at least could be armed with the knowledge and make an informed choice with that doctor when they go and see the surgery. That’s I think one of the biggest problems of sleeping pills is that the misunderstood nature about what they give you and the dangers.

People also don’t necessarily have to be taking sleeping pills, I should note. There is a safe and non-pharmacological alternative which is just as effective. It is called cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, or CBTI for short. You work with a therapist for a couple of weeks. As I mentioned, it’s just as powerful as sleeping in the short-term, but better still, once you finish that short therapy phase, you continue to maintain that better sleep. Unlike sleeping pills, when you come off those you tend to actually have what’s called rebound insomnia, where your sleep is as bad, if not worse than when you started.

I think people can revisit their sleep issues with their doctor. I’m not trying to shame people who are on sleeping pills. I’m not trying to make you feel bad if you are. I’m very sensitive to the desire for better sleep and I’m so sensitive to the issue of insomnia, or the desperate, desperate state. You should be aware of what sleeping pills are, what they do and what the alternatives are.

[00:53:26] MB: What about taking a melatonin supplement?

[00:53:29] MW: Melatonin is useful in the circumstance of jetlag to try and reset your body clock in a new time zone. You should take it 30 to 60 minutes before you want to get to sleep in the new time zone. Melatonin works to essentially time the onset of your sleep. I guess, the analogy would be if you think about the 100-meter race in the Olympics. Well, melatonin is the starting official who has the starter gun.

It’s melatonin that brings all of the different ingredients off the sleep race to the starting line, then starts the race in its entirety. It begins the sleep race. Melatonin itself does not actually participate in the race of sleep, in the generation of that sleep race. That’s a whole different set of chemicals. As a consequence, that’s why actually melatonin when you are in a new time zone and you’re stable now in that new time zone, if you’re a young healthy individual, then melatonin actually isn’t effective as a sleeping aid. It doesn’t actually help if you look at the studies.

That said, I would note that for those people who are taking melatonin and they feel as though it helps their sleep, well then I usually tell people continue on. It’s because the placebo effect is one of the most reliable effects in all pharmacology. No harm, no foul if you think it’s working for you.

[00:54:58] MB: What about napping? Is napping something – if you’re sleep-deprived, can you catch up with a nap?

[00:55:04] MW: Unfortunately, you cannot catch up on sleep. Sleep is not like the bank. This is another myth that I try to deconstruct in the book. You can’t accumulate a debt, let’s say during the week and then hope to pay it off at the weekend. Sleep just doesn’t work like that. There is no credit system, or there is no credit sleep sell within the brain.

You can if you are sleep-deprived, take a nap and overcome some of the basic sleepiness. Your reaction times will improve a little bit after a nap, but you don’t actually overcome all of the higher level, cognitive issues such as decision-making, learning in memory, focused attention, all of those types of things that we know are would buckle and collapse by way of a lack of sleep. Naps just don’t seem to be able to overcome those.

You can’t overcome – you can’t bank sleep and you can’t sleep off a debt. I see this in my students. It’s what I would call sleep bulimia, which is where they’re binging on sleep at the weekend and they’re – try and taking too little sleep during the week. It’s this binge purge kind of cycle.

I would also say naps, just more generally are a double-edged sword. If during the day when we’re awake, we actually build up a chemical pressure in our brain. It’s a sleepiness pressure. Now, it’s a hydraulic pressure, don’t worry. As I said, it’s a chemical pressure.  The chemical that builds up is called adenosine. The more of that sleepiness chemical that you have, the more and more sleepy that you will feel. After about 16 hours of being awake, you’re nice and tired and then you should fall asleep and stay asleep for about 8 hours.

When we sleep, we remove that sleepiness pressure. It’s almost like a valve on a pressure cooker. We release that sleepiness steam as it were. This is where I come back to naps. If you nap too late in the day, you actually release some of that healthy sleepiness, which means that when it comes time to sleep normally at night, you may actually struggle to fall asleep, or at least stay asleep.

The advice would be this, if you are someone who can nap regularly and you don’t struggle with your sleep at night, then naps are just fine. But if you can’t nap regularly and/or you’re having difficulties with your sleep at night then the advice is you shouldn’t nap, you should stay awake, build up that healthy sleepiness, and then you will have a better night of sleep because of it.

[00:57:40] MB: What about someone who’s in a situation, let’s say like a new parent. Is there anything that they can go through obviously, very chronically sleep-deprived state? Is there any strategy for them to be able to implement, that would help them battle through that in some way?

[00:57:55] MW: Some parents describe trying to work better shifts and what I mean by that is in two ways. Firstly, some parents will try to take early, the early shift and then the late shift, the first half of the night versus the second half of the night and switch between those two. Another way that you can do that on an informed choice is try to determine whether you are a night owl, or you’re a morning type, what we call a lock. That’s a genetically predisposed. It’s called your chrono type.

If you are someone who likes to go to bed late and wake up late, versus someone who likes to go to bed early and wake up early, that’s not a choice. That’s a genetic mandate that’s being given to you in your DNA code. You can try to ask in the couple, are you someone who would prefer to wake up early and go to bed early? In which case, could you take the morning shift, the late morning shift?

If I’m someone who likes to go to bed late and wake up late, well then it’s easier for me to actually take the first half of the night and then sleep for the second half of the morning and sleep late. You can think about split shifts like that. Some people will also flip-flop back and forth. Some people will say, “Well, I’ll take the next two nights and you get good sleep, then we switch over and you take two nights.” They try to mix and match it in that way too. It’s a desperately difficult situation.

In part, we would not actually design to be family units like this, if you look at hunter-gatherer tribes who have not been touched by the electrical influence, then they actually tend to sleep in groups. Restless legs dangling all over the place, arms intertwined. Whole families would sleep together and people would take turns in terms of caring for the young. It’s a lot to ask of parents, and those are some of the ways that you can try to overcome it.

[00:59:56] MB: One other question and this is out of left field a little bit. I’m curious, have you seen or studied around the neurotransmitter GABA and its relationship with sleep?

[01:00:07] MW: GABA is the principle inhibitory neurotransmitter of the brain. The way that most sleeping medications work right now and you can just name your favorite one and it will work in this way, is by essentially trying to activate the receptors in the brain for GABA. Those receptors essentially are like the red lights on your neurons. They stop them firing, they stop them from going.

Drugs that try to target the GABA system within the brain are really quite blunt instruments and that’s why sleeping pills, which act exactly in this way are really not precise tools. Sleep is a remarkably complex neuro-physiological and neuro-chemical ballet if you look at it. All of these different stages of sleep, neurotransmitters going up and down and brain networks ebbing and flowing.

To think that you can essentially recreate something that is so complex and so bi-directional sleep by simply just knocking the brain out and switching it off using GABA receptors is really just – it’s an unfortunate outcome of how poor our pharmacology is in this day and age. We just don’t yet have the pharmacological precision and sophistication to mimic sleep at this stage.

[01:01:32] MB: What’s one piece of homework that you would give to a listener who wants to sleep better?

[01:01:39] MW: I would say try giving yourself one week of 8 hours of sleep and see if you feel any better. Just give it as self-improvement test. Try it as a hack, that if you are one of those people who are into the quantified self-movement and you’re into self-experimentation then just test out all of that what you’ve just heard in the past week and just determine if you feel any better when you’re sleeping 8 hours every night and you’ve regular each and every night. Versus a staccato sleep schedule where you’re sleeping 5 hours and 6 hours and 12 hours and then 5 hours again. Just ask yourself, “Did that experiment work? Is it in my favor? Do I feel any better and do I notice that improvement?”

[01:02:29] MB: For listeners who want to learn more and want to find you and your book online, what’s the best place to do that?

[01:02:36] MW: They can find the book, which is called Why We Sleep. They can find that online. Amazon holds it. You can find it from all of your major bookstores, both the major brands, as well as all of the independent. It’s on the list of most libraries too. If you don’t want to part with your money, my publisher would probably won’t like me saying that, but I read online, it’s about the knowledge of the book, not the sales.

If you want to learn more about the work that I do, you can follow me on social media. I am at sleepdiplomat, all one word. Sleepdiplomat. I’m on Twitter and also you can find me on LinkedIn. Also, on the web I am at – it is www.sleepdiplomat.com.

[01:03:21] MB: Well, Matt. This has been a fascinating conversation. So much great information, practical strategies, tons and tons of science. Really appreciate it. Incredible insights. Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all of these wisdom.

[01:03:36] MW: Well, thank you and I have to say a real thanks to you too. It’s not just what people say at the end of these interviews, but I’m trying to fight this battle for sleep. I can only do so much by getting on shows or television, radio or writing a book for example. I need fantastic journalists and media and genius types to actually join and partner with me to get this message out. I too just want to thank you, Matt. Thank you for being part of the sleep mission.

I’m going to grant you now the title of being a sleep ambassador for having me on the show. Thank you very much. Sincerely, I really want to thank you. I desperately need to get this message out. This portal is a remarkable way to proclaim the virtues of sleep. Thank you.

[01:04:25] 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 email 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. 

I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our e-mail list today, by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. There’s some incredible stuff that’s only available to those on the e-mail list, so be sure to sign up, including an exclusive curated weekly e-mail from us called Mindset Monday, which is short, simple, filled with articles, stories, things that we found interesting and fascinating in the world of evidence-based growth in the last week.

Next, you're going to get an exclusive chance to shape the show, including voting on guests, submitting your own personal questions that we’ll ask guests on air and much more. Lastly, you’re going to get a free guide we created based on listener demand, our most popular guide, which is called How to Organize and Remember Everything, you can get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide by signing up and joining the e-mail list today. Again, you can do that at successpodcast.com, sign up right at the homepage, or if you're on the go, just text the word SMARTER, S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222. 

Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes because that helps boost the algorithm, that helps us move up the iTunes rankings and helps more people discover the Science of Success. 

Don't forget, if you want to get all the incredible information we talk about in the show, links transcripts, everything we discussed and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can get those at successpodcast.com, just hit the show notes button right at the top. 

Thanks again, and we'll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

Learn From Harvard’s Most Popular Course - From The Archives with Dr. Tal Ben Shahar

This week we’re bringing back one of the most impactful episodes from the archives of The Science of Success. We dig into the proven science of how we can live a happy life and the pitfalls that can throw us off track. The crazy thing about this research is it’s totally not what you’d think.

Dr. Tal Ben Shahar created the most popular course in Harvard University’s history. He is the best-selling author of several books including The Pursuit of Perfect, Happier, Choose The Life You Want, Even Happier. He’s also the co-founder and chief learning officer of The Wholebeing Institute, Potentialife, Maytiv, and Happier.TV.

We discuss:

• What science shows is the The #1 Predictor of Happiness

• How the direct pursuit of happiness can actually prevent you from being happy and makes you less happy

• One of the most robust findings in the field of psychology research is about what creates happiness

• The paradox of happiness - why pursuing it makes you less happy, and what you can do about it

• Why the expectation that you should be happy all the time is a barrier to your own happiness

• The “hamburger model” and how it can transform the way that you live your life

• The lens that we can use to understand all of our “happy” experiences

• How Tal defines “happiness” as the intersection of meaning and pleasure

• We discuss what The BEST predictor of your future behavior is

• Why awareness is a critical first step to cultivating happiness

• We dig into the research about what really makes people happy

• Why money has very little to do with happiness (according to the research)

• The vital importance of cultivating healthy relationships

• We discuss the blue zones where people live the longest in the world and why these people live longer than anyone else

• The critical importance of physical exercise on your psychological well being

• How to trigger a release of the “feel good” chemicals in your brain (norepinephrine, dopamine, serotonin)

• How happiness helps you be healthier, more creative, gives you more energy, and makes you more productive

• Strategies for indirectly pursuing happiness

• We break down happiness into its essential components and discuss how to cultivate it

• The only 2 types of people who do not experience painful emotions (are you one of them?)

• What happens when we try to suppress negative emotions

• How experiencing and accepting negative emotions can paradoxically improve your happiness

• Why active acceptance and surrender is critical to processing and dealing with negative emotions

• How perfectionism can create self sabotage and unhappiness

• The critical distinction between healthy perfectionism and unhealthy perfectionism

• The vital importance of accepting criticism and how refusing to accept criticism hamstrings you

• Adaptive vs maladaptive perfectionism and why it's important to know the difference

• (Once again) Meditation and how important it is

• The interaction between stress and recovery and why most people look at it the wrong way

• Why stress isn’t bad and in fact can be very good for - but with a very important caveat

• How the concept of weight lifting can help us better understand and manage stress in our lives

• How recovery is vital to your productivity, health, and happiness

• How long periods of recovery are an investment in your future growth

• The power of breath and how it is an incredibly impactful mind/body intervention to reduce stress and anxiety

• The vital importance of rituals and how you should build them into your day

• “We first make our habits, then our habits make us.”

• We walk through Tal’s powerful daily ritual and how you can harness it to change your day

• How self forgiveness and self compassion can transform your life and emotional experience

• And much more!!

If you want to live a happier life - listen to this episode!

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

Starting your own business is an incredible feat. 
It's a labor of love which makes getting through the late nights, early mornings, and occasional all-nighter so worth it. It's no secret that business owners are incredibly busy!

So why not make things easier?

FreshBooks invoicing and accounting software is simple, intuitive, and keeps you incredibly organized. Create and send professional invoices in thirty seconds. FreshBooks helps you get paid two times faster with automated online payments.

Go to FreshBooks.com/science today and enter THE SCIENCE OF SUCCESS in the how did you find us section and get started today!!

Want To Dig In More?! - Here’s The Show Notes, Links, & Research

General

• Tal’s Website

• Tal’s Wiki Article

• Tal’s LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook

• Wholebeing Institute

• Happiness Studies Academy

Media

• Tal’s BigThink and Optimize article directory

• Thrive Global - “What Gives Me Optimism: Harvard Positive Psychology Expert Tal Ben-Shahar” By Tal Ben-Shahar

• [Course] Positive Psychology 1504: Harvard’s Groundbreaking Course

Videos

• Happiness 101 - Tal Ben-Shahar

• Five Ways To Be Happier Today

• Cool Animated Video Narrated By Tal

• Brian Johnson Notes - Tal Ben-Shahar

• Total YouTube Search

Books

• Short Cuts to Happiness: Life-Changing Lessons from My Barber by Tal Ben-Shahar PhD

• The Joy of Leadership: How Positive Psychology Can Maximize Your Impact (and Make You Happier) in a Challenging World by Tal Ben-Shahar and Angus Ridgway

• Sleeping with Your Smartphone by Leslie A. Perlow

• Choose the Life You Want by Tal Ben-Shahar PhD

• Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment by Tal Ben-Shahar PhD

• The Pursuit of Perfect by Tal Ben-Shahar PhD

• The Blue Zones, Second Edition by Dan Buettner

• The Relaxation Response by Herbert Benson

Misc

• [Wikipedia Article] The Grant Study

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.

We’ve been doing this show for more than four years and we’ve had so many amazing, incredible and exciting guests on the show. It’s a pity that we never bring back and share some of those episodes and interviews. From time to time, we love to sprinkle in and bring back some of our all-time favorites from the archives. In this episode, we're bringing back our interview with Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar, where we discussed the paradox of happiness, why pursuing it makes you less happy and what you can do about it, while we dig into all the research about what really makes you happy.

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 interview, we discussed modern work and why it's become exhausting and dissatisfying and why it doesn't have to be that way. We shared strategies for defeating burnout and making progress on the most important and meaningful things in your work with our previous guest, Bruce Daisley.

Now, for our interview from the archives with Tal.

[0:02:09.3] MB: Today, we have another amazing guest on the show, Tal Ben Shahar. Tal created the most popular course in Harvard University’s history. He’s the bestselling author of several books including, The Pursuit of Perfect, Happier, Choose the Life You Want, Even Happier. He’s also the Co-Founder and Chief Learning Officer of the Whole Being Institute, Potential Life, Maytiv and Happier TV.

Tal, welcome to The Science of Success.

[0:02:34.5] TBS: Thank you, Matt. Great to be here.

[0:02:36.3] MB: Well we’re very excited to have you on here. For listeners who may not be familiar with you, tell us a little bit about your background and your story.

[0:02:44.0] TBS: I actually started off my college career as a computer science major. I was at Harvard at the time and I found myself in my second year doing very well academically, doing well in sports, athletics, I played Squash, doing well socially and yet being very unhappy. It didn’t make sense to me because looking at my life from the outside, things looked great but from the inside, it didn’t feel that way.

I remember waking up one very cold Boston morning, going to my academic advisor and telling her that I’m switching course and she said, “What to?” I said, “Well, I’m leaving computer science and moving over to philosophy and psychology,” and she said, “Why?” I said, “Because I have two questions. First question is, why aren’t I happy? Second question is, how can I become happier?” It’s with these two questions that I then went on to get my undergraduate as well as graduate degrees, all the time focusing how can I help myself, individuals, couples, organizations, lead happier lives.

[0:03:47.1] MB: One of the concepts that you’ve shared in the past is, and you’ve described a couple of different ways, but one of them is kind of this idea of hamburger model and the four different archetypes. I’d love for you to sort of describe that and share that with our listeners.

[0:03:59.4] TBS: Sure. One of the first things that I realized when I started to study philosophy and psychology was that I was actually living life in a very far from an optimal way. I was living a life that was actually making me unhappy. I remember one day going to the hamburger joint and looking at my burger and realizing that there’s a great deal we can learn from hamburgers. 

For example, there is the very tasty and unhealthy burger, which many of us love to eat and then feel guilty about, there is the vegetarian burger that perhaps is very healthy but that is not very tasty. Then there is the burger that is neither tasty nor healthy. And then we have the ideal burger; that is the burger that is both healthy and tasty. I thought about these four kinds of burgers as being parallel to four ways, four different ways of living our lives.

The unhealthy and the tasty burger would be that of the hedonist, a person who thinks about their immediate pleasure but don’t think of their long term wellbeing. That’s not happiness; that’s perhaps short term wellbeing but it’s not happiness. Then there is the burger that like the vegetarian burger, which is you know, healthy but not tasty. That’s about thinking of the future but not enjoying the present, not enjoying the moment. 

Then there is the third burger, which is neither tasty nor healthy and that, you know, we’re all sometimes in a rut, having bad experiences, not really feeling like we’re going anywhere. That’s the worst of all burgers and finally there is what I’ve come to call “the happiness burger”, the healthy and tasty. That’s when we’re having experiences that are both pleasurable, enjoyable, and are also good for us for the long term.

In many ways, we can look at all happy experiences through this lens. For example, if I’m working at a place where I’m enjoying my work, or I experience pleasure and it’s meaningful to me, it’s important, I can see a long term trajectory in a happy workplace. Or if I’m in a relationship or I’m enjoying the time I spend with my partner and we’re building a life together. There’s also future benefit. The relationship is a healthy relationship. Well, that’s the happy relationship. 

Almost every experience we can situation in one of the four hamburger types. Again, the unhealthy and tasty, the healthy and not tasty, the not healthy and not tasty and finally the happiness burger, which is both healthy and tasty. What we want to do is as much as possible, live our lives in that fourth archetype. It’s not possible to be there all the time, but it’s certainly possible to be there more of the time. The more time we spend there, the happier we are.

[0:06:57.3] MB: I’d love to dig into how do we spend more time in that kind of fourth archetype, the happiness archetype? Maybe before we dip into that, how do you define happiness?

[0:07:08.5] TBS: Based on that model, I define happiness as a combination between meaning and pleasure, or between future benefits and present benefit. You see, there are many people who define happiness as just an ongoing experience of pleasure but don’t really think about the meaning part, about the future part.

Then there are other people who say, “Well no, this is all about hedonism and what happiness really is, is about having a sense of meaning and purpose, a long term benefit.” Well, neither definitions are sufficient. As I see it, and again, there is a lot of empirical data backing this up. What happiness is about, the good life is about the ability to bring the two together. To bring the present benefit, the pleasure component and the future benefits, the meaning component.

[0:07:57.9] MB: How do we spend more time in that happiness quadrant?

[0:08:02.8] TBS: The first thing is awareness. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. If I’m able to identify times in my life when I was leading a happy life, when I was having happy experiences, in other words, when I was doing things that were both meaningful and pleasurable. Then I can simply ask myself, “Okay, so how can I have more of it? What did my partner and I do when we experienced the happy periods in our lives? What did I do at work or what work was I engaged in that brought a sense of meaning and pleasure to my life?” Then, the question is, “How can I have more of it?” 

So first of all, it’s awareness and then the willingness and the desire to replicate the good experiences. That’s one way of bringing more happiness to my life. There are other ways; so we know for example, what are the kind of things that bring us more meaning and pleasure in life? One of those things, for instance, relationships, the number one predictor of happiness is quality time we spend with people we care about and who care about us. Of course, not all relationships contribute to happiness, they’re also toxic relationships. 

But if you look at the happiest people in the world, the thing that defines their lives are relationships and what kind of relationships? That varies you know? For some people, it’s deep intimate friendships, for other people it’s the romantic relationships, for others, it’s family, for some, it’s all of the above. Whatever the kind of relationship is, this is the defining characteristic of the happiest people we know of.

[0:09:41.4] MB: That’s a finding that’s found again and again in the research, right? That’s not just kind of an opinion, that’s something that’s very validated from the science itself?

[0:09:50.2] TBS: Absolutely. Let me give you just a couple of examples. The first interesting line of research looks at the happiness levels of nations. The question was, what are the happiest countries in the world? There are various organizations from the UN to gallop that asks this question. The countries that consistently appear in the top 10 of the list are countries like Denmark and Australia and Columbia and Israel. Holland, Costa Rica. 

You know, when you look at this countries, some of them you would expect to be there. Yeah, Australia of course, the kind of life that we believe that most Australians lead is a happy life. A lot of sports and activity and they seem like a happy bunch. Denmark, yes, understandable. But Israel and Columbia? These two countries consistently appear at the top of the happiest nations in the world list and if you wouldn’t expect that, both Columbia and Israel have their fair share of challenges.

The question is, “Why these countries and not others? Why this countries and not countries like the US or Germany or the UK or Singapore or Korea or Japan? Why?” The first thing that we know is that well, money has very little to do with it. Yes, if countries are poor, they’re unlikely to be happy countries. The population there is likely to be unhappy where there is poverty. But beyond the basic levels, beyond the basic levels of income, when there is enough food and basic shelter, additional money turns out not to make a difference to happiness levels, which explains why the wealthiest countries in the world are not the happiest countries in the world. 

What does make a difference? Relationships. In all the countries that I mentioned before, whether it’s Denmark or Israel or Australia or Columbia, there is a real emphasis on cultivating an intimate, healthy social network. Now, what does that look like? Well, in countries like Columbia, for example, family is high on the value list. In Israel, same thing, friendships as well. In countries like Denmark. Social relationships are emphasized. You know that in Denmark for example, 93% of the population — that’s almost everyone — 93% of the population are members of social clubs. 

Whether it’s their active members of social clubs, it could be their church or their sports club or whatever it is. Relationships are a priority. This is one line of research that points the importance of relationships. Another one is the by now, very well-known Harvard study, which looked at Harvard graduates, over a period of… well, for the past more than 70 years. Most of them are no longer alive, and also looked at an equal number of men from poor neighborhoods and what they looked for was who were the people who were the happiest among them? The single factor that came out, close supportive social relationships. The number one predictor of happiness.

[0:13:15.1] MB: That’s amazing. It’s fascinating that whether you’re looking at kind of individual experiences or nations as a whole, you see the same kind of conclusion born out in the data.

[0:13:26.0] TBS: Yes, this is one of the most robust findings in the field and by the way, it’s not just happiness, it’s also very much associated with health. People’s immune systems are actually a lot stronger when they enjoy healthy social support.

[0:13:42.3] MB: I think there’s a book called Blue Zones that came out a couple of years ago that delved into this kind of areas around the globe, where people lived the longest and one of the major factors there, as well, was supportive social networks.

[0:13:54.8] TBS: Yes, very often we see high correlation between happiness levels and health. For example, we know that people who are optimistic on average live eight to nine years longer than people who are pessimistic. Of course, optimism is closely associated with happiness and what we see in the blue zones are relatively happy people and very healthy people and why are they happier? Well, there’s some interesting findings. One of them absolutely strong, social support, whether it’s friendships or families, sometimes both. 

The other things that we see in the blue zones that are also associated with happiness is they’re physically active. They don’t have gyms in those places and again, these places are places such as Sardinia and Italy, or Loma Linda just outside of Los Angeles. Or a place in Costa Rica, or Okinawa in Japan, or a Greek island. What’s unique about these places is that they’re physically active, they don’t have gyms necessarily, but they walk a lot or they work the fields. This is another thing that’s associated with both health and happiness.

There’s some fascinating research here beyond the blue zones about physical exercise. For example, regular physical extra size for as little as 30 minutes three times a week. That’s not that much. 30 minutes, three times a week and in terms of its impact in our psychological wellbeing, it’s equal to our most powerful psychiatric medication in dealing with anxiety, or depression, it also helps a great deal with attention deficit disorder.

Not to mention the great benefits for physical health for against the chronic disease and so on. Now, the reason why physical exercise works so well is because what it does, it releases certain chemicals such and norepinephrine, serotonin, and dopamine. These are your feel good chemicals in the brain and it functions in exactly the same way as our antidepressants do. I should add, without side effects or without negative side effects. 

This doesn’t mean that we can get rid of all the psychiatric medication or encourage those who are on them to stop and, not at all. Many people who takes psychiatric medication, really need it and very often they need it just in order to get out of the house and begin to exercise. The important thing to realize here is that physical exercise is very important, not just for our physical wellbeing, also for our psychological wellbeing.

[0:18:06.1] MB: I think exercise is so critical and, you know, I’m a huge fan of doing cardio multiple times a week and not at all for the health benefits, purely for the psychological reasons and I kind of view the health benefits as almost a positive side effect of what I consider sort of primarily a psychological intervention.

[0:18:28.1] TBS: Yes exactly. I often say to my students that even though I know a lot about positive psychology and I know the techniques and the tools and obviously I apply them to my life as well. If physical exercise was taken away from me, I don’t think I would be able to lead a happy, healthy, and fulfilling life. I think that is a central component, certainly for me, of happiness.

[0:17:14.6] MB: What causes people to fall out of the happiness quadrant?

[0:17:19.6] TBS: There are a few things; one of the things actually that paradoxically takes people out of happiness is their direct pursuit of happiness. Interestingly, there is research showing that people whose primary goal is to be happy, they end up being less happy. They end up being frustrated and they experience more painful emotions. The problem there is that you know, in the one hand, if you directly pursue happiness, you become less happy but on the other hand, we know how important happiness is. The benefits to happiness are not simply in that it feels good to feel good. 

People who increase their levels of happiness are as I mentioned earlier are healthier, they’re also more creative, my likely to think outside the box, they are better partners, better team players in the workplace, they have more energy, they get more done, they’re more productive. There are numerous benefits to happiness beyond the fact that we all want to feel good. We have a problem that on the one hand we know happiness is good but on the other hand, we know if we pursue happiness, it actually makes us less happy.

So what do we do about that? The way to resolve the seeming contradiction or this impasse is to pursue happiness indirectly. What does this mean? It means that we look at the ingredients of happiness, the components that lead to happiness, for example, if I know that relationships lead you happiness, well, then one of the objectives that I can set for myself is to cultivate healthy relationships.

To spend an extra hour a week with my BFF. To think more about, “How I can improve my relationship with my partner?” Or whatever it is. To pursue relationships. If I pursue relationships, that will indirectly lead to more happiness or to think about, how can I exercise more or better? What kind of exercise contribute to my wellbeing? For some people, dance is the best form of exercise, for other people, it’s the meditative nature of swimming. Find and persist. We know that another thing that contributes to happiness is a sense of meaning and purpose. How can I find or how can I engage in things that for me provide a sense of meaning and purpose. I’m not pursuing happiness directly.

What I’m doing is I’m engaging in those activities or implementing those ideas that I know will contribute to happiness. Because just saying, I want to be happier and I’m going to pursue happiness. That’s too abstract and it actually just leads to frustration rather than happiness. That’s why it’s important to study the field in order to breakdown happiness into its essential components. 

One way to understand it is to look at happiness as the sunlight. To look at the sunlight is difficult, it’s even unhealthy, not possible for a long time. However, if I break down the sunlight then I get the spectrum of colors. that I can look at. That I can savor and enjoy and benefit from. It’s breaking down that sunlight into its components to breaking down happiness into its components and pursuing those.

[0:20:52.0] MB: I’ve heard you talk about before that upon hearing that you lecture and have written extensively about happiness. People often ask you, “Are you happy all the time?” I’d love to hear kind of your answer to that and how you think about that.

[0:21:06.3] TBS: Sure. Another barrier to happiness is the expectation that we will be, or even can be happy all the time. So I remember when I was teaching my first class in positive psychology, was having lunch in one of the undergraduate dorms at Harvard when a student came over and asked me if he can join me for lunch and I said, “Sure,” and he said to me, “You know Tal, my roommates are taking your class,” and I said, “Great.” Then he said to me, “You know Tal? Now that you’re teaching a class on happiness, you’ve got to be careful.” I said, “Why?” He said, “Tal, you’ve got to watch out.” He said, “Why?” He said, “Because Tal, if I see you unhappy, I’ll tell my roommates.”

Now, suggesting that of course I ought to be happy all the time, given that I’m teaching a class on happiness. I told my students the next day in class, “The last thing in the world I want you to believe is that I experience constant happiness or that you, by the end of the year will always be happy. Because there are only two kinds of people who do not experience painful emotions like sadness or anxiety or anger or envy or disappointment, two kinds of people who do not experience painful emotions. The first kind are the psychopaths. The second kind are dead people. 

You know, I told my class and I told this to myself as well. The fact that we experience painful emotions, it’s actually a good sign, it means that we’re not psychopaths and we’re alive. It’s a good place to start; we can really build on that and in fact, when we do not allow ourselves to experience the full gamut of human emotions including anger and sadness and envy and anxiety. If we don’t allow ourselves to experience these emotions, these emotions actually strengthen, they fortify and they become more dominant. 

It’s when I give myself what I’ve come to call the permission to be human when I allow myself to experience the full range of human emotions. That’s when I open myself up. A, to these emotions, leaving my system and B, opening myself up to also more pleasurable emotions such as joy, happiness, love and so on.

Paradoxically, it’s when I do not give myself the permission to experience anxiety and anger and sadness, that’s when I experience more anxiety, anger and sadness. When I give myself the permission to experience these emotions, that’s when I more likely to experience happiness.

[0:23:46.1] MB: Do you remember when you started your small business? It was no small feat. It took a lot of late nights, early mornings and the occasional all-nighter. The bottom line is that you’ve been insanely busy ever since.

Why not make things a little easier? Well, our friends at FreshBooks have the solution. FreshBooks invoicing and accounting software is designed specifically for small business owners. It’s simple, intuitive and keeps you way more organized than a dusty shoe box filled with crumpled receipts.

Create and send professional-looking invoices in 30 seconds and get them paid twice as fast with automated online payments. File expenses even quicker and keep them perfectly organized for tax time. The best part, FreshBooks grows alongside your business, so you’ll always have the tools you need when you need them without ever having to learn the ins and outs of accounting.

Join the more than 24 million people who have used FreshBooks. Try it for free for 30 days, no catch and no credit card required. All you have to do is go to freshbooks.com/science and enter the Science of Success in how did you hear about us. That’s all you have to do to get started for 30 days free, no credit card required. That’s freshbooks.com/science. Go there and check it out.

[0:25:14.8] MB: I’d love to dig in to that a little bit more and the kind of “what happens when someone tries to suppress their negative emotions?”

[0:25:23.1] TBS: Let’s do a quick experiment. If you’re listening to this interview, do this experiment. For the next 10 seconds, do not think of a pink elephant. Five more seconds not to think of a pink elephant. Now, I bet you, almost everyone listening thought of the pink elephant. Why? Because when we try to suppress a natural phenomenon such as visualizing the word that we’re hearing, that phenomenon only intensifies. Just like we can’t suppress the seeing or thinking of a pink elephant. We cannot suppress the experience of painful emotions. When I tell myself, “Do not experience anxiety, do not experience anger, then anger and anxiety will only intensify, will grow. 

In contrast, when I simply give myself the permission to experience these emotions. Okay, I’m anxious, okay, I’m angry. Wow, I’m not a psychopath and I’m human. These emotions actually lose their hold on me and they flow right through me and when they flow right through me, when this set of emotion flows right through me, it means that other emotions such as joy and pleasure can also flow freely through me. 

[0:26:43.5] MB: And correct me if I’m wrong, but is this kind of the same concept that you talk about of active acceptance? 

[0:26:49.4] TBS: Yes. So when I talk about “acceptance and permission to be human” I don’t mean passively accepting these emotions. In other words, I don’t mean “Okay well I’m just angry, or anxious, or sad, so I’m going to do nothing just vegetate in front of the TV.” No, what I’m talking about is accepting these emotions, experiencing them and then asking myself, “Okay what can I do now in order to feel better?” But only after I’ve accepted and experience these emotions. 

Now how long do I accept and experience them for? Well that depends. If, for example, I’ve just lost someone who’s dear to me, well then I need a fair amount of time to just be sad, to just cry, to just talk about the painful emotions. If I just got a poor grade on an exam, well I need some time but less time than I would if I’ve lost someone dear to me. So it’s contextual. 

But some time is always necessary to experience the emotion and then to ask, “What can I do now? And “what can I do now?” could be, “Well maybe I should go for a run” or go out and dance with my friends or watch TV but that is the second step after the first step, which is full acceptance, full surrender to the emotions, whatever they are.

[0:28:04.9] MB: I like the inclusion of surrender in there as well and I think this is something that I’ve personally — a lesson that I’ve personally learned really deeply over the last year or two is when you accept these emotions instead of fighting them and trying to bury them or hide them, it’s really powerful how much better you feel and how much more effectively you can deal with them. 

[0:28:27.6] TBS: Yes. So the idea of surrender, when people especially in the west, when we talk about the word surrender or surrendering to emotions we immediately see it as associated with giving up of course and that is by necessity something which is bad, which is necessary. You know we’re all about “never giving up” and “giving the good fight” and “stand up straight” and that’s not always the right approach. Yeah, maybe it’s the right approach when we were playing a sport or when we have a real challenge at work, but it’s not the right approach when we are facing emotional difficulties. 

When we’re facing emotional difficulties sometimes the opposite is what we need to do. It’s not to try harder, it’s actually to let go. It’s not to stand up straight, it could be just to lie down. It’s not to fight, it’s rather to surrender and these sound better or more helpful responses to difficult emotional experiences. 

[0:29:29.4] MB: I’d love to segue into talking about perfectionism, and I know that’s something that you’ve written a lot about. It’s very related to these topics. Tell me a little bit about your take on perfectionism. 

[0:29:41.8] TBS: Right, so perfectionism essentially is unhealthy fear of failure and unhealthy extreme sometimes obsessive fear of failure that permeates those areas in our lives that are most important to us. So, if I can give a personal example, when I was a professional Squash player losing a game was an absolute disaster or even having a practice session which was not perfect, that was an absolute disaster. Or later on, it was when I was a student, perfectionism permeated my academic experience, at least for the first two years. 

When I started to study psychology, very quickly I realized first of all that I was a perfectionist and secondly, the consequences of perfectionism. We were all unhappy when we failed. It doesn’t feel good to fail, but there are very different kinds of responses. One response, the perfectionist response, “This is awful, this is terrible. Now I’m never going to succeed again. I’m a complete failure.” 

The healthier approach is, “Okay, I failed. It’s not pleasant, not fun, but what can I learn from it? How can I move forward? How can I go ahead?” What’s the upside of failure? If you listen to many of the most successful people in the world, they would tell you that the most helpful experiences that they had over the years were experiences of failure, when they learned from it and grew as a result and that’s the much healthier approach to failure. 

Now when I talk about failure I mean it in the broad sense. Also while we can look at a painful emotion as a form of failure because the perfectionist, one form of perfectionist, is the person who wants to have a perfect, unbroken chain of pleasurable, positive emotions. Now that of course is not possible, and then when the perfectionist experiences a painful emotion, that immediately is a disaster and he enters or she enters a downward spiral of self-criticism, very often self-hate, and of course unhappiness as a result. 

[0:31:49.5] MB: So for somebody that is caught in one of those cycles or has very unrealistic expectations about their happiness and their well-being, how do they deal with that or how do they break out of that cycle? 

[0:32:03.8] TBS: Yeah, so there are a few ways. The first is really understanding what perfectionism is and distinguishing between healthy perfectionism and unhealthy perfectionism. So often when people are asked interviews, “So, tell me your shortcomings?” And very often what people say, “Oh I’m a perfectionist,” and of course, they talk about it as a shortcoming. But actually what they mean is, “Well you can trust me. I get things done really well. I make sure. I’m a responsible person. I make sure things are bent perfectly.”

So they’re saying it as a short coming, as a problem but actually they mean it as something that they’re somewhat proud of and being responsible and being hardworking and being persistent and reliable, these are positive traits by and large. So there is this part of perfectionism, which is not bad, which is actually good but there’s another part of perfectionism, which is harmful. Which is harmful to first of all happiness but second also to creativity, to relationships. 

Because if I’m a perfectionist I cannot hear criticism and if you cannot hear criticism and you’re not open to other people, I mean intimate relationships are almost impossible and there is very little learning when there is perfectionism because there is a reluctance to admit imperfections, to admit that, “I don’t know.” So there are two kinds of perfectionism, what psychologist call the “adaptive” and the “maladaptive” perfectionism. So first thing is to be able to understand, what kind of perfectionism do I want to get rid of or do I want to make less dominant in my life? 

Second, the ways you make it less dominant, less pervasive is paradoxically by failing more. You see, one of the reasons why perfectionist are so afraid of failure is because they have elevated failure to a larger than life status and they don’t fail much and then in their minds failure becomes this potential catastrophe. Whereas if we fail a lot by putting ourselves in the line time and time again, after a while we see, “You know, the world didn’t come to an end after this failure and neither after this failure.” 

And in a sense, we get used to failing. We begin to get used to being imperfect and overtime, we become more comfortable failing. So that’s one way. Another way which indirectly helps a great deal is actually meditation. Because what is meditation? Meditation is learning to be present, learning to be here and now and when I’m present to an experience, to any experience, whether it’s the experience of sadness or the experience of failure, it becomes less difficult to tolerate. I learn to live with it and then I realize, “Hey that is actually not that bad not only is it not that bad, I actually learned a lot by being present to this experience, so there’s no need to fear it happening again,” and I become less of a perfectionist then. 

[0:34:59.8] MB: I’d love to explore the interplay between stress and recovery and I’d love to get your thoughts on that. 

[0:35:07.2] TBS: Sure, so one of the things that over the last few years have become very clear through the research is that for years and decades, psychologists, professionals as well as lay people have looked at stress in the wrong way. If you ask most people, conventional wisdom today would tell you that “stress is bad”, that what we need to do is eliminate stress, get rid of it or at the very least minimize it in our lives because it’s associated with chronic disease, with unhappiness, with depression and anxiety, you name it; stress is the culprit. 

Well, it actually turns out that not only is stress not the culprit, that actually stress potentially is good for us. How come? Look at this analogy: You go to the gym and you lift weights, what are you doing with your muscles? You’re stressing your muscles, now is that a bad thing? Of course not. You lift weights and you become stronger. You stress your muscles two days later and you become even stronger and on and on and you become fitter, stronger, healthier, happier. Stress is not a bad thing actually. It’s potentially a good thing. 

When do the problems begin at the gym? The problems in the gym begin when you lift weights and a minute later, you lift more weights and then you increase the weightage and the following day you go in and again, you push yourself again and again and again. That’s when the problems begin. That’s when you get injured. That’s when you get weaker rather than stronger. The problem therefore, when it comes to stress, is that we don’t have enough recovery. In the gym when you have enough recovery, you get stronger through the stress. 

The same happens on the psychological level not just on the physiological level. On the psychological level, we can deal with stress. We’re good at it. We were created whether it’s by God or evolution, we were created to be able to deal with stress. The problem is that we don’t have enough recovery today. You know the difference between 5,000 years ago or even 50 years ago and today is that in the past there was much more time, many more opportunities for recovery. Today there isn’t because we’re on most of the time. 

You know, there’s a wonderful book by a Harvard professor, Leslie Perlow called Sleeping With Your Smartphone. It has become our most intimate companion and we’re on it constantly, we’re available constantly. Instead of switching off, instead of taking time for recovery. Whether it’s a meal with our friends or family or whether it’s going to the gym or whether it’s just going for a walk in the streets, or even better, the woods, these forms of recovery are so very important for us to reset the system in a sense and just like we need recovery in the gym, we need recovery in life.  And the stress today, the problem with stress today is that people don’t have enough time to recover. If they do have time to recover, that stress can only make us strong, happier, and healthier. 

[0:38:07.9] MB: How do we build or find more time for recovery? 

[0:38:12.9] TBS: Unfortunately, we can’t find more time. We have finite amounts of time but what we can do is put time aside for what we think is really important and recovery is really important and it’s not giving up time. Recovery is a form of investment. So when I invest, if I invest money, yes I’m in the sense giving up money but I’m giving up money for the sake of future gain so that I have more of it in the future and in the same way with the recovery. 

Yes, I’m putting some time aside for recovery when I am not working, for instance. But I am actually getting much more in return because in the time after I recover, I will be a lot more productive, a lot more creative and of course happier. 

So recovery is a good investment and recovery, again, is something, whether it’s 15 minutes of meditation or an hour in the gym or just hanging out for a couple of hours with friends and recovery is also a good night sleep. A lot of research on the importance of sleep for well-being and for cognitive functioning, it could be a day or two off over the weekend and recovery can be the vacation, the week or four week holiday once or twice a year. So all these forms of recovery are great forms of investment. I get much more in return. 

[0:39:33.1] MB: I’d love to talk about — we’ve examined a couple of the different mind-body interventions that deal with anxiety and stress. We’ve talk about exercise and how important that is, we’ve touched briefly on meditation. One of the other things you’ve talked about is the power of breathing and I’d love to hear some of your insights. 

[0:39:51.3] TBS: Sure. So there is, again, a lot of work, a lot of research on breathing and the nice thing about it is that it’s always there for us literally from the moment we were born until the moment we die and we need to make better use of this thing that’s right under our very noses and what does it mean to make use of breathing? Because we breathe naturally and again, we always do it. But there are helpful and unhelpful forms of breathing. 

So for instance, when stress levels rise and when we don’t have enough recovery, our breathing actually becomes shorter and shallower. We don’t take a deep breathe in. Now it’s very easy to simply decide, to set our alarm clock or smartphone to remind us, say every two hours to take three or four or five deep breaths, which you spend 10 minutes first thing in the morning just breathing in deeply and focusing on the breathe going in and out and we’re benefiting then from both breathing and it’s a form of meditation as well. 

Now what is proper breathing? It’s really like what a baby would breathe. When you watch a baby breathing, you see their belly go up and down. This is called belly breath, and engaging in belly breathing, again, three to four deep breathes every hour or two and then maybe a couple of minutes in the morning and a couple of minutes more in the evening, that can go a long way as a form of recovery, as a form of taking in sufficient oxygen as a form of changing our experience from the fight or flight response. 

A stressful response to what Herbert Benson from Harvard Medical School calls “The Relaxation Response” and again, it doesn’t take much. It’s a very simple intervention that’s with us all the time. I, as a ritual, engaging in deep breathing a few times a day and that has done wonders to my overall experience of wellbeing. 

[0:41:56.8] MB: I’d love to touch on rituals, you just mentioned that. What are some of the rituals that you found daily that have really helped you cultivate wellbeing and happiness? 

[0:42:07.6] TBS: Yes, first of all maybe I can just say a couple of words about the importance of rituals. Because many people think that if they understand something, so for example, I understand the importance of exercise or I understand the importance of breathing or the importance of relationships, well then that’s enough to bring about change. I’ve had the “aha moment” I was convinced by a study and a research and now I’m ready to live happily ever after. 

Well unfortunately that’s not the case. Knowing what’s good for us doesn’t mean that we’re doing what’s good for us and doing is necessary for bring about the real change. Rather than relying on knowing or understanding, what we must rely on to bring about lasting change are rituals, are habits. You know, John Dryden, the British philosopher/poet once wrote: “We first make our habits and then our habits make us,” and it’s important to make habits to create rituals that will contribute to our wellbeing. 

So let me share you some of the rituals, some of the daily or weekly rituals that I have. One of them is physical exercise, three times a week on particular days, particular times I exercise. For me it’s usually a stationary bike or swimming. Three days a week I do yoga. Every morning when I get up, I spend between 10 and 12 minutes deep breathing while reminding myself of the things that I want to be reminded. 

For example, I remind myself — and this is all written down. I remind myself to be present. I remind myself to bring more playfulness to my work, to my family. I remind myself to contribute, to help others and cultivate healthy relationship. I remind myself to be patient and finally, I remind myself to give myself the permission to be human, to be humble about myself, my life, my expectations. 

Now these things, I remind myself of everyday. They are already second nature, I’ve formed neural pathways in my brain around these ideas that I believe are so important for a happy, healthy, and fulfilling life. It’s only by engaging a ritual around them that they can become second nature, they can be assimilated, internalized and finally another ritual that I have before going to bed is expressing gratitude for at least five things in my life.

[0:44:42.3] MB: That’s such a great exposition about rituals and I love that quote, “We first make our habits and then our habits make us.” That’s really powerful. I’d love to dig in to the concept, and this goes back a little bit to kind of when we were talking about perfectionism and the permission to be human. I’d love to talk about self-forgiveness. Can you share some of your thoughts about that?

[0:45:04.8] TBS: Sure. The Dalai Lama, when he came to the west for the first time, interviewed many western scientists, psychologist, practitioners, theoreticians. One of the most surprising things that he found was that compassion, the word for compassion in the west stands for compassion towards other people. He said, in Tibetan, the word for compassionate is Sewe. Sewe is equally about compassion toward others and towards one’s self. We’re very hard with ourselves, that has to do a lot with perfectionism or is a cause of perfectionism.

We’re not forgiving, we don’t give ourselves the permission to experience painful emotions or to fail, to be human. Unfortunately, that’s a cause of a great deal of unhappiness. There’s no one who is perfect and no one ever was or ever will be. The sooner we accept that, the better, the more forgiving we are of our imperfections or of our failures, the happier, and paradoxically, the more successful we’ll be in the long term. 

[0:46:14.7] MB: For somebody who has been listening and wants to have kind of a concrete starting place to implement some of the ideas that we’ve talked about today, what’s sort of one simple piece of homework that you would give to one of our listeners?

[0:46:28.2] TBS: What I would do first, we are potentially the best teachers that we have. What I would do is, I would sit down and I would write, I would write about my best experiences from the past, “When was I at my happiest?” From those stories that I write down, I would extract what I consider the essentials. Keep in mind all the things that you heard about permission to be human and about relationships and about exercise and about expressing gratitude and try and extract the essentials.

In other words, do research on yourself, or rather what I distinguish between research and search. Research is very often about other people. Search is within one’s self.

[0:47:16.2] MB: For people who want to learn more about you, where can people find you and your books online?

[0:47:21.3] TBS: Well, my books are on Amazon or you can go onto my website, www.talbenshahar.com.

[0:47:29.7] MB: Well Tal, thank you so much, this has been a fascinating conversation and I know I’ve taken away a ton of insights and I think the listeners are really going to enjoy this. We just wanted to say, thank you so much for being on the show. 

[0:47:42.6] TBS: Thank you Matt for the opportunity.

[0:47:46.1] 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.

I'm going to give you three reasons why you should sign up for our e-mail list today by going to successpodcast.com, signing up right on the homepage. There are some incredible stuff that’s only available to those on the e-mail list, so be sure to sign up, including an exclusive, curated weekly e-mail from us called Mindset Monday, which is short, simple, filled with articles, stories, things that we found interesting and fascinating in the world of evidence-based growth in the last week.

Next, you're going to get an exclusive chance to shape the show, including voting on guests, submitting your own personal questions that we’ll ask guests on air and much more. Lastly, you’re going to get a free guide we created based on listener demand, our most popular guide, which is called how to organize and remember everything. You can get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide by signing up and joining the e-mail list today. Again, you can do that at successpodcast.com, sign up right at the homepage, or if you're on the go, just text the word “smarter”, S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222. 

Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes because that helps boost the algorithm, that helps us move up the iTunes rankings and helps more people discover the Science of Success. 

Don't forget, if you want to get all the incredible information we talk about in the show, links transcripts, everything we discussed and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can get those at successpodcast.com, just hit the show notes button right at the top. 

Thanks again, and we'll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

Brené Brown, Dan Siegel and Friends - 2019 Holiday Special

Happy Holidays from The Science of Success!

Consider this mashup to be your personal little Christmas present from Me, Austin, and our team over here at The Science of Success. For this Holiday Special we brought you some of the best moments on giving, connectedness, compassion, kindness, Courage, and much much more. You’ll certainly recognize some of these guests such as Brene Brown, Oscar Timboli, as well as some potentially new faces like John Wang, Dacher Keltner, and more.

Now, usually I’m the one asking the guests on the show to give you some homework but this episode I’d like to ask something of you. This week, find some time to express gratitude and do something special for someone else. This may be as simple as calling a family member, friend, colleague or mentor and letting them know you care about them. Maybe it’s writing a letter to a long lost friend. Perhaps it’s even donating some of your time to help those in your area who may be in need this season.

Whatever it is, express some gratitude towards your fellow human beings. It’s hard to believe we’ve been running the show now for over 3 entire years. It’s been a true honor of mine to help bring so many lessons to you all and to help everyone unlock some of their hidden potential. I can’t wait for 2020 and another exciting year on The Science of Success. As always, feel free to drop me a note at matt@successpodcast.com and have a great end to 2019.

Yours,
Matt

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

P.S. - Seriously…it’s kind of a

Check it out!

Episode Transcript

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

[00:00:11] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence based growth podcast on the Internet, with more than four million downloads and listeners in over 100 countries. Hey, it's Matt here, and I wanted to reach out and do something a little bit different for this special episode during the holiday season. As many of you know, we released a mash up on gratitude during Thanksgiving this year, and many listeners wrote back in with feedback that they really enjoy the compilation format. And so for Christmas this year, we wanted to expand on that and bring you some of the best moments from the show for Christmas this year. 

Consider this mash up to be your personal little Christmas present from me, Austin, and our team here at the Science of Success. For this holiday special, we brought you some of the best moments on giving, connectedness, compassion, kindness, courage and so much more. You'll certainly recognize some of these guests, including Brené Brown, Oscar Trimboli, and more. But you might see some new faces on there as well. People from back in the day like John Wang, Dacher Keltner, and some exciting guests from our archives. 

Now, usually I'm the one asking the guests on the show to give you some homework. But in this episode, I'd like to personally ask something of you. This week, find some time to express gratitude and to do something special for someone else. This may be a simple as calling a family member, a friend, colleague, or mentor and letting them know that you care about them. Maybe it's writing a letter to a long lost friend. Perhaps it's even donating some of your time to help those in your area who may be in need this season. And one of my personal favorite things to do is to buy toys for Children that are in need through a program like Toys for Tots or the Angel Tree. It's so much fun, and it's a great thing to do around the holiday season. But whatever it is, express some gratitude towards your fellow human beings. 

It's hard to believe that we've been running this show for over four years now, but it's been a true honor to help bring so many lessons to you to help everyone unlock, even if just a little bit, help everyone unlock some of their hidden potential. I can't wait for 2020 and for another exciting year here on the Science of Success. As always, feel free to drop me a note. My email’s matt@successpodcast.com. I hope you have a great end to 2019 and I hope you enjoy this special Christmas episode. 

Yours truly, Matt, Austin and the entire Science of Success Team. 

[00:02:5] MB: 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 email 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 home page. 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 44222.

We sat down in a previous episode with our past guest, the legendary podcaster Dan Carlin, to uncover how we can make sense in today's confusing world. If you want to find some clarity in all the chaos and confusion, listen to our previous episode. Now for a Christmas special. 

[00:03:57] MB: I totally agree and coming back to the people the perspective of the people who were in the arena versus the people who are in, as you put it, the cheap seats. It’s funny because I have so many young people who are listeners of the show, and I have nieces and nephews who are in high school and college, and they're so scared sometimes to just take the first step. They're so scared, as you put it, to show up. Why are people so afraid?

[00:04:22] BB:I think there are a lot of reasons, and I think some of them are demographic. I think some of them are informed by race and class and gender. I mean, I think it’s complex. But here’s what I would say. When you think about young people, and this is my 22 years of teaching graduate students. We don’t teach people how to get back up after they fall. Because we don’t teach people how to rise, they never take the leap. 

Can you imagine if you didn’t know – If you physically fell and you didn’t know how to get back up? You’d spend your whole life tiptoeing around. You’d spend your whole life like bracing your palms on the hood of a car when you step off the curve, then you would follow the car with your hand until you open the door. Then you’d hold on to the oh shit handle as you try to get into the seat. You would never let go of everything and just walk, because you’re deaf ear would, “If I fall, I don’t know how to get back up.” 

The same thing is true in our socio-emotional world. If we don’t know how to get back up after failure, disappointment, or setback, we will spend an enormous amount of energy making sure we never have to get back up. 

So, for me, I have a lot of bounce. I have a lot of bounce. So, I’m willing to take chances, because I’m very secure in my ability to get back up. I think even if you think about going back really to young, young folks. Even if you think about letting kids experience adversity.

So, one of the conversations my husband and I had very early on when we were brand new parents is we both come from like divorce parents. A lot of really hard, hard shit. Stuff that we would never want to subject our kids to. At the same time, we both really respect our own and each other’s resilience. Did I just say he’s a pediatrician? He’s a pediatrician. So we have a lot of parenting conversations. 

So, the big finding we came to was we need to let – There’s a line between adversity and trauma and we need to let our kids experience adversity, not so much trauma. That kind of sets us back. So, I think having experiences with adversity and knowing how to get back up makes people braver, because they’re willing to take a chance.

[00:06:43] MB: Such a powerful analogy and really shines light on this notion. I love the example of walking around with a fear of never being able to get back up. Because it’s so clearly highlights the idea that the truly important skillset is not whether you’re prefect at walking, but it’s just learning how to get up over and over again. 

[00:07:08] BB: I mean, that’s it. I don’t even know who said the quote, but someone has a great quote that says, “The most important number is not the number of times that you fall, but the number of times you get back up.” That is so – I know it’s like cheesy, like queue the rocky music or whatever. But it’s just true. 

So, what we know – I mean, for me, to be honest, Matt, if I think about all of my work over the last 20 something years, I don’t think that I’m more proud of anything that the research that we did on courage and the fact that courage is teachable, observable and measurable. It’s four skillsets.

But one of the key four skillsets is learning how to get back up. The first big skillset is the ability to vulnerability. We call it rumbling with vulnerability. The second one is really knowing what your values are and how to live into them, because people who are not super clear and just very gray clear about their values and what those behaviors look like are not as brave. They don’t risk the fall. 

The next one is braving trust, learning how to trust yourself and other people appropriately. Then the last one is learning to get back up. So we can teach these things. But I got to tell you. As I step back and think about the way that we parent today. Not everybody, but a growing part of parenting, I think, unfortunately. The way schools are set up. We’re not teaching courage skills. 

[00:08:42] MB: I couldn’t agree more, and in many ways that the root of that idea is what underpins our entire project with the Science of Success as well. I want to dig in to all of these different ideas. So let’s start at a high-level with courage. What is courage? When you say that, when you talk about it, how do you think about how we define courage? 

[00:09:04] BB: It’s interesting, because I don’t have a definition for courage that’s any different than data-driven definition for vulnerability. We define vulnerability as the willingness to show up and be seen when you can’t control the outcome. The definition of vulnerability as a construct itself is it’s the emotion we experience during times of uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure. 

I spent like probably, I don’t know, maybe 5 years, because I spent 90% of my time in organizations, big, fortune 10, big Silicon Valley companies, teaching courageous leadership skills. So, I spent so many years trying to convince people of a relationship between courage and vulnerability. Then it got very clear to me one day when I was at Fort Bragg working with Special Forces, and I asked a really simple question, which was – Because everyone thinks vulnerability is weakness. Everyone thinks that it’s oversharing. Everything is soft. 

So I asked this question, “If vulnerability is uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure, give me a single example of courage in your life on the field, off the field, other troops, other soldiers. Give me a single example of courage that you’ve witnessed or experienced yourself that didn’t involve vulnerability, that didn’t involve uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure.”

It was kind of just silence and you could see these troops, they were just shifting in their seats and uncomfortable and a couple of them started putting their heads in their hands. Then finally one guy stood up and said, “Ma’am, there is no courage without vulnerability.” Three tours, there is no courage without vulnerability. 

So, I think any conversation that we start around what is courage is it’s the willingness to put yourself out there when you can’t control how it’s going to go. If you’re putting yourself out there and you can kind of control or predict the outcome, you’re not being that brave. You’re probably doing good stuff, maybe, but you’re not being courageous. 

[00:11:06] MB: I just got goose bumps when you said that. Such a powerful definition, and it’s something that’s so important. It’s such a needed message in today’s world, today’s society. I feel like so many people stick to what’s comfortable and what’s safe and they’re so afraid to step into uncertainty and to step into risk. 

[00:11:31] BB: Yeah, I mean, it’s the Special Forces soldier. But it’s also the guy sitting across from the person he loves and thinking, “Shit, man! I want to say I love you. Should I wait to say it? Maybe I should wait for her to say it first. Okay, you know what? I’m going to be brave. I love you.” That’s also courage and vulnerability.

[00:11:53] MB: Yeah, that’s a great point. It spans the spectrum, right? It’s these every day moments of life and it goes all the way back out to these heroic achievements in the military and beyond. 

[00:12:06] BB: Yeah. I mean, it’s the CEO of the startup looking for funding and being turned down 50 times. It’s the 51st time. That’s brave. That’s courageous. That’s vulnerable. So, this mythology that vulnerability is weakness, we just cross the 400,000 pieces of data mark, which was a big mark for us. There is zero evidence, zero, that vulnerability is weakness. It is by far our most accurate measure of courage. 

In fact, we have a daring leader assessment. We put together an assessment for courageous leadership, and we worked with MBA and EMBA students at Wharton, at UPenn, Kelog, at Northwestern, and the Jones School at Rice. We spent three years putting together this instrument. Make sure it’s valid, reliable. Basically, it’s as simple as this. I can tell you how brave you are by measuring your capacity for vulnerability. 

[00:13:12] MB: It makes perfect sense, because if you’re afraid to be vulnerable. By definition, you’re coming at that from a place of fear and scarcity. 

[00:13:22] BB: Yeah. I mean, I love the fact that you just said every day scenarios, everyday situations. Yeah, I didn’t know how this podcast was going to go. I don’t know that I’m going to get on it and give it a shot. If I screwed up, it’s going to be out to tons of people, but it’s saying something to your roommate like, “Hey! Dude, you can’t keep leaving your shit everywhere. It’s not working.” It’s sitting down with your boss and saying, “Hey, I understand I messed that up, but the way you’re giving me feedback, I can’t hear what you’re saying. So I want to learn from you, but when you’re yelling and screaming and pounding your first, that doesn’t work.” 

[00:13:58] MB: One of my favorite quotes of yours, and I’m paraphrasing this a little bit, but it’s this idea that vulnerability is not as hard or scary or dangerous as getting to the end of your life and asking yourself what if I had shown up? 

[00:14:14] BB: For me and for the people I’ve interviewed that are late in life, I cannot imagine a more terrifying thing. I do not want to look back. There are two things that are really important to me when I look back on my life and my career. The first one is I do not want to look back and wonder what if. What if I would have said yes? What if I would have tried that? What if I would have said I love you first? 

The other thing is I want to be able to look back and know without question that I contributed more than I criticized, because criticism is so easy. It’s not vulnerable. It’s not brave. Contribution, super brave and hard. Because everyone will have comments and thoughts about what it is. There’s very minimal risk of failure and criticizing. 

That’s why the Teddy Roosevelt, it’s not the critique who counts. For me, it’s really not the critique who counts. So if you leave some kind of really shitty tweet and your avatar is an egg or like the little icon or some movie star and your handle isn’t your real name, useless to me. Block or mute forever, whichever is easiest for me. 

But if you leave a really hard thing for me to hear, but it’s respectful and your name is there and your picture is there, there’s a 95% chance, if I see it, I’m going to come back and say, “Tell me more. I’m curious. Why do you think that? I’m interested. Can we dig in?” I might DM you and say, “This is a really interesting point.” 

I mean, someone made a point about something that I said in Braving the Wilderness. I was talking about Black Lives Matter and why it’s important and I was talking about the dehumanization of people. A woman said, “There's something about the way you framed this sentence that felt privileged and tone deaf to me.” At first I kind of recoiled and I’m like, “Oh my God! I’m out here supporting this stuff that like I’m taking a lot of heat for, and then yet I'm still tone deaf.” But I was like, “Tell me more.” 

We had this long conversation on our DM's on Twitter and I called my agent and said, “Stop the process. Is that a real thing? If need to change something. I wrote something that was in a privileged blind spot for me. I need to change it. I can make it better.” They stopped him and changed it. Random House did. So, feedback, even hard feedback, constructive feedback, difficult feedback, is not the same as being a critic your whole life and never risking vulnerability. It’s just not brave.

[00:16:52] MB: So, how do we start to step into vulnerability, or as you called it, rumble, with vulnerability?

[00:16:58] BB: The answer is pretty counterintuitive, because here's – When I spent the last seven years studying leadership, and I mean talking to everyone, leaders from everyone from Pixar, to Special Forces, from oil and gas companies in Singapore to people who work for the White House, like across-the-board. Talking to Fortune 10 CEOs, really asking what is the future of leadership. 

So, it was the first time I had ever done a study where the answer saturated cross. There was not a single participant who said something different than, “Oh my God! The future of leadership is courageous leadership. We've got to have braver people and braver cultures.” We are facing too many geopolitical, environmental, just technology, everything is shifting so fast that if we don't have courageous people leading, companies won't make it. Organizations won't make it. Governments won't make it. 

So was interesting is my hypothesis was wrong. So I assumed that the greatest barrier to what I call daring leadership or courageous leadership was fear. So as we started moving into this what we call selective coding, I went back to some of these leaders and said, “Wow! Okay, we're hearing it's brave leadership. We hear the only people who will be standing in the next five years and really meaningful leadership capacities are courageous people, building courageous cultures. How do you stay out of fear?” 

These people looked at me like I was crazy. They were like, “What?” I said, “You’re a daring leader, how do you stay brave all the time?” They’re like, “I'm afraid all the time. I don't know what you're talking about.” I was like, “What?” But you’re a brave leader.” They’re like, “Well, you can put me on whatever list you want to, but I’m scared all the time.” 

So, as we started digging in and digging deeper into the data and interviewing more people about that, what I learned was it's not fear that gets in the way of us being brave. It's armor. Armor gets in the way of us being brave. Armor gets in the way of us being vulnerable. 

So, the difference is, let’s say, you and I are both leaders, and we're both on a scale from 1 to 10 thought – We’re both scared five. So, Matt’s a five scared leader, and I’m a five scared leader. But as a daring leader, Matt, you're aware of your armor and you choose to be vulnerable and show up and take it off even though it's really seductive to put it on. I, on the other hand, am not aware about how I use armor to show up. So, I stay in my armor. 

So, the first thing we have to do is understand – I mean, you can’t do any of these without self-awareness. So the first thing is understand what is your go-to-armor. How do you self-protect when you're in uncertainty risk and feel emotionally exposed? 

For me, it's perfectionism. I get emotionally intense and can talk over people. This is not mine particularly, but some people, they use cynicism as armor. Some people – And this is not mine either, but – I mean, trust me. I have a shit ton of it, but these just happens to not be mine. A lot of people have to be the knower. So when they’re vulnerable and feel exposed, they become the knower, and it's more important for them to be right than get it right. 

So, we have to figure – I’m a pleaser. That's definitely mine, and I know when I'm wearing my pleasing, good girl, make everyone around me happy armor, because the armor weighs 100 pounds, but the resentment weighs 1,000 pounds. I become a really resentful, angry person. 

So, where we start with learning how to rumble with vulnerability is examining what myths were we raised believing. Were we raised believing it's weakness? Were we raised believing that it's over-sharing? How were we raised?

Then the second question is what armor do I use to self-protect. Am I the blustery, posturing tough guy? Am I the knower? Am I the cynic? It's all bullshit. None of it matters. What is our armor? Does that make sense?

[00:20:54] MB: That totally makes sense. I love the little quip about how the armor weighs 100 pounds, but the resentment weighs 1000 pounds. 

[0:21:03.0] MB: Definitely. So you touched on and talked a little bit about the band. Just to reiterate, what is the One Kindness Challenge itself? 

[0:21:12.9] JW: It’s actually a really simple thing. Now at the end of the day, like I said, we all want to do kind things. We all realize the power behind kindness, but it’s easy to forget, even right here with us right now. You could think of a time where you’ve done an act of kindness, it could be recently, or it could be from a little while back ago, and I want you to picture that. Picture what it is that you’ve done, or picture what it is that you’ve been seeing somebody else do, and how that made you feel, how that experience felt. 

Like, just take a moment, just really immerse yourself in that memory and how did that make you feel? What are the feelings that you’re going through? What are the experiences that you’re going through in your body? And in that moment, even just now when you are remembering it, when you are picturing yourself there now, what you’re experiencing could be one of a few things. Maybe you are experiencing some level of warmth. Like warmth that is starting up at your chest area, and it could be feeling like this calmness, this serenity and happiness. 

So what is happening there is that your kindness is actually triggered by this thing called the vagus nerve, which is right at base of our brainstem, and the vagus nerve basically controls things like your digestive track and your body functions, but more importantly, it controls your heart and your heart rate. So this has been linked in a lot of ways, the Vegas Nerve to empathy, and feelings of sympathy and empathy, which is why a lot of times when we see somebody doing act of kindness, you get that same feeling as if when you were doing it yourself. 

If you have ever watched those videos, you can go into these great series of videos that are made by a Thai insurance company, and one of the videos has this guy just going around doing these daily simple acts of kindness, and he’s just going around helping people do things like water plants, and helping old ladies cross the street, helping street vendors, giving some money away to somebody who’s perhaps living on the street and not as fortunate as he is, and he’s not a rich man or anything like that. He’s no Bill Gates, he’s no Elon Musk, or some great philanthropist, he’s just some guy trying to make people’s lives better. Every time I watch that video, I get that same feeling. I want to tear up. I just feel like this amazing sense of joy and everything like that. 

So what I’m experiencing, what you’re experiencing in that moment when you’re watching that and feeling that, and remembering that, is that you’re getting a hit of dopamine. You’re getting this hit of oxytocin in your body, where that level is going up, and you’re feeling what scientist have now called “The Helper’s High”. It actually is kind of a high, because you really do get this thrill from it. So our goal with the movement is very, very simple. 

We’re trying to get as many people doing a daily act of kindness, and like I said, it doesn’t matter if you’re doing a massive act like, “Oh, I’m going to go out and help build a shelter, build a hospital down in Peru,” or if you are doing something extremely simple, which is just like, “I am going to open a door for somebody, I’m going to help that lady in the parking lot with her groceries. I’m going to go up at someone and say, ‘Hey listen, I just want to say I really appreciate you and what you’ve done.’” 

Or you might write a note of thank you to my old high school teacher, or my old friend who once helped me and I never got to really express that. All of those count as acts of kindness, and the funny thing about that is that, as it turns out in these studies, there’s not a massive difference between the size of the work that we do, but there is a massive difference in the consistency. 

Which is to say, if you do one act, like let’s say you do one massive act in one day, and then you don’t do anything again for six months, the effect of that is not anywhere near as powerful as if you were to do, let’s say, 21 days of these smaller acts, which is why we tell the people who are part of our movement, we say, “Look, you could participate in this, we hope you participate in it forever, just what an amazing thing you’ll be doing in the world, but at the very least, try it for 21 days. Do it once a day for 21 days, and see how it makes you feel.” 

I can guarantee you, it will change your life. It would change the way you see the world. It would change the way people look at you, which is another thing that we talked about, which is actually kindness makes you look more attractive to the opposite sex, and to other people, which is great, but it would change your lifestyle. It would change how you feel. So our goal is to try to get a million acts of kindness out there, because it’s very clear that right now, we need to more kindness in this world more than ever. 

Whatever your politics is, whatever your background or culture or history is, I think it’s pretty clear that right now the world is going through some changes that, let’s just say, there may be more to this, right? People are becoming a little bit more disconnected. People are becoming a little bit more distant from each other. So we need to build that back into our societies. So that’s what the movement is about, We’re trying to get people to go out there and do 21 acts of kindness at the very minimum, and just watch their lives change. 

[0:26:09.4] OT: I'll flip it the other way though, Matt. If you think about the teacher who made the biggest difference for you at school, generally people say it's the teacher that listen to them. Is that true for you?

[0:26:21.4] MB: That's a good question. I don't know if it's true for me or not. The thing that taught me how to listen is that I was a debater in high school and you have to be able to listen really intently to understand what the other side is saying and doing.

[0:26:34.4] OT: How did that make you a better debater by doing that?

[0:26:38.7] MB: We're flipping the script already. I like it. It made me a better debater, because – and this is something that as you're well aware and you’re evangelizing this idea around the world to be successful at anything. I apply this in business and life, across the board. You have to understand what someone else is doing, what they're saying, what they're feeling, what they're going through, to be able to respond, to be able to provide a solution. 

That was true, whether it's a response in a debate, all the way up to whether you're dealing with a management crisis at a company. It's the same fundamental thing. You have to be able to understand what's really going on and what's really happening and confront reality as best as you can discern it. To be able to do that, you really have to listen very deeply.

[0:27:24.5] OT: The leaders I work with Matt and you highlight this from the debate. One of the exercises I set them is for today, the next day and the next week, listen to somebody in the media you fiercely disagree with. In doing, so not a person who's right in front of you, like it was with your debate, but if you can tune your frequency to make sure that you listen to somebody in the media, whether that's on TV, or radio, or a podcast, whatever they have as an opinion, make sure it's the opposite to you. 

Then you can start to understand the difference between hearing and listening, because if you listen to someone you fiercely disagree with, suddenly you'll become conscious not only of their assumptions, their judgments, their prejudice, anything you find that's different in your historical experience to them. You’ll also start to notice that as a mirror back to yourself and you wonder, “What prejudice am I holding? What assumptions am I holding?”

A really simple tip for everybody, if you want to become aware of your listening blind spots, those things you're not even conscious are true for you. Spend one day out of t6he next seven and spend 30 minutes listening to someone you fiercely disagree with through the media. 30 minutes is important, because for five minutes you can hold it, maybe even for 15 minutes you can hold it. Once you go past the 18-minute mark, you start to get frustrated and you start to get angry and you start to wanted to bake that person there. A really simple, practical tip for everybody; if you want to become conscious of your listening blind spots, listen to somebody you fiercely disagree with.

[0:29:07.5] MB: Yeah, that's a great tip and a great strategy. I want to come back to something you said a second ago that I think bears digging into more, which is this notion of the difference between hearing and listening. Tell me more about that.

[0:29:18.1] OT: We all hear, in fact the very first skill we learn inside our mother's womb at 20 weeks is to distinguish our mother's sound from any other sound, Matt. At 32, weeks you can distinguish Beethoven from Bon Jovi from Bieber. The minute we come into the world, we come into the world on very active birth. The moment you scream is when the clock starts. That's when on your birth certificate, the time of your birth is defined by the time you scream. We spend the rest of our life screaming to be noticed.

Yet, the very last thing that leaves us as a skill when we pass away, when I interviewed a couple of palliative care nurses and doctors is hearing. Hearing is listening to sounds. In fact, while you sleep, you can hear. It's really important that you hear while you sleep. It's part of our survival instincts. Listening is the ability to make sense of what you hear. The difference between hearing and listening I always say is the action you take. Nothing is more frustrating when you have a conversation with somebody. You nod and you commit to do something and you don't do it. The next time they come back they go, “How did you go with that?” You’re, “Oh, I forgot.” They interpret that as, “Well, you heard what I said, but you really didn't listen.”

For most of us, listening is about making sense of what we hear. Deep listening, on the other hand, is helping the person who's speaking to make sense of what they're saying, because too much of listening is fixated on ourselves and understanding what we need to do to make meaning of what they're saying. That's handy, but a really powerful listener helps the person speaking make sense of what they're saying, not just you make sense of what they're saying as well.

Most of us in the 80s and the 90s, they had this amazing movement called the Active Listening Movement, which is focus on the speaker, notice what they're saying, nod, use non-verbal affirmatives like, “Mm-hmm. Mm,” or, “Tell me more,” as an example. The reality is all that's helping you to do is helping you to listen is interesting. Helping them to listen to themselves is even more important.

Matt, there's three parts in neuroscience I'd love everybody to understand before they leave the podcast today. If you are only taking one note, this is the note I'd be taking; if I got run over by a truck and I hope that one thing I pass on to the world is these three numbers. I speak at a 125 words a minute. You listen at 400 words a minute and I think at 900 words a minute. We're going to deconstruct each of those numbers.

This is the maths and science of listening. It's the neuroscience of listening. If I speak at 125 words a minute and you can listen at 400, Matt, you're going to be distracted. You're going to fill in the gap. I'm going to sound boring and there's 300 words you're going to fill in your head, because you can. If you want to try this out, just turn the podcast up to 2 times speed and you'll still be able to make sense of what we say. Blind people can listen at up to 300 words a minute, because they've trained their mind to do that. For blind people, the speed at which they can listen increases their ability to literally see their environment around them.

If I can speak at only a 125 words a minute, a horserace caller, or an auctioneer can speak it up to 200 words a minute, you can still make sense of that, but we're all programmed to be distracted. Again, it's happening for you right now. I'm not speaking fast enough and you're filling in the gaps for those 300 words that I'm not speaking fast enough for you. It gets worse. If you're on your cellphone and you're sending a text message, or a WhatsApp message, or anything else on that phone, it's impossible for you to notice what I'm not saying. It's impossible for you to notice my body language.

Here's the frustrating thing for me as the speaker, I've got 900 words stuck in my head and I can only get a 125 words out at any one time then. The maths is really simple. The likelihood, that first thing out of my mouth is what I'm thinking, there's a 1 in 9 chance, or 11% that what I say is what I'm thinking. I'm at the stage in my life that I'm spending more time with a doctor than I'd like. If they said to me I've got an 11% chance of surviving surgery, I'd be asking for a second opinion. The reality is in a conversation, we should be asking for a second opinion as well, Matt.

[0:34:00.5] MB: I want to explore a couple of the things you said. Those are some really interesting stats. Coming back to something you talked about a second ago, tell me about this idea of how do we help somebody listen to themselves? I might be phrasing that incorrectly, but how do we focus on the other person and the idea of deep listening, how do we help them make sense of what they're saying, as opposed to just actively listening to them?

[0:34:23.5] OT: Yeah. Sot he very first place to start is to remember if there are five levels of listening, level one is not paying attention to the speaker. Level one is listening to yourself. You can't be conscious enough to focus on them. 

They're listening if you've got the last conversation that you just had in your head, or the next conversation, or the fact you've got to go to the gym later on this evening, or the fact you've got to sort out something on the weekend, or you've got a dinner party, or you've got a birthday party and you've got all this noise going on in your head before you even get to the conversation. It's impossible for you to help them listen, until you listen to yourself. You need to be an empty vessel in the conversation, so you can focus on them.

A lot of us come into the conversation as if we jump into the passenger seat of a car and forget to put our own seat belts on. We're driving away in the conversation and all of a sudden, if they slam the brakes on, you're going to go through the front window, because you're not in the same swim lane as they are. You're not in the same conversation. Three really quick tips, Matt, to get you centered, ready for that conversation to help them listen to themselves.

Tip number one, switch your cellphone off. Oh, wow. That's crazy talk. I know. If you're addicted to your phone, which about 86% of us are, just switch it to flight mode then. In flight mode, you can take some notes, but you're not getting notifications coming in. In the data that we've done, 1,410 people, the biggest struggle people have with listening is the distraction of the cellphone. That by far makes up the biggest distraction.

If you want to improve how you've listened and you've got the cellphone switch to flight mode or off, here's two other tips; tip number two, drink water during the conversation. Just a glass of water for every 30 minutes in a dialogue. A hydrated brain is a listening brain. The brain represents 6% of the body mass, but it consumes up to 25% percent of the blood sugars of the body. It's a really hungry part of the brain.

The reality is a hydrated brain can get more blood sugars there faster. Brain that isn't taught how to listen struggles with how to listen. We do a lot of work in the prefrontal cortex when it comes to listening. This is the most modern part of the brain. When it's untrained, it feels hard. A lot of people say to me, listening makes my brain hurt. I always say you're doing it wrong. If that's how you're doing it and we'll explain what that means shortly.

Tip number three is simply this; the deeper you breathe, the deeper you listen. If you can notice your breathing and deepen your breathing, the more oxygen you can get to the brain, the more likely it is that your brain will perform well on the task of listening. Three things before we even start fixating on the speaker is to get ourselves into a state that we're available to hear what they're saying and more importantly, to hear what they're not saying. That's where we're going to go to next. I'm sure that's prompted a few questions for you, Matt.

[0:37:35.8] MB: Many different things that I want to explore, and so many important themes and ideas. I think the place I want to come back to, those are great tips – I really love. I want to reiterate, or emphasize the point you made about putting your cellphone in airplane mode and even the idea of actually telling somebody in a conversation, “Hey, I'm going to put my phone in airplane mode, so I can really focus on you and this conversation,” is a really powerful gesture.

[0:38:01.5] OT: It reminds me of a have a great story I have to share with you. About 11 years ago, Peter was flying from Seattle Microsoft head office. He ran about a 100 million dollar business for Microsoft. It was not insignificant. You figured this guy's pretty busy. I was hosting 20 CEOs in Australia in a roundtable, where he would be at the head of the table. We were in a fancy-pants hotel that had this big boardroom table and he literally just flown in from Seattle that morning. He's straight into the meeting. It was 9:00 a.m. and he was at the head of the table.

What Peter did next really changed the way I thought about listening. He sat down. I introduced him. Then Peter said, “I'm really sorry. Please forgive me. The most important thing I can give you right now is my attention.” With that, he stood up. He took his cellphone out of his jacket pocket, switched it off and put it in his bag. Now what was interesting was what happened next with the other 20 CEOs sitting around the table. What do you think happened then, Matt?

[0:39:10.2] MB: I don't know. They all put their phones away?

[0:39:12.9] OT: Yeah. 14 of them put their cellphones into their bags. Now what that did for the other six was interesting. I don't know if it shamed them into doing something, but I'm guessing the rest switched them into flight mode. 

For a lot of us, we can bring about change just by role-modeling that change. In most meetings, when I do that, the person I'm working with will reciprocate. If we want to bring about change, it's not about asking everybody else to make that change. If you can simply role-model, make an example that you're going to switch your phone into airplane mode, you'll be surprised what happens to the other person, but more important what happens next on the quality of the conversation.

[0:39:57.4] MB: I love that point too about saying the most important thing I can give you is my attention. I might be paraphrasing a little bit, but that was such a powerful example, such a great gesture. It's something that's so simple to do and yet, it's hard and it's not necessarily easy.

[0:40:16.8] OT: What happened at the end of the meeting was fascinating. These execs, they got these amazingly tight schedules. They're in the country for two to three days and they have all these very highly leveraged meetings where he was just going to other locations to do very similar kinds of meetings. I do briefed the group for the next half an hour.

What was fascinating was they said they were expecting the group to talk about the future of technology, or something else to do with technology, or technically orientated conversations. That's what they were expecting from Peter in that dialogue. What they said was – Peter was just asking each of them what they were struggling with personally. He created a pretty safe environment. That group, I know stayed connected well after this event with some of the challenges they were talking about themselves personally. The value that Peter created wasn't just the value around what he talked about technically for a very brief period of time, but he helped everyone listen to each other. That again is a really powerful thing we can do.

A lot of the times if there's three, four, five, six people in the room, we generally hear from the loudest. We don't take the time to make sure that everybody is being heard. That's really critical. Again, the difference between a recreational listener and a deep listener, a powerful listener and impactful listener is their ability to listen to what's unsaid bad. 

Back to the point about helping somebody make sense of what they're saying themselves, the most potent thing we can do as a listener is to help them make sense of those 800 words stuck in their head. Back to the maths again, I speak at a 125 words a minute. I can think at 900. That's an average. Some people can think at 600 words a minute. Some people can speak way up, I think way up to 1,600 words a minute.

On average, we speak at about – I think at about 900 words a minute. If I say the first thing that comes out of my mouth, unless I'm a great actor who's rehearsed my lines well, the likelihood what I say is what I mean, is 11%. You get probably better odds going to Las Vegas and playing the slot machines, or going on the roulette wheel. The odds are going to be much better for you there.

Here's a couple of simple, practical tips; when somebody says something, treat silence at the end of what they say like it's a word. Listen to the beginning of the word, the middle of the word and the end of the word. Treat silence like it's another word. In doing so, what you'll notice is they'll either unpack another 125 words in their head. Well, they’ll pause. Might bow their head down a little bit. If you can remember these simple phrases, what else? Tell me more. How long have you been thinking about this? What else? Tell me more. What else have you been thinking about this?

All of a sudden, just magic happens. You'll be nodding as I say this. What they’ll do is they'll draw their breath and they'll use phrases like this, “Hmm. Well, actually. What's really important on this topic is.” Or they'll say, “Hmm. Now that I think about it, what I haven't told you is.” Or they’ll say, “Hmm. What I've said is interesting, but let's focus on this.” It doesn't matter how it comes out, Matt. What they're doing is exploring what stuck in their brain.

You see, our mind is like a washing machine. While we're on wash cycle, it's sudsy, it's dirty, it's moving around and it's not making much progress. When we speak, it's like the rinse cycle of a washing machine. It's clean water it's coming into our brain. As we speak and express this idea, what's happening to the neural pathways and the synaptic connections is that creating an electronic circuit for the idea to be expressed.

Then the idea takes a concrete form, where we can look at it together, we can analyze it together and more importantly, the speaker can see it and notice it. For most of us, if we just practice saying, “Tell me more,” you'll be shocked what you hear. More importantly, they'll start to understand what they mean, not just what they said the first time.

[0:45:02] MB: Hey, what's up? It's Matt. I want to tell you about the most epic and life-changing thing that we've ever done here at The Science of Success. It's about to happen, and I wanted to personally invite you to join me. We're launching an incredible, live, in-person two-day intensive for fans of the show that want to take their lives to the next level. This will be an intimate two-day in-person deep dive with me where we will go over all of the biggest lessons and greatest life-changing insights that I've personally pulled from years of interviewing the world's top experts on The Science of Success, and I'm gonna show you exactly how to apply and implement them to 10x-ing your own life in 2020 and beyond.

I've spent months planning the life-changing content for this live in-person intensive, and here's what we're going to dig into. You can bring your own unique challenges and desires and get highly specific, tailored feedback on exactly what you need to do in order to achieve your biggest goals. We will personally dig into what's holding you back and find out exactly what you need to do to take your life to the next level. I'll show you how to become a master negotiator and deal with any conversation, no matter how tough. You’ll get the exact tools that you can apply right now to influence anybody using Jedi mind tricks. I'll show you what to do to banish fear from your life and to get rid of negative emotions.

We’ll reveal exactly how you can overcome procrastination and overwhelm, and increase your productivity by more than 10X, and I'm gonna show you how to finally end self sabotage and overcome what's holding you back. And this is only scratching the surface of the epic things that we're gonna cover in this live two-day event. Here's the most important thing. This is not a listen and learn session. This intensive is an immersive implementation experience where you'll walk away with a comprehensive model to take your life to the next level.

After these two days, you'll have a tailored blueprint to see massive results in your productivity, your happiness, your influence, your creativity, and ultimately, in achieving your biggest goals. Because I want to make this a truly amazing experience and I want to give tons of personal one-on-one interaction and engagement with every single person who attends, there’s only 15 seats available for this intensive, and seats have already started filling up.

I am personally committed that for every single person who attends this live intensive, that I will help you create massive results in your life, and I will do everything that it takes to make sure that you have an incredible experience and get the maximum amount of value possible. To find out more and to grab your seat for the intensive before it sells out, just go to successpodcast.com/live. That's successpodcast.com/live to find out all the information.

The intensive is gonna be here in Nashville on January 27th and 28th. All the details and logistics are available at successpodcast.com/live. Grab your seat now. I cannot wait to see you and hang out with you and take your life to the next level here in Nashville in January. Success podcast.com/live, grab your ticket today.

[00:48:30] MB: So getting into the data a little bit, what does the science say? Again because one of the big things on this podcast, we like to be data driven. What does the science say about how to acquire power?

[00:48:42] DK: It’s so funny, Matt. I think a lot of people maybe a lot of your listeners like if you ask them, “All right, be honest, do you want to have power?” They'd feel a little bit uneasy or queasy, right? Like, "Oh, I don’t want to grab power," and in a new way that’s because we think of power as Machiavellian. But I really define power as your ability to advance the greater good, to alter states of people around you and make them do good work. And I think that fits a lot of different social scientific definitions of power that you could apply at the international level. 

So that begs the question of how we gain power, and this is where I was really surprised in writing The Power Paradox about how much we’ve learned to answer this question in the scientific literature. So we gained power, for example, by really listening carefully and really taking in the wisdom and thoughts of other people around you. Abraham Lincoln, in the historical accounts, was just a great practitioner of this art of just empathy, listening, hearing people well, gaining collective wisdom, actually gains you power. 

Another way we gain power is, to put it really simply, by being kind and pro-social. In hunter-gatherer societies, there’s a prize winning essay that summarizes who are the leaders in 48 hunter-gatherer societies living for 200,000 years in the conditions of our social evolution, that really in which our social structure started to take shape. And Christopher Baum observes, it’s really the person who is fair, impartial, humble, and kind, right?

So studies are starting to show, for example, in the competitive altruism literature that if I share, if I’m kind, if I express gratitude, for example in the work of Mike Norton in Harvard in social networks or organizations, people will respect me more. They'll give me status and I’ll have power and influence. So I think in a way, we’re returning slowly, with a lot of exceptions in the world, to our evolutionary roots of power being founded in kindness and empathy and being fair and humble. You seemed shocked. 

[00:51:04] MB: Oh definitely. I think it’s a very counter intuitive finding. If anything comes to mind, I’d love to maybe hear one or two examples from the research kind of about how you came to that conclusion. 

[00:51:15] DK: Yeah, so let me give you a couple of examples, and I think these are just scientific tidbits out there, because I’ve been speaking in really broad terms. So what studies find, for example, is that if you are able to read other people’s emotions well and in The Power Paradox, this book, I present a couple of fun tests of like reading emotions from people’s facial expressions or drawings of emotion. If I can empathize in that way, I actually rise in financial analysis firms, right? I gain more power. 

If I’m a school kid and I’m in seventh grade and I’m facing the Lord of the Flies politics on the playground and I know how to read people’s emotions well, just detecting emotions in their facial expressions, once again I gain social power. If I am working on a team — this is a recent study from MIT by Woolley and colleagues — I am working on a team, we've got to solve some hard problems and I’m listening carefully and asking good questions., really simple practices, my team does better and I gain power, right? 

So these are all specific examples of how, you know, this counterintuitive notion that being good to others actually gets me power. A final example of Adam Grant and Francesca Gina, if I am the manager and I am trying to get people to do things and I simply say, "Thank you," right? I express gratitude, those people are more productive and enhance my influence and power. So there are a lot of new findings that tell us that Machiavelli was wrong, that the pro-social tendencies are pathways to power. 

[00:52:58] MB: I want to unpack a lot of these different pieces. I definitely want to dig into this idea that the mind is embodied and also relational. I want to talk about three pillar training. I want to talk about the wheel of awareness. Before we get into any of those, to contextualize this a little bit more, I want to hear your story about your experience in Namibia.

[0:53:17.2] DS: Yeah. Well, our institute is called the Mindsight Institute. For years when I was in medical school in the 70s, I noticed that my teachers didn't sense the mind and that is they treated people like bags of chemicals. It was very strange. I dropped out of school for a while. Before I came back, I made up this word mindsight for how we see the mind. You have physical site, where you see things like chemicals, or the body, or whatever. Then this mindsight, it's a different system.

Flash forward many years, we became very interested here at the Mindsight Institute as to whether other cultures that represent in some ways, not the influence of contemporary culture, would they have words that try to communicate about the inner nature of our subjective experience, or what we're aware of? That would be how you'd look at the insight capacity of a person to have mindsight, and then how they would use that for empathy. These are two of the three aspects of mindsight. Mindsight is insight into your own mind, empathy to understand the mind of another and integration. The third thing is to honor differences to promote linkages. It's basic kindness and compassion and love really.

We went to Namibia, because there was some reason to believe that genetically some of the ancestors of the group that was the originally the homo sapiens who were the originators of all human beings were there in Namibia. There's some other views these days, but that was the line of reasoning then. We went to Namibia and we went out to different tribal groups and we had the good fortune of being able have a translator with us and interviewed the villagers to see if they used mindsight language. Indeed they did.

That's why we went and it was a really exciting thing. If there was any way to get close to the original ancestors of all of us, we were there. It was a beautiful thing. One evening around the campfire, we were just hanging out with the villagers and I asked the translator to ask one of the villagers a question, because there was a drought there and there was a famine and there was a lot of disease and there was a lot of poverty and people were appearing really, really happy.

It was perplexing from a contemporary cultural view of the importance of material comfort that we associate with what we think success and happiness is. I see a lot of miserable people with a lot of stuff here in the contemporary world, but there we were in Namibia with all these challenges to material comfort, but basically very happy.

The translator says, “You want me to ask this guy if he's happy?” I said, “Yeah. If he's happy, why is he happy?” “You want me to ask him why he’s happy?” I said, “Yeah, please.” He asked the villagers the question. The villager says to me, I will never forget. He says in his language and it's translated back into English for me, he says, “My people are happy, because we belong. We belong to one another in our community and we belong to earth.” There was this silence and I felt incredibly grateful for the response and then this wave of sadness came over me about just thinking about back home in the United States.

Then the villager asked the translator a question who translates it for me and he says, “He wants to know if where you come from, do you belong and are you happy?” I thought about how much misery there is where we are. I said, “There is a lot of experience of not belonging and there is a lot of unhappiness, even though there's a lot of relatively. There's food. There's not the disease you're facing. We have water. I mean, there's a lot of unhappiness and people don't feel successful and they're on this ladder to try to get more successful and more stuff and more of this, more of that.”

We just all stared at each other. That moment has really stuck with me. The whole notion of belonging relates directly to what we're talking about, the mind being both embody and relational. It raised for me back then when I was in Namibia, a deep – it's a question, but it's really like an emotional question thing. What is the self? What it was itself really? My next book is all about this that I'm just starting. This idea of in contemporary culture, we tend to think of the self as your body, or since the time of Hippocrates, you say the mind is just brain activity, or neuroscientists certainly reaffirm that.

That places the mind as the source of self inside your skin and case body. I think there's just something fundamentally limiting about that, if not outright wrong, that this villager was really describing the idea of belonging to community and belonging to earth. Since then, a lot of the workshops I do and the connections I have with – I consider people coming to workshops my colleagues. We're all in this journey together trying to learn. The whole notion of an integrated self would be where yes, you have a body and the body is an I or me, it's an internal locus of your – location of your mind, of yourself.

You also have a relational self that's different. It's differentiated, but it's equally as important and yet, it's not really a focus of what we often do in contemporary culture. It's all about I, me, mine; this internal thing. A relational self will be like an us, or a we.

I started teaching these lectures called from me to we, which sounds cool, it rhymes. One of my online students had come for this in-person workshop and she got really angry at me very appropriately and she said, “I'm really mad at you.” I said, “What are you mad about?” She goes, “The title of your talk.” I said, “What's wrong with my title?” She goes, “It's me to we.” I said, “Well, what's wrong with that? We is important.” She goes, “Yeah, I know we is important, but why get rid of me?”

I go, “Oh, my God. You're right.” She goes, “Shouldn't I be exercising my body?” I go, “Yeah.” She goes, “Shouldn't I be understanding my personal history and where I came from and my relationship with my parents, parenting me inside out approach?” I said yes. “Shouldn't I sleep well?” I said, “Of course, you do all these things.” She goes, “Isn't that all the internal experience?” I said, “Yes, it is.” She goes, “Why would you want to dop me?” I said, “You shouldn't.” She goes, “Well, come up with another name.” I said, “Okay, well how about not only limited to an internal me, but also extended to a relational we?” She goes, “That doesn't rhyme at all.”

I said, “Okay, okay. If you can integrate itself, it would need to be a candle.” Now I'd say this is like a candle is both the wax and the light. You're going to be the wax of your body as a me, but the light of your relationships which is a we. If you integrate that, you maintain both somehow. “Me plus we equals mwe,” I said to her. She was very excited about it.

I've been using we mwe, M-W-E as the simple three-letter word. We've been getting all sorts of other foreign languages born from English, other languages to come up with their own version, like you don’t know it’s in Spanish and things like that. It's been fun, because mwe allows you to have your internal experience, but also puts right into the word the relational identity as a we;  me plus we equals mwe. That's what came from Namibia.

I was realizing that belonging and not just fitting in, but actually belonging where you're maintaining your me, but you really are part of a we, so you're a mwe, is I think for me the, or from mwe, it is the way the belonging lesson from Namibia has come through in what I'm working on now.

[1:01:25.2] MB: Clarifying this for the listeners and making sure that I understand it as well, this idea of the relational self; in a very real and scientific sense is the notion that our minds are composed of in one aspect are relationships with others and with the world as well, is that correct?

[1:01:42.0] DS: Absolutely. When you put the mind as this embodied relational, emergent process is coming from energy and information flow, then basically what you do is with that view, you realize skull and skin don't limit that flow. It's an artificial divide to put the mind and the self, which I think comes from the mind to limit that by your skull or by your skin. The system is energy and information flow just as you're saying, Matt. It’s inside your body and, underscore and, it is also in the energy information flow you are sharing from the body you’re born into, so you do have an internal me for sure. We're not denying that. And you have a relationship with other people and the nature around you, which just to make it two P’s, we'll call that the planet. It's people in the planet is the connection that creates your relational self. It's really an interconnectedness.

[01:02:42] 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.

I'm going to give you three reasons why you should sign up for our e-mail list today by going to successpodcast.com, signing up right on the homepage. There’s some incredible stuff that’s only available to those on the e-mail list, so be sure to sign up, including an exclusive curated weekly e-mail from us called Mindset Monday, which is short, simple, filled with articles, stories, things that we found interesting and fascinating in the world of evidence-based growth in the last week. 

Next, you're going to get an exclusive chance to shape the show, including voting on guests, submitting your own personal questions that we’ll ask guests on air and much more. Lastly, you’re going to get a free guide we created based on listener demand, our most popular guide, which is called How To Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide by signing up and joining the e-mail list today. Again, you can do that at successpodcast.com, sign up right at the homepage, or if you're on the go, just text the word “smarter”, S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44222. 

Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes because that helps boost the algorithm, that helps us move up the iTunes rankings and helps more people discover The Science of Success. 

Don't forget, if you want to get all the incredible information we talked about in the show, links transcripts, everything we discussed and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can get those at successpodcast.com, just hit the show notes button right at the top. 

Thanks again, and we'll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

Thanksgiving Special 2019

Hey Guys, Matt here I wanted to wish you a Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours and even if you don’t celebrate thanksgiving and no matter where you are in the world I wanted to let you know I AM GRATEFUL for you. It’s people like you listening to the show that keep us going, keep us reaching out to guests, and keep us evolving to find new ways to help you grow, to motivate you, and help you live the life you were meant to live.

That’s why this week I and my producer Austin put our heads together and came up with something a little unique. This week we’ve put together a mashup of some of our favorite points made by guests about gratitude. This includes insights from many past guests such as Kamal Ravikant, David DeSteno, Chase Hughes, and more.

Think of this as a quick hour-long masterclass on some of the best ways to embrace gratitude, learn how to find joy, and take stock of what you’re grateful for. Our plan is to put together more of these in the future to bring you curated episodes that go SUPER deep on one topic or important life skill. Let us know what you think! Any ideas on which topic or skill should be next! Hit me up at EMAIL and also be sure to join our mailing list for even more great content at successpodcast.com.

Once again Happy Thanksgiving and keep on being you! Let’s unleash our human potential together. Without further adieu, here are some of our favorite guest insights on gratitude.

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

Are you hiring for your business or next big project?

LinkedIn Talent Solutions is here to help and make hiring the right person simple, powerful, and easy!

LinkedIn goes above and beyond. Screening not just the hard skills you need but soft skill as well to find the right person fast!

LinkedIn looks at things like collaboration within a team, creative skills, adaptability and much much more! That’s how LinkedIn makes sure your post get in front of the right people at the right time to all your needs without all the typical hiring headaches.

It’s no wonder great candidates are hired every 8 seconds on LinkedIn!

Right now, LinkedIn is offering Science of Success listeners their first $50 on the Talent Solutions platform absolutely free! Just go to www.linkedin.com/success to find the right candidate for your project today!

Episode Transcript

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

[00:00:11] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet with more than 4 million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries.

Hey! It's Matt here. I wanted to wish you and your loved ones happy Thanksgiving. Even if you don't celebrate Thanksgiving and no matter where you are in the world I wanted to let you know that I am grateful for you. It's people like you listening to the show that keep us going, that keeps us reaching out to guests and keeps us evolving to find new ways to help you grow, to motivate, you to help you live the life that you were meant to live.

That's why this week, my producer, Austin, and I put our heads together and came up with something a little bit special and unique. This week we've put together a mash-up of some of our favorite points made by previous guests about gratitude. This includes insights from many past guests, including Kamal Ravikant, David Desteno, Chase Hughes and several more.

Think of this as a quick one-hour master class on some of the best ways to embrace gratitude, learn how to find joy and take stock of what you're really grateful for. We may even do more of these deep dive episodes in the future. So let us know what you think about it.

Once again, I just wanted to say I hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving. Keep on being amazing, and thank you so much for everything. With that, let's hear a little bit about gratitude.

Are you a fan of the show and have you been enjoying the content that we’ve put together for you? If you have, I would love it if you signed up for our email list. We have some amazing content on their 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 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 44222.

In our previous episode we brought on Grant Cardone to give you a real look at what it means to be successful and what it really takes to get there. He shared the exact shift you have to make in order to 10X your life. We uncovered why you should ignore most people's advice. How to push yourself to a new level beyond what you even think is possible. Why learning isn't enough to get to the highest levels and much more. If you're serious about 10X in your life, listen to our previous interview with Grant Cardone.

Now, for our special Thanksgiving episode.

[00:03:08] MB: What drives people to help others, as opposed to hanging it back? The kidney chain is obviously one example of this. What happens in the world and to other people when we start to shift our approach towards paying it forward?

[00:03:26] WB: There's two explanations for paying it forward, what the motivations would be for doing that. One I mentioned, which is that you help me and I feel grateful for that help and I pay it forward and I help a third person. If you talk to economists, they'll say there's a more self-interested reason for helping, which is that I'm willing to help someone who has not helped me, because I want to look good. It's all about impression management. It's all about my reputation. I'm going to appear generous, so therefore, other people will be more likely to help me in the future.

Now that's fine and I have no problem with that. The interesting thing is that the research on these two different motivations, being I'm going to help someone who hasn't helped me to build my reputation that will make me appear as a generous person, I'll be helped in the future. Versus the idea of paying it forward out of gratitude. Those research has been done in two different streams. I did a study with Nat Buckley, where we put together both of those and ran what we call a horse race. We said, “Okay, we're going to collect a whole bunch of data and we're going to analyze statistically those two reasons, those two motivations and we control it for a host of other factors through all these statistical models.”

We're going to run this horse race. We're going to see which worse crosses the line first. I'll cut right to the finish line. It turns out that both horses cross the finish line, but the one that wins the race is the gratitude story, the idea that we pay it forward. We help people who haven't helped us, because we're so grateful for all the help that we have received from other people.

[00:04:53] MB: That's fascinating. The work that you've done around paying it forward and this may be, I don't know if I'm characterizing exactly correctly, but either led to or was a part of the creation, or discovery of what you call a reciprocity ring. Tell me a little bit about that and what are those and how do they work?

[00:05:16] WB: Yeah, reciprocity ring is a group level activity based on this whole principle of paying it forward. It was an activity that my wife, Cheryl, and I created about 20 years ago. We had an interesting conversation one evening. I'll never forget it. She said, “Okay, you teach your MBA students how to analyze their social networks.” I said, “Yup, that's what I do. That's what I know how to do.” She says, “Well, what do you do when they ask you how do I put this into practice and how do I build my network appropriately and how do I use my network?” I said, “Well, I have some stories and some antidotes and essentially, I hope the bell is going to ring and class would be over, because I don't have a whole lot.”

That centered a whole conversation about the idea of social capital. I think about human capital as our strengths, education, skills, the things that usually appear on your resume. Social capital is the network that we’re involved in and all the resources that it contains. I said, social capital is a combination of the networks that we have, but also this principle of generalized reciprocity, which is the fancy academic term for paying it forward.

We had a discussion about that and one thing led to another and we created a prototype of the reciprocity ring. After some trial and error, really settled on a formula or a recipe that really works quite well. I could describe it very briefly and will sound very simple, but there's a very structured way it has to be done. In fact, we train people to run a reciprocity domain, because they have to follow a certain recipe. Essentially, everyone gets an opportunity to make a request. We have criteria for what's a well-formulated request and that's something we might talk about later on in the show.

Everybody gets to make a request, but they spend most of the time helping other people meet their requests. Either they've got the answer, or the resource and they could share it, or they get tap their outside network and they could make a referral, or a connection. Those are the two ways that people can help. When people do this in a group, people discover that they get help from a lot of people, but it's not the people that they helped. It's more of this indirect generalized reciprocity, or paying it forward.

Now we do this in groups of about 24. I think over a 150,000 people around the world have used the reciprocity ring. It’s used in most of the major business schools, a lot of different companies. It was used recently at the Harvard Business School, where they had 900 MBAs engaged in this. We had about 40 different rings running at the same time. My favorite one and I think that's the most moving example of a request that was fulfilled was about a little girl who lived in Romania. Her name is Christina.

Christina suffered from a condition called craniosynostosis. The human skull is made up of different bones and they're joined by sutures, these fibrous tissues. This design allows the skull to expand as the brain and the head grow. Well every now and then, one of those joints or sutures will fuse prematurely and then the brain can't grow. The outcomes are awful. You can have a misshapen head, learning difficulties, blindness, seizures, even death.

Well, the chances of finding a surgeon who could correct this on Romania were pretty slim. This little girl's fate was up for grabs. Well, it turned out that her aunt Felicia lives in France and she works at the business school INSEAD. They used a reciprocity to ring every year for all their incoming MBA students. Part of being trained to run a ring, that's what Felicia was going to do, she was on the staff, she had to make a personal request. The trainer said, “Make sure it's meaningful. Something really important.”

She thought of her little niece back at Romania. Made a request for her, saying describe the whole situation and said, “I need help. She needs help.” Turns out that someone else who was in the reciprocity ring that day, who was also being trained, he was adjunct faculty, worked at a pediatric hospital and said, “I know surgeons who can do that operation. I'll introduce you.”

One thing led to another. Christina and her family flew for Romania to France. She had the surgery. It was a complete success and she's now living a happy and normal life. It's amazing. I have a picture of her that I keep on my desk to remind me of the power of asking for what you really need. When you do, miracles can happen, just like that story with Christina.

[00:09:39] MB: Wow. That's a really moving story and a great demonstration of the power of reciprocity rings. It really demonstrates a point you made earlier that everybody's network –every single person's network has a tremendous amount of untapped potential, or as you called it social capital that we're just not fully maximizing.

[00:10:04] WB: Oh, absolutely. What I've learned over the years is that there is a wealth of resources out there just beyond your fingertips. The only way you can get to it is by asking. That turns out to be the crux of the problem, is that most people are very reluctant to ask for what they need. There's a lot of reasons for it. There's eight reasons, in fact, of why it's hard to ask. Some of those are just incorrect beliefs. I can give you a couple of examples.

Sometimes, we don't ask because we're afraid we're going to look foolish, or incompetent, or that we can't do our jobs. You don't want to ask a trivial request, because then that's not going to raise your perceptions of your confidence. What the research shows and this was done by a team of researchers from Harvard and Wharton, they found that as long as you make a thoughtful, intelligent request, people will think you are more competent, not less. People fear that asking is going to make them appear to be incompetent.

As long as it's a good request, it’s a thoughtful request people will say, “Hey, you're confident. You know your limits.” You don't keep banging your head against the wall, working on a problem where it could be solved much more effectively and easily by reaching out to your network and getting some help from other people.

Another barrier is that we often underestimate other people's willingness and ability to help by a really big factor. One of my favorite studies was done by Frank Flynn and his team when they were at the Columbia University. They decided to test this with a field experiment, which is they were going to send people who are participating in the study out into New York City to do this. They had to go to a stranger and ask to borrow their cellphone. That's all they could say. They said, “Could I borrow your cellphone to make a call?” They couldn't explain, or beg, or plead, or come up with a sob story. That's all they could do.

It was really interesting, Matt. A number of the people who signed up for this experiment and you get paid for doing it, for participating. When they discovered what it was about, they quit and they said, “There's no way I'm going to go do that. I'm not going to walk in through a stranger in New York and ask to borrow a cellphone.” Some people did participate in the study. Before they went out, the researchers asked them, “Well, how many people do you think you're going to have to ask before you get a phone?” They were saying, “Five, six, seven, 10, infinite number of people, I'll never get one.” Well, it turns out that you only have to ask one or two strangers now.

If the first person doesn't let you use their phone, the second person probably will. There's a lot of other studies that support that that we often don’t ask because we think no one can help us. In fact, people have lots of resources. They have great networks and people are very willing to help, but they could only help you if you ask.

[00:12:52] MB: So I think we've talked about why and kind of how self-control is so highly correlated with pretty much every positive life outcome. Let's dig a little bit now into some of these strategies. How do we develop more self-control and what are these kind of emotions that we can cultivate to have more self-control?

[00:13:12] DD: Sure. The three that I focus on are gratitude compassion and pride, but let me give you just a sense of how this works. So, if what I'm saying is right, then when you're feeling, let's say, grateful, you should do better at the marshmallow test, right? You should show more self-control. So we wanted to actually put this idea to the test, but we wanted to do it with adults, not kids and most adults don't like marshmallows, but they do like cash. So we constructed an adult version of the marshmallow test, and the way this works is people come to the lab and we have them reflect on a time they felt grateful, reflect on a time they felt happy, or just tell us the events of their normal day, which is kind of a neutral control. Then we had them answer a series of 27 questions of the form. Would you rather have X-dollars now or Y-dollars in Z-days? Where Y was always bigger than X, and Z varied over weeks to months. So a typical question might be, “Would you rather have $35 now or $70 and in three weeks?” So basically, would you rather have one marshmallow now or two marshmallows later?

We told him to make it real. We're going to honor one of their questions. So if we pick that question, you said you wanted $35 now. We’d hand you $35. If you wanted $75 in three weeks, we’d mail you the check for $75 in three weeks. What we found is most people were pretty impatient. So we can kind of calculate how impatient they weren't. So an example is people who were feeling neutrally saw $100 in a year is worth $17 today, or another way of saying that is if I gave them $17 right now, they’d forgo getting $100 in a year. I don't know about you, but if you don't need those $17 to survive today, passing up an opportunity to quintuple your money in a year is a pretty dumb idea given what the banks are paying. But if we made people feel grateful, they wouldn't take that, right? They became much more patient.

For them, it took them over $30 before they were willing to forgo the hundred dollars, and what that translates to in marshmallows is they were much more willing to wait. They valued the future reward more than the present, or they at least discounted the value of the future reward less than most people would. If you value a future goal more than you normally would have, you're not in a state of conflict trying to make yourself aimed toward it. If you value it more, it just becomes easier to pursue it.

So we found that over time, we measure people's daily levels of gratitude. People who experience more gratitude generally in their life are more future-oriented. They have more self-control. We give them these financial tasks. They want to wait for the larger reward, and other people have done the same thing with pride and compassion.

So what this means is if you begin to cultivate these emotions regularly in your life, they’re kind of like a booster shop for self-control. So we've seen compassion is tied to less procrastination, more perseverance toward your goal, whether we’re talking about academics or athletics. We found that pride actually makes people persevere toward their goals. They’ll spend 40% more time working to hone skills that they believe are important, and it's a way of just changing what the mind values, making it value the future, which just makes it easier to persevere toward those long-term goals.

[00:16:23] MB: So how do you measure kind of the longer term impacts of these pro-social emotions outside of sort of an isolated lab experiment? Let's say the impact of gratitude 3, 6, 9 months down the road.

[00:16:37] DD: Yeah. So what we said is we would follow people in their daily lives and then give them these financial tests, but there're lots of people who actually study this in organizations. So, for example, there is great work out there by Adam Grant and Francesca Gino, which shows that – Talk about an environment where you need some level of grit. They looked at people working in call centers, basically calling people all the time were hanging up on you and your job is to persevere through this.

What they found is that if the manager of a group expresses gratitude for people's efforts or expresses – They anticipate that they'll feel proud of their efforts because the manager will appreciate them, gratitude and pride, actually significantly predict people's efforts. They’re work longer and they're more successful and they’re less stressed and they're happier at pursuing whatever their job task is. We see the same thing at Google, right? The teams that are actually the most successful, the biggest predictor isn't the technical prowess of the team. The biggest predictor of a team's success at Google is that team does the manager instil a culture of empathy and compassion among the people there where the individuals who they feel that other people to team care about them, trust them, are interested in them as people, they’re willing to work harder and they're happier and less stressed at doing it. So what we do in the lab, we have tight control over these things to manipulate and see what they do, but the evidence from the real world showing that it increases self-control is pretty prevalent.

[00:18:13] MB: So in essence, this kind of emotional strategy is much more sustainable and powerful way of cultivating self-control. It's almost like the kind of idea of pushing versus pulling. You're not constantly struggling to maintain it. It's sort of a foundation or a font within you that's kind of welling up.

[00:18:31] DD: That's exactly right. We talk about these emotions as kind of fonts of virtue. That is, if you cultivate these, they’re like parent virtues. They increase lots of other things that people admire, and you're not constantly having to remind yourself from the top down, “Oh, okay! I know I don't want to work, but I've got a work, or I know I don't want to practice, or I know I don't want to not eat the Ben & Jerry's.

If you just feel these emotions, you don't have to remind yourself to do the right thing. They simply make you value those future goals more and then it’s just easier to persevere toward them no matter what they might be. But they also solve another problem that we’re facing these days. So people talk about kind of an epidemic of feeling isolated, or loneliness, or lonely. There's a recent statistic that shows 53% of people report feeling lonely in their public lives and at work.

We know that loneliness is about as bad for your health as is smoking in terms of what it does to human’s longevity because of the constant stress people are under when they feel isolated. When you cultivate these emotions as part of your daily life, I like to say they not only give you grit, they give you grace. That is, they alter your behavior in such a way that makes you not only willing to work harder to achieve your own goals but to invest in others and help them, and what that does is it reinforces that social side, that social network that is so important for our well-being.

David Brooks likes to talk about a distinction between what he calls resume virtues. Those are the virtues that we need to get ahead at work in our careers, like being nose to the grind stone, assertive, hard-charging, and eulogy virtues, those things that we want to be remembered for, things like being generous, being kind, being fair. He laments that these are different aspects of life and how do we balance them.

My argument is they’re only different aspects of life and seems separate because the way we live our lives now. For most of human history, there wasn't a difference. The way that you succeeded was having good character, was being generous, was being trustworthy, was being kind, because that's how you formed relationships that allowed you to cooperate with others, whether it was in hunting, in agriculture and whatever it might be. It's only now, because of the way we live our lives, you can kind of succeed as an individual and get enough money to pay for your other needs.

So if we cultivate these emotions, they build both of those virtues simultaneously. They build our self-control, but they build our social networks and our social support. There's lots of evidence showing that people who express gratitude, who express compassion, who express appropriately calibrated pride, and by that I mean pride in skills that they actually haven’t developed, not kind of egoistic, hubristic pride. We find that attractive. We want to be with those people. We want to work with those people. So I think that's why this is a much more resilient route to kind of building success and building perseverance than the kind of nose to the grind stone willpower way.

[00:21:30] MB: So tell me a little bit more about the evolutionary basis of these pro-social emotions.

[00:21:36] DD: Sure. People always ask me, “Dave, I want to be successful. So should I be a jerk or should I be a nice guy?” I say, “Well, what's your time frame?” Because if you are a jerk in the short term, you will rise to the top. So there are these wonderful evolutionary models out there. Some of the best done by a guy named Martin Nowak who’s a professor at Harvard, and what he finds is that over the short-term, if you're kind of selfish and you don't cooperate with others and you don't pay back your debts and you don't help people, you will accrue a lot of resources because you’re exploiting other individuals.

But over time, people will recognize that you’re kind of like this and no one will want to cooperate with you. So you’ll lose all the gains that we normally get from working with others. So over time, as individuals who are cooperative, who show empathy, who to help others, who are fair, that gain the most resources.

What we know is that it's emotions like gratitude and compassion that push us to do these things. So, for example, another study in my lab we do is we bring people into the lab and we make them feel grateful or we make them kind of not feel anything in particular, and we give them financial tasks where they can cheat others and make more money for themselves, or they can split profits equally. What we find is when people are feeling grateful they are much more likely to choose a decision where they're going to split money equally with someone else rather than take more for themselves with the other person's expense, even though the other person won’t have any chance to kind of seek vengeance on them for so doing.

So what these emotions are doing is they’re making us behave fairly and, in essence, that's an issue of self-control. For me to behave fairly, I have to be willing to devote some resources to you in the moment and not hung them all off myself for future payoff. So these emotions do the same thing. Same thing with compassion, I feel compassion for someone. I’m willing to give them time, money, shoulder to cry on, things that all might not be the most fun for me to do in the moment, but I do that because in the future I know I'm going to reap those rewards back when I'm in that position.

For millennia and even today, it's these emotions that underlie those behaviors, and what we’re finding is, as I said, they not only make us willing to sacrifice to help other people, but also our own future selves. And that's the best way to ensure that we’re going to be successful down the line.

[00:24:06] MB: Yeah, it's so key. As soon as it becomes easy for, you need to find kind of that next challenge and start pushing through the resistance.

Going back to these five key factors that you can use to hack authority, we got dominance, discipline, leadership, gratitude and fun/sense of adventure. Tell me about — I guess is leadership kind of encapsulated in authority as well or is that sort of a separate piece of the puzzle, and then what about gratitude and fun? I think those are kind of surprising things to see on a list of hacking social authority.

[00:24:40] CH: I think that gratitude and self-discipline are both extremely contagious and they're both extremely visible on your body. Somebody else might call it energy, and I don't profess to know how. It just beams out of you, but it really does. You can tell when you meet somebody that's really got their stuff together. It just shines through everything that they do. It almost puts every person into kind of a followership role to where they want to keep experiencing that. Leadership and authority are very, very closely related. Authority is something you want people to perceive and leadership is something that you're doing internally, the thought processes that you have.

[00:25:31] MB: What are those internal thought processes behind leadership?

[00:25:35] CH: I would say the number one thing you can do is just continually ask yourself how can I lift this person up or these people up. The authority would be a natural byproduct of having your stuff together and just managing your life.

[00:25:54] MB: Essentially, and tell me if I’m misunderstanding this, but essentially the idea is that if you have your life together, if you're firing on all cylinders, you’re having fun, you’re grateful, you have kind of positive energy beaming out from you, you’re organized, you’re getting things done, that sort of state naturally puts people around you into a mode where they defer to you almost or feel like they want to do what you tell them to do.

[00:26:23] CH: Yes. We’ve got a huge section on there on how to kind of hack that for lack of a better term. That definitely makes the agentic shift start to happen. Just as an example of this, how looks matter. They did a crosswalk, what they called a crosswalk study in Texas and this was decades ago. It’s been repeated several times, but this guy in a blue jeans and t-shirt in a downtown area, busy traffic, decides to break the crosswalk signal and just — Of course, the street is open, like there's no cars coming, but he goes against the crosswalk signal that tells him not to go. A couple of people follow him, and the same guy goes back to his apartment or wherever and changes into a really nice business suit and decides to break that crosswalk and go ahead and cross the street. The chances of people following him were increased by 89%, just because of his clothing. Just changing your clothes or changing that guy’s clothes made people break the law where they otherwise wouldn't have.

[00:27:34] MB: Fascinating, and that's a really good sort of crystalline demonstration of the idea that even simple shifts in the way that people perceive you can lead to massive changes in the way that they react to you and their behavior.

[00:27:49] CH: Absolutely, and it's not just how they perceive you just your clothing. You will, once you start getting that self-discipline, and you’ve got your social skills all these stuff start to get handled, you will walk differently. You don't need a tactic anymore. You don’t need conversation starter tactics anymore. Once all of these stuff happens and once you get those five qualities kind of hammered down, everything else starts to become a byproduct. The success is a byproduct of having that stuff figured out.

[00:28:23] MB: I want to dig in to how to create or manufacture your own luck, but before we do, I'm really curious if you could share maybe an example or two or a story from some of the research you did around luck, because I know there's some really kind of interesting and compelling examples.

[00:28:38] RW: We had a lot of them, and there's enormous consistency. I think the lucky people, always in the right place at the right time, lots of opportunities, they always fall on their feet and so on. In terms of the unluckiest people, we had one woman who had five car accidents in one 50-mile journey, which she put down to her jinxed green car, and then one day she came to the University and watched her trying to park the car, and we realized there were a few other factors in there. She’s also unlucky in love, so she signed up with a dating agency and first date came off his motorbike and broke his leg. The replacement day, walked into a glass door and broke his nose and eventually when she found someone to marry, the church they're going to get married in was burned down one day before the wedding, and that was how her whole life had gone. That was very typical of the unlucky people. Everything I touch was an absolute disaster.

Then on the flip side, you have these lucky people who wanted to start with a new kind of business venture and went to a party and met somebody there by chance and that person was exactly the person they needed in order to catapult themselves forward, and they became millionaires and so on. So very big differences between the two groups.

[00:29:55] MB: And how can somebody, for example, the woman who was consistently unlucky, how could she sort of transition or become someone who is lucky, and what were some of the differences between her and a lucky person?

[00:30:07] RW: Well, if we start with the differences, one was very interesting, almost perceptual different actually in terms of how they were seeing the world, and this was the form, the basis for an experiment we did. This then became quite well-known in terms of having people look at the newspaper.

We asked people to come into the lab to flick through a newspaper and just count the number of photographs in the newspaper. It's a fairly dull thing to do. What we didn't tell them is there were two large opportunities placed in the newspaper. One was a half-page advert with massive type that said, “Stop counting. There are 42 photographs in this newspaper,” and the other was another half page advert that said, “Say, you’ve seen, tell the experiment you’ve seen, and win,” whatever it was, 100 pounds or something.

What was fascinating was the lucky people tended to spot those opportunities, and so they would stop and go, “My goodness! That's great. I don’t need to count all the photographs, or could I have my prize now?” The unlucky people literally turned the page and didn't see them, and that's to do with this notion of attentional spotlight, that when we look at the world, we’re not seeing everything that's in front of us. We’re seeing a small part of it, where we place that active attention. When you become worried and anxious and concerned, as the unlucky people were, that becomes very small. You become very focused, and in doing so, you don't see something if you don't expect to see it.

The lucky people were far more relaxed and far more cheerful, had a large attentional spotlight, and so more likely to see opportunities they don’t expect and also act on them. That was the type of study we’re doing in order to try and tease really what was happening, why one group would say, “My goodness! I get all these opportunities,” and another group would say, “I never get a break.”

[00:32:06] MB: I love the newspaper experiment. That’s one of my favorite examples, and I’m so glad you shared it, and it just demonstrates really clearly that it's not necessarily sort of fate and random chance that's causing people to be lucky or unlucky. Obviously, there is a factor of that, but in many ways you can kind of create your own luck.

[00:32:26] RW: Absolutely. That was the premises of the research. Then what we did was to go on and test that. So hold on a second. If we take a group of people who are not particularly lucky or unlucky and we get them to think and behave like a lucky person, does that increase their luck? That data forms the basis, the luck factor book, and we found very simple exercises. The simplest one, but one of the most popular and which is now a well-known exercise, but at the time it wasn't, which is just getting people to keep a lucky diary and at the end of each day writing down the most positive thing, positive thought that they’ve had during that day, or one negative event that used to happen is no longer happening, or some sense of gratitude they have, their friends, or family or health or job or whatever. That starts to reorient people quite quickly.

So one of the issues with focusing is that if you are an unlucky personal or think you are, you literally do not see the good things in your life until you start to carry out that exercise. It’s a very, very simple intervention found, well it’s the simplest of interventions that had the most powerful effects, but you could see dramatically over the course of a month or two people becoming more positive, becoming luckier because of those interventions.

[00:33:47] MB: I’d love to kind of dig in and understand how you define loving yourself, because I think it’s something that I think you and I and many listeners may kind of intuitively grasp it, but I can definitely see somebody listening to this and thinking, you know, that seems kind of egotistical or selfish, and I don’t think it’s that at all.

[00:34:03] KR: You know, it’s actually interesting. Someone pointed that out to me once, and I thought about it, and I thought, “Okay, here’s what’s egotistical and selfish. Hating yourself. Because that’s being self-absorbed, just saying negative things to yourself. That is selfish.” Because you know what? It makes you worse, and it makes your relationships worse, it makes the world worse. That is the ultimate selfish thing I can do.

Loving yourself actually is the most positive thing you can do, because it’s not narcissistic. It’s not looking in the mirror and saying I’m so beautiful, and it’s not like — there’s no narcissism in it. It’s actually feeling love. Feeling love, which is probably the most beautiful emotion that exists. Every great song, every great poem, there’s a reason why over history, all this has been written about it, because it is the truest emotion.

If we’re going for the one true thing that really every human has within, that actually — love for a child, love for our parent, love for our significant other has caused such great actions in human history, you know? Sacrifice. Imagine sacrificing for yourself versus like all the sacrificing for others.

By the way, sacrificing for yourself is called self-discipline, which only results in good things. For someone listening, someone sent me an email once and said you know, I’m skeptic about this. I’m like dude, if you’re actually taking the time to email me, it means that you're not where you want to be in your life. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be bothering. You’d be too busy living your life. Why don’t you just try this? Why don’t you try it and see, and worst case, turns out you were right all along, you had lost nothing. You’re still miserable. Or, it could actually work and you’re better off.

I don’t really understand too much when someone says they don’t get the whole love yourself thing. I’m like, you know, I think if you were ever a baby, you know what love is. We may have lost touch with it, but it’s in us, and it’s truly like the fundamental human emotion that ultimately we all crave and we need. If we start from a place of giving that to our selves, so we’re not coming from an empty place, life has to be far better.

[00:35:59] MB: That reminds me of something else that you’ve talked about that I think is a really powerful concept, which is the idea that life is not happening to you, but it’s happening for you.

[00:36:09] KR: Yeah, that’s actually something I’ve noticed with people that I found to be significantly successful and happy or fulfilled. That’s why I work in Silicon Valley, and now because of my books, the kind of people I get to meet, I know quite a few insanely successful people, but I don’t know that many successful and fulfilled, or successful and consistently happy people. The ones who have that are the ones who basically — everything in life is basically an experience where they have to grow and learn, and use for their personal growth.

It’s not like they don’t get sidelined by life when you have that attitude. I came across a few months ago, there’s actually — in one of Rooney’s poems he says that. There’s nothing, this isn’t anything new under the sun. These are fundamental human truths that people have been figuring out since we’ve been around.

Imagine like, living from that place. Everything that’s happening is actually for your benefit. Cheryl Richardson has become a dear friend, she’s a very successful self-help author, and she said to me once, I got through a breakup and I was sad about it, she said, “You know? Try looking at it this way: rejection is God’s protection.” I mean, if you think about that, because if someone, if things end with someone, we as human beings don’t know what’s way down the road. You know, it could be magical now, it could be the worst thing that ever happened to you 10 years from now, right?

If it ended now, it could actually be a great gift. If you start looking at it as everything is happening for my benefit from that place, it makes life a lot simpler, and it actually makes us happier. Call it a simple mental hack, it works.

[00:37:36] MB: Yeah, that’s so powerful. I love that phrase. Rejection is god’s protection. I think many times, looking back on my life, there’s so many things that I desperately wanted or wished would happen, and the fact that they didn’t happen was the best thing that could have happened to me.

[00:37:49] KR: Yeah, look. I was writing for over a decade. Obsessively, you know, teaching myself, reading the great authors at night after work, and on the weekends just writing, rewriting. You know, sending out material, getting rejection letters, and the rejections hurt. I remember I would be depressed for a week or two, and then I would think, “Okay, I’m going to be a better writer,” and I would work harder the next round and get more rejection letters.

You know what that gave me? Over a decade, I became a way better writer because of that. That allowed me to be the kind of writer who could write Love Yourself and take his ego out of the way and just write only every word that mattered and cut everything else out. If I hadn’t got those rejections for a decade, I wouldn’t have written Love Yourself. If I had gotten like, published early on, I’d be writing this really clever drivel. It’s very easy to write clever stuff. I mean, I do it all the time, and then I throw it in the trash, because I know now how to write pure from the heart, but that took a lot of time and a lot of work to get to that place. That was all because of the rejections.

[00:38:44] MB: You touched on earlier kind of the difference or the distinction between someone who is successful and someone who is fulfilled. Could you explain that distinction?

[00:38:52] KR: I always make this distinction of someone who is successful AND fulfilled. Fulfilled, right? A couple of things I’ve noticed with that. One of the key things is their attitude tends to be that everything that’s happening is actually for their benefit. They work it out, they’ll handle it, they’ll figure it out, they’ll be in a better place because of it.

Success and fulfilment. I think, in that case, I think fulfillment for me is when you’re really living your life in a way that your life is an expression of you. The true you, what you’re putting out in the world, where you’re being, if you’re walking the earth, being you, and putting out to the world a real you. That is natural fulfillment.

It’s actually a beautiful way to be. Now having success from that place is more amazing. You’ll never have any issues with that success, because it’s just you being you. The real you, not the ego, not the scared person, just you, the gifts you got. I would say like, of all the things I’ve done, startups, building companies, venture capital, all these things. The thing that I found most fulfilling, even though it’s also the hardest work I’ve done, is writing and putting these books out. It is by far the most fulfilling thing I’ve ever done in my life. Blows everything else away. Because it’s a pure expression of me.

[00:40:05] MB: One of the things you’ve talked about is the idea that if something scares you, there’s magic on the other side.

[00:40:11] KR: Yeah.

[00:40:11] MB: I’d love for you to kind of explain that.

[00:40:13] KR: That’s just a rule I’ve developed for myself. It’s just a personal rule, and one, whenever I live, just results in magic. Like, for example. I was terrified of putting the Love Yourself out to the world, I was petrified. I wrote it, and I remember, just being like, I was just as likely to just trash it than I was to publish it, right? It was actually crossing that fear that actually changed my life, transformed my life.

I’ve noticed other things. If there’s like, they’re really scared, you know, okay, if you’re scared of throwing yourself in front of a truck, yes, that’s a legitimate fear, but like most of our fears that come from within, they’re actually, I think, often a signal of where to go rather than where to run away from. It’s kind of funny how that works.

I think in our gut, we’ve learned to listen to in a very weird way as humans, but like this fear of going and asking that girl out. What’s the worst that can happen? Eventually, you could meet the girl of your dreams. Publishing the book where I’m going to be a laughing stock in Silicon Valley. Everyone’s going to be like, “What the hell, dude? You’re writing this book about loving yourself, with this strange cover, and now you’re doing like, mantras in your head?” I thought I would never be able to raise a dollar for a company again. By doing it, it changed my life. So many CEO’s I’ve met told me how it’s transformed their lives and made them better. That was a huge thing.

It’s almost like I look at life as a cliff. These things in life, it’s a cliff you're standing on and we’re waiting to jump, and we think, you know, we’re going to jump after our wings grow. The irony is that they never will. We have to actually jump somewhere along the way. While we’re falling is when they grow, because it’s like life tests us. I think life gives us more than we could ever ask for, but we have to step up. It’s life that requires us or of us. I think that’s a fine deal.

[00:41:52] 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.

I'm going to give you three reasons why you should sign up for our e-mail list today by going to successpodcast.com, signing up right on the homepage. There’s some incredible stuff that’s only available to those on the e-mail list, so be sure to sign up, including an exclusive curated weekly e-mail from us called Mindset Monday, which is short, simple, filled with articles, stories, things that we found interesting and fascinating in the world of evidence-based growth in the last week.

Next, you're going to get an exclusive chance to shape the show, including voting on guests, submitting your own personal questions that we’ll ask guests on air and much more. Lastly, you’re going to get a free guide we created based on listener demand, our most popular guide, which is called How To Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide by signing up and joining the e-mail list today. Again, you can do that at successpodcast.com, sign up right at the homepage, or if you're on the go, just text the word “smarter”, S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44222.

Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes because that helps boost the algorithm, that helps us move up the iTunes rankings and helps more people discover the Science of Success.

Don't forget, if you want to get all the incredible information we talked about in the show, links transcripts, everything we discussed and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can get those at successpodcast.com, just hit the show notes button right at the top.

Thanks again, and we'll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

Grant Cardone: Why Most People Aren’t Willing To Succeed

In this episode we bring on Grant Cardone to give you a real look at what it means to be successful and what it really takes to get there. He shares the exact shifts you have to make in order to 10x your life. We share why you should ignore most people’s advice, how to push yourself to a new level, and why learning isn’t enough to get to the highest levels.

Grant Cardone is the CEO of Cardone Capital, an international speaker, entrepreneur and author of The 10X Rule as well as two dozen best-selling business programs. Named the #1 marketer to watch by Forbes Magazine, Cardone founded The 10X Movement & The 10X Growth Conference, which has grown into the world’s largest business & entrepreneur conference. He has been featured on countless media outlets across the globe.

• What was the inflection point that really changed your life and career?

• How do you go from the fantasy of being successful to actually being successful?

• How do you go from success to mega success? How do you go from making good money to

• Operating out of his house, not spending money on advertising - how did he go from 3mm to 30mm?

• It wasn’t one time, it was 1000 small moments that lead to Grant’s greatness and his rise in fame

• The FIRST thing to change was Grant’s mindset - “I have to be a big boy now”

• He was being held back by other peoples’ thinking - small thinkers, people who were playing small ball

• "You can fake a lambo but you can’t a jet."

• STOP listening to people who are mid level successful and have successful small businesses. If you want to be a real player you can’t get advice from little players. You can’t be a whale and act like krill.

• Start managing other people’s money - leverage other peoples’ capital to get into a bigger game

• How to raise 20bn in 72 hours.

• Change the questions you ask yourself. You have to keep changing and leveling up the questions you’re asking yourself.

• Don’t get comfortable in any one lane, understand business as a whole.

• You have to take NEW RISKS all the time. You have to reach out and meet new people.

• Share the stage with other people - collaborating with other people lifted Grant’s brand up and took him to another level - 10x is a movement it’s not just about Grant.

• Coca Cola and Netflix lose huge amounts of money in order to be successful.

• How do you start filtering good advice and bad advice when you're trying to 10x?

• You have to compromise something to really take it to the next level. If we wanted to really take ourselves to the next level we have to get uncomfortable and do what it takes.

• People have to KNOW you before they can trust you. You have to get yourself out there.

• Money moves to familiarity, especially in times of crisis.

• “The aha never turns into money” Whats money is aha + do do. You have to turn ahas into ACTION.

• Grant spent years on the mistaken idea that the best product would win. Then he spent years thinking that people needed to trust him. That as a mistake too - then he had to shift to getting people to KNOW you.

• How do you get known?

  • Start with WHO do you want to know you?

  • How can you distribute content to them at the lowest possible cost? You can either spend money or you can spend energy. It’s a lot cheaper just to spend money on paid ads.

• How do you stand out? #1 thing is FREQUENCY. It’s not about how unique your content is. People have to trust you.

• Likes don’t matter. You have to build of following of REAL people. Do you want to build an army?

• You have to be the brightest star in the room, otherwise you’re gonna get overlooked.

• Never give up on an ad campaign, keep working it until the offer makes sense to people. Flip what you’re offering, change the offer, try something new. If you give up on the promotion of an idea, that idea will never find it’s way into society.

• Just cause its a good idea doesn’t mean it’s gonna make money, and just cause it makes sense doesn’t mean it’s gonna make money.

• “If you’re gonna take a whipping take it quick” Don’t get stuck in the loss. Run another play. Keep going.

• Allocating time across multiple businesses

  • Which one has the biggest pay day

  • Which one is closest to the goal line

  • You can’t manage everything. Be a good quarterback, plug in where you are good and where you can add value.

• If there’s 3 people in your company you will never figure out what kind of business person you really are. That’s when you really get to meet yourself - when you 10x your company. It will be UNBELIEVABLE.

• How can you find out how big you are playing small? It’s impossible.

• There is no courage without fear.

• You have to get reps in. If you don’t step into fear you will get smaller. You have to confront and push through your fear.

• #1 Most Important Rule is PROMOTE YOURSELF.

• What’s wrong with most people’s relationship with money?

  • The Middle class rules don’t work anymore.

• Study people who’ve mastered the circulation of money.

• Multiplying money is very different than saving money.

• Homework: Don’t save any money. Don’t have any money in your checking or savings account. Clean out your retirement account. Start spending your money.

• An entrepreneur, by definition, puts time and money at risk in order to have more time and money. People save money because they’re playing it safe.

• Homework #2: Get around people that PUSH YOU. You can’t like your coach. You need someone who will bump you and push you to do more. You don’t need someone to walk along side of you. You can’t get greater without pressure.

• You always achieve more with somebody else than you would by yourself.

• Stay in RISKY and DANGEROUS environments all the time.

• Get involved with people that are PUSHING THEMSELVES.

• Homework #3: Make commitments to things that pull you forward.

• People are built to create and to contribute.

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

Are you hiring for your business or next big project?

LinkedIn Talent Solutions is here to help and make hiring the right person simple, powerful, and easy!

LinkedIn goes above and beyond. Screening not just the hard skills you need but soft skill as well to find the right person fast!

LinkedIn looks at things like collaboration within a team, creative skills, adaptability and much much more! That’s how LinkedIn makes sure your post get in front of the right people at the right time to all your needs without all the typical hiring headaches.

It’s no wonder great candidates are hired every 8 seconds on LinkedIn!

Right now, LinkedIn is offering Science of Success listeners their first $50 on the Talent Solutions platform absolutely free! Just go to www.linkedin.com/success to find the right candidate for your project today!

Want To Dig In More?! - Here’s The Show Notes, Links, & Research

General

• Grant’s personal site

• Grant’s LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook

• Cardone University

• GrantCardoneTV

• Cardone Capital

• The Cardone Zone Podcast

Media

• Article directory on Entrepreneur, Medium, CNBC, AMEX, Business Insider, Elite Daily, and Huffpost

• Arabian Business - “'If anyone has 10X figured out, it's Dubai' - serial entrepreneur and author Grant Cardone” by Jola Chudy

• Fortune - “The Key to Being a Great Entrepreneur” By Grant Cardone

  • “Be Hungry or Starve as an Entrepreneur” By Grant Cardone and Entrepreneur

• Investopedia - “The Multi-Million Real Estate Empire of Grant Cardone” by Shobhit Seth

• Freshsales Blog - “How Grant Cardone Built a $750 Million Empire” by Nivas Ravichandran

• SUCCESS - “4 Changes You Can Make to Reach Your Full Potential” By Grant Cardone

• TIME - “How to Stay Laser-Focused on Your Goals” by Grant Cardone

• [Podcast] Eventual Millionaire - 10x Your Business with Grant Cardone

• [Podcast] Jordan Harbinger - Grant Cardone

• [Podcast] Lewis Howes - Grant Cardone: Think Bigger and Take the Risk

Videos

• Grant’s YouTube Channel

• Who is Grant Cardone Really?

• The Greatest Salesman in the World

• 5 Steps to Becoming a Millionaire - Grant Cardone Trains His Sales Team LIVE

• Grant Cardone’s Vimeo Channel

• The Wolf of Wall Street - Grant Cardone vs Jordan Belfort | Sales Training Heavyweight Match - The Wolf's Den #14

• Impaulsive - GRANT CARDONE’S BILLIONAIRE ADVICE: CASH IS TRASH - IMPAULSIVE EP. 127

• Tai Lopez - Grant Cardone & Tai Lopez: How To Sell $287,000 A Day & Own $700,000,000 In Real Estate

• Evan Carmichael - "STOP Thinking Like the MIDDLE CLASS!" - Grant Cardone (@GrantCardone) - Top 10 Rules

• Goalcast - How To Multiply Your Success with the Rule of 10 | Grant Cardone | Goalcast

• Valuetainment - Grant Cardone's Most Controversial Interview with Patrick Bet-David

Books

• The 10X Rule: The Only Difference Between Success and Failure  by Grant Cardone

• Sell or Be Sold: How to Get Your Way in Business and in Life  by Grant Cardone

• Be Obsessed or Be Average  by Grant Cardone

• How To Create Wealth Investing In Real Estate: How to Build Wealth with Multi-Family Real Estate by Grant Cardone

• The Millionaire Booklet  by Grant Cardone

• If You're Not First, You're Last: Sales Strategies to Dominate Your Market and Beat Your Competition  by Grant Cardone

• The Closer's Survival Guide: Over 100 ways to ink the deal  by Grant Cardone

• How to Get and Stay Motivated  by Grant Cardone

• Sell To Survive  by Grant Cardone

• Secrets of Selling  by Grant Cardone

• The Automotive Closes (Automotive Sales Closing Techniques) by Grant Cardone

• Selling: The Secret to Success by Grant Cardone (2008-04-12) by Grant Cardone

Misc

• [SoS Video Special] *SHOCKING* Grant Cardone Calls Out Podcaster

Episode Transcript

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

[00:00:11] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet with more than 4 million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries.

In this episode, we bring on Grant Cardone to give you a real look at what it means to be successful and what it really takes to get there. He shares the exact shifts you have to make in order to 10X your life. We uncover why you should ignore most people’s advice. How to push yourself to a new level beyond what you even think is possible, why learning isn’t enough to get to the highest levels and much more.

Welcome back to another business-focused episode of the Science of Success. Everything we teach on the show can be applied to achieving success in your business life. Now we’re going to show you how to do that along with some interviews of the world’s top business experts. These business episodes air every other Tuesday along with your regularly scheduled Science of Success content. Enjoy this business-focused interview.

Are you a fan of the show and have you been enjoying the content that we’ve put together for you? If you have, I would love it if you signed up for our email list. We have some amazing content on their 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 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 44222.

In our previous episode, we shared lessons from the world of high stakes poker. What’s it like to bet a million dollars on the turn of a card? What can we learn about making better decisions and dealing with tough emotions under those extreme circumstances? We shared a powerful strategy for managing your emotions in a crisis, showed you how to make tough decisions like a professional poker star and much more with our previous guest, Alec Torelli. If you want to make the best decisions for your life even under the toughest possible circumstances, listen to our previous interview.

Now, for our interview with grant. Please note, this episode contains profanity.

[00:02:42] MB: Today, we have another epic guest on the show, Grant Cardone. Grant is the CEO of Cardone Capital, an international speaker, entrepreneur and author of The 10X Rule as well as two dozen bestselling business programs. Named the number one marketer to watch by Forbes Magazine, he has founded the 10X Movement and the 10X Growth Conference, which is one of the world’s largest business and entrepreneur conference. He’s been featured in countless media outlets across the globe.

Grant, welcome to the Science of Success.

[00:03:09] GC: Man! I appreciate you having me. I hope there is a science to the success.

[00:03:13] MB: That’s what we’re trying to find out.

[00:03:14] GC: I’ve been looking for it my whole damn life.

[00:03:17] MB: That’s awesome. Let’s dig into that a little bit. I’d love to figure out at least in your experience, Grant. Obviously, you’re tremendously successful. What was the or was there – I know you had a really interesting upbringing in childhood and a lot of traumatic and challenging pieces of that, but what was one of the biggest inflection points in your business career? What was the moment that you went from being an average Joe to somebody who you’re like, “Wow! This rocket ship is really taking off. I’m really going to achieve success on a level that most people never do,” or that maybe even you didn’t think was possible.

[00:03:48] GC: Yeah. The 10X rule, man. The 10X rule was a game changer. I’ve been in this space of trying to discover the science, seriously, ever since I was 10 years old, but I made it a profession when I was 25. 25 years old, I’m like, “Okay. I’m going to learn how to do business.” I learned how to do sales when I was 25. At 30 I learned a little more about how to sell stuff, because I had my own business then. I was selling stuff door-to-door. But I didn’t really learned the business game. I didn’t know I was really going to really, really be somebody. I always thought maybe I could be. I think we all had these fantasies, right?

When I was a kid I thought maybe I’d be a rock and roll star, and then in my teen years I thought I was going to be a baseball player. Then around 20 I said, “Maybe I’m going to be a drug pin.” I’m going to be the next The Godfather of some kind of – I felt maybe I was going to end up in the crime business, because I didn’t know what I was going to do for a living. I was literally lost for like 10 years.

But when I finally became a legitimate businessman in my 30s, and from 30 to about 45 years old, I was making good money. I mean, I was doing in comparison to the other people around me, I was definitely successful, but I knew that I had another level in me. It took me 2008 when the thing changed. Everything changed for me between 2008 and 2010, I wrote the 10X rule in 2010. When I wrote that book, I wrote it for me. I never thought I’d sell one copy of that book.

I was trying to figure out the science of my next level. What would it take for me to scale my business like the big boys? Prior to that I was making – I don’t know, three million bucks a year, which is a great deal. Less than 4% of all business in America make a million dollars. Very few people ever learn how to make a million dollars, and I was doing 3, but I wasn’t doing 30. I wasn’t spending on advertising, and I was still operating out of my house, and I had maybe half of an employee. I was contract laboring people. I was kind of like a broken vehicle that was getting patched up and bundled all the time. I looked good by the time I got to the destination, but I knew when I got in the car, dude, everything was kind of like just being held together. I had to do everything.

In 2008 when the economy fell apart, when we had this what I would call a depression, not a recession. This global, massive contraction. When the tide went out, then we found out, “Okay, what is Grant really made of? What kind of business is this really?” Anybody that had too much debt at that time or not enough cash, not enough assets, not enough customers, if you weren’t known in probably at least 10 different industries, you got ripped apart.

The last 8 or 9 years has really been the creation of Grant. This is a long answer to a very simple question you’re asking. When was it? It wasn’t one time. It has been a thousand times. I went from having $7 million in the bank to almost $1.5 billion worth of real estate in the last 10 years. I went from 3 employees to almost 500 employees. From spending no money in advertising to spending a million dollars a month in advertising.

The first change was this, like my mind changed, “Hey! I got to be a big boy now.” I had been negatively impacted by other success people’s thinking. Meaning, the guy that made a couple of million dollars from his house, from the entrepreneurs, from the – Well, what are they called? The solopreneurs. We have words being used today every day that weren’t even being used 20 years ago. Solopreneur, entrepreneur, self-employer, influencer. Just because you can influence, don’t mean you can cash a check.

[00:07:34] MB: That’s very true.

[00:07:36] GC: That’s why I say that thing about you can fake a Lambo, but you can’t fake a jet.

[00:07:41] MB: I like that.

[00:07:41] GC: Anybody can lease a car. You can even charter a jet. You can even take a photo in front of a jet, but you can’t fake put your name on the jet. For me, the science of success is really about what did Coca-Cola do? What did Warren Buffett do? What is Elon Musk doing? What did Alexander the Great do? Not what did Bobby do on Instagram to get 700 likes?

[00:08:07] MB: Yeah. That’s such good advice, and looking at studying the greatest achievers of all time, the Alexander the Greats, the Caesars, Rockefeller, etc. I mean, you could see the bookshelf behind me where I have all of those biographies sitting there. I’m curious, I want to dig in to more this transition point, and I love the piece of advice that you had that it wasn’t one thing. It was a thousand small things. What were some of the other things? You talked about shifting your mindset. What else enabled you to go from a successful small businessman to a world-shaping mogul?

[00:08:39] GC: I quit listening to small successful businessmen and women. I quit getting advice from, no offense, punks, and I felt like a punk, dude. I felt like, “Oh! I’m a businessman. But you walk into a room, you go to New York City. You’re making 3 or 4 million bucks a year and you think you’re the shit. You got a couple of cars paid for. You got a house. You belong to a country club.

I walked into a meeting with Goldman Sacks with a billionaire. At that time I was probably worth – I don’t know, 80 million bucks. Dude, they didn’t pay attention to me. I was not even there. I could have walked in with a hard on and no pants. They wouldn’t even recognize that I was there. I could have opened an account that day with 80 million with Goldman Sachs. They still wouldn’t have paid attention to me. I was no one.

When I walked into the Goldman Sachs building and saw their elevators, their elevator, one elevator was bigger than my office. I was like, “What the fuck have I been thinking, man? What have I been thinking?”

Now, at that time I owned a bunch of real estate, but I refused, I refused to manage other people’s money. I’m like, “What am I thinking? Everybody, all my uncles, my brother, all these people, all these little players – My account, my lawyer said, “Don’t manage other people’s money. Don’t take other people’s money Don’t let other people invest with you. It’s a problem.” All these other people.

Then I walked in the Goldman Sachs’ building, I’m like, “How did they build this place?” They raised other people’s money. They had people working in that building that made more money working for Goldman Sachs than I made working for myself. I’m like, “What the fuck have I been thinking?” This is a thousand – I’m getting beat. I feel like I’m in Singapore, I’m getting cracked in the back with a – What is that? A cane? A cane. I’m getting beat, man. I’m like, “Whoa!”

Blackstone this week, I think it was last week actually now, they raised $20 billion in 72 hours. One thing has to happen and you’re like, “I want to be a real player.” If you want to be a real player, you cannot get advice from little players. You can’t be a whale and act like a krill. Yeah, you can show up like a little clown fish, but you got to remember, you can’t leave anemone because somebody is going to eat your ass up.

I was telling the guy in the interview the other day, “Bro, you got to change the questions you’re asking yourself.” If you start in sales and you want to get great at sales. Okay, good. Get great at sales, but at some point you got to start asking questions about business, not sales. You got to elevate the game. You got to start getting uncomfortable with other shots.

For the business person, the businessman, the businesswoman, for a person to go from an idea to be an CEO really running a company, you got to keep changing the questions you ask yourself and not get comfortable in any one lane. That means you’re always taking new risks. I’m having to take new risks all the time. I’m having to reach out and meet new people. I’m having to be in new interviews, ask new questions.

[00:11:36] MB: Yeah, that’s great. There’re a number of really good insights from that. One of the things that seems like it was a breakthrough for you is this idea of starting to manage other people’s money or leveraging other people’s capital so that you could play in a bigger game. How did you begin implementing that into your life? You’re sitting there in the elevator, as you say, “Oh my God! I have to start leveraging other people’s capital.” How did you start to put that into motion?

[00:12:00] GC: Well, that was one company, okay? It wasn’t about other people’s money. It was the realization like, “What was I thinking?” Why am I worried about raising money from other people when I know I have a great investment vehicle?” I know it’s better than Goldman Sachs, this shit paper. They’ll sell anything to anybody. They’ll take a billion dollars from you and let it sit in a bank account and pay you nothing, like whatever.

I know I’m putting people in these beautiful real estate deals, but I won’t put anybody in it, because I got this one piece of data that was given to me by another buy that said, “Leave other people’s money alone, man. Don’t get too big. Fly under the radar.” That was just one little business, okay?

There was another business, my seminar business. My seminar business, I was told early on, “Hey, you need to be the main guy on stage.” That was bad data. When I started collaborating with other speakers bringing other people, it was no longer Grant on stage. It became the 10X movement.

I’ve worked with Tim Story, Tim Grover, Steve Harvey, Snoop Doog, Little John, John Maxwell. We got Scooter Braun coming to my next gig. I mean, I’ve had unbelievable names. When you collaborate with other people, it lifts your brand up. But I was told by people in the speaking space, the coaches, the gurus, these guys that operate a business from home part-time and tell people how to have a full-time business and grow their business. I was told by them, man, “Hold the stage yourself. Don’t share the stage.” Again, it’s just bad advice. You got to collaborate. You got to go wide.

I look at Coca-Cola, or Google, or Facebook, or Netflix. Look at the money they’re willing to lose in order to get to be a dominant power in their space. The average million dollar company does not want to lose money. They’re terrified to lose money. The average entrepreneur is unwilling to even invest money in time to grow their business. That’s why so many of the office from home, it might why you’re running your podcast from the house. It’s cheap, dude.

[00:14:07] MB: That’s fair.

[00:14:08] GC: The reality is, look, for you to get sponsors, for you to become a 10 million a year podcast, you’re going to have to get a studio. You’re going to have to get advertisers. You’re going to have to have bumpers. You’re going to have to sell a part of your soul. But everybody’s got to comprise something to get bigger and a lot of people don’t want to compromise. They want to just stay where they’re at.

[00:14:29] MB: That’s really interesting.

[00:14:35] MB: Hiring the right person takes time, time that you often don’t have. But you shouldn’t let a time crunch get in the way of finding the right candidates for your business. That’s why LinkedIn is the best place to post your job. In fact, I was on LinkedIn jobs this morning looking for candidates to fill a key role in one of my businesses.

LinkedIn jobs screens candidates with hard and soft skills you’re looking for so that you can hire the right person quickly. You can look for things like collaboration, creativity and adaptability looking beyond just work skills and resumes to connect you with the candidates who are a perfect match for your business.

That’s how LinkedIn makes sure that your job post gets in front of the people you actually want to hire, because they have a much better ability to get a deep insight into exactly who is the right candidate for you and your business.

Find the right person meant for your business today with LinkedIn jobs. You can pay what you want and the first $50 is on them. Just visit linkedin.com/success. Again, that’s linkedin.com/success to get $500 off your first job post. Terms and conditions apply.

[00:15:55] MB: You brought up a really good point, which is there’s a lot of bad advice. You brought up a number of good points, but this idea that there’s a lot of bad advice or limiting advice from people who are maybe at the middle tiers of success, how do you filter out, how did you know this is bad advice versus this is good advice. I should listen to this person. I should ignore what this other person is telling me.

[00:16:14] GC: I’m careful about who I study. Then when I read, when I find somebody I’m like, “Okay, I like this person. I want to study them. I don’t just take data from them without taking a look at the data. Howard Schultz is famous for saying one of the things that he believes in is don’t advertise. He’s a multibillionaire. Took an idea called Starbucks. It’s a word-recognized brand today. One of the most valuable brands in the world. He says, “Do not advertise.” I saw this this morning and I’m like, “Howard says, “Yeah, I’ve seen that before.” What does that really mean when Howard Schultz says don’t advertise? Does that mean I should not advertise?

I’m like, “Wait a minute. He doesn’t money on advertising, but –” And I think he does spend money on advertising. But he buys the best locations in New York City to put his stores on. In Miami, the best locations possible. Houston, Texas, best locations possible. Tokyo, Japan. Best locations. He will pay more money for lease to make sure he gets traffic he needs. That is a form of advertising. In fact, it’s cheaper for me to buy some space on Facebook than it is for me buy 5th Avenue and 43rd Street. He is advertising. Okay?

Also, number two, for him to become the president of the United States, which he dropped out of, he would have to advertise, and he didn’t, so he had to drop out. Just because the guy is super successful, just because he has a piece of a data doesn’t mean you want to just drink it, eat it without first studying it. Because if I study the Googles, or the Facebook, or the Netflixes, or the Coca-Clolas, or the Superbowl. Do you want to advertise? If you’re Lays potato chips, you need to advertise. If you’re Nike, you better advertise. If you’re a small entrepreneur, you need to get the whole world to know, you must advertise. This is a mistake I made for 20 years. Not marketing, not advertising. Holding on to money, because I was a little player. Holding my money. I don’t want to spend it. The reality is if nobody knows me, they can never trust me.

[00:18:21] MB: Yeah, that’s fascinating. So what was the inflection point where you realized that you need to start making yourself more well-known? That you need to start advertising? That you need to start deploying your capital instead of hoarding it?

[00:18:32] GC: I can only be in one place at one time, right? I’m talking to you right now. Hopefully this gets out to millions of people. When the economy crashed in 2008, I knew this was not about the economy. It was about me. No one knew Grant Cardone. When things go to shit, whatever leftover money there is always goes where it knows. Money does not go to strange places when it becomes scarce. It goes to familiar places.

Money moves to familiarity. It moves to where I’m comfortable. What’s comfortable? Something I see every day. That’s why people go home every day, it’s comfortable. That’s why people say, “No place like home,” because it’s so familiar, man.

Where does money go? Money goes home. Money always goes home. Money goes to where it’s most familiar, and no one knew me. One industry knew me well, and when that industry got cut in half, there was 20,000 auto dealers in America. They all knew me. They got cut in half down to about 9,000. They didn’t have any money. So that one industry, I was to put it upon one industry. That’s when I knew what Warren Buffett meant about never depend on one flow of anything.

That’s when I got busy saying, “I got to create –” Number one, I got to get more people to know who I am. This is where the mind clicks. I’m giving you practical now. Not just aha. Because the aha never turns into money. You guys watching, “Oh, man! That was great.” That’s never money ever. Ahas are never ever money for me. What’s money for me is, “Aha! Do-do.” For me that meant, “Okay. I got to get everybody.” I made a list of industries; chiropractor, medical, dentist, cosmetic surgeons, plumbers, roofers, real estate agents, real estate brokers. I need to get every one of these professions to know who I am. Financial advisors, brokers, bankers. I need to get them all to know me.

This was 10 or 12 years ago. This was pre-podcasters. The word influencer wasn’t even around yet. Now we have all that. If somebody is listening to this right now, what are you going to do? You got to give people that have influence to know who you are. It is not important who I know it is, but it’s not as important as who knows me. Because if I can get people, if I can get strangers to recognize my name or my face or seem somewhat familiar, that is the next level to saying, “Okay. Now I can start sharing ideas and concepts and products and possibly becoming profitable.”

[00:21:03] MB: Yeah. It’s the classic know, like, trust cycle and you’re basically saying that when you advertise, when you become somebody who’s really well-known, that you’re accelerating that cycle and elevating yourself to a higher paying field where you have tons more opportunities.

[00:21:18] GC: Yeah. What I did for 25 years is I just tried to get people to trust me. The first thing I did was I thought – Actually, I made a different mistake and that I thought, “If people just saw how good my product was, I’d be good.” I spent years with this idea that I have the best product, and that was going to do it. That was a mistake.” Then I’m like, “Okay. Now I need to get people to trust me.” That was actually a mistake too. I need to get people to know me, because if they don’t know me in an industry, my product doesn’t matter and they’ll never trust me.

We all see signs of best product getting beat all the time. Just because you have the best product does not mean you’re going to get the most business. You have to get known. You’re right, get known. What did you say? Known, liked and trusted?

[00:22:02] MB: Yeah. Know, like, trust. You have to know somebody in order for you to like them, and you have to like somebody in order for you to trust them.

[00:22:08] GC: Yeah, that’s probably right. I didn’t know those last two. But that probably makes sense. I’ve spent the last 8 years. I didn’t have an Instagram account 8 years ago. Nobody did. I didn’t have a Facebook account. Facebook had just come out. I started a YouTube account I think 11 years ago. I didn’t know how to do a YouTube video. I didn’t have a subscriber to any of these channels. I didn’t have a Twitter account.

Those were all distribution channels, right? Hey, how do I get known? Make a list. Who do I want to know me? Three; how can I distribute content to those at the lowest possible cost? Because at that time, I didn’t have any money. I’m either going to spend money on that distribution channel or I’m going to spend organic energy. They’re very similar, by the way. It’s a lot cheaper just to spend money. We probably spend a million dollars a month in monetary exchange for ads today. Money, we trade a million dollars in amount in advertising. But I’ll bet you, I’ll spend another 10 times that in energy.

[00:23:05] MB: How do you stand out when you’re creating all these content? There’s so much noise now on social media. Obviously, you have a platform now that helps you standout. But when you were just getting started or for somebody who is just getting started, what advice would you have for them to be able to stand out amongst all of that noise?

[00:23:22] GC: Frequency. Number one, be frequent. You got to be frequent. It’s not how you unique your content is in the beginning. People have to trust that you’re going to be there. In the beginning, there actually had to be a little shock that you keep showing up. Why is this guy doing this Facebook life thing? He’s only got three people there. It’s hard, man. It’s a grueling deal. It’s much easier to go hire a manager, an agent or just spend money on advertising. This is a grueling grind down. Nobody talking about how much of a grind it is, because a lot of people are just buying. They’re buying bullshit likes. I’m glad the likes are going to away. It’s going to destroy people, man. It’s going to kill them. These guys on Instagram, they got to get their likes. It’s going to crush them, because it doesn’t mean anything.

You’re going to build a real following of people, and Instagram and Facebook, this is a not a new thing. This is the way it was 100 years ago. You got to build a following. You want to build an army? If you’re going to take over some part of the world, a thousand years ago, you needed an army. People need to know that you’re serious and they need to know that you’re a threat. Because if they don’t know you’re a threat dude, they’re not going to take you serious and you’ll only pull that off a couple of times.

People are trying to roll around by themselves, and you’re wondering why people aren’t taking you serious. Because you’re competing with them wrong, man. Lebron can roll by himself. He shows up, everybody watches them. You’re lost in the crowd. Nobody sees you. You can’t even see yourself anymore. Everybody is got to become Lebron. You got to become a star.

I look up in the sky at night, man. My eyes always go to the brightest star in the sky, and that’s not going to change. It’s going to change because of your race, your color, religion, your prayers. You got to be the brightest star in the room, otherwise you’re going to get overlooked.

Brightest star also – What comes with the brightest start is when everybody is looking at you, they’re also seeing either you don’t meet their expectations, “Oh, he ain’t that bright. I thought that star was bigger than that.” When you get that much attention, what comes with it is not all admiration. Then a person really meets themselves. When you start getting more the likes, you get dislikes, and you get people ignoring you, and you get people just using you, and want to steal from you, and scavenge you, and click bait you, and bully you. Look, nothing’s changed from the days of junior high school. It’s pretty much the same thing.

[00:25:56] MB: This is a little bit of a subject change, but in the same vein, when you’re – Whether it’s investing at a media campaign or even beyond that, how do you think about when you should double down in something and keep going and soldier through versus when you need to cut your loses?

[00:26:10] GC: On an ad campaign?

[00:26:12] MB: Yeah, and maybe beyond that when you’re starting a company, when you’re working on a project.

[00:26:17] GC: Yeah. Well, those are two different questions for me. One is on the ad campaign. You should never give up on the ad campaign. You need to shift whatever the offer is. You need to keep working that ad until the offer makes sense to people. Sometimes it’s just flipping it, right? Instead of selling the seat, you’re giving the seat away and they’re joining a membership, or, “Hey, here’s the seat. You get the membership.” Sometimes you just got to flip it. But if you give up on the promotion of any idea, the idea will never find its way into society.

Now, if you have an idea that’s terrible, that’s the other part of this question. Just because it’s a good idea, it doesn’t mean it’s going to make money. Just because it makes sense, it doesn’t mean it’s going to make money. Why would a guy like me compete with Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, fidelity? You’re going to take those guys on, man, you better be ready to go and you better have a product that has some kind of like unique advantage. If you find out it does, then you’re right. Then there’s a point where you got to bail.

If you told me you had an idea about an app, the moment you say app, I’m closing my mind. I’m not even interested. They cost too much to build. They cost 10 times that to get anybody to know about them. It will cost you 100 times more to get them to remember that they even downloaded your app to use it. It’s just a bad idea. If you can’t give somebody the app, even if you give them the app and it has money on the app that they can take, you’re going to probably not make the business work. Some ideas are just terrible, because there’s so much competition in the marketplace.

Do you remember the Apple Newton by any chance? It was about this big. It’s probably before your time.

[00:27:57] MB: Yeah, I don’t remember it.

[00:27:57] GC: If you Google the Apple Newton and Bill Gates or Microsoft, the Apple Newton was the first iPhone and Bill Gates – Steve Jobs was running out of money. He went to Bill Gates and said, “Look,” and they were furious competitors. Really didn’t like each other. Steve knew he needed Bill’s help. He says, “I need money.” Bill agreed to give them money. They had to bury the apple, the Newton.

I had a product depended upon the Newton. It was a company. I probably never even talked about this before until today. I knew when that deal happened, I had to get rid of the company. They were going to bury the Newton, build it and run it around, and four days I got rid of my company. I took my whipping and moved on.

So if you’re going to take a whipping, take it quick. Move on and what you want to do now is you want to take all that energy now that you don’t have, you don’t have to direct. You need to know that you’re going full steam ahead, but all that energy that you had pushing on that, in this case, the Newton, I had to shift all that energy on to these other projects. Because what you don’t want to do is you don’t want to get stuck in the loss, man.

If you watch the NFL, or ball club, they run a play, it doesn’t work. They don’t go crying on the sidelines. They run another play. You just don’t want to keep running bad plays though. You got to advance the ball at some point.

[00:29:13] MB: Obviously, you talk a lot about taking massive action, going all-in, being fully committed. How do you think about – I don’t know exactly. You have what? 6 or 7, maybe more than that companies now. How do you think about committing time to each of those and obviously you’re not running each of them fulltime. How do you allocate your effort across all of those and how do you think about doing that with multiple businesses?

[00:29:35] GC: Which ones had the biggest payday and which one is closest to the goal line. Most of what I’m doing is kind of emergency managing, kind of like a grenade. I pull the pin. We have a project. I got 60 days and this thing is going to blow up all over everybody’s face. I’m handling things on timelines. This podcast, today’s podcast, it pops up. It showed this morning. I walked in my office, like, “You got a podcast at 1:00,” as a way you’re telling me right now. I thought you wanted your schedule? I do, but I don’t need – At 9:00 in the morning, I don’t need to know what’s happening at 1:00. Okay?

From 9 to 12 today, I just hammered issues that can advance things. Things that are below my pay grade. Somebody else needs to handle it, or things that are above my pay grade. There are legal issues. That’s above my pay grade. Have $600 dollar an hour person handle that. Have the accounting department handle that IRS thing.

The plane. The plane we flew in last night from New York, I don’t know anything about the plane. I just know where I sit on it. But I’m not taking care of it today. The pilots are. They sit up front and act like they’re flying the plane. I sit in the back knowing I own the plane. You got to know your place, dude. What are you doing? What are you doing? You can’t manage everything. It’s kind of like Tom Brady. What is Tom Brady doing? Tom is not playing defense. Tom is playing full-on offense. Tom does what Tom does. Tom puts points on the board.

My job at my company is to put points on the board. I’m not the video guy. I don’t shoot the video. I don’t edit the video, but that doesn’t mean I can’t say, “Hey, that video sucks, dude. Add this footage. Flip this. Put this here. Put that there. Open with that scene back with me walking on to the plane. Dude, what will be perfect for this. Cut it down.” Then we play with stuff like that.

Look. You’re not going to figure any of that out if you’re a one-man show. If there’re three men in your shop, you’re never going to find out what kind of business person you are. Get 30 people, 10X rule, man. You got 30 people, get 300. You got 300, get 3,000. Then you’re going to find out what kind of leader you are. That is when people get to actually meet themselves. This is not a bad thing. This is going to be a fucking unbelievable thing.

When you go from three people to 300, you’re going to be like, “Damn! I am a businessman. I’m a real legit dude. I can do this.” But people will never find that out, because they’re running too small. How could you find out how big you are playing small? It’s impossible. Nobody knows that a million dollars is no money until they have a million dollars. The only people that think of million dollar is a lot of money is the people that don’t have a million dollars. Just go around the streets, bro. You got out on the streets. Where are you today?

[00:32:17] MB: Nashville, Tennessee.

[00:32:18] GC: Yeah, go to Nashville. You go out on the streets and say, “Who thinks that million dollars is a lot of money?” Every person that raises their hand will not have a million dollars.

[00:32:26] MB: Yeah, I totally get what you’re saying.

[00:32:28] GC: You don’t know what you don’t know man, and people don’t even have any clue about how big they could be, because every day they’re playing so small. You could be the next Howard Stern, bro, but you’ll have to leave your house.

[00:32:42] MB: Yeah, that’s great advice.

[00:32:44] GC: You won’t know it, and the world won’t know that you’re the next Howard Stern until you leave. Mark Zuckerberg, he had to leave his campus room. He did not want to go to Silicon Valley. He had to leave to become Facebook, what Facebook is today.

[00:33:01] MB: The most epic and life-changing thing that we’ve ever done at the Science of Success is about to happen. We’re launching a live in-person intensive just for you. This will be an intimate two-day deep dive in-person with me where we will go over all the biggest lessons and greatest life-changing insights that I’ve personally pulled from years of interviewing the world’s top experts on the Science of Success and show you exactly how to specifically apply them towards exponentially achieving the goals that you have for your own life and business. You’ll learn how to influence anyone, 10X your productivity, overcome procrastination and overwhelm and so much more.

Bring your own unique challenges, goals and desires and get highly specific tailored feedback and a playbook for exactly what you need to do to achieve your biggest goals. Here’s the thing, we’re only going to have 15 spots available for this intensive. That’s 15, 15 spots. If we sell out super-fast, we might do a second intensive, but this is priced so that I can spend intimate one-on-one time with every single person who attends.

This event is going to be here in Nashville on January 27th and 28th. Get more details and reserve your seat before we sell out at successpodcast.com/live. That’s successpodcast.com/live. I can’t wait to see you here in Nashville.

[00:34:41] MB: Why do you think people get stuck playing small ball when they could be so much bigger?

[00:34:45] GC: Because they got small balls. How do you get big balls, dude? You got to practice. You got to start swinging your balls around. You got to –

[00:34:57] MB: Take risks.

[00:34:58] GC: How do you build biceps, dude? How do you build calves?

[00:35:02] MB: Get reps.

[00:35:03] GC: You got to work them. I’ve always had small calves my whole life, and the only way I can get some muscles – I can get them popping out. I just got to go in there and push them. But you see, what people do is people work the easiest muscle they got. They can get biceps, they work their biceps. My wife, she does abs. She can get abs instantly. I’m like, “Look, you need to work those.” I’ve been working those my whole life, man. They’re easy. They pop easy. But people don’t pay attention to stuff that takes little work. They go for the easy thing.

The person ends up calling themselves an introvert. They’re not an introvert. You didn’t stop running your mouth at Thanksgiving dinner. The whole time the introvert said they going to talk the whole damn time. It’s like you didn’t talk to anybody in fucking three months. You will shut up when you’re around your favorite sister. Who’s the only one that listens to your bullshit? But you get out in an audience where nobody knows you and then you’re like, “Oh, I’m an introvert.” No you’re not. You’re an excuse maker. You’re uncomfortable and you’re not willing to move through your discomfort. You got small calves and you don’t want to work them.

How do you build it, dude? You build courage by being courageous, and courage means take action in spite a personal horn. I’m at risk. I am afraid. It is not courageous if you’re not afraid. There is no courage without fear of being present.

[00:36:20] MB: Yeah. That reminds me of one of my favorite quotes, which is everything you want is on the other side of fear.

[00:36:27] GC: Yeah, you don’t want to run man, and it’s real by the way. Your fear is real. It’s real. You can’t tell me it’s not real to walk up somebody you want to do business with and tell them to fuck off. I just give you some weird, crazy, thing to do. Go up to Connor McGregor and punch him. You tell me that fear is not real. Walk up to some stranger and push them for no reason. You’ll be terrified, dude. Tell me it’s not real fear. You’re having a real, like, “Wait a minute, I’m having something real here.” Make a cold call to somebody and ask them – You try to get a million dollars from. It feels real. I know all these cool things people say, but I know this, if you don’t do the fear, you’re going to get smaller as a result to not doing it. That’s real too. You have to confront your fear. You have to just push through it. You got to push through it. Maybe something good comes out of it.

At the very least, at least you’re going to find out, “Wow! I hit Connor. He hit me back. He broke my nose.” That could be what your breakthrough moment right there, because you will get so much free press.

[00:37:34] MB: Yeah, that’s interesting. Always thinking about the PR.

[00:37:38] GC: Oh, man! Promote first. Number one most important thing people should be doing today is promote themselves.

[00:37:42] MB: This is a subject change, but something you touched on earlier as well, what do you think is wrong with most people’s relationship with money?

[00:37:50] GC: They don’t have any.

[00:37:53] MB: But why?

[00:37:54] GC: It's because of our upbringing. You can’t take 311 million people, throw them into a place called America. Free to do whatever the fuck you want. Money everywhere. Just look around. Just go outside. Have money everywhere, man. I’m looking at your bookshelf. I’m like, “God damn! $25, $25, $25, $25, $25, $25, $25.” This guy wants to buy a book. I don’t see my book on your shelf.

[00:38:20] MB: There’s a lot of books you can’t see there, Grant.

[00:38:22] GC: Is any of my books up there?

[00:38:23] MB: Yeah, I got 10X Rule.

[00:38:24] GC: Let me see. Where is it, man? Where is it? Pull it down. I don’t believe you.

[00:38:28] MB: I got to go dig it out, man. We’re going to run out of time.

[00:38:31] GC: I’ll wait.

[00:38:31] MB: It might take me two or three minutes, dude. I have a whole stack of books over here.

[00:38:35] GC: See? You forgot about me.

[00:38:37] MB: I would never forget about you, Grant.

[00:38:39] GC: I’m buried in there in all that other stuff. You got the 4-Hour Work Week.

[00:38:43] MB: I do have the 4-Hour Work Week as well.

[00:38:45] GC: You see? Which one are you going to with? The 10X rule or the 4-Hour Work Week? Because they’re complete contradictions.

[00:38:50] MB: You’re inspiring me with this 10X talk, dude. I got to get out of my house.

[00:38:55] GC: Yeah, dude. I don’t want to work four hours a week. I want to work four hours every minute.

[00:38:59] MB: I like that.

[00:39:00] GC: Back to the money thing. The money this is a big thing for – Everybody needs to handle this money issue. There’s a huge, huge problem in the world. We hear about this financial inequality every day on TV. I think 1% of the people in America are about to have the entire net worth of the middle class. 1% of America is going to be – Literally, have more net worth than the entire middle class of America. Why is that? Is it income inequality or is it information inequality?

I think people have the wrong data. People are operating off the middle class rules. Go to college, get a job, save your money, buy a house, plan for retirement.

[00:39:45] MB: Small ball.

[00:39:46] GC: Small balls. One is always smaller, by the way. That’s a problem when they’re both small. You have mostly male audience, right?

[00:39:53] MB: Majority male, but we have a lot of female listeners for sure.

[00:39:56] GC: Okay. The women know what I mean by small balls. No courage, man. All talk. All hat. No horse. You wear the boots, dude. You got the big cowboy belt. That’s it. That’s where the whole thing is right there. Guys got a big watch, no money in the bank. He’s at the club balling like a baller, renting a Lambo on the ride home. No. Probably just rented one on the way over there. He owns part of the club with the other 200 guys that each put in 10 grand. It’s just a lot of pretend going on, man, rather than like, – Hey, look. I’m saying that because I have done some of that and I played smaller. I call them business that were doing hundreds of millions of dollars a year, and I’m consulting them on how they can make more money. They were spending more money in advertising than I was making in a year.

[00:40:46] MB: That’s crazy.

[00:40:47] GC: A little bit of a paradox. I felt that every time I went and did it too. They were hiring me to come in and get their people to think different. But every time I did it, I felt like, “Wait a minute. They just paid me,” which it looked like a lot of money. It was like – I don’t know, 10,000 bucks an hour or something. To me I was like, “I was so proud of it.” They’re spending 10,000 every hour on advertising.

Who’s thinking small here? I thought 10,00 grand for an hour of work to work was a lot of money. They were spending that every day on advertising. They bought me one time. They bought the ads, literally, every hour, every day of the week, 30 days in a month every day of the year.

See, you got to start like, “Who am I getting my advice from? My mom? My dad? If you want money, man, the only place you can get money from, if you want to change the way you think about money, you have to study only people that have mastered money. Not people that have mastered avoiding debt. Not people that have mastered saving money. People that have mastered the circulation of money. Some of the names you mentioned earlier. I don’t want to save money. I was taught how to save money. I’m great at saving money. I needed to learn how do I get money to multiply? How do I have buildings with my name on it? Why does Donald Trump not ever talk about the house he lives in?

His house is a building on 7th Avenue. He lives in the top of the 7th Avenue building called Trump Tower. Now he lives in the White House. He doesn’t know either one – He has zero interest in where he lives, okay? He wants to be in places where he can drive control revenue. Donald Trump might be a bad example, because so many people hate his guts. But let’s choose Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett never talks about his $38,000 house. One house he’s bought his whole life.

He’s investing money in companies. Most Americans, the biggest investment they make in their life is to buy a house. Most entrepreneurs have more equity in their homes than they do their business. I know business owners that have more equity in their house, put more money down in their house than they do their advertising budget. Spent more money on furniture and paint and roofs and appliances than they do their staff or their furniture. Small balls.

[00:43:13] MB: Fair enough.

[00:43:14] GC: Small balls, until, “Oh! I could put my name on it. It’s 202 2nd Avenue. I live there. Me and my dog.” I know some people, entrepreneurs, they got a bigger budget to feed their Labrador than they do their staff.

[00:43:33] MB: Yeah. The part about – I didn’t actually know that stat about how entrepreneurs have more equity in their houses then they do in their companies in average. That’s mind-blowing and such a great point about the difference between having a mindset of multiplying money versus having a scarcity-based mindset of trying to save money or reduce debt.

[00:43:56] GC: Yeah, exactly.

[00:43:57] MB: So for somebody who is listening to this conversation that wants to level up, they want to take risk, they want a 10X, they want to take massive action, what would be one action step, one challenge that you would have for them? One thing for them to do. You said earlier, “Ahas don’t turn into money.” For somebody who’s listening to this interview, what can they do to start taking action implement something we’ve talked about?

[00:44:20] GC: Oh man! There’d be a lot of things you could do right now. One, how much money do you have in your savings account? Get rid all of it. Don’t save any money. Don’t have any money in your checking account or your savings account. Retirement account, take it all out. Start spending your money. “Well, what else can I do, Grant?”

What people are doing, they went into a business to build a business and now what they’re doing is saving cash. It’s like you got to shift everything, man. By definition, an entrepreneur, someone that puts time and money at risk in order to have more time and money. Organizes a business, taking on more than ordinary amounts of risk in order to grow that business.

All of a sudden, you got a business and now what you’re doing is you’re saving your money. The first thing I would do is you have any money, I would look at why are you saving money? People save money because they’re playing it safe. Now somebody watching this is going to be like, “Well, don’t I need an emergency fund?” Maybe. Maybe you do. I don’t know. Maybe you do need an emergency fund. What you need to do is build your damn business so it will take care of you in emergencies.

[00:45:21] MB: Built cash flows so that you have recurring income stream.

[00:45:25] GC: Yeah, exactly. Cash flows. Spend money so you can have money in time. That’s one thing. If you don’t want to do that thing, or even if you do do that thing, you got to get around to people that are going to push you. If you don’t like this interview right now, if you’re listening to this and you’re like, “I cannot stand this guy.” Dude, then I’m your guy. You can’t like your coach. Okay? I’m not a therapist. I’m not Dr. Phil. He lost his show. You need somebody that will bump you. You need somebody that will push you up, okay? You don’t need a guy to walk along side of you. If you’re going to get greater, it will not be without pressure. If you’re going to achieve something beyond what you’re already achieved, you will not do it by yourself and you will always achieve more with somebody else than you would by yourself. So you need to get a game. You need to get some gangsters around you. You need to stay in very dangerous environments all the time. Join me at the 10X Growth Conference. Join my mentor program. Get involved with people that are pushing, pushing, note telling you to push, but are pushing themselves. What do we have for companies over here? 50 little ventures? What do we have?

We got 7 million companies. We got 15 or 17 little venture going on around here. They all take money. They all take money. They all take time. They all take risk. It’s like, “I’m doing that right now. I don’t spend all my time talking on stage.” We’re trying to learn how to grow.

One, get rid of your reserves. Two, get around somebody that will push you. Three, you need to make commitments to things that pull you forward. On my calendar, if you saw my calendar for the next three months, I have all these events pulling me. I want to sleep in, but I have an obligation. That obligation pulls me. I’m not having anything push me. I’m being pulled forward.

[00:47:19] MB: Great advice. Really, really insightful. I have a quick question. I’m just curious. Is there ever a point where – I mean, you’re obviously tremendously successful. Is there ever a point where you would get burnt out or say, “I don’t want to keep pushing myself so hard. I want to sit back and enjoy things,” or is it the pushing and the growing that you – Is it the process itself that really motivates you?

[00:47:41] GC: Every time I’ve wanted to go sit on the sidelines, something bad happen to me. Probably not. Every time I’m like, “I’m good now. I’m going to chill out. Every time I do that – People are built to create and to contribute, and I’m doing this today. I’m not being paid to do this today. My life does not change because of this podcast today. I’m not doing any business with you right now. I still don’t believe you even have one of my books back there.

[00:48:06] MB: You’re hurting my feelings, Grant.

[00:48:08] GC: You don’t have a statue of me back there. You got a statue of Buddha. He ain’t never done nothing for you. Every time I’ve gone into that, every I’ve done that, I end up like, “Okay. What’s wrong?

When I’m producing and creating, producing and creating and contributing and giving back, my day goes by faster. I just got a 10X alert, amber alert. That’s smart, man.

[00:48:31] MB: It’s time to 10X.

[00:48:32] GC: 10X, man. 10X. February 20th, 02-20-2020. I’m doing the most talked about entrepreneur conference on planet earth. 10,000 people will gather from around the world for the biggest 10X party on the planet. 3 days. We register the 4th day. So the first day is the registration, and then three days, there’s a party on the 20th, which is freaking unbelievable numbers, 02-20-2020. There’s a registration part. It’s going to be insane. Then on day 21, 22 and 23, three days talking about revenue, 10X-ing your revenue and your sales. Day 2, 10X marketing. Getting the whole world to know who you are. Day three, how to create the 10X ideal life so that you never burn out. Living a life of purpose and power and prosperity.

[00:49:27] MB: Grant, where can people find out about that conference, find out about you and everything that you’re doing online?

[00:49:33] GC: 10xgrowthcon.com.

[00:49:36] MB: All right. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Grant. Fantastic conversation. Some really insightful and potentially controversial points, but I really enjoyed everything that you said, and it was certainly motivational and inspirational for me.

[00:49:48] GC: Matt, you’re the man, dude, but you need somewhere edit in some kind of proof that you actually have the 10X Rule.

[00:49:54] MB: Okay. I’ll send your team a video of me holding the 10X Rule.

[00:49:58] GC: Okay. Awesome.

[00:49:59] MB: For listeners who are curious about whether or not I actually have a copy of Grant’s book, The 10X Rule, check out the show notes for a special video reveal. They’re available at successpodcast.com, and you can find them right on the homepage.

[00:50:13] 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.

I'm going to give you three reasons why you should sign up for our e-mail list today by going to successpodcast.com, signing up right on the homepage. There’s some incredible stuff that’s only available to those on the e-mail list, so be sure to sign up, including an exclusive curated weekly e-mail from us called Mindset Monday, which is short, simple, filled with articles, stories, things that we found interesting and fascinating in the world of evidence-based growth in the last week.

Next, you're going to get an exclusive chance to shape the show, including voting on guests, submitting your own personal questions that we’ll ask guests on air and much more. Lastly, you’re going to get a free guide we created based on listener demand, our most popular guide, which is called How To Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide by signing up and joining the e-mail list today. Again, you can do that at successpodcast.com, sign up right at the homepage, or if you're on the go, just text the word “smarter”, S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44222.

Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes because that helps boost the algorithm, that helps us move up the iTunes rankings and helps more people discover the Science of Success.

Don't forget, if you want to get all the incredible information we talked about in the show, links transcripts, everything we discussed and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can get those at successpodcast.com, just hit the show notes button right at the top.

Thanks again, and we'll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

Dr. Brené Brown: The Can’t Miss Interview On Shame, Self Worth Empathy & Living a Courageous Life

If you don't feel worthy of love and belonging, if you feel lesser than other people; if you can't forgive yourself for your mistakes or your terrible moments or the stupid things you've done in life; if you can't accept your humanness; if you can't show your face or eyes to others due to shame; if you can't own up to your mistakes for fear of judgement; if you compare yourself to others; if you constantly strive to prove yourself to others but feel as if you never measure up; then this interview with Brene Brown is for you.

We're living in a culture of `never enough'. I'm certainly feeling it. Are you? I never work hard enough, I don't help others enough, I'm not successful enough, I don't eat healthy enough... and on and on.

I have been struggling with the shame, vulnerability, perfectionism, anxiety and the feeling of 'not enough' my entire life.

Most of us live our lives hiding in our armor and trying to protect ourselves.  

Are you living with shame? Do you always feel an underlying itch of `never enough'? Do you find yourself disconnecting from people you love? If any of these questions ring true then I hope you'll check out this interview. Even if they don’t ring true to you, you will get a ton out of this amazing conversation.

These thoughts of `never enough' turn into feelings of shame and fear. How do we combat shame and fear? By being vulnerable and expressing gratitude, according to Brené Brown.

This shame, this culture of never enough, can only ever truly only dissipate by allowing yourself to be vulnerable.

Vulnerability leads to happiness, or as Brene Brown calls it, "wholeheartedness".

 This interview did an amazing job helping me understand the difference between sharing vulnerability in ways that lead to connection and over-sharing in ways intended to manipulate others - and why that kind of oversharing has always led to disconnection.

As Brown explains, we're drawn to other's vulnerability but repelled by our own.

This interview opened my eyes. It gave me a new perspective to my problems. Brene not only says why and how these issues arises but also share specific tools you can start using right now to overcome fear and shame, to live a courageous life, and to be happy.

After listening to this interview, something in me changed. I feel calmer now, I started to forgive/love myself more, tell myself its ok to be vulnerable/imperfect and that I am enough.

In this episode we welcome legendary researcher Dr Brené Brown to the Science of Success. We discuss vulnerability and learn that vulnerability is not weakness, it’s not oversharing, it’s not soft. We learn that even brave and courageous people are scared all the time. We discuss the incredible power of learning to get back up when you’re down, how you can stop caring about what other people think about you, and much more in this in depth interview.

Dr Brené Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston where she holds the Huffington Foundation – Brené Brown Endowed Chair at The Graduate College of Social Work. She is the author of five #1 New York Times bestsellers: The Gifts of Imperfection, Daring Greatly, Rising Strong, Braving the Wilderness, and her latest book, Dare to Lead, which is the culmination of a seven-year study on courage and leadership. Brené’s TED talk – The Power of Vulnerability – is one of the top five most viewed TED talks in the world with over 35 million views. She is also the first researcher to have a filmed talk on Netflix, “The Call to Courage” which debuted in April 2019.

We discuss with her:

• The teacher appears when the student is ready

• Life is about the willingness to show up, to put yourself out there, to be all in, when you can’t control the outcome 

• It’s not the critic who counts - it’s easy to spend your life in the cheap seats and hurl judgement at people who are trying and failing 

• Feedback is required for mastery of anything. 

• Why are people so afraid to show up?

• Our society doesn’t teach people how to get back up when the fall. 

• Everyone spends their whole life tiptoeing around to ensure they never fall, but the more important skill is to build the skill of GETTING BACK UP. 

• In our social and emotional lives we spend our entire lives tip-toeing around and being terrified of ever falling down. 

• The importance of experiencing adversity. There’s a line between adversity and trauma, we need to experience. 

• It’s not about being perfect at walking, it’s about LEARNING THE SKILL SET OF GETTING BACK UP AGAIN AND AGAIN

• Courage is learnable, teachable, and measurable - and there are 4 key skill sets 

  • Rumbling with vulnerability

  • Knowing your values and how to live into them

  • Braving Trust

  • Learning to get back up

• Courage is essentially the same thing as vulnerability. The Willingness to show up, put yourself out there, and be seen when you can’t control the outcome. 

• Vulnerability is not weakness, it’s not oversharing, it’s not soft. 

• Vulnerability, at its core, is about Uncertainty, Risk, and Emotional Exposure

• “There is no courage without vulnerability” 

• Courage spans the spectrum from everyday moments in your life, to the most epicly heroic experiences of your life. 

• Vulnerability is the opposite of weakness, it's the MOST accurate scientific measure of courage. 

• Vulnerability is not as hard, scary, or dangerous as getting to the end of your life and asking “what if I would have shown up?"

• You want to look back and know without question that you contributed and put yourself out there. 

• One of the most defining lessons of Brene’s seven year study on leadership is the importance of courageous leadership. 

• Even brave and courageous people are scared all the time. 

• It’s not fear that gets in the way of us being brave or vulnerable, it’s armor. 

• “You can’t do any of this without self awareness?"

• What is your go to armor? How do you self protect when you feel emotionally at risk or exposed?

  • Perfectionism

  • Cynicism

  • The Knower, more important to be right than get it right

  • People pleasing

  • Blustery posturing tough guy 

• The armor weighs 100lbs, but the resentment weighs 1000lbs

• What myths about vulnerability do you still believe? 

• When you’re in your twenties and early thirties, you still believe that your armor serves you 

• None of the drinking, the partying, the achieving, will take away the PAIN that the armor causes you.

• How do you start to take off the armor? Loving kindness and self compassion. 

• Self exploration is a key starting point to taking your armor off. 

• To get rid of your armor - ask yourself:

  • How did your armor serve you?

  • How did it help you get what you wanted or needed or felt you deserved?

  • What’s the COST of the armor? 

  • What am I afraid of if I stop doing it?

• When you work so hard to keep the peace on the outside, you wage a war internally. It’s not your job to make sure you don’t disappoint anyone.

• “I do not calculate my value based on what other people think of me"

• People pleasing is the bright side of manipulation. 

• “Am I doing this because I really want it, or because it’s for someone else?"

• How do you stop caring what other people think about you?

• “I’m like a turtle without all the shells, but I’m in a briar patch” 

• No one wants to burn out but they are living like they’re on fire.

• “The mirror perspective"

  • Who are you around? Who are you hanging out with? Do they reflect your values and who you want to be?

• You can replace the armor with something that helps you - CURIOSITY

• Courageous people are usually DEEPLY CURIOUS 

• Get curious about how you’re showing up, is it serving you? Are you self protecting in a way that’s keeping you small? 

• Armor prevents you from growing. 

• If you’re in your 20’s and you haven’t figured everything out yet in your life, that’s OK. 

• "Don’t ask what the world needs, ask what makes you come alive. What the world needs is more people who’ve come alive."

• How do you get back up when you’ve fallen down? 

• Your brain is wired for survival. When something hard happens the brain is wired for survival - it focuses on protection - your brain goes into survival mode. 

• Your brain thinks in stories - it builds and creates stories to explain the world around you - even if those stories are wrong.

• A lot of the time we create stories that don’t reflect reality in any way. 

• Your brain rewards you for creating stories, the more salacious and dramatic the better, even if the stories are completely wrong. 

• One sentence that can completely change your life.

• Why you should start using “The story I'm telling myself…” or “The story I’m making up right now is…"

• The stories we tell ourselves are what keep us down and completely predict your level of resilience. 

• Are you aware of the stories you tell yourself? Are you brave enough to check them out? IS there a recurrent theme to those narratives?

• Homework: Take the daring leader survey. 

• Homework: Educate yourself. Watch her TED talk, her Netflix special, read her books. Creating a shared vocabulary is the root of change.

Click here to download this beautiful hand illustrated visual note.

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

Love Brené Brown?! Here’s Our Show Notes, Links, & TONs of Extra Awesome Content By & About Brené!

General

• Brené’s Website

• Brené’s Daring Leader Survey

• Brené’s LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter

Media

• [Article] Mental Floss - Roosevelt's "The Man in the Arena" By Erin McCarthy

• [Article] Wiki Article - Brene Brown

• [Article] The Cut - “How I Get It Done: Brené Brown, Author and Research Professor at the University of Houston” By Gabriella Paiella

• [Article] Calvin Ayre - “Op-ed: what poker can learn from Brené Brown’s ‘Braving the Wilderness’” by Lee Davy

• [Article] Forbes - “Why You Need to Watch The New Brene Brown Netflix Special Immediately” by Danielle Brooker

• [Article] Vanity Fair - “Brené Brown Wants to Change Your Life” by Sonia Saraiya

• [Article] Washington Examiner - “In ‘The Call to Courage,’ Brené Brown has the best rule for dealing with people on social media” by Madeline Fry

• [Article] LA Magazine - “Vulnerability Guru Brené Brown Is About to Become the Marie Kondo of Emotions” By Merle Ginsberg

• [Article] CEO Magazine - “Exclusive interview with Brené Brown: “Failure is part of the ride.”” by Ruth Devine

• [Article] USA Today - “5 takeaways on vulnerability from Brené Brown's 'The Call To Courage'” by Erin Jensen

• [Article] Refinery29 - “Brené Brown On Scammers, Astrology & Influencer Culture” by Cory Stieg

• [Article] Oprah Magazine - “Brené Brown's New Netflix Special Will Teach You How to Live Your Best Life” By Michelle Darrisaw

• [Podcast] On Air with Ryan Seacrest - Brené Brown Breaks Down Why Being Vulnerable Is Crucial In Life

• [Podcast] 10% Happier with Dan Harris: #185: Brené Brown, Vulnerability: The Key to Courage

• [Podcast] Lewis Howes - Ep. 536: Brené Brown - Create True Belonging and Heal The World

• [Podcast] Finding Mastery: Ep 146 - Dr. Brene Brown, Research Professor and Author

Videos

• Netflix Original - Brené Brown: The Call to Courage

• TED - The power of vulnerability | Brené Brown

• TED - Listening to shame | Brené Brown

• TEDxTalks - The price of invulnerability: Brené Brown at TEDxKC

• Marie Forleo - Brené Brown Shows You How To "Brave the Wilderness”

• Evan Carmichael - “You HAVE to Make a CHOICE: Am I Going to SHOW UP?” - Brené Brown (@BreneBrown) Top 10 Rules

• The RSA - Brené Brown on Empathy

• The RSA - Brené Brown on Blame

• UHGCSW - Living Brave with Brene Brown and Oprah Winfrey

• 99U - Brené Brown: Why Your Critics Aren't The Ones Who Count

• OWN - Dr. Brené Brown: The Two Most Dangerous Words in Your Vocabulary | SuperSoul Sunday | OWN

• Good Life Project - Brene Brown on The Power of Being Vulnerable

Books

• [Amazon Author Page] Brené Brown

• [Book] Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts by Brené Brown

• [Book] Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone  by Brené Brown

• [Book] Rising Strong: How the Ability to Reset Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead  by Brené Brown

• [Book] Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead  by Brené Brown

• [Book] The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are  by Brené Brown

• [Book] I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn't): Making the Journey from "What Will People Think?" to "I Am Enough"  By Brené Brown

• [Audiobook] The Power of Vulnerability: Teachings of Authenticity, Connection, and Courage  by Brené Brown PhD

• [Audiobook] The Gifts of Imperfect Parenting: Raising Children with Courage, Compassion, and Connection  by Brené Brown PhD

• [Audiobook] Men, Women and Worthiness: The Experience of Shame and the Power of Being Enough by Brené Brown PhD

Full Episode Transcript

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

[00:00:11] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet with more than 3 million downloads, listeners in over a hundred countries.

In this episode, we welcome legendary researcher, Dr. Brene Brown, to the Science of Success. We discuss vulnerability and learn that vulnerability is not weakness. It’s not oversharing and it’s not soft. We learned that even brave and courageous people are scared all of the time. We discuss the incredible power of learning to get back up when you’ve been knocked down. How you can stop caring about what other people think about you, and much, much more in this in-depth interview.

I’m going to tell you why you’ve been missing out on some incredibly cool stuff if you haven’t signed up for our email list yet. All you have to do to sign up is to go to successpodcast.com and sign up right on the home page.

On top of tons subscriber-only content, exclusive access and live Q&As with previous guests, monthly giveaways and much more, I also created an epic free video course just for you. It's called How to Create Time for What Matters Most Even When You're Really Busy. E-mail subscribers have been raving about this guide.

You can get all of that and much more by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the home page, or by texting the word “smarter" to the number 44222 on your phone. If you like what I do on Science of Success, my e-mail list is the number one way to engage with me and go deeper on what I discuss on the show, including free guides, actionable takeaways, exclusive content and much, much more.

Sign up for my e-mail list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the home page, or if you're on the go, if you're on your phone right now, it's even easier. Just text the word “smarter”, that's S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222. I can't wait to show you all the exciting things you'll get when you sign up and join thee-mail list.

In our previous episode, we discussed how to hack your brain to finally create the results you want in life. We took a hard look at what really drives results and the reality that knowledge and skill aren’t what make you successful. The subconscious drives your behavior. That’s it. You don’t need any more tools to achieve your goals. You just need to change your beliefs and your subconscious set points for success, happiness and achievement. Action is the ultimate arbiter of your success. We asked; are you taking enough of it, and how can you take more? We discussed all of these and much more with our previous guest, John Assaraf. If you need a breakthrough to finally get where you want to be, listen to our previous episode.

Now, for our interview with Brené.

Please note, this episode contains profanity.

[00:03:24] MB: Today, we have another legendary guest on the show, Dr. Brené Brown. Brené is a research professor at the University of Houston where she holds the Huffington Foundation Brené Endowed Chair at the Graduate School of Social Work. She’s the author of five number one New York Times bestsellers; The Gift of Imperfection, Daring Greatly, Rising Strong, Braving the Wilderness, and her latest book, Dare to Lead, which is the culmination of a 7-year study on courage and leadership.

Brené’s TED Talk, The Power of Vulnerability is one of the top-five most viewed TED Talks in the world with 35 million views, and she’s also the first researcher to have a filmed Netflix talk, called The Call to Courage, which debuted in April 2019.

Brené, welcome to the Science of Success.

[00:04:06] BB: Thank you. I’m excited to talk to you.

[00:04:08] MB: Well, we’re super excited to have you on the show today. We’re huge, huge fans of you and your work and we can’t wait to really dig into it.

To start out, I just wanted to say I love that you reprised and brought back the Teddy Roosevelt arena quote in the introduction to Dare to Lead, because it’s such a great quote. It’s so simply encapsulates your message and this notion that this powerful idea that it’s at the root of vulnerability. It’s not about whether you’re winning or losing, but it’s whether you’re showing up and whether you’re in the game.

[00:04:41] BB: Yeah. I wish I could take back every single instance where I said something that was like hyperbole, so that when I said this people knew it was really serious. But that quote, it changed my life. There was my life before that quote and my life after that quote literally in a five-minute span, because I was – I guess the teacher appears when you’re ready, right? But I think I was so desperate. It was right after the TED Talk had gone kind of viral and I was so desperate for some kind of filing system to understand the vulnerability, the fear. What do I do with the support? Which was great and overwhelming, but what do I do with that 5% or 3% of criticism that’s so painful? I needed it so bad. So when I came across it that day, I just was like, “Oh! This is a complete framework for how I want to life.”

[00:05:38] MB: It’s such a great way to encapsulate a lot of your work, because at the core, it shows what so many people struggle with, and I want to dig into this, because you know so much about it much more than we do. But about why people are afraid to show up, to take action, to get out there in the world and do things, because it’s so easy to be criticized, to be shamed, to have people say negative things about you and it stops a lot of people from ever really showing and starting to really be themselves and to live their lives.

[00:06:10] BB: Yeah, I mean just the first two stanzas. It’s the critique who counts. It’s not the man who points out how the strong person stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the person who’s actually in the arena, whose face is marked by dust and sweat and blood, who strives violently, who airs, who comes up short again and again and again. Just those stanzas, to me, are life. It’s about the willingness to show up and put yourself out there and be all-in when you can’t control the outcome. That is everything, from work, to love, to sports, to parenting. I mean, to innovation and creativity. It’s the whole – It’s not the critique who counts. It’s so easy to spend our lives in the cheap seats and like hurl criticism and shame and judgment at people who are trying and falling and failing.

It’s so funny that one thing that has been so clear to me in the last 10 years, the kind of feedback you get from people who are in the arena in their lives is very different than the kind of feedback you get from people who have made a fulltime career out of cheap seating.

[00:07:25] MB: What is the difference in that feedback?

[00:07:27] BB: Not all of us who are trying to live a brave life are skilled feedback givers. So I don’t want to give that impression. But, when I see someone who’s kind of skinned up, bruised knee, stretch marks on the heart telling me, “Hey, I think you really screwed this up. Did you think about this?” I listen, because I see it as a person who’s also trying, but the cheap seat stuff is often delivered with paying no attention to how hard it is to put yourself out there today. I can’t do the sideline coaching. I’m not open to it. I really am not.

I love feedback, because one of the big parts of my work is I believe feedback is required for mastery of anything. I’ve developed – And the organization that I run here in Houston, a really vulnerable, honest, courageous feedback culture. We give feedback all the time right away on the spot in a kind, respectful way, but we are very much a feedback culture. So I am a big believer in feedback, but I do believe you have to be very thoughtful about who you accept it from.

[00:08:37] MB: I totally agree. Coming back to the people, the perspective of the people who are in the arena versus the people who are in, as you put it, the cheap seats. It’s funny because I have so many young people who are listeners of this show and I have nieces and nephews who are in high school and college and they are so scared sometimes to just take the first step. They’re so scared, as you put it, to show up. Why are people so afraid?

[00:09:02] BB: I think there are a lot of reasons, and I think some of them are demographic. I think some of them are informed by race and class and gender. I mean, I think it’s complex. But here’s what I would say. When you think about young people, and this is my 22 years of teaching graduate students. We don’t teach people how to get back up after they fall. Because we don’t teach people how to rise, they never take the leap.

Can you imagine if you didn’t know – If you physically fell and you didn’t know how to get back up? You’d spend your whole life tiptoeing around. You’d spend your whole life like bracing your palms on the hood of a car when you step off the curve, then you would follow the car with your hand until you open the door. Then you’d hold on to the oh shit handle as you try to get into the seat. You would never let go of everything and just walk, because you’re deaf ear would, “If I fall, I don’t know how to get back up.”

The same thing is true in our socio-emotional world. If we don’t know how to get back up after failure, disappointment, or setback, we will spend an enormous amount of energy making sure we never have to get back up.

So, for me, I have a lot of bounce. I have a lot of bounce. So, I’m willing to take chances, because I’m very secure in my ability to get back up. I think even if you think about going back really to young, young folks. Even if you think about letting kids experience adversity.

So, one of the conversations my husband and I had very early on when we were brand new parents is we both come from like divorce parents. A lot of really hard, hard shit. Stuff that we would never want to subject our kids to. At the same time, we both really respect our own and each other’s resilience. Did I just say he’s a pediatrician? He’s a pediatrician. So we have a lot of parenting conversations.

So, the big finding we came to was we need to let – There’s a line between adversity and trauma and we need to let our kids experience adversity, not so much trauma. That kind of sets us back. So, I think having experiences with adversity and knowing how to get back up makes people braver, because they’re willing to take a chance.

[00:11:26] MB: Such a powerful analogy and really shines light on this notion. I love the example of walking around with a fear of never being able to get back up. Because it’s so clearly highlights the idea that the truly important skillset is not whether you’re prefect at walking, but it’s just learning how to get up over and over again.

[00:11:47] BB: I mean, that’s it. I don’t even know who said the quote, but someone has a great quote that says, “The most important number is not the number of times that you fall, but the number of times you get back up.” That is so – I know it’s like cheesy, like queue the rocky music or whatever. But it’s just true.

So, what we know – I mean, for me, to be honest, Matt, if I think about all of my work over the last 20 something years, I don’t think that I’m more proud of anything that the research that we did on courage and the fact that courage is teachable, observable and measurable. It’s four skillsets.

But one of the key four skillsets is learning how to get back up. The first big skillset is the ability to vulnerability. We call it rumbling with vulnerability. The second one is really knowing what your values are and how to live into them, because people who are not super clear and just very gray clear about their values and what those behaviors look like are not as brave. They don’t risk the fall.

The next one is braving trust, learning how to trust yourself and other people appropriately. Then the last one is learning to get back up. So we can teach these things. But I got to tell you. As I step back and think about the way that we parent today. Not everybody, but a growing part of parenting, I think, unfortunately. The way schools are set up. We’re not teaching courage skills.

[00:13:22] MB: I couldn’t agree more, and in many ways that the root of that idea is what underpins our entire project with the Science of Success as well. I want to dig in to all of these different ideas. So let’s start at a high-level with courage. What is courage? When you say that, when you talk about it, how do you think about how we define courage?

[00:13:44] BB: It’s interesting, because I don’t have a definition for courage that’s any different than data-driven definition for vulnerability. We define vulnerability as the willingness to show up and be seen when you can’t control the outcome. The definition of vulnerability as a construct itself is it’s the emotion we experience during times of uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure.

I spent like probably, I don’t know, maybe 5 years, because I spent 90% of my time in organizations, big, fortune 10, big Silicon Valley companies, teaching courageous leadership skills. So, I spent so many years trying to convince people of a relationship between courage and vulnerability. Then it got very clear to me one day when I was at Fort Bragg working with Special Forces, and I asked a really simple question, which was – Because everyone thinks vulnerability is weakness. Everyone thinks that it’s oversharing. Everything is soft.

So I asked this question, “If vulnerability is uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure, give me a single example of courage in your life on the field, off the field, other troops, other soldiers. Give me a single example of courage that you’ve witnessed or experienced yourself that didn’t involve vulnerability, that didn’t involve uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure.”

It was kind of just silence and you could see these troops, they were just shifting in their seats and uncomfortable and a couple of them started putting their heads in their hands. Then finally one guy stood up and said, “Ma’am, there is no courage without vulnerability.” Three tours, there is no courage without vulnerability.

So, I think any conversation that we start around what is courage is it’s the willingness to put yourself out there when you can’t control how it’s going to go. If you’re putting yourself out there and you can kind of control or predict the outcome, you’re not being that brave. You’re probably doing good stuff, maybe, but you’re not being courageous.

[00:15:46] MB: I just got goose bumps when you said that. Such a powerful definition, and it’s something that’s so important. It’s such a needed message in today’s world, today’s society. I feel like so many people stick to what’s comfortable and what’s safe and they’re so afraid to step into uncertainty and to step into risk.

[00:16:11] BB: Yeah, I mean, it’s the Special Forces soldier. But it’s also the guy sitting across from the person he loves and thinking, “Shit, man! I want to say I love you. Should I wait to say it? Maybe I should wait for her to say it first. Okay, you know what? I’m going to be brave. I love you.” That’s also courage and vulnerability.

[00:16:33] MB: Yeah, that’s a great point. It spans the spectrum, right? It’s these every day moments of life and it goes all the way back out to these heroic achievements in the military and beyond.

[00:16:46] BB: Yeah. I mean, it’s the CEO of the startup looking for funding and being turned down 50 times. It’s the 51st time. That’s brave. That’s courageous. That’s vulnerable. So, this mythology that vulnerability is weakness, we just cross the 400,000 pieces of data mark, which was a big mark for us. There is zero evidence, zero, that vulnerability is weakness. It is by far our most accurate measure of courage.

In fact, we have a daring leader assessment. We put together an assessment for courageous leadership, and we worked with MBA and EMBA students at Wharton, at UPenn, Kelog, at Northwestern, and the Jones School at Rice. We spent three years putting together this instrument. Make sure it’s valid, reliable. Basically, it’s as simple as this. I can tell you how brave you are by measuring your capacity for vulnerability.

[00:17:52] MB: It makes perfect sense, because if you’re afraid to be vulnerable. By definition, you’re coming at that from a place of fear and scarcity.

[00:18:01] BB: Yeah. I mean, I love the fact that you just said every day scenarios, everyday situations. Yeah, I didn’t know how this podcast was going to go. I don’t know that I’m going to get on it and give it a shot. If I screwed up, it’s going to be out to tons of people, but it’s saying something to your roommate like, “Hey! Dude, you can’t keep leaving your shit everywhere. It’s not working.” It’s sitting down with your boss and saying, “Hey, I understand I messed that up, but the way you’re giving me feedback, I can’t hear what you’re saying. So I want to learn from you, but when you’re yelling and screaming and pounding your first, that doesn’t work.”

[00:18:38] MB: One of my favorite quotes of yours, and I’m paraphrasing this a little bit, but it’s this idea that vulnerability is not as hard or scary or dangerous as getting to the end of your life and asking yourself what if I had shown up?

[00:18:54] BB: For me and for the people I’ve interviewed that are late in life, I cannot imagine a more terrifying thing. I do not want to look back. There are two things that are really important to me when I look back on my life and my career. The first one is I do not want to look back and wonder what if. What if I would have said yes? What if I would have tried that? What if I would have said I love you first?

The other thing is I want to be able to look back and know without question that I contributed more than I criticized, because criticism is so easy. It’s not vulnerable. It’s not brave. Contribution, super brave and hard. Because everyone will have comments and thoughts about what it is. There’s very minimal risk of failure and criticizing.

That’s why the Teddy Roosevelt, it’s not the critique who counts. For me, it’s really not the critique who counts. So if you leave some kind of really shitty tweet and your avatar is an egg or like the little icon or some movie star and your handle isn’t your real name, useless to me. Block or mute forever, whichever is easiest for me.

But if you leave a really hard thing for me to hear, but it’s respectful and your name is there and your picture is there, there’s a 95% chance, if I see it, I’m going to come back and say, “Tell me more. I’m curious. Why do you think that? I’m interested. Can we dig in?” I might DM you and say, “This is a really interesting point.”

I mean, someone made a point about something that I said in Braving the Wilderness. I was talking about Black Lives Matter and why it’s important and I was talking about the dehumanization of people. A woman said, “There's something about the way you framed this sentence that felt privileged and tone deaf to me.” At first I kind of recoiled and I’m like, “Oh my God! I’m out here supporting this stuff that like I’m taking a lot of heat for, and then yet I'm still tone deaf.” But I was like, “Tell me more.”

We had this long conversation on our DM's on Twitter and I called my agent and said, “Stop the process. Is that a real thing? If need to change something. I wrote something that was in a privileged blind spot for me. I need to change it. I can make it better.” They stopped him and changed it. Random House did. So, feedback, even hard feedback, constructive feedback, difficult feedback, is not the same as being a critic your whole life and never risking vulnerability. It’s just not brave.

[00:21:32] MB: So, how do we start to step into vulnerability, or as you called it, rumble, with vulnerability?

[00:21:38] BB: The answer is pretty counterintuitive, because here's – When I spent the last seven years studying leadership, and I mean talking to everyone, leaders from everyone from Pixar, to Special Forces, from oil and gas companies in Singapore to people who work for the White House, like across-the-board. Talking to Fortune 10 CEOs, really asking what is the future of leadership.

So, it was the first time I had ever done a study where the answer saturated cross. There was not a single participant who said something different than, “Oh my God! The future of leadership is courageous leadership. We've got to have braver people and braver cultures.” We are facing too many geopolitical, environmental, just technology, everything is shifting so fast that if we don't have courageous people leading, companies won't make it. Organizations won't make it. Governments won't make it.

So was interesting is my hypothesis was wrong. So I assumed that the greatest barrier to what I call daring leadership or courageous leadership was fear. So as we started moving into this what we call selective coding, I went back to some of these leaders and said, “Wow! Okay, we're hearing it's brave leadership. We hear the only people who will be standing in the next five years and really meaningful leadership capacities are courageous people, building courageous cultures. How do you stay out of fear?”

These people looked at me like I was crazy. They were like, “What?” I said, “You’re a daring leader, how do you stay brave all the time?” They’re like, “I'm afraid all the time. I don't know what you're talking about.” I was like, “What?” But you’re a brave leader.” They’re like, “Well, you can put me on whatever list you want to, but I’m scared all the time.”

So, as we started digging in and digging deeper into the data and interviewing more people about that, what I learned was it's not fear that gets in the way of us being brave. It's armor. Armor gets in the way of us being brave. Armor gets in the way of us being vulnerable.

So, the difference is, let’s say, you and I are both leaders, and we're both on a scale from 1 to 10 thought – We’re both scared five. So, Matt’s a five scared leader, and I’m a five scared leader. But as a daring leader, Matt, you're aware of your armor and you choose to be vulnerable and show up and take it off even though it's really seductive to put it on. I, on the other hand, am not aware about how I use armor to show up. So, I stay in my armor.

So, the first thing we have to do is understand – I mean, you can’t do any of these without self-awareness. So the first thing is understand what is your go-to-armor. How do you self-protect when you're in uncertainty risk and feel emotionally exposed?

For me, it's perfectionism. I get emotionally intense and can talk over people. This is not mine particularly, but some people, they use cynicism as armor. Some people – And this is not mine either, but – I mean, trust me. I have a shit ton of it, but these just happens to not be mine. A lot of people have to be the knower. So when they’re vulnerable and feel exposed, they become the knower, and it's more important for them to be right than get it right.

So, we have to figure – I’m a pleaser. That's definitely mine, and I know when I'm wearing my pleasing, good girl, make everyone around me happy armor, because the armor weighs 100 pounds, but the resentment weighs 1,000 pounds. I become a really resentful, angry person.

So, where we start with learning how to rumble with vulnerability is examining what myths were we raised believing. Were we raised believing it's weakness? Were we raised believing that it's over-sharing? How were we raised?

Then the second question is what armor do I use to self-protect. Am I the blustery, posturing tough guy? Am I the knower? Am I the cynic? It's all bullshit. None of it matters. What is our armor? Does that make sense?

[00:25:34] MB: That totally makes sense. I love the little quip about how the armor weighs 100 pounds, but the resentment weighs 1000 pounds.

[00:25:41] BB: I mean, this is the thing. Even if the people listening are between 25 and 35, there is a difference between a 25-year-old and a 35-year-old, and the difference is when you're 25 – I have a 20-year-old daughter and I’m like, “Man! If you can get this now, I don't even know what you'll be able to accomplish.”

The difference is when we’re in our 20s and even our early 30s, we are still convinced that the armor serves us. We’re still fresh off adolescence. I mean, they moved adolescence to like 24 now or something, around brain development. We still believe the armor serves us. But by the time you get to 35, 38, 40, for sure. Then you're in kind of midlife and then that's when the universe is like – The armor, it's killing you, and the drink-in and the work-in and the achieving and acquiring. None of it will ever take away the pain that that armor causes you.

So, I think, really, if you look at kind of the people that we’re talking to probably today, this is such an opportunity in your life to figure out the armor and to really start using some loving kindness and some self-compassion to talk to yourself about how it's not serving you anymore.

[00:27:04] MB: Hey, I’m here real quick with confidence expert, Dr. Aziz Gozipura, to share a lightning round insight with you.

Dr. Aziz, how do you become more confident and what do people get wrong about confidence?

[00:27:18] AG: I love this question. So, my life mission is to inform people this one thing, that you can learn confidence. Because the biggest thing that people don't realize is that confidence is a skill. They think confidence is something that you're just born with, that the people that look confident just somehow have some ability that you don't have, and that’s what I thought for many years until I discovered that actually this is something we can learn.

So, what most people get wrong about this other than thinking that they can't, so they don’t even try, is think it’s going to be this huge undertaking and it’s scary and they try to just push through and do this thing that I hate to phrase, but it's so common, which is fake it till you make it. What they don't realize is that there is a much easier way, a simpler way and ultimately a faster way and a gentler way. That is to treat it like any other skill, like the guitar. You want to learn how to play the guitar. You want to break it down into its individual elements, like notes, chords, progression, scales. If you learn each individual thing, all of a sudden, you could play a beautiful song.

Confidence is absolutely no different than that, and you can break confidence down into its little individual elements, like body language, starting a conversation. How to be assertive? All these things can be broken down in sub skills, and if you just learn those sub skills one after another, take action on what you learn and practice it just like an instrument, all of a sudden, in a pattern, in a period of months – You could be stuck for decades, but in a period of months, you can have more confidence than you've ever had in your entire life. That's what I’m dedicated to doing. That's what I teach. That's what I create all my programs around, and that's really the message that I want to get out there to everyone listening and everyone in the world.

[00:28:54] MB: Do you want to be more confident and stop suffering from social anxiety and self-doubt? Check out successpodcast.com/confidence to hear more about Dr. Aziz and his work and become more confident.

[00:29:11] MB: You touched on this a little bit, but what does it look like when you start to take the armor off? And I think this might be a good place specifically to look at this, because people pleasing and that kind of stuff is also something that I really struggle and deal with as well. So, maybe since that’s something we both struggle with, how would you think about starting to take that armor off?

[00:29:31] BB: I think it's some self-exploration, for sure, and I think it's about always understanding, especially when we were young. I would say young as like five or six to probably early 20s. How did it serve us? We were both people pleaser. So, are we both use people pleasing as armor? I wouldn’t tie it to my identity or your identity, but I'd say it's armor for both of us, as you tell me.

How did it serve us? What did we gain by it? How did it help us get what we want or need or think we deserved? What has been the cost of it? What is the cost for that armor? What is the cost of not saying what's really on our mind? What’s the cost of taking care of everyone around us at our own expense?

I saw this quote in the feed. We do a bunch of training for this group of African-American therapist called Black Therapist Rock, and they had this quote in their feed the other day which is like – I could barely read it. I showed it to sisters and we are all like, “Ugh!” because I said, “When you work so hard to make everyone comfortable and keep the peace on the outside, you wage a war internally within yourself.”

I just thought, “God! That's so true.” Like, it’s not my job to make sure everyone is getting along here. It’s not my job to make sure no one is disappointed with me. On my 50th birthday, Oprah Winfrey gave me this incredible advice. She said, “If you think you're going to do what you love and do work that makes a difference and never piss off or disappoint someone, you don't understand.”

So, I think for me taking the armor off for me was about really getting to the place where I do not calculate my value based on what other people think of me. My people pleasing is kind of the bright side of manipulation, and I would much rather be not liked and respected and trusted to be truthful than I would to be liked. That just doesn’t serve me anymore.

So, every time I make a decision, still, I have to think, “Am I doing this because it’s what I really –” First of all, I just spent five years figuring what it was that I really wanted. Even now, like I wasn’t even sure, because I was so used to saying yes to make sure everyone was happy and thought I patted me on the head. So, I think the thing was what it is – I think where you start is how has that been serving me? What's the cost, and what am I afraid of? What’s my fear if I stop doing this?

[00:32:04] MB: Yeah. I think those are some great really, really powerful questions and a really excellent framework to start to take that armor off.

I'm curious, how did you come to a place – Because I think many people would like to feel or say or think that they don't calculate their value based on what others think of them. But the reality is that often times we do. How did you personally, or how do we, as me, the audience, etc., move past that or move beyond better or breakthrough that?

[00:32:39] BB: I mean, I had a therapist and a big ass breakdown. That would be the moving through your plan. It’s not good. I mean, if you think you can do this work on your own, you don't understand the nature of the work. We’re not neurobiologically hardwired to figure this stuff out by ourselves.

So, whether it's a therapist, a group, a men's group, friends that you can talk to. You have to think through this stuff aloud around people you trust where there's a lot of psychological safety, and you have to think through. You have to think through – I mean, it's really hard, because – I wrote an article on my website about I just celebrated 23 years of sobriety in May. I wrote about an exchange that I had with my therapist. I think I saw her for a couple of years, maybe two years, three years, and I remember one day going into her and saying, “Man, I need something for the anxiety. I need something. The people pleasing is out of control. The anxiety if out of control.” I’d been sober at that point I think for 10 years. I just given up flour and sugar.

So I was like, “I got a have something. I got no fall back here, no beer, no muffin. I'm trying not to work 60 hours a week. I got nothing.” She's like, “What do you want me to give you?” I said, “Something for anxiety or something,” and she said, “Say more.” I said, “I’m like a turtle, a turtle without a shell. I’ve taken off all the shells. I’m vulnerable turtle, but I'm in a briar-patch. Everything hurt. Everywhere I move pokes me and hurts me.”

She's like, “Maybe we should just talk about getting out the briar-patch instead of like trying to find a new shell.” I was like, “Get out the fucking briar-patch. That’s your advice to me? That's all you got?” Then I remember like that was such an important metaphor for me to share, because I think no one wants to burn out, but everyone's living like their own fire. No one wants to hurt or have to carry around the armor or the shell, but everyone's living in a briar-patch. I think this process involves really reflecting on who am I around. I always call that like the mirror perspective. Look at who you're hanging out with. Do those people reflect your values? Who you want to be? How you want to show up in the world? Are those people brave with their lives? You got to assess like who you're hanging out with. You got to assess what it is you want from life. Are you clear about what you want? If you're not clear about what you want – First of all, if you’re clear about what you want, you’re 25. That's weird to me.

Then I think the big thing that tell even leaders, again across, the globe is you can replace the armor with something that helps you, and that's curiosity. The one thing that really deeply brave people share in common is insatiable curiosity. They're curious about themselves. They’re curious about the world they live in. They’re curious about the people around. They’re curious about how to be better.

So, curiosity. So, I think for the people listening, it’s get curious about how am I showing up. Is it serving me? Am I myself protecting in a way that's keeping me small? I mean, that's the thing about armor, is it prevents you from growing into your gifts.

[00:36:02] MB: Some really great points, and one thing that you kind of casually tossed out that I thought was really important was, even this notion that you're in your 20s, if you're younger and you're not clear about what you want to do with your life, how you wanted to find and live your life. That's okay.

[00:36:19] BB: Yes.

[00:36:20] MB: I feel like there’s so much pressure in our society today to have everything sorted out. But the reality is that's not really the case, and it's all right to be figuring things out.

[00:36:30] BB: Yes! I finished bachelor’s degree when I was 29. 29. I spent the time until I was 29 doing a myriad of things, from bartending and waiting tables for six years. Taking customer service calls in Spanish. Hitchhiking through Europe, and I learned more about empathy and vulnerability and shame and the things if I study in those periods of time as I did in doctoral classes. Studying multivariate analysis of emotional variables. Nothing is wasted.

I told my daughter when she went to school and said, “If you already know what you want to be, I'm not paying for college, because we’ll find some kind of vocational training or something.” She's like, “Oh my God, mom! You're killing me. It's so cringe worthy to not know what you want to be when it's too awkward.” During freshman orientation, knows what they want to be. I’m like, “What is everyone want to be?” “Well, everyone wants like a doctor, or a lawyer, an engineer.” I’m like, “Yeah, those are some of the most miserable 30-year-olds I’ve ever interviewed in my life. I'm giving you the opportunity to study Latina feminism in the middle – Whatever, Middle Ages.” I don’t know if there was such a thing, but probably. “I'm giving you a chance to take STEM classes and liberal arts classes and take classes that may make no sense,” because it's this Howard Thurman quote that I live by, and Howard Thurman was like a Civil Rights activist, a theologian, and he said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, because what the world needs is more people who’ve come alive.” Nothing is wasted, and it's the gifts that you can give us are an order of magnitude bigger if you were in your power doing what you love.

[00:38:18] MB: A great quote and a really important message and something that the listeners sometimes I think need to hear, because it's so easy to get caught up and the belief that everything has to be perfect and defined and we have to be on this trajectory, especially in today's world at such a young age.

But I want to change or really come back to something that we talked about at the very beginning, because I want to get one or two concrete strategies for developing this skillset as well, which is the ability to get back up. We talked about how important that is. How that's 100 times more important than learning how to walk.

What are some of the tools or strategies that you've uncovered for helping get back up when you fall down?

[00:39:01] BB: Yeah, there’s a lot of raw material to getting back up, but there's one piece of gold. One piece that you could listen to right now, and it could change your life over five minutes. That is understanding the neurobiology of falling. That when something hard happens, when we experience setback, disappointment, heartache, our brain is wired for one thing above all else, and that’s survival.

When something hard happens, the brain goes really limbic and it's like, “Oh my God! How do I protect you? How do I protect you?” and it's not just like – It's not like a bear is attacking you. I mean, like, it's like you and I work together and I come out of a meeting and you’re my boss. I’m like, “Hey, good meeting, Matt,” and you look at me like, “That sucked!” and you just keep walking in your office. That’s going to trigger something in our mind to go into survival mode, like, “Oh my God! My boss just said that sucked and shrugged his shoulders and walked into his office.”

So what happens is because the brain is wired that, we know now that the brain completely read story. I mean, like a computer reading an old punch card. The brain read story. It understands the narrative pattern of beginning, middle and end, and it craves a story to understand when something hard is happening.

What is happening? I don't know how to protect you. So if we give the brain a story, we get a chemical reward of, a calm reward, an, “Okay. I understand what's happening reward.” It's very seductive and necessary and helpful for us.

The problem is that the brain rewards us for a story regardless of the accuracy of the story, and the brain loves a story that if I said to myself, “I wonder what's wrong with Matt. He looks pretty pissed off. I guess maybe's having a hard day or maybe – I don't know.” The brain is like, “That's a shit story. You get nothing.”

But if I'm like, “Oh my God! Matt hates me. I knew he hated me. He’s trusted me. He's never liked me. I’ve have done something in that meeting that pissed him off. Oh my God! I'm in trouble. Oh my God! I’m going to get fired.” Then the brain is like, “Got it! Matt, dangerous, bad, against us, not safe.”

So, what the most resilient research that we found have in common and the significant change your life really is the story I'm telling myself. That when we fall, when we’re hurt, when we’re pissed, when we lose something or we’re disappointed, we fail at something at work. If we can challenge the narrative, the narratives that we make up and I can go to you and knock on your door and be like, “Hey, Matt. Do you have a second?” “Yeah, what's up?” I said, “I have a good day, and you looked really pissed and you were like, “That's sucked.” The story I'm telling myself right now is something happened in that meeting that you and I need to clean up. That you’re pissed off at me about something.” You look at me and you go, “No, man! No. No. No. No. No. Not at all. I’m just like I cannot believe these 9 o'clock meetings, instead of being done at 10, are over at 11 and 12. I mean, it just sucks. It's ridiculous. I have spin class every day at 10:30. I’m missing my spin class third time in a row.” I’m like, “Oh! What about the part where you hate me and are going to –”

The stories we tell ourselves are what keep us flat on the arena ground, mired in blood and sweat and dust. It's the narrative. Here's how that works. I use it every time Steve and I have a fight. The story I'm telling myself. I use it with the people at work all the time. I had just had a conversation with our CFO recently were I was like, “Oh my God! We were trying to negotiate this – A big partnership, and I said they’re going pull out of the deal.” He’s like, “What did you hear?”

I said, “I didn’t hear anything, but that the story I'm making up is they’ve had the redline now and they're not getting back to us with the contract redline.” He’s like, “They had the redline for 30 minutes at 60 pages.” He’s like, “Why are you making up stories?” I’m like, “I don’t know. I guess I’m in some fear and scarcity about this.” He’s like, “Okay. Well, keep checking out the stories with me, because that's a crazy ass story.” I was like, “Okay. Got it. Steve, my husband. Look, the story I'm making up right now is that you really do want to go. You're just pissed off because you don’t think I want to go.” He goes, “No. To be honest with you, I don't want to –Here's a great day. Hey, Brené, I have got a meeting at the hospital tonight. It's a dinner and a CEU continuing education. You can bring partners. But you don't really have to go.” Then I would get, “Fine. I don’t want to go.” He’s like, “Why are you being like that? I'm just saying, I know you’ve got a lot going on.” “No. It's fine. If you don't want me to go, I'm not – Whatever.”

Now it's like, “Hey, there's a thing tonight, and do you want to go? Partners are invited. When you say you don't want to go, I’m making up a story that you don't want me to go.” “No, I just know you’re busy.” “Okay great.”

This is the stories we make up and our ability reality check them completely predict our level of bounce and resilience. Are we even aware of them? Are we brave enough to check them, and can we find a narrative pattern? All of my stories that I make up always come back to I'm not enough and I'm disappointing people, which is like the bane of my existence. That's my work for this lifetime. So, if people could start thinking in this story I'm telling myself, the story I'm making up right now, we can probably use it 100 times a day in this office.

[00:44:46] MB: That’s a great tool and something that you can start implementing right away.

[00:44:51] BB: Yes. It’s so powerful.

[00:44:54] MB: Yeah, that’s amazing. For listeners, and this might actually be the answer to the question, but for listeners who’ve been listening to this who want to start somewhere, who want to begin implementing. We talk about so many important themes and ideas in this conversation. What would be one action item or step that they could take right away to start being more vulnerable, or to start getting back up, or to start implementing some of the themes that we’ve talked about today?

[00:45:21] BB: I mean, I think you could go – The Daring Leadership Assessments is free online. You could go to brenebrown.com. It’s in our dare to lead hub. You could take that. It gives you a pretty lengthy printout of the four skillsets of courage, vulnerability, rising skills, trusty skills and value skills and kind of tells you where your strengths are, where your opportunities for growth are. It's a very quick kind of thing to do.

I think a lot of this work that I do is very psycho-educational. The psychology part is you got to do some self-examination and some self-work, but the education piece is you've got to learn more. I think one of the biggest compliments I get after I give a talk is I already knew everything you said. But I didn't have any other words for it.

So, I think educating ourselves on what is vulnerability, what isn't vulnerability. I think if you're trying to get braver at work, I think dare to lead is a really great place to start. If it's about personal and work, the first place I try to especially start to explore shame, vulnerability encourage in both men and women is daring to lead.

So, I think – I mean, when we go into a place to do culture change work, we always start with book reads, our TED Talks, are something that ground people in language that they can use to talk about what they're experiencing and shared language is the root of change. So, if you're with your partner or a friends and you watch the TED Talk or the Netflix Special together and say, “I thought this was really good. I thought this part was kind of bullshit. Here are some language that was really helpful.” I think that’s how we see change happening. But language is absolutely a prerequisite for change.

[00:47:18] MB: Love the point about shared vocabulary. It's so important to have a common framework of words and ideas that you can use, because it really helps shape conversations.

For listeners who want to find out more about you, the TED Talk, the Netflix Special, the books, all of the amazing things that you're working on, what is the best place for them to do that online?

[00:47:40] BB: Yeah. I think the best place to find everything is brenebrown.com. It's just B-R-E-N-E B-R-O-W-N.com. One thing I will point out is after we finished the research for Dare to Lead, we decided this is important with give everything away.

So, there's a Dare to Lead hub that has a downloadable free companion workbook, the Daring Leader Assessment, a glossary, cards that you can download for when you're giving and receiving hard feedback that just have five or six language tips to use and don't use, a daring feedback checklist. We just made everything free and downloadable. So, have at it.

[00:48:19] MB: Awesome. Well, we’ll make sure to include all of those resources in the show notes at successpodcast.com. Brené, thank you so much for coming on the show. You're truly an inspiration. We are huge fans of you and your work, and this is a phenomenal conversation. So many powerful ideas. I laughed. I got goose bumps. It was awesome. I really, really enjoyed having you on here.

[00:48:39] BB: Thank you so much, Matt. I'm a big fan. So, it was really fun to talk to you and have, do this in person, or at least by computer.

[00:48:47] 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.

I'm going to give you three reasons why you should sign up for our e-mail list today by going to successpodcast.com, signing up right on the homepage. There’s some incredible stuff that’s only available to those on the e-mail list, so be sure to sign up, including an exclusive curated weekly e-mail from us called Mindset Monday, which is short, simple, filled with articles, stories, things that we found interesting and fascinating in the world of evidence-based growth in the last week.

Next, you're going to get an exclusive chance to shape the show, including voting on guests, submitting your own personal questions that we’ll ask guests on air and much more. Lastly, you’re going to get a free guide we created based on listener demand, our most popular guide, which is called How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide by signing up and joining the e-mail list today. Again, you can do that at successpodcast.com, sign up right at the homepage, or if you're on the go, just text the word “smarter”, S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44222.

Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes because that helps boost the algorithm, that helps us move up the iTunes rankings and helps more people discover the Science of Success.

Don't forget, if you want to get all the incredible information we talked about in the show, links transcripts, everything we discussed and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can get those at successpodcast.com, just hit the show notes button right at the top.

Thanks again, and we'll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

The Epic Real Life Quest to Interview the World’s Most Successful People with Alex Banayan

Today’s episode is a bit different than a normal episode of Science of Success. We share the incredible "Real Life Story of The Epic Quest To See How The World’s Most Successful People Launched Their Careers” - including a wild journey of hacking the Price is Right, meeting Bill Gates and Lady Gaga, and an epic five year quest to study and learn form the world’s top achievers. This is a topic I’ve dedicated my life to and this fascinating discussion with our guest Alex Banayan shines some new light on one of the most important questions of our lives - what was the inflection point that set massively successful people’s lives on a different trajectory? 

Alex Banayan is the best-selling author of The Third Door, which chronicles his five-year quest to track down the world’s most successful people to uncover how they broke through and launched their careers. He has been named to Forbes’ “30 Under 30” list and Business Insider’s “Most Powerful People Under 30.” He has been featured in major media including Fortune, Forbes, Businessweek, Billboard, Bloomberg TV, CNBC, Fox News, MSNBC, and much more!

• My passion has been studying the worlds top achievers - Alex took that to another level 

• Alex’s seven year journey becoming obsessed with studying the world’s most successful people 

• Do you know what do you want to do with your life? Are you on the right path?

• How did Bill Gates, Stephen Speilberg etc achieve epic results so early in their lives?

• When no one would talk to the world’s most successful people early in their careers - how did they break through?

• The ridiculous story of “hacking” the Price is Right

• “The Flinch” - when you become so nervous that you don’t do anything

• Breakfast with Larry King 

• The common strategy shared by the worlds top achievers

• The world’s top achievers all treat success the exact same way 

• The Power of the Third Door Framework 

• Most people think success is either a function of waiting your turn or being born into it 

• The reason most people never achieve their dream is not because the dream is unachievable but because of their fear stops them from going after their dreams

• What makes the world’s top achievers so fearless? 

• Top achievers don’t achieve fearlessness, instead they achieve courage 

• Fearlessness is jumping off a cliff without thinking about it, courage is acknowledging your fears, looking at the consequences, and then deciding you care so much about it you’re going to take one step forward anyway

• For the world’s most successful people there wasn’t one big single tipping point in their lives - it was a series of incremental small steps that compounded over time 

• When you’re in the trenches building your dream there is no tipping point - it’s all just little steps 

• Why you have to “Build a pipeline"

• You’re naturally going to get “bullshit no’s” throughout your life

  1. The key to dealing with NO is having enough other people in your pipeline who are going to say yes 

• “Adventures only happen to the adventurous” 

• Saying Yes when you’re scared, when things don’t make sense, but you still have an opportunity in front of you

• Everyone tries to over-optimize and wait for things to be perfect. If things are 80% there it’s up to you to jump and close that gap. 

• The founder of TED live’s his life by two mantras:

• If you don’t ask you don’t get

  1. Most things don’t work out 

• The Power of Possibility transforms people much more than giving them the tools and resources to succeed 

• Homework: If you’re looking to find your path, looking to find your passion - Take the “30 Day Challenge.” Buy a notebook, write “30 day challenge” on the front. Every day for the next 30 days you have to journal about the same 3 questions. It has to be 30 consecutive days, it can’t be spread out over several months. Pick the same time of day and consistently do it:

  • What excited me today? What filled me with enthusiasm?

  • What drained me of energy today? 

  • What did I learn about myself today?

  • The magic happens on the last few days 

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

Make a positive impact this giving season!

And let us make it easy and help you do it!
That's why for the rest of 2018, we're proud to be partnering with The Life You Can Save!

For a limited time, we're giving you the chance to win a free $100 donation to The Life You Can Save charity and cause of your choice!

Simply click here or the image above and submit your answer to be instantly entered to win!

The Life You Can Save has a well-curated, compelling list of impactful giving opportunities where your donation will be HIGHLY IMPACTFUL and cost-effective!

Show Notes, Links, & Research

• [Twitter] Alex Banayan

• [Book] The Third Door: The Wild Quest to Uncover How the World's Most Successful People Launched Their Careers by Alex Banayan

Episode Transcript

[00:00:19.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[00:00:11] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet with more than 3 million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries. 

Today's episode is a bit different than a normal episode of The Science of Success. We share the incredible real-life story of the epic quest to see how the world's most successful people launched their careers including a wild journey of hacking The Price is Right, meeting Bill Gates and Lady Gaga and an epic five-year quest to study and learn from the world's top achievers. This is a topic I've dedicated my life to, and this fascinating discussion with our guest, Alex Banayan, shines some new light on one of the most important questions of our lives. What was the inflection point to set massively successful people's lives on a different trajectory? 

Do you need more time? Time for work? Time For thinking and reading? Time for the people in your life? Time to accomplish your goals? This was the number one problem our listeners outlined and we created a new video guide that you can get completely for free when you sign up and join our email list. It's called How You Can Create Time for the Things That Really Matter in Life. You can get it completely for free when you sign up and join the email list at successpodcast.com.

You're also going to get exclusive content that's only available to our email subscribers. We recently pre-released an episode in an interview to our email subscribers a week before it went live to our broader audience. That had tremendous implications, because there is a limited offer in there with only 50 available spots that got eaten up by the people who were on the e-mail list first. With that same interview, we also offered an exclusive opportunity for people on our e-mail list to engage one-on-one for over an hour with one of our guests in a live exclusive interview, just for e-mail subscribers.

There's some amazing stuff that's available only to email subscribers that's only going on if you subscribe and sign up to the email list. You can do that by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. Or, if you're driving around right now, if you're out and about and you're on the go, you don't have time, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44222. That's S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44222.

In our previous episode we showed you how to solve any problem in your life using a simple and no risk tool that you can start using right away. We dug into why you get stuck on problems and how we often deceive ourselves. We talked about why reasons are often a ruse and how they can become dangerous once they turn into excuses and much more with our previous guest, Dr. Bernard Roth. If you want to be able to solve any problem or challenge you encounter, listen to our previous episode. 

Now for our interview with Alex. 

Please note this episode contains profanity. 

[00:03:11] MB: Today, we have another awesome guest on the show, Alex Binayan. Alex is the best-selling author of The Third Door, which chronicles his five-year quest to track down the world's most successful people to uncover how they broke through and launch their careers. He's been named to Forbes 30 Under 30, Business Insider's most powerful people under 30, been featured in major magazines, including Forbes, Fortune, BusinessWeek, Bloomberg, CNBC and much more. 

Alex, welcome to The Science of Success. 

[00:03:38] AB: Thank you so much for having me. 

[00:03:39] MB: Well, I'm really excited for this interview because my passion has been, for years and years and years, sort of the same passion that you have and it’s this idea of studying the world's top achievers and trying to figure out what was the inflection point or what was the change, what was the thing that set them off on a trajectory that was different from a sort of a normal person? You and I met in person at one point and we were kind of talking about this, and the thing that I'm the most interested – I read tons and tons of biographies of every – Rockefeller, Bill Gates, all of the – Warren Buffett, all of these billionaires, all of these people who are really successful and the part that's the most interesting to me is always like the first 10%, 20%, not when they’re children, but the early beginnings of their career and that part where –

[00:04:24] AB: That’s my whole obsession. 

[00:04:25] MB: Yeah, and I always get frustrated, because the whole story is about what they're doing once they’re super successful. That's not really interesting or compelling to me, because I can’t apply it. What I want to figure out is what was that breakthrough? What was that point? What was that change that they did when they were young that set them off in this different path? You took that passion to a completely another level and spent years of your life and – I mean, the stories are insane, and we’ll get into them in a second, but basically following this path that I've been fascinated with. So that's why I had to have you on the show. To start out, I’d love to figure out how that journey began for you. 

[00:04:58] AB: First of all, that means a lot, and the fact that we have the same awkward obsession is going to make this really fun. I've been doing the same thing you’ve been in really for the past seven years, just really obsessing over studying success. The journey started seven years ago. I was 18-years- old, a freshman in college and I was spending every day lying on my dorm room bed staring up at the ceiling. I don’t know if you've gone through the what do I want to do with my life crisis, but if you have, it's this all-consuming thing that you follows you everywhere you go. It's what you think about right before you go to bed. 

To understand what I am going through this crisis, you have to understand that I'm the son of Jewish immigrants, which pretty much means I came out of the womb. My mom cradled me in her arms and then she stamped MD on my ass and sent me on my way. I wore scrubs to school for Halloween in third grade and thought I was cool. That was my childhood growing up. 

I checked all the boxes in high school. I studied for the SATs. I took on the biology classes. I even want to premed summer camp. By the time I got to college of premeds, but very quickly I remember lying on my dorm room bed looking at this towering stack of biology books and feeling like they were sucking the life out of me. At first I assumed I was just being lazy, but very quickly I began to wonder, “Maybe I'm not on my path. Maybe I'm on a path somebody placed me on and I'm just rolling down.” 

So now not only do I not know what I want to do with my life. I have no idea how all the people I looked up to, how they did it. How did Bill Gates sell first piece of software out of his dorm room when nobody knew his name? How did Steven Spielberg become the youngest Judeo director in Hollywood history without a single hit under his belt? This is what they don't teach you in school. I just assumed there had to be a book out there with the answer. 

So I'm going to the library and I'm just ripping through business books and biographies and self-help books, the similar biographies you were just talking about. I had a very similar frustration that you had, which is that all these biographies had so much time talking about what Bill Gates' leadership style is like once he becomes a billionaire. But to me I wanted to know when no one would take his calls, when no one would take his meetings. How did he find a way to break through? 

It's not really about an age in someone's life. It's more about a stage. After going through all of these business books and biographies, I was left empty-handed, and that's when my naïve 18-year-old thinking kicked in and I thought, “Well, if no one’s going to write the book I'm dreaming of reading, why not write it myself?” I thought it would be super simple. I would just call up Bill Gates, interview him, interview everybody else. I thought I’d be done in a few months, that I assumed would be the easy part. The hard part I figured was getting the money to fund this journey. I was buried in student loan debt. I was all out of bar mitzvah cash. So there had to be a way to make some quick money. 

Two nights before final exams, I’m in the library doing what everyone's doing in the library right before finals. I'm on Facebook, and I’m on Facebook and I see someone offering free tickets to The Price is Right, and I'm going to college at USC, so it's not too far from where the show is being filmed. My first thought is, “What if I go on the show and win some money to fund this dream?” Not my brightest moment, plus I had a problem, I had never seen a full episode of The Show before, plus I had finals into in two days. I told myself the dumb idea, “Do not think about it.” But I don't if you’ve ever had one of these moments where an idea just keeps clawing itself back into your mind? No matter how dumb it is and you tell yourself to stop thinking about it, this one idea just keeps clawing itself back and back into your mind. 

To prove to myself this is a bad idea so I can get back to studying, I remember opening my spiral notebook and I’m sitting at this small round wooden table in the corner of the library and I opened up my spiral notebook and I write best and worst case scenarios. I just start writing out the worst case scenarios; fail finals, get kicked out of premed, lose financial aid, mom stops talking to me, mom kills me. There’s 20 cons, and the only pro was may be, may be win enough money to fund this dream, and it felt as if somebody had tied a rope around my gut and was slowly pulling in that direction. 

That night I decided to do the logical thing and pull an all-nighter to study, but I didn’t study for finals. I studied how to hack The Price is Right, and I went on the show the next day and executed this ridiculous strategy and it ended up winning the whole showcase showdown, winning a sailboat, selling the sailboat, and that's how I funded the book. 

[00:09:36] MB: The story of you hacking The Show is hilarious. I mean, it was something about – I forget the exact details, but you rolled up, you’re wearing a ridiculous outfit and costume, right?

[00:09:45] AB: . I got there and during my all-nighter of research, I'm on the 23rd O of Google by 4 AM, and I find out that The Price is Right isn’t exactly what it seems. Although it looks completely random, like, “Alex, come on down,” as if they pulled your name out of a hat. What I learned is there's a system to it and like all things in life, although it looks like random luck, there's actually a system. What I learned is there's a producer who interviews every single person, the audience right before the show begins. Then on top of that, there is an undercover producer planted in the audience, then confirm or denies the original producer’s selection. 

I’m sure you’ve done very similar things where it looks like this completely random series of events, but if you do your research or you actually do the homework, you realize there's a system and you can learn how it works. 

[00:10:35] MB: I want to hear a little bit more about the story, because I think not only is it a crazy story, but it gives a really good context to the broader journey that you went on. I mean, from somebody who had never even seen a complete episode of The Price is Right, how did you then go on to, as you’ve put it, hack it and end up winning?

[00:10:53] AB: Well, when I got to the CBS Studios where the show is filmed, the second I got there I knew I had no idea who the undercover producer is. So I’m just assuming everyone is. I’m dancing with all the ladies. I'm flirting with custodians. I’m breakdancing, and I don’t know how to breakdance. After about an hour of waiting outside the studio inline, I spotted the casting producer, and I saw him from 50 feet away and I knew exactly who it was, because during the night before I did all these research on him. I knew his name was Stan. I knew where he grew up. I knew where he went to school and I knew he had a clipboard, but it’s never in his hands. His assistant who sits 10 feet away from him holds it, and if Stan likes you, he’ll talk to you a bit more. If he really likes you, he’ll turn around and wink, and his assistant will put your name on the clipboard. 

If The Price is Right is a night club, Stan is the bouncer, and if you're not on his list, you’re out. Bore I knew it, he is standing right in front of me and he's like, “What's your name? Where are you from? What do you do?” I’m like, “Hey, I’m Alex. I’m 18-years-old. I’m a freshman in college. I’m studying premed.” He goes, “Oh! Premed? You must spend a lot of time studying. How do you have time to watch The Price is Right?” I'm like, “Oh! Is that where I am?” The joke just dies. No laughter. I can see his eyes are darting like he's about to move on to the next person. 

I had read in one of these self-help books that I read during my life crisis, it said that personal contact, personal touch, accelerates a relationship. So I had an idea. I had to touch Stan. But I’m standing like 20 feet away from him behind this railing. So I’m like, “Stan! Come over here. I want to make a handshake with you.” He’s like, “No. No. It's okay. It’s okay.” I’m like, “Come on!” So very reluctantly comes over and I teach him how to pound it and blow it up and he's laughing. He wishes me good luck and starts to walk away. He doesn't turn around to his assistant. She doesn’t write on the clipboard, and just like that it's over.

I can remember really vividly the feeling like my whole dream was sort of walking right away from me, almost like sand slipping through my fingers. The worst part is I knew I didn't even have a chance to really prove myself. So I don't know what got into me, but I felt this rumbling in the pit of my stomach and I started yelling at the top of my lungs, “Stan!” The whole audience sweeps their head around. They think I’m like having a seizure and Stan runs over and he’s like, “Are you okay? Are you okay? What's going on?” I have no idea what I’m going to say. I'm looking at him, and you have to understand Stan is in a typical Hollywood, red turtleneck, or he's wearing a black turtleneck with a red scarf even though it’s 70° outside. I’m just looking at him and I’m like, “Your scarf!” and now I really don't know what I’m going to say next. 

I just look at him with all the seriousness that I can. You can feel the tension and I just looked at him and I'm like, “Stan, I’m an avid scarf collector. I have 362 pairs in my dorm room and I'm missing that one. Where did you get it?” He starts cracking up, because I think he finally figured out what I was trying to do and he was laughing more at why I was doing it. He gives me the scarf. He’s like, “Look, you need this more than I do.” We joked around a bit more. He turns around, winks, and his assistant makes a mark on the clipboard. At that point the line moves on and I think maybe like 20 minutes later I noticed this woman with long brown hair looking around at people's nametags a lot. She’s in the audience and she’s looking around people's nametags. She keeps walking around. Then I looked closer and I see a laminated badge sticking out of her back pocket and I figure this has to be the undercover producer. 

I just come out of puberty at that point. I’m blowing your kisses and she's laughing and then I started dancing and she's laughing even more. She takes a sheet of paper out of her pocket, looks at my name tag and makes a mark. At this point you would think I'm feeling on top of the world, but it was right then that I realized I had spent my entire all-nighter studying how to get on the show. I still didn't know how to play. No big. I just out my phone and I Googled how to play Price is Right. 

I'm reading up, but about 30 seconds later I feel a tap on my shoulder and security takes my phone away. At this point I have no plan B. I remember sitting on this cold metal bench outside of the studio and I'm just sulking, and I’m sitting next to this old lady with white hair and she noticed something’s wrong. So I asked her what the problem is, and I just started venting to her. I tell her about finals. I tell her about premed. I tell her about this book. I tell her I’ve never seen a full episode of the show before, and she pinches my cheek and she's like, “Honey, you remind me of my grandson.” 

I asked her if she has any advice, and she's like, “Sweetie, I’ve been watching this show for 40 years,” and decades of wisdom starts downloading into my head in a matter of minutes and I have this idea. I gave her a big hug. I say thank you. Then I turned to the person next to me and I’m like, “Hey, I’m Alex. I’m 18. I’ve never seen this show before. Do you have any advice?” Then I turned to another person, then a group of people, then another group of people. Over the course of an hour I end up crowdsourcing the wisdom of about half the audience. Right about then, the doors to the studio opened and the rest of the show unfolds and we can go into this story in more detail if you want later. But it was less Einstein and more Forest Gump the way the rest of the show unraveled. But I ended up winning the sailboat and selling it and that prize money is how I funded this entire seven-year adventure. 

[00:16:30] MB: So I'll save. There're some other hilarious nuggets in that story. Actually, one of my, I mean, literally laugh out loud moments in the rest of The price is Right journey, but I'll save that for listeners who want to dig in to the book. You hacked The Price is Right. You win this sailboat. You sell it. What's the next step in the journey to interview and study from the world's top achievers?

[00:16:49] AB: First of all, I sell the sailboat and I have all this cash for the first time in my life and I feel like a millionaire. So I’m going back to my college campus. I’m taking my friends out to lunch to Chipotle. I'm like, “Free guacamole for everybody.” I’m feeling really good.” Now that I have the money though I realized, “All right, it’s time to start trying to get interviews.” That's when I realized I had another problem. I didn't really know exactly who I needed to interview, because I knew I wanted to interview the world's most successful people, but I didn't know who was on that list, and I don't really believe in these Forbes list or these algorithms that quantify success. I did what I always do when I have a problem. I called my best friends. 

Me and my best friends, these are the boys who I grew up with. They all came over one night. It’s midnight. We’re all in my room, and I just asked them, “If we could make our dream university, who would be our professors?” Then it became really easy. Bill Gates would teach business. Warren Buffett would teach finance. Spielberg would teach film. Maya Angelou would teach poetry. Jane Goodall would teach science, and that list, Larry King would teach broadcasting. Steve Wozniak would teach computer science, Mark Zuckerberg for tech, and it was really that list that became the treasure map for this journey going forward. 

[00:18:10] MB: So once you have the treasure map, and I want to make sure we have time to kind of dig into some the lessons from this journey too. So I want to accelerate the journey a little bit. What happens once you kind of started down that path, and was it easy to kind of get access to these people and interview them?

[00:18:27] AB: Like literally just thinking about the answers like very preposterous, because every single interview that came to be for the journey is its own ridiculous story. For Tim Ferriss, I had to crouch in a bathroom for 30 minutes and like jump out when he was walking by. One of the crazier stories, by far the most miraculous one happened about halfway through the journey. So I had just – The context is I just spent eight months on this quest to track down Warren Buffett, and I ended up hacking his shareholders meeting. But you’ve read the book. So you know it ended as a sort of this gigantic disaster at the end that sort of backfired in my face. I was really dejected. I went back to L.A. where I lived and I just couldn't get out of bed for a week. I was really down on myself. 

Again, my best friends are incredible, and one of my best friends, his name is Corwin, he wanted to cheer me up and he's like, “Yo! Let's go grab some lunch and talk.” So we go to our grocery store and we’re sitting on the sidewalk eating some sandwiches, and Corwin is trying to raise spirits and he's like, “Hey man, you just got to focus on the future. Do you have any other interviews lined up?” I’m like, “Dude, I have nothing.” He's like, “Come on! Let's say you did have an interview lined up, who would you want to talk to?” I’m like, “Dude, even if I had an interview lined up, I would probably mess that up too. Not only do I not have an interview lined up. I don’t even know how to interview people.” He's like, “Dude, you got to stop being so hard on yourself. Interviewing is not a science. It’s an art.” 

As we’re talking about this, by far the most miraculous moment of this entire journey happens. A black car pulls up and parks right in front of us. It has tinted windows. The door swings open and out walks Larry King. I don’t know if you’re the same way, but weirdly when everything is lined up perfectly for me, whenever like the stars align, that's actually when I get the most nervous. That's when I'm paralyzed by anxiety. I looked at Larry King and I just freeze, and he walks right past me into the store’s sliding glass windows and I don't say a word. 

My friend Corwin is like, “Dude, what the fuck? Why didn’t you say anything?” I call the sensation the Flinch, when I become so nervous that I don't do anything. The thing about the Flinch is it's very good at disguising itself as logic. I start giving these logical excuses to Corwin like, “Oh, I don’t want to be that guy. It's better to find an introduction.” I'm just giving all these excuses and Corwin is like, “Dude, at least you can just go and say hi.” Then excuses [inaudible s 00:18:27], I’m like, “I do know. He's in the grocery store. There's no way I'll be able to find him at this point,” and Corwin’s like dude, “He's 80 years old. How far could he get?” 

Very reluctantly I stand up and I walk into this grocery store to look for Larry King. I’m looking at the bakery section, no Larry. I walk over to the produce section, fruits, there's vegetables, there's no Larry. Right then I remembered that he had parked in the loading zone, which means he must be leaving any minute now. So this boost of adrenaline kicks in and I just start running through this grocery store and I’m running down every aisle, no Larry, no Larry, no Larry, no Larry, no Larry. I cut a corner, I'm now sprinting down the frozen food section. I’m dodging cans of tuna, no Larry. I figured he has to be at the checkout counter. So I run over to the checkout counter, no Larry, no Larry, no Larry, no Larry. 

At this point I want to kick myself, because he had been right in front of me and I hadn't said a thing. I walk out of this grocery store. I’m walking to this parking lot. I'm staring down at my feet and I looked up and 20 feet in front of me is a Larry king suspenders and all. Similar to that moment with Stan, all these pent-up energy and baggage inside of me combusted and out of my mouth uncontrollably I just yelled, “Mr. King!” and the echo reverberated through the parking lot way louder than I expected. 

The poor guy, Larry King has had quadruple bypass surgery. I'll never forget, he pretty much jumps in the air and slowly turns his head around. Every wrinkle on his face sprung back as if he's looking at the Grim Reaper. At this point I have no idea what to do. So I just start running after him and I'm like, “Mr. King, Mr. King, my name's Alex. I’m 19-years-old. I’ve always wanted to say hi,” and he's like, “Okay, hi,” and he just starts speeding off towards his car. 

I'm too late in the game to pull back now, so I just am awkwardly following him to his car and he’s know opening up, stuffing in his groceries. He opens up the driver door, he’s about to climb inside and I’m like, “Wait, Mr. King, can I go to breakfast with you?” He just looks at me like I’m this lunatic, but before he can answer, he looks out on to the sidewalk and sees about 10 people are watching this go down. I think out peer pressure almost, he just sort of shrugs his shoulders and he goes, “Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.” I’m like, “Oh my God! Thank you! Thank you so much. I’ll see you tomorrow I guess?” He's like, “Okay.” He gets in his car and shuts the door and I’m like, “Wait, Mr. King, what time?” He just looks at me and he like starts the engine and I'm like, “Mr. King, what time?” He even looks at me again and he just puts the car and drive.” 

I'm now standing in front of his car flailing my arms in the air shouting, “Mr. King, what time?” He looks at me and just goes, “9:00 and just speeds off.” The next morning it's not 9:00 and I show up at his bagel restaurant and there he is sitting in the corner booth with all of his best friends having breakfast and there’s actually an empty seat at the table, but I had a chance to reflect on how I acted the day before so I thought I’d be a little gentler. So I like walk up to the table and I'm like, “Hey, good morning, Mr. King,” and he looks to me and just mumbles under his breath. He’s like, “Blah-blah-blah.” I don't really get a response. 

So I figured he probably just wants some alone time with his friends and I'll sit at the table next to him and wait for him to call me over. So I sit at the table next to him and I’m waiting 10 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour passes and finally Larry King stands up and he starts walking toward me and then he walks right past me and heads for the exit. 

I put a hand up in the air and I'm like, “Mr. King?” He is like, “What is it kid? What do you want?” At that point I felt this very sharp familiar pain in my chest and I just looked at him and I was like, “Honestly, I just wanted some advice on how to interview people,” and this slow smile spread across his face almost as if to say, “Why didn’t you say so?” He ends up putting a hand on my shoulder and giving me one of the best monologues of interview advice and then he checks his watch and then he looks up at the ceiling as if he's debating something in his mind. He looks back at me and he goes, “All right, kid. Tomorrow, 8:45. See you here.” 

I show up the next morning at 8:45. He calls me over to his table. He asks me why I even want to learn how to interview people. I tell them about the book and he's like, “Okay, I'm in.” Over the course of the past five years I've been to breakfast with them over 50 times. 

[00:25:57] MB: The crazy thing about that story is that it's just one of, as you said, maybe a dozen or more similarly absurd and ridiculous things that happened on this kind of real-life epic quest to interview some of the world's top achievers. I want to get into some of the meat of some the lessons that you learned from this. So fast forwarding all the way to the end, just to give the audience a sense of the scope and the breadth of some of these people that you interviewed and connected with over the course of writing the book, tell me sort of who you ultimately ended up talking to. 

[00:26:28] AB: So thankfully a lot of the people in that original list ended up saying yes, But it took two years to track down Bill Gates. It took three years to track down Lady Gaga. Whether it's Maya Angelou, or Jessica Alba, or Quincy Jones, or Steve Wozniak, Pitbull, Quincy Jones, it's really been this unbelievable journey and I couldn't be more grateful for them really – Because the truth is I'm not CNN. I’m not the New York Times. I was this 18-year-old kid. So I'm very well aware that they weren’t doing this interview because it was serving them or that he was going to help them in any way. They were really helping with this mission. I believe that if all these people come together, not for press, not to promote anything, but really just to share their best wisdom with the next-generation, people can do so much more. I couldn’t be more grateful, they all came on board.

[00:27:24] MB: Obviously, in the book, you get a lot more detailed into all the specific lessons and strategies from each of these individuals. I want to come back to the meta-question that we began the conversation with, which is this notion that once you interviewed all these incredible achievers across a huge spectrum, what were some of the – Well, let’s just start with the main question that I have. What was the inflection point? What was the big change? What was the big shift? What did you see that was the common thread between all of their journeys and what set them apart from a normal every day person’s trajectory?

[00:27:56] AB: When I had started this journey, there was no part of me that I want to find that one key to success. We’ve seen those TED Talks, we’ve seen those business books, and normally I just roll my eyes. What ended up happening after the seven years of interviews and thousands and thousands of hours of research and going through hundreds of biographies, is I started realizing – I don’t know if you're a music fan, but there was almost this common melody to every single interview I did. The analogy that came to me, because I was 21 at the time, is that every single one of these people treats life and business and success the exact same way. They treat it the exact same way. 

It's sort of like getting into a nightclub. There's always three ways in. There is the first door, the main entrance, where the line curves around the block, where 99% of people wait in line hoping to get in. That’s the first door. Then there’s the second door, the VIP entrance, where the billionaires and celebrities go through and. School and society have this way of making us feel like those are the only two ways in. You either wait your turn or you're born into it. 

What I've learned is that there's always, always a third door into the entrance where you have to jump out of line, run down the alley, bang on the door hundred times, crack open the window, go through the kitchen, there's always a way in, and it doesn't matter that's how Bill Gates sold his first piece of software, or how Lady Gaga got her first record deal. They all took the third door. 

[00:29:35] MB: That was one of the most interesting takeaways that I had from the book, was this notion that there's a different path that may not be what most people's perception of success is, and as you said, most people think about it's either – I like that analogy, waiting your turn or being born with it. There's another path, there's another journey, and the funny thing about the book is that you essentially take that third door to achieving all the interviews that you had with all of these individuals. 

[00:30:02] AB: Yeah, by accident. What I've learned is that if you have a dream, it note doesn't matter if it's starting your own business, if it’s growing your existing business, if it's getting a big promotion, if it's u creating a book or a work of art that you've always imagined of creating, there is no other option but the third door. There is no other option. 

The reason I've come to learn this is that there will always be a point. One of the big things that I realized about this journey is that a universal struggle and conflict. The reason most people end up not achieving a dream is not because the dream is unachievable. It's because of their fear of going after it. When I had started working on the book, I was consumed by fear, not just the beginning, the whole way through. 

If you asked any of my cousins who I grew up with, I was like the most scared kid you would ever meet. I had a nightlight on. I was terrified of roller coasters. I was not a brave kid, and I remember when I was starting out doing this research, one of my obsessions was trying to figure out how all of these people became so fearless. I just assumed Bill Gates and Elon Musk, they had to be fearless, or else how could they have done what they did. 

What I learned during my research and when I would end up interviewing them is I started realizing every single one of these people was not only not fearless, they were completely terrified the whole way through. That was the exact opposite of what I assumed. What I learned is that while it wasn’t fearlessness they achieved, instead it was courage. While the word sounds similar, the difference is critical. Fearlessness is jumping off of a cliff and not thinking about it. That's idiotic. Courage on the other hand is acknowledging your fears, analyzing the consequences and then deciding that you care so much about it you're still going to take one thoughtful step forward anyway. 

[00:32:07] MB: I think that's a great way to put it, and even that phrasing that you just used, take one step forward, one of the other takeaways that I had from reading the book that I thought was fascinating was this idea that all of these successful people, there wasn't a single moment or tipping point that changed the entire trajectory of their lives, but it was rather one step at a time that –

[00:32:28] AB: Right. It's such an alluring idea though. As someone who’s obsessed over success, I’m sure you have too. There is this allure of like – It's almost like the Holy Grail, that tipping point. It's this like very magical concept. 

[00:32:47] MB: Exactly. We actually recently had an interview with a gentleman named Beau Lotto and he talked about this from a creative standpoint, the idea that creativity is sort of one step at a time into a place from knowing to not knowing, into a place of doubt and uncertainty, and that creative leaps from the outside look impossible or unachievable to the person making that creative leap. It's just the next step in the journey that they've been traversing. It seems you're –

[00:33:14] AB: Right. 100%. 

[00:33:16] MB: Your research uncovered essentially the same conclusion about the success of Bill Gates, and Lady Gaga, and Steven Spielberg and all these incredible people that you came across in your journey. 

[00:33:24] AB: Yeah. What I've learned is that when you're looking in hindsight, only then can you see a tipping point. If you're looking back on Bill Gates’ career from a 50-year vantage point, you're zooming out and you can see all 50 years. Yeah, you can say, “IBM deal he made in Boca Raton was critical to the eventual success of Microsoft.” 

Now, when you're Bill and you’re 20-years-old and you're going into that meeting with IBM and they're telling you to go fuck off, it sure doesn't feel like a tipping pint. Then when you get the deal and it's about to fall apart because you can’t finish it on time and your employee wants to quit and your server crashes, it sure doesn't feel like a tipping point. What I've learned is that when you're in the trenches, when you're an entrepreneur, when you're building a dream, there is no tipping point. It's all just little steps. 

[00:34:25] MB: I'm so excited to tell you about our sponsor for this holiday season. The incredible organization; The Life You Can Save. 

I'm sure you get overwhelmed by the countless giving opportunities out there. You feel confused, frustrated and unsure about what the best thing to do is. When that happens, you often end up making scattered donations to a smattering of random charities with no idea of the real impact you're creating on people's lives. That's why I love the Life You Can Save. 

You know the focus of The Science of Success is on being evidence-based. The beautiful thing about The Life You Can Save is that they focus on evidence-based giving, finding, selecting and curating the most high-impact donation opportunities so that you don't have to do all that hard work. You can start giving right now by visiting www.thelifeyoucansave.org/success. That's thelifeyoucansave.org/success. 

They've already done the homework and they have an incredible well-curated compelling list of hugely impactful giving opportunities where your donation will be high-leverage and cost-effective. Our hearts, relationships and networks often guide or giving. The resulting donations usually do some good, but really as much as we like them to do. 

The Life You Can Save makes it so that you can easily navigate how to make your charitable giving go much, much further. You may not be as wealthy or successful as Bill Gates, yet you can still have an enormous impact on the lives of people living in extreme poverty. They can experience dramatic improvements in their lives for much smaller donations. 

Visit thelifeyoucansave.org/success to find out more and make rational, evidence-based charitable gifts this holiday season. 

[00:36:36] MB: There's another idea that came out of the book that I thought was really fascinating, and it was the notion of building a pipeline. Without going super in detail, I’d love to talk about or maybe just touch on briefly how you met Elliott and how he sort of shape that journey and tell you that lesson as well. 

[00:36:53] AB: Well, the book on the outside is really this book about tracking down the world's most successful people and uncovering how they launched their careers. But there’s also all these layers of themes, and one of the biggest themes is how critical mentorship is to achieving a dream. By far, the biggest mentor I met happened about a year into this journey. This is the mentor that changed the course of this book. 

It’s a year in, I've been working on the book nonstop. I'm still in college. Finally after a year, I was – To me, Bill Gates, was my Holy Grail interview. That was the mountaintop. About a year I get a call from Bill Gates’ chief of staff. It took me a whole year to make this happen. But I finally am on the phone with Bill Gates right hand guy. 

I’m standing in a CVS parking lot eating like an ice cream cone. I’m 19. He’s like, “So you want to interview Bill, huh?” I’m like, “Yeah! It’s my biggest dream,” I'm telling all about the book. He’s like, “Look, I love what you're doing. I love that you're doing this to help your generation, and I feel like I'm 95% there.” He's like, “But the thing is you’re only about 5% there,” and I’m like crashing down to the ground, and he explained to me that, “Look, even when Malcolm Gladwell wanted to interview Bill Gates for outliers, it wasn't an obvious yes.” Bill Gates' chief of staff is telling me I need to go build more momentum and I need to go get a publishing deal with either Penguin or Random House and to call him back when that’s done. 

I remember just standing in the parking lot after he hung up and just two words were echoing in my head, “5%.” I remember going back to my room with my head in my hands wanting to pull out my hair, because if I am on the phone with Bill Gates chief of staff and I'm only 5% there, then I must be at -50% with people like Bill Clinton, or Richard Branson. I end up having this thought like sort of flashed through my mind, this random, almost like itch in my head, and I remember someone once told me about Richard Branson and Bill Clinton speaking on a cruise ship once. So almost to procrastinate, I take on my laptop and I Google Richard Branson cruise ship. This article pops up. It's on fastcompany.com and the headline says, “Summit Series takes the high seas.” 

I start reading this article and its talking about Richard Branson is the keynote speaker and there's Tim Ferriss, Gary Vaynerchuk and Blake Mycoskie and Russell Simmons and you know The Roots are the house band and it's all happening on this cruise ship in the Caribbean and I'm like salivating. This is like my book in cruise ship form. 

I'm reading and I'm reading and I'm reading and at finally at the end of the article it says, “Summit Series was founded by serial entrepreneur Elliot Bisnow, 26-years-old.” I was like, “What the fuck?” My cousin is 26-years-old. I didn't think you could do that at this age. I end up Googling Elliott Bisnow and I go down another Google rabbit hole where hours start passing by without me noticing. I'm just reading everything I can. I’m skipping meals without noticing, and reading about a Elliott online was sort of like reading about the guy from Catch Me If You Can, where there's a lot of stuff about them on the internet but nothing that actually said who he was and what he did. 

By the end of that night, I remember feeling this very overwhelming sensation of, on the one hand, I can't wrap my hands around the sky. But on the other hand, I felt like if there is anyone on earth who could teach me how to build momentum and who could teach me what I have to do to get to Bill Gates, it have to be this guy, Elliott Bisnow.

I remember closing my eyes, and when I opened them, I took out my journal and I opened to a fresh page and I wrote, “Dream mentors,” across the top and I underlined it. On the first line I wrote Elliott Bisnow, and a couple of weeks later, I'm in the library studying for an accounting exam. It finals again. It was time for an accounting final, and I couldn't get this Elliott guy out of my head and I needed to focus on studying. So I was like, “All right, I’ll just spend 10 minutes writing Elliot a cold email and then I’ll go back to studying. 

I had interviewed Tim Ferriss a bit earlier. So Tim Ferriss gave me his cold email template. So I use this secret Tim Ferriss cold email template and I email Elliott Bisnow, but of course it takes me three hours to really perfect this email and edit it down. I end up sending it off to Elliot. I can't even find his email address online. So I end up having to guess what it is. An hour later I get a reply, “Great email. What are you doing on Thursday?” I look at my calendar and on Thursday it says, “Accounting final exam.” So I replied back to Elliot the only thing I can, I go, “I’m completely free. What do you have in mind?” He goes, “Great. I'll meet you at 8 AM on Thursday in Long Beach at the Westin Hotel,” and he's like, “Read this book before we meet.” I’m thinking, “All right, my final isn’t until 12 in the afternoon, the meeting is at 8 AM. It's probably going to go 15 minutes. I'll still make it back in time for finals.” 

I read the whole book Elliot told me to read and I show up for this meeting at 8 AM, but our 15 minute meeting turns into four hours. I end up missing my file, but I end up spending that entire summer traveling with Elliott around the world. He not only became my mentor. He’s still my best friend to this day. 

[00:42:39] MB: There are so many interesting lessons from your relationship with Elliott. I mean, there are so many takeaways that I want to pull out of this. One of the lessons that you had from Elliott and one of the ideas that he shared was this notion that adventures only happen to the adventurous. I want to talk about that, but before we dig into that, let’s come back to this idea of pipelines, because that was one of the biggest takeaways that I took away from the book and I think that Elliott taught you as well.

[00:43:04] AB: Right. I learned this the hard way, because I had mentioned briefly earlier, I went on this eight-month quest to track down Warren Buffett where the only thing I did for eight months was trying to get an interview with Warren Buffett, and Elliot was just yelling at me. He’s like, “You idiot! You have to build this pipeline.” 

What Elliot was trying to explain to me is that you're naturally going to get what he calls bullshit noes, where you ask someone, let's say, for an interview and they're like, “Oh, I would love to. I’m just really busy right now. Thank you so much.” That’s a bullshit no. That's not the real – It’s not just that they're busy. Everyone's busy, but if Opera calls and says, “I want to interview you tomorrow,” all of a sudeen you become free.” 

Elliot is like, “They're called bullshit noes,” and Elliot’s like, “I get a thousand of them a week.” He said the key to dealing with bullshit noes is you will never be able to logically argue a bullshit no, because you don't actually know the real reason. You need to do a couple things. He gave me three things. The one is you have to build a pipeline. If you have 30 people that you're working on, if you got a bullshit no from one, you still have 29 more to work on and it frees you up from being desperate, because desperation clogs intuition. That’s the first one, building a pipeline. 

The second one, he said, “You have to think bigger.” If you’re offering someone, the reason they probably say no is cause what you’re offering them isn't big enough. It's not exciting enough. It's not commanding attention. The third thing is, is you're not thinking – He's like, “You have to think different,” where you're asking these down the middle request, “Can I sit down in your office for 60 minutes?” These very down the middle things, but he is like, “Look, if you –” With Warren Buffett, I ended up asking my questions to him during his shareholders meeting with Larry king. I ended up having breakfast with him with Steve Wozniak. We had lunch outside Apple headquarters. He’s like, “You need to start thinking more differently.” So those are the things that Elliott did that started changing me from just being hounded with noes starting to slowly get some more yeses. 

[00:45:08] MB: I think a pipeline is something that a lot of people don't think about when they envision marching towards their goals, and it's something that's been really helpful for our show as well, is having people – Not every guest says yes to us and there's lots and lots of noes that we've gotten, but it’s not about the people who say no. It's about the people who say yes. 

[00:45:26] AB: Right. 100%. 

[00:45:27] MB: The other fascinating lesson that was I think one of Elliott's catchphrases was adventures only happen with the adventuress. Tell me a little bit about that. 

[00:45:35] AB: He has a lot of good phrases. 

[00:45:37] MB: He does. He does, and they’re littered throughout the book. I mean, I know it involves at some point or another last-minute flights around the world and all kinds of crazy stuff that you go a lot more detail into in the book, but I just thought that was a great phrase. 

[00:45:49] MB: I think it's not only a phrase, it's a way of life, where Elliott's phrase of adventures only happen to the adventurous, is it's not just literally about you jumping on airplanes and stuff like that. It's really about just saying yes when you’re scared, when things don't make sense, when an opportunity is in front of you, you have to jump. 

Every so often you'll be lucky enough if the stars align 80%, and I think what Elliott is really trying to say is that everyone tries to over optimize and wait for things to be perfect until they’re hundred percent lined up. Really what his life motto is it's never going to 100% line up. If it's 80% there, it's up to you to jump and close that gap, and that's what adventures only happen to the adventurous means. 

If someone says, “Hey, it was great meeting you. Let me know the next time you're in L.A.,” saying, “I'll be there next week.” Even if you don't have money, you’re selling your laptop so you can buy a Greyhound bus ticket to go across the country, that’s adventures only happen to the adventurous. 

[00:46:55] MB: And that ethos underscores the whole narrative throughout the book, including one of the last themes I’d love to touch on is this combination of the power of boldness and not being afraid to ask for something, and this notion of the mindset of possibility. Tell me about those. 

[00:47:13] MB: One of the best – Talking about like great quotable catchphrases, one of them came from the founder of TED. He said something that I'll never forget. He like looked me in the eyes and he goes – He’s like, “I live my life by two mantras.” Number one, if you don't ask, you don't get. Number two, most things don't work out.” I think that's like the perfect balance of life mantras. Number one, if you don't ask, you don't get. Number two, most things don't work out. 

I love that, and really like you said, all of these – If you look at any one of these individual stories in the book, if you look at how Spielberg launched his career, if you look at – It doesn't matter who you're looking at. There might be different stories and different lessons. The Bill Gates chapter has Bill Gates’ negotiating secrets. But when you pull back, when you get to the end of this journey and you can sort of look at it in hindsight, I started realizing that the soul of this book goes much deeper and it's really about possibility. 

What I've learned is that you can give someone all the best tools and tactics in the world. and for some reason their life still feels stuck. But if you change what someone believes is possible, they’ll never be the same. 

[00:48:29] MB: That’s a great way to look at it. That idea has shaped my life in many, many ways and sometimes you have this shift in the way that you perceive the world and it suddenly opens a tremendous amount of opportunities. 

[00:48:40] AB: Yeah. I'm all for optimizing and using research and data to figure out how to make sure you achieve your goals, but that's like the frosting on the cake. I think sometimes it doesn't work unless you have that foundation of a mindset of possibility, because you’re going to have all the hacks in the world at your disposal. But if you don't actually believe it's possible, you'll never try it. 

[00:49:07] MB: And that in many ways wraps together a lot of the themes you write about in the book and go in much more detail and contextualize with amazing and hilarious and absurd stories, some of which you touched on and many of which there’re tons more that we haven't even scratched the surface of or we’re going to run out of time and won’t be able to. But this idea that taking the third door, that there is another path out there if you can see it, if you can conceive of it, if you can believe in it, if you can be bold enough, adventurous enough, as you put it, courageous enough. There is a huge amount of magic and opportunity out there in the world, but you have to take that step. You have to take that action. You have to be somebody who executes. 

[00:49:47] AB: 100%. Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. 

[00:49:49] MB: So for listeners who want to execute, who want to take action, who want to concretely implement some of these ideas and themes into their lives, what would be one piece of homework that you would give them as an action item to take action and implement some of these themes that we've talked about today?


[00:50:05] AB: So it sort of depends on what stage you are in your journey. I have different action items that I always recommend people if they’re in the middle of their grind, in charging through the must, a lot of people who I've been meeting on the book tour are people who – Some people are just starting out with their careers. Some people are late in their careers, in the 50s, and 60s and they're trying to find their next big jump. Let's say you're in that latter group, where you’re looking for that patch and you're looking for your path something that makes you jump out of bed every day. Here is something very concrete that you can start doing today that will change your life forever, and it sounds super simple, but the results are unbelievable. It sounds so simple that it's almost hard to believe that it’ll even make a difference. But it is shocking, and it's called the 30-day challenge, and this is how it works. 

If you want to do this, go by, go today to – Go to like a pharmacy and buy a $1 spiral notebook, a really just simple spiral notebook and write 30-day challenge on the front, and it's really important that this is a fresh spiral notebook and there’s no many other writing in it. So you write 30-day challenge on the front and every day for the next 30 days you have to journal about the same three questions, and it's super important that these are 30 consecutive days. You're not doing 30 days spread out over a few months, over a year. You're doing 30 days in a row and you have to choose one time of the day, whether it's morning or night, where you will consistently do this. These are three questions you have to journal about. Number one, what excited me today? What excited me today? What filled me with enthusiasm? What excited me today? That's the first one. The second one is what drained me of energy today? What drained me of energy today? The third one is what did I learn about myself today? 

If you journal on these three things, the first few days will be sort of, but by day 10, 12, you're going to start really hating this exercise. It’s going to start feeling really boring and really repetitive and you're not can you think it's going anywhere and you’re going to want to stop. By day 20, it's going to start getting a little interesting again. By day 28, 29 and 30 is when the magic happens, because then you can start seeing that pattern over 30 days, and I highly, highly recommend anyone who's looking for their path, looking to find their enthusiasm, looking to find their passion, looking for the next step to feel more alive, to go after their life's work, the 30-day challenge helps more than I could say. 

[00:52:41] MB: That was great, extremely practical and applicable. For listeners who want to find out more about, who want to find the third door, where can they find you and the book online? 

[00:52:49] AB: The book is everywhere you like to buy books. So whether it's Amazon, or Barnes & Noble, Kindle, audio books, I recorded the audiobook myself. So it’s a ton of fun. So it’s on Audible and iTunes, and if you ended up getting the book because you heard it on the podcast, definitely say hi to me on social so I could say thank you. My handle is @AlexBanayan. So A-L-E-X B-A-N-A-Y-A-N, and I would love, love, love to say. 

[00:53:18] MB: Well, Alex, thank you so much for coming on the show for sharing your stories, some of your stories and all these wisdom. I can say I've read the book and it was a fascinating journey. Incredible stories, you'll laugh, you'll cry, but it reminded me of when I read it the first time that I read the 4-Hour Work week, and it had that kind of energy that vibe that more than anything opens the space of possibility and makes you think about all the exciting cool and fun and unknown things that are out there. 

[00:53:48] AB: Thank you so much, man. That means more than I could say. 

[00:53:51] 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.

I'm going to give you three reasons why you should sign up for our e-mail list today by going to successpodcast.com, signing up right on the homepage. There are some incredible stuff that’s only available to those on the e-mail list, so be sure to sign up, including an exclusive curated weekly e-mail from us called Mindset Monday, which is short, simple, filled with articles, stories, things that we found interesting and fascinating in the world of evidence-based growth in the last week. 

Next, you're going to get an exclusive chance to shape the show, including voting on guests, submitting your own personal questions that we’ll ask guests on air and much more. Lastly, you’re going to get a free guide we created based on listener demand, our most popular guide, which is called How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide by signing up and joining the e-mail list today. Again, you can do that at successpodcast.com, sign up right at the homepage, or if you're on the go, just text the word “smarter”, S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44222. 

Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes because that helps boost the algorithm, that helps us move up the iTunes rankings and helps more people discover the Science of Success. 

Don't forget, if you want to get all the incredible information we talked about in the show, links transcripts, everything we discussed and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can get those at successpodcast.com, just hit the show notes button right at the top. 

Thanks again, and we'll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

Your Ultimate Guide to Performing Under Pressure and Unleashing Confidence - Dr. Michael Gervais is BACK

In this episode we go deep into the high performance habits of the worlds top performers, look at the only place confidence truly comes from, dig into why we struggle to perform when the pressure is on, examine the habits, routines, and strategies the world’s absolute best use to perform at their peak, and much more with our guest Dr. Michael Gervais. 

Dr. Michael Gervais is a high performance psychologist who has worked with some of the world’s top performers including the Seattle Seahawks, Felix Baumgartner (The Red Bull Athlete Who Completed the Stratosphere Jump) Olympians, musicians, and champions! His work has been featured on ESPN, CNN, The New York Times, and much more!

• We love to put some of the world’s top performers on a pedestal - but there are extraordinary things that take place every day that aren’t capture on the cameras

• Are extraordinary performers born that way? No.

• Why do we struggle to perform “when the lights are on”/ “when there is pressure”

• Top performers have fundamentally organized their lives around growth and improvement

• What does it mean to have your life organized around performance and growth?

• There are only 3 things we can train

• We can train our body

  1. We can train our craft

  2. We can train our minds

• The origins of sport are built on the ancient traditions of war

• When we look at the best in the world across domains - they are more similar to each other than dissimilar

• Relentless dedication to building and refining their craft

  1. Relentless dedication to building the right body / carriage

  2. Ability to adapt and be strong from a mental perspective

• Provide opportunities to stress the system (mind & body) and to recover the system

• Feedback loops are both internal and external

• The importance of having consequences - both natural/physical consequences and man made consequences

• Lessons from working with coach Pete Carroll from the Seattle Seahawks

• Ask yourself: Who in your life helps you be better and what are the characteristics of those people?

• The most significant accelerant to someone’s success is knowing that you have their back

• Internal feedback loops

• How am I doing? How does it feel? Am I executing at the right level?

  1. What is going on in my body?

  2. Being aware of the energy, tension in your body, your thoughts, etc

• Once you become aware of maladaptive mental strategies - then you develop the tools to adjust

• First awareness,

  1. Then skill

• External feedback loops - having people in your life who can help you get better

• At any given time we can have our attention focused internally or externally - but we can’t spend too much time focused on the internal

• In training - the external feedback loops and human feedback becomes tricky - and that’s why Dr. Gervais has a deep commitment to maintaining and building healthy relationships

• To do extraordinary things in life - NOBODY does it alone. We need other people. You have to invest in the true connection with other people.

• The greatest wayfinders, when they set sail, they don’t pray for calm waters, they pray for rugged seas, moving through the rugged seas is what forges strength - that is where you get made, that is where you find your true nature

• The brain’s job is to scan the world and see what’s dangerous - but you can’t let the brain have too much control

• Your brain is underserved, underutilized, under-programmed

• If you don’t train the software of your brain - the brain’s natural reaction will win.

• You have to condition your mind so that your brain doesn’t win. So that your natural fight or flight reaction doesn’t take over.

• YOLO.. FOMO… now FOPO - Fear of Other People’s Opinion - one of the most silent traps that robs us and keeps us stuck

• What should we do if we get caught up in the internal dialogue too often? What should we do if we get stuck in our head too often?

• Start training your mind, just like you would train your body. Start training in simple, calm environments, and then push yourself into more and more stressful environments

• Optimism is at the core of mental toughness. Optimism is a skill, you’re not born with it, you have to TRAIN it.

• Just like everything - genetics are involved, environment is involved, training is involved.

• This is about conditioning your mind to be extraordinary on the razors edge

• 5 Functions Under Stress

• Fight

  1. Flight

  2. Freeze

  3. Submission

  4. Flow

• In western culture, our self worth is tied to our achievements and results. The idea that we need to do more to be more is broken. It’s wrong.

• The notion that you need to do more to be more is exhausting - it’s time to flip the model.

• We need to BE MORE to DO MORE, let our DOING flow form our BEING

• Present

  1. Rounded

  2. Authentic

• Our value in inherent and not contingent on what we do. The intellectual idea is not enough, we have to ACT ON IT.

• The acquisition of knowledge is not enough, you have to APPLY to knowledge.

• When you have a deep trust that you can do difficult things, and you don’t need the doing to define you, you have incredible freedom.

• The most powerful people in the world are those that have nothing to lose.

• Those that have NOTHING TO PROVE are incredibly powerful.

• I know how to be me, express me in any environment, and I'm not intimidated by what you think.

• Love deeply and know yourself and love others.

• When you don’t need to defend and protect yourself, when you can BE yourself, there is an incredible freedom in that.

• There are no tricks, there no tips - just the hard work.

• Can you be yourself in highly stressful, rugged, hostile, razor’s edge environments.

• When you get exposed for what you’re not good at, that’s when the GOOD FEEDBACK LOOPS OPEN UP - and you need to get into those environments more often.

• What are the environments and conditions where you struggle?

• Training confidence is extremely mechanical. Confidence only comes from one place - it’s not past success, its not preparation - confidence ONLY COMES FROM what you SAY TO YOURSELF.

• Write down what your internal dialogue sounds like - write those thoughts down, self doubt, self criticism, excessive worry - those thoughts don’t open up space, they constrict you.

• Write down what it sounds like to be in your head when you’re on point - when it’s good to be you, what do you say to yourself?

• Externalizing your thoughts is a key step in building confidence.

• Practice good thoughts, and put yourself in environments to test them.

• “If you’re gonna throw darts, know where the bullseye is” - the bullseye in this case is what thoughts work for you

• Thoughts lead to thought patterns, thought patterns lead to habits of mind. We want to build positive habits of mind.

• Feelings only happen if you reverse engineering them through thinking and thinking patterns.

• Insights from Felix Baumgartern’s Stratosphere Jump

• Thoughts lead to emotions, and emotions + thoughts impact performance

• It’s sloppy to show up and just think you will be OK, show up in presence

• Training the mind is not EXTRA - it’s something we need to invest in on a regular basis. If you train your craft to a ridiculous level, but you don’t train your mind, as soon as pressure enters the environment, you will will be exposed

• To have a strong mind, you have to TRAIN YOUR MIND FOR STRENGTH

• Mindfulness is intimately linked to confidence

• Mindfulness is a focus training to focus on the awareness - that awareness training is the beginning step of being aware of our thoughts and thought patterns. If we can become aware and more sensitive to our thoughts and thought patterns, we can course correct and built a more optimal internal state.

• “Choking” - where does that term come form? What does it mean to choke?

• Performing under pressure is good, but it’s not dissolving pressure - that’s a different thing.

• If you think there’s pressure you’re right.

• Is it possible to change your relationship with yourself and your environment in such a way that pressure is dissolved. You have to do the hard work to figure out your unique psychological framework from your parents, peers, pop culture, and more.

• Do you think buddha had pressure? No he dissolved it. What about Jesus? The purpose was so much larger, and their internal framework was so sturdy that they dissolved pressure. Flow state / the zone is essentially the dissolving of pressure. Using the challenge of the environment to create a deep focus.

• Focus on the task at hand, not focus on the clunkiness

• We dig into the daily architecture of a world class performer and what that looks like

• “You would be surprised by how much we focus on recovery” within the framework of a world class performer’s daily architecture

• Day in and day out is an internal competition with yourself

• Mindfulness/meditation is a “massive accelerate” to mastering your internal domain

• Homework - take a good hard look at your sleep patterns

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This weeks episode is brought to you by our partners at Skillshare!

For a limited time, Skillshare is offering our listeners TWO MONTHS OF UNLIMITED CLASSES for only $0.99! That's UNLIMITED classes for two months for only $0.99. Go to www.skillshare.com/success to redeem this incredible offer NOW!

Skillshare is an online learning platform with over 18,000 classes in design, business, technology, and more. Whether you’re trying to deepen your professional skill-set, start a side hustle, or just explore something new, Skillshare will keep you learning in 2018 and beyond.

Again, Skillshare is offering our listeners the incredible deal of two whole months of UNLIMITED classes for only $0.99 so get out there and start learning at www.skillshare.com/success

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [SoS Episode] The Psychology Secrets of Extreme Athletes, NFL Teams & The World’s Top Performers with Dr. Michael Gervais

• [SoS Episode] Everything You Know About Sleep Is Wrong with Dr. Matthew Walker

• [Article] Good genes are nice, but joy is better by Liz Mineo

• [Wiki Article] Martin Seligman

• [TEDTalk] The new era of positive psychology by Martin Seligman

• [SoS Episode] Embracing Discomfort

• [SoS Episode] How To Demolish What’s Holding You Back & Leave Your Comfort Zone with Andy Molinsky

• [Book] Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert M Pirsig

• [Website] Finding Mastery

• [Website] Compete to Create

• [Twitter] Michael Gervais

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] 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 a billion downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries. 

In this episode, we go deep into the high performance habits of the world’s top performers, look at the only place confidence truly comes from, dig into why we struggle to perform when the pressure is on, examine closely the habits, routines and strategies of the world’s absolute best, and what they use to perform at their peak and much more with our guest, Dr. Michael Gervais, who’s making a comeback appearance on the show. This is his second time around. We love the first interview so much that we’re having him back. 

I’m going to give you three quick reasons why you should sign up and join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. There are some amazing stuff that’s only available to our email subscribers, so be sure, check that out, sign up and join the email list if you have not done it. 

First, you’re going to get an awesome free guide that we created based on listeners demand. This is our most popular guide, it’s called How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it absolutely for free along with another surprise bonus guide when you sign up and join the email list today. You’re also going to get a curated weekly email from us every Monday called Mindset Monday, which listeners have been loving. It’s short, simple, articles, stories and videos that we found fascinating or interesting in the last week. 

Lastly, you're going to get an exclusive chance to shape the show. You can help us vote on guests. You can submit your own questions to our guests, help us change the intro music, become part of exclusive things that we only offered our community, including giveaways and much more, but you won't know about any of that stuff unless you're on the email list. So be sure to sign up, join email us today. Again, you can do that at successpodcast.com and sign up right there on the homepage, or if you’re driving around, if you're on your phone, if you're on the go right now, just text the words “smarter”. That's “smarter" to the number 44222. That's “smarter" to 44222. 

In our previous episode we discussed the relationship between bad ideas and creative genius; the three biggest lessons from setting the most successful hedge fund on earth; why a complete stranger may often be a better judge of your abilities than you are; the key things that stand in the way of developing more self-awareness and how you can fix them; why it's so important to invest in the ability to make better decisions and much more with our guest, Dr. Adam Grant. If you want to become a better version of yourself, be more creative, have more ideas and be more innovative, be sure to listen to that episode.

Now for the show. 

[0:03:05.5] MB: Today, we have another exciting guest coming back to the show, Dr. Michael Gervais. Michael is a high-performance psychologist who has worked with some of the world’s top performers, and including the Seattle Seahawks, Felix Baumgartner, the Red Bull athlete who completed the stratosphere jump, Olympians, musicians and champions. His work is been featured on ESPN, CNN, The New York Times, and much more. Michael, welcome back to the Science of Success. 

[0:03:31.6] MG: All right. Thanks for having me back. This was a great conversation the first time around. So, thank you. 

[0:03:37.7] MB: We really enjoyed the conversation last time and there's so many more nuggets of insight that we want to dig into. I mean, you obviously have spent a tremendous amount of time working with some of the world’s top performers, athletes, musicians, etc., and really kind of seen what it takes to perform at the highest levels. I'd love to, in this episode, kind of unpack and get into some of the concrete elements of kind of how do you work on those mindset trainings for somebody who's at the top of their game? What does that look like? How do they structure their day and how does that process kind of function? 

[0:04:11.8] MG: I love it. So one of the, I think, fundamental — I don't want to call it a mistake, but there's a nuance here that I want to talk about, which is we love to put the great doers of the world on a pedestal, and some of the most extraordinary people are people in sport, in science and people that have done amazing things. It's not that they — What they've done is not amazing, but there's media around it. So we pay attention to it. 

There are extraordinary things that take place all the time, but there're no cameras. We don’t know how to value that creativity, that dedicated disciplined mind, because we don't see it. So what I want to pull a thread back on is there are extraordinary people right now listening in your community that do extraordinary things and they know it and they’re nodding their head, like, “Yeah, right on.” They just don’t have a camera pointed at them.

That begs the question is; are the extraordinary doers that have cameras on them, are they born that way? No. We know. What is it about? Okay, yes. They are able to perform when the lights are on, and many of us struggle with that. Okay. So that is one piece of it, is that sometimes the non-conditioned mind finds it very difficult to be fluid and to be eloquent when there's “pressure”, and we have to define pressure for ourselves so we can get into that conversation. 

So it's not that these extraordinary doers that have media coverage are fundamentally different than the rest of us, but they have done something that is fundamentally different. They’ve organized their life, fundamentally organized their life to grow, to get better, to be progressive, to push to the boundaries, to have incredible feedback loops that are highly accurate and very sensitive and finely tuned, and those feedback loops are part of the accelerated arc or accelerated growth that they're looking for. 

So while it's easy to put extraordinary doers on a pedestal, and I don’t want to take anything away from what they've done, because you see some of the best in the world, the tip of the arrow in any domain and it’s like, “Wow! That is beautiful,” like look how easy they make the complicated seen, and it is beautiful, whether it's words, or whether it’s painting in canvas, or whether it's movement motion. It is beautiful when you see the best in the best. But when we pull back the curtain and really look what’s extraordinary, is the way that they fundamentally organize their life to get better and to help those around them get better. 

[0:06:49.8] MB: There're several different things I want to unpack from that. So just to make sure we don't forget these, I definitely want to dig into pressure and how to perform under pressure. I really want to talk about how we can build feedback loops into our lives. But before we do either of those, tell me more about this idea of having their day or their lives sort of fundamentally organized around performance and growth. 

[0:07:11.4] MG: Okay. Well, if we take a look first at what is very primary, like the basic, basic, basics of people getting better, there're only three things that we can train as we’ve talked about before. We can train our body, we can train our craft and we can train our mind. For a long time, people have invested incredible resources, good science as well as old school traditions on how to develop a craft, whether that craft be ballet or whether that craft be something about leadership. There’s a good science and some practices. On the leadership stuff, it goes all the way back Sun Tzu, The Art of War. I don’t know how many translations there’s been, but those principles seem to be interesting to lots of leaders and all of modern day research that comes up about leadership. 

The same with sport, like the origin of sport are built on ancient traditions of war. So those traditions have been passed down and past passed down and passed down and mutated and adapted for modern sport. So they're great traditions and there's good science. The emerging field of sport science is we’re starting to get our arms around what are the right questions and what is the right — Or what are the right data to be able to have better insights that are actionable for athletes to be even more finely tuned to both their intuition, their sense of how their body is doing based without data as well as how their body is doing with data. 

Okay. So then the third pillar though, the mind, and how to condition and train the mind. It’s a big deal, and I haven't met an athlete or a coach yet you on the world stage that doesn't say, “Oh, yeah. The mental part of the game, that’s a game. That is a big deal.” It begs the question; what are the ancient traditions and what is the science teaching us about how to condition our mind? 

So when we look at the best in the world and when we look at them across domains, the tip of the arrow across domains are more similar to each other than dissimilar. That being said, there is no just one path and not everybody does it a certain way. There are as many different routes to becoming one's best or the best that you can imagine. So there is a common thread though that people are uncommonly relentlessly dedicated in almost a nauseatingly focused way to build and refine their craft, to build and have the right body for the right carriage, if you will, to be strong and flexible to do things that they need to do. Then, also, saying ability to adapt and be strong from a mental standpoint. 

So those are the three lenses, and what they do is they organize their life to be able to provide opportunities to stress the system and recover the system. When I say system, I’m talking about the human mind and body, and it’s not that mechanical. It's not that simple, but every day we need to push on the limits of our craft, push on the limits of our body and push on the limits of our mind, and then appropriately recover. How do we know if we are pushing to the limits? We need those feedback loops, and those feedback loops are both internal and external. 

So what an external feedback loop is like information from the environment, which in, let’s say, actions sports or X-Games types of stuff or things that are happening outdoors. Less the stick and ball sports for just a moment, but more of the action-adventure sports. 

When people make mistakes there, there are consequences. I don’t want to be dramatic. There can be radical consequences, but they don’t have to be. But those consequences are often physical and they’re real and that sort of toll on the body can be very dangerous. So those feedback loops are wonderful. When you get real-time natural feedbacks, when there are consequences on the line, that feedback is awesome, because you have to be on. You have to have your antenna perked in just the right attunement. If not, those consequences can — They can get you. 

Then there's also more man-made or artificial consequences. Those man-made artificial consequences oftentimes show up in business, they show up on tradition stick and ball sport, where it's a little bit of like you look back to other humans to see how you're doing. That can be an accelerant, that could be a good thing and that could can be troublesome if that is — If looking for others for feedback becomes part of a loop that is not — What’s the right word here? Is not primary and pure, meaning that it can get cloudy and noisy when we’re looking to other people to see how you we’re doing. Unless we know those people in our lives, have our best interest at heart. 

We asked the last two years, we’ve spent — Coach Carroll is the head coach of the Seattle Seahawks. He and I built a joint venture together and we took our insights on how to switch on a culture and how to train the minds of people that want to be great. The work, essentially, we’ve been doing it up at the Seattle Seahawks together and we’ve built this business. Over the last 24 months we’ve trained 30,000 people, on average, eight hours a person. That's 240,000 human hours of mindset training across our efforts here, and we’re just getting started, but it’s a really good dent. I shouldn’t say it’s a dent. It’s a really good momentum is more of what it feels like. 

The point that I want to share about that is that when we ask folks about who in your life helps you be better and what are those characteristics of those people? It's basically an exercise to help people say, “What are those characteristics, and am I living that way? Am I helping people based on the characteristics [inaudible 0:12:59.3] be better?” 

Across the board, it’s like unanimously it’s outrageous. People say, “You know what? The most significant accelerants for me being better, those people in my life, are those that I just know that they have my back, that they have my best interest, not their best interest.” 

When we stitch that back to the feedback loop, the feedback loop from humans is really important when we know first and foremost that it is really about them providing us the right information in the right way at the right time to help us grow, to help the person grow. It doesn’t mean that they’re interested in the benefits, the ancillary benefits if you do extraordinarily well, and that’s kind of the coaching role in many ways, is you want to help athletes or executives be great. When I say coaching, I’m not talking about life coaching. I’m talking about performance coaching. When you want to help them be great, that there is a glow that you get and that helps your career as well. 

It is sticky in some circumstances because we are relying on each other to do great, but we have to first and foremost have the relationships where it’s pure, and the information I’m going to give you is for you to be your best. Anyways, I could talk more deeply if you’d like about feedback loops, but those are some of the large 60,000-foot frames that I think that are important to get right. 

[0:14:27.5] MB: I want drill down into feedback loops, but I don’t want to lose sight on the larger conversation, so I do want to come back to that. But talking specifically about kind of developing feedback loops in our lives, I think when I look at something like sport, or even something like poker, or chess where there's really clear sort of results and measurement and the ability to go back and analyze performance really succinctly, it's obvious kind of how to get feedback. But when I look at something like business or investing or even some creative endeavors, how do you think about developing feedback loops and those more kind of murky, nebulous fields? 

[0:15:04.2] MG: Okay. The main levers of feedback are internal, so that's like, “How am I doing?” What does it feel like? Am I aligned with my thoughts, my words and my actions? Is my body executing at the level or in the right way? 

When we’re talking about poker and those types of things, it is an alignment that you can sense. Is there clarity in my thought? Does my body have too much tension? Not enough tension? Am I under-aroused, over-aroused? There is an internal feedback loop, and that is a skill to become aware of that. 

The second part of that skill is to be able to once you’re aware that maybe — Let's say that you're a bit too much, or you’ve got too much energy in your body, or you're thinking about what happens if you blow it, or what the consequences will be if you’ll lose this hand or lose this round. That once you're aware of maladaptive physical or mental strategies, then the second part, the second skill is to have the tools, the mental skills and tools to be able to adjust. So it's a two-part system of being great as an internal feedback loop. First, awareness, then skill. 

Now, external is when you've got people in your life that are helping you get better. That's part of external, and the other part of external is being able to recognize the impact that you're having on the environment and/or that the environment is having on you. At any given point in time that we can have attention focused internally or externally, and if we spend too much time on the internal awareness, we lose the ability to focus on the external, which is really where sport and performance take place. It happens outside. All of the thinking and the regulation that happens inside is to ready us to be able to have output, and that output, what we’re looking for is high performing, eloquently adjusting, real-time, sensitive, extraordinary impact on our environment. That’s what the output is. Whether it's a paintbrush, whether it’s the analysis of a poker table, or whether it's snapping a free-throw, game seven of the finals in the NBA, whatever it might be. 

So there is an internal game that happens first, and then there's an external game. What we want to be able to do is have this rapid cycle between internal and external, and that is essentially the feedback loops that we’re talking about. 

Now, when we’re in training, those external feedback loops, the human part is the part that gets tricky, because human relationships are tricky. They’re not simple, and that's why we start — When I saw we, I’m talking about Coach Carroll and I, more particularly, maybe at the Seattle Seahawks, there's a deep commitment to want to be a relationship-based culture where we start with the relationships, because it's with the relationships with other people that makes us. Now we have to have a relationship with ourselves first to be a great partner for other people. So it's relationship with self first, then relationship with others, getting those things calibrated properly, getting the mission set up so that we can nod our head and point our noses in the right direction, in the same direction, and then work ridiculously hard running to the edge of our capacity on craft, body and mind every day. When guys are tripping and falling down or not doing exactly right or literally dropping a ball sometimes, it's okay. I got their back, because I know that I’m going to trust that they’re going to have my back as well. 

So to do extraordinary things in life, whether that's being an extraordinary lover or being an extraordinary entrepreneur, nobody does it alone. We need other people. So what that means is we’ve got to invests in the true connection to lock our arms, because to do extraordinary things, we need other people. That means we got to stay locked as best as we can when it gets hard, and the greatest way finders — I'm not sure if you're familiar with way finder. The people that travel the world without modern technology and travel the oceans without modern technology. When they set sail — And they might not come back, because the ocean is dangerous. When they set sail, they don't pray for calm waters, they pray for rugged sees, because it's the rugged see, it’s moving through the rugged see that becomes the separator. Most people can’t manage the tension. They can't manage the hostility or ruggedness, because they have not conditioned their mind to find that that is where we get exposed, that is where we get made. That is where we find out our true nature, in those rugged and hostile environments. 

For most people, if they haven’t conditioned their mind, their brain wins. So the brain's job is to scan the world and find what’s dangerous. I don’t want to oversimplify this really beautiful piece of electricity, chemistry tissue that we have really no idea what this three pounds of tissue is doing in our skull, and it's beautiful. It’s amazing and it’s underserved, underutilized, under-programed and that hardware, our brain tissue is programmed by our mind. The mind is the software, the hardware if you will, and those that haven’t been training the software, the mind, and brain will win, because its whole job is to keep you alive. The mind’s job is to override to know how to override our DNA when we find ourselves purely responding in survival mode as opposed to optimized mode. Our survival tactics that are natural to our brain will help us stay alive, and they are optimized for survival. 

When you're giving a speech in front of — I don’t know. Fill in the blank. Two people to 20,000 people, it’s not survival mode at that time. It’s meant to be a moment to express authentically, and if we don't condition our mind — This is not me on a pedestal. If we don’t condition our mind, our brain will win. I know you felt that, Matt. I know that your community folks feel it, that we have those moments and we’ve studied our ass off, we prepared for it and all of a sudden we tighten up and we've got cortisol running through our system. We’ve got too much adrenaline. We've got that stuff inside of us. We start to sweat in weird places. We start to think differently. We start to have this rapid eye movement. We’re scanning the world and seeing if we’re doing okay. Bullshit on that. That’s where we get into trouble, is when we look into the world and to the eyes of other people to see their body language to see if we’re okay, that's wrong. That's not having an accurate internal filter. That's having an external focus filter to see if you're okay based on what other people think of you. 

I know you've heard of YOLO, you only live once. That’s great. You’ve heard of FOMO, fear of missing out. That's cool. But I think there’s a new thing that — I don’t know. I haven’t heard it before. Maybe this is like where it happens, FOPO, fear of other people’s opinion. It’s one of, I think, the most silent traps that robs us, that t keeps us stuff from expressing and exploring our own potential, fear of other people’s opinions. 

Especially in our modern times, we’ve got this ancient brain that’s trying to keep us alive. In modern times, we just haven't quite figured out how to say, “I’m okay. I'm likely not be hunted today and there's not a predator that’s 15-feet tall that's trying to — Whatever, and there’s not a warring country that's coming into my tribe today.” This is a speech. This is a bet I’m laying on the poker table. This is a free-throw shot. This is — Well, fill in the blanks. 

I got to get off my pedestal for a minute. I got to tell you, Matt. I love these conversations, so when you asked me to come back I was like, “Yeah! I love it.” 

[0:22:53.7] MB: You’re probably listening to the show because you want to master new skills and abilities so that you can live a rich and rewarding life. That's why I'm excited to tell you once again about our loyal and amazing sponsor, Skillshare. Skillshare is an online learning community with over 16,000 classes in design, business and more. You can learn everything from logo design, to social media marketing, to street photography and you get unlimited access to all of these classes for a single low monthly price so you never have to pay per class again. 

They have some awesome courses on there that I personally love, everything from mastering Evernote, to mind mapping, to learning how to draw, or if you want to get a leg up on graphic design, social media, even your culinary knife skills, be sure to check out Skillshare

Skillshare is offering something incredible to our listeners; two months for just $0.99. You can get that by going to skillshare.com/success. That skillshare.com/success for two months of courses for just $0.99. Be sure to check that out. 

[0:24:00.6] MB: No. That’s great. I mean, there're so many things I want to dig into from what you said. I mean, let's start with when — By the way, I think it's such a really important point that the brain, the hardware of the brain was not designed to exist in modern society. It was designed to exist tens of thousands of years ago. The reactions we have to an email from your boss might be the same reaction we had to a dangerous threat out in the bush, and it's not the appropriate reaction in many cases. 

Funnily enough, the very first episode we ever did on the show was called the Biological Limits of the Human Mind, and that's what we talked about. So I love that principal. But I want to ground that back into what should we do when we get caught up in that internal dialogue, in that internal game when we’re too much in our heads. How does that look like to kind of both prepare for that and also in that moment kind of pull out of that? 

[0:24:56.7] MG: Okay. It’s just like everything else. It's just like physical training, and it's just like technical training, is that you want to start in a thoughtful progressive way. So early days, you start training your mind in calm environments and then you say, “Well, what does that mean? What are we training?” 

You can train confidence. You can train calm. You can train focus. You can train optimism, which is I think at the center of mental toughness. You can train passion, believe it or not, by understanding what gets in the way of passion. You can train passion as well by having a clear mission that really get your heart the thump. You train lots of mental skills, including imagery and resiliency skills. You can train all those in quiet, calm environments, and that sometimes is involved in knowledge acquisition, like what are the mechanics of competence? What is a definition of optimism? Why is it important? What’s the science around it? There’s knowledge acquisition first with just about anything. Then there’s the practicing of it. You practice those in progressively aggressive environments. So you start again with a calm environment, practicing optimism in a calm environment, and then practicing it in a more stressful environment until maybe you’re practicing it in hostile and rugged environments where consequences are real. 

I mean, we could get into the weeds of optimism if you want. Many people hear that word and they’re like, “Oh, okay! It just got soft.” “Oh! We’re going to talk about everything’s good and positive.” No, that’s not what it is. It’s not what it is at all. Optimism and pessimism are essentially the way that you think about the future and it's a skill. You’re not born with it. You don't come out of the womb optimistic or pessimistic. 

There is some evidence that there is some genetic dispositions where people come out of the womb with a little bit more of an anxious, pessimistic state, and some come out with a bit more optimistic, calm state. That being said, it’s a skill. Okay? It's just like everything. Genetics are involved, environments are involved and so is training. 

I don’t know. I just flat out don't know somebody who is world-class, world leading that doesn't believe that what's coming up is going to be extraordinary. That’s a skill. It’s totally a skill. As soon as I talk about optimism and pessimism in small rooms of 200 or 2,000 people, I could feel it. I could just feel that people are like, “Oh, okay. Here we go. I knew it. This is going to turn soft all of a sudden.” It’s like, again, bullshit on that. This is about conditioning your mind to be extraordinary on the razor’s edge, and if you don't believe it's going to get good, it happens, we’d give in to the attention of our brain and we eject out. If we eject out too early or pull out too early or escape, if you will — Remember, our brain is this five functions under stress; fight, flight, frees, submission and flow. If we pull out too early, we don’t get to the good stuff. 

If I could pull on this thread just a little bit more. Right now, we live in a culture, Western culture for certain, where productivity, where our identities are increasingly tied to how much we’re doing. We are running and gunning. We’re hustling and where our self-worth driven by all the non-conscious belief. If we do more, that we’ll be more. We’ll be more relevant, be more valuable. We’ll be more needed, maybe more worthy, and it's a function of what and how much we do. That’s wrong. The idea that we need to do more to be more is broken, and it was passed down for good reason from our great-great- grandparents coming through the Industrial Revolution when they saw machines coming in and they said, “Oh! You know what? No machine is taking my job. I’m going to outwork that thing. You can't replace a human.” So they went home and passed on that thinking that we need to work to save our jobs, and that's where like the real hard work value systems were reinforced in modern times, but now it's gone crazy. It’s literally — I bet you feel it. I bet your community feels it, where this idea that I need to do more to be more is so tiring and so exhausting that people find a real deep fatigue worrying about all the things that they need to do to be okay. It's time to flip the model. I think you would feel and I think most people do feel it. It’s time to flip the model, that we need to be more to do more and let our doing flow from our being. When we’re talking about being; being more present being more grounded,  being more authentic. It feels like to me it's time to recognize that our value is inherent and not contingent upon what we do. 

You can nod your head right now say, “Yeah. Mumbo-jumbo. Yeah, I hear you. Of course, that’s not new.” No, it’s not, but the intellectual idea and concept is not enough. We have to act on it. So the acquisition of knowledge is not enough, and so many of us are smart enough that learning comes easy, that we want to learn, learn, learn, learn, read this book, that book. I get asked all the time, “What are the three books that you enjoy?” Who cares? It's how do you apply. Why do you care what book I’m reading? I don’t get that. It’s a book that I’m interested in. That doesn’t mean you should be interested in it. It’s the application of knowledge that really is, I think, the most important accelerant to our growth. Knowledge is important. It’s a base, but it's how you condition and train and apply it in calm environments, progressively working up to rugged environments that allows you to say something to yourself, which is something along the lines, “I can do difficult things.” When you can say I can do difficult things and you can have a deep trust that you can be authentically yourself and grounded and present in any environment and you don't need the doing to define you, there is incredible freedom right on the side. That's a human that becomes really powerful. 

In graduate school, one of my professors was just bang-on right about this and you just hit it home. He says the most powerful people in the world are those that have nothing to lose. Then you just stopped talking. I could tell, he knew exactly what he meant, but he wasn't giving us the answer. Come to find out, it's like those that have too much money, they can just out-money in anything. They are dangerous, because they don't care about it. They have too much. I’m thinking about the billionaires that — Some sort of lawsuit or whatever. That’s a dangerous human. 

You know who the other dangerous ones are? Those who have nothing. They have nothing. Maybe they have no home. They become dangerous, because they have nothing. So there's nothing to lose. Then there's a third person, those that have nothing to prove. Because they don’t have to do the thing to prove to you that they are okay. 

So we can talk about all the mental skills and tactics and tools, and they’re all great. They’re very important to get you to one, which is I know how to be me and express me in any environment, and I'm not intimidated by what you think. I love you. I love people, and I no longer care what they think of me. If you can get to that place, there is an freedom on the other side to figure it out. I think that is part of all of our journeys, to figure out how to love deeply, to know yourself so well that you can love others. You’re not trying to protect and save your own ass and defend yourself when someone in your home says, “Why did you do that?”  Listen, I wish I was free from that. I’m not. I’m not trying to say that I’m this [inaudible 0:32:29.8]. That's wrong. I’m just like everyone else in your community trying to figure it out. 

When we don't need to defend and protect ourselves, that we can be ourselves and be eloquent and adjust, there's an incredible freedom on that. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, a manager, a leader in an organization, a poker player or an aspiring or world-class athlete, to be able to be grounded and be present in stress, what once was a stressful environment — Woo! That’s the good stuff.

[0:33:01.2] MB: Wow! That was amazing. Literally, when you said that those who have nothing to prove are incredibly powerful, I got chills. I mean, a fascinating idea and concept and I think so, so important. I love also the notion that we need to let our doing flow from our being. Both of those ideas are really, really interesting to me. 

[0:33:23.7] MG: Yeah, there we go. There we go. It's good stuff. The tools and tricks and tactics — There's no tricks, by the way. There’s no tips. It's like you got to just do the hard yard of training your mind and get to the place that you can be you. What does that mean? Can you be yourself in a highly stressful, rugged, hostile, razor’s edge environments? Because if you can't and you know you can't, or know that most of the time you can’t, you’re just fooling yourself. You’re trying to prove that you're okay. That's a slippery little internal game that our minds can play on us. 

I know this from me, trying to work me out better so I can be a better partner to other people, is that it's hard to do the hard things. It's really hard. When it gets hard — There’s a sign in the Seattle Seahawks in one of the doors for one of the team rooms and it says, “Everyone wants to be great, and so they realize what is required of greatness,” and doing the hard things means that you're not great at it. It’s hard. It's sticky. It's like you're not eloquent, but that's where we get, again, exposed for what we’re not good at. Not exposed as a human, but exposed as a doer. Not a beer, but we get exposed what we’re not good at, and that's where the good feedback loops take place. It’s like, “Oh, look. I can't think clearly as soon as —” fill in the blank, or I can't move eloquently as soon as —” fill in the blank. I need to be in those environments more effort. 

For your community members that are listening, I think it's really important for them to write that stuff down. Write it down. Just put it on a whiteboard. Put it in your phone, whatever. What are the environments and conditions when you struggle? Them from there you can back in a very clear mental skills training and say, “Okay. Well, I’m going to train confidence. I’m going to train calm. I’m going to train mindfulness,” and that’s where it gets really, I think, bespoked and customized. 

[0:35:19.9] MB: There's so many different ways I want to dig into this. I do want to want to talk a little bit about some of those kind of tactics for training calm and confidence. I know in our previous conversation we went really deep into optimism and kindness of the strategies for training that. Tell me a little bit about how you work on training calm and confidence. 

[0:35:40.5] MG: Confidence is really mechanical. It’s super simple. It's super simple to understand. It doesn’t mean it’s super simple to do, but confidence only comes from one place. Most people when asked that question — I don’t want to put you on the spot, Matt, but like your community members that are listening, where does confidence come from? If you just take a moment to try to sort that out, where is that coming from? That if it only comes from one place, it's not success. It's not great performance. It's not path to success. It’s not preparation even. 

I can't tell you how many best in the world — Like in the UFC, I was fortunate enough to spend some time working with some amazing combative athletes in that domain, and some that didn't understand how to actually, the value of training their mind, but that they were doing some work, because I was obviously working with them. I would see them change from the concrete floor walking into the UFC cage, I’d see them change on the five steps that they walk up to walking through the threshold of the cage door. The cage door closes behind them and they’re looking across to another skilled human, equally as skilled, may be better, maybe a little bit worst, but equally as skilled. 

To have 18,000 fans in the environment, millions of people watching to want to see blood, potentially yours, and you're looking across to another man that is equally as skilled as you. All you have is your feet, your elbows, your hands, some knees and your mind. That’s it. Your hands and your feet and your mind in the most ancient tests, and I see people change because the environment dictated their mind, rather than their mind dictate the environment. It begins with conference. It really does. Confidence only comes from one place, which is not past success. It’s not preparation. Those are necessary, but not sufficient. It only comes from what you say to yourself, and I've seen people that are pretty confident on the concrete floor, but then as soon as they walk up the steps, they start to say something to themselves, that inner dialogue, that self-talk that’s like, “Oh, man! I don’t know. Maybe. God! I hope I’m going to be okay. Gees! I wish I would have slept a little bit better. Damn!” fill in the blanks, and that’s where we start to really unravel. 

So confidence doesn't come from preparation. You got to have it. It’s a necessary ingredient, but not enough. It only really comes from what you say to yourself. So, write it down. Write down what it sounds like when you’re a shithead to yourself, like when you're screwed up, write those thoughts down and then be done with them. Those thoughts, those self-critical, self-doubt, excessive worry, all of those thoughts don't build space. They build constriction, they build tension, they build tightness. While it might seem right or might seem — I don’t know, candid-flavored if you will. What’s the big deal? If I say to myself, “I suck.” That one statement is not enough to do any real damage, but it's a little paper cut, and over time, a bunch of paper cuts in the same area becomes a real irritant. 

Then on the other side, write down the thoughts. Literally, the statements, the way it sounds to be in your head when you're on point. When it's good to be you, what are you saying to yourself? That would be like 101, like the 101 course on confidence is what are the negative thoughts and what are the positive thoughts. Write them down. Get them out of your head. Externalize your hard drive. Get it out and then you could just make a decision about, “You know what? I want to have more of those good thoughts.” “Okay, for me to have those good, I want to practice them and then I want to put myself in environments that test them to see if they hold up, and that’s it.” 

Again, it's a mechanical process, but it doesn't mean it is mechanical and you do it. You don’t walk into an environment and say, “Oh, God! What are my good thoughts? What are my epic thoughts? That’s right, I am strong.” No, it's not like that. It’s like you’ve conditioned yourself to know that you are strong and to know that those types of thoughts build you. In the ready room, go back to the UFC. In the ready room when you’re breaking a sweat, that’s where you say to yourself, “I put in the fucking work. Let’s go! My shit is strong and on point. I’m going to snap my jab. I’m going to pivot my hips and I’m going to lock and load. Let’s go!” whatever it is. If you don't appreciate the combative sports, then you would use it something in a more artistic canvas and/or business way. So it’s doing the work ahead of time. Where does confidence come from? Now you know. It comes from what you say to yourself. Who’s responsible for that? You are that will do the work. 

[0:40:29.9] MB: So I want to get really specific on this. Once we — Let’s say somebody who’s listening and maybe has a lot of problems with negative thoughts or negative self-talk, write down the negative thoughts, write down kind of positive self-talk and what that looks like. How do we then start to — What are the mechanics of kind of conditioning ourselves to use an experience more positive self-talk? 

[0:40:53.9] MG: Again, the first is having — If you’re going to throw darts, know where the bull's-eye is. The bull's-eye in this case are thoughts that works for you, and it's not that if you wrote down five thoughts, those are the only five thoughts to have, but they just capture the spirit of that type of thinking. 

Remember, thoughts lead to thought patterns, and thoughts patterns lead to habits of mind. So we want to create habits of mind that you what? Build confidence. So what are the thoughts are just the beginning part of the bull's-eye to have thought patterns. How do you do it? Well, you could go way back to kind of early days in sport psychology and practice those thoughts. I don't think that's not — That’s too silly for me, but at least knowing them, writing them down is good, but it's really about the feeling, those thoughts and thought patterns and habits lead to emotions and feelings. So we want to get to those feelings, but feelings only happen if you reverse engineer them through thinking and thinking patterns. 

Then what do we do? We get clear that there is a type of thought structure that promotes us to feel big and strong and flexible and dynamic. So then the next thing that we do is we go challenge ourselves. Every day we’d make a commitment to challenge ourselves to see if we give in to the challenge and start to critique and doubt and worry, or do we stay the course and fight through it and say, basically, the thoughts on the other side. It’s not more complicated than that. 

Now if you don't want to do that because you can't quite figure out how to get to the edge of your comfort zone today or tomorrow, and there's lots of ways to do that. You can do that through emotional vulnerability and you can do the old school ways, do it through getting your heart rate up where it feels like it's going to — You’re at your max thresholds. So you can do it through fitness, but it’s limiting, but that's the way that a lot of people do it. Through emotional vulnerability is another way, by being uncomfortable emotionally. 

Now, you can also do it — If you don’t want to do it, again, physically, you can do it in imagination. So you can close your eyes and use this amazing imagery making machine that from good science we know does impact our performance, it impacts our neurochemistry, it impacts our neurobiology and it also impacts our psychology when we see ourselves performing and being in certain environments in particular ways. So if we can slow down and actually create a lifelike image of a particular scenario, that we can practice ways of thinking and ways of feeling and ways of moving. If you go back to something like one of the projects, the Red Bull Stratos Project that I was fortunate to be part of with Felix Baumgartner, he only got one shot in real life to jump from a 130,000 feet and he was going to be the first human to travel through the speed — To travel and break the speed of sound without a capsule around him. The brightest minds in aerospace were not sure if when he traveled through the sonic boom and part of his body was subsonic and part of his body was transonic, like there was these different tensions on every part of his body, they weren’t quite sure what was going to happen. Whether his arms and legs are going to rip off when he traveled through the sonic boom, if he could travel at the speed of sound, Mach 1. 

If you only get one shot at doing it, and we know that a particular way of thinking and feeling precedes behaviors, so thoughts lead to emotions, and emotions and thoughts together impact performance. Well, let’s get our thoughts and emotions right. So we put ourselves, especially in hostile environments, in the right condition to capture the right way of performing. How many times do you think — I’m not going to give you the number, because that part of the conversation is for him to share. What I just shared is all public. But you can imagine how many times that we used imagery to get the right state of mind and the right state of body prior to the jump so that he could perform and adjust eloquently. It is sloppy just to show up and think that you’re going to be okay. You show up in purposeful ways, in low stress environment all the way to the most rugged environment you can create. 

[0:45:06.0] MB: That's really fascinating. I’d love to hear a few more insights from your work with Felix. I mean, I remember watching that live and especially to the point where he kind of passed out for a second or they lost communication or whatever, was really, really tense, but it was an amazing jump. 

But before kind of digging into that a little bit more, I think underscoring this whole kind of delve into strategy and self-talk and how to think about your thought is something you said earlier, which is really important, which is that there are no shortcuts, right? There is no kind of tricks or tips, really, the piqued performance and all these things, the strategies are complex or hidden. They’re really simple. It's just about doing the hard work and actually putting the work in. 

[0:45:52.1] MG: Yeah, and that's why I think it's really important to just honor those — If you want to be the best version of yourself — Again, for what aim? So that you can be deeply connected to other people, and because it's the connection together that takes us to the extraordinary. Again, that's everywhere from business to love and sometimes those two are co-mingled. But the idea, meaning that we can love deeply what we do and the people that we’re with and do extraordinary things. The idea that there's only three things that we can train; craft, body and mind, training the mind is not extra. It's not something that we live to the end of the day or later. IT’s something that we need to invest in on a regular basis, because if you train your craft to a ridiculous aim and you are a technician, I mean, at the highest proficiency in the gym, so to speak, or in the office cubicle, but you don't train your mind, and then as soon as there is these forms of pressure in the environment, once you leave the workout gym and go into the arena or you leave the cubicle and go on stage, or go into the boardroom and your mind is not strong. Honestly, you're exposed. That's not good. That's optimal. We have to do all three. 

Again, I want to come back to — Let me see if I could stitch together confidence and mindfulness. Those two are intimately linked. So mindfulness by definition is a training modality to help increase awareness of thoughts. It is a focused training. It’s not a relaxation training. It’s a focused training to focus on the present moment without judgment of our awareness of our thoughts, our emotions, our body sensations and the unfolding environment around us. That awareness training becomes the beginning grounds of being aware of our thought patterns, being aware of our actual thoughts. If we can become aware of our thoughts and thought patterns and become more sensitive and finely tuned them, we can course correct and choose the thoughts that help build a state, an internal state promotes us to be more optimal as opposed to being unaware of our internal thinking patterns, and if those thinking patterns are not promoting, actually create so much tension and toxicity internally that we shut down or close off or tighten up. That's what the term choking comes from. There’s choking, there’s micro-choking, there's performing, there's performing under pressure and then there's dissolving pressure. But most people don't choke and most people don't dissolve pressure. They place somewhere safer in the middle. Micro-choking is more choking off access. Our mind is choking off access to our craft, and performing and thriving under pressure is cool, but it's not dissolving pressure. 

So our work is to become aware of our thoughts that lead the thinking patterns and course correct them as quickly as we possibly can to promote an internal state that allows us to be present, authentic and grounded so that we can adjust eloquently to the external demands, sometimes internal demands, of performance. Again, there’s no shortcut. You just got to do the hard work. At this point, I'm sure much of your community is familiar with mindfulness. If they’re not, it is a definite beginning place to start. 

[0:49:20.4] MB: Just in a side really quickly, I know we kind of came up on the hour. Do you have maybe like five more minutes or maybe a few more minutes just to kind of wrap up one or two questions and then get to kind of the end where we’ll ask where listeners can find you and that kind of thing? 

[0:49:31.4] MG: Sure. Of course. Yeah, thank you. 

[0:49:33.1] MB: Okay. Perfect. Those little housekeeping issue. So tell me more about — I love this distinction between the idea of performing under pressure versus dissolving pressure. 

[0:49:43.4] MG: Performing under pressure is that you interpret — If you think there's pressure, you're right, and that also holds true for being able to dissolve pressure. It is possible to change your relationship with yourself and the environment in such a way that pressure is dissolved. How does that happen? Well, there is no — I can't tell you how to do that. You have to figure it out. You have to do the hard work to figure out your unique psychological framework that your parents gave you, that your peers influenced, that pop culture’s influence and that you've learned and patchwork together based on your mentors and deep thinking that you’ve had. Each person has its unique psychological framework. If that psychological framework interprets something to be a pressure that could break or shift that framework, a framework like a building that can't withstand the tornadoes or winds or whatever, the rain even, then you're going to feel pressure. 

So you can dissolve it too. You can have such a sturdy framework. Think about the most influential people in the world, those that from thousands and thousands of years have changed the way we understand what's possible. Those tend to be political leaders and spiritual leaders. I mean, if you are a spiritual person, do you think that Buddha had pressure? No, he dissolved it. He did public speaking and his heart then would come up, like he was speaking from a grounded authentic place. How about Jesus? He was passionate and purposeful and he had to train his mind, I think, as the story goes, so did Buddha, so did Confucius, so did Muhammad, they trained their minds. They talk about that, but they dissolved pressure because the purpose was so much larger and their internal framework was so sturdy that they dissolved it often. 

You see when great performers in modern times talk about their “best”, they talk about being in flow state, and flow state or the zone, if you will, is essentially dissolving a pressure. It’s using the challenge in the environment to have a deep focus. Also, I guess, stitch back to mindfulness. Mindfulness is a deep focus training. So deep focus promotes is one of the promoters of flow state. So they use their environment to help deep focus. Focus on what? Focus on the most essential task at hand and not have to focus on the chunkiness of worry and doubt and frustration of our mind, because we really worked on having great thoughts. I hope I answered that question for you. 

[0:52:12.6] MB: I think that was great, and it’s a really important distinction and something that I think really gives me some good perspective on thinking about and kind of dealing with pressure. I'd love to circle back and kind of tie this in concretely in some way. We started out the conversation sort of talking about the daily architecture of world-class performers and sort of what that looks like. I’d love it, if you're comfortable sharing, maybe an example of what does the day in a life of a world-class performer look like from sort of the way that they structure and organize their day?

[0:52:49.1] MG: I think you’d be surprised by how much we talk about recovery, the science and the art of recovery. A normal structure looks something like wake up in the morning, maybe do some bodywork, because there are some recovery patterns that need to take place, and then there's obviously food throughout the day, is staple for most and high quality food. I’ll just talk about a more optimized program, but it's a pretty early wake-up. I get some food in, get some movement, rehab, tissue work on. There are some meetings take place, and those meetings are either with the entire team or sub-parts of a team and there’s individual meetings. There is anywhere between 15 to 20 minutes, to 60, 70 minutes of physical training in the gym. There's more study time, more meetings. There is at least one, sometimes two, training sessions where you're actually working out your mind, body and craft. So that's what a practice really is designed to do. 

There’s some down time, but it’s not as much as you think. There’s maybe 20 minutes here and there for some down time. There’s obviously, like I said, there’s lunch and everything embedded through, and then there's more film. So there's meetings, film. There’s individual meetings. There’s physical movement. There is technical movement, and then they’re either threaded throughout or separate time set up for mental training. The threading throughout is what the highest organizations in the world are doing. They are starting their meetings with X-number minutes of mindfulness training, not waiting for the athlete to do it later. They’re starting their meetings that way. That also happens in business as well. Some businesses are doing that or adopting that practice. 

So that's what it looks like, and there's often homework and the days are long and there’s usually at the upper limits about four hours of nauseatingly deep focused physical work, and then there is about four hours of cognitive and/or mental emotional work, and rinse and repeat until you get the chance to compete against other people. 

So day in and day out is an internal competition with your teammates as well, not trying to step on their throats and choke them out, but working with them to help sharpen their sword and sharpen your sword and return. Then you get a chance to do it with other teams as well. So that's kind of what it looks like, but we talk about the art and science of recovery far more than you might imagine, and we do not approach recovery as something that comes at the end of the process, but it's an integral part of the process itself. Taking time to do this often — To do this is challenging and it's often neglected. It is an essential component of higher performance. 

[0:55:37.2] MB: I know we dug pretty deep into recovery in our first conversation. So we’ll make sure to include that in the show notes for listeners who want to kind of dig in to some of the other topics that have been circling around what we've gotten into today. But for listeners who want to kind of concretely implement a lot of the ideas we've discussed, what would you give to them as kind of one piece of homework or an action item to start implementing some of the ideas we’ve talked about today?

[0:56:04.1] MG: I think that our last conversation, we talked about a philosophy. So if we — Having our own philosophy, and if that hasn't gotten done yet, it’d say go back and do that and get that done. If folks miss that, maybe having a link into our earlier conversation will help. I would start there. If that’s already done or you don’t want to do that for whatever reason, I would start with mindfulness and really paying attention to practicing being aware of the thoughts, of the emotions, of the body sensations and environment, and/or environment. Mindfulness can be substituted with the word meditation. We’ll just start there. 

I mean, that's a massive accelerant to maybe even mastering the internal domain. I can’t imagine a process without mindfulness or paying attention to the internal state and master being in the same conversation. So I would start there. I’d also like take a deep hard look at your sleep patterns. If you are under recovery, you’re eventually going to break down and/or just your brain does — Our brains does something pretty phenomenal, is that they adapt to suboptimal, because they say, “Okay. I see the game you're playing. You’re not going to allow me to recover properly. Well, I'm just going to not have as amazing of an output. So suboptimal becomes the new normal, which is a bomber, because it's like cooking a frog. You don’t quite realize that it’s the boiling water — The fog doesn’t ever quite realize that it's not in a god environment. 

So I would start with mindfulness, sleep, philosophy, kind of the big stuff. Last thing as we close this out, is that Harvard did an amazing study where they followed for 75 years, they followed people on the path of fulfillment, deep meaning in life stuff. What they found is one of the pillars of people that had fulfillment in life is that they asked and wrestled with the deep questions in life. They didn’t avoid them. They weren’t distracted by them. They actually [inaudible 0:58:03.9] with it. Who am I? What is my purpose? When am I doing with my efforts? What does this mean to be human? The deep questions in life. What is the purpose for spirituality? For mindset training? for doing this amazing amount of work? What am I doing here? [inaudible 0:58:24.6] with those big questions. Philosophy is who I am? To do that deep work is just another important, I guess I would say reminder for all that that that stuff you have to do alone. You can have those inspired conversation with people, but ultimately you have to make up your mind about who you are. 

[0:58:42.7] MB: For listeners who want more of you and your work, where can they find you online? 

[0:58:47.0] MG: So there’s a couple of places. Thank you for asking. The — What is it? 140 characters? Whatever. Is that what it is? Is Twitter 140 or is it 144? 

[0:58:56.2] MB: Didn’t they up it to 280 characters? 

[0:58:58.4] MG: We got 280. Okay. Something, 280 characters. You can find me on social media and Twitter, which is @MichaelGervais, and that’s Gervais, and LinkedIn, same thing, Michael Gervais. Instagram is @findingmastery. So we’ve got a podcast we fired up called Finding Mastery, and that websites is pretty clean. It’s fundingmastey.net, and world-class performers, deconstructing and better understanding their path of mastery. Then coach Carroll and I are just about done with writing a book. That would be coming soon. Those are the best places. Then my business with Coach Carroll is called Compete to Create, and that websites is competetocreate.net. 

[0:59:45.8] MB: Well, Michael, once again, an incredible conversation. So many great insights and ideas. Always a pleasure to have you on the show to share all of this wisdom. Thank you so much for coming back and returning to the Science of Success. 

[0:59:58.8] MG: Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. Thank, Matt. 

[1:00:01.0] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created the 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 email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That's matt@successpodcast.com. I'd love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener email. 

I'm going to give you three reasons why you should sign up for our email list today by going to success podcast.com, signing up right on the homepage. There are some incredible stuff that’s only available to those on the email list, so be sure to sign up, including an exclusive curated weekly email from us called Mindset Monday, which short, simple, filled with articles, stories, things that we found interesting and fascinating in the world of evidence-based growth in the last week. 

Next, you're going to get an exclusive chance to shape the show, including voting on guests, submitting your own personal questions that we’ll ask guests on air and much more. Lastly, you’re going to get free guide we created based on listener demand, our most popular guide, which is called How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide by signing up and joining the email us today. Again, you can do that at successpodcast.com, sign up right at the homepage, or if you're on the go, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44222. 

Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us as a referral to a friend either live or online. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us an awesome review and subscribe in iTunes because that helps boost the algorithm, that helps us move up the iTunes rankings and helps more people discover the Science of Success. 

Don't forget, if you want to get all the incredible information we talked about in the show, links transcripts, everything we discussed and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can get those at successpodcast.com, just hit the show notes button right at the top. 

Thanks again and we'll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

Blindspots, Bias, Billionaires and Bridgewater with Dr. Adam Grant

In this episode we discuss the relationship between bad ideas and creative genius, the three biggest lessons from studying the most successful hedge fund on earth, why a complete stranger may often be a better judge of your abilities than you are, the key things that stand in the way of developing more self awareness and how you can fix them, why it’s so important to invest in the ability to make better decisions, and much more with our guest Dr. Adam Grant. 

Dr. Adam Grant has been Wharton’s top-rated professor for six straight years and has been named a Fortune’s 40 under 40, as well as one of the world’s 10 most influential management speakers. He is the multi bestselling author of Give and Take, Originals and Option B which have been translated into over 35 languages. His work has been featured on Oprah, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and he is the host of the new TED Podcast, WorkLife...

• You don’t know yourself as well as you think you do

• There are two things that stand in the way of self awareness

• We have blindspots that other can see, that we can’t

  1. Biases - the things we don’t want to see

• We are better judges of our internal state, but much worse at judging our external behaviors than our friends and colleagues

• We are motivated to have a positive image of ourself

• A complete stranger is a better judge of your assertiveness, creativity, and intelligence after 8 minutes than you are of yourself (after your entire life!)

• We all want to think of ourselves as being smart and creative

• “Male pattern blindness”

• Any time a trait is easy for others to see and hard for us to see - we are bad at judging it

• Human blindspots are predictable and most people have the same kinds of blindspots

• At Bridgewater they tape video + audio of every single meeting

• Bridgewater was a fascinating place to study deep self awareness

• No one has the right to hold a critical view without speaking up about it

• Peer support in the workplace is vital

• When we get criticized, we make the mistake of going to people to support and cheer us up - we need a “challenge network” to challenge our assumptions, push us, and see through our BS

• When things are going poorly, people usually ignore the naysayers and dissenters, but the more you do that the worse things typically get - you should be doing the opposite

• How do we avoid shooting the messenger when we receive negative feedback?

• Any time you are about to receive negative feedback, get some praise / positive feedback in a positive domain to buffer your negative emotional response first

• Why “feedback sandwiches” (praise, criticism, praise) doesn’t work as well as people think they do

• If you’re praising, praise in a separate realm

• “Democracy is a dumb idea for running a company” - some people’s decisions are objectively better than other people’s

• The power of domain specific believability scores and how that’s shaped Bridgewater’s results in a positive way

• Not all feedback is equal

• Go around and look at your feedback sources and ask yourself two questions

• What’s their track record in the skill you’re asking for feedback on?

  1. How well do they know YOU?

• The three biggest lessons Adam learned from studying Bridgewater

• Turn the idea of Devil’s advocate upside down

  1. Someone arguing for a minority view often turns the group against that view

     1. Don’t assign a devil’s advocate, unearth a genuine devil’s advocate - it helps groups make better decisions

     2. Authentic devil’s advocates create authentic divergent thinking

  2. You must speak up when you have a dissenting opinion and encourage people to speak up when they have a dissenting opinion

  3. Say to people “one of things I really value is when people disagree with me or when someone respectfully and thoughtfully challenges my beliefs"

  4. Ask people to “opt-in” to wanting feedback - you have to be willing to ask for it and opt-in to it

• Why would a billionaire spend hours arguing about the placement of a white board?

• Personality is really bad at predicting one specific behavior, but it’s great a predicting aggregate behavior

• The marshmallow test, personality, and delayed gratification

• Situations repeat themselves over and over again - tiny decisions about things like a whiteboard cascade through all decision-making processes

• We look at each moment of our life as if thru a microscope, what we should do is look at them through a telescope and see how everything is a microcosm of something larger, similar to personality

• By investing in improving your decisionmaking skills you accrue more and more interest on that over time

• The mental model of positive EV thinking - looking at aggregate outcomes and not specific instances

• The best model for psychology is meteorology and how that ties into Charlie Munger - power of thinking across academic discipline and building mental models from a wide array of academic disciplines

• Lessons form Shakespeare, Edison, and Picasso to understand what makes them different from their contemporaries

• The more BAD IDEAS you have, the more creative you are

• We are too close to our own ideas to judge them accurately

• One of the biggest predictors of creative results is raw output and being prolific

• Your first idea is rarely your best idea

• Research shows these conclusions across a huge array of domains - business, music, art, innovation tournaments, and more - the more ideas you create, the more valuable ideas you create

• You don't max out on quality and originality until you have about 200 ideas on the table

• How can we improve our creative forecasting skills?

• Managers often have skewed incentives to reject new and creative ideas

• What has worked in the past is at best irrelevant, or worst may be negatively correlated with success

• If you can’t trust yourself and you can’t trust your boss who can you go to? Creative peers are the answer.

• Fun fact - clowns are universally hated.

• You can open your bosses mind by having them spend 5 minutes brainstorming for themselves, that will prime them to be more creative and less evaluative/judging

• Your most promising idea is often the one you typically rank second, not first

• Start with evaluating your challenge network - think about the people who’ve given you the best critical feedback in your life, who are those people, and how can you benefit from their criticism?

• Example - send an article to your challenge network before publishing it

  1. Create a system to repeatedly engage them

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This weeks episode is brought to you by our partners at Skillshare!

For a limited time, Skillshare is offering our listeners TWO MONTHS OF UNLIMITED CLASSES for only $0.99! That's UNLIMITED classes for two months for only $0.99. Go to www.skillshare.com/success to redeem this incredible offer NOW!

Skillshare is an online learning platform with over 18,000 classes in design, business, technology, and more. Whether you’re trying to deepen your professional skill-set, start a side hustle, or just explore something new, Skillshare will keep you learning in 2018 and beyond.

Again, Skillshare is offering our listeners the incredible deal of two whole months of UNLIMITED classes for only $0.99 so get out there and start learning at www.skillshare.com/success

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Personal Site] Adam Grant

• [Article] “People Don't Actually Know Themselves Very Well” by Adam Grant

• [TED Podcast] WorkLife with Adam Grant: A TED original podcast

• [Article] Balancing on the Creative Highwire: Forecasting the Success of Novel Ideas in Organizations By Justin M. Berg

• [Article] Creative productivity: A predictive and explanatory model of career trajectories and landmarks Summary by David Zach Hambrick

• [TEDTalk] Who are you, really? The puzzle of personality by Brian Little

• [Research Profile] Walter Mischel

• [Research Article] Devil's advocate versus authentic dissent: stimulating quantity and quality by Charlan Nemeth, Keith Brown, and John Rogers

• [Wiki Article] Dunning–Kruger effect

• [Article] Research: We Drop People Who Give Us Critical Feedback by Francesca Gino

• [Article] The Psychology of Change: Self-Affirmation and Social Psychological Intervention by Geoffrey L. Cohen and David K. Sherman

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] 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 a billion downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries. In this episode we discuss the relationship between bad ideas and creative genius. We look at the three biggest lessons from studying the most successful hedge fund on earth. We talk about why a complete stranger may often be up better judge of your abilities than you are. We examine the key things that stand in the way of developing more self-awareness and how you can fix them. Look at why it's so important to invest in the ability to make better decisions and much more with our guest, Dr. Adam Grant. 

I'm going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. There's some amazing stuff that's only available to our email subscribers, so be sure to sign up, check out the email list as soon as possible. 

First; you’re going to get an awesome free guide that we created based on listener demand. This is our most popular guide. It's called How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide when you sign up and join the email list today. Next, you’re going to get a curated weekly email from us every single Monday called Mindset Monday. Listeners have been loving this email. It’s short, simple, filled with interesting articles and insights, things we found fascinating within the last week. Lastly, you're going to get an exclusive chance to shape the show. You can vote on guests help us change our intro music, parts of the show, even submit your own personal questions to our guests, and much more. You can sign up by going to success podcast.com, signing up right on the homepage, or if you're out and about, if you're on the go, if you're driving around right now, just text the word “smarter”. That's “smarter” to the number 44222. That's “smarter” to 44222. 

In our previous episode we approach the concept of the self from a concrete and scientific perspective, not in an abstract or philosophical way. What are the hard sciences, like biology and physics, say about the existence of the self? Does the self exist from a psychological perspective? What is the science say and what does it mean for ourselves, our future and how we think about change and self-improvement? We explore the scientific search for the self with our guest, Dr. Robert Levine. If you want to discover who you truly are, listen to that episode. 

Now for the show today. 

[0:02:54.3] MB: Today, we have another amazing guest on the show, Dr. Adam Grant. Adam has been Wharton's top rated professor for six straight years and has been named to Fortune's 40 under 40, as well as one of the world's 10 most influential management speakers. He's the multi best-selling author of Give & Take, Originals and Option B which have been translated in over 35 languages. His work has been featured on Oprah, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and he’s the host of the new TED podcast called Worklife. 

Adam, welcome to the Science of Success. 

[0:03:24.2] AG: Thanks, Matt. Delighted to be here. 

[0:03:25.8] MB: Well, we’re very excited to have you on the show today. Huge fans of your work and your ideas, me and Austin. So we’re really thrilled to have you on here. I’d love to start out with a topic we talk a lot about on the show and something you wrote recently about the in the Atlantic, which is self-awareness and how people often don't really understand self-awareness or think that they’re a lot more self-aware than they are. Could you kind of share the thesis of that article and what it was about?

[0:03:53.9] AG: I love getting to talk to an audience that’s as fascinated by psychology and the evidence behind it as I am. This is a real treat. I think that what’s striking to me is that pretty much as long as I've been a psychologist, I've gotten the reaction from people, “Well, wait a minute, what could you possibly know about me that I don’t? I own my own mind.” 

I started thinking about that and kind of pushing back and saying, “Well, you know? You own a car, and you might even be the only one who drive it, but that doesn’t mean when the engine stops working, that you know what to do going under the hood to fix it.” 

I think that there are two things that stand in the way of self-awareness as I’ve read more and more the research on it. One is just basic blind spots. We have blind spots because there are things that other people can see that we can't, because we’re stuck inside our own head. So we have all these backstage access to what's going on internally, but we can't see independently from an outside view what our behavior looks like. What that means is that psychologically we’re better judges than our friends, and then definitely than strangers of our internal state. How anxious am I, for example. We’re much worse that judging our external behaviors, the parts of our personality that other people can see clearly, like how assertive am I?, for example. 

Then the other sort of big self-awareness challenge is not just blind spots, which are the things we can't see, but also biases, the things that we don't want to see. So we’re motivated to have a positive image of ourselves. There’s this really cool research by [inaudible 0:05:32.9], a psychologist who was trying to break down when are we better judges of our own personality versus when are other people more accurate than we are? 

So what she did was she had people rate themselves on a whole bunch of personality descriptions and then also some traits, like intelligence and creativity, and then she had their friends rate them. She got four of their friends to do it, and she also had some complete strangers interacted with him for about 8 minutes over a pizza, and then they made judgments too. 

Then she went and actually tested them in all these straight. So she measured their assertiveness, for example, by putting them in a leaderless group discussion and then coding the videotape to see who dominated the conversation and who was a little bit more hesitant. She gave them an IQ test to gauge their intelligence. She gave them a creativity challenge where you can actually measure how many ideas people generate and how novel they are within the group. 

So she does all of these, and then what she’s able to show is that the blind spots are pretty clearly in these external domains. So people were worse than their friends at judging their own assertiveness, but in the internal domains, they were better. When they rated their own anxiety versus their friends rated it, they did a better job than their friend did at predicting how nervous they would be giving a public speech when there was an evaluator watching and not smiling and they were being recorded. 

But then there is another dimension beyond just the internal sort of external blind spot issue, and that’s the bias issue. So people turned out to be terrible at judging their own intelligence and their own creativity, because we all want to think of ourselves as smart and creative, and so people tended to be overconfident. That was especially true among men in the study. I guess you could call it male pattern blindness or something like that. 

I think the big lesson here is that any time a trait is hard to be for us and easy to see for others — Sorry, I’ll say that again. I think the big lesson here is that any time a trait is easy for other people to see or hard for us to admit, we can't trust our own judgment of it. 

[0:07:39.6] MB: You had a great phrase in that article that I think kind of underscored this point, which is you said that human blind spots are predictable. Can you elaborate on that and kind of explain how that ties into this?

[0:07:51.5] AG: I guess, I looked a lot of my life thinking that I had different blind spots from everyone else I knew, and that how clearly you could see yourself depended on whether you were surrounded by people who were willing to tell you the truth, basically. 

I think what psychologists had discovered, which I find so interesting, is that, actually, most people have the same kinds of blind spot. It tends to be those things that you can’t see because you're stuck inside your own head, and I guess I first figured this out when I was teaching negotiations. I would have some MBA students and executives who negotiated like sharks and they lost trust, and then others who are just major people pleasers and they were too accommodating and they failed to stand up for themselves. I would have them negotiate and then I’d give them feedback. I’d have their counterparts give them feedback and they'd always under correct. 

Finally, I just decided, “You know what? I’m going to videotape them.” I’d sit down and watch the tapes with them and they were just horrified. They’d say, “Is that what people have been seeing for years? Is that really how I come across?” It’s kind of like hearing your own voice on tape for the first time. I really didn't even need to say anything after that, because once they could observe the behavior from an outside view, they were often much more — They were much more prepared to correct it and they were motivated to correct it, because they got it. 

I think that's something we should all be in the habit of doing, is If you're an athlete, you'd review the game tape after every single competition. I know, I used to a springboard diver, and in my diving days in high school and college I would watch videos of every practice in slow motion, because there’s one thing to have my coach tell me what he was seeing. There’s a whole another thing for me to see it myself. Then very frequently, I wouldn't argue back as much. I just go and do it. 

I think that's one way that we can spot the pattern blind spots, or I should say that differently. So if you want to recognize your blind spot, the patterns are there are things that you can't see from inside, and you often a videotape or a audiotape helps make those visible. 

[0:10:02.0] MB: I love that idea, and I think feedback is — If you look at something like deliberate practice or just improving and growing in general, feedback is such a vital component of that. How do we — I think it's really clear in a field like sports or may be a competitive activity, like chess or gambling or something like, or poker specifically, but in a field like business that there's a much kind of murkier connection between action and output, how do we tighten those feedback loops or kind of get the “game tape” so that we can get that feedback and help spot our blind spots?

[0:10:36.3] AG: That was one of the things that I wanted to understand when I lunched this podcast with TED. So the vision behind the Work Life was I would invite myself in to organizations, they’d go to the extreme and something that we all either struggle with or curious to — Excuse me. Something that we all struggle with are curious to learn more about and try to master.

For feedback, I went to Bridgewater, the hedge fund that’s been named the most successful in the world, where they do videotape and audiotape every meeting and in conversations with a few exceptions. First I thought it was going to Big Brother, and very quickly I walked in and I’m being videotaped and audiotaped and after a few minutes I forgot it. Sort of the real me came out. 

Ray Dalio, the founder, pointed out that he thinks it's a lot like what it must feel like to be on reality TV, where anytime you're sitting at home watching you’re like, “How do these people not realize that their behavior is being broadcast? They would never act that way.” The answer is you can't be on self-monitoring or evaluating all the time. 

So Bridgewater was a really cool place to understand these dynamic, because they believe so much in radical transparency. One of their principles is, is that no one has the right hold a critical opinion without speaking up about it. 

So the insight I walked away with is I was thinking about networks wrong, or at least I had my view of — My view of networks was incomplete. I've read a ton of research on the value of support networks. We know that if you have mentors and sponsors, your career is more likely to advance. We also know that pure your support in the workplace is about as important as support from above, and yet when we get criticized, we make the mistake of going to our cheerleaders and we lean on the people who encourage us, which is great for motivation, but we need another group of people, and that's what Bridgewater is so good at trying to build. I’ve come to call that a challenge network. The support network is the people who build you up when you're down. The challenge network is the group of people who tell you you're not there yet, right? Who push you because they really care about helping you get better. 

As I watch this happen in Bridgewater, I was thinking about some research that Jim Westphalen is calling [inaudible 0:12:51.5] on what happens to CEOs when their firms underperform? So they surveyed hundreds of CEO and they want to know basically when your company’s performance is objectively bad, what do you do? Td they found that on average what most CEOs do is they then lean on their support network, which are their friends who are in very similar jobs, in very similar industries, in very similar companies and they ignore their naysayers and their dissenters who usually have a fresher point of view, who might be in a not sort of drink in the same Kool-Aid or stuck inside the same bubble as them. The more that they do that, the worse their company's performance gets. 

So they end up sort of thinking inside the inner circle when they need to be going outside that circle. Of course, that's more pronounced that their subsequent research showing that if you’re a narcissist, you’re at greater risk for doing that. So narcissist are especially likely to ignore objectives, sort of failure signals from the market. They’re more drawn to social praise and they’re re more likely to fall victim to flattery from the yes-men or the brown-nosers who surround them. I think we've all been in that situation. 

Francesca Gino did some studies on this where she asked people to just identity the colleagues that they went to for feedback, and then rate how much are they encouraging and praising you versus criticizing and challenging you. Then she followed up a few minutes later to find out what — Excuse me. She followed up a few months later to find out what would happen to these relationships, and she found that just like those underperforming CEOs, that what most people would do is they went out of their way to avoid their critics. 

So if in the last six months somebody has given you really harsh feedback, you've done everything in your power to drop them from your life. In the short run, that might feel good, it might help with your motivation, but it destroys your opportunity to learn. I think we all need to embrace that challenge network if we want to reach our potential. 

[0:14:51.9] MB: How do we open ourselves up to that challenging feedback and kind of fight back against the natural tendency to shoot the messenger, for lack of better term? 

[0:15:02.7] AG: My favorite research on this, hands down, comes from I guess the literature on self-affirmation. So Claude Steele at Stanford kicked it off several decades ago. Sherman & Cohen have done a nice review in the last decade or so, and the idea is that it’s way easier to take criticism in one domain when we’ve praised in another. As long as we have this tendency to sort of gravitate toward the people who give us positive reinforcement, we might as well use that to our advantage and say, “Okay. Anytime I’m going to seek out criticisms or somebody reaches out to let me know that they're about to give me some negative feedback, what I can do is I can buffer myself against the blow of that by looking for some positive feedback in a completely separate domain.”

So if I'm about to get feedback on a creative project I have just worked on. What I want to do is I want to first go and figure out, “Okay. What are completely unrelated things that I've done well lately?” So I might review a good decision I made in the past few week. I might go and check my calendar and see that I've actually been extra productive and I’ve cleared some things off my to-do list. Once I've affirmed a skill or a value or an achievement in a different domain, now when I come into this creative project I’m much less likely to see that as the heart of my identity. So it’s less crushing then when somebody tells me that my creativity was really, really, really poor in this particular project and it seemed totally unoriginal. 

I think that obviously we can do this as feedback givers, not just receivers. So many people love to dish out a feedback sandwich and say, “Let me praise you, and then I’ll criticize you and then I’ll praise you again. So we get to start and end on a high note,” which the feedback sandwich does not tastes as good as it looks, if you look at the research. Because, one, you people don't trust the praise when it comes first. They’re waiting for the other shoe to drop, and they think you're just trying to butter them up. 

Then two, even if they do, primacy and recency effects are much stronger than whatever we might process in between. So you're more likely to remember the first and last things that happened than the middle, and that means the praise on both ends might drain out criticism. What I always recommend to people instead is to say either just put the criticism on the table, and then you can end with some praise or at least some encouragement about your confidence in the person, or flip it and say, “All right. I’m going to praise first, but I’ve got to make sure that’s a separate realm. Then when I give the criticism, my hope is that you've heard it a little bit more, because you had something else, some other talent to fall back on to stake your ego or your self-esteem on.” That tends to work much better than the alternative. 

[0:17:46.6] MB: Kind of a corollary of that and something that I think you touched on in the interview with Ray Dalio was this kind of idea of believability weighted feedback, and that feedback varies based on how credible the person giving it to you is and sort of the idea that not all feedback is equal. How can we implement that when we’re about feedback from colleagues, friends, etc., and looking at ways to improve ourselves?

[0:18:11.5] AG: It’s such an interesting question. One of the things that I love at Bridgewater is that they think that democracy is a dumb idea for running a company, because the whole idea of democracy is that every person's opinion or vote has equal weight, and their point is that in the workplace, it doesn't and it shouldn't. 

There's a reason that we promote people, because we trust their decision-making skills or they've demonstrated a particular level of expertise in a certain domain. But Bridgewater also doesn't allow the people who have risen the power to drive every decision and every piece of feedback. What they want to do is they want to know — And they 77 different domains where they have people rate each other regularly and they want to know, “Okay. How credible are you in this domain?” Because you might be really great at, let's say, analyzing markets, but really terrible at analyzing human relationships, or vice versa. So instead of having an overall believability score, you get a domain-specific believability score, which is your track record of performance in that domain, which is probably at some level relevant to whether your — Let me say that different. Sorry. 

You get a domain specific believability score, which is more or less a probability of being right in this domain based on your track record in the past. So I think if we wanted to — Anybody who wanted to try to simulate that in your own life. I think what you do is you go around and you look your feedback sources and you ask yourself a few questions. The first one is what is their track record in that domain? If they demonstrated real expertise or confidence in the very skill you're asking for feedback on, the more they have, the more credible they tend to be. The ones who don’t I think are at serious risk for the Dunning Kruger effect, the unskilled and unaware of it, where people who are novices often are the most overconfident and the most likely to overestimate their skillset. So those are the people whose opinions usually want to discount. 

Then the other question is; how well do they know you? I will never forget when I was in grad school, my first semester, I was encouraged to seek out one professor who was supposed to really good at big picture career advice. So I emailed him — I cold email him and he wrote back and he said, “I’m happy to meet for coffee. Send me your resume and we’ll talk it over.”

I sat down with him and he said, “You are insane. You're doing four times more projects than you should be, and you get a cut 90% of this stuff or else you’re never even going to graduate, let alone get a job.” At first I was a little devastated, because I thought, “All right. This is a guy who has really excelled in this field, and so he has a lot of expertise.” But the more I thought about it, the more I realized, he didn’t know a thing about me. It was the first time we'd met. He'd never seen any of my work. He didn't have a sense of my motivation or my abilities. So how credible could he really be? I decided that I was going to make sort of my motivation in grad school day by day to prove Jim wrong. 

I actually would wake up about once a week and think, “Okay. How do I prove to Jim that in fact I could do all these projects?” That became a little bit of extra source of fuel when I got papers rejected or when I got negative feedback in the classroom to say, “All right. Yeah. This is not fun, but I still have to show Jim that I wasn't crazy.” I think that that how well do they know you, how credible are they not just on the field, but also on your work to me as it is a critical set of questions.

[0:21:53.6] MB: In your time with Ray and the work you did with Bridgewater, I'm curious, they’ve obviously build a kind of a radically different organization, which in many ways is created radically different results for what they've done and led them be so successful. What were kind of some of the simplest or most practical takeaways that you found that are kind of the, say, sort of from an 80/20 perspective, the easiest things to implement without completely upending the culture of an organization or the structure of your relationships?

[0:22:26.4] AG: Yeah. I'll give you — There were three things that I've actually taken away and applied in another organization that anybody could adopt pretty easily. The first one is that they really turn the idea of devil’s — Excuse me. They really turn the idea of devil’s advocates upside down. So the research on this by [inaudible 0:22:43.6] has been fascinating to me for a long time. What [inaudible 0:22:47.4] has shown is that what most people do when they're trying to get a different opinion is they assign somebody in the room to play the role of devil’s advocate, and when she gets grouped together to make decisions and she randomly assigns one person to advocate for a minority view, not only does it not help. On average, it makes the group more convinced of the majority opinion that they already liked. So it backfires. 

When you break down why, there’s sort of two mechanisms at play. One is that the person is just playing a role. So they don't take it seriously enough and they don’t argue forcefully enough. Two; everybody else knows they're playing a role. The rest of people and in that room sit there and say, “All right! Now we’ve heard the person playing devil’s advocate. Check! We can go right back to what we already believed,” and they just all shoot down the argument pretty quickly. 

Of course, you do need dissenting opinions, and what [inaudible 0:23:41.1] shows is that instead of assigning a devil’s advocate, you want to unearth a devil’s advocate. Find the genuine dissenter who authentically disagrees and invite that person to the conversation. If you do that, the group’s probability of making a good decision goes up. The person argues more passionately. The group gives more weight to it, because they know it's a real viewpoint. 

What I work with leaders on, what I often hear for pushback is what, “I get it. I want to hear that person's voice. But what if they’re wrong? What if I invite them into the conversation and they steer us in an unproductive direction?” I say good, because it gives me more research to do. No. I say good, because I am just so struck by the evidence that minority opinions improve decision-making creativity even when they’re incorrect. When you hear an authentic dissenter speak up, even if it's not the right view, it stimulates divergent thinking instead of convergent thinking, and that means that the group is more likely to reevaluate the decision process, go back and gather new information, update their sense of what the criteria are, and that’s good for decision quality and for original thinking even if it's not the right opinion to begin with. 

So going back to Bridgewater, one of the things they do is when they have a big decision to make, they actually will run a poll. It's an anonymous poll at first and they’ll ask, “Okay. How many people think we should do A, and how many people think we should do reverse A?” Then they get a sense of the distribution in the room and then they will invite three of the authentic dissenters to argue against three of the people who are supporting the decision. I think that’s such an effective way to surface the real dissent in the room and make sure it's valued and heard and considered seriously.” So that would be one. Do you want me to go through two others or you want to move forward?

[0:25:33.3] MB: I’d love to hear the other two strategies, yeah. 

[0:25:35.7] AG: Sure. I’ll try to talk shorter. I think I've been overly empowered by your statement that I should feel free to go very deep. 

[0:25:42.4] MB: No. Go deep. We want you to go deep. That’s why you’re here.

[0:25:46.5] AG: I feel like I’m rambling for a long time, but I’ll try to be a little more succinct here. So a second thing that I think is exciting at Bridgewater is — I mentioned they have this principle that no one has the right to hold a critical opinion without speaking about it. That's the opposite of what I've seen in most workplaces, where if you have a critical opinion, you have no right to speak up about it. But the challenge is to make that real, and the way that Bridgewater has done is they've actually extended their performance evaluations to include — You get rated on whether you are challenging your boss and sort of asserting your viewpoint, raising critical perspective even if they might — They have a term for this actually, which is it’s something like rubbing salt on the wound. I think that — Actually, I can say that more clearly. I will say they basically evaluate you on whether you're fighting for right, even when other people disagree. Are you willing to poke the bear a little bit if there’s a good reason to do it?

I think we could all do that, right? When we give people feedback, why not sit down with them and say, “You know what? I'm going to give you this feedback. I just wanted to let you know, one things I really value is people being willing to disagree with me.” Or when we start working with new colleagues to say right off the bat, “Hey, you know what? One of my favorite features of a collaboration is when somebody challenges my assumptions and my beliefs respectfully and thoughtfully,” and let's actually make that part of the way we evaluate the quality of our relationship, is are we having good healthy debate. 

Then the last thing that I think is pretty actionable for anybody from Bridgewater is they ask you to opt in you want a feedback. They say, “Look. We don’t want to work with somebody who says, “This process is not for me,” and we think you’re going to take it a lot better if you decided you want it.” 

I think so often we have feedback conversations, we don't do that. We’re so nervous about the discussion or we’re feeling guilty about hurting somebody's feelings, that we just whip off the Band-Aid and get it over with, as supposed to sort of opening the conversation by saying, “I noticed a few things and I was wondering if you wanted a few thoughts, or I'm trying to give more feedback to the people whose work I really value. I’ve been told I don't give enough critical feedback. I’ve been trying hard to come up with some. If you're interested, I’m happy to have that discussion and I’d love to hear your feedback too.” I think just initiating that opt-in process is something we can do every time we give feedback, and for that matter every time we receive it too. 

[0:28:34.6] MB: You’re probably listening to the show because you want to master new skills and abilities so that you can live a rich and rewarding life. That's why I'm excited to tell you once again about our loyal and amazing sponsor, Skillshare. Skillshare is an online learning community with over 16,000 classes in design, business and more. You can learn everything from logo design, to social media marketing, to street photography and you get unlimited access to all of these classes for a single low monthly price so you never have to pay per class again. 

They have some awesome courses on there that I personally love, everything from mastering Evernote, to mind mapping, to learning how to draw, or if you want to get a leg up on graphic design, social media, even your culinary knife skills, be sure to check out Skillshare

Skillshare is offering something incredible to our listeners; two months for just $0.99. You can get that by going to skillshare.com/success. That skillshare.com/success for two months of courses for just $0.99. Be sure to check that out. 

[0:29:41.5] MB: How to someplace like Bridgewater avoid almost a sort of paralysis by spending so much time arguing and debating and figuring out who's right, who's wrong, all these kind of pieces of the puzzle?

[0:29:55.2] AG: Well, I think that they believe that — It's funny. Bridgewater is a place where I think a lot of people arrive there and they're really frustrated by what they perceive is inefficiency. I remember watching one meeting where Ray did about — I don’t know. It must've been over an hour of a diagnosis of why a whiteboard was a few inches higher than that it was supposed to be. It had been in the wrong spot. He had requested it be moved, and then it wasn't in the right spot. They spent a huge amount of time diagnosing why that decision went wrong. I’ve looked at that thinking, “Are you people insane? Why would you spend all that time in that when you're managing $160 billion?” It’s not like the placement of a whiteboard has any real consequences for your work.” 

I have to say as I was debating this back-and-forth with Ray, he did change my mind on it, and he changed my mind in part, because one of the arguments he made reminded me of one of my favorite ideas in psychology. The idea — This is Walter Mischel. Mischel back in the 60s, this sort of devastating attack of personality psychology where he said, “Look. Personality traits don't predict behavior. We have the whole science trying to assess how extroverted you are and how anxious or emotionally stable or neurotic you are.” When you actually measure these traits, they do a terrible job predicting really anything that matters in your life choices or your success at work. 

Why do we have these? We have a rich social psychology that says, “The situation influences a lot of behavior and we’re all kind of — We manage to be different people in different situations, and personalities are not as important as we thought they were.” 

I have ever mentor, Brian Little, who’s referred to the aftermath as Mischel shock, because so many personality, psychologists all of a sudden felt like their life's work was under threat. There were all sorts of updates to that. First, we found out that personality is really bad at predicting one specific moment of behavior, but it’s actually pretty good at predicting aggregated behaviors. 

If I wanted to know, Matt, how you’re organized you’re going to be at 3 PM today, your personality is probably not going to tell me much about that. But if I wanted to know on average how organize you’re going to be for the next month every day at 3 PM, well, personality lot more useful then, right? Because we have a global trait, and that’s going to predict a pattern of behavior and not a specific instance of behavior, which is more like a blip. 

We got a bunch of updates to the idea that, actually, how much people fluctuate their behavior, that's a personality trait too. Mark Snyder called it self-monitoring. High self-monitors are the people who are constantly adapting to meet the expectations of the environment. Low self-monitors say, “This is who I am and I’m going to try to be the same person regardless of the circumstances,” and they’re driven more by their sort of internal compass than external accused. So you start to break that down and personality does a better job predicting the behaviors of low self- monitors than high self-monitors. 

What’s funny is after decades of this debate, Walter Mischel back around and said, “Actually, I got this wrong.” It’s not surprising that he came back with that, because he's a psychologist who did pioneering experiments on the marshmallow test where he found that the kids who were able to delay the gratification of eating one marshmallow at toddlers, in order to get two marshmallows about 15 minutes later did better in school and had more stable relationships as much as a dozen or so years later. 

He was a believer in individual differences, right? That ability to delay gratification and the exercise of control. That is a personality trait. So he comes back around and he says, “Actually, we’ve been thinking about personality all wrong. We should really think about personality as a set of if/then statement where we all have a bunch of them, which are our tendencies to be organized and disciplined, to be friendly, to be outgoing, to be open-minded, and so on. But those don't come out equally in every moment. They're different if that activate different thens, and we all have signatures. He said, if we really want to predict your behavior and understand what you're going to do in a given situation, we have to know what part of your personality that situation activates. 

So long detour away from Bridgewater, but this is where I landed with Ray. He said, “Look. The reason that I'm going to go and analyze a whiteboard placement is because situations repeat over and over again.” This tiny little decision of adjusting the height of a whiteboard is actually a microcosm of our decision-making process, and there's something about that if that activated the wrong then in the group of people who are supposed to fix it. 

So if I can get to the bottom of it and analyze it for a trivial decision, then maybe we can prevent that if then pattern from repeating. We can either activate a different if or we can find the people who have the right set of then to handle that issue that required a lot of attention to detail. I thought that was so interesting and it really got me thinking about how in fact all of our work and all of our lives are just the same kinds of situations repeating over and over again. We don’t see that because we tend to look at those situations through a microscope when we’re in them. We see all the idiosyncrasies of them. 

What we really should be doing is zooming out and looking at them through a telescope, which is when we’re able to see how this one argument that I'm having with a coworker is actually sort of triggered by the same fundamental disagreement that the last four were too. So I think that it seems like time wasted, but ultimately it's time well spent if you can help you change a whole pattern of behavior. Longest answer ever. 

[0:35:49.7] MB: No. That was great. You brought it all the way back around, which is awesome. It's funny, one of the things that we talk a lot about on the show and I’m a huge believer in people like you and Ray Dalio obviously, kind of help shape that thinking as well. But is this idea that we — I call it kind of the art of decision-making, but basically if you really hone your ability to make better decisions, it cascades through everything in your life, whether you're buying a car, a new house, business decisions, making an investment, etc. I almost look at it as if you're harnessing the power of compounding by getting better at making decisions. It's sort of cascades through everything that you do from that point forward. 

[0:36:27.3] AG: I love the idea of talking about that in terms of compounding. It never occurred to me to use that language for it, and I think that's exactly what you're doing. By investing and improving your decision-making skills, you're accumulating more and more interest on that investment over time. If you don't do it, if you just treat each situation as completely different from all the others, then you really fail to learn anything from the last [inaudible 0:36:53.0] that might apply to tomorrow’s. 

[0:36:54.9] MB: Yeah. I think that's a really, really good insight. The other thing that I think is great, and your analogy with personality was really relevant, but this whole notion, there's a lot of different systems where you might have a really kind of a large amount of randomness in the short term, but the kind of outcome is really predictable and aggregate. If you look at everything from kind of poker, right? If you're making positive decisions, positive expected value decisions, in the short term, you might end up losing a bunch of hands are going broke, but over a long time horizon, that variance kind of evens out. 

If you look at something like whether, it was kind of the distinction between weather versus climate. It’s really hard to predict sort of short-term variations in the weather, but over time, over a longer time horizon, the climate is actually extremely predictable. So I think that's a great analogy and almost, really, a really relevant mental model to think about as well. 

[0:37:42.1] AG: Yeah. I think it's a mental model that we should all use more often to say, “Look. Any time you have a model, you should be trying to predict the outcome — You should be trying to predict an aggregate of the outcome. You want to predict a pattern of behavior. You want to predict what the climate is going to do over multiple years, as opposed to multiple hours.” 

Brian Little, the personality psychologists, mentioned earlier, he said that he thinks that often one of the things that actually both frustrated me and hooked me on psychology was when Brian said, “Look. I think we have the wrong model often when we’re trying their think about what psychology is supposed to do. We’re not doing physics. We’re not doing sort of hard science. We’re doing social science,” and people are much, much more complicated in the sense that we don't operate by stable laws. There’s no law of gravity governing my decision-making process. 

So he said he actually felt the best model for our field would be meteorology, that predicting human behavior is at least as hard as predicting the weather if you look at all the complex factors interacting to affect it. I hated that it first, but the more I thought about it, the more interesting it became as a puzzle. If we could get a little bit better at predicting human behavior, then we could probably make fewer awful choices and we can try to use our knowledge of psychology to help people live better lives. 

[0:39:11.6] MB: I mean, that makes me think of Charlie Monger, who’s one of my all-time favorite thinkers. It's funny, because you talk about and he writes a lot about kind of building this toolkit of mental models across a huge array of academic disciplines, and that sounds very kind of amorphous and ethereal, but that's a perfect example of really concretely bringing that to bear in the sense that if you study meteorology, there's actually some really practical applications for how to think about psychology and how to think about applying psychology to making better decisions and living your life. 

[0:39:42.3] AG: Yeah. It just can't tell me whether I should wear a raincoat today. 

[0:39:45.7] MB: That's right. This is going to be kind of a hard segue, but I want to get into some other kind of really important concepts and talk about them briefly. One of the things that you wrote about in Originals that I think is, to me, kind of one of the really important kind of fundamental conclusions was this notion of output and how that kind of impacts originality and creativity. Could you talk a little bit about how the power of having bad ideas and creating kind of prolific output is really important in being an original?

[0:40:16.3] AG: Yeah. There’s a psychologist, Dean Simonton, who put this idea on the map. He studied what he calls is creative productivity, which is basically both the quantity and the quality of creative output. But he doesn’t just study it among ordinary people. He does this historiographic analyses of eminent creative people throughout their lives and across centuries. 

He studied Shakespeare, and Edison and Picasso and compared them to their peers to try to figure out what makes them different. He had this finding that sort of knocked me out of my chair when I first read it. I was reading his research and he said, in a nutshell, that the more bad ideas you have, the more creative you are. I read that and I thought, “What? How could this be true?” 

I thought I always had this vision of creative people as dreaming up there masterpiece and then going and executing on it. Not really tinkering with a bunch of other possibilities, right? It’s hard to imagine that Shakespeare didn't immediately know Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet as he envisioned it, or the moment it struck him, that he didn’t know that’s the one. 

What Simonton shows very clearly in his data and now we have experiments also showing that it’s s true for ordinary people, not just sort of outlier original thinkers, is a huge part of creativity is the volume of ideas that you generate. Part of that is because we’re too close to our own ideas to judge them accurately. 

One of the studies that Simonton sort of launched and [inaudible 0:41:52.8] and others had followed up on is Beethoven is a self-critic. You have roughly 70 of Beethoven's compositions where he actually wrote letters to people who knew him well, like his friends and contemporaries, evaluating his own work. So he got a sense of what kind of self-critic he was. He committed lots of false positives where he thought a composition was brilliant and the expert really didn't think it was particularly great. Then also committed plenty of false negatives, where he said, “Yeah, I'm really not happy with this work,” and it became a classic. 

You see form that work and lots of subsequent research that we are often too close to our own ideas to judge them just like we’re too close to our own minds sometimes to see them clearly. You need lots of ideas just because you can't trust your own judgment. You also need lots of ideas because your first idea is rarely your best idea. The first idea that you have is usually the easiest one to think of. It’s either sort of a rare Eureka moment or something that's relatively simple and obvious. 

You want those second, third and fourth thoughts. Simonton was able to show this between creatives. So if you look at Beethoven, Bach and Mozart, one of the things that differentiates them from their peers as they produced not just a few more, but hundreds more compositions, into the 600 and 700. At least in Bach’s case, I think about a thousand, when most of their peers we’re in the sort of below a hundred range. And there's a really nice linear relationship — number of compositions that you do in a lifetime and your eventual greatness. 

I think that's because the more of those variations you run, the more experiments you try, the more likely you are to stumble on to something that's truly original. We see this in all kinds of domains. So a couple colleagues, Christian [inaudible 0:43:48.1] and Carl Ulrich, who studied people trying to create new products. They look at these innovation tournaments where you just have people submit ideas and then peers and subject matter experts vote on them and the question is; which of them are most promising? And then you advance in then the next round and eventually bet on some ideas. They found that a typical brainstorming session might produce 10 to 20 ideas, but you don’t max out on quality and in originality until you have about 200 ideas on the table, which is why you see that when Pixar makes a movie like Cars, they will consider about 500 scripts. It’s why you'll see when Fisher-Price makes a toy, they’ll consider about 4,000 concepts before honing in on a final 12. You need a very, very, very big haystack to have a better shot at finding a needle. 

[0:44:36.9] MB: I love the kind of example from Beethoven, and I think Simonton wrote about this, this similar corollary, that idea, which is basically that even the most creative and successful people, these kind of creative geniuses, etc., had essentially zero predictive ability to determine whether their next kind of project would succeed or not, which I just found fascinating. 

[0:44:59.2] AG: Yeah. That turns out to be an individual difference too, right? Some people turn out to be more accurate self-critics than others, but no one is anywhere near perfect. I have a former student, Justin Berg, who wanted to follow up on that and figure out how we can all improve our creative forecasting skills. 

He studied circus artists, I think Cirque du Soleil. He got over 100 of them to submit videos of brand-new acts that had never been seen before, and then he had different groups rate them, actually have them rank them. So groups got to watch a bunch of different videos, ranked them from best to worst, and then he sent them out to over 13,000 audience members. Not only had the audiences evaluate them, he also had the audiences donate their own money if they wanted to the performers as an indication of would you pay to see this person in action? 

He found that the worst judges of the performances were the circus artists themselves judging their own act. They would they would say things like, “This my act. How could it not be amazing?” It was just too easy for them to fall in love with their work. But then he went to managers. They are the gatekeepers. It's their job to pick ideas. He found that they were almost as bad as the circus performers themselves, and they’re bad for the opposite reason. Instead of being too positive, they tended to be too negative. Especially on the truly original ideas, they were disproportionately likely to reject the most promising, most novel ideas. 

I think that seems to happen for two reasons. One is cute incentives. If you bet on a bad idea, everyone it will know and it could embarrass your career. Whereas if you reject a good idea, no one will ever find out. At some level you say, “All right. Am I going to stick my neck out for an unproven idea, or am I going to play it safe and just pass up this this weird idea?”

The other thing that happened to managers was they tend to build a prototype through years of experience. So they would say, “All right. When I see a new idea, I’m going to compare it to all the ideas that have worked before,” and the more different it was, the more likely they were to reject. But that doesn’t make any sense. If you're trying to be original, what's been successful in the past is as best, be relevant and it might even be negatively correlated with what’s going to work tomorrow, which is why you see examples like Seinfeld and Harry Potter getting rejected by industry executives, because you can't make a sitcom about nothing where no one likes any of the characters. You can't write a children's book that that’s long, and it turns out that the people deepest in the industry are the most blind to ways that you can deviate from the prototypes. 

And so [inaudible 0:47:31.2], well who can you trust? If you can trust yourself and you can't trust your boss, who do you go to? He found a third group that was excellent at creative forecasting, which was creative peers, circus artists judging each other's ideas. They had this great sort of distance so they could tell you, “That act where you dress up like a clown, don't do that. No one likes clowns.” Which is actually a data point in the study; Clowns Are Universally Hated. But there's also the flip of that, which is unlike the managers, these creative peers are really invested in seeing new ideas takeoff. So instead of looking at an idea and saying, “Eew! That's weird.” They would look at it and say, “Huh! That’s weird,” and they're much more likely to give it a chance. 

Actually two quick things that Justin discovered which I think are really powerful is, one, you can get other people if your boss is not open to ideas, you can open your boss's mind. Before your boss judges other people's ideas, just have your boss spend five minutes brainstorming him or herself. That five minutes of brainstorming is enough to take your boss out of sort of an evaluative mindset where they're looking for reasons to say no and into a more open, creative mindset where they're looking for reasons to say, “Maybe.” 

Then the other thing is Justin wanted to improve people's judgment of their own ideas. So one of his experiments, he had people — They generated 10 to 15 ideas and then they had to rank them from favorite to least favorite, and he found that your most promising idea is not on average the one you rank first. It's the one you rank second. That first idea is the one that you are still passionate about that you just can't see it clearly. 

Whereas idea number two, you have a little bit more distance, a little more objectivity and you're more likely to recognize the flaws, but also have enough enthusiasm about the idea to try to fix the flaws. So I realized that some people are probably going to try to game the system and say, “Wait. I’m just going to take my favorite idea and call it my second favorite and then I'll be good,” and that doesn't work. But I think there's something to be said for your next favorite idea as one that has a lot of potential. 

[0:49:38.3] MB: What would be one piece of homework that you would give as kind of a concrete action steps for listeners to implement some of the things we’ve talked about today?

[0:49:46.9] AG: Oh! I think if I were going to give one piece of homework, I would say start by evaluating your challenge network. So think about the people who’ve given you the best critical feedback throughout your career or throughout your life and ask yourself, “Okay. First, who are those people? Secondly, how do I build in a regular system of engaging them to benefit from their criticism knowing that I trust the quality of their feedback and that I believe they care about helping me improve?” I guess my version of this is whenever I write an article, I have my challenge network that I send it to for feedback. There are four or five people there are sort of go-to sources, and then I know they will tell me what arguments don't make sense, what ideas are not interesting. I also know that they care about helping me write better articles. So they’ll also say, “You know, in that last paragraph, there’s actually a gem here that you should written the whole article about it.” Then I have my work cut out for me. I think if you identify your challenge network and then you create a system or a process for engaging them regularly for feedback, you will become less defensive and more open and you’ll also get better information. 

[0:51:00.4] MB: Where can listeners find you and your work online?

[0:51:03.8] AG: It's kind of you to ask. For anyone who’s motivated to do that, at adamgrant.net I have everything I’ve have ever published up there. You can download lot of articles and TED Talks. I do a free monthly newsletter called Granted on work in psychology where I answer and read questions and then I also share some of my favorite articles of the month. Then I guess for anybody who’s into podcast, which I suspect is everyone here. For people who are excited to add more podcasts to their listening schedule, Work Life is now available everywhere you get a podcast. It's just like all the good ones, free. 

[0:51:42.2] MB: Well, Adam, thank you so much for coming on the show. Incredible insights, wisdom, so many things that I would've loved to go deeper on, but so much valuable information and really, really appreciate your time and your insights. 

[0:51:53.6] AG: It was a pleasure to be here. Thank you for asking such interesting and thought-provoking questions. I really will work hard to cut my answers in half next time.

[0:52:01.3] MB: All right. Cool. 

[0:52:02.5] 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 email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That's matt@successpodcast.com. I'd love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener email. 

I'm going to give you three reasons why you should sign up for email list today by going to successpodcast.com, signing up right on the homepage. There are some incredible stuff that’s only available to those on the email list, so be sure to sign up, including an exclusive curated weekly email from us called Mindset Monday, which is short, simple, filled with articles, stories, things that we found interesting and fascinating in the world of evidence-based growth in the last week. 

Next, you're going to get an exclusive chance to shape the show, including voting on guests, submitting your own personal questions that we’ll ask guests on air and much more. Lastly, you’re going to get a free guide we created based on listener demand, our most popular guide which is called How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide by signing up and joining the email us today. Again, you can do that at successpodcast.com, sign up right the homepage, or if you're on the go, just text the word “smarter" to the number 44222. 

Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you enjoy this episode, please leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes, because that helps boost the algorithm, that helps us move up the iTunes rankings, it helps more people discover the Science of Success. 

Don't forget, if you want to get all the incredible information we talked about in the show, links, transcripts, everything we discussed and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can get those at successpodcast.com, just at the show notes button right at the top. 

Thanks again, and we'll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

Everything You Know About Sleep Is Wrong with Dr. Matthew Walker

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Listen To The Episode

Show Notes

Video - 4 Scientifically Proven Paths To A Perfect Night Sleep

The Sleep Deprivation Epidemic - Why You Should Sleep More

Links and Additional Research

Episode Transcript

Are you tired? If your answer is yes, it would seem relatively straightforward to assume you're not getting enough sleep.

It’s one of the most important things you can possibly do for yourself.

Improve. Your. Sleep.

You’re going to spend a large portion of your like sleeping. And that’s a good thing! Getting more sleep not only allows you to wake up well rested each morning but also prevents disease and can lead to a longer (and happier) life overall.

Did you know that routinely sleeping less than 6 hours a night can increase your risk of cancer by 50%? After just one night of less than 5 hours of sleep Natural Killer Cells (which fight cancer cells) drop by 70%! After just one night!

Sleep isn't just about rest. It's about the body repairing itself, doing maintenance so to speak. Unfortunately, what has been discovered over time (and discussed in this book) is that, if you lose sleep, taking a nap, while it takes the edge off, it doesn't replace the sleep lost during the night.

Our ability to fight disease (including cancer) and obesity may be directly tied to not getting enough restful sleep. Pills don't help either. Yes, they knock you out and make it easier to fall asleep but they lack the restorative power of natural sleep and, in fact, some sleeping pills can increase your risk of cancer.

Knowing this, it must change the way you think about the old saying “I’ll sleep when I’m dead”… because ironically adopting that mindset will get you there quicker.

Do you find that you wake up feel groggy or angry? Do you reach for the snooze button 1, 2 or even 3 times each morning? Or, do you hop right out of bed ready to tackle the new day?

What about at night? Do you struggle to fall asleep? Tossing and turning seemingly unable to count enough sheep to get to bed. Or, are you out like a light when you pull the covers over yourself?

If you want to literally improve every single aspect of your life and wake up feeling refreshed and rested each and every night this interview is for you.

To get started NOW, download our free guide below and learn 5 super simple and easy ways to maximize your sleep starting tonight!

In this episode we discuss everything you ever wanted to know about sleep. We examine the findings from hundreds of studies across millions of people and pull out the major findings about how vitally important sleep is, the global sleep loss epidemic, the stunning data about sleep and productivity, the simplest and most effective evidence based strategies for getting better sleep and much more with Dr. Matthew Walker. 

Dr. Matthew Walker is Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Founder and Director of the Center for Human Sleep Science. He has published over 100 scientific studies and is the author of the book Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams. Which is currently the #1 Amazon Bestseller in Neuroscience . He has been featured on numerous television and radio outlets, including CBS 60 Minutes, National Geographic Channel, NOVA Science, NRP and the BBC.

Show Notes

• Global sleep loss epidemic - the average American sleeps only 6.5 hours per night

• Sleep has slowly been eroded by our society over the last 60 years

• Sleep is vital and essential from an evolutionary standpoint - you can’t just lop off 25% of the necessary sleep you need

• Studies across millions of people show one clear thing - the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life

• If you sleep less, you will be dead sooner, lack of sleep kills your more quickly

• Lack of sleep is a major predictor of “all cause mortality” including cancer, Alzheimers, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, depression, and suicide

• Hard science shows why a lack of sleep is tremendously bad for you

• Sleep has an image problem, we stigmatize sleep and think its lazy and slothful - people wear lack of sleep as a badge of honor to be celebrated

• Less sleep does not equal more productivity

• The 5 clear truths of sleep research and productivity

• Under-slept employees take on less challenging problems

  1. They produce fewer creative solutions

  2. They exert less effort when working in groups (slacking off, social loafing)

  3. They are more likely to lie, cheat, and engage in deviant behavior

  4. The more or less sleep that a CEO has had, the more or less charismatic they will be

• Chronic exhaustion cost most first world nation 2% of the GDP - 411 billion dollars lost each year to a lack of sleep

• The research is very clear that under-slept individuals are not as productive or successful

• The evidence is resoundingly clear - cutting on sleep makes you less productive and less creative and less effective

• After being awake for 21 hours, you’re as cognitively impaired as someone who is legally drunk

• The two principle types of sleep - REM sleep and non-REM sleep

• The different stages of sleep - the 4 stages of REM sleep

• Hard science shows that deep Sleep is critical to clearing toxins out of your brain

• Sleep is like a sewage system for your brain - it cleans all the toxins and debris out of your brain

• The less sleep you have, the higher your probability of getting Alzheimers

• Different cognitive systems in your brain also work during sleep - its like saving files to a hard drive, you have to sleep to get the save button

• The emotional circuits of the brain are changed and modified by sleep - the amygdala (which controls fight or flight) is regulated by the pre-frontal cortex

• Lack of sleep can have a serious negative impact on your emotional health

• Sleep reboots body systems as well - not just the brain

• Deep sleep is one of the best blood pressure medications you can imagine

• Deep sleep regulates insulin levels and blood glucose levels

• Sleep is also essential for the reproductive system

• Sleep boosts testosterone and lack of sleep makes you 10 years older from a testosterone standpoint

• Appetite, weight, food consumption are all regulated by sleep - lack of sleep makes you eat 300-550 more calories per day, and makes you eat more high sugar and high carb foods

• Sleep also has a profound impact on the immune system - one night of 4 hours of sleep will drop natural killer cells (body cancer fight cells) by 70%!

• The link between lack of sleep and cancer the WHO recently classified night shift work as a probable carcinogen

• Sleeping 5 hours per night makes you 200-300% more likely to catch a cold than someone sleeping 8 hours a night

• There is not a SYSTEM or PROCESS in the body/brain that is not impacted by sleep

• The most striking omission in the health literature today is that sleep is not at the center of the health conversation

• 3 key ways sleep improves your learning

• Is it wise to pull an all nighter? What does the research say?

• The “memory inbox of the brain” (hippocampus) and how sleep is vital to creating and storing memories

• Sleep is vital both BEFORE learning and AFTER learning to store and save new memories and solidify them into the architecture of the brain

• Sleep replays information and strengthens memories

• Sleep provides a 3x advantage to problem solving compared to an equivalent period being awake

• "The 6 Unpopular Tactics for Getting Enough Sleep"

• Carve out enough time and make sleep a priority - carve out an 8 hour window to sleep every night

  1. This is the #1 thing to do - regularity is KEY - go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time, no matter what

     1. Sleeping in late creates “social jetlag” which has serious negative consequences - regularity of sleep is key

  2. Keep the temperature cool - keep your bedroom 68 degrees - your body needs to drop its core temperature 2-3 degrees to fall asleep

  3. You can hack this by taking a hot bath before bed

  4. DARKNESS is key to producing melatonin. Phones, screens, blue light etc trick the brain into thinking its day time and shut off melatonin production

  5. Reading on a tablet 1 hour before bed shifts your melatonin production 3 hours later!

     1. Use blackout shades

     2. No screens 1 hour before bed

  6. Do NOT stay in bed if you’ve been in bed longer than 20 minutes. You brain is a very associative machine - being awake in bed trains the brain that it’s OK to be awake in bed. Get up, go to a different room, read a book in dim light, no screens, no eating. And only when you feel sleep return to bed, and you will re-learn the key association between making the bed about sleep

  7. Some people don’t like this idea.

     1. Meditation is a great way to get yourself to fall back asleep. The studies are very clear, very well done that meditation can help improve sleep.

  8. No caffeine after noon and avoid alcohol in the evenings.

  9. Caffein prevents deep sleep

     1. Alcohol fragments your sleep and makes your wake up much more, leaving with un-restorative sleep

     2. Alcohol blocks dreams and REM sleep

• Sedation is NOT sleep. Knocking out your cortex is not natural sleep.

• You could be A FAR BETTER VERSION OF YOURSELF mentally, cognitively, physiology if you just got more sleep

• Current sleeping pills are “sedative hypnotics” that do NOT productive naturalistic sleep, and do not get the benefits of sleep

• Sleeping pills have a far higher risk of death, cancer, infection

• CBTI - cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia is just as effective as sleeping pills in the short term, but much more effective long term

• Melatonin can be a useful tool to time the onset of sleep

• Does napping work?

• There is no such thing as the sleep bank - you can’t accumulate a debt and then hope to cash in on the weekend - sleep doesn’t work like that

• Napping can prevent you from falling asleep and staying asleep! Be careful!

• How does GABA impact your sleep?

• Sleep is a remarkably complex neurochemical ballet

The Sleep Deprivation Epidemic: Why You Should Sleep More 

Do you ever pull an all-nighter to cram for a test, but still fail? Maybe you work 60-hour weeks but feel like you’re getting nowhere. Unfortunately, developed nations are suffering from a sleep deprivation epidemic, but science can help us see the reasons for getting a good eight hours every night.

 A common saying you hear is, “You can sleep when you’re dead!” But recent sleep studies have shown us that less sleep means our lifespans shorten and our quality of life will decrease too. Unfortunately, our society pushes us to sleep less and work more, so we need help shifting our social perspective.

It turns out, that our relatively recent attempt to shorten the amount of sleep we get runs into a lot of problems against the million-year-old necessity that mother nature has put in place. The 20-25% decrease we’ve imposed on ourselves has led to an increased likelihood of developing every major disease that kills us in the developed world.

Elucidating Sleep Science

“I think part of the problem, perhaps, is that the science of sleep is actually not being adequately communicated to the public and I think it’s people like myself who are to blame.” – Dr. Matthew Walker 

Dr. Matthew Walker is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at UC Berkeley, founder and director of the Center for Human Sleep Science, and author of Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams. His belief is that sleep science is not understood by the public, which was part of his motivation for writing Why We Sleep.

Many people appear to be proud of how little they sleep. However, the list of problems linked to a lack of sleep include Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes, depression, bipolar disorder, and suicide, among other mental health conditions. With this information in hand, it’s necessary to remove the stigma on getting a sufficient amount of sleep (about eight hours).

Dr. Walker set out to write a book of reasons why you should sleep, rather than rules. He addresses the relationship between sleep and productivity, citing laboratory and workplace studies that have provided him with five clear truths.

Five Facts About Sleep-Deprived Workers

“It’s very clear that under-slept individuals are not going to be successful.” – Dr. Walker

1. They take on less-challenging problems.

2. They produce fewer creative solutions.

3. They exert less effort when working in groups.

4. They are more likely to lie, cheat, and engage in deviant behaviors.

5. Less sleep means less-charismatic leaders.

He also notes that a recent report demonstrated that chronic exhaustion and fatigue (due to a lack of sleep) caused most first-world nations to lose about 2% of their GDP (that’s $411 billion for the U.S.). “If we solve the sleep deprivation problem in the U.S., we could almost double the budget for education, and we could make huge in-roads into the problems we have with healthcare,” he adds.

Dr. Walker shares an analogy to represent the current nature of an office workplace by comparing it to a spin class: “Everyone in the office looks like they’re working hard, but the scenery never changes – there’s never any forward progression in terms of momentum with productivity and creativity.”

Finally, he ends his evaluation of workplace attitudes by observing how their attempt to optimize the efficiency of every system stops at the human level. Where the budget, taxes, hardware, and software are all effective, there’s no focus or understanding of a human’s cognitive or physiological capacities and their necessity to reboot and recharge.

Sleep: The Human Recycling Period

“There really isn’t any system within your body, or process within the brain, that isn’t wonderfully enhanced by sleep when you get it or demonstrably impaired when you don’t get enough.” – Dr. Walker 

Dr. Walker informs us that we need eight-hours of sleep after 16-hours of wakefulness; and after 20-21 hours of being awake, we are as cognitively impaired as someone who would be legally drunk behind the wheel. So what exactly is happening when we sleep?

Sleep is simply divided into rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, where we dream, and non-REM sleep; while non-REM sleep is further divided into four sub-stages. Each stage performs different yet necessary functions.

When we are awake, we are essentially in a form of low-level brain damage. Thus, one of the functions performed during the deepest stages of non-REM sleep is to clear out the metabolic toxins that have been built up in our brain. This is done through our brain’s glymphatic system (similar to our body’s lymphatic system). While asleep, this system’s performance increases by 200-300% relative to when we’re awake. (This process is known to remove a toxic protein called beta-amyloid, one of the leading candidate causes of Alzheimer’s disease.)

Sleeping also improves our learning in at least three ways.

1. Sleeping prepares our brain: A lack of sleep leads to a 40% deficit in our ability to make memories.

2. Sleeping ‘saves’ information: While asleep, we transfer information from our short-term to long-term memory. Like hitting the ‘Save’ button, it prevents us from forgetting memories.

3. Sleeping strengthens our memories: Sleep interconnects new memories together and interconnects it with pre-existing memories. This creates an updated associative network of memories.

Dr. Walker comments on the third point, “That’s the reason that you can come back the next day having extracted and divined creative novel solutions to previously impenetrable problems that you were facing.” While simple problems benefit from focused thought, complex problems benefit from non-conscious thought, such as that which occurs during sleep. It’s because of this function that nearly every language has a phrase similar to “sleep on a problem,” and not to “stay awake on a problem.” He ends with the analogy, “It’s essentially informational alchemy that occurs overnight.”

The emotional circuits of our brains are also modified during sleep. Our amygdala is reconnected to our prefrontal cortex when we get a good night’s sleep, which puts a brake on our emotional gas pedal. When we are deprived of sleep, the connection is severed, which essentially makes us all emotional gas pedal and no brake.

The benefits of sleep don’t end at the brain; there are many physiological systems that are rebooted during sleep as well. Deep, non-REM sleep is one of the best forms of blood pressure medicine, because it slows your heart rate. It also releases a variety of restorative chemicals and hormones, including a growth hormone that restores the cells in your body.

Sleep regulates your metabolic system, specifically insulin levels. In fact, studies have shown that one week of five-six hours of sleep a night will disrupt a person’s blood sugar enough to classify them as pre-diabetic. This illustrates the crucial role sleep plays in regulating the metabolic system.

A lack of sleep is known to age both men and women by a decade in terms of wellness and virility by disrupting the reproductive system.

Appetite regulation and food consumption are directly affected by sleep. Sleep deprivation causes in imbalance in leptin, which tells your brain when you’re satisfied with your food, and ghrelin, which tells your brain you’re not satisfied with your food. This causes you to eat 300-500 more calories a day. Not only do you eat more, but you’re also more likely to reach for starchy carbohydrates and high-sugar foods, while avoiding high-protein foods.

One night of four-hours of sleep will drop your cancer-fighting immune cells by 70%. The link between sleep-deprivation and cancer is so strong, that the World Health Organization recently classified night-time shift work as a probable carcinogen because it disrupts our sleep rate rhythms.

Five-hours of sleep per night the week before you get your flu shot will reduce your body’s antibody response to less than 50%, rendering it largely ineffective. Similarly, with five-hours you are 200-300% more likely to catch a cold than someone who gets eight-hours of sleep.

According to Dr. Walker, “All lack of sleep is, perhaps, a slow from of self-euthanasia.”

How to Fall Asleep Fast and Sleep Better

“I think what we know is that: Without sleep there is low energy and disease, with sleep there is vitality and health.” – Dr. Walker 

Dr. Walker begins to share five tips (and their explanations) for how to sleep better. These five tips all follow a primary, overarching requirement: Carve out an eight-hour, non-negotiable sleep window every night.

1. Go to bed and wake up at the same time.

Regardless if it’s a weekday, the weekend, or a holiday, always wake up at the same time. Even if you have a bad night of sleep, just make sure you fall asleep early the following evening. Sleeping in late causes “social jetlag” where you feel tired in the evening and drift forward in time; this has deleterious consequences to your health and sleep.

2. Keep it cool.

Keeping your bedroom around 68°F (18.5°C) is optimal for most people. This is because your body needs to drop its core temperate 2-3° to initiate sleep. If your feet get cold, then you can wear socks. Also, a hot bath before bed causes mass vasodilation (more so than a hot shower); this pulls your blood near your skin’s surface, plummeting your core temperature.

3. Keep it dark.

Darkness releases melatonin, a vital hormone for the onset of sleep. Too much light inside the house (or from LED screens) before bed will trick your brain into thinking it’s daytime, shut off the production of melatonin, and prevent sleep. Dim your lights by turning half of them off in the evening, avoid LED screens in the last hour before bed, and use black-out curtains.

4. Get up if you’ve been awake in bed for longer than 20-minutes.

Whether you’re trying to fall asleep or wake up, you must get out of bed if you’ve been lying awake for more than 20-minutes. If not, then your brain creates the association that your bed is about being awake, rather than asleep. If you’re trying to fall asleep but can’t, then go to another, dim room and maybe read a book (but avoid eating and screens). Only when you’re sleepy should you return to bed; that way you fall right asleep and recreate the association that beds are for sleeping. Dr. Walker, a hard scientist and skeptic, even suggests meditation, citing its support from clinical trial data and his recent conversion to the practice himself.

5. No caffeine after noon and no alcohol in the evenings.

Even people who claim that caffeine doesn’t affect them because they fall right asleep suffer from less-deep sleep. When they wake up, they don’t feel as refreshed, then reach for an extra cup in the morning, thus building a cycle of dependency and addiction. If you don’t stop at noon, then certainly after 2:00pm. Alcohol, on the other hand, sedates your cortex (effective knocking out your brain). This causes un-restorative sleep by waking you up multiple times throughout the night. It also blocks your REM sleep, which is critical for creativity and memory processing as well as emotional and mental health.

A common trap for people to fall into is thinking, “Well, this is how I am now at this age.” But this perception of yourself prevents you from realizing that you can be a far better version of yourself, mentally, cognitively, and physiologically, if you simply start getting enough sleep.

This trap can easily occur as a result of excessive or improper caffeine consumption. It isn’t until people come off caffeine that they start to feel the benefits that normally come from high-caffeine use. “It’s like wiping a fogged window, and you can start to see clearly through it,” Dr. Walker comments, attributing the improvement to a full, restorative night of sleep. 

How to Deal with Insomnia

            “There are no sleeping medications that we have currently that produce naturalistic sleep.” – Dr. Walker

Sleeping Pills

Dr. Walker goes on to address the question of sleeping pills. He explains that the current class of drugs one will be prescribed are called ‘sedative hypnotics.’ Just like alcohol, these sedate (or knock out) your brain. The sleep you get on sleeping pills is not the same as natural, healthy sleep.

Additionally, these pills are associated with a far higher risk of death, cancer, and infection. Though these links have not be confirmed as causal or merely associational. He goes on to inform us that that people don’t necessarily need them, and there is a safe, non-pharmacological alternative which is just as effective: cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBTI).

With CBTI, the benefits to your sleep are just as powerful in the short-term, but they also continue long-term as you maintain the practice. Sleeping pills, on the other hand, produce rebound insomnia, where your sleep is just as bad (or worse) once you stop taking them. (People should revisit these issues with their doctor if they’re interested in alternative treatment.) 

GABA

GABA is the principle, inhibitory neurotransmitter of the brain; it works like a red light for your neurons, telling them to stop firing. Most sleeping medications work by targeting the GABA system, though their blunt nature is incapable of properly mimicking the complex neuro-chemical and neuro-physiological ballet that occurs during sleep.

Melatonin Supplements

Next, Dr. Walker discusses the uses of melatonin supplements. While they don’t actually help a young, healthy person with a stable sleep schedule, they’re great for helping someone adjust to a new time zone. By taking it 30-60 minutes before you want to sleep, it can help reset your body’s internal clock and counteract jetlag. He also notes that if people take melatonin and they feel that it helps (even if it doesn’t), then they should continue to do so.

Napping

Many people think that, if they don’t get enough sleep, then they can just “catch up” on it later, either with a nap or by getting more sleep at night. Dr. Walker states, “Sleep is not like the bank. You can’t accumulate debt, then hope to pay it off at the weekend. There is no credit system.”

However, if you are sleep-deprived, then you can nap and overcome some of the basic sleepiness. Your reaction times improve a little, but you don’t overcome the higher-level cognitive issues, like decision-making, learning and memory, and focused attention. He goes on to discuss a futile tactic he sees in his students that he calls ‘sleep bulimia.’ This is where they get too little sleep during the week, then try to binge sleep during the weekend and make up the deficit.

He uses an analogy to describe a negative aspect of napping: Throughout the day we build up a chemical pressure in our brain, a sleepiness pressure, due to the build up of adenosine. The more you build up the sleepier you feel; and after 16-hours of wakefulness, you should fall right asleep and stay asleep for eight-hours, thus releasing the sleepiness pressure. However, when we nap, it’s like we open a valve and let a little of the pressure out. This makes it harder for us to sleep well at night, either by struggling to fall asleep or stay asleep.

Echoing the placebo affect associated with melatonin supplements, if you can nap regularly and sleep well at night, then keep napping. Otherwise, you should avoid napping and build up that sleepiness pressure until you fall asleep at night.

Action Steps for a Good Night’s Sleep

To finish off, Dr. Walker suggests a simple self-improvement test: Give yourself one week of eight-hours of sleep a night. Determine if you feel better when you get eight-hours of regularly scheduled sleep versus a random schedule of five-hours one night, then six-hours the next, and so on. Then ask yourself, “Did that experiment work? Is it in my favor? Do I feel any better? Do I notice that improvement?”

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

[Book] Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker
[DVD] Memento
[Twitter] Matt Walker
[LinkedIn] Matthew Walker
[Website] Sleep Diplomat

Why We Sleep (14min)

• The incredible benefits of getting enough and the terrible side effects of not getting enough. 

• The Brain and The Functions of learnings and memory. 

  • Sleep after learning is essential and like hitting the “save” button after learning. We also now know that it’s important even before learning. 

  • Without sleep the memory circuits become blocked up.

• Examine The Hypothesis of the All Nighter

  • 40% deficit in the ability of the brain to make new memories without sleep.

  • Brain activity is shot almost entirely after sleep deprivation. 

    • He describes it as like Memento the movie. (Great movie BTW)

• What is it that causes people to get good sleep and how does it affect our brain?

• What in sleep causes these benefits?

  • As we get older our memory gets work but our sleep does as well and they are related.

• Sleep is critical for your emotional and mental health

  • On less sleep these areas of the brain become irrational. 

  • Video of a subject illustrates this point. - Subject goes from angry to laughing then back to base in about 20 seconds. 

  • Without sleep you can’t take your foot off the emotional gas pedal.

• Sleep deprivation is correlated with depression and almost every psychiatric disorder. 

• The body relies on sleep as well.

  • 75% reduction in NK cell activity even after one bad night of sleep. Immune system will be shot. 

  • Lack of sleep and cancer has been shown to have a strong relationship. 

Matthew on CBS This Morning (6min)

• ⅔ of Americans do not get their full recommended 8 hours of sleep. 

• Every disease in developed nations is made worse by lack of sleep.

• Short Sleep = Shorter Life

• Brain - builds up a toxic buildup in the brain.

• Body - No immune system and activities stress chemistry leading to heart disease and cancer. 

• ALL RESEARCH BASED

• Naps - A double edged sword. Sleep is not like the bank, you can’t accumulate debt then pay it off as you go about your day. 

• Sleeping Pills - These are bad!

Secrets of the Sleeping Brain (1hr 41min)

• Long video that goes deep into some of the topics covered above. 

• Love the concept that we’ve hit on before that sleep actually allows you to integrate in ideas and learnings into what you’ve been doing prior. 

The Sleep Deprivation Epidemic (6min)

• Sleep is one of the most important aspects of our life and yet it is increasingly neglected in twenty-first-century society, with devastating consequences. Award-winning professor of neuroscience Matthew Walker provides a fascinating insight into why it is vital we start taking sleep seriously.

Episode Transcript

[0:02:21.7] MB: Today, we have another fascinating guest on the show, Dr. Matthew Walker. He’s a professor of neuroscience and psychology at UC Berkeley and a founder and the director of the Center for Human Sleep Science. He’s published over a 100 scientific studies and is the author of the book, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the power of Sleep and Dreams, which is currently the number one Amazon bestseller in the neuroscience category. He’s been featured on TV, radio, including CBS’s 60 Minutes, National Geographic and much more.

Matt, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:02:53.7] MW: It’s a pleasure to be on Matt. Thank you for having me. 

[0:02:56.2] MB: Well, we’re very excited to have you on here today. I’d love to begin the conversation and talk a little bit about – as I think you’ve called it the sleep deprivation epidemic, and what happens to us when we don’t get enough sleep.

[0:03:11.4] MW: You’re right. There is currently a global sleep-loss epidemic. This is sweeping developed nations. It’s been underway for probably about 60 or 70 years. We know from surveys back in the 1940s that the average American adult was sleeping 7.9 hours a night. Now we know that number is down to 6 hours and 31 minutes during the week for American adults.

Back in my home country, not much better. It’s 6 hours and 49 minutes on average people are sleeping. Japan seems to be the worse; 6 hours and 22 minutes. I just give you those numbers to reaffirm first this pernicious erosion of sleep that has happened over the past 70 or 80 years as truth. But also just to take a step back, I think we have to realize that it took mother nature 3.6 million years to put this necessity of 8 hours of sleep in place.

Then we have come along, and in the space of blink of an evolutionary eye; 60, 70 years we’ve locked off maybe 20%, 25% of that sleep amount. How could it not come with deleterious consequences? I think it’s been proudly confirmed that we are in a global sleep-loss state of deficiency, or an epidemic as the CDC and the World Health Organization have called it.

What are the consequences though? Because if it’s not doing us any harm, then why worry? If only that were true, there is demonstrable harm that is underway because of the sleep-loss epidemic. We can start at the big 30,000-foot level and make it a very simple statement based on epidemiological studies from millions of people. That is the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life. Short sleep predicts all-cause mortality.

I think that classical maxim that you may have heard. You can sleep when you’re dead. It’s always struck me as ironic, because if you adopt that mindset, we know from the evidence that you will be both dead sooner, and the quality of that now shorter life will be significantly worse. 

If you dig down a little deeper you can say, “Well, if a lack of sleep kills you more quickly, then what is it that is killing you more quickly?” It seems to be just about everything. Every made disease that is killing us in the developed world has causal insignificant links to a lack of sleep. That list currently and tragically includes Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes, as well as numerous mental health conditions; depression, bipolar disorder and most recently and sadly, suicide as well.

I think we’re really now starting to understand not just how deathly a lack of sleep is and the current weight of our sleep deprivation, and that elastic band of sleep deprivation can stretch only so far before it snaps. But with also understanding from hard science exactly why a lack of sleep produces such disease, sickness and ill-health within the brain and the body.

[0:06:31.1] MB: It’s amazing and it’s so important to think about why sleep is so vital. Yet, in today’s society it seems like there is more and more of a push to sleep less, work more, hustle more, do more. How do we combat that? 

[0:06:49.5] MW: There is. I think currently, sleep has an image problem in society, because more often than not, we seem to stigmatize sleep and we suggest that people who are getting sufficient sleep and I actually choose my words quite carefully there. As being lazy, as being slothful, those who get maybe 7 or 8 hours of sleep a night.

People I think are – or some people, I should say. Not all, but some people are perhaps quite proud of the fact of how little sleep that they’re getting and where it almost as though it’s a badge of honor to be celebrated. It’s sad, because for all of the reasons that we’ve just discussed, it’s an ill-advised mentality to expose.

It’s also strange, because if we don’t always have that opinion. I don’t think any of us would look at an infant sleeping during the day and say, “Gosh, what a lazy baby.” We don’t do that, because we know that sleep at that time of life is absolutely non-negotiable. It’s fundamentally necessary. But if you look at the evidence somewhere between infancy and now even childhood, not only do we abandon this notion that sleep is necessary and important, but we give it this terrible stigma.

I think that attitude has to change, and there are many ways in which it has to change. I think part of the problem perhaps is that the science of sleep is actually not being adequately communicated to the public. I think it’s people like myself who are to blame. I’m a sleep scientist, a professional sleep scientist for 20 years now.

I can’t go around wagging the finger at people if people have not been educated by the science that the taxpayer dollars have funded. That was part of the motivation to write the book that I didn’t feel as though there was a book after that gave people a blueprint manifesto of all of the real hard science of sleep.

There are lots of books out there that you can buy about the quick fix, these are the 10 rules to better sleep, or – I got nothing against those types of books, but for me I felt it was important because my sense is that people don’t respond to rules. They respond to reasons rather than rules, and I wanted to give and write a book of reasons for why you should sleep, rather than rules for how to sleep.

[0:09:27.7] MB: I want to dig a little bit more specifically into some of the negative implications or maybe the flipside of why sleep is so important for certain activities. For somebody who – let’s contextualize this maybe within a framework broadly thinking about, if I want to get more work done people often say, “All right, I’m going to sleep less,” or, “I’m going to pull a all-nighter,” or, “I’m going to cut down on my sleep so I can be more productive,” how does that usually pan out? What does the science say about doing that?

[0:09:59.5] MW: It doesn’t pan out very well. In fact, the opposite is true; we now know that less sleep does not equal more productivity. There have been lots of laboratory and workplace with these, and they give us five clear truths. Firstly, under-slept employees tend to take on less challenging work problems. In other words, they opt for the easy way out. Under-slept employees actually produce fewer creative solutions to work problems that they’re facing.

They also actually exert less effort when working in groups, and we’ve done some of these work. They essentially slack off. It’s what we call social-loafing. They write the tale of others and try to claim their hard work is their own.

We also know very interestingly that under-slept employees are more likely to lie, cheat and engage in deviant behaviors, such as falsifying a claims, receipts, etc., and it’s a scaling function; the less sleep that you have, the more likely you are to lie and be deviant. 

What’s also interesting is that it scales the business hierarchy all the way up to the top. We know that the more or less sleep that a business leader has had, the more or less charismatic their employees will rate that business leader.

Even though the employees themselves know nothing about how much sleep that business leader has had. They can actually see it in the expression of the behavior of their leader. You can then actually scale that up from those that have low-level studies, all the way up to the high-level studies. There was a recent round report, an independent report that demonstrated that chronic exhaustion and fatigue due to a lack of sleep caused most first-world nations about 2% of their GDP. For the United States, that’s 411 billion dollars that we lose each year due to a lack of sleep.

If you can just think about that, if we solve the sleep deprivation problem in the US, we could almost double the budget for education and we could make huge in-roads into the problems that we have with healthcare. Or we could just flat out give people remarkably high tax rebates, simply by solving the sleep-loss epidemic.

I think in response to your question, it’s very clear that under-slept individuals are not going to be successful. It’s a little bit like, if you think about your workforce and you’re forcing them to come into work every morning, early and leave very late, so no one is getting enough sleep, it strikes me a little bit like a spin class at a gym.

Everyone in the office looks like they’re working hard, but the scenery never changes, there’s never any forward progression in terms of momentum with productivity and creativity. I think we need to change our attitude in the workplace regarding sleep. The evidence is very clear there.

[0:13:04.3] MB: Especially around the creativity and the productivity aspect of that. It makes me think almost about the – an applied version of the 80-20 principle, where it’s not necessarily just more hours of work equals more output, but it’s really vital to have quality work, where you’re creative, where you’re bringing a fresh perspective and a well-rested mind. That’s when you really produce value. That’s the 20% that produces 80% of your results. All the busy work and the hustle and muscle, if you don’t get enough sleep you’re not going to be able to really be incredibly productive.

[0:13:44.3] MW: I think that that’s very true. Is there a way that we could actually break the classic [inaudible 0:13:50.0] 80-20 law that’s common throughout nature and it’s applied to human beings as well. By way of manipulating sleep could we actually force it to be that it’s 30% or 40% of your workforce that returns now 80% or 90% of the productivity by way of sufficient sleep. 

It’s just coming down to the very fact that what is the recycle rate of a human being? I think people have failed in the workplace to actually face this question and ask it. It’s surprising, because people in the workplace are wonderfully astute at trying to squeeze every ounce of effectiveness and efficiency out of all of their systems, be it the budget, be it the tax, be it the hardware, be it the software.

I think we forget about the biological organism at the heart of most companies, the human beings themselves. We have to ask, “How long can an individual be awake before they decline and decline significantly in the productivity, efficiency and effectiveness?” We now know that that evidence, you need 8 hours of sleep, 16 hours – after 16 hours of wakefulness, the cognitive capacities and the physiological capacities of the body starts to decline dramatically in after 20 or 21 hours of being awake. You are as cognitively impaired as someone who would be legally drunk in terms of driving behind the wheel.

There really is a recycle refresh rate of a human being, and we know that and it declines dramatically once you get past that 16. What I’m suggesting there is not 16 hours of work. I’m suggesting that this 8, 9-hour work span, then people need that downtime and they need to get that 8 hours of sleep to reboot and refresh.

[0:15:45.3] MB: What’s actually happening during that recycling period?

[0:15:49.7] MW: Well, we know firstly that there are multiple different stages of sleep that we ebb and flow in and out of, throughout a full 8-hour phase. Those different stages of sleeping, the two principle types of sleep, I should note that probably most people are aware of, or what are called non-rapid eye movement sleep, or non-REM sleep, and rapid eye movement sleep or REM sleep, which is the stage principally from which we dream.

Non-REM sleep actually has several sub-stages to it, stages one through four, increasing in the depth of sleep. By the way, it always strikes me as funny that scientists are not a very creative bunch. We have these four stages of deep non-REM sleep, and all we could come up with was stages one through four. Let’s set that side for a second.

We know that all of those different stages of sleep perform different functions end up all necessary. To come back to your question though, exactly what is happening at night? Well, let’s take deep non-REM sleep for a start.  The deepest stages of non-REM sleep. That stage of sleep is actually critical for essentially clearing out all of the metabolic toxins that have been building up in your brain.

Now that may sound a little bit hand-waving, but is actually very hard to get science from animal studies. When we are awake, we are essentially in a form of low-level brain damage. That’s what wakefulness is. We produce a variety of metabolic byproducts as a result of all of that waking brain cell combustion that we’re doing.

It is during sleep at night when we clear that away. What is clearing that away? Well, it turns out that we made a discovery, which is a sewage system in your brain. Now you have a sewage system in your body that you’re probably familiar with called the lymphatic system. But your brain also has one, it’s called the glymphatic system after the cells that produce it or compose the system called glial cells. 

That sewage system within the brain, glymphatic system, is not always on, at least not in highest flow capacity. It’s only during sleep and particular deep sleep at night where that cleansing system of the sewage network actually kicks in to high gear. It increases by maybe 2 to 300% relative to when we’re awake.

Why is this important? Well, one of the metabolic toxins that the glymphatic system clears away as we sleep at night is a toxic protein called beta-amyloid. Beta-amyloid is one of the leading candidate causes of Alzheimer’s disease. This is why we know that people who are not getting sufficient sleep across their lifespan are at a far high risk probability of going on to develop Alzheimer’s disease. The less sleep that you have, the less clearing away of that toxic byproduct. That’s one way, general way that we know that the brain gets essentially a refresh.

We also know that different cognitive systems and networks within your brain undergo a restoration. For example, we know that learning in memory systems get overhauled. We take information that we recently learned and we transfer it from short to long-term memory during sleep, which is actually like hitting the save button on new memories, so it prevents you from forgetting by cementing and solidifying those memories into long-term story sites.

We also know that there is a clearing out of your short-term memory reservoir. It’s perhaps a little bit like shifting files from a USB stick, so that when you wake up the next day, you have this renewed capacities to start learning and acquiring new facts and information all over again. That’s a more specific way in which the brain actually gets an overhaul at night during sleep.

We also know that the emotional circuits of the brain are changed and modified by sleep. There are deep emotional brain sensors, very old evolutionary centers specifically a structure called the amygdala, which controls the vital flight response. That structure, the amygdala is normally regulated in us higher order primates, human beings specifically, by a part of the brain that sits just above  your eyes called the prefrontal cortex, which acts a little bit like the CEO of the brain. It makes very high-level executive top-down control decisions.

When you had a good night of sleep, that part of your frontal lobe has been reconnected to your deep Neanderthal amygdala fight or flight center of the brain. It just regulates it. It’s a little bit like a break to your emotional accelerator pedal. When you don’t get enough sleep, that connection is actually severed and there’s a consequence. You become almost all emotional gas pedal and too little frontal lobe regulatory control brake.

There are many different ways in which sleep generally and very specifically seems to regulate our brain. I could also speak about the different ways that sleep actually reboots multiple systems within the body. That’s certainly the ways in which it refreshes your brain.

[0:21:13.5] MB: I want to dig into learning productivity and the emotional aspects. But before we do, tell me briefly about the physiological and the body reset aspects of sleep as well.

[0:21:25.3] MW: Firstly, we know that deep non-REM sleep that we described is perhaps one of the best forms of blood pressure medication that you could ever imagine. It’s during that deep sleep that your heart rate actually drops, your blood pressure will lower. There are a variety of restorative chemicals and hormones that are released, a growth hormone in particular to actually restore the cells within the body. It’s fantastic for the cardiovascular system.

We also know that it regulates your metabolic system, specifically it regulates insulin levels. If you’re not getting sufficient sleep, your blood glucose actually starts to become disrupted. There are [inaudible 0:22:07.7] that is now taking healthy people with no signs of diabetes. After one week of five to six hours of sleep a night, their blood sugar is disrupted so profoundly that their doctor would subsequently classify them as being pre-diabetic. That’s how critical sleep is to maintaining the metabolic system.

We also know that sleep is essential for another one of the major systems, the reproductive system. Here I’ll speak frankly about testicles, because we know that men who are routinely getting just 5 to 6 hours a night have significantly smaller testicles than those who are sleeping 8 hours or more.

In addition, men who report getting just 5 or 6 hours of sleep each night have a level of testosterone, which is that of someone 10 years their senior. In other words, a lack of sleep will actually age you by a decade in terms of that aspect of wellness and virility. We see very similar impairment in equivalent reproductive hormones and health, of course by a lack of sleep. It’s not just males who are disrupted in that way.

There are a variety of systems within the body. It also regulates appetite and weight and your food consumption. We know for example that those individuals who are not getting enough sleep will have an imbalance in the two hormones that control your hunger and your food intake. Those two hormones are called leptin and ghrelin.

Now leptin sounds like a Hobbit, I know, but trust me they are actually real hormones. Leptin is the hormone that tells your brain you’re satisfied with your food. You’re no longer hungry. You should stop eating. Ghrelin is the antithesis of that. Ghrelin will actually signal to your brain that you are not satisfied by the food that you’ve just eaten, that you are still hungry and that you should eat more.

People who are put on a regiment of just 5 or 6 hours of sleep for one week will have a mocked reduction in leptin, the hormone that says, “You’re fine. You’ve eaten enough, you can stop eating. You’re not hungry.” A mocked increase in the hormone ghrelin, which tells you, “You’re not satisfied with your food. You’re hungry and it’s time to eat more.”

That’s why people will actually eat somewhere between 3 to 500 calories more each day when they’re not getting sufficient sleep. You should also know by the way, it’s not just that you eat more, but what you eat is non-optimal when you’re sleep-deprived. Without sufficient sleep, you actually reach for the heavy-hitting starchy carbohydrates, as well as high-sugar foods and you stay away from the protein-rich foods. In other words, you’ll find yourself reaching for another slice of pizza rather than leafy greens, kale and beans.

It’s not just that you eat more. It’s what you eat that is also detrimental too. I hope that gives people just a little bit of a few brush strokes in terms of the bodily consequences. The one that we probably haven’t mentioned though, which is perhaps most impacted is your immune system. We know that one night of 4 hours of sleep will drop critical anti-cancer fighting immune cells called natural killer cells by 70%, which is a truly remarkable state of immune-deficiency, which happens very quickly within just one night.

Secondly, we also know that the link between a lack of sleep and cancer has now become so strong that the World Health Organization recently classified any form of night-time shift work as a probable cause energy. In other words, jobs that may induce cancer, because of a disruption of your sleep rate rhythms.

We can look to more benign things too. We know that if you’re getting just 5 hours of sleep in the week before you go and get your flu shot, you will only produce 50%, or in fact, less than 50% of the normal antibody response, rendering that flu shot largely ineffective.

Finally, know that if you’re getting just 5 hours of sleep a night, you are 2 to 300% more likely to capture cold, than someone who is getting 8 hours of sleep a night. This was a remarkable study where they quarantined people in a hotel and they had tracked how much sleep that they were getting in the week before. Then they flushed up the nose of all of these individuals; the flu virus. Then in the next few days they looked to see how many of those individuals succumbed to the flu, how many got infected. Then they bucketed them on the basis of how much sleep that they had in the week before, and that’s how they were able to come to that conclusion.

There really isn’t any system within your body, or process within the brain that isn’t wonderfully enhanced by sleep when you get it, or demonstrably impaired when you don’t get enough.

[0:27:25.3] MB: What a powerful statement. I mean, just that sentence alone really succinctly summarizes the fundamental conclusion that the science is in across nearly every spectrum of the body, the brain, etc., that sleep is incredibly valuable. That 8 hours of sleep specifically is really critical.

[0:27:46.2] MW: I think it is. I think what we know is that without sleep, there is low energy and disease. With sleep, there is vitality and health. The sleepless epidemic is perhaps the greatest curable disease that no one is really talking about, or effectively trying to solve. I would simply say that the lack of sleep is both the most striking omission in the health conversation of today. All lack of sleep is perhaps a slow form of self-Euthanasia.

[0:28:16.6] MB: I want to dig back into the relationship. Let’s touch on learning and memory. Tell me a little bit more about the work you’ve done and some of the research around how sleep can improve learning and memory.

[0:28:29.8] MW: Sleep actually is beneficial for memory in at least three ways that we’ve now discovered and this is the work that we’ve been doing, or some of the work that we do at my sleep center.

First, we know that you need sleep before learning to essentially prepare your brain; perhaps a little bit like a dry sponge, ready to initially soak up new information the next day. We did a study where we tested a very simple hypothesis. Is it wise to pull the all-nighter? Is it a good thing, or a bad thing?

We took a group of individuals and we either gave them a full night of sleep, or we kept them awake throughout the night. Then the next day, we wedged them inside an MRI scanner and then we have them try and learn a whole list of new facts as we were taking snapshots of brain activity. Then we tested them to see how effectively that learning had been.

Firstly, what we found is that when we put those two groups head to head, there was a 40% deficit in the ability of the brain to make new memories without sleep, and just a frame that in context it would simply be the difference between acing an exam and failing it miserably. What we went on to discover from the brain scans however was why the brain was failing to lay down those new memories.

There is a structure in our brains, on the left and the right side called the hippocampus. You can think of the hippocampus a little bit like the memory inbox of the brain. That it’s actually very good at receiving new memory files and holding on to them initially.

When we looked at that structure in those people who’d had a full night of sleep, we saw lots of healthy learning-related activity. Yet, in those people who were sleep deprived, we actually couldn’t find any significant activity whatsoever.

It was almost as though sleep deprivation had shut down your memory inbox as it were and any new incoming files. They were just being bounced. You couldn’t effectively commit new experiences to memory. If people would like to just understand what that means in terms of the hippocampus, I’m sure many people listening have probably seen the movie Memento. In that movie, that gentleman has damage to the brain and specifically to the structure of the hippocampus. From that point forward, he can no longer make any new memories. It is what we call in neurology, densely amnesic.

That part of his brain was the hippocampus and it is the very same structure that your lack of sleep will actually attack and prevent your brain from actually laying down and placing those new memories into a fixed state within the brain. That’s the first way that sleep is good for learning a memory.

You also need sleep not just before learning, but also after learning, but for something different now. Sleep after learning will essentially hit the save button on those new memories. It will essentially solidify those memories into neural architecture of the brain. As we mentioned before, it actually will transfer those memories, almost like packets of information being transferred across the network, from a short-term vulnerable storage site to the more permanent long-term storage center within the brain, which is called the cortex; this wrinkled mass that sits on top of your brain.

That means that when you come back the next day, those memories are protected and safe and you will be able to remember, rather than those memories being vulnerable to being overwritten or lost, for example to the ravage of time. Which mean, that they are ultimately forgotten. 

We also know a little bit about how sleep not only transfers memories during sleep, but even strengthens those memories. It’s during sleep that the brain actually replays the information that you’ve recently learned. These are studies done in humans, but also in animals they were actually placing electrodes into the brains of rats and they were having them run around a maze.

As they were running around the maze and learning the maze, all of these different brain cells which fire in a specific signature pattern, which was essentially the imprinting of a memory and it adds different tones to them. It would sound a little bit like “babababam, babababam, babababam.” The brain is imprinting this memory as the rat is running around the maze.

Low and behold, what happens is that when you then let the rats sleep, but keep recording and keep eavesdropping on the brain, what do you think reemerges? It’s exactly the same pattern, “babababam, babababam.” The rat is replaying those memories. What’s incredible however, is that it’s actually replaying them at somewhere between 10 to 20 times faster. Rather than “babababam,” it’s actually, “brrm, brrm, brr, brrm, brrm.” It’s this high-speed fidelity replay. We think that that actually helps score the memory trace into the brain in a strengthened manner, almost like etching on the surface of glass. You’re really strengthening that neural circuit. That’s sleep after learning to strengthen individual memories, and I guess essentially future proof that information within the brain.

There is a final third way that sleep actually helps memory that we’ve discovered, which I think is perhaps most exciting. Sleep doesn’t just simply strengthen individual memories. It’s that strengthening of individual memories by the way that happens during deep, non-rapid eye movement sleep, or dreamless sleep.

Sleep also then actually interconnects those new memories together and interconnects new information with all of your pre-existing back-catalog of autobiographical stored information. Essentially, what sleep is doing and this is actually the work of rapid eye movement sleep of dream sleep, is that you’re starting to collide information together within the brain. This is a bit like group therapy for memories.

What you awake with the next morning is a revised mind-wide web of information within the brain. It’s a new associative network, or at least not a radically new associative network, but it’s an updated and it’s a modified associative network. That’s the reason that you can come back the next day having extracted and divine, creative novel solutions to previously impenetrable problems that you were facing.

It’s probably the reason – I mean, now know this, for example that sleep will actually provide almost a three-fold advantage in problem solving relative to an equivalent time period spent awake. That science is now very well, I think rendered and described.

There probably is a reason that you’re never told to stay awake on a problem and in every language that I’ve inquired about to date, that phrase sleeping on a problem seems to exist. It seems to transcend cultural boundaries. It’s a phenomenon that is common across the globe. I should also note by the way that we – the British, we say you sleep on a problem. I believe and please correct me if anyone knows this, but I believe the French translation is a little closer to you sleep with the problem, rather than you sleep on a problem. I think that says so much about the romantic difference between the British and the French. I’ll digress before I lose my British passport.

[0:36:22.5] MB: That’s great. Yeah, that’s a funny anecdote and probably true. I’ve seen the phrase creative incubation and some research around creativity, and some of the science behind what you’re describing. To me, it makes so much sense that the more you give the brain the ability to something, and when you come back to that problem, you’re going to be much more creative. You’re going to be much more effective at solving. 

[0:36:48.0] MW: That’s right. It’s not just sleep by the way. If it’s a complex problem, simple problems tend to benefit from deliberative focused thought. But complex problems, problems where there are maybe 10, 20, 80 different variables and you could think of this as something very crass to you. What type of knife or fork set do you buy? This may be just three or four different variables. Versus, what type of card do you buy, where there is maybe 16 different features of variants that you have to choose between.

Well, the more complex a problem is, the more benefit there is to actually stepping away and stopping consciously thinking about it. That’s where the non-conscious brain seems to go to work. It seems to be able to distill amounts of information that we just can’t consciously juggle all up in the air at the same time when we’re awake. It’s just too much for a working memory. 

If you’re to think of perhaps what the extreme version of that non-conscious processing would be, you would probably design a system that looks very similar to sleep. That’s exactly why sleep provides those creative benefits. It’s essentially informational alchemy that occurs overnight.

[0:39:22.9] MB: I want to segway now and get into strategies for sleeping more effectively. We’ve talked at length about how important sleep is both from avoiding a tremendous amount of negative consequences, but also in producing a myriad of positive benefits. Tell me about, for somebody who maybe has trouble sleeping, or just in general, what are some of the basic interventions that we can implement in our lives to sleep better?

[0:39:50.5] MW: These tips I suppose, and again, I’m not just going to tell you the rules. I won’t just try and explain the reasons for each of these rules. I do warn people that some of them are probably not necessarily desirable. It makes me very unpopular, but here they are.

The first overarching rule of course, is that you just have to carve out an 8-hour non-negotiable sleep opportunity every night. It sounds crass and it’s sounds hokie, but I do this in my life as well. I’m not just saying this because I’ve just written a book and I want to practice what I seem to be preaching. But it’s from a very selfish perspective, because I know the evidence so well. If you knew the evidences I do, which and I hope people will do after reading the book, you just wouldn’t do anything different. I don’t want to short a life, I don’t want a life filled disease and pain and sickness and suffering. That’s why I do give myself a non-negotiable 8-hour opportunity every night.

Once you’ve got that in place – I don’t think it’s insurmountable. People are doing wonderful things in terms of actually committing non-negotiable time to exercise, and people are trying to eat more healthily. I don’t think sleep is a lost cause in this regard. 

Once you’re getting that opportunity, then I think there are five things that you could do. If there is one thing that you do from all of these tips, it is these; regularity. Go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time, no matter what, no matter whether it’s the weekend, or the weekday. Even if you had a bad night of sleep, still wake up at the same time the next day. Accept that it’s going to be a bit of a tricky day. But then just get to bed early the following evening and then you will reset.

Because if you sleep in late for whatever reason, you’re not going to feel tired until later that following evening, and you start to drift forward in time and it’s called social jetlag. That has marked deleterious consequences to your health and to your sleep. Regularity is key.

The second is temperature. Keep it cool. Keep your bedroom around about 68 degrees is optimal for most people, which is probably colder than you think, or about 18 and a half degrees Celsius. The reason is this, that your body needs to drop its core temperature by about a 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit in order to initiate sleep. That’s the reason that you will always find it easier to fall asleep in a room that’s too cold, than too hot. Because at least the cold room is moving your brain and body in the right thermal direction, that it actually wants to go to for sound and healthy long sleep. 

Try to keep your temperature in the bedroom cool. Wear socks if you get cold feet. Some people complain about this, so it’s okay to wear those socks, but keep the bedroom cool. Another way that you can exploit this hack is actually to take a hot bath before bed, or a hot shower. The bath is better if you look at the evidence.

Most people think that when they have a hot bath, they get into bed, they’re nice and warm and that’s what lets them fall asleep more easily. It’s actually the opposite. When you get into a bath, all of the blood comes from the core of your body out to the surface, that’s why you get that rosy glow. It’s what’s called mass vasodilation.

Once you get out of the bath with all of that blood near the surface of your skin, you have this huge massive thermal dump. You get this evacuation of heat from the body, which plummets your core temperature, and that’s why you’ll fall asleep more quickly and more soundly.

The third tip is the light, and actually darkness more specifically. We are actually a dark-deprived society in all first-world nations. You need darkness to allow the release of a critical hormone called melatonin. Melatonin will time the normal healthy onset of sleep. If you’ve got lots of light inside of the house during the evening, and especially if you’re looking and staring at those LED screens from phones, tablets, laptops etc., that will actually fool your brain into thinking it is still daytime and it will shut off melatonin, so you won’t be releasing melatonin.

There were studies done where they had people reading on an iPad for one hour before bed. If I was doing that here in California, their data demonstrated that my release and peak of melatonin didn’t happen, or were shifted by three hours forward in time. I would essentially be close to Hawaii in terms of my internal clock timing to sleep, rather than California.

Keep it dim. You can turn down half the lights in the house in the evening. You don’t need all of them on the last hour before bed. Also stay away from screens in the last hour, and try and use black out curtains, that can actually be very helpful.

The fourth tip is not to stay in bed if you have been awake for longer than 20 minutes. This applies to whether you’re trying to fall asleep, or whether you’ve woken up and are trying to fall back asleep. The reason is this, your brain is a remarkably associative device. If you are lying in bed awake, it quickly learns that being in bed is about being awake rather than being asleep.

You need to break that association. After 20 minutes or so, if you haven’t fallen asleep, get up, don’t get too stressed, go to a different room and in dim light, perhaps just read a book, no screens, no eating. Only when you feel sleepy should you return to bed. In that way, you will actually relearn the association between your bed being about being asleep, rather than being awake.

I would note that some people actually don’t like the idea of getting out of bed. It’s dark. Maybe they’re warm and maybe it’s colder in the rest of the house. I understand that. Another way to try and help you get back to sleep that has good proven clinical trial data behind it is actually meditation. I’m actually quite hard know a scientist, and when I was looking into this evidence as I was writing the book, I was really quite skeptical.

The studies were very clear, very well done, some of them out of Stanford here just down the way from me. So much so that I actually started meditating myself and that was seven months ago, and I’m now a regular meditator. If I’m traveling going through jetlag, for example and struggling with sleep, I will actually use a meditation relaxation practice.

The final tip is the one that really makes me deeply – well, deeply unpopular, just generally as a person anyway, but this is the one that really makes me unpopular with people. No caffeine after noon and avoid alcohol in the evenings. Forego and I kept and I’ll explain both.

Everyone knows of course that caffeine activates you. It’s a class of drugs that we call a stimulants and it can keep people awake. What people may not know however is that for those people who say, “Well, I can drink an espresso after dinner and I force sleep fine and I stay asleep.” That may be true. However, the depth of the deep sleep that you have when caffeine is swirling around within your brain during sleep is nowhere near as deep as if you had not had that cup of coffee in the evening.

As a consequence, people wake up the next morning. They won’t fee refreshed or restored. They don’t remember having a problem falling asleep or staying asleep. They don’t equate it with the cup of coffee they had the night before. But now they find themselves reaching the two cups of coffee, or three cups of coffee in the morning, which essentially is building a dependency and addiction cycle. That’s the issue with caffeine and that’s why the suggestion is stop caffeine midday and certainly after 2 PM.

Alcohol is probably the most misunderstood drug when it comes to sleep. Alcohol is a class of drugs that we call the sedative hypnotics. Sedation is not sleep. Many people will say, “Well, I nightcap, I have a quick whiskey and it puts me to sleep. It’s great.” It’s actually not true. What you’re simply doing is you’re sedating your cortex, you’re knocking out your brain essentially. You’re not getting into natural sleep.

Then there are two more problems with alcohol. Firstly, it will fragment your sleep so you will wake up many more times throughout the night, which leaves you with what we call un-restorative sleep. The final thing is that alcohol is one of the best chemicals that we know blocking your dream sleep, your REM sleep, which is essential for not just creativity and that associative type of memory processing that we spoke about.

REM sleep is also critical for emotional and mental health. It is during REM sleep when we provide our brain a form of emotional first aid, and you won’t be getting that if you’re blocking REM sleep by way of alcohol. Those would be the five tips to better sleep and hopefully they help some folks. I’m also happy to speak a little bit about sleeping pills. They’re also misunderstood, but those would be for most people the five tips that I would offer.

[0:49:17.9] MB: Great advice. I try to implement as many of those as possible. One of the things, specifically caffeine is something that I used to drink at my peak. About a cup of – I mean, a pot of coffee a day. Now I basically don’t consume any caffeine. When I do, I limit myself, no caffeine afternoon. Maybe one cup of tea is the maximum. I’ve noticed a huge impact on that impact in my sleep. Sorry, were you going to say something? 

[0:49:44.6] MW: Yeah. I’m just going to say, I mean it’s immensely wise and it’s one of the problems with a lack of sleep is that you quickly reset your perception of your effectiveness and your health. You just think, “Well, this is how I am now at this age.” Not realizing that you could actually be a far better version of yourself, both mentally, cognitively and physiologically if you were just to start getting sufficient sleep.

I think many people fail to realize that with caffeine especially that it’s only when they come off caffeine do they really start to feel both the benefits of all of the side effects that normally come with high caffeine use, but especially the benefits on sleep. It’s like wiping a fogged window and you finally can start to see clearly through it.  That’s the benefit of a full restorative night of sleep.

[0:50:36.8] MB: I have a couple short questions all around specific sleep strategies or tactics. Let’s start with – you touched on sleeping pills. Tell me about sleeping pills. Do they work? If so, why or why not?

[0:50:50.2] MW: There are no sleeping medications that we have currently that produce naturalistic sleep. The current class of drugs that you will be prescribed are called sedative hypnotics. Again, as we mentioned with alcohol, sedation is not sleep. The sleep that you have when you’re on sleeping pills, if I were to show you the electrical signature of your sleep if you would come to my laboratory, it would  not be the same on sleeping pills as it would be if you’re just having naturalistic healthy sleep. That’s the first thing.

The second thing, and I go to great lengths and a whole chapter in the book to discuss this, is that people are probably not aware of the risks of sleeping pills. They have not been communicated to public adequately. Firstly, we know that sleeping pills are associated with a far higher risk of death. They’re also associated with a significantly high risk of cancer and infection.

Now, we don’t yet know if this is causal versus simply associational, but what I wanted to do is to try to get that information out to the public, so they at least could be armed with the knowledge and make an informed choice with that doctor when they go and see the surgery. That’s I think one of the biggest problems of sleeping pills is that the misunderstood nature about what they give you and the dangers.

People also don’t necessarily have to be taking sleeping pills, I should note. There is a safe and non-pharmacological alternative which is just as effective. It is called cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, or CBTI for short. You work with a therapist for a couple of weeks. As I mentioned, it’s just as powerful as sleeping in the short-term, but better still, once you finish that short therapy phase, you continue to maintain that better sleep. Unlike sleeping pills, when you come off those you tend to actually have what’s called rebound insomnia, where your sleep is as bad, if not worse than when you started. 

I think people can revisit their sleep issues with their doctor. I’m not trying to shame people who are on sleeping pills. I’m not trying to make you feel bad if you are. I’m very sensitive to the desire for better sleep and I’m so sensitive to the issue of insomnia, or the desperate, desperate state. You should be aware of what sleeping pills are, what they do and what the alternatives are.

[0:53:15.8] MB: What about taking a melatonin supplement?

[0:53:18.6] MW: Melatonin is useful in the circumstance of jetlag to try and reset your body clock in a new time zone. You should take it 30 to 60 minutes before you want to get to sleep in the new time zone. Melatonin works to essentially time the onset of your sleep. I guess, the analogy would be if you think about the 100-meter race in the Olympics. Well, melatonin is the starting official who has the starter gun.

It’s melatonin that brings all of the different ingredients off the sleep race to the starting line, then starts the race in its entirety. It begins the sleep race. Melatonin itself does not actually participate in the race of sleep, in the generation of that sleep race. That’s a whole different set of chemicals. As a consequence, that’s why actually melatonin when you are in a new time zone and you’re stable now in that new time zone, if you’re a young healthy individual, then melatonin actually isn’t effective as a sleeping aid. It doesn’t actually help if you look at the studies.

That said, I would note that for those people who are taking melatonin and they feel as though it helps their sleep, well then I usually tell people continue on. It’s because the placebo effect is one of the most reliable effects in all pharmacology. No harm, no foul if you think it’s working for you.

[0:54:48.1] MB: What about napping? Is napping something – if you’re sleep-deprived, can you catch up with a nap?

[0:54:53.7] MW: Unfortunately, you cannot catch up on sleep. Sleep is not like the bank. This is another myth that I try to deconstruct in the book. You can’t accumulate a debt, let’s say during the week and then hope to pay it off at the weekend. Sleep just doesn’t work like that. There is no credit system, or there is no credit sleep sell within the brain.

You can if you are sleep-deprived, take a nap and overcome some of the basic sleepiness. Your reaction times will improve a little bit after a nap, but you don’t actually overcome all of the higher level, cognitive issues such as decision-making, learning in memory, focused attention, all of those types of things that we know are would buckle and collapse by way of a lack of sleep. Naps just don’t seem to be able to overcome those.

You can’t overcome – you can’t bank sleep and you can’t sleep off a debt. I see this in my students. It’s what I would call sleep bulimia, which is where they’re binging on sleep at the weekend and they’re – try and taking too little sleep during the week. It’s this binge purge kind of cycle.

I would also say naps, just more generally are a double-edged sword. If during the day when we’re awake, we actually build up a chemical pressure in our brain. It’s a sleepiness pressure. Now, it’s a hydraulic pressure, don’t worry. As I said, it’s a chemical pressure.  The chemical that builds up is called adenosine. The more of that sleepiness chemical that you have, the more and more sleepy that you will feel. After about 16 hours of being awake, you’re nice and tired and then you should fall asleep and stay asleep for about 8 hours.

When we sleep, we remove that sleepiness pressure. It’s almost like a valve on a pressure cooker. We release that sleepiness steam as it were. This is where I come back to naps. If you nap too late in the day, you actually release some of that healthy sleepiness, which means that when it comes time to sleep normally at night, you may actually struggle to fall asleep, or at least stay asleep.

The advice would be this, if you are someone who can nap regularly and you don’t struggle with your sleep at night, then naps are just fine. But if you can’t nap regularly and/or you’re having difficulties with your sleep at night then the advice is you shouldn’t nap, you should stay awake, build up that healthy sleepiness, and then you will have a better night of sleep because of it.

[0:57:30.1] MB: What about someone who’s in a situation, let’s say like a new parent. Is there anything that they can go through obviously, very chronically sleep-deprived state? Is there any strategy for them to be able to implement, that would help them battle through that in some way? 

[0:57:45.0] MW: Some parents describe trying to work better shifts and what I mean by that is in two ways. Firstly, some parents will try to take early, the early shift and then the late shift, the first half of the night versus the second half of the night and switch between those two. Another way that you can do that on an informed choice is try to determine whether you are a night owl, or you’re a morning type, what we call a lock. That’s a genetically predisposed. It’s called your chrono type.

If you are someone who likes to go to bed late and wake up late, versus someone who likes to go to bed early and wake up early, that’s not a choice. That’s a genetic mandate that’s being given to you in your DNA code. You can try to ask in the couple, are you someone who would prefer to wake up early and go to bed early? In which case, could you take the morning shift, the late morning shift?

If I’m someone who likes to go to bed late and wake up late, well then it’s easier for me to actually take the first half of the night and then sleep for the second half of the morning and sleep late. You can think about split shifts like that. Some people will also flip-flop back and forth. Some people will say, “Well, I’ll take the next two nights and you get good sleep, then we switch over and you take two nights.” They try to mix and match it in that way too. It’s a desperately difficult situation.

In part, we would not actually design to be family units like this, if you look at [inaudible 0:59:17.8] tribes who have not been touched by the electrical influence, then they actually tend to sleep in groups. Restless legs dangling all over the place, arms intertwined. Whole families would sleep together and people would take turns in terms of caring for the young. It’s a lot to ask of parents, and those are some of the ways that you can try to overcome it.

[0:59:45.6] MB: One other question and this is out of left field a little bit. I’m curious, have you seen or studied around the neurotransmitter GABA and its relationship with sleep?

[0:59:56.5] MW: GABA is the principle inhibitory neurotransmitter of the brain. The way that most sleeping medications work right now and you can just name your favorite one and it will work in this way, is by essentially trying to activate the receptors in the brain for GABA. Those receptors essentially are like the red lights on your neurons. They stop them firing, they stop them from going. 

Drugs that try to target the GABA system within the brain are really quite blunt instruments and that’s why sleeping pills, which act exactly in this way are really not precise tools. Sleep is a remarkably complex neuro-physiological and neuro-chemical ballet if you look at it. All of these different stages of sleep, neurotransmitters going up and down and brain networks ebbing and flowing.

To think that you can essentially recreate something that is so complex and so bi-directional sleep by simply just knocking the brain out and switching it off using GABA receptors is really just – it’s an unfortunate outcome of how poor our pharmacology is in this day and age. We just don’t yet have the pharmacological precision and sophistication to mimic sleep at this stage.

[1:01:22.4] MB: What’s one piece of homework that you would give to a listener who wants to sleep better?

[1:01:28.5] MW: I would say try giving yourself one week of 8 hours of sleep and see if you feel any better. Just give it as self-improvement test. Try it as a hack, that if you are one of those people who are into the quantified self-movement and you’re into self-experimentation then just test out all of that what you’ve just heard in the past week and just determine if you feel any better when you’re sleeping 8 hours every night and you’ve regular each and every night. Versus a staccato sleep schedule where you’re sleeping 5 hours and 6 hours and 12 hours and then 5 hours again. Just ask yourself, “Did that experiment work? Is it in my favor? Do I feel any better and do I notice that improvement? 

[1:02:19.2] MB: For listeners who want to learn more and want to find you and your book online, what’s the best place to do that?

[1:02:25.9] MW: They can find the book, which is called Why We Sleep. They can find that online. Amazon holds it. You can find it from all of your major bookstores, both the major brands, as well as all of the independent. It’s on the list of most libraries too. If you don’t want to part with your money, my publisher would probably won’t like me saying that, but I read online, it’s about the knowledge of the book, not the sales.

If you want to learn more about the work that I do, you can follow me on social media. I am at sleepdiplomat, all one word. Sleepdiplomat. I’m on Twitter and also you can find me on LinkedIn. Also on the web I am at – it is www.sleepdiplomat.com 

[1:03:11.4] MB: Well, Matt. This has been a fascinating conversation. So much great information, practical strategies, tons and tons of science. Really appreciate it. Incredible insights. Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all of these wisdom.

[1:03:25.4] MW: Well, thank you and I have to say a real thanks to you too. It’s not just what people say at the end of these interviews, but I’m trying to fight this battle for sleep. I can only do so much by getting on shows or television, radio or writing a book for example. I need fantastic journalists and media and genius types to actually join and partner with me to get this message out. I too just want to thank you, Matt. Thank you for being part of the sleep mission.

I’m going to grant you now the title of being a sleep ambassador for having me on the show. Thank you very much. Sincerely, I really want to thank you. I desperately need to get this message out. This portal is a remarkable way to proclaim the virtues of sleep. Thank you.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong with Eric Barker

In this episode we ask what really produces success by looking at what separates truly successful people from the rest, we examine many common and conflicting “success maxims” and look at what the data actually says really works, we dig deep into the vital importance of knowing yourself and your own strengths, look at the power of aligning your work with your environment, and discuss the dangers of constantly overcommitting your time with Eric Barker.

Eric Barker is the creator of the blog “Barking Up The Wrong Tree” - with over 290,000 subscribers.  His work is syndicated by Time Magazine, Business Insider and he has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and more. Just recently, his new book Barking up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong was named a Wall Street Journal Bestseller.

• The future is already here, its just not evenly distributed

• How Eric took a myth-busters approach to success maxims and figured out what really works

• Vital importance of knowing yourself and your strengths

• Why you need to align with a context and environment that rewards your skills

• What really produces success? What separates the very successful from the rest of us?

• We take alot of the common maxims we hear that conflict about success and look at what the DATA actually says about them

• What are intensifiers and why should you know about them?

• When are negatives positives? How can you know when it’s important?

• Context really reveals when and how these maxims work or not

• Do nice guys really finish last? What does the science say?

• Why, in some contexts, being a jerk can pay off (and when it can backfire)

• Strategies to improve self knowledge and know yourself more deeply

• Pursuing your passion doesn't always lead to happiness, but pursuing what you’re good at more frequently does lead to happiness

• Research is clear - focus on what you’re good at - and find a way to compensate for your weaknesses.

• Understanding your strengths allows you to plan the right way to go about achieving your big picture goals

• Deluding yourself is often worst situation of all and you frequently end up working against yourself

• Do quitters never win? Should we quit or persevere? How do we think about Grit?

• The vital importance of opportunity cost - we only have so much time in the day - we have to focus in on the biggest things

• Strategically quitting is not the opposite of grit, but enables you to focus in on the most important things

• People consistently over-commit their time and don’t understand how little time they have

• We consistently make the error that in the future we think we will have more time

• Find a balance - look at what’s producing results - show grit with those things - things that aren’t producing results

• Why you should absolutely dedicate 5-10% of your time to what Peter Simms calls “little bets”

• The key litmus test on whether or not you should apply GRIT or QUIT

• What research reveals (Richard Wiseman in the UK) on how you can improve your luck!

• How do we “walk the tightrope” between confidence and delusion? How often should we “believe in ourselves”?

• Confidence as a whole is a problematic paradigm, confidence follows success, it doesn’t lead to success - it has NO effect on outcomes, only impact on trying to build confidence is that it increases narcissism

• Confidence is often either delusional (detached from reality) or contingent (which can crash your self esteem)

• Self compassion provides all the benefits of self confidence with none of the drawbacks

• How to change the way you talk to yourself and cultivate self compassion

• The simplest and easiest cure for the “plague” of procrastination you can use right now!

• The more you work, if you’re actually doing deliberate practice, the better you do

• What’s more important HUSTLE or work life balance?

• There is an, essentially linear, relationship between time and skill development

• 10,000 hours alone is proof of nothing - its all about deliberate practice - our current understanding of skill development is grossly oversimplified

• Difference between obsession and passion?

• In living a truly successful life - relationships, alignment, and fulfillment are essential

• And much more!

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This weeks episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at Brilliant! Brilliant is math and science enrichment learning. Learn concepts by solving fascinating, challenging problems. Brilliant explores probability, computer science, machine learning, physics of the everyday, complex algebra, and much more. Dive into an addictive interactive experience enjoyed by over 4 million students, professionals, and enthusiasts around the world.

You can access courses online for free right now! however, Brilliant is offering The Science of Success Listeners 20% OFF THEIR FULL SUITE of classes and course simply go to brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess in order to claim your discount and start learning these incredibly important skills today!

SUCCESS Live: Learn. Develop Achieve.  SUCCESS believes success is possible for every person who seeks it.  Find it at SUCCESS Live, a two-day event, open to the public, taking place in Long Beach, California on September 8th & 9th 2017. SUCCESS Live features some amazing guest speakers including Keith Ferrazzi, Peter Diamandis, Jocko Willink, and More

Ticket packages are still available to the public at https://www.successliveevent.com/! Don't miss the chance to learn the inner workings of your mind, reignite your passions, and become a better leader by becoming a better YOU! JOIN US, members of The Science of Success team at SUCCESS LIve by going to https://www.successliveevent.com/ today!

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Personal Site] Barking Up the Wrong Tree

• [Book] The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done by Peter F. Drucker

• [Book] Barking Up the Wrong Tree by Eric Barker

• [Audiobook] The Luck Factor: The Scientific Study of the Lucky Mind by Richard Wiseman

• [HBS Faculty Profile] Boris Groysberg

• [Stanford Faculty Profile] Jeffrey Pfeffer

• [Website] Authentic Happiness

• [SoS Episode] Why You Shouldn’t Follow Your Passion & The Rare Value of Deep Work with Cal Newport

• [HBR Article] Managing Oneself by Peter F. Drucker

• [HBR Article] How Leaders Become Self-Aware by Anthony K. Tjan

• [Stanford Faculty Profile] Robert I.Sutton

• [Wiki Article] Gabriele Oettingen

• [Article] The Luck Factor by Richard Wiseman

• [Website] Self-Compassion with Dr. Kristin Neff

• [Personal Site] Sam Harris

• [Article] The 75-Year Study That Found The Secrets To A Fulfilling Life By Carolyn Gregoire

• [Article] Good genes are nice, but joy is better By Liz Mineo

• [Stanford Course] Life Course Studies Program

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success with your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:12.6] MB: Welcome to The Science of Success. I’m your host, Matt Bodnar. I’m an entrepreneur and investor in Nashville, Tennessee and I’m obsessed with the mindset of success and the psychology of performance. I’ve read hundreds of books, conducted countless hours of research and study and I am going to take you on a journey into the human mind and what makes peak performers tick with a focus on always having our discussion rooted in psychological research and scientific fact, not opinion. 

In this episode we ask what really produces success by looking at what separates truly successful people from the rest. We examined many common and conflicting success maxims and look at what the data actually says about what really works. We dig deep into the vital importance of knowing yourself and your own strengths. We look at the power of aligning your work with your environment and discuss the dangers of constantly overcommitting your time, with Eric Barker. 

The Science of Success continues to grow with now more than a million downloads, listeners in over a hundred countries, hitting number one New and Noteworthy and more. I get listener comments and emails all the time asking me, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all these incredible information?” 

A lot of her listeners are curious about how I keep track of all the incredible knowledge I get from reading hundreds of books, interviewing amazing experts, listening to awesome podcasts, and more. Because of that, we’ve created an epic resource just for you, a detailed guide called How to Organize and Remember Everything, and you can get it completely for free by texting the word “smarter” to the number 44222. Again, it's a guide we created called How to Organize and Remember Everything. All you have to do to get it is to text the word “smarter” to the number 44222 or go to successpodcast.com and join our email list, that’s successpodcast.com and join our email list. 

In a previous episode we discussed why people struggle to reach outside of their comfort zones and why it’s so critically important that you do. We explored the five core psychological roadblocks stopping people from stepping outside of their comfort zones. We went deep on how you can become tougher, more resilient and embrace discomfort and how you can master the art of small talk, what you need to cultivate the skill of global dexterity and much more, with Dr. Andy Molisnky. If you want to finally make progress on something that's been holding you back, listen to that episode. 

Also, don't forget. If you want to get all the incredible information we talked about in this show, links, transcripts and much more, and believe me, there's a ton of short notes for this episode. Be sure to check out or show notes that success podcast.com. Just hit the show notes button at the top. 

Lastly, you know how much I talk about the concept of mental models and how vital it is to build a toolkit of mental models in order to be successful and achieve your goals. That's why this week I am super excited to tell you that one of our sponsors, brilliant.org. Brilliant is a math and science enrichment learning tool that makes mastering the fundamentals of math and science easy and fun. They’re offering a special promotion for Science of Success listeners, and can get it at brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess. Mastering the fundamentals of math and science is such an important component of building to toolkit of mental models, and Brilliant is a great way to get started on the path. 

[0:03:16.6] MB: Another sponsor for this episode is the Success Live Summit, which as we hinted at, is not actually the Science of Success, but Success Magazine puts on an awesome live summit and they’ve been kind enough to sponsor this episode as well as hook us up with some sweet guest speakers, which will be coming on the show in the next couple of weeks. But this event is actually pretty awesome and I'm kind of bummed out that I'm not going to get to go to it. I have an immovable schedule conflict, but my producer, Austin, who’s here in the studio with me will be able to attend it and he’s going to be there. 

[0:03:45.7] A: Yeah, we’re super excited. If anybody who’s listening to this right now wants to meet up, shoot me an email, austin@successpodcast.com. We’d love to chat, shake hands, take pictures. It’d be awesome. I think it’s really important for people that are striving to become more successful, to become more fulfilled, looking into the science of success to be around other people with those same goals. 

This time around the event, it’s two days. It’s in September 8th and 9th in Long Beach, California. There’s ticket packages available and they’ve got some amazing speakers, Matt. 

[0:04:10.7] MB: They really do. There’s people like some of my favorite authors, Keith Ferrazzi, Never Eat Alone, which is literally sitting on my desk right here. I constantly keep it in front of me because it’s probably the greatest book ever written about networking. They’ve got Peter Diamandis, incredible thinker and leader. People like Brendon Buchard, Mel Robbins. Really phenomenal lineup. 

[0:04:28.7] A: Yeah, it’s going to be greatest, and they’re speaking on a ton of things, from success, how to become a better leader, find balance in your life. If you’re a CEO of a company, you really got to find time to recharge, time to hit the gas. Just finding balance and mental strategies to making yourself bigger and better and your business bigger and better. Really hitting on all cylinders here. It’s going to be a great, great event. 

[0:04:47.7] MB: You can learn more and get tickets at successliveevent.com. That’s successliveevent.com. Definitely check it out. If you're in Long Beach, I would highly recommend checking it out, if you're looking for a really cool event, September 8th and 9th, Long Beach, California, successliveevent.com, you can find all the information you need. 

[0:05:06.6] A: Success Live: Learn, Develop, Achieve. Go to successliveevent.com today to get your ticket.

[0:05:11.9] MB: Now, for the episode. Today, we have another amazing guest on the show, Eric Barker. Eric is the creator of the blog Barking Up The Wrong Tree with over 290,000 subscribers. His work is syndicated by Time Magazine, Business Insider and he's been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and much more. Recently, his new book, Barking Up The Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success is Mostly Wrong was named a Wall Street Journal bestseller. 

Eric, welcome to the Science of Success. 

[0:05:42.2] EB: Thanks so much. It’s great to be here.

[0:05:44.0] MB: We’re super excited to have you on. As I was telling you kind of before we got started, I’ve been a long time reader of your blog and a big fan. I got to ask you at the beginning, how do you pronounce the name of it and what's the story behind the actual kind of — I'm going to botch it terribly, like bakadesuyo or badakaseyo. I don’t know how to say it. Tell me the story behind what that is and why you initially named the blog that. 

[0:06:06.7] EB: I started the blog on a lark. I didn’t even really know what I was doing with it at first. Basically, I took Japanese as my language in undergrad and I found out the first day of class that my last name means moron in Japanese, so I’ve been to Tokyo three times. I’ve never had a Japanese person forget my name. 

Basically, in the Japanese language you usually use last names, what [inaudible 0:06:33.0] means I am Barker. What [inaudible 0:06:36.4] that’s also means I’m an idiot. They’re the same exact sentence. Basically, from a URL, that is either me emphatically saying my name or me emphatically saying I’m a moron. However anybody chooses to interpret it. Perhaps not the best marketing choice on my part for a URL, but definitely has a fun back story. 

[0:06:56.6] MB: That’s awesome. I didn’t know that story, so that’s really funny. Tell me a little bit about how did you initially kind of get involved in this path and what drew you to really wanting to understand the science behind what makes people successful. Obviously, that’s the name of this podcast, and so I think there’s a ton of synergies between what you write about and what we love to dig into on the show. 

[0:07:18.7] EB: Yeah. I’ve been doing a blog now for about eight years and basically I started just coming through the RSS feeds of academic journals and kind of broadened it out. I was just looking for, initially, interesting stuff, and then eventually stuff that we could use to kind of improve our lives, because there’s a great William Gibson quote I love where he said that, “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.” I think that’s true. A lot of questions we ask ourselves about success, about life, we think they’re mysteries. The truth is a lot of these things have been solved by scientific studies, most of those are not terribly fun or pleasant to read. 

I started doing that for a number of years and then I was lucky, blog kind of took off and people encourage me to write a book. I’ve had a very unconventional career of myself. I was a screenwriter at Hollywood. I worked in the video game industry, then I was a blogger, and I just saw that a lot of the ideas we have about success, these pithy little maxims we hear, like nice guys finish last, and it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. I saw that in a lot of situations these just didn’t apply to my career. I didn’t think they necessarily applied to other people or at least they were incomplete. 

Given that my blog was focused on personal development and success in many areas of life, everything from happiness, to productivity, to relationships and negotiation, I kind of wanted to tackle those head on and give them the Mythbusters treat and basically kind of look and see were they true, were they not true, and trying to get both sides of the story almost like a court case and hopefully make it fun and tell some engaging stories that people can relate to while trying to break down these myths. That was kind of the path I was on. 

[0:08:56.3] MB: I think that’s a great approach, and I love the structure of the book, which is as you said, to kind of take all of these maxims that we hear and people kind of casually toss out and say, “Hold on a second, is that even true?” In many cases, these maxims are directly contradictory. What does the data actually say? What is the research say about these strategies? That’s a genius approach to kind of cracking that walnut. 

[0:09:20.9] EB: It was really interesting for me, because in some — Maybe in a prior era, these things were more true, but now life is so complicated. We have so many options, so many possibilities that it’s hard to believe one pithy sentence, like nice guys finish last, is really going to sum up — is going to just include the sum total of anything. There’s definitely some insight in a lot of these, but I wanted to really look at what the experts and the academics had to say. It was educational for me as well and my intention here was to write the book I wish I had 15 years ago and to kind of have fun with it, because with everything I write on the blog, my attitude with everything is just try and — It’s like it better inform me or it better entertain me and preferably it’d better be both. 

[0:10:10.4] MB: You opened the book with a question of what separates the truly successful from everybody else. What did you see when you actually looked at the research and the data and figured out what are those key things. What are the differentiators that separate someone who’s really successful from someone who doesn’t achieve that?  

[0:10:30.4] EB: What I found was really interesting. Some insights that came from — The 10,000 foot overview were some insights that came from Gautam Mukunda and Boris Groysberg, two professors at Harvard Business School. The kind of the basic formula being, first, to know thyself. It’s really understanding your signature strengths, and that’s a funky academic term for knowing what your unique skills are, what you can really bring to the table that makes you standout. Knowing your interest, knowing your passions, knowing your signature strengths. Then aligning that with an environment that rewards those, those incentivizes those, because you can be really good at something, but if you’re not at a place that respects and values that, you’re probably not going to be very successful. 

On the flipside, you might work for a great company or a fantastic organization, but if you don’t really bring something to the table that’s unique and stands out, again, you’re probably not going to do so well there either. Once we look at those signature strengths and we find a place that rewards them, believes in those, you can really use something. 

What’s interesting there, and I discussed this in both the introduction and the first chapter, is what Harvard professor Gautam Mukunda calls intensifiers, and those are basically qualities that in general are negatives, but in the right environment can actually be positives. They can actually be the incredible competitive advantages. The example I used in the book is I want to talk about the story of Jure Robič who was the dominant participant in the Race Across America, which is this bicycle race that literally goes from Atlantic City to San Diego. They crossed the entire United States. Unlike the Tour de France, which has breaks, the Race Across America does not stop. The minute the clock starts, it does not stop, meaning if you stop to go to the bathroom, if you stop to sleep, if you stop — Anything, your competitors can pass you. People usually complete the race in 9 to 12 days. Two people have died trying to do this. It is just a relentless monster of an event. Outsize Magazine just declared it the most grueling ultra-endurance event there is. 

Jure Robič was the most dominant athlete in this sport, and the reason that he was so dominant is he would literally lose his mind. He would actually go crazy. He would hallucinate. He would become paranoid. He just start crying. He would hop off his bike and get in fist fights with mailboxes. He would lose his mind, but that disassociation allowed him to cope with just the unimaginable pain and discomfort of riding a bike for 9 days straight and he was so dominant he would actually — The difference between him and first place and the guy in second place was 11 hours. Literally, he would pass the finish line and you’d have to wait half a day to see number two cross the finish line. 

I think when I was a kid, my high school guidance counselor didn’t tell me that losing my mind and getting in fist fights with mailboxes was a path to success if anything. That’s where we get into the complexities of it where it’s just not so simple as played by the rules, get good grades, eat your Wheaties and everything is going to work out for you. We need to look at those times where when our negative is positive, and that’s why, like I said, when I talk about knowing yourself and finding the right environment, that doesn’t necessarily mean the typically prescribed things, like good grades and be sweet and nice. It’s that alignment between who you are and where you are that really produces success, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be those things that we were all told in elementary school. Sometimes the most biggest of negatives, like losing your mind, can actually be a positive, and that’s where I think we need to broaden how we think about what results in success, because when we talk about qualities like stubbornness, and stubbornness is a negative. 

If you’re an entrepreneur trying to do something really difficult, stubbornness is called grit and all of a sudden we think it’s fantastic. Grit and stubbornness can be the same exact thing, but that quality in you when you align it with the right environment, it’s a fantastic positive. For entrepreneurs, it’s probably essential. When you put it in a wrong environment, like a typical corporation where a group think is really a big thing, being stubborn and difficult can be problematic. It’s more about alignment in the big picture than it is about the positives or negatives of any particular quality in the abstract.  

[0:15:03.9] MB: I love that nuance and that story really highlights the example that context is vitally important. Another story that you’ve talked about is the story of Pixar, which I thought was really powerful. 

[0:15:16.3] EB: Yeah, basically it was right after Finding Nemo and Steve Jobs was concerned that they were going to lose their edge. That they had broken new ground. They had stepped aside from the typical animation, animation way of doing things, like Disney and the others, and they’ve been phenomenal, and they brought in Brad Bird to direct the next movie and he wanted to do things differently and try and make sure that they stayed innovative and they stayed edgy, and he didn’t do that by bringing in new people. He didn’t do that by only taking the top tier talent. He did that by telling the heads of Pixar, Steve Jobs and Ed Catmull. He said, “Give me all the black sheep.” He said, “Give me all the people who want to do things differently. Give me all the people who are probably headed out the door or going to get fired.” 

With those guys, Brad Bird, they managed to do things the studio had never done before they managed to accomplish things more cheaply. They did it quicker. In the end, they ended up making the film The Incredibles which not only grossed, I think, over $600 million, but also won The Oscar for best animated feature. Again, they did this by embracing the different attitudes that some of these people had rather than looking at them through the typical corporate lens of, “Oh, those guys are difficult.” No. Those guys might have a very different but good way of looking at things. Now, that doesn’t mean that different is always good. Different can definitely be bad, but we need to be very careful about just labeling anything that is outside the norm or doesn’t align with the current values of upper management as bad, because I think that’s something we’re seeing now more than ever is just corporations love to talk about, “Oh, we want to innovate.” “Oh, we went outside the box.” Yeah, but we also don’t want to change. That doesn’t really work. Being able to look at what the qualities are, sometimes qualities that on the surface seem like negatives in the right environment can be positives.  

[0:17:16.9] MB: I think the point about context too really reveals why many of these traditional success maxims are so limited, because as you pointed out, in a specific context that skillset or that ability might be really powerful, but in many other contexts it could dangerous, it could be disastrous or it could be problematic. It could be inhibiting you from achieving what you’re trying to achieve. 

[0:17:41.3] EB: No, absolutely. I think that’s a lot of — One thing I was very cognizant of when I was writing a book was I just didn’t want it to be this — We’ve seen a lot of business books that just hold up one concept and they say, “This is the and all be all answer. This quality is always good in every situation everywhere for the rest of time. It has no downsides. No negatives. No side effects, so all we need to do is have this one thing and everything is going to be great and live happily ever after.” Life doesn’t work like that. Plain and simple, life doesn’t work like that. 

For instance, when talking about the research in terms of nice guys finish last. A huge distinction is short term versus long term. In the short term, being a jerk can really payoff, and anybody who has seen a jerk get promoted or a jerk become CEO knows this at least in their heart of hearts. In the short term, you see this and so many experiments that have been done in terms of theoretical constructs, like the prisoner’s dilemma, a lot of Robert Axelrod’s research, you see that in the short term being bad can be very, very good. You see things like Jeffrey Pfeffer’s research at Stanford Graduate School of Business where kissing your boss’s ass, the research shows is far more effective than actual hard work. Again, that’s in the short term. Over the long term, we gain a reputation. Over the long term, that reputation is going to affect you. It depends on that context, again, where used car salesman doesn’t expect to see you again, and that’s why they have the reputation they do and why they use the methods they do. Your mom hopefully is going to be with you the rest of your life, and that’s why moms have the reputation they do. They’re really looking out for you. 

It’s critical to understand, when we try to make everything one-size-fits-all, one simple answer, that’s usually not the case, but to understand, “Well, gees! I’ve seen good guys get ahead and I’ve seen bad guys get ahead. Is it just random?” No. It’s not random. In that particular case, it’s usually often an issue of short term versus long term. 

I think to understand nuance, to understand the importance of context really allows us to really start to get our brain around how success really works in the real world. 

[0:20:02.0] MB: I think the other characteristic that you identified about what makes the successful standout and the vital importance of knowing yourself, that’s something we delve into a lot on the show and one of the most recurrent themes received from across the board, even looking at people like Buddhist teachers, meditation teachers, etc., it's so critical to understand yourself. 

[0:20:25.7] EB: Yeah. I think that it's something we pay a lot of lip service to, but I don’t think it’s something that a lot of people really to sit down and think about. Hey, our brands are filled with cognitive biases and many of us can be overconfident or not so self-aware, but to sit down and actually think about that, you look at the research in terms of self-awareness has some really powerful advantages to it. There are ways to go about it. Management guru, Peter Drucker, talked about feedback analysis where taking the time to make predictions and then see how they work out in terms of, “Am I going to do this well? Am I going to do that well?” 

Overtime you’ll see patterns, you’ll see trends, or if you’re a little bit more brave and are a little bit more thick skin to do an informal survey of your friends, of those closest to you, to get an idea. Of course, with friends who you believe will be honest with you, to get an idea of what they see your strengths and weaknesses are, because if you ask, say, 10 friends, yeah, there’s going to be some randomness, some noise in there. My guess is in terms of strengths and weaknesses, you’re going to hear a handful of things over and over again. Those are the things that you should really kind of hone in on because it not only does it make us obviously more successful to do things we’re good at. That’s pretty intuitive. 

On the flipside, when you look at the research at University of Pennsylvania on signature strengths and surveys done by Gallup, both of them show that the more time you spend on things that you are good at, the happier people are, the more respected feel. There’s just overall in terms of subjective well-being increases dramatically. Past that, if you look at some of the work by Cal Newport at Georgetown, you see that our passions — Many people have the typical passions. They want to be a professional athlete. They want to be a singing success. There’s not a lot of spots for those things. Pursuing your passions doesn’t always lead to happiness. 

However, there’s a good body of research that shows that when you pursue the things you’re good at, that you become happy, that passions don’t necessarily lead to success, but when you do things that you are successful, you become passionate about that. You become happy that you’re doing and you enjoy them more. 
Those are definitely some tips we can use there in terms of the power of self-awareness. 

[0:23:00.4] MT: How do you think about balancing the kind of advice to focus primarily on improving your strengths versus improving your weaknesses and repairing your weaknesses. 

[0:23:11.7] EB: The research is pretty consistent on that one. Again, Peter Drucker wrote a fantastic piece to the Harvard Business Review a number of years ago that you’re going to do much better by trying to improve on your strengths and trying to bring up your weaknesses. Your first goal, it’s going to be easier. You’re probably more passionate about it and you’re going to spend time on it. It’s going to be much — You’re going to see bigger gains, larger marginal returns. Beyond that, also bringing up your weaknesses is going to be very difficult. 

If you look at Drucker’s book, the Effective Executive, which is a fantastic book in general, he says that it’s much better to focus on the things you’re good at and then find a way to compensate for the things you’re bad at. In other words, if you are extremely creative and dynamic and innovative and you’re always coming up with really powerful new ideas, but you are a complete disorganized mess, it’s far better for you to double down on being creative and coming up with interesting ideas and to hire an assistance to keep you organized than it is for you to sit down and study a bunch of productivity books and trying to do something that is just completely kind of going against the grain. 

To point to specific examples, Bob Sutton, a professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, when I interviewed him he talked about the fact that this is exactly what many successful chief executive officers have done including Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg is they didn’t say, “Oh, I’m going to bring up my weaknesses and try and be this incredibly well-rounded renaissance man.” 

What they did was they said, “I’m going to focus on what I’m good at, and when I round out the rest of my senior management team, I’m going to make sure that they fill in those gaps that I’m not so good at so that those things are being addressed, but I’m not the one who has to address them.” 

[0:24:56.9] MB: I think the great word there is compensate, right? People might get confused when they think about focusing on the strengths versus focusing on weaknesses. If you find a way to compensate for your weaknesses, then that enables you to focus deeply on your strengths. 

[0:25:11.1] EB: Absolutely. Any system or tool that you can leverage to do that is fine. Where if you see people who, because of their time at an organization or with a particular boss or mentor or maybe their time in the military, they develop certain good habits and they might not be the most organized person, but because they were at an institution or in the military that thought them a number of habits, then they can pick those thing sup. Training yourself in terms of habits can be a personal way to compensate for your weaknesses. They use certain technology, tools, or aps that help you compensate. 

Again, if you’re an entrepreneur or if you’re an organization where you have direct reports, you can be cognizant of this and hire to attempt to deliberately compensate for your weaknesses, because you’re going to see in general much greater returns from focusing on your assurance. 

[0:26:09.4] MB: That’s circles back to the importance of knowing yourself. Again, if you really have a clear understanding of where you’re strong and where you’re weak, it’s that much easier to say, “Hey, I suck at being organized, or I suck at this particular piece of the business. This is what I need to find somebody. Their skillset is exactly this.” 

[0:26:28.1] EB: Yeah. It’s funny you say that, because that’s exactly what Drucker says in Effective Executive where he says, “WE all know those people who they just — They’re few and far between, but we all know someone who is able to take on a project and pretty much they may not know what they’re doing, but they know how to approach it. They go ahead and it seems they’re always a phenomenal success and we’re envious of these people. 

Drucker says one of the reasons that people can do that is because once you are really aware of your strengths and weaknesses, you’re very quickly able to diagnose a situation and say, “Oh! This naturally aligns with my strengths, so I’m just going to sit down and do what I usually do,” or “This is not so aligned with my strengths, but knowing that my strengths are, then I can find the right kind of solution to this. I can get help from the right people because maybe I’m a better communicator than I am researcher. Okay, well then. I’m going to get on the phone and I’m going to talk to some experts who really — Or maybe I’m a bookwork, but I’m not a great communicator. Okay, well then. I’m going to real all the great books on this and I’m going to focus on putting something like this down on paper as supposed to merely talking to people.” 

Just understanding your strengths allow you to plan the right way, to go about achieving a goal, because there’s many different strategies you can take. Once you kind of know the meta goal, what’s the overall big plan, there’s often many different ways to get there. When you know your strength, you’re able to better plan. When you don’t know your strengths, you’re kind of rolling a dice. If you’re diluting yourself, then you actually might be in a worst situation of all, which is maybe you actually working against your best interests. 

[0:28:13.4] MB: I’m super excited today to tell you about our sponsor for this episode, brilliant.org. Brilliant.org is absolutely awesome website that’s focused on math and science learning and making it super easy and approachable. You know how big of a fan I am of mental models and building a toolkit of mental models. In many ways, one of the core word things driving this show is helping you build a toolkit of mental model so that you can better understand the world so that you can master the art of decision-making. That's why brilliant.org is so awesome, because you can integrate a lot of these mental models around probability, math and science into your day by using something like brilliant.org. I've got my producer, Austin, here to join us and talk a little bit about brilliant. 

[0:28:58.4] A: Yeah. I’ve been taking some of the courses and I’ve been diving in. It’s absolutely great. You say math and sciences and a lot of people, you have an idea on your head about this course and you’re going to be like, “They’re fun. They’re interactive and they keep you going. They have streaks.” Probability is one of the course that really caught my mind. They sort of approached it from what’s one of the foundations of probability, which is games of chance. Things like poker, rolling the dice, casino blackjack, things like that. 

The way they framed all of these math and science, framed it in a way that you can kind of understand it and apply it in real life. It’s not just memorizing equations and numbers, but still very impactful. 

[0:29:32.2] MB: I'm a big poker player, which you’ve heard me talk about sometimes on the show. I’ve been on a few poker podcast and that kind of thing. Austin sometimes comes to my poker game that I host, and I can tell you he definitely needs to brush up on some of these probability courses. 

[0:29:47.4] A: That’s why I’m going with brilliant.org to learn more how I can come here and take your money. We have one tonight even. 

[0:29:52.0] MB: We do. I don’t know if you’re coming to the game or not. 

[0:29:53.5] A: We’ll see. 

[0:29:55.7] MB: Yeah, it’s amazing. Again, I think it's so important and so few people really understand math and science, and America is falling behind in those categories. I don't want you to be left behind, and that's why I think something like brilliant.org is such a great sponsor for this show. We’re super excited to have them, and it's an incredible place where you can go and brush up and build these science and math skills. 

The cool thing is they’re actually offering 20% off of their premium plan to anybody who’s a Science of Success listener. You can get that at brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess. That's brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess. I highly recommend checking it out. You know how important math and science skills are, and if you want to build a toolkit of mental models, understanding things like chemistry, physics and probability are some of the cornerstones of that and I'm definitely going to be spending a lot of time on Brilliant brushing up on some of these fields that I already have a pretty good understanding of, but you can always use a refresher. 

[0:30:53.4] A: Yeah. There’re already four million students, professionals and enthusiasts, just like you all out on Brilliant learning, brushing up on these skills and taking advantage of the software. 20% on their premium plan when you go to brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess.

[0:31:06.5] MB: Alright, back to the episode. 

Let’s segue into some of the other lessons from the book. One of the ones that we hear about all the time is the idea of persevering, should we stay with it? Do quitters never win, or is grit the important factor, or should we cut our loses, move on quickly and find things that are successful? 

[0:31:30.4] EB: Yeah, I think it’s really interesting, because grit is kind of having a moment now. It’s kind of its time in the sun, and there’s a good reason for that. Obviously, a lot of people do have trouble persisting with their goals over the long term, so that is critical. I think we do a disservice by acting like grit is the answer to everything, because if that was the case then I would still be in tee-ball and playing with action figures, because that’s what I was doing when I was seven and I decided to stick with that. 

No. We all change. We all grow. We all evolve, and increasingly the modern work world, people are having multiple roles in completely different careers, in completely different industries, so adaption is critical. 

Grit is really powerful, and we can see the research from Martin Seligman and others that shows that optimism promotes grit. That taking things and perceiving them, using a frame, a game-type frame where it’s a game of sorts can help promote grit. On the flipside, we need to look at the advantages of quitting. We need to see. If you look at the economic principle of opportunity cost, we all only have 24 hours in a day and if you just keep being gritty with things and you keep adding new skills, well eventually you’re just not going to have time for them all. 

The truth is that strategically quitting is not the opposite of grit. It is complementary to grit, because the more things you quit, the more time, energy, money resources that you have to devote to the things that you want to be gritty with, that you want to focus on, because there’s research, one of the studies in the book where when you ask people, people are consistently conservative with estimating money. People don’t think that they’re going to be a millionaire tomorrow. They’ll be conservative in terms of committing themselves to spending lots of money. 

However — And this is the opposite of the time equals money perspective. However, we don’t look at time like that. People will consistently overcommit in terms of how much time they have. If something seems further away, if I ask you to do something three months from now, well you just seemed sure and positive that in three months you’re going to have more time where it’s probably much more realistic, unless it’s an exception. It’s probably more realistic for you to look at your last week. Think about how busy you were, and it’s probably how busy you’re going to be three months from now. Yet, we consistently make the error that in the future we’ll have more time. In the future, sadly, the days are still going to have 24 hours. In a week, there’s still going to have 7 days. We really need to be cognizant of those timing issues and use that to our advantage when we’re planning, we’re trying to figure out how to be successful. 

[0:34:12.6] MB: So true. Literally, just thinking about it now, I feel like I will have more time in three months, and it’s very hard to kind of dislodge that bias from my mind, but logically I know that that’s probably very unlikely. 

[0:34:27.5] EB: No. It’s critical to think about that, because time used is really big in terms of grit. You’re not going to have more than 24 hours in a day. Being able to quit, being able to think. So what it comes down to really, what I recommend in the book, is finding a balance where it’s looking at what’s producing results. What’s not producing results? The things that producing results are getting you where you want to go, that’s where you want to show grit. The things that aren’t producing results, and sometimes those are hard to face. You want to try and like go up, but you always want to be devoting five to 10% of your time to what Peters Sims calls little bets, and that is little low-cost investments to kind of see what can work out. See what might be able to come of that and be trying new things, because the world is changing fast, so we need to be changing with it, and to find that new opportunity, that new hobby, relationship, whatever, we always need to be trying new things. 

Another thing that people can use that’s really powerful, a research by Gabriele Oettingen at NYU, she talks about a great little acronym called WOOP, and what that is is wish, outcome, obstacle, plan, and that is whenever we’re dreaming about something we want, some goal we have in the future, to walk through those four steps. To first, think about what you’re wishing for. The second is to think of the concrete outcome, what you would actually like to happen specifically. The third, and this is critical, is to think about the obstacles. What’s in the way, so that you’re not merely wishing and dreaming. You’re not daydreaming. You’re thinking about the obstacles. What’s in the way? Fourth is to make a plan based on that. That really helps people be much more realistic about their goals and create a plan to get to them. 

What is fantastic, really interesting, is that a secondary effect that she found with this research was that it actually became a litmus test for whether to apply grit or quit. When people went through the WOOP plan, when people went through wish, outcome, obstacle, plan, if they felt more energized afterwards, if they’re walking through it, if they felt like, “Wow! This is great. I can certainly do this.” Then that was probably something that they should apply grit too over the long term. 

However, if people went through it and they felt a little down. They felt de-energized, then the plan probably wasn’t realistic and it’s probably either a goal that they needed to discard or a goal that they needed to kind of reframe, that they needed to think about what the meta goal was and find a different way to go about achieving it. 

[0:36:53.2] MB: I love the idea of little bets. You know, it’s funny. I was thinking about I know this podcast basically came out of a little bit. I had a buddy suggest to really put a few episodes out on the internet and kind of slowly took hold. As you said at the start of the interview, your blog started out the same way. These are two very concrete examples of how you should always be out there trying new little things and dedicating a little bit of time to sort of low-risk opportunities and activities that may take off and they may not. That’s why I always kind of had an issue with the idea that you should never quit, because I think you should be testing lots of little things and seeing what’s getting some traction and what’s not and then double down your bets and the things that are actually working. 

[0:37:39.9] EB: That’s critical. When people talk about luck, what’s interesting is there’s research on luck. Now, I don’t mean luck in terms of magic, but luck in terms of seemingly random good things, positive things happening to you. Richard Wiseman, a professor in the UK did some research and he found a few things that you can actually do to improve luck. 

One of them was the idea of being open to new experiences, trying new things, because it’s intuitive. We don’t usually think about it, but it’s only rational intuitive. If you lock the door to your house, don’t answer the phone, don’t go on the internet, how many random good things are going to happen to you? Not too many. Versus if you’re out there exposing yourself to possibilities, yeah, negatives can happen, but playing positives can happen as well. That’s the kind of thing we need to be thinking about is trying new things, exposing ourselves to new experiences, because you can’t guarantee that great things are going to happen to you, but there are certainly things you can do to increase or decrease a possibility of those little serendipitous moments occurring. 

One of the best ones is little bets, little low-cost, low resource, low time investment, things that could produce great results. I dare to say that in the modern era, that is sort of essential, because the world is changing. We’re going to have to change, and that’s something that we need to keep doing a certain percentage of our time just to make sure that we’re keeping up with the natural changes in the world. 

[0:39:12.2] MB: Tell me about what are the other topics that you wrote about that I thought was really interesting was how do we, as you put it, walk the tight rope between confidence and delusion, and how often should we really focus on believing in ourselves? 

[0:39:26.9] EB: It’s really interesting, because confidence is — There’s no doubt that confidence, first of all, makes us feel good. Second of all, confidence has an enormous impact on how others perceive us. Confidence was a really interesting thing to explore, because I’ve never heard anybody say, “I’m trying to decrease my confidence.” 

We don’t see a lot of books about how to reduce your self-esteem in five easy steps. That’s probably because the book wouldn’t sell, but you just don’t hear anybody talking about the downsides of confidence. Part of that is because we have a separate word we use. We’ll talk about narcissism, or hubris, or we’ll call it over confident, but nobody kind of gives less confidence what its due and we — Again, because we have another word for it often, which we often label like humility, which is a positive quality because when we are less confident, we’re open to learning. We’re more open to new ideas. We don’t alienate other people by being know-it-alls.  

When you look at it, what you’ll often find is that confidence as a whole is a problematic paradigm, because when you look at the research, confidence usually follows success. It doesn’t lead to success. When California launched a state initiative to try and increase the self-esteem of students because they thought it would increase grades, decrease drug use, all these other things, what they found is that it had almost no effect at all. In fact the only effect it probably had was increasing narcissism, because confidence usually follows success. It doesn’t always lead to it. 

What we can find is that often that’s because confidence is very often either delusional or contingent. Delusional in the sense that people are overconfident and that usually leads to failure eventually, because eventually reality gives us a kind of market correction in the form of a metaphorical punch in the nose, or confidence is often contingent. Self-esteem is contingent, where basically you have this vision of yourself and in order to realistically maintain it, you feel you need to wake up and slay a dragon everyday so that you can continue to feel good about yourself, and this just keeps you on a treadmill of you keep having to achieving just in order to feel good about yourself. That’s exhausting, but not only is that exhausting, you’re going to have an off day. One day you’re not going to slay that dragon and your self-esteem crashes, and that’s how we end up on this rollercoaster of emotions having to work so hard to feel good about ourselves and then not feeling good about ourselves, and it’s a double down. 

What we see is when you look — Going back well over a thousand years, is the Buddhist concept of self-compassion, which Kristin Neff at the University of Texas at Austin has done a bunch of academic research showing that this isn’t just a philosophical concept. It’s actually a really good kind of alternative to self-confidence is self-compassion. Basically what that is, is rather than with self-confidence or self-esteem, trying to build yourself up to be something greater than you’re not. Self-compassion is seeing the world more realistically and being far more open to forgiving yourself when you’re not Superman, when you don’t achieve. Taking a realistic perspective and then understanding, sometimes you’re going to fail. That’s human, and forgiving yourself and moving on. That keeps us out of that contingent treadmill cycle and keeps us out of delusion. What her research has shown is that self-compassion provides all the benefits of self-confidence without any of the negatives and it’s a very powerful tool that we can all use to get us out of the self-confidence track.  

[0:43:02.2] MB: That’s amazing, and self-compassion is something that we talk a ton about on the show. Again and again it comes up as such a vital skill to cultivate. How do you — From what you saw, what are some of the best ways to cultivate self-compassion? 

[0:43:18.6] EB: The first real step is we all have that voice in our head that’s so critical and we’re quick to beat ourselves up when we make mistakes and it’s really changing that voice. Changing the way you talk to yourself, where instead of being so negative and critical, is to just have more of a grandmotherly sort of forgiving attitude where instead of, “Oh! I get this thing in late, and I’ll — I’m so stupid. How do I do this every time?” As supposed to, “You know what? I made a mistake. It happens. I’ll do my best to correct it, but this happens and it’s okay. It’s not the end of the world,” to take that perspective. 

What’s interesting is you look at the research in terms of something we all suffer from, kind of a plague, is procrastination. We’re also inclined to beat ourselves up for procrastination, but what the studies show is that forgiving yourself for procrastination is actually a much better — It leads to people getting things done and on doing stuff. We feel like we need to punish ourselves, but that kind of keeps us in that loop here we’re punishing ourselves and we see ourselves as procrastinators and we’re still tied up as supposed to letting it go, letting the fear go, letting the concern go and just getting something done. So much of procrastination comes from fear, from this kind of negative anticipation and just taking that voice in your head. When you hear that critical voice, just trying to soften it. Just trying to say, it’s like, “Yes. Hey, I make mistakes. That’s human. That’s natural,” and forgiving yourself again, as supposed to when we take that self-confidence vision of, “I’ve got to be Superman. I’m this awesome super thing.” That can only lead to two places; having that insane, over the top, I’m 150% attitude, that can only lead to you being utterly diluted and completely cutoff from reality, because it’s not who you are. It’s impossible, or to you just crushing your self-esteem because seeing unrealistic standards, and then when you see the results are not 150%, then you feel terrible about yourself. I don’t think anyone of us wants to, A; feel terrible about ourselves, or B; be utterly diluted and cutoff from reality. It’s much better to develop that sort of softer, quitter, forgiving voice in our head and to just catch ourselves whenever we’re too critical, whenever we’re beating ourselves up. That’s a really good first step to self-compassion. 

[0:45:48.0] MB: That makes me think about something that I think about a ton, which is the balance between almost this Buddhist sense of non-attachment with ambition and achievement. How do you strike a balance between those two things? I know you don’t necessarily directly address that in the book, but I’m curious what your thoughts are about how those two things kind of balance each other and how self-compassion plays into that.  

[0:46:12.0] EB: One of the things I do talk about in the 6th chapter of the book is just that hard work really does pay off. Hard work really does payoff in terms of skills and stuff like that. It’s not necessarily rewarded in an organization, but when you look at the greats in terms of any area of skill-based individual achievement, yeah, the more you work, if you’re actually doing deliberate practice, it pays off. What does that mean? That means that somebody who works nine hours a day is going to do better than someone who works eight hours a day. Somebody who works 16 hours a day is going to be — It can almost become a prescription for workaholism and that can be dangerous. 

In the subtitle to the introduction, I talk about the decoding what successful people do so that we can learn to be more like them or so that we can learn why it’s good that we aren’t, because I would say the heights of success, you’re going to find a lot of workaholics and you’re also going to find a lot of people who are extraordinarily successful but not necessarily happy. 

When we look at the idea, the Buddhist ideas of kind of non-attachment, yeah, it’s like you want to reach the heights of success, the extremes. That may not be aligned with a much more modest forgiving, but would you be happy as a millionaire or do you have to be a billionaire? Those are the kinds of questions we need to ask ourselves, and that’s sort of the work-life balance question, because if you take it that there’s a more or less linear relationship between hard work and skill development, that’s going to lead you towards a workaholic attitude. If you take the attitude that, “I need to be enjoying myself. I need to have downtime. I need to have some fun.” Then that is going to take you away from the very, very heights potentially of success. 

It’s a decision we all need to make for ourselves. I quote Sam Harris in the book talking about, “If you want to reach the extremes of success,” he says, “is that align with those kind of Buddhist kind of more mild, not necessarily.” But on the other hand, as Harris says, “But do we need to be torturing ourselves as much as we do? Do we need to be as non-self-compassionate as we are?” The answer to that is probably no. We can definitely glean something from those more moderate detached Buddhist attitudes. In the end, as I talked about in the book, you need to have a personal definition of success. The standards that are presented to us in the media these days are statistical anomalies and not replicable for most people. If we hold ourselves to those standards, it’s almost a prescription for clinical depression. We need to say, “What’s going to make me happy? What is good enough?” That I think is very well-aligned with some of the more Buddhist ideas you’re talking about.  

[0:49:12.5] MB: How do you think about the idea — That I totally understand and agree with the — I’m a huge fan of deliberate practice and that these sort of direct relationship between time spent practicing and skill development. Zooming out or thinking about that kind of a different perspective, how do you think about the application, the 80-20 principle and sort of the nonlinear relationship between results produced and time spent, right? Because it’s not necessarily — If you’re looking at achievement broadly, or financial success, there’s a lot of other factors that go into that than sort of just raw time spent. 

[0:49:46.4] EB: That’s one of the things I think the biggest mistake people make when they haven’t really read the literature. It’s just, “Oh, 10,000 hours.” It’s like, “Well, no. It’s not 10,000.” I’ve definitely driven a car for 10,000 hours. That doesn’t prepare me to go into Formula One or NASCAR, because that wasn’t deliberate practice. I was not actually pushing my limits and trying to get better. I may have spent 10,000 hours washing my hair in the course of my life. I’m not an expert hair washer. 

First and foremost, realizing that 10,000 hours alone is just proof of nothing. It is the issue of deliberate practice. Again, there’s a lot of other factors as well. There are issues. If you’re 5 foot 4, you can spend 10,000 hours. I still don’t think you’ll be in the NBA. There are physical limitations, natural limitations, and also there’s always going to be diminishing marginal returns where the further along you go, the harder it’s going to be to improve your first year or two at anything you’re going to make. If you are using deliberate practice and spending a lot of hours, you’re going to get very good very fast. After those 10 years, it’s going to require enormous amounts of energy and effort and time just to move the needle a recognizable amount. 

I think very often when we’re talking about skill development, it’s grossly over simplified and because that’s what most people want to hear, but it is more nuanced than that and we need to be realistic about some of the limitations and some of what’s involved. I don’t think it’s surprising that many of the people who do reach the heights of skill development and success in arenas, even if they have natural gifts, there is usually a fair amount of obsessiveness involved. It’s seen again and again and again that we love to use more positive-spin words, like “passionate”, but when you look at a lot of the daily routines and habits of people who are extremely successful in sports, music, writing, etc., even science and other areas, the word obsessive rings a lot more true than passionate. When Jeffrey Pfeffer looked at top success executives in business, so you don’t have to be talking about the arts. He said that here’s a number of qualities you absolutely need to be in the top of your game. 

The first thing he listed was energy and stamina, because he just said you’re going to be working a lot. You’re going to be working hard and things are going to be thrown at you and if you don’t have energy and stamina, yeah, there’s a lot of great qualities you can have, but you’re just going to need to keep going. I think we have a lot of illusions about what it takes to get really good, but it’s a lot more nuanced than just a work hard. 

[0:52:40.3] MB: In the conclusion of the book you asked the question, “What makes for a successful life?” I’d love for you to share that wisdom with the listeners. 

[0:52:48.1] EB: In terms of a successful like, it’s like we really need to be thinking about that concept of alignment, of your signature strengths and picking the right environment. We need to really think about relationships. Relationships are really critical, because that is part of that environment, is the relationships you have. When you look at the results of the Grant study, which fall a number of men, I believe started in the 1930s and followed men throughout their entire life, in college, throughout, you saw that George Valliant who led the study for a few decades, when interviewed, he said that the most important thing in life is your relationships, full stop. That was critical. 

When you saw similar results out of a German study, which was another longitudinal study that followed people throughout their entire lives, because it’s very easy to do a sample of 100 undergrads for a month or two, but to follow people from their teen years or their youth all the way throughout, relationships are really critical. 

Obviously, in business, in one of the chapters I talk about networking and how important that can be. In terms of our lives, how you feel about other people. The interesting thing is those people with good relationships who felt loved, who gave love, actually were more career successful as well. That idea of aligning your signature strengths with your environment is really important, but if we’re not thinking about relationships and our connections with other people, we don’t — I don’t think any of us look forward to having deathbed regrets. What you see is when people are on their deathbed, in an informal study, that most of the things were not about work, not about career and financial success. In fact, quite the opposite. One of the top five deathbed regrets was, “I wish I had not worked as hard.” We need to be thinking about those relationships, because in the long term they seem to be much more important than the immediate finance or career successes. 

[0:54:49.3] MB: For somebody who’s listened to this interview and they want to concretely implement some of the advice and the wisdom that you shared, what would be one piece of homework that you would give them as a starting point to do that? 

[0:55:02.0] EB: I would say what we talked about in terms of know thyself. I would say to do an informal survey of your friends. The friends who aren’t just going to tell you what you want to hear. Who you know are — Who, in general, those friends are perhaps a little too honest. They have good news for you now. To ask 5 or 10 friends to tell you what they think your strengths and weaknesses are. Like I said, you’re going to hear some random things, but I think you’re going to hear a number of things repeated. 

Once you start to identify what those are, then you can start to think about your environment, and if you’re up for a career shift, you can think about an organization or a company that might respect those things. If somebody says, “You’re really organized. You’re fantastic with logistics,” then being a painter might not be the best choice. However, working for FedEx or UPS might be a fantastic choice if you’re really organized, time efficient and good at logistics.  

By the same token, to just understand wherever your strengths might lie, if you can align those. In the same way, even at home, with your partner, with family, to realize what you’re good at, what you’re not good at can really help your relationship in terms of dividing duties and tasks around the house or with kids in terms of your partner as supposed to both of you doing things which it’s inefficient for you to be handling when you have advantages elsewhere.

First and foremost, I would try and survey those friends. Try and get an idea of those strengths and then start thinking about who rewards those. What groups, organizations really reward and value those things, and then you can start to see to pick the right pond, to basically find the place where you fit in and you are valued and respected. I think that’s really critical. 

[0:56:58.7] MB: For listeners who want to find you, read of what you’ve written, where they can find you, your blog and the book online? 

[0:57:06.7] EB: Because my URL is a little hard to spell, I think the best thing is to probably either Google Barking Up the Wrong Tree, that’s my blog. Barking Up the Wrong Tree blog, or Google my name, Eric Barker. The best way to keep up with what I’m doing is to join my email list. You’ll get one email a week with my latest post in terms of the research and stuff I’ve been looking at. My book, Barking Up the Wrong Tree is available on Amazon and other retailers. They can find those there. 

[0:57:34.7] MB: We’ll make sure to include all of those in the show notes as well as all the studies that you talked about. There’s tons and tons of notes for this episode that I know listeners are going to want to dig into. 

Eric, thank you so much for coming on the show. As I’ve said, I’ve been a huge fan of your blog for years and years and it’s so great to have you come on and share all these knowledge with our listeners. 

[0:57:52.7] EB: Thanks so much, Matt. It was really a pleasure. 

[0:57:54.1] MB: Thank you so much for listening to The Science of Success. Listeners like you are why we do this podcast. Your support is what drives us and keeps us creating great new content, adding value to the world and interviewing amazing guests each week.

The emails and stories we receive from listeners around the globe bring us joy and fuel our mission to unleash human potential. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s matt@sucesspodcast.com. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every listener email. 

The greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please, leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes, because that helps more and more people discover The Science of Success. 
	
I get a ton of listeners asking me, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all these information?” Because of that, we’ve created an amazing free guide for all of our listeners. You can get it by texting the word “smarter”, that’s “smarter” to the number 44222, or by going to successpodcast.com, that’s successpodcast.com and joining our email list. 

Don’t forget, if you want to get all these incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we just talked about in this show and, believe me, this particular interview with Eric Barker has a tremendous amount of show notes. Be sure to check out the show notes, you can to successpodcast.com and hit the show notes button at the top. 
 
Thanks again, and we’ll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

Simple Strategies You Can Use To Persuade Anyone with The Godfather of Influence Dr. Robert Cialdini

In this episode we discuss an old trick palm readers use that you can leverage to get people to do what you want, why persuasion does not lie just in the message itself, but rather in how the message is presented, what the research reveals about why the context matters as much, if not more, than the content itself, why you shouldn’t ask people for their opinion but instead ask someone for their advice, how small differences that seem trivial make a HUGE impact on human behavior, and much more with Dr. Robert Cialdini.

Dr. Robert Cialdini is the president and CEO of INFLUENCE AT WORK. He is the multi best selling author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, and his latest book Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way To Influence and Persuade and he is currently a Regents Professor Eremites of Psychology and Marketing at the Arizona State University. Commonly referred to as “The Godfather Of Influence” Robert’s work has been featured around the world with clients such as Twitter, Microsoft, London Business Forum, SXSW, and more.

We discuss:

• How very small differences can have very big effect on human behavior.

• How researchers boosted their response rate from 29% to 77.3% with one simple question

• How can a photo change your ability to solve problems more effectively?

• How to create a state of mind in your recipient that makes them more open to your request!

• This one trick palm readers use that you can leverage to get people to do what you want

• The Power of persuasion does not lie just in the message itself, but rather in how the message is presented

• How did a small change in communication greatly affect the United Kingdom's tax collection.

• Context matters as much as or more than content

• How can you ethically leverage the concepts of pre-suasion?

• One thing you can do to hack job interviews using this simple tactic

• Why you shouldn’t ask people for their opinion but instead ask someone for their advice

• Ask yourself “What is it about my message that will make it most wise for people to say yes to it”

• Is it possible to use pre-suasion on ourselves?

• How changing a simple image can greatly improve your ability to solve problems.

• "Tell me what you’re paying attention to, and I'll tell you who you are"

• And much more!

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This Episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at Skillshare! For a limited time, Skillshare is offering our listeners One Month of UNLIMITED ACCESS ABSOLUTELY FREE! Just go to www.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free unlimited month NOW!
 

Are you a professional looking to get a leg-up at work? Or just someone who just loves learning new things? Are you looking to do your job better? 
Want to add some impressive skills to your resume? Skillshare is an online learning community with over sixteen thousand classes in design, business, and more. You can learn everything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography. Unlimited access to all of this for a low monthly price – never pay PER class again!

Again, Skillshare is giving our listeners a month of unlimited access - absolutely FREE! Go to www.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month!

This Episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners, That Moment Podcast. That Moment explores the pivot that changes everything: moments that open doors for discovery and growth, but also bring the looming possibility of failure. Each show features different leaders and innovators sharing their stories of taking risks in business and in life. That Moment is produced by Pivotal, who believes when change is the only constant, people and businesses must be built to adapt. Get the details of their first episode "It Was Essentially Disrupting Ourselves" here and check them out on iTunes, Google Play, and Soundcloud.

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Website] Influence at Work

• [Book] Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini

• [Book] Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade by Robert Cialdini Ph.D.

• [SOS “Weapons of Influence Series”] Series Playlist

• [SOS “Weapons of Influence Series”] Why An Almost-Empty Cookie Jar Is More Valuable Than A Full One

• [SOS “Weapons of Influence Series”] Why Co-Pilots May Ignore Instinct and Let A Plane Crash

• [SOS “Weapons of Influence Series”] Why Ugly Criminals Are 2X As Likely To Go To Prison

• [SOS “Weapons of Influence Series”] Why You Should Always Ask the Guy in the Blue Jacket for Help

• [SOS “Weapons of Influence Series”] The Power and Danger of a Seemingly Innocuous Commitment

• [SOS “Weapons of Influence Series”] How To Triple the Rate of Your Success With One Simple Question

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success with your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:12.6] MB: Welcome to The Science of Success. I’m your host, Matt Bodnar. I’m an entrepreneur and investor in Nashville, Tennessee and I’m obsessed with the mindset of success and the psychology of performance. I’ve read hundreds of books, conducted countless hours of research and study and I am going to take you on a journey into the human mind and what makes peak performers tick with the focus on always having our discussion rooted in psychological research and scientific fact, not opinion.

In this episode we discuss an old trick palm readers use that you can leverage to get people to do what you want. Why persuasion does not lie just in the message itself, but rather in how the message is presented. What the research reveals about why the context matters as much, if not more than the content itself. Why you shouldn't ask people for their opinion, but instead ask someone for their advice. How small differences that seem trivial can make a huge impact on human behavior and much more with our guest, Dr. Robert Cialdini. 

The Science of Success continues to grow with, now, more than a million downloads, listeners in over a hundred countries, hitting number one New and Noteworthy and more. I get listener comments and emails all the time asking me, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all these incredible information?” A lot of her listeners are curious about how I keep track of all the incredible knowledge I get from reading hundreds of books, interviewing amazing experts, listening to awesome podcasts, and more. 

Because of that, we’ve created an epic resource just for you, a detailed guide called How to Organize and Remember Everything, and you can get it completely for free by texting the word “smarter” to the number 44222. Again, it's a guide we created called How to Organize and Remember Everything. All you have to do to get it is to visit successpodcast.com and join our email list or text the word “smarter” to the number 44222. Again, that “smarter” to the number 44222. 

In a previous episode we discussed what to do if you don't know what you want to be when you grow up. We looked to the concept that you only have one a true calling. We learn how to become a better big picture thinker. We looked at the superpowers you can develop by being a multipotentialite, how to master rapid learning and cultivate beginner's mind. The fallacy behind the phrase jack of all trades and much more with Emily Wapnick. If you want to learn how you can have it all in your life and career, listen to that episode.

If you love this episode and you want to go deeper into some of Dr. Cialdini's work, be sure to check out our Weapons of Influence series where we go deep on all six key principles of influence, which you can find along with all other links, transcripts and information we’re going to talk about today's show in our show notes. Just go successpodcast.com and hit the show notes button at the top. 

Your support is what drives us and keeps us creating great new content, adding value to the world and interviewing amazing guests every single week. You can become part of our incredible mission and help us build an even better future by becoming one of our patrons on Patreon. If the Science of Success is valuable to you we would love for you to sign up and become one of our patrons, and we offer some awesome bonuses if you sign up as well. Join us today and become a part of our mission to unleash human potential by going to successpodcast.com/patreon. That’s successpodcast.com/patreon.

[0:03:31.8] MB: Today we have another legendary guest on the show, Dr. Robert Cialdini. Robert is the president and CEO of Influence at Work. He’s the multi-best-selling author Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, and his latest book, Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade. He’s currently a Regent’s Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at the Arizona State University. Commonly referred to as the Godfather of influence, Robert’s work has been featured around the world with client such as Google, Microsoft, IBM, the Department of Justice and more. 

Bob, welcome to the science of success. 

[0:04:03.0] RC: Thank you, Matt. I’m pleased to be with you and your listeners. 

[0:04:06.8] MB: We’re incredibly excited to have you on here today. I’m sure, many long time listeners will be familiar with you and a lot of your work. I want to focus on your new book, Pre-Suasion. We’ve talked — We’ve done a whole series on the show about the principles of influence and how vital those are. Tell me a little about how did you go from the six principles of influence to the concept of pre-suasion? 

[0:04:32.2] RC: It took me a long time. It was 30 years between the writing of the book influence and pre-suasion, and the truth is I never had an idea big enough to compete with the impact that influence had had. I didn't want to plan to push next to this tree that influence had become. I wanted to wait until I had another seed for a tree, and that didn't arrive until the idea for persuasion. 

Opposed to influence, which covers what best to build into a message to get agreement, pre-suasion describes the process of gaining agreement with a message before it's been sent, and although that may seem like some form of magic, it’s not. It's established science. 

[0:05:21.6] MB: Tell me a little bit more about that idea. How can we get someone to buy into an idea before we’ve even presented it to them? 

[0:05:30.5] RC: There is a key moment that allows a communicator to create a state of mind in recipients that is consistent with the forthcoming message. It's the moment in which we can arrange for others to be attuned to our message before they encounter it. That's a crucial step for maximizing desired change. 

For example, in one study, when researchers approached individuals and asked for help with the marketing survey, only 29% agreed to participate. If the researchers approached the second sample and preceded that request with a simple pre-suasive question, “Do you consider yourself a helpful person?” Now, 77.3% volunteered. Why? Because when they were asked before the request if they were helpful, nearly everyone said yes. Then when the request occurred, most agreed to participate in order to be consistent with the recently activated idea of themselves as helpful people. 

[0:06:40.1] MB: That’s fascinating, finding — Basically, more than doubles the effectiveness by simply asking a question which leverages the commitment consistency tendency. 

[0:06:50.6] RC: Right, and there's a further study that shows that it's not simply getting people to make a commitment publicly. It's getting them to reflect on a particular trait that they might have. In another study, people were asked to try a new soft drink. Somebody walked up to them on the street, handed them a flyer that asked them to try a new soft drink. To do so, they had to give this stranger their email address. Under those circumstances, only 30% were interested in doing that. If at the top of the flyer there was a question, “Do you consider yourself an adventurous person?” Now, 55% gave their email address to a stranger so that they could access something new. What these researchers did was put people in touch with their adventurous side simply by asking the question, and then people behaved in a way that was congruent with that adventurous side. 

[0:08:04.4] MB: I believe you’ve talked about in the past how you used to be a palm reader, and this is similar to the lesson that fortunetellers and palm readers used to get people to sort of agree with what they're about to say. 

[0:08:16.7] RC: Exactly. I learned how to be an amateur palm reader, and I tried using the system in various ways to see how accurate it really was and I found that it wasn't any good at all at describing who people were, what their fortunes were. It was very accurate at getting people to reflect on a particular aspect of themselves, that I could claim I saw in their palm. 

For example, supposed I was reading your palm and I bent back your thumb and I said, “Matt, I can tell from the resistance here that you are very stubborn person. If somebody tries to push you in the direction that you don't want to go you're going to push back.” You might do more than just refuse, you might do the opposite out of resistance and reactants. 

What that will do is send you down a memory shoot of the times when you were, indeed, stubborn and resistant and you will say to me — You’ll hit some instances and you’ll say to me, “Yeah, that's right.” That's who I am.” 

If instead I bent back your thumb, very same thumb, and said, “You know, Matt, I can see that you're actually a flexible individual. You're willing to change your mind if you encounter information to suggest that you've been wrong in the past.” That will send you down another different memory shoot where you will encounter times when you were flexible and you will look up to me from that palm that I'm reading and you'll say, “That's right. That's who I am.” 

I can get you to focus on a particular trait or capacity that you have, and as result, make you more likely to think of yourself as that kind of individual. There's an old saying that; tell me what you're paying attention to and I'll tell you who you are. If you're always watching sports on ESPN, I can tell that you’re a fan. If you're always reading gourmet magazines, I can tell that you’re a foodie by what you're paying attention to. 

Well, with the new behavioral science tells us is that getting you to pay attention to something doesn't just reveal who you are, it makes you who you are in that moment. I can make you a flexible individual. I can make you a stubborn individual by what I focus you on first. 

[0:11:23.0] MB: It's fascinating, and even when you're saying those examples, as you’ve said it, I sort of felt myself almost in a reaction just starting to think about all the time that I've been stubborn. Then when you switched to flexible, I started thinking about, “Oh, yeah. All these times I’ve been flexible,” and then I caught myself and I was like, “Hold on, I'm getting primed to think about these things.” 

[0:11:43.4] RC: Right, and that's the trick that palm readers use, but it's now something that is available to communicators to move us in various directions. We have to be very careful. When we encounter a message, not simply to look inside the message for evidence of the persuasive strategies of the communicator, we have to ask ourselves what happened just before I received that message. 

I’ll give you an example, there was a study done of an online furniture store that specialized in sofas. For half of their visitors to their website they sent them to a landing page that had as its background wallpaper fluffy soft clouds. For the other half of the visitors, they went to a landing page that had small coins, pennies, as the landing page depiction, background depiction. Those people who saw the clouds then rated comfort as more important in buying a sofa than before. They then searched the site for comfort related information and they preferred to purchase more comfortable sofas. 

Those were sent to the background landing page of small coins, pennies, rated cost as more important in their decision of buying a sofa. Search the site for price information and preferred to purchase inexpensive sofas, and when they were asked afterward, “Did those clouds or coins make any difference in your choices?” They laughed. They said, “Of course not. I’m a freestanding entity. I decide based on my personal preferences of who I am and what I want.” They didn’t recognize that the clouds and the coins changed who they were and what they wanted in that moment. 

[0:14:08.8] MB: I think you’ve raised two really, really important point, and I wanted to dig into each of these. One sis this idea that the importance, the notion that the persuasion doesn't necessarily lie just within the message, but rather the context of the message is presented in the things that happened before the message. Then the second thing you just brought up, which I think is vital and really underscores how important, how powerful, and sometimes how insidious this can be, is the idea that people consciously have no awareness of the fact that they're being primed to think these certain ways and make certain decisions based on what they would consider consciously to be completely irrelevant factors. 

[0:14:48.8] RC: Exactly. I’ll give you another example. A study was done in France where they went to a shopping mall and had a very attractive young man walk up to young women who were strolling along through the halls of the shopping mall. He stopped them, gave them a compliment and asked them for their phone number so he could call them for a date later. 

Under most circumstances, his success was dismal, where they were passing various kinds of stories. Only about 13% of the time did he get a phone number, even though he was selected to be very attractive movie star looks kind a guy, but if they were passing one particular kind of shop, his success doubled. It was a flower shop, because flowers are associated with romance and not one of these young men when asked afterwards recognized what had happened to them. 

[0:15:53.0] MB: That reminds me of another example, which I think tell me if this is the same sort of psychological tendency, but I think it was when people were purchasing wine in a wine store, if they put on German music, it was like 70% of the purchases would be German wine. If they put on French music, 70% of the purchases would be French wine, and yet when they asked consumers if the music have any impact on the wine purchase, everyone said that it had no impact on then. 

[0:16:17.7] RC: Exactly. Right. This is a dangerous stick of dynamite that we have now in the idea of pre-suasion. That's why we have to be so ethical about the use of this. We have dynamite. We can people in our direction and they won't even recognize it. We have to be very careful that we take the ethics and their interests into account as communicators. On the recipient side, we also have to be very careful that as recipients of this information we don't dismiss the context in which the information was presented. 

[0:17:05.7] MB: That gets back to the first point I talked about, which I want to dig into a little bit more, the idea that the message itself is not were all the persuasion takes place, and it can take place around the message or before the message. Tell me more about that phenomenon, that notion.

[0:17:20.5] RC: Yeah. Remember the idea from back in the 70s, the medium is the message? This notion that the channel in which you send the message can be a message itself. If you meet somebody face-to-face, versus you call them on the phone or you send them an email, that's a message itself that you've taken the time to meet with them face-to-face rather than send them an email. The message is partially the medium. 

What we've learned since then is that not only is the medium the message, the messenger is the message. Sometimes, simply establishing one's credibility as a communicator, as an honest and informed a broker of information can be enough to be the message. It's often the case that people say yes to something simply because of the credentials of the communicator. There was a sort of alarming study that was done that measured brain activity when people were given communications about a particular economic decision that they could make. 

When it was just sent to them by an unknown communicator, those sectors of their brain associated with cognitive analysis lit up just as you would expect. When they were told that the communicator was a distinguished professor of economics at the University of Chicago, their analysis sectors of their brain shut down, they flat-lined. Instead, another's sector of the brain lit up which had to do with attribution of responsibility for messages. Who is this person essentially? 

The messenger was the message, the context. Before there was even a message sold the audience. There is another way in which we can think of it. The multitude is the message. Not only is the medium the message, or the messenger the message, the multitude is the message. If a lot of other people are doing something, that's an indication that it's the right thing to do before you have even encountered the message.

For, example in the United Kingdom, they have a problem with people who pay their taxes late and they send them message, the tax office, that says, “If you don't pay in a certain time, here will be the consequences,” and they get about 68% of the people responding by paying their taxes after getting that message. 

If instead they say the great majority of UK citizens do pay their taxes on time, now this goes to 73%. If instead they go even further and say, “The great majority of taxpayers in your community pay their taxes on time,” it goes to 79%. Learning what most others are doing is a message itself. All context to the content of the message that is yet to come. 

[0:21:19.7] MB: The word context, that’s a great way to kind of succinctly capture this notion, which is the idea of the context matters as much, or maybe more than content in many cases. 

[0:21:31.5] RC: Often, more than content. 

[0:21:35.6] MB: Are you a professional looking to get a leg up at work or just someone who loves learning new things? Are you looking to do your job better? You want to add some impressive skills to resume? This episode in the Science of Success is sponsored by Skill Share. Skill Share is an online learning community with over 16,000 courses in design, business and more. You can learn everything from logo design, to social media marketing, to street photography. Unlimited access to all of these for a low monthly price and never pay per class again. 

There are actually some really cool courses on here. I’ve recommend several of the courses on implementing the GTD method, getting things done, which if you're not doing that is a really, really highly effective productivity strategy to several different people I work with. I've recently gotten into drawing. There are some awesome looking courses on sketching, ink drawing, doodling and drawing the human figure that I'm really interested in taking. 

Skill Share is giving my listeners a free month of unlimited access all. All you have to do is go to skillshare.com/success and redeem your free month. I definitely recommend checking this out, it’s a really cool website with a ton of awesome and interesting classes. 

In a world where change is one of the only constants, people and businesses must be adaptable. This episode of The Science of Success is sponsored by our partners at That Moment, a new podcast about the pivot that changes everything. Sometimes we recognize the need to seize the moment and change course. Other times, we have no choice but to pivot. 

During these rapidly changing times, pivots can bring uncertainty, fear, and the looming possibility of failure, but can also open doors for discovery, growth, and change. In each episode of That Moment, business leaders and entrepreneurs share their stories of taking risks and finding success at work and in life. From autonomous cars to new sensor technology, the insurance of driving is changing. 

In the latest episode of That Moment, hear about how Allstate is leveraging new technologies to test, learn, and develop more quickly. Then, Naomi Starkman tells her story about walking away from the New Yorker to become a farmer. Why did she make this pivot, and what is she doing now? Find out on the latest episode of That Moment, available wherever you listen to podcasts. 

[0:23:54.0] MB: How can we leverage some of these principles? Let’s think about for those who are operating kind of ethically in a sound way, how can they leverage these principles to influence people in the way that they want to? 

[0:24:08.7] RC: Let's take the workplace as an example. Suppose you're applying for a job and there is a meeting that you have with an evaluator. Sometimes it's a team of evaluators, sometimes just a single person, and you go in and what we've always been taught to say is, “I'm very happy to be here. I want to answer all of your questions that you would have for me. Here’s I'm going to suggest we do.” We also say, “But I’m curious. I have a question for you. Why did you invite me here today? What was it about my resume that was attractive to you?” Here's what they will do, they will begin by focusing on your strengths. The context for the interview will be your strengths. That will be the starting point for the interview. They will search your resume. They'll say, “Well, it's because your credentials are what we want, or it's because your values that you indicated fit with our value statement.” That will be the launching point now. You’ll also be informed about what it is that they think is most important. You’ll be able to build on that. 

I have an acquaintance who claims he's gotten three straight better jobs in a row using this tactic. Okay.  Now let's say you got that job and you've got a new initiative that you want to develop, but you know you need they buy-in of a colleague of yours to send this idea forward. You approach that person, maybe give that individual a draft or a blueprint of your idea and ask for that person's advice. That's a mistake, not to include this individual, and you ask for that person's opinion. I'm sorry. I meant to say a a pin. You ask for that person's opinion. It's a mistake to ask for that person's opinion because when someone is asked for an opinion, that person takes a half step back from you and goes inside intra-specs and separates. Instead, if you change one word pre-suasively and ask for that person's advice rather than opinion, that individual takes a half step toward you psychologically, sees him or herself as a partner in this process. 

The research shows that person will now become more supportive of your idea than if you ask for an opinion. There's a saying; when you ask for someone's advice, you're usually looking for an accomplice. Here’s what the behavioral science says. If you get that advice, you usually get that accomplice, and that's what you want when you want something forward in an organization. 

Okay, and then one last thing. Now let's say you've got a meeting to present your idea and it's got a particular budget and you have figured out the budget so that it will be $75,123 to accomplish your idea, to get it launched, and what you typically do is to reduce that to 75,000. You round it off to $75,000. That's a mistake, because if you say — Research shows, if you say 75,123, people assume that you have done your homework. You have figured this out. You are knowledgeable about the pros and cons of the budget. You've got it down to the dollar. Even though it will be more money by $123, then $75,000 figure, people will be more likely to accept that budget under those circumstances. 

I saw another study recently, remarkable. Back the UK, again, with the tax office. They got this idea, “Hey, let's tell people that the majority of taxpayers pay on time.” They sent one message that said nine out of 10 of the people in your community to pay their taxes on time. For another group, they sent a message that said 88% pay their taxes on time. The 88% message got twice as much tax payments because it was a precise number, rather than a rounded one that seemed like it was pulled out of the air. That's one thing you can do before you even begin, begin with a budget. Put it at the top of your proposal that has a precise number rather than a rounded one. 

[0:29:53.6] MB: It's fascinating and I think it can't be overlooked that the small differences that seem so trivial to someone who’s not consciously applying the principles of influence, the principles of pre-suasion, they seem so irrelevant and yet they make a tremendous impact on human behavior. 

[0:30:12.3] RC: You're precisely right about that, man. I'll tell you something how I decided to write this book, pre-suasion. I had been seeing studies in the research literature suggesting something like this, but I haven't really put it together till one day there was a knock at my door. I answered it to find the man who was asking me to contribute to a cause. After school programs for children in my district whose parents were working, who would have to get child care for them and so on. We would have education opportunities for them after school. 

He didn't show me any credentials to indicate that he was from the school district and I hadn't heard that the school district was initiating such a program, and yet I gave him more money than I would've given to someone from the United Way or the Cancer Society that I normally give. After I closed the door, I remember thinking to myself what just happened here? I realized it wasn't the content of what he said. It was the context. He did something first that made me want to give money to this cause. He brought his seven-year-old daughter with him and was focused on children, and children's issues, and children's needs, and children's challenges. He put me in touch with that side of myself that became top of mind now and made me who I was in that moment, and I thought to myself, “Oh, there's a book here.” 

[0:32:08.4] MB: That’s fascinating, and I think those are some great examples of how just by being a little bit conscious of it by thinking ahead and saying, “How can I set up my environment, or the presentation of the context for this particular piece of information to make it more effective?” There are so many lessons and strategies that can come out of that.

[0:32:29.2] RC: Yeah. I think the way to do it in an ethical fashion is to say to yourself as a communicator,” What is it about my message? What dimension of my message? What feature of it? What aspect of it will make it most wise for people to say yes?” That's what I should put. That concept is what I should put at top of mind in my audience before I send them the message. Something that will cause them to focus on a feature of what I have to offer that makes it wise for them to choose it.” 

If we go back to that furniture store, that online furniture store example. If the best thing about the furniture at this store is the price of it, that's then pennies should be the first thing people encounter. Even though the more comfortable furniture may produce a bigger profit margin for the store, to be ethical they should not put clouds on their background wallpaper. They should put pennies, because their strength is the value, their low-cost. That's where we should send people if we’re going to use this ethically. 

[0:34:06.4] MB: I’d love to look at another angle of the concept of pre-suasion. Is it possible — And what are some ways that we potentially could apply pre-suasion to influencing ourselves? 

[0:34:18.9] RC: Yeah. This is really a good question, because it's what I think I've been able to use it for since I started thinking about this. Here's what I've done. If I have a task that requires me to be very thoughtful, there is a particular image I put at the top of my computer screen that research shows increases the likelihood that people will solve a difficult problem correctly. It's an image of Rodin’s The Thinker. 

Research showed if you give business students, business school students a set of difficult problems and you asked them to solve those problems with a variety of different images, a nature scene and so on, the kind of thing you usually have as your screensaver or your background wallpaper. That's not as successful as if you give them an image of Rodin’s The Thinker. They actually solve 48% more problems correctly. We can do this to ourselves. We can put ourselves in a state of mind that is congruent with the goal of our message. 

There's another study that shows that if you want people to expend a lot of energy in a task, persist at it and be energy driven with this task, show them a picture of a runner winning the race and that will increase their performance on that kind of task. What I do now is depending on the goal I have for a particular task, I choose an image that's congruent with that goal and put it there on the corner of my screen as I perform the task. We can do that.

[0:36:29.1] MB: That’s a great and such a simple strategy to implement that everybody listening could immediately put in place right now to sort of prime themselves with just the smallest thing in their environment to help them move towards whatever they're trying to achieve. 

That said, what is one really simple piece of actionable advice you would give, almost as a form of homework to our listeners for them to implement some of the concepts we’ve talked about today? 

[0:36:55.4] RC: Here’s a very simple thing. Very often, when we want people to move in a particular direction, we want them to change. It requires change. Here's what the research shows. If we ask them for change on a Monday or Tuesday will be more successful than if we asked them on a Thursday or Friday. 

If we asked them for change on the first or second day of the month will be more successful than if we asked them on the last day of the month, or second to the last. Why? Because at the beginning of things, change is in — It's something new. Something has just changed, and change is in the air. 

There's a study, for example, that showed that armed forces personnel here in the United States are often asked to contribute to a retirement plan so that when they retire they will have a good amount of money available to them and they’ve been resistant to that as a rule, except at one time after they have just changed locations to a new base. Then they become significantly more open to the idea of doing something new, of getting away from their old habits and moving to something new. 

If as communicators we are interested in getting change, we can increase the likelihood that people will change in our direction by picking the right time. Once again, the context, rather than the content of our message is vitally important.

[0:38:52.1] RC: Where can people find you and your books online for people who want to do more research and dig in and learn more? 

[0:38:59.6] RC: Yeah, probably the best place is on our website, influenceatwork.com, that's all one word influenceatwork.com, and they can get access to our books, our videos and so on, and opportunities for speaking or consulting, training, those kinds of things are available. 

[0:39:23.5] MB: Bob, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all these incredible wisdom. We are huge fans of you and your work and it's truly been an honor to have you on the Science of Success today. 

[0:39:34.5] RC: Thank you, Matt. I enjoyed being with you. It was a good set of questions, I have to say.

[0:39:39.7] MB: Thank you so much for listening to The Science of Success. Listeners like you are why we do this podcast. The emails and stories we receive from listeners around the globe bring us joy and fuel our mission to unleash human potential. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s matt@sucesspodcast.com. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every listener email.

The greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please, leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes, because that helps more and more people discover The Science of Success. I get a ton of listeners asking, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all these information?” Because of that, we’ve created an amazing free guide for all of our listeners. 

You can get it by texting the word “smarter”, that’s “smarter” to the number 44222, or by going to successpodcast.com and joining our email list. If you want to get all these incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we just talked about in this show and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can get them at successpodcast.com, just hit the show notes button at the top. 

Lastly, your support is what drives us and keeps us creating great new content, adding value to the world and interviewing amazing guests every single week. If the Science of Success has been valuable to you, we would love if you would become one of our patrons on Patreon and support the show. You can go to successpodcast.com/patreon and support the Science of Success. 

Thanks again, and we’ll see you on the next episode of The Science of Success.

The Shocking Truth About Talent & What It Means For You with Geoff Colvin

In this episode we discuss the “experience trap” and why someone who has been doing their job for 20-30 years may be no better (and sometimes worse) than someone who has very little experience, look at the shocking truth that 35 years of research reveals separates world-class performers from everyone else, how “Talent” is overrated, misunderstood, and most research says it doesn’t even exist, we go deep on the critically important concept of deliberate practice, and much more with our guest Geoff Colvin.  

Geoff Colvin is an award-winning speaker, writer, and broadcaster. Geoff holds a degree in economics from Harvard, an MBA from NYU, and is currently the senior editor-at-large for FORTUNE. He is the bestselling author of several books including Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everyone Else, Humans Are Underrated: What High Achievers Know That Brilliant Machines Never Will and more. Geoff has delivered over 10,000 broadcasts on the CBS Radio Network and has been featured on Good Morning America, CNN, CNBC, and more.

• The “experience trap” and why someone who has been doing their job for 20-30 years may be no better (and sometimes worse) than someone who has very little experience

• What do surgeons, auditors, parole officers have in common with their skillsets?

• Why the assumption that a lot of experience makes you good at something is fundamentally flawed

• What the very best performers are constantly doing that most people simply don’t do

• Why going to a teacher and taking lessons is NOT enough to get better at singing (or any other skill)

• What separates world-class performers from everyone else

• Why the concept of talent is a loaded term that most people don’t understand

• Why the conception of “talent” as an in-born gift is a mischaracterization

• How “Talent” is overrated, misunderstood, and why most research says “talent" simply does not exist

• What 35 years of research and science answer exactly what explains great performance better than anything else

• What is the concept of "deliberate practice" and why is it so vital to great performance?

• The road to great performance is long and hard, but most importantly it's available to anyone

• Why deliberate practice is not what you typically think of when you think of practice

• The key components of deliberate practice:

• Deliberate practice is an activity designed especially for you, at your stage of development, at doing what you’re doing right now

  1. It is designed to push you just beyond what you’re currently capable of doing

  2. Can be repeated at high volume

  3. The vital importance of continual feedback

• Why high-volume deliberate practice changes the physical structure of your brain

• As you get better, your deliberate practice must be adjusted higher

• Why deliberate practice is neither work nor play

• The vital importance of training and practicing just outside your realm of ability

• How to harness deliberate practice for business & investing

• Simulation

  1. Software that lets you make these decisions at high volume

  2. Create simulators that put these decisions to the test at high volume

  3. These simulations have to be highly realistic and very demanding

• How a basketball team has used the lessons of deliberate practice to achieve over 100 consecutive wins

• “The real game is easy compared to the practice” - Practice harder than you play!

• The Battle of 73 Easting and how the military leveraged deliberate practice to win one of the most decisive tactical victories in the modern era

• Try to find practice “in the activity” itself when you can

• Deliberate practice is way more work than most people are accustomed to doing, but the payoff is nearly always worth it

• How do you reconcile the advice of “focusing on your strengths” with the fundamental conclusions of deliberate practice?

• How do humans become and maintain economic value as robotics, software, and technology continue to replace human workers?

• The skills of deep human interactions are some of the most high-value skills in the future workplace

• The value and importance of sensing what other humans are thinking and feeling and responding in an appropriate way

• Why human interaction, empathy, collaboration, storytelling will become more and more important

• Emotional intelligence is a trainable skill that can be improved

• EQ and Emotional Intelligence is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Personal Site] Geoff Colvin

• [Author Page] Fortune.com - Geoff Colvin

• [Book] Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else by Geoff Colvin

• [Book] Humans Are Underrated: What High Achievers Know That Brilliant Machines Never Will by Geoff Colvin
  

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success with your host, Matt Bodnar.
 
[0:00:12.6] MB: Welcome to The Science of Success. I’m your host, Matt Bodnar. I’m an entrepreneur and investor in Nashville, Tennessee and I’m obsessed with the mindset of success and the psychology of performance. I’ve read hundreds of books, conducted countless hours of research and study and I am going to take you on a journey into the human mind and what makes peak performers tick with the focus on always having our discussion rooted in psychological research and scientific fact, not opinion.
 
In this episode, we discuss how the experience trap and why someone who’s been doing their job for 20 or 30 years may be no better and sometimes worse than someone who has very little experience. We look at the shocking truth that 35 years of research reveals separates world-class performers from everyone else. We talk about how talent is overrated, misunderstood, and research says doesn’t even exist. We go deep on the critically important concept of deliberate practice and much more with our guest, Geoff Colvin. 
 
The Science of Success continues to grow with more than a million downloads, listeners in over 100 countries, hitting number one in New and Noteworthy, and more. Do you want to stay up-to-date with the latest episodes, tactics, research, inside notes and more from the show and our guests? We’d like to invite you to receive this exclusive bonus content, it's called Mindset Monday. Each week, we share with you the very best, latest, most actionable research and strategies that have impacted our lives, fired us up and can be used by you starting now. 
 
All you have to do the sign-up is to go to our website; successpodcast.com and enter your email to receive all these and even more great content from us. Again, just visit our website; successpodcast.com and join our email list or text the word “smarter” to the number 44222. 
 
In our previous episode, we discussed how to master the universal skills required to succeed at work, the counterintuitive truth of taking more responsibility for your own mistakes, flaws and screw-ups and how that can help you succeed more quickly. We looked at how to cultivate and create accountability in your life, challenge yourself to rise up to a higher level and become more vulnerable. We talked about the Benjamin Franklin effect and much more, with our guest Pete Mockaitis. If you want to crush it at your job, be sure to listen to that episode. 
 
Lastly, if you want to get all these incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we’re going to talk about this episode and much more, be sure to check out our show notes, just go to successpodcast.com and hit the show notes button at the top. 
 
[0:02:52.3] MB: Today, we have another amazing guest on the show, Geoff Colvin. Geoff is an award-winning speaker, writer, and broadcaster. He holds a degree in economics from Harvard, an MBA from NYU is currently the senior editor at large for Fortune. He’s the best-selling author of several books including, Talent Is Overrated, Humans Are Underrated and more. Geoff has delivered over 10,000 broadcasts on the CBS Radio Network and has been featured on Good Morning America, CNN, CNBC and many more. 
 
Geoff, welcome to the Science of Success. 
 
[0:03:23.5] GC: Thank you, Matt. I am delighted to be with you. 
 
[0:03:26.3] MB: We’re very excited to have you on here today to share your wisdom. For listeners who may not be review with you, tell us a little bit about yourself and your story. 
 
[0:03:34.1] GC: Well, it’s in some ways, a pretty simple and short story. I’ve been at Fortune Magazine for virtually my entire career doing all kinds of things there, meaning writing, editing, pretty much everything you can do on the editorial side of a magazine. In addition, I have had this sort of long parallel career in radio. You mentioned the CBS stuff. I’ve been on the radio one way or another since I was in high school and have always loved that. I do a lot of speaking nowadays on some of the topics we’re going to be talking about today and some other ones. As you mentioned, I do write the occasional book. It's a collection of things that I just happen to like to do. It’s pretty good gig that I get to do them. 
 
[0:04:23.6] MB: So I’d love to start out and kind of go deep into the book Talent is Overrated. That was one of my favorite books that I’ve read in the last 5 or 10 years. To start out, tell me about kind of the concept of the experience trap and the idea that for many people who’ve been doing their job for 20 or 30 years, in many cases and often times, they are no better off at that job than someone who has just started out or has very little experience. 
 
[0:04:49.7] GC: Yeah, it’s a big surprise, but this effect has now been documented in a number of fields. Wouldn’t you think that somebody who’d been doing something for a long time would be getting better at it? In fact, there’s a lot of policy that’s kind of based on that, right? People get promoted in some organizations still, simply because they’ve been doing something for a long time. Yet the evidence is pretty clear, that is by no means an assurance that people are getting better at it. 
 
In fact, there is evidence that people not only may not get better, in some cases they make it worse. For example, auditors who are supposed to go through financial statements and detect fraud on average were worse after 20 years of experience than somebody who was new with this. Some of the things that surgeons are supposed to like predict recovery time, they actually got worse with age. Something similar actually what people who predict whether if you’ll let somebody out of prison, how long will it be before they come back? Their skills get worse with time. 
 
It’s a real prize but it's a serious issue, because if we’re not getting any better just by doing stuff, then how are we going to get better? In other words, we all kind of assume that what makes people good at what they do is a lot of experience doing that? In fact, I often recommend to people, “What would you tell a little kid, a son, or a daughter, or a niece or a nephew, who just said, “What makes so-and-so so great?” Whether it's a famous musician or athlete or whoever they might ask you? If they just ask you, what makes them so good? What would you say?” 
 
One of the things you’d probably say is, “Well, they worked hard at it for a long, long time.” The truth is that's not a very good explanation as we've just been describing. People who work really hard at something for a long time, and they’re wonderful conscientious people, are not necessarily any better and sometimes they are even worse. 
 
[0:07:09.9] MB: Let’s dig in to a little bit at why does that happen and why are people's assumptions about experience so flawed? 
 
[0:07:16.4] GC: It happens apparently because of something that goes on inside a person's mind while they’re working, while we are working. This applies to all of us. What researchers have found is that people who outwardly appear to be doing the same thing are not necessarily doing the same thing, and the difference is that some people, while they’re doing whatever they may be doing, are thinking, “Okay, how is this going? How am I doing? How can I be doing this better?” and not just generally, “How can I be doing better?” Specifically, “What part of this job I'm doing right now? What part of it should I be focused on improving?” 
 
The very best performers are constantly doing this. Most people are not constantly doing that. They're just going through the motions. One example that comes from the research is people who are working on singing, people taking singing lessons. You say, “Well, they’re all trying to get better because they’re going to a teacher and taking these lessons.” 
 
Well, it turns out not. It turns out that people who think of singing is a kind of fun hobby, something that they enjoy doing, they experience the singing lesson as fun. This is enjoyable. The people who are professional singers, successful professional singers, experience the singing lesson completely differently. To them, this is hard work. It is stressful and exhausting, and it's because they are in their minds focused on how they can get better, intensely focused. In fact, it can be exhausting. 
 
The reason this is important is if you observed the two of them, you’d say, “Well, they’re both doing the same thing.” You’d say they're both taking a singing lesson. In fact, they're not doing the same thing, and the difference is in their brains. 
 
[0:09:36.0] MB: Before we dive into deliberate practice, which I want to go deep on, tell me about so many people have a flawed perception of the idea of talent and what talent is. How do you think about talent and why is the common conception of it so wrong? 
 
[0:09:54.4] GC: It’s a great question, and in fact part of the experience of researching and writing that book is that I have really changed the way I think about that concept, and I’ve even changed the way I use the word. In fact, I try not to use the word talent because people have many different ideas of what it might mean. 
 
Here’s the issue. Most of us think of talent as an inborn gift of some kind. We use the word very broadly and very loosely, but most of think that talent represents some kind of inborn gift, so-and-so is really talented at playing tennis and somebody else just really is not talented at playing tennis. What we are thinking when we say, is the first person somehow came into this world with a gift, an ability to do something fairly specific, in this case, play tennis, that most of us just don’t have. 
 
When you look at Serena Williams or Roger Federer solely and what they're doing seems to be superhuman. It seems to be beyond the capabilities that most of us could even conceive of, then the idea of an inborn gift does kind of make sense. The reality is that the research is now quite clear, that that's not what accounts for great performance. In fact, some researchers say that talent in that sense, talent in the sense of a gift that you are born with to do something fairly specific, whether it's play a sport or fly a jet or lead a group or whatever it may be. The idea of talent as an inborn gift to do something fairly specific, that doesn't even exist some of the researchers say. 
 
Now, I decided not to take such an extreme position, that's why I called the book Talent is Overrated and not Talent Doesn't Exist. In fact, at the very least, it is far less important as an explanation of great performance, then other factors, and that’s what we’re going to get into next. 
 
What I would ask people to do is just stop. Every time you hear yourself saying, “So-and-so is really talented,” or “So-and-so is naturally talented,” or “So and so is a natural born leader,” or surgeon, or golfer, or accountant, or whatever. The next time you catch yourself saying that, just stop and say, “Is that really what I mean? Do I really believe deep down that so-and-so — Do I believe that Tiger Woods came into this world with a fairly specific ability, the ability to play golf, and that he just has it and most of us don't? Is that really what I think?” It's a good exercise to go through, and I hope people will at least carry that with them and think whatever they use the word talent. 
 
[0:13:16.6] MB: What is the factor that separates these world-class performers from everybody else? 
 
[0:13:24.3] GC: The answer is pretty clear, and this is not me giving my opinion. This is 35 years now of good research on exactly this question. What explains great performance better than anything else is what researchers call deliberate practice. That's not what most of us think of when we use the word practice. It has a fairly specific meaning. 
 
Whether you're talking about sports, or music, or business, or teaching, or anything else, what all of the great performers seem to have in common is this particular specific activity of deliberate practice and particularly doing it a lot, doing it a lot every day for years. 
 
To go straight to the bottom is that the idea of talent as an innate gift doesn't explain great performance very well. Deliberate practice does explain it very well. The good news is you don't need an inmate gift. The road to great performance is long and hard. Nobody says it's easy. The good news is it’s available. This is an incredibly liberating message, because it says that all of us have at least the ability to be much much better performers than we are. If we want to go all the way, we have within certain bounds that all of us may operate within, and we’ll get to that. We all have the ability to be actually great performers if we just know how it’s done. This idea of deliberate practice is in fact how it's done. Shall we go into it? 
 
[0:15:19.6] MB: Let’s go into it. 
 
[0:15:20.8] GC: Okay. As I said, it’s fairly specifically defined and it’s not what most of us think of when we say we’re practicing. I discovered, for example, if what I do out on the driving range at the golf course is pathetic example of deliberate practice. It’s not even close, and this accounts for a lot of the way I play golf, I’m afraid. 
 
The specific meaning of the deliberate practice is as follows; it is an activity that is designed especially for you at your particular stage of development in doing whatever it is you’re doing. Let's think of a sport. People often talk about this in sports. However good you are right now, specific practice activity is designed for you at this moment, and that means it’s going to change, because as you get better, the deliberate practice activities are going to have to change to reflect that. 
 
Second thing, it is designed to push you just beyond what you can currently do. It doesn't try to push you way beyond what you can currently do, because then you’re just lost. You have no idea, go after it. It doesn't allow you to keep operating within your current abilities because then you don't grow. It is constantly pushing you just beyond what you can do. 
 
As you get better of course, it has to be adjusted to keep pushing you just beyond. It can be repeated at high volume. This turns out to be really important, and when the researchers first discovered this, they didn't understand all the reasons why it was really important. They just observed that it really was. It turns out that doing these practice activities at high volume literally changes the structure of your brain. It causes physical changes in your brain, and specifically it causes a substance called myelin to form around some of the connections in your brain, and you will even hear people now in the sports world talking about myelin because they wanted to build it up in the brains of the people they’re training. You got to do it at high repetition if you can. 
 
Then the final element is continual feedback. You can’t get better if you don't know how you're doing. You need some kind of continual feedback to tell you how you’re doing all the time. This takes us right back to the beginning, the fact that the deliberate practice activity has to be designed for you, that feedback is going to tell you how you’re doing and therefore how the deliberate practice activity needs to be changed. 
 
Those are the essential elements. They can be applied in virtually any real. A couple of things to keep in mind; deliberate practice is neither work nor play. It's not work and that it's not the actual performance. If you're training at a sport, you're not actually playing a game. It’s not exactly work, but it’s not play, because it's not fun either. It’s hard. 
 
In fact, one of the things that has to be faced about deliberate practice is that for most people it's really hard, because by definition it means you're going to be failing. You’re going to be making mistakes. Because, remember, I said one of the elements, and this is really the heart of it, is being constantly pushed just beyond what you can do. If you're being pushed just beyond what you can do, you’re trying to do stuff you can't quite do yet. By definition, you're going to make mistakes, you're going to fail. None of us really like making mistakes and failing too much, but that's the essence of deliberate practice. Being pushed just beyond so that you're not quite able to do it until eventually you can. As soon as you can and you’ve got it solid, then you got to be pushed again just beyond what you can do. 
 
That’s what it's all about, and it is remarkable to see how this has been applied in all kinds of fields and is being increasingly applied in new fields. People are realizing what this is all about and how it works and figuring out new ways to use it. Anyway, I'll stop there. That's the essence of deliberate practice, and that is what characterizes the great performers in pretty much every realm. 
 
[0:19:55.6] MB: After reading Talent is Overrated, and this is one of the things that I spent a lot of time thinking about, how can we — I’ll ask a specific version of this, but I’m also curious about kind of a larger picture as well. Being an investor and being in the world of business, I thought a lot about how can I apply the framework of deliberate practice to something like improving my abilities as an investor or as a business person and fields where there’s very long gap between kind of action and feedback, how do we leverage those lessons to harness the power of deliberate practice? 
 
[0:20:32.9] GC: Yup, it’s a great question, because this comes up in a lot of real-world fields. As you say, there’s a long gap between what you do and how it turns up. How can you do this? The way it’s done, and the real way to do it is the way it's been done from the beginning in sports and music and some other realms as well, which is, essentially, simulation. When a team is practicing, a lot of it is conditioning and so forth, but a lot of it is simulation. That is doing stuff that's like the game except it isn’t the game. The nice thing in investing and business is that there is now software available that enables us to simulate this so that we can speed it up and therefore do it — For example, make investing decisions at high-volume. 
 
Furthermore, I know of examples where companies have created their own stimulation. For example, this is a real-life example. A company that makes pharmaceutical products that are what they call Biologics. They aren’t mixed up as chemicals in a vet. They have to be grown, and this is a very hot area of pharmaceuticals now, they have to be grown, they’re alive, and then they have to be shipped at just the right moment. 
 
The difficulty is that they have to be grown, shipped at the right moment and get to the doctor or hospital that needs them at the right moment. If they don't get there at the right moment, then their value was lost and that they’re no good anymore. This is just a lot of money wasted. The company was having so much trouble getting the stuff produced and shipped on schedule that it was failing. In fact, it was in danger of going out of business. 
 
What they did was created a highly realistic simulation of the production and shipping process where they could compress it, because when it’s in simulation, growing some of these things can take weeks. In a simulation, you can pretend that they were grown in minutes, and then go through the whole process of the order processing and the packing and the shipping and so forth, and they created this simulation, they put their people through it repeatedly, then told them, “Okay, now reflect. How did you do?” By the way, they did everything you're supposed to do in deliberate practice. They provided them a lot of feedback. They had this big digital readout telling them all along the way how they were doing so they could look up and see at any given moment. Then they would stop, the team would talk and say, “All right, how can we improve?” They came up with ideas, they’d try that. They did it over and over, getting feedback on their own performance, and they went through this for weeks. It saved the company. They figured out new ways to do this, do the production and shipping, packing and shipping, on time, and it saved the company. That how it can be done in business. 
 
By the way, in investing, if it’s going to work on investing decisions, you can get software now that uses huge datasets to simulate how investments are going to do, and you can do it at high-volume because you can compress the times. 
 
The larger point here, and it’s a really really important point, has to do with highly realistic simulation that is very very demanding. Since I pay a lot of attention to this obviously, I have been struck by how often this comes up. Here’s my favorite example, just recently — Or the latest example, just a few days ago, there was an article in the New York Times about the University of Connecticut women's basketball team. Arguably, the most dominant team playing any kind of basketball anywhere because they’ve gone over 100 games now without a loss, 100 and some consecutive victories. 
 
The question is; how do they do this? It’s exactly what I just said, highly realistic simulation at a very intense level. They simulate games and they work incredibly hard at this. In fact — For example, they’ll practice with a shot — The normal shot clock in basketball is 30 seconds. They’ll practice with a shot clock set at 24 seconds just to make them faster, and they do this for hours a day, these highly realistic drills that are really really intense. 
 
One of the players, in explaining how they win all these games said, “Because the real game is easy compared to the practice.” What struck me is, the very same thing has been said in people in completely different realms. 
 
In the military, for example, the Army got on to this back in the early 90s, highly realistic training, much more realistic than they had ever done before. When a tank troop won a huge victory in Operation Desert Storm in 1991, a battle that’s famous among military strategists, it’s called the Battle of 73 Easting. When it was over, they said, “This battle — This was easy compared with the training we did.” If you go back even further to when fighter pilots were being trained in the Vietnam War, this was a revolution that I describe in the later book. This was a revolution that later became famous as the Top Gun school, but it was new back then. 
 
When fighter pilots were being trained to go up against the North Vietnamese, and they dramatically improved their success rate which had been terrible previously. When the pilots would come back, they would all say the same thing, “This was a lot easier than the training we did.” You hear people saying almost precisely the same things over and over when they are explaining how tremendously successful they were. They did highly realistic simulation at a very intense level. That’s the principle to take out of it. 
 
[0:27:07.6] MB: For the average person listening here that may not have the resources to develop a simulator or a highly realistic training simulation, how can they take some of the lessons of deliberate practice and build and design a practice or training curriculum for themselves that helps them improve? 
 
[0:27:25.4] GC: Obviously, that’s a great question. It, of course, depends on exactly what you're doing. One of the things that we can all do is find practice in the activity itself. In other words, normally, the practice is done separately from the activity. The truth is, in the world of business, we’re not generally given too much time to practice. It’s funny, we’re expected to just go out there and perform every day. It is possible to apply some of these principles in the actual work itself. 
 
For example, suppose you are in a sales role and you're going into make a sales call, makes a sales presentation. You want to get better at what you're doing. That's the first rule. You want to get better at what you’re doing, not just go through the motions. When you go into this presentation, to the sales call, think about it ahead of time and don't just think, “Yeah, I want to do this better.” Get very specific, “What element of this do I want to focus on today?” It could be anything. It could be anything. 
 
Let’s suppose it’s trying to discern what the customer isn’t saying. What’s the unspoken desire or unspoken objection or whatever it is that the customer has and it’s important but they're not actually saying it out loud? “Okay, that's what I’m going to focus on when I go in.” 
 
You go in, and then in the midst of doing it, you occasionally sort of step outside yourself and say, “All right, how is it going? Am I doing what I came in here to do? What am I learning? What’s happening?” Just look at it as if you were outside the situation. 
 
Then, really important, afterward, take the time to reflect on this. Say, “Okay, I went in there trying to discern what the customer wanted but wasn't saying. Now, how did I do?” Reflect on it and say, “Ah! Now that I think about it, when he said such and such, what he really meant was such and such, but I didn’t pick up on it. Now, I can see that.” 
 
Then use that knowledge to iterate what you should be focused on the next time you go in. Now, this is proven to be very effective. It’s way more work than most people do when they are going about what they do in their jobs. That’s way more work than most salespeople do, but the payoff is always worth it. I emphasize this. 
 
In fact, this is something that we find time and again in deliberate practice. It’s way more work than most people in a given field are accustomed to doing, and the payoff is always worth it. The payoff is always just a knockout, but most people don't do it. 
 
[0:30:30.0] MB: I’m curious. In the business context, one of the things that I’ve thought about as a possible sort of methodology to leverage the principles or deliberate practice would be looking at things like case studies. Like buying a book of case studies and going through them, because you can test your decisions in real time and know the answer and kind of have that available, but you can still sort of go through that decision-making process. 
 
[0:30:55.7] GC: Yeah, and that’s a great way to do it. That's another great thing to do. The case method of teaching business is a great method of doing it for just the reasons you say, because now these cases are available. You can get them online pretty easily. They are a source of great value in trying to apply these doable practice principles. As long as you're disciplined enough to really make yourself think through and even write out what you think should be done at the point in the case where it stops and says, “Okay, that's all we’re going to tell you. You are now the product manager of such and such in this case. What do you do next?” 
 
If you really stop there and don't just think, but write down so that you can’t fool yourself later, write down what you think you would do next. Then, if possible, go see what was really done next and what happened. That is a really really valuable thing to do. I always caution people though, write down your thoughts because, otherwise, when you read, what actually happened, we all have this tendency to say, “Oh yeah, I thought that,” even though you didn't. Please write it down. 
 
[0:32:15.1] MB: That’s such an important piece of advice. In general, the whole field of decision-making, decision journaling and all that, and it's so important to write down your though t process because it's so easy to fool yourself after the fact. 
 
[0:32:28.1] GC: Yup. It happens over and over. 
 
[0:32:31.3] MB: I'm curious, and this is changing gear slightly, but how do you reconcile or think about the advice, kind of the adage to focus on your strengths with the fundamental conclusion of the results of deliberate practice? 
 
[0:32:44.7] GC: Right. This comes up because it doesn't — Sometimes it seems to be a real conflict. Don't focus on your weaknesses, focus on your strengths. There's a whole big consulting practice that’s been developed around this and so forth, and deliberate practice seems to be saying focus on your weaknesses. Find the things you can't quite do and work on them. I don't think the conflict is what it appears to be. I think it's a difference in scale. 
 
When they say focus on your strengths, I think what that means is choose something large-scale where you feel strong, where you have developed success or demonstrated success, where you don't trouble motivating yourself. It’s something you would like to do or you’re really interested or really want to get better at, stuff that you feel strong doing. 
 
Once you've done, then what makes you great at that thing is absolutely going to be the deliberate practice framework. Tiger Woods, I don’t know if he focused on his swing. As you know, he was raised from infancy to be a golfer, but focusing on his weaknesses is what made him the world's greatest golfer. For some reason, at some point in his career, he was not good at getting out of the sand. Something that terrifies amateur golfers, but professional golfers are so good at it, generally, that they hardly worry about it. Tiger wasn't so great at it, and so he had drills that he made up and that his coaches made up to do this. He’s put a dozen golf balls in the sand, then he’d step on them to bury then and then he'd practice hitting them out of the sand, and he’d do this over and over and over. That's focusing on your weaknesses. 
 
I guess the bottom line is large-scale; focus on your strength. Once you've done that, focus on your weaknesses, because that’s what’s going to make you great. 
 
[0:35:03.2] MB: In essence, sort of find a field or an area that you’re strong in and then use the methodology of deliberate practice itself to improve within that area. 
 
[0:35:12.4] GC: That's exactly it. Very well said. That's exactly it. 
 
[0:35:17.2] MB: Let's transition and switch gears a little bit and talk about the book Humans Are Underrated. It’s a fascinating conclusion and a really interesting book. Tell me about — When I think about technology today, and you hear so many new stories about the continual displacement of workers. You look at industries, things like in the future with automated vehicles, autonomous vehicles, things like truck drivers completely potentially being replaced as an industry. With all these technical disruption, how do you feel about humans and the workforce and how people are going to be able to adapt to this?
 
[0:35:53.8] GC: Yeah, this is becoming such a hot topic because we’re seeing increasingly what you described, technology achieving capabilities so advanced that they can in some cases replace human beings entirely. This question of how will we humans be productive? How will we be economically valuable as technology takes over more and more work including quite high-value work, the work that people have to be educated for many years to do and work that pays very well in medicine, in law, in finance? This is happening already and it's accelerating. How are we people going to be economically valuable? That was this question that I began with. Really, the question that you set up there. 
 
What I concluded after spending a lot of time with the research is that we will be valuable through the skills of deep human interaction, managing the exchanges that take place only between human beings. This is deep stuff. It's not all rational. A lot of it is emotional. It has to do with sensing what other human beings are thinking and feeling and responding in some appropriate way. It has to do with working together with other humans. 
 
These skills are going to be economically valuable no matter how technology advances, but they are fundamentally different skills than the skills that have traditionally made us economically valuable, because most of those skills have been the kind you can get from a book, the kind you can learn in a classroom; calculus, accounting, engineer, law. Those are still going to be important, but they are increasingly not going to be the skills that make us economically valuable because technology does them at least as well as we do. It’s these skills of human interaction, empathy, collaboration, storytelling that are going to make us valuable. The evidence is supporting this more every day. 
 
[0:38:27.4] MB: Tell me a little about some of the evidence that kind of supports that thesis. 
 
[0:38:32.2] GC: Well, there are a few things. One, if you just look at what employers are asking for, it’s striking that they're saying this is what they want. A survey of big employers said, “What do you need most now from your employees?” and they’ve been saying relationship building, co-creativity, brainstorming, cultural sensitivity. It’s exactly the group of skills that I was describing. 
 
I was talking a while ago with the chief information officer of one of the largest retailers. It’s a guy who hires hundreds of coders, software writers, every year. Now, software writers are practically the stereotype of people you think who don't need human skills, right? Supposedly, they sit in a cubicle and they tap at the keyboard and they write their software, and that's all they do. Who cares whether they can interact with another human being? 
 
This CIO who hires hundreds of them says, “It’s just the opposite.” He says, “I need people who are empathetic and collaborative in these jobs.” Why? Because they're creating software that other people are going to use. They have to be able to feel the experience that they are creating in these users. They have to be empathetic, and they have to be collaborative because the problems that they face are too hard for any one person to solve alone. These problems have to be solved in teams. If they can't collaborate on the problem-solving, then they're not very useful. 
 
What he's saying is the difference between a high value colder and a low value coder is empathy and collaboration, skills of deep human interaction. If it's true in software writing, it is certainly true in every other realm as well because we all interact much more. 
 
[0:40:45.5] MB: How do we cultivate these high value human facing skills, and are they innate or can they be learned and trained? 
 
[0:40:55.2] GC: Yeah, it’s a good question to ask, because most people kind of instinctively feel that they are innate. We say all the time so and so is a real people person, but it isn’t true. They are skills, not traits. They are skills. They can be trained, and they are being trained now in schools, medical centers, companies, even armies are training these skills now. It’s being done in all kinds of ways. 
 
One of the most striking things is at business schools, whether it's Stanford or Harvard or any of the other top business schools, they have really revolutionized their curricula in the past few years to focus on these skills. First of all, everybody works in teams. That's been true for quite a few years. They force people to work in teams. More than that, they put them through role-playing exercises. It's funny how this connects to talent is overrated. It's the same thing. Highly realistic simulations at an intense level. 
 
At Stanford business school, for example, first-year students are put in situations where they have to deal with a simulated board of directors and those simulated directors are alumni of Stanford business school, so they really know what they're doing imitating a Board of Directors, or they will be put in a simulated meeting with venture capitalists. Again, they’re alumni who are venture capitalists, so they’re really really realistic. 
 
The students will be put through this and it's all skills of human interaction, it’s all the way they handle themselves in these social settings, and then they are critiqued afterward. They get the feedback necessary and deliberate practice so they will get better. They are skills. They are being trained, and they are being trained exactly according to the principles of deliberate practice. That’s how schools are doing it. I mentioned that armies are doing it. That's a whole story onto itself, but I always have to say, when it comes to appreciating the new importance of these skills of human interaction and when it comes to training those skills, I have not discovered any institution anywhere that is as advanced as the US Military, and that surprises a lot of people. That's not what they think of the military is doing, but it is what they're doing because they understand that for them, as well as for businesses, skills of human interaction are becoming more and more crucial as technology does more and more stuff. 
 
[0:43:56.0] MB: That's a fascinating conclusion, and I think it’s so important. We talk a lot about on the show about things like emotional intelligence and how to cultivate those kinds of abilities. It's such an important thing to focus on. 
 
[0:44:09.9] GC: I agree, and getting more so all the time, because the technology is advancing with just astonishing speed. If we’re going to compete against what the software can do, it’s obviously a competition we’re going to lose. 
 
What you're describing, sometimes EQ, emotional intelligence, empathy is becoming a hot word. These are going to be sources of economic value for more and more of this. 
 
[0:44:46.0] MB: For somebody who’s listening to this that wants to practically implement some of the conclusions we’ve talked about today, what would be one simple piece of homework that you would give them as a starting place to use some of these ideas? 
 
[0:45:00.3] GC: A couple things. One; with regard to this most recent point of skills of human interaction, think about how you communicate with people, there’s a hierarchy. At one end is in-person face-to-face conversation, then we go down the hierarchy with the video call below that, a telephone call below that, email below that, texting below that, and think, “Okay, can I go up a level in communicating with the person I’m about communicate with? Can I call them and will they answer the call? But can I call them rather than text or email them? Could I video call them? Could I even go to their room or office or wherever they are and speak to them in person face-to-face?” 
 
First of all, observe what your instincts are, and then say, “Could I go up higher on the hierarchy in communicating with them?” The reason I say that is that each step up on the hierarchy is a richer form of communication, and you will develop skills that you will not otherwise develop by going as high on the scale as you can, by communicating in the richest possible way available to you and we are all developing this tendency to go low on the hierarchy because it's fast and it's easy and convenient and sometimes it's the only way, but always ask yourself, “Could I go up higher?” and try to have the richest form of communication you can. That's really a good way to help develop these human skills as a real simple initial step. 
 
The other thought is what I was describing earlier about the person going into the sales call or the sales presentation, do that yourself in whatever kind of activity is relevant for you. It depends on what field you're in and what your objectives are, but before going into a situation, do this before during and after thinking that I described, “What do I want to work on before? How's it going when you're doing it?” Then reflection afterword, “How did it go and what could I, should I have done better?” You can apply this to anything and it will really open your eyes. 
 
[0:47:32.5] MB: For listeners who want to learn more, where can people find you and your books online? 
 
[0:47:39.2] GC: Thank you for asking that. The answer is the easiest place to find it all is geoffcolvin.com, but I always have to say on a podcast, I spell Geoff the English way, geoffcolvin.com. You can get all the books there and the articles and other stuff as well. The books, of course, are all easily available at Amazon or any place else you want to look. 
 
[0:48:09.4] MB: We’ll make sure to include all of those links and links to the books in our show notes. Geoff, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all of these wisdom. I'm a huge fan of Talent is Overrated and the whole concept of deliberate practice. I’m so glad we got to go deep into that topic today. 
 
[0:48:25.1] GC: Me too, and thank you very much for asking about it. I really enjoyed it. 
 
[0:48:29.5] MB: Thank you so much for listening to The Science of Success. Listeners like you are why we do this podcast. The emails and stories we receive from listeners around the globe bring us joy and fuel our mission to unleash human potential. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every listener email.
 
Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend, either live or online. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please, leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes, because that helps more and more people discover The Science of Success. 
 
We’d like to invite you to receive this exclusive bonus content from us and our guests. It's called Mindset Monday. Each week, we share with you the very best, latest, most actionable research and strategies that have impacted our lives, fired us up and can be used by you starting today. All you have to do to get this is to sign-up for our email list. Just visit our website; successpodcast.com and join the email list or text the word “smarter” to the number 44222. Again, that’s “smarter” to the number 44222.
 
Lastly, if you want to get all these incredible information; links, transcripts, everything we talked about in this episode and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. Just go to successpodcast.com and hit the show notes button at the top. 
 
Thanks again, and we’ll see you on the next episode of The Science of Success.

Research Reveals How You Can Create The Mindset of a Champion with Dr. Carol Dweck

This episode is all about MINDSET. What is a mindset? What is the fixed mindset and how does it shape the way we act in the world, what is the growth mindset and how can it transform the way we live our lives? We look at research data from over 168,000 students, examine the mindset of champions, the dangers of blame and excuses, and much more with Dr. Carol Dweck.

Dr. Carol Dweck is a Professor of Psychology at Stanford University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is the author of the best-selling book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success - which is one of the single most important books in shaping my life. Her work has been featured in several publications including The New York Times, Washington Post, The Today Show, 20/20 and many more.

• What is a mindset?

• What is the fixed mindset?

• We go deep into the “fixed mindset” and how they view challenges and the world

• What is effort and how does the fixed mindset perceive it?

• Is effort necessary to be successful or is it a sign that you’re not naturally talented?

• If you have a fixed mindset, how do you think about criticism?

• Do you often “need to be right?” - and how could that need be impacting your life?

• We examine in detail what the “growth mindset” is and what underpins its core perception of reality

• Setbacks are welcome and setbacks are inevitable

• This fundamental conclusion is backed by 35+ years of psychological research, hundreds of studies, and more

• A study of over 168,000 students (the entire 10th grade population of Chile) demonstrating all of these findings

• Research data from everything from dating life to conflict in the middle east bears out the lessons of fixed vs growth mindset

• What is the most effective way to recover from devastating rejections?

• Is it possible to change your mindset?

• How to transform your mindset and specific steps you can take to move towards a growth mindset

• How to find the things that trigger your fixed mindset reactions

• Discover and name your “fixed mindset persona”

• Success as improvement vs success as superiority

• Self handicapping and the concept that effort robs you of your excuses

• Repairing your self esteem vs repairing your failure

• It’s impossible to learn from a mistake if you deny making it in the first place

• The grave danger of placing blame, making excuses, and denying failure in order to protect your self esteem

• The mindset of a champion and how champions rise to the occasion

• Viewing people as judges vs viewing people as allies

• How do we reconcile the lessons of mindset with the idea that you should focus on your strengths?

• What are the most common triggers of the fixed mindset?

  • Taking on a challenge, out of your comfort zone

  • Struggling, not making progress

  • Setback, criticism, failure

• Strength and weakness are much more dynamic than we understand or give them credit for

• Don think your strengths will be strengths forever if you don't work on them and grow them

• The dangers of the self esteem movement and how it actually cultivates the fixed mindset

• And much more!

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Article] Growth Mindset Workshop – Carol Dweck and Susan Mackie

• [Book] Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol S. Dweck

• [Book Site] Mindset

• [TEDTalk] The power of believing that you can improve by Carol Dweck

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success with your host, Matt Bodnar.

[00:00:12.4] MB: Welcome to The Science of Success. I’m your host, Matt Bodnar. I’m an entrepreneur and investor in Nashville, Tennessee and I’m obsessed with the mindset of success and the psychology of performance. I’ve read hundreds of books, conducted countless hours of research and study and I am going to take you on a journey into the human mind in what makes peak performers tick with the focus on always having our discussion rooted in psychological research and scientific fact, not opinion.

This is a very special episode of the science of success. To celebrate as we land our one millionth download, can you guys believe that? One million downloads. For all the listeners that had been here since day one and for all of you who are just discovering the show. We’re going to bring you an incredible special guest today, the author of one of my favorite books of all time. 

This episode is all about mindset, what is a mindset? What is the fixed mindset and how does it shape the way we act in the world? What is the growth mindset and how can it transform the way that we live our lives? We look at research did from over 168,000 students, examine the mindset of champions, the danger of blame and excuses and much more with Dr. Carol Dweck.

The science of success continues to grow with more with more than 1,000,000 downloads. Listeners in over 100 countries, hitting number one new noteworthy and more. I get listener comments and emails all the time asking me, Matt, how do you organize and remember all this incredible information? A lot of our listeners are curious about how I keep track of all the incredible knowledge you get from reading hundreds of books, conducting amazing interviews, listening to podcast and more.

Because of that, we created an epic resource just for you. A detailed guide called How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely free by texting the word ‘smarter’ to the number 44222. Again, It’s a guide we created called How to Organize and Remember Everything. All you have to do to get it is to text the word “smarter” to the number 44222 or go to scienceofsuccess.co and put in your email.

In our previous episode, we went deep on sound. We discussed how sound changes your body and affects your heart rate. Breathing pattern and brain waves as well as your hormone secretions. The secret to cultivating soundscapes that make us happier and more productive. The incredible power of listening and how it can change your reality. How like sound waves, we’re all vibrating from the smallest physical level to the macro level and much more with Julian Treasure. If you want to discover some simple sound hacks to be happier and more productive, listen to that episode.

Lastly, if you want to get all this incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we talk about on this episode and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. Just go to scienceofsuccess.co and hit the show notes button at the top. 

[0:03:12.9] MB: Today, we have a truly amazing guest on the show. Dr. Carol Dweck. Carol is a professor of psychology at Stanford University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She’s the author of the bestselling book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success which is one of the single most important books in shaping my life. 

Her work has been featured in several publications including the New York Times, Washington Post, The Today Show, 2020 and much more. Carol, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:03:40.6] CD: Thanks Matt, it’s great to be here.

[0:03:42.4] MB: Well we’re honored to have you on the show. For listeners who may not be familiar with you and your background, tell us a little bit about yourself?

[0:03:50.2] CD: Well, I’m kind of an egghead, I’m a professor but I also have broad interest in the world, I’ve always since childhood wanted to figure out how people think, how they work, how to make them more better.

[0:04:07.0] MB: You obviously wrote the book mindset which as I said at the top is probably one of the top two or three most impactful books that I’ve ever read in my entire life. I recommend it to people all the time. For listeners who may not know, I really want to dig in to the fixed mindset, the growth mindset and some of the key learnings from the book.

Just to begin, when you say mindset, what is a mindset?

[0:04:28.5] CD: Well, when I say mindset in the sense that it’s used in my book, I mean, people’s beliefs about their most basic abilities and talents. When people are in a fixed mindset, they believe their basic abilities, talents, personal attributes, personalities. That these are fixed traits, you have a certain amount, you have a certain type and that’s it.

But, when people are in more of a growth mindset, they believe that yeah, people differ but everyone can develop their talents, abilities and personal qualities. Again, it doesn’t mean everyone’s the same or everyone will go to the same place ultimately.

But it means, everyone has the potential to develop. And boy, when you look into things, all the people you think are natural super stars, underwent a long period of development, often with tremendous setbacks. It’s the sense that you can develop that propels you forward. Not just some natural talent or personality that you were born with.

[0:05:48.0] MB: Let’s start with the fixed mindset. Tell me a little bit more about the fixed mindset? How does someone with a fixed mindset think and how do they approach things like obstacles and challenges?

[0:05:59.6] CD: First, to make totally clear, we all are in the different mindsets at different times and I can talk about that later. We all have triggers that can put us right into a fixed mindset no matter who we are. That said, some people are more often in a fixed mindset and some people are more often in a growth mindset.

When you’re in a fixed mindset, you think, for example. My intelligence is just fixed, I have a certain amount, I can’t do anything about it, I really value being intelligent. The goal of my life becomes to look smart at all cost and all situations and never look dumb.

When you’re in that fixed mindset, a voice in your head says, maybe you shouldn’t do this, maybe you’ll mess up here. Hey, do this, people will think you’re really brilliant. When someone else is looking really smart, you feel threatened by that, when you're working on something hard and maybe struggling a little, you get really anxious, you think, maybe I’m not as good at this as I hoped I was, as I want to be.

When you hit a setback, that’s a calamity, that’s a real condemnation of your natural talent. If you are so talented, would you have had that failure? Would you have plunged into this mistake like that? Will everyone know it? Will you be unmasked, will you be found out finally?

The fixed mindset system is kind of this fear based system, kind of fear alternating with arrogance because if you’re going around thinking it’s fixed and you have this arrogance you feel, I’m better than other people who have less of it but if you’re struggling or having setbacks, then you’re feeling really kind of insecure.

But, what we found in our research whether you’re in the arrogant phase or the un arrogant phase, you’re not primarily a learner. You're not looking always to grow your skills to create teams that will help you develop and so forth. You're primarily about showing you’re smart.

[0:08:41.0] MB: How does the fixed mindset think about effort?

[0:08:44.7] CD: In a fixed mindset, there is a general tendency to think, if you’re really smart, you shouldn’t need a lot of effort, you shouldn’t need as much effort as other people and if you need a lot of effort, as much effort as other people, it might call your ability into question.

I think this is why so many promising people never fulfill their potential, they were going along, they were the smart one, they were the genius, they coasted along. They didn’t have to work as hard as other people because they did have the talent and the knowhow.

But, at some point, other people seem to catch up, there were competitors and at that point, the person in the fixed mindset has a choice. Should I roll up my sleeves and work hard too? Should I try new strategy, should I get a mentor, should I use resources to help me develop my abilities?

Or, should I retire while I was the smart one or should I go do something new? Often you’ll hear people say that I got bored with that, I didn’t like that anymore. That could be true but often it’s the case, they felt threatened, they didn’t feel like a natural talent anymore. They drifted somewhere else, I get a lot of letters from people saying, they just kept drifting from one thing to another, they went as far as their natural talent took them and then they jumped to something else.

They never really understood what the cause of that was. When they learned about the mindsets, they realized that if you’re in a fixed mindset, trying to feel smart all the time and you suddenly don’t, you go somewhere else, it’s not fun anymore.

[0:10:47.2] MB: How does someone with a fixed mindset think about criticism?

[0:10:52.1] CD: They don’t like it. When you’re in a growth mindset, you seek criticism, you ask for feedback, you work with people around what you need to improve because you believe, that’s how your talent will develop. By the way, it’s also smart strategy because when you get people to mentor you, they’re invested in you but in a fixed mindset. Criticism is humiliating, it’s and indictment of your natural ability.

You don’t really want to hear the criticism, you’re already putting your fingers in your ear, you’re already trying to discount it, trying to think or even explain out loud why the criticism isn’t appropriate. Even in relationships, if you have a fixed mindset about yourself as a person. In relationships, a partner may be trying to give you really helpful feedback about what they need or what upsets them or what isn’t working.

If you’re in a fixed mindset, you really take that as a slam, as someone pointing out a deficiency. In a fixed mindset, you need to be right, what you did was right. I talk in my book mindset about my fixed mindset legacy where I needed to be right and my husband and I had to invent this third person we called Maurice.

When something went wrong and when I was trying to blame him or he was trying to blame me, we said, let’s blame Maurice and then look at the problem, it’s his fault, let’s look at the problem, let’s discuss it like let’s get on with it.

In a fixed mindset, it’s kind of that blame game which is really destructive. In the example I gave your partner is just trying to give you feedback. Listen to it as helpful feedback because you want your partner to listen to your feedback, your needs, just take it as something that will grow the relationship, bring you closer, try to understand what that criticism is, whether it’s your boss, your partner or your family.

The more you listen to it in an open way and learn from it, the better those relationships will be.

[0:13:33.8] MB: The fixed mindset, it sounds like a pretty scary place and I know personally because I used to spend a lot of time there that it can be. Let’s change gears and tell me a little bit more about the growth mindset?

[0:13:45.9] CD: The growth mindset as I mentioned is a place where you believe your abilities can be developed. Again, it doesn’t mean you saying you’re Michael Jordan or Mia Ham or Yoyo Mah but you understand that abilities can be developed through hard work, learning good strategies, pushing out of your comfort zone as often as possible.

Just keep pushing that limit and getting lots of great input and mentoring from others. It’s a place where if you’re not pushing out of your comfort zone, something’s wrong. If you’re just feeling smart but not feeling you’re getting smarter, something’s wrong. When you get feedback rather than being threatened, you try to learn from it.

If you see someone who is really better than you at something you pride yourself on, instead of thinking, maybe they’re the ones with the talent, you think, I wonder how they got there? I wonder what they can teach me? I wonder how I can get as far as they got or maybe even further. The focus is, not on looking and feeling smart all the time or being perfect or beating out the competition for smartness all the time.

But, it’s about becoming smarter, growing, learning. Again, pushing out of your comfort zone, using mistakes and setbacks as opportunities to learn. It was a long time before I could really get in to the idea that setbacks were welcomed, setbacks were inevitable because it’s so different from a fixed mindset place.

I come out of a fixed mindset legacy, my sixth grade teacher as I explained in my book seated us around the room in IQ hoarder and wow, everything, it was already the highest IQ class in the school but for her, every point counted and not just academic things, she wouldn’t trust someone with a little bit lower IQ to carry the flag in the assembly or even erase and wash the blackboard.

We just got so inculcated that your IQ said everything about you and yet over time through my work, I started taking on more and more risks and challenges. When I wrote Mindset, it wasn’t common for academics to stretch into that, those areas to really put yourself out there, reveal yourself personally, talk to your reader as you talk to a friend.

In that growth mindset, you keep seeking experiences that will take you to some unknown and enhanced place and you can’t even imagine what that place will be until you stretch yourself and inevitably, people say that they’ve gone further than they ever imagined. Just by pushing out of their comfort zone all the time and by the way, collaborating with others, we have research in fortune 500 company showing that in a growth mindset setting, people collaborate, learn from each other, get smarter together.

In a fixed mindset setting, they compete with each other, hide information, cut corners, keep secrets from each other so that they can be the lone super star. You can readily see how people in that growth mindset setting get much further, innovate more, create more, rise in the company more readily.

[0:18:17.3] MB: You touched on some of the research that you’ve done and I think it’s really important for the listeners to understand how data backed and sort of research validated these findings are. Would you talk a little bit about some of the work that you’ve done on some of the research you’ve conducted?

[0:18:31.5] CD: Yes, exactly. I’m telling you the bottom line about the research but we’ve been doing research on the fixed and growth mindset for about 35 years. We have actually, and others have hundreds of studies with people of all ages.

For example, in some of the studies, we might measure people’s mindsets about their intelligence, ask them to answer questions like this, agree or disagree. Your intelligence, something very basic about you that you can’t really change, fixed or everyone, no matter who they are can become substantially more intelligent growth.

Then we look at say in students, we look at their achievement over time and we have often found that students endorsing that growth mindset, achieve more in terms of grades or test scores or going on to college or graduating from college.

Achieve more over time. Recently we did a study with all the 10th graders and she lay 168,000 students. Those who held more of a growth mindset, achieved substantially more at every level of family income.

We also have a number of studies where we teach people a growth mindset, more recently through online courses that we’ve developed for the research and again, we find that people who learn this growth mindset have a greater desire for challenge and they often go on to do better in school. We have that researched, lots of it, we have research on relationships, showing and so do other people, showing that people and more of a growth mindset are looking for not just personal growth and relationship but partner’s growth and growth of the relationship itself.

They are more open to feedback, they are more open to solving problems in more of a fixed mindset. The people are more interested in not approaching problems, not finding there’s anything wrong with them and if things start going wrong in the relationship, they start thinking, maybe this wasn’t meant to be, maybe this isn’t the right relationship rather than how can we talk about this and repair it and go forward in a stronger way.

We have a program of research on conflict in the Middle East where we’ve shown and are continuing to show that when either Israelis or Palestinians have more of a growth mindset that groups, the idea that groups have the potential to grow and change, they have a somewhat more positive attitude toward each other and more willing to even contemplate compromises for the sake of peace.

It is kind of really quite broad, some of my colleagues have shown that when people are in a growth mindset, they’re better able to handle stress, they see more things as challenges rather than stresses and they function better in situations that may be full of conflict. Those are a few lines of research that we engaged in. 

Let me tell you one more in honor of Valentine ’s Day. One study I did with graduate student Lauren Howe, it actually came out last Valentine ’s Day. It showed having people recover from painful rejections. What we found was that people who live more of a growth mindset, a belief that they as a person could develop over time told us about rejections they had had and in one of the studies and boy, everyone said, rejection was super painful, you know, there’s someone who loved you and who knew you really well and they don’t want to be with you anymore.

How could that not hurt? But, looking back, people in a growth mindset said, you know? I really learned a lot from that, it was painful but I learned to be more open or I learned that that wasn’t a good match, I really need someone who is more this way and they felt it steered them on the road to finding a better match in the future.

People with more of a fixed mindset about who they are felt differently. Many of them, five years later still felt diminished, reduced by what happened, they felt that the rejection told them who they truly were, not the great person they thought they were but someone less than that and they’re still grappling with that feeling of being inadequate, they’re taking it into their new relationships.

They’re not being as open or vulnerable in their new relationships, thereby perhaps making the rejection more possible in the future but also limiting their new relationships because the shadow of the old relationship still haunts them.

Makes them feel bad, makes them feel fearful. It’s not that those with the fixed or growth mindsets started out being different people, but their mindsets made them react to this rejections in really different ways and they carried on, they carried this legacy forward in really different ways too.

[0:25:24.5] MB: Can we change our mindsets? Because I know when I’ve shared this concept with people, especially those who were sort of Mired in a fixed mindset, that’s one of the first questions that I often hear.

[0:25:34.3] CD: Yes we can. It’s not an easy process, it’s a long process. Well some people say hey, I had this insight, I get it and they can run with it. For many of us, we have fixed mindset legacy and that’s kind of our default but my colleague in Australia, Susan Mackey, developed this idea that I’ll tell you in a moment and she’s used it with business executives, teachers, students.

First is the idea of identifying your fixed mindset persona. It’s that person that lives inside of you and says to you, I’m warning you, don’t go there, you can make mistakes. This is much too hard for you, you’re messing up, I warned you. Look at that person over there, that’s the true genius. This person living inside of you, this fixed mindset persona, not trying to harm you, not trying to undermine you, trying to keep you safe but at the same time, we know a fixed mindset keeps us safe but keeps us stagnating or arrogant or undermined.

It keeps us in places that don’t allow us to grow optimally. The next thing you do is you try to understand the situations that trigger your fixed mindset. Could be different for different people. For some people, it’s being out of their comfort zone, for others it’s when they’re criticized, for others, it’s when they’re in a group and other people seem to be more knowledgeable than they are.

When is it that this person shows up? I saw Susan Mackey working with a business executive, he said, my fixed mindset persona is Dwayne and Dwayne shows up when we have a deadline looming, I’m not sure we can make it, he criticizes the whole team, he often takes the work back from them and does it himself.

At the end, he hates them, they hate him, everything even if he makes the deadline, everyone’s miserable and he and his team started talking about how it affects them all when Dwayne shows up and how they could going forward recognize Dwayne showing up and deal with him you know?

That brings us to the next step. Name your fixed mindset persona. Name it. Could be Dwayne, it could be your critical other aunt or uncle, it could be a teacher you once had, it could be a character from a book or a movie but you know, when people just give it some thought, someone typically comes to mind pretty quickly, a name comes to mind.

Okay, now, you’re going to work with that named fixed mindset persona. Again, don’t try to shove it back into its box, don’t ignore it, don’t insult it, don’t send it away, welcome it. Say Dwayne, thank you for your input, I hear you, maybe you’re right, maybe this is a risky venture but you know, I use people as a sounding board, people are on board, it’s exciting.

I’m going to learn a lot. I wonder if you can jump on board too, if you can join me going forward, then you know, you engage in the thing, it doesn’t work out as planned, Dwayne comes back triumphant. Okay Dwayne, I hear you, again, I know you’re trying to protect me but let’s see what we can learn from this setbacks and let’s move on together.

Can I count on you to collaborate? It’s a kind of make friends with that fixed mindset persona, bring it on board with your growth mindset goals, little by little, it doesn’t happen overnight. But whenever you feel anxious or threatened, it often means Dwayne is there. Listen to your Dwayne.

Make friends, bring Dwayne onboard with your growth mindset goals, little by little. We haven’t done research on this yet but almost everyone who has tried it has really been pleased by the process.

[0:30:34.0] MB: There’s a few different ideas from the book that I really want to hear your thoughts on, one of them is the distinction between success as improvement versus success as superiority?

[0:30:48.2] CD: Yes, in a fixed mindset, every success can be seen as a sign that you’re a superior being. That you’re better than others, the worst thing would be to be ordinary right? Ordinary like this other people who struggle and maybe you think of them as mediocre.

Each success says, no, you are someone special, you are better than other people and you can feel good about that. Every day you can go home and review all the successes you had socially, personally, in your work and feel like yes, I’m worthy, not just worthy but worthier than other people.

But in more of a growth mindset, hey, it’s nice to succeed, no one’s saying it isn’t, it’s nice when people like you in a firm, it’s nice when things work out, of course you want that but even more so, the fact that you have grown, that your relationship has reached another level, that you’ve turned a setback into a triumph, that you’ve grown from. 

That you’ve understood something, you’ve worked hard on something and have understood something, that you didn’t understand before. Also, getting pleasure in other people’s growth. A success is when you’ve mentored someone or helped them and they’ve grown and they’ve succeeded. It’s got this moving forward impetus rather than just sitting there and basking in your greatness.

[0:32:51.8] MB: Another concept that I found fascinating and this was something that really resonated with me when I first uncovered it is the idea that effort robs you of your excuses.

[0:33:01.5] CD: Yes. There is a phenomenon in psychology called self-handicapping. What it means is you really handicap yourself, you go to a party the night before, big presentation, you don’t prepare till the last minute and you do that, you're handicapping yourself, you’re actually making failure more likely.

But, if you don’t do well, you have an excuse, you went to a party, you left till the last minute and if you do well anyway, wow, that really means you're a talented person. Going all out, putting all your effort into something robs you of the possibility of having an excuse for why it didn’t work out.

In a fixed mindset, this makes perfect sense that it makes sense that you would jeopardize your success in order to have an excuse but in a growth mindset, that’s insane. Why would you do anything that works against your improving and succeeding? 

Because in a growth mindset, you know, hey, this is just the first iteration and even though its’s important, I’ll learn from whatever happens and as a team, as a relationship will be better off going forward. This foundation Silicon Valley that gives the failure of the year award. It’s for a team that went all out, did everything they should and could.

The project didn’t work out and then, they learned so many valuable lessons from what happened from that failure that the organization is in a much better place, the organization as a whole is in a much better place going forward to make projects succeed in the future.

[0:35:08.0] MB: One of the most impactful ideas from the book for me was the distinction between repairing your failure versus repairing your self-esteem and how it’s impossible to learn from a mistake, if you deny that you made one to begin with?

[0:35:23.7] CD: yes. In a fixed mindset, the goal is to, after a setback is to repair your self-esteem. We have a study where we give people a really hard task, they don’t do well, people in a fixed mindset choose to look at the performance of people who did a lot worse than they did, they’re not going to learn from it but boy they’re going to feel better than someone.

People in a growth mindset look at the performance of people who did a lot better than they did so they can learn and do better the next time. If you’re looking to repair your self-esteem, maybe you’re looking for people who did worse, maybe you're looking to place the blame, maybe you're looking to deny the failure, in any of those cases, you’re not going to be better off going forward.

Neuroscience research shows that when people are in a fixed mindset, the part of their brain that processes errors is hardly active. They are just turning away from that error as quickly as possible.

As a result, they’re not correcting the error at the next opportunity as much as people in a growth mindset. In a growth mindset, that area of the brain is on fire, it’s just super active, they’re looking at the error, they’re processing it, they’re learning from it and they’re correcting it.

Again, a setback in a fixed mindset is a terrible thing and of course you want to lay the blame or feel better about yourself because it brings you down, it means you're a lesser person but if you can get your fixed mindset persona to collaborate with you, you can say, all right, this happened. What can we learn from this?

How can we shore up this skill? How can we improve in ways we need to improve and go forward more successfully?

[0:37:43.0] MB: To me, that was really one of the most water shed things that I took away from the book was this simple concept that because you're trying to protect your ego and protect your self-image, if you don’t believe that you made a mistake and you’ve externalized that with blame or excuses or whatever else it might be.

It’s impossible for you to learn from that because by definition, you don’t think that you did anything wrong. Without a focus on that, you're never able to improve and it’s such a powerful concept. Another concept in the book that I thought was really interesting was the idea of the mindset of champions and how champions rise to the occasion. Could you talk about that?

[0:38:23.8] CD: Yes. There’s this example I give in the book of Billy Jean King, the championship tennis player playing against Margaret Court, another historic figure in the world of tennis. Billy Jean King was trouncing Margaret Court in a match, in a set rather and before she knew it, she had lost.

She, Billy Jean King had lost. Same thing happened again, she was trancing her and she looked around and she had lost and she realized, that’s what a champion is. There are days you're not at your best, you didn’t bring you’re a game, your focus isn’t there, your strokes are a little off and somehow, you find it within you to prevail.

Michael Jordan once played a championship game with a high fever and he dug down, he found it within himself an athlete, great athlete after great athlete, somehow they just didn’t — they weren’t in perfect shape that day but they found it, they found it in themselves, that energy, that focus, that will, that brought them to a victory.

By the way, we have a program of research on willpower and the people who do best are the people who say, “Okay, it’s in there somewhere, it’s large, it’s replenishable and I can find more willpower, more energy when I need it.”

[0:40:25.8] MB: Another cons have you talked about in the book that I thought was fascinating is the distinction between viewing people as judges versus viewing people as allies.

[0:40:34.5] CD: Yes. When you’re in a fixed mindset, you always have an audience. An audience that has the potential to judge you. Your boss is a judge, your partner is a judge, your friends can be judges. You’re always having to perform and prove yourself so the judges can give you back the validation that you need.

But in a growth mindset, you are surrounded by people you can collaborate with, you can learn from, who can give you constructive feedback, who are resources and for whom you are a resource. It’s a really different world, it’s a world of greater trust, it’s the idea that not all people, that your people but the people are there to help you develop, that people are in your corner rooting for you or at least you can find mentors and certainly your partner is rooting for you.

And that they are not judges. They are collaborators in your development. You can also teach them to be more that way, tell them what kind of feedback you need, tell them what kind of support you need. Now, I’m not denying that there are people judging or that there are situations in which you are judged but I’m saying, as a general view of the world, find those people who are committed to your development or can be resources for your development.

[0:42:28.3] MB: How do we reconcile the lessons of mindset with the idea or the advice of focusing on your strengths?

[0:42:37.1] CD: That’s a great question. Now, you get a lot of advice focused on your strengths and I’m not saying don’t focus on your strengths but I’m saying, strengths and weaknesses are really dynamic. Weaknesses, you could have weaknesses because you never built up those muscles, you never trained in those areas.

You can have a weakness that’s a weakness in one setting and a strength in another setting. So, nothing wrong with finding out what your current strengths are and your current weaknesses are but one thing I found by studying great leaders, CEO’s and so forth is that they built up their abilities in areas of weakness that would have held them back.

A lot of people tell me they thought something was a weakness but when they worked on it, when they got the proper input and the mentorship, they were really great at that. I have in my book some drawings, some before and after self-portraits of people who couldn’t draw to save their lives, a weakness but they took Betty Edwards drawing on the right side of the brain seminar and I think it was four days later, they were drawing these amazing self-portraits, you will not believe the before the seminar and after the seminar self-portraits.

You would say, these were talented people. That shift was amazing because they got the proper training and what it says is that you can’t predict from the before when you don’t have training to the after when you do have training. Again, yeah, capitalize on strengths, why not, of course. But don’t think your strengths are going to be strengths forever if you’re not working on them and growing them and don’t rule out weaknesses as future areas of strength, in the right circumstances with the right training.

[0:45:00.0] MB: Tell me a little bit about the power of words and what happens when for example, we tell a child that they’re smart?

[0:45:06.6] CD: That’s so interesting, we undertook this research at the height of the self-esteem movement, when everyone told tell each other, tell kids, tell your employees, tell everyone how brilliant they are at every opportunity and what we have found in this research is telling kids they’re smart, puts them into more of a fixed mindset. You’ve done something and someone says, oh my God, you’re brilliant at this.

Suddenly you think, everything I do has to be brilliant. Then if you have an opportunity to take on something challenging that you might fail at, in the presence of that person or even in the presence of your own judgement. 

You think well, maybe not. Maybe I want to do something that keeps showing how smart I am. However, when you give feedback to people that focuses on that process, the process they engaged in, their hard work, they’re taking on challenges, they’re trying different strategies, their good use of resources, they’re being a great team member. If you focus on that process they engaged in to do well or have that good performance, they become more willing to go out of their comfort zone.

They become less thrown by setbacks because they feel like right, the process is what’s valued here. I can duplicate that process, I can engage in that process, I’m not under threat, I’m not under judgment. Now, of course, in a business or in school, you have to perform, ultimately but research has shown that when the more you engage effectively in that process of learning, the better you're going to do in the long run.

[0:47:03.3] MB: What’s one piece of homework that you would give to somebody listening to this episode in terms of kind of a simple first step that they could do to implement some of the things we’ve talked about?

[0:47:13.7] CD: Yes, I would say, the very first step is to find your fixed mindset triggers. You know, we used to talk about it as if they were fixed mindset people and growth mindset people, no. We all have fixed mindset triggers. Find those triggers. When do you start hearing that voice, when do you start feeling that anxiety or I don’t really want to do this, that kind of fake boredom or distaste.

Find those triggers. Start keying in to how you feel when that’s triggered, what you’re thinking, how you behave, how you affect others around you. First step, find those triggers. Second step, give them a name.

[0:48:03.9] MB: What would be a good example of a few common things that trigger the fixed mindset?

[0:48:10.3] CD: Yeah, there are a few very common things. First, you’re taking on a challenge or you're thinking of taking on a challenge or you’re out of your comfort zone, big trigger. Big time when people feel threatened and the warning voice starts talking, that persona starts talking.

Second, you’re struggling, you’re not making progress, that’s often a trigger that says get out of there or you don’t like this, instead of find resources, get help, try new strategies. As we’ve been saying, the big trigger, setback, criticism, failure. Nope, what you did wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t right, maybe it wasn’t even good, big trigger.

[0:49:08.1] MB: For listeners who want to learn more, where can people find you and find Mindset online?

[0:49:13.7] CD: Well, my book, Mindset actually an updated addition is coming out this week and is not a completely new addition but we’ve added some important things about the persona work, our work in business organizations, common misunderstandings of a growth mindset. The book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, we have a website. Mindsetonline.com.

[0:49:52.7] MB: Well Carol, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your incredible wisdom. As I said, to me personally, Mindset is one of the most impactful books that I’ve ever read. I would highly recommend everybody listening, go read that book, get the new updated edition.

I’m a tremendous fan and so thank you so much for coming on here and sharing these insights with us.

[0:50:13.0] CD: You’re welcome. Pleasure.

[0:50:15.8] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the science of success. Listeners like you are why we do this podcast. The emails and stories we receive from listeners around the globe bring us joy and fuel our mission to unleash human potential. I would love to hear from you, shoot me an email, send me your thoughts, kind words, comments, ideas, suggestions, your story, what the podcast means to you. Whatever it might be. I read and respond to every single email that I get from listeners. My email address is matt@scienceofsuccess.co. 

Shoot me an email, I would love to hear from you. The greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please, leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes because that helps more and more people discover the Science of Success. I get a ton of listeners asking, “Matt how do you organize and remember all these incredible information?” Because of that, we created an amazing free guide for all of our listeners.

You can get it by texting the word “smarter” to the number 44222 or by going to scienceofsuccess.co and joining our email list. If you want to get all of these amazing info, links, transcripts, everything we just talked about and much more, be sure to check out our show notes at scienceofsuccess.co, just hit the show notes button at the top. Thanks again and we’ll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

The Secret Science of Lies & Body Language with Vanessa Van Edwards

In this episode we discuss how school gives you zero of the social and interpersonal skills necessary to be successful in life, the best starting point for build nonverbal communication, how to read facial expression and body language to discover hidden emotions, how to become a human lie detector, the secrets super connectors use to work a room, and much more with Vanessa Van Edwards.

Vanessa Van Edwards is the lead investigator at Science of People, a human behavior research lab. She is a Huffington Post columnist and published author. Her work has been featured on NPR, Business Week and USA Today. She has written for CNN, Fast Company and Forbes. Her latest book, Captivate, was chosen as one of Apple’s Most Anticipated Books of 2017.

We discuss:

• School gives you zero of the social and interpersonal skills necessary to be successful in life

• The skills of nonverbal communication can be learned and trained

• Between 60% and 90% of our communication is non-verbal

• Why you shouldn’t put 100% of your eggs in the “verbal communication” basket

• How humans give more weight to non-verbal communication

• What is the best starting point for build nonverbal communication?

• The importance good eye contact & a strong handshake

• Why eye contact creates oxytocin and builds deeper connections

• The “sweet spot” for maintaining good eye contact

• What blind babies teach us about our facial expressions and the universality of much nonverbal communication

• How twins separated at birth have the same nonverbal affectations

• What are micro-expressions and why they are so important

• The facial feedback hypothesis and how our faces create a feedback loop

• The 7 micro-expressions that will change your life

• Research from mental patients who lied to their doctors

• How to read facial expression (or body language) to discover hidden emotions

• The “fake science” myths around human lie detection

• The statistical cues to deceit - things that liars most often do

• Do “truth wizards” exist?

• Average person is 54% accurate in detecting lies

• What is baselining?

• Encoding vs Decoding

• What research on thousands of hours on TED Talks tells us about successful body language & the importance of congruency

• Most people are better at decoding than encoding - start with what you are weakest at

• We cannot cover up what we feel, focus on opportunities where you can thrive instead of places where you are merely surviving

• “The secrets of super-connectors,” how to “work a room” and the specific patterns they use

• How to be someone’s "social savior”

• "Context conversation starters”

• You learn ALOT about someone from a handshake

• Handshakes produce more oxytocin than 3 hours of face to face time

• Make the handshake equal (firmness and direction)

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Ted Talk] Trust, morality — and oxytocin? by Paul Zak

• [Paul Ekman Article] Micro Expressions

• [Science of People Quiz] Spotting Lies

• [Book] Human Lie Detection and Body Language 101 by Vanessa Van Edwards

• [Book] Captivate: The Science of Succeeding with People by Vanessa Van Edwards

• [Website] Science of People

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success with your host, Matt Bodnar.

[00:00:12.4] MB: Welcome to The Science of Success. I’m your host, Matt Bodnar. I’m an entrepreneur and investor in Nashville, Tennessee and I’m obsessed with the mindset of success and the psychology of performance. I’ve read hundreds of books, conducted countless hours of research and study and I am going to take you on a journey into the human mind and what makes peak performance tick, with the focus on always having our discussion rooted in psychological research and scientific fact, not opinion.

In this episode, we discuss how school gives you zero of the social and interpersonal skills necessary to be successful in life. The best starting point for building nonverbal communication. How to read facial expressions and body language, discover hidden emotions, how to become a human lie detector, the secrets that super connectors use to work a room, and much more with Vanessa Van Edwards.

The science of success continues to grow with more with more than 900,000 downloads. Listeners in over 100 countries, hitting number one new noteworthy and more. I get listener comments and emails all the time asking me, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all this incredible information?” A lot of our listeners are curious about how I keep track of all the incredible knowledge you get from reading hundreds of books, interviewing amazing experts, listening to podcast and more.

Because of that, we created an epic resource just for you, a detailed guide called How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely free by texting the world “smarter” to the number 44222. Again, It’s a guide we created called How to Organize and Remember Everything. All you have to do to get it is to text the word “smarter” to the number 44222 or go to scienceofsuccess.co and put in your email.

In our previous episode, we looked at what rabbit populations, craters on the moon, files on your hard drive, and the GDP of countries all have in common. We discussed the power fractals, the math of chaos theory, and what it all has to do with the 80/20 principle. How your understanding the 80/20 principle is only the tip of the ice berg. How to generate 16 times more leverage to achieve your goals. We went deep into sales wisdom from one of the world’s top marketing consultants and much more with Perry Marshall. 

If you want to achieve massive leverage in your life, listen to that episode.

[0:02:27.9] MB: Today, we have another awesome guest on the show, Vanessa Van Edwards. Vanessa is the lead investigator at the Science of People, a human behavioral research lab. She is a Huffington post columnist and publish author. Her work has been featured on MPR, business week and USA today. She’s written for CNN, fast company and Forbes. Her latest book, Captivate, was chosen as one of Apple’s most anticipated books of 2017.

Vanessa, welcome to the science of success.

[0:02:54.8] VE: Thanks so much for having me.

[0:02:56.7] MB: Well, we’re very excited to have you on today. For listeners who might not be familiar with you and Science of People, tell us a little bit about yourself and your background?

[0:03:05.8] VE: Yeah, well first of all, I cannot help but say that the title of your podcast, Science of Success, is possibly one of the best titles ever because those are two of my favorite topics, science and succeeding. I was thrilled to be on here with you guys.

[0:03:19.7] MB: Awesome, that’s great! Yeah, I mean, you know, it’s funny, very similar to the purge you take, we try to have every guest that’s on here, we really want to focus on is this data back, is this sort of research validated or is this just kind of somebody’s talking points. I think everything that you’ve done is so grounded in the research, that’s why I’m really excited to dig in and explore a lot of these topics.

[0:03:40.4] VE: Yeah, that’s the perfect kind of segue into what got me started in this crazy career. So, you know, as you mentioned, I run a human behavior lab in Portland, Oregon and what got me started is actually, I felt like school did really well by me. It taught me all the technical skills that I needed for a career but it taught me zero up to people skills. So when it came to interviewing, negotiating, making chit chat with colleagues, networking, heaven forbid, dating, flirting and trying to be emotionally attractive like those definitely not. 

So I realized that I felt like there was this missing skill set that most people kind of think will just happen, right? Adults always say, “Oh, she’ll pick it up, she’ll figure that out in the playground or she’ll eventually pickup how to ask for more money in a negotiation.” But those kinds of skills, unless you’re lucky enough to be born with them, which most people are not, you do have to learn them and that was the case for me. I kind of created the text books, the courses that I wish I’d had in school.

[0:04:43.0] MB: That’s awesome, and your first book started out digging into body language and how to determine if people are lying and a ton of the components of nonverbal communication. As a starting point, how much of our communication is nonverbal? You hear a lot of different stats thrown out about that and, you know, what’s kind of the research really say about how important nonverbal communication is and what kind of what proportion of our communication is made up of nonverbal queues?

[0:05:10.8] VE: Yes, there’s two important things to keep in mind when it comes to nonverbal, the first is, it’s far more than we think about, at a minimum, 60% of our communication is nonverbal and some research says it’s up to 90%. You might have heard the famous Mary said a 93% that actually has not been backed up so that 60% is still a lot, not quite as much as the 93-myth that goes around but what’s important is that we put all of our eggs in a verbal basket.

If you talk to someone who is about to go into a pitch with investors or about to go on a date or about to go into an interview, they usually think about what they want to say, you know, the questions that are going to answer, they practice their verbal responses. We very rarely think about how we want to say something.

That basically is coming out with 40% of our ability and so that’s the first thing is that 60% is sort of a missing ingredient, it’s this un-utilized super power that I think we have and the second thing is that we give more weight to nonverbal. What I mean by that is, when you think about how we are evolutionarily, we have developed the ability to be very persuasive verbally. It’s relatively easy to come up with a story quickly especially for highly creative people. 

There’s some science that say that highly creative people are better liars. But nonverbally, it’s very hard to be convincing with your body language. It’s hard to control your facial expressions, it’s impossible to control your micro expressions, it’s very hard to think about, “How can I lie convincingly with my words and look like I’m telling the truth as well?” We tend to look at someone’s nonverbal as a more important indicator of honesty, which means that if you go into a pitch and you have the perfect script but if you are not congruent with your words or your nonverbal does not support your words, it actually comes across as inauthentic.

When I think people talk about this idea of “be more authentic”, “be yourself”, “be passionate”, those phrases always drove me crazy because I never really knew what they meant so I think that learning that nonverbal has more weight, it was like, “Oh, I get it! An inauthentic person is someone who is saying one thing but showing another.” I think the most important thing that we can do from a body language perspective is to align our words along with our body.

[0:07:29.0] MB: Nonverbal is obviously something that, as you said, it’s hard to control, it’s difficult to master, and it’s a very complicated topic. Where do we begin, what’s the best starting place to begin to build this skill set?

[0:07:42.6] VE: That’s a good question. I would say that the first thing that I would encourage people to think about is the two things you heard most since you were little, but a little bit defined. We’ve heard most — when I tell people like, I studied body language, they tell me, “Oh, good eye contact and a good handshake.” That’s great.That’s like a really good start however there’s a little bit more to the story when it comes to good eye contact. 

For example, in western cultures, we make about 60 to 70% eye contact in the ideal conversation. What I mean by ideal conversation is when we make eye contact with someone, we produce oxytocin and oxytocin is the chemical of bonding. A researcher Paul Zack, if anyone is interested in sort of the chemistry of love, I highly recommend his book. I actually a meeting with him next month that I have a little oxytocin necklace that I wear instead of a heart because I think that’s the true expression of love and what he has found is that oxytocin is what makes us feel that warm and fuzzy feeling of belonging. 

So if you’re with someone and you’re having this deep conversation and you’re making great eye contact, you actually begin to produce oxytocin, mutual gazing produces oxytocin. If you don’t hit that 60 to 70%, the body doesn’t get as much oxytocin as it would like. So if you’re looking around, you’re looking at your phone, you’re looking at your watch, if you tend to process up — some people tend to have a very wondering gaze — the other person is going to feel like, “I don’t know if we’re on the same page here.” Or, “I don ‘t know, I’m not really feeling it with this person.” 

That’s where that comes from, it’s actually a chemical feeling. That’s why we say that liars look us in the eye less because that shiftiness makes us feel really uncomfortable, the funny thing about liars is they actually look you in the eye more because they’re trying to see if you believe them. So eye contact is this really funny beast but what you want to know is that in that 60 to 70%, that is the sweet spot. So eye contact is not just good for you because it feels like you should be doing it, it’s actually good for a chemical reason. It’s a chemical reason we feel connection.

[0:09:43.2] MB: I think that’s great and you hear all the time that it’s important to maintain eye contact but the fact that there is a sort of neurological, neurochemical reaction that actually makes eye contact so effective is fascinating.

[0:09:56.5] VE: Yeah, and I think it helps, so whenever I do corporate trainings, I do a lot of corporate trainings and my favorite group is highly technical people. I would even say geniuses, I would go as far to say that. You know, amazing engineers, programmers, graphic designers, very technically brilliant. And I was just doing a training at Intel and I asked them, I have a little slide in my presentation that says, “What is the ideal amount of eye contact, is it 30% of the time, 50% of the time, 60% of the time or 65% of the time, or 90% of the time?”

Without a doubt, whenever I have highly technical groups, everyone in the room raises their hand at 30% of the time. That hurts them, right? They’re undermining their credibility without realizing it when they are in their own heads about a process and not focusing enough, giving that other person the chemical reason to pay attention to them.

[0:10:44.9] MB: I think the interesting point and it just segue’s into some research that you talked about in the past but these are things that are biologically rooted in our bodies and things that, you know, regardless of somebody’s disposition towards you, the more eye contact you have, it shares literally a physical reaction in them.

The research you’ve talked about previously about how babies develop facial expressions, can you share that example? I think that’s a really interesting instance of another example of how this are sort of universal and not kind of culturally driven or individual?

[0:11:16.6] VE: Yeah, so of course there is some nonverbal that’s cultural, we can talk about that if we want but a lot of the principles that I teach as much as possible, I try to make them universal and this baby study was sort of — I read this and I was just like, I was amazed at the amount of our body language or our nonverbal communication that’s genetic or coded. 

In this research experiment, they looked at congenitally blind babies. Babies who have been blind since birth, and back in the day we used to believe from anthropologist used to think that we learned nonverbal that we would look at our mother and father’s face, we would mirror or mimic the facial expression, that’s how we learn facial expressions. Or we watched how our mother flipped her hair and that’s how we flipped our hair. But actually, what they found is that congenitally blind babies make the same facial expressions at the same time as seeing children.

What this means is that we are somehow genetically coded to make these expressions and they’re not learned. They are the same across genders or races. They also found that there was, I think it was done at the University of Edenborough, where they looked at twins and they found that twins who were raised separately showed very similar nonverbal affectations. 

So like flipping your hair, how a woman flips her hair over the side of her shoulder, how she laughs, how a man walks, how a man scratches his nose, they found that twins actually do the same thing even though they had different parents, they were raised in different houses, they were raised even across the globe. This was really surprising for people because it legitimized nonverbal science as a way that we can study something because if you know that something has universal application, it’s much easier to study and it’s not just cultural. So that study I think was the first of many that indicated that there could be an algorithm here.

[0:13:05.9] MB: How do you — I know one of the things you’re an expert at is micro expressions and talking about babies and their different facial expressions, how do you read somebody’s facial expressions to determine their emotions or their reactions?

[0:13:19.1] VE: Yeah, so a micro expression is a really fancy word for a very short facial expression. So technically it’s a brief facial expression that is involuntary that we, as humans, make when we feel an intense emotion. We like to think as adults that we’re pretty even keeled that we don’t have intense emotions, that we don’t show, we’re stony faced, right now. Stoicism is so hot, everyone’s trying to be real stoic but we are actually quite emotional creatures, very emotional beings and we tend to show our emotions on our face, involuntarily.

The reason for this is because it helps with our empathy and most people don’t think of facial expressions this way but there’s something that’s called the facial feedback hypothesis and this basically says that when we feel an emotion, we make a face. But when we make a face, we also feel that emotion.

So there’s this really interesting feedback loop that happens with our emotions and why this is important is because when we meet another human being and they show us a sadness micro expression, our body has neurons and begins to mimic it without even realizing it. If you look at a face of someone sad, you usually will begin to form the sad face, we can’t even help it. So as you make that sad face, you begin to feel literally feel the emotion that they feel.

This is why humans are empathetic, it’s because we not only mirror the people around us but that mirroring helps us feel like them. So that’s a very body sensation intuitive feeling based way of interacting but we typically interact in our head, we don’t think about this kind of emotional expressiveness that’s why facial expressions are so important and that’s why we talk about empathy being so important. That’s a very different explanation for empathy.

[0:15:02.4] MB: What are the different micro expressions and are they cross cultural?

[0:15:08.8] VE: There are seven different micro expressions. They are — let’s see if I can do it all off the top of my head. They are fear, happiness, anger, disgust, contempt, sadness and surprise. Yay, I’m so happy I was able to do that for memory is smooth. Yes, those are across cultures.

Dr. Paul Eckman is the researcher who coined, I think he discovered the micro expression, I don’t know if he coined the phrase. That might have been Darwin. Don’t quote me on who coined that phrase, but Dr. Eckman is the one who pioneered this concept and what he found in the back of the 1970’s was first, he was working with a mental institution on patients who lie to their doctors and this always has been a huge problem that it was particularly a problem there because they had patient who lied about being okay. 

So she was very depressed and she went into the doctor and said, yes, I’m so much better, can you give me a weekend pass to go home. Thank goodness before she left, she admitted she had like a breakdown, she had admitted that she had lied that she was actually planning to go home and harm herself.

This really rattled the doctors in the hospital because they believed her. They had issued her with a path, they were going to let her go home, and they thought she was so convincing and this happens, it happens a lot where patients will lie to the person who is looking out for their best interest. People go to the doctor’s offices, they lie at what medications they take, they lie about their eating and exercise habits and so Paul Eckman was watching the video of this patient over and over again.

He eventually slowed down the video, he was watching it on slow motion and he noticed that right before the patient lied to say that she was really looking forward to seeing her family and being home, she made a very brief sadness micro expression and he realized that there’s something to reading facial expressions to discover hidden emotions.

So he took this research and he traveled to remote regions in Papua New Guinea, and forgive me if I don’t get the exact science right. I think it’s chapter six of my book, if you want to dive into the deep stuff but it’s a high level. He went to Papua New Gene and he found a tribe that was not very exposed to the outside world. So they hadn’t seen a lot of television, they hadn’t seen a lot of movies, they weren’t exposed to western culture and he asked them to make facial expressions based on different emotions with the translator.

He would say, “What’s an angry face? What’s a sadness face?” I think he actually did it with situations. So I think he said, “If your friend stole your food, what face would you make?” He found that the faced they made were strikingly similar to when he asked Americans that question. Basically that we somehow have these universal responses to this emotions and he was able to repeat this study and found seven universal ones. There are over 10,000 facial expressions, but there are seven universal micro expressions and by studying them, you can learn how to spot emotions across cultures and genders and races.

[0:18:05.3] MB: Speaking of somebody who, for the example of lying to their doctor and being able to discern that, is it possible to tell if somebody’s lying solely based on their body language?

[0:18:16.2] VE: Yes, it is possible. Of course it’s possible. So we do a lot of human lie detection research in our lab. I’ve always been fascinated by it. I’ve been fascinated by the real science and the fake science. Let’s bust some myths, first of all, some of the fake science. So fake science, liars have shifty eyes or liars don’t look you in the eye.

That is completely false because research has found that actually liars look you in the eye more, as I mentioned, because they want to know if you believe them. They actually make a lot more eye contact, they go over the 70% into like the 80 and 90% range, which is interesting because we also don’t like that. So as humans, not only do we not like below 60% because that isn’t enough oxytocin, we also don’t like above 80%. 

There is like a sweet spot in the middle and the reason we don’t like above 80% is because one, our instinctively we know that that means that someone is kind of checking us out and it’s a very invasive queue, it’s almost too much oxytocin. Like when two men are about to get into a fist fight at a bar, they usually are intensely gazing at each other. It’s a very territorial invasive gesture. We don’t like being looked at that much. So that’s the first myth to bust. 

The second lie detection myth is you probably have heard this silly NLP “study”, which wasn’t even really as study about when people lie, they look up to the left and people are telling the truth, they look up to the right. That has not been backed up. In fact, it can often be reversed based on if you’re right or left handed, it can be reversed based on how you access memories, not everyone accesses them the same way. What’s hard about lie detection is there is no Pinocchio’s nose. 

There is no one thing that means someone is lying, there are statistical queues to deceit. So there are things that we have found, liars most often do, like 76% of the time, liars will do X but those are not foolproof; they’re not 100%. so what we’ve developed is a framework, there are seven steps of lie detection to help you be an ethical lie detector and an accurate lie detector. So it takes a little bit longer but it makes you much more accurate and also make sure that you’re not assuming guilt where there is none. 

In fact, the more optimistic you are about humanity, the better lie detector you are. It actually serves you well to not be skeptical. Skeptics actually do worse on lie detection quizzes. I think we’re just putting up, it’s not up yet, but if you want to see how you do on a lie detection, we have a free lie spotting quiz at sciencepeople.com/lies and you can test your ability because we are looking in our lab, we’re constantly doing research experiments and I really wanted to know if there was such a thing called “truth wizards”.

Dr. Paul Eckman and Dr. Maureen Sullivan found that there was a very small percentage of the population who can detect truth with 80% accuracy. That’s very rare, most of us, average people, detect lies with about 54% accuracy. We are terrible lie spotters. We are starting to run this lie detection test to see if we can find people who can get all five of the lies right. On our little quiz, it’s five lies, you watch five real people lying and we see if you can spot them. We’re also trying to back up the idea there’s a truth wizard behind lie detection.

[0:21:32.1] MB: What are some of the statistical queues that give away that someone’s lying?

[0:21:35.9] VE: Well, I can’t teach you just statistical queues because remember that they’re not 100%. For example, one of the statistical queues is nose touches. In Bill Clinton’s testimony, they — I believe it was Allen Hirschberg researcher, I think? Who counted the amount of nose touches during the Bill Clinton trial and he found that, Avana Colinsky, and found that when he was lying on the stand, he touched his nose, something like 46 times and when he was telling the truth on the stand, he touched his nose twice. 

They think that the reason for this is because we have a very special tissue at the very tip of our nose that slightly inflames or slightly increases when we feel guilt or intense guilt and so our nose very slightly itches, which makes us want to touch it more. They think that maybe the writer of Pinocchio had this sensation. Some people, by the way, in our lab have said to us, “I feel my nose itch when I lie.” So some people can even feel it. You might want to pay attention to it the next time you’re lying and so that is one statistical cue to deceit. 

However, what if someone has allergies? What if someone always constantly touches their nose? So you can’t take that clue alone. You have to make sure that you are hitting the 100% with it. So that would be an example of one of the queues and why you have to be a little careful with it. 

[0:22:50.0] MB: And does that tie into the concept of base lining and figuring out what someone’s default behavior is before you can assess how they’re thinking or feeling or reacting to you? 

[0:23:00.6] VE: Yes, so that’s exactly what that ties into. Base-lining is half of it, you also have to make sure though, and this is I think the biggest mistake that a lot of rookie lie detectors make is that they think, “Oh I will baseline someone and then I’ll look for statistical cues of deceit.” But there are additional precautions that you have to take to make sure that you are not mistaking guilt from nerves. 

So that is the biggest mistake that people make is truth tellers can be nervous too. Nerve does not indicate lying or guilt. In fact if you accuse an innocent person of doing something terrible, they will often be very nervous because they don’t like to be falsely accused. We hate it. Actually, being falsely accused can often make us angrier and more nervous than being accurately accused. So you have to make sure that you’re knowing how to differentiate nerves from guilt, or emotions and anger from guilt. 

[0:23:50.7] MB: What are some of the other steps that people can use to become human lie detectors? 

[0:23:55.3] VE: I would say that the most important thing that would help is learning the seven micro expressions. So when you learn how to spot these and they’re a blessing and a curse. Micro expressions is where I started my research many, many years ago because I found them fascinating and what’s great about them is once you know how to see them, you see them everywhere. I joke with my students that once you learn them it’s like turning on the world in HD. Like, all of a sudden you see the world in high definition. 

So what you are looking for in lie detection is you’re looking for congruency and this is the same thing for authenticity. So in body language, you’re talking about two different sides, decoding and encoding. Decoding is spotting queues, looking for hidden emotions, looking for emblems of someone’s emotions or feelings. Encoding are the signals that you send off to the world. So saying “I want to look confident on this date,” and then knowing exactly what to do to look confident. 

Or saying, “I want to look friendly in this corporate board meeting. How do I look friendly?” A lot of people struggle with the encoding piece but it’s actually very different than the decoding piece. So with congruency, there’s both decoding and encoding. You want to encode signals that are correctly aligned with your words. You want to demonstrate the words that you are using and you also want to decode people when they’re speaking to you to make sure that they are being congruent. 

So with the seven micro expressions, what you’re looking for is you want someone to look like the words that they are using. So if someone says they are angry, they should look angry not afraid. If a woman or your wife says, “I’m fine,” but shows contempt, she is not fine. That is not congruent words. You want to spot the differences. The other aspect which I think is interesting is we did a huge research experiment last year and the year before on TED Talks and what I was looking for was I wanted to know if — I love puzzles, and so I noticed that on TED there was all these amazing TED Talks but the same 20 went viral like they got viewed millions and millions of times whereas hundreds of other talks barely got noticed. 

I was searching on the TED website for leadership and there was two talks that popped up, one by Simon Sinek, which had 45 million views and one by Fields Wicker-Miurin, which had I think was under 40,000 and both of these talks were on the same topic, they had almost the same title. When they first came out they were both given by relatively unknown experts and they were both 18 minutes long and it came out the same month of the same year, September 2009.

I was like, “Why? Why is it that one of these talks went viral and one didn’t?” What I realized after doing the TED Talk research, we analyzed thousands of hours of TED Talks and found five main patterns from the most successful to the least successful TED Talkers. One of them was this idea of congruency that the best TED talkers speak to you on two different levels. They’re speaking to you with their words, but they are also speaking to you with their hands and their body and their face. 

The worst TED Talkers were so memorized that their non-verbal was almost neutral. So it was almost as if the people who had rehearsed too much had rehearsed their emotions and their passion out of their TED Talk and so they were delivering this talk that was great verbally. It was every word was hit spot on, but from a facial perspective, they were showing no happiness. From a body perspective they were showing neutral or low power. 

From an expressiveness standpoint, they were not aligning when they would say, “I am so angry about this cause that I work for,” and not showing any anger the audience didn’t believe them because they were like, “Where is the manifestation of the anger? You’re just saying that,” and so I think that the best place to start is looking for those inconsistencies is understanding the nuances of body language so that you know where to look or spot things. 

[0:27:52.1] MB: So encoding is the process of getting congruent with our own emotions and our own body language with what we are trying to communicate and decoding is the process of trying to decipher what the rest of the world is saying and what other people are saying and reading through, are they congruent in their body language and their behavior? 

[0:28:11.8] VE: Yeah and what’s interesting is, if you think for just a second, I always have my audiences self-diagnose. So on a scale of one to five, one being terrible, horrible, awful and five being amazing rock star perfect, how would you rate your decoding ability? The ability to spot hidden emotions. So if you want to give yourself a little self-rating. 

[0:28:32.5] MB: Oh sorry, were you asking me to rate or are you just talking?

[0:28:36.0] VE: Yeah, please. 

[0:28:36.9] MB: I mean I am familiar with some of this stuff, so I would say probably three out of five, three and a half out of five maybe. 

[0:28:42.1] VE: Cool. Okay, so now encoding, how would you rate your ability, one being awful, horrible, abysmal, five being amazing rock star perfect, your ability to control your non-verbal? 

[0:28:53.5] MB: Let’s say probably like two and a half or three. 

[0:28:56.2] VE: Okay, cool. So what’s interesting is that will tell you exactly where to start. You want to start with the lower one, the lower number. Most people have a strength and a weakness. Most people are better at decoding than encoding. So if you’re not as good as encoding that’s where you would want to start because that will automatically help you with your decoding anyway. So if you think about that, for those who are listening, about whichever your lower number is that’s where you want to start. 

[0:29:19.4] MB: That was the next question that I was going to ask is which one of these should we start working on first. So let’s get into since encoding is the one that I needed to do more work on, we’ll start there. Tell me what are some of the secrets or some of the best places to start if you want to improve your ability to encode? 

[0:29:33.9] VE: Yeah, so remember that we cannot cover up what we feel. So I think the body language teachers or even the people skills teachers that make me sad are the ones that try to tell you to fake it until you make it. I do not believe that that works. I think that it is an extremely inauthentic way of acting and the problem is our emotions are catching. So we can pick up on people’s emotional cues. 

So if you are trying to learn to encode and you want to show confidence and you walk into a networking event where you feel extremely uncomfortable, even if I teach you the best power body language moves there are, your feelings of lack of confidence are going to leak through or come through and so that’s where you get people who are really rubbed wrong. I would say if you think about it in your life the people who have really just like — where you were like, “Oh I do not get along with this person. I don’t like this person,” it was probably because they were trying to use power queues, confidence queues, attraction queues but didn’t actually feel them. 

So the very first thing with encoding is actually making sure that you are showing up in the places that make you feel amazing and making sure that you are getting your mindset right before you actually walk into an event. So researcher Dr. Barbara Wilde found that when people look at a picture of a smiling person, they actually begin to feel happier. It improves their mood. When they look at someone with a neutral expression it doesn’t change their mood at all. 

The reason I share these studies is because I think that we often think that we can cover it up or we can make it work but I feel like if you don’t like networking events, don’t go to networking events and then I call these thrive versus survive locations. So I personally do not like nightclubs or loud bars. I have a really hard time even at concerts, and that’s because my favorite way to interact with people is having very deep conversations where I’m exploring, they are exploring. We’re talking about a topic deeply and in a really loud concert venue you can’t do that or in a loud bar you can’t do that. 

So I really like learning places like conferences, classrooms, networking events. I really like barbecues, smaller parties, one-on-one coffees, you should think about what are the different places where you actually can set yourself up to succeed because that’s the best thing that you can do because our emotions are naturally contagious. 

[0:31:55.7] MB: How can we, let’s use the example of the networking event or something like that, how can we spark up a meaningful conversation with a stranger? What are some of the secrets behind the science of having really powerful conversations? 

[0:32:10.1] VE: We did an experiment where I partnered with a bunch of local organizations and what I was looking for were the secrets of super connectors. I wanted to know, you know, I’ve heard this phrase “work a room, how to work a room” and again, me being not naturally people inclined I was curious about what that actually meant, I had no idea. So I was like, “Okay, let’s actually map up a room and let’s follow people who are really good at working it and let’s see what they teach us.” 

So we partnered with a bunch of organizations. We tracked all the networking events, basically at each networking event we set up cameras in every corner of the room and as people entered, we had them do a little pre-survey. On the pre-survey we asked them their name, we asked them for their business card, we asked them what their goal was for the evening, we asked them how much they liked networking. We felt like we could sniff out the people who hated it and who were just there because they felt like they had to be there, and their goal for the event. 

Then we tracked every single person throughout the room. So we watched movement, we looked at how many handshakes there were. We looked at how many connections were made and at the end of the night, we had people do a post survey where we had them answer questions like, “Did you have a good time? How many business cards did you collect? How many contacts did you make, and what’s your LinkedIn profile?” and then we went online and looked at their LinkedIn contacts to see where they unemployed, were they employed, how many connections do they have on LinkedIn. 

We ended up specifically paying attention to what we call the super connectors. These were the people who had a lot of connections in LinkedIn but also really felt like they benefited a lot from the event. They collected the most business cards, they had the most handshakes and non-verbal interactions with people in the room and they collected the most cards. We looked at those people and we found that they had very specific patterns in the room. So one of the things that they did really well was they tended to plant themselves in the right places. So, can you guess where is the best place to stand in the room? 

[0:34:05.3] MB: Maybe just off the bar like when people are getting a drink and then wondering on what to do next?

[0:34:11.7] VE: Yep, exactly. The perfect place to stand, actually just to really get detailed on what you just said is, it’s right as someone is turning, they have their drink in their hands and they are turning to the room with that look of like, “Who do I know? I have no one to talk to. What do I do next?” That is the perfect opportunity to come in and be someone’s “social savior", that’s what I call it because that is the most high anxiety moment in an event, when you are standing there with your drink and you are like, “What do I do?” 

So I like to plant myself right as people exit the bar and are specifically turning around to face the room and the best thing you can do here is make context conversation starters. So, “How’s the wine? I was thinking about getting another wine, is it good? Have you ever been to this place before?” Even just, “Hey I’m Vanessa,” works so well in that moment because they are so grateful that someone was there to talk to them that they don’t even care what you say, they’re just excited to be able to talk to you. 

[0:35:13.7] MB: What was that phrase that you used, context conversation starters? 

[0:35:17.1] VE: Yeah, context cues or context conversation starters. I have maybe 10 or 15 of them I think in chapter three. They are under “conversation sparkers”. That’s one or two of them and then we have a couple I call them Killer Conversation Starters that you can use as well. 

[0:35:32.8] MB: And how would you recommend making a great first impression when you meet somebody? And I think this integrates both the conversation elements and obviously the non-verbal as well, what are the keys to really making a solid impression with them? 

[0:35:46.5] VE: I would say that there’s a lot but the one that I would do as the first priority would be the handshake and again, this is one of these things that we’ve heard about a lot. We’re like, “Yeah, I know how to make a good handshake.” But there are a couple of really interesting subtleties about a handshake. So we learn a lot about someone from a handshake. In fact the amount of oxytocin that’s produced in a handshake, so oxytocin is especially produced when we have skin to skin touch. 

So hugs as well, it doesn’t happen to be skin to skin but touch, hand to hand, hugs, pats, high five’s, those all produce tremendous amounts of oxytocin. The amount of oxytocin that’s produced in a handshake is worth three hours of face-to-face time. So if you are talking to someone for three hours making eye contact, that is still not as much oxytocin on what we would produce in that immediate handshake. 

The biggest mistake that people make is they forgo the handshake for a wave. I see women do this all the time where they walk in a room and they go, “Hey. Hey Bob, how’s it going?” And they’d hold up their hand in a little wave. The fist bump produces a lot less oxytocin than a palm to palm handshake or you’re at a networking event, you have a drink in one hand, a plate in the other, you don’t bother. You always want to bother because it’s literally sealing the deal for your first impression. 

It’s what carries that oxytocin really high and so making the handshake, making sure it’s a priority and then also making sure that it’s incredibly equal and what I mean by that is not just firmness, which is important to people but actually the direction of your hand. So if you think about a handshake, reach out right now towards your computer or the front of you as if you’re going to shake someone’s hand. Your thumb should be up towards the ceiling or the sky and your pinky should be angled down. 

When the handshake gets shifted, so the back of your hand is up towards the ceiling and your palm is towards the ground. That is a very dominant way of shaking someone’s hand. If you ever had your handshake flip, like you started shaking hands with them and then they flip your hand up, it feels terrible and ask people that if it hasn’t happen to you and people remember if that happens to them, that’s because it’s very, very dominant. 

So it’s really important to make sure that you keep it really equal and then also doing the opposite of offering your hand up. That’s a very submissive gesture. So equal, nice and balanced, firm, and making sure that you don’t short change the handshake is one of the best things that you can do in a first impression. 

[0:38:09.0] MB: So on firmness specifically, because this is something that I have debated with people in the past, do you mirror their firmness or do you try to be on the firmer side? 

[0:38:17.5] VE: With a handshake specifically, I kind of liken it to squeezing a peach. You know how when you go to the grocery store and you squeeze a peach, you feel the softness and then you squeeze until you feel it get firm, that’s exactly is like with a handshake. When it’s soft you squeeze and the moment you feel muscle tension, you stop because that’s a mutual way of getting the right firmness where you’re not over squeezing someone or under squeezing them. 

[0:38:45.4] MB: What is one piece of homework that you would give our listeners to implement some of these ideas or improve their ability to develop the skills of non-verbal communication? 

[0:38:56.3] VE: One, this is what’s really easy, is I would get feedback on your handshake. So we almost never get feedback on it. So whenever I do workshops I always make everyone do a handshake audit. Specifically, I want them to product oxytocin but I also want them to give feedback and I would say 30 to 40% of the room are shocked to get feedback that their handshake is too firm or too strong. They flip someone’s hand, and so we very rarely get feedback on it. So ask at least three people that you trust to audit your handshake. 

[0:39:27.3] MB: For listeners who want to dig in and learn more from you, where can people find you and the book online? 

[0:39:32.0] VE: Yeah, so the book is called Captivate. It’s available wherever books are sold, at least that’s what my publisher tells me and everything else is on my website. So our lab is scienceofpeople.com and I hope that you can play with us. We have tons of research going on, come and take our lie detection quiz, take our vocal power quiz. We would absolutely love to play with you. 

[0:39:51.7] MB: Awesome, well Vanessa thank you so much for coming on the show. It’s been an honor to talk to you and we’ve really enjoyed learning all these fascinating lessons. 

[0:40:00.2] VE: Oh yeah, thanks so much for having me. 

[0:40:01.9] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. Listeners like you are why we do this podcast. The emails and stories we receive from listeners around the globe bring us joy and fuel our mission to unleash human potential. I love hearing from listeners, if you want to reach out, share your story or just say “hi”, shoot me an email. My email is matt@scienceofsuccess.co. I would love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener email. 

The greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please, leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes because that helps more and more people discover the Science of Success. I get a ton of listeners asking, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all of this information?” because of that, we created an amazing free guide for all of our listeners. You can get it by texting the word “smarter” to the number 44222 or by going to scienceofsuccess.co and joining our email list. 

If you want to get all of these incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we just talked about and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can go to scienceofsuccess.co, just hit the show notes button at the top. Thanks again and we’ll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

The Paradox of Happiness - Why Pursuing It Makes You Less Happy & What You Can Do About It with Dr. Tal Ben Shahar

In this episode we discuss the paradox of happiness - why pursuing it makes you less happy, and what you can do about it, we dig into the research about what really makes people happy, we break down happiness into its essential components and discuss how to cultivate it, we look at the interaction between stress and recovery and why most people look at it the wrong way, why active acceptance and surrender is critical to processing and dealing with negative emotions and much more with Dr. Tal Ben Shahar.

Dr. Tal Ben Shahar created the most popular course in Harvard University’s history, he is the best-selling author of several books including The Pursuit of Perfect, Happier, Choose The Life You Want, Even Happier. He’s also the co-founder and chief learning officer of The Wholebeing Institute, Potentialife, Maytiv, and Happier.TV.

We discuss:

• What science shows is the The #1 Predictor of Happiness

• How the direct pursuit of happiness can actually prevent you from being happy and makes you less happy

• One of the most robust findings in the field of psychology research is about what creates happiness

• The paradox of happiness - why pursuing it makes you less happy, and what you can do about it

• Why the expectation that you should be happy all the time is a barrier to your own happiness

• The “hamburger model” and how it can transform the way that you live your life

• The lens that we can use to understand all of our “happy” experiences

• How Tal defines “happiness” as the intersection of meaning and pleasure

• We discuss what The BEST predictor of your future behavior is

• Why awareness is a critical first step to cultivating happiness

• We dig into the research about what really makes people happy

• Why money has very little to do with happiness (according to the research)

• The vital importance of cultivating healthy relationships

• We discuss the blue zones where people live the longest in the world and why these people live longer than anyone else

• The critical importance of physical exercise on your psychological wellbeing

• How to trigger a release of the “feel good” chemicals in your brain (norepinephrine, dopamine, serotonin)

• How happiness helps you be healthier, more creative, gives you more energy, and makes you more productive

• Strategies for indirectly pursuing happiness

• We break down happiness into its essential components and discuss how to cultivate it

• The only 2 types of people who do not experience painful emotions (are you one of them?)

• What happens when we try to suppress negative emotions

• How experiencing and accepting negative emotions can paradoxically improve your happiness

• Why active acceptance and surrender is critical to processing and dealing with negative emotions

• How perfectionism can create self sabotage and unhappiness

• The critical distinction between healthy perfectionism and unhealthy perfectionism

• The vital importance of accepting criticism and how refusing to accept criticism hamstrings you

• Adaptive vs maladaptive perfectionism and why its important to know the difference

• (Once again) Meditation and how important it is

• The interaction between stress and recovery and why most people look at it the wrong way

• Why stress isn’t bad and in fact can be very good for - but with a very important caveat

• How the concept of weight lifting can help us better understand and manage stress in our lives

• How recovery is vital to your productivity, health, and happiness

• How long periods of recovery are an investment in your future growth

• The power of breath and how it is an incredibly impactful mind/body intervention to reduce stress and anxiety

• The vital importance of rituals and how you should build them into your day

• “We first make our habits, then our habits make us.”

• We walk through Tal’s powerful daily ritual and how you can harness it to change your day

• How self forgiveness and self compassion can transform your life and emotional experience

• And much more!!

If you want to live a happier life - listen to this episode! 

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Wikipedia Article] The Grant Study

• [Book] Sleeping with Your Smartphone by Leslie A. Perlow

• [Book] Choose the Life You Want by Tal Ben-Shahar PhD

• [Book] Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment by Tal Ben-Shahar PhD

• [Book] The Pursuit of Perfect by Tal Ben-Shahar PhD

• [Book] The Blue Zones, Second Edition by Dan Buettner

• [Book] The Relaxation Response by Herbert Benson

• [Website] talbenshahar.com

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success with your host, Matt Bodnar.

[00:00:12.4] MB: Welcome to The Science of Success. I’m your host, Matt Bodnar. I’m an entrepreneur and investor in Nashville, Tennessee and I’m obsessed with the mindset of success and the psychology of performance. I’ve read hundreds of books, conducted countless hours of research and study, and I am going to take you on a journey into the human mind and what makes peak performance tick, with the focus on always having our discussion rooted in psychological research and scientific fact, not opinion.

In this episode, we discuss the paradox of happiness, why pursuing it makes you less happy and what you can do about it. We dig into the research about what really makes people happy. We breakdown happiness into its essential components and discuss how to cultivate it. We look at the interaction between stress and recovery and why most people think about it the wrong way. We also look at why active acceptance and surrender is critical to processing and dealing with the negative emotions, as well as much more with Tal Ben Shahar. 

The science of success continues to grow with more with more than 775,000 downloads. Listeners in over 200 countries, hitting number one in New and Noteworthy, and more. I get listener comments and emails all the time asking me, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all this incredible information?” A lot of our listeners are curious how I keep track of all the incredible knowledge you get from reading hundreds of books, interviewing amazing experts, listening to awesome podcast, and more.

Because of that, we created an epic resource just for you. A detailed guide called How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free by texting the world “smarter” to the number 44222. Again, It’s a guide we created called How to Organize and Remember Everything. All you have to do to get it is to text the word “smarter” to the number 44222, or go to scienceofsuccess.co and put in your email.

I’ve also gotten a bunch of listener emails recently asking me, “Hey, can you provide a link to the books that you guys talked about. Can you give me a transcript of the episode?” All this stuff. I wanted to let everyone know, if you haven’t checked them out, be sure to check out our show notes. It’s got everything we talked about in every episode including this episode and all of our previous episodes. You can get all of our show notes at scienceofsuccess.co. Just click the show notes button at the top.

In our previous episode, we went deep in the concept of free will. We looked at the question of whether or not freewill exists, we examined how quantum physics impacts the existence of freewill, we also looked at the neuroscience behind the concept of freewill, and looked at whether conscious decision making exists at all or whether our decisions arise completely within the subconscious, with Dr. Alfred Mele. If you want to deeply understand freewill, listen to that episode.

[0:03:01.1] MB: Today, we have another amazing guest on the show, Tal Ben Shahar. Tal created the most popular course in Harvard University’s history. He’s the bestselling author of several books including, The Pursuit of Perfect, Happier, Choose the Life You Want, Even Happier. He’s also the cofounder and chief learning officer of the Whole Being Institute, Potential Life, Maytiv and Happier TV.

Tal, welcome to The Science of Success.

[0:03:26.1] TBS: Thank you, Matt. Great to be here.

[0:03:28.8] MB: Well we’re very excited to have you on here. For listeners who may not be familiar with you, tell us a little bit about your background and your story.

[0:03:36.6] TBS: I actually started off my college career as a computer science major. I was at Harvard at the time and I found myself in my second year doing very well academically, doing well in sports, athletics, I played Squash, doing well socially and yet being very unhappy. It didn’t make sense to me because looking at my life from the outside, things looked great but from the inside, it didn’t feel that way.

I remember waking up one very cold Boston morning, going to my academic adviser and telling her that I’m switching course and she said, “What to?” I said, “Well, I’m leaving computer science and moving over to philosophy and psychology,” and she said, “Why?” I said, “Because I have two questions. First question is, why aren’t I happy? Second question is, how can I become happier?” It’s with these two questions that I then went on to get my undergraduate as well as graduate degrees, all the time focusing how can I help myself, individuals, couples, organizations, lead happier lives.

[0:04:40.5] MB: One of the concepts that you’ve shared in the past is, and you’ve described a couple of different ways, but one of them is kind of this idea of hamburger model and the four different archetypes. I’d love for you to sort of describe that and share that with our listeners.

[0:04:52.6] TBS: Sure. One of the first things that I realized when I started to study philosophy and psychology was that I was actually living life in a very far from an optimal way. I was living a life that was actually making me unhappy. I remember one day going to the hamburger joint and looking at my burger and realizing that there’s a great deal we can learn from hamburgers. 

For example, there is the very tasty and unhealthy burger, which many of us love to eat and then feel guilty about, there is the vegetarian burger that perhaps is very healthy but that is not very tasty. Then there is the burger that is neither tasty nor healthy. And then we have the ideal burger; that is the burger that is both healthy and tasty. I thought about these four kinds of burgers as being parallel to four ways, four different ways of living our lives.

The unhealthy and the tasty burger would be that of the hedonist, a person who thinks about their immediate pleasure but don’t think of their long term wellbeing. That’s not happiness; that’s perhaps short term wellbeing but it’s not happiness. Then there is the burger that like the vegetarian burger, which is you know, healthy but not tasty. That’s about thinking of the future but not enjoying the present, not enjoying the moment. 

Then there is the third burger, which is neither tasty nor healthy and that, you know, we’re all sometimes in a rut, having bad experiences, not really feeling like we’re going anywhere. That’s the worst of all burgers and finally there is what I’ve come to call “the happiness burger”, the healthy and tasty. That’s when we’re having experiences that are both pleasurable, enjoyable, and are also good for us for the long term.

In many ways, we can look at all happy experiences through this lens. For example, if I’m working at a place where I’m enjoying my work, or I experience pleasure and it’s meaningful to me, it’s important, I can see a long term trajectory in a happy workplace. Or if I’m in a relationship or I’m enjoying the time I spend with my partner and we’re building a life together. There’s also future benefit. The relationship is a healthy relationship. Well, that’s the happy relationship. 

Almost every experience we can situation in one of the four hamburger types. Again, the unhealthy and tasty, the healthy and not tasty, the not healthy and not tasty and finally the happiness burger, which is both healthy and tasty. What we want to do is as much as possible, live our lives in that fourth archetype. It’s not possible to be there all the time, but it’s certainly possible to be there more of the time. The more time we spend there, the happier we are.

[0:08:00.0] MB: I’d love to dig into how do we spend more time in that kind of fourth archetype, the happiness archetype? Maybe before we dip into that, how do you define happiness?

[0:08:11.7] TBS: Based on that model, I define happiness as a combination between meaning and pleasure, or between future benefits and present benefit. You see, there are many people who define happiness as just an ongoing experience of pleasure but don’t really think about the meaning part, about the future part.

Then there are other people who say, “Well no, this is all about hedonism and what happiness really is, is about having a sense of meaning and purpose, a long term benefit.” Well, neither definitions are sufficient. As I see it, and again, there is a lot of empirical data backing this up. What happiness is about, the good life is about the ability to bring the two together. To bring the present benefit, the pleasure component and the future benefits, the meaning component.

[0:09:02.6] MB: How do we spend more time in that happiness quadrant?

[0:09:07.2] TBS: The first thing is awareness. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. If I’m able to identify times in my life when I was leading a happy life, when I was having happy experiences, in other words, when I was doing things that were both meaningful and pleasurable. Then I can simply ask myself, “Okay, so how can I have more of it? What did my partner and I do when we experienced the happy periods in our lives? What did I do at work or what work was I engaged in that brought a sense of meaning and pleasure to my life?” Then, the question is, “How can I have more of it?” 

So first of all, it’s awareness and then the willingness and the desire to replicate the good experiences. That’s one way of bringing more happiness to my life. There are other ways; so we know for example, what are the kind of things that bring us more meaning and pleasure in life? One of those things, for instance, relationships, the number one predictor of happiness is quality time we spend with people we care about and who care about us. Of course, not all relationships contribute to happiness, they’re also toxic relationships. 

But if you look at the happiest people in the world, the thing that defines their lives are relationships and what kind of relationships? That varies you know? For some people, it’s deep intimate friendships, for other people it’s the romantic relationships, for others, it’s family, for some, it’s all of the above. Whatever the kind of relationship is, this is the defining characteristic of the happiest people we know of.

[0:10:53.9] MB: That’s a finding that’s found again and again in the research right? That’s not just kind of an opinion, that’s something that’s very validated from the science itself?

[0:11:03.4] TBS: Absolutely. Let me give you just a couple of examples. The first interesting line of research looks at the happiness levels of nations. The question was, what are the happiest countries in the world? There are various organizations from the UN to gallop that asks this question. The countries that consistently appear in the top 10 of the list are countries like Denmark and Australia and Columbia and Israel. Holland, Costa Rica. 

You know, when you look at this countries, some of them you would expect to be there. Yeah, Australia of course, the kind of life that we believe that most Australians lead is a happy life. A lot of sports and activity and they seem like a happy bunch. Denmark, yes, understandable. But Israel and Columbia? These two countries consistently appear at the top of the happiest nations in the world list and if you wouldn’t expect that, both Columbia and Israel have their fair share of challenges.

The question is, “Why these countries and not others? Why this countries and not countries like the US or Germany or the UK or Singapore or Korea or Japan? Why?” The first thing that we know is that well, money has very little to do with it. Yes, if countries are poor, they’re unlikely to be happy countries. The population there is likely to be unhappy where there is poverty. But beyond the basic levels, beyond the basic levels of income, when there is enough food and basic shelter, additional money turns out not to make a difference to happiness levels, which explains why the wealthiest countries in the world are not the happiest countries in the world. 

What does make a difference? Relationships. In all the countries that I mentioned before, whether it’s Denmark or Israel or Australia or Columbia, there is a real emphasis on cultivating an intimate, healthy social network. Now, what does that look like? Well, in countries like Columbia, for example, family is high on the value list. In Israel, same thing, friendships as well. In countries like Denmark. Social relationships are emphasized. You know that in Denmark for example, 93% of the population — that’s almost everyone — 93% of the population are members of social clubs. 

Whether it’s their active members of social clubs, it could be their church or their sports club or whatever it is. Relationships are a priority. This is one line of research that points the importance of relationships. Another one is the by now, very well-known Harvard study, which looked at Harvard graduates, over a period of… well, for the past more than 70 years. Most of them are no longer alive, and also looked at an equal number of men from poor neighborhoods and what they looked for was who were the people who were the happiest among them? The single factor that came out, close supportive social relationships. The number one predictor of happiness.

[0:14:37.8] MB: That’s amazing. It’s fascinating that whether you’re looking at kind of individual experiences or nations as a whole, you see the same kind of conclusion born out in the data.

[0:14:49.9] TBS: Yes, this is one of the most robust findings in the field and by the way, it’s not just happiness, it’s also very much associated with health. People’s immune systems are actually a lot stronger when they enjoy healthy social support.

[0:15:08.1] MB: I think there’s a book called Blue Zones that came out a couple of years ago that delved into this kind of areas around the globe where people lived the longest and one of the major factors there, as well, was supportive social networks.

[0:15:20.7] TBS: Yes, very often we see high correlation between happiness levels and health. For example, we know that people who are optimistic on average live eight to nine years longer than people who are pessimistic. Of course, optimism is closely associated with happiness and what we see in the blue zones are relatively happy people and very healthy people and why are they happier? Well, there’s some interesting findings. One of them absolutely strong, social support, whether it’s friendships or families, sometimes both. 

The other things that we see in the blue zones that are also associated with happiness is they’re physically active. They don’t have gyms in those places and again, these places are places such as Sardinia and Italy, or Loma Linda just outside of Los Angeles. Or a place in Costa Rica, or Okinawa in Japan, or a Greek island. What’s unique about these places is that they’re physically active, they don’t have gyms necessarily, but they walk a lot or they work the fields. This is another thing that’s associated with both health and happiness.

There’s some fascinating research here beyond the blue zones about physical exercise. For example, regular physical extra size for as little as 30 minutes three times a week. That’s not that much. 30 minutes, three times a week and in terms of its impact in our psychological wellbeing, it’s equal to our most powerful psychiatric medication in dealing with anxiety, or depression, it also helps a great deal with attention deficit disorder.

Not to mention the great benefits for physical health for against the chronic disease and so on. Now, the reason why physical exercise works so well is because what it does, it releases certain chemicals such and norepinephrine, serotonin, and dopamine. These are your feel good chemicals in the brain and it functions in exactly the same way as our antidepressants do. I should add, without side effects or without negative side effects. 

This doesn’t mean that we can get rid of all the psychiatric medication or encourage those who are on them to stop and, not at all. Many people who takes psychiatric medication, really need it and very often they need it just in order to get out of the house and begin to exercise. The important thing to realize here is that physical exercise is very important, not just for our physical wellbeing, also for our psychological wellbeing.

[0:18:06.1] MB: I think exercise is so critical and, you know, I’m a huge fan of doing cardio multiple times a week and not at all for the health benefits, purely for the psychological reasons and I kind of view the health benefits as almost a positive side effect of what I consider sort of primarily a psychological intervention.

[0:18:28.1] TBS: Yes exactly. I often say to my students that even though I know a lot about positive psychology and I know the techniques and the tools and obviously I apply them to my life as well. If physical exercise was taken away from me, I don’t think I would be able to lead a happy, healthy, and fulfilling life. I think that is a central component, certainly for me, of happiness.

[0:18:56.8] MB: What causes people to fall out of the happiness quadrant?

[0:19:01.9] TBS: There are a few things; one of the things actually that paradoxically takes people out of happiness is their direct pursuit of happiness. Interestingly, there is research showing that people whose primary goal is to be happy, they end up being less happy. They end up being frustrated and they experience more painful emotions. The problem there is that you know, in the one hand, if you directly pursue happiness, you become less happy but on the other hand, we know how important happiness is. The benefits to happiness are not simply in that it feels good to feel good. 

People who increase their levels of happiness are as I mentioned earlier are healthier, they’re also more creative, my likely to think outside the box, they are better partners, better team players in the workplace, they have more energy, they get more done, they’re more productive. There are numerous benefits to happiness beyond the fact that we all want to feel good. We have a problem that on the one hand we know happiness is good but on the other hand, we know if we pursue happiness, it actually makes us less happy.

So what do we do about that? The way to resolve the seeming contradiction or this impasse is to pursue happiness indirectly. What does this mean? It means that we look at the ingredients of happiness, the components that lead to happiness, for example, if I know that relationships lead you happiness, well, then one of the objectives that I can set for myself is to cultivate healthy relationships.

To spend an extra hour a week with my BFF. To think more about, “How I can improve my relationship with my partner?” Or whatever it is. To pursue relationships. If I pursue relationships, that will indirectly lead to more happiness or to think about, how can I exercise more or better? What kind of exercise contribute to my wellbeing? For some people, dance is the best form of exercise, for other people, it’s the meditative nature of swimming. Find and persist. We know that another thing that contributes to happiness is a sense of meaning and purpose. How can I find or how can I engage in things that for me provide a sense of meaning and purpose. I’m not pursuing happiness directly.

What I’m doing is I’m engaging in those activities or implementing those ideas that I know will contribute to happiness. Because just saying, I want to be happier and I’m going to pursue happiness. That’s too abstract and it actually just leads to frustration rather than happiness. That’s why it’s important to study the field in order to breakdown happiness into its essential components. 

One way to understand it is to look at happiness as the sunlight. To look at the sunlight is difficult, it’s even unhealthy, not possible for a long time. However, if I break down the sunlight then I get the spectrum of colors. that I can look at. That I can savor and enjoy and benefit from. It’s breaking down that sunlight into its components to breaking down happiness into its components and pursuing those.

[0:22:44.9] MB: I’ve heard you talk about before that upon hearing that you lecture and have written extensively about happiness. People often ask you, “Are you happy all the time?” I’d love to hear kind of your answer to that and how you think about that.

[0:23:00.8] TBS: Sure. Another barrier to happiness is the expectation that we will be, or even can be happy all the time. So I remember when I was teaching my first class in positive psychology, was having lunch in one of the undergraduate dorms at Harvard when a student came over and asked me if he can join me for lunch and I said, “Sure,” and he said to me, “You know Tal, my roommates are taking your class,” and I said, “Great.” Then he said to me, “You know Tal? Now that you’re teaching a class on happiness, you’ve got to be careful.” I said, “Why?” He said, “Tal, you’ve got to watch out.” He said, “Why?” He said, “Because Tal, if I see you unhappy, I’ll tell my roommates.”

Now, suggesting that of course I ought to be happy all the time, given that I’m teaching a class on happiness. I told my students the next day in class, “The last thing in the world I want you to believe is that I experience constant happiness or that you, by the end of the year will always be happy. Because there are only two kinds of people who do not experience painful emotions like sadness or anxiety or anger or envy or disappointment, two kinds of people who do not experience painful emotions. The first kind are the psychopaths. The second kind are dead people. 

You know, I told my class and I told this to myself as well. The fact that we experience painful emotions, it’s actually a good sign, it means that we’re not psychopaths and we’re alive. It’s a good place to start; we can really build on that and in fact, when we do not allow ourselves to experience the full gamut of human emotions including anger and sadness and envy and anxiety. If we don’t allow ourselves to experience these emotions, these emotions actually strengthen, they fortify and they become more dominant. 

It’s when I give myself what I’ve come to call the permission to be human when I allow myself to experience the full range of human emotions. That’s when I open myself up. A, to these emotions, leaving my system and B, opening myself up to also more pleasurable emotions such as joy, happiness, love and so on.

Paradoxically, it’s when I do not give myself the permission to experience anxiety and anger and sadness, that’s when I experience more anxiety, anger and sadness. When I give myself the permission to experience these emotions, that’s when I more likely to experience happiness.

[0:25:44.7] MB: I’d love to dig in to that a little bit more and the kind of “what happens when someone tries to suppress their negative emotions?”.

[0:25:53.5] TBS: Let’s do a quick experiment. If you’re listening to this interview, do this experiment. For the next 10 seconds, do not think of a pink elephant. Five more seconds not to think of a pink elephant. Now, I bet you, almost everyone listening thought of the pink elephant. Why? Because when we try to suppress a natural phenomenon such as visualizing the word that we’re hearing, that phenomenon only intensifies. Just like we can’t suppress the seeing or thinking of a pink elephant. We cannot suppress the experience of painful emotions. When I tell myself, “Do not experience anxiety, do not experience anger, then anger and anxiety will only intensify, will grow. 

In contrast, when I simply give myself the permission to experience these emotions. Okay, I’m anxious, okay, I’m angry. Wow, I’m not a psychopath and I’m human. These emotions actually lose their hold on me and they flow right through me and when they flow right through me, when this set of emotion flows right through me, it means that other emotions such as joy and pleasure can also flow freely through me. 

[0:27:18.1] MB: And correct me if I’m wrong, but is this kind of the same concept that you talk about of active acceptance? 

[0:27:24.5] TBS: Yes. So when I talk about “acceptance and permission to be human” I don’t mean passively accepting these emotions. In other words, I don’t mean “Okay well I’m just angry, or anxious, or sad, so I’m going to do nothing just vegetate in front of the TV.” No, what I’m talking about is accepting these emotions, experiencing them and then asking myself, “Okay what can I do now in order to feel better?” But only after I’ve accepted and experience these emotions. 

Now how long do I accept and experience them for? Well that depends. If, for example, I’ve just lost someone who’s dear to me, well then I need a fair amount of time to just be sad, to just cry, to just talk about the painful emotions. If I just got a poor grade on an exam, well I need some time but less time than I would if I’ve lost someone dear to me. So it’s contextual. 

But some time is always necessary to experience the emotion and then to ask, “What can I do now? And “what can I do now?” could be, “Well maybe I should go for a run” or go out and dance with my friends or watch TV but that is the second step after the first step, which is full acceptance, full surrender to the emotions, whatever they are. 

[0:28:45.7] MB: I like the inclusion of surrender in there as well and I think this is something that I’ve personally — a lesson that I’ve personally learned really deeply over the last year or two is when you accept these emotions instead of fighting them and trying to bury them or hide them, it’s really powerful how much better you feel and how much more effectively you can deal with them. 

[0:29:09.0] TBS: Yes. So the idea of surrender, when people especially in the west, when we talk about the word surrender or surrendering to emotions we immediately see it as associated with giving up of course and that is by necessity something which is bad, which is necessary. You know we’re all about “never giving up” and “giving the good fight” and “stand up straight” and that’s not always the right approach. Yeah, maybe it’s the right approach when we were playing a sport or when we have a real challenge at work, but it’s not the right approach when we are facing emotional difficulties. 

When we’re facing emotional difficulties sometimes the opposite is what we need to do. It’s not to try harder, it’s actually to let go. It’s not to stand up straight, it could be just to lie down. It’s not to fight, it’s rather to surrender and these sound better or more helpful responses to difficult emotional experiences. 

[0:30:17.2] MB: I’d love to segue into talking about perfectionism, and I know that’s something that you’ve written a lot about. It’s very related to these topics. Tell me a little bit about your take on perfectionism. 

[0:30:30.5] TBS: Right, so perfectionism essentially is unhealthy fear of failure and unhealthy extreme sometimes obsessive fear of failure that permeates those areas in our lives that are most important to us. So, if I can give a personal example, when I was a professional Squash player losing a game was an absolute disaster or even having a practice session which was not perfect, that was an absolute disaster. Or later on, it was when I was a student, perfectionism permeated my academic experience, at least for the first two years. 

When I started to study psychology, very quickly I realized first of all that I was a perfectionist and secondly, the consequences of perfectionism. We were all unhappy when we failed. It doesn’t feel good to fail, but there are very different kinds of responses. One response, the perfectionist response, “This is awful, this is terrible. Now I’m never going to succeed again. I’m a complete failure.” 

The healthier approach is, “Okay, I failed. It’s not pleasant, not fun, but what can I learn from it? How can I move forward? How can I go ahead?” What’s the upside of failure? If you listen to many of the most successful people in the world, they would tell you that the most helpful experiences that they had over the years were experiences of failure, when they learned from it and grew as a result and that’s the much healthier approach to failure. 

Now when I talk about failure I mean it in the broad sense. Also while we can look at a painful emotion as a form of failure because the perfectionist, one form of perfectionist, is the person who wants to have a perfect, unbroken chain of pleasurable, positive emotions. Now that of course is not possible, and then when the perfectionist experiences a painful emotion, that immediately is a disaster and he enters or she enters a downward spiral of self-criticism, very often self-hate, and of course unhappiness as a result. 

[0:32:45.9] MB: So for somebody that is caught in one of those cycles or has very unrealistic expectations about their happiness and their well-being, how do they deal with that or how do they break out of that cycle? 

[0:33:01.8] TBS: Yeah, so there are a few ways. The first is really understanding what perfectionism is and distinguishing between healthy perfectionism and unhealthy perfectionism. So often when people are asked interviews, “So, tell me your shortcomings?” And very often what people say, “Oh I’m a perfectionist,” and of course, they talk about it as a shortcoming. But actually what they mean is, “Well you can trust me. I get things done really well. I make sure. I’m a responsible person. I make sure things are bent perfectly.”

So they’re saying it as a short coming, as a problem but actually they mean it as something that they’re somewhat proud of and being responsible and being hardworking and being persistent and reliable, these are positive traits by and large. So there is this part of perfectionism, which is not bad, which is actually good but there’s another part of perfectionism, which is harmful. Which is harmful to first of all happiness but second also to creativity, to relationships. 

Because if I’m a perfectionist I cannot hear criticism and if you cannot hear criticism and you’re not open to other people, I mean intimate relationships are almost impossible and there is very little learning when there is perfectionism because there is a reluctance to admit imperfections, to admit that, “I don’t know.” So there are two kinds of perfectionism, what psychologist call the “adaptive” and the “maladaptive” perfectionism. So first thing is to be able to understand, what kind of perfectionism do I want to get rid of or do I want to make less dominant in my life? 

Second, the ways you make it less dominant, less pervasive is paradoxically by failing more. You see, one of the reasons why perfectionist are so afraid of failure is because they have elevated failure to a larger than life status and they don’t fail much and then in their minds failure becomes this potential catastrophe. Whereas if we fail a lot by putting ourselves in the line time and time again, after a while we see, “You know, the world didn’t come to an end after this failure and neither after this failure.” 

And in a sense, we get used to failing. We begin to get used to being imperfect and overtime, we become more comfortable failing. So that’s one way. Another way which indirectly helps a great deal is actually meditation. Because what is meditation? Meditation is learning to be present, learning to be here and now and when I’m present to an experience, to any experience, whether it’s the experience of sadness or the experience of failure, it becomes less difficult to tolerate. I learn to live with it and then I realize, “Hey that is actually not that bad not only is it not that bad, I actually learned a lot by being present to this experience, so there’s no need to fear it happening again,” and I become less of a perfectionist then. 

[0:36:09.6] MB: I’d love to explore the interplay between stress and recovery and I’d love to get your thoughts on that. 

[0:36:17.5] TBS: Sure, so one of the things that over the last few years have become very clear through the research is that for years and decades, psychologists, professionals as well as lay people have looked at stress in the wrong way. If you ask most people, conventional wisdom today would tell you that “stress is bad”, that what we need to do is eliminate stress, get rid of it or at the very least minimize it in our lives because it’s associated with chronic disease, with happiness, with depression and anxiety, you name it; stress is the culprit. 

Well, it actually turns out that not only is stress not the culprit, that actually stress potentially is good for us. How come? Look at this analogy: You go to the gym and you lift weights, what are you doing with your muscles? You’re stressing your muscles, now is that a bad thing? Of course not. You lift weights and you become stronger. You stress your muscles two days later and you become even stronger and on and on and you become fitter, stronger, healthier, happier. Stress is not a bad thing actually. It’s potentially a good thing. 

When do the problems begin at the gym? The problems in the gym begin when you lift weights and a minute later, you lift more weights and then you increase the weightage and the following day you go in and again, you push yourself again and again and again. That’s when the problems begin. That’s when you get injured. That’s when you get weaker rather than stronger. The problem therefore, when it comes to stress, is that we don’t have enough recovery. In the gym when you have enough recovery, you get stronger through the stress. 

The same happens on the psychological level not just on the physiological level. On the psychological level, we can deal with stress. We’re good at it. We were created whether it’s by God or evolution, we were created to be able to deal with stress. The problem is that we don’t have enough recovery today. You know the difference between 5,000 years ago or even 50 years ago and today is that in the past there was much more time, many more opportunities for recovery. Today there isn’t because we’re on most of the time. 

You know, there’s a wonderful book by a Harvard professor, Leslie Perlow called Sleeping With Your Smartphone. It has become our most intimate companion and we’re on it constantly, we’re available constantly. Instead of switching off, instead of taking time for recovery. Whether it’s a meal with our friends or family or whether it’s going to the gym or whether it’s just going for a walk in the streets, or even better, the woods, these forms of recovery are so very important for us to reset the system in a sense and just like we need recovery in the gym, we need recovery in life.  And the stress today, the problem with stress today is that people don’t have enough time to recover. If they do have time to recover, that stress can only make us strong, happier, and healthier. 

[0:39:26.7] MB: How do we build or find more time for recovery? 

[0:39:30.7] TBS: Unfortunately we can’t find more time. We have finite amounts of time but what we can do is put time aside for what we think is really important and recovery is really important and it’s not giving up time. Recovery is a form of investment. So when I invest, if I invest money, yes I’m in the sense giving up money but I’m giving up money for the sake of future gain so that I have more of it in the future and in the same way with the recovery. Yes, I’m putting some time aside for recovery when I am not working, for instance. But I am actually getting much more in return because in the time after I recover, I will be a lot more productive, a lot more creative and of course happier. 

So recovery is a good investment and recovery, again, is something, whether it’s 15 minutes of meditation or an hour in the gym or just hanging out for a couple of hours with friends and recovery is also a good night sleep. A lot of research on the importance of sleep for well-being and for cognitive functioning, it could be a day or two off over the weekend and recovery can be the vacation, the week or four week holiday once or twice a year. So all these forms of recovery are great forms of investment. I get much more in return. 

[0:40:56.3] MB: I’d love to talk about — we’ve examined a couple of the different mind-body interventions that deal with anxiety and stress. We’ve talk about exercise and how important that is, we’ve touched briefly on meditation. One of the other things you’ve talked about is the power of breathing and I’d love to hear some of your insights. 

[0:41:15.5] TBS: Sure. So there is, again, a lot of work, a lot of research on breathing and the nice thing about it is that it’s always there for us literally from the moment we were born until the moment we die and we need to make better use of this thing that’s right under our very noses and what does it mean to make use of breathing? Because we breathe naturally and again, we always do it. But there are helpful and unhelpful forms of breathing. 

So for instance, when stress levels rise and when we don’t have enough recovery, our breathing actually becomes shorter and shallower. We don’t take a deep breathe in. Now it’s very easy to simply decide, to set our alarm clock or smartphone to remind us, say every two hours to take three or four or five deep breaths, which you spend 10 minutes first thing in the morning just breathing in deeply and focusing on the breathe going in and out and we’re benefiting then from both breathing and it’s a form of meditation as well. 

Now what is proper breathing? It’s really like what a baby would breathe. When you watch a baby breathing, you see their belly go up and down. This is called belly breath, and engaging in belly breathing, again, three to four deep breathes every hour or two and then maybe a couple of minutes in the morning and a couple of minutes more in the evening, that can go a long way as a form of recovery, as a form of taking in sufficient oxygen as a form of changing our experience from the fight or flight response. 

A stressful response to what Herbert Benson from Harvard Medical School calls “The Relaxation Response” and again, it doesn’t take much. It’s a very simple intervention that’s with us all the time. I, as a ritual, engaging in deep breathing a few times a day and that has done wonders to my overall experience of wellbeing. 

[0:43:28.8] MB: I’d love to touch on rituals, you just mentioned that. What are some of the rituals that you found daily that have really helped you cultivate wellbeing and happiness? 

[0:43:40.1] TBS: Yes, first of all maybe I can just say a couple of words about the importance of rituals. Because many people think that if they understand something, so for example, I understand the importance of exercise or I understand the importance of breathing or the importance of relationships, well then that’s enough to bring about change. I’ve had the “aha moment” I was convinced by a study and a research and now I’m ready to live happily ever after. 

Well unfortunately that’s not the case. Knowing what’s good for us doesn’t mean that we’re doing what’s good for us and doing is necessary for bring about the real change. Rather than relying on knowing or understanding, what we must rely on to bring about lasting change are rituals, are habits. You know, John Dryden, the British philosopher/poet once wrote: “We first make our habits and then our habits make us,” and it’s important to make habits to create rituals that will contribute to our wellbeing. 

So let me share you some of the rituals, some of the daily or weekly rituals that I have. One of them is physical exercise, three times a week on particular days, particular times I exercise. For me it’s usually a stationary bike or swimming. Three days a week I do yoga. Every morning when I get up, I spend between 10 and 12 minutes deep breathing while reminding myself of the things that I want to be reminded. 

For example, I remind myself — and this is all written down. I remind myself to be present. I remind myself to bring more playfulness to my work, to my family. I remind myself to contribute, to help others and cultivate healthy relationship. I remind myself to be patient and finally, I remind myself to give myself the permission to be human, to be humble about myself, my life, my expectations. 

Now these things, I remind myself of everyday. They are already second nature, I’ve formed neural pathways in my brain around these ideas that I believe are so important for a happy, healthy, and fulfilling life. It’s only by engaging a ritual around them that they can become second nature, they can be assimilated, internalized and finally another ritual that I have before going to bed is expressing gratitude for at least five things in my life.

[0:46:25.7] MB: That’s such a great exposition about rituals and I love that quote, “We first make our habits and then our habits make us.” That’s really powerful. I’d love to dig in to the concept, and this goes back a little bit to kind of when we were talking about perfectionism and the permission to be human. I’d love to talk about self-forgiveness. Can you share some of your thoughts about that?

[0:46:49.9] TBS: Sure. The Dali Lama, when he came to the west for the first time, interviewed many western scientists, psychologist, practitioners, theoreticians. One of the most surprising things that he found was that compassion, the word for compassion in the west stands for compassion towards other people. He said, in Tibetan, the word for compassionate is Sewe. Sewe is equally about compassion toward others and towards one’s self. We’re very hard with ourselves, that has to do a lot with perfectionism or is a cause of perfectionism.

We’re not forgiving, we don’t give ourselves the permission to experience painful emotions or to fail, to be human. Unfortunately, that’s a cause of a great deal of unhappiness. There’s no one who is perfect and no one ever was or ever will be. The sooner we accept that, the better, the more forgiving we are of our imperfections or of our failures, the happier, and paradoxically, the more successful we’ll be in the long term. 

[0:48:02.2] MB: For somebody who has been listening and wants to have kind of a concrete starting place to implement some of the ideas that we’ve talked about today, what’s sort of one simple piece of homework that you would give to one of our listeners?

[0:48:16.4] TBS: What I would do first, we are potentially the best teachers that we have. What I would do is, I would sit down and I would write, I would write about my best experiences from the past, “When was I at my happiest?” From those stories that I write down, I would extract what I consider the essentials. Keep in mind all the things that you heard about permission to be human and about relationships and about exercise and about expressing gratitude and try and extract the essentials.

In other words, do research on yourself, or rather what I distinguish between research and search. Research is very often about other people. Search is within one’s self.

[0:49:08.3] MB: For people who want to learn more about you, where can people find you and your books online?

[0:49:13.0] TBS: Well, my books are on Amazon or you can go onto my website, www.talbenshahar.com.

[0:49:22.4] MB: Well Tal, thank you so much, this has been a fascinating conversation and I know I’ve taken away a ton of insights and I think the listeners are really going to enjoy this. We just wanted to say, thank you so much for being on the show. 

[0:49:37.0] TBS: Thank you Matt for the opportunity.

[00:39:03.2] MB: Thank you so much for listening to The Science of Success. Listeners like you are why we do this podcast. The emails and stories we receive from listeners around the globe bring us joy and fuel our mission to unleash human potential. I love hearing form listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@scienceofsuccess.co. I would love to hear from you, and I read and respond to every listener email.

The greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend, either live or online. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please, leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes. That helps more and more people discover The Science of Success. I get a ton of listeners asking, “MAtt, how do you organize and remember all this information?” Because of that, we’ve created an amazing free guide for all  of our listeners. You can get it by texting the word “smarter” to the number 44222, or by going to scienceofsuccess.co and joining our email  list. 

If you want to get all of this incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we just talked about, and much more, be sure to check out our show notes at scienceofsuccess.co. Just hit the “snow notes button at the top. Thanks again and we’ll see you on the next episode of The Science of Success. 

The Hard Truth About Psychology, Learning New Skills, & Making Mistakes with Dr. Art Markman & Dr. Bob Duke

In this episode we discuss whether time speeds up as we get older, why your life story only makes sense looking in reverse, whether or not brain games actually work, the importance of proactive learning instead of passive learning, why psychology confirms all your worst fears about studying and getting smarter – and much more with a special TWO GUEST interview featuring Dr. Art Markman & Dr. Bob Duke!

Dr. Art Markman is a Professor of Psychology and Marketing at the University of Texas and Founding Director of the Program in the Human Dimensions of Organizations.

Dr. Bob Duke is a Professor and Head of Music and Human Learning at The University of Texas at Austin, He also directs the psychology of learning program at the Colburn Conservatory of Music in Los Angeles.  
Together they co-host the NPR radio show Two Guys on Your Head and recently co-authored the book Brain Briefs.

We discuss:

• Does time speed up as you get older?

• Why your brain pays less and less attention to things that don’t change

• How you underestimate the power of new experiences to have a positive impact on you

• Brains are efficient, and efficient is another word of lazy

• Why your brain wants to keep doing what it did last time

• How Dyson vacuums were created (and what sawmills have to do with it)

• The importance of learning things that seem like they “don’t matter” right now

• The downside of a linear and close-minded path of achievement

• Why “everyone they know who is successful knows A LOT about A LOT of things” and you can’t know ahead of time what key information will make you successful

• Why you shouldn’t edit your life story in the forward direction (and what that means)

• Is your memory doomed to fail?

• Why one of the worst things you can do for your memory is to worry about your memory!

• Do brain games actually work?

• How do you engage the mind a way that develops thinking?

• The difference between reading and writing and how they impact your brain

• The importance of proactive learning instead of passive learning

• What the data says about regret and how to deal with it

• How learning is effortful when it actually works, and why without effort, there is very little learning

• Is it true that we only use 10% of our brains?

• Your brain is 3% of your body weight, but uses 25% of your daily energy supply

• Does listening to Mozart make you smarter?

• Why we can’t get something for nothing (and why you should stop looking for “get smart quick schemes”)

• Why psychology confirms all your worst fears about studying and getting smarter

• How curiosity is vital to your thinking ability

• Why its OK to get stuff wrong, as long as you repair your error

• Why every bit of skilled performance that you see has a deep reservoir of hard work hidden behind it

• The critical importance of perception and self awareness in growing and improving

• Why you are worst at judging your performance when you are bad (isn’t this one true!)

• Why “expert performers” are really good at identifying all of their flaws

• How to cultivate self awareness of your flaws in a way thats non-threatening to you and your ego

• Mistakes are not the problem, but denying them is

• The critical importance of sleep

• How sleep clears toxins out of your brain, helps you form better memories, learn more, etc

• Think about what has brought you joy, what brings you joy, and schedule those things into your life regularly

If you want to master your mind - listen to this episode! 

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Book] Brain Briefs by Art Markman and Bob Duke PhD

• [Podcast] Two Guys on Your Head

• [Book] Smart Thinking by Art Markham

• [Book] Smart Change by Art Markham

• [Book] Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol S. Dweck

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success with your host, Matt Bodnar.

[00:00:12.4] MB: Welcome to The Science of Success. I’m your host, Matt Bodnar. I’m an entrepreneur and investor in Nashville, Tennessee and I’m obsessed with the mindset of success and the psychology of performance. I’ve read hundreds of books, conducted countless hours of research and study and I am going to take you on a journey into the human mind and what makes peak performance tick, with the focus on always having our discussion rooted in psychological research and scientific fact, not opinion.

In this episode, we discuss whether time speeds up as we get older. Why your life story only makes sense looking in reverse. Whether or not brain games actually work. The importance of proactive learning instead of passive learning. Why psychology confirms all your worst fears about studying and getting smarter, and much more with a special two guest interview featuring Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke.

The Science of Success continues to grow with more than 700,000 downloads, listeners in over a hundred countries, hitting number one in New Noteworthy, and more. A lot of our listeners are curious about how to organize and remember all this information. I get tons of listener emails and comments asking me how I keep track of all the incredible knowledge I get from reading hundreds of books, interviewing amazing experts, listening to podcast and much more.

Because of that, we created an awesome resource for you and you can get it completely free by texting the word “smarter” to the number 44222. It’s a guide we created called How to Organize and Remember Everything. Again, to get it, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44222 or go to scienceofsuccess.co and put in your email.

In our previous episode, we discuss the daily practice that works to develop self-love, how fear is often the signpost for what we most need to do next, the lessons from a 550 mile pilgrimage through Spain, how seeking too much knowledge can be often counterproductive and much more with our guest Kamal Ravikant. If you want to be inspired starting out this new year, listen to that episode.

[0:02:07.2] MB: Today, on The Science of Success, we have a special episode. Two guests at once. We have Dr. Bob Duke who is a professor and the head of music in human learning at the University of Texas in Austin. He also directs the psychology of learning program at the Colburn conservatory of music in Los Angeles. 

We also have Dr. Art Markman who is a professor of psychology and marketing at the University of Texas and the founding director of the program in the human dimensions of organizations. Together, they cohost the NPR radio show, Two Guys On Your Head and recently coauthored the book Brain Briefs. Gentlement, welcome to The Science of Success.

[0:02:39.2] AM: Thanks a lot for having us.

[0:02:40.3] MB: Well we’re very excited to have both of you guys on here. For our guests who may not be familiar, can you each kind of introduce yourselves and say hi and tell us a little bit about yourself?

[0:02:49.1] AM: Sure, I’ll go first. Yeah, I’m Art Markman, I am a professor of psychology, I study the way people think so I’m interested in reasoning and decision making and motivation and for me, in addition to writing lots of papers that get read by 30 of my closest colleagues, it occurred to me not so long ago that almost everybody I know has a mind, almost nobody knows how that mind works.

I try to spend a lot of my time, in addition to doing research, to bringing insights from the field of cognitive science outward to other people in the hope that they might use that information to live their lives differently and probably better.

[0:03:25.3] BD: I’m Bob Duke and as you said, Matt, I’m a professor of music and human learning here at the University of Texas. Throughout my career, I’ve been studying learning and memory, not only in the context of music making but in other context as well. It’s always been of interest of mine because I work with a lot of people who are preparing to be teachers, what are the mechanisms by which people develop skills for memories, refine your skills over time.

Art and I had had several informal interactions over the years before we actually got started doing the radio show and it’s been now I guess going on four years now, right Art? It’s been a wonderful collaboration that it’s been a great deal of fun to be a part of.

[0:04:03.4] MB: Well, you guys have so many fascinating topics that you’ve written about and talked about. I’d love to start out you know, the way that the book, Brain Briefs, is kind of structured, you have all this amazing questions and you kind of go into answering a bunch of them. I’d love to start out and kind of go through a few of this questions that I found really interesting and kind of get your take on it and share some of those insights with our audience. One of the first that I found really fascinating was, does time speed up as we get older?

[0:04:30.5] AM: The older you get, the more that you begin to worry about that. But since Bob’s the older one, I’ll let him share his experience on this first.

[0:04:37.6] BD: Well the short answer is, yes. Of course what we mean by that, it doesn’t actually speed up but certainly our perceptions of the passes of time change as we age and there are a couple of explanations for that that I’ll let Art tell you about. But one of the things that’s sort of interesting about that is that when you look back into your past right?

Our perceptions of what we recall, what we remember change over time for reasons that have to do not only with an aging brain but also with just the proportion of experiences that we’ve accumulated over the course of many years of a lifetime. 

[0:05:09.6] AM: Obviously one thing that makes time feel like it’s sped up is that the older you get, the more experiences you’ve already had relative to what you’re going through right now. A year of your life when you’re six years old is an enormous proportion of your life, whereas a year of your life when you say 50 is a much smaller proportion compared to what you’ve experienced. But in addition to that, as you get older, your life tends to become more routine. You tend to rely on things that you’ve done before and as a result, you don’t lay down lots of new landmarks in your life the way you do when you’re younger.

When you’re younger you have your first time on a bicycle, your first time going to school, your first time getting in a fight on a schoolyard, or whatever it is. When you get older, you tend to do the same stuff over and over again and then when you look back on it, it’s hard to separate out all of the events, which does have the happy fact that if you continue to create lots of new experiences for yourself, like say by starting to do a radio show or something like that, then you have the opportunity to slow time down a little bit.

[0:06:13.3] BD: Yeah and I think one of the things that’s embedded in what Art’s talking about is how much our brains in their efficiencies pay less and less attention to things that don’t change. One of the ways that that routine issue that Art was talking about affects what happens to our memories is that our brain recognizes that there’s no real reason to keep reforming this memory because it’s just like the memory that’s already in there. 

I think all of us have probably experienced driving to work or driving home from the office and, you know, having many things on our mind and getting home and not remembering the trip. Well, that’s an example of how our minds can be other places when things become highly routinized.

[0:06:54.2] AM: Which, by the way, isn’t a terrible thing since the last thing you’d want to do is to clutter your mind with all the details of your daily commute. But it does make the time seem a little bit shorter when you look back on it.

[0:07:04.6] MB: I find it so fascinating and I think the idea that it’s sort of a proportion of your life right? Like you said, if you’re a six year old, on year is a massive portion of your life, whereas the older you get, a year is sort of incrementally less and less of your total life experience.

[0:07:19.0] BD: Thanks for the reminder.

[0:07:23.7] MB: You know, one of the things that you said I found really fascinating is the idea of landmarks, and how our memories are formed by unique new experiences. I once heard an example of a dinner party and someone was saying, “How can you make a dinner party more memorable?” And they said, “Instead of having everybody sit in the same room and listen to the same music for four hours, change the room you’re in and change the vibe, change the music every hour.” So Instead of having kind of one memory that your brain lumps together, you suddenly have four distinct memories that feel longer even though it’s the same amount of time.

[0:07:53.3] AM: Yeah, that sort of thing is great and I think, by extension, I think people should be a little bit mindful of trying on some new experiences, trying out some new things in order to create those landmarks in your daily life so that it’s not just remembering the dinner party, it’s also remembering October.

[0:08:13.7] MB: That touches on something, this is not a question from Brain Briefs but something I know you’ve talked about, which is kind of the importance of openness to new experiences. I’d love to hear a little bit about that and why it’s so relevant.

[0:08:24.0] BD: Yeah. Well, you know, I mean. In most of our lives, this is a good thing to follow up on, what you just asked about the passage of time. Our brains make memories when there are things to pay attention to that we need to pay attention to. The more predictable our lives are from day to day, the less our brains need to pay attention because we know what’s going to happen and it pretty much happens the way we expected it to.

There’s not much to really think about or to lay down memories for. When you create new experiences for yourself, and Art mentioned this a couple of minutes ago about aging. When you create new experiences as you age, you’re creating more memories that make your life seem more full and more interesting and more engaging.

I think often, we underestimate how much new experiences actually can do for us for our mood or sense of wellbeing and everything, but we have to acknowledge the fact that many people are not so open to new experiences. They like routines and they like to know what’s coming up. In everybody’s life, the challenge is to find a balance, a personal balance for you about how much newness, how many new experiences do you want in a given span of time, and how much do you want to rely on the predictable things that you know are going to happen every day? 

I think if anybody examines our own life, I mean, certainly for me, there are routines that I have in my day that I like very much, the fact that those are routines. But having the job that I have and the job that Art has, we get to experience a lot of new things in any given week and that also makes our lives seem that much more energized and vital.

[0:09:55.1] AM: The thing is, you have to remember that, as Bob likes to say, brains are efficient and he usually follows that up by pointing out that efficient is another word for lazy, which means that brains really want to keep doing what they did last time. So one of the reasons why they’re such a strong driver to keep doing the comfortable and familiar thing is because it actually feels good in the moment to do that. 

You know it’s going to happen, you know how it works and so you settle into this routine and as a result, you’re often a little bit hesitant to engage in some new thing because it seems like an awful lot of work and so we often don’t do those things. We actually do in the book, talk a little bit about openness in the first chapter because, you know, Bob and I as he said are privileged to be in careers where we have the opportunity to do all sorts of new and interest sting things. 

Nonetheless, when our producer Rebecca Macenroy asked us, “Hey, would you guys like a show on the radio?” Which is something we had never really considered before. We sort of stared at each other at first. I think our initial reaction was, “What? That seems a lot of work.” But then our openness to experience kicked in and we thought, “Yeah, sure, why not?” We ended up doing this brand new thing that neither of us had ever envisioned for ourselves and it’s turned out to be a wonderful part of our lives.

I think that that first hesitant reaction is one we often give in to. But by not giving in to that and trying that new thing, we create all sorts of opportunities that we didn’t envision in advance.

[0:11:26.0] MB: In a previous talk that you guys have given, I think you shared an example of Dyson vacuums.

[0:11:32.1] AM: Yeah.

[0:11:32.8] MB: I’d like to hear that story.

[0:11:33.1] AM: Sure. So James Dyson, he was an interesting guy and one of the things about him that was so interesting was that he just learned a lot of stuff about a lot of stuff without regard for why it might be valuable later. One of the things he learned about was sawmills, which most of us don’t have much experience with saw mills. 

My personal experiences usually in cartoons, right? Saw blade, log, body on the log. A real sawmill has no bodies on the log in general but definitely logs in saw blades and a lot of saw dust. What he learned about them was that the way they get rid of all that sawdust is by sucking it out of the air and then using a giant contraption called an industrial cyclone to pull the sawdust out of the air. 

Now, he learned about this without any real sense of “wow, this is going to be important to me later”. Until one day he was contemplating how to make vacuum cleaners work more effectively and in particular, how to keep the bag of a vacuum from filling up and getting its pores clogged in ways that lessen its efficiency and he realized that you could take the industrial cyclone that a sawmill uses and build a small home version of it and put it into a vacuum cleaner and that that would actually change the need for a bag in a vacuum.

I think what’s most important about that is we live in an era, educationally, in which we are told what to learn in our education system and then we’re told, “Learn this stuff in particular because it’s going to be on the exam,” which leads to my least favorite question as a professor, which is when students come up to me and say, “Will this be on the exam?”

After years of struggling with that question, it occurred to me that the proper answer to students is when they say, “Will this be on the exam?” I say, “Yes but it might not be my exam,” because you never know when that piece of information you learn is going to turn out to be valuable.

[0:13:24.4] BD: That really speaks to, I think the way many people think about planning out their lives and what’s going to happen and I think there’s become an unfortunate trend in certainly achievement oriented people in American culture that the thing to do is to plan out this linear trend, “I’m going to get this degree and I’m going to do this internship and then I’m going to go to graduate school and then I’m going to get this job.”

All of those plans are built around the idea that “I know now, exactly what I’m going to need to do and need to learn and need to be able to do 10 years from now”. That is a fiction, right? Everyone we know and I do mean everyone who is really successful at what they do knows a lot, as Art said, about a lot of things that when they learn them, really, there was no indication that that would be one of the central things that would allow them to be successful.

So the questions that people think about whether they’re college students or even younger students or young adults who are just starting out in their life and thinking, well what kind of things do I need to know to be able to be successful in this thing. Well there’s certainly is a package of stuff that’s important for you to be able to function. But beyond that, the people who really excel, the people who have all the features that employers and admirers claim to want — they’re creative, they’re insightful, they’re good problem solvers — didn’t get there through a linear path of activities and learning experiences.

They got their through some circuitous path going through some things that seem to be pointless at the time, other things that didn’t seem to be particularly interesting, other things that were fascinating but maybe weren’t going to be useful and then ended up being useful. I think the openness to experience idea really is about that issue, about exploring things that you might be curious about that might be interesting to you. That might be enlightening in some way even without the guarantee that in the long run it’s going to be useful.

[0:15:17.0] AM: Just to follow up on Bob’s point for a second. One of the things that’s really important is, I think a lot of people tend to edit their life story in the forward direction. Meaning, they have this idea of what their life is going to be like and then they seek experiences that are consistent with that idea of where their life is going and they avoid experiences that don’t seem to fit the narrative that they’re creating.

The problem is that when you look at the life stories of successful people, that life story generally only makes sense when you look back on it. In the forward direction, it’s pretty chaotic. They tried all sorts of things, some of which worked out, some of which didn’t, some of which turned out to be important, some of which didn’t and in the moment, it was often very difficult to determine what the pivotal pieces of learning were, what the pivotal experiences were. Yet they were just open to trying those things, knowing that some number of us were going to turn out to be valuable in the future.

[0:16:10.8] MB: I think that’s such a powerful insight and something that I think you guys did such a good job explaining and really impacting for the listeners. In the vein of something you touched on a little bit earlier, the idea of the brains kind of efficiency or laziness, another question that you asked in the book is, “Is our memory doomed to fail?” And I’m really curious what you think about that.

[0:16:30.8] AM: Bob, do you remember when we wrote about that?

[0:16:32.3] BD: I can’t remember a thing. I don’t know. I mean, the short answer to this, this is how you turn something, little ideas into a book, you have a short answer and then you talk about it for the next six pages. But I mean, the short answer is, well, our memories are doomed to decline in terms of the retrievability of things in our memory. 

My favorite thing in art says, I see we’re both saying each other’s lines on this podcast is that you know what? By the time you reach your new 20’s, your brain starts the long and slow decline, that’s the bad news. The good news is that the decline is long and slow. Even though there are certain diseases and injuries and other kinds of things that lead to rapid declines in memory and cognitive function.

For a typical human being who is relatively healthy, that decline is so slow that it’s mostly imperceptible even though, as we get older because we’re attuned to the idea that our memories are likely to fail, we are on heightened alert to notice every instance when we can’t find our keys or I can’t remember somebody’s name or whatever happens to be when in fact, those are things that are probably have been a part of our lives for many years it’s just as we’re getting older, they seem to loom larger in our perception.

[0:17:46.4] BD: yeah, the fact is, we’ve been forgetting things our entire lives and we don’t start worrying about that forgetting until we get older because we believe that that is now a sign of an impending cognitive apocalypse and I always like to point out, I have three kids and when they were younger, they would constantly forget stuff, they’d forget to do homework, they’d forget to take out the trash, they would forget all sorts of stuff and I like to say that at no point did any one of them ever say, “Wow, I just had a senior and high school moment.”

Then you get older, you turned 50 or whatever age it turns out to be for you and you forget something and now you think well it’s over. It turns out that one of the worst things you can do for your memory as you get older is to worry about your memory. What the studies show is that older adults who are worried that their memory is getting worse perform worse on memory tests than people who are getting older and don’t worry about their memory getting worse.

You can even induce that in a study, you can induce that worry about your memory and see that effect. What this means is, relax. The fact is yeah, look, studies show that if you want to know where somebody’s cognitive peak is, that long, slow cognitive decline means that in your 20’s, you process information fastest and you remember new things the quickest. In terms of what makes you really smart, because that has to do with what you know, you’ve accumulated lots of knowledge over the course of your life. 

So the people who are actually acting most intelligently, tend to be people in their 60’s and 70’s because they have a huge base of experience and knowledge that they can draw from. Yeah, there might be a couple of things here and there that they have forgotten but that huge store of knowledge actually gives them an advantage over younger people. In many ways, younger people need to be faster because they don’t know as much.

[0:19:33.1] MB: The processing power itself kind of slows down a little bit but the benefits of the accumulated wisdom and knowledge, essentially outweigh that slowdown for a number of years?

[0:19:43.0] BD: Particularly for people who remain mentally active, right? We know very clearly that the more new things you continue to learn throughout your life and the more new things you experience, the longer the deficits in memory that begin the accrue are held at bay. They don’t become noticeable to you because the way we retrieve memories from our memory store is by ways of all of the things that each memory is connected to, right? 

So the more interconnections you have among the things in your head, the easier it is to retrieve them. If you’re experiencing new things, one of the things that that’s prompting your brain to do is to create new connections among things that may be related in ways that when you learn them 10 years ago, you didn’t really recognize that relationship and now you do.

As Art was saying, the advantage of older adults, and being one I’m happy to claim this advantage is that not only do I have a lot of stuff in my memory but that stuff is organized in a way that lets me access it in ways that are very advantageous. We talk often about why would you have people memorize a lot of things when you’ve got an encyclopedia, a map of the earth in your pocket, in your phone? You can retrieve all kinds of information from the phone. 

But the issue with that is, you can only work with so many things at a time in your so called working memory, your processing part of your memory. The more time it takes you to get the stuff, you’re going to stick in your working memory, the slower you are. If you’ve already memorized some things and you’re pulling out information that’s already in your memory, I’m sure it’s clearer how much more efficient that would be then have to start typing on a keyboard or on a phone to go and find something out.

[0:21:24.1] AM: The other thing is, the brain has so many great ways of accessing that information based on the similarity between the situation you’re in right now and stuff that you’ve learned before. Whereas if you’re trying to find that information on the computer, you have to find the right question to ask. Had Google existed in the late 1970’s when Dyson was thinking about trying to remove the bag from the vacuum, if he had been able to Google “how do you get rid of the bag in a vacuum cleaner”, he would have gotten a whole bunch of websites and probably educational videos about how to change the bag in your vacuum.

But at no point would any of those sites have said, “Oh and by the way, consider replacing that bag with an industrial cyclone.” You got to have that knowledge in your head if you’re going to do really interesting stuff.

[0:22:10.9] MB: One of the things, I’m a huge fan of Charlie Monger and we talk about him a lot on the podcast, and he talks about the idea of kind of mental models and organizing your memories and your knowledge in a kind of a coherent lattice work that this easily accessible. I think that’s such a great point.

[0:22:27.2] AM: Yeah.

[0:22:27.5] BD: Yeah.

[0:22:28.3] MB: On the ideas of sort of remaining mentally active, one of the questions that you guys touched on, it’s something I’m really curious about is do brain games work?

[0:22:37.0] AM: Shortest chapter in the book.

[0:22:40.2] BD: Well if work means, do they help you learn to play brain games? Absolutely they work. Whether they do anything beyond that, there’s not a lot of evidence that that’s the case.

[0:22:52.7] AM: It turns out that brain games tend to focus on very specific tasks and well intentioned at first, right? I think the idea was that we know for example that this concept that Bob was talking about a working memory, the amount of stuff you can hold in mind, is related to performance on all kinds of tests of intelligence and things like that.

There was a real interesting question of, if we could expand your working memory capacity, would that in fact make you smarter? But it turns out that there isn’t really a compelling way of changing the brain’s architecture in a way that increases that working memory capacity in a way that creates general intelligence.

As Bob was saying, what you learn when you play these brain games is how to play the game. But you may as well, if you’re going to practice something, you may as well practice something that you may actually encounter again later outside of the context of sitting on your phone or your computer.

[0:23:49.5] BD: Yeah. You know, for anybody who enjoys brain games just for the fun of the game, well then great. They should play whatever things they want to download. I’m an Angry Birds fan but nobody claimed that that was a brain game, right? If you think about what really engages the mind in a way that develops thinking, it’s not just responding to other things, but it’s creating new things on your own. 

People who read have a different experience than people who write because writing requires a different set of activities in your brain than reading, watching a good video, whatever it happens to be, which mostly receptive kinds of responses were. We know that brains are trying to figure out what they need to do. If you’re engaged in something where you’re receiving input from somewhere else, it really doesn’t matter what you do, this stream of input keeps coming and whatever, well then, there’s not really a lot for your brain to be engaged in.

But if you happen to generate something on your own, it engages not only the parts of your brain that have to control whatever motor activity or whatever has to do the stuff but it also requires you to draw from different parts of your memory. That might not even have been connected before because of the nature of the task you’re trying to accomplish.

I’ll let Art talk about this too, but one that springs to mind is that Art as an adult had always wanted to play the saxophone and rather than waiting until his family was surrounding him on his death bed, saying whispering, “I wished I played, I always wanted to play the saxophone.” He actually went out and learned to play the saxophone.

I’ll let him talk about that experience a little bit.

[0:25:24.5] AM: Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right, you know? As Bob points out, it’s really important to engage in activity. In fact, B.F. Skinner who is one of the grand daddies of behavior of psychology kind of gets a bad rap in modern times because there were limitations to behaviorism. But one of his fundamental insights was that in order for the brain to learn something, you don’t just expose yourself to information, you also engage in activity. 

Activity was a fundamental part of the learning process that he was working on and I think that that’s something that’s actually gotten lost a little bit. As Bob was saying, I think it is really important for us to continue to do that throughout our lives and so when I was in my mid-30’s and was thinking about stuff I would have always liked to do and I had read some research on regret, actually. The research on regret shows that if you ask a bunch of college sophomores, what they regret, it’s almost exclusively dumb stuff they did like getting drunk at a party. But if you ask older adults, people in their 70’s, 80’s and 90’s what they regret, it’s almost exclusively stuff they didn’t do.

One of the reasons that that data point is so important is because we all have a remarkable mental capacity for time travel where we can project ourselves to the end of our lives and then look back and ask, “Is there something I would regret not having done?” For me, one of those things was I had never learned to play the saxophone and so in my mid 30’s, I got up one day and said, “All right,” I went out and found a teacher and bought a saxophone and said the fairly realistic goal that in 10 years I wouldn’t suck. That’s worked out okay. I’m in Austin and I’m in a band, which almost obligatory if you live in Texas.

[0:27:03.5] MB: As a corollary to kind of thinking about brain games and by the way, actually before I say this, I love the point that you guys made about the critical importance of active learning and not just sitting there passively. Whether it’s watching YouTube or reading or whatever it might be but really, engaging your brain in the learning process.

I’m curious, writing as you guys touched on is obviously kind of one potential way to do that. But for somebody that’s maybe outside of school that’s graduated, that’s in the working world, what are some ways that we can kind of actively learn and really engage with information instead of just being passive consumers of it?

[0:27:38.0] AM: I think, if you’re in a community that’s large enough, that there are various clubs and where people who share a given interest can go and engage together in something. It doesn’t have to be necessarily an intellectual only task or even a musical task. There are many community choirs that people can sing in, if music is what you’re in to and what you’d like to do. Some people take up a new sport. They learn, if they never played handball they learn to play handball or they learn some other skill that requires some effort and one of the things that Art and I talk about a lot is that learning is effortful if it works. 

If you don’t feel like you are putting much effort into something, you’re probably not learning much as you might think you are or as much as you are intending to. I think if you are engaging in something that makes you happy like for Art playing the saxophone, well then the effort is well-spent because you feel like, “My God an hour ago I couldn’t do this and I’ve been practicing for an hour and now I can do this. That’s a pretty cool thing and it’s enjoyable because I like music and I like playing the saxophone,” and when you contrast that to a brain game as you say, “God my score an hour ago was X and my score now is X plus whatever value. Okay and what?”

[0:28:55.6] AM: “I’m going to call mom!” 

[0:28:58.9] BD: Yeah, right. 

[0:28:59.8] AM: I think that is absolutely right and the fact is that technology provides all sorts of opportunities for people to be more active in a way that they learn. So 25 years ago if you wanted to practice your writing you might keep a journal but for many people just keeping a journal or writing something that you kept to yourself wouldn’t necessarily feel that rewarding. Now you can go in the internet and have a Google blogger’s site set up in eight minutes. 

And then you can start writing and putting it out there for people to see and so there are all of these opportunities to engage with material that you think is important and interesting to write about it and while you may have the opportunity to educate or influence others with that, you are also solidifying your own knowledge by engaging with it in that active way. So I think there’s just more avenues for doing that that don’t require just sitting and playing little games. 

[0:29:54.9] MB: So changing directions a little bit, I’m curious, one of the other topics that you guys talk about is the idea that we “only use 10% of our brains”. I’d love to hear your insights on that. 

[0:30:06.4] AM: Yeah, well that is one of the great myths that’s out there and as a cognitive psychologist, probably the question I get asked most frequently in some form or another and so one of the things we wanted to do is to understand where that sentiment came from because of course the brain, we actually use all of our brain all of the time. It’s an extraordinarily energy hungry organ. It’s about 3% of the human body weight, it uses 20 to 25% of someone’s daily energy supply. And that’s really the amount of energy that’s required just to keep the lights on. 

The physiological processes that are required to keep the brain active are very expensive from an energy standpoint which is why most beings in the planet don’t have large brains relative to their body size. So where does this myth come from? And it may come from one of two places. One is that early neuroscientist when they were exploring the brain found that only a small mass of the cells in the brain are neurons. 

The ones that actively carry signals and most of them are support staff, glial cells and other things like that support what the brain is doing. And so you could argue well only about 10% of the cells in the brain are the ones that are actively engaged in the thinking process and a lot of the rest of it is cells that are working behind the scenes, but another issue has to do with brain capacity.

One of the amazing things about the human brain is that we’re continually able to learn stuff and the brain doesn’t get full. There isn’t some day at which you try to learn some new thing and your brain says, “Sorry can’t do that, can’t learn anything else,” and so a number of writers, from William James on forward, have made the point that we may very well only use a small fraction of our capacity for thinking and so that 10% number may reflect that also. 

[0:31:55.8] MB: Another question that I thought was interesting out of the book is, “Does listening to Mozart make us smarter?”

[0:32:02.8] BD: So wouldn’t that be lovely if it did? I’d be so smart, I listen to Mozart all the time. Like many things in the sciences, and Art and I talk about this in many different contexts, somebody publishes an article that is caught by the media and portrayed in a way that it’s not quite as circumspect as it should be. And then it just takes off and in 1997, I think it was this article came out almost 20 years ago now that these psychologist in California had people listen to Mozart and then take a special reasoning test, which is one dimension of IQ. And the people who listen to Mozart got higher scores than people who didn’t, it sort of became the Mozart Effect. 

Now the term “Mozart Effect” is copyrighted and people publish things that they sell for babies and all this kind of stuff and actually when you look critically at the data, there’s no evidence that listening to Mozart really does anything that doing a lot of other things would do. There was one study that I don’t think is ever published but this guy put this up online. He had people stare at a moving computer screen saver and their scores went up as much as they did listening to Mozart. So a lot of it has to do with… 

[0:33:12.7] AM: The flying coaster effect. 

[0:33:14.1] BD: Yeah, right. Exactly. So a lot of this has to do with arousal and attention and what we know basically if you’re going to stimulate somebody such that they might do perform better on some cognitive task, for people who don’t like Mozart, if you make them listen to Mozart they’re not going to perform better. They’ll probably perform worse. So what people actually are responding to are ways to heightened arousal and heightened attention. 

You would understand how that would be evolutionarily a smart thing for brains to do, right? When you’re aroused in some way, you’re a little more attentive, you’re thinking a little more faster. I mean all those things that allow us to navigate the world are in play here but like many things that sound too good to be true, this is too good to be true. 

[0:33:57.9] AM: And I want to follow up on one thing because if you juxtapose playing brain games and listening to Mozart you also get this other piece, which is a lot of times, we want to find ways of getting something for nothing, right? We all know from school that in order to get a good grade on a test, you have to read the textbook and answer some questions and study and study early off and we know that but what we keep hoping is that there’s an easier way. That if we could only put the book under the pillow or let it play while we’re asleep or listen to Mozart or play this fun video game, then that would obviate the need to do the hard work that’s required to learn stuff. 

And what I tell any student that I teach in a cognitive psychology class is that psychology confirms all of your worst fears about studying. You have to do the work and while it may, at the front end, seem unappealing to have to take that big book down and slog through it that is in fact what you have to do in order to learn stuff. You have to actually do the work and face the knowledge, there really isn’t a shortcut but man, wouldn’t it be great if there were? And that’s I think what a lot of people respond to when they see effects like that. 

[0:35:10.4] MB: And that’s something we’ve had previous psychologist on the show that have talked about the exact same phenomenon, which is that maybe instead of “get rich quick schemes” people are constantly looking for this kind of “get smart quick schemes” and the reality is the way to become smarter, the way to become a better decision maker is to just put in the work and it’s a long journey. It’s a challenging journey, but at the end of the day it’s one that’s really worthwhile. 

[0:35:31.9] BD: I think Matt what leads people to be attracted by the ideas of brain games or whatever other thing that have offers some promise of getting you smarter or more creative or whatever is that when people say this to somebody, we have to put in the work. A lot of people are asking, “What the hell does that mean? Work at what? What do I do?” and I think when you look at people who are generally adept at dealing with the circumstances that they confront in their lives, those people tend to be generally curious people, right? 

They wonder about things. They say, “Well, why is that like that and why does that thing take so much more time than this other thing does?” Or whatever happens to be that they are considering at the moment, and that kind of curiosity is enlivening in terms of your memory, in terms of your perception, in terms of your general thinking ability. Because you’re asking a lot of questions and what brains are willing to expand the effort to do is solve a problem and so by creating little problems for yourself, even just asking the question, “Well why is that?” Well now you’ve got a problem to solve and that ongoing problem solving is beneficial to your thinking overtime. 

[0:36:37.1] AM: But this actually raises another point that we talk about in the book a little bit but it seems relevant here, which is we have a very strange relationship with errors and failure. We don’t like to not know stuff. We don’t like to not know how to do stuff and if you think about our education system, one of the things that it teaches us is mistake minimization. The way you get good grades in school is by getting stuff right. Not by getting something wrong and then repairing your error, which is actually what makes you smart in the long run. 

And so this is a real problem because what it means is that a lot of people are a little bit afraid of really digging into some new thing because they don’t like that feeling of being in this nether region in which they are aware that there’s this thing they don’t know anything about but they don’t know it yet. And I think one of the things you have to do if you’re going to really broaden that base of experience and do the work you need to do to be smarter is to be willing to tolerate both the knowledge that, “Hey, here’s something I know I don’t know and I’m going to work for a long period of time to repair that gap.”

[0:37:43.1] MB: And I am a tremendous fan of Carol Dweck, and the book Mindset and the whole distinction between the fixed and the growth mindset, I think it’s so important to accept and embrace your mistakes and to try to move your ego out of the way whenever you’re thinking about your own mistakes. 

[0:37:57.7] BD: I absolutely agree with you, Matt. I’m also a Carol Dweck fan but the thing is schools don’t make that easy, right? Because I know of very few instances where not getting things right provides you with opportunities to correct what you’ve done and actually get credit for the correction, you know what I mean? Usually what schools cultivate, as Art was saying a minute ago, is get it right when you get asked or when the paper comes due or whatever happens to be. 

I think Art and I have the privilege of working at a major research university and so we get paid our exorbitant salaries to be confused most of the time. I mean we are trying to solve problems that no one has solved before and answer questions that nobody has answered before and it’s confusing and we get a lot of stuff wrong. But without the opportunity to try and fail and then retry and maybe retry many times after that, it’s impossible to make any intellectual progress.

[0:38:51.8] AM: Carol Dweck is great. Carol and I were colleagues together for a while at Columbia before she went off to Stanford and I came down here to Texas and I completely agree that that mindset of being willing to try things that may fail is so important, particularly because when we evaluate the skilled performance of other people, we discount all of the work that they’ve done. So when people hear your podcast or when they read a book that they really enjoy, they are seeing a final product of something. 

They are not seeing all of the work that went into creating that. They are not seeing all of the attempts that didn’t go as well. They’re not reading the first drafts of the pros. Bob has the privilege, the way we wrote this book in general is I like to fill blank pages, Bob likes to edit and so it was a match made in heaven. One of the things that that means is that Bob got to read a tremendous amount of half-baked pros that ultimately became what came out in the book but nobody else gets to see that and I think that it’s important for people to realize that almost every bit of skilled performance that you see required a tremendous amount of work and effort and revision and practice to get there and then that is the critical insight underlying the mindset work that Carol Dweck works on. 

[0:40:14.9] MB: So I’d love to segue into something that you talked about in the very beginning Bob that relates to this, which is that you said your expertise is helping people develop skills and thinking about how they form memories and how they refine their skills overtime. I’d love to dig into that a little bit and some of the major lessons you’ve learned about how we can become more skilled, how we can really focus in on refining our skills overtime. 

[0:40:38.1] BD: Yeah, one of the things that is central to this whole idea of becoming more skillful is you have to become more perceptive about what you were doing. A lot of people who were practicing a skill, whatever the skill happens to be who aren’t noticing the somewhat smaller features of what they’re doing, really has no opportunity to improve and anybody who watches somebody teach a really good lesson or take a really good lesson, what you see is what really excellent teachers do is they help people know what to pay attention to. 

And that’s what’s a big part of the teaching is telling them what to do, right? Because when we develop skills, it’s not because someone told us to do something and now we do it. I mean would that it were that easy, right? But the part of our brain where skill memories are activated and where they went off is not something you can tell verbally or consciously to say, “Okay, do this now.” You have to just do it and as we were talking about a few minutes ago, in doing it you’re going to make some errors and you’re going to have to make adjustments. That are even below being able to control consciously. 

I mean Art plays the saxophone, the saxophone is one of the most inherently out of tune instruments, in terms of the way it’s built, of the wind family. I mean it is terribly out of tune. So if a saxophonist is going to play a scale in tune and all the notes are going to be in tuned, the saxophonist has to make all kinds of adjustments to the tension in their mouth and the placement of their tongue and the speed of the air and there’s no way to tell somebody, “Now this is where your tongue comes up a little bit, and this is where you squeeze a little bit with your arbiter.” 

There’s no way to do that. What you do is you listen to the sounds that you are making and somehow your body figures out through trial and error what kinds of things you need to do to play the scale in tune but that’s not going to happen if somebody doesn’t hear what an in-tuned scale sounds like and recognizes the discrepancies between the scale and playing now and the in tuned scale. So that’s a real challenge. 

I think a lot of people who see or if you are a golf fan. I am not a golfer but I bet that if you really love golf and you watch pros or you watch these videos that help you become better, one of the things that really, when you watch a great teacher whether you’re a pitching coach or a gold pro or whatever happens to be and you say, “What are they talking about the most?” They are getting the students to notice more about what they’re doing. Because if you don’t know really clearly what the goal is you’re trying to accomplish and recognize the discrepancies between what you’re doing now and what you’re trying to do. Well then the likelihood of improving at what you’re doing is really, really low. 

[0:43:06.5] AM: And what we know from a lot of studies is that the lower your level of performance in an area, the worse you are at judging your own performance. So that the least good performers are the ones who most over-estimate how good they are at whatever it was they just did and one of the things, and Bob talks about this a lot, one of the things that expert performers are really good at is identifying all of the flaws in what they just did so that they can improve them. And I think it’s just that self-monitoring ability is so crucial for improving your skills because you can’t fix and area you are not aware of. 

[0:43:44.8] BD: Yeah, exactly. 

[0:43:46.8] MB: That phrase, that line, is so important. “You can’t fix an area you are not aware of” and I think many times a lot of it comes from this kind of framework of mistake minimization that people are taught in school and elsewhere. There is such an almost subconscious incentive to bury your mistakes. To hide from your mistakes, to pretend like, “Oh I didn’t make any mistakes.” What are some ways that people can cultivate that self-awareness of their flaws in a way that is non-threatening to them? 

[0:44:10.9] BD: One of the most important things to do is to hang out with other people who acknowledge their flaws and you see this in industries. My favorite example is, and I talk about this a lot is the FAA. The airline industry you would think that if ever an industry wanted to hide it’s flaws it would be the aviation industry because if you scared people into thinking that aviation was unsafe then people wouldn’t stick themselves in a metal tube and allow themselves to be hurled through the air at hundreds of miles an hour. 

In fact, if you are a member of the aviation industry and you make an error, if you report that error through the system the FAA has developed within 24 hours and your error was not the result of breaking the law like coming to work drunk, then that error can’t influence your status with the company you work for. You can’t be fired, you can’t be reprimanded for that error and the reason for that is because the FAA actually takes all of those mistakes and catalogs them and uses that to figure out what changes in procedures, what changes in maintenance schedules are needed to keep aviation safe, which is why airplane flight is as safe as it is. 

The reason that this works is because the entire industry has decided that single mistakes are not the problem. The cascade of errors that leads to catastrophic failure is the problem and I think that by extension, whenever you spend time with a community of people who are willing to acknowledge their mistakes, it makes you much more comfortable in doing that yourself and I think that that’s just absolutely crucial for allowing yourself to continue to improve in all of the things you do.

[0:45:52.6] MB: I’d love to segue into a different topic just for a moment. You’ve talked about the importance of sleep. I’d love to hear your thoughts about why it’s critical to sleep and why sometimes doing things like pulling all-nighters is often not the most effective strategy. 

[0:46:07.4] AM: So we live in a chronically under-slept society in which people think that sleep is something that they’ll do when they’re dead. And it turns out that you spend about a third of your life asleep which means that it must play some important function and it really does. The brain is actually extraordinary active while you’re sleeping and it’s doing several different things. 
One of the things that brain is doing during sleep is actually clearing toxins out of the brain that build up over the course of the day partly just through the things that build up from using energy. And partly from other toxins that may come in through other activities people engage in. But on top of that, the brain is actually actively helping you to remember and to forget while you are asleep. So one of the stages of sleep actually helps with your skill learning. So if you’re learning to play a musical instrument and you practice a scale over and over, you get a little better while you’re practicing and then you get more better when you sleep. It actually smooth’s out the performance, the motor performance. 

In addition to that there are other stages of sleep that influence what’s called memory consolidation, that is it actually helps to burn in some of the most important memories. So if you study for a test before you go to sleep then after you wake up you have better memory than if you study for that test and then stay awake for the same amount of time. So sleep ends up having a big influence there as well and not only does it help you to remember, it also helps you to forget some of the less desirable things. 

So details of your day that were somewhat mundane tend to be lost while you are asleep and the emotional impact, particularly the negative emotional impact of things that happen to you will fade as you sleep and that’s important. Because we all know, we all have things happen to us where somebody gets really angry at somebody else for something they did and in the moment they’re really angry but overtime and in part because of sleep you begin to disengage your memory for the event from the emotional content of that event. Which is part of what enables you to get on with your life and to do other things with those people who may have done something to bother you. 

[0:48:22.9] MB: What is one piece of homework that you would give to people who are listening to this episode?

[0:48:27.6] AM: Bob you got some homework for people? 

[0:48:29.1] BD: I do and you know, I think I would spend a few minutes speaking about what are the things that I experienced, I have experienced in the past that bring me joy and I would schedule those into my week. I think a lot of people do a lot of drudgery that they think, “Well I’ll get this over with and then a week from now, a month from now, this summer or whenever they are thinking about it, I’ll schedule in a little happiness here,” and I think it’s important to schedule happiness into every day. 

That’s easier for some people than others because some people’s lives are easier than others. They have more privileges, they have more opportunities for choice, those kinds of things. But I think irrespective of your life circumstances, to be able to put yourself in situations where you think, even if it’s for five minutes, “I will have a conversation with a friend that I haven’t spoken to in a while or I’m going to take a walk,” or whatever it is that brings you some feeling of happiness and joy that that should be a part of every day.

[0:49:27.9] AM: Yeah and I’m going to add one thing to that, which is I think that as another piece of homework, find somebody you haven’t talked to in a while and ask them to talk in some amount of detail about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it and learn from the people around you. Learning doesn’t have to be drudgery. It doesn’t have to involve sitting in front of a big book and struggling through it. 

We learn a tremendous amount because we’re such social species from the people around us and taking the time to really sit down and have a great conversation with somebody and understand the way they think about things, can be a really valuable learning experience and at the same time also be a joyous one and I think having more of those conversations is a great thing to do. 

[0:50:10.6] MB: Where can people find the two of you and the book online?

[0:50:14.9] AM: I’m the designated self-promotion person in this duo. So the podcast we do, the radio show is called Two Guys On Your Head. It can be found wherever podcasts are found, so iTunes, Stitcher. You can go to twoguysonyourhead.org. If you’re on the Austin, Texas area of course we’re on KUT Radio in Austin and you can also find our book Brain Briefs, pretty much wherever books are sold except that our publisher is a division of Barnes & Nobles. So it’s not available as a Kindle book. The hard cover is available on Amazon, but they refused to make a Kindle so the seven nook readers have access to it. 

[0:50:53.5] MB: Well Art, Bob, I just want to say thank you so much for being on the show. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation and I know the listeners are going to get a ton out of all the incredible insights that both of you shared. 

[0:51:04.5] BD: Well thanks Matt, it’s been a real pleasure. Thanks for inviting us on. 

[0:51:07.3] AM: Yeah, this was great. Thank you. 

[0:51:09.4] MB: Thank you so much for listening to The Science of Success. Listeners like you are why we do this podcast. The emails and stories we receive from listeners around the globe bring us joy and fuel our mission to unleash human potential. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@scienceofsuccess.co. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener email. 

The greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please, leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes. That helps more and more people discover The Science of Success. I get a ton of listeners asking, “Matt how do you organize and remember all this information?” Because of that, we’ve created an amazing free guide for all of our listeners. You can get it by texting the word “smarter” to the number 44222 or by go to scienceofsuccess.co and joining our email list. 

If you want to get all the incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we talked about in the show and much more, be sure to check out our show notes page. You can get it on our website, scienceofsuccess.co. Just hit the show notes button at the top. We have show notes for this episode and all of our previous episodes. 

Thanks again and we’ll see you on the next episode of The Science of Success.

Uncover the Root of Your Pain, How to Smash Perfectionism, Love Yourself, and Live a Richer Life with Megan Bruneau

In this episode we discuss why the “happiness” movement has done us a disservice and sometimes makes things worse, how perfectionism creates an illusion of control and distorts your reality, how to become aware of the critical inner voice at the root of your pain and unhealthy habits, the incredible power of self compassion, and much more with Megan Bruneau.

Megan Bruneau is a psychotherapist, wellness coach, writer, podcast host and creator of oneshrinksperspective.com After years of perfectionism-fueled depression, anxiety, and eating disorders, she discovered how to like herself, take risks, and find success without beating herself up to get there. 

• Why Megan advocates a holistic approach to mental health

• Why the “happiness” movement has done us a disservice and sometimes makes things worse

• How to become aware of the critical inner voice at the roof of your pain and unhealthy habits

• What your “secondary emotions" are and why its so important to pay close attention to them

• How you internalize self judgement from your childhood experiences

• You can have expectations about mood not just performance and that can create suffering

• The importance of giving yourself permission to feel feelings even when they are uncomfortable

• What your physiological symptoms look like when you experience a fight or flight response

• How to build tolerance and grow your “emotional muscle”

• The tools you can use (with a concrete example) to stop a downward spiral of anxiety

• Things you might do that actually make a negative emotional response worse

• The importance of making space for difficult feelings ( through mindfulness )

• How to have deep self compassion and treat yourself with kindness

• What exactly to say to yourself when you’re dealing with difficult emotions

• Why you should treat yourself like a dear friend who is suffering

• How the “self esteem” movement screwed you up and created many of your emotional challenges

• What happens when your self worth is dependent on being better than other people

• How Megan defines perfectionism (and why you might be a perfectionist without even realizing it)

• The critical importance of self compassion and how you can practice it

• The importance of understanding the concept of "common humanity"

• We define mindfulness and its core components, and discuss how to practice it

• Why painful feelings don't make you broken, but are a natural part of the human experience

• The huge downsides of having your self worth tied to your achievements

• Why your fear of difficult and uncomfortable emotions is the roof of your suffering

• The exact internal dialogue you should use if you constantly put too much pressure on yourself

• The massive danger of “globalizing” negative experiences

• Why giving up high expectations actually enhances your performance

• Why you should change for your focus from being productive to focusing on what’s meaningful

• How you can “become friends” with difficult emotions

• And MUCH more!

If you are frustrated, suffering, or struggling with uncomfortable emotions, listen to this episode!

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Book] The Compassionate Mind by Paul Gilbert PhD

• [Book] Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself by Kristin Neff

• [Website] One Shrink’s Perspective

• [Personal Site] meganbruneau.com

• [Book] When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times by Pema Chodron

• [Website] Mindful Self-Compassion, Christopher Germer, PhD

• [SOS Episode] How To Put Your Body In Relaxation Mode, Reduce Stress, and Develop Body Awareness with International Yoga Expert Tiffany Cruikshank

• [Amazon Author Search] Alan Watts Book Catalogue

• [Video] “You’re It” by Alan Watts

• [Video] The Dream of Life by Alan Watts

• [Video] We Are All Connected ft. Sagan, Feynman, deGrasse Tyson & Bill Nye

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to the Science of Success with your host, Matt Bodnar.


[00:00:12.4] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success. I'm your host, Matt Bodnar. I’m an entrepreneur and investor in Nashville, Tennessee, and I’m obsessed with the mindset of success and the psychology of performance. I’ve read hundreds of books, conducted countless hours of research and study, and I am going to take you on a journey into the human mind and what makes peak performers tick, with the focus on always having our discussion rooted in psychological research and scientific fact, not opinion.


In this episode, we discuss why the happiness movement has done us a disservice and sometimes actually makes things worse. How perfectionism creates an illusion of control and distorts your reality, how to become aware of the critical inner voice at the root of your pain and unhealthy habits, and the incredible power of self-compassion and much more, with Megan Bruneau. The science of success continues to grow with more than 640,000 downloads, listeners in over a hundred countries, hitting them with new noteworthy and more. 


A lot of our listeners are curious about how to organize and remember all this information. I get tons of listener emails and comments saying, “Matt, you read so many books, you do so much research, how do you keep track of all this stuff?” We put together an incredible guide for anybody that’s listening, you can get it for totally for free that will help you organize and remember all of this incredible information. This is how I keep track of everything, it’s the personal system that I use and get it totally for free.


All you have to do is text the word “smarter” to the number 44222. Again, it’s a guide we created called How to Organize and Remember Everything. I get emails all the time, listeners telling me how much they love this guide and how awesome it is. You can get it, all you have to do is text the word “smarter” to the number 44222 or you can go to scienceofsuccess.co, put in your email and we’ll send you the free guide today.


In our previous episode, we discussed lessons from 25 years of studying the evolution of human emotion, examined whether the Machiavellian concept of power still works, explored the surprising scientific data on how you can acquire power, and looked closely the foundations of enduring power from studies of military units on how to achieve and maintain power with Dr. Dacker Keltner. If you want to understand deeply how to acquire power and what makes you lose it, listen to that episode.


[0:02:35.1] MB: Today we have another exciting guest on the show, Megan Bruneau. Megan is a psychotherapist, wellness coach, writer, podcast host and the creator of oneshrinksperspective.com. After years of perfectionism fueled depression anxiety, eating disorders and more, she discovered how to like herself, take risks and find success without beating herself up to get there. 


Megan, welcome to the science of success.


[0:02:58.8] MB1: Thanks so much for having me Matt. I’m stoked to be here.


[0:03:01.2] MB: Well we’re very excited to have you on. So, for listeners who may not be familiar with you, tell us a little bit about yourself.


[0:03:06.9] MB1: Sure. Oh gosh, what do you want to know? Like you said, I’m a psychotherapist, I’m a wellness coach, a writer, podcast host, all of that and I have a real interest in helping people change the relationships to themselves so that they’re able to take the risks that they want and follow their dreams and that kind of thing. I have a background in personal training, nutrition, yoga, so I take like a really holistic approach to mental health but I’m not like anti-medication or anything like that. 


Yeah, I also have a real vested interest in helping people realize the utility in their emotions because I think we have the slight super pathologizing culture that we live in that tells people they shouldn’t feel sad or anxious or any of those sorts of things, and the happiness movement has really done us a disservice. My main purpose is for being out there or to help people learn how to like themselves more and make space for their difficult feelings and experiences.


[0:03:57.2] MB: So when you say “the happiness movement has done us a disservice”, tell me about that?


[0:04:01.3] MB1: Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot in positive psychology and like the happiness industry that I think is very helpful for people, particularly a focus on self-growth and looking inward and things like that. However, there’s a lot around like positive thinking and choosing happy and you see a lot of this stuff out there on Instagram and hear people saying like, “Happiness is a choice.”


What that does is it actually makes people feel worse, especially if you’re dealing with depression or going through a rough time and even like the idea of gratitude while gratitude is a super effective intervention if used effectively. If you just kind of like are using it to invalidate what you’re going through and you’re like, “Oh, there’s children starving in Africa or this are first world problems, you don’t have any reasons to be upset.” What it does is it creates what we call secondary emotions.


We have primary emotions and we have secondary emotions and our primary emotions are basically the feelings that we feel that are super evolutionary. Like, they’re there for a reason. You feel loneliness because it will make you connect, you feel anxiety because it’s telling you to prepare for something or be vigilant or be on the lookout because you may be in danger. Sometimes we feel depression because we’re not living the life that we want to live and depression is telling us, we need to sort our shit out.


Really like every emotion has utility in it and a lot of this emotions are very uncomfortable and they’re meant to be that way because that’s motivating. We’re far more motivated to take action when we feel uncomfortable in order to alleviate that discomfort. This idea that we need to only feel comfortable emotions, such as like happiness and excitement and calm, what happens is when we start feeling this uncomfortable emotions which I thought is like primary evolutionary emotions, we then judge ourselves for feeling them.


So we’re like, “Oh my gosh, you're so weak or you’re pathetic or you’re being ingrate or you’re doing it wrong like you just can’t be happy like everyone else,” and then we create this layer of what as I said were called secondary emotions which come out of self-judgment and that might be shame or anxiety or anger for feeling sadness or shame or guilt or depression or whatever. So basically like, what this happiness movement has done is it’s created, in some cases for some a lot of people, another layer of emotions and another layer of suffering that comes out of judging ourselves for feeling anything that’s not happiness. Does that make sense?


[0:06:21.9] MB: That definitely make sense. I’m curious, tell me or dive a little bit more into the idea of self-judgment?


[0:06:27.9] MB1: Yeah, so I mean we all have our inner dialogue going on that really evaluates the stimuli in our lives. So like external stuff and the world that our day to day and everything and like moment to moment, but we have this real inner voice and this is not like, “Oh, you’re hearing voices in your head.” It’s just like, if you start to pay attention to it you’ll notice you have thoughts and that’s like an interpretation of your experience and we tend to internalize.


Usually we internalize the voices of our caregivers or for some people if they’re really bullied in high school or had like a really critical sibling. But usually we — the way that we relate to ourselves is kind of a compilation of how the people around us have related to us growing up. So for some of us we’re like really hyper judgmental around anything that we do and we’re super self-critical and this kind of gets into perfection, which I imagine we’ll talk about it at some point.


We judge ourselves for anything that we perceive to be not meeting our expectations and I think when we think about expectations we oftentimes think of performance, but we have expectations for ourselves around our mood as well. Our thoughts that we have. Just our day to day that doesn’t necessarily always involve performance. We judge ourselves for how we feel. So that’s sort of self-judgment in the context of judging ourselves for having a certain emotional experience or a certain thought. But we just tend to be like, I mean, I imagine many people listening to this can relate to being hyper self-critical and self-judgmental or have inward judgment.


[0:08:10.5] MB: I think you made a really important point and something that kind of gets lost a lot of the time, which is that it’s easy to think about sort of anxiety or performance anxiety especially in the context of sort of performing or achieving a result. But the under current there is that we also have expectations about what our mood should be and if that doesn’t happen then we can get into this sort of cycles of self-judgment and waves of secondary emotions.


[0:08:37.2] MB1: Totally, and that’s really performance anxiety, you know? It takes us out of being able to perform and just be in the moment and be in the flow of what we’re doing best because we’re so hyper focused on the experience we’re having and that’s the same thing with social anxiety too, or really any form of anxiety. But it’s like, you know, you go into a setting and let’s say you’re feeling a bit anxious because you don’t know anybody there and you know, you’re maybe feeling a bit self-conscious and that’s normal.


Human beings want to be accepted, we want to be liked. That’s very primal of us, because if you weren’t accepted in caveman days like you’re probably going to die, right? It’s really natural to have that desire to be accepted and to not be rejected and to feel self-conscious and kind of wonder like, “Oh, I want to make sure that I’m socially acting in a way that will be received well as opposed to being rejected or isolated.” But often times with social anxiety, what happens is then we’re aware of that anxiety and we’re like, “Oh my god, you’re feeling anxious, stop it. You have to go into this, you’re going to rock it, you own it. You’re super confident and you don’t feel confident and people can see that and your failure and everyone can tell what you’re thinking.” 


And we start to really spiral with some of this thoughts that are really focused around how we believe we should be presenting ourselves emotionally as well as outwardly. So when we can give ourselves permission to feel feelings and some of them being uncomfortable ones while still having an experience, while still going up there and giving the presentation, while still going to the party and talking or going on a date or going on a podcast or whatever, then it’s much less painful and distressful because we’re like, “Yeah, that’s cool, I’m making space for some of those feelings. Those are just there to help me.”


[0:10:21.9] MB: So if you get caught in kind of a spiral of thoughts like that, what are some things you can do to break out of it?


[0:10:28.3] MB1: I mean, I think it’s sort of a spectrum because if we get so caught that we’re feeling like we’re on the verge of a panic attack. In that case, it might be helpful to remove yourself from the situation and kind of reset, right? I mean if you’re feeling like you’re having real physical symptoms and anxiety and, you know, you’re like sweating like crazy and you just can’t — because what happens with anxiety is it’s like the fight or flight response, right? So our body prepares for fight or flight and so what that looks like physiologically is like core starts pumping through our system and all of our blood kind of drains out of our prefrontal cortex, which is where logic and decision making happens and it goes into our large muscle groups, getting prepared to fight or flee.


Our pupils dilate and our digestion shuts off and we’re getting prepared because we feel stress, right? If you feel like you're at a point where physiologically you’re beyond the point of being able to kind of practice mindfulness, which is what I imagine we’ll get into as well. Then I would say like, remove yourself from the situation if possible and like give yourself permission to kind of reset. You know? Do something and this is — maybe it will be helpful to work with an example. What comes to mind for you now, when you think about feeling like you would be spiraling and just be like super overwhelmed with those thoughts and feelings?


[0:11:41.2] MB: Yeah, one thing that sometimes creates anxiety for me is like — I have mild claustrophobia, so being on a plane sometimes, I get very anxious.


[0:11:52.3] MB1: Yeah, okay. So this is an interesting one because, I mean, we have to also be realistic with our options, right? You’re not going to open the emergency exit and jump out of the plane, that’s just not an option. Maybe it is, I like to think that it’s not because I hope that you can’t open those things like a random bystander can’t if they get really anxious. So we also have to look, “Okay, what’s realistic?” Right? You’re feeling really claustrophobic on the plane and actually, I mean, that might be a place to practice more of the mindfulness that I’ll get into.


It also might be like, “Okay, what can I do in this situation to help me feel more comfortable? Can I go to the bathroom? Can I listen to some music? Can I focus on my breath? Is there something that I can do that can help me just stop the kind of spiraling thoughts and feelings?” But however, being realistic they like, you are on that plane and from the moment it takes off until the moment it lands, you can’t get off.


So that’s an interesting example because often times like we can remove ourselves from a situation and sometimes, like I’m a big proponent of “do what serves you better”. So in some cases like in a person’s healing or recovery or introspection or self-growth period of their life, you might need to take yourself — like let’s say you’re trying to get used to riding the subway, right? It’s something that causes you a lot of anxiety so for someone like yourself with claustrophobia, maybe that’s a challenge at times. Like you’re riding during rush hour, that’s going to be super stressful.


Through mindfulness and getting to know your limits and stuff, there might be times where you’re like, “Okay, I’m going to ride two stops and then I’m getting off because that’s just like too distressful for me and I’m not trying to make myself suffer more than I need to. However I’m trying to — I’m growing my emotional muscles,” you know what I mean? It’s kind of like going to the gym, we want to build tolerance or this difficult emotions that if we don’t pay attention to them, we end up becoming slaves to them.


So if every time you go on the subway you felt anxiety and you listened to that anxiety and did exactly what it told you, and you’re like, “I’m like I’m getting off.” You’re never going to be able to ride the subway. I realized of kind of like taking your plane example to the subway but I just feel like that might be an easier one to sort of show the different options, is that cool?


[0:13:58.9] MB: Yeah, that’s totally fine.


[0:14:01.3] MB1: Okay cool. So, if every time you get on the subway, you get off the moment you feel anxiety, it’s like that’s cool. Maybe that’s what you need? But it’s also not going to necessarily help you develop comfort with a discomfort anxiety gives you, you know what I mean? So, you want to be able to kind of find this balance where you’re like okay, some days you might feel empowered to ride the subway two to three stops and eventually you’re riding at like five, 10, 15 and eventually riding it for hours and that’s awesome. But other days you know, it might be too distressful for you and you can get off.


There’s like this kind of balance between being like, “Okay, I’m feeling a difficult emotion right now,” and in your case of being on the plane, it’s like this claustrophobia but ultimately that’s anxiety. “Here are my options, I want to alleviate — I want to cope with that anxiety. My options are, I can either remove myself from the situation that’s causing me anxiety or causing me this difficult emotion or I can kind of put up my umbrella and like the storm of this emotion and still be in the storm but comfort myself enough that I can cope with it.” That’s where like self-compassion comes in and that’s where connection comes in and that’s where self-soothing comes in.


So the first step would be, “Okay, what choice do I want to make here? Do I want to choose to fully remove myself from the situation that’s causing me this emotion so I can just like alleviate the emotion entirely? Or do I have enough resilience and resources in this moment to stick it out and it’s not going to be like so distressful that I’m going to feel traumatized essentially? If that’s the case, if I want to make the choice to stay then what do I need?” So In your case of the plane example, like you don’t really have a choice, you are on that plane and you're just going to have to put up your umbrella and hope that you have an umbrella and what does that look like? 


Is that music? Is that the person next to you? It’s that focusing on your breath? Is that going to the bathroom? What’s your kind of way of coping with that? But then the example of like the subway, you have to make that  decision, “Okay, am I going to get off and not feel that anxiety because I’m off and that’s very relieving but I also know that that’s not going to help me on my path toward building my emotional tolerance muscles? Or am I going to pay attention to that anxiety that I’m feeling and make some space for it and remind myself that it’s going to pass, it’s not permanent and remind myself that it’s not going to kill me and focus on my breath and put on that music or again talk to the person next to me or again, count to 10 or whatever you’re in practice self-compassion, all of that sort of stuff?” 


I guess like coming back to your original question of what are the tools that a person can enact when they’re feeling like they’re spiraling, and they’re aware of that? The first step is obviously like this mindfulness of becoming aware of what you're experiencing and noticing like, “Okay, what is happening for me right now? Okay, I notice I’m spiraling.” Then being like, “Am I in this place of spiraling where I need to just shut it off and get the fuck out of here? Or can I sit with the spiraling to a certain extent and pay attention to it and ask myself what I need so that I don’t necessarily need to remove myself from the party or stop the presentation or leave the date or turn off the podcast mic,” or whatever. Does that make sense?


[0:17:11.0] MB: Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense and the two things that I found super helpful in a situation like that where, you know, there was no way you can kind of leave is one kind of just really trying to practice kind of acceptance and accepting all the emotions and feelings that you’re having and the other one is something I know you’ve talked about, which is sort of the idea of impermanence and the sense that everything is temporary, all anxiety eventually subsides and so just sort of riding it out and accepting it as it is so that you can kind of eventually sort of move through it.


[0:17:44.8] MB1: Totally, I mean, we live in a world where we’re sold this message that everything is permanent and we need to reach this permanent state of whatever or of happiness or success and like that’s just not reality. That sells a lot of things because people think if they buy something and then they’re going to be happy or if they get married or if they buy the house or if they get the promotion or whatever and that’s just now how life works. I mean, life is like a series of experiences woven together and ultimately what it all comes back to is like the sensations that we feel.


Those are a result of our interpretations and our emotional experiences and when we can make peace with the fact that nothing is permanent, everything is impermanent, everything is constantly changing, it makes it — it’s actually, I mean, it’s painful on some levels because it’s like, “Oh, that’s too bad. I really wanted to just like grab happiness and hold onto it for the rest of my life.” But it’s also very liberating because we’re like, “Wow, any of this painful experiences that I make currently be going through or that I’m afraid of going through, those are going to pass as well.” It’s kind of the like “this too shall pass”.


In those moments, when we’re going through that storm of whatever the emotional experience is, we have things that we can do that can make it worse such as judging ourselves or pushing the emotion down or telling ourselves that we’re pathetic or whatever or telling ourselves it’s going to last forever and that’s like — there’s a Buddhist saying that like “pain times struggle equals suffering” and that’s when we create suffering. Life has pain in it, that’s just like what life is. It’s filled with grief and disappointment and loss and sadness and things not going the way that you want them to and like inevitably there are going to be painful emotions alongside all of the beautiful, wonderful really comfortable ones. When we judge ourselves for feeling those, we create additional suffering. So that’s kind of like the whole “pain times struggle equals suffering” thing. 


So if you think about you’re going out there into the emotional storm that you can’t avoid, you make things a lot worse by practicing self-judgment and all the things I mentioned and that’s kind of like being like, “Oh, I think I’m just going to like, I don’t’ know, take off all my clothes and like, I don’t know, roll around in the snow or something like that.” Like that probably would make the storm worse. However, there are certain things that you can do again such as like putting up that umbrella or putting on a jacket and mixing together a snowstorm and rain storm, whatever storm works for you; come up with your own metaphor. But basically through practicing self-compassion which is making space for the difficult feeling through mindfulness.


Reminding ourselves of like we’re human and, you know, emotions are a natural part of our experience and it doesn’t mean that we’re broken, it doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with us and many other people, millions of other people are feeling a very similar emotion or the same emotion at this time and that’s kind of what unites all of us and then also practicing self-kindness, which is essentially like saying to yourself what you would to a friend and one that is I advise clients to use and I use it with myself is starting your dialogue with yourself in a moment of distress with, “It’s understandable your feeling ____ because ____”. 


Something like, “Hey, it’s understandable that you’re feeling anxious right now. Because you want to perform well in this presentation, or like you want to give a good impression on this date or you know, you want to do well on this test or you want to do well in this interview or wherever the anxiety is coming from like it’s coming from a good place, it’s there to help you,” right? So just taking away that layer of judgment that comes from stoop feeling anxious you’re being so weak and actually being like, “Hey, it’s understandable you’re feeling anxious right now.” Validating your experience. 


So that’s kind of like one of the ways that we can make space for that emotion and be able to kind of like ride it out, but then also as you said, relying on this piece of impermanence it’s like, “I’m going to practice this self-compassion with the knowledge that the emotion will pass,” that’s a central positive self-compassion. Just makes it far less distressful and anxiety provoking to have a difficult emotional experience when we have all of this in mind.


[0:21:45.7] MB: So tell me a little bit more about kind of self-kindness and self-compassion and you mentioned something about the way you would treat a friend.


[0:21:53.0] MB1: Totally. So, self-compassion like the real guru’s, there are Paul Gilbert and Kristin Neff and like they’re amazing. Paul Gilbert has a book called The Compassionate Mind and Kristin Neff has one that’s just called Self-Compassion: Changing the way you relate to yourself, or something like that. They’re both like amazing, amazing resources for anyone who is interested in this further but basically what self-compassion is, it’s a few things, it’s sort of like the — first it’s kind of like the response to the self-esteem movement of the 90’s that really screwed a lot of us up. 


So basically what movement did, it was like, “Everyone gets a gold star, everyone, you’re the best. You're perfect.” And in reality, that’s not statistically possible because statistically we’re all average you know what I mean? Some of us are better singers than others, some of us are better tennis players than others. But at the end of the day, we’re all ultimately average and there’s no sort of like — no one’s more worthy than anyone else and for some people, that can be really terrifying especially for people who struggle with perfectionism, where their self-worth is very dependent on believing that they’re better than other people.


So what self-compassion is it’s sort of a response, we finally learn, “Oh my god, telling people that they’re perfect doesn’t work.” Because what it does, like when you tell your child that they’re perfect, they’re the best, they actually then, their self-esteem or their self-worth gets very tied to always believing they’re the best. Then they get on the real world where they realize they’re not the best and they’re like, “Oh my god, who am I? I’m worthless, I’m nothing, so long as I’m not the best,” you know?


Self-compassion is the answer to that. Self-compassion is like, “Hey, we’re all imperfect, you’re imperfect, I’m imperfect and that’s okay. We’re all kind of like fumbling along through life together and nobody really knows what the fuck they’re doing but like we’re trying and that’s cool, you’re allowed to be imperfect and that doesn’t make you not worthy or not lovable or not desirable or any of those sort of things.”


So that’s kind of like the underlying like, because a lot of people when they hear self-compassion or “self-love”, if you want to call it that, they think of it as being like, “I’m going to look in the mirror, I’m going to tell myself I’m the best,” and it’s like, no, it’s about sometimes looking in the mirror and being like, “You’re having a really rough day, that’s okay. Yeah, maybe you're not super on your game and that’s okay too.” There’s still like a desire for growth and learning and getting to know yourself better and being a better human. But the three, if you want to break self-compassion down, the three main kind of like action items that come out of it are mindfulness, self-kindness, and this idea of like common humanity. So, I’ll speak about each of those. 


Mindfulness, you probably heard of mindfulness before. Mindfulness is like a real buzz word this days and in some cases I think it’s being misinterpreted because there’s just such a focus on “just be in the present”. That is a big part of mindfulness but what often gets lost is like the central components of mindfulness are non-judgment and acceptance and just kind of like curiosity and observation of that current moment. So it’s not just about being present, it’s being present without judgment and with acceptance and that’s like, we can practice mindfulness toward the anxiety that we feel, the thought that we’re having, the bodily sensations that we’re experiencing or the pain that we’re feeling. What we perceive of around is like our current interpretation of the weather. We can practice mindfulness to kind of anything that like taps into any of our senses. 


Mindfulness is like the first place that self-compassion starts because mindfulness is essentially like being aware without judgement, with compassion, with acceptance and just really noticing what is happening with this sort of more like, almost as if you’re watching a movie, you’re not over identifying with it. So when you think about how we react to life, basically what happens is there’s a stimuli like there’s something that happens, some sort of situation and then we have this interpretation of what that is and often times that’s where the self-judgment comes in. Then we react. Often times we forget that there’s like the interpretation piece in the middle like we just have a situation and then we react. Something happens and we freak out. 


We don’t realize, well actually, there’s like this space in there that through practicing mindfulness and getting to know a little bit more about what that is and bringing more of it into your life. You actually get a lot more control over how you react to the world around you actually really empowers you to not necessarily have this unhealthy or unswerving reactions through emotions. Mindfulness is basically being like, “Okay, I notices I’m feeling something or I notice like a situation just happened and let me sit with that and just kind of like spend a moment acknowledging what’s going to be the best reaction here?” And then choosing how I want to react. It’s like something that’s where a lot of meditation is very helpful and yoga and focusing on your breath and just starting to really notice your thoughts without necessarily judging them or reacting or noticing your feelings. Because then that empowers you to actually make a decision, it’s more deserving for you.


So basically, mindfulness is this idea of, as I said, being aware and so you start to become aware of let’s say like this critical inner voice that is ultimately at the root of a lot of your pain or a lot of your unhealthy habits. So that’s like the first step there, you’ve got the mindfulness, you’re paying attention. Then, there’s this self-kindness piece, which is like, “What would I say to a friend in this situation? Am I going to tell a friend that they’re like a huge screw up and they’re never going to amount to anything and no one’s ever going to love them and they’re pathetic? Or would I tell a friend like my god, you’re so fat and ugly and no one’s going to love you and my god, I can’t believe you have cellulite, like you're a failure at life? Am I going to tell a friend the same things that I’m telling myself right now?” Probably not, right? 


Because most of us are former compassionate and understandable and flexible with other people than we are with ourselves. So there’s a mindfulness piece of recognizing like what’s going on, “How am I reacting to myself right now? What am I experiencing?” Then there’s the self-kindness piece and that’s where like the example I used of “this is understandable because ___” can be really helpful. Then this common humanity piece, which is like, “Hey, I’m not alone in this. We’re all in this together. Everyone goes through this sorts of experiences and feelings like heartbreak, disappointment, grief, loss, pain, frustration, envy, jealousy, rejection, anxiety, depression, disappointment.” 


I’m probably repeating myself now, but all of this painful feelings are just part of the human condition and part of what it is, be alive. It doesn’t make you broken that you’re feeling them, it makes you human and that’s like what unites us. So just really reminding yourself, “I’m not the only person going through this right now, this doesn’t not make me broken, this does not make me like a bad human or a failure or like crazy, or any of the kinds of pathologizing terms that we call ourselves when we experience something that we believe is not in line with that happiness movement that I talked about earlier.


So the common humanity piece is really helpful. Not for like being like, “Oh, everyone else feels this so therefore you shouldn’t be upset.” It’s more like, “Hey, you’re not broken, it’s cool, it’s okay to feel this way, like make space for it,” you know? Those are like the main — that’s what self-compassion is ultimately. Just to recap, it’s the mindfulness piece, it’s the self-kindness piece, it’s the common humanity piece and when you can kind of bring all of those into your experience or any painful experience, it is like that umbrella or that jacket in a storm that’s going to be really helpful for you in weathering it.


[0:29:06.8] MB: I’d love to dig in more on perfectionism, that’s something that we’ve had a lot of listeners email in and ask about and are very interested in and I love the definition that you use, which is the idea that you’re self-worth is dependent on being better than other people. Tell me more about that.


[0:29:25.3] MB1: Totally. So I define perfectionism as like having five characteristics and yeah, like I said, that’s sort of like self-worth being dependent on being better than other people. That’s definitely one of them and really how I define that one is, your self-worth is basically dependent on your achievements and your performance and outcomes and doing and productivity and how you look and inevitably because we judge our performance in comparison to other people, and comparison to what the “average performance” might be and that’s like our frame of reference then yeah, actually it is basically like being better than others. Being the best and so that’s a huge part of it. 


But there are also several other components that I think are really important and that we don’t always recognize when we think of perfectionism. There’s obviously like the fear of failure piece and that’s like a pretty classic one. But really what’s underneath that is like a fear of difficult emotions and, in my opinion, that’s really what’s at the root of all the problems in the world. We don’t know how to sit with our uncomfortable emotions and in our attempt to alleviate our emotional pain, we react impulsively or we react in like none-mindful ways. So basically it’s like yes, there’s the fear of the feelings that come along with failure, but there’s also just the fear of any uncomfortable emotion. A fear of like the emotions that come about with uncertainty, we’re feeling out of control. Because those are really uncomfortable experiences, however they’re very inevitable experiences in life.


So people who are highly perfectionistic tend to be incredibly like routine and want to make sure that they can predict exactly how something’s going to go, and that they feel this illusion of control in their behavior or their environment because the thought of feeling like anxiety or feeling out of control or feeling inadequacy or whatever other difficult emotions they’re struggling with is really, really terrifying. So they kind of create this box that they stay in and this sort of like illusion that they’ve got it all together with themselves, but what that comes out of is like not really taking risks or not putting themselves into situations where they might fail or where they might feel uncomfortable emotions.


It’s like this vicious cycle because there’s then the perception that they never really fail at anything or they never feel difficult emotions and they’re like succeeding but the reason they’re “succeeding” is because they’re not taking any risks that whatever allowed them to fail. So that whole — the fear of the difficult emotions is like a big one there. But then there are two other ones that are really indicative of perfectionism. One is this idea of the critical inner voice. So I mentioned that earlier, like just being super hard on ourselves and responding to ourselves in ways that we would never speak to a friend. 


That perpetuates all the other stuff because it’s like, “Oh well, if I know that if I fail in my eyes or I don’t meet expectations, then I’m going to respond to myself by being a huge asshole and basically abusing myself and I don’t have like the tools to cope with that pain, then I’m definitely not going to take risks. Because if I fail, the way that I cope with failure is by essentially like self-abuse.” Then final one is these unrealistically high expectations. Again, it’s like all such a vicious cycle because then you have this unrealistically high expectations that are very inflexible as well. It’s like, “I expect myself to perform at 100%.”


Let’s say you wake up and you’re like super sick or you get dumped or your mom’s in the hospital or they’re just like things going on in your life or you’re just like in a low mood, right? PMSing, and you still hold yourself to those unrealistically high expectations. So we almost set ourselves up for failure in doing that and so it’s like this really paralyzing, super anxiety provoking way of relating to yourself and to life because it’s like you have to walk this fine, fine line where if you take the wrong step, everything crumbles and that’s why often times people who relate to being perfectionistic, can identify with being like they think they’re super anal or they’re high strung or they just don’t know how to relax and it’s because like there’s so much riding on whatever their next step is because at any wrong turn, everything could crumble and they’ll feel so terrible about themselves. 


Just like recap those five things for anyone listening. Fear of failure, fear of uncomfortable feelings, unrealistically high expectations, critical inner voice, and then your self-worth being dependent on these outcomes and achievements which can often lead to people feeling as though they’re bipolar. I get a lot of clients come in and they’re like, “Pretty sure I’m bipolar. Yesterday I felt really great, I was super happy. I looked good and things were going well at work,” and then the next day they’re like, “Then today I’m having a fat day and you know, I got like rejected by this guy and got feedback on this presentation and they said I needed to work on this thing. I just basically feel like a failure of a human.” And it’s like, “Well that’s not being bipolar, that’s having your self-worth be very dependent on the outcomes and achievements piece. Those are the kind of five factors of perfectionism.


[0:34:48.2] MB: That’s incredible and so much of that stuff, I think, not only resonates with me but I think will really resonate with a lot of our listeners. I feel like in many cases, I put a lot of pressure on myself and I’m curious, kind of walk me through maybe sort of a really simple example of an internal dialogue that you would use to kind of back away from something like that.


[0:35:09.4] MB1: Sure, yeah, what’s some — can you give me an example of what would be a position in which you’d be putting pressure on yourself?


[0:35:14.4] MB: I mean I think all kinds of different things. I don’t know if I have a specific instance.


[0:35:18.2] MB1: Okay, well let’s think of what would be something that listeners would relate to? Okay, so I think as women, we put a lot of — and men too obviously, but we put a lot of pressure on ourselves for our appearance and definitely that might be like, in terms of like how we feel and everything like that and not feeling sexy but a lot of times like women and people who are very perfectionistic put a lot of pressure on themselves around weight and like reaching a certain kind of goal that they perceive to be, again, that kind of like answer to their pain or will make them finally good enough, or help them finally reach that place where they never feel anxiety anymore, you know?


Or it might be a way of maintaining this illusion of like kind of control and not having to deal with the anxiety that might say that they’re not good enough, you I know? So I think with that example, there’s like the pressure of this ultimate goal or a pressure to always be a certain way that unfortunately really contaminates the joy that we could possibly have in life because it takes us away, it takes us out of any moment where we could actually just be there and experience it, and enjoy it because we’re constantly thinking like, “Oh, you know, what am I — I have to make sure that I’m getting to the gym, I have to make sure that I’m exercising. Or I have to make sure that it’s like, you know, I stay with this really tight parameters of my expectations for myself or my appearance.” 


In that case like self-compassion can be so powerful because it’s this idea that’s like, “Hey, hold up, your self-worth is not dependent on a number on the scale and when you’re on your death bed, is it really going to be that important how much you weight when you were 28, or whatever? And is that what you look for in your friends and in your partners, like their physical appearance, is that what’s most important?” And kind of like tapping in more deeply into your values and things like that. Just essentially giving yourself permission to be imperfect. 


Now, that’s something where it’s like I guess the pressure piece is more around this ultimate goal, which is a more — like that’s kind of perfectionism in like a systemic sense I suppose. But then there’s also like the perfectionism where I think might be more related to what you were talking about, which is like a performance piece that’s like more like an individual experience. So let’s say it’s like giving a presentation. So we have this pressure on ourselves and our mind starts to tell us things like, “You are, you have to ace this presentation and if you screw up then that means that like you are a — you’re unhirable and like you are just like a waste of life and no one’s ever going to take you seriously and oh my god, then you're not going to be able to get a job and like then there’s going to — six months are going to go by and you’re going to be unemployed and you’re going to have a gap on your resume and then what’s going to happen and then nobody’s ever going to want to hire you and then you’re going to become homeless and then you're like going to die,” or whatever.


We have these kind of like spiralistic thinking of believing that if something doesn’t go as planned with this pressure that we’re putting on ourselves then the worst thing ever is going to happen. It’s interesting because often times we don’t actually even like reach the point of, “Oh, I’m going to be homeless.” There’s just this like intense anxiety and fear around what happens if it doesn’t go how I expect or hope it to go? It can be helpful in those situations where you’re feeling a lot of pressure around your performance, whether it is like the presentation or the interview or the date or whatever to be like, “Okay, instead of this visualization chip,” I mean, and don’t get me wrong, visualization can be helpful. 


But instead of being like, “This is going to go perfectly, 100% yeah, it’s going to go so well, I’m not going to screw up at all,” which actually can keep our anxiety quite high because it keeps us in that very tight place where we can’t screw up, it can be helpful to be like, “Hey, you know what? You’re probably going to jumble your words at some point, you know? There might be something you say that doesn’t make a ton of sense or maybe your face is going to go red or maybe your palms are going to sweat a little bit and like maybe you’re not going to — in fact, you’re definitely not going to meet your expectations in every way because you’re a human and there’s like no, you’re not a robot, there’s no way you can make this go perfectly. But that’s okay.” 


Being able to permit yourself a little bit of like wiggle room in terms of the performance itself, that’s one way that you’re going to make your expectations like more realistic and thus make the anxiety less overwhelming because really when you think about it, all of our painful emotions to a certain extent are come out of like the disparity between our expectations and our reality. If your expectations are super high, there’s more of a chance that like your reality is going to fall below those expectations and in that space is going to be like disappointment, rejection, shame, guilt, anxiety, frustration like all those sorts of things.


So when we can kind of like lower the expectations, not in the sense that you’re becoming complacent or you're not still expecting success from yourself. But when you can make them like a little bit more realistic and be like, “Hey, there’s little more wiggle room there for having like the odd jumble of your words here and there or the odd sort of like embarrassing comment or something because you’re human and like that’s going to happen, then it alleviates the possibility of such strong emotions as a result of not reaching those expectations and then it also alleviates like the anxiety that we feel when we are expecting ourselves to hit that unrealistically high place. I’m like having a moment right now myself where I’m like, “I don’t know if this is really making any sense? And I don’t know if it’s going to be helpful,” you know?


[0:41:08.7] MB: It’s making a ton of sense, I think it’s super helpful.


[0:41:11.9] MB1: Okay, that’s good to hear. But you know, it’s interesting because even as I’m saying all of that, in my mind, I’m like, “This is interesting, I’m saying these things, but I wonder if this is actually helpful to the listener?” And like, “Oh my gosh, I wonder what Matt’s thinking right now? Is he going to go — is he and his producer after this going to be talking about this being like, “Wow, that girl was out to lunch,” right? I still have my mind that tells me this sorts of things and of course it can be helpful to seek a little bit of assurance and be like, “Matt, do I sound crazy?”


But it’s also helpful to just be like, “You know what? If that is the case, it’s okay,” you know? “You did your best, not everything you’re going to say is going to make perfect sense and that’s all right,” right? I think, really the central kind of theme there is like permit yourself to be a human, permit yourself to make some errors, that’s okay. The other thing that we tend to do is we just do something called globalizing. So when we don’t meet our expectations, such as let’s say it’s like the presentation and one presentation or one interview goes poorly and then we’re like, “Oh my god, I’m so bad at public speaking, I should never do this again, I am like the worst, I’m just like, I’m not a public speaker, I’m not good at that.”


Because we had a really hard time with the experience of “failure” in our eyes and so in order to prevent ourselves from ever feeling it again, we’re like, “I’m just never going to do that again, I’m going to avoid those situations and I determined that I am bad at public speaking or bad at you know, speaking in front of audiences or bad at giving presentations so I’m never going to do it.” That’s like very unhelpful because it prevents us from ever having opportunities to grow and learn and practice which is like what we need to get better at things. 


But ultimately also, it’s not the truth. You have one negative experience where you don’t meet your expectations or like you really bomb something out of countless experiences where you probably rocked it. That’s not helpful to be like, “Og no, I now suck at this,” right? That’s something to keep in mind as well, alongside this whole “let yourself be human” thing, also remember like don’t make an interpretation that because you failed once, you are a failure you know? Because you bombed a presentation that you don’t know how to give presentations. Or because you had one bad date that you’re undatable, you know? 


I would say in terms of things that people can take away from this, trying to really keep in mind those two major things of being like, let yourself be a human rather than telling yourself everything’s going to go perfectly, actually tell yourself you know what? Things aren’t going to go perfectly. Aim for like 80% in every area of your life, just aim for 80% and be like, “Look, I got 20% wiggle room, that’s cool, 80% is awesome.” That’s going to help alleviate a lot of your anxiety and then also just constantly reminding yourself like one instance of “failure” in your eyes does not make you a failure at whatever you’re’ trying to do well.
 
[0:43:58.5] MB: So, I’m curious for somebody that kind of striving for achievement, excellence, wants to be at the top of their field, how do you strike a balance between that and kind of the idea of self-compassion and sort of being kind to yourself?


[0:44:14.1] MB1: Totally, I think that’s a great question and I think it’s something a lot of people struggle with when they’re starting to move away from perfectionism and be like, “Okay, hold on, if I’m not performing to be the best like how do I still make sure that I’m successful and how do I still make sure that I’m not going to end up like not getting out of bed and gaining 200 pounds and just like dropping out of school or not working or whatever?”


So I think the first thing to recognize is that like, a real characteristic of perfectionism is all or nothing thinking. So we tend to think like, “Oh my gosh, if I’m not killing myself, trying to strive for success, I’m going to become like what I completely have zero respect for, which is like this crazy lazy person who’s just like a free loader and has no desire to live their life and it’s just like a waste. So we have the all or nothing thinking when it comes to that. So the first thing to recognize is, look, if you start being a little bit more self-compassionate to yourself, it actually enhances your performance because what it does is it gives you, it empowers you to take risks and you need to take risks and step out of your comfort zone to grow and to get better and to succeed more. 


So self-compassion is actually a tool for success. It’s not a tool that’s going to just like — it’s not like self-pity and just telling yourself you don’t need to keep striving for growth and development. So first of all just changing a bit of your understanding around what self-compassion actually means. It’s really like there to enhance your performance rather than deplete it. But then also like coming back to your values, ultimately. Again, having our self-worth and why we’re on this earth being dependent on, I don’t know, some recognition that it’s also impermanent. 


No one else really cares about too much and we’re the ones who put the most pressure on ourselves to look a certain way and achieve a certain amount. Who are we really doing this for and why? And what is that going to bring us? And to starting to ask these bigger questions which you’re not going to answer in one sitting but it’s something to meditate on and something to think about more and be like, “Okay, do I want to continue to ride this rollercoaster of feeling good when everything is going well in my life but it being like a huge liability,” because you don’t have a lot of control and all these painful things in life are inevitable? Or do you want to come back to a more sustainable place of self-worth which would be like, “Let me take a look at my values,” and lead with values versus performance. 


Something that I was really huge for me was changing my perspective around what is productive, to viewing it as meaningful. When we think of, “Okay I have to be productive all the time,” there are only a few things that bin to the ball of productivity, right? Whereas if I can take a step back and be like, “Okay, I want my life to be meaningful.” Do I want my life to be productive? Why? So that when I die I can leave behind a bunch of papers that no one’s really going to read or I can feel really good about like the weight that I reached when I was X age? That it’s ultimately going to change because everything is impermanent. It really comes back to this idea of think about when I am on my death bed how do I want to look back on my life and what will have been important to me and what really does make me feel good moment to moment? 


Yes, achieving to a certain extent does that, but it’s also very fleeting and with perfectionism we achieve something but then we raise the bar higher because it’s never good enough because there’s this fear of letting ourselves bask in our successes or enjoyment. So for me personally, I really enjoy connecting and most humans do. Again, that’s a very primal instinct of ours is to connect and to have intimacy with people and I also really enjoy learning. I also really enjoy challenge but not because I want to achieve something. Because I love the process of creating and that’s where I get my meaning from. 


So I guess I’d encourage listeners to think, “What gives me a sense of meaning and purpose in life and can I lead with that as opposed to leading with a focus on outcomes and achievements?” And when you lead with that, it’s like you win every time. You’re always successful, because even if the company that you’re creating isn’t making the revenue you were hoping for, you know that your desire to build and create and help or have an impact or whatever it is that is a reason behind you starting this company, you’re still doing that. You’re still succeeding in all of those areas in terms of living with your values and leading with that. Yeah, maybe you’re not getting the revenue that you are hoping for. 


But at the end of the day, you’re still meeting your expectations in terms of living in line with your values and that’s how humans stay happy, is by feeling that sense of meaning and feeling like we’re here for a reason and feeling connected. And so I would encourage people to really start to peel away some of these onion layers and question some of their beliefs around what they’re here for. For me, a really formative moment was when I was 24 and I was finishing my masters and I was struggling pretty seriously with anorexia and I was very, very, very thin and I was with this guy and I had this world view that if I am successful and I am a certain weight, I can make sure that the world would not crumble around me and everything will be good and everything will be fine. 


And I was not in a happy place at all, but these excessive like overworking and overachieving and maintaining a very low weight were my ways of feeling good enough and that was my perfectionism. That was how it manifested and then the guy dumped me. He left me for someone who’s in his master program. It was the most devastating breaking open experience of my life and it literally took me two years to get over, but it was also the most transformative experience of my life because not only did I then learn how to deal with difficult emotions and “become friends with them”, I guess you could say. But it also turned upside down this world view of mine that was like that’s what’s important in life and that’s what people value in you and that’s the way to feel happy and that’s the way to feel good is to achieve and do this and do that. 


You know what? People aren’t going to love you more based on how much you achieve and if there are people who are doing that, those aren’t the people you want to surround yourself with. So come back to what do you value, what is important to you? When you’re on your death bed what do you want to have felt like you’ve experienced in this life? And do you want to hide behind the desk for the next 50 years and then die? Is that a good life to you? Maybe for some people it is, I don’t know? But I guess I would encourage people to really look at that. 


And the other thing, I know I have been talking for a long time, but the other thing that was really formative for me is Allen Watts’s perspective on viewing life not even viewing it as a journey because for some people it’s like, you know, view it as a journey and it’s all about the destination. Yeah, that’s great but let’s take it to the next step. He talks about viewing it as a song. You don’t listen to a song because you are waiting for it to end. You’re not trying to get to a destination point. You’re listening to it to have an experience. You want to have emotions evoked and sometimes songs make you feel crappy in a really healing way and sometimes they make you feel like — I mean, that’s why there’s so many kinds of music. 


And so try to think of your life as a song and if you can just experience all of it and be open to all of it and trust that there are different emotions that you’re going to experience and you’re there to pay attention to it and to be in it rather than to get somewhere, those were super performative experiences for me. So hopefully there’s something in there that your listeners can take from those pieces of advice around taking away the — I guess finding the balance between achieving yes and seeing what’s important, but why is it important and how can you find that balance where you can still experience life and feel happy?


[00:52:23.3] MB: You know it’s funny, I’m a huge fan of Allan Watts and he creeps into a surprising number of conversations we have here on the show. So I am really glad that you brought him up. That was an incredible explanation and some really good insights. For listeners who are curious and want to do some more homework on this, I know you mentioned two books already, what are some resources that you think would be good for them to check out?


[00:52:45.9] MB1: Yeah, for sure. Definitely those books that I mentioned. So it was The Compassionate Mind by Paul Gilbert and Self-Compassion by Kristin Neff and actually I think Self-Compassion by Kristin Neff is a probably more practical one for people if they want to choose one between the two and it’s more in lined like it’s a woman who’s written it. She talks about traditionally female experiences that we go through. But of course, I would love for you to check out my website, meganbruneau.com, there’s oneshrinksperspective.com, but also you can see more of my resources all compiled together at meganbruneau.com and there’s a lot that I have written on self-compassion and overcoming perfectionism and things like that. 


Really anything, a hugely formative book for me was When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron. That’s more of secular Buddhism and that’s actually where self-compassion comes out of. It’s more or a — and mindfulness and all of that. It all comes out of secular Buddhism so it’s a very different way of relating to the world, relating to your feelings, relating to life. And if someone is going through a difficult time right now who’s listening to this podcast, that book absolutely changed my life. But the amount of people for whom it has changed their lives, just go to Amazon and read the reviews. So I really encourage people to read that book. 


Chris Germer is another person who does a lot of work on this. Oh, what is his website? I think it’s mindfulofcompassion.com but I’m not 100% sure. Maybe I’ll get it back to you and you can put it in the show notes. But there are like, really just like anything in the realm of — you can just Google “self-compassion” and there are tons of sites that come up and just start to delve into this a little bit more deeply and download some audio meditations and stuff to your phone. Because a big part of self-compassion is actually becoming more in tune with our body and like feeling a sense of compassion from ourselves like physically. 


So it’s not just a mental thing and for many people who are perfectionistic, we are so detached from our bodies. Like we don’t even — we have no idea what we’re feeling because what we feel is uncomfortable, we do something to turn it off. So we either like distract through some form of addiction or whatever, or we avoid it by like removing ourselves from the situation that’s making us feel that way or just never going into a situation that makes us feel that way.


So a big part of self-compassion is also becoming more in touch with your body. Listening to some meditations and things that can help you get more in touch with like actually what you’re feeling physically can be really helpful and then also like yoga. I think everyone should do yoga. It’s just such a great way to reconnect with your body and to practice a lot of the work that you learn reading these books, to actually implement it because you can have all the theory and all in the world but if you're not actually implementing it and experiencing it, it’s not going to be that super beneficial and it’s not going to help you rewire your brain so that your brain defaults to self-compassion, as mine does now finally like several years later. But it comes through the practice of actually learning a new language. 


You will always have the language itself, criticism, you can go back to that if you want to but what we want to do is we want to help you learn how to default to self-compassion. In yoga you can start to practice being like, “Oh, this is interesting, I’m noticing I’m comparing myself to that person, they’re doing that pose better than I am. Or I notice I’m beating myself up because I can’t do this or I fell out of the pose. Or I notice that I’m like, being super, super competitive and you know, is that helpful for me? And what that’s like? And what emotions are going through it? Am I judging myself for being competitive?” 


Maybe I can make space for my sense of comparing and being competitive, but also take a step back and be like, “Is this helpful for me? Can I relate in a different way?” So I guess I would recommend, check with those resources but also bring some form of mindfulness meditation, movement practice into your life where you can actually start to get to know yourself better and how perfectionism and self-criticism acts on you and then start to actually put into practice a lot of the stuff that you may have heard today and that you will learn through reading these resources.


[0:56:39.0] MB: Well we will make sure to include all of those resources in the show notes at scienceofsuccess.co. One more time, where can people find you online?


[0:56:46.9] MB1: Yeah, check me out — so meganbruneau.com and then you can also find me like I’m on Instagram, I’m on Facebook, I’m on Twitter, I’m on YouTube. I’d love for you to send me an email if you have any questions or if you just want to reach out and say “hey” or reflect or whatever. It’s just megan.bruneau@gmail.com. Again, hopefully Matt can include this in the show notes. Yeah, so definitely reach out to me. I love hearing form people, it helps me come back to my values which is like “I think I’m on this earth to help”, you know?


It helps remind me that even though there are a lot of trolls out there who love to say really negative things, because that’s a part of this world as well, there are also people that appreciate it. I love those sort of warm fuzzies and stuff like that but I also want to help you on your journey in whatever way I can so if there’s a question you had or if there’s a resource you’re looking for, let me know and I’ll do my best to help guide you on your journey because we’re all in this together.


[0:57:44.2] MB: Well, Megan, thank you so much. This has been a fascinating conversation, full of actionable insights and some really great stuff. So we really appreciated having you on the show.


[0:57:53.1] MB1: It was awesome and it’s such a pleasure to be here Matt. Thank you so much for having me. 


[0:57:56.4] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the science of success. Listeners like you are why we do this podcast. The emails and stories we receive from listeners around the globe bring us joy and fuel our mission to unleash human potential. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email address is matt@scienceofsuccess.co. I would love to hear from you, and I read and respond to every listener email.


The greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend, either live or online. If you enjoyed this episode, please, leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes. That helps more and more people discover the Science of Success. Lastly, I get a ton of listeners asking, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all this information?” Because that we created an amazing free guide for all of our listeners. You can get it by texting the word “smarter” to the number 44222, or by going to scienceofsucces.co and joining our email list. People love this guide. I get emails all the time, people telling me how much it’s changed their lives and how awesome it is. 


If you want to get all the incredible information that we talked about, links, transcripts, videos, everything that we mentioned in this interview, and much more, you can get all of our show notes at sciencesofsuccess.co. Just go to scienceofsuccess.co, hit the show notes button at the top. You can get show notes for this episode and any of our previous episodes as well. We have transcripts, the whole nine yards. Lastly I want to say thanks again and we’ll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success. 

Influence Anyone With Secret Lessons Learned From The World’s Top Hostage Negotiators with Former FBI Negotiator Chris Voss

In this episode we discuss the secret lessons hostage negotiators around the world use to win the day, how to understand and influence people’s emotional drivers, the two words that can transform any negotiation, the biggest hallmarks of powerful master negotiators and much more with the FBI’s former lead international kidnapping negotiator Chris Voss.

Chris Voss is the founder and CEO of the Black Swan Group, an adjunct professor at Georgetown and University of Southern California. During his 24 year term with the FBI where he most recently served as the FBI’s lead international kidnapping negotiator, Voss worked approximately 150 kidnappings worldwide, from the Middle East to Haiti including a number of high-profile kidnappings. Voss has been trained by the FBI, Scotland Yard and Harvard in the art of negotiation and negotiated with likes of terrorists, hostage takers, and bank robbers.

We discuss:

• FBI’s behvaioral change stairway they use to negotiate with terrorists and hostage takers

• Why emotional intelligence is at the forefront of business success today

• How to leverage “tactical empathy” in your life to achieve the results you want

• How to create leverage to influence anyone in the world by understanding their emotional drivers

• Why you should never be mean to someone who could hurt you by doing nothing

• Why understanding is NOT the same as agreement and why that is important

• The biggest barrier to negotiation success is not complexity - its overcoming the awkwardness

• How repeating the last 1-3 words someone said can have a huge impact

• Why winning in a negotiation is not the same as beating the other side

• The incredible importance of listening and how you can cultivate “active listening"

• The power and importance of open ended and clarifying questions

• How to draw out the hidden cards from the other side of a negotiation

• The secrets hostage negotiators AROUND THE WORLD use regardless of cultural dynamics

• The two most important words in any negotiation

• The three different types of negotiator and the strengths and weaknesses of each

• How changing one question totally transformed the kidnapping negotiation for Jose Escobar

• Why Chris would “never lie to anyone he’s not going to kill"

• Why Chris hates compromise in any negotiation

• The “F Word” in negotiations and why you should be careful with it

• One of the biggest hallmarks of powerful negotiators

• And much more!

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that!). 

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Book] Getting More by Stuart Diamond

• [Book] Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss and Tahl Raz

• [Website] The Black Swan Group

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

[00:02:23.3] MB: Today we have an incredible guest on the show, Chris Voss. Chris is the founder and CEO of the Black Swan Group, an adjunct professor at the Georgetown and the University of Southern California. During his 24 year term with the FBI where he most recently served as the FBI’s lead international kidnapping negotiator, Chris worked with approximately a 150 different kidnappings worldwide from the Middle East to Haiti including a number of high profile kidnappings. He also has been trained by the FBI, Scotland Yard and Harvard in the art of negotiation and negotiated with the likes of terrorists, hostage takers and bank robbers. 

Chris, welcome to The Science of Success.

[00:03:01.2] CV: Thank you very much, happy to be here. 

[00:03:03.8] MB: Well we’re super excited to have you on. So you obviously have an incredible background, tell us a little bit about your story and how you got down this path?

[00:03:14.0] CV: You know I was walking through the corn fields of Iowa when I realized that I had to be a hostage negotiator, no. You know, a police officer, FBI agent, New York City, part of joint terrorist task force, actually I’ve been a SWAT guy. The crazy thing was I had been on the SWAT team in the FBI and I had a reoccurring knee injury and providence, the universe got me into this whole communication thing, verbal communication, what a concept, right? 

But I knew we had hostage negotiators and I decided I wanted to learn how to be a hostage negotiator and then it landed into just basic human communication and how do we communicate with people who really don’t see eye to eye to us no matter how intense that is and it was great. I found it much more interesting and it added a lot to the rest of my life and now it’s making work in business and personal life. 

[00:04:08.8] MB: And you’ve obviously been through some incredibly difficult, tense negotiation situations. What are the concepts that, I believed you’ve talked about it and something that I’m really interested in, is the idea of the behavioral change stairway. Could you explain that concept a little bit? 

[00:04:25.0] CV: Well, it’s the idea that there’s a progression of how we get to where we want to go and the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line. It’s like what I like to talk about in communication all the time because, we want to go directly at what we want. And the stairways, it really started as two dimensional representation of we’ve got to make some steps and each step then becomes the foundation for the next step and the first of it is just basic developing a rapport. 

You develop a rapport by, I’ll use the term that puts everybody to sleep, empathy. Most of the time, when was the last time you were at a cocktail party and you had an exciting conversation about the latest developments in empathy? It’s probably not being talked about on CNN but it’s really an indirect root to establish in a great relationship is letting the side know you understand them and showing them how you understand. 

And one step leads to another, which basically then puts you in a position to influence other people. It’s based on trust and it’s based really on emotional intelligence and one step at a time was each step being a great foundation for the next and you can influence outcomes. You can change people’s minds. 

[00:05:39.7] MB: And one of the things you’ve done incredibly well is bring emotion into the process of negotiation, which originally started out as a very dry, logic driven field. Can you talk about that a little bit? 

[00:05:52.3] CV: Yeah, well you know I’m not bringing emotion in at all. It’s there, it’s the elephant in the room. I mean there’s this monstrous creature in the middle of every communication and what we want is based on what we care about. You know, you make every single decision, each one of us, I make all my decisions based on what I care about and that makes decision making by definition an emotional process. So my approach is let’s stop kidding ourselves. 

Hostage negotiators don’t kid themselves about emotions. So they said, “Okay, look this is an emotionally driven situation. Give me a set of tools where I can navigate these emotions.” The history of business negotiation has been this fiction that somehow we’re rational and we’re logical, and I’m sorry and that’s why emotional intelligence has become to the forefront of business success today. Study after study, survey after survey shows that the top performers of every level at business are those who are using the most emotional intelligence, every single level. 

Even IT internet related interactions, you have to be able to communicate with people to get stuff done and so give me the tools from hostage negotiators, the tools that are designed for maximum success in emotions and do they apply to our business and personal life? Absolutely. Because we’re driven by what we want and so it’s a recognition of the reality of we make our decisions based on what we want. Emotional, what we care about, emotional intelligence and these are the skills, these are phenomenal skills. 

[00:07:35.1] MB: You made an incredible point, which is that it’s not that you’re bringing emotion into the process, it’s that it’s already there and we just have to learn to work with it and accept and recognize that fact.

[00:07:47.4] CV: Yeah, it’s just there. I used to have to try to make the case for it and scientists don’t understand what hold together the universe and because they can’t measure it they say, “Well there must be something out there called dark matter. It must be dark matter,” and I used to say emotions are the dark matter of negotiation because we don’t know what it is. We can’t wrap our minds around it, but it holds everything together. So let’s recognize that it exists and maximize it and this stuff is very effective. I mean you can’t get away from it. 

[00:08:21.7] MB: And you touched on empathy a moment ago. Tell me about how to sort of leverage that, especially in a situation where somebody listening might think, “How can you have empathy for a terrorist or a hostage taker?”

[00:08:34.7] CV: Right, right and you know what? This is not your grandfather’s empathy either. I mean we’ve learned enough about it over the years and that’s why I changed the term in my book to “tactical empathy”. I mean we know what this is. We know what we’re looking for and we know how it affects people. So I’ll tell you in advance what are the triggers you want to look for and it changes people’s outcomes. It’s the real essence of connecting with someone because everybody can help you. 

There is an old saying, “Never be mean to someone who could hurt you by doing nothing,” and there’s pretty much everybody that you interact with can probably hurt you by inaction or choosing not to do something. So if you are willing to accept that that’s true, then the flip side is, pretty much everybody you interact with can help you in some small way if they feel like it and they feel like it when you connect with them, when you have rapport with them. When they feel like you understand them. 

When they look at you and they say, “That’s right. I believe in what you just said,” and it can be something as simple as taking your application and then putting them on the bottom of the pile because they didn’t like the way you spoke to them to putting them on the top or maybe taking your application or whatever you want, your request, and directly walk in it and see the boss at that moment. Or it’s the Macy’s sales person who looks two ways to see if the manager is around and then decides to give you the employee discount because they like the way that you talk to them. I’ve had that happen to me a number of times. 

You know somebody is always in a position to help you if they feel like it and when you start accumulating this over a long term period of time, it’s a return on your investment and you find yourself with great relationships in business deals, and somebody comes to you and says, “Hey you know what? I looked out for you today. There was this problem coming and I went ahead and dealt with it because I knew it was going to catch you off guard,” and that’s the way you become successful over a long period of time and you’re happier and the people that you do business with like doing business with you.

[00:10:40.3] MB: So how can somebody who’s listening right now apply the lessons that you’ve learned from building empathy or creating tactical empathy for someone like a terrorist or a hostage taker and what are some practical ways they can apply that in their own lives? 

[00:10:55.9] CV: Okay, great question and I’m glad you brought it back because the exercise, the challenge is, let’s define tactical empathy. The same way Daniel Goldman calls it cognitive empathy and Goldman says that actually sociopaths are the best at this and that’s simply recognizing what’s driving the other side and then articulating it back to them in a way where they feel hurt. So this is what’s important here is what’s not said. 

I’m not saying you agree, I’m not saying you disagree. If I neither agree nor disagree with your position, if I simply understand where you’re coming from and recognize it, that gives me the ability to have empathy with anybody. I can know what drives you without agreeing with it and then I can have empathy with a terrorist or sympathy for the devil. Empathy with a terrorist, not quite the same thing. I’m not agreeing it, I’m not feeling it, I am just seeing it. 

And because of that, I can tell you, with Jihadi John, the killer from ISIS, I can tell you what drives him and as soon as I know what drives him because I simply recognize it, now I can influence it, I can move and I can change it. I might not be able to change it a little, I might be able to change it a lot. But I am greedy in my influence and I want to and I am very particular. My dollars are scarce, so I am not spending my dollars when I can spend emotional intelligence and change the outcomes at the same time and with that, it gives me the power to have influence on anybody on the planet. 

It might not be a little, it might be a lot. I’m not willing to leave anything on the table so I’ll take whatever influence I can get to try to change the outcome. If you can accept that you only have to see where the other side is coming from to be able to then take apart what their drivers are and maybe dismantle them and rebuild them a little bit, their emotional drivers, you can then have influence on anybody on the planet and that’s what a hostage negotiator does. We put ourselves in a position to influence anybody. We don’t have to like them, we just have to be willing to influence them. 

[00:12:54.4] MB: I love that point that it doesn’t matter what your starting point is, you can create influence with anybody on the planet if you are able to really dig in and understand what they want, what they’re feeling and thinking emotionally and what drives them. 

[00:13:09.2] CV: Yeah and it’s important to draw the distinction that understanding is not agreement. Now that scares some people. That scares a lot of people. I can understand Bernie Sanders supporters, I can understand Donald Trump supporters, I can understand Hillary Clinton supporters. I can understand all of them and soon as I know where they’re coming from, it gives me an opportunity to adjust where they’re going. 

[00:13:34.1] MB: You touched on this concept a moment ago, the idea of, and maybe it’s a little bit different, but the idea of mirroring. Can you talk a little bit about that? 

[00:13:43.0] CV: Yeah, sure. A mirror is, and it’s not the mirror that everybody else thinks of. Most people see mirroring as, “Let me mirror their body language, let me stand like they stand. If they’ve got their chin in their right hand, let me put my right hand in my chin. If they’re leaning against the wall, let me lean against the wall.” The mirroring of the physical body language, that’s not it. It’s simpler and it’s actually more powerful. 

The mirroring a hostage negotiator does, what the difference is, the mirroring is just the repetition of the last one to three words that someone has said. The last one to three words that someone has said? Exactly. Just exactly like that, and it’s a great simple tool that feels enormously awkward when you do it. When I am training people I have them do it right away because the biggest barrier to these skills is not their complexity or the intellectual challenge of understanding them. 

The barrier here is feeling awkward because it’s different. You feel awkward, the other person feels listened to. A mirror triggers, punches of button in somebody else’s mind. It’s like reword what you just said and go on. It’s always a command. It’s the closest thing that a lot of people that I have trained they say, “Wow, this is Jedi mind trick. A Jedi mind trick? It’s a Jedi mind trick.” Because people love it and they want to go on. 

It was a funny story that, it made me look funny and that’s why I included it in the book. I had an employee that was mirroring me for 45 minutes once and I didn’t even know it. My son was sitting there and finally he couldn’t take it anymore, he goes, “Stop at doing it, don’t you see what he’s doing to you?” And I was like, “No, what’s he doing?” “He’s been mirroring you for the last 45 minutes, you didn’t even know it. You just enjoyed talking so much he kept you going.” 

[00:15:33.1] MB: So it’s really just as simple as repeating back the three or four words that they said? 

[00:15:37.9] CV: Right, you pick up one to three words and the problem that solves also is like most of us when we say what we mean, we often use words that are very carefully selected for our own brain and we know what we mean by that but there is a pretty good chance actually, it isn’t exactly the way the other person is thinking and your perfect words are kind of missing the mark and if somebody says, “What do you mean by that?” 

Well most likely they repeat the exact same words only louder. It’s like an American trying to be understood in France. I just say it again, only louder and what a mirror does is it flips that switch so the person will repeat what they’ve said in different words. It’s how you get someone to paraphrase themselves is what it really does. It triggers a paraphrase and you don’t have to paraphrase for them, you let them paraphrase and you’re going to increase your meaning. 

The other thing you’re going to do, you mentioned moments before, it buys moments for you in the conversation so you get more time to think and the other thing that mirroring does and I’ve got a client of mine who’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, he mirrors the other sides negotiation position. So key words in it every time, because he knows how they respond tells them whether or not they’re firm or whether or not they’re open for conversation. And when you get someone to paraphrase themselves, that gives you a real clear idea of the firmness of their position. 

[00:17:07.9] MB: So the idea of buying moments in a conversation, I know you’ve talked about the importance of listening and I want to dig into that, but also the idea that if you’re focused on only on explaining yourself and explaining your arguments, it’s really, really hard to kind of step back and understand what the other side is saying. 

[00:17:25.1] CV: Right, yeah good point. You need this moments because some people have described the art of negotiation as letting the other side have your way. Well how do you let the other side have your way? You’ve got to get the other guy talking, which means you have to be quiet and you have to keep them talking. Winning in a negotiation is not beating the other side. 

Because when you beat the other side, actually you leave resentment planted in them and they want to pay you back if they feel beaten and what’s going to happen is it’s going to erode your implementation and as a human being or as a company, revenue is realized when it comes in not when it’s promised, which means you don’t make your profit when the deal is signed. You make your profit as the deal is implemented, even if it’s in an agreement between a husband and wife. You both realize value as you carry out what you agreed to. People who feel beaten aren’t going to want to implement. They’re not going to want you to realize your revenue or again, they’re going to hurt you when they can by doing nothing. 

So you buy these moments so you let the other side talk that you find out what’s possible, never be so sure of what you want that you wouldn’t take something better. You’ve got to hit the other side what those better things might be and then when they came up with a great idea that you didn’t think of, you look at them and you congratulate them for how smart they are and then they’re going to implement. You’re both going to like it and you’re both be better off and so you’ve got to let the other side go first in order to get there. 

[00:18:55.9] MB: So going back a little bit to talk more about how we can be better listeners, tell me about the concept of active listening and how can we cultivate that? 

[00:19:04.8] CV: Well, it’s not just active but it’s proactive. So you cultivate that first, the first and simplest way to cultivate it is to shut the front door. Is to go silent and, you know, we talk about moments, what’s a moment? A moment is three seconds. Give the other guy a chance to speak and then actually try to paraphrase what he said or ask a clarifying question. There’s great power and clarity when you’re trying to pull clarity out of the other side. 

Paraphrase what they’ve said. Mirror the last three words of what they just said to get them to paraphrase. You’re designing a communication process that draws the other side out, which the other thing that you want the other side to do is you want them to show you their hidden cards. In every conversation, in every negotiation, there are things that we’re holding close to the vest that’s really important to us. That’s why we’re holding them close to the vest. 

There are hidden cards if you will are proprietary information, are secret information that happens every time. If you are holding cards, so are they and where the real magic lies is where those cards overlap. So you’ve got to get the other side to trust you enough by listening, what we used to call active listening, which is not just sitting there with your mouth shut and glaring at them intensely. But it’s asking them a good question, asking them what or how. 

The two biggest great questions start with the words “what and how”. Or trying to draw them out with some clarification and then give the conversation back to them. Most of us when we talk, we want to talk for half an hour. You know, ask them a question and let them start talking again. Encourage them. It’s a very encouraging process but it’s very much how you get at their black swans, there are hidden information, their secret hidden cards where you make great deals. 

[00:21:06.2] MB: The two greatest questions start with the words what or how, explain that? 

[00:21:10.6] CV: What and how, people loved to be asked how to do something. People loved to be asked, “What about this works for you?” Of the list of open ended questions that you could use. What and how are the most powerful because they make the other side feel good. In many cases, you’ve just done though is especially with how, you’ve caused them to take a look at the overall situation and the context of it and you’ve also caused them, you know, one of my first favorite way of saying no is, “How am I supposed to do that?” 

There’s two things about saying that. First of all, it’s those words but secondly and even more importantly is your tone of voice. Because people can either feel like you are asking for help or you are making an accusation. I can say, “How am I supposed to do that when you present me with a difficult challenge that I can’t accomplish?” Or I could say, “How am I supposed to that!?” The exact same words but completely different meaning which is an accusation and I am signaling that I don’t like what you want and maybe even then I don’t like you, which is bad for the communication. 

So the how questions are one of the most flexible things combined with tone of voice to draw the other side out or even to set a boundary and say, “Look, I can’t do that, and I need you to take a look at the whole context here and I need you to look at me when I say how am I supposed to that?” And it lets you know that I want to cooperate with you but what you just put on the table just doesn’t work. 

[00:22:42.9] MB: And you touched on this in that explanation, tell me more about open ended questions and why they’re so important? 

[00:22:49.6] CV: Well they invite the other side to talk, they show that you’re willing to listen and they are the most flexible overall. You can actually, and some people have been running circles with the how and what questions, so how do you follow up a how and what question is extremely important also. Every CEO in the planet has been asked, “What keeps you awake at night?” And they’re tired of that question. Not that they’re tired of that question but as soon as they’re done answering, the person that asked them doesn’t listen to the answer in any way, shape or form. 

And that gets back to a little bit of the active listening or the proactive listening I’ve talked about before. If somebody answers your question, somebody answers your how or what question, you’ve got to show them that you are paying attention and that you just didn’t have a preset list of things that you want to say regardless of what their response is. But there is a list of what’s called a reporter’s question. It’s the who, what, when and why, how and where? And the how and what questions actually invite the longer answers. If I ask you “when, where, who,” those are all very short answers, very concise answers that don’t invite a lot of conversation. 

If I ask you why even when I want to know why, you feel accused. Why did you do that? Why did you wear that shirt? Why did you get up at 7 o’clock this morning? So one of the advantages I have as a hostage negotiators having used these skills in literally every culture on the planet, interesting side note, every hostage negotiation team whether in Japan, whether they’re in China or whether they’re in Nigeria, whether they’re in Latin America uses the same skills and these skills have been road tested in every culture and they work on use because we’re human beings. 

The why question in every culture on the planet, we always ask why when we think someone is doing something wrong. We’re like battered children for why, we always feel accused and so that’s why we knock that off of our list of questions asked. Now you may need to know why, you just turn it to what question, instead of saying, “Why did you do that?” You say, “What made you do that?” So if you throw all the rest of these out, you’re left with the what and how questions and they’re the most powerful. 

[00:25:06.6] MB: Tell me the story of Jose Escobar’s kidnapping? 

[00:25:10.4] CV: We used to use, Jose Escobar was really when we moved completely away from the classic proof of life question, you know, “What was the name of Jose’s first dog when he was a kid?” The what questions that are designed to enlist a one word answer and there are security questions for our computer, there are security questions for our bank accounts, our credit cards, it’s a question that sounds like an open ended question and it’s usually a one or two word answer and only one person on the planet can answer it. 

That used to be the proof of life question, and we realized that we won’t get long answers. We didn’t get that much out of it. It was real easy for the inside to answer it, it took no effort on their part and bang-bang, we proved somebody was alive but we really didn’t get anywhere else and we switched that to, “How do we know Jose’s alive and how are we supposed to pay you if we don’t know he’s alive?” And that massively changed the dynamic because the other side, killers, terrorist, murderers, it made them stop and think. It made them look at the context, it made them look at us. 

It accomplished all the things that we want to good how question to do and the thing that I realized more than anything else was because he turned dilemma in business is, how do you get to the decision maker? Well, kidnapping organizations are businesses and the decision maker is never the negotiator just like every business negotiation. We found out after the fact is that we kept asking the representative, the negotiator of the group acting on the decision maker’s behalf, “How do we know Pepe’s alive? How are we supposed to pay if we don’t know if he’s alive?” 

Their representative kept going back to the jungle and huddling up with the rest of the kidnappers saying, “This is what I’m being asked, this is the answer that I’ve been giving. I just want to know if this is the best way for us to proceed based on the question,” and they spend a tremendous amount of time, we found out afterwards, talking about whether or not they were going to take Jose to town and put him on a phone. 

When we realized that that adjustment from “what was the name of Pepe’s first dog”, or Jose’s first dog. I call him Pepe now and then because that’s actually his nickname and how do we know Jose is alive? It changes the whole dynamic on the other side and they get together and they worked together in ways that we know that we had never made kidnapping groups work together before. Jose ultimately escaped and part of us getting them to work together and slow the situation down contributed to his opportunity to escape. So that was our adjustment, getting away from one word answers to the how question and we gained a tremendous amount of power over the other side when we did that. 

[00:28:00.5] MB: And how can that same proof of life concept be applied in a business context? 

[00:28:05.3] CV: Yeah, it’s a great question and it gets back to in business, the primary objective is to get to the decision maker, get past the blocker get to the decision maker. That’s faulty because first of all, that treats the blocker, who’s the important player on their team, as if they need to be dismissed and that sends a bad signal and it sets your blocker up as actually a dill killer on down the line because never be mean to someone who can hurt you by doing nothing. 

As soon as you’re dismissive of the blocker, the blocker now begins to slow you down or chooses to let you be hurt by things that they can hurt you with inaction. So we need that blocker, we need the blocker to feel included to get to the decision maker and the how questions begin to involve the blocker in our solution. When you’re talking to the blocker in business, the representatives, the sales rep, the secretary whoever it might be, you would ask things like, “How are your objectives proceeding with your company? How can we work with you so that everybody is better off? How does what I propose fit into what you guys are trying to accomplish?” 

“How does what I propose fit into what you guys are trying to accomplish”, now suddenly makes your blocker feel involved and wants you to succeed because they are going to answer you and they’re going to want their answer to succeed and as soon as they give you that answer, you now have a collaborator on the other side as oppose to a blocker and they now start to work with you to work with the decision maker who’s the person you’re trying to get to. 

Because once you get to the decision maker, after you’re done talking to them, the decision maker is going to go back to the blocker and say, “What did you think of this guy” or gal? “How did they interact with you?” They’re going to say, “Thank you for bringing this person to me because this fits into our objective. So they’re going to say, “Don’t ever let that guy through again.” Your blocker is going to have a tremendous to them how all of that is teed up to the decision maker and that’s what the how questions are designed to do, pull the other side together behind your objective.

[00:30:11.2] MB: That’s fascinating. So what are some of the other parallels you have seen or some of the ideas that have crossed over from hostage negotiation to business negotiation or negotiation in everyday life? 

[00:30:24.1] CV: Well the other side always wants more. They just don’t know where it is and as soon as they feel listened to, they’re going to be more amenable to other ideas. There are three basic types in negotiation and they get us back to the caveman response because the caveman part of our brain, the amygdala, that where every thought goes through there. Evolution hasn’t evolved that out of our brain, it’s still there and so when the caveman saw something, he thought, “I run from it, I kill it, or I make friends with it and it becomes part of my tribe.” 

Fight, flight or make friends. I eat it, it eats me, I mate with it, however you want to describe those three basic responses but in each one of those responses, coming to an agreement is a secondary benefit. There’s always something more important to the other side than coming to an agreement and part of that is always in being understood. So if I can gain leverage on you, if I can get more of what I want by not spending a dime but by simply letting you know I understand, then I open up the opportunity to get more for me and to have you like it. 

Stuart Diamond wrote a book that I loved the title of it’s called Getting More. It sounds very selfish but it’s in fact what we all want. We all want to do better, getting more is also about having, from my context, it’s also getting more by having better relationships. By having someone want to collaborate, by having the same person want to do business with you again instead of you needing to search for new business counterparts all the time. 

I have tremendous respect for Donald Trump and what he’s accomplished as a negotiator and as a business man. Understand that he needs to change his business venues every few years with his very aggressive approach because people get tired of that aggressive approach. When was the last time he put up a building in New York City that came anywhere near to Trump Tower at the Grand Central Station? Magnificent pieces of real estate that he did back in the 80’s. 

Having to look for new business partners all the time means that he has to continually move from place to place to place. Not all of us have the ability to do this. Most of us like Warren Buffett would, I’d rather be like Warren Buffett because he’s got to be not only the richest guy in Omaha but he maybe one of the richest people on the planet. He hasn’t gone from place to place to place to place and not all of us want to move from place to place to place almost as if we’re in the witness security program. We want to stay in one place and we want to flourish and we want to prosper. 

And you do that by having great relationships and having people wanting to continue to do business with you and that’s a lot of what this is really designed to do. 

[00:33:20.7] MB: So you talked about the difference in style between Trump and Warren Buffett. Tell me about how that plays into this sort of the three different negotiating styles, which you touched on as well, and describe a little bit what each of those styles are. 

[00:33:36.0] CV: Well you know one style is a very extremely assertive. I supposed that even more say it’s sort of aggressive and the aggressive style is intoxicating because you beat the other side and you have victory and you celebrate. The problem with that is, the more people you beat, the fewer people want to do business with you and what really comes to pass is as I was talking to an executive in an energy company in Boston several years ago, the CEO of the company. 

In his industry. He developed a relationship of being a very tough negotiator and after a while, no one would make deals with him. Everybody that he talked to if by definition you did business with him, he won that meant you lost, nobody wanted to do business with him and he was in the position where he actually had a deal on his desk that he negotiated every single point with the CEO from the other company and the CEO refused to sign. 

Having negotiated and agreed to it at every point when it came to signing at the bottom he wouldn’t sign and he said, “I know why this guy won’t do this. I’ve got such a reputation as a tough negotiator. If he signs a deal that means he lost and he knows his board’s going to fire him because he lost,” and that’s the residue of being the very assertive guy. When you always win and the other side always loses then pretty soon people lose their appetite for that and nobody wants to do business with you and with all due respect for Mr. Trump, his business is spread all over the world. 

He doesn’t stay in one place. He’s not putting building up in New York City anymore, he’s not building casinos in Atlantic City anymore, he’ll build a golf course or a resort in one location and then he will have to move on and my assessment is he’s left such a toxic residue with each deal that people don’t want to continue to do business with him. That’s one type, now he actually prefers to be understood, interestingly enough, and the book that he’s gotten some criticism over. 

As to whether or not he wrote it, I don’t know the art of the deal, I don’t know if he wrote it or not and his co-author is bad mouthing him now which is another interesting residue of being assertive but I read that a long time ago and he was more than willing to talk about and described the people that could handle him and there are people that have handled him. His son in law is one of them. His son in law was not one of the assertive-aggressive types, his son in law is very analytical. 

His son in law is very quiet, Ivanka’s husband I believe and in this is a great description of what I refer to as the analytical guy. The analytical guy doesn’t like open conflict. He sees it as being extremely non-productive. The analytical guy thinks things through and you will never discuss a problem with an analytical person until they have at least one solution and probably multiple solutions. So the analytical guy, the non-open combat guy can do very well with the assertive negotiator and you see that play out in Donald Trump’s organization with the people that he seems to have the most respect for. 

So that’s the second type, and then the third type is the person whose relationship oriented and they make friends. They bring you into their tribe, they want you to be part of their life, they want to have a long term ongoing relationship with you, they’re likeable and there’s an interesting statistic that people who are likeable, you’re six times more likely to make a deal with someone you like and that becomes a very strong tactic to be brought into a negotiation. You can understand that if you are likeable, people will want to do business with you. 

That sounds crazy, right? Why would you want to do business with somebody you like as oppose to somebody who feels like they’ve got punched in the face by you. So likeability is the third core attribute and in my view the great negotiator combines all three tribes. A great negotiator is assertive without being aggressive. A great negotiator thinks things through and comes up with multiple options. A great negotiator develops a good relationship with you and is very likeable and you want to continue to do business with them. So whatever your default type is, I’m here to tell you don’t discard it, add to it and add to it by evolving and improving not by changing. 

[00:38:03.2] MB: You’ve said before that you would never lie to anyone that you’re not going to kill. Tell me about that? 

[00:38:09.4] CV: Yeah, you know, that came up because when I went through Harvard Law School’s negotiation course as a student and I was, I’m the only FBI agent, I think, that every went through the class who wasn’t a student. They said, “You know, what do you feel about lying?” Because they are very much against lying. Lying is a bad idea and I said, “Well as a hostage negotiator, I’d never lied to anybody that I am not going to kill and even then, I’d probably don’t do it because somebody they know is going to find out about it and I’m going to have to pay for it.” 

I mean lying is this great seductive trap, “Maybe I can just get what I want right now if I tell this one lie and I’ll fix it later.” Well there’s a couple of problems with that. You just set a ticking time bomb on yourself that’s going to blow up because nobody likes being lied to. That’s the first problem. The second problem is, what if they were trying to trap you in a lie to begin with? 

Most people, the practiced liars try to trick us into lying to see if we will. I mean they see it a million miles away and there are some negotiators that actually try to seduce you into a lie early on so they can see your first tale. They will ask you a question they know that you won’t give you a straight direct response too. So many times the temptation to lie is actually a trap set by the other side. All right, so let’s pretend that it is not a trap and most of the time it is. If I lie to you, you’re going to make me pay for it and then their trust is broken, you’ll never going to believe me again. 

And if I can get away with that lie, and I never have to deal with you again, since you’re in my world to begin with, you’re going to tell somebody that I lied to you and my reputation is going to precede me. There is an old phrase, “Do something right, three people know about it. Do something wrong, 12 people know about it.” So there is a 12X multiplier on lying and that gets around and then pretty soon, you’re done in your community and you’re going to have to join the witness security program because you’re going to have to move on. So there’s just so many things wrong with lying. It’s just such a bad idea. I’m not interested in letting myself in for those kind of problems. 

[00:40:20.6] MB: So how do you feel about compromise in a negotiation? 

[00:40:25.2] CV: You knew you were going to ask me that question. I hate compromise. The spirit of compromise is a great thing, the practice of comprise is a bad thing. The best descriptor for compromise is I’ve got this great gray suit on and I’m not sure whether or not I want to wear a black shoes or brown shoes, so I compromise and I wear one black and one brown. That’s compromise. “I’m not sure if you’re right, you’re not sure if I’m right, we’ll take a little bit of each one’s idea and let’s put it together and see how it works,” and a lot of times compromise is a little bit lazy. 

Look, I’m sorry for those of you that compromise but take a little more time, find a better outcome. Compromise is watering down solutions and then the secondary part of the problem with compromise is we always feel loses twice as much as we feel equivalent gains. So when I compromise, I feel I’ve given in and I’ve lost something and it’s going to sting me and for me to feel even with you, I need you to lose too. Compromise is a path to lose-lose and then if a loss feels twice as much as an equivalent gain, if I lost five, I want you to lose 10. And if I make you lose 10, then when you lose 10, you’re going to make me want to lose 20 to get even, and it’s this vicious spiral and I’ve heard a lot of people describe negotiation as, “Well we were both unhappy so then I know it was a great deal.” 

That’s not what I want. I don’t want to be unhappy with the deal and I don’t want to be at a deal where I am not satisfied until I make you feel unhappy. It becomes this vicious spiral and if you just take a little more time and maybe hear the other side out, maybe they’ll throw something on the table that you really like and instead of asking them to compromise, you take their better solution. That gets you out of the vicious spiral and maybe put you into a virtuous circle where things are getting better all the time instead of getting each other back. So compromise is a dangerous whirlpool trap that I don’t want to get sucked into. 

[00:42:35.7] MB: Tell me about the idea of shaping what is fair in a negotiation? 

[00:42:40.7] CV: Fair is the F word. You just used the F word on me in a negotiation. Oh my God! Fair is this emotional, bang-bang word that if I say, “Look, I just want what’s fair,” which is said all the time, I’ve just accused you of being unfair. It’s what manipulative negotiators do. It’s what the NFL owners did when they lock the players out. The NFL players said, “We’ll be happy to come back to work as soon as you open the books and show us what you’re offering us is equitable based on revenue,” and the owners didn’t want to answer that question. 

So they said, “We’ve giving the players a fair offer.” It was a cover for a position of weakness. We use the F word, the word fair, when we’re afraid we can’t defend our position but somehow we’re losing. So it’s actually a great tip of the iceberg window into what’s going on with the other side. Nobody ever uses the word fair when they are coming from a position of strength ever. Because if you’ve got a position of strength, they’ll just lay it out. 

We often use fair when we’re afraid of a loss coming our way and we can’t defend ourselves from that loss and interestingly enough, I tell, in all the masters of business administration programs that I teach in, watch for the word fair and I’ll bet you you’d see it come up in nearly every negotiation you have and I’ll be darned if that isn’t true. So people are covering positions of weakness all the time and fair is the word that comes up more frequently than price and is always an indicator of the other side’s feeling of insecurity. 

[00:44:32.0] MB: That’s fascinating. I love that idea that when somebody starts talking about fairness, it’s really a tell for weakness or lack of strength. 

[00:44:40.2] CV: Yeah, it is. 

[00:44:43.2] MB: So changing gears a little bit, and this something I’m fascinated about, tell me about the Chase Bank robbery? 

[00:44:49.6] CV: Yeah. Well, bank robbers with hostages happen all the time in the movies and in the real world that we live in, it happens about once every 20 years in the entire country. So I was fortunate enough to negotiate at the Chase Bank robbery with hostages and literally it was in New York City and the last bank robbery with hostages in New York City was 20 years before that. We get into this bank robbery and we expect bank robbers upset about being trapped and we get a stone cold manipulative guy on the other side who is absolutely convinced that he can work his way out of this and it was the first time I learned about the use of personal pronouns. 

We couldn’t get this guy to use “I, me or my, I want”, you know, “this is my idea”, “this isn’t making me feel good”. We couldn’t get him to use a singular personal pronoun to save his life. He always used “we, they and them”, he always talked about the guys, the other guys in the bank as being the more dangerous ones. You know, “I’m not sure because I don’t know what they’re going to do.” He was always laying it off on them. I’ve came to found out that this is the hallmark of powerful negotiators in business. If you’re sitting across the table from someone that is constantly talking about the people that are not at the table, the rest of his team. You know, “My board of directors,” the guys that are not in the room that is a sign of the dominant decision maker in the group. 

They are covering their influence with plural pronouns because they do not want you to corner then and in the Chase Manhattan bank robbery, we had the mastermind of the bank robbery on the phone from the very beginning. He’d manipulated everybody and he was hiding that manipulation from everybody and he didn’t want us to know that he was the ring leader. So he was happy to pick up the phone and tell us about the other guys that were inside and he had to ask permission from them. He was constantly laying it off on them. 

I saw this in a kidnapping in the Philippines about 10 years after that and have come to learn that the dominant decision maker will avoid singular pronouns like the plague. He’s hiding or she is hiding their influence. So you’re talking to somebody who’s always using plural pronouns and trying to defer to others, you’re talking to a powerful and influential person and they know it and they don’t want you to corner them and that was the biggest lesson in the Chase Manhattan Bank. 

[00:47:25.8] MB: That’s such a fascinating story and obviously an incredibly important negotiating lesson as well, thank you for sharing that. What would one piece of homework be that you might have for some of the people listening to this podcast? 

[00:47:39.5] CV: You know watch the interactions around you just a little. Watch people talking at each other because they both want to go first and watch when one of them gets tired and the other keeps talking at the tired person, you’ll see the tired person try to get the other side to shut up by saying, “You’re right, you’re right, you’re right.” Watch the number of agreements that one person thinks was made when the other person just said, “You’re right,” with no intention of following through. 

Study the dynamics around you a little bit and you’ll see that if you will listen first, you’re going to save a lot of time and you’ll see that “you’re right” is what people say to you to get you to be quiet and when you can get out of that, the homework then is try to get people to say “that’s right” instead of “you’re right” and then see what happens. I can promise you that amazing things will happen. 

[00:48:46.5] MB: What are some resources you would recommend for listeners who want to do some more research about negotiation and some of the things we’ve discussed today?

[00:48:54.8] CV: All right, so I’m going to say I want you to buy my book, Never Split the Difference. I think you’re going to get a return in your investment before you finish the first chapter. I think it’s a great book primarily because I got a great co-author who wrote a readable book and the feedback that we’ve gotten back constantly from everybody that’s read it is, “It’s useable, it’s counter intuitive, and it’s an easy read.” It’s not unusual to have somebody tell me they’ve read it multiple times. So I’m going to ask you to buy my book. 

Now, we’ve got a bunch of stuff on the website, blackswanltd.com, that’s complimentary. It’s free. We give away a lot of free stuff. We’ve got a twice a month negotiation advisory newsletter that’s very short pieces to give you useable information that comes out twice a month. It’s called The Edge and it’s free. We’ve got a variety of different short PDF reports that will supplement your negotiation. Those are free, we’ve got some e-mail negotiation lessons that we charge you for and I think that they’re a great buy. You are going to get seven times your value out of anything that you buy from us and you’re going to get tremendous amount of value off our website and the free stuff also, blackswanltd.com. 

[00:50:20.0] MB: And I can agree, Chris’s book is amazing and he obviously, anybody listening to this can tell that he has been through some incredible, and incredibly difficult negotiations and there are a ton of lessons from his book. Well Chris, this has been amazing. I’m so fascinated with your story and your background and all the work that you have done. I just wanted to say thank you very much for being on the Science of Success.

[00:50:43.1] CV: Man, you are awesome. Thank you for having me as a guest. 

The Psychology Behind Making Better Decisions with Global Financial Strategist Michael J. Mauboussin

Do you want to improve your decision-making a build a better mental toolkit? In this episode we explore the psychology behind making better decisions with Michael J. Mauboussin. 

Michael is the Head of Global Financial Strategies at Credit Suisse. He is the author of three books, including More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places, named in the The 100 Best Business Books of All Time. Michael also serves as an adjunct professor of finance at Columbia Business School.

We discuss the following topics:

• The interconnectedness of knowledge across many different disciplines

• How to switch to the “outside view” to make better predictions and decisions

• How to improve your results without being any smarter or better trained

• A fascinating psychology study that demonstrates how we deceive ourselves

• The biggest biases that cause investors to make bad decisions (and how to combat them)

• Why the right tools aren’t enough to make you a successful investor

• Concrete steps to start down the path of better decision-making

• How to understand the difference between luck and skill in complex fields like business, investing, and entrepreneurship

• How to become “numerate” and understand the physics and mathematics of misjudgment

• What statistical base-rates are and how they can improve your decisions

• How reversion to the mean really works and why you’ve been misunderstanding it

• The power of checklists and other decision-making tools

• And much more!

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions how to do that!).  

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Book] Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by Anders Ericsson (see here).

• [Book] Tales from Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience by Michael S. Gazzaniga (see here).

• [Book] A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life by Brian Grazer and Charles Fishman (see here).

• Michael Mauboussin Articles on Value Walk (see here)

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Today we have another awesome guest on the show: Michael Mauboussin. Michael is the head of Global Financial Strategies at Credit Suisse. He is one of my favorite authors and the author of three books, including, More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places, which was named one of the 100 best business books of all time. Michael also serves as an adjunct professor of finance at Columbia Business School and is an expert in decision making, behavioral psychology, and all of those fields applied to the financial markets, especially. Michael, welcome to The Science of Success.

Michael:	Thanks, Matt. Great to be with you today.

Matt:	We are super excited to have you on here. So, to kind of kick things off and get started, tell us a little bit about... For listeners who might not be familiar with some of your books, tell us a little bit about your background, and how did you become so fascinated with the psychological aspects of human decision making, specifically within the context of investing, which you're obviously an expert at, but also, you know, even more broadly.

Michael:	You know, Matt, I think part of it is you mention my association with Columbia Business School, and I started teaching there in the early 1990s and I was thinking a lot about what I was talking about with the students, effectively giving them tools to try to make them successful investors, and sort of had this growing feeling that what made for great investing had less to do with the tools--you know, accounting and financial statement analysis and valuation, although those things are obviously really important--and much more to do with decision making and temperament, especially under stressful situations. So, probably in the mid-1990s, I started to just open up my reading quite a bit. A lot more science, a lot more in the world of psychology, and sort of being exposed to this world as a lightning bolt of recognition that probably what makes for great... not just great investors, but really great in any field, is awareness of a lot of these psychological factors that improves the quality of decision. So, it sort of changed my whole tenor, recognizing that a lot of things we teach, for example, in business schools or actually any kind of school, are just the ante to the game, but the real success has to do with this whole other field of decision making. So, that was sort of my epiphany, was that recognition of where value comes from. The other thing I'll just mention is I was reading widely... You know, I was one of those  guys who was... You know, I'd read something and I'd be like, oh, here's a connection to this, or here's a connection to that, and just sort of this recognition that we live in an extremely rich world, and that there are a lot of interesting connections between different things that may not be superficially obvious but that I think could really make... that could be some really fascinating connections, and I think really helpful connections to allow people to think about the world more effectively.

Matt:	And that's essentially the concept of the idea of multi-disciplinary thinking, that Charlie Munger is a huge proponent of, and I know you're a huge proponent of, and something actually we touched on a little bit with one of our previous guests, Shane Parrish of Farnam Street. Can you explain a little bit more about, and maybe even provide some examples of, how different disciplines can impact each other or how maybe psychology can underpin finance, or something like that?

Michael:	Yeah, absolutely. The way I like to think about this is that it's like a toolbox, the metaphor of a toolbox, right. You might have the best hammer or the best screwdriver of anybody, but what you really want to do when you're thinking about the world is to have the right tool to apply to the right problem. And so, I think the Munger approach... And I do. I give huge credit for my thinking to Charlie Munger, who I think is the most articulate. I'd also mention another book, which many of your listeners may be aware of, by E.O. Wilson called Consilience, and these ideas that many of the vexing problems in our worlds are at the intersection of disciplines and we need a sort of full toolbox to try to tackle them. So, to me, this is the way to think about the world. The other thing I'll just say is another quick comment, is that we've made huge strides in science over the last, let's say, 400, 500 years through reductionism, which is to say basically breaking things down into its fundamental components, and it's been extraordinary, and I think a lot of the things we take for granted in life, advancements, are the result of that amazing work. But I think increasingly, we're bumping into areas where we're dealing with systems that are complex, where reductionism really doesn't work, where, in a very real sense, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. And that requires a very different way of thinking about the world. Now, if you think about academia in general, you get paid for specialization. You get paid for being narrow. But a lot of the problems in the world are kind of going the opposite direction, where it's important to think about things from different perspectives. So, one example I would give you, and I think is also a very powerful mental model in and of itself, and for me was another big eye-opening moment, is just thinking about markets as complex, adaptive systems. The stock market, right. So, if you say to an academic or a really traditional economist, "How should we think about how people behave?" they'll typically say, "Well, we've got these models of agents who are rational and they understand their different... They have information that comes in and they understand their preferences and they have utility functions, and then they make decisions on the basis of this. You know, we've known for a long time that empirically, that's not how the world works. So, if you try to extrapolate that into a model of markets, it just doesn't fit the facts all that well. Complex adaptive systems, by contrast, come at the world as thinking about the interaction of heterogeneous parts or agents, right, and you can think about other examples like ants in an ant colony, right? Absolutely fascinating, because the colony itself is almost an organism. It has a life cycle and is sometimes aggressive, sometimes passive, but every individual ant is really basically clueless. They're sort of bumbling little agents within this total. So, I think that's a much, much richer way... And by the way, your consciousness, for example, neurons in your brain, you can think about example after example, people that live in New York City are components of a complex system. And when we take that sort of set of tools and that way of thinking to the world of markets, it just opens up, again, new ways of thinking about things gives you good reason to understand why markets are generally hard to beat, but it also gives you some insight as to why markets go periodically haywire. So, to me, this whole mental models thing is just a really, really powerful way to think about the world. Now, let's talk about the pros and cons. The pros is, I think, that if you do understand big concepts from various disciplines, gives you a huge leg up in life. The con is it requires constant--basically--reading and thinking and learning. So, if you're going to get into this world, it ends up being sort of a commitment to perpetual learning. Now, that's not everybody's cup of tea, but if it is, I just think it's a really fun, exciting, and I think ultimately a great way to find success.

Matt:	I love the idea that the traditional education or business school or whatever it might be is sort of the ante to get into the game, but if you really want to win, if you really want to compete at the highest level, you need to have a much richer and much deeper toolkit to really understand reality.

Michael:	Yeah, and I really think that's the case. The other thing I'll just say is that's certainly true. I also think that there are gaps now in our education. Especially, for example, in high school and college students. I'll give you one example, and I don't mean... This is sort of a negative example, but I don't mean to be too negative. One of my sons went to a really terrific high school and they decided to develop a leadership center for the kids, which is great, right. So, they were working on things communication, cultural awareness, a lot of things you would say are really important. But what struck me as fascinating about it is there was actually no segment or module on decision making or on psychology. So, I went to the guy that ran the program and I said, "This is really interesting, because at the end of the day, our future leaders are really people that need to be equipped in understanding how to make decisions, understanding being [INAUDIBLE 00:10:39], or understanding the scientific method and what science tells us. These are actually very essential elements in the future, and we're just basically not teaching those things. So, that, to me, is another area that we should be spending... And by the way, I'm about to go back to one of my college reunions, and when I went to college, the kinds of things, the decision making courses--they're now much more common--didn't exist at all. So, if you're someone of my age and you're in your forties or fifties, chances are you didn't have any access to it in school. So, there's more of it now, but certainly not enough of it, in my opinion. So, yeah, I think you have to supplement a lot of what your curriculum has been in order to become a more well-rounded individual.

Matt:	So, if you're somebody that's listening to this podcast, what are some easy steps or maybe some first steps they could take on the path towards starting to build this toolkit or starting to maybe understand human decision making more effectively, or make better decisions?

Michael:	Yeah, Matt, and I think that you know my answer, which is probably to start, whether you can read or certainly listen to audiobooks or something, but there are a handful of books that'll probably get you off and running. One book that I always loved, and I'm sure you're fan of as well, is Bob Cialdini's book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. It's an easy book to read. It's got six big models about how you could influence people and their decision making, or you can also see or reflect how those things influence you and your decision making. So, that's a great starting point. Another great one, of course, is Danny Kahneman's book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. It's probably a little bit more of a challenge, but so rich in terms of its content. So, that would be another thing I would say, is people reading that and just really, I mean, the degree to which you're willing to wade into the, for example, the psychology literature is fantastic. So, that's one set of things. The second set of things is if you have an appetite to do so, it's really great to try to hang out with people who are different than you. And that might be if you're a finance person, hang out with artists or people who are into literature. You know, there was a very famous essay many years ago about the two cultures, sort of the literary culture and the scientific culture, and the argument was these cultures really didn't meld with one another, and I think those people who really tried to reach out, to understand different points of view, have diverse thoughts, I think that really just forces you into being actively open-minded about the world and, I think, really gives you a leg up in a lot of circumstances. So, I don't know if that's a gentle entry in, but probably the first thing I would say is to start to read some of these things and think about, be introspective about how they're influencing you or how your decision making processes work, and then just make an effort to reach out to people who are different. You know, is Brian Grazer the guy who wrote a book on creativity recently? Do you know that book?

Matt:	I do not.

Michael:	The Hollywood guy. So, the Hollywood guy.

Matt:	We'll put it in the show notes.

Michael:	[Laughs] Yeah, exactly. So, we'll track down the exact book, but I think it's just called Creativity. And he had this sort of extraordinary story, which I absolutely love, and he said he just made a point, is when he read an article... He's a pretty famous producer now, but he'd read an article about somebody, he would just say, "I want to meet that person," and he would call them up out of nowhere and say, "I'd love to have a cup of coffee with you. Can we make that happen?" And he'd reach out to people where it'd take six months, 12 months, 18 months to schedule something, but he was just reaching, going all over the place. One week he'd be talking to a lead athlete. Next week he'd be talking to an astronaut. Then he'd be talking to a Navy SEAL. Then he'd talk to a police commissioner. I mean, this incredible, fascinating array of people, and he just made it part of what he was about, and I think he argues that really helped stoke his own personal creativity and mindset.

Matt:	That's fascinating. And that makes me think of two kind of quick notes for people who are listening. One is we actually did a whole... We did a six part series called Weapons of Influence where we basically... On the podcast, where we basically broke down each of the major pillars of influence and kind of dove deep into the research studies and the findings behind it. So, for people who want to kind of take that first step that Michael's recommending, that's a great way to get started. And the other thing, briefly, we also did a really cool episode recently on creativity, so, to kind of drill into some of this neuroscience behind that and how to spark your own creativity, for people who are listening.

Michael:	Super cool. Super cool.

Matt:	So, one of the things you touched on briefly was the idea of being numerate, and another way that I think Peter Bevelin called that in the book Seeking Wisdom is the physics and mathematics of misjudgment, and I know Munger did an amazing job in his speech about human misjudgment, kind of nailing all the different psychological factors. But two of the things I think that you've done an incredible job of really studying and explaining, Michael, are the concept of base rates and the concept of reversion to the mean, and I'd love to drill into talking about both of those, and I know there's a lot to unpack in each one of those, but in a way that we could kind of explain them to a layperson that's never heard of either of those concepts why they're important and what they are.

Michael:	Yeah. So, great. Great question. The base rate, it really comes from the work of Kahneman and Tversky, so Danny Kahneman, Amos Tversky. They were examining how people... Well, actually, the ideas precede that by many decades, but they sort of codified this to some degree. And the idea is that there are two ways of making forecasts of the world, what they called the inside versus the outside view. So, the inside view--and Matt, this is how you and I typically operate, right. You know, if I give you a problem, you give me a problem, our classic way to solve it is to gather a bunch of information, right, combine it with our own inputs, and then project into the future, right. So, if you go to a college student and you say, "Hey, when will you be done with your term paper?" they sort of think about what their calendar looks like, how hard the paper is, and so forth, and they make some sort of projection. So, that's the natural way to think. The outside view, by contrast, we're calling the base rates, says, you know what? I'm going to think about my problem as an instance of a larger reference class. Basically, in plain words, I'm going to ask the question, what happened when other people were in this situation? Right, and it's a very unnatural way to think for two reasons. Number one is you have to leave aside your own information, this cherished information that you have, and second is you have to find and ultimately appeal to this base rate. So, for example, in our term paper example, instead of saying, "Hey, when will you finish your term paper?" and the student thinking about their own schedule and the difficulty of the paper, you basically ask a question of all the students who had a term paper due a certain day, when did they actually complete it? It's a very different question, and it turns out that what we see in the decision making literature is the introduction of base rates actually massively sharpens the quality of forecasts. So, we've applied it very specifically, for example, in the world of business to things like sales growth rates for companies. So, you might say, you know, hey, here's a company that has 10 billion dollars in sales. What's the sales growth rate going to be for the next three years or five years or ten years? So, you could model it. Again, bottom up. Sort of say, "Here's what they do. Here's how many new units they'll sell," and so forth. Or you can ask the question of companies of that same size over time, "What's the distribution of growth rate?" So, they're not mutually exclusive. Both of them go together, but that's the idea of base rates. And so, once you start to think about base rates, you start to see them, they're basically everywhere. But certainly realms like sports, realms like business, we have really good data on base rates and I think they can be really, really helpful. Reversion to the mean is another concept that is really important, and I think very, actually, quite tricky. So, reversion to the mean formally says that outcomes that are far from average will be followed by outcomes with an expected value closer to the average. So, the classic example of that is heights of people, right. Heights of fathers and sons, for example, specifically. So, what we know is that very tall fathers have tall sons, but the heights of the sons are closer to the average of all the sons. And likewise, short fathers have short sons, but again, the heights of the sons are closer to the average. So, there's sort of a squishing back toward the middle. So, that's an effect that happens, right, and it's just a statistical artifact. By the way, on the height thing, for instance, that sort of has to be true, if you think about it for a second, because otherwise there'd be people walking around who are 20 feet tall and two feet tall. That doesn't happen, right. So, here's an interesting way to think about the reversion to the mean, how powerful the force will be. So, if the correlation from one event to the next event is basically zero, then you should expect very, very rapid reversion to the mean. Let me give you one really concrete example from the markets. It turns out if you look at the standard [INAUDIBLE 00:19:52]500s. They're the most popular index in the U.S., and you look at the results from year to year. So, you take on X axis t=0, like what it did last year, and then on the Y axis, t plus one, what it does in the subsequent year, and you plot that going back to the 1920s. The correlation is basically zero. In other words, what happened last year tells you absolutely nothing about what's going to happen the subsequent year. So, as a result, the best estimate of what's going to happen next is some measure of the average, right. Reversion to the mean. And so, your best estimate for the market is basically the historical average. On the other extreme, if the correlation is perfect, very high, you expect no reversion to the mean at all. So, Matt, if you and I ran a sprint against Usain Bolt, he's going to win, right. And when we run again, he's going to win again. It's going to be perfectly correlated that he's going to win every single time, and there is no reversion to the mean. So, how we finished in prior races or how he finished in prior races doesn't really make a difference. He's going to win every single time. So, this idea of reversion to the mean, you can think about how correlated outcomes are over time. That also gives you an idea of how rapidly that idea of reversion to the mean takes effect. So, super powerful, super important, and often really overlooked. Even people who do this for a living--for example, sports executives--somehow get tripped up and don't fully take into account reversion to the mean.

Matt:	And one of the things that I really struggled with, and I've read your chapters, and a bunch of Kahneman's stuff over and over again. I've read your chapters in The Success Equation five or six times, trying to really drill that concept into my head as the relationship between correlation and reversion to the mean. And also, you know, kind of going back to the simplest example is flipping a coin, and when people think about reversion to the mean, sometimes if a coin comes up heads four times in a row, people think, oh, I'm due a tails, right. But that's actually a completely incorrect way to think about and really understand how reversion to the mean actually functions.

Michael:	Yeah, exactly, and I think that... Look, one of the reasons it's so challenging is because we have intuitions about how all this stuff works, but if we want to be slightly more formal, exactly what you said. So, when correlations are low, reversion to the mean is very, very powerful, and that's my stock market example. When correlation is very high, reversion to the mean is not a powerful force. In other words, what had happened before is, for the most part, a pretty good estimate of what's going to happen next. And yeah, no. By the way, that little heuristic, that's one of our tools in our toolbox. That's a mental model. It's an incredibly powerful mental model and, remarkably, very few people get it. The other thing, you know, Kahneman talks about this, but one of the other reasons that reversion to the mean is difficult is because our minds are wired to seek causality. If I give you an effect, some sort of an outcome, your mind is going to try to come up with a cause to explain it. And reversion to the mean is a concept that really has no cause and effect. And I'll give you an example that I always find to be fascinating. It turns out I mentioned before that the heights of fathers and sons, tall fathers have tall sons, but the heights are closer to the average of all the sons. But it turns out, and this is somewhat counter-intuitive, that if you plot the heights of the sons, it turns out very tall sons have tall fathers, but the heights of the fathers are closer to the average of all the fathers. And we know that sons don't cause father's, right. So, it gives you pause. You sort of say... So, in other words, the reversion to the mean has no arrow of time, and the notion of causality really doesn't apply. It's just it applies any time you have two series that are not perfectly correlated with one another. And by the way, the heights of fathers and sons, the correlation's almost exactly .5. So, in other words, if you're six inches above average, the best estimate of your son's height would be three inches above average, half the distance between your height and the height of everybody else. So interesting, right. So, I applaud you for going back to the concept. I did the same thing many, many times, going back to it, and there are some other people besides Kahneman who talked about it effectively. I just think it's a really hard concept to get your head wrapped around and it also is worthy of a lot of study.

Matt:	I think the trickiest part is the very counter-intuitive notion that there's no cause and effect. That's what people think that it means, that there's some kind of cause that it's going to happen, cause something to happen, when in reality there's no arrow of time, there's no causality at all.

Michael:	Yeah. So, I would say, Matt, to be a little bit more careful about it, it doesn't mean the causality isn't part of it. It just doesn't require causality, right.

Matt:	Yeah, that's definitely a better way to say it.

Michael:	So, the example I give that also... Well, I'll give you a quick story on this. I was presenting to... it was actually an academic conference, and it was on behavioral strategy. Super interesting. So, these are professors of strategy, corporate strategy, who have a behavioral bend. Super interesting topic. So, I was doing a presentation a little bit on luck and skill stuff, and I showed them a very classic, well-known picture where, if you take, say, 100--I'm just making this up--take 100 companies and you rank them in quintiles, so from top to bottom, and then you follow those cohorts, the highest returns on capital I'd say specifically to lowest returns on capital, and you follow those cohorts over time. What you'll see is the high return on capital returns go down and the low ones go up, which is exactly what reversion to the mean would indicate. So, I show that slide, and everyone's sort of, you know, amening and hi-fiving, and they all get that, right. But then I flip the data and I started with 2014 and I went backwards. So, I went from 2014 back to 2005. And again, what you do is you rank the companies on 2014 return on capital, again, highest to lowest, and then you follow those cohorts back in time. And what you find is the same picture. 

Matt:	That's wow.

Michael:	So, it's clear for example that competition... So, you say, why would returns on capital go down over time? And the classic answer in economics is competition, right. So, if you're earning very high returns, maybe I'll come in and try to take part of your business away. That makes total sense. But clearly, competition can't work backward, right. So, it's the same idea that it's flummoxing, right, because competition is such a satisfactory answer as to why returns go down, but it doesn't really explain what we're after. Only partially explains what we're after. It's a really interesting point.

Matt:	And I think that the mind invents the reasons why it's happening. Often it's just a statistical artifact.

Michael:	Yeah. And that's the work... And that's another thing I would recommend. I find this to be almost infinitely fascinating, but the work by Michael Gazzaniga, who is famous for his work on split brain patients, so these are people that have suffered typically epilepsy and, to address these severe seizures, they sever the corpus callosum, the bundle of nerves between the two hemispheres of the brain. And what that opened up for Gazzaniga, Roger Sperry before him, was this opportunity to study modularity in the brain, and what Gazzaniga found was in the left hemisphere, where our language resides for most people, that there's a module they've now dubbed the interpreter, and the primary job of the interpreter is to find causes for every effect. So, it's a sort of cause and effect closing machine. And to your point, often in life, cause and effect are clear. You throw the rock at the window and it smashes. That's cause and effect, right. But the point is that if there's randomness, there's luck, going back to your coin tossing example, there's some sort of stochastic process, your mind is just going to make up a cause. It's fabricated, right, because it wants to close the cause and effect loop, and what Gazzaniga was able to show so brilliantly and so poignantly is that, with these experiments with these split brain patients, they could really isolate where this is happening and come up with these really fascinating results. And Gazzaniga wrote a book last year and he makes this point where... quite powerful, where he sort of makes this claim where he thinks that that module, that cause and effect connection, is the thing that distinguishes humans from other species most fundamentally, which is really interesting if it's true. So, I think that's a really important thing to keep in mind, too, is that our minds are constantly closing the cause and effect loops and it's not above any of us. We all do it and we just have to be very, very mindful of the stories that we're telling ourselves, because sometimes they're true and sometimes they're not.

Matt:	And I don't know the specifics of those studies, but essentially, what they were doing, they had them open a door or something, right, and then the other hemisphere of the brain would invent a reason why they had done it or something, right?

Michael:	Yeah, totally. Exactly. So, I mean, there are lots of different examples. They would show pictures or whatever it is, but one simple example, yeah, would be something just like that. They would flash some words to the left visual field, where it goes to the right hemisphere. Something that'll say, the patient sitting down will say "Stand up." So, the left visual hemisphere sees it. Right hemisphere connects. The patient stands up. So, it's interesting. Of course, the left hemisphere, the person knows that they're standing up. They have no access to that cue, but now the researcher will say, you know, "Patient, why are you standing up?" And the research is almost humorous. It's because these people would fabricate these sort of elaborate, crazy stories. You know, my left knee is sore and I want a stretch, or something like that, right. They would fabricate something that would sort of hold the whole thing together. But obviously, it was completely contrived. So, again, you get these chuckles as you see these things that these people are saying, but the more serious and fundamental point is that we're all doing it all the time and we're just not mindful of it. So, this is just shining a spotlight on something that we're all doing all the time. So, it's a really hard thing to do, but it's discipline to say, am I fabricating a narrative here or is this a luck-laden activity or a luck-laden field? Am I simply just capturing luck here and I'm making up a story to try to make for a cohesive world?

Matt:	I think that's the critical point, is that just because... It's happening in the research, but the reality is it's happening every single day to everyone who's listened to this podcast, and both of us.

Michael:	Precisely. Absolutely.

Matt:	Well, I think that's a good segue into the idea of cognitive biases, and I know that's something you're very knowledgeable about. What are some of the most insidious or even some of the most common cognitive biases that you see people suffering from? And maybe specifically in the context of investing, or even broadly?

Michael:	Yeah. So, there are really two things that I would mention in investing. There are many more. One of them, which is extremely difficult to sidestep, is confirmation bias. This is this idea that even if you struggle to make a decision--let's say buy an investment, buy a stock or what have you--even if you sort of struggle to come to that conclusion, once you've made a decision, we all have a natural tendency to seek information that confirms out point of view and to dismiss or disavow or discount disconfirming points of view. And one of the things we've learned, you know, certainly, and I think a lot of what we've been seeing in computer science the last 25 or 30 years has been strongly reinforcing, is this idea of updating information as new information comes in. So, it's a Bayes' theorem. So, you have a prior... you have a point of view of how the world works. New information comes in and, really, if you're doing your job properly, you should be updating your view, updating your prior, given this new information. And, unfortunately, the confirmation bias is this sort of huge brick wall that prevents new information from finding its way into your mind or finding its way into your decision making. So, that's the first one that's a really big one. The second one is probably overconfidence, and this is very trivial to demonstrate if you get a group of people. People tend to be very overconfident about topics that are a little bit away from their own bailiwick. So, if I give you questions that you know a lot about, you'll do fine, but things that are just a little bit on the margin from that, you'll tend to be overconfident. And the way that tends to manifest in an investing setting, for sure, is people tend to project ranges of outcomes that are too narrow. In other words, they think they understand the future better than they actually do, and they fail to consider possibilities, whether they're really good possibilities or really bad possibilities, and that's, I think, the more pernicious component of overconfidence. So, those are two that come to mind, but boy, you know, things like... We could go on and on. Loss aversion. So, we suffer losses more than we enjoy comparable-sized gains. That's a really big one that looms large in a lot of our decisions. So, there's a long list of them, but those two probably, confirmation bias and overconfidence, are probably the one-two that I would list first.

Matt:	And what do you think are some ways that people can combat each of those?

Michael:	So, confirmation bias is just really, the key is to be as open-minded as possible. Jonathan Baron at University of Pennsylvania's got this beautiful phrase. He called it actively open-minded, and this idea of really, truly trying to be as open as you can to new information or new input. And the second thing, I think it's very few people are going to be formal about doing something like Bayes' theorem, but understanding behind Bayes' theorem, which is, you have a point of view. New information comes in. Are you revising your view, both directionally the correct amount and the magnitude of the correct amount? So, those would be some ways to try to do that. Overconfidence, the key is to just... and we can go back to our discussion a few moments ago about Bayes rates, is just to continue to compel yourself to think about alternatives, right. I'll give you one example that's a very simple one. I joke with my students at Columbia Business School, often when there are stock recommendations, you know, you see someone on CNBC or something, or they recommend a stock for purchase, they'll often say, "Well, the upside is 30% and the downside is 10%." Something like that, so it sounds like three to one. Pretty good, right? But if you think about, just statistically for a moment, the standard deviation of the stock market, right, so how fat the bell shape is of the distribution of returns. It's about 20% standard deviation in the last 85 years or so. So, that's a diverse five portfolio, of course. So, the standard deviation of an individual stock is going to be higher than that. Let me just pick 30% just to make the numbers easy. So, the average stock, let's say roughly speaking, would be up about 10%, mean return, average, with a 30 standard deviation. So, just translate that into statistics. That would say that about 68% of the time, it's going to be between up 40%, right, 10% mean plus 30 standard deviation, to down 20%. So, 10% mean minus 30%. So, 40 to -20. So, I just joked about this 10 to 30 percent upside, 10% down. You know, just one standard deviation is wider than most analysts are willing to accept, and certainly going on two standard deviations, it's vastly wider. So, imposing this discipline on yourself to understand what the underlying distributions look like and to recognize, try to think about having ranges of the future that are wide enough. And then there are other techniques, which we could talk about, and I think you probably have covered some of these in some of your prior podcasts, but things like pre-mortems. So, these sort of structured ways to get people to think about different points of view are also some nice techniques to allow to do that.

Matt:	You know, we actually use pre-mortems in our business, but it's not something that I've talked about at all on the podcast. I'd love for you to kind of extrapolate on that concept.

Michael:	Sure. I mean, so most people know about post-mortems, right? So, in other words, the patient has died or something adverse has happened to the patient and we sit around as a medical community and say, given the facts that we had at the time and our technology, what could we or should we have done differently to get to a better outcome? And we're also very familiar with scenario forecasting. So, we sit here in the present. We peer into the future and say, "Here are the possibilities we should consider as we make a decision." A pre-mortem, as you've already gathered from the name, is a very different exercise. It actually effectively launches yourself into the future and you look back to the present. So, now it's June, for example, 2017 and we look back to today, June 2016. This was developed by a social psychologist named Gary Klein, and so, just to give props to him, he's the guy that developed this. And so, we can tie together two ideas here. So, here's the classic way to do this. You say, "Let's sit down. We'll meet in our conference room." I suspect this is what you guys do in your business. And you say, "We're going to think about making a particular decision." Let's say it's an investment decision or a business decision to expand or what have you. And what we're going to imagine, then, each of us, is that this decision turned out to be a fiasco. Total disaster. We're all embarrassed about it. But now it's June 2017, so it's a year from now. So, each of us is going to write a little narrative, write a little 200-word essay about why this decision turned south. And it's very important to do it independently, and it's very important to do it from the point of view of the future looking back to today, right. So, you might say, and then you combine the different inputs, and it turns out that that exercise tends to generate substantially more alternatives or scenarios than simply standing in the present looking to the future. And by the way, is that consistent, Matt, with your own experience in your own company?

Matt:	Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

Michael:	Yeah. And so, let's tie this back to the idea of the interpreter. You might say, "Well, hey, I'm looking at scenarios. I'm thinking about this already. Why is a pre-mortem adding value?" And the answer, I believe, is by launching yourself into the future, assuming that this particular outcome has occurred, what that does is it wakes up your interpreter, right. This little module in your brain, you've now given it a fact and you're saying, "Hey, interpreter, why did this go bad?" And the interpreter's like, "I'm up to this task," and starts generating particular causes for it, right? So, in a sense, your scenario planning, standing in the present, future, the thing isn't done. So, you're not really thinking about causes in a very rich sense. And the second, the pre-mortem, you're basically recruiting your interpreter, in a sense, to help you understand scenarios more richly. Isn't that cool? So, I think that's part of the psychological reason why pre-mortems, I think, can be more effective than simply scenarios. And, you know, my experience is very consistent with yours, that organizations that have adopted, embraced pre-mortems tend to report that they have much richer discussions, much more heated debates, and ultimately probably make better decisions as a consequence of going through the exercise.

Matt:	Another related concept that we've used a number of times is something from the military called a Red Team. Have you ever heard of that?

Michael:	Yep, absolutely. So, we wrote a piece about decision making, and we talked about different things. So, we talk about Red Team, Blue Team very specifically. And, you know, you may have mentioned this before, but red team typically is attacker, blue team is defender. I think today, one of the good... it's from military strategy, of course, but today, one great example, very relevant example is cybersecurity. So, you might say, "Hey, chief technology officer, are we protected from cyber-threats?" And he or she may say yes, but you might hire a hacker to be your red team, so to challenge yourself to see where your vulnerabilities lie. And so, red team... And, by the way, this was my prior job. If we had a particular investment that wasn't working out well or a thesis that didn't seem to be unfolding, we actually would do this, that you'd assign some people to go off and develop the counter case, the devil's advocate case. You'd have people defending the point of view of the firm and we just let people sit across from each other at a conference room, and everybody else would be judge and jury and we'd let them go at it, which was great. I'll tell you the one thing that I learned. A couple of things that I would just add onto that. One is that in Red Team, Blue Team, I think it's really important to distinguish between facts and opinion, and I think a lot of our discussions in general, by the way, we tend to not distinguish as carefully as we should or could between facts and opinion. So, this is a really interesting exercise I'd recommend all the listeners to do, if they have a few minutes, is to pull out an article. For example, something you either really agree with or something you really disagree with, right. So, something that's really polarizing for you. And then take two different color highlighters, say blue and yellow, and with one color, highlight what you would deem to be facts and then another color what you would deem to be opinion, and then simply step back from the document, and whether you agree with it or disagree with it, try to have a balanced assessment as to whether you're being persuaded or not persuaded by fact or opinion. That's super cool. The second thing I'll mention, which was a new thing for me, is that Adam Grant's a great professor at University of Pennsylvania, and he wrote a book called The Originals. I don't know if you guys talked about that. There's some stuff on creativity in there, as well.

Matt:	Have not.

Michael:	But Adam talked about Red Team, Blue Team, and he actually made a point that I didn't appreciate fully until I read it. And he said, "If you're assigning red team responsibility in your organization, what you want to find is someone who really doesn't believe in the thesis." You don't want to just say, "Hey, can you be the devil's advocate?" You want someone who actually doesn't believe in the thesis, someone who really is the devil's advocate, and he just says that enriches the dialogue greatly, versus having someone that's sort of an innocent bystander, grab them by the collar and say, "Go tell us why you're against this." So, that was another little wrinkle that I just learned about, which I think could add a little value in the process. 

Matt:	And another tool that I know you're a big advocate of our checklists. Can you talk a little bit about that, how important they are and how they can improve decision making?

Michael:	Yeah, absolutely. You know, I was really inspired, and I think many others, originally, by Atul Gawande's article in The New Yorker, which ended up being a book, The Checklist Manifesto. But the protagonist of that original New Yorker article, and to a large degree, the book, is a guy named Peter Pronovost, who's a doctor at Johns Hopkins. And, actually, we had a conference a number of years ago where he invited Pronovost to come in. And the story's nothing less than astounding, where Pronovost basically... And by the way, he had lost his father to a medical error, so it was very real and very personal for him. Where Pronovost basically introduced a very simple five-step checklist for putting tubes in, intravenous tubes, and found that they could massively reduce infection rates, saved lots and lots of lies, and I think Gawande in the book argues that Pronovost may have saved more lives in the United States than any other person in the last ten years or so. So, this sort of informs us that... By the way, doctors, if you ask them what they need to do before putting a tube in, they know what to do. It's not like their lack of knowledge. It's really a lack of execution. And so, I think the point that Gawande makes in the book that I think is so powerful is that in every field where this has been studied, be it aviation, medicine, construction, a faithful... First of all, coming up with a good checklist and a faithful use of the checklist has led to better results, and this is without making the underlying users any smarter or any better trained. So, it's just hewing to the process more accurately, which is really fascinating. So, I think a lot about this in the context of investing. Now, investing is a little bit of art and a little bit of science, and I think where the checklists really do apply very effectively is in a lot of the process-oriented stuff. So, how to do certain types of calculations. Basically, it's sort of the fundamental components of investing analysis. Now, the art part comes into some other elements of interpretation, but I would just say if you have components of whatever job you do, and I think almost all of us do have components that are somewhat algorithmic, where consistency and accuracy are really, really helpful, you should be thinking about, if you're not doing it already, developing and applying checklists. Gawande's book is fantastic. Pronovost, by the way, himself, wrote a book about this topic, and maybe the last thing I'll say that came out of Pronovost's book, which I think is very important, is that he said one of the keys to checklists succeeding is actually gathering and analyzing data. In other words, being scientific about this, not sort of just a nice idea of having a checklist, and I think that was one of the keys to Pronovost's original wild success as a Johns Hopkins, was not just that they developed a proper checklist but they figured out ways to get the doctors to use it, and then they really kept track of it and gave the doctors feedback. And so, this idea of data collection and feedback is also a really, really key element to this whole thing.

Matt:	Changing directions a little bit, I'd love to dig into some of the stuff you talked about in The Success Equation, kind of untangling luck from skill and the concept of the luck-skill continuum. One of the tools or mental models that you use to describe that phenomenon was the two jars model, which I found to be extremely helpful. I'd love for you to kind of explain that a little bit.

Michael:	Sure. So, you know, and by the way, luck, skill, the whole topic of The Success Equation, it had been sort of lurking in the shadows for me for many, many years. I played sports in college and high school and a sports fan. Clearly a big deal in the world of investing, and also if you look at corporate performance, it's almost everywhere you look, this idea of luck was sort of there, but hard to pin down. And I read Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb in 2001. That certainly got me thinking more about that, and I think Taleb does an incredibly effective job in that book of sort of underscoring the role of luck, but didn't really do much to help us quantify a lot of this. So, the cornerstone of the book, as you point out, is called the luck-skill continuum, and the way to think about this is that you just draw a line and on the far left you put activities that are pure luck, right. So, roulette wheels or lotteries, where really, there's no skill whatsoever. And on the far right, you might put pure skill activities. And things like maybe... a lot of things. Pure skill, but running races, or chess is probably over there. And then, just thinking about arraying activities between those two extremes. So, where does a basketball game fit on that? Where does bowling? Whatever it is, right. So, that in and of itself, the methodological approaches to trying to do that was really, really interesting. But, as I got into this, as you point out, I was trying to think about conceptualized the so-called two jar model. So, the idea is that your outcome for whatever activity is going to be the result of drawing a number from a jar filled with numbers for skill, and then drawing a number from a jar that's got luck. Right, so you're going to pull two numbers out, add them together, and that'll be your outcome. Now, if you're on the pure luck side of the continuum, for example, you'll have a luck distribution. You can envision it as a bell-shaped distribution, is fine. And your skill jar is filled with zeroes, right. So, only luck will make a different. If it's on the pure skill side, you know, you have a skill distribution and you're drawing zeroes from luck, so only skill matters, but almost everything in life is sort of these two rich distributions colliding with one another. And the question is, how much is each contributing? So, I just think that's... And by the way, one of the really nice things about the two jar model is it allows us to understand to some degree things like reversion to the mean, which we spoke about before. It allows us to appreciate the fact that great outliers--for example, streaks in sports of consecutive hits in a baseball game or consecutive shots made by a basketball player--are always, and almost by definition, going to combine great skill and great luck. Because, if you think about it for a second, that has to be true, right. Not all skillful players have the streaks in sports, but all the streaks are held by skillful players, right, because skill is the prerequisite and luck comes on top. So, to me, it's just a very, very vibrant way to think about a lot of things in life, and the key point of The Success Equation is not just thinking about these topics, but hopefully providing some people with some ways to think about the concrete, how they have to deal with the world differently concretely, as a consequence of understanding the role of luck.

Matt:	And one of the things that I'm really fascinated with is the concept of deliberate practice, and you touch on that and how it relates to and applies more specifically in skill-dominated systems. But I'm curious, you know, how would you think about applying something like deliberate practice, or maybe the core lessons behind deliberate practice, to a field like investing or business or entrepreneurship?

Michael:	Yeah. Super interesting. And so, deliberate... I don't know if you've... There's a brand new book by Anders Eriksson called Peak, on this...

Matt:	I have not heard of it. I'll have to read that.

Michael:	Okay, yeah. Check it out. So, Anders Eriksson just wrote a book called Peak, just as it sounds, which I just read a couple of weeks ago. So, that is his... you know, talking about deliberate practice, just to reiterate for all the listeners, deliberate practice is this idea of practicing that is at the cusp of your ability, so a little bit at or right beyond your ability, often where you have a teacher or coach, someone who can give you instruction, and you're getting quality feedback. So, you're proving at the cusp of your skill level. So, as he points out, a lot of us practice things, or we do things that's like we practice. We do things over and over, or even we practice but we don't really satisfy the requirements of deliberate practice. It's usually not beyond our or at the edge of our capability. We often don't have coaches. We often don't get the quality feedback. And, as Eriksson expresses it, deliberate practice is not a whole lot of fun, right. It's actually very tiring, because you're constantly pressing yourself. So, I wrote a piece about this actual topic of deliberate practice and 10,000 hours back in 2004. It came before Gladwell's book and so forth, and I've struggled since that moment of writing that piece about what deliberate practice means. What is this idea of working beyond our boundaries and getting feedback and so forth? So, I don't know that there's a perfectly good example of that, so maybe I can make two points. One is what I argued in The Success Equation, is skill improvement or skill development through deliberate practice is absolutely valid in fields where your output is an accurate reflection of your skill. So, what kinds of things would that be true? It would be, you know, music, if you're a musician. Athletics, it would be true. Chess playing, it would be true. So, there's certain fields where the output is an accurate indicator. There's very little luck that's filtering out the outcomes, right. So, that's where deliberate practice really is good. As you slide over to the luck side of the continuum, what happens is the connection between your skill and the outcome is colored greatly by luck. So, for the example I gave Matt that's a trivial one is, if you're a blackjack player and you enjoy playing blackjack and you go to Atlantic City, you may play properly with standard strategy and lose badly for a few hands, or you may play very foolishly and win for a few hands, right? So, this connection between your skill and the outcome are broken. And when that's the case, what I argue is you should focus almost exclusively on process. And process, it's got elements of deliberate practice, but process is going to have three components, as I would argue for it. One is an analytical component. That is both trying to find situations where you have an advantage and also how do you bet, given your advantage. I'm going to call the second component behavioral, and this covers a lot of what we've been talking about today, but are you aware of managing and mitigating the behavioral biases that we all fall prey to? And the third I'm going to call organizational, which is we all work for companies or parts of organizations or parts of teams. None of them are perfect. Agency cost can be a very big deal. What are we all doing collectively to minimize those organizational drags, right. So, to me, it becomes very process-oriented, and I think if you look at the elite performers, whether it is in sports betting or even sports team management or investing, you get a very common thread, that those folks are almost always and almost exclusively focused on process in the faith, the full faith that a good process leads to good outcomes over time.

Matt:	I think that's great advice and that's something that I've struggled with a lot, is kind of how to reconcile that or how to deal with the challenge of getting whether it's accurate feedback or whatever else it might be in systems where there's a very fuzzy relationship between skill and outcome.

Michael:	Exactly.

Matt:	So, you've touched on this a little bit, but if you had to kind of distill it, what would one piece of homework be that you would give to the listeners of this episode?

Michael:	Read. [Laughs] Read is probably the main thing, is to... And I actually say that I think working with people like you or following people like you is a great place to help curate some of this stuff, but I think it probably helps to have some thoughtful people. Shane Parrish, you mentioned, was fantastic.

Matt:	He's great.

Michael:	And Shane's another guy who can help you curate that stuff. But I think starting to just...making sure that you commit a substantial percent of your day to learning, continual learning, and, again, being diverse in what you're reading and thinking about; and forcing yourself, compelling yourself to have the stance of being actively open-minded, so making sure that you're considering different points of view, you're exposing yourself to different types of people. So, that maybe not. That's maybe a tall order, but, to me, that would be the first thing I would say. And, you know, I do find a lot of people struggle to find time--or at least they perceive they struggle to find time--to read, and the main thing I would just say is that life is about tradeoffs. So, the question is: Are there things that you're doing today in your moment to moment that you could trade off, that you could do less of, that would allow you to do more reading? Because I do think the return on investment is really, really... The return on time and the return on investment is really high for reading.

Matt:	You know, there's a really funny study that Zig Ziglar talks about in some of his old speeches. And I think the study was in the '50s or '60s, but they basically looked at...they looked at a factory and they started with everybody from the factory workers up to the line managers, up to the office managers, up to the president, and they looked at how many hours a week they each spent watching TV. And there was sort of a relationship where, you know, it's like the factory worker spent 20 hours a week watching TV, all the way up to where the president spent half an hour a week watching TV or something. So, that's a great point, is that there's always a way to find time to read if you make it a priority.

Michael:	That's right. Exactly. And I love that. And, again, it's maybe not everybody's cup of tea, but for people who are probably listening to this, it is going to be something that they'll find interesting and I would just jump in. And I would also encourage... Especially for young people it's a great thing to get going on. When you can work it into your habits when you're young, it's just a huge leg up through the years, for sure.

Matt:	I mean, obviously you're a very active reader. Do you have any kind of methodology that you use to keep track of all of your kind of book notes or to keep...to sort of categorize everything that you've read and all the knowledge that you've accumulated?

Michael:	[Laughs] So, Matt, I wish I had a good answer to this question. The answer is no, not so much. But I guess I...

Matt:	I struggle with that, too. That's why I'm asking -- for myself, in this case.

Michael:	[Laughs] But I benefit from a couple things, which are sort of offshoots of the way my career works. So, I have the fortune of being able to write a fair bit for my job and not just book stuff or just day-to-day stuff, and so that allows me to weave in a lot of the stuff that I read and implement it, and I think teaching and writing are two really powerful mechanisms to help consolidate thinking and consolidate ideas. So, that helps a lot. And, beyond that, it's just... Now, a lot of it is cumulative, right? So, it's just trying to make sure that whatever I'm reading clicks into place. I mentioned this Anders Ericsson book and, you know, I've been reading about... I think I have probably a half dozen books or more on expertise. Many of them were edited by Anders Ericsson. So, that was just adding onto something that I had a little bit of a foundation in. So, yeah, there's not much method to my madness, but I'm not sure that... Yeah, I'm not sure... I think just jumping in is probably the first and foremost thing to do.

Matt:	Where can people find you and some of your works online?

Michael:	So, probably the easiest thing to do is go to michaelmauboussin.com. So, that's a website that mostly highlights the books that you mentioned at the outset. The Success Equation, our skill lookbook, also has its own website, which is success-equation.com. Success-equation.com is also kind of fun because there are some interesting little simulations that you can play around with, including the two jar model you talked about. There's also some fun stuff on the Colonel Blotto game, which is a game theory model, and a little mind reader algorithm. So, there are some fun things to do there as well. And then it's harder... My professional writing is difficult to get access to through formal channels, but if you've got some fingers in Google, you can tend to find a lot of the stuff on there. So, I would just google it. [Laughs]

Matt:	And I think valuewalk.com has a great list of a lot of your...a lot of your pieces.

Michael:	Yeah. So, ValueWalk's a good example. Yeah, exactly. And Hurricane Capital's done a great job. So, a couple of these sites, those guys do a nice job of recapturing a lot of the stuff we do.

Matt:	Well, Michael, thank you so much for being on The Science of Success. It's been great to have you and it's been an enlightening conversation.

Michael:	Matt, it's been my pleasure the whole time, so thank you for having me.

How To Stop Living Your Life On Autopilot, Take Control, and Build a Toolbox of Mental Models to Understand Reality with Farnam Street’s Shane Parrish

Do you feel like your life is on auto-pilot? Do you want to take control and build a better and deeper understanding of reality? In this episode we discuss mental models, cognitive biases, go deep on decision-making and how to improve and build a smarter decision-making framework and we look at a number of key mental models that you can add to your mental toolbox.

If you want to dramatically improve your decision making with a few short steps - listen to this episode! 

Shane Parrish is the founder and author of the Farnam Street blog, which has been featured in Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, and much more, its one of my personal favorite blogs and an incredible resource dedicated to making you smarter every day by mastering the best of what other’s have already figured out.

We discuss the following topics:
-Why you should focus on mastering things that change slowly or don’t change at all
-Why reading “pop” books and news doesn’t make you smarter
-How to pattern interrupt yourself when you get focused on the wrong things
-What “mental models” are and how you can use them to your advantage
-Why you should focus on your “circle of competence"
-How to reduce your blindspots and make better decisions
-Simple steps you can take right now to improve your decision-making
-How to think about the world like Charlie Munger
-How you can avoid becoming “a man with a hammer"
-Why you should focus on avoiding stupidity instead of trying to be smart
-Why its so important that you should keep a decision journal (how to do it)
-And much more! 

Learn more and visit Shane at https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions how to do that!).  

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Shane Parrish is the founder and author of the Farnam Street blog, which has been featured in Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and much more. It's one of my personal favorite blogs and an incredible resource dedicated to making you smarter every day by mastering the best of what others have already figured out. Shane, welcome to The Science of Success.

Shane:	Thanks for having me, Matt. I'm excited to be on.

Matt:	We're super excited to have you on here. So, for listeners who might not be familiar, tell us a little bit about what is Farnam Street and what do you talk about on the blog.

Shane:	Oh, there's so many ways to describe it, but a friend of mine put it best when they said it was an online intellectual hub for people who are rediscovering their curiosity and want to be better, in a non-self help-y way, but want to be better at solving problems, removing blind spots, exploring life. I think that about encapsulates the blog. We talk about everything from art and philosophy to the science of decision making to what it means to live a meaningful life to what it means to be a good friend, and how you can go about doing that and how you can learn from other people, and not only learn from other people but learn from their mistakes. I'm very open about some of the mistakes that I've made about being a good friend, and some of the decisions I've made have factored into how we think about decision making. So, I think that it's just an online intellectual resource for people who are consistently looking to gain an edge over somebody else.

Matt:	And how did you initially become interested in this subject?

Shane:	Oh, it started back with my MBA, and it wasn't really anything that I thought would turn into what it has become today. Originally, when I started my MBA, I was focused on doing my homework and passing and all of this stuff and getting good grades, and all of a sudden it became pretty apparent to me that a lot of the schools—and I won't mention names—have become check cashing institutes, where somebody, usually a corporate sponsor, sponsors an employees to go get an MBA, and the schools have a large incentive to allow those people to get MBAs. So, what happens in between is almost irrelevant, as long as those people get MBAs and the school gets a big check. The learning became secondary, and so I took it upon myself originally to start learning on my own, and then this is the manifestation of that. Like I said, it was never intended to be what it is today. It's a lot of luck, a lot of happenstance, a passionate group of 80,000 readers, and it's kind of taken off from there.

Matt:	So, kind of the tagline of the subheading for the blog is Mastering the Best of What Other People Have Figured out.

Shane:	Yeah. I mean, I'm not smart enough to figure out everything myself, so how do we learn? We learn a lot through reading. We learn a lot through experience. But there's only so many things that I can experience in life, so I want to try to learn from mistakes of others, the epiphanies of others, the insights of others, and that'll give me kind of a cumulative advantage over a long period of time, in terms of the knowledge that I can accumulate and how I apply that to problems.

Matt:	You know, that's an interesting... When you say cumulative knowledge, I've heard an analogy before that it's almost like compound interest. You know, when you start to read, you kind of build this knowledge base and this framework that you can continually sort of layer knew knowledge into. It's like, someone can't just read two or three books that you read recently and catch up to where you were before.

Shane:	Yeah, definitely, and it depends on what you're learning and what you're reading, right? I mean, all of that factors in. There's almost a half life to knowledge, and you want to learn if you're going to apply yourself, and you have an opportunity cost to your time. You want to start learning things that either change slowly over time or don't change at all. Unless you're in a niche field where you have to keep up with the latest neuroscience or research in a particular field, it makes more sense to apply yourself broadly to things that change slowly over time, and then use those tools to reduce your blind spots when making decisions, when connecting new things for creativity and innovation and solving problems, and then also for how to live a meaningful life.

Matt:	That's a great point. The idea of mastering or focusing on things that change slowly or don't change at all. What would you say are some kind of types of knowledge that would fall into that category?

Shane:	Well, I mean, if you look back in history, we have this big bucket of time, right? We have psychology, which everybody thinks is this great knowledge to have, but it's fairly recent that we've discovered these heuristics and biases. But physics has been around for a long time and chemistry's been around for a long time, and these laws don't change much over time. I mean, our heuristics and biases are important to understand, but you also want to merge them with other ideas. And I think that where people go astray is when you go to the bookstore and you pick up the bestselling book, and we have every incentive to pick up... I call them pop psychology books, but the pop psychology book of the day, because we feel educated, we feel like we're learning something, we feel like we're moving forward, and it's on a subject that's usually topical, that's in the news, and then what happens inevitably over time is those books disappear and the study either gets disproven or there's contrary evidence. It doesn't end up being knowledge, so you end up spending your time, whether you believe it or not, you spend your time entertaining yourself. And I think it's great to entertain yourself. You just need to be aware of when you're reading for entertainment, when you're reading for knowledge, when you're reading for information, and the way that you approach those subjects should differ. And your goals, in terms of how you get better throughout your career or what you want to do is also... will lead you to different sources of information. 

Matt:	I love the idea of focusing on kind of going back to the hard sciences, and that's something that someone who I know you're a big fan of and I'm a big fan of, Charlie Munger, talks about a lot. Kind of, you know, focusing or thinking about biology, physics, really those core fundamentals, and then branching out more and more into kind of the things that are built on top of that.

Shane:	Yeah. Munger is the source of a lot of inspiration for me, in terms of just the way that he approaches problems, and when you think about the world, it is multi-disciplinary. So, if you don't understand the big ideas from other disciplines, how can you synthesize reality? How can you remove your blind spots and how can you gain an edge or make better decisions that other people miss if you don't understand those big ideas from different disciplines? And these ideas are understood at different levels and you hone them over time. It's not something that you just conceptually grab. You write a chapter on physics one night and you understand gravity. It's something that you develop over a long period of time, and you hone those ideas. And I think that when you encounter new information, you start mapping it to what you already know, and this is where Munger's concept of the latticework of mental models comes in, where you start saying, "Oh..." You start seeing people make decision making errors and you can say, oh, that's confirmation bias, oh, that's anchoring bias. That's great. It gives you insight. But those are heuristics. Those are great. But it also gives you insight into, oh, well, they're operating outside their circle of competence. I'm operating in a complex adapted system. There's supply and demand effects here, and then when you kind of go through this mental list of models that you have in your head from other disciplines, including ecology, investing business, heuristics in terms of psychology and mathematics, statistics, chemistry, physics, you can usually gather in your mind mentally the variables that will control the situation. Right? Momentum is an incredible variable that people underestimate a lot of the time. That's a concept from physics. Statistics, in terms of sample size and distribution and mean and medium, and understanding the difference between those things enables you to make better decisions, and it enables you... More importantly, it enables you to reduce your blind spots, which I guess, in the end, is how we make better decisions. We all have a certain aperture onto the world, and that aperture is not a 360 degree, almost holographic view of what the problem is. But by reducing our blind spots, we come to a more complete knowledge of the situation, and that knowledge enables us to make better decisions, avoid stupidity, which is also an important outcome, and then go forward. 

Matt:	So, backing up slightly, can you kind of define or dig in a little bit more on the concept of mental models? It's something that we've mentioned briefly on the podcast, but some listeners may not be familiar with it.

Shane:	So, in my mind, I mean, there's two types of mental models. There's the psychological mental models, which are how we deceive ourselves, and those would be kind of like the heuristics that are popular today. There's availability. There's confirmation bias. There's anchoring bias, hindsight, overconfidence, and so on and so forth. And then there's kind of like the time simulations, and these are also heuristics, which are important to understand in some senses, right, where there's gravity. If I drop a pen, I know what's going to happen, but I'm simulating time. So, understanding that and understanding feedback loops and redundancies and margin of safety and the prisoner's dilemma and understanding how these things play out over time enables us to fast forward through time and see the most probably outcome when we're making a decision. Doesn't mean it's a guaranteed outcome. I mean, there are some things that are pretty guaranteed, like gravity, but it gives us a better aperture into the problem that we're trying to solve and also enables us to recognize intuitively that there's other outcomes that are maybe less probably but still possible. 

Matt:	So, can you think of an example of applying some of these mental models in a challenge or problem that you've faced recently?

Shane:	Well, one of the mental models that we use a lot if circle of competence, and circle of competence enables you to, just knowing where you're competent and where you incompetent enables you to make a better decision. I'll give you a kind of high level overview of how that works. If you're accurate in your circle of competence and you keep, say, a decision journal or something like that, you'll be able to hone that over time and you'll be like, well, when this type of decision comes up, like an investment decision in an airline company, I have a really high batting average. I would say that's within my circle of competence. But we all can't sit back like Charlie Munger or Warren Buffet and basically for the fat pitch that's within our circle of competence. Most of us have this pragmatic reality where we have to make decisions outside of our circle of competence. But if you recognize that you're outside of your circle of competence, you approach the decision in a different way. What I mean by that is now you start, instead of becoming overconfident, you start recognizing that other people's opinions may be valuable. Instead of thinking that you have all the information, you start seeking disconfirming evidence to the belief that you hold because you know you're not operating within the circle of competence. So, just a knowledge of a circle of competence and where you make good decisions and where that boundary is enables you to proceed in an area outside of your circle of competence and still make better decisions than you would have otherwise.

Matt:	And in that example, circle of competence is essentially one quote-unquote "mental model" in the toolbox, right? The goal is essentially to build a toolbox of tens, if not hundreds, of potential models that you have kind of deeply internalized in a way that it's almost intuitive, so that when you encounter a problem, you can naturally kind of pluck the four or five most appropriate models for understanding that particular situation.

Shane:	So, I think about it like you're a craftsman, right, and you show up to the job, and if you have a hammer, there's a limited set of problems you can solve. There's a limited amount of creativity that you can have with raw materials. The more tools you have, and the tools and the knowledge industry happen to be sometimes mental models, and sometimes they're very niche, you don't always need to be a broad, generalist thinker. Oftentimes, the most rewarding professions, like neurosurgery or lawyers, tend to be very niche in terms of how they think about the world and the problems that they try to solve. The rest of us have to operate in a lot of ambiguity in the sense of, we're solving problems that may not be as narrowly defined. We may not be in such a niche where we studied it for 15 or 16 years and we have to get on this treadmill to kind of keep up with it, but we're solving general business problems, and then the problem becomes how do you solve those problems better? How do I become better at my job? How do I become more valuable as an employee, as a knowledge worker? And I think the answer to that is acquiring more tools to solve different problems, but, more importantly, by solving different problems, you're often avoiding different problems. We teach a course on productivity, and one of the biggest sources of productivity that really not a lot of people think about and is very counter-intuitive is that the best way to be more productive is actually to make better decisions, because when you think about how most of us spend our days, we're spending so much time just fixing mistakes and solving problems that we've created by rushing our decisions, by not thinking about them, by not doing something that we could have done to change the outcome. So, the best way to get free time is to make better initial decisions. And when you think about that, it makes a lot of sense, but most people don't frame it that way. So, if you want to start making better decisions, one of the best ways to go about that is to understand the problem, and one of the best ways to understand the problem and understand reality is to be able to synthesize it. You want to be able to look at the problem from a three dimensional point of view. And if reality isn't multi-disciplinary, then I don't know what it is.

Matt:	And when you say reality is multi-disciplinary, can you elaborate on that so that listeners who might not be as familiar with Munger and his conception of worldly wisdom know what you're talking about?

Shane:	Yeah. I think you can't just look at one background. Like, if you have a psychology degree, the world isn't only psychology, right? It's also physics. It's also ma. It's biology. All of these things factor into most of the problems that we look at, and our goal, as a decision maker in an organization, not only do we want to make more effective decisions, we want to recognize when we're making decisions outside of our circle of competence, or that multiple disciplines might factor into. Psychology's great in terms of corporate decision making, but it may underplay supply and demand. It may underplay switching costs. If you don't have a grasp of these concepts and you don't have an intuitive mature about how to handle them or how to structure them in your mind, then you become what Munger says is the one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. You're handicapped in life. And then people will run circles around you, and that may be fine and that may not be fine, and that all depends on your makeup and what you kind of want to achieve and how you want to live your life.

Matt:	And I think in many ways, economics is a field that's often criticized for failing to understand or take into account the implications of other disciplines, with the example I know... I think there's a psychology book where they talk about the difference between econs and people, where it's what an economist would say how someone would behave and how they actually behave in the real world.

Shane:	Yeah. I don't think I know enough about the discipline of economics on that level to comment on what the economists think. I think there are economists out there who think in a very multi-disciplinary manner. Greg Mankiw from Harvard, I think, would be one of those people who think that way, and Munger has pointed out that his textbook thinks about economic problems in a multi-disciplinary way. I think his criticism was he doesn't actually point out that he's thinking about them in a multi-disciplinary way, and I think there's a lot of lessons that the rest of us, especially those of us who operate in mid- to large-sized corporations, can learn from business, about the time value of money and investment returns and marginal costs, and most importantly, probably, opportunity costs, which is a lesson that all of us can learn in the sense of you life one life and you can trade time for money and that's fine, and you can also trade money for time, and Buffet has a great quote where he said the rich... I forget the exact words, but the rich are always trading money for time, whereas the poor are trading time for money. And when we think about that, that comes down to opportunity cost, and most of us... Say, for example, you live in the suburbs or you live somewhere where you have a long commute. Most of us view that as a cheaper way to live. But do we factor in—and the important question is, do you think about—the time it takes to commute? Do you think about the two, maybe the two and a half hours a day you're spending in the car, and how do you value that time? And when you start factoring that in, it kind of changes the dynamics of what you're thinking about in terms of cost and value. Example would be reading. If you're reading something, you're not reading something else. So, if you're reading Gawker, whatever, Buzzfeed... I don't even follow most of the media today, but if you're reading the latest news, that's great. It's keeping you up to date on current events but it means you're not reading something that's enduring that doesn't change. So, there is an opportunity cost to everything we do. If you go to lunch with a friend, maybe you value that a lot, which I do, personally, and if you sit and do nothing but read the newspaper, you value that, and it becomes just knowing what's valuable to you and knowing how it helps you achieve the goals that you're trying to achieve or how it entertains you or gives you some sort of down time, which is also an important cost. But there is an opportunity cost to everything, and I think people underestimate how important that concept is to grasp, right. While you're watching Netflix, you're not doing something else. And if somebody else is doing something else that makes them better, more valuable, or more knowledgeable, eventually, over time, you're going to lose the edge that you have. And I think that's important to realize.

Matt:	I definitely have the same sort of perspective about most news, most current events. I barely read any sort of news sources. Mostly what I read are blogs like Farnam Street or things that really talk much more deeply about, to use the phrase that you use, things that don't change over time, right? You know, you can fill your head with a bunch of news. Six months later, most of that stuff is irrelevant. Whereas if you fill your head with these mental models...

Shane:	When you think about how we consume information, most people—and I'm generalizing here—are consuming articles, like ten ways to get promoted at work or whatever the clickbait headline of the day is. And what's really funny is I've talked to some of my friends who are like this, and they love it. They do it for entertainment. That's great. But they're often, like, "You know what's really interesting is I click on the same article two days in a row and it's just got a different headline, but I don't really recognize that I'm reading the same article until the last paragraph, when something kind of jumps out at me." So, they're going through these 800 to 1,500 word articles and they're not actually remembering that they read it yesterday. So, what are they doing? I mean, that's just a form of entertainment at that point. And then anybody who's promising the world is not going to deliver that. There's now four steps you can take to guarantee your employment. There's no six ways to negotiate with your boss to get a raise. I mean, there's tips and there's tricks and there's probability involved, in terms of, well, if you employ this, and I know one person who teaches about how to get a raise at work, and one of the main factors that he's giving people is the courage to ask for a raise. But he's not actually giving them a tool that they develop, right? He's basically saying you need to ask for a raise, and a lot of them get a raise when they go and ask for a raise. And that's fine, but what is he teaching them, long-term? Maybe it's self-sufficiency and maybe it's that I can ask for things I want. We want to teach people things that don't change over time that apply to a wide variety of problems, from everything from innovation to decision making. I mean, we factor into corporate mergers and acquisitions. We can set it in SEC filings. There's a whole bunch of stuff that we want Farnam Street to be, but it really boils down to giving you more tools that you can use over a year, over two years, over three years that enable you to be better at whatever it is you want to be better at, and part of that is just recognizing when you're reading things for entertainment or information and when you're reading things for knowledge, and when you're reading things for knowledge, you want to slow down. When you're reading things for entertainment, you might want to speed up. But it's not to say that one is better than the other. I don't think we're making that decision for people. We're just giving them an alternative. 

Matt:	You know, it's funny you mentioned the story about somebody reading the same article and not realizing it. One of the things that we talk a lot about on the podcast and that I'm a big fan of is meditation, and it may not be for everyone, but one of the beautiful things about meditation is that it kind of gives you that inner dialogue to sort of check your thoughts and be like, hey, what's happening, right? So, if you start... Sometimes I'll get sucked into a loop of reading a bunch of stuff on Reddit or something like that, and then my mind will kick and be like, what are you doing? Pull out of this dopamine loop. And I'll pull out and be like, all right, I gotta stop doing that.

Shane:	Yeah, but that comes back to a feedback loop, which is also an important concept from engineering, right. So, the mental model is that you've created this either intentional or unintentional feedback loop that enables you when you go astray or do something you're not wanting to be doing to just check in and be present, right? We all make decisions. It's whether we make them consciously or unconsciously, and a lot of us just spend that time, I would say, unconsciously, which is fine. But you've enabled yourself to kind of be like, oh, is this how I want to spend my time? And that feedback loop enables you to make different decisions about consuming information. It might mean that you go back to Reddit and you start reading more, and it might mean that you're like, what the hell am I doing? I want to do something else and I want to spend my time differently. But just that in and of itself, that feedback loop, that mechanism to kind of switch from unconscious to conscious is one of the most incredibly valuable things you can have. And I would say meditation probably is the foundation for much of what I do. I don't meditate every day, but I do meditate on a regular basis, and it enables me to structure my time better and it enables me to clear my mind and have moments in my mind that are device-free, that are quiet, that are calm, that are soothing, and it's made me respond to situations in a different manner than I would have in the past, where I might have made more anxiety or stress about a certain situation. Now it's enabled me, I would say, to become more stoic about it and just accept the world for the way that it is, instead of pushing back against things that I think are unfair or unjust and just accepting that that's the way it is, and that is unproductive energy and my mind would get clouded with some of the stuff like that, before I started meditating, before I started yoga, and now it's become a lot more clear in terms of the path that works for me.

Matt:	It's funny that you mentioned stoicism, because we have a whole episode about the idea of accepting reality. The same concept of, it doesn't matter if it's fair, it doesn't matter if it's just. It's all about accept things the way they are so that you can move beyond them. 

Shane:	Yeah. I mean, Joseph Tussman has this amazing quote, and I think it becomes about this. He says, "What the pupil must learn if he learns anything at all is that the world will do most of the work for you, provided you cooperate with it by identifying how it really works and then aligning with those realities. If we do not let the world teach us, it teaches us a lesson." And I think that's one of the most profound things I've come across in a long time, and I think that enables us to think about, am I confronting the world or am I accepting it? And if I'm accepting how it works, that's a bit of a feedback loop into checking what I think and checking my approach to life, and that feedback loop over a long period of time should compound and enable us to better align with reality. It's not something like... You don't go to bed Thursday night and wake up Friday morning and be like, I'm going to align myself with the world. You just start opening your eyes to how the world really works, how it operates, the different outcomes, and understanding that outcomes are not necessarily guaranteed and they're a function of probability, and we all have periods of bad luck, and then you enable that over time to slowly learn to roll with the punches.

Matt:	It's amazing that once you've kind of gone down the road of internalizing and really starting to understand many of these different mental models, it's almost like, you know, I'm thinking about... I was in a meeting last week in kind of a sales meeting, and it's amazing how I can just immediately see it's like they're using this bias and they're doing this thing, and it's like you start to kind of build this framework where you can subconsciously just capture that stuff.

Shane:	Yeah, totally. And I mean, the flip side to that is biases are biases for a reason. I mean, they work most of the time. They're heuristics because they work 99% of the time. Our goal is to kind of recognize when they're leading us astray, which is why there's frameworks for decision making that enable you to just check and balance that. One of the questions that you should ask yourself is where am I leading myself astray, where am I... I'd be fooling myself. And that's when you kind of check your biases and your heuristics yourself and start thinking about, oh, well, it's a really small sample size. Should I be basing a $500 million merger on two years of track record from this other person? And then just enabling those questions usually generates a better outcome, but not always, right. I mean, you really have to think about this stuff. And when you think about how we structure our days, how we structure our time, most people don't take the time to make good decisions. And what I mean by that is they're not making a conscious choice to make bad decisions. So, just setting themselves up for failure. Think about the... Generalizing again. Think about the modern office worker. They work... Let's say for the sake of argument, they work nine to five. They show up. They've got to drop off the kids first. It's a hectic morning. They get in a little later than they want. It's 8:35. They open up their email. They have a nine o'clock meeting but they've got to go through 30 emails before then, because some people have shown up earlier and they've redirected their time, and then they realize that it's 8:55 and they have a nine o'clock meeting, and they're supposed to make a decision on something, so they pull up the document that's the briefing on the decision they're supposed to make, and they have five minutes. So, what do they do? They read the executive summary and they go to the meeting and they base their decision on the executive summary, which most times will work. It's another kind of heuristic, right? But often it leads us astray, because we don't do the work behind the scenes to understand the decision to understand the dynamics of the problem, to understand things. So, one of the other ways that you can increase productivity, and I guess it leads into making better decisions, is to schedule time to think about the decision. I mean, that's very counter-intuitive. We mention it in our productivity course, which is bewaymoreproductive.com, but it's incredible to me the amount of people who show up to work and just let email dictate their day. And they rely on, I guess, their wits or their spur of the moment judgment to make decisions. And, you know, 90% of the time that's going to work for you, but the 10% of the time it doesn't work for you is going to consume most of your time going forward.

Matt:	So, for somebody who's listening right now, what would you say are some concrete things they might be able to do to kind of immediately start improving their ability to make smarter decisions?

Shane:	Well, I think one of the things that you can do is, if you're unsure of the path forward, is to invert the problem, right. And to invert the problem means think about what you want to avoid and if you're avoiding those outcomes, you've already come to a better conclusion than you would probably otherwise have. But that's not the best way to make better decisions. I mean, the best way to make decisions is really to understand the problem and understand the dynamics, and part of that is recognizing when you're operating within your circle of competence and when you're not. And if you're the head of an organization, then it's understanding how people learn from each other. You might have... Say you have 100 people in your organization. Somebody's got a circle of competence in X. Somebody's got a circle of competence in Y. Often, the way that we facilitate decision making is in a way that X doesn't learn from Y and Y doesn't learn from X. But eventually, X or Y quits and retires and then the other has to make a decision. But they haven't learned. Even though they worked with the same person for ten or 15 years, they haven't actually learned how they structure decisions, how they think about the variables that govern the decision, what the range of outcomes could be, and how to hone that attention. This becomes really fascinating to me, because I know a lot of investors who, you know, they read everything about a company, which I get. I mean, it makes a lot of sense. But when you really know the variables that you're looking for, you're able to filter the information a lot quicker. When you understand the situation, you know, they could put out 6,000 pages of press releases and documents a year. You don't necessarily need to read every word of it. What you want to look for is, do the variables that I know; what are they; what are they saying; are they indicating that we're on the right track; if yes, all things are probably good. And yeah, you want to see disconfirming evidence. Most of us consume media. This is another interesting and possibly important point about how we consume media. We consume things that tend to reaffirm what we already think instead of consuming things that disconfirm what we think, and if you go back to Charles Darwin, he wasn't... He had this amazing discovery, which is probably some degree of luck and some degree of him being able to disprove himself. So, one of the tools or tricks that he had in his toolkit was, every time something disagreed with him, instead of glossing over it, he paid attention to it. And think about the way that we consume media today. We don't consume media like Charles Darwin. We consume media like, oh, well, if I'm a pro-Trump supporter I'm going to read pro-Trump articles. If I'm a pro-Hillary supporter, I tend to be inundated with pro-Hillary articles or anti-Trump articles, which is really just reinforcing my view. What we really want to do is slow down and come across things that, oh, well, I thought these five variables matter, but this person's saying a different variable matters. Why does that matter? Does it conflict with my view of the world? How does it conflict? Are they right? And then kind of dropping our assumption that we know what's best or dropping the feel-good nature of the media we consume, which is, I agree with you. And, I mean, that feels great. We get probably a dopamine rush from that. We're not alone. Everybody agrees with us. But at the end of the day, as a knowledge worker, you're paid to be right. So, it's not about paid to be feel good. It's paid to be, when am I wrong, recognizing you're wrong, and there's a lot to be said out of scrambling out of problems, right, and recognizing that you're right early and taking course correction, instead of waiting till it's too late. 

Matt:	So, how would somebody listening to this start acquiring a lot of these different tools and mental models?

Shane:	Reading Farnam Street would be a great example of how to go about it, but I mean, most people go back to reality. Most people aren't going to set aside an hour a day and start going through physics textbooks. They're not going to set aside an hour a day of going through biology textbooks. And most people don't have the time, with kids and family and work, to set aside time to learn on a regular basis, consistent basis. So, the way that you go about it is becoming more open-minded, and one of the ways to become more open-minded is just to read things that disagree with you, and not read them in a critical sense of, oh, that's hogwash, but read them in a sense of, oh, that kind of makes sense. Right? I really want to take a different approach, or, oh, I was wrong, and admitting you're wrong. And you don't have to admit to the world you're wrong, but admitting to yourself you're wrong is a big step in terms of getting better at recognizing the keys to the world. And then recognizing how you consume media. Are you consuming it for opinion? Which I think a lot of people do, right. We want to show up at the water cooler, and we live in a culture where you have to have an opinion on every subject, otherwise you're ignorant and uninformed, which is just ridiculous when you think about it. But in that culture, what it creates is this environment where we read these op-eds, or we read this headline, and that becomes our opinion. We haven't read the article. We haven't thought critically about it. We haven't spent the time doing the work, and yet we formed an opinion on it. And I think that that is contrary to the approach that we want to take, where maybe the way to consume most of the mass media we get is for information. I'm not going to let somebody else do the thinking for me, but they can provide me with the statistics that I need to form my own opinion, or they can provide me a structure for an argument that I will then refute or think about critically, but not one that I will regurgitate without having thought about it. It's okay to say I don't know. And then if you really want a fun exercise and you work in an organization of, I would say, more than ten people, I mean, just keep a tally pad in the last page of your notebook about how many times people say, "I don't know." I mean, I've consulted with organizations big and small, and it almost never comes up. There's almost nobody who's ever said, I have no idea. And that can vary between, "How do you think IBM's doing in their cloud computing space?" to "How do we design this part better?" Everybody has an answer to everything, and once you recognize that, you're like, that's not possible. How can that be the case? There's no way you can understand all of these different things. And then when you recognize that in yourself, it enables you to be more open-minded about other people's opinions, but it's important to probe them. Why are they thinking that? What variables matter to them? Why do those variables matter to them? What would cause them to change their mind? And then when you start thinking about it from another person's point of view, it inevitably creeps into your point of view, and then you start thinking about, what would cause me to change my mind? Why do I think what I do? Where does that information come from that I think this? Is it a headline I read on Twitter? Do I really want to base a decision on that? Do I really want to state an opinion on that? And I think that when you start thinking at that level and that, that enables you to move forward in a way that you're more conscious about what you're consuming, how you're consuming it, and the types of decisions and models that you're adding to your life.

Matt:	Going back to the comment you made about how few people say "I don't know", I think it's something that Munger touches on, kind of the idea... It ties in many ways to overconfidence bias. But the fact that often the most wise or the smartest people are the ones who typically are like, "I don't know," and the least informed, most over-confident person is the one who barges in with a very concrete opinion about XYZ.

Shane:	Yeah, but when you think about how that manifests itself in an organization, often the organizational psychology is the one that promotes the person who has an opinion and is right, versus... It's not because they're right because they've thought about it necessarily. I mean, they could be right just based on odds. They could be right for the wrong reasons. And the person who says, "I don't know," gets left behind. What I mean by that is saying "I don't know" is an important trait to recognizing and understanding knowledge. That doesn't necessarily make it an important trait to getting promoted, and I think when people start distinguishing, you know, I want to be smarter because I just want to understand the world better and I think that's going to help me live a better life, and that, in and of itself, should, over a long period of time, obviously, aggregate into disproportionate rewards in terms of what you value. Maybe that's promotion. Maybe it's level. Maybe it's quality of life, spending time with your family. And maybe it's other things, and that's fine, and everybody has their own kind of utility value associated with all of this stuff. The flip side is the person who goes in, and let's say it's a coin toss and just says heads four times in a row. Well, they're going to be wrong a lot, but they'll also be right every now and then, and if they get promoted because they're right but for the wrong reasons, you can kind of accept that and it doesn't become this, oh, they're better than I am. It becomes, oh, well, that's just luck, right. They're right for the wrong reasons. That'll eventually catch up to them. And then you also need a feedback loop. Like, when am I right for the wrong reasons and how do I learn from that? And it's that learning and that feedback loop that enables you to compound over time, and most people aren't conscious about learning. They're not conscious about their decisions. They're not conscious about their feedback loop that they employ, so they're not actually getting better at what they're doing. And when you think about driving, driving would be a perfect example. We learn how to drive when we're, you know... It's 16 in Canada. We learn how to drive when we're 16. We probably stopped getting better at driving for all effective purposes when we're, like, 19. And then we spend all this time driving but we're not practicing. We're not getting the feedback we need to be better. We're just kind of recognizing the cues that we've already learned. And I think we do that with decision making. We do it with organizations. We do it with new jobs. We spend maybe the first year, we're getting better at our new job, we're learning about different things, and then all of a sudden we kind of get the hang of it and we stop getting better. We stop the compounding. And when you stop the compounding, that's a really bad thing. What you want to constantly be doing is, like, how can we get better, and challenging yourself. And one of the ways to do that is decision journals and to seek outside feedback. It's to ask people how you can be doing better. It's to ask people to coach you, right. Like, a lot of people have mentors in organizations. How do you think about this? What should I be thinking about? What are the variables that I should be thinking about? How do I structure this? How do I approach this problem? And if you're really open to it and you're not just asking to kind of be a kiss-ass or something like that, then that enables you to get better over time. 

Matt:	There's so many questions I want to ask after that. One of the things that comes to mind immediately, talking about the concept of being right for the wrong reasons, I'm a very avid poker player, and one of the biggest lessons that poker taught me was the difference between winning a hand because you made the right decision or losing a hand even though you made the right decision, and kind of what I think often in poker is called positive expected value thinking, in terms of make the right decision based on the math and then whatever the outcome is, it's irrelevant at that point.

Shane:	Yeah. It's not always going to work for you, but you also need to be able to tally that, right, to check your view of the world. So, if you think I made the right decision but I lost and I should have won 80% of the time, you need some sort of feedback that you're not making that same decision and losing all of the time, right. You need some sort of check-in balance that, yeah, 80% of the time I do win when I make that decision. So, yes, it's a good decision, and not just that you have this comfort in, oh, this is what I believe and it was just bad luck. So, you need to actually go a little bit deeper than kind of thinking that way, and poker would be a great example where the odds are pretty well-known and you can go through that structure, but most of the world isn't as structured. It's not as refined as that. So, it becomes more of a, like, where was I off, where was I wrong, and that becomes a very humbling exercise for people, and that humbling-ness is what often creates... or what often leads them to stop the feedback loop, because there's no CEO who wants to admit that he was right for the wrong reasons or she was right for the wrong reasons. But internally, you need that check-in balance in terms of getting better over time, so that you can calibrate yourself, calibrate your circle of competence, and calibrate your decisions and better understand how the world works. It's the only way I know of to improve your ability to make decisions. 

Matt:	So, going back to the driving example that you used earlier, one of the things that I'm fascinated with and I know you've talked about is the concept of deliberate practice and how you can drive for thousands of hours and never improve versus if you sort of concentrate and do deliberate practice, you can grow and achieve and become better.

Shane:	Yeah. I mean, deliberate practice is so important, right. It's about getting better at little things and seeking feedback that's usually immediate, in terms of how you're getting better. One of the best ways to do that—I mean, again, I'll apply it generically to people who work in an organization—is don't just send the report your boss asked you for, but seek feedback and specific feedback, and kind of corner them and be like, "Hey, where could I have done better? Where did I do wrong?" And if they can't give you that feedback, then you're never going to get better at the job that you're in, and if you can get that feedback, it doesn't necessarily make you better at your job, but it makes you better in your boss's eyes. So, it's also filtering that feedback and going, oh, this is what he or she wants versus how I think the world works, but you also want to calibrate that. Why does he or she want that? How do I get better at doing what I'm doing every day? How do I get better at sending emails? I mean, how many of us, just for an example, send an email to schedule an event or a meeting with somebody or a coffee, and we need 30 emails to do that, and we need 30 emails all the time to do that. Why is that? Well, part of the reason is we don't do something simple like, "Hey, here's some proposed dates. Do any of these work for you?" in the first message. Usually, that reduces the number of emails that you need to do that. Well, that's a great feedback mechanism, in terms of getting better. And if you deliberately try different things when you're proposing something that you do commonly throughout the day, like, ten or 20 times, then you can start to get feedback on what works and what doesn't work, and you're almost kind of AB testing things. It's like, it's almost [INAUDIBLE 00:45:58], right. Like, here's my best idea today, but does this other idea work? Does it change my understanding of how people will respond to this? Does it enable me to get to the outcome I want quicker and better and in a win-win way? And, if yes, then let's adopt that. And if not, then I can revert to my old one. 

Matt:	I think feedback is such an important idea, and one of the ways that people often get tripped up—and, I mean, again, this loops back into a lot of the different cognitive biases—is ego, right, and kind of denying reality or getting caught up in their egos.

Shane:	Oh, man. Yeah. I mean, we all have egos. That's incredibly important to recognize. I mean, I don't know a person in the world who doesn't have some sort of ego, especially wrapped up in their opinion on a controversial subject. Adapting to that reality is incredibly important, and recognizing sometimes it serves you and sometimes it doesn't, and it's the same as mental models, right. Sometimes they work and they serve you and they enable you to make better decisions, and sometimes they're wrong, but often we're just coding things into our head that, oh, well, when this happens, do this. But we're not actually saying, well, here are the reasons this happened. Do they exist in this situation? So, applying that mental model won't necessarily work. Ego can become this incredible enemy of seeking wisdom, and I don't have any good ideas, I guess, for how to avoid that from creeping in. I mean, I know people who are naturally very egotistical. I know people who are very naturally the averse to that, but they both have egos. And they're both sensitive in different ways and they both approach the world in different ways. And I think part of it is, if I was forced to comment on it, would be understanding where you are and meeting the world at that place, and then understanding where you want to be and recognizing the path towards that. And ego can be something as small as, I need to give other people on my team a voice, and I'm not always right, and part of that comes back to calibration and feedback loops, and that helps check your ego and helps humble you, in a way, and part of that comes back to saying, sometimes I do need to be the egotistical leader, and by egotistical I mean not that you think you're right, but projecting confidence, and by projecting a path forward. In uncertainty, people will naturally gravitate towards people who take risks, who seem to know what to do, and your job is to not only grasp those risks and those situations and those opportunities and move forward and galvanize your team and kind of push forward, but it's to recognize that you may be wrong. Even if you're not projecting that, it's to recognize that maybe it's wrong, but here's how I will know I'm wrong and here's how I will course correct if I am wrong. You don't necessarily have to tell your team that, but you have to recognize it internally if you want to be the best version of yourself. 

Matt:	So, one of the tools you touched on earlier was the idea of a decision journal. Can you explain that a little bit and sort of demonstrate or talk about how maybe you use that, or how someone listening could potentially use a decision journal to help improve their decision making?

Shane:	Most people make decisions and they don't get better at making those decisions, and so when you think of an organization, you think about how they're going to go about making decisions. They'll make the same decisions. They'll make them by committee. Nobody's learning from anybody else. Nobody's really accountable for the decision, and nobody's getting better, right. So, you end up reaping... And when people think about, well, why do we keep making the same mistake over and over again? That would be one of the reasons. Nobody wants to be humbled, right. So, nobody really wants to keep an accurate decision journal, and by decision journal... We have a conference called Rethink Decision Making, and we talk about this extensively in there. But what you really want to catalogue, and we've created physical decision journals for participants at our conferences, what we go through is individual decisions. So, you can either share them or not, but what you really want to do is start calibrating yourself, and you want to talk about the situation or context of the decision, the problem that you're facing, or what about it is different. Why is it a problem? The variables that you think will govern the situation. So, there's never one. There's usually multiple. The complications or complexity as you see it, why do you have to think about this? What are the factors that you're considering today as you're making the decisions? You want to talk about the alternatives that were considered and why you didn't choose them, right. There's never one path, and I mean, we've kind of nailed into this view of, oh, you know, the corporate PowerPoint presentation. I can't tell you the amount of boardrooms I've been in where it's like you have these three options or these two options, and it becomes a false duality. I mean, there's way more options than that. We just narrowed them down for simplicity. We need to recognize that that simplicity isn't always what we want, and we do want to dive into these other options. And then you want to kind of explain to yourself the range of outcomes that you see possible in the situation. And the reason that you want to do that is often you're going to have an outcome that is something that you don't see. And you want to assign a probability to those outcomes so that you can start to hone your ability to understand yourself, where you make your decisions, where you make bad decisions, and what type of probability you assigned to the different outcomes. Then you want to talk about what you expect to happen. Like, what is the most probably event, or maybe not the most probable, but there's an intervening factor that you think will lead to a different outcome. But you really want to talk about the reasoning behind it. So, you want to get into your own kind of self-dialogue about why you think this would happen, when you think it'll happen, and the variables, again, tying it back to the variables that you think will govern the situation. And then you also want to keep track of things like the time of day you're making the decision, and the mood you're in when you're making the decision, because you're not always going to be happy and you'll probably recognize that most people make better decisions when they're in a certain type of mood, and that mood might vary by the person. But what I've learned through implementing decision journals at various organizations and with hundreds of people is that the time of day often affects the quality of decision that you're making. We tend to... Again, generalizing, but we tend to make better decisions in the morning than in the afternoon, right, and you can use that for decision theory or depletion of cognitive resources or whatever. We tend to be more mentally alert at the front of the day than at the back of the day, so one of the ways that you can take advantage of that is to structure decisions at the beginning of the day, not the end of the day. That simple fact alone will enable you to make an incremental improvement to the quality of decisions that you're doing. And then importantly, it's not about just keeping track of this. You want to review it, right? You want to go back in six months and be like, how did this decision play out? How did I think it was going to play out? How did it actually play out? And what can I learn from this? Do I need to calibrate myself differently? Did I think I was within my circle of competence and clearly I'm not because something way outside of the probability that I expected happened, or do I think that I'm reasonably right but now I can learn or hone my understanding of this situation differently? And when you think about that on an individual level, you start learning a lot, right. You don't want to use vague or ambiguous wording. You don't want to talk in abstractions. You really want to use concrete wording that you can't deceive yourself with later. You don't want to talk about strategies. You want to be specific about what strategy. You want to be specific about what variables. Because that enables you to learn. But when you think about it, learning on an individual basis is great, but the real value to a corporation is when a CEO or a vice president or somebody high up in the organization enables organizational learning, so that I'm not only learning from myself, now I'm learning from you. If I had access to your decision journal, now all of a sudden I don't necessarily need to make the decisions you're making, but if I had to, I bet you it would be a better decision than if I didn't have access to your thoughts and the variables that you thought, and knowing the outcomes that you achieved with those thoughts. And that will enable us slowly, over time, to make better decisions. Now, better decisions alone aren't enough. The world is always changing, so we need to make better decisions on a relative and absolute basis, but we also need to make slightly better decisions than our competition, and if we can do that and we can do it over a long period of time, well, then eventually we're going to own the industry. 

Matt:	I love the concept of handicapping all the probabilities and then coming back and reviewing how accurate was my prediction that this was a 20% likelihood, this was an 80% likelihood.

Shane:	Oh, yeah. That where most people stop doing it, though, right? So, they'll get an outcome. If they get an outcome they thought would happen, and then at, like, 5% of the time, and it's a decision they've made repeatedly over the last six months, like, say, buying a stock, for example. They'll give up, right. Or, if they get outcomes that they didn't expect, they'll give up. Or, if they get the answer right for the wrong reasons, they'll give up. And by give up, I mean they just stop keeping a decision journal, because it becomes humiliating. And when you think about decisions in corporations, one of my favorite things to do when I'm in a corporation and consulting or helping them is to listen to the people involved in the situation and how everything is always right, right? And how they predicted it. You know, if I work with you for a year, I can quickly figure out that you didn't predict that for the right reasons. You got lucky. And then, just understanding when people are right for the right reasons and when people are right for the wrong reasons, and when people have bad outcomes but they're for the right process, that enables you to surround yourself with people who can challenge you, who will help you make better decisions over a long period of time, and those are the people you really want to work for, right?

Matt:	So, changing gears a little bit, what's one kind of piece of homework that you would give to our listeners?

Shane:	Oh, become self-reflection, right. One thing that I work with people a lot on is just take stock of your day. And I don't mean, you know, a typical Saturday or something. I mean, how do you spend your day? How are you matching your energy to the task? Are you reading newspapers in the morning and matching your best time of the day to a task that may be a low value add for you? Newspapers aren't something to avoid. I mean, everybody works in a different industry. They have different constraints. But if reading the newspaper at 6:00 p.m is going to not make a difference, then reading the newspaper at 7:00 a.m., I would advocate that you maybe need to think about why am I reading it at 7:00 a.m. Is that a habit? What is the most productive use of my time at 7:00 a.m. in the morning? I want to be thinking about something deep, something strategic. I want big chunks of time in terms of how I approach that problem. And I think that that enables you to switch out of automatic mode and it enables you to switch into something conscious, and I don't care about what choices people make. Within reason, obviously. I mean, if they're conscious about those choices. But we usually get into this autopilot and that's how we live our lives, and then we wake up at the end and we recognize that, you know, maybe that wasn't the best approach, or maybe that wasn't the approach that I wanted personally, and those are the decisions where we want to take a different path. Being conscious about those decisions and inserting a moment in the day on a regular basis where you just do five minutes of self-reflection. You can call it meditation. You can call it whatever you want. You can go sit on the toilet, but what you really want to do is just think about, like, what did I do today? What could have been better about today? Where did I waste my time? How do I waste less time in the future? Where could I have been more productive? Where should I have invested more of my time, my thinking energy? And then being aware of how these things interact over a long period of time, so also taking that and thinking about, well, I spent my time on X today. Why was I dealing with X? Not, like, how did I deal with X? And what is the path forward? But why is X an issue? Is it because I made a poor decision in the past? Why did I make a poor decision in the past? Does my environment play a role in that? And start asking yourself questions like that. And then just being open to the response about it. I mean, it's not a dialogue with a friend. You don't have to admit you were wrong to anybody else. You just want to be open to yourself in getting better over time so you're spending less time doing stuff like that, more time doing what you want to do. I don't know if that helps.

Matt:	No, that's great. That's super helpful. And I think everybody could take five minutes at the end of their day and kind of reflect on what to place and why.

Shane:	Yeah, but nobody does that. Well, I don't mean nobody, but very few people do that on their own volition, and the people that I've helped start it, we do it in an organized and structured way. They almost always continue, and they say it's one of the most helpful things they've ever done.

Matt:	What are some books or other resources that you'd recommend for people who want to kind of follow up or dig down on some of the topics we've talked about today?

Shane:	I think Peter Bevelin's book Seeking Wisdom is amazing. 

Matt:	One of my favorite books of all time, by the way. Seeking Wisdom.

Shane:	Yeah. Porcelli's Almanac. I mean, we want to get less out of this... and, I mean, I fall into this trap on occasion. Less out of this, I need to read more, and what we want is more about what am I reading and do I understand it and is it worth reading to a level of understanding. I mean, I've met so many people who tell me that they've read Seeking Wisdom or Porcelli's Almanac, but then they do things that would definitely contravene the wisdom in those books. So, reading and understanding are two different things, and we want to apply ourselves to understanding. And if you just read the same book, you know, the people who say... And, I mean, I was one of them back in 2013. I think I read... Or 2014, it was. I read 150 books. I must have started 300. But at the end, I mean, one of the biggest lessons, one of the biggest failings I had, one of the biggest lessons I learned, and this is almost like a big secret, right, is that it's not the number of books you read. I could have read five books over the course of the year and actually improved myself more than reading those 152, because you start losing... When your goal is to read more books, you start losing track of what it is that matters and the understanding that matters and where does that come from. And then reading Porcelli's Almanac, that's not a book you read once and you kind of chuck on a shelf. And reading Seeking Wisdom, you don't read it once and then be like, oh, I got it. It's something that you read, you digest, you try to apply, you read again, you digest, you try to apply. And then through that, you hone your understanding of those ideas, and then you start consuming other information. And you map it and you translate it in your mind to the ideas that you've learned, the structure that you've decided to go for. And I think that, aside from that, I mean, I've moved almost materially to older books. We do a lot fewer newer books than we ever used to, a lot more of the books that have been around a long period of time, because that's usually an indication that they contain some sort of wisdom that's enduring, or they hit on some point that helps us hone our understanding of a topic that is still relevant. Less about the bestsellers, less about the Gawkers, less about the "What is the trend of the day?", more about what changes slowly over time, more about what am I really interested in, more about do I understand my circle of competence, how can I improve that? I think that that is all individual based. There's no ten books I can give everybody to read and they'll walk away satisfied. It's kind of a [INAUDIBLE 01:02:14], right. If you like white wine and I offer a red, that doesn't make a good [INAUDIBLE 01:02:20]. It's all individual-based and customized to you and what you're trying to achieve and where you are.

Matt:	I think... I mean, Seeking Wisdom is probably one of the best books I've ever read, and my copy, I think every single page has multiple notes, underlines, highlights. You know, somebody could probably spend a year just digesting that book, or more, easily. 

Shane:	Oh, totally. I have friend who reread that on a regular basis. You know, honestly, I would say that's a large portion of their success, is that not only do they reread it, but they understand it and they understand the dynamics at play, and then they apply it to life and they become incredibly successful by doing that. 

Matt:	Well, where can people find you online?

Shane:	So, we're at farnhamstreetblog.com. F-A-R-N-A-M Streetblog.com. We do three to four posts a week, covering everything from art and history all the way to philosophy and psychology, and I'm also on Twitter, which is @FarnamStreet. @ F-A-R-N-A-M-S-T-R-E-E-T, and we're on Facebook as well. Or, you can just Google Shane Parrish and Farnam Street crops up as, I think, the number one link on that. And that would be a great way for you to follow along with what we're doing and build your toolkit over time. I would encourage you that if you see an article and you're like, oh, well, I don't agree with this, or I don't want to learn about art, that you give it a week or two. I can't tell you the number of times I've had people go, you know, "A friend of mine sent me your link and I read it for a day and I was like, oh my God, what is this, and then I read it for a week and I was like, oh, this is really interesting, and then I read it for a month and I'm like, oh, I'm addicted to this. I can't actually get away from it. I've started going back and reading all their old posts." Because the topic of the day is not necessarily... I mean, our approach is to give you a broad range of solutions, or tools, if you will, so that you can build better products or solve different problems. Inevitably, we're going to come across something that you don't agree with or that you think is useless, or something you already know. And often, we contradict ourselves, right, and part of that is getting the reader to do the work of understanding that contradiction, and we're not giving you... We're giving you 90% of the solution. We want you to do the 10% on your own. And that 10% is where most of the value comes from, because if I give it to you, you don't actually understand it. It doesn't become part of your life. By you doing the work, then it becomes embedded in what you're doing and how you're approaching things.

Matt:	Well, Shane, this has been a great interview, and I really want to say thank you very much for being on here, and I know the listeners are going to love a lot of the stuff that we talked about today.

Shane:	Thanks, Matt. Really appreciate it. I'm looking forward to it.