Speaker 1: It is very hard to disagree. You'll hear this when
Speaker 1: you hear people talking about decisions. Paul, can you agree
Speaker 1: to this? Paul? Can I get your agreement on this?
Speaker 1: What needs to be true to get the room to agree.
Speaker 1: We don't need agreement. The better we disagree, the faster
Speaker 1: we decide.
Speaker 2: Hey, everyone, before we get into this week's podcast, we
Speaker 2: got a pretty cool announcement to make you are not
Speaker 2: able to connect with us. We have a pretty cool
Speaker 2: little widget that's on the website. Just go to poletailor
Speaker 2: dot biz Forwards Life Podcast and near the top of
Speaker 2: the page you'll see a little icon that says send
Speaker 2: a message to the poll Tailor podcast. And so what
Speaker 2: we can do with that You just click on that
Speaker 2: and then you send us an audio message and we
Speaker 2: will get the audio message. Now, the first thing I
Speaker 2: want to do with using it is actually do and
Speaker 2: ask me anything episode. So all you gotta do if
Speaker 2: you got a question that we want me to cover
Speaker 2: is just go to Paul Taylor dot b is z
Speaker 2: Forward Slash podcast and on start the recording, and then
Speaker 2: send us a message about what you would like me
Speaker 2: to talk about, and they ask me anything and leave
Speaker 2: your name. We will call it out on the show.
Speaker 2: I'll get that all put together. And the other thing
Speaker 2: you can do is just leave us a message about
Speaker 2: what you like about the podcast, what you don't like
Speaker 2: about the podcast. I talk to a bouch all of
Speaker 2: that sort of stuff, and just give us some feedback
Speaker 2: and we will use that to continuously improve. So looking
Speaker 2: forward to hearing from you now I hover the podcast.
Speaker 3: It's a silver Welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: It's great to be here. Thanks for having me excited
Speaker 1: the chat all the.
Speaker 2: Way from Toronto. What's the weather like over in Toronto?
Speaker 3: Now you've just at the tail end of spring.
Speaker 1: It's amazing. Actually it's usually called here around now, but
Speaker 1: today was twenty four degrees, nice breeze. Its beautiful.
Speaker 3: So Canadians talk canadianstock centigrade.
Speaker 1: I mean, we could do fair night if you want,
Speaker 1: but yeah, my brain works in celsius.
Speaker 2: Ah. I didn't realize that that Canadians were celsius slice centigrade.
Speaker 1: I know, it's weird though, So we're metric everywhere, but
Speaker 1: human weights and heights, Like I could tell you my
Speaker 1: height in feet in inches, yes, but I have to
Speaker 1: start to calculate it in centimeters. I don't know why,
Speaker 1: but if you ask me how far away something is,
Speaker 1: I'll answer in meters.
Speaker 3: That's very like the UK. That's right, so and and
Speaker 3: and it's weird.
Speaker 2: And it's interesting living in northern Ireland, right because everything
Speaker 2: is in miles in the north, and then you drive
Speaker 2: over the border into the size that Republic of Ireland
Speaker 2: and everything's in kilometers. But you know, I've grown up
Speaker 2: in feet and inches talking about height, but also in miles.
Speaker 2: But interesting, having lived in nausea for twenty years, I'm
Speaker 2: not fully metric. Apart from the height thing. I always
Speaker 2: still have to.
Speaker 1: Trans feed anytime I get an official form. It's like
Speaker 1: how many centimeters are you? I'm like, oh good, God.
Speaker 3: Like here he does.
Speaker 2: So to tell us a little bit, this one is
Speaker 2: a little bit different. This podcast. We're really going to
Speaker 2: talk about work and life and kind of getting what
Speaker 2: you want with what you have, which is I really
Speaker 2: like and I love the type of your book, The
Speaker 2: Grass is Greener, So tell us a little bit about
Speaker 2: your background professional background, because it's it's quite interesting and
Speaker 2: I think audience members will get why I'm talking to
Speaker 2: you once you've talked through that.
Speaker 3: Cool.
Speaker 1: Yeah, happy to I mean, it's one of these things
Speaker 1: where like every time I explain it, looking back, it
Speaker 1: feels like I have this well whole idea, like a
Speaker 1: good idea in my head of this is the path.
Speaker 1: And at the time it was still is kind of
Speaker 1: a bit all over the place, but high level dan
Speaker 1: to where we are today. Engineer by training did a
Speaker 1: mass was an engineering thought. I was going to be
Speaker 1: very technicle worked as an engineer for a while software hardware.
Speaker 1: Wanted to learn business, didn't want to go back to school.
Speaker 1: I joined a startup and said, hey, I think I
Speaker 1: can do business. Nothing on paper says I could do business.
Speaker 1: How about I just come here and work for a
Speaker 1: little while for free, and let's see what happens. No
Speaker 1: R no foul. Got very lucky. Executive team there kind
Speaker 1: of took me under their wing and I got to like,
Speaker 1: sit here, don't talk, take notes, treatment, but I could
Speaker 1: sit in all the rooms. So I learned about fundraising, commercialization, deals,
Speaker 1: all that kind of stuff. It was awesome. From there,
Speaker 1: I jumped founded my first company. It was like a
Speaker 1: double you know, happy with it, didn't retire at the
Speaker 1: age of twenty two. Wanted to go bigger, so did that,
Speaker 1: went the conventional route, raise VC money, you know, hired
Speaker 1: up a team two and a half years, maybe a
Speaker 1: chat for another podcast where we could talk about if
Speaker 1: you want that company crashed. Lots of learnings out of that.
Speaker 1: One thought my career was over. You know, no one's
Speaker 1: ever going to hire me. I'm a total failure? Or
Speaker 1: what I to do now? And one of my investors,
Speaker 1: whose money I almost entirely lost, calls me up one
Speaker 1: day and says, I met this team. I think you
Speaker 1: should have a chat with them. It was the folks
Speaker 1: at Airbnb back before Airbnb was. Airbnb joined there when
Speaker 1: it was you know, a few hundred people got to
Speaker 1: experience the ramp up to thousands and see what that
Speaker 1: was like, which was incredible. Left there became the COO
Speaker 1: of an AI company, back before AI was the cool
Speaker 1: thing to do and everybody was doing it, and we
Speaker 1: built that up from the ground floor again, which was
Speaker 1: really amazing. And now I spend the majority of my
Speaker 1: time advising other founders, other executives, you know, scale ups,
Speaker 1: larger corporations, on how to build teams that people are
Speaker 1: both love working for and are incredibly high performing, which
Speaker 1: sometimes feels like an oxymoron. And I had this book
Speaker 1: come out in September, which has been crazy exciting. Never
Speaker 1: thought I would write a book, you know, all about
Speaker 1: how to enjoy your job more and how to tactically
Speaker 1: accomplish that. So it's not just a bunch of platitudes
Speaker 1: that you know, we all know, like find a job
Speaker 1: you love, You'll never work a day in your life,
Speaker 1: like thank you. Go find me one person for whom
Speaker 1: that's true. Like it. You know, what what can I
Speaker 1: actually do tactically?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Very cool, I'm here talking to you.
Speaker 2: So the startup, the startup ward is a very interesting world, right,
Speaker 2: So I had a startup, rese some money and you
Speaker 2: know it's fucking all encompassing, isn't it. It's a pretty
Speaker 2: full on Please, what were the big lessons that you
Speaker 2: learned from working in because you've worked in a couple
Speaker 2: of different startups.
Speaker 3: Right, anything that's big that has.
Speaker 2: Come out of that startup word that you can apply
Speaker 2: across the board.
Speaker 1: That's a hard question. Yeah, the answer is yes, And
Speaker 1: I'm struggling. It's like the ideas are rushing out of
Speaker 1: my mouth and all getting stuck. You know, to pick
Speaker 1: one is hard. Maybe I would pick one from it.
Speaker 1: I pick two, you know, one from Airbnb. Maybe they're
Speaker 1: both kind of airbnb ish. But I've kind of learned
Speaker 1: I'm a very people first person. Now, you know, you
Speaker 1: tell me a problem. I work with my clients. They
Speaker 1: tell me we're not hitting our sales targets, or the
Speaker 1: engineering team's not moving fast enough, or revenue isn't where
Speaker 1: we want it to be. And where a lot of
Speaker 1: people will start unpacking. You know, what's the market, what's this?
Speaker 1: What's to that? I'm like, who are the people involved,
Speaker 1: what are they trying to accomplish, what does that look like?
Speaker 1: And what's getting in the way for them? And this
Speaker 1: is kind of backwards to the way that I thought
Speaker 1: about it coming up through my engineering background, where it
Speaker 1: was very much like what's the problem, how do we
Speaker 1: solve it? And people are one of many inputs to
Speaker 1: solving it, but like they're interchangeable, you know, you take me,
Speaker 1: you take you, you swap us around. We can get
Speaker 1: the job done. I think that for me that has
Speaker 1: proven out to be incorrect. And you know, focusing on
Speaker 1: the people is that old saying. You know, you take
Speaker 1: care of your people and they'll take care of the problems.
Speaker 1: I really think hard about how we're building a team
Speaker 1: around people to what I love doing. How do we
Speaker 1: make sure that people are feeling fired up to do
Speaker 1: the work even when it's hard. How are they able
Speaker 1: to do the best work in their careers. I think
Speaker 1: it's not easy to put people in that position and
Speaker 1: sustain it over time.
Speaker 2: A comment on that, and before you get onto the
Speaker 2: second one.
Speaker 3: I just did a bit of work with a company
Speaker 3: in the state.
Speaker 2: It's called One Life Fitness, So they're a fitness chain
Speaker 2: that have grown pretty quickly and done an amazing job
Speaker 2: in the fitness industry and just got bought out by
Speaker 2: VCS and I spent I did a half day with
Speaker 2: the entire leadership team, got to know the owners of business,
Speaker 2: and then I went out to their convention and did
Speaker 2: did three days with all their their kind of key
Speaker 2: staff in there. And the thing that really struck me
Speaker 2: I saw it in the first half day that I
Speaker 2: did with the leadership team, but then just being there
Speaker 2: with all the people was just how focused they are
Speaker 2: on people and they had they had actually a twin
Speaker 2: focus on mission and people, so they were very passionate
Speaker 2: about the mission. But Jesus today look after their people
Speaker 2: and were genuinely concerned about their people, and they're I
Speaker 2: think one of the biggest success stories in the fitness industry.
Speaker 3: Of lit.
Speaker 2: There's a lot that have flindered, but these guys have
Speaker 2: grown really quickly but kept the culture. And it was
Speaker 2: just amazing just how much talk there was about culture, culture, culture, people, people, people.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, I think it's usually important, you know, we
Speaker 1: we're saying it. Airbnbs online is Brian Cheski, the CEO,
Speaker 1: was like, don't fuck up the culture. Pretty simple role,
Speaker 1: you know. And so you're going to scale, the culture
Speaker 1: is going to change, but don't screw it up. And
Speaker 1: to not screw it up, you've got to be talking
Speaker 1: about it constantly. You've got to be hiring against it.
Speaker 1: And culture isn't like, oh, we have a ping pong
Speaker 1: table in like free food. You know, that's not culture.
Speaker 1: Those are amenities. Culture is like how do we show
Speaker 1: up for each other? What's the work environment? Like how
Speaker 1: do we treat each other when we're at work? You know,
Speaker 1: I think these things are important and often overlook they
Speaker 1: get the like soft skill Moniker, and I think it's
Speaker 1: the opposite. You know, you go to companies, a lot
Speaker 1: of companies, and I'll show me your values. I'll ask
Speaker 1: the question. Right, we have a tough decision. Should we
Speaker 1: work with this customer or not? Should we grow into
Speaker 1: this market or not? Do we hire this leader or
Speaker 1: get rid of that leader? First question, show me the values.
Speaker 1: Why are you asking me this question?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 1: You know, if you're not using your values to make decisions,
Speaker 1: they're just like a nice piece of art on the wall.
Speaker 1: And for me, when you have five, six, seven, eight
Speaker 1: nine values, they're not doing anything for me. Values are
Speaker 1: something where it's like, I'm prepared to pay a price
Speaker 1: to adhere to this value. And if I'm not going
Speaker 1: to pay a price for it, why am I writing
Speaker 1: it up there? And by price, I mean maybe we're
Speaker 1: not going to work with this customer because they provide
Speaker 1: a product that isn't align with our values that's going
Speaker 1: to cost us something. Maybe I'm not going to hire
Speaker 1: Paul because you know, he's a great guy and he's
Speaker 1: highly skilled, but he just doesn't match our culture in
Speaker 1: the way that we work here. Nothing wrong with him,
Speaker 1: but you know, we're letting go of where we're not
Speaker 1: going to hire a person who could be really great.
Speaker 1: We're not going to go into a market because it
Speaker 1: doesn't matter of ours whatever it might be. You know,
Speaker 1: I really like to have people think about values through
Speaker 1: the lens of what are you prepared to pay a
Speaker 1: price for? And if you're not going to pay a
Speaker 1: price for it, it's not a value. They're easy to
Speaker 1: hop hold and everything's going great A lot harder when
Speaker 1: things are going well.
Speaker 2: I love that that we're in violent agreement on that.
Speaker 3: I love your what he.
Speaker 2: Prepared to pay a price for? I've never thought it
Speaker 2: through that lens. But when I work with organizations, particularly
Speaker 2: leaders leadership teams, and especially the big organizations, I will
Speaker 2: often say, right, stand up, who can tell me the
Speaker 2: purpose of the mission statement of this organization? Right? And
Speaker 2: a bunch of people stand up, and I say, remain
Speaker 2: standing if you can get a word by word for beatum.
Speaker 2: And then and then some people sit down and say,
Speaker 2: remain standing if you're willing to put a thousand dollars
Speaker 2: on it one way, bet right that if you get
Speaker 2: one word wrong that side and most of the room
Speaker 2: for you in set time, you probably collected lot. And
Speaker 2: then I do the values, And my whole thing is
Speaker 2: that values are not. You know, a lot of people there.
Speaker 2: It's just a backslapping episode, isn't it. Or they're bringing
Speaker 2: these external consultants and they get these values that seem
Speaker 2: really cold, but their behavior is not congruent with their
Speaker 2: values exactly. For me, mission is where you're going, and
Speaker 2: values is how you get there.
Speaker 1: And I'm so interested in how you get their story.
Speaker 1: I think that for me has been the you know
Speaker 1: we talked behind crashed the company you were kind of
Speaker 1: asking about, like the second lesson. You know, I think
Speaker 1: it's some morphed version of when you're in startups, like
Speaker 1: it is an ego buster. I have failed in every
Speaker 1: possible business way that you can imagine, and I'm still
Speaker 1: standing and things are still going great, and you know,
Speaker 1: you think that like, oh, this failure is going to
Speaker 1: get me. If this goes wrong, my career is over.
Speaker 1: If this happens, I'm done. Not really. People aren't paying
Speaker 1: as much attention to you as you are to yourself,
Speaker 1: you know, And there's there's always a good story, so
Speaker 1: long as the way you got there is aligned with
Speaker 1: your values to bring the conversation full circle, And you know,
Speaker 1: I think that's why, like I was shocked when the investor,
Speaker 1: I'm like, dude, I lost all your money, what are
Speaker 1: you doing me a favor for And he's like, I
Speaker 1: watched the way you did this. That was the right
Speaker 1: way to do. It's not a fault at the company crash.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. You know, you were
Speaker 1: a human throughout it and trustworthy throughout it, and you
Speaker 1: did it the right way and for that reason, I
Speaker 1: would recommend you for anything. And I was like, ah,
Speaker 1: you know, I thought it was all about the outcome,
Speaker 1: and now I think a lot more about the process
Speaker 1: to get to the outcome. What do the steps look like,
Speaker 1: what's going on day to day for you? This was
Speaker 1: like the genesis of the book and just really being
Speaker 1: more focused on you're doing the right thing. Sometimes you win,
Speaker 1: sometimes you lose, but like overall, it's gonna be a
Speaker 1: win when you're proud of the steps that you're taking
Speaker 1: hard to do.
Speaker 2: A couple of questions are a comment on that and
Speaker 2: what you just said, people are not paying as much
Speaker 2: attention to you as your paying to yourself. That is
Speaker 2: a message that needs to be imprinted in every single
Speaker 2: teenager's brain around the world, right particularly with today and
Speaker 2: social media, because it's a hard one. I think it's
Speaker 2: a you know, this is a massive tangent, but that
Speaker 2: that is a a massive driver of people just being
Speaker 2: in their own heads and thinking everybody's looking at them,
Speaker 2: thinking about them, judging them, all that stuff, when in fact,
Speaker 2: everybody's too busy in their own heads thinking about what
Speaker 2: others just thinking about. But to bring it back to again,
Speaker 2: you talked about values. You talked about essentially, what that
Speaker 2: investor was saying was that you had good character that
Speaker 2: you know throughout those tribulations. I will often talk an
Speaker 2: album for a while. Actually I should talk about this
Speaker 2: a bit more about Shackleton. You're familiar with, arn't Shackleton?
Speaker 2: And that I mean, for me, if listeners haven't heard
Speaker 2: this story, the story of endurance is, I think, and
Speaker 2: leadership lessons, right, I've got actually a book right behind
Speaker 2: me about leadership lessons from the whole Shackleton thing. But
Speaker 2: Hayes big thing was hiring on character, because you can
Speaker 2: teach skills, and he purely hard on character. And one
Speaker 2: of his other things was sabby haring and faring that
Speaker 2: as soon as he realized that the person was not
Speaker 2: of the right character, didn't fit the values. Then he
Speaker 2: got rid because he knew that. You know, he did
Speaker 2: not actually know what he was going into, but he
Speaker 2: knew was going into something that was bloody difficult.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: The more uncertain the path, the more certain you want
Speaker 1: to be about the people. Like I think, it's yeah,
Speaker 1: it's that simple. You know, I don't know what we're
Speaker 1: going to hit. Let's make sure that we're aligned on
Speaker 1: the way we think through problems, not the same. Last
Speaker 1: thing I want is ten other me's going with me
Speaker 1: on a journey. I'm like, that's that's not going to
Speaker 1: go great for anybody. But I want ten people that
Speaker 1: are aligned with my value so that I know when
Speaker 1: things start to go wrong, we're not going to be
Speaker 1: pushing each other down. We're going to be looking for
Speaker 1: a way to, you know, pull all of ourselves up.
Speaker 1: So it's hard, you know, it's Hiring for values is challenging.
Speaker 1: People can get offended. They think that you're kind of
Speaker 1: judging their character. It's not that, you know, you can
Speaker 1: be a great human being and just not a fit
Speaker 1: for the values of an organization. You know, there are
Speaker 1: lots of great people who wouldn't fit great in an
Speaker 1: investment bank. That doesn't mean that the investment bank is
Speaker 1: wrong or that the people are wrong. It's just like
Speaker 1: this is not, you know, a great fit. I love baseball.
Speaker 1: You asked me to play cricket. I'll try, but like
Speaker 1: that's not something that I'm you know, all that passionate about,
Speaker 1: and the rules of the game are quite different, so
Speaker 1: I'm probably not going to be phenomenal at cricket. And
Speaker 1: I think it's just kind of getting that into the
Speaker 1: ethos of the organization that every time we make a
Speaker 1: major decision, the values need to be considered. And what
Speaker 1: bigger decision than who's going to be on this journey
Speaker 1: with us and what people do we have to ask
Speaker 1: to leave, you know, the journey with us for whatever reason.
Speaker 1: It's very hard. It's a simple thing to say, but
Speaker 1: it's not an easy thing to do to permeate the
Speaker 1: values through major decisions inside of an organization.
Speaker 2: And I think one of the things that becomes really difficult.
Speaker 2: I mean, you kind of captured it when you talked
Speaker 2: about the CEO of Rbnb saying don't fuck up the culture.
Speaker 2: Really interesting research by a Scottish anthropologists called Dunbar and
Speaker 2: it just popped into my head for some reason.
Speaker 3: I have no idea.
Speaker 2: But he was an anthropologist who studied basically, you know,
Speaker 2: anthropologies for him was the study of humans and tribes
Speaker 2: and how we interact. And he studied human tribes all
Speaker 2: around the world and came up with something that's now
Speaker 2: called Dunbar's number.
Speaker 1: I think I know that, yeah, keep going.
Speaker 2: Right, So that what he found in tribal societies was that,
Speaker 2: you know, as humans, we have always lived in small
Speaker 2: to medium sized tribes. And Dunbar showed up and over
Speaker 2: again when a tribe hit about one hundred and twenty
Speaker 2: to one hundred and thirty people, that it started to fracture,
Speaker 2: that there started to become lots of subgroups and stuff
Speaker 2: like that, and competing interests. And Dunbar's number was the
Speaker 2: kind of the upper limit of a a well functioning tribe.
Speaker 2: And then other people have taken that and actually applied
Speaker 2: it to business. And I've talked to a number of
Speaker 2: startups who are growing and you know, maybe it's not
Speaker 2: exactly that one hundred and twenty one hundred and thirty,
Speaker 2: but certainly when they get over one hundred, that one
Speaker 2: hundred to one hundred and fifty. That's when just everything
Speaker 2: becomes so much more complicated.
Speaker 1: When you don't know everybody's name. That's the that's my
Speaker 1: kind of spot is like when you no longer know
Speaker 1: there goes PAULI. You're like, who's that guy? You know?
Speaker 1: And that happens to you two three times a day.
Speaker 1: It's and you're right, I've seen it. The inflection point
Speaker 1: is somewhere around the low hundreds, and then once you
Speaker 1: start getting up into like five hundred to one thousand,
Speaker 1: things shift, and ten thousand they shift again. Like it's
Speaker 1: it's lots and lots of shifting, you know. That's why
Speaker 1: you ask a questionary like people dynamics, man, I think
Speaker 1: it's everything. You can have the best strategy in the
Speaker 1: world and you can't find a way, like the right
Speaker 1: system of work, the right values to glue everybody together.
Speaker 1: You know, the end of the day, if you're going
Speaker 1: to do something truly transformed, it probably more than one
Speaker 1: hundred and twenty people are going to need to be involved.
Speaker 1: So how are they all going to work together in
Speaker 1: a way that's effective and not? You know, one plus
Speaker 1: one equals negative one, you know, that's that's that's why
Speaker 1: I'm so interested in team dynamics and that kind of
Speaker 1: stuff around. It's not just about the product. I love
Speaker 1: the product. I love that stuff, but who are the
Speaker 1: people around it? You know, it's the surest way to crash,
Speaker 1: and the best way to be successful is to really
Speaker 1: invest in people.
Speaker 2: Okay, so let's not talk about the individual.
Speaker 3: Right, So your book is all about you.
Speaker 2: Know, your grass is greener. I like that topic. I
Speaker 2: sorry that title. It's just kind of appealed to me
Speaker 2: straight away. Why did you come up with that title?
Speaker 1: I would love to take credit for it, I can't.
Speaker 1: It has to go to my brother in law. We
Speaker 1: were kind of work shopping titles and I kind of
Speaker 1: had the concept and I hadn't found the words yet.
Speaker 1: And I'm glad to hear you like the title because
Speaker 1: I love it too and work really really hard at it.
Speaker 1: But what I was trying to capture is this essence
Speaker 1: that a lot of times I think we make. Look
Speaker 1: if you look at work right now, a lot of
Speaker 1: people are struggling. I think that's you can look at
Speaker 1: all sorts of different numbers, like look at the number
Speaker 1: of people that are quiet quitting, or the data on
Speaker 1: the great resignation millions of people quit and change jobs.
Speaker 1: Something like eighty percent of them are regretting it now,
Speaker 1: like people are burning out, they're disengaged. There's just a
Speaker 1: lot of struggle in the workplace.
Speaker 2: I'm going to throw in at Jason just for here,
Speaker 2: because I read it recently. In New South Wales, which
Speaker 2: is a big state, it's probably nearly a third of
Speaker 2: the population of austral It is certainly over a quarter.
Speaker 2: Psychological injuries are rising at three times the reit of
Speaker 2: physical injuries in the workplace.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a huge problem. And I wanted to like
Speaker 1: add to the story, and it added to the conversation
Speaker 1: in a bit of a different way. And I found
Speaker 1: that a lot of the rhetoric is are these things
Speaker 1: like find a job you know that you love, and
Speaker 1: ever work a day in your life. And I think
Speaker 1: it's true that there are times when you're in a
Speaker 1: toxic work environment and the only thing you can do
Speaker 1: is make a change. But for my research, a lot
Speaker 1: of times we assume that the only thing we can
Speaker 1: do is make a change, and often there's a lot
Speaker 1: you can do, like hold up a mirror and some
Speaker 1: things that you can do that you can change that
Speaker 1: you're in control of in your job, no matter how
Speaker 1: micromanager your boss might be. And you do these things
Speaker 1: and it can improve your work situation a ton. And
Speaker 1: the worst case is you try these things and it
Speaker 1: doesn't improve your work situation. Then you know for certain
Speaker 1: it's time to make a change. But too often we
Speaker 1: jump to something new we think it's going to be better.
Speaker 1: The honeymoon period ends because we haven't changed how we
Speaker 1: work right. The way we're trying to accomplish our ject
Speaker 1: gives all of the frustrating stuff from the old job,
Speaker 1: except for maybe you have better snacks now, and a
Speaker 1: slightly higher salary comes rushing back, right, And.
Speaker 3: That's hence the grasp being greener.
Speaker 1: Right, That's right. And what I what I wanted to
Speaker 1: show people is I started kind of working on these
Speaker 1: tactics for myself, and what I learned is, geez, like,
Speaker 1: the things I thought were going to help me enjoy
Speaker 1: my job more were things like accomplish this, accomplish that,
Speaker 1: achieve this, add this accolade. Those things were fleeting. You know,
Speaker 1: I know you'll know this better than me, But like,
Speaker 1: hedonic adaptation is a real thing I think happens, you know,
Speaker 1: you peak in my case for like sub five minutes,
Speaker 1: and you're already thinking about the next objective that you're
Speaker 1: going to try to hit. But you know, how can
Speaker 1: you kind of systematically enjoy the journey a little bit
Speaker 1: more along the way. And as you know, a type
Speaker 1: A who was very focused on accomplishing things, what I
Speaker 1: kind of learned is there's like a lot of rejection
Speaker 1: around this enjoy concept. You know, for me, I was
Speaker 1: always like, well, I'll enjoy it when I get there,
Speaker 1: when I retire, when I sell a company, when I
Speaker 1: make X amount of money, when I get this promotion
Speaker 1: or finish this project. Enjoyment's always like just over the hill.
Speaker 1: But if you look into the research, what you find
Speaker 1: is like, enjoyment isn't the fluff of your job. Enjoyment
Speaker 1: is the fuel. Like if you enjoy your job more,
Speaker 1: you're going to increase the probability that you accomplish. The
Speaker 1: more you enjoy, the more you achieve, the more you achieve,
Speaker 1: the more you enjoy. It's like this beautiful self fulfilling prophecy.
Speaker 1: And so I bought into that. But then the question
Speaker 1: is like, well, what do I do? You know you
Speaker 1: get another platitude like work smarter, not harder. Everyone's heard
Speaker 1: this one, right, Yeah, borderline offensive, Like I don't wake
Speaker 1: up in the morning every day and say to myself,
Speaker 1: I have a job to do. What's the dumbest way
Speaker 1: I can get this done. I'm trying my best and
Speaker 1: someone comes along and like, hey, Jay, you should work smarter.
Speaker 1: I'm like, okay, do you have any suggestions, because I'm
Speaker 1: you know, I'm trying. And this was where I kind
Speaker 1: of flipped over a bunch of these workplace assumptions because
Speaker 1: I had, you know, systemically experimented with a bunch of stuff,
Speaker 1: and it completely changed my perspective. I wound up writing
Speaker 1: this book where it's like the nine most common workplace
Speaker 1: challenges and a specific tactic that is entirely within your
Speaker 1: control that you can like put down the book and try.
Speaker 1: And the kind of guarantee I give folks with the
Speaker 1: book is like, read the book and try the tactics.
Speaker 1: It's either going to improve the situation and you're going
Speaker 1: to be enjoying your job more and achieving more, or
Speaker 1: it won't and you're going to have some clarity about
Speaker 1: whether or not that's the right job for you to
Speaker 1: be in.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I like it, and look, well we will dive
Speaker 2: into maybe one or two of those workplace challenges and
Speaker 2: the tactics that you can use. But a couple of
Speaker 2: things that popped up when you were talking about that,
Speaker 2: the hadonic adaptation and they you know, I will enjoy
Speaker 2: this more when I get there, and then talking about
Speaker 2: the process. You just kind of summarized a brilliant book.
Speaker 2: I don't know if you've ever read it, but you shoot.
Speaker 2: If you haven't, you shoot, because I think you will
Speaker 2: love it. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle meant.
Speaker 3: You read it?
Speaker 2: Yeah, cool, and that you know the line that's stuck
Speaker 2: in my head. I think I was seventeen when I
Speaker 2: read it is you know, he was talking about the
Speaker 2: top of the mountain and people just just always being
Speaker 2: focused on getting to the top of the mountain and
Speaker 2: this one line, sometimes it's better to travel than to
Speaker 2: get there.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Great book. I'll throw another one back at you.
Speaker 1: Have you read The Courage to Be Disliked?
Speaker 3: No, But so you're gonna like that.
Speaker 1: You're gonna like this one because I think I think
Speaker 1: I heard that you were into a lot of Japanese psychology.
Speaker 3: I think, yeah, yeah, my wife's a practitioner in it.
Speaker 1: So that's why I thought, yeah, you're gonna love this book.
Speaker 1: Amazing analogy in there where it's something to me and
Speaker 1: I'm going to butcher it terrible. You're going to read
Speaker 1: the book and email me in three weeks and say, dude,
Speaker 1: you've totally screwed it up. But like, the concept is,
Speaker 1: we all have this idea that life is like a
Speaker 1: mountain climb. We're trying to get to the peak. And
Speaker 1: the point in the book is it's not climbing a mountain.
Speaker 1: It's dancing. Right. You're active and you're moving, but you're
Speaker 1: not going.
Speaker 2: Anywhere and nice right, and they're.
Speaker 1: Objectives, but they don't take you to any place. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and when you shift your mentality from trying to get
Speaker 1: to the peak to trying to do the best dance,
Speaker 1: you know, it can really have a big, big impact
Speaker 1: and the courage would be Dislike for me, it's one
Speaker 1: of those ones where it's just like you read the
Speaker 1: book and it like flip my brain inside out a
Speaker 1: little bit. I'm like, that's perspective shifting. Like I I
Speaker 1: highly recommend it. It's a bit of a tough read
Speaker 1: to get through because it's translated from Japanese. So the
Speaker 1: flow is yeah, yeah, that's worth it. In my opinion,
Speaker 1: it's really really worth it.
Speaker 3: Cool.
Speaker 2: Right, that's on to the top of my list before
Speaker 2: we jump into the workplace thing. You said one of
Speaker 2: the things that I was quite intrigued about is that
Speaker 2: you seem to be your own scientist, which I love.
Speaker 2: So you've said that you've tried a whole heap of
Speaker 2: personal and professional wellness experiments that didn't work. Talk to
Speaker 2: me about some of the fuck ups. Talk to me. Oh, actually,
Speaker 2: you know, we often call the field experiments. But you know,
Speaker 2: Thomas Edison famously said, you know when he was trying
Speaker 2: to ten size and field experiments, and he was like,
Speaker 2: with every field experiment, I'm one step closer, right, I
Speaker 2: know what doesn't work. So give us some maybe a
Speaker 2: couple of experiments that you try that just flopped. Oh,
Speaker 2: I mean, and and what did you learn?
Speaker 1: We could talk for hours about this, for sure, and
Speaker 1: I can. I could even give you one in the
Speaker 1: middle that was like one of the only like maybe ones.
Speaker 1: A lot of them were quite conclusive, either very good,
Speaker 1: clearly not good, or like right in the middle. So
Speaker 1: the long and short is. I went like super deep,
Speaker 1: you know, like Tim Ferris before I knew who Tim Ferriss,
Speaker 1: was like if there was a thing somewhere that said
Speaker 1: this will make you feel better, do better, or perform better.
Speaker 1: I was like, game on, I'm gonna try that. And
Speaker 1: I kept this tracker and I was running probably somewhere
Speaker 1: between like two and four different like experiments every single week,
Speaker 1: and I would measure it every single day, and I
Speaker 1: had all this like interesting day. It was really it
Speaker 1: was really good. That went on for about two years,
Speaker 1: and then I brought it to the workplace so we can.
Speaker 3: Talk about the engineer and you is coming pretty strong.
Speaker 1: This was like from startups, you know. I was used
Speaker 1: to the idea of when you're trying to get product
Speaker 1: market fit. You have a thing, you have an idea,
Speaker 1: you want to put the product in market. You're always wrong.
Speaker 1: You try it, you iterate it, you have hypotheses, you
Speaker 1: test and learn. I did that on myself, right. I
Speaker 1: was the product and I was like, let's test and
Speaker 1: learn and see what happens here. So I had read
Speaker 1: this book. You asked them some of the ones that
Speaker 1: didn't go swimmingly. I had read this book about the microbiome,
Speaker 1: and it blew my mind. You know, I never thought
Speaker 1: about this idea that you know, I'm this one person
Speaker 1: and there are billions of these things on my skin,
Speaker 1: inside of me, and they have a huge impact on
Speaker 1: my health, my mood, my wellness. Never thought about this
Speaker 1: great mic or biome sounds awesome. Here's the thing. When
Speaker 1: we shower, the hypothesis went, and we're constantly using cleaning
Speaker 1: products on our body, we are altering our microbiome and
Speaker 1: we're not altering it for the better. So the test
Speaker 1: is stop with all of the cleaning.
Speaker 2: Products, right so that you then you then become a
Speaker 2: self cleansing entity.
Speaker 1: Your microbiome gets to a spot that's much more natural
Speaker 1: for you, and so it puts you in a more
Speaker 1: center place in YadA, YadA, YadA. The book's called Clean.
Speaker 1: If you want to read it, you can check it out.
Speaker 1: So I'm like, great, I'm gonna do this. Well, let's
Speaker 1: what could go wrong? Idiot? So I still wash my hands,
Speaker 1: but like, no soap, no shampoo. I made it like
Speaker 1: five days, four days, and it just was like this
Speaker 1: might result in a better microbiome, but I feel disgusting,
Speaker 1: like just for like, I didn't want to go out
Speaker 1: of the house anymore. I was like avoiding people. You know,
Speaker 1: I'm causing you, like, do I stick? Am I that
Speaker 1: guy right now?
Speaker 2: Like?
Speaker 1: And that was whatever benefits I might have gotten down
Speaker 1: the road was pretty much tossed out of the out
Speaker 1: of the gate because I just didn't feel physically amazing
Speaker 1: and like, so that one went in the garbage. Funnily enough,
Speaker 1: my wife, my wife didn't notice. I didn't tell her, so,
Speaker 1: you know, years later when she found out, she's like,
Speaker 1: what the hell, So it couldn't have been that bad,
Speaker 1: but I really didn't love that one of the ones
Speaker 1: that was kind of a maybe. I got big into
Speaker 1: cold plunging. Again, this was long before it was like
Speaker 1: the cool thing to do. I would start my day
Speaker 1: with forget the exact amount, but four or five minutes freezing,
Speaker 1: freezing cold, and I replaced my morning shower with it.
Speaker 1: So it was like I would cold plunge and then
Speaker 1: I would shower very quickly. At the time, I had
Speaker 1: a very young son, and I've got two kids now,
Speaker 1: but a young kid. And for anybody out there with parents,
Speaker 1: you know, I was like the CEO of an AI
Speaker 1: company I had a young kid, and as silly as
Speaker 1: it sounds, the like eight minutes in the morning when
Speaker 1: I get to take a shower is like sacred time.
Speaker 1: You know, I don't get at I don't get a
Speaker 1: lot of other meat time at that time. And so
Speaker 1: what wound up happening was, first of all, it works
Speaker 1: in my experience. The theory is you could plunge, it
Speaker 1: hits your dopamine, and depending on how you do it,
Speaker 1: that dopaminehit can carry throughout the day.
Speaker 3: But know what adrenaline as well?
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, So I was tracking how I was feeling,
Speaker 1: and both my data and my felt experience was like
Speaker 1: I am feeling better, Like I feel invigorated, I feel great,
Speaker 1: but I dread the hell out of every single morning.
Speaker 1: And it just hit me in a moment in my
Speaker 1: life where I was like this might be better for me,
Speaker 1: but I don't enjoy the process, back to like are
Speaker 1: you enjoying the journey? The outcome was there, but the
Speaker 1: way I was accomplishing it it was pain. It was dread.
Speaker 1: I didn't like. It was like throwing away eight minutes
Speaker 1: that I really enjoyed it. It was like a tight moment
Speaker 1: when I could you know, hop in the shower and
Speaker 1: have my own space, and instead it was just like wow, freezing,
Speaker 1: hate this, Get me out of here. So I stopped
Speaker 1: that one, even though for me it really felt like
Speaker 1: it was having the intended impact.
Speaker 2: Can I just throw in something in there? Having interviewed
Speaker 2: Professor Mike Tipton on this, who is pretty much the
Speaker 2: world leading scientist when it comes to cold exposure, and
Speaker 2: I was talking to Mike, and he reckons that almost
Speaker 2: all of the benefits come in the first twenty to
Speaker 2: thirty seconds, that it's just the cold water shock, and
Speaker 2: that it's at that natural response that we have to
Speaker 2: that cold water, that entire body brain system that is activated.
Speaker 3: And it's really interesting that the reason that it increases
Speaker 3: dopamine and nora adrenaline.
Speaker 2: Is if you think about it, that cold water shock
Speaker 2: would be you falling in as a hunter gatherer to
Speaker 2: really cold water flight. So it makes sense that norah adrenaline,
Speaker 2: one of the stress chemicals that enhances focus, would dramatically increase,
Speaker 2: as would dopamine, which is about gold directed behavior and
Speaker 2: division to act would spike up right. And I find
Speaker 2: and you'll still see that I thered there's people who
Speaker 2: are doing cold plunges, they're in ice bats, they're eight
Speaker 2: ten minutes, ten minutes, they're sticking on Instagram, and I'm
Speaker 2: thinking anything past thirty seconds, it's just fucking ego.
Speaker 1: That's what I've read now is eleven minutes a week
Speaker 1: is enough to make the difference, and eleven minutes a
Speaker 1: week is not.
Speaker 2: You know that that's son, your Sonnsberg's stuff. And actually
Speaker 2: it's really interesting because she found out but there was
Speaker 2: no real dose response comparison. I'm actually wanted to run
Speaker 2: an experiment with Professor Grant Scofield on the Homesis lab
Speaker 2: to find out what is the minimal effect of dose? Right, Yes,
Speaker 2: eleven minute works, but does two minutes work?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 1: And let me know if you do what temperature?
Speaker 2: Yeah, well that that's that's going to be the interesting thing, right,
Speaker 2: is the dose response and what is the minimal effect
Speaker 2: of dose? But anyway we we transgress.
Speaker 1: I mean I could go on for out. There were
Speaker 1: I must have done hundreds of hundreds of these things,
Speaker 1: and to this day I continue to do like sub
Speaker 1: twenty of them. So there were a lot of ones
Speaker 1: that went the wrong way.
Speaker 2: What do you reckon has absolutely worked that's a bit
Speaker 2: of standard okay, cool meditation.
Speaker 1: You know, that was something I thought I would never do.
Speaker 1: You know, I kind of incorrectly look down my nose
Speaker 1: at it as for someone else who has time for
Speaker 1: that kind of thing, it's soft like, yeah, I don't
Speaker 1: have time for it. Basically, total game changer therapy was
Speaker 1: a big one for me. Huge. To be able to
Speaker 1: talk to somebody and you know, a professional who understands
Speaker 1: my the way my mind works and you know, can
Speaker 1: teach me some stuff about myself has been really great.
Speaker 1: There's lots of stuff in the book that I cover
Speaker 1: as well, but you know how I open and close
Speaker 1: my week and prioritize is completely different. You know, there's again,
Speaker 1: we could probably spend the whole podcast on experiments that
Speaker 1: failed in the ones that that did pretty well.
Speaker 2: So total dude, talk to me about your meditation practice
Speaker 2: because it's something that I've doubled in every nine and
Speaker 2: I'm one of those people who he's not great at meditating.
Speaker 2: I find a guided one is much easier. But where
Speaker 2: I've landed is breath work. Right, breathwork is something that
Speaker 2: works for me, which is essentially a fault, right YEA
Speaker 2: call it.
Speaker 1: Whatever you want. And you know, I'm not a guru
Speaker 1: by any means. I think if I was a guru,
Speaker 1: I would say something to you, like, there is no
Speaker 1: such thing as not being great at meditation. My favorite
Speaker 1: book if anyone's thinking about meditating and they're not kind
Speaker 1: of like fully into it yet ten Percent Happier by
Speaker 1: Dan Harris. I love that book.
Speaker 3: I liked it, Dan Harris.
Speaker 1: I love this book like he just it's it's the
Speaker 1: journey to start meditating, told from the mind of a
Speaker 1: complete skeptic, which is amazing. And his story is unbelievable.
Speaker 1: You know, if you don't know it. He used to
Speaker 1: be a news anchor. He goes on air. He was,
Speaker 1: you know, taking a lot of cocaine at the time,
Speaker 1: and he has a breakdown on air and he has
Speaker 1: to figure out how to pick the pieces up in
Speaker 1: his life after that, and he's highly skeptical, and he
Speaker 1: goes through a whole bunch of meditation tests. For me,
Speaker 1: I keep it light weight. I don't like to breach
Speaker 1: too much, so we don't spend too much time on it.
Speaker 1: But for me, it's quite simple. Now it's ten minutes
Speaker 1: a day. It's time that I you know, just reserved
Speaker 1: to sit and similar kind of breath work stuff, just
Speaker 1: whatever's going on in my mind. I'm going to take
Speaker 1: some time to be mindful of paying attention to what's
Speaker 1: happening inside of my head rather than just you know,
Speaker 1: running around. I find the ten minutes I used to
Speaker 1: meditate much longer. It kind of abs and flows based
Speaker 1: on what's going on in life at the time. It's
Speaker 1: been as much as you know, forty five minutes to
Speaker 1: an hour a day and as little as two to
Speaker 1: three minutes a day, depending what's going on. I just
Speaker 1: try to keep the consistent practice and it's had an
Speaker 1: incredible impact on my self awareness.
Speaker 2: And look, I would throw in one that's a little
Speaker 2: bit left find that people don't really think of as meditation,
Speaker 2: but the Stoic philosophers were big fans of it.
Speaker 3: And that's journaling.
Speaker 2: And that just reflective process and you know, the store
Speaker 2: which were big of setting your intentions for the day,
Speaker 2: spending a few minutes just in the morning about setting
Speaker 2: your intentions, how I want to show up, what sort
Speaker 2: of virtues do I want to express today? And then
Speaker 2: just doing a reflection in the evening. You have you
Speaker 2: played with journaling a bit.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, so that's what I meant about my kind
Speaker 1: of weekly habit. I open and close every week, and
Speaker 1: I open and close every day with a similar kind
Speaker 1: of a thing of what's important this week? You know,
Speaker 1: what things are not going to get done this week.
Speaker 1: I'm very intentional about that. You know, how do I
Speaker 1: want to show up this week? Are there some things
Speaker 1: that I'm thinking about? Journaling is something I dabbled with.
Speaker 1: Multiple different kinds of journaling were in the big experimental set.
Speaker 1: You know. I didn't keep up with it, not because
Speaker 1: I would say it didn't work. I just found meditation was,
Speaker 1: you know, doing the job for me. But the one
Speaker 1: that stuck out the most is free writing. I really
Speaker 1: like this one. You basically, it's really simple. You get
Speaker 1: a probably in my case, I needed a bunch of
Speaker 1: pieces of paper, but you set a timer the KOD
Speaker 1: amount of time. I'm minute, two minutes, five minutes. The
Speaker 1: only rule is you can't stop writing. You's just right.
Speaker 1: You write right, right, right right, and it's whatever comes
Speaker 1: out of your brain. You know, I'm thinking this right now.
Speaker 1: I'm thinking that right now. I don't know what to write.
Speaker 1: I don't know what to write. I don't know what
Speaker 1: to write. It doesn't matter what you write. It's just
Speaker 1: that you continue the stream of consciousness down on to
Speaker 1: the piece of paper. And I noticed that that had
Speaker 1: a very interesting effect of just like seeing what was
Speaker 1: going on in my mind written down on a piece
Speaker 1: of paper, and then when you're done, it's not like
Speaker 1: dear diary. Today I met Paul and we had such
Speaker 1: a nice conversation, so I can read that in five years.
Speaker 1: You finish, you crumple it up, you throw in the garbage.
Speaker 2: Ah, you know, it's just it's just a self awareness practice.
Speaker 1: That's right, It's just time. For me. It was just
Speaker 1: time where I was like, ah, I'm seeing what's going
Speaker 1: on in my mind written down on a piece of paper.
Speaker 1: And there was this interesting effect of like when you're
Speaker 1: disassociated from the thoughts going in your mind physically, it
Speaker 1: was a really interesting way to see, like, this is
Speaker 1: an interesting like look at the way my thoughts were
Speaker 1: bouncing around here, written down on a piece of paper.
Speaker 1: That's cool. On to the next thing, you know. And
Speaker 1: doing that every day for a couple of weeks, I
Speaker 1: found was making me much more mindful of I could
Speaker 1: pay attention to the talk track going on inside of
Speaker 1: my head. And once that happens for me, it was
Speaker 1: a you know, between meditation, drilling, whatever. Amazing for me
Speaker 1: to see the way that my mind speaks to me,
Speaker 1: you know, when you're not paying attention to that it's
Speaker 1: for me. It was quite surprising, Like, I, this is
Speaker 1: not how I would talk to other people. Why am
Speaker 1: I talking to myself like this?
Speaker 2: You know, you just induced a flashback for me from
Speaker 2: about thirty years ago when I was in Cambodia.
Speaker 3: I was I was backpacking.
Speaker 1: I got really sick in Cambodia. I love it there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was amazing place. Particularly Actually it would have
Speaker 2: been thirty years ago and I was in I was
Speaker 2: in rural Cambodia. I but had gone to battom Bang
Speaker 2: and I wanted to go and visit this temple that
Speaker 2: i'd read a bike and I had a guy take
Speaker 2: me on the back of a motorbike out to this
Speaker 2: temple and walked up to the top of the temple
Speaker 2: and there was a monk there, a female monk, and
Speaker 2: you know that we started chatting through the guy who
Speaker 2: take me, who spoke from English, and turns out she
Speaker 2: was there meditating for a month and she would just
Speaker 2: go down to get Brice and and and to spend
Speaker 2: the whole day in the in the temple meditating. And
Speaker 2: I actually said, you know, I asked for some advice
Speaker 2: because at the time I was trying to do a
Speaker 2: form of meditation called no mind meditation, where you just
Speaker 2: completely empty your mind. And I was Robbie shut at right,
Speaker 2: I couldn't get past three seconds. And I told told
Speaker 2: the guy, and then he explained to her, and then
Speaker 2: she just started laughing, like this belly laugh.
Speaker 3: I thought that this was hilarious. And then she.
Speaker 2: Said to him, and through him, she said, don't worry
Speaker 2: about that. She says, you can't do that. You just
Speaker 2: need to become the watcher.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's great.
Speaker 2: And and what you talked about that that stream of
Speaker 2: consciousness is just about being the watcher. Is that self
Speaker 2: awareness of what's happening in your in your own mind,
Speaker 2: because I think without that, people just get hooked with
Speaker 2: this stream of consciousness, right, and it just takes them
Speaker 2: to all sorts of of sometimes on helpful places. Let's
Speaker 2: switch over, so we talked about some of the personal stuff.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about a few tactics that you have in
Speaker 2: terms of your your workplace right for enjoying your day
Speaker 2: to day work more, whether it's progressing faster or speeding
Speaker 2: up your decision making.
Speaker 3: Give it.
Speaker 2: Give our listeners a couple of the tactics that you
Speaker 2: talk about the book in the book in order to
Speaker 2: get that more enjoyment out of your work.
Speaker 1: Sure, let's go like in rough order the book. I'll
Speaker 1: give you a sampling from the first third and a
Speaker 1: sampling from the middle third, and that like they'll give
Speaker 1: you a sense, and it's ordered this way on purpose.
Speaker 1: You know, the meat of the book is how to
Speaker 1: enjoy your job more. That's kind of the middle third.
Speaker 1: But the challenge it is that stuff's a little bit
Speaker 1: more self reflective. And we'll talk about it in a second.
Speaker 1: Makes sense that you have to do a bit of
Speaker 1: self reflection there and people will tell you if you
Speaker 1: want to improve, like focus on yourself to start. It's
Speaker 1: very hard to do that job off the side of
Speaker 1: your desk. And the reason we have challenges with that
Speaker 1: is not that we're incapable. We don't have time. And
Speaker 1: so the first third of the book basically titled you
Speaker 1: know how to do five days of work in four
Speaker 1: without working until midnight. And it's all about But.
Speaker 2: I think you've not just cooked everybody who's listening to this.
Speaker 1: Right, So the whole idea is you first have to
Speaker 1: create some space and then you can create some change. Right.
Speaker 1: And the surprising thing is creating the space is not
Speaker 1: as shockingly hard as it might sound. And there's basically
Speaker 1: three things we cover in the first third. Miscommunications, decision making,
Speaker 1: and prioritization. These are the three biggest things in my
Speaker 1: experience that slow you down at work. Right, You get
Speaker 1: in miscommunications and they wind up being very costly for you.
Speaker 1: Decision Making you sit around waiting for a decision or
Speaker 1: a meeting after meeting after meeting after meeting, trying to
Speaker 1: get to a decision. Prioritization. You have a never ending
Speaker 1: to do list, so you finish your work for the week.
Speaker 1: You don't even know what that means, and there's already
Speaker 1: more work and you're doing it and you're working like crazy. Right,
Speaker 1: how do you prioritize effectively? Which you know means saying no?
Speaker 1: So we could pick any one of those tactics. Does
Speaker 1: one kind of jump out at us the problem you
Speaker 1: want to dive into.
Speaker 2: I reckon fuck Now, they all jump out at me
Speaker 2: and I can see how all of them and become
Speaker 2: real issues for people. So you just pick your fever.
Speaker 1: I love them all, but I'm a huge nerd about
Speaker 1: decision making, so maybe i'd pick that. There's two chapters
Speaker 1: dedicated to decision making in the book, Faster decisions and
Speaker 1: better decisions, but faster decisions. Let's like, we'll play a
Speaker 1: bit of a game. Okay. There's a common thinking that
Speaker 1: the bigger company gets, the slower the decision making is
Speaker 1: going to be. Okay, I'm going to tell you some
Speaker 1: things about a company, and you're going to try to
Speaker 1: guess how quickly they can make decisions. And I'll give
Speaker 1: you bonus points to count for nothing if you can
Speaker 1: guess who the company is. Cool.
Speaker 2: I've got to guess they actually name of the company.
Speaker 1: You don't have to, but i'll give you bonus points.
Speaker 1: Not okay, cool? Okay, So the company is four hundred
Speaker 1: thousand people, okay, over one hundred and seventy five billion
Speaker 1: dollars in budgets. They've got long term objectives, so they
Speaker 1: can't learn from their mistakes over time. The stakes are
Speaker 1: very high. A bad decision will kill somebody right the highest.
Speaker 1: They have no chat, no email, and no cell phones
Speaker 1: to make communications quicker as they have to make decisions
Speaker 1: in the workplace, How quickly do you think that company
Speaker 1: that I just describe, which is a real company, what's
Speaker 1: their average decision time? And again, if you can guess
Speaker 1: who it is bonus points.
Speaker 2: They've no chat, they've no email, they have no phones
Speaker 2: like no cell phones. I reckon their decision time is
Speaker 2: actually reasonably quick because it's not all this back and
Speaker 2: forth and back and forth and waiting for some person.
Speaker 2: So I actually suspect that their decision making is actually
Speaker 2: quicker than companies that have them all of this different technology,
Speaker 2: just because of what I've seen in the workplace. So
Speaker 2: are you talking big decisions life or death?
Speaker 1: That's right, we got to invest billions of dollars that
Speaker 1: could result in killing people. The biggest decisions you can.
Speaker 2: Make, right, let's just say for those big decisions, maybe
Speaker 2: a couple of weeks.
Speaker 1: One day, one day, Wow, you want to guess who
Speaker 1: it is?
Speaker 3: Something maybe ock the hell? But they don't have phones.
Speaker 2: I would have said NASA, or I would have yeah,
Speaker 2: something to do with aeral space.
Speaker 1: I have played this game with so many people, I
Speaker 1: can't keep track. You are the first person who has
Speaker 1: gone NASA boom. Really it's nineteen sixties NASA, and it's
Speaker 1: the the team that sent people to the moon. Okay.
Speaker 1: And so when I go into work with teams, we
Speaker 1: talk about, hey, we want to try to speed up
Speaker 1: decision making. You know, a couple of weeks feels fast.
Speaker 1: A couple of weeks is unbelievably slow. And I'll say, hey,
Speaker 1: we can make decisions faster here. Our decisions are too complicated.
Speaker 1: Are they more complicated than sending a human being to
Speaker 1: the moon and back with a computer less powerful than
Speaker 1: your watch?
Speaker 2: Well?
Speaker 1: No, they're not. Okay, Well, our decisions are too risky.
Speaker 1: Are they riskier than sending a human being to the
Speaker 1: moon and back with a computer less powerful than your No? Okay,
Speaker 1: you know, well we have really big budgets and cross
Speaker 1: functional teams. Are there more than four hundred thousand people
Speaker 1: and two hundred billion dollars involved right now? No? NASA
Speaker 1: could do it in the nineteen sixties. We can do it.
Speaker 1: And so the question is why are we slowing down?
Speaker 1: And the interesting thing for me is I'm a giant
Speaker 1: decision making or like I said, you unpack this thing.
Speaker 1: It's like, why is it happening? We're actually building teams
Speaker 1: that is inherently slowing down our decision making. We just
Speaker 1: don't realize it. And the moment you realize it, the
Speaker 1: light bulb goes off and you can speed it up.
Speaker 1: I'm going to give people one sentence. They're not going
Speaker 1: to believe me that it will speed it up, but
Speaker 1: it will when they try it tomorrow at the office. Okay.
Speaker 1: And this is the more people that we put on
Speaker 1: a team, the more diversity that we look for in
Speaker 1: those people, the more likely we are to disagree. And
Speaker 1: human beings, to a brand about tribes earlier, are hardwired
Speaker 1: to agree with each other. It is very hard to disagree.
Speaker 1: You'll hear this when you hear people talking about decisions. Paul,
Speaker 1: can you agree to this?
Speaker 3: Paul?
Speaker 1: Can I get your agreement on this? What needs to
Speaker 1: be true to get the room to agree. We don't
Speaker 1: need agreement. The better we disagree, the faster we decide.
Speaker 1: Seems like an obvious statement, but when we all agree
Speaker 1: with something, we just do the thing that we all
Speaker 1: agree to and it doesn't take long to make that decision.
Speaker 1: The decisions that take time are the ones that we
Speaker 1: don't agree on. And so instead of spending all this
Speaker 1: time thinking about how do we agree more, how do
Speaker 1: we get Paul to agree with this? Instead, let's focus
Speaker 1: our energy on, well, how do we disagree better? Can't
Speaker 1: it be true that I have to make a decision
Speaker 1: and Paul doesn't agree with me, and I can decide
Speaker 1: and we can get moving. And so the thing that
Speaker 1: we're looking for, what great teams can do, what NASA
Speaker 1: can do, what the fastest moving companies today can do,
Speaker 1: is they aren't looking for agreement, They're building alignment.
Speaker 2: Yeah, consensus is now necessary to make decisions, right, Not.
Speaker 1: Only is it not necessarily, I think there are a
Speaker 1: very small subset of decisions that might need consensus. Otherwise
Speaker 1: I think it's one of the worst ways to make
Speaker 1: a decision because to get to consensus is basically the
Speaker 1: antithesis of diversity. It shouldn't be true that we get
Speaker 1: a group of people who think differently and yet arrive
Speaker 1: at the same conclusion every time. Then we don't have
Speaker 1: a group of diverse thinkers. We just say we do.
Speaker 1: And if we build a team for diversity and we
Speaker 1: force them to agree all the time. We're wasting all
Speaker 1: the time and energy we spent trying to build a
Speaker 1: diverse team in the first place, we might as well
Speaker 1: have how large of this team. But the case for
Speaker 1: diversity is pretty ironclad. You know, a more diverse team
Speaker 1: produces better business outcomes. It's like been shown over and
Speaker 1: over and over again.
Speaker 3: And an interesting observation on there.
Speaker 2: Having worked with lots of different leadership teams and I
Speaker 2: run like full day sessions on high performance teams, what
Speaker 2: I tend to find I don't know if you have
Speaker 2: noticed this, either in your experience or your research, in
Speaker 2: that leadership teams who get on very well individually and
Speaker 2: have been around for a while and like each other socially,
Speaker 2: I tend to find that they are the worst at
Speaker 2: making decisions because they don't like conflict. They don't want
Speaker 2: to disagree and yeah, and that.
Speaker 3: Conflict for them becomes a dirty word.
Speaker 2: Where I said to him, people, you're running a business here,
Speaker 2: You're not running a kombya loving It's like you're paid
Speaker 2: to make decisions and you're paid to actually have productive conflict.
Speaker 2: I think that is something that is missing, is this
Speaker 2: idea of productive conflict where you passionately to be a ideas.
Speaker 3: You play the ball, you don't play the individual.
Speaker 2: But then you have to come to decisions.
Speaker 1: You play the ball to a point, right, and that's
Speaker 1: the challenge, right, And I think that I agree with
Speaker 1: you completely. What we want is we want the conflict
Speaker 1: out in the open. We don't want it to be well,
Speaker 1: I don't agree with this, but I'm not going to
Speaker 1: have the conflict. I'm just gonna run around behind the scenes.
Speaker 2: And slowly and sabotage behind the scenes.
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 1: And you may not do that on purpose, but you know,
Speaker 1: confirmation bias is a real thing. You have a thing
Speaker 1: in your head. I don't think this is right. As
Speaker 1: soon as you think that thought, you're not going to
Speaker 1: try necessarily to sabotage it, but you're not fully supporting it,
Speaker 1: and therefore you're kind of shooting it in the foot.
Speaker 2: So if you think, I think, sorry, there's a just
Speaker 2: to clarify that for me, there's a continuum of sabotage.
Speaker 2: There's this soft sabotage where you're actually not supporting it,
Speaker 2: and then there's the act of sabritage.
Speaker 1: That's fair. Yeah, absolutely, you know I'm going to make
Speaker 1: sure that Paul's decision blows up in his face and
Speaker 1: he goes down to a flaming ball of you know,
Speaker 1: non glory, like that's not that would go back to
Speaker 1: the values question and whether that would be the right
Speaker 1: human being on your team.
Speaker 2: And the soft sabotage is just not being committed, not
Speaker 2: being fully committed, right.
Speaker 1: And that word is that word is the most important
Speaker 1: you know, committed, And I think it's I don't need
Speaker 1: to agree with your decision to commit correct, right, And
Speaker 1: so I'll give you the tactic, and I'll give you
Speaker 1: one for bonus because you brought up the word committed
Speaker 1: and it's it's the big like buzzer, the buzzer word
Speaker 1: for me on this one. The challenge with disagreeing is
Speaker 1: we don't know who we're disagreeing with and who gets
Speaker 1: to decide that we disagree And this seems so obvious,
Speaker 1: but the simple tactic here is before you debate any decision,
Speaker 1: decide who decides. And all you need to do is
Speaker 1: if you're like a you can be a leader in
Speaker 1: the company, you can be an intern in the company.
Speaker 1: Listen for a decision. The vast majority of times that
Speaker 1: you hear a decision brought up on your team at
Speaker 1: your company. The next thing you'll hear is a debate
Speaker 1: about which of the options we can choose. But when
Speaker 1: we do that, we haven't first reconciled. How will we
Speaker 1: reconcile a disagreement? Oh, this is going to be Paul's decision. Great,
Speaker 1: now let's go crazy, because Paul's going to listen. He's
Speaker 1: going to tell us when he's hurd enough, and he's
Speaker 1: the one who's going to say, I know there are
Speaker 1: three options. I'm picking auption number one and this is why,
Speaker 1: and here we go. Or we're going to say a
Speaker 1: week next Friday, we're going to take a vote, No problem, right,
Speaker 1: We're going to debate this thing like crazy until a
Speaker 1: week next friday, until we all put up our hands.
Speaker 1: I know, yay, whatever however you want to vote and
Speaker 1: that the decision is done. But without that, we assume
Speaker 1: we have to have consensus. And what that turns into
Speaker 1: is me trying to convince Paul that I'm right, rather
Speaker 1: than me giving Paul the context that I have that
Speaker 1: he doesn't to improve his decision. Whatever it is, Okay,
Speaker 1: so decide who decides. Listen for your decisions decide who decides,
Speaker 1: That by itself will speed up your decisions significantly. We
Speaker 1: won't go into the research too much, but there's a
Speaker 1: lot of research out there. What it shows is the
Speaker 1: average person is wasting one full business day every single
Speaker 1: week because of slow decision making on their team.
Speaker 3: Fucking hell.
Speaker 1: Okay, So you don't need to change how you work.
Speaker 1: You don't need to, You don't need to like become
Speaker 1: some productivity guru. Just speed up decision making on your
Speaker 1: team and it will save you up to a full
Speaker 1: day of loss productivity every single week. Decide who decides
Speaker 1: will get like eighty percent of the way there.
Speaker 3: That's cool, shit, love it. Okay, what we got next?
Speaker 1: Okay, So we were talking about I enjoying the job more. Okay, yes, okay,
Speaker 1: so this one again, I kind of like, you know,
Speaker 1: a little bit agitating with the book on purpose, like
Speaker 1: you say the thing, and then there's a lot of pushback. Okay,
Speaker 1: if you enjoy your job more, it's going to lead
Speaker 1: to better outcomes for you. Fantastic sounds great. Number one
Speaker 1: pushback I hear is I have no time for that.
Speaker 1: I can't enjoy my job more. I got too many
Speaker 1: things to do. My boss told me I have to
Speaker 1: do X y Z. What are you telling me? Like, sure,
Speaker 1: I'd love to be playing the piano right now, but
Speaker 1: that's not what my job needs. The first point I
Speaker 1: like to make is enjoyment and fun are not the
Speaker 1: same words. Okay, fun is always enjoyable. Enjoyment is not
Speaker 1: always fun. Example, if you're a runner, you go for
Speaker 1: a run, you're doing a marathon, you're on the last mile.
Speaker 1: That's probably not fun in that moment, but you enjoy
Speaker 1: the run. Professionally, when I've been enjoying my job the most,
Speaker 1: it's not usually when I recognize that joy in the moment.
Speaker 1: I think back to a time when I'm like, the
Speaker 1: team was cranking on a problem up against the tight deadline.
Speaker 1: We were all going in the same direction. It felt great,
Speaker 1: but it was very challenging, stressed out if we're going
Speaker 1: to hit it. But you're like, this is what I
Speaker 1: enjoy personally about work. Okay, So that's kind of the
Speaker 1: first thought there is, Like, it's not the same as fun.
Speaker 1: We're not aiming for fun. We're aiming for like enjoyment overall.
Speaker 2: And the way that I throw it, can I throw
Speaker 2: a word at you there. Yeah, just as you're describing that,
Speaker 2: the word that's popping into my head is being engaged.
Speaker 1: Engaged is another word, for sure. You play around with
Speaker 1: the words and like, do you want to pick engaged?
Speaker 1: Do you want to pick enjoyed? You know, I have
Speaker 1: found ways to engage myself in things that I don't
Speaker 1: think contribute to my well being because I'm stubborn and
Speaker 1: crazy and want to accomplish things. And so I picked
Speaker 1: enjoyment because it is one that I think, you know,
Speaker 1: I wanted something that was viscerverall around. It's important to
Speaker 1: me to enjoy this process because I don't know what
Speaker 1: the outcome is going to be. But engage is a
Speaker 1: word that's often thrown around in the workplace.
Speaker 2: Obviously, we'll run with and run with the enjoyment, So
Speaker 2: give us the tactic care.
Speaker 1: Okay, So the idea here is you don't have to
Speaker 1: change what you do. You just need to think about
Speaker 1: changing how you do it. And this sounds again a
Speaker 1: little bit out there, but if you stop and think
Speaker 1: about the way that we plan, either on teams or
Speaker 1: as individuals, what you'll realize is the vast majority of
Speaker 1: the time we spend thinking about work is talking about what,
Speaker 1: what's the objective we need to hit, What does the
Speaker 1: GAN chart look like? What are the specific things that
Speaker 1: need to be accomplished. We don't spend a lot of
Speaker 1: time talking about how do we want it to feel
Speaker 1: while we're accomplishing these things, how do we want to
Speaker 1: get there? Right? If I'm thinking about going to a restaurant,
Speaker 1: I open up Google Maps, I type in the location.
Speaker 1: I can walk, I can take public transit, I can
Speaker 1: drive if I'm driving, I can avoid tolls. I can
Speaker 1: take the scenic route. Gives you options, all of them.
Speaker 1: Get me there. We spend all of our time talking
Speaker 1: about what, and not a lot talking about how and so.
Speaker 1: Once people tell me like well, I can't just change
Speaker 1: my job, that's exactly the point. Don't change job, just
Speaker 1: change how you do it. You got two people, you
Speaker 1: and me. Right, let's say the task is, hypothetically, you
Speaker 1: got to deliver a report on a project to the
Speaker 1: team at the end of the week. I like presentations,
Speaker 1: you like data analysis. My version is going to be
Speaker 1: talk to some folks on the team, put together an
Speaker 1: awesome PowerPoint slide, get into the meeting with the team,
Speaker 1: stand up, deliver a kick ass presentation. I hope and
Speaker 1: people are going to love. It's going to go great.
Speaker 1: Your version is going to be do a bunch of analysis,
Speaker 1: crunch it in an Excel spreadsheet. Send an email to
Speaker 1: the team before the meeting is saying please have a
Speaker 1: read through this, come to the meeting with them. Any
Speaker 1: questions you have, they come with the questions, you answer them.
Speaker 1: We both accomplish the same job, but if I did
Speaker 1: it your way or you did it by way, we'd
Speaker 1: be miserable at it. So the tactic is take some
Speaker 1: time away from what not A lot ten percent wants
Speaker 1: you to figure out what needs to be accomplished and
Speaker 1: think about your best practice. I hate to turn best
Speaker 1: practice in general, because best for whom what's best for
Speaker 1: me with the presentation isn't what's best for you. And
Speaker 1: that the job all I'll kind of give people that
Speaker 1: they can try at home. It is a fun exercise.
Speaker 1: Is you get a piece of paper and you're going
Speaker 1: to write down on the left hand column. So you
Speaker 1: want to you're picturing the piece of paper sitting down,
Speaker 1: you know, landscape mode. You're gonna write down on the
Speaker 1: left half of the piece of paper a list of
Speaker 1: the activities at work that you enjoy. Not a giant list,
Speaker 1: but like it's probably going to be five, six, seven,
Speaker 1: eight things. You know, I really like brainstorming with my team,
Speaker 1: I really like crunching data and Excel spreadsheet, I really
Speaker 1: like giving presentations. Whatever it might be that you enjoy
Speaker 1: doing these things. They give you energy when you do them. Okay,
Speaker 1: Then on the right side of the piece of paper,
Speaker 1: open up your calendar, look at last week, and write
Speaker 1: down a list of the activities you actually did, and
Speaker 1: when you're done, draw a line from the things you
Speaker 1: enjoy on the left to the corresponding activities that you
Speaker 1: actually did. In the vast majority of cases, you will
Speaker 1: have almost no lines, and then you will wonder why
Speaker 1: I don't enjoy my job day.
Speaker 2: To day cause you're not doing the stuff thriving.
Speaker 1: It's so simple. But if you want to enjoy your
Speaker 1: job more, do more jobs you enjoy, but you have
Speaker 1: to take the time to do it. And so the
Speaker 1: solution there is, once you have this piece of paper,
Speaker 1: anytime you're given a new task that you need to accomplish,
Speaker 1: take it out and think about a way to get
Speaker 1: it done using one or more of the items from
Speaker 1: that list, I have to give an update to the team.
Speaker 1: I really enjoy presentations. I'm going to give a presentation
Speaker 1: to the team, right, and just taking a hot second
Speaker 1: to run through your list of these are activities I
Speaker 1: know I really enjoy and finding a way to accomplish
Speaker 1: whatever is already on your to do list. Leveraging one
Speaker 1: or more of those activities is going to result in
Speaker 1: you enjoying your day to day more. And when you
Speaker 1: enjoy your day to day more, you're going to enjoy
Speaker 1: your job more overall as well. Small change, big impact.
Speaker 2: And I think for anybody who you send this listening
Speaker 2: out there, and I know there are quite a lot
Speaker 2: of them who are a leader, this is about giving
Speaker 2: your team members of autonomy. Oh do this with your
Speaker 2: team for Yeah, it's like give them autonomy of how
Speaker 2: they do their job. Because what you're essentially saying is
Speaker 2: taking autonomy, right, is having having a say or control
Speaker 2: of how you get your job done.
Speaker 3: And that's what it should be. It's like, I just
Speaker 3: want to get it done. You do it.
Speaker 2: However it's best suited to you.
Speaker 1: Right If you're a leader and you go to your
Speaker 1: team and you tell them, you ask them you run
Speaker 1: them through the exercise I just described, and they see
Speaker 1: you taking an interest in their enjoyment at the office
Speaker 1: is going to build unbelievable trust. If you're on the
Speaker 1: other side. Okay, a leader has a boss as well.
Speaker 1: And again some common pushback here is like, well, my
Speaker 1: boss won't let me do it that way, and that
Speaker 1: will be true in that'll be true in some cases.
Speaker 1: I think if your boss is such a micromanager that
Speaker 1: they're breathing down your neck and they're literally dictating every
Speaker 1: every single thing you do and the exact way in
Speaker 1: which you do all of those things, that might not
Speaker 1: be the right environment for you if you want autonomy.
Speaker 1: But in most cases, you know, let's say that my
Speaker 1: boss gives me a job. I got to give the
Speaker 1: project update at the end of the week. I'd like
Speaker 1: to do it with a presentation. I want to have
Speaker 1: that conversation with my boss. Hey, what would need to
Speaker 1: be true for me to accomplish this with a presentation?
Speaker 1: And the wording there is very specific, not can I
Speaker 1: what would need to be true for me to do
Speaker 1: it this way? And they might say, you know, I
Speaker 1: need to make sure, I need you to make sure
Speaker 1: that this thing, and this thing and this thing is
Speaker 1: included in your presentation. No problem, I can do that,
Speaker 1: They might say, Jay, I really need you to do
Speaker 1: it in a spreadsheet this time. It's just the way
Speaker 1: that it needs to happen in this particular case. And
Speaker 1: you know what in that Noha, no foul, you're going
Speaker 1: to have to do it the way that your boss
Speaker 1: wants you to do it. But what you've done is
Speaker 1: you planted the seed that you're thinking about this. And
Speaker 1: I guarantee you, if they're a halfway reasonable manager, you
Speaker 1: have that conversation two or three more times, you're going
Speaker 1: to start getting the ability to doing to do the
Speaker 1: jobs more in the way that you're going to enjoy more.
Speaker 1: You have to open that conversation with your manager and
Speaker 1: they're not going to figure it out for you.
Speaker 2: Hence the exercise like it, let's very sae its advice
Speaker 2: and so sorry, we are running out of time, but
Speaker 2: they the one from the last third of the book
Speaker 2: and give us one on that.
Speaker 1: H quickly is tough. So that one's you know, better
Speaker 1: decisions feedback and what would need to basically how to
Speaker 1: see opportunities everyone else misses. That's like put that chapter last,
Speaker 1: because it's a it's a life changer for me. How
Speaker 1: much time do we have? Do I have to give
Speaker 1: you this forty second version?
Speaker 2: No, no, no, no, you can give me the three
Speaker 2: or four minute version.
Speaker 1: Now I'll give you the three or four minute version.
Speaker 1: Most impactful question I've ever learned in my life. If
Speaker 1: you're you know, a physics person, this single question is
Speaker 1: the root of all the other tactics in the book.
Speaker 1: We've already talked about it a little bit. The like
Speaker 1: short version of the story here is I had just
Speaker 1: started Airbnb and crashed a company. I had produced a
Speaker 1: plan on what we were going to do. My original
Speaker 1: job there was to lead growth in Canada back before
Speaker 1: anyone knew what Airbnb was, and put together this plan.
Speaker 1: I worked on it really hard because my confidence was
Speaker 1: in the gutter.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: I really wanted to impress everybody, and I wanted to
Speaker 1: impress myself that I wasn't a failure. YadA, YadA, YadA.
Speaker 1: I fly down to San Francisco with this plan. I
Speaker 1: worked really hard on present it to the team there.
Speaker 1: One of the leaders. Nobody says anything while I'm presenting,
Speaker 1: which is like deeply uncomfortable for me. By the way,
Speaker 1: I like some kind of like is this landing? What's
Speaker 1: going on here? Like feedback I get at the end
Speaker 1: is this is a great plan. Jay, we want you
Speaker 1: to do ten times a result with ten percent more budget.
Speaker 1: Laptops close, everybody leaves. Okay, I'm upside out. Like they
Speaker 1: told me it was great, that's fun, But then they
Speaker 1: said do ten times better. Like hard for me to
Speaker 1: think of me being great when I'm off by an
Speaker 1: order of magnitude, Like okay, let's put that aside for
Speaker 1: a second. Then it's like ten X, Like I'm going
Speaker 1: to relatively you know, aggressive individual like we could hit
Speaker 1: ten X if you give me like eight times more
Speaker 1: budget or five times more budget, like ten percent more
Speaker 1: budget ten X impossible. I'm spun around. I'm upside down,
Speaker 1: going through orientation the whole time. I'm down on the trip.
Speaker 1: I'm flying home, and I decide, you know what, if
Speaker 1: I'm going to fail, I'm going to go down in
Speaker 1: big blazing ball of glory, like I'm going to suspend
Speaker 1: my disbelief for a second. And I asked, what would
Speaker 1: need to be true to ten X with only ten
Speaker 1: percent more budget? And I had already done the job
Speaker 1: of listing all the reasons in my head why I
Speaker 1: can't be done right. You know as well as I do.
Speaker 1: Our brains have a negativity bias. It's really easy to
Speaker 1: like find the ways why something's not going to happen,
Speaker 1: what would need to be true for this thing to happen.
Speaker 1: And when I did that, I kind of flipped the
Speaker 1: plan around a little bit. The team I worked with
Speaker 1: didn't change. I didn't get appreciably smarter. I just asked
Speaker 1: different question. Within ten X we got really close, and
Speaker 1: the really uncomfortable learning for me was given that I've
Speaker 1: never asked this question in my life. Have I been
Speaker 1: underachieving by an order of magnitude up until this moment?
Speaker 1: And the inescapable answer was like yes. And so the
Speaker 1: tactic here is we're always looking to try to see
Speaker 1: opportunities other people are missing. You have that one person
Speaker 1: in your office, like, how the heck has that person
Speaker 1: seen that thing all the time? Like they're incredible, it's systematic.
Speaker 1: And what you can do is you listen for a
Speaker 1: trigger and you ask a question. It's a relatively simple approach.
Speaker 1: The challenge is when someone says can't or won't possibility
Speaker 1: statements right, or you think can't or won't, Confirmation bias
Speaker 1: kicks in and your brain will find all the reasons
Speaker 1: why that statement is true. It can't be done for
Speaker 1: this reason, it can't be done for that reason.
Speaker 3: When you hear camp and answer, I will just throw
Speaker 3: in there. From a neuroscience perspective, not.
Speaker 2: Only when you do that, but you will tend to
Speaker 2: dismiss or minimize information that disagree.
Speaker 3: We love, is that right?
Speaker 1: Confirmation bias is a frightening beast right, And it's so
Speaker 1: easy to fall into that trap. And what happens is
Speaker 1: we can't do it. Confirmation bias kicks in, we never
Speaker 1: think to check, and we roll on past potentially a
Speaker 1: really amazing opportunity. So what you do is you listen
Speaker 1: for a possibility word, and you recognize that human beings
Speaker 1: are using a possibility word when they mean feasibility. There's
Speaker 1: a huge difference between can't and shouldn't. Shouldn't is a
Speaker 1: strategic decision, that's a feasibility word. So when someone says
Speaker 1: can't or won't, or you think can't or won't, trigger
Speaker 1: yourself and immediately ask what would need to be true?
Speaker 1: Don't talk to me about the reasons why can't. We're
Speaker 1: going to do that exercise in a minute. Let's just
Speaker 1: list out what would need to be true hypothetically if
Speaker 1: this thing was possible. Oftentimes I find you write down
Speaker 1: that list, it doesn't seem as scary, and if you
Speaker 1: don't know what step to take to try, you write
Speaker 1: down the list. And then for each item on the list,
Speaker 1: let's say you write down three things that we need
Speaker 1: to be true to accomplish this crazy sounding objective. For
Speaker 1: each item on the list, if you think I can't
Speaker 1: do these, there's that can't word again, and that's what
Speaker 1: we need to be true. Break that thing out into
Speaker 1: its component parts of what we need to be true,
Speaker 1: and continue that exercise until you hit a thing. You're
Speaker 1: like that, I think I could do do that thing
Speaker 1: and see what happens. And what I've learned from this
Speaker 1: is there are huge opportunities sitting out there that I
Speaker 1: never paid attention to because someone said can't or I
Speaker 1: thought can't or won't or isn't going to work or
Speaker 1: whatever what would need to be true? Suspend your disbelief
Speaker 1: for a moment, run that chain all the way down
Speaker 1: until you get it to a unit of work that
Speaker 1: you think you can accomplish, and do it, see what
Speaker 1: happens from there, and you'll be shocked at the outcome
Speaker 1: opportunities to start. Honestly, it sounds silly, but like falling
Speaker 1: out your feet.
Speaker 2: Man, you just summarized a whole heap of the best
Speaker 2: bits of motivational interviewing for health behavior change.
Speaker 3: In that.
Speaker 2: But I I what I really like is the way
Speaker 2: that you you drill done into that. So you know
Speaker 2: and in behavior to we asked about the you know,
Speaker 2: the five wise but that that what would need to
Speaker 2: be true for me to lose this twenty kilos of
Speaker 2: weight loss?
Speaker 3: Right? But then it's when you find the canton.
Speaker 2: So I need to be exercised, I need to be
Speaker 2: changing my diet, I need to be doing this consistently,
Speaker 2: sleep hygen, but I can't do that. Well, what would
Speaker 2: need to be true for that to actually happen? I
Speaker 2: like the way that that drills done in that.
Speaker 1: It is exactly based on the five wise concept. It's
Speaker 1: just a rather than rather than pulling apart a problem.
Speaker 1: Why is this happening? Why is that happening? Why is
Speaker 1: this happening? It's breaking apart an opportunity. It's of it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I like it.
Speaker 2: I really like it.
Speaker 3: Man, this has been has been awesome.
Speaker 2: So the book is called The Grass Is Greener Grass. Yes, sorry,
Speaker 2: your grass is Greener.
Speaker 1: In fact, if you google the Grass is Greener you
Speaker 1: will find a gardening book and that is not my book.
Speaker 1: And it was an unintended consequence of the name that
Speaker 1: I didn't I didn't think about, so that's why I
Speaker 1: corrected you.
Speaker 2: Otherwise, you know, ah, yes, yes, and I like it
Speaker 2: Your grass is greener. And use what you have to
Speaker 2: get what you want at work and in the life
Speaker 2: from Jason Silver. Jason has been awesome and anywhere else
Speaker 2: that we can send people, website, socials, any of that
Speaker 2: sort of stuff.
Speaker 1: Pretty easy to find on LinkedIn, you know, put in
Speaker 1: Jason Silver. There are a couple of us, but you'll
Speaker 1: figure it out relatively quickly. I'm the one with your
Speaker 1: Grasses Greener in the Airbnb have you And then if
Speaker 1: you want to get in touch, read more about the book,
Speaker 1: see what else I'm up to. The Jasonsilver dot Com
Speaker 1: is my website.
Speaker 2: Yeah, cool, awesome, great stuff, mate, Enjoy whatever is left
Speaker 2: in your evening in Toronto.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Thank you, and thanks everybody who listened through
Speaker 1: all the way down here. I appreciate your time and
Speaker 1: hope you got some impact out of it.
Speaker 3: Oh man, no doubt, no doubt.
Speaker 2: People will get impact as long as they were actually
Speaker 2: focused on the podcast and not doing all the shit
Speaker 2: at the same time.
Speaker 3: Right season. Thanks very much, thank you,