#127 Best of 2021: Conversations of the Year
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Welcome to The Knowledge Project. I'm your host, Shane Parish. The goal of this podcast is to master the best of what other people have already figured out so you can unlock your potential.

We interview world-class doers and thinkers so that you can better analyze problems, seize opportunities, and master decision-making. Every episode is packed with lessons and insights that never expire. If you're listening to this, you're missing out. If you'd like special member-only episodes accessed before anyone else, transcripts, and other member-only content, you can join at fs.blog.com. Check out the show notes for a link.

This is a very special edition of the podcast and the final episode of 2021. We're looking back at some of the very best conversations that we had on the knowledge project this year, covering a wide range of topics with some fascinating guests. There are 10 different conversations in this very special episode, and I think you'll find there are lessons to be learned from all of them. To start us off, we're going to hear from Kat Cole, who appeared on episode 117 in August.

Kat spent nearly a decade in leadership roles with Focus Brands, the global multi-channel franchisor that operates Cinnabon, and a few other brands like Antions and Jamba Juice. She started as a waitress at Hooters and climbed her way through the ranks of leadership to eventually become the COO of a global brand. I asked her about the first person to ever bet on her, and our conversation took off from there. She outlined how her belief in the power of possible shaped her incredible career arc.

It's time to listen and learn.

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Who is the first person to ever bet on you? Wow. I would say my mom. Maybe by default, I had to watch the girls. I was nine years old and she was working three jobs. She fed us on a food budget of $10 a week for three years, which meant she wasn't home a lot. And so she trusted me. Outside of my mom...

What feels like the first person to bet on me was Bonnie, who was the person who hired me at Hooters. She hired me as a 17-year-old hostess, and she was the general manager at the store. She herself had been a waitress, a Hooters girl, and moved her way up to running the restaurant. And she is the one who gave me the ability to move into being a waitress.

And she's the one that came to me when the corporate office called and said, we're looking for really great employees to travel around the world to go launch the franchise. And maybe as importantly, she's the first person to call me out and treat me like an adult. I was working three jobs in the early days and I was late pretty often because I was working three jobs and it was impossible to juggle getting from one place to the other given the shift time.

And she sat me down. I'll never forget it. I remember the exact words. You're great with your peers. I'd love to give you more shifts. I would love to give you more opportunities, but I depend on you showing up on time. And if you're late, other people have to stay later. And I need to know that I can depend on you. And if this isn't enough of a priority for you, that's okay. We can scale back your shifts or you can quit and work other jobs, but I need to know where you are on this.

And it was the first time I was 18. And it was the first time that I really felt like an adult, like a working adult. It was just a job. You know, these were just jobs up to that point. And she's so skillfully with so few words said so much. And it, I quit my other two jobs.

I never thought I knew what I was doing. Never. Not once did I think, yes, I'm going to do that because I know what I'm doing. What I thought was, I can figure it out. You also believe in people. And I thought that this was interesting. You called yourself a positive, no, it was an optimistic. What was the term you used? I've used a few terms, but either a pragmatic optimist or an optimistic pragmatist or a practical optimist.

you know, any of those things that don't seem to belong together. I thought that was really interesting because I also sort of like by default believe in people and sometimes it comes with a cost and, you know, you called it a tax earlier. I'm wondering if you can expand on that a little bit. Yeah. I really do believe humans are

mostly magic and that, that we are all just unfinished magic. And we're more likely to be the fullest extent of our magic if other people see us that way first. And, um, I've certainly learned that when I see people for their potential and their possibilities, that they seem to live up to that more quickly than when they interact with others. And I have felt

that benefit of being looked at as my potential and felt the need and the ability and desire to grow into that. So the upside of believing in people is so high, right?

And not but, and some will let us down. And the frequency that I'm let down is so low compared to the frequency that I'm proven right in people's potential. And so it just feels like this tax. It's like a single digit percentage tax that is a small price to pay for getting all the upside that comes from looking at people as the great things that they are and the possibilities that they have in front of them.

One of the stories that you told that I really want to make sure that we draw out when you mentioned the positive intent before was about chicken wings. And I love this story. So I'm going to get you. I've only told it once. Yeah. So I want to hear this story again. I think everybody will benefit from this. Yeah. So I was a waitress at Hooters.

And there was a customer that started coming in with some friends every Friday and he would order 50 chicken wings, which is one giant plate of a mountain of saucy chicken wings and a couple pitchers of beer for he and his friends. And he would eat them all. They would eat them all and then call one of us over and say, excuse me, there were only 40 wings here.

And you need to take it off my bill or give us a discount.

And I remember thinking, what do I do in this moment? Because if there were only 40, maybe we screwed it up. So having that default of, yeah, okay, that can happen. But then he did it again the next Friday and again the next Friday. And it became apparent that this was either a game or a scheme to get a discount. And so instead of fighting with him, which some managers and servers were starting to do, because there's no way that was happening. Right.

so consistently to only him on a shift. Instead of fighting with him, I just decided before they finished the plate of 50 wings, I rang up with my employee discount, a plate of 10 wings, had the kitchen produce that. And before they were finished, brought them a plate of

of 10 wings and smiled and said, "I'm sure we got it right this time. I'm sure there's at least 50 here." And his friends who clearly knew he was being a bit of a difficult customer all laughed and like, "Oh, she got you, man." And it was the first time someone didn't fight him. It was almost like customer service judo where I was using his energy in a way to play the game back to him, but in a giving way.

And he never complained again and he gave me a really big tip.

Moving from the restaurant world to the world of professional sports, we're going back to episode number 120 to hear from Chris Bosh. Bosh is a two-time NBA champion and was inducted to the NBA Hall of Fame earlier this year. He played on some of the most iconic NBA teams of his generation. One of the most interesting things he shared in our interview were some of the subjective factors that separated the championship teams he was a part of with the other teams he played on.

what made a good coach, and the difference between losing and being beaten. That was the main thing that I found. Like Pat Riley said it best, it's either winning or misery. Coming with that idea from the first day in camp, and then, you know, the day-to-day work. Knowing that we need to win, we're going to win, and this is how we're going to win. And having that attitude. And even for myself as a leader in Toronto, those were things that I had to learn eventually.

you know, setting the tone, being that person, you know, that has to lead these group of teammates into something hopefully that'll materialize into something. But,

I saw how the attitude, just the attitude in embracing the tough situations. If you watch the finals or watch playoff basketball or any championship in any sport, every team goes through a moment where they want to quit every time. You know, that is indescribable.

How about not quitting? How about you keep doing your job? And matter of fact, let's do it even better. Let's turn it up a notch when it gets hard. That was the main difference that I saw that was really a huge, huge, had a huge, profound impact on me. You know, just seeing like, OK,

I've learned to use cliches, right? I used to hate them. Now I love them. When the tough get going, going get tough. Boom. There you go. Take that with you. I gave that to you for free. Take heed to that one, man. What do you think makes an effective coach? Being prepared, being ready, having a game plan and being ready to deviate from that game plan whenever if it's not working.

There's that fine balance of sticking with what you said you were going to do and just, all right, guys, hey, that game plan, throw it out. This is what we're doing now. You have to know. You kind of have to know, in my opinion, when to deviate from that. But I think overall, just someone who can connect with their team, can communicate well,

effectively, which with each member of the team, and that's including their staff as well. And that can get everybody on the same page and keep everybody on the same page. I think, you know, that's really what a coach does. Cause at the end of the day, the players are going to go out there and it's about the players. It's nothing a coach can do outside of saying the right things to get the right response out of their players. Other than that,

It's just all preparation and, you know, thinking ahead. Is there a difference in your mind between losing and being beaten? It's all the same to me. It's all the same. A loss is a loss, man. And that's to say, you know, I never... Hold on for a sec, because I remember this thing. It was a couple years ago that, and I forget what happened, but it's sort of like,

Losing is, you know, you didn't put in the work. Getting beaten is like the other team was better than you. And like, yeah, objectively speaking, you're still losing either way. But is there a difference between like, man, if I practiced harder this week, we probably wouldn't have lost that or. I mean, you said the word already right there. You said we wouldn't have lost. We lost. We are losing.

And there's nothing wrong with that. I don't want that to have a negative connotation on the thing. You know, I was brought up in a harsher reality when I was, you know, being taught the game of basketball around extremely competitive people. So there are very extreme competitive thoughts that I have in myself. But this is how I think. Loss is a loss, you know, whether it's by one or 100. I've

You know, one of that makes me think like somebody like, would you rather lose like on the last second shot or just like lose by 100? They said lose by 100. I said, man, I'm losing the last second shot. That doesn't even mean you had a shot. If you didn't have a chance, like you won't even want a chance. You know, I'm that person. And yeah, loss is a loss. If you get beat. OK, a loss. And that's OK. And that's OK. You got beat. That is a loss.

It's a win column and a loss column. At the end of every game, you either win or you lose. You can take whatever you want to, whatever lessons you want to afterwards.

But let's not, let's keep it, let's keep apples to apples, orange to oranges. Loss and wins. Okay, that doesn't mean, that doesn't necessarily, you know, speak to your character or speak to your approach. And yeah, if you're not successful, if you lose, that doesn't, you know, mean that you can't take away, well, if I would have done those things. No, no, no. How about we do those things this time? And how about we don't lose the game this time? How about we win that jump?

That's what I love. And then win it. You know, that's the attitude that's required to be successful, in my opinion, to go for the win. And if you don't, all right, I'll be back, you know, until I win. And then when I win, we're going to keep it going.

Next up, we come to a more touching subject that I'm sure has affected a lot of us in some way over the past few years. Loneliness. Back in episode 114, I spoke with Norena Hertz, who is honorary professor of the University College of London and the author of many books, one which came out in 2020 called The Lonely Century. I

I asked her what the difference is between being alone and feeling alone and how you can still be lonely in a marriage or relationship. And also about the role technology has played in causing loneliness, but also helping to cure it. And loneliness shaming. We explore that too.

Being lonely has a sense of powerlessness attached to it. It's a sense you lack agency. It's about wanting to feel connected. Typically, we think of loneliness as being wanting to feel connected to friends and family, but I actually broaden it to include also feeling, wanting to feel connected to your government, wanting to feel connected to your employer. So loneliness for me is about feeling connected

disconnected in a much more existential state about feeling that you're not cared for, that you're not supported, whether it is by those closest to you, but also whether it's by your government or your workplace. And is it technology that's causing us to feel lonely? Or do we go to technology because we feel lonely and we seek out sort of technology as a way to feel connected or find people like us?

So when I started my research, I was agnostic about the role that technology and social media played in today's loneliness crisis. But the more I dug into the academic literature, and there's by now, of course, a vast body of this, the more I came to believe that technology was important.

net a problem here. Up until about a year and a half ago, it was hard to actually establish definitively whether it was just correlation that people who were lonely were spending more time, for example, on social media, or was it causative?

And there was a landmark study that was carried out by Stanford University about a year and a half ago, a real gold standard of a study where they had 3,000 participants, 1,500 in a control group, and the other 1,500 were expressly charged to go off, in this case, Facebook.

The results were very clear. The group who went off Facebook for two months were significantly less lonely, significantly happier, and interestingly spent significantly more time doing things in person with friends and family. So it wasn't that they just migrated onto other platforms. And since then, there have been a few other studies which have supported this, showing that social media actually

actually makes people feel more lonely. But even our devices play a part here. We've all done it. We've all been in a room with our partner or our family, heads in our phones, not even really hearing them, not present with them. And there was a study where they put a smartphone on a table between a couple, even when the smartphone was turned off, even when neither person was touching the smartphone,

the couple felt less empathetic towards each other and less connected. And so there's lots and lots of research on why technology net is making us feel less connected to each other. Although I'm actually quite optimistic about the role that

social robots and virtual assistants will be able to play in alleviating loneliness. And in my research, I've kind of looked into this a lot. And one example is an Israeli startup. It's a company called Eliq. They have a social robot specifically designed for elderly people. And during the heights of the COVID pandemic, they shipped thousands of these Eliq robots.

to the United States and the stories of people who were holed up, isolating, self-isolated, saying,

I would be feeling so lonely if I hadn't found a companion in my LEQ. And of course, we know from Japan, where this has been going on for much longer, that people can really become very attached to their robot friends and carers, even knitting bonnets for them in elderly people's homes. So it doesn't mean that we need to have a relationship with people to feel less lonely. Go deeper on that. So that's...

a very interesting and important question. How I see it is that on an individual level, social robots, technology can help alleviate our loneliness for sure. But what does this mean for society? Because if we choose to hang out with our Alexa rather than Alexis,

If we choose to spend time with Ellie Q rather than Ellie Ann, we're not going to invest in our human, the dangers we won't invest in our human relationships. Moreover, the danger is that we'll get very used to having relationships with

essentially servants who do what we want and laugh at our jokes and are much more submissive than any human relationship would be so whilst I do see it as a cure for loneliness at an individual level I do worry about the ramifications for society should we wish to migrate our friendships

to social robots and virtual assistants. I want to come later to a little bit of the implications of loneliness on society with or without robots. But it seems like one of the major problems with loneliness is that there's so much shame in admitting that you're lonely. Why is that? There is a stigma. I'd say especially nowadays when popularity, when the market for popularity has never been more visible. And again,

social media clearly playing a role in that it's, you know, you scroll on your feeds and everyone looks like they have more friends than you and is having more fun than you and is more popular than you. And so it's easy to believe that others are more popular than you. And there's something that feels quite shameful about feeling like no one wants to be your friend. So I think there is a stigma. I do think something

One of the positives that has come out of our shared COVID experience is that we are talking about loneliness much more today than we were in the past. And we should be because the scale at which it's affecting us collectively is immense. Rich, poor, young, old, male, female loneliness.

lonely people. Is this a Western Eastern culture thing too? Like does this transfer across all these cultures? It does even though the more individualistic society is the lonelier it's likely to be and

Also, I argue that the neoliberal capitalist mindset, so the dog-eat-dog, me-first, self-interest-first mindset is also inimicable, ultimately, to a world in which we feel connected to each other and feel part of a community. And, of course,

The East, as well as the West, has been becoming more neoliberal and more individualistic. You even see this in pop song lyrics. So there were studies done with pop song lyrics, which show that in general, in the West, pop song lyrics from the 1980s to today have become increasingly individualistic with words like we are now supplanted by words like I mean my.

And this is even going on in China, fascinatingly, where you're seeing a lag, but you're also seeing this trend. So more individualism, more loneliness, more neoliberalism, more loneliness. And the West doesn't have the monopoly now on either. That's really interesting to think about how this will play out. And I mean, we can anticipate some of the consequences. I just want to go back a little bit more to the individual and acknowledging loneliness. And I was talking to a friend about this and saying,

She said simple things like filling out a form made her feel lonely when it asked, who's your emergency contact or who's your next of kin? What's your response to that? I think we have come to see the family as family.

as the all-important support network in our lives and I would argue that we really need to redefine support networks for the 21st century so that friendship networks you know are viewed as meaningful as ones where we have blood ties and that ideally we should be moving to um

to a whole system whereby we're able to invest in our friendships as much as in our blood relationships. And, you know, wouldn't it be fantastic if at work people didn't just have

Mothers and fathers increasingly now getting paternity and maternity pay when they have children, but also if people were allowed not only to take off paid time to care for an elderly relative, and some companies are pioneering this,

But also if you were able to take time off to help out a friend in need, help out a neighbour, do something for your community. So I think part of our challenge and part of the reason your friend probably felt so lonely is because you don't really think, oh, I'll put down my friend as a next of kin or as my emergency contact. And yet...

And yet, how great would it be if we could? But of course, in order to do that, it's not just about companies doing things. It's also about us prioritizing our friendships more ourselves. And it's hard to do that because many of us are so busy working all hours, so overstretched. And care takes time to nurture. Relationships don't just happen on the fly. So we're partly culpable, of course, too.

Rethinking is something more people should do, which is why we had to include a section from episode 112 with celebrated psychologist Adam Grant. Grant is a professor of psychology at the Wharton School and the author of five books, including his most recent Think Again. In this conversation, Adam explains the importance of rethinking ideas, separating what we believe from who we are and what happens when we get into an overconfidence cycle.

The conversation picks up after I ask him why it's so difficult for us to rethink our ideas. There are probably multiple reasons for it, but I think two of the reasons why people are really hesitant to rethink things are one, it makes the world feel much more unpredictable. You know, if my views aren't fixed, then who am I? And how do I navigate a really confusing and often turbulent world? And two, it's

It makes me feel like I am not an expert. And a lot of us take pride in our knowledge. You know, when I think about power, there's a classic French and Raven framework where they said, look, you know, there's expert power. There's what's called referent power, which is basically being liked and respect. And then there's coercive reward and legitimate power.

And most of the bases of power that people have in life come from a position that they happen to hold, right? So my ability to reward you or punish you, my ability to get you to listen to me because I have a role of authority is not something I can carry with me. And so the knowledge I have is one of the few things that I get to hold on to. And the idea that that might be fragile, it not only questions my identity, it also, I guess, questions my status and my standing in the world, which is something pretty uncomfortable to do.

Let's double click on that identity concept, because I think that you sort of said our views are almost tied to our identity and that gets in the way sometimes. This is something I'm always puzzled by, and I feel like I see it in every field. There are professionals in almost every field who not only are interested in particular ways of being or particular practices, but they actually define themselves by living those practices. You know this already, but when I was writing the book,

I started thinking through, you know, how terrible would the world be if some professions had not rethought some of their convictions? So imagine, for example, that you went to a doctor whose identity was to be a professional lobotomist. That would be extremely dangerous. And yet there was a time when a lot of physicians defined themselves by that method, by that set of tools.

We've seen the same thing with police officers, right, who identify themselves as the kinds of people who would stop and frisk because you never know where a criminal could be. And we know from the evidence that that just had horrendous effects, particularly when it comes to disproportionately arresting and prosecuting people of color.

particularly black people here in the US. We've had teachers and parents who identified with practices that were just highly ineffective and maybe even harmful. And I think that it's dangerous. I think that for me, an identity is not about what you believe, it's about what you value. And so I want to have a set of principles. For me, my highest values are generosity, excellence, integrity, and freedom.

And I am completely flexible on the best ways to live those values. And so you might come tomorrow and tell me, you know what?

The randomized controlled experiments that you do, the longitudinal studies you do, there's a fatal flaw in them and there's a better way to be helpful and excellent at your job. And I would be skeptical because I believe in science, but I would be open to hearing the idea. How did you get to that point? Like, how do we convince ourselves to attach our identity to values and not beliefs? Like, that's a tricky path, isn't it?

Do you think so? I don't know. It seems like it is. Otherwise, we'd just be rethinking all the time. I mean, isn't that part of the fun of being human, though? To me, rethinking is code for learning, isn't it? Well, it is, but we don't update our views very often. That's part of the issue. Our own and others, right? It's hard to see it when we don't do it. It's really easy to see when others don't do it. What is the process by which we update our views?

That's a great question. The way that I've landed at thinking about this is to say, look, when you have a belief, you have two options. One is you can subject it to a rethinking cycle. The other is you can fall victim to an overconfidence cycle. So an overconfidence cycle is something we've all both committed and witnessed probably too many times. But the basic idea is we start by being proud of something that we think we know.

And that leads us then to feel a lot of conviction. That kind of launches us into confirmation bias, where we look for information that confirms our expectations, as well as desirability bias, where we look for information that basically reinforces what we want to be true. And then we see what we expected to see and what we wanted to see, and we get validated. And that only makes us prouder of what we know and less open to rethinking.

The rethinking cycle is very much the opposite. It starts for me with intellectual humility, which is about knowing what you don't know. You know, no matter how much of an expert you are in a given field or a given topic, you have a long list of things that you're clueless about. And being aware of what your ignorance is leads you to doubt your convictions. It makes you curious about what you don't know. And that opens your mind to new discoveries. And then every time you learn something new, it's not the sign that, oh, now I'm an expert.

It's this sense that, well, there's so much more to learn, right? And I've made a tiny, tiny dot of progress in a whole universe of knowledge. And I can't wait to see what I learn next. And so I think one of the things we need to do is we need to give ourselves permission to enter rethinking cycles. And there are a lot of ways to do that we could talk about. But Shane, I'm going to ask you about this because a couple of years ago, you wrote a post about how we should have more second thoughts.

And I had literally started writing about that. I think it must have come out around the time that I was writing the Think Again book proposal. And I had proposed a tentative title for this book as Second Thoughts. This is amazing. You're on the exact same wavelength as me. And this is what you do for a living, right? You rethink things. You also ask the Farnham Street community and your whole audience here at the Knowledge Project to rethink a lot of their convictions. So where do you start your rethinking cycles? And how do you know when it's time to enter one?

I think like I've just summed this up as like outcome over ego. And so I usually try to wrap my outcome or wrap my my sense of identity or ego in the outcome. And that's something I learned when I was working for the intelligence agency. Right. Like it wasn't about me having the best idea. It was like, who's got the best idea? Because that's going to get the best outcome. And then.

You sort of grow up in an environment where that becomes, I would say, the norm by and large. It's hard in a knowledge environment, though, right? Because you have so much of your worth. You want to contribute to something. I think there's a biological need to contribute to something larger than us. And if your identity, you're not mechanically making something, you can't see, there's nothing tangible to what you're producing, then you effectively are a knowledge worker in one way or another, and then you're paid for your judgment. So if your judgment isn't right, what is it?

And then what you do is you force your way, right? Like you don't intentionally sabotage other people, but you only look for confirming evidence. You're not open to changing your mind because your sense of identity is tied to being right, because that's how you contribute to the organization.

It's interesting, but not at all surprising to me that you really learned this in the intelligence community, because the way you're describing your process of rethinking is exactly what I learned from studying super forecasters, right? Which is they will often come in to making a judgment and say, okay, the only way to have a better shot at being right is to recognize all the places where I'm wrong.

And I love this practice in particular that came from one of the super forecasters in the book, Jean-Pierre Begum, who, when he forms a tentative opinion, will actually make a list of the conditions under which he would change his mind. And I've actually started doing this over the past few months because I don't want to get locked into something that was, you know, maybe sort of a soothing belief, but ultimately one that's not going to serve me well.

I want to end with sort of like this question that people say a lot in organizations, because I think you'll have a good response to this, is people say, I'm entitled to my opinion. And, you know, that's their way of ending the conversation and saying, you know, you can't change my mind on something. How do you respond to that? Yeah, you're entitled to your own opinion. If you keep your opinion to yourself, you're entitled to your own opinion.

If you decide to say it out loud, then I think you have a responsibility to be open to changing your mind in the face of better logic or stronger data. And so I think if you're willing to voice an opinion, you should also be willing to change that opinion.

The next conversation comes from episode 108 of the podcast, which is one of my personal favorites with Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen. I call him Dr. Z. He's currently the associate administrator for the science mission directorate at NASA, where he seeks big questions about the universe and our place in it.

When something goes wrong with a mission, he's the one answering to Congress about what happened. So naturally, I had to ask him about his decision-making process. The conversation picks up after I ask him how he manages a $3 billion in public resources and what strategies he uses to decide when to launch and when to stop a mission from deploying.

So first of all, you recognize that the launch is an irreversible decision. Right. And of the moment I say go, it's done. You don't get it back. It is over. Right. So it's irreversible. So basically, whenever you make a decision like that, and many people do that in the business world too, right, kind of these kind of one-way doors, I think, as others call it, kind of you

You only go through it once. The way you do it, I believe, is you recognize that you want to make the decision well-informed and with all the scrutiny up front. So the way I make that decision is, first of all, I don't make it alone. I put in the room

The people, the best people that I know kind of from the engineers, but also the policy people. And, you know, and I actually have people who don't report to each other. Like I have an engineering organization, just the way we built NASA over decades, that we have an engineer organization that talks about just engineering without any other encumbrances, right? The question just is, will it work? What's the likelihood for it to work?

There's one that talks about safety just that way. Is it going to be safe? Right. And no other, no other, if that's, that's their focus. And so you basically, the way you make the decision is you,

You bring together that kind of, of course you work, you'd recognize by the way, the most important thing is to empower the team, right? Kind of, I mean, frankly, I'm not the most important guy in this. I'm just making the decision to live with it, you know, and I'm the guy in the congressional hearing, right? If something goes wrong, so everybody knows that, right? So I will make the decision and it's one, it's not a vote. It's one decision by one signature. The only signature that matters there for most of these missions is mine. Right?

right? Because I take the accountability, right? But I would be a fool to not listen to the others. So for me, you really get to know with big decisions, I actually spend a lot of time meeting the teams. I want to, I've built space hardware. I can sense how good it, you know, I listened to the team. I listened to the things that are not said. I listened to

I basically figure out whether they're scrutinizing each other, whether we have a lead that squashes opposition. You know, those are all warning signs. You want to see whether I look at mistakes people are making. Are they? By the way, I don't care if they make a mistake.

But are they making stupid mistakes? And over and over again, are they disciplined? So all that stuff, it's years of work that come together to that decision where I said, yes, we launch. Where are you when you make that decision? Are you in a room with other people? Are you alone? Are you walking? Are you running? What are you doing when you actually make that call?

In many cases, I'm in a room with other people. But if I'm not sure, I will take a break. And I think well when I run. I think well in the shower in the morning. So, I mean, there are kind of points of clarity. If I'm not sure, I will never push into a decision. I mean, the way I always go is I go backwards, right? Suppose I'm sitting in the congressional hearing.

And I just blew up X and Y. Can I explain how I made the decision in a way that it made sense there? Space is hard. And by the way, every once in a while, we will fail. And I remind everybody of that. If you want to not fail, you're in that safe space over here that's irrelevant.

That's not how NASA got to where it is. It's not because people splayed it safe. It's because we do take risks. We do leave the launch pad, even though we know it's dangerous. With 1.5% to 3% likelihood, it will not make it out of the Earth's gravity, statistically speaking. So we take that risk, right? So just that itself.

I will never, one of the things I really believe in is don't get pushed. If I'm not sure, I don't mind being the only guy who is not comfortable, you know, and I will back off. I basically said, thanks, we're stopping the meeting. I appreciate that. If anybody has anything that is not being said, I will not make a decision for 24 hours. Send it to me by email.

And I will go back and if I find that there's more information I can gain that really is relevant, I'll do that. If I find, you know, like you get into a place where more information actually doesn't help you because it adds ambiguity to the team.

I make the decision right on the spot because frankly, I'm ready for it because I did the work. So it's not because I came in unprepared. I did the work for years in advance. I know, kind of have all these data points and I've discussed them with my group of diverse leaders who look at them from different perspectives. Is there examples where you've made that call and it's turned out to be wrong, but you got a good outcome? Yeah. Yeah.

So I want to, I'll talk about two decisions. The first one is, I was one of the first decisions I made. It was a billion dollar assets. It's the June omission. I was in orbit or is in orbit around Jupiter. And so we were in an orbit of a 50 day orbit and we wanted to drop the, fire the engine and drop it down to a 15 day orbit. What that does is,

And I may have the date slightly wrong, but you get the point. I wanted to get over 100 missions. So sometimes I mix updates. I did not want to think we're going to talk about this. But anyway, I wanted to kind of increase the frequency of encounters by a factor of three. That's what I wanted to do. The question was, do we want to do that? So the entire team, look at them from their point of view. They're

frankly, perfectly fine in a slow orbit. They say we need 20 flybys. It costs the taxpayer 50 more million dollars to just stay where you are. The principal investigator, everybody's like, let's just leave it where we are. There's risk. We want the minimum risk. And I'm like, well, what's the opportunity cost? You're spending 50 more million dollars to do the science. And so what I had to do is unentangle that kind of natural inclination, which I understand because I was in his role before.

From the actual technical question, is it important? So in that room, there were very few people who wanted to fire the engine. But I took the decision to fire the engine. And then we prepared for it. And as we prepared for it, all of a sudden we realized that the engine had a problem. It had a leak. Something was wrong with it.

And frankly, what we needed to do is basically look at that. As we prepared for this exact, what I believe is the exact right decision, we actually realized that we couldn't do because now we would have to fire the engine. So I made a second decision. We would have to fire the engine in a state that it had never been tested. Now, I have a billion dollar asset that's basically working.

And I need to take a risk. Is it worth that risk? So actually the second decision, I had to reverse the first decision to fire. I actually decided not to fire.

because of the kind of enhanced and unknown risk. We thought that the ancient people said we could probably do that. We just have never done it. And there has never been a burn that long in that configuration in any test environment. Okay, that's crazy, right? You don't, I mean, of course, I'm boiling it down to the quintessential 30 seconds of the meeting, right? Once you learn that, it's like you don't fire. So ultimately, we ended up not firing immediately.

Because we did the scrutiny in the first and the second decision, we set ourselves up in a way that actually made the science way better because we actually had – I had asked them to bring – yes, there's opportunity costs, but tell me what you can do extra science that you weren't able to do. So we actually moved it up. So by failing in my first decision, we enhanced the mission significantly. Yeah.

I appreciate you sharing the details of that. You said there was two decisions that you recalled. What was the other one? So the first one was let's fire, even though everybody opposed it. The second was let's not fire because, you know, even though some of the technical people said we could do it, but we put enough scrutiny together.

that basically, again, I was wrong on the first decision. You could say, well, I'm sure somebody said, well, you could have just not fired and we're exactly where we are. It's like, no, that's exactly the right scrutiny. Because in a congressional hearing, I could actually now explain to you how I cautiously spent that extra $50 million. It's not because I just, I'm not handling the pressure.

well, we actually learned something that really matters. Learning is an important part of innovation. How do you disseminate what you learn within the organization? How do you share that knowledge? That's actually a really good question, and I struggle with it. And basically what happens to me on a given day, I make multiple decisions, right? And for me, what I've started to do

is sit down and talk people through the decision. It's almost like, see what I'm seeing. And really create that rigor in the organization and kind of show how the decision path goes. Asking questions out loud and talking through it. And so that's what I'm sharing in the leadership team. I worry sometimes just because NASA is so

hierarchical, because of the fact that only one signature matters. My schedule is always subscribed by a factor of ten every week. So I say no a lot more than yes relative to my time. That's my most important good. So for me, the question I'm asking, I'm spending enough time to actually disseminate things into the organizations because

I'm, you know, it would be helpful for them to actually know this is the scrutiny we're putting on it. I try to do it and I ask people to do it, but I just want to tell you, it's a question on my mind that I'm currently thinking about, you know, I just, I'm not, and that reason I'm saying it, it's like, I see some of the same mistakes over and over again. It's like, no, no, I don't want, like for me, what I really hate, if you really want to tick me off,

Come show up and tell me everything is low risk. That makes me believe you haven't understood your job, right? Don't make me feel good.

Make me feel scared and then make me feel comfortable because you're dealing with all the risks. Don't come and say it's all low risk. It is not low risk. It's rocket science. And so for me, it's like, you know, and at the beginning, everybody came with this because, you know, these organizations have their histories, their leaders, you know, like some leaders don't sleep well if they have problems, you know, so they have pain aversion. It's a big leadership weakness, you know.

to not be able to carry worries with them, you know, and those worries pulling them down. So, you know, that the whole organization behaves in a way that they never bring a worry to you. You still have them, but you don't know them, right? So you get surprised, you know, and I'm like, no, no, no, I won't. I need you to be worried more than me. Then I'm feeling comfortable. I don't want you to be calm. I need you to be worried. That's what I want.

From astrophysics and NASA to video games, our next conversation from episode 101 features Jane McGonigal, a

a world-renowned designer of alternative reality games and a New York Times best-selling author. In this conversation, she shares the three questions parents should ask their kids about the video games they're playing, as well as the ideal amount of time we should spend playing video games and how gaming at night can help with nightmares and even certain traumas. This conversation picks up as she starts explaining how most video games can help people learn tangible life skills.

The most important thing is this is my life researching, you know, the potential benefits of games played, you know, by the right person at the right time for the right reason. And the number one thing we know, any game that you love, I don't care if it's League of Legends, it's Fortnite, it's Candy Crush, whatever, whatever you feel drawn to. We know that there is a transferable benefit, which is you get better at learning new things

at dealing with systems that are frustrating and having to adapt. You know, you're learning new rules, you're learning new interfaces. It's designed to frustrate you and you have to adapt and get better. And you build confidence in your ability to get better. And every game does this. And it's something that we shouldn't trivialize. We shouldn't pretend that games are, you know, just escapists or just a pastime. That they actually build...

you know, this kind of growth mindset, they build this resilient way of dealing with challenges. And they, especially for young people, for kids who grow up learning game after game, I have five-year-old twin daughters who just got their first tablet this year, and they've already taught themselves to play over a hundred different games on this tablet. And every day they come and show me like, mom, look at this game. I learned, want to watch me play this game. And

just the confidence that you can build and I can learn anything. I can teach myself. I can get better. I can develop new skills, even if I'm terrible at this the first time I tried it. That's something your whole life until you're like 100 years old and desperately trying to keep that neuroplasticity going. And how do I keep my brain healthy and active? And where's that gray matter going to grow? You can grow it by learning something new that's hard for you. So from five years old to 100 years old,

any game that's designed to be challenging is going to give you that benefit. So how should parents think about that with kids? Because there's a lot of questions around screen time and whether I should let my kids play certain video games or not. How do you think about that?

Okay, so the number one thing is you have to be in conversation with your kids around what they're playing. And there are three really powerful questions that I ask my kids and anybody I'm trying to get to know better and like understand their relationship to games and understand their personal strengths. So you ask them about whatever their favorite game is right now. What does it take to be good at this game?

What skills does it require? What kind of personality or temperament does it require? You ask them, what have you gotten better at since you started playing this game? And you ask, what's the hardest thing you've accomplished in this game? And ask them to tell you about how they did it. You know, what did you have to do in order to meet that challenge? Because it turns out that people who can talk about

what they've gotten better at, what real skills, whether it's, you know, being able to manage my breathing under pressure, my heart rate under pressure, if they're a competitive e-sports player, or if it's creativity, maybe it's, I don't give up when things are hard. It's communication, stressful situations with my teammates. It's, I can get, I know where to look whenever I, I don't know what to do. I'm a really good information finder, whatever it is, they're,

people who can talk about that, they tend to bring those skills to their work, to their learning, to their relationships, to their hobbies. Um, and all you have to do to get somebody to transfer the benefits of games to real life is just have that conversation. And you can do it with yourself too. Like just have a little game journal. Every time you play a new game, you're like, well, what am I getting better at by playing this game? What's the hardest thing that I have achieved by, uh, when I've been playing this game and what did it take to do it? Um,

And so if you're having those conversations with your kids, I don't care what they're playing. I don't care if they're playing Fortnite, you know, for 20 hours a week and that stresses you out. By the way, 21 hours a week is like the tipping point where we do start to see it can get in the way of physical health or mental health. So, you know, okay, less than 21 hours a week. But other than that, it can be anything, the killing zombies, you know, like it's stuff that you don't understand why they enjoy it. You can still ask those questions and you can still have that conversation and you can reflect back

to anybody. Like when I watch my husband play a game, you know, I can tell him what I think, what strengths I think he's showing. And I can show him that I see all of those great things and those great qualities in him. Games are just a great way to tell each other, you know, what we're good at and what we want to be appreciated for and what we value in each other. And so we should just have more of those conversations. Right.

Are there better times a day for kids to play? Yeah. So, okay. There's a really counterintuitive study that I, parents always like, Oh, when I tell them about it, cause it's, it showed the opposite of what most parents assume is true.

which is if you want kids to retain what they study better, you should have them play video games first and then do their homework and then study before they go to sleep. Because if you study first and then as your reward, you get to play games. When you go to sleep, your brain is going to focus on the most salient problem it was recently trying to solve. I'm sure, I don't know if you've ever had this experience. You go to sleep and your brain starts like,

Like just it's working on whatever you were just really fixated on. So you want that brain to be fixated on, you know, the calculus or, well, you know, whatever the –

foreign words you're studying are not on the level that you were trying to solve in a game. So actually reversing the order is, is a really good tip. The key is just to setting a hard time limit so that, you know, they play for 90 minutes and they switch to work or whatever it is. But yeah, you don't, you don't want to have the game right before bed unless you're

you're you've recently been traumatized which is this is like can we do a psa a little public service announcement um if you're having flashbacks of a traumatic event or you're ruminating on something that it's making you crazy like you can't get this bad experience out of your mind you can't get this you're replaying this conversation over and over again because you you feel like you said the wrong thing and you just feel fixated on it playing a game right before bed

will essentially hijack the attention center and especially the visual centers. If it's a game that's very visual, I mean, Tetris is like the golden game and in clinical trials, when they studied this effect, it's like Tetris is the best option because it literally hijacks your brain. Like you close your eyes and you see the falling, you know, Tetris blocks. But any game that can really focus your attention will make it less likely for you to be then lying in bed or,

trying to fall asleep with all these negative thoughts or having nightmares and flashbacks that you can't control. So yeah, you should play the game right before bed if you're dealing with that problem. But otherwise, do something else like you're learning or whatever your growth stuff is, read, do that before bed. Instead, it'll stay in your brain better. Is there a difference between the benefits we get from single player games versus multiplayer games?

Yeah. You know, I say right game, right time, right person. You know, if you're trying to control your attention, you might have an easier time with a single player game. If you're trying to manage anxiety or you want to, you know, slow your heart rate down or you need some, you need a positive emotion because you're having a hard day, you know, just pull out your phone or your switch or whatever and do a little solo gaming that gets you in the right frame of mind. And then, you know, social gaming is,

I mean, we know that people who spend a lot of time playing the same game with the same people report getting more social support in their everyday lives. So even if it's a game like Pokemon Go where you might not see the other player, you might not be speaking to them. Maybe we're doing remote raids together. We're just sending each other virtual gifts every day. You're more likely to...

text somebody that you've had an interaction with in the game or pick up the phone and ask them for help with a problem or just feel like you have a rich network of support if you need it. It's sort of that safety net that you feel like you have in your life that makes us, I don't know, less anxious or feel less alone. If you play the same game with the same people, League of Legends, whatever it is. And so, yeah, you know, I try to have a balance in my life. You know, if I'm super anxious, I'm not going to and I'm trying to like

focus my mind. I'm not going to do Pokemon Go because that's not quite stimulating enough. I might need to do something a little more challenging. But you start to learn and curate a set of games in your life that plays the right role for you. And I think the more that you can articulate this game gives me this benefit. And I play this game because it helps me in this way. We don't see people like that developing pathologies around gaming. They're not the people who are

feeling overwhelmed. They're playing 40 hours a week, 60 hours a week. It's taken over their lives. You know, the people who run into the problems tend to be escapist gamers who just feel like games are the only thing that, you know, keeps them sane. They want to avoid reality, but they're not thinking about the benefits that it can give them to make them stronger in real life or more capable of meeting those challenges. Next up is episode 108 with my friend Nir Iwal.

That was released in February. Nir is the bestselling author of Hooked and Indistractable, and he was named the prophet of habit-forming technology by MIT. Here, Nir explains the leading cause of distraction. And it's not what most people assume it to be. This conversation picks up as Nir starts to explain the moment he had an epiphany about distraction. There was one seminal moment that really made me reconsider my relationship with distraction. It was when I was with my daughter one afternoon.

And we had this just daddy-daughter time plan just this afternoon to play together. And I remember we had this activity book that daddies and daughters could play different games. So there was Sudoku, make an air paper airplane. And there was to get to know each other, ask each other this question, like a conversation prompt. And the question was, if you could have any superpower, what superpower would you want?

And I remember the question verbatim, but I can't tell you what my daughter said, because in that moment, for some reason, I decided to look at my phone and have to check something. And my daughter got the message that I was sending that whatever was on my phone was more important than she was. And when I finally looked up for my device, she was gone. She left the room to play with some toy outside and I'd blown it.

And Shane, if I'm really honest with you, it didn't just happen once. It would happen on multiple occasions, not just with my daughter. It would happen every,

When I said, you know, I would go exercise and I didn't, uh, I was going to eat right, but I wouldn't, uh, I would get to my desk and say, okay, I'm going to write, I'm going to work on that hard, uh, project I've been delaying. And yet 20, 30, 40 minutes, I'm checking the news or scrolling Twitter or doing whatever else. That's not the thing I said I would, was going to do. And so that's when I decided, look, I really have to reassess this problem. And my first instinct was

was to do exactly what most people do well it's the technology distracting me you see i was looking at my phone instead of being with my daughter it must be the phone's fault and i actually i read every book i could find on this i i did the digital minimalism i did all that stuff i got rid of it i did the digital detox and it's amazing you know i i i got myself a flip phone uh a

From Alibaba. I had to have it imported from China because they don't really make them in the States. Like 1990s style. Exactly, exactly. This flip phone with no apps, no internet connection. I even found on eBay a word processor that a library was selling from the 1990s. No internet connection, just an ethernet cable. That's how you like downloaded whatever you typed into the word processor.

And I sat down at my desk and I said, great, no internet, no apps, no Facebook, no Twitter, no email. Now I'm going to write. And I would sit down at my desk and I'd say, you know, before I start writing, there's that book that there's that chapter in the book. I think this might be helpful with my writing. And boy, my desk is cluttered. Let me just clean up my desk real quick. And you know, the trash, the trash needs to be taken out. And I still got distracted because I

What I discovered was that distraction, the leading cause of distraction, and research bears this out, the leading cause of distraction is not what we call external triggers. It's not the stuff outside of us, but rather distraction begins from within, what we call the internal triggers. That is the leading cause of distraction. Boredom, uncertainty, fatigue, anxiety.

If you don't understand this principle that I live by, that time management requires pain management, time management requires pain management, you'll always be distracted by something, right? If it's too much news, too much booze, too much football, too much Facebook, it doesn't matter.

Something is going to distract you unless you understand what feeling you are trying to escape. Procrastination, distraction, it's not a character flaw. It's not some kind of moral failing. It is the inability to deal with emotional discomfort. Go deeper on that. Like, why are we unable to deal with emotional comfort? Where does that come from? Yeah, yeah. So fundamentally, is there gender differences too?

I haven't seen gender differences, but I think the reason why we why distraction and procrastination is always an emotion regulation problem is because the root cause of all human behavior is not what most people expect.

that most people subscribe to this pop psychology notion that has, you know, Freud actually proposed that he called it the pleasure principle, that everything we do is about the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, right? Jeremy Bentham said something very similar. We all know it as carrots and sticks, right? This is how you motivate. Turns out, neurologically speaking, this is not true, that human motivation is not about carrots and sticks. It's not about pain and pleasure, but rather it's just about one thing,

All human behavior is spurred by the desire to escape discomfort. Everything we do, we do for just one reason, the desire to escape discomfort, even the pursuit of pleasurable sensations. If you think about it, craving, desire, wanting, lusting, these sensations are themselves psychologically destabilizing. They feel bad. In fact, the brain spurs us to action by creating this discomfort that gets us to act.

So this is called the homeostatic response. We know this to be true physiologically. It's pretty much common sense, right? If you think about how if you go outside, you know, you live in Ottawa. If it's cold, your brain says that doesn't feel good. It's too cold. You should put on a coat. If you come back inside with that heavy coat, your body says, oh, this is uncomfortable. It's too hot. Take it off. If you're hungry, you feel hunger pangs. So you eat. And if you're stuffed, you ate too much. Oh, the brain says this doesn't feel good. You should stop eating.

So those are physiological responses to discomfort. The same holds true to our psychological responses. So for example, when you feel lonely, check Facebook. When you're uncertain, before you scan your brain to see if you know the answer, Google it. When you are bored, oh my goodness, tons of solutions for boredom, right? Sports scores and stock prices and the news, right? Let's think about somebody else's problem halfway across the world so we don't have to think about what's going on in our own lives.

So lots and lots of solutions, commercial solutions are offered for these emotional discomfort that we seek to escape. So that's why the first step to becoming indistractable is not to blame the technology. It's not to shame yourself. It's to claim responsibility for these uncomfortable sensations by mastering the internal triggers. And this is worth talking about for just a minute, that most people out there,

When it comes to distraction, they tend to fall into these two buckets of what I call blamers and shamers, right? The blamers, they say, it's Facebook. It's the iPhone. It's my boss. It's my kids. That's why I'm not doing what I said I was going to do. I don't accomplish my goals. I don't, you know, I missed this deadline or I did this and I didn't do what I said I'm going to do. It's because of this stuff outside of me. They blame, or this is what I hear all the time these days. It's the modern world, right? As if you can do anything about it.

Any of that stuff. You can't change any of that stuff. There's no magical time machine to go back in time before these technologies existed. So that's futile. The other extreme, and this is the camp I used to fall into, is what we call the shamer.

The shamer doesn't blame things outside themselves. They shame themselves, right? They say, oh, there I go again, getting distracted. I have a short attention span. I have an addictive personality. I'm a more, I'm not a morning person, right? They label themselves with all of these, uh, self-defeating, uh,

images of themselves, self-images that make it even worse. Why? Because the more shame we feel, the more of these internal triggers, shame is a very uncomfortable internal trigger. The more we feel of that internal trigger, the more likely we are to seek escape with, guess what? More distraction.

So we don't want to be a blamer. We don't want to be a shamer. We want to be what we call a claimer. A claimer claims responsibility not for how they feel. This is a really important point. You cannot control your feelings. This is a myth, right? You can't control your urges any more than you can control the urge to sneeze. If you feel the urge to sneeze, it's too late. You already felt that urge.

What you can control is how you respond to that feeling, how you respond to that urge. So when you feel the urge to sneeze, do you sneeze all over everyone and get them sick? Or do you take out a tissue and cover your face so you don't, you know, you don't infect others?

So that's where the word responsibility comes from. It's how we respond to those internal triggers, to those uncomfortable emotional states, so that when we feel boredom, anxiety, fatigue, loneliness, whatever the case might be, do we escape that discomfort in an unhealthy way by getting out of our heads, turning on the TV, reading the news, going on email or Facebook or whatever, or do we deal with that discomfort in a healthy way that propels us forward?

A couple of things you said there strike me as really interesting. And maybe you can pick up on one of these threads, which is like one, we sort of have habitual responses to things, even though we control them. You know, when I'm looking at Facebook in line at the supermarket or something, that's a, you know, it develops a habit.

And then the other thing that you said that really struck me was how when we shame ourselves, our identity becomes within that shame. And then that becomes self-reinforcing because if you tell yourself you're always distracted, you're always the person that does this. I mean, that just becomes more and more of the case. That's what you see, what you expect.

and you become powerless in a way. I'd love to hear you sort of like riff on those two things. Right. And this is definitely something that the tech companies take advantage of, that the internal triggers are...

Part of the hook model that I describe in my book, that they attach themselves to that uncomfortable emotional state, the boredom, the uncertainty, the fear. They know that you are looking for a salve. You are looking for some kind of solution. And so whatever you habituate to, whatever you turn to with little or no conscious thought will be what your brain will look for to solve that problem as quickly and efficiently as possible.

which is something to be aware of. We have to be careful with that. Now, the way we short circuit that is to understand what is that discomfort. And this is, of course, nothing new. Plato talked about this 2,500 years ago, the Greek philosopher, he called it a crassia, the tendency to do things against our better interest. And he asked this question, he pondered, why is it that even though we know what to do,

Why don't we just do it? This isn't a modern question. This is an ancient question. This wasn't a question that just came up with Facebook and the iPhone. People have always been distracted by one thing or another. And the answer is, it's always this inability to deal with discomfort in a healthy way. And I think part of the problem, particularly today, it's a relatively modern phenomenon,

is that we have this aversion to discomfort in an unhealthy extent. What do I mean by that? Of course, pain doesn't feel good. It's not meant to feel good. It's meant to spur you into action. But that doesn't mean that feeling bad is bad. That in fact, feeling bad can be very good.

That if we think about, you know, how many books today have happy in the title and preach contentment and, you know, tell you that if you follow this five point plan, you're going to reach nirvana as if if you're not constantly happy, something's wrong with you. And that's totally ridiculous that I would argue.

that from an evolutionary basis, you wouldn't want a species of homo sapien to be happy and contented all the time. If there was ever a group of homo sapiens that was happy continuously, our ancestors would have killed and eaten them, right? That would not be a beneficial evolutionary trait. You want people to be perpetually perturbed. You want them to want more. That's what gets us to hunt, to invent,

to create that discomfort that wanting more can be rocket fuel to propel us forward. And so that's why it's very important not to run away from that discomfort, but to harness it to lead you towards traction rather than distraction. So how do we learn to deal with that discomfort? Like how do you teach your daughter to deal with that rather than solving her problems? How do you teach adults to deal with that?

discomfort instead of running away from it or thinking that it shouldn't happen at all. Because a lot of people seem to grow up at least in the Western world where they feel like, uh,

You know, it's somebody else's responsibility to make them happy or take care of problems for them. Right. No, I think that this is this is I think the the aid that the question of our age. And I think, you know, this is this is a good place because I realize we jumped in the conversation without kind of defining some terminology. I think words are really, really important when it comes to this subject. So let me just back up just for a quick second and talk about what is distraction, really? I mean, we use this term, but what does it actually mean?

And I think the best way to understand what distraction is, is to understand what distraction is not. So most people will say the opposite of distraction is focus, right? I don't want to be distracted. I want to be focused, but that's not actually the opposite of distraction. The opposite of distraction. If you look at the origin of the word, the opposite of distraction is traction that both words come from the same Latin root, which means to pull.

And both words also end in the same six letters, A-C-T-I-O-N, that spells action. So traction, by definition, is any action that pulls you towards what you said you were going to do, things that you do with intent, things that help move you towards your values and help you become the kind of person you want to become. So those are acts of traction.

The opposite of traction is distraction. Distraction is any action that pulls you away from what you plan to do. Anything that is not done with intent, anything that moves you away from your values and pulls you further away from becoming the person you want to become. So this isn't just semantics. This is really important because I would argue that any action can be traction or distraction. What do I mean by that? Let me give an example.

I would sit at my desk every morning before I embarked on this line of research. I would sit at my desk and I would say, okay, I'm going to work on that big project. I'm going to finish that blog post. I'm going to work on that proposal. I'm going to get to work. That thing I've been delaying, no more procrastinating. I'm going to do it. Here I go. But first, let me check some email, right? Because that's a worky task, right? That's something I have to do at the end of my day anyway, right? So let me just go do that right now.

And what I didn't realize is that I was letting distraction trick me into prioritizing the easy and the urgent work as opposed to the important work. That this is the most pernicious form of distraction, the kind that we don't even realize is

is pulling us off course. Because if I sit at my desk and I start playing Candy Crush, well, okay, obviously that's a distraction. But if I'm checking email thinking I'm productive, but really I'm not working on that thing I know I should do that's more important, that is also a distraction because it's not what I plan to do with my time. Conversely, anything can be traction. So don't believe these chicken little tech critics that say video games are melting your brain and Facebook is melting your brain and everything is melting your brain.

The science doesn't support that at all, right? That if you plan to spend your time playing a video game or scrolling social media or watching a YouTube video, great. There's nothing wrong with it.

as long as it's done on your schedule, not the tech companies. So the time you plan to waste is not wasted time. Any distraction can be turned into traction by simply making time for it in your day. So back to your question about how do I teach my daughter this? There's a whole section in the book about how to raise indistractable kids. And this is something I feel really passionate about because if you think the world is distracting now,

Just wait a few years, right? It's only going to become more distracting with virtual reality and augmented reality and who knows what else reality. It's only going to get worse. Mastering distraction is the first step to creating great work. But once you've mastered that, you have to actually start creating. For advice on that, we took to episode number 105 of the podcast with Seth Godin, which was our most downloaded episode of 2021.

Seth is the author of 20 bestselling books, founder of the Alt-MBA, and runs one of the most popular blogs in the world where he's written thousands of entries every single day of the year. The most interesting part of his episode begins as I ask him to expand on something he said before, which is creativity is a choice. It's not a bolt of lightning from somewhere else. What does it mean that creativity is a choice? Well, first thing.

Have you ever been creative once in your life? Have you ever solved an interesting problem, told a funny joke, said something to somebody else that needed to be said? I've never met anyone who said no. Everyone has been creative at least once. So what does it mean to be creative more than once?

It means that you have to extend yourself with empathy to the person you are seeking to serve, to the person who the work is for. And you have to extend yourself not just through space, but through time into the future, announcing something that might or might not work. You don't know yet. That's what makes it creative. If you exert the emotional labor to do those two things, sometimes you will have a successful creative outcome.

That's a choice. So the people who say, I don't have any questions. Well, no, it's impossible you don't have any questions. What you're actually saying is, I don't care enough to ask a question that might embarrass me. That's what you're actually saying. And that's a euphemism for, I don't want to make the choice to be creative. I have this theory that one of the biggest things that holds us back in life is that we're unwilling to look like an idiot in the short term.

to be successful in the long term. Yeah, that's brilliant. You should write that one down. What does it mean to trust yourself? So the original title for my book was Trust Yourself. I even own trustyourself.com, which is lying mostly dormant and it wasn't inexpensive. When we say, I am talking to myself, nobody thinks that's a weird thing to say. Who is I and who is yourself? Why does it feel so normal to

to have two voices in our head, because we all do. One voice is hyperliterate and verbal and vocal and a critic. It is responsible for getting us to fit in all the way. The other voice, not that good at being verbal. That self is the one that wants to make things better, that's curious, that's inquisitive, that might color outside the lines.

And it's the first voice that is mostly in control. And so when we look at great shortcuts and hacks like warning pages, they exist to bypass the first voice.

that so many of the things that creative people do as part of their practice exist to make the first voice, the monkey mind, be a little calmer so that the other voice can be trusted enough to speak up. That doesn't mean it will always work, and it doesn't mean we should let that voice do whatever it wants to, but it should at least be allowed to present its agenda so that our more cognition-focused brain can make a decision.

What does it mean to be a professional? You said doing what you love is for amateurs and loving what you do is for professionals. Can you expand on that and then explore some other differences?

Okay, so there are very few amateur surgeons, right? You want a professional surgeon. You want the surgeon to show up and do her work beautifully, even if she's in a bad mood. And you want her to keep going to continuing education classes to be understanding the state of the art. Not because they are fascinated by how the knee works, but because they said to you, I'm really good at knee surgery and I will take care of you.

A professional makes a promise and then keeps the promise whether or not they feel like it. Amateurs get to be authentic, whatever that means. Amateurs show up when they want to and make what they want to make. I love being an amateur at some things. Don't sell your hobbies. Do your hobbies for you. But if you're going to be a pro...

It means you need to understand the state of the art. It means you need to raise the bar. You need to understand who it's for and what's it for, what change do you seek to make. There's a whole bunch of obligations that go with being a professional that put you on the hook. And for years, I've had uniforms at work. I don't usually wear them in public. They change from time to time. The beginning was a lab coat. Lately, I've just been trying the Japanese volunteer fireman hoppy coat that

Because when you put on the uniform, you've just sent yourself a message. Do your work at your workspace. Do it at the appointed hours. Never, ever miss a deadline. Never, ever go over budget. Because professionals don't miss deadlines, don't throw tantrums, and don't go over budget.

And every once in a while, a creative breaks through because they're doing their hobby for money. And they do those things. They miss their deadline, blah, blah, blah. And people applaud them. And then eventually they fade away because the industries we work in, they want to work with professionals. How do we define work? Well, there's the work and then there's work, the verb. For me, the work is what the professional said they would do. And

There are definitely times that permission marketing, the phrase that enabled me to be an author, came to me in the shower. But it didn't come to me in the shower accidentally. It came to me in the shower with intent. I went into the shower and I was getting close to the self-appointed deadline. And I said, I'm going to stay in the shower until I have a name for this thing we do here, even if the water gets cold.

And we only had a 40 gallon hot water tank at the time. So I knew I didn't have a lot of time. I was in there to do work. And I think as we get more and more privileged, where our work looks so much more like what people used to think of as hobbies, we can get confused by the fact that our work is a hobby. It's not. And treating it like our work, I think helps us make it better.

You mentioned earlier something, and I forget the context, but maybe you can expand on it, about meeting the spec. Talk to me about that. I know I've been ranting, so thank you for giving me this platform. This is beautiful. Keep going, man. There's lots to be said about spec. First, let's talk about Edwards Deming and what spec and quality mean.

Quality is not luxury. Quality is not expensive. Quality is not that you love it. Quality is just one thing. It meets spec. So if I look under an electron microscope at any part of a Lexus, which is by any measure the highest quality car there is, under an electron microscope, it's filled with defects. But they're not defects that matter because they're defects that are within spec.

And so we begin by understanding what is the spec of the work we're going to do. If it meets spec, not only is it quality, but it is good enough. And good enough is not a slur. Good enough is a definition. It met spec. So once it's good enough, we ship the work. If you're not happy with that, change your spec. But let's be really clear about what the spec is.

That what it meant for a Lexus to be good enough when they first came out was it had to be a standard deviation better than a Mercedes. That was their definition. And if someone's going to say, no, no, we can't ship this Lexus because it's not perfect, the product manager should say, no, no, no, no, no. It was never supposed to be perfect. It never can be perfect. It simply met spec. The hard work was in defining the spec, a spec that will get you to the next step.

Two questions about spec. Do you think that applies in a world of leverage where the difference between something that meets spec and something that exceeds spec can be massively disproportionate? Yeah, no, I think that we're having a semantic discussion here, but if the massive...

shift that you're looking for that comes from leverage is important, that should be part of the spec. Okay. And do you think we hide behind perfection? Oh yeah, all the time. Talk to me about that. All the time. Double click on that. So if we've had a hundred years of industrialism and industrialism has been all about don't ship things that are defective.

If we have brainwashed every human being who is alive, who has been through organized schooling into understanding that an A is better than a B, and there are wrong answers and right answers on the test, well, then it's super easy to say good enough and perfect are the same thing. So when I was in college, symbolic logic was one of my favorite classes. The symbolic logic exam was not only open book, open note, it was unlimited time.

in the room. So you got there at 8 AM and you could stay as long as you wanted. I decided when I got to college, I would take as many classes as I could because it was all the same price. And I wasn't going to care about my grades because I didn't want to be tempted to go to law school. And so if I could take a class pass, fail, I would because spec was easier to meet. And after three and a half hours in the logic exam, I said,

I could probably get a few more points here, but I have met my spec and I left. And I was one of the first people to leave, but someone stayed there for, I think it was 18 hours. And the question is, what did they get in exchange for that focus on perfectionism? Because I know what I did in the other 15 hours that were free to me. And I think unless you believe you're immortal, using your time wisely is probably a good practice.

Continuing with the theme of choice as an adult, we look back on episode 109 of the podcast with Angela Duckworth.

Angela is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the founder and CEO of a nonprofit whose mission is to advance the science and practice of character development. Our interview covered a wide variety of topics, including the mindset we need to take on challenges in life and how to teach those strategies to our kids. But this portion of the conversation picks up after I asked her about the things we can control versus the things we can't control and how those affect us.

Let's start with the mindset of like, hey, I can change something. I've done these research studies on this self-control technique called situation modification. And this work was done with collaborators, including James Gross at Stanford. James Gross actually originally and mostly studies emotion. And one of the things that's interesting about regulating your

your anger is if you have a bad temper or your sadness, if you tend toward melancholy or your happiness, if you want more of that, or I guess if you wanted less of that is that people can, you know, use these like sort of mental strategies, like what I pay attention to, how I'm going to frame things, my self-talk, but also you can just change your actual situation. So for example, if you constantly get into arguments at Thanksgiving with your brother-in-law,

then maybe you should sit at the other end of the table or like not go to Thanksgiving with your brother-in-law or like make sure that like you're watching football while your brother-in-law is like cutting up the pie, right? So we extended that in a study of middle school. Well, actually we've done it in all different age groups. I'll tell you about a study we did with high school students

where we randomly assigned high school students to watch this little video. It was about five minutes long. And then we told them similar things, but the intervention wasn't very long. And we were like, you know, you can change your situation. You know, like people think when they have to exercise self-control to like study or do all in school, they think it's all willpower. But like, actually, like you could, for example, put your phone in another room.

like you could make sure that you study in a place that like people aren't walking into and out of all the time. So in that study, there was a control group that learned about willpower and how important it is to like, you know, use willpower to accomplish your goals. And then there was a neutral control group. And what we found is that the condition that increased academic goal attainment best was the one where you just explained to kids like, Hey, you can modify your situation. And I think that,

idea that like your situation isn't just like fixed or set but something you can agentically intentionally modify is one of the most important lessons that you could learn in life I love that I think that there a lot of people are passive about life it's like life just happens to them and

And things just happen to them. And it's sort of like you can put that in the victim mentality sort of mindset, but it's really, it's deeper than that. No way. Right. It's like, I have no agency over anything. It's not necessarily, but the story, it's just sort of like this general passiveness to you. And I, I believe in a very active life. Where did you learn that? Like, why do you think you have come out on that end of the continuum? Yeah.

I don't know. I mean, I first got that phrasing, I think it was from Graham Duncan in a conversation we had in New York. And he just sort of recounted this story to me about...

And one of his friends actually was driving with this portfolio manager. And they, I think he actually wrote about this on his blog too, but they were driving and then this car swerved out and almost hit him. And the guy driving the car was like, why does this stuff always happen to me? And it was just a very revealing sort of mindset, right? And it comes back to sort of that question, which is like, what are the mindsets that are going to enable us to

capitalize on life in part in bad situations, capitalize on bad, capitalize on good, intelligently prepare to put us on the path to success.

I think you're on to something very important. And I guess I have a fondness for like, you know, great psychologists in their 90s. Because I have been calling Al Bandura a lot. He is the psychologist at Stanford, he's 96 now, who coined the term self efficacy, to describe the belief that you can do something if you try, right. So self efficacy about physics would be like, I can

I can learn physics if I tried. And I had this conversation with him, you know, a couple of weekends ago, actually, where I asked him, I was like, Al, you've spent your whole life studying self-efficacy, but there was this other person whose name is spelled R-O-T-T-E-R, but I think it's like Dutch or German. Anyway, so I'm going to mispronounce it as Rotter, but Rotter studied locus of control and

And locus of control was to me like super similar. So I asked Al, like, what's the difference? Because in locus of control theory, you either have an internal locus of control or an external locus of control. Right. So life kind of happens to you or that would be the external or like, you know, you're in control. And he said, oh, there's a very important difference.

I'm more interested in saying that like I can control, you know, my behavior, not necessarily that that behavior is going to like manifest.

magically make everything the way I want. What Locust Control is about is more just like in the grand scheme, is the actual outcome going to be my doing or not? Because all I want to say is that people have agency over their behavior, over their performance, not necessarily that you're going to get hired just because you are the most qualified candidate, but that you could control your own behavior and performance.

So I think that's a very important nuance here, because I don't think that we want to teach our kids that they have control over whether the coronavirus vaccine is going to be made available in their municipality in the

one month or another, or whether they're going to get into a certain college, because those things are a bit downstream. But where I really agree with Bandura, first of all, that we do have control, we do have agency, and that it's dramatically more productive to when you think about your own

No.

Okay, we need to resurrect Howard Thurman even before Freud. Okay.

memoir. So Arthur Ashe, for those who are younger than us, maybe, you know, he's a great tennis player, and I believe the only black male to win Wimbledon. So he wrote this memoir called Days of Grace, which I recommend. And in it, he talks about how so important in his life was Howard Thurman. So that led me to Howard Thurman. And the reason I bring it up is that

Howard Thurman has all these sermons about how there is the final consent. He was like, you cannot change that you were born into a racist society. You cannot change that you were born into a certain family, but you can always change how you react to it.

Right. Like you and you're responsible for how you react to it. And in Viktor Frankl said the same thing about his experience in the concentration camps. Right. That that terrible things can happen to you over which you do not have control.

But you can control your reaction. And I don't want to even say that you can control it 100%, but I do think you have some control over your reaction. And I think this agentic view is accurate and adaptive. How do we as parents instill that mindset in our kids?

I asked Al Bandura this. I said, you know, do you think that you could learn as much from failure as you could from success? Right. Because there are all these like adages and aphorisms about failure, especially in startup land. And he said, oh, this one, I 100 percent believe mastery experiences, success, success experiences are what really build this success.

you know, sense of agency. If your kid has like a Teflon life where, you know, everything comes easily in part because you make it that way. And there are a lot of parents who like sort of just,

make their kids' lives frictionless, right? Like, oh, you know, you're struggling for 10 minutes. Like, I'll get you a $500 per hour tutor. Like, oh, your teacher is not so great. I'll get them fired. Like, that's not the kind of success experience that Al Bander is talking about because he's talking about success after challenge, success after struggle. So I think Al Bander's advice is the best advice, which is the number one thing, and there is more than one thing,

But the number one thing is that people develop confidence when they have struggled to overcome something and they have come out victorious. And the engineering problem for a parent is then to figure out the right size of challenge for the kid, like in the next moment in time. And I think that we often get it wrong, like the challenge is just too big or the challenge is too small.

It's sort of monitoring and adjusting based on your particular child and the circumstances involved. How do we do it as adults? Do we seek out these opportunities to be challenged? Do we...

I think that we are benefited in large part by having a surrogate parent. I mean, what I mean by that is, you know, whether you're 50 or five, right, it's good to have somebody who is a little older and wiser than you, who is like helping you figure out the next challenge. And most of the people that I study, like they never get out of being mentored, you know, like they have a management coach, they have like a personal coach, they have a therapist, you know,

the ones I'm most jealous of have a peer for whom they coach each other. Right. They have somebody who's like, you know, you should write a book. It's like, Oh no, I can't write a book. No, you should really write a book. Like, and you know, it's that, it's that kind of challenge setting that of course you can try to do it on your own. But I think we're always benefited by having like another human being whose advantages are multiple. But one of them is that they're just not us.

Right. So they have a psychological distance from our situation. They have a better, a different aperture into our situation, one that removes a lot of the nuance and the nuance in our case might be holding us back. Right. And the ego, right. Sort of like, and sometimes, you know, the people who are looking at us have a better sense of our strengths as well.

Finally, we go back to one of my favorite interviews of 2021 and hear from a guest who came on for a reappearance, which is Jim Collins. Jim Collins is a renowned business researcher and author, but beyond that, he's a deep thinker about his personal relationships. And he's thought hard about what it means to be a great friend and live a meaningful life.

This conversation from episode 110 picks up after I asked him to explain a lesson he's learned from his late mentor, Bill Azir, on the importance of building relationships and not transactions. If I stand back and I think about what are my absolute most primary values, and particularly ones that I got from Bill, they are curiosity and relationships. And the curiosity, I think, has kind of been with me all the way along, but the relationships when I got from Bill.

Bill's basic view of the world was, number one, life is short. You never know what's going to go away. And in the end, what does that add up to? What is meaningful? And Bill believed that people break into two buckets. There are those who kind of come at life as a series of transactions. And there are people who come at life as building relationships.

Bill believed that the only way to have a great life, you can have a successful life doing transactions, but the only way to have a really great life is on the relationship side. And so Bill just pounded in me, instilled in me, modeled for me. In the end, it is really deep relationships and doing things you love with people you love and those connections. And so we got into this conversation, though, about relationships one day.

And I asked Bill, so, okay, so what makes for a great relationship? And Bill said, oh, a really great relationship is one where if you ask each person independently who benefits more from the relationship, they would each say, well, I do. And I said, well, isn't that a little bit of a selfish way to look at it? And he said, well, no, let's think about this for a minute, Jim. Let me ask you, Jim, who do you think benefits more from our relationship?

I said, well, clearly I do. I mean, with everything you've done for me. And he said, well, isn't that just great? Because I would answer that I do. And he said, see, the reason both people can answer that way is because both people are putting into the relationship, not for what they're going to get from it, but for what they can give to it. And because both people are doing that,

Both people would feel that they are the ones who are the ultimate beneficiary because of how much the other person gives. Everything we do here at the Good to Great Project is relationship oriented. I mean, there's not a single day that goes by that we don't think about what is the relationship element of this decision of how we handle something, of how we say yes or no. Everything goes back to relationships. One of the other lessons you learned from Bill is

was the trust wager. Talk to me about that. Bill had this really interesting stance on trust that ultimately affected me. And so let's make this both human and intellectual. When I left Stanford to launch out on my own, and in our last conversation, I described launching out on my own and the fear of that and the commitment and so forth. And when I sort of left

The relatively cloistered world of a place like Stanford, you kind of hit a broader world and certain assumptions about how trustworthy people are might get dashed by events. And I don't want to call people out on this, but just suffice it to say that to my great shock, I discovered that some people actually genuinely weren't trustworthy.

I was just naive in some level, right? But when I've had people like Bill Azir in my life or I'd met people like Jim Stockdale or Peter Drucker, people that just have such a character caliber that I was in a very rare group of folks. And so I asked Bill, have you ever had your trust abused? He said, oh, yeah, of course. I've had my trust abused. It's just part of life.

But then he gave me this, you know, this was one of this great mentor moment. He said, this is Jim. This is one of, now that you're starting to have this experience and really experience it, you need to decide what is your opening bid when you are establishing a relationship with someone, when you're interacting with the world is your opening bid to assume trust, to assume that someone is trustworthy and to grant them the full benefits of that. That's your opening bid.

And that trust can be lost, but the bid is trust. Or is your opening bid to not trust, but the trust can be earned. So many aspects of your life will be affected by which fork on that you take. That's a stance on life. And I said, well, it seems to me, Bill, you've chosen the trust bid as the opening bid. And he said, yes, I have. I said, but Bill, brutal facts.

Not everyone is trustworthy. And the brutal fact is some people abuse that trust. So have people abused your trust? And he said, of course they have. And he went on and he described a situation of somebody who was quite close to him who had abused his trust and it had cost him enough that he said it hurt. Right. Not just emotionally, but financially as well.

And then there's this little kind of cul-de-sac on the whole thing that Bill has, which is the notion of you don't leave yourself exposed to a catastrophe in such a way that if you trust your, let's say, your CFO and you never look at the books and then you discover one day that you had a problem and your company is bankrupt.

You always pay attention to the cash flow. You always watch the numbers. You always keep an eye on things. It's not like you become disconnected from reality. But he said, but I never left myself open to catastrophe. Beyond that, yeah, that one hurt. I said, well, did it change your approach to trusting people? He said, no, it's just part of the cost of living. And then he went on.

And he described it as upside and downside. And this sort of gets into the, you know, it just simply hardheaded. This was a hardheaded view. He said, I've come to the conclusion when I think across the iterative relationships and interactions and aspects of life that there is far more upside in an opening bid of trust. And there is far more downside in an opening bid of mistrust. It all goes to the question of people.

If you really basically want to have your life, whether they be people in your company, whether they be people in your life, whether they be your friends, whether they're people you rock climb with, whatever it is, the very, very best people will respond to the bid of trust. The best people will be attracted to that. And you want the best people to be attracted.

And the second is, he said, have you ever considered the possibility, Jim, that your opening bid affects how people behave? If you trust people, you're more likely that they will act in a trustworthy way. So it's a double win. It's the best people and they'll behave in a trustworthy way. The flip side is, if you have an opening bid of mistrust, the best people will not be attracted to that.

If you have this opening sense of you have to earn my trust. Now, you may have to earn my trust how good you are at something, right? Or earn my respect for your performance or that sort of thing. But if I basically like, I don't trust you, you have to earn it. Well, some of the best people are going to be like, I don't need to put up with that. I'll go do something else. And for Bill, it was always about, again, people and relationships, right? That's where the trust comes from.

And he just came at it as a very hard-headed and warm-hearted approach to the world. And that's why I think there were so many people whose lives were affected by Bill Azir. He trusted them and he responded in very trustworthy ways in the world.

The other thing, though, that on an intellectual front on this is, as I think you know, I'm a huge fan of this thing called the Great Courses series, where you get college-level courses, 60 lectures, 40 lectures, whatever. And I've been doing them for years and years. There's one called Games People Play, and it's a course on game theory. And of course, I know you know game theory well. If I remember it right, the essence of it was that the best strategy is an opening bit of cooperation. Now, the game can unfold from there.

But that is a good place to start. So I was very sort of like Bill had this sense of game theory that was in his approach to relationships and humanity. I don't know if he ever took a course on game theory. I think that's a really interesting way to approach it. And I definitely agree with that personally. And my friend Toby has this concept that I think might help people. It's very visual. It's called the trust battery concept.

And you can do things that increase your trust or decrease your trust. But if you start that trust battery at, say, the 75th percentile, then, you know, you're starting from a different place than if it's the fifth, you know, your 5%, your trust battery is full. And it's been my experience that the benefits of reciprocal trust and the speed and not living with your guard up all the time is more than worth letting yourself occasionally get screwed.

Another friend of mine had this really good concept about when to forgive and when to sort of like, and he said, as long as it's not malicious, just always forgive. One of the things that Bill always emphasized was that sometimes you don't know the whole story. He said, sometimes it may not be ill intent. It could just simply be a misunderstanding or it could be just incompetence.

Somebody might not actually be untrustworthy. They might just be incompetent or they made a mistake. Right. And so be careful. There's this this moment I call it seeing the hat. It's a weird thing, but

Driving down a road in Boulder and imagine a car all of a sudden veers into your lane from the lane next to you. You're both going the same direction and you're like, oh, you know, idiotic driver or whatever. And then you notice that what had happened was when you went on pass further is somebody's hat had blown off in the middle of the road and they were going to maybe step out and grab it. And but you couldn't see that.

I think Joanne had this experience and you sort of think about it as like, well, wait a minute, you know, maybe you don't see the whole situation. You're jumping to a conclusion about why somebody is doing something when actually, if you can see the hat, you'll look at it a little different. I think that's a great place to end this conversation. I really appreciate you taking the time and explaining it. And I think it's perfect, perfect point to leave on.

Till next time. Yeah, no, I appreciate you, man. I appreciate it. Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you. I really enjoyed it. Oh, my pleasure. This was great, Shane. So good to see you again. No, we can't end it. You haven't told me what I should rethink. I'm going to push for this. The Knowledge Project is produced by the team at Farnham Street. I'd love to get your advice on how to make this the most valuable podcast you listen to. Email me at shane at fs.blog. You can learn more about the show and find past episodes at fs.blog slash podcast.

To get a transcript of this episode, go to fs.blog slash tribe or check out the show notes. Can you do me a small favor? Go online right now and share this episode with one friend who you think would love it. Thanks for listening and learning with us. Till next time.