A Bit of Optimism - Two Bits of Optimism with Brené Brown and Adam Grant: Part One

Episode Date: December 13, 2022

What separates exceptional ideas from good ideas?  Here’s an example of a good idea: Book two podcast guests and meticulously plan a conversation about creativity.Now, here’s an exceptional idea: Get Brené Brown and Adam Grant to join you on a call, have absolutely NO plan, and hit record.  This is… A Bit of Optimism.For more on Brené and Adam's work check out: https://brenebrown.com/https://adamgrant.net/ 

Brené Brown and Adam Grant are known for their really good ideas. And so we got together, the three of us, and we talked about where ideas come from, where creativity comes from. And the three of us, as we tend to do, talked about lots and lots of other things as well. And there was just too much stuff to squeeze into one episode. So we decided to break it into two. This is part one of the conversation between me, Adam, and Brene. This is a bit of optimism. I get this question all the time. How do you come up with your ideas? So my question for you is, how do you come up with your ideas?

Which of course then leads to the most obvious question, which is, where do ideas come from? I'll kick us off by saying I get a lot of my ideas from reading Brene and listening to Simon. Rubbish. Absolute rubbish. Because if neither of us existed, you'd still have a lot of ideas. I would have fewer ideas and worse ideas. I don't know that I'm a good person to even answer that question, right? You'd have to ask other people who work with me all the time.

But I think one thing I've heard is that my brain is a little bit, I guess, I feel like I'm trying to put together a quilt all the time. And everything I read and every question I get asked is like a little square, but it's lonely. And it's looking for sort of other squares that fit with it. And I think that, I guess in that sense, I don't know, Boyer would say, I'm much more interested in the scholarship of integration than the scholarship of discovery, right? So I want to know how all the ideas in my field fit together and what makes them relevant to all of our lives. And I think a lot of people in our field, they make their careers just studying one little square, right? And I want to put the quilt together. So that, that for me is a source of ideas is to say,

what are the bridges between, you know, all these different themes that I'm hearing about? So, yeah, I guess maybe as a concrete example, when I was working on Give and Take, which is the reason I met both of you, I guess, I don't think I would have gone down this path or stumbled into such great company without it. And that really came from a lot of conversations with people saying, I'm not sure whether when I interact with others, whether I should try to help them, whether I should try to get something, whether I should try to trade favors. And so then I started reading all of these papers and I kept seeing the same things in different language. I kept hearing

people talk about, you know, in different words, what it meant to give or take or match. And all of a sudden the light bulb went off and I was like, wait, this is a worldview. I needed to articulate that. But it was already out there. Nobody had put it together. So is there a sense of the quilt before you start looking for the squares? In other words, is there a larger worldview that all of your work is seeming to work towards that you know what the pieces of the quilt are? Sometimes. I think most of the time, though, I'm kind of looking for something that I thought was interesting and useful. And if I come across something that surprises me and I think might

actually have practical value, it ends up in a file, right? And then every once in a while, I'll go back through the file and I start to see the patterns. But more often than not, I don't realize that there are even squares, right? I'm just following my curiosity and then something starts to stick to something else. I think I'm a lot like you, Adam, in a lot of ways. I have been 100% a pattern finder since I was probably five or six years old. My mom sewed, I understood patterns, I would have a dress that matched her dress that would match my Barbie's dress. So I've been a pattern maker. And some of it out of necessity, to be honest with you, I grew up in a very mercurial family. And so very early, I was able

to say, wow, there's a connection between this mood, this language, and this emotion that's getting ready to come. And then I couldn't believe that no one else got it. So I think I've always been a pattern hunter and finder. And I had to do my purpose statement a couple years ago. And what I came up with is my purpose is to connect the seemingly unconnectable and then use language, image, metaphors, and stories to make those connections accessible to people. And so I think my ideas come from seeing patterns, naming them, and then being able to make those connections accessible through language and story and metaphor sometimes. I have a question. Shoot, Luke. Brene, you just gave us a purpose statement without a why.

Simon is here. What is the why? I have to know. Yes, it was going through my head. I wanted Simon to not have to be the one to ask for once. Okay. Teacher's pet, Adam. What an asshole.

I was trying to help him, but I threw you under the bus in the process. I'm really sorry. I think it's actually in a why statement form. And Simon knows that we are why statement up at the wazoo over here because I text him on about a yearly basis and say, explain to me the how and all that again. I think it's so to make the world a more loving and braver place. That's why I do it. There it is. So that, yeah. I always have a so that. Yeah. But I think how my ideas come is really, yeah, I think I find patterns. And, you know, it's also a part of grounded

theory methodology that Barney Glazer and Anselm Strauss were very passionate about. They had both, Barney Glazer had studied explication to text at the Sorbonne. And so this is this form of analyzing poetry and literature word by word. He was my dissertation chair. He was very adamant around languaging things that you see that others don't in a way so they feel seen and understood. So like when I say the vulnerability hangover, everybody's like, oh yeah.

That's always my test when somebody's trying to explain an idea to me. They'll tell me their concept and then they'll say what I mean by that is. And I'm like, well, if you have to say what I mean by that is, then why don't you just tell me that? Oh yeah, that's true.

And people come up with these very clever titles for their ideas that are not intuitive, that require explanation. And I come up with these very clever titles for their ideas that are not intuitive, that require explanation. And I think that's part of good communication, which is learning to speak in terms that other people can actually understand. I agree. I agree. This happens to academics and CEOs and generals, which is they all speak to each other as if they speak some new codified language. The problem is if you sound like a scientist, only scientists understand you. But if you sound like a scientist, only scientists understand you.

But if you sound like a truck driver, then everybody understands you. And the dirty secret is if you sound like a scientist, even scientists don't understand you. They just nod their heads because they don't want to appear that they don't understand you. And so using simple language and basic words so that people can understand is more important than sounding smart. But I will tell you just really frankly,

and I don't know what your experience has been, Adam, or your experience, Simon, just doing the work we do with leaders is I was very much trained that the more accessible your work is, the dumber you are. There was a lot of value put on big words that I understood about 40% of the time, even when I used them. And accessibility was seen as a threat to the academy. I mean, that's just academic snobbishness. There's nothing else. Academic arrogance is all that is. You do come from academia. I don't.

So, you know, academics think I'm an idiot and think that I have completely dumbed down all of the things that they've been working tirelessly on and ruined everything. You think that academics think that about you? I don't think so. They did in the early days, 100%. Absolutely. These days, maybe less so just because of the way careers work. But absolutely, as I started spreading my ideas, absolutely, academics dismissed me and say I was just watering down science. There's a lot of self-preservation in that. For sure, for sure. Let me stop and ask this question. Are we in agreement that creativity and pattern recognition are the same skill set?

Because I'm not sure I'm on board with that yet. I'd have to be convinced. I think recognizing patterns is a form of creativity. Yeah. I think that's true, but I don't think, I think they're two different constructs with two different answers to your question. I think creativity is the umbrella and pattern recognition falls underneath it somewhere. Or, okay, let me think out loud for a second. Let's pull on that. This is my favorite part. This is my favorite part. This has bugged me for a while, which is what is creativity and can you teach someone to be creative? And I think the mistake that we make, this is my only insight, and it's a really small one. I think the mistake that we make is that creativity is not a thing. We talk about creativity

as a thing. And I think creativity is a behavior. To say, I am creative, I am a creative, it is a noun, right? Is actually incorrect for a number of reasons. One, it requires that I have to be that all the time. It creates a tremendous stress when I'm not that. And it is judgmental of both myself and of others who may not, quote unquote, be creative. I think what creativity is a behavior. I enjoy being creative and the products that I produce are sometimes new or different as a result of my enjoyment of being creative. Okay. So being creative is the thing. So what does it mean to be creative? And can I teach someone to be creative? And why is it that I like being creative? Where did that come from? And if you think about

it, there is not a seven-year-old on the planet that we would say, you're not creative. Right? No children are ever not. Some of them have talent. That's something different. But every child enjoys being creative. Draw me a cow and you'll get 15 versions of what a cow could look like. And we, as their parents say, I love your cow, even though it's purple and has eight legs and clearly is not a cow. They've interpreted their cow. We encourage and we encourage creative thinking,

being creative. And then for some reason at some age, that stops. And for too many people, the parents, the schools, the teachers stop encouraging them to imagine anything they want, being creative. And we start asking them to conform to something or other, some sort of standard or ideal or whatever. That's clearly not a cow. Now try again and draw me a proper cow. just maybe, for the three of us and those who are deemed, quote unquote, creative, we had parents who continued to encourage us to be creative. In other words, talk about the world, articulate the world in the way that we saw it. And we kept getting positive reinforcement to keep doing that.

So when the pressures of conformity started to weigh down on us, we had already been socialized to continue doing, enjoy being creative. Because when a kid stops enjoying the creativity, they stand up and they walk away from the table. And so what happens between childhood and adulthood where we literally stop enjoying being creative or stop being creative? It's so interesting to hear you talk about that, Simon, because that was not my experience at all. I grew up thinking I was completely uncreative. And what I was good at was figuring out what was going to be on the test and then getting an A. And I think what happened to me is in college, the definition

of A work started to change. And it was less about regurgitating existing knowledge and more about coming up with a novel observation or making an interesting argument. And all of a sudden, I discovered that what I had learned to excel at was no longer rewarded. And I had to develop a different kind of skill, which is I had to notice things about human behavior in order to be a decent psychologist. decent psychologist. I had to be able to explain the patterns in human behavior. And all of a sudden, there was a premium on seeing things differently from others as opposed to conforming to the standard of what quality was. And I felt like I was behind. And I remember, I actually remember telling my mentor, Brian Little, that I wanted to be a professor, but only teach, not do research, because I was passionate about other people's ideas. And I wanted to try to inspire students the way that my own teachers had moved me, but I didn't have anything new to

say. And it took me a good probably six years to unlearn that defense mechanism of I don't have anything to add because I'm not creative. So we're different. Brené, where are you? Yeah, I never thought of myself as a creative. In fact, I think I write in the Gifts of Imperfection about kind of, I mean, my powers of observation and connecting, especially connecting behavior, cognition, and affect, and how we think, feel, and behave, was more of a survival mechanism for me. I remember the death of creativity in my life growing up that we lived in New Orleans in this funky pink stucco house. My dad worked full time at Shell and then he went to law school at night. And my mom was in this big food co-op and they'd

make food all the time and it was great. All the curtains were handmade, all the art was framed, but it was our art. My dad finished law school and we got transferred to Houston and we moved into the suburbs. And then that move was like you had clothes from the mall, not clothes that your mom made, even if they were cool. No one's drapes were handmade. It was like the competition about whose JCPenney's drapes were better. And all of a sudden it was conform, conform, conform, which aligns with the research that we see on shame and creativity in kids happening fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, middle school, high pressure, peer conforming ages. And let me tell you this too. I've interviewed probably over a hundred teachers about what happens in the classroom still. It's not even a conformity issue. It's a no deference,

no respect, hard to control, hard to manage. And so that really happened starting fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth grade. So I would say maybe 10 to 13 or 14. And in high school, forget it. I want a cow that looks like everybody else's cow. Don't look at me. Don't make eye contact with my cow. Heartbreaking stories in our research about people, the death of their creativity. So I didn't see myself as a creative and I had to claw that back around 40. Part of my midlife kind of unraveling was clawing back that I am a creative. The question you ask about whether it can be taught or not is something I've struggled with for 10 years. I've thought about researching it.

I've thought about writing about it. Can I just pose an idea to see what y'all think? Of course. One of the reasons I think that I can make connections between what is seemingly unconnectable is the gigantic size of my reference set. I read deeply and widely and not just in my field. I get obsessed with like, wow, there's a group of folks who are huge My Little Pony fans and they have My Little Pony conferences. And I'm reading about, like I'm watching a documentary right now on this subculture. And I wonder if one prerequisite

to pattern finding is the size of your reference set. I think necessarily so. I mean, I think this is one of the arguments of diversity, right? Which is if you grow up in one neighborhood with one type of person around you with one worldview, then there's not a lot of patterns to connect other than the ones that are consistent with the one thing you see. And the more that we travel, meet other people who aren't like us, meet people who have different worldviews and different experiences and grew up extremely differently, and everybody gets to throw their ideas on the table, somebody gets to say,

well, hold on, don't you see what these ideas all have in common? I think there's truth to that. I think where we get that information is based on how we learn. I'm not a reader. I've carried shame about that for many years because people always ask me, Simon, what are the three books on your bedside table? And I'd be like, I've got about eight books on my bedside table and I've started none of them. I love the idea of books. I keep buying books. But as a kid with ADHD, my whole life I've struggled to read. I've written more books than I've read, which has caused me a lot of shame in the past. But now what I recognize is that I get my ideas and I get my information from talking to people. As a kid, because I didn't read in school, I had to learn, to your point about survival, Brene, I had to learn to really be a good listener

and discern what's important and what my teachers were telling me. I couldn't skip class in college. I had to go to class because that was the way I learned. And I had to take notes with a pen, otherwise I wasn't going to learn. The only reason I'm bringing that up is I don't want people to feel like you have to read a thousand books to be able to find patterns, but you have to be exposed to new ideas that aren't your own constantly to be able to find patterns. God, that's huge, huge point to make. And I think you also have to not be too highbrow about where you get that information. Because one of the things I do is I watch a lot of British mysteries. You know, I watch a lot.

I do. I do. I watch a shit ton of British mysteries. But I'll tell you about reference set so people don't think, oh, she's at home reading all the time. Here's what I mean by reference set. set so people don't think, oh, she's at home reading all the time. Here's what I mean by reference set. So I'm reading this fish out of water procedural where this guy gets in trouble in Birmingham. They send him to the Dales. He moves up to the Dales to solve mysteries. And he's just grossed out by the fact that they eat this Winsley Dale cheese with their cake and

their pastries. So I was like, I'm going to order some of that because I want to try that. I wonder what that's like. So I'm not getting my ideas from War and Peace. I'm getting my ideas from my audio book that I listen to when I'm cleaning. So I think it is about curiosity too, maybe, listening. I think there has to be a problem to solve. There is an analogy that our conscious brains have access to the equivalent of about two feet of information around us. Our subconscious brains have access to the equivalent of 11 acres of information around us. And so when we weigh the pros and cons, when we access our expertise, we're really only accessing a very small portion of our intelligence. But that's not when our best ideas happen. Our best ideas happen when we're in the shower or driving to work or going for a run, where we're not quote unquote thinking, but our subconscious brains are still ruminating on the problem or the opportunity that has been posed. And that's why in the shower, we're like, that's it. And we have that crazy, fantastic idea. And we come running to work a

week later, we're like, I got it, I got it. But it won't just offer solutions or ideas for random things. Our brains will process informations for ideas or problems that we're actually facing or trying to solve. So when I'm writing a book and I have an idea set that I'm struggling through, all of my ideas that I'm having in the shower, when I'm going for a run, they're just firing at craziness. All are very focused. When I'm not writing a book, it seems like I'm not making any ideas. And to Adam's point about the quilt, like he's not sewing together squares randomly. I have to believe that there's something that you want to solve that problem for yourself or somebody else,

that all of a sudden that filter processes massive amounts of information coming from all of these sources. And the more sources we have, the more details we have to solve that problem. But I still think there has to be a thing that's preoccupying us subconsciously. I love that you use the term filter, Simon, because it's exactly what I was thinking about as you two were talking. I feel like a huge part of creativity is a filtering challenge. That if you put your filters up too high, no new information comes in and you end up with tunnel vision. But if you leave your filters too low, you're getting all sorts of random inputs that you don't need. You want to filter the information in your environment through a goal that you're trying to achieve or through a problem you're trying to solve. And I think my problem for a lot of my career was my attentional filters were too high.

I'm laser focused on something I want to accomplish. And so a lot of the people I'm talking to, a lot of the things I'm reading, they don't immediately fit. And so I screen them out. Right. And so I've talking to, a lot of the things I'm reading, they don't immediately fit. And so I screen them out. Right. And so I've got to lower that. Simon, I would suspect that you have the opposite challenge as somebody who's much more naturally a lateral thinker than I am. Right.

And who seeks out a lot of divergent information that in order to sit down and write a book, you have to lift the filters up and make sure that you're not getting too many different kinds of stimuli in. What do you think? I think the analogy of the filter going up or down is accurate. I think it happens more naturally than that. I can only speak for myself, but all of my work is semi-autobiographical. And so start with why I was born out of the loss of my passion in my own work. Leaders Eat Last was born out of the fact that I had trust issues with people I was working with, where simultaneously I was spending time with these amazing human beings in the military who would give their lives for people they didn't even like, where in the business world,

we didn't even want to give up credit for things, let alone our lives. And then the Infinite Game started out, I was having conversations with folks and I stumbled upon Dr. Kars's work. My whole life I've been told I'm an idealist, I'm unrealistic. I've written books on the subject of how work should work. And literally, people would still tell me that's not how the world works. And the discovery of finite infinite games was like, oh my God, I'm not the naive one that doesn't understand how the world works. You're the naive one that doesn't understand how the world works. You're the naive one that doesn't understand how the world works. This is brilliant, right? But it's all my journey. And so when I have my own challenges, or when somebody poses to me just the most fantastic intellectual challenges,

all of a sudden that filter goes to the right place. And I'm pretty focused on solving one or two problems, but not 10 problems. And so I think it happens more naturally. You're describing something that psychologists often call problem reframing. Instead of sort of taking it through the lens that it was handed to you, you're taking a step back and saying, wait a minute, oh, you're playing the wrong game. And you've now brought a different lens to the problem. I think this goes to your question of how do we teach creativity? I love problem reframing as a skill, right? So a simple example would be elevator weights were maddening, I think about a century ago, right? Like elevators

took forever to go up. And there were all these engineers who were trying to speed up elevators. And then there were safety problems. What do you do with that? Well, some designers come into the equation and they say, well, the problem actually is the perception of time, not the actual time. So how can we distract people from the fact that the elevator ride is long? Let's play music. Let's put a mirror in. People find themselves riveting. If they're looking at themselves, hours could pass. They might not even notice, right?

And all of a sudden, the problem of speeding up the elevator has been reframed as the problem of how do you make the elevator ride more interesting or how do you make the watch pot boil, so to speak? And I think that is a skill that you both bring to the table constantly, right? I feel like every time I engage with either of your work, I find myself thinking, wow, Brené, in your case, what I thought was a problem of connection is actually a problem of

shame. I didn't know that, right? And I'd love to hear both of you talk about, do you have a deliberate process for reframing problems? Does it happen instinctively? Is it sort of a natural offshoot of the incubation that Simon was talking about? Or is it more structured and more intentional? I always try to tell myself, let it go. Stop fishing. You've cast the net.

And so the way I think about it is when I'm trying to figure out something that's really bugging the shit out of me, I'm like, I'm going to cast and I'm just going to sit there and just wait and wait for the bobble to go down. But now I just always tell myself, probably the last 10 years, 15 years, maybe I just, 10 years probably, I say, you've cast a broad net. And I think this is like, I've never heard the two feet 11 acres thing. But I think that's what this is for me. This is my metaphor for it that I've cast this huge net that spans from conversations with the woman who does my hair at the salon, to my British mystery that set in the Dales, to reading deeply around immigration issues in Germany, to my own research. And I've cast a net. And now what I want to need

to do is something that occupies my fishing two foot obsessed brain, because there's an 11 acre net that has tiny hooks on it that's out in the world that will catch what I need to catch. I don't know what the science is behind this. Maybe one of y'all knows, but I actually have never written a book without watching, I'm not exaggerating, 100 Law & Order reruns and playing probably 30 hours of ping pong. Like I have to do something that occupies a part of my brain that is viciously going after an answer so the net, the broad net can do the work. One thing I learned about how to quote unquote make ideas happen is to allow that limbic

brain to allow that net to do its thing. And the problem is because it's not conscious, I don't know when or how it's happening. One thing that gets in the way for people to be creative is constantly engaging and not allowing that limbic brain to wander. So for example, you're on your phone in the bathroom, you're on your phone on your way from your house to the subway, you're on your phone in the bathroom, you're on your phone on your way from your house to the subway, you're on your phone on the plane, we're checking phone calls while running, I'm texting on the treadmill at the gym. I see it all the time. And so people have filled up all the gaps, so much so that the brain never wanders. When I learned that,

needing to let the brain wander, you watch Law and Order or you play ping pong, what you're doing is you're disconnecting the brain and allowing it to do its thing. You're not quote unquote thinking. I started building into my calendar every Friday, nothing gets scheduled every Friday. But for years, it's been chunks of time, like I have three hours in the middle of a random day that's literally for whatever I want. People would think I'm doing work. And I was like, I was watching TV or I'd go for a walk or I just go to a museum. And the point was to do not the thing that I'm supposed to be doing. When I was writing one of my books, I kept a dry erase marker in my bathroom because I had so many ideas in the shower that I'd get out of the shower and if I waited too long,

I'd lose them as quickly as I had them. And so I'd actually write them on the tiles as soon as I got out of the shower and my bathroom was filled with ideas. And when I was brushing my teeth in the evening, I'm not working, I'm just standing there brushing my teeth and you start like,

I'm starting reading the little notes on the tiles and I'd have another idea. Allowing the brain to popcorn without forcing it to do anything. And I think this is the mistake that people make when they're trying to be quote unquote creative. They think it's something, okay, I'm going to be creative now, as opposed to I'm going to create a space to allow creativity to happen, even though I don't know when it's going to happen. That's the hard part. You cannot predict or force it. You just have to create the spaces.

And one of those times, something will happen. And I've been prescriptive about those times and about disconnecting, not knowing when it's going to happen. I agree that it's very difficult to force it, but I think there are things you can do to facilitate it. As we've been talking, I've been thinking about the research of an incredible former student, Justin Berg,

who has spent most of his career studying, can we teach and unlock creative thinking? One of the experiments he did, I just found so eye opening. He said, look, you know, being creative at the end of the day is just generating ideas that are novel and useful for solving whatever problem you're trying to solve. And the mistake that a lot of people make is they start with the useful question and that limits their divergent thinking. So he said, what if we could flip that? What if we start with novelty and then worry about the usefulness piece of the equation later? And he took a concept from painting theory called the primal mark, which is the first brush stroke that you lay on a canvas. And he said that shapes the direction of the painting. And so if we could get people to start with something more unusual, more unconventional, then it would open up all these possibilities. And I love that idea of saying, let's start with a more unconventional

primal mark. That's a launchpad for creativity. And it's the opposite of what I've always done. I wonder if what Brene and I are talking about, which is, you know, starting with the curiosity to look to different places, inherently provides those marks. Exactly what I was wondering. Barney Glazer, again, the methodologist, the grounded theory methodologist, his axiom, which is not grammatically okay, but has changed, but all his data has been like my trust in my net has grown so much that even before the TED Talk on vulnerability, the one that kind of launched my career in many ways, I wrote that on a flight back from Maui and presented it two hours or three hours after I finished it. Are y'all familiar with Immunity to Change by

Keegan and Leahy, this whole idea about why we don't change? Well, I had Lisa on the podcast, and we were going to academically talk about it, but then all of a sudden we decide the last minute she's going to take me through the process. And the process is some really hard feedback that I got around our organization feels destabilized right now. I have resisted for five years discipline scheduled meetings. I canceled them at the last minute. I take my name off the attendee list and I think someone else can handle it. And in turn, I get pecked to death with thousands of questions because there's no discipline scheduled time. And the whole immunity

to change idea is that it's not about willpower. This whole idea of change is like, there's more than just the New Year's resolution theory of change. There's something in your life right now that you're committed to, for probably a good reason that's getting in the way of you changing. And so as she's taking me through this thing in public, she said, What commitments do you have that we're not talking about? And I said, it's my commitment to creativity. I don't want to have scheduled discipline. I'm a creative. I don't want these freaking scheduled discipline bullshit meetings. And she said, so that's one commitment. What's another commitment that you have? And I said, I don't think I can't think of another one. She

said, well, what about your commitment to answering the 500 slacks, the one offs and direct messages because you don't attend meetings. And I was like, okay, the one-offs and direct messages because you don't attend meetings. And I was like, okay, well, I do have that commitment because I have to be a good leader. And this whole idea of creativity and discipline, when you mark out time, Simon, that's discipline. When I play ping pong and let myself think that's discipline. Someone left in the comment of the podcast on LinkedIn, I do the same thing. I consider myself a creative. You need to listen to Adam Grant interview Lin-Manuel Miranda about free space to do nothing but eat chocolate cake. What did he say to you about his creative time?

Lin basically said he only gets creative ideas when he's daydreaming. And if he hadn't gone on vacation with a daiquiri, he would never have dreamed up Hamilton. Exactly. Okay. That's a case for protecting creative time. But Brene, this is fascinating. I saw that you had posted that you had a hard conversation with Keegan and Leahy, and I hadn't listened to it yet. So now I'm even more curious to hear the full one. But I struggle with the same thing. And for a long time, my solution has been something I never had a term for until I read a Paul Graham essay where he called it

maker days versus manager days. Oh, I love maker. Yes. Yeah, like so good, right? It's so simple. I don't need to explain it. Simon, it passes your test. But my problem is that as more doors have opened for us, I feel like we need more and more maker days to write books, to create good podcast content, even to have something worth saying on social media. And so that time becomes more sacred. And I think my bar has gone up for what's a good idea over time. And that means I need even more of that time. And so I find myself wanting to have fewer and fewer manager days and cutting out meetings. And I know at some level, I can't do that because then I'm going to fail to deliver on my responsibilities to the people who are dependent on me.

But I have not known what to do with that. And I'm wondering if either of you has a possible solution. This is a perfect segue to sort of, I think, the next component to this, which is courage. A friend of mine named Jen Waldman, who's one of the top coaches to some of the most creative people on Broadway. And she literally coaches people how to be creative. And she will talk about that really has nothing to do with creativity, it has to do with courage that sometimes having the courage to express the thing that you want to express but you're afraid to express it going back to that seven-year-old who has no problem saying i this is how i interpret a cow whereas an adult we're like i don't know it doesn't look like a cow i don't think i want

to show it to anybody or i'm afraid to even draw it quote unquote i don't know how to draw a cow and jen talks about the first pancake first pancake, everybody knows that the first pancake sucks, but you go through the motions of using up batter to make the first pancake to get to the third pancake, which is perfect. And that's the one we serve. And people who are trying to be creative are trying to serve up the third pancake first. So good. So good. What creative people learn to do is have the courage for the first pancake, knowing full well that it sucks. And you get comfortable with, this is a bad idea. This is a bad thing. This is a bad performance. It's a bad song. But the point is they did it. They put the pen to paper, they drew the picture, they started somewhere, and then they built upon it and got to Pancake 3. I don't think people realize that it takes a long time to become an overnight success.

One of the definitions of a professional is they make it look like we could all do it. You go look at a baseball player or anybody, a ballerina, and you go, oh my God, that's so easy. And you don't realize how hard. Part of the job is to make it look like we could all do it, even though we know we can't. But the thing that they all have in common is the first pancake. So when I go back to courage, and I've talked about this, and I think we've even talked about this, is where does courage come from? And I believe courage is not some deep internal fortitude, but courage comes from our relationships. That if you have at least one person in your life who says, I got your back, that if everything goes south, I will still be

there with you and for you, or say things like, you got to do this. It's the right thing to do. When you have at least a relationship that that person does that, we seemingly have insurmountable amounts of courage. And so to go to a person and say, can seemingly have insurmountable amounts of courage. And so to go to a person and say, can I bounce an idea off of you? And you give this ridiculously bad idea and they don't shoot you down. They just let you do your thing. They're just basically the frying pan. They have no opinion as to the shape of the pancake. I'm just giving you a place to make the pancake. I love this metaphor. Maybe I'm taking this too literally, but you just reminded me that the last time I made pancakes, I was incredibly excited that the first one came out great. And I'm now regretting that. I need to screw up the first pancake.

It happens occasionally, and that's called luck. That was not talent. That was luck. luck. That was not talent. That was luck. The idea though of celebrating the first pancake going poorly as a step toward making pancakes, I think is a skill. Anne Lamott calls it the shitty first draft. And ever since I got that term, we call it the SFD at work. And now it's an interesting assignment that you talk about this related to courage because we are not interested in seeing the final drafts first. We really celebrate the SFDs because without seeing the SFDs, the shitty first drafts, we don't see where the growth is. We don't see where the thinking is. We don't see where the coaching has been effective. And so we are big celebrators of the

shitty first draft. I'm going to cut off the podcast here now. Hope you'll join us back for part two of a conversation with me and Adam and Brene. Until then, take care of yourself. Take care of each other.