Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan - #121: How to DECODE The Secret Strategy to Achieving Greatness with Ron Friedman

Episode Date: June 15, 2021

Turns out there IS a formula to greatness! And Ron Friedman, accomplished academic with a Ph.D. in social psychology, best selling author, speaker, and coach, has figured it out. And lucky for us, he wrote Decoding Greatness to share that knowledge! Sit down with Ron and I today as we dive into what top performers do differently, the power of reverse engineering, and busted myths about creativity. If you were ever curious what the secret strategy is that launches people into greatness, press play!     About The Guest: Ron Friedman, Ph.D. is an award-winning psychologist and founder of ignite80, a consulting firm that helps smart leaders build extraordinary workplaces.   An expert on human motivation, Friedman has served on the faculty of the University of Rochester, Nazareth College, and Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Popular accounts of his research have appeared on NPR and in major newspapers, including The New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Vancouver Post, the Globe and Mail, The Guardian, as well as magazines such as Men's Health, Shape, and Allure.   Finding Ron Friedman: Website: www.ronfriedmanphd.com Read Decoding Greatness For Courses & Coaching visit: https://www.ignite80.com/  Twitter: @RonFriedman   To inquire about my coaching program opportunity visit https://mentorship.heathermonahan.com/    Review this podcast on Apple Podcast using this LINK and when you DM me the screen shot, I buy you my $299 video course as a thank you!    My book Confidence Creator is available now! get it right HERE   If you are looking for more tips you can download my free E-book at my website and thank you! https://heathermonahan.com    *If you'd like to ask a question and be featured during the wrap up segment of Creating Confidence, contact Heather Monahan directly through her website and don’t forget to subscribe to the mailing list so you don’t skip a beat to all things Confidence Creating!     See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

We're not talking about just copying. We're talking about taking the formula that has worked and then modifying it just a little bit because all of that pressure that you're putting on yourself, as we mentioned earlier, if you're trying to be super original, your work is going to be rejected. So that's not the path to doing things. The path to doing things is to collect the examples that really resonate with you, analyze them to figure out why they're working, and then create templates, templatize those examples that you can then apply to your work and add your unique spin. I'm on this journey with me. Each week when you join me, we are going to chase down our goals. We'll overcome adversity and set you up for a better tomorrow. I'm ready for my close-up.

Hi, and welcome back. I'm so excited for you to meet my new friend, Ron Friedman. He's an award-winning psychologist who served on the faculty of the University of Rochester and has consulted for political leaders, nonprofits, and many of the world's most recognized brands, popular accounts of people. his research have appeared in major papers, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe. I mean, he's been everywhere. Even Harvard Business Review in psychology today. Ron is the founder of Ignite 80, a learning and development company that translates research in neuroscience,

human physiology, and behavioral economics into practical strategies. Don't be intimidated. He breaks it down and makes it understandable for us. His first book, The Best Place to Work, was selected as an Inc. Magazine best business book of the year. And his new book, which is out right now, Decoding Greatness, was just selected by Amazon as the June book featured for all of Amazon. Correct, Ron? That is correct. That is crazy. Congratulations. As soon as your book comes out, it's already being featured as an Amazon bet. So congrats. Well, thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity, and I'm excited to share some of the insights today. Oh, my gosh. So Ron, as you know, we were talking about when we were offline a couple of weeks ago, one of the things that I receive or I have received as

negative feedback from my agents is while I use a lot of real world business examples and lessons, I don't back it up with neuroscience. And unbeknownst to me, that's your expertise. Yeah. So I studied as a social psychologist specializing in human motivation. I studied with the experts that Dan Pink wrote about in his breakthrough book, Drive. And so my research has always been about how do you become healthier, happier, more productive at work. And my first book, The Best Place to Work, came out of my experience working in the real world. So I was an academic for a long time, studying and teaching science and psychology.

And then I went off into the corporate world. And what I realized is that all of the science that researchers know lead to greater creativity and productivity and success, all that's being ignored in the workplace. So I wrote a book translating over a thousand academic studies so that everyone, regardless of whether they're a CEO or just someone starting out, had access to the latest science of top performance. And that was the best place to work. But there was something missing in that book. And what was missing is that even within the best workplaces, there's a range of performance levels. Some people are top performers, others are not.

So for this book, Decoding Greatness, I was curious about what is it that top performers do differently? And what I discovered is not the typical stories we hear about someone being incredibly talented or someone putting in 10,000 hours of practice. It's something called reverse engineering. And so people from a wide range of fields, whether they be artists or inventors or entrepreneurs, are using this process of finding the best in the field and then working backwards to figure out how they did it. And coders who have been doing this for years, but it's not just for a technologist. It's also people like Monet who reversed engineered other artists in order to become a groundbreaking contributor. Malcolm Gladwell, Stephen King, they reversed engineered their idols to become great writers. And even Judd Apatow reversed engineered other comedians to become the comedy legend that he is today.

So reverse engineering turns out to be a lot more common that we've been led to believe. So, Ron, let's get into that a little bit because I know it sounds intimidating to people initially. And the way you open the book is with an amazing story that I, and I read a lot. I've been in business forever. And I had never heard of this story about Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Xerox. And I really appreciated the insights around reverse engineering that you shared with the readers. Yeah. So back in the 1980s, computers looked nothing like the intuitive devices we had today.

So if you wanted a computer to do anything, you had to input a very rigid. text-based language to tell it what to do. Now, of course, we don't have to do any of that. We just point and click. That innovation, that enabled us to just have this much easier way of interacting with computers, that was the innovation that was introduced by Xerox. And Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were both aware of it. And what they knew is that Xerox had no intention of bringing that to a popular audience. They just assumed that computers are going to be for very wealthy organizations. They said... Unfortunately, they assumed wrong.

Correct. They assumed wrong. And it was because Zerox. Alex's executives grew up in the 1950s. They thought typing was something for secretaries. They didn't realize the potential. Gates and Jobs saw it. They reversed engineered. And what that means is they didn't steal the technology. They saw what the thing did. And then they went back and thought, if I wanted to recreate that same thing, how would I do it? That's called reverse engineering. It's just working backwards from the best in the field to figure out how they did it. They didn't just copy. They also added a unique twist. So in the case of Microsoft, they wanted to make computers affordable. In the case of Apple, they wanted to make computers user-friendly. So they took a great

idea that's underutilized, put their own spin on it, and then introduced it into the world, and obviously the rest is history. I also just want to share a little bit more about that story. I liked how Bill Gates was a vendor to Steve Jobs initially, which I did not know that, and then Bill Gates came to market with this reverse engineering of the Xerox technology ahead of Steve Jobs, basically pulling the rug out from underneath them, Steve Jobs lost his mind, was livid called Bill Gates in. And Bill Gates basically said, listen, this was not proprietary technology to you. You basically reverse engineered what Xerox had, as did I.

And I just beat you to market. And then I love that he goes on. And I took all this from your book. I had no idea of the story before, but it resonated with me so much. I remember it specifically that he then goes on to say, oh, basically that's your piece of shit version of, this reverse engineered technology where mine will be beautiful. And it was just, it was so interesting now here we are, you know, so many years later to look back at Apple and their importance on aesthetics

and Apple and how, you know, the way things appear and look at how important that was to Steve Jobs, where Bill Gates, that wasn't important to him. And they did come to market with very different products. And I didn't realize the riff that put between the relationship between those two men. Yeah, it's a great story. And what's really, I think, fascinating is that we, When we look at Steve Jobs, we look at Bill Gates, we just assume, oh, they must be hugely talented. So that's not for me. I can't do that. I don't have that kind of talent.

But that's the message of decoding greatness is that, wait a second, you don't have to be enormously talented. You don't have to be a genius. What you need is a system for figuring out great examples, work backwards to figure out how they were created, and then put your own spin on it so that you can introduce your version out into the world and make a contribution. And it's not by practicing for 10,000 hours. It's not by finding your talent.

it's simply by having this system of working backwards. You just mentioned system. And that was one of the important themes that I took from the book is how can this be repeatable? What is the framework? And one of those examples, and you give many in the book of different ways to reverse engineer, but one example was about taking an idea from one location or geographic region and moving it and bring it to another one. And you gave two examples, extremely successful examples.

One being Chipotle and the other being Starbucks. And I was wondering if you could get in a little bit to breaking those concepts down. Yeah. So one of the things that entrepreneurs do incredibly well is they're not just necessarily more creative or intelligent. You know, that's when we think about entrepreneurs. What's different between them and, let's say, a middle manager, more willing to take risks. Are they smarter? It turns out it's none of those things.

We have research out of the Harvard Business School that shows that what entrepreneurs really differ on is their ability to recognize patterns. And one of those patterns happens to be, what is the underlying structure that makes a business successful? And it turns out there are all of these formulas that you can read into successful businesses like Chipotle and Starbucks, which happened to share the same pattern. And that pattern is find something that's successful in a different location and import it into your hometown. So in the case of Chipotle, that wasn't an innovation, really. what it was Steve Ells, who was the founder of Chipotle, saw that burrito bars were blowing up in San Francisco. So he moved to Denver and started his own burrito bar and the line went out the door.

And that's when he saw the potential for a chain. In the case of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, who was working as a salesperson for time that Starbucks did not have any coffee shop. Starbucks was just selling coffee beans to connoisseurs. He went to Italy and he saw the coffee bars were exploding there. You brought that back into the United States and obviously the rest of its history. So in both of those cases, there is an underlying formula that you can learn from. So if you're listening to this right now, think about what is something that's really popular somewhere else that I can bring into my hometown or the reverse?

What's popular in my hometown that I can bring somewhere else? So the other thing that you mentioned in regards to entrepreneurs, successful entrepreneurs, and is having this framework and system, but also curiosity plays an important role, is a theme that I took from the book as well. Oh, without question. You know, curiosity is one of the underlying traits that will enable you to pick out some of the things that are working in different fields and then to bring them into your own. So when we think about creativity, a lot of people assume that, oh, if I want to be creative,

I better go into a dark room, close my eyes, and dig deep. But that's not how creativity happens. Creativity ultimately is about combining elements from different fields. And so if you look at some of the greatest innovations of our time, they were a combination of pre-existing elements. So we talked about Steve Jobs. Well, Steve Jobs didn't invent the MP3 player. He didn't invent the phone, but he put them together in making the iPhone.

And obviously, it wasn't just Steve Jobs. It was Apple. But the point is that those are pre-existing elements. In the case of Google, Google took the way that academics organized information and citing articles and brought that to the way that we organize information on the web. So, again, two distinct elements that already existed, they just combined them and found a novel use for them. Starting the year with a wardrobe refresh, Quince has you covered with luxe essentials that feel effortless and look polished. They're perfect for layering, mixing, and building a wardrobe that lasts.

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He got bombed. He lost by a margin more than two to one. And the problem, if you can believe it, was that he was a terrible speaker. He was a law school professor. and he was used to lecturing students. And when he went out onto the campaign trail, he was lecturing voters. And voters did not appreciate being lectured to, and they let him know at the ballot box. So for a while, he was left, as I say in the book, he was rudderless.

He had no idea what he was going to do. He was thinking about leaving politics until someone suggested to him that he'd go and observe what pastors were doing in church. And all of a sudden, he took some of those elements, brought them into his political speeches, and his style was transformed. He was telling more stories. He was modulating his tone. He was pausing in certain elements.

And all of that came from elements that he imported from churches into politics. And so he was combining two preexisting elements. And what that illustrates, again, is that he didn't find his talent. He didn't go practice for 10,000 hours. He reversed engineered what was working and combined it in a new way. And we can all do that in whatever our field is to succeed more quickly. It's such a powerful example. Another one I was not aware of.

I knew that Barack Obama. was a law professor because ironically he was my sister's law professor, which is crazy. And she loved him in class. But like you said, in the class setting, you're being lectured to and spoken at as a teacher, right? It's coming from that place of authority and power. As someone running for a seat and wanting your vote, you want people to like you, to connect with you. And it's a very different conversation. So to hear that he was able to combine his success and knowledge as a professor with the understanding of what makes a preacher more relatable, likable, and involve people in the movement to take those things together and to see what an impeccable, amazing speaker he is today. It's really eye-opening

to this idea that you can deconstruct from what success is already showing us out there and combine it with those unique attributes you have to make something unique and different. That's exactly right. And what it also teaches us is that there isn't just one way to succeed. So Barack Obama didn't study Bill Clinton, right? He didn't study Jimmy Carter. He didn't study Ronald Reagan. What he did was he looked at an outside field and tried to find a way of importing them. Now, I don't know that not necessarily was conscious for him where he said, I need to evolve my speaking style. But if it was, then he would have had a pathway to succeeding faster. And that's what decoding greatness gives readers, which is to say, you don't have to rack your brain to figure out a way of

combining new ideas. Here's the roadmap. I'm giving it to you. There's the template for doing this. And all you need to do is figure out what are some ways that I can evolve my style by importing elements from different fields. Another example in the book is the doors, right? So light my fire. When you hear that song, it sounds incredible. It sounds like it's something completely new. You never heard anything like it. But there was a formula behind that song.

And that formula was they took rock and roll. They combined it with Bossa, which is what you hear the Latin beat in the background. And then the opening is a riff on Johann Sebastian Bach. And so they took three preexisting elements. they combined it to create something completely new. And so the question for all of us is, what are the elements that we find really impactful? And how can we challenge ourselves to combine them in a new way? And you know what's so interesting to that point, and thank you for explaining that.

It's interesting to me that you highlight in the book that coming up with the most outrageous, unique, creative idea on your own that's never been tested or never been done is actually more likely to fail versus going out into our existing marketplace and taking from what already exists and has been successful in combining them together. Yeah, this is one of the other myths of creativity, as we think we need to be 100% original for people to view us as creative. But as a species, we are distrustful of the new. And that extends to how we perceive products.

So when something is completely new, has no basis in any sort of, has no track record, we're distrustful of it. Great example of this is the Apple Watch. I have an Apple Watch. I love it. gives me all these metrics, half of which I don't need, but I still like them and I check them all that. But the Apple Watch wasn't actually a complete novelty when Apple introduced it. The smart watch was actually introduced by Saco over 20 years ago, and it was a complete flop. It all had a lot of

the same features where it gave you news, gave you sports scores, gave you the weather, and they couldn't sell them. And it's because the market wasn't ready. And there's also research showing that, you know, the more creative the idea, the less likely we are to accept it. And not only that, but we also punish people who come up with creative ideas by viewing them as weaker leaders. And the reason for that is, especially in the workplace, this is critical for anyone who's a leader in the workplace, is how we want our leaders to behave is we want them to give us predictable behaviors and to demonstrate confidence. And when you introduce a creative idea, it feels risky. And that's the opposite of what you're expecting from a leader.

So if you ask people to rate a creative idea, the more creative they rate it, and then you ask them to rate the leadership ability of the person who suggested it, their leadership ability actually plummet. And so what it tells us is that, unfortunately, in most workplaces, the people who have the best roles end up being the people who are least risky and more conservative. And that actually speaks volumes about why it is that so many organizations feel stagnant. And so having Benning Corporate America for over 20 years, I couldn't agree more because typically you see leaders that are just taking that safe, boring route, not moving fast, breaking things, innovating, and bringing concepts in from different marketplaces. So I couldn't agree

more with that. One of the things that I liked that you did in the book, which was very new to me as well, was this idea of taking existing systems and putting numbers against them so that you could evaluate things. Can you explain how that works? Yes. So this is intimidating for a lot of people. So if you don't like numbers, bear with me for two minutes because I think you're going to find this valuable. So what I talk about is how much you can learn by quantifying features. Now, that sounds scary. So let me just say that a different way. I'll give you a particular example, which is how we can turn websites into numbers. Okay. So here's what I mean. So if you look at Apple's website, it's hard to know what's going on there on the surface by looking at it. But when you start

quantifying how many times certain features appear, all of a sudden you have a completely different understanding. So, for example, I took Apple's website into the coding greatness, and I show you how many of their panels on their website mentioned price. And I think it's something like 18%. Then I do the same thing for their chief competitor, Samsung. And I look at how many of their panels mentioned price. And it's something like 56%. And so that tells you something really interesting, which is that Apple isn't highlighting their price. Samsung is. So I do this for lots of different features. And like, for example, how many of the buttons pop up and how many of the banners are moving. And what you find is that Apple's website is a lot quieter.

And Samsung's is a lot busier. And so all of that reveals a strategy because what it tells you is that Apple is optimizing for simplicity, whereas Samsung is like just trying to get your attention and trying desperately to get you and to interact. And I compare it to going into Apple's website is like going to a museum and going to Samsung is like walking into a busy mall. And you can't get that understanding by just looking at their websites. But once you start quantifying their features, now you see the differences really pop. And that tells you not just what their strategy is, but if you wanted to reverse engineer it and produce something that builds on that model, you have a roadmap for doing that now because

you know what percentage of your banners need to mention price, what percentage of your banners need to move or pop up or buzz, you know, all the kind of features that grab people's attention. And that's the value of doing it. The other thing I would say about this is that a different thing. way of thinking about this is how when you go to the doctor, they get your vitals. And that includes your blood pressure, your heart rate, and your weight. And the reason they do that is because just having those numbers allows them to compare you to the average person in your age group. And right away, they're able to tell you what's different about you. In other words, like, are there numbers that

you should be concerned about? And that's basically what we're doing here for different websites or different books or different speeches. The more numbers you have access to, the more you can compare to see what's really different about this particular example. I love that example because, again, it's not something that I typically my brain just gravitate towards, however, it is something that I can do now that I'm aware of it. And it actually, when you explain the example of Apple versus Samsung and breaking it down into metrics, that reminded me of another key element you taught in the book, Decoding Greatness, which was if you're about to take something on, whether you're launching a new product

or you have a new email campaign you're trying to launch is instead of just looking at it from the vantage point of how did this work last year, how are the past five years? Instead, how would Apple approach this? How would, you know, one of these best of class and another industry approach this? Yeah, you can do this for any website. You can do this for any marketer. And what it does is it gives you direction. Now, we're not talking about just duplicating Apple because if you just wanted to do, you'd have to have the same products for it to be equally successful in the same history. that's not going to work. But what it gives you is an access to a range of tools for both modifying your

website and just giving you direction on how to start it. Whereas if you just start with the blank page, you're going to be there for the while. That's going to be pretty intimidating. But just having that roadmap to understand, okay, here's how Apple's doing it gives you just an approach that you can build on without having that intimidation factor and not having to waste time struggling. I like that idea of stimulating creativity by looking at it through a different lens, which also reminds me something you talk about in the book, which is creativity is stimulated by working with others, not working alone. Actually, working alone is a detriment to creativity you point out. Absolutely. In the book, the way that it is structured is I talk about all the

different ways people reverse engineer to give you ideas of how you can do it yourself. Then I show you how you can go do it for a TED talk, how you can do it for a website. And then I talk about how to evolve the formula so that you're not just reproducing somebody else's work. And One of those formulas for evolving formulas is the Marvel approach. So the Marvel approach is that every one of the Marvel's movies feel a little bit different. I don't know how many movies they're up to right now, but it's a lot. And I've probably seen all of them with my kids. And it still feels interesting to me.

The next one that comes out, I think it's Black Widow, I'm still going to go see that. And so the question is, how are they doing this? How are they getting you to continue to stay interested in a formula that just keeps being repeated? What insight does that teach us about evolving the formulas is that we want to master. And so how Marvel does it is through a process that is called inexperienced experience. And what I mean by that, and this is in my term, this is a term by researchers at Encead. Inexperienced experience means find a team member whose expertise lies outside of your domain

and have them work on your team. And in the case of Marvel, what you'll notice is some of their movies are very serious, some of their movies are very funny. And the reason that range exists is because some of the directors came from the Game of Thrones group of creatives, and the others came from improv comedy. And so they're able to modify their underlying formula by introducing team members whose expertise is just a little bit different. And we can all do that in our projects.

And what that means is if you're working on creative work, even if your team has been successful in the past, don't just rely on the same group of people. You actually want to either bring in a contractor or hire someone new or recruit someone from an outside department because that's going to help you evolve your approach just a little bit so that your work feels fresh. I love that and I can so relate to that. And you also gave the opposing example, which I don't remember what it was. I'm sure you'll tell me, but it was the franchise, vampire franchise that had Twilight, which was this breakout success and so many people tried to replicate and imitate it without the Marvel variation. Yeah. So that's what happened is that

there was this breakthrough opportunity. Everyone saw, oh, Twilight, again, is the story for those who aren't familiar. The story of a young adult book of a girl who falls in love with a vampire. I think I haven't read it, but I think that's it. And as soon as that came out, there were so many copycats.

And we see this all the time with, what is the name of the provocative book that no one wanted to buy, but they all had it on their Kindle because it was... The shades of gray. That's it. That's it. That's right. So when that came out, there was a million copycats as well.

And so the challenge is twofold. One is that if you're trying to reproduce someone else's formula, you're probably not going to be 100% accurate in doing it because that person has particular talents that you don't. And so you're going to fall a little bit flat. But then beyond that is that audience expectations shift. So people who are going to find your Twilight Copycat interesting because they already know how Twilight ended. So it's constantly a moving target.

And so if you're just replicating someone else's formula, you're not going to be as successful as you would be if you figured out why that formula is working. and then modified it just a little bit to make it your own. So this is so interesting, Ron, is that it's eye-opening for me now. When I was writing my second book, which is coming out in November, I worked with a different editor than I did the first time that I wrote my first book. And this editor said to me, Heather, at a halfway point in the book, he said, I want you to put your book down. I want you to go pick up Rachel Hollis,

who had one of the most successful books in 2019, nonfiction. He said, I want you to go pick up her book, and I want you to read a couple chapters. and when you're done, I want you to come back and write again. And I said, why? I'm not in the, I don't want to be Rachel Hollis. I don't want to copy her. All the things that you're, it's so funny that you explain in the book. And he said, I'm not telling you to copy her.

I would like you to just go read and then come back and be you and write, you know, again. And so now that I'm, I've learned what decoding greatness has taught me was he was trying to get me into that cadence of, you know, how is her storytelling evolved, how are the points that she's making? because for whatever reason, I wasn't following the formula for success that he saw me doing in the earlier chapters. I had deviated somehow. And by going back and reading her very successful formula, which is about her stories and very different stories than I or teachings than I share in mind, but I was able to get back into that successful formula or so we hope, such that, you know,

hopefully it'll be a big success. Let me tell you, I think that this is one of the biggest myths about creativity is that we think that if we're looking carefully at someone else's work, then we're going to be reproducing it and therefore become hacks. And the truth is that all the great writers do what you just described, all of them. And anybody who tells you differently is lying to you. So I will look at particular writers whose storytelling, I think, is really strong. Or I have a different writer whose use of words are just a little bit more precise or people whose examples are just more captivating. And I have a collection, right? I have a collection. I have Google docs of different openings that I've considered really powerful or different conclusions that ended sections in a way that

was emotional or transitions between paragraphs. That's my collection. But your collection might be different. If you work in marketing, maybe you should be collecting landing pages or maybe you should be collecting logos or maybe you should be collecting particular emails that made you want to buy a product. We all need a collection because it's by studying those great examples and we can figure out what's working here and also be inspired when it's time for us to start writing. So rather than staring at that blank page like we talked about when you were doing when you were writing your book, it's so helpful to have those great examples, particularly ones that speak to you.

Your collection is probably going to be different than my collection and Rachel Hollis's collection. Right. So we all need to be a little bit more sensitive to the works that we find very impactful and then have an easy way to access them when it's time for us to create our own materials. When you want more, start your business with Northwest Registered Agent and get access to thousands of free guides, tools, and legal forms to help you launch and protect your business. All in one place. Build your complete business identity with Northwest today. Northwest registered agents has been helping small business owners and entrepreneurs launch and grow businesses for nearly. 30 years. They are the largest registered agent and LLC service in the U.S. with over 1,500 corporate guides, real people who know your local laws and can help you in your business every step of the way. Build your business identity fast with Northwest registered agent and get access to thousands of free resources, forms, and step-by-step

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Visit northwest registered agent.com slash confidence free and start building something amazing. Get more with Northwest Registered Agent at www. northwest registered agent.com slash confidence free. So there's another thing that you taught in the book, which I wish I had known. I'm so pissed I didn't have this book a couple years ago, Ron. So you're killing me with coming out with it now. but grateful that it's out now and everyone pick it up because it's going to be super helpful to you no matter what business you're in. I gave my first TEDx talk in Q4 2019. I didn't have a formula, but, and this is so funny, I guess it's not funny to you. It's funny to me now. When I sat down with the head of TEDx Boca Raton to talk about the engagement and what it would look like, he said there is a video I need you to watch before you start working on your talk. Sure. He gets me the video. I watch it. And it, was a breakdown or an analyzation of Martin Luther King's. I have a dream speech. And Ron,

so crazy. It mirrors the grass that you, this up high, high, low. It is the exact mirror of the one that you broke down the funny TED Talk that has so many millions of views. And as I was reading, I never understood it because they didn't explain it to me in detail the way that you did in the book. and it was so helpful to understand. I understood his point when I watched them breaking down this amazing speech. Okay, Heather, make sure you have variation and show what could be or in what was, but I didn't understand the formula that you broke down for us, which was so eye-opening. Yeah, I appreciate you saying that. So what I did for TED Talks in this book is that I show you the emotional trajectory that the audience is on. In other words, what do you feel when you're listening

to the talk? Do you feel positive? Do you feel neutral? Do you feel? do you feel negative? And what you find is that in this particular talk that I analyze, which is Ken Robinson, which is the most popular TED Talk of all time, is that it's like a roller coaster. It's like up and down and up and down. And that's how he keeps you interested. And knowing that is useful when you're creating your own TED talk, because what it tells you is you can't just be all the way positive the entire time. You can't be all the way negative. It's not a funeral. You've got to be up and down to capture people's attention. And the other thing that it reflects is that it is kind of like the hero's journey. So if you think about the hero's journey where the hero goes off to on this very difficult goal,

they're constantly experiencing challenges, things are looking bad, but then they overcome it, right? And so they're doing that over and over and over again. And that's what you see in common in Star Wars and Harry Potter and things like that, movies like that. And I got the idea for doing the emotional trajectory from Kurt Vonnegut, who is the famous writer. And Vonnegut would do this all the time with stories to understand their underlying formulas. And how he did it was he would translate the story. story into a picture, and he did that by graphing the protagonist's fortunes on a graph.

So, in other words, are things going well for the protagonist, are things going poorly? And what he did this, and he would graph this out over time. So at the beginning, are things going well, things going poorly in the middle, at the end? And when he did this, it was kind of like giving a story an x-ray, and you'd be able to just step back and see the overall arc. And what he discovered is that all stories basically come down to six basic variations. and we just keep hearing the same story over and over again. And because we don't understand the formula that's happening,

we keep consuming the same story multiple times. So a great example of this is Annie versus Cinderella, basically with different characters. At the beginning, Annie and Cinderella, things are not looking good. Annie's an orphan. Cinderella is being abused by her stepmother. And then in the middle, things are going great. Cinderella goes to the ball.

Annie gets adopted. Then things go back down to being. terrible because clock strikes midnight. And in the case of Annie, she's kidnapped by people pretending to be her parents. And then at the end, they both live happily ever after. They're both rescued. And those stories great. That's the same structure. It's the same story, just different characters. And we don't realize it step back by reverse engineering what's happening and seeing the big picture. And you also shared the example of Harry Potter versus Star Wars. And it's so, it just kept hitting me with this message that you don't have to recreate.

the world. You don't have to be the most creative person. In fact, you shouldn't be because there are formulas proven to make you more successful that you can model after and then layer on the unique components that only you will bring to the table. And just to reiterate this is that we're not talking about just copying. We're talking about taking the formula that has worked and then modifying it just a little bit because all of that pressure that you're putting on yourself, as we mentioned earlier, If you're trying to be super original, your work is going to be rejected. So that's not the path to doing things. The path to doing the things is to collect the examples that really resonate with you,

analyze them to figure out why they're working, and then create templates, templatize those examples that you can then apply to your work and add your unique spin. That's the formula. It will save you time. It will abolish any kind of frustration you're bound to feel and it will make you more successful. Now, Ron, didn't you actually create some of these templates yourself? for people. I did. Yeah, I've got, I created this course. It's called Blueprints for Greatness. And in it, I actually created templates for TED Talks and for viral articles. I deconstructed HBR articles and fast company

articles to show you what they're doing. And then I also did it for a couple of bestselling books. I took Charles Duhigg's The Power of Habits. And then I compared it to James Clear's atomic habits. And I did that a little x-ray where you could see the emotions. And what's fascinating is that Charles Duhig's all over the place. And he's got so much negative. Like, there's a lot of negative because he's pulling at your heartstring. But clear is all about application. And so there's not much emotional variation at all because it's all about how do you apply this to your life. And so that insight is something that you probably wouldn't get by reading it, but by converting the story into images very clear what's happening. Well, I'm definitely checking those out. Where can everyone find

those templates? That's a great question. It was available only to my audience. But you can find more information on decoding greatness book.com, which is you can actually get the book there and get a free course that comes along with it that shows you how to apply some of these strategies. I think based on that question, I might have to put it on that website too. So decoding greatness book.com. And you can find out more about me at Ron Friedman, Ph.D.com. Well, I'm definitely a supporter and fan of decoding greatness. Ron, really eye-opening. And it's something that this book is not a one-and-done read. This is something where I'm going to have to pick it up again every six.

months to remind myself because these are lessons and teachings that you might be aware of on some level, but to really look at it in black and white, the way that you've mapped it out, the structure that you have it laid out. It's very, very helpful to apply back to my business today and for everybody here. So thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate it. Okay, well, Ron, such a supporter. Thank you for coming on today. I will include all the links in the show notes below. And we'll see everyone next week.