EntreLeadership - #166: Charles Duhigg—New Ways of Thinking About Productivity

Episode Date: September 26, 2016

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Charles Duhigg returns to the podcast for a cutting-edge look at the science of productivity. He explains how we can improve at the things we do how and how to get more done without sacrificing what we care about most. This is a fascinating conversation. Also on tap, Dave discusses one of our core values: crusading. And always, we’re giving away FREE tools, so listen in! entreleadership.com/podcast 3-Part Leadership Video Series E1D LiveStream Infusionsoft's Lifecycle Marketing Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

helping business leaders grow themselves, their team, and their profits. This is the Entree Leadership Podcast. Now, here is your host, Ken Coleman. Broadcasting from the Music City, this is the podcast of leaders, by leaders, for leaders. Thank you so much for the download. Charles Duhigg, a guest previously on this podcast, and this guy is one of the brightest minds, I think, writing anything when it comes to business content, personal growth content, his latest book is smarter, faster, better.

The secrets of being productive in life and business. He will be our future conversation. And then we're going to bring you Dave Ramsey teaching from one of our staff meetings on one of our core values. Crusade. We are crusaders doing work that matters. This will fire your soul. And of course, we have some great free stuff. Additional free stuff this episode.

I'm very excited about this. A Entree Leadership video series that we've never given away. I'll tell you more about that. and the other free resources as we get to them. So again, Charles Duhigg was a guest on episode 79 back in 2014 for The Power of Habit, one of my favorite books. And so when his new book came out and it's been out a while, smarter, fest or better, I said to Eric the producer, we need to get Charles back on.

He really is one of the most fascinating people to talk to. We had an enjoyable conversation and you're going to get to hear it. So let's get right to it. Here is Charles Duhigg. Charles, great to be with you again. and really excited about breaking this book down so much to talk about. I mean, this is probably a three-hour interview. We won't do that, of course.

But it's just the stories that you've put together to teach us in this book are really fantastic. And so I want to dive in to the Teams chapter. And specifically, you know, you've got some great stories here. Saturday Night Live happens to be one of my favorite shows of all time. I feel like I started watching it in the golden era, the 80s and 90s. you talk a lot about the unique environment that Lauren Michaels, the creator of Saturn Night Live, fostered. And specifically, page 56, I want to read a quote and then have you kind of teach us on this because it's really kind of unorthodox when we think of leadership and teams. He's got a quote where he says, there's no eye in team.

He said, you know that saying there's no eye in team? He's asking a question in the quote. And then he says, my goal was the opposite of that. all I wanted were a bunch of eyes. I wanted everyone to hear each other, but no one to disappear into the group. The next line that you write, Charles, is that's how psychological safety emerged. What's this idea behind this, this psychological safety, and why did it work so well? Well, it's a fascinating question and a fascinating idea, right? This question of how you get teams to work together. And take, you know, since you're a Saturday Night Live fan, think for a

at what the first season of Saturday Night Live must have been like, right? Nobody knows what the show is going to be like. You've got all of these young comics and comedy writers in their 20s. They come from all over the country. Most of them, this is the first time that they've ever lived in New York. And, you know, like most comedy writers or comedians, they have some quirks, right? They've got some, they've got some rough edges on their personalities. And what Lord Michael's idea is, let's take all of these people with different sensibilities, let's put them into a room. Let's have them create a show together. And by the way, if your sketch gets chosen to be on air, then it means that other person's

sketch, that one's getting canceled, right? Let's create a competition to try and figure out who gets to actually get airtime. Now, if you were to tell me that that's what you were setting up, I would say that's a recipe for disaster, right? You've got John Belushi who's like stoned out of his mind on one side of the room, Al Franken, who's stoned out of his mind on a totally different drug on the other side of the room. It's like a recipe for disaster. And yet, Lauren Michaels, not only made that.

show come together, it's been one of the most consistently successful shows in television over the last 40 years. And the question is why. And it gets to that quote that you just read, which is when Lord Michaels, and I spent a long time talking to Lauren, he said that when he tries to put a writer's room together, when he tries to put the cast of the show together, he's not trying to find people who will all gel together instantly, because that doesn't make for a good comedy show. Instead, he wants people who have different kinds of sensibilities, people where there's a little bit of tension there and they're going to create something new together. But then the question is, okay, so I've got all these people who are kind of real strong individuals. They all have different

approaches and backgrounds. How do I get them to work together? And interestingly, the answer to that question can be found at Google, the computer company. Because Google had a very similar question, which is what they were trying to figure out is how do you build the perfect team. About five years ago, they started this quest to figure this out. And it took them years and years and millions of dollars. But what they figured out initially was that they thought that building the perfect team had to do with choosing who is on the team, putting the right characters together, right? Like maybe you have friends away from the conference room so everyone gets along really well. Or maybe you look for people who all like the same type of management style. Or maybe you want a combination of introverts and extroverts.

And Google experimented with all of this. And they looked at all their data and they figured out that who was on a team didn't seem to correlate very well whether that team was successful or not. that instead the thing that made a difference in whether a team succeeded was how teammates treated each other. And in particular, if the teammates all did two specific things, then almost no matter who was on that team, it would succeed. The first was that you needed to have what psychologists call equality in conversational turn taking, or put differently, basically everyone on the team has to speak up at some point. Not necessarily everyone speaks the same number of minutes, But during a course of a meeting, everyone has to speak up.

Everyone has to say their peace. And the second thing that you need, because talking up isn't enough, is you have to have what's known as ostentatious listening behaviors, which means that when you speak up, I show you that I'm listening by making eye contact with you, or by asking you questions about what you just said, or repeating what you just said. Or I pick up on nonverbal cues. And if Jim hasn't said anything in a little while, I say, hey, Jim, I notice your arms are crossed. You don't look like you're that happy with what we're talking about.

tell me what's going on inside your head. If you have these two things, this equality in conversational turn-taking, this ostentatious listening, it creates what's known as psychological safety, this feeling like you belong in this meeting, other people at the table, they want to hear what you have to say. And that's why Saturday Night Live works, is because when Lauren Michaels runs a meeting of his writer's room, he forces every single person in that room to speak up. And he makes people show each other that they're listening.

By first of all demonstrating this kind of ostentatious listening, but by teaching everyone else to do the same thing. And that's why you can get all these people who might hate each other normally, people who are kind of misanthropes, who can't get along with other people. And you put them in Saturday Night Live and somehow magically a team comes together. This is fascinating, Charles, because I know a lot of leaders right now are listening to this and they're going, okay, but I don't want to go out and intentionally bring a team together of people that don't like each other. not saying that, but what you are saying is it's really the how, not the who on the team. It's how they function so that you can really laser in on those two key communication points when you are meeting. I mean, is it that simple that you can take that many people that are so widely different and maybe not even get along, but you create this boundary, this safe place where

when we're meeting together, then this is how we're going to do it and we're going to produce. Are there some pitfalls on your research on this? Like, give me the underbelly to this. Well, so you're exactly right that that's exactly what we're saying is that people who don't normally like each other or people who are great friends. They can all work together equally if you have the right culture in place. And we all know this, right? Because we've all been on teams where we just feel like the team is working. Even if everyone else in the team is someone you would never normally want to go have like a beer with or like hang out with.

But it just works when the team comes together because the culture is right. So you asked about the pitfalls. Well, some of the pitfalls are that you can oftentimes, if you don't cultivate people's independence, you can get group think. Right. So one of the real dangers with any team setting is that when people all feel like they ought to get along, they sometimes start self-censoring. And someone brings up a dumb idea and no one wants to say, that's a dumb idea or here's a

better idea. And so that's why one of the things that Lauren Michael says is that all he wants are eyes on teams because he wants people to disagree with each other. Same thing at Google. Google is an engineering company. They believe that unless you have engineers arguing with each other and disputing what the best way to do something is, you're not going to get to the perfect idea, the best incarnation of that idea. And so one of the things you have to do is in addition to teaching people how to speak up

and how to listen to each other is then the leader has taken upon themselves to, to say, look, this is a safe space. So I need you to say things that you wouldn't normally say. That's right. I need you to disagree with each other. I need you to tell Jim or to tell Willie or to tell Susan that you think their idea is terrible. And here's a better one. But here's how we do it.

We do it by letting everyone speak up. And then you show Jim or Susie or whoever it is that you listened to them, that you heard their idea. And this is why you're disagreeing. You disagree. with the idea, not the person. There's a lot of tactics that we can use, but at the core of them is this basic idea that what we always want to do is make people feel like there's no consequences for saying something, even if that's a hard truth. So if it's a type of thing where I'm worried that if I speak up and I disagree with my boss, that my boss is going to hold it against me, then you're

never going to have genuine disagreement. And you're never going to have psychological safety. And so what does your boss need to do? Your boss needs to celebrate when you disagree with them. Right? And it's almost that second tactic. I need to ostentatiously listen. So when you say, hey boss, I think you're a moron, as the boss, I need to say, what I hear you saying is that you think I'm a moron. And I'm so glad you just called me a moron. It is so helpful to hear you say that I'm a moron, right? You, particularly the group leaders have to reinforce the behavior you want to see and to show that you can disagree. And more importantly, you can be wrong without it being held against you. That is so good because at the end of the day, Charles, when people feel safe to share their ideas, to share their disagreements, that's when the best idea wins. And then Saturday Night Live, you're talking about the best sketch. The best ideas become the best sketch. And that's what leads to a long run with the audience. It really is the safety to put some gloves on, some boxing gloves, some head gear, and get in there and spar, knowing that you're trying to get the best outcome.

That really does take a team to the next life. level. You're absolutely right. So good. All right, folks. A quick review here because there's so much richness here. The two big things, everyone's got to have a voice and everyone has got to be listening. And then, as Charles said, it does not mean that everyone has to agree. And we don't all have to hold hands and sing kumbaya at the end of the meeting either. So that's really, really good. I want to jump to the focus chapter. So much stuff here again. It's almost hard for me to pick a jumping off point for you, Charles. I'm going to go to page 88, folks.

Again, this is what I'm learning and trying to give you some nuggets where some things jumped out to me. And this is where you introduce a phrase called Creating Mental Models. And again, I'm going to quote something from the book that you wrote, Charles, and let you take off. You write at the middle of that page, page 88, cognitive tunneling, and you're going to explain both of these phrases, and reactive thinking, occur when our mental spotlights go from dim to bright, a split second. And so cognitive tunneling and reactive thinking, two things that you introduce before we get to this page. But creating mental models is the way to make sure that we manage both of those somewhat strengths, but can be weaknesses as well. So explain all this to us and why mental modeling is so important. So there's this basic question, which is, you know,

smarter, faster, better is looking, the book is looking at why some people and companies are more productive than others. And one of the things that we know from research is that the most productive people tend to be able to focus better than their peers. Their brains tend to be able to, in split seconds, decide what is important and should be focused on and what can be safely ignored, what distractions can be set aside. And in particular in that chapter, we tell the story of Qantas Flight 32, right? This airplane that took off in 2010 from the Singapore airport headed to Sydney, Australia and had the worst mid-air mechanical disaster in modern aviation, and the pilots managed to land the plane safely. And the big question is, when you're sitting in a cockpit and all

these alarms are going off, how do the best pilots decide what to pay attention to and what to ignore? Or, for that matter, when you're an executive walking into your office in the morning and your pockets buzzing with your phone and there's 100 emails competing for your attention and there's all these people coming up and saying, hey, can you come to this emergency meeting? How do the best executives decide, this is how I'm going to spend my time, and these are things that I can set aside for right now. And what we know from studies is that the people who do this best are people who build what you call mental models. Essentially, they tell themselves stories about what they expect to occur, and they tell themselves those stories as things are occurring. And as a result,

that helps their brain automatically decide what to focus on. A lot of this comes from studies of folks like firefighters. The best firefighters, they tend to have this habit that when they walk into a burning building, they immediately start telling themselves a story. They start saying things like in their own head. They start saying, you know, I'm walking into this room and I expect the right-hand corner to be on fire. I expect to see some flames there. In the left-hand corner, there's a staircase. I expect to see even more flames around the staircase because stairs burn faster than everything else. And then when they walk into the room and they're telling themselves that story and they look over at the staircase and they see fewer flames than they expect or more flames than they expect. Or more flames than they

expect on that staircase? Something in their brain goes, pay attention to that staircase. There's something wrong there. Let's figure out what I don't understand yet. The same thing happens when executives walk into their offices. I was talking to one Fortune 500 executive, and he said that every morning on the subway, he would do this thing where he would try and visualize his day with just like half a degree more specificity than anyone else. And this is how he would do it. Most of us would say, you know, I've got a meeting at 10 o'clock. It's going to last to 11. You know, here's is what I hope to accomplish in that meeting. This guy, he would get up the subway and say, okay, I've got a meeting at 10 o'clock. And you know what? I'm just going to tell myself a story

about how that meeting is going to unfold. I bet it's going to start with Jim bringing up that dumb idea that he always brings up. And then Susie, Susie is going to disagree with Jim because Susie always disagrees with Jim. And if I let them fight it out for three or four minutes, then if I jump in with my idea, I'm going to look like the peacemaker and I'm going to kind of look like a genius and everyone's going to listen to me. Now, it only takes about 45 seconds to kind of tell yourself a story about how you want that meeting to unfold. But as a result, because that person has a mental model for what should happen, they're so much better prepared to take advantage to that meeting, and more importantly, they know where to focus. They don't get distracted by Susie and Jim arguing

with each other. They're not caught off guard when their boss asks them some question out of nowhere. Instead, they kind of have a story, a mental model that they can follow to help them succeed. And you had asked about cognitive tunneling. So cognitive tunneling is this kind of automatic instinct that our brain has that is the opposite of mental models. And we've all experienced this. When you're driving down the street and you go in the speed limit and suddenly you see a cop car out of the corner of your eye and you hit on the brake needlessly, that's because you've been caught in a cognitive tunnel. What a cognitive tunnel is is it's when your brain feels overwhelmed by stimuli and it tends to focus inappropriately. on the most obvious thing it can latch onto. So it latches onto the fact that there's a cop car

and you should hit the break. Or in that meeting, I mentioned, if you don't have a mental model and your boss asks you some question that you didn't expect, and suddenly you just blurt out an answer instead of taking a moment and thinking about what you really want to say. Or when you're juggling, you know, you're at home and you're talking to your spouse and you're making dinner for the kids and your phone suddenly buzzes with an email and you sort of hastily hit a type of response and hit send. And then a couple minutes later, you think to yourself, gosh, I really wish I had waited to hit send. I wish, that's because you're caught in a cognitive tunnel, right? Your brain, when it's overwhelmed, it latches on to the most obvious stimuli and it pushes you to respond

right away. In that airplane cockpit that I mentioned in Qantas Flight 32, that's a real risk cognitive tunneling because when you're in the middle of an emergency, there's all these alarms going off all around you. And so the thing is, how do we save our from a cognitive tunnel? How do we make sure that we don't blurt out an answer or send off or an email too quickly? That's why mental models are important. It's because they stop us from doing that. If we have a script in our head and something unexpected happens, our first instinct is to say, look, either put that aside or pay more attention to it before you behave. A mental model, the story we tell ourselves, when we just visualize how we want our day or this meeting to

unfold, it gives our brain the ability to almost automatically decide what we should automatically pay attention to, what we can put aside, and what we can ignore. And that's the key to focus. That's such a good model for us that the idea of an emergency happens, you know, and you're in this cockpit. But I want to ask you a deeper question on that, go a little bit deeper on this. And that is there's the intentional model that you gave us, right? The CEO, the executive, who said, I've got this meeting at 10 o'clock, and I kind of know the players in the room. I know the subject of the meeting, so I'm going to run a mental model there. But then there's the cockpit situation, and I guess a pilot can say, all right, any number of emergencies that could happen,

what am I going to do here? So they may not know the specifics of the emergency, but are they saying ahead of time, all right, when an emergency happens, if it were to happen, I've got to quickly get myself into a fresh mental model. Is that the approach? And what I'm specifically asking is the unknown, where you haven't prepared for it, how do you in the moment stop and pause and make sure that you're running the right mental picture? You know, a huge part of it is just practice. So Qantas Flight 32, that's a great question, because in Qantas Flight 32,

they didn't expect an emergency to occur, but they had done two things that were really important before that emergency broke out. And what happened for folks who aren't familiar with the story is that one of the fan blades on the jet engine detached from the shaft. And it actually broke off into the wing and shot through the wing, creating this huge hole in one of the wings and cutting through electrical lines and hydraulics lines and fuel lines, really damaging the plane. And two things saved that airplane. The first of which is that the captain of that flight, a guy named Richard de Krebny, he was so focused on this idea of mental models. that he made his co-pilots practice what they would do. Tell him a story about what they would do in case of an emergency.

So he actually said it when they were taking the shuttle that morning from the hotel to the tarmac. He actually said to his co-pilots. He said, okay, tell me a story. If engine two goes out, what are the first words going to be out of your mouth? Where are your eyes going to go? What are you going to do with your hands? If engine three has a fuel loss, tell me what you're going to do first. He practiced these stories.

And in the first 30 or 45 seconds after the emergency started, if you listen to the cockpit tapes, you'll actually hear them speaking in these short, clipped sentences. It's almost as if they're reading from scripts because they had to basically practice this, right? They had worked out a story about what they would do in case of an emergency. And in most flights, that would have taken care of all the problems. The thing about Qantas Flight 32 is that the plane was so badly damaged that there literally weren't enough scripts to handle all of the things that were going wrong. As soon as they'd fix one problem, five more would pop up. And then they'd fix three of those and ten more would pop up. There just weren't enough mental models to accommodate what was happening.

And Richard Dekrebony, sitting at those controls, he actually felt himself getting drawn into this cognitive tunnel. He felt himself getting overwhelmed. And so he did this kind of interesting thing. He closes his eyes in the middle of the emergency. He closes his eyes. He takes his hands off of the controls. And he thinks to himself, I need a new mental model. I need a simpler mental model.

Now, he's flying an Airbus A38 at this point. One of the most complicated airplanes on Earth. But what he decides to do is he decides to imagine that plane as a Cessna. Like the plane he had learned to fly on, the simplest plane in existence. And the reason why that made sense to him, that doesn't make any real practical sense. But the reason why that helped him was that a Cessna has basically just the bare minimum that you need to fly. It has a navigation system, the ability to go up and down in the air and landing gear. And he thinks to himself, if I imagine this plane is a Cessna, then it will help me decide what to focus on and what to ignore.

Now, how does that help us, as you mentioned, in one of those situations where we're caught off guard by an emergency, where we're sitting in a meeting and suddenly everything starts falling apart. Nothing lines up with the story we've been telling ourselves in our head. Well, it's at moments like that that being in the habit of being able to change the story in your head, being flexible and nimble, having some stories in your back pocket, that's when it's really helpful. Because we've all had that moment when you're sitting there and nothing goes as planned. And suddenly you think to yourself, oh, you know, I actually daydreamed a situation like this once. Like when I was having trouble falling asleep, I thought about like, what would happen if the meeting completely fell apart? I know what to do. I have a new story that I can tell myself. That's why it's so important to get in this habit of telling yourself stories, of narrating your own life to yourself, of imagining I'm going to have a conversation with my son. How do I expect that to go? I'm going to have a tough conversation with a co-worker. I'm going to have a relaxed conversation with a colleague.

Just kind of playing with those ideas and telling ourselves stories about ourselves. It gets us in that habit of building mental models. And that way, when you're at that moment of panic and crisis, you've got something in your back pocket. You can pull out. And it might not fit perfectly. But it means that instead of simply reacting, instead of stopping making decisions, you at least have something to guide what you ought to do. Yeah, that's good. And it really allows for that true focus, not this hyper intense focus where you make the wrong decision, but you can kind of almost step back for a moment and see where you need to.

to go next. We've been talking about this from an emergency standpoint, if you will, or a avoiding a bad decision or avoiding crisis or avoiding meltdown. I want to flip it for a minute because, you know, the title of the chapter is focus. And one of the things you did so beautifully in your habits book is give us some tools where we can use for progress. So I want to flip this for a moment. These mental stories, you know, these pictures, how can we use them in a positive way? And I think you gave us an example of that CEO who was preparing for the meeting. But on a day-to-day basis, the habit of creating those mental pictures. I'm thinking of athletes, Charles, you know, who do such a good job of envisioning golf comes to mind.

They envision a swing ahead of time. Jason Day right now is the number one golfer in the world. He does this on every swing if you've seen him. He literally closes his eyes as he stands behind the ball on the tee. Give us some things we can use to create positive habits so that's not just about solving the problem in the moment of unexpected, you know, when it hits us. What's the positive side of this? It's a great question. And in many ways, the most important aspect of this, right? So I'm glad you brought up athletes because, you know, Michael Phelps obviously just dominated the Olympics again.

In the power of habit, I tell the story of how Michael Phelps actually has this visualization technique, where every night before he goes to sleep and every morning as soon as he wakes up, he visualizes the perfect race. In his brain, he calls it playing the videotape. He puts the videotape in, and he visualizes the perfect race so much so that he'll visualize what it feels like for his hand to come out of the water. What does it feel like when the drops of water come off his lips? And he's trying to do exactly what you're saying. He's trying to make the perfect race feel so natural, so inevitable, that he'll actually say, and he's been asked, what did it feel like to set a new world record? And he said, it felt just like I expected it to. It felt almost.

most anticlimactic because I have visualized this a thousand times. Now, what does this mean for you and me? Well, think for a second. Do you have kids? Absolutely. Three. And I've got two. How old are your kids? Ten, eight and seven. So I'm busy. Yeah, I've got an eight year old and a five year old. So I'm in the same place. You know, I mean, think for a second about how we have conversations with our kids, right? Usually, it's kind of like pulling teeth. It's like, what did you do today at school? Nothing. How are your friends? They're good. Right. So how do we use this focus and this mental modeling to do positive things in our life? Well, one of the things that I've tried doing is, as I'm coming home before I see my sons in the evening, what I try and do is I try and envision the perfect conversation with my kids. Like, for instance, what question do I ask them that gets them to actually say something in response?

If I was imagining the perfect interaction with my two sons, how would it go? And here's what's kind of magical about it is when I've done that, and again, it takes. two minutes on the subway. When I come through the door and I sit down for dinner with them, it's like all of a sudden I have these new magical questions. Like instead of saying like, what did you do today? How are your friends? Like suddenly I have these questions that are more interesting. Like, you know, you mentioned that you were like Dungeons and Dragons. What do you think about like this one dragon, right? Like I've thought ahead of time a little bit. I've played out the script in my head of how I expect the perfect conversation to go. And we can do that with almost

anything. One of the things that we know from studies that have been done is that, in particular, there's someone named Amy Cuddy, who's a professor at HBS, who's written about this, is that oftentimes people visualize negative scenarios, and the best thing you can do is to visualize the perfect positive scenario. To tell yourself a story about what you're going to do today that's going to be a world-changing success, because once you know what it's like to swim the perfect race, once you've imagined it, it's so much easier to follow that script in real life. So if you're going to a party and you're thinking to yourself, what would be the perfect small talk I could make? And it's low stakes, right?

You're just kind of playing with ideas in your head. If the story in your head doesn't work out, that's okay. Just start another story. But by having that in your back pocket, you're so much better prepared to actually succeed once you get to that party or once you get to that meeting or once you sit down and have dinner with your kids. That's so rich. It's this instant focus thinking through our schedule the night before. and then as we move into it throughout the day. If you've got a four-minute walk, this is a great exercise.

That's what I took away from it. And I think you're absolutely right on the kids thing because I want to know how we as parents can help move this habit into our kids. So let's stay here for a moment. I've got a 10-year-old, and he has a bit more anxiety than the other two around test taking. Now, we know this. So many people, millions of people that have anxiety around taking tests. Some are just great test takers.

I was awful at test taking. taking. As parents for a moment, let's stay here. How can we begin to help our kids think about that test to create their own stories here so they can see, okay, this works for them as well. Well, I think the number one thing is to indulge daydreaming. Really what we're talking about here, right, is we're talking about indulging this instinct to just imagine what might happen. And for kids and something like tests, it's a matter of saying to them, let's work together to just daydream what the perfect test would be like. Now, maybe he's got so much anxiety that starting with the school test is the wrong

place to start. Maybe right now he can't tell himself a story that ends up well about a school test. So let's find something smaller. Let's find something like some internet exam. Like if you were just doing some one of those dumb tests that they have on BuzzFeed, what would be the funest one that you can think about? If you were going to design one of those tests, how would you design it to make it fun? Let's just like daydream and tell each other's stories and make ourselves laugh.

Right. And then from there, okay, so now we've got a little bit of a habit of talking about tests in a positive way. Now, if you were designing a test for school, daydream with me. Like, what test would you love to do at school? Maybe in the middle of it, you have to do some push-ups. Maybe it's like a test to see how many glasses of water you can drink. Like, let's start making it fun and low stakes and comfortable. And let's get in a habit of telling ourselves stories about how that,

test is successful. And I promise you, in a week or two, you're going to be at a stage where you're saying, hey, there's a math test coming up. Tell me a story of how you would just rock that math test. What would that feel like? Like you sit down, do you start with the first question? Do you start by writing your name at the top of the page? What do you do to get yourself centered before you even look at the test? We're playing with ideas about how we can manage ourselves. And we're we're And within psychology, these are known as contemplative routines, the ability to teach ourselves to think a little bit more deeply and a little bit more easily. And what's magical about that is that once you've talked through how to do that math test,

once you have some type of story in his head, when he sits down to take the math test, it feels so much more relaxing because it's unfolding exactly like he expected. This isn't the first time he's taking that math test. This is the 15th time. He's done it 14 times already in his head. it's unfolding exactly like he expects. He's in control. And that makes it much less anxiety producing.

That's it. That's it. Because those mental models allow us to anticipate the feelings we will feel. So when he gets that lump in his throat, he's anticipated that. I see great value there as well. So that it's not just shock to our system. And he has some plan, right? When you feel that lump in your throat, what are you going to do?

Maybe part of it is you just close your eyes and you think of a joke. Maybe you take a glass of water. But the point is that you're in control, not the situation. Yeah, that's so powerful because we know the mind is so powerful. All right, we're going to jump to goal setting, the goal setting chapter. So much great stuff here as well. Page 127, folks, is where I'm going to read from because Charles cites some research from the Academy of Management Review, Business Journal in 2011.

And I want to read this and set you up here, Charles. Stretch goals is what we're talking about. Stretch goals, and this is the direct quote from the review, serve as jolting events that disrupt complacency and promote new ways of thinking. By forcing a substantial elevation in collective aspirations, stretch goals can shift attention to possible new futures and perhaps spark increased energy in the organization. They thus can prompt exploratory learning through experimentation, innovation, broad search, or playfully. And so then you go on to write about the importance and the power of stretch goals. And I want you to, I'm going to set you up and let you talk on this, but I want you to talk about the downside of this as well.

But first talk about why stretch goals are so important. And then I want you to kind of go into, all right, there is this, we're going to be careful not to have too many stretch goals or too big of a stretch goal. So when I was writing smarter, faster, better, one of the big questions that kept on coming up was, what's the right way to write a to do list? because everyone writes to-do lists, right? And as the smallest productivity aid on earth, is there a way, a right way, and a wrong way to write a to-do list? And so I talked to researchers, and they would say, yeah, actually, that when most people write to-do lists, what they do is they use it as an

external memory aid. They write down a list of tasks that they want to get done. And they just put them in kind of haphazard order. Now, the problem with this is that our brain will automatically look for the easiest thing to do and try and do it first. In fact, one of the things that we know is that about 15% of people, when they're writing a to-do list, at the top of that list, they'll write something that they have already gotten done because it feels so good when you sit down at your desk to cross it off right away, right? It feels like you've accomplished something to cross something off your to-do list. The problem is that if you're using a to-do list that way, you're using a to-do list not for productivity. You're instead using it for what's known as a

mood repair. You're basically using a to do list to make yourself feel better. And so when I was talking to researchers, I would say to them, look, what's the right way to write a to do list? How do I choose goals that are going to make me more successful? And what they said is, well, what you need to do is

you need to write at the top of your to do list a stretch goal. You need to write your most important task. Maybe it's your most important task for today, maybe for this week, maybe for this month or this year. But what you want to do is you want to use, you your to-do list, not as a memory aid, but rather as something that prompts you to think about your priorities. Because if you write the most important thing for this month at the top of your to-do list,

and let's say that's write that memo, write that memo I've been putting off for six months, I need to write that memo that's going to get me promoted, that's my stretch goal for this month. If that's at the top of your to-do list, and you just spent the last 45 minutes answering emails, and you look over at your to-do list, and it says, write the memo at the top of your to-do list, and it says, write the memo at the top of the list, then there's something in your brain that's going to say, you know what I should be doing right now? Not replying to emails. I should be working on that memo. And this is what stretch goals do. Stretch goals allow us to, first of all, identify what is actually most important to us. And then they push us to elucidate what that is, to really vocalize

what's the most important thing. If I could only get one thing done, this month or this year, what would it be? Because the truth of the matter is, every single person only has 24 hours in each day. And your ability to be successful is not about getting more hours. It's about using those hours on your most important goal. Now, as you mentioned, though, there can be downsides to stretch goals, right? Because if I write down at the top of my list, get a new job that's going to double my salary, that's going to seem kind of overwhelming, right? The problem is stretch goals, saying my most important goal, the thing that I, my biggest aspiration, putting that at the top of my to-do list, the problem is it can be kind of daunting.

It can be too big. So what do I have to pair stretch goals with in order to make them seem realistic? And that's where this thing called smart goals comes up. Smart goals is just a way of taking a big goal and breaking it into smaller chunks. What it does, it only takes about a minute to do, but it says, okay, if you have a big goal, then tell me for today, specifically, what do you want to get done? That's the S from smart. How are you going to measure success? That's the M, right? Is it just getting the memo written, or is it getting it written and edited? Is it achievable? Have I chosen a goal for today that I can

actually do? That's the A. R is realistic. How do I make it realistic? Do I need to turn off my email for the next three hours so I actually have time to think about this memo? Do I need to close my door so no one bothers me. And then T, what's the timeline? Is this something that's going to just take a morning or a day or a whole week? How much time should I set aside for it? Now, what's interesting about this is that if you have a stretch goal at the top of your to-do list and underneath, you use the smart system to break it into this kind of specifics, then suddenly you have a plan. You know where to start. And this big goal, this thing that could seem overwhelming or daunting, you now have broken it down into a little bit of a bite-sized chunk that you can start with today.

And maybe tomorrow, maybe tomorrow you have a new smart plan. But the point being that you know how to stay focused on what's most important and you know how to figure out a path to start on it. That's the difference between the most productive people and everyone else. The people who aren't as productive, they're still busy. All of us are busy. in contemporary life, you could spend an entire day dealing with emails and responding to other people's meeting requests and doing like dumb little paperwork on your desk. You could spend an entire day being busy the entire time and get nothing important done. So what's different about the most productive people, it's not necessarily that they work harder or that they spend more time at their desk.

And in fact, oftentimes they spend less time at their desk. but it's rather that they focus on what really matters. They've taught themselves to identify what their stretch goal is, what their most important goal is for today and this week and this month and this year. They remind themselves of what that is by writing it at the top of their to-do list. And then they know how to break that into a plan in just a couple of minutes so that when they are ready to start, they know what to do first. That's the difference.

This smart system is really important for leaders, teachers, parents, especially in today's world of progress, when you see the coaches or administrators flame out because they just overwhelmed everybody. They didn't run the process through the smart system. They didn't run that giant goal through it to see, is this even doable? And it's on page 130, folks, if you're taking notes and you need to go get the book, of course, run and go get it. On page 30, that smart flow chart, that goal setting flow chart that Charles just walked us through is there. But Charles, this is important for us as leaders to make sure that we're not setting too big. of a goal that ends up becoming the very thing, this ambitious, beautiful, pure idea was so unrealistic

that it ends up killing the organization. And that's important. That's exactly right. And so you have to also have these honest conversations around that smart goal. Right. And we know this from General Electric. We know this from Google. We know this from other companies. That that's why when we were talking earlier about psychological safety and we were talking about how to build teams that can really communicate with each other. It's essential to have those go hand in hand because one of the things that a big goal does, that a stretch goal does, is it unlocks our ambitions. It unlocks our sense of possibility. It makes the world seem like a bigger, more amazing place. But it also raises anxieties. And unless you have the ability to turn to your colleagues and say, I love this goal,

I want to get this goal done, and I'm scared to death of how we're going to do it, Unless you have that, that yin and that yang, it can become self-defeating. And the truth of the matter is that we know this in lots of different ways, right? You know, in smarter, faster, better, there's a chapter about how to make creativity more productive. And we know that creativity comes from encouraging people to talk about their own experiences to become one are known as innovation brokers. But at the same time, we also know that you can spin off in a thousand different directions

and waste a lot of time if you're just indulging creativity. So that's why you got to have someone there who helps you stay on task. You have to build these mental models to help yourself stay focused. A lot of success is about embracing the fact that there isn't one solution to a problem. Rather, that oftentimes, not just a problem but an opportunity or to life, that oftentimes it's about finding balance between that which is big and ambitious and that which is small and a plan and what tells us what to do first thing when we get to our desk. Yeah, since you mentioned the innovation chapter, I wanted to go there anyway, so let's go there.

It's a beautiful segue by the guest. There, again, so much in all of these chapters, folks, I'm just pulling out certain little things to turn Charles loose. You reference a quote by a researcher named Brian Uzi, if I'm saying that correctly. and he mentions, I'm not going to read it, but the quote mentions that the people that we think of as exceptionally creative, he says, are essentially intellectual middlemen. I thought that was really brilliant. I'm going to let you finish that thought because it's so strong as we think about innovation and creativity. I love this idea. And Brian Uzi is like one of my favorite, when I was writing smarter, faster, better, I probably talked to him half a dozen times. He's just a really smart guy. So there's this basic question, which is, if you want to be creative on demand, what type of person should you find to be your creativity partner? Now, most people would tell you, oh, you should go find some, like, artists, right?

You should find, like, one of those kind of, like, free spirits who wears weird clothes and is really, really creative, right? We all know folks like this, right? The folks that are, yeah. And so Brian looked at this, and he said, okay, so how creative actually are the artists? the types of guys or women who lock themselves in a room and wait for some brainstorm to hit. And what he found is that those people tend to be much less creative when compared to another type of person who's known as an innovation broker. And an innovation broker is the type of person who goes out and they expose themselves to different kinds of ideas. So they might not look like an artist.

They might look like a pretty run-of-the-mill colleague that you work with. But maybe they're in the marketing department and they love to spend time with people in accounting. Or maybe they're in accounting and they love to go over to the shop and see what all the engineers are doing. Or maybe they're the type of people who listen to opera and they read science fiction and they read trade journals and they love to read the Wall Street Journal. They're the type of people who, in other words, are very intellectually curious. That curiosity exposes them to a bunch of different kinds of ideas. And so they get to be able to pick and choose ideas. Now, that's an important prerequisite to becoming an innovation broker, but it's not sufficient on its own.

Because we all know people who are curious about different types of things. The difference between them and the people who are most creative is that innovation brokers, they tend to have, again, habits in their lives that push themselves to think about the ideas that they've been exposed to. So one of my favorite examples comes from the book. It's the story of Frozen. My daughter's favorite movie, by the way. Right. We all know Frozen as this movie that was a huge blockbuster, right? But what most of us don't know is that Frozen was on the brink of catastrophe like two months before it appeared in theaters.

And so one of the things that the producers did is they told everyone, look, we want you to go out and collect ideas. Collect as many potential ideas as you can. Go talk to people in other departments. Go talk to other types of storytellers. We've got to figure how to make this movie work. because for some reason, the script, the story just isn't coming together. But then what we want you to do is instead of just collecting all those ideas, we want you to collect those ideas and then we're going to have a big meeting.

And in this meeting, we want everyone to go around and talk about what matters to you most. Right? We want you to have a structured system not only to be exposed to stories and ideas, but to think about which of those stories and ideas really talk to you. So they had this big meeting. They told everyone, go collect a whole bunch of stories, go tell me what you care about, think about, and then come to this meeting, and we're going to talk about which ones matter. So they start going around the room, and at this point, they don't know what Frozen is about.

They don't know the story yet. There's been all these different attempts, and some of them, the two main characters are these princesses that are fighting each other. In other stories, there's an ice queen, and the ice queen is attacking the town. They've tried all these different things, and none of them have worked. And they're going around the room, and they're asking everyone to think and to talk about what stories matter to them. And the first time around the room, everyone says, well, look, we want to tell a story about princesses. Because one of the things that we've realized in talking to

our colleagues is that Disney knows a lot about princesses. We still have things to say about princesses, right? More than any other company, Disney knows princesses. So then they're going around, they're like, okay, so princesses is one thing we want to talk about. What else do we want to talk about? And they're going around. And one interesting thing about Frozen is that there's an unusually large number of women working on the Frozen project. In fact, the co-director, is the first female director in Disney's history. And as they're going around the room, there's all these women who are saying,

you know, the other thing I keep on thinking about as I've been collecting stories is, well, I keep on thinking about my relationship with my sister. Because the thing about sisters is that sisters are kind of cliched, right? There's lots of stories about sisters. But sisterhood is really complicated. You know, it's usually not that there's a good sister

and an evil sister. It's usually that like sisters grow together and then they have a falling out and then they grow together again. It's complicated. and sophisticated. And as they're going around, these two kind of cliches appear. The first cliche is princesses.

The second cliche is sisters, something that's been written about in fiction for hundreds of years. And because they have a format, because they have a process, where people can talk and think about the ideas they've been exposed to, someone says, look, what if we were to make

both these characters and Frozen? What if we were to make both of them princesses and both sisters? and suddenly it's like someone turned a key in a lock. Because as soon as they did that, it unlocked all these creative possibilities, right? If you have the two main characters be sisters and both princesses, then it means that instead of the prince saving the princess, you can have two princesses save each other.

And once you do that, you can actually make the prince into the bad guy, but you don't have to reveal that he's the bad guy until the end of the movie. The reason why Frozen was so creative was because Disney has a process of asking people to get exposed to a lot of stories and then to develop habits of thinking about those stories, of contemplating on those stories. And we see this happen again and again and again. The way that people, for instance, create inventions is they go out and they expose themselves to a bunch of ideas and then they have habits of thinking about how those ideas interact with each other. Again, these contemplative routines. And that's where

creativity comes from. And anyone can do that. It's so powerful, Charles. I mean, Uzi says you quoted him that these people are attacking the same problems in different settings all the time. And so they have this ability to step back like you said and they just transfer this knowledge. You write on page 214, I think it may be the best phrase in the book. And what you've just described for us is fostering creativity by juxtaposing old ideas. In this particular story, it's old stories, right? They're all thinking about. Disney had them go back and bring stories that were old, if you will, or from the past. And then, as you just beautifully laid out for us, then we get creative when we've got some old ideas that have worked. And that, to me, seems so much

more freeing for folks that don't consider themselves creative. You don't have to be this off-the-wall creative. You just have to go back to what works and then innovate. Is that the takeaway? That's exactly right. Anyone can be creative. Anyone can be a creative genius. You do not have to be some artist sitting in a room. All that you have to do is you have to put yourself in a situation where you get exposed to different kinds of ideas and you have some way of thinking about them. And maybe that means that you talk them through with a friend. Maybe it means that you take a bath every morning and you just let your mind wander and think about all the stuff you saw yesterday. Maybe you're someone like Jerry Robbins, the choreographer for West Side Story, who would write these long letters every single night to his friends, like detailing some new jitterbug contest he had gone to. anyone can be a creative genius if you take old ideas and you think about how to mix them in new ways.

Well, Charles, we just touched on a few chapters. We talked about teams. We talked about focus, goal setting, and we talked about innovation. There's so much more folks, motivation, managing, decision making, absorbing data. So much there. One of the things I love that you did at the very end of the book, page 269, you call it a reader's guide to, using these ideas. And any of our audience that knows you well from your previous book, The Power of Habit, which is an absolute mustery. This is a wonderful follow-up, smarter, faster, better.

But you actually apply lessons and how we can use the stuff that you've given us, the data, the stories. I want you to just wrap up our time together to the listener here and tell them how to use that last section and what you'd love to see as a win for this book when someone gets it. Well, the best way to use that last section is to think about what does productivity mean to you and what tools has this book given you to help you understand how to become more productive, how to become more successful? Because the truth of the matter is that productivity and success, it differs from person to person and it differs from day to day, right? A productive, successful morning for me on a Wednesday morning might be waking up, getting my kids to school as fast as

possible, get into my desk, and start working before 9 o'clock. But a productive and successful Friday morning might be one where I walk my kids to school and we get a chance to talk about what's going on with them. And I don't feel stressed or there's not something in the back of my head about that email I need to return. What really matters is, and we know this, that the most productive and successful people, they're people who tend to think about what productivity and success means. They're people who tend to take time out of their day to ask themselves, do I enjoy what I'm doing? Does it feel like a good use of time? They have conversations with their husbands and wives, where they say, do I feel successful? Is this what I really want to be

doing? They find ways to make time to think about what productivity and success is. And then, then they have tools available to them to get closer to what their real goals are. And that's why I wrote this book. It's eight chapters. It's eight different ways, eight different sets of tools, eight different ways of thinking that allow you to get closer to your goal. And that last part, the appendix, the user's guide to using these ideas, it's hopefully a toolbox for folks that says to them, let me help you think about what's most important

to you, how you define success. And then once you know what that definition is, here's a set of tools that puts you in control of getting as close as possible to that without making your life awful. You know, this is the second time I've had the privilege of interviewing you, and I want to ask one more question before I let you go. You've been very generous with your time, but there's a word that keeps popping up throughout the conversation. I don't know if you folks have picked up on it, but Charles keeps mentioning thinking, thinking, thinking, at the end of the day, when you write the power of habit and then you come back with smarter, faster, better, the secrets of being productive

in life and business, I'm just curious. How in... important is it that we carve time out every day, even if it's five minutes. It just occurs to me that thinking, thinking, thinking is huge. Do you agree with that? Teach us, encourage us on that. Absolutely. I think throughout history, thinking has been the killer app, right? Thinking is the thing that has always made the difference between the most successful people and everyone else. And when you think about the things that are timeless in our society, they tend to be things that encourage thinking. When you think about going to concerts or reading or prayer or meditation or spending time in nature, what are those things really, right? What's happening when I sit down and I go to church on a Sunday morning or I go to a concert on a Friday night and I sit and I listen?

It's a moment for me to contemplate. It's a moment for me to think about my life, to think about what's going on, to think about what my bigger aspirations are. Throughout history, the cultural elements that have remained strong, that have proven themselves to be so important, are the ones that encourage us to think more deeply. And we know that if you, you don't have to think a ton more deeply, right? You just have to think half an inch more deep than you normally do. That's the difference between genuine success and everything else.

So the more you can think, the more you're setting yourself up to succeed. Makes me think all of a sudden of the great wisdom of Dr. Seuss. All the things you can think. It's just, it's written for kids, but it's so brilliant and so transferable for us. We get going so fast sometimes we forget to think. Charles, do you make me think, buddy? I got to tell you, I love tearing your books apart for a conversation. What's hard is to pick what I'm going to ask and what I don't have time to ask.

That's the biggest stressor for me with you, buddy. But it's always a joy to have you with us. I know you're busy. Our audience loves you in your book. And we're really grateful that you spent time with us. Well, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. Now, there was so much to take away from that conversation for me.

I took a lot of notes. But one of the aha moments for me was when we were talking about the idea of these people who take old ideas, ideas that have been around for a very long time and maybe these ideas and these winning strategies have been used in completely different spaces than the one they're in, right? Completely different industries. So maybe something that worked well in the entertainment industry but can be retooled in new context

and win big in a completely different industry or for a completely different organization. The idea of old ideas, think about how to remix them, if you will, in new ways. I think that's a real challenge for those of us who sometimes feel like maybe we're stuck, in some space that we need to be jolted from, whether that be personally or pressually or in an organization, the idea of going, hey, what has worked in the past? And how could it fit here? That is the real creative genius. It doesn't always have to come from somebody who is labeled a

creative. I thought that was wonderful. And I think that's something that for an organization, for leadership specifically, to be thinking about old ideas, old paradigms, and then putting them into our current context. Really, really great stuff. Hey, speaking of great stuff, I told you about this at the start of the podcast. We are going to give away a video series from Dave Ramsey teaching from what we have learned, our tribe, you, the All Access members, our podcast listeners. This is the biggest pain points that you have. Specifically, we want to know how to cast vision. How do you create a mission statement and then develop goals?

How can I be better at time management personally, and then as an organization, maybe our team? and then some great culture stuff. How do you create and sustain unity and loyalty? So I've got a special video series we're giving away to you. This is Dave Ramsey teaching on these felt needs. These are what you've told us you want more information on. So this is super, super, super on target for you. All you got to do is text the word develop to 33444.

Text the word develop to 33444 and you can sign up. Now this video series is going to start on October the 14. It will be emailed to you, so watch for it, and you can watch these videos at your convenience on-demand goodness that is addressing some of the biggest pain points that you have identified for us. Now, this content, if you're wondering, where did this come from? This is Dave teaching from our Entree Leadership Master Series. You hear me talk about that from time for time.

And so this is high-end stuff. Again, text the word, develop to 3-3-44-4. Or you can always go to the show notes from this episode at Entreeleadership.com. slash podcast, entreleadership.com slash podcast. Speaking of Dave teaching, we're going to bring you some content right now where he spoke to our staff meeting recently on one of our core values. And that is crusade. We have a crusader mentality.

We are crusaders because we're doing work that matters. Work that changes people's lives. It's not a motivational slogan. It's a fact. We have the data. Millions and millions of people have been changed because of the content, the story that we're telling and helping them figure out. And so we are crusaders. So this is Dave teaching on one of our core values, Crusade. In 1982, there was a book that came out called In Search

of Excellence by Tom Peters. And Tom, in that book, went through and studied companies that were excellent, much like, and I've told some of you this before, much like Jim Collins was done with the book Good to Great, where he took companies that went from Good, great and he went and found companies that were excellent companies and he used, again, publicly traded companies and he used some financial measures in the stock market and their return on assets and that kind of thing to measure, were they an excellent company or not. And he found all kinds of wonderful stories of things that were happening in these companies culturally and leadership-wise. What were these excellent companies doing? One of the things he found

was that people in the organization realized they were part of something bigger, than themselves. And they plugged into that bigger thing than themselves as a reason to do the things that they did in the organization. In other words, how you do your job, the way you look at your job, the way you look at what we do here, and the way you plug into something like, you know, Denise talking about the Mercy graduate going through Financial Peace University, the way you plug into that or whether you plug into that is an indicator in mass and aggregate as to whether or not we're an excellent

company. The good news is that we have just this incredible crusade that we're on. I mean, the different things that we do here all do point back to one thing, giving people hope, and ultimately leading them to Christ or getting them to know Christ better than they knew him before. And so we've got a pretty stinking high calling. And it's this really big idea. And what it does is if you're smart enough to plug into it, and we're smart enough to together to plug into this higher calling idea, then what it does is it keeps us energized. And it keeps us from getting stuck in the mundane. And it keeps us from just doing the J-O-B.

You know, it's like, oh, God, thank God it's Friday. Oh, God, it's Monday. How quick can I get out of here? I got this place is just killing me. I was with some young people this weekend. And, you know, he said, you know, every time I go to work, this place, the place takes a little part of my soul. And I thought, God, man, what a horrible. horrible thing. And I didn't know the guy well enough to tell him what I thought, but I wanted to tell him, quit Monday morning.

Work at Subway. I don't care what you do. But for God's sakes, don't do that for much longer. You hear what you just said. I mean, the place takes a little bit of your soul. Oh, and by the way, you took a little bit of their money while you think that, which makes you kind of a thief. you know so really you know it's a matter of integrity you ought to leave a place that takes part of your soul you know so the opposite of that is to have a higher calling where you know it refreshes my soul that's what happens in an organization when they have a higher calling and everyone knows what it is and people are plugging into it in aggregate we do that so well that if you work here and you don't do that you stand out as ugly you stick out when you don't you when your spirit leaves this place, people know it here because you're so unusual. It's not the norm here because we just

don't. I mean, and if a leader finds it, we help you find your calling somewhere else because you, it left. And when your spirit leaves, take your body with it because the rest of us are on a crusade. There's what happens when you're on a crusade. You will not be denied. You will not accept defeat. You can go longer and harder and faster than those other people that aren't on a crusade. When you get on a crusade, people that don't do the thing you're wanting them to do, in your mind you can't say this because you have to have a filter, but in your mind you go, you're stupid.

You're stupid. You're not teaching entree leadership and you haven't got your team on all of access. You bought all access and you're a small business owner and you don't go to the stinking site and watch the videos and join the mastermind. What is wrong with you? I mean, who would do that? That has to be what goes through. Your mind. If you don't have that going through your veins, you're not on a crusade. If you're not on a crusade, you're going to slip off into just another day, just another dollar. place takes a little bit of my soul every time I go in there. Go find something that doesn't take your soul.

Because I've been doing this 25, almost 30 years now. And every Monday morning, it doesn't take any of my soul. Sometimes I'm tired. Sometimes I'm really pissed off and frustrated at something that's going on. Sometimes I'm in the middle of a fight. Sometimes I'm in the middle of turning stuff around that I don't want to turn around that should have been working. I'm in the middle of whatever. But you know what? I come in here Monday morning. I'm ready to go. it still refreshes my soul. And if it ever doesn't, y'all are in trouble because I'll leave. Because I'm not going to do it either. You need to do something.

God has a plan for you. It is to give you hope. It is not to bring you harm. Do something where you're plugged into a crusade. This is why this place is where it is. We're not here because we've always been the smartest or we had the best piece of technology or the prettiest office furniture or the best.

or the best location. We're not here because of any of that. We're here because we were a group of people banded together that care and care deeply. Every day. That's the difference maker. That's the difference maker.

And when we quit doing that, we're going to become one of those places that steals your soul instead of refreshes it. And those are decisions that you make, and I make together. So that's why Crusade's on the back wall. This place operates on a crusade.

If you're not on a crusade, you can't run through a brick wall. If you're not on a crusade, you can't chase something down and tackle it. If you're not on a crusade, you don't care enough to win. People don't freaking accidentally win the Super Bowl. They don't win the Super Bowl because of an aggregation of talent. If we could just get the right draft pick, the draft pick is not your problem. Your problem is your people don't freaking care enough to finish the play. Whistle to whistle, wide open, finish the play.

That's when you're on a crusade. Otherwise, what do we call it in sports? They mailed it in. And people spend their whole lives 40 to 60 hours a week, spiritually, intellectually and emotionally mailing it in. and then they wonder why they're miserable. Don't be miserable. Find something where you're not mailing it in.

Bring it, baby. Strap in. Game on. There's stuff to do. There's people on the other side of what you're doing that this matters. Marriages are impacted. People's family trees are changed. And if you think this is sappy and you think this is corny,

you're right. But we're just so weird. around here, we believe it. All the way down to the souls of our feet, don't let someone tell you ever that the stuff we're doing here is not the best in the world. Because it is. And if it isn't, we're probably working on it to get a little

better. Every day. Always polishing, always changing. Why? Because we care. Every one of us. In aggregate. And that is the secret sauce. of this place. Well, that's just a sample of some of the greatness that you're going to get at our Entree Leadership One Day event that we're live streaming. Now, we're going to be live in Kansas City on October the 19th, so we'd love to have you

there. If you're anywhere near us, we'd love to have you there. But we're going to for the first time, and as of right now, the only time, we're going to live stream this event. So you can watch it anywhere with anybody. The event is October the 19th. Live from Kansas City, we have a special podcast rate for you. listeners. It's only $24. You're going to save $5. If you use the code,

EL Podcasts, you can get it for only $24. EL Podcast is one word, and that's the code to use at entreleadership.com slash E1D. The website to sign up, Entreeleadership.com slash E1D. Use the code, EL Podcast, to get $5 off. You're going to get it for only $24. So jump on this because, again, this is a way for you to take what is, an extraordinary one day and share it with your team, share it with friends, however you want to do it in that you can watch it live together. It will not be offered on demand, so you got to jump on this opportunity, October the 19th. Hey, our friends at InfusionSoft have a great September

giveaway. We've been telling you about this. They've entitled it, Life Cycle Marketing Planner. What does that really mean? Here's the reality. You have to have a long-term plan for your customer. If you want to keep, you want to retain customers, you'd be crazy not to have a long-term plan. And so this life cycle marketing planner is essentially a template that InfusionSoft has developed because they know it works. Things like giving you planning advice for every stage of the customer funnel, right? When they enter into your world, you move them up, down sideways, however that funnel looks, they're going to give you a planning advice for this. Interactive tools to help you customize your plan. Instructions to identify

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Well, I enjoyed Charles Duhigg. I hope you did, so we want to thank him for his time and his wisdom. And on behalf of our producer, Eric, the entire Andre leadership team, thank you so much for listening. We'll talk with you again very soon.