Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - What Corporate Cultures Are Getting Wrong (And How to Fix It) | Andrew McAfee

Episode Date: November 29, 2023

What can we learn about success from the phenomenal growth of digital technology and the extraordinary achievements of Silicon Valley teams?And almost more importantly, what can we learn from the shell-shocking failures of some other seemingly great businesses?Today’s guest has been researching the digital transformation of businesses for three decades, and he’s landed on some fascinating— and extremely practical— conclusions.In this episode, I’m thrilled to have Andrew McAfee join us for a deep dive into cultures of innovation— environments where risks are not just taken but embraced, where failures are seen as pivotal learning opportunities, and where the status quo is openly challenged.Andrew is not only a principal research scientist at MIT but also a visionary thinker and a best-selling author. His latest work, 'The Geek Way,' is providing a framework to help teams work well in our rapidly changing business landscape – where success means more than profits and market share.Andrew has identified four pillars of ‘the geek way’: science, speed, ownership, and openness. The beauty of the geek way is it's not confined to the boardroom or the tech lab. This approach can have profound implications for all of us, in every aspect of our lives. Whether you’re in business, sports, arts, or really any field, Andrew has some fascinating insights, frameworks, and tools that I think you’ll find helpful on your personal and professional journeys. I’m excited for what we can learn together as we dive into this week’s conversation with Andrew McAfee._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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stay present and engaged with my thinking and writing. If you wanna slow down, if you wanna work smarter, I highly encourage you to check them out. Visit remarkable.com to learn more and grab your paper pro today. Look, we are the planet's only species that gets together with large numbers of unrelated other individuals and cooperates intensely and learns very quickly. Culture is how you get stuff done. Welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Gervais, by trade and training a high-performance psychologist. Today, I'm thrilled to have Andrew McAfee join us for a deep dive into cultures of innovation. And so what are those?

They're environments where risks are not just taken, but they're embraced, where failures are seen as pivotal to learning, and where the status quo is openly challenged. The combination of those three are radical. And that's where Andrew comes from. That's what I want you to feel in this conversation, what it means to work in that type of culture. Andrew is not only principal research scientist at MIT, but he's also a visionary thinker. And he also a best-selling author. His latest work, The Geekway, is providing a framework to help teams work well in our rapidly changing business landscape where success means more than profits and market share. Andrew has identified four pillars of The Geekway. Science, speed, ownership, and openness. The beauty of The Geekway is it's not confined to the boardroom or

the tech lab. This approach can have profound implications for all of us in any and every aspect of our lives, whether you're in business or sport or arts or really any field. Andrew has some fascinating insights and frameworks and tools that I think you'll find helpful on your personal and professional journey. So with that, let's jump right into this conversation with Andrew McAfee. Andrew, it is awesome to have you on the podcast. It is awesome to be on the podcast. Thank you for having me. We have so much to learn from you. And so I'd love to just roll up our sleeves and get right into it.

Yep. What do you see as the biggest mistakes that companies are making right now in regards to culture? I'm actually going to outsource this question because I had the chance to ask this exact question to Jeff Bezos a few years ago. And via a weird chain of events, I found myself in a small group at a cocktail party standing right next to Bezos. And I thought to myself, I'm a business researcher. This is kind of what I'm supposed to do for a living. I am not going to pass this opportunity up. So just kind of apropos of nothing, I cold called

him and I turned to him and said, Jeff, when you look at other people trying to run large companies, what's the biggest mistake you see them make? And he didn't hesitate. He said, they become too risk averse. They find ways to say no. They find ways to stop being bold. The penalties for getting something wrong become too high. And the whole organization just becomes just more risk averse. Defensive is another good word for it. And he said, we spend a lot of time at Amazon trying not to fall into that trap. And he said, there are a few very, very big decisions that we have to get right. So we spend a lot of time talking about them. What's the backplane architecture for AWS? You kind of can't screw that up and redo it. So you've got to work really hard

on that upfront. He said, aside from that, I want the philosophy, the bias of this company to be the opposite. Don't sit around analyzing, talking, just go try something and see if it works. And if you fail at it, we're going to try to very hard to have that not be a black mark on your career. It sounds simple, but think how few companies actually do that. Yeah. I hear that and I go, oh, I resonate with that in my own life. And meaning as I feel like I took bigger swings, faster swings, a bit more reckless swings when I was younger. And then as I'm older, I'm measuring twice, cutting once, which feels appropriate in a lot of ways.

So I understand there's probably a developmental psychological thing that's happening for both individuals and for companies that are pulling them back from the edge. Okay, so let's push back just for a minute, just for some clarity. What have you been fascinated by in the research and the writing of your new book, The Geek Way? What is the thing that right at the center that has you most interested? I'm going to give you not one, but two things. And the happy circumstances of this book were that the two things got to come together. The first one was I've spent, and I mean, it's coming on 30 years now in business schools, trying to understand, I guess you could call it the digital transformation of the business world. I'm a computer nerd by background. I was one of those guys with the Apple II as a kid.

I've always just been fascinated by computers. And so when I became a business academic, I got very lucky because the web was happening, the worldwide web. I still remember when I saw the first browser and how mind-blowing it was. So for a 30-year career, I've been trying to understand the transformation of the business world by digital technologies. And as part of that, I kind of have spent one foot in each of the two economies. One in the economy that you and I grew up in, the industrial era, the general electric, Coca-Cola, general dynamics kinds of companies.

And I walked around and tried to understand how they were putting technology to use. And then I also spent a lot of time in the technology producing part of the economy. Think Northern California or Silicon Valley, talking to technology makers. And over the years, I kept on having this vague notion that these two kinds of companies were different, just a place. And in particular, if you look at where value has been created in the American economy over the course of the 21st century, if you look at where the stock market gains have come from, it's incredibly disproportionate. The Valley has been responsible for about one third of the total stock market gain in the US over the 21st century. The six of the seven biggest companies by market

cap in the country are from the Valley. The seventh one is Microsoft. There's just this crazy concentration of value. And the rest of the economy looks a little bit lackluster by comparison. And I've been trying to figure out what accounts for this rocket-like success happening in this tiny piece of real estate. The other thing that happened that I got really passionate about was this body of scholarship, of research in a new discipline. It goes by a bunch of names, but I prefer cultural evolution that tries to answer. This is my spin on defining what this discipline is all about. That tries to answer what I think is a fundamentally fascinating question.

Why are we the only species on the planet that launches spaceships? I mean, it's not even close, right, Mike? You and I are not anticipating that the octopuses or the wasps or the chimpanzees are going to launch their Sputnik tomorrow. It's not going to happen. So that's kind of an interesting question. There are a lot of species on the planet. Why are we the only ones? And the first answer is usually our intelligence. And that's actually a lousy answer. That doesn't get you very far. A much better answer, and this is where this field called cultural evolution has really coalesced, is to say, look, we are the planet's only species that gets together with large numbers of unrelated other individuals and cooperates intensely and learns very quickly. There's a great quote from a psychologist who studied the same thing. And he

said, 10,000 years ago, the pinnacle of chimpanzee culture was sticking a twig in a termite mound to get termites out. Now, the pinnacle of chimpanzee culture is sticking a twig in a termite mound to get termites out. Meanwhile, think what we've done over the past 10,000 years. So our cultural evolution, our ability to evolve our cultures is what makes us unique. And we have some idea of the mechanisms of cultural evolution. And my kind of eureka moment was to say, wait a minute, this lens of viewing human cultures as things that evolve helps me anyway, understand what's going on in Silicon Valley. Because what I think the geeks of Silicon Valley have come up with is a company that is able to experience faster cultural

evolution that can just change itself in the ways it wants to quicker than companies in the rest of the economy. That's the phenomenon that I got fascinated in. That's what led to this book, The Geek Way. Okay. Quick pause here to share some of the sponsors of this conversation. Finding Mastery is brought to you by LinkedIn Sales Solutions. In any high-performing environment that I've been part of, from elite teams to executive boardrooms, one thing holds true. Meaningful relationships are at the center of sustained success. And building those relationships, it takes more than effort. It takes a real caring about your people. It takes the right tools, the right information at the right time. And that's where LinkedIn Sales Navigator can come in. It's a tool designed

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slash finding mastery. That's David, D-A-V-I-D, protein, P-R-O-T-E-I-N.com slash finding mastery. And now back to the conversation. Okay. For clarity for our listeners, it's the intersection between a business success and cultural evolution. So let's pull that apart and just land on a definition of how you're thinking about culture. Yeah. And then let's understand what gets in the way of rapid evolution. And then what are the things that support rapid evolution? Mike, you asked this fundamental question. What do I mean by culture? And I never, ever thought I would write a book about culture or corporate cultures because

that is such a, I thought, meaningless buzz phrase to talk about anything that people want to talk about. I just, I thought it was an inherently squishy topic and I didn't want very much to do with it until I came across this discipline of cultural evolution. And as part of that, a definition of culture that I think is absolutely rock solid and gives me something to hang on to. And it comes from Joe Henrich, who's an anthropologist at Harvard. And he says, by culture, I mean the large body of practices, techniques, heuristics, tools, motivations, values, and beliefs that we all acquire mostly by learning from other people.

And two things about that made me kind of go hallelujah. Now I understand. First of all, this is pragmatic as heck. This culture is how you get stuff done. Second of all, culture is transmitted from other people. You get it from learning and from teaching other people. It's this interpersonal phenomenon and that it's, it's not about, you know, your, it is about your values and your rituals and all these things. But for me, fundamentally, it's about how you actually go get stuff done in the world.

That's a definition I can go run with. Okay. So what gets in the way of cultures having rapid evolution, of being flexible and growing, of doing their thing? There are a couple main suspects. One of them is impeding the learning. In other words, if you're doing anything that gets in the way of the rate of learning of your organization, of your culture, you're making a really big mistake. And let me give you a couple of the biggest things that I've come across that I think get in the way of learning. Number one are HIPOs. And Mike, have you heard this business acronym? Yeah, it's good. No, please. This is my favorite business acronym. It stands for highest paid person's opinion. And it's how a lot of companies make their decisions a lot of the time. And in particular,

there's this really interesting trap. Companies say that they're data-driven, they're evidence-driven, they want to follow the data. But what happens is there's some team of analysts who helps crunch the numbers and tee up a decision for a hippo. And then the hippo says, essentially, thanks, analysts. I'm going to go with my gut. I'm going to go wherever, you know, my intuition, my experience, my gut tell me to go on this decision. It's not being data driven. It's kind of data as one input for a hippo. I think that's the opposite of actual science, which is we don't care how big a hippo you are. We don't care what you've done in the past or where you are on the org chart or your

fancy resume or anything. You better bring receipts. You better bring data. And we are going to argue with you. We're going to challenge you about your data. We're going to try to figure out if you believe A and I believe B, what test will tell which of us who's right. And we're going to do this in a very egalitarian fashion.

Science is the fastest way to get more accurate about the world. And hippos get in the way of science. Another thing that you can do that really gets in the way of your organization's ability to learn is to plan instead of iterate. And we humans love to plan. Danny Kahneman, who has studied us more deeply than most people I've ever met, talks about a planning fallacy, that we're just really, really fond of our ability to sit around because we're so smart and we're going to come up with the right answer. We're going to diagram it all out in advance. And when we do that, man, we just find out it doesn't work very well. And we get kneecapped by reality over and over. What the geeks are adamant about is the minimum viable plan. We hear about minimum

viable product. They also love minimum viable plans after which they go iterate and they go try to do something and get feedback from a customer or from reality. And they try to do it in as public a way as possible. And the reason I think that's critical is in that definition of culture that we had earlier. Culture is transmitted from peer to peer via learning and teaching. The more opportunities you have to observe people around you, to learn from them, to teach somebody else, to get involved in that very human cultural transmission process, the faster you're going to learn. So iterating is a beautiful way to do that. Sitting around and planning on a whiteboard ad nauseum, that's a terrible way to

do any kind of learning. So I think hippos and plans are two of the big things that will slow down your rate of learning. Okay. So I love this because you're not saying don't have a plan. I'm not saying don't have a plan. Right. You're saying have a minimal viable plan, which is like have a skeleton, have a straw man, have a basic plan in place and be ready for the trade winds to knock it in some way. And for you to be able to put your foot in the ground or to adjust to those trade winds by tacking, if we the CEO of Planet, this amazing company that puts cheap satellites up and scans the earth every day. And Will said, look, I was trained as a systems engineer at NASA. You can't just wing it if you're putting a communications satellite into space. You have to do a lot of upfront thinking and planning about the components and how they're going to work together. There is a minimum viable plan. And Will said, you know, it's higher than a lot of

software geeks like to admit. But once you've got that, then Will and Planet and the other geeks that I've learned so much from, they just say, how quickly can we increase the pace of iteration? How fast a cadence can we get so that we get feedback from reality instead of just further planning? Okay. So let's pull, before we go to the hippo, I want to, I want to just put a pin in hippo for a moment because in big sport or elite sport, um, historical traditions matter. And there's something that is amazing about what your mentor's mentor mentor has passed on that did not have a traditional scientific method. It did not have the advances of technology, but there's something that's in

there that makes the, and I'll use football for a minute, that makes the resilient and tough competitor true. And if we get really fancy, and I'll give you a small example right now, and I don't want to get too lost in this is that we, there was eight years ago, let's say, I think it's about that time. Maybe it was more like 10 years ago. We had the advent of a sports science approach to strength and conditioning. And the thought was let's not load them as much. Let's create agile athletes. And let's call it 20 years ago, there was a lot of time under tension. There were the big, strong, massive humans that could hard to knock over. And once they got, you know, their explosive was going, they were incredibly powerful. So it was like, just think about it.

Mack truck versus, I don't know, Corvette or something. Right. Yeah. More like Porsche. And so, so, and I'm over-exaggerating. And then what ended up happening is we start to see more injuries, oddly enough. Okay. So you can make a case lots of different ways about this, but there was like the sports science was on it about the cutting edge modern way to grow an athlete. Yeah. Okay. Period. And they also missed some of the ancient traditions that kind of like a tie fighter at a young age, you know, bamboo on the knuckles over time creates this incredible scar tissue and adaptation that makes those knuckles incredibly hard that if you don't bang on knuckles at an early age, you can't kind of catch up and adapt in a fast enough time to have that just raw weight to somebody's hands. So I'm just setting that up for a moment for you. And of course,

maybe you want to jump in now and we can come back to Envy plan in a minute. But where do you want to take it? I categorically agree with you. And you're helping me avoid a mistake, which is to portray science as a kind of a dry process or not a human process. And the way I talk about the great geek norm of science in the book, I try very hard to say this is an inherently human process. We're going to go test claims with data and experimentation and stuff like that. But where do we get the ideas

from? We get them from people. And as you point out, all human groups have prestigious individuals. These are the people who have demonstrated that they're good at the thing. It's a feature of every human group. And as far as I can tell, we are wired by evolution to be able to spot who's prestigious and to consciously and subconsciously learn from those people. And ignoring that is a really bad idea. And part of the reason I think the geeks are obsessed with quick cycles is that you quickly get to see who has the stuff, who's actually delivering, who's actually delivering, who's the prestigious person. You kind of naturally gravitate toward them.

When I rail against hippos, I'm typically railing against people who use their status on the hierarchy to end discussion or say, we're just going to do things my way. That's typically what, as you know, this is called a dominance leader as opposed to a prestige leader. Those are two very different kinds of people. I probably want to see a little bit less dominance behavior in a lot of organizations, but the prestigious people are a deeply important part of the culture and the learning that goes on anywhere. Yeah.

There's also a part here about biases, first impressions and biases that we have that get in the way of getting to the truth, the hardened truth of something or the most efficient, fastest way, as opposed to the charismatic, culturally biased image of a leader. And so I do like this piece of it. And again, it's tricky because we're looking for speed. We're looking for accuracy and having those two have a feeling that has some soul and spirit in it is really important. And, and I, that's, this is where I get a little concerned about the envy plan. You know, the most minimal viable plan is that I don't think I'm going to take some liberties here, right? Not to be

confused that I'm comparing myself to these people or in any way, but I'm not sure Beethoven had a minimal viable plan. As I'm saying it, I don't know, right? I don't know if da Vinci had a minimal viable plan. I think he was wanting to create a masterpiece. And maybe there is a plan. Maybe there's iterations and we could probably split some hairs in there. But there's something that is obtuse about speed, ship that shit, let's get it out. We'll fix it as we go I, I guess it's going to work good enough. And so like, there's something really obtuse about that, that I think the customer, the client, the partner who's spending time and or money deserves better. And so I get confused here and my bias is to slow down and get it right. And to have a spirit and soul in it. And I feel pressure. Andy, I feel real pressure that I'm going to fall behind, that our company

is not going to be able to keep the momentum that we have. I feel like I'm doing seven things pretty good, and I should be doing three in a world-class way. And so I just, I just, I just, I just, you know, like shared a lot with you, but, but we're, but we're a small team of 30 folks that are trying to figure this thing out. We're chipping away. We're helping multinationals do the same. So come on, tell me, I'm going to be really selfish for a minute. Tell me where I'm missing this. And I, answer is I don't know, because I feel a lot of that same tension and turbulence in my life. And as many times as I tell myself that you should be doing, what is it, two, three things

and doing them very well, I find myself doing what, six, eight things. And some of them feel like I'm kind of half-assing it. And as you know, as you just articulated, that's not a great feeling. But you're touching on this really fundamental issue, which is how do you get just stellar results? How do you get world-changing results? And I think you use the phrase, how do you get the good stuff that we deserve? And yeah, we deserve, like, I want Beethoven symphonies.

Absolutely. Here's something else that I deeply want. When Russia invaded Ukraine, there was one organization on the face of the planet, one, that could quickly ship large numbers of rugged, inexpensive, portable, reliable, high-bandwidth internet terminals to that war zone. And this is important for the people on our side, right? And we love to talk about Elon Musk and people demonize him. There's all kinds of things to say about Elon. Here's one really important thing to say about Elon. He founded the only company in the world that could do that and that could deploy

that capability when it was needed. And I find this astonishing because SpaceX is a little bit more than 20 years old. The era of satellite communications is 60 years old. There are plenty of companies out there with much more experience than SpaceX. I think they should collectively be embarrassed by their performance in giving us bandwidth through space. And if you read about Elon, and I haven't read Isaacson's new biography yet, but I'm certainly going to. The main thing you know about the guy, one of the things you learned, he's just obsessed with cadence, with iterating, with planning. There's a quote of his that I put in

the book that said, if a plan is long, it's wrong. If it's tight, it's right. And he believes, and SpaceX and Tesla believe, that the way you go accomplish great big things in the world, are we going to become a Martian species? Who knows? But the way you accomplish this is by trying a bunch of stuff and blowing up a bunch of rockets and figuring out how to get thousands of satellites into space so that you and I have the cheap bandwidth that I think we deserve. I'm going to pause the conversation here for just a few minutes to talk about our sponsors. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentous.

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And because speed and accuracy are kind of the competing interest for most businesses, unless you've got the luxury, like Isaacson, to be able to take like, I don't know, I think he takes years. All the time he wants, right?

It's amazing. Yeah, I mean, he's cracked the model. Okay. So before we take the, you've highlighted two things that get in the way of cultures evolving in a meaningful way. And then you also attribute much to geeks and, you know, the title of your book is The Geek Way. So let's kind of pause and define what a geek is for us.

Yeah. And I'm walking away from the longstanding definition of geek, which is just somebody who's way into computers, although there's a lot of truth to that. For me, I use a two-part definition of geek in the book. Part number one is that it's a person who gets obsessed with a really tough problem, hopefully a big problem, and they can't let it go. They're just very tenacious about it. The second part is that they're willing to embrace unconventional solutions. They're not kind of held by the mainstream or the conventional wisdom. So for me, a synonym for geek is something like an obsessive maverick. And I talk about a bunch of geeks, obviously, in the book. The first one I think I talk about a lot is Maria Montessori, who for me is the patron saint of geeks, obviously, in the book. The first one I think I talk about a lot is Maria Montessori,

who for me is the patron saint of geeks because about 120 years ago, she got obsessed with this question of how do young children learn? What's the right environment to accelerate their learning? And the Montessori method, Montessori schools come from her. It was so far out of left field. Everyone was doing industrial education in the early 20th century. There were kids in rows of desks getting their knuckles whacked and having reading, writing, and arithmetic inflicted on them. And Maria said, no, that's actually not the right way to do it. high tech. A weird number of founders and leaders came out of that kind of schooling system because I think she removed all the pointless hierarchy and overhead to this thing called learning. And she showed that it's an inherently kind of joyful process of discovery about the world. And a lot of the geeks that I respect a lot have taken that forward and are trying to keep that energy alive in their companies, in their organizations. Let's talk about structure, organizational structure. You've got the traditional top-down control and command military type influenced models, which are pretty typical. Then you've got the matrix model, which, you know, it's kind of

complicated in lots of ways because there's cross-pollination of efforts that are required for success. We're trying to do something a little different. We're trying to build something that is more like phosphorus. So it's teams, if you will, like atomic structure, but it's teams that form and are orbiting around the center and the center being our purpose. And so there's these teams that are, and then what ends up happening is that there's sometimes not this rich accountability because the power and control model is you need to have this done by this date. or it's like, listen, when do you think you can have this done by? Great. October 1st. Okay. Got it. Make sure that that's done. And

I'm doing my best kind of jerk voice. And it doesn't mean to be a jerk by any means. Like, I'm just trying to be obnoxious here, but how can you open up when it comes to culture, structure is really important and accountability and autonomy sometimes can compete with each other a bit. So how, what did you come to better understand about structure as it relates to creating the culture that evolves quickly and having great accountability towards the shared vision? Yeah, it's, it's a fundamental question. And one of the things that I learned researching the book was that there's not one dominant org structure among the geek companies that, that I talked to and that, that I learned a lot from, like you probably

know, Apple is this intensely functional organization. Uh, Amazon tries very hard to be decentralized and to have these single-threaded leaders, which took over from the two pizza teams. They don't have the same org structure at all, but I noticed what I think is a pretty deep commonality. They all have some formal hierarchy. That Zappos experiment with holacracy has not gone very much farther because you got to get things done as an organization and waiting for the volunteer

army to form is probably not a great idea. So they all have a structure. But again, I guess I'll use this phrase, the minimum viable structure is what a lot of the geeks are going for. And instead of telling you how you're going to do your job, the structure and the hierarchy exists to make sure that everybody knows what's expected of them, how they're going to be held accountable, what the measurements are, how does your plan for your part of the organization fit into the broader goals of the company. Salesforce pioneered this and they take it very, very seriously. So there's kind of an accountability hierarchy or an accountability bureaucracy that gets formed. You've heard of John Doerr's great OKRs, objective and key results process. That's just the work of making sure that all these kind of decentralized teams that are

swarming around are swarming in a way that's aligned with the overall goals of the company. Then what I really respect is after the geeks go through that alignment process, they then say, great, I'm not here to tell you how do you do your job. Your job is to increase, I don't know, shoe sales in Italy by 20% next year. Good luck to you. We've all got a dashboard so we can see what your sales are trending like over time. Are you on track or not? But my job is not to micromanage you. And if you don't get it done, then we're going to talk about next steps. Yeah. We use OKRs just to be clear. Yeah. I found those to be meaningful. Yeah. Okay. So we've identified two trap doors from a cultural evolution perspective. What are a couple of things that you would say are must-haves

that cultures that evolve with a rapid pace that are doing a great job that they invest in and they do really well? I talk about four great geek norms and I've been racking my brain to think if I could only have three of them, which would they be? In other words, what do you have to have versus what's nice

to have? And I think it's like asking me if I had four children, which one would I give up? Because I think they kind of all go together in one big happy family. So the four things that I talk about in the book as core to the geek way and this very rapid cultural evolution that they've accomplished are science, which we've talked about a bit, ownership, which we just talked about, this strong bias toward pushing the authority and the responsibility down while maintaining alignment. The third one is speed, which we've talked about, iteration, cadence, pace. And the final one is openness, which is the opposite of defensiveness, of being protective, of protecting your turf and the status quo.

I think another big aspect of openness is psychological safety, which my former colleague Amy Edmondson is so articulate about. Her new book is just doubling down on that incredibly important concept. Do you feel comfortable speaking truth to power in your organization? If you only gave me one, oh man, first of all, I would beg for more. If you only gave me one, I might pick openness because it is the guardian of the other ones. In other words, if we're in an organization that actually has a norm of openness and I see a departure from the stated values of the organization, I will feel comfortable bringing it up and saying, Mike, hey, boss,

like you're saying X and we're doing Y here. What gives? There are so few organizations where a junior person would feel anywhere near comfortable saying that and saying, hey, you know, we're not living our values here. What's going on? That if I could pick one, it would probably be openness. If you gave me two, I would probably take speed, this notion of cadence and iteration, simply because I believe that's how you unlock the learning that we human beings are so good at. We're just these kind of mosaic builders and pattern matchers about what we see people around us doing. It's really important to give us a lot of models to draw from. And an open, very iterative style of work is a way to present lots of models to people. So those are the first two I pick, I would think.

But I would beg for all four. Yeah. Well, you know what? I don't know. It is possible, isn't it? It's possible to get all four. To varying degrees. To varying degrees. Yeah.

Let's play it out out let's follow this thinking openness then speed then oh man you're killing me uh i i i think i would say science because if if you decide if you do everything else but you make your decisions based on the horoscope you're going to make your decisions in a very you're going to get a lot of them wrong, right? If you don't have the truth discovery, that's at the heart of science, saying accurate things about the world. If you're going to roll dice to make your big decisions, as opposed to do an AB test, you're figuring something out. And then I think you're in a really bad place. And as much as I love ownership, I guess I've just decided that's the fourth out of my four.

So if I play it back to you and I go, okay, so we're really open. We're not defensive. We're exploratory. We all value working in an iterative way. And we want to make sure that – I'll just say we're measuring twice, cutting once. That's a combination of science and speed in my mind. But we don't feel ownership. Right.

This is why I hate your question because what you just described is we're having a great time and we're not getting anything done. Yeah. So this is where like the, um, let's say the CEO who's responsible to the board who like, you know, they feel that downward pressure from maybe it's wall CEO who's responsible to the board who like, you know, they feel that downward pressure from maybe it's wall street or the board or whatever. And, or maybe they've invested their life savings into the project. And they're like, are you kidding me? Yeah. I'm really glad that we're getting along. We're working fast and we're being smart about our decisions, but Hey, there's this thing called cashflow. Yeah. Right. So like, and we all, we have budgets now and if things don't get done,

we're in trouble. So that accountability ownership piece. I hear you. Yeah. People, when people lead with that, without the other three, it's problematic.

Right. And so that's, I think the toxicity that we've seen over cultures for the last 50 years or something. Then it's just screaming at people for, for not getting their job done for being idiots in this kind of miserable work culture. I talk about Quibi in the book. You remember Quibi? It was this short form video startup launched by Katzenberg. He recruited Meg Whitman to be the CEO. And man, that guy had ownership. That guy wanted it

desperately with every fiber of his being he's this incredibly ambitious competitive person and he had a very strong sense of ownership about quibi and it died an unbelievably uh visible painful death uh and that's like one and a half billion dollars like they returned some of it to their investors but the amount of cash that they burned through compared to what they actually were able to do in the world or the traction they were able to gain in the market, it's astonishing. But I guarantee you that Katzenberg had an extraordinarily strong sense of ownership about that. The problem is that he didn't propagate that sense downward anywhere in the organization. He was a micromanager.

There was all this lore about how he didn't listen to ideas. And I found this amazing quote as I was researching Quibi's story, where an employee there said, look, you know, unless you listen, you have to listen to Katzenberg, you have to listen to Whitman because they're the hippos, they know everything. And you wind up just doing this shitty job because you're just doing things that you don't believe in anymore. The employee was more articulate than that, but it just, it conveyed this kind of, you know, this life of this professional life of quiet desperation that a lot of people lead because they're in a, you know, a low ownership, low openness environment. They can be miserable places to work. No, it's the extraction model. You know, like I'm going to extract the best of you at the cost of your relationship with your family. You know, it's not good.

Yeah. And I'm just going to yell at you to go do my order, to follow my orders and do the things that I tell you to do because I know best and I'm a micromanager. Yuck. I think most people want to work with some speed. It's exciting. Yeah. They're afraid to make the mistakes that, you know, speed would require. So, you know, that's a tension for people. We say fail fast,

fail forward, fail often, but we don't mean it. We do mean it, it's just very hard to do. Well, I say we don't mean it because we don't show our own mistakes. We don't financially reward that behavior. Good point. You know, like we don't behavior. I don't think we really mean it. We say it because we think psychologically it creates space, but we don't back it in the right way. And I've got good examples of that in sport teams and otherwise. But okay, let's just say that people like that speed. There's an energy around it and they want to be thoughtful. They want to use good research and science, But man, that competes. Like, do we really have to run an A-B test?

Can't we just go with the hippo? Can't we just go with what seems intuitive? Okay, so I see some competition there. I think the openness one is the most challenging because it so squares up with psychology. And now, as a psychologist, psychology is invisible. It's hard to see. It's hard to train curiosity over defensiveness. It's a very difficult thing to do. I violently agree with you, unfortunately. Violently agree.

Agree, agree, agree. I categorically agree. It's really hard. Yeah. Okay. These norms are somewhat unnatural for a lot of us. That's why they're hard. That's why every company just can't do them. And that's why when I learned from and when I talked to a lot of the geeks that I feature in the book, they talk about what a slog it was to try to get these norms in place, this kind of culture in place, and how hard they had to work over a long time to have any hope of getting them to stick. This stuff is hard. We don't want to be challenged. So what are some best practices?

Yeah. So let's, what, what are you finding are some best practices to create the psychological skill base and framing from an individual to stay open when it feels to them as though all eyes are on them because they dropped the ball and some sort of thing that they suggested is going sideways. Again, I get to outsource this question because I interviewed Yamini Rangan, who's the CEO of

HubSpot, a marketing automation software company based here in my part of the world in Cambridge, Mass. And she took over a couple of years ago from my friend, Brian Halligan, who was the founder and CEO of HubSpot. And she walked into a very well-performing high culture organization. Halligan and his co-founder, Dharmesh Shah, took culture seriously from the jump. And so they brought in Yamini and she's now running the company. And I said, so like, what do you do to build on an already strong culture? Give me a tip or a trick. And she had a great answer. She said, I had a meeting with my direct reports and I shared with them my performance review from the board. Warts and all, the good stuff and the bad stuff. And you know,

there was some of each. And she said, here's what the board told me. And here are the things that I need to work on. And here's kind of how I'm going to about that. And I thought that was such a brilliant move because it is not just talking about the importance of vulnerability. It is showing vulnerability to a group of pretty high-powered people inside the company. Again, I'll sound like a broken record. We human beings follow consciously and subconsciously the example of prestigious people around us. If we see the boss start to say things like, yeah, the board thinks I screwed this up or I could have done this better.

That's kind of like, well, maybe it's okay for me to acknowledge mistakes in my own place. I heard that that behavior of sharing your, your performance review with your team, but that started to propagate throughout HubSpot. And I don't think it was the result of any official policy. I think it's because people follow prestigious individuals and she, she does things like show and model openness and vulnerability as part of her personality. And because she realizes that's an important thing for a leader to do. I love that example because the research that we just did for the last couple of years is on what we would consider one of the greatest constrictors of human potential, FOPO, fear of people's opinions.

FOPO, yeah. Yep. Yeah. And so what she just did is inoculate FOPO because she's saying, look, yeah, I don't know how you're going to think about this, but I'm going to take a risk. And I'm going to be honest and I'm going to share exactly what's happening. And what that does is it creates air cover for other people to say, yeah, it's not about what we were thinking and the opinions we have. Like it's really about a plan to get better. She's a bit of an emblem for decreasing FOPO across an organization.

Yeah. Can I tell one more HubSpot story? Yeah, please. This gets to the same thing. Early on, Halligan, who was then the CEO, came to me and said, hey, I want to start some executive education for the HubSpotters. And that's a common enough thing. And so we brainstormed a curriculum.

And he said, OK, this is where it got a little bit weird. He said, OK, come into the office. I want to run it by some of the people. And normally, if the exec and the academic agree on the curriculum, that's the end of the story. For Halligan, that was the beginning. He said, let's go bounce it off my people. I'm like, yeah, sounds great. So he walked in. There was a conference room of about 20 people. And I talked about their curriculum. And Halligan talked about what he wanted to

accomplish. And then he said, what do you all think? And he sat down. And the first person to speak, I don't think the kid was shaving yet. This was a brand new hire. This is a very young employee. And the first words out of his mouth were something like, there are a couple of things here I don't like. And he went on from there. And I'm in the room going, oh, wow. I just watched a career limiting moment take place here, right? Flatly contradicting your CEO as a new hire. That becomes company lore in a lot of places, not in a good way. And I looked around the room and I realized I was the only person who found it interesting or surprising at all. You know, you can sense when the temperature in the room goes up, this was not happening at all. And Halligan just sat there and looked at this kid. And at the end he said,

yeah, that's a good point. I hadn't thought of that. And the conversation went on from there. I'm like, oh man, like that is a very powerful behavior too. Just don't do any of the classic things you do when you're being challenged, when you're feeling defensive, just don't do those things. If you ask for feedback and you get an honest report or get an honest attempt at it, say thanks, right? And now one final word from our sponsors. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Cozy Earth. Over the years, I've learned that recovery doesn't just happen when we sleep. It starts with how we transition and wind down. And that's why I've built intentional routines into the way that I close my day. And Cozy Earth has become a new part of that.

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you by Caldera Lab. I believe that the way we do small things in life is how we do all things. And for me, that includes how I take care of my body. I've been using Caldera Lab for years now. And what keeps me coming back, it's really simple. Their products are simple and they reflect the kind of intentional living that I want to build into every part of my day. And they make my morning routine really easy. They've got some great new products I think you'll be interested in. A shampoo, conditioner, and a hair serum. With Caldera Lab, it's not about adding more. It's about choosing better. And when your day demands clarity and energy and presence, the way you prepare for it matters. If you're looking for high quality

personal care products that elevate your routine without complicating it, I'd love for you to check them out. Head to calderalab.com slash finding mastery and use the code finding mastery at checkout for 20% off your first order. That's calderalab, C-A-L-D-E-R-L-A-B.com slash finding mastery. And with that, let's jump right back into this conversation. So let's play with this because that's a great model, you know, which is like, cool. Thank you. And that is so high performance feedback requires two people.

Yeah. And so we can go at building the capability or capacity for both. Like, what are the skills to give feedback well and to receive feedback well? And when you get those two synced, it's like, great. And instead of like, yeah, but you missed this piece or yeah, but I don't think you really understand. Let me give you an example is that a supervisor says to a direct report, hey, what happened? And then the direct report is, what do you mean?

It says like, you know, there was a bunch of mistakes in this thing and it's not like you, but like this, this, this can't keep happening now. Like what's happening. And the direct report says something like, well, yeah, it was actually Susie or Johnny, you know? And like, I didn't, I didn't get it late. And look, I just, I don't know if you really understand how stressful it is down here. I'm barely sleeping. I'm barely getting this stuff done. Like, look, I just need a little grace here and I'm exhausted. And I'm not sure, you know, how much, you know, how hard it is to get these things done. So, okay. Pause. How would you fly into that conversation? I'm going to go on a podcast where I get asked easier questions than this.

Hey, come on now. We can both be geeks, right? Yeah, no, no. I find this really tough because I would, I hope I would give that person the grace, but then I would try to understand, you know, do you always feel like you're stressed out? Are we always, are we, are you always feeling like you're behind? Yes. Yes. I've been saying this for, I've been saying this for way too long. Like, Oh, I'm not alone in it. We all feel this way. Okay. Uh, you know, are, are Susie and Johnny constantly letting you down? Is this, is this a fit? Is this a feature here too? You know, I don't want to talk about that.

Maybe I threw him under the bus a little bit, but I just need you to understand that I'm stressed out. I'm not getting this thing done. And I am sorry for a couple of mistakes. I appreciate the apology. Are there things that I can do to help change the environment here? We have to get the work done. We've all signed up for this, but are there,

are there ways that are there things where I can remove roadblocks or make stuff easier? So you don't feel so behind or so stressed all the time. I need an assistant. See, this is why I write books instead of actually trying to run an organization. I need you to spend more money. run an organization i need to spend more money you know right i need to spend more money yeah yeah which you know like this is where

and anyways we can definitely let's pop out of this but the idea is is that what you just did is i got defensive i got a little explosive and you didn't react to that and come over top what you did is you asked questions and then you stayed curious did i pass did not make it oh you yeah flying colors flying colors amazing yeah let's go and then according to me like you know hey that's all that's all i need that's great yeah we should have our audience like uh our community have you noticed that that that really good leaders people i respect a lot they tend to be question askers a couple of the alpha percent that i've hung out with like um eric schmidt who i know a little bit former ceo of google that guy

is a master question asker man that that guy he will dissect your argument without being a jerk about it but he will get to the heart of the matter by asking a couple just absolutely precise questions. And it's a very powerful skill. The quality of your life is directly correlated to the questions you ask yourself. And that was an insight from Rich Devaney on this podcast that he and I were going back and forth. He was an sales operator. The quality of your life is directly correlated to the questions you ask yourself and others. Now, I say that and I've been fortunate to work around some amateur coaches, even though they're on the world stage, and masterful coaches.

Yep. The best of the best of the best, they ask way more questions. They ask, is that a striking pattern? I believe that. Yeah. Striking is a good word. Yeah. Okay. So this is awesome. This is really fun. I'll finish my observation is that you did not get defensive yourself. You didn't get sucked in. You didn't over-personalize it or even personalize it at all. You stayed in a curious framework. You tried to open up roadblocks. And those all ladder back up to modeling openness, working for speed. I imagine that you would kind of de-escalate ownership in this moment, but you might need to come around and say,

I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. This is the fifth time we've had this conversation now. Got it. Right. You know what I mean? Like, and just that it's like, I don't, we have to, we have to solve this and I can't solve this completely for you. We don't have a budget for headcount. You got to solve this thing. You know, so hard conversations are, I think, what make and break cultures. The way I think about culture is that it's the artifact of relationship. And it starts with the relationship you have with yourself. And then it begets the relationships we have with each other.

And they happen in hallways and they're made and broken on how we confront or have difficult conversations. Some cultures don't confront. They don't really get better. And they have a culture of not valuing the tension required to advance, to evolve. Exactly. And some cultures just scream. And that's not a productive thing to do either. I quote both Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen in the book, who are famous arguers. I think these guys have been locked into a 20-year argument that's at the base of their friendship and their work together. And Andreessen said, look, you really want to find a company

where you can speak truth to power, where you can have these difficult conversations. And he said, if you find a company where that's not the case, he said, I suggest you get your resume together and go look for something else. That's going to be a miserable place to work. But you bring up that these are not always easy questions. I've been in plenty of seminars as an academic where I was the person in front of the room. And if someone had offered me a root canal to get me out of that room, I would happily have taken it. This stuff can be, it can be hard. It can be hard on your ego. We shouldn't pretend otherwise. And I'll add one more thing is we'll stay on this relationship bit is that sometimes when we have

hard conversations, um, they're triggering triggering for us but if we're doing it in a semi-public place which can happen from time it can happen at a board meeting it can happen at a at a meeting where there's eight other people in the room is that we have to also take care of the people that are watching the heart conversation and almost explain it to them and so it and so sometimes just like you know it's a photographer taking a picture of a photographer and so when you just explain hey everyone you know what's happening here this is a hard conversation yeah and uh jane and i you know um we're in it right now and thank you guys for holding the space and um thank you for allowing us to go through this we're not going to be much

longer. Jane, maybe we'll take some of this offline, but is there somewhere we can get to a resolution on da, da, da, da, da? What can I do for you? And I'm going to ask the same for you now. And so being masterful at relationships feels like what is required for the next generation or the now generation of leaders to be great in organizations. I'd love to hear your thought about that. I think that's exactly right. And one thing that I might add to that scenario that you just outlined is to say to the other people in the room, everybody, this is a really important issue. And even though Jane and I are disagreeing about it right now, we've got to, we as a group have to come to some kind of resolution here.

So we're not just arguing to prove that we're right or because I love to yell at Jane, but this is, this company has to make a decision on this issue. Jane and I are on opposite sides of it. You know, we got to get through this and then we can, then we segue into the stuff that you talked about. But this idea of narrating the conflict is a thing that needs to happen fairly often and it's a signal i think to everybody else in the room conflict is okay disagreement is okay if you're not doing any of it man you you're sailing into disaster that's right and i'll double click on one more thing

this is just for fun is if you embarrass somebody publicly yelling will embarrass people often yeah um doesn't have to it's the content as much it is the volume i'm not a yeller and i like but the point is that um if you embarrass somebody publicly that takes a long time to heal because right at the center of our primal instincts is to belong and to have a sense of belonging and to be okay. And like, if you do that to somebody publicly, you have to, you have to, you have to publicly recover or not recover, but repair it. And I'm not so willing if you, if you embarrass me, you know, Andy, I'm not so willing to say, okay, it's okay. He feels bad. I think lots of human groups have deep experience with arguing and debate. It's how they get smart about things, but this belittling or yelling or making someone feel like they've, they've lost face, they've lost status. They're now marginal to the group, man, that you should only do that if it's a very, very, very deliberate strategy.

And then you don't want that person around anymore. How about that? Yeah. And that is, that is really aggressive. Like it's really mean. It's super aggressive i spent some i spent time with the as you know the leadership team at microsoft yeah and um we got to the point of some of our our work where satya nadela stops the room

and he says he looks around and he's got his team at direct reports now this is an employee base of about 200 000 people one of the most significant tech companies on the planet. And he looks around. This is like early in his tenure. And he says, we have a bold ambition. We need to know each other. And so that's where I've seen the air cover from one of the most significant CEOs, I think, of our time to be able to create the air cover for relationships. We still don't appreciate how great a leader Nadella has been at Microsoft. When you look at the value creation, when you think about how dead in the water Microsoft was for like a decade plus before then, the more I hear stories about his style and how he approaches his job. I interviewed him for the book. You've talked with him a bunch. This is, this is a very, very impressive leader of a big organization.

I totally agree with you. And it's, it's been a thrill spending the last decade, you know, working alongside him and his team and the org, like it's been what an upfront view into a radical transformation. And so, yeah, it's been really fun. So, okay. Could we double click on risk-taking, go back to the top where right where we started and, and can we open up risk-taking one more time? Because, you know, we talked about Quibi and they took a big risk now. And we've talked about companies that don't take enough risk and the tension to take risk. So I'm not sure where you would land on advising companies on risk-taking. And so is it calculated risk? Is it data-driven risk? Is it risk just a little, but make sure you've got something in the war chest? Maybe that's not the right way to say it. Is it to risk just a little bit and make sure that you've worked with that literally are the best in the world. They put their lives on the line. So I'd love to get your take on how

you're thinking about risk. And the stakes aren't that high for business success or failure, right? They're just not. Most people, very rarely does somebody die. That's a very, very rare occurrence, but it still feels like an existential threat, right? I don't think our brains are really calibrated to understand if this project fails, I'm going to be just fine, right? We don't have that little track in the brain that says, this is business risk. Yeah. Things are largely going to be okay. It's not like the parachute didn't open or anything. So we are wired to preserve the status quo. And in particular, the status that we've painstakingly built up, the prestige that we have in the organization, these things, statuses is real to us as oxygen, man. And the thought that we might have less of it tomorrow because we took

a risk and that didn't work out, man, most people will not take that deal at all. It's just very, very unnatural. And I think what the geeks have worked really hard at, the successful ones, is not just saying, but also putting in place measures where the career risk gets divorced from the project risk or the effort risk. And again, I'll concentrate on Bezos and Amazon because I think he's been so smart about so many things. They started handing out just do it awards. They were old smelly sneakers really early in that company's history. And the thing didn't have to work. This thing that you were suggesting didn't have to work. It didn't even have to be implemented. It just had to be kind of bold and outside your job description. And I think if you do enough of those kinds of things,

and if you do not fire the people who tried something bold and the project failed, I talked to an executive at Amazon who was responsible for the Amazon point of sale system at a retailer. That did not succeed, right? The last thing most retailers want is more Amazon in their lives. It was just not, it was like a really, you know, kind of bad project idea. But this person said to me, we learned a ton. And at Amazon, where I was at that time with the people around me, it was not any black mark on my career. We kind of went on and I took other projects and some of them were successful. That's the kind of signal you want to put out there in the world. Bezos said not too many years back publicly, I think in the shareholder letter, I guarantee we're incubating multi-billion dollar

fails inside Amazon right now. And he said, for a company of our size, that's the scale of risk that we need to be taking. If we're not making billion dollar mistakes, if some of them don't work out, we are being too conservative. And I think if you say that and you don't fire the people who actually take risks and don't succeed, if your actions lined up with your words, you can encourage more of a risk centric or risk tolerant culture out there. But again, you're swimming upstream.

We humans do not like to take risks with our status at all. As a bit of a futurist, you have a way of seeing around corners. When you think about the next three years out, and this is not a big leap, but when you think about the next three to maybe 10 years, how are you imagining the future of work, the future of technology, AI? How are you thinking about those three legs to the stool? I'm more optimistic than a lot of my colleagues, and especially a lot of my colleagues who study AI and they look at this new wave of generative AI that we have, and it's so powerful. It's so powerful and it's so flexible. A lot of my

colleagues, including people I respect a great deal, are emphasizing the negative or emphasizing the bad things that can happen. And we should, right? We need a list of the bad things that can happen. We need to be mindful about them. We need to head the ones we can off at the past and be able to react very quickly to the other harms that come up. That's different from being negative about the technology as a whole. And that's different from kind of wishing that it weren't there at all. I think that we humans have a pretty good history, a pretty enviable track record of, you know, muddling our way through with very, very powerful technologies. Great. Here comes another very powerful technology.

I have some faith that we're kind of going to get it right. Now, the bad actors will use it, and they'll create deepfakes and misinformation and flood zone with all kinds of AI-generated crap. Yes, those things will happen. That's not the end of the story, because the white hat people will also come up with safe havens. They'll find ways to combat this kind of stuff. And I have faith that there are more of the white hats than the black hats. And I think that we're going to be okay. And when I think about putting these powerful tools in the hands of creators, in the hands of people responsible for our health, in the hands of the innovators out there, man, I can't wait to see what they come

up with. We're going to extend these tools to the people lower down on the income ladder all around the world. How much creativity are we going to unlock? In the next, you give me three to 10 years, how many new Beyonce's and Jimi Hendrix's and Joni Mitchell's are we going to find out there who are taking this toolkit and doing crazy things that I can't even imagine right now? Man, I want to see that. I'm excited for how you've drilled down your insights, how articulate you are about the applied nature of the concepts. And I love to hear. I'm an optimist as well. I think that technology is going to help us solve some of the most difficult things that we're facing in the future. So I'm bullish on it.

Do you think we're going to get through the energy transition without a whole lot more technology and innovation? Do you think we're going to stop cooking our planet without a whole lot more technology and innovation? No chance. Yeah, I know. Yeah, we're kind of digging our own hole as opposed to finding the solution. So I'm with you on it. And I want to say thank you for your time, sharing, you know, your intelligence in this passionate way and just having a little fun, you know, around how to make work better.

This has been an absolute blast. Thank you for wrong-footing me a few times. It's great fun. No, geez. I did not feel that at all. No, you didn't do it deliberately, but you asked tough questions that I hadn't thought of before. And I'm super grateful. Yeah, that's fun. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much.

And I want to make sure that everyone goes to the right places to follow your work. Yep. We've mentioned the book a few times. Where can people find it? The book is available wherever good books are sold. It is called The Geek Way. Pretty direct title. And I'm amacafy on Twitter. Please follow

along. Yeah, very cool. And then before we go, what do you name your keynotes? When you go out and do a keynote, what do you name those? Now, I name a lot of them The Geek Way just because I've got books to sell and because I think it does capture something that I'm interested in. I typically name them after the title of my most recent book, but there are also titles, you know, competing in the age of AI is a pretty popular keynote talk these days. Yeah. Yeah. I hear you. Okay. Do you have a go-to title? No, no, no. I just like, yes, I do. Like it's like, you know, at the frontier, you know, the intersection of psychology and high performance, but right on. Yeah. But I, I love the idea that like, how do you condense this wealth of knowledge that you have into seven words, you know, and you've got it down to three,

the geek way. Yeah. Very cool. Okay. All the best to you, Andy. I appreciate you and can't wait to activate your book and your insights across our community. It's been an absolute blast. Thank you for having me on. The easiest no-cost way to support is to hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you're listening. Also, if you haven't already, please consider dropping us a review on Apple or Spotify. We are incredibly grateful for the support and feedback. If you're looking for even more insights, we have a newsletter we send out every Wednesday. Punch over to findingmastery.com slash newsletter to sign up. The show wouldn't be possible without our sponsors and we take our recommendations seriously. And the team is very thoughtful about making sure we love and endorse every product you hear on the show. If you want to check out any of our sponsor offers

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