Good Life Project - Nilofer Merchant: How to Turn Ideas Into Impact with Onlyness

Episode Date: July 31, 2017

Nilofer Merchant is a master at turning seemingly “wild” ideas into powerful new realities and showing the rest of us how we can do the same.Over the years, this has taken the form of books, her top-ranked TED talk, strategic advising for some of the largest, most-innovative companies in the world and game-changing startups, as well as being a member of organizational teams responsible for global impact and billions in product revenue.More recently, though, she's focused her fierce ideation and research lens on a bigger question. Nilofer asks, "do we really each have within us the unique capacity to make a substantial impact?"Her conclusion, indeed we do. And, we're living in times that, maybe for the first time ever, have made it possible for people who've been marginalized, disenfranchised and stripped of power to bring forth and build momentum around ideas that, in her words, are mighty enough to "dent the world." Merchant explores these ideas in her intriguing new book, The Power of Onlyness: Make Your Wild Ideas Mighty Enough to Dent the World.Big idea: Every single one of us has the ability to contribute. The fact that we don’t is the society’s greatest problem and the greatest opportunity.You’d never guess: How one woman was able to sway the decision of a group of Pakistani tribal leaders to change the way they create justice.Current passion project: Educating people about the power of ideas and the power of all people to move ideas to create impact in the world.Rockstar sponsors:Get paid online, on-time with Freshbooks! Today's show is supported by FreshBooks, cloud accounting software that makes it insanely easy for freelancers and professionals to get paid online, track expenses and do more of what you love. Get your 1-month free trial, no credit card required, at FreshBooks.com/goodlife (enter The Good Life Project in the “How Did You Hear About Us?” section).Are you hiring? Do you know where to post your job to find the best candidates? Unlike other job sites, ZipRecruiter doesn’t depend on candidates finding you; it finds them. And right now, my listeners can post jobs on ZipRecruiter for FREE, That’s right. FREE! Just go to ZipRecruiter.com/good. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The reason that we don't all bring our best ideas to bear is because we haven't found a safe enough place to take that risk. So it's not the fact that we're not bold enough. It's the fact that our group, the context in which we're in, does not make it safe enough to bring our best ideas. So it's not boldness, it's belonging that limits how much we can actually bring our best idea to bear. If you look at the about part of the website for today's guest, Nila from Merchant, you'll find that she has been responsible

for launching over 100 products, netting more than $18 billion in sales. She's become a mover, a shaker, a force of nature in Silicon Valley, in the world of innovation, working with companies from Apple to Autodesk and advising many others. She has a huge TED Talk. But here's the thing. The Niloufer that I know, the Niloufer who has become a friend of mine over the years, is a woman who is stunningly bright and deeply curious about the power of ideas, the power of people to move ideas, to create impact, and more recently, how seemingly disempowered people, seemingly powerless people, people

who you would assume would not have the power status to take an idea and bring it to the world in a way that would allow it to expand out and make a huge dent in the universe. She's curious, fascinated, and deeply committed to understanding and helping that process. She's the author of a new book, The Power of Onlyness, Make Your Wild Ideas Mighty Enough to Dent the World. So we get into what this thing of onlyness is that she's talking about and how we can use that thing that's super special about us to make that dent in the universe, to use her language, to make that dent in the world. Really excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields. This is Good Life Project.

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You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk. Good to be hanging out. I was thinking that you're somebody who spent so much of your adult life and maybe your younger life too in the world of ideas, championing ideas in one way, shape, or form. And championing ideas in one way, shape, or form. And championing?

Championing? The people who champion ideas in larger organizations, and now you're sort of like expanding that scope. And so I had a deeper curiosity, which is, why do you care so much about ideas? What is it? It's funny, I sat down with Liz Gilbert a while back, and she has this theory that ideas exist independently of people. They're floating around in the ether just waiting for somebody to kind of touch one and make it real, like turn it, make it manifest. And if you don't take it, somebody else will. It's beautiful. And I remember her TED Talk.

So before I answer the question, I'm inspired by her. She gave a talk at TED. And I remember because I had been working on what was my first book. Back then, my only, you know, it was still a manuscript. And I had just gotten rejected. Like the manuscript had basically been sent back to me with this is a piece of shit kind of note. And I'm sitting there at TED with this background noise of I have to figure out what to do with this manuscript. And Gilbert shows up on stage and tells this story of a poem coming across the landscape and the person chasing the poem and catching it by its tail and pulling it back into them. And after she was done and that session was done, I was running from

the hall to go back to the hotel room to get to my computer. And my husband and I both go to TED together. And so he happened to see me as I was literally running. And he's like, what's up? And I go, I got it. I got it. And I felt like I had the idea by its tail and I wanted to go pull it back into me. And so I'm inspired that you start our conversation with her stuff. I do believe ideas are everywhere. And unfortunately, they usually have to show up in a package that we expect, that the cultural dominant group expects. Back when I was an admin at Apple, I remember once being invited to a meeting and getting asked to bring your best ideas. That was a note that was sent to everyone. I was on this list. I assumed I was included in this message. And I showed up and I raised my hand a couple times and did things to participate. And it was really obvious after

about 15, 20 minutes that that part of the note did not apply to me, that they wanted it to come from the people they expected it to come from, the Berkeley MBAs, the Harvard MBAs, the people who had the quote unquote right title. And I remember thinking, well, I have some ideas. I'm not sure they're the best ideas. I certainly had self-doubt. But it seems strange to me that they only expected ideas from a certain group of people. And then as my career grew, I kept noticing how many people were dismissed. It wasn't just youth. It wasn't just gender. It wasn't just all the typical ways that ideas are dismissed. It's almost as if every group has a certain

expectation of who will be brilliant amongst us. And yet most people actually have something to contribute. And so then over the years, 20 some years of working inside all these major corporations, it became so obvious to me the biggest Achilles heel that we face is not tapping into the pool of ideas that we have right there and figuring out how to actually bring all that energy and passion into our organization. Yeah. I'm curious in that first meeting when you had that awakening, what were the signals that you were picking up that let you know you were, quote, not worthy? Well, one of them was just the lack of eye contact. It was as if I was invisible and it didn't matter that I was there or not there. That sense of being unseen pervades me to this day.

Every time I get ignored and I go back to that meeting meeting of I'm kind of here, but not really. And I suspect a lot of people will resonate with that, with that sense. No, I know I do. I think that's so telling. Yeah. And it is interesting. There's, you know, I think that we hear the rally cry constantly, like bring me your best ideas. We need new ideas. We need different ideas. What got us here ain't going to get us there. And yet we only look to a really thin slice of humanity to provide those ideas. Where do you think that comes from? It's how power has worked for a long time. And power affects our ability to actually have an idea. This relationship of who do we expect to come up with brilliance?

Who do we expect to have novel and fresh ideas? We often look to people who already have authority or who already have title, who already have status. And so if people don't, the working assumption, whether it's conscious or not conscious, is, well, those people must not have ideas or they must not be hustling hard enough. I think that's the great myth around ideas, actually. I think we think the people who aren't crushing it just aren't trying hard enough. And I think there's something else actually going on rather than that. What is that something else? The reason that we don't all bring our best ideas to bear is because we haven't found a safe enough place to take that risk. So it's not the fact that we're

not bold enough. It's the fact that our group, the context in which we're in does not make it safe enough to bring our best ideas. So it's not boldness, it's belonging that limits how much we can actually bring our best idea to bear. And just think about any situation you've been in where you're like, yeah, I'm the odd duck here. And then you're not going to be the one to kind of take this huge, gigantic risk, right? Because if you go back to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it goes survival, it goes food, shelter, the next gateway is belonging. Belonging, right in the middle, yeah. And so if you think about the hierarchy of ideas being at the top and your own sort of

self-expression and ability to contribute your bit to the world, that's higher up on that triangle and belonging being the gateway. So if you're in a context where people are basically telling you, like I was at that Apple meeting, you don't count, you're unseen. They're telling you in invisible ways. Are you even going to take that risk of self? Because you'd rather have your job and you'd rather, you have to conform, right? It's a matter of survival of how do I figure out how to also be here with these people? And so you actually probably start to internalize, oh, it must be me. I must need to learn how to express myself better, et cetera, instead of actually going, ah, context is affecting my ability to contribute.

Yeah. And yet it's like this, not a double-edged sword, it's a, what's the analogy I'm looking for? You know, how do you go from that place of being perceived as not having the, you know, like, quote, power to deliver something that's worthy of being heard or seen to actually being that person where you step into the room and everyone turns to you and says that when it's almost like to get to that place isn't part of that cycle that you have to at some point find the will to offer something that is unique enough that it distinguishes your contribution and you have to find a way to take

that risk with yourself so i think there's two parts, right? One is, so what you're asking is what I would consider the classic definition of agency, which is what is it the part that I own and claim for myself? And then how much of my social relationships are in place that will let me do that? And you can't talk about one without also talking about the other. Because agency is our power, our identity, our ability to have status in a room is interlinked with who we're with. This is actually the lesson, the journey I've gone on in understanding things. Because the question I had for a long, long time in my career, my life,

was, why is it some people make a contribution and others don't? And so if you just look at my own storyline, I first figured out, oh, well, maybe it's because I don't have enough degrees. Or maybe it's because I don't have a title. Maybe it's because I haven't learned the expression of those ideas. Maybe, you know, so you kind of go through this checklist and you kind of work through, well, I've done this and I've done this and I've done this work and this work and this work and this work and still not changing the power dynamic until I end up being in a room full of people who want my ideas, who understand how to create enough safe context for me to be able to explore, my biggest and boldest ideas don't show up. And this is true for all people.

And the reason it's so contraindicated is for a lot of people, people who are already part of the dominant culture, they don't see it. They don't see how much these invisible forces affect the other people. For them, they always belong. And I mean, which raises a big question, how do you open their eyes and their ears without simultaneously raising their defenses? The world is going to start needing more and more ideas. This is the, all of our complex problems that we're having today, whether it's education or healthcare or global warming, or you kind of pick your issue. These are not private problems. These are not the

scope of one person. So the thing that's going to allow us to incubate the feature and rupture the status quo and get us to a new place is going to be fresh ideas. So this is just a, you know, if you just think about the suck at the end of the hose, the thing that's going to create newness is the fact that we need new ideas. We're actually at a crisis point for that. And so then the question is, how do each of us step up? How do we find all those spots in the world only we stand in and figure out from that vantage point, what is this perspective or idea that I have that could make a difference? So how do we claim that for ourselves? That's the first part of adding value in the world

is claiming it for yourself, seeing it already as valuable. And then the second piece is, this is the new piece that social media really enables, is how do you find the other people who give a shit about the same thing? And that's the last 10, 15 years has really shown us we can do that. And then all of a sudden you start to have this magnetic force of I have an unusual take. It's so unusual, in fact fact that i don't know if anybody else even has it but if i can figure out a way to seek and signal those other people we might gather together and do something really interesting so let's deconstruct that a little bit because it's there's a lot in there and it's really important especially in the times that

we're living in right now the first part that you're talking about is like how to find that thing within yourself and you use the phrase only. So I think it would actually be really helpful if we if we actually just kind of define the term onlyness. So when you use the word onlyness, what do you actually mean by that term? Well, I think the stories tell the story of onlyness. So can I share one of the stories? Yeah, please. Okay. So one of the first stories in the book is with Kimberly Bryant. Kim is a engineer by training, and she had gone to school and largely felt alone in that setting being a woman and a person of color. Her background of how she was raised didn't have engineers in her environment. So here she was really pioneering for herself this new career.

And so the first time she shows up at this job at DuPont, she's so excited because, oh So here she was really pioneering for herself this new career. And so the first time she shows up at this job at DuPont, she's so excited because, oh, my gosh, finally she's going to have the peer group she wants, some engineers who are equally geeky to her, and she might be able to create great things. And her manager introduced her in that first moment as a twofer. and what he meant by that implying some kind of lottery jackpot moment right was he was describing her as black and a woman of color which is so unusual in the tech community and so he called her a twofer and you can almost imagine her heart deflating because all of a sudden she was looking for this place where she could belong and what she was being identified as as otherness and yet she had something that only she could bring function of her history and experience visions and hopes and so by putting her in the otherness category they were not celebrating that thing that only kim could bring which was onlyness and then kim sees her daughter kai getting treated very much the same as she did as she was going and learning

coding. And so this mostly white, mostly male culture was basically dismissing Kai. And Kim could see the repeat of history one generation over. And she thought, oh my God, this cannot continue. So she gathered up some of her Kai and her friends who were like at this point, seven, eight, nine, 10, and puts them around a kitchen table, borrows some computers, designs some curriculum, and basically figures out, okay, I'm going to figure out how to help you learn to code in a context that's really useful so you can thrive. And does that, does that well. So other parents reach out and say, hey, I'd love to help Mike, and now the program has spread and spread and spread. Program is called Black Girls Code. When she was naming the program, she really struggled with the name, whether or not to call it Black

Girls Code, because society's dominant culture in America says that black is a negative. And yet for Kim, it was not a negative. It was simply the perspective that she offered a group she belonged to with great love and affection. Why should she deny it? And it was another entrepreneur who asked her, why are you struggling with this so much if that's what it is? And so her claiming for herself that Black was positive and that it could be a source of strength for the 1.4 million jobs that will be created in coding by 2020, that we need a fresh new pool of talent coming into that workforce. And so that which was deeply personal for Kim in that claiming exercise of saying, no, no, no, it's actually really positive, can also serve as a claiming exercise for society and serve and shape society so that

it changes too. So onlyness is this braided idea, the value creation starts with you. And every single one of us has something to contribute. That when you can then be connected with other people in something that is common in a distributed network instead of a hierarchical network, then we can actually have novel and fresh ideas come into the world and scale, which is something we've never really had the opportunity to do before. Yeah.

And you just also added a phrase there, which is every single one of us has something to contribute in the world, which I know you personally have struggled with validating. I have. It's probably been, in fact, I'll tell you a story that when I was writing the book, I wrote that. I wrote that every single one of us has something to contribute. And the fact that society doesn't recognize that is its greatest problem and its greatest opportunity. I believe that. And so I would write that in. It was in my final chapter because I was basically wrapping up that message. And I'll never forget one of the top rank thinkers, I think he's number three, read the book as a courtesy to me as in early stage,

even before we'd gotten to Galley, read the manuscript. And he said, you know, that's a really super audacious idea. And I'm not sure I believe it. In fact, I think it's too, there's plenty of evidence to suggest it's not true. And the way he wrote this seven page email to me suggested he was almost ashamed to know me because of this idea. And I read and reread that note, really affected by someone who's essentially a mentor and this kind of relationship to me. And so I deleted the line. And then sort of secretly, like in the middle of the night, like the next time I was working on the book, I wrote it back in. And then I sent it out to another group of people with, again, inner circle people. And i had the same line get challenged

and so i deleted it out and then like the next time i was working on the manuscript i put it back in sort of secretly hoping no one would notice and i realized that even that struggle that process of well this is not an idea that other people accept as valid why do i believe that it's valid? And that exercise, so you can even see my internal struggle, even as I'm writing a book about, you know, this is what I believe. And this is my novel idea I'm trying to bring to the table, which is hopefully going to unlock the ideas of so many other people. And yet I'm scared because my peer group or who I see as my peer group in that moment, says to me, hmm, no, maybe not. And so

that process of affirming it for myself was really me saying, no, no, no, I really do believe this. I believe that every single one of us has the ability to contribute. The fact that we don't is society's greatest problem and its greatest opportunity. And I sit here today, I even get a little verklempt because I think oh who am I to believe that and yet I hope that in this process of sharing the book and the idea and the many examples I found of people living

into that fullness I hope it actually becomes a reality and so that's why I ended up leaving it in the book is I actually then acknowledge it's not necessarily going to happen but I ask the audience of people who are reading it to help make it happen. So it's almost like an invitation, an act of faith. It's like an offering, like let's all make this true.

That's the very last word I leave the book with, let's. Yeah. Yeah. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not. Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are.

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making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. vary. So our awesome friends at Freshworks make ridiculously easy cloud accounting software for freelancers and small business owners who know that making every single moment count is a really important part of getting a lot of stuff done and being able to do the things that they want to do in their business.

By drastically simplifying things like invoicing, tracking expenses, and getting paid online, FreshBooks has totally changed the game for now more than 10 million people. You can link your FreshBooks account to your credit card and debit card. So next time you expense the business stuff or the tank of gas or lunch, it just shows up automatically. They have notifications and awesome customer service. To claim your month-long unrestricted free trial with no credit card required, go to freshbooks.com slash good life and enter the Good Life Project in the How Did You Hear About Us section. One of the things I think that comes up early is when you start to think about the idea of onlyness, what is my unique conduit contribution to the world is how do I know?

How do I figure that out? How do I, and is there a process? Is there a test? Is there an inquiry? Do you just know or not know? Does something have to happen in your life to unlock it? Because I think it's a big question for so many people. Or do we all know and we're just not owning it

because we're terrified of what might happen if we do? Well, let me turn around the question to you and ask the listeners to do the same thing for themselves for a second. How do you know? How do you know anything? So let me have you be the proxy for our listeners. Jonathan, how do you know? When you started working on the Good Life Project, how did you know? It's a two-step process for me. Well, maybe a three-step process. One, an idea

comes. I can't tell you where it comes from. Probably a combination of 51 years on the planet, a ton of failures, a ton of experiences, massive data sets, somehow patterns drop, and I'm like, huh, interesting idea. The next thing for me is generally what can I do to validate or invalidate it quickly and easily? Like I dirty test it. I look for external data. And then I inevitably reach a point where sometimes it's just clearly yes or clearly no. You can validate or invalidate. There's some things where you're like, oh yeah, boom. Like there's a series of experiments that I can run that say yes. Sometimes you run the series of experiments and it says no. Sometimes you run the experiments and you're like, we don't know. So if you want

to continue down this path, you need to continue down the path based on intuition and faith. So let me decode what you just said. There was something on this earth, your history and experience that's informing the questions that you have in your head and the things you're paying attention to, right? So some of that is stuff that's happened to you. Some of that is what you might call vertical identity, the things you were born into, your socioeconomic status, your gender, your gender your language right all the places on earth that you've lived and some of it is also what you care about all the different things that you've been paying attention to your yoga background the businesses you formed even your your financial trading background what would be part of what you have

cared about and there's this other piece that I think often gets neglected, which is a definition of onlyness. So I define onlyness as a function of your history and experience, visions and hopes that allows you to have a distinct perspective or set of ideas or possibly even breakthroughs that when connected with other people can scale big enough, mighty enough to dent the world. So that's my definition of onlyness. And so history and experience, visions and hopes, most of us discount the visions and hopes part because it's unprovable to anyone else. And yet that's the creative act is to claim that. Totally, right. Yeah, right. And so when you say you had an idea, quite often that idea that spark is actually us having a hope for something that's possible

and we discount it because like we almost look around like no one else can see that hope and yet this is the contributive value of onlyness most of us are conditioned to focus on the comparative value of what we're doing with other people so if you run a podcast are you the best podcast blah blah blah and yet if you actually look podcast, are you the best podcast? Blah, blah, blah. And yet, if you actually look at what is this thing only I can bring? And can I do that exceptionally well? That's a different question. Do it to the best of my ability so I can serve some people with the set of things I really care about.

It starts to change your focus. And then I think the second thing that you talked about, so I'm deconstructing your story, right? And so hopefully sharing how all of us might get to it, is what is the ways in which we explore it? So in all the stories, I did about 300 examples of real people doing essentially quote unquote powerless people doing really remarkable things despite their status. And of the 300 stories, wherever I would start them in the story and they would say, I would be like, where did it begin? They would start at what I might call now the 30% mark. So they called the beginning. And I'd be like, is that really the beginning? Tell me the real beginning. And I would literally just keep pulling on that thread until at some point it would become clear that for two to five years they had been exploring it.

Exploring it in some way that they weren't even telling anyone else, sometimes not even themselves, that they were exploring it. And so they started the story at the point where they had more concrete evidence that there was something. Yeah, because it's like it's defensible. Or at least like not total lunacy at that moment. Because the hope is becoming the best, right? We've done enough work. So this invisible thing that we just conceive of can now have some out of our own body experience of like, I can point to something. But what was going on in those two to five years, I'll tell you what was going on. They were actually building the scaffolding and support structure as if you're building a house. It's this, you know, like you

can't go into a new space until the sort of structure has been there. It's sort of like that for ourselves. We're actually building out a little safe space for ourselves that we can grow into. It's like an arm of ourselves, a wing of ourselves that we're kind of like almost just shaping up and saying, oh, there's got to be some beams and stuff. And we're doing that exploratory process so we can even go into that space. And that's why we discount it too, is because we need to. That's how we take that risk for ourselves. So it's perfectly acceptable. So those two things is exactly how we come to our onlyness. First, how do we claim something even if other people have told us it's irrelevant? And sometimes that's about claiming a vision or hope for the world

that's born of our experience, that's born of our perspective, and even if no one else sees it first. And then the second is just to give yourself some room to explore it without having to feel like you put your whole life on the line or you have to change jobs or all those other things. Sometimes we put way more dependencies on it. Yeah. No, that's so interesting to me. I'm sort of like reflecting on how my internal process syncs up with that. And it definitely, it aligns so powerfully with what you just described.

I mean, it's very, people have said to me, it's like you put something into the world and it seems like it's fully formed, you know, like, and it's just, it hits the ground running. I'm like, no, actually my process is like, this has been forming in my head for years. And I'm very conservative about who I share what's actually going on with. And the moment that I put it into the world, because I wanted to be at a point where I use the word defensible before, but where at least I feel like I can have, if somebody comes at me and says, no, that's not legit. That's not right. You know, for X, X, X, and X reason,

just like somebody did on the fundamental concept of everybody has value to you. I want to be at a point where I can look back at them and say, yes, and boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Like I've actually really spent some time, like I've tried to anticipate all of that. And still at the end, you know, it's like Roger Martin's quote, who's like resonated in my head for years after I heard him say it, which is like, you know, like the two most deadly words to innovation are prove it.

You know, it's almost like the power and the originality of your perspective, your lens, your idea is not validatable or provable in advance. Like the only way to know is you've got to do it into existence. That's exactly right. And you don't just do it by yourself. Yeah. So that early phase where you're exploring and giving yourself room to make it defensible, which is I think a perfectly great word to use in this case because that's about risk, right? When I'm going to show up with this- It's social risk, too.

Social risk, exactly. Well, people think I'm stupid, and all my social credibility goes out the door. And driven in no small part by ego. Exactly. So that's why this early process, I want us to give ourselves permission for this early process. And here's the thing. All journalism stories that you read, like a

Fast Company story or choose your favorite magazine, they start off and the story at what I would call the 30% mark. And they start off there because the other part's invisible. It's invisible to most of us, by the way, because most of us aren't that intentional about the thing. And also because how the hell would you even describe that process? Right. And also it's not sexy. Exactly. I wandered around the forest for? Right. And also it's not sexy. Exactly. I wandered around the forest for a while. That's what it feels like.

It's like people don't want to act. I think people don't want to hear that part of the story. Right. So here's our problem though with that, right? Is if all the stories that we've read about entrepreneurs and innovators and change makers and disruptors and activists start off at that mark point, then what confirmation data do we have that says our wanderings are worthy? And that's what I wanted to actually try to decode in the process of onlyness and doing the research is actually that's an incredibly valid process.

It doesn't have to be visible. You don't have to talk about it. There's a very good psychological reason why you don't want to actually. But you have to recognize for yourself that that is a part of the process. Yeah, I so agree. And the concern that I often have when I see so much media telling the story starting, I love the idea of the 30% starting the story there, is that we set the expectation for anybody who might want to breathe an idea into reality that that is where the story begins. And we invalidate the profound worth of everything that came before it. And then when people actually experience the angst and the toil and the months and the

years that have to come before it, they think they're doing something wrong. And they walk away because nobody's actually validated that part of the story. Right. So those of us who live in contexts that are not safe. So for those of us, 60, I think the data as I went through it was 69% of us have been told that our ideas don't count. So if you just think about normal groups, stereotypes that are told your ideas don't count in society, that group, especially that usually doesn't have a context that's safe enough for them to have that original idea. So this is a weird loop. This is how the

status quo remains. The status quo is if you don't have people who already believe in you and already think you're going to have an idea, and then you don't have that positive confirmation of data in the marketplace that says, by the way, there's this other phase that's invisible to everyone that's going to look like this and feel like this. And you've got to go through this phase. We have basically not given anyone the keys for how they own their own inspiration, that moment where someone sees that idea running across the field and then starts to chase it is that zero to 30%. It's in the chasing of the idea that we get to catch it. There's no guarantee we're going to catch it. There's no guarantee that idea is a big idea. But we chase the idea because we see

something no one else sees. And we hope that that idea might actually serve many other people and not just ourselves. And then what do we do with that? One of the things that you've introduced is the idea that, okay, so yes, if we work on the assumption that we all have that something, that capability, regardless of power status, and that the changing nature of the world and technology is opening the possibility for anybody to actually, using your words, make a dent. How do we take that idea and scale it beyond, scale its impact, scale its understanding beyond the confines of us? So this is the beauty of how ideas scale in this world is how do you find the other people who care about the same things as you? That's passion, that's purpose.

How do you find them online? How do you find them in real life? So let me share another story just from the book because I just thought it's such a relatable story. There's a guy named Alex Hillman based out of Philly. He's been on the podcast. Has he really? Oh, fantastic. So then the listeners will know his story.

But let me share my take on the story. It was great meeting Alex. And he was 23 at the time the story starts. And the way he described his life then was he was working for an agency, showing up in suits, miserables all get out basically, and had very little friends. And so he described – I said, you know, what was like your typical day like? And he described it as like, you know, he would go to work and he would come back and he would mostly take out hunched over his computer. And I had a picture in my mind as soon as I saw that I was like, oh, that's kind of a sad life. And he really wanted to work with other geeky creative types who wanted to build

things. And he thought the only place that he could do that would be out west, you know, sort of California tech company, even though he loved Philly. But Philly is sort of like, you know, in a pocket of the world that a lot of people don't know. It's almost like a place you kind of drive through, right? At least at the time that Alex was having this experience. Especially in the tech world. Especially in the tech world. And so, you know, there's Mecca over here and then there's everything else outside of Mecca. And so he had a job opportunity fall through in California.

And he had this moment of, I'm not sure I want to be in California. I think I really want to be here. So what if I gave myself six months to actually find the other people who might care about the same things as me so I could stop being so lonely in this no-name city of Philly? And this is the funniest thing in the story that got cut out. The editor cut it out. And I was like, actually, this is really pertinent in the story. So it will seem small, but it's really big. He changed from wearing suits to wearing like flannel t-shirts and ironic t-shirts and stuff and showing up at these different venues, any kind of networking venue that he could find in Philadelphia.

But he was really trying to signal like, here's who I am. And then what he was trying to do is find the other people who cared. And he literally met one guy at one event asked him out for beer and then they'd go to other networking events together and they went on the search and over time he had five people gathered together and then 10 and they would take over coffee shops and the whole idea was what if we just find the people who are like us then we won't feel so lonely and we'll have better work we don't have to leave Philly. We can create a community for ourselves. And I love how organic it was, one by one, coffee shop, beer, blah, blah, blah. And then at one point, they were at some event and he stood up in front of his tribe, part of his tribe was there.

And he stood up and he said, what if we could actually build our own space? And somebody else, and I want to say it was Lauren Gallagher, who was in the audience, said, yeah, and what if it was also related to Philadelphia and our history? And so that was the conception of this place called Indy Hall, which was one of the first and best co-working spaces created in America, creating a space for our creative, geeky, doer people to all hang out together, support each other, and have a kind of work context that makes sense and here's the thing i talked to the former deputy mayor of philadelphia in this process he's now former but at the time he was in this role and he said it changed our city it changed our city because it created a hub and a way for us to even connect with those people and figure out how to serve those people and and so the city changed because all of a sudden you could do more things to engage that tribe of people and get that tribe of people to become vital members of the community. And so here's this one small act of Alex's, right, which is this idea of can Philly also be a home

for creative geeky types like me? And then he ends up in this process of chasing and finding the people like us to also shape the entire city. So it included and was reshaped by his debt. And that to me is the journey. It's as simple as how would I find the other people? And that's why I love the story of Alex Hellman is I think most of us, when we think how we find our people, and I'm putting it in air quotes as we talk, we think about it in this big conceptual way. And it might just be one by one, bird by bird, as Anne Lamott would say, finding the people who care about the same things as us, and then figuring out how to build something that

we care about together, not because I told you to, but because we want it in common. I know Alex. And one of the things that he shared with me a couple of years back when we sat down was, I can't remember the exact statistic, but something like 90% of the members of Indy Hall don't actually have desks there. They participate and they contribute just because they want to be a part of the community and the shared ethos and the shared sensibility that he's created. Even if they're not there physically in a space every day, there's something bigger that's happening. And that flipped a switch for me when he said that.

I was like, oh, yeah, now I'm starting to get it. Because all of us need a place to belong. So we cannot take risks of our own ideas if we feel like we're standing all alone in the world. And so for all of us who are freelancers and entrepreneurs and creative types who do not work inside big organizations, we have this thing of like, well, I'm just out here, little lonely me. And onlyness is this thing. It's the opposite of loneliness, right? It's how do you pull on that string in the world that only you see and it connects you so deeply to the fabric of the world that only you see and it connects you so deeply to the fabric of the world and so alex ends up doing this relatively simple act and in doing

so ends up really serving something that a bunch of people want which is how can i have a hub of people who look feel more like me by the way now there's five different co-working spaces in philadelphia which to me is also a sign of the ways in which we might find inspiration from, oh, there's one place. Well, maybe this one's more a writer's group, and this one's more a geeky group, and so on and so on. Yeah. The other thing that you said is that he, because the big question I think for a lot of people and for me as always, like, how do I know who are my people? Like, how do I, what do I telegraph into the world? And what are the, what are the harmonizing principles? And this is something you write about. It's also something you just kind of said, but it was interesting because you shared it first, you know, he,

he wore his finals and has ironic t-shirts, which is like, okay, so then as he's signaling that I'm looking for people who look like me, but that's actually not it. That's just like this external signal. It says, well, maybe it's like an attraction mechanism. It's like the ruffling of the feathers that say, well, let's have a conversation. But the deeper thing is then do you think like me and do you want what I want? Like, what is that sense of shared purpose or curiosity, which is like the to come to a common understanding of who are we to one another. They didn't do that because Alex said this is who we are to one another. They came by it naturally, organically, which if you think about all relationships, that's exactly how we all figure out who we are to each other. I remember the first time you and I met, and we started just wandering through different things that both of us care about until we kind of figured out piece by piece, here are things that are really deep connection points and we stay in touch as a result of those

connection points, right? So it's organic, it's conversational, it's relational. The onlyness construct was introduced in a book in 2012 that Harvard published, right? And what I was arguing in that book was value creation is fundamentally changed. It's going from capital and organizational systems, which is largely how we've made money before, to ideas. And I was basically saying, well, don't ideas come from people? Can't ideas then come from all people? And the big piece that I was trying to say there, though, is now you actually have to have a social construct, not social media, but a social construct that glues it together. What are relationships fundamentally built on? Trust. So what Alex had to do is spend time with those people, having a trusted relationship with them

until they kind of came together and said, here's who we are to one another. They could have just been friends that didn't have shared interest. They could have just been friends that didn't have shared interest. They could have just been friends that didn't have shared purpose. And we've all been in those kinds of communities that it doesn't really serve. It doesn't scratch our itch in the same way. But this group in particular, in fact, one of the people who's in the early group, Dylan Thomas, I want to say, he's a video guy and he's in the book. But he had this interesting moment where he said, well, Alex wasn't the only one who was

looking for this thing, but none of us were acting on it in the same way, right? We all had this little nugget that we were looking for, but we couldn't articulate it. And then as we sat together, we were like, oh, what we're looking for is a geeky creative type space where we can learn from each other without having to work for a big company like Google. That was what we we're looking for is a geeky, creative type space where we can learn from each other without having to work for a big company like Google. That was what we were all looking for. And what we didn't realize, none of us had that expression of it. But as we spent enough time together, we're like, that's it. And I think that's interesting, right? That didn't happen because Alex showed up saying, well, I'm looking for this. It's that zero to 30% moment where he was actually exploring, how do I solve

this thing for myself? And slowly but surely came to it himself, his own level of clarity. And then in the seeking and signaling, which is chapter four of the book, figuring out, okay, how do I find more people like us? Then how do we have a shared framework, which is chapter five? And then chapter six, how do we actually have shared trust together that would allow us to do something bigger? That's organic relational stuff. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist,

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Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die.

Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot? Flight risk. So there are these different elements that you need to kind of bring people together around. Part of the conversation you also move into is once you start to figure out, okay, these are the ideas that we all care about, what are we trying to accomplish? rabbit hole who wrote this legendary small book from dictatorship to democracy, which has been sort of the source material for every nonviolent revolution, sadly, which often violently ends. And one of my questions was, can we actually apply this as a bigger frame to organizing people in the world to do big things? It's interesting. Someone I was talking to when they saw the book recently, they said, oh, your book is like activism for business. And that's an interesting angle.

It kind of is because what you're doing, yeah, you're taking a lot of these ideas that people have organized around a purpose and a desire to create change, to make a dent using your language and saying, okay, how can we actually apply this to a world, to just a very different world that it's existed in. And you also write about and talk about one of the big challenges, which is I think we tend to be really good at organizing around pain points and what we don't want. Like we want something different. We tend to be less good in identifying what we believe to be true and what we do want. Yeah. So here's the thing, right? It's easy to say this is broken and out of that dissatisfaction kind of point to that thing and say that's broken. It's harder to then say I have ideas for how to fix it or here's what I believe is possible. And here's why. Because it's more obvious what is broken. And so it's easier to point to. It's less obvious for ourselves what is it we believe is possible when it doesn't exist yet. Just to back up and think about how do any of us claim an idea?

How do we grow it into existence? It's not because it shows up all like perfectly clear and delivered. That'd be like saying a person shows up perfectly clear and delivered, right? We live our life. We gather experiences. We shape what we believe is possible. We even we have nascent notions. Then we'll sit there and go, hmm, what is possible here?

And so it's almost like I use this string metaphor or thread metaphor. And I think I may have actually just already said it, but let me slow it down a little. I think a lot of us pull new ideas into existence in this way. It's as if we see a thread, maybe metallic is how I picture it in my head. And we don't even know like what is at the end of that thread. But our own sort of curiosity is what allows us to pull it and pull it and pull it. And at the end of that thread could be something completely different than what we might have imagined when we first started that little tug. We don't know it until we start tugging on it. And what I found in my own life is when I let that curiosity play

itself out without judgment from myself or other people is when I figure out what's at the end of it. And most of us are waiting for this other thing. Like I have entrepreneurs on a regular basis come to me and say, well, how can I prove that this is like valid? And I'm like, I don't know. Have you done the work of a pilot? Have you beta tested it with real people? What are all the ways in which you prove anything? You build it, you try it, you learn from it, you advance it. And yet most people are looking for the, I would like a $50 million investment capital, you know, kind of model. And they're looking for the finished thing and not willing to go through the doubt and

the journey and the process, because that's the messy part that we can't explain to our parents or friends or even sometimes ourselves as to why we're going on that journey. And yet that's, I loved it that you called it an act of faith. I do think it's all new ideas are born out of an act of faith, that we believe something might be possible, and that we're willing to bank on ourselves long enough to give ourselves that room enough to be curious enough to go explore it. Yeah, I so agree. And I wonder whether in the context of business especially, there are businesses and cultures of business that are sort of all about innovation, and they're more comfortable with the ideas of those ideas. The vast majority of the business

world is not. And the vast majority of humanity is not. we're not comfortable stepping into, you know, like Joseph Campbell's abyss. And I also feel like so many of us, we take the idea and we go from the idea to immediately what we believe to be the solution. We fall in love with that vision of the solution. And then we go in search for a problem and people that it will serve. And that's almost the exact opposite. And I think that is the predominant paradigm so often. And it's the exact opposite of something where it's truly innovative, it's truly new, and it's in service of something real. So rather than saying, here's a solution, how do I find the market and scale it? It's like, here's an idea. Let me see if other people see the idea too. And I think that terrifies people because we don't know what the solution is going to be. We don't know if it's

going to be worth it to invest in it. We don't know if it's going to succeed or fail. So we don't want to take action towards it because like we were talking about before, there's social risk. There's all sorts. There's risk of failure, there's risk of judgment, there's financial, there's a risk of actual loss of power and prestige. And it terrifies us to go to that place. And yet if we don't, we lose and the world loses. I'll tell you a story that so ties to that. And in fact, there's a story in the book that every time people are reading it now, like the early galleys are out, people are like, oh my God, I love your husband. So it's a story about my husband. And in some ways, it's probably the closest proof point I had

that this was a big thing by watching him. And I'll back up. So he had come to me, gosh, this is probably now 10 years ago or so, and said, I want to get a PhD. He kind of blurted it out. And he wasn't terribly unhappy in his job. PhD. He kind of blurted it out. And he wasn't terribly unhappy in his job. So the question kind of came out of the blue. And I remember literally having the conscious thought of like, well, we have a kid and we have a mortgage and what the hell. And I had also, for those of you that don't know my personal story, I'd also put my first husband through law school and I had paid for it and I was not a big fan of doing it again. And so I looked at him like, uh, uh, you know, and instead of what I actually

said was, well, why don't you talk about this with a coach? Like, is this really going to help you accomplish your goals? And so he went and talked with someone in this, I'd not set this up, but this person said, you know, rather than thinking about a PhD, why don't you just think about what does it really want to be doing? And how could you maybe start on that right now? Small ways. And that was her advice. And so he came back and said, well, I really want to, this was literally his phrasing, I want to change the world. I want to solve all global economic development issues. That was his quote unquote charter. And she was like, well, maybe like, how could you take a small little slur? And I find this really amusing because he started writing a blog that I think he called Neophyte Humanitarian.

And he started expressing what that his set of ideas, they turned out to be far more specific than change the world kind of blah, blah, blah stuff. And it turned out to be specifically how do you share solutions for problems that have already been solved so other people don't have to duplicate that problem. So you use data to kind of, you know, incubate things. So how do you build a better water well in a particular part of Kenya using local resources? So it was very specific. And so he's basically writing like his daughters are reading it. I'm sometimes reading, like no one's reading this thing, right? But he does it for maybe like a month or two before some guy in, I want to say it was Australia, it was Bali, wrote to him and said, hey, by the way, I found your blog really interesting. I think there's this other guy over here who happens to work in Humboldt County, might

also be interested. Why don't you guys ping off each other? And he connected them. And those three people, after a short few months, gathered together and thought, you know, what we all have in common is that we're trying to figure out how to use appropriate technology to solve development issues. And we think data could be a useful schema to do it. The three of these guys, none of them, by the which, have a PhD, none of which are experts, none of which have permission, none of which have money, nothing.

There's like nothing to say that they are credentialed to go do this thing. And yet, on like literally like an hour a week, these guys end up building a website called Appropedia. So the idea is Wikipedia, but for appropriate technology. 20 million hits so far, 14,000 solutions translated into all these different languages, all by literally like an hour a week. And what I loved about watching that evolution of the story was just how much we learned by first giving ourselves permission to even chase it. People will then connect us. And then we start to solve problems as it becomes more evident what the problem is that we could solve. It just starts, you know, if there is a tug or sometimes I call it the suck at the end of the hose, right, which is my market

demand, my business side, the suck at the end of the hose becomes really obvious, but it doesn't become obvious until you've first done some of that initial exploratory stuff. And so my husband became the first proof case in a way of onlyness. How did he stand in that spot in the world only he stood in a function of his history and experience, visions and hopes? How did he start to pull on that thread? How that thread led him to find the other people who cared about the same things? How they came together and pulled on that thread more about what could this be? And as they did that, they found more and more people. There's something like a thousand contributors on Apropedia now. And I find that just such an interesting, like, no one's going to know about this guy. I mean, I just happen to

write about him, but no one's like, no one's going to discover him. There's no fortune article that's going to be written about this thing. But it really made a difference for us, a group of people. And so how do each of us solve a problem that we might see as possible to solve? First, by valuing what we have to offer, that spot in the world only we stand, and even if no one else values it, and claim that narrative for ourself, and then seek and signal and find those other people and then to act in some way on it. What could that serve? How could we do that better and operationalize it? Because, you know, I think sometimes we also love ideas for the sake of ideas. I'm not a big fan of that. You can probably tell from my operational background. My whole thing is like, do something. In fact, it was one of my first thoughts about, you know, what could I name this book? I wanted it to be

do something, you know, with your friends, because I think that's the most interesting thing we can do with our ideas. Yeah, I completely agree. And as soon as I can get out of my head with something, I'm out. Like the minute there's something testable in any way, shape, or form, the minute I can like swap action for thought, it's like, let's do it. Because- That's really insightful.

I don't know how insightful that is. It's just my MO. No, I really think it's insightful, because I'll tell you, people who I have met in the last 10 years of this journey where I've been really exploring this question at some level or another, people will say, well, I don't have the money or well, I don't have the time or well, I don't have, and they will come up with a series of reasons. And I'm not saying they're not legitimate reasons for themselves. I understand people have objections that they have to manage. But I think I'm like, well, how could you try? How could you do one thing? How could you move to action on one thing? And it's that one thing that if you could do 100 times in small

little ways, all of a sudden you move the needle, right? We all underestimate what we can get done in like 10 years and we overestimate what we can do in one. And so what is the way in which we could act now that, you know, bit by bit. That's why I like the word dent. I know it's actually, of course, I came from Apple and I have that background of make a dent in the world from Steve Jobs. So I have that heritage of that phrase. But I liked it also because I like the idea of reshaping the world to include so many more of our voices. And so I thought about it like a copper pot, dent by dent. we might reshape the world to include all of us and by adding our little shape into that. Yeah. Which feels like a good segue into what's spinning in my head right now, which is there seems to be a relatively, or you've kind of laid out a path to identifying

that thing within yourself and then bring it to the world so that you can find or attract those who in some way resonate with that, who see the world similarly, who want to be in community with you. And for some, that's enough. To make the dent that can or they want to make, that's enough. Bringing those people together is enough. And for others, the potential size and impact of the dent could be so much bigger if they could figure out how to bring those who do not immediately feel the call or the sense of purpose or understand why this relates to them into the conversation and the community. How do you do that? Can you do it? Of course you can do it. Let me tell a story of someone who did, just because I personally love the stories I ended

up discovering for this journey. So Samar, who's a story in chapter five, Samar was an anthropologist who had trained at Oxford. And at some point, somebody had given her a new phrase, like said, oh, the way this group solves things is very peaceful, like Swara, S-W-A-R-A. She'd never heard the term before. And she's Pakistani by heritage. And so she was like kind of Googling it and, you know, kind of finding out like, well, what is it? And it basically turns out to be a way in which tribal leaders create justice. But it will surprise a lot of us what justice looks like, according to this group, that they trade young girls in compensation for what men's crimes are. So if you did something wrong against my family,

instead of you personally paying the price for that crime, you might give me your daughter, who's maybe four or six or eight, and that daughter would then come live with me, and more likely as a servant or in some really unseen way in the family. But effectively, her life would end as an innocent party to all this and would drastically change. And so Samar ends up discovering how big the issue is. It's sizable. The numbers are in the book. And she sits there and figures out at first like her feminist, almost Western trained sort of point of view is like, oh, my God, this is so wrong and we must end it.

And what actually creates change is she goes into these conversations with the Jirga, which is these local councils of people in these tribal areas of Pakistan. And she sits down and she shares with them what she's learned about it. And her goal isn't to try to convince them, but to share that point of view only she has and to also offer other points of view. And what she does is she's gone around and on film, gotten experts on this field to say that this is actually not a legitimate form of justice according to Islamic Sharia law. And in fact, there are better forms. Here's other better forms. But to give up essentially the life of the daughter for justice is not fair.

And so instead of her walking in, you can almost picture a feminist, Western-trained kind of person walking in saying, you're wrong. She actually sat there and said, could you consider some more perspective on this? And here's the research I've done. And she does this and she has fathers of other daughters who have had to give up their daughters and really suffered from that on film. She talks about these judges who are Islamic judges, et cetera. And she basically leaves them with all this new information and for all intents and purposes walks away. And I'm sitting here thinking, okay, I could never do that, first of all, right? Like how brave is she to be able to have these conversations without judgment? And yet I realized that was exactly right.

So you cannot, onlyness is not about your idea being so much better than other people's ideas. It's not the oppression of other people's because that would just be inverting the power structure that's existed so far. Onlyness is about how do I so celebrate the fact that those jirga leaders are trying to create justice. They're trying to build their community. They have goals and objectives of their own. And how do I still contribute what I have to them in such a way we might reframe the entire thing?

So she showed up with extreme respect for Islam, extreme respect for the justice that they were actually working to create, and then said, this may not be the only way though. And so she basically disturbed their status quo enough by sharing what she had to offer, but then she left it up to the accountability of them to change things for themselves. To disturb the status quo is not to insist on your answer being right. And then she let them talk amongst themselves. And she remembers the first time she was told that a jirga had basically decided to take money instead of a girl and that they had figured out a different compensation plan. And she remembers being shocked at the answer because she's like, could it really be that we could sway people not by insisting on an answer that is our own, but by creating a new type of curiosity about what is it we have in common. What she'd effectively done was reframe the

question, which is, of course, we believe in love. Of course, we believe in justice. Of course, we believe. And she figured out how to reframe the question so that she could also, the answer didn't have to end up with the girl's life being lost. It was such a profound, it's almost too big a story in a way to show, right? Because how many of us could put aside our own prejudices and anger at the situation and walk in with acceptance to these people are trying the very best they can with their story. But this is a reframing work that all of us can do. We can show up and respect and regard other people's points of view and then listen really deeply for what is it

we actually have in common. And in doing so, maybe also find a new framework that all of us can buy into. This is what's going to create deep change. Yeah. And I think it's what's so missing in the public dialogue these days. There seems to be a point where it's so polarized. The discourse these days is so polarizing that there's, I feel like the room for conversation, for respectable discourse, for not coming into a thing with the pure intent of saying, I'm right, you're wrong. My job is to make you see the world the way that I see it. That that dominates, it dominates the media landscape. It dominates the public conversation. And I agree with you.

I think that way is the way, the way that you describe, not the way that I'm describing. Yet that is so absent in public discourse these days. It's interesting. I have this weird overlay with that also, which is I spent years studying, learning copywriting, which is fundamentally the science and art of influence in print. And one of the early things that I- Oh, I wish I had that skill. It comes in really handy in a lot of parts of life. One of the early things that I've learned is never try and just sort of like stop someone

and change the conversation. First, understand the conversation that's already going on in their head. Enter that conversation, you know, like engage in that conversation and then gently introduce ideas that might move the conversation to a different place. And then at the end of it, rather than saying, you must do this, say, this is what I've offered. But of course, the decision is yours. There's actually really interesting split testing data that shows that conversion increases when you actually have a much softer call to action where somebody feels like they still have the power to choose, that you're honoring within them their own intelligence, their own discretion and intention, and their own ability to make a choice that is just in their

eyes or right in their eyes. So it's kind of an interesting weird overlay that just kind of popped into my head as you were sharing that. So profound, right? We're getting a little philosophical, but of course, it's so practical too. It's how do you figure out how to join a conversation rather than start a brand new one? And that involves respect, respect for your own ideas, first of all, and then creating enough space for respecting each other. So right now what's going on, I think, is this notion of, well, I really believe something is important. For the left, it's that people of color, for example, have the same rights for safe spaces, et cetera, as non-people of color, that the Black Lives Matter movement is entirely about, well, we deserve equal justice under the law. And that's what that invisible to the Black Lives

Matter movement is this comma two, right? That's embedded in their logic. But on the other side, it's to say, what's a right issue for a second? Oh, so that unborn fetuses have a right to life. These are really difficult issues. And each side is so afraid to listen because they're so afraid that they will lose their own values in the process. That's why we don't listen. It's because we actually hear our voice of injustice yelling in our own head and we think that if we mute that voice of injustice, we will give up our own values.

We don't trust ourselves enough. And so then we're not listening to the other party because we're like, no, no, no, we have to listen to that voice of injustice going on in our head and make sure we never give up our convictions. And so then we're like yelling it, no, no, we have to listen to that voice of injustice going on in our head and make sure we never give up our convictions. And so then we're like yelling it to the other people, hoping that our convictions communicate. And really, if we could just trust that our convictions are our convictions for a reason, that, you know, there's a group of people who believe that, you know, all people should be treated equally.

Like that's a conviction. By the way, you're not going to lose that conviction. You can quiet your yelling about it for a minute. And the other side, there's a real reason why that group believes what they believe, but they have to also listen to, okay, well, what does that mean in the world? And listening is this moment where you actually can accept that your own thing can be quiet for a minute long enough. You're not going to lose it. And right now our society is doing this contempt for the other side. And that worries me a great deal, right? Because it's just one power model

over another. It's like a teeter-tot system. Obama won for, you know, politically, right? Obama won for eight years. Now we're going to do a teeter-tot to the absolute polar opposite. As good a man as Obama was, we're going to choose a misogynistic sexual predator and put him in the White House. It's a teeter-tot. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. Like, this will only end badly if we keep playing a teeter-tot game. It's what three-year-olds do. It's not what adults do. But we haven't figured out what is the way in which you can hold an idea as your own

with great conviction and still deeply respect that other people have different points of view. And so this is going to be that that's probably the most advanced thing that we could possibly talk about but i want to just kind of back it into something practical which is to remember that sometimes we fight for our own ideas and we kind of yell at other people in the process and i mean yell like not actually physically yell but sort of burst into the room with our ideas as if somehow our idea will dissipate. And you can trust that if you believe in something, it's in you. You can say it calmly and you can approach it with a questioning heart and you can explore the

alternative points of view around that idea and shape and be shaped. It's okay. And you can kind of return to your own space. And I think the reason we sometimes push, push, push, and sometimes overpush our own agenda is because we're so deeply afraid that this little nugget that we finally discovered about ourselves, our own hope about the stories, I would have this moment of like, what is really happening here? What is it that, you know, I'm seeing in these five, six, seven stories that's common, and it doesn't make any sense to me. And then I would find more literature around it to say, is there evidence behind it? And that's what actually caused me to go in the book or not. And one of the pieces of research that I did was around Carol Dweck's work, because this whole growth versus fixed mindset is so useful as a frame. But I talked to Carol and I asked her, what is the psychology, what's the thing that's going on in someone's head for them to be able to have a growth mindset? Like I get it that you need one

or whatever, right? But like most of us are having an internal conversation. What's that internal conversation? And I'll never forget because she sort of like was like, like oh my gosh no one's ever asked me a question before she was so happy i had to be asked a new question and she said the the conversation you're having with yourself is i trust myself enough that if i fail at it if i lose it if i don't get it right the first time i trust myself enough to recover and so this is what we all have to learn, right? How do you, when you have conviction of something, how do you trust yourself enough to explore that idea, even though you have no idea where it's going? How do you trust that even if it doesn't work out, it's okay. How do you get yourself to that place? That's the ultimate. I think if we can do that,

we can build anything. Because if you trust yourself, you're actually going to listen better too. That's where the practical part comes in. You're going to listen a lot better to someone who has such a divergent point of view because you're like, I trust that I got it. In my head, I got it. I can come back to it. But I really want to listen hard for what you believe so I can think of where are the bridges between us, that curiosity that might connect us. Yeah, I need to just let that land for a bit. It's really powerful. It's a philosophy.

It is. It is. And it's not easy to live. I'm sort of like reflecting on whether I do. And I feel like it's also a bit domain specific in the way that I sort of interact with the world. There are certain areas where I think I'd probably, yeah, I would be like, yeah, I trust myself to test my ideas, to listen to others, to be completely open to being wrong, and other areas where I probably don't. There was a guy that had really been figuring out

how to do a distributed model where a whole bunch of people could contribute their ideas. And then he got challenged because an employee of his came to him and said, I have a completely different idea for how we even build the platform that lets a whole bunch of people contribute their ideas. And he really remembers the moment because he goes, oh, my God, I just want to hang up the phone with this guy. And it's Eric Herzman who I'm speaking about. And the platform he had built was Ushahidi, which by that point, I think, had something like 10,000 deployments that would let people actually bring people to safety, whether there was an earthquake in a city or a tornado or all these different sort of emergency use cases. But his engineer had come to him and said, I have a completely different way of reinventing the core thing we do.

And he had to ask himself, how much do I believe in this power of distributed work? You know, how much will I let people really take the reins and fix whatever they see? And that story in the book is really a journey of him sitting there going, how do I trust my own people? How do I give them more rope? How do I signal that that's the kind of world in which we're going to live? Because ultimately, that's the kind of belief he had, right? But it took him a step. And one of the things he said to Brian when Brian asked him to fill it, he says, you know what?

I'm going to go ahead and let you do it. But here's the thing. We're going to run it as a concurrent so that we don't risk everything. And if we fail, which we very well might, we'll fix it together. And I thought how amazing that action is because what he was effectively saying to his own team member is, I trust you enough to take risks because whatever we do, we can always fix it. We can always learn. We can always get back up. And that's our journey is to learn together.

And I think that's going to unlock a whole set of possibilities for every type of organization. If we could have leaders that said, I got your back and figure out how to live out of that place of trust, which is the most relational construct that we have, that's the glue of our new distributed world, it's going to change everything. So we're hanging out in New York right now and you just flew over. And before you left, I emailed you and I was like, I'm sitting on my couch watching a four-hour documentary, five Scorsese about the Grateful Dead. And you've got to check it out because there's so many touch points about like your ideas and your book. That's right. That's my fun thing I'm going to watch on my way back on the flight tonight. What struck me so much about it was that they built this massive global, it's almost like a country like a like a moving nation you know like the deadhead

and from the beginning the one thing they didn't want was power the one thing they didn't want was to be anointed the leaders at least you know like jerry garcia according to the way that the story is told i i don't know it enough to really understand that's true and i know there have been a lot of marketing books built around how brilliant they were at how they created this structure and allowed taping and created this viral marketing stuff. And it's kind of funny

because the way that I saw the story told was like, no, man. Like every time we had a choice to make about whether we keep the power and control and create rules or whether we just let people like trust them to do what felt right, we chose the latter. It wasn't intentional. Well, it's interesting you say that they didn't want power. I would draw a distinction here that I think is really useful because we sometimes think

about power as yes or no. And I think there's actually three forms of power and we have to understand which one we're actually talking about. So organizationally, and so when we're talking about Grateful Dead, there's centralized power, where effectively a very small group of people sets all the direction everyone else is at the behest of that. There's decentralized power, which slightly more people have, you know, sort of like thinking about licensing systems or decentralized power. Most of this power and decision-making is made at the rest of the top. Everyone is largely executing that direction. The third one is really what the Grateful Dead did, was networked power, which is how does everyone hold part of the power schema? I don't hold all of it. You don't hold all of it. But together, when we add together,

all of it amounts to something much bigger. And this distributed power model is certainly what the Grateful Dead did because they said, our attendees are not just passive recipients. They are co-creators with us. They help create the experience. They can certainly share it with other people and become fan evangelists. They basically said, every one of us has a role to play. We're going to make music from up here.

You're going to help us have an incredible experience. So they basically said it is more than what we do and you passively receive. It is what we co-create that creates this. Distributed power is a model, though, we often call no power because we think about it against hierarchical power. And actually, it's just a very different form of power with a different set of rules. No, I like that distinction. I'm glad you made it. Which interesting too is that, and again, I'm not a deadhead. I love dead media, but I was never sort of like deep into the community on that level. I was more like a Beatles. But it also felt like there was such a profound and longstanding yearning, especially for Garcia, to play the role of leader and to set the tone and to tell people what to do and what not to do. And his deep and enduring desire not to be that person and not to play that role caused really intense suffering. So it's interesting. Well, we live in a patriarchal structure where we're kind of looking for someone to be in charge instead of saying, I own a set of responsibility. And that's actually, his music was all about this,

right? If we're going to actually have a world full of love, peace, and freedom, then you own a piece of it and I own a piece of it, and we're going to do something together. And we don't exactly know what that looks like. And it's relying on the love and bonds and relationships between people that will co-create something. It's a very different construct of what he was even holding in his head, but it was fully embodied in his music. Yeah. Except on the one hand, it feels like people really enjoyed so much of it. And on the other hand, so many still yearned for that person to tell us what to do. We like heroes. We do.

I mean, I'm sort of fascinated whenever I see these 90s style type of gurus be on stage, which you and I are on the circuit enough that you watch them get asked to speak alongside you. And I'm fascinated by it because they use a very manipulative model of creating agreement in the room where they tell you what to do and you're supposed to get excited enough to go do it. And then I always feel like, boy, I'm going to be such a letdown or something when I come right next to them because I'm using a very different model of power.

I'm basically saying, we're going to create this experience together. I'm going to ask something more of you in this process. I'm inviting you into a new space, which doesn't mean I insist on it. And so it's almost like two mental paradigms. I always wonder like as an audience, if they get like how different the two paradigms are, because I'm going to come in with a style that says, I respect what you bring. I'm going to engage you. We're going to create an experience together that I actually think in the end is going to create more of a light bulb moment where it will live inside you. And then you will carry that light far out into the world rather than me sitting up here holding a torch and you saying, ooh, torchbearer. Right?

Yeah. And we both go for the same thing. I mean, it's like a Mildred Kahn set, collective effervescence. I think for me, part of it comes from, or maybe the earliest expression was I was a club DJ in college. And if I was sitting there and playing an amazing set, it didn't matter if there was nobody there. I was like pulling the strings to a certain extent. But it was this co-creative thing that happened. This immersive, all-encompassing, completely absorbed state. And I would drop into it.

And they would drop into it, and they would drop into it, and there was a merging that would happen when it was happening really well. Well, I learned it from consulting because I was doing work that often McKinsey or Bain or other companies had already been hired to do, so they'd already failed at a project before, a big transformation, a turnaround, whatever. And then they were hiring this tiny little company called Rubicon to come in and do that same hard problem. And I was sitting there, I just had this little epiphany of, okay, we got to do it different. They did, because we're not going to, you know, there's no reason for us to duplicate that model. Let's try a different model. And my insight was, it didn't matter what answer I had. Did not matter how brilliant I was or how fast I came

to that insight or any, it didn't matter. Any of that did not matter. What mattered was that the answer resided in the organization, because if the answer resided in the organization, they would pick up that ball and run it all the way down the field and score the goal. And so I was like, how do I create the entire engagement so that ultimately it basically looks like they came up with the answer themselves? And then I would focus on what was my mode of inquiry? What was the way in which I would create learning experiences? How do I get the right people talking to one another? Right.

So I was structuring the experience of it as much as I was making sure the right content players were in the room because I was making sure that learning was going on in such a way that it became their idea. And quite often people would be like something magical happened. We don't know what it was. And I think to some degree, that's all that matters. Something magical happened. You did it. Combined together. But that is not the prevailing attitude because the attitude generally is, I need to be seen as the catalyst for that something. And even more so as the source for that something. Because if I don't get credit for it, I don't get paid and then they're okay on their own. Rather than, no, if I get known for being able to walk into a room and help create the magic that I can then step back from and it continues without me, there is powerful, there's value in that too. That's another way to actually build what you want to build.

The fear is if I don't get credit, I don't get the referral, so therefore I don't get the next level of business and my business dies, right? So I get the referral. So therefore, I don't get the next level of business and my business dies, right? So I get the fear. And yet what you can do is – so then it becomes not a question of if you choose that model. It's how you choose that model. So I would say the CEO of, you know, let's say Symantec and say, listen, we're going to work on creating experience within your organization so the answer resides in your organization when we're done. Here's a couple things we're going to tell you about it and the rest you're not going to know because we're going to design it as we go. And this at the end is about this outcome. So as long as we hit this outcome, you know who is there. And so the business card would get passed along from CEO to CEO, right? Because I was figuring out how to, but it took me like five or six years,

by the way, to get confident enough that I was like doing anything that was worth that kind of conversation. And then to be able to say it early on enough to be able to set the frame. So it didn't become a question of if I was going to be successful in this model. It was how would I be successful in the model. And that changes everything, right? You learn then what's the other set of things you need to change. The thing that we struggle with is when we're doing distributed power and then we don't know how to live into it fully,

we default back to centralized power constructs because we're like, oh, that seemed to work before. And then we try to do this melange of the two, which doesn't work. Yeah, that doesn't work. You either need to live into distributed power and live into it fully, or you need to go back to centralized power and decide one singular party gets to be in charge of everything. And by the way, no problem today that we're facing on Earth, honest to God, if you think about the rattling set of things that we're struggling with, those are not problems that any single country,

any single person, any single expert can solve. This is all about how we move to a distributed model. This is about, you know, we don't need another self-help book in the world. What we need is group help work and teamwork kind of work because all of the things we're actually all trying to solve are about the ways in which people come together to co-create the future.

That feels like an awesome place to come full circle. I'm going to ask you the same question that I asked you, I guess, a couple of years ago now. I'm curious to see if your answer has evolved, which is, this is a good life project. So if it's sitting here today, I ask you, I offer the phrase to live a good life, what comes out? I think to actually believe in the power of your own idea, even if no one else believes it's valid,

to give yourself that room and to chase that idea across that field and maybe even into yourself and into the world. Because until you do that, you're never going to find out what gives you meaning, what gives you purpose, and ultimately what makes a good life. Thank you. Thank you. And as we wrap up, I want to give a final shout out to our awesome sponsors and supporters. Right now, you can post a job on ZipRecruiter for free. That's right, for free. Just go to ziprecruiter.com slash good. Today's show is sponsored by FreshBooks,

which is a super cool cloud accounting software. To claim your month-long unrestricted free trial with no credit card required, go to freshbooks.com slash good life and enter the Good Life Project in the How Did You Hear About Us section. if you would take just a few extra seconds for two quick things. One, if it's touched you in some way, if there's some idea or moment in the story or in the conversation that you really feel like you would share with somebody else, that it would make a difference if somebody else is less, take a moment and whatever app you're using, just share this episode with somebody who you think it'll make a difference for.

Email it if that's the easiest thing, whatever is easiest for you. And then of course, if you're compelled, subscribe so that you can stay a part of this continuing experience. My greatest hope with this podcast is not just to produce moments and share stories and ideas that impact one person listening, but to let it create a conversation, to let it serve as a catalyst for the elevation of all of us together collectively, because that's how we rise. When stories and ideas become conversations that lead to action, that's when real change happens. And I would love to invite you to participate on that level. Thank you so much as always for your intention, for your attention, for your heart and I wish you only the best.

I'm Jonathan Fields signing off for Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes.

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