Good Life Project - The Secret Science of Perfect Timing: Dan Pink

Episode Date: April 30, 2018

Turns out, perfect timing is less of an art and more of a science than we ever knew. In today's conversation with mega-NYT-bestselling author, Dan Pink (http://www.danpink.com/) we dive into the "secret" science of perfect timing, drawing from his new book, When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing (https://amzn.to/2HB7Tuw). Prepare to be pretty seriously surprise, you just might discover there is a perfect minute, time of day, day of the week, month or year to finally do that thing you've always wanted to do AND have the highest likelihood of success.And, of course, since we had Dan in the studio, we also dive into his career, his writing life and how, why and when he chooses to commit to a project, book and so much more.-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We generally move through the day in these three stages, as you say, a peak, a trough, a recovery. Now that's true for our mood. If you look at all kinds of different measures of mood, whether it is sociologists looking at the emotional content of tweets, to people self reporting how they're feeling over the course of the day, in general, our mood follows that pattern, peak, trough, recovery. And then that pattern of mood then has an effect on our performance. And so you see things like kids scoring lower on standardized tests in the afternoon versus in the morning. You see some remarkable research out of the LA Unified School District where kids who take math in the morning do better than kids who take math in the afternoon

in a significant way. You see all these horrible things that happen in healthcare. Some 20 years ago, my guest today, Dan Pink, left his career as a speechwriter for then Vice President Al Gore to kind of strike out on his own as a writer. Soon after he penned an article for a young company called Fast Company that was called Free Agent Nation. That became a book that really exploded into public's consciousness and effectively launched his career as an author over the past 20 years or so. latest called When, where he dives deep into timing. It's one of the things that we never look at. Are there good and bad times of day, of month, of life to do all the things that we want to do? It's a fascinating conversation. We start out kind of tracking Dan's life and career to a certain extent. I've sat down with Dan in the past when we were filming. So if you want sort of a deeper dive into his personal journey, we'll link to that in the show notes. Really excited to share this conversation.

His latest book is called When, The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing. And super quick reminder today, meaning April 30th, if you're listening on the day this episode airs is the last day to lock in your spot at our super awesome, fun, transformational, kind of life-changing according to a whole bunch of campers. Once a year, three and a half days summer camp for grownups and get $200 off the full registration fee. Of course, you can still sign up after today. We'll still love you. It's just that you'll lose the $200 discount. And man, think of all the different ways that you could totally jam with that extra 200 bucks. So let's make it official. I've got hugs and more waiting for you at camp. Visit goodlifeproject.com slash camp today, April 30th,

to claim your spot and get your $200 off, or just click the link in the show notes. Okay, on to our show. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. 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. 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,

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. The Apple Watch Series 10. 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.

Dan and I taped a Fuller conversation, which kind of like took you into his sort of like backstory a little bit more. A chunk of years ago, that was actually on video, so we'll be sure to link to more chunk of years ago. That was actually on video. So we'll be sure to link to that in the show notes. I was reflecting on that conversation a little bit on your current work and also on sort of your trajectory and realize that it's just, it's like, it's, it's right around 20 years

now since you left a career as a speechwriter for Al Gore. And I mean, I literally, I think it was a couple of months ago, 20 years ago, and penned this article called Free Agent Nation for this then, you know, like emerging kind of like tiny thing called Fast Company that kind of exploded into the public consciousness. Does it feel like 20 years? No, it feels like it was yesterday. Fortunately, I've only aged about six months, so it's a lot easier. Yeah, no, it has been 20 years since I've

been doing this. When you say that, Jonathan, I can't even fathom it. It seems unreal. What's interesting too is, for those who haven't read it, and then there was a giant book that came out of it after, what's the 30-second download on Free Agent Nation? Free Agent Nation was a book about the rise of people working for themselves. That book came out 17 years ago, and before any of the stuff we take for granted now, before social media, before widespread broadband, before smartphones, before what we now know as the gig economy, sort of the precursor of that. And so it's just a book that looks at how it happened, why people are doing it, where it was going. Yeah. So that was an incredibly prescient book also. Well, thank you. You're kind to say that. Because back then, I think the numbers that

were being thrown around was there are something like 20, 25 million people who are sort of combined between freelancers and small entrepreneurs part of this. It's got to be a multiple of that at this point. Yeah, it seems that way. The numbers are notoriously tricky on this stuff. Well, it's because of the way that the Bureau of Labor Statistics and other statistical agencies count things. Also, the fact that people are in polyemployment. So, I mean, one example, meaning that they do multiple things. And so, you know, I would be a case in point because I'm actually a salaried employee of Daniel Pink Incorporated. So I would actually count as a W2 employee, not as one of these

freelance, elance, small proprietor kind of operations. So because I'm, because I'm incorporated and I literally get a W2 from my company. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. I mean, that would make me actually the same status. Right. So, so it's very hard. It's very hard to untangle it. I think what we know is that it's a decent number and that it's growing ever so, ever so slowly. Do you feel, I mean, I mean, it feels like what you laid out then, it has become really the de facto way. It's the future. I mean, I read something recently that says something like 34, 35% of the population is that now, and by 2020, it was only a couple years off, it's expected to close in closer to 50%, which is kind of stunning. Yeah. I mean, 50% sounds a little high to me, but when you have something like one, you know, if you're talking about something in one third, that, that seems plausible to me.

The other thing is that as people move through their lives, their working lives, they're going to pass through stages of that as well. So it's not like any kind of employment arrangement we have now is fixed forever. And so I think that's one of the big changes since I wrote that book. At the time that I wrote that book, you basically had to leave corporate America, migrate to free agent nation, and denounce your past. And now the analogy I like to use is dual passports. So you have people who can move back and forth. They can do five, six, seven, eight years working for themselves, then go work for a company for five, six, seven, eight years, and then go do the other thing. But I also think the bigger thing that's going on in the workplace is that whether you work for a company or not, whether you're a W-2 or 1099, it's in some ways a less meaningful distinction.

Because what's happening right now are a couple of things. Number one is that people with talent have an edge in the labor market more than ever before. Talented people need organizations less than organizations need talented people. So that gives people with skills that are in demand a lot of leverage. The other thing that's happening is that in general, and this has been going on in the American workforce for 40 years, there's been a shift of risk away from organizations to the individual. So when you look at somebody like me or you, we are taking on some amount of risk by going out on our own, but people who work in organizations are taking on risk as well. And at some level,

we can argue that we're taking on less risk because we're diversifying portfolio, we're diversifying our income streams, we're not relying on one income stream. And, you know, the other thing that's happening in corporate America is that people are paying more for their health insurance. They're not getting the education and training they used to have, so they have to pay that out of their own pocket. We have this move from – we can really empty the room now by talking about pension policy. There's a move from defined benefit pensions where you get a check when you retire to defined contribution 401ks, which is what probably you and I have. So all of us are becoming more independent and being forced – having to deal with all

the virtues and vices of that. Yeah, I mean, which I think is a good thing because it does seem like a lot of the power is shifting, but there's a big assumption there and it's, and you introduced this, which is the word talent. You know, the assumption is that you have actually, that when you are that person, you have a lot of the power. If you have chops, if you've done the work to get to the point where you have that blend of skill craft and, and whatever level DNA plays into that. That's exactly right. And you see this just more broadly in the workplace.

This is one reason we have inequality in the broader economy, in the broader workplace, is that there are greater returns to certain kinds of skills, and there are diminishing returns to other kinds of skills. And so if you have talent, if you have skills that are in demand, your goal, that doesn't matter what work you're doing. If you have skills that are becoming obsolete or that are not in demand, you're in a world of hurt, whether you're working for yourself or you're working for somebody else. Now, that seems self-evident, but what's happening is that the point on that is becoming finer and finer and finer and finer. The returns to certain kinds of skills have become enormous, and the punishment delivered to lack of those skills or skills that are in decay has become much more significant. This is why, I mean, Robert Frank, who's an economist at Cornell, has an idea, he calls it the winner-take-all economy. And that's a lot of what's going on right now. Yeah. I mean, but, and at the same time, the ability to train and the skills that you need to actually participate at that higher level, I think has never been more democratized.

There's a great degree of democratization in it too. My view of this whole thing is that it's generally, generally the glass is half full, not half empty, my view on all of that. And you see it. And I say that having written this book all those years ago, my methodology for it was going out and talking to people, going out and interviewing people. I did hundreds and hundreds of interviews with people who had either made this choice or were forced into it. And in general, most people were more satisfied doing that than they were at a traditional job for a whole host of reasons. Number one, I mean, the main thing was essentially a sense of autonomy. And also, you know, there's a recast bargain too. It used

to be that you would sacrifice some amount of, that you would trade your loyalty for some degree of security. So company gave you security, you gave them loyalty in exchange. But if the company's not giving you security, then what's the bargain? And so I think people are reckoning with that in a very hard headed way. The people who I interviewed, even people today you see, I mean, literally outside this window here in New York City are saying, wait a second, it doesn't make sense for me to put all of my financial capital in one company, one investment. I'm not going to put all my human capital in there. And so, again, I mean, it's become a hackneyed example now.

But, you know, I came over here in an Uber. It took me forever to get here. But I came over here in an Uber. And the people who are driving Ubers are doing this to fill in certain kinds of gaps. They're doing it to supplement their other kind of income. They're doing it because they have two other gigs that they're working on too. Yeah. And they're even among that, they're splitting between Uber and Lyft and VIA.

So even within that, they're diversifying sort of like their opportunities there. It is really interesting sort of like to see how that's happened, to see how 2008, 2009 sort of affected that whole thing. And again, sort of smacked a lot of people into realizing like, oh, this is not the way it used to be. You have over this same 20-year or so span, I think written six books if I'm right. Six books, Jonathan, yes. Although written slash one of them, actually it was manga. It's a graphic novel. Right.

I still had to write it. It still has words. Yeah, it has words. It has fewer words. It has a lot of pictures. It has pictures too. Which was a really fun book. It's kind of interesting because when I look at your trajectory as a writer.

Thank you for calling it a trajectory. Well, that's kind of what I want to ask you to a certain extent. When you look at these sort of like six different books, it averages out to what, one every two, two and a half, three years, something like that. Like three years, yeah. Do you see a through line in it? Well, that's an interesting question. I mean, it's interesting to me.

I'm not sure it's interesting to that many other people, but it depends on, do I see a through line? It depends on my vantage point. It depends on which way I'm looking. So if I look prospectively and knowing my own intentions, knowing what I'm working on, there is absolutely no through line. I don't work on a book and say, oh, this new book, when? It's connected inexorably to the book I wrote before that, which is connected inexorably

to the book I wrote before that. Zero intentional through line. However, like many things in life, including life itself, sometimes it makes sense retrospectively that if you look back on it, one can see a through line. However, like many things in life, including life itself, sometimes it makes sense retrospectively that if you look back on it, one can see a through line. But I have to say, there's no intentional through line. That said, I think that readers might be able to find a through line. Yeah. I don't know. Do you ever, I mean, what do you think? Well, it's interesting because I was looking back at the different books and to me, and then I, there was one thing that actually brought it together to me, for me, which was like the one big thing, which was not a book, which was a couple years ago.

Now you did the project on Nat Geo, Crowd Control, which was essentially a TV series about behavior, human behavior. And that, to me, was the through line. It's like everything you're doing is kind of like looking at the behavior underneath everything. Why do we do what we do in some way, shape, or form? And how does society affect that? Like how do we control outward and how does that control us inward? That's good. I think that's a more astute observation than I can make.

But I mean that very seriously because it's not like – truly, there isn't that kind of intentionality. There isn't that kind of broad conceptual strategy. I basically move to the next project and say, what would be interesting to work on now? What am I curious about? Where do I think there's something new to say? And then obviously put a commercial screen my office where I map out, you know, here are the 12 books I want to write in, you know, the next 30 years. Yeah, which is interesting because I know some writers that do exactly that. And they're just like, okay, this builds on this, which builds on this, which builds on this, which builds my coherent body of work. Your sort of approach seems really to be, this is fascinating to me. And I'm interested enough that I know I'm willing to spend three years diving into this and trying to deconstruct it and figure it out and then turn it into something that matters

to other people. Bingo. Well said. I could not, I seriously, I cannot put it better than that. The other thing about it is, is that, is that, to the extent I can offer any guidance on this, is that for the people who do map that out, there's a logical fall'm going to do, the fourth thing I'm going to do. When they get to the fourth thing, what they're not reckoning with is that you're a different person then than you are when you're constructing that chart on your wall. And so you're dealing with, at some level, a different human being because we learn and we grow and we change. And that's a big factor too. Yeah. How much of that, so I interviewed somebody

a chunk of years back and it was fascinating because when I read the epilogue in the book, he said he will never commit to, and this is somebody who's like a journalist, who's written a bunch of books. And similarly, it takes years to write a book. There's extensive research. And he said in the epilogue, he said, I will never commit to writing a book unless I believe going into it that the process of writing the book will in some way change me as a human being and as a writer along the way. So really, it's interesting that you say that because I think we don't necessarily think about that. Do you feel like the books you write in some way meaningfully change you or the way you relate to the world? I think so. I mean, I think it's true. I think it's true of any reasonably significant experience. So if you take, I think if someone were to take a job, an intense job that was a three-year's hard to get fired, et cetera. But you know, it's an intense three-year, a three-year project. I think any,

any kind of intense three-year project is going to change people. Right. But you don't go into it saying to yourself, like, this is an important thing that I need to happen in the process of writing this book, or at least not intentionally. No way. I'm not that thoughtful. The other thing that you said was interesting to me also, which is that you do consider the potential commercial viability of a project before you go into it, which makes sense to me. Because if you're married, you got kids in schools and you're devoting three years of your life to this. But in sort of the world of writing, there's a real split about, you know, like people say, like, you should never do that. And other people are like, well, no, I mean, if you want to treat it like an enterprise.

Yeah, it is the it is never the first screen ever. The commercial screen. It is basically a little check. It's a check at the end. It's one of the things that comes last just to make sure it's sort of like, you know, I'm going to go out for a bike ride here. I know where I'm going. I know, I know how long I want to ride for. All right, let me just make sure my tires are inflated. It's, you know, it's that kind of check and things like that. So if I wanted to write at one point, I mean, this is embarrassing, but at one point I was convinced that farm subsidies were ruining

the United States economy. I had this theory that farms, that the amount of money that you've spent to subsidize farmers who aren't really farmers is basically large agriculture companies, that farm subsidies were destroying this country. And I had this idea. It's like, okay, I should write like a short book on farm subsidies. That doesn't pass the commercial screen. Okay.

And the other thing about it, more important. A small number of people who And the other thing about it, more important, small number of people who'd be really more important, more important, more important is, you know, part of me also, when I started thinking about it was,

do I want to spend three or four years, you know, three years working on a topic like that, but it's really, it's so, so I'm sort of at some level, I'm in the middle. I would never lead with that.

Like I can think of, you know, dozen commercially viable books that I would never want to write. So I can think of, you know, dozen commercially viable books that I would never want to write. So I look at it and say, what am I interested in? What am I curious about? And the other thing is that if I'm curious about something, that itself is something of a commercial screen. Because if I'm curious about it, probably other people are going to be curious about it because I'm not that special, right? It's not like, oh, I'm going to have this unique curiosity about something that no one else will care about. No, not at all. It's like, if I'm,

if I'm wondering like, you know, whatever, it's like, you know, how much of our time do we spend selling stuff? And what does that mean? What is it that really motivates people? How do we get better at timing? If I'm wondering about that kind of stuff, I think other people are probably wondering about that kind of stuff. And so it's really just the, you know, just it's really, let's just make sure there's air in the tires before we go for this ride. Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense.

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. 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, 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. The TV project. Yes.

That seems like this one giant aberration in what you're doing. What happened there? I was just approached by a production company that wanted to do this. I love the idea. I thought it was great. I thought I could add something to it. And it was a great experience. It was totally fun.

And I learned a lot. And one of the, one of the things that I learned, I mean, it was one of those, you know, as someone who's been a writer for most of my life, going to another medium was really interesting and really challenging.

And I learned a huge amount. I mean, it was, it was, I loved it because my, you know, as a, you know, like, let's say I start working on a new book. Okay. It's a seventh book. I'm still going to learn stuff, but the learning curve is going to be not as steep as it was for the first book. And so it's sort of exhilarating to go to something where your learning curve is far steeper than it is ordinarily, because you're dealing with an entirely different medium, a different way of telling stories, a different way of conveying ideas. Yeah, which clearly for somebody, I mean, you've got a very apparent love of learning and like fierce curiosity about things and about the world.

The ability to drop into something where it's sort of like forced beginner's mind and I know nothing. It sounds like that would terrify a lot of people, but it sounds like for you, it's kind of like, let's do this. Yeah. Although, I mean, the subject matter was something that I was comfortable with. So that was that, that, so there was that familiarity. It's really just the, it's really just the, the, the, it's really just the medium that was, that was, that was new. And the other thing about it is, is that unlike a book where, you know, it's mostly me and there's some other people, obviously some really talented people

helping publicize it and helping edit it and whatnot. This is much more of a team endeavor. Television is television production is much more of a team endeavor. And that was really interesting too. How do I fit into a team? How do I, what role do I play on a team? Yeah. Have you explored other forms of media? Are you, are you pod curious at this point? I actually have, see, I actually had a, tried a podcast several years ago. I think it was a little bit ahead of the voters that was, that I thought was fairly interesting, but it was so time consuming, I stopped doing it. And then I started doing it again. I have this podcast called the 1-3-20 podcast that HubSpot is sponsoring. And so, so, so I like that.

I like different, I like experimenting with differented different media. Let's talk about timing. So you spent the last three years exploring this question of time and timing. It manifested in the creation of a really interesting book called When. Why this question? Why are you so fascinated? You know, it's very similar to what we were talking about before. So I wrote this book basically because I was, well, I guess it was curiosity and frustration together. Because I was making all kinds of decisions about when to do things in my own life.

When should I do this kind of work? When should I do that kind of work? When should I exercise? When should I start a project? When should I abandon a project? I was making them in a completely half-assed way. I can say half-assed, right? Yeah.

It's a podcast. You can pretty much say anything. I was making them in a completely half-assed way. And can say half ass, right? Yeah. It's a podcast. You can pretty much say anything. I was making them in a completely half ass way. And that frustrated me. And I felt like there's got to be a better way to make these decisions. And so I looked around for some guidance. It didn't exist. Then because one of my first moves in sort of understanding things is to say, okay, is there any research on this? I started looking at research on this, and that took me down this rabbit hole that was fascinating and also vast. That's the thing that really blew me away. There's so much research on this. And the reason I think that it hasn't been fully harvested

is that it's in so many different fields, in so many different domains. And in the academic world, you know, the biologists don't talk to the psychologists. Yeah, everyone's siloed. Exactly. They're super siloed. You know, the macroeconomists don't talk to the microeconomists who don't talk to the developmental economists. They don't talk to the psychologists. Psychologists don't talk to the anthropologists. The anthropologists don't talk to the endocrinologists. I mean, and what I found is that across all of these domains, you have these scholars who are asking very similar questions. What's the effect of time of day on how we feel and how we behave? How do beginnings shape us?

How do midpoints shape us? How do endings shape us? How do groups synchronize in time? How does the very way we think about time affect what we do and how we do it? And so there were all, there's basically a similar basket of questions, but they were being asked in, you know, it's almost like the world before telecommunications, like these villages that never talked to each other were exploring the same basic things. Yeah. It's kind of mind boggling to know that with how connected we are in every conceivable way these days, that there is still so much siloing, still so much non-communication and miscommunication going on among fiercely intelligent, devoted, accomplished researchers in all sorts of different fields.

And so many of the answers to one person's question are out there in another domain, and they're just not aware of it and talking about it. You're absolutely right about that. Part of it has to do with, like in academics, with the structure and incentives in academic careers. There is zero incentive for a... So let's say you're a young economist pursuing tenure. There's pretty much no incentive for you ever to talk to an endocrinologist, certainly before you have tenure. What you want to do is you want to be in the right journals in your field over and over again. And once you have tenure, you see people who sometimes will branch out and do, you know, more cross-disciplinary things. But at the outset, you have people who, you know, there's a,

the incentives are all for this within domain specialization. So that you carve out, so you are the leading expert on the macroeconomy of island nations, which is cool, which is interesting. But it could be that the macroeconomy of island nations has something in common with what molecular biologists are doing. And you would never know that. And at the same time, there's not only disincentive, but you might even argue almost punishment for sharing what you're discovering in popular media. So there isn't even this opportunity for a broader audience to say, oh, well, this connects to this. These two people should be talking. No, I think that's an interesting point. I think that there are some, not all, but I think there are some people in academics who worry, the phrase they always use is dumbing down. I don't want to dumb down what I have to say about astronomy in order to talk to

a popular audience. I don't want to dumb down what I have to say about economics. And yet the people, and I disagree vehemently with that. But it creates room for people like Neil deGrasse Tyson, who is not a scholar, who is not a professor, but who is a good, who has a strong background in astronomy, astrophysics and whatnot, and is a good explainer. And so you got, you know, all these astronomers out there and all these astrophysicists out there who can't explain to a popular audience. It's a market opportunity for somebody like Neil deGrasse Tyson. Right. Okay. So let's talk about somebody like Neil deGrasse Tyson. Right.

Okay. So let's talk about somebody like Dan Pinkson. Yes. Because you are not a scientist. I am not. You're an intelligent guy who knows how to research and knows how to write. So when you take three years and you devour all this research and you put it through the pink lens and you share it in a way where common people can understand it and take action

on it, how does, have you then had conversations back with the scientific community about how that lands with them? Yeah. Yeah. And absolutely. And also I also talk to them while I'm doing this to make sure that I get it, to make sure that I've gotten it, make sure that I've gotten it right. And so I've gotten emails from many of the people whose studies I've written about in this book, when thanking me saying, Hey, thanks a lot for mentioning that. I don't think anybody had ever read that paper. Thanks a lot for thanks a lot for people who read the actual academic. Right. Thanks a lot for, thanks a lot for, for, for mentioning it.

But I'm, I do think it's a conversation. I think part of it also is like the academics, a lot of their training is very specialized training. And so, you know, there's room for people who are generalists and translators. Yeah. And especially if you can bring academic wisdom and make it applied and digestible, then all of a sudden people can interact with it. And what I see, which I'm really inspired by, is that when that happens, and then people read, you know, Wen or any number of books that sort of like have that translative effect. And then, you know, like tens of thousands, millions of people read this, start to run their own N of

one experiments in their own lives. And then we start to crowdsource large data sets around these ideas, way, you know, like, oftentimes, thousands and thousands of times larger than the actual data set of the research, and that gets reported back to the researchers, then you have all sorts of really interesting new realizations and questions. I agree with that. I agree with that completely. I mean, there are different degrees of rigor, but I agree on some kind of crowdsourced study. But I do think that that is absolutely the case. And one of the things that I'm convinced of that I might not have been convinced of 20 years ago is,

like 20 years ago, if you told me I would spend as much time as I am writing about science, I probably would have been slightly surprised. Not shocked, but slightly surprised. But I'm becoming more and more convinced, exactly as you're saying, that in many domains of our life, we have to act more like scientists. We have to know, not say, you know, know what to do, know what the answer is, but say, hmm, what's the right question?

And what kind of experiment can I run to help get closer to the correct answer to that question? And, you know, and so we see this already online with A-B testing, but I think that A-B testing is a much more versatile, powerful tool. And so for instance, like managers inside of organizations, I think that they have to start thinking about when, you know, they'll look around saying, oh, how should I schedule my staff? Or how often should I give people feedback? And, you? And the honest answer to that question from anybody is, I don't know, but you can test it. So, you know, it's not going to be in a peer reviewed journal, but you can say, you know what, I'm going to give people feedback at the end of every day for two weeks. Do that and see how it is. Then I'm going to give people feedback midday

every day for two weeks. See how that goes. Now, again, this isn't necessarily the scientific method, but it's a different approach from saying, I know what to do and I'm going to go do it. You're basically saying, I think I know what the right question is. I have two alternative answers to it. I have a hypothesis about which one is right. Let me go out and test it. And I really think that that's how we have to start in organizations and in our own lives doing things. Yeah. I mean, it's almost, it's like, it's also kind of blending like the agile slash lean development approach to scientific. Yeah. So agile is very, it's a very good point. Agile is a, is a close cousin of not a sibling of what I'm, of close cousin, if not a sibling of what I'm talking about. But I do think that it is that the form of scientific thinking, I don't mean knowing about biology or knowing about physics. I mean, what is the scientific method? The scientific method is, I have a question, I have a hypothesis. I have a way to test it. Yeah. And then just go about doing it. Let's talk about the ideas that you share

in this current book. You kind of actually laid out the macro categories. So maybe let's spend a little bit of time on each one of those. Turns out that timing within a day matters on a lot of different levels for a lot of different things. You identify the sort of three cycles that we, just as individual human beings, tend to go through during any particular day. Take me through those. So we generally move through the day in these three stages, as you say, a peak, a trough, a recovery. Now that's true for our mood. If you look at all kinds of different measures of mood, whether it is sociologists looking at the emotional content of tweets, to people self-reporting how

they're feeling over the course of the day, In general, our mood follows that pattern, peak, trough, recovery. And then that pattern of mood then has an effect on our performance. And so you see things like kids scoring lower on standardized tests in the afternoon versus in the morning. You see some remarkable research out of the LA Unified School District where kids who take math in the morning do better than kids who take math in the afternoon in a significant way. You see some remarkable research out of the LA Unified School District where kids who take math in the morning do better than kids who take math in the afternoon in a significant way. You see all these horrible things that happen in healthcare in afternoons versus mornings. And so what you see is- You mean like within doctors and healthcare providers and hospitals?

Yeah, some horrifying things. So if you look at hand washing in hospitals over the course of a day, big drop in afternoons. You look at anesthesia errors, four times more likely at 3 p.m. than at 9 a.m. I mean, just a parade of, it's just a parade of horrors. And what we know, again, is in general, we move through the day in these three stages, peak, trough, recovery. Most of us move through it in that order. People who are night owls go in the reverse order. But what it tells us, what all this research on the pattern today tells us is this. One, our cognitive abilities are not the same throughout the day. Our abilities, especially our brain power abilities, change throughout the day. You are not the same at 9 a.m. as you are at 3 p.m. as you are at 7 p.m. I'm not saying that you're worse.

It's not like you're progressively worse, but your cognitive abilities are not the same at different times of day. Second thing is that the difference in our abilities is significant. It's not like, you know, it's not like a one degree, one percent difference. It's some significant differences in our performance over the course of a day. And the other thing that's the most important thing, and this is the thing that really surprised me in doing this research, is that what you do, so much of it is dependent on the nature of the task. And that's really the key thing here. So during our peak, which for most of us is the morning, we should be doing our analytic work. That's work that requires focus, attention, heads down, and vigilance.

That's the word that's always used in this research, vigilance. You can bat away distractions. So writing a legal brief, analyzing data. We're better off doing that during our peak, which for most of us is the morning. For night owls, it's later in the day. During the trough, the trough is not good for very much, right? This early to mid-afternoon period, it really isn't. But what we can do is that we can move some of our routine, less important work there, work that doesn't require a lot of cognitive firepower or creativity. So answer, there's a lot of stuff we do in the course

of a day that is pretty routine. I think of it as like, I have so many emails that I answered that don't require incredible thoughtfulness, incredible creativity, incredible analysis. It's just, you know, yes or no, you know, yes, no questions. Do you want to do this? You know, do you want to, you know, would you rather go to, you know, this venue or that venue? Do you, you know, have you ever heard of this guy before? Can you make an introduction to this? Really routine stuff. Do that during the trough. And then during the recovery is a very Do you, you know, have you ever heard of this guy before? Can you make an introduction to this person? Really routine stuff. Do that during the trough. And then during the recovery is a very interesting period.

We have rising mood. Our mood rises again, but we're less vigilant and we're less vigilant, I should say. And so that makes it a better time for things that require a little bit more looseness. Conversations like these, for instance. I do a lot of my interviews now later in the day and in the early evening because for the way that I interview for a lot of things, I don't need I'm not doing a deposition. I don't have to be like locked down and intensely analytical about it. I want a little bit of looseness. And so essentially, if we move our analytic work to the peak or administrative work to the trough and our our kind of creative insight, conceptual work to the recovery, we're going to do a little bit better. And what the research tells us is that time of day, just time of day, explains about 20%

of the variance in how people perform on these cognitive tasks. That's a big deal. I mean, that's huge. If you talk about 20% productivity or efficiency or 20% better ideas in a business or an organization or a foundation, whatever it is, that's huge. I mean, people bring in consultants and pay a gajillion dollars to try and create a 20% gain in something. So to know that simply potentially reorganizing the way you just do your work or do the stuff that matters most during the day can potentially give you that boost. And also in life and death scenarios, but this is interesting, right? So how do you deal with

this then? Because if you say that in life and death scenarios, let's talk about medicine, there is a very defined cratering of this 20% of negativity, like if it happens in mid-afternoon, yet you can't control the timing of emergencies. You can't control, and a lot of negativity, like if it happens in mid-afternoon. Yet, you can't control the timing of emergencies. You can't control, and a lot of times, you know, like an OR has to be used from X hour in the morning until X hour at night. Like there has to be somebody in there all day long for a hospital to pay its bills. How do you deal with that? Well, I write about that in the book. And I think the medical profession has done a decent job of reckoning with that. In some cases, what you have to do is you have to, you have to, first of all, like all of this stuff, you have to be aware that something's going on. You have to be aware that

you're not performing the same way at different times of day. And so what's happening, and I write about going to the University of Michigan Medical Center, standing in on a surgery, and what they, you know, the surgery was in the, it was in the afternoon trough. And what these doctors and other healthcare professionals did is before the surgery started, they took a timeout. They took a step back from the operating table. They said, you know, we're going to look for ways. We have this waning vigilance, this waning mental energy. So what we're going to do is we're going to be intentional, take a step back and go through a checklist and say, we're going to have to do this, this, this, this, this. What are we missing? What do we need to do? So rather than just kind of willy nilly go into something that

you literally take a time out and that can be a way to restore your vigilance. And I think that we should be doing more of these kinds of things. That's for those, as you say, for these very high stakes kinds of encounter. If somebody gets hit by a bus and goes at two o'clock in the afternoon and goes to the hospital, goes to the emergency room, they can't say, oh, come back tomorrow. We're going to be more mentally acute, you know? And so there are things to do to raise our acuity back up. So for instance, I mean, let's talk about the healthcare. So in this study on this big decline in hand washing inside of hospitals, one of the best, most effective remedies was giving, it was mostly nurses in the sample, giving nurses more breaks and a different kind of break, particularly a social break. Give nurses more

breaks and social break, hand washing goes back up. I mean, the educators among your listeners will find this completely a no-duh conclusion. But in Denmark, what they found was that the students who were taking the test in the afternoon who were doing worse, that a way to get their test scores back up, give them a 20 to 30- minute break beforehand to get something to eat and run around. And then their scores go back up. So we can, it's not like we're hostage to any of this stuff. What we have to do is we have to be, and this is my, this is like the word of the year for me, is intentional. We have to be intentional. And we're not intentional when it comes to matters of timing. We're intentional when it comes to matters of timing. We're intentional when

it comes to matters of what we do, because we all have a to-do list. We're intentional when it comes to who we do it with and how we do it. But when it comes to when, we are not intentional about it. And we should be, because the evidence is overwhelming that it matters. It matters a lot. It matters a hell of a lot. And if there's one thing that I want to see happen is out there in response to this basket of ideas, it's this. Think about how we schedule meetings in organizations. There's only one criterion we use, availability. When is somebody available? We don't think what kind of meeting is this going to be? If it's an analytic meeting, maybe we should do it at this time of day. If it's a creative meeting, maybe we should do it

at this time of day. We have this Bermuda Triangle in the middle of the day. Maybe we shouldn't do an important meeting during that period. Are we dealing with people who are better and more acute in the morning? Are we dealing with people who are more mentally acute in the afternoon? Are we dealing with people who are more creative in the morning? Are we dealing with people who are more mentally acute in the afternoon? Are we dealing with people who are more creative in the morning or dealing with people who are more creative in the afternoon? We give zero thought to that in scheduling meetings.

It's all availability, which is a strategic blunder. Yeah, I so agree with that. I mean, it's interesting because I've started blocking out windows in my calendar. I've been doing this for a while now because I realized, you know, like my quote chronotype, my is, I do have this, you know, readily identified. Are you more of a Larker and Aller in between?

I am. Well, it's kind of interesting. All right. So this brings up another issue, which is parents shift workers, right? Sometimes you're forced into a mode of work that doesn't allow you to accommodate your natural patterns, right? Sometimes you're forced into a mode of work that doesn't allow you to accommodate your natural patterns, right? So if you're a parent of an under two-year-old kid- Oh yeah, no, you're done. Right. It's all bits are off, or if you're a shift worker. So for me, when I was in law school,

for example, like years and years ago, I would go home, I would watch Magnum P.I. in the late afternoon because that was my chaff. And then I would wake up and then I would study until three in the morning because that's when I was completely alert. But how old were you? Late 20s. Late 20s, okay. So I'm different now. Yeah, but also, but you make a lot of good points here. So number one is that when it comes to our chronotype, let's talk about a chronotype.

Chronotype is basically what's our natural tendency to wake up early and go to sleep early, wake up late and go to sleep late or somewhere in the middle. And people's chronotypes change over time. So your chronotype and my chronotype has changed over time. Little kids, as you know, as I know, are very early. They wake up early. They run around like crazy people right from the outset. But around the age of 14 or 15 or so, people's chronotypes start changing. People become much more like owls. They have a shift literally two and sometimes three hours later. It's all biological. And that period of intense owliness lasts till about 24, 25. And then in general, people return to greater, ever so slowly to greater larkiness. In general, that's broad patterns. Men move back to larkiness more slowly than women,

which is one reason why men and women of the same age, heterosexual couples of the same age, often have different sleeping patterns. Often the man is going to sleep 45 minutes, an hour, hour and a half later than the woman. But then you have some people who are just owls. That's who they are. They're late types. And so part of it is your chronotype is changing. The other thing is that you mentioned little kids.

Yeah, if your kid gets up and you're an owl, you gotta get up, all right? And that's hard. It's hard getting up with little kids in the first place. It's harder when you're an owl. You mentioned shift work. There's a lot of research in shift work in this whole domain called chronobiology, the study of our biological rhythms.

In fact, the three guys who won the Nobel Prize in medicine last year were chronobiologists. The research, there's a lot of research on shift work. And it says it is terrible for us. Shift work is terrible for people's physical and mental health. That if you do shift work for a long period of time, there are serious consequences, negative consequences to it. Shift work is terrible. And so there are some times where the harsh realities of life say we have to go against our type. But people pay a very severe price for that.

Yeah. And then you have people where, or industries where like the entire industry is built on a 24 hour work cycle. So how do you like, there's no easy answer. There isn't an easy answer. So, so if you think about, you know, they go back to a hospital, a hospital, certain hospitals have to be open all the time. You know, what I would advise is that you have to have people who are staffing from, say, 12 at midnight to 6 in the morning. I would do some serious rotation of that. I would not have somebody do that for several years. It's going to be deleterious to that person's health. We know from just any time of day that taking breaks is extremely important in restoring our mood, in restoring our mental acuity, in restoring our sense of, you know, sort of reducing fatigue.

And so if you're working through the middle of the night, breaks are also important. It's interesting also that when you see what's happening with kids, the pressure that's put on kids, high school students, college students, basically anyone who's in rigorous academic thing these days, the striving, the inhuman and inhumane almost striving for perfectionism and the expectation about performance is not only crushing psychologically, it's also damaging to the ability to actually perform on the level that you want to perform. And what really scares me is that the increase in prevalence of kids who are self-medicating

with things like Adderall and other things to artificially basically treat their vigilance and create a level of, okay, so I don't want the troughs anymore. I want sustained hypervigilance for days and days and days. I mean, it's like a disaster in waiting. Maybe not even in waiting. It's a disaster. I think it's a disaster unfolding before our eyes. Yeah. It just seems like so widespread. You talk about one of the other sort of like buckets that you talk about is this, we'll kind of bring them together like it's so widespread. You talk about one of the other sort of like buckets that you talk about is this,

we'll kind of bring them together because it's like a fluid thing, beginnings, middles, and ends, and the importance of those things. Take me there a little bit. Yeah. So one of the things about our lives, any domain of our lives, is that they're episodic, that we tend to think that the time and our way of experience time is very linear. But in some ways, it comes in batches more than anything else. So if you think about a relationship, it's a series of episodes, a career series of episodes.

Being a parent is a series of episodes. And episodes, so if we have this episodic nature of our lives, episodes have beginnings, middles, and ends. Stories have beginnings, middles, and ends. And beginnings, middles, and ends have very different effects on how we behave, how we feel. And there's some really interesting research, once again, splattered across different disciplines,

how do beginnings affect us? So everything from the world of, so let's take beginnings, the world of economics. Lisa Kahn at Yale has some chilling data, I think it's chilling data, showing that if you graduate from college, imagine two people, one graduates from college in a recession, one graduates from college in a boom time, that that shows up in their wages 20 years later, that the labor market conditions when you graduate from college have an effect on what you're earning 20 years later. But what do you do with that information? Because you can't control it. No, but exactly right. So that's something where the individual can't control it. So what you need is you need a collective solution. So to me, that is akin to almost like a natural disaster.

So I have some ideas in the book. So what do you do about that? So one thing that I think you could do is the following. Let's say that if the unemployment rate hits a certain level in your year of graduation, maybe you should have your student loans forgiven. Maybe you should have your student loans postponed. Maybe if the unemployment level hits a certain number, that there should be almost like the Army Corps of Engineers fund, there should be some funds unlocked to help people find jobs, to help create different kinds of jobs. That's not anything that one person can handle, but it shows how much beginnings shape everything. There are areas of beginnings where people can do something.

There's some great research out of the University of Pennsylvania showing the power of what are called fresh start dates. So certain dates operate as temporal landmarks. That is, they stand out from the march of other days in the way that physical landmarks stand out in space. They get us to slow down and they get us to do this kind of mental accounting where we relegate our bad selves to the past and like a business, open up a fresh ledger on our new, much more awesome selves. So examples. New Year's Day would be the most, New Year's resolutions would be the most robust example of that.

However, this is from Katie Milkman, Heng-Tien Dai, and Jason Reese have shown that we're more likely to start a diet and succeed in a diet if we do it on a temporal landmark. So that would be do it on a Monday rather than on a Thursday. Do it on the first of the month. Start on do it on a Monday rather than on a Thursday. Do it on the first of the month. Start on the first of the month rather than on the 13th of the month. Start it on the day after your birthday rather than the day before your birthday. And so that's one area where we 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. 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,

whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging 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. The Apple Watch Series 10, 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. Now, does it actually make sense to wait until Monday? It depends. I mean, it depends on the situation. It depends on how far off the wagon you fall. And I think if you slip up once, I wouldn't wait to reboot. But if you're running, if it's like, okay, I'm sliding away or more likely with people, it's like I haven't even gotten started in the first place, then I would absolutely recommend

using those fresh start dates. They give you a fighting chance to do better. But you raise a really interesting point, because even when we're talking about the stuff at the unit of the day, moving your analytic work to this period and your administrative work to that period and your insight work to another period, there's no guarantee in any of this. We live in a probabilistic universe here. What you're talking about here is boosting your odds.

So if you have a 18% chance of doing good work in general, but then you move things to the right time of day, and that increases you to a 27% chance of doing good work, I'll totally take that. I mean, it doesn't guarantee you're going to be great, but it boosts your odds. That's what all this stuff does. It boosts your odds.

And the same thing with the fresh start date. It doesn't mean, oh, I'm going to do it on the day after my birthday. That just means I'm going to succeed. No, it doesn't mean you're going to succeed. What it means is like you've dialed up your probability a little bit. Yeah.

I think when we talk about beginnings and tying them to specific dates or dates, I think people can feel that intuitively. The thing that maybe is less intuitive is the importance of middles. Oh, yeah. That was a revelation to me. Midpoints have this very interesting effect on us that was completely invisible to me. Like, not – I don't mean the effect of midpoints was invisible to me. I mean the existence of midpoints was invisible to me i mean the

existence of midpoints was invisible to me like midpoints were a thing so but it makes it you don't have to be a genius to figure this out i mean if something has a beginning and an end by its very nature it has a midpoint and midpoints have this dual effect sometimes they bring us down other times they fire us up and so you see this in most prominently in what's called the U-curve of wellbeing. So that people's overall wellbeing is, ends up being higher in their twenties and thirties, dips a little bit in their forties, bottoms in their fifties, and then begins to climb back up again. So. Man, I'm 52. I'm like. You are at the, you are at the, you are at the bottom, Jonathan.

So that's the bad news. The good news is that you're on, is that you're on your way back up, but you also see things in how, and how people behave. There's some interesting stuff about, you have people do a task that requires some kind of focus and conscientiousness multiple times. And, and they will do be very conscientious at the beginning very conscientious at the end but kind of slide in the middle there's a there's a fun paper by a yellow fish bucket chicago on hanukkah candle lighting so you have hanukkah has eight days eight nights jews who

celebrate the holiday supposed to light one candle on night one two candles on night two three candles on night three etc etc but when she looked at what people did they one candle on night one, two candles on night two, three candles on night three, et cetera, et cetera. But when she looked at what people did, they light them on night one, light them on night eight, kind of space out in the middle. And so there's something about hitting the middle that's sort of, oh, you know, I'm a little bit weary here. On the other hand, there's other research showing midpoints can have the opposite effect. So there's some interesting research on teams, for instance. Connie Gersig did this research where she went out and videotaped and audiotaped teams in action, all kinds of project teams. And, you know, just literally recorded on video and on audio everything that they were doing and went back and analyzed. And what she found was something really peculiar, that if a team has a certain amount of time to do a project, during the beginning, they do very

little. But at a certain point in this sudden burst of activity, they get going. And what she found is that that moment of the sudden burst of activity was invariably the midpoint. You give a team 34 days, they get started on day 17. You give a team 11 days, they get started on day six. Over and over again, it was this midpoint that was galvanizing people. And then, so we take that and we sprinkle in some big data from the NBA, showing that there's some great research on NBA halftime scores. Now, basketball is a game that has a midpoint. I mean, literally, it's one of those few domains of life where everything stops and we say, hello, hello, hello, we're at a midpoint now. And what this research showed is that teams that are ahead at halftime are more likely to win the

game. Not a shocker, but there's one exception. Teams that are behind by one are more likely to win than teams that are ahead by one. Being down by one was as advantageous as being ahead by two. And so what we can do with this thing, and this is, I think, a good example of where all this research is, because you have, on midpoints, you've got people who are studying, you know, well-being over time in various countries. You've got people who are running experiments on cutting out shapes and Hanukkah candle lighting. You've got people who are organizational scholars who are looking at how teams really operate. You have primatologists who are looking at ape behavior, and actually,

apes have a midlife slump as well. Then you have economists looking at NBA scores, and at some level, they're asking the same kinds of questions and finding the same kinds of things that midpoints can either bring us down or fire us up. And that itself yields some things that we can do. We can be aware of midpoints. And we can be volitional about how we approach those midpoints. We can say, oh, it's a midpoint. Oh, man, I feel like a 52-year-old guy on the fourth night of Hanukkah. Kind of, oh, I'm giving up. Or we can say, no, you know what? We can be like those teams at the midpoint of a project and say, uh-oh, I got to get going. And one way to get going is to imagine you're a little bit behind. There's other experimental research showing that if people

reach a midpoint and they feel like they're a little behind, they really bring it. If they know that they're ahead, they become complacent. If they know they're far behind, they give up. Right, they just give up. Exactly. But being a little bit behind at the midpoint is galvanizing. Yeah. And I've experienced that. And I think anyone who's written a book has experienced that actually. I mean, I know I have that exact arc when I have, if you give me like X amount of months or years to write a book, I guarantee I'm not really going to hit the ground running until the 51% part. But again, if I'm so far behind at that point, then I'm just busted.

And you see the same thing in entrepreneurship also. I mean, it's literally called the trough of sorrow with startups where there's all the excitement and the energy and all this stuff and everyone's ramped up and running on adrenaline in the beginning. And then reality hits and then like long, crazy hours hit and you go into this space, like, you know, Joseph Campbell's abyss and you just don't know, you know, and everything sucks and you question everything in the world. And, and then, you know, those who make it through the trough of sorrow and start to rise back out, then you have this, you rise up the backside of the you, but it's almost unavoidable. I don't know if I know anyone that has built a successful endeavor without going through that. I certainly haven't been able to avoid it.

Interesting. Trough of sorrow. I like it. Yeah. It's kind of a fun name also. One last thing I want to circle around too, because this is kind of fascinating. Well, actually, we should talk about ends also, right? So let's come full circle on that.

Because this is another thing that I think we don't pay a kind of fascinating. Well, actually we should talk about ends also, right? So let's come full circle on that because this is another thing that I think we don't pay a lot of attention to beginnings. We focus on a lot middles. They kind of, like you said, don't really exist. What's the importance of endings? Oh man. Endings have a huge effect on many aspects of our lives. I mean, there's so much cool stuff on ending. So, so one thing that endings do is they can energize us so in a sort of analogous way to the the midpoint so and this goes and this is actually goes back to some some long-standing research in the field of psychology a guy named clark hall who almost 180 years ago came up with something called the goal gradient hypothesis that said, studying rats, you put a rat on a raceway and put

some food at the end, the closer they get to the food, the faster they're going to run. And that turns out to be still reasonably, reasonably true. And so one of my favorite studies in the book is from Adam Alter and Hal Hirschfield. And it has to do with when are people likely to run their first marathon. And it turns out the ages at which people are likely to run their first marathon. And it turns out the ages at which people are likely to run the first marathon are 29, 39, 49, 59, because they're hitting the end of this completely made up thing called a life decade. And that gets them energized. So endings can help us energize. This is one reason why in certain circumstances, deadlines can be energizing. There's just a lot of great research in here. It's a little counterintuitive.

Even things like if you give a team, if you give people a gift certificate, give some people a short amount of time to use a gift certificate, other people a long amount of time to use a gift certificate, the people who have the less time are more likely to use it because the ending is salient. So all kinds of great stuff on that. Endings also have a huge effect on how we remember things, on how we remember experiences, even on how we evaluate overall lives. There's some really powerful research showing that the way that we assess even the morality of people's lives is hinged very much on how they were at the very end. Like we will discount literally decades of a person's life and evaluate their morality, how good of a human being they were based on how they behaved at the very end. So people who are, so it's a little alarming. So people who are jerks for most of

their life, but then are like nice at the end are remembered as well as somebody who has been a good guy all of his life and then maybe has some rough years at the very end and was kind of an ass. Those people are treated comparably. And you see it in more mundane things like how do customers encode experiences? So, I mean, best example of this is like look at Yelp reviews and how many of them talk about what happened at the end of the meal. So endings do that. But I think one of the things that endings really do is, is many cases, endings of all kinds force to search for meaning. And so you see it in, in the life cycle of, of, of how many friends people have over the course of a lifetime, their friendship networks decline significantly when they get older,

but it's basically because they're only concentrating on the inner circle. They're getting rid of the middle circle and outer circle because they don't want to waste their time doing that kind of stuff. If you look at even friendship networks in a college career, college seniors operate very much like senior citizens and pruning their social networks to the core. You see preferences for people for endings, preferences for rising sequences at the end rather than declining sequences at the end rather than declining sequences at the end. But it goes back to this idea of being aware and intentional about it. And so there are a lot of opportunities for businesses, especially to be much more

conscious of how an experience, a transaction, whatever ends, because that's going to be in many, many cases how the person on the other end of the experience of the transaction encodes it, how that person evaluates it and remembers it. Yeah. I mean, and it's kind of funny because it comes full circle to what we were talking about when you first got here, which was, you know, your extremely long ride on Uber. But one of the things that I think- Which almost didn't have an end. Right. The midpoint that I thought was a midpoint was actually the beginning. And still, one of the reasons that I think Uber and services like that have kind of exploded is

because, and this is what was sold to me when nobody really knew what they were. And they're like, Oh, you have to install this app was that you don't have to fumble with your credit card. You don't have to figure out the tip. You don't have to take out anything. You pull up to your place, you open the door, you say, thank you. And you're done. And, and that was like, so it gave this simplicity and delight to the ending of this experience that a lot of people were talking about. That's an interesting point. I didn't think about that. Yeah. Another thing that came up while you're talking is, you know, cause we're sort of like in the tail end of the Olympics is I've had the chance to speak with a number of Olympians, people who have both metal, they're not metal. And what I found fascinating was that, you know,

this is sort of like the ending to them. They trained for oftentimes years to get to this point. And then when this thing ends, even if they've gotten exactly what they came for, they fall into this deep malaise and depression. It's sort of like this deep, you know, this intense, intense, intense seeking of an end. And this quest forise and depression. It's sort of like this deep, you know, this intense, intense, intense seeking of an end and this quest for meaning and performance and accomplishment.

Once that goes away and they're still here, they're left in this space of now what? And it can be devastating. Right, right. That makes perfect sense. Because they're, yeah, they're at an end, but, and I know there has to be a beginning, but they're in limbo. They're in purgatory. Yeah, it's like they're beyond purpose, and they have to reclaim some sense of purpose in a different way. Purpose purgatory. P2. I feel like this is probably a good place for us to come full circle. So as we sit here, this is a a good place for us to come full circle. So as we sit here,

this is a question I always circle back to. And it's funny because when we first taped video, I don't know if I was actually asking this question. I forgot to go back and see if you answered the first time. It's a good life project. So if I offer up this phrase to live a good life, what comes up? I think that living a good life requires, I think it's in some level pretty simple. It's basically doing something that matters and being with people you love. I mean, I can elaborate on that, but I think it's actually relatively simple. And I'm curious about how deep that actually goes. I mean, what I look at from the vantage point of someone who's your age is a lot of things

that I thought mattered 25 years ago don't matter at all. And there are a lot of, there's so many things that are just not worth getting stressed out about. On the other hand, there's certain things that are enormously, enormously important. And what's important is your relationships, especially your close relationships. Those are, those are much more important than I realized 25 years ago. And also just doing something with your days that you feel contributes. I think it's as simple as that. Do something that contributes and be with people you love and who love you. Thank you. So do you even realize how cool it is that you're still here?

I love that you enjoyed this episode so much that you've listened to the end. Seriously, puts a legit smile on my face. So really just wanted to say thank you. You're awesome. And while we're wrapping things up, might as well share a quick shout out to our super cool brand sponsors. If you love the show, and I'm guessing you do because you're still here, please support them. They help make the podcast possible. Check out the links in today's show notes. Oh, and don't forget, grab your spot at this year's Camp GLP. If you've been waiting, be sure to register by April 30th. That's, well, today, if you're listening on the day this episode airs.

And if you want to lock in your spot and get a $200 super early bird discount, today is the day. Did I mention the $200 discount ends today? Grab your spot, save a bunch of money, and then we can hug it out together in August. Visit goodlifeproject.com slash camp today to claim your spot at $200 off or just click the link in the show notes. See you next week. We'll be right back. 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, 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. The Apple Watch Series 10. 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.