Good Life Project - The Surprising Science of Workplace Bliss

Episode Date: April 7, 2015

"Rather than making perfection the goal, make improvement the goal."If your work environment and culture empty you out, it will make it near impossible to live a good life. Along the way, it'll make the business you're working for grind to a halt. And, if you happen to own that business, then you end up in a personal and professional world of hurt.So, what makes for a great work culture and environment?We point to companies like Google as a shining example of incredible performance based on a creative culture, a beautiful campus and innovative and engaging projects with plenty of time to do crazy things.But, what's really going on there? Turns out there's science behind it.Today's guest, Ron Friedman, is a genius in this realm. He has spent years of his career researching, coaching, and writing about the actual levers that aid in creating the best places to work.In our conversation, he breaks down the academic studies into layman's terms, cites fascinating examples from real companies who are changing the norm, and shares nuggets from his new book The Best Place to Work. We even talk about video games and how we should structure work progression like them.No matter if you're an entrepreneur, working in a large company, or preparing to enter the workforce, this episode is so important to understand what is changing in our work methods and what still needs to change.Some questions I ask:Is having meetings outside scientifically supported as being more productive?How do you deal with managers who are the problem with the company culture?Is it possible to grassroots a cultural change in a company from the bottom up?What have you seen around the culture of failure?What surprised you the most about what benefits work in your research for this book?Follow Ron:Website | TwitterCheck out our offerings & partners: My New Book SparkedMy New Podcast SPARKEDVisit Our Sponsor Page For a Complete List of Vanity URLs & Discount Codes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

And so you should feel free to take more risks because the mathematics of risk-taking is such that the more risks you take, the less critical each one becomes because you're succeeding at more of them. We spend pretty much the vast majority of our waking hours working, not all of us and not all of us traditionally, but one of the things that we tend to focus on so little is the actual environment that we create in which to do our work. Turns out that that environment and so many of the factors that go into it, the culture, the physical setting, all sorts of things make a profound difference in the way that we not only experience the work we

do, but the way we live our lives. That's the conversation that we not only experience the work we do, but the way we live our lives. That's the conversation that we're going to dive deep into with today's guest, author of The Best Place to Work, Ron Friedman. I'm Jonathan Fields. This is Good Life Project. We'll be right back. 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. The Apple Watch Series X.

Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. I want to dive into your current work, and you've got some fascinating stuff in your recent book, but I want to dive into your journey also, because you're doing some really fascinating research. So tell me just sort of your general field of, you know, what do you do now? What do you explore? What are the burning questions that really light you up? Well, I'm really interested in ways that we can take existing research and make it applicable to our everyday life,

whether it be in the workplace or outside of work. But there's just so much information that psychologists have studied over the last few decades that just hasn't made its way into popular culture. And in large part, it's because if you are busy and you have a real job, you don't really have time to pore over academic journals. It's just not a realistic thing for you to do. And then even if you were to have that time, making sense or making the findings applicable is not something that is immediately obvious. And frankly,

it's not a priority for a lot of academics. And also, I mean, academic research is not written for lay people to be able to understand. In fact, from my understanding, from people that I know in academia, it's written almost expressly for the opposite intent. It's like if a lay person can read your research report, you know, eyebrows get raised within academic colleagues. It's, in fact, it's gotten better in the last decade or so with books like, I want to say Dana Raley, but it's not. It's Dan's got great books. Brene Brown also is coming from a place of, you know, more grounded research.

But what's the, Daniel Gilbert at Harvard. He was really a pathbreaker because I remember going into graduate school in the early 2000s and it was really frowned upon to write a pop psychology book. And then when Dan Gilbert did a great job of doing so and he's from Harvard. Stumbling on Happiness, right? Stumbling on Happiness, yes. And that cleared the path I think Sonia Lubomirsky followed. And all of a sudden now you have a lot of very respected academics writing these popular psychology books. And so it's nice that that's happening and that it is no longer the case that you just

need to write for other academics. Is that really true, though? Because I still get messages from people within academia that say that they are largely, they're really looked at as being very unprofessional and not doing the work that they are largely, they're really looked at as being very unprofessional and not doing the work that they're there to do when they're writing for a mass popular audience, especially sort of like a pop science type of thing. And we've seen now the opposite, you know, people who, well, with non-degree people who are surely become popular science writers getting blasted by scientists also for dumbing

down and making what they say is really complex stuff available to popular people. Yeah, I'll take that criticism all day long. Yeah. Totally fine with that. And sometimes in order to make something clear, you need to dumb it down. And if I can communicate 90% of the information to you, that's far better than communicating 0% but doing it in precisely the right way. Yeah, no, I totally agree with you. We're on the same page there. So let's go a little bit further into what you were saying. So part of your job is to take this stuff and make it available. Let's go a little deeper. What are some of the big burning questions that, that fascinate you and that you want to be able to sort of be that bridge for?

Well, in writing my first book, which is called the best place to work, what I did was I took all of the research that's associated with performance in the workplace and try to make that, distill it down, make it actionable, really curate it, take really the pearls and try to make it as valuable as possible to anyone, whether they're a high-level CEO who's running an operation or someone who's just starting their first job. So everything from how companies hire to how we can maximize our performance on a day-to-day level, how do you motivate your employees, everything that has been written.

I try to take thousands of studies and really make them actionable for people. And so that's been my focus. And I'm enjoying it because there's so much that can be talked about and so much that people just don't know from things like how office design shapes are thinking to the way that exercise makes us smarter to how cultural change happens in organizations and how it really isn't about the mission or the vision,

but rather the behavior of the people at the top that defines how people in an organization behave. And actually, I want to go into each one of those and probably a couple of more because I think they're fascinating. And they all touch on sort of the bigger scope of what we're talking about here, which is what are the pieces of the puzzle in living a good life?

And your work, your day-to-day work, and how you experience that is a huge piece of that puzzle. Before we get there, though, I'm curious just on a personal level for you. What's the deeper why that's driving this? I mean, were you a kid who is just fascinated by psychology? Where does this come from? I like taking large swaths of information and distilling them down and making them useful. That's fun for me. But the story behind this

particular book is my personal journey of having been a professor in psychology and studying human motivation in the lab, and then going off into the corporate world. So my goal had always been to become a full-time professor. I got that job and then discovered that just being a full-time professor wasn't interesting enough. For me, it wasn't. If you're in a teaching college, which I was at, you're essentially teaching the same course again and again year after year. And so the reason I got into academics is because I was interested in learning new things. So I wasn't doing enough of that. So I decided I'm going to go off into the corporate world.

And I got a job as a pollster. So my job was to measure public opinion and figure out what people thought and how to influence those opinions. And it was in that experience of being in the corporate world that I came to recognize that all of these insights that psychologists have accumulated weren't being utilized by people in the business world. And it really was everything from the way they hire to the way they motivate to the way that they design their offices. And every manager or CEO who I've ever met and had conversations with and discussed some of this research with has always found it really interesting and valuable, but they just don't have the time to think about it.

They don't have time to look over academic journal articles. So I try to write something that can be valuable to them. So what's your actual gig now then? I mean, so you've got a book. You still love to write and you still be valuable to them. So what's your actual gig now then? So you've got a book, you still love to write, and you still love to integrate research. But what do you actually do on a daily basis? What is your consulting? What is your day-to-day work life? I do a lot of speaking.

So there's keynote talks, there's some training. And I'm also a trained coach. So one of the things, when I was in the corporate world, one thing I got also a trained coach. So one of the things I, when I was in the corporate world, one thing I got was a coaching training. It was actually played for my employer. So I am now exploring taking on a few clients. I've been asked to,

people who've read my writing and like it asked if I do coaching. I thought, well, maybe I can do that. And then thinking about more articles to write, I try to write one or two a week. So for places like Harvard Business Review and CNN. That's a lot of stuff to do. A lot of people are thinking, well, a couple articles a week alone, if you're really, it's a lot of thought to put into it. It's interesting. I love the writing part.

So if I could just do the writing part, I probably would just do the writing part. But as a writer, that's not always enough to sustain your income and support a family. So I have been doing the speaking and the training and the coaching. And it's informative for the writing, which is great. Because if you – I think there's a danger as a writer of just being alone with your thoughts and not exposing yourself to new ideas. And so when you are – Totally agree. If you talk to others and you talk about what they're facing, that can keep you in tune with what and in ways that can make your writing better yeah i so agree with that and because i write and i speak also and i think

it's so interesting because i'll have an idea and it'll be for me in my head and i may have even written about it or and but maybe not shared anything about it and i'll i'll sometimes use speaking engagements to test it's almost like like a comedian, like workshopping their lines. I'll use an engagement to test, to see how the ideas are landing, to see what are the questions that are coming up in the Q&A afterwards that either I got wrong in my initial round of thinking or just I didn't think about. Because a lot of times, if you have an audience of hundreds or thousands of people and you have a Q&A with people who are, at least in my case, I assume that 99.9% are smarter than me, which is awesome because they can ask me questions, which help me learn about the thing that I'm discovering.

So I so agree with you. I think as a writer, it's so helpful to kind of also be out there in the world constantly presenting and sharing your ideas and getting feedback on them if you're open to that. A lot of writers aren't. Yeah. No, I love, I mean, I can't say I love negative feedback, but I think the negative feedback makes me a better writer. And I think we should all have an attitude of that, whatever we do. And in fact, in the workplace, a lot of times what happens is you don't get feedback for six months or 12 month periods in the annual or biannual review. And often it's negative feedback is better than no feedback because then you can at least utilize that information to improve your skills.

And so it's not a recipe for keeping people engaged by giving them feedback so infrequently. So I'm thinking people listening, they're like, wait, you're telling me negative feedback is better than positive feedback? No, not better than positive feedback, better than no feedback. Got it. So because if I'm doing my job on a day-to-day basis and I get no feedback and it doesn't come until six months later, then oftentimes, even if the feedback is useful, it feels like it's coming out of left field. And if the feedback feels like it's coming out of left field, then it makes me feel like my job isn't controllable. And if my job isn't controllable, my environment isn't controllable, that's a recipe for helplessness and disengagement. And so that's why as a manager, it's really critical to give

people feedback more frequently. And even if it's negative feedback to not feel like, you know, it's interesting, the six month review ultimately becomes as a kind of a crutch where as a manager, I can avoid having that difficult conversation with you right now. I'll just put it in my notes to bring it up during the review. And that's okay, because I'm going to talk to you about it. So it becomes an excuse for not having difficult conversations. Yeah. Who was, I'm trying to remember the name, was it Susan Conrad who wrote Fierce Conversations? I've read the book. I don't remember the name. I know, but I think that's who it was.

But yeah, I remember that same concept really stuck out for me from that, which is it's so out of context. And it's like you said, this feelings of helplessness, futility, because you can't – and it probably would have resolved itself or gotten better or gotten substantially worse. And like I wonder if you – well, if you had told me six months ago, you know, we could have turned this into like, you know, a great intervention where now I'm in a much better place, but instead it's just gone down and down and down. I guess that's a great example of what you were talking about of probably a lot of managers or culture creators kind of know this, but just the, the traditional way of doing things hasn't been that.

And they just kind of go along with the way it's always been done, even though in your gut, you know, I mean, because you don't get to the position of overseeing people unless you've been the people you're overseeing at some point also and had those frustrations in that same process. But then when you get to the higher point, I guess you just kind of say, well, I guess my job is to toe the line at this point. Yes. And I think that that's why it's so critical to look at the data. About 10 years ago, a book called Moneyball came out that completely revolutionized how baseball teams looked at talent. It used to be thought that if we just accumulate enough home run hitters, we'll have a winning team. But when baseball teams started

looking at the data by conducting regressions, they discovered that in fact, it's on base percentage that's the critical factor, getting players who are going to take walks and hit singles because the more players you have on base, the more likely they are to score. And today, just about every sports team, major professional sports team has an analytics person on staff that looks at the metrics and figures out what's working, what's not working. I think we're going to see more workplaces have a metrics person in the years to come looking at engagement. When you look at the data of what really gets people engaged, it's not these fancy perks

or amenities. It's not the high-paying jobs. It's not the fancy offices, but rather, it's having your basic human psychological needs fulfilled. And one of those needs is the need for competence. So feeling like you're good at your job, but also feeling like you're growing on your job, feeling like you're growing your competence. That's why feedback is so critical, because if I don't have feedback, I can't grow my competence. Yeah. and I guess the regularity of that feedback is so critical, too. Does that relate also to, like, Teresa Amabile's work on sort of regular progress and regular feedback driving that progress? Yeah, so one of the factors that she finds in her work is that feeling like you're making progress is critical to feeling like you have had a good day at work. And there's no question that part of the reason that that is true is because it feeds our need for competence.

And this is one of those things that is interestingly underutilized at most jobs. At most places of employment, what happens is jobs get easier over the long term. So the more you work at a particular job, the easier it becomes. And so in the book, I talk about video games as the alternative to this. Why are we so interested in playing these games that have no real utility for us? And one of the things that makes these video games really interesting and addictive is that they have a feature called progressive difficulty. They get harder. Every level gets harder. You get good at the game, you go to the next board, it's harder to do. And at most jobs, it's the opposite trajectory, where it becomes easier the longer you do.

And so if you're looking to keep people engaged, you can really learn a lot from a video game by building in competence-building experiences so that people continue to feel like they're growing on the job. Yeah, which is counterintuitive for a lot of people because you almost think that, going back to my example of being at a law firm, it's kind of like, well, you work really, really, really hard until you get to that place where you're a partner and then like a senior partner and then you can kind of just kick back and coast. And I guess this goes back to Dan Gilbert, right?

You know, like effective forecasting. We think we'll know how we feel when we get to that place, but we absolutely have no clue how. And we're usually dead wrong, you know? And what you're saying is that, you know, sort of like that aspiration to get to that place where we can kick back. We may be bored out of our minds and disengaged that we're just completely disinterested in actually being there once we're there. Yes. And I think there's so much that we as individuals can learn from that, not just managers. In terms of, for example, applying this to vacations. When you think about looking ahead to your next vacation, you might say,

I'm going to go to Cancun and lay down on the beach for seven days and do nothing. And you know what? Day two, you're bored out of your mind. For me, it takes about 20 minutes. Right. And so thinking about what am I going to do to feel like I'm growing is critical, not just for vacations, but also when you're looking at your next job. So rather than just choosing a job based on the salary or the title or the prestige, look for a job with as much growth opportunities as possible, as much variety of tasks as possible, because that is what's going to keep you engaged. 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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Flight risk. In your mind, would this, I don't know if there's research on this where you expand out beyond that, but do you think this is a principle which would be pretty universal across all realms of life, like health, relationships, and stuff like that? That sort of complexity and challenge and the opportunity to continue to grow and evolve is something that keeps engagement and meaningfulness up across all the different parts of life? I hadn't thought about it until now. I think you're just gave me my next book. Maybe we'll call it The Growth Principle. How, you know, how development is the key to happiness in life.

But I think it's totally true. I think if you look at what leads people to be passionate in their relationships with their loved ones, it's having new experiences together. So now you're kind of both experiencing new things together. So rather than spending another night on the couch watching House of Cards, why not take a dance class or do some rock climbing together? If it's a new experience for both of you, chances are that's going to be better for your relationship than just doing the same old thing again.

Yeah. And I guess it makes sense also on just the level of physicality. I'm just thinking about health and exercise and movement too. Our bodies adapt and become efficient pretty quickly. And to keep growing, to keep feeling good, you kind of have to shock the system to a certain extent and bring novelty into it. I have

a background also in yoga. At one point I owned a yoga center in New York City. And I was always fascinated by it. Are you familiar with Bikram yoga or City. And I was always fascinated by it. Are you familiar with Bikram yoga or hot yoga? So I was fascinated by it because it's the same, I think it's 26 or 29 poses, I can't remember. Same exact poses repeated in the exact same order

for the same amount of time, two times every time you do it. And people become addicted to it and do it for life. And I always wondered to myself, I was thinking to myself, I'm like, man, that would just become so mind-numbingly boring to me. And then I actually, I've done a bunch of that. And what I realized is that part of the genius of the sequence is that the chosen, the postures that are chosen are postures where the potential level of expression for each posture ranges from absolute newbie to that posture could be expressed in a way that would take years for your body to be able to sustain healthfully and adapt to. So within what seems to be just this limited repetitive thing, the opportunity for growth within a really fixed sequence of postures is actually pretty astonishing.

And I think it's almost like golf in that it's like you're in a room and you constantly see people who are expressing at that next level and you aspire to that, but you can't get there. And so it keeps you kind of yearning to be in that place. And it keeps you and so many people in it for years and years and years. It's interesting. It probably can extend the metaphor to golf. For me, golf is one game. For the professional, it's a completely different game. But yet we're both doing the same thing. Yeah. So interesting. We are strange beings. So let's talk about, I mean, we kind of start to segue into your work and to the current book to a certain extent.

Let's dive in a little bit more deliberately. You threw out a couple of big ideas and things that are sort of like big focal points for your current work. Let's maybe dive into a handful of those one at a time. So got a favorite one you want to start with? So there's a lot in here. There's a lot in here. There's a lot in here. But, you know, we could talk about interviewing, if you like. You could talk about the impact of daylight on our performance exercise.

Let's talk about daylight. Okay. As we're sitting here in this sort of like darkly lit studio room. It's like the Batcave. Yeah. So this is one of the most more surprising things that I uncovered while doing the research for the book is that daylight impacts our performance at work. And you can actually predict how satisfied people are at their job by the amount of daylight entering the office space, which is really remarkable. And in part, it's because daylight is healthy for us.

So when we're around daylight, it gets our body producing more serotonin, which puts us in a better mood. It gets our body also producing more melatonin, which allows us to sleep better at night. And it lowers our blood pressure. So all of these things are positioning us to perform our job a little bit better. And so, you know, for a lot of offices, a lot of people, unfortunately, are stuck in cubicles that don't have any daylight. And so in those cases, you really want to think about taking that spring walk during lunch or scheduling intermission on your calendar and taking a walking meeting with a colleague rather than simply resigning yourself to going to the same drab conference room again and again. Yeah, which is so interesting because for me, I mean, we're recording this and it's the tail end of winter in New York. Man, it feels like a long tail end. But as soon as it starts

to get warmer, I schedule almost all of my meetings as walking meetings. If people want to meet me in New York City, you can pretty much guarantee we're going to be either in Central Park or along the Hudson River somewhere. Because it just feels better for me. It feels better to be outside. And I feel like my brain works better. I feel like if we're going to have a conversation, and it may be a solution-oriented conversation, you're going to get better output from me if we're outside. Is that borne out by science at all? Well, you're clearly elevating your heart rate. So you are getting more blood flowing to your brain, which enables you to focus a little bit better.

But there's a level at which there's too much, right? So if you're on the treadmill, you can't expect to have your best ideas necessarily. And so there's an optimal level to aim for. The other thing is you're exposing yourself to different stimuli. And so because you're no longer surrounded by the same setting as you might otherwise be, you're more likely to have creative ideas. Now you're making different connections than you otherwise would if you were sitting at your cubicle. So there are reasons to believe that that's true, that having an outdoor meeting can make you more creative. But I would warn against thinking that that is going to be ideal for every task, right? So no one setting is going to be perfect for every task.

This is one of the things that I think more organizations need to realize is in a lot of cases, people are assigned to a desk regardless of their job function. So if you're a marketing or you're a sales or you're a creative, you're going to get the same space because this is our office space. Now your job is to deal with it. And a far better approach, I think, is to give people a selection of settings. So giving them that space that they can customize and then offering them perhaps a thinking room, a space rather than taking a room and isolating your most talented executive.

Why not create the office thinking room where people can go in and do some focused work or maybe have another room that is designed to spark creativity. And so we know from the research that being around nature in the form of maybe aquariums or having a view of the outdoors, that tends to help us be more creative in our thinking, having rooms with tall ceilings, things like that. And then having a range of collaborative spaces where people can go rather than having to reserve a conference room when they want to have a meeting, having some informal, perhaps a cafe like space where people can get together and talk about ideas, even if they're not talking about

work. Ultimately, having close connections with our colleagues is going to make us more productive at work because we have that psychological need for connectedness. So thinking about space in a whole new way is, I think, something that more organizations need to do. Yeah. And what's interesting, too, is that when you look at, and you certainly have more insight on this than me, so I'd love to hear, but just from what I've seen, when I look at the landscape of the most innovative, quote, innovative companies out there, they're very often tech companies, they're very often startup They're very often tech companies. They're very often startup or just aggressive growth tech companies.

And you look at the physical settings that they've created, and it's almost more like playgrounds with designated areas. You had the classic center with everyone hangs out and gathers and plays games, and then you would have quieter areas or conference rooms. And you have almost like they build internal structures where you can kind of go into a cave and become ultra-creative. And I don't think that that was done because people understood the science. But intuitively, it kind of felt like that's how, you know, for people who are pushing really hard, working a lot of hours, and the expectation was almost maniacal levels of creativity and innovation, that somehow this type of mixed physical setting became almost the norm for the most innovative, most aggressively creative companies around. Well, I think some – so I don't know that these organizations were sitting around thinking about how to plan.

I don't think they were. I think it's almost like it just kind of bubbled up intuitively almost. I think some of the designers who were brought in were a little bit more informed about this. That's been my experience in talking to designers is that they've been aware of it. In the case of a lot of these Silicon Valley companies, I think that you're seeing a big emphasis on amenities and perks. And sometimes that takes the form of a ping pong table or some places have swimming pools or whatever it is, jacuzzis. However, whatever the next crazy thing is that you can think of, I'm sure there's a company that has it. And part of it is because of this really aggressive fight for talent in many of these industries.

So that's part of it. So they're trying to outdo each other by having the coolest thing that people can talk about. But that isn't necessarily ideal when it comes to building a great workplace. What ultimately leads people to have a great working experience is, again, having those psychological needs met. And so perks can be fun, and there's a place for them, but it shouldn't be the focus. And I think if you look at the companies that are on these best place to work lists, it's almost like they give you a laundry list of all these

amenities. And I think that's confused a lot of people into thinking that that's all it takes. Yeah, no, it's an interesting sort of frame. I was looking more in terms of sort of like the way that they've designated the physical space, but that could also be viewed as, you know, like, well, that's one of the perks of being in this job rather than sort of like there's an underlying shift in the way that we experience or think based on the physical space. And also a lot of them are just having just open spaces. Yeah, which is a huge shift. And so what do you feel about that? I think open space is good for particular tasks like collaborative activities. But collaboration, even in the most extreme positions, is only a portion of your job. And so if you are putting everyone in an open space and requiring them to do some focus work, it's probably not

going to be as good as if you gave them the option of going into a different space that's a little bit quieter. So again, we talked about giving people a range of options. And I think a useful analogy is thinking about the college campus. So the way that college campuses are set up is they provide students with a set of goals for the semester. And then they give them autonomy in figuring out how they'd like to use that space. They can go to their dorm room for some privacy. They can go to the library for some focus work. They can go to the quad, or they can go to the cafeteria where they can collaborate with

others. Really, it's up to them to do a good job. If they don't do a good job, they might be asked to leave. They might be let go. I think if we built our companies in a way that reflects that same approach, I think you'll find that people are a lot more satisfied in their job, but they're also more productive for their companies. Yeah. So then campus instead of compound. Perfect. Yeah. No, I like that. Yeah. And it's interesting also because, you know,

the idea of the open desk and Susan Cain is a friend of mine who wrote Quiet, and the whole exploration of working within a culture where you have something like 25, 33% of people there are going to have some level of moderate to high level of introversion and sensitivity to being around other people. But you don't want to, and for decades, the general workforce has exalted, be as extroverted as you can. There's something wrong with you if you're not the raging extrovert in the room. And that's tamped down. It's destroyed so much contribution by people who tend towards the more introverted, sensitive side of the spectrum. Very often, those are also the same people who are deeply contemplative and have extraordinary ideas. But a lot of that happens in a quieter, sort of less interactive setting, at least the early stages. And like you said, if then you want to take, you know,

sort of like the creative genius that's bubbling underneath and create an environment where it's comfortable enough for that person who's sensitive in social context and to let it out and to share it, to bring it to the team. If you put them into just like a big, giant, loud, noisy, open space with a lot of extroverts around claiming, you know, like putting their staffs in the ground, you'll just never get that work out of them. It's totally true. And there's research also on cultural fit. So a lot of organizations now are hiring for cultural fit, which is the idea of we want people with a particular set of mission and values, but also people with a particular type of personality. And in many cases, it's I want a personality that's going to be similar to everyone else. I'm going to start replicating personalities because if we're all the same, then we're going to be more closely bonded.

It sounds like a recipe for disaster to a certain extent. Yeah. Now, if you are a small company and you have four people on staff and you're about to hire your fifth, then you're about to have a deep cultural change. So in that case, there is some sense behind this idea of let's get people all on the same page. But as a company grows, having people who are essentially just replicating one another is not a recipe for creativity because now people become complacent, not being challenged, not being exposed to new ideas. So having that diversity is really critical if you're looking to have people come up with creative solutions. And that diversity doesn't

just mean diversity in background. It can also mean diversity in personality. I mean, social orientation. I think it diversity in personality. I mean, social orientation. I think it's so important. I mean, social orientation. And also, it's funny. When I was working on my last book, I was looking at literature on sort of creative orientation. And there's a lot of debate and a lot of, you know, like, okay, these are the stages of creativity. And my experience was I really kind of broke down into two people who largely self-identify as either being what I would call, you know, like the insight slash white canvas creator.

And then more the sort of like production slash, you know, like one person, if you give them a white piece of paper and say, like, give me some awesome stuff, they'll drool and they'll be like, yes. And another person, if you give them a white piece of paper and say, give me some stuff, they'll get hives and run screaming. But if you give them something where there are five ideas, they'll take that and iterate on it and spreadsheet on it and build on it. And they're critical, both great parts of the different phases of creativity, but also very different orientations. And if you put together a company or a team, that's all one. You either have a room full of people throwing ideas up against the wall and then they meet again next week and you're like, okay, what happened? Nothing.

Or you've got a room full of people who are just sitting there twiddling their thumbs waiting for somebody to come up with an idea. So it's really important to cross-pollinate both. And I think you're so right. So it's social orientation, it's personality types. But I think you have to deliberately build the culture that allows for that. And I think that's what you were getting at in the beginning of the conversation where you were really talking about the importance of focusing on culture.

Yeah. So I actually think that culture is an idea that a lot of people talk about and very few people really understand. I think when you hear a lot of companies talk about, oh, we have a great culture and we give our employees ice cream on Tuesdays. Or, you know, we all go out to watch basketball games together. And I think that could be a feature of the culture. But really culture is about the behavior of the people at the top. So it's things like what does your manager pay attention to? What does he or she ignore?

What do they get emotionally riled up about? How do they react in the face of crises? Those are the things that send a signal as to what's really critical for the organization. It's not the sign of what the mission, the vision is on the wall. And so if you're looking to have cultural change, you really need to take a close look as a leader at what it is that how you behave. So it's one thing to say it's really important to me that we have work-life balance in this organization. But if you're still sending emails at 10 o'clock at night or responding to memos on Sunday morning,

that sends a signal to your employees that these are the behaviors that are valued. And the other thing that is critical to think about is, what are you rewarding? So if the people in your organizations who are getting promotions are the ones who are pulling out all-nighters, or you're issuing congratulations to people for working really, really hard for extended periods of time.

I understand if it happens to happen occasionally, but if it's going on all the time, those are the people who get rewarded, whether it be with pay or prestige or even just attention, then those are the behaviors that are going to get reinforced and become part of the culture. Yeah. So, what do you do then? I mean, tell me if you come up with a scenario. You get invited into a company or something like that, and there are, quote, culture issues. You know, we've got to fix something.

And you kind of look at, let's say you're brought in by the CEO or somebody in the executive team, you know, the head of HR who sets tone or, you know, the head of culture or whatever, if they have something like that, and you spend some time with this person, and you realize that the problem is them, how do you deal with that? Well, I think we often assume that executives or leaders don't want to hear bad news related to their behavior, but I would challenge that. And I think that they are interested in making changes to the extent that there is proof that it's going to help.

So I think if you provide some evidence and say, look, I just researched or interviewed some of the folks on your team and this is what the perception is and here are some ways you can change it, I think people are open to a data-driven approach to improving their behaviors. And I think in many cases it comes down to the behaviors that are rewarded because you really have to put your money where your mouth is on this stuff. And we're starting to see a lot of companies, particularly around the issue of work-life balance, actually change their reward structure.

So Boston Consulting Group is one company that's doing this. They're monitoring paid time off to flag people who aren't taking enough of it. Then there are, you know, Volkswagen is another company that has actually started shutting down their server after a work shift so that people can't email each other. And there's a company in Denver, Colorado called Full Contact that is a software company that has started rewarding employees with a $7,500 vacation bonus if they can manage to take a vacation without checking their email once. MARK MIRCHANDANI, JR.: That's fantastic.

DAVID ABELSON, JR.: It's those kinds of practices that really demonstrate to employees that this isn't just something we're promoting, but it's actually something that we are going to reward you for, because we recognize it's in your interest to restock your mental energy. MARK MIRCHANDANI, JR.: Yeah. I love that.

And I love hearing those examples, because those are things I'm not aware of. And like you get exposure to that stuff. And I love seeing that it's actually happening now in sort of larger scales and very established cultures because, you know, in a startup environment, it's not all that hard to make change because, you know, on any given hour, the cultures, everything changes so quickly and just nothing is institutionalized in the first couple of years. But you take a really large organization where there's a big, ingrained, proceduralized, institutionalized culture. And it's got to take a very serious commitment and a really serious effort to actually create policies and procedures and

then demonstrate from the top down, not just in policies and procedures, but we're acting this out. And we want you, who we manage, to act it out so that then you who manage the people who are under you will act it out. And then you have buy-in. I don't know whether this happened to you. I've spoken a number of times in organizations where I've had employees come up to me afterwards saying, I love what you said. If this was the way that the culture worked here, it would be amazing.

We can't get by it. And at the last minute, how do we do it? We're all on board. The staff is on board. How do we get the CEO or the COO or the level person who can really make the change, how do we get them to buy in? What's interesting to me is one or two times it was that person who brought me in. But it wasn't really – I was brought in once to run a meeting and talk about uncertainty and managing uncertainty and culture around that. And the person who brought me in was the head of the company. And besides coming to the meeting that everyone was asked to come to,

a half an hour after everybody else, and then on the cell phone the entire time, right, offering up an agenda that was radically different than what people were told was going to happen, sprung it on everybody, announcing some really unfortunate results about engagement in the company, and then saying, we need answers, and wondering what the problem was. You know, and it's interesting to try and sort of like bridge that gap when the person at the top, some people are open, some people aren't. Like, is it possible to almost grassroots this up from the bottom where it's almost it becomes something where the person or the team at the top has to change or else the company goes down the planes.

Well, I think this is why it's so interesting to when you look at the data and you make the data-driven case to people who are in management positions that this affects your profitability. And so that's why- Because the bottom line is always the ultimate convincer. Yeah. And I didn't write this book because I thought, okay, it would be nice if we had some better workplaces and people can go home and live happier lives.

Wouldn't that be wonderful? I don't think that's a convincing case for people. And I think that all of this research supports the idea that you can have greater engagement and then also lower turnover. So if you have lower turnover because your employees are experiencing their psychologically fulfilling jobs, that means you're not only retaining your top performers, but you're spending less money attracting new employees and training them. So there's research showing that people who are checking their emails in the evenings and on the weekends, those are the people who tend to be the least engaged a year later. And it's presenting evidence like that to business owners that I think really is eye-opening for them and helps them recognize that there are easy things that they can do that don't

have to be wildly expensive. Not every company can afford a $7,500 vacation for all of their employees, but what they can do is a very easily applicable approach is to incorporate email tools that allow managers to continue to write their emails at 10 o'clock at night, but have them arrive in the employee's inbox at 9 o'clock the following morning. And that enables people to still capture their creative ideas and still feel like they're getting work done, but doesn't get everybody involved in a back and forth that goes on past midnight.

That's just not beneficial to the company over the long run. Yeah. One of the things that you talk about also is the culture around failure. Talk to me a little bit about sort of your philosophy and what you've seen around this. Well, first of all, you know, this is interesting. A lot of people who've read the book talk about this chapter on, I think it's called Success is Overrated. And it's all about these companies that are actually rewarding their employees for taking risks and failing. And it's because they recognize that over the long run, they're going to have better products and more creative solutions if employees are empowered to take risks.

Now, I do want to say that I don't think all failure is good. So there's bad failure. There's failure that's caused by inattention or lack of ability. And those aren't the types of failure that you want to reward as a manager. But there are some types of failures that are beneficial for your company, like failure caused by experimentation or intelligent risk-taking. Those are good kinds of failures. And so what's really critical is for managers to look at why the failure happened rather than just treating all failures as bad. So put another way is make the goal, let me put it this way, rather than making perfection the goal, make improvement the goal.

And if you can empower people to take risks and then learn from them and then improve their performance, they're going to be more satisfied in their job and ultimately do a better job for you. And as an example in the chapter from a research conducted at Harvard looking at nurses. So nurses who, so what the researchers were trying to look at is how well people got along within a unit and then how many mistakes they made. And so they assumed that if a nursing unit got along really well, there would be fewer mistakes because there's better communication and so forth. But what they found is the opposite, is that the nurses who had the best communication

actually had the most mistakes. And as it turns out, it's not because they were actually committing more mistakes compared to those who had worse communication, but rather it's because they were more comfortable owning up to those mistakes. So they were better able to diagnose what was going wrong, make adjustments so that they wouldn't happen in the future. And that's really critical because as a manager, if mistakes are happening and you have this attitude of, I'm not going to allow mistakes, we cannot fail here. And what's going to happen? People are going to cover up

those mistakes. And if there are mistakes happening and you're not aware of them, that's a dangerous problem because you can't address it. Yeah. And I think there's a really powerful parallel to both entrepreneurship and life. Mm-hmm. and meditations, whatever your vibe, Peloton has thousands of classes built to push you. We know how life goes. New father, new routines, new locations. What matters is that you have something there to adapt with you, whether you need a challenge or rest. And Peloton has everything you need, whenever you need it. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. 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

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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, if we need them y'all need a pilot flight risk um a couple years ago eric reese came out with a book called the lean startup which essentially said you know that your purpose when you're launching something is to it's not to succeed

it's like you're a learning organization you're learning organism is to, it's not to succeed. It's like you're a learning organization, you're a learning organism, like your, your primary metric is learning. You know, it's like, it's let's run a series of experiments, iterations, where the goal is, what can we learn? What can we validate or invalidate? You know, so going into it, knowing that you've got your lining up assumptions, you know, and your goal is to test them to see which are valid and which aren't, knowing that healthy dose of those are going to be invalidated, you know, and not looking at that as failure, but saying, okay, this is, we're running series experiments, of course, you know, the goal is just to figure out what's right and what's

wrong, knowing that a whole bunch is going to be wrong. And that's going to lead us more rapidly to what's right. And, and I think it also flows out into life in general. If you take this sort of almost, you know, life is a series of experiments, and my job is ultimately, you know, I want to get to a place where I feel like, you know, quote, I've succeeded on some level. But especially in the early stages, you know, in the first half of life, a lot of it is, well, what if I actually said, what if I really, my job is to run a series of experiments to figure out what I'm about, like what lights me up? How can I contribute to the world? How do I relate to other people who are the people I like to relate to? How can I be of service? All these different things. How can I express myself? Without this

maniacal quest, say, this has to be figured out now. But I think an interesting thing happens in life, which is that we become bound to long-term high-level financial obligations long before we figure out the answer to those questions and feel that because of that, we're no longer in a position to continue to run those experiments. And in a weird way, I think some organizations experience the same thing. That's a very deep thought. I couldn't agree more. I don't know if it's that deep.

No, I thought that was great. I completely agree with you. I have smiled the whole time as you're speaking. I think that's a great point. And I think what's really critical and can be really liberating for people is to recognize that ultimately people know you and associate your successes with you far more than your failures. And what I mean by that is I give this example in the book about Donald Trump and how when Donald Trump walks into the room with his supermodel wife, we don't see a long line of women who have rejected his overtures. We just see his supermodel wife. And I think the same is true for our accomplishments at work and just accomplishments in life. And so you should feel

free to take more risks because the mathematics of risk-taking is such that the more risks you take, the less critical each one becomes because you're succeeding at more of them. And so I think more organizations start thinking this way and look at the example of Google. We're all familiar with the 20% time. And look at what that's yielded. It's yielded Gmail and all these other highly successful programs. And so rather than putting all of our eggs in the risk bucket, rather just

associating a little bit of time and devoting it to continuing to grow and to try out new things can really help. Yeah. And I guess there's probably some kind of almost like a sweet spot between a small enough amount of time that it's not massively disruptive to the day-to-day operations of what you're doing, but enough time so that you have enough experiments so that the rule of numbers starts to come into play, where you've got enough successes that will sort of largely outmode the impact of the failures, whereas you don't show up at a blackjack table and play one hand. Right.

Yeah. And I can tell you it's true in my life. I mean, I take risks all the time. And as a writer, you're trying out new things. You're also trying to reach out to different editors. And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't work. And I know that. As a writer also, it's like, I mean, you get knocked down a lot, you know.

And people don't see that. They don't know that. So, you know, I used to work in politics before I got into academics. And people look at politicians and they see them on stage and they think, wow, isn't that glamorous? But the majority of the time that politicians spend in their life is in a dark room making phone calls asking for money. They're glorified telemarketers in a lot of instances. And so the day after you win a big election, everyone's like, wow, what are you doing now? And you know what? They're back in that room making those phone calls.

It's the same thing as a writer. Your book comes out, you're still writing articles, still sending emails. And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But if you're not taking those risks and you're not trying to move ahead, you're never going to get there. Yeah. And I think taking those risks and also taking the risks in terms of it's it's kind of coming full circle right like you've also got to take the risk internally in terms of okay I'm gonna write about something that makes me

nervous here you know and let me write about something that's gonna push me as an artist as a creator as I you know whatever as a, you know, whatever it may be. You know, it's the external risk, and it's also, it's the, you know, Brene Brown, like, it's a deeper, more vulnerable risk of just sharing more of who you are and putting that into the world and risking being judged. I think one of the big fears around failure is it's the judgment element of it. Some really fascinating research around uncertainty. So Daniel Ellsberg, sort of the famous Ellsberg paradox about how we run from uncertainty. There was some later research that actually slightly modified his paradox where people could sort of choose an uncertain choice, but the experiments or structures that nobody would – they were led to believe nobody would ever know what their choice would be.

And that completely eliminated the bias away from uncertainty. So there's this huge social context to failure, which is it's partly about fear of loss, but a huge amount of it is fear of being judged for having chosen the riskier path and then guiding it wrong. Right. Guiding it wrong, getting it wrong. Getting it wrong. And we talked about changing culture by rewarding certain behaviors. And in certain industries, you're actually seeing companies and managers who are actually

rewarding their employees for failing, particularly in the pharma industry, where companies like Merck and Company and Eli Lilly, they have started rewarding their employees for failing. And the reason they do this is because they recognize that the longer a scientist continues to research the same project that isn't working, the longer they're wasting their time. And they're going to cover up because they don't want to be let go. If they admit that the drug isn't working, they say, I don't need to run any more tests. This is just not working out. They're afraid to cover up because they don't want to be let go. If they admit that the drug isn't working, they say, I don't need to run any more tests. This is just not working out.

They're afraid for their jobs. And so they're rewarding these people for coming forward by throwing failure parties or by rewarding them with additional stock options because now they can reassign them to a new research project. That's amazing. Is that largely in pharma that you've heard of? Are you aware of that happening anywhere else? Well, the stock option is pretty extreme. Yeah, I mean. But I have seen other.

It's like what you're working on absolutely didn't work. Here's some options. Right, right. Well, you know, there are some ways that you can do this that don't involve huge spendings. So there's this company called HCL Technologies, which has an internal leadership program. And in order to get into the internal leadership program, you as an employee have to put together your failure CV. So rather than giving them your CV of all the successes you had in life, come up with all the failures and then identify for each one what you've learned from this project and how it's made you better. And that brief exercise, imagine if you

just took everyone in your organization, you made them do this, and you all talked about your failures. That might seem a little hokey, but I'd imagine it would reframe certain ways of thinking and really encourage people to take more risks. Yeah, it almost normalizes the experience. So it's like, oh, I'm actually, it's not that different, and it's not that unusual. And maybe if I'm not doing it, I'm the outlier. And what's really eye-opening is it tends to be the people who are the most successful, who have the most failures to report. Because, again, they're taking those constant risks. That gets them to where they are. So interesting.

In the research that you've done over the last couple of years, especially related to all this stuff, what do you think was the single biggest surprise? Well, I mentioned daylight, which I thought was really surprising to me. I can tell you that the stuff about exercise was really interesting to me as well. So when we're exercising on a regular basis, it doesn't just make us feel healthier or look good. It actually gets us thinking in a smarter way. So you're getting more blood flowing to the brain, so you're better able to focus. You're stimulating the memory regions of the brain. So now you're soaking up information more quickly at meetings. It puts you in a better mood. You're better at collaborating with others. So rather than viewing exercise as something we do for ourselves, I really think more people

should reframe it as being part of their job. So when you go at five o'clock to the gym, it's not because you're a slacker and are not working as hard as anyone else. Rather, think of it as you're taking your thinking elsewhere. And now you're going to have more creative solutions. You're going to be better off at your job. And there's research showing that organizations that encourage their employees to exercise, whether it be by coming in late or taking an extended lunch hour or leaving early, they tend to have the most engaged employees. Yeah. I love that. And I'm a huge, huge believer in that. I've seen it in my own work also, and I've seen it in so many different places. And it always boggles my mind when you have a culture

or you just do it to yourself. Like, I'm just going to work all the time and never move my body. And at the same time, you're holding yourself to this standard of optimal cognitive performance and creativity and innovation and job performance. And it's like, you're destroying your ability to actually achieve that standard or come anywhere close to it. And so the single biggest excuse is always, I don't have time, which is just complete fabrication. It's like, you don't have time not to exercise.

But until you're exercising and you experience the cognitive, the creative, the productive boost that it gives you, I think you don't get how powerful an effect it is. Well, this is where coaching can really help. I think when people say, I don't have time, what they are really saying is, I don't consider it a priority in the time I have available. So when you reframe it in the sense of, this is going to open up more time for other things, because now you're going to be doing

those other things in a quicker fashion, that I think is convincing for a lot of people. And also, I would encourage a lot of people to just experiment with this and not view exercise as just sitting on a treadmill because that isn't the best for everyone. Exercise can also mean going out and playing tennis with friends. It could also mean dancing with a loved one. It can even mean buying some electric drums and putting them in your apartment. That's a form of exercise. And so the key is to find something you really,

really enjoy for its own sake and then have it be a source of exercise in your life. Yes, I so agree with that. Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of the sort of a repetition and distraction approach to exercise. It doesn't work. It doesn't last. It makes you think you hate exercise when in fact you just hate the fact that human beings are wired to despise repetition so much that the average club invests in massive entertainment systems to distract you from how mind-numbing your standard rows and rows and rows of revenue per square foot maximizing repetitive motion machines. I'm not going to go too far down that road because I have a background in the fitness industry also and have very contrarian views about how we should pursue exercise, but completely in line with what you're saying, which is that engage the mind, bring novelty into the experience, do things that are intrinsically joy-creating.

Yeah. And you'll constantly be looking around for ways to do more rather than forcing yourself to have to do it every day. You know, it's interesting. It's gotten me thinking about some things, just this conversation. So it's not that you hate exercise. You just haven't found the right exercise. But in all those examples that I brought up about tennis or dancing or playing the drums, it's combining both physical and mental exercise.

Right. It has to be. You've got to engage the mind. Yeah. So, I mean, but for my wife, I could tell you, she goes on the treadmill. She watches HGN Network. She's perfectly happy. That would kill me.

So I play a lot of racquetball because I like the strategizing and the movement at the same time. But maybe that's the dimension that you need to explore in your own life. Is this mentally stimulating enough? And if it's not, here are some adjustments I can make. Yeah. I mean, to me, the leap between play and exercise comes from the level of engagement in the mind. It's not about effort. You know, because when we were kids, we were running around all day long.

We'd come home, you're like covered in sweat, exhausted, you exhausted, just like flopping into bed because you worked out so hard for so many hours. But we didn't call it exercise. We didn't call it working out. It was play. And the difference was that you can't throw around a ball if your mind is focused on something else because you're going to get hit in the face. You know, like your mind, like the activities that we did as a kid demanded intrinsically that our mind be invested in the process without us having to deliberately focus. It's just the nature of the activity required it. You know, and that made us both, you know, like physically and mentally exhausted at the end of it. But we loved it. And we've lost that.

And I think the idea of if you look at some of the things that are really breaking out in the fitness world right now, it's the few outliers who are introducing modalities and cultures around those modalities who are bringing those things back into it. It's so funny to hear the idea of, you know, like some places or approaches regamifying fitness. It's like, dude, it was a game to start with. Like, really, really, really? But that's what's happening. And I'm all have these psychological needs. One of them is the need for relatedness. better we can become as organizations at creating better social connections between employees. And so we all have these psychological needs. One of them is the need for relatedness. And so

at most organizations, social connections are really an afterthought. We give people the equipment they need. We give them perhaps some training. We give them some salary. And we say, OK, well, we hope you guys get along. And maybe there are some trust-building activities that are thrown in there once a year, but those rarely translate into meaningful friendships. And so in the book, I look at what are some things that any company can do to foster better connections. And as it turns out, there's a really simple and straightforward recipe for turning strangers into close friends. And the three components are familiarity, so spending a lot of time with someone, similarity, so finding what you two have in common, and then some level of self-disclosure. So if I tell you about my

daughter and you tell me about your son, and all of a sudden we are revealing some personal information that may not be work relevant, but now gets us to connect with one another. So one thing that any organization can do is when you bring someone into a new job, rather than just telling people about their professional experience, saying, OK, this is Matt. Matt has worked at the following companies, and he has a degree in this.

Please join me in welcoming Matt. That's the typical email you get. Why not spend a few minutes interviewing Matt? Maybe you can set up some questions about, some personal questions, and say, what do you like to do on the weekend? What's your favorite hobby, et cetera. And now you're introducing Matt by talking about his interests outside of work.

And so although it's not work relevant, it gives people an opportunity for bonding in a real way, not in a forced way, which is a lot of what organizations do, but in a real way. And the examples like that are some things that any company can do. Yeah, I love that. And again, it's like, it's all this all the stuff where you know you can start and you can look at the research in this sort of like the the rather large microcosm in context of work but also it's all the same stuff that kind of like flows out to life and then back in it's like okay just how do we take the stuff that makes you know work better that makes life better that makes you know all of it and you can

apply the lessons you lessons in both directions. So powerful crossover lessons. Yeah, and as it turns out, what makes you happy at work is what makes you happy in life and vice versa. And so rather than treating them as separate domains, the best workplaces, I think, integrate home life and work life together. Yeah, I so agree, which is actually why you brought up the term work-life balance before. I actually kind of loathe that term. As well you should.

Because it positions them as being in opposition. Correct. It's like work is something that has to be balanced by life, and life is something like this, is the kindly balance to work, which is necessarily evil. Where it's like, no, what you were just saying, I so agree with. It's like, why can't you have this beautiful, seamless blend and integration where it just all works beautifully together, where you still have boundaries, but fundamentally, they're not working in opposition. They're sort of dynamic co-expressions of each other.

Right. And the idea that we have to put life on hold in order to take care of work, that's another component of it. But I think the reality is now that we work at all hours. The work is no longer confined to the office. And so why are we okay with the fact that work is interfering with our home life? But when we have something to do in the middle of the day that is relevant to your home life, then we scoff at this idea that we, you're taking time out of it. You know, we're going to limit that time because you're only allowed this amount.

Can you imagine if we provided our bosses with a certain number of hours in which they can interrupt our home life? That would not be taken well. Yeah, I think we're, you know, my sense is that we're in this window where just nobody knows what the rules are anymore. You know, we kind of know that the old rules are just broken. They're being blown up left and right. We have a lot of people testing and running experiments.

But nobody knows what the rules are, which is great, because then when you come out with, you know, sort of like the work that you're doing and really looking at the science and saying, this is what really, this is what we know, you know. And then you take that and you bundle it with us being in this window of disruption where people are sort of everything's being thrown in the air. And they may be open maybe for the first time in decades, if not a generation or two of work, to reexamining a lot of their assumptions. I think there's this really beautiful, fertile time for us to recreate the way that we approach and experience the way we work, the way we contribute to the world, the way that we build and participate in organizations, too. Yeah, well, thanks for saying that. Anyway, I want to come full circle.

You've been very kind with your time. So the name of this is The Good Life Project. So if I offer that term out to you um to live a good life um what bubbles up what does that mean to you well you know not to be repetitive but it really does come down to having your psychological needs fulfilled it's having opportunities to grow your competence to feel like you're doing the work that you want to be doing and to feel like you're respected and valued by the people around you. And I think that we're talking about work, but in many ways, this discussion is about life.

And that's what we need in our work life. It's what we need in our marriages. It's what we need in our family life and with our friends. It's having those growth experiences that really fulfill our psychological needs. That's what having a good life is about. Love it. Thank you so much. My pleasure. Hey, I really enjoyed that conversation. If you found it valuable as well,

would so appreciate if you would just head on over to iTunes, take a couple of seconds, and let us know, share a review or rating, always honest. And if you found this episode, the conversation valuable, and you think other people, maybe friends or family would enjoy and benefit from it, go ahead and share it with them as well. And as always, if you want to know what's going on with us at Good Life Project, then head over to goodlifeproject.com. And that's it for this week. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series X is here.

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