Motley Fool Money - The Business of Motivation

Episode Date: October 5, 2016

On this week's show, we revisit two of our favorite interviews. Motley Fool co-founder Tom Gardner talks with Malcolm Gladwell about his book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants. And Dan Pink shares some motivational insights from his book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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That's why they call it money. From Fool Global Headquarters, this is Motley Fool Money. It's the Motley Fool Money Radio show. I'm Chris Hill. We've got a member event in Boston. For this week's show, we're sharing a couple of interviews from past Motley Fool member events. Co-founder Tom Gardner talks with Malcolm Gladwell about his most recent book, David and Goliath, Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants.

But up first is Tom's conversation with best-selling author Dan Pink. Drive is a book looks at the science of motivation, 50 years of research in the science of motivation to say what really motivates people to do great things at work. And there's some really amazing social science here, but what it distills to, is, there's some nuance here. What it distills to is basically this. When we look at rewards, certain kinds of rewards, what I call an if-then reward.

If you do this, then you get that. If you do this, then you get that. What 50 years of social science tells us is that if-then rewards are extremely effective for simple, short-term kinds of tasks, for tasks that are algorithmic. Whether you're following a rule, you're following an algorithm,

with your brain adding up columns of figures, with your body. If then rewards are very effective for that. We love rewards, rewards get us to focus, and so if you know the algorithm, if you know what you need to do, if you see the finish line, if then rewards are enormously effective for that.

But 50 years of science tells us that if then rewards are far less effective for more complex, creative, conceptual tasks. They're not even less effective. They're problematic. Sometimes. They can be a blocker. Oh, yeah.

They can have a deleterious effect definitely, but in many cases, they just are useless. And so the problem that we make in organizations, at least as I see it, is that we apply if-then rewards to everything, rather than to the one area where the science tells us they're appropriate. And again, this is not an argument from kind of what's right or humanistic. I mean, what's sort of moral or humanistic. It's really a question of what this rich body of science tells us about what works and what

doesn't. And the mistake that we make in organizations all the time is that we take these if-then rewards. They work for certain kinds of tasks. Woo-hoo, everybody's psyched. Then we apply them to another kind of tasks. And when they don't work, when these carrot and stick motivators don't work for this one realm of tasks, our reaction isn't, oh, man, those carrot and stick motivators failed again. Let's try something else.

The reaction is, oh, man, those carrot and stick motivators failed, huh? I guess we need more carrots. I guess we need a lot more carrots. I guess we need more sticks. I guess we need sharper sticks. I guess we need to poke people on the eye three times with the stick rather than just twice. And it's taking us down a wrong road. And when I say wrong, I mean wrong empirically.

And so there's a different way to, I think, organize workplaces that is actually consistent with the science of motivation. And it ends up as a consequence being more humanistic. But you're really just following what the evidence says to these conclusions. Let's take the example you provided in an interview I read, in which you discussed how to motivate a teenager whose bedroom is messy. Yeah. So let's say that I happen, let's say that somebody has a 17-year-old daughter. All right.

And hypothetically, let's say her name is Eliza. Eliza Pink. Let's say she's going to get the video later today. Yeah. And let's say that you want Eliza to clean up her room because it's a pig stye. All right. Now, how do you go about doing that? How do you go about a pink stye?

Is that what you said? That's a good line. Let me write that one down. Let's say you want to get her to clean up her room. Now, how many of you are parents out here? Okay, so you've seen this movie before? Okay, so what do you do? So what do you do?

So you're frustrated. So you start your instinct, in some ways, your muscle memory is to say, is to yell, is to threaten, is to do something coercive. Sometimes people are, you know, okay, we'll bribe you. And those kinds of things might work in the short term. But this technique, which is really interesting, it's actually a technique. It's a technique called motivational interviewing. It's something that's used actually in therapy.

And it goes like this. So you asked two seemingly irrational questions. So on the first question, you say, I probably should not have picked my own daughter for this, but I'm already down that rabbit hole. So you say, Eliza, on a scale of 1 to 10, How ready, this is the first question, on a scale of 1 to 10, how ready are you to clean your room? Now, she's likely to give an answer of two.

Okay? Now, those of you who are, all you raised your hands, all of you who are parents, your blood is boiling already, right? Because you want to say, a two, you know, okay, so, but you hold back. Okay, Eliza, you're a two. Here comes the second question. This is the big deal. This is the major key right here. Second question is this. Okay, Eliza, you're two. Why didn't you pick a lower number? Okay, now, what's going on here? So all this, so why aren't you a one? So Eliza might have to say, well, you know, I'm 17 and, you know, I should be able to take care of myself. You know, when I lose stuff, you and mom never know where anything is. You know, I might be able to get to school faster and not have to race out of the house every morning and then I could actually sort of be a little bit more mellow when I got to school and maybe do.

a little studying before I got to school and see my friends. And so what's happening there? She begins articulating her own reasons for doing something. And what's axiomatic here is that when people have their own reasons for doing something, they believe those reasons more deeply, adhere to the behavior more strongly. And so this goes to some of the ideas in drive, which is that, you know, human beings, by their very nature, I think, are autonomous. They want to have, they want to be self-determined.

Circumstances can crush that, can suffocate that. But at our roots, we are people who want to have some. some kind of sovereignty over what we do, how we do it. And one of the best ways to motivate people, one of the best ways to motivate yourselves, is to find the context of situation and the circumstance where that innate autonomy can come to the surface. And why, and I know there is a reason,

why doesn't she typically answer, why doesn't somebody typically answer one? Yeah, that's a good question. Well, it's interesting. In this, very rarely do people say, I'm a one. Okay? Usually, you don't get anything over four, usually, because it's a problem, okay?

But that's a good question, Tom. So when you say it's a one, a one is sometimes very revealing. I'm a one. Okay. What can we do to take this to a two? And what you'll find is that there's usually some kind of obstacle there. You guys are always making me set the table every night and empty the dishwasher and mow the lawn or whatever. Or you know what?

At this particular time of year, I have this extracurricular thing and I'm just so busy. It's like I'm overwhelmed here. And so if you guys give me some relief, maybe I can do a little bit better here. So when you say, what can we do to get you to a two, it's usually people are a one because there's some kind of big obstacle in the way. But in most cases, people are like two's three's and fours. To sell as human, let's hear a few sentences about that. It's a book about the idea that if you look at what white-collar workers especially do every

day on the job, a huge portion of it is selling. Sometimes it's selling products and services, but a big part of it is convincing, cajoling, persuading other people. And what's interesting is that we're now, big deal. in financial services in general, we're doing it in a landscape. Most of our persuasive landscape, most of the history of commerce from the very beginning when people were, I don't know, selling goats in exchange for shells or whatever, was a world of information asymmetry where the seller always had more information than

the buyer. When the seller has more information than the buyer, the seller can rip you off. This is why we have the principle of buyer beware. But in the last 10 years, we've gone from information asymmetry to something resembling information parity. That's a big deal. And what that's done is basically change the whole landscape of sales and persuasion. So with that as a starting point, I looked at, again, back to the social science, some of the research about what it takes to be persuasive in this remade landscape. Looking at very, very small questions of, are there certain personality types that are

more persuasive than other personality types? If you're making an argument, should you offer people one reason, two reasons, three reasons, reasons, five reasons. How does the sequence of your arguments affect people's willingness to assent to what you're saying? When should you use questions? When should you use statements? And so I looked at sort of what are the core kind of qualities and what are some of the practices where we can get better at persuading, influencing, and selling in this remade terrain? I want to go back to Drive.

Yeah. And I would like you to define, and maybe provide an example in your life if one readily comes to mind. Autonomy. Mastery. purpose, why they're important motivators, and how you define them and maybe how they're playing out in your life right now. Okay. Yeah. So if you look at some of the research, what it shows is that, you know, in terms of basically

performance in the workplace, but we can, I think, take it to a higher level of sort of satisfaction with life and sort of performance on a whole array of measures. But let's stick to performance in the workplace. Basically, what people need is this. You've got to pay people enough. You got to pay people enough. You got to pay people enough. Sometimes people will look at this research

on intrinsic and extrinsic motivators and say, oh, the intrinsic motivators count. That means they don't have to pay anybody. That's a very stupid conclusion. That's stupid in the sense that it goes against what the research says. The research says you've got to pay people enough. I actually think there's some interesting research showing the advantages of paying people more than enough,

of paying people beyond the market clearing wage. You've got to pay people enough. And then what people need is autonomy, which is some sovereignty over what they do, when they do it, how they do it, who they do it with. Mastery, which is a chance to make progress get better at something that matters, and purpose knowing why you're doing it in the first place. One of the things that happens in organizations, particularly large organizations, is that people worry that they want to know, if I didn't come into work today,

would anybody notice and would anybody care? If I didn't show up today, would something not get done? Would it like the situation at this place be worse? since I'm not here. And I think that's a big part of what people need sort of, you know, they need to know that they actually matter. And it doesn't have to be mattering in this kind of big transcendent way. It could be mattering the way we got this report out the door because you were here. A final question is putting you on the spot to do a little exercise with us, not that we'll

actually follow through on it right now. But could you just give us a few tips, one tip, anything, to guide us in how to refine our small P or large P purpose? Yeah. No, I think there are a lot of things you can do. There's some great research from Harvard Business School, Theresa Mobule, who found that the single biggest motivator day-to-day on the job is making progress in meaningful work. When people make progress, they feel good, they're motivated. The problem is that we often don't see the progress we're making.

We're often, okay? So, about five years ago, I heard about this startup company, and the startup company is called I done this. Okay? I done this. And what they do, and it's a very easy service, it's still around. What they do is they send you an email or a text at the end of every day, and the email says, what'd you get done today?

What did you get done today? And you have to answer the email. And you just basically list the things that you got done. And then it keeps a little calendar for you. And so when you get subsequent emails, it'll say, I'll get something at 7 o'clock tonight. It'll say, what did you get done today? And then they'll say, they mix it up a little bit.

But yesterday, here's what you got done. A month ago, here's what you got done. Three months ago, here's what you got done. and what this does is that it establishes a ritual for stopping and assessing your progress. I think I've done this every single day for like five years, and I liked it. Here's the investment decision. I liked it so much. Yes.

Are they still in business? They were recently. acquired, and I use that term loosely? Not as a premium. No. They, no. Some really great entrepreneurs are really great. A lot of these things don't work out, but it was not a massive acquisition event.

And for the Pink Family, well, I think net we win because of the enhanced productivity that I gained. Certainly. Made up for the bath that I took. making this angel investment and seeing the angels not win this time. Coming up, Malcolm Gladwell talks David and Goliath. This is Motley Fool Money. Welcome back to Motley Fool Money. I'm Chris Hill.

Motley Fool's CEO, Tom Gardner, recently sat down with bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell to discuss his new book, David and Goliath. Thank you so much for coming and spending time with us. Just outline the overall premise of the book. Well, I was interested in a book in describing in asymmetrical conflicts, or more generally in this notion of, is our understanding of what an advantage is accurate? And that's the theme that runs throughout the whole book.

So if our understanding of what an advantage is is so accurate, why does the weaker party in a war win as often as it does? because the weird thing about, if you look at histories of warfare, is that the, quote-unquote, underdog, the much smaller party in any kind of conflict, wins an astonishing a number of times, which suggests that maybe we're fixating on the wrong variables in explaining conflict.

And then I run with that idea and talk about schools and education and dyslexia and all kinds of entrepreneurialism and all kinds of things along those same lines. wondering whether our kind of intuitive accounting of these things is accurate. What I'd like to do is just spot up some of the characters, some of the narrative of the of the book. So you can just tell maybe a couple short little tidbit about each one. So why don't we start with Vivek. And since I'm going to mispronounce names, why don't I have you pronounce the full name?

Vivek, Renadiv. Vivek. Who is the guy who founded Tipco, software company in Silicon Valley. He's the one who got me rolling on this because I ran into him at a conference once. And I really had no idea who he was. This is a problem that I have that I can't. I have very, very poor facial recognition. In fact, parenthetically, I once was at a dinner at some conference,

sat next to a guy for the whole dinner, and I thought he was a graduate student, and I made him discuss Michigan State basketball with me the entire time. And it discovered at the end of the, conversation that it was Larry Page. And it never, you know, someone was like, do you realize you talk to Larry Page? I was like, that was Larry Page?

I thought he was a graduate student. So I'm bad at this. Anyway, I run into this guy Vivek, and I started talking to him, not realizing that he's the head of Tipco, about his daughter's basketball team. And he had coached, just finished coaching his daughter, 12-year-old daughter's basketball team.

And Vivek being from Mumbai, doesn't know the slightest thing about basketball. And so he went to watch basketball to educate himself on this and concluded that the way Americans played basketball was utterly insane. He didn't understand why you retreated after you scored.

Why do you run back to your own end and wait for the other team to come up to bring the ball up? I mean, sometimes people play the full court press, but his whole point was, why wouldn't you press all the time? particularly if you're the weaker party if you're a weaker party why would you allow the other team

which is better at shooting and passing and scoring than you to shoot pass and score more quickly than they would otherwise why wouldn't you try to stop them from doing the thing that makes them that makes them good right and particularly when you're talking about 12 year old girls who's you know that you he realized if you play the folklore press with 12 year old girls they won't even get the ball in back downs. So he, his team, and furthermore, he realized that his team that his daughter was playing

on was a team of girls from Silicon Valley. They were the daughters of people like him. In other words, these were not girls who went home every night and shot baskets. They were girls who went home and I had like dreamt about becoming marine biologists. They were, they had no talent whatsoever, basically. So he gets these girls together and he says, look, I don't And I don't know anything about basketball. You have no talent whatsoever. It's pointless for us to shoot, dribble, do anything. What we're going to do is get an insane shape,

and I'm going to teach you how to play the most aggressive form of the full court press. And so they start winning games by scores like 6-0. And they go all the way to the national championship. Now, the fascinating thing about that story is that, A, he, That's the rational strategy if your team sucks. In fact, any team that is a decided underdog in any basketball contest ought to play the full court press, even though there's a chance, if the other team can break the press,

you're going to get blown out. But his point is, so what? You're going to lose anyway, right? Your only chance of actually winning is to do something radical. So interesting thing, number one is why then do so few underdog teams play the full court press? Why is there an unwillingness to follow a strategy? strategy that is in your best interest. And the answer is because it's hard and because it gets, people don't like it. And Vivek, people didn't like Vivek when he was coaching his team.

Coming up, Malcolm Gladwell shares some surprising thoughts on choosing a college. Stay right here. You're listening to Motley Full Money. Thanks to Rocket Mortgage by Quick and Loans for sponsoring this episode of Motley Full Money. If you've ever bought a home, you already know how frustrating and time consuming getting a mortgage can be. Rocket Mortgage brings the mortgage approval process into the 21st century by taking all of the complicated, time-consuming parts of applying for a mortgage out of the equation. You can easily share your bank statements and pay stubs at the touch of a button, helping you get approved in minutes for a custom mortgage solution that's been tailored to your own financial situation. And best of all, you can do it

all on your phone or tablet. So if you're looking to refinance your mortgage or buy a home, check out Rocket Mortgage Today at quickenloans.com slash fool. Equal Housing Lender, licensed in all 50 states NMLS Consumer Access.org, number 3030. Welcome back to Motley Fool Money. I'm Chris Hill. Let's rejoin Motley Fool CEO Tom Gardner's conversation with best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell. Let's hear about Caroline Sacks. Caroline Sacks was this pseudonym of, I got really interested in this literature on what's called relative deprivation. And so the question is, if you're talking about, choosing a college, do you want to go to the best college you can get into? Everyone says

you should. But there's reams and reams and reams of educational data to suggest actually that's not a good strategy at all. With some exceptions, you shouldn't go to the best school you can get into. You should go to the school where your chances of finishing in the top third of your class are greatest. The benefits, psychological benefits, or the psychological costs of being at the bottom of any class, particularly if you're in a competitive field like science, math, or engineering, are so overwhelming that it's, whatever, that it's too risky.

If you really want to get a science degree, you should go somewhere where you can feel smart. So Carolyn Sachs is a girl who was really good at science, got into Brown, went, because everyone said, that's the best school you should get into, got to Brown, dropped out of science because she looked around at the other brilliant kids in her class and thought she couldn't do it.

and realized belatedly that she was just in this absurdly elite environment. By any real-world measure, she was good at science. And had she gone to her safety, University of Maryland, she would today have the most valuable commodity in the marketplace, a science degree. So that's a case where, again, our obsession with a certain kind of advantage, in this case, prestige, completely distorts our rationality. David Boyes, the well-known lawyer.

and his story to his journey to the law. He's dyslexic. He reads at most one book a year, and he is America's greatest trial lawyer. When I heard that, I was like, whoa. So I went to talk to him. I was like, I don't know, how did you, how do you even get through law school? But if you can't read, I mean, he can read,

but really, really slowly. And this fitted into this larger theory of if dyslexic If dyslexia is such a terrible problem, then why are such an extraordinarily high percentage of successful entrepreneurs dyslexic? And the answer is that some portion of dyslexics compensate for their disability in ways that leave them better off. So boys said, I got through school by doing two things.

I developed my memory to the point where if you say something, I'll always remember it. Secondly, I learned how to listen. So in law school, he would sit, no paper, no pen. He would sit in the front row, focus on the professor, commit everything to professor, listen to everything the professor said, and commit everything the professor said to memory.

He gets into a courtroom. All of a sudden, he's a dynamo. You know, in day four of the cross-examination, he can say to you, wait a minute. On day one, you said, x, y, and z. Now you're contradicting yourself. He's that guy, right? And that's not something he's born with.

It's something he developed as a result of being denied the ability to run. read fluently. And that's, you can make the same argument for entrepreneurs that, deprived of the ability to succeed conventionally in school, you are forced to delegate, right? It must have interviewed 10 very successful dyslexic entrepreneurs.

Every single one of them, what do they do in first grade? Identify the smartest kid in the class and make friends with them. Of course. How else are you to get through school? They also, by the way, all cheated, which I didn't going to do in my book. But I was actually fascinated by this.

But it's not cheating. Cheating most of the time is where I don't want to do the work, so I take a shortcut. I don't really care about school. I have a contempt for it. These guys care passionately about school, but they can't do it constitutionally. And they care so much that they say, you know what?

I have to stay in school. I am going to come up with strategies that allow me, someone who is you know constitutionally capable of reading easily to continue to flourish and so they cheat and they

I had at one point I had a whole chapter on the cheating techniques of successful dyslexic entrepreneurs but I left it out let's hear about Wyatt Walker Wyatt Walker my favorite character in the book

so the question is White Walker is Martin Luther King's shadowy less known deputy. He's the fixer. He's brilliant. So King is like the saint, running the show,

Walker's behind the scenes. And the question in the chat, I wrote a chapter on Birmingham. What happens when King goes to Birmingham to take on Bull Connor? The climactic event of the civil rights movement in 1963. And the question is, if you have been oppressed for 200 years, what do you learn through that process.

What are the lessons that you, if you're smart and adaptive and resilient, what do you take home from being kicked around for 200 years? And the answer is, you get really, really, really, really clever. And you learn how to play tricks.

King in Birmingham has nothing. He's got no money. He's at the lowest step of his he's just gotten schooled in Albany, Georgia. He's being denounced by everyone, including the black press, he starts to hold marches in Birmingham at the beginning and 12 people show up. Bull Connor is looking at him and laughing. He doesn't even bother to

send his cops out after King because King's so pathetic. And Walker proceeds to play a series of tricks on Bull Connor that have the effect of defeating him. And I won't go through all of them, but my favorite is the, actually, the best one is the one I'm not going to ruin the chapter for you, but I'll tell you the first one. So they have 12 people marching against every day in Birmingham. which is ridiculous. It's nothing. One day they're arguing in the church for fully go out on the march,

and they get delayed. And what happened is that after work, all of the African Americans who worked in downtown Birmingham would come to 16th Street Baptist Church and just hang out to see what was going on. So they're delayed until after workers got out. So they send their march out with 12 people.

And the next day, Walker reads in the press that a thousand people marched in Birmingham, Alabama. He was like, a thousand. We only had 12. And he realizes, oh, wait a minute. To the reporters, they can't tell a difference. A black person's a black person. They can't tell a difference between someone who's just a bystander and a marcher. So it's like, oh, duh, we're always going to march after work now.

And so in the press from then on, it's like 1,200 people marched yesterday in Birmingham. He's like, we had a dozen, right? And everyone is fooled. Even Bull Connor is like, whoa, all these. A lot of this hilarious kind of the story builds from there, but a lot of what people assumed were protesters in Birmingham were always bystanders. Some of the famous photos of the firemen turning the water hoses on protesters, we're not protesters. Wyatt Walker figured this out. They were bystanders who were really hot.

It's Birmingham. who went to the police, to the firemen, and said, turn on your hoses. We're really hot. So then Wyatt Walker had all the photographers line up, take these photos, and then he said, oh, look what they're doing. This man totally outsmarts, Bull Connor. I mean, it's just a textbook case of how,

just because you've got nothing doesn't mean, it's the same lesson as Vivek. Just because you got nothing doesn't mean you have to roll over and die. There's all kinds of means available to you. Use what you got. You got to use what you got. So we're outside the status quo, and we turn for expert advice. And I want just a little riff on that in the form of Roger Craig, San Francisco 49ers running back, and his sister.

So in other words, Vivek is outside the status quo, but he probably couldn't have pulled that all off by himself without turning to one of his employees. Yeah, so it turns out, yeah, going back to the story of Vivek, and his girls basketball team, turns out that Roger Craig works for Vivek. And Roger Craig's daughter was an all-American basketball player at Duke. So he did, you know, he was not completely, he recognized the fact that, you know, he only really knew cricket and basketball was a little bit of a foreign thing. So he knew, he knew, but he also brought in, Craig's very interesting actually, as an advisor, because the whole theme of Vivek's basketball experiment

was to substitute effort for skill and his argument I think it's a very accurate argument and in many domains effort properly expressed is an adequate substitute for skill more than an adequate substitute for skill and that's what if you know if you know about Roger Craig's career

about him that's his whole MO he's an effort guy much more he's also a very skilled guy but the thing that set him apart was an extraordinary work ethic. Roger Craig has run seven marathons since retiring as an NFL running back. Most NFL running backs can't walk after they retire, let alone run seven. I mean, so he knew what he was doing, in other words. He was bringing people who reinforced this really sort of central notion,

which is that if you're willing to really work, that can make up for a lot of deficiencies. So, third factor, you don't overplay your greatest strength. I've phrased it that way from your discussion of the inverted U-curve and maybe explain that concept and see if that's a... Should a David, even though he has a strength, not think about overdoing it, or is it he's still on this side of the U-curve and should be anchoring hard on his strength as far as he can take it? Yeah, the inverted U is... a chapter where I talk about how I think one of the kind of mental models we use to describe relationships between resources and outputs is really leads us astray. So we have this notion that if a little bit of resources, money, makes the problem better,

then a lot of money will make the problem best of all, go away the most. And the answer is no, that doesn't, in most of the things that we, of situations where we look at relationships between what you put in and what you get out. The curve does not look like that. The curve looks like that, or rather the curve looks like a you, that in the beginning things get better, and then they flatten out, and then they get worse. So I use the example of class size. It is absolutely the case that if classes are very large and you make them smaller, kids will do better. But then there's a long stretch between probably, you know, the high 20s in the low 20s where you could make a class smaller

and you will see no effect on kids performance. And if you go too far below 20, kids are worse off. There's really interesting and compelling evidence of this that it is not a good thing for a child to be in a class with 14 children, 14 other students. One, you cannot get a discussion going with 14, not enough voices in the room. Two, one bad apple can totally ruin a small class

because there's nowhere for that. person to hide. Right? You can't. And thirdly, that children who are struggling, what they need most of all is not more attention from the teacher. What they need most of all is another person a peer who is learning at the same pace as they are so they don't feel marginal and isolated. You need to have someone who's asking the same questions, struggling with the same problems. If a class gets too small, the struggling kids are just wiped out. And that's a That's something, you know, a lesson that is so routinely violated. You know, I made fun of private, expensive private schools in my book because I'm sorry,

they deserve it. They take $50,000 of your money and they boast to you that your kid is in a class with 12 out of students. Whoever said that's a good thing, right? All they're doing is justifying the fact that they spent, took 50 grand in your money. And they have 20 Steinway pianos. That was the Hotskka school. where you, I thought, brilliantly pointed out that a school like that is often

serving its primary customer, which is the parent. Not actually the outcome for the student, it's to impress the parent that we have the very best of every piece of equipment times 10. Where is it written? I even find the whole notion that the point of a classroom is to maximize the attention that a student gets from a teacher is insane.

A student, has to go through extended periods where they are forced to solve the problem in front of them by themselves. That's called life, right? The teacher should be there for when you are truly stuck and also should be there to get you to the point where you can solve it on your own. It is not a good thing to have a teacher hovering over your shoulder at all times. That's debilitating. So it goes to this idea that too much, we sought to make the mistake where we push our use of resources well past the point where they are. are useful. Coming up, Malcolm Gladwell talks about the attributes of a great leader. Stay right here. This is Motley Full Money.

Welcome back to Motley Full Money. I'm Chris Hill. Let's get back to Motley Full CEO Tom Gardner's conversation with bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell. I want to talk about the leaders that set up cultures and throw three adjectives at you from the book. Maybe I'm slightly tweaking the wording, but open-minded, persistent, and disagreeable. Why are those three important to find in a great leader? Well, openness, so these are, this is some wonderful work's been done on sort of innovators recently, and they have stressed the kind of, they've looked at what is the kind of prototypical profile of an entrepreneur, innovator, leader.

And the argument is they are, the most obvious one is that they are open, meaning they are creative. And that's, goes to that I'd say. You have to be able to someone who considers all. The second thing is that you must be conscientious in the psychological sense of that word. So there are big five, there are five basic character traits. Conscientiousness is one of them. Are you someone who can follow through on your ideas?

Now, right away, we have an interesting situation here because there are lots of people who are open. There are lots of people who are conscientious. Those that have both those traits are rare, right? you know, I can find in any coffee shop in Brooklyn lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of creative people who can't finish their screenplay. I can also find in any law firm in America tons and tons of conscientious people who we don't want to think outside the box, right?

We want them inside the box, right? They're not creative. So there's these, but that overlap is rare. And then add to the third most important one, which is disagree. which is you cannot be someone who requires the approval of others in order to do what you intend to do. And that's crucial because, and that's the hardest of the three, because we're hardwired as human beings to want the approval of our peers. I always remember when I was writing my book, Blink, I hung out with that guy who studied marriages and he was talking about the one emotion that a marriage cannot survive in the face of is contempt,

because contempt is the emotion of exclusion. That when you're, if your spouse argues with you, they are including you. They're saying, I care about you enough to want to work this out. When they are contemptuous towards you, they're saying, I'm done with you. And as human beings, we need that kind of approval so much that that can end the marriage.

Well, the really great entrepreneurs, at some key most, or innovators or leaders at some key moment as they are doing putting forth their vision need to be disagreeable they need to not need that kind of approval because the one thing we know is that you know there's always a moment in the birth of any great idea when the consensus is it's crazy find me a transformative idea that was was not denounced and criticized at some key moment during its gestation We have to close to let you get on your way, but could you just close by sharing a little bit about how you think about, how we should think about our disadvantages in life? Anyone in the room that sees, I have this weakness, I have this flaw, I have this thing that's helped me back or this shortcoming, or I see it in my child. I see them struggling with this. How should we think about disadvantages? Well, as, you know, it is a cliche, but they, as learning opportunities, there are, you know, you can learn by, capitalizing on your strengths, or you can learn by compensating for your weaknesses, the compensation path is far more difficult, it's far more rare, but it's way more powerful. The things you learn

as you are working around or through adversity are lessons that are far more deeply felt than the things you learn because of your strengths. And so, you know, I chose dyslexia in my book for a reason, because there are just so many examples of people who refuse to deal. That is just about the most serious impediment you can throw in the path of a child. And the idea that there are lots and lots and lots of really, really successful people who, when faced with that

impediment at the age of six and seven, just were undaunted by it. And just found another way to kind of go about the business of getting through school and then ultimately through life. That to me is such a very important. a beautiful example of how we radically underestimate our ability as human beings to deal with, to deal with adversity. I mean, I think we're much better at it than we think. Malcolm Gladwell's latest book is David and Goliath. It is already a bestseller. So go out

there and check it out. As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about. And the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against. So don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. Our producer is Matt Greer, I'm Chris Hill. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.