Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Jeremy Utley on Why Mastering Ideaflow Elevates Everything Else You Do EP 206

Episode Date: October 25, 2022

Stanford professor Jeremy Utley joins us on Passion Struck to discuss his new book Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric that Matters, co-written with Perry Klebahn. Brought to you by American Giant (get 20% off using code PassionStruck at https://www.american-giant.com/). Let's face it. We all strive for grand ideas, but very few truly comprehend how novel ideas are born. Innovation is not a one-time event, nor is it a sprint or a hackathon. It comes from the mastery of ideaflow, a technique that advances everything else you do. The simple fact is that ideas matter. That is why innovators focus on inputs instead of outputs. According to Jeremy, innovators don't obsess over quality, they develop quantity. Jeremy Utley is the Director of Executive Education at Stanford’s d.school and an Adjunct Professor at Stanford’s School of Engineering. He is the co-host of the d.school’s widely popular program, “Stanford’s Masters of Creativity.” Purchase Idea Flow: https://amzn.to/3SwyXKM  (Amazon Link) --► Get the resources and all links related to this episode here: https://passionstruck.com/jeremy-utley-on-mastering-ideaflow/  --► For information about advertisers and promo codes, go to: https://passionstruck.com/deals/  --► Prefer to watch this interview: https://youtu.be/0JZ0btOHz5g  --► Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel Here: https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnRMiles --► Subscribe to the Passion Struck Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/passion-struck-with-john-r-miles/id1553279283  Where to Follow Jeremy Utley Website: https://www.jeremyutley.design/  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stanford/  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremyutley/  Twitter: https://twitter.com/jeremyutley/  -- John R. Miles is the CEO, and Founder of PASSION STRUCK®, the first-of-its-kind company, focused on impacting real change by teaching people how to live Intentionally. He is on a mission to help people live a no-regrets life that exalts their victories and lets them know they matter in the world. For over two decades, he built his own career applying his research of passion-struck leadership, first becoming a Fortune 50 CIO and then a multi-industry CEO. He is the executive producer and host of the top-ranked Passion Struck Podcast, selected as one of the Top 50 most inspirational podcasts in 2022. Learn more about John: https://johnrmiles.com/  ===== FOLLOW JOHN ON THE SOCIALS ===== * Twitter: https://twitter.com/Milesjohnr * Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/johnrmiles.c0m * Medium: https://medium.com/@JohnRMiles​ * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/john_r_miles * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/milesjohn/ * Blog: https://johnrmiles.com/blog/ * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/passion_struck_podcast * Gear: https://www.zazzle.com/store/passion_sruck_podcast

Coming up next on the Passion Struck Podcast. There are two kinds of people in this world. There's zero to one people, people like Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, and then there's one to infinity people. People who can take the thing that they come up with and they can turn it into something great. And I fundamentally disagree with that premise. And I've said so publicly actually because there's really two reasons I disagree. The first reason is cognitive, and the second reason is empirical. Let's put it that way.

So cognitively, the reason I disagree with the Zero to One premise is that premises, there's some people who start with nothing and then they get to something. And the truth is nobody starts with nothing. Welcome to PassionStrock. Hi, I'm your host, John Armiles, and on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you.

Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long-form interviews the rest of the week with guest-ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become PassionStruck. Hello everyone, and welcome back to episode 206 of PassionStruck.

Recently ranked by Apple is one of the top 20 most popular health podcasts, and thank you to each and every one of you who comes back weekly to listen and learn, add a live better, be better, and impact the world. If you're new to the show, thank you so much for joining us, or you would like to just introduce this to a friend or family member. We have episode starter packs now, both on Spotify and at passionstruck.com slash starter packs. And these are collections

of our fans. Favorite episodes that we organize into topics. To give any new listener a great way to get acquainted to everything that we do here on the show. In case you missed my solo episode from this past week, it was on digital addiction. The impact it is causing us on human connection in five ways to overcome it. Please go and check it out. I also wanted to say thank you so much for your continued ratings and reviews that means so much to us growing the popularity of this podcast, the ratings that we're getting, but most importantly, growing our community. We couldn't do it without you, and we appreciate it so much. Now, let's talk about today's episode.

Having worked in Fortune 50 businesses, mid-market companies, and startups, I have seen that teams succeed to the degree that they have a free flow of ideas. Therefore, the number of ideas you or your team can generate in a short set of time is extremely important. But how do you go about quickly determining which of those ideas is important?

How do you overcome dangerous thinking traps? Learn to find inspiration in unexpected places and trick your own brain to be more creative. Our guests today, Jeremy Utley, will cover all those topics and so much more. Jeremy is the Executive Director at Stanford's Paso Planner Institute of Design, better known as the D-School, and an Ag-Junk Professor at Stanford's School of Engineering, where he has earned multiple favorite professor distinctions from various graduate programs. Jeremy is co-author of Idea Flow, the only metric that matters, which releases today. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host on guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now, let that journey begin.

I am incredibly excited to welcome Jeremy Utley to the Passion Start podcast. Welcome Jeremy. Thanks, I'm glad to be here. Well, I wanted to congratulate you and Perry for your incredible book launch today. So congratulations, it must have been so much time and preparation to reach this point. The PR on book writing is doesn't do justice the amount of work that goes into a book. You pick it up at the library, you look at it, you look at a bookstore, you go, that's cool, you set it down, and you don't realize you're effectively picking up a couple of years of someone's life.

In your hand and turning it over, and I have a newfound appreciation for everyone who's ever written a book. That's for sure. Well, as someone who themselves is going through the process right now, it is a lot more complicated and harder than I had ever imagined. Yeah, so I'm here for you. If you need someone to come and meditate, you just let me know. Well I like to get these podcasts off by allowing the audience to get to know the person I'm interviewing and a common question I like to ask

is we all have defining moments. Can you tell me about a moment that defines you and set you up on the path that you're on now? Yeah, yeah, it's a great question. I think, let's see, I mean, there's a few that come to mind, but the one that I'll mention now just because it it's relevant to the topic at hand is I Had the opportunity to work at a consulting firm out of college and I had a great experience there

It was a bit of a grind I would say, but I felt like I was doing the best work I possibly could do at the best firm I could possibly work for it was kind of a dream scenario and firm I could possibly work for. It was kind of a dream scenario. And yet I wasn't totally fulfilled. I wasn't totally invigorated by the work I had to do. It was very much work. And it interests us on the work part. And I came to Business School at Stanford with the expectation that I would go back to this firm later. They were going to actually pay for my business school. It's part of their kind of development programs, a standard thing that they offer to a subset of their associates. So anyway, I came to Stanford fully expecting to move back to the consulting firm into the two-year program. What happened was halfway between my business schooling,

the summer between years of business school. Partially because I already knew what I was going to do, supposedly after school, I had a lot of liberty and leeway to spend my summer doing what I wanted to. So I ended up seeking out my search criteria where I wanted to work at a venture backed startup. I wanted to be in the developing world doing something around helping people out of poverty. That was kind of my selection criteria. So startup, venture capital, poverty alleviation in the developing world. And over the course of a search, I ended up at a company in India

called Delight Design, which designed solar powered lighting for families that live off the electrical grid. They typically burn kerosene in their homes, which is problematic for a number of reasons. Well, my wife and I moved to Delhi and we had an amazing experience and one of the things that my eyes were open to

is the power of design. They had actually come out of the program where I now teach the design school at Stanford and they valued and emphasized design. And I started being curious about design and not necessarily aesthetics or form, but really a way of thinking about problems and a way about thinking about solutions.

And so they started over the course of the summer, they said, hey, you gotta go to the D school and you get back to Stanford, you get another year, you gotta go there. So when I got back to Stanford, I started taking classes at the D school and in elective fashion. I was a classes at the D school and an elective fashion.

I was a business school student, so I took elective courses. And my world was rocked. I was derailed by the D school in a sense, because there was this whole other way of working that I had never experienced before. There was really profound, really invigorating. I remember the first design project I was given. It was reinventing Roman noodles. And I didn't, my fair share of Roman noodles in college.

I thought I knew all about them. But my mind was just blown as I kind of submitted myself to the design process and went through it and I ended up delighting myself with an unexpected what I would really consider a breakthrough for myself. I saw I'm capable of things that I, I'm capable of discovering or coming up with the answers that I don't already possess and doing something

that's really interesting and unexpected and that was really captivating. And at the end of that year, the founders of the D-School invited me to remain on free here as a fellow. They have kind of a junior league faculty development program at the time called the design school fellows. And they asked me to stick around for a year. And so I did. And during that year, I became aware that the job that I was supposed to go back to is not a great fit. Nothing like being

a teacher, which is what I was doing at the D school. But I had obligation or responsibility to them. So the defining moment for me, because I had been, I had had this mindset of, I've just got to follow through, my word is my bond, I said I'd come back, I've got to come back, but I felt this real tension in my heart. And so I said, I'm going to schedule meetings with some of the people who went to bat for me at this consulting firm, some of the partners there. And I'm just going to lay out my situation and I'm going to ask them what they think I should do. And that was a real defining moment for me because one, I wasn't just adhering to some rules. And two, I was kind of allowing my heart or my

passion, if you will, to have a little bit of a say, whereas I was very kind of sterile in my thinking at that point. So I flew to the town where the consulting firm office that had sponsored me was. And when I went there, I sat down and I spoke with a handful of partners who I felt a personal responsibility to and to a person, man and woman alike, all said, well, you can't come back here. That'd be crazy.

There's no way you can come back here. And I was shocked because I thought, well, I said I would and they said, no, it happens all the time. Somebody discovered something else. You gotta do it. You've only got one life. And so making that decision to not return,

which had certain consequences, which we could talk about later if you want, but making that decision was a real defining moment. When I went to college, I studied finance and I love a good spreadsheet and I love a pivot table and just as much as the rest of them. And I did the financial analyst program at the University of Texas hook on and making stock pitches and things like that to the fund managers there. And I did strategy consulting and I knew I was going to go to business school for what reason I have no idea. And then I knew I was going to go back to strategy consulting and I knew I was going to go to business school for what reason I have no idea and then I knew I was going to go back to strategy consulting and then I knew and so I had this path in my mind from basically junior year of college and that moment where I decided to deviate from the path was really powerful to me because all of a sudden I didn't know it the next few years, but hold. And that was invigorating. It was scary. It set me up for where I am today. And so I'm deeply grateful for the permission

that they gave me to deviate from that path. Well, I have a long horn in my family as well. My sister just got an advanced degree there in social working. So she just graduated a few months ago. Amazing. Congratulations. That's great. Yes. So, got one. You know, it's the burnt orange blood red and steep. So I'm sure you've got a blood transfusion at this point from her. Probably. I know when I live there, just how popular football was there and really all

the sports. Yeah, it's incredible. I remember at the time when I was there, we would watch Kevin Durant while he was still playing for them and just amazing talent. Oh, so good. Yeah, Rick Barnes is an amazing coach. That's for sure.

Well, for people who might not be familiar with the D school, I know when outsiders probably look at Stanford, heard of Stanford Law School, they've heard of the MBA program, they might not be as familiar with the design school. So can you just shed a little bit of light on that for the listeners? How did it get its origin? And what is its specific purpose compared to some of the other programs at Stanford? Sure. Yeah, the D school is a unique place at Stanford.

You can consider it almost a school crossing. It's a hub for interdisciplinary collaborations. At Stanford, there, as you mentioned, there are seven graduate programs, law, business, engineering, and several others. And they are all exceptional at going deeper and deeper in their area of disciplinary depth. And you talk about your sister getting an advanced degree or PhDs or things like that. They just go deeper and deeper and deeper. It's like drilling for oil or something. And every one of those programs, their bet is essentially, let's go deeper.

And David Kelly, who's one of the core founders of the D school, had been a product design student. And then he took what he learned in product design and he started a design firm. And he famously designed Apple's first mouse. So that's kind of a big success story. He was good friends with Steve Jobs. Very close with him developed a lot of amazing products with Steve. And David started observing in his own design practice that he was increasingly being invited into more and more strategic conversations, less things around aesthetics or form and function and more around strategy and purpose. And as he started interfacing with radically different kinds of fields in his client pool.

He realized nobody knows the design perspective. As a designer, I've been trained to value emotions, for example, to make my ideas tangible, to generate a volume of possibilities before I make decisions. There are all these kind of core tenants of design. And he realized that the lawyers he's interacting with and the business people he's interacting with and the accountants and HR, etc. They don't have some of these core

foundational values. They may they may share them implicitly, but they aren't they aren't encoded in the way of working. And David started to have a vision for a desire for a place at Stanford. The vision is now cascaded elsewhere, but a place at Stanford where students who aren't designers by training can learn some of the mindsets that make designers so great at solving problems. And so the D-School exists to inculcate that sense of creative confidence, not only to designers, but to lawyers who could bring a design perspective to law and to business people who could bring a design perspective to business and to medical school students who could bring a design perspective to the medical practice, etc etc. So the D school sets at this interesting intersection point at the university where if you're in a degree granting program and you'd also like to develop your ability to collaborate with folks from other disciplines,

you come to the D school, and you do that at the D school. The famous story is David had that idea for a long time, and he mentioned it, I think he was in a business week article or a time article, he was being interviewed by one of those magazines, and Hossow Platner is the founder of SAP, happened to be reading that article in his airplane. And as the story goes, when he touched ground, he called David and said, Hey, I just read this article. What does it take to see that vision fulfilled?

And David said, Oh, you know, take a radical change in the administration's outlook on broad thinking and collaboration versus deep thinking and focus. And Haas said, No, I mean in terms of money, what would it take to make it happen? Because I want to make it happen. And David says, thought of the biggest number I could think of, I said, 35 million dollars. And also said, great, I'll write a check. And David's joke is at Stanford, nobody, I mean, people had been arguing with them whether it was a good idea or not. When he came back with a check for 35 million dollars, everybody thought it was a great idea. idea or not. When he came back with a check for $35 million, everybody thought it was a great idea.

And so that was circa early 2000s, where we kind of began our humble origins, double wide trailer on the edge of campus, which you could kind of your proximity to the center of campus is a rough approximation for how the university sees this neutrality of what you do, right? You could say that or that's at least my kind of metaphorical read of it. And we move from a double-wide trailer on the edgy campus to a floor at a hall that's more central to a building that's more central now to a building that's basically right behind Memorial Church on campus. Be hard to get more central until we move into the church or something. But we've now we teach classes to thousands of graduate and undergraduate students across the university. And we're currently undergoing a process to actually become a degree granting part of the university, which is very

exciting. And I think if a filment of some of David's long-term vision. Well, it's a very interesting story. And ironically, I interviewed Andreas Widmer recently, who's a professor at the Catholic School in DC. And he actually helped launch their principled entrepreneurship center of excellence. And it kind of happened in the same way that you just described as he had a mentor, Art Sioka, who was big in the wine world out on the West Coast.

And Art was willing to write a check to help him get the whole institute started. So it's interesting what can happen when you have a backer like that. Right, definitely. That's so true. Well, speaking of entrepreneurship, there's this, I guess, question from, I think, the beginning of time. Do you think entrepreneurship is born, or do you think it's something that can be taught, especially now that you've been teaching for so many years at the D school? Oh, that's great. It depends on how you define

entrepreneurship. I would say I fundamentally disagree with the zero to one premise. Peter Teal is written a great book, zero to one, which I recommend. I like it. And you hear that phrase get invoked a lot. I heard a very famous leader who will remain nameless for the purpose of this discussion, but household name say recently, there are two kinds of people in this world. There's zero to one people, people like Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, and then there's one to infinity people, people who can take what the thing that they come up with and they can turn it into something great.

I fundamentally disagree with that premise and I've said so publicly actually, because there's really two reasons I disagree. The first reason is cognitive, and the second reason is empirical. Let's put it that way. So cognitively, the reason I disagree with the zero to one premise is there's some people who start with nothing

and then they get to something. And the truth is nobody starts with nothing. One of my favorite stories of innovation is Betn-Ezmith Graham. She invented liquid paper. For those of you who are listening who don't know what liquid paper is, means you're younger than me, but the basic idea of liquid paper is you could effectively paint over a mistake on a typewritten page, right?

Well, Betn-Ezmith Graham was a secretary. It's exes bank and trust in the mid-50s. And she was constantly dealing with this annoying carbon filament in her typewriter. It was smudging her page. She was a single mom. So if anybody is zero to one, it's bet Nezmith Graham. Single mom having to work side jobs and weekend kind of side hustles to make ends meet for her and her son. kind of side hustles to make insmeat for her and her son. And the problem of the carbon filament is well known among secretaries,

but Betnismith Graham had something that many other secretaries did in which she had to take these weekend jobs to make insmeat. And one weekend she was working at a department store painting a window display for a sale. And she made a mistake and she started kind of scratching it out with a straight edge razor. And the painter came and said, well, what are you doing? What are you doing? And she said, oh, I made a sale. And she made a mistake and she started kind of scratching it out with a straight-edge razor and the painter came and said, whoa, what are you doing? What are you doing? And she said, oh, I made a mistake

I'm just racing and he said, no, that painters don't erase mistakes. Painters paint over their mistakes. And that was a defining moment for her, right? We talked about defining moments. And that's not to say there wasn't an enormous amount of work. I mean, she worked with her son's high school chemistry teacher to develop that's in per a kind of formula. She worked with a local paint store employee to develop the product, right? But the point is, even Betnismith Graham, single mom in the 1950s, work in multiple jobs to make ends meet, if there's ever a zero to one story at her, but she didn't start with nothing. But what's happening in the brain is, our brains don't make anything from nothing.

That's impossible. What our brains do is neurons are connecting in new ways and unexpected ways, and that sensation of idea is actually an unexpected connection between two things I already know. So I'll give you an example. I've been working with a company who will remain nameless that works on electric vehicles and autonomous driving.

And this company is trying to address a broadly known phenomenon in the world called range anxiety, which is what people feel if they've got an electric vehicle, they go, I'm not sure how far it's going to get me. Okay. is what people feel if they've got an electric vehicle, they go, I'm not sure how far it's gonna get me. Okay? Well, imagine with me the scene where one of the engineers goes to a coffee shop and she's sitting there, she happens to eavesdrops. She's a couple of folks, military attire come in.

And she said, I couldn't help myself. I was eavesdropping. I said, that's a very effective creativity strategy. Please continue eavesdropping. And she said, I overheard them talk about for jet fighters, they can't scramble the planes to get back to a base, they have to do what's called a midair refueling because of their small tanks. And she said, in that moment, and for

you, I know, John, and for any listener, you go, Oh, I've got an idea, right? Why? You knew about midair refueling, existentially, you knew about range anxiety, but I just kind of brought those things in close enough proximity that you go, what if you do that on the road, right? And we all have this collective hallucination, we call an idea, but the point is,

none of us are starting from zero. No one is. If you're a sentient being, you aren't starting from zero. So this notion of zero to one is There's some people who just like just out of thin air. They conjure magic and that's not true What is true is that people who are Seeking to make a change in the world are looking to make connections and the reason that that engineer sitting in the coffee shop Happened to key in on this idea of a mid air refueling is because she was obsessed with the problem of range anxiety. And if you've

got a problem, Bob McKinley, who's a founder of the design program at Stanford, legendary teacher at Stanford, from the 1960s, he gave students an assignment called Keep a Buglist. And that's long before software development. It wasn't software buglist. He meant keep a list of things that bother you. Because he knew that's a really good source of, it's a really good fodder for innovation. What bugs you? What bothers you?

Write it down. And just like the engineer dealing with range anxiety, just like Betnizmith Graham and the typewriter, if you're attuned to things that bother you, all of a sudden you're like an open open receptor for these or like Legos come together You've got the legop half the legopies and then you're brain. What it's trying to do is just try on different connections if you're in that mindset So that's one reason I don't like the zero to one kind of mentality the other reason just empirically speaking is zero to one Presumes I don't have anything, as I said, that's not true,

but then all of a sudden I get to the one. It's zero to the one is the implication of that line of thinking. And a lot of people think I would want to be an entrepreneur, but like I haven't thought of my idea yet. I don't have the one idea. And the truth is empirically, and this has been studied across toy making operations and the Taco Bell food lab and dice and vacuums and pharmaceutical development and Saturday night live, nobody goes from no ideas to one idea. They go from thousands of ideas to one idea. And the notion that you're going to go from nothing to the perfect thing is what holds I think a lot of people back. It's a total myth. And what real innovators know, and people have an innovative mindset is, I need a ton of ideas, a ton. The manager of Taco Bell

food innovation lab said she routinely tries 2,000 different taco shells a year, 2,000. James Dyson made 5,000 prototypes of the bagless vacuum before it worked, right? And on and on and on. The people who are coming up with the idea are actually generating tons of volume. And so for me, going back to your question about our entrepreneurs, just fundamentally different from the rest of us, I would say not necessarily. And the question is, what's my mindset? Do I have a mindset that it's some ability that is beyond me, then I'm probably not going to be able to do it. But if I have a mindset of,

I'm just looking to make connections in the world, and I'm generating lots of options, many of which probably aren't the right one, and some of which are gonna be successful, then everybody can enter that kind of entrepreneurial mindset. That doesn't mean by the way, the way I would say the reason I mentioned, it depends on how you define entrepreneur. I don't think everybody, maybe as a risk profile, or the financial ability to kind of quit their job and start a new venture, right?

So if you think about entrepreneurship in that way, I would say there's probably lots of temporal factors that play there. But in terms of being entrepreneurial in one's thinking, in terms of being creative, you can bring that entrepreneurial mindset to a desk job, Albert Einstein, famously was working at the Swiss patent office when he did the quote-unquote thought experiment that helps him understand general relativity. He's a third degree, by the way, patent officer, because he wasn't getting been awarded his PhD yet. And so he wasn't even a first degree patent officer. He's a third degree patent officer sitting on a stool in the office in Bern, I think, for eight hours a day.

But that didn't keep him from an entrepreneurial mindset. Mind you, he is an entrepreneur in the way maybe we conventionally define that word. But to me, he's a radically entrepreneurial thinker. So to me, that's, I would encourage everyone to think about, how can I be entrepreneurial in my thinking, even if I'm sitting in the Swiss Patent Office, even if I'm sitting at Texas Bank and Trust in Dallas, Texas? Whatever it may be, it's not, am I launching a new venture right now per se, but do I have a mindset of being attuned to problems and need to be solved, collecting these lagoes of possible inputs and

trying on combinations? And am I thinking about doing lots of that, not just finding the one, but doing tons of things that occasionally yield a delightful epiphany breakthrough moment? Well, I love your examples, and I'll give you another one. One of my favorite interviews I've ever done was with my friend Jim McAlvin. If the listeners aren't familiar with Jim, he launched Square with Jack Dorsey. But I think he gets overshadowed by Jack while I know he does. But really the whole idea behind it came from his experience

being a glass blower and was trying to sell this multi-thousand dollar piece of glass and wasn't able to do it because he couldn't take credit card in the location he was and the person didn't have another payment model. So he then went through all these creative exercises to try to think of a way that he could solve it. And I remember when I talked to him, he always says that everyone of us has a novel problem that we can solve. And he is really the one who patented their credit card reading device. But he said, you can't even imagine how many prototypes of this thing that we developed and then how many hurdles we had to cross to get this

through regulators and even the backlash from the industry who wanted to keep things the way it was. So I think that's another great example of that. Do you see what was the quote? Everyone has a novel problem that they were born to solve. That's, I love that. I love that. That's great. Yeah, he's also a big one to say, muster the power inside yourself to do something different.

And I think what he really means by that is so often, we don't look at being original in the way we're thinking about things. And that's why I think this whole idea of idea flow, which we're going to discuss here in a second, is so important because it's really throwing out ideas that sometimes these ideas could be 180 degrees away from the topic you're discussing, but as you said with the in-air fueling, sometimes these things that can seem to be abstract can create the best fusion and bring the best result when you least expect it. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there's research, by the way, just on that point, John,

that suggests that the farther a field de-anal analogy, the more useful it is in generating novel solutions. So thinking about something that's far away, Arthur Coastler once said that creativity is the unexpected collision of apparently unrelated frames of reference. And it's that apparently unrelated. That's the really interesting thing. Because we're always looking for related frames of reference, right? But it's the apparently unrelated that when it collides, you go, Oh, I had never thought about those things working together. And that's the magic moment. It is. It's absolutely. And I've seen it happen so many times over my career. And it's always when you least expect it to happen that kind of a light bulb goes out goes off. Especially if you're in a group that has.

Thinkers that are all over the place and haven't been united or keep fighting over. I think things that are within the realm that we normally think about. And then this idea comes out of nowhere. And everyone's light bob kind of goes off all at once. And it shifts the discussion, which is an amazing thing to see. Well, I think this is a good point to ask you probably the most important question, which is, point to ask you probably the most important question, which is, what is idea flow and how does one measure something like idea flow? In short, idea flow is your capacity to generate solutions to a problem at any given time, to put it very simply.

And what we know empirically is the quality of your solutions is largely a function of the quantity of your solutions. But very few people think about quantity, as we were talking about earlier, whether it's Taco Bell or Saturday and live or pharmaceutical development, they're generating a much faster possible solution set than they need. They ultimately need one Alzheimer's drug,

or the only need one Doritos, Locos, Taco, or the only need one killer punchline, but they're generating thousands of ideas, thousands of possibilities to get to that one. An idea of flow is our simple way of describing that state of being where you're in the mindset of generating a bunch of possibilities to solve a problem rather than a single possibility. And the simple way to measure it is take any given problem and give yourself two minutes to try to come up with solutions and you see how many solutions you come up with. Very simply your idea flow it can be ten ideas per minute and some people instinct perhaps think ten ideas per minute. And some people, this thing perhaps, think, 10 ideas per minute, are you kidding me? And what I would say, and this is kind of a key distinction, you've got to count crazy ideas too.

And you've got to allow yourself the permission to say crazy ideas. I was with the executive in a pharmaceutical company, a Japanese pharmaceutical company recently, and we did this activity and I said, okay, how many ideas did you come up with? And he said three. I said three really? He said, yeah, I mean, there are a bunch of other crazy ones and illegal ones, but three good ones. And I said, no, you've got to count the crazy ones too everywhere I go in the world. This as a simple kind of illustration of this heuristic everywhere I go in the world.

People ask me, what do you do for a living? I say I help people come up with ideas There is a universal response to that statement. Do you know what it is? No, what is it? How do you come up with a good idea? Could definitely yes, I said no, I said who said anything about good, right? Because they're the, that criteria of quality is so oppressive, it's so ubiquitous, that anytime someone thinks of, when I say, you can come up with 10 ideas a minute,

they go, yeah, right. And what I know there is, they're ruled by this notion of, I can only write down a good idea. I can only think of a good idea. If I think of something, it's a bad idea. It doesn't really count as an idea. And that is a limitation.

And what's fascinating, too, we talk about volume. The other critical element of this, which we can have alluded to, but just to say it explicitly, the other critical element of getting to good ideas is variation. And so it's like the standard deviation has to increase in terms of the amount of possibility that you allow,

like how far from the norm are you willing to allow yourself to go? And the thing about standard deviation is it goes on both sides of the distribution. Like if normal ideas are here, you've got really breakthrough ideas over here or genius ideas, and then you've got goofy ideas over here. And it's a bell curve, right?

And what most people want to do is they go, I love the genius stuff and I'll tolerate the ordinary stuff, but I don't want the goofy stuff. And so they cut off the left hand side of the distribution, the goofy side and what they don't realize is they're also inadvertently chopping off the right hand side, the genius side as well. Because when they

tighten up the variation of the possibilities that they allowed themselves to entertain, they end up eliminating the variation that produces the good stuff too. Yeah, so I guess that raises the question, why is the riskiest move no move at all? move, no move at all. Well, any action is going to produce data and information, right? And if you don't take any action, you get no new data. The way that I see this materialize a lot in organizations is they end a meeting with a decision to have another meeting. And that is effectively the non-decision.

They basically say, we need to do, let's talk about this some more. And what I humbly submit is, without new information, there's not going to be a new conversation. What you actually need is you need to deploy some kind of experiments in the world that's going to give you some kind of information that you can then discuss in the next meeting. So try something, right? And that's what we mean. We say the riskiest move is no move at all. If you're not doing, think about like somebody like Jerry Seinfeld to use an analogy from his craft, wildly inventive,

wildly creative innovator, pioneer in comedy. And we see him on a HBO special, and it's like an hour of just line after line gut splitting laughter, right? It's like this guy, he can't say anything that's not funny. Everything that he says is funny, right? And we love that hour of the HBO special. But what very few people see is that every night for the year that precedes that special,

he's trying out 10 minute long sections or 30 minute long sections of content that usually only yield one minute of actually good material. He's doing 15 or 30 minutes of standup to get one minute of stuff that works. And it's not like he puts a HBO special on the calendar a year from now,

and he goes, okay, I got a year to write a bunch of jokes. No, he's tonight, he's in the club, and he's bombing. You know, if you've seen the comedian, which is on Netflix, there's this great spot in the comedian where this Hecler offstage is after Seinfeld, the show that famous sitcom had run its course. He's like one of the most famous comedians in the world, and he's doing stand-up to develop a new routine. And one of the ladies in the audience is like, is this your first time buddy? And what Seinfeld says and I love it, he just kind of stops and he says,

this is how comedians develop new material and as you can tell, it's quite painful. And the thing is, he knows that that pain is what produces the result, the pain of embarrassment, the pain of putting himself out, the pain of people not, I mean, think about the weight of reputation he must bear. I'm Jerry Freak and Seinfeld, man. And yet, to the 200 people in that club that night, he bombed. But why is he willing to do that? Because the 20 million people who watch the HBO special think he's brilliant at the end of the process. My point is the most dangerous new move is no move at all. If Jerry Seinfeld just set their clamped up and is a part ment and is just worried about the HBO special

and kind of write and jokes down and try and to figure it out, go on, okay, at 363 days left, 362 days left when he's planning and he's planning, but he's not actually getting in the club. He says the purest form of data in his business is a laughter, is laughter from strangers. So what does he do? He puts himself in an environment where he gets pure data. What do we do at organizations?

We perfectly insulate ourselves from any data creating mechanism until launch day, the only time at which it's expensive to fail. The equivalent would be Jerry Seinfeld, not showing any joke with anyone, and really hoping he's got a great set in a year debuting the material on HBO. And that's what organizations do all the time. We debut our material,

and we've not spent any time in the comedy clubs with small groups of people testing the material, refining it, developing it, trimming the bad stuff, adding new good stuff, refining the beats and the rhythms, et cetera. And that's what I mean. We say the riskiest move is no move at all. And I would say that conjoiner to that is the norm in most organizations is no move at all. And I think that's why we've seen so many great companies who had just incredible lifespans now get acquired or just disappear from the landscape. And I think there are two other good stories since you brought up Jerry Seinfeld. I had no Steve Martin and him both had the same technique

that every single day in their professional life, they have tried each to write a new joke at least one each day. And I remember seeing Steve Martin being interviewed and someone was talking about how he became an overnight success. And he said, well, what you didn't see were the 10 years prior to me becoming successful,

where on many, many occasions, I bombed so badly, I wondered if I should continue in doing this. And he used this methodology where he would bring an notebook on stage where he'd have all the jokes written on it. And if one bombed, he'd cross through it. If it did really well, he'd put a star next to it. And that's how he kind of came up with this routine. And I think even if you look at the Beatles, a lot of

people think that they became an overnight success. And that wasn't the case at all. They played together. I, if memory serves me right, somewhere between five to seven years before they got their record deal. And then they almost, I mean, they botched the first record deal and then came back and got one afterwards. So I think a lot of times we think that success is this overnight thing, where really there's a lot of failure on the way

to reaching the point where you see some of these people who you look up to are today. I heard a friend of mine is an author and he and I were talking about the book business the other day. And he told me he used to work for Stephen Covey's organization seven high habits of highly affected people he said the word in that organization is it took it took them three years to make that book an overnight success. Yeah. Well, imagine just looking at Home Depot. You know, could you imagine here they are, Loas is the big player at the time, has a much smaller footprint. They decide to do this huge megastore, which at that time, who knew whether that thing was going to be a colossal flop or was going to change the direction of the industry for all time.

Right. Right. I mean, there's so many things that we think about, but until you start testing these theories, you're never gonna know if something like that is gonna work or not. And that whole testing process is something that you bring up quite a few times in the book. And so I wanted you to maybe talk about that. And why, it's good to have ideas,

but how do you go about testing these, whether you're a solo entrepreneur or whether you're a leader in an organization or could be an office manager to doctor's office? Yeah, yeah. What we advocate is low resolution experimentation. So instead of making something perfect and final, keep it scrappy, keep it rough, and get early feedback. And as you mentioned, there are multiple chapters in the book dedicated to experimentation methods. As core, what we believe is you've got to start with desirability,

is this thing worth doing in someone's life. And then you have to ask other questions, which is, can we do it? Can we make money doing it and on and on? But the fundamental question is, should it be done? I think Charles Eames once said, the fundamental question of design is not how it should be, but if it should be. And it's a really important thing to ask ourselves a question of, how can we learn whether people want this? That's the simple thing. So here's an example that taken from the book, large mall, Westfield mall, Global Power

House has locations in many city centers worldwide. They have a mall that's underperforming in one particular city center because it's fourth floor, which was gorgeously renovated, beautifully apportioned, they weren't getting enough foot traffic up there. And so the retailers that were occupying the fourth floor were moving out because they weren't able to pay rent. And what the Westfield team did is they started brainstorming,

what should we do? How can we drive foot traffic up to the fourth floor? And one of the things that they came up with was let's put a beer garden in there. If we had a beer garden on the floor, that would really move the needle. Cooler heads prevailed and they said, hey, let's gather some data.

And what does that mean in an organization? Let's survey people. So they went and surveyed, I think, 1,000 customers, something like 1,000 customers. And something like, thousand customers and something like 800 of those customers said if you put a beer garden on the fourth floor, I would definitely go so What do you do? Do you implement the beer garden? Thankfully they had taken a couple classes of ours as Stanford They knew what and what we tell people is

Customers aren't always honest with you. Yeah,, David Oglevi said, customers don't say what they think, they don't do it, they say, and they don't feel how they, you know, they can't be trusted, basically, is the Ogleviism to butcher it a little bit. The truth is, it's not because they're evil or malicious or anything like that. It's because they don't want to hurt your feelings. You know, and imagine you, even yourself, sitting in the food court of a mall where you live. And a puppy dog eyeed intern comes up to you with a clipboard and says, excuse me, Mr. can I have a minute? He say, sure, what's up, buddy? He says, we were kind of wondering, my boss really wants to put a beer garden up on the fourth floor.

And I was wondering, if we built that, would you come? What do you say, sure, buddy, put me down for a yes. Why? Not because you have any intention of visiting a beer garden at the mall, but because all the social dynamics are wrong there, right? You're looking at the puppy dog intern. It's clear his job is to collect yeses, right?

It costs you nothing to say yes. So you say yes, right? Well, that's not good data. That's not data that we can move forward with. And yet that's how many organizations commissioned new efforts. We did a survey. People said that they do it's like, okay, what does it cost to them? Make it cost them something. And if you just think instead, well, what could we try? Or how could we learn whether people would go up to the fourth floor? Well, one thing the Westfield team actually did,

thankfully, is they put signs all over the first floor before they ever retrofitted the fourth floor, before they ever put in a beer garden. They put signs on the first floor saying, beer garden on the fourth floor, come and visit. And then they put a small table with a couple of kegs of beer, cost them basically nothing, manful of workers up on the fourth floor.

And they just measured how many people came up. And they'd give them a beer, they'd give them a coupon, they'd say the beer garden's still under development, but we wanted to give you a beer because we promised. And what they found was in months, like 10 people showed up, 10, in months. And this was something that they believe the survey data, they would have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars retrofitting the space to build up to their quality standards, which are very high quality standards. They would

have built an immaculate failure. And what we said is, no, why don't you fail cheaply and quickly and then move on to the next idea, right? And so the simple takeaway is find a way to learn whether people will do what they say they will do. And often what we have discovered is the two things are vastly different. And if you believe what people say, you're going to be in trouble. But if instead, you find ways like the very best data is decision data. What decision it like in this case does someone hit the fourth floor elevator button? Do they step on the escalator? If so, then it's probably believable data that if we invest in a beer garden on the fourth floor, it's going to result in foot traffic. But if they don't hit the button or get on the escalator,

no matter how much they say they like the idea, it's not worth investing. Yeah, it brings me to a startup that I was a part of a number of years ago, friend of mine and I co-founded it. It was called Picket, and a name after the Picket fence. And what we were trying to do was to use AI

completely replaced realtors. And it was a very novel idea. I think we had the technology sense of how to implement it, but when we started to think about what does the life cycle of this look like, we started going out and as you're saying, testing the concept and what we found was that at this point in time, the home consumer is just not in a place where they could fathom that being a reality. I think it will be some time in the future because a lot of the steps that you would have to take would be on the onus of the person looking for a house or trying to sell the house, but I think over time, looking for a house or trying to sell the house. But I think over time, many and many of the capabilities of the realtor will be taken over by automation just like everything else is.

But what it made us do is we realized that we had a good idea but it was the wrong timing for it. But if we had invested all the money that we had gotten which we returned to the investors, we would have gone down this rabbit hole of spending millions of dollars only to have found out it wasn't a viable solution to begin with, which is, I think, one of the mistakes both small and large organizations make way too often. Yeah, yeah, definitely. No, never invest ahead of learning.

I love that quote. Throughout the entire book, it's really all about creativity. And I have my own book coming out here in a few months. And my book is all about how do you become passion struck? And I lay out these five plateaus in it. And I call the fifth plateau a creative amplifier. And so I love that you focused on creativity so much. And what I wanted to ask is through that lens,

what happens when you incorporate creativity into everything that you do? creativity into everything that you do. I think that there are some areas of life where you just, there's some tasks that you've got to take care of and it's just a matter of taking care of them. What I would say is, and maybe they don't even require creativity necessarily. I think that I can make it more fun. But what I would say is I've seen even in my own life, temple example, I live in a west facing house in California.

So in the afternoon, when it's all of, you know, 75 degrees, it gets hot on the front porch, and grocery delivery for whatever reason, always seems to happen in the middle of the afternoon. What we do is, you know, we drop everything, we gotta get groceries in, because the ice cream's melting, and the milk's getting warm and all this stuff and

That is a task for me. That's a hassle when I hear the alarm bells ring I think I'm in a conversation. It's hard for me to just get up and go help but there's a bunch of groceries outside Well one day I wasn't here and my 10 year old daughter was enlisted to deal with the grocery situation and was enlisted to deal with the grocery situation. And she laid a blanket on the ground, put all the grocery bags on top of the blanket and her sister, her two-year-old sister, and did a magic carpet ride through the house

to the kitchen with the groceries. And I saw that and I thought, wow, I never thought about trying to do it differently, ever. And I think there's a lot of areas of life where we never think about trying to do it differently ever. And I think there's a lot of areas of life where we never think about trying to do it differently when a constraint or a challenge presents itself. Oftentimes we discover there's a better way to do it. It's more of an outlook of receptivity and being, I mean, I snapped a picture. What one kind of personal practice for me is I try to take a picture whenever I'm inspired by some

Happening at home. I had this this happened to be the other day. I was talking to my brother on the phone I was running errands and I had you know everything kind of in the car And for whatever reason stacked this 40 pound cooler like a jingabrick of death in my passenger seat And so every time I take a right turn the j, the 40 pound cooler is just slamming into my shoulder. And I've got like an hour in the car to deal with this. And I'm actually, I'm legitimately thinking, am I going to have like a rotator cuff injury? I'm going to be my arm up to hold the cooler. And my brother called that he's a rougher in Texas. And just chat for a minute. And after about five minutes, he goes, Hey, um, what do you keep grunting?

I go, oh, sorry, I've got this stupid cooler. It's just, every time I turn, it slams into me. It's kind of hurting, I'm sorry. And he goes, have you buckled it in? And I mean, like that, John, it's just like, I can't, but he said, yeah, I mean, anytime I got a bunch of stuff in the truck, I buckle it in just so it doesn't roll around everywhere.

And I realized that old proverb, physician healed I sell. It's like, I'm the creativity professor. And yet I've got this cooler slamming in my, and I never even thought for a moment, could I solve this problem? I just resigned myself to 45 minutes of rotator cuff torture. Right? And I took a picture. After I buckled it in, I took a picture and I sent it to it.

But it's like another kind of hallmarked to me of, there are so many more opportunities. The book we have a whole chapter on seeking fresh perspectives on problems. I was talking to someone who had a fresh perspective, and I didn't even, it was only because we have a relationship where you could ask me that awkward question of, why are you grunting? That I got the innovative solution, right? And in one minute, the problem that I thought I was going to have to deal with for 45 minutes was totally solved. It disappeared. But to me, it was a

good reminder, keep that mindset open. If there's something that's causing pain, think for a moment, is there a solution? Do I have to live with this pain? Is there a solution to this problem? What perspectives can I bring to bear? I mean, we talk about ideal flow. You can measure it in terms of minutes, but over a long period of time, what are ways to amplify your ideal flow? Well, having diverse perspectives contributes to how you think about something, leveraging tactics to actually seek new connections in the world, right?

Running experiments that give you new data, right? These are always to kind of amplify the volume of the throughput of your ideas, but it requires kind of a daily reminder. And sometimes it's pain. And sometimes it's like a silly thing I see in my house, but a lot times I realize despite the fact that I am a professor of these things I'm still a student I'm still learning and I still find areas where I have wrongly believed oh creativity doesn't apply there and then when I find the opportunity to apply it I'm always delightfully surprised by how much better things are.

Yeah, I have a friend who is a well-known artist and she at this point paints an unbelievable amount of paintings in a week. Somewhere between five to seven and each of these ends up being sold somewhere for five to ten grand at this point. But one time I was asking her, how can you do it so quickly? She said, well, you haven't seen the 5,000 projects I've worked on to get to this point. And she said, ultimately, creativity leads to mastery. And so my point of bringing that up is when I think we allow creativity into every aspect of our life, it helps us lead to self-mastery. And even if you want to look at Maslow's self-actualization, I think is very much dependent on that and how we approach it. If I may just suggest one activity for listeners, if you go, hey, I want to bring some measure of creativity into my life. One simple tool that we mentioned in the book, but it's simple enough, you can just hear it and do it. It's called the idea quota. And I would recommend that folks, if you want a simple kind of step to get

started, every day we recommend in the morning, but take a problem or a question that you're looking for the right answer on and shift your orientation and say instead of trying to come up with the right answer, I'm going to come up with lots of possible answers. I'm going to come up with lots of solutions. Go for 10 minimum. And what you'll find is if you do that every day, sometimes you solve the problem, sometimes you don't, but the point is you start to lower your self-sensor that keeps you from great ideas. You start to lower the inhibitions. I talked to a Singaporean executive the other day who told me, I do an idea, quote,

to every day, and what I have found is, whenever I tell myself to think of something illegal, that's when the good ideas start coming. And the point is, you're just lowering these. We have all of these associated barriers that keep us from breakthrough thinking. And one of them is I'm looking for the right answer, capital T H E, the right answer. And shifting that orientation to,

instead of just for just for two minutes, right? It's not all day long, but for two minutes, instead of looking for the right answer, I'm just gonna try to generate as many answers as I can possibly think of. Having that shift is a really nice, it builds a really nice foundation that as you said over time,

develops into a robust mastery, but start small. Yeah, well, one of the, I think that's a great concept and one of the other ones that you mentioned that I wish I would have employed more when I was in my corporate jobs is she used the story of Carl Liebert who was at Keller Williams and a practice that he uses to ensure breakthrough thinking. Can you discuss what that is

and why it's kind of the opposite of what you might think you should pursue? Yeah. Well, the truth is creativity and problem solving more broadly needs space. If you look at a kind of a psychological model of creativity, what happens typically, there's a kind of four step model

than most folks' reference, which is step one preparation, step two incubation, step three illumination, that's the light bulb moment, and then step four is verification. So yeah, preparation, incubation, illumination, verification. My humble submission here is incubation is severely undernourished, and today is kind of always connected, always productive, always efficient environment. And our efficiency orientation often keeps us from being effective. And what Carl does is he blocks off Fridays.

And he says, I am going to carve out Fridays to give myself space to think, space to get inspired and space to look at stuff that I find interesting. And so Fridays, I've tried it. I tried to book Friday meetings with them. It's and he's tied up. He's not able to do it. And I know what he's doing. He's creating space. I go, Hey, but I'm creative. We can tell you know, no, no, not on Fridays, right? And having that, for a lot of people, one of the greatest inhibitors to their own efficacy in this creative problem solving and innovation arena is they don't have time. I was talking with an Irish executive. She said, Jeremy, we had like a workshop where we gave them two weeks to just execute an experiment, which can be done very quickly, by the way. We came back and Anne said, I haven't had any time.

And I said, what do you mean you haven't had any time? You had two weeks. And she said, Jeremy, it's Wednesday. I'm on meeting number 32. And I realized, wow, yeah, you're right. That's a real challenge. And so what I said to her, as I said, Anne, I want you to write yourself a love note. Okay, open your calendar. Look next week. Do you have any time? So what I said to her is I said, and I want you to write yourself a love note. Okay. Open your calendar. Look next week. Do you have any time?

No. Okay. Look the next week. Do you have any time? There's a couple of minute, 30 minute windows that have been blocked. Okay. Block that. And in the event name, call it run the blank experiment.

Okay. And then the other, you have another time too, right? Yeah. Yeah. Later in the week. Okay. Great. Now what I want you to block that time and label it, look at the data from blank experiment commissioned on Monday. And she was delighted, right? Because it's like, the reality is if we wait to have time

to work differently, we're never gonna have time. But if we, and because our calendar is our, we're victims of the calendar. But what created people do is they wield their calendar as a weapon. That's what Carl's done. He's actually wielded it to protect his ability to think broadly.

Jeff Bezos in the early days of Amazon, he spent, I think it was Mondays and Thursdays. He didn't have any standing meetings. And he would just scroll the internet for hours and he'd look at his own website and he'd walk the halls of Amazon. But the point is wildly inventive people block time to think. It sounds obvious, but Lin-Manuel Miranda, the writer of Hamilton, his wife observed, you had your very best idea when we were on vacation. You were laying on a pool float, drinking a margarita, and you came your very best idea when we were on vacation. You were laying on a pool float, drinking a margarita, and you came up with this idea of a rap opera based on the life of

a founding father of America. She said, you know what we need to do? You've got a book of vacation every week and not just our family vacation. Now he said what she does, what they do, they go on a week-long family vacation and then the family leaves and he stays there for another week. Bill Gates booked think weeks regularly, right? Famously, he would go off to a cabinet, read for a week, but wildly inventive thinkers, breakthrough thinkers, whether it's an hour, whether it's like in 30 minutes, two weeks from now, whether it's like Carl, a day, a week, whether it's like Bezos, a couple days, whether it's like Lin-Manuel Miranda, a week a year, or Bill Gates, a week a year, whatever it is, use your calendars or weapon rather than being a victim of it. Yeah, I can't say anything about that except I think corporate America today is meeting driven instead of idea driven and that's one of the biggest issues that I found is that if you allow that to happen to you just become a victim of the calendar

instead of allowing yourself to control your calendar. Yeah. Well, and it's interesting you and I both like to blog and I have a blog on medium and my most popular article I've ever written was on the importance of adult play. And I recently interviewed Gene Allweng. I'm not sure if you know who she is, but she has been the right-hand person for Richard Branson for about 20 years and runs Virgin Unite, which is their philanthropic arm. She was telling me a lot of people might not know what the elders are, but they're a group of very senior leaders started out with a Desmond Tutu and Jimmy Carter and

a few others. The whole idea behind it was Richard Branson and Peter Gabriel's collaboration. But when Jean was charged with getting these leaders together, like any person who's used to being an executive, she had their day chock full from eight to seven. And she said she presented it to Richard Branson. And he proceeded in front of her to just tear it up and he said you have the hours of eight to 1130 to play with for doing business related things and the rest of the time we need to play because these people are going to learn so much more about themselves through play and engagement than they ever are sitting there staring at PowerPoint slides. And I think she makes a very good point there and it's something I think you reference in the book as well. Well, along

those lines, and I have two more questions for you, it would be how do you implement creativity in a rigorous way but without it being rigid? Because I think there's a balance there. Yeah, I mean, very simply one thing is just to have some language around what our modality as a team is, for example. So at the D school, we often say there's times we need to flare and there's times we need to focus. And even just having that simple vocabulary, flaring or focusing enables us to know what kind of mindset should we be in right now?

We're flaring, it's a non-judgmental, non-critical building on the ideas of others since a possibility kind of a environment, right? And we're calling each other when the other person's critical or whatever, right? If we're focusing, then we are making decisions and we are evaluating and we're judging and we're examining, et cetera, et cetera. But having some simple language like that really enables a team to thrive. And then I would say the other thing, similar to what you said that Richard Granson said about play, is you've got to be able to have fun. You've got to be able

to laugh together. My friend Brendan Boyle, he runs IDO's play lab. And he said he knows if he walks my brain storm and people aren't laughing, they're doing it wrong. And that's it's that simple. And so I think for a lot of us, as you said, meetings have taken the place of importance in organizations. And when I see people laugh in a workshop, almost always, you know what they do. Look over their shoulder because they've become institutionalized or conditioned to think fun is a bad thing. Laughter is a bad thing. That's not something we do at work. If I'm having fun, it must not be work.

And that's in a shame. I think it keeps teams from their best work when they aren't able to have fun together, when they aren't able to laugh together. And so keeping that sense of joy, monitoring it, being aware of it, and then having some simple language around, flaring, focusing, generating options, making decisions, whatever the right language is for you,

diverging versus converging, et cetera. There's some really simple language that teams can employ to help everybody know what kinds of behaviors are going to be helpful in advancing our teams' purpose and objective in this moment. And that is maybe we can't change. We can change. We can go into a different load in a moment. But having that clarity enables everybody on the team to make their best contribution. Well, thank you for that answer. And before I get to the last one, I just wanted to tell the listeners that we have just scratched the surface of this book. And there's some really cool concepts in here that

I'm going to just allude to a few of them. One is anchoring bias and why it plays a substantial role in creative problem solving. As we talked about before, there's a whole chapter, chapter four, which they go into never stop testing and they use general motors and Keller Williams to describe it. They talk about the marshmallow challenge and how Tom Wu-Jack employs that. They talk about assumption reversal, wonder wandering, and many, many other things, including the concept of making a tactical withdrawal. So lots of things here that you want to check out.

I wanted to end on this question, and I think one of the things we don't think about enough is the psychology of progress. And we often, when we're thinking about a problem that we're trying to solve, we look at the output, and we've kind of got our mind fixated there and I've long believed that it's the inputs that really matter. It's almost like you think about our daily choices. What's going to maximize your saving account someday is making the choice to put money there when you're younger.

Same thing with your health. And so, how do you balance the inputs and the outputs? Yeah, I would say so balance is an interesting word because right now it's enormous. I don't think that means 50-50, but I think that it means make space for input. If you look at creative professionals, input seeking is something that they do. Another defining moment for me going back to the beginning of the conversation was when I met my wife, she was a fashion designer. And one practice that they employed in the fashion industry is they would make mood boards and they would go on inspiration visits to New York or Paris or things like that. I couldn't understand it.

I couldn't code it into a spreadsheet. It's like there's no pivot table that accommodates inspiration. And yet, I saw how much it drove her design work. And especially the subsequent 10 years of being at the design school, I saw that. Well, about three years ago, I taught a class with a hip-hop artist named LaCray. And LaCray and I are teaching our students about going into the world to get inspiration. Mind you, most of these students think when they think of the word inspiration, they think of a cheesy poster that says courage or a teamwork in the hallways of some old office space. But when we say inspiration, what we mean is exactly what you're saying. We mean the disciplined pursuit of unexpected input.

That's what we mean by inspiration. And we were giving our students this assignment. And I noticed there's kind of blank stairs in the room. There's almost like a time warp. I could see my own face looking at my wife going, you're going for what? And I said to LaCray, how would you describe inspiration? What would you say to these guys? And he said, inspirations at discipline.

And I thought, I mean, leave it to a hip hop artist to just drop a bar and it'd be done. That's the point. Inspiration's at discipline. What does that mean? I would say working out to discipline. It doesn't mean that I'm working out all day long every day. But to be disciplined about working out means

there's a period of my day where I'm focused on working out. It's for inspiration to be a discipline. It doesn't mean I'm just like day dreaming and mabel gazing all day. It means there's a period of my day where I'm deliberate about seeking out new information. It could be talking to customers. It could be visiting places that our customers love.

You talk about the assumption reversal tool, right? That's the key to that tool. It could be a me, Ben Franklin, one of my favorite tactics is he met with the Junto every week, people from radically different disciplines for 30 years. He met with these people, right? But the point is, that's another form of inspiration or another form of input gathering. So it's not that when you say balance input output, it's not that it's got to be

50, 50, but it is acknowledging the inputs might think what drive the outputs of my thinking. And if I'm not seeking new input, I shouldn't be surprised if there's no new output. And if I acknowledge right now what I need is new output, then going upstream, so to speak, I need to be seeking new input. That's an underappreciated instinct in the business space. I'll say we just made available for folks who listen to this podcast on our website, ideaflow.design, we made available a bonus chapter called How to Think Like Bezos and Jobs from the book.

So anybody who's listening can go and they can grab that if they want. How to think like Bezos and Jobs. But it's one thing that Steve Jobs did exceptionally well. He went and got inspiration. The famous story, one of my favorite stories, he was unimpressed with the original design of one of the Mac computers, but he didn't know how to describe what he wanted. He just knew that what this metallic clunky thing that the industrial designer had made

was wrong. So he went to Macy's and he was walking around the appliance aisle and he came across the Quizzan Art appliances and he ran back to Apple's offices with a couple of Quizzan Art machines under each arm and he said, this is what I'm talking about, right? There's a great story of that instinct of in the moment, an output orientation says, how does it need to be changed? An input orientation is, where do I need to go to learn how it needs to be changed? Steve Jobs did that, Basel said, many other people do it.

But anyway, it's a really fun bonus chapter. Folks want to check it out. But having that, at least having input or inspiration on one's radar, I think is a step towards the proper balance. That's great. Well, I love ending on that question. And I know you have your own podcast. You like to blog just like I do.

So I was hoping you could tell the audience maybe just a couple more ways that they can, if they want to hear more Jeremy, where can they do it? Yeah, sure. Absolutely. I mean, obviously the book is first and foremost of my mind right now, ideaflow.design. You can check it out.

I also blog, try to blog every single day on my personal website, jermyutli.design. I've got a podcast, Peyton Pipet, where we interviewed first season was about female founders, second season, it's been about black creators, where we just interview folks about their creative practice. And then I run with a team at Stanford,

an amazing program called Masters of Creativity, where we invite breakthrough thinkers from all domains, whether it's, you know, this week we've got Dan Pink joining us to talk about Reg Red. We've got Astro Teller, the head of Google X, coming to talk about running Google X. We've had actors and activists and entrepreneurs and authors. And it's a great place. It's a real community of practice. You can go moc.stanford.edu. You can check out some of the archive of footage there. But that's another, and I'm on Twitter, Jeremy out there at Twitter. So I can send you all those handles and stuff. But lots of ways to stay connected. I really seek in terms of my own personal practice

to be sharing the things I'm learning. I find it's really valuable. It's almost for myself entirely because it's teaching me. I find myself, I'll be trolling through my own blog and go, I forgot about that, right? And it was so important to me at the time that it rose to the level of I got to write about it. And I routinely forget about

things that I thought were important enough to write about in a past version of myself. So, for me, the sharing is just an overflow of my own practice and hopefully folks find it interesting and valuable in terms of their pursuits of creative mastery as well. I love it and all of it will be in the show notes. Well, Jeremy, congratulations to you in Perry again on this work of art and I highly encourage the listeners to do a deep dive on this. It doesn't matter if you're in the corporate world, if you're in medicine, law, you're an entrepreneur, you're a homemaker, something can be taken from anyone to make their life better and have it be more creative.

I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Jeremy Utley, and I wanted to thank Jeremy, Penguin Ranna House, and Cave Hendrix, for the honor of him being guest on our show today. Links to all things Jeremy will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com. Please use our website links if you buy any of the books from our featured guests. All proceeds go to supporting the show and making it free for our listeners. Videos are on YouTube at JohnRMiles, where we now have well over 400 videos and exclusive content that you only find there. Go to JohnRMiles and subscribe. Advertiser deals and discount codes are in one convenient place at passionstruck.com slash

deals. You can find me on Instagram and Twitter at John Armiles and I'm also on LinkedIn. And if you want to know how I book amazing guests like Jeremy Atlite, it's because of my network. Go out there and build yours before you need it. You're about to hear a preview of the Passion Struck Podcast interview I did with Dr. Marissa Franco, the New York Times best-selling author of Platonic, a professor, speaker, and psychologist. Her research focuses on the powerful roles of community and shaping who we are and why

we flourish. Simply knowing about your attachment style contributes to changing it according to research, other studies show over a lifetime it's actually more likely to change than to stay the same, and Platonic is just all about the science of how you can change your attachment style, how you can change that internal hardware to become more secure so that you'll be able to develop those healthy relationships no matter what happened in your past. The fee for this show is that you share it with family and friends. When you find something that's useful or interesting, if you know someone who's looking how to create ideal flow, definitely share today's episode with

them. The greatest compliment that you can give the show is if you share it with those that you care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen. And until next time, live life passion struck. Live Life, Passion Scrub.