Something You Should Know - How to Accelerate and Bulletproof Your Career & How Advertising Affects You

Episode Date: July 11, 2019

If you have a fender bender with another driver, should you just work it out between the two of you or should you report it to the insurance company? This episode begins by explaining the answer to that and why it is so important. https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2013/09/should-you-report-that-fender-bender-auto-insurance-claims-consumer-reports/index.htm Having a job isn’t what it used to be. The changing economy is creating a lot of new jobs while eliminating others and somehow you have to survive amidst all that change. Joining me to help you navigate all of this is Neil Irwin, he is a senior economic correspondent at The New York Times, and author of the book How to Win in a Winner-Take-All World (https://amzn.to/2XKoFP2). Neil offers a strategy that will help bulletproof your career and allow you the grow in whatever field you choose. I bet you have wondered when you leave the house in the morning if you should turn off the AC and turn it back on when you get back – or just leave it on? Well, in terms of efficiency and saving money there is only one answer and I’ll reveal it here.  http://www.menshealth.com/guy-wisdom/should-you-turn-your-ac-off-when-you-leave Ever wonder why some advertising seems to work on you while other advertising messages don’t? Considering how many advertising messages you hear everyday, it is amazing you recall any of them. Marketing expert Neale Martin author of the book The 95% of Behavior Marketers Ignore (https://amzn.to/2LGFc02) joins me as we explore how advertising works on your mind and what causes you to respond or not. This Weeks Sponsors -Quip Toothbrush. Get your first refill pack free. Go to www.GetQuip.com/something -Capterra. To find the best software solutions for your business for free, go to www.Capterra.com/something -Linzess. For information about your IBSC symptoms go to www.ohmygut.info/podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a listener to Something You Should Know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know was all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks. Well, you see, TED Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new TED Talk every weekday in less than 15 minutes. Join host Elise Hu.

She goes beyond the headlines so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future. Learn about things like sustainable fashion, embracing your entrepreneurial spirit, the future of robotics, and so much more. Like I said, if you like this podcast, Something You Should Know, I'm pretty sure you're going to like TED Talks Daily. And you get TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Today on Something You Should Know, should you bother reporting that slight fender bender to your insurance company or not? Then, how to bulletproof your career in a changing economy. And it is changing. For example, if you look at when they made King Kong back in 1933, there were only about 113 crew members on

that movie. But if you look to the more recent King Kong movie back in 1933, there were only about 113 crew members on that movie. But if you look to the more recent King Kong movie back in 2005, 1,700 people worked on that movie. I think there's a parallel there in a lot of the business world. Everything's bigger, everything's more complex. Plus, is it more efficient to turn off the AC when no one's home or leave it on? And how do you respond to advertising? And there is so much advertising. Well, a terrifying statistic is that advertisers pay for 4,500 messages per person per day in this country.

That's an advertisement every 14 seconds for every man, woman, and child breathing in the U.S. All this today on Something You Should Know. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples,

Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, welcome. You know, I've been very fortunate in my life in that I have only been involved in, I think, two relatively minor car crashes in my driving career.

But if you drive long enough, sooner or later, you're bound to get involved in at least a fender bender or two. And when two vehicles are involved and the damage is minor, it can be very tempting to skip the hassle of calling your insurance company or filing a police report and just work it out between the drivers. However, Consumer Reports says that those private arrangements rarely work out. Seemingly minor damage to a bumper can cost over $5,000 to repair, which is much more than most people expect. And then there's always the possibility that the other driver, after they've talked to a couple of people, decide that now their neck hurts and now they're going to sue you and why didn't you call the insurance company. And so really the only time you shouldn't report an accident is a low-speed, single-car mishap close to home, like backing into your own fence or your own garage.

If there are no injuries and the damage is below or close to your deductible, well, then you might as well skip the report. Otherwise, you're probably better off filing that report. And that is something you should know. Whatever job you have now, whatever industry you work in now, those things are very likely to change, and change soon. You probably won't have the same job or be in the same industry five, six, seven years from now because things are changing so quickly. I know many people who, for example, work in the radio business, five, six, seven years from now because things are changing so quickly. I know many people who, for example, work in the radio business,

where I spent a big part of my career, and they're now struggling to find something else to do because the radio industry is shrinking. And so are a lot of other industries. Yet new industries are growing. And your ability to navigate all this will determine how successful you ultimately are in your career. So how do you do it? Well, here with some very insightful answers is Neil Irwin. Neil is a senior economic correspondent at the New York Times and author

of the book, How to Win in a Winner-Take-All World. Hi, Neil. Hi, Michael. Thanks for having me. So anyone who works knows that things are shifting, that there's an instability, and not necessarily all in a bad way, but industries and companies seem to be changing faster and faster, and people are having to make sure they keep up like never before, right? Yeah, I think we all know that this old world where you start a job when you're in your 20s and you keep your nose to the grindstone and work hard and can just rise to the ranks and stay that organization for 30 years, that doesn't exist anymore. Business today, it's so fast changing. The entire business model around major industries

is shifting beneath our feet. And I think the goal for all of us is to have a durable career, even against that backdrop, even when things are changing all the time. Is this perception that things are changing very quickly, that industries are coming and going at this incredibly fast pace, is this perception real? Because other industries in the past have come and gone, and people have adjusted to that. The horse and buggy disappeared. The automobile showed up. There used to be a guy that delivered ice to your house. He doesn't do that anymore. So there are industries that have come and gone. Is the pace picking up?

So it's always been the case that there's change. The nature of a capitalist economy is that there's going to be businesses that succeed and others that fail. I think there was something that existed in the 20th century where if you joined a big, successful company, you really could just kind of keep your nose clean and stay there for a long time. And, you know, there are still organizations where you can stay for a long time. I'm not saying that's gone away. What I am describing is a major shift in the economy that's happened in which these large dominant companies are more powerful than ever, bigger drivers of employment and wages than ever. And I believe there's a very specific way you can become the person who can succeed in those types of organizations that's different

from what that looked like in the 20th century or before. So describe that shift. Everything is digital these days. Essentially, every industry is a software industry in some ways. So if you go to banking or you go to retail, you go to healthcare, more and more of the terms of competition are around who has the best algorithms, the best software. You know, when I choose a bank, I'm partly deciding who has the best mobile app, who has the most ATM machines. And that shift makes the very structure of these industries different than it used to be. And that implies different ways of working. You have to be more able to work in teams that involve people with very different technical skills.

You have to have more adaptability and willingness to change as the business models change. And that's what I think is a crucial thing if you want to have a durable career, not just for the next few years, but for the next few decades. So since industries are changing the way they do business, how do we as individuals need to change? You know, it used to be there was a career ladder. You started as a junior person, and you got better and better at that job. And then you would eventually, you know, oversee other people who did that same thing in a very linear way. I think the key now is to think of it as a lattice. You start with one technical specialty, whether you're in, you might be in finance, or you might be in customer service or strategy or whatever it might be. And then as you go, you don't just get better and better at

that one thing. You gain experiences across different types of functional areas. You become the person who, yeah, you know some software engineering, you know some finance, you gain experiences across different types of functional areas. You become the person who, yeah, you know some software engineering, you know some finance, you know some marketing, you know some strategy. You see better and better how these modern products that involve lots of software, lots of technological complexity, how they fit together. You need to understand how the pieces fit together. I call it being a glue person, somebody who can work on a team and speak the different languages of these different advanced skills and make sure that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Can you give me an example of an industry and how that industry has changed, which would

then require that the people in that industry also have changed? I'm fascinated by the movie business, right? This is in some ways a kind of metaphor for what's happened in the business world as a whole. So if you look at when they made King Kong back in 1933, there were only about 113 crew members on that movie. Then in the 1970s, they made another King Kong movie, about the same size crew, same basic, you know, you had people doing effects, people doing sound, all that type of stuff. But if you look to the more recent King Kong movie back in 2005, 1,700 people worked on that movie. They were all over the planet. They had all kinds of advanced technical skills that brought to bear to create these 3D larger than life characters and animals and creatures on

screen. I think there's a parallel there in a lot of the business world. Everything's bigger, everything's more complex. So I went to New Zealand to a place called Weta Digital, which is one of these digital effects studios that made the King Kong movie and Lord of the Rings and Avatar and a bunch of other things in that vein. I met a guy named Marco Revellant. And Marco's an Italian guy who is kind of the classic example of this glue person I'm talking about.

And what Marco is, he's a modeler, but he also knows how the software engineers work. So when they have to build a tool to enable him to work on the fur of King Kong or work on these recent Planet of the Apes movies, he knows how to work with the software engineers to develop the tools that enables him to do that. He was literally the guy who groomed King Kong. And at the same time, he can deal with the artists. He knows how to communicate with the directors, the visual artists who are trying to create these characters out of whole cloth. And seeing the connection between these hardcore coders who don't really speak the artistic language and these artists who certainly don't speak the coders' language enables them to create products that

make great movies. And I think you see that across all kinds of products. You see that in all these different industries that might not be movies, but might be a great app that you use or might be a great retail product or a great financial product. And I think there's a real lesson there that you want to be like Marco.

You want to be the person who is not afraid of people with different kinds of expertise than you and can help be the glue that pulls those teams together. Is this true, do you think, for jobs and industries that seemingly don't change all that much? Or is this very much a high-tech-y, algorithm-y kind of strategy you're talking about? I think what we're seeing is even industries that on their surface don't seem to change very much, there's a lot of change happening beneath the surface. And some examples of that are retail. So if you go into

a store today, it might look the same as it did 20 years ago, 50 years ago. But beneath the surface, retailers are having to be much more sophisticated about what they call omni-channel services, where they're all competing with Amazon. They're all trying to have the best ability to put the inventory in front of you that you want to buy, to make sure their shelves are stocked, to make sure that they're providing the best possible customer service, to make sure they have the best mobile app. So even industries that seem static are actually changing in ways that are pretty fundamental. But when you say you have to be adaptable and you have to be a glue person, what does that look like in a much more granular way? So you do what differently today

than you did yesterday if you adopt that idea? Well, I'll give you an example from my industry. So I'm a newspaper reporter, right? When I started 20 years ago in this business, all you had to do if you were a newspaper reporter, you write a story, you feed it into one end of an assembly line, an editor edits it, they move it up to the pre-press and the printing plants, and they publish it on paper, deliver it to everybody's door. Now, if you go to where I work, which is the New York Times, what you see is a bunch of glassed-in conference rooms where people with really different skills are working on creating new products. So there might be a traditional word person like me, a writer. You might see graphic artists.

You might see software engineers. You might see business side people trying to figure out how these products are going to work and who's going to pay for them. You have these groups of people who work together to create products that are really valuable in a digital world. And every one of them has different skills. But what's crucial is that the people who succeed are able to communicate and collaborate with those people with different skills. If I'm working with a software engineer, I don't know how to program. I can't program, you know, create an interactive feature or something.

But I can work well with them to make that a reality and share what my expertise has to bear. If you can't do that, you're not able to do the job in these organizations that dominate our modern economy. And when you say you can do that, how do you do that? How did you do that? I think the key is that every step of the way, you look for opportunities to broaden your experience as you're going through your career. It's not a simple matter of taking this class or this training thing. It's a mindset. It's an entire mindset around at every step of the way, you're saying, what is an experience I can have within this job that will allow me to work with

people with different skills, cultivate my understanding of their world, and in turn, enrich what I do? And I think that's the difference from an earlier era is you have to be very deliberate, very focused on making sure each job is stretching yourself laterally in terms of different functional specialties, not just vertically in terms of getting promoted and having a more impressive title. I'm speaking today with Neil Irwin. He's a senior economic correspondent at The New York Times and author of the book How to Win in a Winner-Take-All World. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lining, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla

who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. Look for The Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British

woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back, and in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. So Neil, we're talking about, you know, adaptability, adapting to a new economy and all.

But I've heard, I don't remember the exact quote, but I remember hearing that many people entering the workforce today will end up in careers and jobs that haven't even been invented yet. So how do you adapt to that? So look, this idea of adaptability is not just about positioning yourself for the next job that you might have in a couple of years. My very strongly held belief after all this work I've done, I've gone to all these big companies, done case studies, tried to understand who succeeds. What drives it is the ability to cultivate adaptability. And, you know, I think when we're growing up, we always tend to do whatever we're good at. So if you're good at a certain sport, you keep doing it because you get those positive rewards and you get a big slap on

the back. The crucial thing is you, especially in those early stages of your career, whether it's college, early jobs, is stretching yourself in ways that you're not necessarily comfortable. You know, we all work on different things. If you're not a good public speaker, you work on being a public speaker. Well, I'm arguing that adaptability is a trait just like that, like public speaking, that might be hard for you, but you can get better at by doing it repeatedly. And I think the very act of stretching yourself into uncomfortable areas time after time in the early phase of your career leaves you better positioned later on. So if you've been doing that over and over in your 20s and 30s, suddenly in your 40s, 50s, 60s, it doesn't come so, it's not so challenging and not quite as hard as it would be

if you had a much more linear kind of focused pursuit back in the early days. But there's another philosophy that says, play to your strengths, that if you don't like public speaking, don't beat your head against the wall trying to be a public speaker. Forget that and write, because that's what you're good at and what you love to do. Yeah, I understand that impulse. And look, this world does require deep technical expertise. It's not like you can just be a jack-of-all-trades, master of none. I certainly am not arguing that you should just flit around from one thing to another all the time. What I am saying is that the narrower your focus, the less likely you are to be that person who can adapt, as you say, as the entire nature of work, the nature of what the jobs of the future might be change. The more focused on a single

thing you are, even as, again, it comes very naturally, we all like to do what we're good at, the more hemmed in and the more limited you're going to be in your ability to adapt as the entire economy, the entire world of work changes further. Well, it is different in the sense that before, if you wanted to be a jeweler or a banker, well, you go learn how to do that. You don't really go outside the lines too much. But what you're saying is that in today's economy, you really must go outside the lines. Yeah, so those are two great examples. If you want to be a jeweler, well, a lot of the momentum happening in the jewelry business these days is different online sellers of jewelry that are reinventing the business model of what it means to sell diamond rings. If you look at banking, the terms of competition in the banking industry are more and more around who has the best data analytics, the best capacity to not just make an individual loan decision. You're not a loan officer sitting there deciding, I like you, I'm going to make you a loan. It's designing the systems that make those decisions millions and

millions of times over and over on how much lending to extend to this person or that person. And adapting to that changing structure of those industries is what's crucial if you really want to have that career in the 21st century. There is this fascinating element in almost everyone's career. If you talk to anybody who's successful and have them tell the story of how they got to where they are. There's always at least one moment of total serendipity, luck. They met a guy who knew a guy. They sat next to somebody on the plane that changed the course of their career and their success.

Does this play into that? I think serendipity is, you know, we all have lucky breaks and unlucky breaks over the course of a career. And the lucky breaks are, you know, can be really important in having a long and successful career. I think the key is positioning yourself to really make the most of those lucky breaks when they arrive and making sure that when you get that call, when you bump into that person on a train, that you really are the person they need and can then get the job done. You know, it's, it's, so it's not just about being good at talking to strangers.

It's really about cultivating ability that, that you actually have the technical skills and you have the chops to, to be brought in and make the most when those, when those lucky breaks arrive. Sometimes I think though, that people underestimate the level of knowledge that they need. I mean, you know, YouTube is a good example. Podcasting is a good example of a lot of people try it, but there aren't that many that are really good at it or successful at it. So, for example, moviemaking, look, I have a phone in my pocket that I can shoot video on and even edit that video. Anybody on earth can get the equipment to make a movie in theory, but we see over and over again that it actually does favor,

the marketplace does favor these very high-budget, nine-figure budgets, thousands of crew members, the very best actors. Those are the ones that really break through. And we see that in a lot of fields, that information economics tend to favor very large, very elaborate, very complicated processes. Take the beer market, right? On the one hand, you have lots of micro-brews out there. Anybody can start up a brewery.

On the other hand, if you actually look at the economics of the beer market in the United States, it is overwhelmingly dominated by two giant distributors that have a lot of the brands you see in the grocery store. So we're in a weird world where the capacity to make a kind of independent artisanal product is greater than ever. And yet, oddly, that still tends to end up favoring these very large, very complex organizations. So one of the things that I take from what you're saying, and just from my own observation, is that as technology continues to improve, it's not just that we have to know other things,

some other things, that there's other aspects to a business. There's tons of new things that in any business there is now so much more to know. So I think about this in terms of baseball. I'm a bit of a baseball fan, not a huge baseball fan, but if you remember the Michael Lewis book, Moneyball, that kind of put a name on this trend of data and analytics in baseball, where teams have more and more information to decide what players to sign, who to start, how much to pay them, things like that. And that's really come miles and miles ever since

Moneyball came out. It's really much more complex now than it was back then. And all of that work was done to try and help teams be better. That's why they invested in all these radars and complicated things to understand exactly which players are good and which are not as good. But what's happened since then is the smart players are using that analytics, are using that information to make themselves better. So I spoke to Joey Votto, who's a first baseman with the Cincinnati Reds, one of the best hitters in baseball. And he talks about the ways he processes his own data. He knows exactly what his launch angle is on every pitch, on every hit. He knows exactly when he's missing the ball outside of this part of the strike zone or in that part of the strike zone. And week to week, day to day, over the course of a season, he is using these analytics to understand the weaknesses

in his game and how to fix them and how to get better. And I think there's a real parallel there in the corporate world. So I found one of these parallels at Microsoft. So biggest software company on earth, huge company, huge organization. They've done more and more over the last few years trying to use analytics to understand how different teams work, what's working well, what's not. So I went to Redmond, Washington, where Microsoft is based, spoke to an executive there who runs their device business. So this is their Surface tablets and laptops, the Xbox. And he had a problem because he had a situation where his 700 employees in their surveys, they were not happy

with their work-life balance. They were unhappy. These are hard to hire engineers. If they start quitting for other companies, that would be really bad news. So he's trying to figure out what was going wrong. And he tried out some different hypotheses. Nothing seemed to check out. It wasn't like there were just a few bad bosses who were hard charging and making their employees miserable. It's not like it was just the employees who had to fly to China all the time who were unhappy. Nothing seemed to make any sense. So they worked with the analytics group at Microsoft to analyze email and calendar patterns. They used the metadata to see, okay, how is this team different in how they use their time,

how they communicate than other teams at Microsoft where people are happier. And they found a surprising thing. On this particular team, they were spending way more time in these giant meetings. They were spending an average of 27 hours a week in meetings with lots of people in them. And what they concluded is the reason people were unhappy with their work-life balance is because they spent their whole workday in these giant meetings not getting their work done. And then people had to catch up on things and do individual work in the evenings and on the weekends. So they had fewer meetings and they fixed the problem. But I think this is a great example of how we can all be the equivalent of Joey Votto of the Cincinnati Reds. We're using the data that's available to us to make ourselves better at our jobs. And I think that's just a powerful lesson that all of us need to internalize and become

just avid consumers of analytics that tell us how we are effective, where we're ineffective, how we can fix it. And it certainly seems as if there is no industry that's immune from these changes, really, and everyone is going to have to keep up in order to compete. Neil Irwin's been my guest. He is a senior economic correspondent at The New York Times, and his book is How to Win in a Winner-Take-All World. You'll find a link to his book in the show notes. Thanks, Neil. Sure. Thanks for having me. Hey, everyone. Join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa Demonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? Each week, we deliver four fun-filled shows.

In Don't Blame Me, we tackle our listeners' dilemmas with hilariously honest advice. Then we have But Am I Wrong?, which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our Lister poll results from But Am I Wrong? And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast,

Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney-themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed,

but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. As you have no doubt noticed, some advertising seems to work. Some seems to work really well, but a lot of advertising fails. So with all the thousands of advertising and marketing messages you're exposed to, why is it you respond to some of that advertising but not to other advertising? Well, it may have a lot to do with human behavior,

behavior that a lot of advertising people don't understand. That's according to Neil Martin, who has been examining this for a long time. He is a consultant and author of the book, Habit, the 95% of behavior marketers ignore. Hey Neil, welcome. So start with the premise here of why so much advertising and marketing doesn't work. As a PhD in marketing, I was very frustrated with how much of marketing theory wasn't working in the real world. And when I uncovered this line of research from neuroscience that most of our behavior is unconscious, it explained a lot of what I had discovered in terms of why satisfied customers leave, why most new products fail, and why it's very hard to translate

advertising into revenues. Which so often happens, and that's one of the criticisms of so much advertising is that it costs more to create and buy the advertising than the company ever makes back in dollars because it's so ineffective. Well, a terrifying statistic is that advertisers pay for 4,500 messages per person per day in this country. That's an advertisement every 14 seconds for every man, woman, and child breathing in the U.S. And what we do as a survival mechanism is we learn to ignore it. And in large part, that is an adaptive mechanism that the brain does to filter out irrelevant information. And so advertisers are kind of in that nightmare scenario where they have to yell louder and louder to get noticed, and as soon as they yell louder, we just ratchet up what our filters screen out. And that becomes this really wasted

amount of revenue. And I think advertisers in the U.S. spend about $150 billion a year on advertising, and they know a large percentage of that is wasted. And it's not that it's totally ineffective. It's that they don't know what part's working and what part isn't. And so how do you figure that out? How do you know what parts are working and what parts aren't? Well, I think that the big thing to do is to realize that you have to connect with people emotionally. And that means you have to tell a really well-integrated story about yourself. And you have to make that message consistent so that you create a brand position inside of customers' minds. Because what the customer wants to do is to simplify his life or to simplify her life.

And so if she's shopping, then she wants to make her decisions as quickly as possible. She doesn't want to go through a massive evaluation process. If you're going online to buy headphones or speakers or whatever, you don't want to spend 10, 15 hours in research. What you want to do is make a good decision as quickly as possible. When advertising facilitates us making good decisions quickly, then it's helping us. But what's happened is because so much of advertising is self-serving that we have a tendency to discount it, to disbelieve it, and therefore it's not helping us make decisions. What is it that advertisers are doing that, as you describe it, is self-serving? And what would be a better way to do it?

Well, the big thing is to recognize that word of mouth is much more powerful than advertising. Because if I tell somebody this is a good movie, I don't get anything if they go to it. So obviously, if you're trying to sell me something, you're going to derive revenue. So that's what's in it for you, but what's in it for me. When an advertisement actually helps me by educating me to make a better decision. So the way an advertiser can do this is to say, I'm not the best insurance company for everybody, but if you are a young couple just starting out, we're the perfect company for you. Because what you've just done is you've just told lots of people, don't waste your time coming to me. So you're helping me.

You're saying, don't waste your time on me. I'm not for you. But then you're also creating credibility with that young couple because you're saying, I have designed a package just for where you are in life. And that's where I think that a lot of companies don't ever want to say no to customers because they don't want to lose potential sales. But those companies that recognize and develop the discipline to say, you know, these are the customers we serve well, these are going to be our customers,

and to focus on serving those well as opposed to trying to serve a lot of people not so well. Well, if what you say is true, why do you suppose there is so much misinformation then within the advertising and marketing community about what works and what doesn't work? The problem is that a lot of marketing theory, which came out of the 1960s, was based on a misunderstanding of how people really make decisions. And I had the privilege of working with some of these pioneers, and they were doing the best they could at that time with kind of the very beginnings of cognitive science. But what we've learned in the last 15 years about the way the brain works

is really revolutionary and eclipses everything we knew before. With the whole idea of understanding that what you're trying to do is to work with the unconscious mind of the customer, because that's the part of the mind that's making most of the decisions. But what does all this have to do with habit? I mean, that's the name of your book, Habit, but I'm not seeing the connection yet. Well, that's the thing about it it is that when you look at this idea of habits, what you discover and out of pioneering work from MIT and some people at UCLA and Duke who

spent some time with me, is that there's a part of your brain that develops habits. And you can think about it like getting in your car, fastening your seatbelt, backing down the driveway, making coffee, all of the daily routine things that you do that are so automatic they don't require conscious intervention. And you've driven down the road at some point and not been able to remember the last five miles you drove, right? And you kind of go, how did I do that? How did I navigate this car five miles with no

conscious intervention? But that's the norm. That's the way you shop. That's the way you do most things. And that we are not aware of it because our conscious brain can't access those processes. And there's a part of your brain in the limbic region that develops these habits. And once a habit is encoded, it's much more powerful than your intentions. That's why most of us are overweight. I think 60% of Americans are overweight. And if you go up to ask them, they tell you, I want to lose weight, but they don't.

And some people think they're weak and they're bad and all these other kind of things. But the reality is they are really under the sway of these very powerful unconscious habits that is operating faster and quicker than their conscious brain is even aware. But some people do break out of those habits and they do lose weight. Well, and that's the key. I mean, when you look at how do you do that, and a large part of this is to understand that when you create a habit, you're strengthening these neural connections in these very powerful places in your brain.

And once those connections are set, they don't go away. So if you don't reinforce it, it can become dormant. It's like somebody who's quit smoking, and then maybe two or three years, there's just something happens, and they just reach for a cigarette. And if they start that smoking again, they are right back in that throes of that addiction. So the way to realize, you know, how do I change a habit is to recognize that you have to overlay another habit on top of the old one, and that has to become stronger. And so if you're trying to lose weight, or if you're trying to, you know, if you're trying to break through a competitor's hold on a market, what you have to do is to really

start working first with the conscious mind to say, this is what I'm trying to do. And then you have to proactively start developing the same kinds of habits which are formed through repetition over time. And so one example for the losing weight thing as a metaphor for the business side of this, but you can wait until you're hungry, you know, when you're hungry to make sure that you have, that the good food is just as easy to get to as the bad food. I mean, a candy bar is so easy to eat.

You know, make sure that you have cut up, you know, some turkey the day before that you can, you know, have and, you know, take with you, or that you have some carrots or something that are in a bag with you. And that when you have that cue that would normally get you to look for it, you know, go to the vending machine, that you have something there and then consciously you start off eating that thing and it's not going to fulfill you the way a candy bar would or potato chips. But over time, that's going to become, that's going to taste good to you. And over time, that's going to be as natural to you as potato chips. And then when you go to try to eat a potato chip, it's too salty.

Or if you try to eat a candy bar, it's too sweet. Because over time, your taste buds have gone through that kind of change. And it's the same thing if you're trying to take a customer away from a competitor, to realize that's a very hard thing to do because they have these entrenched habits and you have to kind of dislodge that habit, elevate it to conscious awareness, and then sort of make an appeal to the conscious mind when you've broken the habit, you know, for that time period. And that's that short window of opportunity you have to win them over. Well, one great example I know you talk about, and it's appropriate because

this is a podcast, is the original iPod when Apple came out with it. You know, when they started with the iPod, that section of the music industry was very small, maybe a hundred million dollars total. And they developed a player that was so intuitive, that worked so well with the way your unconscious brain works, so that you could give an iPod to somebody, not tell them how to use it, and within five or ten minutes, they'd figured it out. But the big thing was iTunes. As soon as you plug a CD into your computer, iTunes launches, takes all your music in, and then syncs it to that device. So you developed an incredibly powerful habit around listening to music this way. And to the point now where most kids, the idea of buying a CD

is just bizarre. I mean, why would you buy a CD? And why would you have a CD player? Why would you want to be limited to 10 or 12 songs? And to the point where they own that category, and I think they've become the number one music retailer in the United States now because they've captured our habits. But don't you think that people form habits around different kinds of things? I mean, in the case of the iPod, it was so intuitive that people quickly formed a habit around that that became their way of consuming music. But if you're an airline, it's going to be hard to get people to develop a habit of buying tickets on your airline when so many people have already developed the habit and continue to have the habit of buying the cheapest ticket regardless of what airline. Well, you've asked two or three really good

questions there. And, you know, it's not like your conscious brain is on vacation and can't be brought into play. A lot of decisions that we've made over and over were originally made consciously and then became unconscious. You know, you chose your dry cleaner for a reason. You chose your grocery store for a reason, but most of those reasons are normally about convenience. Even something that's a very highly involved purchase, like an automobile or a house, you're still basically, most people are trying to simplify that decision because we get overwhelmed with the amount of details, with the amount of information. And so we're always trying to simplify that

decision. So the house may come down to, boy, I love the master. The master bedroom is just great. Reality is, of course, it had to be in the right school district. It had to be in the right price range. So there was a lot of these kind of screens, but then there's this emotional reaction to that one thing that makes that house stand out over all the others. Now, you talk about like the airlines thing. It's the same kind of thing. If I'm an infrequent flyer, but how do I get that ticket? Do I go to Orbitz? Do I go to United?

And if I go to United, then United owns me. I mean, they have a really good chance of selling me that ticket. But if I go to Orbitz, then it might be Delta. It might be American. Is my priority around what time I fly, or is it around price, or is it around frequent flyer programs? And so it immediately gets complicated again. And so what we're trying to do if we fly a lot,

then we're going to try to really simplify that. And we're going to say, I'm going to use this website each time because I know how this website behaves. I don't have to relearn it. Does that make sense? Yeah, sure. And it seems from what you're saying is that the more we have to do something, the more flights we have to book, the more trips to the grocery store we have to take, the simpler we want it. And it's all about this idea of being, you know, cognitively efficient and that we don't have, and we are inundated with information.

We have so much information that we are completely overwhelmed. And the problem a lot of companies have is that they have like really smart engineers who work with a product or an idea for a long time and it becomes very, very natural to them, but it's very unnatural to the user. And this is in business-to-business sales. And what you consistently see is the companies that make it easy and make it convenient

are the ones that win, and not necessarily ones with the best product. Aren't there products, though, where it just doesn't really matter? You know, it's a commodity. A pencil is a pencil. You need to buy pencils, a commodity a pencil is a pencil you need to buy pencils you buy a pencil um yeah and when you talk about commodities but why but but it comes back to the same thing that if you make it why do you buy the pencil you buy well and let me let me be real real clear about this the whole point of this is to is to really try to help companies rethink how they approach their customers what i'm trying to get companies to do is to think more about behavior than attitude. When I was interviewing some folks up at Duke who had been studying this and they were

really startled to discover that, you know, habits went out over intentions. If you have a strong habit and you have an intention, most of your habits are going to be in line with your intentions. That's why they formed. But let's say that you have a very strong habit to eating chocolate or whatever, and then you have this intention of wanting to get in shape, that you can bring your mental energy to bear and you can be good for a couple of days, but then most people lapse back.

And that's that power of the habit. And so if you're talking about, is there a specific product that is immune to this? I think anything that you buy repeatedly, your brain is going to try to make that an automatic process. When something's novel, then the conscious brain gets involved to solve the problem. What about products or services or things that are not habitual? I mean, say you're going to take a cruise. You probably don't do that very often. It's a very intentional thing to sit down and read the brochures and go online and check out

the websites. I mean, there's nothing habitual about it. Absolutely. And what we get into, though, is, and that's a beautiful example. It's a beautiful example. So something I haven't done before, it's a cruise. So I get a brochure. Now, do I start looking online? How do you pick which cruise line to go with? Are you going to shop based on price? Are you going to shop based on convenience? Are you going to shop based on... And it's a very cognitive decision, but there's another aspect of habits, which we call heuristics. And heuristics are like little rules that we develop over time, and most of them are sort of unconscious. So you go in and your favorite cereal's on sale, so you stock up. You know, you go in. I shop at a grocery store that has these little, you know, sale stickers under things.

And I sort of, you know, shop the store based on those yellow stickers because it could be a huge, you know, price difference. Now, it's not like can I not afford a $5 box of cereal, but the cereal manufacturer has trained me that I should only buy their cereal when it's on sale because it's on sale for like $3. So it's a huge savings. And so that's the whole idea of developing this rule in your brain. So when you come to something that's novel, like a cruise, it doesn't mean that you're not using some of your heuristics. So you may look at like the different prices for the size of rooms. So, you know, you have a cabin, then you have a cabin that has a window, then you have a cabin that has a porch, and then you have a cabin that's, you know, got a suite all the way up. And so most of us kind of

have, if we look at like five choices, you know, some of us are going to say, I'm going to pick the third, you know, the third most expensive one, because that's the one where I'm probably going to get most of what I really want without the stuff that just makes it too expensive. While other people would go, you know what, I'm not going to spend that much time in my stateroom doing whatever, so I'm going to get the cheapest one, and they'll just think about a price rule. And so it's not that your conscious brain is not involved,

but that your conscious brain is still leaning on a lot of these unconscious rules that you've developed over the years to help you kind of deal with complexity. And since everybody has different rules and different criteria, if you were someone who makes a product and you just say, we're the best for everybody, you're missing the point. Absolutely. I mean, I think if you create a position in somebody's mind that we're the best for everybody, you're missing the point. Absolutely. I mean, I think if you create a position in somebody's mind that you're the best at what you do, I think that's fine as long as it's fairly narrowly focused.

But to say, like, you know, we're the best, you know, you can think through, like, business hotels. You know, why would you stay at Marriott versus Sheraton? Is it because the beds are more comfortable? You know, over time, it's basically, you know, if they've got hotels in my cities and I can kind of really simplify my booking process, I know that website, then, you know, I get on their frequent point system and, you know, and I just get locked in because I don't want to have to think about it every time I do it. Aren't there a lot of people, though, who really like variety?

And so maybe you don't want to stay in the same hotel every time you go on business, even though you could. Maybe you want to go on a different cruise line just to see what they have to offer. And so trying to sell that person, it would seem, to come back to your cruise ship or come back to your hotel, that's a tough sell. And it does seem like an awful lot of people like that variety. When we look at variety, most of us are variety-seeking about some things, but we're not all the time variety-seeking. So in other words, I may be out there, I really like dark chocolate, so I might be really interested in trying out different things with dark chocolate.

But, you know, I'm not, I have no interest in trying new coffee. I've got my coffee, I'm fine, I don't, I have, there's no novelty-seeking in my coffee, you know, pursuit. The big thing to recognize is that when people do something which is a variety seeking thing, they very rarely make the thing that they're, you know, going after for variety into a habit. And so I may get a lot of people who will try something, but that doesn't mean I've been successful. I think the best example of this is Zima. Zima had an unbelievably successful advertising campaign that, you know, got more than 50% of people who drank alcohol in the U.S.

tried Zima once. Very few people tried it the second time. And so they were incredibly successful at getting us to try it, but horrible about making that into a routine purchase. Well, it's interesting how people think and how they make choices and compare that to how marketers and advertisers think people think and make choices and how sometimes that all comes together and sometimes it doesn't. Neil Martin has been my guest. He is a marketer, a consultant, and author of the book Habit, the 95% of behavior marketers ignore. And you will find a link to his book in the show notes. Thanks, Neil. I'll bet you've wondered whether or not you should turn off your air conditioner when you leave the house or leave it running. If the house gets hot,

then the AC has to work really hard later on to cool it back down. So maybe it's better to keep the temperature constant all day long, even though no one's home. Well, apparently that's not true. Apparently the most efficient course of action is to turn it off when you leave the house. It may seem like a waste of energy, but it actually saves you a fair amount of money. It also helps your air conditioner work more efficiently, according to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. Air conditioning systems run most efficiently when they're running at full speed, rather than running for short periods of time at a less powerful speed to maintain a constant temperature all day long. They're also

better able to dehumidify your house when they're running full blast. And that is something you should know. And now that you've heard this episode of the podcast, if you found it interesting, helpful, or insightful, please share it with a friend. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager,

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