Something You Should Know - Powerful Success Secrets You Never Knew & Why Conventional Wisdom is Often Wrong

Episode Date: February 25, 2019

Can you tell just by looking if someone is honest and trustworthy? Actually you can but the reason will surprise you. Listen as I begin this episode of the podcast by explaining why you usually can trust in your instincts in this case. http://www.columbia.edu/~ms4992/Publications/2016_Slepian-Ames_PychSci.pdf After you listen to this segment, you will never look at success quite the same. Laszlo Barabasi, is a professor at Northeastern University and author of the book The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success (https://amzn.to/2EtKW9t). He explains how to objectively measure success and reveals some interesting factors that influence your success that you would have never imagined. There is a lot of conventional wisdom you likely believe. Things like, “Don’t just a book by its cover” or “Everyone deserves a second chance” or “Don’t sweat the small stuff.” However all of these things are not necessarily true all the time - or maybe ever. Attorney David Libman author of the book 100 Reality Checks (https://amzn.to/2E7JGqW) takes a critical look at some common wisdom and offers another take that may just make a lot more sense. It’s spelled phlegm. It’s pronounced FLEM. It’s that gross goo you get in throat and nose when you get sick. What is it and why do we get it? Listen as I explain the purpose of the seemingly disgusting substance. And really, how many podcasts are going to tell you this? http://www.menshealth.com/health/get-rid-of-phlegm This Week's Sponsors -Purple Mattress. Text "Something" to 84888 to get a free pillow when you buy a mattress. Quip. Get your first refill free when you buy a quip toothbrush at www.Get Quip.com/something -Geico. Go to www.Geico.com to see how Geico can save you money on your car insurance Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on Something You Should Know, can you tell if someone is trustworthy just by looking at them? This will really surprise you. Then, a fascinating look at what makes you successful. For example, does going to a prestigious school make you more successful? When we look at how much money people earn 10 years after graduation, it's not the best school you went to, but what was the highest level school that you applied to? Because where you apply to is really gauging where you think that you belong. Plus, when you get a bad cold, where does all that phlegm and goo come from?

And a critical look at conventional wisdom, like don't sweat the small stuff or practice makes perfect. If you truly adopt the notion that practice makes perfect, I think that you'll always be disappointed. And my reality check is practice almost never makes perfect. It makes better, which is still an excellent goal. All this today on Something You Should Know. 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 is 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 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. 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 get a lot of emails from listeners of this podcast. Most of the emails are very kind. Some of them are amazingly kind. Some of them are less than kind. And that's okay. I take no offense because I appreciate the fact that anybody would hear something on this podcast and take the time to write, even if they disagree or didn't like what they heard. I still appreciate the fact that someone would make the effort.

If you ever want to contact me with a question or a comment, my email address is mike at somethingyoushouldknow.net. It comes straight to me. And there's also a contact form on the website, somethingyoushouldknow.net, that generates an email that also comes straight to me. First up today, can you really tell how trustworthy someone is just by looking at their face? Actually, it appears you can, but the reason it works may surprise you. Researchers at Columbia Business School designed a pretty complicated multi-step experiment. What they discovered is that we internalize other people's

expectations of us. So after years of being perceived as trustworthy, you come to act and look like an honest person. Likewise, after a lifetime of being perceived as untrustworthy, you can start to act and look dishonest. The important takeaway from this is that people do judge you by how you look. But interestingly, you in turn act by how they judge you. But it's not necessarily in stone. You can alter how others perceive you by giving them additional information to consider in making that judgment. And that is something you should know. You might think that you have a pretty good understanding of what success is.

And there is certainly no shortage of people who will tell you what success is and how to get it. But you're about to hear a very different discussion on success. It seems that while hard work, talent, effort, attitude, and a lot of other factors are part of the puzzle, there's more to it than that. Laszlo Barabasi is a physicist and professor of network science at Northeastern University, and he's author of the book, The Formula, The Universal Laws of Success. Hi, Professor, welcome. Hey, Mike, it's a pleasure talking to you.

So I like this topic because I think for most of us, for so long, we've learned that you've got to keep your nose to the grindstone. You've got to put in the effort, put in the long hours, and that is how you succeed. But you say, yeah, well, hang on a minute. Oh, yes. That's exactly what I learned. And that was the pattern that I follow much of my life. And it wasn't until we started to look at the careers of millions of individuals that we realized it is not that simple. Performance is necessary, but not sufficient for success. So what is sufficient for success? Because when you look at a lot of individual success stories and you get down to a pretty granular level, you find a lot of factors that don't seem predictable.

Things like luck or, you know, right place at the right time or the other guy didn't show up. There seem to be a lot of factors that are hard to quantify that determine somebody's success. There are. And in order to really kind of understand that, let's take a step back and talk about what is performance and what is success. And the way we approach this is that we consider performance anything that you do as an individual, how fast you run, what research papers you write, what businesses you put together. Success, however, is what the community acknowledges. That is, your performance is about you, but your success is about us.

Because it's the community who really waits on your performance and kind of eventually rewards you for that with success. And this is a very important distinction because I'm a big data person, and we need to be able to measure both performance and success, and we need to distinguish them from each other. And what we find generally is that performance is very hard to measure, sometimes almost impossible to measure, but success, because it's a collective measure, it becomes measurable and therefore it could be studied with the tools that big data offers us. Why is performance hard to measure? There are some cases where performance is obvious. If you

are a runner, then we have a chronometer and we regularly measure your speed but this is pretty much that accuracy through which we see performance is limited to sports in most other areas it's very difficult to say in an objective manner who is better and who offers better performance is my painting better than yours is my research paper kind of more important than yours? There's so many variables that come into that, that even the experts have difficulty distinguishing one performance from the other. Not even the highest experts in music, in classical music, can really distinguish the top performance from each other. Or not even the best experts in wine, are able to reliably grade the same wine if it's offered over and over to them and really kind of give them a consistent rating. So what we find

when we look at the data is that it's very, very difficult to measure in an objective measure performance across different domains. Success, however, it's much easier to measure. So why do we need to measure some of this in the first place? You pointed out that, you know, it's hard to tell what's the best musical performance or what's the best wine, but maybe it isn't important to determine that because it is so subjective. Maybe trying to objectively determine what's the best isn't necessary. So let's step back and qualify what I said about performance. Yes, it's very difficult to distinguish top performance from each other, but it's typically easy, even for non-experts, to distinguish a good from bad performance.

We can easily distinguish a good wine from the bad wine, a good singer from a bad singer. The problem is that when we look at the distribution of people's ability or people's performance, we find that there are quite a number of people who are next to the top. So they really offer top performance. Think about runners, right? So Usain Bolt is the fastest person on earth, but he's really running less than a percent faster than the person who loses the race, right? So even in sports, the top performance are so close to each other that they are almost indistinguishable. And this is even more so in cases where we don't have a chronometer. But in general, we're easily see the distinction between the good and the weak performance.

So what in the formula I discuss about is not a path to take weak performance and bring to success. But let's assume that you have a performance, what it needs to succeed. You are near the top in terms of performance. Why is it that among the 10 who offer the best performance, one succeeds and the other nine are ignored? And what are the mechanisms that take place when we're not able to objectively distinguish the top performance from each other? And when even the experts cannot distinguish the top performance from each other. And when even the experts cannot distinguish the top performance, they start actually giving prices out almost randomly or using other mechanisms. The best example in this context is when it comes to competitions where performers are asked to be

judged one after the other, like in music competitions. And what we find is that typically the prize goes to the last person to be seen or among the last one, thanks to the immediacy effect. So at the end, what we're seeing is that every time when judges are unable to see the performance, they start turning on some other mechanisms, like immediacy, that leads to some form of discrimination because they must hand that prize out. So this is one of the reasons why we need to understand the laws that kind of govern success when performance becomes indistinguishable. That's interesting because I've heard variations or a variation on this in the employment world that when you go to a job interview has a lot to do with whether or not you get offered the job,

and that the closer to the end that you go, the better. That's right. And why I find it really funny, this, is that when the book was on the market and different publishers were competing to publish it, I asked each of the editors to tell me why they would like to publish the formula. And one of the editors said, because I finally understood a puzzle that I had formed now almost a decade. He said, every single year I interview several intern candidates for my publishing house, and for some strange reason, the best candidate is always the last to show up for the interview. And of course, this has nothing to do with the best candidate being the last because people show up randomly for the interviews. It has to do with many different things. You remember much better

the last candidate. But most important, you as the interviewer, you're becoming better and better at asking the right questions from the people that you're trying to hire. And the better questions you ask, the better answers you get. And therefore, you are more satisfied with the candidate. So as a result, I always tell my students, once you've got an interview opportunity, it means that you have the performance to get the job. Now, how do you translate that ability into a success? There, if you can, be among the last one to interview. Find out when the decision is made and try to show up among the last one because that increases significantly your chance of nailing the job. That's a really good example, because so often it seems that competitions are apples and

oranges kinds of competitions. You know, the high school science fair. Well, how do you compare one science project to another when they're so different? How do you compare, you know, classical music and rock and roll? So you can't, there is no best, so you have to rely on something else. And that makes a lot of sense that the person who was last, what you call the immediacy effect, seems to have an upper hand. So I'm wondering what other kinds of influences and factors that we may not be aware of,

what other kinds of things can contribute to success or detract from success? So one of the things that I talk about is the fact that success leads to success. And this is something that I discovered about 20 years ago when I studied the word Y-Web, and we were trying to answer why is it that Google has about 800 million links pointing to them and why other websites are so ignored. And what we realized is that there is a mechanism that pure visibility leads to more and more visibility.

This is really one of the fundamental laws of how success emerges. That is that previous success leads to future success. And this is actually very important and it's illustrated by a beautiful experiment in which a colleague of mine, Arnold Wadnich, tried to figure out, you know, how is really kind of success in awards given to individuals. And for which he chose two groups of Wikipedia editors that were all top editors, and for half of the group, he gave them a prize, and for the other half, he did not. Mindful, these two groups were chosen randomly.

The members were chosen randomly, and the only difference was that one group got a prize, the other didn't. Three months later, the group that actually got the prize got 12 more prizes, and the one who didn't actually didn't get any other prize from other individuals, which is kind of indicating indeed this success leads to success phenomena, because the winning group, the one who got more prizes, didn't get it just because they were any better. They were no better than the other group. They got it because they were already awarded. That having an award makes you awardable. If I want to give you an award, I want to give it to a person whom I will not fail. I want to trust, actually, my choice. And the best way to trust my choice is to trust other people's choices. Isn't that interesting? And maybe that's why people, you know, put awards on their wall

and list all their awards on their resume. Because as you say, the more awards you've gotten, the more awardable you are in the future. Oh, that certainly makes lots of sense, right? In a way that is kind of signaling the fact to the community that other people have chosen MeVorti. And this is how actually important institutions work as well. Yeah, I want to talk to you about that because what you found is truly remarkable. First, though, you know, one of the most important things we do for our health every day is brush our teeth. And yet, most of us don't do it properly. Quip is a better electric toothbrush.

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The Heresies of Randolph Bantwine, wherever podcasts are available. My guest is Laszlo Barabasi. He is a professor and author of the book, The Formula, The Universal Laws of Success. And Laszlo, you talk about something really interesting, and that is success related to the college you went to if you went to college. And a lot of people put a lot of stock in going to very prestigious schools, Ivy League schools or other prestigious and very expensive schools, because the thinking is that going to those schools will make you more successful. But your research, this really is fascinating, your research says

it's not the school you go to. Explain that. When we look at how much money people earn 10 years after graduation, it's not the best school you went to. But what was the highest level school that you apply to? Because where you apply to, given your grades, is really gauging where you think that you belong to. So if you apply to Harvard and Princeton, you think that you have the performance and the ambition to be at the same level of the Harvard and Princeton students, and your long-term performance will reflect that, even if you don't go to Harvard and Princeton. That is so interesting to me.

And I wonder then if that also applies in business. If you apply to the top companies in your field because you think you belong there, is that a predictor that you will be more successful? I certainly believe so. And we don't know the answer because we don't have the data, but this is a research project we're pursuing right now. We're collecting data to answer the same questions in terms of the business. And just to kind of step back, why is it so difficult to answer that question right away? One of the distinguishing features of the formula is that it's totally data-based. That is, very fabulous books have been written about success,

where a successful individual shares his or her experiences. Other books that are very, very interesting have been written about success, where a successful individual shares his or her experiences. Other books that are very, very interesting have been written about, you know, a group of successful individuals and what are their common characteristics. The problem with these type of books is that they only look at the successful individuals and they don't have a control sample, like a placebo, to really see that those features that we're talking about are really very essential to success. So the way we approach this in my research lab is that we look at the careers of all scientists and all artists that ever lived, and we actually

reconstruct every single step of their career, every publication. And we have in our databases both the success stories, but we also have the failures. So therefore, we are able to see what distinguishes the very successful from the not so successful people. Lacking such a placebo effect, let's say such a control, could draw you completely wrong conclusions. For example, you may look at 100 successful people and you may conclude that a common characteristic is that starting to work at 6 a.m. But you may actually find 10 million people who start working at 6 a.m. and yet they are not becoming as successful as your reference frames. So in a way or the other, it's essential for us to understand success in an objective made by comparing both successful

and non-successful individuals to really unveil the patterns that govern success. I still get back to that question, though, of how you measure success. You said that performance is what you're good at, how fast you run, how well you paint. That performance is about you, but success is about us, about the audience, about the awards you win. But it does seem like there are things like, you know, there are movies that are, for example, really financially successful. They make a lot of money, and in the case of the movie studios, that's the measure of success.

But they get panned by the critics, which is another measure of success. So was the movie successful or was it not? And there also seem to be things that determine people's success that you can't really measure, like looks and attitude and confidence and things. I mean, how do you measure that? I would actually dispute that there is no data for that. There's quite a number of research that looks at kind of even physical characteristics and its impact on success. But all of these parts I would put in the case of the performance, right?

Is that because the question is, what is it that you are achieving, what you're putting on the table, and then success about what does the community really acknowledge from that? And all of these kind of hidden type of things can be addressed. As I said, where you apply, what's the highest level of application that you put in for colleges is certainly a measure of your ambition level. Where do you think that you belong? And when you ask all of these questions, which are fabulous questions, we can probably find a way to address it in the data. And that has been really my research lab's purpose.

And that's what I'm trying to do in the formula. Isn't a lot of whether or not you're successful in life, because you're talking about a lot of things that are measurable, whether you won the race or not, or whether you had the best musical performance. But a lot of it depends on your definition of success, right? It's who has the most toys at the end of the game, depending on what you want success to look like. Mike, that's a very good question. And I do want to actually emphasize that we indeed are focused here on the measurable aspects of success, but there are other aspects that are very, very important to us as individuals.

There is what I would call satisfaction or just happiness. And, you know, like I could actually consider as a measure of success that I made it in time for this interview today and I had a chance to talk to you. It could be a measure of success that, you know, I recovered after I broke my leg in a car accident. It could be a measure of success that I learned English, like a second language, which I did and so on. But these are actually things that are very, very essential for our health and for our well-being. But in my mind, these are all necessary for performance because I need to speak English to be able to do, for

example, science in the right way to communicate with my scientific peers and so on. So at the end of the day, all of these aspects of self-satisfaction, happiness, are all kind of necessary for us to achieve that performance. However, the society typically is not able to see these aspects of success. No one but us can actually gauge that. What the society looks at success are the external measurable things. You know, how many people acknowledge what you do? Where is your art exhibited in what museums? How well is your company doing?

How much money is it making? How many jobs did it generate and so on? And these are all external measures of success. These are the ones that are accessible for data for us. And this is the one that the formula is really focusing on. So when the dust all settles from all of this, what's the takeaway? What's the advice? What's the big so what here? I think one thing people would remember would be that, that your performance is about you, but your success is about us being about the community that surrounds you. And I think if we can internalize that particular perspective, that's a game changer, the way we approach the whole success game in our life. Wow, it really changes how you think about success, listening to what you say and all

the factors that go in to whether you succeed or fail. Laszlo Barabasi has been my guest. He is a physicist and professor of network science at Northeastern University, and he's author of the book, The Formula, The Universal Laws of Success. You'll find a link to his book in the show notes. Thank you, Laszlo. Thanks a lot, Mike, for the opportunity. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives.

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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. So until I heard about my next guest and the book he wrote, this is something I've really never thought much about. But you and I have heard a lot of wisdom over the course of our lives. And often that wisdom gets boiled down into a sentence or two. Things like, don't sweat the small stuff, or the early bird gets the worm, or don't judge a book by its cover.

And because it's catchy and clever, we often believe it without really examining it. But wait a minute. Sometimes the small stuff really matters, and you do need to sweat the small stuff. And the early bird gets the worm, meaning getting up early somehow gives you an advantage. Well, not if you're a night person. And don't judge a book by its cover. Well, we all make some judgments about a book by its cover, including whether or not to buy it and read it.

So maybe we need to examine some of the wisdom that we've come to believe. And that's exactly what David Libman did. David is an attorney in Southern California and author of the book, 100 Reality Checks. Hi, David, welcome. Thanks for having me. So you're a musician turned attorney and now author of this book. So how and why did you decide to examine these commonly held words of wisdom? A lot of it comes from life experiences and also experiences with clients. The nature of my practice is that I deal with a lot of individuals and business owners. So, for example, somebody might come in and they've got a dream, say, of starting a restaurant.

And I've had these kind of situations where they're a good cook. They've got their life savings might be something like $50,000, $100,000. People tell them they're a good cook. They decide they want to sink their entire life savings, say, into a restaurant. And yet they've never run a restaurant. They've never worked at a restaurant. They've never done any of those kind of things. And I've seen it in both phases.

I've been lucky enough to see the phase where maybe somebody comes to me before they start that endeavor, and we can talk about realistically really what that means and the risks they're taking, and maybe they'll go get some life experience first before they just dump their life savings in. But I've also, unfortunately, seen the other side where I've never met somebody and they come to me after they've, you know, devoted a bunch of time and money and effort to something like that, and it's failed. So, you know, that's why I'll have a reality check that says something like being a great cook does not always mean you can successfully run a restaurant, because people hear these kind of things, and I hate to see it when it happens, where they rely on something that sounds great but doesn't necessarily have any real support,

I guess for lack of a better term, especially when you're an attorney, evidentiary support. So let's dive into some of these reality checks, and let's start with one that I mentioned in the intro, and that is don't judge a book by its cover. Books are a perfect example, obviously, where when you go to the intro, and that is, don't judge a book by its cover. Books are a perfect example, obviously, where when you go to the bookstore, there's just so many, we're drowning in them. If you don't have a good cover, unless you're famous or there's some other reason that somebody's going to pick up that book, they're probably not going to pick up the book. So I know for me personally that many times I'll judge a book by its cover.

And I think, of course, that obviously goes beyond the regular phrase as well. I mean, we live in a more casual society. I've been on both sides of the spectrum when I was a musician. People were very casual in the business and professional setting. People are less so. But I think there is this trend sometimes where people are sloppy or things like that, and then they're upset that people don't get to the meat of who they are, but they don't really consider that first impressions matter and that people are

going to consider you based on your initial presentation out in the world. So it's important. You have a good one about problem solving and you being an attorney, a business attorney, that you are in the business of solving problems. So what is that one? One of the reality checks is problem solving is problem-centric, which creates the wrong focus. Solution finding is the better way to go. And the way I came to that, a lot of people that I deal with,

I do a lot of lawsuits or they'll come with problems, and you'll have these meetings or you'll have these negotiations and it's very surprising to see that people will continually want to talk and focus on the problem and there might be very little discussion or consideration of what to do about that problem other than just focusing on how bad it is and how annoying it is and you know they kind of get in a loop and so i do you always hear these things about problem solving and i think even that phrase kind of gets you in this loop of focusing on the problem so i try to at least in my personal practice or negotiations deal with not so much the problem but okay we can acknowledge there's a problem maybe there's a disagreement. Usually when you have disagreements, you're not going to get to a place where people will admit the other side is right.

There's too much ego for that. But the very least you can do is focus on trying to solve problems by thinking more in terms of solutions. One of the business reality checks in your book that caught my eye was this one. A threat should be a promise in negotiations. Following through on a threat can make your adversary trust you, which can lead to resolution. And the reason I say that is what I see is people get heated with each other. They get battling with each other. And they want to threaten the world. I'm going to sue you. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that. And they never consider the notion that if you make a threat and you don't follow through, in some way it's actually a breach of the trust and it really weakens you. Because, you know, especially when people

get heated, when somebody else threatens you, most of the time people aren't just going to whimper and go away. They're going to start thumping their chest and fight back. And so what I find is whatever your threat's going to be, you have to seriously consider if that's something you actually want to do. Is that something you actually want to follow through on? If you say you're going to sue somebody in a week unless they respond to your letter, and then a week goes by and you do nothing, then the other side kind of knows that you're just blowing off steam. And so that, I think, is something that people really need to think about. On the other hand, if you actually

make the threat, you actually follow through, then people know, okay, you keep to your word. Whether they like it or not, they start to see there's a consistency in what you say and what you do, and I think that's very important in a negotiation. A common one I know everyone's heard is there's no I in team, meaning that there are no stars, everybody works together, and you have a take on that. It says saying there is no I in team merely demonstrates that you know how to spell. Great teams can and probably should include members with unique approaches and perspectives. Because from what I can tell,

if you've got a team and the expectation is that everybody's supposed to have the same mindset, in some bizarre way, you actually lack what the benefit is of a team. That the best teams have people that make up for each other's weaknesses and fill different roles. I like the one you tackle, because I've heard it so many times throughout life, that you should live each day as if it's your last. It really comes from the notion of, you know, you go to a coffee house, you go to a restaurant or something, and they'll have that quote up on the chalkboard, or you'll see it on a commercial or some variation of something like that. And it's one of those

feel-good sayings that frankly drives me crazy because I don't see that. And those are the kind of things where, let's face it, if this was my last day, no offense to you, I probably wouldn't be talking to you. I might be eating at a buffet, spending as much money as I possibly could, maybe doing many things that on an everyday basis would be poor planning. You have a different take on another one that I mentioned in the beginning, and that is the early bird gets the worm. I say the early bird gets the worm works for morning people. If that's not you, you can still succeed later in the afternoon.

Honestly, to give the example of my personal life, I was always, especially, you know, coming to be, being an attorney, after being a musician, when I was a musician, you know, you'd work till two or three in the morning, get to bed 3 or 4, and get up late. Now that I'm an attorney, if I have a morning court appearance, I'll show up. But in general, my schedule here in Southern California is I might pop into work 10, 10.30, and I might leave like 7 or 7.30. And it's got many benefits, right? I skip Southern California traffic on each way in the commute. I feel rested. And so it's one of those things where people say things,

and it doesn't mean you have to abide by that. If you're not a morning person, instead of torturing yourself with that, pick a schedule that works and just work hard on the hours that work for you. One that I like and you have my full support on is, if you want to be known as someone who thinks differently, use a phrase other than thinks outside the box. The way I came up with that one is, you know, probably like many people who are in the business world, you go to a lot of networking type events, or you'll hear people give you their elevator pitch about their business.

And I would say somewhere around, and this is anecdotal, but I would guess somewhere between 30% and 40% of the time, if you ask somebody about their business, they'll tell you that they think outside the box, and that's partly what makes them different. And if that many people are saying they think outside the box, it seems to me that couldn't possibly be outside the box because that phrase is used just far too much in this society. So I think if you actually are different, you've got to come up with something different.

I've got a similar quote, similar vein. It just says stop using the word passion because that's another one. I can appreciate that passion is a great concept, but so many people use it in the business context they say they're passionate about their work or passionate about what they do that it starts to lose its impact at least for me personally something we've talked about on this program several times something people talk about and complain about a lot is the lack of privacy today, that our information is out there, and you have some thoughts on that. Social media and privacy do not realistically coexist. Choose one,

then stop complaining. That may sound harsh, but I find it interesting that people will post things, say on Facebook or Instagram or any sort of social media site, and then they're highly offended that their information might not be private. And I can appreciate that people don't want necessarily what they sign into to be sold to third parties and things like that. But on the other hand, if you participate in a platform like that, you have to expect there's going to be abuse. It's just the reality that if you give your information away, you can't necessarily trust who you're giving it to. My concept with that is you don't really have a realistic expectation of privacy in general. There's just too much information flowing, and that if you really, truly want privacy, you really have to go above and beyond and take probably many steps that most

people would never take to ensure true privacy for your information. So what about the small stuff? I mean, the phrase, don't sweat the small stuff, it was the title of a very popular book. That phrase has made its way into the culture. People say it all the time. Hey, don't sweat the small stuff. What say you? Yeah, I mean, I can appreciate that. It's a nice phrase.

Sometimes you cannot avoid sweating the small stuff. When the small stuff causes too much perspiration, look for as many distractions as possible. So there's two things. There's the reality check itself. I think in some way that one speaks a lot for itself. But there's also the sort of bigger picture of a lot of these reality checks have to do with, at least for me personally, this idea that you'll hear something like,

don't sweat the small stuff. And at least for me, I'll find myself sometimes sweating the small stuff. And at least for me, I'll find myself sometimes sweating the small stuff. And then I feel bad about myself. Like, why can't I do this thing that, that everybody says you should do, which is just don't sweat the small stuff. So some of these things where, you know, people tell you things like, oh, you know, I give 110%, don't sweat the small stuff, you know, be the early bird, whatever it is, when you don't end up doing that because you're a human, you can feel really bad about yourself. Or you can just get realistic and say,

maybe that phrase doesn't really work for everybody. Maybe I'm just one of those people that does sweat the small stuff. So for me, since I know that I am, I just try to get distracted. If I'm sweating the small stuff, I'll go do something else, go practice an instrument, go watch something, go for a walk, something to get my mind off of it. So one more. You pick one. There's a lot of these reality checks in the book,

but I'm sure you have some favorites. So you talk about one of your favorites. I got this one from being both a musician and an attorney. When you're a musician, you practice your instrument. When you're an attorney, you practice the law. So I have this phrase, the quote we always hear is, practice makes perfect. And my reality check is practice almost never makes perfect. It makes better, which is still an excellent goal.

That's another one of those aspirational things where if you truly adopt the notion that practice makes perfect, I think that you'll always be disappointed. I've seen some of the greatest musicians ever, and still when I've seen them perform, I could probably find maybe one mistake or one imperfection in their performance. But really, the perfection is not really the goal. The goal is to improve and get better. So I think it's important to think about those things. At least for me, it's been important, because otherwise I could drive myself crazy. Well, it is so interesting, and I mentioned this at the beginning,

that we hear these things like, practice makes perfect, don't sweat the small stuff, that they're catchy phrases. And so we kind of buy into it mostly because they're catchy phrases, not because of any critical thinking that anybody does about it. And yeah, maybe practice makes perfect, and maybe not, and maybe not for you, and maybe not for you in this case, it isn't a one-size-fits-all thing. And here's one that I think everybody believes, or at least likes to say, is the idea that everyone deserves a second chance. I mean, that's like a perfect example.

My phrase, of course, on that is everybody may deserve a second chance, but that second chance doesn't have to come from you. We could think of any number of examples, but, you know, if, I mean, just on something mild, right, if in my area, you know, if somebody comes to me and they've got a business partner that stole $200,000, it could be that that business partner, you know partner had drug problems, did lots of things, might correct himself or herself. But it doesn't mean that the person that I'm representing should ever give that business partner a second chance.

That person that needs a second chance has to redevelop their life and go to someone else and prove themselves to someone else. Because you do get these sort of oil and water situations where you see people, they want to be so altruistic, they want to be good, they don't want to be judgmental, which are all great aspirations. But at what point do you sort of cannibalize yourself with these aspirations, because they don't necessarily work in your interactions with other people? Well, I know for myself, I've never really stopped to think about these things. I just kind of believe them.

You know, don't sweat the small stuff. Practice makes perfect, and you just believe them. So I really think it's a great idea that you did this book and that you make people think a little more critically about this common conventional wisdom that we've all heard forever. Well, I appreciate you saying that. I mean, I think you've articulated it very well. That's the concept I'm trying to get across.

So I appreciate that you've picked up on that. Thank you very much for that. David Libman has been my guest. He is an attorney in California, and he's author of the book, 100 Reality Checks. And you will find a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. So here's one of my big pet peeves. You talk to someone while they're looking at their phone, and you ask them a question, and you get no response. It's as if they didn't hear you.

Well, as it turns out, they probably didn't. Research published in the Journal of Neuroscience has revealed that concentrating on a visual task, like scrolling through your phone for texts or Facebook or emails, that may render you temporarily deaf to normal volume sounds. Researchers looked at brain scans of people as they did visual tasks while sounds played in the background. As the tasks got harder, the brain's response to the sounds was reduced. These findings suggest that our vision and our hearing share limited resources in the brain, which is essentially then forced to choose between processing information from our eyes or from our ears. It could also explain why you miss your bus stop or train station announcement while you're reading a book,

or why your boyfriend can't hear you calling him when he's watching TV. And that is something you should know. If you enjoy this podcast, please share it with someone, just one person. If everybody in the audience shared this with one person, well, we'd double our audience. I'm Mike Carruthers. 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, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth

torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook. Starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts.

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.