The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 141: Jonah Berger - The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Behavior

Starting point is 00:00:00 People talk about Steve Jobs, for example. They say, oh, Steve Jobs is successful because it was completely different from everybody else. But dig a little deeper. Actually look at the data. If you look at where Apple's been successful, it's been in markets that they weren't the first entry, actually leading. They weren't different from everybody else. It was in markets where there was already someone in that market.

Starting point is 00:00:20 Apple wasn't the first person to come out with an MP3 player. They just built on what others had done and did it a little bit better. Google wasn't the first to do online search. They came along a while later actually in that market, but they learned from what others did, and they used that to be successful. And so successful companies and leaders aren't all about being different. It's about being similar and different at the same time. Are leaders born or are they made?

Starting point is 00:00:45 Our host, Ryan Hawk, believes that leaders can be made through determined, focused work on learning the art and science behind the makeup of other successful leaders. Now it's time to inhale knowledge and exhale success. You're listening to The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk. This episode is brought to you by Deior Design. If you've gone to learning leader.com recently, you've noticed a massive upgrade. This is in thanks to the great leaders at Deior Design. So if you're looking for a new website, website update, SEO, social media, email campaigns,

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Starting point is 00:02:03 I promise you guys will enjoy it. learning leader.com slash website. Hey, and welcome to the learning leader show. I am Ryan Hawk, and thank you so much for being here. I'm thrilled with tonight's featured leader. It's Dr. Jonah Berger. He's a marketing professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania

Starting point is 00:02:26 and bestselling author of a couple books. First, contagious why things catch on. And most recently, Invisible Influence, the hidden forces that shape behavior. Jonah has spent over 15 years studying how social influence works and how it drives products and ideas to catch on. You know, you wonder, why do some things catch on while others fail? What makes online content go viral? And why do some products, ideas, and behaviors get more word of mouth than others?

Starting point is 00:02:58 Jonah has examined the behavioral science that underlies these questions. He examines how people make decisions, how ideas diffuse, and how social influence shapes behavior, a few of the topics we got into, how to immediately become a better negotiator, just a few tips you could implement right now to help you. And then why successful athletes typically have older siblings, followed up by why comparing ourselves to others is actually a good thing. Surprise me quite a bit. Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, it's Dr. Jonah Berger. All right, Jonah, so excited to have you here on The Learning Leader Show. Welcome to the podcast.

Starting point is 00:03:49 Thanks for having me, Ryan. Appreciate it. And a question around leaders who have sustained excellence. You've studied all different types of people in some processes and things that have helped people become more contagious, how maybe we're influenced. There's a really unique set of research that you've done. I'm curious from your perspective, what are some of the common themes or characteristics you found in people? who have sustained excellence? You know, it's a great question. And it's so important as a leader. You meet so many people, some that you've known for a while, some you haven't. But to create that sustained excellence,

Starting point is 00:04:28 to motivate your troops, to engage everybody, to go after what you're hoping for them to achieve, is really important. And I had the chance recently to speak with Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google. And it was amazing to see him at work. It was amazing to watch interpersonally what he was doing. And he was doing a little bit of something that I've seen many leaders do really, really well. And that is create, even I had just met him just for a couple minutes, a sense of kinship or a sense of familiarity, a sense that we had known each other for a long time, a sense that we could almost trust each other, even though I had just merely met him. And, you know, imagine you find out you and somebody went to the same high school or you and somebody else have the same birthday. Even though you just met them, you feel like you have a lot

Starting point is 00:05:13 in common. You feel like you have a kinship. You can trust. them, you can like them because you have the similarity. So how can we create that as leaders? Obviously, we can't have the same birthday as everyone or have gone to the same high school as everyone. And one thing that I saw Eric Schmidt do that I've seen many leaders do is called mimicry or in some sense being a chameleon. And so some researchers looked at successful negotiators. They looked at hundreds of negotiations. And they looked across them to see what made certain negotiators more successful than others. And they found that successful negotiators seemed to do one particular thing. that was subtly mimic, imitate, almost like a chameleon fitting in with their surroundings,

Starting point is 00:05:51 the mannerisms or the behavior of the person they were sitting across from. So if the other person crossed their legs, well, the negotiator did the same thing. Or if the other person rested their face on their hands, the negotiator did the same. Subtally, and not too obviously again and not all the time, but subtly mimicking the words, the language, the mannerisms of their negotiating partner led those negotiators to be five times as successful. It's not just negotiators. Some other research shows that in a sales context, for example, if a waiter or a waitress repeats your order back to you, word for word, if they mimic what you're saying, so if you come in and you say, oh, you know, I'd like a Caesar salad with chicken

Starting point is 00:06:30 dressing on the side and a Diet Coke. And they say, okay, you'd like a Caesar salad with a chicken dressing on the side and a Diet Coke. Well, just by saying the words back to you, word for word, that waiter or waitress got a 70% higher tip. The same thing happens in dating. Couples that are dating that use language similarly, they're more likely to go on another date. And so just like a chameleon where it fits in with its environment, it changes colors based on its surroundings,

Starting point is 00:06:56 suddenly imitating the language, the mannerisms, the nonverbals of the people around you can increase trust and affiliation. Leaders are often taught to listen, and that's a good trait. But emulating is equally important. You know, not being standoffish, not being different, close that barrier, particularly with people you haven't met before, by emulating them. That'll make them feel more familiar.

Starting point is 00:07:18 It'll turn strangers into allies and it will turn acquaintances into friends. Wow, that's quite an answer. And it's so funny because you just covered like probably a quarter of my notes leading up to the talk. And I absolutely loved it. But it also brought up another thought question in relation specifically to Eric Schmidt. So a pretty well-known leader all over the world. do you think Eric consciously was doing this or does or did he not even realize it? And that's just he just picked it up along the way that maybe it's just subconsciously worked for him by mimic, mimicking the other person or was this a conscious decision by him to do it?

Starting point is 00:07:57 Maybe you guys talked about that. We didn't get a chance to talk about it. But in seeing one person is always hard to know, right? You're never sure whether they learned it or whether they're doing it on purpose. My guess, though, is that they've learned to do it. And it may be something that some successful leaders sort of walk into, they didn't learn, they just happen to do it naturally. But I think other good leaders are always looking around to see what success looks like

Starting point is 00:08:21 and how they can emulate that success. You know, I often give public talks or keynotes or lectures at conferences or big events. And I always look around to see what the speaker before me or after me is doing. What are the ways they're using to engage their audience? and how can I use those same things? And so I think Eric Schmidt, like many good leaders, isn't just inventing it by themselves, isn't just hoping that they're naturally born with that talent. Some of us are, but many of us get there by learning from others.

Starting point is 00:08:49 He would do lots of subtle things. You know, when I met him, he didn't say nice to meet you. He said something like, nice to see you, suggesting again that maybe we've seen each other before. When we left, he said, look forward to seeing you again. And, you know, he used things, subtle things, nonverbales, language, ways of engaging with me that made me feel like we'd known each other forever. We'd met, chatted for five minutes, and I felt like we were old friends. And so those same tools can help any leader build that excellence that they're looking for. Interesting you say that because the nice to see you come is actually one that I always say when I see someone because maybe for a different reason, I'm sometimes fearful that I have met them before.

Starting point is 00:09:28 and I don't want to I don't want them to know that I forgot if I did. Could that be part of it too? Because I always just say, instead of saying nice to me you, it's 100% of the time, I'm like, let's avoid all risk and I'll just say it's nice to see you.

Starting point is 00:09:42 And I think that's a great way to approach it. And you're right, there are many different reasons that we use that particular turn of phrase. It has multiple benefits. And you might, by the way, have happened on that by yourself, but you also might have learned it from someone else.

Starting point is 00:09:56 And to me, that's the real power of influence whether invisible or not, you know, others can help us do things better, faster, easier than we would have on our own. Imagine, for example, if you were picking a car mechanic or, I don't know, maybe a restaurant to try, and you had to do it all by yourself. You had to figure out what a good mechanic was or a good restaurant was or in the case of a leader what the right way to engage with people was all by yourself. It'd be really difficult. And so a time-tested way to get better is to look to others, to look for information, to look at all. online reviews, to listen to podcast just like this one, to learn from the folks that have done it

Starting point is 00:10:33 before you and to learn how to do it better. I know you've talked about that when it comes to people conforming and how, especially even talk about, like your colleague, Adam Grant talks about originals. And I've seen interviews that you've done, both written and some video work where you talk about the power of conforming. Could you expand on how that's helpful? I mean, probably I'm guessing, and some of it, how it has. to do with looking at a place like Yelp or other online reviews, TripAdvisor, if you're getting

Starting point is 00:11:03 going to go on vacation, that that is a sense or a version of conforming to others. But I'm curious, the research that backs that up that you've learned. We all think that influence is a negative thing. You say the word conform, and I think many people sort of shudder, and they go, I would never want to conform to others. I would never want to follow. I'm an independent person that goes at their own pace, and particularly folks that are leaders tend to think that. They think the best way to lead is sort of by being independent,

Starting point is 00:11:33 by being completely uninfluenced by what others are doing, to really lead you need to be different. And that's a great idea in theory. But in practice, it's just plain wrong. If you look at the best leaders out there, they're not completely different from everybody else. You know, people talk about Steve Jobs, for example. They say, oh, Steve Jobs is successful because it was completely different from everybody else. But dig a little deeper. Actually look at the data. If you look where Apple's been successful, it's been in markets that they weren't the first entry, actually leading, they weren't different from everybody else. It was in markets where there was already someone in that market. Apple wasn't the first person to come out with an MP3 player.

Starting point is 00:12:11 They just built on what others had done and did it a little bit better. Google wasn't the first to do online search. They came along a while later actually in that market, but they learned from what others did and they used that to be successful. And so successful companies and leaders aren't all about being different. It's about being similar and different at the same time, something that's called being optimally distinct. If you can think about it, you know, being too different is sometimes difficult for people to deal with.

Starting point is 00:12:38 If your management style is completely different from everybody else's, if your ideas always come from left field, or if the product or service you're talking about is completely different from something customers have ever seen before, well, sometimes they're a little bit reticent to try it, a little bit uncertain that adopting it will work for them. Think back to the Segway, for example, for example, you know, when that thing first came out, everybody said, it's really new technology,

Starting point is 00:12:59 but I don't know if it's going to work. I don't know how do we use it in my own life. At the same time, being too similar, being exactly the same in others, well, that probably isn't good either. If you're exactly the same, what's the reason for people to switch or do something new or think you're better than someone else? But in between, a little bit similar and a little bit different, well, that's just right. I call it almost the Goldilocks effect. Think about Goldilocks, you know, she tried some porridge. It was too hot. Other porridge was too cold. But in the middle, well, that was just right. And so that key is to be optimally distinct, similar and different at the same time, similar

Starting point is 00:13:31 enough that it feels familiar, it feels safe and easy to do, but novel and different enough that it feels special and distinct. That optimal distinctiveness will help you be more successful. Really interesting work, Jonah, that you've put out. So your most recent work is called Book, is called Invisible Influence, the Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior. and it was preceded by another book, New York Times bestseller, called Contagious. And I'm curious, what was it about this topic about how, you know, like the hidden forces that shape our behavior?

Starting point is 00:14:06 What was it that initially piqued your interest to want to go and study this field of work? You know, influence is so important. It affects almost everything we do. And it's amazing, though, that we don't often realize that it happens. I was talking with my father a few years ago, starting some new research in the area, he was telling him about it. He was lamenting the impact of influence on his peers. He was saying, God, you know, he lives in Washington, UC, and he was saying, God, DC lawyers, they're all the same. You know, they make it big. They make partner. The first thing they do is they buy a new BMW. And I said, well, dad, I mean, that's interesting, but you're a D.C. lawyer, right?

Starting point is 00:14:41 And he goes, yeah. And I go, and you drive a BMW, right? He goes, yeah, but, you know, I drive a blue one. And everyone else drives gray ones. And I think that, again, is that, is that. myth of the nonconformist. Even if we're not actually, even if we are being similar to others, we focus on the ways that we're different. And what's so interesting is we just don't see it. Sometimes we do see influence. We see other people dressing the same way or kids listening the same music, but we never seem to see it in ourselves. And that's often because influence is invisible. And often happens below our awareness or non-consciously. Take mimicry, for example, we were talking about. Mimicry works often because people aren't aware that it's going on. If you make people more aware of it,

Starting point is 00:15:19 It's actually less effective, less effective in changing people's behavior. And again, it's not just about being similar. My dad wasn't being identical to everybody else. And it's not just being different. It's about walking that fine line between similarity and difference at the same time. So I'm preparing for this today, Jonah, I read Invisible Influence. In addition to I told you the story about contagious, how that's been read through my household. And a really interesting book.

Starting point is 00:15:48 There's a lot there too, so we could probably talk for hours. But if you're cool with it, I know we didn't chat about this beforehand, I'd love to go through certain parts that I highlighted that I maybe could just ask you brief questions and get you rolling on it because I love the way that you describe some of these really interesting topics. Is that cool? Of course, happy to. So we talked about already being a better negotiator because I think negotiation is such an important aspect of everyday life. We all buy, well, a lot of us listening, buy cars, we buy houses. We negotiate for things, even small items. And so you talked about mimicry when it comes to negotiation.

Starting point is 00:16:28 Are there other tips that you would give to people who are going to buy a car, going to buy a house, in addition to mimicking the behavior of the person you're negotiating with? Yeah. It's always a case where more information is better. More information can be helpful. But you need to be careful about how you use that information. Take days on the market, for example, when you're buying a house. We often use that as a signal of quality.

Starting point is 00:16:52 We look at a house that's been on the market for a longer time, and we assume that it's not as good. There must be a problem if it's been on the market for a while. Well, sometimes that's a diagnostic signal, but sometimes it's not. And so I think we need to be more aware of these subtle influences that might shape our behavior. That can be a great trick. That can be a great tool to use as a shortcut to help us make better decisions.

Starting point is 00:17:15 but it can also sometimes lead us astray. And so we need to be careful about these heuristics or these shortcuts that we use. And sometimes just noticing that they're shortcuts, noticing that we're doing them, helps us make us more aware. And that's actually why I wrote Invisible Influence, you know, had come out with a book Contagious a few years ago

Starting point is 00:17:33 about why things catch on, about how to spread messages and ideas. And would often speak at events to leaders and other folks who wondered how they could use that, not just at a big scale, but as a smaller scale. Maybe they didn't just want something to catch on a product or idea, but they wanted to change their employees' behavior. They wanted to change things within their organization.

Starting point is 00:17:52 Or even they wanted to change something at home with their family. That small-scale influence is really important. And so that's why I wrote the new book. So a few other thoughts. Why expensive products don't use logos? Explain that to me. So we've all heard of the idea of conspicuous consumption. The idea of conspicuous consumption, put simply, is that people buy things

Starting point is 00:18:15 to show others they have status. Status symbols. You buy a big fancy car because you want other people to know that you're wealthy. You buy a shirt with Gucci emblazoned on the front because you want people to know that you have status. And so given all that, you'd expect a certain relationship between logos and price. You'd think that the more expensive a product is, the more prominent its logo would be. So, you know, maybe if you bought something at Walmart, you might not want to advertise it to everybody else.

Starting point is 00:18:42 But if you bought something really expensive, you'd want everybody to know. When we actually looked at this, we went out, we collected a whole bunch of data, and we looked at handbags as well as sunglasses. And we found that, sure enough, low-priced handbags and low-priced sunglasses tended to have almost no, if not really small, logos. And as you walked up in price, the logos tended to get larger. But as you moved up even further in price, they tended to get smaller again and disappear. In fact, it was almost like an inverted U, an upside-down U-shape, where the very expensive stuff tended to have no logos. And in fact, if you look at car logos on the front of our Mercedes, for example. The more expensive cars actually have a smaller logo than the less expensive cars.

Starting point is 00:19:21 And the reason is that people are signaling identity, but also trying to differentiate themselves. Sure, they want to signal that they have wealth. But if the middle price stuff is very expensive, then having a, or the middle price stuff has a big logo, then having a big logo isn't a sign of distinction. It doesn't show that your difference from everybody else. The mid-price stuff tends to have a big logo to show that it's not cheap, but then the really expensive stuff has to have almost no logo as a way distinguishing itself from the mid-price stuff. It's not that has no marker at all. Often, there's subtle signals. Folks that are, you can call it almost dog whistle fashion that only people in the know can pick up. So, you know, shoes with red bottoms or particular details on the

Starting point is 00:19:59 cuff of a shirt or a watch. You know, everyone knows a Rolex, for example, but there are other watches that are actually much more expensive and much more positively perceived by people in the know. It's not that their brands are as well known, but they're subtle signals that show your distinction to other people that have those insights as well. Yeah, I think of like coach or even Louis Vuitton. Like their their logos are way out there for everyone to see. But it's really, I guess they would be considered mid-level brands. Yeah, actually, if you look within those brands, some of their more expensive stuff

Starting point is 00:20:34 actually is less likely to have a logo. And so as someone who's managing the brand, you know, a leader who might be managing a brand, Think about the benefits and the downsides. What do logos do for you? Logos allow people to identify what someone bought. They allow that thing to have signal value. But at the same time, that signal value may be good or bad. Yeah, okay, a few others.

Starting point is 00:20:56 Why do successful athletes typically have older siblings? This is really interesting for me to read. And it was a bunch of different papers that I read and talked about in the book. But some researchers were interested in what makes athletes success. And they started by looking at soccer players, but then they looked at other athletic domains as well to try to figure out what drove success, what does successful athletes have in common? And they found that one thing in particular seemed to be pretty linked to success. And that was having an older sibling. Athletes, successful athletes tended to have an older brother or sister.

Starting point is 00:21:30 And on the one hand, that makes sense, right? So if you have an older brother or an older sister who plays, let's say, tennis, well, you tend to tag along, right? You go to tennis lessons, you pick up a racket earlier, you play with your brother. and sister. And so they not only provide a training partner for you to learn how to play the game, but they also provide a competitor, someone to motivate you to get better. Well, that all makes sense. But actually, when you look at the data, what you see is that elite athletes do have an older brother who played sport, older brother or sister, but not the same sport as the one they end up being successful in. So sure, elite athletes might have had a brother or sister that played tennis,

Starting point is 00:22:06 but they end up playing basketball or an older brother or sister might have played football and they play soccer. And so why would having an older brother or sister did something different make you successful? Well, it turns out that there's a lot of research on siblings and sibling rivalry. Some work, for example, shows that first-born children tend to be a little bit smarter than later-born children, but later-born children tend to be better at sports. And what you see when you look across the data is that siblings not only provide a point of imitation, a place to do the same, but also a point of differentiation.

Starting point is 00:22:37 If your older brother or sister is really good at tennis, well, it's going to be to be hard to be better than them. I mean, after all, they're older, they're bigger than you, and they're probably more skilled to begin with. And so while you might start down that road, you soon find out that that path is taken. It's already owned by someone else. And so if your older brother or sister is the tennis player, you become a basketball player. If they're the smart one, you become a funny one. And so even within our own families, we're being similar and different. We're imitating, but also differentiating to find our own unique identities. That's interesting.

Starting point is 00:23:08 I have a younger brother, and we both actually played all sports growing up most everything we could play with a ball. And we both settled on football, and that's where we got college scholarships. And I played a little bit after college, and he ended up playing 10 years in the NFL. And so it's interesting that he's two years younger. And certainly, if you look at our careers, he's had much more success. but it's, I think a lot of that makes a lot of sense, especially to part of it. And I brought this up before our parents, and I'd be curiously your thoughts on this, Joan. I wasn't going to go here, but we're here now.

Starting point is 00:23:45 So we played up a grade when we were younger as well, meaning if we were in second grade, we played by parents put us on the third grade team and third grade and then on the fourth grade team. So we were routinely getting beat up, I would say, facing adversity, having to raise a level of our play in order to just survive and eventually becoming pretty good. What are your thoughts, is there research or what are your thoughts on that from a parenting perspective of putting your kids up against better competition, bigger, stronger, faster kids? I love that example.

Starting point is 00:24:18 And we didn't look at exactly that, but we actually looked at something quite similar in basketball. So we looked at tens of thousands of NBA and college basketball games to see what made teams more likely to win. And in particular, we looked at the score at half time and the score at the end of the game. And if you were a betting person, you had to pick which team was going to win, not surprisingly, you should bet on the team that's up at halftime. Teams are winning at halftime tend to be more likely to win, and the higher or the more up they are at halftime, the more likely they tend to be

Starting point is 00:24:45 win. But there's one place where if you were a better, you should bet on the losing team. And that's if teams are losing by just a little bit. Teams that are down by one, they're behind, but not so far behind, are more like to win. They're actually more like to win the games than team up by one, even though they tend to be worse teams on average, and they tend to they're behind so they have to work harder to catch up. They're close enough, and being close motivates them to work harder. And I think that's similar to what your parents were actually doing by encouraging you to play up.

Starting point is 00:25:13 As long as playing up was a little bit ahead of you, not too far, but a little bit, close. Almost close you could do it if you worked hard. It'll motivate you to close the gap. It'll motivate you to work hard and perform better. Now, you have to be careful, right? If that was too far ahead, almost like a basketball team that's down by 20 points at halftime, well, then others aren't so motivating. If you felt like that grade up above you was so much better, so much bigger, stronger, faster than you guys were, it'd be hard to keep up and it might be demotivating and cause you to give up.

Starting point is 00:25:42 But just a little bit behind can actually be a good thing. Yeah, I think it could have a negative effect if maybe there wasn't, you have to have some amount of ability in order to just, like I said, stay alive, especially you're playing football where it can be pretty physical. Towards end of your book, you talk about motivating employees, students, and others to work harder. That's pretty broad, but I'd love to hear you dive deeper when it comes to motivating people, really, to work harder. Yeah, and so we can even apply what we just talked about, which is the power of, in a sense, peers that are just a little bit better than we are. Too often in organizations, we use particular motivating tactics. We, you know, yell at people, or we say, we'll give them a bonus. if they work harder or maybe we'll set up a competition where the person who does the best wins.

Starting point is 00:26:32 But what we don't notice when we do that is everybody else actually loses, in particular the people that are far behind, people that are not close to winning, and may cause them to feel like they should give up. They're so far back that they can't make it. And so instead, if we're going to motivate people, we should use that idea that you talked about playing up or use the idea that I talked about being behind by one point. Compare people to others that are just a little bit ahead of them, just a little bit better. So if you're giving people feedback, for example, don't give them feedback compared to the top performer in the organization.

Starting point is 00:27:03 Give them feedback to the person that's one step or slightly better than they are. Some slightly more sales calls done slightly better last month. If they feel like that person's a little bit better than them, it'll get their competitive juices flowing and they'll feel like they can close the gap and work harder. Peers are a powerful motivating force, particularly if they're used effectively. Some would argue, though, that you should not compare yourself to other people. What do you think about that? Not compared to others at all. I think others are a useful reference point.

Starting point is 00:27:33 Again, particularly in American culture, we like to see ourselves as different. We think we're completely different from everybody else. We're uncomparable. But at the core, at the end of the day, we're not completely different. And I think by comparing ourselves, we get a better sense of how we're doing. There's a power company called Opower that actually gives people feedback based on how much energy they're using by comparing it to their neighbors. So you get a bill in the mail. It doesn't just say, well, you're using 2,000 kilowatt hours.

Starting point is 00:27:58 You said you're using 2,000 and your neighbor is using, you know, 1950. Well, by comparing yourself to others, you get a better sense of how you're doing. How do you know whether you're doing well or badly without benchmarking yourself, without getting a sense of where you are relative to others. And in this case, it caused people to use a lot less energy. Knowing how they were doing made them do better. There is some research out there, though, if you're comparing yourself to others, Instagram or Facebook fees that it can potentially cause bouts of depression. Have you studied that?

Starting point is 00:28:28 Yeah, and that's a case where we're looking only at a certain type of others, right? Yeah. We're getting a very, kind of a slice of their lives, not a realistic slice, but the best slice. You know, we're getting all the good things they did, all the amazing things that happened to them. We're not seeing them being sad or depressed or lonely or at home by themselves. You know, you look on Instagram, it always seems like everybody's on vacation or winning an award. And that's not what our own lives are like. And so we feel worse by comparison.

Starting point is 00:28:55 That's, again, a case where we're almost too far back. If we're comparing our regular everyday lives to their amazing lives, of course we look worse. But if we compare our own Instagram lives to their Instagram lives, we probably look pretty much the same. It's interesting. This whole conversation is, and I'd love to do it again. I know we're right up against the time, though, Joe and I really appreciate it. One question, we talked a little bit beforehand. The podcast called The Learning Leaders Show.

Starting point is 00:29:21 I'm curious from your perspective. You're someone who studies influencing others, potentially why something might go viral, why you should have a cheese steak that cost $100, all these types of things. When you first heard the learning leader show, what was the first thought that popped into your mind? I think that those two words together are really powerful. As leaders, we should always be learning. You know, leadership isn't something you're born with. I think sometimes, you know, we look at successful leaders or successful brands.

Starting point is 00:29:51 And we just think, oh, they have this thing that we can't get ourselves. They were born with this skill set. It's not about that. It's about looking to others and learning from others, whether we're comparing ourselves to others, whether we're gaining information from others' best practices. Learning is something leaders should always be doing. And so I think it's a great show. Thank you so much, Jonah, for providing so much value in a really quick period of time.

Starting point is 00:30:15 I absolutely loved it. Where would you send everyone to find more out about you online? Yeah, so the best place is my website, just Jonah, J-O-N-A-H-B-E-R-G-E-R.com. You can find the books there, and there's a bunch of free resources people can apply to get their ideas to catch on and to make themselves more influential. Well, thanks again, Jonah for being here. Really enjoyed it and look forward to continuing our dialogue as we both progress, man. Yeah, look forward to coming back sometime soon. Great. Thanks, Jonah.

Starting point is 00:30:44 Okay, bye-bye. This episode of The Learning Leader Show is over, but we have plenty more to keep you locked in until next. next time. Head over to learningleadershow.com for more information and to request your favorite entrepreneur, CEO, world class athlete, or anyone else that inspires you. You can also talk to Ryan directly by reaching out to him on Twitter at Ryan Hawk 12. Thanks again and we'll see you next time on the Learning Leader Show.

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 141: Jonah Berger - The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Behavior

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