The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 225: Dan Heath - The Power Of Defining Moments

Starting point is 00:00:00 Rather than thinking about it as a contest, think about it as an experiment. You know, what could we learn from the real world that would shed some light on who's right? And what makes that difficult is what you learn from the real world might suggest you're wrong. And you have to live with that. But what's so comforting about it is it takes the pressure off having to be right. And we spend so much time trying to be right. But what good is it really to have predicted something right? when you can go and find out the reality and get on with it.

Starting point is 00:00:38 Hey, and welcome to the Learning Leader Show. I am Ryan Hawk. Thanks so much for being here. It is Mindful Monday. Go to LearningLeader.com. Enter your email address. Join thousands of other fellow learning leaders from all over the world to discuss the latest trends and topics in the world of leading and serving others.

Starting point is 00:00:59 We'd love to have you. LearningLeader.com. Now, on to tonight's featured leader. with the great Dan Heath. Dan's a co-author, along with his brother Chip, of three New York Times bestsellers. Decisive, Switch and Made to Stick. Switch spent 47 weeks on the New York Times

Starting point is 00:01:16 bestseller list that never happens. It's incredible. It's a great book. Tonight, we discussed his latest work, which is titled The Power of Moments, why certain moments have extraordinary impact. He answers the question, what is it that allows change to happen?

Starting point is 00:01:31 How do we do it? And then how do we make experiences better? He studied what makes moments memorable and specifically think about your first day at a new company and how that went. We talked about that in-depth and a great example of a company doing it well. And then the one question you can ask your kids at the dinner table to help build resilience in them. It's such a good story. Ladies and gentlemen, you're going to love it with Dan Heath. All right, Dan, excited to have you here on The Learning Leader Show.

Starting point is 00:02:05 You know, I was given your book, Switch, your book, you're in your brother's book, Switch by a mentor and friend of mine a few years ago. And ever since I read that book, and we discussed it as a leadership group, I had wanted to talk to you. So welcome to the Learning Leaders Show, Dan. Thanks, Ryan.

Starting point is 00:02:21 Thanks for having me on the show. And your latest work, The Power of Moments. I appreciate you and your team sending me a copy. It's an incredible piece of work. But I'm curious to get us started. I mentioned you this a little bit before we started recording, but I love studying or I love talking to people who have studied those who have sustained excellence, specifically leaders.

Starting point is 00:02:39 And I'm curious from your perspective, what are some of the common themes or characteristics of people who sustain excellence? I think what I would call out is decision-making that in many ways our success in life hinges upon our ability to make a string of good decisions, to have a good decision-making batting average, if you will. That's something that Chip and I studied for several years and ended up being in our last book called Decisive is psychologists have spent a lot of time studying what it is that makes decisions go wrong. And it seems like the kind of amorphous, high-level question that couldn't possibly have an answer. Why do our decisions go wrong?

Starting point is 00:03:24 But in fact, there's a pretty clear answer. There's an array of biases and irrationalities and decision traps that we all fall into. and our mission in researching that book is how do you avoid those things? How do you avoid the traps? How can you do better? And I think leaders who succeed through their own intuition or through their own investment and their decision-making process, they just start getting better at avoiding some of the traps that other people fall into.

Starting point is 00:03:53 Like one example of a trap is narrow framing. You know, in organizations especially, we tend to get caught in this. trap of thinking about one option. You know, classic example is mergers and acquisitions. You know, you get a shine for one startup or one competitor that you're going to acquire and everything's going to be better if you do that. And all of a sudden, you've got blinders on because the only choice you're really making is yes or no, do this or don't do this.

Starting point is 00:04:23 And through that lens, there's really not even a choice because if you end up saying no, you feel like a failure. and you've gotten the board excited about something that you didn't do, and you've gotten your company excited about the integration, it doesn't work out. So it's like you're essentially making a choice where there is no choice. And that's something we talk about in the book as a whether or not decision, that if you ever find yourself making a whether or not decision, whether or not to do X, whether or not to do Y,

Starting point is 00:04:53 you're probably in the danger zone. So that's what I would call out is I think leaders do a good job of thinking about their choices as choices, that in other words, they're building a discipline for making better choices. I love that. I think one of the people I think of, and maybe you have some in mind, too, is Colin Powell. He said, I need to have about 70% of the information and it's time to make the decision. And I think the words like Tom Peters would say, and get on with it. Be decisive and go. Are there specific people or maybe even a specific person that comes to mind that is great from a decision-making process, being decisive, getting,

Starting point is 00:05:31 on with it? You know, one organization actually that comes to mind is Intuit, you know, the makers of quickbooks and turbotax. And Scott Cook, the founder, had a philosophy. He called Leadership by Experiment. So he had a great quote, and I'm just paraphrasing here, that he said, when leaders make the decisions, they are made through the three P's, politics, persuasion, and PowerPoint. He said, but if you can figure out how to run experiments to come up with the real answers, then the best ideas can prove themselves. And I love that idea as a solution to, you know, the traditional politics that often plague decision making is if you're arguing with another person or if two camps are arguing with each other about what the right course of action are, it very quickly becomes tribal, where you're trying to undercut the other side's point of view, you're trying to lobby for your own. it becomes a kind of contest. But what Scott Cook is doing

Starting point is 00:06:31 and what he's tried to impress throughout the organization is that rather than thinking about it as a contest, think about it as an experiment. You know, what could we learn from the real world that would shed some light on who's right? And what makes that difficult is what you learn from the real world

Starting point is 00:06:48 might suggest you're wrong and you have to live with that. But what's so comforting about it is it takes the pressure off having to be right. And we spend so much time trying to be right. But but what good is it really to have predicted something right when you can go and find out the reality and get on with it? I love it, man. I love it, Dan. That's, uh, makes so much sense to me. And before we jump into the power of moments, why certain moments have extraordinary impact, which, which I love,

Starting point is 00:07:20 I have to, um, I'm very close, um, with my brothers and particularly my, My younger brother is two years younger. We played sports growing up together and we're still communicate every single day. And so when I see somebody else, and I don't, this is the first I'm asking you about your brother, I don't know the relationship with you guys, but I can't help but feel a connection to somebody who basically works with his brother full time, at least when it comes to writing. So can you explain the relationship that you and Chip have and how it came to be that you guys write books together? Yeah, people are often a little bit mystified. Apparently, it's not a super common thing to be able to work with your sibling, but it works for us. We are, we're 10 years apart in age, first of all.

Starting point is 00:08:07 I'm 44 and he's 54. And so growing up, you know, we didn't know each other all that well. I was eight years old when he was going away to college. And so this process of writing these books has given us a common ground. It's given us a project that has brought us together as, adults. And, you know, when we first started doing this, our first book years ago was called Made to Stick. We had some challenges. I think it's fair to say. Chip has the kind of personality. He's the student that in school would have turned in his essay like two weeks early just to make

Starting point is 00:08:43 sure it was out of the way and polished off. And I'm more the student that would have started the essay at three in the morning with a pile of no-dose. And so you can imagine that created some challenges for our relationship and our work style. But over the years, this is our fourth book that's about to come out. We've kind of figured it out. We've figured out how to work together and who does better with what and how to make the best use of our time. And now it's become the glue, really, in our relationship.

Starting point is 00:09:13 I mean, neither one of us are big, you know, small talkers. I feel like in the absence of these books, we'd probably talk three or four times a year. And now we talk several times a week. So it's been a pleasure. I just found an interesting. There aren't a lot of brother, co-authors who are this successful, well-known, who've published this many best-selling books together. How did it get started? So the origin was completely unexpected. We never planned to write books together. It was never

Starting point is 00:09:43 part of any master scheming on our part. What happened was Chip, who was a professor at Stanford Business School. He had been studying the power of urban legends. You know, this, this kind of mystery of why is it that these false and often sleazy ideas called urban legends, you know, ranging from, you know, somebody found a human toe in a bucket of Kentucky fried chicken to, you know, stranger ones like that if you flash your, well, let me take a step back, you're driving down the road and someone's got their brights on. And so, you know, oftentimes we'll flash our brides to signal to the other person that, hey, your brides are on. there was a rumor that went around for a while that if you did that,

Starting point is 00:10:27 the other person might well be a gang member, and you flashing your brides at them was a sign that they were going to pull over and kill you. So these weird, I remember that one. Yeah. Yeah. These sleazy ideas just have kind of an effortless ability to get traction in the marketplace of ideas.

Starting point is 00:10:44 And the question was, why? What is it about these ideas that's making them so sticky? And so he had begun to develop some theories about that, and he wrote up some of his early ideas in a journal article. I don't even really remember where it was published. But an editor at Random House came across that article and really thought it was interesting and thought some of the ideas were compelling and tracked my brother down and said, hey, do you think there's a book here?

Starting point is 00:11:10 You know, is there more? And my brother got excited and later he called me and said, do you want to do this together? Because between the two of us, I'm more of the writer. and I said, you know, if Random House is asking the only answer is yes. And that was the start of it. So we basically got this enormous gift from the heavens of a call from Random House. I think in the absence of that call, honestly, none of this ever would have happened.

Starting point is 00:11:37 I think we would have continued to do our own thing. And he would have done interesting research. And there wouldn't have been any books. So to this day, we're grateful to Ben Lennon, who was the guy who made that call. And you, I believe, went on to get your MBA at Harvard Business School, correct? I did, yeah. So that call from Chip came basically shortly after I graduated. So he had a full-time job.

Starting point is 00:12:00 I had a full-time job. We were just thinking about the book that became made to stick as just kind of a lark, you know, something to do for fun. And we figured it would come out and we'd sell 18 copies to our family members. But we'd always be able to say, hey, we did a book. And that's what we were playing for. and then it just kind of took on a life of its own. What happened then next, right after Made to Stick came out?

Starting point is 00:12:22 Well, Maine to Stick, we just, we kind of hit the jackpot. Like, all of a sudden we were in Time Magazine and the Today Show was calling and we got just this huge burst of publicity and the book came out and did well and it started opening up opportunities. And so we thought, you know, this was fun. Like we felt like we enjoyed the process of writing this book. We felt like we had some good things to say. We felt like we were offering people some people some.

Starting point is 00:12:46 practical things that they were benefiting from. Why in the world will we not find something else to tackle? And what happened was a lot of the people that we were working with made to stick, I should say, is about how to make your communication stickier. How do you communicate in a way that people remember it and act upon your message? And what we observed was a lot of the people that were struggling with their communication were people who were change agents. They were trying to change things at work or they were, you know, non-profit leaders

Starting point is 00:13:14 trying to get us to recycle or to bike to work or whatever. And so we started to think about the larger issue of change. You know, what is it that allows change to happen? And why do big changes sometimes come relatively easily while other times changes that you think are really small, like losing a couple of pounds or are just excruciating? And so we started to get interested in that mystery of change and we poured a couple of years of research into just looking at when people succeed,

Starting point is 00:13:42 how is it that they're able to succeed? and when people get blocked, what are the blockers? And that led to the book that became Switch that you referred to earlier. Real quick, can you give a high level of view or just a response to? Because that question, I'm thinking of listeners in their car right now, they're probably saying it themselves. So you thought about what is it that allows change to happen? Or what is it that people who have done it successfully, what do they do?

Starting point is 00:14:09 How would you answer that question? Well, there's a book-length answer to that, but let me try to give you the shorter version. I think a lot of it boils down to the way that our brains are wired. So I think if you replay the last time you were on a diet and what makes a diet so painful is there's part of you that has a clear vision for how to succeed, right? You come up with this plan and you're going to eat more vegetables and you're going to cut out the sweets and you're going to jog three times a week and take the stairs at work. And there's this part of you that's really engaged in this master plan.

Starting point is 00:14:46 And it's a plan that makes sense. And you're determined to do it. And you set a goal of losing 10 pounds in six weeks or whatever. And then you find that on a day-to-day basis, it feels very, very different. And things happen where, you know, you find yourself in line at Cinebon and with no apparent cognitive dissonance with the person who just made the plan to lose the weight. And that's something that psychologists say makes perfect sense because of the way our brains work, that in our brains are two independent systems, one of them called the rational system that's

Starting point is 00:15:20 the part of us that's concocting the diet and making the plan. And the other part of our brain being the emotional system or sometimes called the automatic system that runs all of the autopilot behaviors we barely think about. It's the part of us that craves, you know, the part of us that smells, that that, that, sugary, cinnamony goodness at Sinebond and leads us to stand in line. And what makes change difficult in short are times when those two parts of us disagree. So part of us really wants to lose weight. Part of us really wants to gorge on Sineban, and that's what makes change hard.

Starting point is 00:15:56 But if you notice, the same forces are at play in organizational change. That often when we try to change things inside businesses, the tools we reach for are what? the data, the charts, the strategy, the memos, the PowerPoint presentations. And with all of those things, you know, which part of ourselves are we talking to? We're talking to that rational part. And so there's an analogy that becomes the heart of switch that was coined by a psychologist named Jonathan Haidt. And Haidt said that that rational system in us is like a writer that's sitting astride,

Starting point is 00:16:35 a giant elephant that represents our emotional system. So if you kind of picture that image in your brain, you know, this human scale radar on top of a five-ton elephant, the significance of the analogy is that it gets, you know, the weight class right, you know, that we've got this rational part of us that really thinks it's the one in charge. It's the one holding the reins. But if these two ever disagree, I mean, who's your money on? And so that explains why a diet is hard.

Starting point is 00:17:04 you're trying to rain in a five-ton beast on a daily basis. It explains why organizational change is hard. It explains why societal change is hard. And it doesn't mean that change is impossible. That's the whole point of the book. But what it means is we're aiming at the wrong place. We think that change happens because we get the analysis right. But in fact, change happens because we get the motivation right.

Starting point is 00:17:29 And motivation is the elephant's language. Man, I love it. I could talk to you for an hour about Switch. And maybe we will at some point, but I want to get on to the power of moments. And so it's transition a bit because I am a big, I've asked this question to many guests as asking them about powerful moments within their life and inflection points. And so if you're good with it, Dan, I want to dive into a few of my notes from the book. And we can discuss them. You can share a little bit deeper from what was written.

Starting point is 00:17:58 Is that cool? Let's do it. All right, man. So thinking of defining moments in your life. And we've all been through this. Every person listening has been through this. And this is it's your first day at a new job. And let's say you work at an office.

Starting point is 00:18:14 And I'm going to try to paint the picture. And then I'm going to turn over to you to kind of share some of the science and the specific story about John Deere here and one of the people who led this mission there. But you walk into the new office and the receptionist was not expecting you or they didn't realize that was your first day. And your direct manager is not there yet. And eventually some random person or the receptionist walks you to your cubicle or your office. And there is a very old chair. There is a monitor that is not hooked up to anything. You don't have a computer.

Starting point is 00:18:51 And some other random person drops this book on your desk and says, hey, why don't you read this until we figure out what to do with you? And Lanny or Lani, how do you say here? name from it's Lonnie Lonnie okay so Lonnie Lorenz Frye from John Deere understood that this was an opportunity it's a defining moment in your life when you start a new job and she understood the importance of looking at this as an opportunity and found a better way to handle this important moment in our life and I'd love for you to share maybe some of the science behind it as well as finish the story to how they do it better there and how all of us regardless of where we work could do a better job at this. Yeah, so let me first say, just to set the frame, the new book,

Starting point is 00:19:38 The Power of Moments is really a book about experience. It's about how do we make an experience better, whether you're talking about improving the customer experience, if you're in business, or the patient experience, if you're in health care, or the student experience, if you're a teacher or administrator, or even if you're thinking about your kids' experience. And the contention that we make in the book is that if you study what makes experiences memorable and meaningful, ultimately they hinge on certain peak moments, that it's moments that we remember when we reflect on experience. And those special moments don't create themselves, that we have to take the reins and become the author, the creator of moments. And so to get back to John

Starting point is 00:20:24 dear, you know, what you're pointing out is there's this classic important moment that It's the first day of work. It's the employee's first exposure to your firm. It's the first chance for them to meet their teammates. They're doing new work. They're in a new place. It's a critical moment. It's the kind of moment that's going to stand out for months, if not years.

Starting point is 00:20:42 And yet most organizations completely ignore it. But Lonnie Lawrence Frye at John Deere, in conjunction with some colleagues and the consultant, Louis Carbone, they realized this is a big deal. And so they cooked up an experience they called that. the John Deere first day experience. So let me walk you through this as if you were an employee that had just been hired at John Deere. So you sign your offer letter. You haven't started yet. Even before you start, you start getting emails from one of your colleagues. They introduce themselves. They send you a picture. And then they start telling you, you know, here's the way things work here. And here's what we eat for lunch and, you know, some of the places we can walk to.

Starting point is 00:21:23 And here's where you park when you arrive and here's what people wear. And then when you arrive on that first day, the person who's been emailing with you, they're waiting for you at the front door. You recognize them from their photo and they've got a cup of coffee for you. So they walk you inside. And then when you get into the lobby, you notice that your name is in lights. Like on the flat screen monitors in the lobby, it says, you know, welcome Ryan. And then your friend takes you up to your cubicle and there's this tall banner that reaches above the height of the cubicles that signals to everyone on the floor. Hey, there's someone new. Come by and say hello. And your screensaver on your monitor, it has these gorgeous photos of John Deere equipment on farms at sunset,

Starting point is 00:22:04 and it says, welcome to the most important work you'll ever do. And then you check your email, and you've already got an email. Turns out it's from Sam Allen, who's the CEO of John Deere, and there's a little video from Sam Allen where he reflects on his career and talks about the mission of John Deere, which is to provide the food and shelter and infrastructure needed by a glowing a growing rather global population. And then on your desk, there's a little stainless steel replica of the original self-polishing plow that John Deere created, and there's a card next to it that explains why it was so important and why farmers loved it. And at lunch, your colleagues take you out and tell you about all the projects that are underway,

Starting point is 00:22:44 and they pepper you with questions about your background. And over the course of the afternoon, your boss and your boss's boss both stop by to make individual appointments to spend some time with you in the next week. and you leave that day thinking, wow, what we're doing here matters and I belong here. And this experience, when they began to roll it out, especially in offices in Asia, like in Beijing, it was such a hit that some of their existing employees said, can I quit and rejoin so I can get this first day experience? And what I love about this is this was made up. This was made up by a small group of people who spotted an opportunity this first day that was utterly neglected.

Starting point is 00:23:31 And they did something about it. They made a plan. And it is something that has a profound impact on the employee's experience and was explicitly intended to build loyalty to the firm. And it was under their control and it's under our control. It reminds me because I've been in the situation where I've made the mistake personally as hiring somebody than maybe not being there when they're there to greet them. You know what it says is that it shows that person that they are the number one priority of that day of that week. And there's no reason why they shouldn't be. If you have issues with employee engagement or people not recommending their friends to work, those are some of the questions they ask.

Starting point is 00:24:15 you know, on some of those EOS or employee opinion surveys, they ask those questions. It's because of those moments. It's a critical time. And it shows that you prioritize, you care. You're thoughtful. You think about them at a really important, sometimes scary moment as even though they're excited to start somewhere new, probably. They're still really wondering, well, you know, you know they're going to get called from

Starting point is 00:24:41 15 of the closest friends at night. How was your first day? and you have a chance to make a profound impact on that. Exactly right. And it's such an important symbol, you know, that we communicate to that person where they stand and how we feel about them on that first day. The reason this day is so important, by the way, is this is a classic time of transition. So for the employee starting, they're making three transitions at once.

Starting point is 00:25:07 They're making an intellectual transition to new work and a social transition to new colleagues and an environmental transition to a new place of work. And transitions are some of the classic times in life when we need to pay attention to moments. If you think about how many cultures have built rituals around transitions. So even here in the U.S., we've got tons of rituals that hinge on transitions,

Starting point is 00:25:34 starting with the wedding. That's a classic demarcation of the transition from single life to married life. Think about graduations. Think about rights of passage ceremonies, you know, ranging from Quintaneras to bar mitzvahs. So cultures pay attention to transitions because they're important moments worthy of investment. And the first day at work is another one of those transition moments that lacks the investment. But if we pay attention to that, as John Deere did, we can seize the opportunity for ourselves.

Starting point is 00:26:10 I love that story. So another. one that really jumped out to me. So I've had Jesse Itzler on this podcast. It was an episode that still I get emails about and it had him on a year and a half ago. And another interesting aspect of Jesse's life is he happens to be married to Sarah Blakely, who is the creator of Spanx. And Sarah has told her stories before and she'll come on this show here at some point in the near future. I've talked to Jesse about it. But her stories is pointed out in your book, too. a lot of people know youngest self-made female billionaire

Starting point is 00:26:46 how she started Spanx she was working selling fax machines doing that on the side but I think the interesting point to share and that I'd love for you to share Dan is about how she built her resilience and the question that her dad asked all his kids

Starting point is 00:27:02 at the dinner table. Can you can you share? Gosh, I hate to scoop her because it's such a good story but what I would highlight is this that Sarah Blakely says women come up to her all the time and say, you know, the invention that Sarah Blakely created is something that a lot of women had had the idea for years prior. You know, they would come up and say, I've been cutting, you know, my feet out of hose for years. Why am I not the female billionaire?

Starting point is 00:27:29 And the answer to that basically involves the fact that it wasn't the idea that made her a success. It was her tolerance for a seemingly infinite, you know, gauntlet of failure that she had to endure in route to success. So a couple of examples. She had a meeting one time with some lawyers where there was one male partner in particular in the room who kept kind of shifting in his chair and looking around anxiously and she didn't know what was going on with this guy. And much later, he confessed to her that he thought her idea was so bad that he was convinced she was part of a candid camera crew to set them up and make them look foolish. So he was looking for the camera in the room. Later, when she first began to prototype the Spank's product, she needed a textile mill to create the prototype.

Starting point is 00:28:18 But of course, probably literally every top textile mill owner is a man and men didn't get it. And so she kept getting shot down. The only time she got a chance was when one of the mill owners happened to talk to his daughters. And they said, hey, give that a chance, dad. That sounds promising. And so the real question is, how did she endure this nonstop, you know, succession of failure? And there are many answers to that, of course, but one of them that she highlights is she said it goes back to a question that her dad would ask her and her siblings at dinner time. And the question was, what have you failed at this week?

Starting point is 00:28:55 And she said, it sounds like a weird question. But his intention with that question was to get them to not be intimidated by failure, to recognize that failure is almost inevitable as we, pursue the things that are important to us. I mean, even something, think of something as trivial as getting better at a video game or getting better at basketball. I mean, to get better at those things is just a non-stop process of failing. I mean, think about how many times you fail on the first level of a video game and then you finally conquer that and you go on to the second level and you fail 10 times. And then you get to the third level and you fail 10 times. I mean, that's what life is like. But if we fear failure, then that's a recipe for never making progress. And so Sarah

Starting point is 00:29:43 credits her dad for helping to inoculate them against the sting of failure and to prepare her for the need to be resilient and to endure some of those early hardships. Because you're going to face that rejection. If you work in the profession of selling, you're going to get rejected far more, even if you're the best in the world out of it. You're going to get rejected far more than you're going to get a positive response. And so that toughness, grit, resilience needs to be built up through experience of going through it. And I think all of us could be better suited from taking an approach that Sarah did, which she credits to her dad. I thought that was a, there's a really great story. And now I see her and Jesse moving on and doing it with their kids, which they're

Starting point is 00:30:29 a really interesting follow on social media, by the way. But that's a great story. I'm glad that was in there. And what I would share about that is I think it's a great inspiration for parents to realize that you can have a profound impact on your kids in a moment. You know, that was a moment that her dad made up. A lot of other dads don't ask that question. And as parents, you know, I think we're pretty good at creating what we call in the book moments of elevation, you know, moments that rise above the every day. So we think about, you know, a great theme for a kid's birthday party or we plan the annual vacation to Disney World or, you know, we come up with some crazy costume for Halloween.

Starting point is 00:31:10 And that's, that's great. That's fun. It's memorable. Those are powerful moments. But here's a moment that just happened for free at the dinner table and wasn't exciting or amusing or delightful in the moment the same way that Disney World is. And yet it was really laying the seeds of something very powerful. And that's another example of just how much power a moment can have.

Starting point is 00:31:33 which is hard now because there's almost parent shaming you see with social media all of the pictures of why everyone is the best mom and dad in the world i mean i do it too i we're all guilty at times of this but the critical moments are that time when perhaps your child falls off their bike and they need to pick themselves back up versus a helicopter parent there to pick them up and is it tough it is i mean i i know my resilience was built up from my parents, never interfering with football coaches being incredibly hard on me. And there are other parents who did. They didn't want the coach yelling and cussing and doing those types of things towards their kids. And I think my parents realized

Starting point is 00:32:19 that that was good for my brothers and me to go through that to when we weren't successful. Or even if we were, they still were going to be very hard on us to continue to improve and to strive to get better and to build up some of that ability to get. in some cases, some would say verbally abused, I wouldn't call it that, but it did help build a level of strength and grit and resilience that I think was the foundation for a work ethic that is needed to have some success and some sustained excellence. Yeah, parents, well, let's face it, parents have a tough tightrope act. They're trying to navigate between underprotecting your kids and exposing them to

Starting point is 00:32:58 unnecessary risk and anxiety and danger and overprotecting them and kind of creating them and kind of creating this artificial bubble that may be nice when they're eight or 13, but that's not going to exist in the real world. And so, you know, are we sending them out into the world with skin that's too thin? And if other parents are like me, you're kind of constantly weaving back and forth and feeling guilty that maybe you're on the wrong side of that. But what we point out in the book is in any kind of relationship where we're trying to help someone else grow, one of the great favors we can do for them is to encourage them to stretch. And by stretch, we mean to expose yourself to risk in the service of something that's important to you. So, you know,

Starting point is 00:33:43 Sarah Blakely is clearly someone that's stretched. And it's uncomfortable to encourage someone to do that. I mean, because they really might fail. That's the whole point of taking a risk is that you might fail. But in so doing, that becomes the engine of their growth. How do you ever grow if you don't attempt something you haven't attempted before or or try something harder than what you're currently capable of. And the role of a mentor is is not only to encourage the stretch, but also to provide the support needed either to continue to stretch if you succeed or to provide comfort and redirection if you don't. Yeah, that stretch for insight. Was it David Scott Yeager, the two-part formula cited high standards and assurance? Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Starting point is 00:34:31 Yeah, so there's this great paper that was cited for high school kids. So what they did was they studied the essays that some of these kids had written in class. And the teacher collected the papers and then sorted them at random into two piles. And half of the students got a note from the teacher saying, I'm giving you some feedback because I thought you deserved feedback or something really generic like that. And the other half of the students got a Post-it note on their essays that said something more like,

Starting point is 00:35:10 I'm giving you this feedback because I think you're capable of great things and I know you can reach my expectations. So notice the difference there. You know, it's either you've got generic feedback on your paper because I'm your teacher and that's what I do. Or I'm saying, you know, I have high expectations for you, and I know you can reach those expectations. So the way that the students viewed all of those red marks on their paper was dramatically changed by that statement.

Starting point is 00:35:42 In fact, the students had an opportunity. It was their choice whether or not to revise and resubmit the paper. And about 40% of the students who got the generic note from the teachers chose to revise, almost 80% of the students who, got the note setting high expectations for them, revised their paper. So about twice as many, and they made more corrections to their paper than the other students did. And so David Scott Yeager and his colleagues, they captured that in a sort of formula. They said that what's going on there is high standards plus assurance. High standards, meaning I have very high expectations for you plus assurance, and I know you can reach them. And that there was something

Starting point is 00:36:28 really powerful about that because it signals to people that this feedback is not punitive. And it's not permanent. It's not like you're a flawed person and this feedback is evidence of that. Rather, it's this feedback is in support of you becoming the more impressive person that I already know you can be. And that's a very powerful thing. And that's again, an example of how something very simple, Something that happens in a moment, something that's under our control can be an inflection point for someone. Reminds me of my talk with Phil Jones and he talked about some of the magic words. Just changing a few words can really impact somebody's life in a big way. And the fact of saying, I have high expectations for you and I know you can reach them.

Starting point is 00:37:15 I think about great coaches or mentors I've had or even feedback I've given others. You can see almost the look in their eye when or I feel it, I guess, as in the mentee, when maybe I feel a little bit like I disappointed my mentor or my coach. And I wanted so badly to do better for them because they cared. And they had high expectations for me and they saw something in me. And I think we all hopefully can put ourselves in situations to have those people around us. And we can also do that for others that we can mentor. And there's a lot of power in that phrase of I have high expectations for you.

Starting point is 00:37:51 And I know you can reach them. And there's no such thing as a mentor that doesn't push you. Nobody ever looks back on a coach and says, oh, you know, Coach Miller was amazing. He just let us do whatever we want and run around and knock off whenever we felt like. What a great man. You know, he really got the best out of me. There is no such person. So if you are a mentor to someone else, I mean, certainly you're a mentor for your kids,

Starting point is 00:38:19 but likely you're a mentor for someone at work as well. be thinking about what's the next time you can push that person to stretch and how can you support them to make it a non-anxiety-making situation for them? Absolutely. So I got one more story. Dan, I want to cover. This one has, I think, moments of sadness, but also there's something we can learn from it. So there are moments that matter, power moments.

Starting point is 00:38:50 and I think of a guy you wrote about named Eugene O'Kelly, and he was the CEO of KPMG. And unfortunately, in May of 2005, he was told that he had three tumors a size of golf balls, and he had three months to live. And he kind of was, I guess, an accountant or in a finance guy, and he thought of things that way. So he had to basically scrap all the plans for his life. He was a husband and dad of two girls. And so he came up with new goals and scrapped those old plans and drew five circles, a map of us relationships and talked about creating perfect moments for those last three months.

Starting point is 00:39:29 And I'd love for you, Dan, to talk a little bit more about this because I think we all, or at least most of us, and I'm in that boat, can and should find a way to do a better job of creating perfect moments and perfect days, regardless of. or not needing to have a medical diagnosis that Eugene O'Kelly had, but we can all do a better job here. And I'd love for you to share more of his story and some of the research behind this. Yeah, so you set the scene very well. I mean, here's a guy at the top of his game.

Starting point is 00:40:04 He's the CEO of a 20,000 employee firm, KPMG. He finds out his daughter, who's 14, is going to go back to school in the fall without a dad. And he says after he got over just the shock of the diagnosis, his CEO, his accountant instincts kicked in. And he resolved to use those final three months to unwind, as he said, his relationships. And so one night at the dining room table, he drew five concentric circles on a piece of paper. And it represented a map of his relationship. So his family was in the center. And then in the outer ring were more distant relationships.

Starting point is 00:40:43 relationships like business partners. And he decided to start from the outside and work his way in to unwind those relationships. And so some of the first ones with more distant relations were pretty simple. He might have a phone call or an email exchange with them and they would share some memories. And he was really careful not to let it be kind of a sad or morbid conversation. He wanted them to be special. And then as he worked his way in toward the middle when he started to work with close business colleagues or friends, he would plan a moment. You know, sometimes they would meet in Central Park and take a walk or they would meet in a museum and admire art or have, you know, a lavish meal with great food and wine. And he came to think of these occasions as perfect moments. And his mission,

Starting point is 00:41:33 as he saw, was to create as many of them as he could in his dwindling time on the planet. And And I want to just, I flip to the part of the book where we talk about this and I want to share a quote from him. This is from his book called Chasing Daylight. I think this is so powerful. So these are his words. I experienced more perfect moments and perfect days in two weeks than I had in the last five years or than I probably would have in the next five years had my life continued the way it was going before my diagnosis. Look at your own calendar. Do you see perfect days ahead?

Starting point is 00:42:08 Or could they be hidden and you have to find a way to unlock the day? them. If I told you to aim to create 30 perfect days, could you? How long would it take? 30 days, six months, 10 years, never? I felt like I was living a week in a day, a month in a week, a year in a month. The first two sentences of his memoir, chasing daylight, are as follows. He says, I was blessed. I was told I had three months to live. And I think what he means by that, by that strange juxtaposition of thoughts is that final phrase to live that in the shadow of his decline he found a way to live in a way that he never had before. And I think the challenge to all of us is, you know, for most of us, we don't live in

Starting point is 00:43:03 in that kind of, you know, catastrophic health situation. And in some ways, that makes it tempting for us to put off these moments. We think there will be an easier time next year, or I'm busy at work right now, or, you know, it's hard to align schedules, or, you know, I'm going to see that person next year. And so it creates a lack of urgency. And I think what O'Kelly is trying to tell us is restore the urgency. and fight for those moments because those moments are what life is made of. Man, Dan, I love the story.

Starting point is 00:43:42 I think it's a great reminder. It's tragic, but it's a real pick me up, isn't it? Well, I mean, I think it's, it's good to talk about these moments. And I, I brought this up at the end of the conversation for a specific reason, because I think conversations have arcs and stories have them as well. And you guys do a great job of writing about these in all of your books. and I try to do the same on these podcasts, but for when people shut this one off and they finish up, then maybe I think a great podcast episode, it can be like a great speech and sometimes like a great book.

Starting point is 00:44:18 And there's a few things that can happen that I hope happens through doing, whether I give a speech or I'm doing a podcast with an incredible guest like Dan Heath. And that's the fact that it could change the way that you think. it could change the way that you feel, and most importantly, it could potentially change the way that you act. And I'm hopeful that if people hear the story of Eugenio Kelly, and they hear that great passages that you shared, I'm so glad you did.

Starting point is 00:44:43 I highlighted the exact same passage for myself, just as much as anybody else, that I hope people think about that. And I hope it impacts how they feel, and I really hope it can impact and have an effect on how you act and all of us. And that's the power of moments and the power of your and Chip's books have the chance to do this. And I hope this podcast can do the same for people that they shut it down. And even if they get a little emotional, that's okay.

Starting point is 00:45:12 I think that can create some action. And that's my goal. So I appreciate the work that you've done. I want to acknowledge the impact and influence your books and your work, Dan, and your brother Chips have had on my life and so many others. and thank you for that. And then obviously thank you for being a great storyteller. Not all writers can come on here and do a great job.

Starting point is 00:45:35 And you absolutely did. So I'm very appreciative of you doing this, Dan. Thanks so much, Ryan. It's been a pleasure talking to you. Yeah. Where would you send my listeners to learn more about you online? If you're interested in this new book we've been talking about called The Power of Moments, I'm going to make it really simple on you.

Starting point is 00:45:52 Just go to the powerof moments.com. Don't forget that the at the start. and you'll find everything you could ever want to know about the book there. Perfect. All right, man. Thanks again for being here, Dan. I definitely want to continue this dialogue as we both progress because I know there's much more to come.

Starting point is 00:46:11 Definitely. Thanks so much. All right, man. Thanks, Dan. This episode of The Learning Leader Show is over, but we have plenty more to keep you locked in until next time. Head over to Learning Leadershow.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.

Starting point is 00:46:34 Thanks again, and we'll see you next time on The Learning Leader Show. This episode is brought to you by my friends at Callaway Golf. Calloway's business and marketing approach has turned heads over the last several years, helping the company make a dramatic turnaround from losing millions of dollars per year to being a leader in the industry. products like the GB Epic Driver, Steelhead XR irons, and Calloway's Chrome Soft Golfball are aimed at avid golfers looking for premium performance. And the coolest part about this partnership is we're doing a giveaway. Yes, we're giving away the number one selling driver of 2017, the GB epic driver.

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The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 225: Dan Heath - The Power Of Defining Moments

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