The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 238: Neil Pasricha - Why Action Creates Motivation: 1,000 Awesome Things

Episode Date: January 1, 2018

The Learning Leader Show Episode 238: Neil Pasricha - Why Action Creates Motivation: 1,000 Awesome Things Neil Pasricha is the New York Times-bestselling author of The Happiness Equation and The Book of Awesome series, which has been published in ten countries, spent over five years on bestseller lists, and sold over a million copies. Neil is a Harvard MBA, one of the most popular TED speakers of all time, and after ten years heading Leadership Development at Walmart he now serves as Director of The Institute for Global Happiness. He has dedicated the past fifteen years of his life to developing leaders, creating global programs inside the world's largest companies and speaking to hundreds of thousands of people around the globe. "Most think motivation leads to action... No, motivation doesn't cause action... Action creates motivation." Show Notes: Commonalities of leaders who sustain excellence: C -- Clarity - Clear, succinct, memorable O -- Optimism -- "Find the good in everything" P -- Patience -- Delaying decision making until the last possible moment The quality can improve if "we let the tension live" Empower others - "Parkinson's Law" - Work rises to the time needed to complete it. "I don't want to fight the customer."  -- Thinking about everything from their perspective. Wal-Mart Being a Harvard Business School graduate "Chase the companies that don't come to Harvard to recruit.  You'll learn more." -- Why Neil went to Wal-Mart Neil's 30 second pitch to why someone should hire him for a leadership role when he was very young "I had to be artificially confident" His pitch -- 3 quick questions Do you value internal promotions? What's the #1 program you've seen? Would you be interested in topics of developing leaders at Harvard? Get their email address and follow up None of the companies were hiring when he was leaving school... Neil had to "create a job" within companies to get hired Brene Brown - "If you go through life trying to find confirmation you don't belong, you'll find it." 2008 - The world was falling apart, his marriage ended, his best friend committed suicide.. He started the blog, 1,000 Awesome Things Won a webby award for best blog in the world Wrote The Book Of Awesome He moved to NYC... Didn't know anyone, lived alone He was going through pain while starting the awesome things blog.  Focused on three things: Make the blog public - hold him accountable Use a countdown - From 1,000 to 1 -- Helped him know it was going to end at some point Finite - There is light at the end of the tunnel "Most think motivation leads to action. Not true. Action creates motivation." The importance of consistency - Neil's idea was not unique, but doing it everyday made him different from most "Try to be receptive of other people's ideas" -- Helps you "notice things" "Your questions are fantastic.  I'm not surprised." Working on deadlines -- Neil wrote for a newspaper for four years.  Helped with this skill "I believe in consistency" Actionable advice: You have three, 56 hour buckets of your week.  They are: 56 Hours - Sleep 56 Hours - Work/Job 56 Hours - What are you spending this time on? You can do whatever you want... The happiness equation - Work/Life balance fulcrum -- Flywheel Taking his side hustle and making it his full time job -- "I should have done it sooner." "If you go through life trying to find confirmation that you don't belong, you'll find it." -- Brene Brown Social Media: Read: The Happiness Equation - Want Nothing + Do Everything = Have Anything Follow Neil on Twitter: @NeilPasricha Connect with me on LinkedIn Join our Facebook Group: The Learning Leader Community To Follow Me on Twitter: @RyanHawk12

Motivation does not cause action. Action causes motivation. If you run to the stop sign in your dress shoes at lunch, the next day you run a little further. The day after you bring some running shoes. The day after that, you make a little playlist. Like, the action creates the motivation the other way around. This episode is brought to you by Gusto.

Gusto is making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for small businesses. Modern technology does the heavy lifting, so it's easy to get things. right. PC MAG and fit small business have called Gusto the best payroll for small businesses. Gusto saves you time. 72% of customers spend less than five minutes to run payroll. Don't believe it, just Google them. People love Gusto. How often do you actually love your payroll provider? Most small businesses don't have an HR expert, but you don't need one to use gusto with great software and great service. You can focus on your business, not payroll.

and paperwork. And to help support the Learning Leader show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive limited time deal. Sign up today and you'll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just go to gusto.com slash leader. That's G-U-S-T-O.com slash leader. Welcome to The Learning Leader Show. I am Ryan Hawk.

Thank you so much for being here. It is Mindful Monday. Text Learners. to 4422 in order to join thousands of other fellow learning leaders from all over the world in the space of leading and serving others text learners to 44222 now on to the night's featured leader man is a good one it's with neil pas rica harvard mb a one of the most popular ted speakers of all time and spent a decade running leadership development inside walmart also new york times bestselling author of multiple books, including the happiness equation and the books of awesome.

His books have spent seven years and counting on bestseller list and sold millions of copies. Whoa, incredible resume. A couple of things we got into. The three specific reasons. His blog, 1,000 Awesome Things, was successful and how it applies to your work. Then listen to his cold call pitch. The stories Neil told me about what he said and to who. who when he was finishing college.

I love this part. Then the three buckets of your life. Neil's practical advice to help you and your personal and professional life, ladies and gentlemen, I promise you'll get a lot out of this one with Neil Pasadritsa. All right, Neil, thank you so much for being here on The Learning Leader Show. Welcome. Thank you for having me. I've been looking forward to this one for a while based upon watching all your videos

and reading the work that you've put out into the world. over the last few years, both in book format as well as a blog. And I'm curious, you to me appear as someone who is very good at what Seth Godin would say is noticing things, interesting things. And we'll dive deeper into what I mean by that a little bit later. But I'm curious now from your perspective, when you think of people who have sustained excellence, leaders, or just people and friends in general, what are some of the common themes you found in those who have sustained excellence.

Yeah, thanks, Ryan. And thank you for saying that. Anytime I can be compared to a Seth Godin quote, that is always a pat on the back. I love him. And I love the fact that when he closes off his little interviews, he says, and just Google Seth, and I'm the first thing that comes up.

I wish my first name was that Googled, that I'd be the first that comes up if anyone's typed in Neil. Ryan, you kind of got the same slog as I do. Anyways, to answer your question of a sustained excellence, to me, it's all about the acronym, him cop, okay, C-O-P. And I think of those three letters, because they each signify an important word for me. The C is clarity. The O is optimism, and the P is patience. So briefly, the C for clarity is, like I'm doing this model. Like you just asked me, like, the model, I didn't have it a minute

ago and I have it right now because I'm like trying to be clear, trying to be succinct and trying to be memorable. And I think good leaders do that well. The second one is optimism. I remember I was flying down to Texas with my boss at the time, the vice president of HR at Walmart, and a group of people. We rented a van. We were going to inspect this new system that they had in stores. And none of the people that we had scheduled time to meet with showed up. It was a huge cruffle and a big mistake. And we'd taken the private jet to get there. And it was a huge waste of time and a some big problem happened. The trip was a nightmare. And my boss, the vice president of HR on the drive back to the airport said, I loved this trip. We got to see what happens on the ground. We got

to talk to the associates at the stores. You know, it's nice to talk to the bigwakes here, but when you hear from the people, that's a real kind of trip. And I was like, I'm amazed. I was like, she took what, I think everyone would agree to was a mistake. It was a problem trip. And she literally put an optimistic spin on it. And I think great leaders just, it was a stay next to do that. And the third one is patience. And this one I'm talking about one specific aspect of patients. And I'm talking about delaying decision making until absolutely necessary. I learned this one from Dave Cheese, right, who's now the CEO of Walmart International.

And I spent 10 years of Walmart, so I have a few Walmart examples. But I worked for Dave for four years. And I saw that he simply didn't respond to many emails. He didn't get back to many people. And people would think of him as unresponsive. But truthfully, he was delaying the decision to its latest possible time because he knew the quality of the decision would always improve. And many times more than average, for most of us, the decision solved itself, meaning that by having patience to let that tension live, he let the person solve it themselves or move forward or create empowerment for themselves and kind of keep going. So, as you can imagine, by not writing many emails, he didn't get many.

As a CEO, he only got like five or ten emails a day. I was astounded by this, but I realized he's having the patience to let the problem sort themselves out and if necessary, making the decision at the latest possible time. Interesting. Was that a, did he document and tell you that this is exactly what I do and why I do it with this delaying decision making? Because the one aspect of that from a leadership perspective that I, I guess I find interesting is the fact you hear probably the Colin Powell rule, which is,

find 70% of the information at that point. It's time to make a decision. And others will say, the leader, you've got to be decisive and you can't be, you're never going to have 100% of the information necessary in order to, to make a decision. So when you say patience and delaying decision making to the last possible moment,

I think that's counterintuitive to what I typically hear. And I think of COP, of clarity, optimism and patience, that aspect of it is an area where I would ask or be curious to dive a little bit deeper. You've seen that work for him as you've implemented patience and delaying decision making. Has it been really beneficial for you and others or maybe is he a one-off? Bring it up a great point. I love that we're getting to open the stuff up. It's kind of where

the juicy stuff is. I wonder if in Colin Powell's situation, you know, in a more hierarchical government kind of role, you know, he is kind of, is voiced it upon him that he is the ultimate decision maker. So the decision has to be made by him, in which cases should be made quickly, rather than lagging and creating bureaucracy and time. Whereas as the CEO of Walmart, with 2.5 million associates underneath him, really, I think what they were trying to do is show that everybody's empowered to make decisions at the front lines. And so by removing himself as the obstacle of decision making, he was actually empowering the people below him. So I'm trying to illustrate the difference that I see of those two types of roles. For me, I do think and believe,

that this comment on patients is directly related to Parkinson's law, which I'm sure you're familiar with, that work rises to the time available for its completion. So if you say the deadline is tomorrow, well, then we'll make the decision tomorrow. If you say the deadlines in three weeks, it'll take three weeks. If you say your essays do next Monday, everyone hands it in, you know, Sunday night. And so the point I'm trying to make is like, here, give you an example to illustrate this one. One time at Walmart, we were deciding whether or not we should charge five cents for plastic bags, okay? Plastic bags, which were always free in all the stores, were under new kind of environmental trends, you know, really retailers were starting to declare kind of a war on

plastic bags. And so you charge five cents. And so we went through this rig and moral of like coming up with the advertising copy and telling customers and bring your reusable bag from home. And and all the mean is I remember Dave sitting in the corner, it was just quiet. It didn't really stay much. And you know, people, so they kept going and kind of put the ads in it. They got the ads ready to go to flyers, they inserted like the language to the cashiers and what you're supposed to say, would you like a bag or they cost five cents, whatever? And at the very last minute, at the 11th hour, after the flyer was printed, okay, after the flowers printed, after the execution of the copy was sent to the cashiers, he said, you know what, I'm sorry, I didn't come up with this sooner,

I've been thinking about this a really long time, I just don't want to fight the customer. If we do really believe the customer is all right, why would you give them at the very last second in our store a negative experience. It would be very easy for us to add that price back into our cost of goods. So the price can be offset internally. And everybody's like, aha, what a genius? He's right. We're all like, man, we just fucking just bring all these flyers.

You know what I mean? And he's just like, just throw them out. I should have come up with a sooner. But by delaying it, he literally made the better decision. So every retail around Canada increased five cents, plastic bags. It was huge outcry. Of course, customers complained. People were like, you know, this doesn't work for me for all these reasons and like, you know, food banks or people.

Lots of problems come up for this stuff. And we just Walmart wrote the train of, you know, we are everyday local price and we're not going to fight customers. So we didn't do it. And that example all was stuck with me because I'm like, man, just by going slow, he actually went the right way. And he went against everybody at the end, which is really hard to do, as you know. It's really tough and admirable. And it seems like in this case, obviously the right decision. I'm going to, and it's a lot. It seems obvious, actually, but it doesn't always feel that way when you're in the middle of it. And some of the greatest decision makers and leaders, I think, in history, when you study them, you look back and say, well, that was obvious answer to the question or the obvious decision to make, but it's typically not during that time. So I enjoy those stories, Neil. So you mentioned Walmart a few times. For those who don't know you, can you talk or I guess share with me why you decided to work at Walmart and what you do there? Sure. It's graduating from Harvard Business School in 2007 with an MBA. The companies

that come to Harvard Business School are, as you can imagine, Google and Facebook and McKinsey consulting and Goldman Sachs, right? Like the companies that can afford to send a bunch of recruiters on private jets to come hire, you know, expensive business grads for $120,000 dollar salaries. So everyone go to these wine and cheese parties and these case competitions and all this stuff, it's really stressful. And I actually got a scholarship to Harvard from John MacArthur, the old dean, because I was Canadian and my income, you know, in the past three years of flying, was low enough. They're like, congratulations, you're so poor, we're going to give you money. And so I sent him a letter. I was like, hi, John, you don't know me, but your fellowship paid

for my tuition. So here's like a five-page life story of me and how you've changed my life. So he calls me up, the old dean of Harvard. He's like, come meet me for lunch. So I go meet him for lunch. like 85-year-old man at Harvard campus who like has an office like he's he's still there even though he's not the dean anymore and over lunch he's like how's school and i'm like it's super stressful because everyone's like going to these wine and cheeses and trying to get the three jobs at mackenzie he's like oh man he's like you're like you're like a horny guy at the beach i was like excuse me he's like you're like a horny guy outside the beach you're like looking in there's a fence and all these beautiful women are sunbathing inside

And he's like, when recruiting starts, it's like they lift up the fence and all the guys run in. And you know what? You shouldn't chase one of those beautiful women, these McKinsey consultings and the Googles. No, don't. Don't do that. Screw that. He's like, he's like, you know why? Because you won't land one, first of all.

And second of all, even if you do, you'll be looking over your shoulder the whole time. Instead, chase the companies that don't come to Harvard. Chase the companies that are bankrupt, that have reputation problems that are filing for Chapter 11. And if you get a job there, they will be thrilled to have. have you. They will give you a ton of responsibility. They will promote you quickly. They will listen to your ideas and you'll learn way more. So for me at Harvard School, I'd stopped after that lunch, going to any recruiting session at all. And I instead pick the top 100 companies that were in what I call trouble, reputational trouble or bankruptcy trouble or financial

trouble or just literally, you know, kind of not doing well or old companies. And I cold called them and honestly Ryan I got like 50 first front interviews and like 25 sucker interviews and like 10 job offers on companies that were just not coming to campus and that's how I picked Walmart. So what do you do when you started and how did you progress quickly? Yeah. So I was, I said my sales pitch, here's my 30 second sales pitch to people on the phone. I said, why do you want to talk to us? I said because you are spending one year of executive salaries, finding executives from other

companies and I can show you internally how to develop leaders at half the price who are twice as effective. Do you want me to tell you half? And I said, yeah, sure, tell me. And so I was the manager of leadership development at Walmart and then I grew to being the director of leadership development and that was interjected with the four-year stint as project manager to the CEO, who I mentioned earlier. So that was like my 10 years there. And so I did that and a couple of learning and development roles. Really director of leadership was my last job. The natural question is obviously the Harvard business degree is great and it's helpful, but I would still say, who's this guy? Like, who is he to train someone who's probably older than you, more experienced than you,

has maybe more wisdom than you over the years of the trials and tribulations they've been through? Who are you to be the guy to teach Johnny or Jane Smith who's been around a lot longer than you? Well, it'd be really nice if I was able to give you some, like, astute answer, I was able to, like, weasel into these companies, but the truth is, Ryan, remember I said, like, called 100 and, like, you know, I got, like, 50 first-in interviews. Yeah. The other 50 thought exactly what you're saying. The other 50 agreed with you.

Yeah. They're like, who is this, like, little tiny shit called me from Boston, like, drop on the H-bomb and like on the phone, like, screw him. And they didn't, they didn't take my call. You know, they were like, no, thank you. Like, we'll go back to being bankrupt. You know what I mean? Like, we still think there's a future in movie rentals.

See, thanks for calling Blockbuster or whatever. And so, you know, half the companies did think that. I had to be artificially confident because I thought if I was more myself, which is like, especially at age 26, which is the age I was at the time, certainly much less confident, certainly much more, much less swagger, so much less like belief in myself, then I would have sounded like this on the phone. I would have said, hi, you don't know me. Sorry to kind of call you out of the blue.

I'm a student. I'm going to school and I just wonder if I could talk to someone at HR about jobs or about, you know, I've come to some questions I have for a project. Like no one would have said yes. So when I was like putting on a little bit of an air saying, hi, my name is Neil Pazerachia. I'm calling from Harvard Business School. I'm a student here studying leadership development. I was wondering if I could speak to the head of your HR department with two quick questions that'll take 15 minutes about how they develop leaders at Walmart. Would you mind have? I speak to that, like half the time they put me through. So it was just, yeah, I know I was being a little bit of a overconfident, but in order, that was to try to open that door, which some people didn't like and some people did. Wow. So when you get on the phone with the head of HR, what is it, what does it sound? I mean, do you remember exactly what you said? What does it sound like?

So I remember the guy's name who answered the phone at Walmart. He was named with Stephen Cleary. We talked about this for the years I was there because I said, if you never answered the phone, I wouldn't be here. And he picked up the phone. He said, you know, director of HR, Stephen Cleary, how can I help you? And he was the head off. He was in charge of like recruiting for the head office. I said, hi, Stephen. My name is Neil Pasarachia. I'm a Toronto resident. So I was calling the Toronto, I was calling the Walmart Canada office because I wanted to come back home because my fiancee was up here and schools in Boston, right? So I was like, but I'm currently going to

school at Harvard school. I have three quick questions. And my questions are like T-ups, right? So my questions were like, number one, do you guys value, you know, internal promotions? And if so, what do you do to support it? Oh, of course we do. We have leadership development programs and we send people to training. Cool. Thank you very much. Number two, what's the number one program you've seen as effective in developing senior leaders?

Oh, well, we, you know, we do this incredible, like, media training program where we bring in, like, the media and we teach them all how to do interviews or whatever. It is like, okay, cool. My third question was this. would you be interested in I have just completed a study at Harvard in the topic of developing leaders could I send you the results of that study would you be interested in me sending you my my work a white paper kind of thing and like they always said yes and that was a way for me to get their email address right it's like stephen dot clear at walmer.com and so I was like so now I had their email address so I sent them an email saying thank you then I got their email address and then I used

that email address to ask for another conversation, you know, a month later, if we felt like there was something there. And then that month later was conveniently when I was going to be home for Christmas break. So over a Christmas break, I met all these companies. And then I think I mailed them a thank you letter and the third interaction I asked them for a job formally. And the key point to notice here also is that none of these companies were hiring. I think the job recruiting world that we live in is a red herring. Don't get me wrong. I respect the companies like the Indeeds and I think they do a valuable service. What I'm trying to say is it's a red herring. We as candidates sometimes look at the jobs available and then say oh there's nothing good.

But it doesn't work like that. You actually don't need to go up the channel of hiring. You need to navigate inside the company on a tangential flagpole that you build yourself. And then if you can do that, the job is always there. And have a little bit of potentially irrational confidence, maybe? Yeah, yeah. I'm 38 now so I can say, like, I'm coming across probably more confident now than I was on those phone calls. Yeah. But I'm giving you kind of like, it worked.

So here's my, you know, I'm giving you the confirmation bias. When somebody says fake it until you make it, what do you think of that? Oh, yeah, I like that. I like that. And I actually even like Amy Cuddy's version. I think it's fake it until you become it. See, because fake it till you make it implies I pretend to be a leader until I am one, and presumably I'm still faking it.

Whereas Amy Cuddy expands on that and says, fake it till you become it, meaning that, no, I do want to grow into that. And I even like Brené Brown's version even better, which is this. It's from her new book, Braving the Wilderness. She has a line in it that resonates with me is something like this. if you go through life trying to find confirmation that you don't belong, you will always find it.

So instead, assume you do belong and act accordingly. And it's something about like how if we look for not belonging, we'll find it. But if you act like you do belong, it comes to you. And that resonates me even more. Optimism was the O, the second part of your sustaining excellence, the COP from the beginning of this conversation. And through the course of doing 200, whatever, 50 plus of these conversations, I've found that to be a commonality among people who sustain excellence, Neil, is the fact that they have this overwhelming optimism about the fact that they believe the charge that they're leading is going to result in success, however you define success for whatever you are leading. And I think this is where we talk, we're going a little bit deep, but we talk about some mindset shifts that, people need and they need to hear and that's that's with creating optimism in their life and i'm going

to transition and fast forward a little bit in your story but one of the the joys that i've had uh over the years and certainly a lot more recently since since we planned this talk um was 1,000 days of awesome and i know it was built though out of out of some tough moments can you share why you created what was named, I don't know, the official award, but basically the best blog in the world, or I forget the exactly. The Webby Award. Yeah, right. You went to famous award shows because of this blog.

And so I love for you to discuss one, why you created it. What exactly it is for those who don't know. I might, as you go, pull out a few that I really liked of the 1000, but really why it got started and what it's all about. Sure. In 2008, so astute listeners will remember this is like a year or two after I graduated from business school. I found my world falling apart. So my marriage was heading in the wrong direction. I'd been married two years. Remember I came back to Toronto because my fiancee was there. And it wasn't working out. And that was really sad because it wasn't my choice. So I was the one whose heart was getting broken a little bit more, I think. She just said, I don't want to be with you anymore. Yeah, exactly. Like she was she was falling for someone else and did not want to emotionally or physically cheat on me. So she was really open about that. And that was really difficult, as you can imagine. And at the same time, my best friend from Harvard, Chris, Kim, he had been seriously battling mental illness. So he actually attempted his life. He did not succeed. So these two things were happening. And it's in that context. I said, I need to focus on something positive. And it's never in the news. It's never on, you know, I didn't have your show to listen to. So I'm like, okay, I got to, I got to find something. So I go on Google.

I type in how to start a blog. I click the I'm feeling lucky button that no one ever presses. And 10 minutes later, I started up a website called 1000, like spelled like 10000, 1000 awesome things.com, just as a way to put a smile on my face before I went to bed. So I'd come home from work and I'd start writing little essays. about waiters and waitresses who bring you free refills without asking, about flipping to the cold side of the pillow in the middle of the night, about waking up and realizing it's a Saturday,

or hitting a string of green lights when you're late for work, or finally peeing after holding it forever. And I took all these little awesome things, and I wrote like 500 word essays about them all, and I posted them. That's it. That was it. And the blog, you know, completely took off, totally went viral, hit the front page of like Reddit. At the time, big huge websites like dig and FARC and all this stuff.

Go cover in like Wire magazine. And then I won the Webby Award for Best Blog in the World, which is like the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, has this big award show called the Webby's, which is a total fluke that I won. And I go fly to New York, I walk a red carpet. I'm not kidding. I have the pictures to prove this. Martha Stewart is on my left.

Jimmy Fallon is on my right. I'm walking on the red carpet. Hey, what do you do? Oh, I write a block. Yeah, exactly. they were like getting nominated for like some huge online like you know cooking show and I'm like yeah I'm the guy that talks about strangers hearing a stranger fart in the elevator and so I go on stage except the webinar and then 10 publishers you know were waiting for me through I sorry literary agents

they were waiting for me in my inbox and my Gmail box to turn 1,000 awesome things into the book of awesome so if people have heard of me today any of your listeners like you know there are two of them that heard of me before this conversation is probably from the book of awesome because that book, you know, sold a million copies as New York Times bestseller, bestseller list for 200 weeks. That book kind of went viral. And then as anyone in the internet world knows, you know, the mainstream PR amplifies the stuff you're doing online because all the people that haven't heard of these millions of blogs, then find the blog. And by the way, like I should say, my life got worse. Okay, not better as I was doing this. The marriage actually

did end. I had to sell the house. Chris sadly, and I feel like I feel, I feel, insensitive about the fact I glossed over this, but Chris sadly did take his own life as I was in the throes of writing a blog. And I'm planning this funeral. I've got, you know, flying down and I told a memorial service. I have to find a place to live. I find a bachelor apartment in downtown Toronto. I'm 29 years old. I've never in my life ever lived alone before. I've never lived in a big city. So I was like a suburbs kid. I never lived in an urban center ever. And I didn't know anyone. So I got a new iPhone and my contact list was literally empty. Like I had no contacts.

And I didn't know anyone because I didn't want to, you know, we had some mutual friends through our marriage and I was like, you know, I don't really want to keep talking about my divorce all the time. So I was like, I got to make new friends. And that entire gigantic vacuum created space for me to write a blog post every night after work. So you're writing about awesome things yet you were going through immense pain. That's an interesting dynamic.

How were you able to do that? Yeah, well, I knew that I needed therapy, right? So I was, first of all, I was getting formal therapy. For the first time, my life, and I really recommend this for people. It's something that I would never have done. I would have been very cynical about the idea of sitting on a chair and talking to something about my feelings, but it was really helpful. And then I said, I kind of focus on the positive, because that's the only I'm going to get out of this. And so the three things I did that were smart.

in retrospect, we're making it public. Okay, so I had pressure because my mom was going to be reading my blog, so I have to like update it. I made it a countdown. So remember it was number 1,000. Then the next day was number 999. And the next day it was number 90. So I was like, I got this downward pressure, which is really rare.

You don't see that in blogs really. Most blogs, yeah, most things count up. Right? You said you're on the 300 episode or whatever. Like, people count up. But by counting down, it's awesome because it has a really finite quality. to it and as a result of that finite quality the whole time I was doing the project I had a light at the end of the tunnel Which was a goal which was like I just got to get to that I just got to get to number one and sadly I didn't know how to do math so I didn't realize that a thousand daily

Lockwell still takes like three and a half four years like it's like a long time of writing every day But a thousand sounded small to me and those three little parameters I put in created that pressure that I didn't want to write the block but I didn't want to not write it even more if that makes any sense. What was the third to third thing? Made it public. You had a countdown. Made it public.

Making it go down and making it finite. You know, like having a light at the end of the tunnel. So you're like, like I have some good friends who I won't name right now, who have incredibly successful projects and blogs. And sometimes they confess to me like, I don't know how to end this thing.

I don't know how to close it off. I don't know how to finish this. So I put it in my will. Like, and these are projects. And again, I won't name names, but they're getting like,

millions of hits a day or whatever, like they're big projects. So you can't just abandon them, but the person who's writing them might mentally expire on their interest, you know, and then it starts to feel like work. And that's a big problem. So I mentioned Neil at the beginning that one of the aspects about what you do that I find excellent is the fact that you notice things better than most. And that's, that's where the Seth Codin Parallel came in. Like when you write 1,000 Days of Awesome and you read it, as me as the reader and your fans, normally it probably sounds something like this. Number 178, when you hear someone smile over the phone.

Number 198, becoming friends with the other guy who doesn't know anyone here. Number 492, the first text message between new friends. You say, oh yeah, that's really awesome, right? But you don't necessarily, but none of us have really documented it, but we think that. You know, like it is cool when you make a new friend. and you start texting each other, you're thinking, and this is great. I just expanded my number of friends,

and it's an interesting person, and I'm happy that we're friends, but I never really documented it, but then I read 492, or I just went on a double date recently, Neil, actually, and number 530 is listening to couples tell you how they met, and we learned, my wife and I learned how this couple met, and it was a fascinating story,

and then we retold the story of how we met, and before you know it, everyone's smiling, and we're laughing, we're having a great time, and that is something that is awesome. And so you're one of the guys who is able to document these awesome things a thousand times and probably more than that with all the work that you do. Where does this, I guess I would say this awareness level, how have you built that muscle to be aware, to notice these things and then to document it to where the response is, oh yeah, that is really awesome, but no one's really.

ever put it down, written it down before. Thank you for saying that. And I actually think that I would like to answer in the form of a story, okay? Because here's the thing. Most of us think, we grow up thinking that motivation leads to action. Okay. So we think that in order to write a thousand things, I got to be super motivated, like write a thousand things on a piece of paper and then post all about them.

Or if I want to run a marathon, I got to like have the right shoes and get a perfect playlist and I need to get a running buddy to call me accountable. blah, blah, blah. No. Turns out that motivation does not cause action. Action causes motivation. If you run to the stop sign in your dress shoes at lunch, the next day you run a little further. The day after you bring some running shoes. The day after that, you make a little playlist. Like the action creates the motivation the other way around. So similarly with my blog, by starting, by literally just starting number 1,000 broco flower, the world's most terrible

blog post ever, which is me writing just to start. I wrote about nature's most hideous vegetable, the strange mutant hybrid child of cauliflower and broccoli. And I posted it. And then like that was Friday. So I was like, I got to write another one on Monday. I got to write another one on Monday. I want to do this every weekday.

And so that made me write number 99, the little crummy triangle of potato chips left. in the corner of the bag that you can kind of I talk about like to dump truck tilting move to get it into your mouth and or like do you do the rip and lick and like kind of lick it out like a pig like what do you do there's all these different ways to kind of like eat the crumbs and honestly by that end of Monday I got paranoid right because I was like I got to come up with a thousand of these so I wrote all my ideas out on a piece of paper and I had 12 I still remember at 12 I'm like five baseball players finding $5 in your coat pocket, you know, getting grass stains when you're playing with little kids.

And I was really paranoid and worried that my blog was going to die a very quick death next week. But over those subsequent 12 days, guess what? I was looking for more. And people started texting me ideas because I sent my friends that I'm doing this. So they said, oh, how about the cold side of the pillow? Like the cold side of the pillow, which is the first entry in my book of awesome, maybe the most popular one I've ever written. Wasn't my idea.

Someone just sent it to me, and I'm the guy that wrote the 500 word essay about it, right? So people are sending me more suggestions because I make myself the home base. I put a big gigantic sun denting the solar system of the internet with this awesome fantasy. I always tell people my idea was not unique. A guy writing a bunch of things he likes on a blog. Like, can you get more cliche? Like, there's nothing freaking unique about my idea, but I just did it. it every day and by doing it consistently and by the way all my blogs were posted at 12.01 a.m.

So like I stayed up late and I posted them then and I learned that there was a timer so I scheduled them and that led to consistency. So people that subscribed in their RSS feed were like I always get this post at like first thing in the morning and then they say they're like reply and if they replied I got the email directly. I always made my email address be like the place and on the side of my blog I said like contact me anytime. I made my comments open like I'm like trying to be a receptacle for other people's ideas and then they write back and then I say great I'm going to use this one next week and then they keep coming so you call it a muscle and I feel flattered that you said that but I call it like you know paranoid of running out creating the the dented universe phenomenon you have healthy

productive paranoia right I mean yeah in college I mean yeah I think that is another common theme people have this for lack of a better phrase it is this productive paranoia about whatever it is they do. I am insane about publishing this podcast, Neil, every single Sunday night at 7 o'clock so that for super fans, and I greatly appreciate them, by the way, they listen immediately. And then for others, they listen on their Monday morning commute. And I love that. I get to be a part of that ritual or routine. And I know that based on the emails. And that brings me to a thought because I've had this, I've gone back and forth with different creatives. Some say if you put out great work, consistency doesn't matter. You just put it out and they'll gobble it up.

People will love it. I tend to be, as I just told you, a believer in being consistent and creating routines and rituals in my life. And that's why it's the same time every single week. My email goes out every Monday at 9 o'clock Eastern. And so I get the sense that you're also a consistency guy, but I still want to dive deeper into that to see what do you think when it comes to great work, shipping it, and consistency and the importance of that for those people who are either currently creating or they're trying to get something going as they move forward? Well, first of all, this is a really astute question, and your questions are fantastic. I'm not surprised.

And so I'm like, okay, I used to think about, I think it was Malcolm Gladwell. I hope it was him, so I'm not blitzering this. and understanding how he could write so voluminously. And I think he said, I hope this is not a glad that I'm not getting this wrong. He said, you know, I used to be working for a newspaper. And in a newspaper, you have a deadline, and the deadline's always tonight. You know what I mean? Because the article has to go out tomorrow.

Yeah. And when I heard that quote, I was like, oh, wait a minute. I used to work for a student newspaper at my college. It was called Golden Words. It was the only weekly humor newspaper in the country. it was like the equivalent of like a Harvard Lampoon, but it came out weekly instead of Harvard Lampoon's monthly or inconsistently, actually.

So this Golden Awards thing, I was fascinated by this newspaper. I went my first Sunday. They got together every Sunday night at school and literally a bunch of guys sat around eating pizza with computers until the paper was done, like a 32-page paper, the following Monday morning like 7 a.m. And they sent it to the printers and it came out on Wednesday.

Like the whole paper from start to finish, the editing, the writing, the layout, that whole process started at Sunday afternoon and went all the way until it was done, which sometimes took like 24 hours. And I went there every Sunday for four straight years. I did the math once and I did double the time at Golden Words than I did in my classes for four years of university at college. And so that was my 10,000 hours of writing on a deadline. So when it came to me to launch a blog, the Thousand Awesome Things, my view was if I don't have this deadline, this Parkinson's Law type deadline of every night, then I won't do it. And so I believed in that consistency.

I believed in that regularity. I believed I would want that if I was the reader of this blog. I mean, that's what I thought. And I knew I would write if I had that pressure. So I'll give me the counter example, though, to maybe say that this is more of a paradox or a spectrum than an answer is that my friend Tim Urban, who runs the website Wait But Why, right? So I saw him recently in Los Angeles. He's been working on a blog post for over a year. Okay. It's not out yet. He hasn't published it. I don't know if he'll have published it by the time this airs, but he said it to me, he presented it at this conference over that. And he said it, he said, it's not quite done and it's 60,000 words long. And he's like, it's been a terrible year.

He's got like bags under his eyes. He's like, he's like, you know, but I'm really wanting to get this blog post perfectly. It's about like politics. So you can imagine it's quite tricky to write it out. And I am like you. Like you're a Sunday night of seven guy. I love that.

I'm as as a super fan. I'm like, I love Ryan Hoff. Like I want him in my life. And I can adjust your content to my schedule because I have a long commute Monday morning or whatever. I'm like you. I agree with you.

But like Tim has been a year on one blog post and like have a feeling that when it comes out, it'll just go supernova viral anyway. Every time. All of them do. Yeah. Exactly. So it's like, you know, maybe it's a spectrum. Maybe it's not. Maybe the answer is do what you as the creator need to do to get your contact created.

So for those people who are listening who maybe they have a regular nine to five job at a big corporation, they're saying, and Ryan and Neil are talking about these creative pursuits. and when to publish and how to ship and what to do and just follow what I'm good at. But I really like, and this might be a tough question, but I really like ideas or thoughts or actionable tips or advice, Neil, for people to, they walk away from here and they're certainly inspired,

they love the story and it's amazing and they're entertained, but they also leave here with notes on how to execute. So when you hear the story of Tim Urban taking a year for a blog post, which is a 60,000 words is a book, but a year for a blog post. And that's his normal post is around that, that or longer. The Elon Musk post is incredible and all of them really are.

But when you hear that and then you hear kind of the productive paranoia of how you were shipping every night and me every Sunday by seven, what advice do you give to whether it's a regular nine to five who isn't, doesn't have a side hustle, but they're just trying to grow and progress in their career. Or maybe it is a side hustler who is trying to potentially do something. something else outside of their regular 9-55 job. What actionable advice would you give to them? Yeah, sure. Well, first of all, I want to just mention that my entire blog, all four years of writing

every single weekday, plus the book of Awesome, my first book, the book of even more awesome, my second book, which are like half new content. So I was writing the books on top of the blogs. The book of Holiday Awesome, my third book. Awesome is Everywhere, my fourth book. And then my fifth book, which just came out last year called The Happiest Equation, plus giving over like 200 keynote speeches around the world and my TED talks and all that,

that was all a side hustle. I did not actually quit Walmart until last year, like at the time the happiness equation came out. And the reason I quit at that time was because of this model. You want the takeaway here it is. You zoom out to a week. It's 168 hours. And I love that number because I like remembering

that Zuckerberg has the same number of hours as me. And so does Oprah. And so does Brenna Brown. And these are heroes to a lot of people. But like, they wake up and they got the same number of hours. And the richest man in the world, maybe he can buy some extra years, but he can't buy more hours in a week. Okay. So you take that 168, for all the listeners who love math, you'll know that that number is divisible by three.

So if you divide 168 by three, you get three buckets, a bucket of 56 hours, another bucket of 56 hours, and a third bucket of 56 hours. So in my life, and that's what I encourage your listeners to do, think about how much you sleep. And if it's not eight hours, you know, give yourself a little friendly slap and say, I got to sleep eight hours because it really is good for you. And everyone is trumpeting that these days. Like, you need to sleep. So like, let's just call eight hours a night. Eight times seven days a week is 56. I mean, I'm talking the exact number of hours of sleep you're supposed to get a night, multiplied by seven days a week, is perfectly one of those three buckets.

It's like it works out nicely. It's a nice little mathematical trick. So the beauty of the model is that if I ask you how many hours of work, you work, most people say, oh, I'm signed up for a 40-hour-week job. But truthfully, I take work home. I got some commuting. I might answer your emails on the weekend. So I say, okay, round it up to 56.

Why not round it up? Give yourself an extra 16 hours of work outside of your job. And people I know, there's people who are in plus or minus, but let's just call it on average. The point I'm trying to make with this model is that the first two buckets, sleep bucket and the work bucket, create, justify, and pay for your third bucket. And the key model I'd like you guys remember is, what am I spending my third bucket on? Because Zuckerberg's got one, you've got one, I've got one, what is it?

So for me, for all those years, my third bucket was really easy to articulate. You know what it was? My blog. My blog and, you know, related like posting it to Reddit and answering the emails and going on the radio show. I was like, that was my third bucket. And then I had, I got remarried and I had little kids. And pretty soon, my family took up at least a bucket, if not more. And I wanted to be an attentive father. I want to be on for dinner. I want to be giving the bath. I want to be reading a book with my son at night. Like, these are important moments. I don't want to miss that because I'm

not making money. So I'm like, that's a bucket. And then I had a problem because then my work bucket of Walmart and my work in bucket or my fun bucket of awesome stuff, it clashed. So that's why I quit last year because finally I ran out of buckets. But that model enabled my thinking and enabled my time management because I was like, I ate out like from this friendly little vegetarian restaurant around the corner every day because I'm like, ain't got time to cook. My bucket's all about blogging. Sorry.

So, you know, you make some tradeoffs, but just know what you're spending the time on. I love the three buckets. And I remember when we had the pre-call, that helped me and the recent decision that I made. That's not how I initially described it, but it's essentially what I did because I felt like I wanted to spend so much more time focusing on having these quality conversations, writing, speaking, consulting, doing all over that type of work. And I just simply couldn't do it with combined with a big-time kind of corporate internet. national job in a leadership role and thought I have to now make a decision I'd rather make a decision at this stage of my life than wait a long time as others were advising me to do it at points to say why don't you just bank some money for a while and I said well and then what why not just do it

now and get the business started and that's why I Neil as well elected to leave my my job and do all of this full time and partner with some other guys that that could help me as well but and it's made me it hasn't even been that long, but it's made me a much, much better husband and father. I think you could ask them because, one, there is more time. And two, I think when you're pursuing something that you truly love and you're passionate about and you develop a little bit of skill, you're just a nicer person. You're more pleasant to be around and you're happier. And you're obviously the guy who understands the happiness equation.

And so I'd like for you to maybe respond a little bit of my story and what I did. And I know we talked a little bit about on the phone mixed with the happiness equation. And for those listening who could potentially find a way to pursue the work that they truly love. And that sounds cliche. I realize that. But it's still so important because it makes a big difference. I felt it both ways. And how you are outside of work when you are pursuing something you love is going to

going to make your life just so much better. And so can you maybe digest that in a little bit more concise way than I'm being with the happiness equation and what you've studied and written about? Sure. Well, here's one mistake that a lot of us make. We think of work-life balance. And I love your comments about being a better dad, being a better husband. We think of work-life balance as a fulcrum.

And that's a word I did not know until they sent me the cover ideas for the happiness equation. and if you've seen the cover of my book, it's got a fulcrum on it, which is like this little triangle with a balance across it, and then the happy, smiley face,

which I don't personally enjoy, but whenever they made me put it on with the cover, it rolls around. It's called a fulcrum, and we think of work life balance, you know, the old, like, judge scale,

the blind thing, like holding the weights, whatever. So we think of work life balance is that way. You put some on one side and the other side goes up. You put it on the other, the other side goes up.

But instead, what work life balance is actually it is actually a flywheel. Okay, so a flywheel is that thing at the local, I don't know if you have one near your house, we have one near our in Ohio in Dayton, but we have one near us in Toronto. It's called Riverdale Farms.

Now Riverdale Farms is like little pigs and cows and sheep and everyone takes their kids, and it's like a public park. And there's a flywheel that is going around and around, kind of like a windmill. Water comes up to top, and the more water that drips into it, the faster the thing spins.

Do you know what I'm saying? Can you picture that? So those two models are diametrically opposed. We think of work-life balance as a fulcrum or a scale, or lack of better words, I should have used a scale in the first place. But actually, it's a flywheel, meaning that the more energy you get out of, one, it spins the wheel faster. So when I'm really getting energy out of my work, I'm an incredible father and husband.

And when I get a tremendous amount of energy being in a great dad, I'm like so connected with my kids and washing them in the bath and falling asleep with my three-year-old at the end of the night, it looks so cute and so beautiful, so loving. Guess what? I'm like a superman on stage the next morning when I have to give a speech for a thousand people because I feel so energized deeply and internally. And that reversal of fulcrum to a flyweight is one that I'm practicing myself.

And I'm trying to get better at that myself. but it's a it's a substance stand of change for me and one that the research supports. Were you towards the end of the time at Walmart, was it sheerly a bucket thing or were there parts of it that you just didn't like and you wanted to get away from? It was the opposite actually. I was getting from like I actually kind of verbally said I got to leave here a few times over the years and they were like, no, no, we've got to promote you. You know what I mean?

And I actually think what was happening there is that first of all, my side hustle was not a conflict of interest. Like if I was like, you know, opening up a small mark on the side, that would have been a problem for the company. But because I'm like, I'm running a blog about, you know, simple pleasures, they're like, go ahead. Like that doesn't bother us. So I was open with them about what I was doing and I got the ethics committee to approve it at the beginning. Because Walmart is a really big company. You don't want to kind of step on any toes. Like I got the ethics approval first. Then like after I was starting the blog. And then guess what? Because I had this blog that was taking off.

And it was giving me like paid speaking engagements and a paid book deal. I was like a mouthy guy at work. I became like more courageous. Speak truth of power. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And because I was getting like this expensive salary job at Walmart, I was the blogger

who was a little bit more fearless. I had no ads on my website. I thought they were ugly. And no ads on my 50 million hit blog, no ads, no revenue, zero dollars ever. Because I was like, ads are ugly. And I don't need the money. I wasn't trying to monetize a thing right away. I was able to play the long game because I had my salary.

So what was happening for me was that I had, I call it legs on a table, if legs are cash flow streams. I made my whole table more sturdy and I became more courageous in both. So actually, I never wanted to quit the Walmart job. I really never wanted to because I was worried that I would be putting too much creative pressure in my other life. And that would hurt the quality of my output because I might be stressed or pressured to like put advertisements that I didn't. want or like be really worried I didn't get enough speaking events and I was suddenly like start speaking for half my fee and like destroy my bit you know what I mean like I was like that's going to suck so I only did it when I really actually totally had to and run out of minutes in the day how's it been

it's been you know what I should I should have done it sooner honestly I honestly I honestly should have done sooner because here's the thing I fail to notice I'm from an east indian background so my parents were like go be a doctor and I already failed them once and then I was they're like okay well fine go be a lawyer I was like I already failed them on that one and they're like fine go be a dentist I'm like no I'm not going to do that either so the last salvage for them is like don't quit your day job like that's like the East Indian culture right and I'm like oh I'm just going to be a writer they're like oh my god like it's the equivalent of that movie the big sick where like you know Kamal is becoming a state of comic right exactly and that's like that movie made me cry right

You too. Yeah, that movie touched me because I was like, this is in my life. And then what I failed to realize is that I was actually building cashful streams or legs on my table in my awesome thumb bucket. So I had the speaking that was paying me. Book advances. Book royalties. I was starting to do some branding. So you see, I was actually a much more secure business by the time I left than I thought.

So really, I was emotionally mature enough to handle it. and if I'm really honest, I still do get moments of like, is my whole 2018 going to fall off a cliff? I don't have dental insurance from Walmart anymore to like, if my teeth get broken, like I got to pay like thousands of dollars. You know, I have all these things now that I didn't have before that the safety of the big company gave me. But that safety claddles you artificially and sometimes prevents you from leaving when you're actually already ready. It's interesting. I was high. I had a pre-call this morning.

Neil with another upcoming guest and he was saying something similar. He's had immense success, multiple bestselling author and done a lot of other things. And we're talking about 2018 and he still like you, like me, like a lot of people who have been able to sustain excellence is as a very healthy, productive paranoia about his business. And I, and it still surprises me, but I think it in a weird way makes all of us feel a little bit better that even somebody like you who sold millions of books and gives keynotes all over the place and started the Institute for Global Happiness gets nervous at times about the future, you know? Yeah, totally.

And I don't know if we've talked about the natural primal reasons that happens. But you, I'm sure noticed, but like the amygdala, the oldest part of your brain, secretes cortisol and stress hormone, sending you the fight or flight signal whenever danger lurks. Okay, and because we don't live near saber-tooth tigers anymore, danger is represented by like not getting a speaking engagement or like not landing a big podcast guest or like these things give us the danger flash and you and I call that paranoia. Like it's an incredibly productive primal instinct that has enabled our species, you know, survival and oh yeah, we took over the planet and are the most dominant mammal in the world now. So that that cortisol is still flashing through our heads despite the fact that we live in an era of ultimate abyss. abundance, right? Like, we are biologically not going to evolve quick enough. So, you know, for some of the super left brain people listening, like, that sometimes gives me some help because I'm like, oh, I'm supposed to feel paranoid because my stupid brain thinks I'm going to die otherwise. Like, you're stupid brain? Like, you're totally wrong. And then I try to rationalize my way out of it, but I'm just cognizance of fact there's some good primal reason why I am paranoid. Neil, this is great.

And I think I only touched on about 10% of the notes I prepared for this. But I think we were talking to the pre-call that this could happen. And I'm really glad it did. The one thing I'll ask is, can we do this again at some point here in the future? Because there's so much more to cover. But I realize attention spans and time and schedules that I loved this talk. It was fun. And I learned a lot.

It was enjoyable. I really appreciate you sharing some of the high. and lows, a tough moment, but I would like to talk even more because you have so much to share. I'd love to talk anytime, be my pleasure. And the very first thing I said an hour ago was C clarity, CLEARITY, C-O-B, clarity, optimism, pages. And, like, you know, talking to you improve my clarity too. And it is an abler and a lucky thing to be able to have this conversation. So thank you for all the work you're doing. I'm lucky I just get to kind of call in and talk. So you're doing all the hard work and heavy lifting and the Sunday night of seven posting. So

thanks for all the work you're doing. Oh, I appreciate that. Where would you send my listeners to learn more about you online? Every single thing is at globalhappiness.org. Globalhappiness.org. I tried to buy dot com, but it was too expensive. So I got the dot org. And that's linked to all my books, TED Talks, all the social platforms.

Oh, man, there are endless social platforms and everything else about me. And my email address, which is Neal at globalhappiness.org. If you're listing to the show, if you made it to the end of the podcast, if you're in the basement of a gym right now, driving your truck down the dark highway and you are listening to the end of this podcast. Be part of the end of the podcast community and email Neil at global happiness. org and tell me you made it. C.C. Ryan, if you can.

And it's fun getting those emails of people that made it to the end. So I'd love to hear from you and I'm happy to respond to everything I get. The end of the podcast community. I love it. The happiness equation to your book. I appreciate you and your team send it to me. Highly, highly recommend people picking it up and reading it. And I just recently, actually this Monday at 9, I shared your TED Talk, The 3A's of Awesome.

It's got a bunch of engagement from my community. I'm very grateful for that. And it's a great, great talk for those. And we didn't even get a chance to talk about it maybe next time, but the 3A's of Awesome, a TED talk that you gave that a lot of my community already has clicked on and watched and enjoyed. So thank you for putting that out. I know the TED Talks have to be incredibly nerve-wracking. Yeah, because they tell you that they're going to film them and show them on the internet.

for the rest of your life. Fortunately, they see that have gone pretty well for you. I can't even imagine the prep. But no, man, Neil, thank you so much, man, for being here. And I look forward to the next one, man. Thank you, Ron. You too. Thank you.

A big thank you to Neil for that conversation. I love that. I really appreciate intelligent, thoughtful leaders who make me think, especially the three buckets of your life. Really impactful. And thank you for listening. If you'd like to support the show, I'd greatly appreciate you subscribing, rating, and reviewing the show in iTunes Apple Podcasts.

Hopefully only takes you a couple minutes, but writing a review, rating the show, and subscribing an iTunes Apple podcast can really help spread the message. Thanks again for being here this week. I cannot wait for the next one. See you guys next week. This episode is brought to you by Gusto. Gusto is making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for small business. Modern technology does the heavy lifting, so it's easy to get things right.

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