The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 276: Scott Belsky - How To Find Your Way Through The Hardest Part Of Any Venture

Episode Date: September 23, 2018

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk Episode #276: Scott Belsky - How To Find Your Way Through The Hardest Part Of Any Venture "Management is about people. You have to be at a personal level when you're a manager. It doesn't scale. It's not supposed to." Show Notes: Commonalities of sustaining excellence: The ability to sustain curiosity - "you need to keep paying attention with a tuned up curiosity." "They say no more often" "Get into the motion of trying things instead of perfecting things." How to compartmentalize? "I build windows of time in my day to not pay attention to anything but the deep work. No email, no social media, no check book sales." On flights, dedicate time to deep work No wifi, this is alone time to do work Odd reward mechanisms: "I only allow myself to listen to certain music when it's time to write.  When I've accomplished deep work for hours, I reward myself with treats. But only after the work is done." Answering the "what do you do" question: "I am obsessed with products." Adobe purchased his company, Behance Seed investor Best selling author "I help creatives create" How to pursue a side hustle when you work at a big company? "Every person needs to be their authentic self" "You have to feed it. The thing that distracts you. The thing you stay up late to keep working on because you love it.  That's where you should continue to give energy." "A labor of love is always worth it." The Messy Middle -- 820 Evernote notes whittled down to the most effective 120 pieces. Making the leap from individual contributor to manager: "Don't depersonalize it when you become a manager.  A team is like a carefully crafted immune system." "Management is about people.  You have to be at a personal level when you're the manager.  It doesn't scale.  It's not supposed to." "Don't do reviews, do regular check ins... How's it going?" "The stories are the culture of your team.  You're the amplifier of the stories." Qualities to look for in a person to hire: "Every conversation with that person should be more interesting than the last one.  They should become continually more interesting." "There is value on analysis & strategy... But equally important is empathy & intuition." Intuition = truthfulness with self.  High level of self awareness. Be willing to seek feedback.  Be truthful with yourself. "A successful creative entity must be comfortable alternating between the two creative phases: Ideation and Execution." Walt Disney mastered this. "Stimulate people to think differently.  Help people suspend disbelief in themselves.  What if we did this 100X better?" - Larry Page The importance of "staying in the early innings" -- "We're just getting started."  This encourages people to keep trying new things. "Hire people for initiative rather than experience." "Anything extraordinary ever achieved comes from ordinary means." Advice for young professionals -- Find these three overlaps: Figure out what you're genuinely interested in.  What do you stay up doing for fun? What skills do you have or could possess through learning? What is the opportunity? "Take the steps to get into that overlap" Don't make short term money decisions.  Find the overlap over the extra $10K in salary Why we all should have a common place journal Why joining The Learning Leader Circle is a good idea Use the "Get To Know You Document" "Get into the motion of trying things instead of perfecting things." Social Media: Follow Scott on Twitter: @scottbelsky Read: The Messy Middle Connect with me on LinkedIn Join our Facebook Group: The Learning Leader Community To Follow Me on Twitter: @RyanHawk12

As the leader, you are also the steward of the narrative. And if you are not narrating the journey for your team, if you're not telling them the milestones you're passing, the state lines you're crossing, if you're not merchandising the progress that's being made, you can't expect the team to stick together long enough to figure it out. It's one thing to get a team to come and join, people to come and join you to build the team with the vision of the future and the end state that you imagine will be achieved if you work hard. enough, but when day-to-day reality kicks in and you start to fall behind on life, you need to be narrated through. This episode is brought to by Leveraged Learning. Leveraged Learning is a great new book by best-selling author Danny Eni. It's no secret that universities and colleges are struggling to keep pace.

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both as a lifelong learner and as an expert with something to teach. Go to Amazon.com and buy Leveraged Learning, the age of opportunity for lifelong learners and experts with something to teach and buy it today. Welcome to the Learning Leader Show. I am Ryan Hawk. Thanks so much for being here. It is Mindful Monday. Text learners to 4422.2.2.

in order to join thousands of other fellow learning leaders from all over the world. Text learners to 44222. Now, on tonight's featured leader, it's a big one. It's Scott Belski, a true polymath. He currently serves as Adobe's chief product officer. He co-founded Behance in 2006 and served as CEO until Adobe acquired Behance in 2012. Alongside his role, Adobe Scott, is a venture partner at Benchmark, which is a venture capital firm based in San Francisco.

Francisco. In addition to that, he is an internationally known best-selling author. His first incredible book is titled Making Ideas Happen, and his most recent one is The Messy Middle. And Fast Company recently listed him as one of the 100 most creative people in business. So much there. A few of the topics we got into, the qualities that Scott looks for and a person to join his team and his interviewing process. Then the biggest mistake managers make and how to a avoid them, then how to be a better storyteller, as well as some great life slash career advice that is very useful. Ladies and gentlemen, this one is so good with Scott Belski. All right, Scott Belski, joining me from the back of a taxi cab, man. It's so great to have you here

on the Learning Leader Show. Welcome. Ryan, thank you so much for having me. And it's kind of fun to do this out and about. I love it. I think it's more real this way. And this is how it would be if we were just having a call, which I feel. A hundred percent, which we are. Yeah, exactly. I feel very fortunate to be doing this. So I'm curious, man, to get us going.

Yeah. You have an incredible history of work, the things that you've accomplished. And in addition to that, you've spent time around a lot of incredible leaders. And I'm curious from your perspective, when you take a step back and analyze and spend time in those introspective moments, when you think about people who have sustained excellence, What are some of the commonalities you found among those people? Wow. I mean, listen, chief among them is that they also sustained curiosity. I think it's fascinating that when you start to get a lot of attention, you actually

stop paying attention. I mean, even think about what you do when you post something on social media and suddenly you spend more and more of your time checking to see who saw it as opposed to seeing what other people are posting. It's almost as if you enter a void of learning and you stop to, you stop absorbing everything around you for a moment. And imagine now anyone who achieves a level of excellence in their industry where suddenly they're just like not even paying attention anymore. And I think that that's like a fascinating challenge that a lot of very successful people have.

And those that I feel have defied that and have sustained a level of excellence. What they've done, what they've done is they've actually started, they've like kept tuned into their curiosities. They actually say no more often to things that divert them. and they are just constantly, you know, they're just constantly kind of getting a little deeper into the things that fascinate them the most. And in some ways, they actually, when something's out there and published, it's in some ways dead to them. And I admire them for it. I can't say I'm amazing at this. I would aspire to be much better at it. And so like some people that come to mind, for example, that just become like more and more excellent at their craft, take someone like Joe Gabia,

co-founder of Airbnb, who I have found just gets, insanely more curious and more interested in the in the in the in the in the in the global ambition of that of that product in that purpose um someone like a tim ferris or a gary vinerchuk who just with their content they could spend all day fawning over the the fans that they have but instead they are they're kind of you know just i mean gary's still going to yard sales and flipping things and tim ferris is like finding new fascinations like psychedelics or other things like that and just learning as much as he can about them i really admire those people How, so given that you've been able to witness this and see that it's valuable, what are some things you do from a tactical perspective to implement this into your life, to stay curious, to stay, I think, humble in a way, to be thinking about it.

Because I've read, read about the fact that one of the problems is that once you've accomplished big things, you can actually get quite scared because if you, if you produce something else, you're going to get judged again. and that's why people might get much more conservative, not try things. I even heard Paul McCartney talking about this. He's still going strong, releasing another album right now. He doesn't need to do that. And I give big props to people like that. So what are some things that you could do or maybe even a listener after they've experienced some levels of success within their company or they started a company and to not get too conservative?

You know, I think that, yes, part of it is continually tapping into that curiosity and running with it as a opposed to thinking, oh my goodness, my next creation needs to be better than the one before it, because at some point you get yourself into a safe zone where you won't do anything bold and polarizing and therefore nothing extraordinary. I think a part of it is also just almost like getting into the motion of trying things as opposed to perfecting things. Again, like when no one knows, I always have to say anonymity is both a blessing and a curse, right? When you're in the middle of something in the early stages, nobody cares about what you're doing, which is extraordinarily hard because you're not getting any recognition, but also it's great because you can do whatever

the heck you want, and no one holds it against you. And then, of course, that changes as you have anything you're working upon. And I know a lot of your listeners are in big companies that have some sort of legacy to sustain. And I guess the question is, how do you compartmentalize both in a company areas where you can explore stuff without the expectations? And you ask, the original question you had was like for me personally what I'm trying to do is build little windows of time in my day where there's two things I don't do I don't tune into the um inboxes around me trying to peck away at them and try to get ahead of the work that I'm falling behind on I also don't use that time to satisfy my um I call it insecurity work the stuff that I do to just like check to

make sure that everything I've done before is still there you know going and seeing what people are saying on Twitter or going to see how an article is doing or going to see how a book is doing whatever. I mean, you could spend all day every day doing that insecurity work that doesn't move the ball forward. It just kind of makes you feel okay. And it gets in the, it destroys productivity. So I think it's important to have these windows in your day where you are just scraping the bounds of curiosity, just rolling up your sleeves, kind of back to square one, early innings type of mentality. And it gets harder and harder. That deep work that Kyle Newport mentioned on the show before, which I know you're a big proponent of.

And in fact, you even have some ways that you reward yourself that I've read when you spend good portions of time and deep work. It's interesting, Scott, I brought up deep work a lot when I go out and give keynotes. And I find that that might elicit more responses than other topics I cover because people struggle with it so much. What are some of the things you do? I know the incentives you can share to make sure that you're doing regular, especially for you because we're going to get to exactly your. titles and everything that you do here in a second. But what are the ways that you incentivize yourself to make sure you're spending time and deep work on a regular basis?

Well, you know, I'll tell you, there's a few things I do that go on the spectrum from serious to hilarious, maybe. But I certainly compartmentalize time on my schedule. I certainly take flights, airplanes very seriously. I seldom connect to Wi-Fi. Instead, I try to use that sort of force period of disconnection to do sort of the deeper, the deeper work types of things alone. You know, I enjoy that time alone.

And then more on the spectator towards the edge of the, really side of the spectrum. I have a music list that I only allow myself to listen to when I'm doing that deep work. And so I sort of savor it. And only when I'm in like the writing mode or the deep kind of crunching mode, do I allow myself to listen to it. And I even go as far as having some crazy snacks that I like have just kind of preserve for those times because it sounds crazy.

But it is all psychology. It's all kind of hardwiring or short-circuiting, rather, our own reward system and our own selves to do this stuff. Because I do believe that the natural course of society in life is actually a headwind as opposed to a tailwind when it comes to that nature of creative work. Hmm. I love the reward mechanisms you put in place. And it sounds funny, but it makes sense.

I have a certain songs I only listen to when I. I write to get into that kind of mode. And it also triggers, it's like a trigger for me to say, okay, it's writing time. Every once in a while, though, one of those songs might pop up on Pandora and I have to quickly skip it. It's like, it's not right. I'm in the gym. I'm not right.

I can't listen to that. I don't deserve this. It's weird how our brains work, man. But okay, so Scott, let's say, let's say you're at a dinner party with your wife. You guys are having a good time. And the majority of the people don't know you or never, never heard of you. And they come up to you and say, hey, Scott. good to meet you. What do you do? How do you respond? I mean, listen, I'm an obsessive

product. I love building products for creative people. That's always been my passion. That's what I do during my day job now. Newly came into Adobe as their chief product officer, you know, having had an experience in the past with Adobe, having them, you know, after they purchased my company, Behanse, which was a long, drawn out, you know, messy middle of an experience building a company. And that was ultimately acquired by Adobe and spent some integrating it, then left and then came back. So that's, yeah, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, I'm I'm also, uh, I'm also, uh, I'm also an investor. So I've, I've, I've partnered with a, uh, a number of and of course as an author, which is the latest project that I'm super excited about.

Yeah, Chase Jarvis would say you have a lot of dashes. And I would agree. Chase is a fantastic guest here as well. And I'm curious, what does Adobe think of all the dashes? Because when you, I've worked at big companies and done things on the side. And I've found that there are certainly great secure leaders that are happy with it and they love it and they think it's an advantage. And then there are other rather insecure leaders who hate it.

what is it like, I assume Adobe's good with this, given the fact that they purchase your company, they now re-employ you, you have books and everything else. How does that go? At this point in my career, I'm doing things that I feel I can be best at and can learn the most through. And so obviously, I'm very upfront about the teams that I work with. And of course, when I came back to Adobe, I mean, it's obviously very, I was very upfront. This is sort of the healthy mix, if you will, of the things in my life that I think put me at my best.

I just like any sort of dish where you add a bunch of different spices and all together, it's perfect. But if you take them on each on their own, I mean, nutmeg doesn't taste so good. So in my case, what I have found, and I found this the hard way, because I've certainly made some career mistakes that can also talk about. But what I have found is that I love, I love building teams. I love helping teams build great products, preferably for creative people, because I find that that's a unique way of adding value to the world is helping creatives create. I also love partnering with early stage entrepreneurs and actually think that keeps me grounded in what's new and next in the tech world.

And I wouldn't do my job building products at Adobe well if I didn't have that experience. And then as an author, how I understand things is I write them down and I share them and I get feedback. That is just the motion that I find works for me. So that's just who I am. And I think every listener, right, needs to kind of make sure that they're able to be their authentic self where they're working. And if they're not, they're never going to be their best, right? I mean, if some part of us has to be suppressed, you have to ask yourself, why would I do that? And I go to the practical realities of, you know, maybe you have to wait until the right opportunity comes around and you can't quit your job tomorrow and all those things.

But we should all be looking to work in the overlap of all of our interests. Like that is the mecca, right? And I think we should be aspiring for that. I 100% agree. I started this as a side kind of a hustle three and a half, almost four years ago, Scott. And now it's become my full-time work based on obviously this is the foundation. And then everything that comes with it, some of the advising, speaking, those types of things, similar things that you do. And the reason I think it worked is because it started as a side fascination, which is one of your

terms, a phrase that you've coined. And I, that's what I urge people. I was recently doing a Q&A at the end of a talk and people said, well, I want to do something like that, but it's, but it's hard to make money. And I said, the good thing about it is the reason why I think side hustles or side fascinations are, are good to pursue is because at the beginning of them, you don't need to make money. It's good, it's good to have something else that, where you can actually, it can support your family or your responsibilities if you're a, like in my case, a husband and a dad, you need to make money and then do it do it in my case for years before it can be potentially come the real thing when it started it was just a fascination there was no end point to say hey i want this to become the full-time thing it just kind of naturally worked because i was following my genuine intellectual curiosity and you've got to feed it you know i mean one of the things i talk about in the messy middle in the beginning is a little bit about how you know where to give your energy and um and you there's there's nothing there's no greater of a signal of something of something of something something that you'll be successful at and the things that distract you. And I would also say that if

the thing you're doing does not distract you, it's probably not going to succeed. We have to pay attention to where our energy goes in our minds. And at the end of the day, you want to allocate more energy to the things you could stay up late at night, holding your eyes open to read more about, right? I mean, those are the things that you're going to make a dent in. But some of those things, to your point, start aside fascinations. I mean, if you're in school, the things you're doing on the side. I mean, you're not going to, if you want to graduate, you got to, you got to allocate only so much energy to do things on the side. And the same thing with a full-time job at work. But I do think all of us should be aspiring towards inching closer to the genuine fascinations we have

because I got to tell you, like I've seen a lot of different people's entrepreneurial journeys, including my own. A labor of love always pays off. Sell them how you may expect. But I do believe that a labor of love always pays off. Let's hear a little bit about that labor as well as the messy middle book. By the way, is a, I'm appreciative of your team for sending me an early copy. I know it sounds like for whatever reason these were not easy to get. So I'm very appreciative. And it is a, it's a big book, but it is such a, the question I always ask when it comes

to books, because you know how it is, you probably are the same way. You get sent these every day. You have books showing up on your doorstep. And the question to answer, I think, is always, is, it useful? Is this a useful book? And this one absolutely checks that box as being useful for anyone in any form of, I think, leadership capacity, which is what this show is all about. So what is the messy middle and why did this book need to be written? Well, the book was inspired by the incredible volatility that I saw a lot of my friends who were

executives and companies leading big, bold product turnarounds or cultural transformations or entrepreneurs embarking on new ventures or creative writers and artists who were kind of going through a major bold creative project. A common across all of these types of folks in my life was the fact that they endured a very messy middle, as I like to call it, and I went through the same. And what it is is it's the volatility, right? It's the fact that there are extreme lows and extreme highs, things everything seems to be going south. You're navigating extreme ambiguity, uncertainty, anonymity, self-doubt. And then everything starts to, or something starts to work. Like, whether the team feels like it really worked well together today or the product seemed to do something

well today or we just made a presentation that seemed to go well, something resonated with everyone. What was that? And the messy middle is about finding ways to endure those lows, to short-circuit the team's reward system, to stay at it long enough to figure it out. to keep ourselves engaged and find rewards, even when there aren't any external ones yet, and to optimize the heck out of everything that works, whether it is how we manage our team, how we make decisions as leaders, and also how our products are performing, you know, the things that are actually working. And I just realized that, listen, there's no end-to-end business book that is going to walk you

through the middle. Let me just disclaim that up front. But the best possibility is to have a number of prompts at the right time and the right place, some of which are contradictory, by the way, to just help you find your intuition, like really discover the thing that resonates most at the moment for you. And you can have that through your past experiences or, I hope, through a book like this, you know, that actually captures others prompts that worked for them at different points of their messy metals that may work for you. It's so good. Okay.

Are you cool if we get into some specifics that I jot it down after reading it? Of course. Yeah. Specific kind of thoughts slash questions that kind of appear my mind and now that after we've been talking for a few minutes. So one of the things that I think a lot of people that listen to the show go through and something that I've gone through and messed up big time for way too long was when I made that initial leap from individual contributor and I worked in the sales capacity in big companies, individual contributor to then being a manager. In my case, a manager of my peers. It's not always the case, but it is it is at times. And it's a little bit different when you're starting the company because when you started, I'm guessing you're doing just about everything.

And then you do become a manager, though, as well as a doer. Not that managers are not, but you know what I mean. So I'm curious, what advice do you give to people who are making that initial leap? Because there's so many mistakes all of us make when we do this if we don't get the proper help or mentor. And even if we do, we still usually make mistakes. What advice do you give to people at that specific step in their career? Well, part of it is to not make the mistake of depersonalizing management. I think that when many people become managers, they start to think, oh, okay, it's less about

relationships now. It's more about scaling my managerial capacity, whether it's through adding more layers or processes or more generalizing, you know, the people that I'm now responsible for when in fact, the best managers recognize that a team is like a careful. managed immune system. You kind of have to always be on the lookout for little infections. You have to understand not the team, but as much like individual level of where people are at. Like what are they worried about? Like where are they right now in terms of their family and their personal life and every. I mean, these things actually matter when they say that they don't and it should all be business. But in fact, like management is about people, right? And managing people is

inherently something that doesn't actually scale. Contrary to what people would say in big business, you have to be in a personal level. And it's when you start to lose that personal connection is when you know you need another layer of management, by the way, because everyone needs to be on the radar in a personal way, I believe, with the person that is responsible in part for their career. And so that's one of the first mistakes. You know, keep it personal. Like, you know, you sit down with people at Adobe, we have these things called check-ins. We actually don't do reviews where everyone reviews everyone else. Instead, we sit down and we have a dedicated meeting where we don't talk about the product or the market or anything else. We literally, it's like,

how's it going? Like, where are you right now? What are you worried about? What are you thinking about? Those conversations don't happen frequently enough. And I think managers sometimes abstract themselves out of some of that personal stuff when in fact they should be doing the opposite. I would say, you know, another thing to think about as you become a manager is the stories that all aggregated together are the culture of your team. Culture is a word that's thrown around so often, but in essence, it's really just a series of stories that are repeated

that people resonate with that stand for something. And as a manager in some ways, you are now not only a part author of the future stories, but you're also the amplifier of them. And I can think of many years throughout the history of building B. Hans, where we would recount the funny things we did when we reached 100,000 members and the funny things we did to make that some certain outcomes and stuff like that.

And those stories really, in aggregate, helped us to find the culture that drove our intuition around decisions in the business. The personalization part is so interesting that I had no idea. So I remember it was, I think, the third day when I became a manager, I was 26, I believe. And somebody in their mid-40s walked into my office and she said, my husband cheated on me. And he wants a divorce. I want to, he wants a divorce. What, what should I do?

I'm sitting here thinking, what is happening? This is not my job. And then I, and then I remember I spoke with my dad and some others. And they said, oh, buddy, that is definitely your job. That's the way it is. You are a person. She is a person. People tell their bosses things like this.

And I know you may not have thought that when you're an individual contributor, but this is what you signed up for. And that's a not only is that part of the gig, that is the gig. That's what it's about is taking care or at least being there, having those types of conversations with somebody like that, even if there's no way I had the answer. But she wanted to talk to her boss. And that's who I was at that time. And I needed to accept that and realize that that is a massive, massive part of the job. It is.

And I think people that sort of say, hey, work and home are different, everything, you know, leave one at home. and, you know, different person. No one, people shouldn't be different at work. I mean, you shouldn't be a different person. In fact, I think the most successful people I know are truly authentic in everything that they do. Yes. And so you want to, you want to optimize for that, for your people that you're managing

as well as for yourself as a manager. Of course, you know, there's what's what you should be shared and how you should be sharing it and whatever else. But it is, these are all dots, right, of where people are and what they're dealing with and how to help them. And it's important to a, to a, to approach. management in that way. I'm curious, another tactical part of being the person who's a manager. We all go through hiring and firing. And I'd be curious to know, Scott, what do you, I know it depends on the role, obviously. So there are specifics that that are not to be answered now. But when you're just looking in general for someone to add to your team, somebody to hire, what are some of the qualities you look for and someone to bring on? Yeah, I would say that there are a few things.

First of all, I love it when I meet people with whom every conversation is a step function more interesting than the one before it. When you meet someone and you have that conversation and then the next time you meet them, it's sort of like the same conversation recycled and you realize, okay, it's not going to get anywhere further with this person. It may be interesting, but it's a replay. To me, like those are not necessarily folks that I find together we build off each other and make something greater than our. ourselves. Whereas sometimes you meet people where the next time you meet them, it just not only picks up where you left off, but it goes to another level. And that is a very special thing. And that's why when I do hire, I try to have at least more than one conversation with each candidate so I can kind of determine whether this is going to be that type of relationship or not.

I think the other thing I look about, look for, especially when I'm hiring leaders of product and customer-facing services or products or experiences is, I'm trying to find people that value analysis and strategy, yet also value building empathy with a customer and their own intuition. You can have so many great people that are good with spreadsheets and analysis and traditional management and everything else, but it's rare to find someone who also knows how to amp up the volume of their own intuition and make some of those bold bets that are not backed by data,

but end up making all the difference. Because if you look through the history of business, most of those that are actually not necessarily governed by data. Otherwise, other people would have also made the same decision and it wouldn't have been an opportunity. And it's important to look for people like that as well. Intuition and gut instinct are interesting topics that have come up a few times. I've spoken with professional poker players about this specifically because a lot of them say that it's intuition based for your success. And certainly there's math involved. How does one, Scott, you think, develop better intuition?

Well, I think part of intuition comes from truthfulness with yourself. Are you, when you're trying to, when you're making decisions out of fear or when you're making decisions based out of false attribution of what's worked before. So something worked well, but actually wasn't something that I did. But I'm thinking that it was something that I did. You know, I'm not being truthful to myself. I think those are the things that interfere with intuition or like great, great decisions directly from the heart.

but when you are really appropriately critical of everything that works and you can properly attribute things to whether it's good timing, luck, others in your market, other people in your team other than yourself, and when you take blame for the things that didn't work and the things that you screwed up on, when you like kind of increasingly get closer and closer to whatever is quote unquote the truth, I think that is when our gut instinct starts to actually have a tremendous amount of credibility. And that's where we kind of tap into the sixth sense of what's going on. I mean, when you really feel in your gut, what is going on with your product, with your customers in the market, real shoulder to shoulder empathy with the people struggling with the problem you're trying to solve. And of course, everything I'm saying now requires a lot of self-awareness, requires oftentimes asking yourself difficult questions, seeking feedback when no one's giving it to you.

We talked earlier about things that change when you become a manager. There's another one. You know, colleagues are more likely to tell you, hey, you screw that up, Ryan. But when you're suddenly their boss, they're a little less likely to do that. And how do you continue to seek that? So you can just get a better semblance of the truth to have better intuition. And this is really good. So one of the, I'm pulling a few notes from the book and just love your thoughts slash expansion on it.

So one of the highlights for me was a successful creative entity must be constantly. comfortable alternating between the two creative phases. Those are ideation and execution. And I found this to be, it's obviously simple, but beautiful and true. And so the ones who are good at this, one, maybe you could think of examples or how we all could be better at this. Because I think there are some people have ideas for days. They just go on and on, but then they never execute. And there are others who struggle to come up with ideas for whatever reason. But if somebody gives them something to do, they'll go and do it. But the best are the ones who can do both. And so I'm curious, how do we get better at that skill to be a successful creative?

Well, it's a great question. And actually, it's one of the few things I actually talked about in both of the Massey Middle, the new book as well as making ideas happen, which is a book from eight years ago. One of the things that is in both books, because it was so relevant, is Walt Disney. As an example of someone who was both an incredible imaginereer, you know, a engineering type person and was deeply creative

as well as someone who was incredible executor. And I talk about how he would have three rooms in quote unquote rooms, like actual real rooms, physical rooms, but also three personas, where he would have this kind of off the wall, brainstorm creative room space mode where he would go into where everything was it was blue sky everything's okay you can't shoot down anything everything's optional everything's everything's possible right and then the second room was sort of like the slaughterhouse where you pick apart and and and really

criticize every edge of everything and it was just like a messy aggressive space to be in and he was also able to adopt that persona and then finally the third room is sort of the room of reconciliation where you would try to make sense of both the possibilities as well as the risks. And what was amazing was that he was truly able to compartmentalize both his own mode as well as the team in the spaces that they were having these conversations and brainstorms and making these decisions. And I try to aspire to have a similar approach where I can sit with a team and really not be in the critical mode, but rather really think about off the wall.

like, let's just think, like, what are possibilities? What are we not thinking of as well as start to have the more pragmatic approach, but not intermix the two? I think that's the problem as managers is we'll go into a meeting that our teams presenting, and we think our job is to kind of bring it down to earth, be pragmatic. And the truth is, is that's a third of the job, right? We have to also stimulate people to think differently. I know the great anecdote about Larry Page at Google,

where teams would come in and say, here's our plan, and we want to do this and whatever. And he'd say, that's great. what would it take to do 100x that? And the team would be like, what? You know, a hundred times this? Like, we're coming in with an ambitious plan as it is. But what he was doing, and I also talk about this in the messy middle, is he was sort of suspending the team's disbelief in themselves.

Like if they thought it was hard to achieve X, you know, try achieving 100 X. And what would we have, what assumptions would we have to completely abandon, you know, or transcend in order to even contemplate achieving 100 X? And I think that's a very interesting thing that a leader must also apply to a team, aside from sheer execution and pragmatism. What about storytelling? You've talked about the importance of staying in the early innings and sustaining this. We're still just getting started thought process, which is interesting because with some of the business partners I work with, we spend a lot of time in the messy middle, or I would call it the messy beginning because we're spending three hours, coming up with ideas and it is it is so gratifying to make some progress.

The guys that I do this with are listening, probably smiling right now. But it does feel great to make little bits of progress, which is kind of valuing the merits of slow cooking, as you might say. But I'm curious from a narrative perspective, from a storytelling, the importance of becoming good at this, of staying in the early innings. Why is this, I know it kind of all goes together. Why is this so important? That's a great question.

And one of the analogies I use in the book is that when you're embarking on a bold journey with your team, it's almost like, and this is like one without immediate rewards and traction and everything else, it's like taking an extremely long, you know, multiple day road trip with the windows of the car blocked out. So the people in the backseat have no idea where they're going or where they are or if any progress is being made. you're either sitting at a light, you know, and just waiting, or you are driving and making progress. And I talk about how, I love it, by the way, they were having this conversation in the middle of New York City. This is the most amazing thing. If you're honks and whatever, that's because this is real. But anyways, but as the leader, you are also the steward of the narrative. And if you are not narrating the journey for your team, if you're not telling them the milestones you're passing, the state lines you're crossing, if you're not.

if you're not merchandising the progress that's being made, you can't expect the team to stick together long enough to figure it out. It's one thing to get a team to come and join, people to come and join you to build the team with the vision of the future and the end state that you imagine will be achieved if you work hard enough. But when day-to-day reality kicks in and you start to fall behind on life,

you need to be narrated through. And so there is a sense of merchandising that leaders must do. Now, at the same time, I also make the case that you can't celebrate fake wins. You can't celebrate things that condone behaviors that aren't ultimately net positive to the outcome. For example, if you pay for an award and then you say, congratulations team, we got an award, that actually incentivizes bad behavior, which is, hey, let's just make up crap that is telling us we're making progress. That's not effective.

but when you make up milestones that are actually progressively bringing you towards the right end, those must be created and celebrated. And that is where the creativity comes in in narrating that journey for your team. What's the early innings part of that? I think the nature of the notion of the early innings, and I think about the state of a team in the early stages when you have the, you have the curiosity, you're open to trying different things, you're willing to throw it all away and try again

if you know you're not going in the right direction. And then when of course things start to, and by the way, also you hire people based on initiative rather than experience. You're not necessarily yet a resume snob. There's a lot of great behaviors in the early innings of a venture or a journey or turnaround or bold project in a big company that for some reason we start to lose as we get later stage.

and so I talk about how do we stay in that early inning mindset? How do we have an interview with somebody who doesn't necessarily have the right pedigree on his or her resume, but stands out as someone who has a history of taking initiative and anything that's interesting to them? And if we can get them jazz up about what we're doing, they're going to exceed our expectations. How do we make sure that if we are a year into building a product and we know that in our gut, it's not going to naturally grow and be successful over time, It's not going to scale, but we don't have the guts to throw away the work because of the sunk cost. How do we stay in the early innings so we can actually say, hey, let's just try another attack.

Let's just put it to the side. Let's just push pause. I just think we can't lose those tendencies just because time has passed. I love the kind of the maintaining and sustaining that we're just getting started as well as what you said it quickly. But I love it. hiring people for initiative rather than experience. How have you been able to maintain this thought process as you've grown and become much more successful?

Because it's like you said, it's easier when you're early to do that. But then people do become resume snobs or they do say, oh, not enough experience. You know, I mean, I've heard that personally. And I've heard others say that in group meetings where I'm fighting for someone maybe who is less experienced but has some of the other qualities that I really value curiosity, willingness to work, right, initiative,

as you mentioned. How does one maintain that? You know, I'm trying to think of the great answer to that and thinking back

about even a lot of recent decisions that I've made within a big company. I would say that it's absolutely crucial to remember that anything extraordinary

is ultimately a business of exceptions and has never achieved the ordinary means. And so as much as you become accustomed to your processes and the norms

of your industry and the best practices of your teams and the traditional, you know, what you look for in hiring into certain levels and roles and how many years of experience someone should have before they get promoted and what decisions and data points you look for before investing in a product or go to market, whatever, all this other stuff, these are the playbooks of business, right? That books are written about, the business school perpetuates. And yet, time and time again, we're reminded that nothing extraordinary is ever achieved through ordinary means.

and it is a business of exceptions. And so the buses are honking to celebrate this fact. So to constantly remind yourself of that, here's what it does on a daily basis. It makes you look for those possible exceptions. It makes you question yourself when I'm thinking about someone who I think is killing it and exceeding expectations in every which way and who I want to be a pinnacle of an example in the organization of who's just doing extraordinary work. but they're like two years shy when they would typically be considered for a promotion,

it doesn't matter. I'm going to fight for them because that is an example of making the organization stronger. And by reminding myself that in some ways, rules are meant to be questioned and sometimes broken is important. Now, of course, I'm all about the benefits of process. And I think that there's a lot of structure in an organization needs to be respected and upheld for a reason. It's just a reminder that all of us that as leaders, our job is to question the norms. And the greatest work we ever do is when we go against the grain. That is true because that's the hardest thing to do.

Scott, a few more minutes. I would imagine that on a regular basis you get asked by people, whether it's just direct questions for you to mentor them or advice type questions. And let's think of somebody who is early in their career. be just graduated college, smart, ambitious, thoughtful type people, ones who are probably listening to this show. Are there some core pieces of advice, general kind of life slash career advice that you give to those types? And what are a piece or two, if so? When I get calls from some people starting out of their career, and they're oftentimes

asking me, well, do I take this job here? Do I take like a banking job? Or do I go in and join to start up or do I start my own thing or whatever else. I mean, obviously it's hard to tell people what to do. So instead, what I do is I, I just encourage them to work within the overlap of three things and to do everything possible in their career to get closer to the overlap of these three things. And those three things are your genuine interest, really, like what you can stay up at night and spend the weekend working on. Skills you either have or can easily possess. And then the third is opportunity. And to recognize and be honest with yourself about when you're not working in those three things, like for example, if you just love music and that's your genuine interest and you have the

opportunity of living in New Orleans, like a music capital of the world, but you can't carry a note for the life of you, you're not working in your overlap if you're in a band. However, if you're the manager of a band and you have good business skills, maybe you are working in the overlap of those three things. So being honest with yourself about what those three things are around you, the opportunities, the skills, and the genuine interests. And then taking every step you can in your career to getting closer to that overlap, even if it means making an incrementally, you know, less salary in the near term, a lot of young people that I've mentored over the years are like, well, you know, this job is offering me $10,000 more than this job. And I know that's a lot of money,

especially we have a lot of student debt and everything else. But I'm also like, you can't make the decision for that. That is pennywise pound foolish. That's short-term, greed as at the expense of long-term greed. You've got to get closer to that intersection because that's where the greatest opportunities. That's where the greatest things happen in careers. And you'd be silly to make a short-term move that compromises that. When you were younger, were you able to have this type of perspective or no? How did you figure this out? Well, I certainly wasn't able to articulate it as clearly, but I did. You know, I think, you know, I out of college, in college, I studied some design and business, among a few other things.

And I had choices of where to go. I ended up cutting my teeth on Wall Street. That's what you did in 2002 when you graduated college. And I found myself in this boring, mundane finance job at Goldman Sachs. I was like, I got to get the heck out of here, right? A year and a half into it. I just, it wasn't for me. I went to my manager and I talked to her and she was like, well, if you had one dream job, what would it be?

And I said, well, I'm really interested in, like, leadership development. and how organizations are structured and how succession planning happens and all this stuff. And she was like, you know, it so happens that there isn't a group in the firm in the executive office that does this. Do you want to go interview with them? So I was like, sure. So I went to interview and I realized that even though I didn't want to be in an investment bank over the long term the course of my career, I realized that this was an opportunity that

presented itself with skills that I had or could easily possess that got me closer to my genuine interest of leading and dissecting kind of the art of leadership and how organizations are creatively designed and it ended up being one of the most important experiences of my life, even though I always knew that that wasn't what I wanted to do for the course of my career. And so I think that that was like an intuition for me. It was like, okay, if I can get incrementally closer to something, I should take that opportunity regardless. Great advice.

Thank you, Scott. And thank you for investing, the time which I cannot imagine how much of it was to write the messy middle, finding your way through the hardest and most crucial part of any bold venture. And I think this applies really to people in a variety of roles, certainly creatives, but this could be so useful for somebody that works in a big corporation that needs some real life maxim, some ideas, some thoughts. and I like how it's really broken down and how you put it together. And that's why I said, I can't imagine how long it took to do this because it's amazingly well done.

I'm not going to allow it. Well, how long was it? From start to finish as it is it one of those 20 year projects or what's it? Yeah. The stuff that I was collecting for this book in boardroom meetings at 1 a.m. conference calls or talks with people I mentor or entrepreneurs going through an acquisition or things that I went through during the acquisition of Behanced Adobe and everything else. This stuff all happened over the course of the last seven to eight years. Obviously, it took about two years, the last two years, to bring it all together, call it from about 820 insights down to about 120 or so that made the cut.

And that is the book. It's 100 and so insights that are woven together in these three kind of narratives around enduring the volatility, optimizing everything that works, and then not screwing it all up in the final mile of a project or product launch or acquisition or end of any sort of project. It was emotional also because I had to relive my own stuff, especially the parts that I wanted to forget, the trauma of my own doing. And it was somewhat cathartic. I mean, I'm glad I survived the project, but no doubt there was a messy middle of the project writing the messy middle. It's pretty meta.

It's great. You had 820 ideas scaled down to about 100, 120. Yeah, that was brutal. How did you compile all this just tactically? Yeah, actually, I had an Evernote, an ultimate Evernote folder. and I had each note had an insight title and then I started to like add more oh there we go add more to each insight and and start to pose questions that I wanted to answer through like the research phase for the book and get more anecdotes and interviews and that sort of stuff and and I kept kind of calling and

aggregating and killing and prioritizing and it was a lot of like a few years of that sort of touch and go treatment and then eventually just like heads down writing sessions getting feedback from folks testing some things out in social media to see if people agreed or disagreed and that sort of process. So it was really interesting. But all the while I was saying, like, I'm never going to do this again. Oh, my gosh, what did I sign up for? It was really, it was, but I, you know, I'm happy. And I wanted to, I also wanted to write something that I would, you know, want to show to, you know, my kids 50 years from now, you know. And I think it's something, it's a body of work I'm proud I will see. I hope it just, I hope it provokes things for your listeners.

And I just hope that people take away a few things and make them look at the challenges and opportunities they're facing differently. That would make me feel like it was a success. Well, one, having a commonplace book, so to speak, whether it's digital or physical, digital is easier because you can do it on your phone, like your 820 notes within Evernote is a great idea tactically for anyone to take away. Having a regular place to upload thoughts. documents, articles, maxims, whatever it may be, is just a fantastic idea in general. You can look back over the course of it. Everyone should be doing it at all times just when something comes top of mind,

because you'll forget it if you don't. And I think that's just where all human beings and life happens. So I think that's a great idea. And just too, I urge people to buy this book. Really buy it, digest it, read it. It's just really good. I can't say that enough. I really appreciate that.

Thank you. Thank you, man. I appreciate that too. I urge people to buy it. And thank you, Scott, for joining me investing your time in the middle of New York City and a cab and walking around. This is real and it's fun. And I learned a lot of pages of notes. And I love to continue our dialogue as we both progress, man.

Absolutely, man. Thanks so much for having it. Where would you send my listeners to learn more about you online? Hey, I encourage people to follow along. I try to share everything else that's interesting to me on Twitter at Scott Dalski or on Instagram. or on Instagram at Scott Belski. And, but I'm pretty easy to reach. And I'm always open to feedback and other ideas that riff upon stuff we talked about or other

things people read in the book. That's how to find me. Awesome. Well, thanks so much, Scott. And like I said, I want to keep this one going as we both progress and talk to you soon, man. Thanks, right. All right.

Wow. Sometimes you have one of those conversations where basically everything they say knocks you back and you want to write it down. and you feel like you were learning so much. This is one of those conversations. So appreciative of Scott for investing his time with me. I really enjoyed it. Learned a lot.

Have pages of notes. I hope you did as well. If so, I'd love it if you would write to review, subscribe and rate the show in iTunes Apple Podcasts. That's right to review. Subscribe and rate the show. Hopefully five stars on iTunes Apple Podcasts, as well as tell a friend if they haven't heard of it before.

Let it really helps spread the message so that others can be positively impover. by what we're doing. Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. I'm so appreciative of you for that. All right. See you next week. Can't wait. This episode is brought to you by Leveraged Learning. Leveraged Learning is a great new book by best-selling author Danny Eni. It's no secret that universities and colleges are struggling to keep pace. It's sad but true. These institutions are leaving many of our individual and collective needs for learning and growth sorely unmet. This crisis is an opportunity for the experts and professionals

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Excellent. Thank you. Thank you so much. Especially with everything going on, like you're not sitting there with notes. You're just able to riff off the cup. I find to be really impressive that in the midst of, of other things potentially getting your attention, you're able to do that as impressive, man.

It really is. It was a fun, it was a fun experiment. We survived. Absolutely. Tell me when it's a chair. It publishes. I'm really excited to share it when it comes out in October. Thank you.

I'll send you a note as soon as it goes live. It'll be probably, you know, right around lunchtime. Excellent. Okay. Yeah, can be posted. All right. Thanks, Scott. Okay.

Bye.