The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 321: Jay Acunzo - Why You Should Question Best Practices & Act Like An Investigator

Episode Date: July 28, 2019

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk Full show notes can be found at www.LearningLeader.com  #321: Jay Acunzo Jay Acunzo is the founder of the media company Marketing Showrunners, author of the book Break the Wheel, and the host and producer of more than a dozen docuseries about creativity at work. He's a former digital media strategist at Google, head of content at HubSpot, and Vice President of Content and Community at the VC firm NextView.Jay's work has been cited in courses at Harvard Business School and by writers at the New York Times, the Washington Post, FastCompany, Fortune, Entrepreneur, and more. Salesforce called him "a creativity savant," while the American City Business Journals named him as one of Boston's "50 On Fire." Show notes: Leaders who sustain excellence = Curiosity gets you the ability to constantly reinvent yourself Ex: A basketball player who works on a new part of his/her game every summer (constantly adding to the game) Intrinsic motivation Telic type -- Get to level 1, 2, and going... "When you're curious you're constantly turning it over and over..." Be a sensitive skeptic -- Keeping dispirit ideas at the same time "You have to be open and at the same time question everything." Anthony Bourdain -- An inspiration -- Why does that inspire me?  What do I bring to the table?  Be open to all, but skeptical Bourdain -- He's able to sit with anybody and pull out emotional moments from what seemed a normal day. Parts Unknown is not about geography, but with people and their emotions.  "We experience his work with lots of emotion." Best interviewers: 2 types: Conversationalists: Bourdain, Bill Simmons, Conan -- They aren't about the clever question, it's about the environment they create, the trust they build. Questioners: Terry Gross, Kara Swisher - They are genius in the simple questions, and the follow ups... How do you feel leading up to a big moment? A specific anticipatory feeling.  Before getting on stage, think, "Wow, I get to do this." Not, I have to do this. Process to prepare for a speech: Wind down before the gig Rehearse in the office days before, film it, use it as game tape.  Practice, practice, practice. Create muscle memory -- "Don't memorize it, memorialize it." "When I make something, I want to feel something.  I have to put in the reps." Thoughts on "best practices?" "The image in my head is, 'that's the way we've always done things.'"  Must rather find the best approach How to do this? Don't run a faulty equation for your work Don't build on lagging indicators Don't miss variables... You must know the current context "Stop acting like an expert, start acting like an investigator." The 3 Psychological Barriers: Why we aren't making great decisions: The Pike Syndrome:  A feeling of powerlessness after repeated failure (named for the experiment of conditioning a pike to not eat minnows by hiding those minnows behind glass).  Solution: "first-principle"insights about customers The Foraging choice: The decision between exploiting your current position or exploring other possibilities (named for the idea that human decisions under high-stress condition often mirror foraging behavior in animals.  Solution: "Aspirational anchors" for you and/or your team Cultural Fluency: Your behavior when the world unfolds according to the expected norm (a concept honed by a man who ran experiments on his friends and family at a picnic).  Solution: "trigger questions" to add cultural disfluency How to help people develop intuition? Intuition is not an instant clarity generator -- "The ability to consider the environment." --> Ask great questions about context. Break into knowable parts You -- People doing work Customers -- Stakeholder -- who the work is for Resources -- to make it happen Ask useful questions: "Set aside the desire to be right for the desire to get it right." Common mistakes new managers make: They "have all the answers."  Ask questions, Remove ego. Emotion based decisions -- Surround self with the right people to help with deficiencies Qualities Jay looks for when making hiring decisions: Can you do the work? Can I understand who you are? Skip right to the good stuff -- "What's the best story you've ever written?" Want people with an intrinsic desire to create -- Love side projects like his sports blog Advice: Career path is BS -- It's laughable.  Your 20's are about exploration... "Try a lot of stuff."  Do side projects Bad advice: "The idea that being the best is a real thing.  It's ridiculous." Focus on your own body of work, not others.

Stop acting like an expert and start acting like an investigator. Because an expert cares about absolutes. We need the right idea in theory. But an investigator cares about evidence. And so instead of just glomming on to an answer, by the way, that answer usually comes from somebody else, we get really good at asking great questions. So especially in the role of a team leader, that's huge.

Because not only do you self-reflect and investigate well when you ask great questions, you unlock the knowledge of your team. Instead of giving them the playbook or making sure they're running it, you're asking for their input. And now you get a much more motivated, much more engaged, much more proactive group of people. Welcome to the Learning Leader Show,

brought to you by Brixie and Meyer. I am Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Text learners to 44222. In order to join tens of thousands of learning leaders from all over the world, receive mindful Monday updates what I'm reading, watching, thinking about, and writing. Also, the opportunity to be part of my book launch team, text learners to 44222. Now on tonight's

featured leader to great Jay Ocunzzo, founder of the media company Marketing Showrunners, author of the book, Break the Wheel, and the host and producer of more than a dozen docu-series about creativity at work. He's a former digital media strategist at Google. head of content at HubSpot. Jay's work has been cited in courses at Harvard by writers of the New York Times, Washington Post Fast Company, Fortune, and he's listed as one of Boston's 50 on fire. A few of the topics we discussed. The three psychological barriers to making good decisions and how to break through them. Then how to turn intuition into a practical skill. And then Jay shares his preparation process for big moments and how you can implement what's best for you.

Ladies and gentlemen, this one is so good. It's Jay Ocunzo. All right, Jay, Ocunzo, so good to have you here on The Learning Leaders Show. Welcome, man. Thanks, Ryan. I am fascinated by leaders who have found a way to sustain excellence over an extended period of time. And your career is one of excellence, as well as those that you've associated with. When you take a step back and reflect and think about those commonalities of leaders who have sustained excellence, what have you found to be the norm amongst those people? Yeah, it's funny. I wrote the first book last year.

I'm writing in the next book. I want to focus on something to do with consistency because I'm so focused on, are fascinated by that too. So I think, you know, the cliche is curiosity, but I think it's actually what curiosity gets you, which is this ability to constantly reinvent. And I don't mean create wholesale change. I mean add new and more relevant wrinkles all the time. You know, I liken it to, I grew up playing basketball and I always admired those players. I love the stories of that player who comes out of college and they're a shooter. And then in the offseason, they add a better handle.

And in the next off season, they improve on defense. Like they're constantly adding and tinkering and tweaking. And, you know, so I will dub that the art of reinvention. I think great and long-lasting leaders master the art of reinvention. How do you, because I certainly think, I actually believe curiosity is a learned skill, and I think it is a skill to be curious. What are your thoughts on curiosity? I mean, in my own career, I feel like it's about trying to find intrinsic motivation to do the work, and anything else just isn't effective. So if you're motivated by just generating an end result or you just want to clock out a certain time or it feels like a chore, there's actually a psychological. term for that that game theorists are in perpetual fear of. It's called TELIC, TELIC. So I actually had to study game theory at a startup I worked for because we created gamified content.

And TELIC experiences are the type. I'm sure people who have ever played any video game at all know this. It's like you beat level one in Mario and then you get to level two and you keep dying halfway through. So to get to the point where you keep dying, you have to continue to play the first half of level two all the time. And at first, it was really enjoyable. It's the first time you're playing it. It was intrinsically motivating. But now it's like, okay, I get it. I jump here. I go around that bad guy. I go down this tube. And now, okay, now I'm actually proactively playing the game back at the point I keep losing. And so game theorists are in perpetual fear of TELIC experiences because it just, it feels like a chore. You'd rather blink your eyes and skip right to the end.

So to tie it back to curiosity, I feel like when you're curious, you're really turning the problem or the process over and over and tinkering with it and exploring it. And you're not really willing to do that. In other words, you're not really curious about something if it feels like a chore. If it feels like I'd just rather be done with this thing. So I think if you can find a way to make something intrinsic instead of telek, that's where someone's natural curiosity starts to kick in. And certainly for me, in all the creative projects I do, if I can't find that, I'm guaranteed not to succeed. Talk to you about some of those creative projects you do.

So your background, you're a Googler, you came from Google, you've worked at HubSpot. You have quite a career resume and without getting too much into it as far as just a biography. How do you keep pushing that curiosity button or keeping yourself intrinsically motivated about the project or what you're doing on a day-to-day basis? I call it being a sensitive skeptic. It's like you have to be at the same exact time. And I think creative people do this all the time. You carry like disparate or seemingly conflicting ideas in your head at the same time. Like, for example, you're doing the work just for yourself and also you're doing it for your audience, like at the same exact time.

So I think for me, the sensitive skeptic idea is you have to be open and sensitive to the world around you, right? Take in everything. Everything is inspiration. You don't have to go on a trip to some tropical island. You don't have to meet famous people. Everything is inspiration. Everything is usable. And at the same time, you have to question everything.

So, okay, yeah, that's an idea that lights me up. I need to put it through the ringer. I need to give it some friction. I need to tear it apart. I'm inspired by Anthony Bourdain. He was my storytelling hero. And rather than just say, all right, I'm going to create a podcast and try to be a business version of Anthony Bourdain, which totally is my aspiration in my career.

But rather than just say, that works for me, I'll do it. Why does it inspire me? Like what I have to be sort of skeptical? What do I bring to the table that is unique or different or not as good as what he did? Can I deconstruct his episode into its component pieces, kind of extract the rundown? So I think you're constantly wavering between I'm open to everything. It's about trying stuff. But at the very same time, I'm also pretty skeptical about everything.

And it's not just about that lights me up. I'll do it. It's a great idea. It can't just be like that first idea bias kicks in. So to me, you kind of sum that up as being a sensitive skeptic. What is it about Anthony Bourdain that fascinates you? Oh my God. We could literally turn this interview into an Anthony Bourdain treatise. I actually did a sort of in memorandum homage to him in my podcast when he died. It just hit me so hard. So there's a number of things on the surface level, but if you cut to the core, I think it's he was able to sit with anybody and pull out a meaningful, emotional human moment from the seemingly day to day. And, you know, when I think about the show, parts on. on CNN.

I have a sneaky suspicion, and I don't know if this was proactive or maybe retroactive, but the name parts unknown, most people assume means the geographic locations. Like he's going to physical parts of the world that were unknown to the viewer. I actually think the magic is he was able to reach these unknown or hitherto unexplored areas or ideas or stories when just sitting with anybody. Like he could be in L.A., in a part of L.A., lots and lots of people visit. visit and he would find a part that was unknown. And I don't mean physical. I mean this emotional part. And so I love that. And coming out of the business world, everything in my career from Google to

startups, to working in venture capital to now doing kind of the speaker and writer thing, it's always been about career and business. And I feel like that type of content tends to over index on the nutritional value. Like it tends to be very dry and very plain. Here are the facts. apply them to your work. And I always felt like, well, we experience our work with lots of emotion and lots of story, every emotion in the book, in fact, the content we're creating around business should reflect that. And Bourdain was the master at pulling out that meaning from the seemingly day to day. I can't think of anything more day to day than somebody who is working on a marketing team, publishing blog post to drive leads, or running a sales team trying to get that quota hit

before the quarter ends. Everybody views their work. And I think if you're disillusioned with a sense of it's stayed, it's boring, it's predictable, where's the human emotion, where's the story? It's not there. But I actually think when we're fulfilled by that work, it does feel as rich as travel. It does feel as awesome and as moving as a story by Anthony Bourdain. So I'd love to bring that stuff to the business world.

It feels like you study great interviewers, conversationalist as it makes sense. sense given what you do on a day-to-day basis and your work podcasting, interviewing people, writing about it, speaking about it from stage. Who in your mind are some of the best interviewers in the world on any medium? I like this question because I think you can bifurcate it when you answer it. So on the one extreme, you have the people who interview folks and it does not feel like it's an interview. It feels like it's a conversation. Like it's not them asking a question like a sniper and then you have to give an answer. And so I think Bordane was one of those people, but there are others too, you know, coming out of the, I actually wanted to be a sports

journalist in college. So coming out of that world, Bill Simmons now has attained that status where it sounds like he's just hanging out with anybody who, you know, Conan O'Brien is another one of these examples on his podcast. It sounds like those two are just hanging out with interesting people, but they're getting to such really interesting and new places and getting insightful. answers. And it's not about clever questions or the construct of their questions. It's about the environment they create and the trust they build. Because it is a scenario, especially in person, where if you're an interviewer, let's see, I've done 12 documentary series to date now. And I've realized if I'm not having fun, that person is not going to have fun. If I'm not relaxed,

the subject won't be relaxed. If I'm giving them what sounds like a canned question, I'll get a canned response. So Bill Simmons and Conan O'Brien, through years and years and years of practice have made this interview style look so natural and easy that when, you know, if I were to fire up a microphone and try to imitate them, I'd fall very short, even though it doesn't look like they're trying.

So that's like one extreme. And the other extreme is where we tend to answer that question. Who's a great interviewer? You're Terry Grosses of the world. You're Kara Swishers of the world. These people have very poignant, short questions. And I think they're genius in a different way to the first two is that they ask very simple questions. You know, their magic is really the follow-up

because it's really like a dance instead of a march forward when you're an interviewer. You know, the subject might stumble to the left or they might, like I do, go too long with an answer, or they might try to answer their way and not actually answer your question. So the really good content comes with following up. And rather than try to get a clever question out there, which I know some interviewers do, I think it's about asking very simple questions. And then the follow-up is where you get even better material, which means, yes, you might have to edit. Terry Gross does a 45-minute show. She gets two hours with the guest.

So I think those four individuals are incredible. Bill Simmons, Conan O'Brien, Kara Swisher, and Terry Gross. All about the follow-up. Big, I could not agree more. I'm curious, Jay, before a big interview, perhaps a guest that is someone that was a hero of yours or is a hero of yours, how do you feel in the moments leading up to that interview. See, I love that question. That's why you, Ryan, are a good interviewer. It's very similar to how I feel before giving a speech. So, because a lot of the questions that you get as a speaker,

it's like, are you nervous before you go out there? Yeah, but it's a very specific type of nervous. It's almost like I felt before playing in a sport. I just want it to start already because I'm so excited. And I feel, yeah, you know, it's not like, oh, gosh, this again. I got to do it. it's like I can't wait. I'm going to enjoy this and I have this little mental tick where before I go on a stage, I think about, wow, I get to do this. That's a profoundly rare thing in the workplace. I get to instead of I have to. And if you're fortunate enough to either view your work like that or have a job that lets you say that, like, man, that really resets you to being thankful instead of being nervous or dreading something. So I'm like more eager, I guess than I am fearful. I know that feeling. I feel the same. I feel a same way before a speech and a big interview. And it's exactly like before a big football game under the lights with 100,000 people in college, it wasn't necessarily nerves. It was this sense of, I just want, I want to get hit. I want the first hit to happen so I can calm down and just play the game. And I feel like you don't get hit when you're getting a speech, but you just, let me get that first

story or the opening. Like, let me get that outright. And then, and then you're, then you can get into your groove and go and serve that audience. I was, I was just watching you speak, Jay, before we connected. And I, I couldn't help but ask as a, as a fellow speaker, what is your prep process when it comes to speaking? Because it felt like you have, I don't want to say you've memorized it, but you've got these incredible sound bites that are sometimes two minutes long. And I thought, how does he, did he memorize that or does he just know it well enough that he can speak it, that it flows so effortlessly or perfectly? What's your process to get ready when you're going on stage?

So first of all, I think what ends up happening is you tend to rehearse a lot right before the speech. And I actually think that's a mistake. It's almost like I used to run, I can't, I don't know why I keep referencing my high school sports days because it really, I'm not a glory days kind of guy, but I keep referencing this. I used to run cross country in high school. And now I can barely get out the door for five miles. It's just, it's embarrassing. But my coach would always tell us you want to wind down how intense your practices are right before a big race, right? So you don't want to run a hot race cold, so to speak.

You do want to be prepared. You do want to be warmed up. But if you're intensely preparing the night before, that's really dangerous. And so I think most speakers will go in their hotel room and they'll rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. And that's the only time they rehearse. what I try to do is rehearse my face off alone in my office and film it and sort of use it as game tape. And so I keep coming back to that practice, that muscle memory almost when I'm on stage. But I've given it enough room to breathe where my hope is anyway.

It doesn't come across as canned, right? I don't want it to be memorized. I want it to be internalized. And so I can deliver a two to three minute bit. And to me, it's like being a standup. You are delivering bits and you're trying to keep workshopping. and improving them all the time, but it comes from just rigorous rehearsal time well before the speech. So I don't know. I'm sure your listeners have heard you talk about your speaking, Ryan,

but like, do you have that kind of rehearsal cadence to it, or is it always about the night before for you? Well, I've stood in my base here where I'm recording, actually, in my office and stand up and we'll give the speech to the wall, to the room. And I too like to film it. sometimes I'll even speak it sitting down for some reason. It makes me relax a bit and then I will take notes. Sometimes I'll stop. But I'm with you, Jay. I think whenever it's interesting to me, because speaking is just like any other sport.

You wouldn't do it without practicing a lot, at least not if you wanted to be excellent at it. So I do find it interesting every once in a while where somebody will tell me they don't practice like that's a boastful thing. And I would really question someone how do you, I guess I'm just not good enough to do that. I have to practice a lot in order to be, I think, effective on stage and still have a ways to go, obviously, like we all do. But yeah, I'm a big believer in practice, practice, practice, even for a little speech, man. Like if there's going to be 12 college students that I'm going to go do 20 minutes, I'm, I am practicing. I'm going to get it ready for that. I'm not going to take that lightly or just show up.

ill-prepared. I think you owe it to those 12 people to be ready to go. Exactly. And I think really everything I've talked to you about so far, it's all about the same little thread for me, which is when I make something, I want to feel something like during the process and I want, therefore, to deliver something into the world that makes you feel. Like I remember being a kid and having, well, actually, I was in high school and I had somebody perform Huckleberry Finn. My high school literature teacher performed Huckleberry Finn. Instead of just reading it out loud, he, like, stood on his toes and performed it. And I remember the end of the great Gatsby.

He, like, looked away out of the classroom when they delivered those final lines of kind of hope, but also sadness at the same time. I was like, wow, that's what the spoken word, the written word, the created thing should do. It shouldn't just be an injection of facts into your brain. It should be something that really does stick and make you feel. And so I don't know how I would do that kind of work if I didn't put in the reps to figure out where I feel bored or where I feel lit up or where I'm actually like losing myself when I watch it back. Like if I miss a beat in the speech, now you're focused on your questions or same in a podcast or a video series. You're now like, wait, what? Instead of just absorbing things in the flow.

So if I can't get in the flow and feel, I don't know how the person on the other end will. So to me, it's just a direct line to practice. All right, I could talk to you about this all day. So I'm going to get into some of your material now, if you're cool with it, Jay. Did not plan to go that route, but I couldn't help it because I've seen you be such a pro on stage. Okay, I'm curious, man. How does the phrase best practices make you feel? Well, what are words, if not things that bring up something that you've experienced, some image in your head?

My image comes from my time spent about 10 years doing content marketing for brands. And best practices just devolved into because that's the way we do things around here. Shortcuts, hacks, cheats, the gurus get their quick schemes. Like we're living in this era, which is at once great and very harmful to our work because we have access to endless amounts of information. And so now finding best practices is not the goal. Maybe it once was. I cannot speak to somebody who grew up doing business in the 1940s.

But right now, the goal is not finding best practices. Finding the best approach for you should be the goal. And unfortunately, I don't think we've ever been taught how to do that. There's endless possibilities out there. And so now the premium skill is knowing how to vet them. So let's say, Jay, we'll paint the picture of the person who may be listening. and I judge is based on emails I receive. And there's a person who works at a big company.

They're in a mid-level management role. So they have, let's say, 14 direct reports. They're working hard to build an effective team who accomplishes and exceeds their goals set for them by the company. They're ambitious people. They want to grow. They want to continue to get promoted. And the phrase best practice is used constantly.

I know it because that was the world I was in. And I've used it. it a lot. So how can someone develop the skill to say, what's the best approach for me or the best approach for my team or even my company as opposed to just putting in what the best practices of the industry are? Sure. So the thing you don't want to do, especially when you're working in a role that matters to you. It matters to your team that you lead, the 14 direct reports. And my goodness, if more podcasters knew their audience like you did, we'd have a lot better podcast out there. So kudos. And, you know, if that's you, what you don't want to do is run

essentially a faulty equation against your work. When you're making a decision, you want that decision to be informed. Everybody would agree with that. When you're making a choice, you want that choice to be right for your situation. Everybody would agree with that. What ends up happening is when we follow a best practice, we're building our work based on lagging indicators and missing variables. They're lagging indicators. because it's conventional wisdom, it came from the past. It's a possibility that was vetted by somebody else or a past version of you. And they're missing variables because what the expert or the past version of you has not taken into account is your current context. And it sounds like

this very squishy thing to be like, well, how do I incorporate my context? And I think there's actually one behavior change that we need, which can change how we not only make decisions ourselves, but also encourage our team to do this if we're a leader. So that switch is stop acting like an expert and start acting like an investigator. Because an expert cares about absolutes. We need the right idea in theory. But an investigator cares about evidence.

And so instead of just glomming onto an answer, by the way, that answer usually comes from somebody else, we get really good at asking great questions. So especially in the role of a team leader, that's huge. because not only do you self-reflect and investigate well when you ask great questions, you unlock the knowledge of your team. Instead of giving them the playbook or making sure they're running in, you're asking for their input. And now you get a much more motivated, much more engaged, much more proactive group of people.

So I think that is the switch. And when I set out to write the book, I wanted to figure out, is there a methodology we could put in place? Like, who is doing this well? Is there a methodology we can put in place to become consummate investigation? so that the output is more context-based decision-making instead of, that's what works in general or on average when problem is you don't operate in a generality and you don't want to be average. The book referencing is called Break the Wheel.

Question best practices. Hone your intuition and do your best work. Okay. And then so there's three psychological barriers here. I like for you to touch on them because I think this could help people get practical. I really like, Jay, I think an ultimate goal for me is if for someone, the instant that this podcast is over and they can review some of the notes that they've taken after listening, and they could literally implement something right now that could make a meaningful difference in their business or the team that they lead. So can you get into the three psychological barriers that hurt our decision making? Yes.

So I have a double agent in the world of psychology, which everybody in business should be thankful. She's also very smart and pretty and somehow married to me. And so I, you know, found these three psychological studies through no small, or a lot of credit, rather, goes to my wife. But there are three reasons we tend to make decisions based on, you know, something out there, this vague idea of some generic idea, some conventional wisdom or trend that we have to hop on or best practice. So the first, and this plagues us well beyond the working world, I think, is called Pike syndrome, which is essentially learned helplessness. It's this feeling of powerlessness after repeated failure. And that doesn't have to be big failures. That could just be, you know, your boss

shot you down or it didn't quite work the way you thought it was. But it's a repeated failure to live up to what you thought were going to be the results. And pike syndrome is kind of an odd name. So I think it just bears explaining. It's an old scientific experiment where a group of scientists would drop some minnows into an aquarium containing a single pike, which is a, you know, an aggressive type of fish. And what they saw was very predictable. The minnows would get eaten by the pike right away. The pike would attack them as soon as the minnows were placed in the tank. But then they would lower the minnows in surrounded by some glass and the pike couldn't see the glass. And so he would just smash against it for sometimes hours until he decided that he couldn't eat minnows and would

just lose interest in them. And then a very interesting and I think important thing would happen for our purposes. When the glass was removed, those minnows could swim freely all around the tank, completely undisturbed by the pike. And so here you have these like tasty morsels that are floating right by this hunter's nose and he doesn't move so much as an inch. And I think the same could be said about our work. There are these very powerful, but seemingly simple, like it's too obvious. It's right in front of us. Insights floating by us in our context all the time. And very rarely do we reach out, pluck those out of reality, use them when we make decisions. Because of course, No, no, no, no, no. The answer must be out there, right? I was trained in school. There's a right and a wrong answer in theory. So clearly, I need to go find some bigger expert, some giant study, something like that. And there's a very simple solution to Pike syndrome, which is called first principal thinking. I'm sure you've touched on that a lot in your interviews, Ryan, but first principal thinking is essentially the process of just whying something to death until you feel you can't go any further. And that's where you can start to build up more original thinking. Now you put yourself back at the driver's seat because you're like, okay, well, actually,

everyone's latching onto this common accepted assumption, but really it's this deeper thing, which is very fundamental. And if we just start there, we can make better decisions than whatever everyone else is doing. Is there an example you could share of this, Jay, that thinking of, again, of that avatar we're painting, it doesn't have to if there's a better one that doesn't suit with that type of person. But let's take this Pike syndrome. Maybe it's something that you've written about or you've read about when it comes to that could that someone could say oh yeah i've done that or a hiring mistake or a team missing its goals type and there's a there is a mistake right in front of their face they didn't realize it like what's a real world example of this sure also back to our

comments about good interviewers right there's a follow-up question right there i'm always thinking on the meta level here uh so one of my favorite examples is a company called envision which sells design software. And there was one of the marketing team leads there a few years ago. Her name is Claire Bird. She now works at another company called Twilio. But Claire and I spent some time together when I was writing this book. And we talked about one of their more visible projects, which seems completely either atypical or risky to do. And to them was completely logical, which is, I think, the magic of making context-based decisions. It might look crazy if you know the best practice on the outside. But once you talk to these people, they're like, no, here's why it was strategic.

So Claire and her team spent a lot of time doing video case studies, very common in software, right? You have a big complex product you want to sell. You want to equip your sales team to go sell into another organization. So you arm them. And on the website, you put up these video testimonials and everyone knows what to expect. It's like, we were really struggling at Acme, Inc. But then we found Envision. And now everything is great.

And so they're very rote and incredibly ubiquitous. And so as Claire would go on these shoots, she started noticing this pattern where she'd ask very simple questions like, you know, why do you use Envision? What was your problem? What are you trying to accomplish? What has changed?

And then she would ask, how does this make you feel? Like, how did that change? How did you using the product? How did it make you feel? And she noticed something really odd and it started to become a pattern from her customers,

which was they would get really defensive. Not about answering the question, but about they would say things like, you know, how does it make me feel? It makes you feel like I matter finally to this organization. It makes me feel like I can finally explain what I do to sales, to marketing, to my executives. You know, I'm a product designer, which back then is kind of a new field and even now, designing the interface of a software product, the things we all use every day,

such a powerful thing, such an important thing, shapes billions of people's behavior. And yet, even to this day, it's really slowly codifying. It's not as, doesn't have that seat at the table that, say, a sales leader might or a, you know, executive that, you know, came up through different organizations working as a CEO and now they're the chairman of the board or what have you. And so Claire realized, okay, these people don't need more tools. Like, this industry needs a sense of identity. Like, they need a seat at the table. And so instead of investing their resources in these random and smaller case studies, they pulled some of them together and they built an hour-long film called, design disruptors. And they featured some of the world's best product designers from Airbnb,

Google, Facebook. Like, you name the company that you've used their technology and a lot of people do. And they're in this film. And they're like pictured as heroes. Like they interview them about their philosophy and their belief in why design matters. And the crazy part is, not only was this a giant project, you'd think it would justify giant marketing. They never released the film online. So they put trailers out there and they drove people to live and in-person community events to debut the film. And then they had others in different markets around the world that loved the company already kind of act as local servants, local community builders and themselves do these little debuts. So why? Because this community needed a sense of identity. Like you get that better in the room

instead of online. So that's an example where they found the first principle insight. They don't need more tools. They don't need more how-to for design. They need a sense of identity. And when you build your logic back up from there, yeah, actually, a longer film telling other stories and these debuts and in-person premieres actually all make a lot of sense. Wow. Well done. So that was one, Pike syndrome, and that was the solution from first principle insights. Then there's two more. Can you go to two and three? Yeah, we can do those as quickly as you need to, too. But the foraging choice is another. So this is a study out of NYU, 2018, which showed that a lot of decisions that people in the workplace make resemble, no offense to us, because we're all a part of this, it resembles an animal foraging for food because you often make this decision between exploiting your current position or exploring a new possibility. And when, no surprise, when you're adding stress to that equation, the tendency is to keep exploiting the current position.

So that's why a lot of us, you know, again, I came out of marketing. It's why a lot of people find something that works and then what do we do? We beat it to death. Like, we ruin it. And no one's ever like, hey, all right, here come the marketers, here come the advertisers. No, it's because they find something that works. They beat it to death. It becomes a trope.

It dies. People leave. They get frustrated, et cetera. And it's because when stress gets added, we exploit, we cling instead of go exploring new possibilities. That's the foraging choice. which choice are you making? And unfortunately, when we set a goal, in other words, a mile marker down the road that just tells us like what and when,

we add more stress to people's lives as leaders, and they tend to cling. So if you're looking for better ideas, more ideas, more experiments, more innovation from your team, if all they know is grow leads this percent or, you know, drive this efficiency internally, they're not going to actually explore new possibilities. So the solution is something that can supplement a goal called an aspirational anchor, which actually describes the behavior change by looking at the why and the how. So an example of a goal, grow your Twitter followers 50%. An example of an aspirational anchor, let's show the world how fun and relevant we are.

And when you use an aspirational anchor, you're combining two things. An intent for the future. So let's show the world how fun and relevant we are. And some kind of hunger you have today. because the implied behavior change there is, well, we're not currently showing the world that we're fun and relevant. And this is actually the aspirational anchor of a very real brand, Merriam-Webster Dictionary. So I put this to you, Ryan. Do you follow Merriam-Webster Dictionary on social media at all?

I don't. Okay. It's a dictionary. Of course you don't. Except this dictionary is unbelievably funny and timely and relevant. Like, they're more like a pop culture media site than a list of definitions. because if you actually look under the hood, dictionary editors, which are called lexicographers,

their task is not to sit in a high castle and create rules for language. As much as this English literature major wishes, they would do that because now you have words like irregardless in the dictionary. And the reason is lexicographers document popular use of language. In other words, they document pop culture. So for years on social media, Merriam Webster was really predictable and bland, until their chief digital officer, a woman named Lisa Schneider, told their team, like, enough

is our goal now is not grow follow. Our goal is, let's show the world how fun and relevant we are. And they started to mind, you know, who they were as people and their charter as lexicographers for fun and funny and relevant material. They came out years ago and declared the hot dog as a sandwich and the internet like lost its mind. But they got into the pop culture debate. And that is the power of an aspirational anchor.

It helps you deal with this foraging choice. It helps encourage your team to go exploring new possibilities instead of just try to exploit and squeeze every incremental drop of value out of your existing position. Wow. I saw you speak about that too. That's pretty cool. Okay. So the third one of these insightful nuggets that can, I think, help us make better decisions,

a third psychological barrier. Yeah. So we've talked about two so far. This is the third reason we don't make really good. context-based decisions. It's called cultural fluency. It's probably the most common. It's also probably the hardest to identify proactively until you know it exists. Cultural fluency is very simply your behavior when the world unfolds according to the expected norm, as you thought it would. Another way of saying this, because that's how we do things around here. So it's a concept that

has been studied pretty rigorously by a guy named Jim Murray out of Chicago. And Jim, you start of his exploration of this by experimenting on his family and friends at a family picnic. So if you ever get invited to his family picnic, just say no, because you will be enrolled unsuspectingly in an experiment. But he decided he was going to give out two different color plates to the room of friends and family on a Fourth of July picnic. Half the people got white plates, half got festive, you know, like American flag plates. And he then weighed how much food they took at the buffet at the end of the line. And the people with festive plates took more food than the people with white plates

because it's culturally fluent on the 4th of July in the United States to gorge yourself, right? He says after eating like three gallons of ice cream over the weekend and talking to you

the Monday after 4th of July. So then Jim later ran another study that fall on Labor Day and instead of having a festive plate he gave out a just plain white plate like here's the Labor Day plate it's a white plate

and then to the second half of the room he gave them a Halloween plate so pumpkins and ghosts and that kind of stuff and predictably the people with the very out of place pumpkins and ghosts, they took less food than the people with the white plates. So when you take those studies together, it kind of sent Jim on this journey to study this idea of cultural fluency because it suggests that when even something small is a little bit out of place. We have a little bit of discomfort or something that gives us pause. We're more likely to make better, more conscious, more proactive decisions than just go with the flow, which is wonderful because what that means is in the workplace, you don't need.

to hire somebody whose title has innovation in it. You don't need a retreat with your team to knock them out of the routine. You just need something small to get them a little bit out of their comfort zone or question a little bit more that cultural fluency, that norm that you're practicing. So the solution is something called a trigger question, which is just an open-ended question that cannot be answered by Googling, cannot be answered with some documentation internally, can only be answered by self-reflection or experimentation. So as a leader, if you're asking, your teams, a lot of questions, as you should be, a trigger question is one of those questions that you can admit, hey, you know what? There's probably not a right answer that you know. Here's what I'm

wondering. How do we find that out? Well, let me go think about that. I got to self-explore, self-reflect, or let's run the test and find that. So just a little bit of discomfort, knocks you out of cultural fluency, starts to awaken you as to why you're doing things. Are you making good decisions or are you doing them because, yeah, that's what we do around here. What are some examples of effective trigger questions? One of my favorites comes from Starbucks. I know the former chairman has fallen a little bit out of favor because of his erstwhile attempt to run for president. But Starbucks for years struggled to break into China as successfully as they did other markets, certainly the United States.

And they started implementing the consistent playbook. They started doing everything they did in Seattle. beyond in the U.S. to grow from zero, and it just wasn't working. As simple as asking, why isn't it working, but as powerful as asking, who can we talk to that intimately knows Chinese culture? That's a great question that they asked themselves. Now, that's not like, who knows the coffee market, who knows whatever. It's just who knows the people here. And they started talking to, among other people, Jack Ma from Alibaba, who lent his ideas for how to develop Starbucks in that market. Because what they learned was if you just slap that place,

book from the United States onto a new market, like predictably, it's not going to work. But when you're a giant organization, shrug, that's the way we do things around here. And what they learned most notably was the reason they kept losing talent in China. So Starbucks, very famously, gives a lot of good benefits, hires very smart people. It's not like, don't come to Starbucks if you're just checking out. Like, they want driven people, even though they're baristas, they want really smart, creative people. They couldn't do that in China. It was because the one, child rule and the involvement of the parents in the child's life. Turns out if you invest everything you have in one child, you want them to go work for Jack Ma'at Ali Baba. You want them to go work

for Google. You want them to work for a very notable, famous company that seems on the outside looking in to be innovative, to be a place where driven people go, not a coffee shop, clearly. And so they actually did something that seems crazy if you're in Seattle. But it's very smart if you are in China, which is they involve the parents of their employees at an annual summit where they have something to say. They contribute to the direction of the company, or at least they feel they can, hopefully they do. And they also give the parents of their employees benefits like their employees, right? They show them, this is actually a worthy place to work. And then they put their money where their mouth is. Unbelievable change. Crazy. If you know the best practice in

the United States, very strategic and logical, if you know China. I want to shift gears a bit. Jay, so one of the topics that has come up on my show more than a few times, and particularly with professional poker players, is this word that you've written about and spoken about called intuition. And building up intuition can be helpful. That I think is obvious. However, I particularly remember when I speaking with Liv Boree, a really successful professional poker player, Liv said that her individual. Intuition gets continuously built up through experiences. And that's why she likes to play both online and in person to see as many hands as possible.

So that that gut feeling in the sport of poker of like, I just don't think you got it type feeling has been built up over hundreds of thousands of hands. When you think of developing intuition as a skill for that person listening, not necessarily a poker player, but for the leader and a business, What are some ways that you help people develop intuition? So I get, I break out in hives a little bit. I'm a pure creative type person. I can talk about the kind of big, emotional, fluffy stuff all day, every day and really enjoy it.

But I worked in business. I do work in business. I didn't come out of the arts. When I was a kid, my mom is a preschool teacher. She said I would create these magical monsters and scenarios with my Legos. because she's very creative, and my dad is a software engineer. So his part of me came out when I would line up those Legos in perfect logical fashion, and they'd be like, oh, no, we're warring in this kid's brain.

But when you have those two things together, you have to balance, like, how does creativity fit the workplace? So that's what I like to do. So I break out in hives when I just say intuition. So good idea, of course, to put that in the subtitle of one's book when that's you, right? Yeah, totally. But I think it's important to know that intuition has been, has been bastardized.

It looks when it's well honed like this instant clarity generator, like this gut feel. How do you know? Oh, I don't know, boss. I just know. But I think it's something you can make proactive.

Like, if you look at the definition of the word itself, it's not the muse. It's not any of that stuff. It's from the Latin word, insuary, which means to consider or the late middle English

into it, which means to contemplate. So it's not fluff. It's the ability to consider your environment. Right? So let's set aside this idea that like visionaries exist and they have this intuition that lets them see the future or whatever. I just think those visionaries see the present more clearly and they do so by asking really great questions about their context.

And I think the first thing they do to understand that context is they break it up into knowable parts. And so I think there's three knowable parts when you're making a decision in the workplace. So when you have a business result on the line and you're. you're selling a product or a service and you have a team and all those products. I think there's three knowable parts in every decision that you make, or at least there should be if you're making good decisions. The first and arguably the biggest variable that best practices miss is you. Because the people doing the work. The second is the customer.

It's your specific group of people you sell to or if you're convincing somebody else internally, it's your boss or it's the stakeholder. And then the third is your resources. Now, that's not groundbreaking, and nor should it be. It's you, the person doing the work, then the people the work is for, then the ability to make the work happen. And you can ask really great questions about those three things. And in the book, I try to come up with a few and then suggest a framework to create your own. But if you can ask really great questions about those three things, now you set up this like

personal and team-wide vetting system, like a filter that you can take any idea or any best practice and just press it through that. filter and sometimes it pops out the other side and you can say okay great even though this is a best practice we should do it and sometimes it gets caught in the filter and you're like well it sounds really logical when you say it in theory but in our reality no we're not going to use that best practice and then more often some of it gets through and some of it gets stuck and you're kind of left with this amalgam which i think is reality of i'm using my knowledge of best practices and also my knowledge of our context to make good decisions but i think it starts there it's can you

take your context, break it up into knowable parts, and then investigate each part separately. When I think about the best bosses I've had or leaders I've worked for, even coaches as well in sports, Jay, I always think back to the fact that they had this kind of curious look on their face in meetings and asked the best questions, the most useful questions to get us to a place that we previously were not. And I always felt like, how do I develop that skill? And quite frankly, that's one of the reasons that I started this podcast five years ago, Jay, was because I felt like the best way to develop the skill of asking fantastic questions

was to get the reps. And this is one way to get those repetitions is to talk to smart people like you and try to hang and ask questions that get you to a place perhaps you've never been. And I don't know. I'm curious from your perspective. Again, this is a little bit off what I plan to go to. How do you develop the skill of asking useful questions? It's so funny because you just kind of hit the nail in the head for why I think this is an important book for me to write personally.

Because I'm, as everybody now knows, because I make it abundantly clear, I love to talk. And so I think in a meeting, I can suck the oxygen out of the room. And I've always admired exactly the type of person you just mentioned, where they sit back, they take it all in, they ask one great question, and they've added way more to the meeting than, you know, hopefully just a younger version, not current version of myself, would have added, right, with a million words. So the short answer is, I don't think this happens by implement. one thing. I can't give you an answer where you're like, now I ask really great questions.

I do think you have to set aside the desire to be right in favor of the desire to get it right. And I think when you start there, you're like, okay, well, I could say something and let others know how smart I am. Or I could ask this question to show them how smart I am. Or I could be hunting if I'm a leader. I'd be hunting for my team to hold up one answer and be like, this is it. This is the answer. This is the playbook. This is the tactic. This is the tool. But I think that really ignores the sloppiness of implementation and reality. Like when you move out of theory and start executing, it's a lot less clean. It's a lot more variables to take into account. Like the only constant is change. And yet we like to sit. We want precision, but it's a false sense of precision. So I would start there. It's like, am I asking this question because I want to be right or I want us to be right? Or I'm asking this question because I want us to be right. Or I'm asking this question because I want us to. get it right. And that's going to take a lot more investigation and a lot less acting like an expert who professes to know the absolute right answer. You worked as a manager at HubSpot and head of content was your role, correct? Yep. Yeah. And so you managed a team with people. I assume you

weren't an individual contributor. Correct. Yeah. When I started, it was my first job actually getting hired in as a team lead. I didn't build the team then hire it, which I've done before. I had the first time getting hired in a pre-existing manager role. Okay. I'm glad you pointed it out because I think there are a lot of people listening who have a role like that or maybe they desire for a role like that at some point. And one of the things I hope this show can do is I want to, I want wisdom to be shared so that we can learn from the experiences of others and perhaps not make the same stupid

mistakes like I made as a first time manager for years, unfortunately, or maybe you made at HubSpot. What are some of the, I guess, common mistakes that you unfortunately made at HubSpot that you could share to help other people avoid those? I could do two hours with you, one on Anthony Bourdain and now one on only the mistakes I made in that role. You might have to do that, by the way. I like both of those topics. I love Bordane too, but go ahead. Let's do it.

I made some really classic and common ones. Like, for example, again, as a talker, I came in with a lot of answers. and started handing them out or ideas for people before I really took it all in and absorbed, didn't ask the great questions. You know, I think looking back, I was very much like, hey, I did it over here a couple of times, and I think we should just do it that way here. But the context had changed, and I didn't take that into account. And so either people would bristle at the suggestion, and I couldn't figure out why,

or people would say, okay, let's try it, and it just wouldn't work. So, you know, the ignorance of like, I have all the answers because I did it a couple times. I think that's just like that's hubris, that's ego, that's, you know, a young version of me trying, I'm still young, hopefully, but it's a younger version of me trying to figure out like how to impress people. I want it to be right instead of get it right. But I do remember, you know, like HubSpot is it was a very early mover in this like everything must be measured digital marketing. And I think we're actually swinging, the pendulum is swinging back to creativity and qualitative feedback and brand becoming very, very important again for real reasons, not just like it matters, but like people want good experiences

and they buy from those people. They buy from those companies. So at one point, HubSpot was measuring everything down to like this blog post generated this amount of leads for the business. And that's just not me. Like I got into this marketing world as we led with at the top because of emotion, because of story and creativity. And so rather than acknowledge that, which I knew at the time, I had that self-awareness, and then surround myself with people or ask the team, like, hey, who here loves pouring over the numbers and thinks that way?

To compliment myself, I try to fit myself into a mold of like, oh, that's what we do around here, or that's what a manager in business is supposed to do. They're supposed to look at the numbers. They're supposed to report on the numbers. And if it's okay with you,

I'd love to give you a story that's probably my most embarrassing from that company, and that's okay. Of course. So it was my first big meeting. CMO was in the room. I think the CEO even was like pinch hitting for the head of sales. We were hiring one.

So he was in the room. We're like on the precipice of going public. We had this new head of content, me. And content is a very important thing at that company. And so I decided, well, let me, I want to show them how capable I am, show them that I know the right playbook. And I found some chart. I think it was in Google Analytics that suggested that if people visit our blog nine

times or more, they're way more likely to come back. back. Great. This is an insight. This is what managers do. This is the best practice. I'm going to put that chart on the board for the entire department to see. And I think it was like 65 people. I managed nine of those people and a couple executives. Well, I presented it very confidently. I got off stage and then the CMO closed out the event. And he left my slide up there. So I had time to just stare at it for the first time after hastily putting together this project. And what I realized was that insight was completely wrong because what the chart showed was if they visit once, this is their activity. If they visit twice, this is their activity. And then nine through 15 visits to the blog.

It was all grouped together in one chart. So I wasn't actually showing, hey, look at the power of repeat visits nine plus times. I was showing, look, the numbers are bigger because they're reporting on more people. Do you know what I'm saying? It was an aggregate view of people who had visited nine through 15 times. It didn't show that those people were more powerful at all. So I was literally like, look, there are more people over here than over there. That's all I said. So because it was on the board behind my CMO, I got time to stare at it, see the error of my ways. And oh, by the way, it was up there for 65 plus people and the CEO to view. Like, nobody, God bless them, like, called me on it. But I knew they knew because I was just so bad

at being a metrics driven creator or marketer. And I didn't have the awareness of being like, actually I should surround myself with people who love that and are good at that and just know who I am and execute on that instead. Interesting. When you are, you said you inherited a team, but I would imagine at times, you know, you had to make changes and you hired people. I'm always fascinating to learn by any manager, regardless of the industry or even the job role because there are specific skills needed for each and every role.

But let's throw that aside for the purpose of this question, Jay. And I'm curious, what are the qualities that you look for when you have an, opening on your team and you were looking to add somebody, what are a few of the must haves that that person had as part of their character when it comes to hiring that you'd say, you know what, they've got to have this or I don't think I could hire them to be part of my team. I do want to qualify this in that hiring for my team has changed dramatically. And so to respect your listeners, at one point, I was hiring teams in-house for brands.

Now I run an organization called Marketing Showrunners, which teaches other marketers how to make shows, podcast, video series, documentaries, because largely I spend my time doing that. When I'm not teaching it, I'm making shows with a brand client. And so, you know, hiring, I'm hiring a lot of contractors right now. I'm hiring a managing editor for that site, for example. I think we undervalue, we overvalue the cleverness. Like, you know, leaving a cup on the table.

And if they don't pick it up, like, we're not going to hire them. Ha, ha, ha, ha. Like, no, like, this is about can you do the work? And do I know your character? Not do I want to get a beer with you? That's nice. That's a bonus. But like, can I understand who you are as a person?

And so I love skipping, like, right to the goods of what people are actually thinking about, what they're going through every day. Like, instead of having a formal interview process where I have a phone call, the first thing I want to see from somebody when I hire, say, a managing editor is what's the best story you've ever written? answer that, like in an email. This is part of your cover letter. It's not like, Dear Sir or Madam, it's like, here's six questions,

because I want to get to know how you think. What's the best story you've ever written? And if they send me like a how to article or seven tips and tricks for a bigger result in business or, you know, whatever, it's fine.

I might read it if it opens with a story, that's wonderful. But it's partly, are they actually looking at the question? And also, do they have this intrinsic desire to create? Just they love the act of writing or editing or making stuff. So that's the first question.

I love looking at side projects. Like, have you launched things just because? Tell me about those. Why? Actually, when I got my job at Google just out of college, I was shocked to know, like, managers and directors that interviewed me, less the frontline practitioners, but leaders, almost 50% of the time I'd spend talking to them

had nothing to do with my seemingly, my qualifications, my credentials. and they would talk to me about this little sports blog that I launched in college to just air my thoughts, supplement my sports columns as a student writer. And they want to know, like, why did I do it? When did I find the time? How did I design it? How did I get readership? I was like, it's my mom and her coworkers.

I don't know what you want to say. But they were really fascinated by my side project. And if you look at like the history of my career, there's almost two maps you could draw. Like one is what the LinkedIn profile says. and then the other are side projects. And those got me way further faster, I think. So I want to know, have you launched anything on the side? You know, another thing I like to do is test for attention to detail.

I put spelling errors and sentence, you know, like wonkiness into the actual applications and I'll ask people to find them and send them what they found, send me what they found. I ask for examples that inspire them, like who are they drawing from outside our echo chamber? And I love them to just suggest what we should do next with our editorial structure. strategy. Like, looking at the stuff we're doing publicly, what would you suggest? Again, I don't want the right answer. I just want to know how they think. All that stuff is cover letter stuff. And now I know, okay, we're really aligned here and I understand how you think. Let's go deeper and have an actual interview. But for some weird reason, the best practice during interviews is usually that stuff

goes way late in the process, which means you waste a lot of your time and their time too. That's just table stakes to get to the good stuff. You've got to have this. Yeah, exactly. It's again, I like this analogy of a filter when you make decisions. I'm trying to set up like a hiring filter for myself. Love it, man. All right, Jay, one more question. So let's say, and this probably happens to you, you have a earlier in their career, highly intelligent, ambitious person who says, Jay, I look at your life and your career.

and I love it. I'm not saying I want to be like you, but I do want to put together a life and a career kind of like what you've done. I want to leave my mark. I want to positively impact the world, make a positive contribution for others. What general advice should I listen to

and what general advice should I not listen to? Two-part question. It might take you a minute to think about, so I'll try to delay a minute, but I'm just curious from your perspective, if that person is sitting in front of you right now, the things that you are telling them. I wish somebody could somehow reach every career services in college and just say this idea

of a career path is totally BS, especially for today's knowledge workers. You know, maybe if you're in a trade, it's a little bit different. But I'm speaking to people that, you know, I come from the tribe of white collar workers who make stuff and build businesses. Like that idea of a path is so laughable right now. Like I wish someone said like your 20s are about exploration. I thrashed in almost every job. Google HubSpot.

It doesn't matter how glitzy the brand sounded. I was upset or angry or confused. And I was always that student who got straight A's and joined the club and became the president of the club. And then I got the job at Google. And I was like, great, this is what you're supposed to do. I've made it. And I was wildly unhappy.

And then I had friends who had the same upbringing, the same path, the same drive, et cetera. And they were really happy. It's like, why are we so different? We were just in step in school, what changed. It's like I hadn't really developed any self-awareness. I viewed this as a path. You get the job.

You're there for 30 years. So the advice I'd give is like, try a lot of stuff. Side projects are a wonderful place to do that because it's the stakes are lower and you'll learn a lot about yourself because no one's telling you what you can and can't do. So try a lot of stuff, ship a lot of bad work, and you'll work your way towards something better. I don't want to say the thing because that doesn't exist, like something better. That's the advice I'd give. Second half your question, I'm sorry, was the advice you'd ignore or the advice I'd suggest they ignore?

You've probably heard a lot of advice that as you've progressed in your career, you realize is bad advice. And perhaps that is the career path advice. But I'm curious, is there any common piece that's out there that you would say that, in my experience, is just flat out wrong. And it's bad advice. I really, and I got this advice from a boss. I won't say what company, but it was terrible advice. I sat down with them and I said, look, I'm kind of torn. I'm in this weird role.

It's in marketing, but it's really, it's content focused. And now I'm leading a team. And I don't know if I want to be a strategist or a creator. And he looked at me and he's like, well, you're early enough in the evolution of this industry niche where you could probably be the best content strategist. You're probably not going to be the best content creator. because you have to compete with everybody on the internet and plus all the traditional media and publishers

and Hollywood and all that stuff. So if you want to be the best, probably go with the strategist thing. And I was like, oh, okay. And that's profoundly not what I want to do. And also I do elements of both now, but I identify as a creator. So this idea that like being the best

is somehow at all a real thing in our work is so ridiculous because what are the rules of this game we're playing, who's keeping score, is there a Hall of Fame? Some professions, okay, what's their scorecard? Like, the best for you, the best, the most fulfilled maybe? I don't know. There's a needs to be another definition of the best because there's no longer a grade. You know, you come out of school where there is an A plus or a 100 and that goes away. You're not playing to a test. You're not playing to graduate. You're just working until you decide you're not going to work anymore or

it's forced upon you. So be the best win all these terms like that. It's just get rid of that. Stop trying to be that. It's just, it's terrible advice. It also doesn't exist. Yeah. I, sometimes when I see like an NBA player or a quarterback in the NFL say, I just want to be the greatest of all time, I'm going to be the best quarterback ever, the best basketball player ever. I almost wish we could sit down and just have like a 10 minute talk and say, let's be a little bit more thoughtful. I strive to be a better quarterback tomorrow than I am today. And if that is your mentality over and over, and I'm going to put that system in place,

that's the process I'm going to follow to have continuous improvement. I would imagine that you are going to probably maximize your ability. You're going to maximize the work that you can get done. If you think in that regard, if I am going to have a mindset of improvement, of getting better, then you don't have to worry about looking at someone else's Instagram feed. You don't have to worry about any of that. You can just think about am I improving, am I tracking properly as a trajectory of my life,

of my career, of my work going in the right direction. And then you can feel probably pretty satisfied if you have the system in place to do that, as opposed to looking at the highlight reel of others every day. You know, that's so, I so agree. And the thing I'd add to that is the phrase body of work. Like if you're more focused on your own body of work and filing away things that were educational to you, they taught you something about yourself or what you want to do, you know, you're a lifelong learner and you're focused on constant improvement and constant motion forward because that's all a career really is. Now the byproduct is, oh, I found a job I could see myself doing for five to 25 years. Or, oh, I've found a skill set I want to keep deploying and whatever I'm doing. Or, oh, look, I seem to be getting credit for being better at this job than. a lot of people or whatever, like all these byproducts start to kick out, success being the kind of summary of that. And if you just retreat inward a little bit, focus on the body of work

and improving it every day, like you said, that that takes a lot of the existential kind of like it causes me to thrash, all those things off the table. And it focuses you on, A, the thing you can control and be the only real thing when you think about it. Everything else is a byproduct. Jay, man, I can talk to you. all day. I really appreciate it. Where would you send my listeners to learn more about you online? Well, I mentioned I'm always, I have the meta level than the stuff. So if you're like the meta level of the stuff I do, which is like how to make shows, Marketing Showrunners.com, we have subscribers from all these big brands like Red Bull and Roku and Adobe. So that's

marketing showrunners.com. If you want to like consume my work, it's the book, break the wheel, or the podcast unthinkable. Those are like my two sort of digital or creative babies, book and podcast. It's fantastic stuff, man. Thank you once again for being here, and I want to, I'd love to continue our dialogue as we both progress, man. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much. You are a fantastic interviewer, by the way. Really, really appreciate you. Thank you, man. That means a lot. I appreciate it, Jay. Wow, I loved that conversation with Jay. A few of the highlights for me, being a sensitive skeptic, meaning you have to be open, yet at the same time, question everything. And then the gene,

of Anthony Bourdain as both an interviewer and a conversationalist. We can all work to get better at this. Then his preparations process for big moments, particularly speaking on stage. I am fascinated by how people prepare and get ready for these moments in their lives. I think we can learn a lot about them and about ourselves when thinking about how we prepare for big moments. Notice the fact that it's all about getting the reps, the rehearsing, the hard stuff that people don't want to do. that's why Jay is really great on stage because he's willing to practice. And then how to develop intuition, particularly the quote, stop acting like experts, start acting like investigators.

Love that. I hope you enjoyed this one as much as I did. If so, I would love it if you would tell a friend. Spread the message one person at a time. Word of mouth marketing is the best form of marketing in the world. And thank you once again for continuing to. give me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis for that. I will forever be grateful. Thank you so much. Talk with you next week. Can't wait.