The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 451: Rob Fitzpatrick - How To Talk To Your Customers, How To Ask Great Questions, & How To Be Useful (The Mom Test)

Episode Date: December 20, 2021

Read my new book, The Pursuit Of Excellence: https://bit.ly/excellencehawk Text LEARNERS to 44222 for more... Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com Rob Fitzpatrick is an entrepreneur of 14 years and has written three books about his learnings along the way, including the best-selling handbook for doing better Customer Development, The Mom Test: How to talk to customers and figure out if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you. In 2007, he dropped out of grad school to go through YCombinator with his first startup, and has been building products and businesses ever since. Beyond software, he has also kickstarted a physical card game, built an education agency, and more. Notes: The 3 simple rules of the Mom Test: Talk about their life instead of your idea Ask about specifics in the past instead of generics or opinions about the future Talk less and listen more How to run better meetings: Focus on who will be in your meeting and how to maximize the value they receive while there Think about learning outcomes - How will you (as the leader) help them be wiser by going to your meetings

Welcome to the Learning Leader Show, presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Text learners to 4422 to become part of Mindful Monday. You, along with tens of thousands of other learning leaders from all over the world, will receive a carefully curated email for me each Monday morning to help you start your week off right. You also will have the opportunity to become part of my book launch team for my upcoming

book, The Pursuit of Excellence. I am pumped for this, and I'd love to have your support. Text learners to 44222. Now, on to the night's feature, Lear, the great Rob Fitzpatrick. He's been an entrepreneur for 14 years, has written three books about his learnings along the including the best-selling handbook for doing better customer development, the mom test, how to talk to customers and figure out if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you.

During this conversation, Rob and I discuss the three simple rules for receiving more useful feedback. And then the difference between a good question and a bad one. and then a better way to run all of your meetings. You could implement these ideas immediately. Ladies and gentlemen, it's the great Rob Fitzpatrick. Hi, Rob, I told you before, I've been just downloading basically everything you ever written to my brain. And it's pouring out of me now.

But I just want to say, welcome to the Learning Leader Show. It's great to see you, man. Thanks so much for having me, Ryan. I'm excited. So I was reading the Mom Test, one of your books, and I flipped to the very back, which I usually do. and in the acknowledgement section, you thanked your mom and your dad for gently planting the entrepreneurial seed through encouragement and their own collection of insane startup and shipwreck stories. And so I'm curious, first, where did you grow up and what did your parents do?

Grew up in Florida and the reason being that my parents were ship captain and ship crew, respectively, from my mom and dad. And they ended up getting more or less stranded in Florida and due to a series of hilarious mishaps, some including hurricanes, some including terrible bosses, some including, you know, whatever, they ended up getting largely stranded in Florida. And after a couple of years, they're trying to get home to the UK, they sort of said, screw it, this is where we live now. And so that's where I was born and where I grew up. And I eventually got into sailing myself when I went through my kind of freedom-oriented

stage of entrepreneurship in my early 30s. Took a little sabbatical, learned to sail, rebuilt a sailboat. But yeah, that's where I grew up. And their first business, my dad had been, he started his career as a road surveyor and road builder in the highlands of Scotland, which I'm told is not a particularly pleasant profession in the dead of winter. And so then he got an invite, you know, hey, come on this boat, learn to sail, help us out his crew. And he said, absolutely. You know, he's an 18 year old kid or 20s at that point. Never been outside of Scotland from a real poor family. He was the youngest of 13 kids. So he jumped on the boat, learned to sail, really took to. to became a captain. And that was sort of his like freelancing freedom stage. And eventually he got fed up and he had this really, really tough gig where they delivered a yacht and the owner got thrown in jail, the boat owner. And so the boat owner couldn't pay them. So they're on this, you know, multi-million dollar yacht and not able to buy food. And that was in the Bahamas.

There's a tradition where the tourists would throw coins off the pier and the local kids would go dive and try to catch the coins out of the air. And one day they were sitting around watching this. And one of them was like, well, what happens to all the coins the kids miss? So they threw on their scuba gear. They went diving and came up with buckets and buckets of coins. And that's how they got their food money. And after that, he said, that's it. I'm never working for someone else again. I don't care how it happens, but I'm never having another boss. And so they started with what they knew. They set up a little early like done all on pen and paper kind of marketplace agency thing, connecting ships crew with with with with boats who needed qualified crew so they were that that

marketplace and then after that they took all their savings and there's like this really good waterproof type of battery a gel cell and he got the distribution rights so it's german made he got the distribution rights to that battery for just florida you know that's it and he was sort of going around convincing hey if you know if you're putting batteries on a boat you probably want want batteries that don't, you know, break or catch on fire if they get wet. And so they eventually built a pretty defensible little, you know, it's like a classic small business. It was a car repair shop, but they specialized in nautical stuff. They had this distribution deal that was exclusive. And I think he always hoped I would take it over. But, you know, my head was in the clouds.

And it took me a lot of years later to realize what a great little business he built. Wow. Where did you go to college then? Georgia Tech. Okay. And I wanted to do video game design. And I was like, all right, programming, video game design, great. It turns out that is a terrible industry. You really don't want to go into that industry. And so I was like, okay, how else can I make a living and be free of bureaucracy? So I had the genius idea to be an academic. Shortly into my master's program, I realized that I made a huge mistake. And it got myself into even more bureaucracy. And that's about when I found out about startups. So I pitched my master's research, do I combinator? They talked to us, Paul Graham, during the little 10-minute interview. He says,

you know, hey, this is a terrible idea. It'll never work. It'll never scale. I said, why did you fly us here just to be mean? And he sort of said, well, you know, you've got an amazing team. We were like four product people, artists, designers, programmers. And he said, if you can come up with an idea that doesn't suck, we'll invest in you probably. So I was like, oh, we've got six minutes. And he goes, yeah, hurry. And I was like, will you help? And he goes, okay. So we threw around ideas for six minutes. And at the end of it, he ended up backing one of them. And so I dropped out grad school, burned all my bridges there, went into startups and never looked back. Although now I swung more toward the bootstrapping direction. The first one with venture backed, and I found that a

little bit stressful. Wow. I read pretty much every essay that Paul Graham publishes. So smart, isn't it? Well, I just love excellent writing. I know you too. You're one of them as well. And every time you talk about, and we'll get to this, but you talk about learning outcomes. And I think with his writing, I always learn, but I'm also usually entertained. And that is a hard needle to thread. What are some things that you learned from going through Y Comer with Paul Graham and his help during those six minutes? What would you learn for him? I think people have never met him.

they read his essays and his writing in the wrong tone. He has a childlike innocence and authenticity coupled with an incredible mind. And so when you meet with him, he's able to very cheerfully say like, no, no, no, that's completely wrong. You're thinking about this in entirely the wrong way. That's never going to work. And tried a million times before, zero chance. And then it'll be like, maybe I'm wrong, but I wouldn't bet on it.

And he's so, and so he's able to be so straightforward. in a way I'd never heard at any point before in my life, in a way which felt like he was also clearly on your side of the table. And he's just like, look, I've seen this. This is how it is. And he's engaged. He's helping. It's collaborative. It was the best negative feedback I ever received. And I see a lot of his essays in the same light where he's just very innocently and authentically saying like, hey, you know, this is how I see the world. And this is what I think is wrong. And people read all these like motivations and malice. And, and, and, They're not taking it with the straightforward nature that he has.

And what he says, he goes, you know, when you're starting a business, before you've launched, before you're profitable, you should be talking to your customers. You should be writing code. And you should be exercising and hanging out with your loved ones. Those are the only three things you should be doing as a founding team, pre-profitability. And I mean, that's pretty good advice. That's stuck with me. Wow.

How did you find yourself back over on the other side of the pond where you're not in a state, anymore. When did you make that move? I did about 10 years in and around London, and now I'm up in the sub-Pirinese mountains in Northern Catalonia in a little farming village, which is amazing. I saw on your website that you wrote Catalonia. I honestly, I thought that was in California. I looked it up and I go, oh, that's in Spain. Okay. So, go ahead. Yeah, the, yeah, there's, anyway, we made the move for fundraising originally because we were, That first company, we ended up, we were trying to figure out social advertising and user-generated advertising, like using user-generated content in a safe way for brand ad campaigns.

We were trying to figure all that out before Facebook or Twitter figured out social advertising. And obviously, we did not achieve that or everyone would already know my name. But, you know, we had a good run at it. And it was an interesting business that we were very poorly suited for. We were very much a product team. We should have stuck with building consumer products. Maybe we should have been to creative agency. we would have been great at that.

But we kind of followed the spreadsheet. This is a huge mistake, I think, for founders, as to, like, investors get the luxury of evaluating businesses by spreadsheet and, you know, expected value. But as a founder, you're going to have to live every day, right? You're not just getting the value at the end of the road. And so I've really tried now to pick ideas that are going to play to my strengths and my constraints and fit into my day-to-day life.

And the fundamental error we made with that first business was we were just looking at the number in the bottom right of the spreadsheet. And so it was not only we were slower than another team would have been, which is obviously pretty damaging as a hypergrowth startup. And also we were miserable, because we're fighting against our inclinations, fighting against what we wanted. And anyway, San Francisco investors understood building a site that monetizes through advertising, but they did not understand building advertising infrastructure. The investors for those industries are in New York, Tel Aviv, London, the advertising hubs. And so after a very frustrating period of fundraising in San Francisco, we're like, let's look around.

And we ended up getting a great round almost immediately from world-class investors in London. So we moved the team there. And as soon as we arrived, you know, there's this couple weeks where you've signed the deal, but you're waiting for the final legales. As soon as we arrived, the 2008 housing crisis happened. And the investors called me the next day. We'd use the last of our cash in our bank account to get one-way tickets out to London. We didn't even have money for a return flight.

And the next day the investors call me. They go, Rob, today, your business is worth half of what it was worth yesterday. If this deal was coming up to us today, we would never in a million years even consider it because like the whole context of the ad industry has changed overnight. It's like everyone's experimental ad budget's gone. Like your business is in shambles right now. And longest pause of my life, right? I'm on the phone.

It's winter. It's London. Or it's cold anyway. I don't know if it was winter. And he goes, but we've never gone back on a handshake. So let's get this done today. before things get worse. Wow.

Wow. Like I had zero leverage. I had negative leverage. And, you know, they just honored the handshake. And so I spent that night, it was snowing, I think, and like super uncharacteristic for London. And I remember, like, running around because, like, we were still getting settled. We didn't have internet at our house. So I'd bribed this internet cafe owner to stay open.

But I'd run out of cash. He was making me pay more out of pocket each hour to stay open late. And I was like emailing all the lawyers in California and trying to get this deal done. so he could wire the money. And, you know, he's eventually like, nope, I'm done. You know, you got no more money. You're out of here. And so I was running through the snow in my, in my flip pops because I was just in the cafe right down below my new apartment. And, you know, went to a friend's office, used their fax machines, got that done. And it was, it was pretty ecstatic when the, when the money finally hit the accounts. Wow. You know, still, ultimately, that business failed,

which was, which was sad, despite some, some little wins along the way. Well, it is interesting part of your story, the fact that you've dealt with the kind of the roller coaster life of in your business. And I feel like, you know, character is revealed a lot, you know, when things are tough. I think it's revealed when things go really well, too, the type of person you are, right? And so it's like power reveals as well. What are some things you feel like you've learned from, from those really challenging moments, those times where you fail, that you've got, you got someone who. basically said, Rob, I believe in you. I'm going to put my money where my mouth is. I'm going to,

I'm going to honor this handshake deal. And then you, you don't, you don't succeed. It doesn't go well. You fail. What are some things you've learned from those failures? I mean, the most abstract piece is just money maturity. When you're young, you know, I started that business. I probably raised that money when I was 24, something like that. It's like, I mean, a thousand dollars was hard for me to imagine. And then someone gives you a million. Like, ah, and then like, you're, on the fence about losing it, it's incomprehensible, right? And so there's this money, maturity that comes where you're like, okay, you know, it's a tool. They're professional investors. And so I made it a lot more personal than it was. And when you make the money personal,

like obviously when you take it, if you hire an employee, if you raise fundraising, that's a tremendous obligation and you're kind of committing to do your best. I'm not saying that you should take that obligation lately. But ultimately at a certain point, it's like, hey, the business has failed, the writing's on the wall. And I wasn't able to accept that because I was so scared if the money we'd take in and what that meant that I was like, it has to succeed, you know? And so I ended up hurting myself a lot more in terms of both financially. I poured what little savings I had to cover payroll for an extra week, an extra week to try to delay having to admit that I'd failed. And also I was like the emotional burnout from that was tremendous,

right? So much worse than I needed to be. So it took me a long time to recover from that. I had to just do these little dinky survival businesses just to kind of keep a roof over my head and and keep my time and attention free. Why not get a job? I had learned by that point that I was poorly suited for employment. Only recently, sort of 15 years later, I learned that I have ADHD, which I guess is part of it. And I don't do well on a schedule. And I don't do well with someone else telling me what to do.

I like to be quite self-directed. But at the time, I didn't know that. I just knew that every time I tried to work for someone, it had exploded in an upsetting fashion. And also I felt like I had people say you learned from failure, you learn from success or whatever. I hadn't found that. I worked super hard for four years on this business. We'd failed. And I felt like I knew nothing.

And but I felt like what I'd done is planted kind of a forest of experience that I could then harvest for learning. But I needed the time available to reflect on what had happened and extract those lessons learned. So I took the last bit of of money I had. I'd, due to a clerical error, I'd gotten kicked out of my apartment. So they'd been forced to give me back a couple months rent and my full deposit. And so I had a, I had that much cash in my pocket. And I was like, what business can I start with this amount of money that's going to be profitable in the first month? And we'll just put a roof over my head. So I wasn't worried about scale. I wasn't worried about all. I was like, but I needed to succeed because if this business

fails, I'm literally bankrupt. And, uh, and so I was like, okay. So I was just looking for reliable, you know, cash flow, et cetera. I set up a little co-working space. I found a building that was scheduled to be demolished in London. So they weren't able to rent it out to anyone else. And it was horrible, you know, but I was like, I'll take it. And so I got it like up until it was demolished. And I kind of went to a junkyard and found tables and chairs. And in London, there was this quirk where all the startup events were at pubs, but the pubs would close at like 10 p.m. And people were still ready to go. And so I would just go to a different startup event each night and say, after party at my office. And that gave me my like marketing exposure, right? And people would come in.

and then some of them would rent desks. And I had to be physically present, right, to manage that space, but I didn't have to be mentally present, which meant that I had the full day to basically think and learn and study and reflect on my experience and talk to people. And that's where I started to, I felt like that was where I learned. I didn't learn from the failure. I learned from reflecting on the failure.

I did that for nine months. And then I was like, I need an apartment. I was sleeping in a hammock in that warehouse. And then I would put everything away before the tenant showed up because I couldn't afford the warehouse and a house, but I was like, whatever, it keeps the rain off of me. But it wasn't how I wanted to live for long. And so after that, I was like, let's do a business that can make a little bit of money now that I've, you know, and now that I've drawn my, my lessons from that time. Wow. How is it, if we fast forward to

today. And I was reading some of the stats on like just your books alone, the passive. It's not, I guess you call it passive because the work's already done. And now like the word of mouth is so powerful, especially the mom test, but all your books, where what's your monthly income just from book sale? Now, it should be noted. You did not publish traditionally. So by doing that, you forego the upfront advance that a traditional publisher gives you for more on the back end. So essentially, you're betting more on yourself, which I'm fascinated. And we may have to have a whole separate call about that that I'm really curious about. But just book money alone, per month. Where are you at? It's about $20,000 a month at the moment, so about a quarter million a year.

And it's growing also. So it's, you know, I just crossed the first book, just crossed, I think, 550,000s in lifetime royalties. That one came out eight years ago. And the second one is about teaching in-person workshops. So that got dinged a bit by COVID. It was on track. It was growing much faster than the first one. But then COVID flatlined it. So that second book sits steady at about 3,000, 4,000 a month, which is like, that's kind of the failure of my books of like of the three. That's the one. But it's still, you know, it's fine. It's whatever. It's stable. And then the the current one has been, it's only been out for four months, but it did three and a half thousand the first month, four and a half thousand the second, six and a half thousand, nine thousand. So that's on track

to over, overtake. The Montesta is about 12,000. I think I might have garbled those numbers slightly. But, you know, it's on track to overtake. But what I'm doing differently with the third is it's the first two were books that I wanted to put out as pure passive revenue because I felt like I'd learned something interesting and it felt selfish to or suboptimal or something to kind of move on without putting that idea into the world. Documenting it. Sharing it. Exactly. And if I did that, I knew that I didn't want to be a professional book marketer because that is a very poorly paid and unrewarding gig. You're not going to make a living selling a $10 undifferentiated product using your own time.

you need to find a way for it to work. And the two ways that people do it is one, they build a big author platform, right, which works, but it's a slow grind and you need to be committed to the space for a long time, which I never was. I kind of follow my interest. So I tend to jump into different industries every few years, which has made it hard to build a big author platform or a big mailing list because they're not necessarily interested in the new thing you're interested in. And the, well, there's also the traditional way, which is to try to do the big launch and ride a PR wave, but that's too unreliable for me. And, you know, like it works for for publishers because they have a portfolio. They're like VCs. And when it hits big, it hits big. But I'm only going to

write a book every few years. So that's unacceptable risk profile for me. So I didn't want to build the author platform. I didn't want to ride the PR wave. And then the third one is to try to make the book organically recommendable and long lasting. And so I studied that and I thought about what I knew about, you know, virality and word of mouth in tech products. And I tried to build and engineer the book the same way, solve a sharp problem for a focused type of user, write in a way where it won't expire, where all the content will last for, you know, decades, not months. So I avoided temporary news topics. I avoided temporary tools and technology, stuff like that. And then I said, okay, I got to tell someone it exists. So with the first book, the mom test, I took responsibility

for marketing, the first 800 copies, which, you know, I was able to give some away at events. I was able to sell some through writing blog posts and stuff. And then after those, 800, I said, that's it. If the book's bad, it deserves to fail. If it's good, it will grow, because now 800 people know about it. And I didn't want to prop up a bad book through my own efforts, right? I was like, hey, it's in the world. Like, let's let the idea live or die. So I did that one. And this one's different because I'm wrapping a whole business around it. So this one, I'm continuing to actively promote in a way that I never did. The third one, write useful books is about how do you design nonfiction as a useful, recommendable product.

So, you know, very much in line with what we're currently talking about. And the reason that I'm building the business around it is because for 10 years in my little notebooks of ideas, you write down like customer segments and you write down industries and you write down products, all this stuff you're interested in. And I've had independent publishing, independent authors, disrupt the traditional publishing industry, like all this stuff. It's been in my notebook for a decade. I've got product ideas.

I've got sketches, all this stuff. But I can never figure it out because their moats are too strong. The marketing challenge to indie authors is too difficult. I can never figure out the business model. And once I had the book, I was like, wait, this acts is top of funnel, like vision setting, credibility building. This like allows me to deal with some of the credibility mode that the big publishers have. And then it's like, okay.

And then once they're in there, I can let people know. And that leads into the rest. And so we've got the book leads into an author's community, which leads into software around beta reading. The beta reading software gives us quantitative signals about how manuscripts are performing. Normally from a publisher's perspective, a manuscript is a black box. They have no ability to know whether it's going to succeed. or fail pre-launch. So they use the authors platform and previous successes as a proxy,

which is why first-time authors without a platform are wildly undervalued by the publishing industry because publishers don't know how to evaluate a book, only a track record. And so we thought, well, if people are willing to share their beta reading data with us when they're using our software platform, we're going to be able to make a quantitative publishing decision. So the last layer on top with this is a new publisher. We sort of flip the model where it's instead of keeping 80% and giving the author, you know, 12, 15% we're giving the author 80%. So it's like, you know, it's a different model. And we've published our first book through that and hopefully we'll do a lot more, focusing on first time authors without a platform of useful books, really backing this thesis.

Well, you know, not to get too meta on the book publishing, but I have to ask it because it's for my own curiosity. I've published two, or I'm about to publish the second one through a traditional publisher, and they've been fantastic to work with. It's the exact same team on both books. So no complaints.

However, I've talked to a lot of authors who have made a shift who went traditional, you know, the book advanced, the PR, all that stuff, but then also have experimented with other ways. So you're saying your next company would help somebody like me do that. you are going to get a really good deal from traditional publishers and you're going to be treated

really well because of your platform and because of your track records. Like you've released two great books. Well, one's about to be released, but I've read the early version. So I know it's going to be great. You know, you've got like your first book has like a 4.8 star review rating across hundreds of reviews. That's unheard of, right? So, and you've got the, you've got the platform. So you're essentially going to get the best treatment that the big publishers have to offer because

they know they can make a safe bet on you. And you can even arrange bidding wars between multiple publishers and, you know, play that game. And you can get what you want from them. If you were starting out, like say a listener to this show who really, they knew something, they were at the peak of their career, they figured something out that's important, they want to share with the world or they want to use it to either have an impact, you know, that doesn't rely on their time, create passive income or level up their career through like that reputation piece. But they don't have the platform.

They don't have the track record writing. That's the sort that we're really focused on. And so the community is sort of like the, you know, it's like, hey, this is a weird way of writing books. Like normally when you think of writing, you think of the lone genius, like typing away, right? Doing their research, doing their revising. Then it goes off to the editor. Whereas we try to do it much more like the traditional approach to startups where even before you write it, how do you test the table of contents? Well, you teach it.

So you can use coaching conversations. You can use workshops. You can give talks. You can start figuring out, does the table of contents work? doesn't resonate with people. Do people even want to show up? If not, if they don't want to show up to your talk, are they really going to want to buy the book?

You get these early signals. Then like aggressive beta reading when it's still a mess. I remember I had a funny beta reader interaction on this latest book where someone knew me from my first two books. And so they were a fan. And they were like, please let me read it. I want to be a beta reader. I can't wait.

And as soon as she got access, she started, she's like, I can't believe it. I get to read Rob's next book early. And then she left exactly like three comments in the manuscript. The first one is like, I'm so excited to be here. The second one is like, what's happening? The third one is like, this sucks. She never came back.

And I was like, it's so perfect, right? And I think that spooks people, right? Because they're scared to share a manuscript when it's still in progress. And like, of course, you know this, right? An in progress manuscript is not a finished book. They're very different beasts. But if you're not willing to expose yourself to like some people thinking you're stupid, how are you ever going to make a polished finished product?

I mean, I'll tell you, man, I had an early reader group, a challenge network, as Adam Grant might call them, that I called them. I said that in the email or I asked them. And they, I mean, I don't want to be hyperbolic, but they in a way changed my life because the book that you, the early advanced copy that you got I sent to you is much different because of those handful of people. like even the very beginning. I won't spoil it right now, but the very beginning

is completely reworked and rewritten because of an early reader, like a beta reader feedback where I had written that, but it wasn't a different part of the book. And he said, the first part, not to offend you, but the first part's kind of boring.

Why don't you put like the, the interesting story that you're talking about crashing airplanes? Why don't you lead with that? And I just switched it and cut the other part out. The boring part just got rid of it, completely. And I was like, oh my God, this changes the book. And that's my friend Jeff Estelle,

actually, who I've known for a long time, is an army ranger and a wonderful writer in his own right. And I remember he said it to me and I texted him back like, dude, you just dramatically change the tone because of the opening, which is a very important part. And so those, I think though, this, Rob, I want to expand beyond just writers. I think this could apply to life, to people, to leaders of John Calapari said, you know, create your kitchen cabinet, the people who can be honest with you. Can you share more about this philosophy of it, I think it comes from, it comes from maybe all of your books, but specifically the mom test as well as right, useful books of seeking feedback all the time, essentially, like as you go, as you're

building seeking feedback. And that's a great way of building whatever it is that you're building, as opposed to tirelessly doing all this stuff by yourself in the corner, waiting forever, trying to fix it when it's like, no, there are people out there who can help you. What would you, what advice do you give there? Everyone was telling me with my first business to go talk to users, go talk to customers, right? And so I tried and it still didn't work. And I found it very time consuming, very unpleasant.

And then we still failed. It's okay to do something time consuming and unpleasant if it pays off in the end. But it really sucks when it doesn't. And so I realized like how you do it also matters, right? It's not enough to, and you know, you talk about this. You got to ask for feedback in the right way from the right people. Otherwise, you're, you know, you're getting worthless data. In the case of startups, your products, you go, what do you think of this idea?

And people go, I love it. It's amazing. It's so innovative. It's so beautifully designed. I can't believe nothing like this exists. That's like compliments and opinions. It's garbage data. But it's very easy to get misled by it.

In the case of a book, people are like, oh, I can't wait to read it. It's going to be amazing. You've got so much to share. But then it's like, even the advanced review copies sits like unread. on their cabinet or in their inbox for months. And so it's both. It's, yeah, you want the data, but also you need to be getting the right type of data. And so I'm not necessarily going out and saying, what do you think of this?

I'm looking for signals about behaviors and actions along the way. So, for example, one of the things that convinced me to really commit to writing write useful books was a friend of mine in Barcelona, Veronica, she wanted to write a book. And she goes, hey, Rob, you've done this. give me some advice. I said, okay, before we meet, let's meet at a cafe. Let me just type some stuff for you. Read this first, so I don't need to spend the whole time lecturing and we can talk about your questions. So I just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, stream of consciousness, 10 page bullet list, sent it to her. I was like, read this. It's like, do this, don't do this,

avoid this, watch out for this. Think about this. She shows up, she goes, wow, you know. And so we have, she asked a bunch of questions. I got, great questions. I mark those, you know, on my little outline. I respond to her new document. Those have been expanded out into paragraphs, right? She sees that, and now it's 30 pages. It's gone from 10 pages to 30 pages. She goes, would it be all right if I said this to a few of my friends who are trying to write books? And it's like, yes, that is what I'm looking for, right? So if she said like, if she didn't read it, if she didn't want to take the time to show up to the meeting, if she didn't have the follow-up questions, is she at no point did I say, what do you think of this? But I'm giving her the opportunity

to show me that she cares, which is closer to real buying usage, reading behavior, right? When you do it purely through words, what do you think of this? Do you think this would work? These hypotheticals, these opinions, it's just not good data. It's so misleading. And so I look for these signs of early action. But to do that, you got to put yourself out there, right? And you got to do it in kind of a, some people are going to think you're stupid. Some people are going to think the early version sucks. And then you want to find ways to make that safe and comfortable, which is part of what finding the early adopter group is. Who are the people who really care the most? It's a bit explorers.

Like with the Workshop Survival Guide, I thought that, and write useful books to some extent, I thought that for Workshops Survival Guide, tradition, like teachers would enjoy it because teachers care about teaching well. And with Right Useful Books, I thought that authors who had had multiple unsuccessful books would want to know how to improve. And in both cases, those two groups hated my books. I don't know why. I don't know if it's some sort of sunk cost fallacy. I don't know if it's like loss aversion. I don't know if they couldn't like, by reading there was a different way to do it, it would make them think that they'd spent, you know, 10 years, like, wastefully. I don't, they just hated it. So I said, fine, not my early adopters,

right? But there were groups who, who really loved it. So I said, okay, that's who I'm going to be able to get safe feedback from. So, you know, you don't have to bang your head against the wall. You find the group who's into it as your, your, your, your, your foothold and then focus on them. That makes you feel safer, right? Because you're with people who's like, they really care. They want it so much. They're willing to deal with the typos. In software, they're willing to deal with the bugs in business, they're willing to deal with like the instability or non-guaranteed uptime. And, you know, that's how you get started. And then over time, you're able to expand out into the mainstream. I think a couple of things, though. One, you have to have the guts and the willingness

to put yourself out there. It's scary. It's a little scary when you share, especially like, for me with writing, it's scary because I love, love excellent writing so much, like reading. a book that changes your life is the best. And when you compare yourself to some of those, you never, I never measure up, right? It's not even close. But with help, sometimes it gets closer. You know what I mean? And so, but so one, you've got to like get past that. You got to get over the fact of potentially being embarrassed or, or, or, or getting out. So I think that that's a big part. But even more scary than being embarrassed isn't the idea of losing a year or two of your life, building something that has no impact, has no value was, you know,

not to say it's, you know, still you get to think. You're always going to learn from that sort of experience, but it's not as much as if it had been out there successfully as a product that's growing and spreading and lasting in the world. There's a, you know, you write a lot about getting feedback and the good questions versus bad questions. And this happens in the speaking world. I know you speak on stages where there's two different reactions. People, first of all, you speak, people are rooting for you to do well. They want you to do well. They don't want you to do bad. And so afterwards, I've had two different types of reactions. No one's going to tell you you did bad. They just they're not because people are nice. You get off the stage and you'll

have some people who will give you kind of the vague. Oh my gosh, man, that was awesome. And then you'll, you'll get off the stage and you have the person who will say, I have a meeting in four months and you're going to come to that meeting. You're speaking at that meeting. I want do that exact same talk at this meeting in four months for my leadership team. What's the rate? How do we get it done today? The first one, as you say, is a compliment or opinion, garbage feedback, whatever. It kind of makes me feel good. You know, it's nice. It's nice. Don't be wrong. I like the compliments. But the specificity and the action, I guess the third one, like a specific compliment would be where they don't have to book you because maybe they don't have the available

or they're not in the position to book you, where if they, they, they, they hone in on a specific point and how they're going to implement that kind of learning outcome as you would put it into their life and how they're so excited to do this. That's awesome feedback. I love that where they're, they're, they're actually picking something specific. And I think this is, this is one of the things you say when, when I think this is a great book for, or great books for salespeople. And that's, that's where I grew up my first job after getting done playing sports was in professional selling of knowing where you, where you, you know, stand because we all know those sales reps that have these giant pipelines. We look at their

pipeline review and there's a million prospects with millions of dollars yet none are ever closing. And for you, you get past that through the questions and the way you ask the questions. Can we dive into some of those good questions versus bad questions? I mean, I have them all written down too, so I'm happy to write them out. Like good questions versus bad questions. when testing out, whether it's your product, yourself, your services, whatever it may be, I think this applies across many industries of how to actually get useful feedback. This applies a lot more when you're still trying to figure out if you're building the right thing. So in the early stages of a new product or a new expansion or a new business line,

sometimes even a big new feature. But at this point, you're not committed to the product. So if you're in a mature company and your product already has product market fit, you're basically trying to execute it, right? you're trying to sell as much of it as you can. It's like a, you know, it's like a one or two dimensional challenge. When you're in a new division or a new business line or a new company, you're also trying to decide like who's the customer segment.

Like what are the product features? How do we describe it? It suddenly becomes very multidimensional and there's a lot more moving parts. And in those cases, going in and optimizing purely for your close rate is actually a big mistake because you can end up closing yourself into these local master. maximums where you've forced close yourself into like a consulting business where you're having to make so many customizations to close the deal, for example, that it's no longer a product business. And now you've got three customers who are all big and demanding and valuable.

And they all want slightly different things. And suddenly your engineering is grinding to a halt because you're having to support so many different feature sets. And so your overly successful sales has now killed your product business. And so when you're early stage, you're, or at least me. I mean, maybe other people do it differently, but I'm going in very skeptically because I'm saying, look, I'm about to give a decade of my life to this. You better prove to me that you care and and like that other people also care, right? I'm not looking for a lukewarm response so I can push over the line. I'm looking for an enthusiastic response for someone's like, yes, I need this. This is super important to me. And it's, if that's not there, I'm not going to like storm out of the room angrily,

right? But I'm also not going to, I'm going to put them in a hold of pattern. I'm going to say like, okay, you know, like, we'll keep you in the loop. I'll let you know how it goes. And then I'm going to be like, okay, I didn't find the love there, you know, so I'm trying to, I'm almost defaulting to the negative. I'm saying like, I bet they don't care. Let me allow them to prove that they do. And so the ways I'm looking for that, one is lines of questioning about what they're already doing and why. So let's say you're doing something in environmental or whatever, carbon neutral, who knows, or security. You go, hey, we're doing this carbon a neutral thing or environmental thing.

It's going to be incredible for businesses like, yeah, you lead with the pitch. When you lead with the pitch, you receive compliments and opinions. They go, oh, it sounds amazing. Yes, we really care about the environment. Oh, yeah, big priority. Right? It's very different. If you can catch them in a casual context, that same person, but you've removed the

formality of the negotiation, the sales room, you catch them somewhere casual, if you can. And it's like, hey, you know, weird question. What are you guys already doing about, you know, carbon stuff? and they go, oh, honestly, nothing. It's like, why not? Have you looked at stuff? They go, yeah, we looked for a bit.

There was someone who was excited about it, but I don't know. They left the team and, you know, no one really picked it up. It's like, okay, probably not a super top priority, right? Whereas if that same person goes, oh, yeah, we've tried everything. We're spending a fortune on these consultants. We tried this program and this program. Honestly, they're all garbage. Like, it's all greenwashing.

None of it actually makes a difference. We're desks like, like, who, in both cases, that's non-consumption, right? In both cases, they don't have a good solution. But in one case, it's non-consumption because they don't care. And in the other case, it's non-consumption because they haven't found a good solution. Or they go, yeah, we're spending a fortune to do it ourselves by hand and this way and that way. We've got three people on the team just trying to track it down. And they're rolling in spreadsheets.

And you go, oh, that's incredible. That's a home-rolled solution, right? I can make their life so much easier. They're demonstrating that they're willing to spend time and effort and money. There's a little bit trickier with consumers. With consumers, you often need to lead with a prototype. And then just watch if they use it or not. Unfortunately, with businesses, founders always complain about B2B and BD and even governments.

They complain about selling to these big institutions because it's a slower sales process. But I actually love it because you get a much earlier signal about their seriousness if you're able to ask the right questions. And after you've learned what they're already doing and why, you can shift into these early commitments. So you're not able to ask for money, but you can ask for time, reputation, and secrets about the buying process. and those are things that they'll only give you if they're, you know, a little bit curious.

In sales, they just call this advancement, but I find that too abstract of a term for new founders or salespeople to pick up. It's kind of like intuitive. And it's this umbrella term. So I like, like, what are they giving you? Are they giving you something that that is slightly painful for them to give you? If so, you know, you're moving forward, like an introduction to their boss or lawyers, very painful for them to give you. So if they're volunteering that or, you know, without you having to be pushy. It's like, yeah, we're on the right track, even if no money's changing hands. And that's how I start to, like, evaluate the pipeline.

You know, somewhere in there, you find the love, you find the excitement. And it's like you spot the first customers. And then over time, you can build up the credibility, the case study is the momentum, which allows you to start selling credibly to the mainstream. What about for a, and maybe, maybe this doesn't apply. So if it doesn't, then we can move on, but like a service-based business. I get the feeling that that's not a business that you want to be in. I did it for a few years.

We built a little education agency to a million or so in revenue. Can I ask a personal question? So what happens a lot of times is the head of HR or an SVP of something will send me an email and say, you know, I've been listening for a few years and really enjoy the show. We don't really have time to develop an in-house kind of leadership development program, but I've heard you talk about this. Can you just do it for us? We got,

you know, we got budget. And so it's kind of a customized need. I've done it before. I can do it. And I start kind of, I've learned, you know,

how to ask questions and certainly your big help. But, you know, I'll be like, you know, let's fast forward a year from now. And you deem it a massive success, my helping you,

like, what happened? What happened? Right? And they'll say things like, well, now we're a team, we collaborate. Our people are better people. They're more effective leaders, which are all sound like great things. But when I think of building a learning outcome, it's like,

we're a team, we're collaborative, we have better culture. Our people are better all around people. That's tough. I'm like, well, what do I do here? You know, and I know I'm kind of, I mean, I shouldn't be sharing this, but like, that's honestly how I feel and what I think. And I'm like, I know this is good for like the revenue purposes of the business because they could, they're good earners and, and, and, and, and, but, but thinking of, am I, am I doing a good job? I have those questions at times. So what do you think when you hear that scenario? Some people love it and are, are very well suited for it. My business partner, Devin, for example, you know, we, we, we, in, in the current business, everyone's just half time. We like that.

We think that, you know, half time is more efficient. And so with, with, with my other half I work on books. And with his other half, he works as a venture capital partner. And so through that, he does a lot of coaching, mentoring, teaching. And before that, he did this sort of consulting where he'd come in as an executive coach, he'd coach the design and product teams and all of that. And he loves it. It's really well suited to his personality. He likes loading a bunch of different problems into his head. He likes understanding the personalities and the dynamics of the team. He likes helping them. He really enjoys it. I find it miserable. And, you know, for me, like being a VC would be the worst job I can imagine.

It's like all day doing emails and meetings. And it's like, you know, I want to be left alone and work on products. And, you know, I thought about what would I want to do if I was retired? And I was like, well, I would probably spend the morning's writing and reading and thinking. And then I would hang out with my friends in the afternoon and, you know, have some beers and play some chess and relax. And I was like, oh, well, I can do that, you know. Let me just like get on the fast train to there. And so I think part of it is very personality driven.

Like consulting is a choice, right? It's a different type of business. And the benefit of consulting is that it's incredibly fast to test. So normally with a product business, you've got this lead time before you've got a product, right? So you need to invest in R&D, which creates kind of guaranteed downside. There's ways to mitigate it, although modern tools of entrepreneurship are about trying to bring the learning forward. Some of that's talking to customers, some of its early prototypes. some of it's, et cetera, et cetera.

With service businesses, you can often just like start selling it and see if it works. And if it's not working, you're kind of in the meetings. You kind of learn while you earn. That's what I think you're learning. Because if I found, Keno speaking similar, I mean, there's not a stock. I mean, I have stories and examples and takeaways, but I never just give a stock speech. The same one never is given twice. Now, certain stories are shared regularly.

Like my dad tells me, you got to play the hits. You know, like, like, man, that happens. But I feel like, while, again, they can be very profitable. You are at least I say you. I am spending a lot of time thinking about that. And that's why I want to focus for this part on the learning outcomes. Because when you write in the with your book about workshops, like that has to be one of the first core things you think about. is the learning outcomes. I think this applies to leaders, like running teams, running businesses

as well. And maybe you can dig into that more, but about the workshop survival guide, about what learning outcomes are about and the audience profile and even like the schedule, which is a big thing that you write about. Like I think this could be helpful, not just with somebody who runs workshops, but people who are running a business or running a team. Yeah, executive retreats, you know, customer conferences, there's a lot of times, even, you know, any team meeting. So basically the idea is that everyone starts their workshops with the slides, which is a huge mistake. That's like starting a book by hunting for typos. But actually, what's more important is, like, who's it for?

And what's different in their life between the time when they started and they finish it? And the same is true for workshops. When you're running a workshop or a meeting or an event, you're basically saying that I am going to consume some portion of your remaining life. or work day or runway or whatever it is. But in return, I'm going to give you something that you didn't have before that's important and it's going to offset the time you sacrificed. So you're like trusting me with your time and attention. And in return, I will give you something valuable.

That's worth more than what they paid plus the time they spent. And that's a big ask. If you think about running like an executive retreat, you know, you got a dozen, 30 execs in a room for two days. Like the monetary value, the attention value of that is tremendous, right? So you need to give them something really, leveraged and effective. So you go, okay. And so when I'm doing a workshop, the first thing I want to know or any kind of talk, who's in the room, like where are they at and where am I trying to get them to?

This is obviously way easier if they want to be there. It's a whole different thing if you're dealing with an angry audience who doesn't want to be there. That gets much more political and crowd management. But in most cases, with grownups, they want to be there. They choose to be there. And so then you go, okay, that's the outcome. This is where they're at. This is where they're getting to. This is who they are. This is what they know and believe already. A lot of people ruin their events because they start and they spend the first 30 minutes, like convincing people of something the audience already believes or telling the audience something they already know.

It's like, wow, like someone didn't do their homework, right? And like figure out who was going to be in the room. Start with, you know, where they're at. And then it's like, okay, there's the, so the grand outcome. What are the building blocks, the learning outcomes they need for that? And then for me to deliver those effectively, what are like the sub-learning outcomes, the pieces. And it's just a little outline.

I call it a skeleton of a workshop, and it's, you know, sometimes to do one big learning outcome properly, you know, maybe that takes three hours of teaching time, you know, and you're going to throw in breaks and you're going to alternate. That's not just lecture. It's, you know, a bunch of different stuff. With a team all hands, it might be something like, hey, like, we really need to have less urgency in the team because the urgency is creating bottlenecks, which are cascading through the whole organization. So, like, that's where you're trying to convince them, but you can't just say that, right? Because if you just say it, people go, yep, yep, yep, makes sense. And then nothing changes. and their behaviors.

So you go, okay, that's the outcome. What pieces do I need in place? And you break that down. And then the next layer, after the skeleton of learning outcomes, is to think through the attention levels. So if you're doing something short, say an hour or less, this doesn't really matter. But beyond that, people's attention starts to drift.

And if they're not paying attention, they can't be, you know, they don't have energy. They can't be paying attention. If they're not paying attention, they can't be learning or acting or thinking critically about how it integrates in their life. So how do you maintain attention?

Two ways. One is good breaks. Everyone skimps on the brakes. I don't understand this. Like when you skimp on breaks, you're basically guaranteeing that your audience doesn't receive what you're trying to lay down. That's pretty crazy. So give them healthy coffee breaks, you know, 15, 20, 30 minutes, give them a good lunch, an hour, hour and a half if they have to walk anywhere. You know, that makes the time you have with them worthwhile.

And then the other thing is to alternate the style of teaching. And I call these teaching formats. Lecture is wildly overused, but does have its place. If you just need to get people a bunch of facts, lectures a fine way to do it. But if you're trying to teach a skill, so let's say you're trying to teach salespeople to ask better questions, you can't just be like, do it this way. That's a mismatch because you're trying to teach a hands-on skill in an all-heavy format. You need to do this through practice.

So you would do practice scenarios. You would, you know, if you were trying to teach wisdom like decision-making, like when should a customer service rep be giving a rebate versus escalating it versus, you know, trying to upsell? It's like, hey, that's a wisdom question. That's a decision-making question. In those cases, it's case studies and scenario challenges. Hey, let's work through these scenarios. We did some work with scientists who are trying to commercialize their research with the Irish government and, you know, for the Irish universities. And so much of this, right? It's like wisdom. It's decision-making. It's case study. It's like when's the right time to keep focusing on the lab work? When's the right time to be selling? When's the right time to be growing the team? Like these are, it's like wisdom. It's like wisdom. wisdom questions, right? So scenarios, this is why it's something MBA programs actually do really well, is tons of casework. And then suddenly we start running workshops and stuff externally. We're trying to make our team members, our executives, or whoever's more wise. We're like, I will now lecture at you for four hours. It's like, that doesn't make sense. It's a disconnect. And also when you vary the

teaching formats every 15, 20 minutes, just that change in format rekindles people's energy levels. So good breaks, shifting energy formats. It keeps people attentive. And something Alex Osterwalder told me, or maybe he told one of my business partners who told me, he's the dude who wrote a business model generation and an incredibly top tier workshop facilitator. He said that something funny about the workshop world is if you look at reviews, like ratings of workshops, the rating you get is not correlated with how much people learn. The rating you get is correlated with how full of energy they feel at the end of the day. So his point was sort of like, he was kind of making a joke about it.

He's like, don't take the workshop ratings too seriously. But that really stuck with me because it's like, and it made me think that actually, if everyone is tired after your meeting, you failed as the meeting organizer because you designed the meeting in a way, which took away all of their attention. And so not only have you failed to deliver what you were trying to deliver in the meeting, but you've also sacrificed whatever they were going to do next, right, through your sloppy meeting design. I just think, I think this experiential design, Rob, goes well.

beyond just workshops. I think for the person who's getting ready to lead their Monday morning staff call in person, whatever it's on. First, let's talk about the fire escapes. Well, yeah, come on. You're killing me, my. Urge people to think about and prepare

if you're going to have your 12 people together, right? We've seen the math 12 times an hour. So this is 12 hours worth of work. at least put some effort and thought and prep into what you're going to say, what you're going to do, the learning outcomes, who's there, why are they there? Because I was always big on, if I don't have, like, good stuff for this Monday meeting, cancel it. Just cancel. You know what I mean? Like, it's cancel the meeting. Like, that, that to me says, like, is this good enough? That's why I don't like having reoccurring meetings. And some people hate me for this, but like, I don't like

reoccurring meetings. I'm like every time I'm going to plan it with an agenda. And if I don't have like the outcomes and what I'm planning to do, we're not going to do it. And I think that's something to think about I wanted I had to get the one thing when it comes to the mom test here, Rob, because I think it applies to life. And there are three simple rules that I read in and your book, the mom test, that I want to expand beyond just talking to customers. And I want to expand it to talking to people. and having good conversations becoming because if you become a better conversationalist, I think your world will be better. One, talk about, and I'm going to ask you to expand on this stuff.

Talk about their life instead of your idea. Can you expand on this one about just in general? I found if you go out into the world with a curious mind to understand the stories of people, just like how you grew up and your parents, like I didn't know that stuff. Like if you go out thinking that way, your life will be better. And this is the first rule of the mom test. Talk about their life instead of your idea. So, I mean, let me just switch the context into something like trying to hire an important employee or a business partner. Everyone goes into that with a pitch. This is what we can pay you. This is what our company is like.

This is, you know, they're talking about themselves. They're talking about their job position, their, you know, their business, their offer. where instead if you flip it and you go like, hey, why are you even talking to me? I know, this is a weird question, but you know, you could be working at Google. Like, why are you even here? What is it about this, this, this job that appealed to you? And suddenly they're like, oh, well, you know, you're connected to this industry, which is really hard to break into. And I would just, that's my dream industry.

And I would love the ability to just, you know, have a way in. And it's like, oh, okay. Well, then listen, like, I'm not going to be able to pay you your, you know, what Google could pay you. But like, I will go out of my way to make sure that you get a. those industry connections. You can come with us to the customer meetings. We're going to put you on stage, you know, when we do those industry events. And in two years, you're going to quit because you're going to have a great job in that industry. And they're like, wow, yeah, absolutely. And suddenly you've, every, every startup is trying to play Google's game of paying competitive

salaries. But actually, you've got the ability to get people exactly what they want. You just have to ask them. It's like, why are you here? What is it about this for you? The matters. And, you know, you seem the opposite. Like everyone's got that friend or used to be friend who's like, you go, oh, man, I'm having some, some problems. And they go, I've had problems just like that. Let me tell you about my situation. Way worse.

Yeah. Yeah. They like, they like, they're empathizing when really it's like, I'm never talking to this person again. And so right. It's like, and also it just avoids the whole compliments and opinions. Yeah, you go, hey, you know, we should, I don't know. There's a million examples.

Yeah. So one of the things you also said of the second rule, ask about specifics in the past instead of generics or opinions about the future. And one word that I want to pull from that, that I always give as feedback is specificity. I think if you're giving praise, if you're making an ask of my time for like a mentor conversation, specificity is very important to me. If you're talking about, after a speech. I like a specific part of feedback as a poet. And this might be a pet peeve of mind that it could be wrong. But I like that you said, ask about specifics in the past instead of generics or opinions about the future. Like, I mean, imagine a product, you know, it makes you skinnier, more beautiful. You live longer. You feel better. You know, it costs $80 a month, you know? It's like, it takes a few hours to use, but it's, you know, whatever. It's convenient enough people. Yeah, I want that. And you're like, okay, well, you just pitched a gym, right? And their, their, their, their behavior is not going to

correlate because you, you, you're talking in hypothetical future land. The, the, the, the, the, the decision not to go to the gym isn't based on like the value proposition of a gym. It's based on, like, they don't want to move and go do it, you know? And so, but even if you continue that and you go, okay, so why don't you exercise? Like, what would make you exercise? Ooh, you just got, like, one, why don't you is kind of like, hey, imagine an answer for me. And then like what would make you, suddenly you're, you've slipped back into hypothetical future land. Like these, it's not a specific and it is not in the past. And so people go, oh, well, I would definitely exercise. But, you know, there's so much traffic and just the drive to the gym is it's like, okay, well,

when's the last time you just like did some pushups and sit ups at home? And they're like, literally never. It's like, all right. So it's probably not the convenience then, is it? Because like, you could do that right now. It's like, should we do some? I'll do pushups with you right now. and they're like, I really don't want to. It's like, okay, if you ask about what they're already doing, like when's the last time you exercised at home, once last time you tried to join a gym, what caused you to stop?

Like, what went into that decision-making process? How did you evaluate and decide which to pay for and which not to? Like, what have you been searched for on Google in terms of like at-home exercise? Like, if you get these specifics in the past, they don't have to have nailed it, but it's at least showing you their decision-making process. You're getting inside their brain. And that's what you want,

is you want to understand their worldview, their decision-making process. And like not all things, decisions aren't rational, right? We're like messy meat machines. And so you want to kind of understand that on a human level. Whereas when people talk about the hypotheticals, the futures, the usually, is the alwayses, they're talking about their idealized self. They're like idealized self-image, not their actual self.

Yeah. I mean, the third one, though, that I like that I think just applies to everybody, talk less, listen more. And you hear this out and about, I mean, talk less, listen more. I think there's there's so much to this very basic, simplistic view of the world that it seems that we still struggle with this. If you track, there was some interesting studies on salespeople where they just, you know, they record them and just the average time speaking versus the customer speaking.

You've got a new idea. You want feedback. It's a book. It's a business. it's whatever. You're talking about getting a job or a promotion. It could be anything. It's scary, right?

You're nervous and you feel like you need to defend yourself or convince them or give the pitch or argue your case. But actually, like, imagine you're talking to a potential partner or hire someone and it's like, it seems like you're pretty skeptical about this. And then you shut up. That is the scariest question to ask, right? Because you're basically, you're putting. yourself there to be shot down. But actually, in many cases, they will tell you. And that is

information that is so precious. Maybe you don't get that deal, but it's going to allow you to make your whole business, your whole organization, your whole career better. And another one is just like, tell me more. Or like, that seems like it's a big deal to you. It's like, wow, you really care about this. Like, oh, this matters, right? You just give people these little nudges because at least in the business world, this works also with friendships and stuff. but I'm not as good at the personal side of it. I'm still working on that. But in the business side, people never get to talk about their problems. They're always told to shut up and listen. And you're sort of probably the first person they've met a long time who cares about their

problems and their day-to-day experience and their frustrations and their goals. And if you just show that you're giving them permission to continue and that you care, man, the floodgates open up. And suddenly all of this precious learning that everyone thinks is impossible to access is just pouring out, you're like, you know, and that's how you, for me at least, that's how I start to start to get in. What about what product I should be building? You mentioned to me that now you're, as you're building, you're also having to play the role of a manager, leading people. I'm trying. I'm trying to learn. How is that going? I mean, how do you use what you've learned

from the books you write and the philosophies that you obviously understand really well and have worked now to leading a team and a group of people to help go in a direction to accomplish something together. Like it's hard. It's completely different than doing it on your own. How is it going for you? So I certainly use the career goals check-ins, and that's very helpful. And some people, for example, like we have one employee.

who joined recently. And in my head, like, I kind of had this bias where I think everyone wants to be a business leader and an entrepreneur because that's my worldview. And so I was always trying to like nudge people along that path by default. And at a certain point, I started asking, I'm like, hey, you know, if you want to keep this,

it's just a 20 hour a week thing, relax, pay the bills, have half your time to yourself. Like, you know, great. Do you want a promotion track? Like, what do you want this job to look like, you know, six months a year, two years down the line? And I've been startled by how many people say, like, I actually really like it to stay relaxed. Is that okay?

And it's like, yeah, absolutely. You know, and things like, I really like to be given a big goal and figure out my own way toward it. When I started asking people, I've been surprised how many have said, like, actually, if you could help me scope out this project and turn it into some checklists and tasks and milestones, you know, I would really enjoy that. That would make me feel a lot more comfortable. And so I've been struck how much my bias and the way I like to work doesn't apply to other. other people. So that I think I'm getting better at. But there's there's so much more to learn that I'm just not good at it. Like the two things that I'm really spending my learning time on right now. One is understanding community and how to build and foster community. We have this paid community

of authors. And I think it's a pretty foundational, especially with Dow's and smart contracts and all of this stuff that's going on in crypto right now. I think it's very likely that that community building is like, you know, this next big enabling wave. So it feels valuable both from my current business and for the next leg of my career. So that's one piece and the other piece is management. And collectively, those are taking up the majority of my time, just trying to, you know, understand, try, experiment, struggle. But it's hard. It's not something I'm naturally suited for, but it's okay. When you think about people who have sustained excellence over an extended period of time and you can define excellence in your own way. But when you think of those who have

sustained it over time. What are a few commonalities they all seem to share? So there's like a Silicon Valley version of this and a rest of the world version. I want your version. I want your version. So the one that resonates most with me is a sort of honesty about their ambitions and what they're trying to optimize for. Because people can be ambitious around maximizing their freedom, freedom of time, freedom of place, freedom of attention, freedom from urgency, right? So because there's something else that they want to be thinking about or doing. And that's still a certain kind of ambition, right?

Other people are ambitious about, you know, learning or expertise. And the mistake I made with my first company was essentially following the default view of what should be optimized for, which is scale. Like, if you listen to the press, everyone ends up optimizing for scale. And for me, that's not, I'm looping back to it. But, like, originally I should have been optimizing for. with like stability on my own terms, you know, independence. Then I went through this freedom phase.

I really pursued early retirement. And like I got there in my early 30s and I was like, okay, I don't have to worry about money anymore. And I was like, I'm retired. And then after like three years of that, I was like pretty bored. And so now I'm like leaning back towards scale and impact. But when you've got the wrong, when you're not clear on what you're optimizing for, it's like you end up picking the wrong jobs.

You end up starting the wrong businesses. And it's very stressful. And it's a longer path to your goal. And I love when I talk to people who, who are like, yeah, right now I just kind of want to have the time to hang out with my family, you know, and like help out my kids. And it's like, and every time I do, they feel guilty about it. They feel like they should be pursuing more scale.

I was talking to a dude, Steve, the other day. He's already built and sold two companies. He sold one to Unilever. He sold one to Airbnb. Super successful by any metric. Right now he's into woodworking and hanging out with his kids, you know, and going hunting and like cooking. you know, what he finds. He's off in the English countryside. And that's what's making him happy.

And he feels so guilty about it. He's like, yeah, I feel like, I don't know, it's not really a, I should be doing a business, shouldn't I? It's like, dude, you know, this is the life you're trying to build. So that's what I love to me. And then that leads to, you know, people get curious, right? Because they have the surplus time. Then they have the curiosity and they have the surplus. And it's go, oh, I'm going to learn. And then suddenly they found something amazing out of nowhere because they allowed themselves this surplus. They allowed themselves this breathing room. And I admire that much more than the constant hustler.

But it's a different pace. Rob, this has been so much fun, man. I think there's going to be more conversations in the future. I'd love to. But the mom test, the workshop survival guide, write useful books. I think these certainly apply the specific niche audiences you've written them for, but also beyond that. And I encourage people to read them if you are in any sort of leadership

role. If you're a leader, you're going to be writing a lot or you should be. It helps clarify thoughts. You write emails. You write town hall speeches, right? You're running meetings. So the workshop survival guide is very helpful for that as well as writing useful books because it's basically to help you be a better writer. And then the mom test helps you, I think, be a better human, ask better questions, be a better learner, be more curious, become a better listener, all those good things. So I encourage people to check out your books. Just so people know, this came. out of my genuine curiosity. There's no PR people. That's how a lot of my guests are booked now. And there's nothing against that because there's a lot of amazing guests that are booked

through that route. But this one was, I saw Rob's work online. I said, hey, man, I'd love to talk to you and you responded rather quickly. And here we are. So I just want to say thank you so much, man. And I certainly love to continue our dialogue as we both progress, man. Absolutely. It would delight me. And I would encourage everyone to grab a copy of the pursuit of excellence. Is it already up for pre-order? It will be by the time this gets released, yes. Grooving, man. If the version I read, which is, you know, pre-launched, anything to go by, it's going to be a great one. So, yeah, hop in there. Let's bring that to number one ASAP. Oh, man, that means a lot. Thank you. I really appreciate it, Rob. And like I said, this won't be the last time.

Thanks, ma'am. Catch you later, Ron. All right. I feel so fortunate to get to have these curiosity conversations with people like Rob Fitzpatrick. I was simultaneously reading all three of his books, sent him an email, and within 15 minutes, we had agreed to record a podcast together and then did it a few days later. So this was a real treat. I hope you enjoyed it. A few takeaways from my notes. Running better meetings, a few ways focusing on who will be in your meeting and how to maximize the value that they will receive while there. I think the things that Rob and I talked about that came from the mom test as well as his book on running great workshops could really help you when it comes to meetings as well as thinking about learning outcomes and this is how he

designs all of his workshops and it's really making me rethink the meetings that I run the workshops that I run which is how will I or how will you as the leader help the people that come to your meetings be wiser or at least more wiser than they were. when it started. And I think this is a good measure of a good meeting. And then the three simple rules of the mom test, talk about their life instead of yours or your idea, ask about specifics in the past instead of generics or opinions about the future. And then just talk less and listen more. And then this whole conversation was about feedback. And I thought it was it was interesting. when Rob said compliments and opinions are garbage data. Ask questions that will elicit specific. Again, back to that word specific, specific feedback. And as the person who is both asking for this to get it from others, as well as a person who's going to give feedback to others, think of that word, and that is specificity. Be specific in your questions and specific in your feedback. And that will lead you to a better place to get better.

feedback. Once again, I want to say thank you so much for continuing to spread the word telling one person at a time, hey, you should listen to this episode of The Learning Leader Show with Rob Fitzpatrick. It'll make you a more effective leader. And because you continue to do that and continue to write reviews and rate the show, hopefully five stars in Apple podcasts, you are giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you. you so much. Talk to soon. Can we?