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THE SECRET TO BECOMING A PRODUCTIVITY MASTER · INSPIRE STORY

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Speaker 1: The best lives, in some ways are unadorned lives, the
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lives that are not adorned by the trappings of wealth
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or performative complexity, or posturing or status seeking, but are
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the simplicity of.
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Speaker 2: Do you have people who love you? And do you
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have people you love?
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Speaker 3: Hey, everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the number one
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health podcast in the world. Thanks to each and every
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single one of you that come back every week to listen, learn,
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and grow. Now today, I'm super excited because I have
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been reading these authors books since my teenage years and
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I found them fascinating. They totally inspired me when it
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came to behavioral science, understanding the mind, how we think,
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how we make decisions, how we get driven and motivated,
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and I've been a fan ever since. So this is
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a true fan moment for me. Our guest today is
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none other than Daniel Pink. He's the author of six
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books about.
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Speaker 4: Business and human behavior.
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Speaker 3: His books include the long time running New York Times
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bestseller When, which will be dissecting today a Whole New Mind,
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as well as the number one New York Times Bestseller's Drive,
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which was actually the first book that I read from him,
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and to sell is human Dan's books have won multiple
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awards and have been translated into forty languages and have
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sold more than three million copies. Now Dan has been
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a contributing editor at Fast Company and Wired, as well
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as a business columnist for The Sunday Telegraph. His articles
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and essays have also appeared in The New York Times,
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Harvard Business Review, and other publications, and in twenty nineteen,
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London based Thinkers fifty named him the sixth most influential
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management thinker in the world.
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Speaker 4: And he lives in Washington, d C.
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Speaker 3: With his family, and today we're here to talk about
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his latest book, when called The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing,
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which I know you're going to love.
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Speaker 4: So Dan, thank you for doing this.
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Speaker 2: Jake, It's pleasure to be with you.
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Speaker 4: Yeah.
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Speaker 3: You literally you were like one of the first people
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I ever thought of interviewing, before I even had a podcast.
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And I remember saying, too, I believe our mutual friend
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Dan Schabelle, who I believe you know well as well.
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Of course I remember saying to him, I was like,
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I would love to interview Dan, and.
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Speaker 4: He was like, yeah, I can introduce you, and I
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can introduce.
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Speaker 1: You to him.
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Speaker 4: And then I didn't have a podcast there, so I
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didn't interview, so we waited.
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Speaker 2: Worth absolutely worth the wait.
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Speaker 4: Yeah, Well, thank you so much for doing this.
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Speaker 3: I've genuinely enjoyed your book what you've helped me understand
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about human incentives, drive, and now timing, which I think
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is the most fascinating. I recommended this book last year
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as one of my top ten books and pushing it
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out as much as I can, so I'm excited to
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dive into it. But I want to actually start off
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with something that I saw on your Twitter profile. I
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think it was yesterday or a couple of days ago, where
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you actually recommended Trevor Noah's audiobook Crime for a book
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to study with for high school students.
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Speaker 4: And I was understring why particularly that book.
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Speaker 1: There's a large presence on Twitter and have a social
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media of educators, and those are educators among the few
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people who I actually enjoy interacting with on Twitter. And
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so there was a fellow who I think was a
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high school principal who is looking for recommendations for books
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for high school students to read, and I thought that
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that Trevor Noah's book, including the audio edition, was just
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a great choice for high school students.
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Speaker 2: I mean, I'm a father of a high school student.
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Speaker 1: My son has my son has read that book us.
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It's just that it's an extraordinarily principle. It's it's man,
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it's monumentally entertaining. It's just a gripping story of this kid.
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And I think that what he is telling us gives
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us all kinds of insight into our world today.
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Speaker 2: He Trevor was the.
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Speaker 1: Son of a black mom and a white dad, German dad.
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Growing up, he was born in apartheid era South Africa,
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and so simply for Americans, especially white Americans, hearing about
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that is just I mean, even though you know it,
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it's just kind of mind boggling. And then and then
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what happens after a post apart tide, how he decides
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what he wants to do, what his relationships are with
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his mother and father.
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Speaker 2: But I actually listened to the audio edition of this
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of his book, and.
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Speaker 1: It is jay I think, the best audiobook I've ever
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listened to. And the reason for that is that is
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that Trevor Noah speaks multiple languages, and so and so
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he goes into some of these languages, but also his
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ability to do characters and accents is just extraordinary. It's
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a virtuostic performance and just a gripping read. I can't
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imagine a seventeen year old not being sixteen year old
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not being mesmerized by that as I was, and I'm
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way older than seventeen.
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Speaker 4: I love that.
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Speaker 3: No, it's a great recommendation. I think that's awesome. And
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it's always nice to hear authors and very successful authors
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recommending other authors and audiobooks. So I think that's done it. Now,
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You've made it really, really clear.
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Speaker 4: That's right. Tell us about I want to start, you know,
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about with your fascination with human behavior and the mind
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and the way we think and why we do certain things,
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Like where did that come from for you?
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Speaker 3: Because you know, like I said, you were the first
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person or one of the first people to introduce me
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into that whole school of thought.
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Speaker 4: And I just think, like, when you're young and you're at.
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Speaker 3: College or you're at school, you don't really you don't
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really get exposed to these kind of topics.
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Speaker 4: So where was it for you? And you know, how
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did that start for you?
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Speaker 1: I guess I'm not totally sure. I think part of
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it comes I'll give you. I'll give you some analysis
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jay part of it. I think part of it comes
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from being a pretty quiet kid growing up. I won't
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I won't say shy, but just kind of a quiet kid,
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more of an observer, a reader as a kid who
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went to the library all the time. And so just
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that sort of putting myself is always feeling like I
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wasn't quite in the center of things, but was kind
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of on the periphery observing. And who was I observing?
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It was there observing these crazy people. Uh, And so
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that I think was I think that was.
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Speaker 2: Part of it.
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Speaker 1: I also was fortunate enough when I was in college
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to uh to study my very first uh, my very
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first trimester in college. I took introductory to psychology and
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loved it. I studied a lot of economics, a lot
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of psychology and UH, but I ended up actually majored
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in in linguistics, which is a which is a which
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is another social science.
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Speaker 2: So I was always keenly, keenly interested in it.
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Speaker 1: I think if I had my uh if, I I
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can totally see in retrospect in my life that I
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would have become a professor rather than doing the noble
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hackery that I'm doing today.
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Speaker 3: No, that's awesome. It's interesting always how how people got
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to where they got to. And I'm fascinated that you
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haven't fully dissected your journey and and like broken it
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up into little pieces. And I quite like that. I
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think it's uh, I think it's it's very humble of you.
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Speaker 1: Actually, well, I also think it's thank you for that.
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I'm not sure that it's humble as it is accurate.
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I think a lot of times these these they're different
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vantage points in looking at these journeys, and I like
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the metaphor of a journey, the different vantage points in
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looking at these journeys. So if you're in it, and
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you're in your you're you're you're, you're navigating your way.
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At least for me, there was much much less intention
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than one would think.
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Speaker 2: Luck that that kind of thing.
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Speaker 1: I think that in some cases, just because it makes
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us more comfortable existentially, we look back on these things
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and say, oh, there was a clear narrative to that journey,
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and there might be I think that that retrospective look
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is actually valid, is valid too, Yeah?
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Speaker 4: Absolutely? And I know that you spent a lot of
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time in Japan, right, or you spent some time and yeah,
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I spent some time.
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Speaker 3: Sure, Yeah, what's the culture like or what kind of
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influences have you taken from that culture?
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Speaker 4: Reliable?
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Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a really really interesting question, probably more profound
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than I realize.
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Speaker 2: I think that one of them is the virtue of
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simple the city. I think that there is h and.
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Speaker 1: And you you know, and you know living in a
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in a Japanese zen garden style house, that that there
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is in in Japanese design, in in in certain sorts
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of forms of just Japanese culture, there is a premium.
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Speaker 2: On that simplicity. And I think in in in.
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Speaker 1: Many cases, in many realms of particularly American and particularly
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kind of elite, well educated American circles, Uh, there is
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this kind of performative complexity. I mean, forgiven even that
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phrase performative complexity.
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Speaker 4: Is an example.
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Speaker 1: Well, no, it's total bs because it's an example of
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performative complexity. Basically, what it is is that people want
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to feel smart, and the way that they want to
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feel smart is by making things really.
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Speaker 2: Complicated and and and and and.
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Speaker 1: To me, one of the things I absorbed from spending
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time there is actually the keenest form of intelligence is
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to make things as simple as you possibly simple and
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clear and elegant as you possibly can, whether you are
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writing a book, whether you're making a film, whether you're
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building a house, whether you're raising a family, anything like that.
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That there's a virtue in that kind of simplicity and clarity.
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So I think that's probably the thing that sunk in
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the most for me.
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Speaker 4: That's so profound. I'm so glad you shared that.
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Speaker 3: Actually I didn't know what answer you were going to give,
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and I did, And I love that because I've always
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thought that for a while, like you know, I was
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all My work is inspired by two statements. One statement
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is a statement often attributed to Martin Luther King, where
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he said that if you want a new idea, read
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an old book. And so I have this fascination with
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timeless wisdom and kind of true pot And then the
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second one is from Einstein and when he said that
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if you can't explain something simply, you don't understand it
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well enough.
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Speaker 4: And so I've always been fascinated with simplification.
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Speaker 3: And your work does that very very effectively, apart from
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performative complexity, which I believe I don't know if you
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just made that up right now, but it's a great, I.
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Speaker 1: Did, I did, I did?
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Speaker 2: You can have it because I don't want to ever
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say it again.
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Speaker 3: And sometimes I feel like I feel this pressure as
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a as a thinker or a sharer or whatever you
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want to call us, you know, I have this pressure
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of like, oh, well, maybe I'm making things too easy
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to understand. And actually hearing you say that, it's so
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like refreshing for me because I'm like, no, I want
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people to be able to practice it and just get
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it in one you know.
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Speaker 4: So that's a beautiful part of culture. And what part
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of the culture did you feel that? Was it? Architecture?
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Speaker 3: Was it?
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Speaker 4: Language? Was it? You know, where was that in the culture.
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Speaker 3: I didn't have.
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Speaker 2: Any master in the language.
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Speaker 1: That was hard for me too, That that was hard
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for me.
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Speaker 2: Although I think there.
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Speaker 1: Is something, you know, even in the pictorial aspect of
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the language, where a single character, a single image represents
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something that's actually it can actually something be fairly complex.
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So if you take up some a notion that is complex,
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like luck, okay, there'll be a character for luck. I
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know it's true obviously in China. That's true obviously in
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Chinese as well. Well.
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Speaker 2: I just I just thought that when the Uh.
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Speaker 1: If if you look at even Japanese aesthetics, it's it's
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it's an even Japanese cuisine, it's unadorned. It, you know,
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like like really good Japanese cuisine is unadorned. It isn't
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French where there's like leila and link sauces and all
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kinds of stuff on it. It isn't, you know, heavily
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garnished and displayed in this grandiose way. It is pure,
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it is simple, it is unadorned. The essence speaks for itself,
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and there's a there's a there's a there's a lot
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to be said for that.
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Speaker 2: Even if you look at like even.
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Speaker 1: Japanese cuisine, where you go into a place and all
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they serve is ramen. Okay, so not trying to do everything,
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but there you're gonna get the best bowl of ramed you've.
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Speaker 2: Ever had because that's all they serve.
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Speaker 3: Uh.
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Speaker 1: And so I think that that has been that way
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of thinking has probably had a bigger effect on me
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than I than I realized. In fact, in some ways, Jay,
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your question is making me understand that that that had
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a bigger effect because I do think that their clarity
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and simplicity to me are such those are things that
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I as a as a as a creator and as
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a consumer, a prize very very deeply.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean you're you're a phenomenal public speaker as well.
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And if anyone's never seen down on stage, just go
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on YouTube and just watch them on stage, whether it's
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TED or other events. But have you ever reset simplicity
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or clarity out of interest? Like are they themes that
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you see yourself writing about or do you ever have
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you ever been down a rabbit hole and one of
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those and discovered anything fascinating about simplicity or clarity? Because
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I think you're spot on that really, those are the
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two things we're always seeking out right, whether decision making
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or whether it's in how we feel about ourselves or
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a relationship we have in our lives. I'm intrigued because
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I've definitely studied those from a meditation mindful right, right,
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But I'm intrigued to hear about if you found anything
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scientifically that's that fascinates.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, that's another really interesting question. I don't think I've
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ever intentionally uh gone gone after that, but there is
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there is a decent amount of there's a decent amount
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of of.
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Speaker 2: Research showing aspects of this.
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Speaker 1: So for instance, so so for I give you, I
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give you something profound and something mundane, right, so so
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on the on, the on the mundane is it's a concept.
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It's a concept in linguistics, uh, which is which is
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known as processing fluency, processing fluence, and all processing fluency
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means is that the message, the words that the communication
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you're making goes down easily. All right, So so it's
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it goes down easily. Now that's a virtue in and
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of itself. But one of the things that we know
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from from linguistics and some from some social psychology is
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that processing fluency enhances believability, not only understand but believability.
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Speaker 2: And there's a dark side of this, of course.
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Speaker 1: And so what you see is that things that enhance
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processing fluency are effective in getting your message across. An
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example would be repetition. Okay, we know that like repetition
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is effective. Repetition increases people's understanding, it increases their believability.
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Now there's a down side. There's a downside to that.
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Even things like rhyming. There's some brilliant research showing that
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that messages that rhyme are not only considered more understandable
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but actually more believable alliteration lists and things like that.
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So we do know something from science that that clarity
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and simplicity are obviously extraordinarily are extraordinarily effective. That's the
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mundane rhymes increased process influency. Okay, I think the more
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profound thing is that when you look at, say things
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like your listeners. Some of your listeners are probably familiar
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with the famous Grant Study out of.
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Speaker 2: Harvard where they followed a group of men.
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Speaker 1: It was at the time, is all men I think
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it was all white men in graduated.
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Speaker 2: From Harvard in the nineteen.
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Speaker 1: Forty something like that, and they file file I might
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be a little bit off in the years they they
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and they followed them through the course of their lives, uh,
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you know checking you know, a massive longitudinal study. They
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also did it with They later did a group of
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working class men, all men from from from Boston. And
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one of the things that you see from the Grant
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Study is that, you know, like, what makes somebody satisfied,
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what makes somebody happy with their life? And it turned
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out that it's completely unadorned. It's basically, do you have
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somebody you love and do you have people who love you, period,
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full stop. That's it. So the adornment that we were
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talking about in Japanese cuisine, that the lack of adornment
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in Japanese cuisine is that our the best lives in
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some ways are unadorned lives, lives that are not adorned
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by the trappings of wealth or performative complexity or pasturing
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or status seeking, but are the simplicity of do you
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have people who love you?
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Speaker 2: And do you have people you love?
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Speaker 3: Yeah? That that that is truly one of the hardest
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things to understand right now as well, because you know,
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I was literally speaking to another podcast interviewing Peter Demandis recently,
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and you know, he's obsessed with the future and we're
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talking about how you know, he thinks the words improving
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and the future is changing, and like we could we
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could live on another planet and we could you know,
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do all this kind of stuff, and it's you know,
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at the same time, I remember a couple of years ago,
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I got to visit one of the Blue zones in Sardinia.
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Speaker 4: I don't know if you've come across Blue zones, and
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so I'm.
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Speaker 1: Sure I know, I know, I've actually ordered, I've actually
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there's a there's a there's a wine from that from Sardinia.
16:52
Right now, the grape I'm spacing out of what the
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varietal is. I've actually gone out and looked and ordered
16:59
why from Sardinia because for that very reason.
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Speaker 4: Oh that's incredible. Okay, what a small world. So I
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don't drink, so I have no idea what that wine
17:07
is or the help you out.
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Speaker 3: But but yeah, So when I went there and I was,
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I was, you know, I lived with some of the
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people in the town, in the village, and I was
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looking at their lifestyles.
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Speaker 4: And I also interview Dan Butner who talks about the
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blue Zone, and.
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Speaker 3: And you know, it's you look at that simplicity and
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you look at that, you know, that stability of like
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growing up in a village, farming the land, natural exercise,
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not needing to do any hit workouts or any any
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weights exercises.
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Speaker 4: It is it is really really special to see that.
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Speaker 3: And I like trying to entertain the paradox of what
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parts of our lives are better simpler and what parts
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of our lives are better with some And maybe complexity
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is the wrong wordy complexity not even the opposite of simplicity,
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maybe there's another point point and yeah, maybe there's another
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element to like, not the opposite of simplicity, but a complementary,
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paradoxical version of simplicity. That because I find in an
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of myself and I'd love to hear what you think,
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like I what I get fascinated about and excited about
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is the correlation between simplicity and then strategy, right like
18:12
or like simplicity and then like ambition or drive or focus.
18:17
And I find like often today people you know, people
18:21
may connect simplicity with laziness or lack of focus or
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you know that, but we are speaking at a much more deeper,
18:28
essential level of clarity.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. It's interesting.
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Speaker 1: There is a it's an interesting in somebody's a linguistic question,
18:37
no joke about like, what's the right word to describe
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what you and I are talking about? Because I feel
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like you and I are talking about something, well, at
18:44
least what I think is important and quite interesting, but
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our vocabulary, or at least in English, might be impoverished
18:52
and doesn't have the quite right term for that. I
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think you used a really important word. They're essential. It's
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partly about what you know what is is what is fundamental.
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And I do think that this idea that that we
19:05
know that simplicity and ambition can be easily twinned, no
19:09
question about it. I mean you you mentioned that one
19:11
of your guiding quotations was from was from uh was
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from Einstein who was talking about simplicity.
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Speaker 2: And he ended up I mean among his among.
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Speaker 1: His breakthroughs, were with something that is so profoundly complex
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that most of us don't understand it beyond the equation
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we memorized in seventh grade.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, it's very true. It is very very true, and
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that challenge is real. But talking of essentials, I do
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want to talk about because I think this book is
19:38
so essentially driven, so for everyone who hasn't read it,
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and I've recommended it before, we have had this book
19:43
when that I want to talk about.
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Speaker 4: I think time is one of those things.
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Speaker 3: You know, how we use time, spend time, create time,
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what we make time for Like time is one of
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those things that, of course is and the way we
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use that essentially a sensual, essential.
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Speaker 4: Part of all of our lives.
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Speaker 3: And I think when we're talking about simplicity or clarity,
20:05
I think one of the biggest things we lack simplicity
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and clarity on is time. And for me, I've definitely
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noticed how over life, especially when your book came out,
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I've tried to remove people from having to live their
20:20
life based on a timeline or an expectation. And I
20:25
realized that because my life went in a completely different
20:28
direction whereby I became a monk at twenty two and
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didn't have my first job until twenty six and today
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lead one of the most meaningful, fulfilling lives in the
20:39
world thanks to how all my experiences and so it's
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just it's fascinating. There were times in my life where
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I felt like I was behind people that I should
20:48
be in line with. There are times in my life
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where I felt I was ahead of people. There are
20:52
times when I felt like I was trying to figure
20:54
it out. And I think a lot of people usually
20:56
feel like they're behind ahead or eat quo too, and
21:01
that's kind of how we make sense of stuff. And
21:03
that's what when this book came out, which I know
21:05
is like maybe a year ago, year and a half ago,
21:07
maybe the company is going to it's to me that
21:10
was I was fascinated that you were able to pinpoint Yeah,
21:13
and go so deeply into time, which I always thought
21:16
was so much more fluid.
21:17
Speaker 4: And so I get the first question I want to
21:19
ask you, and please take this.
21:21
Speaker 3: Wherever you like, Like, don't feel constricted at all, because
21:24
I like what we're kind of co creating right now.
21:27
Speaker 4: What fascinates you about time the most?
21:31
Speaker 3: That you were so deeply drawn to actually write a
21:33
whole book about timing.
21:35
Speaker 2: Yeah, so that is actually.
21:39
Speaker 1: I'm gonna put the answer to that in more of
21:41
the mundane category. The reason for the impetus for it
21:45
was just frustration more than anything else. It wasn't any
21:49
kind of deep conceptual fascination. So here we are, you know,
21:53
on talk with you from this is. This is my
21:55
office here in Washington, d C. It's the refurbished one
21:59
car garage on my house. I live there, like right there,
22:03
and so you know, I would come to my office
22:06
and and do stuff, do work. And at a certain
22:10
point I realized it like I would have a I
22:14
have a to do list, and maybe I would have
22:16
appointments on the calendar. But I wasn't intentional at all
22:19
about when I was doing stuff. Well, I would write
22:21
when I felt like writing. I would make phone calls
22:23
when I felt like making phone calls.
22:25
Speaker 2: I would do interviews.
22:27
Speaker 1: When I felt like doing interviews, you know, And I
22:29
wasn't intentional about it, and I said, that's that's crazy,
22:33
that's that's crazy, Like like like I end up, I'm
22:36
actually a fairly kind of rational I like to think
22:38
I am at least fairly rational evidence based guy. And
22:42
I'm making these decisions about when to do things. I'm
22:44
not even making decisions. I'm just kind of stumbling my
22:47
way into it. And so I said, well, there's got
22:50
to be some guidance out there on on like when
22:52
we should do things. And I found, to my surprise
22:54
that there wasn't, and that got me really curious. I said, well,
22:58
I wonder if there's anybody's ever researched this. Started looking
23:00
around for research and in turn that there was a
23:02
huge amount of research on this question. But it was
23:04
splattered all over the place. It was in literally two
23:08
thousand different domains. So it wasn't like you say, oh,
23:10
there's a sociologist who studies timing, Well, there might be,
23:13
there is there are, but there are also biologists who
23:15
do that.
23:16
Speaker 2: They are economists who've.
23:16
Speaker 1: Studied that there are microbiologists who have done studies, epidemiologists,
23:21
there's a whole field called chronobiology.
23:23
Speaker 2: And so what you had was you had.
23:26
Speaker 1: Literally two dozen different fields asking very similar in some
23:30
cases identical questions. And what I said is like, maybe
23:33
you know, it was painful, but if I go wide
23:36
enough and deepen up into this research, I can begin
23:38
to piece together the evidence based ways to make better,
23:41
smarter decisions about when to do things, when to.
23:43
Speaker 2: Do things in a given day.
23:44
Speaker 1: But also to your other point, Jay, when we think
23:48
about our lives, our lives are episodic. Episodes have beginnings,
23:53
the episodes have middles, and episodes have ends. That the
23:55
whole idea of the journey metaphor you introduced earlier is like,
23:57
the journeys have beginnings, they have middles, and they have ends.
24:00
And it turns out that there is some fascinating research
24:03
on how our cognitive abilities change over the course of
24:07
the day, and then more episodically, how beginnings affect us,
24:10
how midpoints affect us, how endings affect us. There's research
24:13
on how groups coordinate in time. There's research on how
24:17
the way we think about time affects our behavior. There's
24:20
research again all roads lead back to linguistics. There's research
24:23
based on the way that languages can figure their verb tenses.
24:28
It can predict people's savings behavior, as crazy as that sounds.
24:32
And so it ends up being something that is going
24:36
back to another one of your words, it ends up
24:38
being essential, It ends up being fundamental because we are
24:43
temporal creatures. That is, we have we talk about colloquially
24:46
about biological clocks, about a biological clock, but essentially what
24:52
we have we know from biology is that, especially chronobiology,
24:56
is that we essentially have clocks and every cell in
24:59
our body, I mean, we are walking time pieces. And again,
25:03
depending on your notion of time, sort of philosophically, existentially,
25:07
we are in some ways moving through time. At the
25:10
very least, our conversation began in the past. That right,
25:15
it's going to end in the future. Right, The people
25:17
who are going to listen to their recorded version of
25:19
this are listening to something that happened in the past.
25:21
But those people haven't done anything yet because that's in
25:24
the future. And so we're sort of swimming in this
25:27
essential element of our lives. And so what I was
25:29
just trying to do is just make it understandable.
25:34
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think you did a phenomenal job. And
25:36
so I want to dive into different parts. And I
25:38
guess my first question is like this. Actually there's a
25:41
few things. So the first one is I think the
25:44
most common relationship. And of course I'm making a huge
25:47
assumption here, but I think maybe we'll agree, maybe your
25:50
RESEARCHU say something else, but I'd say my assumption is
25:54
that the most common relationship. And I believe everyone has
25:57
a relationship with money. We have a relationship with time.
26:00
We have a relationship with anything, knowledge, wisdom, et cetera.
26:04
And so our relationship with time for most people is
26:07
I always feel like I don't have enough, right. That
26:10
is a very clear relationship that we all every time.
26:13
It's like I don't have enough time, I can't make
26:16
enough time, I can't find time. Like we say all
26:18
these words which are all about making, finding, creating, having,
26:23
What does that do? What is that mindset toward time?
26:27
How does that actually affect our behavior?
26:30
Speaker 2: Our relationship with time.
26:31
Speaker 1: We can think of it as an ally, we can
26:33
think of it as an enemy. In some ways, that's
26:35
over that's oversimplifying in that case. But I think what
26:38
we're trying to and one way to make time your
26:40
ally rather than your enemy is to recognize the effect,
26:44
often invisible, that it has on your life. So if
26:49
you look so so, I'll give you an example. What
26:53
we know from let's just take the unit of a day.
26:56
What we know very clearly from a whole array of
26:58
research is that our brain power does not remain constant
27:02
over the course of a day. Our brain power changes
27:05
over the course of a day. So doing something at
27:07
nine am is not the same as doing something at
27:09
three pm, period full stop. Now, there's some complexity underneath that,
27:14
but the main idea is that our brain power doesn't
27:16
remain constant over the course of a day, and the
27:18
best time to do something depends on what it is
27:20
you're actually doing. So once you understand those kinds of hidden,
27:24
invisible rules, you can begin to make time your ally
27:28
rather than your enemy and end up mitigating some of
27:31
those feelings that you never that one never has enough time.
27:35
So I think that's I think that's part of what
27:37
it is people who feel like they don't.
27:39
Speaker 2: Have enough time.
27:40
Speaker 1: This is not something I'll write about, but I'll appine
27:42
about it anyway. In many cases, people who don't feel
27:45
like they have enough time, sometimes not always. Sometimes it's
27:49
not a time it's not a sufficiency of time issue,
27:53
it's a sufficiency of priority issue. What they actually don't
27:56
have any clarity about their purpose of their priorities, and
27:59
so they're moving in all kinds. And that's not always
28:01
the case, but I think that's that's partly the case.
28:04
The other thing that we know is that when time
28:06
becomes extremely salient in our lives, we underperform and I'll
28:11
give you in certain circumstances, or we're unhappy in certain circumstances.
28:15
So a great example of that is in professional services,
28:19
but particularly in the practice of law, is the billable hour.
28:23
What we know so if you are a lawyer practicing
28:26
in a law firm, not working for the government or
28:29
doing that or nonprofit or something, you build yourself out
28:32
by the hour. And so what you do is that
28:35
you have, you know, a way to well, I'm going
28:38
analog here, but you have on your computer or you know,
28:41
scribbled down an account of what you're doing, literally in
28:45
some cases in six minute increments. And what we know
28:48
from research there is that that makes people that is
28:51
incredibly thwarting to people's sense of autonomy and so so
28:57
there are all kinds of things in our relationship with
28:59
time that if we can figure it, we can feel
29:01
a little bit better, do a little bit more and better.
29:04
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's that's that's part on. I think that makes
29:07
that answer, and all the parts will make a lot
29:09
of sense.
29:09
Speaker 3: I think the part that I get really interested by
29:13
when we start talking about time in the way you
29:14
just did now where you talking about priorities. You're talking
29:17
about uh, the you know, the the ally versus the enemy.
29:22
And I love that is productivity, even the goal of time,
29:28
because I feel like today one of the biggest challenges
29:31
that I get asked at least and maybe your children
29:34
experience this, or maybe what I see outside in the
29:36
world of social media is a lot of people today
29:39
spend a lot of time overthinking and procrastinating, and that
29:43
scene as a negative thing, and people are often like
29:46
scared of overthinking, scared of procrastinating, or they judge themselves,
29:50
and then they start getting into this kind of like
29:52
you know, vicious circle and cycle of feeling like, oh,
29:56
like I'm wasting a lot of time here. Tell me
29:58
about what you found or even your thoughts on productivity
30:02
as a goal of time versus the effective use, if possible,
30:07
of procrastination and overthinking.
30:09
Speaker 1: Procrastination and productivity. Okay, let's talk about what productivity is.
30:12
Speaker 2: I'm going to be literal this year.
30:14
Speaker 1: Productivity is the amount of units you produce over a
30:17
given amount of time. So it is inherently time based
30:21
because time is in the denominator of productivity. Okay, So,
30:26
so again, I'm not sure that productivity is necessarily the
30:29
best measure. I say that as a writer. Okay, So
30:32
I could be like like, I could be a production like.
30:36
I suppose I wrote more words per hour today versus yesterday,
30:42
I would literally be more productive.
30:44
Speaker 2: But am I Am I a better writer? I don't know.
30:47
Speaker 1: It's probably it doesn't matter what are the words right?
30:50
And so and so. In some ways, productivity is the
30:54
notion of productivity in that very literal sense is an
30:57
artifact of our being an economy where we were producing identical,
31:04
mass produced goods, and so efficiency was the was the
31:08
highest value because everything was the same, and so what
31:11
you wanted to do was in a given denominator.
31:14
Speaker 2: Make the numerator larger. Okay, that's how you increase.
31:18
Speaker 1: That's that's a way to increase productivity or keep the
31:20
numertor the same and shrink the amount of time in
31:22
the denominator. So so that's what that's what, that's what
31:27
productivity is. I think a way to you know, a
31:31
looser way to measure things is is quality and quality
31:35
contribution impact those sorts of things. Uh, and certainly for
31:39
certain kinds of professions like being a writer, writing more
31:42
words is no measure of my contribution to the world.
31:45
Speaker 4: Yeah.
31:45
Speaker 3: So if anyone's listening or watching right now, it's like, Dan,
31:49
I just feel like I procrastinate a law, I overthink
31:52
a lot, yeah, and I waste time.
31:54
Speaker 4: What would be a response today?
31:56
Speaker 2: Okay, So let's okay.
31:57
Speaker 1: So so that's a perdect So that's a productivity thing. Now,
31:58
lets good, let's talk about let's not I'll talk about
32:00
procrastination because we know a lot about procrastination.
32:02
Speaker 2: Okay, Okay.
32:03
Speaker 1: Two big ideas here. One, procrastination is not always bad.
32:08
Speaker 2: Okay.
32:09
Speaker 1: Sometimes you're procrastinating for a reason because you haven't worked
32:13
it out, because you're still incubating an idea. Okay, So
32:16
it's not inherently bad. It's not like all procrastination is bad.
32:20
The second big idea here is that procrastination is basically,
32:23
in general the downside, the down negative procrastination is just
32:28
an emotion regulation problem, right.
32:30
Speaker 2: It has nothing to do with time. It means that.
32:32
Speaker 1: You are unwilling to confront something and therefore are not
32:36
something is so disturbing to you that you would rather
32:39
actually sabotage yourself than confront it. That in some ways
32:43
you're making a quasi rational decision that the pain of
32:46
confronting man, can I really write this is greater than
32:52
actually not writing it in the first place. And so
32:56
we know this from a lot of research. Procrastination is
32:58
an emotion regulation issue. And so what you have to
33:01
think about is what is the emotion that you're avoiding,
33:04
and is there a small step?
33:06
Speaker 2: Is there a way in some ways to trick yourself.
33:08
Speaker 1: Into either confronting it directly or to do something to
33:11
just get yourself going, and that the action ends up
33:15
confronting the emotion. But a lot of times, but again,
33:19
I just in certain circumstances, it's hard to say the
33:21
fact that you're not ready to start is a signal
33:25
that It might be a very very positive signal.
33:28
Speaker 2: It could mean that hey, I'm still incubating this.
33:30
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's that's a great answer.
33:32
Speaker 3: I love that perception because I think I think as
33:35
soon as you start labeling and going, oh, my procrastination's
33:38
bad and this is not the place to be in,
33:40
you're right. You just every all of that is just
33:42
avoiding the actual emotion, which is a signal or a
33:45
sign or an alert that's kind of trying to get
33:48
your attention, and you just keep putting it away.
33:51
Speaker 4: And I think what that leads to. And this is
33:52
something which I found fascinating book.
33:54
Speaker 3: It's like starting things, Like I feel like, you know,
33:58
knowing when to stop a business or knowing when to
34:02
start a project is like the hardest thing in the world.
34:06
And you know, I'm sure you get asked us a
34:07
million times, but like, tell us about the research behind
34:10
starting something and what you found was most critical there.
34:14
Speaker 1: Again, there's there's never, there's very rarely, prospectively a perfect
34:19
time to start something, all right, But there are ways
34:22
to give ourselves a little bit of a different psychological
34:25
a little bit of a psychological edge.
34:27
Speaker 2: And this is the work of Katie Milkman, Jason Reese,
34:29
and henkon Die.
34:31
Speaker 1: They did it at penn Universe, Pennsylvania, and they had
34:35
this idea of what they call the fresh it's called
34:38
the fresh start effect. And a way to understand the
34:40
fresh start effect is like this that certain dates, certain days,
34:43
certain dates are what social psychologists called temporal landmarks, temporal landmarks.
34:50
That is, they are they stand out in time the
34:53
way a physical landmarks stands out in space. So again
34:56
back to the journey metaphor, you're navigating your way, You're
34:58
trying to find your way. Oh there's a landmark, I
35:01
know where I am. Oh there's that building. I have
35:03
a sense of where I am. Temporal landmarks are navigational
35:06
tools in some ways, but certain temporal landmarks have a
35:10
peculiar psychological effect. What they do is essentially they operate
35:14
as kind of a restart. What they say is that
35:17
on certain days that are fresh dart days, you essentially
35:21
relegate your previous bad self to the past and open
35:25
up a fresh ledger on your new self. Right, And
35:28
so there's certain days that actually are more you're more
35:31
likely to start something, and you're more likely to succeed
35:34
while starting it.
35:35
Speaker 2: So what does this mean. Let's let's be concrete here.
35:37
Speaker 1: You want to start something you're probably better up doing
35:39
it on a Monday rather than on a Thursday. You're
35:41
probably better doing it on the day after your birthday
35:44
rather than three days before your birthday. You're probably better
35:47
doing it on on the like the first day of summer,
35:51
rather than three days before the first day of summer.
35:54
Speaker 2: Let's say you're if one is a religiously observant.
35:58
Speaker 1: You know, you know, the day day after or the
36:01
day of a religious holiday, rather than four days before
36:04
that religious holiday. And so you can in some ways
36:07
use have that sense of where you are temporarily and
36:11
pick the right day to start something.
36:13
Speaker 4: Yeah, I can so relate to that.
36:15
Speaker 3: And my problem is I'll try to start something on
36:18
a Monday, I'll fail on Tuesday, and then I wait
36:20
till the next Monday.
36:24
Speaker 1: Well, okay, so that's that's that's a mixed bag. That's
36:27
a mixed bag. It depends on it depends on how
36:30
deep the failure was on Uh, it depends on how
36:33
deep the failure was on Tuesday.
36:34
Speaker 2: Now, there's another strategy for all of this, lease which
36:38
which on all of this.
36:39
Speaker 1: I mean, it's it's reasonably well known, and in some
36:42
ways it's it's interesting because I think it's analogous to
36:45
our conversation about simplicity and the opposite of simplicity or
36:50
simplicity and complexity. In that I do think that in
36:53
many cases we have been seduced into the idea of
36:59
moonshots and big Harryodasia's goals. I think that they're important,
37:03
but I think that they're oversold in a way. And
37:06
what's under sold just think about it. Just think about
37:08
as a pricing issue. Okay, so so so the big
37:12
Harry Otash's goals, moonshots, I think they're overvalued, and I
37:15
think what's undervalue is small wins. And once again there's
37:19
a lot of there's a lot of evidence of that
37:21
starting from carl of like thirty years ago. Small wins
37:25
are enormously important because what small winds do is that
37:29
they small wins can overcome that procrastination problem. Small wins
37:33
can then lead to other small winds and other small
37:35
wins that cascade into something into something bigger. So a
37:38
strategy for overcoming procrastination, a strategy for many things is
37:43
to go, is to gopher small wins. Let me give
37:46
you an example of that. So, so the one strategy
37:49
that I that I've heard of, I mean, I just
37:52
I called it this.
37:53
Speaker 2: It's not originally for me. It just sort of you know,
37:55
out there.
37:55
Speaker 1: I call it J five, not jie, but Jay letter
37:59
J and that's just and that stands for just five more.
38:03
Speaker 2: Okay.
38:04
Speaker 1: And so if you don't feel like doing something, you say, okay,
38:07
you know what I'm gonna do? Man, Okay, So I'm
38:09
so I'm doing some research right now. Okay, these papers,
38:12
some of them are incredibly boring. Okay, you know what,
38:14
I can't stand it.
38:15
Speaker 2: I want to quit. You know what, I'll just read
38:17
five more pages, just five more pages. I'll read that. Okay.
38:20
Speaker 1: Oh my man, I got a boatload of email here.
38:24
I can't deal with it. I just want to go
38:25
inside and have a drink. You know what, I'm going
38:27
to just do five five more, five more emails.
38:30
Speaker 2: And we'll do that. You know what, I'm tired of writing. Okay,
38:34
just five more sentences, that's it.
38:36
Speaker 1: And that you know that can get us going, give
38:41
you a small win. And what happens a lot of
38:43
times is that just five more becomes just ten more,
38:45
just twenty more, something like something like that.
38:48
Speaker 4: I really like that one. That's that's an awesome strategy.
38:50
I think that's good.
38:51
Speaker 2: It's very simple. I use it all the time. I'm
38:52
not joking around. I use it today.
38:54
Speaker 1: I use it today when I looked at my email
38:56
file and I was like, oh god, and bear the
39:00
it's okay, I'm just gonna I've already answered enough email.
39:04
I'm like, okay, just five more and you know what
39:07
I did. I just I did that and I got
39:09
it done and I probably ended up answering eight or
39:12
something like that. And another one, a very well known technique.
39:15
Speaker 2: I use it. I have no shame in using it.
39:18
Speaker 1: You're probably familiar with that, your listeners are probably familiar
39:20
with it is the is the Pomadoro technique, which is
39:24
which has been you know, Pomadora is Italian for tomato,
39:27
and so you know you said a timer. I have
39:31
one on my computer that I use on very dark
39:34
days in set a time or for whatever. I do
39:38
it for twenty five minutes, and like, I just can't
39:40
bear this. Okay, I can't research this anymore, I can't
39:43
read this anymore. I'm sick of writing. Okay, here's what
39:45
we're going to do this twenty five twenty five minute.
39:48
Speaker 2: I'm not gonna do anything else. I'm just gonna do
39:50
it for that twenty five minutes and that can.
39:53
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that can and and I think let me
39:55
let me extract from this as always a large theoretical lesson,
40:00
and it's this, all right, that a lot of times
40:04
in our understanding of what makes human beings tick, we
40:07
think that belief precedes action, that you have to convince
40:11
yourself and then that is the impetus to act.
40:14
Speaker 2: And in many cases, more cases than we realize, the error.
40:19
Speaker 1: Runs in the other direction, that getting yourself to act
40:22
can actually trigger the belief. Yes, And that's a very
40:26
very important it's a very very important lesson.
40:28
Speaker 4: That's so true.
40:29
Speaker 3: And that's really it's kind of like when we're like,
40:31
I can't make my mind up, right, Like even that
40:34
saying is exactly in that belief where you're just spending
40:37
so much time trying to make your mind up and
40:39
decide something. And what I love about what you just
40:43
said is around that whole the small wins element of
40:46
just I always feel like when you can get into
40:48
a good rhythm and pattern of keeping promises to yourself
40:52
and keeping small commitments to yourself, you start to trust yourself.
40:56
And when you start to trust yourself, you can then
40:58
trust yourself with bigger talk. The problem is, like you said,
41:02
is that we go to these moonshot goals and naturally
41:04
we fail at them, and there we don't trust ourselves.
41:08
And I feel like self trust is like the big
41:10
issue when it comes with time is that you're like, well,
41:14
do I even trust myself with this much time?
41:16
Speaker 4: Do I even trust myself to complete that?
41:19
Speaker 3: And you're right about the small wins, whether it's making
41:21
your bed or just five more or you know, all
41:24
of these principles that you're laying out like that just
41:26
builds trust with yourself.
41:28
Speaker 2: I'll give you something else that builds trust with yourself.
41:31
Speaker 1: That's related to this concept, which is again is research based.
41:35
Speaker 2: It's built on at I've written about this.
41:38
Speaker 1: I wrote about it in that book I've talked about
41:40
it before is the work of Teresa Mobula at Harvard
41:44
Business School, and she found that the single biggest day
41:46
to day motivator on the job is making progress and
41:48
meaningful work. Okay, so the days we're making progress, the
41:51
days we're motivated, we come back the next day feeling motivated.
41:54
But one of the challenges is that is that we
41:56
never have a good. We often don't have a good
41:57
sense of how much progress we're making. And so one
42:01
of the so one of the things that I've done
42:02
for this is now for like eight or nine years now,
42:06
is at the end of every day, I have a
42:07
progress what you know.
42:08
Speaker 2: Call it a progress ritual. And all I do is
42:11
I did basically say.
42:13
Speaker 1: What I what would you get done today? And I
42:16
just list what I got done today? And I keep
42:18
a record of that. Uh. And I have to say,
42:21
I almost never look at the list, but it's the
42:23
act of doing I mean seriously, I almost never look
42:26
at the list, but it's the act of doing it.
42:28
So I see, So I just take a moment. It's
42:29
a it's a it's a it's a it's a ritual,
42:32
all right. And you know, I don't have to tell you,
42:34
former monk, the importance of rituals in in in human understanding. Right,
42:39
So it's a it's a ritual. It's a punctuation mark
42:41
at the end of the day. Would you get done today?
42:43
Speaker 3: Dan?
42:43
Speaker 2: Okay, this is what I got done? Baha blah bah
42:45
blah blah.
42:46
Speaker 3: Okay, what what I love that? How do you do
42:49
that for other people? So if you're leading teams. If
42:53
you've got a small team, a big team, a company,
42:55
how do you kind of help people realize the progress
42:58
they're making exactly.
43:00
Speaker 4: Yeah, designs, you can do it for yourself, but yeah,
43:01
how do you do for others?
43:03
Speaker 2: I mean you could do it. You could do a veron.
43:05
Speaker 1: You can do a version of what I'm talking about
43:07
for your for your team. I mean, what I would
43:09
want to do is is I would want to get
43:11
I would want to build that habit in others rather
43:13
than have them rely on me for that. I would
43:15
want to build that habit in others. So what you
43:17
could do is you could have you could ask your
43:19
team send you that at the beginning, not as a
43:22
way to monitor them, but as a way to have
43:26
a way to just as a way to build that
43:28
habit and then eventually have them continue the habit without sending.
43:30
Speaker 3: It to you.
43:32
Speaker 4: Yeah.
43:33
Speaker 3: Absolutely, I'm gonna try I'm actually going to try that out.
43:35
Speaker 1: I'm on what you get done today? Just write down
43:38
the things you get done. I mean, I mean, it's
43:41
it's a very simple concept. We always we often have
43:43
it to do list at the beginning of the day,
43:44
like have a done list at the end of the day,
43:46
And it's.
43:47
Speaker 3: Almost like gamifying your mind, right, because you know that
43:49
if you've got three things done yesterday, you might want
43:52
to get four done today, so you push a bit further, right.
43:55
Speaker 1: I think a lot of times also when we're scrambling around,
43:58
we don't have a sense of what we want.
44:00
Speaker 2: Will you've accomplished. So sometimes it can be and sometimes
44:03
it can be it can be affirming.
44:05
Speaker 1: So I know that many days where I feel like
44:07
I haven't gotten anything done during the course of a day,
44:10
I stop and I do my little progress orrictual again
44:12
we're talking like Jay, yeah, sure, not anything elaborate. I'm like, oh,
44:21
oh okay, actually got more done than today. And then
44:23
on the days where it didn't get much done, you're like, oh,
44:25
come on, man, you gotta you gotta do a little
44:26
bit better than this.
44:27
Speaker 2: Come back.
44:28
Speaker 4: Yeah, you're coaching yourself. You're coaching.
44:30
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a good way to put it. You're in
44:32
many ways you are. What you're doing is you're just
44:33
giving yourself. You know, you're coaching. If you think about
44:36
it like a like a like a sport. It's like
44:38
like a like in in in in track and field,
44:41
or in swimming or something like that your coach is
44:42
there with a stopwatch saying here what you're time today? Okay,
44:46
or you know, here's how much you lifted today. You
44:49
have a sense of you know, are you making progress
44:51
or you're not making progress?
44:52
Speaker 4: Yeah. One, I love that.
44:54
Speaker 3: One thing I want my audience, everyone who's listening right
44:56
now or watching, I want you to be aware of
44:57
is that. Literally this book breaks out everything from like productivity.
45:02
I've done some of the tests with you guys before,
45:04
and I've shared the book when we talked about, you know,
45:08
all all of the different productivity times for different types
45:10
of people based on what time you sleep and what time.
45:12
Speaker 4: You wake up. We've done the NAT's breaks.
45:14
Speaker 3: I'm not going to ask Dan all those questions because
45:16
they're in the book, and that's why I recommend the book.
45:18
Speaker 4: I want to ask Dan stuff that.
45:20
Speaker 3: Isn't in the book or is extending the book and
45:23
part I think one of the biggest questions I do
45:25
get asked that I do want to talk about is relationships,
45:27
because I think dating and getting married and knowing when
45:33
to either pop the question or when you should expect
45:36
the question like these are like these are like some
45:39
of the biggest challenges in the world for on a
45:41
personal individual level for people. And so tell me about
45:45
some of the work that you've found when it came
45:47
to not just like when's the best time to get married,
45:49
but it's almost like when did people when did or
45:52
what did you find when people said they knew or
45:55
they felt they'd found the right person?
45:58
Speaker 2: Yeah, that one is That one is moreble. I have
46:00
to say.
46:03
Speaker 1: I wrote about that only very very tentatively because I
46:06
wasn't sure about the research and that. I mean, you know,
46:10
what it says is that in general in America, marriages
46:17
are more likely to last if people get married after
46:20
age twenty five and before age I think thirty four
46:24
somewhere around there. But again, that doesn't mean if you
46:27
get married at age thirty five you're gonna get a
46:28
divorce you get married at twenty eight year. I mean,
46:30
it's just like there's a slight there's a slight effect there.
46:33
There are some interesting effects on especially in America today.
46:38
People with more formal education are more likely to get
46:40
married and stay married. People with less formal education are
46:43
less likely to get married and less likely to stay
46:45
married if they are. And there's also seems to be
46:47
an effect whatever your level of education, on getting married
46:50
after you complete your education rather than before. But again,
46:53
I don't think you take those large population insights to
46:57
make a decision about whether you're going to spend the
46:59
rest of your life with someone you love. I can
47:01
recommend a book that is, uh well, one of the
47:05
leading scholars of marriage but really the social psychology of
47:09
marriage is at Northwestern.
47:11
Speaker 2: His name is Eli Finkel.
47:12
Speaker 1: He wrote a very good book called that All or
47:14
Nothing Marriage about how marriage has about how marriage has changed,
47:18
uh so, a lot of what we know about healthy marriages,
47:21
and also how marriage has changed in America over the
47:24
last two hundred years. It's a it's a really really
47:27
it's a very very interesting.
47:28
Speaker 4: Book, All or Nothing Marriage.
47:30
Speaker 2: Yeah, they all are.
47:31
Speaker 1: Nothing Marriage by Eli Eli Finkel. Which you know, there's
47:34
a lot of really good research, uh in there, and
47:37
you know there's some relationship advice in there too. You know,
47:40
among the most important things are you know, what do
47:44
you attribute to someone's inherent personality and what do you
47:47
attribute to circumstance? So if your spouse, so if your
47:50
spouse snaps it, you say, uh do you say, oh
47:53
my god, my spouse is the biggest jerk there ever was,
47:55
or do you say, oh, my spouse is having a
47:56
bad day, and people can make the attribution that it's circumstantial,
48:00
not surprisingly, and up better off than people who say,
48:03
you know, attribute to behavior to put someone's inner jerkiness right.
48:08
Speaker 3: Yeah. No, It would be fascinating also to look at
48:10
things like amount of time couple spent together, but amount
48:13
of time couple spent arguing unuseful arguments maybe too.
48:17
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, there's other, there's other, there's other research out there.
48:20
Speaker 2: There's a guy I'm spacing out on.
48:21
Speaker 1: This is a guy named Gotman, I think, yeah, yeah, yeah,
48:24
he's done some research on marriage. And you know, one
48:27
of the not this is not surprising. One of the
48:29
biggest things that you see is if I'm not if
48:33
I'm characterizing it right, is not arguing per se, but
48:38
how people argue yes, and and so somebody has to
48:42
do with the attribution. The other thing, one of the
48:44
biggest signals I think in Gotment's research is when people
48:48
express contempt for their partner. Not surprisingly, that's a marker
48:52
of things gone awry.
48:54
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, you're right.
48:55
Speaker 3: He's he talks about learning how to fight is the
48:58
number one skill needed the relationship, not knowing how to
49:01
plan date night or how to you know, just how
49:04
to communicate, how to specifically fight and yeah, really useful.
49:08
One thing I want to definitely dive into today is
49:11
around this, and you talk about in the book is
49:14
about you know when's the right time to end something?
49:18
Because I think we're always fascinated about it, and we
49:20
talked about that, like when do you know when you
49:21
should start something? And when's the perfect time to start?
49:24
I think one of the things we're not very aware
49:26
of when it comes to business, work, leases, whatever it
49:30
may be, is ending. What have you learned and not
49:32
just in the book, but what have you learned from
49:34
just your own life and experience And just like when
49:37
you found is the right time to end something.
49:40
Speaker 2: That's a harder call to make. I think it depends
49:44
a lot on the circumstances.
49:45
Speaker 1: One of the things that I one of the things
49:46
that one of the things that I do know for
49:48
sure though, is it endings are much more important than
49:51
I realized before I did this research, that endings have
49:54
a profound effect on our behavior, any type of a
49:57
profoun effect on how we remember entire experiences.
49:59
Speaker 2: So you know, famously.
50:02
Speaker 1: You know this fairly well known, is that how an
50:04
experience ends as a disproportionate effect on how people remember
50:09
the entire experience James, Yeah, oh right, right, right right, So,
50:14
and also even even how we evaluate people's lives too.
50:17
So there's a famous piece of research on where they
50:20
gave somebody a description of a fellow who for twenty
50:23
nine years was a wonderful guy, great ceo, generous and whatnot,
50:29
and then in his thirtieth year he became a jerk
50:33
and then unexpectedly died, and they said, you know, they
50:37
had people say how moral of a life did that
50:39
person lead? And then they had a different set of
50:41
group of people evaluated a different character.
50:43
Speaker 2: This character was.
50:44
Speaker 1: A total weasel and jerk for twenty nine years. In
50:47
his thirtieth year he decided to become a good guy,
50:49
being more generous, and then he suddenly died. And so
50:52
what they what they found was that someone who was
50:55
a good guy for twenty nine years and a jerk
50:57
in his last year was rated as a slightly less
51:01
moral than someone who was a complete jerk for twenty
51:03
nine years and having to be a good guy in
51:05
his final year. So so so how something ends has
51:08
a big effect on us. On how something ends, has
51:12
a big effect on how you remember it, how the
51:15
presence of ending has a big effect on our motivation.
51:17
So when we see the end of something, we end
51:20
up kicking a little bit harder. So it's a way
51:22
to a way to get yourself up the dome and
51:26
certain kinds of procrastination situation is to impose an ending.
51:29
Speaker 2: So so, but endings, endings matter. Endings matter a lot.
51:33
Speaker 1: And I think that one of the things that we
51:34
need to do in organizations, in our family lives and
51:36
whatnot is is mark endings and established rituals around endings
51:40
because that ends up being a deep source of meaning
51:42
for people.
51:43
Speaker 4: M Yeah, great, arms, I love love that example.
51:46
Speaker 3: That's that's super powerful, and I think everyone needs to
51:49
think about that because often it's like we put so
51:51
much what you're saying and what I'm learning from this,
51:54
and you're so right, and it's only hitting me now too.
51:57
Speaker 4: Is we put so much effort.
51:58
Speaker 3: Into starting something, like so much effort, like whether it's
52:02
business or a relationship or whatever, it is, like we're
52:04
excited and all these enthusiasm, and then when you break
52:07
up or you end the business, or you reject someone
52:10
or someone gets fired or whatever it may be, that
52:12
process is always handled really poorly. Yeah, and and and
52:17
you're so that's actually what people remember, absolutely right. Yeah,
52:21
And that's scary to think about when when you when
52:24
you think about that for a moment. But anyway, you
52:26
have been amazing with your time, Dan.
52:28
Speaker 4: I'm really really grateful. I could. I could talk to
52:30
you for hours and hours and hours.
52:31
Speaker 2: You're literally fascinating conversation.
52:34
Speaker 4: Yeah.
52:34
Speaker 3: No, it's absolutely brilliant, and I hope we can continue
52:36
to talk offline as well. I'm going to end with
52:39
what we do, which is too rapid fire around. They're
52:42
super fast. You get in the blanks for this one.
52:44
So these are just so time are you ready?
52:48
Speaker 2: Yeah?
52:49
Speaker 4: Time should always.
52:52
Speaker 2: Time should always be on your mind, but not obsessing
52:58
your mind.
52:59
Speaker 4: Okay, good, okay, Segone? Taking breaks.
53:03
Speaker 2: Taking breaks is.
53:06
Speaker 1: One of the most powerful, bang for the buck things
53:10
you can do for your mental, physical, and professional well being.
53:14
Speaker 3: Yeah. And it's all in the books everyone, So just
53:16
you know, there's a whole breakdown of breaks number three
53:19
every day.
53:20
Speaker 2: I must oh interesting.
53:22
Speaker 1: Well, so I'm gonna I'm gonna interpret that as when
53:25
I say I meaning, I, Daniel, every day I must contribute.
53:31
Speaker 4: Okay. I love that you. You excel in your career when.
53:35
Speaker 2: So this is this is about other people.
53:38
Speaker 3: You know what.
53:39
Speaker 1: I'm going to use the same word here other people.
53:41
So people excel in their careers when they contribute.
53:44
Speaker 4: I love it. Brilliant.
53:44
Speaker 3: Okay, these are your final five. These are one sentence.
53:47
All right, I'm sweating now, well.
53:49
Speaker 4: One word yeah, okay, ready out to make it to
53:51
the end here.
53:51
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely, So the one lesson you feel helped you
53:54
the most throughout your career.
53:56
Speaker 2: Not caring what other people think about me?
53:58
Speaker 4: Great answer. I love that. What do you want to
54:01
leave your kids with that you didn't have growing up?
54:04
Speaker 2: A deep and unshakable work ethic?
54:07
Speaker 4: Nice? Okay.
54:08
Speaker 3: If you could create a law that everyone in the
54:10
world had to follow, what would it be?
54:16
Speaker 1: Okay, this is I'm going to show my American Midwestern
54:19
roots here say please and thank you?
54:24
Speaker 4: Nice? Great, awesome, Okay, two more questions left.
54:28
Speaker 3: The fourth question, what is something that you know to
54:31
be true that many people disagree with you on? So,
54:34
something that you're so sure about that a ton of
54:36
people are like, nah, Dan, you tell you will?
54:39
Speaker 2: The world is less fair than it seems.
54:41
Speaker 4: So you believe the world is less fair than it seems,
54:44
and people disagree with you on that.
54:46
Speaker 3: Yeah, well that's a whole other conversation.
54:48
Speaker 1: Then when I say people, I might be reflecting my
54:52
own kind of biases here, but I think especially.
54:58
Speaker 2: Well educated American people.
55:00
Speaker 4: Sure. Great, it's a good answer. I mean it's an
55:02
intriguing point. Okay.
55:03
Speaker 3: Fifth and final question, what is the biggest lesson you've
55:06
learned in the last twelve months?
55:09
Speaker 1: Oh, in the last twelve months. It never works to
55:13
go against the grain of who you are.
55:16
Speaker 4: Wow, very profound.
55:18
Speaker 2: Wow, there's a tough questions, man, but.
55:21
Speaker 4: You answered them pretty quickly, and well, so thank you.
55:23
Speaker 2: Yeah, I answered them quickly.
55:26
Speaker 4: I love that. This is so brilliant.
55:28
Speaker 3: I really hope we get to meet in person and
55:31
wonderful and yeah, thank you so much for doing this everyone.
55:35
Dan's got a ton of great books to sell, a
55:37
human drive a whole new mind. When go and dig
55:41
into these books, they're absolutely incredible. Is an incredible storyteller,
55:45
I mean, incredibly accomplished. I can't even start. But I'm
55:48
just grateful that Dan took this time to be with
55:50
us today.
55:52
Speaker 2: You had me, Jay, It's it's been a lot of fun,
55:54
oh for sure.
55:55
Speaker 3: Would you like to direct anyone anywhere in your world
55:57
and life about anything exciting that you've got going on?
56:00
Speaker 1: The people folks can check out my website, Danpink dot com.
56:04
Speaker 2: All kinds of cool stuff going on there.
56:06
Speaker 4: Perfect We'll put the links everywhere. Thank you so much, Dan,
56:08
This was fantastic.
56:09
Speaker 2: So it's been a lot of fun.
56:10
Speaker 3: If you want even more videos just like this one,
56:13
make sure you subscribe and click on the.
56:15
Speaker 4: Boxes over here.
56:16
Speaker 3: I'm also excited to let you know that you can
56:19
now get my book Think Like a Monk from Thinklike
56:22
a monkbook dot com.
56:24
Speaker 4: Check below in the description to make sure you order today.