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Transcript

Meet The Founders - Paul Slater · Humanity Working

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: You know, a hundred and twenty thousand people in the US alone die every year from uh ailments that are related to workplace stress.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: So that's a that's a crisis, right?
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: And that's something that um we should be doing something about and addressing.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_03: Hey everyone, Matt here.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_03: You know, we've interviewed a bunch of interesting people on the podcast, but I thought it was about time we talked to the Billion Minds founders themselves about what got them here.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_03: This episode is with Paul Slater.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_03: Now I've known Paul for several years, but I still learned some things about him that surprised me.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_03: In this episode, Paul shares how he wound up from a five-year-old in England who wanted to be a surgeon to a 50-year-old in Seattle obsessed with personal effectiveness.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_03: So in our first episode, you spoke a bit about how you got into this field of personal effectiveness, but take us back a bit further.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_03: Did you always plan on being in tech?
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: Uh no, actually.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I I think looking back on it now, um one of the things that influenced me most in my life was um the failure, if you like, that led me to tech.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: So from when I was about uh very young, I I'm I think like five or six years old or something like that, I had very specific ideas to what I wanted to do with my life.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to be in medicine, and in fact, I wanted to be a surgeon.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um and it was just something that was within me.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I was just totally fascinated by, you know, shows on TV that were like uh, yes, medical dramas and stuff, but really more like sort of documentaries that would follow surgeons and hospitals and things like that.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and it just seemed something that was, you know, super cool, the idea of being able to save people's lives and have an intervention um it that that could save somebody's life.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's very specific.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: I knew exactly what I uh what I wanted to do, never really deviated from that.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um and then all through my childhood, my young childhood, and then older in my childhood, I was working towards that one specific goal.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, hit some hurdles along the way, got real sick around uh a time when I was supposed to be uh doing my exams to get into med school and struggled with that.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but did eventually get into med school.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so then that's kind of when reality hit when I got uh when I got into med school and I was finally doing the thing that I had wanted to do and couldn't envision myself doing uh doing anything else.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um and had kind of ignored other signals, you know, things I other things that I was good at um were fine, but I don't think I I necessarily paid uh you know, paid much attention to those things.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: And then uh when I got uh into med school, didn't find it easy.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um there were uh there were elements of it that I was okay at and pretty good at, but other things that I was uh that I was less good at.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um and then basically a confluence of events and uh partly in terms of of struggling with it, and then also some uh some financial issues as well, led me to a big realization um having completed my my first year as to whether I could carry on or not.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I had to take what at that time was a very, very difficult decision, was basically to abandon that, switch majors, become a math major was the um was the thing that I decided to do um uh as you know midway through college.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, you know, that led to a shorter degree and a whole bunch of like practical reasons why I should potentially do it.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: But I think the other really fascinating thing about that was that amazingly, um despite the fact that I'd had all this like strong lead up to it, I then took this decision, this fairly monumental decision to basically abandon um my career in medicine.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um and when I switched to my alternative degree, which is math, I kind of forgot that I didn't really like it.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so and so I switched from something to something else um that I didn't like, and again, funnily enough, was not really that great at.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um and and then having done that, I was like, oh, I made my bed, so I'm gonna lie in it, and push my way through this math, uh, this math degree to get me out the other side, and then to go find a job.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so I look at that uh in a couple of different ways, right?
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: One which is it's it's completely okay to get close to a goal and then just like shift into it into a different direction.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: But also, if you do get really close to a goal and you realize that goal is not going to happen, there can be a lot of like emotional distress and other things that can uh can happen to you.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: And it doesn't necessarily make you a really good decision maker.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I wasn't a really good decision maker.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: There were all kinds of different things I could have done at that time in my life.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: I could have taken a year out, I could have, you know, gone, worked in a couple of areas to try to figure things out, I could have um thought more broadly about the major I wanted to do at college, didn't think about any of that.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: I was just like, well, I guess I can do math, I guess I'll go do that.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so then coming out of that, had no real idea of what I was gonna do with my life, but I knew I was kind of adept at this tech stuff, right?
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: I built computers before, I'd done some programming, uh, you know, so I'd I'd done some various things in this IT field, and it sort of seemed like the future.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: So um initially I tried getting jobs with companies like IBM and stuff like that, didn't manage to get anything, worked in a small firm of accountants actually as a secretarial job, and then kind of like stumbled into tech through that.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: And rest of my life has been really around tech and then increasingly productivity.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: So, no, just stumbling around with the aftermath of the initial failure, uh, which was uh which was setting this goal and then not being able to reach that goal.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's strange that that people don't get I guess the the best broad uh intervention conversations when they're making huge decisions like that.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_03: You know, like yeah going into med school, working your whole early life to get there.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_03: Uh and then realizing oh I'm not that good at this.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_03: Or or thinking about or thinking about the ideal landing spot versus uh the many years it takes to get to that landing spot.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_03: The show is usually about the surgeon, not the surgeon in med school for 10 plus years.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_03: You know, they're already a surgeon when you text them.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_03: That's true.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: So it was a bunch of things that were really interesting about that.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I would say when I was at med school, um, and this might be an oversimplification, but I don't think so.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: When I was at med school, I would say that there were the people in med school broke down into about thirds.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: The first third were people who had worked the tail off to get there and having got there were just delighted, right?
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: Just so happy and and fulfilling their vocation, etc.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: The other third, the second third was people for whom they got there and were like, all right, this is my job now, and I'm just gonna focus and and get myself through this, and then we'll see what happens afterwards.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: And then there's this third third, which I think was just fascinating given what it takes to, you know, to get there and to fulfill that, fulfill that vocation.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: We're like, they got there and they're like, what the heck am I doing here?
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: This isn't what I this isn't what I thought it was, this isn't what I felt, right?
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: This isn't this is just wildly different.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so sort of like disillusioned, like I put all this work to get get here.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I didn't really fit into that disillusioned category.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: I was just not, like I say, I mean, I just didn't really have the skills for it.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the other thing I just think which is really interesting as well.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: We talked a little bit about this on our our podcast with with Nick Law, right?
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: Now, when I when I look back, um I know that I have this thing called aphantasia, which means I have no visual memory.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I didn't know that I had that at that time.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um But what I did know was that when I looked at a body, um, and I had seen, let's say, for example, a particular blood vessel the previous week, and I'm looking now at the same blood vessel, I'm like, I got no clue what that is.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: So I knew I knew there was something in there that told me that my that that that the things that were taking me hours and hours and hours and hours of study, and were taking my friends, you know, 10 minutes of study, that there was something there that was different in terms of what I could do and what they could do, and that was something there that made it very, very difficult for me to do this thing that I had already imagined, always imagined I would do.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, like kind of like when you open up a body and and if your first reaction is, I don't know what's going on in here, you're probably not well set up to be a surgeon, right?
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: So it would be it just struck me how um in all walks of life, we we have this not very well-formed vision of what our future state is.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: And it's based on a not very well-formed vision in most of our cases of what we're good at and what we like.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: And occasionally you get lucky, right?
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: Whereby the thing that you're good at ultimately winds up being the thing that you want to do.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: But often there's a there's a big mismatch.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: And in my case, um, there was a big mismatch, and I didn't understand the reason for it.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: Initially, I just thought I was stupid, right?
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: And that somehow I goodness knows how I'd even got into med school in the first place.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: Now that I was there, um, I was like the dunce in the class.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not really as simple, it's not really as simple as that.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: It is that my skill set was not attuned to the skill set for what was needed to do the thing that I wanted to do.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: And so it took me years and years and years to understand the reality of that.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: And then to go back and think about what I would have done differently.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the answer to that is really hard, as you point out, in the case where oftentimes you are actually on your own with this stuff, right?
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: You're not got other people that are necessarily coming in and and coaching you through that unless you actively seek that out.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: And most of us don't.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_03: I wonder how many in your separation of thirds uh had parents who were doctors who said, Oh, this is what you're doing.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_03: And then they get there and they're like probably quite a few.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_03: I hate all this, I know what to expect, and I hate it.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, probably quite a few.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_03: So that was all in the UK.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_03: Uh uh.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_03: So so then at some point you leave the UK.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_03: You know, how did how did that come about?
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_03: Was that in in the in the story too?
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just over 50 now, and I spent the first 30 years or so of my life in the UK and the last 20 in the US.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm kind of like this strange hybrid that is an expat.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, and you know, you and I have spoken before about the idea of being an expat is is odd because you're semi-at home in multiple places and not fully at home in in any one.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: So in my case, I get out of med school, I kind of like stumble into this tech career and find something that I am actually quite good at, quite adept at, um, and work initially in the field of IT training, um, and then build up a consulting practice inside one of the organizations that I'm working in.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: And then around 2000, um step out from that and form my own training and consulting practice in the UK.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so what was in what was interesting about that was that um I at that time I was living quite close to Microsoft UK.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so I had this vision that Microsoft UK was going to be my biggest client.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so I started kind of like directing my work in such a way that that would be the case and I could get their attention, all that kind of stuff.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I was right in one sense and wrong in another.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: So Microsoft did end up being my biggest client, but it wasn't Microsoft UK, it was Microsoft US.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so I wound up traveling very, very frequently between uh the UK and uh and Seattle, which is where Microsoft US is based, just outside of Seattle.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: So that's like a 10 and a half hour flight if you if you go direct.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: And um, or at least it was back in those days a little faster now.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: And um, and so every two weeks or so, I was on that eight-hour time difference, 10 and a half hour flight, going back and forth and back and forth.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I distinctly remember at some point I'm on this, I'm on this flight going back to the UK again, and something popped in my head because I was exhausted, just utterly exhausted from the constant um time changes.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought to myself, why don't I just live in the US and then I don't have to keep taking this flight back and forth?
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so it was really kind of as simple as that.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: That I was just like, okay, well, I can I can reduce my commute time if I live in the US versus live in versus live in the UK.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so I formed a small version of my company in the US.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: The plan was to kind of bring the company over, and but immigration's a lot more complicated than that.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: So I ended up wound up uh subcontracting and working for a company um in the US.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: And then was basically thought, I'll give it a year, I'll give it a year and a half, I'll see how I feel, and 20 years later I'm still here.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: So um it uh this was that was definitely one of the more spontaneous decisions that I've made.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I suppose there were elements of it that were that had already been kind of built in the sense that I was building these relationships in in the US that I was then able to take advantage of.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_03: That's interesting.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_03: So uh so you're in the US now and I guess doing uh a different set of roles.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_03: You were still kind of were you still kind of exploring in a way?
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_03: Definitely.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I'm not sure that we ever stop exploring.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I and there's something else that I think is really interesting now in retrospect, which is that the themes that you that wind up governing your life, as it were, those themes are not necessarily very clear at the time.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, I start in this, you know, I'm in this world of training um and kind of preparing people in readiness for it.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: That very, very first job that I did in the firm accountants, this is quote of got into tech, they were literally, you know, they didn't have a network inside their environment.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: So I built their network, right?
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: But they didn't have a um, no, none of their staff were used to existing in a digital environment.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so I did a bunch of training and readiness and preparedness as I was taking people from the old world to the new world.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: And what I was really doing was taking people on a productivity journey, like individuals on a productivity journey from where they were to where they needed to be.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_00: And it was very, very rewarding.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: And so as I went from that into my next main job, which was also uh, it started actually with pure like training people on productivity software, you know, the the offices of the world and things like that.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, again, found that uh found that very, very rewarding.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: So I keep like sort of like in this productivity, personal effectiveness domain as I go through all of the different roles that that I have.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: And they were pretty diverse, right?
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: I was, you know, when I first originally arrived in the US, I was writing a bunch of books, um, sort of ghostwriting a bunch of books for um, you know, predominantly for Microsoft, uh, that were quite technical and architectural in nature.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um and at some point along that journey, I'm like, oh, okay, I guess I'm sort of an architect now.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: I guess that's what I do.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then I wind up getting offered um a couple of different options to go full-time inside Microsoft.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: And that caused me to like really stop and say, okay, the easy path is just to ride that wave and I'll go and work inside Microsoft.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: But then I realized that given the fact that I have been working in and around Microsoft for gosh, you know, for over a decade at that point.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, yeah, so yeah, I guess around a decade or more at that point.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: If I then went in and worked for Microsoft, for the mothership at that point, then I probably would never leave it.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: So my entire career would be in and around uh in and around Microsoft and in and around that particular area of tech.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so I decided to take a pause, take a step back and not take that.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: And what I looked for actively was a job.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I wanted a job in a company that did not consider itself to be a technology company, right?
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted a job in a company where I sometimes put it, real people worked.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so that I could understand what it was like to have the perspective of um, if you like, if not antipathy towards tech, a more distant relationship toward uh to technology.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: So I found a job um as an enterprise architect um inside um inside a company called Warehouser.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: The funny thing about that was, and this is absolutely true, I applied for a job as an enterprise architect.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: I did not know what an enterprise architect was.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: So um the job title was senior enterprise architect, and it had elements in the job description that seemed, you know, sort of that I was vaguely good at.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I I thought, well, that looks like a skill set match.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: So so let's see if we can go with that.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: But it wasn't like there were books everywhere about enterprise architecture, and uh, you know, or if you Googled enterprise architect, you'd see a bunch of stuff.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: I just thought, well, I'm an architect and that's got enterprise in front of it.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: I presume it's just an architect in an enterprise.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: No, it turns out enterprise architect is an actual job and it does actual things that I wasn't aware of.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: Fortunately, the hiring manager saw something in me.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure he knew that I didn't know what an enterprise architect was, but he still hired me as one.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I learned how to be an enterprise architect while I had the job title of senior enterprise architect.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: So um, so that was kind of neat and cool.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: But again, what was really interesting about it is that the job of enterprise architecture is really about um envisioning what future state architectures are like for an organization and then bringing the organization to that future state architecture, aka taking all of the people in the enterprise and moving them from a state where they're less effective to where they're more effective, abetted by technology.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_00: So basically, I'm doing the same thing again.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: I just don't realize it, right?
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: I'm doing the same thing again at a at a significantly broader scale.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_00: And then I do that for four or five years inside um inside warehouse.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_00: By that time, I do know what an enterprise architect is.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: And uh and I get a call from Microsoft at that point saying basically, okay, you did enterprise architecture inside one.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Pretty big company, do you want to come and do it for lots of companies and do it under the auspices of Microsoft?
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: And that sounded like a super cool gig.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_00: So that point I was able to move back, having had that experience and having worked inside an organization that was, in quotes, a real company, uh, that you know, built things, manufactured stuff, and and uh you know, built homes and owned land and you know, all those kind of things, and and where the people in the organization weren't all techies and didn't just want to use tech just because, just for the sake of having taken that experience, I could then take that and use that with lots and lots and lots of Microsoft customers.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so then head back to Microsoft to do that work and then a whole series of different roles inside Microsoft, some of which are based around entrepreneurship, some of which uh were you know in a specific uh uh in a specific domain, health and life sciences.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: So I kind of kind of pulled myself full circle back to the health and life sciences domain, but from the spin of of uh of doing tech.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: So the career path I'd love to say was was well thought out and well planned, but like most people, it wasn't.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_00: But what did emerge was that I was I was starting to find out about myself.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_00: I was starting to find out that what drives me is um the ability to see future states, to think strategically about what those future states look like.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_00: And if you like to take a people-centric view of that, right?
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: To be able to say, okay, we're gonna take this set of people and or this individual in some cases, but this group of people and and improve the effectiveness of how they work.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so that theme started to kind of like emerge and was whether I was working, you know, doing some technology or business consulting inside a small startup, or whether I was, you know, building out uh architectures for large organizations, that theme was constant throughout every all of the work that I was doing.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I was able, even ultimately able to tie that back to what my first aspirations were that you know, I want to be a surgeon.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_00: What I want to be a surgeon really meant was is I want to take people who have an issue and make that issue go away in a sense.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: If I like, I don't know, operate on your heart, you're gonna be more effective, ideally, when I you come out of the operation than when you went into the operation.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_00: So it was the it really was that underlying thing that was always driving me in the first place, but I didn't have the ability to see it broadly when I was a kid, and then I built the ability to see it broadly when I when I grew up.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if I've grown up yet, but you know what I mean.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_03: Billion Minds has taken over a dozen years of research into the habits of the most effective among us in this new world where work and life are merging.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_03: They've distilled it down into a 90-day program targeted at employees that do unstructured, ambiguous work.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_03: Employees from five different countries around the world are using Billion Minds to help them start each day with a purpose and end it with accomplishment.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_03: If you or your team wants to discover how Billion Minds can help employees optimize their work in the context of their broader life, go to billionminds.com slash learnmore today.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_03: That's billionminds.com slash L E A R N M O R E.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_03: Billion Minds, providing practical tools for our way too busy lives.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_03: So how does all this end up with with billion minds and what you're doing now?
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_00: That that realization is is ultimately what led to it, right?
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's the purest representation of it that I can think of.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_00: So um the last uh thing that I did at at Microsoft, which is where I met my co-founder and normal co-uh, I don't know what you call us on this podcast, but co-person on this podcast, um, Ryan.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_00: We met each other through uh through the work that we were doing at Microsoft.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so by that time in my career at Microsoft, as I mentioned, I kind of gone full circle and I was now in the health and life sciences domain.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_00: So my official job at that time was I was uh strategy lead for health and uh for health and life sciences, but specifically life sciences.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: That's where you and I met.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so I had that role, and then I got the opportunity uh to be the co-founder of an internal startup um inside inside Microsoft.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I've been very interested in that because as I say, I've always been interested in entrepreneurship and had my at a small scale have my own uh company in the in the UK.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so was really interested in kind of like understanding entrepreneurship in uh in more detail.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_00: And this gave me an opportunity to do it while still getting a salary.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so Ryan and I formed this thing that that later became what we referred to as the clinical research innovation hub.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_00: And the goal of that at that time was to modernize the clinical research process, make the clinical research process more efficient, more effective, um, and ultimately get life-saving treatments to patients faster.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_00: So we're doing that super gosh, super impactful.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, some of the most important work I would say that I've ever done.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_00: And Ryan's doing it too, um, and has come at it from, you know, completely different angle, didn't have any background in that area at all.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um and what we found was two things, which is really interesting.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_00: So one, we got on, which was great, and and uh we could work, uh we could work well together and our skill sets complemented each other.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but the the other thing, which I think was probably equally important, was that even though this was really important work and really impactful, um for the first time for a long time, I was thinking very deeply about this um underlying theme across all of the work that I'd done previously and how it was related to to improving people's you know personal effectiveness.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_00: And that was the thing, despite how fascinating and interesting the work that I was doing on a day-to-day basis was, that was the thing that was obsessing me.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_00: And what was really interesting was it wasn't just obsessing me, it was obsessing my co-founder, Ryan.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so those are the things that we would be talking about after work at the end of the day.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um and initially it was like thinking about our own effectiveness and really, really ambiguous, unstructured setting that was our startup.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_00: But then very rapidly we started to think, okay, well, what does is is that hard for everybody else?
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_00: It probably is.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so that got us really, really, really curious.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_00: So um now I've got this like sort of very pure understanding of what my life and my career has been about and what I want it to be about going forward.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I got somebody else who's really interested in these same themes, and it also feels a bit like a moment.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_00: And what I mean by feels like a like a moment is I feel like I've developed the rounded set of skills potentially that I need, right?
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_00: Including the skills of entrepreneurship that are now being uh now being built out.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_00: But then also something about the world is changing too.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_00: So this this idea of being effective back when I started my career really meant, okay, your maybe your assistant is gonna go away and you're gonna need to learn Word, right?
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so, or there's nobody's gonna type out a letter for you anymore.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_00: You've got to learn to use email or something along those lines.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_00: And if you could get that set of basic skills, then you could be competent and effective in the workplace.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_00: But 20 years later, it wasn't like that anymore, right?
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_00: As in everybody had that set of basic digital competency, as it were.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_00: And but if you were gonna thrive, then you needed to thrive in a world that was very different.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_00: You need to thrive in a world that was unstructured, that was ambiguous, where a job description is just a vague set of like hand-wavy things.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and what success looks like in the workplace is a vague set of hand-wavy things.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so we saw people struggling with that.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_00: We felt ourselves to a certain extent because of the pure ambiguity of the work that we were doing, struggling with that a little bit.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so then that those things for me started to crystallize, right?
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_00: I've got this set of skills now, I've got this amount of experience, I know what my life is about.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I know what direction I want to I want to take it, what direction I want to go.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_00: And it feels like there is a problem sitting out there that this set of skills that I'm looking to apply are really suitable to try to solve this problem.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so all we needed really to do to crystallize that, because Ryan's going along a very similar journey, all we really need to do to crystallize that was to talk to a ton of people.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_00: So we spoke to over 300 people.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_00: And what we really wanted to find out was is this thing that our guts tells us is a big deal, really a big deal.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it was the fourth or fifth interview where I'm speaking to somebody who I've known for the best part of a decade.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I've known this person in a whole bunch of different settings, somebody who I would consider to be very like almost stoic in nature, et cetera.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_00: And 10 minutes into the discussion about this specific topic about how to cope in this world of ambiguity and the personal effectiveness in the digital era, as it were.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_00: 10 minutes in, he's crying.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, there's something that's interesting, right?
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_00: That's I mean, obviously, I'm sympathy, right?
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_00: He's a friend of mine as well.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_00: But at the same time, like the the brain part of me is going, that's interesting.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_00: That probably means something.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_00: And so we carried on that set of interviews.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_00: We got a lot more cries, um, and we got a lot of people who were like, yeah, it's very, very, very important that this problem is solved because right now my ability to be able to do work in the context of my life is gone.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't really understand how to be effective.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm sort of swimming in open water and the currents are uncomfortable and all that kind of stuff.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_00: So that was when it was like, yeah, it's kind of now, kind of now or never.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, COVID hits that makes it even worse because of you know, boundaries, you know, disappearing and all that kind of stuff.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_00: So that really was the that that was really it's like if you're gonna do this, you're gonna stop talking a bit like everybody does, or you will talk about the I'm gonna do the startup someday or whatever, is like, nope, just take the risk, jump and uh and go.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_00: And it's hard, right?
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_00: Because you know, these golden handcuffs and things like that are, you know, they're real.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, and so you're giving you're giving up a salary, you're giving up um security, you're giving up, you know, health benefits and all that kind of stuff, you're giving up all of those things to do it.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_00: But it just at that point just felt like it would have been very wrong not to, and that there would have been a lot of regret had I had I not well and and given your your journey uh to get here and the knowledge of of what you'd learned in in doing that discovery, you're like, well, who else is gonna do it?
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_03: Who else is better positioned to do it?
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_03: You know, and it's the the answer is probably no one, you know.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we all some ways.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_00: I'm I mean, I'm sure there's a yeah, I'm sure I'm sure there's a bunch of there's seven billion people in the world.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure there's a bunch of people that can that that can.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think from I think from my perspective though, um, this felt like my it was the first time since I had that like five-year-old, this is my calling to be a surgeon, that was very kind of misplaced.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_00: This was the first time I kind of felt that feeling again, but had evidence and data to back up that it is kind of my calling.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, who knows how successful ultimately this is gonna be.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_00: But even if it's not, I know that that somehow, somehow, whatever I do going forward, it has to be an extension of this, right?
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_00: I believe very passionately that technology, the way technology is designed um today, in a way that just pays lip service to the idea of being human-centric, um, is just broken, right?
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_00: You don't building technology that somebody loves, right, that somebody enjoys experiencing on a day-to-day basis is one is one sort of way of doing human-centric design.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_00: But in order for our software to truly meet the needs of humans, it has to materially make humans' lives better, and it has to maximize the unique gifts that we have as humans.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that most tech that is designed today does not do that, right?
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_00: In many cases, I hate to say it, but in many cases, many pieces of technology either make our lives worse when taken in the aggregate, or at the very least, are a mixed blessing.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, think about the the sort of uninteresting relationship that we have with social media today, right?
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, there are certain things that social media are absolutely wonderful for and absolutely terrific, but we all know that there are downsides to social media.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and is, you know, is social media, for example, helping our connections with other people, which is the core of what it is supposed to do.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_00: Does it create richer and deeper relationships?
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_00: Well, certainly it doesn't with the people that are very closest to us.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_00: We all know this, right?
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that sort of uh you've probably seen the sort of iconic pictures of, you know, of people that are in quotes connecting with other people and they're sat next to each other, not looking at each other, they're looking at their phones, right?
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's these sorts of things that are um that I think anybody that is a technologist or anybody that is in the in the business of uh of getting software in front of people should be thinking about very deeply.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_00: So that's why we don't even think of ourselves really as a software company.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_00: We are the personal effectiveness company, and what we look to do is to provide the right combination of technology, um, let's say education, if you like, and support and accountability in the which and use the right combination of software and humans in order to be able to get to that outcome.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_00: Somebody put it to me the other day that this is a human problem, so humans have to be part of the solution.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_00: And these the traditional big tech is obviously for scalability purposes, for profit motives, et cetera, is doing everything it can to pull humans out of the picture.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but and then is surprised when the software that it designs isn't always acting in the best interest of the humans that it's the theoretically it's setting.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_03: Are you looking to hone the skills you need to thrive as work and the rest of our lives merge?
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_03: If so, we can help.
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_03: For the first time, Billion Minds has taken the program it offers to businesses and customize it for individuals in a program they call the Elements.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_03: Whether you work for yourself, a small business, or a big company, you can sign up today.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_03: Just visit effectiveness.me and join up now.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_03: Use the code WAYTOBISY to get a savings of$74.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_03: Billion Minds.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_03: Providing practical tools for our way too busy lives.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, there's a there's an element to it where we needed all of these things to exist.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_03: You needed to zoom out on it, you needed to have that experience um to influence what you're doing now because it's it required this uh bigger view that includes the humans, includes the software, and not just one bit of software, but across the full spectrum of available tools and using them for the for the right reasons at the right time, rather than just because they exist.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_03: You know, yeah.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_00: We've we've created a bunch of technology out there that at least on the surface, if used perfectly and used in isolation, is gonna make the people that are using that tech make their lives better.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_00: And then what we're doing is we're relying on the users themselves to know how to use it perfectly in order to make their lives better.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_00: And the best you get in most cases is like, well, here's a here's a piece of training about our tool, right?
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_00: Here's how to, you know, I don't know, here's how to align a set of bullets on a document or you know, to make it super simple, right?
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's that's not telling you how to be more effective with the software.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_00: That's telling you how to use the software.
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_00: We as technology companies will give people these things, we'll give them some instruction manuals on how to use these things, and then everything else is up to you.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the problem here is that life is a lot more complicated than it was when I started my career in tech.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and it's not my ability as a 50-year-old.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_00: That's the thing that really struck me about this.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_00: I thought initially it was like my ability as a 50-year-old to keep up.
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_00: No, it's not.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_00: Like we spoke in our interviews, we spoke to people in the 20s who were having the same, the same challenges.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_00: What it is, is that all of this technology that's been built for flexibility has been incredibly effective and it's created a bunch of flex of flexibility and a bunch of lives that are very different to each other.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so everybody's going through this individual journey, and this individual journey is very, very complicated and it's become very complicated.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_00: I think we mentioned on a previous podcast, it's basically the second law of thermodynamics, right?
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_00: Life gets more, disorder increases over time.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_00: So now we all have these very disordered, very unstructured lives and that have been enabled, aided, and abetted by technology that's been built for flexibility.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_00: We're now at a point where human beings need help with that, right?
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_00: They need help with the fact that it is complicated and unstructured and things like that.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_00: And technology to date has been absent in that.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_00: And so we think that technology should not be absent in that, but we also think, as I say, that it is human-centric.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_00: So the so therefore that humans have to be part of that picture, have to be part of the solution.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think this gives us a that comes back to this idea that like it's if if not now, when, right?
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_00: If not now at the you know, end of a coming out of a pandemic with record levels of uh mental health issues.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, 120,000 people in the US alone die every year from uh ailments that are related to workplace stress.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_00: So that's a that's a crisis, right?
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_00: And that's something that um we should be doing something about and addressing.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_00: And you don't address that with, you know.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: An extra few columns on a spreadsheet or a new app in the app store alone.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_00: It creates it it needs something that's bigger and and more interventional, if you like, at a human level than traditional solutions have been.
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I think that's very true.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I I think about the the overwhelm of apps on your phone, for example, each with a specific purpose, such that, you know, in a in a recent update, Apple had to pull into uh, you know, that that library of apps page where they try to make sense of it for you.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_03: You know, so it's like we know you have 400 apps on your phone and you can't find them.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_03: So we're gonna we're gonna sort them into categories for you.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe that'll help, you know.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_03: Uh you know, so it's it's the context switching and the the trying to manage it and uh you know, in a lot of ways, uh the assumption that uh very quickly everybody will have an uptake on a new app without an instruction manual just because it exists is is a tough one to swallow too.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_03: Uh because kids uh do that very quickly and they adapt very quickly and they drop it very quickly and they move on.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_03: Whereas, you know, people of I think uh current uh working age and and people that are inside these big companies that we that we work for um experienced what your journey and going from you know switching from uh typing a letter to typing an email and you know word processing became a thing that didn't exist before, you know.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_03: Uh yeah.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_03: So it's it's it's it's crazy to think about it.
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well that definitely yeah, there definitely there was an inflection point.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know exactly when it happened, but there was definitely an inflection point where simply like learning the next skill, right?
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_00: So learning the to use the word processor, learning to do some sort of basic PowerPoint and things like that, that were became less sort of general digital competency skills.
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_00: There was an inflection point where by that was just table stakes, already had that.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_00: And then the next set of skills that you really needed was the ability to be able to flexibly adjust and adapt to this crazy changing world in which we sit.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_00: And the first piece, right, could be addressed very simply by doing the sorts of things I did when my career started, right?
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_00: It could be addressed by let's send people to a class to teach them how to use Word.
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_00: You could address that first one thing very well.
• 46:47
  SPEAKER_00: The second thing, by and large, we've been on our own for.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_00: And we've been able to get away with it, I think for one simple reason, which is some people are fairly naturally adept at existing in unstructured in the unstructured world.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but that's not everybody.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_00: And so for the rest, so while the number of people doing that kind of job was larger or smaller, I should say, than the number of people that could do it and do it well, we were okay.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_00: But once we got to a point where like just work becomes that way, and that everybody needs to be really pretty good at that, then I think that's the point at which people need help.
• 47:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_00: And it's strange that we assume that everybody should just be naturally adept, that it's sort of part of what makes it to be human.
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um a few uh years back, I was um uh I decided I was gonna take up running again.
• 47:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I was trying to run a man, I was just like slow and painful and all this kind of stuff.
• 47:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I discovered something called qi running.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the things that they talk about in qi running is that there is just this assumption that because running is a human thing, that everybody's good at running.
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_00: And in reality, no, there's like a technique to running.
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a technique to running well, and it's a technique that you can learn.
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_00: And if you learn that technique, then you can run much more effectively and much more effortlessly than you would otherwise.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_00: This sort of feels a bit like that, whereby it's like it's assumed that everybody should just be okay.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_00: You just like read who moved my cheese and you're good, you know, or whatever it happened to be, right?
• 48:39
  SPEAKER_00: So whatever the sort of modern version of that is, that like your your life is gonna be crazy and changing and unstructured, and just develop, read this book, and then you'll be fine.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_00: And in reality, it's much more complicated than that, it's much more difficult than that.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and people need help.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I know from my early career to tie all the way back to the beginning there, and where what you spoke about is like, why don't people like intervene and you know, and things like that?
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_00: I did not have, you know, I had people who cared about me and loved me and so on, but I didn't have a coach.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't have anybody that was sort of external to me to allow me to think through the various issues as to how I was getting through my day on a day-to-day basis, you know, how I was working with other people, what the, you know, what my goals were and why I had those goals.
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't have anybody that was helping me think through any of those things.
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I didn't have anybody to sort of help me cope on a day-to-day basis, let alone um, you know, sort of deal with what was happening for me in the future.
• 49:51
  SPEAKER_00: And so, like a lot of people, I stumbled around as uh as a result.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_00: So we should not assume that just because we're human, we can do this unstructured, ambiguous thing really well.
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_00: Most of us need an external perspective, most of us need help, uh, most of us need tooling that doesn't exist that is structured to help us do it better, they need uh coaching and accountability, they need education, they need all of these various things in order to help them do it well.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_00: And there is, just as in my example with the Qi running, right?
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_00: If you go from running badly to running okay, it feels really good, right?
• 50:32
  SPEAKER_00: In this other genre, we've seen the same sort of thing, right?
• 50:37
  SPEAKER_00: Where we can take people who do struggle on a day-to-day basis with their effectiveness, raise their level of effectiveness.
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not just the results they get, it's also how they feel, right?
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's how they how well do they sleep, which of course is directly related to this, right?
• 50:55
  SPEAKER_00: How well do they sleep at the end of the day means they feel better the next day, and it means they feel much more happy to take on each day.
• 51:02
  SPEAKER_00: So happy in the moment as well as moving towards whatever it is they want their medium-term goals to be.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_00: So that makes it incredibly rewarding to be able to do this kind of stuff.
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_00: But we need people to actually take a step back and say, you know what, I could be better at this.
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_00: And if I was better at this, I'd feel happy.
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_00: Forget about whether I get promoted or anything like that.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_00: I just actually enjoy the journey more if I could be better at this on a day-to-day basis, start every day with a purpose, end every day feeling like I've accomplished something.
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_00: That's rewarding in its own right.
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and and it we should not assume that either A, we're gonna be brilliant at it just because we're human, or B, that if we're not good at it, that there's something wrong with us.
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_00: No, we're not something wrong with us.
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_00: We just need to, we just need some help.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_03: Excellent.
• 51:55
  SPEAKER_03: Well, thank you, Paul.
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_03: This has been a great, a great look inside uh how you got here to Billion Minds, and uh look forward to to uh thank you talking about it more in the future.
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_03: The Way Too Busy podcast was presented and produced by me, Matt Neal, and was brought to you by Billion Minds.
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_03: If you want to get in touch with us, tweet us at Rising Billion or email us at WayTooBusy at Billion Minds.com.
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_03: Billion Minds creating practical tools for our way too busy lives.