Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences)

0:00 The brain is like a college campus that has different departments in it. Most people rely on their history department way too much. If you instead send things to the kind of the more experimental, open minded science department, the more creative art department, you get dramatically better answers. I know you have a bunch of awesome advice on becoming more influential. It's almost like you're playing like Elden Ring or some video game. The starting point is. To choose your character. Hey, I'm the devil's advocate approach, or I'm the break it and see if it still stands after I hit it really hard with a sledgehammer kind of guy. Your personality kind of has a natural fit. How do we create better relationships within our teams? It's critical to ask what kind of experience am I? Not how good am I at my job, how much do I know, how critical am I to this process, but Am I a miserable experience? And if the answer is yes, don't worry too much about the other pieces yet. You gotta fix that first. I am really excited for this episode. I think it's gonna be unlike any other conversation I've had on this podcast. And then here's the surprise ending. Today my guest is Evan LePointe.

1:00 Evan is the founder of Core Sciences. Which teaches companies and individuals How our brains actually work? And through that lens. How to more effectively work with other people on teams, how to build better products, how to grow your business.

1:14 And how to make smarter and faster decisions. Evan is a four-time founder, including founding company called Satellite, which is the fourth largest analytics product on the internet today, which was acquired by Adobe, where he laid a RAN product strategy and innovation for Adobe's digital business. In our conversation, Evan shares a simple way to understand how our brains work. And through that framework How we can get better at vision work.

1:40 Influence Running meetings. Having more focus and building better and more productive relationships with our colleagues. This conversation is a beautiful mix of science. theory, and also a ton of very actionable and concrete things you can do to be more effective in your work.

1:57 If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it on your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and helps the podcast. Tremendously. With that, I bring you Evan LePointe.

2:11 Evan, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks very much for having me. I'm excited to share some stuff with people. I am really excited for this episode because one, I think it's gonna be unlike any other conversation I've had on this podcast. Two, I think it's gonna really stretch our brains as we learn about how the brain works.

2:30 And three, I think it's really gonna make an impact on how people work and how they relate to other people and work with other people. I thought it'd be great to start by laying a little bit of foundation for people to what they need to understand about how the brain works before we get into how we can actually apply some of the stuff.

2:48 So could you just share some of the stuff that is really important for us to know about how the brain works? The brain is like a big A big galaxy. I mean there's a national geographic quote that we throw up in all of our programs that when we train teams, for example, that says the brain is more complex than any known structure in the universe. And It's easy to read a sentence like that.

3:06 And just run straight away from the problem. And I think that's important for people to not run away from this problem. But more run toward it. Uh, and it's our job to kind of translate the complexity of the brain into like really simple, straightforward systems that you can remember. In the The three or four main systems to stack on top of each other like layers.

3:25 Start with it. The the brain has systems like Different I kinda think of it like the brain is like a college campus that has different departments in it and Your brain has a science department responsible for open minded experimentation. It has an art department.

3:40 In it. responsible for creative kind of boundless thinking. It has a history department. Designed for looking stuff up that you already know. And if you think about sending your thoughts to the right department on the campus.

3:53 Or just different departments, you're gonna get super different responses back from your brain. And where we're stuck largely is most people rely on their history department. Way too much. And that's because the brain is actually built to conserve energy and that's the lowest energy form of generating an answer to a question. that the brain can pull off.

4:11 But if you instead send things to the kind of the more experimental, open minded science department, the more creative art department. the humanities department of your compassion, et cetera. you get totally different answers. And certainly if you ever build products as a company. Or offer services. Those departments are gonna give you dramatically better answers.

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6:24 Try it for free at explode. dot co slash Lenny That's E X P L O Dot C O slash Lenny So that's kind of the first thing is that the brain has these departments and systems in it.

6:38 It also has like pathways. And the pathways thing is really important to understand because There's a likelihood that thought will go down certain pathways in each of our brains. Some of that has to do with personality. Uh which kind of

6:52 sort of predisposes us to have a higher anxiety or a lower anxiety response or a higher creativity or lower creativity response. But you can also be more intentional with these pathways. And uh that's a big component of self awareness is to kinda know what are my Preferences? And then

7:09 Am I actually letting those preferences take over in the situation or am I being more intentional steering down The pathways to activate These best regions and systems of the brain. And the simplest way to keep track of the systems is there's three. There's three really big ones. There there probably are more than three that you

7:27 can learn about, but the ones we want to have everybody learn about are your safety system, your reward system. In your purpose system. And Out of those three, two of them sound really real and sun one of them sounds like fantasy. To most people.

7:41 So yeah, the safety system is pretty obvious to most people when we're scared, afraid, uncertain, we have doubt. We're resentful, angry, apathetic, et cetera. This system of our brain is like trying to restore our standing in the universe. Like I need to get out of this stress. out of this danger. out of this anger.

7:59 et cetera, and you have an objective that that part of your brain, that system Sets and you go chase that objective. Like I want to get safe. So if you're in a meeting you know, practical everyday situation and you you're exposed to a statement that makes you feel unsafe.

8:14 Your objective now actually isn't to contribute to the meeting productively anymore. Like your brain's objective. is to get back to safety. And the same thing of rewards that if somebody says, you know, you'll get something if you do this. Which is the opposite of safety that if you don't do this, something bad will happen.

8:31 Then yeah, your brain gets into this kind of pursuit desire state. Which seems great and can be great in a lot of cases, but also can be pretty narrow. So when you hear people say, That's not my job That's actually the reward system speaking. Saying

8:45 I get rewarded for the things in this list. And this thing that you're talking about is not on my reward list. And I therefore am not interested in it. Like I I have a easier time pushing away from it. Uh, because the reward system of the brain is

9:00 you know, more transactional at you know, in a conceptual way. And then you get to this vague and ridiculous sounding purpose system. But until you realize what purpose is and we've all felt it. Uh if you if you understand the impact of the thing that you're doing. And you understand and care about the people that are impacted by your actions.

9:19 That's those are the conditions for purpose. And that can be really big, like curing cancer. I understand the impact in the people. That's huge. But it can also be like I'm writing an email. I understand the impact of this email and the people affected by it.

9:33 You can feel purpose at this tiny little grain of sand level of your life, not just at the whole you know, beach and shoreline level. And we teach people that that's super important. So that's kind of the foundational layer. And then on top of that, there are a few layers that have to do with your focus.

9:49 'Cause the brain can dramatically shift focus from like open mindedness to deep, deep focus. And then there's kind of the final layer of ability. Which is a l less Like Sciencey?

10:00 You know, let's n neuroscience. And more just practical that your ability is regulated by how much reality you know. Like, do you have the context for the decision or you just know you're supposed to make the decision? People with context? have higher ability than people without.

10:15 And the same thing with with imagination and and logic that if you push those boundaries in your mind further. Your ability increases. Almost disproportionately to how much you've pushed. So these layers just kinda stack on. And I think that's kind of oh, it's approachable. It's simple. It's like we can all understand.

10:33 Is my safety reward or purpose system active right now? What is my level of focus? What level of connection with reality, reason, and imagination do I have right now? And then there's your output.

10:44 As a human. Or as a team. And all these things are like levers we can pull, which is super fun. Amazing. So just to summarize here, so we have these three systems, safety, reward. Purpose.

10:55 than uh our level of focus. And And then there's the ability, like are we able to actually do the job? Those are kind of the Exactly right. Puzzle pieces, okay. So where where I want to take this is

11:07 When we work with other people. Working with other people is very hard. And some of the struggles people have at work in building product and running a company and building teams, hiring all these things is Uh They often get really frustrated by the way other people

11:22 All right. Some people wanna just start building a thing. Some people want to really think about it. Some people Are very Customer qualitative

11:31 Anecdote focus, some people are very metrics focused. Some people are very uh collaborative on a working group. Some people are very I want to work alone. So

11:40 I guess just first of all We just talked about it. Here's how the brain works. And then there's this idea of people work very differently. Can you just talk a bit about just like But

11:50 idea of people are very Why people behave so differently in an effort to help us learn to work better with people that are just like, Oh, that's so strange this person wants to just start building. You know, the maybe the one of the worst pieces of propaganda that people walk around with in their minds is the phrase, we're more similar than we are different.

12:08 And My theory on why we walk around with that phrase or why we're told that phrase, if we zoom in on the situations where we hear that. Is that We have this theory it's easier to get along with people that are like us. So if we

12:22 If we fantasize that this person is like me, then I might Get along with them better. When in fact we should probably be building the muscle that We have the capacity to get along with people that are extremely different than we are. And

12:36 That fourth piece that we talk about in our in like our coursework, you know, when we train managers, for example. is personality. So we talk about Your brain systems, your brain focus, your brain's ability. Which sort sort of paints the picture that humans might be similar to each other and we can activate these things kind of like unilaterally. But then we have to drop this bomb at the end, which is, and here's why that doesn't work consistently.

12:59 Across different types of people. Uh so I know you took Uh our profile, our big five base profile. And that's just one tool out of many. they can help a person understand where on these various spectrum of

13:11 personality traits and motivations they sit. Uh we often use the metaphor of in our training of like culinary school. That were more culinary school for human performance instead of cooking class. And that helps people kind of conceptualize that I'm used to going to cooking classes in my training, like here's how to do a one on one.

13:31 Here's how to offer feedback. Here's a framework for generating product ideas through it to like prioritization and backlog. But we're kind of like Well, what's going on beneath the surface? What are the underlying principles and forces at work? That all that

13:45 kinda comes to the all the stuff that comes to life on the surface really originates from. In in this culinary school metaphor, the one of the things that's really important for a chef is to actually understand what are my preferences. What do I like to eat. Because if I don't know what I like, then I assume everybody else likes what I like, then I'm not gonna be a very dynamic chef. I'm gonna be like everybody likes lots of salt and acidity in their dishes. And then you're gonna go to Germany and open a restaurant and be like, that is absolutely not what we're looking for.

14:13 You know, in this cuisine. So self awareness is a really important step, not just of culinary school, but like for everybody. And you sit somewhere on a spectrum. Your brain has these pathways and these kind of like traffic cops directing traffic in your mind. So you have to start with

14:29 you know, square one with yourself. And understand am I Like prone to try to say things politely and so that they're received well, or am I prone to be super blunt and direct and maybe even Mean and harsh.

14:42 Am I prone to like sit sit back in conversations and let things happen? Or am I prone to take over? Am I prone to go to like intellectual abstract thinking and try to kind of like deconstruct ideas, or am I prone to stay very pragmatic? And if you don't know who you are And you think that like the universe resembles you.

15:01 then you're gonna get super lost in that in that broader spectrum. So I think the the big five I mean, there's a bunch of model. You have Myers, Briggs, Disc, et cetera. They're just all imperfect ways of measuring personality. But just But also useful, despite the fact that they're imperfect. And especially useful if you kinda take a growth mentality instead of a justification mentality to reading them. Like if you say

15:23 Okay, I'm low in politeness, I'm super direct. Your justification mentality of that would be like, Yeah, damn right. Like I'm awesome that everybody knows what I really mean and how I really feel. versus the growth thing, which is like, well maybe there are situations where I can try A little harder than zero percent. To phrase things in a way that

15:42 You know, if we ver if we work backwards from the outcome we want. To choose our actions right now. Like would my would these actions so direct actually Increase or reduce the probability of that outcome. And that's when we become like more dynamic chefs, more dynamic people.

15:57 But yeah, personality is a a broad spectrum, uh, and self awareness is like the the starting point for the whole thing. The big five model gives you a really good list of attributes scan yourself through. And then you should be making a game plan. for how to do that and then you can turn your attention to the network of humans you're a part of.

16:17 And say, Okay, well, in what ways because I'm me, am I so different than these other minds? And how can we kind of create a mesh? mentality. Where thought Shifts among the group.

16:28 to to fit most naturally and in product work especially. You know, whether you're a founder, entrepreneur. kinda thinking about product at that level and and your team at that level. Or you're in the thick of product work. uh pushing your mind and other people's minds to get this right. then you're gonna benefit a lot from understanding these traits and these differences.

16:48 So I think the big unlock here for a lot of people Is that The reason you may are struggling getting something done. Working with someone being successful at your company with your manager with a

16:59 Partner team is they have a very different way of their brain operating and so they think in a very different way. They react in different ways. And you may think the entire world Things the way you do, but they don't. And these tests help you see that.

17:11 To make this super concrete for people, are there a couple of examples or wins you often find That you can share just like Ways to use this to become better. in your job, say this week, like whether with meetings or convincing someone of something, anywhere thing along these lines.

17:27 Yeah, I mean I I think one more layer would be helpful to this, especially if you're a leader or manager. Which is The the The the business world is just isn't just hand to hand combat between a bunch of individuals on like the the blank matrix loading screen, right? Like You're actually in a habitat.

17:45 As a company. And your team is like a habitat. I I think of companies and teams Almost like little terrariums that we're inside of. And is this terrarium set up with, you know, sand and a heat lamp? And and we're a bunch of frogs.

18:00 Like we're gonna turn into frog bacon. Simply because we're in this habitat. So a lot of it is you want to actually create a a habitat or an environment that's kind of predisposed to high functioning thinking and high functioning interaction between people. Because if it's if if the habitat's working against all of you to begin with

18:19 Then All the hand to hand combat that's gonna show up is Actually largely a function of you just being in this You know, heat lamp. Dry

18:29 Uh, devoid of life, kind of devoid of You know places productive ways to grapple, right? And and that's where a lot of teams and companies sit today, especially like more established teams. They've They've either lost their way in the habitat.

18:44 And haven't really set the scene for good. Kind of thinking and interaction. Or they just never had that to begin with. And some of the stuff, like when you've when you've talked to a couple other people in the past. You know, your conversation Uh the the Canva conversation, the Figma conversation both come to mind.

19:01 А злай, іти супер об'єс. the energy that has gone into the habitat. to predispose people to high function. Mm. My interviews with the folks from Figma and Canva.

19:13 Exactly right. I see. Oh say more about that. Uh I mean, so you you think about the um even i in the in the Canva context of like coaches instead of managers. Like that is a You're looking at so so I love this. Let me back up for just a second. There's a a great qu I I think Dan Pink has summarized the bit the problem better than anybody when he said

19:36 Uh, there's a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. And In that gap. It kinda says, like, well, what is it that business is doing that science knows better? And you can kind of almost look at this as an equation of science knows minus what your business does equals dysfunction.

19:52 Right. Like that's That is a pretty crystal clear thing. So if you take this like managers versus coaches. They're taking intuitively, I think. I don't I don't know if they're neuroscientists, but like Intuitively, I think a lot of

20:05 great founders understand Humans don't work a certain way. And this whole paradigm of managers seems to be failing a lot. And this whole paradigm like mantra like fail faster seems to be failing a lot. And like

20:19 La emission statements seem to fail a lot. So you look at this science knows business does as like a lens to examine yourself through. And stuff that fails very often. Is kind of worth a look. And when you look at like okay, do we really want managers?

20:36 Because that seems to fail a lot. Or is there Something that Is there a paradigm? That Works better for human beings that activates more human potential.

20:46 And they hit the nail on the head. So if you kind of do the math of Canva What science knows versus what Canva does. Whether they know they're doing it scientifically right or not. The the The math equals zero.

20:59 Like there's no difference between what science knows and what business does in that case. And uh also the Figma conversation. I loved the phrase from that conversation. Um, imagination is a hypothesis generation. engine, I think is is what Oh the Dylan, yeah, chat with Dylan. I loved that idea. 'Cause when we talk about imagination as a port as a part of ability.

21:20 Uh, we talk about imagination's capacity to generate alternatives for you. Like that's its that's its purpose. It's not just to doodle in the margins in the middle of boring meetings. Like that that's that's part of it. It's a side benefit. But when you look at imagination's purpose. If you have a great imagination, you always have a lot of choices.

21:38 In life. Like Mickey Mouse was a choice. It was like a New alternative way to Send messages through a talking mouse. What that's

21:47 Okay, that's interesting. But what's the other part of the hypothesis generation engine that we focus a lot on is it's not just the ability to generate choices and hypotheses. But it's also the ability to kind of load them into your Oculus headset. and walk around a world in which that choice already has been executed. Like that's

22:07 Kind of akin to vision in a sense that Do you have a really good Ability to load. That one branch of this imaginative tree, this one hypothesis into a simulation.

22:20 And then explore what the world looks like with this in place. And if you look at this coaching thing at uh it's going on at Canva instead of managing. Like you load that in the simulator and like boy this This looks pretty nice. This is a

22:34 This is a higher performance thing, like we've advocacy. Instead of You know, regulation. We have we have growth. It we there's like a whole bunch of aspects that are inherent In that approach where science

22:47 And if you ask a neuroscientist Would that work better? They'd be like, Oh, hell yeah, that would work way better. because it activates this in the brain, it ch it reduces cortisol, it like it does all these things that science knows work. Much better. Mm.

23:01 So like there's a whole list of stuff, I mean, from very deep to very tactical. Of things we can do differently. That that reduce the gap between what you're doing and what science knows. And

23:12 The dysfunction just shrinks and shrinks and shrinks as you do those things. Are there things that you've found people can change in the way they Work. based on the way the brain operates, whether it's run better meetings, be better influence. Like what are some things people can tried to do this week.

23:28 That Will make them more successful if they're work or working with colleagues. In the list of what science knows and what business does, like everything's in there. Culture's in there, meetings are in there, goals are in there, deadlines are in there. Uh, team dynamics, you know, all this stuff is in there. So we'd probably just pick a f a few things out of that very long list.

23:46 Um meetings are a good one. You know, meetings I I forget what the statistic is, but it's some Insane like I twelve figure Amount of no not twelve. Nine figure.

23:57 No, twelve figure. Hundreds of billions, right? Amount of of waste. is caught in Meetings. I mean, we spend gazillions of dollars on waste of time in meetings. And for us, like in our in our programs, the average delta

24:13 Is is between ten and twenty percent. So People save anywhere from a full half of a day to a full day per week. of work as a result of just cleaning up The way they're using meetings.

24:25 Uh, and some of that is just the design of meetings, like treat meetings like a product and you know, treat them like workflows that should be organized and used s you know intentionally. But a lot of it is inside the meeting. Like what's the what's the tactic? So Here's something super tactical, which is Meetings, generally speaking, are a combination of priming and decision making. Like if you look at meetings through the lens of like the phases that they are. And

24:48 I A lot of meetings kind of skip the priming step altogether. They launched directly into decision making. And

24:57 it would be safe to skip the priming step if we began the meeting under the assumption that everybody here is under this you know on the same page. has the same information. And generally speaking, intends for the same outcome. I I think that's a ludicrous assumption for most meetings.

25:14 And yet most people Are actually shocked to find out that we're not on the same page. Even though we literally never have been. And you know it I as long as you're on day two plus of working together.

25:26 So it's a it's a crazy thing that we don't do priming. And priming it can be simple. It can even even be done in the invite. I mean, one of the things that's crazy about Outlook and Google is You can put a very Terrible, useless meeting into Outlook.

25:42 Uh, and it will never look at it and be like, This is probably useless. Just like you can go into uh like Trello and put the dumbest project in the company's history into Trello. It will ingest Anything you put into it. Without any discernment as to its value.

25:58 Now imagine We're gonna have to do this ourselves. For now until like a better calendar comes out. But imagine if Outlook or Google Calendar or or you know

26:08 Cron, which is now as part of Notion. Would just be like uh uh uh you know, like What is the point of this meeting? And you could say Okay, we this is here

26:19 Uh like this meeting is about the generation of options. It's or or creative problem solving or Very tactical problem solving, or efficiency seeking, or Like what is the category of conversation we are about to have? What are some of the basic principles that should apply? I mean are we are we

26:36 Honoring sacred cows? Or are we eating sacred cows in this meeting? Like what is the What is the mode? mentality, the priming, like how can we all kind of say This is the mindset.

26:48 the in in the ultimate Purpose that applies to the meeting. And you can write that and you can read that in under three minutes. So it's not some arduous process. Amazon does it like in an arduous process, right? They're they're kind of known for that.

27:01 But that's wisdom to know, like we need priming. They they're wise enough to realize the the need for it. They make that a very robust execution. It doesn't have to be that robust. So skipping priming is pretty bad. Other meetings get the priming and the decision making backwards. So We start to open

27:21 The meeting. You know, you've heard of like diamond shaped thinking. Let's open the meeting. with kind of expansionary thought and let's end the second half of the meeting with convergence. Well We start the meeting instead with convergence. Realize that we can't reconcile the various

27:36 You know, party in the room. There their needs for convergence. And then you might hear in the middle of a meeting, like, Well, let's start over again and remember why we're all here. And we do the priming in the second half of the meeting. Just in time for the meeting to end. Mm-hmm. So

27:48 That's a super Kind of like Obvious thing that people can do, but that people very rarely do. uh in priming and

27:58 I'm happy to generate like a list, you know, so we don't have to talk through everything, but know to maybe make some little PDFs or something that people can download that say Here's what great priming looks like. And then when you move to the decision making. Uh here's what great decision making looks like. And that way you can have like a little bit of a guide.

28:14 And again, do the do your own math, what science knows, what we're doing in this meeting. We're skipping a bunch of steps. That's growing the po probability of dysfunction or things will going wrong. Uh in Let's shrink that probability instead of growing it. Amazing. Yeah, that'd be sweet if you have that. We'll definitely link to that in the show notes. So the advice here is make sure when you're starting a meeting running a meeting.

28:35 Uh Prime everyone around. The problem we're trying to solve. We're trying to get out of this meeting, the context. versus just diving into decision making.

28:43 And and very notably the principles that apply. Mm. You know, I think that's really, really important. Not just like what we're here to do, but like How you how we can think about this best. No. And you can even have a debate about the principles.

28:58 And it's way better to have a debate about the principles than it is to have a debate about the tactics that are rooted in the fact that you have super misaligned principles. So if somebody's trying to make the decision, you know, with speed in mind. And another person is trying to make the decision with accuracy in mind. Mm. It is completely inevitable that they're about to have a cat fight.

29:20 In the meeting. And they it's not resolvable until they come back and revisit the fact that deeper down, we are approaching this in a completely different mentality with completely different objectives. Awesome. Okay. If you end up having these PDFs of ways to prime success for it, okay, okay, great. Okay. Uh other things that people can do. to work with folks better. I know you have some advice on how to influence more effectively.

29:44 I do have some advice around strategy and vision. So maybe We go into those two directions. Let's start with strategy and vision because I think it's nice to be better at strategy and vision before you start influencing people. So

29:58 What you'll what you'll encounter in life in your mind as ideas are swirling, whether you're generating those ideas or other people are. is your g your brain is gonna sort those ideas into Believed. Believable.

30:14 Kind of. Conceivable and inconceivable. And Y you can come yeah, you can come up with your own words for that, but that's kind of like a starting point, which is If somebody says something you've already experienced, it's something that is believed to your brain.

30:29 Right. So if if we said we should implement an OKR front framework. And you've Experienced it in a in a in a prior workplace or you've read all about Google Doing it.

30:39 Then you're gonna be like, Yeah, we should. It would clean up a lot of junk around here. And and okay, great. So it's a your brain's kind of already in in a yes. If it's believable, maybe you're reading Harvard Business Review and you're kind of reading about things that your business has never done that you've never done. But there's all this evidence. That it works and it makes sense to you mechanically. So you're kind of like, Okay, yeah, I find that believable. And now we're kind of leaning toward yes, or we're still in the yes bucket.

31:06 Now we get into kind of these like unbelievable Yet maybe conceivable. So these are the things that seem to be far fetched. And most of like w going back to

31:19 The Canva conversation The conversation with Uri Right, that you had Um Most of the things that are totally

31:28 Believed. By these leaders. are unbelievable. To most other leaders. Like we don't need managers. That's

31:37 I I don't believe it. So there's like now we've shifted the mind from inbuilt Kind of tailwind to inbuilt headwind. And this is why mine struggle with strategy and with vision.

31:50 Is that Every mind based on like personality we talked about earlier. that line of demarcation between like believed you know, we all have different li lived experience. So the more experience you have, the more believed you have. And then the believable and then the unbelievable

32:06 But yet conceivable. Like these lines shift a lot from person to person. So an idea that totally makes sense to Uri. He's probably been in a thousand meetings where other people are like that'll never work. Even though obviously science knows, for example, it totally will.

32:22 One of the great benefits of science in culinary school is Well let's not reinvent ideas that are already proven. So we already know that certain things activate people's purposeful state and the full brain that seeks comprehension, seeks deeper problem solving, seeks human connection. Those are known things. And the same thing as like the debate about the value of design sits in the strategy and vision. Like, how do we know there's an ROI to a better design here?

32:48 Well, if you could disprove that instead of proving it, because the last million people who asked this question proved it. If you could disprove it, you'd probably win a Nobel Prize. For being the first human to disprove something that is like ironclad. Like we're done. We're done with this debate. So

33:04 That I think is what we have to recognize in ourselves. Big part of self awareness is where our like unbelievable threshold begins. where our believable threshold ends. And then The inconceivable is like get out of my office level.

33:18 Stuff. And a lot of the vision Kinda Thinking and dialogue that happens inside of businesses. directly activates people's inconceivable response.

33:32 Without any self awareness. But that is a that's a personal problem. not a objective problem. And I think that's like it's a really, really important thing for companies and individuals to invest in themselves to kind of say, Do I have the capacity to recognize the situation?

33:50 that I find inconceivable, but that could be totally wrong. And then we can avoid the Months potentially of arguing. That sit between us and experimentation. So I think that's that's the that's the starting point for that. And

34:08 I if we were to kind of do paint by numbers on that, you know what dominoes do you want to knock down? Know your personality. What you're looking for in in the big five model, which we lean into, is openness. If you are low in openness. Your brain It essentially has abstract creative

34:26 Intellectual complex thinking wired. To the pain systems of the brain. Right. That's like how your wiring is. As soon as things get abstract. Not only are you like, ah, I don't like this, you have a much more visceral

34:39 Negative response. To these types of ideas. And you are now going into your pain cave. Right. While somebody else in the room

34:48 may have all that abstract creative exploratory thinking wired to their reward systems. So That's something to really know. And vulnerability is kind of the best approach to this,'cause if you think about your You know, the domino too, once you kinda know this stuff.

35:05 Then the question is how do we socialize this knowledge? You know, in a team. Let's say it's a C suite, a a leadership team, a founder and co founder and you know, the rest of the leadership team. And we work a lot with like Y C companies on this. Here.

35:18 'Cause it's super important. As they hire people. They every incremental hire is an increment of psychological diversity, and it changes everything about how these conversations go. So knowing this Okay, what are our options to socialize this knowledge? Vulnerability is the best option.

35:33 But you know, like Brene Brown will kind of cell vulnerability for its own sake. Not everybody buys. selling vulnerability for its own sake. 'Cause it's it's a

35:43 Scary thing. But it gets a little less scary when we consider how much scarier our alternatives are. Like I can pretend to hide this. That's my Other option. Or I cannot hide it.

35:55 B A Tasmanian devil. And then be unapologetic. So like those are your three options. And when you realize like I can be vulnerable, I can attempt to hide it, or I can be unapologetic, those other two options are ruinous.

36:10 Compared. To vulnerability. The thing you said about Mm.

36:14 openness and Not being good at Big vision brainstorming super resonates with me'cause that's exactly me. So I took I took your test. Uh what does it call it? What's the

36:26 What do you call this test, by the way? For identity test. Yeah. Okay, cool. And we'll link to it in the in the show notes. So I took it. It's basically the big five. Agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, openness and Uh, formerly known as neuroticism now called need for stability.

36:41 And I'm looking at it right here. And I'm actually and I knew this about myself. I'm pretty low on openness, which I don't like to see. But it very much aligns with exactly what you said. I'm not a great at big vision. Thinking at Super

36:55 Like Like when people propose say our des a designer in my team proposes this whole redesign big vision rethink of the way we've been like oh Uh my painting, like you said. And And that's exactly what this test reflect.

37:10 So I think it's a really powerful Uh Example of just Uh

37:15 I understanding this is the way your brain is gonna respond to things that are Say Totally out there, inconceivable or uh what'd you call it? Somewhat conceivable, but not necessarily believable. And that Being aware that that's how your brain works is really powerful. Being aware other people

37:32 have a very different experience with that. Is very powerful. And Your advice here is One This combination of

37:38 This habitat, create this habitat. Where you have kind of all All these versions of people's Ways of thinking where some people are in their happy cave when they're thinking big.

37:47 And then Along those lines your point about being very vul like vulnerably Sherry. Hey, this is me. I am

37:55 Low in openness. People Need to understand this on my team. And let's work together to not Use not let that

38:02 Interest. Is that right? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, because if you think about these ideas as pegs and holes, right, we're gonna take a creativity shaped peg and try to put it through a more pragmatic shaped hole. Th there's like a translation problem there.

38:17 And That's a It's a huge burden. Like if the team actually needs to be innovative. It's a huge burden. Just in terms of time spent on

38:27 That you know, translation. To translate the the visionary strategic ideas that

38:35 But are inconceivable. into ideas that feel believable. For those who kind of Need that. more grounded thing.

38:46 The most common Scenario here is ROI. Which is, you know, the the the classic question to ask about any idea. What's the ROI? Well if the idea is inherently

38:59 generating nth order effects instead of first order effects. Like What is the R O I of having fresh flowers in the lobby of a four seasons hotel. there there's two possibilities for the four seasons. They either

39:14 Have an answer to that question which satisfies The pragmatic shaped hole. Or They have said in their habitat.

39:23 We don't ask those types of questions because they're a huge waste of time. And if you're thinking about a competitive market. You know, like most of the people that you interview are in highly competitive markets. The team that spends less time. Translating

39:38 Satisfactory language. Before they move, which inevitably they will move. Whether in sometimes they'll move because the market forces them to, right? They spend so much time locked up in the ROI conversation or the justification, the translation conversation. That eventually customers start leaving, employees start leaving, and they're like Oh okay, it's becoming more believable now.

39:59 Well,'cause it's moved out of the realm of ideas into the physical world that we can see like right in front of us. And that team Because they got stuck in the translation phase instead of the experimentation phase. has a huge disadvantage in the market. And if you're competing head to head with one team Like this is what I loved about, you know, the Figma conversation.

40:19 That habitat inherently is built for speed. Пизні хабітат і цел. Words are tattooed. To your brain.

40:29 That are like we will not spend time in the translation phase. We're going to not spend much time. And we see this a lot kind of in the interplay between finance departments, product departments, and things like that. Where you know an an overpowered CFO can start asking questions for which there are no answers.

40:48 That kinda just we're dragging the team into a different language. There's much more literal than the more experiential language of the business. So Yeah, you can kinda see this play out all the time. But I think vulnerability is great because

41:01 If you If you are sitting in a meeting, you Lenny And you say, This is not my thing. Basically everything you're saying is inconceivable. Uh

41:10 Now I'm I'm being honest with you. Nobody's gonna s nobody's gonna hate you for being honest. They're actually gonna be glad. that you are honest about the the gap instead of glad that you are super certain that you are the right human to index off of. in the decision making process. you recommend being open about is this is my Uh

41:30 personality. Like this is my core identity almost. Like I don't know the language you'd use, but it's yeah it's not I think all this is inconceivable. It's I think all this is inconceivable because this is the way Absolutely. Yeah, unpack the detail. For sure. Yeah. I mean tell people This this takes my brain all this abstract and kind of creative, future centric thinking that's not rooted in the concrete.

41:50 Is where my brain goes. you know, alarms go off and I'm like I need something concrete. So if you can give me something concrete, I'm more comfortable. But I I At this point I have to

42:01 Maybe Move into a A lot of trust. And like Trust may be my alternative to com to like

42:08 Agreement. Right. Yeah. And there's also I imagine part of like what I always do is I uh recognize, hey, I'm not amazing at this. Let me push myself to Be more open to these things and

42:21 find partners that are really good at this and let them kind of drive Yeah, and it's great, you know, one of the things that's so cool about like the Y C teams that we work with is they're so sophisticated and so smart. So even though they might run into this roadblock, A, they're gonna do exactly what you just said and they're gonna push themselves. You may notice in your profile. The dot.

42:42 that you scored is surrounded by rings That represent how hard it is for you to push yourself. To think in different ways. To think beyond kind of the the home base way of your brain working.

42:55 Now at a certain point your brain breaks. And you move into Foreign territory. Uh and You know, there there's a level of I mean, if you are a very conservative person and somebody's like, let's go to Burning Man.

43:09 That will break your brain. Right. You don't go all the way to the other side of the spectrum. For the record, I've been four times even though I'm uh low. Apparently low in openness. Perfect. At least to go. Got Marity and Burning Man. Okay.

43:22 Yeah. By my low percentile. But you're pushing your brain, you know, and and I mean Burning Man's actually a great example because there are a bunch of different reasons you might go. And if you go for one reason, then you're exposed to the other reasons. And that may be interesting. And you may

43:37 kind of venture closer to those other reasons. You may be like, I'm gonna stay in my reason bubble within the greater context of this place. So like there's a whole bunch of It in you know, business is no different that you can kinda say, Okay, I'm gonna push myself Uh and I may get into

43:53 These kind of places that go beyond my brain's flexibility, like where the elastic band kind of reaches its limits. And then from there I'll trust people. Uh, and I'll have people, you know, uh what I was gonna mention about the Y C founders is so many of them are so smart that they're really able to efficiently

44:11 Translate what they see. Beyond where your band stretches. into the language you feel comfortable with. Mm. quickly.

44:19 Other teams do that really badly and they just like accuse you why can't you see this? And I and it's like Then you get even more stuck. How much shift have you seen in people say they take this test and they're like As I am twenty third percentile and openist. Do you see

44:33 People move. meaningfully across this after if they work on these sorts of things, or is this just like here's who you are? You're not gonna change significant. Personally, I'm more concerned with the effect on teams than on people because if you look at this through the l like I've been a four time founder.

44:49 And Now, if I look at this through like how is my company working? How are my teams working? Um, I don't need all the individuals to get to perfect. I I need Is especially in cases where there's like this translation issue where

45:03 A team is working on something and some Some part of that team is Is saying like let's stop here. And let's stay let's dwell here. If they can move enough.

45:15 that the team the effect on the team is now freed up. That's what we really feel as a business. And So the answer to answer your question directly. People can move a lot, especially through that.

45:28 those first three rings of that range that we depict. Like really, really well. Self awareness is actually kind of the the key. And self awareness and self consciousness. The difference here is that self awareness is simply being intentional with your brain.

45:42 Whereas self consciousness is being worried about your brain. We don't want people to be worried about their brains and like insecure. We just want you to say This is a situation in which my brain can work this way. And this is a situation where I want to push myself. And this is

45:56 So it's like being Intentional. And we we talked a little bit before this episode about kind of this instinct versus intellect. Duality in the mind. And essentially you're just using your intellect to either verify or improve your instinct. You're you're always gonna have instinctive responses about

46:11 risk and fear and uncertainty and doubt and need for for data And all these types of things, but then your intellect can come in and like Watch that part of your brain thinking. And say You're super worried about the risk of this.

46:26 But it's actually pretty low stakes for us to To jump in and try. So you're your need to stabilize that. Is a little misplaced. And your intellect it that that's really what you're doing is saying like

46:37 How much do people change? I don't really worry too much about how how much they change. It's more about how much they can spot with their intellect something that's misfit to the situation. And then take what they're motivated to do. And what they choose to do.

46:51 And separate them. Right. Like that's the It doesn't matter w if we change your motivations, if your choice of behavior And your underlying motivation can be different from each other, that's awesome. Those people are super, and we all know people like that, where you're like, I know this person is uncomfortable right now. But they're totally making it work and I really appreciate that.

47:12 Yeah. Part of the reason I ask is like I I was talking to you about this before we started recording. I want ninety ninth percentile at Albees. I just want to nail this. And I know that's not how it works. I know it's like you have pr b you have strengths, you have weaknesses, you have you can't be amazing and everything. That's funny where My mind goes there. Uh just to close the loop on

47:29 this advice around getting better at vision and strategy. Uh if I were to reflect back what I'm hearing, it's Uh be very self aware about what you are not strong at. Say openness.

47:41 Is that is that specifically the one to focus on if you're trying to figure out how to get the provision? And strategy. There's a whole bunch of stuff. Well, let me let me try to make the list simple. Openness is the biggest one Because it is essentially your tolerance of vision and strategy. And the lower that is, the lower you will tolerate.

48:00 The abstract pieces of the puzzle, for sure. uh the outlandish and kind of like purely creative and rules breaking components. No strategy and vision. Lack of precedents, those types of things. Now the other thing to look out for is as your conscientiousness rises.

48:16 Which is essentially your desire to be efficient, effective. Busy You know, not waste time. I'm high on that one. Yeah, structured and organized.

48:26 That is another contributor in the negative. Which is It's U objectively great to be conscientious person.

48:34 Like they're There are so many benefits until We have to waste time. Productively. And then or we have to break order in organization.

48:44 And then that strength that You know, four days a week or Twenty eight days a month is great for you. On those days where we go and have the off site and say, like, what if we blew it all up? Your to your example of like New design, new website, blow it all up, start over again, different direction.

49:01 That's where the conscientiousness is going to be. Like, why are we doing this? Why are we having this conversation? What's the need? This is inefficient. I could be spending my time doing something else. And Sometimes that'll express itself even in meetings of uh I was in a meeting one time after we were acquired. This is, you know.

49:17 eight or nine years ago now. And When you're a founder and you get acquired There's a new flavor of habitat. That you find yourself in.

49:26 With very new rituals. And one of the rituals that I find myself around a lot. was um The ritual of saying we can't talk about this for the rest of our lives. And we would be about six minutes into a meeting when somebody would drop the we can't talk about this for the rest of our lives line.

49:44 And I would look at my watch and be like, I didn't realize that you were terminal and you I mean I Why are you even in this meeting if you're about to die? Like because we are My take on this is we are super far away from the rest of our lives right now. Why are you saying that we can't talk about something for six minutes? When the diminishing return

50:05 Uh added information. in the priming of this meeting, you know, g to use that again. You knowing X Quadruples your decision quality.

50:16 And you are resisting knowing X. Now we're gonna hit a point where you knowing Why is he et cetera. We've hit a diminishing return and now I'm imp improving your decision quality by one percent. Instead of by four X.

50:30 But We haven't establish like any sensitivity in this room. to the diminishing return curve of of Incremental thought and incremental information.

50:41 And this is like a new habitat. I'm like, in this habitat, do people really hate thought? Do people really Consider themselves. To be like the The

50:51 You know, the police that watch the mean streets of intellectualism for any activity. It's like It's just kinda crazy. But yeah, that's that's kind of the practical side of this is you gotta watch out and you gotta be careful and and that's why I say habitat's such a big deal, because that's a perfect example of a well-intentioned room with mostly people that are, you know, there for the right reasons and the right outcomes.

51:14 But where this normalness of saying A phrase like that, or saying like I disagree. Same meeting, person goes, I completely disagree. I was like with

51:25 Everything? No, absolutely everything. And I go. So Let's look at the meta, you know, the overhead camera of this meeting. This was the initiation of Combat

51:36 Right. That's what the brain is seeing. All the brains in the room are like, oh Fight. Right. So And now what are our objectives? My objective now Becomes

51:46 Wim. Their objective because they've taken a huge risk. of saying I disagree with everything becomes win. And because they are disagreeing with a lot of stuff that they don't understand.

51:58 The inevitability is they're about to be annihilated. in this room where they have both said we can't talk about this forever and now put all of their chips onto the table. To say I completely disagree. Instead of I have a question or can we pull that thread or I don't see how these dots connect.

52:15 So that's that on a super tactical level. There's things we say That activate the amygdala. The combat. Mode of the brain. Versus a

52:24 Different choice of phrase. Which is gonna activate the prefrontal cortex, which is like, Hey Lenny, tell You're connecting these two dots. I'm not seeing how they're connected. Logic. Like now let's activate the prefrontal cortex with this sentence instead of Lenny. That's dumb. I completely disagree.

52:40 Let's activate the amygdala instead. I wanna talk about this habitat point you're making, which I think is really important. But just to close the loop on the strategy vision piece, so just to Just to give people some advice. Very tactical advice is

52:52 Uh Basically understand your personality. Maybe take this core identity test or something like that. Uh Understand if you're low in openness and high in conscientiousness, maybe you're not amazing at vision. And it's gonna be hard for you to think big and

53:06 Yeah, your brain is just gonna like feel agitated when you're around vision. Um, but I mean you can still do it, right? You can still ask people to translate The the key tactic is okay, it's not this You're predestined to suck.

53:20 It's more If you're low in openness, especially if you're also high In conscientiousness. Then recognize your native language for ideas. is a mismatch for the native language of vision.

53:32 And really, really good strategy. And then you can be open about that and be like you can ask for some translations and you can ask for Like I mean trust doesn't have to be non participation. You can actually say like It would help me trust. If you could explain this gap.

53:48 Like a s a great example would be a second order effect. Like why should we have awesome documentation? How do how are we gonna make more money if we have awesome documentation? Ah, great question. Don't be hostile in the way you asked it. But like Just help me understand where what thread are we pulling? Well, we're pulling this thread of customer satisfaction, retention, recommendation, et cetera.

54:07 That You know, Stripe is really good at this, right, especially from the early days. That The great documentation justifies all sorts of second order effects. that then will lead us to this first order effect you're c you're asking about.

54:20 Awesome. Okay. That's really great. And I was gonna go one direction, but I wanna Talk about this real quick. comes up a lot on this podcast is uh the s the power of leaning into strengths and not feeling like you have to be amazing at everything.

54:33 And uh In this example, say I have a low openness, high conscientiousness. I can still be very successful in the role. By in my opinion, leading into things I'm actually really strong at, say

54:45 Conscientiousness. And uh I'm also high in agreeableness. I don't like the sound of that. Um Thoughts on just like It's okay if you're not amazing at vision because your openness is low.

54:57 but you can be better at other stuff and together you end up you can be really successful no matter how your Personality. Absolutely right. Yeah. I mean The the truth is we look at I mean, taking that Canva example of coaches and managers.

55:12 Not only does that change the way an employee feels about the way this connection they have is invested in them. But it also changes inherently a lot of the meeting dynamics and teaming dynamics from like okay hierarchical feeling things, manager. To more Mesh based.

55:29 In intellect, right. And within the mesh You don't have to worry too much about the hierarchy anymore. You can kinda say like This is the nature of my contribution.

55:39 So even in the vision and strategy piece. Maybe your contributions to idea idea generation There g there gonna be some. And they're probably gonna be good. But

55:50 Those those are not ideas to protect in the state that you brought them to the table. Their ideas to set on the table so that people can surround them and improve them. And then as other people contribute ideas that aren't as natural to you. Kinda just realized we're not in the phase yet of judging and ranking and prioritize prioritizing these ideas. That's not where we are in the overall storyline.

56:10 So let it happen. And then if you can Improve those ideas, improve them. And once ideas kind of have that early stage That kind of like what Johnny I've described. uh as like the infancy of an idea when it's really weak and delicate and susceptible.

56:26 If you can nurture that idea to kind of adolescence where it has a little bit of ability to defend itself. Then yeah, now you're in a situation where your conscientiousness can start to think about things like How would we resource this? What sequencing makes the most sense? What is the ROI of these things relative to each other? And consider the second and third order effects and so on.

56:46 And what would the project plans? And to your point of being both conscientious and agreeable. You are this master. Of coordination. In alignment.

56:55 Naturally. So like when that phase of the project begins and we have to get people bought in High functioning together. You know, getting on the same page. Staying on on

57:06 І на стей фокус. Getting the project done. Like All of the people that were good at the beginning with all the vision and strategy, they are just a complete disaster in that face. So Like that's

57:18 That's just how things really work in the real world. And I think we're so Again, focused. Like we talked about at the kind of at the beginning, we alluded to the fact like there's you have to unpack enough complexity. I love the Einstein quote. Make things as simple as possible, but no simpler. And we've made things way simpler than possible in business.

57:37 By saying like This is the right way of doing the whole thing. It's like no no no the whole If you've ever lived a day in real life building a real product, the dynamics shift. A lot throughout the course.

57:49 of you know product life cycle as an example, or really any life cycle as an example. And the peak humans as the dynamics shift. Are very different. peak humans. Lenny is awesome here.

58:01 Contributes here, ten percent, contributes here ninety eight percent. Evan contributes ninety eight percent here. Please get Evan out of the room when it comes to These meetings. Like that's

58:11 That's great. And yes, we should lean into our strengths. But not so much that we don't know our weaknesses. Because Another human strength on your team

58:23 Is the patch. For the bug of your weakness. And we run buggy software in companies and we we say, Oh, I I'm leaning into my strengths. I don't need to worry about my weaknesses. Well, then you become the person who needs everything translated into your language because When your weakness flares its head up, it slows everybody else down.

58:41 So it's really just from an operations business fluidity perspective. A team that is highly unaware of its weaknesses. is going to have a lot. of slowness and a lot of problems as a result of that. They don't have to fix all their weaknesses. But be aware of them and know who is a patch to your weakness.

58:58 Evan, this is so interesting. I love that they were digging deep on this. Is there one tactical thing you Could recommend for someone to become a Better at openness. In

59:07 say a brainstorming experience when they're doing a vision. Or when they're low at this, say me. I think the best exercise for a p conscientious person, especially to feel more open is to become obsessed with reverse engineering. And it's to say it

59:23 There's two forms of reverse engineering that I think are really helpful here. Number one, it would be reverse engineering against a d uh desired outcome. to truly understand the inputs that generate that outcome. And if we think about that at a big level, like okay, we want to win a market. What Are the real inputs.

59:42 To deconstruct that outcome. And understand what our strategy should look like. To attack all of the most relevant inputs. that generate that outcome. I think that's um

59:53 That's the specific form. And then at a super tactical level Like if you want to give feedback to somebody. And let's say, you know, like for me, I'm l low in politeness. You're probably much higher in politeness than I am. And I struggled for years with feedback. to generate the intended outcome.

1:00:09 Like I deliver the feedback. But they The delivery wasn't The intended outcome.

1:00:15 And the way that I delivered it. actually reduced the probability of the intended outcome because I was being Too impolite. Too direct in many cases. Too harsh. And what does harshness do to the brain? Well, that's crystal clear.

1:00:29 So what I was doing and what science knows were very different things. And that's why I failed in those cases. But as soon as I started closing the gap. And realize I need to Try harder.

1:00:40 the story arc of this feedback. I I can that become clearest to me how to do it when I have the intended outcome in mind for the feedback. Like I really would like this person to start turning the corner on this particular way of thinking. Like if you and I work together and it was about openness. Be like, what are some things that I could do right now?

1:00:59 To increment and set the stage for a big shift in openness. as time goes on, that you are bought into. And that's a very If I'm impolite and be like, Lenny, what's your problem? Why can't you do this? Everybody else can do this.

1:01:12 Your willingness to to start turning that corner. I mean, it may be there because the safety system is active like, Oh, bad things can happen. If I don't do this, but like I don't want your safety system to motivate this change. mean in most cases that's an optics based change instead of a material change that will occur. That's why a lot of people they're like

1:01:31 Accountability's a great example. Asking for accountability is the best way to not get it. Because ac asking for accountability activates people's safety systems. Or especially saying. I'm gonna hold people accountable.

1:01:42 Then everybody's like, Oh, great. We should set up a whole movie set of facade houses that pretend everything's great. With no substance behind them. And that's why so many companies end up that way. So

1:01:55 But yeah, I would say That's kind of the tactical. The second thing to understand about openness and reverse engineering Is just situational awareness. Very few conscientious people. Spend

1:02:06 in my opinion as a very open person enough time immersing themselves in the reality that is every day situational awareness ne necessary to do their job. Simp simplest example of this is How many executives have ever talked to

1:02:23 N greater than five customers. You know, like That is a'cause well, I'm busy. I got a lot of stuff to do. I can't I don't have time to go to take a world tour, which is a lot like we don't have the time the rest of our lives to talk about this. I'm not asking you to take a world tour. I'm asking you to stuff into your brain enough situational awareness that the decisions you make every day that affect all those people you're not talking to.

1:02:46 Are considering those people that you're not talking to. So It less about an intended specific outcome in this case. And more about do I really know The

1:02:57 you know, that I would kinda think about this as like if we think could think about like uh Aeronautical engineering. Like, do I actually have a an understanding of the conditions, the flight conditions? That I'm in. Every day.

1:03:10 In order to fly. Really well. And the answer to that for a lot of people is no. So reverse engineering is like probably the whole category. I don't know if that makes enough tactical sense. I'm happy to to to Be more descriptive, but like

1:03:23 That's the category, I think, is like have you reverse engineered how to get outcomes and have you reverse engineered To predispose your mind to come up with really good ideas. and good decisions as opposed to come up with decisions that are super disconnected from reality. Great example being like PLG. I mean

1:03:41 If you haven't done enough situational awareness work. You have no idea if PLG is a remotely viable strategy. For growing your business. If it's remotely relevant strategy for growing your business. And company after company after company has leadership team obsessed With this concept.

1:03:58 that in principle we should be able to let people just sign up and swipe a credit card and onboard and great. No, we have a hyper technical solution. Like that is never going to happen. Or it's like that's not the way they Do budget or like there could be any number of ways that That's You know, not gonna work out. And that's those are just some concrete examples.

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1:05:35 Feels like there's a fractal of stuff we could talk about in this endless th m threads of things that I wanna dig into. Let me shift a little bit to influence. We mentioned this a little bit earlier. I know you have a bunch of awesome advice on how to build your skill at becoming more influential. Does something

1:05:55 A lot of listeners of the podcast are product managers. Also founders need the skill. Who doesn't need to become better influenced? What can we learn about how to become better? Influencers. We'll probably unpack uh a second topic. And open up a side, you know, an off ramp here right at the beginning.

1:06:11 But there's two things. There there's influence itself, and then there's relationships. We should probably talk a little bit about relationships. Trying to exert influence. Through a dysfunctional Relationship. Is

1:06:24 Not gonna go great. And most human beings, especially when they go to work. Are pretty Uh Pretty out of

1:06:34 out of sorts when it comes to relationships. And you even hear crazy mantra like we don't have to like each other to work together. Which are like, good luck with that. I mean Just watch a text message. Pop up on a phone.

1:06:47 Of a person who doesn't like you? And watch their response time. To the text message. Or there's Slack message or whatever. I mean you're talking about

1:06:56 You've built in a multi day At least multi hour delay. into responsiveness sure sh purely because the relationship isn't good. And then you compound that effect over the over the whatever size your company is. That's you know, that's

1:07:11 Massive operational inefficiency. Just because I don't want to respond to Evan right now. Right. Like that's So that's that's a one piece. No. Assuming the relationship is in place and we'll come back to that and talk about that'cause that's a whole very actionable framework to unpack.

1:07:27 Assuming the relationship is good. I think the the starting point for influence is to choose your character and choose your mode. almost like you're playing like Elden Ring or some, you know, video game. And you're gonna be like, Am I gonna Influence in this way.

1:07:41 As like the hero Or the you know, the kind of like the the exemplar of these things. Or am I gonna influence through back channels or am I like what is my character? And everybody's for for your personality kind of has a natural fit for like the character you're gonna select.

1:07:57 as this mode of influence. And then you're gonna pick a speed of influence, which is slow, moderate, or fast. And The habitat can help a lot with this. It's is like if you're if a founder is listening to this. And you haven't created habitat where fast

1:08:13 Influence. Is easy. And ha like the permission isn't there. Then You're slowing the company down inadvertently by just not kinda

1:08:22 Clarifying this with the team. So slow influence is kind of the we'll let them find out the hard way influence. Like they're going Up a cliff.

1:08:33 We know they're going off a cliff. We and a lot of times we find ourselves in what's called the Abilene paradox. And the Abilene paradox is where everybody in the room knows it's a bad idea. But we're all like, We're in. You know.

1:08:45 And the classic Abilene paradox kind of if you look up memes on Google. It'll be like The dad thinks that the kids might want to go camping. Mom doesn't want to go camping. The kids don't want to go camping. Dad also doesn't really want to go camping.

1:09:00 But everybody's like, Dad probably wants us to go camping, so let's give it a go. And like they all go and don't enjoy it. So that's and we see that play out, you know. All the time. And a lot of people will just kinda say I can't do anything. I don't have any influence in this case.

1:09:15 We're just gonna let'em fail and they'll learn. Or this impolite person like me giving feedback the wrong way years in the past, like W you know I'm not gonna sit heaven down and talk to him about this. He'll figure out on his own through failure. That

1:09:29 This doesn't work. And That can take months, that can take years, that can take a lifetime. For people to learn the slow way. And it is a form of influence, right? Like you're you are being intentional to say

1:09:39 I think the world will create s enough failure. That adaptation will occur. That is a form of influence. Just the slowest one. And a lot of people listening probably realize, Oh, that's what I'm doing.

1:09:51 How can I go way faster than just letting things fail? So that's where moderate influence comes in. And A great book to read for uh moderate influence is The Challenger Sale. And in the challenger sale, what we're looking at is The concept of teaching

1:10:07 People something. And then when they live with this n new knowledge They'll see things that they weren't seeing before. So for example the in the feedback example that we can kinda keep using over and over again through this is

1:10:21 Hey, Evan, you might you might want to notice people's body language. While you're saying these things. And here's some signs to look out for that when you've done this and you get this, that's probably a sign that people are bought in and still with you. And when you see this, that's probably a sign that people Are pushing back and you can ask this question.

1:10:39 in that moment and you'll probably hear answers like this. So you're like Giving somebody a tool that their future is gonna Unpack. And the challenger sale kind of assumes a long enough sales cycle.

1:10:52 Where You're not gonna s land the sale in the meeting. You're not trying to close them right there. You teach him some stuff. And you'll say, Hey, if you see this stuff. That's a pretty clean that you need to take action.

1:11:03 So why don't we call you in thirty days? And and And thirty days later we get on foot Hey, have you been seeing this? And they'll go Everywhere I look. I can't not see it.

1:11:12 Yeah. And that's how you influence a person in A few days, a few weeks. Maybe a few months at worst. Way faster than letting them fail.

1:11:22 We actually had I don't know if you know this, mm, we had the author of that book uh on the podcast, Matt Dixon, I think his name. Yeah. And yeah, and the challenger sale, the idea there's like challenge their perspective and view on what is actually real about the market and what they need. Exactly. Yeah.

1:11:38 And I think it's it's and I think yes, there's the challenge component to it, but I think the under appreciated piece of that methodology. Is that You're still letting that person see the world. But you've given them new information. That

1:11:54 is breaking Some calcification in their brain. It's not the challenge. It's not the moment of the challenge where all the magic happens. Like there's moments that occur later. They continue kind of putting that You know

1:12:07 Calcium lime and rust melting formula on this. on this expectation or this kind of decision in their mind. To the point where sometimes they'll turn around and be like, Thank you for even telling me this. So the advice here is

1:12:21 Uh if you're trying to influence someone. Try to figure out what they don't know. Like find information that you know that they may not know because once they know that They may be like, Oh wow, I totally see what you're saying. Yeah, exactly right. And and let them know it and let them live with it. Don't don't cram it down their throat.

1:12:39 And make them accept it. If with they live with it just a little bit, even just a couple of days, that might be enough to come back to a much softer conversation. Does this connect to what you said earlier, which I love, this idea of pick a character, like how your influence like pick your influence style based on your personality, whether it's back channeling And that makes me think of a s very specific person who's like

1:13:00 He's coming on the podcast actually. He's like This Jedi that just gets People aligned. But very behind the scenes, very like The meetings before the meetings.

1:13:10 Uh so that's one character or it's just like uh telling a compelling story probably in a deck. Or uh Or there's other character I guess, yeah. Is that is does this idea of uh sharing information. Is that like a type of character or is that just something that like everyone should just do'cause that's a really effective strategy.

1:13:27 I like the idea of intentionality in just about everything. Like are we are we letting trade wins push us into certain things or are we actually making choices? And I think that step of being intentional about your style and this kind of notion of a character. Uh is a is a wise step to take. So that

1:13:44 You can kinda have some guardrails as you go through this and some consistency, right? It helps other people understand. the role you're playing in influence if you are consistently kind of coming from the same place. you're articulate about that style, like I want to try to influence this organization by doing this this way. And you're gonna see that from me. Over and over and over again.

1:14:06 You've asked y you kind of had given yourself a little permission. And And also you can get some buy in from people if you do want to be more the barbarian or you know, kind of Approach you can say. Hey, I'm the devil's advocate approach, or I'm the break it and see if it still stands after I hit it really hard with a sledgehammer kind of guy.

1:14:24 Is it okay if I do that over and over and over again? And now you've bought future you the permission to approach things in certain ways that Well yeah. meaningfully different influence outcomes, right? Like meaningfully different, like

1:14:37 I was able to do this and it accelerated something. So what I the way I I am hearing this is Uh there are many ways to get what you want. Think about your personality style and Find the path that is most aligned with the way you

1:14:51 operate exactly. Whether it's behind the scenes, whether it's a compelling story. Awesome. So so this character is basically Figure out what your This kind of comes back to leverage your strengths.

1:15:02 What are you good at and use that channel. to convince people of the thing you want. Them to be convinced that. Yep, absolutely. Are there uh I imagine like uh my mind goes to what are the list of thing of ways what are the character options?

1:15:15 Uh in this list when I'm opening up the game and choosing is there any you went through a few but just To give people like Oh, okay, I see I could try it this way. They're like a small list you could share of just like here's ways you could try approaching influence. probably the dimensions are most valuable to people. I

1:15:31 I would say one of the dimensions is compassion. Which is Do I want to influence by trying to help people? By trying to make sure that people Do we get it right and that people

1:15:43 Get value. And then that the permission I'm seeking there is can I ask questions about Why Why are we not thinking about the user right now? You know, why

1:15:53 Why are we not concerned with the value they're gett they're getting? And challenge us in that way. I think there are characters based on Logic.

1:16:03 And and even belief, which is I would like to be the one to kind of insert more knowledge. And insert more kind of causality into conversations and challenge causality. In conversations to make us think harder. and and challenge what we believe and like break up

1:16:20 The sacred cows of the stuff we walked in the meeting with So that we feel differently about things walking out of meetings. I think there's a a bunch of different uh very useful dimensions. One could be very creativity based.

1:16:33 If you follow this big five format, they they're kind of spelled out for you. Um Enthusiasm. Interesting to mention. Like I wanna

1:16:42 Challenge us on the Through the lens of what do people get excited about? What do what does pe what makes people feel good? Does this make people feel good? And Are there tweaks we could make to the product or this marketing campaign or whatever? I mean, look at what Seeky just did with runway.

1:16:56 I mean Like I love that guy so much. And There's so many

1:17:03 components of his character and uh obviously the characters he surrounded himself with. that contribute to really next level Stuff. Right. And they're definitely challenging each other.

1:17:14 using these dimensions of like Compassion to be the you know, the the character of caregiver Or the character of like protector. Right.

1:17:23 And so there's a bunch of different kind of ways you could turn those dimensions into characters but I think When you see the value of each of those perspectives, especially in product, I'm a really big fan of product if you have Dysfunctionally high compassion. Dysfunctionally high openness.

1:17:39 You you have internal rewards and and motivations to explore Regions of product that other minds aren't Exploring as intuitively. And

1:17:51 You don't have to have the whole deck. You know, to to be amazing at product. But you have some unfair advantages if you are super prone to reverse engineering just by your nature. You have you're gonna be more situationally aware and probably make a series of vastly better decisions than the team

1:18:10 that has l l a lot less situational awareness than you do. It's a huge advantage. So but but when it comes to To the concept of influence, yeah, I mean Figuring out these dimensions that define who you are.

1:18:23 And then using them to kind of say, I want the permission to ask a series of questions and challenge our thinking. Through this very intuitive strength that I have. I Can we all see the value in that, or do I need to further

1:18:37 You know Sell myself. Right. And then you and then you'll find like you can take on that character and and play that role really well. I imagine the ultimate unlock is that combined with what is that person's personality style and what is the best way they receive information.

1:18:52 Which is a little harder'cause you can't force them to take some tests and you can't like tell'em. Make them Give you the results. But I know a lot of teams do these tests. uh together as a team and share the results.

1:19:02 And so it's I guess a reminder of just that's really powerful if you and your team Especially the execs at a company. Yeah, exactly. And and when you move into the this vulnerability out of their three choices state. We don't need a bunch of data.

1:19:17 For that to work really well. You know, if you said, Hey, I'm not super strong at this And The rest of the room was like Well Wait. This other person's super awesome at this.

1:19:27 Why don't the two of you work together? Then it's like Under thirty seconds, we've unlocked potential that wasn't there. Yeah. So that's We you want to get business, I kinda think of in the extending the video game metaphor, not only are we choosing our characters or we are a certain character

1:19:42 But the business has a difficulty setting that we chose. Based on the habitat. And I've worked in In and with way too many companies. Where we are playing the game in nightmare mode.

1:19:53 And every enemy takes a thousand shotgun shells to bring down. Instead of just switching the difficulty setting to easy. Which is like the enemies somehow become our friends as we go through this journey. It really can be that transformative. Especially with a case like yours that you talked about.

1:20:12 Okay, I I am not as high in openness. I'm very high in conscientiousness. If I Can admit this Ask different types of questions, everybody else in the room will be like the difficulty setting of this just went to like Zero.

1:20:27 the speed of it just went to way higher than it used to be. And it's we underestimate This Kind of less Concrete part of the business world.

1:20:38 And that's I mean, that's the genesis of this whole business that I was crazy enough to start after starting other companies in the past, which is like We are underestimating how much of our operational reality is a function of our human reality.

1:20:53 And we're are we doing enough? Are we doing the right things to close the gap between what science knows and what business does. And Do we even know what the science is? Have we educated ourselves to close the gap and then Then it becomes super obvious. Oh This makes a lot of sense to be

1:21:08 Open and find the patch to my bug. And Here we go. This fractal of topics uh continues to grow. I'm trying to contain it. Please.

1:21:18 Three things I wanna try to talk about in the rest of our chat that stuff we've touched on. that I think will be really useful to people. One is uh relationships. You mentioned there's more to talk about there, just how to build great relationships. Two is uh I wanna come back to the habitat and building a habitat that is very conducive to innovation and speed and success and Those sorts of things. And then I want to talk about focus.

1:21:38 We talked a bit about just like how important focus is and how differently our brains operate in different states of focus. So maybe we start with the relationship piece just'cause that connects to what we were just talking about of How do we strengthen relationships, create better relationships within our teams.

1:21:52 Yeah, so we we were talking about relationships kind of as this off ramp or this kind of sidecar to influence and we real quickly, this the fast mode of influence in relationships goes really well together. So we talked about the slow and the moderate. The fast mode of influence is cognitive dissonance. It's essentially saying

1:22:10 In the moment. I'm not gonna wait for you to to experience anything. It's saying in the moment. How does this formula compute? Explain to me, Evan. How you being too blunt in feedback.

1:22:23 is going to end up Mm A human being changing. Why do you believe that? And especially it's that second phrase of why do you believe that? Like drill

1:22:32 Below the behavior down into the bleep. What do you believe? That has you doing this. And then we can explore how preposterous the belief itself is. Which then

1:22:43 Bubbles up. to the surface level of Yes. And if you in the environment the habitat's a huge comp component of this as our relationships, which is

1:22:52 If you have great relationships Where people trust each other enough to have this kind of cognitive dissonance conversation. And we have a habitat that is very clear that we are free to discuss cognitive dissonance and logical disconnects. Like that is really important to do.

1:23:09 Then you activate fast influence mode. Basically. So that's a really important thing. And then as you transition relationships, well, what are I the question that w everybody kinda glosses over in my opinion is

1:23:22 What is a relationship? I mean I don't know how you feel about answering that question, but It's a really hard Yeah, I'm just gonna I I would just go to Chat GPT. What is a relationship exactly right. Yeah. Yeah, at this point we have we have some some help that we didn't used to have.

1:23:39 But uh The The other thing that goes along with what is a relationship is like how good is my relationship with person X? Like you and I both know Shreyus. And like

1:23:50 How good is our relationship? I would say it's awesome. Why is it awesome? I don't know. It just feels great. So Let's double click on on a good definition and a good framework. Because once you actually know why a relationship feels great, like

1:24:05 That example. Or why a relationship feels super difficult. Now we can start to build some strategies, some like actual action plans for them. So what we propose to people is if you take that third component of your brain ability.

1:24:19 That is one piece of your relationships, especially your professional relationships. So if you No an engineer. And you have an idea of something you want to build and they have the ability to build it. their ability and their utility to you.

1:24:35 is a function of your relationship and it will contribute to the positive or negative force that you feel in that relationship, like wow, this person has a lot of ability. My appreciation is higher. My faith in them is higher, my cooperation with them is higher.

1:24:50 Do you question a person's ability or they've proven that about that ability's kind of unreliable. those things start to kind of vector downwards. And you know, we'll pick on Shreyus through this as a good example,'cause I think most of the people watching also know him. What is his ability? What is his utility?

1:25:06 As high as I've ever seen. I mean it it's Every conversation He's intellectually, conceptually additive to. Like you're better

1:25:15 You're better after you've talked to him. Every time. At least that's been my experience with him. And we all know people like that. That You know, with various fields and various abilities. So that's uh one piece that's really important. And why as an individual it's so important to invest in your ability.

1:25:30 Because it is so integral to every relationship you have. Particularly professional relationships. And your ability knowledge, your reasoning.

1:25:41 Your your imagination Your skill set. These are all incrementable facets of you. So if you it it's in and that's really, really key. Now here's

1:25:52 The plot twist. Your ability is actually not the most important part. of relationship. Biologically speaking. There's two more that matter.

1:26:02 Quite a bit more. And the surprise ending is the the third one matters the most, which is I scary in some case but so The second

1:26:11 factor of relationships is trust. So Trust in the brain, if we go like very primitive. Back to the amygdala that we talked about earlier. Trust is simply risk.

1:26:23 Human level risk. And Trust can span from strongly negative to strongly positive in a relationship. And we felt that full range with different people in our lives. Strongly negative trust is the brain saying this person is dangerous to me. They are very likely to try to undermine me.

1:26:40 They're very likely to not deliver something. They're very I Personal harm will occur. Bye. Essentially

1:26:48 kind of interacting in this relationship. And then on the other side of trust. I we kinda try to create some levels to this to keep it clean. And you know, I the fractal continues to grow a little bit, but we'll We'll try to keep this simple. But I I like to think of like trust one, two, and three.

1:27:05 Three distinct levels of trust. And trust one. Is let's say we're having a cookout. Uh trust one is Lenny, could you please bring the chips? Ideally sealed. Like

1:27:18 But it's a it's a delegation. Of a a simple non critical task. Knowing that it is likely to get done and get done decently well. Um but I don't It's not a it's not like a huge level of trust. It's it's the people that we work with.

1:27:32 Where this type of delegation in Uh Especially if people delegate under the thesis of I want to do the high value work, so let me put the low value work on other people. That's all the low value work that we put on other people. And it allows us to purify our focus on the high value work.

1:27:48 And we don't need all the low value work to go beautifully well or be artistically brilliant. So trust two is when we step up to almost like I need to do this myself. Is there anybody who could do it as well as me? That

1:28:01 There's no risk to me having them do it. Instead of me doing it. And that's where you get true scalability. Of teams. So if you can

1:28:11 If you can trust people enough, there's the ri your brain's assessment of risk of giving this task to someone else, or giving this knowledge even to somebody else. That they'll treat it the way you would treat it. It a significantly higher positive. Trust that you can feel in a relationship. And then finally trust three.

1:28:28 is when we do hit these breakpoints in our brain. Where we say. The way your mind works is beyond the way my mind works on this topic. So the the classic example of the cookout would be If Wolfgang Puck was a neighbor.

1:28:42 Right. We're gonna have Wolfgang Puck. Do all the most critical stuff. And maybe even set up. You know, the music and the

1:28:50 decor and whatever. Or another example. would be like when Steven Spielberg has has John Williams score a film. He's not hoping John will do it as well as Steven would do it. He's saying

1:29:02 Just send me the bill. Try not to go too crazy. Right. But he's not gonna sit down with the invoice and be like, Why did you need thirteen horns instead of eleven? Like John just gets to do what John does because there's so much trust.

1:29:16 In this kind of like Beyond my event horizon. kind of risk. Like it would be riskier for me to do it than for him to do it or her to do it. Right. So that's kind of the The uh The level. But that that matters.

1:29:30 More to a human being. Because the safety system If it activates Your utility is sunk. So if you're s you're if you're an awesome engineer

1:29:41 But you damage people. It doesn't matter that you're an awesome engineer. Because in the social network the mesh. of your organization. You are a node.

1:29:52 That has like a protective Covering around it. Information is not flowing to you the way it would normally. And delegation is not flowing to you. And access is not flowing to you the way it would normally.

1:30:03 So you are a kind of a protected, deactivated, sequestered node of the mesh at this point. In time. And a lot of people Really don't get that. Yeah.

1:30:12 That's that's a really a good way of measure uh visualizing. Yeah, so and then the here's the surprise ending. The last piece of your ev of every relationship that you have is appeal. Appeal is how your brain interprets the shariences you have with other people. whether or not you look forward to being around that person, whether or not you like their style.

1:30:34 The feel shariences really are. And if you think about Let's pick on Strayus one last time.

1:30:43 What is his Ability and utility. Off the charts. To what extent can he be trusted? Trust three.

1:30:51 off the charts. Will he ever damage somebody? Not I mean not to my knowledge. He may have some Really dark past that we all know about, but as far as I've seen. Not a lot of damage in his wake. And then thirdly, what kind of experience is he?

1:31:05 He's an extraordinarily positive experience. So he naturally accumulates great relationship after great relationship after great relationship. And again, if you're that great engineer. With a ton of ability.

1:31:19 Now let's flip one flip the middle dimension. And we trust you a lot. But you're a hor horrible experience. Are you coming to our off site? Are you in this meeting?

1:31:31 No. You're gone. 'Cause we don't want you there. You're like A hurricane. So so

1:31:38 Biologically speaking, the the biggest bug in our programming as we transfer this to the business context. is what makes the most sense in business is The most You know, if it's a meritocracy, the the best people with the best knowledge that we can trust should be in the room. And we will fight it with every fiber of our being.

1:31:57 If they're a terrible experience. Okay. And that's that's a bummer. And what's funny is you can flip it'cause we all either have friends or know people who have friends that You cannot trust.

1:32:08 They have no ability. The to speak of. But they're a super awesome experience. What a great friend. Like

1:32:16 So how is it that we get this thing? Completely flipped. Mm-hmm. And I think that's the thing is if as you parse that list. Your cell as as you know, anybody listening parses that list. It's critical to ask what kind of experience am I?

1:32:29 That is where to start. Not how good am I at my job, how much do I know, how critical am I to this process. But am I a miserable experience? And if the answer is yes Don't worry too much about the other pieces yet.

1:32:45 You gotta fix that first. And to this point of the profile, like as you parse the profile, you'll find things like obviously not a pleasant experience, like being really impolite. Obviously not a pleasant experience. being super overbearing and assertive. Obviously not a pleasant experience. Being hyper low in openness and and acting out of that and like

1:33:04 Telling everybody they're overcomplicating everything all the time. Not a great experience for people who are actually well intentioned trying to get it right. So there's concrete things that you can do with this knowledge in mind. This last piece makes me think about why some of the most effective PMs are The PMs that bring a lot of energy and positivity to the team and just get people excited.

1:33:25 Which is such a soft skill, but such a powerful thing you can do for your team,'cause people kind of look to you to to to lead them. And if you come at it with like like I had a I had a PM I was working with and every meeting's like This is gonna be awesome. He just like comes right in every meeting. Uh who's ready to Make some decisions.

1:33:42 And it really changes everything. And so So this is amazing advice. So basically if you want better relationships which will make you a better influence. Or

1:33:52 Start with What kind of experience am I when people Work with me, ask me s for stuff. Uh Ask me questions.

1:34:00 Uh and you shared a bunch of specific things you can do. Like something I always tell people is just try to smile. Just Like just look happy. You know, that makes a big difference. Bring energy, look happy, look ex just try to be excited. Yeah. Uh so think about the so if you want to build better relationships which have all these amazing trickle down effects.

1:34:19 Your advice is think about the experience you are to other people when they work with you. Uh Work on trust. And I and ideally get to the place that third level of you are doing it better than them, but that's that's that's a high bar for old things. And then

1:34:33 The last thing is like are you actually amazing? Like is your abil like work in your abilities. That's kind of the last piece. Yeah, exactly. And it's not that none of these become unimportant because the other ones are kind of the gateways. It's I mean Your relationships require all three. Especially your professional relationships. So yeah, it exp it's it's it's more just like it's

1:34:53 If experience is the only thing undermining you when you're otherwise very trustworthy and very skilled and able. That's a shame. Just fix it. And

1:35:04 There's a whole bunch of ways to to go about that, but I like to leave that to people like to explore that creatively. Like, well, oh gosh, okay, I can change this to this, this to this, this to this. On the trust thing. Do you hurt people? I mean that's that's it. Like

1:35:19 Do people have a reason to believe that you are risky or dangerous? And It's it unfortunately in a lot of habitats The habitat itself. Either allows or even rewards

1:35:32 People that are super untrustworthy. Two kinda play the system and advance through the system and as you talk to Jeffrey, right about the power conversation. Like

1:35:43 The worse the habitat, the more his suggestions work. Mm-hmm. Right. And the reason that he's correct, like he's he used the phrase this is How the world always has been, it's how it is, and it's how it how it always will be, right?

1:35:57 Well It's how the Normal, dysfunctional world. Always has been, is, and will be. And if you want people in your organization to rise on merit and for

1:36:08 Influence to work to a to generate better decision making, make better products, have a better company, move Move faster, et cetera. You need to create a habitat where What Jeffrey's observed about the normal dysfunctional world largely doesn't work within your habitat.

1:36:26 So if it if it's effective for people to harm each other In your habitat? You are performing at a much lower level than if harming each other Was extremely ineffective. Right. And that's up to you as a leader, as a manager.

1:36:41 Et cetera. And then of course skill is what it is. Like it's your ability to convert your intents into outcomes. I'm glad you're talking about habitat. That's exactly where I wanted to go. So just two more things I wanna spend our time on. Uh habitat and focus. Had a Create more.

1:36:55 space for focus and get better focus. So you've touched on this many times at this point, this idea of a habitat. Uh I think another way to think about this is like the culture of your company. Is that right? Exactly. Okay, cool. So

1:37:08 Are there a few things you could recommend to people to create a habitat that is conducive of Good stuff. Let's start at the start here. So in the difference between what science knows and business does. Let's

1:37:23 Kind of zero in on the fact that The way most companies approach culture. has a very shaky track record. Like if mission vision values us an airline. you would not allow any family to fly on that airline because it does not arrive at most of its intended destinations.

1:37:40 So That is a uh just a super important Starting point. I'm gonna kill a sacred cow here while we talk about this. And I don't want anybody to to feel like I'm trying to

1:37:53 be mean or anything. It's just it's worth looking at stuff that doesn't work and wondering if there's something that could work a lot better. So if we look at habitat and culture. It's really about what people believe. It's what people believe is acceptable, permissible.

1:38:09 Productive. And the biggest flaw in people's a approach to culture And interestingly enough, even at YC, they talk about like this mission, vision, values, culture stuff. That comes later. Let some stuff happen with the business, that comes later. They're right to say that if that's the paradigm you're going to use. Because it's not gonna work either way.

1:38:29 So you might as well do it later. But if you're gonna do it the right way and investigate human beliefs. And what like we talked about priming, for example, culture is just the macro priming of the entire business. Of what your central belief systems are. And then the permission that forms from those belief systems.

1:38:46 So If you've done that really well. You should do that right at the very beginning. Like in what way should we approach this company? Building this, working together, et cetera.

1:38:57 Like that would be really, really helpful. to get right from day one. And The um the The

1:39:04 belief system that people have There are Two approaches to changing people's beliefs. Mission, vision, values is what we call a performative approach. Meaning I'm gonna come up with some expression Of an inspiring mission, inspiring values, and inspiring vision.

1:39:20 And it's going to be performed well enough. Like it's gonna be like if we were busking in the In the park. This is gonna be a cool enough mission, vision, values that people throw some change into my guitar case. And they buy into it. Like they gather around.

1:39:35 What I think And I think that's just completely the wrong approach. Because we're hoping to inspire people. We're we're hoping to be artistically talented enough. To pull that off. The other approach is to be deductive, logically deductive.

1:39:50 Which is Centrally speaking. There is hopefully a market out there that's glad our company exists. Who is glad we exist? Why are they glad we exist?

1:40:01 And That's shifting our mission. into something that we call your role, the role you play in the world around you. Who is glad you exist? Why are they glad you exist? And that is a fact.

1:40:12 That is not an inspiring idea. That is like okay, we work with this company that does AI based optical character recognition, document ingestion, et cetera. Why is the world glad that w they exist? Well, because it's we get ninety-five percent of the documents scanned in into structured data that normally people have to transfer by hand.

1:40:33 Like that. Pretty compelling. Why is the world glad Warby Parker exists? Because Before you used to choose between Looking dumb and it being cheap and looking cool and it being expensive. And now you can look cool and it's cheap. Like that's

1:40:48 The world's really glad we exist. Now That's true. I don't need you to be inspired to believe that that is true. And now everything that we're gonna think about for the rest of our beliefs We're going to deduce from that.

1:41:01 So we're just gonna use logic to build our culture, not inspiration. So this next thing we need to figure out is How can we understand the specific value that's created when we play this role in the world? We save people money, we save people time. We open up markets.

1:41:16 We help people Explore possibilities and potential they couldn't tap into otherwise. Right, et cetera. So what's the role of core? Like people are glad we exist because we tap into potential they had no access to before. Right, like in at the team level, at the company level, that could be a really big deal. So we know that and we say okay well

1:41:34 Gosh, that implies so much. There's so much we gotta do now. What value does that produce? And then I could say okay. Once we understand the definition of value.

1:41:43 Which comes out of our role. Now we can change the definition of done. So a lot of teams talk about bias to action. And You know, hamsters have biased action.

1:41:54 They get up out of their straw and they Turn that wheel as hard as they possibly can and they go absolutely nowhere. But If you understand the role you play in the world and you understand the value you produce in terms of time savings, cost savings, upside, you know, whatever it is that you do. Then you can say we should have a bias to impact.

1:42:13 Not advised action. We shouldn't just do stuff. We should have an effect. That has uh the result of value creation. Like we should save people time.

1:42:23 And now when you're a product team looking at this and you're saying Oh we here's a cool new idea, Lenny, let's do this. You can now use that as a Habitat level permission To be like, oh, how does that produce value for people?

1:42:35 How does that make people go faster? Save time. Get smarter. Do something they couldn't do otherwise. And then you can e still use that exact same vocabulary when you go sell it to them. This is how it makes you faster, smarter.

1:42:47 More efficient. Save cost. So it's like really Logical deduction. And if people think that we should

1:42:54 Do something. Build a product that doesn't create value. Now instead of being inspiring We can be logical. We don't build things that produce no value. I like that is not a priority.

1:43:06 Until we can turn it into something that does produce value. So you were turning culture Into something highly usable. In getting away from performative culture into logical deductive culture. And I think that's really, really the key for most people is to say

1:43:21 Let's understand why the world's glad we exist. That's why we have a TAM. That's why we have customers. And what does that imply about our standards for ourselves when we execute in value creation? Even down to the email. If I send some wonky email reply to somebody's question and it doesn't produce value for them. I'm not done.

1:43:39 I need to finish the job. Until it produces value for them. Quality standards are baked into this. That again is implied. Would our would Warby Parker be happy? You know, would would I be happy that Warby Parker exists if they shipped me something that's a two out of ten in quality? No.

1:43:56 So we can't make things that are two out of ten. And and everybody has a belief. There are plenty of people that probably Interview at Warby Parker. That think Two out of ten is perfectly fine. Just get it to them.

1:44:07 And Like No, we need a we need a antibody to that belief. We have decision making intelligence, which everybody believes like We we should go fast, break stuff.

1:44:18 Uh or we should be super slow and get everything right and w wherever in between. That's a fun one to talk about. And then finally you have a teaming dynamic belief. Which is essentially every single human's belief of what is acceptable treatment of other human beings. What state does that put the other human in? And a lot of people

1:44:36 particularly like a I'll pick on myself with the low politeness. We'll spend years thinking I'm giving honest feedback quickly. This is efficient. And you're like How is it efficient when it takes people Six months instead of six minutes.

1:44:50 to act on your feedback because they just don't like you so much. And you have this appeal problem that keeps you out of all the rooms that like You you're not actually your t your utility. Which You know, your politeness is a utility. Transferred mechanism.

1:45:04 But We don't want you in the room. So You're not a business benefit. Uh in this case.

1:45:11 So that's kinda the the starting point. As ground zero of habitat is Do not build an habitat. On the roots of inspiration. It doesn't work.

1:45:20 It w it can work, right? If you do it super inspiring stuff And you're super inspiring people. Then you probably have the artistic ability to pull that off. But even then, you'd still be better off if you would do it through logical deduction instead of inspiration. Say someone is like, Okay, I'm gonna improve my habitat, I'm gonna improve my company culture, or

1:45:41 I'm just gonna start setting up a good habitat. What's something they can do like what what can they do today, this week to just start to do that is it sit down and think about what is the value we provide, why do we exist? There's a something else you'd recommend. So the brain

1:45:55 Craves the An answer to the question, Why am I doing this? And not only are there things we we should start doing, but I like to kind of I like to deepen the commitment in people's minds.

1:46:08 by kind of thinking of it as we should start doing things that we've been negligent in doing. Right. Oh, this would be even better, but like we are actually causing some habitat problems by being negligent in certain things. So the primary thing that people are negligent in is answering the question, why should I do this?

1:46:26 To their team. And saying you should do this because it's your job is a form of negligence. Right, like you're not actually answering that question in any useful way.

1:46:38 Because I could also answer that in the safety way. Which mean which I sort of just did by saying it's your job. I'm implying that There's a consequence. Uh, but I could be like, because if you don't, here's the specific bad things that will happen.

1:46:52 You could be giving them a why. in terms of reward because oh if you do this, you get this, or if we do this, we get this. But you could also be giving them a purposeful answer to why. Which is not a form of negligence. Which is to say.

1:47:05 Because our work actually matters. Like there are people out there Waiting on us to ship this product. To improve their situation. And they also want us to get it right at the same time.

1:47:17 So Bias to impact. Through that lens. We do need to ship this. It needs to happen and it needs to be right.

1:47:25 Or at least right enough. In its first version. So If if you have been negligent, and we all have at times, right, is as I'm not trying to judge.

1:47:35 But I'm trying to con You know, convict, right? To to build some conviction, to build some commitment. If you have been Negligent. In answering.

1:47:44 to all these minds that work with you, why we're even doing this. That's the starting point. Is make sure everybody knows why. And that why is a shared why across the team. And not just the Simon Sinek big picture why.

1:47:57 I mean very specific. Why? That You know, for my team when we build training materials When we look at it through that lens of if we get this right, this is what happens to teams and companies and products and their customers. Like there's a

1:48:12 Through line. It's a big deal. And that's why we can't Do it this way. That's why we should get

1:48:19 More uh Obsessed with quality and and why we should get more interdependent as a team and stop doing things that are just our own ideas, but say Hey Lenny, I'm thinking about doing it this way. Is there anything you'd add before I hit go? And then you'd be like, Oh, I think it would be ten percent better if you did it this way. And then now our product is ten percent better.

1:48:38 So That's kinda the the square one is Ask yourself When's the last time Our team had a conversation about why we're even doing any of this.

1:48:47 What value it produces. Who is affected by our decisions. And if that's hasn't happened in a while. That's not good.

1:48:56 Okay. Is is another way to think about this uh your mission is that Yeah, I I think it's an alternative to mission. I I tried you know, and I don't wanna stomp all over mission, vision, values because I think they can work, but I think it's easier for people to conceptualize the importance of their work if they understand we are playing a role, not fulfilling a mission. And

1:49:18 Like role implies obligation. There's no obligation in mission. Unless you kinda like feel the inspiration so powerfully. It's just and and these differences are subtle, but neurologically it's different, right? If I tell your brain Here are the people counting on you to get this right, Lenny.

1:49:36 Your brain activates a region called the anterior insular cortex. Which starts to think about other people. in the context of the solution you're creating. And if I say we are here to change people's lives through this in a more general sense. Your prefrontal cortex will still activate to sl to solve the problem.

1:49:55 But your anterior insular cortex will not. To deep more deeply consider the humans affected. By the problem. So you're kind of You're

1:50:03 Adding to the toolkit. Of what the brain will bring to the table. to generate solutions and if you activate more good regions of the brain, you get better Solution. So I lean into this Personally.

1:50:15 I'm like, you really don't need a mission statement. You need to understand the role you play. And people need to have some response, some physiological Like I get it.

1:50:26 to my actions impact people. And if they don't have a response, you should go find a human who does, for sure. One last thread I want to follow. Focus. You have some really cool advice on

1:50:40 How to help? And this just comes from uh Everybody wants to get better focus. Everyone wants their team to have more time for focus. Everyone wants their engineers to sit there and Build. things faster. They're designers to

1:50:52 get stuff done and it all comes from getting really good at focusing and creating space for focus on your team. What advice do you have for folks that want to Personally. Learn to Focus better.

1:51:04 And to help their team have more time for Focus get stuff done, essentially. I mean, isn't this the the the question?'Cause this is where it all ends, right? Um First things first. Let's let's look at the neuroscience that we have available to us, which is

1:51:21 The study of focus is either is or is tightly associated with the study of what's called brainwaves. That's becoming a lot more popular. We're seeing it like even in athletes, like professional golfers are studying how their brainwaves are focused on the golf shot and which mode to put the brain into to play golf at the highest level. Same thing applies to work.

1:51:41 There's a bunch of different bands of brainwaves. Most of them actually are when you're asleep. So your REM cycles, your deep sleep cycles, your kind of like Drowsy cycles, those are Brain waves, right? You can feel your brain turning off. You can feel your brain turning on when you dream.

1:51:57 Uh, but when you're awake, there's really three primary modes that your brain is in Uh the nerdy side of this Kinda the nerdy language is alpha, beta, and gamma. Those are the those are the distinct ranges of brain activity.

1:52:12 And they basically represent how focused your brain is. So alpha Is Quite simply daydreaming. Right. So your brain is very quiet and empty. I easy metaphor is if you're in your house at night and everything's quiet, you hear things that you don't hear during the daytime.

1:52:28 And that's what alpha is like in the brain. Your brain is actually working subconsciously a lot. But when you're busy, which is beta Your brain is too noisy to hear any of those little creaks and pops in the house. But when you're an alpha, you hear stuff. So

1:52:42 The most common setting for alpha for most people is the shower. So th this it unlocks this mystery of like why do I have all these ideas in the shower? Well, it's because your brain is an alpha. It hears these little creaks and pops in inside of the attic. And it and it unpacks them. goes, Oh, that's an interesting idea. It comes out of nowhere.

1:52:58 Can be driving. gardening, car washing, cycling. Whatever, as long as there's not too much cognitive load. Then you can be daydreaming. And I'll come back to this in a second.

1:53:09 Because There's a big permission problem at the habitat level for some of these focus levels. Beta. Is Productivity mode.

1:53:17 So if anybody you've ever seen somebody with a poster on their back wall that says get shit done That's basically just a poster that says beta. On it. Like I love beta. And

1:53:28 Answer emails, have meetings. Wrong uh in and there are some gamma code, you know, deeper thinking Scenarios where you're Writing code.

1:53:37 Delivering presentations, making presentations like so much of our work day. Is beta. And It's just I mean, some of us have an infinite um amount of demand for beta work. There's just a never ending stream

1:53:51 uh of stuff we could do and get done. And then gamma is your brain's intense focus. So if you're learning something really complicated, like you're learning thermodynamics in college or something like that. And you're just like, Wow. This is not easy.

1:54:07 And you have to really push your brain to grapple these concepts, connect the dots. I Even remember certain things. That's gamma, and we feel that sometimes at work that here's a problem. A a complex issue.

1:54:21 That we could tackle in beta by slapping duct tape on it. Or we could tackle in gamma by reverse engineering. And going deep. And that's where we start to connect the dots that we talked about earlier that Focus and reverse engineering are related.

1:54:37 that in beta, you have no intention to learn anything new to get something done, to think more deeply to get something done. to reconsider an existing process or structure or framework in your mind to get something done. You're gonna utilize those things to get something done. Gamma is where like We go

1:54:55 I would normally do it this way. I can see why that's not the right way. I need to make something new. I need to break My framework. And build a brand new one right now. To do something.

1:55:05 So We Generally spend Too much time and data and work. And that's both a judgment call,'cause I certainly have my own opinion about beta.

1:55:16 I call it the conscientiousness crisis, which is conscientiousness wants beta, openness wants gamma. kind of think of tying these pieces together. And it's not that conscientiousness is like inherently a crisis. But when you meet teams that haven't done any innovation haven't rethought the market, have become insensitive to changes in the environment around them, have become insensitive to their own employee problems and are still just kind of like,

1:55:39 You know, this locomotive that keeps on going, irrespective of What's going on around it. It's that heads down form of conscientious beta. that feels like now's not the time. Let's stay focused. Let's stay focused, et cetera. So we don't want to get rid of beta.

1:55:55 We got a lot of work to do. But Let's put a rule of thumb out there for people to explore. 'Cause it's gonna be subjective to every team and every company. But as a rule of thumb If twenty five percent of your year

1:56:08 Is spent In gamma and alpha. You're probably a lot better off than the teams who spend less than twenty five percent of their year. Thinking deep and being in this more daydreaming mode. So what I wanted to circle back on is

1:56:22 How could we possibly daydream productively? What that's preposterous. And this is where you can build in your mind, and I I do have another PDF for this if people want to see it. But You can build in your mind a three by three grid

1:56:34 Where we have the safety system, reward and purpose system in columns. We have alpha, beta, and gamma in rows. And we basically have a list of nine channels that the brain can activate. to generate different types of thinking. And most of

1:56:49 Comp most of the companies out there, most of the teams out there Are primarily They're all their programming comes from safety beta. And reward beta. How can I be busy to get rewards?

1:57:01 R O I Customers, deals. Whatever. Uh pro even promotion, self self more self. Centered kind of rewards.

1:57:10 And beta. Safety, which would be how can I be busy? Optics, manage my reputation. Avoid risk. That sort of stuff.

1:57:19 So We spend the crisis is is basically realizing Spending too much time in those two out of our nine available boxes. Is

1:57:31 Probably not. Generating anywhere near The ideal outcomes. No. And if we could instead ship to the purposeful column.

1:57:39 Like By answering that brain's craving for why. With an answer that explains it's not about you. It's not about us. It's about Other people are counting on us to get this with right.

1:57:50 Does that matter to you? 'Cause for most people they're like, Yeah, that's actually really cool. I can have an impact on on like real stuff happening in other people's lives and in the world outside of me. So that activates Now all of a sudden we can say, Okay, let's look at alpha across the top row.

1:58:06 Alpha safety. is when you get in the shower. And all of your anxieties, worries, et cetera, come out of nowhere, out of the attic of your mind. What happens in alpha Reward. It's when you kinda have these breakthroughs of how to get a deal, how to win something. Like

1:58:22 It's useful it's daydreaming. But your brain is like prime to daydream in a certain way, whether it's about anxiety or anger, or whether it's about rewards you care about. If it's purpose This is where You know, from a vision perspective, a possibilities product perspective.

1:58:36 You're gonna have all sorts of crazy cool ideas pop into your mind if you've primed your brain to being purposeful and then you daydream. And you can do this like in the middle of a day. certain companies it's easier than others, but if you can push away from your desk and just go sit in a park or something for Ten minutes, twenty minutes, and calm your brain down?

1:58:55 Like listen. Something cool will probably happen in your brain. I can't guarantee that. But You have to experiment with it to find out like how it works for you. And then the same thing for gamma.

1:59:07 When you hear phrases like we can't talk about this for the rest of our lives, that is the gamma the gamma prevention team kicking the door down. And saying, We're here to get you back into beta. You know, everybody, you know, put your hands behind your backs, sort of a thing. And

1:59:22 That's where the habitat and the focus kinda matters because you will not ever get A gamma. Idea. From a beta mind.

1:59:32 You will never get an alpha idea from a beta mind. So if your business needs some breakthrough daydreaming interesting ideas. In order to create adjacencies, to build new products, to seek new markets, to better

1:59:46 fulfill the the the role you're playing within this market. Then you team has to have permission to enter that intellectual focus state. Or that you're turning that channel off. You're like like taking that off of the programming Available

2:00:01 through your particular subscription. And the same thing applies to ga uh to gamma. The habitat Ba basically needs to establish that Gammas of

2:00:11 A viable channel. For a lot of work. And there's permission to go into it. You can certainly overdo it. That's why I say twenty five percent. You don't need to spend half of your year, three quarters of your year in gamma.

2:00:21 It bonkers how smart you can be if you spend three or four hours in an afternoon in that deep focus state. You'll just do stuff you'd never do. And if you can get the team to have off sites that are gamma focused. Uh

2:00:35 you know, everybody scatter and be alone and do this stuff. That are gamma and alpha focused. Yeah. Productive and you bring ideas back. you're just simply gonna generate thinking and outcomes that you wouldn't otherwise

2:00:47 And it may be that ten percent's right for you. It may be that thirty percent rate for you depending on how dynamic your Market customer base are. But just to ask yourself the qu like challenge yourself with the question. The stuff is so fascinating. I wish we had like another hour just to dig deep into this,'cause it feels like just this alone is gonna really transform the way

2:01:05 Companies operate. So let me Let's try to give people something. tactical they can do to create more space. For alpha and gamma.

2:01:13 waves. Uh and essentially your advice is a fourth of your time. Should be spent doesn't if possible in alpha and gamma time. That right. Yeah, I think um

2:01:24 That probably is Overabundance. In all honesty. But if you think about it through like the lens of a quarter, if you're gonna be on a on a set of cadences And this is probably the tactical advice. It's like look at your cadences.

2:01:36 And say at the quarter level, that's probably the right level of fidelity for most people to look at their calendars in terms of like what big stuff should we be doing. 'Cause six months is usually too long to do anything big. Too much has happened in the world. Year is definitely too long to wait for a a cadence. To kinda kick in.

2:01:53 So quarterly's really good. And what's nice is when we When we cluster our gamma time On this quarterly cadence. We can take a lot of the stuff that would

2:02:02 Random conversations that come up out of nowhere and we can be like, Well, we're getting ready to have An off site. this quarter's off site in two weeks, can this idea wait?

2:02:14 Until then. To be processed. So you kinda get this nice little Black hole effect. Where a lot of distractions having a new home.

2:02:24 Because you actually said we're gonna distinctly do stuff. You're saying yes, but not now, to to a lot of distractions. But yeah, I think That's the ideal cadence and that For some teams it needs to be, you know, maybe a half a day or a full day.

2:02:39 You'll figure it out. based on you know your own business, but what per quarter Is a necessary amount of uh time for us to To break beta. and go into deep thinking analysis mode. How healthy is our operation, how smart are we being.

2:02:52 Are we delivering value? What needs to be reevaluated. from the market's experience, the customers experience, the teams experience. Let's look at these different views of the business.

2:03:03 and and make some prioritized decisions about We're gonna make specific improvements this quarter. For these these areas. And and then even once a week, maybe Just

2:03:13 Find Half a day if you can, maybe, but Like maybe less than half a day. Couple hours. To be in gamma, once a week.

2:03:22 And you'll kind of feel it out from there. But I the reason the rule of thumb of twenty five is out there. Is Twive is kind of the risk point,'cause most people will be like, We're not even spending five percent. Or the perfectionist team might be like, We're fifty.

2:03:35 So If you're far away from that rule of thumb, that's a pretty good indicator it's a good time to audit yourself. When you hear the term deep work, was that an ex is that generally referring to gamma? Time.

2:03:47 Yeah, people can use that term in a couple of ways. I think a lot of people All deep work, don't bother me beta. Which could be one. Uh and other Teams might call gamma deep work, but in that's probably more appropriate.

2:03:59 I think Don't Bother Me Beta. Is uh For some teams they need to be told like no no use this team use this time not just to Not be interrupted. But to think differently about problems. To think about

2:04:12 Is the architecture even right? Is the Yeah. Like is the way we are thinking about this even right? Not just get a lot of stuff done. It's not just like sit in your email and write documents. It's actually Try to think.

2:04:25 about bigger problems, things that are Challenging your brain, not just like I'm just productive, getting stuff done, getting stuff done. Awesome. Something that worked really well for me. Similar to what you just recommended is having I had two blocks of time during the week.

2:04:37 That were two hours or three hours long. Or it's just don't bother me. Deep or time. So I had it uh think Wednesday morning and Friday morning for like two or three hours. And actually in the calendars Like if you book something during this time, I will slap you.

2:04:50 And that worked really well. Yeah, nobody nobody complained. We covered a lot. Here's the things we've covered. I was just taking notes on all the advice that you've shared. Uh, how to help people run better meetings. how to get better at developing vision for their team and company and product.

2:05:04 How to be a better Influencer How to build better relationships. How to create a better culture for your company, how to create more focus and more productive focus. That's a lot.

2:05:15 I'm very proud of our conversation. Before we get to a very short lightning round'cause we've gone pretty long, I wanna keep it short. Is there anything else you want to share or leave listeners with that you think might be Helpful. Before we

2:05:27 No, I I don't think we need to I mean there's certainly a lot more that we we could talk about, but I think we don't want to Melt any minds. We want people to kinda walk away and be like, I can do that, I can do that, I can do that. So definitely pick You know, two or three wins. I kinda call them pots of ocean to boil instead of oceans to boil. So like

2:05:46 Get a few pots of ocean boil first, and Uh and focus on that for sure. And definitely Make one of those pots if it's a problem area for you, what kind of experience you are. I mean that's That's central to everything. Everything else works better in the whole system. Uh, once you've boiled that pot of the ocean.

2:06:03 And then Things get easier. And then I guess the only last thing I would add is Think of everything we've talked today. Uh it might help to put some language to it as Explore risers and ceiling risers, because your company has a horizon of performance that you're heading into.

2:06:18 And there's a bottom end of that range and a top end of that range. So as you get better at meetings, not only are you like increasing the you know, you're raising the floor. To get rid of bad meetings and waste. And you might be saving a ton of time or converting useless time into useful time. But you're also might be raising the ceiling. And I would be really specific with yourself and your team about

2:06:38 Which out which outcome are you chasing? Is it both? Is it one or the other? And say like we're actually trying to raise the floor so that our performance never goes below a certain range. We can make we get faster, smarter as a result, fewer mistakes. Or are we actually trying to uncap a ceiling? that we're dealing with right now, especially around things like strategy and vision. If we feel that those conversations always end up

2:07:00 Feeling like Inconceivable arguments. We we have a ceiling on our business's performance as a result of that. Can we raise that ceiling? and explore a higher horizon of performance for the business.

2:07:11 Amazing. Evan, with that we reached our very exciting and very quick lightning round. Are you ready? Yes, let's do it. All right. So let's start with what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people? Well, the obvious first one is never split the difference. I recommend that book to like everybody in the universe. I think if you haven't read it yet, you shouldn't get your driver's license. It's just I

2:07:36 It it if for those who don't know, it was written by Chris Voss, he was an FBI hostage negotiator. And it explores how to negotiate with people and not Just hostages, but your colleagues, your parents, your wife, like everybody. Uh, and there's some very surprising in there. Uh that is unexpected. Like

2:07:54 Like not not trying to get people to agree with you, but Getting them to say no more often. Instead of saying, uh hey Lenny Are you willing to do this? Say, Hey Lenny, are you opposed to doing this?

2:08:05 And it's just this reversal. And I'm Giving you the out is the way he explains it. There's a whole bunch of other technique, but the more of that technique is in a team, the better. The better the team does. That's the no brainer.

2:08:16 The second one I would say since we've kind of covered this topic a little bit about um you know habitat. Today. I If you enjoy reading books that are sort of root canals, but you're better off because you read them, there's a book called Never or not Never Split and there's a book called The Person and the Situation. It was written by some researchers, some psychological researchers, and what it explores is the difference between

2:08:38 How personality influences your behavior and how the situation you're in or like we talked about the habitat you're in. influences your behavior. And If you're not yet convinced that either of those matters, like, oh, it doesn't I'll do what I do and regardless of the habitat or I'll do what I do regardless of who I am.

2:08:57 That book will melt the face off of that. existing mental model. Conclusively. It's really valuable knowledge to understand the mechanics of how the situation influences

2:09:09 Personality influences the person. And then I guess the last Maybe we'll put a fork in the road of a choose your own adventure. If you're a real student of the game and you want to go ten thousand leagues under the sea on this stuff, there's a series of books called the Cambridge Fundamentals of Neuroscience.

2:09:26 You can find it on Amazon. A lot of them you can just get on your Kindle for a lot cheaper than the you know the The library decorating version of it. But that is

2:09:35 Bonkers. It talks about how your brain applies to intelligence, emotionality, relationships. It's it's incredible knowledge. Uh if you instead Wanna keep it more in the experien you know, the w part of the world you experience and can see and not the the brain. Uh, Thaler wrote a book called Misbehaving. It was kind of the the major book about uh behavioral economics.

2:09:58 And again We spend a lot of time in companies talking about the way people should act. Instead of the way people do act. And behavioral economics is essentially the version of economics that's about how people do act, not how people should act. So I think that's a great field of study. And then again, Robert Green's whole library.

2:10:16 is super valuable, especially human nature, if you're into kind of that. He's a little darker of an author. certainly kinda doesn't pull punches about human nature. Uh so that those are All great books to explore. Do you have a favorite product you recently discovered that you really love?

2:10:30 I look more at the category level of products. Um, I really like products that have great ergonomics. Uh a lot of people underestimate the value of what it feels like to use the product? Are things in the right place at the right time? I just started this newsletter, uh, that's kind of like how do you how do you break all of what we do into bite sized pieces for people who are super interested in this stuff to get something weekly.

2:10:54 And it exposed me to Beehive, which is A very well designed newsletter platform, high ergonomics. I I don't ever find it anything hard to find. I can get things to work the way I want them to work. So just I I like that example and I remember even back to when I was

2:11:11 Obsessed with finding the perfect backpack to travel with. And then you find these brands where you're going through security and you didn't even know it, but there's a pocket Designed for your phone. In exactly the place you would want the pocket for your phone to be. And you're just like, That's so great. I love that this team

2:11:26 design this pocket just in the right spot. So that's really my focus is ergonomics and product. Final question. Uh I saw you tweeted that uh people are telling you that you look like JD Vance. Which is hilarious. Do you think this will be a net benefit or a net uh hurdle? It'll be an incredible benefit to Halloween.

2:11:44 'Cause it's totally clear what I'm gonna do for Halloween. Um Yeah, I I mean I guess I'm gonna have to see what people in the street Fortunately, I live in Park City, so I don't run across a lot of people in the street who wanna yell at people. Uh but if I lived in you know Chicago or something like that, I would have no doubt. Somebody would come up and throw something at me. Um But yeah, I I'm neutral on the topic so far, minus the Halloween bonus. We'll see. We'll see how your life changes.

2:12:12 Evan, this has been amazing. There's so much richness to this conversation. And like I said, we've covered like basically everything people want to get better at as product manager, you could say. Uh two final questions. Where can folks find the stuff that you do to dig deeper, to learn more, to learn more deeply from you and Two, how can listeners be useful to you?

2:12:31 Yeah, I mean they can certainly find a a lot of the stuff we do on our website, core dash sciences dot com. find a link to that profile you talked about on there, which can be super fun to take and and insightful. the newsletter, all the stuff that we do, you can kinda find out there. And then certainly Twitter. I mean I I I've always been like really prickly about people that get on Twitter it to post only and not to interact. I'm kind of the opposite. I really love

2:12:56 people's questions and pushback and And just yesterday I probably spent Way longer. that I should have out of my portfolio management in approach to time. Just on a thread where I was talking to this really interesting

2:13:09 Uh woman about Uh this this debate almost about The probability of people doing things uh You know, based on their beliefs, which was And then we had some kind of bystanders watching the whole thing happen. I had a meeting with uh good friend Rod afterwards where we talked about how that all went.

2:13:28 So I love to to talk to people and answer questions and I'm sure people will have plenty of questions that they'd love to drive dive deeper into. So I'm at I'm on Twitter for sure. And then How you can help me. I mean, fortunately for me. Uh, I'm in the business of helping other people. Whether those are individuals, teams, companies, so

2:13:45 The most helpful thing to me is you helping yourself. So if you if you find our content valuable, if you Wanna have awesome managers or anything like that. Uh in this sort of Science based kind of more efficient approach to getting there would be interesting than

2:14:00 Reach out. Uh we don't bite. We're we're pretty easy to to work with and that would be super fun to have a conversation about what your team needs. Evan, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. This has been really cool. Yeah. Same for me. Bye everyone.

2:14:15 Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lenny's podcast.com. See you in the next episode.

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