Marshall Goldsmith: The Essentials Of Leadership

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/6194a95356b98a5f

See, when you're in school, you take test after test after test after test. You had to prove you're smart over and over, thousands of times you have to prove you're smart.
It's very difficult to stop.
You have to learn to quit being right all the time.
And quit being smart all the time.
And quit thinking this is a contest about how smart you are and how right you are.
And realize that I'm here.
To make a positive difference in the world.
And me being smart and me being right.
is probably no longer the way to do that.
Welcome to the Knowledge Project Podcast. I'm your host, Shane Parrish.
The goal of this show is to master the best of what other people have already figured out.
To that end, I sit down with people at the top of their game to uncover what they've learned along the way.
Every episode is packed with timeless ideas and insights that you can use in life.
And business.
If you're listening to this, you're missing out.
If you'd like special member only episodes, access before anyone else, transcripts, and other member only content, you can join us at fs.blog slash membership.
Check out the show notes for a link.
Today I'm speaking with Marshall Goldsmith.
Marshall is one of the top leadership coaches in the world.
And the author of the New York Times number one bestseller, What Got You Here Won't Get You There.
I wanted to talk about leadership with Marshalls so that I can add to my leadership repertoire
And we could all become better leaders.
We talk about how to gain confidence.
Motivating others.
Where leaders go wrong.
Why it's easier to change behavior than perception, and how you can specifically go about changing others' perceptions.
The three words that kill any conversation, decision making, and
Environment.
the relationship between intensity and consistency, and so much more.
Leadership isn't a position, it's a series of actions, and this episode will not only give you the tools you need to become a better leader.
But it will help you upgrade yourself.
It's time.
To listen.
And learn.
Mm-hmm.
I wanna start with something.
simple and then we can build up from there. So let's start with what is leadership.
A leadership
Uh, number one, I never like to get into semantic debates. So when I give you a definition, just look at it as my definition.
Not the right definition. Paul Hersey, my old mentor, taught me that. He said
There are many definitions of words, so don't get into semantic arguments just to find what you mean and just leave it at that.
So for me, I like his definition. Leadership is working with and through others to achieve objectives.
And the key word in the definition is others.
As opposed to doing it by yourself.
Can anyone be a leader?
Oh yeah, anyone can be a leader assuming they have basic
Yeah.
qualities to get along in life.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean
Uh I'm often asked a question.
Are leaders made or born?
A common question.
I mean and I can answer one thing definitively. Are you ready?
One hundred percent of every leader I've ever met, and I've met many, have been born.
They've all been born, yeah.
Okay.
So the only question is, can leaders become more effective? And the answer to that is a definite yes. I have research from thousands of people.
That leaders can definitely increase their effectiveness.
Do we hold any sort of self sabotaging beliefs about leadership?
Yeah, I think we have a lot of self limiting beliefs.
And um the self-limiting beliefs, a lot of these come from inside us, basically, I can't do this, I can't do that, uh, this is just the way I am. One of the most common problems is this is just the way I am, is if we have some real quote real fixed identity that lives throughout time.
And I have to really work on people to change that. Even smart people say things like this, you know, I can't listen, I can't listen, I've never been able to listen, I can't listen.
Well look in their ears. Why not? You got something stuck in there? Why can't you listen? Do you have any curable genetic defect that is prohibiting you from listening? Well, you know, yeah
As long as we tell ourselves
That's the way I am.
Two things happen.
Both bad.
One, we inhibit the odds on ever getting better.
Two
Even if we do change our behavior
We don't seem authentic to ourselves. We feel like a phony.
Because if the real me can't listen
And you say I'm a good listener, you know what I'm thinking, well, that's not the real me.
I'm just pretending to be a good listener because the real me is no good at that.
So a lot of our beliefs are very self limiting, and and by the way, this is not limited to people at the bottom of the food shape.
People like Coach are at the top of the food chain.
And they still do those.
Well that's just the way I am stuff.
So so when it comes to changing our behavior then, and and I want to speak more about this a little later as well.
Are we changing our beliefs about ourselves, or are we changing our
Habits.
How do you think about that? Both.
Both. I mean I you can definitely see if you don't change your beliefs about yourself
it can be hard to change your behavior. Or as I said, even if you do change your behavior, you don't feel real or authentic.
So that's why I think it's really important to to look at both.
uh the way you do look at yourself that you identify your self concept, your identity, whatever that might be, and also your behavior.
Talk to me a little bit about how you go through that process with someone. Do you start with the belief? Do you start with the behavior? How do you get that earned confidence to sort of say that I can do this even though you haven't done it?
Or you don't believe that about yourself.
Well, what I do is I give everyone confidential feedback.
So every leader I work with gets confidential feedback.
From their colleagues.
The average person I coach gets feedback from eighteen people.
So you know, this is and these reports are very um
They're hard to hear sometimes'cause they're not used to getting honest feedback.
Yeah.
And so they get feedback from a lot of people. These might be board members, they might be direct reports, peers.
And then they get this feedback and they say, Okay, I feel good about X, I want to get better why?
I said fine.
Then they need to talk to if they're not the CEO, they talk to the CEO. If they are the CEO, they talk to the board.
say, all right, is this are these the right behaviors and the right people? And they say yes.
And then the next thing is I teach people
How to respond to feedback.
They go back and talk to everybody and say, for example, you know, thank you so much for participating in this process.
The first thing I want to say is, you know, how grateful I am
I don't know who said what.
Many people said
many things to try to help me. I have nothing to lose and much to gain.
Second.
Much of my feedback is positive.
ethical, dedicated, hard working. I care about the company and our customers and creative and getting results and
These are important things to me. I hope mine score high and did.
I do not know who said what
I know a lot of people took the time to help me, and I just want to say how grateful I am.
Then they don't say but, they say and there's something I'd like to improve. For example
Uh I'd like to be a better listener.
If I haven't listened to you or the other people in the past, I'm sorry, please accept my apologies. There's no excuse.
I'm not gonna ask you for more feedback about the past.
I'm gonna ask you for ideas for the future.
If you had have ideas to help me be a positive and open minded listener in the future, what might they be?
Whatever the person says, sit there, shut up, listen, take notes, say thank you, don't judge and don't critique.
And then they listen to the ideas and they say, Thank you. I cannot promise to change everything everyone says.
I can promise so to listen to everyone to think of these ideas and do what I can and
I cannot change the past.
I can change the future.
You know I can't get better at everything. I get better at this.
And I'm gonna involve you and ask you if you don't mind to help me get better.
So that's the responding and then the next thing is they focus on changing.
I had been in business twelve years before anyone asked me the great existential question. What was it? Does anybody ever really change?
Well, I have a background in mathematics. I said I have no research to prove it, so I guess I don't know.
Well for forty five years I've an answered a question. Now I do know. I know who changes, who doesn't change, why people change, why people don't change.
And the key to making change last is and by the way, I've done a research study called Leadership as a context board.
If anyone would like to see a copy of the research, send me an email, Marshall at MarshallGoldsmith.com. I'll send you a copy of it. And it's eighty-six thousand people.
From all around the world.
And
The key to making everything work is you have to follow up and stick with it. What's that sound like?
You know, Mr. Colleague, two months ago
I said I wanted to be a more positive and open minded listener. It's been two months. Based on the last two months, give me ideas for the next two months.
Four months ago I said I want to be a positive and open minded listener. Based on last two months, give me ideas for the next two months, six months, eight months, ten months, twelve months. Well, what happens when you do this is
This is research study from eighty six thousand people, leaders that don't follow up and don't talk to people, guess what? Don't get better.
Improvement looks like random chance.
leaders that do talk to people and follow up to the degree they make it a s systematic process.
Huge improvement.
And what I've learned is people don't get better because of me. They get better because of themselves and the people around them.
I'm a facilitator more than I'm an expert.
One of the things that I that strikes me about that approach that's really interesting is that if if I
have a colleague and the colleague doesn't think I'm a good listener.
And I go to them and I say, Okay, I'm gonna change my behavior and do you have any ideas for what I can do?
And they still are gonna see the world through this eye. I could be a great listener for six months.
And then that one time that I don't listen, they're gonna they're gonna key in on this. Well, this is a very, very critical point.
This is why follow up is important.
Take scenario A and scenario B.
Scenario A, you get feedback. I'm gonna pick a simple example.
Making destructive comments. I picked that'cause you couldn't get simpler.
So I get the feedback, I make too many destructive comments.
Okay, quit doing it.
Just quit doing it.
I go seven months and never make a destructive comment about anyone. Now back to your good point. Seven months later I say, Idiots in finance, stupid bean counters.
How do you get anything done in stupid company that's run by accountants?
You hear me, your reaction is he's never changed.
Here's what happens though when you do follow up.
I come back immediately and have this conversation, you don't believe I'm going to change.
You don't believe you think, Well, they went to this course temporary religious experience, this will never left.
What happens though two months later when I come back and say it's been two months.
I want to do a great job of not making destructive comments, be a good team player, give me ideas. Now you think about it.
You think wait.
You've done a good job.
Four months.
Good job.
Six months. Good job.
Seven months, idiots in finance.
You know what you would say then? You know, you've really worked hard. You went seven months without doing that. You shouldn't have said that.
I said, You're right, I'm going to apologize.
Situation A Did behavior change? Yes. Did perception change? No.
situation B, did behavior change yes, did perception change yes. And you're making an excellent point. In leadership, it doesn't matter what we say.
It only matters what they hear.
If they don't hear it, it doesn't matter if we said it or not.
One of the other points you made about leadership was uh working through others and
I I think that's really interesting because often we transition
into leadership. I mean formal leadership in terms of running a team or an organization or
A department.
And we're we're going from a job where we're a high achiever.
But that achievement is often individual. So how do we transition from being an achiever to a leader?
Well it's very d what you've uh just said is one of the biggest challenges of all
of going into leadership.
Because we're used to doing it ourselves.
No.
You have to learn to quit being right all the time.
And quit being smart all the time.
And quit thinking this is a contest about how smart you are and how right you are.
And realize that I'm here.
To make a positive difference in the world.
And me being smart and me being right.
is probably no longer the way to do that.
See, when you're in school, you take test after test after test after test. You have to prove you're smart over and over, thousands of times you have to prove you're smart.
It's very difficult to stop.
We're
We're
program to prove we're smart.
And it's hard to stop. So I was interviewed in the Harvard Business Review and ask a question related to your question.
What's the number one problem of all the successful people you've coached over the years?
Why is there winning too much?
What does it mean? If it's important, we want to win. If meaningful, we wanna win. If it's critical, we wanna win. If it's trivial, we wanna win. If it's not worth it.
We wanna win anyway.
Winners love winning.
It's very hard for winners not to constantly win.
I'm gonna give you a case study of winning too much that almost all of my clients fail. You will probably fail, and almost all the listeners will fail.
Case study number one.
You want to go to dinner at
Where's R X?
Your wife, husband, friend, or partner wants to go to dinner at restaurant, why?
You have a heated argument.
You go to a restaurant, why?
It was not your choice.
The food tastes awful and the service is terrible.
Option A, you could critique the food, point out our partner was wrong.
This mistake could have been avoided if only you listened to me, me, me, me, me.
Option B
Shut up.
Eat the stupid food.
Try to enjoy it and have a nice night.
What would I do? What should I do? Almost all my clients, what would I do? Critique the food.
What should I do?
Shut up!
Case study two, even worse.
You have a hard day at work, a hard day. You go home, your husband, wife, friend, or partner is there and
The other person says
I had such a hard day today, I had such a tough day.
And we reply.
You had a hard day.
You had a hard day.
You have any idea what I had to put up with today?
Do you think you had a hard day?
We're so competitive we have to prove we're more miserable than the people we live with.
I gave this example to my class at the Dartmouth Tech School.
Young guy raised his hand.
He said, I did that last week.
I ask him, What happened?
He said, My wife looked at me, she said, Honey
You just think you've had a hard day.
It is not over.

Ha.
Yeah, it's not over.
Well, it's hard not to win all the time.
And and the other thing is it's very hard for technically not to add value constantly.
So what does that mean?
I'm young, smart, enthusiastic, and you're my boss. I come to you with an idea.
You think it's a great idea?
Rather than just saying great idea, our tendency is to say, Well, that's a nice idea. Why don't you add this to it?
Well, the quality of the idea may go up five percent. My commitment to execute this idea just went down fifty.
It's no longer my idea, boss, now it's your idea.
incredibly difficult for smart, successful people not to constantly add value.
One of my good coaching clients was JP Garnier.
He was the CO of a very large drug company called Glaxo Smith Cline.
I said, What did you learn about leadership as the CO of this huge company? He said, I've learned a very hard lesson.
And every time your listeners get promoted in life
This lesson becomes more real.
He said
My suggestions become orders.
No, he said, If they're smart, they're orders.
If they're stupid, they're orders. If I want them to be orders, they are orders. And if I do not want them to be orders, they are orders anyway.
My suggestions become orders. For nine years I trained the admirals in the United States Navy.
What's the first thing I teach the new admirals? You get that star?
Your suggestions become orders. Admirals don't make suggestions.
Hamble makes a suggestion, what's the response?
I'm
That suggestion is an order.
So I said, JP, what'd you learn from me when I was your coach that helped you the most?
He said
You taught me one lesson, help me be a better leader and have a happier life.
I said, What was it? He said, Before I speak, breathe.
Breathe.
And ask one question.
Is it worth it?
Is it worth it?
He said, as a CO of this company fifty percent of the time I've had the discipline to stop and to breathe.
Say, is it worth it? What did I decide? Am I right?
Maybe.
Is it worth it?
No.
Oh, uh there's two follow ups I have to this. The first is sort of reprogramming, the the stop adding too much value is
is definitely something that I've had to catch myself doing
uh when I used to lead a team of people
And
Yeah.
It it is what is the
When you catch yourself in that moment.
And you know you can make this idea better.
And you you swallow it, you don't say anything.
It's sometimes good to add value.
I can't tell you when it is or isn't good. Now JP didn't say he never added value.
What did he say?
Half the time he didn't add value.
In the old days he always added value.
See if you just stop and think
you're probably gonna come up with a pretty good answer.
The in real world we don't stop and think.
We just talk.
By the way.
If you have to ask at work, I'll give you a technique. Breathe.
Is my comment going to improve this other person's commitment?
If the answer is yes, fine. If the answer is no, breathe again. Is it worth saying? Sometimes it is.
Sometimes it's not.
At home, breathe.
Great.
Is my comment going to improve my relationship with the person I love? If the answer is no,
Should I say it?
Well at work about half the time, if you have to ask, it's not worth it. At home?
It's almost never worth it.
If you have to ask.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's a good bet, don't even think about it. You know, if you have to ask, is this gonna be a good idea, it it probably won't be.
There's an enormous amount of research and overwhelming amount of advice for leaders out there on how to motivate other people.
What do you want leaders to know about motivation?
Well, let me give you advice for coaching.
I'm not gonna speak about all leadership, because
I'm gonna speak just about coaching. Okay, you ready?
In my coaching for years I didn't get paid if my clients didn't get better.
Better is not judged by me or them and judge by everyone around them.
Now there's a great way to test if someone believes what they're saying. Ask'em a question. You wanna bet on it?
Do you want to bet on it? Now they say, I believe it, but I wouldn't bet on it. You know what you just learned?
They don't believe it.
They don't believe it.
If they believe it, they bet on it.
Here's the money, I bet on it.
Well when you get paid for results, you learn humility.
The client I coach that I spent the most amount of time with did not improve at all and I did not get paid.
The client I coach I spent the least amount of time with and proved more than anyone I've ever coached, two hundred people got better and I did get paid.
A very humbling lesson. I made a chart.
On one dimension was called Time Spent with Executive Coach Marshall Wall Smith.
The other one is called improvement.
There's a clear negative correlation between spending time with me and getting better.
Well, I thought this is troubling.
So I go talk to my client who improved the most.
Who he spent the least amount of time with. By the way, I've spent hours with him. He's a great friend of mine over thirty years, but
Actually coaching very little time.
He improved the most and he was great to start with.
His name Alan Maleli.
Allen went on to be the CO Ford. The stock went from one dollar and one cent to eighteen dollars and forty cents, one thousand eight hundred and thirty seven percent appreciation in stock value.
He also had a ninety seven percent approval rating from every employee in a union company.
C of the year in the United States and ranked number three greatest leader in the entire world.
Amazing man.
So I talked to Alan, my good friend.
I said Alan.
Of all the people I've coached.
I spent the most amount of time with y I spent the least amount of time with you coaching you and you improved the most and you were great to start with.
Now said Alan, I made a chart.
Oh, one dimension was called time spent with the executive coach Marshall Goldsmith. The other dimension was called improvement.
And there seemed to be a negative relationship here. Now, Alan, I said the way this chart looks
Had you never met me?
You would really be good.
So I said, what should I learn about coaching from you?
Well, he taught me a lesson that changed my life. He said, Your biggest challenge as a coach is one thing, customer selection.
You pick the right customer, your coaching process always works. You pick the wrong customer, your coaching process will never work. And he said, Never make the coaching process about yourself and your own ego and how smart you think you are.
Make it about those great people you work with and how proud you are of them.
Then he said, Is the CO four my job in that different? I don't design the cars.
I don't build the cars, I don't sell cars, I gotta have great people.
And every day I drive to work, I tell myself, leadership's not about me, it's about them.
Well
If you ask me to lessen, you know?
I get ranked number one coach in the world for years.
Nobody knows I'm a good coach.
I can't sit there and say I'm a better coach than everybody. How do I even know that? I don't.
One thing I have got, though.
I get the best clients.
How do you go about client selection?
Well number one.
I talk to my clients, I say if I work with you, you will do the following.
You will get feedback, you will talk to people, you will follow up, you will work hard, you will, will, will, will, will.
And then I said, Guess what?
If there's any of that you don't want to do
Is okay.
I just won't work with you.
I just won't work with you.
Now, one thing I'm real proud of in my new book, The Ern Life.
It's the first six pages.
First six pages of my clients.
And the one thing I did in this book that I love
It's it says.
In my fifty year career as an executive educator and coach
I've been blessed to work with many of the greatest leaders in America. In theory I'm supposed to help them.
In practice I've learned far more from them than they've learned from me.
And then I go on to talk about how great they are.
Well, they talk about how great I am.
I talk about how great they are.
You know what?
How great I am is'cause of them.
Anybody would look like a good coach if you coach the people I coach.
Oh so these Jim Kim.
President of the World Bank.
Saved twenty two million lives when he's had a partner in hell.
My friend Alan Malali, I mentioned CO of the year in the United States, Uber Jolie, CO Best Buy.
spectacular leader, turned the company around
Albert Burla, CO of Pfizer, did a few important things last year.
Well, Francis Helsing won the presidential medal of freedoms.
Peter Drucker said the greatest leaders ever met.
Oh, you know, uh she showed money.
Just got nominated for Nobel Peace Prize.
James Downing, head of St. Jude's Children's Hospital, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Well, you know what?
Key to being a great coach.
Work with them.
And the other thing is if people don't care, don't waste your time.
Have you ever attempted to change the behavior of a husband, wife, or partner had no interest in changing? How's that working out for you?
And I was teaching my class, you ever try to change mommy and daddy that had no interest in changing? How'd that go?
One woman raised her hand. I said, Are you trying to change mommy or daddy? She said, Daddy.
I said, What's daddy's problem? She said, He doesn't have a healthy lifestyle.
I asked her, How old is daddy? She said, Ninety four years old.
Leave the old boy alone. You want to smoke a cigar, old man, smoke two. Who cares? He's ninety-four.
Well, you know, people don't care, don't waste your time.
Put your time as a coach in with people that do care.
The ones are gonna get better anyway.
S so on that note, you've worked with some of the best people in the world and thousands of them at that. I'm I'm curious as to what you've learned about what really matters in life from that.
Well
This is a different question.
than corporate success.
If you look at life, my new book, I talk a lot about that.
And I talk about three things. What's it take to have a great life?
All right.
And to me
Great life's not measured by how much money you have or how much status you have.
What does it take to have a great life?
First.
Which I talk about three things I don't discuss in my book and then three things I do.
The ones I don't discuss are number one is health. You need to have good health, but I'm not writing a book on health.
Two, you need at least a l kind of middle class level of income, and I'm not writing a book about that. And you need to have great relationships with people you love and
This book is only partially about that.
Assuming you've got that, you need three things. One
Your aspirations.
You have to have something, why am I doing this? Some reason for existence that's beyond just getting things done.
Yeah, I need a why.
Two.
Your ambitions, those are the achievements that you have.
And then number three is your day to day activities. That's the life you're living every day.
And to the degree these three things are aligned.
you're probably gonna have a great life.
Which
Not as always as easy as it sounds.
Yeah.
What happens is if you look at the history of the world.
Most people in the history of the world were kind of stuck in the action phase, that day-to-day activity. We didn't have a lot of control in our history.
We kinda much did what we were told, were born where we were supposed to be
played our role in life and we just lived from day to day. Not a bad thing, just that's the way it was.
Some people are lost in the aspiration phase.
They have lofty ideas and dreams. They don't achieve much, but they think a lot about big things.
The people I coach and most of the people on this podcast
If they're not careful, they overweight ambition and achievement.
They're lost in achievement.
And the one thing I really focus on in my new book is this.
Never.
Make your value as a human being.
Conditioned on the results.
of what you're trying to achieve. Never do that.
It's a fools game.
It is a fool's game for two reasons. One, you don't control the outcomes.
There are a million variables impacting anything we're trying to do in life today. You don't control that. And number two.
What happens if you do achieve stuff?
How much satisfaction does that give you in life anyway? A week, a month, a year?
Not much.
As soon as you achieve something, if that's all that matters, guess what you're gonna have to do? Achieve more.
And more and more and more and you never get there.
So
It's really
This is counter to Western philosophy.
We have been hammered that achievement is good.
Uh about ninety eight percent of all self help books tell you achieve more, delay gratification. Here's how you can achieve more.
on the assumption that once I achieve more everything will be okay.
The great Western disease is it's all going to be defined when
Followed by when I get the money status BMW condominium. Everything's gonna be okay after that.
There's no win.
That's all nonsense.
It's all gonna be a great win. When is an old person waiting to die? That's when
Yeah, there's no win there. And one one type of book always ends with and they lived happily ever after.
That type of book is called a fairy tale.
That's a fair that's not the real world.
That's not that's a fairy tale. In life, we're constantly reinventing ourselves, and the first thing I talk about is never
Place your value as a human being.
on the results of what you're trying to achieve.
I mentioned Albert Burla, who endorsed the book from Pfizer.
I called Albert, How'd you do last year? Oh pretty good, you know.
Came up with his vaccine, saved a billion or so lives, that's pretty good and
Stocks an all time high and CEO of the year and
Oh book and oh blah blah on and on. I'm pretty good year.
So what's your problem in life? He said, I have a huge problem.
Next year.
Next year.
If his value as a human being is he has to do better than last year
Pack it in. He will never do better than last year.
What happens to the Super Bowl champions?
Disaster.
Michael Phelps won twenty five gold medals more than anyone in history.
What do you think about doing everyone is less metal?
Killing himself.
Killing himself.
If that's it.
You're not gonna win.
You're not gonna win.
So what I talk about in the book is it's
Great to try to achieve things, but don't become fixated on the outcomes.
One of the most brilliant people I've ever met is called his name's Sophie Bacol.
Safe who's a small business guy, started up ten or twelve companies, made tens of millions of dollars, has a PhD in physics from Stanford, has an IQ probably equal to mine and yours combined. He um
You know, just a brilliant guy wrote a book called Loonshots, he's consulted the presidents, on and on and on.
So Sophie's one of the people I spent time with over Covid during Zoom calls every weekend.
And he said he finally realized something.
He's a scientist. He said he finally realized that
That he I always thought happiness was a dependent variable based upon achievement.
That I will be happy after I achieve.
He said, I finally realized happiness and achievement are independent variables.
You can achieve a lot and be happy.
You and Jeff Lot be miserable.
You achieve nothing and be happy.
You achieve nothing and be miserable.
There are independent variables.
And
If you know, when I talk to Safe
I told him how much you have to achieve.
We need two PhDs from Stanford?
What, another hundred million bucks?
Startups and more companies?
consult a couple more presidents? What does it matter? You're on achievement, you're at ninety nine point nine nine nine now.
You think it's gonna matter you get to a ninety nine point nine nine nine nine?
It's not gonna matter.
You just can find something else to do.
And it was a great breakthrough for him.
Because he realized.
You can be happy without
dependency upon the next achievement.
Can we teach people this or does it have to be learned?
Yeah.
And and the way you do it is
You love the process of what you're doing.
You do your best.
It's connected to a higher purpose.
And you achieve what you achieve.
You win, you win, if you lose, you lose.
Yeah, and this comes back to focusing on the process and and instead of the outcome.
Exactly. Uh I tell a story, the golfer in the beer can.
So there's a golfer going to his little country club.
He's playing for the club championship, right? Last hole.
Noisy people in front of him drinking beer. Oh very annoying. But he concentrates.
Show.
It's a drive almost perfect.

Somehow the ball goes over into it.
into the rough a terrible lie.
What happened?
He walks up to the ball.
A beer can.
The idiots in front of him left a beer can on the fairway.
He is so angry.
What does a golfer need to do?
Forget about the drive.
Forget about the beer can.
Forget about the idiots.
Come up with a strategy.
Breathe.
Focus on the process
Hit
The shot in front of you.
Hit the shot in front of you. That's it.
Let all that other stuff go, said
It's just a distraction. Don't think about winning the tournament.
That's a distraction. Don't think about the results.
Hit the shot.
And the other thing is
Forgive the other people for being who they are.
And forgive yourself for wishing they were somebody else.
Let it go.
Don't make yourself miserable because people in front of you are idiots.
How important is it to the the
to have people around you, to have good company around you while you're doing this.
Well, you know
I think it can be very important. Let me

That is this.
We
ended up with fifty or sixty amazing people. And I can mention their names are all in the book. One of them was Pal Gasal, who's a great basketball star
Curtis Martin, NFL All Star, Telly Loon, Broadway star.
We had uh the head of the Olympic committee, the head of Russell Investments, the head of Ancestry dot com, we had all these CEOs.
president of the World Bank, just an amazing, amazing group of people.
And every weekend they talked about their lives.
And every week they would say, Here's what I feel good about in my life.
And here's what I've done wrong.
And please give me help ideas, help me.
And they try to help each other.
Over and over and over and over again.
Well they loved it.
Why?
There's an old saying it's lonely at the top.
It used to be lonely at the top.
Today it is lonely Ur at the top.
People are lonely out there.
People are lonely.
And just having a group of people to talk to
Where nobody's gonna put you on social media, make a fool of you.
Where you can just
be a human. One person said I get to be a human one hour a week.
It's a big deal.
So I think having a support group is more important today than ever.
Having people to help you, to try to you know you know, kinda support you, they're not trying to put you down. And also very few of us live in the community
That we were brought up in.
Most of us don't.
We we don't have this community anymore.
And we're lonely.
So I think it's, you know, the support group really important and and over Covid
I spent four hundred hours doing this.
I think two of the things that you hit on there that are that are really important are
A sense of community.
Sense of purpose.
and also feeling like you're part you're part of something larger than yourself.
And I think that that's missing from so many of our lives, right? That not only the connection to our community.
But also feeling part of something meaningful that's larger than us. And if you're not
What's the point?
So why exactly am I working eighty hours a week?
Why?
Uh.
If there's no larger purpose
Why am I doing this?
How how do we deprogram ourselves then from the the sort of focus on results and
Um you know, getting to the next step and then the next step and the next step being better and better and better.
And how do we get out of that to to the point where we can take pride in the process and focus on
The next shot trying to make the next shot better, or the next practice better, or
Well, I'm I'm gonna share a a technique I talk about in the book. And this is called
The every breath paradigm.
So I'm a Buddhist. I'm not a religious Buddhist. I'm a philosophical Buddhist. I've probably read four hundred books about Buddhism. So I know more about Buddhism than I know about get what I got a PhD in.
Buddhist belief is every time I take a breath it's a new me.
So you breathe.
Knew me, knew, knew me, and
Everything that happened before this second in time was done by an infinite set of people.
They were called the previous me's.
So the first thing is you breathe.
And you think about all the previous years.
Think of all the gifts they've given you that's
Listening to me right now.
Think about
How hard they tried.
How many people they helped.
If anybody did that many nice things, what should you say to those good people?
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Now, did they make some mistakes in life? Of course they did.
Yeah.
Let it go.
Let it go.
So one thing is don't live in the past and beat yourself up over the head for
the things the previous versions of you did.
Uh there's a great story in the book. Uh
A guy's riding in a car with his wife and he had a great
time with the kids over the weekend are so happy and
She starts saying on Well, you know, ten years ago you were never around and you didn't do this and that and the other. And and he said something. He said, You know
That was a different person.
He said, I'm I'm not the person I was ten years ago. Hopefully I'm a better person. I've tried.
And the person ten years ago made some mistakes. I'm not the person.
And you know what she said, you're right.
You aren't that person. That's not fair.
Well, you know, we all change.
We're not the same person you were ten years ago.
And the first thing is just let go of that.
let go of that and just realize, you know, I could be the
person I need to be now. I mean I went to U C L A.
And you know, they had a pretty great basketball coach called John Wooden when I was here and
John Wooden never focused on results at all.
You know what he said?
All I focus on is the process.
And do your best.
If you do your best.
You know what?
Be proud.
I if you lose, be proud. If you win, be proud. If you don't do your best you have nothing to be proud of.
And he said he never focused on the outcomes.
The coach of Duke, same thing. Coach Gay, what does he say?
You have a terrible play.
You feel bad, you know what he says?
Next play. Next play. Next play. You have a great play. You're going like this.
Next play.
You don't jump up and down and live in the past.
You don't put yourself down about the past.
It's over.
It's over.
And one of the things I talk about is vicarious living.
One of the huge problems in our society today is vicarious living, living our lives through others, not living our own lives.
Um
The average American kid that's flunking out of school
Spends fifty five hours a week on non academic media.
Video games.
Movie, T V
Non academic media.
They're living someone else's life.
I was talking to my son about this about
wasting your time playing video games. He says oh you think video games are bad as nothing.
He said people spent over a billion watching somebody else play video games.
I mean
Uh
How vicarious is that?
You know PewDiePie is?
No.
But PewDiePie is his internet star.
People have probably spent a billion hours watching him play video games, some sarcastic Swedish guy.
Over a billion hours have been spent watching the Kardashians.
For what?
They don't care about you.
You're living someone else's life.
And one of the key points is live your own life.
And by the way, when you live in the past, you're living someone else's life too.
Yeah, the guy sitting at the bar talking about Super Bowl three.
He wasn't in Super Bowl three.
The kid was in Super Bowl three.
A young version of him fifty years ago was in Super Bowl three, not him.
Well, that's just another form of vicarious living.
He's living with what he used to be.
I I've done nine programs in my house with retiring CEOs.
And first thing I tell you.
You can live in a past.
You can't you can't sit there and say, I used to be the CEO of something.
You gotta be where you are.
You gotta find meaning now.
Yeah, what you did was great. You did it. That was nice. The previous versions of you did that, you know, good for them.
That's not you.
What are you doing now?
How do you coach people to turn the page?
I have an idea that, you know, I've written about recently called the twenty four hour rule, which is
No matter what happens in your day.
You get that day to celebrate or cry or
The next day you have a new page and it's a blank page.
And you have to move on. You can't hang on to yesterday's wins or yesterday's losses.
You just need to go forward.
That's it. You and you just breathe and you say all right, it's a new day.
Forgive yourself for whatever happened.
Make peace.
Move on. And like Coach K, next play.
Move on.
And
Don't live in the past.
And again, there's this assumption that when ever when I get this stuff, everything's gonna be okay.
What is the great Western Art Form? We've been hammered millions of times you get hammered with the same message. The Great Western art form sounds like this.
There is a person
The person is sad. Oh, very sad.
They spend money.
They buy a product and they become happy.
This is called a commercial. Have you ever seen one of those before?
How many times have you seen that message?
There was a person who was sad they spent money and became happy.
millions of times is hammered into your brain.
No wonder people get fixated on his stuff.
They're given the illusion
that somehow this is gonna make them happy.
So
As we sort of look to lead more inclusively these days, how how do you coach leaders to think about privilege, bias, and blind spots?
Well,
Being more inclusive, I think, is very important.
I am not an expert on unconscious bias.
But let me tell you what I do teach people.
My the book is dedicated my new book is dedicated to Roosevelt Thomas, who was the world's expert on diversity.
And he taught me a lot. I'm not an expert on the topic, but he did teach me a few things.
And the first thing is really different people have something called different referent groups.
They have different heroes, they look up the different people
And it doesn't mean they're good or bad.
But if you understand that
You're much less likely to hate people or discriminate against people.
The other thing he said is you always differentiate between what he called a preference
And a requirement of the job. He uses the example of Phil Jackson coaching the Chicago Bulls and Dennis Rodman.
And Dennis Rodman, you know, had yellow hair or purple hair
Phil Jackson didn't care. He led the league in rebounds.
And
Maybe Phil Jacks did or did not love his multicolored hair.
Point Rosewell made it. So what?
He didn't care.
That's his choice.
Whether I like his hair or not is irrelevant.
This is not a fashion, it's a basketball game.
And really sorting that out is another helpful way.
The other thing is though, ask people for input about yourself.
And you focus on you getting better more than just judging everybody else.
So
Peter Drucker, I was on the advisory board of the Peter Drucker Foundation for uh
Ten years.
Now, Peter Drucker, I'm gonna rank number one leadership thinker in the world. My intellect compared to Peter Drucker is that of a ten year old. I can tell you this guy was smart.
He was playing with a different deck than I was.
And um he taught me many things that
He said, you know.
In the past, the leader of the past knew how to tell.
Leader Future's gonna ask, like you said, they're gonna be inclusive, they're gonna ask why in the past it was a different world.
In the past the leader knew more about what they were doing than the followers.
In the future, the followers no more than a leader.
If I'm if I got a CEO who knows more about marketing than the marketing person, and more about finance than a finance person, more about HR than HR person, they do not have a leadership problem. They have a selection problem.
They had the wrong staff.
You want them to know more about what they're doing than you.
Well, if I manage you and you know more about what you're doing than I do, I can't tell you what to do and how to do it.
I have to be inclusive. I have to listen. I have to involve you.
Why?
'Cause I don't know enough to tell you what to do, and back to the other example, I'll probably do more harm than good.
I'll probably do more harm than good.
So shut up.
How do you think about the difference between managing and leading?
Very interesting question.
Now I just wrote an article in in Chief Executive Magazine about this very question.
And
What did I say?
Feedback on leaders is worse and worse and worse than it's ever been.
behavior of leaders is better and better and better it's ever been. Leaders today are more effective than any time in history.
I mean people say are leaders bullies today compared to the past. Hello, did you ever read a history book? Wake up. We used to have things like slaves and we used to have people building pyramids.
And we used to have kings who would chop your head off for no reason.
That was the world we were brought up in. Were leaders worse than?
Of course they were. Were they bullies in? They didn't there was no question about being a bully. How about negative feedback? Did you give'em negative feedback? What happened? They chop your head off if you gave them negative feedback.
Leaders today are much better. Here's the problem. The standards are much different.
As leaders behavior has actually improved
the expectations of leaders has actually gone up far faster than their behavior change.
So today
Companies can't tolerate bad leaders because employees won't put up with them.
In the old days nobody liked being managed by a bully, nobody liked a bad leader, nobody likes being talked down to.
Treated like an idiot?
But they had to put up with it.
You make choice.
Today people have a choice, and you know what they'll say? Goodbye, especially after Covet. Goodbye. They're not gonna put up with that.
It doesn't mean leaders are worse than they used to be.
It just means the expectations are higher than they used to be and employees have a lot more power than they used to have.
One of the things that sort of seems to have changed during the pandemic is h is how we
We give praise or sort of
uh recognize people for their contributions
in the sense of it used to be you'd run into somebody at the coffee machine or the water cooler and you can say, Hey, you did a great job on this, and now it's more scheduled meetings and back to back and not everybody's in the office. How do you think about that?
Well, I'm gonna make a couple of reflections on this because you really brought up a couple of different issues.
I'm gonna give you
All your listeners one suggestion on giving recognition.
And it works just as well in a virtual environment as it does an in person environment.
And
I've never seen it fail.
One of my clients taught me this.
He went from a six percentile and provided recognition to a ninety four percentile in one year.
Six to ninety four.
So what'd you do?
It's not too complicated. He made a list of everyone that was important in his life.
Friends, family, direct reports, colleagues.

Twice a week, once on Wednesday, once on Friday, look at the page.
Did anyone on this page do anything I should recognize? If they did, email, voicemail, say thank you, little note, nothing too fancy.
If they did if no one did anything, he didn't say anything. You didn't want to be a phony.
One year.
Six to a ninety four. That's all he did.
To me, you don't have to have fancy programs to recognize people.
You had need to have the discipline to ask yourself, should I be recognizing people? That's one thing.
A second technique is start asking people a question. Tell me what are you proud of?
So when you ask people what are they proud of, they often tell you great things you didn't even know.
And it's another great way you can recognize people.
So I I think, you know, a couple of things on giving recognition. The other thing you talked about, though, is this ongoing Zoom call after Zoom call after Zoom call thing.
One of the great leaders in our group is Margieadas. Marg was the CO of Ancestry.com, before that CO of Mattel.
She turned ancestry around, she sold it to Blackstone for four point seven five billion dollars. Amazing woman.

She said, You know, this may be the least important Zoom call of the week for me.
And maybe the most important one for them.
And what you need to do as a leader is you need to stop and breathe.
Before every different interaction breathe, stop.
If you don't, they all start to blur together.
You need to breathe. You need to s where am I?
What's important now?
Who's here?
Breathing, breathing, breathing. Slow down. Start over.
Slow down.
Start over
Slow down, start over.
If you don't
Everything just becomes a blur.
Is is the nature of how we communicate with people, I mean, the the tools that we're using has changed, but where where do leaders go wrong with communication in person and over Zoom?
And what are the ways that we can correct that? Well, I think the best way to improve our communication with people is not to ask me for suggestions, but to ask them.
So let's say you want to do a better job of communicating with Mary.
You know the best person in the world to help you then?
Might be.
It might actually be married.
Ask them.
Yeah, yeah.
I can give you generic answers, but that may or may not fit your issues.
Ask the real people that you work with.
Now one thing I talk about in the new book is empathy.
And it's related to this concept.
Empathy is an interesting thing.
Up until a couple of years ago I just saw empathy is a good thing.
Sounds good, fuzzy, warm.
He has lots of empathy. I thought, Well, that sounds good.
And s I started studying empathy, I realized it's sometimes good.
But too much empathy can be a disaster.
So I talk about four types of empathy, and it's good to look at all four.
And it's back to your question about others.
And connect it to them.
The first type of empathy is called the empathy of understanding.
Now, empathy simply means putting yourself in the other person's frame of mind and understanding the world from their perspective. Well, or feeling the world for the way they feel it or all that.
The first empathy is the empathy of understanding understand you.
Understand why you feel the way you do. Well that's good, you think, very positive.
Could be good, could be bad.
It could be used to help you.
It could easily be used to manipulate you.
Let me give you an example.
Uh.
What was her beer?
It spent hundreds of millions of dollars on ads
With a little dog and a horse.
Now, why do they do that?
How many men actually go into the bar and say, you know, I want a Budweiser beer? Why?
I love that little doggy and the horse.
So cute, I love'em.
Zero.
How many buy beer because of the dog and a horse?
Lots.
They're not spending that money for no reason.
They know the trigger.
They know that that little story is gonna have you buy beer or they wouldn't be spending the hundreds of millions of bucks.
So understanding where other people are coming from
Could be good.
could be used to help them.
Could be manipulative.
could be used to trick them or manipulate them. The second type of empathy is the empathy of feeling.
You know, I feel your joy, I feel your pain.
Could be good. It makes you understand people better, connect with them.
Could be a disaster.
I'm the coach of the head of the Saint George Children's Hospital.
You can see kids die of cancer every day.
He gets to see their parents.
He can't carry that home.
He can't live with that pain.
If he does, he can't do his job.
So it could be good.
It could be bad.
The next is the same thing, the empathy of caring. You think caring is good. Well, caring can be very positive. I care about you, I try to help you.
Can be very negative.
I have a very fun example in the book about the empathy of caring with of all people a hedge fund manager.
Now you think the last person to worry about caring about people too much would be a hedge fund manager, you know, the stereotype of a hedge manager. Everybody doesn't care about people, they would be at the top of the charts.
This is one of the most famous hedge fund managers in the world.
And he's being interviewed by another hedge fund manager.
I'm just sitting there.
'Cause I was a previous speaker before him.
I'm just sitting there kind of just curious to listen.
And he asked the guy
Why don't you have a fund anymore?
And uh
The big guy said.
I'm not as good as I used to be.
The other guys, well w why not?
He said, Well, you know, I've made
obviously tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars for people, but I've also lost tens or hundreds of billions. I probably made fifty one or fifty two percent and lost forty eight or forty nine. That's pretty good.
And obviously I have a few billion left over for me. That's pretty good.
He said I never cared.
I would just make investments and I was an an analyst and play a game and
I was good at it.
And he said, One day I started caring.
I started thinking, you know, wow, this is a he this is somebody's
retirement account and
Your healthcare.
They need this money and
I started caring, and you said it became much less effective.
Afraid to take risks.
See, I don't invest other people's money anymore.
I just invest my own.
If I lose, I lose, I win, I win.
Not that big of a deal.
I don't invest money.
Because I'm always good.
Medical doctors.
You can't operate on your family. Why?
Care too much.
care too much. Sometimes you gotta let go of that caring.
And then the final is empathy, uh the vital part of empathy is doing.
I not only maybe know what you're coming from or care or feel your pain, I'm doing something to help you.
Could be good.
But one of the people in our group, she said
I'm a fixer.
I fix everybody else's problems, I create dependency.
They become like children and they don't take responsibility'cause I'm always taking care of them.
So if we look at empathy, the key, and this goes back to recognizing people how and when
Is
Then I talk about the term in the book called singular empathy.
What does that mean?
I'm gonna be who I need to be.
for the person I'm with now.
I'm gonna be who I need to be now. I'm not carrying around the past.
I'm not sitting there trying to prove how heroic I am.
I'm gonna be who I need to be now. And one of the guys in our group, Telly Leung, I don't know if you ever saw the play Aladdin.
But anyway, he played Aladdin on Broadway for three years, literally a thousand performances, he did Aladdin.
So I as telly.
How'd you do it night after night after night?
He said I had to become the rope.
Now he said I'm gay.
But I had to fall in love with that princess.
Yeah, every night.
And
The way I motivated myself is you said when I was a little boy
I was eight years old and I went to a play.
And it was so touching and
singing and music and lights and I just loved it.
And he said, Every night I get it there on stage, you know what I think?
That eight year old kid.
For you.
This is for you, kid.
And
Maybe I've done the play a thousand times.
But the kid has not seen it a thousand times.
Wonderful story.
So I have him work with people at the children's hospital to help him.
And let me give you an irony. I'm working in a children's hospital in San Diego.
With him as volunteers.
And he's teaching a clas we're teaching this class about empathy.
And I said, Well I'm sure you must have had you medical doctors have had, you know, lots of training about this topic. You know what the answer was?
Zero.
Never been trained at all on this topic.
And they're around nine kids.
So you know
You really need to think what does empathy mean?
When is it useful? When is it not useful? And they were so appreciative.
Do you even have somebody try to teach him about this? To your point about the the first part of empathy there, we can understand without agreeing.
with somebody else too, and I think there's a nuance there where we can see the world through somebody else's eyes.
You can smell what they smell and

That's right.
That's right.
That's right.
And you can
be in touch with someone, but you don't have to agree with them. And also you can't live there.
See the people I coach
They may play like nine roles or ten roles in a day.
I mean they wake up, they have to do a performance appraisal, they have to make a board presentation, they have to go to a funeral.
They have to
uh have an award ceremony, you know.
All day they're in these different roles.
And they just can't carry it with them.
They can't they have to let go of that previous role.
I gotta be I gotta be where I am now.
I I'm not
I'm in an award ceremony, okay.
Somebody died.
That's not now.
It's not fair to that person who's getting the award.
Then I'm still at the funeral.
I'm not at the funeral anymore.
I'm here.
I'm here.
Where do I need to be here? When now?
And it's very hard to do this. It takes a lot of discipline to do this.
But it's really a sign of someone who's a great leader.
that it has the discipline to do that.
That goes to what you said earlier about the the woman, I forget her name, sorry, who was on the Zoom call and said, you know, this isn't the most important call for me, but it might be for somebody else. Yeah, and frequently
A lot of people don't understand this for the people I coach. You think their jobs are glamorous.
A lot of their jobs are boring.
They're listening to presentation after presentation after presentation.
Everything that's been sanitized. They've already seen everything twenty times. They probably know what the person's gonna say.
Yet they need to be upbeat and positive and appear interested.
That's not easy to do.
One of my favorite lessons from you is uh you've said in the past that there's three words that kill conversations, no, but and however.
And
I'd love to talk about what impact these words have and how do we learn to stop using them.
This is a great tool to help you be a better listener and be more open minded.
Just never start a sentence with three words. No, but or however.
If you talk to me and I say no
First word, no. Shut you're wrong. But what does but mean? Disregard everything you said, just erases whatever you said. A terrible habit.
So one of my clients is stubborn and opinionated.
And by the way.
My clients
If they do this, I find them twenty dollars.
So he says but and the money goes to the charity.
So he says, you know, and now you think twenty dollars, what do they care about twenty dollars are rich people.
Yeah, you're right.
A lot of them are men.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm gonna help you.
Somebody said Rich old men.
Would ritual men like to lose
Small amounts of money? No.
Rich old men don't like to lose any money, I can tell you. They hate losing money. So it's amazing how well this works. And the money goes to a charity they choose.
Like one game one.
you know, twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, hundred. He said, This is expensive.
I said you made thirty five million bucks last year.
There's twenty dollars going to a little homeless child.
Shut up.
Shut up.
The money.
Oh he's in your right fifty.
It's embarrassing. And and one of the guys I'm coaching is Mr. Jim Row. Then Mr. Jim Row's a billionaire, just a great guy. He lives in India. He donated Bill Gates flies to India with Warren Buffett to talk rich people into giving money to the poor.
Nice idea, right?
So my friend Mr G M Rao donates three hundred and forty million dollars to poor people in India out of his pocket.
Very generous, man.
Well

What happens is I'm coaching him.
Money goes to the same charity.
Yeah.

Forty dollars. Sixty dollars. You know what he said, this is expensive.


Now I said, Well, excuse me, time out. You just donated three hundred and forty million dollars to this charity two days ago.
And now you're telling me twenty dollars is expensive. What is wrong with you?
He goes, Oh I I forgot. I forgot.
Well I forgot. Sure you forget. How you forget donated three hundred and forty million bucks. Let me tell you the difference.
My friend.
Standing up in front of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and every newspaper in India.
Writing a personal check for three hundred and forty million dollars and giving it to poor people. You know what that's called in life? Winning.
Winning
Twenty dollars.
Losing.
He didn't care about twenty dollars.
You didn't care about three hundred million dollars.
What do you care about though?
Winning.
It's
It's hard for winners not to win. So I've raised thousands and thousands of dollars doing this with my clients. And it's it just works great. Uh the New York Post wrote a story
About my book.
And uh what got you here won't get you there when I was young.
Yeah.
Yes.
Interviewer had a real chip on his shoulder.
Business people are jerks and they have to hire some clown like me to help'em and you know, they're all losers and idiots.
So after about five minutes I said, You think they're bad? You're terrible.
Oh y every sentence you start as no button, however, all you do is argue and prove you're right.
He said, Well, that's wrong. I said, Well starting now, any time you do this, I'm gonna say twenty bucks. I said, Well, but twenty.
Forty, sixty, eighty.
I think it was
No.
I said, Well you said no. He said, Well I I did not say no.
Yes, you did.
So I didn't.
Oh you did.
Well I did not.
I said, Oh you're sure. I'm positive, he said.
That little uh box there. That's a tape recorder.
Tape recorder.
It has a rewind button.
Why don't we just hit the rewind button and hear you? He said, Yeah, let's do this. So he gets the rewind and he hears him, Oh no.
And then his story gets better. Then he goes home and he listens to the tape.
He goes, what an ass, right? And then he talks to it gets worse. Then he says to his wife, I don't do this to you, do I? He wrote the nicest story, though.
'Cause he wrote the story, he said, This story I was gonna talk about what a bunch of jerks they were.
Well, maybe I should look in the mirror.
How do we learn to be
disagreeable then without
Uh or how do we learn to disagree without being disagreeable?
Like this is a hardware default where we're saying this.
And we're having a thought, we're thinking in real time, and we're not taking a breath.
Now breathing, breathing, breathing. What did you just say?
This is hard wired as if somehow this is a genetic
Unchangeable variable.
Don't think that way.
It's not hardwired.
This can change.
Anybody can change.
As long as you say it's hard wired, why even bother?
If it's genetic, there's nothing you're gonna do about it. If it's hardwired, you can't change it.
We can all change.
So don't think hardwired or in the DNA or any of those phrases. We can all change.
Yeah.
I'm gonna teach you something that Peter Drucker taught me.
And you can share this what I'm sharing with everyone who's listening.
If you learn nothing from me but this one little thing.
You're gonna have a happier life.
You're gonna deal with differences better.
And you're gonna be better at influencing the world. Are you ready for this great learning point from Peter Drucker? Are we ready?
Number one.
Our mission in life is to make a positive difference, not to prove we're smart and not to prove we're right.
We are not here on earth to prove how smart we are.
We are not here on earth to prove how right we are, we are here to make a positive difference in life.
If we do not make a positive difference, it is absolutely irrelevant how smart or right we are.
Number two.
Every decision in life is made by the person who has the power to make the decision.
Make
Peace.
With
That
Not the smartest person, a best person, a fair person, a logical person, a wonderful person, a rational person, or even a sane person.
Every decision is made by the person who has the power to make the decision. Make peace with that.
If I need to influence you
And you have the power to make the decision.
And I need to influence you to make a positive difference. There is one word to describe you.
That word is called customer.
There's one word to describe me, that word is called salesperson.
Customers do not have to buy.
Salespeople have to sell.
You sell what you can sell.
You change what you can change.
If you can sell it, you sell it.
If you can't if you can change it, you change it. If you cannot sell it and you cannot change it

Ah let it go. Let it go. And if you don't like it.
Leave.
But as long as you're cashing that check at the end of the month.
You sell what you can sell?
You change what you can change.
And you make peace.
By the way, I have repeated this
Thousands of times.
to people with MBAs from Harvard, CEOs of multi billion dollar companies.
I had just repeated this lesson over.
And oh so few of us ever get this deeply.
One guy.
Uh I'm gonna see him tonight, in fact. My buddy Fred is here in in Nashville tonight.
He's visiting his his friend's a great success story.
So Fred's an old friend of mine.
Fred was CEO of a company, was owned by a company called KKR.
private equity. You know what KKR is?
Anyway cake are New York people, uh would you say uh the squishy people are a little bit bottom line oriented. So Fred is the CO, he's he's forty one at the time.
So he's the CO of this KKR company. You know what Fred says about KKR?
Forty one year old young Fred CEO, he says, Oh, they can't tell me what to do.
Fred. Forty one year old Fred.
Oh no, can't tell me See I'm CEO.
They cannot tell me what to do, I'm the CEO, you see.
Yeah, Henry Gravitz, who's worth uh billions of dollars, can't tell Fred what to do. Sorry, Fred. Let's grow up, son.
So anyway, they figure out how much it costs to get rid of Fred.
Couple million bucks.
They don't even care about the couple million bucks.
It's a pain in the butt. Now they gotta hire somebody new, start over. Oh they're in a foul mood.
So they they have me talk to Fred.
So I told Fred this whole Peter Drucker thing about the decisions and power and all that stuff. So Fred says, Well, they can't tell me what to do. I said, Fred,
I'm gonna help you, buddy.
Is their money, you moron?

No I said Fred.
I said, Fred, not only can they tell you what to do, you know what, Fred, I'm gonna tell you exactly what to do.
And Fred, if you do exactly what I tell you, I may save your sorry butt.
If you do not do exactly what I tell you, I gotta go back to daddy and mommy in New York and say I can't help little Freddy.
And then Fred, I say, he needs a better coach. Fred, there isn't a better coach, is there? You're just screwed, aren't you, Fred? So what's it gonna be, Fred?


Fred.
You know what he did?
He he salutes the flag and says thank you.
That was
Twelve years he was a CO of that company, did a great job, never had a problem, got along with corporate very well.
He just had a little bit of ego issue.
And he would tell you that conversation changed his life.
By the way.
I don't know exactly, but I g I got paid approximately one hundred and fifty thousand dollars for that two hour conversation.
Well you know what? They didn't care.
Save them a whole lot more than one hundred and fifty thousand bucks.
Yeah

Ha ha ha!
Oh!
And ironically, Fred and I are going out tonight. I'm in Nashville now and Fred's kids playing a rock band.
So I'm gonna see Fred after I talk to you and we're gonna go out and see his kids in a rock band tonight.
You you brought up decision making a a little while ago, and that's a key component of sort of
uh leadership. And I I'm curious as to what you've learned about making better decisions that most people miss. Oh making better decisions. Well the first thing I've learned is the decision maker makes a decision.
And let's talk about when you are the decision maker.
If you are the decision maker, this Peter Drucker thing still applies.
Now I'm the decision maker.
And you come to me.
And let's say we disagree.
All right, what do I do? I breathe.
And I think okay.
We disagree.
I can either do it my way or his way.
Um
If it's close, my advice is probably do it your way.
You're more committed, you believe in what you're doing, and fine. Assuming it's
Pretty close. But let's assume I think this is really serious and we disagree and I don't want to do it your way.
That's fine.
That's fine. You know what I said?
I'd say, you know, Mr. X?
Um
In this case.
I wanna do
Decision why for the following reasons, which we've discussed at
you want to do decision X for the following reasons, which we've also discussed.
And you're a very smart man.
And you've got some good rationale behind what you're talking about. In this case I've made a decision.
I still want to do why.
You say I disagree.
I say, Well, in this case, we do disagree, and I respect you, and I still want to do why.
You say, Well, I think you're wrong.
You know what I'm saying?
Maybe I am.
And by the way, if I'm not wrong this time, I'm gonna be wrong sometime.
I respect you.
I value your opinion, I've thought about it, and I've made the decision and here it is.
and I want you to execute it in the best way you can. If you have any problems, tell me what they are and
We'll discuss it.
Yet are we gonna do this has been decided.
As opposed to let me point out why I'm right and you're wrong.
Which is a complete waste of time.
And that's most people's default sort of reaction to that, right? Is to prove that you're smart, prove that you're adding value, prove that you're right.
For what?
And by the way, here's the point.
Let's give me in this case study the leader the benefit of the doubt.
Let's say there's an eighty percent chance my decision is a better chance.
Better decision.
There's still a twenty percent chance your decision is better.
Now my decision is in theory the right decision.
On the other hand, there's a twenty percent chance I'm wrong.
And your decision is a better decision. Well that's life. It's not like engineering school. We're just guessing here.
We're all just guessing.
And sometimes I'm gonna make a good guess and sometimes a bad guess.
And sometimes I make the right decision and it didn't work.
Because of other variables I can't control.
I made the best decision at the time and it still didn't work. That's the way life is the way life happens.
Let's switch subjects a little bit and talk about environment, which affects our unconscious mind and creates sort of invisible defaults in a way.
If we don't create or control it, it controls us. How do you think about people's environment when creating the best position for success?
Well, I wrote a book about this one called Triggers.
Triggers. Now by the way, I this book I'm just doing now, The Earn Life is number forty nine.
And I've done six bestsellers, three
New York Times bestsellers one megabig.
And I have
Also, though I have uh
published forty two books that were purchased only by my mother, my father, and my relatives. So
Ha
Hopefully this one will get purchased by a few people.
So I've I've sold about two and a half million books, so somebody bought a lot of'em, but a lot most of them nobody bought. But this book triggers I talk about that.
As we go through life, there's an argument.
I control it or it controls me.
That's a great
existential debate of life. Two schools of thought. When we look at two dimensions, one dimension is the environment controls me.
I am controlled by triggers in my environment. And what is a trigger?
Any stimulus may impact our behavior. It could be a sight, a sound, a person, a thought.
Any stimulus impacts my behavior is called a trigger.
So one school of thought is we are controlled by our environment. B. F. Skinner, the brilliant Harvard psychologist, thought that. The other school of thought is we control it.
So let's talk about four dimensions. Dimension one is low on
Low on control by others, low on control by self. Chaos theory.
And you know, some smart people believe life is basically random chaos.
Number two is
I control it.
Now there's a ridiculous book called The Secret. Did you ever read that book, The Secret?
No.
It's it's a it's ridiculous book. It sold seven million copies or more.
And the essence of the book is the secret is if I envision it, it will happen.
See, that's it. That's the secret. I'll tell you what the secret is. If I sold seven million copies, if I envision it, it will happen.
And they have all this studies they've done.
Well like Jimmy
One to win the basketball team.
basketball game, no championship. And he envisioned and happened.
And Mary wanted to be a movie star and she envisioned it would happen.
And Harry had cancer and he envisioned it and went away and it did.
By the way, every story in the book is true.
Here's the problem.
They didn't interview the dead people.
They didn't interview the thousand waitresses in Hollywood who envisioned being movie stars, but
And they didn't interview the basketball team that lost.
From a mathematical perspective, this is called the survivor bias.
Well, you know, they did this, they are successful.
Yeah, you did this too, and you're a complete failure.
So, you know, if you envision it, it will happen. Well, if you envision things, you probably increase the odds are gonna happen.
But there's certainly no guarantee it's gonna happen because you envision it. I mean that's to me childish.
The opposite is
You have no control.
And B. F. Skinner, the famous Harvard psychologist, wrote a book Beyond Freedom and Dignity years ago, very famous book. He said, We're just strictly creatures that are a function of our environment. We're like a stimulus response machine.
What I believe is
We control it and it controls us.
To a degree we are controlled by the world.
And to a degree we do make a difference ourselves.
So I I think the purpose of the book is just to make move the scale a little bit.
So you're a little bit more in control than the world's a little bit less in control.
And the first thing you do is you realize
When am I being controlled by the environment?
When?
And then you start becoming aware of it.
And say what can I do?
So that these
unwanted triggers change my life. Because what happens is we all wake up with this
Dream of what we're gonna do every day.
Yet things happen.
And these triggers usually don't push us toward becoming the person we want to become.
They usually push us away from that person. For example, you're gonna go on the diet.
You smell the bacon.
You see the cake.
You know.
You're gonna work out. Well you see the T V show.
You you know, you get distracted.
Things happen.
And so it takes a lot of discipline to go through life.
And just be aware of
When am I controlling it?
And what is it controlling me?
And by the way, a lot of it is unconscious, the beer example.
You know, you're not aware of the fact that Budwives are sitting there in your brain.
Making you want to buy beer.
They are.
You're just not aware of it.
And the more we're open to the fact that we can be manipulated by the environment.
the less likely we are to be controlled by the environment.
The more we deny the fact that we can be controlled by the environment, the easier it is to be controlled.
Are there specific examples or changes that you've seen people make to their their operating environment, so to speak, that have a big impact on their
ability to lead or
be the person that they they want to be.
I am going to share a tool with you. Are you ready?
I am now gonna teach you and your listeners something that takes
Three minutes a day.
It costs absolutely nothing.
And will help anyone listening get better at almost anything.
Some people are skeptical. Now, three minutes a day costs nothing. Help me get better at almost anything. This sounds ridiculous, too good to be true.
Half the people that start doing this quit.
Within two weeks.
And they do not quit because it does not work.
They quit because it does work.
What I'm going to teach you next is incredibly easy to understand. It is incredibly difficult to do.
I've had a person call me on the phone almost every day for twenty five years.
To make sure I do this.
Why?
Somebody asked me, why do you have someone call you on the phone every day? Don't you know the theory about how to change behavior?
I wrote the theory about how to change behavior.
That's why I have a person call me on the phone every day.
What I'm gonna teach you next.
My name is Marsholdsmith,
I got ranked number one leadership thinker and coach in the whole world.
I have someone call me on the phone every day to make sure I do this stuff.
Why?
I am too cowardly to do any of the things I teach by myself.
I'm too undisciplined to do any of the things I teach by myself.
I need help, but
And
It's okay.
Who are we kidding here?
We all need help.
Get over that ego stuff, you know, I willpower. Yeah.
Willpower grossly overrated.
Yeah, willpower. Good luck on that one.
We all need help. Who are we kidding? I need help. You need help. How many of the top ten tennis players in the world have a coach? Ten.
They need help.
Yeah, how does this work?
Get out of spreadsheet.
On one column you write down a series of questions that represent what is most important in your life. Could be friends, family, health.
Whatever it is for you, work. You write it down.
Every question must be answered with a yes, a no or a number.
Yes is recorded as a one, no is a zero or some number.
I mean
You have seven boxes across, one for every day of the week. So every day you fill out the little form.
At the end of the week you get a report card.
I will warn you in advance the report card at the end of the week will not be as beautiful as the corporate values plaque you see stuck up on a wall.
So I've been doing this for twenty five years. You do this every day, and what you quickly learn, you learn that life
is incredibly easy to talk.
And life is incredibly difficult to live.
You do this every day, you're not looking to those talk values. Those are beautiful, the talk values.
Looking at those live values.
Not so pretty.
Let me give you a couple of examples of questions for me.
For example.
One of mine is How many times yesterday did you try to prove you were right when it wasn't worth it?
I don't see too many zeros on my scorecard.
Kinda hard for that old professor not to be right all the time.
How about you? Have you ever tried to be right just a little too much on game once or twice?
Yeah. More often than I'd like to admit. Another one. How many angry or destructive comments did you make about people yesterday?
Well we don't
We don't want other people stabbing us in the back.
Why we start them in a book?
How many steps did you take? How many push ups? How many sit ups? How much do you weigh? Did you say to something nice for your wife, your son, your daughter, your grandchildren? How many minutes did you write? Those books don't write themselves.
Just questions about life every day.
This is hard.
It's very hard to do. Anybody says this is easy, you've never done this.
You tell me it's easy, you've never done it. It's not easy. It's hard.
I work with some of the most successful people in the world. I was just coaching one of the most successful people in the world.
Last week
He was supposed to do this every day for two weeks.
He made it seven days out of fourteen.
Now he has a simultaneous
M D and PhD with honors from Harvard in anthropology.
A normal in five years. A normal human gets a PhD in anthropology in Harvard in eight years. He over in five years got an MD at the same time.
You know what?
He couldn't get it up for three minutes.
Every day.
to do this after he committed to do it.
Why?
It's hard.
It's embarrassing, it's humbling.
And we did this thing over Covid.
I'm gonna share six basic questions that everybody had to talk about. They talked about in every meeting they would stand up and share their scores.
It's like alcoholics anonymous for successful people.
They would stand up and share those scores, right? And they're often not pretty.
I'm gonna give you the six questions I recommend for everyone. Are you ready?
You just do these six questions every day, you're gonna have a better life.
Question number one, every day, evaluate yourself on a one to ten scale.
And every question starts with, did I do my best to?
There's a reason for that.
It doesn't even say you succeeded.
You just said, Did you even try?
You see, if I said did you do and your answer is no, you blame the environment.
It's their fault.
Well when I said did you do your best to, guess what? Uh uh
You gotta look in the mirror.
Me, me, me. Not so pretty.
The first one is did I do my best every day to set clear goals?
Well you th that sounds pretty simple.
All these big deal people I'm used to dealing with, they must get a perfect score on that every day.
No.
No.
They wake up in the morning.
Email
Phone call.
One guy said, How did I do about setting clear goals on a one to ten scale? Uh zero.
Unless my goal was respond to crap all day, which I guess that's I did a good job of that. That was it.
All I did was respond to crap all day.
Question two.
Did I do my best to make progress toward achieving my goals?
Well, every day we set up for these plan when we do bother to make the plans, we have these grandiose plans about the day. We don't plan on anything going wrong or any distractions. We make these plans as if we live in some dreamland.
where everything today for once in the world is gonna work out. It never does.
And people get lost and confused and they forget what the plans were and
It's not so easy. Number three.
that I do my best to find meaning every day.
R than wait for the world to give me meaning.
Did I do my best to make my life meaningful every day?
Not in some abstraction or theory in terms of the real humans I'm dealing with.
Number four, did I do my best to be happy.
Did I do my best to be happy?
No.
It's amazing.
Most people
Often never think to be happy.
You're just too busy doing crap.
So three medical doctors in my book Trigger's I interview.
All individually,

They all have IQs of a civilian.
And I said, How'd you do on the average day on did I do my best to be happy? Don't say the answer. Never don't on me to try to be happy.
They're medical doctors.
Say, did it dawn on you you're gonna die?
Did they cover that in medical school, that death thing? Did they bring that one up? Oh yeah, they covered that death thing.
I said, you think this is a silly or trivial question? I said, No, it's an important question. I
Just was too busy achieving things to think of it.
Well
average person did I do my best to be happy today on a one to ten scale, five point five out of ten.
If they were in school, these people got a fifty five out of a hundred, they would be ashamed.
Then when I tell him the test I gave you is about a thousand times more important than a bozo test you took in school.
Raise the score.
The next one is do did I do my best to build positive relationships?
That is actually harder at work than it is at home a lot of times.
You have a hard day at work, you go home, you're tired, you just lose it.
Forget about the people around you.
Just lose it.
And then the final one is did I do my best to be fully engaged and present every day?
Did I do my best?
One of my personal questions is what percent of the day was I present, engaged?
average day I give myself about a thirty.
Probably line to give myself a thirty.
Probably don't even deserve that.
Most of the time we're not engaged, we're not present.
Uh
Uh.
You're just wandering around.
Stumbling around through life, you know, trying to
I mean it's one of those days you you say you you you wake up in the morning you come home and say, What'd you do today? I don't know.
You don't even know what you did.
Or or the my favorite sort of uh recollection of this is sort of you you interrupt somebody watching T V on a commercial and you say, What are you watching? and they're like, I don't know.
Yeah.
They're staring at it. They don't even know what they're watching.
Yeah.
No one one of the guys said who's in my little group is a great basketball star. This is a great story.
So one of his things was he wants to be fully engaged with his wife,'cause his wife says you're checked out too much. Now you're physically here, but you know, mentally you're not here.
He's gonna do better.
So one day his wife yeah, it was terrible, terrible, terrible.
So I talked to him and said, Well what was the problem? He said, Well I was tired.
Very tired. I've been working out all day. I was tired, you see.
I said that's very interesting. I I went to the national basketball championship finals there and I watched you played that game. I paid a thousand bucks for a seat and so did my son. We watched you and you're running up and down at a court like a ban sheep.
Now I said, Were you tired? He said, I was exhausted.
I said, Did you go to the coach and say, Hey coach?
I'm tired.
Take me out.

Nope. Nope.
He said, I never told the coach I was tired my entire life.
I said you think your wife was impressed with I'm Tired?



Not so much.
Not so much. Well, sometimes it's harder.
It's harder to do this stuff at home sometimes,'cause at home we just
Check out and lose it.
You you mentioned something earlier about Tannis and It's room.
Triggered something in my mind about we talked earlier about taking a breath before you respond and thinking.
And then as you mentioned tennis, I was like tennis players have a ritual between points.
Basketball players have a ritual at the
The free throw line.
What they're really doing is that's their version of this breath and that ritual counters our human nature or instinctive sort of
Tiger Woods, same ritual before he puts.
Same thing. A little rich what does that ritual do?
Calm down.
Calm down.
I'm putting
Remember what am I doing?
You know?
Forget about the score.
Forget about the past, forget about the previous shot.
Forget about the club championship.
No.
Hit the shot.
I think that's super important.
Um I wanna end with um one final question here.
Marshall, thank you for your time.
How do you define success?
I define success is as you go through life.
You have alignment between one
Your higher aspirations in life.
Two
What you're trying to achieve.
And three.
Your enjoyment of the process of life itself.
regardless of the outcomes.
So as I journeyed through life
I've got a higher purpose.
I'm doing my best to achieve stuff that's connected to that.
And I enjoy the process of what I'm doing.
I won.
That's it.
Let me finish now with my best advice for everybody. Are you ready?
I want everybody listening to take a deep breath.
Ah imagine that you're ninety five years old and you're just getting ready to die. You're on that deathbed.
Here comes your last breath.

Right before you take the last breath, you're given a beautiful gift.
the ability to go back in time and talk to the person who is listening to me right now.
The ability to help that person be a better leader
Much more important, the ability to help the person have a better life.
What advice would the wise ninety five year old you
Who knows what mattered in life and what didn't and what was important and what wasn't.
What advice would that wise old person have for the you?
It's listening to me right now.
Whatever you're thinking now.
Do that.
terms of a performance appraisal, that's the only one's gonna matter.
That old person says you did the right thing.
You did the right thing.
That old person says you made a mistake, you made a mistake. You do not have to impress anybody but that old person.
Some friends of mine interviewed old folks who were dying and got to ask him this question, What advice would you have? On the personal side
Three themes.
Theme number one, three words.
Be happy now.
Not next week, not next month, not next year. Not I'll be happy when I achieve this stuff or when I get this money.
Be happy now.
We we we all have the same win.
That ninety five year old person that person looking at death, that is win. We all got exactly the same win here.
Learning point from old people, I got so busy chasing what I didn't have, I couldn't see what I did have.
And I had everything.
Well, many people listening to us scholar you have your health and
You have families and people love you and
Some money and
Probably almost everywhere listening compared to me, you have youth.
You got use.
Don't get so busy chasing what you don't have, you can't see that.
Learning point number two is friends and family.
Never get so busy climbing that corporate ladder, you forget the people you love.
That happens way too much.
And when you're ninety five years old and you look around your deathbed, none of your co workers wave and goodbye.
You realize these people are kind of important. They're the only ones here today.
And number three, if you have a dream, go for it. Because you don't go for it when you're thirty, you may not when you're forty or eighty. It doesn't have to be a big one, maybe a small one.
Go to New Zealand, speak Spanish, play the guitar. Other people think your dream is goofy. Who cares? Not their dream.
It's not their life, it's your life.
I had an embarrassing experience a few years ago. I was teaching my class and I said, Go to New Zealand, speak Spanish.
Guy raises his hand and says.
We're in Spain, you idiot.
We all speak Spanish.
That's
Business advice isn't much different. Number one, life is short. Have fun.
Number two, do whatever you can do to help people. The main reason to help people has nothing to do with money or status or getting ahead.
The main reason to help people is much deeper.
The ninety five year old you will be proud of you because you did and disappointed if you do not.
And if you do not believe this is true, interview any CEO who has retired. I've interviewed very many and ask him a question.
Please tell me.
What are you proud of?
None ever told me how big their office was, how much money they made.
All they ever talked about's the people they helped.
Fine is also the same. Go for it.
Your world's changing, your industry changing. Do what you think is right. May not win, at least you tried.
Old people, we seldom regret the risk we take and fail.
We usually regret the risk we failed to take.
And finally.
As I've grown older, I guess my expectations and way have gone down and down, but impact's gone up and up. Why?
But worrying about what I'm not gonna change.
Let me give you my goal and a little time together here. Pretty simple.
Let's imagine a few people have a little better life.
Listening to our conversation.
That's good enough for me.
I'm declaring victory here.
Mm.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
The Knowledge Project is produced by the team at Farnum Street.
I'd love to get your advice on how to make this the most valuable podcast you listen to.
Email me at shane at fs.blog
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