Greg McKeown:
Welcome back, everybody, to The Greg McKeown Podcast. I am here with you on this journey to learn to grow so that we can accomplish our highest contribution in life, our mission in life. Along the way, one of the things I have learned is that if we only focus on performing, our performance suffers. That idea is not new to me, but that precise language is from Eduardo Briceño. He’s our guest today in part one of a two-part interview.
Before Eduardo became an author, a TED speaker, and a thought leader in his own right, his life was totally changed, as was mine, by the research of Carol Dweck. Carol Dweck is currently a professor at Stanford and formerly of Columbia, who is best known for the growth mindset. That idea that intelligence itself is not fixed, that it can grow, that we can become more intelligent after years of helping to take those ideas out into the world, out into organizations.
Eduardo is on his own journey, and it’s a journey that he’s inviting us to go on. By the end of today’s episode, you will be able to grow your skill level and your output simultaneously, and for the long term, let’s get to it.
It is such a delight to see this podcast growing, reaching evermore people. It’s now consistently right at the top of the education podcasts in America at the very top of the Self-Improvement podcasts, and that’s because of you. And I’m so grateful to be on this journey with you. I encourage you to subscribe to the podcast if you’re new to it and to bring other people along with you on this journey.
Eduardo, welcome to the podcast.
Eduardo Briceño:
Thank you, Greg. It’s great to be here. Thank you for having me.
Greg McKeown:
You write that it’s one of the biggest lies we tell ourselves. The harder you work, the better you’ll do, but a lot of the time, working harder doesn’t yield better results. It just leaves us exhausted. Why is that?
Eduardo Briceño:
Well, you’ve written quite a bit about that, and I’ve learned a lot about that too from you, so thank you for your work on that. But what I realized at some point is I was working really, really hard and thinking that was the path to learning and improvement and success. And what I was missing, and I’ve realized a lot of people are missing, is that there’s two different forms of effort. There’s effort to perform and execute and get things done, and effort to learn and to discover and to connect. And I call those the performance zone and the learning zone. And they’re both really important, and I think a lot of us get stuck in our to-do list in our busyness and just getting things done as best as we know how, trying to minimize mistakes, and that leads us to stagnation.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, I love this. It sounds so simple, but this idea of there being a learning zone and a performance zone and that if you spend too much time in the performance zone, then you think you are going to increase productivity over time, but you’re not getting better at your craft, whatever that craft is. Am I understanding it right?
Eduardo Briceño:
Absolutely. And that’s what I call the performance paradox, that if we focus only on performing, our performance suffers. It’s counterintuitive, but it is the case. We get myopic thinking into just what’s in front of us, and we miss out on discovering better ways of achieving our most important goals.
Greg McKeown:
I see it in my mind as some kind of figure eight where, depending, you could have a tiny first sphere, and then the second sphere is massive because you’re constantly just in execution mode, doing mode, activity mode, action mode. What’s the right balance in your research? Is it 50/50? How does somebody figure out the optimal level?
Eduardo Briceño:
Well, yeah, there’s the idea of alternating between the two zones, and then there’s the idea of doing both together. And I think for most of us, we can get things done in a way that’s also going to lead to improvement.
So when you look at what’s going on in the brains of people when they’re problem-solving, for example. For some people, their brain is paying attention only to the things they do right. They feel good when they get things done. So when they’re getting information, did they get this problem right? That’s what they’re most interested in. That’s what the blood flow and the electricity in the brain is happening, and their brain is not active at a different time, which is when the people who improve they pay attention to whether they got this problem right or wrong, but they pay even more attention when they make mistakes and what they’re getting information about what they did wrong and they think about what they did wrong. And because of that, then you can see that in the subsequent problems, they’re more successful.
So everybody, if you look at everybody from the outside, they’re just solving problems, but what’s happening in their brain is different. And so, as we go about our days, we can spend the vast majority of your time to answer your question, I think for most of us, 80% of our time, 90% of our time, we can be getting things done. But when we’re surprised by something, we can pay attention to it. When we make a mistake, we can pay attention to it; we can solicit feedback to get feedback on our work and our behavior. We can always be trying something different, not just doing the same thing in the same way. And that’s what I call learning while doing. And for most of us in most of our contexts, that’s the case. If you look at some crafts, like if you’re a professional athlete or a Cirque de Soleil performer, then you can separate those two zones a lot more. You have a very clear, pure performance zone and a very clear, pure learning zone.
And you would think in those crafts that the people who engage in deliberate practice or the learning zone eight or 12 hours a day are the best. But actually, the research shows that in those fields, the best in the world engage in deliberate practice only between two and five hours a day. So, it’s not like you want to maximize the amount of time in the learning zone. You actually need rest. You need to explore new things. You need to play; you need to connect with other people. And that not only fosters joy in our lives but also fosters both learning and performing.
Greg McKeown:
When you were at Stanford, you met the psychology professor Carol Dweck. Can you tell me about how that impacted you? It seems to have had a disproportionate impact on the trajectory and direction of your life and career.
Eduardo Briceño:
Absolutely. It was completely life-changing for me first because I read her book and learned about her work. This was a year after she first published her book Mindset. And in reading her book, I learned about growth mindset and fixed mindset. A growth mindset is a belief that people can change and that our abilities and qualities are things we can develop over time. And a fixed mindset is the belief that people are either natural or something or you’re inept, and you can’t change that. And I realized that I was in a fixed mindset in many ways, in many parts of my life, and that I realized how that was preventing me from growing more, from experiencing less anxiety, from connecting more with people, reacting less defensively to feedback.
And so that in itself was life-changing to me. But also I ended up co-founding an organization with Carroll called Mindset Works that we focus on building growth mindsets and cultures in schools and helping schools foster cultures of learning. And I led that organization for over 10 years. And over time, in evangelizing a growth mindset and how important that was, there was more and more interest in me doing speaking, which is something I would have never thought I would end up doing because I grew up as a very strong introvert. And so this opportunity with Carol and then the opportunity to start doing public speaking and get surprised that I enjoyed it and I could be effective, and people appreciated it was life-changing as well. And that’s what I do now. And then also an opportunity to write a book a couple of years ago, and that was also completely unexpected. So, my life has changed in many unexpected ways, and Carol was key on that in terms of opening that opportunity and then working with her and working really hard both in the learning zone and in the performance zone with her.
Greg McKeown:
Tell me more about the moment itself. What was the context that meant you were so open to a new idea? I’m reading into your story that it may have been quite a painful period of time, and you’re looking for an answer, and suddenly, when the student is ready, the teacher appears. Was it like that, or was it somehow different?
Eduardo Briceño:
There was a specific moment before I went to grad school. I was working in venture capital in Silicon Valley on 3000 Sandhill Road, a beautiful place, my office with a mahogany desk.
Greg McKeown:
I know all of these places really well. I know everything you’re describing well.
Eduardo Briceño:
And I came from Venezuela. I never thought I would live outside Venezuela. Just the fact that I was doing this was amazing to me. But one evening, I was working later than usual, and I was angry at something, and I did something that I had never done before and have never done since. I started taking it out on the keyboard. I was working, and I started just continuing my work, but hitting my keyboard just, and I was hitting the keyboard, and my thumb started hurting, which was weird, but I didn’t think much about it because I was used to working through pain. I had gotten used to just sacrificing and just working really hard to perform at my best. But the pain the next day was worse. My forearm was flaring, and it got worse over the next couple of weeks. And over time, I started becoming concerned when doctors couldn’t diagnose me, and it was getting worse. And I met people with my same condition who couldn’t use their hands for more than 10 minutes a day. And that freaked me out. I was only 27 years old. I didn’t know how to do anything without my hands. If I became unable to work, how was I going to pay the bills for the rest of my life?
And I realized then that there were a lot of changes that I had to make on my life. First, I needed to figure out how to heal and how to get diagnosed. It was something called myofascial pain syndrome at the end, and it required a lot of work. When I was going to Stanford, I was stretching for an hour and a half every day. I was using speech recognition, and I did this for three years just to heal and getting some special treatments. I went to DC for six weeks to get a special treatment called dry needling, but I realized I needed to change all these things about how I was living and my nutrition, my sleep, and my exercise.
But I also realized that I couldn’t take my hands for granted. And I thought at the time I realized that I’m not really doing anything that’s changing anybody else’s life. There was so much capital in the industry and the venture capital industry at the time that I felt that whether I was working there or not, these great companies were going to get funded anyway. And I didn’t have great experience and expertise to be advising the CEOs that I was supposedly advising, but in reality, I was just repeating what I heard from other investors, not understanding why that was good, why that was good advice. So I felt very inauthentic, and that was creating stress for me, and that’s what led me to want to go to grad school is I thought I need to be a better steward of my life. I need to feel like I’m making good use of my time on earth. So that was the first moment of realizing I need to make a lot of changes in my life.
And then, at Stanford, I was exploring lots of ideas around social entrepreneurship and education, and Carol was looking for somebody with a business background to start an organization to help bring a growth myself into the world. And so it was kind of meeting with her and another common friend, now Steve Goldman, in her office and talking about her work. And then, we started meeting every two weeks for me to learn more about her work and for us to develop our vision together and see if it was something that we wanted to do together. And that was more of a gradual process, but from learning about her work from that moment, it was something that I realized, wow, this can be really life-changing for me and for many people.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, a disaster is a terrible thing to waste. And when we hit these catastrophic moments in our lives, even if the catastrophe isn’t a single thing but is these multiple overlapping issues, which is what it sounds like in your case, it is a forcing function for us to seriously learn, even in, let’s call it the preamble of this conversation, you illustrated the idea that we only learn when we experienced some kind of failure. And I mean that’s sort of literally true, that expectation failure is the only time in which we learn because what we expect to happen doesn’t happen, and therefore there is a gap, and therefore there is something, a question, something to deal with. And if the expectation failure is painful enough, then there is a tremendous opportunity, and we might not seek those tremendous opportunities in our lives. But nevertheless, it seems like that’s what leads to transformative learning moments, and that seems to be what happened to you. What did I get wrong?
Eduardo Briceño:
I would agree completely with you. Looking back at that period, at the time, it felt to me like the worst thing that could be happening to me; everything was going so well, and all of a sudden I’m risking not having my hands. And I thought that was a horrible thing. And looking back, I realized it was such a great thing because I am in such a better place now.
For one thing, if I had stayed on that path, I probably would’ve ended up with a heart attack in my fifties, let alone the health. But just the experience of life, of feeling a sense of meaning and purpose is right now, and so many things, feeling like I’m really at a much deeper level of happiness. And that wouldn’t have happened without that crisis.
And what I wonder is, so that has happened a few times. The things that have been crises have really come with some really great lessons. And one way that a mentor of mine, Chip Conley, talks about that is, what is this challenge trying to teach me? And he tries to figure out what is this challenge trying to teach me. And I love that question, but what I also wonder is, is it possible sometimes for us to learn these lessons without having to go through the crisis? And I don’t have a definitive answer to that. I hope the answer is yes.
Greg McKeown:
I think we can seek a state of mind and heart that something like brokenness, right, broken heart, contrite spirit, open mind, we can choose that. I believe that. And if we don’t choose it, eventually, it gets chosen for us, but it’s a cheaper way to learn if we can get into that state without life requiring it of us.
I love that you mentioned Chip Conley. I had him on the podcast here, 84, for those who want to go back and listen to that conversation about the great midlife edit that we talked about when we last had ’em on here.
Let’s go back to this core structure. You talk about it in a TED talk that you gave that’s called How to Get Better at the Things You Care About. Can you talk more about what you shared in that? Talk about these two types of learning, how they work together, and how important they both are?
Eduardo Briceño:
Absolutely. Yeah. We sometimes tend to think that the reason somebody becomes great at something is because they spend a lot of time doing that thing, and that’s why they become so good. So if a tennis player is fantastic at what they do, it’s because they have spent 10,000 hours or however many hours playing tennis. And what the research shows is that’s not true. The reason somebody becomes great at playing tennis it’s because they spend a good amount of time doing something very different from playing tennis.
So when you have an athlete working to win a match, they’re in a tournament, which is when we see them, they’re trying to do the moves. They already know well. They’re trying to avoid mistakes, which means they’re going to try to not do those moves that they’re having trouble with, and they’re just trying to win, and they’re trying to minimize mistakes. That’s what they call the performance zone.
And then after the game, though, what we don’t see is they go to their coach, and they say, “Coach, I have to work on this move that I was trying to avoid during the match.”
Now, this is what I need to work on right now. And that’s a very different activity, a very different level of attention that we do during the performance zone. And what most of us get caught up in life is just we’re always performing. We’re always trying to do the things that we know work well or that we do best, trying to minimize mistakes, and that leads to stagnation.
And something that confuses us is that trying to do an activity, just the performance zone, does work to improve when we’re novices. When we’re just getting started at something, I’ve never played tennis before. I’m just going to go play with a friend in that match. I’ll get better because I’m so bad. I don’t need great learning strategies. And part of what we’re doing is just being playful and seeing whether this is an activity that I would enjoy, but once we become proficient, then we might be putting a lot of effort, but we’re putting a lot of effort into performing, we’re not getting better, and then that fosters a fixed mindset because I’m trying hard, I’m not getting better, and that means I get the belief that I can’t get better when the reality is that I’m not engaging in the effective strategies to improve, which are the learning zone.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, I love that idea. I’ve been doing this, I’ve been doing this, I’ve been doing this. I’m not getting better at it. I mean, what kinds of things could listeners or viewers of this conversation be experiencing that frustration in?
Eduardo Briceño:
So getting stuck feeling that I’m not having any breakthroughs in terms of innovation in terms of improvement, not our team is not finding more and more effective ways to work together. If I’m frustrated by our meetings, I continue being frustrated by our meetings, and we’re not figuring out how can we make better use of our meetings so that and whatever working, our collaboration. So we feel that we’re being more and more effective over time, and with a fast pace of change, we might feel a threat that we might be left behind that, oh my gosh, these fast things are happening, and we’re being left behind because we’re not sure exactly how to respond and how to drive change and be ahead of change.
Greg McKeown:
And just maybe anything that matters that you’ve been doing for a long time but still feel like you’re getting a B grade in. So it could be a relationship at work; it could be a particular area of your profession. Public speaking comes to mind. People do it for years and years and years, but they plateau at some point, and they’re not getting any better at it. So, oh yes, you’ve been married for 20 years, for 30 years, but you’re not great at this yet. And this seems to be the kind of frustration that you’re trying to address unless I’m missing something with this idea of the two types of work learning and then the performance. Yes?
Eduardo Briceño:
Absolutely. We sometimes, like you’re saying, get caught up in our mid-level goals, and we lose sight of our highest-level goals, the things that we care most about. And so if we think about what do I care most about and write that down and think about, am I regularly engaging in the learning zone with regards to this, as you suggest, is something to think about.
Greg McKeown:
You give an example of Demosthenes. Can you tell us about him and how these different zones applied to the work that he was doing?
Eduardo Briceño:
Absolutely. Demosthenes was a Greek order and lawyer, and he was the best of his time. And we might think that he might become a great lawyer and order because he had a lot of experience. Sometimes, we confuse experience with expertise, that if you have a lot of years doing something, then you’ll become great. But the way he became great was not just by doing his job a lot; he was very creative. He did things like he had a bad habit of lifting a shoulder, and he wanted to get rid of that habit. So he went into his basement and hung a sword from the ceiling as he practiced in front of a mirror, his speeches, and whenever he would raise his shoulder, he would hurt.
He had a lisp. So he put rocks inside of his mouth in order to be articulate and to be clear in a challenging way that helped him be clear. The courtrooms at the time were out in the open with lots of people watching, so they were very loud. So he would go practice by the ocean where it was really loud to try to speak, practice projecting his voice. So these are all activities that are very different from just doing your job. And the key is for us to think about how we develop experience through the performance zone mainly, but we develop expertise through the learning zone.
Greg McKeown:
We get experience through the performance zone; we get expertise from the learning zone. Is that right?
Eduardo Briceño:
Exactly. That’s exactly right. Exactly right. And so that’s why you can have young kids who have great expertise developed a lot. You engage in the learning zone very effectively, but they have very little experience. And then you can have people with a lot of experience who are mediocre in what they do because they haven’t developed those learning zone habits.
Greg McKeown:
What are practical things people can do if they want to gain greater mastery in something that really matters to them, something that’s essential to them that they’ve been doing for a long time but have not seen improvement in recently?
Eduardo Briceño:
Well, a couple of things. First, we can get clarity around what is essential, what is most important to us, and what is most important for us to improve. So for me, I have a one-page paper that shows what’s important to me in my life. And then every three months or so, I look at it, and I think about what do I want to work on. What do I want to improve?
Greg McKeown:
So, what’s on your list right now? If we had that piece of paper, what would we be looking at?
Eduardo Briceño:
Yeah, so right. Well, at the very center of that paper are happiness, fulfillment, and appreciation. That’s what I care most about in my life, and it’s really happiness, but fulfillment and appreciation is the type of happiness that I’m looking for. And then there are things there, like connection with my spouse is contributions to others, creation, invention, like a nurturing home.
Greg McKeown:
What else is on the piece of paper?
Eduardo Briceño:
Oh, I mean, there are different layers. So it’s the very center of it is the highest-level goal, which is happiness. And then around it, there’s maybe eight or nine goals around it. A grounded financial situation, learning, and growth are definitely part of it. Contribution to others. And then underneath that, further from the center, there is again the how. So you move away from the center by asking how you move toward the center by asking why. And so, in terms of contributing to others, if you move further out from the center, there might be contributing to reducing unconscious biases and unconscious inequitable systems. And so if you go further out, there might be, how do I want to do that? I want to do that by hiring people from underrepresented groups by connecting people from underrepresented groups to resources. And that’s actually a different page, but in that one page is the highest level goals.
Greg McKeown:
Where do you keep your page?
Eduardo Briceño:
I keep it on my computer. I don’t keep it. Yeah, I don’t keep it in any particular place. Do you have something similar?
Greg McKeown:
I have lots of things a little ironically, but yes, I understand just what you’re describing. Okay, so you review this quarterly, that’s good. Personal quarterly, offsite, totally in favor of that. And then, from there, you are trying to identify a gap in one of the areas.
Eduardo Briceño:
And I also talk about it with my wife regularly. So we like to go hiking, and so we talk about how we’re doing in our relationship, but also in other parts of our lives and how we can support each other.
And so whether it is something there or something related to my work, I’m always working on one thing. And so I have a morning habit, which is really important to me. And as part of that habit, I remind myself what it is the one thing that I’m working to improve on. And so that habit of identifying what am I working to improve proactively and having the habit of reminding myself what that is in the morning, I think it’s really important because it primes a growth mindset. It primes a learning zone, and it helps us pay attention to those opportunities to improve during the day.
Greg McKeown:
What’s your one area of improvement right now?
Eduardo Briceño:
What I’m trying to do is to say yes lower because I just released the book, and a lot of things are coming my way, and it’s exciting things, and I get excited about things, and I get excited about getting engaged in a lot of things. And so my initial reaction is yes. And so, I need to pause and engage my reason rather than emotions to then really think about whether there are things that I want to say yes to. So that’s because of my particular situation right now; that is something that I’m working on.
Greg McKeown:
So, it’s a specific and a great example of the paradox of success that you’re describing. If you write a book, and then you’re launching a book, and then the book is successful, it means, of course, first of all, there’s a whole flurry of requests, podcast interviews, and articles that ought to be written in social media posts that need to be put out, and then requests to give keynotes and training and so on. And to top it all off, it’s not just that the number of requests have increased; it’s that the relevance of all of those requests have increased because they’re all pinpointed on exactly the subject you want to be speaking about and teaching about and impacting about. That’s why you wrote the book. You think this is a solution to problems you see in the world. So you have a double whammy of requests because, in your previous life, you’d have said yes to every single one of them. And so, if you’re not careful now, you’ll be buried in all of these good new options and opportunities and fall into the undisciplined pursuit of more.
Eduardo Briceño:
Okay, so you clearly have been in this situation before, and yes, that’s exactly right. And something that helps me is that I have been because I’ve been very focused on the book, I have been under-investing and under-engaging in my marriage, and I want to have more time on my marriage, and that’s the most important thing for me. And so it’s also working to improve and spending time, quality time with my wife. And so that helps me also be much more selective around the things that I say yes to.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, so that may be your primary why for saying no to things you would otherwise have been saying yes to is because now the burden has shifted where you have so many more relevant opportunities professionally that if you’re not careful, if you use the same criteria you used to, then your whole life will get out of whack and you’ll be investing so much more in a professional world and suddenly the person who matters far more to you, but hasn’t changed in their need or their dynamic, they’re not suddenly asking 10 times more of you in the same way that the profession is. And so everything can get out of balance.
What is something from this conversation with Eduardo that stands out to you? What is one thing that you can do differently immediately because of this episode? And who is somebody that you can share this with?
Remember that for the first person who writes a review of this episode on Apple Podcasts, you’ll be able to access the Essentialism Academy for a whole year for free. Just go to gregmckeown.com/essential for details. Thank you. Really, thank you, and I’ll see you next time.
