Greg McKeown:
Welcome back, everybody. It’s such a pleasure to be with you. Thank you. Really, thank you for listening. This is part two of my conversation with Eduardo Briceño. Eduardo is, among other things, the author of The Performance Paradox. It’s all about turning the power of mindset into action. If you’ve ever heard of or been impacted by the growth mindset from Carol Dweck, then this book from Eduardo is about how you can take those ideas and really implement them, and execute on them. By the end of this episode, you’ll be able to lead yourself and others to constantly improve and outperform your targets. Let’s get to it.
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Okay, so let’s talk about this. Let’s try to merge our minds here to say what are the learning tactics that you are advocating in The Performance Paradox , and how can we apply those two gracefully saying no, being selective, and making better trade-offs. Let’s see if we can do that in real-time.
Eduardo Briceño:
Sure. Well, first is the disciplined pursuit of the intention to improve, right? And so it is being clear about what I’m trying to improve. And then so, when I get a queue of a request, I need to respond differently, and that’s a learning zone for me because the performance zone, the execution would be to just say yes. And so what I need to do is to pause, which is not easy for me, and then I need to do something.
Greg McKeown:
Hold on, let’s stay on pause.
Is there any tangible insight you have about that? We’ve all heard, I think, the idea you have to pause. Do you have any specific tools that you have identified?
Eduardo Briceño:
What I’ve been doing is kind of snoozing, maybe sometimes even starting a couple of thoughts on my initial reaction and then snoozing at the email rather than so that I know it’s going to come back later. So that’s a specific strategy that I am trying.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, I like that.
Eduardo Briceño:
And the key here is that trying a new strategy, right? Trying a different strategy. So I love your question, and that’s the strategy that I am trying now, is this news. Do you have that strategy that works for you?
Greg McKeown:
Well, recently I’ve been thinking about this as the five second rule and different though than that phrase has been used elsewhere. It’s not about five seconds to take action. Mel Robins has talked about it in those terms. But this is five seconds to pause, to shift out of agree, disagree, say yes, say no. It’s just pause, understand, get perspective. It’s a sort of tiny timeout. It’s a mental timeout where you are standing apart from your life, whatever the reactive thing is that’s going on, maybe that’s the incoming email, the request, maybe it’s an actual person that’s coming into the room or seems to be emotional in some way. Maybe it’s a frustrating situation that you’re in just that literal like, okay, not agreeing, not disagreeing, understanding. There’s a space between agreeing and disagreeing and that’s understanding. There’s a space between saying yes and saying no, and that’s understanding. And if you can shift into that role, then I think that all the wise decisions follow that primary choice.
Eduardo Briceño:
I like that. That resonates. Also, a challenge that I have in that situation is that I want to help. So if somebody’s asking for my help, I want to help them. And so something that has helped me in this is I listened recently to a podcast to the insight that it’s easier to say no to the people we’re closest to than to complete strangers. And so that made me realize that I’m saying no too much to the people who are closest to me. And so seeking that new knowledge and that insight has helped me take the risk of saying no more often to others. And then that risk of saying no, doing something that is uncomfortable to me, then I get practice in seeing how that lands and what happens afterwards. And I’ve realized it’s okay. People understand. And so I’m taking the risk of doing something that’s uncomfortable. And in doing that, I am getting used to a different behavior that is working for me, but I’m still working on it.
Greg McKeown:
I think one of the things that you are clarifying there for us and putting top of mind is the reality that every yes is a trade-off. Every time you say yes to that stranger, let’s say you are saying no in your case, and maybe for many of us to our spouse. We are saying no to our children. Often we are saying no to exercise and health. These are some of those things that don’t show up as consequences immediately. So the yes or no to the stranger or to the person at the periphery of our lives, we can see the effect if we say yes or say no to them right now. It’s a very present consequence.
Saying no to our health, our exercise saying no to the people who matter most to us. They’ll both be basically there today and tomorrow and the next day. But of course there’s a tipping point otherwise there’d be no divorces. There would be no lifestyle driven catastrophic health incidents in people’s lives if that wasn’t true. Eventually, it catches up. And so that seems to be the point that you are helping us to emphasize is to see the trade-off in the moment you are saying yes to something.
Eduardo Briceño:
Yes. And it is hard to do that. So thank you for clarifying that.
Greg McKeown:
More. What other tactics can we use to be able to be in the learning zone? What else can we do? And let’s see if we can apply that to this subject.
Eduardo Briceño:
I think for most of our situations, perhaps the most powerful learning zone strategy is soliciting feedback all the time, a few times a week from different people. Because we’re social beings, most of what we’re doing, both personally and professionally, we’re trying to create an effect on somebody else, whether it is the people that we serve or our colleagues or our boss. And so in uncovering what’s in their mind and what we’re doing that’s helpful. What we’re doing to uncover ideas for what to change, that is super, super powerful. And it also leads to create a learning culture, a culture where everybody’s soliciting feedback, where’re sharing more transparently our ideas. So that’s one strategy that we can talk about lots of strategies, but that’s one that’s particularly powerful.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah. Okay. So just related to that, if you think about it in terms of this trade-off, what I think it means is we need to have feedback from the people who matter most to us because that’s sometimes less frequently engaged in a professional setting. Feedback is often formalized, and besides you are with them often in the hours that you are most alert, least fatigued. And so these kinds of conversations I think happen more readily. But again, with the people that we’re closest to, you can just move into a kind of rut with them a way that we just do things.
And so one thing I have found helpful about that is to just ask the five star test just to say to each of my children, also to my wife, okay, how am I doing on a scale of one to five? How am I doing as a dad? How am I doing as a husband? And it doesn’t really matter what the number is. I mean it matters, but not very much. The question is always, okay, what could be done to make it a five? Or if it is a five, okay, what could be done to make it better? And I have had a version of that for years and years with our children especially I would say just how am I doing? How can I do better? What needs to improve? And what it has meant now that they’re all teenagers now, we’re sort of through the first phase of their lives is that we’ve been able to address things really quickly really early on while they’re very small, very innocent errors. And so my teenage son said to me, not long ago, “Well, dad, what have I ever had to rebel against? If I’ve ever had a problem, I could just come to you a moment and I knew I’d be listened to and we could just talk through it.”
And I thought, “Wow, that’s a great moment,” and one that I feel speaks to the value of this continuous feedback process.
Eduardo Briceño:
That’s fantastic. I love that. And I actually, I haven’t done been doing that for years, but I’ve been doing it for two months because I was so obsessed with this project and so consumed by it that I proposed, and my wife and I have been meeting once a week and we use a scale of one to five two, just like you described because I want to check in on like, okay, how did this week go for us? How do you feel? And yeah, we actually use two different numbers. One is on a scale of one to five, given present circumstances, and on a scale of one to five, given the ideal and the long-term goal. So those are the two numbers that we give each other, but the conversation is the most important. So if one week one of us is traveling and we don’t spend any time together, that might be a low actual, but a hike given present circumstances. And that’s a useful distinction for us. But yeah, it is the habit of having the conversation, making our thinking transparent to each other so we can learn from each other and calibrate and uncover ways that we can continue to improve.
Greg McKeown:
It’s the disciplined pursuit of improving at improving.
Eduardo Briceño:
Yes, absolutely.
Greg McKeown:
More. What other tactics can we use when we’re doing learning? And then let’s get it back specifically to this idea of how we can say no more gracefully. That’s a test on me as much as it is on you.
Eduardo Briceño:
Sure. So there’s experimentation is something that is a clear strategy in terms of trying new ways of doing things and seeing whether those new strategies work better. And often a trap that we get with experimentation is that we sometimes make our experiments too performance oriented. We get excited about a new idea and then we say, let’s roll out this idea, let’s scale this new idea. And then it becomes hard to iterate from the results of that new approach. And so being clear about what is the goal of the experiment? Is it to learn and then to scale, and then designing the experiment so that we can iterate quickly and learn quickly.
Greg McKeown:
So what that makes me think of here is we know about running pilots, experimenting with something new, but I want to bring into our conversation here, the reverse pilot, right? It’s the not doing a thing and seeing what happens, saying no to a thing, possibly without even saying no, just not doing it. And seeing the consequence so that you say, well, I’m supposed to do X for work, but I’m just not going to do it, spend time in this case because of our framing of our conversation today with my wife, with children, and let’s see what happens. Is there an effect? What is the level of that effect? Otherwise, we live our lives endlessly based on what we’ve done before, where we keep adding and adding and therefore become ignorant as to which things are really giving us the big results and which things don’t matter at all. Yeah. Your thoughts?
Eduardo Briceño:
In the interviews that I was doing in my research for this book, I learned about a team in Oracle where the leader had everybody in the team do a small experiment once a quarter, and anything they wanted to try just do an experiment and then they would share their findings with everybody else, all their colleagues and one of them decided they had to send a report out every day on some statistics to other departments, and their experiment was to just stop sending it because it took a lot of time. And they were like, I’m not sure this is useful. Nobody ever complained, nobody said anything, and they just stopped doing the report and it was a very valuable lesson learned just what you’re saying.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah. I really think that this idea of sort of just experimenting, it doesn’t mean slovenly just being lazy, not doing anything that you’re required to do. It is precision decision-making where you are cutting something out and maybe you get to the point where you’ve cut too many things.
In fact, I know for example, that Elon Musk has a rule about this, that he has a problem solving methodology. It’s five steps to the process. And the first one is to always challenge requirements that when the requirements come in, you have to challenge them all because otherwise you aren’t doing any of the first principles thinking that will help you to really innovate later on. You’re just doing loads of stuff because somebody else said so because someone else said, well, that’s how we did the formula.
He has the rule that if you don’t have to add back later about 20% of the things that you said no to, you’re not saying no to enough. And I think that’s a sort of helpful way of thinking about this to try to get it way closer to a sustainable level for us. Let’s keep saying no until, oh, yeah, well, we should have said yes to that. Okay, let’s move the needle back. You always want to be in that position because otherwise you do not actually know what things are working and what things are just noise.
Eduardo Briceño:
I love that, and that’s really helpful to me. So thank you.
Greg McKeown:
What other tactics can you suggest that will help us to be in a learning zone so that we can improve it improving?
Eduardo Briceño:
Sure. Well, one thing is we might be tempted to change just our individual habits and do this on our own. And we is so much more powerful when we engage the people around us for a number of reasons. When we build our team culture or our organizational culture, and we are both learning and performing together. And so to build a culture that we’re engaging in learning and performance with other people first we can frame what we want, what are our core values? What are our key behaviors? Do we want to talk about mistakes and unpack them or do we want to try to minimize mistakes and never make mistakes? Do we want to solicit feedback from each other? Do we want to take on challenges that may or may not work? So framing and setting the stage.
Second is the systems and habits. How are we going to engage in the performance zone, which we do have lots of systems for that and they’re important, but what are our systems and habits to engage in the learning zone?
For example, in our weekly meetings, do we only have performance conversations or are there some learning sections of those meetings like sharing what we’re learning or what questions we have for each other or what we are grappling with to get ideas from our colleagues. Is that systematized to make it easy for everybody?
And finally, is modeling learning, because often we feel comfortable learning in our private when other people aren’t watching, and then other people experience us as know-it-alls. And so if we talk about the importance of learning, but we are perceived as a know-it-all our actions will speak louder than our words. So we have to be visible and explicit about our own learning process to encourage other people take on those learning behaviors so we can do them together, and then we’re a lot more comfortable and we can learn and perform a lot better together.
Greg McKeown:
Satya Nadella has this idea that at Microsoft they needed to go from being know-it-alls to learn-it- alls. And given the cultural history that he was inheriting when he became the CEO of the company, in which as Brad Smith, the current president of Microsoft was explaining to me on a recent podcast episode, it used to be typical that people even at the executive level would be in meetings and screaming at each other, “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.” That kind of level of communication.
And so when Satya comes along in his first executive meeting, he brings the book Nonviolent Communication with him symbolically, and then also literally to say we have to find a better way of communicating. And I want to extrapolate just a little further on that because there’s a book that’s one of the classics within negotiations called Getting to Yes by William Ury.
But what I want to advocate is that we have to have the communication skills necessary to be able to get to know it’s almost exactly, let’s say something like the opposite, but it’s far less safe to get to know that it even is to get to, yes, to be able to really say, “Well, okay, of all these good things and all of these projects you are already invested in and all of these things that people will want from us and they’re expecting from us, which things are we not going to do of all these opportunities, which ones won’t we go after?”
And it seems to me that most teams are better if they are good at it at getting to Yes than they are at actually together, strategically getting to know. And so I think that’s an area where you can apply everything you just described, but to be able to build a team capable of extraordinary results, it takes this culture of no but collaborative. No, that’s what it seems to me. Anyway, that’s what I’m learning from you.
Eduardo Briceño:
Well, I agree with you, and I think to build on that, for that, you need some things that you talk about, which is clarity and transparency. You need clarity about what’s most important, what’s essential, what are we here for? And then you need transparency in terms of having open conversations with each other about, Hey, here’s why this opportunity sounds really cool, but it’s not this thing that we most care about. And once we have that clarity and transparency, then it can empower us to do a better job at it.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, it’s like a yin and yang of communication, something like that, or a yin and yang of innovation because you need an enormous amount of space to be able to explore all the possibilities and then equal to it, this extreme filter for eliminating everything but that gem. And in that quote from Steve Jobs where he talks about famously the thousand ideas you have to say no to in order to say yes to one great idea. Okay, well, most of us, including me, hearing that idea, you’ve got to say no a lot, but that isn’t actually what he said. What he said is you’ve got to have a thousand ideas and then you have to say no to almost all of them in order to find a great idea. So of course there’s a lot of elimination built into that quote, but there’s also the other side, and it’s easy to lose that.
So you have to create a culture where exploration is welcomed and vast exploration, and here’s a crazy idea and here’s a crazy idea. But then you have to be really equal to that in your filtering. Even now, I still think I am much better at the first than the second. And so if you do that, what you can create is way too many good interesting things going on, and then it will be exhausting and it will strain everybody that’s involved because even if it’s all good, how can you possibly do all of this and do all of it well?
Eduardo Briceño:
Yeah, that resonates. And I would add that the ideas are not independent of each other. When people are generating and exploring ideas, they are sparking new ideas and other people building on those ideas. So we are getting to not just more ideas, which is important, going for quantity, but also better ideas because we’re thinking together and building on each other’s ideas.
Greg McKeown:
What haven’t we covered in your research and your experience that really you think this is essential? People need to understand this.
Eduardo Briceño:
Well, sometimes in our work or in our lives, we get wrapped up in what’s easily quantifiable and we lose sight to your work of what’s most important and in engaging in the learning zone in habituating and systematizing the learning zone into our work and lives, we improve those outcomes, those numerical things, but the process also becomes more joyful, right? It is the journey that becomes better, not just the destination. We experience less anxiety and depression because as the world changes, we know how to deal with that change and how to drive change. We experience more joy from that discovery and exploration and awe of discovery that creates positive emotions in our lives, and we build deeper and better relationship with each other because we’re more curious. We ask more questions, we listen better. We self-disclose more. We build trust. And so our experience of life, when we get out of chronic performance and we incorporate learning into our lives, our experience of life improves as well.
Greg McKeown:
What is the one thing people should do differently as a result of today’s conversation?
Eduardo Briceño:
I would say identify, clarify what you want to improve and how you want to go about it, which is different than just spending time doing it. And find a habit to remind yourself of what that is, how you’re going about it, and reflect on whether that’s working well for you or you want to make a tweak
Greg McKeown:
That felt like more than one thing. I have to say, a little more than one, but I still liked the answer.
What’s the one thing that’s most essential you want to improve? What’s the one way you would like to improve that thing? So that you don’t just jump to trying to do more of it. Just how could it actually be better? And so then you are working on that thing and getting feedback around that specific bottleneck to improvement overall. Did I hear it right?
Eduardo Briceño:
Yes. Thank you,
Greg McKeown:
Eduardo, thank you for being on the podcast today.
Eduardo Briceño:
Thank you so much, Greg.
Greg McKeown:
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.
