the brain is like a college campus that has different departments in it most people rely on their history Department way too much if you instead send things to the kind of the more experimental open-minded science department the more creative art Department you get dramatically better answers I know you have a bunch of awesome advice on becoming more influential it's almost like you're playing like Elden ring or some video game the starting point is to choose your character hey I'm the devil's advocate approach or I'm the break it and see if it still stands after I hit it really hard with a sledgehammer kind of guy your personality kind of has a natur fit how do we create better relationships within our teams it's critical to ask what kind of experience am I not how good am I at my job how much do I know how critical am I to this process but am I a miserable experience and if the answer is yes don't worry too much about the other pieces yet you got to fix that first I am really excited for this episode I think it's going to be unlike any other conversation I've had on this podcast and then here's the surprise ending today my guest is Evan La points Evan is the founder of core Sciences which teaches companies and individuals how our brains actually work and through that lens how to more effectively work with other people on teams how to build better products how to grow your business and how to make smarter and faster decisions Evan is a four-time Founder including founding company called satellite which is the fourth largest analytics product on the Internet today which was acquired by Adobe where he later ran product strategy and Innovation for adobe's digital business in our conversation Evan shares a simple way to understand how our brains work and through that framework how we can get better at Vision work influence running meetings having more focus and building better and more productive relationships with our colleagues this conversation is a beautiful mix of science theory and also a ton of very actionable and concrete things you can do to be more effective in your work if you enjoy this podcast don't forget to subscribe and followed in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube it's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and helps the podcast tremendously with that I bring you Evan La Point Evan thank you so much for being here welcome to the podcast thanks very much for having me I'm excited to share some stuff with people I am really excited for this episode because one I think it's going to be unlike any other conversation I've had on this podcast two I think it's going to really stretch our brains as we learn about how the brain works and three I think it's really going to make an impact on how people work and how they relate to other people and work with other people I thought it'd be great to start by laying a little bit of foundation for people to get a sense of just what they need to understand about how the brain works before we get into how we can actually apply some of the stuff so could you just share some of the stuff that is really important for us to know about how the brain works the brain is like a big a big Galaxy I mean there's a National Geographic quote that we throw up in all of our programs that when we train teams for example that says the brain is more complex than any known structure in the universe and it's easy to read a sentence like that and just run straight away from the problem and I think that's important for people to not run away from this problem but more run toward it uh and it's our job to kind of translate the complexity of the brain into like really simple straightforward systems that you can remember and the the three or four main systems to stack on top of each other like layers start with it the fact that the brain has systems like different I kind of think of it like the brain is like a college campus that has different departments in it and your brain has a science department responsible for openminded experimentation it has an art Department in it responsible for Creative kind of boundless thinking it has a history Department designed for looking stuff up that you already know and if you think about sending your thoughts to the right department on the campus or just different departments you're going to get super different responses back from your brain and where we're stuck largely is most people rely on their history Department way too much and that's because the brain is actually built to conserve energy and that's the lowest energy form of generating an answer to a question that the brain can pull off but if you instead send things to the kind of the more experimental open-minded science department the more creative art Department the humanities Department of your compassion Etc you get totally different answers and certainly if you ever build products as a company or offer services those departments are going to give you dram atically better answers than the reference material just in your history Department this episode is brought to you by webflow we're all friends here so let's be real for a second we all know that your website shouldn't be a static asset it should be a dynamic part of your strategy that drives convergence that's business 101 but here's a number for you 54% of leaders say web updates take too long that's over half of you listening right now that's where web flow in their visual first platform allows you to build launch and optimize web pages fast that means you can set ambitious business goals and your site can rise to the challenge learn how teams like Dropbox Ideo and orange theory trust web flow to achieve their most ambitious goals today at webflow tocom this episode is brought to you by xlow a game changer for customer facing analytics and data reporting are your users craving more dashboard reports and analytics within your product are you tired of trying to build it yourself as a product 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Lenny so that's kind of the first thing is that the brain has these departments and systems in it and it also has Pathways and the pathways thing is really important to understand because there's a likelihood that thought will go down certain Pathways in each of our brains some of that has to do with personality uh which kind of sort of predisposes us to have a higher anxiety or a lower anxiety response or a higher creativity or lower creativity response but you can also be more intentional with these Pathways and uh that's a big component of self-awareness is to kind of know what are my preferences and then am I actually letting those preferences take over in the situation or am I being more intentional steering down the pathways to activate these best regions and systems of the brain and the simplest way to keep track of the systems is there's three there's three really big ones there there probably are more than three that you can learn about but the ones we want to have everybody learn about are your safety system your reward system and your purpose system and out of those three two of them sound really real and one of them sounds like fantasy to most people so yeah the safety system is pretty obvious to most people when we're scared afraid uncertain we have doubt we're resentful angry apathetic Etc this system of our brain is like trying to restore our standing in the universe like I need to get out of this stress out of this danger out of this anger Etc and you have an objective that that part of your brain that system sets and you go chase that objective like I want to get safe so if you're in a meeting you know practical everyday situation and you you're exposed to a statement that makes you feel unsafe your objective now actually isn't to contribute to the meeting productively anymore like your brain's objective is to get back to safety and the same thing of rewards that if somebody says you know you'll get something if you do this which is the opposite of safety that if you don't do this something bad will happen then yeah your brain gets into this kind of pursuit desire state which seems great and can be great in a lot of cases but also can be pretty narrow so when you hear people say that's not my job that's actually the reward system speaking saying I get rewarded for the things in this list and this thing that you're talking about is not on my reward list and I therefore am not interested in it like I I have a easier time pushing away from it uh because the reward system of the brain is you know more transactional you know in a conceptual way and then you get to this vague and ridiculous sounding purpose system but until you realize what purpose is and we've all felt it uh if you if you understand the impact of the thing that you're doing and you understand and care about the people that are impacted by your actions that's those are the conditions for purpose and that can be really big like curing cancer I understand the impact in the people that's huge but it can also be like I'm writing an email I understand the impact of this email and the people affected by it you can feel purpose at this tiny little grain of sand level of your life not just at the whole you know Beach and Shoreline level and we teach people that that's super important so that's kind of the foundational layer and then on top of that there are a few layers that have to do with your focus because the brain can dramatically shift Focus from like open-mindedness to deep deep focus and then there's kind of the final layer of ability which is Le less like sciency you know less neuroscience and more just practical that your ability is regulated by how much reality you know like do you have the context for the decision or you just know you're supposed to make the decision people with context have higher ability than people without and the same thing with with imagination and and logic that if you push those boundaries in your mind further your ability increases almost disproportionately to how much you've pushed so these layers just kind of stack on and I think that's kind of it's approachable it's simple it's like we can all understand is my safety reward or purpose system active right now what is my level of focus what level of connection with reality reason and Imagination do I have right now and then there's your output as a human or as a team and all these things are like levers we can pull which is super fun amazing so just to summarize here so we have these three systems safety reward purpose then uh our level of focus and and then there's the like are we able to actually do the job those are kind of the exactly puzzle pieces okay so where I want to take this is when we work with other people working with other people is very hard and some of the struggles people have at work in Building Product and running a company and building teams hiring all these things is uh they often get really frustrated by the way other people operate some people want to just start building a thing some people want to really think about it some people are very customer qualitative anecdote focused some people are very metrics focused some people are very uh collaborative on a working group some people are very I want to work alone so I guess just first of all we just talked about here's how the brain works and then there's this idea of people work very differently can you just talk a bit about just like this idea of people are very why people behave so differently in an effort to help us learn to work better with people that are just like oh that's so strange this person once to just start building you know the maybe one of the worst pieces of propaganda that people walk around with in their minds is the phrase we're more similar than we are different and my theory on why we walk around with that phrase or why we're told that phrase if we zoom in on the situations where we hear that is that we have this Theory it's easier to get along with people that are like us so if we if we fantasize that this person is like me then I might get along with them better when in fact we should probably be building the muscle that we have the capacity to get along with people that are extremely different than we are and that fourth piece that we talk about in our in like our coursework you know when we train managers for example is personality so we talk about your brain systems your brain Focus your brain's ability which sort sort of Paints the picture that humans might be similar to each other and we can activate these things kind of like unilaterally but then we have to drop this bomb at the end which is and here's why that doesn't work consistently across different types of people uh so I know you took uh our profile our big five based profile and that's just one tool out of many that can help a person understand where on these various spectrum of personality traits and motivations they sit uh we often use the metaphor of in our training of like culinary school that we're more culinary school for Human Performance instead of cooking class and that helps people kind of conceptualize that I'm used to going to cooking classes in my training like here's how to do a one-on-one here's how to offer feedback here's a framework for generating product ideas through to like prioritization and backlog but we're kind of like well what's going on beneath the surface what are the underlying principles and forces at work that all that kind of comes to all the stuff that comes to life on the surface really originates from and in this culinary school metaphor the one of the things that's really important for a chef is to actually understand what are my preferences what do I like to eat because if I don't know what I like and I assume everybody else likes what I like then I'm not going to be a very Dynamic Chef I'm gonna be like everybody likes lots of salt and acidity in their dishes and then you're going to go to Germany and open a restaurant and be like that is absolutely not what we're looking for you know in this Cuisine so self-awareness is a really important step not just of culinary school but like for everybody and you sit somewhere on a spectrum your brain has these Pathways and these kind of like traffic cops directing traffic in your mind so you have to start with you know square one with yourself and understand am I like prone to try to say things politely and so that they're received well or am I prone to be super blunt and direct and maybe even mean and harsh uh am I prone to like sit back in conversations and let things happen or am I prone to take over am I prone to go to like intellectual abstract thinking and try to kind of like deconstruct ideas or am I pr to stay very pragmatic and if you don't know who you are and you think that like the universe resembles you then you're going to get super lost in that in that broader Spectrum so I think the the big five I mean there's a bunch of models you have Myers Briggs disc Etc they're just all imperfect ways of measuring personality but just but also useful despite the fact that they're imperfect and especially useful if you kind of take a growth mentality instead of a justification mentality to reading them like if you say okay I'm low in politeness I'm super direct your justification mentality of that would be like yeah am right like I'm awesome that everybody knows what I really mean and how I really feel versus the growth thing which is like well maybe there are situations where I can try a little harder than 0% to phrase things in a way that you know if we if we work backwards from the outcome we want to choose our actions right now like would my would these actions so direct actually increase or reduce the probability of that outcome and that's when we become like more Dynamic chefs more Dynamic people but yeah personality is a a broad spectrum uh and self-awareness is like the the starting point for the whole thing the big five model gives you a really good list of attributes to kind of scan yourself through and then you should be making a game plan for how to do that and then you can turn your attention to the network of humans you're a part of and say okay well in what ways because I'm me am I so different than these other minds and how can we kind of create a mesh mentality where thought shifts among the group to to fit most naturally and in product work especially you know whether you're a Founder entrepreneur kind of thinking about product at that level and and your team at that level or you're in the thick of product work uh pushing your mind and other people's minds to get this right then you're going to benefit a lot from understanding these traits and these differences so I think the big unlock here for a lot of people is that the reason you are struggling getting something done working with someone being successful at your company with your manager with a partner in your team is they have a very different way of their brain operating and so they think in a very different way they react in different ways and you may think the entire world thinks the way you do but they don't and these tests help you see that to make this super concrete for people are there a couple examples or wins you often find that you can share just like ways to use this to become better in your job say this week like whether with meetings or convincing someone of something any along these lines yeah I mean I I think one more layer would be helpful to this especially if you're a leader or manager which is the the the business world is just isn't just hand-to-hand combat between a bunch of individuals on like the the blank Matrix loading screen right like you're actually in a habitat as a company and your team is like a habitat I I think of companies and teams almost like little terrariums that we're inside of and is this terrarium set up with you know sand and a heat lamp and and we're a bunch of frogs and like we're going to turn into frog bacon simply because we're in this habitat so a lot of it is you want to actually create a habitat or an environment that's kind of predisposed to high functioning thinking and high functioning interaction between people because if it's if if the habitat's working against all of you to begin with then all the hand toand combat that's going to show up is actually largely a function of you just being in this you know heat lamp dry uh devoid of life kind of devoid of You Know Places productive ways to Grapple right and that's where a lot of teams and companies sit today especially like more established teams they've they've either lost their way in the habitat and haven't really set the scene for good kind of thinking and interaction or they just never had that to begin with and some of the stuff like when you've when you've talked to a couple other people in the past you know your conversation uh the the canva conversation the figma conversation both come to mind as like it is super obvious the energy that has gone into the habitat to predispose people to high function like you're referring to my interviews with the folks from figma canva exactly right I see oh say more about that uh I mean so you you think about the um even in the in the canva context of like coaches instead of managers like that is a you're looking at so so I love this let me back up for just a second there's a a great qu I think Dan pink has summarized the bit the problem better than anybody when he said uh there's a mismatch between what science knows and what business does and in that Gap it kind of says like well what is it that business is doing that science knows better and you can kind of almost look at this as an equation of science knows minus what your business does equals dysfunction right like that's that is a pretty Crystal Clear thing so if you take this like managers versus coaches they're taking intuitively I think I don't I don't know if they're neuroscientists but like intuitively I think a lot of great Founders understand humans don't work a certain way and this whole Paradigm of managers seems to be failing a lot and this whole Paradigm like Mantra like fail faster seems to be failing a lot and like lot emission statements seem to fail a lot so you look at this science knows business does as like a lens to examine yourself through and stuff that very often is kind of worth a look and when you look at like okay do we really want managers because that seems to fail a lot or is there something that is there a paradigm that works better for human beings that activates more human potential and they hit the nail on the head so if you kind of do the math of canva what science knows versus what canva does whether they know they're doing it scientifically right or not the the the math equals zero like there's no difference between what science knows and what business does in that case and also the figma conversation I loved the phrase from that conversation um Imagination is a hypothesis generation engine I think is is what oh Dylan yeah CH with Dyan I loved that idea because when we talk about imagination as a p as a part of ability uh we talk about imagination's capacity to generate alternatives for you like that's its that's its purpose it's not just to doodle in the margins in the middle of board meetings like that that's part of it it's a side benefit but when you look at imagination's purpose if you have a great imagination you always have a lot of choices in life like Mickey Mouse was a choice it was like a new alternative way to send messages through a talking Mouse like that's okay that's interesting but what's the other part of the hypothesis generation engine that we focus a lot on is it's not just the ability to generate choices and hypotheses but it's also the ability to kind of load them into your Oculus headset and walk around a world in which that choice already has been executed like that's kind of akin to Vision in a sense that do you have a really good ability to load that one branch of this imaginative tree this one hypothesis into a simulation and then explore what the world looks like with this in place and if you look at this coaching thing at uh that's going on at canva instead of managing like you load that in the simulator you're like boy this this looks pretty nice this is a this is a higher performance thing like we've advocacy instead of you know regulation we have we have growth there's like a whole bunch of aspects that are inherent in that approach where science and if you ask a neuroscientist would that work better they'd be like oh hell yeah that work way better because it activates this in the brain it reduces cortisol it like it does all these things that science knows work much better so like there's a whole list of stuff I mean from very deep to very tactical of things we can do differently that that reduce the gap between what you're doing and what science knows and the dysfunction just shrinks and shrinks and shrinks as you do those things are there things that you've found people can change in the way they work based on the way the brain operates whether it's run better meetings be better at influence like what are some things people can try to do this week that will make them more successful at their work or working with colleagues in the list of what science knows and what business does like everything's in there culture's in there meetings are in there goals are in there deadlines are in there uh Team Dynamics you know all this stuff is in there so we'll probably just pick a few things out of that very long list um meetings are a good one you know meetings I I forget what the statistic is but it's some insane like uh 12 figure amount of no not 12 nine figure no 12 figure hundreds of billions right amount of of waste is caught in meetings I mean we spend gazillions of dollars on waste of time and meetings and for us like in our in our programs the average Delta is is between 10 and 20% so people save anywhere from a full half of a day to a full day per week of work as a result of just cleaning up the way they're using meetings uh and some of that is just the design of meetings like treat meeting like a product you know treat them like workflows that should be organized and used you know intentionally but a lot of it is inside the meeting like what's the what's the tactic so here's something super tactical which is meetings generally speaking are a combination of priming and decision-making like if you look at meetings through the lens of like the phases that they are and I a lot of meetings kind of skip the priming step altogether they launch directly into decision- making and it would be safe to skip the priming step if we began the meeting under the assumption that everybody here is under the you know on the same page has the same information and generally speaking intends for the same outcome all I think that's a ludicrous assumption for most meetings and yet most people are actually shocked to find out that we're not on the same page even though we literally never have been and you know as long as you're on day two plus of working together so it's a it's a crazy crazy thing that we don't do priming and priming it can be simple it can even be done in the invite I mean one of the things that's crazy about Outlook and Google is you can put a very terrible useless meeting into Outlook uh and it will never look at it and be like this is probably useless just like you can go into like Trello and put the dumbest project in the company's history into trell it will ingest anything you put into it without any discernment as to its value now imagine we're going to have to do this ourselves for now until like a better calendar comes out but imagine if Outlook or Google Calendar or or you know Kon which is now is part of notion would just be like ahh you know like what is the point of this meeting and you could say okay we this is here uh like this meeting is about the generation of options it's or or creative problem solving or very tactical problem solving or efficiency seeking like what is the category of conversation we are about to have what are some of the basic principles that should apply I mean are we are we honoring sacred cows or are we eating sacred cows in this meeting like what is the what is the mode mentality the priming like how can we all kind of say this is the mindset the and and the ultimate purpose that applies to the meeting and you can write that and you can read that in under three minutes so it's not some arduous process Amazon does it like in an arduous process right they're kind of known for that but that's wisdom to know like we need priming they they're wise enough to realize the the need for it they make that a very robust execution it doesn't have to be that robust so skipping priming is pretty bad other meetings get the priming and the decision-making backwards so we start to open the meeting you know you've heard of like diamond shaped thinking let's open the meeting with kind of expansionary thought and let's end the second half of the meeting with convergence well we start the meeting instead with convergence realize that we can't reconcile the various you know party in the room their their needs for convergence and then you might hear in the middle of a meeting like well let's start over again and remember why we're all here and we do the priming in the second half of the meeting just in time for the meeting to end so that's a super kind of like obvious thing that people can do but that people very rarely do uh in priming and I'm happy to generate like a list you know so we don't have to talk through everything but you know to maybe make some little PDFs or something that people can download that say here's what great priming looks like and then when you move to the decision making uh here's what great decision-making looks like and that way you can have like a little bit of a guide and again do the do your own math what science knows what we're doing in this meeting we're skipping a bunch of steps that's growing the pro probability of dysfunction or things were going wrong uh and let's shrink that probability instead of growing it amazing yeah that'd be sweet if you have that that we'll definitely link to that in the show notes so the advice here is make sure when you're starting a meeting running a meeting uh Prime everyone around the problem we're trying to solve or we're trying to get out of this meeting the context versus just diving into decision- making and and very notably the principles that apply you know I think that's really really important not just like what we're here to do but like how you how we can think about this best and you can even have a debate about the principles and it's way better to have a debate about the principles than it is to have a debate about the tactics that are rooted in the fact that you have super misaligned principles so if somebody's trying to make the decision you know with speed in mind and another person is trying to make the decision with accuracy in mind it is completely inevitable that they're about to have a cat fight in the meeting and they it's not resolvable until they come back and revisit the fact that deeper down we are approaching this in a completely different mentality with completely different objectives awesome okay if you end up having these PDFs of ways to Prime success okay okay great okay uh other things that people can do to work with folks better I know you have some advice on how to influence more effectively I have some advice around strategy and vision so maybe we go into those two directions let's start with strategy and vision because I think it's nice to be better at strategy and vision before you start influencing people so what you'll what you'll encounter in life in your mind as ideas are swirling whether you're generating those ideas or other people are is you're your brain is going to sort those ideas into believed believable kind of conceivable and inconceivable and you can I mean you can come up with your own words for that but that's kind of like a starting point which is if somebody says something you've already experienced it's something that is believed to your brain right so if if we said we should Implement an okr framework and you've experienced it in a in a in a prior workplace or you've read all about Google doing it then you're going to be like yeah we should it would clean up a lot of junk around here and and okay great so it's a your brain's kind of already in in a yes if it's believable maybe you're reading Harvard Business review and you're kind of reading about things that your business has never done that you've never done but there's all this evidence that it works and it makes sense to mechanically so you're kind of like okay yeah I find that believable and now we're kind of leaning toward yes or we're still in the yes bucket now we get into kind of these like unbelievable yet maybe conceivable so these are the things that seem to be far-fetched and most of like going back to the canva conversation the conversation with erri right that you had um most of the things that are totally believed by these leaders are unbelievable to most other leaders like we don't need managers that's I I don't believe it so there's like now we've shifted the Mind from inbuilt kind of Tailwind to inbuilt headwind and this is why mind struggle with strategy and with vision is that every mind based on like personality we talked about earlier that line of demarcation between like believed you know we all have different light lived experience so the more experience you have the more believed you have and then the believable and then the unbelievable but yet conceivable like these lines shift a lot from person to person so an idea that totally makes sense to iie he's probably been in a thousand meetings where other people are like that'll never work even though obviously science knows for example it totally will one of the great benefits of Science in culinary school is well let's not reinvent ideas are already proven so we already know that certain things activate people's purposeful State and the full brain that seeks comprehension seeks deeper problem solving seeks human connection those are known things and the same thing as like the debate about the value of design sits in the strategy and vision like how do we know there's an Roi to a better design here well if you could disprove that instead of proving it because the last million people who asked this question proved it if you could disprove it you'd probably win a Nobel Prize for being the first human to disprove something that is like Ironclad like we're done we're done with this debate so that I think is what we have to recognize in ourselves big part of self-awareness is where our like unbelievable threshold begins where our believable threshold ends and then the inconceivable is like get out of my office level stuff and a lot of the vision kind of thinking and dialogue that happens inside of businesses directly activates people's inconceivable response without any self-awareness that that is a that's a personal problem not a objective problem and I think that's like it's a really really important thing for companies and individuals to invest in themselves to kind of say do I have the capacity to recognize a situation that I find inconceivable but that could be totally wrong and then we can avoid the months poten of arguing that sit between us and experimentation so I think that's that's the that's the starting point for that and I if we were to kind of do paint by numbers on that you know what dominoes do you want to knock down know your personality what you're looking for in the big five model which we lean into is openness if you are low in openness your brain essentially has abstract creative intellectual complex thinking wired to the pain systems of the brain right that's like how your wiring is as soon as things get abstract not only are you're like I don't like this you have a much more visceral negative response to these types of ideas and you are now going into your pain cave right while somebody else in the room may have all that abstract creative exploratory thinking wired to their reward systems so that's something to really know and vulnerability is kind of the best approach to this because if you think about your you know Domino 2 once you kind of know this stuff then the question is how do we socialize this knowledge you know in a team let's say it's a SE Suite A leadership team a founder and co-founder and you know the rest of leadership team and we work a lot with like YC companies on this here because it's super important as they hire people they every incremental hire is an increment of psychological diversity and it changes everything about how these conversations go so knowing this okay what are our options to socialize this knowledge vulnerability is the best option but you know like bernee brown will kind of sell vulnerability for its own sake not everybody buys selling vulnerability for its own sake because it's it's a scary thing but it gets a little less scary when we consider how much scarier our alternatives are like I can pretend to hide this that's my other option or I cannot hide it be a Tasmanian devil and then be Unapologetic so like those are your three options and when you realize like I can be vulnerable I can attempt to hide it or I can be Unapologetic those other two options are ruinous compared to vulnerability the the thing you said about openness and not being good at Big Vision brainstorming super resonates with me because that's exactly me so I took I took your test uh what is it called what what's the what do you call this test by the way identity is what we call identity test okay cool and we'll link to it in the in the notes so I took it it's basically the big five agreeableness Consciousness extroversion openness and uh formerly known as neuroticism now called need for stability and I'm looking at it right here and I'm actually and I knew this about myself I'm pretty low on openness which I don't like to see but it very much aligns with exactly what you said I'm not great at Big Vision thinking at Super like like when people propose say are a designer on my team proposes this whole redesign big Vision rethink of the way we' I'm like no it's in my pain cave like you said and and that's exactly what this test reflect so I think it's a really powerful uh example of just uh understanding this is the way your brain is going to respond to things that are say totally out there inconceivable or how would you call it somewhat conceivable but not necessarily believable and that being aware that that's how your brain works is really powerful being aware other people have a very different experience with that is really powerful and your advice here is one this combination of this habitat create this habitat where you have kind of all all these versions of people's ways of thinking where some people are in their happy cave when they're thinking big and then along those lines your point about being very like vulnerably sharing hey this is me I am low in openness people to understand this on my team and let's work together to not use not let that hinder us is that right yeah absolutely I mean because if you think about these ideas as pegs and holes right we're going to take a creativity shaped Peg and try to put it through a more pragmatic shaped hole that there's like a translation problem there and that's a it's a huge burden like if the team actually needs to be Innovative it's a huge burden just in terms of time spent on that you know translation to translate the the Visionary strategic ideas that are accurate but are inconceivable into ideas that feel believable for those who kind of need that more grounded thing and of course the the the most common scenario here is Roi which is you know the the the classic question to ask about any idea what's the ROI well if the idea is inherently generating nth order effects instead of first order effects like what is the ROI of having fresh flowers in the lobby of a Four Seasons Hotel there there's two possibilities for the Four Seasons they either have an answer to that question which satisfies the pragmatic shaped hole or they have said in their habitat we don't ask those types of questions because they're a huge waste of time and if you're thinking about a competitive market you know like most of the people that you interview are in highly competitive markets the team that spends less time translating satisfactory language before they move which inevitably they will move whether and sometimes they'll move because the market forces them to right they spend so much time locked up in the ROI conversation or the justification the translation conversation that eventually customers start leaving employees start leaving and they're like oh it's becoming more believable now well cuz it's moved out of the realm of ideas into the physical world that we can see like right in front of us and that team because they got stuck in the translation phase instead of the experimentation phase has a huge disadvantage in the market and if you're competing head-to-head with one team like this is what I loved about you know the figma conversation that habitat inherently is built for Speed because the habitat itself words are tattooed to your brain that are like we will not spend time in the translation phase or we will not spend much time and we see this a lot kind of in the interplay between Finance departments product departments and things like that where you know an overpowered CFO can start asking questions for which there are no answers that kind of just we dragging the team into a different language that is much more literal than the more experiential language of the business so you can kind of see this play out all the time but I think vulnerability is great because if you if you are sitting in a meeting you Lenny and you say this is not my thing basically everything you're saying is inconceivable uh now I'm I'm being honest with you nobody's GNA nobody's going to hate you for being honest they're actually going to be glad that you are honest about the the Gap instead of glad that you are super certain that you are the right human to index off of in the decision- making process and the thing uh you recommend being open about is this is my uh personality like this is my core identity like I don't know the language you use but it's it's not I think all this is inconceivable it's I think all this is inconceivable because this is the way absolutely yeah unpack the detail for sure yeah I mean tell people this this takes my brain all this abstract and kind of creative future Centric thinking that's not rooted in the concrete is where my brain goes you know alarms go off and I'm like I need something concrete so if you can give me something concrete I'm more comfortable but I at this point I have to maybe move into a lot of trust and like trust may be my alternative to com to like agreement right that's yeah and there's also I imagine part of like what I always do is I uh recognize hey I'm not amazing at this let me push myself to be more open to these things and find partners that are really good at this and let them kind of Drive the ship more yeah and it's great you know one the things that's so cool about like the YC teams that we work with is they're so sophisticated and so smart so even though they might run into this roadblock a they're going to do exactly what you just said and they're going to push themselves you may notice in your profile the dot that you scored is surrounded by rings that represent how hard it is for you to push yourself to think in different ways to think Beyond kind of the the home base way of your brain working now at a certain point your brain breaks and you move into foreign territory uh and you know there there's a level of I mean if you are very conservative person and somebody's like let's go to burning man that will break your brain right you don't go all the way to the other side of the spectrum necessary record I've been four times even though I'm uh low apparently low in openness perfect at least there's lots of reasons to go got married burning man yeah makes me feel better about my low percentile but you're pushing your brain you know and and I mean burning man's actually a great example because there are a bunch of different reasons you might go and if you go for one reason then you're exposed to the other reasons and that may be interesting and you may kind of venture closer to those other reasons you may be like I'm going to stay in my reason bubble within the greater context of this place so like there's a whole bunch of in you know business is no different that you can kind of say okay I'm going to push myself uh and I may get into these kind of places that go beyond my brain's flexibility like where they last band kind of reaches its limits and then from there I'll trust people uh and I'll have people you know and what I was going to mention about the YC Founders is so many of them are so smart that they're really able to efficiently translate what they see beyond where your band stretches into the language you feel comfortable with quickly other teams do that really badly and they just like accus why can't you see this and it's like then you get even more stuck how much shift have you seen in people say they take this test and they're like as I am 23r percentile and openness do you see people move meaningfully across this if they work on these sorts of things or is this just like here's who you are you're not going to change significant personally I'm more concerned with the effect on teams than on people because if you look at this through the like I've been a four-time founder and if I look at this through like how is my company working how are my teams working um I don't need all the individuals to get to perfect I I need especially in cases where there's like this translation issue where a team is working on something and some some part of that team is is saying like let's stop here and let's stay let's dwell here if they can move enough that the team the effect on the team is now freed up that's what we really feel as a business and so the answer to answer your question directly people can move a lot especially through that the first three rings of that range that we depict like really really well self-awareness is actually kind of the the key and self-awareness and self-consciousness the difference here is that self-awareness is simply being intentional with your brain whereas self-consciousness is being worried about your brain we don't want people to be worried about their brains and like insecure we just want you to say this is a situation in which my brain can work this way and this is a situation where I want to push myself and this is so it's like being intentional and we we talked a little bit before this episode about kind of this Instinct versus intellect duality in the mind and essentially you're just using your intellect to either verify or improve your instinct you're you're always going to have instinctive responses about risk and fear and uncertainty and doubt and need for for data and all these types of things but then your intellect can come in and like watch that part of your brain thinking and say you're super worried about the risk of this but it's actually pretty low stakes for us to to jump in and try so your your need to stabilize that is a little misplaced and your intellect that that's really what you're doing is saying like how much do people change I don't really worry too much about how how much they change it's more about how much they can spot with their intellect something that's Misfit to the situation and then take what they're motivated to do and what they choose to do and separate them right like that's the it doesn't matter if we change motivations if your choice of behavior and your underlying motivation can be different from each other that's awesome those people are super and we all know people like that where you're like I know this person is uncomfortable right now but they're totally making it work and I really appreciate that yeah part of the reason ask is like Hey I was talking to you about this before we started recording I want 99 percentile at all these I just want to nail this and I know that's not how it works I know it's like you have you have strengths you have weaknesses you have you can't be amazing at everything but that's funny where I'm goes there uh just to close the loop on this advice around getting better at vision and strategy uh if I were to reflect back what I'm hearing it's uh be very self-aware about what you are not strong at say openness is that is that specifically the one to focus on if you're trying to figure out better Vision And so there's a whole bunch of stuff well let me let me try to make the list simple openness is the biggest one because it is essentially your tolerance of vision and strategy and the lower that is the lower you will tolerate the abstract pieces of the puzzle for sure uh the outlandish and kind of like purely creative and rules breaking components of strategy and vision lack of Precedence those types of things now the other thing to look out for is as your conscientiousness Rises which is essentially your desire to be efficient effective busy you know not waste time things struct yeah structured and organized that is another contributor in the negative which is it's objectively great to be conscientious person like there there are so many benefits until we have to waste time productively and then or we have to break order in organization and then that strength that you know four days a week or 28 days a month is great for you on those days where we go and have the offsite and say like what if we blew it all up you're to your example of like new design new website blow it all up start over again different direction that's where the conscientiousness is going to be like why are we doing this why are we having this conversation what's the need this is inefficient I could be spending my time doing something else and sometimes that'll Express itself even in meetings of uh I was in a meeting one time after we were acquired this is you know eight or nine years ago now and when you're founder and you get acquired there's a new flavor of habitat that you find yourself in with very new rituals and one of the rituals that I find myself around a lot was um the ritual of saying we can't talk about this for the rest of our lives and we would be about six minutes into a meeting when somebody would drop the we can't talk about this for the rest of our lives line and I would look at my watch and be like I didn't realize that you were terminal and you I mean I why are you even in this meeting if you're about to die like because we are my take on this is we are super far away from the rest of our lives right now why are you saying that we can't talk about something for six minutes when the diminishing return of added information in the priming of this meeting you know to use that again you knowing X quadruples your decision quality and you are resisting knowing X now we're going to hit a point where you knowing YZ Etc we've hit a diminishing return and now I'm improving your decision quality by 1% instead of by 4X but we haven't established like any sensitivity in this room to the diminishing return curve of of incremental thought and incremental information and this is like a new habitat I'm like in this habitat do people really hate thought do people really consider themselves to be like the the you know the police that watch The Mean Streets of intellectualism for any activity like it's like it's just kind of crazy but yeah that's that's kind of the Practical side of this is you got to watch out and you got to be careful and and that's why I say habitat's such a big deal because that's a perfect example of a well-intentioned room with mostly people that are you know there for the right reasons and the right outcomes but where this normalness of saying a phrase like that or saying like I disagree same meeting person goes I completely disagree and I was like with everything no absolutely everything and I go so let's look at the meta you know the overhead camera of this meeting this was the initiation of combat right that's what the brain is seeing all the brains in the room are like oh fight right so and now what are our objectives my objective now becomes win their objective because they've taken a huge risk of saying I disagree with everything becomes win and because they are disagreeing with a lot of stuff that they don't understand the inevitability is they're about to be annihilated in this room where they have both said we can't talk about this forever and now put all of their chips onto the table to say I completely disagree instead of I have a question or can we pull that thread or I don't see how these dots connect so that's that on the super tactical level there's things we say that activate the amydala the combat mode of the brain versus a different choice of phrase which is going to activate the prefrontal cortex which is like hey Lenny tell you're connecting these two dots I'm not seeing how they're connected logic like now let's activate the prefrontal cortex with this sentence instead of Lenny that's dumb I completely disagree let's activate the amydala instead I want to talk about this habitat Point you're making which I think is really important but just to close the loop on the strategy Vision piece so just to just to give people some very tactical advices uh basically understand your personality maybe take this core identity test or something like that uh understand if you're low in openness and high in conscientiousness maybe you're not amazing at vision and it's going to be hard for you to think think of your brain is just going to like feel agitated when you're around Vision um but I mean you can still do it right you can still ask people to translate the the key tactic is okay it's not this you're predestined to suck it's more if you're low in openness especially if you're also high in conscientiousness then recognize your native language for ideas is a mismatch for the native language of vision and really really good strategy and then you can be open about that and be like you can ask for some translations and you can ask for like I mean trust doesn't have to be non-participation you can actually say like it would help me trust if you could explain this Gap like a a great example would be a second order effect like why should we have awesome documentation how do how are we going to make more money if we have awesome documentation ah great question don't be hostile in the way you asked it but like just help me understand where what threat are we pulling well we're pulling this thread of customer satisfaction retention recommendation Etc that you know stripe is really good at this right especially from the early days that great documentation justifies all sorts of second order effects that then will lead us to this first order effect you're you're asking about awesome okay that's really great and I was going to go One Direction but I want to talk about this real quick something comes up a lot on this podcast is uh this the power of Leaning into strengths and not feeling like you have to be amazing at everything and that in this example say I have a low openness high conscientiousness I can still be very successful in the role by in my opinion leading into things I'm actually really strong at say conscientiousness and I'm also high in agreeableness I don't like the sound of that um thoughts on just like it's okay if you're not amazing at Vision because your openness is but you can be better at other stuff and together you end up you can be really successful no matter how your personality absolutely right yeah I mean the the truth is we look at I mean taking that canva example of coaches and managers not only does that change the way an employee feels about the way this connection they have is invested in them but it also changes inherently a lot of the meeting Dynamics and teaming Dynamics from like okay hierarchical feeling things manager to more mesh-based intellect right and within the mesh you don't have to worry too much about the hierarchy anymore you can kind of say like this is the nature of my contribution so even in the vision and strategy piece maybe your contributions to Idea Idea generation they're they're going to be some and they're probably going to be good but those those are not ideas to protect in the state that you brought them to the table they're ideas to set on the table so that people can surround them and improve them and then as other people contribute ideas that aren't as natural to you kind of just realize we're not in the phase yet of judging and ranking and prior prioritizing these ideas that's not where we are in the overall storyline so let it happen and then if you can improve those ideas improve them and once ideas kind of have that early stage that kind of like what Johnny I described uh as like the infancy of an idea when it's really weak and delicate and susceptible if you can nurture that idea to kind of adolescence where it has a little bit of ability to defend itself then now you're in a situation where your conscientiousness can start to think about things like how would we resource this what sequencing makes the most sense what is the ROI of these things relative to each other and consider the second and third order effects and so on and what would the project plans and to your point of being both conscientious and agreeable you are this master of coordination and Alignment naturally so like when that phase of the project begins and we have to get people bought in high functioning together you know getting on the same page staying on on you know staying focused getting the project done like all of the people that were good at the beginning with all the vision and strategy they are just a complete disaster in that face so like that's that's just how things really work in the real world and I think we're so again focused like we talked about at the kind of at the beginning we alluded to the fact like there's you have to unpack enough complexity I love the Einstein quote make things as simple as possible but no simpler and we've made things way simpler than possible in business by saying like this is the right way of doing the whole thing it's like no no no the whole if you've ever lived a day in real life building a real product the Dynamics shift a lot throughout the course of you know product life cycle as an example or really any life cycle as an example and the peak humans as the dynamic shift are very different Peak humans Lenny is awesome here contributes here 10% contributes here 98% Evan contributes 98% here please get Evan out of the room when it comes to to these these meetings like that's that's great and yes we should lean into our strengths but not so much that we don't know our weaknesses because another human strength on your team is the patch for the bug of your weakness and we run buggy software and companies and people we say oh I I'm leaning into my strengths I don't need to worry about my weaknesses well then you become the person who needs everything translated into your language because when your weakness flares its head up it slows everybody else down so it's really just from an operations business fluidity perspective a team that is highly unaware of its weaknesses is going to have a lot of slowness and a lot of problems as a result of that they don't have to fix all their weaknesses but be aware of them and know who is a to your weakness Evan this is so interesting I love that they were digging deep on this is there one tactical thing you could recommend for someone to become better at openness in say a brainstorming experience when they're doing Vision or when they're low at this save me I think the best exercise for a conscientious person especially to feel more open is to become obsessed with reverse engineering and it's to say it there's two forms of reverse engineering that I think are really helpful here number one it would be reverse engineering against a a desired outcome to truly understand the inputs that generate that outcome and if we think about that at a big level like okay we want to win a market what are the real inputs to deconstruct that outcome and understand what our strategy should look like to attack all of the most relevant inputs that generate that outcome I think that's um that's the specific form and then at a super tactic iCal level like if you want to give feedback to somebody and let's say you know like for me I'm low in politeness you're probably much higher in politeness than I am and I struggled for years with feedback to generate the intended outcome like I delivered the feedback but the the delivery wasn't the intended outcome and the way that I delivered it actually reduced the probability of the intended outcome because I was being too impolite too Direct in many cases too harsh and what does harshness do to the brain well that's crystal clear so what I was doing and what science knows were very different things and that's why I failed in those cases but as soon as I started closing the Gap and realized I need to try harder to like think about the story arc of this feedback I I can that becomes clearest to me how to do it when I have the intended outcome in mind for the feedback like I really would like this person to start turning the corner on this particular way of thinking like if you and I work together and it was about openness would be like what are some things that I could do right now to increment and set the stage for a big shift in openness as time goes on that you are bought into and that's a very if I'm impolite and be like Lenny what's your problem why can't you do this everybody else can do this your willingness to to start turning that corner I mean it may be there because the safety system is active like oh bad things could happen if I don't do this but like I don't want your safety system to motivate this change I mean in most cases that's an Optics based change instead of a material change that will occur and that's why a lot of people they're like accountability is a great example asking for accountability is the best way to not get it because ask asking for accountability activates people's safety systems or especially saying I'm GNA hold people accountable then everybody's like oh great we should set up a whole movie set of facade houses that pretend everything's great with no substance behind them and that's why so many companies end up that way so but I would say that's kind of the Tactical the second thing to understand about openness in reverse engineering is just situational awareness very few conscientious people spend in my opinion as a very open person enough time immersing themselves in the reality that is everyday situational awareness NE necessary to do their job simp simplest example of this is how many Executives have ever talked to n greater than five customers you know like that is a cuz well I'm busy I got a lot of stuff to do I can't I don't have time to go to take a world tour which is a lot likely don't have the the rest of our lives to talk about this I'm not asking you to take a world tour I'm asking you to stuff into your brain enough situational awareness that the decisions you make every day that affect all those people you're not talking to are considering those people that you're not talking to so it less about an intended specific outcome in this case and more about do I really know the you know that I would kind of think about this is like if we think think about like uh Aeronautical Engineering like do I actually have an understanding of the conditions the flight conditions that I'm in every day in order to fly really well and the answer to that for a lot of people is no so reverse engineering is like probably the whole Cate I don't know if that makes enough tactical sense I'm happy to to to be more descriptive but like that's the category I think is like have you revers engineered how to get outcomes and have you reversed engineered to predispose your mind to come up with really good ideas and good decisions as opposed to come up with decisions that are super disconnected from reality great example being like plg I mean if you haven't done enough situational awareness work you have no idea if plg is a remotely viable strategy for growing your business if it's remotely relevant strategy for growing your business and Company after company after company has leadership team of obsessed with this concept that in principle we should be able to let people just sign up and swipe a credit card and onboard and great no we have a hyper technical solution like that is never going to happen or it's like that's not the way they do budget or like there could be any number of ways that that that's you know not going to work out and that's those are just some concrete examples this episode is brought to you by EPO EPO is a Next Generation AB testing and feature management platform built by alums of of Airbnb and snowflake for modern growth teams companies like twitch Muro clickup and DraftKings rely on EPO to power their experiments 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geo.com [Music] Lenny feels like there's a fractal of stuff we could talk about in this endless threads of things that I want to dig into let me shift a little bit to influence we mentioned this a little bit earlier I know you have a bunch of awesome advice on how to build your skill at becoming more influential that's something a lot of listeners of the podcast product managers also Founders need the skill who doesn't need to become better influenced what can we learn about how to become better influen we'll probably unpack uh a second topic and open up a side you know an offramp here right at the beginning but there's two things there's influence itself and then there's relationships we should probably talk a little bit about relationships trying to exert influence through a dysfunctional relationship is not going to go great and most human beings especially when they go to work are pretty uh pretty out of out of sorts when it comes to relationships and you even hear crazy Mantra like we don't have to like each other to work together which are like good luck with that I mean just watch a text message pop up on a phone of a person who doesn't like you and watch their response time to the text message or their slack message or whatever I mean you're talking about you've built in a multi-day at least multi-hour delay into responsiveness sure purely because the relationship isn't good and then you compound that effect over the over whatever size your company is that's you know that's massive operational inefficiency just because I don't want to respond to Evan right now right like that's so that's that's the one piece now assuming the relationship is in place and we'll come back to that and talk about that because that's a whole very actionable framework to unpack assuming the relationship is good I think the starting point for influence is to choose your character and choose your mode it's almost like you're playing like Elden ring or some you know video game and you're G to be like am I GNA influence in this way as like the hero or the you know the kind of like the the Exemplar of these things or am I going to influence through back channels or am I like what is my character and everybody for for your personality kind of has a natural fit for like the character you're going to select as this mode of influence and then you're going to pick a speed of influence which is slow moderate or fast and the habitat can help a lot with this is like if you're if a Founder is listening to this and you haven't create a habitat where fast influence is easy and H like the permission isn't there then you're slowing the company down inadvertently by just not kind of clarifying this with the team so slow influence is kind of the we'll let them find out the hard way influence like they're going off a cliff we know they're going off a cliff and a lot of times we find ourselves in What's called the abalene Paradox and the abalene Paradox is where everybody in the room knows it's a bad idea but we're all like we're in you know and the classic abene Paradox kind of if you look up memes on Google it'll be like the dad thinks that the kids might want to go camping mom doesn't want to go camping camping the kids don't want to go camping dad also doesn't really want to go camping but everybody's like Dad probably wants us to go camping so let's give it a go and like they all go and don't enjoy it so that's and we see that play out you know all the time and a lot of people will just kind of say I can't do anything I don't have any influence in this case we're just going to let him fail and they'll learn or this impolite person like me giving feedback the wrong way years in the past like we're you know I'm not going to sit Evan down and talk to him about this he'll figure out on his own through failure that this doesn't work and that can take months that can take years that can take a lifetime for people to learn the slow way and it is a form of influence right like you you are being intentional to say I think the world will create enough failure that adaptation will occur that is a form of influence just the slowest one and a lot of people listening probably realize oh that's what I'm doing how can I go way faster than just letting things fail so that's where mod influence comes in and a great book to read for moderate influence is the Challenger sale and in the Challenger sale what we're looking at is the concept of teaching people something and then when they live with this new knowledge they'll see things that they weren't seeing before so for example the in the feedback example that we can kind of keep using over and over again through this is hey Evan you might you might want to notice people's body language while you're saying these things and here's some signs to look out for that when you've done this and you get this that's probably a sign that people are bought in and still with you and when you see this that's probably a sign that people are pushing back and you can ask this question in that moment and you'll probably hear answers like this so you're like giving somebody a tool that their future is going to unpack and the Challenger sale kind of assumes a long enough sales cycle where you're not going to land the sale in the meeting you're not trying to close them right there you'll teach them some stuff and you'll say hey if you see this stuff that's a pretty clear sign that you need to take action so why don't we call you in 30 days and and and 30 days later we get on have you been seeing this and they'll go everywhere I look I can't not see it now and that's how you influence a person in a few days a few weeks maybe a few months at worst way faster than letting them fail we actually had I don't know if you know this we had the author of that book on the podcast Matt Dixon I think is his name yeah and yeah and the Challenger sale the idea there is like challenge their perspective and view on what is actually real about the market and what they need exactly yeah and I think it's it's and I think yes there's the challenge component to it but I think the underappreciated piece of that methodology is that you're still letting that person see the world but you've given them new information that is breaking some calcification in their brain it's not the challenge it's not the moment of the challenge where all the magic happens like there's moments that occur later they continue kind of putting that you know calcium lime and rust melting formula on this on this expectation or this kind of decision in their mind to the point where sometimes they'll turn around and be like thank you for even telling me this so the advice here is uh if you're trying to influence someone try to figure out what they don't know like find information that you know that they may not know because once they know that they may be like oh wow I totally see what you're saying yeah exactly right and and let them know it and let them live with it don't don't cram it down their throat and make them accept it if if they live with it just a little bit even just a couple days that might be enough to come back to a much softer conversation does this connect to what you said earlier which I love this idea of pick a character like how your influence like pick your influence style based on your personality whether it's back channeling and that makes me think of this very specific person who's like he's coming on the podcast actually he's like this Jedi that just gets people aligned but very behind the scenes very like the meetings before the meetings uh so that's one character or it's just like uh telling a compelling Story Probably in a deck or uh or there's other charact I guess yeah is that is does this idea of uh sharing information is that like a type of character is that just something that like everyone should just do because that's a really effective strategy I like the idea of intentionality in just about everything like are we are we letting trade wins push us into certain things or are we actually making choices and I think that step of being intentional about your style and this kind of notion of a character uh is a is a wise step to take so that you can kind of have some guard rails as you go through this and some consistency right it helps other people understand the role you're playing in influence if you are consistently kind of coming from in the same place you're articulate about that style like I want to try to influence this organization by doing this this way and you're going to see that from me over and over and over again you've act you kind of given yourself a little permission and and also you can get some buying from people if you do want to be more the Barbarian you know kind of approach you can say hey I'm the devil's advocate approach or I'm the break it and see if it still stands after I hit it really hard with a sledgehammer kind of guy is it okay if I do that over and over and over again and now you've bought future you the permission to approach things in certain ways that would yield meaningfully different influence outcomes right like meaningfully different like I was able to do this and it accelerated something so what I the way I'm hearing this is uh there are many ways to get what you want think about your personality style and find the path that is most aligned with the way you operate whether it's behind the scenes whether it's a compelling story awesome so so this characters basically figure out what your this kind of comes back to leverage your strengths what are you good at and use that channel to convince people of the thing you want them to be convinced of yep absolutely are there uh I imagine like my mind goes to what are the list of thing of ways what are the character options in this list when I'm opening up the game and choosing is there any you went through a few but just to give people like okay I see I could try it this way they're like a small list you could share of just like ways you could try approaching influence probably the dimensions are most valuable to people I I would say one of the dimensions is compassion which is do I want to influence by trying to help people by trying to make sure that people that we get it right and that people get value and then the permission I'm seeking there is can I ask questions about why why are we not thinking about the user right now you know why why are we not concerned with the value that they're getting and challenge Us in that way I think there are characters based on logic and and even belief which is I would like to be the one to kind of insert more knowledge and insert more kind of causality into conversations and challenge causality in conversations to make us think harder and and challenge what we believe and like break up the sacred cows of the stuff we walked in the meeting with so that we feel feel differently about things walking out of meetings so I think there's a a bunch of different uh very useful Dimensions one could be very creativity based if you follow this big five format they they're kind of spelled out for you um enthusiasm interesting to menion like I want to challenge us on the through the lens of what do people get excited about what do what does what makes people feel good does this make people feel good and could are there tweaks we could make to the product or this marketing campaign or whatever I mean look at what Seiki just did with Runway I mean like I love that guy so much and there's so many components of his character and obviously the characters he surrounded himself with that contribute to really Next Level stuff right and they're definitely challenging each other using these dimensions of like compassion to be the you know the the character of caregiver or the character of like protector right and so there's a bunch of different kind of ways you could turn those Dimensions into characters but I think when you see the value of each of those perspectives especially in product I'm a really big fan of product if you have dysfunctionally high compassion dysfunctionally High openness you you have internal rewards and and motivations to explore regions of product that other Minds aren't exploring as intuitively and you don't have to have the whole deck you know to to be amazing it product but you have some unfair advantages if you are super prone to reverse engineering just by your nature you have you're going to be more situationally aware and probably make a series of vastly better decisions than the team that has a lot less situational awareness than you do it's a huge Advantage so but but when it comes to to the concept of influence yeah I mean figuring out these Dimensions that Define who you are and then using them to kind of say I want the permission to ask a series of questions and challenge our thinking through this very intuitive strength that I have I can we all see the value in that or do I need to further you know sell myself right and then you and you'll find like you can take on that character and play that role really well imagine the ultimate unlock is that combined with what is that person's personality Style and what is the best way they receive information which is a little harder because you can't force them take some test and you can't like tell them make them give you the results but I know a lot of teams do these tests together as a team and share the results and so it's I guess a reminder of just that's really powerful if you and your team especially the exec company yeah exactly and and when you move into the this vulnerability out of your three choices State we don't need a bunch of data for that to work really well you know if you said hey I'm not super strong at this and the rest of the room was like well wait this other person's super awesome at this or not the two of you work together then it's like under 30 seconds we've unlocked potential that wasn't there yeah so that's you want to get business I kind of think of I mean extending the video game metaphor not only are we choosing our characters or we are a certain character but the business has a difficulty setting that we chose based on the habitat and I've worked in in and with way too many companies where we are playing the game in nightmare mode and every enemy takes a thousand shotgun shells to bring down instead of just switching the difficulty setting to easy which is like the enemies somehow become our friends as we go through this journey like I mean it really can be that transformative especially with a case like yours that you talked about okay I I'm not as high in openness I'm very high in conscientiousness if I can admit this and ask different types of questions everybody else in the room will be like the difficulty setting of this just went to like zero the speed of it just went to way higher than it used to be and it's we underestimate this kind of less concrete part of the business world and that's I mean that's the Genesis of this whole business that I was crazy enough to start after starting other companies in the past which is like we are underestimating how much of our operational reality is a function of our human reality and we're are we doing enough are we doing the right things to close the gap between what science knows and what business does and do we even know what the science is have we educated ourselves to close the gap and then then it becomes super obvious oh this makes a lot of sense to be open and find the patch to my bug and here we go this fractal of topics uh continues to grow I'm trying to contain it there's three things I want to try to talk about in the rest of our chat that stuff we've touched on that I think will be really useful to people one is uh relationships you mentioned there's more to talk about there just how to build great relationships two is I want to come back to the habitat and building a habitat that is very conducive to Innovation and speed and success and those sorts of things and then I want to talk about Focus we talked a bit about just like how important focus is and how differently our brains operate in different states of focus so maybe we start with a relationship piece just because that connects to what we're just talking about of how do we strengthen relationships create better relationships within our teams yeah so we we were talking about Rel ships kind of as this offramp or this kind of side car to influence and we real quickly this the fast mode of influence in relationships goes really well together so we talked about the slow and the moderate the fast mode of influence is cognitive dissonance it's essentially saying in the moment I'm not going to wait for you to to experience anything it's saying in the moment how does this formula compute explain to me Evan how you being too blunt in feedback is going to end up in a human being changing why do you believe that and especially it's that second phrase of why do you believe that like drill below the behavior down into the belief what do you believe that has you doing this and then we can explore how properous the belief itself is which then bubbles up to the surface level of this and if in the environment the habitat is a huge component of this as our relationships which is if you have great relationships we're people trust each other enough to have this kind of cognitive distance conversation and we have a habitat that is very clear that we are free to discuss cognitive dissonance and logical disconnects like that is really important to do then you activate fast influence mode basically so that's a really important thing and then as you transition relationships well what are the question that everybody kind of glosses over in my opinion is what is a relationship I mean I don't know how you feel about answering that question but it's a really hard I'm just gonna I I would just go to chat jpt what is a relationship exactly right yeah yeah at this point we have we have some some help that we didn't used to have but the the the other thing that goes along with what is a relationship is like how good is my relationship with person X like you and I both know shus and like how good is our relationship I would say it's awesome why is it awesome I don't know it's just feels great so let's double click on on a good definition and a good framework because once you actually know why a relationship feels great like that example or why a relationship feels super difficult now we can start to build some strategies some like actual action plans for them so what we propose to people is if you take that third component of your brain ability that is one piece of your relationships especially your professional relationships so if you know an engineer and you have an idea of something you want to build and they have the ability to build it their ability and their utility to you is a function of your relationship and it will contribute to the positive or negative force that you feel in that relationship like wow this person has a lot of ability my appreciation is higher my faith in them is higher my cooperation with them is higher if you question a person's ability or they've proven that that ability is kind of reliable those things start to kind of vector downwards and you know we'll pick on shus through this as a good example because I think most of the people watching also know him what is his ability what is his utility as high as I've ever seen I mean it it's every conversation he's intellectually conceptually additive to like you're better you're better after you've talked to him every time at least that's been my experience with him and we all know people like that that you know with various fields and various abilities so that's one piece that's really important and why as an individual it's so important to invest in your ability because it is so integral to every relationship you have particularly professional relationships and your ability knowledge your reasoning your your imagination your skill set these are all incremental facets of you so if it's and and that's really really key now here's the plot twist your ability is actually not the most important part of a relationship biologically speaking there's two more that matter quite a bit more and the surprise ending is the the third one matters the most which is uh scary in some cases so the second factor of relationships is trust so trust in the brain if we go like very primitive back to the amydala that we talked about earlier trust is simply risk human level RIS risk and Trust can span from strongly negative to strongly positive in a relationship and we felt that full range with different people in our lives strongly negative trust is the brain saying this person is dangerous to me they are very likely to try to undermine me they're very likely to not deliver something they're very personal harm will occur by essentially kind of interacting in this relationship and then on the other side of trust uh we kind of try to create some levels to this to keep it clean and you know the fractal continues to grow a little bit but we'll we'll try to keep this simple but I I like to think of like trust one two and three three distinct levels of trust and Trust one is let's say we're having a cookout uh trust one is Lenny could you please bring the chips ideally sealed like but it's a it's a delegation of a a simple non-critical task knowing that it is likely to get done and get done decently well um but I don't it's not a it's not like this huge level of trust it's it's the people that we work with where this type of Delegation and uh especially if people delegate under the thesis of I want to do the high value work so let me put the low value work on other people that's all the low value work that we put on other people and it allows us to purify our focus on the high value work and we don't need all the low value work to go beautifully well or be artistically brilliant so us too is when we step up to almost like I need to do this myself is there anybody who could do it as well as me that there's no risk to me having them do it instead of me doing it and that's where you get true scalability of teams so if you can if you can trust people enough there's the ri your brain's assessment of risk of giving this task to someone else or giving this knowledge even to somebody else that they'll treat it the way you would treat it is a significantly higher positive Trust trust that you can feel in a relationship and then finally Trust Three is when we do hit these break points in our brain where we say the way your mind works is beyond the way my mind works on this topic so the classic example at the cookout would be if Wolf Gang Puck was a neighbor right we're gonna have Wolf Gang Puck do all the most critical stuff and maybe even set up you know the music and the decor and whatever or another example would be like when Steve Spielberg has has John Williams score a film he's not hoping John will do it as well as stevenh would do it he's saying just send me the bill try not to go too crazy right but he's not going to sit down with the invoice and be like why did you need 13 horn instead of 11 like Jon just gets to do what Jon does because there's so much trust in this kind of like beyond my event horizon kind of risk like it would be riskier for me to do it than for him to do it or her to do it right so that's kind of the the uh the level but that that matters more to a human being because the safety system if it activates your utility is sunk so if you're if you're an awesome engineer but you damage people it doesn't matter that you're an awesome engineer because in the social network the mesh of your organization you are a node that has like a protective covering around it information is not flowing to you the way it would normally and delegation is not flowing to you and access is not flowing to you the way it would normally so you are a kind of a protected deactivated sequestered node of the mesh at this point in time and a lot of people really don't get that yeah that's a really good way of visualizing yeah so and then here's the surprise ending the last piece of your of every relationship that you have is appeal appeal is how your brain interprets the shared experiences you have with other people whether or not you look forward to being around that person whether or not you like their style the feel of what shared experiences really are and if you think about let's pick on shus one last time what is his ability and utility off the charts to what extent can he be trusted Trust Three off the charts will he ever damage somebody not I mean not to my knowled he may have some really dark past that we don't know about but as far as I've seen not a lot of damage in his wake and then thirdly what kind of experience is he he's an extraordinarily positive experience so he naturally accumulates great relationship after great relationship after great relationship and again if you're that great engineer with a ton of ability now let's flip one flip the middle Dimension and we trust you a lot but you're a horrible experience are you coming to our offsite are you in this meeting no you're gone because we don't want you there you're like a hurricane so so biologically speaking the the biggest bug in our programming as we transfer this to the business context is what makes the most sense in business is the most you know if it's a meritocracy the the best people with the best knowledge that we can trust should be in the room and we will fight it with every fiber of our being if they are a terrible experience and that's that's a bummer and what's funny is you can flip it because we all either have friends or know people who have friends that you cannot trust they have no ability that to speak of but they're a super awesome experience what a great friend you're like so how is it that we get this thing completely flipped and I think that's the thing is as you parse that list yourself as you know anybody listening parses that list it's critical to ask what kind of experience am I that is where to start not how good am I at my job how much do I know how critical am I to this process but am I a miserable experience and if the answer is yes don't worry too much about the other pieces yet you got to fix that first and to this point of the profile like as you parse the profile you'll find things like obviously not a pleasant experience like being really polite obviously not a pleasant experience being super overbearing and assertive obviously not a pleasant experience being hyper low in openness and and acting out of that and like telling everybody they're over complicating everything all the time not a great experience for people who are actually well intention trying to get it right so there's concrete things that you can do with this knowledge in mind this last piece makes me think about why some of the most effective PMS are the PMS that bring a lot of energy and positivity to the team and just get people excited which is such a soft skill but such a powerful thing you can do for your team because people kind of look to you to to to lead them and if you come at it with like like I had I had a PM I was working with and every meeting he's like this is gonna be awesome he just like comes right in every meeting H who's ready to make some decisions and it really changes everything and so so this is amazing advice so basically if you want better relationships which will make you a better influence or start with what kind of experience am might when people work with me ask me for stuff uh ask me questions uh and you shared a bunch of specific things you can do like something I always tell people is just try to smile just like just look happy you know that makes a big difference happy bring energy look happy look just try to be excited yeah uh so think about the so if you want to build better relationships which have all these amazing trickle D effects your advice is think about the experience you are to other people when they work with you uh work on trust and I and ideally get to the place that third level of you are doing it better than them but that's that's that's high bar for all things and then the last thing is like are you actually amazing like is your abil like in work in your abilities that's kind of the last piece yeah exactly and it's not that none of these become unimportant because the other ones are kind of the gateways it's I mean your relationships require all three especially your professional relationships so yeah it's it's more just like if experience is the only thing undermining you when you're otherwise very trustworthy and very skilled and able that's a shame just fix it and there's a whole bunch of ways to to go about that but I like to leave that to people like to explore that creatively like well oh gosh okay I can change this to this this to this this to this on the trust thing do you hurt people I mean that's that's it like do people have a reason to believe that you are risky or dangerous and it's it unfortunately in a lot of habitats the habitat itself either allows or even rewards people that are super untrustworthy to kind of play the system and advancer the system and as you talked to Jeffrey right about the power conversation like the worse the habitat the more his suggestions work right can see that and the reason that he's correct like he used the phrase this is how the World always has been it's how it is and it's how how it always will be right well it's how the normal dysfunctional world always has been is and will be and if you want people in your organization to rise on Merit and for influence to work to to generate better decision-making make better products have a better company move move faster Etc you need to create a habitat where what Jeff's observed about the normal dysfunctional world largely doesn't work within your habitat so if it if it's effective for people to harm each other in your habitat you are performing at a much lower level than if harming each other was extremely ineffective right and that's up to you as a leader as a manager Etc and then of course skill is what it is like it's your ability to convert your intents into outcomes I'm glad you're talking about habitat that's exactly where I wanted to go so just two more things I want to spend our time on uh habitat and Focus how to create more space for focus and get better focus so you've touched on this many times at this point this idea of a habitat uh I think another way to think about this is like the culture of your company is that right exactly Okay cool so are there a few things you could recommend to people to create a habitat that is conducive of good stuff let's start at the start here so in the difference between what science knows and business does let's kind of to zero in on the fact that the way most companies approach culture has a very shaky track record like if Mission Vision Values was an airline you would not allow any family to fly on that Airline because it does not arrive at most of its intended destinations so that is a just a super important starting point because I don't I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna kill a sacred cow here while we talk about this and I don't want anybody to to feel like I'm trying to be mean or anything it's just it's worth looking at stuff that doesn't work and wondering if there's something that could work a lot better so if we look at habitat in culture it's really about what people believe it's what people believe is acceptable permissible productive and the biggest flaw in people's approach to culture and interestingly enough even at YC they talk about like this Mission Vision Values culture stuff that comes later let some stuff happen with the business that comes later they're right to say that if that's the Paradigm you're going to use because it's not going to work either way so you might as well do it later but if you're going to do it the right way and investigate human beliefs and what like we talked about priming for example culture is just the macro priming of the entire business of what your central belief systems are and then the permission that forms from those belief systems so if you've done that really well you should do that right at the very beginning like in what way should we approach this company building this working together Etc like that would be really really helpful to get right from day one and the um the the belief system that people have there are two approaches to changing people's beliefs Mission Vision Values is what we call a performative approach meaning I'm going to come up with some expression of an inspiring Mission inspiring values and inspiring vision and it's going to be performed well enough like it's going be like if we were busking in the in the park this is going to be a cool enough Mission Vision Values that people throw some change into my guitar case and they buy into it like they gather around what I think and I think that's just completely the wrong approach because we're hoping to inspire people we're we're hoping to be artistically talented enough to pull that off the other approach is to be deductive logically deductive which is centrally speaking there is hopefully a market out there that's glad our company exists who is glad we exist why are they glad we exist and that's shifting our mission into something that we call Your Role the role you play in the world around you who is glad you exist why are they glad you exist and that is a fact that is not an inspiring idea that is like okay we work with this company that does AI based optical character recognition document ingestion Etc why is the world glad they exist well because it's we get 95% of the documents scanned in into structured data that normally people have to transfer by hand like that's pretty compelling why is the world glad warie Parker exists because before you used to choose between looking dumb and it being cheap and looking cool and it being expensive and now you can look cool and it's cheap like that's the world's really glad we exist now that's true I don't need you to be inspired IR D to believe that that is true and now everything that we're going to think about for the rest of our beliefs we're going to deduce from that so we're just going to use logic to build our culture not inspiration so this next thing we need to figure out is how can we understand the specific value that's created when we play this role in the world we save people money we save people time we open up markets we help people explore possibilities and potential they couldn't tap into otherwise right Etc so what's the role of core like people are glad we exist because we tap into potential they had no access to before right like and at the team level at the company level that could be a really big deal so we know that and we say okay well gosh that implies so much there's so much we got to do now what value does that produce and then I could say okay once we understand the definition of value which comes out of our role now we can change the definition of done so a lot of teams talk about bias to action and you know hamsters have bias to action like they get up out of their straw and they turn that wheel as hard as they possibly can and they go absolutely nowhere but if you understand the role you play in the world and you understand the value you produce in terms of Time Savings cost savings upside you know whatever it is that you do then you can say we should have a bias to impact not a bias to action we shouldn't just do stuff we should have an effect that has uh the result of value creation like we should save people time and now when you're a product team looking at this and you're saying oh we here's a cool new idea Lenny let's do this you can now use that as a habitat level permission to be like oh how does that produce value for people how does that make people go faster save time get smarter do something they couldn't do otherwise and then you can still use that exact same vocabulary when you go sell it to them this is how it makes you faster smarter more efficient save cost so it's like really logical deduction and if people think that we should do something build a product that doesn't create value now instead of being inspiring we can be logical we don't build things that produce no value right like that is not a priority until we can turn it into something that does produce value so you turning culture into something highly usable and getting away from performative culture into logical deductive culture and I think that's really really the key for most people is to say let's understand why the world's glad we exist that's why we have a tam that's why we have customers and what does that imply about our standards for ourselves when we execute and value creation even down to the email if I send some wonky email reply to somebody's question and it doesn't produce value for them I'm not done I need to finish the job until it produces value for them quality standards are baked into this that again is implied would our would warie Parker be happy you know would would I be happy that warb Parker exists if they shipped me something that's a two out of 10 in quality no so we can't make things that are two out of 10 and and everybody has a belief there are plenty of people that probably interview at Warby Parker that think two out of 10 is perfectly fine just get it to them and like no we need a we need a antibody to that belief we have decision-making intelligence which everybody believes like we we should go Fast Break Stuff uh or we should be super slow and get everything right and wherever in between that's a fun one talk about and then finally you have a teaming Dynamic belief which is essentially every single human's belief of what is acceptable treatment of other human beings what state does that put the other human in and a lot of people particularly like I'll pick on myself with the low politeness will spend years thinking I'm giving honest feedback quickly this is efficient and you're like how is it efficient when it takes people 6 months instead of six minutes to act on your feedback because they just don't like you so so much and you have this appeal problem that keeps you out of all the rooms that like you're not actually your your utility which you know your politeness is a utility transferred mechanism but we don't want you in the room so you're not a business benefit uh in this case so that's kind of the starting point that's Ground Zero of habitat is do not build an habitat on the roots of inspiration it doesn't work it it can work right if you do a super inspired in stuff and you're super inspiring people then you probably have the artistic ability to pull that off but even then you'd still be better off if you would do it through logical deduction instead of inspiration say someone is like okay I'm G to improve my habitat I'm going to improve my company culture or I'm just going to start setting up a good habitat what's something they can do like what what can they do today this week to just start to do that is it sit down and think about what is the value we provide why do we exist there's a something else you'd recommend so the brain craves the an answer to the question why am I doing this and not only are there things we we should start doing but I like to kind of I like to deepen the commitment in people's minds to what what we should start doing by kind of thinking of it is we should start doing things that we've been negligent in doing right not just oh this would be even better but like we are actually causing some habitat Problems by being negligent in certain things so the primary thing that people are negligent in is answering the question why should I do this to their team and saying you should do this because it's your job is a form of negligence right like you're not actually answering that question in any useful way because I could also answer that in the safety way which me which I sort of just did by saying it's your job I'm implying that there's a consequence uh but I could be like because if you don't here's the specific bad things that will happen you could be giving them a why in terms of reward because oh if you do this you get this or if we do this we get this but you could also be giving them a purposeful answer to why which is not a form of negligence which is to say because our work actually matters like there are people out there waiting on us to ship this product to improve their situation and they also want us to get it right at the same time so bias to impact through that lens we do need to ship this it needs to happen and it needs to be right or at least right enough in its first version so if if you have been negligent and we all have at times right this is I'm not trying to judge but I'm trying to con you know convict right to build some conviction to build some Commitment if you have been negligent in answering to all these Minds that work with you why we're even doing this that's the starting point is make sure everybody knows why and that why is a shared why across the team and not just the Simon cynic big picture why I mean very specific why that you know for my team when we build training materials when we look at it through that lens of if we get this right this is what happens to teams and companies and products and their customers like there's a through line it's a big deal and that's why we can't do it this way or or that's why we should get more uh obsessed with quality and why we should get more interdependent as a team and stop doing things that are just our own ideas but say hey Lenny I'm thinking about doing it this way is there anything you'd add before I hit go and then You' be like oh I think it would be 10% better if you did it this way and then now our product is 10% better so that's kind of the the square one is ask yourself when's the last time our team had a conversation about why we're even doing any of this what value it produces who is affected by our decisions awesome and if that's hasn't happened in a while that's not good is is another way to think about this your mission is that term yeah I I think it's an alternative to Mission I I try you know and I don't want to Stomp all over Mission Vision Values because I think they can work but I think it's easier for people to conceptualize the importance of their work if they understand we are playing a role not fulfilling a mission and like role implies obligation there's no obligation in Mission unless you kind of like feel the inspiration so powerfully it's and these differences are subtle but neurologically it's different right if I tell your brain here are the people counting on you to get this right Lenny your brain activates a region called the anterior insular cortex which starts to think about other people in the context of the solution you're creating and if I say we are here to change people's lives through this in a more General sense your prefrontal cortex will still activate to to solve the problem but your anterior insular cortex will not to deep more deeply consider the humans affected by the problem so you're kind of you're adding to the toolkit of what the brain will bring to the table to generate Solutions and if you activate more good regions of the brain you get better Solutions so I lean into this personally I'm like you really don't need a mission statement you need to understand the role you play and people need to have some response some physiological like I get it to my actions impact people and if they don't have a response you should go find a human who does for sure one last thread I want to follow Focus you have some really cool advice on how to help and this just comes from uh everybody wants to get better at Focus everyone wants their team to have more time for Focus everyone wants their Engineers to sit there and build things faster their designers to get stuff done and it all comes from getting really good at focus and creating space for focus on your team what advice do you have for folks that want to personally learn to focus better and to help their team have more time for Focus get stuff done essentially I mean isn't this the the the question because this is where it all ends right um first things first let's let's look at the Neuroscience that we have available to us which is the study of focus is either is or is tightly associated with the study of what's called brain waves that's becoming a lot more popular we're seeing it at like even in athletes like professional golfers are studying how their brain waves are focused on the golf shot and which mode to put the brain into to play golf at the highest level same thing applies to work there's a bunch of different kind of bands of brain waves most of them actually are when you're asleep so your REM Cycles your deep sleep cycles your kind of like drowsy Cycles those are brain waves right you can feel your brain turning off you can feel your brain turning on when you dream uh but when you're awake there's really three primary modes that your brain is in uh the nerdy side of this kind of the nerdy language is alpha beta and gamma those are the those are the distinct ranges of brain activity and they basically represent how focused your brain is so Alpha is quite simply daydreaming right so your brain is very quiet and empty uh easy metaphor is if you're in your house at night and everything's quiet you hear things that you don't hear during the daytime and that's what Alpha is like in the brain your brain is actually working subconsciously a lot but when you're busy which is beta your brain is too noisy to hear any of those little creeks and Pops in the house but when you're an alpha you hear stuff so the most common setting for Alpha for most people is the shower so it unlocks this mystery of like why do I have all these ideas in the shower well it's because your brain is an alpha it hears these little creeks and Pops in inside of the attic and it and it unpacks them it goes oh that's an interesting idea it comes out of nowhere can be driving gardening car washing cycling whatever as long as there's not too much cognitive load then you can be daydreaming and I'll come back to this in a second because there's a big permission problem at the habitat level for some of these Focus levels beta is productivity mode so if anybody you've ever seen somebody with a poster on their back wall that says get [ __ ] done that's basically just a poster that says beta on it like I love beta and answer emails have meetings write code and there are some gamma code you know deeper thinking scenarios where you're writing code delivering presentations making presentations like so much of our workday is beta and it's just I mean some of us have an infinite amount of demand for beta work there's just a NeverEnding stream uh ofu stuff we could do and get done and then gamma is your brain's intense Focus so if you're learning something really complicated like you're learning thermodynamics in college or something like that and you're just like wow this is not easy and you have to really push your brain to Grapple with these Concepts connect the dots I even remember certain things that's gamma and we feel that sometimes at work that here's a problem a complex issue that we could tackle in beta by slapping duct tape on it or we could tackle in gamma by reverse engineering and going deep and that's where we start to connect the dots that we talked about earlier that focus and reverse engineering are related that in beta you have no intention to learn anything new to get something done to think more deeply to get something done to reconsider an existing process or structure or framework in your mind to get something done you're going to utilize those things to get something done gamma is where like we go I would normally do it this way I can see why that's not the right way I need to make something new I need to break my framework and build a brand new one right now to do something so we generally spend too much time in data in work and that's both a judgment call because I certainly have my own opinion about beta I call it the conscientiousness crisis which is conscientiousness wants beta openness wants gamma kind kind of think of tying these pieces together and it's not that conscientiousness is like inherently a crisis but when you meet teams that haven't done any Innovation haven't rethought the market have become insensitive to changes in the environment around them have become insensitive to their own employee problems and are still just kind of like you know this locomotive that keeps on going irrespective of what's going on around it it's that heads down form of conscientious beta that feels like now's not the time let's stay focused let's stay focused Etc so we don't want to get rid of beta we got a lot of work to do but let's put a rule of thumb out there for people to explore because it's going to be subjective to every team and every company but as a rule of thumb if 25% of your year is spent in gamma and Alpha you're probably a lot better off than the teams who spend less than 25% of their year thinking deep and being in this more daydreaming mode so what I wanted to Circle back on is how could we possibly Daydream productively what that's preposterous and this is where you can build in your mind and I do have another PDF for this if people want to see it but you can build in your mind a 3X3 grid where we have the safety system reward and purpose system in columns we have alpha beta and gamma in rows and we basically have a list of nine channels that the brain can activate to generate different types of thinking and most of com most of the companies out there most of the teams out there are primarily their all their programming comes from safety beta and reward beta how can I be busy to get rewards Roi customers deals whatever uh Pro even promotions self self more self centered kind of rewards and beta safety which would be how can I be busy Optics manage my reputation avoid risk that sort of stuff so we spend the crisis is is basically realizing spending too much time in those two out of our nine available boxes is probably not generating anywhere near the ideal outcomes and if we could instead ship to the purposeful column by by answering that brain's craving for why with an answer that explains it's not about you it's not about us it's about other people are counting on us to get this with right does that matter to you because for most people they're like yeah that's actually really cool I can have an impact on on like real stuff happening in other people's lives and in the world outside of me so that that activates now all of a sudden we can say okay let's look at Alpha across the top row Alpha safety is when you get in the shower and all of your anxieties worries Etc come out of nowhere out of the attic of your mind what happens in Alpha reward it's when you kind of have these breakthroughs of how to get a deal how to win something like it's use it's daydreaming but your brain is like primed to daydream in a certain way whether it's about anxiety or anger or whether it's about rewards you care about if it's purpose this is where you know from a vision perspective a possibilities product perspective you're going to have all sorts of crazy cool ideas pop into your mind if you've primed your brain to being purposeful and then you Daydream and you can do this like in the middle of a day certain companies it's easier than others but if you can push away from your desk and just go sit in a park or something for 10 minutes 20 minutes and calm your brain down like listen something cool will probably happen in your brain I can't guarantee that but you have to experiment with it to find out like how it works for you and then the same thing Forma when you hear phrases like we can't talk about this for the rest of our lives that is the gamma the gamma prevention team kicking the door down and saying we're here to get you back into beta you know everybody you know put your hands behind your backs sort of a thing and that's where the habitat and the focus kind of matters because you will not ever get a gamma idea from a beta mind you will never get an alpha idea from a beta mind so if your business needs some breakthrough daydreaming interesting ideas in order to create adjacencies to build new products to seek new markets to better fulfill the the role you're playing within this market then you team has to have permission to enter that intellectual focused state or that you're turning that channel off you're like like taking that off of the programming available through your particular subscription and the same thing applies to G uh to gamma the habitat B basically needs to establish that gamma's a viable channel for a lot of work and there's permission to go into it you can certainly overdo it that's why I say 25% you don't need to spend half of your year three quarters of your year in gamma it's Bonkers how smart you can be if you spend three or 4 hours in an afternoon in that deep focused State you'll just do stuff You' never do and if you can get the team to have offsites that are gamma focused uh you know everybody scatter and be alone and do this stuff that are gamma and Alpha focused that are productive and you bring ideas back you're just simply going to generate thinking and outcomes that you wouldn't otherwise and it may be that 10% is right for you it may be that 30% is right for you depending on how Dynamic your Market customer base are but just to ask yourself the qu like challenge yourself with the question the stuff is so fascinating I wish we had like another hour just to dig deep into this because it feels like just this alone is going to really transform the way companies operate so let me let's try to give people something tactical they can do to create more space for Alpha and gamma waves uh and essentially your device is a fourth of your time should be spent as if possible in Alpha and Gamma time is that right yeah I think um that probably is overabundance in all honesty but if you think about it through like the lens of a quarter if you're going to be on a on a set of cadences and this is probably the Tactical advice is like look at your cadences and say at the quarter level that's probably the right level of fidelity for most people to look at their calendars in terms of like what big stuff should we be doing because six months is usually too long to do anything big too much has happened in the world year is definitely too long to wait for a Cadence to kind of kick in so quarterly is really good and what's nice is when we when we cluster our gamma time on this quarterly Cadence we can take a lot of the stuff that would be what we call calendar Invaders you know these random conversations that come up out of nowhere and we can be like well we're getting ready to have an offsite this quarter's offsite in two weeks can this idea wait until then to be processed so you kind of get this nice little black hole effect where a lot of distractions having a new home because you've actually said we're going to distinctly do stuff you're saying yes but not now to to a lot of distractions but yeah I think that's the ideal Cadence and that for some teams it needs to be you know maybe a half a day or a full day you'll figure it out based on you know your own business but what per quarter is a necessary amount of time for us to to break beta and go into deep thinking analysis mode how healthy is our operation how smarter we being are we delivering value what needs to be re-evaluated from the Market's experience the customers experience the team's experience let's look at these different views of the business and and make some prioritized decisions about we're going to make specific improvements this quarter for these these areas and and then even once a week maybe just find half a day if you can maybe but like maybe less than half a day couple hours to be in gamma once a week and you'll kind of feel it out from there but I the reason the rule of thumb of 25 is out there is 25 is kind of the risk point because most people would be like we're not even spending 5% or the perfectionist team might be like we're 5050 so if you're far away from that rule of thumb that's a pretty good indicator it's a good time to audit yourself when you hear the term deep work was that is that generally referring to gamma time yeah people can use that term in a couple ways I think a lot of people call Deep work don't bother me beta which could be one uh and other teams might call gamma deep work but and that's probably more appropriate I think don't bother me beta is uh for some teams they need to be told like no no use this team use this time not just to not be interrupted but to think differently about problems to think about is the architecture even right is the like is the way we are thinking about this even right not just get a lot of stuff done it's not just like sit in your email and write documents it's actually try to think about bigger problems things that are challenging your brain not just like I'm just productive getting stuff done getting stuff done awesome something that worked really well for me similar to what you just recommended is having I had two blocks of time during the week that were two hours or three hours long or was just don't bother me deep work time so I had it uh think Wednesday morning and Friday morning for like two or three hours and actually in the calendar is like if you book something during this time I will slap you and that worked really well and nobody nobody complains we covered a lot here's the things we've covered I was just taking notes on all the advice that you've shared uh how to help people run better meetings how to get better at developing vision for their team and company and product how to be a better influencer how to build better relationships how to create a better culture for your company how to create more focus and more productive Focus that's a lot I'm very proud of our conversation before we get to a very short lightning round because we've gone pretty long I want to keep is there anything else you want to share leave listeners with that you think might be helpful before we close no I don't think we need I mean there's certainly a lot more that we we could talk about but I think we don't want to melt any Minds we want people to kind of walk away like I can do that I can do that I can do that so definitely pick you know two or three wins I kind of call them pots of ocean to boil instead of oceans to boil so like get a few pots of ocean to boil first and uh and focus on that for sure and definitely make one of those Pots if it's a problem area for you what kind of experience you are I mean that's that's Central to everything everything else works better in the whole system uh once you've boiled that pot of the ocean and then things get easier and then I guess the only last thing I would add is think of everything we've talked today uh it might help to put some language to it as floor risers and ceiling risers because your company has a horizon of performance that you're heading into and there's a bottom end of that range and a top end of that range so as you get better at meetings not only are you like increasing the you know you're raising the floor to get rid of bad meetings and waste and you might be saving a ton of time or converting useless time in useful time but you're also might be raising the ceiling and I would be really specific with yourself and your team about which out which outcome are you chasing is it both is it one or the other and say like we're actually trying to raise the floor so that our performance never goes below a certain range we get we get faster and smarter as a result fewer mistakes or are we actually trying to uncap a ceiling that we're dealing with right now especially around things like strategy and vision if we feel that those conversations always end up feeling like inconceivable arguments we we have a ceiling on our business's performance as a result of that can we raise that ceiling and explore a higher Horizon of performance for the business amazing Evan with that we' reached our very exciting and very quick lightning round are you ready yes let's do it all right so let's start with what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people well the obvious first one is never split the difference I recommend that book to like everybody in the universe I think if you haven't read it yet you shouldn't get your driver's license it's just uh it for those who don't know it was written by Chris Voss he was an FBI hostage negotiator and it explores how to negotiate with people and not just hostages but your colleagues your parents your wife like everybody uh and there's some very surprising technique in there uh that is unexpected like like not not trying to get people to agree with you but getting them to say no more often instead of saying uh hey Lenny are you willing to do this say hey Lenny are you opposed to doing this and it's just this reversal and I'm giving you the out is the way he explains it there's a whole bunch of other technique but the more of that technique is in a team the better the better the team does that's the no-brainer the second one I would say since we've kind of covered this topic a little bit about um you know habitat today I if you enjoy reading books that are sort of root canals but you're better off because you read them there's a book called never not not never split that there's a book called the person in the situation it was written by some researchers some psychological researchers and what it explores is the difference between how personality influences your behavior and how the situation you're in or like we talked about the habitat you're in influences your behavior and if you're not yet convinced that either of those matters like oh it doesn't I'll do what I do and regardless of the habitat or I'll do what I do regardless of who I am that book will melt the face off of that existing mental model conclusively it's really valuable knowledge to understand the mechanics of how the situation influences a person and how the personality influences the person and then I guess the last maybe we'll put a fork in the road of a Choose Your Own Adventure if you're a real student of the game and you want to go 10,000 Le Under the Sea on this stuff there's a series of books called the Cambridge fundamentals of Neuroscience you can find it on Amazon a lot of them you can just get on your Kindle for a lot cheaper than the you know the the library decorating version of it but that is Bonkers it talks about how your brain applies to intelligence emotionality relationships it's it's incredible knowledge uh if you instead want to keep it more in the experi you know the part of the world you experience and can see and not the the brain uh theor wrote a book called misbehaving it was kind of the the major book about uh behavioral economics and again we spend a lot of time in companies talking about the way people should act instead of the way people do act and behavioral economics is essentially the version of Economics that's about how people do act not how people should act so I think that's a great field of study and then again Robert Green's whole library is super valuable especially human nature if you're into kind of that he's a little darker of an author certainly kind of doesn't pull punches about human nature uh so that those are all great books to explore do you have a favorite product you recently discovered that you really love I look more at the category level of products um I really like products that have great ergonomics uh a lot of people underestimate the value of what it feels like to use the product are things in the right place at the right time I just started this newsletter uh that's kind of like how do how do you break all of what we do into bite-sized pieces for people who are super interested in this stuff to get something weekly and it exposed me to beehive which is a very welld designed newsletter platform high ergonomics I I don't ever find anything hard to find I can get things to work the way I want them to work so just I I like that example and I remember even back to when I was obsessed with finding the perfect backpack to travel with and then you find these Brands where you're going through security and you didn't even know it but there's a pocket designed for your phone and exactly the you would want the pocket for your phone to be and you're just like that's so great I love that this team designed this pocket just in the right spot so that's really my focus is ergonomics and product final question uh I saw you tweeted that uh people are telling you that you look like JD Vans which is hilarious do you think this will be a net benefit or net uh hurdle it'll be an incredible benefit to Halloween because it's totally clear what I'm going to do for Halloween um yeah I I mean I guess I'm going to have to see what people in the street fortunately I live in Park City so I don't run across a lot of people in the street who want to yell at people uh but if I lived in you know Chicago something like that I would have no doubt somebody would come up and throw something at me um but yeah I I'm neutral on the topic so far minus the Halloween bonus we'll see we'll see how your life changes Evan this has been amazing there's so much richness to this conversation and like I said we've covered like basically everything people want to get better at as product manager you could say two final questions where can folks find the stuff that you do to dig deeper to learn more to learn more deeply from you and two how can listeners be useful to you yeah I mean they can certainly find a lot of the stuff we do on our website Coreen do.com find a link to that profile you talked about on there which can be super fun to take and and insightful the newsletter all the stuff that we do you can kind of find out there and then certainly Twitter I mean I I I've always been like really prickly about people that get on Twitter to post only and not to interact I'm kind of the opposite I really love people's questions and push back and and just yesterday I've probably spent way longer than I should have out of my portfolio management you know approach to time just on a thread where I was talking to this really interesting uh woman about uh this this debate almost about the probability of people doing things uh you know based on their beliefs which was and then we had some kind of bystanders watching the whole thing happen I had a meeting with a good friend Rod afterwards where we talked about how that all went so I loved to to talk to people and answer questions and I'm sure people have plenty of questions that they'd love to drive dive deeper into so I'm at I'm on Twitter for sure and then how you can help me I mean fortunately for me uh I'm in the business of helping other people whether those are individuals teams companies so the most helpful thing to me is you helping yourself so if you if you find our content valuable if you want to have awesome managers or anything like that uh and this sort of science-based kind of more efficient approach to getting there would be interesting then reach out uh we don't bite we're we're pretty easy to to work with and that would be super fun to have a conversation about what your team needs Evan thank you so much for being here thanks for having me this has been really cool yeah same for me bye everyone thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny podcast.com see you in the next episode