0:00:06 You’ve probably been telling not so good stories all your life and you’ve probably heard people
0:00:12 who tell amazing stories all the time. It turns out that’s not actually something that people are
0:00:18 born with. It’s just strategic. And if you become a little more strategic, you can be one of those
0:00:23 people, right? Now we want to know. Now we’re curious. We’re not giving anything away. We’re
0:00:29 not indicating the end, but we’re finding something that’s going to like appeal to people
0:00:33 in a real emotional way. We’re going to identify a need they have. And if we identify an appropriate
0:00:44 need, then we’re going to grab our audience and they’re going to pay attention.
0:00:58 Welcome to the Knowledge Project, the bi-weekly podcast exploring the powerful ideas,
0:01:03 practical methods, and mental models of others. In a world where knowledge is power,
0:01:07 this podcast is your toolkit for mastering the best of what other people have already figured
0:01:12 out. I’m your host, Shane Parrish. Before we dive in, I have a quick favorite to ask. If you’re
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0:01:49 for more. My guest today is Matthew Dix, who is perhaps the world’s best storyteller. I’m not
0:01:54 kidding. He’s won nearly every major storytelling competition. If anyone has a recipe for telling
0:02:00 better stories, it’s him, and I want it to learn from the master. In this episode, you will discover
0:02:05 lessons on finding, crafting, and telling stories that connect you to other people, stories that
0:02:10 will make them believe in you and trust you and compel them to want to know more about you and
0:02:15 the things that you care about. Steve Jobs said the most powerful person in the world is the storyteller,
0:02:20 but most of us make common mistakes that are easily correctable. At the end of listening to
0:02:25 this episode, I guarantee you’ll be more effective, entertaining, and thoughtful about the stories you
0:02:41 tell. It’s time to listen and learn. There are too many podcasts and not enough time. What if you
0:02:46 could skip the noise and get just the insightful moments, even from shows you didn’t know existed?
0:02:52 That’s what Overlap does. Overlap is an AI-driven podcast app that uses large language models
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0:03:04 transcript, finds just the best parts, and serves them up based on whatever topic you’re interested
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0:04:21 What’s the difference between a good story and a bad story?
0:04:25 I think we can start by thinking about what is a story and what isn’t a story because most people
0:04:32 don’t tell stories. Most people think of a story as some stuff happened over the course of time,
0:04:36 and now I’m going to tell you about that, usually chronologically, and that will amount to a story.
0:04:41 And that really is just reporting on your life, and no one actually wants you to report on your
0:04:46 life other than maybe your mother and your spouse might be required to listen. It’s just a simple
0:04:51 accounting of your day or your week or your month, and that’s not interesting and it’s not a story.
0:04:57 So a story is about change over time. Usually it’s sort of a realization, like I used to think
0:05:01 one thing and now I think another thing. That’s most stories, sometimes they’re transformational,
0:05:05 meaning I once was one kind of person, then some stuff happened and now I’m actually an
0:05:09 authentically different kind of person. But if you’re just doing that, you’re better than most
0:05:13 people. That sort of is the difference between a bad story and a good story is what is a story
0:05:18 and what is not a story. Once we get to the difference between sort of a well-told story or
0:05:23 well-crafted story and a one that is not as well-crafted, we get into things like the acknowledgement
0:05:29 that no one wants to hear anything you ever have to say unless you give them a reason to listen.
0:05:34 And there are people who tell stories that don’t sort of have that fundamental belief as part of
0:05:39 their bone marrow. And the more you believe that, the more you believe that I must entertain
0:05:45 while speaking, delivering content, showing data, delivering a keynote, the more you believe that
0:05:51 no one wants to hear anything I have to say unless I’m relentlessly giving them a reason to listen,
0:05:56 that’s really the difference between someone who is going to be appreciated and remembered and
0:06:01 impactful and someone who will sort of get lost in the crowd. How much of the difference boils
0:06:04 down into thinking about the story you’re going to tell beforehand. And then there’s like this
0:06:08 game where you’re pretending to sort of like ad-lib it on the spot. And the listener is like
0:06:12 pretending that you’re ad-libbing it on the spot because they want that too. They want to believe
0:06:16 that versus I haven’t thought about this before and I’m just going to spew the first thing out of
0:06:21 my mouth. Right. You’re the first person other than me I’ve ever heard refer to it as a game.
0:06:26 I say we play a game with our audience. They pretend that we’re making it up and we pretend
0:06:30 that we’re making it up. When the truth, I think for the best storytellers lies somewhere in the
0:06:35 middle, which is to say you probably should never memorize anything that you say. I’ve never memorized
0:06:40 the story or speech that I’m going to deliver, but what I say is we remember them. Meaning we
0:06:44 understand the beats, we understand what’s going to happen, but if I was to tell you a story now
0:06:48 and then tell you a story five minutes later, the sentences are absolutely going to be different,
0:06:52 even though the events, the dialogue, the descriptions will all be there in some way.
0:06:58 But I think that’s sort of the game we play. The best game players stand in the middle and say,
0:07:01 I know what I’m going to say, but I don’t know exactly how I’m going to say it. And that allows
0:07:06 you to read the audience and figure out is this landing? Do I need to pivot right now? Do I need
0:07:10 to pull an anecdote out of my pocket? You know, I always walk around with what I say is five
0:07:15 anecdotes that if I feel like I’m losing the audience, I can throw that out and grab them back
0:07:20 and hold them for a while. If you’re overly prepared, you’re sort of trapped in your content
0:07:23 and you’re just going to be delivering it. I often call them word callers. If you’ve memorized
0:07:27 your story, really, you’re just a word caller. You’ve just memorized a series of words and hopefully
0:07:32 they’ll come out properly. And maybe you can artfully do it in a pretend acting way, but the
0:07:36 best performers sort of know what they’re going to say, but not exactly how. And that’s, you can
0:07:41 always tell that you can tell it because their talk feels like it’s just for you because you can
0:07:47 look at someone and you can sort of riff on what is happening in the room. I was recently speaking
0:07:50 somewhere and someone picked up their phone and started looking at their phone. And in the middle
0:07:56 of my speech, I stopped and I said, “I really hope your kid is on the way to the hospital right now.”
0:08:01 And he was like, “Didn’t get to school? I’m just making sure that.” And it was a big laugh,
0:08:05 but I wouldn’t have been able to do that if I was a word caller. You don’t want to be overly prepared.
0:08:08 What’s the difference between a story and an anecdote then?
0:08:12 So an anecdote doesn’t have to have change over time. It’s essentially one of those,
0:08:17 “Hey, this funny thing happened to me. Isn’t this crazy?” But it tends not to linger.
0:08:21 You know, a story ideally is the kind of thing that when I tell it to you,
0:08:25 you’re thinking about it for days, weeks, months, or maybe for the rest of your life. Whereas an
0:08:30 anecdote is you sit down and you have beers with your buddies and something crazy happened on the
0:08:35 golf course. You know, something happened in the airport and you tell them it and they all laugh,
0:08:39 but it’s not the kind of thing they want to go and repeat to someone. They’re not going to
0:08:43 remember it. I often think of anecdotes as cotton candy. It’s like delicious in the moment and
0:08:49 lovely, but you don’t really remember your cotton candies, but you remember the best meals of your
0:08:52 life. Stories are the best meals of your life, the ones you reflect back and go, “I remember the
0:08:56 restaurant. I remember who I was with. I remember what I ordered.” That’s the story.
0:08:57 Because you’re connecting to an emotion?
0:09:01 Ideally touching their hearts and their minds. If I tell you an anecdote about my son,
0:09:07 we’re going to laugh. We’re going to understand his humanity even a little bit. You might even
0:09:11 reflect on my humanity, but you’re not going to be sort of thinking about it later on because
0:09:16 I’m not looking to land something in your heart and mind. I’m not looking to connect to your
0:09:22 life experiences. When I tell a story, I’m not hoping that you are thinking that once happened
0:09:28 to me. What I’m hoping is you’re thinking, “I once felt that way. I once thought that way,
0:09:31 or maybe someday I could feel or think that way.” That’s the goal. That’s sort of that
0:09:36 understory that we’re always looking to tell. Before we get into more of a crafting a story,
0:09:38 maybe it would help to have an example of a story.
0:09:41 Oh, sure. Should I tell you a story?
0:09:48 Yeah. Well, the one I like to tell, I mean, for business people, I’m standing behind my school
0:09:52 where I teach. I’m a fifth grade teacher. I’m standing in front of this enormous pile of fall
0:09:57 leaves and they’re quivering. There’s a little boy inside the leaves and his hand emerges and he’s
0:10:01 got a metal object in his hand. He looks at me. His head pops out. His name is Jamie. He says,
0:10:05 “Look what I found.” He’s shaking this metal object. I say, “Wow, look at it.” He says, “Yeah,
0:10:11 it’s a spoon.” It’s just a kitchen spoon. It fell out of a lunchbox yesterday or 10 years ago.
0:10:15 It’s migrated to the bottom of this pile. Now, Jamie, this little red-headed boy, has it in
0:10:20 his hand. I tell Jamie, “That’s not just a spoon, Jamie. That’s the spoon of power.” The moment
0:10:25 that I declare it to be the spoon of power, Jamie knows I must have it. I know Jamie knows this
0:10:30 because he just starts running. He doesn’t say a word. He just sprints because he knows his crazy
0:10:34 teacher. We’ll now chase him down for the spoon and he’s not wrong. I’m responsible for like 100
0:10:39 kids. I have to keep them safe, keep them secure. I don’t care about any of them anymore. It’s a
0:10:44 red-headed boy and a spoon that I must now have. And for 18 minutes over the course of this recess,
0:10:50 I hunt this boy down. I chase him across a field, up a slide, down the other slide, through the woods.
0:10:55 18 minutes later, he still has the spoon in his hand. I can’t believe it. I legitimately tried to
0:10:59 catch a 10-year-old and I could not. But he’s in my class, so it’s fine. I’ll get him eventually.
0:11:03 He’s a 10-year-old boy. He’s focused now on the spoon, but he has the attention span of like a
0:11:07 mulberry bush. He’s going to forget it in a minute and I’m going to grab it. So I’m teaching math.
0:11:11 I’m writing equations on the board. This kid, he’s put the spoon on the corner of his desk,
0:11:16 like to dare me to get it. You know, it’s just out of my reach. So I’ve got one eye on the board,
0:11:21 one eye on him in the spoon. He’s got one eye on his journal, one eye on the spoon. We’re in this
0:11:24 like standoff. And then I’m reading. I’m sitting on a stool. I’m reading a book. He’s still got
0:11:28 the spoon right there. I’ve got one eye on the book, one eye on the spoon. He’s got one on me,
0:11:31 one eye on the spoon. If he’d ever been this focused in his life, he’d like cure cancer.
0:11:36 I’ve never seen him so focused. But he’s like me. He’s a writer. He loves to write. So at the end
0:11:40 of the day, when we write, his head always falls onto his arm. You know, the strokes of his pen
0:11:44 get long. He’s going to get lost in his story and that’s the moment I’ll strike. I watch it happen.
0:11:49 I just wait. See the little red head go down, lands on his arm. I sneak up the front aisle.
0:11:53 I reach over to grab the spoon and it’s not there. And he turns to me and he says,
0:11:57 “Did you really think I was just going to leave it there for you?” And I lose my mind.
0:12:01 Like I start threatening the class. I turn to the right. Like, where’s the spoon? The girl says,
0:12:05 leave us alone. We’re trying to get our work done. Turn to the left. Where’s the spoon? The boy says,
0:12:08 why are you bothering me? I’m trying to be a good student. They all know where it is. They’re all
0:12:13 conspiring against me. Then the bell rings. Jamie’s out of his seat. He runs to get his coat and he
0:12:18 swings by and he pulls the box of books out in the library marked S. He reaches inside and he says,
0:12:24 “I filed it under S for spoon.” And he’s out the door. I can’t believe that I legitimately tried
0:12:28 to get a spoon from a 10-year-old kid and I could not do it. So the next day he comes in,
0:12:32 he has the spoon on a chain around his neck. And he’s swinging it around and I say,
0:12:36 “How did you?” And he said, “My dad drilled the hole. My mom gave me the chain.” And he’s walking
0:12:41 around going, “Oh, it’s a spoon of power, Mr. Dix. The spoon of power.” And as bad as I am,
0:12:47 I’m a terrible person sometimes. Even I can’t tear it from the neck of a 10-year-old. So
0:12:52 all week he tortures me with this. And then Thursday comes. It’s time for our weekly math test.
0:12:57 It’s time for Mackenzie to lose her mind because someday Mackenzie might get a problem wrong and
0:13:00 that will be the end of the world for Mackenzie. So every Thursday I have to like build her up.
0:13:04 Mistakes are valuable. It’s okay, Mackenzie. You might get one wrong. And she’s sort of
0:13:09 falling apart as she does. And then Jamie’s there and he takes the spoon off and he says,
0:13:15 “Maybe this will help.” And he puts it around Mackenzie’s neck and it’s the best math test
0:13:21 Mackenzie has ever taken in her life. Somehow this spoon on her neck calms her down. Three days later,
0:13:25 David’s grandfather passes away. When David comes back to school, Jamie’s by the door waiting for
0:13:30 David. When he walks in, puts the spoon on David’s neck and says, “I think you need this today.” And
0:13:36 he did. For the rest of the year, every single time a kid is in trouble, in any way whatsoever,
0:13:40 that spoon finds their way on their neck. They forget their homework. They have to walk over to me,
0:13:44 face the music we call it. They walk over with that damn spoon on their neck. They get in trouble
0:13:48 with the principal. They gotta make the long walk down the linoleum hallway. They make the long walk
0:13:53 with the spoon. They get bullied on the bus on the way to school. When they go home that day,
0:13:57 they go home with the spoon. Every single time it makes the kids’ days better. So the last day
0:14:00 of school, I gather all my kids on the floor in front of me. It’s the last time we’re going to be
0:14:04 together as a family. And they really are a family. We get to know each other in really
0:14:09 meaningful ways. And so I tell them, “Say whatever you want. Tell us what you’re feeling. We’re
0:14:14 going to have to say goodbye now.” So Jamie stands up and he walks over to me. He takes the spoon off
0:14:18 and he tries to give it to me. And I say to Jamie, “No.” I say, “There was a day back in October
0:14:23 when I wanted that spoon badly. And had I caught you, I would have fried it from your little fingers.
0:14:29 But you managed to keep it and do this amazing thing with it. I just can’t believe what you’ve
0:14:35 done. It’s your spoon.” And Jamie says, “No.” Jamie says, “The magic of the spoon only works in my
0:14:38 classroom. He tells me I need to take it so that next year when kids are in trouble,
0:14:44 I can give them the spoon like he has this year.” And then he pulls this little orange chair up
0:14:49 alongside me so he can get up to eye level. And he takes the spoon off. And for the first time,
0:14:55 I get to wear the spoon of power. The 2020-2021 school year was the hardest I’ve ever taught in
0:15:00 my 26 years of teaching. The pandemic. We went right back to school in September in masks and
0:15:04 social distancing. And everyone was afraid. And lots and lots of people got sick.
0:15:11 Kids got sick. Parents got sick. We lost grandparents. My wife, who’s a kindergarten teacher, got very
0:15:16 sick. My own children got sick. And I used that spoon more often that year than I’ve ever used
0:15:20 it in my life. Every day, people were wearing that spoon. And for the first time in my life,
0:15:25 my colleagues were wearing a spoon of power to get through the day. And as hard as it was,
0:15:28 there’s the best year of teaching I’ve ever had, the most important year I will ever teach.
0:15:34 But I’ve always felt like I was the luckiest teacher in America. Because I have that spoon.
0:15:39 I’ve had it for 16 years. It’s literally in that bag right there. I carry with it.
0:15:46 I carry it with me everywhere I go. It’s weirdly the most powerful teaching tool I have had and
0:15:52 will ever have. It is this thing that I put on a kid’s neck or an adult’s neck. And suddenly,
0:15:59 they feel better. It’s magic. It really is the spoon of power. And so I like to tell that story to
0:16:04 especially business people. Because essentially, what I do is I take something that they have at
0:16:09 least eight to 12 of in their kitchen, a simple spoon that they don’t see is very valuable. And
0:16:14 suddenly, it becomes something incredibly meaningful. The first time I gave that talk,
0:16:20 that story, I did it as a series of stories during the pandemic, actually, at a college in
0:16:25 Western Massachusetts. And it was still during the pandemic, everyone’s masked, except for me,
0:16:30 and everyone’s social distanced. And at the end of the event, I’m a novelist and I write books.
0:16:33 So I often have a table and there’s books and there’s a bookstore and I sign the books and
0:16:37 things like that. But we weren’t going to do it because of the pandemic. So after I finished
0:16:41 speaking that line formed in the aisle and I had to get back on the microphone and say,
0:16:46 “I’m sorry. We’re not going to sign books tonight. Go home.” And most of the people
0:16:50 in the line, they weren’t there to buy a book. They wanted to touch the spoon.
0:16:57 Grown-ass adults who had Doritos and Netflix and pillows at home in the middle of a pandemic,
0:17:02 wearing a mask, chose to line up and touch a spoon that they definitely have 8 to 12 of
0:17:07 in their kitchen. And that’s what we have to do. When we tell a story about something like a spoon,
0:17:12 something as simple as that, it suddenly becomes not a spoon anymore. And the better we are at
0:17:19 telling stories about ourselves, the people we love, the products we make, the services we offer,
0:17:24 all of those things, the more we are able to tell excellent stories about those things,
0:17:30 the more we’re able to infuse those things with whatever we want them to be infused with.
0:17:32 That’s a great story. I like that story.
0:17:36 And I feel the emotional roller coaster as you’re telling it and I remember reading it in your book
0:17:42 too. And I feel the ups and downs and I’m running there with you. And one of the words that you
0:17:47 used earlier was beat. So I’m wondering, walk me through the architecture of that story and what
0:17:52 makes it so effective. Sure. I mean, the first thing before I sort of talk about the structure
0:17:58 is the idea that it doesn’t contain very many adjectives. People often think of stories as
0:18:02 an attempt to describe something when actually nobody ever wants to know what anything looked like,
0:18:08 unless it’s relevant to a story. What people really want is to know what you felt, what you said,
0:18:12 and what you did. And so if you’re going to describe something, you better make sure that
0:18:18 there’s a reason for it to be described. What I believe is leveraging the imagination of audiences.
0:18:23 So I said to you, I’m standing behind my school, the school where I teach, but that’s all I said.
0:18:26 I know that you know what that looks like. You don’t know what my version of it looks like,
0:18:30 but that doesn’t matter to me. Weirdly, some people get interested in that,
0:18:36 but you should not. Nobody cares about what anything looks like. Very similitude is not
0:18:41 relevant in storytelling. When I say we go into my classroom to teach, I say classroom and I know
0:18:44 you have a classroom in your mind. Now, my classroom definitely doesn’t look like yours,
0:18:49 because my classroom has a stage with lighting and sets, because I built a theater into my
0:18:53 classroom, because I’ve been there for 23 years. It doesn’t look like any classroom we’ve ever seen,
0:18:58 but I don’t want you to see that classroom. I want you to see the one that you can already
0:19:03 see in your mind. So when people say to me, how do you make the stories seem so real to me,
0:19:08 I tell them I don’t describe anything. Instead, I choose words that I know already exist in your
0:19:13 mind. I choose those images, and I just extract them and make use of them. So that’s important
0:19:17 always, because I think people over-describe. And the tricky thing is we don’t have a lot of bandwidth
0:19:22 to work with. If you say in the beginning of a story, this beautiful woman walks in the room,
0:19:28 and her eyes are a piercing blue, those blue eyes had better be relevant in the story at some point,
0:19:34 because you’ve just stolen some of my bandwidth, so that I have to track those blue eyes and remember
0:19:38 them throughout the story. And I’ve never heard of a story where eye color is relevant, except for
0:19:44 Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. And yet we describe eye color all the damn time, which really is just
0:19:49 sort of degrading the audience’s ability to hear the rest of the story, because we’re giving them
0:19:54 a job to do. Remember this, remember this, remember this, I’m leveraging imagination throughout that
0:19:59 entire story. But in terms of what I’m thinking about for the architecture, I’m always thinking about
0:20:05 the scenes that I’m going to tell. So scenes are predicated on location. So if I think about that
0:20:09 story, if I’m going to remember it, rather than memorize it, I’m going to know I’m going to be
0:20:13 on the playground, and I’m going to chase Jamie, and I’m going to wrap him down the playscape and
0:20:16 through the woods, but he’s going to keep the spoon. That’s the first scene. And that’s what I have
0:20:20 to get out. And it might come out better one time than the other, but that’s essentially the goal.
0:20:24 And then my second scene is I’m in the classroom, and I know I’m going to teach math, and then I’m
0:20:28 going to teach reading, and then I’m going to teach writing, because that’s what I do. And I know
0:20:33 each time he’s going to be daring me to grab the spoon, but I’m not going to get it. So that’s
0:20:37 sort of scene two. Scene three is the next day. He comes in with a spoon of power on his neck,
0:20:43 makes me crazy, right? Scene four is Thursday, Mackenzie, the math test. Scene five is David,
0:20:48 his grandfather passed away. Scene six is a montage of three things. I know I’m going to say,
0:20:52 kids who forget their homework, kids who go to the principal and kids who ride the bus, that’s
0:20:56 specifically structured to give you three different locations and three different kinds of problems
0:21:00 that kids have. All were real, but I could have chosen from a thousand different times that Jamie
0:21:06 gave that spoon out. I strategically chose for that reason. The next scene is the last day of school.
0:21:10 Jamie tries to give me the spoon. Actually, what I tell you, because I’m preserving surprise,
0:21:14 Jamie tries to give me the spoon. I used the word tries really specifically,
0:21:17 because I don’t want you to think I’m going to get the spoon. I don’t think I’m going to get
0:21:21 the spoon either. I’m rejecting the spoon thinking there’s no way I’m taking this spoon from your
0:21:26 kid. And then he forces it upon me because I want you to be as surprised as I am. And then the last
0:21:31 scene is sort of that pandemic explanation about what that year was like. But that’s what I’m thinking
0:21:36 about in terms of remembering the story. And then to maintain entertainment throughout it,
0:21:42 I’m always thinking stakes, suspense, surprise and humor. Those are sort of the four Mount Rushmore
0:21:47 ways to maintain interest regardless of what you’re doing. Whether you’re telling a story like what
0:21:53 I’ve just done or I’m working with a marketing team on a deck that they’re building and it is
0:21:57 completely absent of stakes, suspense, surprise and humor, which is why nobody ever pays attention
0:22:02 to anything anyone ever does. Because instead of being entertaining, we’re trying to be informative.
0:22:07 When informative is important, but only if people are actually listening. And that first part,
0:22:10 how we’re going to get people to listen is the one nobody ever pays any attention to. They somehow
0:22:15 think that their information is going to be interesting to people. The world is filled with
0:22:20 information. The internet exists. You’re competing against every bit of information that has ever
0:22:25 existed on the planet. So you’d better give me a reason to listen. So I’m always thinking of that
0:22:31 throughout that story. Constantly asking myself, do I have stakes? Is there suspense? Am I preparing
0:22:36 for a surprise? And is there a place where I can drop in some humor? So you mentioned keeping a
0:22:40 storytelling compelling is sort of like there’s elephants, backpacks, breadcrumbs, hourglasses,
0:22:45 crystal balls and humor. You’re well versed. Yeah, that’s pretty good. Let’s go through each of those
0:22:49 individually and sort of like what are they and why are they important for the architecture of a
0:22:54 story in terms of keeping people listening. Like almost on the edge of their seat. What you’ve
0:22:59 identified is sort of what I call the different versions of stakes in a story. The elephant is
0:23:04 sort of the most important one. It’s essentially what has grabbed the audience’s attention initially.
0:23:08 It doesn’t actually have to be what the story’s about. But oftentimes people begin a story without
0:23:12 anything interesting that’s going to grab the audience. A stake is essentially what are we worried
0:23:17 about? What are we wondering about? Why are we rooting for the protagonist? Why are we not rooting
0:23:21 for the protagonist? It’s the thing that makes us want to hear the next sentence. An elephant is the
0:23:27 idea of here’s a thing that you should care about. And the story I just told you that here’s a thing
0:23:32 is there’s a boy with a spoon and Matt wants it. The stake is will he get the spoon? We know that’s
0:23:37 not what the story is actually about, but it gives the audience an initial thing to be thinking about.
0:23:43 In movies, we often get a trailer. So if you see the movie trailer, the stakes are already laid out.
0:23:46 And oftentimes they’re laid out. Anyway, if I say let’s go to a romantic comedy, we know what the
0:23:50 stake is. Two people are not in love and eventually they will be in love. So we know what those
0:23:55 stakes are. But when I open my mouth and I start telling a story in any context, nobody really
0:24:01 knows what I’m there for. No one knows what’s about to be said. No one knows why I’m speaking.
0:24:04 So we have to give them a reason. Something interesting that grabs them. And it doesn’t
0:24:11 have to be much. When Jobs introduces the iPhone in 2007, his first sentence on stage is,
0:24:16 “I’ve been waiting two and a half years to share this with you today.” That’s a stake.
0:24:20 That’s the CEO of Apple has been sitting on something for two and a half years.
0:24:25 And today’s the day we get to see it. That makes you wonder what he’s going to say next. So the
0:24:30 elephant is that constant need that there has to be something big. I call it an elephant because
0:24:34 we should all know what it is. It shouldn’t be a mystery. It should be large and present. And it
0:24:38 can change over time. So eventually I don’t get the spoon, but the new elephant becomes,
0:24:42 “What’s Jamie going to do with this spoon?” It seems to be changing the lives of kids. And then
0:24:46 the elephant becomes, “Is Matt really going to get this spoon? Or is Jamie going to keep the spoon?”
0:24:51 And then the stake becomes the pandemic, which is just a, you know, that enormous elephant of the
0:24:57 pandemic is enough. So that’s an elephant. Backpacks are the idea that oftentimes we’re
0:25:01 telling an audience what our plan is, and then we’re going to tell them the results of the plan.
0:25:06 But we want them to sort of be loaded up with our hopes and dreams along the way. So when I tell
0:25:11 you in that story and I, when I say, “It’s okay because eventually we’re going to be writing.”
0:25:16 And Jamie always gets lost in his writing. He’s like me. His little head falls on his arm,
0:25:20 starts writing away. And that’s the moment I’m going to strike. I just put a backpack on you.
0:25:25 I told you what my plan is. I told you what my hope is. My goal is when I reach for that spoon and
0:25:30 it’s not there, you’re surprised because I’ve loaded you with my hopes and dreams. And then
0:25:34 I’ve shown you that they failed. When I tell that story to a live audience, they often gasp or laugh
0:25:39 when I tell you the spoon is not there. Because in their mind, I have mentally placed the spoon on
0:25:44 the corner. I’ve really reinforced it too specifically. So that when I say I reach for it,
0:25:48 they see it there. And when I say it’s not there, it’s like I pop it away like magic. And they gasp.
0:25:53 They go, “Because it really is in their mind’s eye.” Like it suddenly disappeared. So a backpack
0:25:57 works especially well when a plan is not going to go well. You know, the Ocean’s Eleven movies,
0:26:01 they tell you how they’re going to rob the casino before they start robbing the casino.
0:26:05 Because things are going to go wrong and you have to know what’s going wrong in order to feel
0:26:09 the pressure and the tension of the moment. And that goes for whether we’re doing business or
0:26:14 telling personal stories. As oftentimes, I was working with a scientist. He put a backpack on
0:26:18 this audience. He was trying to cure a disease. The backpack he gave to the audience was,
0:26:24 “We’re going to cure the disease. Here was my plan. We went forward. You know, I did the experiment.
0:26:30 I looked at the results and the results weren’t there.” And your heart drops because it’s a great
0:26:35 story about a man trying to do something great. And the result of it is when they look back on
0:26:39 the results, they discover they’ve actually found something even more interesting. It didn’t cure
0:26:45 the disease they were hoping to cure, but it created some molecule that changed the nature
0:26:50 of the company and ended up curing like 12 diseases instead. But it’s so much better for that scientist
0:26:57 to say, “Here’s what I wanted to do. Here was my plan. I invested all of my life in it. I didn’t
0:27:01 spend time with my children on the weekends. Really built up our emotion in the same way
0:27:06 that spoon. It’s exactly the same as the spoon not there. The cure wasn’t there, right? But
0:27:10 something else instead happened. That was fantastic. Oftentimes, when something isn’t going to work or
0:27:15 it might work in a surprising way, we want to put backpacks on people. The next one is breadcrumbs.
0:27:22 So breadcrumbs are just sort of clues along the way, a little hint to something. The reason why we
0:27:27 might wonder about something, I don’t know if I use a breadcrumb in the spoon story. It’s almost
0:27:33 like poor shadowing, right? Yeah, it is. It’s sort of like you say some of the thing, but not all
0:27:37 of the thing. It’s a little bit like suspense, actually. It’s sort of suspense in the same way.
0:27:44 If I tell you that McKenzie is falling apart during her math test, right? A certain portion
0:27:48 of the audience will see that as a breadcrumb thinking, “Well, this has to do with the spoon,
0:27:51 doesn’t it?” A lot of the audience actually doesn’t even think that. They sort of forget
0:27:55 about the spoon for a minute because they get so invested in McKenzie. You can tell people who are
0:28:00 empathetic in an audience just by how much they forget about the spoon, and they start caring
0:28:04 about a little girl who’s struggling with math. But that idea that there’s a girl here and she’s
0:28:09 falling apart, but this is a story about a spoon, right? That is sort of a breadcrumb hoping the
0:28:14 audience will be thinking, “How are these two things going to connect? What is going on here?”
0:28:21 But oftentimes in a story, we just say we mentioned an object. We mentioned a thought.
0:28:26 We mentioned something that someone says to us, but we don’t allow the audience to understand why
0:28:30 it was said. That’s a breadcrumb meaning it leads them to be wondering about something later on.
0:28:36 The next one is hourglasses. In hourglasses, the idea that once you know you have the audience’s
0:28:41 attention and they’re dying for the next sentence, you make them wait as long as possible. You flip
0:28:46 the hourglass over and let the sand run. A great example of that is the matrix. Bullet time in
0:28:52 the matrix is an hourglass, meaning we’re going to change the way a gunfight happens in this movie,
0:28:57 meaning we’re going to watch the bullet move through space and time so that you will wonder
0:29:03 more if someone is going to be hit by the bullet. Because before bullet time, gunfights were a lot
0:29:08 less entertaining because it was just a matter of whether the person got hit or not. Now we get to
0:29:14 wonder what the course of this bullet is. Any moment where I know the audience wants to hear
0:29:19 the next thing, I will slow things down. That’s the one time I will start describing stuff. For
0:29:25 no reason whatsoever. That orange chair, I simply use the word orange as a means of making you wait
0:29:30 one more second to find out what’s going to happen. If you pay attention to the way I tell that story,
0:29:35 I start speaking slower the closer we get to the moment where Jamie’s going to hand me the spoon.
0:29:42 I just know that if I say these words with a reduced pace, your anticipation increases.
0:29:47 And therefore, when I get the spoon, it’s more likely that you will have an emotional reaction
0:29:53 to it. And that’s just a matter of judging. Now I have them. Let’s make them wait as long as possible
0:29:57 to hear it. Crystal balls. And crystal balls are something we use in life all the time. It’s
0:30:01 essentially just a prediction. It’s an out loud prediction about something that’s going to happen
0:30:04 because human beings are prediction machines. That’s why gambling is so difficult for people.
0:30:10 It’s not really the money as much as it is. I think the cowboys are going to win this week.
0:30:14 And I’m going to put money down on it to prove that I’m right. Those people don’t like wait
0:30:19 till Monday and open the newspaper to see if they won, right? They’re watching it at the moment the
0:30:25 game’s playing because we’re prediction machines. So when I say to you, it’s okay because I’m going
0:30:29 to get that spoon in a little while, right? I’m making a prediction about the future. And now
0:30:32 you’re going to want to hear as an audience whether that prediction is going to come true.
0:30:37 Earnings calls are just like that when they give guidance, right? Their attempt to give guidance
0:30:41 is both to make sure shareholders sort of know the direction of the company. But when they give
0:30:46 guidance, you know those people are going to come back at the next earnings call to see if that
0:30:50 guidance played out or they’re going to pay attention over the course of the quarter to see
0:30:55 what the results are. So guidance is nothing but a crystal ball saying, here’s what we think is going
0:30:59 to happen. And then you wait three months to find out if it actually happened. The more we can do
0:31:04 that, the more we get our audience to want us to continue to talk. I always say, I want my audience
0:31:08 happy that I’m talking. If you just think back on how many times you’ve heard people speak,
0:31:13 how often have you thought, I’m so happy they’re still speaking? If I can get that,
0:31:18 no, that’s the Platonic ideal. That’s the sort of really difficult to achieve. But when the audience
0:31:22 is happy that I’m talking because they can’t wait to hear the next thing that I’m saying,
0:31:27 that I’m waiting every time. And humor. The tricky thing about humor is I do stand-up comedy.
0:31:31 And there are certain people that can just make lots of things funny. And in that spoon of power
0:31:34 story, I could have had you laugh in the whole way through. That’s not useful to me in terms of a
0:31:40 storyteller. Now, if I do stand-up, it’s very useful for me. But humor is a really powerful
0:31:45 tool that gets underused completely in business all the time. Humor changes brain chemistry in
0:31:52 really meaningful ways, causes you to feel closer to me, causes you to perceive me as intelligent,
0:31:55 even if I’m not intelligent, makes you feel better about the world, actually improves your
0:32:00 cognition. All of those chemicals get released due to humor, which primes your brain and gets you
0:32:06 ready to hear me better. But it also does things like if I make you laugh in the first 30 to 60
0:32:12 seconds of a story, you now feel at ease. Because an audience always has that concern,
0:32:17 this concern that this is going to get awkward for us because you’re not going to do a good job.
0:32:22 Many, many times, I have sat in an audience and thought, buckle up, this guy’s going to fall
0:32:26 apart. And I don’t want anyone to think that. So if you make someone laugh in the first 30 seconds
0:32:30 of a story or a talk or a keynote, whatever you’re doing, they relax. They go, okay,
0:32:35 she knows what she’s doing. She made me laugh. Continue. It’s also useful in the boring parts
0:32:41 of stories or actually in the boring parts of data. If you have to speak for 12 minutes about
0:32:45 your data, you’d better be funny. I’m always helping tech companies when they’re doing the
0:32:52 demo of their newly added feature to their platform. And they’re just going to run through it and show
0:32:57 you what it is. And I’m always saying, why would you do it that way? That’s awful. Let’s create
0:33:02 two characters. Why don’t you pretend to be somebody? Let’s make the data amusing. Let’s
0:33:07 make a fake company. And let’s make the fake company that’s going to access your new platform.
0:33:12 Let’s let that be amusing so that people are smiling while you’re showing them what your new
0:33:18 product does. So it takes the boring parts and makes them a lot less boring. You can also manipulate
0:33:22 emotions with humor. Right before I’m going to tell you something terrible in a story, I like to
0:33:26 make you laugh so that the terrible thing hurts more. It increases the contrast. If you’re dating
0:33:30 someone for three months and you discover you’re dating a monster and you need to dump that person
0:33:35 and you really want to like make them hurt because they’ve hurt you, the best thing you can do is to
0:33:40 take them on the best date of their life. And at the very end of that date, that’s the moment you
0:33:44 dump them. And that’s what I try to do in storytelling. I try to take my audience on the best date
0:33:49 possible. And then I hit them with the thing that stabs them in the heart. You know, my wife says her
0:33:53 favorite stories are mine are the laugh, laugh, laugh, cry, which is to say you think we’re having
0:33:59 a good time, but actually the understory is I’m providing you a story that’s going to devastate
0:34:04 you in about three minutes. You just don’t see it coming yet. If you have to tell a part of a story
0:34:10 that’s really difficult for people to hear, a laugh after that can afford a breath. It can allow
0:34:16 people to go, okay, I just heard that bad thing, but he made me laugh. He must be okay. Now we can
0:34:22 move on. So it’s very, very powerful. It can be overused, you know, by certain people and it’s
0:34:27 underused by most people. Two things about the Jamie story that I thought were really fascinating.
0:34:33 One was the way you describe the scene. So like, I feel like I’m there with you and it was vague
0:34:37 enough that you get pulled into it. And I don’t think a lot of storytellers do a really good
0:34:42 job of that in terms of use location a lot to pull us in. It’s almost like you’re watching
0:34:45 a movie in your head, like you’re watching it play. Exactly what I’m looking for. Well,
0:34:50 locations are great because almost all of them are imbued with a thousand adjectives.
0:34:54 I don’t have to say anything. If I tell you, I dropped a bowl of blueberries on the kitchen
0:34:59 floor. You see that perfectly. You know, in your mind’s eye, you can tell me if the floor is wood,
0:35:04 linoleum, or tile. You know, you can tell me if the bowl was plastic, wooden, or glass. You can
0:35:08 tell me if the blueberries are happy summer blueberries or sad winter blueberries. And
0:35:12 if I asked you to look around the kitchen, you could identify exactly what that kitchen looks
0:35:16 like because I’m probably in your kitchen or your parents kitchen or a kitchen you’ve seen
0:35:20 on television a million times. But either way, I don’t want you to see my kitchen because that
0:35:25 would mean I’d have to describe it. And the power of your imagination is always more powerful than
0:35:30 any collection of words that I can assemble. I’m always leaning into location, especially if you
0:35:34 think about films, there’s always a location in every scene. You never are wondering where
0:35:38 someone is unless they’re sort of locked in a trunk of a car, you know, and that creates
0:35:42 lots of wonder and you want to know what’s going on. We open with location because you’re right,
0:35:47 it activates imagination. It forces the movie to continue to play in the minds of the audience.
0:35:52 And it’s almost like my brain starts doing the work for you. You don’t have to describe sort of
0:35:56 like what the floor is like or what the lighting is like or where the windows are, you know,
0:36:01 you just instantly go there. And the other thing I really that stuck out to me about Jamie was
0:36:06 we basically time traveled 15 years in that story. So we started like at recess and then
0:36:11 we went to a day and then we went to a week and then all of a sudden we’re in COVID and it’s,
0:36:17 you know, 10 years later and you’re still talking about how powerful this spoon is and how it’s
0:36:22 helped people. And it’s funny because I wouldn’t normally advance a story so far ahead. I often
0:36:27 tell people that that’s sort of a mistake, try to keep a story in the moment. And had COVID not
0:36:32 happened, the story probably would have ended with Jamie giving me the spoon and me feeling the
0:36:37 power of it for the first time and understanding that it’s going to be something I use forever.
0:36:41 It’s only because of the weirdness and extraordinary nature of a pandemic that allows
0:36:48 that story to jump ahead. But the other thing is you don’t know in that story that Jamie was my
0:36:54 student 16 years ago now. You don’t know that until the very end. And that works well for me
0:36:59 because that story could be happening last year or two years ago. It’s sort of a surprise to you
0:37:04 that I’ve had the spoon for 16 years. And I know it’s a surprise because when I’ve told it to audiences
0:37:09 and I say I’ve had that spoon for 16 years, I see the look on their faces because they suddenly
0:37:14 understand that happened so long ago and you still have that spoon, you know, and I’m often wearing
0:37:18 the spoon. I have it under my shirt and I take it out at the end of the story to surprise people,
0:37:22 you know, I’ve had people say, is that really the spoon? And I say like, do you really think I’m
0:37:26 such a monster that I would lose Jamie Calvert’s spoon that I couldn’t keep track of a single spoon
0:37:32 over the course of time? But yeah, that time game I play with the audience allows that story to play
0:37:37 out well. I would say that most of the time, maintaining stories within the moment is probably
0:37:40 the better way to go. But that one is that one operates a little differently.
0:37:44 So what are the most common mistakes that people make when they’re telling stories?
0:37:47 Well, they describe too much for sure. Actually, there’s some really interesting research on comic
0:37:54 books. They found that when you compare comic book characters, the comic book characters that have
0:38:00 less visual detail are the ones people feel more connected to. So if I draw a circle with two dots
0:38:06 for eyes and a little mouth, you’re going to feel more emotionally connected to that than if I
0:38:11 created a photorealistic version of a comic book character. Because if I give you the circle with
0:38:16 the two dots and the smile, you fill in the rest with what you want it to be. And now you’re connected
0:38:21 to it. If I say here’s what Joe looks like in his photorealistic, there’s nothing you can do with
0:38:27 that other than to accept it in your mind as Joe. Whereas you have a version of Joe in your head,
0:38:36 the platonic version of Joe. And if I allow you to place all of your background and need and
0:38:42 understanding of the concept of Joe into my unrealized picture, you’re more attached to it.
0:38:47 So people make the mistake of overly describing either because they think an audience wants it,
0:38:52 they’ve been taught to do it in school by people who don’t write but teach people how to write,
0:38:56 or there are just people that get obsessed. I’ve met lots of people who say like,
0:39:00 I want them to see my mother the way I saw her. And I say, I hear what you’re saying,
0:39:05 but there’s a difference between what you want and what the audience wants. And the storyteller
0:39:09 that’s doing what they want to do is making a mistake. It’s the storyteller who says,
0:39:14 what does the audience actually want from me? That’s the one who’s going to succeed. You can
0:39:20 share what your mother looks like with your spouse, with your closest friend who’s willing to put up
0:39:23 with you. But the audience doesn’t want to see your mother. They want to know what was said,
0:39:27 what was felt, and what was done. Everything else let us fill in with our brains. So that’s
0:39:31 a mistake they make. The other problem people have is I just believe the beginnings of stories are
0:39:35 essential to grabbing people’s attention. And people waste the beginnings of stories
0:39:41 explaining and teaching us things rather than launching stories in the proper place.
0:39:46 In the hands of a lesser storyteller, let’s say the spoon of power story begins with,
0:39:52 I’m a fifth grade teacher. I’m working at a school in Connecticut. It’s called Walk at School.
0:39:58 I teach about 23 kids per year. We have recess in the middle of the school day. And so I’m teaching
0:40:03 social studies one day when the bell rings and I tell all my kids it’s time to go out to recess.
0:40:07 One of my students is named Jamie, Jamie Calvert. He’s this little redheaded boy. He’s very
0:40:12 precocious. That’s how most people start the story, which is I need to teach you a whole bunch of stuff
0:40:16 so that the story will make sense. That’s the worst way to begin a story because no one has ever sat
0:40:20 down and said, boy, I hope he teaches me a lot of stuff before he says something good. So that
0:40:25 story starts in the right place, which is the actual moment the spoon makes an appearance.
0:40:29 I’m going to teach you all the rest of the stuff along the way, but I’m not going to open my story
0:40:35 by boring you. I’m going to open it with location, action, a little bit of wonder. There’s a reason
0:40:40 why I say it’s a metal object. You never think spoon. Most people think knife. Some people think
0:40:44 gun. And if you’re not thinking those two things, you’re wondering what the hell is in his hand.
0:40:48 And either way, I’m winning because if you made a prediction that it’s a knife or a gun,
0:40:52 now you want to know if your prediction is going to come true. That’s the crystal wall.
0:40:56 Or you’re just wondering, what is in his hand? What is in his hand? And I want you to be thinking
0:40:59 that because that means you want me to keep speaking. You’re happy that I’m talking because
0:41:03 you want me to solve that little mystery that I’ve created for you. The beginnings are where
0:41:08 people follow everything up because a story is like a plane ride to a beautiful place. You can
0:41:13 land in a beautiful place, but no one’s on your plane. Then you’ve failed, right? So the beginning
0:41:16 of the story is the attempt to get everyone on your plane to make the journey with you. And I
0:41:20 think that’s where most stories fail because people disengage immediately. I just think there’s too
0:41:24 many opportunities for people to listen to 30 seconds and go, she has nothing to say. And they
0:41:29 look at their phone, they think of their grocery list, they start looking around the room and saying,
0:41:32 who’s that bust of? They start doing that kind of thing and you’re never going to get them back.
0:41:38 So I would say most of the mistakes are made in the beginnings of stories where they fail to
0:41:42 engage the audience. And at the ends of stories where they fail to actually say anything.
0:41:48 So the end being sort of the five second moment of change or things that are different for you
0:41:54 and that the audience can relate to. Let’s go deeper on that. How do we find those
0:41:59 five second moments? How do we determine the beginning of the story? And those seem to be
0:42:03 the two most critical points, right? Where am I taking you? What’s the destination that we’re
0:42:07 getting on? And like, how do we get on that plane together? Right. So we start at the end
0:42:11 because we want to know what we’re going to say. And I do this regardless of what speaking
0:42:15 engagement you might be doing. If I’m helping someone with a keynote, I say, what’s the thing
0:42:19 you’re trying to say? And oftentimes they say, well, we’re trying to say a bunch of things. And I
0:42:21 say, well, if you say a bunch of things, you’re not saying anything. You have to have something
0:42:25 that you’re aiming at at the end. Even with a marketing deck, I always say, what are the
0:42:28 last three slides? And they say, well, we don’t know, we haven’t gotten to those. And I said,
0:42:31 that’s where we start though, we want to land somewhere. Otherwise, we’re just collecting
0:42:35 slides and changing the order three days before the event, and then two days before the event,
0:42:39 and then two hours before the event, we’re going to say something or we’re not going to say something.
0:42:44 So in storytelling, regardless of what the story is, it’s always, what am I trying to say at the
0:42:49 end? Meaning how did I change transformation or realization? How did my perception of the world,
0:42:55 my perception of myself, my perception of a spoon, or how I live as a human being,
0:43:01 how has that changed over time? And if it’s not a genuine change, it’s just a thing that happened.
0:43:06 It might be an amusing anecdote. I had a amusing moment in the airport yesterday. I got
0:43:10 diverted by the customs agent. I sort of did a bad job with the first customs agent,
0:43:17 and he put a red X on my form. And I thought, I’ve never seen that before. And so he said,
0:43:21 move on. And I went to that place where they sort of release you. And I went right with everybody
0:43:26 else. And the guy said, no, you go left. And I went into customs agent layer two, which I’d never
0:43:30 been in before. And there was a harder questioning. They were essentially trying to figure out why I
0:43:35 was here. Are you doing business here? And I’m like, no, I’m not getting paid. I’m just going
0:43:39 to talk to a guy. I said it in a way that made them very suspicious of me. And in the end,
0:43:43 the way they stopped being suspicious of me is they found my Wikipedia page. And they said,
0:43:46 oh, look, you’re an American novelist and storyteller. And suddenly they all relaxed
0:43:50 that everyone was like, okay, we understand why you’re here. That was an amusing anecdote.
0:43:56 It’s not a story. Because when I left customs, I was not thinking, oh, I see the world in a
0:44:00 different way. I see myself in a different way. I see customs in a different way. None of those
0:44:03 things happened. It was the kind of thing I’ll tell my wife and she’ll go, huh, that’s funny.
0:44:07 And three months from now, neither one of us will remember it because it’s cotton candy.
0:44:11 That’s what so many people do though. They think, oh, I have a story. Let me tell you about customs.
0:44:15 I would never say I have a story. I said something strange happened to me in customs
0:44:21 the other day, right? But it’s not a story. I might probe it and say, is there a story there?
0:44:25 Is there something about me having a Wikipedia page? That’s kind of weird, right? But I don’t
0:44:30 think there is because I didn’t feel, you know, that feeling you get. It’s a feeling of
0:44:36 something just happened. You know, and sometimes you don’t know what it is. I have taken 25 years
0:44:41 to figure out some of the things that have happened to me in my life. But I knew 25 years ago that
0:44:45 it was something. And I knew it was something because I kept coming back to it in my life.
0:44:49 You’re like, that moment really sticks with me. You know, sometimes it sticks with you because
0:44:53 it was crazy. Sometimes it sticks with you because like in the heart, in the mind,
0:44:59 it really hung with you. So you have to have something to say. You have to have a point.
0:45:04 And we start at the end because we want to land in a place where people go, oh, my time was well
0:45:10 spent. He’s presented me with a new way to look at the world. He’s made me reflect upon my position
0:45:14 on this planet, that kind of a thing. That’s what we’re looking for. And that can be as simple as
0:45:19 I want you to see my product in a new and interesting way. So when you leave, you go, wow, that really
0:45:24 is kind of an interesting broom. I’ve got a broom in my house, but I actually think they’ve upgraded
0:45:30 the broom. Like I’m feeling I got to go get that broom now because I don’t have the right broom.
0:45:34 That’s actually a feeling. And that would be the end of a story too. We got to ask ourselves,
0:45:39 what actually generates change over time? That’s the end of the story.
0:45:44 And then how does the end inform the beginning? Well, they’re almost always in perfect contrast
0:45:48 to each other. They have to be opposite of some way. If you want change over time, for the end of
0:45:54 my story, you know, I’ve learned a thing. At the beginning of the story, I must not have that thing
0:46:00 learned. If at the end of the story, I say this is a spoon of power, and it’s really going to become
0:46:05 the most powerful teaching tool I’ll ever have. The beginning of the story is it’s just a spoon.
0:46:09 And those are words I actually use in that story, just an ordinary kitchen spoon. I tell you in the
0:46:15 beginning, this is a meaningless kitchen spoon that because Lord of the Rings was on the popular,
0:46:20 I declared it the spoon of power for reasons that make no sense, except that’s who I am, right?
0:46:25 But essentially, it was a nothing and I made it a something. So we ask ourselves at the end,
0:46:29 what’s the change? What’s the meaning? And then the beginning is always going to be the opposite
0:46:33 of that. And now we have change over time. Now we create what I call an arc, right? It’s going to
0:46:39 go from one place to another. The customs agent story, you can feel it’s flat. Like, there’s no
0:46:44 opening where Matt is nervous about going through customs. I’ve done it a million times. Even when
0:46:48 I saw the red ax, I’m in Canada. What are they going to do? You know, I guess if I was in another
0:46:52 country, if I had just entered North Korea, and I got a red ax, maybe I have a story now, right?
0:46:56 But in Canada, I was thinking the worst they’re going to do is like, make me wait a little bit
0:47:02 longer before I enter Canada, right? So that’s not a story, because I didn’t feel that thing.
0:47:05 And therefore, I can’t have the opposite of that thing.
0:47:07 It’s hilarious to me that story, because I mean,
0:47:10 everybody can get into Canada and yet we stop you.
0:47:14 Right. Well, again, it was probably because I was communicating poorly, like,
0:47:17 what’s the purpose of your visit? I’m here to see a guy. What does that mean? I’m going to
0:47:20 talk to him. What are you going to talk to him about? Well, it’s on a podcast.
0:47:25 What do you mean on a podcast? You know, I was like, I’m just not doing a good job here.
0:47:29 And that’s like, I got myself into trouble because I didn’t tell a good story.
0:47:32 So if the ending is the opposite, the beginning is the opposite. So like,
0:47:37 you have these two transformations, walk me through some common movies and how you see them.
0:47:41 And this might wreck movies for everybody listening going forward. But talk to me about
0:47:45 how the opening scene of a movie often predicts the end and maybe use some examples.
0:47:50 All of the openings of movies or almost all of them will predict the end of the movie for sure.
0:47:54 Romantic comedies are the easiest to play within the beginning. If you see a movie like when Harry
0:47:57 met Sally, they actually say they hate each other at the beginning. I hate you, Harry.
0:48:01 They do not get along. They travel across country and they can’t stand each other the whole road
0:48:06 trip. We know what the end they’re going to end up together, right? There’s no way you can’t know
0:48:11 that. It doesn’t mean you’re not going to enjoy the film. It just tells you this is how this movie
0:48:18 is going to end, right? If we think about the first Star Wars, you know, a new hope, we meet a boy on
0:48:24 a planet who’s dreaming with his friends about flying in space someday and using blasters and
0:48:29 spaceships to defeat an empire. That’s the beginning of it, right? So we have to know
0:48:33 that that’s not what’s going to happen over the course of this movie. What happens is
0:48:38 he meets Jesus in the form of Obi-Wan Kenobi because it’s really a religion story. It’s about
0:48:44 a boy who thinks he’s going to fly in a spaceship and defeat the empire. And instead he finds religion,
0:48:48 something called the Force. And at the end of the movie, when he’s ready to use that spaceship
0:48:53 to defeat the empire, he turns off his targeting computer and he says, “I don’t need technology.
0:48:58 I have religion and religion will save the day.” That’s why when you leave that movie, you feel
0:49:03 good. There’s lots of space movies and some of them you leave and you go, “Oh, that was a something.”
0:49:06 And then there are other movies you leave and go, “That was great.” And you forget all about it
0:49:12 because there’s something about watching a character find a religion and then use that
0:49:18 belief in the thing to defeat evil that means something to us. My favorite example is like,
0:49:24 not a great movie, but Independence Day, the alien invasion movie. I love that movie because that
0:49:29 is so perfectly constructed. That is a movie about people. There’s multiple protagonists in that
0:49:37 movie. People who are all failing to get the respect of the people they value most. So like,
0:49:42 Will Smith’s character at the beginning of the movie is rejected by NASA. You don’t get to be
0:49:46 an astronaut. If you don’t think Will Smith isn’t going to space at some point in that movie,
0:49:53 you’re crazy. The president is being accused of being weak. He’s soft on crime. He’s a weakling.
0:49:58 He’s not the strongman he once was. If you don’t think at the end of that movie, he’s going to
0:50:04 somehow be fighting an alien actually in his plane. You’re crazy. It tells you exactly what’s
0:50:08 going to happen. Jeff Goldblum’s character at the beginning of the movie, you’re doing something
0:50:14 with satellites and television. His father thinks he’s wasting his time. His wife who’s sort of
0:50:20 estranged from him is doing big work and he’s doing nothing. He’s like just sending cable
0:50:25 television up to space. That’s what you’re doing. All of those characters are essentially characters
0:50:29 who are being disrespected by the people they value the most. And at the end of the movie,
0:50:35 all of them will gain the respect of the people they value the most. Now, if Roland Emmerich,
0:50:40 who made that film, said, “Hey, Shane, want to come to my movie?” It’s about a bunch of people who
0:50:44 are not really feeling the respect they deserve. And over the course of time, they’re going to
0:50:48 find that respect. And it’s actually going to come from the sources that they value the most.
0:50:53 You’re probably not very excited about it. But if you place those actual stories
0:50:59 amongst an alien invasion, suddenly we have something that people want to go to. And when
0:51:05 they leave, they go, “It’s kind of not a great movie. And yet for some reason, it sort of stays
0:51:10 with us in a way that other movies don’t. And I really believe that’s why. Even if we don’t
0:51:16 know it on the surface level, I believe that somewhere inside, we recognize we watched people
0:51:23 do a thing that we hope to do someday, which is to say, get the people who don’t notice us
0:51:27 to notice us. That’s what that movie is about. Oh, that’s interesting. I mean, when I hear that,
0:51:31 and I’m like, why is it memorable? I haven’t watched the movie. So I’m going to watch it
0:51:36 tonight, maybe. I think, oh, we’ve all been in a situation where we’re feeling underappreciated,
0:51:40 undervalued, and we all want to be the person, the hero in the end.
0:51:43 Right. Yeah. And that’s exactly what that’s about.
0:51:47 What makes the difference between a memorable movie and one you walk out of and you’re like,
0:51:49 “Oh, that was entertaining,” but you forget like two days later?
0:51:54 Oftentimes, the problem with those films is that whatever is sort of being expressed,
0:51:59 hopefully that five-second moment at the end, because most movies actually have that.
0:52:05 Regardless of what you’re watching, most screenwriters and filmmakers are taking us on an arc
0:52:12 in a certain way. The more relatable that ending moment is, the more deep,
0:52:16 the more resonant it is through the movie, as opposed to what happens in a lot of movies,
0:52:20 which is it just sort of lands at the end because they know they have to wrap it up at the end.
0:52:26 Some movies carry it all the way through. If you think of Die Hard, Die Hard’s a movie about a man
0:52:33 who’s trying to get back his wife. And his wife has decided that her career is going to take precedent
0:52:38 at this moment. And he’s decided his career is going to take precedent. And so they’re apart.
0:52:43 And essentially, he’s just trying to get back to his wife. The whole movie is he’s just trying
0:52:47 to get back to his wife, and they have placed terrorists in front of him. Rather than what we
0:52:53 face typically, which is like a bad phone call, the job isn’t working out, our kids are making us
0:52:57 crazy, that’s not entertaining, but terrorists are. John McClain, the character in that movie,
0:53:02 throughout the entire movie, we’re always thinking about his wife. We’re always going back to his
0:53:07 wife. His wife is always in peril, and he’s just trying to get back to his wife. In a lesser version
0:53:11 of that movie, that idea is introduced at the beginning of the movie, but we don’t really see
0:53:16 the wife again until the end. And so we will feel like, oh yeah, he did go on a journey, but it didn’t
0:53:23 sort of have the time to sink into us in the way that it sinks into us in Die Hard. We understand,
0:53:28 it’s also really important that in that movie, he’s not sort of a jacked up Arnold Schwarzenegger.
0:53:33 We’re like, I’m kind of like that guy. It hurts to run through glass. Like, I understand that I
0:53:37 might be able to do it to save my life, but the fact that in the next scene, he’s sort of screaming
0:53:42 and pulling glass out of his foot in a way I would, as opposed to the way Arnold Schwarzenegger
0:53:46 in a movie would, which he’d just pull it out and crack a joke, you know, and toss it away. That’s
0:53:50 why that movie stays with us, because we’re like, that’s us. And I understand what it’s like to try
0:53:55 to get back to a loved one. And I understand how things are placed in front of us, not those things,
0:54:00 but things. How do we make a good trailer then for a podcast or for a movie? Like, what goes into
0:54:05 that in your mind that pulls people in and like, I have to watch this. I have to listen to this.
0:54:11 We want to make sure that people understand sort of what the problem the character is facing,
0:54:15 what that problem is, and make sure that it’s something that we all can go, yeah, I get that.
0:54:20 But not solve the problem or even let us know if the problem will be solved. John McClain
0:54:25 desperately wants to get back to his wife. And unfortunately, terrorists now stand between
0:54:30 him and his wife. What do you do when there are terrorists standing between you and your wife,
0:54:35 multiple terrorists, and you have nothing except your wits? What do you do? And we go,
0:54:40 I’ve wanted to get back to the love of my life. You know, how is he going to do that? And suddenly
0:54:45 you want it to happen. If they present it as something we want, then absolutely we’re going
0:54:49 to watch it because we want to see how to do it. You know, I think there is a part of our brain
0:54:54 that says, I need to see how John McClain gets back to his wife because I want to get back to,
0:54:59 maybe it’s the love of my life, or maybe it’s like I used to love playing poker and I haven’t
0:55:03 been playing it for a long time. And I want to get back to that love of my life. But we want to
0:55:08 present sort of the stakes in the story without revealing too much of the story. So we want to
0:55:14 see the yearning, the want, the desire. If it’s a podcast, it’s essentially you’re going to present
0:55:20 a question at the top, you know, something like you’ve probably been telling not so good stories
0:55:27 all your life. And you’ve probably heard people who tell amazing stories all the time. It turns out
0:55:32 that’s not actually something that people are born with. It’s just strategic. And if you become a
0:55:38 little more strategic, you can be one of those people, right? Now we want to know. Now we’re
0:55:43 curious. We’re not giving anything away. We’re not indicating the end, but we’re finding something
0:55:48 that’s going to like appeal to people in a real emotional way. We’re going to identify a need
0:55:53 they have. And if we identify an appropriate need, then we’re going to grab our audience and they’re
0:55:58 going to pay attention. I love that. That’s really cool. How do we learn to tell better stories then?
0:56:04 Like walk me through sort of you teach a class on this, like what’s that process for if you had to
0:56:09 give a high level overview of that? Like how do you learn to do that? Start by becoming what I
0:56:14 call strategic listeners. There’s listening, which everyone thinks they’re good at and many people
0:56:18 are not. And then there’s active listening, which is as far as I can tell you look at the person in
0:56:23 a nod while they speak, but I’m not sure if that actually yields anything. So what I say is strategic
0:56:27 listening, which is what I’m relentlessly doing all the time, which is to say, if I’m watching a
0:56:32 movie and it makes me laugh, I say to myself, what did they just do to make me laugh? Like what
0:56:37 combination of words or situations did they assemble? Or how were the words spoken in a way
0:56:41 that produced the laugh? If you hear someone tell a great story and you think, wow, that was a great
0:56:47 story or a great movie, strategically, you should be thinking, what was it about that story about
0:56:52 that movie about the book I just read that made it great? I think a lot of times what happens is
0:56:58 people allow that content to wash through them, which is great if you want to be a consumer of
0:57:03 other people’s greatness. But if you want to be a reproducer of that greatness, then we have to be
0:57:09 strategic. My wife, when we leave movies, I don’t know, somehow she knows when I know a movie is
0:57:15 terrible, even if she thinks it’s good. Like we left the first Wonder Woman movie and she was feeling
0:57:20 great because it was feminist superhero icon. And as we left the movie theater, she goes,
0:57:27 I know something’s wrong with that movie. I can tell by the way you’re walking. And I said,
0:57:32 that movie is a disaster. And she said, can you not tell me for 15 minutes so I can keep
0:57:37 enjoying it? What she was saying is, there’s something fundamentally flawed with that movie,
0:57:42 and you as a strategic listener have pinpointed it. I have not pinpointed it. Right now,
0:57:46 I’m just a consumer of this content. Eventually you’re going to tell me and it’s going to ruin
0:57:50 the movie for me, but just let me enjoy it for a little bit. I told her, I said, I never have to
0:57:54 tell you. And she said, no, you’ll eventually tell me. So, you know, 15 minutes down the road,
0:57:58 I told her what was wrong with Wonder Woman. As soon as I told her, she said, oh, what a terrible
0:58:02 movie. And I said, yeah, I know, but most people won’t notice because they’re going to be consumers
0:58:06 of the content and not the strategic pulling apart at the threads kind of person. I’m the pulling
0:58:09 apart at the threads kind of person. And if you can become that, then you’re going to be a much
0:58:12 more effective storyteller because you’re going to pick up on the things that people are doing.
0:58:16 If I don’t ask, I’m going to get a viscerator for this. So what was wrong with Wonder Woman?
0:58:20 So at the end of Wonder Woman, did you see the movie? I did like a long time ago. I forget it.
0:58:27 At the end of the movie, Gal Gadot, Wonder Woman, she’s battling the bad guy. He’s some sort of God
0:58:34 or something. Hades. Hades. And they’re fighting. And while that’s going on, Wonder Woman’s boyfriend,
0:58:41 for lack of a better word, is in a plane and he’s flying some poisonous bomb into the sky.
0:58:47 And she’s losing to Hades. She’s about to be killed by Hades. And then off in the sky,
0:58:53 she sees her boyfriend and he dies. The plane blows up. He’s risked his life to save her
0:58:59 and all the people in the area. And it’s at that moment that she finds the strength
0:59:05 to rise up and defeat Hades, which means there’s a story about a woman who is incapable of winning
0:59:11 her own battles unless a man sacrifices his life and therefore inspires her to defeat the bad guy.
0:59:14 Oh, that’s interesting. I never thought of it that way.
0:59:18 But that’s exactly what happens. But how often in movies does that happen? When Luke Skywalker
0:59:25 defeats the Empire, it’s not because he’s thinking about Princess Leia. He doesn’t need Princess Leia
0:59:32 to inspire him to take the shot, right? In movies, quite often, many times, almost always,
0:59:39 the man manages to defeat the bad guy without any inspiration, right? When Iron Man defeats Thanos,
0:59:44 he’s literally looking at Dr. Strange. He’s not looking at his wife who is on the battlefield
0:59:51 with him. He’s looking at Dr. Strange. And Dr. Strange says this is the one in a million
0:59:57 circumstances where we might win, right? He’s not relying on a woman and the support of his wife
1:00:01 to do it. He’s doing it on his own with a little information from a guy. And that’s how most male
1:00:08 heroes win the day. Female heroes in so many movies can only win the day if a man does something
1:00:13 first. Actually, the Mary Poppins movie, the new update of Mary Poppins, is even more egregious
1:00:18 because Mary Poppins is this woman who’s trying to save this family. There’s a father who could be
1:00:21 the hero of the day, and he’s not. And there’s two kids, they could be the hero of the day,
1:00:25 they could save the home, but they don’t. Mary Poppins could be the hero of the day. She doesn’t.
1:00:30 Instead, quite literally, the door opens and a man walks in, the guy who played Bert in the original
1:00:35 movie. He’s an old actor that we’re all happy, suddenly made a last appearance. The door opens,
1:00:39 and he basically says, I have all the money you need. Here you go. Everyone fails to save the day,
1:00:43 and then the door opens, and a white guy with a bunch of money walks in and says,
1:00:47 here you go. Here’s what you need. And we’re all happy because we see an old actor that we didn’t
1:00:49 know was going to be in the movie, and he suddenly appears and we’re happy. And hooray,
1:00:53 the day’s been saved. And I sit there and go, really? None of the people in the movie are going
1:00:57 to save the day. We’re going to have the random white guy we haven’t seen for all except the last
1:01:02 two minutes of the movie pop in. But that’s the difference between being a strategic listener
1:01:07 and saying what’s happening in the story and someone who just is enjoying it. And there’s
1:01:11 nothing wrong with enjoying it. Although I do think in both of those movies, I think that what is
1:01:19 being said, which is women can’t win the day, I think that does sort of work its way into our
1:01:25 unconscious. I actually think both of those films are pretty bad if you’re a little girl and you’re
1:01:29 watching that movie because you don’t get to see kids win in Mary Poppins. You don’t get to see
1:01:34 Mary Poppins win. You don’t get to watch Wonder Woman win on her own merit. I do think that
1:01:38 they’re sort of insidious in that way. Not intentionally. I can’t even comprehend why
1:01:43 these filmmakers did not see these problems as they were putting their films together or they
1:01:46 decided they were problems about who cares because we have to kill them somehow and why would we
1:01:51 kill them for no reason. So we’ll do it for that reason. But I do think they’re pretty detrimental
1:01:56 to girls in general. So if you’re a parent, you have a young daughter, what’s a good movie to watch
1:02:02 with her that is not like that, that’ll see the unconscious properly about the woman sort of
1:02:06 not needing anybody else and saving the day. Thelma and Louise. What happens in that movie?
1:02:11 They both die. Well, actually, they don’t die. That’s an interesting, I use this one in storytelling
1:02:18 all the time. Thelma and Louise, it’s from the 1980s, two women sort of get mistaken for having
1:02:22 committed a crime that they did not commit and they essentially get chased by the police and
1:02:26 it’s looking really bad for them. And it’s a story about two women coming together, a female
1:02:32 friendship. And at the end, they have a choice of looking back and ending up in prison or
1:02:36 driving off a cliff together holding hands and they drive off the cliff holding hands. Now,
1:02:40 the interesting thing about that movie is it ends with the car mid-flight. We don’t actually see it
1:02:47 hit the ground, which allows the audience to think maybe they survived. It’s improbable and it’s not
1:02:51 meant to be thought that way. But there’s a reason why we don’t see the car disappear off screen.
1:02:54 And it’s because we’re going to hang it right here. We’re going to stop the movie right here and you
1:02:58 get to sort of determine what you feel about it. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is the same
1:03:03 thing. Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid, they run out of the rocks to go face, you know, a hundred
1:03:08 federales. And we know they’re going to die, but we don’t see them die. So in our hearts and our
1:03:12 minds, they’re still alive. Maybe Butch and Sundance get out of it. And that’s the idea that our story
1:03:17 should always sort of have a little bit of a tail on them. When a story is not complete, when there
1:03:21 are still unanswered questions at the end of a story, when the audience can sort of play it out
1:03:26 a little bit on their own, those stories tend to hang with an audience much more. So we want our
1:03:30 stories to not be wrapped up in a bow because when we wrap it up in a bow, we get to shove it away
1:03:34 and stop thinking about it. You know, I think of it as a rope. I don’t want to not at the end of the
1:03:38 rope. I want a frayed ending that allows people to sort of wonder what the hell happened the next
1:03:42 day. That’s great. When they’re wondering the next day, I’m thrilled. Is it okay to lie when we tell
1:03:47 stories? I don’t think so. I’m a novelist, you know, I’ve published six novels now. I believe in
1:03:52 making stuff up all the time. The phrase, “Never let the facts stand in the way of a good story.”
1:03:56 I hate that. It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard anyone say. When we lie in our stories,
1:04:01 we can no longer be trusted. You know, when I’m telling stories to people, there’s a reason why
1:04:08 people share more secrets with me than you could ever imagine. Everyone from an audience member
1:04:14 all the way up to the CEOs of tech companies that you interact with on a daily basis,
1:04:20 they end up sharing like really private things with me. My wife will sometimes like, you know,
1:04:24 she’ll be in the other room and she’ll hear me talking to someone about storytelling in a coaching
1:04:28 session. And when I come out, she goes, “That didn’t sound like storytelling.” Like the whole
1:04:32 hour wasn’t spent on storytelling. It’s because I’ve spent so much time with this person and
1:04:38 shared stories and expressed empathy and done all the things that I do that people are willing to
1:04:41 trust me, connect with me. You know, there’s a reason why I tell you the spoon of power story.
1:04:46 And you know, when entrepreneur once told me, “You should sell spoons. You should drill holes
1:04:50 and spoons and sell them on chains,” he’s not wrong. I could totally make a bundle. I’m not
1:04:54 going to do it. It’s a really cynical and awful way to be. But it’s because they know the story is
1:04:58 true. If you think it’s fiction, suddenly you don’t want to touch the spoon of power.
1:05:03 It’s just the thing he made up and somehow he got a spoon on a chain and that’s all that’s
1:05:09 going on. So no, I think the extent of lying in a story amounts to I’m allowed to take things out
1:05:14 of stories that are inconvenient for the story. Not inconvenient for me, but because they make
1:05:20 the story not run as well. I tell a story about a bunch of guys in a car, you know, we’ll go into
1:05:24 a place. And I don’t mention one of my friends. And here’s the story. He says, “I was in the car
1:05:27 that night too.” And I said, “I know, but you didn’t do anything. You know, you’re just cluttering
1:05:33 the field. Like you’re just stealing bandwidth from the audience, mentioning that Martin was also
1:05:36 in the car. Like if you don’t do anything, you’re out of the car. You’re irrelevant to me at that
1:05:40 point because you’re irrelevant to the audience. So I’ll take Martin out of the car. I’ll condense
1:05:45 time. So a story that takes place over the course of two days, I’ll push it into one day because
1:05:49 an audience doesn’t want to have to hear that I went to bed, woke up, hit a bowl of cereal. And
1:05:53 then the story continued, right? I don’t want to have that clunkiness of a story. I’ll shorten
1:05:58 locations, push things a little physically closer together, and I’ll eliminate things. All of that
1:06:03 is done in the service of the story, though. If I did something stupid over the course of the story,
1:06:08 I’m not going to remove the stupid thing I did in an effort to make myself look better. In fact,
1:06:12 I will enhance the stupid thing I did because I know that’s what audiences really want. You know,
1:06:17 that vulnerability is what they crave. So whenever I do something stupid, I am thrilled
1:06:20 because it often means I’m going to have a story to tell. A lot of people tell
1:06:27 end stories. This happened, and then this, and then this, and then this. Right. And it’s not super
1:06:32 engaging. Right. And I remember listening to a clip, the South Park guys, they use the terms
1:06:37 but and therefore, and then I remember reading this in your book. So talk to me about this and like,
1:06:42 how we take an end story and make it a but therefore story. It was devastating from when I saw
1:06:46 that clip too. Because I thought I had stumbled upon something that was mine, like, Hey, look what
1:06:50 I found. And then someone said, That’s great. Did you know the South Park guys believe that too?
1:06:55 And I was like, Oh, really? And it’s going to be like Matthew Dicks only. But they’re right. And
1:07:00 I’m right too. And the story is essentially a story that is a series of events, one after the other,
1:07:04 that are not connected in any meaningful way. First graders tell those stories all the time. I got
1:07:08 up and then I got my cereal and then I went to school. Right. But adults still tell those stories
1:07:13 too. Actually, most decks that I’m working on with marketing and sales people are and stories.
1:07:16 You know, it’s an end story, because if you can just throw a slide
1:07:21 into a deck, you don’t have a story, because I couldn’t just throw a random scene into the spoon
1:07:26 of power and still have that story work, right? But people feel they can do that. I’m like, well,
1:07:29 that’s fine, but you’re not telling a story. Now you’re just, you’re just a slide monkey. You’re
1:07:34 just throwing in slides. So an end story is the kind of story that if we take something out,
1:07:39 the story still plays. Nothing really changes in the story. We still can get to the end,
1:07:43 which means it’s probably not a story. You’re probably just reporting on your day. But our
1:07:49 therefore stories rely on connection. Scenes are connected to other scenes connected to other scenes.
1:07:56 So I’m doing this, but that happened. Therefore, this happened, but then that happened. And when
1:08:00 we connect it in that way, we can’t actually remove anything from the story, because the story
1:08:07 will fall apart. I also think it creates motion in a story, sort of an angular, exciting nature to
1:08:11 the story. The spoon of power appears, but it’s not the spoon of power. It’s not just a spoon,
1:08:17 it’s the spoon of power. Therefore, I must have it. So, which is because, which is therefore,
1:08:23 so I chased Jamie, but I don’t get it. But that’s okay, because he’s my student and I’m still going
1:08:29 to have time to teach him. So I’m in math, right? But he’s put the spoon right here. So we’re in
1:08:36 the standoff. Then we’re, I’m doing reading, but the spoon is still here. But that’s okay, because
1:08:41 eventually I’m going to teach writing. I walk up the aisle, but the spoon isn’t here. The bell
1:08:47 rings. Therefore, Jamie gets out of the seat, runs over to his coat, but also goes to the library
1:08:52 and pulls out the spoon. So if you’re budding and thereforeing all the way through, you know that
1:08:56 every scene is required. You know, you don’t have any fluff along the way. There’s no extra scene,
1:09:01 sort of hanging out. And people are going to be so invested in the story. I always tell people
1:09:06 the but is the most powerful word in all of storytelling. If I say to you, I got in the Uber
1:09:11 today to come over here, but that just makes you want to hear the next part of that sentence. If I
1:09:16 said I got in the Uber to come over here today and like the power could go out and you’d be like,
1:09:22 whatever. But if I say but, you know, something happened. It’s an indication that the world did
1:09:28 not continue on in the way you wanted it to. It’s the same thing when we oftentimes the not is more
1:09:33 powerful in storytelling. What something is not is more powerful than what it is. If I say Shane is
1:09:39 smart, that’s fine. But if I say Shane is not stupid, can you feel that that is a better way
1:09:44 to say that? And what it does is when I say Shane is not stupid, it presents the dichotomy. It says
1:09:49 there’s a stupid and there’s a smart and I’m going to tell you which one he is. If I say Shane is
1:09:54 smart, it’s flat. I’ve only given you one option. That one option exists and it’s the one I’ve chosen.
1:09:59 So I’m often describing things by what they are not rather than what they are because that creates
1:10:06 that binary dichotomy in language that causes people to feel energy in our sentences as opposed to
1:10:12 sort of that flatness. Does that only work when it’s complete opposites? Like Shane is not lazy or
1:10:17 does it only work when there’s like a really corresponding strong opposite to that? No,
1:10:20 because I could say something like, and sometimes I do this, it’s really weird. I actually teach
1:10:26 people to practice this in a way that’s weird. Like when I play golf, my coach will say,
1:10:31 do this. And he goes, we’re over exaggerating it right now. Eventually, we’ll get it back to normal.
1:10:36 I have people over exaggerate it. So if I wanted to say the apple was red, you know, if I want to
1:10:40 over exaggerate that and get really good at this, I’d say the apple wasn’t yellow and it wasn’t green,
1:10:45 it was red. So red, yellow and green are not opposites of each other. They’re just different
1:10:49 colors, but you can still do it that way. I might not do it in that instance. That would
1:10:53 start to make me sound weird. But actually, my people, I coach, I have them do that for a week.
1:10:58 I say, I want you to never say what it is. I want you to say what it isn’t, just in an effort to
1:11:03 get used to it so that when you speak, there’s people who just speak dynamically and there’s
1:11:08 people who speak flatly. And I think the dynamic speakers are the ones who are always trying to
1:11:13 energize their sentences by doing things like that. What else goes into teaching people how to
1:11:18 tell effective stories? Knowing what a story is is really important. So understanding as you move
1:11:23 through your life, that there’s moments happening to you. And those are the things that are worth
1:11:28 sharing. I just spoke to a guy two days ago, he’s going to be leading a conference, a whole bunch
1:11:32 of people. He’s a guy who does this all the time. And he met with me because he said, I’m out of
1:11:36 stories. He said, I used all my stories in the last conference. So I need new stories. And I said,
1:11:41 how long was the last conference? And he said two days that you ran out of all the stories of your
1:11:45 life in two days? He did. Right? That’s the problem often is we just don’t have enough stories to
1:11:50 tell. If we start to recognize that our lives are filled with stories, that they’re everywhere,
1:11:55 that we don’t need enormous moments in order to carry the day. And instead, small moments are
1:12:00 actually some of the most powerful moments we can ever share. I would much rather share with you a
1:12:05 tiny, seemingly insignificant moment that’s filled with meaning rather than one of my crazy stories
1:12:09 about the times I’ve died and been brought back to life. Those are fine stories, but they’re not
1:12:13 actually my go-to stories because they’re a lot harder to relate to. I’d much rather tell you
1:12:18 some tiny, seemingly insignificant moment that meant the world to me because that is more likely
1:12:22 to relate to you. So paying attention to that is going to be really important. And then just
1:12:29 establishing that mindset of, what can I say next in order to keep the person listening to me?
1:12:34 You know, it’s those stakes we’ve described. It’s the idea of suspense, which is really powerful.
1:12:40 And once you understand it, it’s simple to use. It’s simply the strategic exclusion of information
1:12:44 alongside the strategic inclusion of information. That’s what suspense is. It’s, I’m going to tell
1:12:48 you some of it, but not all of it. It’s a metal object rather than saying spoon, right? Crossword
1:12:54 puzzles are just suspense devices. They just say, there’s a five-letter word for the color blue.
1:13:00 What is it? And now you have to know. And if you don’t know what it is, it’s suspenseful and almost
1:13:05 frustrating that you don’t know. And the beauty of suspense is the more information you provide,
1:13:09 the greater the suspense increases. So if you don’t know the five-letter word for blue,
1:13:12 and I say, oh, we figured out the first letter, it’s an A, your suspense increases. You’ve either
1:13:17 solved it and now you feel good because the solving of suspense makes an audience feel good,
1:13:21 but also the perpetuation of suspense makes an audience feel good because they want you to
1:13:25 keep talking, right? So eventually we discover the word is Azure, but some people figured it out
1:13:29 and feel good about themselves. And some people heard the word Azure and suddenly felt relief.
1:13:34 But either way, I’m winning. So when we’re speaking, we just have to ask ourselves all the time,
1:13:39 if the power goes out now, will people care? Twice in my life, I’ve been in a movie where the
1:13:42 power’s gone out. Has that ever happened to you? No. Maybe because I live in New England and we have
1:13:46 a lot of weather. It’s like thunder and lightning. So I’m like super worried the power’s gonna go
1:13:50 out right now. Well, twice in my life, it’s happened with a movie. The first time I was alone
1:13:55 watching a movie, power goes out, manager comes in and says, you can come back tomorrow or later
1:13:59 today, see the movie. I never went back because I didn’t care about the characters. The power
1:14:02 went out and I literally was happy that the story was over. The second time I was with my
1:14:06 daughter, the power went out, we lost our minds. I was like, maybe we should go to another movie
1:14:10 theater. Let’s just go find another movie theater that has power so we can find out the end of this
1:14:16 movie. That filmmaker had me on the edge of my seat. That filmmaker made me want them to continue
1:14:22 talking. If we place that as our mindset, if the power goes out, will anyone care? I’m thinking
1:14:27 that all the time. If the power goes out, I want everyone to stay right where they are and be waiting
1:14:31 for me to get the microphone back on so I can finish my story. That’s fascinating. When they
1:14:36 test movies with focus groups, they should almost test halfway through sort of like a fake power
1:14:41 outage and like, do people want to come back tomorrow and see the resolution of the conflict?
1:14:45 Yeah. Well, they do these registers where like, how much you were liking the movie and how much
1:14:50 you’re not liking the movie. And depending on what kind of movie you’re in, if they’re not liking the
1:14:54 movie, if I was paying attention, I would say, well, listen, you’re missing one of the four things.
1:14:59 There’s either no stakes at this moment. We’re not worried about anything. There’s no suspense,
1:15:05 right? We’re not feeling a surprise coming or we’re not laughing. And it’s one of those four
1:15:09 things. I tell stories where sometimes I know there’s a boring part. I hate it. But I’ll get
1:15:14 to a point in the story and I’ll say, for 45 seconds, I have to explain this thing to them. And I
1:15:19 don’t want to explain this thing to them, but I have to. So I’m either going to make it suspenseful
1:15:23 or I’m going to make it funny. Those are probably the two go-to strategies that I use. One of the
1:15:28 two is going to work and get me through the boring part. I still register it as a storyteller
1:15:34 as the boring part because I know that suspense and humor are not really storytelling. They’re
1:15:39 sort of like, I’m painting over the problem so I can get back into the story the way I want to.
1:15:43 But it’s when we don’t paint over the problem. It’s when we’re speaking and we suddenly know we
1:15:47 have to say something that’s not going to be terribly engaging those demos, right? Now I’m
1:15:53 going to demo my platform for you and we’re all going to see how it works, right? That’s boring.
1:15:58 It’s always boring unless we paint over that problem with humor or suspense,
1:16:03 even things like novelty. Just do it in a different way. Do it in a way no one’s done before. That
1:16:10 works too. There’s a reason why Andy Kaufman took the stage with a record player, opened it up and
1:16:15 played Mighty Mouse and just stood there and people were captivated. Eventually they got irritated,
1:16:20 but that was supremely entertaining for people for quite a while because they had never seen it
1:16:24 before. So sometimes it’s just, I’ll find a way to do it that’s never been done before and that’ll
1:16:28 be interesting too. But as storytellers, we have to be thinking that. Structure is everything.
1:16:32 It’s as long as you’ve structured your story properly, meaning you’ve started at the right
1:16:37 spot in the beginning and landed in a place of meaning and you haven’t filled it with unnecessary
1:16:41 nonsense, it almost doesn’t matter what the sentences are that you’re choosing. There’s a
1:16:46 woman in New York, a storyteller named Denusha. English is her third language. It was Polish,
1:16:51 Russian, and then English. And her English isn’t great. It’s fine, but her nouns and verbs don’t
1:16:55 always agree. Her vocabulary is limited compared to mine. She still kicks my ass sometimes because
1:17:00 she’s making good decisions. Once we have a good structure in place and we can perform at an
1:17:06 adequate level, the sentences we apply to that structure mean a lot less because we’re actually
1:17:11 saying something of meaning and we’re starting in a place of engagement and we’re not filling our
1:17:15 stories with unnecessary content. You do those three things. There’s still a million things I
1:17:19 could teach you about storytelling, but those things are really going to level you up quickly.
1:17:24 So you advocate homework for life, which is sort of keeping track of the little moments every day
1:17:28 that happen to you that might be stories, might be anecdotes. In an Excel spreadsheet,
1:17:32 that’s what you use. Walk me through one you haven’t made a story recently that you think
1:17:37 is a story and how do you think about structuring it? Just walk me through your internal monologue
1:17:42 about one of those moments. I knew this was a moment. I felt it. My son is getting ready to go
1:17:47 to scout camp and part of scout camp, which I went to all my life, saved my life. The Boy Scouts
1:17:50 were more instrumental to me than anything. I knew that he was going to have to take a swim
1:17:54 test on the first day. You’re going to swim 100 yards. He’s not the strongest swimmer. He actually
1:18:00 had a little swimming kerfuffle a couple of weeks ago. He swam out to the dock for the first time
1:18:04 at the lake where we go and then he couldn’t get back. He got nervous because he had gotten so tired
1:18:09 swimming out to the dock, which was only like 40 yards out. I knew that going into this scouting
1:18:14 swim test, he might not pass. If you don’t pass, it doesn’t mean you can’t swim, but you have
1:18:18 limitations placed on you. When I was a kid, when I first went to scout camp, they had us do our
1:18:23 swim test at 8.30 in the morning right after breakfast on a Monday and I was annoyed. I was
1:18:28 just that kid that I always wanted to do things on my own terms to this day. I’m sort of that way.
1:18:33 My wife says that’s a double-edged sword. I’ve got like nine pancakes in my belly and I go down
1:18:38 in the cold of the morning and I have to jump in the lake and I swim about 50 yards and I’m done.
1:18:43 I’m like, “This is stupid.” I get out and they go, “Okay, you can swim, but you didn’t swim far enough
1:18:46 you’re a beginner swimmer.” I said, “Okay, whatever.” They said, “That means you can only swim in this
1:18:51 little area here.” I was like, “Oh.” They said, “You can only take a rowboat.” I was like, “Oh,
1:18:55 forget it. I’ll do it again. I’ll take the test.” They go, “Great, Wednesday. That’s when the next
1:19:00 test is happening.” For two days, I was a beginner swimmer, which also meant on Tuesday when we went
1:19:04 across the lake to camp on the other side, all my friends glided across in a canoe and I was in a
1:19:09 stupid rowboat. It took me 45 minutes longer to get across the lake. Everyone made fun of me.
1:19:14 I hated it. I remember that moment. It sears in my brain. So as my son’s getting ready to go to
1:19:17 scout camp, I’m not sure if he’s going to pass the swim test, but I tell him that story. I say,
1:19:21 “This is what happened to me.” I say, “It’s okay if you don’t pass, but what I want you to make sure
1:19:26 you do is not the stupid thing I did, which is just get out because you’re annoyed.” I said,
1:19:32 “Just try.” I said, “And don’t stop swimming because you get tired. Stop swimming because
1:19:35 you physically can’t swim anymore.” And then it doesn’t matter what the results are because you’ll
1:19:40 feel good about yourself. So I pick them up a week later. I don’t make it the first question I ask,
1:19:44 but it is the first question I want to ask. I sort of try to play it cool. I wait a while and I go,
1:19:48 “Oh, hey, what about the swim test? How’d that go?” He goes, “Oh, I passed them the first try.” And
1:19:52 I was like, “Oh, thank goodness. My heart is with him.” And I said, “How did it go?” And he said,
1:19:57 “Actually, on the second lap, I was going to quit because I was so tired, but then I heard you in
1:20:02 my head and I remember you said, “Don’t quit just because you’re tired. Quit if you can’t swim anymore.”
1:20:07 And I heard you say it, Dad, and I swim the other two laps. I’m oddly emotional, not oddly emotional.
1:20:12 I’m appropriately emotional right now because I sent my son off for seven days and there was a moment
1:20:18 when I was in his head. It was like I went on that swim test with him and it was because I told him
1:20:24 a story and I was vulnerable and I tried to make it as relatable to him as possible and as accessible
1:20:29 to him as possible and it carried the day. It’s probably going to be a story I tell someday.
1:20:33 It’s a little trickier to tell because I don’t like to tell stories where I’m the hero necessarily.
1:20:38 That is definitely a Matthew Dix as the greatest father in the world story. I’m going to have to
1:20:44 therefore temper it with some of the terrible things I’ve done as a father so that I can indicate
1:20:49 to people that I am not here to place myself on the top of the mountain as the greatest parent,
1:20:55 but as a parent who screws up quite often but isn’t it beautiful in those moments of parenthood
1:21:01 when you do the right thing and it actually works out and your kid is wise enough to tell you that
1:21:05 it worked out. It was just a perfect moment for me. That’s probably something I’ll tell. I knew
1:21:09 right away that it was going to be a story. So you had this little memory and then you just did
1:21:14 this all in real time. Walk me through how you structured it, how you thought about the beginning.
1:21:17 You know what the ending is because you know that moment. That was the moment you’re sort of
1:21:24 recording almost. That’s your note. So why did we start where we started? Why did we go on that
1:21:28 journey? And obviously you did this in real time so you would refine this, but walk me through your
1:21:32 decisions when you made that story. The most important decision to make in that story is the
1:21:40 structure, meaning what’s the chronological structure of that story. I used a B-A-B-C model,
1:21:45 which is a model that I started in the middle actually of the story. I started with my son
1:21:51 is going to camp and I know he has to take a swim test and I know it might not be easy for him.
1:21:57 The real beginning of the story happens in 1983. I’m going down to the waterfront to take a swim
1:22:02 test with nine pancakes in my belly. I jump on the pond and think it’s stupid and get out
1:22:07 and I end up a beginner swimmer. 30 years later, I’m with my son. That’s a terrible way to tell
1:22:12 that story. You can feel that already, but that’s how most people tell it, right? Most people
1:22:18 tell it chronologically, meaning A-B-C. I started in the middle because for a bunch of reasons. One
1:22:21 is if I tell you that beginning of the story, it already gives away the end. You know what’s
1:22:26 going to happen, right? So I don’t want that. Also stories that take place over the course of 30
1:22:30 years, actually that story takes place over 40 years. Nobody wants to hear a 40-year story.
1:22:37 A 40-year story sucks, right? So what we do is we turn the 40-year story into a week-long story,
1:22:43 which is my son is getting ready to go to camp and I don’t want him to make the same mistake
1:22:48 I made. So I’m going to tell him a story. So I start in the middle at the B. The next part of
1:22:53 the story, the next scene is the A, which is 40 years earlier, I’m at camp and I do this thing,
1:22:57 right? So that’s, I’m bringing us back in time, but I’ve started us in sort of the present. So
1:23:03 it’s a story that takes place in the present, but I yank the past into the present for a moment.
1:23:06 And that way the story doesn’t feel like it’s taken 40 years. It feels like it takes a week.
1:23:11 A guy tells a boy a story and then he waits to see how the story plays out. That’s the most
1:23:16 important thing to figure out in a story like that is where should I start? And it is absolutely not
1:23:22 in 1983. It’s absolutely in 2024. Now, things I already know I did poorly when I was telling you
1:23:27 that story. I didn’t start with a scene, right? I started by teaching you. I said my son’s getting
1:23:32 ready to go to Boy Scout camp. That’s a terrible beginning. What I should have said was my son’s
1:23:38 trunk is laid out in the bedroom and he’s throwing stuff into it in a way that will never work out
1:23:42 for him. I’ll let him make this mistake for a while and then eventually my wife will come in
1:23:46 with packing cubes and she will solve all these problems, right? But while he’s throwing stuff
1:23:51 into this trunk for scout camp, I’m sitting on the edge of the bed and I decide this is the right
1:23:55 moment to tell him what he needs to hear. And that sentence is important, right? In the new version
1:23:58 of the story, because that makes you want to know what it’s going to be, right? So I’m constantly
1:24:03 trying to create a sentence that causes you want to hear the next sentence or I open story by making
1:24:08 laugh, right? You actually laughed when I said throw in stuff in a way that’s never going to work out
1:24:13 and then packing cubes is a funny thing. So all of that is designed to, I’m going to make you laugh
1:24:16 and then I’m going to get you to wonder what the story is and then I’m going to tell the story
1:24:21 and then I’m going to go ahead and have him come back. And I really liked the thing I did with
1:24:26 you where I said it was the first thing I wanted to ask him, but I tried to play it cool. You laughed
1:24:29 when I said that and I knew it. I knew you were going to laugh because I thought that was the
1:24:33 truth and I said it and I knew you were going to laugh because that is the truth of our lives,
1:24:38 which is there’s so many times in our lives when we want to just ask the question right away,
1:24:44 but we know we’re not supposed to. So we order the coffee and we ask how your day was and we
1:24:48 ask how your wife is and we ask how your kids are doing and then eventually when we feel the
1:24:53 moment’s right, we get to the question. That sameness, that reality, that makes you laugh
1:24:58 because you think, “Oh, I’ve done that.” That is a real thing in life that we do all the time.
1:25:03 All of that is how I sort of thought about that story. The structure was good. The opening was
1:25:07 not, but fixing the opening you can see is pretty easy. That’s amazing. Thank you for going into
1:25:13 detail on that. Talk to me about metaphors and finding metaphors and how they can be used for
1:25:18 business people, specifically telling stories or even individuals telling stories about greater
1:25:22 meaning. I remember the story that stood out and I forget the guy’s name in the book that you just
1:25:28 wrote about the Little League and how he turned that into a story for his company. I thought
1:25:33 that was really interesting, but how do we find those metaphors? What we want to ask ourselves,
1:25:38 when we’re trying to do business, when we’re trying to send a message, we’re trying to look for a
1:25:43 theme, meaning or message. People content match. That’s the problem rather than thinking about
1:25:48 what they’re really trying to say. This is a good example. I’m working with a guy who’s getting ready
1:25:53 to do some speaking. He’s going to be speaking to entrepreneurs about getting through bottlenecks
1:25:57 so they can accelerate their companies. The lesson he wants to teach them is sometimes
1:26:04 you just have to find the one right thing that’s holding your company back. He has a great example
1:26:09 of it. He says to me that at Facebook early on, when they were failing to gain traction,
1:26:18 they looked at their data and they realized that if a user accumulated seven friends, made
1:26:22 seven friends or seven connections on Facebook in 10 days, they were likely to stay on the
1:26:27 platform. If they didn’t do that, they were likely to leave the platform. Facebook, recognizing
1:26:33 that data point, focused all of their energies on how can we get a user to find seven friends
1:26:38 in 10 days. That’s when they added features like load your email contacts into Facebook so that we
1:26:43 can show you who they are. We’ll recommend friends to you, things like that. We’ll start telling you
1:26:47 who your friends are that you have in common. All of those features were designed. Facebook
1:26:52 figures out that’s the one bottleneck we have. That’s what he wants to tell the audience,
1:26:57 but he doesn’t want to just use that story. He wants other things. When I’m talking to him,
1:27:01 I say, “Well, what are other examples of singular solutions that you can think of?” He gives me
1:27:06 a business solution, which is just content matching. You already have your business example,
1:27:11 the Facebook one, and it works really well. I think it’s great. Right away, I went, “Uh-huh,
1:27:16 yeah, okay, great.” I said, “What about your personal life? Do you have a personal life,
1:27:20 a simple solution that really changed things for you?” He says, “Well,
1:27:25 there was a point years ago when I was struggling with my marriage. My wife and I were just not
1:27:30 getting along and we had gone to couples therapy and it wasn’t seeming to work.” One day, he sat
1:27:36 down with his buddy and his buddy said, “Are you kissing your wife every morning?” He said,
1:27:41 “No.” His buddy said, “Kiss your wife every morning.” He said, “What’s that going to do?” He said,
1:27:46 “Just do it.” It changed everything for him. Somehow, there was a lack of physical closeness
1:27:51 and intimacy that was missing in the relationship and a kiss in the morning started to change
1:27:55 everything for them. I said, “That’s the story you should use.” He goes, “I’m not using that story.”
1:28:01 He said, “That’s not what the purpose of this business is.” I said, “No one’s going to remember
1:28:05 your other business story. In fact, a lot of people aren’t even going to remember the Facebook
1:28:11 story. But if you want to land the idea that sometimes a singular solution can solve a big
1:28:16 problem, you tell the story about kissing your wife in the morning and they’ll never forget it.
1:28:22 They’ll start kissing their wives in the morning and they will start telling other people to do so
1:28:26 as well. You will have an echo through their lives.” Now, that’s a metaphor, right? That’s a
1:28:31 metaphor for his Facebook example, which is what I said to him was the Facebook example
1:28:35 matching theme, meaning, or message essentially is what’s the theme, meaning, or message of the
1:28:40 Facebook story. A singular solution can sometimes solve a really complex problem. Let’s find that
1:28:45 in our personal life. Now, I’m always fighting with business people on this because they never
1:28:49 want to bring their personal life into the business world, which is why they’re round,
1:28:53 white, and flavorless, why they’re all forgettable, why everything they say is ultimately forgotten.
1:28:58 Because we don’t remember business stories. We don’t remember most of them and there’s so many
1:29:02 of them. But a guy who gets on stage and is vulnerable, it loves to say a few years ago,
1:29:05 I was having a problem with my wife and she was having a problem with me and we were not getting
1:29:11 along and things were looking bad. And then I told my buddy and I end up kissing her and somehow
1:29:15 today we’re the happiest couple and that’s unforgettable. Now, I think he’s going to do it,
1:29:18 but part of me thinks he just told me he’s going to do it and he’s not going to do it.
1:29:22 Because that happens all the damn time. I don’t understand why people don’t
1:29:28 see it because I know you see it. Like you made a sound. I listen to audiences when I said,
1:29:35 “Do you kiss your wife every morning?” You made a sound. You went, “Mmm.” Which said to me,
1:29:39 “That’s all I need to know. The story is perfect.” When you hear that sound from an audience,
1:29:45 you know you have found the perfect story for this example. And if he was you and I was telling him
1:29:49 the story, he would make that sound. He’d go, “Mmm.” But for some reason, because he has to tell it
1:29:55 now, he can’t do it. Because I can’t tell a personal story. I’m there to teach them about
1:30:00 solving business problems and bottlenecks. And I’m like, “You are.” But we don’t teach lessons
1:30:06 always by sticking to the content. We have to expand beyond it to get people to understand it.
1:30:11 Particularly when things get complex, when your business is different than mine,
1:30:17 you have a platform and I have a broom company. How are we going to talk to someone who’s working
1:30:21 for Slack and someone who’s working for a broom company? If both of those people are in front
1:30:24 of us and we’re trying to improve their businesses, how are we going to do that? We’re going to use
1:30:29 metaphors. We’re going to find ways to send lessons and messages to people in ways that resonate in
1:30:33 their lives. Now, the beauty of that story too, and all the stories I teach, like the story of
1:30:37 Boris, the one you mentioned about the baseball game, when we do that, when we’re daring enough,
1:30:43 courageous enough to do it, we create these markers in people’s lives as well. The next time one
1:30:48 spouse kisses another spouse in the morning, they’re thinking about him and they’re thinking
1:30:54 about simple solutions to solve bottlenecks. It’s going to continue to reverberate. Whenever we can
1:30:59 take the content from our business world and bring it into the personal world and allow people to
1:31:05 feel it in a way that is really human and not profit-driven, then suddenly we have stories
1:31:09 that people want to hear and we become unforgettable because everyone is forgettable, unless they’re
1:31:14 doing something that is touching the heart and the mind, slightly different than everybody else,
1:31:17 changing brain chemistry, being entertaining, all of those things. Is there a difference between
1:31:21 telling our own stories and telling other people’s stories? Yeah, there is. Unfortunately, when you
1:31:25 tell other people stories, they’re never nearly as good. If I had told you that my brother went
1:31:31 through customs and got the X on his form and had to get through that second layer, that story doesn’t
1:31:34 mean very much to you. My brother in your mind is a fictional character. You don’t even know,
1:31:38 maybe I don’t actually have a brother. It doesn’t mean they can’t be told. There is a way to tell
1:31:44 them it’s tricky and it’s not as effective. People want to hear the story of the person sitting
1:31:49 across from them. They want to know that you’re the one speaking because that requires vulnerability.
1:31:57 If I tell you a story and it’s not about me, the only vulnerability required is public speaking
1:32:01 and I’ve overcome that and presumably anyone who’s standing in front of other people can at least
1:32:08 publicly speak in an effective, somewhat unnervous way. So me telling you stories about other people
1:32:14 is just me reporting on events for people that you may or may not know. The vulnerability comes
1:32:19 from I’m having difficulties with my wife and we can’t figure out how to solve it. And then one
1:32:25 day I decided to start kissing my wife in the morning and everything changes. That vulnerability
1:32:30 is so powerful. Other people’s stories, you just don’t have that. How do we teach confidence to get
1:32:35 on stage, to tell a story, to have the ability and not only to get on stage and tell a story,
1:32:40 but to be vulnerable. It requires a certain degree of confidence in the audience and yourself.
1:32:45 I get asked inevitably if I work with someone long enough by every client, if I can help them
1:32:51 learn how to be confident. I have more confidence than I need my wife will tell you. And if I could
1:32:55 teach people how to be confident, like a magic pill, I would be the richest person on the planet
1:32:59 because it is the most powerful thing you can have. When you genuinely don’t care what other people
1:33:04 think most of the time, my wife will tell you, “It’s extraordinary and terrible,” depending on
1:33:10 the day. And that’s very true. Sometimes when I genuinely don’t care about most of what people think,
1:33:17 it allows such freedom in life, but also, as my wife will say, sometimes is disastrous.
1:33:21 Are you born that way or is that something you learn? How do you teach people not to care about
1:33:28 what other people think? Well, I used to think and I still kind of think. Most of it happened for
1:33:35 me when I was around the age of 21. I was in an armed robbery. I was managing a McDonald’s restaurant
1:33:40 after closing. Three men broke through the glass and came into the restaurant. And I knew I was
1:33:44 in a lot of trouble because the police had told me about these guys. They had already killed two
1:33:48 people. So when I heard the glass break, I knew what was going on. I was sort of managing the
1:33:53 safe at the time, collecting all the money, and for reasons I will never understand. I had a deposit
1:33:58 of about $7,000 in my hand in a bag. When I heard the glass break, I took it and I reached to the
1:34:02 back of the safe and I dropped it down the chute into the box that I did not have a key for.
1:34:06 In order to a little placard on the box, the manager does not have a key. They got to me,
1:34:09 they put me on the floor, they told me to open the box because they figured out there’s not
1:34:15 enough money in the safe. I told them I can’t and they began beating me. And eventually, one of them
1:34:18 put a gun into my head and said, “I’m going to count back from three and then I’m going to pull
1:34:23 the trigger and I’m going to shoot you if you don’t open the box.” And then they counted back from
1:34:29 three and he pulled the trigger on an empty gun. And I kind of fell apart at that moment. And I
1:34:35 tried to crawl away and they pulled me back and then the guy I was afraid of, the guy, I was afraid
1:34:39 of all of them. There’s one, you know, there’s just one. I’m like, “That’s the one that you don’t,
1:34:44 that’s the one I don’t want to deal with.” And that was the one who put a gun to my head and said,
1:34:48 “This one’s loaded and now I’m really going to blow your head off if you don’t open the safe.”
1:34:55 And when he counted back from three again, I remember being so astounded because all the
1:35:03 sudden I wasn’t afraid and I wasn’t angry. The only thing I felt was regret for what I had not
1:35:08 accomplished yet. That I was 20 years old. I was on a greasy tile floor at the back of a McDonald’s
1:35:14 restaurant. I had just been homeless like six weeks before. I was actually awaiting trial for a
1:35:21 crime I did not commit. My life was a disaster. I had all these dreams and I knew with absolute
1:35:26 certainty that I was going to die in that moment. And I just felt I haven’t done anything. And then
1:35:33 he pulled the trigger on an empty gun again, which resulted in a lifetime of PTSD. But it’s a trigger
1:35:38 in my life that suddenly made everything else seem unimportant. Like nothing seems to matter very
1:35:43 much. I get yelled at by my fellow teachers. Some of my teacher friends say, “Matt doesn’t care about
1:35:46 anything. There’s an A schedule, B schedule, and C schedule. You guys have to figure out who’s going
1:35:50 to get which schedule.” And I’ll say, “I don’t care what schedule I get.” And they get mad at me for
1:35:57 not caring. But I’m like, “That’s not a relevant thing.” And so what I tell people is that sort of
1:36:05 a moment where other people’s concern over what I looked like or thought or did all just washed away.
1:36:09 But oftentimes I’m saying, “Listen, there’s not a gun to my head. I’m not about to die. So this is
1:36:14 nothing.” And sometimes it’s not true. Sometimes it is something. And my wife will say, “That can’t
1:36:18 be the level for everything.” And she’s right. And sometimes it is something and I have to acknowledge
1:36:25 that. With all of that said, my brother and sister would tell you that when Matt was a kid,
1:36:30 she just didn’t care what other people thought either. And maybe that is in me a little bit.
1:36:34 I was the oldest of three and then later five growing up in a home that sort of
1:36:40 didn’t have very much parental support. I was sort of taking care of myself at a very early age.
1:36:47 And I suspect that when you’re nine and you’re trying to find food and take care of your siblings and
1:36:52 going to your sister’s parent-teacher conference because you know that the parents aren’t going
1:36:57 to go to the conference. So maybe you can figure out what’s going on. I think maybe that helps a
1:37:02 little bit too. So the problem with all of that is to say, I don’t know how teachable it is.
1:37:07 Public speaking is very difficult and storytelling is even more difficult because you have to be
1:37:13 vulnerable. It’s kind of like going off a high dive. When I was growing up, there was a 14 foot
1:37:17 high dive at the town pool, which would absolutely not be allowed today. It was very dangerous when
1:37:20 you went off it. Like you always had to hold your hands out or you’d smash your head into the bottom
1:37:25 of the pool. But I remember standing there and watching kid after kid after kid go off that
1:37:29 high dive and everyone was fine. They also went to the surface, jumped out of the water,
1:37:34 did it again. And finally, I decided to do it. And even when I was up there and I knew everything
1:37:38 was going to be fine and I’d seen a million kids do it before me, it was still terrifying.
1:37:44 And eventually, I just had to go off and hit the water. And the second time, it was still terrifying.
1:37:48 Even though I had just done it and it didn’t kill me, I had to do it a whole bunch of times before I
1:37:52 finally was able to just go off and not care. And I often think that’s what I’m trying to get people
1:37:58 to do. I can’t make the fear go away the first time. Right. You just have to go off the diving
1:38:04 board and see that it worked out okay. And the beauty of it is if you stand on a stage and you
1:38:08 share something vulnerable, and I have lots of people who have experienced this, you share something
1:38:14 vulnerable, the response you get is extraordinary. Oftentimes when people share something like that,
1:38:19 they’re worried they’re going to be judged for the stupidity, the shame, the ridiculousness.
1:38:24 But we just will all walk around with that. We’re all walking around with something that we are,
1:38:28 we think we’re the only one who does. And it’s never true. But the problem is so few people
1:38:32 are willing to speak about their stupidities and their shames and their foolishnesses,
1:38:35 that the people who are willing to do it are really valued in this world because they make
1:38:41 the world easier for everyone else. And I’ve never had, never in my life have I ever said something
1:38:45 on stage and had someone come to me and say, “I think less of you because of it.” You know,
1:38:50 I tell a story about pretending to be a charity worker for Ronald McDonald’s children’s charities
1:38:54 when I get stuck in New Hampshire one day without any gas. I actually go collecting door-to-door
1:38:58 as a charity worker to get gas money to get home. It’s a pretty terrible thing. Now, I’m able to
1:39:03 tell that story because I was 19 at the time, so a long time ago, that’s okay. But I tell that story
1:39:08 a lot. It’s actually in my first book. And one of the first times I told that story when I stepped
1:39:12 off the stage was sort of intermission. A woman came up to me and she said, “Aren’t you worried
1:39:15 about what people are going to think of you for that?” And I said, “Well, what do you think about
1:39:19 me?” She said, “I actually love you for it.” And I said, “Do you think you’re some kind of unicorn?
1:39:22 Do you think you’re the only nice person in the room?” They all liked me better for it. Just some
1:39:26 of them want to be at the bar, some of them are using the bathroom, and you came to talk to me.”
1:39:31 I said, “But no one in the room is thinking he’s a scoundrel because at 19 with absolutely no money
1:39:36 and destitute, the best solution he found was pretend to collect money for charity.” Now,
1:39:40 if I’d done it the day before, maybe then I don’t tell the story, and maybe you’re right to think
1:39:45 I’m an awful person. I’ve never had a situation where I say something like that on stage and have
1:39:50 anyone say anything but something kind to me. Is there a difference between writing a story
1:39:54 and telling a story? And what are those differences? Yeah, I had that conversation with someone today,
1:40:01 a client who said, “Can you write my keynote for me?” And I said, “No, I don’t do that. That’s also
1:40:05 boring. I don’t want to do it.” I’ve never written anything down that I actually speak on a stage
1:40:10 other than maybe an outline. But even then, it often is just I’m going to tell this story to make
1:40:16 this point and this story like almost nothing because I know that what I put on a page is always
1:40:21 going to be more grammatically correct than what I’m saying. And so when I help someone with a keynote,
1:40:26 I don’t ever want to see the page. They always want to send me the document. I said,
1:40:30 “I don’t want to see the document because a speech does not live on the page. It lives in life. It
1:40:36 lives in the air. It lives in your voice.” I want to hear what you say because what I say and what
1:40:40 you say are going to be very different things. I’m going to say them in different ways. So when
1:40:46 I’m writing, which I do, I mean, I have nine books I believe in writing, I know that if I was to take
1:40:51 something out of my book and read it out loud, it would sound wooden, inauthentic. It would sound
1:40:58 written. If you’ve ever seen David Sedaris perform, he reads from his books and his notes. He stands
1:41:03 behind a lectern and he reads it. And you can tell it’s read. And that’s the goal of that. And
1:41:09 there’s nothing wrong with it. But it’s not performing. And it’s written more to make you laugh
1:41:13 than it is to connect with you because it is a little harder to connect to someone
1:41:20 as they read. It’s why even politicians who use teleprompters, you can’t see the teleprompters.
1:41:24 They’re designed in such a way that you often don’t even know they’re there when a politician’s
1:41:28 using one because you want to believe someone’s speaking from their heart and their mind, which
1:41:32 is why I don’t memorize anything. Everything is remembered but not memorized. If I was to
1:41:37 look at a page or even memorize a page, you would know it right away. My wife and I,
1:41:40 when we attend storytelling shows, will hear a storyteller and I’ll be like,
1:41:43 “That was a great story and it was fully memorized that I’m sure was off the page.” And she’ll go,
1:41:50 “Yes, it was.” And it just does not make us love the person as much as the imperfect, stumbling
1:41:57 storyteller who also told us a story and did it in that authentic, imperfect way. The former director
1:42:02 of the moth, Katherine Burns, once told me I was getting ready to speak in front of 2,500 people.
1:42:07 I told the story and I made a mistake in it and no one knew about me and Katherine because she knew
1:42:12 the story. There was just a place where I forgot something and I had to double back and slide it
1:42:16 back in because I knew I had to have this thing to have the end play out. And I sat down and the
1:42:20 first thing I said was, “Oh, I screwed that up.” And she’s like, “Don’t be ridiculous. You and I
1:42:23 are the only two people who knew you had to double back.” She said, “You did a great job.” I said,
1:42:29 “Fine.” And she said to me, “It’s in the imperfection that the beauty lies because the
1:42:36 imperfection tells us you had not memorized that thing. You remembered it and then you realized
1:42:39 in the midst of the story that you had forgotten something and you went back and caught it and
1:42:45 then moved on and that made everyone feel like you were speaking to them and not at them.”
1:42:48 And I always think about that. The imperfection is the beauty.
1:42:51 Go deeper on the speaking to people and not at them.
1:42:54 Speaking at them is the idea that it’s almost irrelevant who’s in front of me.
1:43:00 90 entrepreneurs at a conference or 2000 people at the Brooklyn Academy of Music or
1:43:07 six people in a library, when all of those are audiences I speak to, someone who has a
1:43:12 sort of memorized speech. I know authors who have them, authors who have their speech that
1:43:16 they take wherever they go and it never changes because they’ve crafted it, memorized it,
1:43:20 and they deliver it. That’s speaking at an audience, meaning nothing’s going to change.
1:43:24 I’m here to say words. I’m going to basically say them to the middle distance
1:43:27 and when I’m done, I will take a few questions and I will go home. That’s at.
1:43:33 If you’re speaking to an audience, people know right away that what I’m hearing tonight
1:43:39 will not be the same thing he says tomorrow night and it’s in those imperfections that
1:43:44 people will detect that. Stopping a sentence to correct what you just said or circling around
1:43:47 or even repeating yourself accidentally and then saying, “Oh, I already told you that I’m sorry.”
1:43:53 That’s a beautiful thing because then they know it’s for them. People want to know that when
1:44:00 you’re speaking, it’s specifically for them. I’ve brought this part of me to you and it’s
1:44:06 never going to be this way again. It’s going to be the same stuff but it’s going to be done in
1:44:10 a very different way tomorrow and I might leave something out, put something new in,
1:44:14 which I often do, but that’s the difference between speaking to the middle distance,
1:44:19 regardless of who’s in front of you or looking at people and saying, “Who are they?” I once did
1:44:25 a show at the Brooklyn Historical Society. I went there with a story to tell for a moth story slam
1:44:29 and I’d never been there before. It was like a one-time deal and when I got in and looked at
1:44:34 the audience, they were basically all blue-haired old ladies and I thought the story I have is not
1:44:39 going to be appreciated by these ladies. It was a sort of raunchier story. It just wasn’t going to
1:44:45 work but because I don’t memorize my stories, I spent 15 minutes pulling out all the humor that
1:44:51 I knew wouldn’t land and leaning into the heart instead and I won that slam and it was absolutely
1:44:57 not the story I would ever tell the next night. No one laughed at the story that night and yet
1:45:00 they loved it. The next night, if I tell it, everyone’s going to be roaring with laughter
1:45:04 and they’re going to love it and that’s the difference between speaking to an audience
1:45:09 versus having a night. If I come to you and I’m an author and I say, “Listen, I don’t talk. I don’t
1:45:15 do talks but I need to write really compelling stories. What are the key points that you would
1:45:20 get me to learn or understand?” The first thing I would do is especially for an author, I’d say,
1:45:24 “Let’s tell stories.” We’re not going to read from our book because no one has ever wanted that
1:45:29 in the history of the world. Let’s tell stories and let’s find interesting stories about how your
1:45:34 book got written, moments along the way. People are really interested in the work that other people
1:45:38 do. They want to know how the process works. What do you do as a firefighter? Do you live
1:45:42 in the firehouse? How many days do you live in the firehouse? What’s it like? People really want
1:45:46 to know that stuff and the same thing for an author. If you ever hear me give a book talk,
1:45:50 it’s never about even the content of the book. I almost don’t tell you anything about what’s
1:45:54 inside the book. I tell you about the journey to write the book and that’s the method of
1:45:59 let me find half a dozen stories about the writing of the book, where the idea came from.
1:46:04 That better be a story, not just a one sentence. It’s a story. I don’t know if you’ve noticed
1:46:09 but I can’t answer a question without going on for a long time with a story. We’re looking for
1:46:15 those stories along the way that will lead people to want to open the book because they’ve taken
1:46:19 the journey on the creation of the book and now they’re going to want to open it up and find out
1:46:22 what’s inside. They’re invested in it almost. Right. The same thing with the keynote people.
1:46:26 For someone who says, “Can you help me with my keynote?” We start at the end just like a story.
1:46:30 What are you trying to say? When they say, “I’m trying to say three things,” I say, “Well,
1:46:33 you can’t.” You’ve got to say one thing and then we’ll say, “All right, that’s what you’re trying
1:46:38 to say. Let’s find a beginning that’s the opposite of that, the acknowledgement of there was once a
1:46:42 time when you didn’t know this thing and now you know this thing.” But then the next step is to find
1:46:46 those stories. Let’s find some stories along the way that led to that understanding because a keynote
1:46:52 is typically 60 to 90 minutes. We can’t tell a 60 or 90 minute story but we can tell six stories
1:46:57 over the course of 90 minutes that will support it and be entertaining. That’s what I’m helping
1:47:01 authors do all the time is find those stories to tell. But those are stories that you’re telling
1:47:08 people. I mean, in a book, I’m writing a book on XYZ. How do I tell a better story in that chapter?
1:47:14 I see. Yeah. What makes a difference when you’re writing a story versus you’re telling… You can
1:47:19 use intonation and pitch and you can speed things up and you can go faster and slower and you can
1:47:24 pull me… I can’t do that on the page as easy. Right. No. One of the things you can feel a little
1:47:29 better about with a book is you can actually use more adjectives because people expect them. I still
1:47:34 don’t. The first novel I wrote, I’ll never forget it. My agent called and said, “We have no idea
1:47:40 what your character looks like. You have not provided one ounce of description of your protagonist.
1:47:45 That’s crazy.” And I said, “Oh, no, I kind of visualized them as me.” And she’s like, “That’s not
1:47:50 actually a thing.” I have such a poor visual memory. That helps me as a storyteller.
1:47:54 I lived in my home for 10 years with my wife. We were driving home one day. Somehow we started
1:47:59 talking about the color of houses. I told her we lived in a yellow house. She said we live in a tan
1:48:03 house. I said, “It’s yellow like the sun.” And when we pulled down the street, I looked and went,
1:48:07 “Oh, my God, it’s yellow.” 10 years, I didn’t know the color of my house. So it’s not surprising
1:48:12 that I don’t love adjectives anyway. But on the page, we can use a few more so that can be helpful.
1:48:18 The paragraph and sentence structure oftentimes can replace intonation and pacing. What I’m always
1:48:24 fighting with my editors on is this single sentence should be part of the previous paragraph.
1:48:29 And I say, “No, it should not.” Because I wanted to stand out in the way I would punch the sentence
1:48:34 if I was speaking it. So if you look at the way I write, especially today, actually, if you compare
1:48:38 my first novel to my latest novel, you’ll see an enormous difference because this understanding has
1:48:45 come to me. I can craft the sentences and the paragraphs to look such a way that it can provide
1:48:49 some of the humor and some of the suspense. That’s why I hate closed captions. My kids watch
1:48:53 everything with closed captions all the time. And I can’t stand it because it gives the joke away
1:48:57 all the time. You see the joke before the person says the joke. But that’s how sometimes people
1:49:04 write, which is they don’t allow the punch to stand alone. They lose the punch in the previous
1:49:09 paragraph of the eight sentences and the punch is the last one. And I say, “Take the punch out and
1:49:14 make it its own paragraph.” It looks weird in the eyes of an editor because it is associated with
1:49:20 the paragraph before. But I say, “I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in the physical effect
1:49:25 that the reader has when they finish the paragraph and then bang, there’s another sentence there,
1:49:31 all by itself in a way that I love.” It’s also the reason I drop subjects all the time in sentences.
1:49:37 So rather than saying, “I went to the store,” especially if I’m emailing people, I’ll say,
1:49:42 “Went to the store rather than I went to the store.” Because I want to punch right away. I want to get
1:49:46 into the sentence quicker. I don’t want them to feel the action of it. So you can start to think
1:49:51 about things like that when you’re writing to sort of bring some of those things that we get to use
1:49:57 on a stage onto the page. A simple version would be someone would say, “Use italics and bold.” And
1:50:02 that’s fine. But I kind of feel like that’s a 400-year-old trick that’s been used for a very
1:50:08 long time. And I think sometimes it actually doesn’t work. It feels almost corny to suddenly
1:50:12 land on italicized words, or as I would much rather be doing the things like I’ve described.
1:50:18 So thinking about the way the print lands on a page can really make a difference in the way
1:50:22 that it’s affecting a reader. That’s really interesting. I think also your topic sentence
1:50:26 for a paragraph pulls people in or a lot of people just read the first sentence.
1:50:32 When you put the final point at the end of a paragraph that’s five or six sentences,
1:50:36 you’re losing a certain percentage of your audience along the way because they’re reading
1:50:40 the first sentence. And they’re like, “Okay, I get this paragraph. I’ll go to the next paragraph.”
1:50:43 Right. And so they missed that point.
1:50:47 Common mistake with storytellers all the time is I teach them you’ve been taught to write in a
1:50:51 boring way, which is topic sentence and supporting details. That’s a disastrous way to write.
1:50:55 Because you’re right. Once you present the topic sentence, people know you’re going to provide
1:50:59 some evidence. And unless I’m like a nerd who wants to know the efficacy of the evidence,
1:51:05 I’m moving on. So in storytelling, we never start with a topic sentence. If I want to say I had a
1:51:10 really rotten grandmother, right? I would never start the sentence with, “My grandmother was a
1:51:14 terrible person.” And then list the way she was terrible. That’s how you were taught to write,
1:51:17 but that’s a terrible way to write. Instead, I would say, “My grandmother did this to me. My
1:51:22 grandmother did this to me. My grandmother did this to me. And then the last sentence might be,
1:51:26 “My grandmother was a terrible person.” Or I might say to myself as the writer or the storyteller,
1:51:31 “I’ve made my point. I’m going to allow that topic sentence to go unsaid because I think they’re
1:51:36 going to know it already.” And audiences love that. They want to put things together on their own.
1:51:40 But you’re right. When you lead with a topic sentence, you’ve kind of failed most of the time.
1:51:45 Now, there are times when this is appropriate. If you’re writing for a newspaper, right? If you’re
1:51:50 writing scientific things, I was going to write a book with a sociologist at one point because I’ve
1:51:55 spent 26 years now primarily in the company of women because I’m an elementary school teacher.
1:51:59 I’m almost always the only man in a room. And I actually attended an all-women’s college.
1:52:03 So for four years before that, I was in a classroom and I was the only man.
1:52:10 So I wanted to write a book about sort of my reflections on living in a world filled with
1:52:14 females for all my life. And I was going to partner with the sociologist. And ultimately,
1:52:19 the project fell apart because she wanted to write it like a sociologist, which was topic
1:52:23 sentence and supporting details. And I said, “No one reads your books.” And I know why because your
1:52:27 book’s boring because you write in the way that you were sort of taught. And I wanted to do the
1:52:32 opposite. I said, “I want to lead them to the conclusion.” And she said, “No, you start with it
1:52:36 and then you explain why it’s the conclusion.” And we just couldn’t come together because
1:52:40 she wanted to write a boring book and I wanted to write an entertaining book. Her book would have
1:52:45 been respected by academics. Her book could have been read. And my book would have been read and
1:52:50 been impactful to the people I actually wanted to be impactful, which was not academics, but
1:52:57 basically men who maybe operate in a female world and are not doing it effectively,
1:53:01 which is what my goal was. As a fifth grade teacher, how do you advocate that parents
1:53:06 teach kids how to write? I tell them a bunch of things. One of the things is if you’re talking
1:53:12 about spelling, grammar, or handwriting, you’re making a terrible mistake. You’re making writing
1:53:16 unfun. When kids are little, they’re writing with pen and paper. And then when they get older,
1:53:20 they’re typing. They say, “Never look at the writing that your child is doing. Always have them
1:53:24 read it aloud.” Because what comes out of your child’s mouth is always more beautiful than what
1:53:29 they’re putting on the page. That nonsense on the page, that’ll get cleared up eventually.
1:53:34 We don’t have to worry about that. What we want is to make kids love to write. That is the only
1:53:38 goal every teacher should have. Because once you love to write, you’ll start writing and you’ll just
1:53:44 get good at it. So we want to do things like let kids write as many things as they want to.
1:53:48 There’s mistakes where teachers say, “Well, I need you to finish this before you start that.”
1:53:51 But as a writer, I can tell you I’ve never met an author who’s only working on one thing. There’s
1:53:56 the thing that’s to do and then there’s the thing you’re cheating on. And then there’s the thing
1:53:59 you’re not telling anyone about that you think is actually the greatest of all the things you’re
1:54:04 writing. And then there’s the writing in the new genre that you want to explore. There’s all of
1:54:08 that. And yet when we get to school, we tell kids they have to write one thing and finish the one
1:54:12 thing and then move on. We don’t let them abandon writing. My daughter is a writer. She’s a real
1:54:19 serious writer. I think she was 130 pages into a novel. I know at the age of 12, she’s an unusual
1:54:22 human being. At the age of 12, she got that far into a novel and she said, “Dad, I don’t think
1:54:25 it’s that good. I don’t think I’m going to finish it.” And I think a lot of parents would have said,
1:54:29 “You got to finish that. Look at all the work you put in.” As an author, I said, “Yeah, if it
1:54:34 sucks, you should abandon it.” I said, “The lesson is figure that out a little earlier next time. I’ve
1:54:39 abandoned a lot of things. I’ve never actually gotten that far into something and needing to
1:54:44 abandon it. So let’s try to figure out how to do that a little sooner.” But we often tell kids
1:54:49 they can’t abandon their work. They got to finish it. Let me look at it. Parents want to see spelling
1:54:55 and grammar and punctuation because that’s the things they understand how to fix. So they’re
1:54:58 like, “Oh, show me that because I can actually be helpful.” When a kid reads out loud, you don’t know
1:55:05 what to say. And I always say, “Say kind things. Say what you liked about it. Say the things that
1:55:09 you thought were extraordinary. And the thing that you know has to be fixed or the thing you
1:55:15 really want. Make it like the last thing you say after you say eight things.” In teaching,
1:55:20 we try to achieve a six to one ratio, six positive comments for every corrective comment that we’re
1:55:26 going to offer, and try to make that your home too. So just say good things so they keep writing.
1:55:31 Because if you say things that are not kind or you’re overly critical, the thing about writing or
1:55:37 even public speaking and storytelling is it’s not like math. Two plus two exists for everyone.
1:55:43 If you don’t get two plus two right, you got it wrong, but it doesn’t mean that you’re like bad
1:55:47 in a heart and mind sense. But when someone stands on the stage and shares a story, they’re
1:55:52 essentially saying, “Here’s my humanity. What do you think of it?” When a kid writes something on
1:55:57 a page, whether it’s an essay or a story, they’re saying, “Here’s everything I have that represents
1:56:01 me. What do you think?” And if you go, “Well, I didn’t really understand.” Right there, you’re
1:56:07 just like, you’re stabbing the person they are. You need a capital letter. Yeah. It makes them
1:56:11 want to never go back to it again. And again, the goal for every teacher or every parent is to get
1:56:18 kids excited about writing and worry less about the mechanics of writing. That comes and it’s
1:56:22 relevant, but not important. This has been a fascinating conversation. Thank you for your time.
1:56:27 We always end on the same question, which is a personal question. What is success for you?
1:56:36 I just had this conversation with someone. For me, success is always that at some very
1:56:43 future tomorrow, I’ll be doing something different than I’m doing today. I think Stasis is death.
1:56:48 I have a company that produces storytelling content and I’ve got a business partner and
1:56:52 he always wants to plan out six months or a year. And I know why he wants to do it. Actually,
1:56:56 my production manager wants the same thing and I resist it all the time because I feel like if
1:57:02 you’ve planned out six months, we don’t have the opportunity for me to stumble upon the new thing
1:57:10 that I want to stumble upon. So for me, success is in six months, will I be doing something I never
1:57:16 could have imagined doing today that I’m now trying and maybe loving or maybe hating, but at least
1:57:21 finding a thing that I want to start doing that is different. As long as my life is constantly
1:57:28 evolving and I am being presented with new challenges and new opportunities or I’m cracking
1:57:35 doors open that I had never cracked open before, I feel like I’m successful. So avoiding this
1:57:39 moment that we’re in right now, making sure that everything that’s going on in my life right now
1:57:42 is not what’s happening six months from now, that’ll be perceived as success for me.
1:57:54 Thanks for listening and learning with us. For a complete list of episodes, show notes,
1:58:01 transcripts, and more, go to fs.blog/podcast or just Google the Knowledge Project.
1:58:08 Recently, I’ve started to record my reflections and thoughts about the interview after the interview.
1:58:12 I sit down, highlight the key moments that stood out for me, and I also talk about
1:58:17 other connections to episodes and sort of what’s got me pondering that I maybe haven’t quite figured
1:58:25 out. This is available to supporting members of the Knowledge Project. You can go to fs.blog/membership,
1:58:29 check out the show notes for a link and you can sign up today. And my reflections will
1:58:34 just be available in your private podcast feed. You’ll also skip all the ads at the front of the
1:58:39 episode. The Furnum Street blog is also where you can learn more about my new book, Clear Thinking,
1:58:45 Turning Ordinary Moments Into Extraordinary Results. It’s a transformative guide that
1:58:50 hands you the tools to master your fate, sharpen your decision-making, and set yourself up for
1:59:03 unparalleled success. Learn more at fs.blog/clear. Until next time!
1:59:13 [BLANK_AUDIO]

0:00:04 If I put 10 calories and try to improve the feature, I get like a thousand out.
0:00:09 And so I more paid attention to the features and tried to get better at the features.
0:00:10 And this took me a while to figure this out.
0:00:14 And over time, just tried to hire people around my weaknesses.
0:00:16 And I have plenty of them.
0:00:20 I really looked at hiring the best I could in the areas where I was weak,
0:00:21 rather than trying to become an expert at it.
0:00:23 And I’ll give you one area.
0:00:26 And for years, I was convinced I was a great product designer.
0:00:27 I’m not.
0:00:29 I just don’t have that genetic code.
0:00:31 I was actually quite bad at it.
0:00:35 It took a while before that feedback sort of hit me between the eyes.
0:00:39 We started hiring people really good at it and enabling me to let go of it.
0:00:48 Welcome to the Knowledge Project.
0:00:50 I’m your host, Shane Parrish.
0:00:52 In a world where knowledge is power,
0:00:56 this podcast is your toolkit for mastering the best what other people have already figured out.
0:01:00 If you’re listening to this, it means you’re not a supporting member.
0:01:05 Members get early access to episodes, my personal reflections at the end of episodes,
0:01:08 which a lot of people say is quickly becoming their favorite part.
0:01:13 No ads, exclusive content, hand edited transcripts, and so much more.
0:01:16 Check out the link in the show notes for more information.
0:01:18 My guest today is Brian Halligan.
0:01:23 Brian reshaped the way that we think about marketing, sales, and customer service.
0:01:26 With his co-founding of HubSpot in 2006,
0:01:29 he pioneered the concept of inbound marketing,
0:01:34 emphasizing the importance of creating valuable content to attract customers naturally.
0:01:38 Under his leadership, HubSpot has grown from a startup to a publicly traded company
0:01:41 and a global leader in the industry,
0:01:44 empowering millions of businesses to grow better.
0:01:48 I first met Brian at a Sequoia conference where we both spoke.
0:01:55 In the conversation we talk about the phases of a CEO from startup to IPO and how the skills
0:02:00 change, why interviews are a terrible predictor of on-the-job success and what you can do about it,
0:02:05 why hiring panels are flawed, what changed after his near-death experience,
0:02:10 why Jerry Garcia from The Grateful Dead is one of the most underrated CEOs
0:02:14 and what you can learn from him, why consensus is the enemy of scale,
0:02:17 why you need to have winners and losers,
0:02:21 what he learned from Steve Jobs and of course the future of inbound marketing.
0:02:24 It’s time to listen and learn.
0:02:44 Brian, I want to start with the role of a CEO and the journey from startup to scale up to public company.
0:02:51 It’s a remarkable journey and I was on that journey for about 17 years and a couple years ago.
0:02:59 I stepped out of that journey, Shane, in a relatively dramatic way and you may have heard
0:03:06 this story before. I was snowmobiling up in Vermont and I was taking a snowmobile from
0:03:12 Rangewater, Vermont to Woodstock, Vermont, coming to the parry part of the trail
0:03:21 and went up over a lip and went down on the other side and just completely lost gravity,
0:03:28 went straight down up a cliff and smashed at the bottom. The snowmobile was in about a million
0:03:37 little pieces. I was passed out for a long time and then I woke up, it was about four in the afternoon.
0:03:45 It was quite cold and nobody knew where I was. Confident I was going to die and I sat there for
0:03:53 a good hour thinking about, you know, if I do make it through then what? And I never bring my phone
0:03:57 when I snowmobile because in Vermont there’s no signal, all darn state there’s no signal,
0:04:01 but an hour in I’m like maybe I’m on it. It turns out I brought it like a moron
0:04:09 and I checked it and dialed 911. Shane, have you ever dialed 911? I have, yeah. It’s an amazing
0:04:16 service. If that was a start-up I would be thrilled to invest in it. It’s amazing. The woman was sort
0:04:25 of very, very good at it and she says, I remember she said sit tight and mind you I have, I’m a mess,
0:04:31 many, many, many broken bones. And so it’s like, yeah, I’m not going anywhere. And then she called
0:04:37 the two local fire stations and they’re volunteer and there’s no one there and so then she has to
0:04:42 track down the mobile phone numbers of all the firefighters and the rescue people, call us them
0:04:46 at home. They hop in their snowmobiles and they come and find me. By the time they found me,
0:04:53 you know, it’s pitch black, it’s really cold out and basically they went to work on me. I kind of
0:04:58 put Humpty Dumpty kind of back together on the side of the mountain, towed me to a flat area
0:05:03 which is two miles away, helicoptered me to Dartmouth University and there they really
0:05:12 put Humpty Dumpty back together over lots of surgeries a lot of time. And I remember that
0:05:19 because that was the end of my CEO journey. I had been quietly saying to myself that I didn’t love
0:05:26 being CEO of a spot, frustrated with just the core work. And I remember saying to myself at the
0:05:33 bottom of that cliff, I make it out, I’m not coming back. And so I was out of work, a terrific woman
0:05:39 took over for me. It’s a funny story about that while I was gone. And as I got back on my feet,
0:05:43 everyone just assumed I was coming back like, no, no, no, I’m not coming back. You’re doing a great
0:05:48 job. You got this. And I actually think a lot of CEOs would be a lot happier if they did something
0:05:56 similar like that. Not some real part. I assumed, yeah. What went through your head when you sort
0:06:01 of couldn’t move? You’re stuck in the snow. And you couldn’t contact anybody like what are the
0:06:06 thoughts that we’re going through your mind? I’m not super comfortable telling everyone all my
0:06:13 thoughts on this, but a lot of thoughts around if I make it out of this somehow, someone finds me
0:06:22 randomly, what’s going to change? But then I mean, the net net of all of them is life can be very
0:06:30 short, very short. You never know what will happen. And don’t waste it. Don’t waste time doing something
0:06:37 that doesn’t make sense for you. You know, refactor your life. And I refactored my personal life and
0:06:43 I refactored my professional life pretty dramatically. And these days, I really don’t do anything I want
0:06:49 to do. And I wanted to do this podcast. It’s a really good podcast. Thank you. Tell me about
0:06:55 what the changes were. Like, were they all at once? Were they slow? Like, be specific or bear?
0:07:02 Sort of. I always wonder this because I had a near death experience to you a couple years ago.
0:07:09 And I remember pondering life and thinking about, oh man, if this is the end, like, did I spend the
0:07:15 time the way that I wanted to? And if it’s not the end, like, what is it that I really want to
0:07:21 change in life? And what impact will that have? And I’ve done such a better job of sort of taking care
0:07:27 of my body and my mind and sort of self care, if you will, just as a big word to encapsulate that.
0:07:34 I changed a lot of relationships in my life. I sort of invested in some and then I wouldn’t say
0:07:39 broke off some, but definitely stopped investing in some. And so I’d love to hear about the specific
0:07:44 things that you did that you sort of were like, okay, well, this is this is the realization.
0:07:52 It’s exactly like that. When I say refactor relationships, I triple down on family relationships.
0:07:58 I’m gonna say ended relationships, but I certain people that didn’t give me energy in certain
0:08:04 ways and just stopped engaging with. And it’s a much smaller group I engage with these days.
0:08:10 Professionally, I stopped my main job. I mean, I founded HubSpot 17 years earlier. It was kind
0:08:17 of my life and everything was sort of wrapped up in it. And now chairperson some small but
0:08:24 not in the day to day. I got obsessed with maybe similar to you with longevity, like, well, if
0:08:31 I’m going to live to 8590, I want to be very strong living to 8590. So basically anything
0:08:37 Peter Atea or Andrew Huberman said to do, I did, except they drink a little, but I basically do
0:08:42 everything they do lost a lot of week, got much better shape. And so lots and lots and lots of
0:08:48 changes. But I think the macro one was just love your family, tell your mom you love her,
0:08:54 hug your kids at one more time today, and don’t waste time. You know, do things that really
0:08:58 are rewarding to you. One of the big things for me was like just being home for the kids every
0:09:02 day after school, I just made a commitment. I was like, I’m going to be here every day when they get
0:09:07 home. I’m not going to push it at the office a little longer. I’ll find other ways to do that
0:09:12 because I’m also sort of balancing ambition and all this other stuff. But it wasn’t going to come
0:09:17 at the expense of that time with them that I know, inevitably I’ll look back on and be like,
0:09:21 man, I just wish for, you know, a little bit more cookies and milk. And they say the dying
0:09:26 wish of every man if they just want another day. And I think about that a lot, like what am I going
0:09:31 to wish I had done being in my life. So Sheen, while we’re on this, why don’t you tell us what
0:09:36 happened to you? I didn’t know for a long time what was happening to me. I just had symptoms
0:09:41 and they kept getting worse and worse and worse. And so like, I had a fever, then I had an earache,
0:09:46 and this was during COVID. So everybody thought it was COVID. So I went to the doctor
0:09:49 and they were like, oh, you don’t have an ear infection, you’re fine, you don’t have COVID,
0:09:56 go home, suck it up. And then I woke up on a Saturday. And I remember just making a latte,
0:10:03 and then I was drinking it and it spilled down my chest. Okay. And I was like, what the heck?
0:10:08 I’ve been drinking out of cups since I was like two, you know, rarely do I spill something.
0:10:15 And I went to the bathroom and I looked in the mirror and the left side of my face was 100%
0:10:21 paralyzed. And so I had no movement whatsoever. I felt like I was moving things. But like,
0:10:27 if I raise my eyebrows, like you can see now on YouTube, if I raise my eyebrows, this, it was
0:10:32 actually kind of beautiful in hindsight, it was freaky when it was happening. Because this, and
0:10:37 it just didn’t move. And I was like, Oh God, like I got to go to the doctor. My first thought was
0:10:41 actually not to go to the hospital, which is a little weird. So I show up at my former family
0:10:47 doctor’s office on the weekend and they’re like, you need an appointment. It’s Saturday.
0:10:51 And I was like, well, I can’t move my face. So I think that qualifies as like, maybe I get an
0:10:57 appointment today. And she’s like, Oh my God, yes, you see the doctor right away. I go into the doctor.
0:11:01 And she’s like, I think you’re having a heart attack. And I was like, well, this doesn’t make
0:11:08 a ton of sense, right? Like, maybe, I don’t think that’s the case. However, you’re the doctor,
0:11:12 I don’t know what I’m talking about. And she’s like, you need to drive to the hospital. I was like,
0:11:16 well, if you think I’m having a heart attack, why are you telling me to drive to the hospital?
0:11:21 Yeah, it was like, these two things don’t align. Anyway, I go to the hospital, I see a doctor right
0:11:25 away. I mean, for all of the knocks on Canada’s healthcare system, there’s certain things in
0:11:30 triage that they definitely see. I saw a doctor probably within three minutes of getting to the
0:11:34 hospital. And, you know, he’s like, you’re not having a heart attack. It was like, thanks. And
0:11:39 then it’s like, go sit and wait for like 12 hours. Well, we handle all the other urgent people,
0:11:43 which is fine. And so he sees me and he’s like, I’m going to give you some pregnant zone. And
0:11:49 you’ll be fine. And I remember going like, wait, what? Like, you’re just going to give me some
0:11:54 steroids and like send me home. Like, nobody cares about how this happened. I’m a healthy at the
0:11:58 time, 42 year old male. I’m not overweight. You know, I don’t smoke. I don’t excessively drink.
0:12:03 I have nothing that would sort of indicate this. When I was in the waiting room for the 12 hours,
0:12:07 I started talking to a whole bunch of neurologist friends and they were like, you should get tested
0:12:16 for these four things. And it was like HIV, Lyme disease, mono and something else. And I was like,
0:12:22 can I just get a requisition to get tested for this? And he’s like, no, it’s just like a waste of
0:12:26 the medical system. Oh man. And I was like, wait, what? Like, that doesn’t make sense. He’s like,
0:12:30 go talk to your family doctor. They’ll figure that out. I got to go help out their patients.
0:12:34 How’s your faith at this point? Well, it’s still paralyzed, right? So he’s like,
0:12:38 you’re going to recover. He’s like, you have a 99.8% chance of recovery. I’m like,
0:12:42 I’m not worried about recovery. I’m worried about what caused this, right? Like, before we figure
0:12:48 out the future, we have to figure out like, what am I doing something? I need to stop. And
0:12:53 I went to my doctor on Monday and I was like, Hey, can I get a requisition for these blood tests,
0:12:57 which in the States, you just show up and do it. And in some provinces in Canada,
0:13:01 you can just show up and do it too. But in Ontario where I live, they won’t allow you to do that.
0:13:07 You need a requisition. Anyways, she says no for whatever reason. She’s like, if the ER doctor
0:13:12 thought you needed it, he would have given it to you. Please, please fuck off politely is sort of
0:13:16 what she said. And I was like, well, this is so weird. And I’m like thinking about this. And then
0:13:21 I wake up a few days later and I can’t stand. Oh man. So the backs of my knees,
0:13:26 like if I’m moving, I’m fine. But if I stand still for like 10 seconds, I’m literally crying.
0:13:30 There’s tears coming out of my face. I’ve never been in so much pain. It’s like somebody stabbed
0:13:36 the back of my legs with a knife. And I was like, wow, this is like so crazy and up like emailing
0:13:41 my doctor again. I’m like, I really think I should get tested for a whole bunch of stuff at this
0:13:45 point. Like, I don’t know what’s happening. And she’s like slow knowing me. She’s like,
0:13:48 it’ll get better. Just give it some time. And then like three or four days later,
0:13:54 I wake up and I can’t open my mouth. Like I have a lock job, basically. I can open it like a
0:14:00 centimeter. And luckily to cut a long story short, I end up talking to a close friend of mine
0:14:04 who happens to be an eye surgeon. She’s like, I’ll give you the requisitions.
0:14:11 She gives me the requisitions. I test positive for Lyme disease. I start the treatment for Lyme
0:14:16 disease because when you test positive, you can actually, you can fix it. And so I start taking,
0:14:21 I think it’s doxycycline, the antibiotic, which is the treatment for that and instant
0:14:26 improvement. The cool part of this is I saw a neurologist, who tested me for like 200 different
0:14:31 things. You know, I went down to give blood and the ladies like, this is the maximum blood we’re
0:14:38 allowed to take out of you. I was like, oh, this does not sound really good. And I came back completely
0:14:43 normal aside from the Lyme disease. So I’m glad we caught it. Glad we solved it, you know,
0:14:49 made a lot of changes after that. I want to go back to you and HubSpot though. So like you’ve
0:14:56 been on this journey for a long time from startup all the way to scale up to now public company,
0:15:02 sort of chairman, walk me through the different phases a CEO goes through. I personally break
0:15:12 them out like two to 20 employees, 20 to 200, 200 to 2000, and then 2000 plus. And I kind of
0:15:19 grate myself in these seasons. Like, I give myself a B in two to 20, like two to 20, I was doing
0:15:25 customer development, I was the lead user of the product, I was marketing it, but I’m a crappy
0:15:33 coder. And so the heavy lifting was really done by my co founder. 20 to 200. I was kind of in my
0:15:42 element. I loved it. I was in a 200 to 2000, maybe a B, and then 2000 to 2000, maybe a D. I
0:15:48 really didn’t like the work. And I think that’s the case with a lot of CEOs and a lot of executives,
0:15:53 a lot of people like people have a season that they enjoy and they get good at it. I think
0:15:58 that’s very much the case for me, which was the one where you felt like you had to grow the most
0:16:06 to fulfill the role really through the whole thing. I fell under qualified to do it. And
0:16:14 I don’t know about you, but I still have imposter syndrome here on the podcast. And I had it
0:16:18 throughout. I think one of my superpowers actually is I’m a learner and I try to get better and I
0:16:25 listen to other people and I take feedback pretty well. And we had a mechanism that was quite good
0:16:30 for giving me feedback. Really good, actually. My co founder was responsible for my annual 360
0:16:35 review. He’s super introverted. So he didn’t want to go around and talk to other people.
0:16:41 So he sent a net promoter survey out to the board, the execs, customers, all bunch of people,
0:16:45 30 different people. He got a lot of responses, maybe 25 responses. And there were two questions,
0:16:52 Jane. One was on a scale of one to 10, how likely you refer Brian as CEO of HubSpot? And two,
0:17:00 why did you give that answer? And people wrote novels about it. And it’s hard for CEOs to get
0:17:05 feedback, very hard. Very few people get straight feedback to the CEO. So this was a good way to
0:17:12 get the end was big enough that people gave very, very strong feedback. And he summarized to give
0:17:20 me my net promoter score. And then I started reading my review. And each page was different.
0:17:23 So the first several pages were my features and he’s a software developer. He’s like,
0:17:28 here’s your features. So page number one, you’re very good at explaining HubSpot’s vision. And
0:17:35 then he pulled out quotes from the novels people wrote. Page two, page one through 10 were features.
0:17:40 And they were great. And I was pretty confident that I was the best CEO ever invented after
0:17:46 reading for Sunday. And then the bugs came. Page 11 was the bugs. And there were 12 pages of bugs.
0:17:52 And I was pretty convinced I was the worst CEO ever invented by the end of the 12 pages. And I
0:17:56 remember when I finished it, I’m not a Scotch striker. So I remember I poured up class of Scotch.
0:18:05 But that mechanism for getting feedback was we still use it. So the current CEO gets the same
0:18:12 type of a thing. And it’s very, very, very useful. I think founder CEOs often have this problem
0:18:17 that like, founder CEOs like to make decisions, like to be involved with the details, like to
0:18:22 drive things, like to be in the middle of things. And that’s a great strength when you get 10 people.
0:18:27 But that great strength you have turns into your greatest weakness when you have a thousand people.
0:18:31 You’re trying to manage everything, trying to manage your way to know everything that’s going on.
0:18:36 And so the consistent feedback was like, how do you get yourself out of the details? How do you
0:18:39 stop working in the business? How do you start working on the business? That was kind of a
0:18:46 common thread that I worked on across all 17 years. Was that feedback enough for you to walk away
0:18:51 going like, okay, I see this, people are giving me feedback, I accept it, there’s some truth to this?
0:18:58 Or was there a part of you that was like, no, they’re wrong? It was pretty, pretty accurate.
0:19:03 And I’m shaking my head through most of it in the software business. Sometimes there’s something
0:19:09 that someone thinks is a bug, but it’s a feature to somebody else. So some of my bugs, I actually
0:19:14 thought were features. Like, I can be really passionate about something. And probably get
0:19:21 so passionate, it’s like a little scary sometimes. I’m like, fine, if like two out of 30 of you think
0:19:25 that and the rest think it’s a good thing, I can live with that. So there were several things that
0:19:30 I was like, that’s a bug that I can live with. And every year I try to work on one or two of the bugs.
0:19:35 If I put 10 calories and try to improve the feature, I get like a thousand out. And so
0:19:41 I more paid attention to the features and tried to get better at the features. And this took me a
0:19:46 while to figure this out. And over time, just tried to hire people around my weaknesses. And I have
0:19:51 plenty of them. I really looked at hiring the best I could in the areas where I was weak,
0:19:56 rather than trying to become an expert at it. And I’ll give you one area where I made a mistake
0:20:02 on this. In the early days of HubSpot, I fashioned myself like a great product designer. I don’t
0:20:07 know why I did. I think basically, because I followed Steve Jobs, everything he did,
0:20:13 read every book about him, watched his keynotes, and obsessed with him as CEOs are my era.
0:20:18 And I was like, I can do that. I can figure it out. I took classes and I really dug in.
0:20:24 For years, I was convinced I was a great product designer. I’m not. I just don’t have that genetic
0:20:32 code. I was actually quite bad at it. It took a while before that feedback sort of hit me
0:20:36 between the eyes. And we started hiring people really good at it and enabling me to let go of it.
0:20:41 What are some of the lessons you took away from your sort of studying of Steve Jobs,
0:20:48 if you will, that you used effectively? One of my favorite things on the Interwebs
0:20:52 is his keynote. And his commencement speech at Stanford, I think, is quite good.
0:20:58 And once I’ll look back at that, he was faced with cancer. And the way he approached that was
0:21:05 really interesting. And he says it in a different way, but he didn’t waste any time. That’s for sure.
0:21:11 And then HubSpot a lot is based on his work. We started the company out of Sloan, while we were
0:21:15 business school. And at Sloan, they did field trips. And we did a field trip to the West Coast.
0:21:21 And I remember this one day was a really good day. In the morning, we visited Apple. It was like a
0:21:27 year after the iPod came out and it was on fire. And I remember Steve walked into the auditorium.
0:21:32 It was about 100 of us. And he was in a bad mood. And it was pretty intimidating.
0:21:37 And I remember he looked, he looked out and he basically was like, what are you people doing
0:21:41 here for business school? Like he wasn’t into the whole business school thing. And one of my
0:21:46 classmates, JP Gorski, raised his hand up high and he said, we’re here from Sloan School of Management
0:21:50 and we’re studying innovation, disruption. And we thought we’d learn from the best.
0:21:55 And as Steve just melted, he liked that a lot. And then he talked about how we came up with the
0:22:01 iPod. And kernels of this very much made it into the way we thought about HubSpot. And the iPod,
0:22:06 the way he described, was really simple. There were MB3 players before, but you had to be a real
0:22:11 geek to use one. And very few people were buying them. And you had to burn music to them as a pain
0:22:16 in the neck to do it. And he said, I really wanted something simple. So I wanted to take an MP3 player,
0:22:22 build a freemium app, iTunes, and then work with the record company, enable you to download a song
0:22:28 for 99 cents a song. And he said, that’s a one plus one plus one equals 10 for the consumer.
0:22:33 And that was how we originally came up with HubSpot, like a marketer in that day and age,
0:22:38 putting Google Analytics and a blog, social media tracking tools and SEO tools and marketing
0:22:44 automation, CRM and all this stuff. And it was complicated, big, hairy problem. And so we used
0:22:50 that analogy very much that Steve used, like, how do we make an all one system where the one plus one
0:22:56 will equal 10 across all systems. So the morning was really influential. And then that afternoon,
0:23:02 when kids were in business school, we visited a little startup called Salesforce.com and their
0:23:07 CEO, Mark Benioff. And so that day was really formative and thinking about HubSpot.
0:23:12 Oh, that’s crazy. Had you guys just taken your tuition and invested in both of those companies?
0:23:15 I know. That’s a good point.
0:23:22 That’s crazy. So you started it in school. How did you learn how to hire and fire people?
0:23:26 Like, how do you know you have the right fit? How do you know when it’s time to move on from
0:23:31 somebody? You know, I think about that as somebody who went from school to a large corporation,
0:23:35 and they have all these policies and procedures in place. And then now as an entrepreneur,
0:23:42 I’m dealing with CEOs all the time. We’ve never really hired and fired. And I’m curious as to what
0:23:47 wisdom you can sort of pass on to people. Most CEOs, including myself, are quite bad at this.
0:23:56 And I’ve identified some things that may be useful hacks, may not be useful hacks.
0:24:01 This is also a seasoned thing. If you’re hiring someone when you’re 200 employees,
0:24:05 I’d see the mistake everyone makes, and we made the mistake over and over and over and over and over
0:24:10 again, that if you’re hiring someone that you want to go from two to 2000, you’re just really
0:24:16 attracted by that person who came from Google or Microsoft or whatever huge company with a huge
0:24:23 resume and all that stuff. And once in a blue moon, that’ll work. But generally, that’s a failure
0:24:30 condition. If you hire the press release hire that said a couple of phases over you. I don’t think
0:24:34 it normally works. Same thing for board members. My analogy for being a CEO is like you’re an
0:24:41 ice climber going up the ice, and it’s treacherous, and you can easily slip. And what you’re looking
0:24:46 for are executive members who have been up that same sheet of ice, but in the last three or four
0:24:52 years, what you don’t want is somebody who’s 20 years over you, or someone who spent their whole
0:24:57 career on top of the hill looking down on the ice climbers, you want somebody just a little bit
0:25:00 ahead of you on that ice climbing mission. So that’s one thing I think people get wrong.
0:25:08 I also think I think most people are bad interviewers, including myself, like I’ve missed a bunch.
0:25:14 And I think the core reason for that actually isn’t the interview, it’s interviewees,
0:25:21 interviewees are so good in interviewing, you’re interviewing a VP or a C level person for
0:25:28 company like HubSpot. They’re good at interviewing. And if they’re not, they’ve been coached, they’ve
0:25:34 looked on YouTube, like, I just think everyone, including myself, overvalues their ability to
0:25:43 select talent in the interview process. I see that as a overconfidence. I think also like they
0:25:48 see it with the CEOs I work with, and I see it as companies get bigger, like you’ve got a panel of
0:25:55 four people evaluating Shane as a potential VP. If all four people like Shane versus two people
0:26:00 love Shane, two people are like, I’m not sure about Shane. You always go with the person
0:26:04 with the least amount of weaknesses and that lowest common denominator higher. I think that’s
0:26:11 a failure conditions. We’ve noticed that over time, I take two loves and two mezz over three
0:26:18 likes. I think that’s a best practice that people should be doing. And I think people should be
0:26:22 obsessed with reference checking. And yeah, calling the references, getting good at that,
0:26:29 getting good at finding people in your network. I would guess I’ve coached tons of CEOs on average
0:26:34 for every director VP, C level person that’s hired within 18 months, they’re gone.
0:26:39 How do you know when it’s time to move on from somebody? I guess in a way, you’ve either made
0:26:44 the wrong hire or it’s the wrong environment for that person to succeed or however you want to
0:26:49 phrase that. But how do you recognize that? I had a CEO the other day tell me is like the moment
0:26:54 you start thinking about it, that’s the moment to act on it. I’ve never seen anybody change
0:26:59 their mind from that initial thought. How do you think about that? What’s your reaction to that?
0:27:05 Unfortunately, I feel like that’s conventional wisdom. And I think it’s largely puts with what
0:27:12 I’ve seen. I rarely change my mind on people in that kind of context. And everyone says,
0:27:18 when you know, you should move quickly. I never had it call me weak.
0:27:24 Have you ever regretted not moving quickly? It’s sort of interesting to contrast that to
0:27:29 sort of like Jensen, who’s been talking recently about, you know, he doesn’t really fire people,
0:27:35 he sort of like berates them into being better in a public way, berate is probably the wrong word,
0:27:40 but he sort of wants to pull you towards excellence rather than fire you. But I don’t
0:27:45 think that’s practical for most people or most organizations. So you and I both sat through
0:27:51 the same Jensen presentation. Yeah. So it’s been a lot of time thinking about CEOism and coaching
0:27:58 CEOs. And there’s sort of like a set of best practices for being a CEO is almost like a CEO
0:28:03 unofficial school. What’s confusing about the CEO school that’s been around for a long time
0:28:14 is arguably the two, I’m not going to say best, but two amazing CEOs are Jensen at NVIDIA in Elon,
0:28:25 at SpaceX, etc. And they completely ignored almost everything about CEO school, CEO lessons,
0:28:32 CEO best practices. And I find that fascinating. Talk to me about that, right? Where maybe there
0:28:37 is no model, we hold up this model, we teach it, it’s easy to do. We say the right things,
0:28:42 but in reality, the people that end up changing the world are often the opposite of all of the
0:28:47 points that we teach. Berkshire Hathaway, for example, if you looked at their board of directors,
0:28:52 I don’t think they pass any of the sort of like standards that business schools would set for what
0:28:58 an independent board looks like. And Constellation Software is another example of that. So with
0:29:03 Shopify, all these companies that have sort of done these remarkable things, they don’t look
0:29:09 anything like what we’re taught in business school. When I was maybe like 50 employees, Shane, I joined
0:29:15 the CEO group. And I largely joined the group because I respected one of the CEOs and I got him
0:29:22 Colin Engel. And Colin made the room of vacuum cleaners that I robot. And I might describe my
0:29:29 relationship with him in two words, man crush. I was a fan of Colin’s. And I remember this first
0:29:36 CEO group, we met all day, once a quarter. And there’s a couple funny things about the CEO group.
0:29:44 But I joined, I sure were spending some time with these 10 CEOs. And two were kind of,
0:29:48 they’re quirky is the way I would describe them and very unique personalities. And the other were
0:29:55 like central casting, blue blazer, tan pants, like really central casting backgrounds and
0:29:59 everything. And they acted what I thought CEOs were supposed to act like. And I kind of acted
0:30:03 like that back then. And when I looked at the numbers, we all showed each other your numbers.
0:30:07 The two quirky founders CEOs were crushing it and the eight central castings were with a,
0:30:13 and I was like, enough with trying to be central casting, I’m going to be exactly who I am. And
0:30:18 we’re going to make everybody else work around who I am. And it’s a lot easier being who you are
0:30:23 than somebody else. Everybody else has taken that was when I was like, I’m quirky too. I don’t
0:30:28 care that I’m quirky. I’m just going to lean into my quirkiness and be myself. And I’ve sort of been
0:30:34 that way ever since. And I don’t think there’s a profile of CEO. You’re talking earlier, how you’d
0:30:40 love to hire somebody with two, I love this person and to Matt, is that because of that? Because
0:30:44 the person who says all the right things, everybody’s going to be okay with. But the
0:30:48 unconventional person, you’re going to get really too extremes, you’re going to get love or hate.
0:30:53 I think what happens as a company scales is you hire for a lack of weakness,
0:31:00 not for spiky strengths. And that’s institutionalized in the scale ups,
0:31:05 interviewing, panel and process. And I think that’s a mistake. And that’s one of the few things
0:31:11 that leads to really mixed success in hiring execs in these companies. Who do you think is
0:31:20 the most underrated public company CEOs? I think the guy running Uber has done a nice job. That was
0:31:27 a very, very, very difficult thing he took over. He got profitable. I think he’s done a really,
0:31:35 really nice job, very quietly done a very good job. How about you? Oh gosh. I think Toby is massively
0:31:39 underrated. We were sort of talking about him during the break here. What are your thoughts on
0:31:44 Toby? Toby reminds me a lot of Colin Engel, actually, just whip smart. One of the things
0:31:51 I like about Toby and Colin is they’re very first principles thinkered. They don’t care to receive
0:31:56 conventional wisdom. They’re going to think it through and scratch. And sometimes you’re going to
0:32:00 get it wrong. But a lot of times they’re going to get it right and do something really innovative
0:32:06 and smart. Toby’s got so much right. He’s got some big stuff wrong. But for the most part,
0:32:10 he’s done a really, really good job. He’s certainly not central casting.
0:32:15 Certainly not. But I think he’s brilliant and a great CEO and he’s running a great company.
0:32:19 I like that term central casting. Another person who stands out to me,
0:32:23 those people are probably familiar with now, but 10 years ago, nobody would have ever heard of is
0:32:30 Mark Leonard from Constellation Software. He’s not really on my radar. Yeah, exactly. I think they
0:32:36 only issued equity at the IPO and they’re, I don’t know, must be $50 to $60 billion company now.
0:32:41 See, I wouldn’t put Toby in the underrated because I rate him so highly and I feel like
0:32:47 people in my circles rate him highly. Yeah, I rate him highly too. And I still think I underrate him.
0:32:52 Okay, got it. Yeah. Yeah, totally. There’s one other interesting thing that’s, I think,
0:32:58 relevant out of that CEO group. I remember going to the CEO group meeting, the first meeting chain.
0:33:07 And what I didn’t realize is there is a topic for the whole day. And one of the quirky things about
0:33:12 HubSpot up into that point is we didn’t have any HR people. We didn’t allow anyone to talk about
0:33:16 culture because we didn’t think we could measure it. It was too squishy. And I remember I arrived
0:33:23 there on the first day. First thing that got put up was the topic of the day and sure enough, I was
0:33:29 culture. And I remember thinking that’s gonna be a big, big waste of time. At least I got to know
0:33:35 my main crush. The whole morning I was pretty disengaged. And then Colin at lunchtime, I remember
0:33:39 if he said to me, it’s like, why aren’t you engaging? You don’t like stopping here? I said,
0:33:46 no, I think it’s a waste of time. He said, Brian, culture, culture is how people make decisions
0:33:54 when you’re not in the room. Culture is how companies really scale. Okay, okay, okay, okay,
0:33:58 got it. And then the afternoon sort of engaged with it. And then the next day he’d go to the
0:34:03 office. And my co-founder, Darmesh says, how’s the, how was it? How’s Colin? Like, how did it go?
0:34:08 I said, it was really, really good. There’s, there’s one, maybe one topic a day. He said,
0:34:16 oh, it’s the topic. I said, it’s culture. Oh, shit, what a waste of time. I said, no, Darmesh,
0:34:22 culture is how people make decisions when we’re not in the room. Culture is how HubSpot’s gonna
0:34:29 scale. And he said, okay, and it’s very hard for me to assign work to my co-founder to this day.
0:34:36 Somehow I assigned him to be the cultures are HubSpot. And he did an excellent job. And still
0:34:41 is doing an excellent job of marshaling the culture from, you know, 15 employees, 8,000 employees.
0:34:47 And he did two clever things. First thing he did is we’re big on net promoter services. He
0:34:51 surveyed all the employees, scale them what to 10, how likely to refer HubSpot as a place to work.
0:34:57 And then why? Again, people wrote novels about it. And he kind of broken all up into,
0:35:04 you know, different topics. And then he wrote a PowerPoint presentation called the HubSpot Culture
0:35:09 Code that basically described the relationship between employees and a company, and just sort
0:35:14 of outlined how we thought about culture. And then he posted it on the internet and it blew up on
0:35:20 the internet. But we continue to do that net promoter score once a quarter for the last 15 years.
0:35:25 And we’re tracking our net promoter score per quarter. And that’s been very, very useful. Then
0:35:31 we post every response to the net promoter survey and culture on the wiki. And then we address the
0:35:36 issues that come up. That best practice to serve as well. Every six months, we refactor the PowerPoint
0:35:42 deck. It’s a living, breathing document. And we basically treat culture like our second product,
0:35:48 like our product HubSpot, if it’s unique relative to the competition, good quality product, and it
0:35:54 delivers value. It’s like a magnet that pulls customers in and retains them. Same thing with
0:35:58 the culture. If it’s unique relative to the competition, it’s high quality and adds value.
0:36:03 It’s like a magnet that pulls in employees and retains them. And so we put a lot of thought
0:36:06 into that culture stuff. And I think a lot about how do you take, how do you go from start and
0:36:11 scale up? I think a key part of that is getting your culture right and writing it down and
0:36:17 institutionalizing it. I’m going to make a statement about culture. And I’d love for you to argue,
0:36:21 take both sides of the debate, if you will. So I’m going to say that culture is the only
0:36:27 sustainable advantage. I disagree. Why? Let’s take Uber. They had a certain culture
0:36:34 Dara, the new CEO, came in. I’m quite sure he made massive changes to the culture the founder
0:36:41 put together. And he thrives. I think some of the benefit, of course, is his culture,
0:36:47 but they had major sustainable competitive advantages in that they had a fleet of drivers
0:36:52 and customers in the network effect and software that works. And he’s probably been there 10 years
0:36:58 and I don’t think it’s all culture. Oh, that’s interesting. So in my mind, I would sort of think
0:37:05 of that more like they had a advantage, like an operational advantage that came from the network
0:37:11 effect and the scale. I don’t know if that would have been enough to sustain it
0:37:19 going forward without the culture. Fine. I sort of agree with that. I think the best example
0:37:25 on the other side of this is Satya. Satya is on my Mount Rushmore CEOs. A lot of people push back
0:37:29 from me. It’s like, oh, I was an founder. You shouldn’t be on there. He’s on there for me
0:37:36 because Microsoft was gone very, very sideways for a long time. And he stepped in and really
0:37:43 did change the culture in a massive company and couldn’t be more impressed with him and the culture
0:37:48 change and how well that works. So that’s my flip side of the argument is Satya. Okay. Who else is
0:37:56 on your Mount Rushmore? Jerry Garcia is on my Mount Rushmore. Great CEO. The app for mentioned
0:38:02 Steve Jobs on there. Why Jerry Garcia? Grateful dead. Really? Why Jerry Garcia? That’s the most
0:38:08 obvious one on there. Why? No, I’m curious. I’m not a Grateful Dead. I don’t think I’ve ever
0:38:12 really sat down and listened to the Grateful Dead, so you’re going to have to walk me through this one.
0:38:19 Okay. Jerry Garcia was the CEO cut in the cloth of Colin Engel and Toby Lukey.
0:38:25 Really disliked conventional wisdom and kind of rethought everything from first principles,
0:38:30 starting with the music. So they started that band in the mid-60s. And at the time, there were all
0:38:35 kinds of rock and roll music, and there was jazz music, country music, and bluegrass music,
0:38:40 and they didn’t do any of that. They created a new genre of music. People refer to it as jam bands now.
0:38:47 But Garcia himself was a bluegrass player, and the bass player was a jazz musician, and the keyboard
0:38:52 player was a blues guy, and Bob Weir, the singer, was kind of a country rock and roll guy, and they
0:38:58 blended them all together, and they infused this jam band mentality into it, and they really stretched
0:39:04 the songs out with improvisation. So they sort of rethought the genre and made a new type of music.
0:39:11 The product was unique, and the go-to market was exceptionally unique. If you think of, like,
0:39:16 when I was in high school, if I wanted to go to a Rolling Stones concert, I would call Ticketmaster,
0:39:22 and I would wait till whatever it is, 1.30 on a Tuesday, and the Rolling Stones tickets were on a
0:39:26 sale, and I would dial away. I’d be five minutes late, but I’d dial away, and I may or may not
0:39:32 go through. The people who ended up buying most of the tickets were the scalpers. The scalpers had a
0:39:38 whole bunch of people buying the tickets that sold the tickets in a markup, and so the front row of
0:39:43 the Rolling Stones concert was a bunch of bankers of venture capitalists, people who could afford
0:39:48 the tickets, and the people didn’t like anything about that, Shane. Nothing about it. They particularly
0:39:53 didn’t like a bunch of bankers and venture capitalists in the front row of their concerts. They wanted
0:39:59 their hippy, crazy fans in there. They also didn’t like the distribution set up, so it was grateful
0:40:05 then, and then Ticketmaster took their slice, and then scalpers took their slice, and then the fans,
0:40:09 so they said, “We’re going to disintermediate,” just like the internet did to so many things.
0:40:14 “We’re going to disintermediate those two layers, and we’re going to sell tickets directly to customers.”
0:40:19 The way they did it was you listened to a 4015 recording that explained what was going on,
0:40:24 and the way, Shane, you would buy the tickets was you have to put a three-by-five card,
0:40:28 which concert you went to. You can only buy four tickets per concert,
0:40:34 okay, so the scalpers are less incentive, and then you had to go to the post office to get a
0:40:38 postal money order, so just a total pain in the backside to get a postal money order,
0:40:42 and then you had to put a self-address down down below, and then you put your regular envelope
0:40:48 and mail it in. Now, how would the grateful then, Shane, decide who gets the front row seats?
0:40:49 I have no idea.
0:40:53 The way they sort of did it was that self-address, they have the envelope,
0:40:58 the more beautifully you could decorate it with dancing bears and mushrooms and sprinkles.
0:41:00 I love it.
0:41:04 Yes, so they solved a bunch of problems. That’s not the end of it.
0:41:06 What was the last concert you went to, Shane?
0:41:08 Oh, God, it’s been a long time.
0:41:09 Did you go to Taylor Swift?
0:41:12 No, I am a Taylor Swift fan.
0:41:15 Okay, let’s just say you went to Taylor Swift in Ottawa.
0:41:20 And you showed up with your giant camera in your boom microphone,
0:41:24 and you showed up there. What would have happened at the gate?
0:41:25 They wouldn’t let me in.
0:41:27 Why? Why didn’t she want you recording?
0:41:30 It might affect other people’s experience if I have a boom mic.
0:41:37 You can’t prevent people from recording on their phones, so at some degree, they’re accepting it.
0:41:42 The NBA actually went through this a couple years ago. They were trying to really block
0:41:47 people from posting clips on social media. Then they actually embraced it, and it changed the
0:41:53 whole league. It got way more people. Sorry, this is a sidetrack to this, but that change
0:41:57 in the NBA really changed the NBA.
0:42:02 Okay, pre-iPhone, let’s say you were going to a Rolling Stones concert,
0:42:04 and you had all that equipment you were walking in. Of course, they would block you.
0:42:09 And the reason is you see the Rolling Stones in Boston, in New York, and then Philly, and then Miami.
0:42:14 The exact same concert. They don’t miss a note. They’re fantastic.
0:42:15 Same thing.
0:42:19 When you walked into the Grateful Dead with your big boom mic and your big camera,
0:42:23 they put you right in the Taper section, the perfect spot to watch the concert.
0:42:27 They said they did a tape it, and you taped it, and then you went from Boston,
0:42:30 then you went to New York, you taped it, you went to Philly, you taped it,
0:42:34 then you went to Miami, then you get back to your dorm room, and you copied as many tapes as you
0:42:38 could of the best concert, not the worst concert, and you gave them out to all your friends.
0:42:46 And that was how they market. They gave away the content. They were the first in-down marketers
0:42:51 to really nail that. They were the first real freemium model. They were the first viral marketers,
0:42:56 and the way they did it was brilliant. And it worked for them because every concert was quite
0:43:01 unique. They’re a jam band, so they never played the same set list twice, and so there was an
0:43:06 incentive for knuckleheads like me to go from Boston to New York, up and down these coasts.
0:43:11 In fact, I did that last week, I was at the Spear, and I saw them Friday, Saturday, Sunday.
0:43:17 Garcia was a genius. He’s a marketing genius, actually, and I think he’s a music spot.
0:43:25 That’s fascinating. I’m going to have to listen to The Grateful Dead now. I wrote a book on this
0:43:29 called “Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead.” We started talking about inbound marketing there.
0:43:36 I’m curious as to, you guys pioneered inbound marketing to a big extent, and definitely got
0:43:42 the momentum rolling there. How has that changed in the past few years, and where is that going in
0:43:48 the next few years? Ironically, I think it kind of went out of favor a bit over the last few years,
0:43:54 and I think it’s about to come back in favor. The things that change about it aren’t that different.
0:44:03 Instead of cold calling people, and spamming people, and advertising people, and renting space
0:44:08 on YouTube, or renting space on your podcast or your blog, or renting space on New York Times.
0:44:12 Spray your own New York Times, draw a podcast, and become your own publisher, and then pull people
0:44:19 in through Google and search and other social outlets. It works very, very, very well. You’re
0:44:23 living proof of how well it works. The things that have changed, or the social media networks
0:44:26 have changed. When we first wrote about this, before we started HubSpot, we started writing
0:44:32 about inbound marketing. Dig and Reddit were the two big social media sites. I don’t think
0:44:36 things around in Reddit have gone through all these iterations, but obviously it was Facebook,
0:44:42 and now it’s TikTok, it’s Instagram. It’s all these new social media sites. It’s YouTube. People
0:44:49 live in YouTube. It’s podcasts. The medium isn’t necessarily a long-form blog like it was back
0:44:54 when we started HubSpot. It’s videos, a lot of short-form videos, and so that’s changed quite a
0:45:02 bit. I think what’s interesting about what’s going on now is today you go to Google and you get your
0:45:09 10 blue links. If you look across our customers, that’s 62, 63% of the inbound traffic is via Google,
0:45:14 and most of it’s organic. I think over the next five years, that’s going to change a lot. I think
0:45:17 Google’s going to have to change a lot, and I think people are going to spend more and more of their
0:45:23 time inside ChatGPT, and they’re all ChatGPT’s competitors. I think when you’re engaging in
0:45:27 that way and you do a search in ChatGPT for, let’s say, HubSpot, it will tell you about HubSpot,
0:45:30 and then you’ll say, “Well, how does HubSpot compare to Salesforce?” It will tell you about that.
0:45:35 How much does HubSpot cost? It will tell you that. People know a lot about HubSpot.
0:45:38 One of the brilliant things about Google is their blue links, and they didn’t mind sending you
0:45:42 off their website. It’s a very counterintuitive idea. I think that’s going to start changing as
0:45:47 consumer behavior changes, and I think be a really interesting to see how it evolves.
0:45:52 Do you think content is just going to get overwhelming? I mean, you can create content
0:45:58 with two sentences now. You can create blog posts that would rival probably the best people we’re
0:46:03 putting out maybe 10 years ago with almost no effort whatsoever.
0:46:09 I think you’re right, and I think it’s not just that, but it’s going to be e-mails. I think that
0:46:15 the robo-emailing and the BDRs, I look at lots of startups in the CRM phases, might imagine, but
0:46:24 there’s about 48 startups building automated AI agents. I still think having a unique perspective
0:46:30 and a unique personality is going to work. I don’t think your podcast goes away because
0:46:35 I start something that sounds like you, and I use an avatar to deliver it. I think something
0:46:40 what you’re doing will last the test of time. I think a lot of people, particularly in scale-ups,
0:46:44 run away from their personality. They make it generic, and you have a certain vibe and
0:46:49 a certain personality. I think that works for you, and it’s going to be very hard to replicate.
0:46:54 Quality and uniqueness never go out of style, and I think you’re going to be increasingly
0:46:59 important as you just fill content that’s AI generated. It’s almost what you said before,
0:47:04 like lean into your individual quirkiness, and your tribe will find you and then go around with you.
0:47:08 Although you have me worried, we’re almost a million people on our newsletter now. I’m like,
0:47:13 “Oh God, if this is going away, I got problems.” I also think we’re going to see the trend,
0:47:16 and I’m certainly not the first person to say this, but I think you’re going to see
0:47:21 a lot more small big companies, and you’re going to be able to get a lot more done with a lot less
0:47:26 people. I don’t think in a billion dollar company, you’re going to need three, four,
0:47:31 five hundred person marketing organizations. I think the new tools are coming out, including
0:47:36 Upsplot Stoles and CRM Suite. I just see how incredibly powerful they are. I think you’re
0:47:42 going to be able to scale in a whole new way. I think the AI revolution, when it comes to
0:47:48 inbound, I think top of the funnel gets more difficult. I think middle of the funnel gets
0:47:54 easier. Really high quality personalization on your website, on chat, on everything, that gets
0:47:58 much more powerful. Top of the funnel gets more difficult. I think inbound’s going to change,
0:48:03 but I also think inbound is going to make a comeback. How do we do outreach in a world of AI
0:48:08 and in a world where people are bombarded with, is it going to be freemium and then pulling people
0:48:12 in through that and the outreach is letting them know about the freemium stuff? You’ve got to get
0:48:17 good at the branding thing, again, it turns out. Because getting into your or my inbox is going
0:48:22 to become exceptionally difficult with all the changes Google’s making to email that’s getting
0:48:27 part or as it is, but the robo emailing is going to go wild and the robo content is going to go
0:48:32 wild. It’s a little more around branding. You have to be good at everything. It’s like a baseball
0:48:36 5-2 player. You have to be getting found in YouTube. You have to be getting found in all the
0:48:39 social sites. ChatGBT’s going to understand you perfectly well. Google’s going to understand
0:48:43 perfectly well and you need people tripping over your all over the place. I think people have to
0:48:46 get comfortable with the fact they’re going to have less new visitors to their website because
0:48:51 ChatGBT and their ilk are going to know so much about you and not have those lists of blue links.
0:48:55 They’re just going to live on there and learn so much about you. And then when someone’s quite
0:48:59 serious, they end up on your website and you have to get very good at personalizing that
0:49:05 website experience. I also think people are going to end up keeping more information behind
0:49:11 the paywall and the login wall on their websites because they want to keep a little bit back from
0:49:15 ChatGBT because ChatGBT is going to understand the public stuff so well. I think it’s going to
0:49:20 change in a good way though. I guess the baby step that Google made on that was like when they
0:49:26 would just show you the excerpts. If you asked a question, it’d be like basically giving you a
0:49:31 link but it’s really hard to find. It’s like here’s the answer to your specific question.
0:49:38 YouTube is fascinating because unlike voice podcasts, YouTube has virality to it. So when we
0:49:47 do an in-person recording, the YouTube breach is larger in some instances, not all, than our
0:49:54 podcast reach. And so we get like 300,000 people sort of listening to a podcast episode but on
0:50:01 YouTube, we’ll get 300 to 500 to a million people. But it’s YouTube’s algorithm picking it up. It’s
0:50:06 like people watch this but what we can’t do is like send people off that platform. So it’s really
0:50:11 good for like stats. I was at the gym the other day and this guy’s like I got 2 million TikTok
0:50:17 followers but I can’t do anything with them. So I can keep them on this app and I’m really famous
0:50:23 in this localized environment but TikTok is 100% in control. I don’t own that relationship. Same
0:50:27 as YouTube. I don’t own the relationship with the viewer. YouTube does the minute it doesn’t
0:50:32 like me and wants to cancel me or doesn’t like my content anymore or wants to promote a different
0:50:37 message. Whatever that algorithm is that’s doing that can just like you’re gone.
0:50:43 I think you’re right. I thought Google was going to roll over and played that there for a while.
0:50:48 Like I moved most of my search traffic to Proplexity really like it. Google’s kind of started
0:50:52 and stopped the whole bunch of stuff but recently they’re making noises like they’re not going to
0:50:57 roll over and play dead to Proplexity. That’s such an interesting company right now and to
0:51:01 watch their moves will be very very interesting. It’s a challenging time for them but it looks
0:51:06 like they’re going to they’re not going to let Proplexity just hoover up a bunch of their users.
0:51:11 Hopefully not. We all want some competition here. I have a couple random questions. I’m curious
0:51:17 what you’ve learned about making decisions that you think other people miss. On my CEO journey
0:51:26 for a long time I kind of look for consensus. I think consensus is really the enemy of scale
0:51:30 and so I used to say whenever we’re making an important decision there should be winners in
0:51:35 the room and losers. We shouldn’t find like that negotiated settlement that everyone’s happy.
0:51:39 Somebody should be unhappy. Three or four people should walk out unhappy and one should walk out
0:51:45 happy and we’re all we’re all going to be good with it. As you get bigger this gravity pulls
0:51:50 you towards consensus and I think consensus is the enemy of greatness. How do you fight that?
0:51:56 I write that on whiteboards. I talk about that inside of HubSpot. I try to make an example of
0:52:00 that every time I’m in a room. I’ve written a bunch of blogger articles about that. We keep
0:52:05 posted about that. At one point in Signup HubSpot we had a terrific TOO I love and he had a lot of
0:52:10 great qualities. One of his qualities I didn’t love was he was a consensus person and we had a
0:52:15 lot of conflation over that and so we talked about it a lot. The management team talked about
0:52:20 that a lot but I sort of had this thing like there’s going to be winners and losers in every
0:52:24 argument and if no one walks out a little bit sore we probably made the wrong decision.
0:52:29 So go deeper on that for a second there. So put me in the room at one of these meetings
0:52:32 where there’s four people on one side. There’s four people on the other side.
0:52:36 How do we come to that decision? Is it the highest paid person in the room?
0:52:40 Is it the person closest to the problem? Who actually makes that call?
0:52:46 Let’s just say it’s my call which is rare and two people in the room are saying black and two
0:52:51 people in the room are saying white. I think that the majority of CEOs are walking out of the room
0:52:55 with the decisions great. Trying to please everybody. Yeah. Try to thread the needle and I
0:53:00 think that’s a problem. It creeps in more and more. The bigger you get the worse the problem gets
0:53:04 and I always tried to walk out of the room. It’s like we’re going to pick black or white.
0:53:09 If you lose this decision you might win the next one. Let’s not get all pissed off about it.
0:53:13 We’ll all lose our eye and I think that’s the right way to scale it.
0:53:17 Is there anything else you’ve learned about decision making that you’re like oh I wish I knew
0:53:23 this sooner? I would say one thing I’ve learned about scaling a company like from the outside
0:53:30 went from company with an idea and two employees to you know it’s worth 30 billion dollars and
0:53:36 8,000 employees and a couple hundred thousand customers. It looks like a smooth graph from
0:53:43 the outside but I’ll tell you what it’s a grind on the inside building up spot. It’s very much
0:53:48 two steps forward one step back two steps forward one step back two steps forward one step back the
0:53:55 whole way and there was no silver bullets along the way there was no one higher that completely
0:54:00 changed the game no partnership that changed the game no customer no investor. It was all
0:54:05 kind of two step forward one step back two step forward one step back and the other thing I would
0:54:11 say about the journey is kind of related to that there was definitely wartime and peacetime when
0:54:17 you’re halfway through a two steps forward it was peacetime when it’s one step back it was wartime
0:54:25 and I love wartime I’m definitely a wartime CEO I hate peacetime I really need to sit on my hands
0:54:29 and just let it go like it’s going great leave it alone I have a wartime doing that and I think
0:54:35 certain CEOs are peacetime and certain CEOs are wartime I’m very very very much a wartime person
0:54:40 like COVID wartime we made so many changes during COVID I hated COVID and I hated being back in
0:54:46 society but inside of PubSpot that was a fun job. What does wartime mean for you is that like we’re
0:54:52 fighting for our very survival does it mean we can just move faster and sort of ignore some of
0:54:58 the bureaucracy what what does it mean? I think peacetime is bottoms up and more consensus a
0:55:03 wartime more top down it’s like hey it’s wartime I don’t have time to build consensus on this this
0:55:11 is why I think we should do we’re going left and I like that about wartime and wartime is like okay
0:55:19 I remember 2010 the economy was shaky back then we were a very young company maybe 2009 and our
0:55:24 retention statistics were horrible everyone was canceling our product wasn’t fit back then
0:55:29 and we lost our remember of the thousand customers we had in the beginning of the year we lost like
0:55:38 700 of them like just terrible churn rate in 2009 and that was existential and it was like let’s just
0:55:44 stop the music and start over everything we’re doing going forward has nothing to do with
0:55:49 signing up new customers is like how do we delight every new customer yeah let’s stop obsessing about
0:55:54 how do we turn a prospect into a customer let’s obsess about how do we turn a customer into a
0:55:58 delighting customer and so that was a crisis that really worked we changed the culture of the company
0:56:03 we changed the center of gravity from prospects to customers never wasted a good crisis that was a
0:56:08 really good crisis. What you’re building this how did you manage and I don’t want to say balance
0:56:12 it’s the wrong word but it’s the word everybody understands how did you how did you manage work
0:56:18 life harmony or balance especially during the high pressure periods with a young family
0:56:24 I didn’t I did it very poorly what would you go back and tell your younger yourself no I’m really
0:56:32 proud of it I think my grandkids will be proud of it and I think it took a big effort on my part
0:56:37 to pull it off and if I said oh man I wish I just put in 40 hours a week back then I wouldn’t be sitting
0:56:41 on this podcast it would be wonderful to pull it off and I know that’s not a popular answer I’ll
0:56:47 probably get literally done Twitter for saying that I think that’s a reality it was it was a full
0:56:52 context for it. I’ve noticed this thing and I think people don’t like talking about it but
0:56:57 when you find exceptional people who’ve done exceptional things like yourself
0:57:04 they’re not always the most well-rounded people in every aspect of their life and yet
0:57:10 we sort of expect them to be right it’s like we we love Warren Buffett but we want him to
0:57:16 also be a better family man right the weird thing is the minute Warren Buffett starts doing that
0:57:21 he’s no longer somebody we’re talking about as Warren Buffett and it’s so it goes back to those
0:57:27 sort of like strengths and weaknesses and my hypothesis is that people at the tail end of the
0:57:34 curve have incredible strengths and incredible weaknesses and by trying to address those weaknesses
0:57:40 whether it’s school society nudging people we actually limit we put a ceiling on the strengths
0:57:44 that those people can actually deliver to the benefit of the world. You’ll probably
0:57:48 pillar it on Twitter for saying that but I agree with you on that. I’ll give you an example I’ve
0:57:55 never been married I want to get married so I’m like sexually on my to-do list this year I don’t
0:58:01 know it’s gonna be this year but I never did it and every time I had a relationship like I play
0:58:09 game first and do I regret it I don’t know I’ve had a really good life I’ve really enjoyed the
0:58:15 HubSpot run I’m super proud of it I think when I’m 85 and looking back on my life I’ll still be
0:58:20 super proud of it I think my grandkids will be proud of it so yeah I made some sacrifices
0:58:26 I’m okay with it we always end the podcast with the same question I think you’ll have a really
0:58:33 good answer to this what is success for you I think it’s a really cheesy James Taylor song
0:58:40 named the secret of life is enjoying the passage of time I think she’s very right about that
0:58:47 and think about that post my accident I very much try to not do anything that I don’t want to do
0:58:53 or if I’m doing it not to do it very long and I try to live in the present and stay out of the
0:58:58 past too much and stay out of the future too much I think the secret of life is about how do
0:59:03 you set your life up so you’re really enjoying that passage that’s a beautiful answer thank you so
0:59:14 much for coming on the show Brian thank you sir thanks for listening and learning with us
0:59:22 for a complete list of episodes show notes transcripts and more go to fs.blog/podcast
0:59:28 or just google the knowledge project recently I’ve started to record my reflections and
0:59:33 thoughts about the interview after the interview I sit down highlight the key moments that stood
0:59:39 out for me and I also talk about other connections to episodes and sort of what’s got me pondering
0:59:43 that I maybe haven’t quite figured out this is available to supporting members of the knowledge
0:59:50 project you can go to fs.blog/membership check out the show notes for link and you can sign up today
0:59:55 and my reflections will just be available in your private podcast feed you’ll also skip
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1:00:27 making and set yourself up for unparalleled success learn more at fs.blog/clear until next time

0:00:02 If you trade passion for stability,
0:00:05 you basically trade one fiction for another.
0:00:07 Both are products of our imagination.
0:00:10 It really comes down to the imagination.
0:00:15 I mean, it is with our mind that we create stories
0:00:18 and those stories basically shape our experience.
0:00:21 If you live with a story of things never change,
0:00:22 you live in one reality.
0:00:25 And if you live with a narrative that says,
0:00:28 things always change, they continuously change,
0:00:31 then you live with a very different set of beliefs
0:00:35 about how you love, how you work, how you live.
0:00:37 (upbeat music)
0:00:52 – Welcome to the Knowledge Project podcast.
0:00:54 I’m your host Shane Parish.
0:00:55 In a world where knowledge is power,
0:00:59 this podcast is your leverage for mastering the best
0:01:01 one of the people I’ve already figured out.
0:01:02 If you’re listening to this,
0:01:04 it means you’re not a supporting member.
0:01:06 Members get early access to episodes,
0:01:09 my personal reflections at the end of every episode,
0:01:11 which a lot of people now say is their favorite part.
0:01:14 No ads, exclusive content, hand edited transcripts
0:01:16 and so much more.
0:01:18 Check out the link in the show notes for more information.
0:01:22 This episode is a re-release of episode 71
0:01:25 of the Knowledge Project Cultivating Desire
0:01:26 with Esther Perot.
0:01:29 This is one of the most downloaded and shared episodes
0:01:30 we’ve ever released.
0:01:33 Millions of people have listened to it,
0:01:36 but I also realized that many of you have never heard this.
0:01:38 And importantly, if you have heard it,
0:01:41 it’s really worth another listen.
0:01:44 The goal of this podcast is to master the best
0:01:46 of what other people have figured out
0:01:50 and ideally do so in a way that is timely and timeless.
0:01:53 And this conversation is a testament to that.
0:01:56 If you didn’t know it was a re-release,
0:01:59 you would think it was recorded yesterday.
0:02:01 Esther and I talk about the story of her parents,
0:02:04 the difference between living and surviving,
0:02:07 erotic intelligence and why it matters,
0:02:09 permanence versus impermanence,
0:02:13 dating, growing apart, common argument patterns,
0:02:16 criticism and what it takes to maintain pleasure,
0:02:19 desire and excitement.
0:02:22 It’s time to listen and learn.
0:02:24 (gentle music)
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0:03:50 Your parents were in concentration camps,
0:03:53 I think from your mom from 18 to 22
0:03:57 and your father was 25 to 31
0:04:00 because the war started very early for them.
0:04:04 What did your parents credit their survival to?
0:04:10 – Wow, we’re going right to the heart of the matter.
0:04:17 I think my parents always said luck came first,
0:04:22 just sheer luck that they were not rounded up
0:04:24 out a certain morning when they would take 1000 people
0:04:29 and move them from the labor camp to the extermination camp.
0:04:34 But secondly, I think they had sheer determination
0:04:39 that they were gonna be there to, first of all,
0:04:43 to be witnesses, to still be there.
0:04:47 They imagined that they would have members of their family,
0:04:50 actually, that they would hopefully see again.
0:04:56 And they were extraordinarily determined to stay alive
0:05:00 and active about it.
0:05:05 I think they had a very clear sense of where they came from,
0:05:08 who they were and why they needed to survive.
0:05:12 And the rest is the stories that they told
0:05:16 about the multiple things they had to do in order to stay alive.
0:05:19 – What are some of the stories?
0:05:27 – My mother spent a year hiding in the woods when she was 18
0:05:30 and became petrified by the barking dogs
0:05:32 and the sense that every morning she would wake up
0:05:35 in a different place and not know what the day
0:05:36 was going to be.
0:05:38 And she basically surrendered by herself
0:05:40 to a male labor camp,
0:05:43 figuring that maybe they would need somebody in the laundry
0:05:46 or in the kitchen and that at least she would know
0:05:47 every morning where she wakes up.
0:05:52 I didn’t know many people who went by themselves to the camp.
0:05:54 And when the camp was a better option
0:05:58 than the hiding in the woods and stealing eggs from farms
0:06:01 and potatoes from fields and stuff like that
0:06:03 to just stay alive.
0:06:07 My dad, the last year and a half in one of the camps,
0:06:08 he was in 14 of them,
0:06:12 basically organized some kind of a black market
0:06:15 with the kitchen around food and potatoes
0:06:17 or potato peels more correctly
0:06:21 and managed to actually feed the Germans as well.
0:06:26 So DSS basically liked him in the kitchen.
0:06:27 He was better for him.
0:06:29 He ate better, as he said, when my dad was there
0:06:31 than when my dad would go to the factory.
0:06:32 If you went to the factory,
0:06:36 you basically lived another week and there was that
0:06:38 because you had to walk an hour and a half
0:06:40 in frozen weather to get there.
0:06:44 So it’s just stories of how they beat the system basically
0:06:49 and stories of how they made connections with other people,
0:06:51 how they created deep friendships,
0:06:54 how he had a man, another man who became
0:06:59 his kind of lifelong brother with whom he fought together.
0:07:01 I think that it was very clear
0:07:03 that neither of them ever attributed
0:07:06 what their survival to themselves alone.
0:07:08 They had strength.
0:07:10 My dad always talked about how they came
0:07:12 from tiny villages in Poland
0:07:14 where it’s frozen weather in the winter
0:07:18 and they were more robust, they were more resistant.
0:07:20 He carried bags of cement on his back
0:07:23 and therefore he knew how to work hard in the camps.
0:07:26 He didn’t come from Paris or Corfu
0:07:28 or Mediterranean weathers.
0:07:31 So they had this whole way of describing
0:07:34 what made them strong basically.
0:07:39 – Did your parents meet in a concentration camp?
0:07:43 – Interestingly, my parents met the day of liberation
0:07:47 on the road as they came out of the camps.
0:07:49 They were in neighboring camps
0:07:52 and people just basically wandered the roads
0:07:57 and as my mother would say with cotton balls in your head
0:07:59 and looked for whoever they knew
0:08:01 or whoever knew something about the towns
0:08:03 they came from or about their families
0:08:08 or their whereabouts and people basically would say,
0:08:09 “Oh, there is such and such.
0:08:14 “I just saw from that village and go find them.”
0:08:16 So they met each other like that
0:08:18 and they knew of each other
0:08:21 because my father traded with my mother’s family
0:08:24 when they were still in Poland.
0:08:29 They probably would never have met or married for sure
0:08:34 because my mother was orthodox aristocracy,
0:08:38 educated aristocracy and my dad was rather illiterate
0:08:43 and uneducated and a grand man
0:08:47 but not necessarily an educated reader.
0:08:49 So they were completely of different classes
0:08:55 and he always thought that he had found
0:08:58 a beautiful princess that he had like,
0:09:03 come on then, “le gros l’eau” that he had the lotto,
0:09:05 that he had won the lotto with my mother.
0:09:08 And they came like that.
0:09:10 Basically, people gathered on the roads
0:09:12 and began to travel and wonder where they should go.
0:09:14 I mean, they were not gonna go back to Poland.
0:09:19 It’s refugee stories of today, it’s the same stories.
0:09:24 And my dad had helped somebody from Belgium in the camps
0:09:26 and that man gave him a name and a false address
0:09:28 and just basically said, “Come to Belgium.”
0:09:30 So they arrived like that to Belgium
0:09:33 where they had a permit to stay for three months
0:09:35 and then they were supposed to be dispatched
0:09:36 in a number of other countries
0:09:40 which at the time were willing to take the Jewish refugees
0:09:42 and they decided to stay.
0:09:43 So they stayed another five years
0:09:45 as illegal refugees in Belgium.
0:09:48 I mean, it’s quite remarkable
0:09:51 how what I grew up with the story is my first passport
0:09:53 which was a stateless passport.
0:09:57 I mean, that all of that is so, so current.
0:09:59 I think that the relevance of the story
0:10:02 is not so much about what happened then
0:10:05 but about the fact that so much of us thought
0:10:07 this will never happen again, this cannot happen again
0:10:10 and it is happening again all over the place.
0:10:13 – I wanna explore that just a little bit
0:10:16 before we sort of dive into relationships
0:10:21 because what does it mean to come back to life
0:10:24 after surviving the Holocaust in a community?
0:10:26 I mean, what’s the difference between living
0:10:27 and sort of surviving?
0:10:34 – I mean, it’s a distinction that I began to think about.
0:10:36 I didn’t grow up with that distinction,
0:10:39 though there were loads of stories about that,
0:10:42 about people who were depressed,
0:10:44 about people who were bitter,
0:10:46 about people who, you know, you’re married
0:10:48 because I have nothing, you have nothing,
0:10:51 I’m alone, you’re alone, let’s get married.
0:10:54 But often these people had no reason to be together
0:10:57 except rebuilding and so they had a lot of energy
0:11:01 in the initial phases and they had children right away
0:11:03 as a way to prove their humanity.
0:11:06 But after that, sometimes they would look at each other
0:11:08 and these people had nothing in common
0:11:13 and my parents had friends like that who were couples
0:11:15 that didn’t really have much to do together
0:11:18 except surviving but not living.
0:11:21 But when I wrote “Mating in Captivity”
0:11:23 is really when I began to think about it
0:11:25 because mating is about how do you maintain
0:11:27 a sense of aliveness?
0:11:30 It is about erotic intelligence.
0:11:34 And in so doing, I began to look at my community
0:11:38 and noticed that in fact I could make a separation.
0:11:42 It’s a metaphor more than an accurate description, you know?
0:11:44 I don’t know that people I would describe this way
0:11:45 would necessarily agree with it
0:11:49 but I remember thinking in my community,
0:11:52 I often noticed that there were two groups of people
0:11:57 and the people who survived, the people who did not die
0:12:03 often were quite afraid, reticent,
0:12:06 continuously aware of danger, untrusting.
0:12:10 Nobody literally could enter in there
0:12:13 and there was a certain kind of morbidity in the homes.
0:12:15 There was often survivor guilt,
0:12:19 there was often a sense that life had broken them.
0:12:21 And then on the other side,
0:12:24 I saw people who were gonna take life
0:12:27 by the horns with the vengeance.
0:12:29 It’s like I didn’t survive for nothing
0:12:31 and I’m going to make the best of it
0:12:33 and I’m going to live grand
0:12:35 for all those who didn’t make it.
0:12:38 And for me, the way I described it is that
0:12:42 they understood the erotic as an antidote to death, basically.
0:12:46 It’s, what does it take to maintain hope,
0:12:49 to maintain a sense of meaning, to have imagination?
0:12:50 Because if you have hope,
0:12:53 you need to be able to project yourself.
0:12:55 You know, whether you’re in a camp
0:12:56 or whether you’re in a relationship,
0:12:59 you have to be able to imagine yourself,
0:13:01 to have a sense of anticipation,
0:13:04 to project a better situation than the one you’re in
0:13:06 or something to look forward to.
0:13:11 And that whole way of cultivating the imagination
0:13:13 is something that I then began
0:13:16 to really talk to my parents about and understood that.
0:13:20 In fact, you don’t have to be in a concentration camp for that.
0:13:23 This is an essential tool for life,
0:13:27 for experiencing joy and meaning
0:13:29 and freedom and possibility.
0:13:32 – I was thinking as you were saying that,
0:13:34 we often take tomorrow for granted,
0:13:38 but I imagine that that’s almost impossible for you
0:13:40 growing up with your parents in that situation
0:13:42 and in a community like that.
0:13:47 – I would say that it’s the opposite for me.
0:13:52 I think I live with tremendous energy
0:13:57 and I do a lot and I live quite full,
0:14:02 but underneath there is a kind of chronic sense of dread
0:14:07 that everything can stop any moment.
0:14:11 I have no sense that tomorrow is taken for granted for me.
0:14:14 I think that I’m gonna get a big surprise
0:14:16 and it won’t be a small boo boo.
0:14:21 But I try not to think about it the whole time,
0:14:23 but it is continuously there.
0:14:26 And I think on the one hand,
0:14:28 you could experience it as something that is terrifying,
0:14:32 that deflates you, that constricts and contracts you,
0:14:34 or you can experience it as
0:14:37 because anything can stop any moment,
0:14:39 I’m gonna give it its fullest right now.
0:14:44 So in a way, it really naturally creates a stance in life
0:14:48 in which the present has to be savored
0:14:51 or fully experienced or dealt with.
0:14:52 It’s not always a positive thing,
0:14:55 but basically it’s not an effort
0:14:57 to be in the present in that sense.
0:15:00 – If things are sort of impermanent, I guess,
0:15:03 in a way where you’re constantly questioning tomorrow
0:15:06 and what could be there and what might be there,
0:15:09 and how does that affect our relationship
0:15:13 as individuals with trust and vulnerability?
0:15:18 – I mean, the question of permanence and impermanence
0:15:21 is the question that also points to the distinction
0:15:23 between East and West.
0:15:26 We believe that there is such a thing as permanence
0:15:29 and we believe that there is such a thing as stability
0:15:31 and predictability.
0:15:35 There are entire philosophies who look at the world
0:15:39 and at life as being in permanent flux.
0:15:40 That’s the state of impermanence,
0:15:44 that things are continuously changing and morphing.
0:15:49 And therefore, to imagine that you can create stability
0:15:50 is basically a fiction.
0:15:54 And I think there’s something very powerful about that.
0:15:58 That means that you actually are…
0:16:01 I don’t think it necessarily doesn’t permit you to trust
0:16:03 or it doesn’t allow you to feel vulnerable.
0:16:06 It just is a different awareness about the world.
0:16:09 It’s a different philosophical stance.
0:16:12 Look, for example, in mating in captivity,
0:16:15 I remember a moment when I read that sentence
0:16:17 and it made a lot of sense for me, right?
0:16:22 The idea that you should trade passion and for security,
0:16:25 for example, from the Eastern perspective
0:16:27 or from the perspective of impermanence,
0:16:29 if you trade passion for stability,
0:16:32 you basically trade one fiction for another.
0:16:35 Both are products of our imagination.
0:16:38 And once I began to think like that,
0:16:41 it offered for me something way more flexible
0:16:45 in what people can do in their relationships
0:16:48 to maintain a sense of vitality or a sense of aliveness.
0:16:51 And it really comes down to the imagination.
0:16:56 I mean, it is with our mind that we create stories
0:16:59 and those stories basically shape our experience.
0:17:03 And if you live with a story of things never change,
0:17:05 you live in one reality.
0:17:07 And if you live with a narrative that says
0:17:10 things should always change, they continuously change,
0:17:13 then you live with a very different set of beliefs
0:17:17 about how you love, how you work, how you live.
0:17:21 – Can you talk to me a little bit more about the stories
0:17:23 that sort of shape how we see the world
0:17:26 and your experience with them a lot
0:17:29 in terms of your psychotherapy is that,
0:17:31 are you replacing narratives with people?
0:17:34 Are you sort of trying to get them to open up
0:17:37 and expand their view in a relationship therapy?
0:17:39 Or how does that work?
0:17:40 – It’s a great question.
0:17:44 So look, I am a therapist that integrates
0:17:48 a lot of different modalities and different approaches,
0:17:51 but the narrative approach is very dear to me.
0:17:54 And because I do see relationships as stories.
0:17:58 So yes, when people come in
0:17:59 and they come in with one version
0:18:02 or one way to tell the story of their relationship
0:18:06 or the story of themselves in their relationship,
0:18:10 my first thought is, what else is there?
0:18:13 What other story is here that has not yet been told?
0:18:14 But is this really the story?
0:18:17 Is this the only way to look at this story?
0:18:19 That is very much how I think.
0:18:23 Because I do believe that language shapes our experience.
0:18:27 If I say it certain ways, I will feel certain things
0:18:30 and have certain thoughts that accompany those exact words.
0:18:32 And so I have in my mind
0:18:35 that when you come into a first session,
0:18:37 I’ve just said it yesterday,
0:18:39 you come in with a particular story.
0:18:41 By the time you leave that first session,
0:18:44 my goal is that you will leave with a different story.
0:18:45 And if you leave with a different story,
0:18:48 you leave with a different experience of yourself
0:18:52 in your relationship, which opens up possibilities
0:18:55 for new insights, for changes,
0:18:58 for new degrees of responsibility,
0:19:01 and for freeing your perception of your partner
0:19:04 as stuck in the story that you have put them in as well.
0:19:08 So the change, the story is to create movement,
0:19:11 is to create possibility for change.
0:19:15 And that is basically why people do come to therapy.
0:19:18 – I think narratives affect more than our relationships, right?
0:19:20 They affect how we live, they affect how we see the world,
0:19:22 they affect how we see others.
0:19:24 And part of understanding and connecting
0:19:26 with other people is not necessarily agreeing
0:19:28 with their narrative, but seeing their narrative.
0:19:30 – So let me give you an example, right?
0:19:32 Because I literally had this experience
0:19:34 a few days ago, a couple of days ago.
0:19:38 So a couple comes in, and the original presentation
0:19:40 is that they have big fights, nasty fights.
0:19:44 She becomes very mean, she gets abusive, she curses.
0:19:47 She grew up in a very abusive household herself.
0:19:51 And it is about, the story is really presented like,
0:19:53 she’s fine, basically.
0:19:56 It is not that he’s fine, nothing is said really about him.
0:19:58 And she’s the problem.
0:20:00 That’s a classic presentation.
0:20:01 One person’s the problem.
0:20:04 And then it turns out that he’s not just okay,
0:20:06 he’s actually a saint.
0:20:08 He’s the little prince.
0:20:09 That’s how he ends up calling himself.
0:20:13 He’s the little prince who actually can do no wrong.
0:20:16 And therefore, anytime she asks for something,
0:20:18 if she says, I wish you bring me flowers or something like that,
0:20:23 it instantly becomes a slight to him, an indignation.
0:20:25 Because he’s so good, how could he do anything
0:20:29 that is missing or shortcoming or…
0:20:33 And gradually, the session evolved into taking her out
0:20:37 of the role of being the identified patient
0:20:41 and looking at how they actually were in a dynamic together,
0:20:46 in which de facto, there was nothing she could ever ask or say
0:20:49 because he appeared like he was so put together and strong.
0:20:51 But in fact, he was very, very fragile
0:20:58 and always at risk of feeling fractured in his, you know,
0:21:01 in his attempts at creating a strong identity,
0:21:04 but it wasn’t nearly as strong.
0:21:08 And gradually, it became clear that maybe she wasn’t just
0:21:12 the fragile was one, but he was as well.
0:21:16 And that there was a whole story behind, you know,
0:21:20 how he lived with this idea that he is so good all the time
0:21:24 and he’s been so good to his very sad mother her whole life.
0:21:28 And therefore, any comment is unfair to him.
0:21:30 And it totally changed the dance.
0:21:32 It totally changed the dance
0:21:35 because it looked like she had been this unreasonable,
0:21:38 hysterical woman who would come up with these big requests.
0:21:41 No, it wasn’t. It wasn’t at all.
0:21:44 And we laughed and we rewrote the story.
0:21:48 And we changed the whole equilibrium between the two of them
0:21:51 in terms of who does what and who’s responsible for what
0:21:54 and who triggers who, how, and when.
0:21:58 And movement got, you know, air came into the room if you want
0:22:02 and air is what, you know, air creates expansion.
0:22:04 So you breathe differently. You sit differently.
0:22:07 You listen differently. You move differently.
0:22:08 And the story begins to evolve.
0:22:11 And from that place, we began to, you know,
0:22:15 chisel away at some of the stuckness of the relationship.
0:22:16 It’s that what I mean with the story.
0:22:19 It’s not just you sit, you know, and talk.
0:22:23 It’s that the story that is linked to emotions
0:22:25 and emotions are embodied experiences.
0:22:27 So when people tell you a story a certain way,
0:22:29 they also sit in a certain way
0:22:32 that leads to telling that kind of story.
0:22:33 If you change the story,
0:22:35 the body will move differently as well.
0:22:39 It’s a very holistic kind of thing.
0:22:41 But it was so clear in this instance
0:22:44 because it was a while ago that I had had one of those
0:22:47 where you read the intake and you think, wow, you know,
0:22:50 there is a healthy one and a not.
0:22:53 And whenever I get one of those stories
0:22:56 and the not is willing to agree that they are the not
0:22:58 when they’re not, they’re not.
0:23:01 Everybody has their adaptive child inside of them
0:23:04 with which they try to survive in the world.
0:23:06 But underneath is the other one,
0:23:10 the one that dealt with the vulnerabilities if you want
0:23:13 and then came up with all these coping styles, you know?
0:23:16 So that was a way of changing the story.
0:23:18 The guy came in with a rather inflated
0:23:22 lofty sense of himself and left with a more realistic way
0:23:23 of thinking about himself
0:23:25 and a very different way of thinking about his wife.
0:23:28 – What happens after that?
0:23:32 – What happens after that?
0:23:38 Basically, I gave them an exercise
0:23:41 which I suggest that they do a few minutes every day
0:23:45 by which she makes statements to him or requests
0:23:47 or just says certain things.
0:23:52 And he gets to answer to what she actually says to him.
0:23:58 I said, you know, I would like you to just very simple,
0:23:59 right?
0:24:01 She would say, you know, I would love you
0:24:03 to bring me oranges tonight.
0:24:05 And instead of doing his typical,
0:24:08 when is the last time you brought me the strawberries
0:24:09 that I like?
0:24:11 That’s kind of his modus operandi.
0:24:12 It’s always, you know, you want something from me?
0:24:14 What about you?
0:24:17 You know, he could simply say to her,
0:24:20 I know you would like me to bring you an orange.
0:24:22 Very basic reflective listening.
0:24:25 But that reflective listening for him
0:24:30 starts a process by which he’s able to hear.
0:24:32 He’s able to just stay with her,
0:24:34 not make everything about him,
0:24:37 because every time he makes it about him,
0:24:41 it makes her think that indeed there is no room for her
0:24:42 unless she screams.
0:24:44 So she goes back to her childhood
0:24:46 where you needed to scream in order to be heard.
0:24:48 But it’s not just because that’s how she is.
0:24:51 It’s because there’s a dance between them.
0:24:53 Because literally there is no way for her
0:24:54 to say something about her
0:24:57 that he doesn’t make about him and in a defensive way.
0:25:01 So we began to chisel away at the defensiveness.
0:25:03 And we did it with humor
0:25:05 and with all kinds of crazy statements
0:25:07 because if you bring in some of the absurd,
0:25:09 you can highlight that it’s in the form
0:25:11 and not in the specific content that this matters.
0:25:14 And it was really for him to actually understand
0:25:16 that when you just repeat something
0:25:17 and acknowledge something,
0:25:19 that you don’t have to be responsible for it.
0:25:21 You didn’t do anything wrong.
0:25:24 It’s like all he heard all the time at any very request
0:25:25 is that he had done anything wrong,
0:25:27 which wasn’t what she was saying.
0:25:32 So what you have in a couple is people hear the inaudible.
0:25:35 They hear what they heard in their childhood,
0:25:37 but it’s not really what is being said to them
0:25:38 in the present moment.
0:25:41 And you need to bring reality in
0:25:42 so that they can become the adults
0:25:44 that they both need to be.
0:25:46 And I do it with enactments
0:25:50 and made them say, you go home and do this for a bit.
0:25:54 And write to me, write to me every night just a check,
0:25:56 just to say it did it.
0:25:58 Because if you practice this
0:26:00 and you do it with a good dose of humor,
0:26:03 gradually you get the point.
0:26:05 The point is much more serious and deep
0:26:06 than the little exercise.
0:26:11 But basically it changed the entire perspective.
0:26:15 So from there, you begin, therapy is like sculpting.
0:26:17 At first you carve away gross shapes.
0:26:20 You make big motions, big interventions
0:26:22 so that you get the basic.
0:26:24 And then you start to chisel.
0:26:26 And it’s the middle phase of therapy
0:26:29 where you literally create the lasting shape
0:26:32 of how this relationship could really enter
0:26:35 into a new dance with each other.
0:26:37 And the dance will be that I think, you know,
0:26:39 the goal is that she won’t lose it,
0:26:41 that she won’t end up cursing him
0:26:44 where he indeed feels like he did everything wrong,
0:26:46 that they don’t get to that place
0:26:47 and that they certainly don’t get there
0:26:49 in 10 seconds from zero to a hundred.
0:26:52 And that he doesn’t spend his time
0:26:54 constantly proving that he’s the little prince
0:26:56 and that he can therefore hear her
0:26:58 without constantly, you know,
0:27:01 just measuring his image in his mirror.
0:27:04 It’s that fundamental change that needs to take place.
0:27:06 They’re less, they’re a young couple
0:27:08 in terms of how long they are together.
0:27:11 And so it’s actually really not too encrusted yet
0:27:14 and they will have a different relationship.
0:27:17 You know, they will, if they stick to it
0:27:19 because they want it
0:27:23 and because I think they have what it takes.
0:27:24 – You mentioned that they were a young couple
0:27:27 and that sort of call, I have a question about
0:27:29 what are the important conversations
0:27:31 to have with your partner early in a relationship
0:27:34 and how do those differ from the important conversations
0:27:36 to have later in a relationship?
0:27:42 – You know, there is a theory that says
0:27:45 that basically whatever you discuss
0:27:47 the difficult conversations, if you want,
0:27:49 that you discuss 20 years later,
0:27:51 they were all there in the first two dates.
0:27:55 People actually know their things.
0:27:59 They know their key conversations from the first moment.
0:28:02 It’s not that you have different conversations.
0:28:03 The conversations evolve
0:28:05 because you have different life stages.
0:28:07 You have different stressors.
0:28:12 You have different seasons and phases in a relationship.
0:28:15 There are new members sometimes that join, children.
0:28:17 There are people who leave, death and loss.
0:28:21 And all of those shift the system.
0:28:23 A couple is a relational system.
0:28:28 And that system is continuously morphing and adapting itself
0:28:31 to external things, work, money,
0:28:36 where they live, moving, et cetera, health and internal things.
0:28:41 And the conversations that you have are about that, you know.
0:28:43 But there are a few basic ones
0:28:44 you want to have in the beginning.
0:28:47 This couple, you know, they have 20 years apart.
0:28:48 They’re young as a couple.
0:28:51 They’re not necessarily both young in age.
0:28:53 She has more experience than him.
0:28:57 Even though she’s 20 years younger in terms of relationships,
0:28:59 he’s actually quite new at this,
0:29:03 at a more kind of committed long-term relationship.
0:29:06 Where do they want to live?
0:29:07 They’re both foreigners.
0:29:10 Do they want to have a family together?
0:29:13 How will they arrange their professional lives together?
0:29:15 You know, in this instance,
0:29:17 he comes from a rather traditional family
0:29:21 where he’s used to come home and there’s food on the table.
0:29:23 Well, is that the woman you picked?
0:29:26 You know, is that been discussed between the two of you
0:29:27 or is that an assumption?
0:29:29 And if it’s an assumption,
0:29:32 you only make a statement when the food is not on the table.
0:29:35 And she says, why don’t you cook on occasion, you know?
0:29:37 So it’s about people’s values.
0:29:40 It’s about people’s expectations.
0:29:43 It’s about people’s vision for life.
0:29:46 What do they look for in life?
0:29:49 And is there a compatibility about that?
0:29:52 You know, I think one of the big conversations
0:29:54 that accompanies every relationship
0:29:57 is about closeness and separateness.
0:30:02 What is together and what is individualistic or what individual?
0:30:06 You know, how much money do you get to spend alone?
0:30:08 And how much money, you know,
0:30:10 is involved that you start to have a conversation with the other?
0:30:12 Do you travel alone or only together?
0:30:15 Do you go to bed together every night?
0:30:17 Or can you go to sleep when you’re actually tired
0:30:19 without having to become a unison?
0:30:23 You know, how do you want to parent?
0:30:25 How do you envision family life?
0:30:28 How do you see your relationship to the extended family?
0:30:30 What are the boundaries with the grandparents
0:30:31 or with your in-laws?
0:30:33 What do you do with your exes
0:30:35 or with your deep friendships with other people?
0:30:37 Do you continue them? Do you maintain them?
0:30:40 Can you maintain them alone or do they become couple friends?
0:30:44 The issue of boundaries of what is ours and what is mine?
0:30:46 What do I get to still decide alone?
0:30:48 What is my zone of freedom
0:30:52 and what is our zone of commitment and togetherness?
0:30:56 I think this is probably one of the very important conversations.
0:30:58 People don’t discuss it with those terms,
0:31:03 but they factor that is what they are talking about.
0:31:07 I love the idea of sort of couples discussing values.
0:31:09 And I don’t… Are those values permanent?
0:31:11 Do values change over the course of a relationship?
0:31:15 Do what you expect out of a relationship, does that change?
0:31:18 Because often people say they grow apart.
0:31:20 Is that true? How does that happen?
0:31:22 Yeah, but I’ll answer that in a sec.
0:31:26 It’s a different… For example, I saw a couple this week
0:31:29 and they’re having infertility issues.
0:31:32 And one of them wants to really get in there
0:31:36 and use all the means possible that science and medicine can provide.
0:31:39 And the other person basically is a more religious person
0:31:44 and says, “If it’s meant to be, those are not things we decide.”
0:31:48 And this is a real philosophical value question.
0:31:54 What is the right of an individual to tamper with fate, if you want?
0:31:58 Or to tamper with what life puts in front of you?
0:32:01 Do you go at it and try in every way you can
0:32:04 because your agency is what’s at the center?
0:32:09 Or is what’s at the center an acceptance of what life puts in front of you?
0:32:12 Or if you want, what God puts in front of you?
0:32:14 But they’re not discussing it like that.
0:32:16 They’re talking about should they go for infertility treatment
0:32:19 and when is the next IVF cycle.
0:32:22 But what they really are talking about is that.
0:32:25 And once you actually put it in terms of values,
0:32:30 it becomes much less a debate between them about who is passive and who is active,
0:32:32 who gets things done and who is lazy.
0:32:38 And it becomes a kind of a “you bad” rather than “you different.”
0:32:42 That’s why values become really important in these conversations.
0:32:48 You know, we discuss feelings, we discuss values, we discuss beliefs,
0:32:54 we discuss political assumptions, we discuss our view to the universe,
0:32:56 you know, and how we see our place on this planet.
0:32:59 But we don’t discuss it as if we’re in a philosophy course.
0:33:05 We talk about it in terms of how we relate to food and to excess or to abundance,
0:33:09 how we are either looking at what’s missing or at what’s there.
0:33:15 It takes place in small micro moments, but in fact, the conversations are about big ideas.
0:33:18 So when you ask, do people grow apart?
0:33:23 Look, when people grow apart, it’s not because they have a difference of opinion necessarily,
0:33:26 because some couples have major differences in opinion,
0:33:30 but they continue to remain deeply connected, curious about each other,
0:33:38 respectful of who they are, and they’re not threatened by the difference of the other, basically.
0:33:41 Other couples, the slightest difference is World War III.
0:33:44 You know, so it’s not in the difference itself.
0:33:46 It’s in the way that people experience the difference.
0:33:50 If you’re secure, you can be next to somebody who doesn’t eat meat
0:33:55 and you don’t need them to be like you in order to validate yourself.
0:34:00 So when people grow apart, what’s happening is both there are two kinds of growing apart.
0:34:06 There’s either bickering, chronic conflict or high conflict,
0:34:10 or there is disengagement and indifference and separateness.
0:34:17 You can either have too much or too little of the thing that actually makes people grow apart.
0:34:20 You know, that’s really the choreography of growing apart.
0:34:27 It’s constant fighting, or it’s so far apart that you don’t even notice if the other one is there or not there.
0:34:29 That’s the apart.
0:34:36 In the instance of high conflict, what you get is people who are in very critical relationships.
0:34:38 Everything is negative.
0:34:40 There is a blame and defense dance.
0:34:44 You do, I defend, I counter-attack, you defend, you blame me.
0:34:48 And we just go at this all the time and we react to everything the other person is doing.
0:34:51 For everything you do, I have something to say.
0:34:56 You know, and people basically feel diminished and they feel like they don’t recognize themselves.
0:35:01 And, you know, they constantly blame the other for their misery.
0:35:06 That’s the other thing, is they really hold the other person responsible for how unhappy they are.
0:35:10 On the other side, what you have is people who no longer share much of anything.
0:35:17 And they live entire separate lives and there’s very little that brings them together.
0:35:25 And there is a sense of isolation, of sometimes of loneliness, of indifference, of neglect,
0:35:30 of lack of contact, of lack of what we call bids for connection.
0:35:34 You know, ways in which it’s clear that you’re part of my life.
0:35:37 You’re part of the fabric of my every day.
0:35:39 It’s like they’re just so far apart.
0:35:45 And both of these are descriptions of couples that grow apart.
0:35:48 You mentioned something in there that I just want to explore a little bit.
0:35:49 I’m curious about, which is secure.
0:35:52 What does it mean to be secure in a relationship?
0:36:00 I’m going to give it to you as an image of a little child.
0:36:03 You know, do you have kids?
0:36:04 I do, yeah.
0:36:05 All right.
0:36:07 So, how old, if I’m just so I can read the metaphor.
0:36:08 Oh, ten and nine.
0:36:09 Ten and nine.
0:36:13 So, at ten and nine, you still have it very much and you’ve had it from the beginning.
0:36:21 They sit on your lap or they hold you or they rest on your shoulder or on your chest.
0:36:23 They are nested.
0:36:24 They need nothing at that moment.
0:36:31 They’re just kind of a completely at ease or they’re trying to console themselves,
0:36:37 but they are drawing from you their sense of comfort and consolation.
0:36:40 And at some point, they’re done.
0:36:41 It’s all fine.
0:36:46 And they get up and they begin by crawling or they go, they run.
0:36:52 They basically leave you to go and be into their own world, to go to play, to go to do
0:36:53 their thing.
0:36:55 They are now experiencing freedom.
0:37:02 They’ve just experienced safety and security and attachment and nesting and now they’re
0:37:05 moving into the world and they’re going to do hide and seek.
0:37:10 They’re playing their own imaginary realm and in order to play, they have to be free
0:37:15 and unselfconscious and free of worry, otherwise you can’t play.
0:37:20 To be secure in a relationship is to have both of those things, is to be able to come
0:37:25 back to the harbor, to anchor yourself, to feel rooted, and then to get up, to leave,
0:37:28 and to go and play without having to worry.
0:37:29 Now, what is it that you don’t have to worry about?
0:37:34 You don’t have to worry about the fact that when you go, you’re leaving somebody there
0:37:39 who is suddenly bewildered and anxious and depressed and angry, but actually somebody
0:37:45 who is totally at ease letting you go or that you worry that when you come back, they won’t
0:37:47 be there.
0:37:51 And that hide and seek, that’s why that game is so important, is to know that even when
0:37:54 I’m gone, I live inside of you.
0:37:57 Even when I’m gone, when I come back, you’ll be there.
0:37:59 Even when I’m gone, I take you with me.
0:38:06 And so I experience freedom and connection at the same time that is security in a relationship
0:38:09 for adults and for children.
0:38:10 I like that a lot.
0:38:14 And one of the other things I wanted to follow up on was sort of, it sounded like we were
0:38:18 almost getting into common argument patterns within couples.
0:38:23 What are the most common argument patterns that you see and how do we learn to have better
0:38:27 conversations with our partner?
0:38:33 There are three primary choreographies of arguments.
0:38:38 One is fight-fight, fight-flee, flee-flee.
0:38:43 So either we go at each other and both of us go at each other and we enter into the
0:38:51 more conflict, you know, bickering, chronic picking.
0:38:57 The other version is one person attacks, but the other person flees or stonewalls or withdraws
0:39:00 and you get pursuer-distancer.
0:39:04 One pursues the whole time and the other one is distancing.
0:39:08 And the third one is you’ve got both people basically closing the door, going into their
0:39:11 room and not talking to each other for the next two days.
0:39:15 That’s three main choreographies of arguments.
0:39:21 And what’s really important in terms of couples and relationships in general, I will say,
0:39:26 is that it’s probably one of the golden rules, is to understand that the choreography, the
0:39:30 form, is way more important than the content.
0:39:35 If you have people who are going at each other, they go at each other about everything.
0:39:38 It’s not the specific topics that make them go at each other.
0:39:43 Their style is we attack and every subject will be spoken like that.
0:39:48 If they are into we close the door, it’s not the particular issue that makes them close
0:39:49 the door.
0:39:52 They close the door and every issue they will discuss, they’ll address it with the same
0:39:54 dance.
0:39:59 What you’re challenging in a couple is the dance, is the rigidity of the way that they
0:40:01 go at it.
0:40:06 One person instantly raises their voice, the other person basically shuts down, rolls
0:40:11 their eyes, says, “Here you go again,” waits, all of these motions.
0:40:16 That’s what happens in a couple that struggles with this stuff.
0:40:17 You’re asking me about arguments.
0:40:21 So those are the three choreographies of arguments.
0:40:26 When I was doing research for this, one of the things that struck me as incredibly insightful
0:40:31 and I wish I had known a long time ago was you said behind every criticism is a wish.
0:40:34 Can you expand on that and explore that with us for a little bit?
0:40:39 Yeah, why don’t you ask me a question about my new podcast, for example, right?
0:40:43 That would be, I actually would like you to talk with me about my new podcast.
0:40:45 But I won’t say that, right?
0:40:47 Why don’t you bring me flowers?
0:40:49 Why didn’t you say good morning?
0:40:51 Why didn’t you thank me when I did?
0:40:53 What is actually what am I saying?
0:40:54 I’m saying, I wished you had thanked me.
0:40:58 I wished you had noticed that I bought you this new suit.
0:41:03 I wished you had shown me your appreciation for, I wished.
0:41:07 But if I say I wished, I have to put myself out there.
0:41:10 It means I want something and I can be refused.
0:41:12 I can be rejected.
0:41:14 I can be not heard.
0:41:20 And that in a relationship that is not secure, I will defend against that.
0:41:22 I don’t want to show you that side of me.
0:41:26 So instead of saying what I want, I’ll say what you didn’t do.
0:41:28 That’s the criticism.
0:41:34 What you didn’t do and what’s wrong with you is safer in some bizarre way than to tell
0:41:38 you what is special about me and what I would have wanted.
0:41:39 Is that selfish?
0:41:43 No, I don’t think it’s selfish per se.
0:41:47 Because you’re valuing yourself over the relationship by doing that, aren’t you?
0:41:50 By putting it out there, you’re saying in a way, and maybe I got this wrong.
0:41:51 So correct me.
0:41:55 In a way, by putting it out there and being vulnerable, you’re saying us is more valuable
0:41:59 than what I’m feeling and my vulnerability.
0:42:03 And when you hold it in and you’re unwilling to be vulnerable and you’re just criticizing,
0:42:08 isn’t that saying that right now, at this particular moment, I’m valuing myself more
0:42:10 than I’m valuing this relationship?
0:42:11 No.
0:42:13 I would put it to you differently.
0:42:21 I’m saying that you didn’t do something because I actually really, it’s very interesting.
0:42:23 I’m going to try to explain this to you.
0:42:25 It’s not about being selfish.
0:42:30 It’s actually about feeling not worthy enough.
0:42:37 I actually believe on some level that maybe you really don’t care about me or that I’m
0:42:42 not loved or more than I’m not lovable.
0:42:50 And because of that fundamental lack of sense of self-worth, I say you didn’t do this rather
0:42:53 than say, I’m not sure I deserve to get this.
0:42:56 I’m not sure you love me enough to want to do this for me.
0:43:01 I’m not sure that I’m good enough a person to even deserve to have this.
0:43:03 And that’s why I put it on you.
0:43:04 That makes sense.
0:43:05 Do you get it?
0:43:13 It’s a, if I say, you never ask me how I’m doing, you come home and you just start talking
0:43:17 about your day, and then when you’re done, you basically go to your phone and you do
0:43:18 it.
0:43:22 When’s the last time you asked me about me?
0:43:24 What am I actually saying?
0:43:26 I’m saying I feel neglected.
0:43:28 I’m saying I feel ignored.
0:43:32 I’m saying I wonder if you’re still curious about me.
0:43:36 I’m saying maybe you’re more interested in many other people when you don’t really believe
0:43:41 that I have anything important to say, or maybe I’m saying you’re selfish and you only
0:43:45 think about you, which just goes on with, you know, I’m not important enough for you
0:43:49 to think about me.
0:43:54 That’s all some of the things that go underneath, or I’m saying I’ve already told you five
0:43:59 times that I would like on occasion that we also talk about my day and you really are
0:44:00 not interested.
0:44:04 You’re not listening, and I don’t want to say it one more time and again feel hurt that
0:44:10 it’s not coming because you are so selfish to think about you the whole time.
0:44:18 So it’s basically, it’s actually a protective device, interestingly, to criticize the other
0:44:21 person is a protection against being hurt.
0:44:24 I think that makes a lot of sense.
0:44:26 As wonky as it sounds.
0:44:31 Yeah, I mean, you said it and I’m like, Oh, I was totally wrong.
0:44:34 Is there such a thing as too much honesty in a relationship?
0:44:40 And is sort of the opposite of transparency and honesty a secret, or how do you, how do
0:44:47 we think about these, these dynamics of honesty and transparency and secrecy and caring for
0:44:49 our partner?
0:44:53 Look, I will say to you like this.
0:44:57 I tend to not think in categoricals.
0:45:05 I think that all of those behaviors, values, interactions, honesty, transparency, confession,
0:45:08 they are all contextual.
0:45:14 They are all contextual relationships take place in a context.
0:45:23 And once you agree with that premise, then you ask, what does honesty mean in this relationship
0:45:24 at this moment?
0:45:29 Is it caring or is it cruel?
0:45:31 There’s consequences to honesty.
0:45:35 What will it be like for the other person to live with what I just said?
0:45:39 I actually really think I should never have married you.
0:45:40 You’re dumb.
0:45:44 You haven’t said an interesting thought in God knows how long.
0:45:49 I actually still really think about the person that I was living with before, but they died
0:45:54 and I remarried you because I had four kids, but what was I going to do?
0:45:59 What if it’s hurtful but causing you problems like I’m no longer in love with you?
0:46:01 Well, deal with it.
0:46:02 That’s hurtful for your partner though.
0:46:03 Is that something?
0:46:06 If you don’t, if you have doubts, deal with it.
0:46:11 There’s no need to, what can the other person do with those doubts?
0:46:16 I mean, it’s like, you know, what am I going to say, I’m not attracted to you anymore?
0:46:21 What can the other one do about that, assuming that they still try very hard to look good
0:46:27 and all of that and they haven’t gained 75 pounds and even then, it’s like, you know,
0:46:34 if you have doubts, at best, you figure it out alone and then on the things that the
0:46:39 other person can’t do anything about and then you basically say, you’re a fantastic person,
0:46:45 but I don’t want to live with us anymore and I know this is going to hurt you terribly,
0:46:51 but you don’t put the other person in a bind about something, they can’t change.
0:47:00 You know, some honesty is cruel and, you know, I wish I could leave you, but I don’t because
0:47:04 I like our lifestyle, excuse me.
0:47:06 You know, that’s your problem.
0:47:09 That’s not the other person’s problem.
0:47:14 I think we should really not confuse sometimes what are things that we need to take responsibility
0:47:15 for?
0:47:18 What I’m going to be angry with you because I feel trapped.
0:47:19 They’re not trapping you.
0:47:22 You want to go, you go, but I don’t want to go, but I’m angry at you for the fact that
0:47:24 I can’t go.
0:47:30 These are all the dances and the games that people play with each other in the name of
0:47:31 honesty.
0:47:35 Of course, I think a lot of things need to be shared and discussed because we live in
0:47:42 a time where we really value that kind of intimacy as true telling and intimacy as a
0:47:44 discursive experience.
0:47:45 Right?
0:47:48 Intimacy is what I share with you about my inner life.
0:47:54 That’s a very, very recent Western new definition of the word intimacy, into me see.
0:48:00 I’m part of that culture too, but I also am aware that people say things, “Well, you told
0:48:01 me I should tell you how I feel.”
0:48:04 Well, I think you’re a freaking slob.
0:48:06 Is that useful?
0:48:09 Do you get something from that?
0:48:10 No.
0:48:11 It may be true, but it’s not useful.
0:48:16 I find myself saying so often to people, “You may be right, but you are alone,” and it’s
0:48:20 not difficult to be right and alone.
0:48:24 Is your goal to get your partner to change and to do more of what you want, and this
0:48:26 is really not helpful?
0:48:31 Oh, but it’s authentic, okay.
0:48:34 It’s authentically useless.
0:48:38 I do this with my kids sometimes where I’m like, “You’re right, but you’re not going
0:48:39 to get the outcome that you want.”
0:48:40 That’s right.
0:48:41 That’s right.
0:48:42 What is it you want?
0:48:44 You want me to tell you how you think?
0:48:45 I got it.
0:48:48 You want us to agree on something differently?
0:48:53 You got to go at this and not like that, because every time you tell me you’re right, you’re
0:48:57 implying I’m wrong, and if you’re implying I’m wrong, I’m less likely to cooperate with
0:48:58 you.
0:49:02 It’s like, don’t lose the compass.
0:49:04 What is it you’re actually trying to achieve?
0:49:13 People say lots of stuff to each other in my office, and I’m like thinking, “You probably
0:49:14 are right.”
0:49:16 In myself, I’m thinking, “I could see that.
0:49:21 I can totally see how after all these years, this is how you see your partner.”
0:49:23 But seriously, you want to be close, right?
0:49:26 I find that’s supposedly what you said you want.
0:49:27 You know what?
0:49:32 After the dump you just made, I’m not sure you’re going to get close, so tell me what
0:49:33 is it you want?
0:49:37 You want to shrink your partner and shrivel them up and make them feel terrible about
0:49:40 themselves, or you actually want something from them?
0:49:43 If you want something from them, you’re going to have to do this very differently.
0:49:46 So sorry.
0:49:51 How often are those conversations high stakes because we’ve waited so long to have them
0:49:59 versus we should have had them months or years or perhaps decades earlier, and now they’re
0:50:00 so hard.
0:50:05 We have an internal conversation with ourselves that just comes out almost like a fire hose
0:50:11 at this point, whereas had we had it earlier, it would have been a trickle.
0:50:16 How do we learn to bring those things up when the stakes are low?
0:50:21 So I will first challenge you that the stakes are not necessarily low because you’re in
0:50:22 the beginning.
0:50:29 There are lots of people who come with heavy suitcases.
0:50:34 And it doesn’t take long, you know, a few months, a year for the suitcases to open,
0:50:39 and everybody brings their history with them, and the way that they learned to interact
0:50:44 with people, particularly their loved ones, and what they learned at home.
0:50:52 So it’s not necessarily that people are always just so nice in the beginning and they accumulate
0:50:53 over time.
0:50:59 You accumulate because of the resonance of the stuff that is happening with your partner.
0:51:04 If the stuff that happens with your partner is so instantly similar to what you experienced
0:51:07 at home, it doesn’t take long.
0:51:12 It’s not the time, it’s the actual echo chamber of what you have in your relationship
0:51:15 and how it mirrors what you had in your family of origin.
0:51:19 That’s what creates the intensity.
0:51:26 That said, what does happen over time is that the patterns, the back and forth, the conversation,
0:51:34 I had a couple this week, it’s really interesting, lesbian couple, wonderful couple, but they
0:51:40 are four years together.
0:51:45 And basically, I kind of could see in the conversation within five minutes that what
0:51:52 they were saying to each other, this was probably number 197 times the same conversation.
0:51:53 Like this is it.
0:51:55 This is the one.
0:52:02 It’s so patterned, predictable, rigid, narrow, and boring.
0:52:03 And they’re trapped.
0:52:04 They know they’re trapped.
0:52:08 That’s why they’re there because they’re stuck because it’s the same old, same old.
0:52:14 So at one point, I basically switched seats and I made them reverse roles.
0:52:18 And each one for the next 15 minutes basically spoke as if she was the other.
0:52:19 It was phenomenal.
0:52:23 It’s like, if you’re worried that they don’t hear each other and that’s why they need to
0:52:26 repeat the same thing again, no worries.
0:52:29 They know each other’s words by heart.
0:52:33 They could play the other person to the teeth.
0:52:38 So then once we established that, I said, okay, now we can maybe start to have a different
0:52:39 conversation here.
0:52:43 I mean, this is like, you know, one says one thing, the other one snaps right in there like
0:52:44 a banana peel.
0:52:49 You slip on it and up you go, you know, and I say this and she says that and it’s this
0:52:50 ping-pong.
0:52:56 But once they did the role play, they actually began slowly to get into the experience of
0:53:02 the other because you really do enact what the other one is really trying to tell you.
0:53:08 And then you ask them, and how does it feel when you’re saying this yet again, you know?
0:53:18 And it’s that thing that you try to break is the rigidity and the immediacy where you
0:53:24 want to create space for something new to be able to come in so that change can occur.
0:53:31 Otherwise, people do sometimes come dead upon arrival because what you’re looking for is
0:53:36 their motivation on the part of each person to want to do something different.
0:53:41 You know, most of the time people don’t come to couples therapy or relationship therapy.
0:53:46 It’s the same with families when I see families to say what they want to do different.
0:53:49 They come with a long list of expectations of what they want their partner to do different.
0:53:55 You know, it’s like a drop-off center, came to bring you my partner, you fix it.
0:54:02 And you’re trying to say therapy becomes helpful in relationships when each person
0:54:09 is willing to do something new, regardless, non-contingent on what the other person is
0:54:10 doing.
0:54:13 You become committed, you’re not going to do the usual.
0:54:18 If the usual is you close your door and you don’t say another word, or if the usual is
0:54:22 you just up the volume, or if the usual is you go on the vicious attack, or if the usual
0:54:28 is that you just kind of talk about the weather when the other person is talking about their
0:54:33 dying mother, you’re going to make an effort to change what you do.
0:54:39 Because if you consistently start to do something different, at some point the other person has
0:54:42 to adapt, because it’s ping-pong.
0:54:47 If the ball goes to a different corner, you can’t stay standing on the other side.
0:54:50 At some point you will move.
0:54:56 Why does good sex so often fade in relationships, even for couples who continue to love each
0:54:57 other?
0:55:04 There are loads of reasons, I think, that sex fades.
0:55:09 And when I say that sex fades, I think that it’s important to distinguish.
0:55:13 I’m not talking about the act of sex itself.
0:55:23 People can have some type of regular sexual activity, perfunctory, comfortable, or less
0:55:28 comfortable, but I’m not interested in the performance of sex.
0:55:36 That is not really what the people come to me for, I would say like that.
0:55:40 Some people come because they’ve become really sexless relationships.
0:55:48 Sometimes they are deep, affectionate couples that are de-eroticized, that are desexualized.
0:55:53 But sometimes what they want is to reconnect with a degree of intensity, of aliveness,
0:55:56 of erotic charge.
0:56:01 And that’s very different than just the act of doing sex.
0:56:08 So that said, there’s a long list of things that make people disconnect from their erotic
0:56:11 self, basically.
0:56:13 And some of them are not of their choice.
0:56:14 They’re stressors of life.
0:56:15 They have to do with health.
0:56:18 They have to do with economic difficulties.
0:56:25 They have to do with employment struggles, et cetera, et cetera, and children and family
0:56:26 life and all of that.
0:56:32 But sometimes it’s also, I think, and that’s where it became the exploration that I got
0:56:33 interested in.
0:56:37 It’s really a kind of a breakdown of the imagination.
0:56:45 It’s a willingness to go for the least, basically.
0:56:52 It’s the same difference as cooking a beautiful meal for which you thought about, you bought
0:56:57 the special ingredients, you took the time to prepare it, you set a nice table, you looked
0:57:03 forward to sitting down, to enjoying it, to having good conversation, maybe good wine
0:57:10 that accompanies it, et cetera, versus cutting a tomato, which is perfectly fine.
0:57:15 But it doesn’t have the same poetry attached to it.
0:57:21 And that’s what happens to people’s sexualities, is it becomes the kind of basic lasting on
0:57:27 the list that you should do at the end of a long day as if it’s one more chore in a messy
0:57:33 room that is rather uninspiring without much playfulness, without much imagination, without
0:57:36 much creativity.
0:57:42 You can do it, but doing it is not the same as the quality of the experience that comes
0:57:44 with it.
0:57:45 And that’s why it fades.
0:57:51 It fades because people don’t necessarily invest in it and value it as something, you know,
0:57:54 in the beginning it seems to come on its own, supposedly.
0:57:56 So you don’t have to do anything.
0:58:00 And people have this idea that it should be spontaneous, and it should, you should just
0:58:02 be in the mood, and it should just come.
0:58:07 And all these shoulds, whatever is going to just come in a long-term relationship already
0:58:08 has.
0:58:11 So it demands predetermination.
0:58:13 It demands really creativity.
0:58:19 It demands intentionality and premeditation, which is very tricky to premeditate sex, because
0:58:23 it supposedly goes against this romantic, you know, “I just was swept and it came all
0:58:25 over me.”
0:58:30 Part of why we lose it is because we are filled with mistaken ideas about what actually it
0:58:35 takes to create pleasure, desire, and excitement.
0:58:38 Oh, that’s a good segue into love and desire.
0:58:42 What’s the relationship between pleasure, desire, love?
0:58:48 Is love about closeness and desires sort of like finding new experiences or adventures?
0:58:53 And how does that fit in?
0:59:00 I mean, I at one point played with the idea that love is about having and desire is about
0:59:02 wanting.
0:59:07 And therefore, it’s two different verbs that often pull us in different directions.
0:59:13 Love thrives on closeness, it thrives on deep knowledge with each other, it thrives on minimizing
0:59:18 the tensions, on narrowing the gaps, and on a sense of predictability.
0:59:22 You do want to know that you’re going to have the same person the next morning, how
0:59:25 we’ll still love you and that you will still love.
0:59:29 And desire is a lot more fickle.
0:59:35 Desire is to own the wanting and that wanting, how you connect to that sense of sovereignty
0:59:42 and agency and freedom that is the opposite of “you won’t make me.”
0:59:50 It thrives much more on mystery, on curiosity, on the unknown, on discovery, on exploration.
0:59:55 And the challenge of modern relationship is that we want love and desire in the same place.
0:59:57 It’s never happened before.
0:59:58 That’s the interesting thing.
1:00:01 And it doesn’t get solved with Victoria’s Secret just so easily.
1:00:03 What do you mean it’s never happened before?
1:00:07 We’ve never looked for, you know, the word “passionate marriage” is a contradiction
1:00:08 in terms.
1:00:13 We’ve never looked for passion in the same place where we looked for security and anchoring
1:00:17 and somebody with whom to pay the checks and fix the house.
1:00:20 These two things were separate for all of history.
1:00:24 Love stories took place somewhere and marriage took place somewhere else.
1:00:26 Marriage wasn’t necessarily about love in the first place.
1:00:29 It was an economic enterprise primarily.
1:00:35 But the place where you want to experience full surrender, you know, and the intensity
1:00:40 of the unknown, how do you bring that in the same place where you want to know that what
1:00:43 you have today is what you’re going to have tomorrow?
1:00:49 It’s a very, it’s a grand experiment of modern love is that we are trying to experience
1:00:51 security and adventure in the same place.
1:00:57 Now, it’s not impossible, but it is a grand challenge.
1:01:01 How do I pretend with the person with whom I’ve been living for 30 years that there,
1:01:03 that there’s still so much to discover?
1:01:08 How do I remain curious about somebody who I, at the same time, I desperately want to
1:01:10 feel familiar with?
1:01:15 How do I bring surprise in the place where I want to experience continuity?
1:01:20 How do I bring out parts of myself that I’ve never revealed to someone who pretends to
1:01:22 know me so well?
1:01:27 How do I take risks, sexual and emotional risks, in a place where I usually don’t want
1:01:30 too much of a big production?
1:01:34 And this is why it is very challenging to not just have sex in long-term relations.
1:01:39 People can have sex, but have sex that is for pleasure and connection.
1:01:44 Sex that we look forward to, that is anticipatory, that reveals us to ourselves.
1:01:49 That’s a kind of a neurotic intimacy, right, where we discover things about us that are
1:01:51 still new.
1:01:55 It’s what new conversations people can have about that.
1:02:02 What does it mean to take risks in the same place where you also want predictability?
1:02:07 What does it mean to allow yourself degrees of surrender with someone that you need to
1:02:12 rely on who’s going to wake up tomorrow morning to get the kids to school?
1:02:15 Now it becomes really a fascinating exploration.
1:02:23 We all grapple with this thing, you know, and it demands real active creativity.
1:02:28 That’s why I like the food metaphor, because everybody understands the difference between
1:02:34 putting some food on the table and eating for sustenance and having a lavish or having
1:02:43 a beautiful, thoughtful, creative meal that is about pleasure, not just about sustenance.
1:02:46 And the erotic is cultivating pleasure for its own sake.
1:02:49 It’s not about achieving an orgasm.
1:02:51 It’s not about the performance of sex.
1:02:52 We did it.
1:02:53 We both came.
1:02:59 No, it’s really about the quality of the experience and of the pleasure that you experienced
1:03:03 and where it took you and where you went with your partner.
1:03:08 That over time is a real piece of art.
1:03:12 As you were saying that, I was thinking, are there tips and tricks that people could use
1:03:16 at home that want to bring up a conversation about sex with their partner?
1:03:21 But more importantly, I think it’s how do we go about discussing something that’s difficult
1:03:22 or hard with our partner?
1:03:31 Is there a prompt or a way to start that is going to be more predisposed to better outcomes?
1:03:37 I mean, interestingly, I didn’t anticipate it at first, but I do now know that it is
1:03:45 one of the most powerful aspects of the podcast is that people would hear other people have
1:03:48 conversations that they want to have.
1:03:52 And the deeper they would listen to these other people and the more they would see themselves
1:03:56 in their own mirror and the more they would acquire some of that vocabulary to then go
1:04:01 to their partner and say, you know, I was or they listen with the partner to the podcast
1:04:03 and they say, how do you feel about this?
1:04:04 Have you ever thought about that?
1:04:06 Is that something you would be interested in?
1:04:08 Do you have those fantasies?
1:04:10 Is that what you feel with me at times?
1:04:12 Have you ever experienced that kind of a block?
1:04:15 It’s like going to a movie, right?
1:04:21 Like when you have a third entity, it allows you to speak to your partner by virtue of
1:04:27 the thing that you have just watched or shared or listened to in the case of a podcast.
1:04:31 And then you can ask the same question, you know, do you feel that kind of pressure?
1:04:34 You know, have you ever faked with me?
1:04:38 You know, because this woman is talking about that, you know, or this man is talking about
1:04:43 that, you know, have you ever felt that kind of, you know, have you ever wanted to try
1:04:45 that for us?
1:04:48 You know, it’s easier than to suddenly sit in the car and say, oh, you know what?
1:04:51 I was thinking maybe one day we should do this.
1:04:52 Where are you coming from?
1:04:53 You know, where is that coming?
1:04:58 But if you listen to something together, it gives it a permission.
1:05:05 It places it in the permitted conversations that we can have as a couple.
1:05:10 So now you will say, but what are the questions that I ask, you know, in the sessions to those
1:05:11 couples?
1:05:13 I like writing, for example.
1:05:19 So I often think, you know, with some couples, I’ve found it very useful to create a separate
1:05:20 email address.
1:05:24 And that separate email address is one in which you’re not talking about management
1:05:25 ink.
1:05:30 It’s not about the kids, the money, the family, the to-do list.
1:05:33 It’s really the lover’s nest.
1:05:38 It’s when you and I think about each other as partners, as lovers.
1:05:42 And in that place, we write to each other in a very different language.
1:05:46 I’m not talking to the mother of my kids or to the father of her.
1:05:49 I’m talking to my partner.
1:05:50 And I send songs.
1:05:51 I send jokes.
1:05:52 I send pictures.
1:05:56 And I send just sweet thoughts, you know?
1:06:04 And that creates a kind of a lubrication that I still hold you as my lover, not just as
1:06:06 my life partner.
1:06:12 And it creates that erotic space in which we see each other with different eyes.
1:06:18 And that in itself is often very sensual and creates a permission in which people then
1:06:24 start to say different things that they haven’t felt they can say, you know, the grand paradox
1:06:32 is that the idea is greater intimacy would normally free us to greater sexual freedom
1:06:34 and sexual openness.
1:06:37 But in fact, that is not necessarily the case.
1:06:43 The more we start to feel intimate with each other and we become close and we worry about
1:06:48 each other and we are afraid of each other’s judgment, and the more sometimes we actually
1:06:50 become less open.
1:06:55 Many of us were more open in the beginning than afterwards, which is a paradox.
1:06:59 And so then the question becomes, how do we reopen?
1:07:05 How do we start to talk again about things which over time we stop talking about supposedly
1:07:10 because you should know and it’s assumed and we become uncomfortable about it?
1:07:16 And I think that what my sessions are about and what I think I do actually in the podcast
1:07:23 as well is show how you how you make two people who think they know a lot suddenly listen
1:07:27 to each other again and realize that the one that is next to you is actually forever somewhat
1:07:31 mysterious and elusive if you just want to remain curious.
1:07:34 Does part of that come back to the narratives?
1:07:40 It’s almost as if at the beginning, our narratives are wide open and we see you as everything,
1:07:41 including all of your likes and desires.
1:07:47 And then as we spend more time with you, I’m thinking, possibly we start to identify,
1:07:53 oh, you’re a mother, you’re a wife, and these roles and we see less of this big broad person
1:07:57 and that shapes what we see and how we interact.
1:07:59 I completely agree.
1:08:04 I completely, I mean, you know, you see people sitting with friends.
1:08:10 Sometimes I go for lunch and I sit in a restaurant and, you know, or I go to a simple spot like
1:08:15 that and I just see people looking at each other, talking to each other, well-dressed,
1:08:18 animated, engaged, attentive.
1:08:22 And I’m thinking, who is here with their partner?
1:08:23 Probably very few.
1:08:24 Right?
1:08:28 And I’m thinking, what they’re going to do is they’re going to be so engaged throughout
1:08:31 the day and then they’re going to go home and basically they’re going to bring the leftovers
1:08:32 home.
1:08:37 And at home, they’re going to talk very little actually or they’re going to check in on the
1:08:39 day and on the logistics and all of that.
1:08:40 I’ll give you an example.
1:08:41 It was really interesting.
1:08:43 I had it myself recently.
1:08:50 I’m sitting with friends and with my husband and we were talking about playing as children.
1:08:54 And one of the people said, you know, I actually, I don’t remember playing as children like
1:08:55 that.
1:08:56 I didn’t have characters.
1:08:57 We had come out of a movie.
1:09:03 I didn’t have characters and I was more kind of a sport and I was very, very competitive.
1:09:10 And my husband son, he says, oh, me as a child, I was a different person every day.
1:09:15 And then proceeded to talk about the kind of games that they played in the woods behind
1:09:18 the house as children and how they were in fantasy play and all of that.
1:09:22 And I listened attentively like that.
1:09:29 Just like a story that he may have told me or not, you know, and we talked about basically
1:09:35 the power of imagination and to enter other roles and how much we do this as children and
1:09:41 how, you know, actually sexuality is one of the places where people have it as adults,
1:09:43 you know, in their, in their homes.
1:09:47 And I just thought to myself, would we have had this conversation alone where I would
1:09:51 say, what was, what did you do when you played as a kid?
1:09:57 Yet people raise children together, but they don’t ask that question necessarily.
1:10:01 And it’s such a revealing question, how you played as a child.
1:10:04 What kind of, what, did you allow yourself to play?
1:10:07 Did you have the permission to play, was it safe enough to play?
1:10:10 And what kind of play did you engage yourself in?
1:10:13 Boy, does that tell you an amazing story about a person.
1:10:15 It’s a great dinner conversation.
1:10:16 Highly recommend.
1:10:21 I was thinking, I wonder how our relationships would change if we started giving our partners
1:10:26 the best hour of our day and waking up an hour earlier and spending it with them instead
1:10:31 of the sort of like 10 to 11 PM leftovers, as you called it.
1:10:34 I wonder if we went to bed an hour earlier and woke up an hour earlier and spent that
1:10:37 time with our partners, how that would change our relationships.
1:10:42 And we would have, we’d be the most alert and the most attentive and probably the most
1:10:43 curious.
1:10:44 Massive.
1:10:46 I mean, that’s been studied.
1:10:50 And we know, we know that couples that have rituals every Wednesday at five o’clock we
1:10:53 meet in the bar and have a drink.
1:10:56 Every Tuesday we have lunch.
1:11:00 Every month we leave a night away, depends on what they can afford, what they can do.
1:11:05 But those who have that ritual in place, which really states, no matter what else goes on
1:11:12 in our life, we have a dedicated time that is ours where we check in with each other,
1:11:13 whatever we do.
1:11:16 You know, we go rowboating, whatever, whatever.
1:11:22 But it’s very clear that those who’ve done that for like decades on end, now, you know,
1:11:25 you could say it’s because they did it that they are stronger or it’s because they’re
1:11:26 stronger that they do it.
1:11:29 I think those things interact with each other.
1:11:32 But it’s, I don’t know if I would do it morning and night.
1:11:36 It depends on what other people are living in the homes.
1:11:43 But I know that if people have a regularly dedicated time that says, we matter.
1:11:49 And it’s not everything else comes first and we come last, which is what is often the case
1:11:53 for many couples, that that makes a huge difference.
1:11:55 And why does it matter?
1:11:59 Because this is the first time in the history of human relationships that the quality of
1:12:04 the relationship in the couple is what will determine if the family will survive.
1:12:07 Oh, that’s interesting.
1:12:14 For most of history, family life existed regardless of if the couple likes, gets along or doesn’t.
1:12:19 At this point, your family will exist if the couple is relatively content.
1:12:20 Something on that.
1:12:25 So if you invest in the couple, you actually preserve the family.
1:12:30 And what people do is they put all the energy in the family when there is family or in the
1:12:32 work or in everything else.
1:12:35 And the couple is often left gasping on the vine.
1:12:39 And then we need to talk about consciousness.
1:12:40 But it’s neglect.
1:12:42 It’s, it’s, it’s the other way around.
1:12:48 It’s, it’s really, if you look at most people, the couple often will come last.
1:12:51 I hate to end with conscious uncoupling, but I do want to get to it because we had a lot
1:12:55 of questions from readers and listeners about conscious uncoupling.
1:12:57 So what is conscious uncoupling?
1:12:58 What does it mean?
1:12:59 How does it work?
1:13:01 And why is it proven effective?
1:13:08 In season three, I have a whole episode that is called the happy divorce.
1:13:15 And it’s actually a couple that is getting along better now that they are no longer married
1:13:17 than they were when they were married.
1:13:22 And they actually remain very involved as a couple, partly because now that they’re
1:13:28 not married, they can finally free themselves of all the restrictions and assumptions that
1:13:32 they had about what is expected from them in marriage.
1:13:37 It’s very, it’s like they liberated themselves from the constraint of the, of the definition
1:13:38 called marriage.
1:13:42 And so now they can finally have the relationship they want.
1:13:46 So I highly recommend it, it really will explain that.
1:13:52 But for me, the conscious uncoupling is the idea that there needs to be a way for people
1:14:00 to at some point choose to separate without us still thinking that longevity is the main
1:14:06 marker for success, that if you meet at a funeral home at the end of life, then it means
1:14:15 you had a good relationship and that every breakup or separation or divorce is a failure.
1:14:17 I think it’s that that needs to be challenged.
1:14:18 We live way too long.
1:14:21 We live twice as long as a hundred years ago.
1:14:27 And not all of us will necessarily only have one relationship in adult relationship.
1:14:29 You know, we will have two or three, many of us.
1:14:35 And some of us will do it with the same person, but others will sometimes change.
1:14:41 And if you can leave and to the best of your ability, wish good to the other person, wish
1:14:48 them well and wish you well, then you actually are more prepared for the next relationship.
1:14:54 The more you remain tied in your bitterness, you know, the more you bring that with you.
1:15:00 The way people leave the previous relationships, the quality of the breakups is really at the
1:15:03 heart of how people start the next relationships.
1:15:09 How much they will trust, how they trust, how they collaborate, how they protect themselves,
1:15:15 how they anticipate, you know, what had happened, how much they bring these invisible others
1:15:22 access with them, be they ex-partners, husbands, wives, or boyfriends or founders, you know,
1:15:27 it’s really very interesting to see the parallel of those things.
1:15:29 How should you leave a relationship?
1:15:33 Like, what are the variables that you should be considering when you’re doing that?
1:15:36 We want different things in life.
1:15:43 I still love you, I still care about you, I still respect you, I still have strong feelings
1:15:48 for you, whatever the feelings are, you know, I may not love you anymore to want to live
1:15:52 with you or I may still love you but not want to live with you.
1:15:56 Love life and life is not the same.
1:16:05 So you basically, it depends if you have a family then you know that a divorce is a reorganization
1:16:06 of the family.
1:16:10 It’s the end of the marital unit but not the end of the family, it’s a reorganization
1:16:12 of the family.
1:16:18 If you don’t have a family and it’s two people then it’s about, we’ve come to a place where
1:16:23 one of us or both of us have chosen no longer to be together and the best thing you can
1:16:29 do is not want to destroy the other person as a way to kind of separate and justify it
1:16:33 by vilifying them, demonizing them, etc.
1:16:38 Basically I do this for me, I don’t do this for us, that’s a given.
1:16:43 Or I do this, whatever the reasons, and I wish you well and here are the things that
1:16:48 I take with me of what we have lived together and here are the things that I hope you take
1:16:51 with you of what we share together.
1:16:57 And here is what I wish for you and here is where I think that I could have done better.
1:17:03 If you leave and you seriously only think that it’s all about the other person, you
1:17:04 may be missing something.
1:17:08 It’s very good to know that you too could have done things differently.
1:17:12 And that is honesty by the way, you asked me before about honesty.
1:17:17 Honesty is not only what you have to say about the other person, honesty is also your own
1:17:22 reckoning and your own accountability with where you’ve shown up and where you went absent
1:17:25 and missing in action.
1:17:27 Those things go into the final conversations.
1:17:31 When I do conscious uncoupling in my office, which is basically people who are willing
1:17:37 to be deliberate and intentional about how they part, that’s the idea.
1:17:40 The same way that people do it when they come together.
1:17:46 How people start and how people end are amazingly important psychological bookmarks of their
1:17:48 relational life.
1:17:52 I think that’s a great place to end this conversation.
1:17:53 This was fascinating.
1:17:57 Where can people find out more about you online?
1:18:03 So first is estherporel.com and there you can also subscribe to the newsletter and the
1:18:09 blog or the training program sessions or the workshop for couples, which is called Rick
1:18:16 and Ling Desire and then on all the social channels at estherporel official and on Facebook
1:18:17 and Twitter.
1:18:18 Thank you so much, Esther.
1:18:28 This was a real pleasure and a treat and I had a great time with our conversation.
1:18:34 Wonderful.
1:18:36 Thanks for listening and learning with us.
1:18:45 For a complete list of episodes, show notes, transcripts and more, go to fs.blog/podcast.
1:18:49 The Farnham Street blog is also where you can learn more about my new book, Clear Thinking,
1:18:52 turning ordinary moments into extraordinary results.
1:18:57 It’s a transformative guide that hands you the tools to master your fate, sharpen your
1:19:02 decision making and set yourself up for unparalleled success.
1:19:05 Learn more at fs.blog/clear.
1:19:06 Until next time.
1:19:10 [Music]
1:19:13 (tranquil music)
1:19:21 [BLANK_AUDIO]

0:00:04 So you can’t tell just using, you know, what I would call the grandmother test, you know,
0:00:07 would your grandmother understand this? Well, unless you’re selling to grandmothers,
0:00:11 it doesn’t matter if the grandmother understands it. So some people will say,
0:00:15 well, we need to dumb this down and we need to have it so that anybody understands it.
0:00:20 I super disagree with that in B2B. If I’m selling a specialized thing to specialized buyers,
0:00:35 it just needs to resonate with them. It’s okay if it doesn’t resonate with your grandmother.
0:00:44 Welcome to The Knowledge Project. I’m your host, Shane Parish. In a world where knowledge is
0:00:48 power, this podcast is your toolkit for mastering the best of what other people have already figured
0:00:53 out. If you’re listening to this, it means you’re not a supporting member. Members get early access
0:00:57 to episodes, my personal reflections at the end of episodes, which a lot of people say is quickly
0:01:04 becoming their favorite part, no ads, exclusive content, hand edited transcripts and so much more.
0:01:06 Check out the link in the show notes for more information.
0:01:12 My guest today is April Dunford. Her book, Obviously Awesome, totally changed how I think
0:01:18 about positioning when it comes to business. This interview originally aired as a members-only
0:01:23 episode, but I had so many requests for members to share it with their team at work that I decided
0:01:28 to make it public so everyone can benefit. April is an expert in product positioning,
0:01:34 and this episode goes from high level to very detailed examples. We discuss the critical
0:01:39 role of positioning as a strategic approach, not just a marketing exercise capable of totally
0:01:44 transforming a product’s trajectory. April illustrates this with the example of labeling
0:01:49 a muffin a muffin and not a cake, demonstrating how effective positioning can shift perceptions
0:01:54 and drive sales. If you’re interested in getting more sales, loyal customers and bigger promotions,
0:01:58 this episode is for you. It’s time to listen and learn.
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0:02:24 at freedommobile.ca. Wow, there are so many pans at home sense. These are non-stick, made in Italy.
0:02:30 It’s a sign, we need a new pan. We already have a pan, it works. What we have is an extra stick pan
0:02:35 made of, I don’t know what, everything sticks and burns. Do we seriously have to eat burnt food to
0:02:42 save 20 bucks? It’s 20 bucks? 20 bucks, need I remind you, made in Italy. You don’t need to
0:02:48 tell me, we’re getting this pan. Deal’s so good, everyone approves, only at home sense.
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0:02:59 for streaming lectures all day or binging TV shows all night. Save up to $20 per month on
0:03:09 Rogers Internet. Visit rogers.com for details. We got you, Rogers. I want to start with the basics,
0:03:16 what is positioning? It’s interesting, so I’m a positioning expert and when I started out as
0:03:21 a consultant being a positioning expert, the worst part about that is nobody really knows what
0:03:26 positioning is. They think they do, so people will say positioning, that’s just like messaging,
0:03:31 isn’t it? I’m like, actually, no, it’s not quite that. Or they’ll say positioning is like a tag
0:03:36 line. We’re coming up with a tag line and I’m like, oh gosh, no, there’s a lot of things that we do
0:03:43 that aren’t tagline related. My personal pet peeve is when people talk about brand positioning,
0:03:47 that drives me nuts. There is positioning and there’s branding. Those two things are actually
0:03:53 really separate. So most of the things that we confuse with positioning are actually things we
0:03:59 do with positioning once we’re done with it, but positioning is an input. So if you think about
0:04:04 it this way, if everything we do in marketing and sales is the house, positioning is the foundation
0:04:11 upon which the house is built. So my definition of positioning goes like this. Positioning defines
0:04:19 how your product is the best in the world at delivering something, some value that a well-defined
0:04:24 set of customers cares a lot about. Now that’s a bit of a mouthful. A lot of the folks that I work
0:04:29 with are not marketing people, they’re CEOs of tech companies so they don’t have a background in this
0:04:34 stuff. So I think the best way to think about it is it’s like context setting for products. It’s
0:04:42 the context I position my product in such that customers kind of have an idea like what is this
0:04:47 thing? What’s it all about? Why should I care? It’s a starting point for a conversation with a
0:04:54 customer. Can you give me an example? One of the things that really stuck out to me, I was always
0:04:59 trying to explain to tech company CEOs with a tech company example and whenever I did that,
0:05:05 the tech company CEOs would say well that’s a database and we’re not like a database so I thought
0:05:09 I need some examples that have nothing to do with technology. They’re really simple. So I was trying
0:05:15 to come up with an example and it was on my way to work and I went to Tim Horton’s coffee shop in
0:05:20 Canada. So I’m standing in line and the guy in front of me is ordering breakfast. It’s 8 a.m.
0:05:28 and he orders this thing which is a double chocolate salted caramel muffin and I was like
0:05:35 that is some genius marketing stuff right there. So I’ve got a piece of cake. It is double chocolate
0:05:42 caramel cake but if I put it in the muffin format and I call it a muffin, everything about that is
0:05:49 different. The whole context around it is different. It is socially acceptable to order double chocolate
0:05:56 caramel whatever if you say it’s a muffin because I’m now comparing it differently. So if I said it
0:06:02 was cake, what’s cake? Cake competes with other things that are like dessert. It competes with
0:06:07 ice cream and tiramisu and other things you would order for dessert. What does cake cost? Well in
0:06:13 a restaurant it’s 10 dollars, 15 dollars. Where do I get it? I might go to a bakery but I get it at
0:06:19 a restaurant too. When I’m talking about a muffin, well muffin’s totally different. A muffin’s breakfast
0:06:25 it competes with a bagel and a donut. What do I charge for a muffin? I charge a dollar, two dollars
0:06:32 for a muffin. The whole context around it is different. The product however is the same like
0:06:38 that thing that you’re eating is a piece of cake whether it’s in cake form or muffin form.
0:06:45 So I can choose to position it as a muffin. It’s the same product but the assumptions about that,
0:06:50 the competitors are different, your value is different. The assumptions that customers have
0:06:55 about that product are different because I’ve placed it in a different context. What are the most
0:07:01 common misperceptions about positioning that companies have? I would say the most companies
0:07:07 just don’t think about positioning at all. In the vast majority of cases, the companies that I work
0:07:14 with, the positioning feels obvious. It feels like you couldn’t possibly position it as anything else.
0:07:18 So it started like this. The founder woke up one morning and said, “You know what sucks? Email
0:07:23 sucks. We’re going to make way better email. It’s going to be fantastic and it’s going to fix all
0:07:28 these things I hate about email.” And then they launch it and customers say, “I like this part. I
0:07:34 don’t like this part.” They change it. It evolves over time. Maybe the whole market evolves. If we
0:07:39 fast forward two years from now, the founder and everybody inside of the company still says,
0:07:46 “Email. We’re building this email thing.” But maybe that product actually looks more like chat
0:07:52 because that’s kind of like email too. And so we’ll start having this disconnect where the customer
0:07:57 sees it and the company is saying, “Well, this is email. Look at our amazing email.” And the
0:08:02 customer is like, “I don’t know. That kind of feels like chat. You’re calling email. I feel like
0:08:06 maybe it’s chat and now I’m confused.” And I don’t really know what this thing is anymore.
0:08:12 When the company figures out they have a problem, like, “Oh, maybe this is an email. Maybe we should
0:08:17 reposition it.” Nobody knows what to do at that point because they never deliberately positioned
0:08:22 it or did a thing to decide it was email in the first place. It was just obvious. Of course,
0:08:27 it’s email. That was our idea. That’s what we’re going to do. Product positioning is basically
0:08:33 shaping the environment in the consumer’s mind by which they draw comparisons and know what to
0:08:40 expect. That’s a good way to describe it. It’s a bit like the opening scene of a movie. So you
0:08:43 walk into the movie. Let’s say you’re going to a movie theater. You walk into the movie theater.
0:08:47 You know a little bit about it. You bought a ticket. But the job of the opening scene in the
0:08:52 movie is to set context for the movie because you have these big questions. Where are we? What
0:08:58 time frame is this? Who are these characters? What is the vibe of this whole movie? You need to get
0:09:04 these big questions answered before you can settle in and pay attention to the details of the story.
0:09:10 So if we take, I usually use apocalypse now as the example of a great opening scene. The opening
0:09:14 scene of apocalypse now starts with shot of the beach. It’s palm trees. It’s all nice. It’s lovely.
0:09:19 You walk in and you might think, I know it’s called apocalypse now, but maybe it’s not
0:09:23 apocalypse right now. Maybe it’s apocalypse 30 minutes from now. So you walk in, but suddenly
0:09:29 this thing changes. The music gets a little bit more intense. We see this thing. It looks like
0:09:35 smoke, dust, and you’re like, oh, it’s actually smoke. A helicopter goes by and boom, the beach
0:09:39 is on fire. And all of a sudden, we’re in the middle of the Vietnam War. And then the scene
0:09:44 changes and it’s Martin Sheen. He’s in his hotel room. He’s drinking, smoking. He’s clearly in
0:09:49 distress. He walks over the window. He peeks out the blinds and we get the first line of dialogue,
0:09:54 which is actually his thoughts of the movie. He looks out and he says, Saigon. Shit. I’m still
0:09:59 only in Saigon. Every time I think I’m going to wake up back in the jungle. So here we are. We’re
0:10:06 three minutes into a three and a half hour movie and we know a lot. Where are we? We’re in the middle
0:10:12 of the Vietnam War. Specifically we’re in Saigon. Our lead character has been there before. It didn’t
0:10:17 go so well. He has PTSD. This movie is not going to be funny. It’s going to be kind of intense.
0:10:22 Now I can settle in and pay attention to the details of the story. Positioning works the same
0:10:30 way. If I walked up in Shark Tank or I forget what we call it here in Canada, what’s it called?
0:10:37 Dragon’s Den. So let’s say we have weirdo Dragon’s Den and I’m not allowed to give you my whole pitch
0:10:43 for something. I’m just going to talk about the market category. So the category that the product
0:10:49 is positioned in. So I walk out and I say, I’ve got this amazing thing. It’s revolutionary next
0:10:56 generation thing, but it’s CRM customer relationship management. If you’re tech people and you know
0:11:00 what a CRM is, you will make a whole bunch of assumptions about that product just because I
0:11:05 called it a CRM. So you’ll say, well, you must compete with Salesforce. They’re the absolute
0:11:10 leader in that market, the gorilla in that market. So I will just assume that you compete there.
0:11:15 I will make assumptions about what that product does. I will assume that it tracks deals across a
0:11:20 pipeline. I will assume who the buyer of that is. I’ll assume it’s the head of sales, vice
0:11:26 president of sales. I’ll even make an assumption about the pricing, even though I said nothing about
0:11:32 what that thing is or who the expected customers are of that thing. But if you assume that Salesforce
0:11:38 is my big competitor, because they’re the absolute leader in that space, I’m not charging more for
0:11:45 my CRM than Salesforce is. So this is how this works. What it does is I position that product
0:11:52 in a market category. That market category has set off a set of assumptions in the customer’s
0:11:59 mind about that product. If I do this well, it sets off a set of assumptions about that product
0:12:04 that are true, and that’s great. Now I’ve saved marketing and sales a whole lot of time, energy,
0:12:09 effort. I don’t have to tell you exactly who my competitors are. It’s assumed. I don’t have to
0:12:14 list every single feature. A lot of that stuff is considered table stakes in the category.
0:12:20 But it works the same way if I do a terrible job of it. So if I do a terrible job of it,
0:12:25 I position my product in a market category such that it sets off a set of assumptions about my
0:12:31 product that are not true, now marketing and sales has their work cut out for them on doing this
0:12:35 damage that you’re positioning is already done, where they’re like, no, no, no, we don’t do that.
0:12:38 No, no, no, I know you think that. No, no, no, it’s not that. It’s this other thing.
0:12:44 So if I’m trying to compete with Salesforce, should I do that in a way where I have a product?
0:12:50 It’s probably inferior because I’m a startup. Right. And so we can’t go toe to toe on every
0:12:57 aspect. How do we position that in a way to a consumer, which in this case would be a business?
0:13:04 A business that’s a buyer. The most common way that tech companies successfully position
0:13:12 is they find an underserved sub-segment of the market. And then they attempt to dominate that
0:13:18 sub-segment and then push out from there. So I can give you an example. I worked at a company
0:13:26 called Janna Systems. And at the time, this was quite a while ago. So Sebal or Salesforce was
0:13:30 a small company at that point and only selling to the very low end of the market. But the gorilla
0:13:36 in that space at the time was a big, big company in Silicon Valley called Sebal. And so they were
0:13:41 fantastic company, two billion revenue, fastest company to ever get to a billion revenue in the
0:13:47 history of Silicon Valley. Amazing success story. They were positioned as enterprise CRM. They were
0:13:53 the absolute kings of enterprise CRM. We had a product that was also enterprise CRM. So we would
0:13:58 position ourselves as enterprise CRM. And so not surprisingly, we would get a meeting with a customer
0:14:04 and the customer would say, okay, so your enterprise CRM, their enterprise CRM, how are you better?
0:14:11 And the answer to that question was we simply weren’t better than them. We had, you know,
0:14:16 we had two million revenue, they had two billion revenue, they had 400 customers, we had six,
0:14:22 they had thousands of employees, I was employee 26 or something. I mean, we were just no comparison
0:14:31 at all. However, we had a feature that they could not copy that was really interesting.
0:14:36 And we thought it would be really valuable to customers. We didn’t really understand the value
0:14:41 of it for customers. But we always showed it in meetings. So we go in, we show the thing, it’s
0:14:45 this neat feature. And we say, Hey, here’s the feature, it’s really great. And customers would
0:14:50 look at us and say, Hey, that looks cool. What do we do with that? And we’d say anything you want.
0:14:57 And then the customer would say, Okay, well, that’s confusing. What else you got? And then we’d say,
0:15:00 Well, you know, we’re really cheap. If you want us to be really cheap, because we’re desperate to
0:15:05 close business, how we got out of that mess and eventually landed on positioning that was really
0:15:13 good for us is we, we sold a deal to an investment bank. And it was kind of by accident. We hired a
0:15:18 sales rep that had a relationship with somebody very senior at the investment bank, that we did a
0:15:25 good pitch in there, we showed them our magical feature. And what that customer taught us is
0:15:31 that feature was actually very, very valuable to investment banks and the way that they wanted
0:15:36 to manage relationships inside the bank. Once we figured that out, then it was like, okay,
0:15:41 we actually have a feature that’s really, really valuable for a sub segment of this big market.
0:15:48 And we knew at the time, Siebel couldn’t copy us on that feature. So we narrowed down the positioning
0:15:53 and instead of saying we were enterprise CRM, we were CRM for investment banks. And the great
0:15:59 thing about that is that we never got into a real head to head against those guys again. So we would
0:16:05 come in and say, Hey, we’re CRM for investment banks. And the customer would say, Oh, well,
0:16:10 wait, doesn’t Siebel do that? Like, don’t you guys compete with Siebel? And we’d say, Oh, Siebel,
0:16:18 we love those guys. So big, so smart, so many people. They’re like the world’s greatest general
0:16:23 purpose CRM for like call centers and manufacturing plants. And I don’t know what, but not you,
0:16:28 Wolf of Wall Street, you need something special. Let me show you this thing that we would show them
0:16:34 the thing and talk about the thing. And so our plan was to absolutely dominate that space.
0:16:38 And then once we had dominated that, we would be building the product and making the product
0:16:44 more mature. And our dominance and investment banking was going to allow us to get into retail
0:16:48 banking. So we were going to expand the market from there. And then if we were successful in
0:16:53 retail banking, that would allow us to get into insurance. At that point, we would reposition
0:16:59 ourselves as CRM for financial services. If we were successful there, then we’d be big enough
0:17:03 and successful enough to challenge the market leader and take over and be enterprise CRM,
0:17:10 which was still the long term goal. So is this about shrinking your target market or your ecosystem
0:17:14 in a way in which you’re going to compete to one where you have an advantage or an edge over somebody
0:17:20 else and then expanding from there? Often in technology companies, that’s exactly what we’re
0:17:30 doing. That seems like very intuitive. There’s a lot of reasons. So the biggest one is people get
0:17:37 very worried about what we call the addressable market. So if I was trying to fundraise and went
0:17:43 to an investor and said, look, I want to build a thing and it’s just CRM for investment banks,
0:17:47 the investor would say, well, how many investment banks are there in the world? I need you to be
0:17:51 a billion dollar business. That’s not a billion dollar business. I don’t know how you’re going to
0:17:59 do that. For an investor, you need to talk about the long term story. Where do we want to be in
0:18:06 10 years? What is our path to getting to be a billion dollars? And if I look at that example I
0:18:12 just gave you, we had that long term vision. We were going to be a billion dollar company eventually.
0:18:18 But for most companies, when you start, I’m not trying to do a billion dollars this year. I’m
0:18:23 trying to do a million. I’m trying to close five deals. I’m trying to close 10 deals. And in order
0:18:28 to close any business at all, you have to be the best. That’s something. The customer’s not going
0:18:33 to come in and say, you know, there’s these three options and I’ll pick this one that’s just okay.
0:18:39 No, the customer says they want the best thing for their particular thing. So great positioning
0:18:45 is all about defining where do you win? Where are you the best in the world? And even if that
0:18:51 market is very small at the beginning, you need to have a pathway to get to this bigger market. So
0:18:56 I’ll win here, then I’ll win here, then I’ll win here, and the market will expand. So the vast
0:19:02 majority of companies that we know did exactly that. Salesforce is actually a great example.
0:19:10 When they started out, the enterprise part of CRM was absolutely dominated by a big competitor.
0:19:15 So it didn’t make sense for them to enter that market there. Instead, they entered the market
0:19:21 at the very bottom. So they were selling to small, medium businesses. And their secret sauce or the
0:19:26 thing they could do better than anyone else is they were one of the world’s first SaaS businesses.
0:19:33 So it was hosted in the cloud. The value to the customer was that you could get CRM just like
0:19:39 the big companies had, even if you didn’t have an IT department to babysit it. So their big slogan
0:19:44 of no software was all about that. They were selling to tiny companies that had no IT department that
0:19:50 could never touch CRM. And there was no competition there. So it was very easy for them to go in.
0:19:56 And I was working at Siebel at the time. And when they started down at the bottom, we were like,
0:20:00 we don’t care about that market. We’re not going to chase them down there. We sell great big
0:20:09 million-dollar enterprise deals. We had no interest in that. Our goal was to just sit in
0:20:15 the very top of the stack and just sell all of that. And that was it. So of course, what Siebel
0:20:20 did was they started at the bottom and then crawled their way up. That’s fascinating. So
0:20:26 basically to compete from a staffing point of view, from a VC funding point of view,
0:20:32 you sort of say our total market is huge, but then on a practical basis to develop a product.
0:20:36 Right. You have to start small in a lend and expand sort of fashion.
0:20:42 Generally, if you look at most, the vast majority of successful companies,
0:20:49 they’ve started by dominating a market that was too small for the market leader to care about.
0:20:54 They dominated that market. And then what they did was they proceeded to push the boundaries of
0:21:00 that market and creep closer and closer and closer to whoever the market leader is.
0:21:05 What’s the difference between B2B positioning and B2C, like business to business positioning
0:21:10 versus business to consumer positioning? There’s a lot of things that are different.
0:21:16 Kind of, if we think about the core of good positioning, the core of good positioning
0:21:22 is thinking about what your differentiated value is, meaning the value you can deliver
0:21:27 for a customer that no one else can. And then great positioning puts that in a context that a
0:21:34 customer can understand it. If we think about value in B2B, it’s very different than value
0:21:41 in consumer products. Value can be all kinds of things in consumer products. I might buy shoes
0:21:47 because I just like the color green, man, or I’m buying consumer things because I think it makes
0:21:53 me look rich, or it’s going to get me a date, or there’s a lot of different things that are valuable
0:22:00 in consumer. In business to business, it’s very different. In business to business, typically,
0:22:07 there isn’t one person buying. Typically, there’s a group of people. The average B2B deal,
0:22:14 there’s five to 11 stakeholders in the deal. If I’m buying accounting software, my boss comes
0:22:18 to me and says, “Hey, I don’t like the accounting software we have right now. You go buy us some.”
0:22:25 That’s terrifying. My neck is on the line. If I make a bad choice here, I look bad in front of
0:22:30 my boss. The end users don’t like it. Maybe the software screws up. I get passed over from a
0:22:37 promotion, I might actually get fired. There’s stakes in a B2B purchase decision. The way we
0:22:43 think about value is also really different. I can’t go to my boss and say, “I just like the vibe of
0:22:51 this software. I have to make a business case to my boss for why we should buy it.” In businesses,
0:22:55 I mean, we kind of only have two things. We’re either helping you make money or we’re helping
0:23:03 you save money, and that’s about it. I might make a very irrational decision about a product,
0:23:09 and often we do make very irrational decisions even in B2B about a product,
0:23:15 but I can’t say that to my boss. I still have to go to my boss and say, “Here’s why we picked it.
0:23:19 Here’s the list of reasons.” There needs to be some justification. That’s exactly it.
0:23:26 That’s explainable to somebody else. Exactly. In consumer, consumer marketers talk a lot about
0:23:35 emotion, invoking emotion. In B2B, the granddaddy of emotions is fear. Fear of making a poor choice.
0:23:40 Fear of looking bad in front of my boss. Fear of getting fired. Fear of making a mistake
0:23:47 drives a lot of decisions in B2B. This is why incumbents, like whoever’s the leader in the market,
0:23:55 has such an advantage in B2B technology because it is the safe decision. Nobody is going to get
0:24:01 fired for picking Salesforce at this point. They have double the market share of their closest
0:24:06 competitor. You can go to your boss and say, “Look, I looked at all the other options,
0:24:10 but I picked Salesforce because everybody uses Salesforce. They have a big ecosystem.
0:24:14 They have the best this, the best that. They’re the biggest. It’s the safe choice to make.”
0:24:19 If you’re trying to compete against Salesforce, that’s really hard gravity to pull against.
0:24:27 It’s very risky to pick you if the choice is you versus Salesforce or an established market leader.
0:24:33 When you think about consumer positioning, I’m really interested and I know this isn’t your area
0:24:40 of expertise, but when you walk into Louis Vuitton or Mads, how do you think about positioning
0:24:48 such that they can charge $30, $40,000 for a first? The $30,000, $40,000 is the point.
0:24:56 I’m not buying that bag because I think it’s $30,000 better than a bag that costs 20 bucks,
0:25:02 although it probably is finely crafted and all that sort of thing. A lot of times, I think luxury
0:25:10 goods are really about a signal to the market. It’s like I’m a rich, successful person that has
0:25:17 made enough money that I can carry a Louis Vuitton bag or wear a Rolex watch or whatever luxury
0:25:24 things are. It’s outside of my wheelhouse, but again, when we look at consumer stuff,
0:25:32 value comes in all sorts of forms. We buy things in very rational ways in consumer products.
0:25:39 We’re also irrational in B2B too, but most of that irrationality is around fear. It’s like,
0:25:43 I just don’t want to make a bad choice here and look bad in front of my boss or do something
0:25:47 that the company’s all mad at me about later. The thing we have in B2B that’s actually a real
0:25:57 problem is it’s so scary to purchase something in B2B that 50 to 70% of the time, a deal that gets
0:26:05 started actually ends in no decision. The no decision isn’t voted to stay with the current
0:26:10 product that they have. It’s usually no decision because everything looked the same. I couldn’t
0:26:15 confidently make a decision that I was sure I wasn’t going to get in trouble for. It’s easier
0:26:19 to just go back to your boss and say, you know what, now’s not a good time. Let’s buy the accounting
0:26:25 package next year. We don’t need to get into this now. The person who’s been tasked with making that
0:26:29 decision is just crossing their fingers that they don’t have to be on the hook to make the
0:26:33 decision next year. When the decision comes up again, like, okay, let’s go and look again,
0:26:38 they just don’t want to be the person that has to stick their neck out to advocate for something,
0:26:45 which is totally different from how we buy a pack of gum or buy fizzy water at the corner store
0:26:51 or buy a purse. The downside there is really small and at work, the downside’s huge and the
0:26:57 upside’s like nothing. Right. If you advocate for a different product that’s outside of standard
0:27:03 best practices or standard industry standard, then if you’re successful, everybody forgets
0:27:10 that you advocated for it, but if it fails, you probably lose your job. Exactly. In rare cases,
0:27:18 you’ll see senior executives at companies where their role is to change things. So their role is
0:27:23 transformation in some way, innovation, transformation, or a digital transformation.
0:27:28 You see a lot of companies right now that have been tasked by the CEO where there are teams that
0:27:34 have been tasked by the CEO to figure this AI thing out and make sure we’re not falling behind.
0:27:42 In those cases, the person driving that program, if it is successful, is going to get a promotion,
0:27:47 they’re going to get a raise, it’s going to look really good on them if they can successfully do it.
0:27:54 If it’s not successful, then they’re a bum. Would you say the biggest mistake then that you see,
0:27:58 especially with software products, is competing and positioning in too big of a market?
0:28:05 That’s one of the things. I think a lot of times, if you look at the positioning that the company
0:28:12 has, the biggest mistake is not deliberately positioning. I think a lot of companies start
0:28:19 looking at their product in isolation almost, like there are no competitors. You see it a lot
0:28:24 in the way companies do sales pitches. They’ll walk in and they’ll give this sales pitch. They’ll
0:28:28 talk about the product with this great feature, that great feature, this great feature. It’s
0:28:35 amazing. You should buy us. The buyer on the other side of that conversation, they’re terrified of
0:28:41 making a bad choice. They’re sitting there going, “Well, that’s all great, but I just had three
0:28:47 other sales calls with your competitors. Some of that stuff sounds the same.” We walk into these
0:28:52 situations as vendors in general, thinking that the question we’re trying to answer is,
0:28:58 “Why pick us?” The real question we have to answer is, “Why pick us over the other guys?”
0:29:05 I think most companies don’t really wrestle with that. They don’t sit down, put themselves in the
0:29:10 shoes of a buyer, recognize how hard it is to make a purchase decision, and think,
0:29:15 “How do we position versus everybody else?” It’s really easy to go with the incumbent,
0:29:21 the largest. Then you have to basically get people out of that default sometimes.
0:29:26 Exactly. That’s fascinating. Can you tell me what a time when repositioning
0:29:36 a product failed and what happened? I worked at a company where we were building a thing.
0:29:42 The original conception of this thing was that it was a database, but it was a really fancy database
0:29:49 that could do a certain kind of query really, really fast. It was originally developed for a bank.
0:29:58 There were a set of queries that the bank did that were so difficult to process that they would
0:30:04 run them on Friday and the query took all weekend to get the answer back. You’re asking the data
0:30:10 this question and it took three days to get the answer back. These folks, a couple of super genius
0:30:16 database guys, came up with this database to fix that problem and it could run that query
0:30:23 in seconds. It’s amazing technology, fantastic. They got patents on it. Nobody’s seen a database
0:30:29 like this before, really, really innovative. The original conception of this thing was that
0:30:38 it was a database. I joined as the head of marketing and we were having a terrible time
0:30:43 selling. The positioning was terrible. Nobody wanted a new database. There’s an absolute giant
0:30:47 in that market. They’re called Oracle. Everybody’s standard on Oracle. Everybody gets certified on
0:30:53 Oracle. Companies don’t want to have multiple database solutions to do something. We would come
0:30:59 in and say, “We’ve got this nifty new database,” and the customers would say, “Well, we’re Oracle’s
0:31:02 shop. We’re not married to Oracle. We don’t think Oracle is the best thing, but we can’t bring in
0:31:09 another platform.” We eventually repositioned it as a data warehouse, which is a specific,
0:31:13 purpose-built kind of database for doing analytics, which is exactly what we’re doing when we’re
0:31:19 doing this big query. We did that repositioning and it was much, much better, much better.
0:31:25 First call was better, much better than we were doing before. The problem was when we looked at,
0:31:32 we had an assumption that if you had these queries that took three days, you would want to be able
0:31:37 to do them in 10 seconds versus three days. It turned out that assumption was wrong. When we went
0:31:43 to the other banks and said, “Hey, you’re doing this thing and it takes three days,” you could use
0:31:48 this thing and it would take three seconds and they’re like, “It’s okay. Nobody’s really doing
0:31:53 anything over the weekend anyway. We don’t need the answer right away.” Then we had this question,
0:31:58 “Well, who needs the answer right away?” We had never asked ourselves that question. Our whole
0:32:06 value proposition is speed, doing this query fast. It turned out the only customers that needed the
0:32:14 answer right away were customers that were doing the query for customer service. Their customer
0:32:17 calls in, they’re on the phone and they’re like, “Hey, I need to know this thing. Well, I don’t want
0:32:24 to wait three days to get the answer. They want to do it in seconds.” Then we looked at the universe
0:32:30 of companies that had data of a scale where our thing was appropriate and needed this query
0:32:35 answered to do customer service and there was literally 10 companies on the planet and that
0:32:43 was it. The addressable market was so small that it wasn’t a viable business. We had essentially
0:32:49 built a product that nobody wanted. It was neat. It was really innovative. It was really cool,
0:32:52 but there was no market for it. It didn’t solve a problem that anybody really had.
0:32:57 So, if you’re a startup, you have limited resources, and how do you go about identifying
0:33:00 those pain points then to better position your product?
0:33:10 The idea behind the famous book on this is Eric Reese’s Lean Startup. The way the Lean Startup
0:33:15 describes this is you should be out doing something called customer discovery. Before
0:33:21 you write anything, you should be out interviewing customers or potential customers and validating
0:33:28 the assumptions that you have about this market. Is this a thing that people would pay for? How
0:33:34 much would you pay for it? Are there a big enough group of people that have this pain to solve it?
0:33:40 In a perfect world, that’s what we would all be doing, but often products just don’t happen that
0:33:47 way. Often products like this particular company, they had built it custom. They had done the deal
0:33:52 with the bank in such a way that they owned the IP. It seemed like a good idea. They had a bunch of
0:33:56 assumptions baked in there. They never tested those assumptions until later, but it was good
0:34:00 enough to go raise money. They just went and raised some money and, “Okay, now we’re going. We’re doing
0:34:06 a thing.” So, I don’t think a lot of startups do enough customer discovery at the beginning to make
0:34:11 sure that they’ve got a thing that people really want. The second thing is that even if you do do
0:34:17 customer discovery, it’s really hard. It’s really difficult. Customers will sometimes tell you things
0:34:22 that aren’t true, where they’ll say, “Yes, yes, we would buy that and we would buy it for this much.”
0:34:26 But by the time you’ve actually built the thing and you have a prototype of the thing and you get
0:34:29 it in customer’s hands, they’re like, “Actually, there’s a different way to do this and we decided
0:34:34 to do it this different way.” You know that customers have lots of options. So, startups are
0:34:41 very hard because we’re dealing with uncertainty. We’re dealing with a certain amount of assumptions.
0:34:46 Our assumptions may prove to be wrong and we have to be able to move and pivot and look for other
0:34:51 things. Sometimes, our first crack at it isn’t going to work and we’re going to have to go back
0:34:56 to the drawing board and kind of invent something else and see if that works. How do you position
0:35:03 your product on a page? A lot of B2B starts with a sales rep or somebody looking at a page for a
0:35:08 product. How do you position that product? You probably, I don’t know, 10 seconds to get somebody’s
0:35:13 attention. Yeah, 10 seconds to get somebody’s attention. So, the way I think about positioning
0:35:20 is this way. I like to break positioning up into a set of components. So, the component
0:35:26 pieces of positioning are competitive alternatives. So, if you didn’t exist, what would a customer do?
0:35:31 And then we need to understand what makes us different, which is our differentiated capabilities,
0:35:35 like what do we got that the alternatives don’t have? The thing that we really need to understand
0:35:40 is why those features matter. So, what is the value that those features can deliver for our
0:35:44 business? And you mean the features that you have that nobody else. That no one else has. So,
0:35:49 that’s our differentiated value. It says, look, we can do this for your business and no one else
0:35:54 can do it. And then the next thing we have to understand is who cares a lot about that? Because
0:35:57 just because we have that thing, if only three people on the planet care about that, that’s not
0:36:03 a viable business. So, we need to understand that. So, what is it? What are the characteristics of a
0:36:07 target company that make them really, really care a lot about the thing that only we can do?
0:36:14 Once we have all of that, then we need to build messaging around that. So, if we think about
0:36:20 typical homepage of a product, it needs to communicate what is the value that we can
0:36:26 deliver that no one else can. And is this for me, me as the browser, the person that’s there?
0:36:32 So, I need to communicate who’s this for? Why is it different? Why is it better? And that’s
0:36:37 really hard to do on one page. You don’t have a lot of copy to do that. You don’t have a lot of
0:36:42 ways to do that. But that’s what we really have to focus on. The biggest mistake I see technology
0:36:50 companies making is they’re so certain that their features are valuable and people will just understand
0:36:54 what the value of those features are. They’re talking about the features, but they’re not talking
0:37:00 about why the features matter. So, they’re not talking about the benefit. Exactly. So, if I
0:37:06 use the example of the CRM company I was talking about earlier, we had a feature. We just assumed
0:37:11 that customers would look at that feature and know what the value was. But they didn’t. They
0:37:16 didn’t. And so, all we did was talk about the feature. We’re like, “Look, you can model relationships
0:37:22 this way.” And they were like, “But why? Why do I actually want to do that? What’s that good for?”
0:37:25 And we’re like, “What’s good for anything you want to do with it?” Like, you figure it out.
0:37:33 And I think in technology companies, we’re very technical people. We know a lot about technology.
0:37:38 We get so close to it. We just assume that the customer can make the translation from feature
0:37:42 to value. But a lot of times they can’t. And in particularly with something that’s
0:37:48 really innovative, really new, they’ve never seen it before, we’re going to have to help them understand
0:37:52 why those features are important. If we think about a lot of consumer tech,
0:37:59 we’ve been trained how to do this. Like, if I tell you I’ve got a phone on my camera and it’s
0:38:05 2,000 megapixels, you know 2,000 megapixels is way better than 100 megapixels. You’ve been trained.
0:38:11 We know that. But the first time anybody ever talked to you about megapixels, you had no idea
0:38:16 what a megapixel even was. Companies had to teach you why that was important.
0:38:20 It’s interesting because that’s sort of gone away at this point. Like, nobody’s asking how many
0:38:23 megapixels are in their phone. At one point, it was like a big differentiator.
0:38:31 But that’s a good sort of segue into my next question, which is, how has the digital transformation
0:38:35 over the last 25, 30 years changed positioning?
0:38:42 I think the fundamentals of positioning haven’t changed at all, is my opinion. If you read the
0:38:46 original book on positioning, it was called Positioning the Battle for Your Mind by these
0:38:53 guys, Reason Trout. They came up with the concept. They published a book in 1982. And if you read that
0:38:59 book, the first chapter talks about why do we have to worry about positioning? Why is positioning
0:39:07 important? And they talked about how it’s important because previous to that, in any given market
0:39:13 category, there were only a handful of products. So consumers just made a choice between the two
0:39:18 or three choices that they had. But it wasn’t all that important for companies to really differentiate
0:39:25 between those choices. But in 1982, oh my gosh, we have so many choices now, positioning is really
0:39:31 important because the customer has thousands of choices, hundreds of choices. Now, if we look at
0:39:41 the difference between 1982 to now, that has just exploded. Like, I think it’s much more important
0:39:48 now to really establish that position. It’s much harder now to stand out in a world where
0:39:54 we’re exposed to millions of advertising messages a day. Like, think about digital stuff. I am
0:40:01 constantly bombarded with messages from companies. I cannot avoid it. It’s millions a day compared
0:40:10 to 1982. So in order for customers to really stick out, sorry, in order for companies to really stand
0:40:16 out in a market that is so crowded and so overwhelmed with messages from brands,
0:40:22 we’re going to have to get really succinct on what is this thing? What is the value of this thing?
0:40:26 Who is it for? How is it different from the other things in the market? And we’re going to have to
0:40:32 be so clear about that to break out from the noise. And why you should trust us? Because if we’re a
0:40:36 small company, we’ve got like five employees and we’re competing with Salesforce, but we have one
0:40:41 particular feature that they don’t have and we have our sort of positioning at our niche market.
0:40:45 Well, now there’s still a brand issue because it’s like nobody’s ever heard of you.
0:40:52 A lot of this stuff. So if I go back to that example of that CRM company I was in,
0:40:59 the great thing about that was we managed to establish ourselves in this little bubble
0:41:06 of investment banking. And once we had done two customers in investment banking,
0:41:11 we were the kings of investment banking with only two customers. Because we could walk in and say,
0:41:17 well, you know, Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch, what do they got? They got a bunch of call centers
0:41:23 and a bunch of manufacturing. And so we could put a circle around it and kind of make like the rest
0:41:28 of the market doesn’t matter to you, investment banker, like you don’t want the world’s greatest
0:41:34 general purpose CRM. You want the world’s greatest CRM for people like you. That’s how we win in this
0:41:38 thing. If I walk in and say, we’re just CRM, we’re CRM for everybody and we’re just the greatest
0:41:44 CRM ever, nobody wants that. It’s like you’re changing the frame almost like taking up a
0:41:49 photographer. Like there’s this great quote about, you know, what makes a great photograph is knowing
0:41:53 where to stand. And it’s like you’re basically almost picking somebody up and you’re being like,
0:41:58 look at this way. Yeah, this is the this is the Warren Buffett quote, you know, how do you beat
0:42:04 Bobby Fisher? You play him at any game but chess. How do you go about evaluating product positioning?
0:42:12 This is an interesting question. People want me to look at their website and tell me whether or
0:42:19 not their positioning is good. And in B2B, that is almost impossible. Almost impossible. So you
0:42:26 have this thing, it serves a market, I am not the buyer for that thing. So I could look at your website
0:42:31 and say, I don’t have a clue what this is all about. But the thing you sell is for airplane
0:42:36 mechanics. It’s fine if I don’t have a clue about that. It needs to resonate with airplane mechanics.
0:42:42 So you can’t tell just using, you know, what I would call the grandmother test, you know, would
0:42:46 your grandmother understand this? Well, unless you’re selling to grandmothers, it doesn’t matter
0:42:51 if the grandmother understands it. So some people will say, well, we need to dumb this down and we
0:42:56 need to have it so that anybody understands it. I super disagree with that in B2B. If I’m selling
0:43:01 a specialized thing to specialized buyers, it just needs to resonate with them. It’s okay
0:43:05 if it doesn’t resonate with your grandmother. What it does mean is if we’re trying to assess the
0:43:15 positioning, what really matters is when we are, when we have a brand new prospect that comes in
0:43:20 that doesn’t really know too much about us, how long does it take us before it clicks?
0:43:25 And they’re like, Oh, I get it. Oh, I get why you’re different. Oh, I get why that’s good. Oh,
0:43:33 I get why in my career. So I used to be an in-house vice president of marketing. And so the latter
0:43:38 part of my career, I was very focused on positioning. So if the CEO hired me, they hired me because I
0:43:42 could talk intelligently about how we were going to fix this positioning. I would come on board
0:43:47 and what everybody would want me to do is just run campaigns, April, make the revenue go up to the
0:43:52 right. And I was always worried about running campaigns on weak positioning because it’s a
0:43:57 bit like pouring water into the leaky bucket. And so what I would do to assess the positioning,
0:44:03 whether it was good or not, is I would walk over to sales. And there would be people doing sales
0:44:08 people doing first calls with customers. And you hear it in a first call. And it sounds like this,
0:44:15 your sales rep is doing a great job. They have a pitch customers there. And the sales rep has
0:44:21 a pitch that’s maybe a dozen slides long. And they’re saying, okay, here’s what we are. Here’s
0:44:25 what we do. We do this thing. They’re getting into the pitch. And you’ll see the customer. If it’s a
0:44:32 video call, you’ll see the customer and they’ll be making this confused face. And what’ll happen is,
0:44:36 and they’re not saying too much, and a good rep will stop and be like, are there any questions?
0:44:42 Like, are you with me still? And the customer will go, yeah, yeah, yeah, just back it up. Can
0:44:46 you just go back to the beginning, back it up and go back to the beginning, pitch it to me again.
0:44:51 And, and there’s this fundamental disconnect, like, I don’t even know what bucket to put this
0:44:56 thing in. Like, is it a, is it a database? Is it a business intelligence tool? Is it a thing?
0:45:02 Like, you have a frame to figure it, you know, and so there’s something in that positioning
0:45:06 that is just confusing the heck out of the customer. That’s the most common sign you see is the
0:45:11 customers looking at it and they’re like, I just can’t figure out what this thing is. The second
0:45:16 common sign you’ll see with weak positioning is the customer thinks they’ve got it figured out,
0:45:21 but they’re actually comparing you to something that you don’t actually compete with. So you’ll
0:45:25 get to slide three or four and the customer will say, yay, I get it. You’re just like Salesforce
0:45:28 and you’re nothing like Salesforce. You don’t compete in that market. You’re not that. And then
0:45:32 the rep is like, no, no, no, no, no, let me go back. I’ll go back to the beginning. We’ll do this again.
0:45:38 So you’ll hear that a lot. The other thing you’ll hear, and this is almost the most terrifying one,
0:45:45 is in these early conversations with a prospect. The prospect will say, I get it. I get what you are.
0:45:49 I get who you compete with. I just don’t really get why we would pay money for that.
0:45:55 Like, can I just do that with a spreadsheet? Can I just do that with my accounting package?
0:46:00 Couldn’t I just hire an intern do that? Why would I pay money to do that? So they kind of understand
0:46:05 the product, but again, they don’t understand the value of it. Why would I give you money in
0:46:10 exchange for that thing? Who’s in charge of positioning at a company? Good question. This
0:46:17 has traditionally been seen as a marketing function. And even more specifically in tech
0:46:23 companies, we often say this is a product marketing function. But I don’t believe that. I think that’s
0:46:28 not the right way to think about it. If we really think about what we’re doing in positioning,
0:46:34 is we’re getting really tight on who’s our competitor? How are we different? What is the
0:46:41 value we can provide to the customer and who exactly are those customers? If we made a change in
0:46:48 that, that would be a big change in the business. If I think about, again, my CRM example, if we
0:46:55 switch from being general purpose enterprise CRM to CRM for investment banks, that’s a whole
0:47:03 different company. So I don’t think marketing has, first of all, they’re not talking to customers
0:47:12 every day the way sales is. They don’t necessarily understand the differentiation amongst competitors
0:47:19 the way the product team would. And sure as heck, the CEO is going to have something to say about
0:47:25 where we’re selling and how we win in the market. So in the work that I do with companies with
0:47:32 positioning, we do it with a cross functional team. So we bring together product marketing sales,
0:47:39 customer success, support, and we bring everybody together and everybody comes with what they
0:47:45 understand about customers and how we win. And we work through the positioning together as a group
0:47:52 exercise. Now somebody needs to be the steward or the police of that positioning once we’ve said it
0:47:56 to make sure that we are consistent about that in the way we’re using it in marketing and the way
0:48:02 we’re using it in sales. And that’s typically marketing that does that. I also think it’s good
0:48:08 to have somebody be the person that puts their hand up and says, you know what, things are changing
0:48:13 in the market. We maybe need to come back together and check in on that positioning. But I don’t
0:48:17 think that marketing should be able to change positioning or look at positioning or do it
0:48:22 on their own. They could try, but it won’t stick because sales won’t believe in it. The CEO won’t
0:48:28 believe in it. What we actually need is a cross functional team to get together and look at it,
0:48:32 make some decisions, get everybody in agreement and alignment on it, and then we can all go execute
0:48:39 on it in our respective departments. And then marketing can be the steward of here’s the positioning,
0:48:44 here’s how we define it. This is the messaging that comes out of that positioning. And then marketing
0:48:48 be the person that put their hand up and say, you know what, this big acquisition just happened in
0:48:52 our market and we might need to step back and relook at the positioning. It’s interesting that
0:48:57 you say that when you’re talking about a salesperson and the first call, I was thinking, oh,
0:49:03 look, if things don’t go as planned, the salesperson points to marketing, marketing points to the sales
0:49:09 person, everybody points to product. But you even expanded this. You have a cross functional team of
0:49:14 sales, marketing, products, customer success, support, and then you have the CEO involvement
0:49:19 at some point in there too. Exactly. And when things are going well, everybody is a winner and
0:49:25 everybody’s responsible for success. But the minute you have a problem, everybody starts pointing
0:49:31 the finger at everybody else. How do you determine when that’s a positioning problem versus a larger
0:49:37 problem? It’s interesting because, you know, I do this as work as a consultant and sometimes
0:49:42 companies will call me and they think they have a positioning problem and then I have a conversation
0:49:45 with them and I’m like, I don’t actually think that’s a positioning problem because there’s lots
0:49:50 of reasons businesses aren’t successful and positioning is just one of them. So typically,
0:49:57 so sometimes companies will come to me and they’ll say, you know what, every company we talk to
0:50:03 loves us. If we can get them in a meeting, we close all that business. That tells me the positioning
0:50:08 is good. You’re just not getting enough meetings. You’re just doing a terrible job at lead generation.
0:50:14 You should go fix that. You just need to get more at bats. Sometimes what you have is a sales
0:50:19 execution problem. Like there’s something in the way you’re executing in sales that isn’t working.
0:50:25 So my test is often like, so first of all, do you have good, happy customers that stick with you
0:50:29 and love you and are referenceable and whatever? Most of the companies that come to me and say,
0:50:38 yes, yes, we have that. Okay. Do you have confusion at the beginning of your sales process where they
0:50:46 come in and they just don’t get it? That gap between what a customer knows and what a prospect knows,
0:50:51 we can close that gap with good positioning. What role does storytelling play in all of this?
0:50:58 Storytelling is one of these things marketers think a lot about storytelling and obsess a lot
0:51:05 about storytelling, particularly on the consumer side, business to business marketers like to
0:51:09 think about storytelling. I don’t think a lot of B2B companies are doing an amazing job at
0:51:13 storytelling. What’s really funny about that is if you go over to sales, sales doesn’t care about
0:51:18 storytelling. They never talk about storytelling. And yet they’re the ones that actually are face
0:51:22 to face with a customer. And if anyone should be telling a story, maybe it’s your sales team.
0:51:28 Most of the storytelling stuff that you see, or at least what I learned as a marketer going through,
0:51:32 if you go to marketing school and learn storytelling, a lot of what you’ll see is this
0:51:38 hero’s journey structure for storytelling, which is very common in entertainment. It’s the way most
0:51:44 movies are written, a lot of stories are written with this hero’s journey. So in B2B storytelling,
0:51:50 we think about the hero as the customer. So the customer has a problem they embark on this quest,
0:51:55 they meet a guide, that’s us, we’re the guide, and we give them a plan and we help them be successful
0:52:02 and avoid defeat as we have this hero’s journey. The problem with that storytelling arc is there’s
0:52:09 kind of no competitor in there. And if we think about what a buyer is actually trying to figure
0:52:15 out is why pick you over the other guys, a hero’s journey doesn’t really give us an arc to do that.
0:52:21 In the work that I do with customers, we start with positioning. So we get really clear on
0:52:26 what’s the value we can deliver that no one else can, who are the customers that really care about
0:52:34 that. And then we want to build a story around that. The story that we’re trying to tell needs
0:52:39 to answer this question, why pick us over the other guys. So in that storytelling framework,
0:52:45 we need to have a spot in that framework to paint a picture of the whole market and then show where
0:52:50 we fit and where everybody fits. So we shouldn’t actually be just talking about us, we should be
0:52:55 talking about the alternative approaches to the problem, which means we’re going to talk about
0:53:02 competitors, or at least the approach that the competitors take. In the work I do, we take the
0:53:09 positioning, we translate it into a sales pitch. That sales pitch has a storytelling structure
0:53:16 that starts with a conversation around the market. So we’ll talk about, look,
0:53:23 we look at this market in a different way than our competitors. And because we look at it in a
0:53:29 different way, we built the product in a different way. And you’re a customer, you have lots of
0:53:33 choices. There’s other products that you could buy. There’s other approaches you could take to this
0:53:37 problem. Let’s talk about that. We think about this all day. We have opinions about it. We want to
0:53:42 hear what you have to say about it too. So this is the way we look at it. You could do it this way,
0:53:46 this way, or this way. And here’s the pluses and minuses of these different ways of solving this
0:53:51 problem. And this is a conversation with the customer more than me telling the customer stuff.
0:53:58 But at the same time, I’m teaching the customer about what we think is important in a purchase
0:54:04 decision, which most customers don’t know early in their purchase process. They’re trying to buy
0:54:09 accounting software. Half the people doing a purchase in B2B have never purchased a product
0:54:15 like yours before. So they’re doing this for the first time. They’re overwhelmed with information
0:54:20 on the internet. Every vendor says, we’re the best. No, we’re the best. No, we’re the best.
0:54:24 What we need to do in a good sales storytelling in B2B
0:54:32 is help customers understand how to confidently make a decision. In order to do that, I have to
0:54:38 paint a picture of the whole market so they feel good that they understand, ah, if I choose this,
0:54:45 I’m choosing to go big on this and low on this. If I choose this, here are the trade-offs for this.
0:54:49 If I choose this, here are the trade-offs for this. Or you could choose us and here’s the trade-offs
0:54:55 for us. Are we a good fit for you or not? That’s what we should be doing in a good sales storytelling,
0:55:01 in my opinion. And who does that really well, in your opinion? I have a bunch of clients that I’ve
0:55:06 worked with, but one that I think is doing an amazing job of this for a really technical,
0:55:13 complicated product is a company I worked with in San Francisco called Postman. Postman does
0:55:24 essentially a platform for developing APIs. This is a new concept. Nobody had this idea of a
0:55:31 platform for APIs before Postman came up with it. They do an amazing job, I think, of talking about
0:55:38 why APIs are important, so important that you actually don’t want a set of disjointed tools
0:55:44 across your organization to work on them, why that’s important. They’ve coined a concept called
0:55:49 an API First World, and then they’ve done an amazing job of storytelling around that.
0:55:52 So if you go on their website, on their homepage, and you scroll down about halfway,
0:56:02 they have a graphic novel called The API First World, and it’s a graphic novel designed for
0:56:10 technical people to understand this story of, what’s an API? Why is it important? Why do we
0:56:15 really want to have high quality APIs? Why is that important for your business? And why do we need
0:56:20 a platform to enable that? So I think they do an incredible job of that. And they do it in a
0:56:27 thousand different ways. Like if you see the CEO do a conference talk, he’s actually not talking
0:56:33 about the product as much as he is talking about the market and this concept and why we need to
0:56:39 think about APIs differently. But if you are aligned with his point of view on the market,
0:56:44 you’re going to buy this product. But they’ve really done a good job, I think, of developing a
0:56:50 point of view on the market, helping customers understand the context around their product
0:56:56 and the things that you need to understand in order to understand why their product is valuable
0:57:01 and why you might pick it. How important is that from a CEO perspective at conferences and talks
0:57:07 and media to basically put yourself out there and say, I see the world this way, which is slightly
0:57:12 different than most people see it. I think it’s super important. I think this concept of having
0:57:18 a point of view on the market is really, really important. Most founders that I’ve worked with,
0:57:25 if you talk about how the original idea for the product came up, they’ll say, you know, I was
0:57:30 really frustrated. I looked at all the databases and I decided all the databases were doing it wrong.
0:57:35 And if you were smart and you knew what I knew, I had a better way to do it. Yeah, you would build
0:57:41 a database like this. Part of what we need to communicate to customers is we kind of need to
0:57:48 take them on that journey and say, look, we have a different perspective on this. We look at this
0:57:55 problem different. It’s not the problem. We see a problem inside the problem. We have a perspective
0:58:00 on the problem that if you understood it the way we understood it, you would pick our stuff.
0:58:06 Right. So that point of view I think is really super important. And if you can nail that,
0:58:11 it is the key to selling lots of stuff. And how important is it to, you mentioned coin the term,
0:58:17 like how important is it to define the vocabulary by which the customers use ultimately
0:58:23 to make a choice or to own a term so that if it becomes top of mind to them,
0:58:29 nobody else has that term. It’s really important if you are doing something that is truly
0:58:37 innovative, like an emerging thing. So earlier we talked about market categories and most of the
0:58:43 time, if you look at the way the most successful companies do this, they’re going into an existing
0:58:47 market category and they’re serving an underserved corner of that and they’re expanding from that.
0:58:53 About 10% of the time that’s not true. 10% of the time we have something that is emerging.
0:58:57 It’s a market that is emerging. There is no leader in that market right now because that
0:59:02 market doesn’t even exist right now. This is something brand new. You could never even do this
0:59:09 before because technology wouldn’t, wasn’t there to do it. And so it’s emerging. When it’s emerging,
0:59:16 there’s no good vocabulary to talk about it because we’ve never talked about it before.
0:59:24 And often in those cases, what we’re doing is we’re defining or attempting to define
0:59:29 what the boundaries of that emerging market category are. What’s important and what isn’t
0:59:36 important in that emerging market category. And in those cases, we often very much do want to put
0:59:43 some names on things. We may want to specifically name the market category in a way that advantages
0:59:50 us. We may want to name key concepts inside that in a way that helps customers understand
0:59:58 why this is an important key thing that you need to understand in that. And so if you see companies
1:00:07 that have truly done category creation, often they’ve done a very good job of helping customers
1:00:13 understand key things that they needed to understand in order to understand, ah, this is a totally
1:00:19 different problem. I didn’t even know I had this problem. Because if the customer knew there was
1:00:24 a problem and they have that problem, there would be a category of solutions to solve it already.
1:00:28 In emerging markets, we’re often addressing a problem that the customer doesn’t even define it
1:00:32 as a problem. They don’t even know this is a problem. This is just the way the world works.
1:00:36 There’s no way to solve this problem. If we can help them become problem aware,
1:00:42 then, you know, that’s a step closer to that, well, you know, now that you know that you have a
1:00:47 problem, we’re the thing to solve that. How do you think about independent bodies that play a
1:00:53 role? And I’m thinking like in cybersecurity, there’s the Gartner Quadrant. And if you’re not
1:00:58 on there, like people won’t even consider your product, but that sort of limits your ability
1:01:04 to. Absolutely. How do you think about that? I spent a lot of time working with Gartner in my
1:01:14 past roles as a VP marketing. Not every market segment has an analyst or an expert body or
1:01:19 somebody whose opinion matters a lot, but in some segments we do. So I spent a lot of time in the
1:01:25 database market. No large enterprise buys a database without talking to Gartner Group first.
1:01:32 So in that case, we spent a lot of time helping Gartner Group understand what our stuff was about,
1:01:38 why it was important, why they should include us in the quadrant, because we literally needed them
1:01:45 to position us properly to clients that call them and ask for advice. I’ve had other markets that
1:01:50 I’ve been in where the buyers simply don’t call Gartner Group because they don’t care what Gartner
1:01:54 Group has to say about that because Gartner Group doesn’t cover that space. And Gartner Group does
1:02:00 a really good job in enterprise IT. Outside of enterprise IT, they’re a bit less influential.
1:02:08 I think it’s important if we’re a vendor to understand where do our customers look for advice
1:02:14 and where do we need to educate those people or those entities because they’re giving advice
1:02:21 to our customers. Sometimes that’s industry analysts like Gartner. Sometimes it’s service
1:02:26 providers or system integrators like Deloitte and they’ll go to Deloitte and say, “What do
1:02:30 you think about this? We’re doing a big digital transformation. You’re our trusted advisor on
1:02:34 digital transformation. What do you think about these products?” In which case, maybe I need a
1:02:38 partnership with Deloitte because they’re not going to recommend my stuff if they don’t get some kind
1:02:45 of money off of that. So it’s important to understand who influences your buyer. As we go
1:02:53 down market, it’s interesting. There’ll be people like you, like podcasters that people listen to,
1:02:59 people that are experts in things. People ask me my advice about marketing technology all the
1:03:06 time. So in a small way, I’m an influencer there. In the work that I do, companies will often ask
1:03:10 me, “Well, we now need to do all these things in sales. Who do you know that’s really good in
1:03:14 sales? Is there particular technology you should recommend in sales?” The important part as vendors,
1:03:19 I think, is we need to understand who has influence on our buyers and do we need to invest
1:03:24 some energy and attention in making sure that those influencers understand our stuff and our
1:03:29 positioning us well. What are the most interesting mistakes you’ve seen people make when it comes
1:03:35 to positioning? So many things. The first mistake is not thinking about it at all and just assuming
1:03:42 that there’s only one position we could possibly take. Most products, we could position them in a
1:03:48 dozen different markets. And if we really step back and forgot about the history and where we
1:03:54 came from and looked at it with our fresh eyes, we might see something really different. So
1:03:58 we need to think about this in a way customer thinks about it. So not thinking about positioning
1:04:03 at all is the first mistake. The second mistake is, as we talked about before, treating it as a
1:04:09 little marketing exercise. We’re just going to put some new words on the homepage and that’s it,
1:04:14 we’re done. But sales has no idea how to pitch it. Product doesn’t really understand it. It doesn’t
1:04:21 actually represent the truth of our product at all. It’s just nice, pretty words. This is not
1:04:27 repositioning. This isn’t going to move the dial on anything. And then lately, what I’ve seen is
1:04:41 companies that love the idea of category creation are attempting to create a category when they
1:04:47 obviously fit in an existing market category. And it’s kind of wishful thinking that this is a
1:04:52 new category. So they say, no, no, no, we don’t have any competition. This is a brand new thing.
1:04:57 Nobody works like this. And the result is the customer is like, but wait, aren’t you just a CRM?
1:05:03 Why are you using all these other words? I’m just confused. So I’ve seen a lot of companies have come
1:05:09 to me that have attempted to do category creation or pretend that they’re doing this new category
1:05:15 of things. And then it’s been a disaster. Customers are just very confused. They don’t understand why
1:05:20 this is different from the existing things they’re doing. They can’t figure out what bucket to put
1:05:25 it in because they’re trying to create a new bucket. And it’s been a disaster. And then they come
1:05:30 to me and they’re like, now we got to fix this. And how do we do it? When there’s an obvious spot
1:05:37 where they could easily position in a very big sub-segment of an existing market category,
1:05:42 and that would be way easier to sell, way easier to tell the story, way easier to do deals. So I
1:05:49 see a lot of that right now. What’s the difference or maybe what does schools get wrong about B2B
1:05:55 marketing that when you in the academic environment, that sounds good. But in the real world, it falls
1:06:01 flat. Oh my gosh, so much stuff. Most of the research that’s been done in marketing, like when
1:06:06 I went to marketing school, it was so disappointing. All of the research is done on consumer packaged
1:06:15 goods, all of it. And often what you’ll get is a professor inside a marketing department at a
1:06:21 university taking these things that we’ve learned about consumer packaged goods and then stretching
1:06:26 it out and saying, well, obviously this works with B2B exactly the same way. And it’s like, well,
1:06:33 wait a second. So we’ll see things like, I must have this conversation about once a week where
1:06:40 people will talk about, what’s that water, liquid death? You know this one? I don’t drink that.
1:06:45 The marketers are marketers obsessed with this thing called liquid death. And all it is is fizzy
1:06:50 water in a can made to look cool. And they sell it at bars. So you don’t want to consume alcohol.
1:06:55 You’re not into booze. You go to the bar, you still want to look cool. You can order this liquid
1:06:58 death. It’s got skulls on it and stuff. They do all this really creative advertising and all this
1:07:04 stuff. And the B2B marketers look at that and say, why can’t we do that? Right? Why can’t this
1:07:09 just be marketing? Why do we have to worry about product at all? And often you’ll get these marketers
1:07:14 say, look, can we really differentiate on product? Because people can just copy our product.
1:07:20 Eventually everyone will just catch up to us and all the products will be exactly the same.
1:07:27 And if you’re in tech, that is nonsense. That is nonsense. That would be like saying,
1:07:33 you don’t think any of the innovation that Apple’s done matters. They could have just,
1:07:39 it’s just marketing. Do you really think that? So there is kind of this belief that we can take
1:07:46 these things from consumer and apply it to a very considered purchase in a B2B situation
1:07:52 where there are stakes involved, where the person making the decision might get fired
1:07:57 and say, oh yeah, that’s just like buying fizzy water. Oh, at the end of the day, these people are
1:08:03 all people and they’re driven by emotions. We have to connect with their emotions. I agree with that,
1:08:10 but the emotion is fear. It’s not looking cool. It’s not, hey, I like the one with the skulls.
1:08:16 I can’t go to my boss and say, I bought the database with the skulls, man, come on.
1:08:24 I just can’t get away with that. And so I’ve heard a lot of things in marketing classes
1:08:31 where I’ve leaned back and said, okay, man, if we’re selling toothpaste, fine. But if I’m selling
1:08:38 a million dollars worth of middleware, not fine. These rules do not apply. So I think in schools,
1:08:43 we don’t teach enough about B2B. We don’t teach enough about the difference between
1:08:48 a highly considered purchase versus an unconsidered purchase. I don’t think we talk enough about
1:08:54 buying committees. I don’t think we look enough at the research around how difficult it is to get
1:09:01 over indecision in a B2B purchase process and what that means for our positioning, for the way that
1:09:07 we do sales pitches, for a lot of the stuff we do. So I don’t see that covered enough in schools
1:09:15 at all. Every great B2B marketer I know has learned this on the ground, hands on, doing it in companies.
1:09:20 We’re all starting from scratch. What do you know about B2B decision making that you would say most
1:09:29 people get wrong? The biggest one is this idea of customer indecision, that people do not understand
1:09:36 how difficult it is to make a purchase. If you understood the research on that, it’s amazing
1:09:41 anything gets bought at all. There’s a great book out there. It’s by this guy, Matt Dixon.
1:09:47 It’s called The Jewel to Effect. And the research in that is incredible. So when we went into lockdown
1:09:53 in COVID, he took this opportunity to study sales calls because all of a sudden all the
1:09:59 sales calls were happening virtually, everybody was doing them on Zoom. And so they took some AI
1:10:06 and they analyzed two and a half million sales calls. And they did it in partnership with these
1:10:11 companies so that they could look at what happened on the sales call. And then what ultimately
1:10:15 happened? Did we get the deal? Did we not get the deal? What works and what doesn’t work? And
1:10:22 that research is terrifying when you look at it like that’s where this number comes from.
1:10:30 40 to 60% of B2B purchase processes end in no decision. This is the most fearsome competitor.
1:10:37 We have a B2B by far is no decision. And this no decision is not because we’ve made a decision
1:10:41 to stay with the thing we have because we think it’s better. It’s because we look at our choices.
1:10:46 We can’t figure out how to do that in a way that we’re sure isn’t going to get us into trouble.
1:10:51 So we just don’t do anything. If we really understood that, I think we would operate very
1:10:56 differently in B2B. You can see the difference in people that get that and people that don’t.
1:11:02 That’s fascinating. I think it’s really interesting to sort of think of sales cycles. I like the fear
1:11:08 concept. My friend who runs a cybersecurity company, I was like, “Oh, put me in charge of sales.”
1:11:11 He’s like, “What would you do?” I was like, “I would show up with a binder of newspaper
1:11:17 clipping so that companies that got hacked would be like, “My job is that you don’t appear in this
1:11:21 book.” And that would be my entire sale. They don’t care about the technical features. They’re not
1:11:26 buying features. They’re buying the benefit. And when you’re selling something negative,
1:11:31 which doesn’t contribute to revenue directly, you’re basically selling the prevention of
1:11:36 something negative from happening. How do you do that? I was like, “Why wouldn’t that be effective?
1:11:41 I don’t know.” This has been a fascinating conversation. We always end with sort of the
1:11:50 same question, which is, “What is success for you in life?” I feel like I spent my whole career
1:11:56 being a vice president of marketing. I did that for 25, 30 years. And the thing about being a vice
1:12:00 president of marketing, it’s a really hard job. You have to know a lot about a lot of things.
1:12:06 Marketers talk about being T-shaped. You have to know you have to be this deep on so many things,
1:12:10 and then usually you have one thing that you’re really deep on. For most of my career,
1:12:15 I was a T-shaped marketer, and the thing I was really deep on was positioning.
1:12:22 Now I’m a consultant, and I just get to do that thing that I love. And so that has been
1:12:30 such satisfying work. It’s been so satisfying to work with companies, wrestle this thing that is
1:12:39 really thorny, really hard. And when it clicks, it feels like magic. It feels like magic. Good
1:12:44 positioning. When you look at it afterwards, people will say, “Well, of course that’s what
1:12:48 they are. Of course that’s what they do.” And they’re like, “Actually, that was really hard
1:12:52 for us to get there. And if you had asked us two years ago, we had no idea what that is. And now
1:12:57 it’s this and it seems obvious, but it wasn’t obvious.” That is very satisfying work to do.
1:13:04 So I just feel that is success for me. When we get to the end of these projects, and everybody
1:13:09 in the room is like, “This is so much easier to sell. This is so much easier for customers to
1:13:15 understand.” I had a client come to me two weeks ago, and they’re doing the first roll out of these
1:13:20 new sales pitches that they’re doing. And so the first pitch that they did, and they were very
1:13:24 scared to do it because it was a brand new pitch, and it was a really high-profile client,
1:13:30 really big deal, they went in, and it’s a competitive deal. So they know that the prospect
1:13:35 is talk to their two competitors, and then they’re coming to talk to them. And the CEO sent me an
1:13:43 email and said, “After we did the pitch, the prospect CEO pulled them aside and said, “I have
1:13:48 never seen a sales pitch as good at that in my entire life.” We’ve seen a lot of sales pitches.
1:13:54 That was really great. That’s awesome. And so that is the most satisfying thing. And so he’s happy.
1:14:00 I’m happy. Everyone’s happy. You also hit on something in that answer that I think goes
1:14:06 under “appreciated in life,” which is avoiding your weaknesses. So doing the thing that you’re
1:14:11 really good at in structuring your life in a way where you’re not. You’re doing a lot of the things
1:14:15 that you either don’t want to be doing or that you’re not as good at. It’s so amazing. I wish I
1:14:21 had been doing it sooner in my career, although I don’t know if I’d be good at this, if I didn’t have
1:14:27 25, 30 years of being a hands-on vice president of marketing. But this does feel like the reward
1:14:33 phase of my career that I just get to work in my little zone of excellence doing this thing that
1:14:38 has really big impact on companies. I love it. They love it. I’m happy. They’re happy. Everybody’s
1:14:43 happy. If this is all I do for the rest of my life, perfect.
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