Curious Minds at Work

Many of us view motivation as the spark we need to achieve our goals. But Jeff Haden, author of The Motivation Myth: How High Achievers Really Set Themselves Up to Win, explains that it is actually the reverse. To feel motivated, we actually need to take action, that is, to complete at least one small task toward our goal. That is because accomplishing an initial task causes our brains to release dopamine, the reward and pleasure chemical. The good feeling we get when we do this can spur us on to accomplish more. And who better to talk about using motivation to achieve lots of goals than Jeff Haden, the most popular columnist for Inc.com and one of most widely followed influencers for LinkedIn. Jeff is also the author or co-author of 50 nonfiction books, and his work has also appeared in Time, Fast Company, Business Insider, and Entrepreneur. In this interview we discuss: Why motivation is not something you get but something you create How accomplishing tasks associated with your goal can create a virtuous flywheel of motivation, achievement, and happiness Why successful people set a goal and then forget it How focusing on big goals can overwhelm and even defeat us and what we should do instead When we focus on accomplishing the daily tasks associated with our larger goal, we maintain motivation and feel happier Why serial achievers are happier and experience less regret and why we should all aim to be them Why, for most of us, choosing that one thing we might want to do for 40 years is unrealistic Why we need pros rather than coaches to achieve new, challenging goals How pros can pave the way and prevent us from reinventing the wheel The fact that pros hold the key to our success as they have done the thing we most want to do To gain willpower, we need less willpower, provided we structure our environment in ways that reduce our options How maximizing our edge time can help us achieve more The fact that doing what others around us are doing will only get us what they have gotten -- we need to work harder and smarter to achieve something different How successful people work on big goals serially, rather than concurrently How paying attention to the details and making small changes can improve our performance Why the proud feelings you have in accomplishing hard things creates momentum to achieve more How taking productive, rather than relaxing, break can help you achieve What success means to Jeff -- and it has nothing to do with cars or houses or stuff Episode Links Venus Williams Jerry Seinfeld Tony Robbins Friday Night Lights Not Impossible by Mick Ebeling Choice architecture Jim Whitehurst and RedHat David Brailsford If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

What is the secret to changing our habits? Too often, we are led to believe that we need to study successful people and then use our willpower to act like they do. But UCLA Medical School Professor, Sean Young, reveals that this approach mainly leads to failure. Instead, Young and his colleagues point us to seven forces that succeed in creating lasting change. Sean is the author of the book, Stick with It: A Scientifically Proven Process for Changing Your Life - for Good. He is a Professor at UCLA Medical School, and Founder and Executive Director of the UCLA Center for Digital Behavior and the UC Institute for Prediction Technology. His work has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Science, and CNN. In this interview we discuss: Why we need to shift from self-blame to a thoughtful process for change How education alone is not enough to change behavior The ABCs of behavior -- automatic, burning, and common The seven tools Sean discusses to support behavior change - stepladders, community, important, easy, neurohacks, captivating, ingrained Just how powerful stepladders or very small steps can be in changing unwanted behaviors or habits The importance of creating the right-size steps to stay on track in reaching our goals How success with small steps increases our self-confidence to help us stick with it The fact that community -- the influence key others have on us -- can help us change behavior How purposefully structured online, peer-driven communities can help drive behavior change Why quick mental shortcuts or neurohacks can change our brains to help us change our behavior How taking action helps us see ourselves as someone who engages in the behavior we want to have Why it is important to pair the type of behavior with the right tool, like stepladders with common behaviors Why one of the most game-changing tools is making it easy to engage in behavior changes Episode Links seanyoungphd.com @seanyoungphd Michelle Segar, author of No Sweat Richard E. Petty Yo app If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

What if you are creative, but your organization is not? Many of us have worked in places that have tried to adopt more creative practices, and we know that it doesn’t always produce the desired results. In fact, if we introduce creativity, it can even seem to backfire. But Jon Kolko has devised a formula for injecting creativity into resistant organizations. Author of the book, Creative Clarity: A Practical Guide for Bringing Creative Thinking Into Your Company, Jon is a Partner at Modernist Studio and Founder of Austin Center for Design. He served as VP of Design at Blackboard, has worked extensively with both startups and Fortune 500 companies, and has written four additional books on design. Jon shares insights for achieving creativity and innovation in even the most resistant organizations. In this interview we discuss: Why attempts at introducing creativity into organizations can make things worse The role framing plays in the creative process and how it helps with innovation How leading with a creative strategy changes can yield more innovative solutions Why summary problem statements are so important How to push through complexity to arrive at simplicity Why creative people work best a flow state of uninterrupted blocks of time Why embracing a creative culture means embracing uncertainty The role of feedback in a special kind of meeting called a critique The two reactions to avoid when receiving feedback How creative approaches differ in small versus large organizations The three types of ownership of ideas The one skill that every instructor needs to teach students in creative fields What mentors are invaluable Why teaching design thinking is inseparable from teaching of design Episode Links Jon Kolko Creative Clarity Frog Design Ideo Flow The Swoop and Poop Design Thinking If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Do you have the seven qualities of a great leader? As the former sports editor of the Wall Street Journal, Sam Walker chronicled the exploits of some of the most remarkable teams ever assembled. Fascinated by their success, he spent over a decade researching which teams performed best and how they did it. Sam lays out his findings in his latest book, The Captain Class: The Hidden Force that Creates the World’s Greatest Teams. Initially, he expected to find a magical combination of factors such as exceptional skill, brilliant coaching and remarkable strategy. Instead, he discovered something completely different: the 16 teams with the longest winning streaks across 37 elite sports succeeded because of a single player -- the captain of the team. These captains were not only not the best player, but also possessed all or most of seven characteristics rarely associated with great leaders. Sam is currently deputy editor of the Wall Street Journal, where he worked as a reporter, columnist, and sports editor. He is also author of a previous book, Fantasyland. In this interview we discuss: How talent, coaching, money and strategy rarely result in teams stringing together years of consecutive greatness Why a single player, the captain of the team, is the key to the enduring success of outstanding teams Why most captains were appointed by the coach, not selected by the players What the analogies are for this coach-captain in the workplace How these captains excel in seven ways: they are relentless they are aggressive They are willing to do thankless jobs they shy away from the limelight they excel at quiet communication they are difficult to manage they have excellent resilience and emotional control The secrets of success of players like basketball great Tim Duncan Why all of the little things on a team must get done Why Pele, possibly the greatest soccer player of all time, was never a captain Why none of these captains were inspiring speech makers What maps of team interaction reveal about captain communication Why shared cognition is such an important part of team communication Why superstars can sometimes decrease great team performance Why sacrifice for the collective good of the team is so important to winning How we should look for the least likely candidates when searching for group leaders Why we should not mistake the ability to take praise as a sign of a great leader Why criticizing others is a right we earn and how to earn it Why elite leaders are often boring Episode Links Sam Walker The Captain Class: The Hidden Force that Creates the World’s Greatest Teams Fantasyland Barcelona Cuban Women’s Volleyball Team Boston Celtics San Antonio Spurs The Pittsburgh Steeler Tim Duncan Richard Hackman Brazil’s National Football Team Pele Carlos Alberto Hilderaldo Bellini Yogi Berra Sandy Pentland Charismatic Connectors Shared Cognition French National Handball Team Jerome Fernandez Richard Davidson Maurice Rashad Montreal Canadiens Richie McCaw Carla Overbeck United States Women's National Soccer Team If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Breakthroughs can take our work to new and exciting places, yet they rarely happen as often as we’d like. Are there ways to prompt these kinds of moments, so we can create them more often? Olivia Fox Cabane and Judah Pollack tell us how in their book, The Net and the Butterfly: The Art and Practice of Breakthrough Thinking. Olivia is the former Director of Innovative Leadership for Stanford StartX and bestselling author of The Charisma Myth. She has worked with companies like, Google, MGM, and Deloitte, and she has lectured at Harvard, MIT, and Yale. Judah Pollack is a former faculty member at Stanford StartX and a lecturer at University of California, Berkeley Haas School of Business. He has worked with organizations like Airbnb, IDEO, and the U.S. Army Special Forces. In this interview we discuss: How breakthrough thinking requires two systems in the brain: the Executive Network (the net) and the Default Network (the butterfly) How we need off-task time in order for the Default Network to engage and create breakthroughs The 4 types of breakthroughs: Eureka, Metaphor, Intuitive and Paradigm How Eureka Breakthroughs are sudden insights that are fully formed, when everything seems to fall into place That we are predisposed to certain kinds of breakthroughs and how it helps to honor our natural style That no one style of breakthrough is any better than another How Metaphorical breakthroughs help us see topics in new ways How Intuitive breakthroughs seem like just the beginning and less easy to trust, requiring us to have faith in the process How Steve Jobs had an intuitive breakthrough that the iPhone needed to be made of glass That our brains our physical objects that need to build new neurotransmitter receptors in order to construct new knowledge How our practice with exploring new experiences in the brain affects our ability to make breakthroughs How surfing the net for new things or watching new movies can help with building the brain plasticity that helps to make breakthroughs How curiosity enlivens brain plasticity How fear negativity affects the Default Network and works against us having breakthroughs Why our best ideas may come to us in the shower How our inhibitions can cause us to feel like imposters or make us overly critical, either of which can hinder breakthrough thinking How the placebo effect can be used to our advantage Ways we can practice failure in order to normalize our feelings about it Three supertools that can help us achieve breakthroughs How the journey toward topic mastery create preconditions for breakthroughs How implementing these practices can affect us down to the gene level How to find the balance between our fast-paced, hyper-focused work world and the slower, more diffused approach needed for breakthrough thinking Links to Episode Topics Olivia Fox Cabane Judah Pollack The Net and the Butterfly: The Art and Practice of Breakthrough Thinking The Charisma Myth Stanford StartX University of California Berkeley The Executive Mode Network of the brain The Default Mode Network of the brain The Arab Spring The Revolutions of 1848 Occupy Wall Street Steve Jobs Think Wrong Neuroplasticity Impostor Syndrome Inner Critic Placebo Effect Meditation If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Are you prepared to live to 100? Research shows that it is becoming the norm, but that few of us are planning for it. Many are surprised to learn that it not only requires rethinking saving and retirement, but also education, jobs, and relationships. To guide us, London Business School Professor and future of work expert, Lynda Gratton, has written The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity. In addition to her many books, Lynda writes for Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, and Forbes. She points out the possibilities, as well as the challenges, associated with living longer lives. Lynda also encourages us to plan for what lies ahead, so that we can take full advantage of this opportunity. In this interview, we talk about: What learning will look like as we continue working into our 70s and 80s Why working well with robots will decrease our odds of obsolescence How generational markers, such as millennials, limit how we think about work and life Why we will become age agnostic as people of all ages learn and work together Are you building, maintaining, or depleting current skills? The secret to increasing our adaptability and willingness to change Three new life stages that are upending how we think about life and work Are you spending your free time in recreation or re-creation, and why it matters? The important role experimentation will play in our lives as we live longer How marriage and friendships will change as we live longer lives Why juvenescence holds the key to navigating a longer life Why we should be worried about wealth disparity Why living longer will push organizations to rethink work policies and expectations Why individuals and families - not most organizations - will guide us in innovating Selected Links to Episode Topics @lyndagratton www.100yearlife.com 100 Year Life Diagnostic London Business School World Economic Forum Andrew Scott Future of Work Consortium The Shift: The Future of Work is Already Here by Lynda Gratton Stretch by Karie Willyerd and Barbara Mistick If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

We have more control over our happiness than we think. And if we follow the advice of the most cutting-edge happiness researchers, we can help others achieve it, as well. Emiliana Simon-Thomas happens to be one of those researchers. A neuroscientist and Science Director of the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, she speaks and writes about the connection between happiness, meaning, compassion and wellbeing. She also co-teaches an online course, The Science of Happiness that, to date, has been taken by over 450,000 people. In this interview we discuss: Just how important social relationships are to our happiness and wellbeing How our baseline for study is social, not solitary The fact that social deprivation leads to greater stress, lowered resilience, and less happiness How friendships helps us reframe challenges as more achievable The fact that an ongoing sequence of pleasurable moments does not guarantee happiness How happiness is derived from a rich emotional life that includes negative emotions How happiness speaks to the ease with which we experience the entire range of human emotion The fact that happiness stems from our ability to transcend ourselves - to view our lives in relation to a bigger purpose How the ways we spend our time, where we put our focus, and how we view others determines our happiness How forgiving others can have a greater impact on us than the person we forgive How mindfulness is about noticing the world beyond ourselves How graduates of the Science of Happiness course show significant improvement when it comes to happiness, flourishing, and connections to others, along with decreased loneliness and stress The fact that the quality of our relationships has a significant impact on our happiness The game changing difference it makes when we express our gratitude toward others How practicing gratitude helps us feel more optimistic, decreases our self-absorption, and increases feelings of pleasure that can create a reinforcing loop How practicing gratitude and showing appreciation can shift workplace culture The difference between valuing someone for who they are versus what they achieve How our ability to express gratitude and to show compassion are culturally influenced habits, not gendered skills How the data shows that happier employees are more productive, more engaged, more loyal and more attentive to creating a better customer experience The importance role self-compassion plays in our ability to be happy, to show compassion to others, and to improve or maintain our wellbeing Links to Episode Topics Emiliana R. Simon-Thomas @GreaterGoodSC The Expanding Gratitude Project Gratitude and Wellbeing at Work The Science of Happiness course Eric Liu Social baseline theory - James Coan and David Sbarra Robert Emmons Judson Brewer The Gratitude Diaries by Janice Kaplan Center for Positive Organizations Davita Kristin Neff If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Ninety-five percent of us think we are self-aware, but only ten to fifteen percent of us actually are. How important is that difference to our well being and happiness? Well, according to Tasha Eurich, self-aware individuals are are better at their jobs, more satisfied with their relationships, raise more mature children, are better students, lead more profitable companies, and choose better careers. Tasha is the author of the book, Insight: Why We’re Not as Self-aware As We Think, and How Seeing Ourselves Clearly Helps Us Succeed at Work and in Life. An organizational psychologist and researcher whose work has been featured in Entrepreneur, CNBC.com, The Huffington Post, and FoxBusiness.com. In this interview we discuss: Why self-awareness is the metaskill of the 21st century How self-awareness includes how clearly we see ourselves and how well we understand how others see us The fact that 95 percent of people think they are self-aware when the reality is closer to 10 to 15 percent How the ways we self-reflect can work against the benefits we might gain How reflecting on what, not why, shifts us into action and a more positive mindset Why we should journal to figure things out rather than merely ruminate or emotion dump How a focus on learning well helps us take on new challenges in ways that a focus on doing well may not Ways we can mine solutions to problems by asking ourselves what it might look like if the problem were already solved How getting feedback from others helps us gain additional perspectives on how we see ourselves How asking for feedback allows us to show vulnerability in positive ways Why we want to control the kinds of feedback we ask for by choosing the right people, asking the right questions, and using the right process Why we should seek out loving critics for feedback -- people who couple honesty with care How the ways we receive feedback are also important -- that we should give ourselves time to process feedback and to determine if we should act on it Self-aware teams practice honesty and transparency Leaders are the linchpins when it comes to self-aware teams Self-aware teams need psychological safety and an ongoing awareness process Team members can jumpstart self-awareness by taking small steps, like admitting something they do not know or something they did wrong Why it is important to recognize when you cannot influence someone to be more self-aware Links to Episode Topics @tashaeurich http://www.tashaeurich.com/ James Pennebaker Carol Dweck Solutions focused therapy How Emotions are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett Alan Mulally http://www.insight-book.com/quiz.aspx If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Most of us can learn anything, if we're taught how. Yet few of us find this to be the case. Why? Because we lack the skills we need to deal with the resistance and frustration we inevitably face when learning difficult topics. Barbara Oakley wants to change that. Author of the book, A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science, and Professor of Engineering at Oakland University, she shares techniques for mastering any subject. And these are techniques over 2 million people have experienced in her incredibly popular MOOC, Learning How to Learn. In this interview we discuss: How she made the leap from self-described high school math "flunky" to accomplished engineering professor What inspired her to make the shift from Russian linguist to engineer How offering interesting learning hooks can help people learn content more effectively How a diffuse or relaxed mode of thinking helps us organize what we learn The importance of toggling between focused and diffuse thinking to learn The fact that learning difficult things is hard How sleep helps us build the neural architecture we need to learn new things How we can be strategic in our approach to learning Why you actually need content knowledge to become an expert - we cannot outsource it How repetition, practice, and seeing things from different perspectives builds important neural patterns for expertise Why conceptual chunking -- memorizing and understanding -- help us create these neural patterns How our prefrontal cortex relaxes when we know something, so that we can build on that knowledge to solve more complex problems What it means to have an illusion of competence when it comes to learning How we can check our understanding by seeing if we can explain it to a five year old How neural reuse theory, or learning something new by attaching it to something we already know, is a powerful learning tool Why teachers should emphasize how simple something difficult can be to learn How interleaving helps us learn when to use one technique versus another How transfer helps us use learning we have done in one area in a new area and how it is best learned by doing How we can reframe procrastination by focusing on the process not the product How breaking the work into tiny tasks helps us overcome procrastination Links to Episode Topics @barbaraoakley https://barbaraoakley.com/ The Knowledge Illusion by Steven Sloman https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/ Bayes Theorem Negative binomial Geometric distribution Pomodoro Technique and Francesco Cirillo Terry Sejnowski Lynda.com If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Do you really know your neighbors or coworkers? To understand human behavior, we need research participants who act and respond truthfully. But that is a tall order when it comes to topics that are embarrassing or even incriminating. Social scientists have found it hard to get honest answers when asked about topics that might reveal racism, sexism, gluttony or a slew of other socially unacceptable traits. Researchers like Seth Stephens-Davidowitz have found a way around that problem by analyzing data from our over 3.5 billion daily Google searches. And it turns out that the candid words, phrases, and questions we type in reveal a whole lot about us. Seth is the author of the bestselling book, Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us about Who We Really Are. He is also a New York Times op-ed contributor, a visiting lecturer at The Wharton School, and a former Google data scientist. In this interview we discuss: How Internet datasets help us ask bigger questions than ever before How word and picture data expand the kinds of questions we can ask and yield unexpected insights How data from our over 3.5 billion daily Google searches serves as a digital truth serum for learning more about what we actually think and do How big data is giving researchers insights into small groups of people we rarely had before   How big data is helping researchers engage in rapid experimentation and conduct quick tests to see how people respond How horse racing analytics data scientists like Jeff Seder help us think beyond traditional data sets to uncover game-changing findings How night lights in India revealed key insights regarding economic activity Just how much creativity is involved in data science research How researchers studied big data in the hopes of helping political leaders shift hate group behaviors What Google search analysts learned about gender from searches on children and intelligence What we are learning about poverty and economic mobility from big data The connection between the health of poor people and the number of rich people living nearby The connection between the number of tax accountants and how many people cheat on their taxes How data scientists are using our doppelgangers to anticipate what we might want to buy How the healthcare industry can use doppelgangers to personalize treatment The fact that Google conducts more experiments in one day than the FDA does in one year How your love of curly fries may signal high intelligence to prospective employers How it is becoming harder than ever for regulators to stay ahead of all the things companies can know about us as the number of variables keeps on growing How researchers may use big data to figure out, once and for all, which foods are nutritious -- and whether we really should be eating broccoli Links to Episode Topics @SethS_D http://sethsd.com/ Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner Jeff Seder American Pharoah Night Lights and Economic Activity in India 2015 San Bernardino Attack The Rise of Hate Search New York Times article Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!