Bounce! Conversations with Larry Weeks

Dr. Tasha Eurich is an organizational psychologist, researcher, and New York Times best-selling author of “Insight: Why We're Not as Self-Aware as We Think, and How Seeing Ourselves Clearly Helps Us Succeed at Work and in Life Tasha has thoroughly studied the science of self-awareness and has helped thousands of people improve their personal and professional effectiveness. Tasha believes that heightening self-awareness is essential for success today and self-understanding positively affects work performance, career satisfaction, leadership potential and relationships I think we all know someone like a co-worker or manager who thinks he’s a brilliant presenter or thinks he is well loved in the office but in reality they are far from it. But how often do we stop to consider whether we might have the similar problems? Do you understand how others really see you? According to Tasha’s research, 95 percent of the population believes they’re self-aware, but the reality is that only 10 to 15 percent actually are. So the majority of you are not self aware. Ok, so what? A recently published working paper from Paul Green and Francesca Gino of Harvard, and Bradley Staats of the UNC, caught people avoiding criticism - a specific type of criticism where they thought they were doing a good job but then were told they were not, this is called “disconfirmatory” feedback. They show’ed that when disconfirmatory feedback was given, workers would then avoid contact with the people who had given them the unwelcome comments. The problem is that “disconfirmatory” is the most useful type of feedback there is. If I’m blind to the mistakes I’m making I really need someone to explain what I’m doing wrong, however uncomfortable or it gets I just get worse. We have blind spots; things we do, issues we have that we just cannot see from our subjective vantage point.  And if we were more self aware, more open to feedback, they could be revealed to you for positive change, promotion, new position, better relationships, new relationships and on and on.  To the my fellow Googlers out there listening, this will help you with Perf (or anyone working for an organization that has regular performance reviews). Believe me, you can really benefit from what Tasha has to say.  But also, even if you don’t have regular reviews, she says self insight is a meta skill and can be applied to improve many areas of life.  Give it a listen. Some of what we discuss in this episode.  Self awareness as a necessary component of happiness Why self awareness is a meta skill Why insight is more important the higher up the corporate ladder On Dunning Kruger and inappropriate confidence How much should we care how others see us? How to use social media (Facebook) What Tasha thinks of personality testing   How to handle performance reviews How do you deal with negative feedback How self awareness can help someone bounce back from a setback The Miracle Question and how to properly ask it On the benefits of journaling Mindfulness without meditation

My guest is this episode is Caroline Miller. Author of Getting Grit (2017) For almost three decades has been a pioneer with her ground-breaking work in the areas of goal setting, accomplishment, grit, happiness and success.   She is recognized as one of the world’s leading positive psychology experts on this research and how it can be applied to one’s life for maximum transformation and growth. In 2015 she was named “one of the ten positive psychology coaches to follow.” Caroline thinks we need a grit revolution. A change in our recognition and cultural reward system where effort is venerated over talent and people do their best every day regardless of how hard it is and we are all part of other people also being their best.  How important is grit? Caroline has written on the use of the twelve-item Grit Scale and found it to be the leading predictor of who drops out at West Point during the first summer, known as “Beast Barracks.” It had also worked with preteens, determining who would be in the finals of the National Spelling Bee. Grit is considered a key ingredients of high achievement. We live in an exciting but challenging times. Disruptive economic conditions, geopolitical strife and now every negative event around the globe is piped into our homes via television and the internet. Add to this the natural vicissitudes of life itself. As I’m writing this we are rebuilding our fences, screens and cleaning up after a direct hit by hurricane Irma and Houston just went through much worse with Harvey.  Without grit, we can be handicapped by discouragement, fear, inertia and habituated comfort. At various points, big and small, we get knocked down. If we stay down, grit loses. If we get up, grit prevails – Angela Duckworth, Grit If you’ve been knocked down … you’ll need some grit to get up and try again.  The value of hard things  Caroline has done a great deal of research on what really makes people happy. A lot of that data points toward the imperative of doing difficult things in order to live a satisfying, high-quality life filled with achievement. If you do nothing hard at the end of the day the research shows, you feel mediocre about yourself because you know you went for a low hanging fruit. – Caroline Miller Research she has done in Goal Setting Theory, holds that “challenging and specific” goals are required if someone wants to attain the highest levels of performance. Easy goals, don’t just result in mediocrity, she says, but also leave people feeling mediocre. You aren’t happy doing nothing. You are driven to master environments in order to feel related, autonomous and competent. Self efficacy theory is the belief you can do hard things and she says there ways to build that belief. One is just by having small mastery experiences, challenge yourself by doing successively hard things; like parking farther away from the store, taking a cold shower or getting up earlier, mowing your own lawn. Exercise your grit muscle. Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life –  Jerzy Gregorik, Olympic weightlifter Caroline is  like a cross between Tony Robbins and Sheryl Sandberg. She’s motivational, incredibly articulate and footnotes her sentences with research and scientific articles incredibly articulate. Her passion for the topic and her zest is contagious. In this interview, we cover a lot, including: Defining grit, the various types and how they differ The research on purpose and goal setting How to develop grit and the science behind it Her story and how she overcame eating disorder The importance of hope – what it really is How the nation is promoting mediocrity in many arenas The research on how we can build strengths How to cultivate grit in ourselves How we can teach our children to be gritty – she has some strong opinions here How mantras and mottos can change your life Listen up, take notes, if you don’t already follow Caroline, I think you’ll be a fan. Show Notes and Resources Click Here    

NOTE: This is part two of a series on the subject of failure. On this episode, we talk with Ashley Good on how companies can fail intelligently. Part one is with Ryan Babineaux. How does a company deal with failure?   Can companies “fail well” and use failure as a catalyst for innovation? Ashley Good is the CEO and Founder of Fail Forward – the world’s first failure consultancy – that supports people and organizations to acknowledge and adapt to failure in pursuit of innovation.  They do this by offering clients a set of tools and best practices to deal with failure intelligently. Ashley offers a way to build the skills necessary to fail well. She says it's a skill that we can practice but it's one we're often not taught. We're just taught to avoid failure at all costs. We want to create space to take risks and mess up and help our organizations make their way into the future and adapt as they go... when the inevitable failures happen along the way we're able to maximize what we can learn from those experiences to go forward more wisely - Ashley Good This was a very fun interview because there was no pressure. We took failure off the table as any kind of “issue” as we were going to use any mistake we made as part of the show. There is lesson #1, reframe your failures as case studies and experiments. I still I still fail all the time but I have the luxury of being able to use myself as a case study as opposed to as opposed to I think what other people suffer through their failures - Ashley Good And we made no mistakes, the conversation flowed. Funny how that works. Perfection pressure is not conducive to good work or clear thinking. Seems obvious on a personal level but not so corporately.  Ashley says IF you as a manager can bypass shame and defensiveness teams are more productive and if someone does fail, you can find a productive way of working amid failure. A lot of people write and talk about productivity in the workplace. Never heard how defensiveness or shame may impact productivity. Maybe we should address that.   It’s part of our conversation for this podcast: We do talk about failure on a personal level but focus on companies. How would a large business allow for failure while trying to mitigate it? Intelligent or incompetent failure Again, want to be clear here, we are not glorifying failure. Especially within a company. There are things that can sink a company, like losing a big client, a lawsuit, etc. Lesson #3, not all failures are created equally. Ashley says intelligent failures is what want to create room for because we know we need to try new things, experiment and adapt. But we need to acknowledge that there are high consequence failures that we should be avoiding at all costs. There are failures that are blameworthy, where we intentionally deviate from a linear process. "Failure isn't fatal, but failure to change might be" - John Wooden F**ck-up nights, better days Here is something fun I learned talking with Ashley that I wasn't aware of. There are networking events called F**ck-up Nights that have entrepreneurs coming together talking about their start-up mistakes and failures.  It's all about changing the conversation about failure and making it ok to share. People get up and talk about their screw ups that may have unwittingly resulted in eventual success. Something that we could all learn from and emulate. We expend too much energy in success proving and importance posturing. Opening up about your failure not only helps you get over it, but also helps others (and you) learn from it.  Failure, rebirth / reinvention When Ashley tells her personal story about how she started her company, I couldn't help but think of the many people I've talked to who found their calling or passion through some form of failure or pain.  Sometimes the phoenix must burn. Ashley was at one of the lowest points of her life, everything was hard and nothing made sense and all of a sudden a light went on. “This intolerance that we have for those dark moments our inability to deal with them really spoke to me in my moment of darkness." And she was grateful for the experience because she says, up until that moment she hadn't I hadn't really failed at anything.  We don't really practice failing in ways that really matter to us to get good at it, to recognize that we can come through it. Consider this podcast a form of vicarious practice. Give it a listen and learn from Ashley.  

This is part one of a two part series on the subject of failure. On this episode we talk with Ryan Babineaux the author of “Fail Fast, Fail Often” on the importance of making mistakes and learning from them to discover what works and more importantly - what makes you happy.   What if your biggest mistake is that you're not making enough mistakes? I don't mean in the sense of purposely screwing things up. We are not advocating recklessness nor do we want to glorify failure directly - we are glorifying effort, risk, courage and for good measure let’s tack on the end of Teddy's famous poem  "...and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."  Yeah, that.  Ryan has a Ph.D in Educational Psychology from Stanford University and an M.Ed in Psychology and Human Development from Harvard. He is the co-creator of the popular Stanford course “Fail Fast, Fail Often,” and in his best selling book of the same name, discovered after working with thousands of people, that those who were successful seemed to have had less fear of mistakes. They spent less time planning and more time acting. They got out into the world, tried new things, made mistakes but in doing so, benefited from unexpected experiences and opportunities. The strategy is to overcome your fear of losing so that you will increase your at bats for winning by sheer volume of effort and what you learn from that effort. You use that to adjust till you find what works and all the while, gain experience and build resilience. Think of this podcast as a course in a specific kind of courage. Courage to take more risk, courage to try. Ryan says somewhere on the other side of failure is the success you seek, but it's on the other side so walk through it.  What if your goal was to fail, and fail a lot? For a second just forget about the results, think of how many NEW things you would actually start. How many HARD things you would attempt since we flipped failure from avoidance to be the actual goal. The only way to fail a lot is to start a lot of things, try a lot of things. On the podcast we talk about all of this and much more. Give it a listen.    

To say James Altucher is an interesting guy may be a gross understatement. He’s a computer programmer, venture capitalist, former hedge fund manager, successful author, financial journalist, serial founder (20 companies), CEO, publisher, popular podcaster, chess master. He doesn’t own anything, lives exclusively in AirBnBs, does stand-up bits on subway trains. He’s been described as the “minimalist multi-millionaire” and the guy who failed his way to millions. It took me four months to get James on the show. So you know, he agreed to come on immediately (within 2 hrs of my asking) which was very kind as I didn’t even have a show yet – but it took four months to get him on. It was worth the wait. On of my favorite comedies (top 5) is Forgetting Sarah Marshall and James, with just a mention of the film, rolls out a case study on failure and success with a story about the producer Judd Apatow. He riffs like Sherlock Holmes chaining all the connections and experiences that Apatow accumulated while struggling to make it in Hollywood and how it all dovetailed into Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Blew me away. The interview is chock full of insider “here’s what I learned” nuggets like that. Coming back from the bottom, over and over. So here is why I wanted him on the podcast. Losing it all happened to him multiple times, professionally and personally. He founded 20 companies, failed at 17 of them, yet wound up not only surviving but thriving in a media empire / business conglomerate. He is a comeback king with more sequels than Rocky. He is Mr. re-invention and literally wrote the book on it. I wanted to know how he did it, how do you come back over and over again? In this episode, you can learn some of what he learned and shorten your time on the floor. So consider this just a taste of a few of the many lessons he expounds on. 1. Reinvention is a skill you can learn. When you talk with James he makes self-reinvention aspirational. A lot of us have to reinvent out of necessity, but he says it’s something you should always consider. What is happening in the market, in your life and in the world that points to something new? Consider it disrupting yourself before being disrupted by outside forces. What new skills can you learn? What new habits can you develop? Reinvention is a habit. It’s something you should always be on the lookout for…what stimuli from your environment can you take in and incorporate into your next reinvention – James Altucher 1. Ego is an enemy opposed to your successes James talks about how making the money gave him “… this ego to think that I could I could do other things that I had no experience in. But at the time I really had very little experience in anything.” Ego says, you succeeded, and now you know more than you really do. Ego says your successes were ALL your doing. Ego blows you up so no other brains can fit into the room. Brains you need. 2. Know your boxes and check them every day. When James was down and out he put together a checklist of activities that, if he did them daily, helped him recover. Like Superman and the sun, his superpowers returned. They included things like getting enough sleep, swapping unhealthy relationships with healthy ones, writing, learning and reversing any behaviors that were not serving him (doing the opposite). During our chat, he goes into some detail on each. James has the bounce back process down pat. He’s done it so many times that it’s proven itself over and over. Now he seems fearless because he absolutely KNOWS he can get back up again. He has a go-to plan. He checks the boxes. He really made me think about formalizing my own this checkboxes. Maybe I should create my own a personal bounce wiki? I think when I’m down a few of my go-to’s are good books I’ve highlighted over the years, interesting podcasts I listen to and some reflection time to be quite, find my “center” or whatever. What gets you up when you are down?   2. Creativity is a muscle. I never thought of it that way. Like any muscle it atrophies if you don’t use it regularly. And if you’ve lost it you can get it back by exercising it. On the podcast, he goes into detail about this process, and he elaborates on one specific technique that I’ve been trying. Ten ideas a day. James recommends no matter what that you write down ten ideas every single day. Business ideas, blog ideas, any kind of idea and they don’t have to be good ideas. It’s the activity, the work out that’s important. The whole purpose is to do it for its own sake but don’t be surprised if a good ideas come from it. I’ve read somewhere where James said he used a waiter’s pad back when to in write ideas down. I found out he still uses it; he showed it to me. Point taken, you won’t do this unless you have something with you. I use the note app on my phone.  James also gave me a little tip on the idea side, and that is if you write an idea down and if you think there is something there, then you can flesh out “execution” ideas under the main idea in the same way. No matter how good or bad, go for volume and see what results. 3. Happiness = learning James started taking ping-pong lessons after 40 years of playing. He started doing stand-up comedy, not to be a comedian but to learn a new skill.  Psychologists say that stretching and learning something new not only helps us be more confident but it’s a way of connecting with other people, which also adds to happiness. People engaged in learning activities trigger changes in the brain chemistry. Our minds light up when we find new things for the it to do. People say oh I’m 27 and I haven’t found my passion yet. Well there is no one passion, and I’m finding I’m constantly trying to find the things that I’m interested in…so I would never say I found myself. There’s nothing really to find, that notion of finding one’s self is kind of mythology – James Altucher There is so much more on this podcast. We talk about whys and wherefores of his business philosophy, how he looks at investments, writing, stand-up comedy and more. Give it a listen. For show notes and resource links, go here 

What we're trying to do is figure out what leads us to the edge of happiness cliff that point at which we have a maximum productivity, maximum happiness without going over the edge - Amy Blankson There is no doubt that technology in the 20th century has brought advances unimaginable in previous eras. In the US gross domestic product per capita quintupled from 1950 to 2016. Things that were once luxu­ries have become affordable commodities. However, with such advances, computers and all that comes with them, internet, games, email, etc., are now in our pockets, purses or strapped to bodies. They are extensions of ourselves. Tech companies pay big money to UX designers and engineers to create devices and apps that grab and keep your attention. They high want high engagement metrics. They need you to spend time in an app or a video and to come back, over and over. So we all know it impacts our productivity but what about our happiness? What is the impact of a world of screens and notifications on our cognitive behavior and development? What about our relationships? Enter Amy Blankson, my guest on this episode. Amy has become the world’s leading expert on the connection between happiness and technology. Amy is an alum of both Harvard and Yale and has worked with organizations like NASA, Google, the US Army, and the Xprize Foundation to help improve well-being in a Digital Era. Amy states the problem in terms of discernment. “There’s this pain point about technology and happiness with technology specifically draining happiness because people feel overwhelmed. They don’t know what to do with all the information… and how to evaluate what’s actually good for them.” There is now a condition called Nomophobia, as in no-mo(bile) phone-phobia. It’s a fear of being without your smartphone. Seriously, a phobia and 40% of Americans “suffer” from it. One in five young adults admits to using a smartphone during sex. What? Okay, I'll cop to using the phone in the bathroom, so I need help. We are in uncharted territory. Amy says that we absolutely need to look at our relationship with technology very carefully but what she came away with from her research was surprising to me; that time on the screen is not necessarily a bad thing. Time on the screen is not necessarily bad. What is bad is the unintentional non-thoughtful use of the technology - Amy Blankson In fact, she goes further stating that technology can actually increase happiness - IF you use it wisely There’s the rub. Using it wisely On this episode we discuss what she learned writing her new book, The Future of Happiness. Amy talks about how we can mitigate the dispiriting effects tech can have and rather leverage it to increase our happiness. She's done the research and has the data on what you can do in the midst of work / life to harness it to serve your real needs in relation to happiness: social connection, meaning, and well-being. Amy answers LOT of questions I had like... Is there an inverse relationship between personal happiness and tech innovation How should we use Facebook, or should we abandon it? Would we be happier without tech? What is the impact of distraction on our well-being? How do I manage all my apps to minimize distraction? What about wearables? What do we teach our kids regarding appropriate tech boundaries - what exactly IS appropriate? Are there specific apps that can helps us become happier and healthier? Oh, and you have got to hear her answer my Timescape question. Give it a listen. For resources discussed in this episode go here.   

At the age of 36 and as a mother of three with a busy solo practice in internal medicine Wendy Harpham M.D. was diagnosed with stage three non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and just like that, the Doctor became the patient. Now, from both sides of the stethoscope, Wendy uses her unique perspective to help patients become healthy survivors, survivors who get good care and live as fully as possible. Dr. Wendy Harpham is a fellow of American College of Physicians, a best selling author of six books on cancer (Happiness in A Storm is the one I read), a patient advocate and a nationally recognized speaker. Now a 26-year cancer survivor with seven recurrences since, Dr. Harpham has a lot to say about dealing with such a diagnosis and how to live a full, happy life. Wendy has something I really cannot explain; you have to listen to understand. Her passion touched and inspired me. I think a big part of fear are the unknowns related to what you fear and Dr. Harpham shines a bright light on a very dark thing; she gives hope. To those of you who do not have cancer. There are many reasons I think you should listen to this podcast but here are just three. Statistically, one out of two of you reading this will likely hear “you have cancer” in your lifetime. You probably know someone who has cancer or was recently diagnosed. Cancer doesn't own the bad medical news category. This is a lesson in dealing with any severe life challenge.   I felt unqualified to write a post about this show so I'll keep it short. To see a long form post visit www.larryweeks.com/ep-10-cancer-dr-wendy-harpham-happy-storm/ and read another cancer survivors perspective from my good friend, Ron Sparks where he shares his thoughts about the episode.

If you haven't noticed, Stoicism is getting popular these days. Google it and a raft of influencer and popular thought leader articles appear touting the philosophy's benefits. As Nassim Taleb ascribes to the stoic sage in his book The Black Swan: “Someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.” I want that. I talked with scientist/philosopher Massimo Pigliucci to get it.  Massimo is the author of How to Be A Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life. He is also the K.D. Irani Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York. Prof. Pigliucci has published in national and international outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Philosophy Now and The Philosopher’s Magazine, among others. At last count, he has published 152 technical papers in science and philosophy as well as the popular article on Stoicism that appeared in the New York Times. This is no boring philosophy discussion. The majority of our conversation is on Stoic practice and it's practical use in dealing with life's ups and downs including an interesting discussion about overcoming the fear of death.  Here is just some of the discussion.  Misunderstandings that people have about stoicism. Stoicism origin, its influence on religions, modern psychology and it's resurgence in culture of late On prison testing the philosophy, Nelson Mandela, and James Stockdale A comparison of Stoicism and Buddhism On Stoic meditation On dealing with setbacks Internalizing the dichotomy of control Dealing with the fear of death. On indifference If you're new to Stoicism and want to know what all the fuss is about, here is your lesson.

Is everything you know about “success” wrong?   Well, maybe not everything but a hell of a lot of what we’ve been taught about achievement is, at best, simplistic and at worst, just wrong. ERIC BARKER is the creator of the blog Barking Up the Wrong Tree. Almost 300,000 subscribers. His work has been mentioned in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic Monthly, Time Magazine, The Week, Business Insider. His recent WSJ best seller of the same name, subtitled, The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong is the topic of this podcast. The good news is there is much you can do to to up your odds at succeeding in life, whatever that means to you. That’s a hint BTW. There are things that separates the extremely successful from the rest of us and Eric talks about it.  Here are just some of the show notes on things I learned by talking with Eric. Give it a listen. [00:05:18] Some myths about success that we all heard growing up [00:10:04] The Faustian bargain [00:14:07] The importance and power of context [00:16:33] He talks about his most surprising findings (regarding success) [00:17:07] On extroversion and introversion [00:19:54] What we get wrong about the topic of success [00:23:53] “Quitting” and success. [00:25:22] The value of pretending [00:31:16] Why confidence is problematic. [00:37:59] Is college necessary to be successful? [00:43:11] On “intensifiers” and personal success [00:50:26] What to look into if you're failing or unhappy at your job. [00:51:16] The real power in positive thinking [01:01:01] The story of Martin Pistorius        

On the 31st of May in 2014, on a public holiday in New Zealand, Lucy Hone’s 12 yr old daughter, Abi, was killed in a tragic car accident along with her best friend Ella and Lucy’s best friend Sally.  Lucy said her life was smashed, as she put it ... “ I mean your entire life scheme - your life story your identity - has been smashed to smithereens…It's like someone had taken a mallet like a croquet mallet to life and smashed the entirety so it just no longer exists. How do you pick up the pieces and put your what’s left of your life back together?   In the months following the loss, Lucy turned to writing to help order her thoughts. You see, Lucy is a practicing academic in the field of resilience and wellbeing psychology at AUT University's Human Potential Center in Auckland, New Zealand and at the time of Abi's death working on a PhD in public health and wellbeing sciences. Combining research and personal insights she first wrote a blog which attracted a large international audience and led to her book “Resilient Grieving.” It quickly became a bestseller. While she says learning to live without Abi is still very much a work in progress she acknowledges the work she does to support others to inform them that they do have choices in how they grieve has gone some way to make sense out of the senseless. Let's be clear, grief should be felt rather than immediately treated as a problem to be solved and done away with. That said, what, exactly, is the grieving process and how do we manage it before it manages our lives ever orienting all else around loss? On the podcast Lucy discusses the research that tell us there are some grieving models that can help one through it, grieving experiences that are common to everyone and common myths about the grieving and grieving phases. If you have suffered a loss, listen to this podcast. If you have not suffered such a loss others in your life probably have, listen to the podcast and learn how to help them. For show notes and more visit www.larryweeks.com/resilient_grieving_lucy_hone/m/podcast Discussed on this episode On preparing for loss Whether certain grieving processes can weaken us Lucy tells her story, the loss of Abi On sudden loss vs. prolonged loss Defining resilient grieving The truth about the five stages of grieving On ambush grief On secondary losses How can you help others who are grieving - and what not to do