How To Find Ultimate Fulfilment At Work: Marcus Buckingham
嘉宾：Marcus
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§01Transcript — part 1
The thing I think about most, especially when I'm on the go, but also when I'm sat here in the Diary of a CEO studio, is the Wi-Fi and internet that we have to work with.
In fact, any time I'm filming away from the studio, one of the first things I do is when I arrive, I open up an app and do a speed test to see how strong the signal is.
And the number of screenshots I've sent to my team about Wi-Fi signals at different locations is actually pretty crazy.
It matters that much to me because it's such a competitive advantage to have fast Wi-Fi.
Because on any given day, if I'm recording, let's say, hours and hours of footage with a podcast guest, I then often have to have my team send that across to our London team who then do the edit.
So fast Wi-Fi and internet is not a nice to have.
It is absolutely business mission critical.
So when it came to finding the best provider who could supply internet and Wi-Fi to our new LA studio, which I'm sat in right now, we looked at every single option.
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I lost my dad, I lost my marriage, I sold my company.
Then you sort of ask yourself, what are you doing with your life?
My name's Marcus Buckingham.
He's a best-selling author.
A rock star in corporate America.
I couldn't say my own name until I was 12.
The more you try to fix a stammer, the worse it gets.
From a very early age, we start telling people that our strength is what you're good at.
But yeah, I'm good at some things I hate.
What's that?
That's a weakness.
I had got myself into a position where I was solely responsible for one huge client, Disney.
I looked like I sort of feel confident, but I had years of panic attacks.
It was super psychologically damaging.
To be trying to be somebody that you're not, the first relationship you better have is a really good one with yourself.
The best people in any job, they find love in the activities themselves.
Love is for work and work is for love.
And if we do that, it's not just individualistically satisfying.
It's what companies want from us.
So without further ado, I'm Stephen Bartlett, and this is the Diary of a CEO USA edition.
I hope nobody's listening.
But if you are, then please keep this to yourself.
Marcus, it's a pleasure to have you here in our studio here in LA, another Brit.
We've had quite a few Brits in, but you're one that's particularly inspired me with your work.
When I was doing the research on you and reading through your book and your prior book, I...
I was overwhelmed with the amount of questions I wanted to ask you because of the depth of knowledge, but also how much the topics you talk about resonate with me.
The place I wanted to start with you, though, that I found particularly surprising, having met you, having spoken to you, having seen how people have become very enamored with you as a public speaker, is you started your life with a stammer.
Yes.
A really bad stammer.
Yes.
How does someone get from, and I want to talk about that, but for context, you went from having a stammer, which was pretty crippling in terms of social aspects, to Mark French, who's the US's top lecture, leader of the top lecture agency.
Called you one of the best public speakers he's ever seen.
How does one go from having a stammer and being, you know, really hindered by it to that position?
And tell me about the stammer.
Yeah, so when I first started to speak, and this happens for quite a lot more boys than girls, actually, as it happens, my synapses didn't fire right.
And so you have almost immediate disfluency.
So my earliest memories, Steve, are not being able to say my name.
One of my very earliest fears was not ever being able to be married because I couldn't say, well,
Marry me.
So you start off and you start trying to communicate at three and four.
And then you realize that something's really wrong, but you're so young, you don't really understand what's wrong.
And then you get older and older and you realize you can't, you can't put words together.
So for the first 12 years of my life,
not being able to speak was what I thought about every single moment of every day.
And everyone's got their own traumas and their own difficulties.
And I had lots of blessings in my life, but I couldn't speak and I had a lot to say.
So I would keep trying and then it wouldn't work.
And I didn't know why.
And a stammer is a really, it's a perfect metaphor for everything that parents,
try to do with their kids, the more you try to fix a stammer, the worse it gets.
So I went to the speech pathologist and they did the whole Peter Piper picked a pecker, pickle peckers thing.
And you trying to sort of get the muscles to kick in.
And it just got worse and worse and worse and worse.
And then
I was one of five boys that was asked to read aloud in chapel.
I had kept volunteering to be in Christmas plays and stuff.
And I was never picked because everyone rightly was like, uh, he can't talk.
So I'd never really spoken in front of anyone at all.
When I was talking to you, like if I was seven years old and talking to you like this, I couldn't say anything.
Like I wouldn't.
I would try and then you would be like, this is mortifying.
So I'd never been asked to read aloud anywhere.
Anyway, that day, I can say, my palms are sweating even just thinking about it because you realize,
My life's over.
Every single child in the school is going to see me now stand up.
I can't fake the words because they've got the Bible study books because it was in chapel.
So they can see what I'm supposed to read.
So I can't, I used to substitute words that I could say for words I couldn't.
It's an old stammerous trick.
But they're like, you can see what I'm going to read.
Girls and boys at that age, as you know, can be pretty cruel.
So I'm like, I'm done.
I'm just baked, you know, stick a fork in me.
But anyway, I woke up and I turn around and I look at all the faces and it was like a stimulus.
And then my response, my brain felt different.
That's all I can say about it.
It just felt different, felt warmer.
It felt fluid.
And I just read the whole piece with not a single stammer.
Really?
Just the whole thing.
And what occurred to me was I love eyes on me.
It sounds really weird, but the more people I'm talking to, I'm better.
Brain comes faster.
Words come out better.
Stories, I don't know why.
I didn't work at it.
I didn't struggle with it.
It was just that worked on me in the same way that some people have a stammer when they sing, they don't have a stammer.
So I took that away.
I was blown away.
Didn't understand it.
But then I just went, you know what?
That should be an unlock for me.
We often go to our...
Deep traumas to try to understand how to fix ourselves.
And if you have social anxiety, well, what caused it?
Where did it start?
And we sort of,
We pathologize ourselves with the best of intentions.
But I went the other way and I was like, I know so much about this dance stammer.
I've been to more speech pathology sessions and read more books.
And I know so much about it.
I just can't fix it.
Instead, I'm going to...
I'm going to decide that when I talk to one person, I'll just pretend I'm talking to 400.
I'll just literally pretend I'm talking to 400.
And the stammer went away in a week.
I was faking public speaking when I was just speaking.
And I was doing it as a coping mechanism so that I didn't stammer.
And it worked.
Fascinating.
It's weird.
Makes no sense.
Right.
It's like, we're mysterious.
And that's what I read about in the book is that I don't think we've really grabbed hold of that, this huge variability and variety that lives in human beings.
We have talked about it in terms of race or gender or age or nationality or religion, but we haven't really talked about it in terms of why are you different from your brother?
By the time you get to be about 18, 19, you have a hundred trillion synaptic connections in your brain that lead you to love some things and loathe others.
Things that shouldn't go together, go together.
Things that you lean into that you shouldn't lean into, but you do.
Like for me, I shouldn't have loved public speaking, but for some daft reason, I did.
Why?
No idea.
But we...
We have this unbelievably intricate network of synaptic connections that makes us completely different from the person we grew up in the same house with.
And what no one's ever taught us is, A, how do you understand that uniqueness?
Like, what are the signs life is giving you?
And B...
How do you use it?
Like, can you rewire your brain to become someone else?
What happens if you put your 10,000 hours in?
Can you rewire your brain and become a different human being?
Can you rewire that network in your brain?
Well, if you have a growth mindset, supposedly you should.
And yet, actually, we know that's not what happens at all.
You grow more synaptic connections in the part of your brain.
You have the most pre-existing synaptic connections.
Everyone, because you've got the alpha integrin proteins and the blood vessels and the infrastructure.
So actually, growth for all of us is becoming actually a more defined.
Version of who you are.
You don't rewire your brain to become someone else.
The question in life isn't really growth or no growth.
It's where will you grow the most?
So I don't think we've ever really grappled with the 11-year-old who's basically asking herself, who am I?
Is there a me in there?
And we could have 10 years of school.
Yes, where we learn geometry, but you could have 10 years going, here's how to use the raw material of a week of school to start helping you know a little bit more about that weird, massive and massively filigreed network in your brain.
And we could help you learn to have a language around that and how to describe it without bragging or how to be interested in other people's network.
We could do all of that.
And of course, as you know, as an entrepreneur, you want to hire people like that because then they have mastery of themselves.
So when they join a team, they can start going, well, you can lean into me for this.
And, you know, here's a bit where I struggle, actually, I need some help.
And here's where I...
Things come really fast and here's where I'm like a deer in the headlights.
But I know certainly in the company that I built, it's like you don't hire people like that.
You tend to hire people that are completely lovely and smart, but really quite inarticulate at describing where they find love in what they do, where they're at their best and where they...
struggle.
We just haven't grappled with the beautiful, wonderful, extensive variation of us as individuals.
And when you were that age, when you were, say, 11 or 13 or 14, what was, if I'd asked you what you wanted to do when you were older, what would the answer have been?
I didn't own it.
If I go all the way back to nine or 10, I wouldn't have known what I wanted to be.
I did know that I started to pay attention to things that other people didn't pay attention to.
And that was interesting.
Then at 16, I bumped into this titan of...
Positive psychology, whose name was Dr.
Don Clifton, who was the chairman of Gallup, but also its chief scientist.
And so at 16, he said, you're going to go study psychology.
And I had chosen psychology.
And he was like, come to Lincoln, Nebraska, and I'll teach you about positive psychology and studying what's right with people.
And I was like,
All right, I'll do that.
Didn't know where I would lead, but knew that research and psychology, real world observed human behavior, I just was always interested in that.
For people that don't know,
What is Gallup?
Oh, well, Gallup's the first company I joined after school, after university.
Gallup was founded by George Gallup, who was the inventor of polling.
You like polling, I hate it.
He figured out something, which was if you talk to 10,000 very carefully selected people, your predictions of what they're going to do or vote for or anything is more accurate than taking...
100,000 people because your 100,000 people might be skewed.
But if you have what's called a representative sample in your 10,000, then you've actually can extrapolate from your 10,000 to 100 million.
Now, there's subtleties around that, but that's where it started.
After George died, Don Clifton bought the company.
And Don's focus was psychometrics.
So how do you measure things about a human that are really, really important, but you can't count?
§02Transcript — part 2
How can you measure engagement?
How can you measure strengths?
How can you measure resilience, talent?
How do you measure that?
Could I figure out a set of questions that would help me discover something about you in terms of your strengths, your talents, your advantages, your attributes that you don't even know yourself?
Like, I just loved that idea.
And so half of Gallup was polling and half of Gallup was psychometrics.
And so I was there for the first 17 years of my career and we built this tool that 25 million people have taken called Strength Finder.
Strength Finder is all about exactly what it says.
Let's try and measure you on 34 strengths and then we'll give you...
A top five.
So that was the side that I spent my first 17 years of my career with, is trying to measure the uniqueness of human beings.
From a top line perspective, when you were in that role, because I mean, 17 years trying to find the uniqueness in human beings and inventing this thing called Strength Finder.
What did you learn about what a strength is?
Because when I think about a strength, I think it is, I guess, just something that I'm good at.
Yeah.
So when you dive into what a strength is, what you find is it's shot through with emotion.
It's what do you love to do?
What do you lean into?
What do you find yourself unable to stop doing?
There's an obsessive and joyous quality to a strength.
So when you push and push and push on a strength, people think that a strength is what you're good at, a weakness is what you're bad at.
But actually, if you push on that, even just a little, Steve, you bump into people going, yeah, but I'm really good at that and I hate it.
What's that?
What's it where you're really good at it?
Even in school, when you got an A and you're like, I'm thank goodness that class is over because I don't want to take it again.
But your parents go, well, you got an A.
In fact, you got an A in biology.
So you might want to do medicine.
You should be a doctor.
But deep down yourself going, but I don't want.
I don't like sick people.
I actually don't like sickness at all.
And yet, no matter as a doctor, you keep curing them.
There's another one the next day.
They keep coming into my darn office.
You know, I'm never done.
And so from a very early age, we start telling people that strength is what you're good at.
But yet our own human experience is, I'm good at some things I hate.
What's that?
Well, when you push on that, that's a weakness.
And so we should change our definition.
A weakness is any activity that I'm not good at.
Weakens you.
Any activity where before you do it, you don't want to do it.
While you're doing it, time drags on.
When you're done with it, you feel drained.
that's a weakness.
I don't care how good you are at it.
If that's how you feel after it, and then somebody were to say to you, build your career around that, that's sadistic.
But that's the proper definition of a weakness is if it weakens you.
Definition of a strength is any activity that strengthens you.
Before you do it, you lean into it.
You sort of just can't stop yourself from volunteering.
While you're doing it, time whips by and you're like,
You look up, you thought it was an hour, right?
And it's now, you've been doing it for seven hours and you're like, oh my God.
And then when you're done with it, you're like, I don't know, I feel completed or I feel like me or I feel authentic.
I don't feel drained.
I might not want to do it right away again, but I'm like, you're from the Latin, right?
You're invigorated.
You're strengthened.
Which of course means if a strength is what strengthens you and a weakness is what weakens you, what's super cool about that is that you're the best judge of both.
No one knows better than you what weakens you and what strengthens you.
From the nine years old, we could be saying to people, hey, what strengthens you about even video games?
Okay, which video game?
What?
What about it?
Is it a multiplayer game?
Is it a first person shooter?
We could start to get people to be cultivating their own kind of genius about what are your strengths?
Somebody else is the judge of your performance.
No question.
So if you say, I really, really love remembering people's names.
No one can.
can come in and say, no, no, no, you don't.
They can say, well, you should probably use that to give better customer service.
And here's how you might want to do that.
But no one can come in and say, you don't love that.
Because if you say, no, no, no, I do, then you're the best judge of that.
Now, we might want to help you learn the detail of that.
Well, what do you mean by helping people?
What do you mean by learning their names?
Or what bit about it?
So we could help you get more detailed around it.
But a strength...
Is what strengthens you.
And you are the only genius when it comes to your strengths.
17 years with Gallup, that's sort of the biggest takeaway.
And Strength Finder or other tools like that can help you sort of get in the vicinity of what are your strengths.
But really a strength is an activity that strengthens you.
And life, frankly, is waking up every day, kind of putting on a show for you, going, what about this?
What about this?
What about this?
What about this?
Um,
And yeah, you're on the receiving end going, hmm, how about that?
What is it about that?
17 years at Gallup, you know, the other thing I was thinking about before you arrived was you must know how to ask a good question.
Because that's sort of central to Gallup's work is knowing how to ask the right type of question.
And there's so many questions that are trying to get to the same answer, but there's various routes you can take.
And the divergence between, I guess, in terms of outcome of a good question and a bad question must be quite significant.
Like if I'm trying to find out what motivates you, there's a number of ways that I could ask that.
And I think...
A lot of the ways that I would ask that simple question would actually lead me to the wrong place.
Because they're like laced with biases and presumptions and maybe they're not open, maybe they're too binary.
So how does one go about, because asking good questions is so important in life generally, whether you're trying to help a friend, you're trying to hire someone, you're trying to understand anything.
It's all about inquiry.
How does one ask better questions?
Is there, did you learn anything about that?
Well, you're right.
That's what the product is.
And you would test it out.
You would do what's called a concurrent validity study where you take 100 really good managers and 100 average ones and you try out 250 questions.
250 questions and you see which questions elicit patterns of answers that the best people in a role do versus ones that are less successful.
And many of the questions that you thought were great questions, you have to throw out because they don't work.
As in the most successful people don't answer them in any way that's similar to each other and different than these people.
So that's really what the business was, trying out lots of different questions to figure out what are the best questions you can ask, in this case, for a particular role or job.
But in general...
If you want to ask really good questions, the first thing to know is you should be asking open-ended questions.
So you're asking, what did you love most about your previous work?
Open, not yes, no's.
Like, just open-ended.
What did you love most about?
It sounds like an obvious thing, but it's amazing how close-ended our questions are.
As opposed to like, what would be an example of a close-ended?
Did you love managing people?
Are you an overachiever or an underachiever?
You know, or do you,
Like overcoming people's resistance to your ideas.
That's a yes.
So you can, if you're not careful, you close the answer down.
Best questions are always like, tell me about a time when you built something that you didn't expect to build.
It's just open.
Hard to measure though, right, if it's open.
That's why I think people avoid open questions, right?
Because then you get such a variety of answers.
How do you like...
Put them in categories?
Well, when it comes to psychometrics, you have a listen for and you code it.
Plus, when you hear the listen for and zero for everything else, like boiling and not boiling.
So when you're actually building an instrument, this may be too inside baseball as it were, but inside cricket.
But that's how you do it when you're building an instrument.
So for example, you take a question like, how do you know if you're doing a good job of listening?
Let's say that you're trying to figure out empathy and you decide that one of the ways to measure empathy would be a question like, how do you know if you're doing a good job of listening?
So you take your study group of highly empathetic people, your contrast group of less, and you experiment with a whole bunch of questions.
One of them is that one.
Well, it turns out, by the way, that one does have a listen for.
A really good listen for.
What's a listen for?
A pattern of responses that the most empathetic people all seem to share, even though they don't know one another.
Okay.
And the listen for, if you imagine all the possible answers to that question, how do you know if you're doing a good job of listening?
You could imagine somebody saying, well, if I can repeat back to the person what they say.
said, or if I just nod, or like all sorts of, if I mirror their body language.
Turns out the most empathetic people all say the same thing.
They don't say it in exactly the same way, but they say exactly the same thing.
They all say, I know I'm doing a good job of listening when the other person keeps talking.
Well, that's interesting because that means the empathetic person instinctively knows that the job of a listener is not to understand what the person's saying.
Interestingly, the job of a listener is to be, however they do it, in such a way that you keep talking.
The outcome of listening is the other person sharing.
What you realize in most interviews, frankly, first of all, that the interview split of time is 60-40 the wrong way.
The interviewer talks for 60% of the time and the interviewee talks for 40.
So we've got a big imbalance.
And by the way, the interviewer rates the person more highly in a job interview when the interviewer talks most.
There's a very strong...
Really?
Yeah, totally.
When I've talked to you, I rate...
Maybe you didn't when you were building your company, but across the board when you study this, there's a positive correlation between amount of time the interviewer talks and the rating of the interviewee.
Wow.
But anyway, in terms of building instrument, once you've got, oh, wow.
All the most empathetic people say the same thing to that question.
How do you know if you're doing a good job of listening when the other person keeps talking?
Well, then that becomes a listen for.
And then whenever you're trying to measure empathy, you throw that question out, you shut up.
up, you let the person talk.
And then if you hear it unprompted, off the top of their head, if they just say unprompted by you, no cues from you, no biases from you, no nudging, because I like the look of you when you walked in, you just shut up.
Even when the person says, well, what do you mean by that?
And by the way, this is one of the tricks of interviewing.
You have to learn your parry phrases.
A parry phrase is like when somebody, because everyone wants to try to narrow you down.
I'm sure in Dragon's Den, you've seen this.
Like people try to narrow you down towards getting to the place where you say yes.
And so when somebody says, you know, how do you know if you're doing a good job of listening, the interviewee tends to say, well, what do you mean by that?
You mean at home or at work?
Do you mean if I know them really well, if I don't?
And the tendency, because that's just what humans do, is to go, oh, work.
When someone you don't know well, and you narrow it down so they can get the right answer.
So you have to learn a parry phrase like,
Well, I know what I mean by that, but I'm interested in what you mean by that.
Just to knock it back.
Just to knock it back.
And then if you ask a question like that and the person spontaneously goes, if the other person keeps talking and then you actually code that, you can score it.
Going back to your question about how do you score it?
You can score that.
You didn't tell them what to say.
You asked an open-ended question and you knew what you were listening for.
And so you can code it, in this case, a plus.
And everything else isn't a bad answer.
§03Transcript — part 3
It's just a non-predictive answer of that particular trait.
There's a whole bunch.
I mean, if you wanted to select really good salespeople, here's a great question.
How do you feel when someone doubts what you have to say?
How do you feel?
Open-ended.
How do you feel when someone doubts what you have to say?
Imagine all the possible answers to that question.
And what you find is highly successful people, get a hundred of them, less successful salespeople, get a hundred of them.
These people, in answer to that question, how do you feel when someone doubts what you have to say?
They all say, it pisses me off.
The successful ones.
Yes.
Look, don't buy from me.
That's all right.
Disagree with me.
That's all right.
Don't doubt me.
What we called, and we did call it this, a negative emotional reaction.
Because when you're a salesperson, you're like, listen, I respect the fact that you can choose what product or service you might want to go with.
Don't doubt me.
It's like when people say with salespeople, well, you shouldn't take rejection personally.
The best salespeople are like, are you kidding?
That's all I'm saying.
I'm me.
So in this case, when you put the word doubt in there, it's like, it's like a bang.
And you're like, oh, don't doubt me.
So the listen for there is like very specific.
By the way, when you ask great teachers that question and average teachers that question, they say completely the opposite.
They say the best teachers go, I love that.
Because to them, and not all teachers, because there's a whole bunch of teachers who don't say that, but you look at great teachers, they go, no, the doubt is a student.
I want the student to be doubting.
That's learning.
And so you've got,
Ask that for the great nurses, average nurses.
The question doesn't work anymore because who doubts a nurse?
Yeah.
You know, so it's with all these things, I'm sure you found with your business, you can ask one question and then you're really just trying to pin your ears back.
Shut the heck up and let the person ramble because it's so revealing.
Even a question like, what did you enjoy most about your previous work?
Yeah.
I mean, what a great question that is.
And again, people will say, well, what do you mean with previous work?
Do you mean this job?
You go, hey, what did you enjoy most about your previous work?
Just talk to me about it.
It's, well, I think it's fascinating and it's predictive.
Like you can start to predict what people are going to do.
If you can hear what they have repeatedly done, people say, you know, past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior.
No, it isn't.
Repeated past behavior is the best predictor of repeated future behavior.
So if you want to know repeated past behavior, you ask an open-ended question and then you shut up.
And top of mind is what the person repeatedly does or thinks or feels.
And it's so revealing.
We just mostly in conversation, we just talk at each other.
Well, I did this.
Well, I did.
Oh, you didn't fall asleep last night?
I didn't fall asleep last night either.
You missed your plane.
I've missed my plane.
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Your cat seems thirsty-er.
Whoa, slow down, buddy.
Or your puppy is acting clumsy-er.
Day or night, if you don't know what's wrong, know where to go.
Veg ER for Pets.
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Waiting to talk.
Exactly.
In your first book, you talked a lot about employee satisfaction.
So your first book was called First Break All the Rules.
You really highlight the importance of employee satisfaction.
And I think, you know, a lot of people might think, oh yeah, keeping employees happy is, you know, we'll do our best, but it really is, from your work, it's clear that it's central to the success of a company.
I guess my first question is then,
What is the single biggest predictor or the unexpected predictor of employee satisfaction in the workplace?
Because I would think it was like, you know, one might think it would be how much you pay them or how many holiday days they get.
What did you find out?
Well, the two biggest things from all of this research, and it sort of goes full circle from First Break All the Rules, which was the first book,
I wrote, which is based upon Gallup research in, you know, way back when, but it comes all the way full circle, Steve, to this book, which is,
Is all about love.
When you push and push and push on your question, what you bump into is an item, a survey item, that just keeps showing up in people
that are more likely to stay with you, more likely to be productive, more likely to have fewer lost work days, less likely to sue, frankly, if they have an accident on the job, like all sorts of really good predictive real world outcomes, are more likely to happen when someone says, firstly,
I have a chance to use my strengths every day.
Or I love what I do and I'm good at it.
there's something about person, work, fit.
Person, work, fit.
This job has some big bits of it that fit me.
Now, who me is, is variable, of course, but is this job in any way an alien job to me?
Or is it actually part of me?
When you have that in any job, we were talking before about the first job I ever studied was housekeepers, where we think, oh, you know, housekeeper, stupid job.
I mean, I bet they all just want to get out of it as quickly as they can.
But you study the world's best housekeepers and you're like, oh my word, there are some people that love certain aspects of that role.
Any role done at excellence has got a lot of love in it.
And every role done averagely is loveless.
If you have loveless work, you're a worse worker.
We now know all sorts of biochemical reasons why that's so, but it just kept showing up in survey after survey after survey.
Work you fit, however you want to talk about that, is huge.
Which is why, of course, I'm sure when you built your company, you realized this.
Teams are everything.
Teams are everything.
They make homes for unique individuals.
And you can start going, ah, well, you're all weird, but you do this and you do this and you do this and you do this.
And lo and behold, the team's well-rounded precisely because each person on it isn't well-rounded.
And then the team leader, of course, can be really creative about, well, which bit of it do you love?
And can we get you to do a bit more of that?
And then you can lean into this person who weirdly loves balancing the books, but you hate it.
Well, that's interesting.
They love Excel.
You love PowerPoint.
Okay, well, that's it.
That's a team.
And so that's all about person, work, fit.
So that's a huge one.
And then, of course, the second one in terms of all the discoveries around engagement is it's your manager, stupid.
It's like...
If you don't trust your manager, if your manager doesn't know you, if your manager doesn't pay attention to you, then your whole company becomes the manager.
And you can actually walk around your neighborhood going, you know what?
It's a pretty good company, but I freaking hate her.
And if you freaking hate her, you leave.
I left the company's great.
Now, if you flip that around, you can go, the company's terrible.
The pay is bad, and the benefits package isn't really what it's cracked up.
But my manager, Steve, I mean, I would follow him anywhere.
Which, by the way, sometimes happens when Steve moves companies.
So those two things of everything.
I'm not saying that pay is nothing or benefits are nothing.
People like those things.
If you want to see where people give that discretionary effort, if you want to see where certain teams soar and you go, why?
Why is that team crushing it?
And this team's struggling, which by the way, you go inside companies, you start measuring anything, lost work days, productivity, sales, profitability, and what you find, and no one talks about this, but you find variation.
You go inside of...
You go inside of Home Depot, or you go inside of Marks and Spencer's, or you go inside of Goldman Sachs, or you go inside of Tesla, you go inside of Disney.
Oh, well, Disney's got this culture.
Tesla's got that culture.
All of that is rubbish.
You go inside a company, let's just take Tesla, and you start measuring what's it like to work here.
What you get is range.
What's it like to work at Tesla depends massively on which bloody team you're on.
And if you are working on a team down here that's disengaged, your manager doesn't care about you, you're not trusted, that's Tesla.
And when you leave, you're leaving that.
Now, this team over here is a super engaged team.
Same business card, Tesla, Tesla.
But you, I don't know, you read the, I don't know what you read, but you read the business press, it sure looks as though companies have one culture.
Rubbish.
They have as many cultures as they do teams.
They have one stock price, but that's a totally different ballgame.
So in terms of what drives engagement on this team, does someone really think about how I can fit the work that I'm doing a lot of?
And then do I really trust that my team leader is out to make me bigger?
better.
He's interested in that.
When those two things, I'm not saying there are other things, recognition is important, mission, you're going to talk to Simon while you're here, the why is important, but the
Why doesn't compensate for the what?
If what you're doing on that team doesn't fit you, it's like nurses.
You know, why we have such burned out nurses in the NHS and over here too.
Their why couldn't be stronger.
Of course, their why is so vivid.
And yet they're burning out.
They have higher levels of PTSD than veterans that return from war zones.
It's like we're crushing our nurses.
Why?
Well, one, many reasons, but one reason is the span of control.
One nurse supervisor to 60 nurses.
Which is the average over here.
I don't know exactly what the average is in the NHS, but it's really big.
There's no teams in hospitals.
Hospitals aren't built around teams.
They're built around vertical areas of expertise.
So if you're a nurse, 60 of you, one nurse supervisor, that poor nurse supervisor can't do those two things I just mentioned.
He or she can't get to know you in terms of where your strengths and passions lie.
And then they can't put you on a team to help you be collaborative with others so that together you can reinforce and support one another in those areas where you don't have strength or love or whatever.
Humans have been working in teams for 50,000 years.
And if you go to hospitals, there are no teams because the structure is set up to make it impossible.
And then we wonder, we go out and we clap.
But it's all a bit, it's like, hey, rather than dragging people out of the river who are drowning, why don't we go upstream and see why we're pushing them in in the first place?
With nurses, we've built a system where they don't get those two things.
Those two needs met.
No one's interested in who they are and what they bring.
And no one has enough time to pay attention to how they're feeling, what they're into, what they're not into, who could they come work with, like all of that stuff that humans need.
That particular profession doesn't get.
And that's the reason why in all of our studies, I run the ADP Research Institute now, which is a big global institute.
It's the least resilient profession of all.
Even pre-pandemic it was.
And funnily enough, the second most burned out is teachers.
So the two...
Most burned out, least resilient professions have the clearest why, the clearest sense of purpose.
But the reality of the work, the day-to-day reality of the work is super disengaging.
There's no teams in schools.
It's like wherever you see no teams, you get no trust in team leader and no link between you and your work, you and your role, you and your role.
It's like teams are this magic technology that we discovered 50,000 years ago when we tried to bring down big game.
It's so interesting you say that because I've always pondered.
So there's so many things that I thought about there.
The first thing was actually how right you are, having seen in my own organization over the years where I would do my one-on-ones with team members and...
§04Transcript — part 4
If Jason Fisher was managing the team,
even though they were in the same room, they're all in the design department, but the 15 people Jason Fisher was managing would report tremendously high levels of job satisfaction.
team sat next to him doing pretty much the same work would come in and I was, I felt like I was fighting to keep them in the company because they were managed, sat next to the other team, but managed by a different person.
And the crazy thing is in the second team I described one-on-one sessions with me, they would ask to be managed by Jason Fisher.
They would say, could we?
And then eventually our decision as a company was to put Jason Fisher above the whole design studio.
So he was in charge of 40 people, but then he could like oversee the team.
And those people were happy.
And then the second thing you said just at the end there, which really made me think was about freelancers.
And about their levels of engagement and motivation.
They are not in teams.
They tend to work at home alone on computers, on work, which actually is not connected to them.
A different project today, a different project tomorrow.
And I believe that they...
And I've just, it's an anecdotal thing that I've seen in my friends that are freelancers.
I think they struggle the most in terms of Fulfilment and happiness in their work.
Generally, obviously there's perks, but generally.
No, you're absolutely right.
The data would back you up a thousand percent.
We've just finished.
We did a 25,000 person, 25 country study two years ago, just came out of the field three days ago with a 27,000 person study, 27 countries, the least engaged, least resilient professions are people who are alone, who are working as...
Exactly as you said.
That doesn't mean that there aren't some benefits to your point.
They do actually like the flexibility.
But the only places...
Where it really works is where the company, and there's a few companies that do this actually, because of the labor laws or whatever, you stay in a freelance role, but actually you're brought into the team.
You're treated like a member of the team.
Look, in 2017, I read about this too, because I was just fascinated by the fact that the oldest human art we've ever found,
Like in 2017, this guy in the little island of Sulawesi in Indonesia, he's climbing up in a limestone cave and he's looking for a handprint because that's the oldest art we've ever found.
It's like a red handprint in ochre or something.
He's looking to see if he can find it.
And he comes, climbs in, takes his iPhone.
And he's got a 15-foot mural on the wall.
And the mural turns out to be 50,000 years old.
So it's the oldest human art we've ever found.
Well, maybe it's, sorry, 44,000 years, but they think it's actually, conservatively, it's 44,000 years old.
And it's a painting, not of a hand, not of a foot or a face even.
It's a painting of...
A bunch of little human figures, some carrying spears, some carrying rope, and then very clearly the local fauna.
So an anoa, a deer, a wild cat.
And clearly this group of people is trying to get together to capture or kill these animals.
And what's cool about it is that the artist, and they think most artists, cave artists, was done by women, so they think it was women, has drawn each human figure with an animal characteristic.
So one of them has the face of a lion, one of them has a...
Tail of a crocodile.
One of them has a trunk of an elephant.
And they're called therianthropes.
Who knows why, but anthropologists call half man, half animal therianthropes.
And what it looks as though has happened is the artist has looked across the cave, across the fire and gone, Ooh, she's super wily like a crocodile and he's really strong.
So he's brave.
And this one, and she's represented a team of differently talented people.
So what's super cool about it, I think, and I could just be geeking out on it, but the oldest human expression of us with each other is a manifestation of how different we are from one another
in the cave and how acutely astute that person must have been to spot it and then went, hey, what happens if we all...
Came together and then we could do together what we can't do alone.
And then everyone went, all right, we'll try that.
And then it worked.
And then they memorialized it on a cave and that's called a team.
And then fast forward 50,000 years, we go to schools and hospitals and we build places with no teams or call centers or manufacturing facilities.
And it's like, ah, you've run a business.
What you just said, by the way, data backs this up a thousand percent too.
You can go into a company.
And you can ask a question like, I trust my team leader, or do I know what's expected of me at work?
And you've got two teams in the same room and you'll have one team where 90% of people strongly agree that I know what's expected of me.
And doing the same job right next to it.
where less than 40% do.
And I remember when I was like really young in my career, I'd walk back into a company and the CEO would go, because we did these surveys and they would go, what's our culture like?
And I would go,
Well, this team, everyone knows what's expected of them.
And then right next door, there's a team that has no idea what they're doing.
And the CEO will be like, what?
Because we've got policies and we've got goal setting and we've got software that enables cascaded goals to hit people.
And you go, yeah, I know.
We bought a new sofa for the whole lot too, so they should have the...
And you're like, I don't know, but there's huge variation inside that room.
And you, in terms of your experience, had that, you know, every single place you looked, you found variation.
But you don't, it's funny, you don't really read that much about it.
I don't, you don't, you don't.
It's actually, weirdly, this is kind of the first time I've really deeply pondered it.
I can see it having happened in my company, but, and I can see it happening office to office.
So our office in Manchester versus our office in London.
Our office in London was really not good, good in terms of satisfaction at one point.
Our office in Manchester was amazing.
And just...
Yeah, and the real point that stuck with me is that you don't have one culture.
That's kind of been a bit unnerving for me.
It's made me rethink a couple of decisions I made.
But the other thing I know you wrote about in that book, before we get on to this one, is you talked about how great managers handle underperformers.
And how every team has people that underperform.
That are for whatever reason, from what you've,
understood how do great managers handle people that aren't performing to a certain standard?
So the first thing that we've got to remember about all managers, and again, we don't hear this much discussed either, is like, why do we all hate the performance review?
Why do we all hate the annual performance review?
Many reasons, because when I go through it and somebody says you're a four, I go, well, I'm not a number.
So there's that part of it.
But also it's too infrequent, right?
Once a year.
So you go in going, I've got to tell this person everything I'm worried about, anxious about, thinking about, because I'm not going to talk to them again for a year.
It's too infrequent.
The best managers know.
That the world moves quickly.
There's 52 little sprints.
That's a year, 52 little sprints.
So the best managers are checking in with each of their people, really light touch, like 10 minutes, 15 minutes, but every week, one-on-one, every week, one-on-one, really simple questions like, what'd you love last week and loathe?
What are your priorities this week?
How can I help?
But like that every week, little, because remember the goals you set at the beginning of the year are irrelevant by the third week of the year.
I mean, we're in the middle right now of like all sorts of global conflict.
We didn't know that three weeks ago.
So we also know from data, by the way, people don't go back in and check their goals.
So less than 4% of people.
Once they set a goal at the beginning of the year, maybe there's a software program that records it or whatever.
They don't go back in and check it, but we all know it changes so dramatically even in the next couple of weeks.
So the first thing is the best managers are frequently going, how was last week?
How was next week?
It's really this sort of that.
Rhythm, it's like 52 little sprints like that.
And of course, that means if you've got an underperformer, you are hitting it really early.
You don't wait until December and go, you have had a bad year.
You're a two, right?
You're hitting it every week.
And because you're hitting it every week, you've got an opportunity much earlier to start saying two things.
The first is...
And this is so, it sounds so obvious, but one of the questions that separates a good manager from a bad manager, by the way, is you put this question to them.
You've got someone who comes into work consistently late.
What would you do?
So you take a study group, take a contrast group, a hundred great managers, a hundred average ones.
And you just throw that question out.
You've got someone who comes into work consistently late.
What would you do?
And you, again, think of a million different answers to that question.
These folks here, they all say the good ones.
We call it the study group.
When you're doing a concurrent validity study, you take 100 great ones measurably and then 100 average.
I won't get into how you measure it, but it's like that's how you do it.
And anyway, these ones here, their top of mind response, unprompted, is...
I would ask why before I do anything else.
I would say, why are you coming in late?
Maybe is it a bus issue?
Did you miss the, you got something with your kid?
Is it a drop off time?
Should I change your start time to 9.30 so you can get your kid?
Why?
If you start by assuming this is a real human,
You start by assuming this person's not trying to get one over on you.
Which is kind of an interesting mindset.
It's like the best managers start, I think Douglas McGregor called it theory X.
You start by assuming that people want to do good work.
And so if someone's underperforming, you start by assuming there's something going on that I don't know.
And so that's the beginning.
And then because you're doing it every week, it's like the person's not going, wait, wait, that was three months ago.
I fixed that now.
No, no, this is last Tuesday and Wednesday.
Remember?
15 minutes late.
Oh, well, now the person may come up with an excuse, but the first thing you do is you ask a question, you shut up, you let the person define their own reality.
Of course, if you're doing that every week and you're putting together little strategies to help the person, in this case, show up and they don't, then
the instinctive insight the best managers seem to have and the best coaches is that your job isn't trying to put in what God left out.
Your job is to try to draw out what God left in.
Your job as a manager is not to make someone.
Your job as a manager is not to perfect someone.
Your job is to go, who the heck are you?
And then can I find work or indeed a work context in which you can express you?
And if I've consistently seen underperformance from you, it's not because you're a bad human.
It's because for some reason I put you in the wrong role.
In which case my caring doesn't stop.
My loving doesn't stop.
I just practice sometimes tough love.
And I'll come in and I'll say to you quickly, I love you.
And you're fired.
And I still love you because this job, I put you in it, maybe.
And it's wrong for you.
I can see it.
You can see it.
We can all see it.
So let's move you out quickly because this job is, we're not going to rewire your brain so that you get to be somebody else.
You're you.
And this job doesn't fit you.
And it's my job.
Again, another great question.
This is a closed-ended one, but ask great managers, would you give people what they want?
Or do you give them what's right for them?
And then you just shut up and they go with the second one.
You get people what's right for them, even if occasionally it isn't what they want.
So, I mean, there's more to it than that, of course, but in terms of how best managers do with poor performers, frequency, ask questions and shut up, and then stop trying to rewire people's brains.
Most of high performance is the function of talent role fit.
And when you get low performance, it's because the person's not a bad person.
It's because they misfit.
And I bet you've seen that with your people.
You've had a thousand.
So you moved, I bet you moved some people sometimes, not always, but you go from a C minus, ah, so frustrating.
And then you tweak the job even just a little.
And you're like, yeah, who are you?
And they're extraordinary.
That's why I always hate the stuff where people go, well, they're an A player.
It's like, stop categorizing people.
A players depend upon which flipping role you put them in.
I could take your A player.
I'll make him a D.
So don't, there's no A players.
There's just people who really fit their role and get real joy from it and have mastery in it, et cetera, et cetera.
And then there's people that don't.
§05Transcript — part 5
I bet you've been a B minus in something.
100%.
Right?
Me too.
Put me in finance.
E.
Right.
Oh, he's an A player.
Have you seen his spreadsheets?
So that's that notion of like, I'm not trying to fix you.
I'm trying to see you and then find roles in which you can express you as woo woo as that sounds.
You and I both built businesses.
We know it's like, no, that's not woo at all.
That's a good night's sleep.
That's what that is.
When you've got a person in a team that you go, ooh, that's a thing of beauty.
Mm.
One of the things you said as well was the hardest thing about being a manager is realizing that your people will not do things the way that you would.
I think everyone can resonate with that.
Part of the frustration, I think, of being a founder as well is because you're very often very clear on the way that things, you think things should be done, whether that's right or wrong, you just have your own subjective opinion on how it should be done.
How hard people should be working or whatever, it's sometimes difficult to appreciate that other people don't have the same clarity of vision or perspective as you do.
I see that throughout my teams and just with managers generally.
They tend to be quite, what's the word, resentful that their teams might not be...
Doing it the way that they would do it.
Yes, some of us get into management because we want more control.
And then you're like, surprise, you now have to manage by remote control.
Like you're sitting here, people are doing stuff and you're not there.
You're here.
It's like, ah.
But that's why, you know, we talk a lot these days about feedback.
And of course, the opposite of feedback on some level is ignoring people.
And people don't want to be ignored.
There's no question.
If you want to destroy your team, just ignore them.
But feedback is actually pernicious.
The best managers don't give feedback.
By which I mean...
Feedback meaning you doing this wrong.
Let me tell you how to do it right.
I don't mean feedback as in you got that fact wrong.
But in terms of me telling you, this is what your performance is.
And this is how you should.
Do it better.
That's feedback.
Well, you read a lot, right?
You'll see a lot of tools, articles, books even on how you should learn how to give and receive feedback.
That's how you grow.
Somebody tells you, because you have blind spots.
Other people, they know the truth about you.
So they're going to tell you who you are because you can't see it.
That's called feedback.
But of course, what that means is that the person, the manager is assuming, A, that I do own the truth about you, which they don't.
We have observer bias like crazy.
And I don't mean race, gender, age bias.
I just mean idiosyncrasy.
In fact, in psychometrics, it's called the idiosyncratic rater effect, which means I have a unique pattern of rating that I'm unaware of.
And then when I'm rating you and I'm rating this person over here and this person, my ratings should move because I'm looking at different people.
They don't.
My pattern of ratings moves with me, which means that basically all ratings reflect the rater, not the ratee, even though we end up paying or firing.
Or promoting the ratee as though the ratings reflect the ratee, but they don't reflect the rater.
We've known this about this in psychometrics for years.
And yet in businesses today, still most people are rated by their manager.
But the other thing is in terms of learning, when I give you feedback and I go, do it my way, I mean, even with the best of intentions, most feedback basically ends up meaning you would be better if only you were more like me.
There's a realization at some point, isn't there, as an entrepreneur where you go,
I think what I really need to do is actually just create the conditions in which a person
can express the best of themselves rather than me assuming that learning for that person is just information transfer and dumping it into their blank slate.
Like that's not at some point as a entrepreneur, you learn what basically brain scientists have learned for a really long time.
Learning is insight.
All learning is insight.
It comes from within the person.
And so all you can do as a team leader or manager is create conditions within which a person can interact with the world, a client, a prospect, a thing they're making, and then go, ooh, ah, ooh, ah, oh, okay, ah.
And then the person has the learning.
You're not telling them how to be.
When the moment you tell them how to be is the moment you're assuming that they are wired like you are.
So I'm trying to tell a person how to sell.
It's like, no, you sell when the person believes you and the prospect believes you.
And everyone has a different source of belief.
What's yours?
Some people sell through competence.
Some people sell through relationships.
Some people sell through impatience.
Some people sell through being silent.
It's like everybody's source of...
Belief and trust is totally different.
So yes, tell people your reaction as a manager.
Like if somebody comes in late, you can say, look, when you come in late, it makes me think you don't care.
The person can't then say, well, you shouldn't feel that because you go, no, I do feel that.
I feel like you don't care.
When, or in that meeting, when you interrupted your colleague, I felt like you weren't listening.
Because I felt, that felt weird to me.
You shut her down.
That's what it felt like to me.
That's a reaction.
When you then tell the person what to do differently, tell the person how to change their behavior, that's feedback.
And you've basically just crossed the feedback bridge.
And now you're telling them how to be.
And how to be is how to be more like you.
And so as we talk about in the book a lot, it's like, give people your reaction.
You own that.
Don't give people feedback.
And if you're on the receiving end of feedback, shut it out.
Because no one knows you like you know you.
It's so true because, yeah, I mean, everyone says how the importance of giving feedback and communicating and the narrative I've always heard in terms of like management advice is always, you know, you've got to give people constant feedback to help them grow.
Yeah, people don't want feedback.
People want attention.
That's different.
If you give people no attention, they'll shut down.
I mean, loneliness is a killer.
So that's true.
But people don't want feedback.
And imagine when somebody says to you, hey, sit down.
You want to have a conversation?
I want to give you some feedback.
It's like an anvil on your head.
Your brain leaves the room and all you're thinking about is how do I survive this darn thing with Marcus?
Because it's going to turn out to be, Marcus didn't tell me something that he's got the truth about me that I don't have.
And then he's going to tell me a bunch of things and I'm going to have to do this.
As he tells me a bunch of tactics and stuff that don't feel like me.
And.
And you're just trying to think, how do I survive this conversation?
Here, let me give you some feedback.
It's like, ah.
So yeah, I'm on a bit of a campaign going, that is so arrogant.
Feedback is arrogance.
What people want is attention, which could be your reaction.
So if you said to me, Marcus, you know, halfway through that whole session that we did, I thought you got a bit off track.
I can't then go, no, you didn't think that.
Because you went, no, I was lost, man.
Well, you shouldn't have been lost because I was being really clear.
And you go, yeah, but I was lost.
Well, that's a reaction.
And people do want a reaction.
There's no question.
That's why once a week, the managers, really, that's what that is.
It's that once a week check-in is like a frequent attention.
They don't want feedback because they're not you.
And they don't want to be you.
And I know for me as an entrepreneur, that was the hardest thing to learn was like, step back.
They'll show you who you are, who they are.
And then you can help kind of arrange a world in which they get to express and express and express.
Why did you call the book Love and Work?
Why the word love in particular?
Well, I did it as a...
Two reasons.
One, the juxtaposition is always interesting.
Like war and peace, like love and work.
You just don't hear them said that way.
So part of it was like, it just gets your attention.
And the other part of it, from a research standpoint, if you interview people that are really, really good at what they do,
And that's really been my entire career.
I mean, I was talking to you before about study group contrast.
For 25 years, that's all I've been doing.
You take 100 great nurses, 100 great teachers, 100 great housekeepers, 100 great lawyers, and you're just asking open and get ended questions.
You're shutting up.
You're tape recording the whole thing, transcribing it and going, hmm, what's there?
And when you do that,
The best people in any job, they don't all love the same things, but there's love in what they do.
There's vanishing into the activity.
The activity isn't something they're doing.
It's something they're being.
Whether it's cleaning a room and vacuuming themselves out so they can see the lines and they get kicked out of the lines.
Whether it's another housekeeper going, I lie on the bed and turn on the ceiling fan.
And I remember back then going, why?
Because that's the first thing a guest does after a long day out in the theme parks.
And I like looking at the room through the lens of the guest.
You're like, whoa, I love looking at the room.
That's why I sit on the toilet or I lie in the bath.
Even though there's rules in the job description, say, do not lie, you know, in the bath or sit on the toilet.
You're like, whoa.
So when you look at really, really good people in any job, they find love in the activities themselves.
Interestingly, though, they don't love all they do.
The whole cliche about find what you love and you'll never have to do a day's work in your life again.
And I'm a bit of a data nerd.
So you look around and you go, is that true?
And you study the most successful people.
My first master's thesis actually at school was the social and psychological issues of entrepreneurship.
Even the best entrepreneurs don't love all they do.
And so you go, okay, find what you love to do and you never have to work again in your life again.
Is there any data to support that at all?
No, none.
So let's stop saying that and let's rehabilitate with science the word love.
Measurably when you study highly successful people, they find love in what they do.
They don't love all that they do, but they find love in what they do.
They find activities or moments or situations every day that they love.
How many?
100%, 50%?
20% is a really good threshold.
Mayo Clinic research shows doctors and nurses who are not burned out have at least 20% of their activities be things that they love.
Take a bunch of emergency room nurses, they love different things, but 20%, you get below 20%, 19, 18, 17, it's like you start getting really dangerously psychologically damaged.
Even if it's, you know, 21%, though, 27%, 50%, it doesn't seem as though you get necessarily a massive uplift in resilience.
It's not like you need to love all you do.
20% is a threshold.
Like, get above that.
And every day feels different.
Every day feels different.
Different.
So, and then of course, if we dive into the brain science of it, you find that when people are actually in that state of the positive psychologist who we lost last year, Mike Csikszentmihalyi, he called it flow.
Okay.
When you get into that flow state, even if it's just 20% of your time, if you look at someone's brain, when they're in the moment, in the zone, in their element, whatever your phrase is, they have the same chemical cocktail in their brain as you do when you're in love with someone.
So vasopressin, oxytocin, norepinephrine, with the addition of this weird cocktail called anandamide, which brings feelings of wonder and awe.
§06Transcript — part 6
But your brain on love looks at work.
It's a lot like your brain on love with another person.
And when you're...
Doing something that you love, you are more open, measurably, you perform cognitive tasks better, your memory's better, you're more accurate in measuring or identifying the emotions of others, you're just better.
So love and work was like, hey, if you want, this is kind of when I was sitting there trying to fill the pages and thinking, why are you writing this?
On one level, I mean, on one level, I was thinking my kids.
I want my kids to be happy in life and have joy in what they do.
And yet most people don't.
And I wanted to have something that I could go read this, you know.
But on another level, I wanted to write to CEOs like you and me and go, listen.
If you want collaboration, if you want innovation, if you want creativity, if you want really authentic customer focus,
You can't get it without love.
So if you feel abashed talking about love, then shut up talking about these other things.
You won't get them.
Loveless excellence is oxymoronic.
And that's not just a phrase.
It's like you look at what people look like on love at work and they're amazing.
So if we took it seriously at work,
And we've thought about what do you love?
How does that turn into work?
And how does the work that you do inform the detail of what you love?
And then it becomes this wonderful, infinite loop of work is to help you, sorry, love is to help you figure out contribution, which then informs what you love.
Your life is like this.
You've already built a company, you've sold it.
Now you're doing all this other stuff because your love leads you to turn it into contribution, which required you spending tens of thousands of pounds to do something.
And then now you're doing it.
And we're sitting here and there'll be stimuli that information's going into your brain right now.
And it will add detail to that, which you love.
This whole thing over here in LA, it will add a little more detail and your life will be this.
Now, listen, I don't know your mom and your dad, but if your life was like this, they would go, yes, I don't care how much freaking money he makes.
If he knows that which he loves and turns it into contribution, then on his deathbed, he'll feel like he lived a first-rate version of his life.
And I've got an 18-year-old and a 20-year-old.
And I just wish in every fiber of my being that they get to feel that loop.
That's love and work.
Love is for work and work is for love.
And if we do that, it's not just individualistically satisfying.
It's what companies want from us.
We just haven't taken it seriously.
You talked about, I don't know if this was before we started recording, but this...
The curse of, you know, I remember a conversation I had with a young lady who was a lawyer.
And she was clearly dissatisfied in her job.
And it transpired that the reason she was a lawyer is because that's what she had been good at in terms of A-levels, then university, and also her mum and dad had said, like, that's a good job.
And she was almost on the verge of a midlife crisis when she spoke to me because she was so good at this thing that it kind of dragged her off into the future.
And she was now that.
That was her identity.
So many people listening to this now will resonate with that in various ways.
They would have become a banker because their parents were bankers and they were really good at maths.
What have you found out about those people, their satisfaction, and really what they should be doing, I guess?
Is there something else they should be doing instead?
Should we be dragged by our competence in something?
Well, no, as we talked about before, competence can be a devilish curse.
Because you can get the A's and hate the work.
You can get high performance, but actually hate the activities.
Um,
for anyone, if they want a really great career,
The why is important.
Think about, do you really believe in the purpose of what you're doing?
That's important, no question.
The who is important, no question.
If you hate the people you're working with, that's always a bit of a problem.
But the what trumps the who and the why in the end.
Like, what are you actually filling your days with?
So if your friend is a lawyer, it's like, which, give me a day.
Talk to me about a day.
What's a day look like?
What are you doing at 10 o'clock on a Monday morning?
What are you doing at 3 p.m.
On a Thursday afternoon?
That's the what.
What are the actual activities themselves?
So if anyone's...
That trumps the other things.
What always trumps the who and the why, which is why we've got nurses and teachers who are so disengaged.
They believe in the why.
They really love the people on their shift, but the day-to-day reality of what they're doing doesn't fit them.
No one's paying attention to it.
There's no manager helping them.
There's no teams, all the stuff we talked about before that goes, is anyone paying attention to what I have to do every day and whether or not it fits me, which bits do, which bits don't, how do I lean into one another, what does collaborate, all that stuff.
Is missing.
So the why is there, the who is there, the what is wrong.
So if I say lawyer, that could be an entirely different experience for everybody that's a lawyer.
So one lawyer could be doing a completely different thing, different working hours, work from home, work in a great team with weekly check-ins.
And another lawyer, although it's the same job title, could be in an awful corporate office, two-hour commute every day, on their own in a tiny cubicle.
Yes.
So to anyone watching or listening, the first thing to do is assess, like where are you at?
Which really means...
How much love do you have?
In a week.
Do you have a loveless job?
How would you do that?
Well, the simplest way to do it is just take a blank pad around with you for a week, draw a line down the middle of it, put loved it at the top of one column and loathed it at the top of the other.
And this is easy to do.
Most people have never done this.
And all you're going to do is you're going to imagine that your day is made up of many, many different threads.
There's a fabric of a workday, which is a bit like a tapestry on a wall.
When you're far away, it looks like just a picture.
But when you get closer, there's many, many, many thousands of threads.
Well, the same is true of any day.
You've got a thousand different activities, moments, situations, contexts, like just stuff just hits you.
Like, and it's little baby, five minutes, two minutes, seven minutes, five minutes, two minutes, seven minutes.
But these are threads.
Some of them are white, some of them are black, some of them are gray, some are green.
They lift you up a little, they're down a little, but some of them are red.
So in the book here, I talk about red threads, activities that when you're doing them, all that stuff we talked about before, the flow, the energy, the instinct of volunteering, the I'm in my essence, the feeling of innate mastery, those moments.
They could be like two minutes here, seven minutes here, 10 minutes, but there are red threads.
And your life is sort of putting on a show for you every day going, what about this thread?
What about that thread?
What about this thread?
What about that thread?
And the most successful people in any job, of course, they identify their red threads really well.
And then they weave them into contribution.
Now we can talk more about how they do that, but it starts by going, take a black pad around with you.
Think about the clues to your red threads.
What do you instinctively volunteer for?
While you're
Doing something, does time fly by?
When you're done with it, you feel sort of an sense of mastery, a sense of being up, not down.
And then take it around with you for a week.
And anytime you find anything that fits those criteria, scribble it down.
And anytime you find the inverse, before you're doing something, you try to procrastinate or hand it off to the new guy because it'll be developmental, you know, or you're doing it and the time drags on like a snail.
And it's like, you thought you'd be doing it for an hour, but you look up, it's five minutes.
And we've all got stuff like that.
It's like, ah.
And time and love have a weird relationship.
You know, it's like when you're with someone that you love, that whole day goes by in 15 minutes.
And yet before you're with them, like time just stretches out and you're with them and whoa.
Same with an activity that you love.
If you don't love it, you keep trying to do this.
And then when you're doing it, it's like, how's it this long?
Scribble it down in the loathe to.
And so get to the end of one week, just one regular week and see what's in the love to column and what's in the loathe to column.
If there's nothing in the loved it column, well, then you have to stop and do it again next week and pay attention.
And if you get no red threads, two weeks in a row, and this is really easy to do.
No one's ever told people how to do it, but it's really easy to do.
You get two weeks in a row of no red threads.
Then you've got a loveless job.
And the bad trade for anybody is somebody going, well,
My job doesn't have to love me back.
I'm making the money.
I'll just stick it out.
I'll pay my dues.
Or I'll earn the money for three, four, five years.
Then I'll, you know, that, well, five years, then I'll, as though you emerge the same person after five years of loveless work.
You don't.
You are psychologically damaged.
You're a different person.
After five years of loveless work, you're damaged.
And the people, weirdly, who feel it the most are the people you're supposedly supporting at home.
You think the people around the dinner table don't know that you come back every day on your loved it, loathed it list, although they wouldn't say it this way.
There's nothing on the loved it column.
They know.
They can feel it.
People often worry about, don't bring your personal stuff to work.
It's way more powerful the other way.
People bring their work, their emptiness, their alienation at work back home.
So if you two weeks in a row.
nothing, then you have to stop and you have to, in a sense, apply the loved it, loathed it to the rest of your life.
Just take that around and see whether you can find any red threads anywhere in your hobbies, as a mother, as a father, as a friend, in your community, in your faith, I don't know.
Write one love note to yourself, which is simply, I love it when, and then finish the sentence.
And the thing after the word when has to be a verb.
That you're doing, not I love it when people praise me or something.
I love it when I what?
Just write one sentence.
It's amazing, Steve, how many people, adults can't be articulate about describing something that they love.
I know it sounds really weird, but you ask people,
we've done this so many times.
You ask people, you know, tell me what you love or tell me what your strengths are.
Oh, I love people.
Which people?
What are you doing with the people?
Give me a verb.
Any verb will do.
Let's start with a verb.
But we've trained people so long to be divorced from their own emotion or believing that basically their emotion could be rewired if they just work at it and show enough grit or whatever.
And you're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
It's real.
You and your emotional reaction to things is real.
So I would say to people, first of all, do that.
Love it, loathe it.
And then try to write one, maybe even two.
Love, it's a silly word, but I love note to yourself.
I love it when I do what?
I love it when I do what?
What many people will actually find is that if you hate lawyering, it might well be that you're the wrong kind of lawyer.
It might not be that you have to ditch your degree.
It might be that you can start to rewire or re-sew, reweave your job.
So that it has more red threads in it.
So if you do that for a week and you find there are a couple of things on there, actually, there are a couple of love bits.
There are a couple of specific things where I'm like, ooh, ooh.
Well, when you have that, first of all, pay attention to it.
Things that are not paid attention to, they wither.
So every day wake up, it's the advice I would give you or you might give me.
Every day wake up and just try to, rather than what I have to get through, what's the to-do list I have to get through?
Why don't you wake up every day?
Yeah, you may have a to-do list, but wake up every day and go, what red threads can I weave today?
Because they're going to be not 75,000, but there might be five.
What are the five?
Start there.
Then over time, what you'll find is you can start to maybe go, well, next week, actually, I'm going to pick one day.
It's going to be all red.
§07Transcript — part 7
It's going to be all red one day.
Then you might go, because people start to lean into it, they might go, well, could you actually do more of that for this client and this client and this client?
And then maybe you learn a competency, like somebody who's really good at...
Or creating emails that people open, you might go, Eloqua, we'll teach you Eloqua.
We'll teach you that competency because you've got something that you seem to be able to write text that people actually open.
That's kind of interesting.
I know that's not in your job description, but you seem to keep doing it.
And so we'll teach you now a new competency, a new software program.
And lo and behold, you start doing that.
Over time, and you get to the place where the most successful people get to, where we look at the most successful people and we go, how'd they find that job?
Seems to fit them so perfectly.
How'd they find that job?
And of course, they know they didn't find it.
That's totally the wrong verb.
They made it.
They took their red, to use that metaphor, they took their red threads seriously.
And then they didn't imagine someone could read their mind and tell them what their red threads are, because only you know what these things, the little moments, situations, contexts are that really lift you up.
But then they took them seriously and wove them ever more deeply into the fabric of what they do.
Now, sometimes that might mean stop being a lawyer.
You know what, you've worked, you tried this now for six months and there's nothing there for you.
Okay.
Well then that's really tricky.
Now you have to change your entire focus and hopefully your loves will be your guide.
But we actually know over here, I don't know the number for the UK, but 73% of Americans say that they have the freedom to maneuver their job to fit themselves better.
That's a lot of people.
And yet only 18% of us do.
Because if you ask people, do you have a chance to use your strengths every day?
That number is 18%.
So you've got 73%, 18%.
In psychology, we call that an attitude behavior consistency problem.
I know I can do it.
I don't.
So that's, if people are watching and like, I'm in the wrong job, maybe, maybe you're one of the 27%.
You're in the wrong job.
All right.
Before you get there though, try to, I pick out your red threads anywhere.
And no one can do it but you.
That's the thing that, it's like you want to go, hey, nine-year-old, let's start you on this life skill early.
Because even at nine, you know better than all your teachers do.
About this part anyway, about the red threads part.
And that way, when you wake up, you know, your mom's going, be a dentist, be a dentist, be a dentist.
And you're like, mom, there's a whole language actually here that talks about dentistry and whether I love it or not.
And I'll keep walking on down that path, but I'm actually supposed to look really carefully about which bits of any job really lift me up and give me a sense of mastery.
Kids have more of a language, as I say in the book, they have more of a language about geometry than they do about this thing I was just talking about.
So your parents are so powerful and they're so scared and they want you to,
be a layabout and they want you to be able to get a job and they want, they're so scared for you.
But what they've not done, and even the best teachers are sort of scared for you.
Come on, Stephen.
And no one really goes, wait a minute.
How do you make sense of your own emotion in your own life?
What do you lean into?
What do you not lean into?
What are the words for that?
Is there any detail around that?
Or what do you like about people?
What do you like doing with the people?
You imagine how early you could start with that.
And that wouldn't mean that it's Pollyanna.
Like we're still going to put people in the wrong jobs.
I built a company that was focused entirely on people's strengths and I still put people in the wrong job because people are super complicated.
But at least we'd have a framework and a set of shared understandings about what we were even trying to do.
I don't know.
I think there's, for all of us, there's stuff we can do.
You don't have to change the company.
You don't have to change all the HR policies.
You could, any one of us could start right now to do what the most successful people do in terms of weaving red threads into their work.
What were the, in chapter two, I know you talked about having panic attacks when you were, I believe, at Gallup.
What were the red threads that were missing in your role then that led you to getting to a point where you were having panic attacks?
And how did you sort of rectify that personally?
Yeah, that's, you know, it's funny.
I've written a lot of books.
A lot of them have mostly been about data.
And that's fine because I like the precision of data.
But I felt like many people, I'm sure, the pandemic the last few years have been really difficult for us.
And you sort of ask yourself what...
What are you doing with your life?
What life are you living or what mark are you leaving?
You know, I lost my dad.
I lost my marriage.
I sold my company.
Pandemic.
You sort of look in the mirror and you're like, what am I doing?
So for this book, I was like, you know, I'm a repressed Brit.
But I'll put my own story in here because I feel like it's more honest and everybody's life is a story.
The only one I can tell is mine.
Maybe I could share parts of it and other people could learn to tell their own story.
So I did put things in there that I have buried, buried, buried.
And...
Yeah, 29, I was managing Gallup's relationship with the Walt Disney Company.
So I was living down in Orlando and I did start having really bad, I didn't know what a panic attack was.
I mean, as I say in the book now, everyone knows all about panic attacks and it's like, it's like acne, right?
Everyone has them and it's great.
Well, not great, but I didn't know.
I thought I was going mad.
I mean, I thought it's the, the,
it's the buildup as the doctor told me, it was like, it's not that one moment that's causing the panic attack.
It's the buildup actually of, again, we talk about love as a force.
Like if you don't express that, which you love, it's not neutral.
It turns from a beautiful, powerful,
force, love, into a really caustic substance that eats away at you.
It's damaging.
So for me, I...
I'd got myself into a position where I was really solely responsible for one huge client, Disney.
And I was the interface between Gallup with all the people on the teams and Disney.
And I hate that.
I hate having to be responsible for other people's emotions that I can't do anything about.
I hated that every single day waking up and thinking, are the 200 people that are basically our clients at Disney, are they happy?
What are they thinking?
What are they wondering about?
What do they need?
Do they need this?
Do they need...
I mean, even just saying that now makes me break out in a sweat because it's like, I can't do that.
I don't, I'm not a connector like that.
I'm not a connector.
I don't like reaching in going, oh, if I say this to this person and this to this person, then they're going to, and yet that's really what the job had become.
And I like, I mean, when I think about what I love, I love when I have a chance to sit down and really grind on an idea or a set of data to come up with a conclusion that's based on data.
Like, I love that.
I love trying to get up on stage and try to figure out the most evocative way to help someone realize a particular insight that I've come up with.
Like, that's a love note for me.
And more and more and more, I was doing less and less and less of that.
And instead, I was holding the emotions of the people behind me at Gallup and the people in front.
of me at the Walt Disney Company.
And for me, for no good reason, it panics me.
Now I should have known better, I guess.
I hadn't done the love it, loathe it thing back then.
I hadn't even thought about it all the way through to the word love.
But it was clearly a loveless existence.
And when anyone has loveless work, that they're, you know, they believe in it, but the days are empty, psychologically empty.
You don't get to express that, which it's like being in a loveless relationship.
It's like, it's awful.
Even if you feel like you want to help that other person, if the being of relationship with them doesn't allow you to express who you are, they don't see who you are, they see who you are and wish you weren't that way.
It's awful.
So for me, that's, I think, what built up and up and up and up and up.
And in the end, it was like, it was super psychologically damaging to be trying to be somebody that you're not.
When you didn't plan to be there, but now everyone's counting on you to be a certain way.
And I don't mean in a macro sense to be a certain way.
I mean, at two o'clock on a Thursday afternoon, you're supposed to be thinking and feeling this.
And at nine o'clock on a Monday, you're supposed to be feeling all that.
And you realize your days are filled with empty minutes.
Week after week.
Meditation.
Yeah.
That became a tool for you, right?
Yes.
I'm a huge advocate of, well, as you can see from Love and Work, it's like the...
First relationship you better have is a really good one with yourself.
And so the point of Love and Work on one level was to help everybody have a more articulate fluency with their own language, with their own reaction to the world.
And so that begins on some level by shutting out.
I mean, here am I chatting away like a mad prune, but...
Can you breathe in and breathe out for 15 minutes?
I mean, that's, I don't know.
Do you meditate?
I try sometimes.
When I'm with my partner, I do.
We do breath work and stuff like that, which is a kind of meditative practice.
I do like micro meditations, which is during the day, if I notice that my breath is incredibly shallow, I'll go...
I'll try and do the seven second thing.
And I try and take time to just do that.
But I've never been too good at the whole like 15, 20 minutes alone thing.
It's, well, again, everyone's different, right?
So who would dream of saying to you, you should meditate?
All I know is when I had a chance to try to be in sync with my own breath,
It gave me power, I felt.
And so when the Disney people were freaking out or behind me, the Gallup people were freaking out, I was like, I was okay with it.
But as I said in the book, that was a coping mechanism.
It wasn't a flourishing mechanism.
I'm not saying some people can't flourish through meditation.
They probably can.
I couldn't.
For me, it was like, I got clear enough in my own head to realize,
This isn't what I should be doing.
This is a big mismatch between me and what somehow I was getting paid to do.
Prestige is a big thing, right?
It's like somebody goes, you want to run the Disney account?
How much money will I make?
What's my title?
Oh, wow.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, I'll do that.
And so you end up.
In a role where you, it's a, I call it in the book, a misyearning.
I thought they were going to say misinstinct.
Oh yeah.
A misinstinct.
Like you go, yeah, I'll do that.
You raise your hand, but you're like, yeah, everyone has that.
And I, when I read that, I think chapter 11, everyone has that in their lives where you, you're offered a promotion, for example.
And because, I mean, who turns down a promotion?
I had this really interesting day in my company many years ago where I called in the head of marketing, the,
had a, he was the marketing manager.
And I said, you've been here four years now.
We're going to give you a promotion.
You're going to become the head of marketing for the UK and the US.
And he was like, no.
I was like, what?
He was like, no, no, I'm not.
I don't, I don't want that.
I'm not ready.
He was like, I'm not ready for it yet.
§08Transcript — part 8
And he's been there four years.
And I don't want it.
And I walked out of that room and I tell you the amount of respect I had for that individual for being able to say no to promotion because they were, didn't, like weren't ready for that yet.
I just thought, unbelievable.
This is someone that's actually going to be happy in their life.
Well, and the funny thing is at work, right?
We, because we don't start really early and say to people, hey, listen, you are a totally unique human being.
And the way in which you are a totally unique human being.
You respond to the activities of school is really interesting.
And it's helped you have a language for that.
Then you get to go into a job and you don't really have a language for that.
And then somebody comes in and says, I'm going to give you a promotion.
And you are on some in co at level, you're like, Oh, wait a minute.
I really, really love this.
Like I'm, I'm so into the design that I'm doing.
I love the fact that it's me doing the doing, and I'm not responsible for someone else's doing the doing.
I'm the one making the decisions.
I love the thing that I made yesterday.
And the other thing I'm going to make tomorrow.
And it takes such strength of character to go when somebody comes in and says, no, we're going to promote you out of it.
It's like, how weird is it at work that the most creative way we've thought to reward someone for being really good at a job is to move them out of it.
Like that's bizarre.
I think they call it the Peter principle, right?
That you keep playing with that.
You just get promoted to your level of, of incompetence.
That's, that's the Peter principle.
Lawrence Peter, I think was the professor who came up with that.
It takes such strength of character for that person to go.
Wait a minute.
You're saying I would get to do less of all this stuff that really, really invigorates me.
Yes, that's what I'm saying.
Why would I want that?
Well, it's going to come with a bigger title and more money.
Yeah, but, yeah, but it doesn't fit with what I love.
Now that's self-awareness.
That's self-mastery.
Obviously, in the last or second to last chapter of the book, getting to our love and work organization, we ought to create broader pay bands that allow someone
to grow in their role, extend their contribution, and yet not necessarily have to move out of the job in order to manage other people.
That doesn't have to be the only way.
In which we help someone have a career.
That was a really, as you said, it just reminded me that one of the most interesting points of feedback that I got in terms of pushback when someone was getting a promotion was their realization that that would change the team dynamics.
For them.
So if they were becoming a manager, I often heard people say things like they didn't want to become a manager or
not even just in my companies, but just generally people message me on Instagram or LinkedIn, they're hesitant to become a manager because they feel like the friendships that they have in their team would then change.
They then have to speak to the people in a certain way and have to have this like, there becomes this hierarchy, which they don't actually want.
It's really interesting.
One of the great questions to ask people to see if they want to move into management is simply the question, would you rather do a job yourself or would you rather be responsible for other people's work?
That's a great, I know it's not an open-ended question, but it actually turns out to be, for some crazy reason, people don't lie to that question.
I don't know why, but we've asked it probably 50,000 times, and it's as a predictor of whether somebody actually then excels as a manager.
There's an awful lot of people who deep down, you throw them that question, and top of mind, they go...
I'd rather be responsible for my own work, actually.
And as a manager, or sorry, as an entrepreneur, often we go, well, you'll grow into this.
You will.
And on some deep level, you could probably split the world into two.
There are some people, even though they have friendships,
They go, I think I know how to do this, though.
I like.
being responsible for other people's work, their choices.
I like being the one to hold them.
I like, even though I'm a friend and I love them, I like being the one to try to help them.
As we talk about in the book, what's the point of a relationship?
And that's, by the way, a super, I think, a super interesting question.
What's the point of a relationship?
Is it diversity?
Is it protection?
Is it complementarity?
Actually, no, it's just any relationship, even a lover relationship is...
I want to make you bigger.
I want to make you bigger.
I see you.
I don't want to try to correct you, perfect you.
I just want to make you bigger.
Like what a beautiful relationship that is to be in where, you know, the person sees you, like shuts up and listens or watches.
And then you know that their intention towards you is,
not competing with you.
They just want you to do this.
And it's like, wow.
And for many really great managers, they've got friendships.
Like you shouldn't be a friend of people you manage.
That's just absolutely no data on that at all.
Some managers are best friends with the people they manage, but they have a relationship where that person feels like that manager.
who's really just another human, wants you to be bigger.
And that's as cool as heck that is.
If you've got a work team where people on the team feel like my manager, who might well be my friend, wants me to expand, not to become someone else.
It's not like I don't see you and here's my model of who you should be and you better fit it.
It's more like,
No, who are you?
Ooh, this is how that might look for you as you grow.
Some people, I don't know if I'm one of them,
But some people are able to maintain those beautiful friendships and still move into managing because they see managing in a sense as an extension of what a beautiful relationship is anyway.
I know they always say, don't get too close to your people because you might have to fire them.
And then you ask really great managers, can you ever care too much for your people?
Every one of them goes, no, the best ones.
You can never care too much.
Now look, capitalism, capitalism, sometimes you run out of business and our clients ditch us and we've got to downscale the company.
And that doesn't mean I don't care.
It means this is a bloody problem.
Sometimes you get you in the wrong role.
As I said earlier, tough love.
But there's love there.
There's big love there.
And, you know, people often say, well, too much love in the workplace is soft.
It's like, think about people you really love.
If they were abusing drugs, you would intervene.
You would, because you would not, your love would be like, I can't let you keep doing this.
Not because I don't love you, but because I do.
Well, at work, sometimes we're going to go, this job is, I don't know, man.
I love the salary is good for you.
I get it.
This job is not right for you.
And I'm saying that to you because it's hard for me to say it to you.
It's difficult.
And you don't want me to say it to you, but I love you and this is wrong for you.
And if we got more of that at work, that's not idealistic.
The best managers in any company do that.
And that's why when they leave a company,
All their people run with them because it's so delightful and human and possible.
Yeah.
What did you learn then about, you referenced romantic relationships there.
And much of your work centers on, you know, the relationship of one person to another and how to optimize and get the best out of it.
What advice would you give me on how to have a successful romantic relationship in terms of principles based on all you've learned from your book, Love and Work, but also all of your previous work on relationships?
Yeah, so it's funny to write.
I mean, there's a whole chapter here on love and work relationships, particularly after the Me Too movement, you think, well, you shouldn't bring up love and work.
Like, that's just, that leads to bad situations.
But the person who I'm getting married, like the person I'm marrying used to work for me.
So, and depending on which data you look at, between 22 and 27% of people met their partner at work, their life partner at work.
So clearly seeing somebody at work is kind of cool because you see all the bits of them and you see them doing kind of wonderful and crazy things.
It doesn't mean that we shouldn't have ways in which people have relationships at work.
But it's obviously, you can't really write a book about love and work and not talk about love.
And I'm going to sound so bloody nerdy saying this, but there's actually quite a lot of research on what it means to see someone with love.
Like there's a, what does it look like when you're in a love relationship that works?
Mostly, of course, when we study relationships, we study broken ones.
We study divorce to learn about marriage as though, you know, happiness is the opposite of sadness.
It's like, no.
But there has been some research studying happy marriages.
And when you look at what characterizes a really successful relationship, three things stand out and they're all weird.
The first one is...
They had couples rate each other on a list of qualities.
And you would think that in the best relationships, if I rated myself high on impatience and low on creativity and then high on urgency and low, and then my partner rated me the same,
our patterns matched, then you think, well, that's a good relationship because then your partner sees you the way that you see you and love shouldn't be blind.
Love's not blind.
Love's like clear-eyed.
I mean, love starts blind.
They're amazing.
But then you see them and who they really are and then boom, boom, boom.
But actually in the best relationships, the ones that tracked over time, less conflicts, more longing, more yearning for each other over time.
In the best relationships, the other partner rates you high on everything.
The other partner sees you with rose-tinted glasses the whole time.
And they do that because you then, why does that serve the relationship?
Well, you feel so safe and they feel so confident because they see you like this.
So that's the first thing.
Keep your rose-tinted glasses on in a relationship.
The second thing I would say to you is,
If you want to be a good partner to your partner, or if you want them to be a good partner to you, always look for the best explanation of what's going on.
why they do what they do and believe it.
There's an awful lot of reasons why you do what you do.
Some of them are not noble.
Some of them might be selfish.
100%.
And if you're with a partner who, you know, they keep coming in and going, what's the real reason you do?
You know, do you know why you did that?
Because you, if you're living with a detective,
oh, God forbid, you're living with a therapist who's like, let me tell you why you really said that.
It goes all the way back to your mom is what it does, you know, and that's, then you, here's what you do.
You bury it.
You armor yourself against the detective because the detective is sometimes right.
If you want to think about what serves the relationship, it's to be in a relationship with someone who's always looking for the most generous explanation for why you do what they do.
And then they believe it.
Because if they believe it, then they actually lean in more.
And you are more vulnerable because you go deep down, you go, there's all sorts of reasons why I did that.
But they are looking for the most generous one.
That doesn't mean they let you off the hook if you let them down.
I'm not saying that.
But as you look at what the best couples do, they look for all the reasons why you do something.
And it's never one reason.
There's a lot of different ones.
They look for the most generous one and then they believe it.
And then the third thing in really great relationships is that you never in a relationship balance out, well, he's impatient, but at least he's creative.
I mean, he is so disorganized, but at least he's charming.
If you have that kind of detail about your weaknesses and you know, you know,
Your partner knows these really, really well.
Even though they love you for this, they go, no, but he's just awful at this.
This is like a villain that sits off in the wings.
And you know, when you're arguing, your partner, whenever they want, they can just pull out the card and play the villain card and go, see, this is you.
And you know, this person knows you better than anyone else in the world, has 17,000 examples of why that villain is real and lives in you.
That means you do this.
You just keep leaning back and back.
And every argument, you're like, when are they going to play the card?
When are they going to play the card?
Hurts the relationship.
In the best relationships, it turns out, your partner looks at you, everything they see about you, they weave it into, I'm sorry, this is going to sound so soft, but they weave it into a red thread.
So they know that this isn't an aspect of something over here that's separate.
It's part of what you contribute to the world.
And the example I gave in here, my shell, my fiance is, oh gosh, we are not an example, but I mean, we're an example just of ourselves.
So we, you know, we argue and we're up and down.
So, but one of the beautiful things about my relationship with her is,
is I have immediate rejection syndrome.
Well, because I like to really noodle on an idea, when people come to me with ideas, sometimes if my mental brain is full, I go, no, like it's an immediate rejection syndrome, which she called immediate rejection syndrome as a joke.
And rather than saying, putting it over here, it's a villain.
She's,
§09Transcript — part 9
in our relationship, it works such that she knows that this is a part of me wanting to get to the core of an idea.
idea so that I can actually push it all the way through to what I consider to be something really deep or wise or true.
And, and I, if I can't get there yet because I'm still grinding on it, then it turns out to be immediate rejection syndrome.
But, but if you try to unweave that, you would unravel all of this, which is the only good I'm ever going to do in the world is this.
So I'm with a partner who's like, I get, and by the way, sometimes Marcus, it's bloody annoying, but I get that it's a part of this.
It doesn't excuse it.
Like, should I not be blunt when I go, no.
Yeah.
But I know that she knows that I know that she knows that I know that she knows that I know that this is a part of me doing anything good.
She's not putting the villain over here.
He rejects ideas.
It's like, oh no, he needs to grind on them.
And sometimes that manifests in this.
And that's the acceptance piece, which I think everybody...
And being seen.
And being seen.
So it's like, you can't love what you can't see.
And so in a relationship, if you're in a really good relationship with your partner,
You will feel seen.
And then intelligently, you will see that person go, oh, that's why he does what he does.
And then you know that they're looking at you with those beautiful rose-tinted glasses on, not to pat you on the head, but to have really beautiful and powerful expectations of you based upon what they see.
Now that's a relationship.
And that doesn't mean you don't argue, but it means you're in the hands of somebody who wants you, who wants you.
Wants you to be this.
Like that's intoxicating and super sexy.
We have a closing tradition on this podcast.
The previous guest writes a question for the next guest.
Oh, right.
And they don't know who they're writing it for.
And we'll ask you to do the same as well.
The previous guest who sat here yesterday wrote a question for you, not knowing who you were.
And they said, okay, tell me something about yourself that no one knows and would be surprised to know about you.
Oh, I like that one.
That is a stitch up.
Well, the challenge there is I wrote about some things that I've never written about in love and work that I've never shared.
So I now have shared that I couldn't say my own name until I was 12, which I don't think anyone would really have known given what I do.
I look like I sort of feel confident, but I had years of panic attacks.
So those are now shared.
And for me, we're like really, really hard.
And I think the other thing, when I wrote about my children, and we didn't get into it, but the whole college cheating scandal thing for me was really difficult to see the world reach into your kids.
So the panic that you feel when you realize the world, I mean, you're a social media expert, right?
You know how porous.
The
world is.
And so inside of this person is a person who is now forever fearful of how the world can reach into your life and completely mess it up.
And the struggle that I probably have that people don't know is how do you ensure that you aren't cynical?
How do you ensure that you retain some of the joy and the awe?
Like we didn't meet before.
Like I've loved this and I probably talk too much, but it's an awe-inspiring thing to me, another human.
And I want to be able to retain all of that openness in the face of a world that's sometimes really dangerous.
It's a challenge, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Cynicism's the death of love.
Thank you so much, Marcus.
Honestly, it's really astounding that there was a point in this human being's life where you couldn't speak because you were one of the most eloquent, powerful, engaging speakers I think I've ever had on this podcast.
And, you know, you talk about it in the book when time flies, you know, you've been enjoying it and time has certainly flown.
We've been here for more than two hours now.
So, yeah, it feels like 10 minutes.
I mean, I don't need to...
Evangelize about the quality of the book you've written, because I think everyone that's just listened to this conversation can understand the wisdom and the value of this book just by listening to our conversation.
But I will anyway.
It really is a brilliant book.
And there's certain books that I come across sometimes that are written in such a way that time does fly as you're reading them.
And you're
You come away with a real, almost like you'd been through a, almost a cathartic therapeutic journey.
And I, from this conversation, but also from this book, I have a very long list of things that I immediately think I need to do differently in my life that I think will lead to better outcomes.
And the way that you deliver the message on this podcast, but also in the book is in a, as a helpful friend that's guiding me there, as opposed to a preacher that knows best.
And that's why this book is so important.
So thank you.
It's my pleasure.
It's been a real pleasure.
And we're going to do this again soon sometime because you really are a special orator and communicator.
Well, I really appreciate it.
Yeah, I'm in awe of anybody who's done what you've done, frankly, who started businesses and built businesses and gone across town, as it were, stoplight to stoplight to stoplight, making it up, and now you're doing this.
So it was a real honor to be invited on.
And yeah, time has flown by.
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It matters that much to me because it's such a competitive advantage to have fast Wi-Fi.
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