[Music] we are temporal creatures we live in time and we tend to kind of extrapolate whatever's happening right now all the way into the future and that is a fundamental error I have a product that is not selling and the reason is not selling is because uh it's
not a product that people want and I over compensate by working hard on promoting you wrote the enemy of productivity isn't laziness but busy work okay see people who work hard as a way to overcompensate some problem that they don't want to say some skill that they don't want to learn the
problem is not working hard he's working hard as the solution everybody has fears and the only way to to deal with them is to work through them not try to avoid them it's not the fastest year who wins the race but the fastest one of those who finish the race hard work doesn't
scale you don't promote someone because they did their previous work excellently but you promote someone because they demonstrated that they will be able to handle the next soul perfectionism is a 100 tax in other words it doesn't really exist Plato notwithstand
well hello everyone it's Jim O'Shaughnessy with another episode of infinite Loops my guest today is Luca DeLana who I have been waiting to talk to forever because he has so much good advice in the books that he's written in the projects that he works on he's been
talk about a guy with a multiple uh skill stack trained as an auto engineer you consulted at DuPont you you then moved on to your own path as an independent consultant in 2016. I love the fact that you've lived in Spain Germany Kazakhstan I'm going to ask you about Kazakhstan yeah Singapore and
Italy and your books a hundred truths you will learn too late uh we're going to talk about all of this and more look out welcome thank you Jim for having me so let's Jump Right In uh ergoticity and ergotic uh things are often people say what huh what what does
that mean but as somebody who spent a career in Asset Management uh I have to and know all about them and think about them them deeply so for our audience that that doesn't know what those terms mean let's just kind of start at basic uh principles so that they can
understand what we're talking about and what you uh speak quite a bit about um in terms of uh where people often go wrong yes so before introducing the terms like in the in the book for example I only introduced the terms after a half and it's because I find much better to first
use an example and then explain pointing out at what you are looking for perfect and um in the book I use the example of my cousin with a skier and she was an excellent skier very young he made it to the World Cup or he said World Cup and then a couple of
injuries stopped his career very early and the lesson I got from him is that it's not the fastest year who wins the race but the fastest one of those who finish the race and uh the principle will be that survival matters a lot for performance how much and I make an example with a few numbers
very simple example uh I'm thinking let's imagine that my cousin participates in a championship made of 10 races and he has a 20 percent of chances of winning each race but also 20 chance of breaking a leg because he is reckless and I'm asking or how many wins is
expected to make in a championship of 10 Oasis and the naive answer would be two wins because we're thinking 10 races 20 chance of winning each and that makes two races but if you crunch the number you will see that the result is much lower than that and it's about 0.7
and uh less than half of what you would expect and the difference is made by survival because if pack housing breaks his leg in the first race cannot participate to the following ones and he has no chance of winning them so he only has an 80 chance of participating to the second race
an even lower chance of participating to the third one and so on and so that example shows just how important to survival and then the critical point is that the longer your time Horizon the more survival becomes predominantly important with respect to Performance
and this is the mistake that a lot of people make they this they make a case value or they compare uh to people to investors over a short term and then they think that we can just project the performance they think what is the best strategy for the shutdown will also be the best
strategy for this long term I just need to keep repeating it and that's very often wrong that is one of the single biggest problems we face in Asset Management uh we we basically people look at very short periods of time and extrapolate them into the future
thinking that the law of large numbers is going to work for them and as you know uh all of the greatest SKU comes in small sample size it's not large sample sizes and and making the uh naive error of thinking that the results that you see from a very long sample period are
going to be applicable to you over the next three years is a mismatch that people seem to intuitively not understand and you know we even have a term for it in investing it's called hyperbolic discounting and what that leads to are really bad results because people are forever
chasing performance it's at the base of most of the mistakes that people make earnestly it's not like they're trying to do this why why do we why is it so hard for us to understand this concept like an example is oftentimes people get this wrong you say um in in a hospital uh nine boys were
born and only one girl and now do you think that's more likely to happen in the big city uh hospital where there's uh you know 300 births every uh day or in the county hospital where there's only like 15. everybody thinks it's the big city hospital but as you know it's
the small City Hospital could you could you help us uh illuminate how people can maybe more easily understand these misfactions yes the example you made is great to explain the importance of sample sizes in the smallest Hospital you have a smaller sample size so the low of large
numbers basically doesn't apply and that means that you can trust uh the averages less and you can extrapolate which much with much less confidence and this is what happens when you observe for example a Trader who's only been trading for two or three years
you don't know whether you're you're whether his good results come from this strategy comes from the moment in time in which maybe there is a bull market or they come from a lucky set of stocks that you that is selected either way because the sample is small it's less
likely to reproduce in the in the future he makes the example of Lindy to talk about age and I'll I always make the parallel because he's doing the same thing he's talking about Aegis sample size so link is a principle that says the older something an idea has been or a
technology demon long term we can expect it to continue in the future and that's all about sample size so for example the longer a Trader has been successful the longer we say we can we can expect it to reproduce in the future and the other way around if his own has been
successful for short we basically cannot expect anything maybe he will continue maybe not and uh so that that's the important what you are mentioning about sample sizes and that subtle Sciences of all kinds how many Investments he's making because
an investor who only picks three stocks for example you can maybe that's luck and so on so the I I always think of a great quote from Bruce which says uh it is always thus impelled by a state of mind destined not to last we make our irrevocable choices and and that fits in here I think
because we we are temporal creatures we live in time and and we tend to kind of extrapolate whatever's happening right now all the way into the future and and that is that is a fundamental error the mismatch and you've said that time Horizons are the base of all of our
decisions and regrets so help us understand if you were working with somebody as a consultant let's say um in in trading since we're talking about that how how would you help them to reorient their thinking to make better decisions to understand that short term as the highest variance
whereas as we get a larger sample it's like it was the principle of why I wrote what works on Wall Street we we needed as much data as we possibly could to make any kind of imprints at all about the efficacy of those strategies yeah so I would begin with why they want to uh
to chase uh extraordinary performance that might only that might not replicate and usually we get two types of people of competitors we get people investors that use reproducible success strategies and people who use non-producible success strategies
well quality possible success strategy means first of all you make sure your yours you can survive you make sure you can take enough bets in size in time so that you can so that the lowest numbers will apply to you and so on none other producible success strategies
means uh you put uh you you pick a very few stocks you will only try uh you you try to maximize the short-term performance and so on what you will see is that over the short term it's always the non-retroducible success strategies which win and so we we attempted to copy them
we're like I am falling behind I should adapt to my competitors who are going faster and what I always tell my clients is you only compete against players who are using a web producible success strategies and you ignore everyone else because if you follow the other ones you
will end up like them successfully the short term and then ruin the or bad results in the long term and for example this means the importance of training and communication for example as a manager if you're using a short time Horizon maximizing performance over one or two
years you don't want to spend time training building trust communicating because those are all inefficient in the short term on the execution but if you are there to stay for 20 years in the business or even just five years the training will have a disproportionate impact
and it's not anymore a source of of inefficiency that's a source of survivability and of long-term performance and so first thing you need a to have clear water time Horizon if your time Horizon is going to be 20 years which I probably are which I probably
advised then you need to take the decisions on those terms you need to only compare yourselves with people that have at least the time Horizon because otherwise you will follow people that are going in the wrong direction and once you have this time Horizon then
almost everything else almost all the good decisions will follow true it's interesting to me because this is so applicable to things like investing but I have seen over my very long career in investing that uh intellectually I can get people to understand this emotionally it's very difficult for me
to get people to understand it uh my friend uh uh Jason zweig at the Wall Street Journal says it's the difference intellectual versus emotional is the difference between showing someone a picture of a snake and throwing a live snake in their lap yes they understand vividly the
difference uh when you do that so so how I look at this as kind of a fundamental a bug in human OS because we are uh you know the the investment management industry just to stick with that although I think this is applicable across Industries um and we'll get to politics in a minute
because I think that all of the incentives are skewed roughly there um in terms of short-term you're not around for if you only have a four-year term you're you're you're going to be oriented towards four years right uh and and so you're going to make a lot of
Errors because all of your decisions will be based on short term uh not not like you don't care right I'm gone in four years so that makes makes me uh decide things differently but how do you get because God knows I could use the help how do you get people to understand this
uh viscerally to understand that yeah you you're looking at this uh fabulous 30 or three year track record that's the most misleading thing you could look at so there are two answers to this the first one is of course the moment that people like Sasha Summit
and there is intense pain they will learn the lesson but of course that's not something that you want to happen like at the end of you want you want to build them to learn the lesson before they get too much too much a big of pain the second thing which I've seen is the
most affected is to put them in is to find the person that already internalized that principle and get them to spend some time with that person and seeing that person take some costly action that demonstrate they truly believe in the in in a certain value in this
case in the value of the long term so let me explain um let me explain exactly what I mean I used to work for a long time long time in safety for manufacturing and in particular for safety and what you see all the time is that the CEO says that is very important for
our company you really need to always wear your protective equipment and the workers will always think does he really mean it that's my co in a minute definitely just mean that safety is important but does it mean that it's more important than performance
when I have to take a decision with a trade-off does my CEO want to want to optimize for performance or want to optimize for safety that's always the question that's at the back of the mile and the workers willing never get it until they see that the co takes a costly decision
that costs money to the company to prioritize safety and I know it myself because I remember when I worked for the part that I during my own body like I had a lot of trainings about safety I didn't believe that they were really bad that they really believed in this and then what
happens is that one day uh our boss's boss takes 17 of us uh to visit the manufacturing site there is a bus that comes to pick us up from a parking lot and as my boss's boss is the first one to climb in the bus and he notices that there are no safety balance
and she starts back the bus uh to the the boat and he asks for a new bus with the seat belt that was a very expensive decision because there were 17 people uh some really senior leaders who wasted 45 minutes probably let's costed a lot of money but because it costed a lot of money
all 17 people in that moment they understood that yes that was a real value and so I truly I believe that the sensing like when you put someone in front of of a person who truly believes in the value in this case for example some availability long-term Investments and they see that
that person takes a costly action in which they say we ignore those who are doing better than us we don't change our strategy we focus on gains because I really believe that that's the value of of long-term um of a long time time Horizon and that's
going to be profitable for us the moment that that other people see that the person is putting money on the line they will probably get it yeah I I actually love that because that gets us into Skinner in the game and talk is cheap right um Jung had a great thing which said you
are not what you say you will do you are what you do and and I love this particular example because I hadn't thought about it in that way um signaling becomes highly important within an organization so if everyone is giving lip service to oh we're safety is
job number one and then to continue with your example jumps on the bus doesn't notice or care that there are safety belts that is sending a huge message to everyone on his or her team I love that are there other ways that an individual to try to make this as useful for our
listeners and viewers as possible let's let's let's uh expand the industries right so clearly in a manufacturing Industry Safety is going to take one type of importance thing light and limb maybe uh at in danger um in in other Industries like say Finance um it's the it's the psychic is problems
that that hit people are there other things that people can do um especially leaders of an organization but also people within the organization to to signal in such a way as you just demonstrated that everyone is like oh okay they really really mean this all right I'm
gonna change my behavior accordingly yeah so what I advise uh uh always my clients when they want to bring a new Behavior or especially a new value it could be ethics it could be long-term Focus anything what I tell them is that they should always like explain what it means in
concrete terms so for example not we care about the long term but we care about the long term which means that we will never take uh uh legalities categories who will never invest in this way we will never we will always keep this ASAP something like this
then the second step is that they put it as a requirement for any kind of bonus which means you should always say your bonus depends one on business objectives and two on not crossing any values boundaries and you need to do both to get your bonus because otherwise you get all kind of
problem people who take shortcuts um and so on if the values objective is sufficient you get all kind of virtue signalers and so you want to have both you want to have both necessary the business objectives and the values objectives and that is very costly it's it's a costly
signal and that will make people understand that yes they it means it and yes I need to adapt and then if you just do that there is the problem that maybe there are performance I view is one year away and you want to change behavior before that so what you will do is to
put schedule a meeting for example in two weeks three weeks and you check already in that meeting what's the trajectory whether we are on path to meet the year and objective which means are we on path to meet the business objectives for the year end and are we
on past to meet the ethical subjectives for example what did you do to make sure that uh we preserve our value in the long term did you do anything that endangers our long-term value you check those things and you already tell for example someone you're not on track you need to change
that otherwise you will miss your bonus and that will hit very hard and will immediately make you understand that you mean it that you want the long term to matter I think that that is one of my major complaints was uh with the annual review I I felt that they were the least
likely to impact people's behavior because and and I shipped it to people would always say to me well when do I get my review and I said your review will be ongoing and uh that that seemed to work significantly better um but you you touched on a couple of uh
again kind of inherent things in human behavior at least from my observed observation of it and and that is one of the things that I see repeatedly happen um is is that people often conflate uh you know uh they some people call it virtue signaling uh they often can play
saying something like gosh darn it I'm in favor of safety and and internally that making that statement makes them feel as if they've actually contributed something to safety um how do you how do you other than this technique which is a good one no you
said that but you did this right so it's continual feedback and iteration which I'm a big fan of uh but um I are there are there other ways like if you're trying to do it not as a boss but just in your own life let's say you're trying to lead the hierarchy and gain some Independence which is
something else you you write about um how would you uh advise somebody who's trying to internalize this on their own not necessarily A Boss telling them or not necessarily like uh here's my bonus that I'm gonna get uh but um they're just trying to level up
on their own how how would you advise them to proceed so for me the number one thing is again make sure that your role models those that you confront yourself with those that you try to learn with are only people who care about the long term and who are using strategies that enable
them to succeed in the long term with a very high likelihood and the test that I asked myself for example is usually that person that I'm considering whether to admire in 10 parallel worlds would they still be successful in all 10 of them and the Easter answer is yes then it's
likely to be um reproducible success strategy and maybe something that I want to imitate and by the way I use the same test also to consider like all aspects of life because personally for example I want to learn some people who are successful both in business and personal life and
health and not some people maybe who are only successful in business and they didn't care about everything else about their family their health and so on because maybe the strategy that they have was purposely to sacrifice those other parts of their lives and I don't
want to imitate that so for me this is the this is the number one thing and then the second thing is and always like value my choices not based on what's the return that I got in this part of the world but I always ask myself given 10 parallel walls this
choice I made how would it have gone in 10 palette worlds because sometimes I take a choice that maybe in this world that didn't go very well but if it's a choice that made sense and maybe that's like in a lot of other worlds would have made sense then I'm immediately I feel myself
at peace and I don't get that regret that leads me to then switch to less at reducible strategies I love the multi-world example that's something that I do my grandfather taught me this thing called premeditating and essentially what he had me do was imagine what I want or
what goals I want to achieve Etc but then go through all of the reasons why first off figure out if you really want that goal and the only way to do that is to say here's what happens if I get it here's what happens if I don't get it uh do a lot of bad things happen if I get
it uh your example of somebody who's optimized just for business outcomes as opposed to somebody who's optimizing for a successful life I think that is also incredibly important in fact it the synchronicity is lovely because yesterday I was talking to a teammate
and he said exactly that he said I'm only interested in people who are not just successful in business I want to see that they have a happy family that they uh you know they're very good at these other aspects of life and and it seems to me that like when I try to
explain this to people sometimes they it just seems so counter-intuitive to them and and so yeah I I just you know I this is the concept of kind of skin in the game that's another litmus test I like to use um in terms of okay is am I dealing with an agent or a principal agents have
different objectives right if they have no skin in the game their behavior is going to be much different right than principles with skin in the game um and so I you know does that work for for fact for people who are not fans of the Mini World hypothesis of quantum
physics or how else could we get like people listening to this right now that's a great example I that's one that I think our listeners and viewers are going to be able to say I can start doing that right now I can start imagining like the 10 different uh
worlds if I'm only successful in one of them that's a great heuristic I think um my friend Annie Duke has a thing she calls resulting and and that is people um inherently have this idea that they equate if something if they made a bet and they won the bet they think that
their reason for making that bet was sound and if they lose the bet they think that the reason was on sale and of course that is not true at all you have to look at the uh totality of all bets made to create a base rate in terms of okay making this bet continually got to uh 80
success ratio I are there any other great examples like that for our listeners like if they we have a lot of people who actually take notes and so I know that that's going to be a note do you have another note for for people who are especially trying to work on this
themselves and or also if uh managers of others how they could Inspire others to kind of internalize this yes something that I usually talk about is the concept of lace to the bottom and uh the idea is that there are a lot of competition let's say that look like
races to the bottom which means those are competitions where making sacrifices basic forward sacrifices that could be like I sacrifice myself to get ahead in business or sacrifices which could be forms of risk which could be I sacrificed nine parallel worlds to
get ahead to have a chance of getting ahead in One Pilot world and the total is that so much of life and beer raised the bottom for example business and you absolutely don't want to consider uh when you're thinking would imitate or would envy people who are participating in a race to the bottom
and I see it is all the time like a working Consulting I don't want to compare myself to people who are living Consulting as a race to the bottom in which one way where you can get ahead is by working very very hard nothing against working hard but a lot
against working extremely hard so much that you make sacrifices and the key problem you mentioned it uh you mentioned it earlier is that sometimes people are like why should I compare myself with someone who has a good all-around life I want for example to learn how to best do business
from someone who's the best at business and then maybe I want to learn how to best exercise from someone who stopped exercising the thing is that they are playing a different race than you and if you are trying to imitate you cannot compartment compartmentalize
if you're imitating the strategy of someone who's only thinking about business who's only thinking about Fitness you will take risks which are not good for you you will take sacrifices which are not good food and this is something that I've noticed that very often people don't realize
until they really think you make them really think about it maybe you make a few examples but then they they actually notice and they're like oh wait a minute you're right if I'm going to imitate those people I will get I will get some of the results but both
the good and the bad both the ones they got into this world and the ones they got in different worlds and that requires uh uh a a good deal in my opinion of the ability to abstract in your thought uh because like a lot of people don't you know can't imagine it was a ha I
think one of the reasons why we're thinking well here is that like I used to do that all the time I used to imagine myself in oh well what if I lived here or what if I did this career or what if I you know and just kind of jumbled them all together it's kind of a thought process
um let's let's shift uh for a minute to uh because priorities are also important right I think picking up on what you just said uh if you're if you're trying to optimize like the best life so to speak um and and you're saying okay I'm gonna do everything this Fitness expert did
but then I'm also going to do everything this business Expert did gonna it's gonna be it's gonna be a more difficult uh process um so uh you wrote the enemy of productivity isn't laziness but busy work and again I completely share this point of view I also share your point of
view and actually put up on Twitter the other day and I was surprised that I didn't get more pushback which is working harder is not working better can you pick up on on on both of those themes and and share the the wisdom that you have learned yes so the problem is not working hard
by itself because arguably there are situations in which you do want to work hard and the problem is using what is working hard as a form of overcompensation for example I have a product that is not selling and the reason is not selling is because uh it's not a product that
people want and I over compensate by working hard on promoting that's not going to work or it's going to get some marginal results but that's it and maybe that's not something you want to do and the same thing a lot of times at work I see people who work hard
as a way to overcompensate some problem that they don't want to face some skill that they don't want to learn and so on and that always it's territory because it creates marginal results but it won't scale and at some point they will run out of time to work hard
and they will have to sacrifice else or they will have to drop some balls take some shortcuts and it doesn't work I learned this when one day I overheard my manager at the coffee machine talking about another employee of ours and he said she's a um she is very good
but we cannot promote her because her solution to everything is working hard and if we promote her she will work so hard that either she will burn out or she will drop balls and we cannot promoter until working hard is our solution now you can imagine from the point of view of my colleague
if she heard that she would be devastated she would be like what do you mean working hard is the reason why you cannot promote so again the problem is not working hard is working hard as the solution and and that's what what we want to avoid then of course like there are
moments maybe you have a deadline you have the night before a super important client meeting and working hard is a skill in that case but again the problem is The Chronic use is working hard to avoid to face other problems and that's and that's a form of laziness
the I I wonder about your opinion of like I think that a lot of this attitude as we evolved right historically um you know before all of our Innovations uh working hard was the only way to actually get ahead because work uh it done equal pretty much uh results gotten
right like if you're trying to dig a hole or you're trying to farm or do any of that thing successfully uh there is that equation and so it it seems to me that like I wonder are we not the blank slates right do we do we come out with kind of the inherited uh uh bits of our
evolutionary history uh where where maybe that's one of the reasons why it's hard to get these messages across to people um what do you suggest what would you do if I came to you and I hired you and I said I've got this super smart person over here we'll we'll use the woman that
you used as an example right hard work can't promoter but because you know hard work doesn't scale and if you were if you were advising me what would you tell me to do with her specifically with that kind of behavior yeah so how will the suggest you and to have a conversation
with her and explaining to how basically how promotion works in the company and user Network the rule for promotion is you don't promote someone because they did their previous work excellently but you promote someone because they demonstrated that they will be able to
handle them extra that's usually evolved and a lot of people especially young people they don't get and once you explain that then naturally it comes forward that working hard is not what will you get you promoted I mean again like all six sequels the person who works harder has an advantage
but all things SQL and all things SQL means you need to have understood also what you have to do differently which are the skills that you need to demonstrate move to the next level and so I would have that conversation with with the person and tell her like
you've seen I'm very happy with you you I will say something along the lines like I'm happy that you're an employee of this company and I appreciate your work ethic and I think that with this work ethic you will get far ahead in life however work ethic is not sufficient
to get ahead to to advance the other condition which you need to to have to advance is to demonstrate that you have the skill and the know-how that are required by the next law in this case your next role for example let's say that an individual contributor
and they want to move to management in this case some of the skills that that you need to demonstrate is the ability to delegate uh the ability to give feedback to others in a way that is helpful which means that the other person feels more motivated to continue rather than you
just giving some piece of knowledge and then the other person is less motivated to continue less is less energetic of working on what they were doing before and this kind of things and usually having this conversation will have a positive effect on the other
person will make them understand that you are there to support and that they're missing something now there is one key missing piece on that every time that people ask me like how they would solve the a very specific problem with one of their employees
there are always two components one is the conversation that you will have with that employee and what you would say and the other one is everything else you did before and whether the employee trusts that you are a good manager for them and that you have their best interest
because if they don't believe that because if what you did in the past made them think that you don't have the best interest set up then they're like why even if you say the perfect words why should they listen to me and so the first thing would be to take some action that demonstrates that you
have their best interest at art and not in an easy way for example this way would be oh I give you a bonus I give you the day off uh we go out and we drink a beer that's too cheap of an action or too much of a shortcut that people don't really don't trust you but it
should be maybe having a conversation which is a bit difficult and in which you're really demonstrating that you are there for them maybe you're taking some of your very busy time to understand that point of view on something and to understand one word block that they're having
and if you do it and they will start to believe that to to trust because you are a good manager and that uh you have the best interests at that then they will be ready for this conversation which is much more hard and it's about their um deeply held beliefs about what it
means to do great work the the uh this is uh gelling for me because what I keep hearing you say is uh you you really need to make a take an action not not just say a word or say a phrase but actually take an action that is not easy I love your example of yeah let's
go out and have a beer and I'm going to tell you how great I think you are that's pretty easy to do and and so what you what you are recommending and I think uh resonates with me is the action has to not only be costly in terms of either time or money or you know setting
back some objective or any of that to demonstrate like we're back to the seat belts on the bus uh that that you are that way but you also have to do that because another point you make is that that I love is that uh personality in many respects is habits right
um and and so if you can habituate the what we're talking about right now that's gonna really become part of the way your personality the way you actually do things and and so uh you know if if you were teaching a a class on this be it this aspect or how to prioritize or you know any of the
aspects that you uh write uh so convincingly about what what would be kind of lesson one you're the professor I'm coming into your class and and and you're and I'm taking the class because I want to learn all of these uh techniques I want to be able to embody them
you can either give me the first lesson or give me the syllabus whatever with whatever way you feel more comfortable uh making the point yeah so the question is for example a class for managers on what to prioritize so what I would tell them is that there are some
think there are basically three things that need to happen for their people to have to have what it takes to do good work and to feel like doing good work is worth it because a lot of times it just happened so that the bottleneck is that you didn't
that is that your people don't believe that doing good work is worth it or they don't believe that priorities that prioritizing the long term is worth and so they don't do it and so for me the three things are Clarity feedback and Trust so the first thing is that you should be
very clear about what you need from that and the number one advice would be don't be abstract be concrete for example if you tell people you need to be ethical like like everyone will not but everyone will have a different opinion of authentic admits then you should always
like them you should flicker your mind every time you say something abstract you should continue with what I mean is and then something concrete which means for example it could be something like we never lie to to customers and even omissions could be lines maybe that still stands for example
if if you clarify those two things then if it would be clear this is the first step then if you blood Clarity it's necessary but it's not sufficient numbers the second thing you should give us feedback and that's because I know very few people which will get what you need out
of them at the first try what instead is needed very often is that you ask them to do something they do it and then you give them feedback on that and that has to be both positive and negative because sometimes the problem is that they do something wrong and they don't
notice and if you don't tell them they will keep doing it wrong a lot of times people they know abstractly what what is the right thing to do but they don't know how to do it live for example all managers they know that delegating and giving feedback are the
right things to do very few know how to do it why and the only way where you can teach that if you upset them doing it and you give them some fit and you should do the same with your people and you should also give positive feedback because what happens a lot of
times that people do a thing and then they don't see that anyone is noticing it and then they wonder whether it's worth doing it again and that applies with a lot of things when you take the time to do something to give feedback to another colleague and so on and you as a manager you want
to enforce so this is the second step feedback so we have Arc Clarity feedback and then this is still not necessary the third step is Trust and trusted what we were saying before when you say those two things people will understand what it means but they don't know
whether you want it even when it's hard even when it takes effort even when it means sacrificing the shutdown and you should build some action that creates Trust that you really mean what you say also it should be for example when you delegate something
a lot of times people don't fast that you mean it for example deadlines I know so many managers which did say something like send me the report by Friday and then because the other person senses on Friday they don't get an acknowledgment they they start believing that it's not
necessary by Friday they start to believe that when the manager gives a deadline it's not really a dead so again create action that demonstrates that they can trust your words so these are the three things you need to do as a manager Clarity feedback and Trust clarity about what you need then
feedback about not only what's the right thing to do but also the way the right way to do it and then trust that when you say something they can trust that you mean it and these are the definition and in a way it's the consistency of giving the first two that build the
third trust right um I I think that's an excellent formula you've written another thing that I found uh quite interesting and and I loved it because I didn't normally think this way and that is if if you want to change something what you gotta what you
gotta do is desire the actions that lead to the change not uh envisioned the change itself can can you expand on that a little because that really struck me as I was getting ready to talk to you I I hadn't seen it put that way before and it just unlocked the oh of course that
makes like toning sense yes so I've noticed this myself uh when I was going to the gym and the thing I've noticed was that everyone desires to be fit but the people who are sick are the ones who are frustrated when the gym is closed for example they are not on not
they are the ones who don't only desire being but they also desire exercising and the question is why what is the what makes them desire exercising and usually the thing is we all know we all have the knowledge of building if you exercise you get fit eventually
what differentiates is that only some of us when you exercise you want the lady like your brain is already releasing the dopamine and everything else that corresponds to the result so this is like you probably know about the extreme public experiments with dogs
well the scientist is ringing the band every time they where it gives them food so that when he only rings the bell they salivate what does the salivation mean it means that the dog desires not only the food but it also desires the bell in a way you know and that's kind of the same thing
you desire the action when doing the action already gives in your brain shows up as if there you are getting the rewards kind of and this is kind of like what you want to have if you want to keep um keep exercising the behaviors now I simplified it a lot and if anyone is
interested in you know science of it what I said is not completely right it was this super summarized version uh in the book the contrary stick I explain it much better and more much more final but that's that's the idea to pass the Habit you need to associate the emotional the
expected emotional outcome of the action with doing the action not really what doing the action must feel like you're already getting very well and and that's what creating habits means yeah and um you also talk quite a bit about um you know the uh the idea that uh as
one of my guests said uh perfectionism is a 100 tax in other words it doesn't really exist Plato notwithstanding right there are no perfect forms there there are North Stars and Compasses uh but you're probably never going to get the ideal of of something
um and you also write a lot about fear and uh what what I like when you write about fear is you acknowledge everybody has fears and the only way to deal with that is acknowledge the fact that everybody has fears and the only way to to deal with them is to work through
them not try to avoid them not try to you know have a behavior that makes you less fearful I guess right because that's a variable you might not want to optimize on right um so so walk me through like um what you would tell somebody who I bring you in as a consultant you find
somebody who's like got a lot of good skills they're very talented but they they have a lot of avoidance behavior uh doing specific things that would make their their skills scale quite a bit more so good for that person good for me is the owner of company what what would be your process there
yes so what you should then do is try to reason with it because I used to say it's not a context problem like the cortex of the part of the brain that thinks and then there are other parts of the brain which are about fear and so on the problem is not the cortex
so you shouldn't work on the cortex you shouldn't listen with them that's not the bottleneck it will not help what you should do is get them to do some action that they're avoiding and set them up for success so that the moment that they do the action they were avoiding and they see
that it leads to a good result the problem would be over now the problem is how do you get them to do the action that they're avoiding and this solution in a lot of cases doesn't work always but often enough for me to recommend it is given Next Step
which is small enough that it feels actionable so let's say for example that the thing that the person is avoiding is content customers for example if you tell that person you should call cast 10 customers they will not do it or they will do it in a way that sells
sabotages they will call them like in ineffective ways they will talk about the way what they do not to do something as small as possible which means call One customer then you should be the easiest customer someone that they already know or someone that you know that is very good
mode helpful listening something like and then you should set them for success which means what I will do is that I would all play that with them I will tell them imagine that I am the customer call me and we do a fake conversation like I'm not playing as the customer maybe after
30 seconds I will enforce them I stock one second I give them some feedback I I point out the good because I need to enforce that then if I see something bad or something that that is preventing that the conversation from succeeding I tell them we do this exercise three to four five
times then they get the confidence and the know-how they tried with the customer the easy customer let's say hopefully it goes well if it goes well problem 90 solved so that's that's kind of the approach so give them a concrete step which is actionable it should be something that
they know exactly what they have to do they shouldn't have to figure it out because otherwise their mind is avoiding that and they will not do it then you you should reinforce it and the best way to learn fast is global play either you will play it or you play the
hypothetical you say what would you do then you you bring out some common problems for example what you would you do if the client says they're busy what would you do if the client says uh he doesn't like the idea some something like that you had them
overcome their obstacles you're a force it you set them for Success you get them to do it you follow up on them and then it will work that's uh uh what I would refer to as kind of meta practice right um in terms of uh uh doing that step by step I think that's excellent advice
what happens when uh let's let's go back in your step by step um so we and we'll just stick with your example uh we have somebody who's really gifted but they have this this impediment to they they think it drew to call customers or they think they're imposing or whatever and so we start and
we role play and you teach them like I'm busy on this I'm not I don't like the idea what happens do you ever introduce in the role playing as the consultant to the company do you ever introduce the like shot out of nowhere right do you ever uh because I'm I'm thinking about
fears again so you you get the person uh there then what happens if like somebody does something like quite uh either rude or uh you know like don't call me uh you know I I hate your company um I I'm just thinking of these on the Fly and and doesn't that put the person
right back into fear yes so that's that's why I I especially mentioned that the first step should be an easy one you should ask them to call a client that you kind of know that these things won't happen uh something like this so so this this is one of the things the other
thing which you should also do is often while you're doing the role play to explain how you're feeling and what you're thinking because as you mentioned indeed that common reason why people don't like the call is because they think that they're rude that are imposing
and so what I will do is that as as soon for example is that the person is all playing with me and it and they're informing me of the product of the company I will tell them that now I'm feeling interested because I indeed have this problem and I want to know whether the
product that you're selling me had to solve it and sometimes people don't get this sometimes people don't don't get it the other person might be actually looking for your call then the question is under which condition they might be looking for your
call for example if you demonstrate very early on that you will not waste their time and so we will walk a little bit on how you can demonstrate that but very important is to teach the other is to assume about playing to say how you're feeling because very often when we are avoiding
to do something is because we don't know how we would feel or how the person in front of us is feeling and it helps to say that do you have techniques where um I understand that the person that you're helping and coaching to get them to you know I I love the process of use
a concrete step that they can take make it one that is pretty easy to determine that it's going to go well give them the feedback ask about the feeling and like you know so so that's a great step-by-step process but what about the person who um back to the debt back of the
difficult dealing with difficult people um is that something that you would simply say well you use their difficulty in determining whether you want them as a particular client what about a situation where you know your biggest client also happens to be a real
difficult person so uh in this case I would have had them understand have the difficult client for example and I would explain why I'm being District why I'm being rude I was I was I would for example say to my client like to to to the person I'm working with why are you calling me
and then immediately I will stop and I explained to them why I'm saying it why it's likely that I'm saying it and for example I could say like the reason why I say this and is probably because I have a lot of people who call me and waste my time uh
um it could be because I have a terrible headache and depending on those two situation this is what you can do and then now let's try it no I love that because what you're introducing it sounds like to me is you're training your the person you're coaching on on thinking not not being
reactive but rather thinking oh well I wonder maybe he's just super busy and he's got a bunch of people calling him or maybe he's got a headache or maybe you know he's hungover or whatever the the the ability to kind of think oh there might be a lot of reasons for that
allows them maybe to not take it personally so to speak um and and it actually puts them in a position where they could be helpful right so what you're doing which I think is great is you're you're teaching them how to re-uh re-train what's going on um and that's always been something that
I believe very passionately you can reframe things uh you're you're gonna on average if we're looking at a very long sample you're going to be able to um do uh better than than not um do you have any other techniques just on on this in in terms of helping people to refrain
how they approach these things that uh that you know through building habits which become personality right um that that they could think about or or do that would you know kind of really cement this in the way that they go about their occupation or it doesn't
even have to be activation right it's like this is uh this is being a successful parent this is being a successful you know fill in the blank yeah so I have a couple of uh things but they work much less than what I just said like working having another person which
is doing the exercise with you works at success percentages which are so much higher than everything else because you have another person which is guiding you helping you pushing you and so that said things that that work toward to to a lower degree one include lot playing in your head the
things which might go wrong so you're thinking like let's say that the exercise let's say that the habit I want to get is uh I don't know running every morning and then I would ask myself what are the reasons why tomorrow I might do not be one possibilities could be bad weather my
knee has a little bit of pain or something like this and then the question is what you will do in this clip in this case so if there is bad weather is the decision you will not land is the decision you will run the following day the decision you run with the
appropriate gear what about if your knee is a bit painful were you just around maybe it's lower would you run a half the distance will you take a break and usually if you think about the obstacles in advance you're much more likely that when the obstacle comes
you will actually follow through with your plan rather than just stopping so this is this is one uh this is one thing the other thing which I would um ask them is to think about very carefully about their values now let me explain what what I mean by that this starts from um
I think it was an observation I I met us on from Tony Robbins on which I have like like uh like there are some things he wrote which I like very much there are other things which I like a bit a bit less but I think that one of the observations he made is mixed values produce mixed
results and a lot of time when you see someone who's struggling to do something is because he's in the house Minds about it and the reason why he's not Minds about it is because he has contrasting balance which I mean values which are incompatible within the context of this action
and he will not proceed that I'll tell you and bang Juan Tangled that or he will proceed by he will do the action in a way which is not flux which is not success and so sometimes it helps to have the conversation with with a friend with the code but sometimes it helps just to
think about yourselves like there is this action I'm struggling could it be that there are different values of mind which are conflicting and then you want to think like is there any way in which I can do the action in such a way that both values get
respected for example or just acknowledging that as long as those values remain like this you will not add great success with that action and what to do about it do you just abandon the pursuit do you embark on a journey to change your values for example by exposing yourself
to people who solve this internal conflict or there are a lot of answers or any no answer is perfect but any answer is better than not thinking about it and proceed as if the conflicts were not there the I think that's great advice I love mixed uh mixed value sleep to mixed
results um do you Advocate uh one of the things that I have found very helpful and that kind of to this idea that I spoke of earlier that my grandfather taught me about premeditating that involves writing and um I have found and I always have advocated that uh writing helps you
understand whether you understand or not and and it works uh across the Spectrum right it works for uh to pick up on your values thing the advice I would give there is write out the values that you have and uh you know you might surprise yourself because at
the act of writing actually uh engages a different way of thinking about it uh do you find that there's similar value in in that uh Pursuit as well so lighting is exactly how I think like a lot of times like if there is a difficult problem well I need to write
it and if I write it usually and if I manage to keep my head on the sheet of paper without checking my phone for 20 minutes usually I get to a solution or to some progress and it works really well and the reason it works is because if you have two things two beliefs which are incompatible
they can so they can live in your head like our head can hold incompatible beliefs and there is no mechanism to check clearance on the sheet of paper when you write those things against each other next to each other you will notice if there is an incognorance so you mentioned the
exercise of writing dandelions well I do this exactly with uh with some people not not with client business clients but some sometimes like they ask me to do talk like personal growth talks and one of the exercises I do is that I ask the audience to write down a list of
bands and they take a few minutes and they write five to ten months and then I ask them to put them in orders on the most important the least important and everyone does that and then I asked them to take to write down the schedule for last week
and to check whether the way they use their time matches the list of the of the administer violence and if not to rearrange the list in the appropriate order so that it explains the schedule from last week and that's the such a powerful exercise I did it myself I thought I had some
values but when I compared my list of values with my schedule I realized I had different values and you will realize that that list of value that you have will produce that said and if you want to have a different schedule you will need to change your violence
or the priorities themselves and I I love that example because that also works as a incredible tool in uh prioritization of things right because you'll often see I you know I I I say to people you know I a lot of people often ask me like what what should I do because of X right and
and I'll say well I mean you say you want X but it seems that you're always doing why um have do you have you why are you always doing why and sometimes the the responses are really interesting because you can tell pretty quickly who has written it out and and who has not I
love the your example that ideas that are complete opposites of one another can live comfortably in your head but I call writing pushing it into the real world um because you know there it is on the paper and like I've had a writing habit for all of my adult life and you know
when people ask me you know give me one thing that you think would really be able to you know help me more than anything that's the that's the piece of advice I give is like write everything out if you're having a challenge write it out if you don't know write it out
because you'll quickly see whether you know or not which leads to another thing you talk a lot about which is how to how to maintain and optimize positive compounding and and you know I think basically you've already given all of the things that lead to positive uh
compounding the feedback idea the you're earning trust the but another one I think is is a little counter-intuitive because another thing that I believe uh at least in looking at very successful people is agility the ability to iterate quickly um and or change directions
um how do you work that in how do you work in um like in in the process is there a place where you where where there's a pause that's like I need to be agile I need to maybe go over here I'm a big fan of Lao Tzu and you know he he Compares everything to water and uh you
know uh movement is light right um and stasis is dead uh but how do you how do you work that art in like into a process though not in a process I would say system and personally for me it's about doing a bit of everything so let me let me explain what I mean
with what I mean by that um so this is a problem that I always have like in my life like which time Horizon do I optimize it with this project which I started should I keep it long enough because maybe at some point I will start seeing the results or isn't is it just that uh it's not
working and they should change and die iterate um this problem which I'm seeing is it worth changing or not and the best imperfect but best answer I've found is do a bit of everything Less in sometimes think about the think about it like um make like the argument of changing and
how you can change what you should change and so on and sometimes make the argument also no staying there for the long uh thing how can I pass test and so on and I think that just the idea of alternating between those point of views usually will help you get to um
get to get the solution so this so this this is one thing like for example for my life I always try to leave it as in I try to spend like part of my schedule as if like I only had one year left to live and then I tried to spend part of my schedule as if I will leave until I
get 100 years old and part of my schedule as if uh I have 20 years for example and the idea is like to think about this as in like because some point one time Horizon might make you think about some changes and so on and the trick is whatever you do do not take decisions which and gen
endanger the other point of view so yes a part of my schedule I leave it as if I only had one life one year to lie to live but I never do anything which would come which would endanger like my quality of life when I'm 100 years old and then 100 years old yes I spent part
of my schedule optimized like living as is taking actions which make it but never at the point which I make hell my current life as if I lived only one year that's kind of the the how I try to to make it all stay together and I think that it that it works very well
that's very helpful and I I think it fits really nicely with your multi-world outcome analysis uh because it it gets you to understand and unlock your thinking in terms of time um and I think that that is uh that's a that's actually quite a brilliant way to
do it I love that um I want to shift gears because I know we're bumping up against our time here but uh why did you live in Kazakhstan so I I spent I didn't spend so long there I spent a few months oh so basically I visited for someone uh for someone I knew then I started
teaching some courses uh Consulting for a company there oh I spent less than less than a year but it's been a good experience and and and the reason I the reason I asked that one is because I know people who traveled there and come back with these like fantastic stories about how
different it is I one of the reasons why I'm a huge lover of travel is because I think it opens the mind it opens your aperture and it helps you understand that people really do think differently in in different parts of the world what would you tell our listeners and and
viewers like what are your takeaways from having lived and worked in uh you know Italy Germany Kazakhstan uh Singapore um what were the insights that you walked away was that maybe you weren't expecting or you were expecting and they confirmed well so one thing is that you really
learn a lot of so one one superficial thing would be that you learn a lot of the values like different values different ways to see the world That's The Superficial thing the thing which I would uh wishing which instead hits me from that is the fact that you
notice that there are a lot of great people a lot of smart people and it's not that they have different various ways of thinking ways of doing things but it's that once you get to live with them and you notice that they are good people you notice that not only
that can be something different but that there could be something different which is also like comes from the same values as you express the different or the same ways of working or like if doing things efficiently can be done in different ways and you don't really notice that until
you work with someone and you notice that they share the same for example attention to efficiencies you do but then they do something different or they share the same values of fairness and then they do something differently and then you realize that
there are a lot of things that you know that that you believe differently and that's why you need to live there because if you just learn how other things people how other people do different things you don't get the fact that those people they could be the your best friend
they could be maybe a future spouse there would be someone you would have a belief that they have the same values as you and yet they're doing things different and you need to leave it and then you realize that wow maybe the next time that I see someone who's doing the thing
differently maybe it's they could still have the same value system yeah well this has been absolutely fascinating I I I love uh your work I think that uh you you you unlike many consultants that I talk to you make a lot of sense and you offer very actionable advice which I love uh
because you know word salads uh can get in the way I love the fact that you don't do that you get very specific actin items and that leads to uh a path that I think people just listening to this podcast are going to be able to actually write down hopefully and and
then actually put into use immediately that's the other thing I like you you are giving what I would call excellent but practical advice that allows people to like oh I can do that um so I I very much appreciate it at the end of our podcast Luca we always asked our guests
um a funny question which is we're gonna wave a magic wand and we're going to make you the emperor of the world for one day you can't kill anyone and you can't put anyone in a re-education camp but you can speak into a magical microphone and and say two things and
the effect will be that the entire eight billion population of the world is going to wake up whenever their tomorrow is and they're going to think they had those two thoughts themselves and they're going to immediately start acting on them what do you what do you have for us so I think that
sorry I just don't want to give any uh like any answer I think that one should be ask people what their problems are and really listen which I mean like so that you really understand what are the challenges that the other person is facing with light not projecting anything
and then the second thought would be so going and going a bit more like uh more like like in today into more abstract ideas and the ideas of politics like one thing that I would like people is to like not lower the level when we are talking about politics and by this I mean like
so much of what I'm of what I'm seeing happens because we think it's acceptable to to fix picks romance to accept someone from our sideline to put to bring forward one of our points um to to conceal some problems on our side when um to to give bad data to or to like accept
better information from our site if it brings our point forward to not listen to the other person even if they have a good point because considering that the other party is a good point will be like uh diminishing the feather on our side and something like that
and just to like keep the level like like the level of discussion at a high level which by which I mean like you listen to the other person if they make a good point that's a good point you try not to make bad points on your side and I think that it will help a lot
yeah I I love both of those and uh I love the idea and it's something I've always advocated with straw men are easy to build steel men are much harder to build and uh if you can still man your opponent's argument You're Gonna Learn a tremendous amount that you won't learn
if you just uh stick with straw man but you demonstrated something else that I want to I'm going to leave in because I think it's so incredibly important and that was you took your time to think about the answers and you wouldn't really you wouldn't guess oh unusual that is and the reason
I'm gonna leave that period in is people need to understand that that's the much better way to do things don't have because what you demonstrated is you're an active listener and by that I mean you did you weren't listening to that question with an immediate like this is
going to be my response you listen and then you demonstrate it something that I find unfortunately way too rare which is you thought about it and I loved that I absolutely love that so I I'm I am definitely going to try to teach a lesson by leaving the pods in
because so many human beings like they they want to build that pause right and if if you if you it is such a good skill if I mean like literally anyone listening to us right now if you can learn from Luca's last little bit there that one skill you're gonna level up you're not gonna even
understand how much you're gonna be able to level up because you're gonna realize maybe I wasn't listening to people before and maybe I do need to take the pause and time to think so I I I absolutely loved uh the way that you demonstrated that they could do
well thank you so much for sharing if I can just understand on what you said earlier before you asked me the question and you were talking about Consultants that sometimes they say what salads I just want to give a piece of advice for people who sometimes happens to hire
Consultants or to work with them is take a few sentences that those people said walk to the line employee that you have in your company the office worker and so on and say those same sentences and ask them if they make sense for me that's that's that's one bar and
one test so that you can have for Consultants to this to notice some red flags of many consultants I love that I love that because uh yeah if you have and and I'll add an addendum which you might or might not agree with if you have a hard time saying that sentence to your your teammate yeah
you're gonna learn very quickly oh okay that's maybe not the advice I want I love it yeah where where can people uh uh find you um and your books and your and your company yes uh uh my website is uh Luca bellana.com with Double L and double end and uh my books can be found on Amazon
bus and now balls some basic basically everywhere Apple everything yeah terrific well I highly recommend people get your books at this website uh this has been absolutely a pleasure so thank you so much for joining me thank you so much Jim for having me