but the best lives in some ways are unadorned lives that lives that are not adorned by the trappings of wealth or performative complexity or um posturing or status seeking but are the simplicity of do you have people who love you and do you have people you love [Music] hey everyone welcome back to on purpose the number one health podcast in the world thanks to each and every single one of you that come back every week to listen learn and grow now
today i'm super excited because i have been reading these authors books since my teenage years and i found them fascinating they totally inspired me when it came to behavioral science understanding the mind how we think how we make decisions
how we get driven and motivated and i've been a fan ever since so this is a true fan moment for me our guest today is none other than daniel pink he's the author of six books about business and human behavior his
books include the long time running new york times bestseller when which will be dissecting today a whole new mind as well as the number one new york times bestsellers drive which was actually the first book that i read from him and to sell
is human dan's books have won multiple awards and have been translated into 40 languages and have sold more than 3 million copies now dan has been a contributing editor at fast company and wired as well as a business columnist for the
sunday telegraph his articles and essays have also appeared in the new york times harvard business review and other publications and in 2019 london-based thinkers50 named him the sixth most influential management thinker in the world and he lives in washington dc with his family and today we're here to talk about his latest book when called the scientific secrets of perfect timing which i know you're gonna love so dan thank you for doing
this jay it's a pleasure to be with you yeah you literally you were like one of the first people i ever thought of interior interviewing before i even had a podcast and i remember saying to i believe our mutual friend
uh dan chabel who i i believe you know well as well sure of course i remember saying to him i was like i would love to interview dan and he was like yeah i can introduce you to him i can introduce you to him and then i didn't have a podcast there so i
didn't interview so we waited but uh we're absolutely worth the wait yeah well thank you so much for doing this i i've genuinely enjoyed your books what you've helped me understand about human incentives drive and now timing which i think is the most fascinating i recommended this book uh last year as one of my top 10 books and uh pushing it out as much as i can so i'm excited to dive into it but i want to actually start off with
something that i saw on your twitter profile i think it was yesterday or a couple of days ago where you recommended you actually recommended trevor noah's audiobook of crime for a book to study with for high school students and i was understanding why why particularly that book there's a large presence um uh on twitter of and other social media of educators and and those are educators among the few people who i actually enjoy interacting with
on twitter uh and so there was a fellow who i think was a high school principal who was looking for recommendations for books for high school students to read and i thought that um that trevor noah's book including the audio edition was just a great choice for high school students i mean i i'm a father of a high school student uh my son has my son has read that book uh for it's it's just a it's an extraordinary first of all it's it's men it's
monumentally entertaining it's just a gripping story of this kid and i think that what he is telling us gives us all kinds of insight into our world today he trevor was the son of a black mom and a white dad german dad
uh growing up uh he was born in apartheid era south africa and so simply for for americans especially white americans hearing about that is just i mean even though you know it it's just kind of mind-boggling um and then um and then what happens
after post-apartheid how he decides what he wants to do what his relationships are with his mother and father but i actually listened to the audio edition of this of his book and it is jay i i think the best audiobook i've ever listened to and the reason for that is that is that trevor noah speaks multiple languages um and and so um and so he goes into some of these languages but also his ability to do characters and accents is just
extraordinary it's just it's a virtuosic performance uh and just a gripping read i can't imagine a 17 year old not being 16 year old not being just mesmerized by that as i was and i'm way older than 17. i love that no it's a great recommendation i think that's awesome and it's always nice to hear authors and very successful authors recommending other authors and audiobooks so uh i think that's brilliant now now you've made it really really clear
that's that's great tell us about i want to start you know about with your fascination with human behavior and the mind and the way we think and why we do certain things like where did that come from for you because you know like i said you were the first person or one of the first people to introduce me into that whole school of thought and and i just think like when you're young and you're at college or you're at school you don't really
you don't really get exposed to these kind of topics so where was it for you and you know how did that start for you i guess i'm not totally sure i think part of it comes i i'll i'll give you i'll give you some analysis jay part of it i think part of it comes from being a pretty quiet kid growing up um i don't i wouldn't say shy but just kind of a quiet kid more of an observer uh a reader a kid who went to the library all the time
and so just that sort of putting myself always feeling like i wasn't quite in the center of things but was kind of on the periphery observing and who was i observing i was observing these crazy people uh and so that i think was i think that was part
of it i also was fortunate enough when i was in college to uh to study um my very first uh my very first uh trimester in college i took introductory to psychology and loved it i studied a lot of economics a lot of psychology
and uh but i ended up i actually majored in in linguistics which is a which is a um which is another social science so i was always keenly keenly interested in it i think if i had my uh if if i i can totally see in retrospect in my life
that i would have become a professor rather than um doing um the the noble hackery that i'm doing today no that's awesome i i it's interesting always how people got to where they got to and i'm fascinated that you haven't fully
dissected your journey and like broken it up into little pieces and i quite like that i think it's uh i think it's it's very humble of you actually well i i also think it's you thank you for that i'm not sure that it's humble as it is accurate i think a lot of times these these they're different vantage points in looking at these journeys and i and i like the metaphor of a journey the different vantage points in looking at these journeys
so if you're in it and you're in you're you're you're you're you're navigating your way at least for me there was much much less intention than one would think um luck uh that kind of thing i i think that in in some cases just because it makes us more comfortable existentially we look back on these things and say oh there was a clear narrative to that journey yeah and there might be i think that that retrospective look is actually valid is
is is valid too yeah absolutely and and i know that you spent a lot of time in japan right or you've spent some time in yeah i spent some time in jail and sure yeah what's the culture like or what kind of influences have you taken from that
culture oh it's your life yeah it's a a really really interesting question um probably more profound than i realize i think that one of them is the virtue of simplicity um i think that there is a and and you and you know and you know
living in a japanese zen garden style house that um that there is in in japanese design um in in in certain forms of just japanese culture there is a premium on that simplicity and i think in in in many cases in many realms of particularly american in particularly kind of uh elite well-educated american circles uh there is this kind of performative complexity i mean forgive even that phrase performative complexity is an example of
well no it's total bs because it's an example of performative complexity basically what it is is that people want to feel smart and the way that they want to feel smart is by making things really complicated and and and and to me one of the things
i absorb from spending time there is actually the keenest form of intelligence is to make things as simple as you possibly simple and clear and elegant as you possibly can whether you are writing a book whether you're making
a film whether you're building a house whether you're raising a family anything like that that there's a virtue in that kind of simplicity and clarity so i think that's probably the thing that sunk in the most for me that's so profound i'm so glad you shared that actually i i didn't know what answer you were going to give and and i either did and i and i love that because i've i've always thought that for a while like you know i was
my all my work is inspired by two statements uh one statement is uh statement often contribute attributed to martin luther king where he said that if you want a new idea read an old book and so i have this fascination with timeless wisdom and kind of yeah yeah and then the second one is from einstein and when he said that if you can't explain something simply you don't understand it well enough and and so i've always been fascinated with
simplification and your work does that very very effectively apart from performative complexity which i believe i don't know if you just made that up right now but it's a great i did i did i didn't have it because i don't want to ever say
it again and sometimes i feel like i feel this pressure as as a as a thinker or a sharer or whatever you want to call us you know i i have this pressure of like oh well maybe i'm making things too easy to understand
and actually hearing you say that it's so like refreshing for me because i'm like no i want people to be able to practice it and just get it in one you know so that's a beautiful part of culture and what part of the culture did you
feel that was it architecture was it language was it you know where was that in the culture i didn't have any mastery of the language that that was hard for me to that that was hard for me although i think there is something
you know even in the pictorial uh aspect of the language where a single character a single image represents something that's actually that can actually something be fairly complex so if you take out some a notion that is complex
like um luck okay there'll be a character for luck i know that's true obviously in china that's true obviously in chinese as well um i just i just thought that when the uh if you if you look at uh even japanese aesthetics it's it's
it's even japanese cuisine it's unadorned it you know like like really good japanese cuisine is unadorned it is in french where there's like late unlinked sauces and all kinds of stuff on it isn't you know heavily garnished and
displayed in this grandiose way it is pure it is simple it is unadorned the the essence speaks for itself and there's there's um there's a there's a lot to be said for that even if you look at uh like even japanese cuisine where you
go into a place and all they serve is ramen okay so they're not trying to do everything but they're you're gonna get the best bowl of ramen you've ever had because that's all they serve um uh and so i i think that that has been that way of thinking has probably had a bigger effect on me than i than i realize in fact in some ways jay your question is making me understand that that had a that had a bigger effect because i do
think that their clarity and simplicity to me are are such those are things that i as a as a as a creator and as a consumer a prize very very deeply yeah i mean you're you're a phenomenal public speaker as well and if anyone's
never seen down on stage you just go on youtube and just watch them on stage whether it's ted or or other events but have you ever reset simplicity or clarity out of interest like are they themes that you see yourself writing about or
do you ever have you ever been down a rabbit hole on one of those and discovered anything fascinating about simplicity or clarity because i think you're spot on that really those are the two things we're always seeking out right whether decision making or or whether it's in how we feel about ourselves or a relationship we have in our lives i'm intrigued because i i definitely studied those for my meditation mindfulness right right but i'm
intrigued to hear about if you found anything scientifically that's that fascinates you yeah that's another really interesting question i i don't think i've ever intentionally uh gone gone after that but there is there is a decent amount of there's a decent amount of of research showing aspects of this so for instance um so so for i'll give you i'll give you something profound and something mundane okay so so on the on the on the mundane is um
it's a concept it's a concept uh in linguistics uh which is which is known as processing fluency uh processing fluency and all processing fluency means is that the message the words that the communication you're making goes down easily or all right so so it goes down easily now that's a virtue in and of itself but one of the things that we know from from linguistics and some from some social psychology is that processing fluency enhances
believability not only understanding but believability and there's a dark side of this of course um and so what you see is that things that enhance processing fluency are effective in getting your message across an example would be repetition okay we
know that right like repetition is effective repetition increases people's understanding it increases their believability now there's a downside there's a downside to that even things like rhyming there's some brilliant research
showing that that that messages that rhyme are not only considered more understandable but actually more believable alliteration lists and things like that so um so we we do know something from science that that clarity and simplicity are
obviously extraordinarily are extraordinarily effective that's the mundane rhymes increase processing fluency okay the i think the more profound thing is that when you look at say things like your listeners some of your listeners
are probably familiar with the famous grant study out of harvard where uh they followed um uh a group of men it was at the time as all men um i think was all white men in uh graduated from harvard in the 1940s something like that and they follow follow i might be a little bit off in the years they they they um and they follow them through the course of their lives um uh checking you know a massive longitudinal study they also did it with
um they later did a group of of working-class men all men from from from boston and um one of the things that you see from the grant study is that you know like what makes somebody satisfied what makes somebody happy with their life
and it turned out that it's completely unadorned it's basically do you have somebody you love and do you have people who love you period full stop that's it yeah so the the adornment that we were talking about in japanese cuisine that
lack of adornment in japanese cuisine is that our the best lives in some ways are unadorned lives that lives that are not adorned by the trappings of wealth or performative complexity or um posturing or status seeking but are the simplicity of do you have people who love you and do you have people you love yeah that that that is truly one of the hardest things to understand right now as well because you know i was literally speaking to on
another podcast i was interviewing peter diamandis recently and you know he's obsessed with the future and we're talking about how you know he thinks the world's improving and the future is changing and and like we could we could live on
another planet and we could you know do all this kind of stuff and and it's you know at the same time i remember a couple of years ago i got to visit one of the blue zones in sardinia i don't know if you've come across blue
zones as well i'm sure you've done i know i know i've actually ordered i've actually there's a there's a there's a wine from that from sardinia the grape i'm spacing out on what the varietal is i've actually gone out and looked
and ordered wine from sardinia because um for that very reason oh that's incredible okay what a small world so i don't drink so i have no idea what that wine is others help you out but uh but yeah so when i went there and i
was i was you know i lived with some of the people in the town in the village and i was looking at their lifestyles and i also interviewed dan buttner who talks about the blue zone and and you know it's you look at that simplicity and you look at that you know that stability of like growing up in a village farming the land natural exercise not needing to do any hit workouts or any any weights exercises it is it is really
really special to see that and i like trying to entertain the paradox of what parts of our lives are better simpler and what parts of our lives are better with some and maybe complexity is the wrong word yeah maybe complexity not even the
opposite of simplicity maybe there's another point that's a great point yeah maybe there's another element to like not the opposite of simplicity but a complementary paradoxical version of simplicity that because i find
in in and of myself and i'd love to hear what you think like i what i get fascinated about excited about is the the correlation between simplicity and then strategy right like or like simplicity and then like ambition or drive or focus and and i find like often today people you know people may connect simplicity with laziness or lack of focus or you know that but we are speaking with a much more deeper essential level of clarity
yeah yeah i think that's right um it's interesting there is a um it's it's an interesting it's it's in some ways a linguistic question no no joke uh about like what's the right word to describe what you and i are
talking about because i feel like you and i are talking about something well at least what i think is important and quite interesting but um our vocabulary the or at least in english might be impoverished and doesn't have the quite right term for that
i think you used a really uh important word they're essential it's partly about what you know what is what is what is fundamental and and i do think that this idea that that we know that simplicity and ambition can be easily twinned
no question about it i mean you you mentioned that one of your guiding quotations was from was from uh what was from einstein who was talking about simplicity and he ended up i mean among his among his breakthroughs were
was something that is so profoundly complex that most of us don't understand it beyond the equation we memorized in seventh grade yeah it's very true it is very very true and that challenge is real but talking of essentials i i do want to
talk about because i think this book is so essentially driven so for everyone who hasn't read it and i have recommended it before we have this book when that i want to talk about i think time is one of those things you
know how we use time spend time create time what we make time for like time is one of those things that of course is and the way we use an essential essential essential part of all of our lives and i think when we're talking about simplicity or clarity i think one of the biggest things we lack simplicity and clarity on is time uh and and for me i've definitely noticed how over over life especially when your book came out i've tried to remove
people from having to live their life based on a timeline or an expectation and i realized that because my life went in a completely different direction whereby i became a monk at 22 and didn't have my first job until 26 uh and today
lead one of the most meaningful fulfilling lives in the world thanks to our all my experiences and so it's just it's fascinating there were times in my life where i felt like i was behind people that i should be in line with
there were times in my life where i felt i was ahead of people there were times when i felt like i was trying to figure it out and i think a lot of people usually feel like they're behind ahead or equal to and that's kind of how we make sense of stuff and that's when this book came out which i know was like maybe a year ago a year and a half ago maybe a couple years ago it's to me that was i was fascinated that you were able to pinpoint
you know and go so deeply into time which i always thought was so much more fluid and so i guess the first question i want to ask you and and please take this wherever you like like don't feel uh constricted at all because i like
what we're kind of co-creating right now what fascinates you about time the most that you were so deeply drawn to actually write a whole book about timing yeah uh so so that is actually um i'm gonna put the answer to that in more
of the mundane category um the reason for the impetus for it was just frustration um more than anything else it wasn't any kind of deep conceptual fascination so so here we are uh you know i'm talking to you from this is
this is my office here in washington dc it's the refurbished one car garage behind my house i live there like right there um and so you know i i would come to my office and and do stuff do work um and at a certain point i realized
like i would have a i have a to-do list uh and maybe i would have appointments on the calendar but i wasn't intentional at all about when i was doing stuff well i would write when i felt like writing i would make phone calls when i felt like making phone calls i would do interviews when i felt like doing interview you know um and i wasn't intentional about it and i said that's that's great that's that's crazy like like i i end up
i i'm actually a fairly kind of rational i like to think i am at least a fairly rational evidence-based guy and and i'm making these decisions about when to do things i'm not even making decisions i'm just kind of
stumbling my way into it um and so i said well there's got to be some guidance out there on on like when we should do things and i found to my surprise that there wasn't uh and that got me really curious i said well i wonder if there's anybody's ever
researched this so i started looking around for research and internet there was a huge amount of research on this question but it was splattered all over the place uh it was in literally two dozen different domains so it wasn't like you
say oh there's a sociologist who studies timing well there might be there is there are but there are also biologists who do that there are economists who've studied that there are microbiologists who have done studied
epidemiologists there's a whole field called chronobiology and so what you had was you had literally two dozen different fields asking very similar in some cases identical questions and what i said is like maybe you know it was painful but if i go wide enough and deepen up into this research i can begin to piece together the evidence-based ways to make better smarter decisions about when to do things when to do things in a given day but
also to your other point jay um uh when we think about our lives our our lives are episodic episodes have beginnings the episodes have middles and episodes up ends this whole idea the journey metaphor you introduced earlier is like journeys have beginnings they have middles and they have ends and it turns out that there is some fascinating research on how our cognitive abilities change over the course of the day and then more episodically
how beginnings affect us how midpoints affect us how endings affect us there's research on how groups coordinate in time there's research on how the way we think about time affects our behavior there's research again all roads lead
back to linguistics there's research based on the way that languages configure their verb tenses it can predict people's savings behavior as crazy as that sounds um and so um so it ends up being something that is going back to another
one another one of your words it ends up being essential it ends up being fundamental uh because uh we are temporal creatures that is we have we talk about colloquially about biological clocks uh about a biological clock but but essentially what we have we know from from biology is that especially chronobiology is that we essentially have clocks in every cell in our body i mean we are walking time pieces and again depending on your notion of time
sort of philosophically existentially we are in some ways moving through time at the very least our conversation began in the past um that right it's going to end in the future right the people who are going to listen
to the recorded version of this are listening to something that happened in the past but they had but those people haven't done anything yet because that's in the future and so we're sort of swimming in this essential element of our lives
and so what i was just trying to do is just make it understandable yeah and i think you did a phenomenal job and so i want to dive into different parts of it i guess my first question is like there's actually there's a few things so the first one is i think the most common relationship and of course i'm making a huge assumption here but i think maybe we'll agree maybe your research will say something else but i'd say my assumption is that the
most common relationship and i believe everyone has a relationship with money we have a relationship with time we have a relationship with uh anything knowledge wisdom etc and so our relationship with time for most people is
i always feel like i don't have enough right that is a very clear relationship that we all every time it's like i don't have enough time i i can't make enough time i can't find time like we say all these words which are all about making
finding creating having what does that do what is that mindset toward time how does that actually affect our behavior our relationship with time we can think of it as an ally we can think of it as an enemy in some ways that's over that's oversimplifying in that case but i think if what we're trying to and one way to make time your ally rather than your enemy is to recognize the effect often invisible that it has on your life um so if you look so
so i'll give i'll give you an example uh what we know from let's just take the unit of a day what we know very clearly from a whole array of research is that our brain power does not remain constant over the course of a day our brain power changes over the course of the day so doing something at 9am is not the same as doing something at 3pm period full stop now there's some complexity underneath that but the main idea is that our brain
power doesn't remain constant over the course of a day and the best time to do something depends on what it is you're actually doing so once you understand those kinds of hidden invisible rules you can begin to make time your ally
rather than your enemy and end up mitigating some of those feelings that you never that one never has enough time um so so i think that's i think that's part of what it is people who feel like they don't have enough time this is not something i
write about but i'll open about it anyway in many cases people who don't feel like they have enough time sometimes not always sometimes it's not a time it's not a a sufficiency of time issue it's a sufficiency a priority issue
but they they actually don't have any clarity about their purpose or their priorities and so they're moving in all kinds that's not always the case but i think that's that's partly the case the other thing that we know is that when
time becomes extremely salient in our lives we underperform uh and i'll give you uh in certain circumstances or we're unhappy in certain circumstances so i i a great example of that is in professional services but particularly in the practice of law is the billable hour um what we know so if you are a lawyer practicing in a law firm not working for the government or doing that or non-profit or something uh you bill yourself out by the hour and
so what you do is that you have you know a way to well i mean going analog here but you you have on your computer or you know scribbled down an account of what you're doing literally in some cases in six minute increments
uh and what we know from research there is that that makes people that is incredibly thwarting to people's sense of autonomy um and so so there are all kinds of things in our relationship with time that if we reconfigure it we can
feel a little bit better do a little bit more and better yeah that's that that's that's put on i think that makes uh that answer and all the parts would make a lot of sense i think the the part that i get really interested by
when we start talking about time in the way you just did now where you talk about priorities you're talking about uh the you know the the ally versus the enemy and and i i i love that is productivity even the goal of time because i feel
like today one of the biggest challenges that i get asked at least and and maybe your children experience this or maybe what i see outside in the world of social media is a lot of people today spend a lot of time overthinking and procrastinating and that's seen as a negative thing and people are often like scared of overthinking scared of procrastinating or they judge themselves and then they start getting into this kind of like you know
uh vicious circle and cycle of feeling like oh like i'm wasting a lot of time here tell me about what you found or even your thoughts on on productivity as a goal of time versus the the effective use if possible of procrastination and overthinking
uh procrastination and productivity okay let's talk about what productivity is i'm going to be literal with this here productivity is the amount of units you produce over a given amount of time so it is inherently time
based because time is in the denominator of productivity okay so so again i'm not sure that productivity is necessarily the best measure i say that as a writer okay so i could be like like i could be a product like suppose i wrote more words per hour
today versus yesterday i would literally be more productive but am i am i a better writer i i don't know it's probably it doesn't matter like what are the words right um and so and so in some ways productivity is the
notion of productivity in that very literal sense is an artifact of our being an economy where we were producing identical mass-produced goods and so efficiency was the was the highest value because everything was the same and so what you wanted to do was in a given denominator make the numerator larger okay that's how you increase that that's a way to increase productivity or keep the numerator the same and shrink the amount of time in the
denominator so um so that's what that's what that's what productivity is i think a way to um you know a looser way to measure things is is quality and and in quality contribution impact those sorts of things uh and certainly for
certain kinds of professions like like being a writer writing more words is no measure of my contribution to the world yeah so if anyone's listening or watching right now and it's like dan i'm i just feel like i procrastinate
a lot i overthink a lot yeah and i waste time what would be your response to that okay so let's okay so so that's the product so that's a productivity thing now let's let's talk about let's not let's talk about procrastination because we know a lot about procrastination okay okay two big ideas here one procrastination is not always bad okay sometimes you're procrastinating for a reason because you haven't worked it out
because you're still incubating an idea okay so it's not inherently bad it's not like all procrastination is bad the second big idea here is that procrastination is basically in general the downside the darn the doubt negative procrastination is just an emotion regulation problem right it has nothing to do with time it means that you are unwilling to confront something and therefore are not something so disturbing to you
that you would rather actually sabotage yourself then confront it that in some ways you're making a quasi-rational decision that the pain of confronting man can i really write this is greater than actually not
writing it in the first place um and so so we know this from a lot of research procrastination is an emotion regulation issue and so what you have to think about is what is the emotion that you're avoiding and is there a small step is there a way
in some ways to trick yourself into either confronting it directly or to do something to just get yourself going and that in that the action ends up confronting the the emotion but a lot of times but again i just in certain circumstances it's hard to say the fact that you're not ready to start is a signal that it might be a very very positive signal it could mean that hey i'm still incubating this yeah that's that's a great answer i i i love that
perception because i think i think as soon as you start labeling and going oh my procrastination's bad and this is not a good place to be in you're right you just every all of that is just avoiding the actual emotion which is a signal or a
sign or an alert that's kind of trying to get your attention and and you just keep putting it away and i think what that leads to and this is something which i found fascinating book is like starting things like i feel like you
know knowing when to start a business or knowing when to start a project is like the hardest thing in the world and you know i'm sure you get asked this a million times but like tell us about the research behind starting something and and what you found was most critical there again there's no there's never there's very rarely prospectively a perfect time to start something all right but there are ways to give ourselves a
little bit of a different it's like a lot a little bit of a psychological edge uh and this is the work of katie milkman jason reese and hangchen dai um they did it at penn at university of pennsylvania and uh they had this idea of of um what
they call the fresh it's called the fresh start effect and a way to understand the fresh start effect is like this that certain dates certain days certain dates are what social psychologists call temporal landmarks
temporal landmarks that is they are they stand out in time the way a physical landmark stands out in space so again back to the journey metaphor you're navigating your way you're trying to find your way oh there's a landmark i know where i am
oh there's that building i have a sense of where i am temporal landmarks are navigational tools in some ways but certain temporal landmarks have a peculiar psychological effect what they do is essentially they operate
as kind of a restart what they say is that on certain days that are fresh start days you essentially relegate your previous bad self to the past and open up a fresh ledger on your new self all right and so there's certain days that actually are more you're more likely to start something and you're more likely to succeed while starting it so what does this mean let's let's be concrete here you want to start something you're probably better off
doing it on a monday rather than on a thursday you're probably better doing it on the day after your birthday rather than three days before your birthday you're probably better doing it on on the uh like uh the first day of summer rather
than three days before the first day of summer uh let's say you're uh if one is a religiously observant you know uh you know the day after uh or the day of a religious holiday rather than four days before that religious holiday
uh and so you can in some ways use have that sense of where you are temporally and pick the right date to start something yeah i i can so relate to that and my my problem is i'll try to start something on a monday i'll fail on tuesday and then i wait till the next monday well okay so so that's that's that's a mixed bag that's a mixed bag it depends on it depends on on how deep the failure was on uh it depends on how deep the failure
was on tuesday now there's another strategy for all of this yeah please is with which we which i mean it's reasonably well known and in some ways it's it's interesting because i think it's analogous to our conversation about simplicity and
the opposite of simplicity or simplicity and complexity uh in that i do think that in many cases we have been um seduced into the idea of moonshots and big hairy audacious goals i think that they're important but i
think that they're oversold in a way and what's undersold just think about it just think about it as a pricing issue okay so the so so the big heriot issues goals moonshots i think they're overvalued and i think what's undervalued is small
wins uh and once again there's a lot of there's a lot of evidence of that starting from carl vik 30 years ago small winds are enormously important because what small winds do is that they small winds can overcome that
procrastination problem small winds can then lead to other small winds and other small wins that cascade into something into something bigger so a strategy for overcoming procrastination a strategy for many things is to go
is to go for small wins let me give you an example of that so so uh one strategy that i um that i've heard of i i mean i just i called it this it's not originally for me it just sort of you know out there i call it j5 not j y but
j letter j and uh that's just that and that stands for just five more okay and so if you don't feel like doing something you say okay you know what i'm gonna do uh man okay so i'm so i'm doing some research right now okay i have these
papers some of them are incredibly boring okay you know what i can't stand it i want to quit you know what i'll just read five more pages just five more pages i'll read that okay oh my god i got a boatload of email here
ugh i can't deal with it i just want to go inside and have a drink you know what i'm gonna just do five five more five more emails and we'll do that um uh you know what i'm tired of writing okay just five more sentences
that's it and that you know that can get us going give you a small win and what happens a lot of times is that just five more becomes just 10 more just 20 more something like uh something like that i really like that one that's that's an
awesome strategy i think that's good it's very simple i use it all the time i'm not joking around i use it today i use it today when i looked at my email file and i was like oh god i i can't bear that it's okay i'm just gonna
i've already answered enough email i'm like okay just five more and you know what i did i just i did that and i got it done and i probably ended up answering eight or something like that another one a very well-known technique
i use it i have no shame in using it you're probably familiar with it your listeners are probably familiar with it is the pomodoro technique um which is which is bit you know pomodoro is italian for tomato uh and so um you know you said a a timer i i have one on my computer uh that i use in on very dark days uh i set a timer for whatever i do it for 25 minutes and i just can't bear this okay i can't research this anymore i can't read this
anymore i'm sick of writing okay here's what we're gonna do it's 25 25 minute i'm not gonna do anything else i'm just gonna do it for that 25 minutes and and that can um yeah and that can and i think let me let me extract from this as always a large theoretical lesson and it's this all right that a lot of times in our understanding of what makes human beings tick we think that belief precedes action that you have to convince yourself and then
that is the impetus to act and in many cases more cases than we realize the arrow runs in the other direction that getting yourself to act can actually trigger the belief yes and that's a very very important that's a very very important lesson that that's so true and that's really it's it's kind of like when we're like i can't make my mind up right like even that saying is exactly in that belief where you're just spending so much time trying to
make your mind up and decide something and and what i love about what you just said is is around that whole the small wins element of just i always feel like when you can get into a good rhythm and pattern of keeping promises to yourself
and keeping small commitments to yourself you start to trust yourself and when you start to trust yourself you can then trust yourself with bigger tasks the problem is like you said is that we go for these moonshot goals and
naturally we fail at them and therefore we don't trust ourselves and i feel like self trust is like the big issue when it comes with time is that you're like well do i even trust myself with this much time do i even trust myself to complete that and you're right about the small wins whether it's making your bed or just five more or you know all of these principles that you're laying out like that just builds trust with yourself
i'll give you something else uh that build trust with yourself that's related to this concept which is uh again is research based it's built on uh talked about i've written about this i wrote about it in that book
um i've talked about it before is um the work of teresa mobile at harvard business school and she found that the single biggest day-to-day motivator on the job is making progress and meaningful work okay so the days we're making progress the days were
motivated we come back the next day feeling motivated uh but one of the challenges is that is that we never have a good we often don't have a good sense of how much progress we're making um and so one of the so one of the
things that i've done for this is now for like eight or nine years now is um at the end of every day i have a program what you know called a progress ritual and all i do is i just basically say what i what would you get done today and
i just list what i got done today and i keep a record of that uh and i have to say i almost never look at the list but it's the act of doing i mean seriously i almost never look at the list but it's the act of doing it so i so i
just take a moment it's a it's a it's a it's a ritual all right and you know i don't have to tell you former monk the importance of rituals in in in human understanding right so it's a it's a ritual it's a punctuation mark
at the end of the day what did you get done today dan okay this is what i got done okay what what i love that how do you do that for other people so if you're leading teams if you've got a small team a big team a company how do you kind of help people realize the progress they're making yeah there's something you can do for yourself but yeah how do you do it for others i mean you could do it you could do a ver you could do a version of what i'm
talking about for your for your team i mean what i would want to do is is i would want to get i would want to build that habit in others rather than have them rely on me for that i would want to build that habit in others
so what you could do is you could have you could ask your team send you that at the beginning not as a way to monitor them but as a way to just as a way to build that habit and then eventually have them continue the habit without sending it to you
um yeah absolutely i'm going to try i'm actually going to try that out i'm 100 going to try that out what did you get done today just write down the things you get done i mean i mean it's a very simple concept we always we often have a to-do list at the beginning of the day like have it done list at the end of the day and it's almost like gamifying your mind right because you know that if you got three things done yesterday you might
want to get four done today so you push a bit further right i think a lot of times also when we're scrambling around we don't have a sense of what we what we've accomplished sometimes it can be and sometimes it can be um
it can be affirming so i know that many days where i feel like i haven't gotten anything done during the course of a day i stop and i do my little progress ritual again we're talking like jake 30 seconds yeah not anything elaborate um i'm like oh
oh okay i actually got more done than today and then on the days where i didn't get much done you're like oh come on man you gotta you gotta do a little bit better than this come back yeah you're coaching yourself you're coaching yourself yeah that's a good way to put it you're in many ways you are what you're doing is you're just giving yourself you know you're coaching if you think about it like a like a like a sport it's like like uh
like in in in in track and field or in swimming or something like that your coach is there with a stopwatch saying here was your time today okay uh or you know here's how much you lifted today um you have a sense of you know are you making progress or you're not making progress yeah one i love that one thing i want my audience everyone who's listening right now or watching i want you to be aware of is that literally dan in this book breaks down
everything from like productivity i've done some of the tests with you guys before and i've shared the book when we talked about um you know all of the different productivity times for different types of people based on what time you sleep
and what time you wake up the naps breaks i'm not going to ask dan all those questions because they're in the book and that's why i recommend the book i i want to ask dan stuff that isn't in the book or is extending the book
and and par i think one of the biggest questions i do get asked that i do want to talk about is relationships because i think dating and getting married and knowing when to either pop the question or when you should expect the question like these are like these are like some of the biggest challenges in in the world for on a personal individual level for people and so tell me about some of the work that you found when it came to not just like
when's the best time to get married but it's almost like when did people when did or what did you find when people said they knew or they felt they'd found the right person yeah that one is that one is more inscrutable i have to say um uh i wrote about that only very very tentatively because i wasn't sure about the the research on that i mean it you know what what it says is that um in general in america marriages are more likely to last if
people get married after age 25 and before age i think 34 somewhere around there uh but again that doesn't mean if you get married at age 35 you're gonna get a divorce you get married at 28. you're i mean it's just like there's a slight
there's a slight effect there uh there is some interesting effects on um especially in america today uh people with more formal education are more likely to get married and stay married people with less formal education are
less likely to get married and less likely to stay married if they are uh and there's also seems to be an effect whatever your level of education on getting married after you complete your education rather than before
but again i don't think you take those large population insights to make a decision about whether you're going to spend the rest of your life with someone you love i can recommend a book that is um well one of the leading scholars of
of of marriage um really the social psychology of marriage is is that northwestern his name is eli finkel uh he wrote a very good book called the all or nothing marriage about how marriage has about how marriage has changed uh so a lot of what we know about healthy marriages and also how marriage has changed in america over the last uh 200 years it's a it's a really really i it's a very very interesting book all or nothing married yeah the
all-in-one marriage by eli eli finkel which uh and you know there's a lot of really good research uh in there and there there's some relationship advice in there too um you know among the most important things are um you know what do you attribute to someone's inherent personality and what do you attribute to circumstance so if you're so if your spouse snaps it you say uh you say oh my god my spouse is the biggest jerk there ever was or you say
oh my spouse is having a bad day and people who make the attribution that it's circumstantial not surprisingly end up better off than people who say you know attribute the behavior to someone's inner jerkiness right yeah no it would be fascinating also to look at things like amount of time couples spent together but amount of time couples spend arguing on useful arguments maybe two yeah yeah there's other there's other there's
other research out there right there's a guy i'm spacing on this there's a guy named gottman i think yeah john gottman yeah yeah yeah he's done some research on on marriage and you know one of the not this is not surprising one of the biggest um things that you see is i if i'm not if i'm characterizing it right is not arguing per se but how people argue yes um and um and so somebody has to do with the attribution the other thing one of the
biggest signals i think in gottman's research is uh when people express contempt for their partner not surprisingly that's a marker of things gone awry yeah yeah you're right he talks about learning how to fight is the number one skill needed in a
relationship not knowing how to plan date night or how to uh you know just how to communicate how to specifically fight and uh yeah really useful one thing i want to definitely dive into today is around this and you talk about
in the book is about you know when's the right time to end something because i think we're always fascinated by and we talked about that like when do you know when you should start something when's the perfect time to start
i think one of the things we're not very aware of when it comes to business work leases whatever it may be is ending what have you learned and not just in the book but what have you learned from just your own life and experience and just
like when you found is the right time to end something that's a harder call to make um i think it depends a lot on the circumstances one of the things that one of the things that one of the things that i do know for sure though is that endings are much more important than i realized before i did this research that endings have a profound effect on our behavior and he's have a profound effect on how we remember entire experiences so
you know famously um you know this is fairly well known is that how an experience ends has a disproportionate effect on how people remember the entire experience james bond yeah all right right so and also even even how we evaluate people's lives too um so there's a famous piece of research on on where they give somebody a description of a fellow who for 29 years was a wonderful guy great ceo generous and whatnot and then uh in his 30th year he
became a jerk and then unexpectedly died and they said you know they had people say how moral of a life did that person lead and then they had a different set of group people evaluated a different character this character was
a total weasel and jerk for 29 years in his 30th year he decided to become a good guy being more generous and then he suddenly died and so what they what they found was that someone who was a good guy for 29 years and a jerk in
his last year was rated as a slightly less moral than someone who was a complete jerk for 29 years and happened to be a good guy in his in his final year so so so how something ends has a big effect on us on um how something ends has a big effect on on how we remember it how uh uh the the presence of ending has a big effect on our motivation so when we see the end of something we end up kicking a little bit harder so if so
a way to a way to get yourself off the dime in certain kinds of procrastination situation is to impose an ending um so and so but endings um endings matter endings matter a lot and i think that one of the things that we need to
do in organizations and our family lives and whatnot is is mark endings and and established rituals around endings because that ends up being a deep source of meaning for people yeah great answer i love i love that example that's that's
super powerful and i think everyone needs to think about that because often it's like we put so much what you're saying and what i'm learning from this and you're so right and i'm on it's only hitting me now too is we put so much effort into starting something like so much effort like whether it's a goodness or a relationship or whatever it is like we're excited and all these enthusiasm and then when you break up or you end a business or
you reject someone or someone gets fired or whatever it may be that process is always handled really poorly yeah and and and you're so that's actually what people remember absolutely right yeah and that's scary to think about
when when you when you think about that for a moment but anyway you have been amazing with your time dan i'm really really grateful i can i could talk to you for hours and hours and hours you're literally fascinating conversation yeah no it's
absolutely brilliant and i hope we can continue to talk offline as well uh i'm gonna end with what we do which is two rapid fire rounds they're super fast you've got to get in the blanks for this one so these are just okay so time
time are you ready yeah awesome time should always time should always um um be on your mind but not obsessing your mind okay good answer okay second one taking breaks taking breaks is one of the most powerful bang for the buck things
you can do for your mental physical and professional well-being yeah and it's all in the book everyone so just you know there's a whole breakdown of breaks uh number three every day i must oh interesting uh well so i'm gonna i'm gonna interpret that as when i say i meaning i daniel yes um uh every day i must contribute okay i love that you you excel in your career when so this is this is about other people uh you know what i'm gonna use the same
word here uh other people like so so people excel in their careers when they contribute i love it brilliant okay these are your final five these are answers in one sentence all right i'm sweating now well one word yeah okay ready gotta make
it to the end here yeah absolutely so the one lesson you feel helped you the most throughout your career not caring what other people think about me great answer i love that uh what do you want to leave your kids
with that you didn't have growing up a deep and unshakeable work ethic nice okay if you could create a law that everyone in the world had to follow what would it be um okay this i'm gonna show my american midwestern roots here uh say please and thank you nice great awesome okay uh two more questions left fourth question what is something that you know to be true that many people disagree with you on so something that you're so sure about
that a ton of people were like nah dan you're totally wrong the world is less fair than it seems so you believe the world is less fair than it seems and people disagree with you on that yeah yeah well that's a whole other conversation
when i say people i might be reflecting my own kind of biases here but i think especially um uh well-educated american people sure great it's a good answer i mean it's an intriguing point okay fifth and final question what is the
biggest lesson you've learned in the last 12 months oh in the last 12 months um it never works to go against the grain of who you are wow very profound wow these are tough questions man well you answered them pretty quickly
and well so thank you yeah i answered them quickly i loved it done this is uh so brilliant i really hope we get to meet in person wonderful and uh yeah thank you so much for doing this everyone uh dan's got a ton of great books to
sell as human drive a whole new mind when uh go and dive into these books they're absolutely incredible he's an incredible storyteller i mean incredibly accomplished i can't even stop but i'm just grateful that dan took his time
to be with us today i'm grateful that you had me jay it's been a lot of fun oh for sure would you like to direct anyone anywhere in your world and life about anything exciting that you've got going on people folks can check out my website
danpink.com um all kinds of cool stuff going on there perfect we'll put the links everywhere thank you so much dan this was fantastic so it's been a lot of fun if you want even more videos just like this one make sure you subscribe and click on the boxes over here i'm also excited to let you know that you can now get my book think like a monk from think like a monkbook.com check below in the description to make sure you order today