How To Build Career Success - Behavioural Scientist Dr Grace Lordan

if i was to think about leaders of the future actually their ability to stand up and say i don't know i got it wrong or i've changed my mind those three things are really in the forefront of my mind because when you're navigating through uncertainty you're going to get it wrong sometimes and that's okay but it's the deliberate part have you sat down and deliberately now changed your mind hello and welcome to deep dive the podcast that delves into the minds of entrepreneurs creators and other inspiring people to uncover their journeys towards finding joy and fulfillment at work and in life my name is ali and in each episode i chat to my guests about the philosophies strategies and tools that have helped them along the path to living a life of happiness and meaning in this week's episode of deep dive i sit down with dr grace lordon grace is an associate professor in behavioral science at the london school of economics an expert advisor to the uk government as a member of the skills and productivity board and her academic writings have been published in international academic journals earlier this year grace published her book think big take small steps and build the future you want if i were to be a doctor if i were to be a trader what would be the tasks that i would be doing on a day-to-day basis and would i ultimately end up enjoying those tasks in the conversation we deep dive into grace's book and tons of behavioral science concepts including how our emotions influence decision making the relationship between gender and risk aversion why we procrastinate in our fear of failure the one thing about human beings is that we're really good actually at rebounding so when we go through negative experience and we allow ourselves to go through negative experiences we realize actually it's not as bad as i thought there are other options later and we tend to be very very resilient and when we're anticipating failure or anticipating losses we underestimate that resilience so please feel free to grab a cup of tea and enjoy the conversation dr lorden thank you very much for coming on the show you've written this book think big um which is extremely good uh i finished it on audible this morning and we were talking about yeah your kind of woes with recording the audiobook uh which is very good like i i thought the way you were narrating it it was very like expressive um a lot of the audiobooks i listened to are usually fantasy fiction it's a very like non-expressive narrator but so i i could really hear the passion that was coming coming through in your voice as you were as you were writing it i did some drama classes as a kid so i think that they came into good use for the first time ever since i've left school that's very handy um yeah so lots of stuff i want to talk about in the book before we get started you are apparently on the government advisory body for productivity and skills which is very cool um what does what does that mean and how did how does one get into the government advisory body for productivity it's a great question actually so it sits under the um secretary of state um reporting into boris um and it's part of the leveling up strategy and the idea is really to think about skills of the future and how they will be delivered um in the uk so um boris has come out and basically said that he doesn't think education should just be about secondary school and should just be about young people going to university anymore it should be that you get to go to university when you're 25 35 45 and i guess part of our job is really thinking about how those skills can actually be delivered and looking to see actually given what we have already whether or not there's some people who are doing better than others and delivering skills okay like so how how did you how did you get this job did they like does the government email you does someone knock on your door how does that work this was an open competition so they basically advertised they asked for things like you know backgrounds and economics backgrounds and labor um and i think from their perspective my background in economics coupled with the behavioral um science stuff and actually having written the book on kind of thinking about careers from an individual perspective was quite appealing so we've ended up being um we're six people six experts on the committee one person's an education specialist four traditional economists and then there's kind of me who fits between the kind of behavioral economics mold okay yeah so you're an associate professor of behavioral sciences at lse is that right um well one thing that intrigued me as i was reading about uh in reading about your background like i i wouldn't have thought that behavioral sciences in terms of like you know time management and productivity and procrastination some of the stuff you talk about in the book that feels to me as like a lay person that has nothing to not quite fit within economics so like how how does how does behavioral science fit into economics as a field so i mean if you think about the simple um lesson that you might learn if you if you take an economics class we learned that when people are making decisions they weigh up the cost the benefits and the risk and i know you have a medical background so you can appreciate that if someone is choosing to have a big mac today that you might necessarily believe that they're weighing up the cost in 10 years time and the second big mac the next day and the third big mac and that's really where i kind of come from is thinking how do people actually make decisions but how can we tweak that model to really understand human decision making um in a much better way than economists do and in a way that's actually useful for policy makers which i think that a lot of psychologists failed so i kind of put myself in the center where we want to be able to advise government i want to be able to advise firms and what they should actually do to make people happier more productive whatever is their goal in a particular moment and to do that we fundamentally need to understand um decision making and the second thing that's really important to understand is the intent action gap so why is it that i as grace would say i will do things today but very often don't end up doing them and you know whether we talk about education you know people who enter education often don't study as much as they should um people often choose courses that are particularly bad for them even though they say that they might actually um go another path so again it's really getting down to the nitty-gritty of how can we alter decision-making in a way that's not paternalistic but is giving people information to help them go in the right direction hmm okay yeah the intent action gap i i think like we've all felt that in our lives like multiple times a day as i was reading this i started listening to your book about four or five days ago and the very first chapter talks about this idea of me plus um i wonder if you're gonna like elaborate like what does what does meat plus mean so if you i mean if you go back to the economics we're really good i think at making at helping ourselves in the present day so we know what makes us happy in the moment but very often the things that we have to invest in to give our future selves a better future we don't often do so what i like people to do is to think about where would they like to be if it all worked out so if they threw out you know lost aversion if they threw out fear of failure where will they actually end up being and have that be their me plus but before they commit to that being their me plus really think about what will that me plus actually do because i've noticed a lot of times when i talk to people about careers they're attached to a label so they want to be a trader or an investment banker or they want to be a doctor or they're attached to a lifestyle so they want to be able to go on a particular vacation or buy a particular car and kind of think big journey is really thinking about if i were to be a doctor if i were to be a trader what would be the tasks that i would be doing on a day-to-day basis and would i ultimately end up enjoying those tasks so the activities that i'm going to spend the time in and there's two reasons for that so one it makes you happier to actually do tasks that you like which feels like a no-brainer but secondly if you're engaged in tasks that you like you tend to be more successful and it's the second that i'm really interested in and kind of getting people into jobs where they feel that they've reached the success that they want okay interesting and do you think when it comes to being engaged in tasks that you like some people say it's a case of find the thing that fits within your values your personality and when once you find that thing then you'll find it fun and then there's another school of thought that says well you know the whole finding something that you're passionate about is actually kind of hard to do so think about the stuff that you're actually doing and find ways to make it more interesting for yourself uh how how do you feel about those two different different camps i don't really feel that they're different so you know so so people are claiming now that they choose companies based on the values the companies might have and i think that's true in the same way that we choose a company based on a salary but when you're actually in the job what tends to matter with respect to productivity and happiness is how you feel in those tasks in that moment and if i'm working for a company that's saving the environment but i've been treated really badly in a microculture in order to save that environment there's a couple of companies come to mind when i think about that um then i'm not going to be productive and i'm not going to be happy i'm actually likely to leave that that job so it's more about going beyond thinking what is the company's mission what is my personality and what is the micro culture of the team that i'm going to be working in and will that make me happy will i be connected to the mission because my team is connected to the mission it's very hard to assess in advance when you're applying for a job it's really hard it is it's really really hard and i think then if you bring it down to the tasks and asking at an interview what will i be doing on a day-to-day basis um so when i come to work for you ali what would i be doing on a day-to-day basis as part of your team um so if you can imagine me on a monday how will i spend my time the fact that you as a manager have taught about that first they will tell me that you're a good manager because you'll know actually what you want the person to do um and you're not just hiring blindly but the second is having that information allows me to make my mind up because if the if i like the tasks i'm probably going to like the team okay yeah that's very interesting so that was a big part of the message i took away from the me pluster and the way it it manifested in my life when i read it i was i was thinking okay you know let's engage with this like what's what's kind of what does me plus look like and initially i was thinking oh you know i'd really like to have six-pack abs and then i came across a bit where you were like forget about that focus on like what what did the tasks look like and i was like okay you know what what i want me plus to do is to be able to exercise every day and to have fun doing it yeah um and so for the last four days i've actually been to the gym i went to a yoga class yesterday morning i did a workout at like 8am this morning and i i've never really done this sort of thing but i was like excited about that i i was excited that the end goal was not six plus six-pack abs i was excited that the end goal was that in a way there wasn't an end goal and it was a case of just i want to be able to enjoy this um is that the sort of thing that you get a lot when you're doing this sort of research that process rather than outcome kind of thing so i kind of write a lot for kind of people who might not have made it yes or people who have plateaued so if you if you take the exercising analogy from somebody who's contemplating doing the kind of a 5k run rather than somebody who is contemplating doing the london marathon and is really well placed for that and i think for the person who hasn't done exercise for a while or the person who hasn't really invested in their career for a while the worst thing they can do is do too much so if you hadn't invested for a while the worst thing you could do is go to the gym for three hours you might get through it today but the chances of repeating that are really really small and i think kind of the one of the big powerful messages on july anything big is whether you're focused on your health or whether you're focused on your career it's those small actions that you take today will determine yourself in two years time three years time in four years time and actually by throwing out the idea that you're going to reinvent yourself in 30 days is really really powerful because you're much more likely to stick to it you know you can accomplish an extraordinary amount in 12 months very little in you know 12 minutes or you know a very short period of time you know i've been making videos semi-themed around productivity for the last four years and a big chunk of the advice boils down to consistency and just showing up and taking small actions repeatedly and in a way not really worrying so much about the ultimate goal um and these days i teach i uh teach courses helping people become like youtubers and stuff and and the way you become a successful youtuber is you just make one or two videos every week for the next like five years um but no one sticks with it for that long because they have like the oh i must hit a certain subscriber count i must hear a certain like view count and my view on this is that having like in a way those outcome metrics the ones that are outside of our control are kind of unhelpful especially at the start of a journey do you have any thoughts on on that point well when you were talking it actually reminded me i watched a video of yours on compounding so when people are choosing to invest we accept compounding very very easily right so we accept the idea actually that you know if we leave money in for a very long period of time it's going to compound so we're probably going to be okay in our pensions and it's exactly the same here when it comes to your career like those very small things that you're going to do today and i ask for a commitment of 90 minutes a week which for most people regardless of how pressurized you feel is very very possible um that should compound once you do once you've chosen tasks that align with your me plus relatively quickly okay 90 minutes a week that's like 13 minutes a day day-ish yes very doable um one one bit that i was gonna ask you about that i i thought maybe i disagreed with was you talk like the title of the book is think big yeah and the vibe i got from the chapter around goals is that you're keen on people setting or perhaps not but like one camp of people in the sphere is encouraging people to set these big hairy audacious goals and then figuring out the small steps taken you can you can take to get there but then there's another camp and this is sort of where where i think i am whereby i think in a way i feel maybe setting goals is a bit overrated because if you're setting a goal then you're essentially to me that feels like a contract to be unhappy until you hit the goal and then you hit the goal and you have this like fleeting sense of like oh i hit a million subscribers cool yeah you know my day to day hasn't really changed et cetera et cetera so the way i kind of think about goals is i try and throw goals out the window and instead just focus on those like what do i actually want to do but i don't know if i'm just like bsing myself and like you're doing okay so if that seems to be working for you i mean i think so so for people who read the book the goal is really there to serve two purposes so one so that you start investing in your career so it helps to find the tasks this week and two so that you actually bring your future self forward so you're not always investing in activities that just serve you in the present day but in the book i do talk about the idea that every um sunday so every kind of well i i pick sunday because it's the start of my week that you reflect on how the week previous went and you look to see whether or not there are new opportunities that you should be pivoting your goal for so i see the think big part of the book as really giving people a direction so they can set off on a journey and they start walking and more interesting things might actually come along but they make a conscious decision to follow those interesting things so then they go off on a slightly different journey so if you take your own career for example it was probably a great idea that you studied medicine and cambridge right and now you have an entirely different career but you are using some of the skills that you actually learned in the university so in that particular case you would have sat back and said actually do i really want to pivot and do a large pivot and the answer would have been yes but had you never gone into medicine medical school maybe you would never have started walking in this direction and come to the destination so it's really about movement oh okay that's really interesting um i was having these thoughts i was it was a few weeks ago and i was on a date and we went we were kind of driving around afterwards just like chatting and i was kind of thinking that like driving around without a destination it's just like if it felt a bit wrong and so i just put the destination of the like the mcdonald's drive through in the sat nav and it wasn't really about the destination it was about okay i've got a destination now now i know what th what what the journey is and when we got to the mcdonald's drivers like what what else it's a mcdonald's drive through like the the destination is actually not that important but the point is i was thinking huh maybe having the destination lets you kind of set the direction for your journey and then you can always change your mind as you as you go further down the line and as humans we love certainty so even if we've created for ourselves this is the goal that we're moving towards then we change our mind for the period of time that we're moving there is certainty one of the biggest things that hampers people's growth and you know stops them kind of getting to the place where they probably deserve to be is that they feel that the journey is actually uncertain so by kind of having that destination allows you to kind of to move towards it oh okay yeah this reminds me of advice i got when i was in in med school where like once you once you've done your once you start your clinical years the question everyone asks is oh what specialty do you want to do and the honest answer for the vast majority of people is i don't freaking out i have no idea like you know there are those odd like weirdos that i've decided on the age at the age of three they want to be a neurosurgeon yeah um but for most of us it's like honestly i don't know i just want to kind of get a feel of different specialties and kind of um and the advice that one of one of the consultants who i really respected gave me was that look honestly just pick something and start moving towards it because then you will start doing things that will build up your cv and you'll start actually finding opportunities your way and then if you want to change your mind it's much easier to change direction when you're moving forward rather than when you when you're stationary and you learn about yourself as well what do i like and what do i what do i dislike which you won't do if you're just if you're still kind of standing still so kind of you know did i write about what should you do if you have no idea what you want to do in the future where a lot of young people are and actually people who you know and who are later in life and again it's really about thinking what do i kind of like doing now so let's do some more of that and move towards a goal and then on the way being really reflective am i enjoying these tasks or am i just doing it because i like the idea of becoming a surgeon or becoming a lawyer or becoming another job title and i really want people to move away from the second you know i kind of think with the future of work we have this disruption where people who are able to kind of pivot know what their skills are job craft which you might which you've mentioned already it would really stand to them um yeah so it's like you're moving away from being and more towards doing yes being a doctor versus like what does the day-to-day of practicing medicine actually look like and does this sound like the sort of thing that is my idea of fun right now and i guess i guess like it's it's kind of you know there's that thing in in in the research about it's it's hard for us to predict what will make us happy in the future but it's a reasonable first approximation that the sort of stuff i enjoy doing now like talking to people like you or like making videos is likely to also probably make me happy in the future and if it doesn't then well i can just change course yeah this is like a great search so what what you know what the government should have done in covert and some governments did incredibly well was what we call this grid search strategy where they get new data they update their decision making based on the data and they're willing to go backwards or they're willing to go left and they're willing to go right and always having that openness to a change of direction and i think if we kind of bring that into careers that you know really we don't know our preferences very well we've watched some tv when we're young so depending on what you watch that might actually ultimately determine your career maybe you move towards that if you have no idea but always paying attention to am i enjoying the tasks is it do i feel purpose if i was doing this in five years time would i be really really happy um and you know my director in the lsd manuscript um she spoke to me kind of about careers and kind of really thinking five years ahead of time what's your next challenge going to be because by the time five years comes you're not going to be able to do that challenge unless you've spent a decent amount of time doing activities that makes you credible to be that person standing in that room and really taking that approach i think can help people okay yeah interesting we're going to take a very quick break to introduce our sponsor for this episode and that is brilliant i've been using brilliant for the last two plus years they're a fantastic platform for learning maths science and computer science with engaging and interactive online courses and the great thing about brilliant is that they really teach stuff from a very first principles based approach it's almost like the way that we were taught in places like oxford and cambridge where you learn a concept and then you apply the concept to an interesting problem rather than just being spoon-fed stuff like we initially learned in school my favorite courses on brilliant are the computer science ones as some of you guys might know i was torn between applying to medicine and computer science i went for medicine in the end but i always had an affinity to computer science and taking the courses on brilliant like their introduction to algorithms and their introduction to python really helped me get more of a grasp of computer science than i've ever had before it's also great for learning how to code which is an incredibly useful skill to have especially if you want to start a business and i attribute like 98 of my business success to the fact that i learned how to code when i was in secondary school so if you want to check out the courses on math science and computer science then head over to brilliant.org forward slash deep dive and the first 200 people to sign up with that link will get 20 off the annual premium subscription so thank you brilliant for sponsoring this episode you mentioned that um you often you've written about and you and you speak to people that have no idea at all what they want to do how how should someone in that position go about figuring this out and i kind of ask because i feel like i'm kind of in that position right now where it's like i have all these options in front of it i don't really know which one to pick but like yeah so i think for somebody who has no idea what they want to do and who doesn't necessarily have options it really is about bringing it back to what are the activities that i would like to do and how can i get the skills to actually do those activities and then going about spending time engaged in those activities so maybe you want to do some more public speaking you know trying to get on panels um trying to spend some time with people who might be actually able to get you into the room where you can do some public speaking in the future going to talks and studying what makes a good speaker and what doesn't make a good speaker if you really really have really have no experience and then maybe there are some skills that you have to pay for and i do say in anything big for people who do not know what they want to do i would avoid committing to a four-year degree or an expensive master's program and really use the resources that are out there that are either cheap or free because there's so many things that we can actually learn now without having to set foot in into a traditional classroom even though i work in a university and we have wonderful degrees i think you need to be certain to spend spend that amount of money and then i think for someone like you i think doing time audits can really help so during the week writing down what you're actually doing which you probably do already but writing down whether or not you actually enjoyed doing them did you feel firstly a sense of purpose that it was kind of leading you to a better place in five years time or did you feel fun in the moment and then if there were activities that aren't kind of investing in you in five years time and they're not giving you fun at the moment consider job crafting which i think you're in a good position to do where you remove those activities and do more of the things that are giving your purpose and more the things that are giving you fun today okay interesting so time audit and thinking about was this thing fun and if not was it at least purposeful yes and if not why the hell am i doing it yes and i don't journal at all and i really just put these marks next to my diary so after the event i'll edit the calendar and i'll say yeah i enjoyed that that was good that's going to pay me for it in the future as well or actually that was really a drain of my energy um and and let's avoid things like that in the future one thing that i often kind of clash with my mom about is the idea of changing one's mind and making making plans and then changing and then changing them a few weeks to months later um so for example last year i had decided that you know what at the stage my career is currently at i'm i'm considering moving to america to continue to practice medicine and started gearing myself up to take those exams and you know made the mistake maybe not it had a good clickbait title of making a video called i'm moving to america uh where i announced my plans for like moving to america and then as i started preparing for this exam and realized how much work it was going to be and then as the youtube channel started to explode and i thought hang on maybe this you know moving to america you know i it will be four years of residency there's a reasonable a reasonable amount of hard work maybe it'll be fun and at the end of it you become a doctor who makes 400k errors or something like that but i saw i could see the trajectory of the youtube channel being more interesting than that point and so i kind of pivoted and thought screw this america thing but now anytime almost any time i speak to someone they would have seen that video and they're like hey i thought you were moving to america especially my mother your often says that hey you know you said you were moving to america then you changed your mind um yeah do you think there's much or to what extent is there value in picking a goal and then sticking to it rather than just like willy-nilly changing one's mind i don't you want to change your mind willy-nilly so i i come in between kind of in between you and your mom in some ways so so i think the first thing is you know maybe you should do a youtube video on song cost fallacy right and talk to people about the fact that you know you have put yourself out there you had this commitment devised but actually that's the cost that you'll have to think the embarrassment of actually changing your mind because when you reviewed your options and you review them deliberately it looked like sticking to youtube was right for you and i think that second part is really important to ask yourself did you review your options and review them deliberately kind of thinking about what are the costs and benefits or was it something else was it kind of the length of the residency was it a fear of failure was it lost aversion that drove you to that decision and i think if it's deliberate you absolutely should change your mind and you know i think one of the big powerful kind of um influences on our decision making is our emotions um and when we think about the future so if you think about doing a residency in america it does actually sound quite scary to be honest kind of going now you know doing four years when you clearly have a really good career at the moment um were you anticipating kind of a loss that might not necessarily be realized and not seeing gains that that trip would actually give you and i think if you sit down and say actually i was deliberate then you should change your mind and i think one of the problems in society today is that we think that good citizens good leaders should never change their mind and i think in covid that was to the detriment of many countries because it took a lot for some leaders to come out and say look actually this isn't the right strategy i'm going to now change i'm not going to change my mind so if i was to think about leaders of the future actually their ability to stand up and say i don't know i got it wrong or i've changed my mind those three things are really in the forefront of my mind because when you're navigating through uncertainty you're going to get it wrong sometimes and that's okay but it's the deliberate part have you sat down and deliberately now changed your mind or is it something you use the word willy-nilly is it a willy-nilly kind of reflex action and then it might be revisiting oh interesting yeah like when when i was following the news with all the coveted stuff and occasionally there would be the phrase oh the government has made another u-turn and i would kind of think that like isn't it a good thing like like surely sticking to a plan that's shown not to be like a herd immunity or something like you would surely you want the government to make a u-10 yep um why do we have such a a weird reaction to leaders changing their mind about stuff do you think i think things were predictable for a long time so you know i think as well kind of maybe the difference in attitudes between yourself and your mum do you come from generational gaps she would have been in the uk when there was a big period of growth so we had some dips but we haven't seen the disruption like we've seen kind of in the last you know um kind of five six years to people who were early twenties now they are facing much more uncertainty than people would have done twenty years ago forty years ago coming out of outer university and i think when we're in periods of certainty we expect people to get it right you know good decision making is is possible right so if i could give you if i can if i could um talk to you through your options in decision making under uncertainty i could tell you what your life will look like in four years time when you step outside of the u.s or if you turn that option down and say doing youtube i could show you what your life will be but now because the economy is changing the growth cycles are changing we don't have that certainty and i think we need new types of leaders but people you know status quo bias prevails and it's nice to have somebody standing there you know looking very serious telling us that things are going to be okay because they have it in control and for human beings u-turning and change of minds aren't signals that someone has it in control that's interesting um there was there was an exercise i came across a couple of years ago called the odyssey plan um which is the idea that um you know it's it's sort of a way of helping you figure out what to do with your life um where the idea is that you write down five years from now what does my life look like down this current path and then you put that aside and then you say okay five years from now what does my life look like if i take a completely different path you put that aside and then you say okay five years from now what does my life look like if money and societal obligations are no object and i could just literally do what i want what does mother what does my life look like then and i did this this sort of thing about two years ago and it really helped me realize oh i just never spend spend the time thinking long term well medium to long term at all and even just spending half an hour thinking huh if i go down this current path i'll end up i don't know in an aesthetic training program in cambridge being a supervisor it'll be kind of fun that's what my day-to-day would look like that doesn't seem particularly exciting oh okay maybe i should try something else and just spending the time to think about that like really made me change direction in a way um do you have any sort of similar practices or exercises that you that you recommend for people trying to figure out this question of like what the hell do i do with my life i i mean it's a really good question i think it again comes back to the task which sounds really boring so there's lists in the book of activities that people do in their occupation and skills that you might want to hold and i think it comes back to that i'm thinking about are you happy to spend your day engaged in activities like those so a lot of the jobs that look exciting they look exciting because on tv they're glamorized i mean law always is one that comes into my mind and i think i would be a terrible lawyer because the commitment to a day to day that's like six in the morning to eight in the evening is absolutely something that you still need today sadly um but people don't know about that before they go in they think about themselves standing in court and litigating the cases so it's bringing it back to those kind of boring humdrum tasks and i think when it comes to your think big journey it's about what were the tasks that i would be doing in 10 years time how would i spend my monday morning how would i spend my tuesday morning and how can i get myself in a place where that's really realistic and you know for most of us um we won't be able to be in a place where we don't have to worry about money so we have to be doing something that adds value to society but this is an opportunity to kind of put yourself on a path where you get to do tasks that are as fun as possible and you're actually enjoying them so you don't feel like working and i think for most of us that's our goal right that 70 of our time at work it doesn't feel like a painful a painful process we're really enjoying those activities within the field of behavioral sciences i get them like a a lot of the stuff you talk about in the book you talk like at the end of each chapter there's the sort of different insights from behavioral science which are translated into things that we can do right now one thing that i was curious about is what does research in this field look like like how do we how do we know that the stuff that we talk about in the book or the stuff that you read in a i don't know a self-help book how do we know that that's actually legit like what what does the primary material look like it's a great question so i mean behavioral science isn't a discipline so the research can come from economics psychology anthropology and i think the big banner that i would put on it is that it's describing why people behave the way that they actually do um so why do people procrastinate what's the reason that people work more productively together as teams these are questions that behavioral scientists will look at i think the the big fascination with behavioral science scientists is causality so if you were to think about the um the cover vaccine a lot of the debates about it are was did do we really have enough time to put it through field trials in the same way that other medicines have actually gone through these rcts and that's what behavioral science tries to mimic in the real world so psychologists will do lab experiments with students so if you look at the behavioral science literature a lot of the kind of early ideas would be from bringing students into the lab it's not scary like in the 70s i promise so you know really easy stuff and looking to see whether or not we can change their behavior with a particular insight and then somebody like me brings those insights into companies into policy and asks is the stuff that's coming out of the students in the lab actually replicating in companies and a lot of times it doesn't i would be very honest with you because obviously when we have students in the lab we have them for a very short period of time when i'm working with workers i want to know do the change i make work in the moment one week later one month later 12 months later and because of that methods are really important so if you if someone is listening and wants to pivot towards a queer behavioral science you know data science is absolutely your friend in this regard and then i think at the top level we look at macro trends so at the moment i'm building an index with citibank that's going to look to see whether or not we can actually predict profit and loss based on the culture that organizations actually have um and again what we're really going to have an eye on is is that useful for institutional investors so we can change their behavior and can we change customer behavior so it there's kind of two things that i want the listeners to kind of take away one it's about explaining behavior whether it's at the lab level individual level out in the real world or the macro level and secondly it's really can we talk about causal effects are we sure that the change that we made or are we sure that the analysis that we've run is really talking about a direct effect okay yeah i thought the way that you handled some of these in in the book was was really like like often you you see a i don't know lifehacker.com article about there's a study that shows that if you wear red that then you'll perform better in this thing oh amazing you should start wearing red and the way you describe this in the book it's like well actually um it's it's it's fairly correlationally not very causationy but hey maybe there's something there who knows the evidence isn't quite there but yeah maybe consider wearing red and i thought i kind of chuckled when i was listening to that because i was like that's a very nice way of describing the uncertainty that we often have in this sort of research i am the worst person to actually get to write a magazine article because i tend to kind of go well yes the evidence says this but maybe it might work for you but i think that's honest because the populations that are studied by behavioral scientists including me might be different from you so there's two companies i'm working with at the moment down in canary wharf they're right across the road from each other and one experiment worked incredibly well in one company and it did not necessarily it didn't work at all actually the other company we got zero like a flatline zero effect um and that's because context matters and both of those companies have very different contexts very different populations they have their own subcultures and they have their own pressures and it's the same for anything that you're read in a magazine so i i encourage people to be experimental so they might hear me say something but they should say actually you know i maybe grace knows something about what she's talking about but she doesn't know me the only person who knows me is me so i'm going to experiment with her idea and if it doesn't work i'm going to throw it out and that for me is a practice that i think we should do as individuals for our health and careers as managers when we're leading teams and also in the government you know a leadership tactic that might work for boris johnson might not necessarily work for another leader and unless you're mindful of that you're going to be taking on practices that somebody has given you that's actually based on evidence that can't be universal we were brainstorming what we were going to have as like the kind of uh intro music spiel for this podcast oh what did you pick uh we haven't quite figured it out yet but like one thing that i was um i i wanted to say at the end of the intro is you know introduce the guest explain what their credentials are and what we talk about in the episode and something to the effect of so um sit back grab a cup of tea and remember to take everything you hear with a sprinkle of salt because i think like in these sorts of podcasts that you know you've been on i've been on where people are really giving life advice yeah however you dress it up um giving life advice we can only really speak to either our own personal experiences or in your case uh evidence from fairly like not um soft skill type stuff that it's very hard to like you know directly measure like a blood a blood test increasing it's like more hard science and this is more soft science the context matches so much and i think one thing i want everyone to try and be mindful of is that like no one has the guidebook for how to live life you just gotta sort of try stuff and if it works for you then great it works for you but if it doesn't work for you then try something else and it sounds like that's generally how you approach it as well absolutely so be experimental and i think context matters are kind of you know two words to really emphasize if something is working for me in my environment it might not necessarily work for other people and it's also a way of actually to get to know yourself so if you're trying something and it's not working you can think about okay why did it work for somebody else and not necessarily for me and you can have confidence then in kind of trying other tools without getting stuck in the same in the same cycle nice um coming back to the question of goals one thing uh another thing that i've been mulling over for several years now is this balance between being satisfied with where we're at in life versus the worst versus striving for more having like a think a big kind of goal how how do you think about that that balance i think this i think strivers don't like the process so i think if you found the activities that you enjoy doing on a day-to-day basis and and they're filling you up and they're pointing you in a direction towards a particular goal then you're happy doing the process so the type of striving and the type of impatience melts away perhaps not fully because maybe you're more impatient and you want to get there quicker than you're going at the moment but i think people who really suffer from striving are people who have a vision of a me plus that actually is a bit distorted from the reality and they're doing lots of activities now that they don't particularly enjoy that they're not particularly find it finding useful so again i think it's kind of taking a step back and saying you know why am i feeling so frustrated with my day-to-day do i need to rebalance and start doing some activities that i actually enjoy that i can really see the clean clear line of purpose too in order to make myself feel better now um and again once you're moving forward and once you're walking i think that that's that's good that's good enough for most people okay yeah i think like there's there's a lot of evidence as you know about how experiencing progress and i think you talk about how to like make your progress more salient experiencing that sense of progress really is like extremely fundamentally satisfying uh and so i guess sometimes if i think you know i i i guess the standard straw man would be like oh well you know if you just play video games all day then it's it's fun but it's not like meaningful i think it's not meaningful because it's not really progressing you forward in a way that adds value to the world is it is that fair to say or to yourself so you know some people who i meet their values are really about making making money which just which doesn't bother me um but i think that they need to be clear on what are the tasks that they're going to do that add value to the world i think i think that i think that's really true and i think finding the kind of right balance of pleasure and purpose is really important you should play video games if that's something that actually really helps you relax i think for some people it's been shown that it can be like mindfulness so again really thinking about individual differences if playing mario kart is what gets you kind of out of the day and into the moment you should spend time on that but it's balancing that time so balance the time between serving yourself in the present day and also serving yourself in the future okay and i guess most people's dream job would be one where they've got pleasure plus purpose in the same thing yeah and that would be great um but if not then some things are pleasurable and some things are purposeful and just balancing those is that is that fair to say absolutely absolutely and i think as well the kind of adaptation that we feel as humans they call it it's called hedonic adaptation everything that you get you'll adapt to it really quickly so whether you get the nicest car whether you get a pay rise you know the happiness moments are really fleeting so if you really are kind of in a place and you feel that things aren't going your way trying to draw attention to things that are going right kind of the small wins so that you can kind of elongate the happiness that you'll actually get from the car from the pay rise um but also look at those kind of small moments you know if you have an interaction today with somebody and they insult you it would probably weigh really heavy on you whereas if somebody gives you a huge compliment how long do you hold on to that which is a really interesting thing for us as humans right that we really are focused on the negative we're focused on the losses we're focused on our slice of ego but we go through our day and most of us actually have some like you know really wonderful exchanges with people we have some nice things happening to us so drawing attention to those if you're feeling that you're striving and you're starting to burn out hmm yeah it's like with youtube comments like 99.99 of them are really nice and you don't think about them and then when there's one mean one that hits a bit too close to you and you think about that for the rest of the day do you read them i do yeah you read all the comments uh probably not all the comments yeah certainly certainly most of them wow that is good yeah do you you don't seem to have much of a social media presence but you've done a lot of like writing in publications and things do you get like haters is is that a thing so recently i wrote um i wrote something for the ft and it polarized people um and they usually turn off the comment box for kind of articles like the one that i wrote so it was about managers and about mediocre managers kind of holding back people's careers um but it was really interesting to read those comments because people either really loved it in in a five-star way or they really hated it and that polarization i think comes through a lot on social media but i think it's imprinted in our society around kind of political values um around even what people would like to watch on tv that we're much more yes or no or all or nothing than we were in the past and i think think big is really about kind of getting people to kind of come into the center a little bit and kind of say actually you know you can have kind of more balance and you can actually think both in your opinions if you think about polarization but also in the choices that you make on a day-to-day basis um so in chapter two chapter two or chapter three rather um you talk about internal the internal things that are like either holding us back or help can can help us move forward to achieve our think big goals um one of the concepts which is interesting is the idea of locus of control um what is that so locus of the control is the idea that there are two types of people in in in a way of kind of binarizing it there are people who believe that everything is within their own control so when negative events happen to them they take control of the situation and they try to move forward in a way so try to find a side door try to find another entrance and then there's people with an external locus of control who believe that everything happens to them so it's at the hands of other people um it's at the hands of the universe in the extreme um most of us will have both internal and external looks controlled depending on our domain so maybe in family life some people will have internal locus of control they believe that they can control everything they feel quite safe in their family life in the work life they think their career is happening to them and i think again it isn't all or nothing so getting people to think about what is it that i can actually control in this particular moment and taking the choice to take that control so i think even for people who are having a really terrible time in toxic workplaces who are being bullied there is something that they can actually control in that moment and really encouraging them to take that control to allow them to move forward rather than just seeing the negative and just seeing the bad things that are happening to them with the idea that they can get out of that situation um okay how do how do people end up with internal slash external loci we don't know so this and this will come down in the same way like genetics so you would have people who believe in nature and people who believe in nurture and i think the reality is that it's probably a combination of both so our genetics probably give us some proportion of our locus of control and when we're born um depending on the kind of experiences that our ancestors have had but i think the biggest thing is going to be the environment that you actually grew up in so i think if you're put in an environment where you're encouraged to make decisions when you're really young you're encouraged to kind of choose your own path choose your own toys in the play box for example that's going to allow you think that you are are then more in control of your own destiny as somebody who has these kind of really really structured lives and thinks that everything is coming for them and i saw a researcher and i can't think of his name but he's working on the changes of the generation from generations where kids were just left to play so they were kind of pushed down the road towards this kind of structured education where people go to different sessions at particular times but their whole day is stacked by their parents it does seem to have some influence on whether or not you think you can actually control your own destiny those kind of early moments that's interesting i guess like so i feel like i'm i'm quite an internal locus of controlly type person but i wonder if that can also go too far like if for example i don't know i get rejected by a girl and i you know there's an extent to which it is useful for me to internalize that as okay i could have controlled that situation i did badly therefore what can i learn from this etc but there's also part of it that's like well actually there are a thousand reasons why i've been rejected by this girl that have nothing to do with me in the slightest yeah um and i guess it is about balancing the two that sometimes it is actually external factors that have led to something that completely outside of your control but let's think about what are the things we can control and what can we do differently next time potentially and i think this is a really good attitude in decision making so if you think about how most people determine whether or not an outcome is successful they will look to see did they succeed or fail so do they get a check box or do they get an x and in that case for people with the internals that look controlled as you pointed out being rejected by a a girl could be could be this really negative experience it's hard to rebound from if you take the behavioral science perspective or you take kind of good decision-making kind of one-on-one if you come to one of my classes you should be focusing on if you have an outcome that other people would label success and fail sitting down and thinking what did what did i control in that particular situation what could i have done differently what was my input and what was down to luck and in luck i would put anything that's determined outside yourself by other by other people and then it's really about identifying those things that you can't control and taking hold of them and not over obsessing on the stuff that is outside your outside your control so in some ways it's kind of taking the best of the internal of locus of control recognizing that luck does play a role in determining these outcomes of success and failure and and people who do these post-mortems really do see learning and failure but they don't dwell on failure um so if they have a fa if if they fail on a particular moment they're sitting down saying what could i have done differently and then for the future they're taking those lessons on board yeah speak speaking of failure so you you talk in that chapter about anticipating failure and how often that holds people back i wonder if you can talk like what does that mean to anticipate failure yes i mean so anticipation of an event brings on anxieties that can be worse than actually experiencing an event itself so very often if you talk to people who report having anxieties or who are having worries they're talking about something that might actually happen in the future rather than something that they're going through in a particular moment and anticipated loss of version is exactly that you know it's been shown that when i think about what it's like to not get a promotion to fluff up if i'm doing some public speaking um to do something badly that the kind of how i imagine myself feeling that sadness is is felt in my body in in in the way this manifests but it's much worse than actually going through it and i think the one thing about human beings is that we're really good actually at rebounding so when we go through negative experience and we allow ourselves to go through negative experiences we realize actually it's not as bad as i thought there are other options later and we tend to be very very resilient and when we're anticipating failure or anticipating losses we underestimate that resilience um so some of the kind of most successful people in our society are people who have failed a lot because firstly they're learning from their failure but secondly you're probably not going to get very far in life without experiencing failure right you're going to have to get rejected so you know on the daily market it's exactly the same you're not going to meet probably the exact person feel with all the people out in the world if you don't go and meet some people who are wrong for you in the beginning it's the same with jobs so really kind of taking that on board that actually you're going to do some things people aren't going to like you you're going to get negative feedback it's going to be unfair you're going to have bad luck but there's learning in that and you're still on that journey nice um one one bit on the book that i liked was when you referenced the dating market in terms of i i think it was around differences in genders between like risk taking and risk aversion i wonder if you can kind of talk about that i would love to test this so one thing that we know for sure at the average level is that women do tend to be um more risk of rest as compared to men so men are risk-averse which is less so than women and i have this theory that men were able to be rejected much more in early years kind of when they were learning about whether failure is acceptable or not because they have to ask you know women on dates in most cultures so when you're asking a girl you know at 12 13 years of age and they say no to you if you're a disco that's going to be terrible but actually you're learning that it's not that bad so the second time you asked the third time you asked the fourth time that you asked you know there will be people who are actually so resilient to this that by the time they're 15 16 17 they're not feeling that failure and we carry that into other domains in our lives that there are these positive spillovers so i think by having women not necessarily um represented in competitive sports to the same degree as men so they're not you know feeling that they can lose in in the same way from early life and also not being the ones to ask i'm hoping that's changing though i'm hearing that it is but not being the ones to ask as often as men that does set the parameter for risk aggression that economists care a lot about yeah and i guess when it comes to even things like uh asking for a promotion or asking for a raise if if at the average level there's even a one percent difference in risk aversion between men and women that at the extremes is going to translate to a significant disparity between people who get promoted and people who don't and obviously they're it's all multifactorial but yeah it's it's interesting how that that you know yeah theoretically could could be done to that um i have a bunch of uh female friends who are currently on the daisy market and i you know they always like oh you know i don't like these out yeah i could never ask a guy out because i'll get rejected and i'm like come on like are they on the day are they on dating like on technology or are they out there like asking people out on on the street in the in the way in the u.s oh no everyone's in the everyone's on the apps yeah no one ever asks people out on this well well other than a subset of guys that are into that sort of thing it still happens in the us though which always amaze me yeah people go up to each other in real life and in real life no way have always done it so the technology is just as big as it is here but that part of the culture hasn't gone away which i find which i find fascinating um have you noticed any other like in in in terms of like risk aversion does the data say anything on like kind of ethnic minorities versus like white people around like risk taking risk aversion that kind of stuff yes so um for countries like the us and the uk um people of color do tend to be less risk-averse than white men um and there we see less risk of us um less sorry more risk of rate thank you progression more risk averse as compared to white men um but the male female divides still stands there so for example if you were to compare white women to black men black men will take more risks as compared to white women so the gender the gender dimension trumps but we do see this kind of interaction effect um with race and ethnicity um and again it comes down to i think two things firstly early childhood experiences but secondly rejections so white men are much less likely to be told no as compared to all other people so other genders other races and other ethnicities and then if you're told no it becomes rational not to ask again right because you're getting you're kind of getting that feedback loop but actually the reverse is probably true so in some ways women and people of color should probably be asking more because the chances of them then getting a yes is actually going up and but i think that's easier said than done so you know there's a huge literature on societal backlash particularly for women that talks about what happens if a woman actually speaks up and asks for what she what she wants in work and steps outside the stereotype and there tends to be these negative repercussions so simply asking for more doesn't necessarily mean that you'll actually get more um so it is really really complicated and that's why in today's society having that having transparency is really helpful on both sides it's really helpful for companies because they can pay attention to are they allowing you know really talented individuals fall short for reasons that have to do with kind of these embedded stereotypes that they're not seeing but at the individual level when we have transparency a lot of the problems go away so both for women and people of color they feel much better saying actually my salary is in the in the bottom 20 percent but i'm knocking it out of the park if i compare it to the rest of this distribution and why is that so the certainty of having something to actually point to is really really powerful so i i really support you know the gender pay gap reporting and i now support the kind of the idea that we're going to move to having race and ethnicity pay gaps as well oh interesting so i've i've been looking a lot into this stuff um now that i have a team of like 11 people expanding to 20. fantastic um with you know i've i've had a few conversations with the team members around like raises but not as many as i thought i would have and i think there is a i think because at least in our team it's uh we're just making stuff up as we go along so we don't have like a salary policy or a race policy like how do you even benchmark when someone is like writing content for a youtube video or like a youtube i don't know um but i want to add in a level of like transparency where it's more clear that okay this is this level of role this is a salary for this level of role and you can ask for a raise every i don't know at the end of every quarter if you want and here's how like how how should how how should a small business go about being more transparent about this stuff i mean in some ways i think with a small business because i'm in the situation with the lc at the moment where i have a team about the same size as yours um and i and if if somebody asks for a raise and they're successful i think about who are the people who are very like them in the group who deserve a raise as well and i just give it to them so instead of you know yeah because i i also review so and i'm only doing it annually and i think annually is probably enough to kind of really think about uh performance so doing it quarterly is even better i guess um but i think by doing it annually you give everybody the same door to come to you um they can ask for what they want but then just being mindful who didn't ask because again you know there's kind of two things that it's not about necessarily you being kind of fair or being seen to be open people might have had bad experiences in pre-previous jobs where they don't necessarily feel willing to speak up and just by saying i'm doing this every year and then i'm going to review what i've decided to give and i might come to people and and give them raises i think builds trust in a team at at the smaller level which will pay dividends which when you scale which i and i use the word when because i'm sure you will now that you're not going to america so chapter four of the book is all about time and um you mentioned something earlier in the conversation that i wanted to ask you about um you said behavioral science looks at things like why do we procrastinate yeah uh which is a question that i get like from every every direction um why why do we procrastinate it's a really good question and i think in some ways by writing about procrastination i make a rod for my own back because i am a terrible terrible terrible procrastinator i think there's evidence that procrastination is good up to a certain point so adam grant has written about this he's an excellent ted talk for anyone who's interested um and kind of the idea of procrastination so if we think about our thinking styles we have two thinking styles very very fast impulsive is where your habits are built where you're trying to get your small steps embedded and then very very slow and very very deliberate and those classifications are owned to my own to a man called danny kahneman and everyone really then came to believe that actually when you're in the slow mode of thinking that you are at your best so you get to be in flow you get to concentrate on something but there's an emerging evidence that when you're in your fast mode of thinking you have this unconscious that could be worming away at a problem that you're trying to solve so let's imagine that you're trying to think about what you want to do in five years time maybe one of the best things that you can do is to take your focus off it and kind of put it to the back of your mind and some thoughts will actually come out and i think procrastination is good in that respect if you're saying actually i have a really big challenge at the moment i'm i'm not feeling creative i'm going to go for a walk that feels like a procrastination activity but you take the challenge with you or some of our best ideas are in the shower why is that well we're procrastinating in the show we're thinking about what we think about the idea but at the extreme it starts to get negative when you're putting off tasks and the deadlines are looming and the deadlines are looming and you have nothing to show for it and i think then the book offers some really good tips about how to rein that behavior in so how can you make sure that you're not you know booking drinks for friends that you're not putting on netflix that you're not going for unnecessary walks that aren't helpful to you when you need to sit down and actually do the task yeah one thing i find for myself with kind of getting over procrastination is that i think often procrastination is more of a problem with getting started than it is with con continuing so kind of like you know the the law of inertia newton's first law that if something is at rest it takes a big push of energy to move it forward yeah but once it's moving forward it's like it just continues to go yeah um uh and so when i think if i find myself procrastinating i often just think like how do i make it as easy as possible for me to just start doing the thing for just two minutes because chances are once i started doing it for two minutes it will then you know i will then continue like you know if if i have a youtube video to film for a day i'm just like i can't be bothered to set up the cameras i'll just like get up i'm just gonna do it for two minutes just set up a single microphone yeah and it's like okay well that's in the microphone i'm here i've got the music on i might as well just set up the whole thing i know it's all set up i might as well sit down and record the video um but i find that like targeting it to words just making it as easy as possible is is how i personally personally do it um do you have any any hacks or tips on this well that's a great one so lowering the cost of actually doing things so you can liken it when you're thinking you're somebody who doesn't like running to putting your running shoes and your gear out in the in the nights that you actually slip them on what you described though really reminds me of the pomodoro technique that has been shown to work really well for procrastinators so the idea that you don't plan to work for the day you just show up for 20 minutes and there's something about our brain not wanting to have something that hasn't closed a loop that will keep us working so pomodoro technique says you work for 20 minutes and regardless of if you're in flow you take a five minute break and when you take that five minute break you will start worrying and jiggling and really wanting to actually go back to the task so the sheer act of showing up for those first 20 minutes will get you on the path that you described nice um any other tactics that you use to respect i mean especially when writing a book i imagine that's like a reality i mean i use a thing called i use a thing called the compromise effect which has been really shown in marketing so you know you know that your marketers are really lazy when they show you three options for things safe in the knowledge that you'll actually pick the middle option so as human beings we don't like to take the extremes when it comes to kind of making choices so i use this for my workload so kind of in the morning if i'm planning on doing something like writing where there's a particular output i'll define what a low output looks like to find what a medium output looks like and define what a high output looks like and regardless of which one i'll hit i'll mark it off on my to-do list so i give myself that kind of satisfaction um and most of the time and i always say this maybe i'm just an average person most of the time i hit medium and i've tried it on some friends now and they hit this medium output as well so i think if you're somebody who has this mammoth task and this really aligns with chunking right think about what the outputs would look like beyond i need to do x dividing x down and giving yourself a treat at the end of it so whatever it is for you whether it's it's you know netflix having a massage going for a walk going out for dinner with friends bundling it with something that's really attractive is another way to actually get you to get you to the desk again so really our decision making is determined by costs and benefits in the present moment you want to lower the costs in the present moment and you want to make the benefits as nice as possible and bundling with good activities helps as well nice how how do you manage your to-do list like yeah it's a great question i mean again i wake up off my own back by talking about this but it's my struggles that has made me write about actually about writing to-do lists so every day i have a period of time in the morning where i do deep work where i do writing where i do kind of tasks that really really need to be done so this morning i was actually preparing something for the skills committee that you mentioned um in the beginning um and then i go about my day having engagements with people like you you know kind of having kind of enjoyable engagements so i really do the horrible part first and then i have the nicer part of my day that actually comes later so it's hard to for me it's hard to get an appointment with me before 10 and that's because my mornings is for my is for my deep work at the end of the evening i do um i look back on how i spent my day i think about what went right because i'm really bad for seeing kind of small wins during the day um and i'll reflect on each activity and think about actually do this activity did i enjoy it at the moment and was it something that would pay off in the future and if it's something that's neither i try to avoid it or cut it all together and i write about meetings in my in my institution that i don't go to a lot of them now for that exact reason so i find myself showing up people would talk in circles about issues nothing would be resolved we would waste maybe two hours that could be used on something that's giving me purpose or someone else purpose or giving me fun in the day okay that's interesting do you do any sort of weekly review type stuff yes every sunday evening i look back at how i actually spent my time during the week um and days where things went well and days where things did not necessarily go well and then i think about the week ahead and how i can make it better for myself so if i've had a particularly draining week and the activities are things that i need to show up for that can include scheduling more free time in the week going forward so it doesn't actually always mean about getting more work done the next week if i felt quite exhausted and i didn't feel that i was able to show up um it also can mean that i think about what are the activities that i might want to pull out of my calendar given my experiences in the last week um that might not actually be adding value for anybody um and it also allows me to think about what are the big things that i want to check off my list in the week going forward okay so i've so i first came across weekly review stuff like five years ago when i first read getting things done by david allen yeah and in that time i've done about four weekly reviews um any tips for sticking to this practice you need to make it easy so i'm not a journaler yeah so i do all of this on my phone so i basically have my diary is set up and i have kind of two columns that say this was pleasurable this was purposeful that i just fill in so my entire journaling on a sunday evening is 15 to 20 minutes and i think that the the reason that we fall off the wagon with journaling is if we're carrying around notebooks we're carrying around pens it's not really how how we kind of are set up as a society anymore and we're thinking that it's going to take one hour and two hours so it's really about making it simple and doing it at a time so i do it sunday night people who have read think big um who've reported back are using it on commutes and using it on times that otherwise would not necessarily be used for anything useful oh okay that's interesting i spent a lot of time on the toilet scrolling twitter so maybe like it could be a sunday it's a sunday toilet time equals weekly review on my phone keep it simple that will go viral [Laughter] something like that um what is the effect effect heuristic so the affect heuristic is all about emotions right so it basically talks about when we're in a hot state um we're feeling emotional so it could be happiness it could be sadness it might even be feeling hungry um we're likely to make decisions that are based on rules of thumb rather than good decision making and we're much more likely to be biased so you know there's really great research on this that looks at if you are up in front of a judge all else equal how does your sentence look before and after lunch um if you are pitching for venture capital what's your likelihood of being successful all else equal looking at whether you turned up at the start of the day you turned up in the middle of the day you turned up at the end of the day and it really has to do with the emotions of the people who are actually judging you so if you think about yourself when we and the effect heuristic the kind of the outcome is you should never make a decision when you're feeling emotional so if somebody expresses anger towards you if you're feeling angry towards them if they're asking you for a decision park it you know unless you're a surgeon a firefighter or somebody else who really needs to spring into action there is always time for you to take a break it could be a minute it could be 10 minutes it could be an hour but taking that time out and then on the other side if you're facing people who are judging you what can you think about their emotions in in on a particular day that will tip the odds to your advantage so making them laugh is is a really good thing using narrative that actually that they're likely to remember so making them feel sad and empathetic towards what you're trying to sell them is really really helpful and again avoiding being before lunch so hunger is absolutely the worst thing that you want is somebody who's making a decision on your on your future oh okay yeah so i'm uh i'm doing an interview with someone who's applied for a job with our team straight after this uh and i'm feeling kind of hungry now so i should probably just take us out to lunch and then we'll do the interview over over a snack or something that's a good shout out um so in chapter five i think you talk about outside uh well in chapter four inside chapter five is i think it's outside like um getting feedback and judgment and stuff from other people yeah um one area in particular that i know a lot of people struggle with like is the fear of being judged by others when doing things like putting themselves out there or writing a book or starting a youtube channel does what does behavioral science say about this thing of getting over this fear of what other people think about us is it good that we worry about what other people think about us i think you know it's good until it's not which isn't which isn't a very helpful expression but i think it's good in the beginning because i think the kind of anxieties and the nerves that we feel set us up to do a great job right so um i think it was mick jagger before he was going on unconscious to actually label his nerves or this is the excitement about me seeing the crowd rather than actually feeling that the butterflies in his stomach were anything negative and reframing it that way can be can be can be really really helpful um i'm actually forgetting your question my fear of getting uh getting over what people think about us oh yes so i as individuals we tend to think people are looking at us much more often than they actually are um and there's a thomas gilovich was the first to write about this idea of the spotlight effect and the spotlight effect basically says that if i fluff up if i fall down in the street if i do about public speaking even if i do a negative youtube and i have lots and lots of followers the chances of people remembering are actually really really low because we're information overloaded all the time and we're also much more caught up in ourselves than we are with other people but even the people who do remember tend to be much more sympathetic or neutral than we'll actually give them credit for so embracing the spotlight effect and actually taking action kind of safe from the knowledge that you know if you do mess up people probably aren't watching and if they do they're likely to be sympathetic it's a really really good way forward and i think next to that for people who are really hampered by you know kind of the saving face effects that we i recorded from from an irish perspective that you know the idea that it's much worse for me to mess up when other people are looking i think start doing things where people who you don't know won't see you in the beginning and then you'll get some confidence and be able to go a bit more global so taking those small steps rather than staying stuck is really really important yeah both of these like tie in really nicely with like you know when it comes to starting a youtube channel which is quite a terrifying thing for a lot of people i think like when i when i did it i made like 20 videos before i posted it on facebook because that was the audience people that knew me i mean before then like no one was gonna see it because i had like three subscribers and like no one's ever gonna find the videos um but then you know the advice i i give to people when they're really worried that oh what what will my friends and family think is that hey they probably won't care they'll look at it for 30 seconds and move on with a day because they've got things to do would be like you know if your friends and family are like nice people they'd be like oh this is kind of cool they'll love you anyway yeah like the fear is so much more in our heads in our imagination than it is than it is in reality um your one of your final chapters is all about environment and things that we can do in our environment to nudge ourselves towards kind of making progress on our on i think big goals i wonder what tips have you found personally useful in terms of the way you set up your environment to help do things like write a book or like do your research and things like that well i see you have the green which is really good so one of the kind of you know if you're if you're in a place where you don't have uh you know easy access to kind of green spaces bringing green indoors is really really helpful it's really good it's really good it's good for oxygen so yeah so there's a bit a big tick in in in the environment today but you know for me i think the biggest thing is is is digital and really thinking about what's your relationship like with technology and is that the biggest time sinker that you have and then setting up your environment to make it much easier for you to switch off from technology when you need it so you know my job it would be much harder to do my job if i didn't have access to technology so i'm a big proponent of it i can get information really really quickly it's very easy for me to digest lots of academic papers now as well as a lot of kind of taught leaders but that said if that's all i do then i never put any output into the world um and my worst habit is checking email for other people it would be twitter instagram snapchat whatever it is but thinking about is there a way that you can change your environment to make it harder for you because it's all about cost benefits it can make it harder for you to check your email to check twitter to check snapchat and for me it was actually removing it from my phone and removing it from my laptop and putting it on an old ipad allowing myself check my emails on an old ipad that was in a different part of the house so every time i wanted to check my emails i had to physically go to that part of the house and i also set up pledges that i would only check my emails twice a day and then move to once a day and i will tell you i failed a lot so you know there would be lunch time where i would be itching to see is anyone emailing me what's exciting in my inbox and i would go and check but it was much less and i've never been more productive in the periods of my life when i've managed to switch off my email entirely okay that's a good chat i should just understand about how much time i would save because often like the stuff like it doesn't really need a responsibility and one thing you often say in the book is you know unless you're a heart surgeon or the president of some yeah you really don't need to respond instantly to people so and then i think other stuff is easier so you know thinking about the colors on on the walls that inspire you thinking about lighting i mean there's really good evidence on lighting to suggest if you're creative you want to have kind of more dim light if you want to really focus on something you want to have this bright light making sure that you have fresh air in in your room making sure as well that you have a place where you go to work so even if you're somebody who's in a flat chair that feels overcrowded maybe the place for you is going to be a seat in a coffee shop but trying to get that same seat every day there's something about our mind when we're in particular environments that it switches to this is the activity that i'm supposed to be doing in this environment um you know people find that when they go to pubs for example they find it when they go to theater those particular habits that they that they'll follow without knowing why and you can actually bring that to your work where are you actually going to sit down on a day-to-day basis that when you do you're you're digitally detoxed so you're not on email you're not you're not you're not you're not plugged into anywhere anywhere else but the work that you're doing and also that you're not moving around yeah i found um during during the pandemic once i'd taken a break from medicine then i was spending just loads of time just at home on my desk and it was a nightmare and then it was a few months later that i discovered uh the wework co-working space in cambridge and then i started kind of commuting there like 10 minute cycle or 10 minute drive each day and there was something so nice about having an office to commute to where in the past i would have thought oh hey i'm a digital nomad i work from anywhere i work from home but actually i really like going to an office and then just staying there all day and like getting you know a take away for lunch and then and then when i come home it's like i literally only come home to sleep and that just massively increased my quality of life so now i'm trying to find those similar things especially when it comes to so i'm i'm trying trying to write a book as well i've been procrastinating the hell out of it um but one thing i'm trying to do is like you know certain mornings each week will be blocked out no one's allowed to book anything and i go to a specific coffee shop same one every day where that is the only place i will write book stuff yeah um and we've just signed a lease on an office where we can like okay now i can focus on youtube studio when with youtube stuff when i'm at that space i guess there's evidence that this sort of stuff is helpful absolutely and it's like a switch so when you sit down in the coffee shop it would be all about the book when you go into the office it's just about the youtube video i'm i'm really making sure that you stick to that is very important so i don't know how many of your listeners are going to be checking their emails in bed for example or even playing games in bed on their phone it's so it's really really bad for us so thinking about where's the areas in your house in your space that you're going to do particular activities and sticking to that will absolutely make you more productive and you've mentioned quality of life i would be surprised if people didn't follow what you described um and didn't see happiness increases yeah i think with the bedroom thing as well i think in in why we sleep uh matthew walker talks about this that's a great book when your bedroom is just for sleeping it is easier to sleep and you get better sleep yeah whereas if your bedroom is also where you chill on your laptop and where you work and it might be nice to take a zoom call from your bedroom but like you're kind of shafting yourself yeah in terms of sleep and again it's really hard you you can imagine that there might be people who are listening who are their bedroom is their space so they're living in in in a city where their bedroom is just a space but again in the corner of that there can be a chair where you physically go to sit you open your laptop and that's the trigger for your brain actually now i check emails but when you're in your bed that's just for sleeping so even that small separation is enough to build really good habits to make you more productive and happier amazing um i have a bunch of random quickfire questions uh well in that in other questions are quick but the answers don't don't have to be um so what if we can just kind of blitz through those okay i guess question one is what what advice would you give for your younger self i think it would be to to think big um to take some more steps first of all i like that i'll leave it at that that's good um who's had the biggest influence on your career my mom actually so when i think about i wasn't particularly good at school and i wasn't a student that was actually meant to go to university and she was really adamant that i go to education um and i studied computer science and i've pivoted a lot from there but i still use some of the skills so i still were also working in data science but without her i wouldn't have gone anywhere what's your top tip for someone looking for success really embed good habits today that will serve your version of success in the future so the small actions that you're taking today what are you what at this what are you doing today so you know how are you spending your time and does that point you in the direction of success and if the answer is no change how you spend your time just on that note um your own definition of success um i think often when we think of like i don't really like the word success because it's it's so tied up in societal expectations where like you know if i really enjoy gardening and i'm gardening in my backyard society doesn't consider that successful unless i enter a gardening competition and win it like yeah for some reason so like how how do you feel about success by extension how do we figure out what our own definitions of success are because it'll vary for different people i imagine it will vary for different people and i think if you're somebody who's in your garden um and you know you can afford to eat and put a roof over your head you should keep gardening if you know if that that that is a successful life to me you know it's describing somebody who um their needs are fulfilled um and they're also incredibly happy in the activities that they're doing on a day-to-day basis and i think that's really what i would love people to kind of kind of sit back and think about is sometimes we're trading off earning you know a small amount of extra money relatively speaking um in order to get very small increases in where we're actually going in our lives so you want to be in a place where you're enjoying the activities you really do you want to be in a place where you can feel yourself moving forward because purpose has been shown in life um to really make life worth living quite frankly so people you know once you actually find a direction to point in but it doesn't need to be about money and it doesn't need to be about material things hmm speaking of money um there's all that evidence that a lot of listeners will be familiar with that beyond a certain amount let's say 75000 or whatever the different study show further increases in money don't lead to further increases in happiness but then there's another school of thought and there's a a an interestingly titled paper that i think was called something like um if money doesn't bring happiness then you're not spending it well enough yeah where the theory is that like well actually even beyond that point you you can use money to buy back your time by outsourcing things that you don't enjoy doing like i don't know cleaning the house for example which i guess you don't really need 75k to do but yeah there is an element of the more money you can spend on doing on removing the things that you don't like doing theoretically that could increase to a quality of life increase um as someone who's presumably done reading into this sort of research what's what's what what does the data say about about the money happiness correlation so the so if you if you read the correlations it suggests that anything over a basic income of about 35 000 pounds sterling in the uk doesn't bring additional happiness but what it doesn't do because this is relating essentially income to happiness is think about firstly how many hours is some so it controls for hours but i've never seen a paper interact hours with income so thinking about how many hours am i actually working to get that extra you know that extra pound which obviously if i'm working 80 hours a week it's going to be very happy for me to be um happy in the moment but the second thing that she did doesn't do which is a big mistake is it doesn't talk about happiness over the life course so people who are retired get very happy but again it's depending on how much income that they actually have in the opposite direction so i think you need to think about what does happiness look for you over the life course there's going to be times in your life where you'll need to do some difficult things in order to secure particular life course destinations so if you're somebody who wanted to be a surgeon i would imagine it's really hard for those training for the for the years and actually even the job itself is going to have particular pinch points where there's going to be very very very high demand but for some people where that's their passion is going to be absolutely worth it um and i think that's the trade-off that doesn't come true in the literature so the snazzy headlines the same money doesn't buy happiness don't take into account hours worked and they don't take into account kind of smoothing things over the life course how do you how do you think about money personally like you've written a book presumably you get royalties from it you've got you've got other things going on you do speaking at corporate events where i've heard they pay like stupid prices to get someone to give a talk what what's what does that look like for you so i think i mean if i was thinking about one of my values i'm definitely somebody who wants to earn a decent living yeah um but i i will only do that if i'm engaged in tasks that i actually really like doing so i turn down things that are quite lucrative relatively regularly because i know and i've got caught up in a project before that that that is like this when i'm doing it i'm just miserable and i can't wait to hand it over um so again what i'm trying to do at the moment is think about how can i shift my tasks so that i'm i'm really enjoying doing them i'm giving them i'm giving back to society but at the same time it affords me to actually you know kind of increase my income as i get older and i guess you know for listeners who are beyond the point of having their basic needs met yeah then it's easy enough to be like okay cool i'm going to turn down things that i don't like doing yes but for someone who's not at that point yet they're like i i i guess we often do have to do things that we don't necessarily like to make money to make ends meet to get to that point yes um if for someone who's in that position any any advice on kind of keep keeping that going in order to get to the point where then you've got the freedom to kind of do what you want yeah so i think for every activity i mean i did some i did some really crummy jobs when i was in university and i i did some other kind of crummy projects after that but i think focusing on the skills that they're bringing you in the moment is really important um and focusing on how you can actually make turn it into another opportunity after the event i think is important as well and again knowing what you're aiming for so i think if it's somebody who's you know working to pay bills to go to university it's a really linear path i think if it's somebody who is doing a particular job today and it doesn't quite fit with their future self they will need to kind of take a step back and say what are the skills that i'm learning from this what are the activities that i'm getting practice of that i can actually write a cv for the person that i want to be in five years time um and really focusing in on leveraging what you're doing now now for the future but there will always be i think if you want to have particularly kind of a professional career where there's going to be kind of credentials that are barriers to entry there will be some pain on on the journey and i guess you just have to either learn to enjoy the pain or just kind of get over it you do but i think as well it's always the i mean try try and think about what's the combination that you can that you can it doesn't need to be all or nothing so if you're doing a particular course to get a credential hopefully 40 of it is all that's miserable and there's 60 of it that you can actually enjoy yeah and focusing on that part as well so when you do turn up for the parts that are painful think about actually i'm going to be doing something that's quite nice later yeah and i think even for the bits that are painful like you know a big chunk of medical school people don't particularly enjoy studying for exams but you know setting up the environment right doing it with friends having music in the background even if theoretically starting with music like slightly decreases your memory who cares it makes it more fun so i think there are lots of sort of fun levers that we can pull even for things that are miserable um that in in some way help make things less painful and a little bit more fun absolutely and again there's lots of skills that people can learn for free on the internet kind of getting out there if the job doesn't lend themselves in the direction they want to go taking those steps to acquire new skills i think it's really worth doing you know i've hired people who haven't fit the box of what somebody would particularly look like in the role and it's worked out incredibly well for me and i think more and more employers are starting to do that so just because you haven't gone you know to university that you haven't taken traditional paths doesn't mean that you can't succeed in the career that you actually want nice um moving on to our quick questions um what does the first and last hour of your day look like so my first hour is having a cup of tea and standing in my garden now that i actually have green space which i really enjoy um as early as i can actually make it up and my second is unwinding from everything and potentially reading fiction but usually non-fiction okay what kind of fiction slash nonfiction do you enjoy so the non-fiction is exactly what you might expect so it's um kind of organizational psychology behavioral science i do like a good kind of crime novel like white-collar crime so thinking about who brought down ex-bank at a particular moment in time but again kind of really written from a kind of rigorous fact point of view fiction it can be anything so i tend to read popular fiction i have richard ostman's book someone said to me that i'm going to try uh reading which is number one at the moment which is meant to be quite nice very light fiction like what i do read fiction anything in particular you'd recommend so his first book was very good the thursday morning club which people might have might might have heard heard of um and the second one is meant to be really good so i'm looking forward to starting it amazing here we go i'm big on uh fantasy fantasy fiction when i was younger i love fantasy i i haven't read it in a while oh i would recommend have you come across brandon sanderson no oh he's my he's he's overtaking jacob rolling to become my favorite author of all time wow like i for sort of i i anytime i've recommended a brandon sanderson to a friend that they have gone down the rabbit hole of his books and have like it's a series with the same characters yeah it's so so he's got a bunch of different series um which have the same characters but then all of the series are set in this wider like marvel cinematic universe type thing where they kind of interact with each other and he's got this like 20 30 year plan for all the books that are going to come out over the next like 30 years where they'll all aware stuff is being foreshadowed in a book that was released this year that's going to become relevant 25 years from now so it's like a whole lifetime of like incredible fiction i would recommend anyway what material item of like reasonable cost do you think is that that has has added a lot of value to your life oh and my apple products okay yeah they have i mean value in the sense of speeding up my work and making me much more efficient absolutely nice my garden furniture though for relaxing if i was to pick something up just for pleasure are we talking hammock are we talking like chairs like it's a couch with a table and then some stools around so it can fit like maybe 10 people um but in the morning it's just really nice to be able to kind of just get out get out in the air actually yeah play what book would you recommend to everyone i can't recommend them other than other than your own which we're going to be recommending extensively anyway that's a really um that's a good question so i i would recommend and think again by adam grant so it's all about unlearning yeah and so thinking about what are the habits or the preconceptions that you might actually have that aren't serving you well um and and really spending time to kind of unlearn them so most of us kind of go through our lives with a particular viewpoint and it's trying to get you to take a step back and think about what might it be about my viewpoint that isn't serving me well and how can i actually enhance my life and it really ties the idea actually of having what i would call a diverse boardroom so thinking about who you get advice from on a particular on on things that actually crop up in your life and are they very like you so are they the same age or do they go to the same university do they vote in the same political way um and broadening that boardroom to have more people who are different to you in it and and there's two reasons for that so firstly you're less likely to succumb to confirmation bias to be told that you're right all the time which is good for us but diverse boardrooms will see opportunities that you don't see nice um so yes if you don't have a trump supporter in your in your boardroom you go get a trump supporter and if you don't have a biden supporter you go get a biden supporter for all the us at u.s listeners um this is a question we usually ask um like uh entrepreneur type people which is that like if if you lost all your money if you lost all your business what like what would you be doing but i guess for you the equivalent is like if you got cancelled and you know because yeah you know it's unacceptable that you said that thing 10 years ago or whatever yeah what but but you still have the same skills um what would you be doing i think i'd be writing and putting more stuff out there so i think we can we started in you know i'm not on social media because i'm somebody who detests social media i just don't have the time at the moment but i think it's a really good outlet to kind of reach audiences that i otherwise would not necessarily get to meet and i think i will be writing much more content for for online already established online mediums but maybe doing something more myself okay interesting um what quote or mantra do you live by if any oh that's a really good one i have so many of them um [Music] i think so it's really about taking control what you can control and letting the rest go very nice i guess a final question um a journey or destination journey has to be journey amazing and that's the title of the final chapter of your book which is like two pages long yes why why did why did he call it journey because i think you're never done so i think you know these days careers are going to go on probably i mean if you're lucky you'll be 75 and still doing something so you might have wound down but you know you'll still be engaged you'll still be kind of getting out there meeting people and i think the ultimate idea that we find a job and that's the end of it for us is kind of gone it's gone because the economy is changing it's being shaped by technological forces but i think it's better for us to think of it as a journey very nice cool yeah thank you ali pleasure thank you so much

Channel: Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal

Views: 168,017

Keywords: career, science, behavioural science, LSE, author, books, book, selfhelp, psychology

Id: FwvZf0IjaiQ

Length: 87min 9sec (5229 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 31 2021