World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed | E84

in a fixed mindset people think that success is all about talent having the gift a growth mindset is saying okay talent obviously matters it's a factor but it's not enough it's what we do with our talents i wasn't the best table tennis player in the world i never got into the top 20 of the world rankings but with that attitude i maximize my own potential i think leadership counts when it comes to innovation i mean the way amazon conducts meetings then when they start talking the most senior person always speaks last you'll get an unvarnished access to the insights of your brilliant team rather than speaking first and everyone basically converging on what you as the leader has just said there are a lot of people with truly brilliant ideas huge potential who never act on their dreams but having the idea doesn't mean a thing you've actually got to act on that idea honestly i think we shouldn't underestimate how damaging it can be if [Music] matthew syed he's written some of the most important challenging thought-provoking books in the self-development self-improvement team development team building company building leadership space and his ideas are original they are challenging they are fresh they are important he was an elite level sportsman and his ideas come from the world of sport but also the world of business from politics from writing from culture from society he evangelizes about diverse thinking about including more ideas about challenging leadership about challenging yourself about what it takes to start and why most people spend their life sitting on ideas that could potentially change their life but are seemingly imprisoned trapped and blocked by their own mindset he talks about how some of the most talented people in the world can fall short of their potential and how some people with seemingly no talent at all can achieve miraculous things if you apply the learnings from this conversation i have no doubt that it will make you a better person it will make your teams more innovative and it will lead you to living a more fulfilled life so without further ado i'm stephen bartlett and this is the director ceo i hope nobody's listening but if you are then please keep this to yourself matthew everyone wants to be successful everybody i don't know one person that doesn't want to be successful so i think it's probably quite important to define what that word means under your own definition of that word the holistic definition not just a professional definition but how would you define that well look it's great to be here steve i i think that's quite a deep question quite a philosophical one really just getting started i know what kind of opening question is this i i um obviously as as a former sports person i was a table tennis professional for for a number of years um success was defined in terms of winning matches and achieving very uh clear tangible objectives like winning the national championships or the the commonwealth and so the but i think when it comes to life beyond sport yeah it's so objective in something like the 100 meter sprint you want to be your pb and you can see it on a digital readout at the end of a race how close you've come or whether you've achieved that objective in the life beyond sport i have to say one of the things that is quite difficult i think for sports people to transition is it's more elusive more subjective more ephemeral and i think it is a really difficult thing to define what you personally mean by success i'm not 100 sure that i've defined it for myself yet have you have you i i well i i'm i'm getting closer on a prof in a professional sense i what i would how i'd answer that question is i'd say i think i'm successful if in my professional life if i am striving if i'm taking on a worthwhile challenge with people i love so the key terms there are worthwhile subjective to find out how you like challenge which i think is um in integral to being motivated and getting up in the morning and you know all the emotions you need to be internally uh internally fulfilled and motivated and then with people i love which i think is just a really which speaks to community and human interaction which i think is part of our human yeah and the yeah look that makes a lot of sense to me i i have to say what one thing that given what you've just said you'll probably agree with i think the narrow way that success has sometimes been defined in western capitalist societies has been deeply mistaken that it's all about how much money you have in your bank account and i think we all know although you know it's a bit of a cliche to say that it doesn't provide happiness certainly not of a sustained nature i think that that thing about social interaction the thing that makes me happiest for sure is putting one's heart and soul into a project like for example writing a book and then getting a letter from somebody who explains in their own way how it has positively impacted their life and there is no feeling like that for me as a writer and that really is a powerful engine to motivate you to come up with a new idea for a new book the fact that you know it's having it has meaning for other people not that they've paid money to buy it and that money has been transferred via a publisher into my bank account that is much less significant i mean it's great if you do get money for it you know you can look after your kids or you can do something with it but it's that feedback that sense of making some kind of a difference i mean in a funny kind of a way that that's why for a long time um as i came towards the end of my television squad i wanted to go to politics i thought that is the place where you can make the most difference right you've got the levers to do something interesting and then i realized it was not quite as funner avenue perhaps as as uh as writing why why is it that human beings seem to get so much intrinsic joy from helping others i think this is a great and deep significance and you know just to put a historical lens on this after the enlightenment the idea was of human beings as individuals individualism was the great goal of political life and i think we conceived of people as deciding uh to perhaps interact with other people deciding to have families and you might remember margaret thatcher once said there's no such thing as society there are just individual men and women and families i mean she had more to say after that it wouldn't be fair to say that was her entire philosophy by any means i think she was a great prime minister in many ways but but if you actually go back deeper in human history when we uh our ancestors lived at the same time as the neanderthals the neanderthals had probably bigger brains than us they may have been individually smarter but humans lived in tighter more socially connected groups what does that mean it means if somebody learns something useful they can share it with one of their kin and therefore they can also share it with their children they can get a cross-pollination of ideas they can bring ideas together and then it gets passed down the generations and it was that sociality that conferred a competitive advantage on our ancestors above neanderthals it's it is i think our distinctive quality we are social beings to an extent greater i think than any others except the insects like uh ants who for slightly different uh evolutionary reasons cooperate at scale and there's an element of virtue signaling social media that sort of seems to have exacerbated this amongst our my generation in particular who all seem to want to change the world but can't necessarily tell you what they want to change they just want to be a person that's changed the world that's interesting that's interesting because about a decade ago i started looking at you know now i'm i'm believe it or not 50. uh he's a little great well i was going to say i don't if you have to remember oil of are you late no that's probably the slightly older people will remember i don't use that by the way but um i uh started looking at how aspirations have changed since i was in my choice so when i was at university everyone wanted to work for the u.n yeah that was kind of considered the great sort of panacea of life but 10 years ago a lot of people were saying in surveys of young people what do you want to do in life what do you want to be in life and the answer was famous yeah famous you know not not to have a body of work that gives you fame you know to walk to you know you want to walk down the red carpet having created an amazing film but no they just wanted the red carpet and i thought that was that was a dangerous thing and i i'm sure there's been a correction since then but i think the obsession there's been no correction and i think in some respects it's got worse i've just it's a real phenomenon i've noticed in my generation where after i'll come off stage doing a public speech whatever kids will come up to me and say i want to be a public speaker too i never wanted to be i pursued my desire to start a business and a byproduct of that was they pay me to speak on stage now and fame also in my view should be a byproduct of the pursuit of something that's intrinsically important to you right absolutely 100 correct and that's why the obsession with fame is a massive danger i think to uh to a culture um the the thing about speaking so so a completely unintended side effect of writing my first book so i'm finishing table tennis and i'm like you know what am i going to do with the rest of my life uh you know how am i going to define success and i decided to write this book in 2000 when does it come out 2010 called bounce yes and i said this side effect was being invited to give a speech at a big corporation an investment bank an american investment bank and obviously you know as an ex-ping-pong player i'm thinking what is going on here you know how am i suppo imposter syndrome and also you know i went to a school i went to a comp you know we didn't do any almost no public speaking you know we we learn stuff we learn things in the classroom but the idea of getting up in and speaking in front of an audience was kind of very alien so i wasn't that good right because i hadn't practiced that i'd never done it before and i came off the stage and i thought you know what i'm just not cut out for this if i'm invited again to give a talk to a company i'll just politely decline then i thought and it took me about i know 48 hours to think what a ridiculous way to hijack my own development if you actually had the right attitude if you had the right mindset you can probably learn these skills and take advantage of these brilliant opportunities because you always learn don't you when you go and speak in an organizer so i googled public speaking practice and the first hit was called toastmasters and this is like a global network of just public speaking clubs where other normal people um go to the club to develop social confidence and the one nearest me in richmond was in twickenham just over the bridge and there was uh franco worked at lloyd's on the high street just the group you give a speech they'd give you feedback and the mentoring was a really important part of it because you need a bit of feedback and you know what you could have done better and then about two-thirds of the way through there's something called table topics where somebody writes the list of topics on cards but no one else in the room knows what they are so you have to go to the front you pick it up and then turn around and spontaneously talk for a minute on whatever topic the first one i ever did was the natural history museum you know that's terrifying right you're not used to it but you learn and you develop that skill um so so learning how to speak publicly it took me three or four years and i'm not saying i'm brilliant at it now by any means but my goodness how much better when you have a can-do attitude towards it and that brings us to the topic of mindset really nicely you know i've heard you talk about having a growth mindset and a fixed mindset what is the difference between the two so i think for thank you for what it's worth i think this contrast is is so important i mean i can talk about it through my own life but you know in a fixed mindset people think that success however defined is all about talent having the gift uh having the genetic inheritance and you know having the personality trait in order to excel a growth mindset is saying okay talent obviously matters it's a factor but it's not enough it's what we do with our talents so people in a fixed mindset have two massive risks one they think they're so talented they don't even need to try so think of a young person who's just been invited to join the manchester united academy and they're suddenly getting money into their bank account they're able to buy the fast car and they think i'm god's gift and they and the amount of academy coaches who have come to me and said we don't understand it we had this hard-working youngster we invited them into the academy and then they just went off the rails it's a fixed mindset they think their success is the short so they stop putting in the hard yards and don't transition into the first team so that's one danger the other danger is people who don't think they're god's gift but like me at goldman sachs you make one failure and you interpret that as meaning i obviously don't have talent therefore i'm just going to give up you see what i mean yeah so that's the negative version yeah so you've got the i'm super talent is everything and i've got it so therefore i don't need to try talent is everything i don't have it therefore i should give up they're both terribly uh damaging i think a growth mindset it doesn't mean that we think we're all going to be the best speaker in the world i wasn't the best table tennis player in the world i never got into the top 20 of the world rankings but with that attitude i maximize my own potential and going back to your thing about success that's not a bad definition now i think about it you know to try and be the best that we can be in our own lives doesn't mean we're going to be the best who ever lived you know not everyone could be muhammad ali or serena williams or or who or albert einstein but to be the best we can be i think it's so wonderful and just from my own perspective i think trying to fill one's own potential going on a journey that has some meaning there's something wonderfully um uplifting something satisfying about that too i really like the combination of those two ideas this idea of being the best you can be but realizing that it's a pursuit towards something that you may never get to right so the journey and the journey towards being the best you can be at something which has a lot of meaning to you maybe maybe that's the definition we were looking for now i think that that point you make about the journey is really really important what was it i think it was robert louis stevenson said to travel is a better thing than to arrive oh yeah and in a weird kind of way i can say i talked about trying to win the nationals but first of all in the nationals i remember winning going home i was living on my own in a flat in richmond i got home and i thought is that it you know what i mean it was the the fun was actually the training and the camaraderie with my practice partners and seeing those small improvements through time i mean that's consistent with most high performance athletes and um business people and i was reading this piece and i think it was in the telegraph about um olympic depression where you have the olympians who train for the olympics they and whether they get a gold medal like michael phelps who fell into depression or whether they lose either way the outcome is they just lose orientation in their life yeah and and this is why i i and also i felt it myself when a company came along when i was 24 and offered to buy my company and i go home look at right move look at all the cars i can buy and everything and i feel this sense of emptiness and like but then what what's my life without this and genuinely that was like an existential crisis because i was like i can't sell this thing but the insecure broke kid in me thought he was doing this to sell this thing yeah and it was just this really you know it's one i think one of the deep paradoxes of the human mind i mean the the sense of anti-climax when one achieves a long cherished ambition i want to be a millionaire i want to buy an aston martin i want to win the olympic gold medal i remember talking to victoria pendleton oh yeah the olympian yeah because you lit the cyclist you know you live with this ambition it's what gets you out of bed in the morning right i want to win the olympic gold it's what when you're on the track she was explaining you know it's what makes you push harder because you've got this this goal this destination that's pulling you this magnet pulling you towards it then when you get it you wake up the next day and what on earth is getting you out of bed what's causing you to push yourself that's one of the reasons i think people who make money very quickly face massive many not all and this is well documented psychology i mean you'll know about the people who win lotteries whose marriages can end who end up in in often depression i mean that's not a cliche this is well established and i think it's because you get something and then it's like what is left to pursue in life i do some interviews for the time sports stars and i mentioned victoria pendleton billy jenkins yeah exactly the same um uh david beckham um uh ryan giggs uh i mean i've interviewed you know most of the the ronaldo most of the leading many of the leading sports people and it's the same story and i think what i've noticed is that as you did that capacity to take a step back and to say you know what i'm feeling low feeling empty i need to find something else that's gonna galvanize me and and that's what gets people back on and i think the antidote is being aware of that yeah and because then now when i achieve things in my life i don't come into those achievements with this expectation of exponential joy and so i can almost enjoy it more right you know yeah no i totally get that i i trying to think you know yeah i think look just one of the things that i've noticed from my own personal lives the more busy i've got sometimes you don't take enough time to take a step back and to say you know this was a great thing that happened or or to be in the moment when something is happening with one dude do you have kids no no with with one's children or wife or partner or whatever and i think i'm slowly you know i write books on this stuff but i i i'm learning all the time and that's one of the reasons i want to do the podcast when i've read about you i thought you've had such a different set of experiences to me i'll learn a lot from you too we've now had two subscribers come in and watch from behind the scenes we're going to start picking more so all you've got to do if you want that to be you is hit the subscribe button let's talk about failure than something you talk about at great length i think um tend to believe that a lot of the reason why people don't reach their potential however we define that is because they are risk adverse and failure is something they just can't their self-esteem just can't bear i think that's i think that's true my own sense is that this has been exacerbated by the social media so you tell me how the social media it may have changed a lot since i wrote my first book for young people but at the time psychologists had come up with this concept of the curse of perfectionism and their thesis was that young people are obviously now on the social media a lot and a lot of people when they're putting together their social media posts they do it in such a way as to make their lives look really good you know this is the holiday i just had on this wonderfully sunny beach and um you know they might even airbrush photos to make themselves look better and this is my wonderful performance on the piano and and the problem is people then start to think that success is about looking and acting in a perfect way that's massively problematic because why would you want to try anything new which is inherently a risk because if you're doing something the first time you're obviously not going to be perfect um and if you do mess up you draw the thing that goes back to the fixed mindset you draw the conclusion well i'm obviously not talented enough because i haven't nailed it the first time around i think this was also bolstered by in your own reality television now i think reality tell the idea of instant success instant gratification overnight elevation into in into the heavens and if you you know particularly young people think that success is like that they don't realize the incremental steps you need to take to fulfill your potential because as you know most businesses succeed because you know i don't know whether you're familiar with the american jargon but you get a minimum viable product you test the value proposition early you find out the inevitable deficiencies in the prototype or the piece of software and then you make adaptations in silicon valley they call it failing fast in other words they're failing fast in order to get to a better answer if you stop the first time you fail or if you don't try at all you're never going to get to an answer if you think of the history of science science is a success the most successful human institution because scientists by and large are willing to test their hypotheses you know they test it they look at the empirical evidence and they change it in the light of what the evidence is telling them that is the basic pattern of science and and i think the problem is as he alluded to is that if young people are like goodness me i don't want to look anything other than perfect it destroys their capacity to grow and and to have a life of fulfillment because jk rowling put it brilliantly she said the only way never to fail is never to try but then your life is a failure because you've just stayed in your comfort zone the whole time i see that i resonate with all of that so much and there's specifically this this idea i love the science analogy because seeing it as a hypothesis you write in science you you start with hypothesis you're not romantic about it and then you go in pursuit and you you agnostically go and test it right whereas what you're saying is you know young people or ambitious people generally will start with a hypothesis and they will long in need for it to be perfectly incorrect and this is also why businesses fail because founders just they just do everything and i i failed in my first business for many years because of that because i was obsessed romantic about my hypothesis being correct not romantic about the outcome which was trying to be a successful person right look i i think i think that's really really significant and i think that's a great great way of framing it look by the way some scientists fall in love with their theories yeah and they can't adapt it i mean there's been a few examples during the pandemic um and and by the way i mean i don't know listen there's an interest in this but there's a brilliant study by philip tetlock who's an american psychologist and he looked at forecasters so people trying to predict next year's gdp or oil price or other things of this kind and he found a really interesting pattern that the highest reputation forecasters who are on television the most on average make the worst predictions and can you see what what is an error of ego an error of prediction is an opportunity to adapt the model in order to make it more predictive in the long run but if you've been on the tv and you're supposed to be the god of forecasting you start defending your prior assumptions and so people who have an ego that gets in the way of hypothesis testing they are brilliant at creative self-justification i think the people who are most dangerous to companies and innovation are intelligent highly talented people in a fixed mindset they're just inveterate obstacles to making the changes you need to change in order to get the business to where you want to go to or where you want the economic model to get to and so on so i think it's the same in meetings you know i've as you know i'm very interested in how how businesses succeed and the the forum in which we take most key decisions are meetings because no one person has a monopoly on truth so you want to talk to other people but these can be really ineffective if people think that when someone challenges you they're insulting you they're not they're testing your hypothesis we should think of meetings as mutual hypothesis testing so that we can collectively get to the best uh strategy or idea and i think when you frame it in that way you take the stigma out of challenge and dissent and failure let's challenge that then so if if we've got a meeting we've got five 10 people around this table we've got an intern over there uh we've got the ceo there got managers directors around the table one new person one person's been here for 10 years you've got all these different sort of dynamics of people trying to get promotions get a payroll oh my god the ceo's at the table i don't wanna be an idiot i don't wanna say anything dumb you know and all of those like dynamics how do you get those dynamics out of the way and just become focused on letting the best idea win right so this is really well studied um i think the thing to to try and really convey is how dangerous the dynamics you've described can be because what tends to happen in a very hierarchical organization where the ceo or the team leader has discretion over pay and promotion is that people don't say what they think they say what they think the leader wants to hear that's fine if the leader knows everything there is to know because you're just basically ventriloquizing but so in a simple environment you don't need to have a team right you just have the leader make a decision and everyone but when it's a difficult complex decision in other words the ones that confer a competitive advantage on a business the leader needs to hear the different perspectives to make a better judgment but the extent to which this happens a good example is in aviation so i'll describe a classic case in in the aviation is a great area to study by the way when it comes to team dynamics so this is united airlines 173 and it's a flight that took off out of uh denver colorado in december 1978 and it's flying to portland in oregon and as a plane's coming in on the final approach the pilot pulls the lever to lower the landing gear and you know when you're in the cabin you hear it go down and clicks into place but on this occasion there's this really loud bang the plane kind of deviates and the light that should illuminate on the dashboard to show that the wheels are down it hasn't gone on so the pilot doesn't know if the wheels are down it's pitch black so they can't ask air traffic control to look up so he puts the plane into a holding pattern above suburban portland then they try and troubleshoot the the issue so the first thing is the engineer so in these days the cockpit had a captain a co-pilot and an engineer the engineer goes into the cabin and on this particular model of aircraft when the wheels are down two bolts shoot up above the wings the bolts are up but they're still not 100 sure right and you want to know if the wheels are down before you come in so so the pilot they they radio to the manufacturer and that you know they're kind of explaining what's happened the manufacturer is like yeah we think the wheels are down but we're not sure then the pilot's like i wonder if the reason that the light didn't go on the dashboard is because of faulty wiring so he starts playing around with with the in the plane still in the holding pattern as they're doing all of these different checks but at this point another safety critical issue has come into play the plane's running out of fuel right and the engineer knows that the plane is running out of fuel because he can see it going down to zero on the dials right he has a big incentive to tell the pilot that the plane is running out of fuel because otherwise he will die so you have this juxtaposition of objective information and maximum incentive but in the 1970s it was a command and control culture you know the pilot was genomic yeah the pilot was deemed to be the boss the omniscient um controller and the other two were supposed to basically carry out that controller's instructions and they called the pilot sir it was almost always a man right and and so imagine if the engineer says to the pilots now why do we have a team we have a team because no one person has all of the information they're narrow in their perceptual bandwidth other things are happening at the same time but if the engineer says to the pilot you know what we're running out on pu of fuel the implication is the pilot didn't know that already the pilot might get offended isn't he supposed to know everything and we know from this and many other incidents that in that situation we don't speak to each other directly we don't test hypotheses directly we code our language we mitigate our speech and from the voice recorder from the black box we know that the engineer said instead of we need to land because we're running out of fuel critical information for the pilot to make the right strategic decision he said oh we're kind of getting low on fuel here and the pilot because of the insinuation he knows everything wasn't even listening so the plane crashes but not just that plane a number of incidents in the 1970s of exactly the same kind happened because communication was so skewed by this very steep hierarchy it happens in surgical operating theaters famously when nurses can't speak up because they're worried if i say something this is the surgeon you know the the the big cheese and we know from you know for what it's worth from randomized control trial evidence lee thompson at northwestern university meetings are a catastrophe the vast majority of them absolute disaster because people are not sharing information they're basically playing a political game to curry favor with the boss so what you so that so the short answer is you need what's called psychological safety it's i hate the jargon all that means is an environment where everyone feels they can be candid and they can say what they really think and hypotheses are tested when google did a big data analysis of his most successful software development teams psychological safety was the biggest predictor of success because it means you're getting that interplay of ideas that's so important it's interesting because you know these big companies well big companies by by definition i guess have more ideas right but they are often the least innovative exactly and that seems like a bit of a it should be the other way around you would one would think that the biggest companies would be the most innovative because they have more brains more ideas but they're just that's what yeah yeah that's interesting point you make there so big you're right so a bit so well let's think about that what would generate good ideas it's the number of ideas not the number of people if you have an organization with a very homogenous culture very commanding control a lot of sociological convergence you might have 10 000 people all thinking the same way i mean you've seen professional services companies where you see the senior leadership team and they may look a bit different but they're all absolutely thinking exactly the same way they've been there so long that's a big danger for companies see with cities you increase the size of cities they become more innovative companies get less innovative because they get so much convergence they have a lot of people but they think in the state it's an echo chamber basically right whereas startups sometimes a startup might be an idea that's completely off the beaten track and then suddenly you've got this opportunity to scale but even with startups you know often when they go public they start to lose their capacity to to innovate and i think that's why you know i've written a book on it you need a culture of diversity so that you begin to protect and and and value the um like the diverse ideas that enable an organization to anticipate future disruptions and come up with new talk to me about creating a culture of diversity in your in your business then if you're starting a company if you're running a company at scale how do you increase the diversity of right ideas yes so um so the the most important for me the most important thing by far is landing the argument as to why it matters a lot of people don't think it matters i mean i remember going to an hr conference and the the the speaker was talking about diversity is a wonderful thing you've all need more of it and it will always help you do better as an organization and this really awkward customer at the back said can i ask a question and uh like yeah okay um imagine i am the coach of an olympic sprint relay team yeah and suppose um i've got you said who was the fastest person in the world at the time was usain bolt suppose i've got usain bolt in my team and suppose hypothetically i had cloning technology so i could clone usain bolt to have four usain bolts in my four by 100 relay team there's no diversity in that team but they're all very fast right yeah if you said you need to diversify your team that would mean hiring slower runners i don't want to do that as an olympic coach and it was like the air in the room just it's like it'd been punctured and everyone was like that's an awful thing but he was right that question was you know in simple activities cognitive diversity of opinion cognitive diversity doesn't help you if it's obvious what to do why would you want diversity if you've already got a solution a can solution you just need to scale it you don't need diver but when there's a complex environment that logic turns on its head so if you imagine for example you've got five people each one of whom has one brilliant idea you might think you have five brilliant ideas but if they all have the same idea you've only got one yeah all you need is two different ideas and suddenly you've tripled 300 increase in the creativity of that group that's where cognitive diversity matters and if your mission is to solve complex problems diversity is the cornerstone of how well you do it and once you land that argument people start to at the moment people say too many people think diversity is a politically correct box ticking exercise and when diverse voices come in they're condescended to they're not properly included once you realize it's a strength organization start to harness it to do the great things that they want to do i can imagine that organizations don't typically organizations don't know what they don't know and they don't they don't know what they don't have as well so if you don't see what i mean it's like an unknown i know so when the board when he's like let's say we've got six white six-year-old board members sat around a table of a company that's really successful and then they go you know what's their incentive to hide they think we've been doing great we're all very smart you smart yeah i'm smart yeah you smart yeah i'm smart yeah and like how do you make the case to them that they need to hire a black woman and that's going to help when they've just been killing the game with these six white men right well it's okay so again you're absolutely right to ask the question it depends on the context yeah let's say for example the organization is uh an advertising company and they've traditionally been selling to white middle-aged men who uh think rather as they do the the if they only want to sell to white men then there may be no advantage in hiring somebody with a different perspective if they're seeking to broaden their capacity to sell to people from different demographics they won't have the tacit knowledge that they need in order to do if you think of the cia they hired brilliant analysts in the post-war period and they thought they were the best intelligence agency in the world but a lot of the information was obviously confidential it's only now we can see how awful they were because almost everyone almost 100 of their analytical team were white middle class west coast anglo-saxon protestant liberal arts graduates nothing wrong with that background right but if you're trying to assess threats emerging from around the world the soviet union how would you possibly understand the probability of a conglomeration of different nations falling apart if you've been brought up in a stable middle class family in america how are you going to understand tribal sectarianism and the risks of radicalization in the middle east when you come from that background you know when we invaded when when the the the uk joined the coalition to invade iraq you know there was a genuine view that you impose democratic institutions and it will work effectively there was no real understanding of the history of iraq and how those institutions would be hijacked by sectarian interests because these guys had gone to university they'd learned all sorts of interesting things but they had no deep understanding of the dynamics in that country so if i was talking to the for example the director general the cia i would be explaining you know what you know but in the complex world there's stuff that you don't know there's stuff that people who think like you don't know be creative about how you optimize the diverse insights that can help you do the job you want to do now if it was the cia demographic diversity is critical you need to have people from different backgrounds who have had different experiences in order to understand emerging threats for an advertising team it would be different for a team of economic forecasters i can tell you what it would look like mathematically you want highly accurate individual forecasters whose models generate diverse predictions because when you average them you get an incredibly it's called the wisdom of the crowds so there are ways to do it i mean there are tools that we use with our clients to make this work and for what it's worth the really you know obviously slightly self-serving thing to say but i think most of the innovative organizations are thinking exactly what you've just said we need to figure out what it is that we don't know quickly have some tenuous sense so we can start plugging these blind spots right and on that point of innovation which we touched on what are the so running a business running a global business as it scaled i could see that we were getting less innovative you kind of get complacent you build teams you get you know your teams get more comfortable with how it's always been done and then just getting them to disrupt themselves becomes increasingly difficult especially when more people get involved things seem to slow down someone goes on and you'll leave and then you say you've got a new innovative idea you put it on an email thread it stumbles around the email for thread for four months nobody's incentivized to do that because they're all getting paid to do their current job and you don't typically have like an innovation team so when it's everybody's job it's nobody's job these are all probably you know and then these are then you talk about failure as well people aren't incentivized to fail in big organizations what are the parameters or the factors or the dynamics of a team that does innovate so i think i look i think that's all right and i i think it's a bandwidth issue i mean you talked about a team that's been successful thus far i mean to take the legal profession which have you know used the billable hour for a very long time have done a particular and they're busy and they're making money but i hope that it's not a particularly unique insight to say that many of these legal firms will be out of business in a decade if they don't leverage machine learning right and ai in all sorts of different ways and start to disrupt their own so you can carry on being busy whilst your equity value is about to disappear right so unless one is able to say not just we need to be doing things well for our clients and doing what we've always done effectively but we need to also be thinking about how we do things differently and better you may well be busy you may well have satisfied customers but it just takes one competitor to innovate and you're out of the game so i think that that is a good way to focus minds on sparing some bandwidth to that question of innovation so it doesn't just get dropped it's tough right because that often means a change in personnel yeah and nobody likes that idea in big organizations i think this about some of the big advertising groups like they call them the big six and the big six have been around some of them one of them in particular has been around for a hundred years doing advertising what are the big things like wpp publicis those kind of yeah and i was thinking you know in their executive teams you've got people that have been there for 20 30 years then this thing called social media comes along and they're thinking oh my god so it's not billboards anymore on tv um where does that leave me and i'm not gonna know what tick tock and snapchat are and the threat of having to replace oneself i think often and your ego often um means that you go down with the titanic yeah and you know for what it's worth you see this in in um in in many different areas so i think i don't do you admire amazon as a company admirer yeah i mean in some ways not in others yeah so they should pay more taxes yeah yeah but i mean what they've done is just staggering right but i mean i think so i think leadership counts sometimes when it comes to innovation i mean he's obviously no longer um ceo but i think if you read jeff bezos's letters to shareholders they're all about the stuff that we've been talking about experimentation unbelievable commitment um you know we talked about the meetings you know dissent and then commit um almost all of the i mean the way amazon conduct meetings you know they will as you know they'll they'll read the the agenda item in silence so that every single person is bringing an independent perspective to bear on what are the risks of this what might make it how could it be improved what might make it fail and then when they start talking the most senior person always speaks last you'll get an unvarnished access to the insights of your brilliant team rather than speaking first and everyone basically converging on what you as the leader has just said so they have a range of ways of trying to ensure they sustain but you know amazon will will probably struggle but they've done well so far and it's it's i think it's a good case study of how to how to sustain it but it's not i mean but i i've got to say honestly one of the things that i'm most interested in is you know i mentioned i'm 50. i'm totally bewildered by social media and you obviously you you inhabit right that world you know it you've got a nuanced granular understanding of the whole thing yes imagine you're me right so now what do you know i i don't know i don't i don't have the faintest idea of how to youthfully engage with the social i came to twitter late my tweets are rubbish i mean look if anyone's following me thank you but i know i'm not very good at it but i it's an alien world for me and i'm not i've never been on facebook speaking sorry so we're speaking right so what should i do how do i learn how did you learn to speak toastmasters well it's a similar thing but it isn't though because is it yeah it's i when i did my first public talk when i was 14 and i'm i always say this i was i was speaking in front of like parents evening my i'm shaking my hands are sweating so much in this paper shaking so much i realize i'm not gonna be able to read the piece of paper because it's moving too much so i just made up the speech and it's a similar thing with twitter you just said i've done my first tweet awful tweets and then you're like it sounds like you quit or you stop oh you were disappointed still there but i don't do it very much because i kind of i i say that i've probably done a few thousand tweets but i came to it late and i i still feel that if you okay let me ask you this if you had to summarize what you know yeah about the social media and and how one engages with it how one you know one wants one's articles to be read you know how would is it impossible to encapsulate that in a minute i would say so i so what i do professionally what i used to do professionally is i'd go and do these talks telling people all about social media all the tips tricks techniques algorithms all the psychology and really explaining it to them and then i'd end my talk by telling them that everything i've just told them probably won't be the case in three to six months because it changes so much and and what that therefore means is the only way to know what i know is to play with the toy as often as you can and it's and so from this is why i say to people when they come up to me and say how do i become a social media expert i say to them often like we'll name something you're interested in they'll go you know i don't know cars i'll say go make a car instagram page and run it because then it puts you in the trenches and it makes it puts you in a growth moment or so and it's just practice and it's that's all it is so if you want to become a master of this thing that's constantly changing and there's ten updates to the top um four social media apps every single week then you have to have a reason to be showing you've have that life has to be giving you a reason to show up every day and open it up and look at it and and perform these iterative uh tests which give you this feedback loop so for me the real savior for me as a social media ceo and most of the things i went on to sell to clients were learnings that i got from two places the first is um in my company i create this thing called ever changing landscape very very simple internal group everybody shares everything they know every day oh my god i've just seen tick tock have launched this new button goes into the group we then text it to all of our employees at 9 am in the morning every morning on whatsapp so and it's this constant loop of what's new what's changing our mantra as a company became keeping brands at the forefront of what's possible and what but that slogan appreciates the fact that there's a marketing director [ __ ] themselves because it's changing every day and they want to be at the forefront of what's possible but they're [ __ ] so it feels like two jigsaw pieces i'm [ __ ] myself because this thing's changing you're saying you're gonna keep me at the forefront of what's possible which is gonna make me look good to the ceo we're gonna work with social chain and the second thing that kept me at the very forefront and made me good at social media is i run my personal brand on social media which means that on linkedin instagram twitter every day i'm either tweet and i've got a team that helped me now but i'm tweeting i'm looking at the numbers doing a post looking in the comments okay that didn't go well click on the insights button loads of people seem to share this one why is that ah maybe that's because there's eight posts and okay the subtitles oh my god look at the retention number when we did subtitles yeah the retention so much higher click on the insights oh my god look so when we do that at the start of the video 80 of people fall off in the first five seconds of all of my videos so i've got to do something special in the first five seconds and it's that constant learning over 10 years then people call you as a expert it's not i just been playing with a toy longer yeah and that that i mean it's great to hear you say that because i think that's the pattern of learning in pretty much all fields every field in all aspects of life yeah i mean that's science right you're getting the iterative feedback exactly and the more granular the feedback i mean if you know that people are switching off the video after five seconds or ten seconds better than just knowing yeah that 50 dropped off over the total time so so it's the granularity and speed and objectivity of that feedback so playing with do you think that um so you may think this is a cop-out but say you're you know it is me now trying to get if you if you're a writer yeah and you obviously got a lot going on yeah in terms of coming out with the new but do you think it's outsourcing i mean obviously you can you could outsource it to a brilliant person to do you could outsource it to a brilliant person to do a lot of charlatans a lot of snakehole salesmen so it's fine how do you know what's good when you don't know what's good well that's one of the reasons well i've as it happens i have tried to do that and i've had a number of proposals there that i'll check with you okay that's what we'll do in exchange i'll help you find someone that that is actually good um that's the quid pro quo right you could have a lovely what i would say is you can learn one channel one or two channels with no matter how busy you are um and if you do learn one or two channels the impact it will have on your business your as an author as a as as a you know someone that um shares their ideas with the worlds and creates blogs is tremendous you only have to learn one or two channels better than 95 percent of people and to do that you just need to use it every other day and if i was you i'd be thinking twitter i'd be thinking it depends medium is an interesting one i'm going to give you three twitter linkedin and medium i wouldn't bother with instagram if i was you if you're a writer and you're your your the audience that you speak to with the ideas you convey linkedin twitter super easy to learn and i i know that sounds like really of course i'll say that because like but those two platforms i think will have a exponential impact on your business that's interesting so probably i i so somebody in my office handles the linkedin and and instagram but i've i've not really been on them enough and learned so this is really really really helpful do you think that social media has been a force for good in the world because it's difficult i mean i don't know if you you've been following the news on that the last week you probably have the last 48 hours but i see you know we talked a bit earlier about how we can converge with people who think the same as us and we've obviously seen that on certain types of social media where you get these echo chambers trump trump the filter bubble other things of that kind but at the same time you have access if you want it to lots of different voices and people in certain types of societies can blow whistles or things that are going wrong you know i i think the the the political consequences of the social media are among the most important of my lifetime um i obviously am not a native and you know i have a particular analysis what's your take on that so the great things to come from social media the first things that spring to mind are important ideas being shared at scale and change happening faster than it ever possibly could have so you think about key movements around lgbtq rights um you think about certain causes you think about atrocities happening in certain parts of the world having a window into those things and those ideas spreading very quickly and the consensus being arrived that quickly therefore actually been taken quickly therefore changing political change happenings at light speed i think is amazing um i think one could say being able to make some type of connection with people in faraway lands however on the adverse consequences of social media the biggest ones for me are um the the things like instagram which create which will ultimately lead you to believing that you're a piece of [ __ ] and not enough and how does it do that because everyone's life looks so good everyone's amazing um so that does happen on instagram of course yeah i mean the algorithm will show you um the prettiest people typically typically the prettiest people that have the best lives and then obviously there's this almost like black mirror-esque ranking where if i post a selfie and i'm not looking on my a-game i'll get less likes so that's like the the world's going um five by ten steve today and then i come back with the filter and i'm posing and i've done a little photoshop here and the face tune here and i come back look at my fake stuff and it was instagram oh well done and then it's incentivizing me it's you know positively reinforcing me to live a more fake more shallow more materialistic life that's so interesting and and people do you know they change their phones to look better i write about this in my book the the ceo of an app called facetune said that um facetune is basically an app that allows you to very easily without any editing skills change completely how you look you can change your skin color that make you make your face have no spots on it you can suck your face in your hips in and it it's so easy to do and um and on top of and so the ceo of that company said that he hit a gold mine and he says openly he says i it was just a gold mine the amount of downloads that app has had from young people who want to change how they look is staggering then you have this other thing now with which with these face filters where i can put a filter on and it will just clear my skin up and suck my face in just a little bit and now people you know people can't operate without them i think i'm probably guilty of it too if i can just press this button and it's going to increase my prospects of dating and i'm going to go back to the stuff if you don't tell me you're having problems getting data i mean that i can't well actually people can't see you you've been on it he's been on here oh has it he's a great guy but he was like all these that's the two sort of iconic young entrepreneurs but this thing about instagram is really really interesting really interesting so you think it is actually incentivizing people constructing there is no way it isn't if you so let me give you some more information on this so um when when they did a stack this vast report on which social platforms having the most adverse impact on young people's mental health instagram was stand out it's a visual platform which is um ranking you on how you look and the algorithm will show you the richest smart the richest most beautiful most successful people you've got the kardashians on there with 150 million followers who are literally have been in the last couple of months um been like a paparazzi person took the photo of them on the beach and then you got to see what they posted and it's they don't look the same and you've got 100 million girls following this person who is lying about the fact that they don't have cellulite and they're not a normal you know because this is these are normal things we all have you know cellulite and this and this and the rasher and spots here but that and you think about how we attribute the value of anything in our lives through contrast and in which the context in which we see it so if you put i talk about this in my book as well if you put three tvs on a wall in an electronic shop people will think the most expensive tv is too expensive and too bougie they'll think the cheapest tv is probably gonna break and not very good so typically they go for the middle one whereas if you remove them the two in which you the two next to it then they make different decisions and you've seen this with like ash's paradigm and you see it on menus and the way that we attribute the value like i would be the prettiest richest most successful person on planet earth if there was nobody else on earth because it's all a measure of comparison and instagram is a billion people measure of comparison where do i rank you've written about this in yeah yeah yeah i'll give you my book yeah yeah i'm gonna read it was it how to be a happy millionaire no it's the title is happy sexy millionaires and i'm i'm kind of trying to instagram people instagram bait people into buying the book right right right because much of buying books is virtually signaling you know you're right right so the other thing that intrigued me on the way here today was listening to the podcast where you say this is my podcast you know i'm slightly embarrassed about don't tell anyone about it whatever you do yeah you know i would never have i would never have thought of that as a way of having a handle on the part i love that absolutely loved it but it's in funny kind of way it's kind of like as a parent it's a bit like reverse psychology vegetables what getting your kids to eat vegetables yeah yeah but but you know i think the true the truth of human psychology probably you know i mean you mentioned ashley hey by the way you know on psychology and on on the global reach of twitter you talked about ash's conformity uh experiment that's that varies systematically around the world so so uh in in western countries more individualistic countries people deviate more from the herd and explain what that is because yes so um if i if you're thinking of the same experiment the lines yeah yeah so so solomon ash one of the most famous experiments in in modern psychology he um drew a number of vertical lines um uh which were of the same length and then a fifth line that was significantly different in length to the other four and then he got people to answer the question do you think these i think i've got this broadly right do you think all of these lines are of the same length and if you have people answering that on their own like 99 say the fifth line is of a different length to the other four but what ash did is he got you know 10 confederates to come in and say oh they're the same and then oh they're the same and then the third person oh yeah they're the same length and the fourth person they're the same name then when it gets to the actual subject of the experiment they're like oh my goodness if all these people think that it must be the same and so they say yeah they're all the same so they're effectively disbelieving the evidence of their own eyes in order to fit in with the crowd now that conformity bias which surprises all the people is stronger in other parts of the world than it is in in western can i just add as well on these lines when you see these lines there is no possible way that that small line is anywhere near the size of the other lines but as you say because of conformity these these participants just go along with it and it just it's just beggar's belief that that's how human psychology works but there is a good reason for it if you think about it i mean every now well is there a i mean there's a number of different theories about why it happens but one of them is that occasionally um one can get things wrong that seem obvious and if there's a lot of people who are independently saying the same thing that's very good evidence of what they're saying is true um and so humans i think that bias evolved probably to enable us to take advantage of the wisdom of the crowd but crowds if they can i mean crowds can converge on things incorrectly but not independently of it so if you imagine a stock market bubble that's one person buying another one seeing that person buying and then another person seeing those two buying and they get a bandwagon effect whereas if 10 people independently say that these two lines are different and you have no reason to believe that they're lying that's a good reason to start doubting so i think there but but you know the reason i mentioned it is there is this global systematic variation in psychology so you may have heard of uh something called the fundamental attribution error um where we tend to blame people for things that are things have gone wrong because of the situation that's much stronger in the west than it is in the rest of the world cognitive dissonance varies fundamentally even visual illusions um vary around the world and the reason i mention that is i think it's helpful for businesses to understand it but i think it actually reaches into our deep history and how human societies evolve which which is the topic of my next bible i thought you might be interested in that okay so you guys know how much i talk about huel and how much sure has changed my life and also how hewlett is the reason why much of the reason why i'm in the best shape of my life i definitely think that if i hadn't had heal ready to drink i would not be in the shape that i am and i'm stronger than i've ever been maybe two times stronger than i've ever been but what i want to talk to you about today is hughes brand new product which is just launched last week which is the hule protein and he would have never had a protein product but i was actually slightly involved in the testing of this product and it's amazing so i have pretty much all the new flavors here and my favorite flavor as always if you know me you'll know this and a lot of people send me this in my dms a salted caramel if you're looking to increase the protein intake in your diet and you're thinking about getting in great shape over the coming months which i think a lot of people are then i would highly recommend you try the salted caramel fuel protein why try that 100 calories per serving which is staggering 20 grams of protein and it's got like 26 of your minerals and vitamins that you need to function and have a healthy body it's also vegan and dairy-free it's also gluten-free no artificial colorings like a lot of protein products have and no artificial flavorings at all that is the heel way to make nutritionally complete good food for you give it a try send me your snapchats instagrams tweets whatever you do if you try it and also send me your progress because i i get so many dms now from people that are taking huel and that have seen significant changes in their life um and it fills me with joy that i get to talk about a product on this podcast every week that you guys love back to the podcast one thing i i certainly do want to talk to you about as well is how as an individual because we've talked a lot about companies um and teams how as an individual one is to reach that this is a super broad question and i hate asking broad questions because you tend to get broad answers but how has an individual one could reach their potential or what what are some of the fundamental things that block people from reaching their potential we've talked about a fear of failure um we've also touched on the idea that people don't start because of that fear of failure and they don't get the feedback loops but what are the other common sort of threads that you see in the reason why people never get near their potential in life so so in addition to those things so fixed mindset fear of failure risk adversely all the things we've addressed the other thing i think is i've become more interested in it's related to what we've said but i think it's different is is what you might call initiative or agency or proactivity i remember having an idea this is in the 1970s early 1980s i was going to table tennis competitions and carrying this very heavy bag blue holdall ascot hodl and thinking my goodness this is really doing my backing and it was just retrospectively obvious that the solution to a problem that many people had who are traveling a lot is to put wheels on luggage right wheeled suitcases which we all have now but having the idea doesn't mean a thing you've actually got to act on that idea right you've got to say right i'm going to try and design something i'm going to try and sell it to a department store i'm going to try and market it i'm going to try and buy a shop i'm going to have to pay rent i have to go to the bank and get some debt that is a there is a massive difference between a dormant passive idea and one that you act upon another example i lived on richmond on a road in richmond when i first moved there in my mid-20s and it had no off street parking what i didn't realize is that enrichment parking is a nightmare because all the houses have less parking spaces than there are sorry there are more there are less parking spaces and there are houses and so people park on the street and then they get taken up but you end up having to park 10 minutes away a few doors down i notice at the top of the road there's a house with a parking space that is always empty i thought to myself i should knock on the door or i should write them a note and so i'm willing to pay rent or to buy it from you but i never got around to doing it and then a few years later i was at a house party and this person said i used to live on montague oh really that's interesting i lived there too he said yeah i had the house at the time i said what with the parking space he said yeah what i never understood is that no one ever came and asked whether they could rent it and i thought that idea was in my head and i never acted on it why because there is a there's a fundamental inertia in a lot of us between you know it's easy to have an idea it takes a bit of you know i remember when i was injured in table tennis and you know i wasn't practicing i wasn't doing anything and i sat at home you know just posting the letter felt like an unbelievably tough thing to do you have to go all the way to the post office by a stamp you know oh man it was like i'm struggling you know this this the psychologist i've got interested in recently is a guy called michael fraser he's a german really interesting guy and he looked at the unification of germany right after the fall of the berlin wall and you know the west german business like this is fantastic we're gonna have this pool of really keen workers and it just didn't work out because the east german um generalizing a little but the east german workers had worked in in a communist system where all the decisions are taken by the party bosses and so if a machine broke down instead of taking action to fix it they would just wait for the boss person to come along and fix it for them if they needed the telephone number they would wait and they wouldn't act on it and i think that being able to richard branson you probably know i mean i got to know little you know he talked about how i mean i think this is probably well he this is the way he tells it you know virgin atlantic he he was flying to the british virgin islands uh to meet his girlfriend uh he has a stopover in miami uh they're bumped off the flight they delay it to the next day and everyone sat there going this this is a disaster then he thought well hang on a second i could charter a private plane which were which were in the airport so he took the initiative probably a few people had that idea what about chartering a private plane but he actually picked up the phone and said right how much will it cost to charter a plane you know ten thousand dollars he then went around to all the people with a blackboard saying version you know flight this is the amount per ticket some people bought it they managed to take the flight and then when he got home he rented a boeing and and went from there and i think that proactivity is absolutely critical you go to school for all those years you get to 16. but what about going out there and you're about to take a decision about what your future career will be you know in my day when you came out university some people would be in the same career for life and you take that decision without going in asking people what was it like in this job could i perhaps work for a day in this job a lot of people i went to university with took jobs without any of that proactive analysis of what it would be like now you as an entrepreneur have this in spades i want more entrepreneurship in schools i want proactivity instead of learning business studies concepts this is another experiment by michael fraser instead of people doing an mba he gave them a short course on converting ideas into action he calls it the action cycle those entrepreneurs compared to a control group uh you know had you know 25 i can't remember the exact amount but five times more successful businesses or twenty percent higher profits it was uh published in science magazine so you know i think that's a really really big deal that's a mindset i just can't get over this idea that you saw that that car parking space and you know you didn't you didn't knock on or send a letter and i'm trying to understand linked also to um what you then talked about with richard branson at that airport with the with the blackboard going around and trying to sell this airline that he'd just come up with what is the mental like cultural mental psychological difference between the people that sat there and thought i'm just going to accept this situation as is like you did with the driveway or like the other passengers who had just been cancelled did and the person that takes the initiative what is it about them and what is blocking i guess the better question is what is blocking those that are sat there on the airport floor thinking [ __ ] i'm my life is over um or i can't find a car parking space what is blocking them and is it this is my hypothesis there's some kind of mental equation we're all doing very very quickly that's weighing up the effort it would take and also our perceived outcome of success our perceived chance of success in endeavor um and and coming to the conclusion that it's just not worth it or possible i don't think that's what i i i would reject that hypothesis i don't think people make a rational calculation i think it's more habit once you're used to doing things once if you've been at a school where and some people are lucky enough to go to school where you are encouraged to to make things happen to you know some schools you know they are actually asked to start a business to pick up the phone to to um to engage with other people as they seek to do something you begin to it becomes a habit the idea of writing a letter and dropping it's like no big deal that isn't a barrier for me it becomes a it becomes second nature i can tell you from this parking space i was you know i was just in a it was just pure inertia i hadn't learned that entrepreneurial mindset i did i mean that took me a long time to learn as well and you think i'm just thinking about how i would teach someone to take be proactive i i so for i i've thought a lot about this too and i i i think you get people to do it so what fraser does in his courses he keeps linking ideas to action you're not allowed to have an idea without acting upon it he calls it the uh the active ingredient so you get into a habit of so so one uh uh uh one of the entrepreneurs so so he's done these experiments in europe and in africa um but in one of i mean he tells great stories about it but it's such a long time since i read the papers um so i think habit doing it again and again and again you begin to get into the routine of linking ideas to action i i honestly i think we shouldn't underestimate how damaging it can be if we if we just continue to go with the flow and we're not prepared to to break it from time to time then you're kind of just a puppet to the course of life i guess in some respects right and i think uh yeah i think there are a lot of people with truly brilliant ideas huge potential who never act on their dreams you had the dream but think about your dream that would remain dormant in your head had you not acted these are distinct phenomena the idea and the action you can have ideas and dreams without acting on them i just my yeah so i get a lot of dms from people you can imagine the dm's are i've got a great idea and you know that 99 of people you speak to are never going to do anything about it because right the the hardest part is is doing it's just day one it's like think of the name of the company but they they just well i call them sofapreneurs they have the idea on the sofa it never makes it a part of the sofa and that's like 99 of people and i i wonder what the barrier is between like starting i i sometimes hypothesize that it's because of this culture of perfectionism and this culture of needing to start at a perfect point with all the resources all the knowledge all the contacts the right team which is not the case i mean if you look at how ben francis started his business where i started mine it's googling on a computer how do you build a website and doing that for three months um but i but i always i always wonder i think we could we would we would unlock so much potential if we were able to get people just to the starting blocks and we can't they're all on their sofas yeah and and yeah i i yeah i you describe it brilliantly um a couple of things that might be worth throwing in there's a guy called mike barton he was chief constable of of durham police and he kept getting rated the highest by the independent inspector of the constabulary and i remember i was really intrigued by this so i i talked to him and met him and he said that if he could he would ask every wannabe police officer to take one year off to start a business and for it to fail or to succeed just so they started learning using their own initiative because that is what great policing is about um stanley mcchrystal stanley mcchrystal was the head of the task force in iraq after the invasion that were trying to quell the insurgency of al-qaeda and at the time it was a real you know it's a top-down model people at the bottom were passive if they wanted to get anything done they had to go up the chain of command get sign off and it would go back down so lacking agility and not really using their brains and he pushed authority down the chain of command people could do they could as it were initiate action against al-qaeda targets if they thought it was sensible to do so and it had a big big effect on the success of the army the number of operations but also the percentage of successful operations so i think that you know i think there's a lot of different people who are who are working along the lines that we're talking about right now but for me education is a key and i'd like to see more work done in schools to really equip young people with this active ingredient you've written i think we said six books right six books now um they they center around topics like high performance and mindset and and the like um what's the biggest thing that you're a contradiction on in terms of what you can write about and know and and profess to the world but then you struggle with in your personal life to implement that's a great question that's a great question i've never been asked that before so one of the things i'm thinking so so i i you know write newspaper columns all right sports column for the times and the political column for the sunday times right and and i think one thing that i try to do is read other people who disagree with me because that's a really useful thing because either you really understand why you think they're wrong or you realize there's a weakness in your own argument but now i think about i think the last fortnight i haven't i haven't been doing that enough so i must remember that as a discipline to to constantly read those sources that i know are going to be different i've got a question for you by the way so this is another one that i'm thinking about a lot um what do you what did what's your view of the word woke so if you're if you're my age that you know people what your cancer culture yeah um is that a good thing or about which which which part so i mean i was actually funnily enough i was listening to pierce morgan um talk about the word woke last night oh yeah it was like a 16 minutes australia interview and i don't know why it just came up in my i watched 60 minutes australia because i'm in the algorithm so i'm in the echo chamber so it's serving it to me every day and he's done an interview in the last 24 hours regarding meghan markle and explaining you know he's being a bit of a crusader now saying i was cancelled for standing up for my opinions he's like really going for it now um and so i don't really want to get in the definitions because then people are just gonna but so cancer culture i think is a bad thing because i think i mean we saw one yesterday where the qriket player who said some very you know racist things 10 years ago when he was a teenager has now been suspended from the england cricket team 10 years later he said a couple of things you know about you know he said something yeah i don't want to repeat that because someone's going to click on the daily that's my column is that what you're writing about yeah i mean i it's racist i'm a person of color and i think it's ridiculous that he was cancelled yeah he said some stupid jokes some stupid slightly racist jokes 10 years ago are we really going to create a culture where we're going to rid him of his livelihood for some stupid tweets when he was a teenager because i tell you what i don't know a single human being that's not cracked a slightly inappropriate either slash partly racist joke in their lifetime and this idea that publicly we're all angels perfect angels who are here to judge others to the same standard of false perfection that we portray is just like deeply toxic and then also we're now on the on the idea of like free speech we're now stopping the best ideas because we're judging them based on whether they fit or not and this is again we talked about divergent thinking and thinking having more diverse thoughts and accepting them and welcoming them and interrogating them for their merit not whether they fit i think is is awful and my last point again is um there's been a couple of moments black lives matter some other issues where i've my opinion has been in neither camp and i you it's just you know totally unacceptable because i would so black lives matter issue i did a post you know the narrative was if you don't speak out then you're a racist silence is violence and after um george floyd was was tragically murdered i did a post saying listen people process traumatic events in various different ways some just going to social media and posting about it isn't actually a very human way to process trauma so if someone isn't speaking it doesn't make them a racist and also you know and and and the problem with the thinking there is people will look at your opinion and say he's not wearing our football kit he must be one of them and because he's not wearing our football kit the socks the shoes the shorts the shirt he must therefore believe all of the things that the right believe and they put you and it's so binary you there's no appreciation or space for nuance it's not the way to get to the best ideas right look i i i'm really glad to hear you say all that i agree with everything you said and i'll add one other thing so i concur with all of those three points i think they're very powerful um the other thing i'm from a half pakistani half wealth background you know so i've had the p word a lot in the 70s and 80s and i'm sensitive to to racial discrimination i saw my father not get from a brilliantly talented person not get promoted because of its color um and that you know it leaves a real scar on someone growing up the other thing is i think it's a complete absence of an analysis of how to improve the lives of people from ethnic minorities um cancelling somebody who sent a tweet nine years ago in their formative years it is almost like a fig leaf for true action civil rights movement was a great thing in america in my opinion martin luther king the civil rights act the voting rights act but i think we have to acknowledge that it hasn't achieved many of its most basic objectives if you look at the number of black people in prison the education gap the income and wealth gaps i think there's a real empirical question about what we do and it's not going to help those massively important demographic statistics yeah to cancel somebody and it's it's almost like it's a it's a it's a surrender when we should be doing things that can have a tangible effect this is what my my post said it was nine slides long or nine tweet threads and the conclusive point was i'm going to be black forever so if you want to help me and my my future kids and my kids kids a black tile on instagram or a hashtag doesn't actually address the problem canceling someone telling organizations they need to donate doesn't actually help the problem if you really cared if your care was genuine and not survival oriented or virtue signaling orientated you'd probably be thinking about systemic issues and you can't capture or you know or you'd be reading or educating yourself which are all things that won't take place in the public forum so go at the systemic stuff or you know educate yourself that that to me feels like a more genuine way to change things yeah hashtags black tiles canceling does it just seems like you're ephemera you care more about yourself right um it's kind of not it's a kind of uh it's a kind of narcissism i think or at its worst it can be that yeah the people react to that post do you know what on that particular one everyone agreed and that's crazy because no one was saying it and it's like it because i'm a black guy it was like i gave them space to disagree so it was actually on instagram it did 600 000 likes wow which is a lot of likes right it did hundreds and hundreds of thousands of records it's one of my best i think one of my best performing posts ever and it was funny because you had like i don't know three black people in my in the comments section being like yeah yeah i meant to be like angry at me but then when i'd asked them i'd say which one of these um the slides do you disagree with and tell me the sentence you disagree with you can't find something you disagree with in the post it's the sentiment that this is not the party line yeah by the way one other thing the wisdom um the cricket magazine wisdom.com have managed to find a post from an england player that was controversial i think racist or or misogynistic but before they were 16 years of age so they haven't published the name yet but can you imagine if that person was suspended for for something they said when they were effectively a child because we we talked about failure if anyone who aspires to the england cricket team never says anything publicly never writes a school essay that might come back to haunt them you know you never the way we learn is by saying things and then being challenged you don't lose all of that if you basically just either toe the party line or say nothing at all that's a that would be a catastrophe for a dynamic liberal society imagine that all the progress that would have been lost right had people not stepped outside of a party line and instead you know stood on top of podiums and made speeches that people disagreed with and got them stoned and shot and i mean that's where most progress seems to come from it seems to come from an outlier well that's right and and you know i mean it might sound old-fashioned to say this but you know jon stewart mill um locke the founding fathers in the united states what used to be called the western miracle you know the fact that economic growth was was very close to zero percent for the first two million years of uh the species to which we belong right i mean it was very very tiny throughout our history you know somebody who was born in if 2000 years ago and somebody was born 1500 years ago would have seen very little change in society and then economic growth started taking off in the 18th century and now obviously it's doubled and trebled and quadrupled and we expect growth to be two to three percent a year and if it's if we have two consecutive quarters of negative growth we call it a recession one of the reasons that happened is because of exactly what you say people were freed from the constraints of the party line you could say something that for example the religious authorities didn't approve of that the sun is the center of the solar system not the earth you can test hypotheses you can say the world is older than 6 000 years you start to adapt your understanding of the world that's science that's technology and i think the more construct you know now free speech doesn't seem fashionable these days but those ideas in addition by the way to things like due process the thing that has made me trend the only time i think i've ever trended on twitter is when i defended due pro so the idea that in order to be punished for something you have to have had some kind of an independent process some independent tribunal to establish having listened to different sides of the argument whether the crime had taken place now that again is something that takes societies a long time to create a an independent rule of law you know judiciary that's in and and people were like that's outrageous because i was defending somebody who had been accused of a racist remark and i said yeah racism is wrong but let's wait for the process before this person is sacked the implication was i was defending racism itself but that is not the same thing but i worry a bit that we're losing that uh that distinction i think there's certain people fighting back yeah yeah and that'll be maybe it'll swing back the other way yeah i hope so i i i would hope so too um self-belief i'm very intrigued as to um you know some certain people in our society are more self-believing than others um you see differences in um genders and races and and backgrounds and i think a lot of people in my dms i'm and this is where the question comes from i have so many young kids in my my dms that are struggling with um confidence or lacking self-belief and i wondered if you had any words of wisdom for those in my dms that can't find confidence and self-belief i think for what it's worth that self-belief self-esteem other things of that kind of overrated um and the reason goes back to something we said earlier i mean there was a movement in the 70s and 80s in western education to build self-esteem in young people and the way to do it was to let them succeed all the time right so you won't remember this but it would you give them easy tests get them to pass and give them lots of and then praise them for how super talented they were they get all this self-esteem and they can change the world people were so worried about undermining self-esteem that there were no losers in sports days at some schools i don't know if you have you heard of this everyone's a winner yeah everyone gets a sticker and that was all about building it was called the self-esteem movement right but it failed and the reason it failed is because people would keep succeeding and you know they'd get all this self-esteem and then then they'd be given a difficult test right or they would leave school and they'd actually hit the real world where they would fail and what happened all the walls of their world would come crumbling down oh my goodness i've never felt before right self-esteem that is frag and people would protect their self-esteem by not trying new things right and and that's a disaster self-esteem can be very fragile i i like to talk much more about resilience we want people we i want my children to be resilient to try new things to mess up but not to be devastated by it and that i think is a much better quality now it may be that when people are talking about confidence what they really mean is resilience i want to be able to walk into a room give it my best shot things don't go slightly wrong i'm going to carry on regardless every person who's a success has had some really tough difficult moments and i just think that's an inevitable part of learning how do we build resilience in ourselves growth mindset is very strongly related to it so instead of um you know for parents out there i don't you probably have a very young audience i'm showing myself but but uh the parents out there it's very easy to praise young people for their talent you're super they've just drawn a picture you're super talented you're the next picasso you think they're going to develop all this self-esteem the problem as i've said is that you know the moment they draw something that isn't picasso as soon as they get negative criticism oh my goodness i'm no picasso after all um much better thing to do is to praise them for the effort or the process well i love the way that picture that the colors fit together they think oh right if i want to develop as a painter i have to make the colors fit together in a more sophisticated way you're aligning their mind and motivation with the journey they need to take to fulfill their potential so it's good experiments praising for effort praising for process is a much more um positive thing than praising for talent and fixed attributes it's interesting because in my company i came to learn that um the most effective way to get my teams to innovate was to praise them for the effort and the process as opposed to the outcome because if it became about the outcome the successful failure of the experiment then um which is largely actually outside of their control right when you're doing so if i say to my team right we're going to build this website and we think it's going to do this whether it does that or not whether this product market fit whether it's a success or a failure isn't actually in their control the bit they can control is starting doing it and the process of getting to the point where we press go live and so we what i learned in the last year of my business was we would celebrate the um conducting the experiment not the outcome of the experiment exactly right actually that is exactly the same thing and it's interesting that if you look at r d you know um have you had a six sigma yes yeah so so one of the things i mean one of the big massive i mean six sigma is a great process you know like lean manufacturing or um uh uh your toilet pro things of that kind it's basically squeezing out variation isn't it so if you imagine making a car or you know manufacturing car all it takes is one component in the engine to be of the wrong size or specification and the whole thing won't work so six sigma is about delivering and executing with no variation but when you're innovating you need variation you need to try new things if you're trying to create a new computer program a new website or a new drug and you don't know which combination of ingredients they're going to create it you need to try lots of combinations if you penalize people for failure oh my god and you're only judging them on the outcome and it fails and then they're like stigmatized they will never try you need you know that's where failed fast car yeah you've nailed it that's exactly the insight that i think is is is important and i guess the last thing i want to talk to you about is leadership um and how to how one can become a better leader in whatever field of life you're you're in whether it's sports or whether it's business like me um what are the attributes of successful leaders well i i think um i think it's a very difficult job leadership yeah of course it's extremely difficult i don't know if you'd agree with this but i do think even in a psychologically safe you know where people can speak up a leader still needs to make the decision i think it it can often lead to confusion over who's in charge if it's a completely democratic organization oh god yeah you need leadership so i believe my own view based on evidence is that you need social hierarchies in order for organizations institutions and societies to succeed but you want those hierarchies to work so leadership i don't think you can outsource it you need to make judgments you need to take ownership of those judgments but i think if i had to say one thing okay i'll give you my and this is based on knowing a lot of like you know many many leaders in lots of different contexts over a long period of time i think the best leaders have a hybrid approach to leadership okay and what i mean by that is when you're evaluating what we should do next you need to be humble you need to encourage different ideas and you need not to be threatened when people dissent because that encourages people to speak up but when you've made a decision and you've found the destination and you're going for it i think you need to then have confidence and you know you need to galvanize that's where charisma comes to the fore when you articulate the mission because at that point having different ideas you know you're already on the way that can often be quite disrupt i mean obviously you do need to change the trajectory if you know something but i think that and funny enough in sport you see so humility and evaluation confidence and execution it's the same in sport so if you imagine you're a surgeon or or in surgery if if you're humble at the time you wield the scalpel this might go wrong i don't know everything you know your hand's gonna be if you're tiger woods on the 18th you want to be absolutely confident when you take the pup execution but then if the surgeon says i'm a genius i'm brilliant you know i'm confident i don't need to learn they'll never evaluate what happened and therefore won't improve i'll tell you what made me think i want some ghosted david it's like a fixed mindset right complacency creeps in and you two say that again we're talking about the surgeon that's sure there right and it's the fixed mindset analogy you made right and then complacency creeps in it's a disaster because what you want to do after a surgical procedure is review it in a completely honest way so you can find out things that you did wrong and could improve but if you have utter self-confidence i don't need to improve that's exactly as you say a fixed mindset response you don't improve through time beckham i ghosted his autobiography a few years ago and he told me about when he took the free kick against greece how old are you by the way 28 so you won't even you won't remember this i remember i would never forget two it was the world cup qualifiers and he ran to the left corner i'll never forget that's right that's right so his extra time he needed a score to get through and teddy's sharing him trying to take the ball and you see on the video beckham snapped and he said when i took that freak i was a hundred percent i was going to make it that's a useful thing to have right but you meet beckham away on the training pitch the humility i need to improve the way i take free kicks i need to look at the things that went wrong in the previous game i need to just see that so leaders need to be both humble and confident depending on where they are on the performance side when they're out there executing confidence when they're evaluating reviewing humility i think most of the best leaders have it you know sachin adela at microsoft is a great example of that humble you know their market cap has grown over a trillion dollars since he took over you know very humble person i've met him a number of times great great person but there is confidence when he's galvanizing his team towards a decision that they've debated and discussed i think that's so true i was just running through all the great leaders that i know and those um those attributes seem to be there even you know a good example is sir alex ferguson ria ferdinand sat in the chair and he told me that sir alex ferguson is obviously known for the hairdryer and being very clear on what he wants but then if so ria went to sir alex ferguson after a game and said you know you didn't support my brother anton got racially abused and then rio wore a shirt in protest of it alex sir alex ferguson was really angry rio went to him after the game and had a chat with him and alex alex admitted he was wrong yeah and held his hands up and i somehow managed to make it up to rio within a couple of words but you know that's that's right that's exactly right that's but it goes with with ferguson he always hired constantly you know assistant managers who challenged his perspective you know uh carlos quiroz mike phelan mullenstein mclaren he also would often do competitions for his players to guess who would be in the opposition team he would go to other clubs and watch the way they trained ferguson came from from govan from a very working-class background he never lost his capacity to learn never and he was always had a certain level of humility but once they were out there and performing he was incredibly self-confident and i don't think that's a contradiction interesting it makes me kind of reflecting then on how important it is to be curious throughout your life even when new technology like social media pops up and you you're a little bit disoriented by it and i see that in really great successful leaders that i know in my life business owners ceos the ones that are the most curious um tend to have the best long-term outcomes and longevity and i think it's hard to teach curiosity um i do i do wonder myself because obviously i made my money off social media and even now i'm getting too old for that are you still working in the business no i'm not working in the business anymore now i've resigned at the end of last year so now i'm a free agent working on a new business but in a similar industry slightly different um much bigger ambition um i guess and i'm working across multiple industries so i'm like working in a psychedelics biotech firm that's about to list for you know several billion dollars i'm working huel i'm on the board there and work with that team i'm working in a variety of different companies all around the world that are in mental health consumer goods social media um you know and i think i've done that as well because i as i talk about my book i want to like resist my labels i want to stay curious i want to stay emerged in worlds that i don't know i'm working on a blockchain company at the moment which is web 3.0 using ethereum and smart contracts and it's my i like being diverse in my thinking because i actually think that's where creativity comes from in a weird way and the one of the things that enables me to have this podcast is i have a very diverse view of the world and a very diverse view of organizations and people and that will make me good at it sounds like a crazy thing to say like we're putting on a theatrical show in manchester sold out it's like this it's called the diversio live there's a big choir all this all these really amazing things and when i look at that show what it is it's a culmination it's a very very different show but it's a culmination of all these random experiences i had in my life going to the theater for the first time listening to a choir watching kanye west um a light show i saw and all of these little things and so i think you know i mean you you write about it you talk about diversity of ideas i'm going to send you a copy so my latest book well a couple years ago now was called the power of rebel idea is a power of diverse thinking i'm going to send you a copy i want to have a copy of your book i'm going to read it i'm going to read it this week oh wow that's fast well how many words is it is it very long no no no no 17 000. 70. no no 55 000 yeah yeah okay it's interesting you'll be particularly intrigued by i think by the first couple of chapters which focus on social media the world we're living in keeping up with kardashians generation et cetera et cetera well i've got to say uh you know i know we're coming to another you are you're exceptionally articulate oh that's a huge compliment so i i kind of you know i uh i'm interested in that because i think um you know i definitely didn't have that when i was at school i wasn't able really to put sentences together you should do a podcast you just have the most amazing voice i've got to tell you my brother found an old tape of me being interviewed as a 15 year old [Music] when i got selected for a national team i just really start i think we need more of that learning how to you know communication is so important getting our ideas across so that somebody can understand not just what we say but what we mean yeah and i think that's a i think that's a radically learnable skill you know a lot of the top speakers have practiced it youtube aside it's one that's in decline because of screens typing well yeah that's true yeah yeah yeah you have to talk to each other anymore yeah zoom anyway listen thank you so much for your time it's been such a pleasure to to meet you you're you're i mean you're an individual that's had such a tremendous impact on the thinking especially of people in the professional but also self-development world i remember reading your book a long time ago on a plane bounce and how intrigued i was by um the emphasis you put on this growth mindset and practice and being teachable and your your your where you are in life not being set in stone if you're willing to put in the work and practice and um yeah i mean my team here are also huge fans of yours matt over there's read all your books and he he'll read them in 24 hours this is this guy's a monster thank you and good luck with it i'm going to follow you with huge interest from from now on and uh you're about to hit the main stream aren't you dragonstone hasn't been brought yeah good luck thank you [Music] foreign

Channel: The Diary Of A CEO

Views: 240,076

Keywords: The Diary Of A CEO, the diary of a CEO podcast, CEO, podcasts about life, podcasts about life lessons, matthew syed, how to be successful, mental health podcasts free, how to be successful in college, growth mindset for students, growth mindset, matthew syed podcast, matthew syed table tennis, matthew syed bounce, matthew syed rebel ideas, matthew syed you are awesome, matthew syed interview, World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed

Id: OqLAZuie06U

Length: 102min 13sec (6133 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 14 2021