The power comes when you get to roll up those numbers and see in black and white, like how much time did I really spend in the last quarter doing email?
And you you know, you got.
To look yourself in the mirror at that point and say, ten years from now, do I want to be the person who spent one thousand hours doing email?
Welcome to How I Work, a show about the tactics used by the world's most successful people to get so much out of their day. I'm your host, doctor Amantha Imba. I'm an organizational psychologist, the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium, and I'm obsessed with finding ways to optimize my work day. Today's show is a best of episode of How I Work, where I go back through the archives and I've picked
out one of my favorite episodes from this year. But before we get into that, just a couple of little housekeeping things. Firstly, I'm always keen to get listener questions, and I'm going to be doing a few episodes that are all based around questions that are on your mind about productivity and work and maybe even the future of
work in this crazy world that we're in. So if you've got something on your mind that you'd like me to answer or dig into research around, send me a note at Amantha at Inventium dot com dot au and my email is always in the show notes as well. And if you're enjoying How I Work, why not share the love and tell other people about it. It's one of the ways that this podcast has grown so much in the last couple of years. So thank you to everyone that does talk about How I Work. It's hugely appreciated.
And also thank you to the hundreds of people that have left reviews for How I Work. It's so lovely getting your feedback. So thank you. All right, let's get on to today's show and on this best of episode, I am so excited to have Dan Heath on the show, so if you haven't come across Dwan Heath. Dan is the co author, along with his brother Chip, of four New York Times bestsellers, which are Decisive, Switch, Made to
Stick and the Power of Moments. The Heath Brothers books have sold over three million copies worldwide and have been translated into thirty three languages. Dan is a senior fellow at Duke University's Case Center, which supports social entrepreneurs and The book that he released this year in twenty twenty was an amazing book called Upstream, which is all about solving problems before they actually happen. So we took about
a bunch of different strategies in this book. We certainly delve into some strategies around solving problems before they happen, and things like how Dan overcame his procrastination tendencies and how he has become such an awesome writer. I just love this chat with Dan. I hope you will too, So on that note, let's head to Dan to hear about how he works. Dan. Welcome to the show.
Hey, thanks so much, thanks for having me on.
I must say I feel quite starstruck talking to you because I've read all of your books, and I must say Decisive in the Power of Moments would make it into my top ten business books list of all times. So you've just had an enormously huge impact on me and how I think.
So thank you so much. I appreciate that.
And I've just finished reading Upstream, which is obviously your latest book, and I think before we delve into that, it'd be great to just hear from you. What's the premise behind Upstream?
The premise of upstream is very simple. Actually, it's the realization that so many of us in life get caught in this cycle of reaction. You know, we're constantly reacting to problems and putting out fires and responding to emergencies, and we can actually live a long time that way. It becomes an almost self perpetuating cycle because the energy that we need to put out all these fires is precisely the energy that we would have needed to pause
and solve some of these at the systems level. And so upstream is about the idea, can we learn to escape the cycle of reaction and began to stop problems before they happen. And that's what I mean by that word upstream. That's so often we're downstream and reaction mode, when we have the ability, if we seize it, to move upstream and prevent things.
I must say it's already started influencing my thinking about just how I think about problems at work. And I know how we got connected was actually through the book. And you use an example of how I tried to solve a problem at my work probably going back about five years ago in relation to what you call the Cobbra effects. So at Inventium, the innovation consultancy that I founded quite a few years ago. Now, we were in the process of moving office and I wanted to create
this beautiful open plan environment. We basically got this warehouse shell, so it was ours to do what we want with the design. And you know, it's this beautiful kind of four meter twelve foot ceilings, lots of natural light. We got these two big custom made wooden tables where we all sit around. It's all very communal, and I thought, won't that be great for collaboration and you know, working together, because after all, we're an innovation agency, so that's kind
of what we do. And it turned out to be an absolutely terrible decision, like the open plan office is impossible to get any work done. And then, funnily enough, in I think I was in twenty eighteen, some researchers from Harvard published some research which which I came across, which talk about how face to face collaboration actually decreases quite substantially by about seventy something percent in open plan environments, yet digital communication so emails and instant messenger, increases by
about the same amount. And I kind of thought, ah, yes, that is exactly what has happened here, and then as a result, the problem that we now have is that most days most people choose to work from anywhere but the office when they're trying to do deep focused work. So I'm curious, like, what your reaction was where when you came across this story of mine, and how we can use that to I guess, improve our ability to go upstream.
Well, the reason I was so struck by your story and included in the book is because it kind of relates to one of my own greatest surprises in researching this book. And I'll admit when I first started researching upstream, my mental model was I'm going to go out and find people who are really good at preventing problems, and
I'm going to shine a spotlight on their work. And my mental model was, Hey, once people see that this is possible, we're all going to say, you know, we're idiots to be stuck in reaction mode all the time. Of course, so we should be doing this. Look at how easy it is. And when I got into the research, what surprised me was, yes, there were people who were succeeding.
I talk about a lot of them in the book.
But there are also a lot of people that were trying and failing to prevent problems. And so as I got deeper, I came to respect that. While I still remain a firm advocate that we need to shift our attention upstream, it's incredibly difficult for a variety of reasons that I talk about in the book and that we can talk about here live. It's hard to do systems thinking. It's hard to get ahead of problems and to reverse
engineer them. And in your situation, it's a classic example where you know your goal is to do something upstream. You want to increase collaboration among your staffers, and so you're thinking.
Well, how do I do that?
How do I design an environment where people we'll talk more? And you came to the obvious conclusion, Well, if we have an open office floorplan, people will be closer together, there'll be no barriers with them. It won't be a nineteen fifty style cubicle environment. Of course, they'll talk more.
And a lot of other fortune five hundred companies had exactly the same instinct that you did, and it all made perfect sense until you get in that environment and you realize, oh gosh, there's all these counter dynamics where it's just like being on an airplane. It's not that going on an airplane means we're more likely to talk
to the people next to us. It's probably the opposite that going on an airplane and being trapped against people that close to us in physical proximity makes us want to put on our headphones or give them a really impassive look that deters them from trying to talk to us. And so that to me is a kind of system a symbol rather of what's complicated about systems thinking and why it can be so difficult to accomplish our good intentions.
And so I came to appreciate the fact that while while good intentions are necessary and why we need this upstream instinct, we also need to kind of be aware what we're up against. And I think in your situation and a lot of others, maybe one possible moral of the story is that our intuition is never going to be good enough to help us guess what the right answer is, no matter how obvious it seems. And in your shoes, I would have thought exactly the same thing.
If I had to put down money on a study, will an open office floor plan increase communication. Of course I'm betting on that. I mean, it's just basic sociology. But in this case, there were dynamics we couldn't foresee, and maybe the only way to have foreseen them was to figure out some way to experiment with it in advance. So I'm curious whether whether you take the same moral away or whether you think about it differently on and.
The irony is, we experiment on everything, and we teach experimentation to our clients. It's such a fundamental part of what we do and how we think. And it's interesting. I've recently just launched this year long project called My Year of Better, which is basically, every week, I'm going to try a different experiment on some strategy that is meant to make life better. Experimentation is so fundamental to
what we do. But gosh, this was five years ago and experimentation was probably slightly less a focus of what we do. So I mean, now one hundred percent would move straight to experimentation. Something that always strikes me about your books, and I was particularly interested in this decision for Upstream is the language that you use and the
labels that you give to things. I find it's always so precise and unique and sticky, which is kind of not surprising given that you wrote the book on stickiness,
Made to Stick. And I want to know in the case of Upstream, because for me, and I think for most people reading it, like when you get into it, you kind of go, of course, it has to be called upstream, but I think when you start researching that concept, it's not necessarily the obvious title, and you talk about how you know you deliberately didn't call it something around prevention or proactivity. And I want to know, like, what's your process in thinking of like the firstly, the title
of a book. I'm always so curious about that, and I think that the titles of all your books are just brilliant, but also then the labels that you give to things within the book. So I'd love to know a bit more about your process and perhaps for Upstream, how did you come to arriving at that for the title?
Yeah, good question. Let me take that in two parts.
I'm realizing even as we're talking, I've been throwing around this word upstream left and right, and I should probably give people some context for what is this word and where did it come from? And the origin is from a parable that's become well known in public health. It's originally attributed to a sociologist named Irving Zola, and it goes like this.
So you and a friend.
Are having a picnic by the side of a river, and just as you've laid out your food and you're getting comfortable, you hear a shout behind you from the river and you look back and there's a child and the river drowning, I mean, thrashing about, and so you and your friend just instinctively dive in, grab the child, bring them to shore, and just as you're adrenaline level so they're starting to subside, you hear another shout and you look back and there's another child in the river.
So you dive back in save that child. And no sooner have you gotten them to the shore, that you hear two more shouts. There are two children in the river now, And so begins a kind of revolving door of life saving. And you're gradually getting weary and you're not sure you can keep up with the demand. And then you notice your friend swimming towards shore and stepping out as if to leave you alone, and you say, hey,
where are you going, I can't do this alone. All these kids are drowning, and your friend says, well, I'm going to go upstream and tackle the guy that's thrown all these kids in the river. And that's kind of the perfect symbol of what this book is about. That we come to accept our downstream position. We take it for granted that our job is to keep fishing drowning kids out of the river, and we never make the space or reach the conclusion that we could have prevented
that from happening. Now to your question about the terminology, I mean, I will admit, as an author, you know, titling a book something like Upstream, which ninety nine out of one hundred people couldn't define other than in the kind of literal sense of it. You know, my publisher was worried some people would think this was a fishing book or something. It's terrifying, you know, to name something upstream, But it was so central to the book that I
thought it was worth the gamble, honestly. And the reason why I chose Upstream over something like prevention because in many ways this is a book about prevention, and in a way I'm trying to kind of sex up the very idea of prevention, which which has these kind of worrying, nannyish overtones to it that I think are completely wrong. But one reason I appreciate it upstream as distinct from something like being proactive or being preventive, is because of
the stream metaphor. And what I like about it is the way that it suggests to us that upstream is a direction. You know, in the parable there are two locations, there's downstream and there's upstream. But in the book, what I explain is is upstream is actually just a never ending spectrum. And I give an example of a specific problem. My parents had their home broken in two years ago, and I.
Talk about how.
Could you could have prevented that break in on radically different time scales, you know, from seconds before, if there had been a piercing loud alarm that would have triggered when the burglars kicked down the door, maybe that would have prevented it all the way through hours, through days,
through months, through years, even decades before. I talk about the research of this guy named Richard Trimblay who suggests that the best time to prevent crime is by intervening with the pregnant mothers who are carrying the future quote
unquote criminals. And what he means is that many of the things that especially high risk mothers have to contend with poor environmental conditions, poor nutrition, damaging relationships, depression, and more, many of those things which are associated with the aggressive instincts of their children can be changed. That you can actually nurture high risk pregnant women in a way that twenty years later might result in their child going to
college rather than breaking into someone's house. And so I love that kind of stretching of our minds that comes with that mental model, that it's not a question of you know, one or two downstream or upstream, it's a question of how far upstream can we go and should we go? And preventing problems.
I think, like, I mean, it works perfectly as the title. But that's interesting hearing you talk about how the publisher thought it was a risk, which I can understand that as well. Well.
Now if it's sold aid copies, we know it.
Was was right. Yeah, I want to know because writing a book for you, I've heard you talk about it being about a three year process. I guess from inception of the idea research, writing, and then all that comes with publicity. So that's a long time to be sitting with an idea like upstream. And you know, I imagine you know when when you're writing a book like this,
it's always front of mine, probably with your life. And I want to know what are some of the most significant changes or impactful changes, let's say that you've made to your own life to focus more on the stream.
There's kind of two levels. Well, at the trivial level, it's made me much more cognizant of recurring irritance. So I'll tell you one that literally just occurred to me this morning. So I woke up at six fifteen in the morning. I have a sixteen month old who usually is the alarm clock in the family, and today it was kind of my turn to get up and get her. And so I'm waking up. It's in the dark, and
I'm trying to get my clothes on. And one thing that happens to me all the time I'm getting up, I'm trying to put on my clothes in the dark so I don't wake up my wife.
And how do I put my shirt on? You know?
Is it inside out? Is it right side out? And you've got to get the front from the back, but I can't see the tag in the dark. I can't see, you know, the letters on the front of the shirt in the dark, and so I'm just kind of taking a stab. And for some reason, my experience is that virtually nine times out of ten I guess wrong. And then I'm kind of irritated because maybe you wake up happier in the morning than I do, but I'm already irritable, and then I get my shirt on back words and
I feel like a chump. And so I was thinking, this is exactly the kind of thing that you just sort of live with, that you don't have to live with. And so I've hatched this idea now where every night I'm going to lay my shirt down in the same way so that in the morning, when i have to do this automatically in the dark, I'll know exactly what
orientation it's at. And you know, it's not like I'm going to win a Nobel Prize for that for that dramatic insight, but it's it's an example of how downstream reaction can become habitual, even even when it's at a
recurring disadvantage to us. Now at the at the broader level, I think what it's made me think about is my priorities in life and how to ensure that the structure of my days and the way I spend my time is aligned with those, which, of course is just a classic difficulty, especially for your you know, small business listeners or entrepreneurial listeners, trying to you know, to go back to that classic two by two, how to make sure you don't collect the important but not urgent things in
your life, which I'm sure you've talked about many times on the show. And so I've begun to become relentless about time tracking, which is not natural to me. I'm not kind of a you know, genetically organized person, so it took some growing pains to get into the habit of tracking my time. And then about once every quarter I just look and I just have broad categories. You know, how much time did I spend writing, how much time did I spend speaking or teaching, how much time did
I spend doing email? And kind of the big buckets, at least for me, of ways I spend my time. And then I start to try to move those numbers, and for me, I know what makes me happy, and what makes me satisfied is to spend as much time as I can speaking.
And writing, actually in reverse order, writing first and.
Speaking second, and everything else in a way is to be minimized. I mean, there's a certain amount of email that I have to do just to continue relationships, but I don't want to. I don't want to spend a lot of time doing email. And there's a lot of other commitments, you know, things I said yes to that
I often end up regretting saying yes to. And and there's something about looking at the numbers, uh and seeing that you can move the numbers in your own time expenditures that's very motivating to me in a way I wouldn't have guessed as a non organized, non numbers focused person. And so that's an example of where I'm trying to use kind of the the technology of personal productivity to carve out space for the things that are really important.
M I love that. Yeah, I had Laura Vandicam on the show. I feel like it's kind of the queen of time tracking quite a while ago, and I'm wondering what's like to get granular about it. What's your process for time tracking and using software, or using an Excel spreadsheet? What is that? What does that look like?
I do?
I use an app called Toggle. I'm just going to be the endorser for Toggle, although I'm not a very good endorser because I use the Freebee.
Version of the system.
But I suspect there's you know, half a dozen others that do the same thing. And it's just the kind of thing where you go and you set up your categories and then when you start something like if I start a writing shift in the morning, I just have to go and kind.
Of click a button.
It's super easy, but the payoff comes if you're relentless.
About doing it.
The power comes when you get to roll up those numbers and see in black and white, like how much time did I really spend in the last quarter doing email? And you you know, you got to look yourself in the mirror at that point and say, ten years from now, do I want to be the person who spent a thousand hours doing email? And then that opens the door to change.
That's awesome and I like that distinction between the two types of upstream thinking that you've applied in your life. I remember reading in the book the story about how you bought a second computer, cha Ja, And I was wondering if you could talk about that, And also I was curious because that then led to you talking about how you do a lot of your best work in coffee shops. So perhaps could you explain what happened with just that very simple upstream solution there.
Yeah, of course, this is a This is another from the category of recurring irritants that we just for some reason endore. So I have a proper office with a proper desk, but for whatever reason, I do my best writing in coffee shops. And that's that's always been the case. And I have my regular routines. I try to sit in the same table, and I put my headphones on, and that's just kind of where what.
Works for me.
But as part of that, you know, I'm lugging my laptop around, and so every time I go to the coffee shop, you know, I got to fish my power cord out of the bag, plug it into the wall, finish my shift, and then I come back to my office to do email or calls or whatever, and then I got to fish the power cord out of the bag.
Again and plug it into the wall.
And I've got one hundred cords going from my desk, so it's always just a little bit of a nuisance. And and this just seemed like that's the way reality has to be. You've got to constantly be doing this with your power chord. And then, I'm embarrassed to say it took being in the process of writing a book called Upstream to make me think, hmm, what if? What if I lived in a world where I had two power chords? And so I know you're all astonished by my genius, but I bought a second power chord and
I fixed one of them permanently to my desk. So now it's just a trivial matter of setting my laptop in and I move it a quarter of an inch to plug it in, and another one lives always in my laptop bag. And so again, you know, no great insight, there no great need for creativity. It was just kind of a flash of recognition. And in the book I talk about the force that explains why this is so uncommon. You know, why did it take me writing a book about prevention to even think about this?
And it has to do.
With a force called tunneling, and tunneling is a word from a book called Scarcity written by El dar Shafir and Sinndel Mull and Nathan And what they mean by tunneling is they say, when we're juggling a lot of problems in life, at a certain point we give up trying to solve them all and we shift our mental model into what's effectively tunnel vision. I mean, just call up that visual image in your mind. You're in a tunnel. You're just trying to knock things down one at a time.
You know, in a tunnel, the only way you can go is backward and forward, and for most of us, forward is the only direction. And so what that means is I've got to constantly be parrying the problems that I'm dealing with. I'm going to work around to get to the next one. And tunneling becomes, you know, one of these self reinforcing habits. Because when you're in a tunnel and you're used to tunneling and only question is how far forward can you get?
In a day?
You stop asking, hey, am I going the right direction at all? Or is there a or tunnel that I could put myself in, or is there a way I can step out of this tunnel? For an hour a day and consider some of my behaviors. And so tunneling is one of the villains, if you will, in the book that helps to explain why it's so uncommon or unnatural to shift into upstream thinking.
It's really interesting. Since reading the book, I've actually developed a list on my to do list software of things that I am doing repetitively in terms of every week, but that I find either mine normally boring or irritating, or something that I could either outsource or find a solution. And then what I'm planning to do is weekly review that list and try to think more upstream.
You had any easy wins, like any second power chord kind of stories.
Well, well, it's funny because I do have a second power chord story, but that happened before the book. So in my home office setup, it's funny, like you, I do my best work in coffee shops, but in my home office setup, I've got the rooms kind of split in half, and half of it is the podcast studio with the soundproofing barriers and so forth, and the other half is where I would do normal work like writing
or something like that. And I used to only have one power cord and I would move it between both sides of the office, and it struck me that that was quite annoying, having to go under the desk and find the right cord and so forth. And so I too bought a second power cord.
A non expli association of people.
I know, I know exactly. I feel like Apple and missing a trick by, you know, not bundling in two power cords into the one package. But I think that's great, just the idea of thinking about recurring irritance in your life. I don't want to delve into the coffee shop thing. How did you discover that you get your best work done in coffee shops? Was there a moment? Was you know, why did you even start doing that? If you've got this lovely hoime office.
Well, my love of coffee predates my love of writing. So I was already spending a lot of time in coffee shops. And I need to be heavily caffeinated before I get really productive. And so I'm not sure there's any great epiphany story behind this one. But I did notice that when I was writing Made to Stick, which was the first book that my brother Chip and I wrote together in those days, I was a horrible, horrible procrastinator.
I mean I loved to have written. As some famous author said, whose name I'm spacing on now, I love to have written. But writing was something that I would put off, just relentlessly, and it got to the point where I would procrastinate so badly that the only way I could get myself to write to get over that hump was I would actually go down the street. And there was this copy center called Kinko's that rented computers by the hour, and I started going there and paying.
I mean I had a computer, mind you. I started going there and paying to use their computers because I would feel so guilty about procrastinating when I was paying someone for computer usage. And that's what got me over the hump. And I sort of eventually weaned myself over that idiotic payment system and kind of downshifted to coffee shops.
I don't know, Maybe it's something about just feeling like you're being held accountable to the productive people around you in a coffee shop, But I don't have any sensible explanation for why that works. But it's the kind of thing where you don't really need one if you're careful in studying yourself at your best moments, you can learn a lot. And we can spend a lot of time wallowing in what doesn't work and in our problems and
in our frustrations. But if we just kind of flip the lens a little bit and say, hey, when things do work, when do they work, and why do they work? And for me, the answer to that question was, Hey, I seem to really be able to click when I sit in the same table in the same coffee shop and order the same thing and put on my headphones. And so that's what I'm going to do.
That's awesome. I think for me, I feel like, you know, writing is such a lonely activity, and I think when I'm in amongst other people, whether they're working or chatting, I just feel like I'm not missing out on stuff. I'm just kind of in amongst it. But then I'm doing my work. Now. I'm so encouraged to hear that
you are a procrastinator. I think I read your books and they're brilliant, And I've heard you say that with the books that you've written with Chip, your brother, you kind of take on predominantly the writing role and he takes on the research role. Have I got that right?
Yeah? Yeah, yeah.
So it's encouraging to hear that you procrastinate over writing. Does that still happen when you're writing now or has it become so routine and habitual that you've got your setup and when you're in the coffee shop with your stuff that you need, you're kind of straight into It's kind of almost have loth And what's that like for you?
Now?
I am am pleased to say that I am a largely cured of procrastination. So if you are a procrastinator, please no hope, because I was right there with you in the trenches. Now, I don't know that my solution is scalable, because my solution was to have a brother slash collaborator who was whatever the opposite of a procrastinator is. You know, he was the kind of student who would turn in their urn paper a week early just to
make sure it was out of the way. And I was the kind of student who had started at three am in the morning with you know, six caffeine pills or something.
And then I think, you know, my wife.
Is also the opposite of a procrastinator, and so I think between the two of them, they kind of beat that instinct out of me. But it also has a lot to do, as you said, with habits. And you know, one thing that has been true for me that that I've you know, back to that idea of studying your own right spots. One thing that is absolutely crystal clear from me is that I do much better with momentum
in writing. So if I can write, you know, twenty five days out of thirty that is far far better from me than writing fifty days out of five months, I will literally have more words on the page, and there'll be better words with the twenty five days quickly than with the fifty sporadically. And so that's the kind of thing that over time you start to learn about yourself is you know, what is it that elicits your best work and work that you're proud of, and how do you replicate that.
It's interesting what you say about I guess having non procrastinators around you. And obviously with Upstream, this was your first solo book, and I'm curious as to how that was as a process and did you have to develop different strategies for getting the book written given that it wasn't a partnership with Chip.
Yeah, it was, I mean it was it was like starting over. You know, it's like half of the half of the team has gone. That's an enormous hole to fill. And and I think probably it's shaped up about like you would expect. You know, some things, some things were really good about it. I didn't have to negotiate everything in the book, and I could kind of do things the way I wanted it.
Uh.
You know, that's that's always the advantage of working solo, as you get to have your way. And the downside was, you know, it was a much lonelier process. I didn't I didn't have a partner to talk things through, and I didn't have someone in the boat with me rowing that we could we could agonize about things together.
And uh.
And of course the obvious is I lost his incredible research ability. I had to basically hire a small team of people. I had to basically hire a research team to uh, to try to fill some of the things that he did as as an individual. So it was a lot of new habit creation, a lot of new routines. But I think I grew from that. You know, it's any time you try something new that that scares you a little bit. It may work or it may not, but either way, you're probably going to grow. And I felt like I did.
Yeah, it's interesting the idea of not having that person to bounce ideas around with, almost that sparring partner. And it reminds me of this idea that Adam Grant talks about in terms of developing a challenge network, so deliberately seeking out a network of people who you can go to to critique your work. So how did that work for you? I mean, obviously you've got an editor, as all authors do, but were there other strategies that you put in place to I guess get that feedback.
I suspect this is just me. This is not like some kind of universal rule. But I'm the kind of writer where if I, if I get a lot of feedback, it's demotivating to me.
Like I sort of like this idea of.
Unveiling, Like I like to go in my little hole and do some writing and then voila, show it to people and get their action at that point. And if if people are kind of quibbling with me or pushing back on a day to day basis, it makes me question myself in an unhelpful way. So I do, for sure get feedback, and it's it's critical, it's indispensable, but I do it in a in a more formal way
than perhaps the Adam Grant strategy suggests. Like I basically with this book, had had a moment roughly halfway or sixty percent of the way through the process where I had created a kind of draft one point zero book that I shipped out to a bunch of people for feedback. There are a couple of things that I want to point out about it. One was it was at a time in the process where I could afford for them
to push back. I think a lot of writers make the mistake of you know, you get ninety percent of the way there and then you start asking for feedback, and at that point you just if you get negative feedback, you can't afford to take it on. You know, your your instincts are going to be to push back and think, oh, well that's just nitpicking, or you know that you know
I can't afford to revisit that. Doing it earlier in the process allows you to kind of, I don't know, a mental space to really rethink things if they were necessary and in some cases with the book they were The other thing that I believe in with respective feedback is I believe in I believe feedback is better when it's specific. So I don't tend to ask people, you know,
what do you think of the book. I don't want them to be tied up in trying to spare my feelings or you know, trying to play back what they think I want to hear. And I also don't necessarily trust if they had something that was core to the theme of the book. I don't know that you want to trust someone who's spent five hours thinking about your book over yourself that spent two years working on the book.
But what I think you absolutely can trust is just people's instinct about Hey, did you like this part or did you not?
Was this interesting? Was it not?
You know, which of these two things did you like better. It reminds me years ago I had the conversation with the founder of Icebreaker. We were talking about market research, and he said, my mental model of market research is, you know, imagine if you called people into a focus group room as a brewer and you said, hey, what
kind of beer would you really like to drink? You know, people people are going to come up with an answer to that, but you really can't trust that answer because people just don't have a language to articulate their perfect beer. I mean, I don't know what I would say. I would probably try to come up with something that sounded smart, but I'm not sure it would be useful guidance. But he said, what you absolutely can take to the bank is if you hand people two glasses and you say, hey,
which of these beers tastes better to you? I mean, that's gold. That's useful feedback. And so that's the spirit of what I try to honor with the book is is I want to get feedback at a point in the cycle when I can use it. And the second thing is I want to get feedback that's particular enough that I can really trust it.
I like that idea of, you know, getting feedback when it's sixty percent done. I couldn't agree more. It's so hard really taking on feedback when you feel like you're really close to shipping the product, because you've just got way too many biases in play. So that's such good advice.
I want to know, how how do you know when you're onto a winning idea for a book, because I just think with all of your books, I just go, oh, they're so brilliant, and they're so universally appealing as well, so that in those really early stages, I'm kind of really keen to know with all of your books, where did the ideas come from? And how did you know that, yes, this is something that is worth spending the next three years of my life.
One.
Yeah, I think that's one where I'm not going to have a very satisfying answer, because I just think that fundamentally, nobody, as William Goldman once said about Hollywood and why certain films do well and others don't, you know, nobody knows anything. And I think that's true. I think that I have no idea if upstream will sell well or not. About All that you can assure yourself of.
Is two things.
One is is this a topic that's going to keep me fascinated for the period of years that it takes to properly research and write about a book? And Chip and I have had several experiences where we started books that we were quite excited about in month one and then we literally burn three or four or five months
and decide, I just don't think this is it. I don't think I can keep my attention up for two more years of this stuff, and so you just flush it, I mean literally just wasted work, but not in the long run since so you can assure yourself of your own attention. And that was one that for me. I mean, even if nobody else in the world thinks Upstream is interesting, I do. And I've been thinking about these ideas for
about eleven years now. I mean I literally started my first word file keeping notes on Upstream in like two thousand and nine, so I knew for sure this was a book that was going to be fascinating for me, which is a big deal. And then the second thing is, I think you can assure yourself that at least for
the kind of book that we're talking about. This is certainly not true for novels or historical fiction or whatever, but for these kinds of books, you can assure yourself that a lot of people are facing the problem that you're tackling. So with Made to Stick, you know, we knew for sure that there were a lot of people in the world who had really good ideas that they
were trying to get across to other people. They needed to build alliances, they needed to make great presentations, They wanted to give powerful vision speeches to their teams, and so we knew the need was there if we could find.
A set of tools that were useful.
And so there's some comfort that comes from knowing, at least you're tackling a problem that's really important and really pervasive. But in terms of, you know, does do the two of those things translate into book sales?
Who knows?
I think there's ten confounding variables in the middle.
I've heard you say in terms of what makes a great business book, in terms of the how to business books, like the genre that you write with in you said, do people crave the information in the book? And does the book deliver useful tools? And I really loved that as kind of thinking about Okay, you know, they're two things I guess to guide your decision making.
Yeah.
I heard a speech years ago from this publisher named Ray Bard, and I remembered it to this day, and he talked about the notion of a felt need, which, you know, we're talking a lot about writers and writing today. But I think many of these ideas apply to lots of different markets, and this one certainly does, and felt need is the idea that it's not enough to give people a product, you know, in this case, a book that is good for them, they have to have, they
have to feel a need for it. And the example he gave was was memorable. He said, the perennial bestseller What to Expect when You're Expecting for pregnant Women is the perfect example of felt need. You know, you find yourself pregnant, you've done the pregnancy test, and you get the pink strip, and you're like, oh my god, what am I in for? What's gonna what's going to happen to my body? And what's normal and what's not normal?
You crave information. And ray Bard contrasted that with a book for men that was how to have more empathy for the bodily changes your wife is going through during pregnancy, and he said every man should be required to read that book. I mean it should be, it should be, you know, a legal it should be a legal requirement for men to read that. But there's probably not the
felt need, which is of course telling about men. But I think his point is right that having a book that's good for you is not the same thing as a book that you demand, and so I think when we're in the business of trying to get people to buy what we're selling them, we have to pay attention to what their felt need is, not what do we think would be good for them.
That's such great advice really, for anyone putting anything out into the world that they're hoping someone will find a value. I love that. I would also ask with your books. I feel like they've all got these very elegant frameworks that sit behind them, and I want to know what's what's your process for developing those because I'm imagining once you've got your initial idea, it's the framework that would come next before you even start putting pen to paper
in terms of writing the prose of the book. Is that sort of fair to say in terms of your process.
Yeah, absolutely so.
Just to give listeners a concrete example, we've talked a couple of times about this book Made to Stick. That's about how do you make your ideas stick with people? And the core of the book is a six part framework that sticky ideas are simple, they're unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional,
and they're often told us stories. And so we're using a little kind of cheesy mnemonic there success minus the final s. We didn't find a seventh trait, so we have this kind of truncated version of the word success to help people remember. And before, as you said, before we started the book, we knew what that framework was and it guided the production of the book. But of course we spend a lot of time in the wilderness trying to figure out what those traits are and which
ones do we believe. And with our first four books we had a framework for each one in the same spirit, and that's really the heart of our collaboration that yes I do most of the writing and yes Chip does most of the research, but the hard part is really what's in the middle of those two things, which is figuring out what are the patterns in the research that you're doing, and windows academic research seem to meet up with real world experience, and when are you hearing the
same things from very different disciplines in a way that makes you trust the idea more. And on top of all that, it's not enough for something to be true, it also has to be useful, at least for the kind of books we're writing. You know, we don't want to just have academic debates. In our books, we want people to have tools that will make them better business
people or government leaders or teachers the next week. And so part of what we kind of aspire to in our books is are the ideas we write about are they true? Are they backed by some kind of evidence? And are they practical? And are they interesting enough to keep a reader flipping through a book. So if we can overlap all of those circles in a neat, little ven diagram, that's where our framework emerge is from.
Yeah, that's great. Like how much toing and throwing is there to land on the final framework? I guess this is several weeks, a several month process. You know, once you've I guess done a lot of the research that sits behind the framework.
Oh, it's months and months and months. I mean it's the heart of the book.
Really.
The framework is fundamentally what we're offering people. I mean, the book is a package for the framework, but you could communicate the framework in a workshop or a speech
or an article. The framework is the thing. And so you know, from the very beginning we are we're iterating, and you know, we probably take a couple of months just Blue Sky to research and start to see if themes are bubbling up, and you know, by three to six months in we're starting to try to come up with draft frameworks and then they get iterated one hundred times before we finally land on something that we think is the right blend of simplicity and practicality and.
Completeness.
I am fascinated by this, and I've also very encouraged to hear what a long, intensive process it is, because I look at these in your books and I'm like, oh, wow, that's so brilliant. So I'm very encouraged to hear about how challenging it is. Just from a selfish point of view,
I know we're almost out of time. And look, my last question for you, I guess relates to everything that you have written and learned in the process of writing your books, because they do cover such fundamentally important topics like how to change people, how to make decisions, how to create these defining moments in your life. And I know for me, you know, as I mentioned, decisive and power of moments have been ones that I think I apply.
I still apply, you know, some of the strategies from those books almost every week of my life, like for example, with Decisive, I still whenever I'm faced with a whether or not decision where there's essentially should I do this or shouldn't I, I remember that those decisions fail fifty percent of the time, and I de liberately look for some true alternatives and with the power of moments that that influenced my thinking not only about work and customers,
but also just about time with my daughter and deliberately crafting these defining moments that still impacts me to this day. And I want to know for you, out of everything that you've written, what I guess maybe one or two or three of the kind of they might be just really simple changes, but I guess changes that have had you been really impactful in your life. MM.
You know what are the greatest hits? I think you know.
One of them, honestly, is the same one that you flagged. I think Decisive, which is our book about decision making, has fundamentally changed the way I approach decisions. And one of the tips that's easiest to explain is the one that you mentioned, which is, any time in life you find yourself framing a decision about whether or not to do such and such, you know, should I buy this thing or not? Should I take this trip or not? Should I say yes to the project or not. That's
a dangerous framing. And the reason is because not is not a particularly compelling decision option.
Right.
It's like think of a corporation thinking should we acquire this firm or not? And the longer you think about it, and the longer you ponder it, and the more due diligence you do, the more you feel invested in the one option that's on the table, and the harder it is for you to just say no, because then you've flushed all that analysis.
It's gone.
And so when you have a decision, you've got one option on the table. Rather than frame it is should I do this thing? Should I buy this thing or not? Challenge yourself, you know, do the opportunity cost question. So it's I was talking to someone the other day who wanted to write a book that was on their bucket list. And so rather than think about it as should I write a book or not, you should think, whatever itch
that I'm trying to scratch by writing a book? What if I couldn't write a book, how would I scratch that same itch?
You know?
Is it?
Maybe it's a creative thing, and you might have spent that time doing improv comedy, or you might have spent it painting or something like that, or maybe it's a business development thing like the book for you would have represented a way to get more clients or more speeches or what have you. And if that's true, what would you do to advance those goals in the absence of a book? And then that's your comparison. You know, it's
not should I write a book or not? Is should I invest hundreds of hours writing a book or hundreds of hours getting better at improv comedy. So that's one thing I think about all the time, and that that has become a permanent part of my decision process. Another thing that has stuck with me is the idea that you mentioned of peak moments, which comes from the Power
of Moments book. And the heart of this I think I can summarize as follows is what we know from people's memories of their experiences is that some moments matter dramatically more than others. I mean one hundred or a thousand and times as important certain moments are than others. And if you even think about your own memories, like think back to a vacation you took five or ten years ago, or think back to a semester.
In school or in university.
You'll quickly realize that the vast majority of that experience is gone and what you're left with are certain moments. And question is why those moments? And in the book we try to answer the question what is it about those experiences that's stuck with you? And how can you go about creating more? And so what it's taught me is I think the most practical lesson that comes out of that is to be willing to endure inconvenience for
the sake of a peak moment. Like I think of a time it was a couple of years ago now, but there was a full eclipse of the sun that was I forget what you call the path of the sun that gets the full eclipse. But we were pretty close to that path where I am in North Carolina in the US. But it required about a let's see, three to three and a half hour each way drive, so maybe seven hour round trip drive. And I think before I wrote the book Power of Moments, I would
have said forget that. I mean seven hours on the road and there's going to be traffic because every other Yahoo's going to be trying to see the eclipse. And you know, I'll just watch the thing on YouTube and be done with it.
How good can it be?
But what you realize is five years from now, all the details of that drive are going to be gone. That's a classic thing that your memory is gonna flush. But what you will remember, and what I do remember, because I did make the trip, is it's seeing the world go dark around you in the middle of the day and hearing insects start to make noise because they're tricked and they think it's the nighttime, and so you're hearing crickets chirp in the middle.
Of the day.
And then when the sun finally starts to come out the other side, you hear birds chirp as though it's the morning. And it's just this, this fundamentally alien and wonderful experience that would not have been replicated on YouTube. And so yes, I drove seven hours to have an experience that lasted about ten minutes. But you know, five years down the road, ten years down the road, all I'm going to have left is that wonderful moment that would have been absent had I done kind of a
strict minute by minute trade off of time. So that was a very long answer to your question. But those are two things that have really made a difference in my life.
That is a beautiful story. And look, we are so out of time. Time has flown for me certainly. But finally, where can people find you, Dan? And where can they get their copy of Upstream?
Well, wherever you buy books, hopefully they have a copy of Upstream on hand. And if you want to learn more about me, come check out the website Heath Brothers dot com.
That's Heath H. E. A T. H.
And you can find out about all the books we've discussed right there.
Fantastic and I will link to all that in the show notes. Dan, it has been an absolute joy. Thank you so much for your time.
Thank you, it's been fun.
That is it for today's show. If you have enjoyed this chat with Dan, maybe you know someone else that would like it as well, So why not share this episode with them through hitting the little share icon wherever you listen to this podcast from And if you're enjoying how I work, I would love it if you could leave a review in Apple Podcasts. And thank you to everyone that has done so. So that is it for today's show and I will see you next time.