Dan Pink || Motivation, Selling, and Perfect Timing

Pink is the author of six provocative best selling books, including his newest When, The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing. His other books include A Whole New Mind, Drive and To Sell as Human. Pink's books have won multiple awards and have been translated into thirty eight languages. Hey, nice to chat with you today, Dan, Hey Scott, thanks for having me. Boy. You know, we cover a wide range of topics in this podcast. You've covered a wide range of topics in your own writing. Do you see like

a core thread that runs through all of them? Not? Really, I mean yeah, right now, I mean there's certain so there's certainly I can guarantee this. There's no intentional designed thread it's not like I have some master plan out there. Put it mildly, I think that, you know, maybe there

is a thread that is visible retrospectively. Yeah, and it's something that maybe readers can see more than I. I mean, if there's any sort of common dominator, it might be that I tend to write a lot about not even exclusively. I tend to write a fair amount about work, just because I think work is a really interesting domain and wish to study what makes us tick. But now just

making it up as I go along, like everybody else. Yeah, but I do find that interesting that, Like, I notice that I learned things about myself when I read enough of my work over a long period of time and I look back and I'm like, wow, something emerged here from my that actually reveals something about my soul. I was wondering if you've noticed anything that kind of you like it? Go wow. I really kind of obsessed with his X Y, And you know, you know what, I

am not that introspective. I guess I have not. That's honestly, it's not I probably should be more introspective. It's not anything that I have really considered. Maybe it's worth doing. Fair enough, it's not a requirement. Yeah. So let's start with your book Drive. Lots of meat in there that has areas of mutual interest. Can you start with the outdated notion of motivation that shall we say motivated to

you to write Drive in the first place. Yeah. What's interesting about this stuff in that book, which is, as you know, Scott, is based on you know, about fifty years of research in behavioral science, is that there's nuance to it. Every once in a while, the nuance gets lost. And basically the big idea there is that there's a certain kind of motivator that we use in organizations. Psychologists

like you call it a controlling, contingent motivator. Okay, I like to call it an if then reward because if you do this, then you get that. If you do this, then you get that. Now here's the thing. We use all kinds of rewards in organizations, all kinds of rewards, but this is in some ways the mainstay rewards. And what the research tell us about if then rewards, not about all rewards, but about if then rewards in particular, is that they're pretty good for simple algorithmic tasks with

short time horizons. They're less good for more complex tasks with longer time horizons. And the problem is that in organizations especially, we use them for everything, and so they can be effective for very routine short term tasks, but they're less effective for tasks with longer time horizons, and that they require more conceptual thinking. So we use them

for everything. When they don't win, and when we don't work in the second category, instead of saying, hey, we need a new approach, we just say, hey, those carrot and stick motivators didn't work. Oh, let's have some more carrots. Let's have crunchier carrots. Let's put carrots with honey delays on them, or you know, even the sticks. It's like, oh, let's have sharper sticks. Let's poke people in the eye four times rather than just three times, and it carries

is done a wrong. Do you mean motivate people by saying you only poke them twice instead of three times? Is that what you mean? Oh? No, I mean I mean really motivating people like oh, because I'll demotivate people aren't responding very well because we're only poking them twice in the eye. Let's put them let's say, let's put them three times in each eye for a total of six and that'll really get them to Yeah, so it's just a little bit outdated. But again, I mean, you know,

there is nuance here. And so sometimes people say, oh, human beings are so noble they don't respond to rewards, which is nonsense. It's almost as much as nonsense as people who say human beings respond only to contingent rewards. Yeah, and I love how you put this nuance in there, and you certainly don't say that in the workplace we should completely eliminate external rewards. That it's also also it's

not only external internal, it's basically non contingent. And so what extra reward is like salary, It's like, yeah, should people be paid salary? Yeah, people should be paid a high salary. Like there's a very good there's a very good argument rooted in psychological science even economic science, on

the importance of paying people healthy salaries. You can make the psychological argument, but you can also make an economic argument that if you pay people, I mean, georgeja Koloff made this argument, you know, if you pay people more than the market, Like there's a think where we've got a market clearing wage, right, so we know that there's a certain range. Like I'm in Washington, DC. So let's say I'm at an insurance company. I want to hire

a corporate auditor with six years of experience. Okay, there's going to be a salary range there. And what George Akerloff said in some of his research is that hey pay people a little bit outside of that range, higher than that range. It's like, why would you ever do that? And it turns out that what it does well, first of all, it raises the opportunity cost of quitting. Second of all, it basically eliminates all grievances about fairness and so people can just focus on the work. So, yes,

pay people well, pay people well. But this idea that you can constantly calibrate and manipulate people with these contingent rewards is just as a complete fallacy. I want to bring up something that not many people a familiar with this idea. I've really digged into the writings of Abraham Masel, who, as you know, was a seminal, motivational researcher and theorist.

He had this idea of meta pay, so he argued that self actualized people shouldn't be paid in what other people are so concerned of people who well er in the hierarchy, but those who are kind of higher and more self actualized, they get more excited by the reward of virtue or the reward of like feeling like they've

done something good. And he actually made the case that like, if we pay self actualized people metapay and we pay the other workers more with actual money that people care about the money, then they'll be less likely to resent the people who are self actualized. It's actually kind of

an interesting argument about human nature. It is an interesting argument. Now, it's very interesting, and you know, as you know it being a Maslow expert, I mean it's really you know, Maslow didn't do that all that many experiments and did a lot of theorizing. And this is a fascinating theoretical concept. I think you could run you could run a ground the other way, and that if you if like let's say it's you and I and I'm getting very high

metapay and you're getting a lot of money pay. If you're getting more money pay than I am, problem with people will get jealous of right, it's because because of fairness, because of you know, the human beings are just exquisitely

attuned to this norm of fairness. It's an interesting idea, and it's actually adjacent to some of the other ideas here, which is that, you know, one of the things that we do know from a lot of research is that purpose is a pretty powerful motivator and and maybe purpose is maybe purpose and metapay are sibilis, yes, yeah, And that's totally totally so purpose and metapay. And so we know from a lot of research that you know that fundraisers will work a little harder if they get to

meet the people who benefit from their fundraising. For instance, we know it's a great lovely piece of research out of Harvard Business School from a couple of years ago, where they had cooks in a cafeteria. You know this research that cooks in a cafeteria that usually could not see the customers, and if you rig up and they rigged up an iPad in the cafeteria line so that the cooks could see the customers. And when they did that, they were measuring the dependent variable was the quality of

the food, not satisfactor or anything like that. And when cooks could see the customers, the quality of the food improved. That's in some ways that you know, a sibling of Metapay. So I think that Maslow, as with many, many many things, sort of in his brilliant, fertile mind, was onto something that it's the whole thing about. What was that book that he wrote. It's very hard to read as a very complicated first adjective name, but it's like epigistic beginning

management or something like that. Yeah, U psychean management psyche in management, right, which I found a very hard book to read, and yet it contains I think a lot of the seeds of much of contemporary management thinking today. So that's awesome that you read that. Not many people are even aware of that book. Actually pronounced the name, but I couldn't think of the name of it. No, I'm impressed that you read it. And actually that book

is actually a collection. It's actually his journals from a particular summer he spent observing, and all those things are dictation. So if they're hard to understand, it's because he dictated things into a tape recorder company. What kind of company was I was like electrical it was a management Yeah, it was like they produced electronics. Yeah that's right, Yeah, yeah, yeah, pres electronics. But when he went into you know, he didn't plan on really enjoying that job. He wasn't interested

in management or business beforehand. He thought, oh good, you know, this would be an opportunity for me to go out west and do my writing on what I'm really interested in, you know, which was like religion. And he was at that time he was working on peak experiences in religion.

And then he was like, holy cow, Like, these workers are so motivated, you know, they feel such great pride for their work, and they were applying his theory of self actualization in the workplace, and so he dropped all the other work he was doing, and as he writes he dictated in New Psychic Management, he says, he's like, you know, I used to think education was the main place where we can learn the most about human nature, et cetera. Now I'm convinced it's the workplace. So that

actually was a shift the summer of nineteen sixty two. Yeah, go on and on and on. But it's interesting because that connects to the first question, because I think one of the reasons that I'm interested in writing about I think one of the reasons why I've been drawn to writing about work, at least for the first you know,

several books I've written, is precisely that that. First of all, if you think about just how much time people spend it work, all right, it's over half of their waking hours, sure, And then you think about what goes on, it's everything. It is how to group coordinate, how do conflicts emerge, how does stuff get done? What do people find what tasks are valuable, what do people find valuable? How to

how are people effective? And it's it's like everything. It's like basically what it is to be, you know, not fully what it is to be a human, but it becomes this scope through which you can look at the entire human condition. Yeah, it sounds like you're like learning about your own thread throughout the course of this podcast as it goes on. Maybe this is an Maybe this is a what is it you fish in? You psyche and you know the good society, you know, like the

society self actualized. Maybe this is a psychean podcast. Oh you know, maybe I should Actually I've been thinking about changing the psychology podcast name, by the way, and I'm like, maybe I should call it the U psyche and podcast. But no one would call it you psycheic today? How about that? If I do that, do I have to give you some royalties? Now? For absolutely, like I make any money anyway, but if you if you do that, the only thing I'll get from your angry text saying

why the heck did you make me do this? Well I do, yeah. No one knows what you psyche and means yeah, and no one does except me and you know. But let's talk a little bit about this interesting mode because I know that you built on the work of CC and Ryan, is that right, and you extended it in very interesting directions, made it very accessible. So it's it's not just the same thing as their model by any stretch of the imagination. But there is something I

want to discuss about their mode. They have this motivational continuum. And you're quite right that external versus internal is way too simplistic, But they do have this motivational continuum from a motivation to external pressures like you said the that would be the carrots, to internal pressures. We have interpresses like guilts and ego involved and pressures we put ourselves at to value and then to full intrinsic Like I just find this intrinsically enjoyable. My work is do what

do you think of that continuum? How much did you draw on that in your own book? For me, it started to get more complicated when you get to things like introjection, which they an idea that they introduce. I don't find that as compelling as some of the other things, by the way, that came from Carl Rogers, Oh, really antic psychologist. Yeah, so I found the introjection less compelling.

What I found really compelling are these A lot of their research, especially even the cross cultural research on autonomy as a fundamental attribute of who human beings are, that human beings do intrinsic inherently want to be self determined, And looking at their research and just thinking of just my own interpretation of life, is I really think that

is the default human condition. I don't think it's the it's the condition of every person today by a long shot, but I do think it is the default human condition. I think it's a powerful way of it's a powerful way of understanding. And also I think that their research and others showing all the ways these continued rewards can go awry is really valuable. But some of the stuff I found less introjection being the best example of that I found less compelling. Well, let's think that through for

a second. Isn't it possible? And I know that you talk about importance of grit as well, and as part of autonomy, is it possible to be really unhealthily autonomous? And I think that's why I personally like the introjection part of it, because it's like, you know, you could be autonomous, but you could be doing the wrong goals. It could be purely driven by insecurity and ego. Yeah, absolutely,

but you're still autonomous. Yeah, yes, and no, I mean so, I mean that's that's again where you can get as you say, exactly, that's where introjection can come in. So the question is, if you are doing things out of a sense of guilt or pressure, is that truly self determined? And that's good And the answer would be probably not. But and I think it's an important question for me.

There's a certain point when you're writing for a popular audience, that is, there are certain kinds of debates within the field that I find like really interesting to talk about, but that actually, you know, one secret of writing is what do you leave out? And to me, that was that's in the category of what do you leave out? So if someone asked me a question about it's like, heck, yeah,

let's talk about it. Let's talk about whether feeling guilt, you know, whether feeling guilty is actually a form of self determination or actually runs a foul of self determination. Woo hoo. That's a room empeer for most people. And so it's to me, you know, that's worth leading, it's worth leading out in that particular context. I thought occurred to me as you're saying this, I should probably care what I mean by it after I say it. But you're kind of like the Stephen King of nonfiction writing.

You know, he talks a lot and his beautiful book on writing, you know how we need he needs to kill his darlings. You know, oh yeah, totally totally tell the good story. I want to clarify your wrings. Nothing about though. No, No, it's horrifying to some people, I'm sure, and that I have been as prolific as Stephen King. The guy's unbelievable. I was going to say, you probably are. No, I was going to say that there's a there's a

comparison there. You don't think here's the comparison. We both have four letter last names, and we both are native speakers of English, and that's I think where the comparison ends. The pink. He's Stephen King exactly. But yeah, okay, there's a reason they call him the King. No, but I do think that, and I like Stephen King. I think

I actually like reading Stephen King. I read a fair amount of Stephen King too, in part because I think it's I think reading Stephen King is good for any writers, even you know, even nonfiction writers, just because of the propulsiveness of the way that he write, just like his ability to keep things moving forward all the time. It's

really just breathtaking the way he does that. But at the point about killing your darlings, I think it's even more important in some ways for certain kinds of nonfiction. And one of the things that I see in certain kinds of nonfiction books is, and I feel the writer's pain on this, is that hey, I spent all this time, I did this research, and I found this stuff out, and so I want to tell you about it. And but if it doesn't move the story of the argument forward,

the reader doesn't care. And so it's like you got to you know, as painful as it is, you got to leave it out. Yeah, you do, and it is very painful. I mean, like I can't do it. I leave it all in and then I give it to my editor and say, do whatever you want with it. Like that I needed, like it's almost a compulsive thing. Like it's like I needed to include it all. And then at that first stage, first stage, Yeah, the first

stage you included. You know, first drafts, you try to include anything, but you actually have to be I think there's a certain ruthlessness is helpful in writing. It's the way I look at and as one progresses, you begin to develop that kind of ruthlessness to the point now where I read over something and I basically I think that every sentence, every word has to explain to me why I shouldn't kill it. Yeah, and they are. You're

doing right by the reader. And I think unfortunately a lot of books don't always even aspire to that, unless sureing I managed to achieve that, but I think a lot of books don't aspire to that. There's a lot of it's like, oh my god, that's like, okay, I really didn't need these two pages just because you did

the research one afternoon. That's right. Yeah, so I really have learned a lot about science writing by reading your work, but is extraordinarily difficult for me to switch between these radically different modes of thought, from journal scientific writing to popular science communication. It's like being what's multiple personality disorder? Yeah,

multiple personality disorder. Right, it's like, you know, I go from this like hyper detail reviewer comments are like at the level of granularity that would, you know, make your head explode, and they make my head explode, and then switching to like where it's like, oh no, I don't need include that level of detail, you know, and like there is no picky reviewer. I mean, there are certainly picky critics, but yeah, of course, but you know what I mean. So it's really hard. Oh I can totally

understand that. And this is the advantage of not having those well developed journal writing skills. Yeah, actually that's a good point. Yeah, maybe it's a trade off. I don't run into that conflict because there's nothing to conflict with. Yeah, yeah, you're more harmonious, integrated human I am, I am. I'm actually climbing ladder about to have a peak experience. It's true, Okay, Yeah, so maybe if I want to get more into science writing out suck more in my journal writing now, I

don't know, just stop doing it. Yeah, well, I enjoy it too though, So it's tough when you enjoy multiple things that are so different from joint. That's a whole other topic of conversation. Let's talk about selling. Can we move into that direction right now? You wrote this really fascinating book which really laid down, you know, a basic truth about humanity is that, you know, pretty much, even if superficially looks different, pretty much everything in the world

today is in some form of selling. And people's jobs, you know, and cars depends on how well you can move something and move back. So can you talk a little bit more about this fundamentally? What do you think the fundamental if you had to think in evolutionary terms, like you know, other animals, it's not like monkeys are selling other monkeys, but they are doing something resembling what this drive is. That's interesting. I haven't thought about it

much across species. It could be something that make humans, I mean what in evolutionary terms, you know, our brains allow us to do things that other species can't do, and one of the biggest ones is collaborate, even though other primates obviously can collaborate, but collaborate, but also what we also are able to do is collaborate across great distances, and that requires at least some capacity to persuade wo

other people to join your cause. So my hunch is that there probably was an evolutionary advantage to people who were adept at persuasion and influence. It'd be surprising if it didn't. If there wasn't, because the people who weren't adept at that probably didn't get others to go along with them and protect them and do all those kinds of things. It's a really interesting question about other species.

I haven't really thought much about it. I wonder whether, like the collaborative activity and other species is is we can consider it selling. I haven't thought about that. It probably isn't. It probably is in some ways. I mean, there's wooing obviously in species for reproduction. But I don't know. I just don't know enough about it. This is one book that I have that I haven't finished. Yeah, back here somewhere. It's You Have a Million Books behind You

by Franz de All, who's Emirates climatologist. It's called are we smart enough to know how smart animals are? And it makes me curious about that. I don't know a lot about animal thinking. Well, that's a really good point that he made, and I certainly don't know the answer, but just in thinking about it, it it seems like it's more linked to the Macavelian system we see in monkeys,

which are is quite developed. You know, it's funny because you use the word cooperative, you know, sometimes that's antithetical too, like do you distinguish between like dark triad selling and cooperative like non zero sum selling? Does that make sense? I don't even know. Yeah, no, I see where No,

I see where you're going. I mean, one of the arguments of the book, so I would say that dark triad selling is a form of manipulation, exactly right, And whereas I think, and one of the arguments of the book is that that kind of selling, that that low road kind of selling is becoming tougher today because of

information parody. That is, like taking the low road is easy in a world where sellers have huge amounts more information than buyers, where buyers don't have any choices, where buyers don't have a way to talk back today, not fully, but today buyers have a lot more information, a lot more choices, and a lot more ways to a lot more ways to talk back. So you know what you're calling like dark triad selling, you know, the sort of machia What else is in the triad, like psy psychopathy.

Believe me, there's plenty of psychopathy, narcissism, and machiavelism in the world. It's just that I actually think in selling it's less effective these days. Wow, that would be wonderful if a lot of like dark tried people listen to this podcast and we're like, Wow, if I just a more cooperative I could manipulatively get what I want better than you know, that's actually a sneaky way of getting them to quality. It would be. It could be the

light version of the dark triad. But by the way, the other thing about it, though, The other thing about it is that you have to think about you know, you use the word zero sum, and I think that's actually a really way to look at it. So are the interactions and are these transactions zero s or positive? Some? And I do think that that dark triad personalities look at encounters of all kinds as zero s winning and that people who are more self actualized, to borrow phrase,

probably look at interactions as more positive some that's right. Yeah. Also, you know if you look at great you know. The connection between this and evolution is a great book by

Bob Wright called Non Zero. I love that. It's grateful, Yeah, and it's all about how like you know, the reason we've been able to progress is because we don't think of things as zero s. We think of things as we think of encounters as positive some you know, like this conversation here, it's like, there's not going to be at least I hope, not going to be a winner or a lose. There is not If I win, you lose, If you win, I lose. It's a theoretical positive some

for you, for me, for the listeners. But if I were, if I were a narcissistic Machiavellian psychopath, then I might want to use this interview to make me look good somehow at your expense. Totally. But of all of the personality afflictions that I have, dark Tria, it is not up there, you know, I mean, we all got something come on, yeah, yeah, it's called being human. I wanted to make a point. You know, sometimes in the psychology podcast, I don't have fully baked ideas, but I just like

to try to articulate them on the spot. Sure, So, who wins when two people are trying to get at the truth they both care deeply about, not their ego but the truth. Yeah, one person, the person who is better at representing the truth kind of does win in a sense. But it shouldn't be attached to the ego. You see a lot of times on you I'm just

going to give example. You know, you see a lot of times on YouTube these intellectual debates, and then these people will reframe it as like X person dominates Y person or X person obliterates you know, and I really can't stand that framing. But you see how it's kind of like reframed when it really is just like a really nice mutual dialogue of two people interested in getting it the truth. But sometimes that's reframed. Have you seen

that too on YouTube? I don't know. I mean, you see it very much in political discussions, yes, yes, And so you know I think that especially in the press coverage of political discussions. So it's like, you know, is this legislation a win for the Democrats or a lose for a loss for the that kind of stuff. It shouldn't be basically like that, taking the ethic of sports

writing into turning everything into essentially a sports contest. The thing about sports is that at least a particular g game is a baseball game, is a zero sum contest. Somebody wins and somebody loses. The other thing about baseball games is that the stakes in importance to humanity is limited, so it's fine, whereas like political discussions, you would think the stakes to humanity are greater. What a terrific analogy,

because people really do what the human tribalism need. People really do treat their political party like they do a baseball team, you know, and like whatever the party person says, you know, like no matter how crazy or incorrect, untruthful it is, it's like rah rah rah go win. Yeah. This is the this is the biggest thing going on

in American politics. And this is this is the work of a political some great work done by a political scientist at Maryland named Lilliana Mason, who's basically the Herd thesis, which I think is very very well supported by a whole array of pulling data and others. Is that what's happened in this first of all, in this country in particular, has been an incredible sorting a guy can't think of.

They wrote a book called The Big Sort, which is why you know people in you know, if you look at my ninety if you look at my ninetyges zip code, they're going to be a shitload of priuses and no catal acts, and in my ninetages zip code, they're going to be. Here in Washington, d C. They're going to be very very few Trump voters and a lot of Hillary voters. They're going to be very few people who listen to country music and a lot of people who listen to NPR. I'm not saying that's a good thing

or a bad thing, but it's a thing. And so you have this massive sorting by neighborhood, but you also have a massive sorting politically so that the you know, in the old like the first Republican to be elected to the United States Senate was an African American, Edward Brook. You used to have Southern conservative, Southern conservatives who were Democrats. You don't have that anymore. You used to have people like John lindsay, a liberal Republican. You don't have that anymore.

And so what you have now is you have incredible polarization of the parties hinge very much to identity, to the point where you have one party which is basically a white party and another party that is largely a non white party. And when people it's basically one party is heavily white and the other party is heavily non white, but includes whites who live in urban areas. And so what you have there is when your politics have become

hitched entirely to your identity. Political conversations, political battles become purely zero sum, and what's at stake is not only winning and losing as in a baseball game, but which at stake is your identity itself. And so this is why the whole point of politics has become to win. And this is why you see so identity, Trump's identity, humanity, identity, Trump's smaller things, identity, Trump's ideology, identity, which is why you can have a swing, a Republican swing in their

view of law enforcement or Russia in a flash. Identity, Trump's ideology, identity, Trump's issues, identity, Trump's interest ten years ago, you had Tom Frank write a book called, What's the matter with Kansas? What these people and these people on Kansas possibly be doing voting for conservatives? What it was against their economic self interest? And you know what they didn't say was what's the matter with Northwest Washington, d C? Where you have people who are supporting candidates who are

going to raise their taxes against their self interest. So identity Trump's interest, identity Trump's ideology, identity Trump's issues. It's all about identity, and it's about winning and losing. And that's it. And Mason has this great factoid in there where she talks about Republicans, something like seventy percent of Republicans believe there's some gun control provision, let's say background checks or safety locks. Seventy percent of Republicans believe in

that when you ask them in a poll. But if you ask them, should Congress pass a law to mandate safety locks or whatever some kind of thing like that that they agree with, the number who support passing a law to do that goes down to something like forty eight percent because that would be a win for the other guy. So identity, identity, identity, identity. It beats interest, it beats ideology, it beats issues. That's what's going on

in this country. You really nailed it there, and even this is I'm repeating the pieces of Lily animation, but I've become very convinced about that. Jennifer Richardson at Yale has done some interesting research about how that the changing demographics of some really really interesting research in psychology about how changes in demographics actually make people in experimental settings make people more conservative, and not just white people. But you know, it's not, as she says, it's not white

people psychology, it's people in general. So there's some big, big, big, big, big, big, big big issues going on. But the biggest thing in the country right now is essentially a civil war of identities. It's not politics, it's a civil war. It's an identity civil war, identity civil war. Well, you know, if we take it a deeper level than identity, I mean, I don't know how I got on that dark track, but oh no, I mean I love the detours. To me. The detours are more exciting than what's on the to

do list. It's always the for me. At a deeper level of identity, though, it seems like people are hitching their identity on their ego. There's like something deeper there of like, you know, my ego is at stake or my self esteem is you know, as opposed to oh there some transcendent truth is at stake. See, they have very different consequences depending on what you hitch. You know, the identity on totally right, because I think that identity is it's I read the completely identity is hitched ego,

self esteem, whatever. It's not about any kind of broader it's not about any kind of broader truth. Then when it's a political battle, you don't want your identity to lose because that's a major major, that's a major injury. It's an injury. It's an injury and a loss for your whole self rather than legislatives anyway, not anyway, Like this is really awesome stuff. Dark tryad identity politics. Who knows what else is next? No, but this is the interesting,

This is this is what's interesting. But so let me try to do a ninja move here and tie what you said into next thing I wanted to talk to you about. So you know, you talk about the new abcs of attunement, buoyancy, and clarity do you think great politicians, you know, not just great ones who are like they care about humanity, they are good people as well. They incorporate these three things when they try to move large segments of their base. Absolutely, yeah, that was good. No, No,

I think that's right. So so atunement is can you understand someone else's perspective? Can you get out of your own head and see something from someone else's point of view? I think that good politicians are able to do that. Buoyancy is basically, you know, former resilience. Can you stay afloat in an ocean of rejection? You know, really good

politicians are able to do that. And then clarity is, you know, the is you know, not only accessing information but curating it, making sense of a welthare of information, and then also moving from problem solving to problem finding. And I do think that, you know, skilled politicians are really pretty good at that, and even the less noble politicians are pretty good at that. Yeah for sure. And then in terms of the extras introversion to mention, I

really like how you discussed then your book. It's a topic I'm interesting as well. Is it a myth that you have to be an extrovert in order to have these three things or got these three skills. There is almost no correlation between strong extroversion and sales success. It's a total myth. Thank you for the spelling. That myth doesn't mean that strong introverts are better. They're actually not, They're worse. So strong introverts aren't very good at this either.

So what really matters? What really the personality that seems to have the greatest success in persuasion, sales influence are and proverts, which are most of us, you know a

little bit. You know, the distribution of introversion extraversion in the population is kind of sort of a bell curve, and so most of us are not is all Myers brings his fault because they said, they said, you know, you're an I or an E, when in fact most of us it's spectrum, and most of us are someone where you know kind of you know, it's it's it's a bell curve basically, and so most of us are sort of in the middle of that that bel crub.

So I'm an introvert, like the on any sort of instrument, I would test on that if you give you a choice between I and E, I mean never forget about myers grace, but on the right, on their legitimate Yeah, exactly. On the Big five measure of extraversion, I'm going to come out more introverted than extrovert, but I'm not going to come out as a super strong introvert. And what

that means is that I'm basically I'm basically an ambrovert. Yeah, but I mean there's something about that versatility that's actually really useful when it comes to sales, because you know, it's like being ambidextrous and sports. You know, you can move to your left, you can move to your right, Whereas being ambidextrous and sales persuasion means that you know when to speak up, but you also know when to shut up. You don't what to push, but you also know when to hold back, And so that kind of

ambidextrousness is extraordinarily valuable. I couldn't agree with you more

on that note. So let's next ten minutes or so, let's include this podcast talking about time management or no, no, not time well, managing your life, and it's it's broader than just time management, right, so's scheduling, you know, like making timing matter, And this covers a whole wide range of things, as you know, could you want to pick one of the most obscure things, like one of the things people wouldn't necessarily think about, would have such a

profound effect on one's life if they manage it properly. Well, I think there are all kinds of there's all kinds ofgory stuff on that. The biggest thing is that is that you know when we you know when we think. To me, it's like the broader category is like various when decisions, right, So when when should you do something? And that could be over a course of a lifetime, over course of a project, over the course of the day.

I was really intrigued by a lot of the by the research on midpoints, and by the research on endings. That is a lot of our a lot of our lives are episodic, you know, so a project, for instance, as the beginning of middle and an end. Certain kinds of jobs have beginnings, middles and ends. Certain relationships have beginnings, bills and ends. And the effect of endings on our behavior,

effect the midpoints on our behavior are really interesting. Midpoints is not anything that I even thought about until I started doing the research for this book. When so interesting. And then well, let's talk about some of the things. What about. I mean a lot of things are very practical, like when is the worst time to be a hospital? Oh, shot, that's an easy one, okay, right, So yeah, So basically, don't go to the hospital in the afternoon if you

can avoid it. And the evidence is pretty overwhelming. If you look at like anesthesia rors four times more likely at three pm than at nine am. If you look at colonoscopies, doctors fund half as many polyups in afternoon exams as they do in morning exams. You look at prescribing unnecessary antibiotics much more common in the afternoon versus the morning. If you look at hand washing in hospitals,

big decline in hand washing hospitals in the afternoon. So yeah, no, that's among the findings that have been most useful in my own personal life. Husban that So my daughter earlier this week had her nineteen year old had her wisdom teeth taken out, and believe me, she had to have general anesthesia. There is no way that she was going for that in the afternoon. She had a live satter appointment at seven point thirty pay And I love that they are applying your research to help your daughter. Oh,

totally totally to on that. I mean, I've done it in other realms, as I've done it in other realms as well, and other kinds of like. I will not, I seriously will not. If I get run over by a bus at two in the afternoon, I'm going to go to the hospital. Okay, I'm not going to say, oh, wait till the morning, but if I have discretion over it, no way would I go to an important medical appointment

or the hospital in the afternoon. I'll do a routine teeth cleaning in the afternoon, absolutely, you know, go for that. But if I'm having a like oral surgery, There's no way I'm going to go in the afternoon. This is great, ok I'm going to just throw stuff at you and just like give me the answer to it, Like just give me, like tell me, just give like the one

word answer. Right. So, like, when should you quit your job when you're approaching an anniversary and your job doesn't give you both control and challenge more than one word one sentence is perfectly fine? When should you get married? Well, it seems like your marriage is slightly more likely to succeed if you get married after you've completed your education,

no matter how much education it is. And also between the ages of twenty five and thirty two, your marginally your marginally less likely to your marginal it's likely to get divorced. But again on that, Okay, we're talking about large population. So if you get married when you're thirty three, it doesn't mean you're going to get divorced. If you get married when you're twenty nine, it doesn't mean you're

going to You're going to stay married. I think, to me, the most interesting piece of research on marriage, well, I mean, first of all, I mean like marriage is an incredibly interesting topic, and Eli Finkol at Northwestern has done a terrific book on this called The Marriage. I love that book,

but one of the really interesting things. But there's some research out of Emory showing an inverse relationship between how much a couple spends on their wedding ring, engagement ring, and wedding and the likelihood success of the marriage succeeding. So the more you spend on the wedding, the engagement ring, and the wedding, less likely the marriage is to succeed. Is that call? Oh, the less likely I was going to sa say, if it was more likely, it'd be

cognitive dissonance, but you're saying it's less likely to succeed. Yeah, so the more you spend, the less likely to succeed, So expending wedding. Well okay, so why so okay, first of all, the opposite. Okay, so this is great. Okay, this is great. So you would predict the opposite because of course I'm in love with this person. Look how much my marriage? How could this be falling apart? We had this glorious wedding, right exactly, how could this marriage

be falling apart? I have this uh sparkly diamond ring. That's a great theory. The research shows the opposite. Now, causation. Yeah, you know, you're scientist. You have to be very very skittish about causation if we're outside of a laboratory setting, right, even if we're in a laboratory set, and we have to be very skittish about causation. But one, okay, so I'll give you my initial hypothesis. It was that people who spent a lot on weddings and engagement rooms had

materialistic values, and materialistic values were antithetical to enduring marriages. Okay, there needs to be zero evidence of that. Oh okay, people have controlled for like materialistic values in this progression. There seems to be zero evidence. There is zero evidence of that the raining theory right now, and again not even it's not even theory, the raining speculation. Yeah yeah, Now,

it's actually much more pedestrian. And it's this that one of the things that we know helps causes marriages to break up or at least accelerates marriages breaking up are its financial distress. And to be the most persuasive argument here is that when couples spend a lot on their weddings and a lot of engagement rings, they go into debt, and as a consequence, they start their marriages under greater

financial stress than a marriage where they spent less. And so it's really that it's really debt and financial stress that's the result of these expensive weddings and engagement rings that is driving it. That's very like sensible hypothesis. And one could think that you know, you want to start your marriage often good foot. If you're starting it off broke because you've spent so much in your marriage, it's all going to kind of go down here from there.

You know, there are all kinds of you know, I've been married for twenty three years, and so they're all kinds of happily married for twenty three years. But there are all kinds of stressors unmarried, you know, And one of the biggest ones is financial stress. And so if you if you go from day one, it's like you're underwater from day one. That can you know, up the it doesn't guarantee you're going to get divorced. There are plenty of financially stressed people who have happy marriages, but

it could up the odds of one getting divorced. So interesting. Just a few more. When should you exercise? It depends on your goals. It seems like morning exercises better if you want to lose weight, form a habit, or get an enduring mood boost. Because I think the last one is persuasive, because you know, exercise, particularly aerobic exercise, is a mood booster, and it can last for a fairly long time. You exercise late in the day, you sleep away.

The mood boost after an exercise seems to be better for avoiding injury. I think that's a lot because a body temperature or body temperature goes up later in the day and so you're literally more warmed up. It's better for performance. There's some interesting effects on long function and I coordination and speed at sort of late in the afternoon and early in the evening, and people also report

enjoying it more in the late afternoon and early evening. Again, I think a lot of it has to do with body temperature, So it really depends for morning exercise for and during mood boost, habit formation and weight loss, afternoon exercise for enjoying it more, performing better in a voiding injury. Cool. Okay, last question, and it's a bit of a cheeky framing. Are you ready? When is the best time to have a midlife crisis? Was that a clever question? Yeah? That

was That's a really good question. Well, I mean, you know, at the midlife crisis, the brainchild of Elliot Jacques in the early nineteen sixties is complete bogocity. There's no sort of a widespread crisis at middle age. There is something very intriguing that goes on across cultures is that there's a U shaped curve of wellbeing. So people actually their subjective wellbeing is dips a little bit in middle age, but no serious crisis. And I'm at in my life now,

at the bottom of that U shaped curve. Now I'm at basically the so everything is up for me from now on. Statistically, everything is up for me. Oh does that mean like on average? Yeah, so to people in my population, cohort on average are going to lift. I don't know if how I will. Oh, gotcha, Well I hope you will. Hey, thanks a lot for the chat. This was a lot of fun, and I've had a lot of fun reading your work. Thanks a lot. I appreciate the questions and I appreciate the dark alleys you

walk down with me. I enjoyed it. Yeah, me too. Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at Thespsychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology Podcast dot com. Also, please add a rating and

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