Ron Friedman || Reverse Engineering Greatness

world's leading nonprofits. His books include The Best Place to Work, The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace, and most recently, Decoding Greatness, How the Best in the World Reverse Engineer Success. Doctor Friedman is so great to chat with you today. Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. Scott. Oh wow, So it's been quite some time since you've last been on the Psychology Podcast, hasn't it. It has six years maybe more. You're one of the early early

guests of the show show. You know what it's It's always as pleasure to speak with you. But I have to applaud you for the incredible growth of this show and it's a no small measure. So I think your curiosity and your presence on these shows. So I don't know how much you want to speak spend talking about you, but I'm happy to do it all show along. Thank you. That was that was enough that I really do appreciate it.

I really do appreciate it. I'm just I'm antsy and well, I'm eager to jump into your new book because it's an area of interest I've had for many years. I've you know, read, obviously read this topic, tried to study it scientifically. What are the ingredients of greatness? You know? And you have a very fresh take on it, which comes down to trying to reverse reverse engineer greatness. Can you tell me a little bit about what that means, reverse engineering greatness. Yeah. So, so let me take a

step back and just give it some context. So there are two main stories that we've been told throughout our lives about what is required to achieve at the highest level. And those two big stories are Number one, that greatness comes from talent, and this is the idea that we're all born with unique strengths and that the key to finding your greatness is identifying a field that allows your inner strengths to shine. The second major story is the

Malcolm Gladwell story. It's the story of practice. It's the idea that if you just have the right practice regiment and that you have the discipline to execute against it for year after year after year that eventually you'll become great. But what I discovered in doing the research for decoding Greatness is that there is a third story about how

people rise to the top of their professions. And it's one that's not often discussed, and we could talk about why that is, but it is strikingly common among artists and entrepreneurs and inventors, and that path is reverse engineering. And reverse engineering simply means identifying extraordinary examples in your field and then working backward to figure out how they were created. And there are all sorts of examples of this throughout history. So you know, in Silicon Valley the

idea that of reverse engineering is very well known. There's a long history of coders who have deconstructing, deconstructed winning products to identify how they were created. It's how he got the laptop and the personal computer and even the iPhone.

But it goes far beyond that, because what most people don't realize is that reverse engineering is how authors like Stephen King and Malcolm Gladwell learned their craft, and how painters like Claude Monet and Pablo Picasso became groundbreaking artists, and even how comedians like jud Apatow became remarkable, remarkably high achievers. So reverse engineering, working backwards from extraordinary examples to identify how they were created, turns out to be

way more common that we've been led to believe. Amazing. You know, there's this idea in psychology when we're trying to understand the determines of greatness, like unders Erickson, who studied the expertise approach, will take experts and try to understand what does the experts have, you know, to explain greatness. But as a lot of scientists have critiqued that approach because it already weeds out all the predictors of it

earlier on. You know, when you only look at those who have reached a certain threshold, you might be missing out on various characteristics and traits that were important in the earlier stages of things. So how do you get around that, critics? You know, I mean, like I could see a scientist hearing your approach and asking that question.

I can hear their voice in my head. Yeah, you know what I frankly, it's irrelevant to my enterprise because what I'm interested in is what is the methodical approach to take extraordinary examples and figure out what we can learn from them. So I'm less interested in what made someone else great than I am in having a methodical approach for improving my own skills. And that's what decoding Greatness is about, is about the methods and the techniques

that you can use to unpack extraordinary work. So one example I offer in Decoding Greatness is I show you how to reverse engineer the most popular tech talk of all time, and that tech talk belonged to Sirkin Robinson, who's no longer with us, And if you go online and you check out that talk, it's the one to talk about how school beats the creativity out of us. It's the idea that children are very curious at an

early age. They arrive at school and then they're taught that there's only one a right answer, and that constant reinforcement of the idea that there's only one correct answer short circuits their interest in exploring different ideas in any event, Into coding greatness, what I do is I show you how to use various techniques to illuminate what he's actually doing there. So one of the techniques is to reverse outline. Reverse outlining is a twist on the traditional outlining approach.

So when we outline, we bullet point what we're going to put into a finished piece. Reverse outlining is taking someone else's finished piece and then working backward to identify what that outline might look like. That's a technique that can help you identify what is happening over the long stretch of a talk and kind of give you a big picture of view of what's happening and so shows

you the flow. But more importantly, what I do to his TED talk is I quantify different features, meaning I turn certain features into numbers, and I show you that over the course of this very popular, just a twenty minute talk, he shares a grand total of one persuasive fact. Now that's a remarkable statistic, because if I were to create a new TED talk, I would assume that I'd need to just really flood you with a lot of persuasive information to convince you of my point of view.

He's got one persuasive fact. What's he doing a lot of He's telling a lot of jokes. He's got forty jokes in twenty minutes, and he is giving you a lot of personal anecdotes, and so just that short analysis that I've just shared with you in the last two minutes gives you a vastly different picture of how to craft a tech talk than you might have had and gives you directions so that if you're creating your own TED talk, you now have a template from which to work,

as opposed to just staring at the blank page. And I think that's powerful, is just knowing how to take a part extraordinary examples turn them into a template to give you that that head start on crafting your own material, I think is invaluable. Ah yeah, yeah, I will. I love that TED talk, and I love that topic, you know, creativity among kids and may both sir Ken Robinson and Anders Ericson, who I mentioned earlier rest in peace. I have great respect for both of them. Yeah, contributors, Yeah

for sure. Uh. You know, you talk a little bit about how both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates reverse engineered the xerox to a certain degree or they and you make it clear. And I really liked your actually nuanced footnote. I think you should have put that footnote in the and the main you know thing. But you you have this footnote where you say you're not saying that they stole the idea, but that you know they definitely were inspired by it and then built upon it. Can you

can you tell that story a little bit? Yeah, First of all, I want to applaud you for reading the footnote. I usually will prefer footnotes. Let me tell you right, let me tell a nerd. I'm a nerd. I'm on you know, fifty to one hundred podcasts. Now, I have a hard time with people reading the book, let alone the footnotes. So congratulations to you on doing the homework.

So the story of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates is one that actually is the launching point for this book because it's probably the best and end most talked about example of reverse engineering and history. And it's the story of how the personal computer was developed. And many people assume that Microsoft made tremendous contributions, and so did Steve Jobs, and they did, but they the idea of the personal

computer did not emerge out of the ether. Back in the nineteen eighties, if you wanted to use a computer, you had to use an arcane text based language to input your instructions known as syntax, and today, of course that computers don't operate that way. Today we can point and click, and that advance that allowed humans to point and click and use a visual display. It was called

a graphic user interface. The graphic user interface was that big bridge that led computers to just explode all over the place because now they were so easy to use. You could just convey your instructions using a mouse. That advancement was the contribution of Xerox in the form of a computer called the Xerox Alto. Now most people have never heard of that computer, and it's because Xerox didn't think it had the potential to be a consumer product.

They were trying to sell it into very large, very wealthy organizations at a price, an exorbitant price of over one hundred thousand dollars. And Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were both familiar with this idea, and they thought that Xerox was sitting on a gold mine and was underutilizing

this really critical idea. And so what they did was they saw that example of this underutilized technology and then they reversed engineered, meaning they didn't copy the code, they didn't take it purchasing one and take it apart, and then duplicate the machine. Rather, what they did was they looked at what it did to work back or to understand how what might have been created, and then they took those insights into radically different directions. In the case

of Microsoft, they looked to make computers affordable. In the case of Apple, they looked to make computers that were artistic and were easy to use, an intuitive and both made tremendous contributions. And if it wasn't for reverse engineering, it's a good chance we wouldn't have had we wouldn't be having this conversation right now over a computer. That's true.

That's true. I love the story you tell about how they when when Steve Job thought Bill was stealing his idea, his idea, and you know, he brought up he brought Bill over the meeting to a meeting, and and Bill's like, well, you know what was the quote? You know, this is a great quote you stole. But I this is a tremendous showdown between these two entrepreneurial giants and Steve Jobs at the time, so I kind of glossed over this part. So Steve Bill Gates was an Apple vendor at the

time when he released when he announced Windows. Steve Jobs, who's about to release the Macintosh, finds out that Steve Job that Bill Gates is about to release Windows and thinks that he has stolen it from Apple. What he didn't realize was that, in fact, Bill Gates knew about the alto just as Steve Jobs did. And so Steve Jobs calls Bill Gates over in his office, tears into him. He says, you're stealing from us, and Bill Gates coolly responds, well, Steve,

there's more than one way to look at this. It's more like we both had this wealthy neighbor named Xerox, and I broke in to steal the television and found that you had already stolen it. And that was just a mic drop moment. And this is just a small sliver of their ongoing saga, which I then described Vibe in the introductory chapter of Decoding Greatness, where there are just constant battles between these two and more than one

instance of reverse engineering leading to their greatest innovations. I sure wish there was a recording of that meeting, right, Wow, Yeah, Well so okay, so let's let's just talk about some of these maybe counter and two of ideas in your book, because you did notice some things that they go against some of the standard canon of what determines greatness. You say, in a majority of cases, copying or over relying on established recipes is a losing strategy that rarely results in

memorable outcomes. So how do you square that with the idea of the importance of reverse engineering? Because it seems like you're contradicting yourself on the surface, but obviously you're not. Yeah, so that's a great point. So just to say that a little bit differently, what I argue in this book is that all you're doing is copying someone else's proven formula, chances are you will not succeed, and there are two

critical reasons for that. The first reason is that the person who was successful with their iteration likely has some characteristics or personality traits, or attributes or experiences or reputation that enabled them to be successful the first time. So I gave the example of Sir Ken Robinson. He's telling forty jokes over the course of twenty minutes. I'm not a particularly funny person. If I got up on the TED stage and tried to tell forty jokes, it would

be a disaster. It works because he's a funny guy and he's got a particular style of delivery. There's another reason why simply copying someone else tends not to work. It's because audience expectations shift with time. So in the book, I give the example of Twilight, and the book Twilight, for those who aren't familiar, is the story of a teenager who falls in love with a vampire. When that book came out, it exploded. It was on the bestseller

list for quite some time. So that all these copycuts come out of people falling in love with vampires and they all fail miserably. And why do they fail. It's because audience expectations shift, meaning that the idea of what was once novel now feels, you know, like it's been done. It's no longer interesting. And so the key is to is to use reverse engineering to understand why something works, but then critically to evolve it just enough to make it your own things. So I talked about Twilight and

how that failed originally, Well, what was successful? What was the next iteration of that? Abraham Lincoln is a vampire hunter that succeeded. Why because it was taking the idea of you know, chasing vampires and adding the level of history. So it's all about combining different elements and that's what tends to be successful. Is you know, we often I think, conflate and maybe this is something you want to get to get to Scott. I feel like we conflate the

idea of originality with creativity. Those two terms are not the same thing. Just because you are are not original doesn't mean you're not creative, and just because you're creative doesn't mean you're necessarily original. And as it turns out, originality tends to backfire. So it's those, it's those, it's those iterations that are completely new and overwhelm audiences with

originality that tend to fall flat. And it's because as a species, we tend to be distrustful of the new, and that distrust extends to the way we experience objects

and experiences. So I talk about in the book about this study that was conducted by the Harvard Business School looking at the type of medical research grants that get funding, and that what they did in the study was they had objective raiders code the proposals for the degree of novelty that they each had, and then they look to see whether they whether the degree of novelty predicted receiving funding. And what they found was that the grand proposals that

had them most originality tended to get rejected. The grand proposals that had no originality also got rejected. What got funding, it was the grants that had a minor dose of novelty. And the researchers refer to this as optimal newness. And I think what that teaches us and is really critical if you're someone who's in the arts or if you're someone who's even you know, in the business world, trying to introduce a new product or service, you don't want

to overshoot the mark by overwhelming people with originality. You want what you want to do is you want to give them something that they have experienced before and then modified or combine it with an insight or an approach from a different field that makes it slightly new that you're you're far more likely to win popular approval and respect and admiration if that if you go with that approach. Yeah,

that's consistent with the creativity literature. The science of creativity literature usually Creativit is defined as both originality and meaningfulness, one without the other it doesn't creativity. So if you just wildly original like a schizophrenic word salad, but it has no meaning, it has no meaning. You know, like people aren't going to be like it's brilliant. You know. It has to you know, it has to fit into someone's pre existing schemas to least some degree, you know,

at least some degree. Yeah cool, cool. I'm going to ask a very unrelated question, but what algorithms like Tinder teach us about improving our skills or is it restually related? It's related. Yeah, So this is this is another interesting story. This is in chapter two of Decoding grat and is where I look at what algorithms can teach us about finding hidden patterns. And the way that algorithms work is

that they present. In the case of Tinder, they present users with a small sample set of potential mates, and they ask them to swipe right if they find them attractive, swipe left if they find them unattractive, and then it uses what Tinder algorithm does. It then uses the people you've swiped right on to look for commonalities that and then so for and there may not even be things that you are conscious of. So for example, Let's say, Scott that you've rated, you know, ten potential partners and

five of them were attractive to you. What tinders algorithm will do is initially all redheads. Well, you've spoiled, you spoiled the big reveal. But they may maybe other things

besides redheads. Maybe you're conscious of red heads, but you're not conscious of the fact that they all tend to like spicy foods, or they like the outdoors, or they're introverted, all of those types of features that may be hidden in their personality profiles that you may not be optimizing for on the conscious level, but in fact are the

things that appeal to you. That's what enables Tinder's algorithm to then present new potential partners that share those traits and increase their chances of helping you find the right maten live happily ever after. But without that initial set of examples, Tinder's algorithm is fairly useless, and the same

is true for all of us. If we're looking to find patterns in extraordinary work, what we need are examples of the types of work that we find resonance, which is why one of the first strategies I offer in this book is to become a collector. So if you want to get good at reverse engineering and learning from the best in your field, it helps if you can identify examples that you find resonant. And so I argue that,

rather than simply passively enjoying experiences, start a collection. I can tell you you know, when we think about collections, we think about physical objects. We think about stamps, we think about rocks or gems or wines. But that definition of collections being only relevant to physical objects is too narrow. And in fact, I can tell you that presenters will collect presentation decks, copywriters will collect headlines. I'm a writer. I don't know about us cut, but I collect stories.

I collect academic journal articles. I collect powerful verbs, all of the things that I will then draw from as I'm writing my next book or my next article. And so, when you have a collection of the works that you consider extraordinary, now you can start to unpack them for patterns. And it's by comparing the ordinary against the extraordinary, meaning the things you have in your collection versus the things

that didn't make your collection. And now by comparing the two, you can't help but identify some of the ingredients that went into creating it. And so if you know, the question I often get is, well, how am I supposed to create this collection? It could be as simple as just starting a Google doc. You know of if you're a marketer, you can start collecting websites that you consider impactful. If you are a writer, you can use Google docs as well. If you are a designer, you can start

collecting images on Pinterest. And again, it's just about having that personal museum that you can then go to and visit, not just for unpacking and reverse engineering those great examples, but also just to go somewhere where you when you want to be inspired instead of just simply looking at that blank page. If you're a writer, you can have a collection of powerful openings, scan them before you start writing, and I bet you it'll make your work a lot easier. Cool.

You know, the secret easter egg of this podcast is you're actually teaching people how to learn exactly right, not just a code greatness, but word anything. Uh So, okay, so how did what does the Ritz Carlton hotel chain know about this? Because you you say they know a little bit something about how to improve it anything? Absolutely, and so the Ritz Carlton is you know, if you've ever looked into high priced hotels, Ritz Carlton is usually at the top of the list. They're they're there year

after year, one of the best at customer service. And how they got really good at customer services that by identifying a particular metric that they wanted to get really good at. And I use this example because in the first half of the Cody Greatness, I show you all these examples examples of how people are reverse engineering in different fields, and I show you how you can reverse engineer formulas and then also how you can modify their formula.

Is just enough to make the winning formula original and novel to you. The second half of the book is about bridging the gap between your vision, in other words, the formula you're trying to execute and your current ability, because chances are at the beginning, when you're just starting out, your skill level won't be high enough to execute against the formulas that you've decoded, and so it's critical to

know how to skill build quickly. And the first chapter in that section on bridging the gap between vision and ability is called the scoreboard principle. And the scoreboard principle is simple. It simply states that the secret to improving at anything is measuring. In other words, anything you measure you are likely to improve on. Measurement begets improvement. That's the measurement. Measurement, Yeah, measurement begins, that's improvement. That's what

the scoreboard principle ultimately states. Measurement begets improvement. Anything you want to get at start measuring. And the Ritz Carlton is committed to one particular metric because they know it will mean everything for the success of their hotel. In the case of the Ritz Carlton, that metric is net promoter scores. Now, net promoter scores is just a fancy market research way of saying how many people who leave your hotel are likely to recommend the experience to a

friend or a colleague. They don't just simply measure customer customer satisfaction, although they're interested in that, they're primarily interested in net promoter scores because they realize that if not enough just for people to have a good experience, you want your customers talking to their friends and colleagues, because then that's how you get your grow your customer base

and get new customers. So they're interested not just in getting having people who have great experiences, they're looking to create raving fans, and so after you leave you Riz Carlton hotel, you'll get an email within twenty four hours asking you how likely you are to direct men the experience to a friend or a colleague. And the every

Ritz Carlton is obsessed with this number. They share it with their staff on a daily basis, and it's one of the reasons they've uncovered leading indicators that improve the hotel experience for their guests. So in the case of the Ritz Carlton, one of the things they discovered is that one of the biggest drivers of net promoter scores is the extent to which you fulfill customer's unexpressed desires. So there's two things that people often use. They use

expressed need is the thing you specifically ask for. So an example of this is if I call up the Ritz Carlton, I say do you have a cafe? The answer to that is yes. But if they want to go further and they want to address my unexpressed desire, they might say, and this they'll often do this to the Ritz Carlton is they'll say, yes, we do, sir, would you like me to text you the menu. You see how that's taking it one step further by trying to read into what it is I really want, not

just what what I actually asked for. And they do this spectacularly at the risk why they become it's crafty. It's why they've become one of the best hotel chains in the world. In that context, is a good thing. You know, I don't know how much you want to be going around your daily life. You know, maybe it's a good way to make friends, new friends, and lovers,

but that's that's very strategic. Wow, Okay, I want to talk about I want to transition for second, talk about courage because that part of your book kind of blew my mind a little bit, right, because we're often told that growth requires courage, right, and the only way to improve is to get outside the comfort zone, learn from your risks, or take risks, learn for your mistakes. But you've found, you know, reverse engineering things. That's not always

the case or necessarily the case. Right. Yeah, if you look at the most successful businesses, they're taking risks all the time, but they're not necessarily putting everything on the line. They're being very strategic in the risks that they take by minimizing the impact if those risks fail. So a great example of this is and by the way, this is an approach we can all use in our own

lives to improve our ability to grow new skills. And so one example I give is how businesses will often test with a small subgroup of their customers before releasing a new product out into the field. And so you know, there are all these examples of companies that you know

test in small markets. Often they'll do it in less developed countries because the price of advertising there is lower, and so they're able to get some feedback that it then improves the product before they release into more expensive markets. We as individuals can learn from this. I give the example in the book of Tim Ferris and how Tim Ferriss came upon the title for his first book, The four Hour work Week. In the caps of Tim Ferris,

he didn't have a huge audience at the time. He was a relative unknown, and so what he did was he took one hundred dollars out on Google ad Words and he tested the different titles he was considering to determine which title got him the most clicks. It cost them one hundred dollars. He didn't take, you know, and he was able to get some great feedback right out of the gate. What he didn't do was he didn't just release the book out and then you know, find

his courage and hope that it worked out. He got some feedback and cost them one hundred dollars to do it. That's just one example is applying it with a small audience. So in the case of everyday individuals, if you have a new product you're considering, if you're working in a business, for example, instead of simply releasing that new product and hoping that it works, tested with a few customers or a few clients and get some feedback in advance before

you invest some time producing it. We all have access to test audiences now on places like Facebook and Google. It doesn't cost a ton of money, and it gives you some immediate feedback to determine whether you're on the right path, so you know, for example, if you're considering writing a novel, why not run ads to it as if it existed and determine whether or not to get some clicks that'll tell you whether or not you're on

the right path. Another great example of this, Scott This is one of my favorite examples of the book is selling first and then building later. This is what a lot of businesses do, is they will sell first and build later. And a great example of this is the story of Nix Windmerm. And nix Windmurm was in the turn of the century. He was living in Silicon Valley. He was looking for a pair of shoes with the mall, couldn't find them and thought to himself, man, there has

to be a better way to buy shoes. And so what he did was he opened up a website. And he didn't have any money to build a shoe warehouse. So what he did was he went to his local shoe store and he took photos of their shoes, and he came to an agreement with the manager and said, look, I'm gonna take photos of your shoes, and if anybody buys them, i'm gonna come to your store. I'm going to physically give you the money and I'm gonna ship it to them in the mail. And the manager's like okay.

And Nix Windmurm is one of the founders of Zappos, and it's a great example of how he he did not, you know, try to have raised trendous amount of funds. He didn't find his courage and invest his life savings into a shoe warehouse instead of what he was very strategic. He sold first and he built later. And again that's an approach that any of us can use now on Kickstarter or places like that, where you can test out your ideas, take big swings, take lots of big swings,

because that's how you're going to learn. But just don't put everything on the line. And if you are feeling hesitant because you don't have the courage, chances are you're not necessarily minimizing the risk involved. And that's a far better approach to success is find ways of testing your ideas without putting everything on the line. Makes a lot of sense, makes a lot of sense, and sometimes that

takes courage. Though sometimes that is courage being able to withstand the feedback you know of in order to grow. It does take us. I don't deny the importance of courage at all. What I don't think is true, and I think this is kind of like the thing that we've been led to believe is like we should all at is more courage, or all it takes is perseverance,

Like sometimes it's a limit to those things. And we're far better off optimizing by reducing the impact of having courage or taking risks than we are in just elevating our courage. I got you, I got you. Yeah, good point. Well, so, in terms of how we learn, why is repetition just the repetition model not necessarily the way to go? You know what, can I go back a second, beau? I feel like there's one other thing I want to say about it. Oh yeah, I feel like this is an

important discussion. And you know, when we talk about courage, part of the reason why the impact of failing is so difficult to stomach is because we've over invested in a particular aspect of our life. And so one of the things that businesses do, and this is another one of the strategies I discuss, is they have portfolio businesses. They have a wide array of products and services in

different fields and industries. So if any one particular thing doesn't work out, they're okay because they've got a million other things. The same is true for all of us. If you put all our eggs in one basket, in the career basket, for example, and that one career thing doesn't work out. Let's say you've invested two years in writing a novel and that novel isn't selling. That's disaster.

But if you have a novel and you also have a consulting business, and then you have a podcast on the side, then all of a sudden, that novel that you've invested time in not working out is still painful, but it's not quite as devastating. And the same is true for human relationships. If you have two or three close friends and you get into a fight with one of them or things aren't going well, all of a sudden, you know, it's devastating. You feel like you need to

do everything to fix that relationship. But if you have ten close friends and when one's not going well, you can give give them the space, you know, to get back and maybe touch base with them after things have cooled off after a few months. You know, I've had some interesting conversations with high school friends during the previous election, and fortunately that election now over and we can talk about other things and we're still friends and that's totally fine.

And I just feel like if they were my only friends in life, I would either have to change my worldview, or I would just be really depressed for a while. But because I fortunately have a good network of people, it was okay to have those uncomfortable conversations, set them aside, and then come back to them. I love that. That makes a lot of sense. Cool. Thanks, Thanks for further elaborating on that. Well, do you want to talk about

that expertise idea, you know, with the repetition. I think that a lot of people have this idea that the way to get better is just to practice practice, practice, practice, meaning repetition. Yeah, but I'm happy to talk about this. It's funny to say this to you because you've written about this extensively and quite well, so the idea of

simply practicing. So, in other words, if I'm just trying to get better piano and I'm just going to play the same song all the time and not push myself to focus on the parts of the song where I

have tremendous difficulty, I'm likely not going to improve. And part of the difficulty with practice is that the human mind is constantly working to automate things, meaning that you know, one of the reasons we're able to now drive or brush our teeth while thinking about what we're going to have for dinner or what we're going to do the next day. Is because we're not consciously thinking very carefully about those physical activities. We've now automated it. And on paper,

automaticity is wonderful. It allows you to multitask and do lots of different things. But when it comes to improvement, automaticity is a barrier because you're not paying careful attention. And unless you're paying careful attentions, chances are you're not going to identify those parts where you're struggling, and you're not going to push yourself to improve on them. And so that's one example of how practice actually gets more difficult with time. And the solution comes to us from

the work of ANDREWS. Erickson, where he talks about deliberate practice as being one pathway to overcoming the challenges of automaticity, which involves identifying those parts where you're struggling and you well and repeating just those parts, and also increasing the level of difficulty at times so that you're constantly stretching and forced to pay attention. I also give the example

of the book about being strategic with your hobbies. One of the ways that you can improve is to identify a hobby that has overlapping skills with the with the with the primary work that you're trying to get good at.

And so this is a form of cross training. So athletes, for example, football players will will often do practice martial arts in the off season because getting really quick hand movements will help them with their with their tackling and with their what's the word scott when they when they blocking.

That's right, with their tackling and with their blocking. For professionals, if you're having if you're trying, for example, let's say you're a salesperson and you're trying to get really good and comfortable with the idea of being on the spot and presenting in front of large groups. That can be intimidating.

But if you take up the hobby of karaoke singing, where you're also pushing yourself to be a little bit uncomfortable, that can actually help you be a better presenter when the time comes for you to present in front of a large group. And so the idea is to identify hobbies that make you better at your job and invest in those. And another great example of this, and you might you're probably familiar with this as well, which is that a lot of executives are now really interested in

improv comedy. And it's not because there's suddenly captivanded with the idea of being funny. It's because they realize that there are a lot of overlapping skills. In order to be good at improv. You need to be really present, and you can be a great listener, and you need to think on your feet, and those are the same

skills necessary to become a better executive. And so again, you know, we don't when we think about improving, we often think about how we spend our time when we're at work, but we may be better off thinking about how we utilize our free time in our hobbies in order to ultimately reach our goals. Yeah, I love that, and you know I love improv. Yeah I do. Uh. Well, tell me a little bit about the role of visualization, uh,

you know, or visualizing success. You some people, you know, think that they swear by that, but you're you found not only doesn't not work, but it might make you less likely to succeed. Is that right? Right? That is correct? That is correct? So, oh exactly, so I live in my imagination. Well, visualizing success can be fun in the moment, but what it won't do is it won't make success more likely. And there are all these great examples of

celebrities who swear by visualizing success. So probably the most best known example is Jim Carrey, who wrote himself a check for ten million dollars when he was back when he was a struggling artist and a sturgling actor, and uh, as it turned out, just before that check was about to expire, he got the role in Dumb and Dumber that transformed his career. Another great example is Andrescu, who's a Bianca and Drescu a phenomenal tennis player who won

the US Open. She wrote herself a check for the prize money for the US Open long before she succeeded, and she went on Good Morning America and made a statement along the lines of I believe we control reality with our minds. Now. That is a common sentiment online, and it's an appealing one. The idea if you just you know, you get that vision board out and you start clipping images of where your life is going to be in ten years, then you're going to get there.

And I think there's some value to having goals, for sure, But the challenge with visualizing success is it actually what the research tests does actually makes you less likely to succeed. And this is a study done at the UCLA where they took in introductory psychology students and they divided them into three groups, and this was just before the midterm. Group one was asked to visualize themselves achieving a high score on the tests. That was the visualizing success condition.

The second group was asked to visualize themselves studying for the test, and the third group was simply asked to report how often they studied for the exam. And what they found was that the group that visualized themselves succeeding and achieving a high score did worse than either of the two groups. The group that did best was the

group that visualized themselves studying for the test. And it's because forcing yourself to identify when and where and how you're going to study leads you to front load some pretty critical decisions like where are you going to be, what books are you going to need, where you're going to put your phone, all of the decisions that are required to study effectively. And when you frontload those decisions, you're better prepared to actually execute against your goal. If

then thinking and so what that? The key takeaway here is that if you want to get better, visualization can help, but far better to visualize yourself doing the actual activities necessary to succeed rather than simply visualizing the outcomes. Dualized process not outcome. And it can work in anything, can work in public speaking, can work with studying for a test, It can work for a job interview. Visualize the process. Yeah,

that that's really good advice. That's that's actually really good advice. When I was very when I was very young, I used to just daydream about being an NBA star and that didn't didn't lead to that also didn't help that Kobe Bryant was on our basketball team. What do you mean your high school team in middle school? No kidding, no kidding, no kidding, or mare in high school and Balkino middle school. So that didn't help, you know, uh, maybe no amount of visualizing process either, it would have

gotten me to beat him on the court. But anyway, I want to just circle back to like the very beginning question I asked you, because I do feel like it's the elephant in the room with this discussion, and that's the role of talent. You know, I noticed you didn't have a chapter on like decoding greatness. I noticed that talent really, really it matters, because the thing is, the talent gets weeded out at that stage. You know that no longer is at the predictor of things. So

how do you know that by decoding greatness? By looking at those who are great? This is the same criticism that's been, you know, leveled against Ander's work, and I think rightfully so Anders really underplayed the role of talent because he was looking at those at stages of the development of the expertise process of world class expertise, where talent was no longer the biggest predictor, but it was a pretty big predictor earlier on. So what do you see as the role of talent there? The talents is

certainly plays an important role, there's no question. And so does practice. If you practice effectively, you're going to get better. If you are born with a particular set of strengths that lend themselves to your particular field, that's vital. But I guess I'm less interested in identifying the true causes of greatness than I am about identifying the tools that any schlub off the street can use to improve their

skills quickly. That is a far more interesting to me. So, you know, I've often thought about, you know, other people in our space, Scott about you know, there are people who are really interested in identifying what the top top, top, top top people in the world are doing and then popularizing that. And I think that's interesting work. I follow it, I read it. I'm not interested in that, as you know, like I'm not interested in microdosing LSD. That's not for me,

that's not for most people. What I am interested macrodos right. More interesting to me are the tools and techniques that everyday people can use right now to get better. And I think that this is a vital and overlooked approach that people don't talk about. Now. We didn't touch about why why it is that people don't talk about it. I think this is important. I think the reason people don't talk about reverse engineering, even though a huge number of people at the top of their fields do this,

I think that they're secretly ashamed. They're ashamed that they are copying. I think they think that they're maybe they think this, maybe they don't. I'm going to argue that reverse engineering is not copying, and even if it were copying, copying would make you more creative. And so this is one of the most important findings I think in this book.

One of the most important, most interesting findings is how if you actually do take the time to copy someone else's work privately, not passing it off as your own, just simply you know, the copy work is an idea. I'm sure you've discussed previously on the show. It's the to To give you an example of what that means. It's simply taking a finished work and then trying to reproduce it, whether it be a painting or a blog post or a book, reading a page, trying to recreate

it for memory. That process actually makes you more creative, not less. And this is not just me saying this. There's research out of the University of Tokyo. This is creativity experts who brought people into the lab. These were amateur artists. They divided them into two groups. Group one was asked to create original artwork every day for three days straight. Group two was asked to create original artwork

on day one. On day two, they were asked to copy the work of an established artist, and then on day three, they were asked to resume creating original works. And what they were looking at with the experimenters were interested in is which of the two groups was most creative on the final day of the experiment, And so they brought in objective raiders and they had them code and rate the artwork produced on the final day of

the experiment, looking at the level of creativity. And what they found was that the second group, the group that had paused to copy the work of an established artist, was significantly more creative on the final day of the experiment. And it wasn't simply by replicating the approach that they had learned from on the second day of the experiment by copying the established artist. It has been going off in completely different directions, by doing things that had nothing

to do with the work that they had observed. And so the question is why why does copying make us

more creative? And it's because when we do that copy work exercise that I described earlier, where you're copying someone else's established work and trying to reproduce it for a memory, what that process does is it forces you to compare your instinctive inclinations against the decisions of a master and often what that does is when you're comparing your instinctive inclinations to the work of a master, you are enlightened and you open your eyes are open to all these

different possibilities that are hidden in your work that you had been ignoring until now. And so far from dismissing the idea of reverse engineering or studying the work of someone else's someone else's work really closely as something that only hacks do, I think we need a better approach for learning from the best in the world so that we can not just elevate our skill level but also

enhance our creativity. That felt like a good place to end you say you say in your book, no matter what your field, your capacity for achieving at a high level need not be defined by whether or not you were fortunate enough to be born gifted, or happen to receive the guidance of an expert. I do think that reading your book can help any any schlub, maybe not become a genius, but certainly learn faster, learn better, and

and maybe even have a better quality of life. So thank you so much for being on my podcast today and sharing your uh, your your great uh, your great wisdom. Oh my my, great pleasure, and thanks for the great questions. Thanks for listening to this episode of The Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology Podcast

dot com. Also, if you'd prefer a completely ad free experience, you can join us at Patreon dot com slash psych Podcast. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the show, and tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.