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Hello boys and girls. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris show where does my job to deconstruct world class performers, all different types to tease out routines habits and so on that you can apply to your own life. This is a special in between a so which serves as a recap of the episodes from the last month. Features a short clip from each conversation in one place.
So you can jump around get a feel for both the episode and the guest and then you can always dig deeper by going to one of those episodes view this episode as a buffet to wait your appetite. It's a lot of fun. We had fun putting together and for the full list of the guests featured today. See the episodes description probably right below where we press play in your podcast app or as usual you can head to Tim.BlogSlash podcast and find all the details there. Please enjoy.
First up, Cal Newport, a professor of computer science at Georgetown University and the New York Times best selling author of deep work. His new book is Slow Productivity, the lost art of accomplishment without burnout.
Could you give some examples old and new of people who in your mind exemplify slow productivity. I was motivated by slow food as an example where they look back to traditional cuisines where cultures had evolved over generation and generation like what's the right way to eat in this region of Italy and the slow food movement would look back at that.
For inspiration, I look back at what I call traditional knowledge workers so people who did things with their brain but not the normal 1950s and onward I'm in an office or working at a computer screen so like artists and philosophers scientists the original knowledge workers they tended to have a lot more freedom and autonomy than we did today. So I said great. We can study them to see what do they gravitate towards in terms of how they approached or structured their really important work because they had freedom and flexibility so we can identify what matters.
And then adapt that to the sort of modern life so a lot of my examples are these traditional knowledge workers so one of the early examples is you know Isaac Newton. And I said okay we all know he wrote this great master work the principia calculus is just invented in that as part of the effort to specify the laws of gravity that gives celestial order to the way that the cosmos works.
He wrote that thing over decades decades he would go and do other things and come back it wasn't this frantic push until it's done but no one remembers how long he spent working on that there's like that thing changed the way we understand the world linman well Miranda with his first play in the heights the same way I do his whole story it's a seven year Odyssey.
From when he first performs his first version of that play as a student play which wasn't very good to win it first goes on to a professional stage is pre broadway to you that's a seven year period and he's working on it that he's not these working on it again and he's not. We don't know about that now is like oh yeah his first play one a lot of grammy city did Hamilton.
He's like a really good player if you read Wikipedia like oh yeah you don't realize this in ops is in one time told them like when he left when he graduated from college his dad was like you really should go to law school he took a job as a substitute teacher he was spending a lot of time with a freestyle rap troupe called love supreme that would travel around doing like freestyle rap shows so if you zoomed in on a particular day.
In the almost decade linman well Miranda was working on in the heights like man you're so lazy you're not even working on your thing like what's going on why aren't you getting after it why aren't you you know why aren't you crushing it because things take longer I use Georgia O'Keefe as an example of seasonality that her productivity as an artist didn't really pick up until she began so you know what in the summers I'm going with Alfred Stiglitz we're going the lake George and I'm going to sit there in a shanti that she called it the shanti was an out building near the.
I'm just going to paint and be inspired and then I'll come back after the summer and finish the artwork and show them and do all the other sorts of stuff most productive years of her life by actually slowing down for a season every year her productivity exploded she became you know one of the most famous early modernist of that whole era of painting right so we see those examples what Murray curry at the pinnacle of about the discover in pitch blend the substance she studied about the isolate radio activity and when her first to 2 Nobel prizes.
The first of the Nobel prizes goes to France with her family on vacation for 2 months in the moment like what are you doing you got to be getting after you got to be crushing it but we don't see that now like yes she was great she won 2 Nobel prizes like way to go she wasn't part of the hustle culture that's the interesting things when you go back and study people
using things of real value using their brain they were smart and they were dedicated and they worked really hard but they didn't hustle and they didn't work 10 hour days day after day they didn't work all out year round they didn't push push push until this thing was done it was a more natural variation they had less on their plate at the same time and they glued it all together by obsessing over quality that's the slow productivity approach it still produces stuff that you're really proud of
but it doesn't burn you out and it doesn't leave you in this weird out of sync balance where work is taking up almost all of your time. Next up Claire Hughes Johnson author of scaling people tactics for management and company building and former chief operating officer of stripe where she scaled the company from roughly 160 to 6000 plus employees.
I want to come back for a second to Fred Kaufman and victim versus player can you explain what this is I love this one because I think it's so simplifying and clarifying really about are you managing someone or interacting with someone who has agency takes responsibility friend when he introduces this framework tells the story of how young children and he's the I think he has six or seven children by the way but how young children
when something has happened that they know is bad will not take responsibility so they will say things like the coat is at school. So not I left my coat at school right or a thing has happened things have happened the toy is broken. You're like well did you break it you know so he has this really disarming way of introducing this concept which is we're all laughing just like you and I were like aha the toy is broken.
So then he's like okay now let's talk about if one of your direct reports came to you and said the report was not written. And you're like the report that you were meant to write but how it actually manifests is you're supposed to write some report up or some summary of a meeting and you say oh tell me where that is and the player says completely my fault I had planned to get it to you by five o'clock yesterday.
I prioritize this emergency that came up didn't tell you my bad can we renegotiate can I get it to you five o'clock today and you're like fine I wish you told me that you are going to get it but. The victim says let me tell you about that report.
Lucy owes me her notes and I can't finish it without Lucy and Lucy you know super slow at getting her notes and I'm sorry I don't know when I'm going to get it but that actually is pretty common people are like well this other person that I'm depending on.
And therefore I have no responsibility and they're a victim and they're going to play the victim and I think that's a very hard person to coach how much do you have to select that in your hiring process versus coach people from one side to the other. Have you had much success or seen much success in moving people from the victim side to the player side and that's a bit of a leading question by my tone I guess I suspect there are a lot of instances where that's hard.
But in the success cases what is that coaching process look like I've seen both I feel like with people who are earlier in their career they're more I'm all growth mindset but they're a little more moldable and you can actually coach people out of this as like a way of operating if they're later in their career it's a little more ingrained and it's quite hard especially because they tend to not be aware of it because they've somehow been successful operating in that mode and so they're kind of like what do you say.
You see leaders who and you know how they behave Tim is they say well if it's not under my direct control.
Then I am not responsible and so they become empire builders and some organizations let them get away with it they're like sure you can have all the infrastructure teams then like it becomes this weird failing upward problem where people say well if I can control it I'll take responsibility if it's within my house then I'll take responsibility so people satisfy that check box by giving them more and more resources and I'm going to be able to do that.
So I'm going to be able to do more and more resources what a nightmare exactly and it becomes this weird expanded scope of this person who actually doesn't take responsibility it's a pattern I've seen for people earlier in their career the easiest coaching move you do which I'm sure you've heard or someone's done it to you I've certainly had it done to me they're saying Lucy didn't send me your notes and you're saying what could you have done differently and you have to let uncomfortable silence then and some people will then say what do you mean?
But some people will say well I guess I could have helped Lucy right the notes so what I try to do is stay in the discomfort which is hard and just sort of like let's list out a few things you could have done differently and not be judgment on like not judge the things just say what it was so you could have helped Lucy right the notes you could have said a deadline with her that was a headliner right put a deadline in a sauna where people can actually see it you could use a productivity tool where you could see I love those tools because that's sunshine sunshine is a good thing.
Sunshine is a great disinfectant. I give everybody can see that Lucy has not done her action item that is going to help Lucy be more accountable but the point is you come up with this list and the person often is like wow you're right really what you're they're kind of going to have to admit to you is they're being a little lazy they're not helping others do the work they're not a good collaborator and that's what I sometimes do with someone is like you know I if this is a pattern I say you know I see this pattern do you see this pattern where you're waiting for other people all the time tell me more
about why you think that's happening why are the people not delivering for you and the question is like either it's because they haven't figured out how to do action items or accountability or be clear about deadlines or there's someone people don't like to work with I always call it like going met at like you're looking from the balcony at the
situation which is a term from adaptive leadership are you on the balcony are you on the dance floor and if you're on the balcony you try to get the person up there with you say why do you have this pattern of people not helping you get your work done and then I think of it as going to the basement I know this is I'm very visual person so we look down and they sort of if they acknowledge it they say yeah I guess I see that and I say well let's talk about a few examples and we come up with some
examples then we go down and we're in the scenario and I say let's do the five wise I mean everyone loves the five wise I'm like why do you think Lucy didn't send you the notes well she's not good at deadlines okay and then this is a wonderful expression that I
learned from some coach I had a million years be that as it may which is not normal English language but I don't know it work sort of like be that as it may okay maybe Lucy's terrible deadlines but why else well I didn't ask her to get it to me to specific time okay so maybe there's a thing why else you know and you're sort of pushing them and sometimes not every time they'll sort of say well I don't know Lucy and I don't work that well together and you're like oh say more
about that what do you think's going on and of course by the way your left hand column Tim is it's because Lucy doesn't like you because you blame her for all of your misdeed lines right but I can't say that because that person is going to go from learning to barely in learning mode I'm trying to bring them along with me and they're going to just shut down and by the way they may never admit that Lucy doesn't like them because they blame her for misdeed
lines but they're gonna realize that their manager who's me is not letting them off the hook and they can't get into an agency a player mindset I'm a responsible party for my work and others then there are going to be off my team if I can't coach them out of it to your point there's two gaps that I think are really hard one is people who can't stop being victims and the other gap I call self awareness gap where they think they are the
best in the world I once worked with this bd person who was like I can negotiate a deal better than anyone and talk about not being in a learning mindset I'm like do you not think we should get any outside advice I'm exaggerating a little bit but really unaware that they had any potential blind spot or had never done a deal like this deal and I'm like how are we going to close this awareness gap because the people around you are
saying you are not the best person to negotiate this deal and I'm trying to hand it to someone else and you're like what you have no one better than me you know and that's a very hard gap to close next up William Uri co-founder of Harvard's program on negotiation co-author of getting to yes
and author of getting past no his new book is possible how we survive and thrive in an age of conflict and then camp David happened the Egyptians and Israelis arrived to camp David for this retreat and after three days they were just going out at hammer and tongs they were just dug into their
positions Egypt demanded the entire sign I back Israel wanted to keep a third monachrome bag and said I'll pluck out my right eye and cut off my right hand rather than surrender a single settlement they were just about to give up and then siphons remembered the memo in his
briefcase and he said the card he said well why don't we try out this idea for a wentex process and they tried it out and this is the way it went was the Americans instead of asking the Egyptians and the Israelis in a traditional way you know the mediator goes in and asks you to make
a concession no one wants to make a concession no one wants to make the first concession because that'll signal weakness for sure and you know bagged and so that said I have to go back and consultant it wasn't going to go anywhere so the Americans said instead with a one-text process
they said don't make any concessions we understand what your positions are just tell us what your interests are and they said what do you mean it was so tell us what you really want what do you really concerned about I mean it's you're trying to draw a line in the sand but what's the underlying
driver what is it you're really afraid of what are you concerned of what do you really want and the Egyptians talked about sovereignty so that said you know this land has been ours since the time of the pharaohs that we want to back and the Israelis talked about security you know
said Egyptians had attacked them four times in the previous 30 years across the Sinai they didn't want that happening again so then the question became not where do we draw a line in the sand but how do we get Egyptian sovereignty and Israeli security and the Americans went back and drafted
up what's called we call it a one-text it's a non-paper paper it's very low status you've got coffee stains on it or whatever it is but it was an idea to do both to try and reconcile both interests to meet the interests of both and it was based on an idea actually the Egyptians
at service which was a demilitarized Sinai a Sinai where Egypt gets the entire Sinai back you know flag can fly everywhere but it's demilitarized so Israel gets security and in this context demilitarized means there cannot be presence of military forces that's it Egyptian tanks can go
nowhere and basically Americans the idea was to propose that you know the Americans would put technical means you put a little multinational force in there but you could tell if a goat crossed but no armed forces there exactly got it wow what a story yeah I mean the ideas I mean the one
text the way it works is very simple it's kind of like what in Silicon Valley called rapid prototyping nowadays but essentially the Americans took the idea and they said we're not asking to accept it we don't want you to make any decisions all we want you to is criticize it well no one likes to make a hard decision but everybody loves to criticize so the Egyptians criticized it the Israelis criticized it the Americans went back and redrafted the proposal to try to address the concerns and then
they brought it back and did it again and again more criticism the Americans went through that process 23 times there were 23 drafts over the course of 13 days even less because there was fewer days and by the end of it only at the very end of that process did Carter go to Sadat and beg in the
two leaders and say this is the best we can do we can't improve it anymore we can't make it better for one without making it worse for the other this is the best we can do do you want it or not and then Sadat and Began were faced with a very different decision instead of having to make multiple
painful concessions they had to make only one decision and only at the end of the process when they could see exactly what they were going to get in return and so Sadat could see who's going to get the entire sign iback Began could see who's going to get a non-president in peace with the
Egypt and they both said yes and that's what led to the camp David peace treaty to a treaty that has lasted 40 years has lasted actually more than that at this point to 45 years to this point has lasted to this day even in the midst of wars assassination coup d'etat and it was the
inventive idea of like applying our creativity not just to the hardware of software of computers but to the way in which we negotiate that there are better ways to negotiate more effective yeah and that was a really just powerful example for me the software of humans in a way the software of
humans that's what we need that's really what we need yeah and to sort of debug so you mentioned a few things on underscore the first was the powerful looking behind positions for the underlying interests I suspect we'll come back to this for sure but identifying the wants desires concerns
fears that are behind a request or sort of unrelenting position and you also mentioned something and you didn't say it in these words but it seemed to imply what I'm about to mention and that is writing the other sides of victory speech and quotation marks like what are they going to
use to explain to others why they agreed to X whatever that is would you mind expanding on that doesn't need to be in the camp David contacts could be in another context but it strikes me that in both cases I mean these leaders need to go back and explain to their cabinets to their populace
why they did X and that that type of consideration of external judgment I would imagine accounts for a lot of failures at the negotiating table the victory speech is one of my favorite exercises because you're looking at an impossible situation could be with your boss could be with your roommate
or it could be an international conflict but you're looking at something seemingly impossible it's kind of like you know I like to climb mountains you know you're at the bottom of the mountain you look at the top of the mountain and it seems impossible to get there you can't get from here to
there in your mind but you might be able if you use your imagination put yourself on top of the mountain get from there to here and then you can figure out your way back in others you can work backwards and that's what is behind the victory speech which is when you're facing a difficult
conflict start by writing out the other side's victory speech imagine you're asking your boss for something you know it might be a situation and you write out what is it you imagine just as a thought experiment imagine your boss says yes to you they accept what you want them to do they say
yeah now imagine your boss then has to go and justify that to someone else who he cares about maybe his board of directors maybe his peers or her peers and write out the victory speech just write out maybe three talking points like how could they present to the people that they care about
why they said yes to your proposal it's got to be a victory for them can be a victory for you obviously because they're doing what you want them to do but think about it and think about the hardest questions that they're going to get the criticisms that they're going to receive and then think
about what are the best answers I can give go through that exercise and then see your job as a negotiator as helping them deliver that victory speech and I can tell you about I've used it but that's the essence of it is to work backwards think about what victory would look like and then work
for it last but not least soman Chanani New York Times bestselling author of the school for good and evil book series and beasts and beauty his collection of reimagined fairy tales so I never did drugs going up I mean maybe did pot once or twice and found it slowed me down to the point
of I never wanted to do it again and just sort of walled that whole thing off as stuff that other people do and then during covid I read the body keeps the score and you know I had struggled with some things from my entire life in terms of anxiety and just getting stuck in kind of ruts
of feeling and it was 2021 January where I just remember talking about follow the flow I stood up went to my computer remember being in Miami in my parents house googling ketamine treatment New York City I knew nothing about ketamine like nothing how is it even in your field I don't
just popped into that I don't know I just remember going ketamine there in New York City calling up scheduling the consultation and a week later I'm in back in New York going to meet the doctor and I was like I don't know if I'm right for this I don't want anything that will
mess with my creativity I said the only reason I'm entertaining this idea is because it's in a doctor's office I said I would never do drugs on my own because the fear surrounding that of what could happen and where it's procured from and all that stuff would end up
infecting the whole experience and with a doctor's office you know I'm entertaining it I said but I don't want it to affect my creativity I don't want it to he's like it's only going to make you more yourself and more creative but he goes these are the three things that I think
make for a good candidate he's like number one have you felt emotionally numb for most of your life and at that point in my life absolutely I think I was in a just cycles of numbness number two was did you have a volatile childhood where emotions were not particularly welcome and I was like
check check the number three goes this one's the most important he's like do you know how to have fun and I said no and I cried I remember crying in the office he's like do you know how to have fun and I was the first time anyone had asked the question in the right way because I knew the idea fun
I knew that I should be having fun I knew how to act like I was having fun but I never felt like I was having fun and he goes you don't drink I said no and he goes and I meditate I was in that point four or five years into meditation he's like you're gonna have a very good response this he
just like insi and so I started ketamine treatments at that time I think you do six in 12 days and then you go back for a booster in my case it's every 10 weeks and I still go change my life I mean it was like I feel like a totally different person because what it did is it woke up parts of
my brain that I didn't know existed because they had shut off so early that I didn't know they were there and then all of a sudden I started to get glimpses of what I could be like and then it became a question of could I hold on to that and little by little some people I think get their benefits
much quicker or they don't get any benefits at all I mean it's so individual in my case it was almost like a practice it was like every 10 weeks I'd go learn a million things work on those things in between go back and it almost became like my version of like the deepest therapy you know it's
become a huge reason for everything and I think it's also allowed me to follow the flow more than ever because the whole thing of a ketamine treatment is it's a it's a sedative right so it puts your brain in such a relaxed state that you have no choice but to follow the flow where it goes
and the flow usually leads you closer to the truth so I don't know I think it's for someone who was so anti-drugs it was the biggest thing I've changed my mind about yeah and now here are the bios for all the guests my guest today is Cal Newport Cal Newport is a
professor of computer science at Georgetown University where he is also a founding member of the Center for Digital Ethics in addition to his academic work Newport is a New York Times best-selling author who writes for a general audience about the intersection of technology productivity and culture
his books have sold millions of copies and have been translated into more than 40 languages he's also a contributor to the New Yorker and hosts the popular deep questions podcast his new book is slow productivity the lost art of accomplishment without burnout Cal is not active on social media
this is usually where I would say you can find him on these following social media profiles but you can't find him he is really not active outside of his YouTube channel which is the at Cal Newport media channel and the podcast and everything else you can find at cal report dot com in this
conversation we talk about slow productivity human-paced productivity the dangers of checklists and to-do lists and approaches that are similar we talk about so many things that Cal puts into practice himself he walks the walk in part of what I find so impressive about him is how effectively he is put positive constraints around his work and within his life so that he can do what he does best with the fewest distractions possible my guest is Claire Hughes Johnson Claire currently serves as a
corporate officer and advisor for stripe a global technology company that builds economic infrastructure for the internet if you've bought just about anything online chances are at some point or another you have used stripe or if you've sold something Claire previously served as Stripes Chief Operating Officer CEO from 2014 to 2021 helping grow the company from fewer than 200 employees to more than 6000 employees at various times she led business operations sales marketing customer support risk
real estate and all of the people functions including recruiting in HR and if you think that sounds completely impossible and crazy you are right it does sound completely impossible and she explains how she managed to spin so many plates at once at such a high level prior to stripe Claire spent
10 years at Google leading a number of business teams including overseeing aspects of Gmail Google apps and ultimately consumer operations as well as serving as a vice president for ad words online sales and operations Google offers and Google self-driving car project so she has a very diversified
background and is highly highly adaptable her book which I recommend is scaling people tactics for management and company building we get into a lot of nitty-gritty details you're not going to want to miss this one so you can find Claire on Twitter at c Hughes Johnson c h u g h e s johnson
today we have William Yuri as a guest I am extremely excited about this guest I have been familiar with Williams work for decades and when his name popped up as a possible guest I had to hop right on it because I had many many questions for him so who is William William Yuri you can find them on
Twitter at William Yuri g ty you can also find them on LinkedIn and other socials is co-founder of Harvard's program on negotiation is one of the world's best known and most influential experts on negotiation his co-author of getting to yes the all time best selling negotiation book in the world
the author of one of my favorite books on negotiation getting past no negotiating in difficult situations which side note I used to help build my first company and his author of the new book possible how we survive and thrive in an age of conflict he has served as a mediator in
boardroom battles labor conflicts and civil wars around the world and avid hiker he lives in Colorado there are some incredible stories in this podcast episode they will blow your mind the role that Dennis Rodman has played in helping William to understand the North Korean leader Kim Jong
Un there are stories about Hugo Chavez or Hugo Chavez the former president of Venice Willie yelling in Williams face and how that came about and what came of it lessons learned from Nelson Mandela in addition to Warren Buffett and the stories just go on and on and on
so much in ony for those who don't know who are you I think of myself as a specialist in the teenage mind and I access that by being an author of young adult fantasy using everything I can about connecting to young people and lovers of fantasy through novels so that's what I've been
doing for the last 10 years and for people who might want to dig into that further any works you might suggest they start with or check out website anything like that I wrote a series called the school for good evil for 10 years there's six books in the series and a Netflix made a movie
out of it that came out last year and then another book a little bit for older audiences called Be Some Beauty which is going to be a TV show sometimes soon so those are kind of my two main things hey guys this is Tim again just one more thing before you take off and that is five bullet
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