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Episode: #762: Coach George Raveling and Claire Hughes Johnson

Author: Tim Ferriss: Bestselling Author, Human Guinea Pig
Duration: 02:47:55

Episode Shownotes

This episode is a two-for-one, and that’s because the podcast recently hit its 10-year anniversary and passed one billion downloads. To celebrate, I’ve curated some of the best of the best—some of my favorites—from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited.The episode features

segments from episode #332 "Coach George Raveling — A Legend on Sports, Business, and The Great Game of Life" and #724 "Claire Hughes Johnson — How to Take Responsibility for Your Life, Create Rules That Work, Stop Being a Victim, Set Strong Boundaries, and More."Please enjoy!Sponsors:Wealthfront high-yield cash account: https://Wealthfront.com/Tim (Start earning 5.00% APY on your short-term cash until you’re ready to invest. And when you open an account today, you can get an extra fifty-dollar bonus with a deposit of five hundred dollars or more.) Terms apply.AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement: https://drinkag1.com/tim (1-year supply of Vitamin D (and 5 free AG1 travel packs) with your first subscription purchase.)Shopify global commerce platform, providing tools to start, grow, market, and manage a retail business: https://shopify.com/tim (one-dollar-per-month trial period)Timestamps:[00:00] Start [05:14] Notes about this supercombo format.[06:17] Enter George Raveling.[06:48] The most important conversation is the one you have with yourself.[09:03] The only two choices George has when he gets out of bed in the morning[11:13] A personal audit once per week.[11:40] Retirement at 80?[12:10] George's controversial collection.[14:50] George's less controversial collections.[15:44] Relationships as a privilege.[17:28] Most of George’s best friendships started by mistake.[18:20] The importance of maintaining friendships with younger people.[19:22] Relationships as a patnership.[19:52] A voracious reading habit.[23:28] How George selects his next book.[25:17] How George continues to grow in his 80s.[29:09] Recommended reading.[30:42] Kindness as an opportunity.[33:32] The 1984 Olympics.[37:32] Enter Claire Hughes Johnson.[37:54] Say the thing you think you cannot say.[43:26] Detoxifying your left-hand column.[51:11] Victim versus player.[58:43] Recommended reading.[1:05:32] The case for reading fiction.[1:12:57] Crafting a working-with-me document.[1:20:47] Make the implicit explicit.[1:26:07] An Irish Goodbye.[1:27:13] Email policies.[1:32:37] Renegotiating the terms of expectations.[1:34:41] Listening for the quiet no.[1:37:06] Money versus time.[1:38:53] Good rules can be liberating.[1:41:39] Leadership and disappointment.[1:46:38] Renegotiating past disappointment.[2:05:45] Asking a question versus stating an opinion.[2:09:37] Training wheels for a "no."[2:11:06] Time, talent, treasure, and testimony.[2:15:16] Spotting bad apples while hiring.[2:17:16] If you're not self-aware, how would you know?[2:20:01] Work style assessments for self-awareness building.[2:27:17] Paragons of no.[2:29:30] No more boards.[2:33:37] Pushers and pullers.[2:40:32] Parting thoughts.*For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsorsSign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissYouTube: youtube.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Margaret Atwood, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Dr. Gabor Maté, Anne Lamott, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_02
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So learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com slash Tim. That's drinkag1, the number one. Drinkag1.com slash Tim. Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out. This episode is brought to you by Shopify.

00:02:52 Speaker_02
Shopify is the all-in-one commerce platform that powers millions of businesses worldwide, including me, including mine. What business, you might ask? Well, one way I've scratched my own itch is by creating Cockpunch Coffee. It's a long story.

00:03:05 Speaker_02
All proceeds on my end go to my foundation, Saisei Foundation, to fund research for mental health, et cetera. Anyway, Cockpunch Coffee, it's delicious. The first coffee I've ever produced myself. I drink it every morning. Check it out.

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00:04:23 Speaker_02
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00:04:38 Speaker_01
My hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now or the sooner the better.

00:04:43 Speaker_00
What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over a metal endoskeleton.

00:04:58 Speaker_02
Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferriss.

00:05:01 Speaker_02
Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to sit down with world class performers from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives.

00:05:14 Speaker_02
This episode is a two for one, and that's because the podcast recently hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about, and passed 1 billion downloads.

00:05:24 Speaker_02
To celebrate, I've curated some of the best of the best, some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes.

00:05:36 Speaker_02
And internally, we've been calling these the super combo episodes, because my goal is to encourage you to, yes, enjoy the household names, the super famous folks, but to also introduce you to lesser known people I consider stars.

00:05:49 Speaker_02
These are people who have transformed my life and I feel like they can do the same for many of you. Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle, perhaps you missed an episode.

00:05:59 Speaker_02
Just trust me on this one, we went to great pains to put these pairings together. And for the bios of all guests, you can find that and more at tim.blog slash combo. And now without further ado, please enjoy and thank you for listening.

00:06:17 Speaker_01
First up, Coach George Raveling, the first African-American head basketball coach in the Pac-8, Nike's former director of international basketball, inductee of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame and the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame, and the custodian of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

00:06:37 Speaker_01
's original typewritten, I Have a Dream speech. You can find Coach Raveling on Twitter, at George Raveling.

00:06:48 Speaker_02
I had read, and please feel free to correct this, that you've said the most important conversation is the one you have with yourself. Right. Yeah. So could you elaborate on that please?

00:06:58 Speaker_02
Because I think that self-talk is, and I'm not sure that's what you're referring to, but so, so terribly important. So I'd love to hear you just elaborate on that.

00:07:09 Speaker_00
gotten, the more I've come to the conclusion that the conversation that you have every day with yourself, as you characterize it, self-talk, is so vital. It's far more important than the conversations you have with those around you.

00:07:26 Speaker_00
And the best part about the conversation with yourself is you're in total control of that conversation. You can craft the conversation any way you want to.

00:07:36 Speaker_00
And so I try to have at least 90% of the conversations that I have with myself, which I have two or three times a day, that it's positive self-talk.

00:07:48 Speaker_00
If I start to linger on to something negative, then what I'll do is I'll immediately deal with it and discount it. For example, since I'm Catholic, I'll make this confession. So this morning when I got up, Your reputation is so impeccable.

00:08:06 Speaker_00
I got up at five. I'm really nervous. I'm thinking to myself, God, what if I do a bad job? I'll be so embarrassed. And so the minute I started thinking that, I said, nope, that's not it. Get fired up, man. You're going to do it. I'm in the bathroom.

00:08:20 Speaker_00
I'm doing this motivational talk for myself to eradicate any doubt that I have. And I keep saying to myself, you got to go in there. You got to give them your best shot. You can do it. So I'm getting myself fired up for it. And this is out loud.

00:08:33 Speaker_00
Yeah, because I really spend as much time as, probably, at least, well, I wouldn't say probably, once a day, I'll find an hour to just go someplace and sit by myself, and all I'll do is take a notebook and just put it in a pen in front of me, and I'll just sit there and think.

00:08:53 Speaker_00
Whatever comes into my mind, and then I start to fixate on those things. I'll write down notes as a result of something that I think or I'll write out a strategy.

00:09:03 Speaker_00
For example, the way I govern my day, Tim, is I get up in the morning and I put my two feet beside the bed and I say to myself, okay, George, you only have two choices today. These are the only two choices that you have and you got to make one.

00:09:21 Speaker_00
And the two choices are to be happy or to be very happy. And there's no other choice. And so then I start to plan out my day. And so I have these points of focus. Energy management, time management, environmental management, productivity.

00:09:37 Speaker_00
And to me, productivity is a byproduct of the other three. So how do I manage my energy? every day so that I can be at maximum efficiency. So one of the things I try to do is declutter my mind. I won't do any more than four things a day.

00:09:54 Speaker_00
And it reverts back to something one of the presidents at Nike, Charlie Denson, said one time in a leadership meeting. He said, let me ask you guys this. Would we be better off doing 25 things good, or would we be better off doing six things great?

00:10:10 Speaker_00
And so to me, to simplify my day, I will not do more than four things. I try to limit the meetings to two, and if it's two, one of them is usually a breakfast meeting.

00:10:23 Speaker_00
When I go into the office, I have a total commitment once I get into the office to be totally focused on business matters, try to be as disciplined as I can not to get on the telephone. And also to meet with the two people that work with me.

00:10:39 Speaker_00
We meet every single day and we talk as a team because I want us to function as a team. I want each person's opinion to be valued. If one person happens to be 50 years younger than me. So what? Their opinion is valuable to me.

00:10:56 Speaker_00
I respect everyone's knowledge. And I think to myself, they know something that I don't know. And so I want to value their opinion. So we meet every day as a staff. We talk about things. And it helps me grow and it keeps my day simplified.

00:11:13 Speaker_00
I try to once a week have a personal audit. I go back through the week and I audit my week and make course corrections along the way.

00:11:23 Speaker_00
So that's when I really get into the self-talk part is having these little mental audits that my life's just not going on and on and on. I try to evaluate, am I making progress? What am I doing that's good? What am I doing that's not working?

00:11:37 Speaker_00
And then make those course corrections. At 80 years old, I try to hold myself to the most severe standards, and I just despise the idea of retirement. I think that it's the biggest force that's ever been predicated on us, is this idea of retirement.

00:11:55 Speaker_00
Because the first thing that happens, you retire physically, and then you retire mentally, and then you're just taking up residence in society. And I don't ever want to be a resident of society. I want to be a contributor to society.

00:12:10 Speaker_02
When I was doing homework, I read somewhere that you have a collection of racist mementos. Yes. In your house.

00:12:17 Speaker_00
Wow, you did do some research.

00:12:18 Speaker_02
Could you? Beyond that, I don't know the details, but that just stuck in my mind because that's something I think that a lot of people would actively avoid. So why do you have this collection?

00:12:27 Speaker_00
No one's ever asked me that question, but I probably have over $100,000 worth of black collectibles. For about eight or nine years, it became an obsession with me.

00:12:40 Speaker_00
And so I would go to antique shows and go to stores and hunt down all black memorabilia. I have things that date back before. I actually have a first edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin. So I started to collect books, figurines, and postcards.

00:12:55 Speaker_00
Postcards, I started with figurines. And so a friend of mine told me about an antique store that was closing, and the gentleman had a huge collection of black collectibles.

00:13:08 Speaker_00
And so it was in San Pedro, so I went down and I paid him $35,000 for the collectibles. He had over 100 pieces. And part of the deal was that he had to mark them and write a little card so I would understand the historic significance of them.

00:13:23 Speaker_00
Postcards, Tim, I have them back before you had, this might surprise you, originally that you didn't have to put a stamp on, on a postcard to send it out to mail. So I have, I have them back in the earliest one I have is 1891. Wow.

00:13:38 Speaker_00
But what was interesting about the black postcards was they always made blacks, they pictured them in a derogatory term. One of the more frequent ones you see is a black person eating watermelon with a smile on his face, but they were all derogatory.

00:13:56 Speaker_00
Now here's what's, Further interesting, we've now put stamps on them. I was able to read the messages on some of them. And so the one that I remember the most is a lady's writing to one of her girlfriends, and we'll just make up the name.

00:14:11 Speaker_00
She says, Helen, We have a nigger that works at our house that smiles just like him. And so in those days, to use the word nigger was commonplace. And I don't know that you ever learned to accept it, but it was something that was said commonplace.

00:14:29 Speaker_00
So I started to build this historic collection of memorabilia so that

00:14:35 Speaker_00
I could have a legacy for my children and their children and I have them on display at my home to remind me of where we were and where we are today and the trials and tribulations that we've gone through.

00:14:50 Speaker_00
Do you collect anything else or have you collected anything else? Books and friends. In my library at home, I have well over 2,500 books and probably I have another six or 700 that are in storage because it just ran out of space.

00:15:08 Speaker_00
But I just continue to buy books to read them. I have, as you probably researched, I have an unusual way of going about reading books. And friends, I don't have a strategy or anything for,

00:15:22 Speaker_00
friends that most times people, when I meet them, are not who they ended up being, whether it was Phil Knight, Bob Knight, John Thompson, Sonny Booker. I could tell you tons of people, when I met them, they were not who they ended up being.

00:15:37 Speaker_00
But for some reason, we were able to build an authentic and sustainable relationship. I've always looked upon relationships as a privilege and at the end of the day at the core of all relationships in my mind is trust and respect.

00:15:55 Speaker_00
And so both of those have to be earned. And so over the years I've met people and unintentionally we've stayed in touch and there's been this level of trust that's allowed the relationship to endure. But it's something that's a lot like marriage.

00:16:11 Speaker_00
You have to work at it. You have to understand that there's a balance in relationships. And with me, the number one thing that I ask myself continually is, what can I do for you?

00:16:27 Speaker_00
Your good friend Ryan Holiday and I had dinner last night, and one of the very last things I said to him, I said, Ryan, is there anything I can be doing for you in the next 30 days?

00:16:38 Speaker_00
I've always had this theory that if you help enough people get what they want, you'll always get what you want. I've never tried to enter a relationship based on selfish motives, that if I know this person, I'm going to get these benefits.

00:16:53 Speaker_00
So I try to find out what do we have in common as people? What is it that we can share? How can I help this person?

00:17:00 Speaker_00
No matter how famous they are, how successful they are, everyone has certain needs, even if they're just psychological needs, or we all need truth tellers in our life. And so

00:17:13 Speaker_00
And building relationships, I try to make sure that I surround myself with people who want to see me become better and can help me become better, that I can learn from them, and that I can contribute to their lives.

00:17:27 Speaker_00
And so most of the friendships I have in life, they all started by mistake. One of the young men that's here today, that has taught me almost all I know about technology. I spoke at a clinic in Orlando.

00:17:42 Speaker_00
A friend of mine, Kevin Eastman, was running the clinic. And I said to him, I said, who's going to put my presentation up on the screen in that? Do you have an IT guy? And he said, yes.

00:17:52 Speaker_00
And so I said, well, introduce him to me, because I want to put my presentation up. I want to walk to the back of the room and make sure it's clear and so forth. I met Alex of RCA and during the time I was there, we just hit it off.

00:18:06 Speaker_00
And so when he, I'm pretty sure he was taking me back to the airport and I asked him if he would be interested in doing a website for me and he said, yes. And so that's how it started and it's turned into a lifelong friendship.

00:18:20 Speaker_00
And I think that was the start of me recognizing that I needed to be around more young people. And so I don't associate, and maybe it's bad to say this, but I don't hang out with many people my own age.

00:18:35 Speaker_00
Most of the people that I associate with are younger people because I think they're the future, they're smart, they're naive enough that they'll tell you the truth, and they're not afraid to tell you if they think you're wrong.

00:18:48 Speaker_00
And when I hang around people my own age, it tends to always revert back to the past. And I don't want to talk about coaching at Washington State or being the first black this or the first black that. What I want to do is figure out at 80 years old,

00:19:03 Speaker_00
What is it that I don't know but need to know? And how is this going to help me stay relevant in this ever-changing world? And so I tend to spend most of my time with younger people who inspire me, who I can have a partnership with.

00:19:20 Speaker_00
That's the other thing about relationships. I think relationships at their most authentic stage, it's a partnership. We share common vision, common goals, common objectives, common strategy, common execution plan. It's a we mentality.

00:19:36 Speaker_00
It's not a me mentality. And it's a win-win mentality. It's not I win, you lose, or you lose, I win. It's not about that. We were in this thing together, and we're in the boat together.

00:19:48 Speaker_00
We're going to row in the same direction, and we're going to get the boat ashore. You mentioned books.

00:19:54 Speaker_02
I want to make sure we give reading at least a few minutes because you are known as a voracious reader. The Human Google, one nickname, and you've read probably, I'm sure, thousands of books at this point. You were very kind when we first got here.

00:20:13 Speaker_02
We're recording this right now. You said, I learned from the wise man. It's always a good thing to bear gifts or something along those lines. And you gave me several books. You've also gifted many, many different books.

00:20:23 Speaker_02
How did this love affair with books start? And could you tell us about how you read books? Because as you alluded to earlier, you have a particular way of reading books.

00:20:32 Speaker_00
As I look back on it now, Tim, and with a point of reference to so many times as we speak, it's always going to be my grandma. Well, my grandma told me one time when she'd be in the kitchen cooking, she'd tell me stories.

00:20:45 Speaker_00
And one time my grandma told me, she said, George, you know, back in the days of slavery, the plantation owners used to put their money in books and hide them up on the bookshelves because their banking system wasn't as sophisticated as it is today.

00:21:00 Speaker_00
And so I said, well, Grandma, why did they do that? And she said, because they didn't have to worry about the slaves stealing the money because the slaves would never take the books off the shelf because they couldn't read.

00:21:11 Speaker_00
And so from that, I began to understand that As long as someone can control your mind, they can control who you are in your body.

00:21:23 Speaker_00
And so I decided that I was never going to allow myself to be in a position where someone can control my mind and control my body because of my lack of information and knowledge.

00:21:38 Speaker_00
So I decided that I was going to try to read and learn as much as I possibly could on a continual basis, because I believe that people will have a greater respect for you if they respect you intellectually.

00:21:55 Speaker_00
And I've often felt in life, if I had the choice between Tim liking me or Tim respecting me, I'd far more hope that you respect me than like me. And I figured the byproduct of you respecting me will be that you'll learn to like me.

00:22:11 Speaker_00
So I don't work at trying to get people to like me. So I've been on this mission for a reading for years and years and years. And it's become an obsession now with me I don't go anywhere without a book and a notebook.

00:22:29 Speaker_00
If I go to the doctor's office, I take a book with me. I have a new system now.

00:22:33 Speaker_00
If I go to a bookstore, and I'm in Barnes & Noble, and the line has got eight or nine people in it, rather than stand there for 10 minutes waiting, I'll start reading the book right there in line and start underlining things.

00:22:46 Speaker_00
So I have all these quirks that I've acquired over the years with reading books. First of all, I divide the book into messages.

00:22:55 Speaker_00
I don't spend any time now trying to read a whole book because there's probably, in most books, there's probably maybe eight to 10 chapters that are really powerful and influential, and the others I skim through. So I never start a book

00:23:10 Speaker_00
from the front and go to the back. I just, I'll open the index and I'll find what I believe is an interesting chapter and I start there. And that's actually how I purchase a book. When I'm in the bookstore, I have this routine that I go through that.

00:23:24 Speaker_00
And if it passes, I buy the book. And if it doesn't, I don't buy the book. What's your routine? So if I, let's say I'm going to envision this one. So our office is in El Segundo, which is outside of Los Angeles. And so I go to Barnes and Noble there.

00:23:39 Speaker_00
One thing I found out that because there's so many corporate offices within a two mile radius that they tend to house really excellent business books.

00:23:49 Speaker_00
So I'll go in and soon as I go in, I look at the books that are on reduction sale to see if there's something there that might be a good buy. Then I go to the new releases, nonfiction. By the way, I go to a bookstore four to five days out of the week.

00:24:04 Speaker_00
I'm constantly going in and I just call it search and discovery. So I'll go to the new releases in a nonfiction and I'll look through the books. There's usually 20 books on the table.

00:24:14 Speaker_00
I'd say eight out of ten times I'm going to find a book that I had never heard of before.

00:24:19 Speaker_00
And so I'll pick the book up, I go to the back, I read about the author, then I go to the front part and I read the promos down the side, and then the next thing I do is I go

00:24:30 Speaker_00
to the chapters and I'll find a chapter and I'll open it up and I'll see the writer's style. I look at the style. Is this someone that's a book filled with a lot of statistics or stories? Because I know what I'm looking for.

00:24:45 Speaker_00
The books that have had the most impact are the ones that make me change the way I think or act or behave. Those are the books that ultimately end up being the best for me. So I'll go through the book.

00:24:59 Speaker_00
And then once I find this one chapter, I start to read some of it. And I can tell if this is going to be me or not. And at that point, I'll purchase the book. But I just don't go in and buy a book based on the top 10.

00:25:13 Speaker_00
Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's just that I've had better success. So now, Here at 80 years old, two of my favorite authors are Ryan Holiday and Walter Isaacson. They've both taken me on interesting intellectual journeys.

00:25:28 Speaker_00
The first book I read by Walter Isaacson was Steve Jobs and I was so blown away. I had underlined about three quarters of the book. I was quoting, writing down quotes and As you know, the Steve Jobs book couldn't be anything you want it to be.

00:25:43 Speaker_00
It couldn't be a thesis on leadership. It was just utterly fascinating. I loved Walter Isaacson's writing style. So when I finished the book, I went back, I said, damn, I like the way he writes. So I go back and I look to see what else he had written.

00:25:58 Speaker_00
And so then I see he's done a book on Benjamin Franklin. He's done a book on Einstein and subsequently Kissinger and others. So I go to the bookstore and I buy the Benjamin Franklin book.

00:26:11 Speaker_00
And I am blown away and a little sad because I feel like, God damn, I went through all this education. No one ever taught me any of this stuff other than the kite. And so before that, I think if you'd have asked me,

00:26:25 Speaker_00
Who was the most important American of all time? I think I would have probably tended to say Abraham Lincoln.

00:26:32 Speaker_00
But after I read Isaacson's book on Benjamin Franklin, I would now feel, I mean, the lottery system, banking, schools, streets, he did so many unbelievable things. And then from there, I went to Einstein.

00:26:49 Speaker_00
And anybody who can write a book on Einstein that an idiot like me can understand the physics, and it was absolutely, it was a miracle.

00:26:59 Speaker_00
So in the book, Tim, I read that Einstein was very active in what they would capture in those times as the Negro Movement. And it says that he wrote a book on Einstein in the Negro Movement. Well, I had never heard of this.

00:27:15 Speaker_00
So I immediately stopped reading and go Google Einstein on the Negro Problem. And lo and behold, it comes up. So I chased the book down.

00:27:25 Speaker_00
So what I find a lot of times in reading books, and in your book, Tools of the Titan, I'm reading and I see this, you mentioned in there about masterminds. And I had never heard of Masterminds. So I circle it and I write Google behind it.

00:27:40 Speaker_00
So I go back and I go online and I find out, wow. So I'm thinking to myself, oh my God, I never knew about this. So how do I become part of it? So I sent some information to Ryan Holiday about this Mastermind.

00:27:53 Speaker_00
So he gets back to me and he says, oh, I'm surprised you didn't know about that. He says, you want to go? I'll get you in. So the next thing I know, I get this invite to go to Masterminds in Carmel Valley.

00:28:06 Speaker_00
And my eight years on earth, that was the greatest collection of intellects that I've ever been around in my life. I was so intimidated. And what was marvelous, that was when I knew I was on the right path.

00:28:18 Speaker_00
Because I'm 80 years old, the next oldest person there is probably 49. They're all young, energetic people. And I readily admit, I was so intimidated. I didn't think, I was thinking to myself, God, how am I going to fit in?

00:28:34 Speaker_00
And every night I went to bed with the worst headaches that I ever had, because I couldn't process all this stuff. By the second day, I've already filled up a notebook of notes. And it was one of those life-changing experiences.

00:28:49 Speaker_00
So you helped me grow as a person just by what you mentioned in Tools of the Titan.

00:28:56 Speaker_02
Well, thank you for reading it, first of all. I'm sure that with all my notes here today, I'm going to have to figure out a way to have another conversation with you for sure.

00:29:05 Speaker_02
So hopefully I won't blow it between now and the end of the interview, but books that you've re-read the most yourself or gifted to other people the most? Are there any books that come to mind?

00:29:18 Speaker_00
Being 80 years old, it's a long span of reading. The books that I've given out the most, rarely do I go to meet anyone. I can't tell you the last time I met someone and I didn't bring them a book. It's just become a habit now to give them a book.

00:29:35 Speaker_00
In most cases, I give them two or three books. But the books that I've given away the most lately are Ryan's two books, Obstacles and Ego is the Enemy. I give Ryan's books away a lot.

00:29:47 Speaker_00
One thing that I like about Ryan's book is it's easier to carry because it's smaller. So I can get a little bag and I can put 12 of them in there. Yeah, mine are not as user-friendly from caring perspective.

00:30:00 Speaker_00
One thing I found with your two books is I take them on as a personal challenge. I said, if he spent this much time with this many pages, I am not going to allow the length of the book to intimidate me. I'm going to see this as an opportunity.

00:30:16 Speaker_00
And so what I did with Tools of the Titan, I call that my China book. So it's 13 hours to Shanghai or 13 hours to Hong Kong and 13 coming back. That's 26 hours, man. I can knock that sucker out.

00:30:32 Speaker_00
Some books, you just have to find the right environment in which to read them. But most of the books I read, There are very few of them that I don't come away and feel that I'm a better person.

00:30:43 Speaker_00
One of the things I like to ask myself at the close of every day is, what did I do to make myself a better person than I was yesterday? What did I learn today?

00:30:53 Speaker_00
And so from a talk that I do, I say that every day is composed of 86,400 seconds of opportunities. And how shameful is it for me at the close of my day to say that I didn't do anything today to make myself a better person than I was yesterday.

00:31:12 Speaker_00
And that's shame on me, because I had 86,400 seconds of opportunities to do something, even if it's no more than a thank you, a random smile, a pat on the back. Think about this, Tim.

00:31:25 Speaker_00
There are a lot of people in this country who go through 24 hours and never have anyone say anything to them positive. You might be the only person that day who said something to that person that was positive.

00:31:38 Speaker_00
Or I know we're in a different culture now, and I always think I'm running a little risk, but if I'm in a restaurant or somewhere and a person's waiting on me and he or she has a great smile, I invariably say, hey, you have a great smile.

00:31:56 Speaker_00
Sometimes I feel a little uneasy when I say it to a female because I don't want someone might think you're trying to come on to them. But at the same time, I'm willing to take that risk.

00:32:05 Speaker_00
So earlier when we were leaving breakfast, as we were leaving, the two waitresses said, thanks for coming. And they had a big smile on their face. So I said to both of them, two of you have a great smile. Well, to me,

00:32:18 Speaker_00
I like practicing random acts of kindness because so much today we're cruel and unintentionally cruel. We don't think how valuable the little things are, the thank yous, the smiles, the taking time to listen.

00:32:36 Speaker_00
I had a situation, I still grapple with this when people stop you on the street and ask for money. We were having lunch yesterday and a lady came up and she asked if we could spare some money. She wanted to get something to eat or drink.

00:32:50 Speaker_00
So I gave her $5 and I said, now I hope you used the $5 on what you said you were going to do. So she points and there's a little grocery store a few doors down. She comes back. shows me the drink and the $3 change. And so it was a win for both of us.

00:33:10 Speaker_00
But I grapple with this thing about, do I give him some money or do I not? In this case, I mean, I really felt good that I was able to do something for her and she did something for me because she made me feel good.

00:33:25 Speaker_00
What she really did is help fortify my mind that I should probably be giving more instead of less.

00:33:32 Speaker_02
Well, you've given a lot in a lot of ways in many years of your life, and certainly one capacity is that of coach or educator or teacher, and we could spend days, and hopefully we will.

00:33:47 Speaker_02
Hopefully we'll get to know each other even better and spend more time together. For now, I thought we might jump forward, at least from your childhood stories, to the Olympics, 1984.

00:34:01 Speaker_02
And there are many different angles we could take to get into this, but I suppose where I wanna start, there's so many different things that I wanna touch on, but since we were talking about communicating and phrasing and words, could you share the motivational quote that you came up with

00:34:20 Speaker_02
at that time. And I think it's each one of us has a relative who gave his life for this country. The least we can do is give 40 minutes of ourselves.

00:34:27 Speaker_00
Yes, that's actually a Bob Knight quote. And it was a motivating force because when you stop and think about it, very seldom in our lifetime does our country ever come to us and say, we need you. It's always the exact opposite.

00:34:46 Speaker_00
We're looking for something from the government. But I felt that this was a unique opportunity that the country was basically saying to the team and the coaches that we need you and we need you to bring back a gold medal for us.

00:35:01 Speaker_00
And so this was a unique opportunity for us to serve our country.

00:35:07 Speaker_00
And I can remember vividly in the months leading up to the 84 Olympics in Los Angeles, I would envision that we were going to win the gold medal and we were going to be standing there and to hear the national anthem play and to be at attention and look at the American flag.

00:35:25 Speaker_00
I know that we're in a different era now and a different time, but the reality was this is how I felt. And so I grew up in an era where my grandma taught, America, right or wrong, America. Whatever the problems are, we'll work them out.

00:35:40 Speaker_00
But at the end of the day, we're an American. And so I envisioned what was it going to be like when we stood there and received a gold medal and heard the National Anthem played and you had the satisfaction of saying to yourself, mission accomplished.

00:35:56 Speaker_00
And it was one of the most unique experiences I've ever had in my life to be in a position where you could represent your country and you could have a good feeling about it.

00:36:10 Speaker_00
I'm sure there'll be a lot of people who will question why I felt that way, but that's the truth of the matter.

00:36:21 Speaker_02
Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors, and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront. There is a lot happening in the US and global economies right now, a lot. That's an understatement. Are we in a recession?

00:36:34 Speaker_02
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Visit Wealthfront.com slash Tim to get started. That's Wealthfront.com slash Tim. This was a paid endorsement by Wealthfront.

00:37:32 Speaker_01
And now, Claire Hughes-Johnson, a corporate officer and advisor for Stripe and its chief operating officer from 2014 to 2021, and the author of Scaling People, Tactics for Management and Company Building.

00:37:49 Speaker_01
You can find Claire on Twitter at C. Hughes-Johnson. Claire, thank you so much for making the time.

00:37:56 Speaker_04
I'm so glad to be here, Tim. Thank you for having me on.

00:37:59 Speaker_02
And we were talking briefly about how one thing that you've observed, I'm just joshing here, of course, a lot of cool people go to Brown.

00:38:07 Speaker_02
I want to ask about somebody else who seems pretty cool, who I'm not sure went to Brown or not, but that is Fred Kaufman. And I guess he is the origin of your second favorite operating principle, perhaps? Say the thing you cannot say.

00:38:20 Speaker_02
I just love this line.

00:38:22 Speaker_04
Say the thing you think you cannot say.

00:38:24 Speaker_02
Oh, there we go. That's actually such a critical distinction, right? That is such a critical distinction. I simplified it. That probably tells you a lot. We could psychoanalyze that later. But say the thing you think you cannot say.

00:38:37 Speaker_02
Can you provide listeners with a bit of context as to what this means and why it is important?

00:38:44 Speaker_04
I laid out, and I had to think about this for myself, four operating principles for me as a leader and a person. And I shared them with others because I think actually everybody should authentically come up with their own.

00:38:55 Speaker_04
But this one was the second one, the first one about self-awareness is the one I probably talk about the most with everyone and myself. But the second one is say the thing you think you cannot say.

00:39:05 Speaker_02
That's why I started with the second one.

00:39:07 Speaker_04
Yeah, because no one asked me about it. And it's a lesson that I've learned, and I think there's a journey that people go on with this lesson, so we can share about that, but I've certainly gone on the journey.

00:39:19 Speaker_04
And the person who is probably one of the most pivotal to me stepping from square one, which is we often just don't say the thing. We just don't say it, was Fred Kaufman.

00:39:29 Speaker_04
And Fred was, I'm gonna get some of this wrong, but as I understand it, he was an accountant by training. He became a professor at MIT. He was teaching accounting. He grew up in Argentina, by the way. I don't think he went to Brown.

00:39:43 Speaker_04
And he had some sort of life revelation that he was not living with the true dimensions of his being and his values. And what he needed to do was stop teaching accounting and become a leadership coach and advisor.

00:40:01 Speaker_04
And he wrote this book, Conscious Business, which I recommend. I don't recommend a lot of business books. I'm just gonna be perfectly honest to him. I often read the beginning of business books and then I never finish them.

00:40:12 Speaker_04
But Conscious Business, I have read all of it. And he formed this firm called Axcellent at the time that Sheryl Sandberg hired at Google. So Fred and his team come in to start working with Sheryl Sandberg's organization of which I was a member of.

00:40:29 Speaker_04
management and then leadership. But initially, I was sort of one of the senior managers, like not anyone particularly special.

00:40:36 Speaker_04
And to Cheryl's great credit, because not a lot of companies at the stage Google was at were investing two, three days of management training and leadership training. Like we all went through these 360 assessments.

00:40:46 Speaker_04
They gave us these report outs, and then they put us in these boot camps with Fred and his team.

00:40:51 Speaker_02
And just for a snapshot in time, when you say at that scale, what was the status of Google at that time, roughly?

00:40:58 Speaker_04
I joined Google in May of 2004, and it was maybe around 1800 people. I mean, there's a lot of contractors, I'm gonna be honest, but I think in terms of full-time employees, and it was, by the way, for me, the biggest place I'd ever worked.

00:41:11 Speaker_04
So I was like, this place is huge. And then just fast forward, I left Google in 2014, and it was like almost 60,000 people. So, whoa.

00:41:19 Speaker_04
So I would say that the excellent engagement with Cheryl and her team was probably right before the IPO, which was in August of 04, and then in 05, I would say is when we had. So, you know, Google actually was doubling every year.

00:41:32 Speaker_04
So it's probably 3,000 to 4,000, you know, but Google had gone public, but was still maturing and establishing, especially on the sort of investment and management and organizational skills.

00:41:45 Speaker_04
But Cheryl, of course, ahead of her time on things like that, was making the investment and had the budget, that was a benefit of Google, as we certainly had nice margins, Tim, that we could spend on management training.

00:41:57 Speaker_04
And so we did this bootcamp with Axcellent, but one of the things that Fred has is he has some really great frameworks. He has one about being a victim versus being a player.

00:42:05 Speaker_04
But one of his frameworks is, how do you take what he calls your left-hand column? So you and I are talking right now. Say we're having a conversation in the workplace. Our brain is always operating in the background.

00:42:17 Speaker_04
And it's often thinking some things about the conversation, about the person, about sometimes it's thinking, what should I be doing? What do I want to have for dinner?

00:42:25 Speaker_04
You know, but we have this ongoing monologue in our brain and the left-hand column with respect to look, it's about our conversation. Fred was really pushing us as a group. He's like, how do you, he'd say detoxify. I can't do his accent.

00:42:39 Speaker_04
detoxify the left-hand column and actually say it, like say the thing. And then we'd go through these exercises. And so this was sort of a light bulb for me, which is like really about giving hard feedback.

00:42:51 Speaker_04
At that time I was in management training, but what I've come to learn is not only is say the thing you think you cannot say, certainly about giving feedback and being more direct in your management conversations.

00:43:03 Speaker_04
But I actually think it's a really tremendous leadership skill, which is to get in a room and I don't care if I'm in charge of the team or I'm just a person on a board. I'm on some boards now and we're sitting there.

00:43:16 Speaker_04
and there's often an unspoken thing. You've been there, you've been in the like, Tim, you seem like someone who would actually put the thing on the table. Like I think you and I are.

00:43:23 Speaker_02
Sometimes to my detriment, but yes.

00:43:25 Speaker_04
Well.

00:43:26 Speaker_02
I think I need help. And this is where I'm gonna ask you if you could give an example, it could be hypothetical or real.

00:43:31 Speaker_03
Yeah.

00:43:32 Speaker_02
Of this type of experience and also the detoxifying. Yeah, how do you detoxify? The like gentrifying your inner language so that you don't sound like a complete asshole.

00:43:47 Speaker_04
And I think, I mean, the short answer is you got to ask some stuff as a question often to stop yourself from making a big judgment. But Tim, yeah, I think what I pick up in you and from listening to you is you're willing to take some risks.

00:43:59 Speaker_04
And so I think. this is really about risk taking and saying something that you're not sure you should say, but you're going to put it out there.

00:44:05 Speaker_04
And then the question is, how do you do it with as much finesse as possible so that you don't end up having blowback, which believe me, I've sometimes said the thing I think I cannot say and had people look at me like, oh my goodness.

00:44:16 Speaker_04
But most of the time I'm reading the room, right? Here's an example, which is, I mean, just classic, more of a business example, but certainly happens in my personal life too. So we went through various business planning types of

00:44:27 Speaker_04
Tactics at stripe but one of them we were using for a while was your classic quarterly business review you have teams come in we've given them a template and we say please fill out these things let's see your data let's see where you are versus your goals what's your strategy what's your plan write this memo we're all gonna read the memo and then we're gonna have this discussion about how you're doing.

00:44:46 Speaker_04
And often teams come in and they want more resources or they want us to solve something or decide something and we're of course saying like well it's actually you you're supposed to be deciding and solving but it's a discussion with the executive team.

00:44:56 Speaker_04
And I'm sitting in one of these reviews with a team that's primarily working on an area of the product. So it's product and engineering leaders. It's not my part of the org that I run, but I'm invited to be there and I like to be there.

00:45:07 Speaker_04
I like to be close to the product. And I'm listening to the discussion and it starts to become incredibly clear to me that the team is feeling defensive or blocked or angry.

00:45:20 Speaker_04
I couldn't quite tell what it was that there's another team doing some similar work. And by the way, if you've read any Jack Welch stuff, he actually had this tactic as a leader where he'd put two teams

00:45:31 Speaker_04
on the same problem and sort of like get them to compete. These Tiger teams, that was not Stripe's tactic. I just want to be clear. We were not interested. We never had enough people. There's no way we would put engineers on the same, believe me.

00:45:43 Speaker_04
So it was mystifying. And I think, by the way, I could hear it because I wasn't in the room super close to the material. This wasn't my part of the org. I hadn't heard about the details of some of these projects until this meeting.

00:45:54 Speaker_04
I'm reading the document. I'm listening to them talk. And I just said, can I just ask if there's something we're not talking about here.

00:46:02 Speaker_04
And they're all looking at me because I rarely like poke in on certain moments with respect to like, what's our product roadmap? And is there something we're not talking about?

00:46:10 Speaker_04
And everyone looks at me and I said, I feel like you're really concerned about this other team, what they're building or what they're up to. Are you concerned? And initially, no, no, no. I mean, you know, it's fine. It's fine.

00:46:22 Speaker_04
Like they've got this thing they're doing that it's cool. I said, well, is it, do you think it's the same thing? Is that what I'm hearing? And I just started to ask a bunch of questions of the leader of the discussion.

00:46:33 Speaker_04
And I said, well, should that team be in the room right now? Should we have a meeting with both of you? Because it feels like there's asymmetrical information and that you all

00:46:44 Speaker_04
don't feel confident in what they're building, and that you're either dependent on them or competing with them with what you're building. And they were like, maybe.

00:46:52 Speaker_04
I mean, it eventually became like we don't have the right people in the room to have a conversation about the problem. And so we sort of stopped it and said, let's go do that to the credit of the rest of the people in the room.

00:47:03 Speaker_04
But as we left, one of the engineers who was sitting on the sort of periphery walked up to me on the stairs and he was like, that was refreshing. But why I'm bringing it up is to me, that was a moment of leadership.

00:47:14 Speaker_04
Which by the way you don't have to be a vp or co to do that the leadership is to say i am observing a thing. That people are clearly not saying and are uncomfortable and is actually seems to me like a bad practice happening.

00:47:29 Speaker_04
And I am going to just call it, like, I'm going to ask, is this going on? Am I seeing this correctly? And it's going to change the whole trajectory of the meeting and the conversation and maybe of the team and their work.

00:47:41 Speaker_04
It did result in some de-duping ultimately, but I think that's what I mean by say the thing.

00:47:47 Speaker_02
De-duping meaning having people working on less similar, overlapping Venn diagrams of responsibilities.

00:47:54 Speaker_04
Exactly, and I think really what it was is they both had a part of their team that was sort of doing the same thing, and they were feeling dependent on each other. It was almost like a yin-yang, and they didn't have the whole picture.

00:48:04 Speaker_04
And I was like, all right, someone needs to have the whole thing under their control. So it was almost duplicate plus dependency, which is sort of worse.

00:48:11 Speaker_02
Sounds like a recipe for lots of headaches.

00:48:13 Speaker_04
Exactly. But there's also, Tim, I'm sure you can picture an example, in a personal situation where you know.

00:48:19 Speaker_02
Oh, they're all the time.

00:48:19 Speaker_04
Where you take a risk with a friend, and you say, hey, have you told your husband that you feel that way? So the detoxifying, though, in any of these examples is, in your mind, you're having a judgment. We're always judging.

00:48:33 Speaker_04
The brain looks for shortcuts. We know this. I'm judging, and I'm like, oh, I'm convinced that they're pissed at this other team, or I'm convinced my friend and her husband are having problems, and I'm gonna solve them.

00:48:43 Speaker_04
But to detoxify it, you have to sort of float above yourself and say, it is not gonna be productive for me to open my mouth and issue a judgment on another person. or someone else's work product.

00:48:55 Speaker_02
Yeah, people take that really well.

00:48:57 Speaker_04
Yeah, exactly. People super don't like that. So what can I do? What can I say? And my feeling is it's usually a question that opens the aperture of the conversation there, but keeps them in a mode of curiosity, openness. How can I ask?

00:49:18 Speaker_04
And the problem and the art here, and this is why you have to practice it and it's uncomfortable, is sometimes you say something too general. You're like, is there something you're not telling me?

00:49:28 Speaker_04
That's not going to work because that's going to make them think, wait a minute, is there some like paranoid thing? So it has to be more like, you can use the words, I'm hearing a concern about the work of this other team. Say more. Are you concerned?

00:49:40 Speaker_04
And I'm all about hypotheses. I love management by hypothesis, which is like, I think this is happening. I'm going to name it. I'm going to name the hypothesis I have. And then I want you to validate it. Or by the way, fight with me. Say to me, no, no, no.

00:49:53 Speaker_04
I have data to the contrary. And I'm happy to revise my hypothesis. But if you don't state it, you're not going to get anywhere.

00:50:01 Speaker_02
We're going to come back to what people might perceive as uncomfortable conversations, and I want to ask later, we're going to take a side quest for a minute, about giving feedback to direct reports.

00:50:14 Speaker_02
Because a lot of people who listen to this, or who are watching this, have smaller teams.

00:50:20 Speaker_02
My experience is that often people who are good at having these direct conversations in a personal context or a business context are sometimes compartmentalized in their capability in the sense that they're very good, for instance, I think I'm better on the personal side than I am in the business side, specifically when it is team members of mine, employees.

00:50:44 Speaker_02
If it's with contractors or joint venture partners, I can do that.

00:50:49 Speaker_02
for whatever reason, I think it's probably, we can also do years of psychotherapy on this, but a fear of someone, say, abruptly quitting or something if I don't deliver the message properly, whereas I'm not worried about my friend quitting our friendship.

00:51:02 Speaker_02
They might get pissed and put me on ice for a week and give me the silent treatment, but it's not going to be a forever thing.

00:51:08 Speaker_02
So I want to come back to that, but before we go there, I want to come back for a second to Fred Kaufman and victim versus player. Can you explain what this is?

00:51:19 Speaker_04
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?

00:51:30 Speaker_04
Fred, 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.

00:51:45 Speaker_04
So they will say things like, the coat is at school. So not, I left my coat at school.

00:51:52 Speaker_02
A thing has happened. Things have happened.

00:51:53 Speaker_04
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, ha ha, the toy is broken.

00:52:04 Speaker_04
But then he's like, OK, now let's talk about if one of your direct reports came to you and said the report was not written.

00:52:11 Speaker_03
Yeah.

00:52:11 Speaker_04
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.

00:52:24 Speaker_04
I had planned to get it to you by five o'clock yesterday. I prioritized this emergency that came up. Didn't tell you. My bad. Can we renegotiate? Can I get it to you at five o'clock today? And you're like, fine.

00:52:36 Speaker_04
I wish you told me that you weren't 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 is super slow at getting her notes.

00:52:50 Speaker_04
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, it's this other person that I'm depending on, and therefore I have no responsibility.

00:52:59 Speaker_04
And they're a victim, and they're going to play the victim. And I think that's a very hard person to coach.

00:53:06 Speaker_02
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?

00:53:19 Speaker_02
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 does that coaching process look like?

00:53:32 Speaker_04
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.

00:53:43 Speaker_04
If they're later in their career, it's a little more ingrained and it's quite hard, especially cause 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 are you saying?

00:53:56 Speaker_04
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.

00:54:08 Speaker_04
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.

00:54:17 Speaker_02
If it's within my house, then I'll take responsibility. So people satisfy that checkbox by giving them more and more resources. What a nightmare.

00:54:25 Speaker_04
Exactly. And it becomes this weird expanded scope of this person who actually doesn't take responsibility. It's a pattern I've seen.

00:54:31 Speaker_04
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.

00:54:41 Speaker_04
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? You're like, oh my gosh.

00:54:51 Speaker_04
But some people will say, well, I guess I could have helped Lucy write 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.

00:55:03 Speaker_04
And not be judgmental, like not judge the things. Just say what it was. So you could have helped Lucy write the notes. You could have set a deadline with her that was ahead of your deadline.

00:55:12 Speaker_02
Put a deadline in a sauna where people can actually see it.

00:55:15 Speaker_04
You could use a productivity tool where you could see. I love those tools because that's sunshine. Sunshine is a great disinfectant, Tim. If everybody can see that Lucy has not done her action item, that is going to help Lucy be more accountable.

00:55:29 Speaker_04
But the point is, you come up with this list and the person often is like, wow, you're right. Really, what you'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.

00:55:39 Speaker_04
They're not a good collaborator. And that's what I sometimes do with someone who's like, you know, 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?

00:55:49 Speaker_04
Tell me more about why you think that's happening. Why are people not delivering for you? And the question is like,

00:55:55 Speaker_04
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.

00:56:04 Speaker_04
I always call it like going meta, like you're looking from the balcony at the city, which is a term from adaptive leadership. Are you on the balcony? Are you on the dance floor?

00:56:11 Speaker_04
And if you're on the balcony, you try to get the person up there with you and 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.

00:56:24 Speaker_04
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.

00:56:31 Speaker_04
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.

00:56:43 Speaker_04
And then this is a wonderful expression that I learned from some coach I had a million years ago. Be that as it may, which is not normal English language, but I don't know it worked. Sort of like be that as it may. Okay.

00:56:53 Speaker_04
Maybe Lucy's terrible at deadlines, but why else? Well, I didn't ask her to get it to me at a specific time. Okay, so maybe there's a thing. Why else? And you're sort of pushing them.

00:57:04 Speaker_04
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?

00:57:17 Speaker_04
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 missed deadlines, right?

00:57:26 Speaker_04
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.

00:57:35 Speaker_04
And by the way, they may never admit that Lucy doesn't like them because they blame her for missed deadlines. but they're gonna realize that their manager, who's me, is not letting them off the hook.

00:57:46 Speaker_04
If they can't get into an agency, a player mindset, I'm a responsible party for my work and others, then they are gonna 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.

00:57:59 Speaker_04
One is people who can't stop being victims. And the other gap, I call it 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.

00:58:12 Speaker_04
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.

00:58:25 Speaker_04
Or had never done a deal like this deal and i'm like how are you gonna 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.

00:58:42 Speaker_02
Yeah, totally. And I promise we are going to spend some time on self-awareness.

00:58:47 Speaker_02
The book I've probably gifted most to my friends and houseguests and so on in the last few years is actually a very short book called Awareness by Anthony DeMello, which is outstanding. I need to read it again. I read it probably once or twice a year.

00:58:58 Speaker_02
So we are going to spend some time there. I'm kind of tiptoeing around the edges of the dance floor, as it were, and tiptoeing and sidestepping on the balcony because I want to paint a picture of you also as a person, not just the concepts.

00:59:16 Speaker_02
So we are going to spend some time there. Also, just as a side note, if you decide to write another book, I think the toy is broken as the title and then the subtitle could be like a high performers guide to taking responsibility. Oh my God, so good.

00:59:32 Speaker_02
The toy is broken.

00:59:33 Speaker_04
Tim, you're hired for my marketing team. I got to tell you, we're not always the best at naming things at Stripe.

00:59:39 Speaker_02
So you're invited. That's the one thing that I'm good at.

00:59:42 Speaker_04
You're on the team. Congratulations.

00:59:44 Speaker_02
Thank you. That's a hell of a team. My boss sucks. Oh wait, I'm my boss. You're the boss. Terrible.

00:59:51 Speaker_02
You said you don't recommend a lot of business books, and I am going to come back to Sheryl and Axcellent in a little bit, but you don't recommend a lot of business books. Sometimes you read the introduction and you're like, that's enough. Thank you.

01:00:01 Speaker_02
Let's talk about a non-business book, and that book is To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. What is your history with this book, and why do you recommend it?

01:00:14 Speaker_04
I love great literature. I think that's how I grew up. My parents are both teachers. father was a high school English department chair and teacher and baseball coach.

01:00:24 Speaker_04
By the way, he would probably say he was a baseball coach and then he would say, and a teacher. And my mom was a college professor for a long time. And I wish more people loved literature because I think, how do you understand the human condition?

01:00:38 Speaker_04
Literature is like the best shortcut to that in your life. But I think there are some authors for someone who becomes a student of literature, that sort of changed their worldview about really what's possible with writing.

01:00:51 Speaker_04
So not just the book changes how they feel and think, but actually the process. Sort of like when you see a product, I think you love innovative products. You know, when you see something and you're like, that is going to change my life.

01:01:04 Speaker_04
And so I think that To The Lighthouse represents, I mean, Virginia Woolf is a writer that resonated for me. And I think if you understand

01:01:14 Speaker_04
If you've also studied history and you think, okay, she's writing some stuff in like the early 1900s, 1920s, not a lot of women publishing a lot in that time in Britain. She gets herself into this writer's collective with men and women.

01:01:30 Speaker_04
She also has relationships with men and women. She's like pretty avant-garde person. But if you read A Room of One's Own, it's basically one of the, earliest feminist manifestos that exist. And this is where I think, Tim, you're like me.

01:01:46 Speaker_04
I love people who are polymaths. You're like, not just this amazing novelist. Thank you, Virginia Woolf. But you're also writing just your thoughts on things like women should have a room of their own.

01:01:59 Speaker_04
I mean, actually, figuratively, you know, not just literally. And I think that she is fascinating. Her life is fascinating. And I want to acknowledge not all of her personal views are great on some things.

01:02:11 Speaker_04
As that happens, I worry that we started to not study certain artists because they've said some things or done some things which I would disagree with.

01:02:19 Speaker_04
I think people think she was an anti-Semite, and it does appear that she said some very anti-Semitic things in some of her writing. I still think you should study Virginia Woolf, and I will own that as my position on her.

01:02:31 Speaker_04
But I think To the Lighthouse, most people would say, is her most important novel.

01:02:36 Speaker_04
I will be honest with you and say, when I wrote my thesis in college, I was gonna write it on To the Lighthouse, and then I actually decided to write it on Mrs. Dalloway, which is another one of her novels, because I loved the parallels from Mrs. Dalloway with a book called The Passion by Jeanette Winterson.

01:02:55 Speaker_04
So Jeanette Winterson is a female British writer, more in the modern era, who had broken through with a memoir called Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, and then had published this book, The Passion, and then a book called Sex and the Cherry.

01:03:09 Speaker_04
She's published now several books. But Jeanette Winterson, I think, is a descendant, in my opinion, of Virginia Woolf. And I was like, I'm going to.

01:03:16 Speaker_04
examine these two novels, and I didn't choose To the Lighthouse, but I will say that, and To the Light is not an easy read, and I want to own that. Also, I think it's very, Mrs. Dalloway, much more digestible, shorter book.

01:03:27 Speaker_04
It has some repetition in it, some beautiful rhythm in the writing where you're like, oh, and I'm coming back around in this circular way to the way the story sort of moves you. To the Lighthouse is like a dream state.

01:03:38 Speaker_04
You feel like you're in a dream state. You're like the points of view are shifting. Who's the real narrator here? What is the story? You're not being driven by your classic plot or character driven story. It is much more internal.

01:03:52 Speaker_02
It's like John Wick in some sense. I'm kidding. I'm kidding.

01:03:57 Speaker_04
I feel like the plot of John Wick is pretty clear. I am going to take vengeance. Excuse me now. I'm going to come out of retirement and kill everyone.

01:04:06 Speaker_02
What a great work of art.

01:04:07 Speaker_04
I'll be the first one to tell you, I read a lot of mysteries and thrillers and I like movies like that, actually. So I'm very multidimensional. But I think for To the Lighthouse, you find something new every time you read it.

01:04:18 Speaker_04
You think about life, death, the human condition. What is love? What is family? What does it mean to connect with other human beings? And there's something about the way the writing works.

01:04:27 Speaker_04
I mean, it's set in this island in Scotland and there's a lighthouse and they go out in the boat. Like you literally feel like you're surfing in a boat.

01:04:35 Speaker_04
Like that feeling when you're like, I'm not really connected to firm land, but I'm in this inner sanctum of people's heads. So I think that it changed me because of the way it felt to read it.

01:04:46 Speaker_04
Frankly, the themes are much more sophisticated than my 19-year-old self probably could have handled. You just said you should read Awareness again.

01:04:54 Speaker_04
I should go read To the Lighthouse again, because now that I am a mother and a wife of a certain age, I'm like, this book is going to resonate a lot more for me. But what's amazing is Virginia Woolf was never that.

01:05:06 Speaker_04
She didn't have children, and she unfortunately did kill herself. She had a lot of demons, and actually the way that she killed herself, brutal. What did she do? She filled her pockets with rocks and drowned herself.

01:05:18 Speaker_04
I think that a lot of artists are tortured, but the fact that she could project into this Mrs. Ramsey and this woman, this very maternal figure, was a sign of true artistry. Sorry, that was very long.

01:05:31 Speaker_02
That's why I have a long podcast. So I'm not going to let it go. I'm going to continue to chew on this bone a little bit. And for the record, I actually love John Wick. But I don't want to dwell on John Wick.

01:05:41 Speaker_02
I was going to say, first, if you like dream state evoking novels, the one that blew my mind, and 9 out of 10 people hate this book, so it's a very strong caveat, but it's Little Big by John Crowley, who's actually a poet by training. It is so

01:05:59 Speaker_02
unbelievably good. You have to slog through the first 150 pages, but beyond that, it's absolutely stunning. So what are the reasons to read fiction, aside from the, as I think you put earlier, the insight into the human condition?

01:06:13 Speaker_02
If you were trying to get someone to take that first bite of the forbidden apple of fiction, are there any other points that you would make?

01:06:23 Speaker_04
How do you build empathy? How do you understand everybody has a story? I mean, you've traveled a lot, Tim, but a lot of people you and I both know haven't traveled the world. They haven't been to that many countries.

01:06:34 Speaker_04
You want to go to another country, find a great novel that's been translated from that country and read it. And like, you will understand that country in a way that no travel guide will ever give you in my opinion. So I think it's a very cheap way.

01:06:48 Speaker_04
And there's also to build like emotional intelligence. I've worked now in tech companies for over 20 years. And when you sort of get to certain levels of responsibility with management and leadership.

01:07:03 Speaker_04
You can be technically the smartest person in the room but if you have no emotional intelligence or dimensionality in contemplating emotional states you are gonna start. you are going to struggle to lead.

01:07:17 Speaker_04
And so when I say understand the human condition, I don't just mean like, I'm reading a book and I understand, wow, that's how it might feel to be in a divorce, or that's how it might feel to lose your child.

01:07:26 Speaker_04
Or, you know, I'm saying, no, you yourself as the reader, if the book is really good, start to feel the feelings. You start to feel like, oh, I lost a child. Emotional exercise is hard. It's either happening to you. So you're going through an emotional,

01:07:45 Speaker_04
situation in your own life, which is hard, but doesn't happen every day to most people, or you're going to get emotional exercise from, in my experience, a lot of people get it from film. They get it from video content.

01:07:59 Speaker_04
Short form video gives you like a dopamine hit in my opinion, but not an actual deep story, emotional resonant hit.

01:08:06 Speaker_04
We think we're getting it when we see, oh, that dog fell through the ice and then that guy rescued the dog and you're sort of like crying and you're so happy, but like in a 30 second YouTube video, like, no, that's not an emotional arc.

01:08:18 Speaker_04
That's just, I like to see people rescue animals who are drowning, but like, no, I really want, I think it's a serious film. Maybe it's John Wick. John Wick might be a way to detoxify your left hand collar.

01:08:31 Speaker_02
I almost cried. I said to my friend who'd seen it before, I was like, if they touch that dog, I'm gonna lose it. And he just stayed silent and I was like, oh no, here it comes. Uh-oh, uh-oh, uh-oh.

01:08:40 Speaker_04
But anyway, point is... I think it's emotional workout. Literature, great films.

01:08:46 Speaker_02
Yeah. The other thing I would say is fiction is often much more efficient and elegant in delivering truths than nonfiction. And that's speaking as someone who is a militant nonfiction purist for decades.

01:09:02 Speaker_02
And I really wish I'd started earlier with reading very, very high quality fiction.

01:09:08 Speaker_04
So what was your gateway fiction? What got you? I'm so glad to hear you're a convert.

01:09:12 Speaker_02
Oh, gateway fiction. I mean, I would say that early on I was an avid fiction reader.

01:09:18 Speaker_02
So as a kid, there were books like The NeverEnding Story and then later Dune, for instance, science fiction, A Stranger in a Strange Land by Heinlein, which were also very condensed thought experiments.

01:09:33 Speaker_02
That's part of the reason why I like sci-fi quite a lot. So for folks who are male, also female, but if they're male tech, On the spectrum over performers i'll usually steer them to say ted chang. Short stories like exhalation is a second collection.

01:09:52 Speaker_02
Then i stopped for a long time because it's time to get serious and follows the rules and be a business guy and so on and so forth so i read all the nonfiction stuff and then i would say.

01:10:03 Speaker_02
later on, now that I'm reflecting on it, because I'm trying to pinpoint, and maybe it's because you seeded me with the Argentina. I used to live in Argentina for about nine months in 2004.

01:10:13 Speaker_02
And in an effort, this is going to sound ridiculous to people who are familiar with his work, but I wanted to read fiction in an effort to get better at Spanish. So I found side-by-side Jorge Luis Borges

01:10:28 Speaker_02
which is incredibly challenging in Spanish, I will say right up front. But that ethereal kind of magic realism fever dream type of conjuring that he was able to accomplish was intoxicating to me because it's effectively mind control, right?

01:10:51 Speaker_02
Like language on some level is mind control.

01:10:55 Speaker_04
If you said to me, like, what's the other to the lighthouse? I would say a hundred years of solitude. Gabriel Garcia Marquez and my introduction to magical realism.

01:11:04 Speaker_04
And what's interesting is you went to this, because a lot of guys I talked to, they're like, Neil Stevenson, three-body problem, it's like there's a sci-fi, Dune is always in there, Contact, you know, like whatever, it depends on when they were born.

01:11:16 Speaker_04
But like you get this sort of sci-fi, but what you just did, I love, which is, where else is there sci-fi? In a lot of Latin American literature, Isabel Allende, Borges, Marquez,

01:11:28 Speaker_04
And that's where maybe the genders can meet, which is really emotional, gripping, multi-era stories, but really wild stuff. It's like Dream State is happening. And you're wondering, were they on drugs? What's happening here?

01:11:43 Speaker_02
Of course they were on drugs.

01:11:45 Speaker_04
I 100% love that you went there because I think it's when you're pushing the sci-fi into a different realm, it's magical realism.

01:11:53 Speaker_02
The most creative people I know, this includes business for sure, the most creative, if they're the most creative deal makers, they read and consume very widely. They're not going to this huge buffet and always eating shredded carrots.

01:12:06 Speaker_02
Okay, fine, like shredded carrots, yeah, they're healthy for you, easy to eat, I get it. There's a whole buffet.

01:12:11 Speaker_02
And they end up being able to connect disparate fields and ideas in a way that end up being ultimately incredibly interesting and sometimes very profitable. And I would say, who was it? He worked with Daniel Kahneman.

01:12:26 Speaker_02
I want to say it's Amos Tversky, something like that. But he said something along the lines of, researchers waste years not being able to waste hours. I'm butchering the quote.

01:12:38 Speaker_02
But it's like if you feel so rushed that you cannot read a short fiction book, that is a symptom of a much larger problem, I would say. And so proving to yourself, creating the slack in the system to do that has its own benefits.

01:12:53 Speaker_02
Fiction conversation check.

01:12:55 Speaker_04
We believe in it.

01:12:56 Speaker_02
Yeah, we believe, we believe.

01:12:57 Speaker_02
All right, so let's come back to, I'm going to take a further, not digression, because this is just a natural conversation, but we are going to come back to feedback for direct reports, but I feel like we need a smoother off-ramp.

01:13:10 Speaker_02
So what might make a nice off-ramp from the fiction is something that is highly, highly, highly personal and non-fiction, and that is a Working With Me document. So I want to ask about questions that you might answer in a Working With Me document.

01:13:24 Speaker_02
You could explain what a Working With Me document is, and there are a number that come to mind that I have in front of me here, but perhaps you could just give a little bit of context on what a Working With Me document is and how it is helpful.

01:13:39 Speaker_04
Working with me documents basically trying to write your own user manual.

01:13:44 Speaker_04
And i don't think you have to be a people manager but i've come to believe it's a best practice if you are gonna be managing people to do your best to write a user manual to working with you the idea came to me actually i was moderating a panel at google.

01:13:58 Speaker_04
Google had been involved to a point where it's trying to celebrate management so we done this great manager award.

01:14:02 Speaker_04
And i was the moderator interviewing the great managers that we'd selected across several teams in front of this big room of people at google and i asked them you ask what are some practices that you think of really benefited you as a manager and one.

01:14:17 Speaker_04
of the panelist said well i copied this thing that yours and this is yours who's along many many decades at google i think he's only retiring like now, who worked in infrastructure and building the servers and that like a lot of what really makes your google results come very quickly you can think worse and then i google cloud a lot of work but,

01:14:37 Speaker_04
He wrote a user manual and this person described it and then they went on to say they wrote one and they shared it with their team and their team's response. And I was like, I should write one. Like here I am moderating this great manager panel.

01:14:47 Speaker_04
I haven't done this. So like any good learner, I go back and I sort of like bang out this document. I mean, this is the thing that's the most interesting to me in this

01:14:56 Speaker_04
maybe anti-growth mindset, but this was probably, I don't know, 2009, 2008, whatever. It was like many years ago. I bang out this document and I call it the unauthorized guide because I don't work for me. So I invited a comment.

01:15:10 Speaker_04
I said, for those who actually have had me as a manager, like, please tell me how on base I am or not.

01:15:17 Speaker_04
And then i gave it actually i had the time had this really amazing woman who had been a manager in my organization and then she went on maternity leave and came back and asked to be my assistant i want to change sort of i think i could be kind of a chief of staff to you and she's very talented and we got very close and she worked for me for like.

01:15:33 Speaker_04
At least half my career google and i was like may read this am i anywhere near like am i on base here. She's Irish, which is a theme somehow in my life. I really bond with the Irish.

01:15:46 Speaker_04
She said, well, I feel like at the end, you don't even acknowledge that you like good crack. Crack, which I'm saying wrong in Irish, is fun joke humor. She said, I've never been in a meeting with you where we didn't laugh at least once.

01:16:02 Speaker_04
That's the thing, by the way, that you don't know because you're never not in a meeting with you. And so I was like, oh, that was super helpful. But I feel embarrassed that I'm like, I said, am I saying I'm funny? She's like, no, you like a good laugh.

01:16:14 Speaker_04
It's true. I'm not particularly that funny, but I really enjoy humor. Anyway, so we added a section at the end, but she said, no, I think this is pretty good. I think you should send it to the team and see what they think.

01:16:23 Speaker_04
But what's amazing, Tim, is that document has not changed markedly.

01:16:27 Speaker_02
Since 2009 or whenever it was. Since like 2009.

01:16:29 Speaker_04
It has not changed very much. And we can decide how we feel about that. But I think it's a great exercise in self-awareness. It's a great exercise. And also sort of thinking about, okay, when I have to make a decision.

01:16:42 Speaker_04
So to your point, what kind of content is there? Some of it's very tactical. It's like, how do I like what communication channels work best for me? So how to use our one-on-one versus send me a Slack versus a text versus call me in today's world.

01:16:55 Speaker_04
You know, that like, I literally have people. that I work with, actually, I think, you know, I work with Patrick and John Collison, the Stripe co-founders, of course, they contacted me on every channel.

01:17:05 Speaker_04
Like, how is it that you're texting me, WhatsAppping me, calling me, slacking me, rarely emailing me, actually emailing is probably like the least interesting channel to them.

01:17:14 Speaker_04
So you give guidance, like what are the best channels, like how to use our one on one, but also things like how do I tend to make decisions? If you're coming to me for a decision, here's what you can expect.

01:17:23 Speaker_04
If it's this kind of decision, how long will I need? What kind of data might I like? I have a section in my doc which is I tend to be intuitive, so I've taken a lot of different personality assessments.

01:17:33 Speaker_04
I actually don't really spike in a lot of areas, but I spike as highly intuitive, meaning you come to me with something, I intuitively have an opinion. I'm like, Oh, I think this is going to be the right thing to do. Or I think I say I'm intuitive.

01:17:46 Speaker_04
And then I write dot, dot, dot, don't worry, but data driven. So I'll tell you my intuition. And then I'll say, you bring me data. So we either can validate it, or you tell me your intuition, but let's get some data.

01:17:57 Speaker_04
So I don't just get out there and start operating without any basis. But I think that you're trying to reflect that, but I think it's important to reflect that.

01:18:06 Speaker_04
Like, for example, in my first version, one thing that did change when my team read it was I said, I'm not a, by the way, every manager is like, I'm not a micromanager. It's like a common, everyone's like, well, don't worry, I'm not a micromanager.

01:18:19 Speaker_04
Unfortunately, a lot of us are. And I said, I'm not a micromanager. I will delegate. I will trust you. But if I'm concerned, you're going to know and I'll get more involved. Right. And so I thought I was being pretty honest.

01:18:29 Speaker_04
Like when I do get involved, we should have a conversation because it means I'm having an issue with trust, which means I'm not sure I'm happy with the product. So this guy who worked for me, he said, I'm not sure that you're accurate about this.

01:18:40 Speaker_04
And I said, well, are you saying I'm a micromanager? And he said, well, there was this one thing and he named this project that I had delegated to him. And he's like, then you proceeded to show up in every meeting.

01:18:51 Speaker_04
read every document, be in the spreadsheet. And that was, to me, felt pretty micromanaging. I was like, yeah, I bet it did feel that way. I said, I did that because that project was the first time it was like a sales compensation scheme.

01:19:05 Speaker_04
I was like, that's the first time I'd ever built one. And I was really like wanting to learn. And he said, well, you never told me that.

01:19:11 Speaker_04
So as far as he was concerned, I showed up in every damn thing this poor guy had scheduled and he's supposed to be leading and he's supposed to make a recommendation to me. And I'm like, reading all the same stuff, participating.

01:19:23 Speaker_04
I mean, I was looking back, I'm really embarrassed. I was like, I can't believe I didn't tell you, because I had full confidence in this. He was probably, by the way, better positioned than I was to build this thing.

01:19:33 Speaker_04
And I was counting on him, but then I went and undermined him. And so that's why, by the way, the Working With Me document is also helpful, is because if you have good relationships with people you work with,

01:19:41 Speaker_04
They will tell you, yeah, you think you act this way, but you really don't. So then I had to add a section about sometimes when it feels like I'm micromanaging you, it's because I'm trying to learn.

01:19:50 Speaker_04
The first time I've ever done a thing, you are going to see me hyper involved. But what we should do is establish that ahead of time. And if I don't, please call me on it.

01:19:59 Speaker_04
Anyway, the point is, yeah, the working with me document became something I just shared today with anyone who starts to work with me closely. And what happens in high growth environments like Google and Stripe is like your team changes a lot.

01:20:10 Speaker_04
There's new people. People's managers change. It's hard. You don't love that. But like I've had people come to me and say, you're my fourth manager in a year. So what are you trying to do?

01:20:19 Speaker_04
You're trying to create a shortcut because there's anxiety when we first work with someone. Well, should I call you if I have some kind of crisis?

01:20:26 Speaker_04
When you're at night and Slack looks like you're available, should I Slack you stuff or should I wait till the next morning? Or like you're looking for guidance, you're looking to read the person.

01:20:34 Speaker_04
I'm like, just tell them, tell them how to work with you. And then that reduces the anxiety. And ideally, they write their own manual.

01:20:41 Speaker_04
And then you've both sort of shortcut some of the get to know you stuff so you can just jump right into working together.

01:20:47 Speaker_02
This is something I wanted to explore because jumping, I suppose, to something you explore at some length in your book, which I definitely recommend people check out.

01:21:00 Speaker_02
I underlined this a couple of times for myself because I still feel like I have room to improve here, and that is Strive to make implicit structures and beliefs explicit. Make the implicit explicit. And that shows up in so many different ways.

01:21:15 Speaker_02
It can manifest in so many different ways. And I want to stick with the Working With Me document for a minute. This first came to my attention because I had dusted in Moskowitz.

01:21:26 Speaker_02
on the podcast from Facebook fame and then certainly of Sana, and he shared his Working With Me document, and I've since seen a few versions of this. But I wanted to get your take on what might be worth adding to this list of questions.

01:21:44 Speaker_02
Here are a few. What do I want to be involved in? When do I want to hear from you? One you already mentioned. What are my preferred communication modes? What makes me impatient?

01:21:53 Speaker_02
Are there other questions that you have found helpful to address or topic areas worth including? Having seen these letters, having crafted your own Working With Me document,

01:22:07 Speaker_04
My Working With Me document was published in Elad Gill's book, High Growth Handbook, and went like a little bit viral, like viral for Claire, not for Tim Ferriss.

01:22:16 Speaker_04
But like still, I was like shocked at how many people that I've never met had like seen it. And I also got some criticisms on the interwebs that was like very egotistical in some way.

01:22:26 Speaker_04
It was sort of like, here's how you make me happy, which I was like, okay, that's like a totally fair criticism and not the intention. By the way, I'm like,

01:22:35 Speaker_04
I'm trying to reduce anxiety and help people feel comfortable being honest with me, whatever, but I get it. It seems very self-absorbed.

01:22:45 Speaker_04
So one of the things that I'm reacting to is like, the question, I guess, if I were going to phrase it as a question, it would be, how do I help you make great decisions or how do you like to make decisions?

01:22:56 Speaker_04
You know, but I think in my document, I just sort of have headers like decision-making. Cause I'm not, that's why yours called it user manual, which is a very technical, like an engineer is going to be like, I'm going to write a user manual to me.

01:23:07 Speaker_04
And I just called it working with me. There's a section on what types of information do you like to see? Because that's different than how do I want to be communicated with? And it's different than when should I get in touch with you?

01:23:19 Speaker_04
Which is like, yeah, if there's a crisis, get in touch with me, but there's something in mine.

01:23:24 Speaker_04
Where i talk about the fact that if like someone on your team is having a major life event i'd like to know about it i'd like to send them a note i'd like to.

01:23:31 Speaker_04
Say i'm sorry or celebrate their child or you know i think what types of information do you like to have i also get really explicit about things like.

01:23:39 Speaker_04
Email protocols mean different things to people especially in different generations i'm sure you've seen this. But I used to work with someone who would send FYI and really, really feel strongly that you need to process that information and like,

01:23:55 Speaker_04
have a response. Whereas for me, I'm like, if you send me FYI... That means no response.

01:24:00 Speaker_02
For me, anyway.

01:24:01 Speaker_04
That means, yeah, I can read it later and it's interesting, but I don't need to respond. And I'm like, I can't believe this, but I think I have to... Back to, I think you asked your guests a question of if you were going to have a billboard.

01:24:13 Speaker_04
I think the fight for me in my billboard would be, is it make the implicit explicit, or is it undermine the superstructure from within? I'm not sure, but one of those is my billboard.

01:24:26 Speaker_02
But the first one... I think I get the first one.

01:24:29 Speaker_04
Making the implicit explicit is so valuable. By the way, a lot of people are like, I love that your book is so humanistic about people and how to care for... I was like, folks, my book is about getting results.

01:24:42 Speaker_04
I do appreciate other humans and I love working with them, even though sometimes Patrick calls and I would be like, oh my gosh, this is like the hardest problem. And we'd go, oh, if there were no humans involved, it would be so much easier.

01:24:54 Speaker_04
But point is, I love humans and the human condition, but I really am talking about how do you get results. And how do you get results? You get super clear and transparent about anything implicit.

01:25:06 Speaker_04
You make it explicit and you're like clear, like this is a process we're going to go through it to get to this outcome. And what is the outcome we want? Make it explicit. I mean, Tim, you, I think, are the master of this. What are we measuring?

01:25:17 Speaker_04
Why are we measuring it? How will we know if we won? And I would add to that. And what process will we go through together to get there?

01:25:24 Speaker_04
So that no one is guessing or reading the tea leaves or wondering why another team is doing the same project put it all on the table so that we can get to the end faster. And frankly more inclusively and why do i care about inclusion.

01:25:38 Speaker_04
Yes inclusion is a good thing for people to feel better and included but actually because if you hired a bunch of smart people. And yet they don't feel included. They will not share their opinion.

01:25:50 Speaker_04
And the reason you hired them is because they're smart people who bring diverse opinions. And if they won't say them, then you're like not really benefiting from all that work hiring them because you want a better outcome. This is all about results.

01:26:02 Speaker_04
But I think it's a little windy to get there sometimes.

01:26:06 Speaker_02
Yeah, totally.

01:26:06 Speaker_04
Until you make it explicit.

01:26:08 Speaker_02
I wanted to piggyback off of your Irish pattern in life and recommend a short film that I think won an Oscar. I might be making that up, but it won some slew of fancy awards, and I watched it last night called An Irish Goodbye.

01:26:22 Speaker_02
It's about 22, 23 minutes long. You can find it on Vimeo. I think you might be able to watch it on YouTube as well. hilarious and profound and outstanding.

01:26:31 Speaker_02
I think based on the little that I feel like I've sort of felt out with our Fiction Love Fest, I think you would really enjoy this. It is one of the better short films I've ever seen. It's really good. It's really, really good. So an Irish goodbye.

01:26:45 Speaker_04
I've got, what is it? Little Big

01:26:47 Speaker_02
And Irish goodbye. Start with an Irish goodbye, because then you'd be like, wow, Tim really recommends good stuff. And then if you hate Little Big, at least I'll have some redemption preemptively. Okay. Okay. That's fair.

01:26:58 Speaker_02
It's like the amuse-bouche before you try to chew on the fever dream.

01:27:01 Speaker_04
And I'll say also, I'd love a good Irish goodbye. I used to find it a little offensive, but now I'm like, gosh, there's some real beauty in just disappearing.

01:27:11 Speaker_02
Oh, I do that all the time. I do it all the time. So email policies. I had a request from Kevin Kelly recently, who's been on the podcast and is a close friend. I asked him if I could help him with anything. We're having a conversation.

01:27:23 Speaker_02
He said, well, I do have one request. And it's not for him. It's because he gets asked about it so much. He doesn't have any issues with email.

01:27:30 Speaker_02
But he's like, I want you to ask every one of your guests about email policies slash rules, systems, anything that they have ended up using that they have found helpful.

01:27:41 Speaker_02
And I will say in advance, my assumption is that almost, well it's not my assumption, I've also run into this, even though this podcast has some of the top performing people in the world of every discipline imaginable, they all claim to kind of suck at email, they're behind and it's hard.

01:27:57 Speaker_02
So I understand that. Being that as it may,

01:28:00 Speaker_04
See, it's a beautiful expression.

01:28:03 Speaker_02
Do that as it may.

01:28:04 Speaker_04
You are still going to have to answer this.

01:28:06 Speaker_02
Are there any sort of email policy systems, rules, implicit things that you make explicit that you found helpful?

01:28:14 Speaker_04
I actually worked on Gmail right after it launched at Google and like you should think I would be like a power email organizer and I'm okay, but I'm not great.

01:28:23 Speaker_04
But one thing that just stuck out in my mind as you brought this up is I had a good friend who was a

01:28:28 Speaker_04
executive at Genentech and she rose up with Genentech as it got big and she got more and more responsibility and she told me about this leadership training they put them in, Tim.

01:28:36 Speaker_04
Honestly, whenever I look at my inbox, I think of this training where they gave them some 30 minutes, some window, they gave them an inbox and they were like, you need to process all this and kind of do the right things, right?

01:28:52 Speaker_04
And so in this inbox of like 100 emails, whatever, they have 30 minutes, you have to find there's like a massive legal issue, there's an HR violation, but it's like not in the headline of the subject of the email.

01:29:04 Speaker_02
It's like an anxiety dream.

01:29:06 Speaker_04
It's like a bunch of bombs in these messages and you have to like open them, skim them, decide you have to come back to it, right?

01:29:13 Speaker_03
Yeah.

01:29:14 Speaker_04
And I kind of was like feeling like Japanese game show. I'm like, what's this mean? that people might wanna watch. And I think there is a sector of people who might find that like really interesting to watch.

01:29:25 Speaker_04
So sometimes I look at my inbox and I'm like, oh my gosh, I have 30 minutes and I need to find all of the legal time bombs.

01:29:33 Speaker_04
But one of the things that I think I'm very good at on email is it's a set of people in my both professional and personal life, like they get opened immediately.

01:29:43 Speaker_04
And i'll open it and if it's by the way read fyi i'll be later i really wanna make sure i mean it's easy some of these people like your kids by the way my kids are teenagers they never email me so that's like easy but you know certainly if you're the ceo of a company even if you're not the ceo anymore if the founders of stripe email me directly.

01:30:02 Speaker_04
I'm going to open the email pretty freaking quickly, just to make sure. It's sort of like your boss, but I do think that some people have a methodology, which is either LIFO or FIFO, last in, first out. I think that that's tempting.

01:30:18 Speaker_04
My husband does this a little bit. It bothers me. I'm like, you have cues, which is who is it from and is a group or is it direct to you? use those cues to prioritize. And so if you only have 30 minutes, you know where to start.

01:30:33 Speaker_04
That's one of the things, and it is a combination of the people and what's being sent to you directly. So I think that's like a number one rule I have that I'm pretty actually good at.

01:30:42 Speaker_04
So there's certain people who feel I'm very responsive on email because I am very responsive to them. I'm not maybe responsive to everyone as consistently. The other is, I have, this is like more of a cheat, but you're an investor, I think. Right.

01:30:58 Speaker_04
So I, I've invested in some companies and a lot of them send these investor newsletters or investor updates. And of course I'm, because I do have some Gmail skills, I label them. I know there's a folder full of them.

01:31:12 Speaker_04
And I have every intention, Tim, on Friday for like two hours, I'm going to read those investor updates. Okay. You know what? That is not correct.

01:31:23 Speaker_04
Sometimes when I'm on an airplane and I'm trapped, I like open and start reading them, but like, I am not reading them in a timely fashion. And I'm sorry, all the founders I've invested in. I'm sorry. I'm not reading.

01:31:35 Speaker_04
Your investor updates in a timely fashion but what i've learned to do and this goes back to making the implicit explicit and also to another rule i have which is.

01:31:43 Speaker_04
Strive to set expectations with people so now when i invest in a company i say to them i say look you may email me i'll give you my email.

01:31:52 Speaker_04
I said i'll give you my cell phone i'm quite good on text but please don't abuse it and if you wanna whatsapp me and not take whatever either of those is gonna work and then i say to them i want you to know i really appreciate getting the investor updates i will not read them in a timely fashion i may not read them at all.

01:32:08 Speaker_04
If you need something from me directly like you need help me interview this person or i have a crack you should get in touch with me directly not as like at the end of an investor email it says please help us hire a scientist.

01:32:22 Speaker_04
End cognitive load wise i'm like. I have been feeling so much guilt about not reading their – by the way, they spend so much time on them and it's terrible sometimes. But I no longer feel guilt. I've told them, you must contact me directly.

01:32:37 Speaker_04
But this is actually a management lesson, which is why not – this goes back to the user manual or the working with Claire guide. Why not tell people I have this habit? of ignoring this kind of thing.

01:32:48 Speaker_04
And if you need my attention, please, you have my permission. Please use it. Please text me even. I mean, for these founders, they have my phone number. I'm like, if you need me, you can call me.

01:32:58 Speaker_04
But it's sort of a human lesson we learn over and over again, which is we're like dying inside that we're disappointing someone. And I'm like, no, just renegotiate the terms of what expectations they should have of you.

01:33:10 Speaker_02
How else does this renegotiating show up?

01:33:13 Speaker_02
This has become, it's embarrassing to say, but I'd say maybe in the last two years has become such a revelation for me in a sense, because I always thought about negotiating as the thing you did in the beginning.

01:33:26 Speaker_02
And I got, I think, pretty good at that.

01:33:28 Speaker_02
And at times, though, I would have, who knows, like maybe I had two glasses of wine, or I had too little sleep, or whatever, and I would agree to these things, and then later I'd look at my calendar, and my blood pressure would go up, you know, 30 points, because I felt trapped by these commitments that I made when I was compromised, or rushed, or whatever.

01:33:48 Speaker_02
Lazy, fill in the blank. And this renegotiating has become an invisible option made visible for me in the last two years. Could you talk a little bit more about how you have used that in your life, personal or professional, how that shows up?

01:34:05 Speaker_02
Examples would be really helpful here so people can really get a grasp on it.

01:34:09 Speaker_04
I'm having like almost a physical reaction to relating to you about this calendar. It's like your past self. I used to say, Oh my gosh, I just mailed myself a letter bomb.

01:34:18 Speaker_04
So one is of course, we all strive to improve, which is do not make a decision in the moment about a timer, a commitment of resources or time. without trying to project your future self.

01:34:30 Speaker_04
But of course we all do, because you're right, we're rushed, we're trying to be responsive, we're trying to move through our inbox, by the way, because we've only got 30 minutes or we might fail the corporate training test.

01:34:39 Speaker_02
Or the Japanese TV show, don't want to come in last.

01:34:41 Speaker_04
Yeah, so one thing is trying to be better about projecting. And I also had a friend who's like a very kind of spiritually in touch person. And she said, when something is requested of you, she said, you need to sometimes listen for the quiet no.

01:34:57 Speaker_04
Can you say that one more time? So she said, when something's requested of you, a person, I mean, she's like sort of like, sometimes your reaction is, wow, yes, right? You've had this. I mean, hey, Tim Ferriss. asked me to be on his podcast.

01:35:11 Speaker_04
I was like, yes, emphatically. That is something I want to do. That is easy. My future self is very happy to be, my past and future selves are very happy to be here.

01:35:22 Speaker_04
But often we get a request, you have this experience and you're looking at it and she says, listen for the quiet no, because we are often feel like we have to say yes. And her trick is,

01:35:35 Speaker_04
And I know this wasn't the question you asked me, which I will answer, but her trick is- These are really closely related.

01:35:39 Speaker_02
I'm so interested in this. Yeah.

01:35:42 Speaker_04
I think they are. Do not respond immediately.

01:35:44 Speaker_04
Because we often feel, I mean, if you're someone who prides yourself on being decisive and responsive and empathetic, as I do, I feel like, well, they asked me to be on this panel at this important conference or whatever.

01:35:55 Speaker_04
And I'm like, I've learned that my response, in fact, should be, when do you need to know? whether or not I can be on this panel. Or I'll even say, I need two weeks to get back to you about whether I can be on this panel.

01:36:09 Speaker_04
Because if I don't give myself some space, I will do yes instead of the quiet no. because I didn't give myself time to really think about, is this my priority? Should I spend my time? Oh my gosh, I have to fly to the city. Like you have to really think.

01:36:25 Speaker_04
So I think when you are renegotiating, so I'm proud of you that you found this as a skill. And by the way, I have the same problem. I had a delayed travel earlier this week.

01:36:35 Speaker_04
And I was looking at my next day and I was thinking, well, I am going to get home, but I'm going to get home at like now two in the morning. And then I looked and I was like, I should not even be doing that stuff.

01:36:45 Speaker_04
I was like, why did I even agree to go into Boston and have lunch with this person and then talk to this other person? And so I was like, I am going to renegotiate those commitments. I don't even have to say that I was delayed. So it's a good skill.

01:36:58 Speaker_04
But what I look for is a pattern. a pattern of, why am I renegotiating this stuff? It means I'm not making the right decision in the first place. So I listen for the quiet no.

01:37:07 Speaker_04
But if I find myself renegotiating, it is often about, yeah, commitments I've made. Commitments, especially of time. My mom was a very talented, apparently, mathematician in college. And my mom went to Harvard, well, Radcliffe then.

01:37:21 Speaker_04
But I think it was pretty rare for a woman to be a star in the math department. Super rare. And she decided to go get her PhD in history and to major in history. And I said, why did you switch? Why did you make the switch?

01:37:37 Speaker_04
And she said, I realized that there is a trade-off that most people find themselves making between money and time. And she said, I knew that if I prioritized math, it would likely lead to a more lucrative career.

01:37:54 Speaker_04
By the way, my mom was like out there, she was going to work and she did, and she was going to have kids and work, but she was like, it would lead to a more lucrative career, but I would not have time.

01:38:03 Speaker_04
So I decided to become, she became an academic, she got her PhD, she became a professor. And why? Because professors have more control over their time and they have the summers off and they have time to think and write.

01:38:14 Speaker_04
And that's what she knew she wanted. which by the way is pretty aware for like a 19 or 20 year old to realize you're going to trade money and time. I think it's Peter Thiel who says like people don't value their time highly enough.

01:38:26 Speaker_04
They just like don't get every hour is costing you something. And I've taken me so long to come to this point where I'm like, Oh my gosh, I just threw away and said, sure, I'll meet with you to give you advice about that thing.

01:38:38 Speaker_04
And I'm like, Oh, so I've become less responsive on email. because I am trying to stop myself from mortgaging my time. You may or may not have had the same experience, but all right, here's an example. You're looking for concrete.

01:38:56 Speaker_04
I have a woman who I highly value personally in my life. She's a founder and she asked me to be on her board. By the way, to stop myself from saying yes to stuff, I make rules. I made a rule. I was like, no more boards.

01:39:09 Speaker_04
I also have a rule about travel right now. I'm like, my daughter's going to college soon. No more travel unless it meets these criteria because I want to be home. Of course, she doesn't want to hang out with me, but I want to hang out with her.

01:39:19 Speaker_02
What are the criteria to study curiosity? Could be just a few examples.

01:39:23 Speaker_04
really important to Stripe. I still actually work part-time for Stripe and they get bids on my time. And if Stripe said, the most important thing you can do for Stripe is go to, this happened to me recently, go to Helsinki to slush to this conference.

01:39:36 Speaker_04
I was like, fine, I will do it. I will go to Helsinki for Stripe. And by the way, I had a great time and I met a great number of founders and it was actually a blast. So is it important to Stripe? Is it a personal connection that is meaningful to me?

01:39:49 Speaker_04
That is asking of my time treasure talents my criteria is not to say yes to default but it is to number one is there a way i could do it that is less friction as in my flying to california anyway.

01:40:03 Speaker_04
Therefore i can do that commitment if i bundle it so can i control when it is. And if I can control when it is, and it's a personal connection that's meaningful to me, I will make it happen, but it will not happen quickly.

01:40:15 Speaker_04
But if it's not something I can control where and when it is, then I have a subset of criteria of like, but I often will say like, could this thing, maybe it's a conference, can I do this next year and get back to you later so I can actually think for a minute?

01:40:29 Speaker_04
A lot of it is buying time. But I have these rules about things because it stops me. So I said to her, I said, I have made a commitment to myself that I will not join another board. And she, because she's a talented founder, she's persistent.

01:40:41 Speaker_04
And she said, why don't you just come and be an observer? Why don't you just come to the board meeting? And then she told me why she really needed help in this particular moment.

01:40:50 Speaker_04
And there was a situation where having someone who was sort of a friendly, who was neutral in the room was going to be valuable. So I said, okay, I will come, but I will not, like, I really want to set your expectations right.

01:41:02 Speaker_04
I was like, I am not, this is not going to reel me in. I'm not going to join the board.

01:41:06 Speaker_04
And I did go and she actually convinced someone else and the two of us went and we actually, I think helped her through a particular moment by being sort of board participants.

01:41:16 Speaker_04
But then she said, I'd like you to come to every, you know, of course, every board meeting. And I said, I don't think I can commit to that, but I can try when it's virtual. And if it's in person, I'm pretty sure I won't, but you can invite me.

01:41:28 Speaker_04
And I went to a couple, I did pretty well. And then I started to look at my calendar and I was like, I can't do this. I can't even take three, four hours. And so I needed to renegotiate it. There's a quote that I have in my book that

01:41:42 Speaker_04
that people find, I think, the most compelling line in the book, and I keep having to remind them, it is not my line.

01:41:48 Speaker_02
Yeah, I know this problem, where I'm like, no, no, no, no, don't attribute it to me, that was Mark Twain or whatever.

01:41:54 Speaker_04
Exactly, exactly. The line is from Ron Heifetz or Marty Linsky, these are the adaptive leadership guys who do the balcony and the dance floor analogy, and it is, leadership is disappointing people at a rate that they can absorb.

01:42:08 Speaker_02
I had that line underlined. It's very catchy.

01:42:10 Speaker_04
Because it really makes you think and it's kind of dark too.

01:42:13 Speaker_02
Yeah. What does that mean in like concrete terms?

01:42:16 Speaker_04
Yeah.

01:42:16 Speaker_02
And then I'm not going to let go of the renegotiating because I'm going to come back to that. I want to ask you about phrasing and wording that you use, but let's talk about leadership and disappointing people.

01:42:26 Speaker_04
I think one of the ways that leaders disappoint people is their time.

01:42:29 Speaker_04
You don't have unlimited time you're the CEO of a company there's no way you're gonna be at all the things or do all the things but the key is how do you create enough leadership buy-in that people understand and also you get a little bit of.

01:42:44 Speaker_04
Forgiveness when you're the ceo i think but leadership is disappointing people at a rate they can absorb.

01:42:50 Speaker_04
To me is about management is very knowable it's like how do i get from point a to point b what people do i need what's the scope how can i measure it here's the project plan here's the milestones here's the talents i need and i'm gonna deploy and delegate and.

01:43:05 Speaker_04
I think leadership is very unknowable because it is essentially having a vision, an idea, a goal that you haven't even fully understood yourself, right, often?

01:43:17 Speaker_04
It's like, we're going to climb this mountain that no one has ever climbed before, by the way. you have to be really convincing to build followership. You're painting a picture of the top of that mountain, man. And it is awesome.

01:43:32 Speaker_04
And the climb is going to be really challenging, but really rewarding. And you are going to get on that journey with those people and you are going to be wrong about a lot of what you just said, right?

01:43:45 Speaker_04
No, actually it wasn't as easy up the South face as we thought it was. Yes, we did actually need special equipment. I mean, come on, you don't even know how you're going to get up there.

01:43:56 Speaker_04
The analogy that's more concrete that I use is I came into Stripe and look, it's a product that has people's money and you need to have good support experiences when something is wrong with any kind of payment. I'm expecting money.

01:44:11 Speaker_04
I'm trying to take money. I'm moving money. There's a high expectation. And Patrick is like, we need to build 24 seven global support. We had really good ambitions. And by the way, I want to be clear. One of the things that Stripe has as a value

01:44:27 Speaker_04
is to be users first. It is always our most important operating principle. It is actually deeply in the culture of the company. So much so, Tim, that when the support team would get behind, the entire company would stop and answer support emails.

01:44:42 Speaker_04
And so this was becoming an existential problem because we had to do engineering work and other work to build the company. But we were like ending up on Fridays before the weekend because you want to get back to people quickly.

01:44:54 Speaker_04
answering support tickets. By the way, you hit product market fit, you get traction. This is a super normal problem. But it is not great because the product is people's money. It's a quality problem, but it's a problem nonetheless.

01:45:05 Speaker_04
And so Patrick is like, look, we need to have this 24-7. And I had to get up as the leader and say, I will build this. And I had built similar things for Google. So I wasn't completely describing a mountain I'd never seen.

01:45:19 Speaker_04
But I certainly didn't join Google when it was only like 160 people with 21 support people. And I was like, we are now going to do a set of things to solve this. And it took me a few years. And it's not perfect.

01:45:32 Speaker_04
And it involved hiring very talented people. I don't get credit for what we built. But I still look back on that and I say, I can't believe I declared that I would get it done. And I didn't have a plan because I'm more of a manager.

01:45:44 Speaker_04
I'm more of like, I need to have a clear plan on how I'm going to get this done. Instead, I was like, yep, we're going to have it. Public announcement. And I mean, Patrick kind of pushed me there, but I was like, this is uncomfortable.

01:45:57 Speaker_04
And I'll tell you, I did disappoint. Did I deliver it by the end of that year? Oh, no, Tim, I did not deliver it by the end of that first year. Like, let's not kid ourselves. I disappointed, but I did figure out a way to do it.

01:46:09 Speaker_04
And I think people followed me, they kept following me, they kept believing we were gonna do it, which is some combination of me being authentic, I think, me being honest about where we were, me having a plan eventually, me demonstrating that it mattered, whatever.

01:46:23 Speaker_04
So I think that's what it means, is like, you will not live up to everything you said, all the expectations of you. with your time, with your ideas. We're all humans. We're not perfect, and we're not fortune tellers.

01:46:37 Speaker_02
I'm not a fortune teller. So this ties into the renegotiating actually pretty well, because there are many different species of renegotiating. One was, you gave an example very early on in the conversation when Lucy was getting thrown under the bus.

01:46:53 Speaker_02
The dog ate my homework situation. And then we segway from that to the player versus victim. And the player would say, you know what, you're right. I committed to get this to you by 5 p.m. I didn't.

01:47:05 Speaker_02
And because this emergency popped up and I didn't let you know, I should've let you know. How about 5 p.m. tomorrow? Or whatever the example was. renegotiation.

01:47:14 Speaker_02
So in this particular example, when it becomes clear to you that by whatever deadline had been agreed, you were not going to be able to deliver what you were going to hope to deliver, what does that conversation look like?

01:47:26 Speaker_02
I mean, it's not exactly semiotics, but I know you like language and I know you consume a lot of language. So what is the language that you use to have that conversation, whether it's verbal or in email?

01:47:38 Speaker_04
I think you made the connection and then you didn't finish making a connection. But it is so easy to sound like a victim when you are facing this kind of a situation.

01:47:46 Speaker_04
And if you're someone who prides themselves on being a player, on taking ownership, and you've made this commitment and you're like, oh, my gosh, there is no way I'm either coming to that meeting or delivering 24-7 global support in six months.

01:47:59 Speaker_04
And so what does it look like? I think what it looks like, the first thing I did that was probably the smartest thing I did when I joined Stripe was

01:48:08 Speaker_04
I listened and I did my first 90 days and I talked to everybody and I heard sort of, here's priorities, here's what people need, here's what need my attention. And then I sat down with Patrick and I said, I'm hearing these four things.

01:48:20 Speaker_04
One of them was the support thing, by the way, that really need my attention. And I am going to rank them. And then I want you to see my ranking. And I want to agree on my level of priority.

01:48:31 Speaker_04
I said, because I can't make meaningful progress on four things at once, I can maybe keep And I actually predicted in that moment, I said, because we had to build sales, we had to build recruiting.

01:48:44 Speaker_04
We had some internal operational stuff that needed to be fixed. And then we had this support smoldering fire. And I said, I think I actually need to build sales and recruiting ahead of fixing support.

01:48:56 Speaker_04
But I predict support is going to implode within the next six months.

01:49:00 Speaker_02
And at that point, you were COO. Is that right?

01:49:03 Speaker_04
I was COO. I was actually hired as chief of business operations. And then I became, we just swapped titles with someone else, but it's a long story. But yes, I was basically COO. And remember, we're users first.

01:49:13 Speaker_04
This was a painful, because we were also not getting back to sales leads, though, Tim. I was like, you know, I just want to, I'm also here to build some revenue. I'm here to build go-to-market, and I'm here to deliver some revenue for this company.

01:49:24 Speaker_04
And I'm like, we have this other thing where we're not getting back to our prospects. And so it was a very Sophie's Choice kind of moment. Honestly, oh, and then we couldn't hire people to build the company, so we couldn't get back to sales leads.

01:49:37 Speaker_04
This is normal, by the way, this happens, especially for people like me coming into that kind of opportunity. But what I loved about that conversation was Patrick was, one, first of all, supportive.

01:49:47 Speaker_04
He was like, great, this is good for us to talk out now. And then he had to admit, he's like, I can't believe I'm doing this. But I agree, you're not going to fix support in the first six months. We made an agreement.

01:49:58 Speaker_04
And then, by the way, Tim, four months in, complete explosion.

01:50:03 Speaker_04
And i was thinking in my head thank goodness this goes back to expectation setting i'm like thank goodness i said out loud that i thought i was gonna explode and then i mean by the way still terrible i was so sad i was like oh my gosh i had to go then put it at the top of the priority list basically but i had at least four months to build some other things point is one is try to set the priorities align on them and.

01:50:24 Speaker_04
set expectations ahead of time. Even if you haven't done that, you're going to reach a moment where you're like, there's no way we're getting to the top of this mountain. And so what you try to do is not come up and make a bunch of excuses.

01:50:35 Speaker_04
So what I think I did in those moments, we had written public goals in the company, we had plans. And I just want to be clear, none of the plans, this is where when you're working with founders, maybe this is a side, what do you call them?

01:50:48 Speaker_04
Side quests. This is a little bit of a side quest.

01:50:50 Speaker_02
Love side quests.

01:50:51 Speaker_04
But when you're working with founders, people describe this reality distortion experience, which often is more that they

01:51:00 Speaker_04
have a version of reality and they're like, no, no, no, we can ship the iPhone in five minutes or whatever, you know, and like, everyone's like, yes, Steve, yes, we can.

01:51:09 Speaker_04
There's another version of reality distortion I find, which is you can fix that thing in five minutes. It's now a joke between Patrick and I, because he'll be like, yeah, we could just like code that up.

01:51:20 Speaker_04
And I say in five minutes, it's not five minutes. So we had a consistent conflict where I would say to him, no, that mountain is not going to be climbed by the end of this year.

01:51:32 Speaker_04
I never actually said I was going to build that thing by the end of the year, and he refused to hear it. He was like, no, it really needs to be the goal. This actually needs to be the goal.

01:51:42 Speaker_03
Be that as it may, Claire. Yeah, be that as it may, Claire, I'm making it your goal.

01:51:48 Speaker_04
I was like, okay, under duress, I am going to take this goal, and try to put some language in it. I mean, I'm gonna get a red, right? Whatever on your, I mean, that doesn't feel good. This is the other thing.

01:52:02 Speaker_04
It's beneficial to walk into a situation like that after some amount of career success so that you have some amount of self-actualization. So I was like, luckily my whole identity is not tied up in this goal because I would have been destroyed.

01:52:15 Speaker_04
I would have really lost confidence. By the way, a lot of leaders you hire into a startup environment end up losing confidence just because you're getting pummeled totally pummeled.

01:52:24 Speaker_04
And you need to sort of be like, no, no, no, I have identity outside of the success of this moment. But I was like, all right, I'm going to publicly get up in front of the company and have failed on this goal. But we disagreed.

01:52:34 Speaker_04
We agreed to disagree that this is possible. What's also funny, though, is I was like, I think he really believed it was possible. And he's very smart. And of course, then I'm going home. I'm driving home at night.

01:52:44 Speaker_04
I'm like, has he ever built anything like this? No. Why am I even listening to him? But they reality distort you into thinking, yes, it's completely possible. Like, I don't know how I got fooled.

01:52:54 Speaker_04
But what I did sort of commit to myself is like, I have to make meaningful progress. So what are some of the milestones we can point to? So what you do is you go in and you say, well, I was not convinced this was the right goal, but I agreed to it.

01:53:07 Speaker_04
Here are the milestones that I'm glad we hit. So you kind of don't forget to point out you made progress. I think sometimes people get defensive. They're like, I don't want to be defensive. But you have to be like, look, it's like nothing happened.

01:53:17 Speaker_04
And then you try to be data driven. And what I think, because this is where the context matters, Stripe's founders and Stripe's culture is very learning oriented.

01:53:27 Speaker_02
Very, very. More so than almost maybe any startup I've come across.

01:53:31 Speaker_04
Yes.

01:53:32 Speaker_02
At an early stage too.

01:53:34 Speaker_04
Yes. So think about the cultural context you're in. What did we learn? What did we not know and what did we learn trying to get there on this goal? What did I learn? By the way, some of them are mistakes I made. And so try to be humble.

01:53:47 Speaker_04
Stripe is also a very humble culture. Say, here's some things I thought I knew. By the way, I thought I did know. I was like, we were going to outsource certain things. that I thought was going to be easier than it was. And that is true.

01:53:57 Speaker_04
And here's what I learned. Here's what I thought. Here's what the truth was. Here's what I learned. Here's now what we're going to do differently. And by the way, everyone's nodding in the room because they're like, cool, cool. We had a plan. We tried it.

01:54:08 Speaker_04
I mean, they're engineers. They know it like did not work the way we thought it was going to work. We're going to try this other thing.

01:54:12 Speaker_04
So you basically do a retro postmortem, whatever you want to call it, sort of publicly in front of everyone in the language they like speaking. So the language Stripe likes speaking is learning. I made mistakes. What am I doing differently?

01:54:28 Speaker_04
What do I see next? How are we going to get there now? You know what I mean? Like it's, I'm confident, but humbled by this experience. And I've learned a lot.

01:54:36 Speaker_04
And here's some data that shows we have made some progress because I also people want to make sure like, are we actually know what we're doing? So that's what you do. And I think depends on your context and sort of what language do you speak?

01:54:47 Speaker_02
So that is a big example, and that is, I think, a very effective way to, as a player, offer a mea culpa in a way. At that point then, and this may be, if this is going to require a dissertation, then tell me and I can rejig.

01:55:04 Speaker_02
But how did you decide to scope the thing and then make a counteroffer effectively? Or was that even your decision to make? I don't know.

01:55:13 Speaker_02
In terms of like, okay, we've learned these things, these were some assumptions, and then leading into the kind of now what?

01:55:20 Speaker_04
I won't do the dissertation version, Tim, but I will tell you one bind I found myself in consistently that I'm sure you have also, is it's a talent bind, which is I can only do so many things at once, individually, me alone.

01:55:33 Speaker_04
And I did feel like a victim, I'm going to be honest, because I had been trying to hire someone, I had hired someone, they hadn't worked out, partly my fault, partly not my fault.

01:55:43 Speaker_04
And I'm in a meeting, this happens so many times, but I'm talking to Patrick and I'm like, look, we know so-and-so didn't work out. Here's what happened with that. We now have face a choice, which is you have Claire as a resource, me alone.

01:55:57 Speaker_04
Am I going to go lead support directly? Like, am I going to go start building this thing with all my, most of my time? And what is the opportunity cost of that?

01:56:06 Speaker_04
What is the trade off of me not leading sales by the way, at that moment, which I was also leading. And this is where I fell into a trap because I had like a few too many needing to clone myself problems.

01:56:16 Speaker_04
And this happens when you're growing quickly, but it's still, I got into an egregious case of needing cloning. Then we're having a renegotiation conversation.

01:56:25 Speaker_02
Not even a reasonable case of needing cloning. Egregious.

01:56:27 Speaker_04
No, it was egregious. It was egregious. There was one point where, I mean, I think it's important that people, especially because they seem to think I have some like storied career.

01:56:36 Speaker_04
I'm like, there was a moment where I had taken a former colleague from Google who I was admittedly, I'll be honest, was trying to recruit to Stripe out for a coffee.

01:56:45 Speaker_02
You're just going to be a bored observer. Just come once.

01:56:47 Speaker_04
Yeah, right. Exactly. Exactly. And he says to me, he used to actually work for me and he knew how much I pride myself on good management practices. And he asked me, how many direct reports do you have?

01:56:58 Speaker_04
And I told him, and he almost like I had to peel him off the ground. He's like, I can't believe you let that happen to you. He was like, what happened to the Clare Johnson that I know? I'm like, I know. I'm so sorry. Like I had so many direct reports.

01:57:10 Speaker_02
How many direct reports?

01:57:11 Speaker_04
It was a crime. At peak. I think the peak, I want to say the peak to you was 23, but it might've been 27 and I just like lost control of it. I really don't, Tim, I didn't want to go here. I didn't want to go here.

01:57:25 Speaker_04
It's so many one-on-ones and of course I do actually make one-on-ones happen. So point is I got schooled by my former direct report for violating my own rules in the need for cloning. But the point is the negotiation turns from we're negotiating

01:57:43 Speaker_04
you getting this massive goal done to what's the cost of me getting that goal done for the other priorities and then you're making a joint decision by the way the outcome of that negotiation could have been let's not build out sales any further let's not keep internationalizing let's not open new markets let's wait on those other things because we decided you should just go and be the directly the head of support honestly

01:58:10 Speaker_04
That was not where the conversation went. It was like, OK, what creative ideas do we have to somehow do both? Because we're reality distorting. That's fine. But actually, you know, you got to push yourself.

01:58:22 Speaker_04
And so I think in that exact moment, if I'm remembering the scenario, we talked about some talented people. I had hired some people into the org. who we're like, could we lean on them?

01:58:33 Speaker_04
Could we put some newer leaders, managers into the deep end and get them to take on more of this plan?

01:58:41 Speaker_04
And in the end, that was part of the solution, which is let's take some risks with some people we have, give them more than they probably are ready for and see if they can swim, which I'm not always a fan of because I have seen people not make it out of the pool.

01:58:55 Speaker_04
By the way, a lot of young companies find themselves in that situation. And if you have great hiring, which we did, I'm proud to say that.

01:59:03 Speaker_04
Actually, that's where opportunities and magic can happen for people like I'm going to get to build out the global support. But anyway, so we ended up sort of compromising, but we weren't going to trade off my other responsibilities.

01:59:14 Speaker_04
And that became a more important discussion about how do I deploy anyone who's the CEO has got to be thinking, well, who are my most important resources and how am I deploying them against the most important priorities?

01:59:26 Speaker_04
So take the negotiation up to that level would be my advice.

01:59:30 Speaker_02
That's a great macro renegotiation example. And we're not going to stay on this forever, but I want to spend a little, little, little more time on it.

01:59:39 Speaker_02
When you're renegotiating the next day, sort of moving down to the micro here, what language do you use? Like you have a meeting booked, you got a lunch booked in Boston, you got this, you got that.

01:59:49 Speaker_02
And the other thing, when you reach out to these folks, what do you say?

01:59:53 Speaker_04
I think you want to, again, be a player, not a victim, and you got to take responsibility. So I think there is a version of saying, I don't love if it's the next day. That's rough. Yeah, it could be the next week too, right?

02:00:08 Speaker_02
It's just broadly speaking.

02:00:10 Speaker_04
I do actually tend to look at my calendar at least a week ahead and sort of start renegotiating because I don't like to be the one who's like the morning of or the day before.

02:00:18 Speaker_04
But I think you sort of own it, whether this is an email, it's probably an email, but it might be a text, and you say, first of all, I am very sorry. I know we had time tomorrow on the calendar.

02:00:30 Speaker_04
I am staring at a list of priorities and I've realized you're saying something that doesn't hopefully make them feel diminished. I mean, I often will tell them there's this thing.

02:00:39 Speaker_04
I am on this board in the middle of a transaction and I have to be on a phone call for four hours tomorrow. And unfortunately, I think I need some time to prep. I need some time to prep. And I booked our lunch. and it's not realistic.

02:00:52 Speaker_04
I'm not going to be able to be present at that lunch. It's not great. I try to give, I'm probably over-context people, but I think it makes you more human. It's like, look, I did this thing. I'm sorry.

02:01:04 Speaker_02
What if you don't have a house fire to point to? What if you just look at it and you're like, oh.

02:01:09 Speaker_04
You're like, you're not important.

02:01:10 Speaker_02
Yeah.

02:01:10 Speaker_04
I mean, you get it.

02:01:12 Speaker_02
You're like, why did I agree to- Why did I mail myself the letter bomb? Yeah, the ghost of Christmas past is coming to scratch at my door, and I'm realizing I don't want to moderate this panel in Tuscaloosa.

02:01:23 Speaker_02
No offense to Tuscaloosa, but you get the idea. Because I've got all this other stuff going on, and I just don't want to spend the energy. What do you do in a case like that?

02:01:30 Speaker_04
So again, I try not to be the day before.

02:01:33 Speaker_02
Sure. No, let's say you look out and you're like, okay, this thing is in two weeks. I'm not doing this thing.

02:01:36 Speaker_04
Yeah. So my instinct is always to offer context and be a little bit vulnerable, which maybe is not expected. I think you also know there's a, I think women will get judged more for certain things.

02:01:49 Speaker_04
And in particular, like not being conscientious is the thing that gets a little more beaten into you is my feeling as a woman. And so you have to also watch out for creating some reputational issue that I think maybe not everyone has to watch out for.

02:02:05 Speaker_04
So maybe some of my instinct to offer more information is to like try to avoid that hit.

02:02:11 Speaker_04
But I've been saying to people recently, actually, that I have reworked my personal priorities and the demands of my time are higher than I've actually seen in my professional life, which is true. And I have realized that I cannot

02:02:27 Speaker_04
do a good job of some of the commitments I've made. And unfortunately, I can't travel and be on this panel and be effective for you. And this is where I feel sometimes I'm a little weak.

02:02:39 Speaker_04
I'll try to offer, I mean, I try to think, do I know anyone locally who could do this? I'll be like, I think I have an idea if you want an idea on someone who could sub in.

02:02:47 Speaker_04
Like, I'll try to find some solution for them if I'm really leaving them in a lurch, right? Because I don't love that. But I kind of am just honest about like, I can't do this well. And I think you want someone at their best.

02:03:00 Speaker_04
It's not going to be my best.

02:03:02 Speaker_02
Yeah. That's good language. That's really good language. I'm not going to drag us back into the swamp of selling literature, but it's good language. That's good wordsmithing, right?

02:03:11 Speaker_04
Right. And I think you're showing, look, I looked at priorities, I realized... And also you're showing context, which is, this is a true statement. I'm like, I have more demands on my time than I've ever had in my life. And

02:03:22 Speaker_04
I'm learning to cope with it and I'm learning that I can't perform at the level I'd like to perform. And I don't want you to suffer for that. You want to show respect for people. They want a good panel. They want your best.

02:03:33 Speaker_04
You know, you're saying like, please just, you have to trust me. I'm not going to be great. And they'll be disappointed. One thing that I do think, I think Cheryl's an example of this. There are people I've come to respect.

02:03:44 Speaker_04
They're the people who protect their time like demons, right? The other people I've come to respect are the people who are like very comfortable just saying no. You know what? No, I'm sorry, I can't do that.

02:03:54 Speaker_04
My hope for myself, my future self is I am not in the situation where I'm doing that renegotiation. Again, it goes back to being honest, taking time before you make the commitment to say no. But it's also with investments.

02:04:06 Speaker_04
Like a lot of founders will be like, or even nonprofits, they come and they're like, I want to tell you about our organization. And you're like, oh, that organization sounds amazing.

02:04:14 Speaker_04
But then do you want to waste an hour of your time and their time learning about it when you realize, I don't have time to commit a lot to this organization. What they would rather have is one, no, it's not on my list of causes that I support.

02:04:27 Speaker_04
Or by the way, two, I will give you X amount of money. You never have to meet with me. I don't actually have time, but it sounds good. Here's some money. Goodbye. And they'll say, well, can you make that commitment for multiple years in a row?

02:04:38 Speaker_04
Maybe, maybe not. But I think getting faster at like, there's a pattern here, which is you want my money and my time. Am I willing to give any money or time? Yes, no. If I'm willing to get a little bit, just tell them and get out.

02:04:51 Speaker_04
Don't have a dog and pony show about it. Or investments. I just don't really invest in a lot of B2C. I'll just write back and say, this is not for me. I don't really do B2C. Good luck. And they're like, thank you.

02:05:02 Speaker_04
Because they didn't waste their time sending you a deck, sending you, you know,

02:05:05 Speaker_02
Yeah, they're not chasing the Glen Gary feeds forever. Right.

02:05:08 Speaker_04
And so you think you're being an empath by saying, oh, let me hear your story. This is my trap. My personal trap is, I think I'm being an empath, giving them 30 minutes, let me hear your story. And in fact, the empathic thing to do is to say,

02:05:22 Speaker_04
I'm going to do a probability assessment. The chance that I'm going to invest slash make a donation are sub 5%. No, no for you, no for me. And you don't have to think about it ever again. You don't have to email me tomorrow and ask me again, right?

02:05:35 Speaker_04
Like they're going to keep coming back.

02:05:37 Speaker_02
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I love that. So glad I asked. And a great answer. Also very useful, useful answer. What are some other rules we are going to back the car into the garage of self-awareness?

02:05:50 Speaker_02
Because a lot of this pulls at the hem of self-awareness from a bunch of different directions. But you mentioned that there are certain rules you have because your kid has gone off to college and therefore X, Y, and Z.

02:06:05 Speaker_02
What are some of the other rules that you have for yourself around what you will or will not do?

02:06:10 Speaker_04
Well, I have a rule. This is more of just a self-awareness. I do get intuitive and I do jump to sort of judgments, conclusions, solutions quickly, so I have a rule.

02:06:21 Speaker_04
that especially if I'm in a position of leadership and I'm in a meeting and there's other people, instead of stating my opinion, I have to ask a question. Because if you're the senior person and you state your opinion, the whole thing is over.

02:06:32 Speaker_02
Yeah, right. Yes, Steve, we can ship it in five minutes.

02:06:36 Speaker_04
Uh-huh, exactly. Here's an iPhone. So that's a rule.

02:06:41 Speaker_02
Could you give an example of what that would, because you could also ask a question in a way that makes it clear. It's your strong opinion, right? So what might that look like?

02:06:53 Speaker_04
So what it looks like is they're kind of looking to you, you know, I think we need to X and you're like looking at you and you say, I have a thought I do, I'll share it, but actually I'm interested in what you all think we should do. Got it.

02:07:06 Speaker_04
You know, like I want to learn from your thought before I share mine, you know, and that's by the way, the benefit of seniority is you can be like, no, I'm not going to like,

02:07:14 Speaker_02
I appreciate and refuse to answer your question.

02:07:15 Speaker_04
I'm not going to perform right now. I will perform later because I actually want you to participate. I'm often now in a position of sort of coaching leaders. And because I'm more of an operator, not a professional coach, I have the same problem.

02:07:28 Speaker_04
I'll be like, oh my God, this is obvious. Like, here's what you're going to do. And then I think, no, no, no, no, no. So I'll say to them, all right, give me the bones of the situation. And then I'll start to tell them what I think, and I'm like, no.

02:07:40 Speaker_04
And I'll say, you know what? And I totally commentate. I'm like a sports color commentator. I'm like, I was about to jump in and tell you exactly what I would do if I were you. And they're at the edge of their seat, because that's what they came for.

02:07:52 Speaker_04
Like, that's what they want. And I say, we're not going to learn from that. What I want you to do is tell me your instinct. What is it you think you're doing next? And I don't even say, give me the whole answer. I'm like, what would you do next?

02:08:02 Speaker_04
Because it's often a situation. There's an executive they think is underperforming. There's a team off the rails, whatever. I'm like, well, what are you going to do next? Then I get them talking and then I sort of get out from them.

02:08:13 Speaker_04
And I'll tell you, Tim, most of this, I mean, there's a reason these people are leaders. Most of the time, they're like 80% of the way there. They're just not confident in their instinct. And so my job is not to tell them what to do or how to do it.

02:08:26 Speaker_04
It is to build their confidence in their instinct. And then, yeah, we can brainstorm the last 20%. And I mean, it's just like, this is a total digression, but good pedagogy, right? Like how do people learn? People do not learn by being told answers.

02:08:41 Speaker_04
We all know this, but yet we get some amount of experience in our life and we think, I'm going to go tell some people some answers.

02:08:48 Speaker_04
No, what you're going to do if you're a good leader, good teacher, is you're going to lead them through learning with you and they are going to get to the answer and you are going to celebrate them doing that.

02:09:01 Speaker_04
But I cannot tell you how many times I myself have to create a rule to shut my own mouth because I love helping people. Luckily, I don't think it's the no at all version of this. I think it's the, I can help you. Oh my God, I see how to help you.

02:09:17 Speaker_04
And I just want to tell them the answer and I got to zip it, zip it. So one rule is like, yeah, I'd make a travel rule. Another rule I make is, as I already told you, which is don't say yes immediately.

02:09:30 Speaker_04
It has to be very rare for me to say yes immediately. And as a pleaser, that's very hard to be like, no, I'm sorry, I have to get back to you next week.

02:09:37 Speaker_02
How often do you say I have to get back to you next week versus I'm not sure, can you get back to me next week versus, in other words, where does the ball fall and who's court?

02:09:49 Speaker_04
Good feedback for me, Tim, and I take it. Thank you. No, I think that is actually a really good tactic that I don't do enough of is to say, I think this is unlikely that I'm going to be able to do this.

02:10:03 Speaker_04
I'm willing to consider it, but what I'd like you to do is go look at your other options. And if you're not finding something, feel free to get back to me by the end of the month and I will consider it.

02:10:14 Speaker_04
But it's like basically telegraphing, like I kind of want to try to help you, but I can't. You got to go to your plan B. I'm not going to be your keynote speaker. And that's a great feedback.

02:10:23 Speaker_04
I think that's a good, maybe even it's just, if you find yourself doing that, you should be asking yourself, why is it just not a no?

02:10:29 Speaker_02
It's a no. Yeah.

02:10:31 Speaker_04
It's a no for me.

02:10:32 Speaker_02
It's a no.

02:10:33 Speaker_04
Tim, right? But maybe it's a way to trial yourself into realizing, oh, this is a no.

02:10:38 Speaker_02
This is the training wheels. Yeah.

02:10:40 Speaker_04
I like your idea, which is like, put the ball in their court. Maybe again, it's back to some donation requests or something like, this is not for me now. Feel free to get in touch in the future. A lot of those people might just not ever.

02:10:52 Speaker_04
And I mean, sorry for them because they're not persistent, but is that being a player? Is that being a player enough? I don't know.

02:10:58 Speaker_02
Yeah, hitting the snooze button can lead to a delayed 24-car pileup later, in my experience, right? Good analogy. I was chatting with a friend of mine about this, because I'm fascinated by rules for folks who handle a lot of inbound, of any type.

02:11:13 Speaker_02
And his rule for the charitable stuff specifically, like, ah, here's my GoFundMe, or this or this, he's like, well, look, he's done very, very well professionally.

02:11:22 Speaker_02
And he's like, okay, look, if it's a friend, and it's basically any cause that's not going to entail reputational risk, if it's like, ah, my buddy's doing a climbing Kilimanjaro for prostate cancer, and he has a GoFundMe, they'll basically give 5k to anything sight unseen, because the universe of possible

02:11:41 Speaker_02
acquaintances or friends who's going to come to them with that is pretty limited. But the rule is like, 5K, that's it. That's our rule.

02:11:47 Speaker_02
And then for anything large, it's just like, we focus on this and this and this, and outside of that, we are not involved. That's it.

02:11:54 Speaker_04
Yeah. No, I think that is so powerful. That would be another rule is like, for something that's a major commitment of my time or my resources, someone said to me, it's time, treasure, talent, but there's another one that's like testimony.

02:12:11 Speaker_02
Oh, okay. So time, treasures, capital.

02:12:15 Speaker_04
Treasure, talent, and testimony. And testimony is interesting, right?

02:12:18 Speaker_04
Because you could, Tim, care about something that you can't give time to, and you could say, if you need a quote from me, again, now we're like in this weird, rarefied air where someone might want a quote from probably not me.

02:12:29 Speaker_04
But I think that that's another thing you could do. But the thing that for any of those categories, you need some criteria, which is like, You know, some people it's about climate.

02:12:40 Speaker_04
If it's not related to climate and working on the climate crisis, it's a no. And I think those people actually make more friends than I probably make. Cause I'm like, I'm not sure that sounds so important.

02:12:50 Speaker_02
Just to ask a clarifying question on one, time I get, that seems pretty straightforward, hours, minutes. Treasure, it's like financial resources, things of that type. Testimony, okay, like endorsing something or some version of that.

02:13:05 Speaker_04
By the way, a version of that might be like, can I introduce you to someone and endorse you?

02:13:09 Speaker_02
Yeah, totally. What is talent? I mean, I understand the word, but I think of talent as if they're utilizing your talent, wouldn't that kind of fall into the time bucket or is it a separate thing?

02:13:18 Speaker_04
You know, I had a similar question because this was a friend of mine who was like facilitating this workshop with people trying to think about what their criteria were for like, what what am I going to spend my time on?

02:13:28 Speaker_04
I think that the version of it is you say to someone, I agree with you, like I can't really deploy my particular talent without putting some time in.

02:13:40 Speaker_04
But the example was, say you are very good at some specific thing and the thing takes you less than 30 minutes. I don't want you to join my board, but can you read this press release and tell me, is it good or not? I think it's like, you know what?

02:13:58 Speaker_04
I can't give you my time. I can't join a board. I can't commit to a regular meeting.

02:14:02 Speaker_04
It's what i say to some of the founders i work with my don't expect me to read the newsletter and try to volunteer for all the things you need but if you think my particular talent.

02:14:13 Speaker_04
It's going to be useful and here's what it often looks like tim is they send me profiles of people they're thinking of hiring. And I give them a five minute Claire assessment. And so that is my time, but I don't get on the phone.

02:14:25 Speaker_04
I'm just like, here's the questions. Usually how it comes back. Cause I'm all about questions is here's the three to five questions I'd have about this background. If I'm you and I'm hiring for this role, why did they move around five times?

02:14:39 Speaker_04
Why did they stop doing that job? I would just give them interview questions and then I would back away. So you're right. It takes me a minute. You probably have a version of that.

02:14:49 Speaker_04
I've heard people like text you with very specific, which supplement should I take or which, you know, should I intermittent fast?

02:14:58 Speaker_04
You could probably like text back this one, no, this one, you know, that's probably still time and you probably should count how much time it is, but it's a way to stay connected.

02:15:06 Speaker_02
It's compressed because of the expertise slash exposure.

02:15:10 Speaker_04
Right. You already know the answer. You have the talent. You don't have to go do extra work and you can answer quickly.

02:15:16 Speaker_02
quick add-on because I realize you've done so much hiring and developed so much talent. I'm so curious how you spot bad apples or elicit negative feedback or infer negative feedback when in the U.S.

02:15:33 Speaker_02
it is so incredibly difficult to get honest negative feedback from anyone because they're so concerned about liability. You're talking about like references. Hiring, yes, references, exactly.

02:15:47 Speaker_04
The non-dissertation answer is one, people have trouble giving hard feedback. People have trouble asking this question, which is, I think a question you just ask, which is like, is this someone in the top 20% of people you've ever worked with?

02:16:00 Speaker_04
And then they say, yes, you say top 10. And then if they say yes, oh, so is it top five? Because what happens is when people are asked for a very specific quantifiable ranking of something, they don't like lying. And so,

02:16:13 Speaker_04
What I think happens is we're not comfortable asking for ranking questions sometimes about humans. And I don't love them actually in most contexts.

02:16:19 Speaker_04
But in this case, I'm like, I'm going to pin you down on how good this person really is and how they handle. And you could go just to top five. But I think that's the short answer. I think the other answer is

02:16:33 Speaker_04
you say to someone, you put them, again, in the role of, you say, look, I'm gonna be their manager, you were their manager, what's the thing I can do that's most important to help them?

02:16:43 Speaker_03
That's a good question.

02:16:45 Speaker_04
And people will say some very revealing things, because all of a sudden they're back being the manager of the person. And they're like, well, I'll tell them to really be more truthful when things are off the rails. And you're like, what?

02:17:02 Speaker_04
And then you'll sort of get going. You'll be like, tell me a situation where you had to use that advice. Anyway, so those are two. One very specific, pin them down, and one a little more tricky.

02:17:13 Speaker_02
So good. Oh, deft. Very, very elegant. All right. As promised, the garage of self-awareness. That is the very strained analogy that I used. And tell me if this ties in.

02:17:25 Speaker_02
And I'm curious what good answers to this question might be, but I do want to talk about self-awareness so we can go into it however you would like.

02:17:33 Speaker_02
Because it's sort of the foundational layer for everything that is built upon it, or it seems that way to me.

02:17:39 Speaker_04
That's my hypothesis.

02:17:41 Speaker_02
So actually, I was going to ask you about the question, when have you seen me do my best and worst work? But we can come back to that. We can come back to that. I'm going to bookmark that. Maybe we'll get to it. Maybe we won't.

02:17:51 Speaker_02
But how should people think about self-awareness? And I'm just going to share something that I found in the course of doing homework. And you can certainly fact check this. But I thought it was quite thought provoking. This is from CNBC.

02:18:04 Speaker_02
And I think it was an interview with you, so this is, you know, if you're not self-aware, how would you know? That's a hell of a question. It's kind of like, you know, the tree falling in the forest, no one to hear it kind of question.

02:18:15 Speaker_02
Here are some telltale signs. You consistently get feedback that you disagree with. This doesn't mean the feedback is correct, but it does mean how others perceive you differs from how you perceive yourself. Interesting. I added the interesting.

02:18:27 Speaker_02
You often feel frustrated and annoyed because you don't agree with your team's direction or decisions. You feel drained at the end of a work day and can't pinpoint why. You can't describe what kinds of work you do and don't enjoy doing.

02:18:38 Speaker_02
So that's setting the table or maybe just piquing people's curiosity. How would you suggest people think about self-awareness? Why is this important in the worlds in which you operate?

02:18:48 Speaker_04
I spend a lot of time thinking about how do you get results through people, through teams. Like I'm not actually the one building the product, so I got to do it through kind of brute force, human brain power and human time.

02:19:00 Speaker_04
And I think that most people who think that way start with the individuals you're managing or the team or the organization. And my argument is where you started this section of the garage is it's the foundation is self-awareness.

02:19:14 Speaker_04
It's actually has to start with you. You're not going to get great results from the people around you until you understand yourself. And I mean, I think there's some obvious reasons why, which is like, look, I alone can't move the mountain.

02:19:27 Speaker_04
I need you and I need to compliment myself. How am I going to compliment myself with other capabilities and skills if I don't understand what I'm bringing to the table? By the way, a lot of people think they're the director in every scene.

02:19:40 Speaker_04
No, you're not. You're often an extra. And just knowing that will make you more effective. So that's a side piece of advice for you.

02:19:47 Speaker_04
But a lot of self-awareness building, to me, a lot of these work style assessments you can take are just trying to help you figure out your defaults. Like, what's my default setting?

02:19:57 Speaker_04
A lot of them are asking you, you know, are you more introverted or extroverted?

02:20:01 Speaker_02
So you're talking about, I guess for maybe lack of a better descriptor, almost like personality typing tests, like Myers-Briggs.

02:20:06 Speaker_04
Yeah, like Myers-Briggs, DISC, Enneagram. I mean, there's Discovery Insight. There's the Hogan Assessment. Like whatever, that's like 170 questions. Like there's all these different, there's the big five personality test. There's a lot of them.

02:20:21 Speaker_04
There's a lot of them.

02:20:22 Speaker_02
StrengthsFinder, it goes on and on.

02:20:23 Speaker_04
StrengthsFinder, good one. Like there's so many. To me, they all boil down to on one axis, Let's call it the horizontal axis. You've got are you more introverted or extroverted?

02:20:34 Speaker_04
And the litmus test is sort of introverts think to talk and extroverts talk to think. So where do you fall on that continuum? And then the other thing is the vertical axis, which is are you more task oriented or people oriented?

02:20:48 Speaker_04
Which by the way, doesn't mean you can't get a task done. And my litmus test for this is like if someone comes to you with like a massive problem in some organization,

02:20:58 Speaker_04
Is the first thing you think of the first task that has to get done or, oh my God, the people? And it's just, what do you lead with?

02:21:04 Speaker_04
For me, I'll be like, oh my gosh, someone's getting fired, which is sort of a task and a person answer, but you're kind of... Anyway, but I would say... Sorry, I'm being very negative today. But I would say it sort of boils down then.

02:21:18 Speaker_04
And then you think, OK, what quadrant am I in? Am I a more extroverted, task oriented type person or extroverted people? By the way, a lot of extroverted people are into people are excellent at sales. Makes sense.

02:21:29 Speaker_04
Their default is I love getting stuff done. Talking to you like that's yay. And then you've got your introverted, task oriented people. Where do a lot of those people work? Tim, do you think introverted, task oriented people?

02:21:43 Speaker_02
Engineering, programming.

02:21:45 Speaker_04
Engineering, finance.

02:21:46 Speaker_02
Finance.

02:21:47 Speaker_04
Give me a spreadsheet and I will rule the world. I do not need to talk to you to finish this model. In fact, you often do, and I know that.

02:21:57 Speaker_04
And so that's the other thing is you have to be really careful not to stereotype with any of this and not to generalize.

02:22:02 Speaker_04
But I think it helps any human frameworks are useful for a reason, which is I am comfortable sort of saying, OK, where can I place myself in these quadrants? And then what does that mean? My default setting is.

02:22:14 Speaker_04
And by the way, the people around me have different default settings. One of my biggest is such a dumb tactical lesson, but I'm one of those people where if I trust who I'm meeting with. I don't need the agenda ahead of time. I'll be like, let's meet.

02:22:28 Speaker_04
And then at the very beginning of the meeting, bang out the agenda, make sure we know what we're going to get done. I still like to run it well, but I'm kind of loose with the prep. I have people who have worked for me who are like,

02:22:40 Speaker_04
If they're like, I don't have time to think ahead of this meeting what we're going to talk about. And I'm thinking there's something wrong with them. I'm like, well, come on. We trust each other. We've worked together.

02:22:48 Speaker_04
We're just going to spitball about this. And they're like, no, I had to learn that there are humans in the world who, if they don't have time to think before a meeting, will not be effective in the meeting and will be uncomfortable.

02:23:00 Speaker_04
Because my water is really different than that. Really different but you if you're trying to create an environment that's conducive to different styles different defaults.

02:23:11 Speaker_04
You gotta be aware of your own and then realize and i have to operate aware of others because i want that meeting to be really effective.

02:23:19 Speaker_04
And i got an email you know richard the day before and tell him we're gonna spitball ideas for this new marketing campaign. That's what it all boils down to.

02:23:27 Speaker_02
And it's really cultivating awareness, but starting at home, in the sense.

02:23:30 Speaker_04
Start at home, and then start to map the other people.

02:23:33 Speaker_02
Guinea pig is always in the cage right next to you in that case, right? It's just easier to, some days it's a little easier to study.

02:23:38 Speaker_02
Coming back to the personality test for a second, or are these, I'm not sure if this is the right way to categorize them, Myers-Briggs, DISC, any of those.

02:23:45 Speaker_04
Work style assessments.

02:23:46 Speaker_02
There we go. Work style. Work style assessments. If you could only choose one or two that have been most helpful to you personally, what would you choose?

02:23:56 Speaker_04
I would say there's one that's called, I think if you just Google, it's Insights Discovery, which is sort of, to me, more effective than Myers-Briggs.

02:24:05 Speaker_04
Myers-Briggs has a lot of interpretive work you have to do on your results, like understand what sensing is, understand what the decision-making process of a sensing judge or whatever.

02:24:16 Speaker_04
Insights maps you more and they have some shading and colors, but it's sort of like more straightforward. That is one I'm a fan of. The other is more of a simple one. But Patrick Collison, obviously, who I've worked with, I think I brought him around.

02:24:30 Speaker_04
He felt like these things are like horoscopes. He's like, they're just going to give you a report, and it's going to sound like a plausible prediction of you. And I said, I get it. I get the skepticism. And I really do, by the way, for anyone.

02:24:41 Speaker_04
And actually, I think there's value in getting a horoscope. How does it actually make me feel? Do I agree with it or not? What am I really? It actually is part of a process, in my opinion.

02:24:49 Speaker_02
Yeah, it's a prompt, like a Rorschach prompt. Yes, it's a prompt.

02:24:53 Speaker_04
And how you react to it is interesting, right? Like you're like, I really, yes, I am finding love this year. You know, or am I not? But so point is, he then did some research and there is the big five personality test is very simple.

02:25:08 Speaker_04
It's available for free online, as far as I can tell or I've seen. And it's just these five factors like neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness. There's one that's sort of entrepreneurial, comfort with ambiguity, like whatever.

02:25:23 Speaker_04
And you can tell a lot from, well, one, the research supports that they're pretty indicative of certain human behaviors. You and I have had a lot of conversations in this discussion about things like saying yes too easily,

02:25:38 Speaker_04
But if you're like very high agreeableness and very high conscientiousness, guess what? You're going to end up committing to too much stuff.

02:25:46 Speaker_03
Yeah, for sure.

02:25:47 Speaker_04
And so when I'm saying, oh, I'm jealous of those people who protect their time, you know what? They're pretty comfortable being disagreeable.

02:25:54 Speaker_04
They're pretty comfortable being like, no, or frankly canceling at the last minute saying, sorry, I don't have time today for you. And if they're not very conscientious, they're like, I don't even feel bad. But by the way, no judgment.

02:26:05 Speaker_04
A lot of founders are really good about being like, look, I'm doing the most important thing that I got to be doing today. And I'm the operator. I'm like, oh, but we made a bunch of commitments and we made a plan and we got to stick to the plan. Right.

02:26:19 Speaker_04
And that meeting of those styles is very powerful. That's why you want a diverse team. But anyway, I would say those two.

02:26:29 Speaker_02
Yeah, Patrick is endlessly fascinating. He's been on the show probably a couple years ago, but boy, oh boy, does that man read. He really is a voracious consumer of knowledge.

02:26:40 Speaker_04
He is. He puts the rest of us to shame. You know what, though, Tim? He's never, I bet he's never seen John Wick.

02:26:46 Speaker_02
So we have that.

02:26:47 Speaker_04
We have that going for us.

02:26:50 Speaker_02
We do. 1-0 Ferris-Cousin. Put Wick on the scoreboard.

02:26:55 Speaker_04
Yeah, we were actually in a meeting and he said something about Greg Popovich and two of us looked at each other and were like, do you really know who Greg Popovich is?

02:27:03 Speaker_04
It was like amazing because Patrick also is not super up on sports, popular culture, you know, we all have our strengths.

02:27:11 Speaker_02
Popovich, also incredible, somebody I would love to have on the show at some point. Oh yeah, absolutely.

02:27:16 Speaker_04
Yeah, well that's why he knew.

02:27:17 Speaker_02
So going to the kind of black belts of no, I'm wondering if there are people who stand out outside of the Collisons as people who are sort of paragons of no.

02:27:28 Speaker_02
People who are really good at saying no or defending their time, where you're like, wow, that person's really good at keeping their eye on the one puck that matters. Anybody come to mind?

02:27:39 Speaker_04
Well, I mentioned to you, I think Cheryl's very good at getting back, being very accessible and fast and sort of decisive, like no, efficient. She's very efficient. And sometimes that efficiency is a no, right?

02:27:50 Speaker_04
I mean, my version of it is someone who I think at least doing it carefully with others' feelings. I don't love the person who has an assistant, for example, who cancels everything.

02:28:03 Speaker_04
No, there's a model here, Tim, you've seen it, where they agree to everything and then they have a clean up crew. They have a clean up crew.

02:28:11 Speaker_02
Like the wolf from Pulp Fiction, they send it out to do the dirty work.

02:28:14 Speaker_04
Yeah, yeah. I think what's happening is I'm doing left-hand column filtering names of people right now in my mind where I'm like, nope, can't mention them because I think they actually have a clean up crew.

02:28:23 Speaker_02
They use the clean up crew.

02:28:24 Speaker_04
They use the clean up crew. There aren't that many who seem, I mean, I think you have some good I think it's in four hour work week. You have some good models of pushing people on not just being busy, but being productive.

02:28:39 Speaker_04
There's some engineering leaders I worked with at Google who I thought was very bold, but it of course makes sense. They would look at what were we planning in a meeting? And they'd be like, Hmm, I don't need to be here.

02:28:51 Speaker_04
Or this meeting doesn't seem important. You know, and to me, those are paragons of no though, because it was very open, very direct, very honest. It was like, I see what you're trying to do with this one hour and I am not giving you my hour.

02:29:04 Speaker_04
Why can't more people just call it? You know?

02:29:06 Speaker_02
Yeah.

02:29:07 Speaker_04
Uncomfortable. There's a finance guy that I'm on a board with and he'll be like, what are we trying to accomplish in this? And how long do we need? And he'll set his, I'm here for that objective and I'm only here for this long. And I admire it.

02:29:20 Speaker_04
Because he's like, don't be chatting away about other stuff. I want to be productive, not busy.

02:29:25 Speaker_02
I want to hear about your fishing trip right now, Ralph.

02:29:28 Speaker_04
Exactly. Exactly.

02:29:30 Speaker_02
So just because you mentioned the board, why no more boards? Just the thinking behind it.

02:29:35 Speaker_04
I think there are different motivations for being on boards. I don't know if you serve on boards.

02:29:40 Speaker_02
No. Basically, from the beginning, I have a number of friends who have policies that they won't join any more boards, and I took that as an indicator. As a sign. And you should. And so I've only done advising. I've never been on boards.

02:29:52 Speaker_04
So I would say there's a sector of the world that feels it is a service. And I do think it's a valuable service. By the way, I serve on some boards with some people who are like Jedi master board members.

02:30:01 Speaker_04
And I'm like, wow, you are serving these companies because you are like awesome at governance and proxy statements, politics, and you like get it, you know. But I think there's a service motivation.

02:30:13 Speaker_04
There's a motivation that has to do with maybe a personal, like CEO really trusts you. You want to help them, like that's mostly what happens to me. I'm like, I want to be there for that person. But it is a big commitment.

02:30:25 Speaker_04
And if you're someone who's realized that time is your most precious resource, which is my mom realized somehow when she was 19, but I did not. Boards can stomp all over your calendar. They can just say, you know what?

02:30:37 Speaker_04
All day Friday, someone just made an acquisition offer. And you're like, goodbye. You realize like you think you're controlling your time because they don't meet that often, but no, no, no, no.

02:30:49 Speaker_04
So really what I've decided is I need to like go on a board diet and then rebuild. I'm not going to say no ever. Like I'm never doing it again. But I've realized the bar has to be like extremely high.

02:31:03 Speaker_04
I mean, I'm on the board, one of my favorite boards and I would do it forever. I don't know if I'm adding that much value, but is the Atlantic, which is private.

02:31:10 Speaker_04
So it's easier, but the quality of the people involved, we're doing the business brain stuff, but there's also like, you get to meet these amazing writers and you get to be part of exchange of ideas about the future of democracy. Yes.

02:31:23 Speaker_04
You know, that's enriching me. That's the other thing is making sure there's an exchange in the board of your learning, you're getting enriched, they're benefiting. And I don't think it's easy to always get that balance right.

02:31:34 Speaker_04
And so you just have to be careful. I think you just have to be. And I think I just didn't realize the level of. commitment, not just time, but sort of to do it well. I mean, it goes back to renegotiating.

02:31:47 Speaker_04
So what I'm doing is I'm saying no more boards until I've renegotiated some of my current commitments.

02:31:53 Speaker_02
And then we'll see. That's also a very powerful language right there. Categorically, I'm saying I have a policy of saying no to X until I have A, B, and C. That's right. Done deal.

02:32:03 Speaker_04
And by the way, people can't argue with that because they're like, that does sound like a very sane thing to do. But I have a lot of appreciation, more than I did before, of folks who do this in service. Governance matters, right?

02:32:15 Speaker_04
It matters for institutions, not just companies. And it should be done well. But gosh, it's a big commitment.

02:32:21 Speaker_02
Be careful with those big commitments, folks. They sneak up on you. Yeah.

02:32:25 Speaker_04
Anything that has multiple years attached to it.

02:32:28 Speaker_02
Yeah. Oh boy. It's kind of like the scope creep time evaporating version of the best business model of all time, which is being a venture capitalist where you have these stacked funds. That's great if you're taking your two and 20, but if it's

02:32:44 Speaker_02
a commitment of your time over multiple years, and then they start to stack, and oh my God, then you're like 27 snow layers deep in the avalanche of time requests. No bueno. That's right. That's right.

02:32:55 Speaker_04
And you get like a 10-year horizon.

02:32:57 Speaker_02
Yeah.

02:32:58 Speaker_04
I mean, at minimum. And that seems exciting at the beginning, and then you stack another 10 and another 10, and you're like, wait a minute. All of a sudden, I'm like 65 years old, and you know,

02:33:11 Speaker_04
Anyway, I think it's, yes, some funds have closed and hopefully you've done well, but you made commitments before those things happened to another set of them. So it's like a rolling avalanche. The avalanche is not ending.

02:33:26 Speaker_02
Do not say yes right away, folks.

02:33:28 Speaker_04
Yeah, especially to multi-year commitments. That's probably the headline. That and the toy is broken.

02:33:33 Speaker_02
I'm telling you, that's your next book. I really think you could do well. I have to ask this because it's of acute interest for me personally, also because it might help me individually, but also with employees of mine.

02:33:47 Speaker_02
Managing high performers, how do you get extraordinary output from extraordinary people without burning them out or letting them burn themselves out?

02:33:56 Speaker_04
If I was like, what are the pantheon of management lessons? So one of them is you got to manage different people differently.

02:34:02 Speaker_04
Pantheon lesson is spend disproportionate amount of time with your high performers because instead what we all do is get all of our time sucked by the folks who are struggling and then we don't invest in the high performers and then they're either burning themselves out or finding a new opportunity because they're not realizing their high performers and benefiting or they know they are and they're not getting investment and they're like I'm gonna go get investment somewhere else.

02:34:26 Speaker_04
So number one is, how do you manage them? Is you make sure that they are a priority of yours, even though they are perfectly good on their own, which is the sort of dilemma, right? Like, how do I help them?

02:34:37 Speaker_04
In my book, I steal, I mean, I don't steal, I credit, I source a lot of frameworks.

02:34:41 Speaker_02
The book, Scaling People, Tactics for Management and Company Building.

02:34:44 Speaker_04
Oh yes, thank you.

02:34:45 Speaker_02
Just to throw it in there.

02:34:46 Speaker_04
So there are a lot of QR codes. You can scan and look at the sites where I reference a lot of materials and books, conscious business, Fred Kaufman's in there.

02:34:55 Speaker_04
One framework, I think, I mean, as far as I can tell, I made up myself was a top talent framework, which is, again, I try to like simplify things, but I think high performers fall into two categories and I call them pushers and pullers.

02:35:11 Speaker_04
And so the pusher is the one who's like, give me more, give me more. They're often wanting to get more comp too, but they're like, I want recognition. I want responsibility. I want scope. I want to move the needle. I'm high impact.

02:35:22 Speaker_04
They're very impatient with themselves, with other people. They can be a little high friction for the team because they're like going for it, grabbing it, grabbing it.

02:35:31 Speaker_04
But, you know, it's fun because you load them up and they're just like carrying the whole thing up the hill without you. But they can be tough.

02:35:39 Speaker_04
My main coaching often ends up with them is saying, until I believe that the people working with you love working with you, I don't think you're succeeding. And they're like, what? What?

02:35:52 Speaker_04
Because they're all keeping score, but they're keeping score in the sort of maybe early in his life, Tim Ferriss version. I don't know.

02:35:58 Speaker_02
Oh, no, that's a fair assessment. I mean, I think I am a pusher as an entrepreneur for sure. And that I've learned how that can be a liability. It can be a huge superpower and it can be a huge liability.

02:36:11 Speaker_04
Right. And your job is to sort of, like I say, you know, giving direct feedback is holding up a mirror and just being like, here's the beauty of you and here's the liability part.

02:36:20 Speaker_04
And if you can't show me that you can work on the liability part, I can't keep loading you up. Because in the case of the pusher, yeah, they might burn themselves out, but they actually burn out the people around them. So that's the pusher.

02:36:34 Speaker_04
So the puller, it's funny, this happened to me in a couple of conversations I've had, is I'm usually being interviewed by someone who's like the pusher and I'm the puller, but anyway, I'm the puller, is someone who, no complaints, you load them up and they're like, yep, yep, I got it.

02:36:50 Speaker_04
But they're not asking for it, they're not grabbing it, they're not pushing, but they're highly competent, they're very organized, they're very consistent, reliable. And they have good judgment.

02:37:00 Speaker_04
And you're like, okay, I know that person won't screw that up. I know that person will get the people to the party and the, you know, whatever it is. And you just start loading them and they don't renegotiate. They don't know how to say no.

02:37:13 Speaker_04
And then they explode. Like they basically implode or explode.

02:37:16 Speaker_02
That's what I've run into with past employees.

02:37:19 Speaker_04
Yep. And there's some, like I went through a period of my own development where I was like, I think of it as my martyr period where I literally, I don't know who I thought I was martyring myself for, like everyone else.

02:37:33 Speaker_04
I like, I would be doing all this stuff for my colleagues, for my team. And I was like, no one appreciates like, I don't know. And I eventually had a really good open conversation with a guy, not my boss who worked with me. And he's like,

02:37:46 Speaker_04
Did I ask you to take that on? Like you just started running that project or you run our planning process or like, did someone ask you? And I'm like, well, no, no one was doing it. So I'm doing it. And it was like, hmm.

02:37:57 Speaker_04
And it's like, and why do you feel like you have to do that? I was martyring myself for nothing. Like I think martyrs at least are celebrating like a God. I was like sacrificing myself on the altar of someone didn't do the work, so I'll do it.

02:38:12 Speaker_04
It was very bad, very bad. And I was resenting the hell out of my colleagues.

02:38:17 Speaker_03
For sure.

02:38:18 Speaker_04
I mean, this happens in relationships. I mean, it's like the who's going to take out the garbage thing. I designated myself the garbage collector for like a whole set of things, partly because I thought it was that was part of my job.

02:38:28 Speaker_04
But still, it was not good. Not good. Anyway, the polar will implode slash explode. And you might not be able to save them if it gets too far. So your job with them is like, look, let's work on delegation skills. Let's work on saying no.

02:38:42 Speaker_04
Let's work on boundaries. Like, look at me. Let's work on rules, boundaries. How do you not be the person carrying everything and doing three jobs? And I think that once you know those two archetypes, you can sort of look for the signs of them.

02:38:56 Speaker_04
And then you can think, well, what's their classic development area? And then your job is to be all over them on that development area.

02:39:03 Speaker_04
because they will collapse if you don't get them to see that part of their job, like the pusher, especially part of your job is to stop creating friction for everyone.

02:39:15 Speaker_04
And like for me, I really started to take exercise seriously when I decided it's part of my job to be like a better leader. I need to get a certain amount of exercise and now I will make time for it.

02:39:25 Speaker_04
And I think a lot of these types are like, I'm going to do everything to win these pushers. And you're like, you know what? Part of winning is like avoiding a Pyrrhic victory, avoiding one where everyone wins but dies on the field, right? Like that.

02:39:37 Speaker_04
And they're like, oh, well then how do I do that? Because it doesn't come naturally to them. They're like, how do I? And then they'll say, I don't want to work with low performers. And this is the problem.

02:39:46 Speaker_04
They're so good that, I mean, now we're going deeper on this, they're so good that you can't quite say back to them, no, those people are the same as you. So instead you're like, yeah, okay, we all have different strengths and weaknesses.

02:40:01 Speaker_04
What I feel like you're doing is not even appreciating what anyone else is bringing to the table. Why do you think that is? And it's like, they don't stay up all night like I do getting the thing done. You're like, no, they don't.

02:40:13 Speaker_04
And i actually don't think sometimes you should stay up all night getting thing done but what do they do well and then you get them trying to think about assets you like how can you use that asset to get the things done but they really don't think that way cuz it's on their own shoulders.

02:40:29 Speaker_02
Takes practice, like so many things. Claire, this has been a fantastic conversation. Thank you so much. I've had so much fun. I've taken copious notes. I'm going to be following up on a million side quests, as we call them, but important side quests.

02:40:43 Speaker_02
I've taken notes of phrasing that you've used, all sorts of things. So I am looking forward to actually digging into my homework. I will not stay up all night, for the record.

02:40:52 Speaker_02
I'm trying to also health first, sort of foundational along with the awareness, having the vehicle to do the things you want to do.

02:40:58 Speaker_02
Your book, which I highly recommend to folks, is incredibly tactical, scaling people, tactics for management and company building, tons of templates, tons of frameworks, lots of specifics that you can apply immediately.

02:41:13 Speaker_02
People can find you, correct me if I'm getting this wrong, but on Twitter at C Hughes Johnson. We'll link to LinkedIn as well. Are there any other websites or anything else that you'd like to point people to?

02:41:25 Speaker_04
The Stripe Press website you can find scaling people and you can find actually I did interviews with a bunch of leaders that there's digital-only content, which we can give you all the link to that. But no, thank you, Tim.

02:41:36 Speaker_04
This has been wide-ranging, as promised, and stimulating, and I've got some recommendations I'm walking away with, so thank you.

02:41:44 Speaker_02
Thank you so much, Claire. And for everybody listening, we will link to everything in the show notes. This will be encyclopedic, and you can find that at tim.blog slash podcast.

02:41:55 Speaker_02
You can just search for Claire, and this will pop right up, and you'll find everything that we discussed. And until next time, be a little bit kinder than is necessary, not only to others, but also to yourself. And as always, thanks for tuning in.

02:42:08 Speaker_02
Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend?

02:42:19 Speaker_02
Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel.

02:42:28 Speaker_02
It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things.

02:42:38 Speaker_02
It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests.

02:42:50 Speaker_02
And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So, if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about.

02:43:05 Speaker_02
If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog slash friday, drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Shopify.

02:43:19 Speaker_02
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02:43:33 Speaker_02
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02:45:02 Speaker_02
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