Podcast appearances and mentions of dan pink

Welcome to The Achievers Podcast. I'm your host, Amber Deibert, Performance Coach. I help enterprise sellers unlock their full potential by aligning their work with how they workout and cleaning up mindset trash, so they can sell more, stress less, and take back control of their time and success. You have everything you need. The calendar is clear, the task is right there, and somehow you still cannot get yourself to do it. You are not burned out, and you are not off your habits; you are just out of gas, and you assume the problem is you. In this episode, I unpack what actually creates motivation, why being unmotivated is information and not a character flaw, and the three intrinsic drivers (autonomy, mastery, and purpose) that have to be in place for the motivation to show up. Pull one out, and the whole thing quietly stalls, so I show you how to find the one that is off and the levers you can pull to bring it back.

Dan Pink has a bold idea for how to use your regrets as a positive force in your life. Dan is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of seven books, including A Whole New Mind, Drive, When and his most recent, ⁠The Power of Regret⁠. He is also a top rated keynote speaker who has spoken to organizations such as St Jude Children's Research Hospital, Google, Goldman Sachs and more. On this classic episode of the Elevate Podcast, Dan joined host Robert Glazer on ⁠the Elevate Podcast⁠ to discuss how we can harness regret in our lives, the things in life people tend to regret most, and much more. Thank you to the sponsors of The Elevate Podcast Shopify: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠shopify.com/elevate⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Framer: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠framer.com/elevate⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Indeed: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠indeed.com/elevate⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Ethos Life: ⁠⁠⁠⁠ethos.com/elevate⁠⁠⁠⁠ Keeper Security: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠keepersecurity.com/ELEVATE⁠⁠⁠ Fora Travel: ⁠foratravel.com/elevate⁠ Northwest Registered Agent: ⁠northwestregisteredagent.com/elevate⁠ Whatnot: Search "Whatnot" in the app store to download Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 2073: Dr. Jenny Brockis explores why many workplace wellness programs fall short of creating truly engaged and productive teams. By highlighting the importance of autonomy, meaningful workplace relationships, and cognitive wellbeing alongside physical and mental health, she reveals what it really takes to build a thriving, high-performance work culture. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://drjennybrockis.com/2017/7/10/workplace-wellness-missing-point/ Quotes to ponder: "Being healthy at work incorporates physical, mental and cognitive fitness." "Boosting engagement and productivity needs something more. In his book ‘Drive' Dan Pink talks about the need for mastery, autonomy and purpose." "To do the work we love, with people we like and for the benefit of others doesn't have to be difficult, but it does take vision, time and tenacity, and has to start from the top." Episode references: Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us: https://www.danpink.com/books/drive/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of Paradigm Shifting Books, hosts Stephen Covey and Britain Covey dive into Daniel Pink's groundbreaking book Drive, which challenges everything we think we know about what motivates people. They explore why the traditional "carrot and stick" approach to motivation works for some tasks but actively undermines the kind of complex, creative work that defines most of what we do today. Drawing on decades of social science research, Pink lays out a compelling framework for understanding what truly drives human performance.Stephen and Britain reflect on how these ideas apply far beyond the office, from NFL locker rooms to families to personal growth. Britain shares a vivid story from his time as a scout team player in the NFL, illustrating how a simple moment of recognition from a coach unlocked a sense of purpose he had not felt before. Stephen ties the book's core principles, autonomy, mastery, and purpose, directly to leadership, noting that when leaders design environments around these three drivers, motivation follows naturally. This episode is a must listen for anyone who leads a team, raises a family, or simply wants to understand what makes us do our best work.What We Discuss[00:00] Introduction[00:35] Why Dan Wrote Drive[02:11] Carrots Sticks Problem[04:10] If Then Rewards: When They Work and When They Don't[06:43] Money as a Threshold Motivator, Not the Whole Story[13:09] Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose: The Three Core Motivators[16:00] NFL Story on Purpose[18:33] Connecting Drive to Leadership, Sports, and Life[21:05] Resume Virtues vs. Eulogy Virtues: Redefining Success Notable Quotes[04:30] "If-then rewards are very effective for simple tasks with short time horizons." – Daniel Pink[06:17] "The problem with if-then rewards is not the reward, it's the contingency, the if-thenness of it. Because if-thenness is a form of control." – Daniel Pink[08:37] "The best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table." – Daniel Pink[13:14] "Once you're through the threshold, there are three core motivators for long-term performance on complex tasks: autonomy, mastery, and purpose." – Daniel Pink[22:59] "Find something you care about and get really good at it, because the act of getting good at something you care about is inherently satisfying." – Daniel PinkResourcesParadigm Shifting BooksPodcastInstagram YouTube BookDrive by Daniel Pink Daniel PinkWebsiteInstagramLinkedInYouTubeBritain CoveyLinkedIn InstagramStephen H. CoveyLinkedIn

Send Leanne a messageLeanne Hughes and Alan Weiss explore what it really takes to design premium client experiences — from large-scale thought leadership conferences to intimate high-touch group gatherings in penthouse suites around the world. Alan shares the frameworks, courage, and lifestyle philosophy behind his most successful events, and Leanne reflects on her own recent red carpet camp-out experience.Topics CoveredDefining high-end experiences — Alan's two models: large group conferences (125–150 people) vs. intimate groups (7–10 people in premium locations)The large format event — Outside speakers (Dan Pink, Jonah Berger), a $30–35K AV crew, volunteer wranglers, concurrent sessions, and how to turn a cost-neutral event into $150K in spinoff businessThe intimate group format — Penthouses in London, Paris, and LA; Michelin-starred dinners; provoking IP over socialisingThe role of location — Why venue matters more for small groups, and how Alan used his Kauai suite to transform a stuffy sessionProgram design — Overwhelming with value, reframing problems rather than solving them, and the story of Mike Robert's legendary Pebble Beach strategy programCourage and filling seats — Becoming an "object of interest," the chain reaction of attraction, and why you should never lead with priceAccessibility as a brand strategy — Being the most accessible expert in a niche, and where to draw the lineCurating the right room — Why sophistication and maturity matter more than income, and the one time someone didn't belongLifestyle as the real brand — Why people follow Alan for the life he lives, not just his consulting expertiseWhat people get wrong — The experience should showcase you, not the venue; using Broadway plays, tours, and dinners as vehicles for IPVirtual high-end experiences — Why Alan believes in-person is essential for high-touch, community-building workPlanning and promotion — Shameless promotion, letting your wife veto the destination, and the 24-hour sign-up experimentKey Quotes"You don't solve problems. You recast and reframe them, so people say, 'I never looked at it like this before.'" — Alan Weiss"The higher high-tech goes with AI, the higher touch is required." — Alan Weiss"I prove that you can do it — and more importantly, that you can do it unashamedly." — Alan Weiss"If we're not pissing somebody off every day, we're not doing our job." — Alan WeissResources & People MentionedDan Pink — Author and speakerJonah Berger — Wharton School professor, author of ContagiousMichael Bungay Stanier — Author of The Coaching HabitRandy Gage — Author, prosperity mindset expertThe Innovation Formula — Alan Weiss & Mike Robert (1985)ConnectAlan Weiss: alanweiss.comLeanne Hughes: First Time FacilitatorTalk the Walk — next episode: first week of JuneGet Work Fame, my Substack newsletter, sharing the best ideas direct to your inbox!Support the show

“The technology we’re working with today really makes a lot of those best practices and mental models and the whole toolkit more accessible than ever to more people.” –Marshall Kirkpatrick About Marshall Kirkpatrick Marshall Kirkpatrick is founder of sustainabilty consultancy Earth Catalyst and AI thinking tool What's Up With That. His many previous roles include founder of influence network analysis tool Little Bird, which was acquired by Sprinklr, where he was last Vice President Market Research. Website: whatsupwiththat.app LinkedIn Profile: Marshall Kirkpatrick What you will learn How generative AI transforms cognitive tools and lowers barriers to advanced thinking Techniques to combine human and AI-powered sensemaking for richer insights Practical strategies for filtering and extracting value from infinite information The importance and application of diverse mental models in modern decision-making Methods to balance manual cognitive work with AI assistance for optimal outcomes The role of adaptive interfaces in enhancing individual cognitive capacity Metacognitive approaches to networks and how AI can foster organizational awareness Ethical and societal implications of democratizing access to AI-powered cognitive enhancements Episode Resources Transcript Ross Dawson: Marshall, it is awesome to have you back on the show. Marshall Kirkpatrick: Oh, thank you, Ross. It’s such a pleasure to be reconnecting with you here. Thanks for having me on. Ross Dawson: So back you were very, very early on in the podcast when it was Thriving on Overload, and it was interviews with the book, and you got incorporated—some of the wonderful things you were doing in Thriving on Overload. So I think today, in this world of generative AI, which has transformed everything, including the way in which we think, the Thriving on Overload themes are still super, super relevant, and in a way, we need to be talking about them more. That theme at the time was finite cognition, infinite information. How do we work well with it? I don’t know if our cognition has become more finite, but the information has become more infinite, and there’s just more and more. But also, it cuts two ways, as in, what is the source of all the information? AI is also a tool. So anyway, let’s segue from some of your cognitive thinking tools, technology-enabled cognitive thinking tools and so on, which we looked at. So how do you—where are we? 2026, what do you think about human cognition in our current universe? Marshall Kirkpatrick: Well, especially when you frame it up in Thriving on Overload terms. I mean, those were four, five long years ago that we last spoke, and the book that came out of it was just fantastic. I think it has some timeless qualities, and I think that the technology we’re working with today really makes a lot of those best practices and mental models and the whole toolkit more accessible than ever to more people. That’s what I hope. I think that, yeah, between individuals and organizations, there’s so much that, historically, someone like you or me or the people closest in our networks were willing and able to do and excited to do, that many other people said, “That sounds like a lot of work.” The bar is lower now, because a lot of just the raw cognitive processing can be outsourced into a technology that serves as a lever. Ross Dawson: Well, I mean, that idea of levers for these cognitive tools is interesting. I guess, the very crude way of saying it is, we’ve got inputs into our human brain, and then we are processing information. I’m just thinking out loud a bit here, but it’s like, okay, we have tools to be able to filter, to present, to find what is most relevant, to present it to us in the ways which are most useful—very obvious, like summarization, visualization. Then as we are processing it ourselves, we have dialog, or we can have interlocutors who we can engage with and be able to refine and help our thinking. Does that sort of make sense, or how would you flesh that out? Marshall Kirkpatrick: Yeah, I mean, when you put it that way, it makes me think about Harold Jarche and his Seek, Sense, Share model, right? I think that AI, especially when connected to things like search and syndication and other traditional technologies, can impact all three of those stages. It can hypercharge our search. I think the archetypal example of that, on some level, feels like the combinatorial drug research being done, where just an otherwise cognitively uncontainable quantity of combinatorial possibilities between molecules can be sought out and experimented with for a desirable reaction. And then that sensing, or the pattern recognition that AI is so good at, is something that we do as humans—some of us better than others—and it’s a lifelong muscle to build and what have you. But the AI is really, really good at it, and so it’s a ladder to climb up in some of that sensing. And then the sharing component becomes so much easier with the rewriting capabilities—turn A into B, reformat something into a summary or a set of bullet points, or ideas and words into code. AI is just so excellent for that translation that makes new levels of sharing possible. Ross Dawson: That’s fantastic. Yeah, I had Harold on the show again in the Thriving on Overload days. But you’re right, that’s extremely relevant. Let’s dig into that. I love that you brought up that combinatorial search, which is so important. As opposed to going into Perplexity to do a search, it’s far more interesting to find the uncovered connections between things, which are relevant to what you’re doing. And that’s— Marshall Kirkpatrick: Absolutely. I remember reading, years ago, Dan Pink’s book “A Whole New Mind,” which preceded the generative AI era. But he said, if your kind of work is something that’s easily reproducible by computers, good luck to you. You really are going to need uniquely human practices in the future, and what exactly those are, I’m not sure, because the one that he identified, I don’t think has proven to be uniquely human. But I really appreciated learning about it from him, and that was what he called symphonic thinking, or the ability to draw connections between seemingly unconnected phenomena. So for many years, I have been doing a personal exercise with pen and paper that I call triangle thinking, where I’ll take three different phenomena—maybe that’s the owl outside my window, one of the notes that I’ve taken on paper, and something I come upon on the internet, or maybe it’s three very deliberately related things. I label them A, B, and C, and I ask, what might A have to say about B? What might B offer to A, and vice versa? I write out the six unidirectional connections between those things. And without fail, one, two, or three of those end up being real keepers, where I say, “Aha, that’s a really interesting idea. I’m going to take action on that.” And now, by the time I’ve got the letter B written out, an AI has done that ten times over. I like to do it both ways—still both AI and with my naked brain—but that combinatorial ideation, the generative combinatorial ideation, is, yeah. I’m curious what your thoughts and experience and hope for that might be. Ross Dawson: Well, there’s a prompt I use called “Apply Diverse Thinking,” where it generates extremely diverse perspectives on a topic—who might those very unusual people to think about something be, and then what would they think about this particular situation? Of course, there are a whole array of different thinking tools. There’s Marshall McLuhan’s tetrad, which is a little bit similar to your thing where, again, you can and should do it—well, not manually. What’s the manual equivalent of brain? Marshall Kirkpatrick: Thoughtfully, perhaps. Yeah, good one—deliberately, manually. I mean, Azeem Azhar over at Exponential View uses a fountain pen and paper and will sometimes have his team come online and they’ll do two-hour thinking sessions with no AI allowed. They just get on, I believe, Zoom, and just think through things with pen and paper, individually and together. And then they’ll kick off OpenAI or what have you, and use all the tools afterwards. Ross Dawson: Yeah, well, a couple of things. Actually, research has shown that in brainstorming, it is better for everyone to ideate individually before doing it collectively. And of course, that’s unaided. I think there are analogs there where—actually, one of the frameworks I just released last week was basically to say, think it through for yourself before you ask the AI, because then you have a reference point. If not, you don’t have a reference point to say, “Well, what am I expecting it to do? Let me think it through for myself,” even if it’s just a little bit, as opposed to just going in blank—”All right, give me an answer.” Just that simple thing of thinking through for yourself first is enormous. What it does is, obviously, give you a reference point for that. And I’m going on a lot about appropriate trust at the moment—as in, trust the AI enough, but not too much, which I think is absolutely critical capability. And part of it is being able to say, “Well, this is what I think it should be giving me.” Now you have a reference point for what it gives you. Marshall Kirkpatrick: Yeah, that sounds great in many cases. I do think that’s the right tool for the job in a lot of places, but not necessarily all. I’m thinking of the Iron Triangle of product management—fast, cheap, good, pick two. On some level, just handing the AI the keys for certain decisions is uniquely fast and cheap, right? And maybe it’s good enough. Ross Dawson: Oh yeah. Well, you’ve got to choose your battles, because if you’re now doing ten times what you were doing last week, then maybe for a tenth of those you can do some thinking before you delegate it to the AI. Marshall Kirkpatrick: Yeah, a strategy for how to do that. I think, well, that sounds important—some checkpoints along the way, some random selection of testing things. Ross Dawson: Well, that’s interesting. One of the critical things people talk about with AI model oversight is sampling. As they say, “Okay, I’ve got 1,000 outputs—I’m going to take 20 of them and check how good they are.” You’re not checking every output, but you’re doing some kind of ongoing sampling. Marshall Kirkpatrick: Are you checking with your own deliberate brain, or are you checking with another AI? Ross Dawson: It could be either, depends on the case—how critical it is. This comes back, of course, to the fact that accountability is only human, and so the human who is accountable has to make that decision: “All right, I’m happy for another AI to check it,” or, “Actually, I want to go in myself to see.” And that’s a judgment call. Marshall Kirkpatrick: Totally. And it feels like a process design issue and a personal accountability matter. I mean, “The AI made me do it” is not a viable excuse. Ross Dawson: Let’s hope it remains that way. So, good for those Seek, Sense, Share stages. Sense is one of your superpowers, both in the way you think and also the way you use the tools. It’s probably worth introducing—now you’ve just released this wonderful product called What’s Up With That. So just tell us about the product, but also, I want to go to the bigger context of sense—sensemaking, how we use it generally, how AI can use that, and your role with the tool in that. Marshall Kirkpatrick: Yeah, you know, I think there are so many different ways that sense can be made of anything, so many different ways that anything you read or think about or do can be put into context. It’s just overwhelming. I think we all have our favorite—not all of us, but those of us who are into this have our favorite tools, our favorite ways to—you know, a lot of people will think about something in terms of its past, its present, and its future, or they will break it down in analysis into parts, or they’ll synthesize it together with other phenomena and see how to understand. I think sometimes of the famous Donella Meadows quote, the mother of systems thinking, who said, “Systems thinking isn’t any better than analytical linear thinking than a telescope is better than a microscope.” So there’s just a superabundance of fascinating, powerful tools that all provide different views on anything we’re trying to make sense of. One of the things that I’ve always found a lot of joy and usefulness and power in is learning about new lenses and processes and tools. Now that generative AI has put the ability to develop software into my hands—instead of having to go and hire someone else to build that software—I have built a system that takes as many of those different models and lenses and processes for making sense of something as I can. I mean, it would be trivial to pull up a list of 200 mental models. I might go visit Shane Parrish’s website and The Knowledge Project. I think of ones that would be particularly useful, like, “Tell me who the intellectual predecessors are of this thing I’m reading,” or one of the other capabilities inside of What’s Up With That—my favorite, probably, is a combinatorial one called Fertile Edges. That says, “Take what I’m reading right now, identify the topic that it is a constituent of, and then find other adjacent topics where innovative people have built bridges between those adjacent topics and what I’m reading about, and tell me who those people are.” And that’s really fun. So I have built this sensemaking system, and that’s a part of What’s Up With That. There are really three parts to it. The first is, it analyzes whatever you’re reading or watching, and it pulls out the net new, truly novel, most notable elements. Yesterday, I was telling you, it was a little bit inspired by the US military intelligence guideline that says, when you’re writing up a report about something, focus on what’s new in that situation—tell us what we don’t already know. That’s the first thing that What’s Up With That does. It says, “All right, here’s what’s new in this document relative to its field,” because we just drew a real-time map of the state of the art, and we say, “Okay, here’s what’s really novel there.” The second thing that it does is that toolbox full of all the different mental models and lenses, and it recommends a sequence. One of my favorite books I ever read was “On Grand Strategy,” about strategic thinkers throughout history, who talks about the significance of thinking in terms of sequences of actions. So now, What’s Up With That will say, “Here’s a sequence of analytical lenses we recommend that you subject this document to,” and with a click, it’ll go and do that for you—it’ll do that cognition for you and then just give you a report. The third thing that it does is probably—it, the shorthand for it is compound learning. You don’t have to remember all the things that you read anymore, because our system extracts the causal claims from everything you read, archives them, and then compares everything you read in the future that you analyze with our system to your library of causal connections in the past, to say, “Whoa, we just found a chain of claims that could surface a multi-step risk or opportunity that’s relevant to your work.” We do that both for your data exhaust—your history of things you’ve analyzed—and we do persistent monitoring of the web to detect anything that could be relevant to a project or chain by that same kind of symphonic synthesis and connection. So those are the categories that it has. Ross Dawson: Yeah, I think you’re only scratching the surface of what your tool actually does, and obviously, more generally, these are just pointing in wonderful ways to how you can go beyond saying, “Tell me about this, ChatGPT,” to some far more nuanced ways of getting AI to do it. Marshall Kirkpatrick: People have had the same challenge with Google, historically. Google has struggled with that, to figure out—”I’m feeling lucky” was probably the first intervention in a novice, beginner’s mind, coming to a hyper-complex opportunity space. Even still, now, 20 years since Google launched, I feel like you can tell people that they can search for “site:domain keyword” to find instances of that keyword not in the web at large, just inside that specific domain, and most people don’t know that. It’s a simple power, and there’s a bunch of things like that. So figuring out how to unlock—and I don’t know how much they’ve even worried about it, because they’ve got that cash cow of advertising—but people don’t even recognize, sometimes, whether they’re clicking on an ad or a search result. In polls, when people are asked, they say, “No,” even if they put the ads at the top or mark them as ads, or a bunch of stuff they do do, but nobody notices. So that interface of complexity and accessibility and scale—we’re in it again here now, in this generative AI era. There’s so much more that could be done than is immediately obvious. It’s a real challenge. So I’ve taken the approach that I have, which is to roll up a bunch of that and turn them into buttons and recommend them automatically and try to recommend them just in time, and stuff like that. But I’m sure lots of different people are going to try to respond to that gap of simplicity and complexity in different ways. Ross Dawson: Yeah, that’s—which comes back, I think, a little bit to, you know, I firmly believe that the heart of the future is interfaces. We have these extraordinary capabilities—against finite cognition and infinite capabilities, let’s call them. That’s very much to the individual. The adaptive interface, I think, is going to be absolutely critical. All right, well, it’s after lunch and I’m not feeling so—the interface adapts to you. Marshall Kirkpatrick: So I heard you say that. Ross Dawson: The interface adapts again. Marshall Kirkpatrick: Right? I heard you say that in a conversation with Ramez Naam some time ago. I was listening to that interview that the two of you did together while I was playing hacky sack out in front of my house. I grabbed my hacky sack and I said, “I’ve got to go inside and do something about this idea of Ross—yes, interface variability.” In that case, I did a little experiment that I didn’t implement because I decided not to, but the general idea I want to pursue further, and I’ll tell you what that experiment was. One of the capabilities inside of What’s Up With That is that you can get a reading review synthesized, so that instead of just a list of links, you can get a narrative document exploring the themes, weaving together the last ten articles that you’ve read, and it’s easier to remember and to think about. I decided to hit the Nanonets API and have an image put up at the top that illustrated the themes. Now, maybe it’s just because I read a lot of dystopian AI, authoritarian politics type of stuff, but the images were terrifying, and they’re kind of expensive and slow, and they also look kind of repetitive. I was like, “All right, Ross, I haven’t cracked that nut quite yet in the variable interface, but I think you’re really on to something there.” Ross Dawson: I’ll try to work on that too, a little bit. So coming back to this wonderful thing we laid out, alluding to some of the wonderful ways we can use for really rich investigation of ideas and how to think. It comes back to this frame of mental models. All of us get our mental models from the moment we’re born—we get this understanding of the world, which is hopefully useful. Sometimes, some people’s mental models are not very effective in guiding them in how they work. Our role is to continue evolving, getting better. I call it enriching mental models. Back in my first book, I talked about that, and of course, that’s in the context of the world changing, so mental models can’t be static anyway. In a way, what you’re pointing to is the many, many ways in which we can, at one point, improve our mental models. All right, I understand this linear lineage of thinking, and I can see the strands between that, and these neurons are connecting in my brain in some form. But how can we pull to that bigger picture of all of this lattice of things to be able to say, “All right, I am actually thinking better through these interactions”? Marshall Kirkpatrick: You know, I think that there is a visceral sense—a sense of safety that can come sometimes when a new mental model illuminates a risk that you hadn’t considered before, and you breathe a sigh of relief and say, “Oh, thank goodness, I can now account for that.” And there’s an excitement with opportunity. There is something about a collective greater-than-individual opportunity here, because it’s tempting to—I’m not sure what that looks like, but I feel like there’s some social and interpersonal and network-based. One of the other things I do is build systems for network self-awareness, to build metacognitive network monitoring kinds of systems. I feel like there are mental models on that level as well. Ross Dawson: So I’ve got to dig into that—metacognitive network monitoring. Explain Marshall Kirkpatrick: Yeah. So every one of us, and our organizations, exists in a network of customers, suppliers, competitors, regulators, thought leaders, with orbits that extend out. The signals are strongest in the closest ones, and perhaps they are weaker and harder to hear, but really significant coming from outer orbits—even from other industries or other topics. It is overwhelming. It is cognitively uncontainable for any of us to keep up with all the work being done, all the thoughts being shared, all the new developments and opportunities from all the different entities that we’re interconnected with. One of the other offerings that I build for organizations is a system where I go out and map as many of those as possible with people. Those might be your target accounts you’re wanting to sell to, or your peers in a community of practice. Then I set up systems, basically using RSS, email newsletters, web page change notification—the technical underpinnings—to say, especially when organizations are—there are some forms of communication that organizations do naturally by default, and those tend to be speaking to their own customers. If you can listen to what organizations are saying to their own customers at scale, you can pull in a large quantity of signal, and then the challenge is to winnow that down into just the filtered signals that are most relevant to your priorities. I’ve got a system that uses AI to do that. Then there are combinatorial possibilities as well. I’ve started merging that in with What’s Up With That now, for example, where when we’re watching your broader network and a signal gets picked up on the back end, we’re generating hundreds of possible scenarios for that signal to intersect with your work and projects and priorities, and then we’re filtering to say, “Yeah, but tell me just the subset of these that are most significant and imminent and actionable and interesting.” If there’s something, then we will alert you and tell you what’s going on. Otherwise, you never hear from us, and you just go about your business. But a couple times a day, I get alerts. Yesterday I got an alert that said, “Hey, one of the founders of Manus, the AI platform that Meta just acquired for $2 billion, just got detained in China trying to go back to Singapore. Given your interests in AI and anti-authoritarian politics and the infrastructure battles around AI, we thought you might want to know about this.” I said, “Thanks, What’s Up With That, I really appreciate it.” That’s an example of the sort of thing—so that’s how I do it. Other customers will take that and use it to populate a podcast or a newsletter, and do both an intake and an output as a conduit of that kind of network self-awareness. Ross Dawson: Yeah, well, as you know, my kind of—my metacognition is my mantra. I think one of the key points is this simple question: How can AI assist me in getting to a point of metacognition? I would argue, if we use AI even vaguely well, it’s already doing that, because you’re saying, “Okay, well, let me think about what I can do and what the AI can do,” and you’re starting to think of that system. The only thing that enables this humans plus AI is metacognition, because you can actually see above and see your role and the AI’s role. I think this broader question of saying, many of the things you’ve been talking about are how AI is helping us to get to a point in metacognition. Marshall Kirkpatrick: Ross, can I ask you a question adjacent to that? I think I am not the only one who wants to know, perhaps—and maybe this is a trade secret, I don’t know—but how you think about your analysis and sharing of scientific research papers online? You’re so good at that, and you do a lot of it, and it’s really valuable. It comes to my mind when you talk about metacognition—what role does that function, what are you doing there, what role do you see that playing in this bigger conversation? Ross Dawson: Well, I’ll just tell you the mechanics of it, which might partly answer your question. I go into, often, three or four of the AI engines, including Grok, actually, because it’s very good at search. I say, “Tell me the most interesting research papers in the last few weeks,” whatever—on, I might say, human-AI collaboration or AI and strategy, whatever it might be, just different frames. Then I go and look at them. To be frank, I probably should do some more filtering with AI and tell them, “Only from reputable authors,” etc., because I have to just look at a lot of stuff, but that’s useful in its own right. Then I start to see, okay, this is a paper which is not only interesting, but actually would be useful to summarize for other people. I do a lot of surfacing—a lot. I’m very quick at scanning, so that’s just a mental process. At that point, when I found the paper, I’ve got a Gemini gem and an OpenAI GPT, both of which I call Insight Distiller. Basically, I stick the paper in there, it comes out, and I always rewrite it. I will either prompt the AI to improve it in various ways, and then always just rewrite or choose which of the points I put in, and so on. So there’s actually a fairly manual process, but very, very AI-assisted. To your point, there’s so much extraordinary research going on, and people don’t look at it. The function, I think, is what you’re alluding to—it’s just like saying, “This is the essence of a paper, and you can read it in a few minutes and get some really good insights, and hopefully that will inspire you to go have a proper look at the paper, because there’s a lot more in there.” To myself, of course, going through all that is enormous and valuable to me, but it’s useful to others too. Marshall Kirkpatrick: Absolutely, wow. That is a high-touch. That’s great. I bet you really have a lot of compounding learning as a result of it. Ross Dawson: Yeah, it’s kind of this thing where, just the nature of how my brain works and my immersion in stuff, I think it somehow gets me to some decent understanding of what’s going on. So to round out, what’s the next phase? I think this is an extraordinary time, but in the frame of what we’re talking about—AI and cognition—from your perspective, or just the world’s perspective, where do we go from here? Marshall Kirkpatrick: Well, I think that it comes down, in part, to values. I can’t help but think about this K-shaped future that we risk moving towards, where some people are using all kinds of augmented capabilities and building on top of past experience and education and what have you, and income inequality just gets more and more intense. The gap between people who are excited about this stuff and can use it, and everyone else, just gets all the bigger. That’s not good for anybody. I really hope that isn’t the case. I’d love to get the J of exponential change without too much of the K of increasing inequality. I think that’s the direction we’re pointed in, but I do hope that we can democratize access to a lot of these capabilities and figure out how to use them in partnership with other ways of thinking—like Azeem and his team, writing on paper, like some of the indigenous traditional knowledge practices around the world that are very place-based and around ecosystem balance and recognizing humans as a part of nature, working with AI and technologies. I’d love to see this be an additive experience, more than a destructive experience for humanity and the rest of the planet. Ross Dawson: Yeah and that’s why you and I both working on is doing whatever we can to nudge things in those directions. So where can people go to find out more about your wonderful work? Marshall Kirkpatrick: Well, these days, I am pointing people mostly to whatsupwiththat.app. That’s kind of my home these days for all the different work. Ross Dawson: I’ll recommend it. Marshall Kirkpatrick: Oh, thank you so much, Ross. Ross Dawson: Very useful, and I’ve only just begun to use it so— Marshall Kirkpatrick: Awesome, well, let’s stick some of those papers in there and red team it and hit “Find Science” and get other scientific reviews of the claims in the paper, etc. Thanks—it’s so great to be back in touch with you here and not just watch from a distance, but to get to put our heads together like this is a real pleasure. Ross Dawson: Thanks so much, Marshall. The post Marshall Kirkpatrick on cognitive levers, combinatorial possibilities, symphonic thinking, and compound learning (AC Ep39) appeared first on Humans + AI.

Sarah and Beth react to Trump's State of the Union address, Governor Abigail Spanberger's response, and what it all signals for 2028. Outside of politics, they turn inward and share their experience with Dan Pink's AI-powered self-reflection exercise. Topics Discussed: Trump’s State of the Union Looking Ahead to 2028 Outside of Politics: Brutal Truths from AI Ready to go deeper? Visit our website for complete show notes, exclusive premium content, chats, and more.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

New Year's resolutions promise hope, but for many people, they quietly deliver shame, stress, and self-blame instead. If resolutions leave you feeling worse about yourself every January, this episode explains why — and what actually works. Host Gabe Howard is joined by returning favorite Jodi Wellman to unpack why traditional goal-setting often backfires, especially when it comes to mental health. They explore the psychology behind the “fresh start effect,” how all-or-nothing thinking sets us up to fail, and why massive lifestyle overhauls rarely stick. More importantly, they offer practical, compassionate alternatives; Like shifting from rigid goals to identity-based habits, process-focused wins, and restarting without guilt when things go off track. Listener Takeaways The mental health cost of setting outcome-based goals Why smaller, process-focused goals actually create lasting change How to restart a goal without guilt or self-punishment Whether you've already ditched your New Year's resolutions or never believed in them to begin with, this episode explores a healthier, more realistic way to create change—without harming your mental well-being. “What is really common, which is set a goal. Don't get there. Feel bad about it. So net net it's not a good experience. For many of us, that's problematic because we feel badly about ourselves [. . .] And maybe that's your version of self-compassion is to let that goal gracefully go.” ~Jodi Wellman, MAPP Our guest, Jodi Wellman, MAPP is a speaker, author, and facilitator on living lives worth living. She founded Four Thousand Mondays to help people make the most of the time they are lucky to be above ground.  With 25 years of corporate leadership experience (most recently as Senior Vice President of Operations at a leading health and lifestyle organization), Jodi has led private CEO advisory boards and coaches teams to work well and live even better. Jodi has a Master's of Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, where she is also an Assistant Instructor and facilitator in the Penn Resilience Program. She is an ICF Professional Certified Coach. Her book, "You Only Die Once: How to Make It to the End with No Regrets," made Adam Grant's Summer Reading List and was a “Top 3 Psychology Book of 2024” by the Next Big Idea Club (curated by Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Cain, Adam Grant, and Dan Pink). Jodi has been featured in The New York Times, Oprah Daily, Fast Company, CNBC, Forbes, Psychology Today, The Los Angeles Times, and more. Jodi's TEDx talk is called How Death Can Bring You Back to Life; with over 1.3 million views, it is the 14th most-watched TEDx talk released in 2022, out of 15,900! Our host, Gabe Howard, is an award-winning writer and speaker who lives with bipolar disorder. He is the author of the popular book, "Mental Illness is an Asshole and other Observations," available from Amazon; signed copies are also available directly from the author. Gabe is also the host of the "Inside Bipolar" podcast with Dr. Nicole Washington. Gabe makes his home in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio. He lives with his supportive wife, Kendall, and a Miniature Schnauzer dog that he never wanted, but now can't imagine life without. To book Gabe for your next event or learn more about him, please visit gabehoward.com. Please share the show -- it's how we grow! Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If your life looks good on paper but feels flat, this is for you.Many of us follow the rules, build what appear to be successful lives, and still sense something essential is missing. That feeling sends us on a chase for more meaning or purpose, impact and clarity. But, what if the way we seek them is all wrong, and actually makes us less happy, content and alive, not more?In today's conversation, we explore a radically different way to think about meaning, one rooted in aliveness, presence, and becoming rather than achievement, impact, mattering, or outcomes.My partner in conversation is Dave Evans, the coauthor of the New York Times number one bestseller Designing Your Life, cofounder of the Stanford Life Design Lab, and author of the new book How to Live a Meaningful Life. I've known Dave for years now, and he's spent decades helping people redesign work, identity, and daily living in ways that feel deeply human.In this episode, you'll discover:Why fulfillment and impact often become dead ends rather than answersA simple shift that helps you feel more alive without changing your circumstancesFour overlooked sources of meaning that most people rarely accessHow to move fluidly between getting things done and actually being presentA practical way to experience wonder, flow, coherence, and connection in everyday momentsIf you've ever wondered why a life that looks good can still feel unsatisfying, this conversation offers a grounded and hopeful reframe. Press play to explore a more livable path to meaning.You can find Dave at: Website | Instagram | Episode TranscriptIf you LOVED this episode, you'll also love the conversations we had with Dan Pink about regret, reflection, and using inner signals to guide a more meaningful life.Check out our offerings & partners: Join My New Writing Project: Awake at the WheelVisit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Cindy Esliger explores regret, the unpleasant emotion we'd rather forget about that can actually help us grow and gain clarity. Regret isn't a sign that something is wrong with us; it's actually a sign that things matter to us. It alerts us to something that didn't align or that still needs our attention. So if we learn to acknowledge regret, it can be a catalyst for transformation. Cindy offers insight into defining, understanding, and dealing with regret so it can become a useful tool in career advancement.    Regret tends to be quite uncomfortable, so we avoid revisiting it. However, there are consequences to not reckoning with our regret, and Cindy identifies four of them: 1. Career stagnation, 2. Chronic dissatisfaction, 3. Low self-trust, and 4. People-pleasing paralysis. Cindy points out that when we dare to examine our regrets, we can turn them into strategic fuel for career growth. She names three ways we can start: 1. Reflect on past regrets, 2. Anticipate potential future regrets before making a decision, and 3. Recognize the lessons in our regrets.Author Dan Pink identifies four kinds of regrets: foundation regrets, boldness regrets, moral regrets, and connection regrets. Understanding these can help us realize that regret does not necessarily point to something done wrong, but rather that something was challenging or we were at a crossroads. Cindy shares five powerful ways to harness the value of regret without getting stuck in it: 1. Use the future self test, 2. Sort the decisions that actually matter, 3. Reframe mistakes as data points, 4. Set our own bar, and 5. Practice self-compassion. The goal is to work with our regrets instead of against them.Resources discussed in this episode:Guide to Turning Regret Into Career ClarityAstronomic AudioConfidence Collective—Contact Cindy Esliger Career Confidence Coaching: website | instagram | facebook | linkedin | email Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Dan Pink: Why Leaders Keep Getting Motivation Wrong (and How to Fix It)Daniel Pink is one of the world's foremost authorities on work motivation and human behavior. His seven best-selling books include Drive, To Sell Is Human, When, The Power of Regret, and A Whole New Mind.Recorded in London's historic Guildhall during the Thinkers50 London Summit & Awards Gala in November 2025, this conversation features Dan in dialogue with Provocateurs hosts Des Dearlove, Thinkers50 co-founder, and Geoff Tuff, Deloitte's Global and US Sustainability Leader for Energy, Resources, and Industrials.In this episode we discover:Why traditional “carrot and stick” motivators don't work at work – and the three reasons organizations still cling to themThe three key forces that genuinely drive human performance: autonomy, mastery, and purposeThe three blind spots preventing leaders from unleashing these forces in their organizations Dan also challenges the tendency towards dehumanization in leadership and reveals how the emotion of regret, when properly harnessed, can transform leaders into better negotiators, problem solvers, and strategists. He leaves us with one provocative question every executive should ask before making major decisions: What will the you of ten years from now think about what you're about to do?This podcast is part of an ongoing series of interviews with executives. The executives' participation in this podcast are solely for educational purposes based on their knowledge of the subject and the views expressed by them are solely their own. This podcast should not be deemed or construed to be for the purpose of soliciting business for any of the companies mentioned, nor does Deloitte advocate or endorse the services or products provided by these companies.

In a world obsessed with Martech optimization and AI, is the most overlooked competitive advantage simply understanding how the human brain actually works?Agility requires more than just adapting to new technologies; it requires a deep, empathetic understanding of the timeless human behaviors that drive customer decisions.Today, we're going to talk about the intersection of marketing and human psychology. We'll explore how understanding cognitive biases and behavioral science isn't just an academic exercise, but a critical tool for creating more effective customer experiences, more persuasive messaging, and ultimately, a more resilient and agile brand.To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome, Phill Agnew, Host of Nudge Podcast at Nudge Podcast. About Phill Agnew Phill Agnew hosts Nudge, the UK's #1 marketing podcast. It's a critically acclaimed behavioural science show that has featured world-renowned guests such as Richard Shotton, Rory Sutherland, Tali Sharot, Jonah Berger, Dan Pink, and Chris Voss. With a knack for demystifying complex psychological concepts, Phill translates cutting-edge behavioural science into actionable insights for marketers, business leaders, and everyday professionals. His podcast has been downloaded by hundreds of thousands across the globe, establishing Phill as a trusted voice in behavioural marketing.,Yes,This has been completed Phill Agnew on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/phill-agnew/ Resources Nudge Podcast: https://www.nudgepodcast.com/ The Agile Brand podcast is brought to you by TEKsystems. Learn more here: https://www.teksystems.com/versionnextnow Catch the future of e-commerce at eTail Palm Springs, Feb 23-26 in Palm Springs, CA. Go here for more details: https://etailwest.wbresearch.com/Drive your customers to new horizons at the premier retail event of the year for Retail and Brand marketers. Learn more at CRMC 2026, June 1-3. https://www.thecrmc.com/ Enjoyed the show? Tell us more at and give us a rating so others can find the show at: https://ratethispodcast.com/agileConnect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstromDon't miss a thing: get the latest episodes, sign up for our newsletter and more: https://www.theagilebrand.showCheck out The Agile Brand Guide website with articles, insights, and Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology: https://www.agilebrandguide.com The Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link—a Latina-owned strategy-driven, creatively fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. https://www.missinglink.company Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In a world obsessed with Martech optimization and AI, is the most overlooked competitive advantage simply understanding how the human brain actually works? Agility requires more than just adapting to new technologies; it requires a deep, empathetic understanding of the timeless human behaviors that drive customer decisions. Today, we're going to talk about the intersection of marketing and human psychology. We'll explore how understanding cognitive biases and behavioral science isn't just an academic exercise, but a critical tool for creating more effective customer experiences, more persuasive messaging, and ultimately, a more resilient and agile brand. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome, Phill Agnew, Host of Nudge Podcast at Nudge Podcast. About Phill Agnew Phill Agnew hosts Nudge, the UK's #1 marketing podcast. It's a critically acclaimed behavioural science show that has featured world-renowned guests such as Richard Shotton, Rory Sutherland, Tali Sharot, Jonah Berger, Dan Pink, and Chris Voss. With a knack for demystifying complex psychological concepts, Phill translates cutting-edge behavioural science into actionable insights for marketers, business leaders, and everyday professionals. His podcast has been downloaded by hundreds of thousands across the globe, establishing Phill as a trusted voice in behavioural marketing.,Yes,This has been completed Phill Agnew on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/phill-agnew/ Resources Nudge Podcast: https://www.nudgepodcast.com/ The Agile Brand podcast is brought to you by TEKsystems. Learn more here: https://www.teksystems.com/versionnextnow Catch the future of e-commerce at eTail Palm Springs, Feb 23-26 in Palm Springs, CA. Go here for more details: https://etailwest.wbresearch.com/Drive your customers to new horizons at the premier retail event of the year for Retail and Brand marketers. Learn more at CRMC 2026, June 1-3. https://www.thecrmc.com/ Enjoyed the show? Tell us more at and give us a rating so others can find the show at: https://ratethispodcast.com/agileConnect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstromDon't miss a thing: get the latest episodes, sign up for our newsletter and more: https://www.theagilebrand.showCheck out The Agile Brand Guide website with articles, insights, and Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology: https://www.agilebrandguide.com The Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link—a Latina-owned strategy-driven, creatively fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. https://www.missinglink.company

In a world obsessed with Martech optimization and AI, is the most overlooked competitive advantage simply understanding how the human brain actually works? Agility requires more than just adapting to new technologies; it requires a deep, empathetic understanding of the timeless human behaviors that drive customer decisions. Today, we're going to talk about the intersection of marketing and human psychology. We'll explore how understanding cognitive biases and behavioral science isn't just an academic exercise, but a critical tool for creating more effective customer experiences, more persuasive messaging, and ultimately, a more resilient and agile brand. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome, Phill Agnew, Host of Nudge Podcast at Nudge Podcast. About Phill Agnew Phill Agnew hosts Nudge, the UK's #1 marketing podcast. It's a critically acclaimed behavioural science show that has featured world-renowned guests such as Richard Shotton, Rory Sutherland, Tali Sharot, Jonah Berger, Dan Pink, and Chris Voss. With a knack for demystifying complex psychological concepts, Phill translates cutting-edge behavioural science into actionable insights for marketers, business leaders, and everyday professionals. His podcast has been downloaded by hundreds of thousands across the globe, establishing Phill as a trusted voice in behavioural marketing.,Yes,This has been completed Phill Agnew on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/phill-agnew/ Resources Nudge Podcast: https://www.nudgepodcast.com/ The Agile Brand podcast is brought to you by TEKsystems. Learn more here: https://www.teksystems.com/versionnextnow Catch the future of e-commerce at eTail Palm Springs, Feb 23-26 in Palm Springs, CA. Go here for more details: https://etailwest.wbresearch.com/ Drive your customers to new horizons at the premier retail event of the year for Retail and Brand marketers. Learn more at CRMC 2026, June 1-3. https://www.thecrmc.com/ Enjoyed the show? Tell us more at and give us a rating so others can find the show at: https://ratethispodcast.com/agileConnect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstromDon't miss a thing: get the latest episodes, sign up for our newsletter and more: https://www.theagilebrand.showCheck out The Agile Brand Guide website with articles, insights, and Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology: https://www.agilebrandguide.com The Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link—a Latina-owned strategy-driven, creatively fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. https://www.missinglink.company

In a world obsessed with Martech optimization and AI, is the most overlooked competitive advantage simply understanding how the human brain actually works?Agility requires more than just adapting to new technologies; it requires a deep, empathetic understanding of the timeless human behaviors that drive customer decisions.Today, we're going to talk about the intersection of marketing and human psychology. We'll explore how understanding cognitive biases and behavioral science isn't just an academic exercise, but a critical tool for creating more effective customer experiences, more persuasive messaging, and ultimately, a more resilient and agile brand.To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome, Phill Agnew, Host of Nudge Podcast at Nudge Podcast. About Phill Agnew Phill Agnew hosts Nudge, the UK's #1 marketing podcast. It's a critically acclaimed behavioural science show that has featured world-renowned guests such as Richard Shotton, Rory Sutherland, Tali Sharot, Jonah Berger, Dan Pink, and Chris Voss. With a knack for demystifying complex psychological concepts, Phill translates cutting-edge behavioural science into actionable insights for marketers, business leaders, and everyday professionals. His podcast has been downloaded by hundreds of thousands across the globe, establishing Phill as a trusted voice in behavioural marketing.,Yes,This has been completed Phill Agnew on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/phill-agnew/ Resources Nudge Podcast: https://www.nudgepodcast.com/ The Agile Brand podcast is brought to you by TEKsystems. Learn more here: https://www.teksystems.com/versionnextnow Catch the future of e-commerce at eTail Palm Springs, Feb 23-26 in Palm Springs, CA. Go here for more details: https://etailwest.wbresearch.com/Drive your customers to new horizons at the premier retail event of the year for Retail and Brand marketers. Learn more at CRMC 2026, June 1-3. https://www.thecrmc.com/ Enjoyed the show? Tell us more at and give us a rating so others can find the show at: https://ratethispodcast.com/agileConnect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstromDon't miss a thing: get the latest episodes, sign up for our newsletter and more: https://www.theagilebrand.showCheck out The Agile Brand Guide website with articles, insights, and Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology: https://www.agilebrandguide.com The Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link—a Latina-owned strategy-driven, creatively fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. https://www.missinglink.company Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Why does happiness always feel one step away? In this episode, we welcome back positive psychology expert Jodi Wellman to explore why so many of us keep “moving the goalposts” on our own success, and learn why accomplishments that once thrilled us eventually feel ordinary. Jodi breaks down why we convince ourselves that one more thing — a new job, a relationship, a move, a big purchase — will finally deliver lasting happiness. Using Gabe's own podcasting journey as a case study, the conversation exposes a mental trap familiar to anyone who's ever felt like their wins “don't count” for long. But this episode isn't just about naming the problem — it's about fixing it. Jodi offers practical, research-backed strategies to help you savor your accomplishments, find a healthier balance between ambition and contentment, and stop letting your inner critic erase your progress. Listener takeaways why humans believe they're always “one thing away” from feeling fulfilled what the hedonic treadmill is and how it sabotages our happiness how to balance ambition with genuine joy so you can grow without feeling miserable If you've ever wondered, “Why don't I feel successful?” this is the episode that can finally help you understand. “We like to dupe ourselves. It's just one of the features of our psychology. It all comes down to this idea called the hedonic treadmill. We think, and we go for it. We'll buy the pill, we'll make the move, we'll take the job, we'll buy the car, we'll do a thing. And usually it's external stuff, but sometimes it's internal, like, I will become the person that I've been meant to be and that will make me happy. But then, because we adapt so well, this is this hedonic adaptation, hedonic treadmill, we adapt so reliably, damn it. And we end up, over time, some of us shorter than others. Naturally, meh. Okay, well, how come it's not doing it for me anymore?” ~Jodi Wellman, MAPP Our guest, Jodi Wellman, MAPP is a speaker, author, and facilitator on living lives worth living. She founded Four Thousand Mondays to help people make the most of the time they are lucky to be above ground.  With 25 years of corporate leadership experience (most recently as Senior Vice President of Operations at a leading health and lifestyle organization), Jodi has led private CEO advisory boards and coaches teams to work well and live even better. Jodi has a Master's of Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, where she is also an Assistant Instructor and facilitator in the Penn Resilience Program. She is an ICF Professional Certified Coach. Her book, "You Only Die Once: How to Make It to the End with No Regrets," made Adam Grant's Summer Reading List and was a “Top 3 Psychology Book of 2024” by the Next Big Idea Club (curated by Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Cain, Adam Grant, and Dan Pink). Jodi has been featured in The New York Times, Oprah Daily, Fast Company, CNBC, Forbes, Psychology Today, The Los Angeles Times, and more. Jodi's TEDx talk is called How Death Can Bring You Back to Life; with over 1.3 million views, it is the 14th most-watched TEDx talk released in 2022, out of 15,900! Our host, Gabe Howard, is an award-winning writer and speaker who lives with bipolar disorder. He is the author of the popular book, "Mental Illness is an Asshole and other Observations," available from Amazon; signed copies are also available directly from the author. Gabe is also the host of the "Inside Bipolar" podcast with Dr. Nicole Washington. Gabe makes his home in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio. He lives with his supportive wife, Kendall, and a Miniature Schnauzer dog that he never wanted, but now can't imagine life without. To book Gabe for your next event or learn more about him, please visit gabehoward.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What if the emotions we try to avoid are actually pointing us toward something better? Bestselling author Daniel Pink reveals how regret can become a powerful teacher, helping us make wiser choices, live with more intention, and take the chances that truly matter. We also explore what fuels real motivation, how to master the timing of your day, and why your future self will thank you for acting boldly today.Thrive Global Article:Dan Pink on Using Regret to Do BetterAbout Our Guest:Daniel Pink is the author of seven bestselling nonfiction books on a range of topics, from human motivation to the science of timing to a graphic novel career guide.His books include the New York Times bestsellers The Power of Regret, A Whole New Mind, and When—as well as the #1 New York Times bestsellers Drive and To Sell is Human. His deeply researched works have been translated into 46 languages and have sold more than five million copies around the world.Over the years, he has also hosted a National Geographic television series, given one of the 20 most popular TED talks of all time, worked as a columnist at the Sunday Telegraph and the Washington Post, served as chief speechwriter to Vice President Al Gore, and been a clue on Jeopardy. He lives in Washington, DC, with his family.About Lainie:Lainie Rowell is a bestselling author, award-winning educator, and TEDx speaker. She is dedicated to human flourishing, focusing on community building, emotional intelligence, and honoring what makes each of us unique and dynamic through learner-driven design. She earned her degree in psychology and went on to earn both a post-graduate credential and a master's degree in education. An international keynote speaker, Lainie has presented in 41 states as well as in dozens of countries across 4 continents. As a consultant, Lainie's client list ranges from Fortune 100 companies like Apple and Google to school districts and independent schools. Learn more at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠linktr.ee/lainierowell⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.Website - ⁠LainieRowell.com⁠Instagram - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@LainieRowell⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn - @LainieRowellX/Twitter - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@LainieRowell ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Evolving with Gratitude, the book is available ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠here!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ And now, Bold Gratitude: The Journal Designed for You and by You is available too!Both Evolving with Gratitude & Bold Gratitude have generous bulk pricing for purchasing 10+ copies delivered to the same location.

In this special episode, we sit down with Chris Hill, former host and executive producer of Motley Fool Money and one of the most recognized voices in investing. Over his 25-year career at The Motley Fool, Chris co-created five shows about money and investing, hosted more than 3,500 episodes, and interviewed some of the biggest names in business and finance—including Malcolm Gladwell, Michael Lewis, Dan Pink, Becky Quick, and Mark Cuban.Chris is also the narrator of Morgan Housel's international bestseller The Psychology of Money and its New York Times best-selling follow-up Same As Ever. His audiobook narration of The Psychology of Money reached #1 on Audible's Nonfiction bestseller list in 2023.Join us as Chris shares insights from decades of experience, his approach to simplifying investing for beginners, and his thoughts on building financial confidence for retirement. Whether you're just starting your investment journey or preparing for life after work, this episode delivers practical wisdom and inspiration.Timestamps:00:00 – Intro03:03 – Chris Hill's Journey to The Motley Fool08:07 – Money Unplugged Podcast: The Mission, Memorable Moments, & Core Audience18:04 – Simplifying Investing: Chris Hill's Approach20:56 – Investing Recommendations for TRS Members26:04 – Most Common Investing Mistakes Influenced by Fear28:27 – Chris Hill's ETF Choices: Buy, Add To, & Hold Forever31:56 – Making Investment Decisions: The “Circle of Competence”35:18 – Chris Hill's Three Stock Choices: Buy Now & Hold Forever40:19 – Why Consumers Should Read Morgan Housel's “The Art of Spending Money” 44:45 – Finding the Balance: Being Financially Prudent vs. Splurging51:11 – Last Words & Finding Money Unplugged53:57 – OutroAre you about to retire? If you haven't had the chance to meet with us one-on-one in a virtual or in-person format, and are within 2 years of retirement eligibility, be sure to log in to your TRS account online and register for a session today! Are you new to TRS or in the middle of your career? Be sure to designate your beneficiaries as soon as possible in your TRS online account. We want to hear from our members! Please email the show for topic inquiries, questions and comments! Contact us at ⁠⁠⁠⁠podcast@trsga.com⁠⁠⁠⁠. Host: Everett Crockett Guest: Chris Hill, Host of Money Unplugged, Former Host & Executive Producer of Motley Fool PodcastFor more information visit: ⁠⁠⁠⁠www.trsga.com⁠⁠⁠⁠ Facebook: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/trsgeorgia⁠⁠⁠⁠ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@trsgeorgiaInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/trsgeorgia/#RetirementPlanning #PensionPodcasts #RetirementThis podcast is for information purposes only and should not be considered financial, legal, or tax advice. The views and opinions expressed are those of the speakers and may not reflect the views of the Teachers Retirement System of Georgia.

If you've ever wondered why people do the strange things we do, this episode is your new favourite rabbit hole!Today we have Phill Agnew on the show, the mind behind Nudge — the UK's #1 marketing podcast, downloaded hundreds of thousands of times.But today?You get Phill unplugged — telling stories, breaking down psychology, and showing you how a few behavioral science principles can transform your business, your life, your TikTok following and even your marathon time.

Justin Brady builds podcasts & DTC content for iconic brands. He has interviewed the founder of Starbucks and Hint, CEOs of Mattel and GoDaddy, Presidential candidates, Senators, US Ambassadors, #1 New York Times best-selling authors, and cable news personalities. He has written for The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and Harvard Business Review, Brady started The Creativity Cultivator podcast nearly a decade ago with early guests like Matthew E. May, David Burkus, Jessica Kriegel, and Dan Pink. The show would go onto be in the Apple Podcast new and noteworthy charts and the top 1% of podcasts per iHeart Media. Today, Brady has interviewed hundreds of A-List leaders, best-selling authors, CEOs, White House cabinet members, Hollywood celebrities, and billboard performing artists. Brady has hosted numerous livestreams as an anchor/interviewer including a Soar.com stream featuring guest like Rep. Justin Amash, and The Global Peter Drucker stream live from Vienna's Hofburg Palace where he interviewed guests like author Edgar Schein, Pierre Le Manh, CEO of PMI, and Bloomberg Editor, Sarah Green Carmichael. Brady talks to groups on communication and how to use trust channels to rapidly scale relationships. He also leads workshops on content and podcasting strategy. Previous talks have been for Boston Techstars, Nashville Entrepreneur Center, the Minnesota AMA, and Knowledge Summit in Colorado Springs. Brady hosted a talk show on iHeartRadio, interviewing guests like Pauly Shore, Mike Rowe, and six USA Presidential Candidates during the Iowa Caucuses. He wrote on creativity, tech, design thinking, and workplace culture for The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Quartz, The Creativity Post, and The Harvard Business Review. Brady owns Cultivate, a referral-only PR company. His clients have achieved hundreds of millions of impressions in Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, TIME, Axios, CNN, and through top influencers and YouTubers like Mr. Beast. To get in touch with Justin: https://justinkbrady.com/ To connect with Tyler: https://www.tylerkamerman.com/

http://www.sherylkline.com/blogIn Parts 1 and 2, we built trust with Strategic Empathy and Curiosity that Creates Trust. Now we complete the ECO Mindset Model with Optimism… not Pollyanna positivity, but a clear, credible future-cast that aligns what you want, what they need, and what the organization must achieve. Why Optimism (and What It Is Not).Optimism is the discipline of communicating a shared vision, better future, and the path to get there. It acknowledges real pressure and loss-pain, but refuses to leave anyone in that valley. Bring them up to a concrete “what good looks like” vision, so the conversation ends on a crescendo and forward motion. Future-cast the Win (for Them, You, and the Business).Once you've validated what's at risk, ask: “If the end of Q4 were a 10/10, what would need to  be true?” Then paint the joint outcome: what gets protected, what advances, what success metrics we'll see. This shifts the room from defensiveness to determination. Use “We/Us/Let's” to Create Kinship.Language shapes belonging. Replace “I/you” (which can create distance) with we/us/let's to signal partnership and shared accountability. This builds what Dan Pink calls kinship… the sense that we're on the same side, solving the same problem. For example, ‘We can absolutely get that done.' or ‘Would it be out of the question if we spend 30-minutes reverse engineering how to make this happen?'Put it All Together (E → C → O):Empathy (E): “It seems like growth and pipeline are vital, and there's real pressure to deliver.”Curiosity (C): “What would put those goals most at risk? What would make Q4 a 10/10 for you?”Optimism (O): “Let's partner to hit a 10% lift by Q4. Would it be unreasonable to pilot with Teams A and B to reduce exposure, then scale. I'm confident we can make this happen together.” One-page Structure You Can Use Today:Acknowledge the pressure of the OTHER (1–2 sentences).Name what's at risk and what's desired (what they fear losing + the 10/10 outcome).Future-cast the joint win (metrics, milestones, protections).Outline the path (pilot → measure → scale).Invite partnership with we/us/let's and a clear next step. When you close with a credible, shared vision (and a plan to reach it) you're no longer a threat. You're the trusted partner who helps everyone shine: you, your leader, and the organization. Here's to your best quarter yet. Now It's Your Turn.What's one outcome you can confidently future-cast this quarter… and how will you frame it with we/us/let's so it feels like a joint win? I'd love to hear from you!The ECO Mindset Model Checklist (FREE Download).Stop struggling to be heard. Learn the proven framework that helps leaders have maximum impact while building trust and partnership with their managers. Get your FREE comprehensive checklist... everything you need to start building influence today.What's Inside:✓ Strategic empathy questions to ask before every meeting✓ Sample conversation starters and language to use✓ Active listening techniques that build trust✓ The future casting formula for creating shared vision✓ Common pitfalls to avoid (and how to course-correct)✓ 5-minute pre-meeting prep guide

Have you ever found yourself halfway through a concert, dinner party, or even a family gathering and thought, “OK, I'm ready to go now,” even though you're having a good time? You're not alone, and it doesn't mean you're antisocial or ungrateful. In this episode, host Gabe Howard sits down with Jodi Wellman, a positive psychology expert and TEDx speaker, to unpack the surprising psychology behind wanting to leave events early.Together, they explore why both introverts and extroverts can feel this way, introducing concepts like “experience efficiency” and “memory optimization.” Learn how our brains process peak moments, why leaving on a high note can actually enhance our memories, and why you don't have to “get your money's worth” by staying until the very end. Key takeaways: Find out why some people feel “full” on fun faster and don't need to stay until the end to enjoy an event. Reframe early exits as a smart way to manage energy, time, and joy—without guilt. Learn practical language for confidently setting boundaries when you're ready to go, without shame. Discover how even the most outgoing people can feel “peopled out.” If you've ever snuck out of a party, left a holiday dinner before dessert, or wondered why you plan your exit before you even arrive — this episode is for you. “And yes, there is a purpose to the dinner and the tasting menu that goes all the way to the end. And yes, of course, we rationally know that. And yet, those of us who are experience minimalists are still OK to say, I got my fill. I got the appetizer and I had part of the entree. And admittedly, not many of us are kicking back our chairs and leaving halfway through dinner. But metaphorically, this works. When we know we've had our fill and we feel truly good that, wow, I got the songs I needed and wanted or look, I did most of the hike and I don't have to get to the top. I'm cool to go back. I feel good about myself. That's the thing. Are you having a good time and do you want to end on a high? That is, to me, sound judgment about living a life worth living.” ~Jodi Wellman, MAPP Our guest, Jodi Wellman, is the founder of Four Thousand Mondays, a speaker, author, and assistant instructor in the Master of Applied Positive Psychology program at the University of Pennsylvania. Her book, "You Only Die Once: How to Make It to the End with No Regrets," made Adam Grant's Summer Reading List and was a “Top 3 Psychology Book of 2024” by the Next Big Idea Club (curated by Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Cain, Adam Grant, and Dan Pink). Jodi has been featured in The New York Times, Oprah Daily, Fast Company, CNBC, Forbes, Psychology Today, The Los Angeles Times, and more. Jodi's TEDx talk is called How Death Can Bring You Back to Life; with over 1.3 million views, it is the 14th most-watched TEDx talk released in 2022, out of 15,900! Our host, Gabe Howard, is an award-winning writer and speaker who lives with bipolar disorder. He is the author of the popular book, "Mental Illness is an Asshole and other Observations," available from Amazon; signed copies are also available directly from the author. Gabe is also the host of the "Inside Bipolar" podcast with Dr. Nicole Washington. Gabe makes his home in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio. He lives with his supportive wife, Kendall, and a Miniature Schnauzer dog that he never wanted, but now can't imagine life without. To book Gabe for your next event or learn more about him, please visit gabehoward.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“No regrets” is an American slogan along with “No Fear” and “Just Do It.” Yet more often than not we don't “just do it,” having no fear is psychopathic, and having no regrets means you have no sorrow for ever hurting anyone or making a mistake. Regret is simply recognizing sadness or disappointment about something we did we wish we hadn't, or we didn't do and wish we had, and Dan Pink's research showcases it's a massive power if we'll recognize it and learn from it. Not as he says, reject it or wallow in it. The following conversation was my second time having Dan on the show. Dan Pink is a multi-best selling author, and when I say best selling, I don't mean one day on an obscure Amazon book category like Amish Romance, but the actual New York Times bestseller list. You'll likely recognize his books such as A Whole New Mind, To Sell Is Human, and When. His books have sold millions of copies, have been translated into forty-two languages. He also has a TED talk titled “The Puzzle of Motivation” which has somewhere north of 30 million views. I recently saw him being interviewed by Oprah Winfrey. Dan is an author like Brene' Brown who leads with research, and he's now turned his focus to regrets with his new book, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward. I asked him back on the show the moment I saw the book title and you're about to hear me dig in with him on how we can harness regret for our progress, not suffer or run from it. Find The Power of Regret anywhere you get books and connect with Dan at danpink.com Sign up for your $1/month trial period at shopify.com/kevin Go to shipstation.com and use code KEVIN to start your free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This new podcast will help you get your daughter off to a great start to the school year by maximizing her study space, teaching her about the 3 factors needed for optimal breaks, and avoiding procrastination and multitasking. You'll also learn the rationale behind why phones and devices need to be absent from her study space.Related resources:Dr. Jordan's previous related podcast, How To Be Happy, Successful, And Mindful While Getting It All Done With Laura Mae Martinideas on creating a good study space: David Smith, CEO of Silicon Valley High SchoolDaniel Pink book: When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing7 Ways to beat procrastination: Dan Pink video:How multitasking hurts your brain article:Send questions for Dr. Jordan to answer on his next podcast to anne@drtimjordan.comDr. Jordan's new book is now an audio book: Keeping Your Family Grounded When You're Flying By the Seat of Your Pants, revised and updated edition with an invaluable chapter on technologies, social media, and readiness signs for both https://drtimjordan.com Amazon Book Link: Join Our Community:https://www.facebook.com/DrTimJordanhttps://www.instagram.com/drtimjordan/https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-jordan-md-79799120b/

What if regret isn't something to avoid, but a powerful tool for living a better life?In this conversation, Daniel Pink shares surprising insights from his book The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward, revealing how our regrets can help us make wiser decisions, build deeper connections, and live more intentionally. If you've ever thought if only…, this episode will change how you see the past—and your future.You can find Daniel at: Website | Instagram | Episode TranscriptIf you LOVED this episode, you'll also love the earlier conversation we had with Dan about the powerful role of timing in life.Check out our offerings & partners: Join My New Writing Project: Awake at the WheelVisit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

During our time in Maine this month, we had the pleasure and honor to spend time with artist, gallery director, and visionary Whitney Vosburgh. It was a wonderful experience to meet with him in Columbia Falls and tour Mothers Art Gallery built in 1841 and restored starting in 1970. The building has architectual character that includes weathered timbers, rustic finishes, and art displayed with an aesthetic of authenticity and honor to the history of Maine. Here is more about Whitney Vosburgh. He has an MA in Religious Leadership for Social Change from the Graduate Theological Union, and a B.F.A. from Parsons School of Design in New York City, his expertise on  the Future of Work has been featured in four books, including a bestseller by Dan Pink. When Whitney is not focusing on business consulting, speaking, and writing, he can be found making art, and growing Mothers Art Gallery into a destination gallery that brings the best of the world of art to Maine and the best of Maine's art to the world. He does this all in a lovingly restored 1841 barn in the heart of Downeast, Maine. This episode took place inside Mothers Art Gallery on Wednesday, July 16, 2025. Thank you very much to Whitney Vosburgh for his thoughtful conversation and hospitality. Mothers Art GalleryInstagram for Mothers Art GalleryWork The Future: Today

Ever feel like you're stuck in a cycle of powerlessness when it comes to parenting challenging teens? This episode of the "Not By Chance" podcast is your guide to transforming that feeling into a sense of empowerment. Join Dr. Tim Thayne and his wife Roxanne as they explore strategies to help parents become effective leaders in their family dynamics.Discover the power of family-based approaches—Dr. Thayne shares insights from a National Institute on Drug Abuse study showing a 30% reduction in relapse rates with these methods. It's all about involving parents, the most invested stakeholders, in the treatment process. The journey begins with a shift in belief: parents must recognize their potential to influence change. Drawing from Dan Pink's concepts of "grit" and "buoyancy," Roxanne emphasizes the need for persistence and resilience.Consistency is key. Dr. Thayne discusses the impact of applying true principles, even when it feels unnatural. By breaking old patterns, parents can foster positive outcomes in their interactions with teens. Emotional management is another crucial element—staying calm during conversations can transform the dynamic. Roxanne shares her personal experience of giving up raising her voice, highlighting the benefits of calm communication.Trust is the cornerstone of any relationship. Dr. Thayne cites research showing that teens who feel trusted by their parents are significantly less likely to engage in risky behaviors. He offers practical advice on building trust through choices and accountability, using real-world examples to illustrate these concepts.Join us for an episode filled with actionable insights and inspiring stories. Whether you're navigating the challenges of parenting or seeking to strengthen family bonds, this conversation is your roadmap to creating lasting, positive change. Welcome to a journey of empowerment and transformation with the Thaynes.

On this episode of the Customers First Podcast, I engage in a deeply insightful conversation with Jaime Raul Zepeda, a Workplace Culture Architect and Executive Leader. Jaime brings a wealth of experience in enhancing employee engagement and cultivating high-performance environments. We delve into the connection between cultivating a people-first culture and driving business success, exploring how organizations can maximize their potential through strategic people-centric practices.   Jaime shares his journey into this field, sparked by a transformative reading of Dan Pink's "Drive." He emphasizes the importance of making work a fulfilling experience since we spend more time there than anywhere else. We discuss the domino effect of workplace culture on overall happiness and fulfillment, affecting employees and their subsequent interactions in their personal lives. Jaime's passion for fostering environments where people thrive radiates as he outlines his experiences at notable organizations like Great Place to Work and LinkedIn, which ultimately led to his current role in Best Companies Group.   We shift our focus to what a redesigned employee experience could look like. Jaime passionately advocates for a holistic view encompassing the triple bottom line: people, profit, and planet. He challenges leaders to remember that focusing solely on profit can lead to disengagement and high turnover rates. Instead, he asserts the importance of feeding the people within the organization to maintain engagement and commitment. Citing the importance of dignity and fairness, Jaime insists that leaders must prioritize their people's fulfillment to excel in business truly.   Throughout our conversation, we explored the misconception that employee happiness is synonymous with engagement. Jaime argues for a deeper understanding of growth and fulfillment, emphasizing that real challenges, rather than mere perks, lead to meaningful employee commitment. He invites leaders to invest thoughtfully in their people, fostering growth that stimulates pride and mastery rather than temporary satisfaction.   We further examine how organizations can cater to diverse employee motivations by distinguishing between those who seek rapid career advancement and those who prefer steady growth. Jaime explains the importance of personalized development paths tailored to the individual's desires and goals, reinforcing that genuine growth leads to a stronger organizational culture.   Jaime and I tackle the common pitfall of senior leaders focusing too heavily on top performers while neglecting the rest of their teams. He encourages a balanced approach to leadership that equally values all employees, asserting that fostering a culture conducive to everyone's development will fortify the organization against future challenges.   As we conclude, Jaime reminds us of the integral link between employee satisfaction and customer loyalty. He encourages leaders to actively engage with their teams to understand their needs and expectations better. Our discussion leaves listeners with a powerful reminder that adopting a people-first mentality is not just a feel-good approach but a strategic imperative leading to increased organizational success. Jaime's insights are invaluable for any leader looking to create a thriving workplace culture that sparks employee engagement and customer loyalty.   Jaime's Contact Information: LinkedIn: @jaimezepeda Website: https://jaimeraulzepeda.com   Tacey's Contact Information: Website: taceyatkinson.com All Socials: @TaceyAtkinson    Thank you for tuning in, and I look forward to having more valuable conversations together in the future. Remember: Customer-Centric Cultures Create Magical Customer Experiences. Now Go, Create the Magic!

Ever feel like the way you work is slowly grinding you down? In this mind-opening conversation, neuroscientist and author of Hyperefficient: Optimize Your Brain to Transform the Way You Work Mithu Storoni dismantles the industrial-age approach to work.She maps out a brain-aligned framework to tap into unseen wellsprings of energy, motivation and creativity, allowing you to create your best work while feeling fully alive.You can find Mithu at: Website | LinkedIn | Episode TranscriptIf you LOVED this episode, you'll also love the conversations we had with Dan Pink about the scientific secrets of perfect timing for peak productivity.Check out our offerings & partners: Join My New Writing Project: Awake at the WheelVisit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What does soccer, soda, and software have in common? According to Jim York—everything. In this episode, he and Brian Milner break down what great teamwork really means, why shared goals matter more than job titles, and how understanding your team’s unique contribution can unlock better flow and results. Overview In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian Milner sits down with veteran Agile coach and trainer Jim York for a deep dive into what makes real teamwork tick. They unpack what separates a group of coworkers from a high-functioning team, explore the role of shared goals in driving motivation, and walk through value stream thinking using vivid analogies from sports and soda cans alike. Whether you're part of a Scrum team or leading cross-functional initiatives, this episode will help you think differently about collaboration, flow, and how teams can work better together. References and resources mentioned in the show: Jim York Jim's Blog Jim's Video Library Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation by James Womack & Daniel Jones Liftoff Vision: Launching Agile Teams and Projects by Diana Larsen & Ainsley Nies GoatBot Join the Agile Mentors Community Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. Jim York is a business owner helping teams discover how to delight their customers. He uses systems thinking, agile and lean to co-create resilient, learning teams. As a coach, he works with his clients to help them grow in directions that matter to them to achieve their goals. Jim is a Certified Agile Coach®️, holding both the Certified Enterprise Coach and Certified Team Coach credentials; Certified Scrum Trainer®️; Agile Fluency®️ facilitator; LeSS Practitioner. In 2007, Jim co-foundered FoxHedge Ltd with his wife, Melissa York. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian Milner (00:00) Welcome in Agile Mentors. We're back here for another episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast. I'm with you as always, Brian Milner. And today I have the very distinguished gentleman, Mr. Jim York with us. Welcome in, Jim. Jim York (00:12) Well, thank you, Brian. Glad to be here. Brian Milner (00:15) Very excited to have Jim with us. We were just chatting before and Jim and I met years ago at a conference. We got introduced by a mutual friend, Mr. Kurt Peterson, who has been on the show. He came on a little bit earlier to talk about Kanban. And just for those people who aren't familiar with Jim, Jim is a co-founder of a company called Fox Hedge. And he has been an Agile coach, a Scrum trainer for quite a while now and I give him the title Luminary, kind of scrum luminary, thought leader, been around doing this for a while. I hope that doesn't sound insulting in any way, Jim, to call you that. Jim York (00:55) Nope, nope, just trying to shine my light and help others shine theirs. So that's what a coach does. So. Brian Milner (01:00) Awesome, Cool, well, we wanted to have Jim on because we had this topic that it's kind of a broad topic, but it's, I think, actually crucial to today's world. And that's just the broad topic of teamwork itself. So I'll start this way, Jim. I want to get your opinion. In today's world, with the changing kind of landscape with AI and everything else that we see that's kind of influencing how we work, has teamwork had its day? Is it time now for something new or is teamwork still the best way to build things? Jim York (01:34) Yeah, well, teams are universal. I think once you get more than one single individual and you get some task that requires more than what one person can do, it's inevitable. We've to work together. And so I don't see that going away. It might change a bit. But in many ways, think the things that we face today are, in many ways, things that we faced before. They might be showing up in a different way, but I think there's some universality. universality to teamwork. Brian Milner (02:03) Yeah, I agree. And so what do we mean by teamwork? Why don't we define that a little bit for everyone? Jim York (02:09) Yeah, I guess we have to step back and start looking at what's a team. If we talk about teamwork, there's this whole expression, teamwork makes the teamwork. So what's a team? And the classic definition of a team is it's a group of individuals working on a shared goal. And so it's kind of like built into the definition, we're working on a shared goal. So teamwork is that combined action. Brian Milner (02:13) Yeah. Yeah. Jim York (02:32) And so that's kind of the general concept. It's, you know, some of the parts, you know, is greater than the whole. And so it's taking that mix of experiences, knowledge, skills, and bringing them together and having that dynamic, that energy, and kind of focusing it in the same direction. You know, that's really what teamwork is about. Brian Milner (02:55) Yeah, it's good to clarify it, because I think the word team gets quite widely used in today's world. you'll hear people describe that, hey, that's my sales team. When you look at it and how they actually work together, there's not really a lot of teaming actually happening. It's just a group of individuals who have the same job and that. that format. I do think you're right. It's important to understand the difference between that kind of a team and what we're talking about here as a team. Jim York (03:25) Yeah, there are different kinds of teams and people in a sales team, even if they're not working with each other, the fact that they have a shared goal does create some sense of team. And there's different teamwork where everybody's providing kind of their unique thing. And then you have, I think like a team in a rowing, when you have like four people in a rowboat. they might have somebody who's steering the boat, you know, but they have the four people holding onto the oars and, you know, they're working at a similar cadence. You can say to a certain degree they're individuals. I don't know if they're fungible. I don't think they're necessarily fungible, but they're working together to accomplish that shared goal. know, the people in rowing, that's different from people on like a soccer team. You know, on a soccer team, you're... You got the whole pitch, you know, you're all over the place and the ball's moving around and there's this kind of coming together and going apart of various team members interacting at different places and at different times throughout the game. You're kind of acting dynamically to where the ball is and where the opponents are and where they are on the field. And so there's this creativity that occurs there that's kind of a different kind of creativity than you might see in a rowing type of competition. Brian Milner (04:18) Yeah. Jim York (04:42) But yeah, I think there are different kinds of teams, but I think that universal theme of being a group of individuals that are having that shared goal, I think that's the thing that's in common. It's not the nature of the work that some people might call agile versus predictive or planned work. mean, the concept of a team is more universal thing. Brian Milner (04:43) Yeah. Yeah. I like the example of kind of the crew, right? Of rowing and stuff. I think that's a good picture because you're right. I mean, it's very subtle, but there's a lot of combined movement. And if one person is off a little bit, it really affects how others are working. I've used the example sometimes in my classes as a contrast to think about like a golf team. You know, like the idea that you have the group of people who, again, I say this in classes. So anyone listening to this who's a golf expert, it really loves golf. Please, email in and tell me if I'm wrong about this. But this is what I say in my classes. You know, if you're on a golf team, it's a group of individuals who are each shooting their own 18 holes. But then at the end of the round, you just total up the score. And if you have the lowest lower score than another team, then you win, right? But it's, When I'm shooting my 18 holes, I'm not necessarily aware of what everyone else on my team has done or what they're doing at the same time. We don't play off each other, right? I don't take the first shot and then they take the second shot. It's all on me to do my best. And then hopefully everyone else has done their best and we just kind of see how it works out at the very last second. Yeah. Jim York (06:17) Yeah, so teams are different. know, teams are definitely different. And I think it's that idea of the shared goal that is the thing that kind of the glue that holds the team together and that shared goal that can be at various levels. I mean, it can be at this grand big picture level. You know, sometimes what's referred to as a product vision, it can be at a more discrete team level. Sometimes that's referred to as, you know, our our unique contribution to the product division. So that would be like our team mission. And then there's maybe, you know, a specific task. And so, you know, we might be working on a specific, very small, discrete task. And, you know, there's a potentially a group of people working on that thing. And, and, and those people have that shared goal of moving that task, you know, through a process to a completion state. And so there's, there's some variability here in the different kind of levels and Hopefully, there's some alignment between those different levels when you're talking about a team. Brian Milner (07:14) All right, so there's some different kinds of teams and it kind of is wide ranging in how we would describe it. There's different configurations, but we have a single purpose. We're working together towards a single purpose. That's kind of our unifying factor there. So then what makes teams work? What's the glue other than our purpose? How do we actually... Combine efforts, how do we play off each other's strengths? How does that happen? Jim York (07:47) Yeah, well, it depends, right? I mean, that's the classic consultant's answer. It depends. How do we play off of each other? If you're in an environment where you've got a known solution to a known problem and you're just executing steps in a plan, those dynamics are pretty well understood. People in that process can be trained to do different types of activities. They can gain experience in that. Brian Milner (07:50) Yeah. Jim York (08:08) That's a fairly predictable kind of process, but then there are others where it's emergent. And so we have to kind of figure it out on the fly as we go. And even those environments where it seems that we've got a pre-existing solution, there is a very clear variable there, and that's people. People show up different every day. I might have had a poor night's sleep, and people might think, well, Jim's normally fairly easy to work with, but wow, today he's... got a short temper or whatever it might be. And so we have to of figure out on the fly how we adapt to those variables. anything that has to do with people, you're going to have some variability. think stepping back, Brian, I think one of the things that is important to kind of understand or get a sense of what part of the system that we want to understand when we're talking about a team and they are dynamics, they actually are fitting within some sort of product ecosystem. And so where are the boundaries of what we mean by our shared purpose, our shared vision within that ecosystem? There's a classic book called Lean Thinking by James and Womack. And there's a really interesting example, simple diagram in the book of a value stream. And it's a value stream of a cola can. And it's kind of fascinating. You kind of see this very simple value stream in there and it starts with aluminum being, well, not the aluminum, but the bauxite actually being mined. And it goes through a reduction mill and then to a smelter. And then it goes through some hot rolling and cold rolling process. And so finally you get basically rolls of sheet aluminum that go to a can maker and the can maker is cutting the cans that are then formed into the cola can. You know, and that can maker is actually the middle of the value stream because all the things I've described so far are upstream. Downstream of the can maker, once they've made the cans, the cans go to a can warehouse somewhere and they sit there until a bottler says, hey, we need some cans because somebody's ordered some cola. And so, you know, the cans make their journey to the bottler and they get filled and then they get... Brian Milner (10:01) Hmm. Jim York (10:17) go to a bottling warehouse and of course there's transportation, there's trucks carrying these empty cans from the can maker to the bottler and then the filled cans from the bottler to the bottler warehouse and then ultimately they go to some wholesale operation and then to a retail store and then you and I perhaps will go into the store and buy a six pack of cola and we go home and we drink the cola. And so you see this very simple kind of journey, this little value stream. from the perspective of the can maker. And so, first time I encountered that value stream, I'm sitting there looking at the can maker and I'm asking myself the classic question that I ask my clients. One of the first questions I ask is, who's your customer? And so for the can maker, it can be very easy to look at that and go, well, it's the bottler because the bottler is the one who places the orders for the cans. So clearly the customer for the can maker is the bottler. Of course from a lean perspective we look further down the stream We were looking at the end of the stream to see you know, what's what's it all for? What's it all for? And if you look at the diagram you get to you know finally to the end of the stream and there's the home where the person's potentially sitting on their couch and enjoying you know that that cola and so you know if you think about all the different steps along the value stream from the mining to the to the smelting to the bottler and Brian Milner (11:17) Ha Yeah. Jim York (11:38) the can maker themselves, the retail store that's selling the cola. The thing that you would ask them that would be the glue that would hold them together for this would be what Diana Larsson and Ainsley Nees call in their lift off book, the product vision. And so the product vision is really kind of what's it all for? And the cool thing about a product vision is it's very concise, it's very succinct and everybody can hold it in their heads very easily because of that. It's typically one sentence. And so I'm going to speculate this because I'm not a, I'm not part of this value stream where Cola makes its journey to people in their homes. But I'm guessing the product vision for all of these various people along the value stream boils down to something along the lines of our customers enjoy a convenient, refreshing beverage. And so the cool thing about that simple statement is that Brian Milner (12:23) Mm-hmm. Jim York (12:28) If you were to go to the mine and ask a miner and say, some of this bauxite that you're mining, in the context of this soda, what's it all for? Now, they're probably mining bauxite for a variety of different customers and a variety of different products. But in the context of this particular value stream, they could look down to the end of the stream and say, it's all about that person sitting on their couch at the end of a long day who simply wants to have a convenient, refreshing beverage. And so that's what you know, this particular product vision is. And so that kind of calls into view a couple of things. One is context is important. So when we're talking about the product, we have to be very specific about what it is that we mean, who is that customer at the end of the stream, and what is the experience that we want them to have. And so this product vision is, as I said, very simple. our customers experience a convenient, refreshing beverage. Now, that makes it simple in terms of this particular value stream, but it also makes us aware that it's very complex for the miners because they've got to deal with competing interests from a whole lot of different customers. And so if they've got limited capacity, they may be trying to figure out, which customer do we satisfy? And so the usefulness of the product vision is being able to go to that mining company and say, do you find value in, do you want to support this activity of creating this experience for this customer with convenient refreshing beverage? And if they buy into that, if they agree with that, that's your leverage, that's your argument. why you should deliver against this value stream versus some other value stream. Now, you don't always win that argument, which is really what life is about, is we're always dealing with trade-offs and we're dealing with different options or opportunities. And so I think that's one aspect of this. But when we talk about the team in the context of a product vision, The team is huge. The team is absolutely huge because it's not just a can maker and the can maker team. It's also the bottler and the bottler team. It's maybe the truckers union that's providing transportation between these different things. the retail store. It's the retail warehouse. All of them potentially have their own concept of team. And in order to create value, it's not just what you do and provide to your next partner on the value stream. You have to really pay attention to the entire value stream because ultimately anything that doesn't come together in the right way at the right in the right place right time It puts it all at risk It puts it all at risk. So I think it's important that we kind of understand the product vision this highest level glue that holds us together and then at a more discrete level look at your team, for example the can maker and What is their unique contribution? In Liftoff, Diana Larsson and Ainsley Niece call this the team mission. And so what is the team's unique contribution to the product vision? And so for the can maker, it's also fairly simple. It's like, we make the cans. And they could flavor that a bit with, they use the latest technology and they use environment. sensitive manufacturing processes, know, they source things using sustainable, you know, approaches and the like. at the team mission level, we're getting a little bit more discreet in terms of what it is that that team is contributing to the greater whole. So think part of this is just kind of stepping back and thinking about what it means to be a team. Brian Milner (16:12) Hmm. Jim York (16:24) You know, are we talking about we're a team that's the collection of all of these things? At times that might be a useful way of thinking about it. At other times we need to kind put our heads down and focus on what our unique contribution is and make sure that we're doing the appropriate job there. Brian Milner (16:24) Hmm. Yeah, this is fascinating because so what I'm hearing is that really we have to expand our thinking a little bit about teams because teaming teams are, know, in one sense, the small group that you're working with on a on a regular basis, but it's there's a larger team concept as well of the entire value stream from end to end. All the people who are contributing, they all are are working towards that ultimate goal of, in your example, someone having a refreshing beverage at the end of their long, day at work? And how often do we actually realize that or look at that? Are the miners really even aware of the fact that they're contributing to that sort of a larger team goal? I think that's a great question. Jim York (17:21) Yeah, that's an excellent point. And what are the implications of either that awareness or lack of awareness? And I think this kind of comes to play when we think about what motivates teams. If all I know is that I'm mining bauxite, that might work for some folks. That's enough motivation. Sometimes people say my paycheck is enough motivation. Brian Milner (17:44) Ha ha. Jim York (17:45) But if you really understand what it's all about, that maybe ties into a bit of self-worth, that I'm a contributing member of society. It could also help you make the right decisions and perform the right actions if you know ultimately what this is gonna lead to. And sometimes that's a calculation that's done in terms of the quality. of the work that you're doing or the output that you're creating. For certain applications, the quality might have certain characteristics where the quality has turned up very, very high in some areas or maybe it's lower in other areas because it's good enough. And if you overbuild quality, you might be introducing some waste because it's not. It's not necessary for the job at hand. In other places, if you deliver below quality, you introduce some risk that the product is not going to be, or the ultimate customer experience is not going to be what it is. I don't know about you, but I've occasionally gotten one of these plastic soda bottles where they've made the plastic so thin for the soda bottle that the liquid is actually needed inside the bottle to maintain the structural integrity of the bottle. Brian Milner (18:54) Yeah. Jim York (18:54) And if I were that customer sitting on the couch at the end of a long hot day, let's imagine it's a white cloth couch and I'm drinking orange soda and I reach over to pick up the soda and my hand, you know, grasping around the soda bottle, all of sudden the soda bottle just collapses in my hand and orange soda goes all over me and the couch and everything else. mean, that's, you know, there's some quality characteristics, some specifications around that. Brian Milner (19:02) Ha ha ha. Jim York (19:18) container that that plastic container that has to integrate well into the rest of the process. It has to work with the bottler and it has to work with the consumer when they're actually using it. So it's understanding the whole can certainly help teams feel a sense of purpose and also can guide that decision making in those actions around it. Brian Milner (19:30) Yeah. Yeah, I think that's an important thing to keep in mind and remember because, you you mentioned, you know, some people would say paycheck is a motivator. And I, you know, I, I kind of subscribe to the Dan Pink kind of motivation philosophy that, know, that, can only do it so far that it is a motivator, but it is a motivator only to a certain point. Beyond that point, we need more. We need more to motivate what we're going to do. Cause you know, there's a million things out there that can give me a paycheck. I could work in a lot of different places, but I've chosen to do what I do for a reason. There's something that fulfills me from doing that, or I prefer it in some way to what my other options might be. I know I've heard people say this in classes before, the idea of how do you have a vision for somebody who builds clothes hangers? We have this talk about vision, this grand design. Big purpose. Well, how do you do that for someone who has clothes hangers? You know, like I get that, you know, there's not everything, every product in the world has, you know, a save the world kind of vision, right? But I think you can, in your example of kind of the mining thing, I think is a good example of this because you can connect it to that ultimate value. And when you connect to that ultimate value, it doesn't that motivate people more to think, hey, I'm helping someone who's had a hard day. I know what that's like. Have a hard day, sit down on your couch and you just want to relax a little bit. Yeah, I want to help that person. Like that, is something that that'll gets me out of bed, you know? Jim York (21:06) Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I think that does require you to think beyond what we often think of as being the team. Because to make it all come together and result in that ultimate product vision, that, you know, the person having the convenient refreshing beverage, in my example, you know, all of those different parts have to come together. And any one of them, if it doesn't happen, you know, that we don't have that value that's realized at the end of the value stream. And so having that connection to what it's really ultimately about is critically important. And understanding where you fit into that and what your value add work is, I think is critically important. And so we talked about like at high level product vision, we talked about this unique contribution of your team like the can maker, and so our team mission, we make the cans. And then we get to the practicalities of the task that's in flight, the work that we're doing right now. And I think that's a critical piece of this puzzle. What is it that's the thing that's being acted upon right now? The work in process or the work in flight. And depending on what the nature of that is, I think that drives a lot of... decisions and one of them is around, you know, who do we need? So who are the actual people, you know, that have the right skills, knowledge, experience in order to do that work? And also it informs our process and so, know, again, that process could be something where it's a known process and we're just, you know, turning the crank or it might be something where we're having to figure it out on the fly. Regardless of the nature of the work, there's going to be a workflow. When we're trying to get something done, the work is going to be flowing through some sort of process. And it's that flow that really intrigues me. we want to look at the flow, especially if speed matters. And why would speed matter? Sometimes speed matters because customers want what we are building yesterday. So they want it as soon as possible. So time to value is often what's considered there. If we're something new that hasn't existed before, sometimes we're also building quickly so we can get it in front of someone to get their reaction to see whether it's fit for purpose. So we might think of that as being time to feedback. But the flow itself is there's the workflow. And so work, the nature of it is a piece of work is something that maybe an individual can go work on. Other times there's a piece of work that requires more than one person to work on. So there's an element of collaboration with that. Even when it's an individual that can work on a piece of work, usually they've received something from somebody that allows them to start that piece of work. And when they're done with that piece of work, they're passing what they've done along to somebody else and that other person is picking up. So even if... there's an ability to work on a discrete task by yourself, there's still an interaction often on the front end of that and the back end of that. So work is still flowing and we have to figure out how to collaborate in such a way that the work that is not being held up in some queue somewhere where we're getting some bottlenecks and that they're constraints. so figuring out how do you enable the work to flow and how do you enable the people to flow? Years ago, I had an opportunity to coach soccer and on my team, I taught them, in addition to like skills, I taught them three concepts. And so the first one was, everybody on the team should know where the ball is. And so it seems pretty obvious, you should know where the ball is. But if you look at this from a team building software perspective, does everybody know where the ball is? You know, what is the work that's in flight and what's the current state of that? I mean, we use information radiators to try to help people understand where the ball is, but often I don't think we use them as effectively as we might. So I'm always challenging teams to figure out, you know, how do you use your communication systems, your information radiators to enable everyone in your ecosystem to understand, you know, what's the work in flight and what is its current state? And why do you need to know that? Brian Milner (24:55) Hmm. Yeah. Jim York (25:24) Well, if you know where the ball is, you can get a sense of what are the things that are in the way of that ball moving forward. So my second rule for the team was know where your obstacles are. And so in a soccer game, you're seeing your opponents. And so you might have a great plan on how you're going to advance the ball from where it is currently down the field towards the goal. But little problem with that. You've got people on the other team trying to keep you from getting there. So you're having to react real time in the moment to those obstacles. And so in addition to everybody on the team knowing where the ball is, everyone on the team needs to know where the obstacles are. And so when you have that information, and again, for a team building software, this is the kind of thing that should be readily available in some sort of information radiator, real time ability to see where the ball is and to see what's in the way. Why is that important? Well, if you know where the ball is and you know where the obstacles are, you can position yourself as a team member to be what I called the help. And so by the help, that's the one or two people on your soccer team that if you're the one with the ball, you know you can pass to them easily. You know, that they are constantly moving around and positioning themselves to be in the place where it's possible for you to get the ball to them. So who are those two people? Well, it changes depending on where the ball is. And so what the team has to do is kind of get a mental mob. Brian Milner (26:41) Ha ha. Jim York (26:47) in their heads of the actual position of people on the field and get a sense of if the ball's here and the obstacles are here, then I should put myself here. Now, it isn't for all the team members to position themselves to be the help because that would be crazy. Just as we see on Agile teams, when somebody picks up a task, the whole team typically doesn't swarm on that task. It would be too many people on the task. Brian Milner (27:06) haha Jim York (27:16) So who shows up to work the task? The right number of people with the right skills and knowledge. So how do they know to come? It's because the work is made visible. And so they come because they see that they're needed. How fast do they come? Ideally, they're there instantly. Now, why might they not be there instantly? Because they might be working on some other tasks. And so if this were to happen in soccer game, you would see the other opponent, you know, they would be... basically scoring goals against you right and left because when you try to pass the ball, you wouldn't have somebody there to receive the ball. So knowing where your help is, if you've got the ball and passing it to that person helps you continue the flow down towards the goal. So if you're not the person who has the ball and you're not one of those two people that are the help currently, What you're doing as another team member is you are. orienting yourself on the field so that you will be the help when it's needed. And so there's this constant movement of people down the field. And where this really brings it home, I'll use this example, and I'm coaching agile teams, is they'll talk about how all their work and stuff, and I'll use the example of the soccer game and the one ball, and they say, now let's imagine you put two balls in flight. Brian Milner (28:16) Hmm, that makes sense, yeah. Jim York (28:36) Can you optimally move those balls down the field towards your opponent's goal? And typically, there is a limit, right? How many balls can you put on the field? Two, three, 15? It's like, yeah, it really drives home the point of limiting the work in process. the teamwork is made more effective and efficient if we have some sense of where the work is, what is the nature of it so that people can come and go, I call this people flow. so we're looking at things like the, well, out of... Brian Milner (29:05) Yeah. Jim York (29:09) out of the concept of open space, the law of mobility. It's like within our organizations, within our teams, can we have people flow to where the work is needed and also have people flow away from the work when they're not needed? And so enabling that autonomy of the individual to be able to go where they need to go in order to optimize the flow is a... Brian Milner (29:13) Yeah, yeah. Jim York (29:34) is a key organizational design problem. Brian Milner (29:37) Yeah, yeah, this is fascinating stuff. mean, I love the analogy with the soccer teams and that I mean, I, that makes sense to me. I love kind of where you're going with this. If people are hearing this and thinking, well, I like to hear more about this stuff. We're going to put links in our show notes back to Jim's site on this because he's got a lot of blog posts. They're kind of around the same theme on this. And we'll link to those specific blog posts for you so that you can find them. But Jim, I want to be respectful of your time and our listeners' time. So thank you so much for taking your time out to share this with us. Jim York (30:08) Well, I've been very pleased to join you, Brian. Thank you for the opportunity. Brian Milner (30:13) Absolutely.

What if the key to building better teams and products is hidden in our brain chemistry? In this episode, Brad Nelson joins us to break down the neuroscience behind motivation, happiness, and productivity—especially for Agile teams. From dopamine and serotonin to stress hormones like cortisol, we explore how brain science can inform leadership, team culture, and workplace habits. Plus, we connect these insights to practical Agile practices like pair programming, retrospectives, and sustainable velocity. Unlock the full potential of your product team with Integral's player coaches, experts in lean, human-centered design. Visit integral.io/convergence for a free Product Success Lab workshop to gain clarity and confidence in tackling any product design or engineering challenge. Inside the episode... The four key brain chemicals that drive motivation and happiness Why a lack of control is the most stressful thing at work The neuroscience behind agile practices  How to use gratitude, movement, and breaks to boost productivity The connection between stress, cortisol, and sustainable team performance Practical ways leaders can create high-performing, engaged teams The surprising link between happiness, mastery, and continuous learning Mentioned in this episode Dan Pink's work on autonomy, mastery, and purpose - https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_the_puzzle_of_motivation?podconvergence DC and Ryan - https://www.apa.org/members/content/intrinsic-motivation?podconvergence Shawn Achor - https://www.shawnachor.com/?podconvergence Positive Psychology  - https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/positive-psychology?podconvergence Upward Spiral by Dr Alex Korb - https://www.amazon.com/Upward-Spiral-Neuroscience-Reverse-Depression/dp/1626251207?podconvergence Hawthorne studies - https://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/hawthorne/01.html?podconvergence Maslow's hierarchy of needs - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs?podconvergence Meik Wiking and the Happiness Research Institute - https://www.happinessresearchinstitute.com/experts/meik-wiking?podconvergence HarvardX: Managing Happiness: https://www.edx.org/learn/happiness/harvard-university-managing-happiness?podconvergence Book: The High 5 Habit by Mel Robbins: https://www.amazon.com/High-Habit-Take-Control-Simple/dp/1401962122?podconvergence TED talk on The brain-changing benefits of exercise by Wendy Suzuki: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHY0FxzoKZE?podconvergence Book: The infinite game by Simon Sinek: https://www.amazon.com/Infinite-Game-Simon-Sinek/dp/073521350X?podconvergence Peter Senge's “Learning Organization” - https://infed.org/mobi/peter-senge-and-the-learning-organization/?podconvergence Brad's favorite product: Nvidia Shield for streaming content: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/shield/shield-tv-pro/?podconvergence Brad's podcast Agile for Agilists: https://www.agileforagilists.com/?podconvergence Brad's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bradgile/?podconvergence Places to get started on finding a therapist:  Psychology Today - https://www.psychologytoday.com/?podconvergence Better Help - https://www.betterhelp.com/?podconvergence Talk Space - https://www.talkspace.com/?podconvergence Subscribe to the Convergence podcast wherever you get podcasts including video episodes to get updated on the other crucial conversations that we'll post on YouTube at youtube.com/@convergencefmpodcast Learn something? Give us a 5 star review and like the podcast on YouTube. It's how we grow.   Follow the Pod Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/convergence-podcast/ X: https://twitter.com/podconvergence Instagram: @podconvergence

Empathy advocate and author of The Empathy Dilemma, Maria Ross discusses how empathy fosters transparency in leadership. Learn practical strategies to build trust, improve communication, and inspire teams by leading with empathy. Explore how transparent leadership creates stronger connections, boosts morale, and drives organizational success.In this episode: How the definition of empathy has changed over timeWhat empathy means in today's workplaceWhat to do when empathy has been weaponizedThe 5 pillars of empathetic leadershipShow Guest: Maria Ross is a speaker, author, strategist, and empathy advocate. She has spoken in front of TED stages and at top conferences and companies, and she's been featured in NPR, Entrepreneur, and Forbes. Her newly-released book, The Empathy Dilemma, is described as “refreshing” by Dan Pink and a powerful “balance of empathy and accountability” by Dorie Clark. Maria lives in Northern California where you may find her sipping red wine, doing CrossFit, or indulging in a British crime drama.Support the showJill Griffin, host of The Career Refresh, delivers expert guidance on workplace challenges and career transitions. Jill leverages her experience working for the world's top brands like Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Hilton Hotels, and Martha Stewart to address leadership, burnout, team dynamics, and the 4Ps (perfectionism, people-pleasing, procrastination, and personalities). Visit JillGriffinCoaching.com for more details on: Book a 1:1 Career Strategy and Executive Coaching HERE Gallup CliftonStrengths Corporate Workshops to build a strengths-based culture Team Dynamics training to increase retention, communication, goal setting, and effective decision-making Keynote Speaking Grab a personal Resume Refresh with Jill Griffin HERE Follow @JillGriffinOffical on Instagram for daily inspiration Connect with and follow Jill on LinkedIn

Welcome to another episode of the Unmistakable Creative Podcast. In this episode, we're thrilled to have a conversation with Dan Pink. Dan is known for his insightful books, five of which are New York Times bestsellers, and his unique perspectives on motivation and human behavior.In this enlightening conversation, Dan Pink shares his wisdom on the power of regret and how looking backward can move us forward. He discusses his latest book, "The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward," which debuted at No.3 on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction bestseller list in February 2022.Pink delves into the scientific secrets of perfect timing and the importance of understanding our emotional states. He also discusses the concept of intrinsic motivation and its three key elements. This episode is a treasure trove of knowledge, offering listeners the chance to learn from Pink's experiences and insights.Tune in to this episode of the Unmistakable Creative Podcast for an extraordinary exploration of these themes. You can find the Unmistakable Creative Podcast on all major podcast platforms. Don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review! Subscribe for ad-free interviews and bonus episodes https://plus.acast.com/s/the-unmistakable-creative-podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Former Google executive Jenny Wood reveals how traits we're often told to suppress - like being weird, shameless, or obsessive - can become unexpected superpowers for success in her new book "Wild Courage: Go After What You Want and Get It." Through stories like chasing her future husband off a NYC subway and leading billion-dollar operations, Jenny shows how embracing these characteristics unlocks extraordinary potential in work, relationships, and life.You can find Jenny at: Website | Instagram | Episode TranscriptIf you LOVED this episode you'll also love the conversations we had with Dan Pink about experiencing regret.Check out our offerings & partners: Join My New Writing Project: Awake at the WheelVisit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We often hear about morning routines and the best time for certain activities. What I mostly hear however, are people's experiences of what works best for them, and while I'm appreciative they've found what works for them, I'm cautious to take anything and say it's what everyone should do. I am interested in what research actually says though. Dan Pink is one of the most prolific researchers I know when it comes to human potential. I've lost track of how many best selling books he has written, such as A Whole New Mind and The Power of Regret. I've had Dan on this show multiple times, but this recording was my first time with him and it was around a book he wrote titled, When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing. Dan did the literal research to find statistics on when the best time was, for us as humans to perform certain activities. What times were best for certain conversations. Think of it as what time is statistically most optimal. What time will give you the best chance of success to do something. I fascinated myself with it, which is why I'm bringing this episode back for you to benefit from. Sign up for your $1/month trial period at shopify.com/kevin Go to shipstation.com and use code KEVIN to start your free trial. Use my promo code WHATDRIVESYOU for 10% off on any CleanMyMac's subscription plans Join millions of Americans reaching their financial goals—starting at just $3/month! Get $25 towards your first stock purchase at get.stash.com/DRIVE. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Words are worth a thousand pictures by Eli Woolery How does Sir Jony Ive, the famed former head of design at Apple, start every project? If, like me, you guessed by sketching, you'd be wrong. I was surprised to learn when he visited the design capstone class I co-teach at Stanford that he starts all projects by writing. But Jony gave our class a powerful example of why writing is a far more versatile conceptual tool than sketching. He spoke of working with a landscape designer on his property in the UK. The designer could have shared drawings, but instead he wrote about the night garden, and how the flagstones would radiate both the heat from the warmth of the day and the fragrance of the flowers along the pathway. “I write because I realized at art school that you can only draw a small percentage of the attributes of an object. You know, if I were to draw this [holds up a glass], you would understand only 20 percent of its nature. You would have no sense of its weight or material or temperature. You would have no sense of the way that it reacted to its environment. Writing helps me frame the problem. A lot of mistakes are made when you frame a problem, because you could already be dismissing 60 percent, 70 percent of the potential ideas.” —Jony Ive, in an interview with McKinsey Quarterly Free from the constraints that even the best draftsperson would face, Jony and his team can conceptualize not only the look of products, but the touch, weight, and even the emotions they trigger. Perhaps it shouldn't surprise us that good design can start with writing. Good writers are adept at taking an iterative approach to creativity. They create memorable characters through empathy. Their characters evolve, and they often reimagine old stories with new, innovative approaches. “The difference between writers and non-writers is that writers go back again and again. My old classics teacher used to say that the people who succeeded in classics were the people with the highest tolerance for failure. I think the same is true for writers.”—Madeline Miller, author of Circe and The Song of Achilles Madeline Miller is a great example of an author who uses all of these techniques in her writing. Her book Circe takes the titular character who was a peripheral—if important—part of Homer's Odyssey, and reimagines her as the protagonist. Her empathetic approach to the enchantress-in-exile reframes the story in a way that makes us feel a human connection to the not-quite-human character. Professional writers also aren't afraid to make mistakes as they go. Many have a bias toward action, creating the rough outlines (parallel to a prototype) of the work before going back to refine it. “My husband is a master carpenter. When I asked him if master carpenters make fewer mistakes than regular carpenters, he said no–but they recognize [the mistakes] more quickly. It's the same for writers as they gain experience.” —Madeline Miller, author of Circe and The Song of Achilles Former guests on the show, David Sedaris and Dan Pink, shared wisdom about writing that can teach us plenty about becoming better designers. Continue reading this issue of The Brief on Substack

In this episode, Mitch Matthews dives into a common question from coaches: Should you reward referrals with money or gifts? Drawing insights from Dan Pink's book Drive, Mitch explains why offering monetary rewards for referrals can actually decrease motivation. Instead, he shares a powerful and effective strategy that has helped him build a referral-based coaching business—one that feels authentic and beneficial for everyone involved.Learn how to create a win-win-win referral system that encourages happy clients to introduce you to others while keeping the experience genuine and rewarding for everyone. ✅ Why offering money or gifts for referrals can backfire✅ The psychology behind intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation (based on Dan Pink's research)✅ How to structure a referral system that feels natural and rewarding✅ Mitch's personal referral approach that has led to 75–80% of his coaching business being referral-based✅ When and how to introduce your referral program to clients⭐ Leave a review & help others find the podcast!FREE Resources & Links:

In this episode of The Brainy Business podcast, Melina Palmer is joined by the renowned author Dan Pink to explore the intriguing concept of regret. Dan, known for his bestselling books including Drive, delves into his latest work, The Power of Regret, to discuss why this often-dreaded emotion can actually be a force for good. As the episode airs on New Year's Eve, it encourages listeners to reflect on their past year, consider their regrets, and use them as a tool for growth and improvement in the coming year. Dan shares insights from his comprehensive research, including the American Regret Project and the World Regret Survey, which uncovered common themes in the regrets people experience worldwide. He categorizes these into four core areas: foundational, boldness, moral, and connection regrets. Throughout the conversation, Melina and Dan discuss how understanding and embracing regret can lead to better decision-making, problem-solving, and ultimately, a more fulfilling life. In this episode: Discover why regret is a common and natural emotion that can be beneficial if harnessed correctly. Learn about the four core categories of regret and how they manifest in people's lives. Understand how reflecting on your regrets can help clarify your values and guide future actions. Hear about Dan Pink's research methods and the fascinating insights gained from the World Regret Survey. Gain practical advice on how to confront regret and use it as a tool for personal and professional growth. Show Notes: 00:00:00 - Introduction Melina Palmer introduces the episode's theme of regret and its potential power. 00:02:30 - Dan Pink's Background Dan shares his journey as a writer and how he came to explore the topic of regret. 00:10:00 - The No Regrets Myth Discussion on the cultural perception of regret and why it is misunderstood. 00:20:00 - Research Insights Dan talks about the American Regret Project and the World Regret Survey findings. 00:35:00 - Four Core Regrets Explanation of the foundational, boldness, moral, and connection regrets. 00:45:00 - Processing Regret Tips on how to reflect on and learn from regrets to improve future outcomes. 00:48:17 - Conclusion What stuck with you while listening to the episode? What are you going to try? Come share it with Melina on social media -- you'll find her as @thebrainybiz everywhere and as Melina Palmer on LinkedIn. Thanks for listening. Don't forget to subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Android. If you like what you heard, please leave a review on iTunes and share what you liked about the show.  I hope you love everything recommended via The Brainy Business! Everything was independently reviewed and selected by me, Melina Palmer. So you know, as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. That means if you decide to shop from the links on this page (via Amazon or others), The Brainy Business may collect a share of sales or other compensation. Let's connect: Melina@TheBrainyBusiness.com The Brainy Business® on Facebook The Brainy Business on Twitter The Brainy Business on Instagram The Brainy Business on LinkedIn Melina on LinkedIn The Brainy Business on Youtube Connect with Dan: LinkedIn Learn and Support The Brainy Business: Check out and get your copies of Melina's Books.  Get the Books Mentioned on (or related to) this Episode: The Power of Regret, by Daniel Pink Indistractable, by Nir Eyal Your Future Self, by Hal Hershfield Work Well, Play More, by Marcey Rader Good Habits, Bad Habits, by Wendy Wood Top Recommended Next Episode: Time Discounting (ep 328) Already Heard That One? Try These:  Bikeshedding (ep 99) Planning Fallacy (ep 346) Optimism Bias (ep 34) How to Set, Achieve and Exceed Brainy Goals (ep 70) Dominic Packer Interview (ep 178) Other Important Links:  Brainy Bites - Melina's LinkedIn Newsletter The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself Exploit & Explore: Two Ways of Categorizing Innovation Research

Maria Ross emphasizes that true empathy is misunderstood, often confused with niceness or agreement, and instead should be about understanding and acting on others' perspectives.The Empathy Dilemma aims to support leaders in adapting to a post-pandemic world by balancing the needs of the business with those of their employees. The conversation covers five foundational pillars of effective empathetic leadership: self-awareness, self-care, clarity, decisiveness, and creating joy at work. Ross also addresses myths about empathy, including the false notion that empathy is tied to gender. Leaders need to embrace empathy to increase engagement, innovation, and collaboration in today's complex work environment.0:17 The Empathy Edge and Its Impact01:20 The Empathy Dilemma: Addressing Leadership Challenges04:10 Understanding Empathy: Myths and Realities06:25 Empathy in Leadership: Practical Applications07:23 Gender and Empathy in Leadership19:12 The Five Pillars of Empathetic Leadership24:07 Creating a Joyful Work Environment31:19 Conclusion and Final ThoughtsMaria Ross is a speaker, author, strategist, and empathy advocate. She has spoken in front of TED stages and at top conferences and companies, and she's been featured in NPR, Entrepreneur, and Forbes. Her newly-released book, The Empathy Dilemma, is described as “refreshing” by Dan Pink and a powerful “balance of empathy and accountability” by Dorie Clark. Maria lives in Northern California where you may find her sipping red wine, doing CrossFit, or indulging in a British crime drama.Here's where you can listen to her TedTalk. Download a free chapter of The Empathy Dilemma here.Unlock your mental and emotional wellbeing with Emma. Emma is your emotional and mental wellbeing available to everyone. You'll wonder where she's been all your life. Want to give us some love but don't know how? Leave us a review and subscribe on Apple iTunes or Subscribe on Spotify! Mentioned in this episode:Try Emma for Free Right NowGo to Emma at MyEmmaAi.com and sign up for a free trial.

We've curated a special 10-minute version of the podcast for those in a hurry. Here you can listen to the full episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/no/podcast/daniel-pink-regrets-timing-and-the-key-to-good-breaks/id1614211565?i=1000679154334Nicolai Tangen and bestselling author Dan Pink explore the themes of regret, motivation, timing and the science behind effective breaks. Pink shares his perspective on why embracing regret can lead to a richer, more fulfilling life, and explains the importance of autonomy in work, decision-making, and productivity. He also discusses how structuring your day with well-timed breaks can significantly boost performance. Do you know how long the perfect nap should be? Tune in to find out! In Good Company is hosted by Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management. New full episodes every Wednesday, and don't miss our Highlight episodes every Friday.The production team for this episode includes Isabelle Karlsson and PLAN-B's Niklas Figenschau Johansen, Sebastian Langvik-Hansen and Pål Huuse. Background research was conducted by Sara Arnesen.Watch the episode on YouTube: Norges Bank Investment Management - YouTubeWant to learn more about the fund? The fund | Norges Bank Investment Management (nbim.no)Follow Nicolai Tangen on LinkedIn: Nicolai Tangen | LinkedInFollow NBIM on LinkedIn: Norges Bank Investment Management: Administrator for bedriftsside | LinkedInFollow NBIM on Instagram: Explore Norges Bank Investment Management on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this classic episode, Matt talks with Daniel Pink about his book, "When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing."

In the episode of The Leadership Podcast, Jan and Jim discuss a recent study from the Center for Creative Leadership that highlights key leadership challenges at all leadership levels: Poor time management - competing priorities and confusing busy with results Poor people skills - and a lack of self-awareness Inability wield power & influence across the organization Inability or unwillingness to to delegate (aka still doing “old” job) Widespread disengagement Cultures by default versus design. Jim critiques the study, highlighting the blurred distinction between leadership and management, and emphasizes that leaders must delegate and trust others to succeed.  Also discussed is disengagement and trust issues, linking team engagement directly to managerial influence, and the growing trend of side hustles.  Jan and Jim stress the importance of relationships, simplifying business processes, and preparing thoroughly for meetings. They also reflect on how leadership traits, like communication, curiosity, and trust, are essential for building strong teams and organizational success. They emphasize that growth and development come from allowing mistakes and cultivating future leaders, while maintaining a balance between compassion, fairness, and operational efficiency. Listen in for a discussion that is sure to spur more discussion.     Key Takeaways [01:22] Jan starts the main discussion, sharing that the Center for Creative Leadership released a study identifying the top leadership challenges for different managerial levels. He categorized the challenges into three pillars: leading self, leading others, and leading the organization. The key issues highlighted were time management and people (for self), disengagement (for others), and organizational processes. [03:06] Jim adds that the study revealed a common challenge: the ability to influence without authority, which is especially tough at the senior level. He emphasizes how important it is for leaders to truly know themselves and trust others, noting that trust issues are often rooted in leaders' unwillingness to delegate. [04:06] Jim critiques the study, saying it blurs the line between leadership and management. He highlights that frontline challenges like time management and operational processes are more about management than leadership, while the executive-level challenges align more closely with leadership. He believes that leadership and management are distinct but equally important. [07:09] Jim criticizes the second half of the study, noting that it felt like two separate studies mashed together—one based on AI analysis and the other from leadership experts. He acknowledges that while the recommendations weren't bad, the execution of combining the studies felt sloppy. [08:09] Jan expresses skepticism about the validity of the study, pointing out that busy senior leaders are unlikely to fill out assessments. He argues that leadership problems depend heavily on the size and type of company, and a study based on more personalized interviews would have been more insightful. [08:54] Jan focuses on disengagement and trust issues, noting that 70% of team engagement is influenced by managers. He also comments on the increasing trend of side hustles among workers, a lack of trust in the workplace, and how companies often complicate things unnecessarily. [10:13] Jan and Jim discuss how relationships, rather than transactions, drive business success. They reference Peter Drucker's belief that a company is only about marketing and innovation, and that everything else is a cost. Jan emphasizes the importance of simplifying business processes and planning for the future. [11:51] Jan advises that leaders should approach meetings with deliberate plans, rather than winging it, as effective negotiation and leadership require preparation and follow-up. He observes that many leaders fail to allocate time for planning and reflection, which compromises their effectiveness. [13:13] Jim shares his critical take on the article's structure, arguing that leadership qualities are universal across all levels of management. He believes there are five essential leadership traits that apply to all leaders - self-reliance, clarity, relationships, communication, intentionality, and self-reliance as the most important. [16:45] Jim explains that communication is more about listening, being curious, and showing genuine interest in people, rather than focusing on just outward expression. He mentions how great politicians are remembered for making individuals feel like they were truly heard, which helps build strong relationships. Jan shares a lesson about knowing when not to say anything or intervene as a leader, recalling a client situation where skip-level meetings led to unintended consequences. She emphasizes the challenge of staying connected without overstepping. [18:46] Jim reflects on how an executive's presence can sometimes disrupt the environment, making it harder for employees to have open conversations. He highlights the importance of timing and mindful involvement in the workplace. [19:41] Jan raises concerns about the burden placed on employees when others take time off or need accommodations, leading to extra workload and declining morale. She touches on the complexity leaders face in balancing fairness, compassion, and operational efficiency. [21:10] Jim points out that what employees say they want, such as more vacation or benefits, may not be what they truly need. He suggests that sometimes, more guidance, challenges, and communication lead to better engagement and happiness. [21:34] Jan references a quote from Dan Pink, explaining how employers often confuse "hygiene factors" like pay and policies with intrinsic motivators. She emphasizes that while pay and policies shouldn't be problematic, what really drives engagement is helping employees feel appreciated and that they belong. [22:39] Jan and Jim conclude by discussing the importance of trust in leadership. Jan notes that growth and development come from allowing mistakes, which need to be accepted as part of the process. A successful leader not only delivers results but also cultivates future leaders. [24:17] And remember,  the race is not always to the swift, but to those who keep on running. Quotable Quotes "There's management, which is important, then there's leadership, which is different and also important. When you have two of those in equal measure, you're really effective." "If I want people to trust me, I have to trust them." "People buy from people they like, period." "A company is one of two things: it's marketing and it's innovation. Everything else is a cost." - Peter Drucker "You personally need to be squared away for you to lead others. Very difficult to lead others if you're a hot mess." "Clarity of purpose, problem, and potential. You need to know where to focus your time to solve problems and reach potential." "Relationships are everything. If you don't have good relationships, it's very difficult to hold people accountable." "Great leaders are great communicators." “Communication is much about listening and being curious and interested in people than it is about what you say or state.”  “Communication is a collection point for what's in everyone's head, not just an outward projection of what's in mine.” “Sometimes what we think people want or what they tell us they want aren't what they need.” “The race is not always to the swift, but to those who keep on running.”  “We think if we fix pay and policy, we improve morale, when in fact, people want to feel appreciated. They want to know they matter and belong.” “A leader has to grow other leaders. You can't say you achieved results and not have a replacement and say you were successful.” “We need to be more aware of what people need to achieve better engagement and performance. It's not always more money or more vacation.”  Resources Mentioned The Leadership Podcast | Sponsored by | Rafti Advisors. LLC | Self-Reliant Leadership. LLC |  

I couldn't resist the subtitle, kids, sorry. It's not that shocking—but Tim's journey was definitely only for the bold.I've known Tim Grahl—or known of him—for more than a decade. I watched him help writers like Dan Pink launch their non-fiction books onto the best seller list, and devoured and followed his excellent advice about launching my own books (which you can find here at booklaunch.com). Then I watched—or rather, listened—as he pivoted into the world of fiction, enlisting editor Shaun Coyne to join him on a podcast and help him use Coyne's Storygrid method to work on what eventually, after many revisions and a whole lot of failing in public, became Tim's first novel, The Threshing. At the same time, he and Shaun were building Storygrid into what's not just a business, but a huge community of writers and editors. He's just published his second novel, The Shithead, a very different book from the first… I call it The Firm meets The Alchemist; Tim prefers Fleishman Is In Trouble meets Faust. Both work. We talk Tim's sideways journey into fiction, and then we talk craft—in particular, how to learn what you don't know, the myth of the lone writer in a cabin and the importance of feedback and then we dig into a passionate discussion of theme.You can check out The Shithead here. Links from the podBooklaunch.comStorygridShaun Coyne's book, StorygridThe Prince of Tides, Pat ConroyThe Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz ZafonThe Accidental Tourist, Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler(KJ also mentions Redhead by the Side of the Road)The Husband's Secret, What Alice Forgot by Liane MoriartyHeads up! This is probably the only time you'll see this. Join me—KJ—for Novelmber, which is very hard to pronounce but is my word for reclaiming my writing space in November. Think NaNoWriMo, our version—daily challenges and stretch goals, formatted by you, for you.There will be write-alongs, posts, a massive Google spreadsheet for sharing goals and updating progress, thoughts on how hard this is, and more than you want to know about why I need this regroup so badly. All writers, every genre, welcome. This is sign-up only—I don't plan to spam the whole #AmWriting community with my wails of writerly distress daily for an entire month—but it's also for everyone who wants in. I hope you'll join me—I don't want to go this alone. Don't worry, signing up is simple! Here's how:Click here to go to your #AmWriting account, and when you see this screen, toggle “Novelmber” from “off” (grey) to “on” (green).THAT'S IT!Once you set that up, you'll get all future Novelmber emails. Any audio or video will show up in those, along with write-along schedules. You'll also want to add yourself to the Google Sheet where we'll all record our overall goal, day's goals, daily progress and what we're feeling. I've started it off. Join me for the first write-alongs HERE. (That's a link to my Zoom Room.) I'll be sitting there: Friday, November 1 10:30-12:30 (ALL TIMES EST)Tuesday, November 5, 2:00-4:00Friday, November 8, 9:00-11:00 More times coming. Join me, help me, let's make Novelmber WORK! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit amwriting.substack.com/subscribe

BONUS: Unlocking the Secrets to Thriving Workplaces and Agile Leadership with Vasco Duarte In this insightful BONUS episode, Vasco Duarte is interviewed by Bill Fox for an episode on the Forward Thinking Workplaces Podcast. Vasco is a visionary leader in agile and lean software development. Vasco shares his revolutionary approach to fostering innovation, creating dynamic workplaces, and leading teams to success. His strategies are designed for leaders looking to elevate their organizations by focusing on people, purpose, and efficient work processes. Tune in for practical advice on how to unlock your team's full potential and thrive in today's fast-paced work environment. Creating Environments for Natural Innovation “Innovation is a natural human quality; it flourishes when you don't make an effort to prevent it.” Vasco emphasizes that innovation isn't something leaders need to force. Instead, it happens organically when the right environment is in place. He encourages leaders to shift away from rigid structures and towards creating motivating spaces where creativity can thrive. By doing this, teams naturally become more innovative and solutions-driven. “The only way innovation does not happen naturally is if we make an effort to prevent it from happening.” Motivated Individuals: The Key to Project Success “Build your projects around motivated individuals and trust them to deliver their best.” Vasco highlights the importance of centering projects around motivated individuals, giving them the trust and support they need to succeed. According to him, leaders should focus on empowering people, unleashing their full potential. When teams feel trusted and valued, they bring more energy and creativity to their work. “If you trust people and give them the space to perform, they will achieve things you didn't expect.” The Power of Community and Purpose “Aligning purpose with autonomy and mastery leads to engaged and high-performing teams.” Drawing from Dan Pink's model of autonomy, mastery, and purpose, Vasco stresses the role of community and clear purpose in building engaged teams. He explains how people are naturally motivated when they understand the purpose of their work and have the freedom to master their skills. This alignment creates a strong sense of belonging and shared goals within the team. “When people have a sense of community and purpose, they bring their best selves to work.” Defining Boundaries to Foster Innovation “Clear boundaries create a flexible framework where innovation can thrive.” Vasco believes that well-defined boundaries are essential to encouraging innovation. Far from being restrictive, these boundaries offer a structured yet flexible framework that helps teams feel secure while exploring new ideas. When teams know the limits but also have room to experiment, they perform better and innovate faster. “Boundaries are not barriers; they provide the structure that allows innovation to flow freely.” Streamlining Processes with "#NoEstimates" “Focus on delivering value efficiently by reducing waste in your processes.” One of Vasco's most transformative ideas is his “No Estimates” approach to software development, which encourages focusing on value and reducing waste. This method ensures that teams spend their time wisely, enhancing productivity without the guesswork of traditional estimations. It's all about respecting everyone's time and effort while delivering maximum value. “Stop wasting time on estimates and start focusing on delivering real value to your customers.” Leadership Aligned with Employee Purpose “Leaders must understand and align with the purposes of their employees to drive team success.” Vasco shares valuable leadership advice, urging leaders to connect with their team members on a deeper level. By understanding employees' individual purposes and goals, leaders can foster more meaningful and productive collaborations. Open communication is key to building cohesive, high-performing teams that are aligned with the organization's vision. “When leaders align with their team's personal goals, they unlock higher levels of performance and engagement.” Real-World Insights from Industry Practitioners “Learning from practitioners in the field brings fresh, actionable insights.” Through his podcast, Vasco shares real-world insights from a wide range of industry practitioners. These stories highlight different approaches and solutions that have been successfully applied in various sectors, providing listeners with diverse perspectives on innovation and agile leadership. “Every practitioner I speak with offers a unique lens on solving the challenges of modern work environments.” About Vasco Duarte Vasco Duarte is an agile thought leader, podcast host, and one of the pioneers behind the “#NoEstimates” movement. With years of experience in lean and agile software development, Vasco helps teams and organizations improve productivity, efficiency, and innovation through dynamic leadership and strategic processes. He is also the host of the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast, where he shares insights from industry practitioners on agile leadership, team dynamics, and efficient workflows. You can link with Vasco Duarte on LinkedIn.

I'm so excited to share this special 20 min episode stack as a highlight with a powerful message. I'm publishing this curation to help you make the most of your time. The episode features segments from the episode 017, 018, & 019 featuring Susan Cain and the following Aftercast & Solocast. https://richie.libsyn.com/susan-cain-quiet-the-power-of-introverts-in-a-world-that-cant-stop-talking ====== Introversion is not shyness. You can be a shy extrovert or an introvert who is not shy. "Don't think of introversion as something that needs to be cured." What about the Western Extroversion Ideal? The omnipresent belief that the ideal self is gregarious, alpha and comfortable in the spotlight” has pitfalls. What about extroverts who claim to be introverts? Discover the power of Quiet personally, professionally and in parenting.   Erase from your vocabulary, "Now, I want to be someone else" and discover the power of quiet. Includes strategies for parents, children, teachers, in the office, at home and personally. What about introverted parenting? What if you have children with two kinds of children (introvert, extrovert)?    How do you best parent them with the chill time or attention needed? Clue: Don't overprotect them, honor who they are. As Susan Cain says on this podcast, "Introverted kids have a longer runway that they have to travel before they take off and fly...you want to be with them on that runway...and they need to know from you that you really love who they are on that runway with them."   Get ready to spend your time the way you like and not the way you think you're 'supposed to.' Stop denying your own reality of how you want to spend your time and step into your True North of what you'd like to be doing if you could.   Richie Norton interviews Susan Cain author of the bestsellers Quiet Power: The Secret Strengths of Introverts, and Quiet: The Power of Introverts in A World That Can't Stop Talking, which has been translated into 40 languages, is in its seventh year on the New York Times best seller list, and was named the #1 best book of the year by Fast Company magazine, which also named Cain one of its Most Creative People in Business. Her record-smashing TED talk has been viewed over 30 million times on TED and YouTube combined, and was named by Bill Gates one of his all-time favorite talks.    LinkedIn named Susan the 6th Top Influencer in the world. Susan has partnered with Malcolm Gladwell, Adam Grant and Dan Pink to launch the Next Big Idea Book Club; they donate all their proceeds to children's literacy programs. Her writing has appeared in the The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. Cain has also spoken at Microsoft, Google, the U.S. Treasury, the S.E.C., Harvard, Yale, West Point and the US Naval Academy. She received Harvard Law School's Celebration Award for Thought Leadership, the Toastmasters International Golden Gavel Award for Communication and Leadership, and was named one of the world's top 50 Leadership and Management Experts by Inc. Magazine. She is an honors graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School. She lives in the Hudson River Valley with her husband and two sons.    This powerful podcast will help you personally, professionally and in your relationships regardless of whether you lean introvert or extrovert. An instant classic in applicable learning for greater life improvement, happiness and productivity with quiet power. "Embrace the power of quiet."   RICHIE NORTON SHOW COMMUNITY: https://www.facebook.com/groups/richiepodcast   RICHIE NORTON SHOW NOTES AND RESOURCES: http://www.richienorton.com/   RICHIE NORTON SOCIAL:   INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/richie_norton LINKEDIN: http://www.linkedin.com/in/richardnorton FB: https://www.facebook.com/richienorton TWITTER: http://www.twitter.com/richienorton

The topic of regrets has come up in multiple conversations recently, so I'm reposting a show I often reference. “No regrets” is an American slogan along with “No Fear” and “Just Do It.” Yet more often than not we don't, just do it. Nor should we. And having no fear is psychopathic. To me, having no regrets means you have no sorrow for ever hurting anyone or making a mistake. Even if you learned a lot and redeemed some things, I've felt regret has a purpose. Regret is simply recognizing sadness or disappointment about something we did that we wish we hadn't, or we didn't do and wish we had, and Dan Pink's research showcases it's a massive power if we'll recognize your regrets and learn from them. Not as he says, reject them or wallow in them. This was my second time having Dan on the show. He's a multi-best selling author, and when I say best selling, I don't mean one day on an obscure Amazon book category like Amish Romance, but the actual New York Times bestseller list. You'll likely recognize his books such as A Whole New Mind, Drive, To Sell Is Human, and When. His books have sold millions of copies, have been translated into forty-two languages. He also has a TED talk titled “The Puzzle of Motivation” which has somewhere north of 30 million views. Dan is an author like Brene' Brown who leads with research, and my muse in this episode is his book, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward. I asked him back on the show the moment I saw the book title and you're about to hear me dig in with him on how we can harness regret for our progress, not suffer or run from it. Find The Power of Regret anywhere you get books and connect with Dan at danpink.com Sign up for a $1/month trial period at shopify.com/kevin Go to shipstation.com and use code KEVIN to sign up for your FREE 60-day trial. Get 20% off your first probiotic membership order at pendulumlife.com/drivesyou  Kajabi is offering a free 30-day trial to start your business if you go to Kajabi.com/kevin Go to Quince.com/drives for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns Go to cozyearth.com/driven and use code DRIVEN for an exclusive 40% discount Join thousands of parents who trust Fabric to protect their family. Apply in minutes at meetfabric.com/WHATDRIVESYOU. If you're concerned about OCD, visit NOCD.com to schedule a free 15-minute call with their team. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“What people regret over time are things they didn't do. They didn't take that trip, they didn't ask that person out on a date. They didn't start that business,” says former political speechwriter and author Dan Pink. “I think it's because we are slightly over-indexed on risk. We overstate the risk in many circumstances.”In this episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, strategic communications lecturer Matt Abrahams sits down with Pink to hear how we can take more risks and how leaders can inspire others by focusing on the why instead of the how. “There's almost incontrovertible evidence that a sense of purpose is the most cost-effective performance enhancer that organizations have,” Pink says.Episode Reference Links:Dan Pink: WebsiteDan's Books: Website Original Episode: Ep.92 No Regrets: How to Take Risks in Your Communication, Relationships, and Career Website / YouTubeEp.103 Simple Is a Superpower: How to Communicate Any Idea to Any Audience Website / YouTube Ep.80 Magic Words: Change What You Say to Inspire and Influence Others Website / YouTubeConnect:Email Questions & Feedback >>> thinkfast@stanford.eduEpisode Transcripts >>> Think Fast Talk Smart WebsiteNewsletter Signup + English Language Learning >>> FasterSmarter.ioThink Fast Talk Smart >>> LinkedIn Page, Instagram, YouTubeMatt Abrahams >>> LinkedInStanford GSB >>> LinkedIn & TwitterChapters:(00:00:00) IntroductionHost Matt Abrahams introduces guest Dan Pink, a NYT bestselling author and former political speechwriter.(00:01:17) Lessons from Political SpeechwritingInsights from Dan's experience as a political speechwriter.(00:03:58) Speak Like a HumanThe necessity of authentic communication and the power of speaking naturally and directly.(00:07:57) The Role of Immediacy in CommunicationHow immediacy can enhance connection and engagement in communication.(00:09:24) Problem Finding vs. Problem-SolvingThe value of identifying hidden problems in persuasive communication and sales.(00:11:21) Understanding and Harnessing PurposeHow purpose enhances motivation and performance in work and life.(00:15:11) Communication, Risk, and RegretThe impact of perceived versus actual risk in communication and decision-making.(00:20:16) Timing and Breaks for Enhanced PerformanceOptimizing performance through strategic timing and the importance of taking breaks.(00:22:41) The Final Three QuestionDan shares communication advice, a communicator he admires, and three ingredients for successful communication.(00:25:39) ConclusionSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

When your days are full and deadlines are looming it can feel difficult to stay motivated. However, there are small things that can increase your energy and get you through the tricky times. This week, Helen and Sarah talk about Dan Pink's work on motivation and reflect on what they do to increase their purpose, mastery and autonomy at work. They share 6 tried and tested ideas for action that are simple and easy to fit into your day.More ways to learn about Squiggly Careers: 1. Download Squiggly Careers PodBook: https://bit.ly/squiggly-podbook2024 2. Sign up for PodMail, a weekly summary of the latest squiggly career tools: https://bit.ly/sc-podmail3. Sign up for our monthly Squiggly Career Calendar: https://bit.ly/squigglycalendar_signup4. Read our books ‘The Squiggly Career' and ‘You Coach You': https://www.amazingif.com/books/If you have any questions or feedback (which we love!) you can email us at helenandsarah@squigglycareers.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Unsold Mindset: Redefining What It Means to Sell by Colin Coggins & Garrett Brown ABOUT THE BOOK: This Wall Street Journal bestseller is captivating readers of Adam Grant, Dan Pink, and James Clear and has been called "a life-changing book as much about life as it is about selling." What if the greatest salespeople on the planet are the opposite of who you think they are?   Everyone sells, every day. It's why the most successful people are so good at selling themselves, their ideas, or their products. Yet when people hear the word "sales" they think of some version of the overly confident, manipulative, "don't-take-no-for-an-answer" stereotype.  Because of these misperceptions, when they find themselves in a situation where they need to sell, they feel compelled to put on the persona of a "good salesperson."  But there's a disconnect between who we think good salespeople are and who they actually are. In any room, they're not the most self-confident, they're the most self-aware. They're not the most sociable, they're the most socially aware. And they don't succeed despite obstacles, they succeed because of obstacles.   Colin Coggins & Garrett Brown sought out some of the most successful people from all walks of life, including CEOs, entrepreneurs, doctors, trial lawyers, professional athletes, agents, military leaders, artists, engineers, and countless others in between in hopes of understanding why they're so extraordinary.  They found that as different as all these incredible people were, they all had an eerily similar approach to selling. It didn't matter if they were perceived as optimists or pessimists, logical or emotional, introverted or extraverted, jovial or stoic - they were all unsold on what it meant to sell and unsold on who people expected them to be.   The Unsold Mindset reveals a counterintuitive approach to not just selling, but life.  This book is not about "building rapport," "objection handling," or "trial closes." It's a journey toward an entirely new mindset — because the greatest sellers on the planet aren't successful because of what they do, they're successful because of what they think.   Being a good person and a good salesperson aren't mutually exclusive. The Unsold Mindset will change the way you think about selling and the way you think about yourself. ABOUT THE AUTHORS: Colin Coggins and Garrett Brown are long-time sales leaders, practitioners, teachers, and best friends. They met at software startup Bitium, which they helped lead to an acquisition by Google.  They teach the popular course they created, "Sales Mindset for Entrepreneurs," at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business. They are also investors, corporate advisors, and co-founders of Agency18, a firm that helps mission-driven companies adopt the Unsold Mindset.  Sought after as keynote speakers and guest lecturers, they love connecting with audiences from diverse industries, professions, and backgrounds and showing them that it's possible to successfully sell without being someone you're not. Click here for this episode's website page with the links mentioned during the interview... https://www.salesartillery.com/marketing-book-podcast/unsold-mindset-coggins-brown

Big-time institutions are jumping into newly-approved Bitcoin spot ETFs, and that could create trouble for some of the bigger players in crypto. (00:21) Jason Moser and Matt Argersinger discuss: - Why there's so much cash sitting on the sidelines right now, and why it may or may not work back into the market. - Blackrock and Fidelity getting in on the newly available Bitcoin spot ETFs, and how they could create problems for Coinbase. - Earnings updates from industry leaders Prologis, Taiwan Semiconductor, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. (19:11) Best-selling Author Dan Pink takes ideas from his books and applies them to the modern topics of AI, employee motivation, and what the modern office is really for in an increasingly hybrid world. (32:12) Jason and Matt break down two stocks on their radar: Globus Medical and RPM International. Stocks discussed: IBIT, FBTC, COIN, PYPL, PLD, TSMC, MS, GS, RPM, GMED Host: Dylan Lewis Guests: Jason Moser, Matt Argersinger, Dan Pink, Shannon Jones Engineers: Dan Boyd Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices