Ep230: The Performance Paradox – How Only Focusing On Performance Leads to Performing Worse | with Eduardo Briceño

Zack Arnold

Hi, I'm here today with Eduardo Briceño, who's a global keynote speaker and facilitator who guides many of the world's leading companies in developing cultures of learning and high performance. And you're also the author of the new book, The Performance paradox, turning the power of mindset into action. And for anybody that wants to do a little bit of a superficial died before they go right into the book, your TED talk, how to get better at the things you care about, which I absolutely loved, by the way, and your prior TEDx talk about the power of belief combined had been viewed or 9 million times. So Eduardo, as we talked a little bit about off the record before we started, boy, did I get lucky with you falling on our lap, because I am going to thoroughly enjoy today's conversation. I can't thank you enough for taking the time.

Eduardo Briceño

Thanks, Zack, for having me. I look forward to the conversation.

Zack Arnold

Yes so as I had mentioned a little bit before, and my guests may already know this, because I've probably mentioned it a time or two in passing. My bucket list of podcast guests include none other than your mentor, Carol Dweck. And if I had the option to get mutually introduced to Carol Dweck, or Michael Jordan, I'd say, Well, Michael can wait. I'd really like to see if we can get Carol Dweck on the calendar. And the reason I bring that up is because she's a very influential mentor of yours. And she talks about something that's called fixed versus growth mindsets. And she wrote the seminal book mindset, which I believe is the foundation of pretty much anything, anything that you want to accomplish anything that you want to achieve whatever kind of life you want to build, I always tell my students, it starts with mindset. So in lieu of actually having Carol here, because she was so influential to you, where I'd actually like to really start, before we get to the performance paradox and your work, just kind of lay the basic foundation of understanding the importance of mindset, and the difference between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset.

Eduardo Briceño

Absolutely. And yes, I agree with you. For me, growth mindset, and fixed mindset has been completely life transforming. And for me, when I first learned about Carol's work, which was in 2007, I read her book, and I met her, I just uncovered a lot of insights about how I was getting in my own way, and how I was preventing myself from achieving things that I cared about and how I was reacting defensively to feedback. So a lot of people have heard the term growth mindset. And when we ask people what a growth mindset means, for those kind of who know a little bit about or even a lot, sometimes we hear, it's about working hard, or it's about persevering. And a growth mindset is none of those things. A growth mindset is not a behavior. It's a mindset. A mindset, it's a belief is a belief, about the nature of human beings, specifically, is the belief that we can change and that other people can change. And that's important. So it says opposed to a fixed mindset, which is when we believe that we are fixed the way we are like, for example, if we think that we are naturals at something like we're natural leaders, or natural athletes, that's a fixed mindset, or I'm not a math person, that's a fixed mindset, like I can't get better. As a leader, I can't get better at math, either, because I'm really good or really bad, or in the middle. And what what happens when we're in a fixed mindset is, first, we don't do anything to try to get better, because we're starting with the assumption that we can't get better, right? The reason people do things well, is because they either have it or they don't have it. So it's not because of what they do to get better. We also then tend to not take on challenges that we can learn from and that can lead us to greater performance. We react defensively to feedback when other people do things that are not like good things like they, for example, do something passive aggressive, we tend to label them and think of them as evil, for example. So we tend to respond by retaliating engaging in warfare, so it leads to conflict. And a growth mindset leads to us trying to get better to soliciting feedback to better listening to feedback, to asking more questions, to get better learning what other people's preferences are better, engaging in conflict resolution, so that we can better build relationships and collaborate. So there's a ton of behaviors that result from either having this assumption of humans being fit, you know, fixed the way they are, or humans being able to change. And that is, like you said, a foundation of both learning and achievement.

Zack Arnold

The simplest example that I can give of where I believe that I was largely not raised, but just kind of conditioned based on the traditional education system and a fixed mindset comes down to IQ tests and standardized scores, right? I could literally go for four hours and do my own live impromptu TED talk about all the feelings that I have about traditional education, and all the things that are broken about it. But as I was growing up, it was you're in the smart group, you're in the dumb group, you're in the special group based on this score. And by the way, this number doesn't change. Your IQ is always going to be this number. You're always going to be in this range and your standardized test score, and your brain is fixed and as soon as I learned about neuroplasticity, we're literally On a neural level, your brain can change. But just the belief that if I not just apply effort, and I grit my way through, and I persevere, but I changed my belief that things can change. And as I learned, I can improve. My entire life literally changed from that I was in the gifted group, which, you know, seems like it would be a blessing, but it can also be a curse, because that's always just the expectation, anytime I failed, well, then that mean, like using your words, you know, usually I was a winner. But then when something wrong, I became a loser, it became about identity, and not just about performance, or lack of skills or lack of experience. So I don't want to go into this too deeply. And I want to get to your work as soon as we can. But just backup my assertion as somebody that does this for a living in the academic world, about how poorly we are trained in our current educational model to understand the value of mindset,

Eduardo Briceño

Absolutely right on like, you know, just think about the term gifted, you know, you're we're in the gifted group, so that kind of implies that something was endowed on you, and you're special. And that's why you can do these things at a higher level. And when you're doing those things successfully, and getting straight A's, you might feel good about yourself, I am gifted and that might might like, raise your self esteem. But the problem, like you said is when things get harder later, and we don't get an A or we start a job that is difficult, or we get some difficult feedback, then we tend to say, oh, my god like this, either this person is not saying something that's true, can you we're trying to react defensively protect our ego, or okay, I'm not this good. So I'm going to shy away from this challenge, I'm going to stay within my comfort zone. So we become more fragile, right, we stay within what we know how to do and what's comfortable to us. So there's a lot of things about the education system that tend to put us into a fixed mindset. And also, you know, the a lot of these things are unintentional, we all have kind of our best intentions also in our homes, right? In our homes. We might praise kids for being smart, for example, you know, they do something well and quickly and without effort and without mistakes. And we say you're so smart. And when we do it with our best intentions, thinking that will raise their confidence. And they'll be able to go after hard things because they're smart. But the reverse happens, right? they shy away from challenges, they want to continue showing and proving rather than improving. So they stay within what they have already done well, so that they can continue to be told that they're smart. And when they encounter challenges, they are a lot less resilient, they shy away, they don't want to try anymore, because if they try and fail, it makes them feel not smart.

Zack Arnold

What I learned through years and years of conditioning, I learned how to do what I was told show up on time, complete all of my homework completed at a high level because I do have a certain Scholastic Aptitude, right, that is just an advantage that I was given by genetics. But given all that what I really learned how to do was the formula and the habits necessary for a certain type of success. And then the giant rude awakening that I had was that the most fundamental skill that I'd never learned that was never developed, that was never impressed upon me, is the skill of learning how to fail. I was really good at success. And I was horrible at failure. And that was when I started to dig into this idea of mindsets and realized that failure is the key like that. That's the secret weapon. So now when people ask me, you know, what's different about you and I what differentiates the success that you've had in Hollywood, or as an online podcast or entrepreneur, the first thing I say is, there's nothing special about me, I am no different than anybody else. The difference is, I'm willing to fail faster than you are. That to me has been the key, which was the shift from fixed to growth mindset.

Eduardo Briceño

Absolutely. And, you know, you brought genetics and to that point, growth mindset doesn't mean that everybody kind of is born the same. And we're all just a product of our environment. And what we do, we there are genetic differences. But the thing is that each of us can significantly get a lot better in anything, or in lots of different skills and qualities. And, and if we focus on that, then we grow a lot more, and we achieve a lot more and the people who become the best in the world, they all work to get better. Because if you don't, then you're never going to be you know, a very, very skilled person. And to your point about failure. Yes. You know, when I was doing the research for this book, I learned, I knew mistakes and failure were were important. I've talked about even those in those in the TED talks he talked about, but I didn't know how important it was. So it turns out that you mentioned neuroplasticity, our brain, a brain. Neuroplasticity works from just experience up to the point of our mid 20s. So if we just walking around the world and we're seeing things our brain is reconfiguring just from observing and then being part of those experiences until our mid 20s. From our mid 20s On the way the neuroplasticity works, kind of changes and then that doesn't happen as much and what the way that it acts To change the brain changes is from mistakes and failures. So it's from making predictions that turn out not to be true. And that surprises and we realize, oh, wow, like, this is something that I thought worked differently. And now, I realized that things are actually different than I thought. So to your point, whether it's entrepreneurship or, you know, creative endeavors, I mean, those are two fields, where failure is so important, because we are going into uncharted territory, right? We have to test we have to iterate. And that's about experimentation, doing things that may or may not work, and learning from failure and getting better along the way.

Zack Arnold

So one of the things, one of the most important questions that I want to make sure we answer by the end of this conversation is how do we create an environment and create habits that are going to lead to this consistent learning and failure and growth, but I feel like that's a little bit further down the road. So I want to put a pin in it. But what I want to dig into a little bit deeper, and this is going to be kind of threading your narrative with my narrative. So I'm going to do this is definitely as possible. But I believe one of the areas where the education education system has massively failed us, and it has really helped succeed for those, you know, the top, not even 1%. But point 1% of people that are owning all of these companies and corporations and businesses, is the amount of specialization where from preschool, the first question we're asked is, What do you want to be when you grow up, and then we have to be in a specific magnet program by middle school, we have to know what our college is by high school. And we have to have a major by the time we're 19 years old, and know the direction of the rest of our life, which has served the factories in the industrialized system and the corporations very, very well. But I see this transition now back to generalization with the advent of artificial intelligence, and just frankly, the economy, in general becoming much more gig based and having more of a broad diversification of skills. So I want to get a sense from your mind, how we can apply this idea of the growth mindset to navigating all of this, but also at the same time helping us better understand how much of this really is, I just need a different mindset. And I can make anything happen? Versus I do have natural talent or aptitude? Because like you said, it's a little bit of both. But how do you just not fall into the trap of Well, I'm just a naturally gifted athlete. So I guess that's what I need to work on versus, well, I'm not as naturally gifted in this thing. But I'm more passionate about it, we're really going to have to diversify both what we're already naturally good at and the things that we have to learn. So I realized there's a lot there. But the simplest version of it is how do we apply these idea of these two different mindsets, to lead us to deciding what we want to focus on next? And thus learning more about this performance paradox? Which is where we're going, you know, right after this?

Eduardo Briceño

Sure. You know, it's, there's a lot there. Yeah. So let me start kind of with this education system, I completely agree with you. So first of all, schools haven't been tasks with developing learning skills, right, which is, I think the most important thing that schools could do is develop us as lifelong learners, people who are skilled in continuing to develop whatever we want to develop throughout our lives, and our interests are going to change our passions are going to change, we're going to be discovering new things, and wanting to do new things in the world. How do we develop those skills as we go through life, schools are not designed to they're not even like tasks to do, that's not the goal. So I like many other people, I was a very curious and creative little kid, until I got to school, you know, when I got to school, then I started learning things that were irrelevant, that were not useful. Anyway, it became kind of rote learning doubt, where the goal was just to get a good grade and pass the test and go to the next level. And so the most influential thing that I learned in school is that learning sucks is that learning is boring. It's irrelevant, is useless. And what a tragedy, right? And so I think, in the ideal world, we would want to just nurture that. And there's research that shows that the number of questions that kids ask every day drop precipitously when they start going to school, right, because they become a lot less curious. And so ideally, you know, we would want to be in an environment where we can identify what we're interested in and explore, and tinker and do projects around those things, and just pursue our interests. Right. So to your point about, you know, how do I determine what I want to do in my life and what I want to pursue, I think that what we're interested in what intrigues us is so, so powerful, and we can become great at it. Because becoming great at something requires huge commitment. It requires passionate it requires thinking about these things, not just at work, but when we're having fun and when we're going out for a walk with friends or whatever. And it also doesn't mean that we are only focused on that narrow thing to your point, like the breath is so so important. If you look at the Nobel Prize winning scientists, they're about 20 times more likely to engage in hobbies in the arts and the performing arts than other successful scientists or the general public. And so You know, Einstein played the violin. So when we cultivate our curiosity to ask questions to wonder to learn things that we have never been exposed to before. First, we connect things that have never been connected before, which leads to creativity and innovation. It gives us ideas for the craft that we do, right. But also it makes the process so much more joyful, it makes it makes work and life more full and more interesting and more fulfilling, because we're constantly discovering and being in all an amazement, so the understanding that the focus of our attention, that we can learn how to do the things that interest us and intrigue us and explore those things and tinker with, you know, what might be here? And what might this lead me to? Or just for the benefit of, hey, I'm curious about this question. Let me spend an hour or an afternoon looking into it or asking questions about it, that leads to, you know, incredible fruits afterwards.

Zack Arnold

If we didn't have another 64 minutes, I'd say that was a mic drop moment. And it was amazing having you here today, I've already done I've already I've reached all of my objectives, and you completely hit a homerun on my point. And I've never heard somebody put it so succinctly. And I'm probably going to outright steal this is that the only thing that schools taught us is that learning sucks. That is such a perfect encapsulation of it. Because what we don't learn how to do is learn, we learn how to regurgitate, we learn how to retain information. And given all the technology we have available to us today, all of that is absolutely useless. We don't need to retain information, we have phones that can do that we now have AI that can even synthesize basic ideas that have been synthesized before, our ability to learn how to learn is what's going to set us apart and allow us to chart these new paths. And the reason that I'm really hitting this point home, is because I hear so many of my students and my clients that say, Why am I struggling so much. And I reset the expectation, you should know how to do this, because you've never been taught it. And that's a big aha moment where it doesn't matter if you're 20 or 30, or 50. Just because you've been doing it for a long time, doesn't mean you get better at it, which is the perfect segue to understanding the difference between learning and performance. Because I had this debate all the time. But I didn't have the framework that I have now because of you. So talk to me about what you call the performance paradox.

Eduardo Briceño

Sure. And just to be very clear, because I think you and I both, we don't mean that educators are evil or doing a poor job, it's just that the system is not set up, or the goals of schools and education is not to develop lifelong learners, that's not in the standards that's not in what schools are being asked to do. Right. And there's a lot of systems around other goals that make the educators role, you know, difficult but you know, that said, we can continue to grow as educators just like in any profession, we can get better at what we do, we can work within the system and within the confines and the constraints, and foster a growth mindset and creativity and passion in our students too.

Zack Arnold

I'm glad you said that. And I actually I want to interrupt you for a second because I need to emphasize this too. For those that don't know, my wife is a third grade teacher, my father's a teacher, my mom was a teacher, my sister is a fourth grader. Third, I don't know if some elementary school teacher. So I just I want to make make it clear that if anybody didn't get the sense for me, and you help correct me, this isn't about the teachers, this is about the system and the way the system is designed. And I've had this conversation with my wife more than once, where I tell her that the vast majority, especially now with the advent of AI, the vast majority of what you're teaching your students in third grade, they're not going to be able to use and it's not going to be useful to them when they graduate high school. The reason you're such a great teacher is you instill the belief in your students that they can you instill the belief that somebody cares about them and wants to see them succeed. But her teaching, you know, civics or whatever this or that, or the other thing, the system itself is the problem and not the teacher. So I'm glad you emphasize that, because teachers and teaching is my entire livelihood. My problem is with the system, that's where my frustration is,

Eduardo Briceño

Yes. And hopefully will continue to change the system. And I've been to the White House a few times to convenience about this. And I do think that, you know, policymakers are making progress and and will continue to make progress around us. And my wife was a second grade bilingual teacher. She's a professor of education now. So I am passionate about education as well. But one of the things that happens in school and the system and this gets to your question about the performance paradox, is that very often what students are doing in school is doing something for a grade, right? They are tasked with something that is going to get great and it's going to get a number or a letter on it. So what message does that send that sends the message that what we want kids to do is to be able to be doing everything well all the time, ideally, perfectly. Ideally, we want them to get 100 on everything they're doing every day. And that sends the message that we want them to be doing things they already know how to do not things that they don't know How to do that they're grappling with that they're making mistakes with like to your point about failure, so that we can learn from where those mistakes are examining them as Oh, this is where I went wrong, this is how I can get better, right? And so instead in school to start in schools, and then we can talk about kind of what the implications are for us now, instead, what could happen in school is, most of the time should be focused on learning, which means students should be doing things they don't know how to do making lots of mistakes, think talking about those mistakes and examining them. So if if we put a problem in front of a class, and a lot of people don't know how to do it, we shouldn't ask who knows how to do it, have them explain how to do it, and then move to the next problem. Instead, we should think about all the and examine all the problems that happened and and examine them and think about where did this go wrong? And what can we learn from this, and let's think about this mistake. And let's, let's talk about mistakes, a lot more than let's talk about how to do it. Right, right. And so the distinction between those two things, is what I call the Learning Zone, which is when we're focused on learning, we're doing things we don't know how to do, we're going beyond what we know, that's when we're focused on improvement. And the performance zone, which is when we're we're assessing ourselves, we're testing ourselves, we're trying to get things done. So to make an analogy, in sports, for example, if you're playing a championship final, it's a high stakes game where then you want to when you're in your performance zone, you're trying to do the things you already know how to do well, if you're having trouble with your topspin serve in tennis, you're going to avoid that move during the match. Because all you want to do is win. But then after the match, you're gonna go to your coach and say, Coach, I have to work on my topspin serve, let's let's spend an hour working on that. That's a very, very different activity and area of attention than what we do during the match. And the best tennis players are any athlete, they get so good because they spend a lot of time in the Learning Zone working on how to improve, which is different from executing and performing. And for most of us in work and life, we get stuck in the performance zone, just always trying to do things as best as we know how trying to minimize mistakes. And that leads to stagnation. So the performance paradox is the counterintuitive phenomenon that if we just get fixating on performing, our performance suffers, our results are lower, if we're only focused on performance.

Zack Arnold

Yeah, and the counterintuitive thing about this that I found so fascinating, both in the work that you've done, but just discovering this over and over and over, as we make the assumption that those that are new to something, they're the ones that are doing all the learning, then you crossed this threshold, where now you're elite. But the craziest thing that I've seen over and over and over across multiple disciplines, and music and sports and everything else is that it's the absolute best that whether they've won or lost, they break down the game tape, so to speak afterwards. And you gave an example, in your TED talk about Beyonce, because you think, Well, if there's anybody that's achieved a level of perfection and only needs to show up performing, it's Beyonce, she's the best in the world at what she does, or maybe now number two to Taylor Swift. But if we're talking about Beyonce, she clearly just chills out after she's done with a performance right?

Eduardo Briceño

And right now, so yeah, Beyonce after each performance, she goes to her hotel room, and she reviews tape, she reviews a video of the performance, she makes notes, lots of notes about what could be improved, whether it is her hair, or her movement, or the lights or people around her. And she shares notes with everybody in her team so that the next day, they can work on some things before the next performance. So it is the performance is the performance zone. They're trying to do things as best as they can. But then afterwards, they are doing things very deliberately to get continue to get even better. And those people to your point that are fantastic. And the best of what they do, they continue to work to get even better.

Zack Arnold

So having said that, if we're looking at whether it's Beyonce, like Kobe, LeBron, they're all the kind that like they they win the championship. And then next morning, they're figuring out what do I need to do better between now and next year, which to, you know, a lay person would seem absurd, what one of the things that drives me crazy, and I'm going to do my best that I could on a soapbox and turn into a grumpy old man. But I might for a few minutes here and there. It's when I see people that are more seasoned or experienced in an industry and I see this in Hollywood all the time, that are responding to questions or comments in social media. They say, I've been doing this for 30 years. And my response is, it doesn't mean you've been doing it well for 30 years or renewing it right. Like I've had a driver's license since I was 16. I'm not ready for NASCAR. Right? So let's dig a little bit deeper into the differences between the learning and the performance. And and so people realize that experience does not equal expertise or the fact that they're moving forwards.

Eduardo Briceño

Absolutely. You know, it's to your point about the difference between experience and expertise. There's research out of Harvard, they took over 60 research studies that looked at the relationship for for doctors for medical doctors, between experience, which is the years on the job, and expertise, which is how good they are at their job, their patient outcomes. And what they found is that on average, the more years of experience that medical professionals were on the job, the worse their patient outcomes, they actually became worse over time, on average, obviously, not everybody, there are doctors that have great learning habits, and get better over time, and better and better, just like Beyonce or Kobe, right. But on average, they got worse, because they're so busy executing, performing seeing patients, right diagnosing, prescribing, treating that, and they do it with their greatest care, because they care about patients, and they want to help people, right. But what happens is that first the world changes, right, and new technologies happen, the world changes in different ways, and we're kind of staying stuck behind. But second, they forget information that's relevant to infrequent diagnosis, so that when somebody comes with an infrequent illness, they might not realize it, whereas somebody who is kind of fresh out of school kind of will remember that better, because they just studied it more recently. So that happens in you know, whether it's in chess, or in surgery. And so there's a difference, right? It doesn't mean you can become really skilled, pretty young, if you're a really great learner. And of course, you can always continue to get better. But it involves being deliberate about continuing to get better. And to your point about when leaders whether they have 30 years on the job, or two years on the job, when leaders act like no adults, that's very detrimental to their teams and their organizations. Because that's what other people emulate, right? People say, Okay, in this organization, what what gives you status is to know a lot and to be annoyed or to be sure of yourself and not to listen to other people. So that's what I'm going to do to, that's when it becomes no IT organization. You know, it just the organization doesn't change doesn't learn and goes under.

Zack Arnold

Yeah, so this is not a thread that I want to pull on. Because I don't know this for certain, but I have a feeling the mention of this alone could lead to a two hour conversation, I'm going to put a link in the show notes to something that's called the Dunning Kruger effect. Because the Dunning Kruger effect when you think I know it all, that's actually peak stupidity. And the more you learn something, the more you realize how little you actually know. And this is going to be a little bit of a deviation from that. Because again, this could be an entire conversation. But one thing that I want to bring up specifically about the value of learning and how it relates to performance, I had a realization give or take maybe five to 10 years ago, that I had crossed that threshold from I was no longer learning and growing and excited about the craft and learning new tools. I was now the curmudgeon that didn't want to learn the new tools. And I realized, I don't want to be in the learning zone with what I'm doing anymore. I'm at a high level on the performance zone. But as soon as I lost the interest in going back to the Learning Zone, that's when I said it's time to do something else. And now that I've very much diversified, not just editing television and movies, but doing the podcasting, doing the writing, doing the coaching, doing American Ninja Warrior, all these other things. The value that I've seen in diversification is 100 fold. Because there's always something new for me to learn that motivates me to learn something else. And you may be familiar with David Epstein, who wrote the book range and other person on my podcast bucket list. I really want people to better understand both the value of diversification and this first mover's advantage, specifically now that we're moving into this world of the AI revolution for creatives. And the reason that I think it's so important to bring you on to talk about this is because the most important thing we have to be willing to embrace in this transition is learning and failure. So talk to me a little bit more about how this diversification of interest and this desire to learn ultimately is going to allow people to learn better, but it might not be the straight and narrow path right to the shore.

Eduardo Briceño

Great. Well, if I had a podcast, David Epstein would also be in my podcast, bucket list as Carol Dweck, that's a great book range. And so to your point, you got to the point where you didn't have that passion to continue to learn the skills that you already were executing at a very high level of performance. One thing that I want to point out about that is that a growth mindset or a learning orientation doesn't mean that we need to be learning everything all the time. In fact, that's not effective, right? To try to just learn everything all the time, that that's just doesn't make sense. We have to be strategic. I mean, exploring and tinkering broadly and following our curiosity is great, but also if we want to become great at something that we're interested in and passionate about being also having some focus and choosing what things we want to get better at is also something that I have a lot of value. So what I heard from you, is you develop some great skills in editing and production and media and Hollywood. And you probably use a lot of those skills today. Right you've you have expanded and you have learned new skills and use them in different ways and connected those new skills with the with the skills that you build earlier on in your career. That's, that's wonderful. So there are things where we might make the choice like you probably have of, okay in this particular area become really good at. And I'm going to be more in the performance zone in this skills because I'm going to focus my learnings on on these other skills and the combination of the two are going to bring something special, you know, a podcast, Optimize Yourself that is going to be kind of different and at some some unique value to the world. So yes, when we broaden our horizons, there's a lot of benefits that come from that we connect the disconnected, we have a greater understanding also of how systems work. And Systems Thinking is a really important way to solve problems and to lead to creativity, right? If we understand how the world works, how, how different things connect to each other. And that enables us to better contribute in in ways that are different than if we just work in silos, you know, without a broader view of the world.

Zack Arnold

Yeah, and speaking of connections, and a totally shameless plug in to help the listener navigate a couple of these things. I could talk about systems for days and days. And I have, so I'm going to link to the episode that I did, talking to James clear about habit building and systems building. I'm also going to link to an episode that I did with Joey Cofone. That's all about the laws of creativity and how you can break down. Creativity is not just generating new and original ideas, but combining existing ideas. So I just want to make sure anybody that's like, Oh, this is fascinating. And I want to go deeper, and tell that David Epstein episode exists, and it will exist, trust me at some point. But I want to send people both to James clear to learn about systems joy kufan, to learn about creativity. But going back a second, I think this is going to be really valuable to hit this point home, where you had said, you don't have to learn all the time you still need to perform. Here's the realization that I had, and it took a while to get there. When I was younger. Yeah, there were times or performance, like I've got a big episode or a big film, and I gotta be in performance mode, and I gotta cut and I gotta meet deadlines. But as soon as the pressure was off, it was always what's next. What can I learn next? What's the new tool or I'm gonna watch action movies all day long to understand how action montages are cut together or music choices are made. But then the transition happened, where as soon as I was out of performance mode, working on a big TV show, it was, I want to learn WordPress. And I want to understand how to build a podcast and there's a part of me that's like, What is wrong with you? You're so scatterbrained, can you just can you stay focused on the task at hand and keep in stay in your lane, right? And I didn't realize how valuable now in hindsight, 10 years later that diversification was. And I started to follow that intuition more and more, where if I have this idea that I want to learn or a skill I want to develop, it's not a matter of stay in your lane. That's not what you do anymore. This is the thing you do. I can't imagine if I hadn't pulled on the thread. Well, what if I wanted to learn to become an American Ninja Warrior, that one thread changed my whole life, but I didn't believe I had permission. Because it's always about do your one thing and stay in your lane. But the level of diversification that I've gotten has served me so well. But it really was that realization of I wanna learn, I just don't want to learn this thing anymore. And it took me a while to give myself permission to do that.

Eduardo Briceño

Yeah, I can resonate with what you're saying. And one thing I want to point out is, you know, we can think about the learning zone, the performance zone, as we're either learning or performing. And sometimes that's true, we can dedicate some time only to learning and some time only to performing. But for most of us, the biggest opportunity is in combining the two and learning while doing we don't actually learn by doing simply by doing something, we learn only if we're novices, once we become proficient just doing something, it's going to not make you get better unless you do it in a way that's deliberate to improvement. So we need to be trying something different right to taking, making doing an experiment, soliciting feedback, thinking about the mistakes that we're making, and what we can learn from them. Those are things that are different than simply doing. But But for most of us, you know, we were so busy getting so much done. It's it's out pain, trying new things as we're doing those things, experimenting, and tinkering with new ways of working so that we can get better over time. So we're combining learning and performing at the same time as we're getting things done. Sometimes it is time to just focus on performing and not worry about learning. And those times or a either when the stakes are really high, right? If you're doing something that if you make a mistake, it's going to have big consequences, you're going to try to minimize mistakes. So you're going to try to focus on what you know, works. So that's one and the second is sometimes we can make kind of a tactical decision to just focus on performance when the short term goals are really important. You know, we have this week we have to get this really important thing done. And I don't have enough time I'm not going to sleep enough so I'm just going to focus on performing and getting it done. But if we do that every week, then we stagnate.

Zack Arnold

So I was gonna say that's basically the story of most people's lives right now. Have you seen my calendar? Where exactly would you like me to fit learning when all I'm doing is keeping my head above water. It's performance mode 24/7. As soon as you meet one real unrealistic expectation, well, then today's miracle becomes tomorrow's expectation, Rinse, lather and repeat. So how do I learn more effectively in this environment of doing doing doing 24/7?

Eduardo Briceño

Yes, the first step is there a realization that if we are in that hamster wheel, if we are treading water, the realization that if we continue in the same way, we're gonna continue in this hamster wheel and treading water, right. So that's the first step is is identifying the problem. And identifying that, if I find a way to embed a little bit of learning every day, or every week, and I start getting better, then I'm going to be able to get more results in less time, which is going to make a bit more time for both learning and performance, it's going to make even a little more time right out to get more results in less time. And then it's gonna get easier and easier to accelerate and get better over time. I call that the flywheel of competence. So the flywheels are like really heavy wheels that are hard to start turning. But when you start turning them, like just the angular momentum is easier to turn and turn and turn until they become unstoppable. It's hard to stop them, right. And that's when we start embedding, kind of learning how to into the way we do things and the way that we live and we work, then we get into the flywheel of competence, and things become easier and easier over time for us to become more skilled. And so the way to start is to start with something quick and simple. Right. And that doesn't take a lot of effort to your point about James habit, James clear and atomic habits, or BJ Fogg and, and tiny habits, you know, we can identify what is something really quick and easy that I can start doing every day, that is, doesn't take much time at all. And then that's going to start a seat, right, and it's going to be a lot easier for us to expand from there. Something really quick that any of us can do everyday that I think is really powerful, is to remind ourselves every morning of what one thing we're working to improve, just like write it down on a piece of paper, look at it at the same time in the morning, every day, that's gonna see your intention to get better at something, it's going to help you notice opportunities to get better at that throughout your day as you go about your day. And that's going to prime a growth mindset and the learning zone. And that's a great way to start.

Zack Arnold

It's funny because we're basically going to be establishing a table of contents for all of my favorite episodes. For anybody that wants to learn more about the one thing, visit my episodes, Jay Pappas and talking all about one thing, either you've reviewed all my episodes already, or clearly you and I are operating on the same wavelength. But this is the foundation of everything that I teach is you got to break it down into little pieces. And I have found that for me, and I think for most of the students in my program, that little place to start is a podcast interview just like this one, where you hear the conversation, we're going to talk for 90 minutes, and somebody's going to come away with one little kernel of an idea. And they're gonna say I want to go deeper into it. So maybe they join a mailing list, maybe they do a workshop. And then all of a sudden, they've been in my community for three years. And they don't even know where it started. To start with that one thing, I'm just going to listen to a podcast and force myself to learn. Rather than have if I'm in the car or exercising or doing dishes or whatever, I'm just going to use music or distractions. If you switch that switch in your brain to say, No, I'm in learning mode, the tiniest little bits are going to lead to a lot more momentum. Like you said that the flywheel effect, because I too, I often get into the trap of man, my entire calendar is all work, work, work doing doing doing. The time that I feel like I'm breathing is when I'm in learning mode. When I'm reading a book, when I'm listening to a podcast while I'm taking a walk, that to me is re energizing. So I find a way very meticulously with the math included, how can I balance the amount of hours in the week between them and doing motors, you would say in performance mode versus learning mode. So let's assume that we've gotten past this idea of there's no way I have enough time and people start to embrace this idea of doing learning, there are two things that we would both agree that they're gonna run up against fairly quickly, which is how do I deal with the different types of mistakes that I'm going to make? And how do I start receiving and giving feedback. So let's start to break down different types of mistakes. Because I know that it's not just oh, I screwed up on I failed, you've created a great framework for understanding the different types of mistakes we're going to encounter when we're in learning mode.

Eduardo Briceño

Yeah, sometimes, you know, as I've gone through my journey, sometimes I've heard mistakes described as mistakes are wonderful. We want to make mistakes and learn from them, which in some ways resonates with me. But it's also true that mistakes can be detrimental mistakes can lead to death, they can lead to people getting hurt, and it can lead to, you know, losing customers. And so, getting a little bit clearer about what are different kinds of mistakes and how do we want to engage in them and how can we best learn from different types of mistakes is helpful. So in chapter five, it's all about kind of four different types of mistakes. One is the stretch mistakes the strike Mistakes happen when we're trying something we haven't done before or going beyond that what we can already do well, and we're tinkering, were trying new skills, we're experimenting, and we are bound to make mistakes, because we are going beyond what we know. And those are the, you know, those are fantastic mistakes to be deliberate about, right? We want to figure out what are the times and spaces where I can take risk, where I can experiment where I'm not going to, like, create a lot of damage, right, because I've created safety islands that I can tinker and experiment with and be creative around, right? So there's a stretch mistakes, we want to be proactive about making stretch mistakes by taking on things that are challenging and experimenting, then there's the high stakes mistakes, which are mistakes, that if we make those mistakes, you know, there's going to be negative big negative consequences. And so we want to try to minimize that, right? Beyonce is, is not setting out to try something new and experimenting, when she's in front of 80,000 people, she'll do that like backstage, you know, where she's working with her team. And so that's the low stakes versus the high stakes. And so when the stakes are high, especially when people can get hurt, or when you know, our company can go down, we want to put our best foot forward. But that should be but much very small percentage of the time it for most of us in our job, unless we're, you know, in charge of security and nuclear plant or something like that. And then there's the sloppy mistakes, which is when we do something poorly, and it's something that we should know better. We already know how to do this thing. And we just made a sloppy mistake. And often when we think about why did I do this sloppy mistake? How can I prevent this in the future? Often the answer is about kind of focus about I was trying to think about too many things at the same time. And I need to think about what systems I put in place to be able to foster more focus. So if if it's important if it's meaningful, and I really want to try to avoid that mistake, I want to think about how do I avoid this mistake? The answer is often, you know, how do we foster more focus that said, for me, when I make bisogni mistakes, often, they're also a source of joy. There's something that okay, like I was focused on this other thing I made a sloppy mistake in the periphery is not important is funny, let's just laugh about it. I sometimes share it with family or friends post a picture of it on Facebook, whatever it is, right? So mistakes bring us joy and humanity to our lives. And then the fourth kind of mistake is the aha moment mistake, which is when we do something as we intended. But then we realized that it was the wrong thing to do. We realized there was something we were missing, there was a blind spot. And what we did created a consequence that we didn't expect. And those mistakes are precious, you know that we can learn so much from a ha moment mistakes. So when they happen, we can't proactively elicit them like we can elicit stress mistakes, but when they happen, we need to treasure them and think about what can I learn from this gift of this. There's a ha moment mistake that I just made.

Zack Arnold

Yeah, and I think that just about anybody in a creative field, especially those that are editors like myself, the aha moment mistake is the one that we wish we knew how to replicate. It's where Oh, I'm going to put this in here and this to crap, I hit the wrong button. Whoa, what just happened? Right, like I never in a million years would have thought to put shot a next to shot X. But this is the crux of the entire scene, right? those aha moments are amazing. They're hard to replicate. And I've, I found a couple of practices and ways to make them to get quote unquote, lucky a little bit more often. But you're right, that they're they're kind of like serendipity. But the one of these four that I think is the most important for people to really both understand and embrace is the stretch mistake. Because I've done entire presentations where I talk about there's literally one key to success in achieving any goal in any field, I firmly believe this, you can simplify it down to you find the hardest version of what you can do. And you do something slightly harder, because it's going to force you to fail, but you're going to iterate in a safe space, and you're gonna grow faster. And I learned this lesson through learning how to become an American Ninja Warrior. So the simple example I get is if you have a rope, and you've never climbed a rope before, and you're thinking well, I don't know, maybe I could climb 10 feet. Well, great. Your goal right now is climb 15 feet, right, because you're not going to do it the first time. But you're going to learn all of the obstacles standing between you and the goal and you can iterate faster. But you're also going to be in a place where the failure is kind of fun. So one of the two years that I got the casting call to be on the show, my entire reel was my failures. It was me falling over and over and over and over and over and over, because that's a huge part of my story and how it leads to growth. And of course I capped it off with well, you know, I've learned a few things and I can do some cool stuff too. But most of it was here all the things that I've done wrong and I didn't realize how valuable deliberately designing a life around stretch mistakes was. So what have you found either through your own work or through research about the value and creating the stretch mistakes?

Eduardo Briceño

Absolutely. So what you describe part of what you describe is, is called deliberate practice right which was discovered Ergun coined by Florida State professor Anders Ericsson, who wrote the book peak, and, you know, unfortunately, he passed away a couple of years ago. But he was another treasured mentor of mine. And I'm honored to build on his work. And, and what he found is that the people who become most skilled in their domains, they engage in deliberate practice, which is just what you what you said, right? It's about identifying a specific sub skill that we want to improve. No. So it's not like I want to become a better Ninja Warrior, I want to get better at climbing the rope, right? So it's like, it's a skill. And it's about identifying something slightly beyond what we can do, right and trying it failing, and figuring out how we can adjust. So if we're, for example, playing golf in when we're in a tournament on the range, we're trying to do things as best as we can, but on the course. But when we go to the range, and we're practicing, we are seeing different things. We're saying, Okay, I want to try to use the UN, I don't play golf, but I want to try to use the five club and I'm going to try to like, tweak my swing in this particular way and see what that does. And that's probably going to lead the ball to go too much to the right, I'm gonna adjust my club a little bit to the left, right. And so we're making making mistakes and making adjustments based on what those mistakes do. The mistakes are feedback to us. And that is how the best people in the world get better. I am curious, Zack, do you have an example on the creative field right on something where in your creative work of what kind of stretch mistakes could look like?

Zack Arnold

Yeash, so I'm so glad you brought this up. Because I was going to actually talk about this anyways, again, you and I totally on the same wavelength. And this was the difference between I'm in learning mode, versus I'm in performance mode, and I'm not interested in learning anymore. So when I started to learn more about peak performance, and psychology and time management, and all these things, what ended up happening in the evolution of my editing career, is I was no longer in learning mode on how do I cut a better scene? Or how do I cut a cooler montage? It was how can I be more effective and less time, because I had kids and I didn't want to be in the edit suite for 80 hours a week. So I thought I'm in a game of phi. And I'm going to learn how to cut faster without the quality going down. So I started asking myself the question, if I've got, you know, one hour of raw dailies, or two hours, or whatever it is, what's the fastest that I can cut it and still deliver the same results. So I was actually time blocking on my calendar and doing the math and setting timers. So it wasn't so much I want to make better creative choices, per se. It was how can I maintain my level of creative choices and do it in less time. And that completely changed the game and changed my entire career. And what I found by default, is that forcing myself to fail forced me to learn new things about the creative process. So that I was all of a sudden growing more creatively, even though all I wanted to do was become more efficient. I also became more effective. One of the things I did early in my career and people think this is crazy. Because I'm I have the the these diverging or now converging interests of athletics in creative work. I thought, well, what if I created drills? What if I actually drilled myself on these key skills, one of them was being as fast as possible, hitting all the hotkeys that I hit the most without looking down on my keyboard. And I would map my keyboard, not pneumatically, where it's like S is for slip, and B is for a razor blade, it was more based on the distance of the keys to my fingers. How do I map it? So I know that if I use my index finger all day long, what key should that be, and forcing myself to not use the mouse and I wasn't allowed to look at my keyboard to see can I get faster making these creative choices. And these all compounded to, I was doing the same amount or more work at a higher level in way less time. So that's an example of how I was really creating these stretch mistakes, to get better, creatively.

Eduardo Briceño

Fantastic. I can picture how you were cutting the video page for the American Ninja Warrior and how your skills between you know cutting video and athletics came together beautifully there. And that what you bring about in terms of the keyboard is also an area that Anders Ericsson and his colleagues studied. And it's something that probably a lot of us can relate to. Because think about how many hours we spent writing kind of emails and writing documents over our lives. We spent so many, many hours doing like typing. But most of us having become world class at it even with even though we spent so many, many hours typing, right. And so the people who become like twice as fast and twice as accurate as most of us, they spend like 10 to 20 minutes each day, fully concentrated trying to type 10 to 20% Faster than they're comfortable with. So they're making a lot of mistakes as they're trying to do that. And they examine what words led them to make mistakes. And they practice the same the same way but using text that leads them to make lots of mistakes. So the difficult words, they try to type those faster just for 10 to 20 minutes every day. And over time, they become so much better and so much faster just like you did.

Zack Arnold

It's funny because you're, you're reminding me how big of a nerd I really am. And I didn't realize it, because I don't remember when it was, I think it was before I had kids, but it was probably give or take about 15 years ago, I would spend 30 minutes a day doing online games where you were gamifying how many words you could type per minute, because I felt like I was really clunky on the keyboard. So I was like, No, I'm gonna play this game, what's my word count now, and it would be exercises like F, F, F, G, F of F of F of h. And it was actually really, really fun. It was like a nice diversion. But I got significantly better at typing more efficiently and typing faster. And you put all those things together, one of the pieces of feedback that I get all the time and have for years from producers and directors is they're like, I've never seen anybody do this faster than you do it. And again, it goes back to the beginning of the conversation. I'm not genetically gifted with the ability to edit fast, I drilled it over and over and over not because I want to be faster, because I want to get the hell out of my office at the end of the day, right. So there was a means to an end where I was willing to make those mistakes. But here's here's the next part that I think is so important for people to understand most of the mistakes that you're going to make, you're not going to realize you're making them unless you have somebody that's giving you feedback and iterating. So I want to talk a little bit more now about this process of how you can elicit feedback and how you can surround yourself and create a positive feedback loop. Because yeah, if you're on the golf course, and you make a mistake, you can be all by yourself, like owl, the shot didn't go far enough or a slice to the left. But especially in creative fields, we have to learn how to take feedback, but not turn it into criticism. So how can we learn to both ask for better feedback and give better feedback?

Eduardo Briceño

Sure. So feedback is so powerful, I think is probably the most powerful learning strategy in most workplaces, because we are social beings, right? So we're collaborating, we're trying to create things to have an effect on other people, whether it's to entertain them or delight them or do any sort of both collaboration and effect on other human beings. And so what effect we have we do something and we think that it's going to have an effect on other people. But it usually we're usually a little off right. And usually like whether it is we create a different better effect or a different worse effect than we thought there's usually something there for us to learn. And so by making what is in other people's mind, visible to us, we can learn so much about how our behavior affects them. And the key, the most important thing is just to solicit feedback to solicit feedback frequently, and often from a variety of people, not just from one person, because when we solicit people solicit feedback. First of all, it puts us into a learning mindset, right? It reminds us that we want to learn second, it makes it easier for the other person to give us feedback, because a lot of us are afraid to give feedback because the other person might react offensively, we might think they might not want feedback. So if you if somebody asks for my feedback, then it makes it a lot easier for me to give it and usually the feedbacks a lot more specific and useful. It's related to something that I want them curious about or want to learn about. So when I solicit feedback, and make it easy for for other people to give it often when we solicit feedback, though, often other people respond by saying that was great, or you know, that was wonderful. And so when when that happens, I say that that's great. But can you say more about what was helpful? And especially if there's something that I can do better? Like, what is one thing that I could do better? Right? So pushing them a little bit? Can you give me some information either about kind of things that have worked particularly helpful, so I know to continue doing them, or ideally, also something that I can change to try to get continue to get better. So we need to extract that a little bit from other people, because often people are afraid because they think that you're going to react defensively. And when we give feedback, ideally, again, like the other person is listening it but how we give it depends a lot on our relationship, our trust in our common understanding of feedback, like if people see feedback as something that is a sign of weakness, something that is a sign of incompetence, then if we give feedback, other people are going to just react defensively and you know, they're going to get upset at us. So ideally, if we if we have colleagues that we work with, and we have our family, we wouldn't have conversations about this about the Learning Zone about feedback, what these things are, why we want them in our lives. So we get on the same page. And we can start these conversations and develop habits of soliciting feedback and learning from one another.

Zack Arnold

Yeah. So let's assume that I completely and totally by the premise of I need to solicit feedback. The big giant question that you kind of answered a little bit that I want to really pull this thread a lot deeper, is how do I solicit feedback? And I think it's a two part question. The first of which, and this is something that I teach extensively in my program, and I say this over and over to my students. The quality of the answer that you get is going to be based on the quality of Your question. So if your question is, what did you think you're gonna get a really crappy generic answer, as opposed to? I was thinking that in this section, I wanted this result, like, in a simple example, I really wanted you to laugh right there, but you didn't laugh. Can you give me a sense of why you didn't think that was funny? Right? Well, that's gonna come off as Oh, that's a really good question. Let me break that down to help you. But then the second part be at how do I ask the right questions to solicit feedback? It's how do I overcome the fear that I sound incompetent? Or it's embarrassing to have make mistakes? Or it's embarrassing to be asking for feedback at all? Because that means I'm imperfect. And I should have this all figured out. So it's, how do I ask these questions, but how do I overcome the fear of asking the question at all?

Eduardo Briceño

Yeah, so a couple of things. So for example, when I do, I'm a public speaker, I do keynotes after my keynotes, I want to solicit feedback, right, so often, I embed the feedback into live polling, I use live polling to make the sessions interactive. And then the last question, or the last two questions are for me to get feedback and to think about what what went well, and what I could improve. And that's an entire session. But whether I do that or not, I also want to later kind of solicit feedback from people who were there who attended in conversation. And I could just say, you know, what, could I do better? And that would be fine. But I say, as you know, I'm a big fan of feedback. You know, I would love to know your thoughts on what was helpful to you? Or what is one thing I could do better, and just reminding them, that feedback is something that we can all benefit from, and that the most skilled people do, right, so that I don't come across as incompetent if they think that people who solicit feedback are not confident. Right. So that's one thing is framing. So we want to get on the same page about what feedback is, and we can do that quickly when we're soliciting feedback. You know, as you know, I'm a big fan of feedback. You know, I would love your thoughts right now. And I spent the last three years writing this book, the performance paradox. And a key part of that was solicited feedback. I mean, I had so many readers read things and provide feedback on the draft. And even now that the book is ready, and it's finished, I love to solicit feedback from readers to learn more about how it lands and how it's helpful or not to different people. So if I asked, What do you think of my book, that's really hard for people to like? It's a big question. It's almost like, it's really difficult to answer, right. So the way that I'm soliciting feedback right now, I might find ways to get better at soliciting feedback. But what I'm saying for people who want to read the whole book is, what are the chapters that were most helpful to you? And why? And are there some things that you wish I had gone deeper on in the book that I didn't go deeper on? Those are two questions that I'm asking that I'm finding helpful when people answer, but I feel like the questions we ask my depend a little bit on what we're working on what the situation is, what our relationship is with a person. But I'd be curious in your perspective, because I suspect that you have some other kind of insights and strategies around how to solicit feedback.

Zack Arnold

I definitely do. And I love how you've turned this into your the podcast hosted out the guests. I love conversations like that. So yes, this is something that I thought about extensively. And again, I've done a lot of A B testing in many rooms and trying different ways to ask similar questions. And what's the response from this director versus that director? And I agree that as we talked about already, the quality of the question is going to really dictate the quality of the answer. And one thing that I want to bring up to add to what you said, is that the timing of the type of feedback matters as well. Right? So my guess is the reason you formulated your questions about which chapters resonated with you the most? And what do you wish I had gone deeper on that? I didn't, that feedback informs another book, right. Now, let's imagine you asked what I believe to be a great question at the wrong time. Right? So I'm going to steal this question blatantly from one of my mentors, probably, again, somebody in our similar circle, Adam Grant. So Adam Grant creates what he calls a challenge network. And one of the questions that he asks, which has gotten me by far the best feedback I've ever had, on speeches, on classes on presentations, even if you enjoyed this, if you were forced to cut 20%, what would you take out? And individually, I probably wouldn't take most of the feedback. But what I noticed are patterns. And when I asked 50 people the same question, and one of them says, Oh, this is the dumbest thing you mentioned, like well, 49 people said this was their favorite part of the presentation. So thanks, but no thanks. But if 15 People all said it took me a little while to really get sucked in. Well, that means if I'm gonna cut 20%, or even just 10, it's probably in the beginning. So it's about asking a really specific question. But if you were to ask people now, if you went out to all the people with your finished published book, if I were to cut 20%, which would I cut a little late for that question, isn't it already published?

Eduardo Briceño

Yeah, I agree. And that is you might have a question that I sometimes ask which is in the keynotes, I do sometimes I asked that question. You know, if you will. to cut something, what would you call it? And that gives me very useful information. Yeah, yeah.

Zack Arnold

And that's something that I have certainly used a lot as well, where sometimes it's thrust upon me by either a timing requirement or a studio or whatever it might be. But an example would be that if I'm cutting an episode of TV or cutting a movie, and the general consensus is it's it's just a little sluggish, it feels a little slow. Great. What are your suggestions? I don't know. I don't know what I would do with that. I just I feel up. But I don't know how to tell you what the solution is what I find, especially if we're going to dig deeper into this idea of how to ask the right questions, and get the most effective feedback. What I think the mistake that most people make, and I see it mostly in my world of editing, but I think it can be applied almost anywhere. The question they're asking is, tell me what to do and give me the solution. The question needs to be tell me what isn't working. And it's my job to solve it. So it's not a matter of well, if the scene is too long, tell me what shots or what lines of dialogue you want cut? I don't know. Okay, well, tell me what feeling you didn't get the you wanted. I wanted the scene to move faster. Great. Let me figure out what the solution is. So I'm always pushing to get feedback on what isn't working? And how do you feel that you're in? What are you feeling that you don't want to be feeling? Or what do you more? What is your experience of it versus tell me what to do? And I think the lazy version of feedback is, give me the notes and give me the solutions. And I'll execute them. Right. So that comes back to the quality of the question.

Eduardo Briceño

That makes a lot of sense. I mean, it also makes particularly sense in kind of creative fields, or you're the expert in your craft, right, and you want to create an effect on the person that you're talking to. So you're getting feedback on the effect you're having, and you are the expert who is going to come up with a solution to the effect that you that you want to have.

Zack Arnold

So I put a pin in this before. And we're really close to pulling this pin out, we're one question away. But I just I want to frame up the where I want to end is I really want people to understand how to create a more effective learning environment and better systems. And you've broken down kind of these, these four basic steps. And I want to get to those because I love me some frameworks, let's just take something really complex and simplify it. But there's one thing that I want to put in between that, which is given the amount of information that we now have available to us and the amount of things that we need to learn or we want to learn especially right now in creative fields. We are being bombarded with 87 Different AI tools every single day. How do we actually distill down and what suggestions you have for like, this is the thread that maybe I should pull. And then once we figure out what we want to learn next, I want to talk about how to create this high performance learning environment.

Eduardo Briceño

I would love your thoughts on that. Because I feel like you've probably had a lot a lot of thinking around this. But what my reaction might be that we want to tinker broadly to get a sense of what kinds of tools are there out there? And what might be most useful to me right now in what I'm doing what might be the greatest opportunity. And then think or more with that tool, start using it and figure out how do I collaborate with this tool so that in combination with a tool, we can create something even better than I was able to do without a tool. So that's my reaction, but I'd love your thoughts on it.

Zack Arnold

Yeah, so the way that I would break it down is very similar to a lot of things we've already talked about is I would use this methodology of the one thing in conjunction with this idea of making a stretch mistake and going further outside my comfort zone. So like us that I would start really broad. So if I go back nine or 10 years ago, where I decided, I think it's time to start looking into a career transition simultaneously, with really taking care of my health and my well being. One morning, it was a podcast about sleep. And other morning it was a podcast about nutrition, this was about fitness. This was about circadian rhythm. This was about time management. This is about title and like so many different things coming at me, but it was kind of like I was at a buffet. So like, I am hungry for something new. But I don't even know what I like yet. So let me just see a little bit of everything. But then all of a sudden, I started to realize, if I pull this lever, and I really focus on this lever, just for now not I have to decide what I'm going to do for the rest of my life. But if I just pull this lever, I think I'm gonna get more leverage, so to speak, and it's gonna get me more results. But it's also the area where I'm most excited to be making mistakes and learning. So it's kind of that that intuition of like, this is like, for example, there was a point in which I'm like, I just want to do a deep dive into WordPress. And I made a really, really shitty first version of a website. But I was excited about making a shitty website because I was learning how WordPress works and how it things. And then as soon as I got to a point where I'm like, Yeah, I've learned enough and I don't want to go any deeper and I don't want to learn code. Boom, here you go. You do WordPress for me, but I then had a language and I had a lingo. So for me, it's always about there's so many broad things to learn which one gets me the most leverage. But where am I the most excited to just screw up and like you said, tinker and make mistakes. Then all of a sudden that thread gets pulled like when I originally I can't remember when exactly I discovered as a little bit less than a year ago, but when I discovered David Epstein's book range, it was just like, Oh, I heard him on a podcast because of all Auto Play, I wasn't seeking out that idea at all. But all of a sudden, this kernel of the value of generalization, it just would not stop. It was like this little bug that was burrowing into the center of my brain. And I'm like, There's something here. And that led me to find other books and other topics and other conversations. And this is the only thread that I'm pulling right now, the time will come when I feel like I've done what I want to do with this, what's the next thread? So for me, that's kind of how I decide what it is that I want to learn and focus on next.

Eduardo Briceño

That makes sense that to expand on both our answers, and it's something you touched upon, but I wanted to call out, is when we're going broad and exploring lots of things we I mistake that I have made in the past is that I've, I've gone about doing that in isolation by myself to the detriment of not asking somebody who knows already a lot or who is more experienced, like a mentor, for ideas, and for them to point me in some directions, right. And so getting advice from people who are more experienced, being mindful of their time, but getting some quick pointers and some lay of the land is really useful. And then the other thing that you pointed out is that the value of dividing and conquering or collaborating so that, you know, we don't need to become experts in everything that's important in our job, we can make decisions about okay, this is one piece that I could learn how to do. But instead, I'm going to collaborate with somebody who's really good at that so that I can focus on this other thing.

Zack Arnold

Yeah, and the piece of that, that I want to just double, triple and quadruple down on, which is another one of the threads that I pulled is that the fastest path to go from failing all the time to starting to succeed all the time is having a mentor, having an expert that's done exactly what you want to do next. And one of the areas that I did a super deep dive on is how can I learn how to better communicate with and surround myself with the world's experts on the things that I want to learn? So the only thread I was pulling was how do I write an amazing cold outreach message to have anybody in the world mentor me at anything, which again, that was the one lever, I was dabbling with it? And I had some students say, Hey, can you look at my outreach email, give me thoughts. I'm like, I guess I mean, it's certainly my thing, but I'll give you feedback. And then all of a sudden, it became a thing. And then it became the foundation of everything that I teach. Because once you have this growth mindset, and you want to learn something in this learning becomes addictive. And you start to really get this flywheel moving. You don't want to sit around and have it take forever, you want to find somebody that can shorten your learning curve. So that was one of the areas that I really double down on is how do I surround myself with mentors? It's one of the reasons I've got a podcast, right? The podcast isn't generating a bunch of money for me, in fact, I barely break even. But the relationships that I build, because I have these conversations is priceless compared to any sponsorship money or viewership or anything else. And that's a skill that I decided that I wanted to develop.

Eduardo Briceño

And part of the skill that you develop that I think is kind of soliciting, like to your point about kind of how do I craft those messages to ask somebody where they would be my mentor, or helped me in some way. And a lot of people trip around asking for help or making that ask because we are afraid of rejection, right? And it connects to your point earlier about soliciting feedback, were afraid of rejection, or of you know, a comment that is not something that is a praise. And so we need to also kind of grapple with what feedback is, but also what asking for help is and how do we frame what asking for help is so that we feel great about asking for help. And for me, you know, asking for help is a way to connect with somebody, just like you said, to get to meet somebody to build relationships, to give somebody else the opportunity to contribute, like I love to contribute to the world, other people love to contribute to the world if I can give them the opportunity to help me and to contribute to somebody else. A lot of people appreciate that if I am being respectful of their time and using their time, in a good way. I've done my homework, I've been thoughtful about what I'm asking them, I'm making great use of their time. And in fact, my book would not be there would not exist. If I hadn't asked for help to somebody who has been mentioned in your podcast before Chip Conley. I sent him an email asking Him for help on something completely unrelated. And I didn't know him at all. And he I just was hoping that he would reply by email and he suggested that we speak and have a 20 minute call. And in that call, he suggested that I write a book and he introduced me to a literary agent and that's why I have a book now. So it is amazing how asking for help and what what it can lead to and what kinds of adventures and learning and contributions it can it can produce.

Zack Arnold

Anybody that's listening right now saying oh my god talk more about this. This is where we get this part 78 of our Table of Contents episode because I talk all about this idea that game recognizes game and a gamers want to surround themselves with other other a gamers which is probably in your compelling pitch by Chip saw the value in connecting with you and you weren't quote unquote, bothering him or like, Oh, I'm so desperate and I need your help, he sees a relationship that can be mutually beneficial. I talked about this extensively with Chase Jarvis. So once again, our Table of Contents episode, if you want to go deep into this concept about how to connect with a mentor and build a genuine relationship, just look for the episode of Chase Jarvis. Otherwise, I could literally talk about this for hours, but we're running out of time

Eduardo Briceño

To your point, you know, tip is a dear mentor, and friend. And you know, I know him really well spent a ton of time with him. I've been to modern elder Academy and spent a week with him in Mexico. And so it led to an incredible relationship just from asking for help. So yes, to your point. Absolutely.

Zack Arnold

Yeah. So the final place that I want to end is the one that I've been promising this whole time. Like I said, I love me some simplified frameworks. And you have this very simple kind of four step a bullet points for these are the steps required for high performance and developing effective learning. I want to break down what these are. Can you mention the four steps? Yeah, so it's this idea about the first we have to believe that we can improve, then we actually have to want to, then we need to incorporate this deliberate practice and put ourselves in a low stakes situation. So essentially, it's everything we've talked about. But I want to boil it down to just give me the steps give me the checklist, because I think that we've already talked about them, but I want to package them to simply,

Eduardo Briceño

Absolutely, yeah, so sometimes, growth mindset is painted as a silver bullet, right? If we just develop the belief that we can change, then everything changes. But a growth mindset is super, super powerful that we talked about, but it's necessary, but it's not sufficient. So along with believing that we can change and improve, we also need to know how to improve, we need to know the difference between the Learning Zone and the performance zone and how to build habits in our life, to engage in both learning and performing. We also number three, to your point need a purpose, we need something we care about, like why are we going to put effort into learning or into performing or into both? You know, what is it that is interesting to me, or that brings meaning and purpose for me to spend my energy on this thing rather than that thing. And finally, we want to be in a learning community, we want to be with other people who also see themselves as learners and who want to collaborate with us to help one another grow and improve. So when those four conditions are in place, then we become unstoppable. We are motivated and effective learners and performers.

Zack Arnold

Yeah, I'm glad that you brought that up. Because one of the things that I found so intriguing, and very bold, is fixed mindset versus growth mindset. So incredibly important. Thanks for all the work you've done, Carol. But here's what's missing, here's what doesn't work. And then you expanded upon all of the building blocks that go on top of it, because it is simple enough to think, Oh, well, now I have a growth mindset. And I want to learn so I'm all set. And you're like, Yeah, not so fast, there needs to be more of a framework, so that we can really build upon that. And I appreciated the fact that you went beyond the things that she's done, which again, are just so seminal, and have been life changing for just the Educational Complex in general. But you're like, No, there's a little bit more than we need to talk about, like I appreciated that. So I could literally go on and on and on and on. But I want to be very respectful of your time. So the place that I want to leave our audience is the most important part, which is the shameless self promotion portion of the program. So if I'd been compelled to learn more, either about you your work, or more specifically, if I want to buy this book, where's the best place to send people?

Eduardo Briceño

Well, we talked about Mindset by Carol Dweck, seminal book about growth mindset. And then my book that just came out is called The Performance Paradox: Turning the Power of Mindset Into Action is available wherever books are sold. I'm also active on LinkedIn and have a newsletter at briceno.com, my last name.com

Zack Arnold

I love it, we're going to make sure that all those are included in the show notes. So then the final place to leave, is there anything that is absolutely vital that you want to share with the people listening today that we haven't already touched upon.

Eduardo Briceño

Just I really appreciate the work that you are doing, Zack, and I've listened to some of the episodes have learned a lot from them. And I love how collaborative this conversation has been and how I've learned from you. And we've just kind of co-create it together, which I think is part of creativity, right? It's not just doing things on our own, but also, you know, a part of the range part of tapping broadly, is also tapping the expertise and the experiences that different people have and bringing them together. That is also part of creativity. And I think it's part of what we've done today.

Zack Arnold

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. So I can't thank you enough for for taking the time to be here and to share your expertise. Thank you.

Eduardo Briceño

Thank you, Zack.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai