Episode 324: The Performance Paradox with Eduardo Briceño

Welcome to another episode of the Above the Business podcast. My name is Bradley Hemner, your host. I got a question. Have you heard or have you read the book The Growth Mindset by Carol Dweck? At this point, I think it has like 22,000 reviews on Amazon. Came back, came out several years ago. Well, if you love that book, you are going to love this podcast. I'll just leave it at that. Without further ado, here's my conversation with Eduardo. Borsino. What if you could step out of the day-to-day and see your business from a whole new perspective? Welcome to Above the Business, where we empower you to rise above the daily grind and embrace a higher way of business ownership. It's time to build your business by design. Eduardo, welcome to the Above the Business podcast.

Great to be here, Bradley. Thank you for having me.

Uh, pumped to have you. I'm excited to be able to talk about performance today, but before we get into any of those things, we always start with background and origin story. So why don't you take our listeners back a little bit around your journey? Sure.

I grew up in Venezuela until I was 16. My parents moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where I finished high school. And for college, I studied finance and chemical engineering. Then I spent 2 years working in investment banking and then 5 years working in venture capital. So I was in the finance world like a lot of your listeners are. And after a while, I actually got a, a repetitive strain injury called myofascial pain syndrome, and I had to change a lot of things about my life, try to figure out what was happening and how to heal. But one of the things that I realized is that I wasn't passionate about the work that I was doing at the time, and I wanted to pivot and change career. So I went to grad school and met there a professor by the name of Carol Dweck, who wrote a book called Mindset. And we co-founded a company called MindsetWorks. I led that company as the CEO for, for over a decade. And through my work with her and through the people that we led, that we served, I became really passionate about improvement and learning and how you translate that into high performance. And that's the work that I do now. So I, I I just released a book called The Performance Paradox, and it's all about how do we improve in work and life at the things that we care most about.

Yeah, well, I didn't tell you this before we hit recording, but before we started recording, but I will occasionally, maybe once a month or so, we'll go to Barnes Noble and I'll just begin to kind of peruse in the personal development space and in the business space. Looking for books that stand out to me. When I saw your book, The Performance Paradox, I was like, yep, that's absolutely— we're going to try to get Eduardo on there because that in and of itself— look, we talk about small business quite a bit and how to be able to grow our businesses. And within that, I think we all individually as leaders and entrepreneurs want to be able to improve our own personal performance. All right. So layup question here. What do you specifically mean by What is the performance paradox?

Sure.

The performance paradox is the counterintuitive reality that if all we do is perform, our performance suffers. So what do I mean by that? I mean, you know, when I was working in investment banking and venture capital, I had the vague idea that the way to succeed was simply to work hard. If I just worked hard, then that's what I was supposed to do at work. That's what was going to lead to success and to improvement and growth. And what I've learned in working with Carol Dweck and Anders Ericsson and lots of other researchers as well as practitioners is that there's actually two different forms of effort and strategies. There's effort to execute and to get the job done and to get results and to sell and to serve people. That's what I call the performance zone. And there's effort to improve and to innovate and to get higher levels of performance and increase our skills. And that's what I call the learning zone. And we have to figure out ways to habituate both of those zones. They're both critical. And so they tie to, you know, the name of your podcast very much. You know, when we work in the business, we are in the performance zone executing. When we are on the, you know, working on the business or above the business, we are working to improve. And, and that's that. So we have to engage in the learning zone, not just in the performance zone, in order to achieve higher levels of success.

So let me ask you this, you know, when I think this would be important for our listeners. Some people— I think a lot of people have heard of the book The Growth Mindset that Carol wrote, but just because for context, I don't want to make an assumption here, do you mind kind of going back? Because I think it will frame the rest of our conversation and kind of give maybe some of the, the thesis behind that book, the studies that was done in that book, etc. And then I'll kind of come back to what you just said just a moment ago.

Absolutely. So Carol Dweck coined this term growth mindset and has done research on it since the '80s. Now there's been literally thousands of researchers who's done research on this in lots of areas. And what the research has found, what a growth mindset is, is the perspective about the nature of human beings. Specifically, a growth mindset is the belief that our abilities and qualities can change and can be developed as opposed to being set in stone. So for example, and we all, are in a fixed— what the opposite of a growth mindset is a fixed mindset, which is when we see people as set the way they are. And we all are in a fixed mindset about different abilities or different people. And when we are in a fixed mindset, when we believe that we can't change or that other people can't change, we don't do the things that are necessary to change. And without change, there cannot be improvement. And so, for example, we might sometimes talk about somebody being a natural leader. You know, implying that the reason people are great leaders is because they're either natural or not. So we're in a fixed mindset. If we're in a fixed mindset, we don't do anything to improve our leadership, leadership, or to give feedback to a person that can help them become a better leader, right? Or we might assume that extroversion and introversion are fixed and that, you know, if we want to become better at developing relationships with people, you know, that's not something that you can get better at, or working with numbers or working with words. And so we, we, we need to kind of work at become more aware of when, when we're in a fixed mindset about ourselves or about others and how that's getting in the way of our growth and our results. Now, how that ties with the performance paradox is that believing that we can change is necessary but not sufficient. We also need to understand how to change. What strategies do we use in order to improve? And when we understand how, then we can strengthen our belief that we can. And they both both the belief and the strategies can reinforce each other.

Okay. So this brings up two. One is to tell me if you think that this analogy makes sense, like how you, uh, how you relate to this analogy. And then, then I've got a question and I'm going to totally butcher this, but there's some idea behind, if I had 8 hours to chop a tree down, I would spend 6 hours sharpening the axe. Is that, is that kind of what we're somewhat alluding to as well, is that we're spending time improving our skills, our mindset, um, even acquiring certain tools to be able to help us so that when we are performing, we're going to be better at the performance aspect of what we're doing?

Yeah, so we can, if we have 8 hours to, chop a tree, right? We can spend, like you said, 6 hours sharpening the axe, and that might be a good idea. Then we can chop the tree really, really, really fast. 6 hours might be too much. I don't know. But certainly 8 hours sharpening the axe would not meet our goals, right? So we need performance zone. We need to perform in order to get results. And, you know, 6 hours or less, it's 30 minutes, 6 hours. So there's, there's a pure learning zone, which is sharpening the axe. There's a performance zone, which is chopping the tree. And there's learning while doing, which is chopping while learning along the way. So how could, how might you do that? You might do that by, you know, trying a different stroke each time and seeing whether different strokes have a different effect. Uh, you might, if you have somebody around, you might ask them for feedback around how you're chopping and maybe they have ideas about how you can do it better. So we can either be in either zone or do, do, do both together. And, and the, the greatest opportunity for most of us is to learn while doing. So to do our job in a way that we are experimenting, trying different things, soliciting feedback, and kind of learning as we go is something that we all can benefit from. Because for most people, most of the time, we're only worried about getting things done, and we can be getting things done in a way that's also going to lead to improvement. That way we can work smarter over time.

Yeah, I think that the way you said that is perfect. I mean, we're not going to spend 6 hours, I mean 8 hours the entire time just sharpening the saw. At the same time, grabbing the, grabbing the axe or the saw, whatever the analogy is, and we just start chopping away and we never take the time to sharpen it. We never take time to kind of look at it and say, wait a minute, is this technique working, etc.? You know, how do I analyze exactly what I'm doing versus just like, well, just sheer effort is going to be able to get me there. Well, it does take hard work. I think that I think that makes a lot of sense. Okay. So here's something that I've personally really wrestled with, and I'm actually genuinely curious. Forget the podcast. Okay. This is the Wardo and Bradley right here. No, I'm kidding. I think this will resonate with a lot of people. Um, and that is that you hear people talk about, and I do know where they're coming from. I mean, there's an assessment out there called StrengthsFinders. And the idea is find out what you're good at and just do that. And then delegate. If you're a business owner, you have the opportunity to just get rid of everything else. And so it's like, okay, well, that makes sense. Do I actually literally do that? I mean, do I only just find out what I'm good at? And then I'm kind of watching this play out. Can— context a little bit different. My son is 13, middle school basketball. His weakness is he needs to get better at his ball handling, period. He needs to improve in order to be able to get better, more minutes, especially whenever a team is pressing. Well, if we took that analogy of the strengths, which he's, he's, he's a good shooter, that is his, his strength. And we only worked on that and yet did not work on the weaknesses, then that would not give him more playing time. He would not be able to then advance. And so I've wrestled with this idea of doubling and tripling down in your strengths and just disregarding it in business. And so this is what's making me think, like, how does this land with you? What is your thoughts around— yeah, but this is a weakness and not understanding how to, how to, how to see and study and understand your financials. You and I were both finance majors. Is a weakness in the business. We need to improve upon that. Does this make sense? The question I'm asking.

Yeah. So first of all, in sports and with the kind of world-class performers, they work on both their strengths and their weaknesses. They don't disregard their weaknesses because, like you're saying, a great basketball player with, without great ball handling is, is probably not going to work out. And so that's for to become world-class as an athlete and as a performer, you have to work on both, not necessarily at the same time. You might work on a weakness this season and then on a strength the next season. In business, That can sometimes be true or not true. It depends on your teamwork, the type of work that you do, what you can, what you can decide to disregard or not. But I would say that we can see strengths and weaknesses either in a growth mindset or in a fixed mindset. So in a fixed mindset, and a lot of the times assessments like, like StrengthsFinders and other, and other assessments are often painted in a fixed mindset. They are described as, hey, you know, we're going to find out what your strengths are and what your weaknesses are. And that way you can only do your strengths. And it's, it's, it's as opposed to we're gonna learn more about what you've developed more and what you are weaker at and what your strengths and weaknesses are. And you can get better at either your strengths or your weaknesses. You're gonna choose, you're gonna choose whether there's a strength or a weakness that you wanna work on. You know, like for example, in a team environment, often listening is really, really important. So it's like ball handling in basketball, right? If somebody's a really poor listener, Even if it's a weakness, it's probably a good thing for you to work on, right? And so we need to— but where the assessment is helpful, I think, is in increasing our self-awareness, getting information around what are we doing that's really helpful to our team and to the people we serve, and where are we not? Where are our weaknesses? And then we can think about, you know, and get feedback from other people, get information, and then make decisions about, okay, do I want to focus on this strength because this weakness is not important? Or because this weakness can be covered by another teammate? Um, or is this weakness something that's really getting in the way of me achieving higher results and something that I want to work on and improve?

Yeah, okay, that, that makes a lot of sense. Can we have— are we across the board growth mindset, fixed mindset, or are we growth mindset in certain areas of our life maybe health, fitness, but we're fixed mindset when it comes to our relationships. Vice versa. Tell me about that.

Absolutely. Our mindset varies depending on the domain or the type of ability that we're talking about. Just like you said, we might have a growth mindset about public speaking, believing that we can become a better public speaker, and a fixed mindset about creativity, thinking that some people are naturally creative and others aren't. Or vice versa, we might see creativity as something that we can learn and improve, and public speaking as something that people are either naturals or not. And so each person, our mindset will vary just depending on the, the way we've thought throughout our lives and the messages we've received, the sense we've made of observing the world. And also our mindset can vary depending on the person. Like you might see yourself as a great learner, but then label some of your colleagues in fixed ways or family members or some of your customers. And then if you believe that other people can't change, you won't share information with them that might be useful for them to learn more and to improve. And so they won't change. So it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. And then our mindset also is not fixed. So we can develop more of a growth mindset. And one effective way to do that is to learn effective strategies to improve. So for example, if, if I am in a fixed mindset about creativity, I believe some people are naturally creative or not. I might go to a creativity workshop, like a design thinking workshop where I learn strategies to be more creative, and I see that I can, I can create something a lot more creative than I have in the past, and I can realize, wow, there's actually people who teach how to become more creative, and I could work at this to become more creative. And that can shift my mindset about creativity because I've learned how to improve at it.

Yeah, what's coming up for me is like this idea of discipline. You know, there's a few people that I can point to, um, One of my friends and clients, Dustin, who'll listen to this, he's— that's just a skill of his, right? And I can catch myself at times just saying, I just don't— I just don't— I'm not as disciplined as he is. Like, that's the picture perfect of discipline. And I'm just not going to do that. That's not who I am. And then as you're talking through this, I'm making myself think like, well, yeah, that's a fixed mindset thing of saying like, well, you may not necessarily be him, but I can definitely improve in my own journey of being more disciplined in certain aspects. Of, of my, of my life. I have a question around how do I self-assess? Because it's easier to self-assess other people, but how do you self-assess? I mean, that one happens to be easier for me, but how do I self-assess for myself places and areas that I, I have a fixed mindset, but I don't even know it?

Yeah, uh, there are definitely blind spots when it comes to fixed mindset because we we might just assume that there's something that doesn't change. Like, for example, for me, I had a very strong fixed mindset as I grew up on social interactions. I just thought some people were natural at making conversation and saying funny things and being engaging. And I didn't think of that as a skill. I just thought it was a trait of people that didn't change. And so that was a— not only was it a fixed mindset, it was a fixed mindset that I wasn't even aware of. Or you can think about extroversion or introversion, lots of things that we might not even think of as abilities, right? And so one way, so through feedback, we can, we can get feedback from other people. That's a great way to increase our self-awareness. We can also kind of list what do we value in people? What do we value in myself or in other people that I really appreciate? And then are there some of those things that I see as traits that are not things that people develop, you know. So that's another way to, to try to uncover more of our fixed mindsets. Another way is to learn more about the effects of a fixed mindset and then think about when we are doing those behaviors. So for example, when we're in a fixed mindset, we tend to respond negatively to feedback or criticism. We tend to try to protect our ego by saying what the person's saying is not true. So when we are reacting defensively, either at that moment or later, we can look back and say, why did I react defensively? Is there an assumption that I can't improve behind that reaction? Right? Or, uh, when you're saying that you compare yourself to somebody else and feel inept or feel like you're not capable, uh, that's another example of something that we might, might lead us to think about. Hey, you know, might there be a fixed mindset around that that's behind that reaction?

Is there ever a time that having a fixed mindset is a benefit?

A fixed mindset can be a benefit when it's true, but we can never be sure that it's true. So for example, I believe that I'll share with you. Well, so for example, let me take a really simple example of height, right? I think that the height as an adult is hard to change. So if I want to become a great basketball player, I, because I believe that I can't change my height, I'm probably going to work on other skills related to basketball that are going to help me to improve. So my fixed mindset, if my fixed mindset is true that I can't become taller, then not spending time trying to become taller is a good use of time because so that I can use that time in trying to improve in other ways. So But so for another example, when it comes to cognition, for example, is I believe that the brain can't think of two things at the same time. It can't have two conversations at the same time. So for example, I can't be reading a book while listening to a different audiobook and like being present and understanding both of those threads. So that's a fixed mindset. I believe I can't improve at that. And that means that if I want to improve my learning and read more and get more out of books, I'm not going to try to get better at reading while listening at the same time. I'm gonna try different strategies. So if that fixed mindset's true, then it's helpful 'cause it helps me focus on things that I can improve. But the problem is that we can never be sure, right? We can never be 100% sure that I, that there isn't a strategy that we haven't discovered to listen to something while we read something else. And so there's, I can, I can never be 100% sure that I'm right, but on the hypothesis on the things that I think I can't change, If that hypothesis is true, then it's helpful for me to prioritize.

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That's good. All right, so we, we live at a time where there's so much amazing content. The downside of that is there's so much amazing content, there's so many books that I have wanted to get around to reading and I have not yet, and I put it on my not staying up, put it in the office, I put it down. I'm, I'm like, I got to get to that. And that's just one example. There's podcasts like this one. There's YouTube videos. There's articles that I want to read. There's newsletters that I want to read. There's conferences I want to attend to. I could keep going. And so one of the things, ironically, we're actually, uh, at the time when this podcast is being released, the next day One of the, one of the small things that we're just discussing is this idea of unintentional versus intentional consumption. And so we can just, I know that I have personally in my effort to want to just learn and get better, have had these guys for people not looking at this, my AirPods in my ear at all times. Well, there's a real downside to that. Is I don't have an intentionality of separating what is signal versus noise. For me, it just ends up becoming, you know, just more information. And I've talked about this on here before, and I'm getting to a question which is a few years ago I even, uh, was on this podcast and said, yeah, I read 36 books and I hit my goal of reading 36 books. And, you know, I was proud of that. But, you know, the last 12, I don't even remember because I was barreling through them just so I can say I hit my goal of hitting 36 books. Okay, so what I'm trying to make— for me personally, maybe this is somebody that's hearing this— is to say, how do I balance having a growth mindset and wanting to improve in these certain areas, and at the same time not overwhelming myself with too much information, what people would put out there as content?

Yeah, great question. And there's so much to it. And I feel the same. I would say there's so much to, to talk about this. So one is that I absolutely agree with you. There's so much great content and we could be overwhelmed by it. But the other side of the coin that I like, the way I like to look at it is that, that means that for passionate lifelong learners like you and me, The world is a paradise and it's going to be a paradise for the rest of our lives, right? Because we're never going to run out of content. We're always going to be able to continue to explore and discover. And that's a source of joy and happiness and fulfillment and growth. So that source will always be there. And the goal is not to be exhaustive and to just— to, to just like we can't read all the news about everything that's happening in the world or read all our newsfeed in our social media. We can't learn everything at once. And so we need to to make good use of our time and do it, whether it is with a goal to improve or with a goal to enjoy what we're learning. Um, and, and I like to focus more on quality rather than quantity. And so to your point, if we just focus on, on consuming content, that's not the optimal strategy because we forget a lot of it. We forget a lot more than we think we're gonna forget. That's one of our human biases. Um, and it's not very— if your goal is to, if your goal is to improve and to expand your knowledge, which is really valuable, then we need to figure out how do I do that most effectively? And often it is to consume less content and do it more deeply rather than try to consume more podcasts and more books and go through a lot of content. So how, like, as an example, right? When, when I listen to podcasts that Sometimes I listen to podcasts for joy, right? Because I wanna like just have just a light podcast. I just wanna like, whether it's, it's a comedy or whatever, or just politics, things that are news and are not deep content that I care most about.

Politics is joy. Politics gives you joy.

No, no. So when it's news, but I actually stay out of news very much, but, but I do sometimes listen to one or two podcasts around the, current events, which I try to stay out of. I, I love to learn more about like human psychology and the things that are long-lasting knowledge, right? The, the, the, the timely things are things that, um, that becomes obsolete pretty quickly. So I don't, I don't particularly spend a lot of time like reading the news or anything like that. But, um, but so when I'm listening to something that's a current event, for example, there's a war going on and I wanna understand like the basics of it, I might listen to it. but it's not that important that I like consume that knowledge deeply. So I might just listen to it. But when I, when I'm listening to a com— to a podcast that is related to my work, is, is related to my area of expertise, I first have it transcribed by artificial intelligence. And then as I'm listening to it, I highlight the, the real gems, the things that I want to either commit to my memory or put into my second brain system for reference. And then after I listen to the podcast, I take those highlights and I do something with them. I might share them with somebody else, or I might, uh, put them in my second brain reference system, or I might put it in my digital flashcard system, uh, if I really want to remember it. And so those are, those are ways to consume something deeply to make sure that it's gonna be consolidated into my long-term knowledge, which is the only way that I can actually make use of it, because in order for it to be useful, I need to have it be retrievable in my brain when I need it. And for that, I don't need to just have heard about it once. I need to actually have committed it to memory.

Yeah, I think that's such a good example. You know, this year I've really made a renewed commitment to my health. Right before this podcast, it's, um, I went to and got a lift in. And, um, I don't say that in some big way. I mean, I went and worked, got a workout in and came and did that. And, um, uh, while I was in there, I was listening to, I actually wasn't watching it, but I was listening to a YouTube and, uh, uh, of somebody who I've decided that I'm going to follow. This is like, you know, the, the, I, I picked the areas that I really want to grow in. And so therefore there are certain people that I'm going to then follow their information so I can develop that skill set. So I'm listening to this like hour and a half or so podcast, or I guess you, I'm sure it is a podcast, but listen to it on YouTube. I was like, man, I'm going to go back, rewatch this thing. And so it's gone from just hearing it and let me just go to the next one and go to the next one, go to the next one. To now I'm going to go back and actually study it. And to your point, if people are not familiar with the idea of a second brain, Tiago Forte has got a great book out on that. Fantastic concepts if you want to dive deeper into those things. And so I will then do the same thing as I'll take— I'm going to take the notes from this that I learned so much, and ultimately they're going to make it into my Notion page. So where I can actually like start to digest? What are some of the things I want to take away from that? I listened to a 6-minute clip the other day that my coach sent to me on Jeff Bezos, and it was like a string of bullet points that I wanted to kind of study those things as opposed to just burning through just more and more and more kind of content. So I think that, I think that's really helpful. You know, it really is a thing though, because we can just get kind of get overwhelmed with conflicting ideas at some point. You know, I think I gave the one of weaknesses and strengths as an example. And so then you kind of get in this aspect of kind of being paralyzed, like, oh my gosh, there's so much information, these things can be conflicting, what do I do? Um, I don't know if you, if you've ever had that experience before.

Yeah, I think that there's a lot of situations where there's conflicting information, and I think that's a great opportunity to get curious and to look into it further if it's something that's important to us that, that we really want to try to understand better to get to the bottom of it. And maybe in some situations, one perspective and one approach makes more sense. In other situations, a different perspective or approach makes sense. There's, there's a lot of paradoxes or dual intentions, I call them, where there's two truths that are in tension, in tension with each other. And that is, you know, very prevalent in work and life. And as we learn more and get curious and ask more questions and dive deeper, we make more and more sense of it and make more and more kind of harmony out of those tensions.

No, I like the, I like the word dueling tensions.

That's good.

I like, I really like good language. Uh, I heard one the other day, a crisp document. I was like, oh, that's really good. I'm taking that one. I really like dueling tensions. Okay. Last question. We have spent kind of a lot of time in this discussion around us personally. And I am a fundamental believer that we get better than kind of ever— it helps us to be able to help everybody else around us. But if we're wanting to work to develop more of a culture of continuous improvement, always getting better, always learning, of a growth mindset in our organization, how do we do that? How do we begin if we see and spot areas, maybe with our individual team members, that, boy, that is, that's a fixed mindset, right? That is 100% fixed mindset. How do we begin to cultivate that culture and the environment in our organizations that the environment itself, the culture begins to shape people into a growth mindset?

Well, culture is super, super important. And, you know, my part 2 of my book is all about culture. And culture is really important because we're social beings. And we talked about growth mindset, which is a belief. We form our beliefs from our observations of other people largely, but also from our observations of the media. And, and also the strategies and the habits like engaging in the learning zone and the performance zone that involves habits and strategies. And those are things that we learn and do with the people around us. So as we are trying to build a strong organization that's going to continue to innovate and to improve, and to adapt, we know thinking about culture is really, really important. So how can we do that as leaders? 3 things that leaders can think about doing is first, think about how you frame the work that is to be done. Like, what is it that people are supposed to do at work every day? Is part of what we're supposed to do working to continue to change and to improve ourselves, right? Is, is, you know, using ideas like performance zone and learning zone or growth mindset, you know, how are we supposed to to approach experimentation and to approach feedback? What is work about? Second is what systems and habits are we going to use to perform, but also to improve? Like in a lot of the systems and habits that are common are only performance systems and habits. Like, you know, what needs to get done by when? How do we keep ourselves accountable to that? And that's super important. We need that. But we also need systems and habits to improve. Like, you know, in weekly meetings, do we talk also about what we're learning or what experiments we're doing or what mistakes we're making, what lessons we're drawing from it? Do we solicit feedback from customers? Do we solicit feedback from each other? Do we get together every once in a while and think about how we're working together? What's working well? What might we tweak? And those are all systems and habits to get better over time, not just to get the work done. And finally, and most important, is modeling learning. Often we have the idea that as a leader, I'm supposed to know the answers and to be sure of my decisions, um, and to project confidence, meaning that I'm sure 100% of what I'm saying. And instead, we need to model being a learner, meaning that we might be really good at what we do, but we're also continuing to work to further improve, and we are ask questions and we solicit ideas from other people and we solicit feedback and we are clear about what we're working to improve and other people know what that is so that they can give us feedback and support us along the way. So framing, systems and habits, and modeling the way are the 3 most powerful strategies to build culture.

Oh, that's really great, you know. Um, and, and, and, well, first of all, I love frameworks, okay? It just makes things seemingly approachable, things that I can remember every week. I'm gonna pop this up on the for people may not be able to kind of see this. We always do wins and we then we do lessons. What's a lesson you learned or were reminded of the previous week? And then we always do stuck. So we always do wins, lessons, and stuck. And so that, that was really great for me to hear that of like, oh, okay. Yeah, actually we are like, what is the lesson you learned? And I hadn't even thought about it from a— that is a picking up a growth mindset. The wins is because, hey, business is really hard. So we got to try to find the wins in business. But I had never really thought about the lessons aspect of it is cultivating a growth mindset. So that's great. Okay, that's really, really good.

So you make it easy, right? By making it a habit in the system, it's the default. So you make it really easy for everybody to do it. And the stuck is also very much a learning thing where somebody's saying, I'm stuck on this. What ideas do other people have? Right? And so you're ideating, how do we, how do we get better so that we can get unstuck?

Oh, that's really good. Eduardo, before I let people— you share with people how they can connect with you, where they can obviously pick up the book, etc. What does— we've kind of already talked about it a little bit, but for you, the name of the podcast is Above the Business. What is being able to get above the business? How does that relate for you personally?

Well, I would love your perspective as well, Bradley, but here's my take. So we're working in the business is the performance zone, is execution on the business, is to improve at the business, to try different strategies, to improve how we perform and to improve our skills. And to me, above the business means taking at a, you know, 10,000-foot level, looking at the business from the high level and thinking about how is this working at a high level? Are there—

is—

do I need a different strategy or even a different kind of Yeah, high-level pursuit. And even, I mean, above the business, even, you know, at the highest level would be, is, is this business even the right thing for me? Is it actually serving my, my highest level goals as a person and what I care most about? You know, what is my approach to life and, and what strategies am I using? What's working? What's not working? How does the business fit in? Uh, how about you? How do you think about it?

Yeah, I mean, I, I think you nailed it. I mean, I think that I think of it that way too. I just want to, you know, I had not even considered this until you just mentioned that, but when you made the decision to leave where you were, I'm sure that you needed to, you know, whether that was at a coffee shop or whatever, you got kind of out of the day-to-day, right? You were probably not sitting at your desk responding to an email and then saying, Epiphany. I'm leaving this and going to go start pursuing my dream. I mean, somehow you were able to get above all of the noise. And I think that there's even quite literally— I've heard people mention that they have such clarity when they get in a plane. I'm talking about quite literally get in a plane and they look down and they're able to just kind of like see a perspective on things. And so I think as visionary entrepreneurs, which is the majority of our listening audience, they want to be able to see around corners what's possibly coming. Hey, how is AI going to disrupt that? And you just can't do that when you're in. And I would even say when you're on the business, right? When you're on something, you may not be in the minutia of it, but you're working on it as opposed to being able to kind of get above it and see it from that, like you said, 30,000-foot view perspective. So it's good, really great feedback there. Eduardo, I've really enjoyed this conversation. It's been great. The ratings on Amazon of your book have been obviously fantastic. Really encourage people to pick it up. It came out just September of 2023. If people want to connect with you and see what all you have going on, obviously look at the book. Where would you point them to? Sure.

Well, the book is called The Performance Paradox, is wherever books are sold. And I'm very active on LinkedIn so people can connect with me or message me there. And I also have a monthly newsletter at my website, which is brucenio.com, and there's a free PDF there with 5 strategies to build a growth mindset as well if people want to download it from my website.

Awesome, Eduardo. This has been great, my friend, and hope to have you back on in the future.

Thank you, Bradley. Great to talk to you.

Well, I really enjoyed that conversation with Eduardo. You know, I want to give him credit. When we stopped the recording of the podcast, we ended up staying on for maybe 5 to 10 minutes, both kind of giving feedback to one another about how can we get better, how can I be better as a podcast host, what are the things that I felt like that he did really well, etc. And I thought that it's really cool to see somebody living out something that they evangelize and what they talk about and what he wrote in the book. And so I really appreciated that. And it's made me want to, as I shared with him, I've wanted to try to figure out this, like, what does it mean to turn pro as a podcaster? How can I ask better questions? How can I just simply be better? And there's some specific things that I'm working on to try to do that. People I'm studying, of course, Rogan. And I don't really love Rogan's podcast, but I do love studying how he has gotten so good at his craft. That to me is really inspiring. And then other people like Stephen Bartlett, um, The Diary of the CEO. What are the things that they do inside the podcast and the questions themselves? Of course, their sets are beautiful. Well, I'm not there to be replicating those type of things, and many of their episodes are in person, which I think certainly adds to the camaraderie. Audrey into The Connection, Chris Williamson, uh, etc. I mean, those guys are exceptional at what they do and they ask really great questions. And so, but my point is, is not for you to learn about how I'm attempting to be better, but there is this idea of how do I get better. And one of the ways to do that is through feedback loops, which is obviously what he talked about. And for him to live that out, I think was pretty cool. Certainly The main takeaway that I have is whenever he talked about framing the work, systems and habits, and then modeling learning. When everybody else sees you wanting to improve in whatever way that is, whether it's through books, whether it's through you listening to other podcasts, etc., you are attending because you're trying to be the best version of yourself that alone certainly is going to rub off. But also, can you create some— he calls them systems and habits. I would refer to that as structure, process, and routine. What are some of the processes and the routines that you can begin to put in place? But he calls them systems and habits. And I think that there's certainly a parallel there. And then framing the work. How do you begin to frame the work? So those three things that in that framework itself, really stands out to me. So really enjoyed connecting with Eduardo and, uh, make sure you connect with him on LinkedIn and, uh, go check out his book and, uh, pick it up. I think you'll get a lot out of it if you're wanting to cultivate this mind, this growth mindset, and also for yourself and for your team. Thank you to our podcast partners, Today@Pro, Coach P Consulting, and Autopilot Recruiting. We appreciate their partnership along with, of course, Club Capital and BlueprintOS. Look, if you want to be able to have an incredible user experience both for you and for your team, the software that you use and the software that your team interacts with on a day-to-day, day-to-day basis, it really matters. It matters if it's beautiful. Uh, was listening, as I think I mentioned to all of you, a podcast with Bezos the other day, and I have not heard him on very many podcasts. And there was a 6-minute clip and he was talking about how much he values the beauty of certain things and even the beauty of a document, a, um, a document that he will get before a meeting. Well, I think that Absolutely the same thing is going to be true whenever you're working with a certain piece of software in your business. Well, that's exactly what you'll get with Tadeo, but it's more than just a great user experience and user interface. You're able to customize it with different word tracks. Maybe you've picked up some of those word tracks from Coach P and you're able to embed your own. So it actually connects the day-to-day things that your team is doing with customers and with prospects and with leads, able to put in customized WordTracks. And then that's actually where your sales and your bonus and compensation plans are going to exist. And it's really easy to get started and really easy to use on a daily basis. Of course, it's going to connect, it's going to be compliant with your corporate-approved CRM that you have, so you have no worries there. Go to todayapp.com. TodayAppPro.com. TodayAppPro.com. We really talk a lot about A-players, and specifically I'll use the framework: how do you attract, how do you develop, and how do you retain A-players in your team? Well, specifically, if you want to be able to attract and have a great recruiting system, part of that, just like with your leads for your customers or for your clients, You need to have a pretty wide funnel for your people that you want to come on and work for you in your team member pipeline. In fact, I think the team member pipeline and your lead pipeline follow a fairly similar logic step by step. Obviously it's different in what it is that you're doing, but you are certainly selling them to get them buying into your culture and get them to make a switch from working somewhere else to coming and working for you. And the hardest part for most people is at the top part of the funnel, both in volume, but then also in the quality and the vetting of some of those candidates on the front side. Well, that is exactly where Autopilot Recruiting shines, is in the toughest part for most people, hardest part, they're able— you can outsource that for an incredibly, like a ridiculously affordable rate to be able to do something to help you buy back your time so you can focus on maybe the later stages in your recruiting process. That you have and making the ultimate decision. Plus you want to be able to have quality candidates and they can help you to be able to do that. Go to autopilotrecruiting.com. And of course, let them know that you heard about them on the Above the Business podcast. Developing. We talked about this with Eduardo today, but developing yourself and your team is incredibly important. And so having a habits with that. Well, one of the ways to do that is to be able to get access to somebody who's doing it literally the highest level. If you're an insurance agency owner, go and check out Coach P Consulting. This is what it means to have a growth mindset, both for you and your team. And maybe that first step is just to go get a free, no obligation, go and check out Coach P for an entire month. You're going to get up to 8 sessions completely for free. Just let him know that you've been listening to Bradley go on and on and on for a long time. About the value that Coach P brings, go to coachpconsulting.com. Of course, one of the most underutilized assets really in the business, of course, is going to be, you know, and it can be an incredible weapon for you is if you are able to read and understand your financials to make better decisions. Club Capital can help you to do that. Go to club.capital. And book a no-obligation demo. Hey, if you'd like to check out some of the things that we're doing at Above the Business at the time that this podcast is dropping, tomorrow we're doing an event actually, and, uh, we'd love to have you come and be with us on Zoom, and we work with you one-on-one to be able to help you to be able to make 2024 a great year. Go to abovethebusiness.com. All right, everyone, Till next episode, lead well.