How to Design the Life You Want with Innovation Pioneer and Olympic Medalist John Coyle

Living a life in full is a conversation you always wanted to have with that person who gave an amazing TED Talk or the author of one of your favorite books, or that inspirational Olympian you always wanted to know more about. It's graduate level conversations with those making a difference in the world and in the lives of others. This show brings you new ideas and approaches so that you can live a life in full. I'm your host, Dr. Chris Stout, and I hope you enjoy this episode. Today's episode is brought to you by the ATI Foundation. ATI Physical Therapy's philanthropic efforts extend their commitment to quality care outside clinic walls by giving back to communities. They touch the lives of thousands of people each year through their ATI Foundation. The ATI foundation is an independent 501c3 charitable organization that gives help and hope to children with physical impairments. Since 2003, the foundation has raised over $4 million to assist children with physical impairments in our communities. Often the beneficiary families have mounting debt and are overcome by financial and physical obstacles. Through the work of the clinical and corporate team members, they raise funds to purchase medical equipment, pay medical bills, remodel families homes to accommodate their child's special needs. But more importantly, they give families hope by offering a better quality of life for their child. To learn more about the foundation and ATI, please visit atipt.com welcome to another episode of Living a Life in Full. I'm your host, Dr. Chris Stout. John Coyle is an Olympic medalist, NBC analyst, author, professor of innovation, and a design thinking and innovation expert, and he's our guest on today's episode. John has a BS in Engineering and Product design from the Stanford D School and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University with a focus on organizational behavior, marketing, and entrepreneurship. It's great to have you on the show, John.

Hey, thanks for having me.

So there's a lot of facets of your life and your career that I want to be able to cover in this episode, but I guess maybe kind of one of the most interesting things to me in a very diverse career is to start with the Olympics. I mean, that's just such a hallmark kind of thing. You were for folks that may not know you're an Olympic athlete with the US speed skating team from 86 to 98, winning a silver medal at the Winter Olympic Games. Is that right?

That's correct.

Okay, that is so awesome. So just tell us about that. Tell us about your life leading up to that. How does one start the journey to become an Olympian you know, I think

it started when I was really young. My dad bought me a bicycle that I wanted it to look like a motorcycle. And so we took off, fenders and all the reflectors off. And I started riding that thing when I was 7 years old for hours a day for no real reason. I just loved to do it. But what I didn't know at that time was I was really setting the foundation for my future in sports. I just personally found that was where I found my flow was riding that bike. And the summer of the next year, my dad bought me a 10 speed. And that that summer I actually did 13 century rides.

Oh gosh.

Which if you think about the 10,000 hour rule, how many kids on the planet did 13 century rides when they're eight? Probably one. Yeah, I think I know him. Yeah. So that was what kind of really got me started was the cycling and cycling and speed skating are very much interrelated as you know.

Yeah, yeah, I want to get into that as well too. So you, you've got the bike, you're doing 13 centuries. I didn't know about that. That's sort of amazing. So geographically, where were you? Was this in a place where there is ice skating as well too?

Yeah, I was in Detroit, Michigan and I was a cycling club there that's produced a lot of pretty famous and successful athletes. And I just happened to stumble into training with some of the best in the world.

So it really started with cycling, not with skating. And you made a transition to skating and did both at the same time? Correct. Tell us about that.

Well, when I was 10, my coach said that I needed to skate in the winter to stay in shape for cycling. And I grew up skating on a lake, so I grew up on a lake, so I knew how to skate and I was the fastest kid on the lake. So I was pretty sure this was going to go well my first race. So we lined up on a beautiful sunny morning against eight or nine other boys and girls. They shot the gun and I watched as they all disappeared around the corner in front of me. It was a three lap race and I got lapped.

Oh, gosh.

So clearly I didn't know what I was doing. Wow.

Well, I mean that did that then give you the gumption to say, hey, I don't like this place that I'm winding up in. And then you got into training or what came next?

You know, this generation is different than ours, I would say. I remember trying to tell my dad I wasn't going to go back out there and that did not fly. And suddenly I was back out there and practicing and racing. And by the end of that season, I did end up getting third place at the Michigan State Championship. So I progressed pretty rapidly.

Wow, what a wonderful transition. So according to my research, you've competed in short track spe and you've been a three time bronze medalist in the World Speed Skating Championships.

Correct.

Tell us about that. What's that like? What? The World Speed Skating Championships. Who were you competing against and what was that like? What kind of. And I don't even know, honestly, like what are the distances in those kinds of races?

Oh sure, if you'd like, I'll give you a little bit of the origin to actually getting good at the sport.

Please.

So I, so the events are all the same, 500,000 meter, 1500 meter, 3000 meter, 5000 meter. They're almost the same distances as long track. It's just the size of the rink. So that's the primary difference. But I was, you know, I was continuing to progress in the sport and I won nationals by the time I was 12. And then I made the national team when I was 13. And then, you know, a few years later I was got accepted to Stanford. So I had had to go. I mean that's the only answer, right? That's gonna say, yeah, so thank you. I'm in California and it's, you know, there's not much ice time and I don't have a coach and. But I kept skating and I managed to win the US Trials my senior year and go to the World Championships where I was 12th place.

Wait, let me put a hold on that. So you did that? Like who coached you?

Nobody. Right. But I was always listening to my inner monologue for my coach back in Michigan, Mike Walden, and his mantra was, race your strengths, race your strengths. And he always said that over and over. So I just basically trained on the things I liked to do that I was good at. So fast forward. I graduate and I think, okay, I can go from 12th to 6th to 1st in the two years I have to prepare for the next games. And so I'm with the Olympic team for the first time full time, training like crazy. And they put me through some tests. They found out I had a pretty weak aerobic constitution. So they said, we're going to fix this. We're going to make you stronger and faster, able to go farther, faster. And I went from 12th in the world on my own to 34th the next year to not even making the team, finishing 30th at the US trials that I'd won two years prior with coaching. With coaching and support.

Uh, oh.

So it just didn't work. You know, I'm just. I don't fit the mold of most competitive speed skaters. They tend to be aerobic monsters. And I'm more of an anaerobic athlete.

I'll be darned.

So I decided to quit the team, not the sport. And I started thinking about solving a different problem. Instead of trying to fix my weaknesses, I anchored back to Mike Walden race my strengths. What are my strengths? My strengths are anaerobic power. What if I could go sort of farther, faster? What if I could go less, far less fast? And the way to do that in shore track was to skate a. A tighter track. Everybody was skating very, very wide. So I decided to change my technique, dive into each corner, which required a huge burst of power. It was much more like, pulsy than what all the aerobic athletes were doing. And one year to the day of not making the team, getting 30th, I showed up to trials, and in the very first race back, in a sport where hundredths determined first from second, I broke the US Record by five seconds and the world record by a second.

Five seconds. Yeah, that's. That's like, you know, like winning the marathon, you know, like a mile ahead of everybody else. Right.

Well, I'll tell you what happened when I crossed the line. My coach had jumped out on the ice with pseudo former coach anyway, and he's holding up a stopwatch. He tells me at the time, and I didn't say a word.

I was.

I was sure that I'd gone one lap, not far enough. So I didn't say anything. I just went off the ice and I got a camera that somebody recorded the race. And it was like, counting laps. I'm like, so, seven, eight, nine. Oh, thank God.

Wow.

Because those kinds of margins, you just don't generally pick up.

Exactly, exactly. That's just amazing. So pick us up from that, then. Where did you go from there?

So when I'm from there, I actually met. I set every US Record back to back and then went on to set the fastest time in the world in the 500 meters later that year as well at the world championships. Unfortunately, I fell in the semifinals at the worlds and didn't get my shot to win a Worlds, but, you know, went on to Olympics and so forth.

Gosh. So what do you. I mean, you say that, you know, your. Your physiology isn't that of being aerobic. So was it more like the technical aspects of how you skated or how did you.

Yeah, I'm an anaerobic athlete, so I can produce lots of power for short bursts with a short rest. And so once I changed that technique, I basically coasted the straightaways. So everybody else was trying to meter out their track to sort of keep steady.

Yeah.

And that didn' work for me. And once I realized I could just dive into the corner, hit it hard, it was three GS you pull in the corner, by the way.

No kidding.

Yeah. So it's triple your body weight.

Gosh. Wow. That just even makes it all the more amazing.

I can break it down for you if you'd like.

Yeah.

So here's the physics.

Yeah.

So you enter a corner going 33 miles an hour going this direction and two seconds exactly later you exit the corner going the opposite direction. That's 0 to 66. 6 in two seconds, which no car on the planet can do. It's an 8 meter radius. When you do the math, V squared over R gets you the g forces at three GS. And so I'll break it all the way down for you. For 166 pound skater, you never run two legs at once. 166 pound skater does the equivalent of a 500 pound one legged squat from deeper than 9 degrees while leaned over at 70 degrees while traveling 33 miles an hour on an 18 inch long, 1 millimeter wide blade on ice, headed directly at a wall.

It's hard. Unbelievable. Wow. And you're doing that with a number of other athletes with a whole bunch

of trying to kill you.

Exactly. And you have a lot of padding and protection on too, Right? Like what, a millimeter or half a millimeter thick?

Spandex.

Spandex. Very shock resistant.

So.

Wow. So I'm starting to see some parallels because in my questions for you, is then like then the shift, which maybe isn't necessarily a shift as much as it is a parallel with the USA cycling team. And then you raced in the world Cycling champions. And it seems like I skated enough to be able to fall and hurt myself, but cycling I was as an amateur very much involved in and enjoyed and get it and put in lots of miles, not the kinds of speeds and miles that you were putting in, especially at your early age. But it seems like there's sort of a lot of the physics into that as well too. Do you feel like your anaerobic capacity was what was helpful with these kinds of championships as well? Oh, for sure.

I really. The one thing I can't do is I don't go up. So I go down pretty well. But you know, in order to go down, you have to go up first. So I could, I can't and never could do races with hills. I'll tell you, knowing your strengths is not as straightforward as it sounds. I will tell you for years and years and years I would always do poorly in races with hills, but only races with long hills. And I never sort of figured that out. And I was at a Tour when I was 17 and the first two stages had long climbs and I immediately got dropped and I would finish like 20 minutes behind the pack. And I was so confused because I had just won a bunch of races in a row back in the Midwest. And then the third day was two races the same day. There was a criterion, which is a circuit race. It was in Dale Flat, which I placed second in. And then the very next race that evening was a uphill time trial, six kilometer uphill time trial. And there were 108 kids and I finished 108th. And I was like, I don't get it. I was second earlier. What is wrong with me? And really, it was actually a fellow cyclist that sort of just like put it all into two words. He's like, dude, you just can't go up. And it's just true.

I'll be done.

So track cycling was really my specialty. It's short races, high speed. You only turn left, by the way. I have to make three lefts to make a right, apparently that's good.

Well, play to your strength. So isn't that fascinating? But I would think of so many other people would have deconstructed that by saying, well, it's because I left it all in my first race. And so I was bushed, I had no more fuel. And so next time I'm going to fuel differently. Or next time when I do the. I'm not going to do the criterium race, I'm just going to do the hill. Next time I'm going to do this or do that. But the fact of what you learned, I think in your skating aspect as well as in your cycling aspect, that's like poetry. It's so elegant to say to what your coach said of playing to what your skills are rather than trying to be a decathlete or something, you know, and do 15 different things, which are 10 different things, which obviously people can do very well as well. But to be able to niche it that way, that would have never occurred to me in a million years. That's brilliant.

It took way too long, let's put it that way. But the day you let go, like the day you let go, and this happened to me in the workforce as well, the day I let go that I wasn't an aerobic athlete, which I didn't want to do, that's like admitting that I have a fundamental weakness, which I do. I mean, I have lungs the size of almonds, but in the workforce as well. Like, I was a pmo, a program manager for a while, and that's like the very worst use of my limited skill set. I'm more of a creative person. Crypt people are almost always disorganized. They shouldn't be PMOs, right? So the day I went to my boss scared, saying, I don't know if this is a good fit. I think maybe something in marketing would be a better fit. Man, it was just like taking a sandbag off my shoulders because I could actually do the things that I do well rather than focus on playing whack a mole with weakness all day.

It's interesting because I think a lot of folks, not just in the athletic realm, but bringing it into work, as you were saying, feel like, well, I have a deficit. Therefore, that's where I'm going to focus all of my energies because I have to fix this one thing. Then once I do that, everything will be butterflies and rainbows and everything will turn out fine. As opposed to focusing. It's like a power lifter isn't going to go be a marathoner or something. So I think that's brilliant. So are my facts straight? Did you race with Lance Armstrong?

So sad. Fact is, I'm the only person on the planet to have raced in the same cycling team as Lance Armstrong and worked directly for Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay of Enron, arguably the two greatest frauds perpetuated in modern mankind. But I was a force for good. I never do.

That's good.

I never did any whitewashed trades.

That's good. Well, you stayed clean in spite of what was going on around you. Did you and Lance have much interaction?

Not a lot. He actually joined the team after I left, so it was the same team, club owner, manager, coach, everything. But we crossed paths a few times at the training center, but not a lot.

Gotcha. That's quite a checkered past you have there, John. So I want to shift gears a little bit. I'll probably use all sorts of athletic and bicycling metaphors here for the rest of the talk, but you're also an author Yes. I believe your first book was the Art of Really Living. Is that right?

The Art of Really Living manifesto.

Yes. Okay. And in that I think I have this quote, right. So correct me if it's not, but in it you say that quote, the best way to unlock human potential and drive growth is to design lives, careers and teams, maximizing strengths rather than fixing weaknesses. And that the best way to innovate your life in business so that you can take on greater challenges is to grow and increase personal resilience. So I think we know where that line came from in terms of your upbringing. So tell us a little bit more about that book and your concept about this aspect of developing your personal resilience.

Yeah, sure. And actually that quote is actually from Design for Strengths, the second book. So. But you know, what I've seen over well, and there's some really good data, but what I've seen over and over is people that spend all day trying out experience is trying to fix their weaknesses, they run out of willpower. And there's some studies that suggest that if you spend at least a third of your day in your areas of strengths, you have triple the willpower of others. And willpower is somewhat of a used up resource. Right. If you're using it all to try to fix all this stuff and you know, it's operant conditioning from when we're kids, because kids will quit stuff too quickly for sure. So they get coached to never quit, never give up, never quit, give in. Quitters never prosper. Good things come to those who wait. This is all great advice until it's not. And I think it's actually potentially bad advice for adults. I can't name the person that said this, but if you're over 25 and still trying to fix your weaknesses, that ship has sailed. Or Scott Adams, I like his version, which is persistence is awesome until it's stupid. And I think that happens, right? That happens to people.

Yeah. Like you said, I mean, even with your upbringing with your dad and you know, his having you go ahead and do these kinds of things and have the support to be able to do that, but it is, it's tough as a, as a person when you're talking about yourself, it's tough as a parent, it's tough as a partner in a business, it's tough as a partner in a relationship probably to be able to kind of differentiate. Where is that tipping point, you know, where, you know, how many times do I have to hit my head against the wall to say, you know, hey, maybe you Know, I need to be doing something a little bit different, so.

And plus, we don't want to admit it. Right?

Well, there's huge shame in that sort of a thing. And I think a lot of times, you know, if you quote, unquote, you know, make the team, whatever that is, it may be something athletic, maybe getting into Stanford, maybe following, you know, family business or whatever that is. There's, you know, lots of carnage on the roadside where that just is not something that works for people or they do it. But it's really maybe not playing to a level of life satisfaction that I would suspect that, you know, you've been able to do for the work that you do and what your life has been like. So I want to shift gears again with being an author. And we'll talk about your teaching as well, too. But you career aspects, you're also a CEO and you're the founder of Speaking Design Thinking. And I know from your bio that David Kelly, who's the father of design thinking, was at Stanford Design School. And I'm guessing there's a connection there. There is. Tell us about that.

In fact, David, in many ways is probably responsible for my silver medal. So I was. And getting back to sometimes quitting is good. I think quitting is good when you quit for the right reasons. And the right reasons, well, it's easier to say what the wrong reasons are. The wrong reasons to quit is because you didn't try hard enough, you didn't put in the energy, you didn't spend enough time, you weren't focused, you weren't motivated, all of those things. That's quitting for the wrong reasons. But quitting for the right reasons is when you literally put in the right amount of energy, effort and focus and you still get nowhere. That's life telling you you've hit a guardrail and you probably should be doing something different. I experienced this my sophomore year, Stanford. I was trying to be a mechanical engineer. I was taking math 202, which is something called linear algebra. Still don't know what that is to this day. I got a 13% on the midterm after aggressive study. And I thought, my feeling going in there, I was so afraid to see this score. And my thought would be I was going to be so embarrassed and disillusioned and all. And I literally walked out of the classroom with like. I was like as happy as a clam because I realized I can't do this anymore. I won't do this anymore. I don't have to. And so I Moved into the closest adjacent engineering major was something called product design. And I knew a bit about it, but not a ton. And a few weeks later I got assigned my academic advisor, which turned out to be David Kelly, who taught me design thinking. Hadn't actually coined the term yet. And then we fast forward after graduation, when I was ready to quit, I anchored back to two things. Mike Walden saying, Race your strengths and design thinking. Of what am I solving the wrong problem? Because one of the cores to design thinking is if you're stuck, there's a good chance you're solving the wrong problem. And that's what I was doing. Solving the wrong problem instead of farther, faster, how to go less far less fast was directly out of design thinking. So to close that whole circle is Dave's brother Tom invited me out to Ideo, his company last in November. And I got to tell the story to David himself.

Oh, wow.

And it was really powerful. It was actually pretty emotional moment.

Wow. Well. And we'll put in the show notes, links with ideo. I mean, just the work that, that he's done, that they've done is just outstanding. So I years ago got to hear him speak at a TED conference, just, you know, was just blown away with the, and that's, that was in the 90s and the stuff they were doing back then, you know, so it's just really, really amazing. So you mentioned with this misattributed quote that your latest book is Design for Applying Design Thinking to Individual and Team Strengths. So is that more focused on what your organization does or tell us more about that work?

You know, the Design for Strengths book really was taking two fairly common topics. Design thinking is becoming more and more of a buzzword. It's creeping its way from the west coast where it's pretty widespread. I mean, most of the big companies you think of, Amazon, Google, Apple, they all use it in house. They have teams that teach it. They have structure and process around it. It's not as well known in the Midwest and the east yet, but I'm seeing it a lot more. So nothing necessarily new and novel there. The whole strengths movement from probably Marcus Buckingham, Tom Rath, whatever, 15 years ago. Again, not new news. What I thought that book left out was, okay, sure, fine, I should double down on my strengths. But how do I know what they are? And it's not an easy thing to figure out, actually. I believe that most people's weaknesses are fairly broad and pervasive and that most of their strengths are extraordinarily niche. Right.

Yeah.

And so that's the hard part is, all right, what are my niche strengths and how do I figure out what they are? And I think it's a very long, iterative process. I'll break down two for you if you'd like.

Please.

You're a good communicator. I know this, but I don't know in which way to whom, right? So you might be with a big audience, a small audience, live recorded, podcast, video, audio only. You might be good at telling stories, narrating. You might be good with facts and data and analytics. You, you might be better with small groups or facilitating, which is its own skill. You may be better one on one. I read once that the first George Bush was not the greatest orator, but he was apparently really powerful one on one. Now, was he a listener or was he a challenger or was he a coach? There's so many variations to good communicator. And this is where I think the strengths game has fallen down, hasn't. And helped us hone into the specificity. So I'll break another one down for you. My dad thought I was fast as a kid. Okay. Fast is a strength until I wasn't. Right? Anything that lasts longer than a minute, I'm pretty much out of it. So I have no endurance, right? So when I was a sprinter. Now sprinter's a little bit better, a little tighter phrase. But I'm not that great a runner. I'm not that great at soccer and things like that. Even those have sprint aspects to them. So I'll break it all the way down from you. This is my only strength as an athlete. I am fast as a sprinter in events requiring huge bursts of power against resistance for short intervals with a short break, all while balancing, traveling at high speeds, turning, only left with a group of people trying to kill me. It's the only thing in the world I'm good at. Describes two sports.

I was going to say, fortunately, there's two very popular sports that applies to attracts me.

Skating and cycling.

Wow. Wow.

Actually, I have a third sport. Yeah, I tested it out last summer. It was a hypothesis, but I figured that running with the bulls in Pamplona, which has a left turn at the top, would be similar because it's a whole bunch of people traveling high speed, balancing, trying to kill you. And I'll tell you, I mean, I felt completely at home. I was never afraid. I knew exactly what was going to happen.

And no puncture wounds? No puncture wounds made it all right. Good, good. Yeah, that's.

I would have.

I've been curious about the left turns with that. Wow. So in the application of these kinds of things, then in your work with your organization, you do consultation with other organizations to learn how their employees can identify these and exploit these?

Yeah, most commonly I do keynote talks around some of my various topics. And the other thing I do is, is what I call innovation development workshops. And I'll sort of frame it the way I always frame it when I speak to them. Almost every company says that innovation is essential. Right. Poll last year, 94% of CEOs said so. I kind of wonder about the other six. And then the other question I asked them is, do you have a leadership development program, which most large companies do. Then my next question is, okay, so how are you teaching your leadership leaders of the future to innovate or lead innovatively? And it's crickets, right? Because most of those programs have been around for a while and they're great. There's nothing wrong with what they teach. It's giving feedback, it's strategy, it's analytics, it's data analysis. All of that stuff is important. But if you're expecting your leaders tomorrow to innovate in the situation which they're in and you don't teach them, that's kind of unfair. And the fun part is when I do get involved with some of these programs and I'm usually invited back because they're fun. Like being creative is fun. It's rare that you get to do it at work.

Sure.

And so teaching people design thinking or creative problem solving is a. It's very easy to do, it's fun to do, they like it. And then they ask me back, so so far, so good.

That's great. That's great. So then it almost gives employees who have gotten C suite approval to be able to learn these kinds of things, get into these kinds of things and start to apply them in whatever is a pretty broad spectrum in terms of industries or are there certain ones that are in particularly a sweet spot?

Well, I would say this. The most advanced companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, they all have in house teams. I actually got to do a workshop at Google. And I was kind of confused because I know they. I know this is. Is part of their DNA.

Yeah.

And so after I closed the gig, I didn't want to ask too many questions before that. I asked, what about the design thinking teams that you have here? And he's like, oh yeah, they're all in an off site this weekend. This was the only time I could get my team together. So it's probably my one and only time.

Very opportunistic. So that's brilliant.

The more I actually would say, the more jaded the industry, the more likely, at least so far, that I've been invited to come in, which is actually, it's great because it's putting you, putting the energy where the need is the greatest. So I do a lot of work with insurance, but, you know, is an industry that's pretty stagnant and right now in about to go through a major, major change like, you know, driverless cars and all these other things that are coming their way, disruptors coming from different fields. It's. That arena is going to be different, vastly different in 10 years.

Yeah. And I've even heard things like with car subscription services where you subscribe to your car and that covers your whatever, your maintenance, your insurance, your whatevers. And yeah, it'll be very interesting to see, you know, using design thinking, using creative applications, of taking whatever data are that are out there and applying to whatever kind of industry. I think it'll be fascinating to see, you know, will it always be certain industries playing catch up, or will there be others that are sort of leading the way that then allows, let's say, autonomous cars or flying vehicles or whatever. I was just reading a thing, I think it was in the Wall Street Journal about kind of what's coming next. And just the, you know, there's test testing in 2019 of electric drone, things that take a human from point A to point B. Yeah, it was just sort of like, how do you ensure that? How do you get a price point where that doesn't cost like a bazillion dollars just in terms of risk, let alone development?

And flip that over for a second. If you think about the accident rate is expected to go down by 100, 100 times less. Does that mean that insurance premiums go down to 1% of what they are now? I mean, that's simple math. Right. So that puts these companies out of business.

That's right. And it's sort of. I've also heard that, you know, some of the primary frustrations that people, humans are having where there's like autonomous vehicles sort of being experimented with, is that the autonomous vehicle always drives at the speed limit. So people are very angry that it's not driving as fast as they want to be driving and stuff. But again, it speaks to like back to the insurance thing. And I think even like today you can get these little devices, like I've got a thing, an app I can have on my Phone that will track my driving, it'll track my acceleration, it'll track my distance. I forget a variety of other kinds of things, like maybe if I swerve too much or have too many hard brake stops or whatever, and that a. If I use it, no matter how good or bad a driver I am, I get a little bit of a discount incentive. And I presume over time it'll start to say, well, even though maybe Joe Blow isn't having accidents, Joe Blow is just lucky that he hasn't had yet, so we're going to jack up his rates or something. And thinking too about, I have adult children. I'm sort of forecasting that maybe their kids will think how barbaric it was that people actually drove their own cars. Oh my gosh.

Oh, Neanderthal.

Yeah, yeah. Gosh, that. Didn't people die all the time? Yeah, they did indeed. And what was that insurance thing? What did that do? Yeah, I think that it'll be quite an interesting new world. So throughout what we've talked about already, there have been aspects of time, there have been aspects of. With what you talk about in your writing, there's been aspects in terms of, you know, winning medals and things like that. I remember you made mention. I forget if it was in your writing or Perhaps your Naperville TEDx. Talk about what? I don't know if you can remember this number, but it was just. It was outstanding. The difference between like someone that came in with a gold medal versus someone that came in 10th place. It was like at the.00 something or other crazy kind of decimal. Do you just.

As a fan of toy, do you remember? It wasn't my Olympics, but I like this example because it's so particularly egregious. In the 2002 Winter Olympics for speed skating, the 500 meter, the difference between the gold and silver medal, after a lifetime of training, 2/100 of a second. Gosh, gold, the 10th. So the hero's welcome gold medal are being sent back to Siberia for four more years because you got 10th place at the Olympics was 31/100. I mean, that's.

Gosh, that's that long. 10 people in that space in a two clap. Gosh, that just. It just is astounding. I mean, it's sort of like, you know, if we didn't have the capacity with a stopwatch, you know, it'd be like, wow. So let's shift our gears again and talk about time. A while back, I wrote a piece in LinkedIn called Ask Yourself how Long have I got. And it really sort of hit a nerve with a lot of people and had some good comments and some good dialogue back and forth and related to what I was just mentioning about your TED Talk, in that talk, you talked a lot about the misperception of time as being linear. And is that a term that's like, does that somehow relate to chronoception? And is that something that you've coined or tell us more about that concept?

Sure, yeah. So chronoception is a technical term for time perception. So how you perceive time. And time is the most common word in the English language. And I think that's actually an inherent mistake behind that. So let me explain. It would be like the Eskimos having only one word for snow. We're trying to make it work too hard. So that's why it's the most common word, is because we talk about it. It's in every cliche. Right. Like there are so many time cliches.

I've never thought about that.

But you're right, now's the time. I mean, everything. But the Greeks, in their wisdom, because they were really smart about things, they actually had two words for time, and so they didn't have to make it work as hard. And so chronos was one word that meant clock time. That's the word that we tend to attribute the most meaning to. They had another word, kairos, which means human time. And that is how we perceive time, how we experience time. The etymology is actually when an archer releases an arrow, it's the moment that everything happens at once and the trajectory is set. And these kairos, human moments, are way more important than chronos moments. And if you look at the Bible or any old text from the Greeks, kairos was used far more often than chronos. And here we've lost even this notion that the way we experience time speeds up, slows down. Some moments matter, some don't. And all of this gets back to brain science. So the Greeks were great observers of how we experience time. They couldn't describe the hippocampus and how it sweeps memories, the long term memory and all of this. But what they did understand is certain types of memories are stored and retrievable and others are not. And those kairos moments that really matter are those memories that are stored and retrievable and carry lots of data.

So, and I could understand that too, like perhaps a shift then in just, you know, the ability to keep track of time, you know, and then thinking about it, you Know, industrial revolution and productivity and, you know, the whistle blows, you know, all those kinds of things. You're right. I mean, we've sort of architected over I don't know how many years, you know, centuries. But that aspect to really sort of regiment how we think about. About things. I mean, our watches, our scheduling, our timers or whatever. So is it in the concept of how you work and how you write and the workshops that you do to help people start to differentiate that, to get more into the Kronos aspect of maybe time doesn't need to be quite as linear as we think about it?

Yeah. So the work I'm doing, the book I'm working on right now, is called Counterclockwise Designing Endless Summers. And so every time I begin my time talk, I always start with, how long did summers last as a kid? And vast majority of the audience will say, just like that, forever. I've done a poll as well. 67% of people using a blank write in will write that word.

Wow.

So there's this sense that most, vast majority of adults, 98% of adults feel that time is speeding up the older we get, that summers keep getting shorter. And this is a really horrifying prospect because life isn't just short, it's actively getting shorter. Right. So if you think you're half done at middle age, you're actually not according to the way you experience time or conception. So all this work I've been doing for now about eight years, and it'll result in the book and is already incorporated in my talk, is how do we slow, stop and reverse that perceived acceleration of time and experience summers as long, or in my case, much longer than when we were kids. And it's totally doable once you understand the neuroscience of it. Now I'll just give you a super short version of that, please. And there's a huge misconception out there. People keep talking about how time is flying by or slowing down in the moment, but that doesn't matter. That doesn't matter at all. The way we experience time in the moment actually is often inversely proportional to how we remember it. So you think of that long, boring day where you're doing that plotting horrible activity, and you watch the clock kind of tick and then sort of stop. But you won't remember that day other than that was a bad, boring day. Think of the first day before you go on vacation and you go into the office and you're like, you know, you get in like an hour early because you got a half day and you're going to be gone for a week and you're looking at the clock and you can actually see the hand spinning as you're trying to get through all your stuff. And so you might have some assume that to expand time you have to have long boring days. But the thing about the first day of vacation, because then you head to the airplane, you get off and you go for a walk on the beach and you see the sunset and you have a cocktail and you go for a night swim and you're reading a book and the whole day is over.

Like this.

But in memory, which of those do you remember? You could always zoom in, rewind on that first day of vacation because you're laying down lots of memory. So here's the trick. You, the you that you think you are, your experience with time, time is only in long term memory. Once you sort of ignore how you experience time in the temporal present, then you can start to design for, okay, how do I lay down more memory that's more recallable. And there are ways to do that and there's, you know, a couple of key principles I can share if you'd like. But once you can do that, then you can actually slow time way down in terms of the way you experience it in your temporal past. The way you think about how long you this summer was, how long this year was, how long this decade was, and I'm about 18 years into this year.

That's fantastic. So what are those ways? Do you bring in other sensory inputs

or tell us, I'll give you in brief, the three sort of primary laws. And this all has to do with how memory is swept and kept. The hippocampus is sweeping memories about every two seconds. Right now the amygdala sits right next to the hippocampus. It doesn't do anything. It's. It scans for danger, but it tries not to get involved. But as soon as there's risk, uncertainty, fear, heightened emotional circumstance, it gets involved in sending your writing memories ten times a second. So that's when time feels like it slows down in the temporal present, like in a car crash, because you're Sweeping memory at 20 times the frame rate. So it's like a movie. Frame rate speeds up. It feels like time slows down. Now what's interesting about the amygdala is most amygdala memories are highly retrieval and they're stored. Now the hippocampus might like if you commute to work and it's the same roads, you won't store that memory. And so you'll be like, oh, how did I get here? Now here's the bad news with that. It's as if it never happened. So you might as well not have been alive. It's like that. True. So the more memories you can store. So what are the key characteristics? One of them is uniqueness. And uniqueness is intensity in combination is a really powerful one. Think of. So the way I think time passes through your brain and mind is like fixed flow of water through a garden hose. When you squeeze the aperture for the water in a garden hose, the water speeds up, right? That's when you put your thumb over the end and it sprays farther. Our brains are constricting the flow of time as well. And why? Well, if you think of the base times height for this aperture for time, as it were in this metaphor, think of breadth of experience. So how new experiences you're having and the depth of emotional experience. Now think of an eight year old. Everything is new. They go to the beach, mountains and the new baseball game. First crush. And emotionally they cry a lot. And they have these amazing moments of euphoria. They got their first kiss, they just won the game. And so their aperture for time is both wide open from a height and depth perspective and breadth of experience perspective. Time trickles through. Summers last forever.

Wow.

So now you're 20, declared a major, you have a job, you have more routine in your life, you're starting to squeeze in your breadth of experience and you don't, you don't like getting chosen last for the team, you don't like to cry a lot. So you start to squeeze your emotional aperture as well and time starts to speed up. That's when people notice it. And then out middle age for some people with a routine where they go to the same job with the same location, with the same co workers, eat at the same places for lunch, they go to the same places on vacation. And with the gauze of Advil, Paxil air conditioning, life is super safe, super comfortable. But their aperture for time has shrunken so much that a decade can feel like a year as a 20 year old, which can feel like a summer as an 8 year old. Wow. But if you take on new stuff, so here's the trick, you don't just take on new things. Lots of people in their 30s do this. They'll be like, I gotta take up yoga, triathlon, voice lessons, piano lessons, Toastmasters. Those don't have any emotional repercussions. You can't lose really at Toastmasters. You can't fail at voice lessons. You take a class, you probably don't care the outcome. So how to know if you're doing it right? Well, you have to care enough to cry like 8 year olds did. And if you take on something new, care enough. So what do you do? You don't take a class, you teach one. You don't go to Toastmasters, you go to do a TED Talk.

Right?

You, you care enough about that triathlon that you really want to win and then that'll slow down time.

Absolutely works. I'll be darned. Wow. Well, does that have overlay with, with mindfulness and meditation kinds of things or are those separate tracks?

They are somewhat separate. I will, I will say this. Part of the ability to recall memories, part of the ability for the hippocampus to sweep stuff that your long term memory stays in tune with is being present. Like if you're off into future land and you're experiencing something in the present that could potentially be important, think about it. If it's your young kid telling you about a problem at school, but you're really anchored to something that's going on at work or your business, whatever, then you're missing that. You're not going to write that memory and you're going to miss that opportunity to have that.

So right now would just is very popular in the media for, I don't know, the last 18 months at least, and probably for the next 18 at least has been people's focus on their devices. So I could imagine that your dimensions of your awareness and your aperture and your amygdala are all kind of in a thimble at that point. Right. Because you're certainly not present based per se and you're almost kind of doing a digital Advil of numbing yourself or whatever by just, or even something negative by looking at curated, you know, wonderful lives of all your high school classmates or something. So I guess part of that too is having the, like you said, like, you know, if you're giving a TED Talk, you're not sitting there playing on your phone. If you're, you know, doing any of those kinds of things that are, I guess maybe a fundamental component is that you've identified that it's important to you and that all of those things then also require concomitant commitment to them. You don't just get up and walk on stage and do a TED Talk or go, you know, go do a triathlon with no training or whatever. So that's fascinating. How about, do you think about it in the context too. Or have you thought about it, like with relationships, with parenting, with significant others and things like that? Because those obviously are critical molecules, moments and things that get committed to memory, but aren't necessarily. They can be loving or they could be traumatic or both. But are there ways to make it feel like the time that you have with a loved one can be slow down and committed?

For sure. This is again, where there's a lot of misconceptions around quality time or quantity time. And the reason reality is that each of us has in our lives a series of moments. I would say that memory is made of moments, not hours, months, weeks or years. And if your time that matters with your loved ones are these moments, then you need to create more of them. So watching tv, it's not going to leave any kind of lasting memory. Being on a device is not going to leave any kind of lasting memory. Doing things in real life time with. And this is the hard part, with a risk element. This is the hard part, and it's the unfortunate reality is we remember things, good or bad, when there's a risk component because that's when the amygdala gets involved and it leaves a memory that we'll always be able to find. So how do you design moments that have some element of risk and reward to make it worth it? Those are the things, things that kids and loved ones will remember.

And risk doesn't necessarily mean that you're slacklining over the Grand Canyon or something. Right.

Sometimes risk is being vulnerable.

Yeah.

The time you finally had the conversation about how much you cared. Right.

That's a beautiful way to put it because I think sometimes risk comes with these loaded things. You think about, okay, it's going to be a. I'm going to have PTSD because of this risky thing or whatever. But there's also, I mean, maybe this is what you're talking about can be one of the components to.

There's also.

What's been bantered around is post traumatic growth.

Yes.

You know, where you do survive, whatever trauma it was major, minor, however it is a person experiences it. And I think it's always. That's fundamental to a person's own experience of it. Not an external person making a judgment. But to have that aspect because it really does ingrain itself. I mean, you. I grew up as a clinical psychologist and I can tell you there's lots of times where stuff that had happened decades before was just right there in the room as if it had just happened. So that's really. And from the neurological neuroscience aspect of it, that makes perfect sense. I mean, I never really thought about that in the conceptualization of time, but that's. That is just. That's really fascinating. Wow.

I mean, think about it. If the amygdala is involved and if it writes a memory that's negative traumatic, it's going to be recalled, and it will never not be recalled, almost for sure. And so, but this is where there's a sort of a unique trick that there's a bunch of different psychological mechanisms to try to replicate it in different ways, but they all. They all achieve the same thing. So here's the really interesting thing that I learned from Moran Surf. He's a neuroscientist scientist here in Chicago. He teaches leadership at Kellogg, amongst other things. He's become a good friend, but he helped me see this. One thing that I knew about memory that your listeners may or may not know, but is that when you recall a memory, you don't actually pull up a postcard, right? You actually assemble bits and pieces of data. And if you look at an MRI scan, it is identical to imagining something that never happened before. So your brain is doing the same function. It's pulling in bits of bits and pieces of data. In this case, they replicate something that did happen, but it wouldn't look any different than I say, all right, imagine yourself jumping off the top of this roof right now with a hang glider. You've probably never done that, but you can easily imagine it, right? So that function is the same. Now here's where it gets really interesting. So Moran told me just a few weeks ago, when you put that memory away, you just recalled. You change it every time you pull it up, you've touched it, and when you put it away, you put it away.

Change.

Now, here's where it gets to PTSD or post traumatic growth. How did you put it away? Better or worse? If you put it away, worse. Oh, I'm even worse off. I'm a terrible person. This has ruined my life. That's post traumatic disorder. But if you say, you know, I did learn from that, though, and I'm a better person because of it now, it's not going to happen in one repetition.

Sure.

But this is the funny part for me with Miranda, I was like. And so, by the way, if you want to know the true story in any crisis, you gotta ask the coma victim. I'm like, what do you mean? He's like, well, think about it. Every other person has told that story. By the time you get to them, they've told what happened 20 times and they've actually changed the story. It's a little bit like they get the phone call. So if you get the coma victim right when they wake up, you get the clearest impression of what actually happened before they go and change that memory,

which they will do in spite of the trauma that their brain is suffering. So isn't that fantastic? Fantastic. Wow. That makes good sense to me. I mean, again, thinking back psychologically about how sometimes it's almost like the reliving it, sometimes there's a cathartic aspect of it which goes to your point about putting it away in a better place, so to speak, that I've learned from this, I'm different from this. And having that kind of recognition and then thinking about even like addictive disorders where a lot of times you talk about triggering kinds of of things. There's certain smells or certain situations or certain music or certain people or certain whatevers that have been paired with that, that then, you know, stimulate the whatever it is that causes the psychological urge to use again or whatever. Wow, that's fantastic. So good segue. Speaking of Northwestern and academics. So you're a graduate level faculty and a master's degree program in innovation. So tell us about that. What kinds of things do you talk about with your students?

So right now I'm teaching a capstone class at Marquette University and it's. But I've taught down in Mexico and I'm working right now. I've been in discussions with, doing some exec ed at Kellogg as well as at Stanford.

Wow.

David Kelly invited me to design a class for.

Congratulations. Oh, how awesome. Wow.

But most of that work really is around teaching the process and mindset of innovation. I think that's where a lot of people go off the rails. Like, oh, design thinking. It's process has five steps. Accept, define, empathize, ideate, prototype. And the process is fine. But if you have the wrong mindset, you won't get anywhere. And so part of what I teach is bouncing back and forth between a process, say design thinking and a mindset. So the designer's mindset, for example, is one of the things I teach. And it's a really, it's a practiced approach that people, most people don't get to quickly because it combines two very extraordinarily different things. It combines scientific detachment about what the problem is and how to solve it and human passion for finding a solution. Now this is where I get into this area that I call Occam's Razor versus Maslow's.

Hammer.

So Occam's razor, for those who don't know this cliche or phrase, is that the simplest solution to any given problem is probably the right one. And that's true until it's not. Now, for most, I would say for most complex problems, either relationships or business, it's not true. Life now is complicated, right? And so assuming that the simplest solution is the right answer is actually usually wrong, I would say in life. And then Maslow's hammer is. If all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail. So here's how people. Most people frame up the challenge. They got a complicated situation. They go, well, the most obvious answer is this. We're gonna raise taxes, we're gonna reduce taxes. We're gonna like anything complicated, right? And then they go at it with all their human passion to solve it, and they're well away with this hammer. And then they put a solution in place that either doesn't work or it actually leads to even worse consequences because they didn't think of all the unintended consequences, and they never looked at a big picture. So design thinking and design thinkers will say, what is the entire arena of possibility in terms of solving this? Have we defined it right? Do we really understand it from the shoes of the person we're solving for? And then with all their human passion, once they've angled in on something, they start to test prototype. But then they back up and say, wait a minute. So this ability to dive in with human passion because it's the only way we solve anything, but to back up on occasion and have the detachment like a scientist would, that's the dance that design thinkers require.

Wow. It sort of reminds me of, like, just because you might have a plane and a piece of wood and a piece of sandpaper, that doesn't make you a craftsman, Right. That you really, you know, you can have these tools, you can have your five steps, you can have your whatevers, but then to be able to bring those things together, to be able to then make whatever it is that needs to be made is poetic. That's great. So this is probably somewhat related to your academics and your teaching. I know that you curate some pretty amazing events and retreats, and I think you're just kind of off one from September from Utah. Tell us about that.

So it was our first time expansion summit. And, you know, I talk a lot about time, but I don't usually when I give keynotes, for example, people are sort of voluntold to be there, and they're marched into the Marriott and they sit politely in their seats and you know, they go out to the buffet with the heated Sterno canisters in the hallway. And so I don't control the experience at all. And the Kairos Kronos time concept is, it's a belief, it's been operant conditioned into you since you were a kid, that the clock, time is what matters and we don't have any for most people, a native capacity to have language for and design our lives or the way time actually works. Now what I'll often hear afterwards when I give the time talk is, oh, I knew this, I just didn't know how to describe it. So people intuitively understand that the clock isn't the ruler of all things, that time speeds up, slows down, it's not linear. But what we wanted to do was control the experience to actually deliver exactly what we're saying is true, that we already know. And so without giving too much away, I will say that we managed to get 50 people to give up a three day weekend to go to Utah for an agenda less meeting because we couldn't part of the way to get the amygdala involved.

Kind of a paradox there right at 3 o' clock we'll be doing.

So there was no agenda, no timeline, because what we wanted to be able to do was to create surprise, delight, some risk and uncertainty as well. So if we'd given the detailed Chronos agenda, that's exactly contrary to the chirospones we're trying to create. So we designed the experience from start to get go the 45 hours we had together to be full of surprise, uncertainty, joy, risk, beauty, physical intensity, emotional intensity, all these things that lay down the kind of memories that will be permanent, recallable. And we did it. It was a hypothesis.

Yeah, yeah.

So I'll tell you my favorite piece of feedback and this. I got this from seven or eight people and it was always adjacent to their main feedback. The main feedback was really powerful and life changing. And I learned a lot about how time works. I'm going to create these event horizon moments for my kids. I'll give you one example before we close about the kind of moments that really are life changing, expanding. But then they'd say, oh, and then, you know, I was so as you, as you told me, as you warned me, I was so exhausted when we got home and I was unpacking and then I was like, oh shoot, I better go get the mail because I bet the mailbox bursting and then oh, I better Clear out the fridge because it's probably the produce is all destroyed. And then they go to their mailbox, there's no mail. They go to their fridge, the vegetables are pristine. Like, oh, it's only been two days. So they had intuitively convinced themselves they had gone for like three weeks. And they went through all the motions

because they would expect. Wow.

So we were able to do it. We were able to manipulate cognitive time to expand it in a very meaningful way.

I think it's brilliant that because like you said, you know, the, like if you get invited by a company to come do it, there's you know, a tacit expectation, okay, well it's, you know, this time and this date and you better be there sort of a thing. And people, some yahoo, it's a field trip. And other people begrudgingly, I got too many other things to do. But people can self select for something like this. I mean, to give people that kind of an opportunity where, well, I can't really take his class, I can read his book, I can follow him on social. But to be able to be with you and have this in some way almost kind of curate experience, it's not really a. I mean, it's structure without structure or something. You know, it's sort of like a controlled Burning man or something probably. So are you going to have more of those?

Yeah, for sure. The feedback was so powerful that we already planning our next one.

Excellent.

In Mexico. I'll tell you, I'll give you one secret that we did.

All right.

I mean, the whole weekend was event to event experience from experience. But to just get people out of the norm, you know, we met, we did registration, we let the host do all that. So it was just straight up normal, you know. But then they walked out afterwards and we got into a bus to a destination unknown. Right. They don't know where they're going. We blacked out all the windows in the bus, we put a curtain in front and we sent them on their way ransom notes. So they don't know where they're going, they don't know how long it's going to be to get there. Just as they were about to drive off, I'm like, it's 17 hours Tijuana, there's no bathrooms here.

How many does everybody have? Two kidneys.

So about a half hour later, they were driving actually at the top of this mountain. And then the bus lurched to the side and the driver got up and ran away. So they're just left there and they stayed in the bus for about 10 minutes as I was told. And then they got out and they're like milling around and they're like, what? What the hell is happening? But you did warn us this was going to be different.

This is a risk.

So then they see like a trail of broken watches down a trail. So they headed on their way to the first of many surprising events.

Wow. Oh, that's so brilliant. Such creativity, which does not surprise me whatsoever. Well, John, this has just been a great time together. We'll put all these kinds of things, your books and, and whatnot in the show, notes and links and what have you. But what are some of the best ways to get to know more for listeners to get to know more about you, your work? If someone wants to have you come out and talk to one of their companies, if someone wants to sign up for one of your mystery retreats, what are some of the best ways to do that?

I mean the easiest way is to go to my website, johnkoyle.com so it's really straightforward. It's D O Y L E. But there are, if you stick around for, even for probably about 10 seconds, there'll be a little pop up. I know everybody hates us, but that would put you on my newsletter. It's not that common. I probably do five or six a year, so it's not like I'm spamming people. I'm not selling anything really. The newsletter usually includes a blog post or an article that I've written or sometimes I do videos about, usually about time or strengths or innovation or all three. And then you have access to know when we're to do our next retreat, which will probably be in March, somewhere in Mexico.

Excellent. Okay. So people do that and then if someone wants to have you come out to their company or someone's interested, they go to the same website.

Go to the website. You can just email me@john kcoyle.com but there's a place on the website with all my, all my speeches are There, my TEDx's, a couple TEDx's, all my materials are there. And yeah, I love, I mean I love working with companies too. We either do keynotes or workshops. Books on Amazon, book is on Amazon. Barnes and Noble.

Good. When's your new one coming out?

Well, it's a little unclear. It should be done by the end of this year, but then you know, we're going to use a publisher so that's going to take a while. So it's going to probably be September, October of next year.

People can stay tuned and they'll learn more about it on the website and on your email list. So I have to say too you are just one of your additional skills is just one being so good at naming your books that your titles are awesome. Thanks. That's really fantastic. So, any last thoughts or anything, John, as we wind up today?

Yeah, I'll just say that when it comes to the time expansion mechanism, there are we talked about uniqueness and emotional intensity and those are two of I'd say I think there's five key ingredients that if you stack all five, you can get some of those moments that are worth a lifetime kind of moments. So you've got uniqueness, emotional intensity, sometimes physical intensity, not always required beauty and the flow state which is being in your area of strengths. So when you can both trigger the amygdala through some intensity and be doing your very strength best, whatever it is. And sometimes by the way, I think strengths are strength for people. So being with a loved one is a strength. And you can get the flow state with people you care about much more easy than some acquaintance. When you stack all five of those, you're going to lay down so much memory that when you unpack it, you can lay down the equivalent of a year in a moment. And if you can design those moments and gift them to others, that that's the thing that's amazing is when you can gift those moments to others.

That's brilliant. Well, it really brings together I think your background of those kinds of perception around Kronos about design, about then making it tangible and not just some woo woo kind of thing is amazing. It's fantastic. Well John, thanks man. I really appreciate you taking the time to show. We'll get all these details. If folks are listening in a place where they can't really write things down, we'll get them in the show notes. And I really do encourage people to sign up to John's email list and check out his videos. The TED Talk in particular I thought was just fantastic how you did things. So thanks for being on the show and it's great to get to know you better, John.

All right, we'll do it again.

All right, awesome. Living a Life in Full is a production of Stout Media, a subsidiary of Gordian Knot LLC. Assistant producer Gracie Wong Music Dan O' Brien executive producer and host Dr. Chris Stout to learn more, stop by our website at lifeinfull for show notes and please recommend us to your friends and subscribe on your favorite platform. And as for the obligatory disclaimer, this podcast is for general information uses only and does not constitute the practice of psychology, medicine, nutrition or other professional health care services, including the giving of medical or psychological advice. No doctor patient relationship is formed. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I take conflicts of interest seriously. For all of my disclosures as well as show notes, please see livingalifeinfull.org podcast and my LinkedIn profile. Thanks and until next time.