534: How to Live Future Ready with Dr. Frederik G. Pferdt

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This is the Read to Lead podcast, episode 534.

I think people should move away from that question, what do you want to be in the future, and ask themselves how do they want to be in the future. The future, because that really points towards attributes or qualities— being more open in the future, right? Or being more curious in the future, being more empathetic in the future, being more kind, more loving. I think those are the things that we should think about.

When we're kids, the future is exciting to imagine. Then we grow up, and soon the events and circumstances of our lives overwhelm us. Before we know it, we're afraid of tomorrow, waiting to see what the future drops on us instead of chasing after the future we want to have. Hi, I'm Jeff. This is the Read to Lead podcast, the podcast dedicated to your personal and professional growth. I believe if you want to achieve true success in business and in life, that intentional and consistent reading is a must. Today we're joined by special guest Dr. Fredrik G. Fehrt. He's author of What's Next Is Now: How to Live Future Ready. I'll be asking Fredrik to share about reframing problems as opportunities in order to achieve better outcomes. Characteristics of good questions and how we can train ourselves to ask them more consistently, how to approach experimentation and the fear of failure with a more positive and growth-oriented mindset, and much more. The last couple of weeks we've had guests on the show like Scott H. Young and before that Harry Max, who both have either come to visit us or will be visiting us inside the Read to Lead community. If you're a Read to Lead Plus member, you get to take part in those private gatherings with some of our guests here on the show. In fact, if you were to join today, you'd get a 7-day free trial where you could go right now and check out our private discussion with Harry from June and participate in our upcoming session with Scott on July 18th. If you'd like to find out more about what a Read to Lead Plus membership includes, it's easy. Just go to jeffbrown.com/plus. Me. By the way, it's a lot more than just those monthly author visits, and everything you get is just $9 a month. That's it. Go to jeffbrown.me to find out all about it. Again, that's jeffbrown.me for more. Dr. Frederick G. Fert shaped one of the most fabled creative cultures in the world as Google's first chief innovation evangelist. He founded Google's Innovation Lab, where he trained tens of thousands of Googlers to develop cutting-edge ideas and taught groundbreaking classes on innovation and creativity at Stanford University for more than a decade. He has worked with many international government agencies, startups, organizations, and businesses ranging from NASA to the NBA, and his work has been highlighted in Fast Company, Harvard Business Manager, and many other media outlets. His new book is called What's Next Is Now: How to Live Future Ready. Well, Fredrik, I'm excited to have you here.

I'm excited to introduce my listeners to this book. I think it's one that every single one of them should read for reasons we're about to go into, but thank you for being here. I really appreciate it.

Thank you so much for having me, Jeff.

Well, before we officially started, you and I were just talking about people's apprehension of the future. I think many feel overwhelmed by the thought of the future and, and they even struggle to see themselves in it. I think you would agree. How does your book's opening chapter help us overcome that feeling and empower us to actively participate in shaping our own future?

Yes, you're making a great point, Jeff, right? We have such an interesting relationship with the future, right? Many of us, me included, right? We feel sometimes overwhelmed. We feel anxious about the future due to many things, right? Like we always refer the rapid pace of change, you know, in technology, economics, and society. What I wanna do is I want to help people to really feel excited about the future, right? So that they move away from feeling anxious to feeling excited and literally can't wait that the future is going to happen. And I'm really challenging us to rethink our relationship with the future instead of like what you've mentioned, passively anticipating what might happen and be in that waiting pattern, right? I want us to actively participate in shaping what will happen. And this shift in perspective is crucial, I think, for overcoming that what I say, inertia that keeps us really tethered to the past. And so the question is really, how can we do that? How can we feel more excited about the future? How can we change our relationship with the future? And there's a couple of ways we can do that. The first thing is that we probably want to move away from falling in love with predictions, right? We just— our brain loves predictions, right? Like weather predictions or stock market predictions or tech predictions or predictions about our relationships with each other or predictions about the next job you're going to have and so forth. Our minds crave these forecasts because they create a sense of certainty. But I think this certainty is a false one because no one really can predict the future. So people— and that's probably the second thing— is people tend to adopt this passive stance, waiting to see what happens. Feeling that the future, that happens to them rather than something they can influence. I want to help people move away from observing what's happening in the so-called, like, outer world, like, you know, around us, because most of that we can't control, right? We can't control the weather, we can't control the stock market and so forth, but we can control our inner world, how we respond to these things that are happening to us and what choices we make in the moment as well. We have very much influence about these choices, and I want to help you to really discover this what I call inner agency that is really a powerful force that we can leverage and we can train and we can use.

Well, Frederic breaks down that inner agency into 6 dimensions: radical optimism, unreserved openness, compulsive curiosity, perpetual experimentation, expansive empathy, and what he calls Dimension X. My friend, the late Dan Miller, would always ask the question, what does this make possible when faced with a challenge? And he even asked that question in the face of a cancer diagnosis. Talk about what you mean by radical optimism and how best to go about reframing problems as opportunities in order to achieve better outcomes.

Absolutely. So this future-ready mind state that you just described with those dimensions, right, really helps you to see more opportunities, right? And create more opportunities for you as well, right? It's a way in how you can respond in every moment to, you know, challenging situations. And by integrating these dimensions into our lives, we really can build like what we call resilience. We can adapt better to change more effectively and be proactive in shaping our futures. Optimism, openness, curiosity, experimentation, empathy are all things that should sound familiar to you, right? It's not something that, you know, you have to read up about or like you have to take a class on, right? It's all things that we have built into our, our systems, right? It's like something we actually grow up with, right? Curiosity, for example, right? We are all born as curious human beings, right? Coming to this world and this planet as young individuals crawling on the floor, taking everything in with our senses to really trying to understand the world and discover and make sense of it, right? And we have that relentless drive to really learn and explore and asking questions and seeking new experiences. So that curiosity is something that we are born with. But at the same time, when we grow up and over time, it gets dormant. It basically goes into the background. It's the same with openness, right? Being receptive to new ideas and perspective and embracing diversity in thought, right, is something that we are mostly born with. But again, like, we put that on the, on the back burner, right? So to speak. And what I want to do is I want to bring those back. I want to help people really leverage what they already have more so they can see more opportunities in their future. And that is something we can train ourselves in and we can, we can use more, right? And there's practices and ways that I describe that are really accessible to everyone, really easy for people to understand, but at the same time, mostly very difficult to practice in our lives because again, like, you know, we rather not follow our curiosity and, you know, ask the big questions or ask the difficult questions, or we sometimes are more closed instead of being open because it's again, like just something that we feel comfortable with most of the time.

You talked a bit about openness there. The second dimension is that unreserved openness. And I think you mentioned the traits being— three key traits— trust and transparency and generosity. Openness can sometimes make us feel vulnerable or exposed. What advice would you give to anyone struggling with that feeling and maybe hesitant to fully embrace openness?

Yes, absolutely right. It makes us vulnerable, right? If you can turn that into an opportunity, right, by being more vulnerable, you also see more opportunities. There might be other people reaching out to you and say like, hey, Jeff, thanks for sharing that so openly, right? Now I trust you more with things that I want to share with you, right? So you build a trust relationship by being more open. One example that I usually like to use is at Google, we used to have this open forum at the end of the week called TGIF, Thank Google It's Friday, where Larry and Sergey, they're both founders and CEO, that time was Eric Schmidt or now like Sundar Pichai, like would be around and some of the leadership team too. And we all would gather and being able to ask questions, right? Asking questions to the founders and asking critical questions, right? Questions that really were maybe not easy to answer, but there was a trust relationship with the leadership team to be able to ask those questions. And One of the most fascinating things for me is that the people who joined the company that week, right, the new employees, they were actually given the microphone first. So they actually had a chance to ask the first questions. And for them, it was like something different because they were probably not used to that, right? Being, you know, a newbie in an organization and be able to ask, you know, your CEO or the founders like a critical question on your first day related to like, you know, what could be done better or like what could be done differently and so forth. But I think it's very important. That also speaks to vulnerability, just being able to share that sometimes you don't have an answer, right? And Larry and Sergey did that, right? They sometimes said like, you know, we don't know, right? But we'll figure it out together. Thanks for asking that question. And I think there's a power because then you see more opportunities. And as soon as you do that, being more open, you are literally walking down like a hallway with all the doors that you could possibly open and you open them, right? You take a peek inside and mostly step into these doors. And if you If you wouldn't open these doors, right, if you would not be open, right, you would not discover opportunities. And so for me, that picture of walking down a hallway, opening all these doors and trying to discover what is behind those is a metaphor for being open. And I think that presents you more opportunities.

You said a little bit earlier some words about curiosity. One of the dimensions is compulsive curiosity, which I think you define as a relentless search for knowledge and a desire to explore the unknown. And a key part of this is asking good questions. A curious person asks good questions. What are some characteristics of good questions and how can we train ourselves to ask good questions more consistently?

Yes, I'm a passionate sailor and my family is kind of like sailing with me too. Like my wife is probably the better sailor, to be honest. And my kids are getting there as well, which is super exciting. And so if you look at like the maps from the 1500s or 1600s, right, the maps were like at that time on the edges filled with monsters, right? So the maps really signal to you that you should not go to the edges, right? You should not go beyond what's known.

You're asking for trouble.

Exactly. You're asking for— so you're going to be eaten by the monsters, right? Or you're going to fall off the world, right? Because most people at that time probably thought the world is still like a flat surface. So it's interesting because that really signaled like, don't follow your curiosity. And we still have in our modern world kind of like these guideposts that, you know, you should not go here or you should not do that or whatever it is where you're not allowed to follow your curiosity. And we also know that when people did follow their curiosity back in the days, the sailors that went beyond these edges, they discovered the New World. They discovered something that no one else has discovered before and actually didn't believe that there was something to be discovered. And so that is really speaking to the curiosity that I want to bring out in people, like going beyond the edges, what's known, because there might be a new opportunity waiting for you. And asking good questions is something that we can practice, right, and rediscover. If we're looking at children, right, and when we were young, we asked about 170, 180 questions a day about everything, right? We challenged the status quo and we asked our parents, why is it that way? Or why can't it be better? And so forth. And we can relearn that. And one of the ways that I like to help people frame questions is with that starting point of I wonder, right? Because I wonder really helps you to get into that mode of imagining and trying to really follow your imagination as we as as human beings, we have that superpower to imagine, and imagination is really something that we can, we can all do. There's another great thing about asking good questions is asking why as a starting point. And compulsive curiosity is not just asking one time why, but you ask a couple of times why. And there's a method called the 5 Whys when you're trying to really understand and uncover new insights by asking like why and why and why and why over and over again to go deeper into something that might be a root cause of something you want to discover. And I think that's a powerful way of going about your curiosity and really discovering new opportunities.

You emphasize in the book that there's no failure in experimentation, only learning. And many of us struggle with that fear as well, the fear of failure. How can we overcome this fear and maybe approach experimentation with a more positive and growth-oriented mindset?

Yes. So the path to the future is really paved with experiments, right? That's how we learn. That's how we figure out what works, what doesn't work. And if you truly follow that spirit of the path to the future is paved with experiments, you're going to discover that there is a fear of failure, right? That we all have. It's a natural instinct that's been passed down from our ancestors. They had to worry about things like being eaten by big predators or eaten poisonous plants, right? They had to really worry about these things. But today we still want to feel safe, but most of the things we do in our lives aren't life-threatening, right? So we are not at a risk that we're going to be eaten by a predator or like eating poisonous plants, right? We mostly have labels on food that, you know, really tell you like, hey, that's safe to eat. Sure, if you're climbing a mountain or you're jumping out of a plane or working with wild animals, you need to worry about safety, right? It's not that, you know, you should not wear a helmet when you're in a race car or something like that. Those activities can be dangerous without proper precautions. But when it comes to everyday things like starting a diet or even creating a big vision for your future or talking to a stranger or maybe someone you fall in love with, applying for your dream job, these risks are much smaller. And you should ask yourself, what's the worst that can happen? Most of the time, the worst thing is that you'll be exactly where you are right now, right? Maybe you feel a little embarrassed if you fail., but you'll still be safe, right?

Right.

And many people hold back because their brains trick them into thinking any failure is as dangerous as being bitten by a snake, right? A poisonous snake. They don't stop to ask what's the worst that can happen? And in most cases, that answer is pretty simple. You'll just be back at square one. So the first step to overcoming the fear of failure is to remind yourself of this truth. You won't fall off the cliff most of the time. The farthest you can fall back is where you started. And so whatever your goals are, it's time to do a real risk assessment, right? Not the kind where your brain lies to you and makes you think failure will be fatal, right? Instead, be honest about what you're afraid of. You'll likely find that your fears are overblown and that your mind is playing tricks on you. And that's okay. It happens to all of us. Our brains really want us to stay comfortable, but achieving big goals will always push us out of our comfort zone. So So this is really kind of like the homework I want to give to people. Think about a goal you've been putting off because you're afraid of failing. Sit down and write out the worst things that can happen if you fail. And you'll see that the risks are often much smaller than you thought.

Empathy, you said, is essential to this process. I believe you describe empathy as not a moral imperative, but a practical one.

Can you elaborate on the practical benefits of cultivating empathy, both in personal and maybe professional contexts?

Yes, there is some, some pretty interesting research on what the future self kind of like, you know, helps you to, to do. And so a practical way of looking at empathy is not just looking at empathy for others, but empathy for your future self, which is something I'm pretty fascinated by, because the research on the future self really examines how individuals' visions of themselves in the future actually affect their current behaviors and decisions. So these Findings indicate that a clearer and more connected sense of one's future self is actually associated with better decision-making in areas such as health, finance, and personal development. You actually save twice the amount for retirement if you are trying to really understand your future self. And I can give you a little bit of a rundown of that study, which is pretty fascinating. So the Future Self Research Project at Stanford asked 20-year-old students if they could imagine themselves 10 years in the future. And the students were like, yeah, we can totally see ourselves, you know, we'll probably have a little bit more money and maybe a better car or something like that, right? Then they asked the students if they could picture themselves in 20 years in the future. And they said like, definitely, yeah, we'll have a relationship or a family and a good job and maybe also a house, right? But here it's getting interesting. But when they asked the students that they imagine themselves 30 or 40 years out, the picture really got fuzzy, even blurry, right? They couldn't describe anything about where they might be or what they might be doing. They had no image at all. And so another of the project studies put the 20-year-old students in virtual reality glasses that showed them a much older version of themselves. And after several minutes taking in this image of their future self, the majority of the students said that they intended to pay more attention to their health and save more money for retirement. So it turns out that the future has more meaning when it's right in front of us instead of being far off on the horizon. And that is very powerful because you can practice that by doing short imagination exercises, trying to visualize your future self. You don't need virtual reality glasses for that. You literally can close your eyes and trying to imagine yourself in the future, and that has a tremendous impact on the behaviors today.

That's so powerful. In, in the chapter called Dimension X, you talk about the cost of inaction. Share a bit about what Dimension X is. What do you mean by that? And maybe some examples of how recognizing and acting upon it can help us overcome inaction and then thereby create positive change.

Yes. So cost of inaction is really powerful because again, when we think about that fear of failure, right, where our minds tell us like, don't talk to that person, right, you fell in love with, or don't, you know, apply for a new job, or, you know, don't go to this new place that you haven't discovered, right? We actually stop doing something. So we don't get into a mode of moving forward and make progress. And that leaves us where we are, right? Which is not a good place to be because everything is changing all the time. And if you're trying to, you know, stay where you are, right there, there is a cost involved definitely for you. And Dimension X is something that I want to help people to discover because it's their unique superpower. And everybody has a Dimension X, a unique superpower that they might be aware of or might not be aware of, right? And as soon as you start to be aware of like what's your unique superpower then you can actually start using it more, right? Because that helps you really to overcome challenges and to navigate that ambiguity that is right in front of us. And for me, I discovered that my Dimension X, my unique superpower, is a bias towards action where I really try to not overthink things and really, you know, try things out and trying to give it a go instead of waiting for something to be fully thought through and so forth. So that's kind of like just my, my unique superpower. And I feature about 14 people in the book that all share their unique superpower to really help others to feel inspired to maybe go on a similar journey to do a life map exercise that is also in the book that helps you to really go back in time to trying to map out what were some of the highlights in your life and some of the lowlights in your life and how did you respond in all of those situations and what has been your superpower. Creating awareness around that, again, is really helpful because then you can start using your Dimension X moving forward and really make use of that to overcome future challenges.

Well, what have I not asked you about, Frederic, with regard to the book that you want to make sure people know about?

You ask great questions. Yes, I think we covered a lot. There's one thing that I really want to emphasize, which might be Helping people again, like, have a different relationship with the future. And it comes back to that question about how do I want to be in the future? So for me, in my life, I've been asked a lot of times, like, you know, what do you want to do next? Or what do you want to have next? Or what do you want to be next? Right. And, you know, my parents asked me that question a lot and, you know, teachers and so forth. But I never had a good answer because I felt like this is just pointing towards like a job description or something you want to, you want to get or something that you want to have. I think people should move away from that question, what do you want to be in the future, and ask themselves how do they want to be in the future? Because that really points towards attributes or qualities or even those dimensions that we discussed, you know, being more open in the future, right? Or being more curious in the future. Being more empathetic in the future, being more kind, more loving. I think those are the things that we should think about if that is something that we want to be in the future. And again, as soon as you find ways of thinking about that question, how do I want to be in the future, I think you're starting to put the actions in place today and start behaving differently, moving towards these qualities. And I think that's a path to success. It's a path towards a better future for yourself because then you're not focusing on a, on a goal in terms of a job that you want to have, or like some materialistic kind of like possessions that you want to get. It's moving towards how do you want to be as an individual, as a human being in this world. And if you're going to show up more kind, more open, more curious, and so forth, I think you're going to have a better life, seeing more opportunities, and you're going to have a better future too.

It reminds me a bit of what James Clear talks about in Atomic Habits when he says, "We don't rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems." I think asking, "How do I want to be in the future?" is like putting our systems on steroids. Yes, I love that. That's how I would frame it, I guess. Let me ask you about books. Selecting 2 or 3 that have been particularly impactful to you might be tough, but I'm going to ask you to do that anyway. Could you recommend a book or 2 that has had a particular impact on you over the years, your career or personally?

Yes. Can I be totally honest with you, Jeff? Absolutely. Yes. Showing some vulnerability here and openness, which might lead to some opportunities. So I was actually never an avid reader. Like, I literally never read a book fully in my life. Oh, wow. So I browsed through books and kind of like, you know, chose specific pages and And as soon as I wrote books and wrote this one, you know, I started to fill up my library and like read books from various genres as well. And that's probably like what I would recommend is that don't go to the books that are like in your field of interest, right? Go to the books that might be on the edges or even like, you know, a book that you would never pick up. I have this habit of whenever I go to like, you know, the doctor or whatever it is, and you're in the waiting room, right? And you see like a stack of magazines, go to the magazine that you would not pick up usually, or the magazine that's on the bottom of this stack, right? Because that's the magazine probably no one else has picked up so far. It might be something that, you know, just reading for a couple of minutes might really trigger a new idea or work might give you some interesting insight into the world. And so that would be my recommendation in terms of like books to explore is maybe walk through a library and go to the edges of the library or the places where you would never end up usually, right? And pick up that book and trying to just, you know, see where it might take you, right? Because there might be some interesting connections to the world you care about in the field of interest you're you're in.

One last question, and this is with regard to your methods for personal knowledge management. What would you say are some of your most tried and true methods for capturing the things that you want to learn long-term and making sure they don't get lost such that you can come back to them in the future and use them in future work, et cetera?

Yes. So I might not recommend a tool or a— Sure. A technology, I might recommend maybe a practice that is really helpful for me, which is I do my, my morning meditations and we're really trying to observe and be aware of how am I thinking, how am I feeling at this moment, and trying to focus my attention away from following an idea or away from like, you know, wherever my thoughts are going to take me towards a body experience, right? Like mostly like breathing is a good, a good anchor. To focus on, right? And as soon as you do that and you're trying to gently, you know, not follow an idea and trying to bring your attention back to your breathing, there is a powerful thing that happens afterwards, which is like you have a little bit more clarity, you have a little bit more of, I would even say, like room to think, right? A room where like a new idea might come up or an old idea might reemerge again.. And that is something for me very powerful because whenever like an idea comes over and over back again, right after a meditation, there might be something about this idea, right? That just keeps nagging me, that keeps kind of like, you know, bothering me in a good way. But you need to create that room because that idea never comes back when I'm fully like emailing or on social media or like in other ways distracted, right? I think giving that room and whenever that idea might come back and, reemerge, there might be something powerful about this idea. So that's my way of trying to maybe capture, like, you know, just in the unconscious, having these ideas percolate and grow and develop. And as soon as they reemerge, you know, paying a little bit more attention to them.

I really love that advice. That's very different than much of the advice I get when asking that question. I really, really like that. Thank you for that. Well, the book again is called What's Next Is Now: How to Live Future Ready by Dr. Frederic G. Fehrt. Frederic, thank you so much for being here. I really enjoyed talking with you about this book, and I look forward to helping a lot of people find out about it and go out and get it and make use of it.

Appreciate your time. Thank you so much for having me, Jeff.

To review once again, those 6 dimensions are radical optimism, unreserved openness, compulsive curiosity, perpetual experimentation, expansive empathy, and Dimension X, that superpower that Fredrik says we all have. Have you thought about what yours is? Fredrik's book has been out for a couple of weeks now. I highly recommend it. I think you'll love it. To find out more about Fredrik, his book, and this episode, visit the show notes page for the episode. That will be at Readtil readtoleadpodcast.com/534. You'll also find a link there on my Notemaking Mastery course and more too on how to become a Read to Lead Plus member. All that can be found once again at readtoleadpodcast.com/534. If you come across a book you've truly enjoyed and you think that author needs to be a guest on this show, let me know. Feel free to reach out jeff@readtoleadpodcast.com. Well, that does it for this week. Hope to see you next time. Until then, remember, leaders read and readers lead.

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