181: Find Your Edge (And Collect 10 No's to Pass Go) with Laura Huang

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For show notes from this episode, visit pivotmethod.com podcast. If change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

Welcome back everybody. I am thrilled and delighted to be here today with Laura Huang. She's an associate professor at Harvard Business School and was named one of the 40 best business school professors under the age of 40 by Poets and Quants. Today we are talking about her first book, fresh off the 2020 presses, turning adversity into Advantage. Laura, welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having me.

So we're having this conversation shortly after the book has launched. Have there been any surprises, serendipities or delightful moments since the book came out?

You know, I mean, I think the most, the most fun and sort of rewarding are people who have written to me sort of out of the blue that I, that, you know, that were previously strangers and now they've sort of shared so much about themselves and their stories and it's just been so neat to kind of hear about their own, their own journey and their journey from adversity to advantage and what they've sort of experienced, you know, so I had one person who wrote a long Medium post about how sort of like life changing the book was for him. And then there's like everything from that to.

People who send in pictures of themselves with the book and with really sweet notes. And then one of the sort of, I guess the, the most fun ones was there was a woman at the Philadelphia airport who was working at one of the shops there. And it was the first time I had seen the book in the airport. And so I sort of was like, oh, has anyone bought this book? And she sort of, and she said she's like, oh, well, it just came out. Is it any good? And so then I sort of opened it and flipped to my picture at the end and she started Screaming. And we've now kept in touch. And so it's just sort of those fun. Those fun moments that I think have been really nice.

Oh, that's so fun. That's such a great story. I know. It's. My dad likes to. I mean, it doesn't really embarrass me, but if ever we're in a bookstore together, he'll go ask the information desk. Excuse me, do you have the book Pivot by Jenny Blake? And, like, the most random things will happen, or sometimes they'll put it together that it's me. Or. Or I'm, like, standing there and they're like, no, what's that about? And then my dad will say, well, you have the author right here.

So funny. Like, oh, yeah, that's. That's us. We're asking about my own book, but I also have to ask being named one of the 40 best business school professors under the age of 42 things that must have been fun to get that nod from poets and quants. And to even be a professor under the age of 40 is an accomplishment in itself. But what is it about the way that you teach or your classes that you think connect with students?

You know? So I guess the first thing was that it was such an honor. But it was also, like, at the same time, I thought, oh, my gosh, everyone's gonna know how old I am, because they actually write. When they write it up, they include your exact age. So there was this moment where I was like, oh, this is amazing. Oh, this is not good. Because I tried very hard to not sort of reveal how old I am with my students.

Because you're worried that you're too young.

Either direction. I mean, sort of one of those things where I want them to focus on what the class is about and not on, you know, not as much on who I personally am and my age. But I mean, I have just always loved teaching. And there's just something about.

Being in the classroom and being with students. I have phenomenal students who just. I learn just as much from them as I feel like they learn from me. And I think that's sort of one of the things that I've always had in my classroom was just this really open dialogue and lots of sort of experiences, experiential.

And engaging with them and them engaging with me. And I think that just creates this learning environment that I hope that I'll always be able to have.

And what classes are you currently teaching?

So I'm currently teaching. I just finished teaching a class, a leadership class. And then I typically teach leadership and entrepreneurship. So this year I taught leadership. Next year I'll be teaching an entrepreneurship class called Founders Journey, which is very much also about leadership, but it's about the people issues of entrepreneurship and everything from how do you split equity with a co founder to interacting with investors and customers. It's all sort of the nitty gritty, challenging pieces of leading as an entrepreneur as you make this journey.

That is so necessary because I feel like there is a lot of press and books and writing on other aspects of startups and entrepreneurship, but navigating the people side. And in fact, it reminds me of a point in your book where you say you've petitioned at times to rename soft skills as core skills or even power skills, saying you can't really be successful without them. Because just now I was about to say, oh yeah, it's so good to get into the people side of things and the soft skills. But I agree with you, they're not soft at all. Figuring out how to navigate partnerships and investor relationships and dissolving partnerships is so vital. And as people have often said, if you start a business with someone, you're marrying them.

Yeah, I mean, I think the word soft kind of gives this impression, right, that it's like either not as important or not as relevant.

But they're so critical. And even in things that are very numbers driven or analytical or what we would consider hard, like hard skills, there's so much of the nuance and the perceptions that are embedded in that. So even for example, when I'm teaching something like term she.

Or valuation, which is sort of analytical and about contracts and numbers and, you know, terms and that sort of thing, I mean, what we forget is that each of those terms speaks to some underlying perception or concern or risk or whatever the case may be. And so understanding that interpersonal piece really helps us understand and be much more effective in understanding the terms or a term sheet or a contract or what the case might be.

And yeah, I just think that, you know, even with some of. I found very early on in some of my early research that.

What we consider to be analytical is sometimes based on.

Something or we may first come up with something that is based on our intuition or our gut feel, and then we just post hoc rationalize by bringing in the data or the numbers or the hard facts.

Yeah, I love what you said about. It's also surprising and it connects to the theme of your book, Edge. Sometimes it's surprising the aspects of ourselves or personality or a skill set that do Give us an edge. And it might not always be those technical skills or number crunching or something that looks like what you would need to know for a term sheet or to negotiate even. And I just have to share the start of the book, which is so funny. It's so funny because I think it does illustrate this point where you got a meeting, you landed a meeting with Elon Musk, and you say in the book, you sat down and the first word he said to you was no. And you write, literally, we sat down, he looked at me and he said, no. I was totally disoriented and looked at him blankly and asked, no, to which he replied, no. And then he told us to leave. And then you say, what. What helped you recover this meeting? Can you share the story with listeners?

I mean, yeah, the story, it very much was that the first thing that he said to me was, no, get out of my office. Right. It was that sentiment. And I remember thinking, like, what? I haven't even said a word.

Like, that must have been so shocking. Yeah.

I was like, what could I possibly be already getting kicked out of this man's office for? Because I haven't said anything. And this was a meeting that, that a friend of mine and I were. We were meeting with him to talk about the private space industry because, you know, he started this company called News SpaceX. And we were researching the emergence of private space as an industry. And we had prepared so well. Like, we had studied everything about the industry and SpaceX, and not just SpaceX, but, like, every company that he's. That he's ever been involved in, from, like, Tesla to everything. And so we, you know, we had put in so much hard work and so much preparation. We even had a gift that we had prepared to give him. And so we get to this meeting, and so you can imagine the first when somebody says, no, get out of my office, you're like, what is going on? And so I, in that moment, was so taken aback that I didn't know what to do. And so I did what I. When I'm, like, nervous, I sort of just laugh or, like, giggle. And so I sort of started laughing and not knowing what was happening. And then he saw, like, I guess he was taken aback by me laughing, and so he started laughing. And so the both of us are sitting there laughing at each other. And while we're laughing in that moment, I realized that he wasn't actually looking at me. He was looking at the gift we had brought. And I realized that he thinks that it's probably that he thinks it's a product prototype and that we're entrepreneurs trying to pitch him. And so I sort of sputter out in my laughter like, oh, you think we're entrepreneurs? And he's sort of like, aren't you? And I'm like, and you think we're trying. We want your money. And he's like, don't you? And I said something along the lines of like, no, no, what? Like you have money or something. And he thought that was hysterical and started laughing even more and then was like, please come into my office, which was really a cubicle in the corner of the open layout, but.

Was like, please come in. And so then. And that was how we sort of started that meeting. And we ended up having this phenomenal meeting where by the end of it, he was offering us the very things that he had tried to say no to, right? He was offering us connections and then introductions to people that he knew and all these sorts of things. And it was really turning that moment into one where we were able to sort of delight him and show him something counterintuitive that made him pause and say, what's going on here? And then we were able to kind of really have that meeting.

It's just so funny that your immediate response was to laugh and that he then matched it. And what a funny interaction, the whole thing. And I love how you said you found a way to delight him.

Well, I mean, I don't think he has very many people who come to his office and start, like nervously laughing at him. So I think he was sort of like, what is going on here?

And what were you there to do in the first place? Because, I mean, how did you even get that meeting?

Yeah, the meeting was totally serendipitous, like from the. From the get go. So the friend of mine who and I who went Elon was presenting at this event and this friend of mine was at that event and they like had this serendipitous meeting and then that's how he. They bumped into each other. And then that's how the meeting happened. And then this friend of mine very kindly brought me along. And he brought me along because he knew that we had been doing all of this research on how the private space industry even came to be. This is like an industry where so much of it was dominated by NASA and the government.

And.

So how was it that now we're seeing this flux where. Or this inflection point where there are companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX and Virgin Galactic that are able to make this.

Industry, this industry based on external startups and external technology outside of, outside of the Boeings, the NASA's and such.

I find it fascinating too that for a person at his level, he has adapted or gotten this knee jerk reaction or impulse of within 60 seconds. It sounds like he was ready to tell you no and say, please leave my office. Like there was no sense of him. Yeah, I'd love to hear your take on that because it must be true at that level. He's got to get really good at that.

Yeah, it actually makes total sense. I mean, this is one of the things that I talk a lot about in the book, which is that we tend to know our part of it. We know our piece of who we are and what we're trying to say, but we don't think a lot about how others are perceiving us. And of course his default is no. I mean, this is a man who's probably asked for things all the time. It was, you know, so his perceptions of us. His default is going to be no. So it's so important to be able to not only understand the value that we provide and the pieces that we bring in, but how are our counterparts, how are those other people perceiving us? And when we understand that, that's when we're able to much more effectively turn things in our favor.

That kind of reminds me of a broader conversation around approaching people where there's a significant gap in terms of their level of fame, notoriety, success, power. And I don't really know how to put that, but even though I don't get crazy, star eyed, you know, starstruck, if I'm, let's say I'm not, I'm not around celebrities all that often, but it has happened, let's say, once or twice. And sometimes I might think I'm being normal or being myself, but that I'm really not. Like, it's so hard to be.

Truly authentic in those moments. And I could imagine you meeting with Elon is a similar thing, where the fact is you have done a lot of preparation and you might have been a little nervous. He's Elon Musk. So what would you recommend? How could somebody who feels like, well, who am I to Elon or fill in the blank celebrity name? What would be the edge in that situation? And what about in terms of like even just managing nerves and showing up authentically, which I know is something you talk about as well, and being yourself when you just inherently feel like this person might kick me out in 60 seconds.

Yeah, I mean, I think it really depends on the context. But what I talk a lot about is that, you know, being prepared is not always. I mean, you want to be prepared, but sometimes we over prepare. And being over prepared is not a good thing because being overpred doesn't allow you to.

You know, dynamically improvise and delight others. In that moment when we are over prepared, we're sort of tethered or like, you know, we're constrained by the 10 points that we know, that we know we want to make. Right? I mean, I easily could have been like, no, we're here for these things. Like, let me just start talking about the things that I try to convince him that we are. But you know, it's, it's sort of that being prepared, but loosely prepared that allows us to be able to guide these perceptions in a much more effective kind of way. When I talk about sort of creating and gaining that edge.

You know, it's, I talk about it as an edge, but edge actually stands for the framework that I've developed through my research and through lots of these sort of stories and through these sort of, these people that I've interviewed and different situations. And edge actually stands for the edge where E is for enrich. So it's about how do you enrich and provide value? So that's the piece of it is knowing who you are and knowing how you provide value in any situation that you might be in. So it's like a. It's very much about self awareness and understanding how you enrich. The problem is that we don't always have that opportunity to show how we enrich and provide value because we either don't belong to the right networks or we don't belong to the right groups, or that we don't have the right opportunities or the chance, or we're kicked out of somebody's office within 30 seconds. We just don't have that opportunity. And so that's why the D is for delight. And it's so important to be able to delight people to show them something that is slightly unexpected or surprising or counterintuitive because that's the equivalent of sort of cracking that door open a little bit. So you then do have the opportunity to show how you enrich and provide value. And you know, it comes in lots of different forms, but it's, and sometimes it's people that you're just meeting and other times it's people that you've known for 10 or 20 years. But when you're able to show some piece of you that they didn't quite expect. That's when you're able to then have that much deeper, richer conversation where you're showing each other how you provide value. And. But from there, you know, the G is for guide, because even when you enrich and delight, you still have to be guiding people's perceptions. You need to continuously be guiding people to how they see you and who you authentically are.

And then the final E is for effort and hard work, because that comes last. And we often think that hard work and effort comes first, that if you put in the hard work, that it'll speak for itself. But in fact, that, you know.

We.

Get frustrated because we see situations where we're putting in just as much hard work as other people. And we realize that even though hard work is critical, it doesn't, you know, it doesn't always speak for itself. And hard work alone isn't always enough. And so that's why it's last, because when you know how you enrich and delight and guide, that's when your hard work actually works harder for you.

I love this framework, and I love that it spells edge, because each of the four parts really.

Substantial and they matter. And sometimes, you know, with acronyms like just kind of tweaking a word to fit. And I also love so much that I love the emphasis on delight is really delightful to see that throughout your book. It's something I feel passionately about as well. Surprise, serendipity, delight, joy. You know, you even say in the book that delight as a verb means to give joy. And I love weaving that into these conversations around business and work and career, because people don't always associate it, or they might see delight as frivolous somehow. And yet delight can be such an engine and such a driver for everything that unfolds from there.

And the other thing is that last one having effort go last and in fact, principle one of your book is hard work should speak for itself, but it doesn't. There's nowhere more true with that sentiment than in entrepreneurship, because you can work hard, and that does not at all all correlate to income. You can like an entrepreneur or you're creating something, you could work extremely hard on it. And it just doesn't mean that it's going to correlate to success or income. Even a book, you could work really hard on a book for five years.

Yeah.

There's no guarantee of how many copies it's going to sell. And again, people who write bestsellers, they probably did work hard on their book, but it's not the only thing that went into it, and there's a lot more that goes to it. And I like that you pointed out sometimes people get frustrated because they look at others and they say, but I'm working so hard.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it's absolutely true. And, you know, it's one of the reasons why. I mean, I didn't set out to write a book about this, but I had been studying, you know, disadvantage and inequality and people who are underestimated for, you know, nearly more than a decade. And I kept getting asked this question of, what can we do about this? Like, it's sort of depressing. Like, all these negative outcomes based on who people are and based on the adversity that they might face. And so are there strategies? Are there tactics? Are there ways that we can level the playing field? And, you know, what I found was that a lot of research is around the structural things, like things that we can do to change the systems or the structures to be more meritocratic. Right. Things like putting more women in executive positions or as mentors when there's gender disparities and things like that. And that's certainly not going to hurt. I mean, that's all really great stuff. And there's lots of different reasons why we should absolutely be doing that. But I also realize that that can't be the entire solution because we have been talking about these things for a really long time and decades, and in some instances, things just don't change, or in other instances, they change, but change really slowly. And in far other situations, they change, but they not in the ways we intended and create other sort of unintended aspects. And so this was really around, are there strategies? Are there tactics? Are there ways that people can, from within imperfect systems, be empowering themselves to create their own advantage and their own edge? And so that's what I've really been studying these last couple of years is that piece of it. And what's hard is that it's very much a personal thing like that There's. People are sort of like, okay, well, okay, then what are the five steps? Like, what are the five steps that I need to do to create an edge? And. And I would love to be able to give people, like, a recipe and say, here are the things. Here's the steps that you take. But the thing is, the more personal you make this, the more you truly understand the ways that you enrich and provide value, the ways in which you understand the perceptions that other people are going to have about you in particular, based on who you are and the mix of your identities and the mix of your traits, the better off you're going to be in delighting and guiding and being able to create that edge.

I loved the story you shared in the book to that end of Crazy Rich Asians, which is such a brilliant movie in so many ways. But specifically, the example you pulled was the director of the movie asking Coldplay for the rights to have a band in a film play the song Yellow. And that. That was gonna be a pivot on how Asian people have experienced that word and even discrimination and racism from that word. But he wanted to reclaim it. Can you share that story for listeners? Cause it really stood out as so powerful. And Coldplay at first said no. And just how the director and the film was able to share his vision, his story, his context, to turn that no into a yes. I would just love to hear that through your lens. Yeah.

I mean, it was a song that the director, John M. Chu, had really loved as a child, and he.

And, you know, when he was working on this movie, really wanted this movie to be a part. This song to be a part of the movie. And in fact, he wanted the song to be sort of at that. At that cathartic moment of the movie that was like, the most poignant part of it, and.

Asked Coldplay if he would be able to use the song. And what was happening at the time was that Coldplay had received a lot of backlash already about, you know, sort of race and ethnicity and the way in which their music was sort of. So they had gotten a lot of backlash already. And so they quite understandably were like, okay, you know, no, this is not. We don't want to. We're not attracting any more attention. We don't want to attract any more attention to this. Like, there's a lot of misunderstandings around our music.

And John M. Chu really recognized that. He recognized that, like, hey, this is that whole piece of, like, seeing that other person's perspective and seeing where they're coming from and seeing their perceptions and what they're attributing from this situation. And he wrote them this letter really explaining the beauty of the song as he saw it and how, you know, his whole life he had. Yeah, he had gotten. He had been. He had had to face sort of discrimination and bias and. And things related to his race and his ethnicity and. But how he also saw the beauty in the color yellow and wanted to reclaim it. And if anyone's going to be calling, you know, Asians Yellow. He wanted to own that narrative around it and really sort of explained all of this to Coldplay. And I just think it's such a beautiful example of taking something that is an obstacle or a constraint or something that's seen as a negative stereotype and flipping it to really work in your favor. And we all have this, and sometimes we try and minimize our weaknesses or minimize the negative stereotypes that people have against us. And instead, I think there's a lot of power in owning those and flipping them to our advantage.

You say being yourself entails guiding others to all the glorious versions of yourself. And I can see where that ties in, which is even the versions that you think are a disadvantage. And I just find that such a powerful message from your book overall, which is, don't ignore what you think is a disadvantage. And time and time again, you have all these examples of when people can embrace it and share it. And I'd love to hear your take on all the glorious versions of oneself and how to demonstrate that. But Crazy Rich Asians. The soundtrack was so powerful because, as you describe as well, he was really blending, you know, Asian and Asian American culture with global and international. And covers. I love the COVID of Fools Rush In. I listened to that on repeat for weeks and weeks. But the movie itself itself was such a powerful statement and it got so much press and it was such an achievement, you know, to have all these Asian actors in a primarily Asian cast, I think only Asian cast, for the first time in 30 years.

Yeah, I mean, I think that part of, you know, embracing all of those varied pieces of yourself. I mean, I talk about it as, you know, we are all thinking about it as in, you know, we're all a diamond, right? We're all individual diamonds. And all diamonds have flaws, and all diamonds have, you know, angles from which they shine really brightly. And those flaws are going to be there, and those angles are going to be there. And it really depends on the lighting or the angle at which somebody's looking at that diamond or the environmental conditions or whatever that dictates how you're seen and how you're perceived. And so it's the equation of when you go into situations, you're still showing them that same diamond. You're still embracing and owning all those pieces of you, who you are, but you're trying to figure out at which angle are you going to shine the brightest, because that's when you're going to have the deepest, best connection with somebody else. And they're trying to do the same thing. And when you're able to do that, that's when you really have a context or a situation in which you're providing value to each other. And so there are times when people say sort of, oh, well, you know, this feels like I'm being strategic or even manipulative here by trying to manage perceptions and guiding people to how they should see me. And in fact, it's the opposite.

It's not strategic at all, because people are going to have perceptions of you regardless of whether or not you help guide them to who you are or not. People are going to be trying to write a story about who you are, and you should be the one to be able to write that for them because it's you. And so it's the opposite of being strategic or manipulative. In fact, it's showing them who you are so that you can have that deeper connection with. With that person. Because otherwise, you know, these first impressions dominate, and then you have no idea what perceptions and attributions they're actually making about you. And then there's so much uncertainty and confusion and inauthenticity in that.

I think sometimes it's also hard for people to see themselves clearly. I mean, that's kind of the nature of humanity in a way that why do we go to therapy? And it's like, if only we saw ourselves clearly reflected in a mirror the way others see us, but we often don't. How do you advise students, readers, listeners to find the angle from which they shine the most?

Yeah, I mean, that e part the enrich. How you enrich and provide value. I mean, that's the part that we. We sometimes assume is the easiest. Like, we know what we're good at, we know what our strengths are, we know our weaknesses are. But in fact, that's actually the most difficult piece of it. So I talk a lot in the book about, like, stripping away social. Like we are in this socially embedded world. And so socially, we sort of know where we fit in and social. We see what other people are doing, but kind of going back to your basic good. So I talk a lot about, you know, thinking about what are those core superpowers, those core two or three things that you're really good at. And if you think about it in terms of, like a company, for example, or an organization, like, imagine you have a restaurant that's really, really successful. They're successful because people went there because, for example, they had really good bread or they had, you know, really great homemade pasta. And like, later on they expanded their menu and added lots of other things. And we get off course sometime because we expand and we have different branches and we open up different restaurants and we lose sight of like, what was that core thing that really got people coming in the first place? And for people, sometimes it's traits. It could be things like, at the essence, you're somebody who's trustworthy and you're loyal and you're empathetic. And you forget, for example, that if you take somebody else who's also really trustworthy and loyal but they're not as empathetic, that it's a completely different person with completely different goals and completely different outlook on life. And instead we see others and we're like, we're so much like them and we can achieve the sort of things that they can achieve because we're thinking, look how similar we are in terms of those two characteristics. And so I talk lots about sort of strategies for how to hone your ability to not only understand yourself and your core goods, but also that of other people and how they're going to be perceiving you because of who they are.

Sometimes it's hard to translate as well, equality. Because I love this question, who are you at your essence? And then sometimes it's hard to translate. So someone might say, well, at my essence, I am kind. You know, kindness is a core value. And yet they don't see how different they are or how much more kind they might be. Just like you said, that actually that one variable of two people starting the exact same business or, or going after the exact same customer support or sales role could translate so differently. And it reminds me, I'll just real quickly. No, it's okay. I'll just say I was recently at Oprah's 2020 vision day long event. I did a podcast on it a few episodes ago. And she said, you all might think my superpower is interviewing people. It's not. My superpower is connection, it's seeing people. And when she said that, I had such an aha moment that I think a lot of times we try to do this work of enrich. How do we enrich? What are our superpowers? And we come up with the resume words or the personality assessment words, interviewing Microsoft Office. And actually it's more of an essence than that.

Yeah, absolutely. I think. And the more that we allow ourselves to be vulnerable and to experience different, different experiences, the more we're able to sort of see that and really understand that.

Another thing that you share in the book is.

Guiding others to see your trajectory it's not where you've been, it's where you're going. That was interesting to me, too, because yet again. And why did I write Pivot? Because so often people have a hard time figuring out where they're going and certainly expressing that to others. And yet we know that if someone asks you at a cocktail party and they say, what do you do? It's better to just answer with something you're excited about. If you're bored at your job or you're not excited to talk about what you do or where you've been or where you've come from, I think often that's where we default. But I'd love to hear more about this guiding others to see your trajectory, what that means. And then because you're a professor, you're interacting with many students who are probably a little bit unsure as well of exactly what comes next. So how did those. How do people who are in that situation, if not quite sure, still share a vision with whoever it is that they're speaking with?

Yeah, I mean, there's this element of we think that we are going to point X, and that's sort of our goal or that sort of our vision. And what I say a lot is that it's not. You know, there's a couple of elements to this. I mean, the first is that when we take. When we see somebody who we aspire to be, like somebody is the CEO of a company, for example, and you want to be that the CEO of that, you ask that person, like, how did you get there? And they'll say things like, well, then I got this degree, and then I studied this, and I did a rotation and this function. But if we followed the exact same path, we inevitably will not get to that same role. We will not get to that same position because we're sort of. We're so different and we're so varied. And so it's actually the sort of worst advice to kind of follow that blindly and to take that same trajectory. The second piece of it is that I talk in the book a lot about go for directionality. Right. Rather than going for, like, that point X. If you know what your basic goods are, you know what your superpowers are, go in that direction. Because there's so many other opportunities and different ways that you can be successful rather than just trying to land on that 1x spot. If you go in that direction, it allows you to delight and guide and improvise in different ways that really do allow you to be successful much more. Lots more. Broader. In a lot more broader sense.

Yeah. I say in pivot, decisions are data. Like, sometimes you just need to decide at least little things and go in that direction. And then. I love how you say this. If you know what your basic goods are, your superpowers just head in that general direction. And it's so true that that is when serendipity happens, we meet the perfect person at the perfect time. You also are so happy to see you weave in intuition to the book as well. And I don't think our intuition. It's like intuition works a little better when we're in motion somehow or where we're not frozen by the perfectionism of having to have it all figured out.

Absolutely, yeah. I mean, I think one of the key things.

Especially in terms of intuition, is that we tend to think that.

You know, using our gut feel, our intuition, that it's something that's always overly emotional and, you know, like, subconscious and quick. But there's so much information that, you know, our intuition is actually something that does provide us with our experience and our patterns and our. And lots of data embedded in that. So.

It'S critical that we. That we also don't lose sight of the fact that in some situations we do want to be really analytical, but in other situations, we perhaps don't want to be analytical at all and want to completely allow ourselves to go based on intuition.

So if you could give listeners one experiment related to the EDGE framework, maybe it's the thing that you see people trip up on most often. What would you encourage them to do when they finish listening to this interview?

Yeah, I mean, one thing I talk a lot about is constraints and how we see constraints. And so one of the sort of exercises that I talk about and then I also have my students do, is this exercise called 10 nos. And what you do in your. The goal of it is in a week or in whatever timeframe you give yourself, is that you're supposed to get 10 people to say no to you. And it has to be like a full no. So not like, oh, yeah, maybe I'll do this in the future, or maybe, yeah, I can't do that, but I'll do this instead. It has to be a full no and what it forces us to do. I mean, we're so used to asking for people for things that we think they're going to say yes to or trying to influence and position in a way that puts us in this sort of positive light. And this exercise gives people permission. It forces them, because the goal is to get them to say no. And so it takes away some of that, like wanting to please people or wanting to say things in the right way or wanting to.

You know, try and get to this point of agreement. And it turns around. Like, people drastically start to think about constraints in a different way. Number one, they realize that people are much willing to. People say yes to a lot more than you expect them to say yes to. Number two, it changes the ways that you sort of ask for things, even when you are asking people to say say yes. And it just gives you this perspective on what constraints are and sort of what your advantages are and how to create your edge.

Now, does the person need to say no? What if they just don't respond? Like, I email Elon Musk and invite him to the podcast and doesn't respond? Does that count? Or is the goal you.

Yeah. So that's sort of like a hedge, right? That's like, you don't know, like, that person sort of. It has to be like a, like, preferably face to face when you're actually.

And they need to sort of be able to say no.

Okay. I love this homework. Before you mentioned face to face, I was thinking about. You're absolutely right that it would change the entire approach. For example, I reach out to guests for the podcast where I'm pretty sure they'll say yes, or there's a good chance that they'll say yes. What I don't do is aggressively try to get 10 no's. It would completely change who I was reaching out to if I was trying to get no's.

Yeah.

It would be a completely different list of people. Like, it's just. It really struck me when you said that even though it wouldn't be in person, that's next level.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And yeah. So, I mean, share with me what happens. I love when people sort of share, like, oh, here's what happens. And I mean, like, one person was able to get courtside tickets to a kid. I thought that this person. Right. So there's like all these incredible things, these stories around where you thought it was absolutely going to be a no and it ended up being a yes and vice versa. Things that you thought. Right. That. And so I think it's just fascinating. So I love, you know, please do share what comes out of this experiment if you try it.

Okay, challenge accepted. I'm going to make this my goal to collect 10 no's for the podcast. I don't know how long it's going to take me. I know if I were being A good coachee would pin that down. But this is epic. I can't wait. If anyone listening, if you do the 10 no's experiment, please do write in and let us know. I'll loop Laura in on the reply and how cool. I just, I just can't believe it. That's the. And that's the power of a, of a powerful question. I wish I had a different word adjective that would come. But that's it because it just completely transforms the way we even approach the task. And that's something, you know, the notion of 10x thinking if you try to solve the problem at 10x, whatever it is now, the solutions would as well be much more creative.

Yeah, absolutely.

So good. Laura, thank you so much for sharing these insights. It's been really joyful to speak with you. Where can people find you if they want to see more of your work or keep in touch?

Yeah. So my website is Laura Huang.

Huang is H U A N G and I'm on social Twitter, Instagram. Laura Huang, la.

Amazing. Do you live in la? No. You teach at Harvard?

No, I live in Boston.

What does LA come from?

I think it's a remnant from long time ago.

Okay.

I'm long due for a visit to la.

Yeah. Because my Instagram handle is Enny Blake nyc. So like I guess if I ever move, I'll look back fondly when I lived in the city. And listeners, if you want to check out Laura's book, it's called Turning Adversity into Advantage. Laura, huge thanks again.

Sure. Thank you.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot podcast. Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates by signing up for Pivot List, a curated twice monthly newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening to and the latest tools I'm geeking out on. Sign up@pivotmethod.com pivotlist get show notes from this episode@pivotmethod.com podcast and connect with me on Twitter @jennyblake.

Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.