268: Decoding Greatness with Ron Friedman

Hi, this is Charles Michael Davis. Toyotathon is on. So stop by your local Toyota dealer for incredible year end deals on the cars, trucks and SUVs known for their legendary reliability like the stylish and efficient Camry. The Ready for anything RAV4 or check out a rough and rugged Tacoma or Tundra, all with great financing and lease options available to qualified customers. Visit buyatoyota.com to find out more. Toyota let's go places.

What's next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot podcast and author of Pivot. The only move that matters is your next one.

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.

Hello friends. Welcome back. I am so excited to be here today with my friend Ron Friedman. Ron is an award winning social psychologist and professor. He specializes in human motivation. Today we are talking about his awesome new book, Decoding how the Best in the World Reverse Engineer Success, which was selected by Amazon's editors as one of the year's best nonfiction books and made it to USA TODAY today. Congrats, Ron. Welcome to the show.

Thanks so much. It's great to be here.

You have a learner's mind because I could just tell how many notes you've taken, how many articles you've read, books you've read, podcasts you've listened to, masterclasses you've taken. Can we start by you telling us your process, which I learned from your book to ask you about telling us about your process for harnessing this much research into a big idea?

Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, let me just say I feel a little humbled to be sharing my process with you, given that you're the notion expert and have a much more thorough process than I do. But I am kind of old school in the sense that I just like to consume a lot of information and input it frankly into Google Notes and, and, and that's it. I just have a Google Doc that I utilize and then I just kind of organize it a million different ways until I see the commonalities and themes and then I bridge those themes through cliffhanger and connections and sections. And so that process, I think is one that obviously is applicable to writers, but regardless of what field you're in, there is a real value to capturing the anecdotes and the ideas that you encounter and not just simply relying on memory. So that when it's time for you to produce, you have a wealth of information you can draw from.

Do you have a big idea for a next book first and then you start collecting this research? Or do you also have a way to reverse engineer into the next topic based on the collection, the treasure trove in your Google Doc?

I start with a big idea and then I input. So in other words, I might input the same book multiple times, depending on the window through which I'm looking at the idea. So if, for example, if I'm reading a classic book, you know, whatever it might be, let's say it's Dan Pink's Drive, and I've got. I've. I'll read it the first time, I'll underline the main points that I think are important, and then if I'm writing a book on relationships, I might see different connections than I would writing a book about creativity.

One of the things I found most compelling in the description to Decoding Greatness is the flap copy which says, for generations we've been taught there are two ways to succeed, either from talent or practice. And this book brings the third approach, reverse engineering. Talk to us about this misconception that the ways to success, the paths to success, are talent or practice and where your book comes in.

Yeah, this was the big idea for the book. And it's the idea that we have long been told two major stories about how people achieve great things and rise to the top of their profession. The first story is that greatness comes from talent. And from this perspective, we all have our innate strengths. And the key to finding your greatness, for example, Jenny, is to just identify a field that allows those inner strengths to shine. The second big story is that greatness comes from practice. This is the Malcolm gladwell idea, the 10,000 hours. The idea that if you just have the right practice regimen and you have enough discipline to carry it through for years and years and years, eventually you will become great. But in doing the research for this book, Decoding Greatness, what I found is that there is a third story, and it's one that people don't often talk about. Yet. It is the path through which an astonishing number of top performers, everyone from writers and artists to inventors and entrepreneurs, it's a path that they've been using for generations, and it involves mastering a skill that people don't often talk about, and that's reverse engineering. And reverse engineering simply means studying the best in a field and then working backward to figure out how they did it. And in Silicon Valley, which I know is where you've come from. It's an idea that is very well known. It's how we've got the personal computer and laptops and the iPhone. There's a very long history of coders deconstructing winning products to figure out how they're made. But what's less well known is that reverse engineering also explains how authors like Stephen King and Malcolm Gladwell learned to write and how artists like Pablo Picasso and Claude Monet became groundbreaking painters, and even how Judd Apatow became one of the most successful comedy minds of our generation. So studying the best in a field and then working backward to figure out how they were created turns out to be a lot more common than anyone has realized.

Talk to us about your process as a writer. Have you done this, like, in terms of developing yourself as an author? Have you reverse engineered from authors you admire?

I do this all the time. And I really believe that reverse engineering isn't an activity. It's more of a mindset. And so anytime I encounter anything that I think is compelling, I will take a second and think about, how do they pull that off? What can I learn from this? How can I apply this to the thing I'm working on? And so, as I'm reading books often, what I'll do is I will, at the end of a chapter, kind of just reverse out, outline what's happening in the different sections. How did this author do this? What are they doing here? But then it goes a lot deeper than just the structure, because what you can do, as someone who is constantly trying to learn, applying this reverse engineer mindset, is to become a collector. Which is one of the key points that I raise in the book, which is the first step to becoming great, is recognizing greatness in others and keeping tabs on the things that really move you. And so I mentioned the Google Doc for ideas. I also have a Google Doc for powerful words and a Google Doc for compelling headlines and some strong transition sentences. So I've got this collection that I can then go visit and then break down even further to understand what's happening in these particular examples. And then comparing the items in my collection against the items that didn't make my collection. And in doing so, that's what helps you identify what it is that really resonates with you. Because now you're comparing the. The extraordinary against the ordinary, the things in your collections against the things that are not in your collection. And that's how you identify the themes that move you and are really resonant for you. And this is something that you can apply if you're a graphic designer, if you are a marketer, if you're a writer, you can apply this in so many different ways. And I know that speakers collect presentation decks, and if you are a salesperson, you can collect proposals. And so having that collection that you can then go visit and deconstruct, that's the first step to really elevating your performance.

I love that you have a powerful words bucket collection. Bucket. And then transitions and turns of phrase, because I will often highlight those in my Kindle, but that's where they stay. And I just love that you actually pull out transition sentences that are compelling to you. And do you then draw from those, kind of borrow from them when you write your next thing, or are you mostly collecting them to learn from them and see why did this work so well?

I definitely don't borrow them. What I do do is I will use them as inspiration. So it's interesting because a lot times, if you can just read five compelling opening statements or transition statements in a row, that just stays in the forefront of your mind, and then your transition becomes easier to identify. Does that make sense? So it's kind of like inspiration more than anything else. And. But I do go further in. For example, with opening sentences, what I will do is I will try to understand the pattern. So here's an example of a powerful opening sentence. And what I did after reading this opening sentence is I then kind of identified what are the constituent parts. And this is actually taken from Joan Allaire in one of his. I think it was his book on creativity. I think it's called Imagine. And here's an opening. Actually, you know what? This is a New Yorker article. So he writes. In the late 1940s, Alex Osborne, a partner in the advertising agency BBDO, decided to write a book in which he shared his creative secrets. So what's happening there? So he starts off with the date, then he identifies an individual, then he provides the individual's title, and then he closes with an action. And it's kind of a cliffhanger at the end there, where it's like, decided to write a book in which he shared his creative secrets. Obviously, you want to know what are the creative secrets. So that's the structure. It's date, individual title, action. Once you have that formula, you could apply it to another sentence quite easily. Right? So in 2021, Jenny Blake, host of the Pivot Podcast, interviewed an author she admired. And I can apply it. And so it's have I, you know, are we copying Jonal error? No. We have identified a formula that we can now apply in a new way. And the key is to take a formula that works and then modify it slightly to make it your own. So, you know, that was just the first crack at the sense. I'm sure we can make it a lot sexier if we wanted to. The approach and the reverse engineering approach and what it gives you is it gives you a formula that you can now use to create something that is far, far easier than just staring at a blank page.

You say nothing brings down a genre faster than a string of copycats. When I was reading your endnotes, which you and I both delight in, you say that popular among nonfiction writers is to leaf through the endnote section at the back of a book and examine the original sources an author used to construct their piece of. It's the writer's equivalent of enjoying a delicious meal at a restaurant and then raiding the chef's pantry to uncover the ingredients. The index is equally prized because it helps writers unpack an author's thinking, sometimes even their own. So you and I share a love of endnotes and indices.

Through your endnotes, I found Malcolm Gladwell's masterclass, which I hadn't taken yet. Took his masterclass. Speaking of transitions, he talks about how sometimes he doesn't bother, he just numbers sections, section 1, 2, 3. He gives them a numerical number within the chapter. But of course, once Tipping Point came out, which took him two years to create a tipping point for Tipping Point, then we did see a string of the next Malcolm Gladwell or everybody describing their book as a Gladwellian approach to this, or even the idea of pop social science kind of was associated with Malcolm Gladwell. And at some point it must be frustrating for the Malcolm Gladwell's of the world. I mean, maybe he's just truly happy for his strategies to spread. But I wonder what you said about copycats, that it kind of does water down the original format a little bit. Unless you're truly an untouchable master. And then maybe the original person has to keep innovating.

Like you, I'm a big fan of Gladwell, and I think he really is unique. I think one of the reasons people have had trouble reproducing his formula is because his vocabulary is so specific and you can tell when someone doesn't have the literary chops and they're applying the Gladwell formula, whereas he. It just comes naturally for him. If you hear him in interviews, it's just the way he talks he's not producing a formula, it's just the way he is. And what's fascinating is that when you, to your point, when you reproduce somebody else's formula and it doesn't feel authentic to you, people can tell, and that is where I think a lot of writers and marketers fall flat, is they're trying to reproduce formula that doesn't feel authentic to them but has worked for others. And at the same time, audience expectations shift the more they're exposed to a particular formula. So in decoding greatness, I talk about Twilight and how when that book came out, it was the story of a teenager who falls in love with a vampire and it was an extraordinary success. And then in short order, tons of copycats came out of other teenagers who were also in love with vampires, and the whole genre collapsed. But what was successful, it was the next iteration of, of that formula, which was Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, and that exploded onto the scene. And it reminds me of how Lin Manuel Miranda has become the success that he's become. You know, what he's doing isn't so much reproducing somebody else's formula. He's combining elements from different genres. So if you look at in the heights, it's salsa plus rapid plus the traditional Broadway formula. And that show did well. But it wasn't until Hamilton, where he added a fourth element, which was American history, to that formula of rap plus salsa plus the traditional Broadway formula, that it really exploded. And so often what it takes to become a true success isn't just to copy somebody else's established formula, but to take an established formula and combine it with other elements and ones that are uniquely interesting to you. And so far from that being problematic, I think that's what we should lean into, is we shouldn't just simply avoid others influences and hope to be completely original, because that often backfires. We could talk about why that is, but the people who are truly successful are the ones who are taking an established formula and adding a component or element that makes it just unique enough so that it feels fresh. And that's often what the true success comes from. And on the point of creativity, one of the things that we often think is that in order to succeed we need to be completely original. And in fact, that tends to backfire. And there's a study in the book about that showing that when people are exposed to ideas that are completely original, they tend to reject them. And it's because we're born with a brain that is designed to keep us alive. And when we're exposed to ideas that are completely fresh and unique. That feels unsafe to us often. What happens if you're too original? That often gets rejected. And so what you want to do is take an established formula and modify it ever so slightly so that you are identified with something that is slightly unique and that tends to get a lot a much better reaction.

I don't know about you, but as a perpetual learner, I have a lot of noise, I'll call it noise in my mind about is this original enough? And I'm always trying to push my ideas and my writing or speaking or podcasting, whatever it is I'm doing to be original enough. I never want to be derivative or accidentally copying someone without attribution. But of course we know that's really hard to do. There's not so many totally original things is such a thing as too original. I know that when you started writing this book, you set out to write a different book and your editor saw the first chapter. I believed, correct me if I'm wrong and said this is the book, it's right here. It's just this zoom in on this one thing which what we're talking about decoding greatness. Was it difficult to pivot midstream while you had already started this project thinking it was going to be something else and then ending up doing such a deep dive on just this one area?

So when I set out to write this book, I wanted to do something that was a lot more ambitious and has a lot had a lot more components to help people achieve top performance. And so what it ended up being was a book about reverse engineering which is focused on the mastery dimension of top performance, which is one of the components and factors that leads to top performance. But isn't the only thing this book was already, as I think you could tell Jenny reading it, it was fairly encyclopedic on its own. You can only imagine there's a lot. So the way I kind of think of it is I believe that readers attention span has shrunk considerably over the last 20 years. And so my approach is I need to have fireworks on every page. There's gotta be something that is exciting or interesting or unexpected all the time, basically within every five minutes. And if you're. If I'm not doing that for you as a writer, then I haven't done my job. So here I felt like I did have enough to make that carry through. I think rather than it being a completely different book, I think what would have happened is that the book I set out to write. Probably would have been 1500 pages, right? I was gonna say. I think my editor just saved me from a lot of hard work. Close your eyes. Exhale. Feel your body relax and let go.

Of whatever you're carrying today. Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered for from 1-800-contacts. Oh my gosh, they're so fast. And breathe. Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste. Visit 1-800-contacts.com today to save on your first order. 1-800-contacts this episode is brought to you by Nespresso Gift Magical Mornings with Nespresso Vertuopop. Compact and stylish virtual pop is made to meet every morning coffee craving. From espresso to coffee, hot or iced, at the click of a button. And celebrate the season with Nespresso's limited edition coffee flavors. Sweet almond and hibiscus, cinnamon and candied tamarind and festive double espresso Magic in the making Shop the holiday gift collection exclusively@nespresso.com I consider pivoters certainly anyone who's here and sticking around high net growth TED Talks are probably in circulation. You just did a fascinating thing midway through the book of Illustrating Algorithmic Thinking by unpacking Sir Ken Robinson's 2006 TED Talk and you break down this takes up many pages in the book of the template for this and then the actual example with Sir Ken Robinson analyzing the length, the duration, the word count, the structure, opening thesis arguments, the content, biographical stories, anecdotes, arguments, jokes, data, cliffhangers, getting into the emotion. What arc, what emotional arc does the speaker take the audience on? And then to delivery pace body language slides first, I think it takes a lot of rigor. I admire the rigor that you put into that. Take us through the steps of once we unpack something we really love, then what?

Yeah. So first let me comment briefly on the TED Talk, which is that in doing so, in unpacking Sir Ken Robinson's TED Talk, what I discovered is that he's doing many things that I would not anticipate would make a TED Talk successful. So among them is that he shares a grand total of one fact throughout the entire talk. Now, if I was sitting down to write a TED Talk, not having done this analysis, I would assume that I need to collect a whole bunch of persuasive facts in order to make my case. But that's not what he does, and in fact, what he does do is he tells a whole bunch of anecdotes, biographical stories that help the viewers relate to, to his experience. And at the same time, he's telling a lot of jokes. I think it was something like 39 jokes within 18 minutes. So that, I think is valuable in its own right, is by reverse engineering, having a methodical approach to unpacking the successful execution, you now have a better understanding of what resonates. So it's storytelling and telling jokes, not bombarding people with facts. That approach of reverse engineering a TED Talk is valuable, obviously, in the case of Sir Ken Robinson, but it's more valuable if you can pinpoint three or five talks that you find resonant and then do the same thing for those talks, because you might find that there are completely different elements that resonate with you. And so I mentioned in Decoding Greatness that this approach, the Sir Ken Robinson approach, would probably not work for me. I'm not going to sit there and give you 39 jokes in 18 minutes. That's not going to work for me. That's not my thing. But what might work is if I took, I don't know, let's say, Susan Cain's talk, which is very different than Sir Ken Robinson's talk, or maybe Dan Pink's talk, again, very different. Often, as I mentioned earlier, one of the best things you can do is not simply to reproduce someone's successful formula, but to take elements from two or three different talks and to combine them into something that's completely unique. So in the case of Susan Cain, her talk where she's holding the suitcase, but she's doing a whole bunch of storytelling, some of it's personal, some of it's about her grandfather. That is similar in the sense to Sir Ken Robinson, where he's telling a whole bunch of anecdotes. But in her case, she's using a very different emotional tone. He's funny, and she's kind of melancholy throughout. And that approach of combining those two things, maybe it's telling some jokes but also being melancholy, that would be unique. Right. So what you're looking for is to find elements that are distinct and to combine them into something that's both unique and feels genuine to you. So it's not about reproducing somebody else's formula, but rather evolving it. And I think one of the reasons that TED talks have become a little bit less. I don't know if they're less popular, but just, I think they've had their moment.

I know.

Yeah. I think part of that is because we're seeing a lot of people reproducing the same formula.

Do you think we ever misattribute our reverse engineering analysis? For example, let's say Susan Cain, we reverse engineer her TED Talk, we map it all out and we think we know what made it such a mega hit. What if we attribute it to the melancholy tone, but meanwhile it's the fact that nobody had talked this way about introverts before. How do we guard against our own blind spots in this way where we think we're reverse engineering it, but we're missing the point completely or we're missing the actual role of talent. So like you said, the authors who might reverse engineer a Gladwell book but kind of miss the fact that, well, this doesn't fit your strengths. This just isn't how it's not going to work for you.

Yeah, there are two things I would say to that. So first, on whether or not we're missing it, I think this is a metrics driven approach. So one of the things I talk about in the book is how you can identify metrics for elements. Let me start over. You can identify metrics for exceptional works and then identify metrics for non exceptional works and then compare the two to identify where the outliers are. So in political polling, what pollsters will often do is look for differences between key groups to identify what it is that's driving their voting behaviors. So for example, you might find that women between the ages of 45 and 54 lean Democrat, whereas men between the ages of 45 and 54 lean Republican.

That's a trend that is supported by the data. And what I argue in Decoding Greatness is that you can create this metrics driven approach to identify differences between works that stand out versus those that don't. So in the case of Susan Cain, if we compare her talk to 10 talks that are not in the most popular TED talks of all time, and you identify that the emotional tone is different, then that gives you strong reason to believe that that is one of the key factors driving its success. Because now you've compared viewership of the different talks and you've looked at key features that are different between her talk and everyone else's. So I think there's a mathematical reason to believe that that's true. On top of that, there's also a timing issue.

Right.

Because if you were to give that same talk today, I don't know it would be nearly as successful, which is the same as the true for different podcasts that certain podcasts took off because they were presented at a certain period of time. And if you were reproduced that formula today, they wouldn't take off. What that argues for, I think is not to again, not to reproduce someone else's successful formula, because even if you manage to pull it off 100% accurately, the moment will have passed.

Yeah, it's funny you bring that up because it's on my mind a lot as it relates to podcasts. In the example you're giving, I'm pretty sure, who knows. When Joe Rogan started, Tim Ferriss was around 2015. Jordan Harbinger, good friend, he started 2005. I want 2006. Anyway, the interview show was unique. It was helping launch podcasts. Then came serial. But now large handful of celebrities have podcasts that are interview based and they have access to just incredible guests. And then every major media platform now has a whole portfolio of podcasts, which wasn't the case five years ago, even when I started pivoting. And so now I feel like I'm the one stuck in that TED position in a way. Like, okay, the interview has the interview format. Jump the shark. Maybe, maybe not. Then it's really about finding some unique topic or audience. I mean, I don't see myself throwing out this interview format completely, but it is a very interesting moment in time and a kind of a conundrum of, well, shoot, this just totally spiraled the quantity. And I'm not one to focus too much on competition and worry too much about it, but I do think about how does one innovate when a certain format just becomes so overwhelming? I probably subscribe to 200 different podcasts. I'm one of those super listeners and there's just not time in the day to listen to all of them. So listeners are going to be making more discerning choices now than they might have been five years ago.

Yeah, I think that's a great point. And I also, you know, I've had conversations with John Lee Dumas of Entrepreneur on Fire and I asked him if he was to to start again today, would it be as successful? And he said absolutely not. And it's because his big innovation was to have a daily show which was unique at the time. And so he would record five interviews all on the same day of the week and then release them, drip them one a day. And that made the key difference because he was training his listeners to look in their inbox for their other podcast app for his new show. And so that's an example of a minor innovation that made a big difference. So unless you're identifying your minority variation and you can test this out, this isn't something you necessarily have to, you know, commit to test out what it is that your minor innovation might be to gain that traction. Because to your point, you're competing with so many podcasts right now that you really have to think about what, what am I trying to achieve? What, what am I aiming for? Am I just trying to have a podcast? Am I, am I aiming to convert these into customers? Like, what is my goal here? Because it's so easy to just do it for the sake of doing it than to, I think, have a strategy behind what you're really trying to achieve. Just to put a nail on it. The point we made earlier, which is that it's not enough to replicate somebody else's successful formula, but you need to evolve it. And often the best way to evolve is not to try to bring something in that's completely new, but simply just to combine. So combine something else that's working in a different field. If you can do that, you can evolve it it enough that in a way that feels true to you, but then also feels new to your audience.

This has been so joyful to chat with you and I loved reading your book. Listeners find decoding greatness, how the best in the world reverse engineer success wherever you get your books. Ron where else can people find you to learn more?

The best place to go is my company website is ignite80 and the reason it's called ignite80 is because over 80% of employees are not fully engaged at work. Mission at Ignite 80 is to teach leaders and their teams science based practices for creating happier, healthier and more productive workplaces.

I love it. Thank you so much Ron. And thank you everybody for being here listening.

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 Enny Blake.

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

Hey Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile.

You know one of the perks about.

Having four kids that you know about.

Is actually getting a direct line to.

The big man up north. And this year he wants you to know the best gift that you can give someone is the gift of Mint Mobile's Unlimited Wireless for $15 a month. Now you don't even need to wrap it.

Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment.

Of $45 for a three month plan equivalent to $15 per month. Required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes if network's busy, taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com.