Kevin Surace: The Joy Success Cycle

Do you want to know the biggest mistake people have when it comes to AI or AI tools? I invited Silicon Valley legend Kevin Serrace onto the show today. He's the guy that helped actually pioneer Siri, Alexa and a whole bunch of other virtual agent type software like that. He holds 94 patents. What he's doing with AI is incredible in terms of productivity. He breaks down how he's the most productive ever and the way that he does things. But what he says is most of us are just playing around. We're just playing around with all this stuff. But here's a real shocker. He actually claims that success, massive success, doesn't just come from the technology at all. It actually comes from finding joy in everything that you do every single day, all the way. As far as, like, firing people. If you got to do that, there is joy in that. So he breaks down the balance of joy and technology and how you could be the most productive, the most effective and, and the most joyful throughout the whole process. So let's get into it with Kevin.

I'm going to pause this really fast and shout out a podcast that you should go follow. It's called the Science of Scaling. It's hosted by Mark Robert and it's brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Now, the reason why I like this show is that each week Mark Roberge, the host, sits down with leaders in business and talks about scaling properly. So I like Mark because he is in the trenches. He is the founding CRO of HubSpot Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School. He's a co founder of Stage 2 Capital, and he's diving into the secrets, the strategies, all these tactics of how to properly grow with people that are doing it right now. What I found is most companies, when they're growing, they either do the wrong things to grow or they do the right things in the wrong order.

And.

And that's what I gather from these episodes. So it's a great way to straighten all that up. So go listen to Science of Scaling wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, before you get into the episode, I urge you to hit pause and go check out the AI Digital mind. It's like a digital twin of this podcast and a whole bunch of other content I've released. Go to hustleandflowchart.com AI Joe. It's hustle and flowchart.com AI Joe. You can, you can literally chat with this podcast with me and my guests in text, audio and video for free. If you Want one of these made for yourself? If you're Interested, go to hustleandflowchart.com interest and we make these things out. So enjoy. Let's get to the episode. All right, Kevin, we're doing this. I appreciate you taking the time. I don't know how you have the time, but you probably get that all the time. You're kind of accomplished in the number of patents, he said 94 patents, mainly in technology and AI. You've been, what, on the ground floor with things like Siri and Alexa and OnStar before AI and all this stuff really took off, or this kind of smart, intelligent software. How do you have the time?

Well, first of all, multitask. Well, it's very interesting. I meet a lot of people now who are really trying to focus on monotasking and doing one thing at a time. I actually multitask quite well now. I'm not going to do emails in the middle of a podcast, right. Because I got to be focused on this. But generally, look, there's only so many hours in the day, and regardless of what Elon says that he can get by on three hours of sleep or whatever, actually, you just don't think well on three hours of sleep after a while. Right. And humans need, pick your poison, seven or eight hours of sleep to actually function well and have good brain health. And so you've got to have good brain health, you've got to sleep, but then you got to make your working hours, whatever those are. If it's four hours a day, if it's eight hours a day, if it's 12 hours a day, they have to be incredibly productive. Right. I get 350 emails a day. By the end of the day, they have to be gone. That's my filing system. Right. They have to be cleared out. I have no choice. And so, you know, if you think about that, each one can't get a minute, there's not enough time. Each one's got to have seconds. And you have to know what the response is. And you have to be quick. You have to use the tools. I mean, there's no question. AI, certainly. LLMs, transformers, etc, chat, GPT, GPT4O. Gemini Copilot has made me immensely more productive.

Yeah.

And. And I don't play with them. I use them. I use every tool at my disposal. You know what? Just like, why would I do math when I have Excel? Exactly. I have a tool here. It does that. Could I do long division in my head? Yes. Why would I want to? You know, let's let's, let's use the tools that are given us. All right? Look, you can't get the time back. You've got to use every hour and every minute to its fullest. And that is what I do. So I'm sort of just an absolute monger. And I'm multitasking three things. And my poor wife, she'll come in and say, hey, Kevin, I need to ask you something. No, I'm not quite like that. But, you know, it's like, ah.

There were eight things and I don't know where they are anymore. Where do I restart? Right. And so that's what's hard on people around you, is like the interruptions are, are challenging.

Yes, they are.

But you're going to do a lot in life. You're going to have to multitask or you will never get them done.

That is a good point, because you hear the, yeah, the sayings of multitasking. Doesn't work. It's not good for you not getting attention, whatever it might be. But, yeah, look at folks like Elon. Obviously you guys operate differently, but. And I would love to get into that in a little bit, too, but the, the fact that, yeah, it's time, it's pure time, and you're not getting that back. You need to expand time. And now we're living in this age with tools.

That's right. Well, Elon and I probably operate similarly in many ways. I've met Elon many times and we've had great conversations. Look, I don't necessarily agree with everything he's doing, and that may be politically and other things, and the way he's running Twitter, and I might do that differently. But that said, he is a heavy multitasker, and, and he is a multitasker across multiple fields, as you know. And he does one thing that I do, which is I am not afraid to learn a new field, regardless of age. So I don't have to be a rocket scientist today, but if I was hired to go in and run a team, a new team to get a rocket to Pluto, I'm making it up, right? I go, okay, well, let's. Let's learn the physics around this, right? I don't have to build every part of an engine myself, but I can understand the physics literally in weeks. I can understand the basic physics of how this works. I can understand what people have done in the past. I can understand that to get to Pluto, I need an ion engine or something different. I need to. I need to get a lot closer to the speed of light than we're, than we have been. Right? Because I don't want to take 28 years to get there. That's not completely useful. And then it's just math and don't break the laws of physics. So when I approached, you know, I have patents in AI, I also have patents in soundproof drywall. People go, you made soundproof drywall? You invented soundproof drywall? I did. And higher value windows and a bunch of other things and auctions. And how did you do that? Well, there was a real problem and a real pain point. The pain point was people could hear through walls in hotels and motels, and they could hear through walls in apartments and in condos and in town homes. And that should be fixed. How can we fix that? So I did a lot of research on what had worked and what hadn't worked. And virtually nothing practically had worked. And then I stumbled upon some ways to convert acoustic energy and vibrational energy to heat energy. That's used for bridges and it's used for disk drives, and it's used for all kinds of other things. I go, could I apply this concept to a wall? And then it's just physics, it's just math. And then you learn the math and you realize that nobody else has ever done this before. And there's no patents in the field. And so, okay, you invent soundproof drywall and it turns out it works. And nobody thinks it works because they go, well, it weighs the same as regular drywall. Yes, but it works well. And then I had people say, well, you got these lab reports. You must have paid off the lab. Well, we paid the lab because they don't work for free. Well, see, they took money. Well, come on. So these are nationally accredited labs that you go to, by the way, to prove that, you know, you're reducing sound. And we built walls that could reduce sound by more than 20 decibels going from one side to the other, and super proud of that, that work. And today that's a multi billion dollar product line. It goes in every hotel and motel and condo and townhome. And nobody would build without that. Right? So, so, so, you know, solve real problems. And you have to your mind has to be open to see the problems and open to solve the problem. So I think in that way you'll find a lot of people like Elon and others, I think Bill Gates was this way, certainly Steve Jobs find a real problem that people are willing to pay for and then attempt to become a relative expert in that field. You don't have to be the expert, but you're going to have to be a relative expert in that field and not be afraid of that polymath thing. You know, they use the term. Oh, a polymath. He knows so many things about so many fields. Well, I just took the time to go learn it. You know, I can read every patent in the field in probably, you know, three weeks. So just go read them.

What's your approach then? So folks listening, you know, and, and they might be having excuses of age or time or whatever, don't know the tools, the tech as. As well as Kevin does, you know, what's your approach to those folks? Or what would you tell them?

Look, I think people who say, well, I'm just too old to learn anything new. Someone's going to yell at me for saying this. Probably you're too lazy to learn anything new or, or you don't want to learn anything new. And that's okay. Like, I'm not beating that up. I think Elon would beat it up and say, wow, you know, but if that's the life you want, great. I mean, there are many people who say, look, the life I want is to go play golf. God bless. Like, I have no judgment on that. Right? It's just not my thing. My thing is to continuously learn. I read technology stuff, right? Voraciously. Even to just keep up in the AI field, I can't keep up. There's too much, too many publications every single day that I cannot read all of them. Many of them are at such a technical depth that I would have to spend two days to really dig into that. But I don't have two days for one paper. I have to get a summary of it. I have to understand what they did. I don't need to understand all of the math. I need to understand someone else does understand all that math. And then I need to move the next thing and say, okay, I understand now that this is available to me and I can apply it, right? You can learn practically any field you want. Now. I have a degree in engineering that helped me, right? So I was all. My brain was already thinking about physics and electrons and computer science and coding and like, from a young age. So I. I mean, I think if you. But if I had a degree in business, what would I do? I'd say, great. There are all kinds of business models, business methods, marketing methods, marketing tools, sales tools that I could learn throughout my life and get better at every single one. So still, there's value in learning. You might not jump and Learn physics, that might be a big jump, but that's okay. There's other things you can learn that are applicable to every field.

It's probably based off of your foundation, whatever understanding you already have. Interest. Yeah.

Or interest. Right. That's right. But lifelong learning, it's a, It's a good thing it didn't stop when you went to college, didn't stop when you went to high school. It shouldn't stop. But I honor those who say, not for me, not my lifestyle. Fine. They're probably not listening to your show. They're probably, probably not your audience. Right. Your audience says, I guess I have to be a lifelong learner. Yes, you do. And, and as much as, you know, here's the interesting thing. Even like CEOs. Right. Well, I know so much about marketing because in my last company. Great. But every six months there are new tools and changes in the way we market, in the algorithms that are promoting or not promoting your, your posts, etc. I mean, look, if this was 20 something years ago, the idea of building entire companies around social media marketing online was no such thing. You, you'd still run newspaper ads and TV ads or something and today you wouldn't bother with that at all. That's a. Probably a waste of money. And instead you're working the algorithms of Facebook or Instagram or, or TikTok or, or LinkedIn if it's a business to business sale. Right. And those are the tools you use. And so you have to be a completely different marketer today and use a set of technology tools to monitor all those and give you a B test and give you the results every morning and change the ads. And that's what we do. Or if they're not ads, they're posts or they're news articles or they're, they're human interest stories or however you're going to market what you have.

Yeah. And, and staying up with the times in your domain and, and just what data. In really understanding what that is, synthesizing and doing something about it or, or don't.

Or fall behind in your field. And, and that's. Okay. So I'm, I'm done. I want to golf the rest of my life. I want to live on an island. Or, you know, that's totally. They're not listening to your show, as I said. So we have a, we have a great audience here that wants to hear this stuff. So.

Yeah. And there's something that I've been, It's so fascinating because I coach, I train, do some fractional Work on AI for a lot of businesses and it's great summer tapped in. But I know the large majority of people have no clue what's even possible with AI or technology right now, let alone what's coming in the next handful of years. And I want to get your perspective of this because I've really found I'm like one of the things that excites me with this time is like I could be the bridge. And I think all of us who are tapped in can be the bridge to others who might not be listening to the show or tapped in. Because I genuinely think going into the future there's articles published. I was just reading one last night from Financial Times. It was about like the shrinking population, but because of that, the quality of life and the value of things, it's. It's just going to be like 3x times or more productivity required.

That's right.

So I'm curious of your thoughts on that.

Yeah. So people are always, you know, I'm a keynote speaker, I do, I don't know, 40 plus keynotes a year. Right. All around the world. A lot of them on AI and a lot of them on the joy success cycle. So we'll talk about both a little bit. But in the AI world, I've been in the applied AI world for about 25 years. That means I am applying the best algorithms to real problems. That is different than developing the best algorithms. You know, I didn't develop the transformer, but I know how to use the transformer a variety of ways that other people probably haven't thought of. Right. So when you project out, I can see where we are. In five years we are going to have humanoid robots. These Robots just in 20, in 2024 started to learn on their own using reinforcement learning. We did not have that before. We were coding them with rules. It was a rules based technology. Today they can learn to brew coffee on their own because they sit there for three days and spill the coffee all over the place. But eventually they learn how to do it right. And they, and they build a neural net around that. Right. And so we can see that there will be of course software agents working for us. Agentic AI much better than they have been through say with say RPA Robotic Process Automation. We can see that we will want to interface with our physical world. So humanoid robots make complete sense. But the, there are several companies really driving the cost of those way down. And again training with reinforcement learning. So I can see we're on a trajectory for kind of 2030. You might have a humanoid robot in your home. And we all want someone actually who at least cleans and does the laundry, right? I mean, and so some people would say, well, why does it have to be humanoid? Because we built our homes for humans. They're not built for some other kind of thing. They're like to open a refrigerator door. If you look at where the handle is, you actually need an arm and a hand to do so without one, it's, it's not, it's not possible. You can't have some little robot on the floor somehow open. You'd have to change every appliance, right? Our ovens are at a certain, certain height. Our stove is at a certain height. So you need sort of a, call it a 5 foot 7 humanoid robot that interfaces in your kitchen and with your laundry. And so that's going to happen. And if I miss this by a year or two, maybe it's not 2030 and maybe it's 2034, right? Or maybe it's 2028. That is an exciting thing and some people are going to be scared of it. I am not scared. I mean, I can't wait, right? Do the tasks I don't want to do. And this is what we're doing already with GPT4 chat. GPT.

Copilot. It's what we're doing at work, right? We're starting to offload the tasks that we're not good at. And by doing so, that is expanding our brain. So I use GPT4O for ideation all the time. So I go, I have this problem. I have three ideas about it. Give me seven more. Whoom. Not all of them are good, but all of them are interesting. And some of them are go, oh, I would have never thought of that. I mean, I would have thought of it three days from now when the project was over, right? So all of a sudden I have a hundred brain power. I can, I can multiply my brain by 100x if I want to. I can write 52 blog posts today instead of writing them over the year and I'm done with that task for the year. This is brilliant. And with more people in the US anyway retiring that are coming into the than are coming in the workforce for us to double the size of our revenue of our companies. It used to be we just hire twice as many people. Well, there aren't twice as many to hire. So now we're going to have to do it another way. We all have to become probably twice as productive over the next five to 10 years. As we've been. And we already have measurements showing that we can at least achieve that, if not more. So I think it's the most exciting time to be alive. It's the most exciting time to be in technology. It's the most exciting time, arguably, to start a company, because you can start it with less people and you can leverage large language models and multimodals to do some of the work. A lot of the work for you. You don't. I mean, look, my presentations in keynotes. Yeah. I used to hire out an illustrator who'd do these great illustrations. Now I just get that from a multimodal. And it, you know, it draws for me. It gives me six or eight of these things. I put them in. I'm done, like, in a minute.

Yep.

Not two weeks. I'm done in a minute. And it didn't cost me fifteen hundred dollars. It cost me a dollar.

Any style you want.

Yep, any style you want.

That's it.

And retro punk done. Yeah.

It's awesome. And I've done the whole 52 weeks of blog posts, email, social. It's so simple. Once you get your head wrapped around the process.

And even in Riverside, we're on Riverside right now, which is a podcasting platform for those who don't know. And Riverside automatically, as you know, will transcribe this to the two of us, and then it will summarize it, and it'll do so in a matter of minutes. And it used to take you personally, if you were doing it before they had that technology. Hours, you know, hours and hours and hours was the painful, you know, And I got to summarize it. Here's the point. Maybe you take notes. I don't do any. Nobody does that anymore. It just does this for us. So what a great thing it took. It lets you do what you want to do better. And took away that sort of grunt work that, or you were handing that off to someone we often handed it off to.

Right.

You know, someone who worked for the producer.

Right.

Yeah, yeah.

It's. It's crazy. I mean, it wasn't even that long ago going to places like Rev.com to get everything done.

Yeah.

You know, like, I can get it done and, you know, get it back tomorrow or a few hours.

Right. That was quick. Well, I used to go to Upwork before that, because you'd hand it off to someone in, like, Uruguay who would listen and try to summarize and, you know, no, I have a machine that does it now for free in a matter of minutes. This Is good. So I'm sorry for the person Uruguay who isn't doing that work anymore. And we like Uruguay. I'm not picking a Uruguay, of course, of course. But you know, it's done. So these are great tools. Just like Excel is a great tool.

And the point here is it's the person in Uruguay or elsewhere is probably found something else. And if they're staying up with the technology and what's possible opportunity wise. That's why I keep thinking of this concept of being a bridge. Like communicate what's possible to folks who will listen.

Absolutely.

Then hopefully that conspires other ideas or people that keep talking about it. So then the folks that might be out of work or a little complacent, whatever it might be, rally them up, you know, like behind this so we can actually boost all that productivity.

One of the things I say to people I think you'll use this is stop playing. So I, I'm doing keynote speeches. How many people have used ChatGPT, right? Not everybody raises their hand. Right. How many people have played with it? Everybody raised their hand. How many people have used it for real work on a consistent daily basis? Like three hands go up you go. Stop playing. Just stop playing. Pick some tasks and say, I'm going to do this with this as my assistant, I'm going to get it done with this is my. Because when you start doing real work and you do that real work every single day, you start to find real work to do and expand your brain. Otherwise you go, well, I played with it and I tried this. That didn't like it. You know, we don't play with our tools. We work with these tools to get actual work done. So go get actual tasks done. Like, let's write a blog post. Let's write a blog post. Okay, what's it about? What do I want it to be about? Where can it get more information? Well, there's some more information on our website. Great. Tie it to your website, tie it to your page, you know, et cetera. So do real work. Stop playing.

Well, there you go. That's the homework for anyone watching or listening. Go do, do that blog post. Write that email. One of those two. That's all right.

You're gonna, by the way, you use that to respond to an email. Like you get an email from a client or you get email and you go, I could respond. I'm gonna spend a half an hour stewing on this and it's not gonna be that good. Literally. Take this, put it in there and say, I need a response that keeps the customer happy, brings them back to me. You know, it's in the voice of me and you know, blah, blah, blah. And you go, oh, I couldn't have written it that well. I'm serious. And then you may edit a few words or edit a few things, you might take a sentence out, but still you go, I'm sorry, I could not. I would have taken me a week to think of that.

I'm going to pause this really fast and shout out a podcast that you should go follow. It's called the Science of Scaling. It's hosted by Mark Roberge and it's brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Now, the reason why I like this show is that each week Mark Roberge, the host, sits down with leaders in business and talks about scaling properly. So I like Mark because he is in the trenches. He is the founding CRO of HubSpot, senior lecturer at Harvard Business School. He's a co founder of Stage 2 Capital, and he's diving into the secrets, the strategies, all these tactics of how to properly grow with people that are doing it right now. What I found is most companies, when they're growing, they either do the wrong things to grow or they do the right things in the wrong order. And that's what I gathered from these episodes. So it's a great way to straighten all that up. So go listen to Science of Scaling wherever you get your podcasts. I'm going to do a quick shout out one more time for the thing I talked about, the top of the episode, which is the AI version of me and of this podcast and my YouTube videos and all these things. It all lives within this AI platform. I used Delphi AI to create it and I want you to use mine. It's totally free. Go to hustleandflowchart.com AI Joe that's hustleandflowchart.com AI Joe. Test this thing out. It's crazy. You could type with it, talk with it, you can even use video and you can look up anything from this podcast. You can ask a question about your business life, any scenario. It kind of learns about you with the information you give it. It's rad. You will love it. And also there's a lot of people who are asking, how do I get one of these? How do I build it out? The cool thing is my team and I have been building a ton of these every single day. I've used the platform Delphi AI for two years. I'M actually one of their advisors because I was one of their first users and just gave them a ton of feedback. I love it, but we build these things, so if you want to use it for lead generation, for, you know, you have all this content as an expert, author, coach, type person, we can put that into this digital brain and make it interactive. You could use it for customer service, internal training for your team, for your organization. Lots of uses. If you would like one of these, I can pass over an exclusive deal. There's no one else that's. That's offering this out there. I work closely with Delphi as one of their partners, agency partners, to build this out. So hit me up. Type hustleinflowchart.com interest into whatever browser. Again, that's hustleandflowchart.com interest and hit me up. Let's build this thing together. All right, back to the episode. There's a. There's a mental model that we train on. Buddy. Brackistan came up with it, but it's a 1080. 10. It's like you start with the idea or whatever, that initial prompt thing, whatever it is, right. Chad, GPT or said AI LLM. Do the 80% heavy lift, and then you're the. You're the human that takes.

That's right. Yeah, that's right. You. It's still your look. It's still your work. That's the interesting thing. You initiated it. Yep. You read it, you edited it, and then you posted it or sent it or whatever. So it still reflects what you want to reflect. But like I like to say, unless you were. I was not. I was not an English major. Not an English major. Chachi. BT is an English major. So I now have an English major helping me every moment of the day. And so my English is much better. My language is much better. The. The fluidity, the meaning, you know, the. The emotion that. That whatever I want to come out, I want this one to be much more emotional because I want to show it from the heart.

So an English major would know how to write that kind of prose. Now I can write like an English major. It's still me. I've still. These are the words I want to say, but I couldn't have thought of them without sitting there stewing for a week. I'm not an English major. Right. So look, that's. That's another way to look at it.

I love it. Yeah. If you want to write like Hemingway, well, guess what? Prompted to do such.

Absolutely. Right. Like Hemingway. Boom. Yeah.

Done. Well, all right. So everybody stop playing, go do the. Do the work and just spend 10 minutes. You'll. You'll figure it out, guaranteed.

And the longer the prompt, the larger the prompt, the more you give it, the better, right? Most of these can take in 2,000 words now, right? Huge, huge prompts. So the more you tell it, the more you give it, including, hey, I wrote this blog post. It's 800 words. Rewrite it for me to get more views. Boom. And you go, oh, that's way better than what I wrote. But it's still what you wrote. Sent through an English major's brain that cleaned it up. And by the way, we used to pay people to do that. So I would always write a blog post, and then I'd send it out to a blog post expert who would rewrite it and use prose that I couldn't write in sentences. And, you know, that I wouldn't have thought of. It's still my ideas, but they were just really good at writing it in a better way. Now I have a machine that does the same, and that poor person I know is out of work, and I apologize for that. Well, she was very nice for now.

You know, maybe not.

She's actually using the tools herself and selling, you know, doing what she's doing now at a lower cost, but doing more of them, and, you know, it all works out.

And that right there is the key. You know, it's like she found a hack, or not a hack, but just a way to be more productive, give more value. That's the point.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yes.

Love it. And not gonna lie, a lot of the podcast here, like the. The hooks that I'll put at the front, or the intros of these. Guess what I'm doing? I'm putting the description into Claude or ChatGPT.

Right.

I have a whole template project on one of the best books. It gives me, like, 10 to choose from. I pick one and then modify and make it my own, and it's great.

Yeah, well, you have to. Why would you. For, as you know, there's some formulas to use on, say, LinkedIn that the algorithms right now are. Are they move to the top and they give you more views. Right. I cannot easily write within that formulaic thing, but I can tell ChatGPT or GPT4 to do it, and they'll go, sure, I'll take what you wrote and put it into that formula so that you get the maximum number of views. And when I use that, I actually get about four times the number of views than if I did it myself, even though my English isn't too bad, it's just not as good as the English major that knows the formula. So I shouldn't bother to do what I shouldn't do, right?

Yeah, yeah. And we can keep going down the rabbit hole here.

All right. But there's more, there's more to talk about in the joy success cycle.

Absolutely. And that's where I was going to pin it to, is because everything that you do, and this is where I think my takeaway I was, I was learning about you, Kevin, and knowing that the joy of success is this piece of work that you're working on currently, maybe by the time someone finds this, it's already out, you should go get it, wherever that will be someday there'll be a book.

This will probably be out before that. But yeah, I'm going to get there.

So the joy of success. So why joy? What is it in your eyes? But also I'm thinking, you know, in the context of your career, and I know I haven't even covered nearly everything you've done, but the patents to the, the different companies you've been a part of and technology and most fast moving places, you know, our industries. How does joy wrap into all of that?

Yeah, well, look, there's plenty of books on happiness and how to be happy and how do you. That isn't this right? What I've done is I've said in order to be the most successful you can be, you need to have joy at every moment. So joy is intimately tied to success. And this really came out of people asking me, why is that you so bubbly and joyful and. And by the way, why is it that you have 94 patents? And why is it that you can find all these, all these pain points? And why is it that your mind is open enough to see those? I go, well, it turns out they are tied together. They are completely. And the joy success cycle is the more joy, the more success, the less joy, the less success. And once you tie those together and you realize they're important, you start to look at every moment of your day in a different way. Now, the way we score that in the book and we teach people how to do this is what we call the positive quotient. Right. So how many positive thoughts did you have? And you keep adding points for that and you want to stay at 10. So great. And anytime you have a negative thought or a complaint, internal or external complaint, and humans love to complain, so this is a very important thing. You take the score away, you Take one point away, right? So let's say you get up in the morning, you go, oh, my knees hurt. Minus 1.

You. So you're starting with 10 from the.

Day starting, even if you start at 5, let's say you start at neutral or you start in the middle, all of a sudden you're minus one. Now you're at four. Less. Less chance of success that day. Then you go and you get some breakfast, you go, oh, I'm out of cereal. What an idiot I am. Now you're at three. And then you go, oh, look at this day. I have to fire someone. I hate that. Okay, now you're at two. Okay, if you go tomorrow, here's. Here's the goal for your listeners tomorrow. I want you to wake up and count the number of complaints or negatives you have, internal or external, throughout the day. The number, everything, every single one, right? In a normal day, and remember, we're not talking about, you know, a death in the family and cancer. That's not what we mean here. We mean your normal day, right? So the normal day, we have list of things to do and things come at you, and some of them are new and some of them are surprises and some, you know, whatever, weather, whatever. So a normal day, if you count them, you're going to find most. Most Americans have over 100 complaints all day, either external or internal. It's very easy to get there. It's a few an hour. All of a sudden you add up to over 100 a day. And at the end of that day, you go, I had no Idea I had 112 complaints a day. No wonder I'm not meeting all my goals, and no wonder my mind isn't open to see some of these opportunities. Because you're down in the gutter and you're trying to dig yourself out of Complaintville, right?

And once you're in Completeville, too, like, it goes deeper, easier, right?

Well, yeah, you have these joy killers, and it just keeps killing you and killing you and killing you, right? Just takes away and takes away and takes away. So that's fear and it's stress and burnout. And you get all those things happening because you're down in this terrible cycle that took you into zero. Now, what happens if you got up the next morning, the following morning, right, two days from now and you say, okay, Kevin said I have to limit my complaints or negatives or whatever, right? To one a day. You still get one. Only one. Because I live by this. I really try very hard to keep it at one so you get up, of course you're not thinking yet, and you go, oh, oh, geez, my back hurts this morning.

That's your one. Now, this is an exercise in mental control, is the whole point. Because once you're counting, you go, I already used my one, and I. And I blew it. I gave it away on something stupid. So now I have none left for the entire day. And so all of my tasks. So you look at your task list. I like to make task lists. Sometimes the night before, often the night before. I like to make a task. They say, here's the 10 things I have to do today. And numbers. You know, number three is fire Bill. You know, whatever. And because you do that as leaders, right, you know, there's many ways to look at firing Bill. Of course, most of us say, oh, this is going to be hard. I don't want to do it. The conversation is going to suck. He's going to cry, you know, whatever. I'm hurting his family. No, that's not the way to look at it. I want you to take every task and find the joy in that task. Now, in some tasks, the only joy in the task is completing the task. So an example might be, you know, I don't know, I have to sweep the floor. And maybe there's just no joy in cleaning for you. So some people get great joy from cleaning just because they love to see the place clean. But you can look at that task and say, hey, the only joy in this for me is completing the task. And that's how I'm going to look at. I can't wait to complete that task, to check something off my list. Because once you make lists and you check things off, there's great joy in checking things off the list.

That physical action, right?

That is. It's a big deal. It's a dopamine hit, right? So. So here I got a fire Bill, and I like Bill, and he's been my friend. But by the time you get to letting someone go, usually it's because they're no longer a match for your company. By the way, they might have been a match three years ago, they might have been phenomenal, but they're no longer a match today. And the fact is, they're not doing great work for you, and you're actually not being great for them at this point. It's cycled downward and it's not working right. So here's the joy in that. I know every time I fired someone, every time I've had to let someone go, sometimes it's layoffs. It's. Whatever it is, they are going to be better off because they're going to end up in a better position with someone who likes them more in a position that works better for them. And maybe a company that has more money for that project, whatever it is. Right. It's going to end up better for them and better for me, or else I would have kept them. It's actually better for both people. This is a good thing. And when you look at all jobs as temporary, which people tend not to do, but they need to, and Reid Hoffman said this, actually, so I'm stealing it from Reed. When you look at every job is a temporary place that you go, you drop some golden nuggets, pick up some golden nuggets, and then your time's up. If you think that way from day one, you know, you're only there for a short period of time. It could be a year or two or three if it's Silicon Valley, on average is three or four years. You don't, you know, that's just how the cycles go. And then you're not shocked when the boss calls you in and says, well, it's going to be a tough discussion. You go, no, it isn't. I've been planning for this since day one. I knew that my time here was a limited time. I've enjoyed the limited time I've had. I realized that today is the ending day of that and it's all good. And now I get to go and do the same thing at another company. Drop some golden nuggets, pick up some different golden nuggets.

Yeah.

And my time there will end also. It'll be three years or five years or two years or whatever it is. So when you, when everybody looks at it that way, there is. This is a joyous occasion. And I know people are going to be laughing at me listening to this, but the point of this is that.

No, it's.

Yeah, he's crazy. There's the point of this is you control every moment of your day and how much joy it brings you every moment of the day. And if you want to be the most successful, you can be in whatever that is. It could be monetarily, it could be just the title. It could simply be your company. It could be with family, it could be anything. If you want to be the most successful, you can be every moment of the day. You got to find the joy in that moment, the joy in that task, the joy in being on this podcast with you. Right. Every single thing. And I Have great joy being on the podcast with you.

Same. I love having you here.

So does that make sense? So it is a mental exercise. And you have to. Now that you tie joy to success, you go, okay, if I believe joy is absolutely drive success and that cycle, you get success, you get more joy, you get more joy, you get more success. And that cycle is tied together. Once you live that way, it changes why you're doing everything during the day. Right. So you look at everything with joy. Hey, I found this great little cable that brings me joy. Right? Every single thing. You have to find a little modicum of joy in joy moments all the way through the day changes your life.

And I'm assuming through and I could see how it could change. It's just like anything else negative, you go down that negative spiral. It is at least I believe you might have the better answer. You humans are just naturally do that. Naturally good and negative.

Yeah, but.

So we're training ourselves kind of an uphill battle. But it's mental control like you said, is it? That's what this whole thing is.

No one else controls how you're going to look at this task. So the task is to write a blog post. I don't want to write a blog post about this thing. I've written enough blog post. Well, that's one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is, hey, I'm going to learn something new. I may even use some new tools. I'm going to edit it. I'm going to try to beat my last week's speed of, you know, one hour. I'm going to do it in 12 minutes, whatever it is. Right. There's so many ways to look at this as joy and then check it off the list. Right. So that moment can bring you joy or it can bring you negative. And people who are at their job go, well, you know, their Eeyore, well, I got to do this task. Okay. Do you think they're ever going to make it? Whatever success means to them, they're not going to have it because Eeyore doesn't lead the company. Eeyore doesn't go up to lead the group. Eeyore doesn't lead anything. Just sits there in the basement going, well, I'm going to complain today.

You know, it's contagious.

You know it's contagious. Yeah, that's right. So we want. I want you to rethink your life and say, every moment, I'm going to find the modicum of joy in this moment. And by the end of the day, I'm going to have 110 joyful moments, tiny little ones, instead of 110 complaints. And if I do that, I have a better opportunity where my mind is open for success. My mind is open to see other people's pain points and how I might solve them. My mind is open to listen to other people's concerns or challenges or headaches or whatever it is. Right. My mind is open and I'm able and willing to deal with all the things that come at me. And because no matter what, I'm going to look at everything with, you know, those 110 points of joy instead of 110 negatives.

Yes. How are you tracking all of this? Like, what's your personal process here?

Yeah, I don't need to keep track of them anymore because I, I, you know, I'm at a point where in general I have one or zero complaints a day. That's what I go for. And look, it's easy for people to drag you into, you know, it's sort of into that. It's, it's difficult for my wife, who's an amazing, highly accomplished CEO herself. But when we're together and something's gone wrong. We were on some flights and the flights got delayed by many hours and you had to switch flights and then you got put back in the back of the plane and sort of all these things happen. And finally she's just angry at me because she goes, why is it that you can't see how terrible this is? I don't know. Here's me. I got an extra five hours to work on my notebook. This is great. This is fabulous. This is the best thing that's ever happened to me. How dare you? Yeah, I'm being a little physician. She's not that way. But, you know, the point is it can be a little. For those who don't understand the process and are not trying to follow the process, it can be a little nerve wracking that you're not wallowing in the pain that they're wallowing. I'll give you an example. I recently spoke to a very large company with the Choice Success Cycle. And one of the challenges they were having is that they had reorganized a lot of the groups and all of these groups, they didn't like the new groups and some people got laid off and they didn't like the new people they were with. And, and. Right. And so everyone was wallowing in this negativity. Well, I don't know why I Got put in this group and this really sucks. And I know I'm not going to hit my numbers now. And there's this company and, oh, my God, you know, and the whole thing was, everybody was at a zero, right? And I came in and said, stop that crap. Right? If that's what you want to do, just get. Just leave. Right? I clearly, this isn't for you. But reorganizations are part of corporations. They're part of corporate history. It always happens every few years for lots of reasons. Okay, so what I want you to do is instead of saying, but my buddies are over there and I'm not part of that group, here's a chance for you to learn a whole new set of people and a whole new set of skills and go have a beer with different people and learn their lives. What a great opportunity for you to expand your mind because you were no longer expanding over there. You knew that group. Now you have to start over and learn all new people and all new idiosyncrasies and you all get to do this. What a magical moment this company has given you. And a whole. I heard later that lots of people took the joy success cycle seriously and started living it. And they changed the way they looked at that reorg instead of, oh, this is terrible. All my friends, they started to look at it a different way and say, wow, I'm going to find joyful moments all through this and, and realize there's joy in the change. Even though humans hate change. Start to enjoy change, start to love change.

You can't stop it. And things are changing faster than ever. And with. With joy, I can imagine. I mean, I'm not just imagining, but yeah, like you've. You've experienced, I'm sure, much more than most. There's a chain event, you know, like, it just. It's almost like these four cats, you.

Know, that's the cycle. Joy success cycle. You get some success. And by the way, the success could be, I completed the task which brought me joy, which then brought me more success, which brought me joy. You want to be. You're either on that cycle or you're on the downward spiral. Right? The joy killers. Do you really want to be on the joy killer cycle and you want to be on the joy success cycle? I want to be on the joy success cycle because where does it lead to success? Do that. Whatever success is. Again, it's not always I'm going to be a billionaire, right? It could be a lot of things.

It could be whatever you want, but. And to kind of Wrap this up. You know, Kevin, I'm thinking of. You said stop playing like that. Still stuck with me. And I think so many people are in this play mode in whatever part of their life. If we're going to technology and AI, it's probably studying, it's learning, it's reading, it's watching a bunch of YouTube videos and going down the rabbit hole. Great. And what are you going to do about.

Seems like that's a big takeaway is like there's a lot of people that are very intellectual and there's a lot of folks that are very hyper motivated to. But if you're stuck in this middle part of. I've seen a meme going around like midwits, essentially the folks that just have all the information, the energy, but they're not doing anything about it and they're just kind of stuck.

Yeah, that's right. And you know, Yoda sayings and memes are the best because Yoda was an alien of few words. But when it said them, I don't know what if it's a male or female, that thing. But whatever, when it said them it meant something. So I like to quote Yoda, which is do not play. Right. So do or don't play. Right. So it's all about doing something not playing. Right. So it's not do not play, it's do comma, not play, do not play.

That's. We're going to end it right there. Kevin.

Yeah.

I love it, man. This is so cool. Well, tell us where folks should go. Follow you. I know you have stuff everywhere but you know, home base for where they can get the book eventually.

Yeah. KevinSerace.com it's just my first name, last name dot com. So easy to find. My LinkedIn is on there. A bunch of stuff in my keynote talks is on there. Some of the joy, success, cycle stuff is on there. When the book comes out, there'll be more about it there. So you can always find me there. Kevinserace.com yeah and you.

I got to give you a shout out because like the, the ted, TED talks and all that stuff. I mean you were 10 plus years ago or something talking about AI and all these things. Essentially what's happening right now. I'm like, you were so ahead of the curve.

So it was 10 years ago I was, I gave. That was a TEDx talk actually I've done TED talks and TEDx talks, TEDx to Orange county and I think it was 2014 and I gave that and people are going, what's he talking about. He's crazy. What? That's our world. I don't. This AI thing, but I had already been around it for enough years that I could see where we were going. You could see what was happening with neural nets because we got deep neural nets by 2012, so we understood what might happen. And in the end, when we have transformers and LLMs and all of that today, it is a result, as Sam Altman said, or it's a proof that neural nets work. Deep neural nets work. Deep learning works. That's a proof that deep learning works. Because we can now go out and learn a trillion phrases and build a, you know, a deep neural net. Right. And it works as deep as you want, as big as you want. I mean, you need $6 billion in compute power, but if you have that.

Yep.

You can. You can build the world's most knowledgeable thing in the English language. Really fascinating, man.

Yeah. We need some nuclear power plants. We need all these other, you know.

We'Re bringing them back. We look not. Not to be political. We should have never shut them down. Right. I mean. I mean, people talk about climate change and this and that, and what's interesting is so many people protested, and especially in the 70s and 80s, against nuclear power because they thought it was dangerous. Now, what that led to is more coal plants, which was far more dangerous than nuclear power has ever been. And we should have built, you know, 500 nuclear power plants, and we would never. We would not have a climate change problem today. But we. We messed up. We messed up.

Hopefully that'll go back quicker than ever. We'll see. Yeah.

But we're starting. We're starting excited.

Yeah. Well, Kevin, I appreciate you. We could keep going all day, I feel, but I'm going to go nerd out with more of your keynotes, too, just to get.

Okay. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Well, thanks. Thanks so much for having me. Hopefully, hopefully people listen and share and get excited about the Joy, Success, Cycle and AI and do not play.

Sam.