Life-Changing Books Podcast Episode 84. Eduardo Clemente: Author of Attitude is Your Superpower

Eduardo, welcome to the Book Thinkers Life-Changing Books Podcast. How are you doing today?

I'm doing great, Nick, and thanks, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here with you. It's always great to engage with you, so it's very exciting to, to be here today and share some interesting conversations, hopefully.

Yeah, I'm excited as well. For those in my audience that are not familiar with you or what you do or the book that you've written, could you please introduce yourself to everybody?

Sure. So my name is Eduardo, Eduardo Cumens. So most of my life has been spent in banking. I started my career in the banking sector as an auditor first, and then I moved to the client side in the banking space, and I've done 16 years of banking so far. In the last couple of years, I've started to also create my own projects. And I'm very active into the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Angola. I do a bit of business angel investing. I also do some mentorship for entrepreneurs and startups. One of the companies I collaborate the most is Founders Institute, when I'm a mentor for them to the Angolan chapter. I was born in Portugal. Europe, but most of my life I've been living in Angola in West Africa. For those who don't know, it's an amazing country, come and visit, great beaches, great places to visit, and you know, most of that ecosystem in entrepreneurial work has been done here locally in Angola, which has been great because you learn a lot and you get to meet a lot of different people, and also, you know, a couple of years back I decided to to do this crazy thing about writing a book. And so I've decided to put some ideas I had into paper. And so now when people ask me what I do, it's a bit of all of those 3 things. I'm still in banking, I'm still an executive in the banking space, I do entrepreneurial work with startups and a bit of investing, and I'm an author, and I also do some talking about books Well, amazing.

And during one of our previous conversations, I shared with you that I did spend some time, I think all the way back in 2019 or 2020, in Lisbon, Portugal. So that's a beautiful country. But tell us a little bit more about Angola. I mean, I want to visit every country on the planet. You said there's beautiful beaches. And what, um, what are some of the main attractions to living there? And what do tourists do if they want to visit?

Unfortunately, the country has not explored very well all of its potential from a tourism point of view, and so it's not very well advertised outside of the country, so most people don't know it. But for example, the coast, the coast is in the Atlantic, so it's West Africa and the west coast is all in the Atlantic, most of it quite warm coast. Luanda is on the northern part of the country, but if you go deep a little to the south, you have amazing beaches. from Luanda to Benguela. And you can, you can do surf. There's surf beaches where people come and do a lot of surfing. You can just, you know, relax in a resort close to the beach. There's one or two safari spots, you know, simple ones. But you can also visit the second biggest waterfalls in Africa. So Victoria Falls are very well known, and very little people know our falls, which are Kalandula Falls. They're very beautiful. You can Google it and see how amazing they are. It's amazing to visit. It's really, really beautiful. But it's a country that has a lot of, a lot of different things. So you have the beach, you have cities, you have deserts, forests, and everything in between. You can go with your car and navigate through the desert and go to— which is very interesting because our desert ends in the beach. So you have desert and the beach in the same experience. And you have some resorts in the beach where you can have lunch, you can stay on the beach for a little bit and then go into the desert, which is great if it's at the end of the day, you can see the sunset in the desert, which is a great experience. And so there's a lot of attractions, they're not really, really well explored, but once you get here, you know, people help you understand what to go visit. There's, you know, amazing landscapes, you know, really, really beautiful places to visit. The good thing about not being so well explored is that they're quite virgin still. So you don't, when you go there, there's not, you know, 500 people visiting the same spot. A lot of the times you get there and you're the only one. And so you still get a bit of that feeling that, oh, it's, it's, I'm exploring something. It's quite new. And it has a very good, very good experience there, but it's an amazing country. It's quite a big country. People don't realize, but Angola is quite big. And it has a bunch of different experiences. It's quite interesting. I do recommend that people visit.

Well, good. I'm happy I asked. I mean, like I said, I want to visit every country on this beautiful planet that we live on. And now I have an excuse or a reason to come visit you and to do some of those touristy things. Now, we won't really touch on the banking piece, but before we jump into the book, the author section of your life, let's talk a little bit about the angel investing. So what types of businesses are you investing in? What types of entrepreneurs do you work with?

So the entrepreneurial or the startup ecosystem in Angola is quite recent. And I mean, we're decades away from the evolution that, you know, the US or Europe or Southeast Asia has already gone through. And so we are actually in the very early stage of the ecosystem. So for example, there's no VC fund. in Angola currently. So what you have is angel investors or angel investors clubs that get together and do some investing. And then it becomes a bit complicated because you don't necessarily have a clear exit strategy, not having those funds as part of the market, but it's a very early-on ecosystem. And so basically what we're doing is seed and pre-seed, which is normal for angel investing. You usually go pre-seed or early seed stage. I try to do investments where it's not just about the money, so I want to be a part of a business if I can believe that I add value with my experience or my knowledge of the market or knowledge of people, so I try to bring to the table not just the investment piece, but knowledge and helping them through mentorship to develop a strategy, to think how to scale, how to organize the team, how to better solve the problem, how to create some efficiencies. And so I do try to work with the young teams that approach me in the sense of helping first and then going through the investment and then while investing, then keep helping the business develop. I've done a couple of investments, fintechs, but also I'm now looking at other things like tourism. So a tourism tech company is something that I'm looking into, education, as well. I try to link it with tech because I think tech potentiates scale in the future and it reduces a lot the capital needs that you require to scale and so I do tend to be more linked to tech investing, not necessarily just fintechs. The tech is the base, but I'm looking at different sectors. Most of the entrepreneurs here are not serial entrepreneurs, they're not experienced. Most of them are young kids coming out of the university, and because it's hard to find jobs, they just go and deep dive themselves into finding something that they're passionate about and a problem they want to solve. And so you don't have that level of experience that you find in Europe or in the US, where you talk to entrepreneurs, but they sometimes, they know more than you because they've done 10 different companies already. They're going through the 11th one. They already know everything. They already have the contacts to get fundraising. And sometimes you're there as a mentor, but you quickly realize that those guys have more experience than you do. Here, it's not yet the case. It's a very nascent ecosystem. And that's why I decided to kind of be a part of it, because I believe there's a lot of potential. But the young kids, they mostly need help with business experience, business maturity, and how to involve themselves into that. And so I'm trying to help as much as I can. It's also a way of giving back, you know, giving back to the experience that Angola provided me for the 16 years that I've been here, and giving back to the kids and, you know, and helping them scale their business, creating a good business, helping create jobs for the future, which is very important. As well. So it's a bit of that.

Yeah, I'm happy I asked because that provides a little bit more context about you and the way that you view your experience living in Angola, the different ways that you can, you can give back. You know, I was talking with another author recently about the different ways we can give back, and it's not always financial. You can give your talents and share wisdom with younger people, aspiring entrepreneurs, and I think that's a really cool thing that you're doing. Now let's jump into the meat and potatoes part of our conversation. It sounds like 3 years ago is when you decided you wanted to write a book. When did you decide, like, the title of the book, the subtitle of the book? Like, when did you really start to put together the structure? Did that process happen really fast for you? Or did it take a while?

So about 3 years ago, I started thinking about writing about attitude. So I knew it was about attitude, but I didn't have a title. Didn't even know if attitude was gonna be part of the title or not. I was a bit confused about that. It is my first experience writing a book, so I've never done it before. And I did start by thinking about kind of like the structure or the chapters that it's going to have, because in my head it was a way of trying to build a framework of all the things I think I need to talk about for this subject of attitude. I didn't necessarily know exactly what I was going to develop in each of those chapters. But that was my first step, was building a framework of the topics that I want to approach. And it took me a little bit. I think it took me 6 months to kind of do the structure and starting to do the intro. And then I realized I can't start with the intro because I don't know what I've been writing the book. So I don't know what to say in the intro. I need to do this last. So I started doing the intro and then at At the middle of it, I said, okay, I can't do this. I need to write the rest of it first, and then I'll go back to the intro. And so the first 6 months were very unproductive. But it was that framework of thinking about what is it that I'm going to write about. The title, I think I've only decided close to the very end of writing the book. I was trying to find something that linked to what the book was about. and in a way that captured the attitude part, of course, because that's what the book is about, but then that translated to people that it's something that you have and that you can own. And so that superpower piece is that it's yours, it's in you, it's under your control, and that's why— what kind of it came from. And then you kind of— Sticked in my head and I liked it and then I just went with it.

Attitude is your superpower. I love it. And I also love your subtitle, How to Create Incredible Life-Changing Success, because this is the Life-Changing Books Podcast. So there's some good synchronicity there.

Awesome. No, I think, I think it's, it's, it's what matters. It's not just about career or job or progression, it's about being happier. in your life. You know, whether we like it or not, work is a big part of what we do. We spend at least 8 hours a day doing it, um, for at least most of us. And so it is a big part of what we do, but it is, it is about being happy. It is about finding ways of facing life with a smile. And, you know, you shouldn't just go through life for the sake of it. You should enjoy the ride. You know, you should You should love living. And I think that's, that's an important part of what the book is for.

Yeah, no, I agree 1,000%. So if somebody is listening today, and they're in the beginning part of this conversation, and they're wondering, is this book going to be a good fit for me? Is this conversation going to be a good fit for me? What are some of the primary benefits that the reader can expect to actually learn about and implement if they choose to read or purchase a copy of your book?

Yeah, so I mean, the first thing that I tried to make of the book is not make it sound very formal or a list of things to do. It's— I try to make it like this, like a conversation that I'm having with you, and I try to make the language of the book like I'm talking to you through the book. So very informal, using a lot of cases of things that happened to me. And I use those cases as ways of explaining why I believe certain things help. And so what I think you can take of the book is examples of how we can make things simpler for ourselves. Just changing the way we think about certain things, just deconstructing certain myths that we might have and making life easier, making life simpler, making— look at certain things that might be happening in a much, much, much more positive way. And I think at the end of the book, what you take from it is there's a bunch of hints and a bunch of tips that you can take from it. But the biggest one is, for me, once I've read it after writing it, is the positivity that you should include in your life and how you should believe in yourself, trust in yourself, and whatever you want to do, it's up to you. And I think all of the tips in the book lead to that. It's a book that I believe helps finding a much more productive, proactive, positive way of tackling life and the challenges it might bring.

Yeah, I think there was a good blend between like philosophy and teaching about attitude and some of the different ways that you can define it and some of the different like core values that sit underneath the umbrella of attitude. But then you followed it up with a lot of of action, like steps and exercises and things that you can actually implement. So we'll talk about some of those today. One of the first questions from the book that I'd like to have you expand on is the difference between hard skills and soft skills and why they aren't taught in school. They're not differentiated. You know, why aren't soft skills taught in school?

Yeah. I mean, I actually, the name is quite interesting. if you think about it, because when you read hard skills, you can read it in 2 ways. Either it's a hard skill because it's a physical skill, it's something that is hard because it's there, you can feel it, or it's hard because it's hard to learn. And if you think about it, hard skills are technical skills. You know, you need to learn your math, you need to learn your English, you need to learn your science. physics, chemistry. Those are all important things in life. And those are usually classified as hard skills. You know, learning Excel is a hard skill, or learning to use PowerPoint, or how do you work with Zoom, or, you know, those, those are all classified as technical hard skills. But the true hard skills to learn are the soft skills. It's much harder to, for example, understand how your emotional intelligence works and how you navigate it and how you improve it and how you control it than it is to learn physics or chemistry or whatever. Because usually hard skills, you can deep dive into a technical book, you learn, your, your head goes through it, you memorize it or you understand it, and you're set, you can use it. Soft skills are much harder to learn despite of the name because you actually have to practice it and you have to fail a lot before you understand how it works. And we do that in life. I mean, when we're kids, we start getting— we start having relationships with our colleagues and sometimes, you know, we cry and sometimes it's like when we start dating. I mean, you have to find a way of approaching the girl or the guy that you like And you're going to fail a lot before you succeed. I mean, unless you're very lucky, but usually you fail a lot before you succeed. And you start learning as you go along. There's tips that you can use. So soft skills are like magic. You need to practice. You need to practice a lot. You need to find how it fits for you. How do you— how can you use it? How does it— I'm sorry, how does it work better? And so I find for me and through my career that developing those soft skills was much more work-intensive than learning Excel or English or maths or etc. And then the name for me is— I've read somewhere that the names should change and I can't remember what the names they proposed for it, but You know, when you think of soft skills, it seems easy, right? It's soft stuff, it's easy to navigate, but it's actually much more complex. And it's also the soft skills in today's world where knowledge is everywhere. You can Google everything, you can find YouTube videos that explain you how to do a million things. Soft skills is what make or break your career and what make or break your relationship with other people. Regardless of what your career is, even if you work by yourself, but you have to sell something or you have to engage with people, those are the skills that you need to develop your relationships, to develop an awareness of other people of you. So how the other people perceive you is much more related to your soft skills than to your hard skills. Yeah.

You know, I remember in the book you said something like, you can have all of the right hard skills, right? All of the right technical skill sets. But if you don't have a great attitude, you won't be successful in life. And I even remember all the way back during one of our original discussions, which could have been, geez, like 5 months ago or something like that. You were telling me that that was something that you had observed in a lot of very successful people. They had the technical skills, the hard skills, but they also have all of the soft skills. That's what's really enabling them to succeed. And it sort of reminds me of a line that I read in a book called Black Sheep by Brandt Mensah. He says, listen, even if you have the best cup of coffee in the world, if you have a bad attitude, the coffee's not going to taste great that day. And sort of in reverse, if you have a bad cup of coffee but a great attitude, it's probably going to taste great, right? So attitude really changes things, and it probably makes up for a lack of technical hard skills sometimes because people just want to work with you if you have a great attitude. Do you agree with that?

Completely, Nick. I think that was probably one of the strongest realizations I had in my career. it was that I spent a lot of years focusing on the wrong thing. So like I said, I started as an auditor, and, you know, coming out of the university, starting as an auditor, it's all about hard skills, it's all about technical stuff. You need to know your Excel, you need to know your formulas, you need to know your accounting, you need to know this, you need— and you need to be the best at all of those things for you to build a career. At least that's what you think at that point in time. And then with the progression of my career, and I had been— I've been lucky enough to progress and to move forward in my career and to have challenges put up in front of me. And a couple of, you know, 3, 4 years ago, when I got the chance to become an executive director at a bank, I actually had that conversation with the person that approached me and asked me if I wanted to take on that challenge. And I asked, but why, why me? I mean, I look around and I see a lot of people that I believe technically maybe have more value and, and can give you a better result because technically they're much more sound. I've, I've, I, I'm not a specialist. I've always been a generalist. So there's always been that kind of imposter syndrome as well with me that not being a specialist in anything, something. Maybe other people are better suited for that. And what he replied to me was exactly that, was, but it's not just about the technical stuff. Technical stuff is great. And you need to have a certain level of skill. I mean, you can't be completely ignorant about the technical skills. But there's— it's like Peter's principle. It's important up to a point. When you get to a certain point of technical skills, going above that won't be your differentiating factor. What, what he told me is the way you approach things, the way you relate to people, the way you approach problems, the way you add value to everybody around you is what makes you more valuable. And that's why we're approaching you for this. It's because of your attitude. It's because of how you relate to people, how you relate to the problems, and how you relate to the situations that you encounter. And that was like the light bulb I had never thought about it in that fashion. And then I really realized, okay, then I've been focusing probably on the wrong side of my career, and I need to develop the other side of it. I need to start developing my leadership skills, my creative skills, my emotional intelligence side of things. And that's when all of these things started happening, you know, with all of those trainings and conversations that the idea of the book came about. I kind of also shifted my career and got involved in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. So a lot of it, I think, came because of that realization that you don't need to be the best technically. Of course, it's important that you're at least sound in what you're doing, of course. But the rest of it is going to add a lot more value to you going forward, especially to grow In your career?

Yeah, maybe a year or two ago, I had Vishen Lakhiani on our podcast, and he's the founder of a company called Mindvalley. And I think the way that he describes Mindvalley is they teach the intangibles. So you mentioned before, maybe renaming hard and soft skills, maybe it could be tangible versus intangible. And those intangible skills that you just mentioned, like that you had to develop, that would actually accelerate your career faster than the hard skills. creativity, innovation, positivity, things of that nature. So I love to see how it accelerated your career. One of the, one of the other really good points at the beginning of the book is that whatever your current attitude is, there is always room for improvement, right? You can always improve your attitude. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah, I think it's There's no perfect— there's no perfection. There's, there's no perfect state of attitude. You're never there. There's, you know, there's always situations that come up that you've never experienced before. How do you react to those? And sometimes you react very badly. Sometimes we're tired, we're stressed, and our reactions are not the best. And so there's always room to do it better next time. And, and also a good thing about attitude is It's not a one-off thing. You don't respond to something today badly and then, okay, you have a bad attitude for life. You're, you're done. It's over. Your career is done. Your life is done. No, you can change it every day. And you're going to have ups and downs. There's going to be good days. There's going to be bad days. As long as you're thinking about this, you're purposely thinking about managing this and you have much more better days than bad days, then people will generically perceive you as a person with a good attitude. Of course you're going to have bad days and they will forgive you for those bad days because they know that on average that's not you, you're having a bad day. The opposite is much trickier. So if you're generally seen as having a bad attitude, 1 or 2 days of a good attitude won't shift the dial for people. So you need to bring that consistency of thinking out, how can I pass my— the sense of the feel that people have when they interact with me being mostly positive rather than negative?

Mm-hmm.

Because attitude is about how people perceive you, right? So you can think you have a great attitude. But if other people don't think that about you, then you don't. Perceptions is what count here.

That difference right there, you talk about the 360 exercise, right, to help understand the gap between how you perceive yourself versus how other people perceive you. So could you tell everybody about that exercise?

Yeah, I think that I've done that as well, and it was an eye-opening exercise for me. It's like there's a lot of assumptions you make about yourself. You think you're great at this, and you might think you're lousy at that. That's your view. But when you're constantly working with other people, your view is a very small part of it and probably is the part that counts the less, because how other people see you is much more important. So let's say that you believe you're great at empathy because I always understand people, I always ask questions, I always understand what they're going through. That's what you think. But then if you ask the 20 people you work with and they say you're lousy at empathy, you can't be good at it. I mean, if everybody that engages with you says you're not there, then your perception is wrong because everybody else feels that you need to improve there. And so the 360 exercise is a great tool where you can map your view. So you do the assessment first, your assessment on behaviors, on skills. So you can do it for soft skills or hard skills as well, you combine it. So you define the questions that you want to understand better about yourself. Is it about leadership? Is it about team management? Is it about quality of work? Is it about how do I engage with people? Do I provide feedback? Am I a good and motivational leader? Do I share the why we do things? Do I involve people? Am I inclusive? So you can put all of those into questions, and then you provide your responses to those questions. That's kind of like your baseline. And then you provide that exercise. And it needs to be— so you can't know who's answering to what, it needs to be anonymous. So you want really honest feedback from people. And if you have teams that work with you, you send that to the teams that report to you, you send it to peers, that work with you in a different environment than the teams that respond to you. And most of us, we have someone to report to, a boss. We should send it to that person as well. And then you have all of those responses. Sorry. And you're going to map— the important part is the gaps. Where am I seeing myself above everybody else? So like, let's use that empathy example. you. So let's say that I, I believe I'm a very empathic person, and I classified from 1 to 10, I said I'm an 8, and the response from everybody else puts me at a 4. I know I have a problem here. So I know now that empathy is something that I need to work on to improve my attitude towards how other people perceive me. And now I know. And if I want to go and have a deep dive to it, If there's people I believe can be honest with me and they're not afraid of providing me honest feedback, I can start picking 2 or 3 people that I believe will be honest and, and ask more questions about it. So, okay, this is the outcome of my test. I thought I was here, people say I'm here. Do you agree with this? And people, if they're— if they have a good relationship with you, they will probably say yeah. I mean, maybe, maybe they don't agree with that classification, but overall they don't agree with yours either. And then you start asking more, but why? Because I need to understand. If I want to improve, I need to understand what's missing. And if you get good examples from it, that will add even more value because suddenly you have, you have the place where you have the gaps and you got 2 or 3 people to really provide you like examples of why people might perceive you in that way. And now you have a base to work on. Maybe I need to be more curious. Or maybe when people are saying they have a problem, I shouldn't then very quickly move to talking about the goal that we need to achieve. I need to understand if that, if that person can be part of the work this week. I mean, let's say people are going through, or they had a death in the family, or going through divorce, or someone is very sick. You can't move from that conversation and say, no, I'm very sorry, I understand what you're going through. And in the next sentence, okay, have you done what I asked? You might be thinking you were very empathic because of the first sentence, but the other person is going to perceive that you're already moving to the goal. So you don't care about anything that we've been discussing previously. And those examples, sometimes you need more conversations to get them, but they're very valuable. And this District 60, it's what it gives you. It gives you a very clear view of how other people perceive you. Sometimes they actually perceive you as better than you. So there's positive gaps.

That actually happened to me. Yeah, that's actually happened to me before with empathy. I was somebody who, when I was a little bit younger, I lacked empathy, I think, throughout my high school years, my early college years. But Book Thinkers has enabled me to positively impact a lot of people. And I've been focusing on empathy for so long that when I started to get feedback from other people, they'd say, what do you mean? Impact is one of your core values. You're very empathetic. And I was like, whoa, I, you know, I ranked myself lower on the totem pole. And what you're saying reminds me of that Peter Drucker management aphorism that if you're not measuring something, you can't manage improvement. You need to understand your baseline and where the gaps lie. So that you know what to focus on. Otherwise, you're, you're just saying, oh, I'm focusing on empathy. But did you actually make progress? You don't know unless you retest, right? So it's a good way to make sure you quantify some of these things that are very hard to quantify.

Exactly. And it's like you're saying, you could be still focusing on empathy and people already said you're there, you don't need to focus on that. Maybe you need to shift your focus to something else now. And unless you measure it, you don't know. And this is something that I was discussing the other day, actually, in a leadership conversation. And it also links to leadership. If you're a leader of a new team, if you've got a new team, how do you know how to work with that team without first understanding who your team is? Because there's no one secret trick for managing a team, even if you're a coach in a sports team. You can't use the same sauce, secret sauce in this team for that. Because it won't work because people are different there. So you always need to measure first, understand what your baseline is, where are you. And in this case, you're doing it about yourself, you're understanding where am I on a behavioral component, on skills level, whatever it is that you want to measure. And then you have a baseline, and then you know what you can work, and then you can repeat it a year from now, years from now. see, like you're saying, how am I evolving? And, you know, some of the people that help you do these exercises, usually there's companies that do this professionally, they can guide you through it. They actually say even without working on stuff, just because of your experience or evolution, results will change. If you do it in 3 years, you won't be the same person. There's already changes. that happened, even if you're not putting specific effort. So doing it from time to time is important.

Yeah, no, I agree 1,000%. I think it's really important to establish a baseline, measure constantly, and always focus— like, have an intention for where you're trying to improve. Can you share with us, Eduardo, maybe an example of somewhere that you needed to improve when you went through this exercise?

Yeah, I mean, 2 of my realizations when I did the first one a couple of, well, 4 or 5 years ago was 2 main points of improvement. One was empathy. That's why I used it as an example. Although I didn't rate myself too high because I knew I was not there, but the rank people gave me was even lower than that. So I still had a gap. And the other one was providing feedback. and engaging more with people. So I was— I think I was very goal-oriented. And what that exercise made me realize is that I need to shift to be more people-oriented.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Okay, let's move on a little bit. One of my favorite subjects from your book is that your attitude— and you might remember this from my original Instagram post, but Your attitude is not your personality. There's a difference. Can you explain the difference to everybody?

Yeah, I think I decided to talk about it. Because sometimes when you say to people, you know, when you're being honest with them and providing feedback on their attitude, sometimes you say this, maybe you need to improve your attitude just a little bit, you know, tweak this and tweak that. And the usual response of defensive people is, but that's who I am, so I can't change that. And I don't think it's true, because one thing is your personality, you know, your core values, your beliefs, you know, your religions, your political ideals. That's who you are. Those are your ingrained values, beliefs. That's what drives whatever thing you do. Your attitude is very momentaneous. So you, like, like we were saying before, you can have a great attitude today and a very bad one tomorrow just because you had a bad night's sleep or you were stressed or your wife screamed at you, or, you know, you had some problem or someone hit your car on the way to work, and suddenly your day is ruined and now you're responding very badly to stuff. Your attitude is about how people perceive you in each situation, and so you can shift it. You can change your attitude and respond to something Even if it stresses you out, if you're rational about it, if you purposefully think about it, okay, this is stressing me, but I can't respond to it negatively. Let me try and build the response to this that builds positivity and that builds a positive feedback loop. You can change that. You don't need to change your beliefs. You don't need to change your value system to be able to change that response to the same situation. And so I think they're very different things. Attitude, you can shift it for good or bad very easily, as long as you think about it. If you're purposefully about it, it's very easy to shift. Your personality is much more ingrained. Of course you can change your personality, but it takes a long time. It's an evolution of your life. And sometimes we change our beliefs. We might You know, I've met people that change religions, so that's a big belief, and people do change it. Or, you know, political parties or political ideals. But that changes rarely, like from one day to the next. It's usually built by experience, by things you see through a long period of time, and then you start shifting that personality. Um, so an example I used, I think, in the book is like Actors, you know, you're an actor. Let's say you're Nick, you're an actor. You're always Nick when you're coming out of the set, but in that construct, in that movie, you're reacting like your character needs to react. You might be more positive, more negative. You might be screaming at someone or crying or engaging with somebody in a conversation. It doesn't change your belief system. You're still you, but you're reacting to a situation depending depending on the character that you're portraying. So you're changing your attitude because of that character, but you're not changing who you are. So I kind of use that example to make— kind of exemplify it.

Yeah, it reminds me of chapter 4 in your book is all about having a growth mindset. So Carol Dweck famously talks about the difference between a fixed and a growth mindset. A fixed mindset Oh, this is just how I am. Whereas a growth mindset is, you know, I have the ability to change this over time. You know, I might be low empathy right now, but I might want to work towards high empathy. And actually, in fact, that's a good transition. In chapter 5, you talk about emotional intelligence. You talk about how emotional intelligence is not static and it can be improved. So what are some of the— what are some of the things that you've done or implemented to focus on Your low empathy, because you said it was low, what are some of the things that you've done to improve that?

When I realized that about, um, about empathy, my first thought was, okay, how do I work on this? Because I don't know, I mean, it's not like I can buy a book with formulas and I can apply these formulas and okay, next week it's done. I have no idea how to work on this. So the first thing was I read a book about emotional intelligence. It's called Emotional Intelligence 2.0. It's not a big book. It's quite easy to read, and it's quite powerful, at least for me it was. And it kind of talked about emotional intelligence, not necessarily about empathy. But some of the things there are related to empathy because it's managing your relationships with other people. How do you manage your responses to other people? How do you understand other people? And so that book was a big part of it, but then I went a bit further and I Googled about empathy and I read some books about it. And what I realized in one of those experiences, and I read about it, was one of the biggest tricks to improving your empathy is improving your curiosity. So if you want to understand people, the first thing you need to do is be curious and ask more questions. If you don't understand why people are feeling in a certain way, ask, you know, ask why. So, okay, but why is that bothering you so much? Okay, I understand what you're going through. But going through something— so let's say, for example, that, that car thing. Someone might hit your car, and for you, you don't— couldn't care less. I mean, you'll fix it, you'll go to the garage and fix it. Other people, for them, it's like the end of the world, the worst thing that could have happened to them that day. And so someone can come to you and say, someone hit my car and I'm really upset. And you understand someone hit the car, but you don't understand why they're upset, or at least not that much. And so you need to ask, but why? Why is it bothering you so much? And I don't know, stupid answer, but it might be like, because, you know, all my savings I invested in this car, or this was my dream car, or this was like my father's car and he died and I want to keep the much better as possible, there might be something there that you don't know unless you ask. Or why is it that people react very harshly to some situations? So in those— in reading Emotional Intelligence 2.0, I realized, for example, that one thing that pushed my buttons into reacting badly was that I tend to like conversations or decisions to be done quick. You know, I tend to be quick to understand what's being discussed. And so for me, okay, I've understood it. Let's move on. Let's go next. What's next? But not everybody has the same rhythm. So you need to understand that some people need more time to understand something, other people need less time. And you need to understand that that's a trigger. You need to understand what's the trigger that makes you react badly. And once you understand the trigger, you can control it better. Now, sometimes when I'm in a meeting and I start feeling anxious, I think to myself, see, it's happening again. You've already got it, but you need to give time to other people to get it. So don't stress, just write on a piece of paper what you want to talk about. When it's your turn to talk about it, just write it and let the conversation flow. But you need to understand those, those triggers. And that's what I tried with empathy. And for me, honestly, the curiosity piece was what opened it for me. Just ask more questions, be curious, understand what people are thinking. I mean, don't ask too much questions if people don't want to talk about it also, but if people are open to discuss it with you, that is going to help you. Asking questions is going to help you understand people, and if you ask it in a positive way, if you're being polite, if you're being, you know, positive in the engagement that you're having with people, It becomes a conversation. People are happy to share with you. Sometimes it even helps them because they find, they find someone who they can talk to about what they're experiencing. And it builds, it builds this muscle of asking more questions. And then you start recognizing some responses in some people. People are different. And you start understanding if Nick responds to this in this way is because he's very upset. And if he's upset, I need to leave him be. Or, you know, Jack might be different. If I'm talking to Jack and I'm realizing he's upset, okay, when he's upset, he needs a pep talk. So let me go there and let me just try and talk to him. So, but curiosity was what I discovered to improve my empathy.

I really love that book, Emotional Intelligence 2.0, and it helped me in a big way. And yeah, curiosity has helped me be more empathetic as well. You want to be interested in what other people have going on. And so if, if I show up on this podcast today and I'm having a tough time and you ask me a couple of questions about how I'm feeling, you know, I feel like, wow, Eduardo really cares about what I've got going on today. He's an empathetic guy. And all it takes is a couple of questions, you know, tell me a little bit more about that. Why are you feeling that way? Help me understand your point of view, your perspective. And that's another big lesson from this book is that humans are different. We're not all the same. People don't see the world through the lens through which we see it. They see it oftentimes through a very different lens. So I really enjoyed that takeaway too.

And also be honest about it. If you really want to work your empathy, ask the questions, but be interested, like you said, in the answers. It's like, how many times do we go through corridors, go through people and say, hey, how's it going? How many times do you listen to the response?

Yeah, not very often. You barely do.

Yeah, barely. How's it going is more like a hi thing. But if you're really asking how's it going, you should stop, say how's it going, get the response from that person. If you're not convinced that everything's okay, because that's the default, you know, response. How's it going? Everything's good. Is it really? Is the person looking like everything is okay? So, you know, be really interested, invest time into it, because that's going to return a lot for you as well.

Another subject from your book, going back to chapter 2, is confidence. And you mentioned that reading tons of subjects like neuroscience and, and things like that were like training for you and helped you develop confidence in different areas of your life. So could you talk a little bit about confidence? I mean, a lot of people struggle with confidence.

Yeah, I mean, there's different types of confidence. Of course, in the book, I was, I was focusing more around the professional aspect of it, or the change management of it. But it's like, for me, When I read about stuff, or I do a LinkedIn Learning training, or I see YouTube trainings on something, it opens. Let's say, I don't know, five years ago, I had no idea what blockchain was. Zero. And so the first time I read about it, and I saw some videos in the next week, I had an idea, an understanding of it. If someone started a conversation about blockchain. I could be part of that conversation. I mean, I wouldn't be an expert, but I could say, oh yeah, it's very interesting. I've already read about it. This is quite interesting. I like that idea about it. It can be used into that sector. So just reading or doing some trainings about certain topics, you know, that's the power of being a generalist, you know, knowing a little bit of various different things because then you can start piecing them together. And then if people Bring those subjects rather than being defensive and shutting down because I can't open my, my mouth about this because I know zero about this. So I actually hope people don't ask me a question about this. You know, learning, learning, reading, seeing videos opens that confidence to, oh, I can talk about this. I've actually read it. I've seen that video. So I actually want to be part of this conversation. And if people ask me, I have something to respond. And so it builds that difference. If you're out there putting yourself out there knowing more stuff, you're open to that, to those discussions. And those discussions in turn makes people think about you. But he always has an opinion about everything. He also has— he has a view about all these different stuff. He's quite an interesting character. So it also builds that positivity about engaging with you, because whatever is the subject you're always an interesting part of the conversation. Kind of like that.

Yeah, Eduardo, I'm noticing a connection between a few different chapter subjects and that word curiosity, because curiosity builds confidence. Curiosity helps with emotional intelligence. Curiosity is part of a growth mindset. Curiosity is part of adaptability. Like, you've got to be open to new ideas. And so that's an interesting word. It seems like it's a big theme with you— curiosity. I, I really like that.

It is indeed. And, um, I actually just realized it when I was writing the book.

Oh really?

Because you start writing one thing and then you write the next one and suddenly you start seeing that connection. But this links to that. Interesting. Because when you do the— when you do the list of chapters They're independent topics, things you want to talk about. And then when I started actually putting it in writing and sharing some experiences, I made those exact connections about, but yeah, confidence builds this, and curiosity helps with this. So there's a link between these things. And curiosity is very powerful because it's like there's a lot of books also and podcasts and videos about the power of questions, right? That's, that's the curiosity piece. When you start asking questions, you're opening your mind to different stuff, and it links to the growth mindset. I mean, our brain is not set in stone. We can learn different things. I mean, for me, understanding the fixed mindset is very difficult because if, if that is true, I wouldn't be here talking to you today because I couldn't have never learned English. Portuguese speaking, that's my first language. So if you're— if you can't learn new things, I wouldn't be able to drive, I wouldn't be able to speak English, I wouldn't be able to do math exercises because I didn't— I wasn't born knowing math. So if you, if you have a fixed mindset, it means you can never learn anything, which it can't be true. I mean, life itself tells you you're wrong. You've already learned so much things. And you can do that throughout life. If neuroscience has told us anything so far is that your capacity to learn, your neuroplasticity, is there through your entire life. Um, and, and so being curious is the door to all of those things. You won't learn unless you're curious enough to open a new book, or to buy a new book, or to buy a new— or open a new video, or to engage in a conversation about a new topic. Or to ask a question. Curiosity is really a big part of us being able to be more positive about life.

We've talked a little bit about books so far, but you reference quite a few inside of your book. What role have books played in your life? What are some of your favorite books?

Well, you know, I think I'm a late bloomer to books. I read a few. I was a good reader. Up to when I was in university. Then I started working and I always had that feeling I don't have time to read. So I kind of gave up on reading for about 15 years. And I've picked up the reading habit maybe 4 years ago again, and it changed my life completely again because of all of this. It built my confidence. It built my knowledge level. I read about various different things, which for me is good. Because then it opens me up to— I always believe that if you want to put a strategy up in place for something, the more you know of different things, the more analysis you can combine those things into. There's analogies about different things that work for business. So if you know what's happening enough in different sectors, you can make an analogy, bring that knowledge to your business, And then it adds value. And so reading, I think, has been a key piece of my growth as an individual, as a professional. It has been instrumental for me to be able to do my job better, especially when my role changed. I mean, I was an auditor and then I was in finance most of my life. And very quickly, 3 years ago, I moved from just looking at finance to looking at innovation, technology, IT, product development. So my career kind of changed, and reading helped me a lot to understand these topics, to be comfortable to talk to specialists. I know I'm not one, but then I got the confidence. I know enough about this subject that I can be part of the conversation. I know what's the goal. I know how it works. I can't do it myself, but I know what's— what the goal is with using this type of technology. I mean, I can't do an AI program, but I know how I can use it to improve my business. And reading has been that. It opened me up for a lot of opportunities, I think. Favorite books? I mean, it's difficult, but—

Listen, I know how difficult it is because I've read like 400 in the last 6 or 7 years. So—

I think maybe in the last 2, 3 years, there's 3 or 4 that kind of resonated. Multipliers and Impact Players by Liz Wiseman. Those 2. The Adaptation Advantage was another one that resonated quite strongly with me. And maybe, uh, Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek as well. I think maybe those 4, if I'm like on the top of my head in the last couple of years, those are probably the 4 that resonated the most.

Awesome. Yeah, thanks for sharing those. Well, I can't believe that we've already been talking for almost an hour, so we've got to start to wrap this up sometime soon.

Sure.

Prior to pressing record, I, you know, I sort of asked you like, what subjects are you really interested in talking about right now? And you said, listen, chapter 6 deals with adaptability and everything changes and the next industrial revolution, the technology shift. Those are subjects that people are interested in and that you're passionate about talking about. So let's talk a little bit about those. I mean, why is it important to be adaptable? And what are some of the things that you see coming over the next few years that we should begin to prepare for?

Sure, so I think, you know, there's like 2 currents when you look at the future, you know. There's one reality: life is changing faster than it ever did before. And another truth, another fact, is that the speed of change will never be as slow as it is right now. So it's already tremendously fast compared compared to 10, 15 years ago, but it will only increase. It will never stay as it is, and it won't slow down. It will just increase. So change is going to be a constant in our future. You know, currently kids come out of university and they're not prepared because the jobs they will be doing 5 years from now don't exist today. So you can't be prepared in university for something that you don't know what's going to be. So that change, you can look at it from 2 perspectives. You can fear it because you're going to become irrelevant, or you can embrace it because you're going to have opportunities to do so many different things. And for me, that's the way to go. It's embrace the change and realize that I can do so many different things in the future. I can add value in different ways. And you— for this to happen, Of course, you need to be curious, but more than that, you need to deconstruct, especially for people already in the workspace, people that already built a career, you know, especially people, you know, 35 and above. We tend to link our profession, what we do, to who we are. You know, most of us, when we go to an event or we meet someone and that person asks you to introduce yourself or Or asks you, who are you? Usually the first thing we say is what we do. Oh, I'm a CFO, or I'm an engineer, or I'm a web designer, or I'm this. That's not who you are. You're not that. That's what you do. You're you. You're Nick. I'm Eduardo. That's, you know, I'm— my personality is who I am. But this is very ingrained in our brains, even when we're kids. People ask you, what do you want to be when you grow up? It's not what do you want to do when you grow up, it's what do you want to be. And that's wrong because you're not going to be an engineer, you're going to be doing engineer work. And so that, that is very powerful. And actually there are studies that show that when people lose a job, the psychological impact of that loss of the job is more— is stronger And harder to go through than a divorce or death of a family member, because it's so ingrained in what you do. So the first thing you need to do is realize who you are is not linked to what you do. What you do is your job. It might give you social capital, of course, because you're working in a big company and people want to talk to you. Of course, there's links there that you might lose. It's one thing if I'm a VP at Google or a VP at XYZ Co. Nobody knows XYZ Co. Okay, you're still doing the same job, but there's that social capital that links to what you're working. And that's true. But if your skills are there, your value is not linked to your job. Your value is linked to what you are as a person and what you can do. And like you were saying before, if we have a growth mindset, and it's proven scientifically that we all can learn, then when we look at all the change that is coming, it shouldn't scare us. We just need to start being curious now, start learning more stuff, and start preparing. It's like if I'm working in, I don't know, some, some type of factory, and I'm worried about change and robots, taking over my job. I need to go and be curious about, hmm, how do I learn to maintain a robot? How do I learn how to program a robot? And then I'm still going to be relevant because they're going to need me to keep that robot working. And I'm going to be learning new stuff. And probably I'm going to enjoy that work quite tremendously because the future of jobs is much less repetitive and much more creative. and value-driven. And so rather than just hitting keys or doing something repetitive, the future of jobs is going to be much more exciting. And so the opportunities that we have are tremendous, but we need to stop thinking that we are what we do, and we need to start learning, building that confidence, building that capacity to learn at to look at change as a challenge that I will take and that I will surpass. And it builds positivity. Being positive is about believing whatever comes my way, I'll find a way of sorting it. I might not know how yet, but I'll get there. And that's the mindset that you kind of— you should use while facing this transformation because it's going to hit us all. I mean, I don't know what I'll be doing 10 years from now. What I know is the more I read, the more I learn, the more I put myself out there, the more prepared I will be to take— to take on whatever change comes my way.

All right, great. So you are not what you do. I love that. And knowing that things will change and you will have to adapt, you need to learn and be open to things, be curious. And all the way back in chapter 2, you say that confidence happens slowly. And so for me, when I hear, you know, 5 years ago when I heard about blockchain and I started looking at different cryptocurrencies, those were very intimidating subjects, but I was curious and open and I learned slowly. And now I'm confident about those subjects. I could talk about them all the time. And you can read books, you could watch YouTube courses, whatever the case is. So that's cool. Well, Eduardo, thank you so much for coming on the show today. For people that want to learn a little bit more about you, or they got a good introduction to the book and they want to grab a copy, where should they go? What should they do?

Yeah, so first of all, thanks for having me, Nick. It's been a pleasure to be here and sharing. It's always very, very positive to engage in conversations with you. We can talk for hours. It's awesome. It's amazing. About the book, I mean, it's available in most online platforms. I mostly have it on Amazon, but I've realized that other platforms have picked it up. So online retailers, you can find it— Amazon, Ubuy, Barnes& Noble, Walmart— you can find it almost anywhere, I've realized while Googling it. And so online you can find it everywhere. I don't know physically where. I do know that IngramSpark puts it into some physical stores, but I don't know exactly where. But, you know, online you can find it all over the world and with websites that deliver all over the globe.

Awesome. Well, again, thank you so much for coming on today.

No, thank you, Nick. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.