"The #1 Thing HOLDING YOU BACK In Life IS THIS!" (Ultimate Success Advice) | Josh Linkner

But for I know there's a lot of entrepreneurs out there listening like, okay, how can I grow my business? How can I, how can I be more effective? How can I be more effective in my family or my community, things that are important to us. And I just would encourage people to first identify what is everybody else doing and then ask yourself, how can I give it a judo.

If you don't.

Mind, just give me an itty bitty background about kind of, kind of where you've been. Because I know that you know kind of where you've been. The experience that you're leaning into is a big driver behind the book. And kind of some of the success things, or not even some of the success, a lot of the successes you've seen have got you kind of focused in on this particular message. So give us a little background about kind of where you're from and all that good stuff.

Yeah. So I'm a scrappy Detroit kid. I was born in the city of Detroit, not the suburbs, as were my parents and grandparents. So I just have a deep connection to my hometown. Sort of a city with a soul. And I grew up always being a bit of an oddball, not, not in a good way. Like I was. There was 19 people in a room, there was 18 of them and one of me. And I was always a little bit of a misfit. But I deeply loved creativity. I started playing music very early, so I started playing music at 8. Kind piano, first switched to guitar and I became a musician. I put myself through college playing music. I've performed all over the world. I studied jazz primarily, but could play other forms of music as well. And that's what I was planning to do. I was planning to be a professional musician. But as fate would have it, at age 20 I started a company and P.S. i'd never taken a business course. I didn't know what I was doing. But I played jazz and jazz is like this improvisational art form. So I said, oh well, maybe I could just figure it out. So I made a bunch of mistakes. But I started a tech company at age 20 and. And without all the gory details. Over the next 30 years, I started, built and sold five tech companies and had a pretty good run. Raised several hundreds of millions of dollars for others raising. I ran a venture capital fund for quite some time. I've been involved in the launch of about 100 startups and I've gone on to write four books on my deep passion for human creativity and innovation. So that's me in a nutshell love it, dude.

Well, look, what's the number one thing that you feel like you've discovered the whole most people back? Because I know one of the things that I take away from it is I think most people have their focus wrong. You know, it seems like all the overwhelmed frustration feelings and stuff like that is because maybe they're, maybe their focus is in the wrong place or expecting big things but not realizing there's, there's more to the story. What do you, what do you think is holding most people back nowadays?

Well, obviously there's a lot of factors on an individual case that might be holding a particular person back. But one thing I see all the time being a big fan of innovation is this. You know, we crave innovation. We come up, we want this big ideas, we want to transform our business and our lives and our families. But we think that the only way to get it is by swinging for the fences, which feels scary and risky and all that. So in the book, I really tried to decouple innovation and creativity, look at it differently, flip it upside down, and really encourage people to focus on small little acts, little teeny micro innovations, everyday innovations, because those actually add up to big things and they're not scary and they're not risky. And when we're doing little ones, we're actually building skills. So I think what's often misunderstood about swinging for the fences is that that's actually not the best way to hit a home run. You're better off actually learning how to swing in the first place and hitting a few singles.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it seems like in this day and time that swinging for the fences, so to speak, is definitely intimidating. But it also would increase fear, which may decrease you even taking action to begin with. You know, I know one of the things that I love about your materials is, you know, it's this essence of building confidence with each one of the little wins and the fact that it kind of takes you to another level as you go. What does this experience taught you about confidence and kind of building confidence?

You're exactly right. It's funny, like we all want to become the best in our craft and so think about Da Vinci, one of the all time greatest artists. Well, his first painting wasn't the Mona Lisa. First Da Vinci had to learn to paint. He had to paint every day. He had to screw up, he had to make terrible paintings. And over time he became the artist that we know. And that's exactly the same for each of us as we grow our own businesses. It's not about, you know, you one day wake up and you've achieved greatness. It's about kind of plugging the day in and day out and building daily habits around cultivating these skills. So that's what builds confidence. It's funny, what confidence really is about. Isn't someone getting it right the first time? Actually, that can deplete confidence because then you're so worried you're going to screw it up the next time. Confidence is built by making mistakes and overcoming them. As we overcome adversity, our confidence grows just real quickly. So again, I play jazz music and people ask me all the time, like, how do you know you're going to get it right? You're improvising most of what you play. You're in front of a live audience. You can't go, go have a do over. How do you know you're going to do it right? And the truth is, I know I'm not going to do it right. I know with absolute certainty I'm going to screw something up. There's never been a jazz performance where I haven't. What's given me confidence is the ability to course correct. It's knowing full well that I'm going to make a mistake and then knowing that I have the capability to sort of dig myself out of that hole and make it okay at the end.

Yeah. How does that play into this? One of the things that I love most about your work is this concept of dormant creativity.

I hadn't heard it.

I've never heard. I had never heard that phrase before until I was introduced to some of your work. Explain to the audience what dormant creativity is, kind of why it's important. How do we shift that kind of concept?

Yeah. Imagine if you, in your backyard right now in Raleigh, North Carolina, had an oil well and you learned that you had oil beneath your backyard. So if you're like, yeah, you know, I'm not going to really do much with it, you know, that would be sort of silly. Like there's this really valuable thing that's lying dormant. And so actually, as I've studied human creativity now for 20 years, and with academic research and hundreds of interviews with amazing people, CEOs, billionaires, celebrity entrepreneurs, what I've learned is that all human beings have enormous reservoirs of dormant creative capacity. Think of that as the oil well that's laying inside you. And if we all have this and we don't put it into use, we're kind of missing a cool thing. And so what I try to do is give people the Tools to unlock it. Instead of you going back in your backyard with a plastic shovel from your kids, you know, if I give you an industrial drill, like you're going to get to that oil more effectively. So that's kind of, I feel like I'm on a mission, honestly, to help everyday people become everyday innovators by helping them unleash this dormant creative capacity. The other thing I'll just say on that point real quick is that it's a highly leverage activity. In other words, if you can bring like 5% more creativity to the surface, that could have 100% or a thousand percent impact in your business, in your life and your, in your community. And so just even a teeny bit extra, just tapping into that vein of creativity a little bit actually can drive a massive reward in the outcomes that we care the most about.

Yeah, no, totally. In fact, if I think about a lot of my life, you know, I started my first company when I was homeless and, you know, that incremental progress and confidence that kind of led to, I guess, the creation of other ideas and concept also built, you know, this other mentality of, hey, maybe I can do this over time. And that one little seed, you know, became like, you know, if you're looking at a flat line, became that little incremental thing. And that one incremental shift literally can, you know, looks very different five, ten years down the road from what I can see for sure.

Yeah, that's a really good way to think about it. And that's kind of how I think of these big little breakthroughs as those, you know, tiny little shifts and adjustments. It's like, you know, you drop a teeny pebble in a stick, you know, that, that, that impact wasn't that big, but it can, it can have ripple effect that, that, that spans for miles. And that, that's the same thing with our creativity. If we can cultivate a little bit, put a little bit into action, you know, great outcomes come. Great, great, great outcomes will follow.

Absolutely. Well, you know, you did a lot of, you did a lot of research, put a lot of time and energy into this new book, which is one of the reasons it's gonna be so powerful. Is there a specific maybe piece of data that came out of your research that just is really exciting that you think everybody needs to know?

Yeah, it's pretty cool. So I got the chance to debunk a lot of myths, and I looked at all kinds of academic research, but there's some fascinating things that we've learned. There are some studies in academic research where the slightest adjustments have a massive impact on people's creativity. So for example, they gave people a standardized creativity test. They broke them into two groups. They were equal demographics and everything. And this was done in University of Italy. But so this one, one group is given a picture to look at like a film of like sheep grazing, like the most boring thing you could imagine. The other group was given a film that was awe inspiring, like majestic cliffs and bald eagles and all this kind of stuff. And right after this was just like a couple of minutes, they were then asked to do the creativity test. And the results were stunning. There's a 40% boost in creative capacity just by stirring up a little bit of awe. And the cool thing to me, back to dormant creative capacity, it wasn't like they just randomly selected the most creative people. They were the same group of people basically. But just a little teeny adjustment can do have a giant impact on unlocking creativity. Another one that was fascinating, there was research at the University of Houston where same type of thing as researchers do, they have, you know, control group and another group. So they brought people in, they said they were going to do some tests or whatever and then they basically took half of the people randomly and ostracized them. They're like, oh, you're not good enough for this test, you don't qualify. They kind of made them feel like misfits, but then they just shrugged their shoulders, hey, like since you're here anyway, why don't you just take this test? And kind of rolled their eyes at them. So compared to the other group that they just didn't do that, those antics, the people that felt like they were misfits, that they were outsiders, had a gigantic improvement in creativity. In other words, when they felt like they didn't have anything to lose or they didn't have that filter, they were able to actually express way better, more powerful ideas. Once again, all these examples just lead to the fact that we as human beings are hardwired to be creative. That's our natural state. We can express it in different ways. Like I play jazz guitar pretty well, I can't draw a stick figure if I tried. So it doesn't mean that everybody listening needs to like be painting with oil on canvas. We can each be creative in our own ways. But here's the key thing, we can all be creative. And when we just have a little bit of tinkering with that, a little bit of unlocking of the skills, a little bit of technique, I mean it's amazing. We all truly become artists in our own field.

Yeah. I mean, do you think that the biggest forms of innovation and creativity is actually stirred in that person's unique sphere of genius? For example, like, you know, you mentioned obviously playing guitar with excellence. I play guitar nowhere near to your level, you know, but I can't play piano. Right. You know, but I find myself, if I'm sitting down with a guitar for a good hour or something like that, I'll tinker around and come up with a little song that I'm happy with. Just in that moment. Does it seem like that authenticity is really what's driving the greatest form of creativity inside of any individual at any given time?

I think authenticity certainly plays a key factor. One of the things that's actually probably an even bigger factor is borrowing from different parts of life. So it's funny, I studied at the Berkeley College of Music, and I had a professor. I was sort of at a plateau in my playing, and he said, josh, go feed the pigeons. And I'm like, what is that, like a new scale? You know, he's like, no, no, go feed the pigeons. I'm like, well, is that a Zen metaphor for some proverbs like, no, man, get a bag and go feed the pigeons. Stop playing guitar for a couple days. He's like, your technique is fine. You just don't have anything to say. And so it was only when I got away from the craft a little bit and had some outside influences that I was able to actually improve my music. And I think we see that all the time. So I'm a better business person because I study music. I'm a better father because I'm a better business person. And so I think what happens maybe in your case when you're. When you're inventing stuff on the guitar, it's not only that you're learning the mechanics of the instrument, but you're bringing elements of your success and challenges and everything from other areas of life. And very much what creativity is is that sort of mix and match. It's the mashup of insight that you gain in one part of your life and applying it somewhere different. And I think that's actually what might be happening with.

When you're.

When you're taking out tinkering on the guitar. In other words, you might become a better guitar player not by practicing chords, but by having other experiences outside of music altogether.

Yeah, I didn't even think about that because obviously I would have, you know, listened to different things, picked up different things, met different people, maybe had an amazing day. You know, I have found that if I'm feeling really good, most of the songs that I'm kind of writing in the moment are kind of upbeat and happy, you know, and if for some reason I had a kind of a. Not necessarily a great of a day, I'm doing a lot more A minor, E minor chords where, you know, it's kind of like a. I pull down to the emotions a little bit. That makes total sense. Well, speaking of this creativity sector, you know, I find that, you know.

A Time magazine poll came out a couple years ago. They've done it twice since, and they keep getting the same results, which is about 70% of the population, if you will, would express that they're. They feel, you know, lack of trueness, frustration, overwhelm. Like they're not. They don't feel. Feel like they have a semblance of really who they are, what they're about, why they're here. None of that kind of stuff. So if that's the case, then obviously that. That that person is struggling with innovation and creativity, even if it's just in their own life, let alone just the professional career and stuff. What is holding people back from being more creative and actually building on these little wins?

Well, the biggest blocker of creative output is not natural talent. The research is crystal clear that we're all. We all have the capacity. Like, we've got the hardware. The biggest factor is fear. So fear is that poisonous force that really robs us of our best creative thinking. In other words, we might share our safe ideas, but we hold our crazy cool ones back, or we might not share any at all. Thing is that fear and creativity cannot coexist. So if we're in a cultural environment, in our jobs or in our families or whatever, where fear is seeping in, it's very, very difficult to be creative. The trick is to use techniques that remove fear and also to try to compartmentalize it, to send your. Your analytical self out for a Starbucks so your creative self can really get after it. But what I've learned is that we need better techniques. Like when I'm playing music, you know, I've learned certain techniques over the years that allow me to be more effective. And the same is true for any type of creative expression. Most of us rely on brainstorming. And brainstorming is totally out of date. It was started in 1958. Like, things have changed since 1958.

I think we need an update a little bit.

And furthermore, it's designed. It's a perfectly designed Exercise to yield mediocre ideas. Because again, fear creeps in the room. And so you have a crazy idea, but instead of sharing it, you don't share it because you don't want to offend your boss or you don't want to look foolish. So I've developed over the years a toolkit of much more powerful and more fun too, by the way, techniques. I call them idea jamming because I don't like brainstorming. But idea jams are techniques to allow you to get through that fear. Just a quick example of a technique. There's one called roll storming. So roll storming is brainstorming in character. In other words, you're taking on an actual problem, but you're pretending that you're somebody else. So if you're in a meeting and again, your fear is there, you don't want to offend somebody. But now instead of being you, you're. You're playing the role of Steve Jobs. No one's going to laugh at Steve for coming up with a big idea. They might laugh at Steve for coming up with a small one. So, so now you're like, totally liberated. So the technique is super simple. You just pick any character you want. You can be Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis. You can be a movie star or a sports hero. You could be a villain. And you pretend, pretend that you're that person. Because when you're pretending you're someone else, you're no longer responsible for the ideas. You're. You can let your creativity surface without any type of repercussion.

Dude, that is phenomenal. I've never thought about that. That is so cool. Well, let me ask you this. As you're kind of looking at this, this creativity, so we've kind of identified maybe some of the hurdles that somebody's going to face in becoming more creative. We've kind of generated, kind of focused in on why creativity and innovation can be so powerful even with incremental changes, and how that can change things and transform things. Let me ask you this. Is there a specific time of day that people are more creative versus not as creative during the course of the day? With all the research you've done?

Yeah. The answer is yes, except there's a star next to it. Because the answer is it's different for different people. Daniel Pink recently wrote a very good book called When. And it basically identifies that people have their own circadian rhythms. He says that some of us are owls and some of us are larks. And so I think it's important for each person to sort of identify where they're in the creative zone and honor that. Like, for me, I write much better in the morning than I do in the afternoon. I can't work out in the morning. I just suck at working out. So I adapt my schedule that way. I'll write and do creative stuff in the morning and I'll exercise like in the afternoon. So I think a lot of it is just more used the word authenticity earlier. It's not a one size fit all. It's just that, you know, identify what works best for you and then do your best to honor it wherever you can.

Yeah. Well, let me ask you this. Was there an actual big little breakthrough that you discovered as a process of writing this book to begin with? In other words, what kind of. I'm just interested in some of the epiphanies that you have, because I know sometimes I'll get in writing mode and I'm like, oh, that sounds so good. Like, that was like. That was almost like revelation. What types of revelations did you have in putting this together?

Well, you know, this is my fourth book, so. And by the way, I'm no master. I'm still learning, still a student, but I have.

We all are. Exactly.

But I've developed a couple of techniques. You know, one thing I like doing is not confusing the editing process with the creative process. And this, by the way, something we do all the time with creativity. You know, the minute an idea comes out, we extinguish it too quickly because it's not perfect. We instantly get into like editing mode. So I do what I best describe as idea spewing, where I just sort of like vomit ideas onto the page. And it doesn't matter if my grammar's off. It doesn't matter if the sentence isn't coherent. It doesn't matter if I'm not painting beautiful, rich imagery with my words. I just get stuff on the page. Then I take other multiple passes at it, and each pass has sort of a different objective. One pass might be to tighten up the sentence structure. Another pass might be, could I add humor? Another one might be could I add more vivid detail? But I don't expect perfection when it comes out. I let the creative process happen naturally.

Yeah, well, one of the things you're also really known for and one of the reasons your books do so well and we enjoy reading them so much, is this is because you do share a lot of stories. You know, you do kind of like build stories and bring people into the store. You know, that's one thing that I love most about your work is that you spend time trying to almost make it like a mental movie for us, which actually endorses and creates creativity. Come to think of it.

Is there a favorite story that you've had in this particular book that you wrote that you're releasing right now?

Yeah. Thank you so much for saying that. And I'll tell you, like, I feel that my previous works I'm proud of, but this one, I took it to a different level. I feel like it's a piece of art. And I'm not no Hemingway. I'm not being boastful at all, but I can be proud of it. Like, I can look myself in the mirror and say it was a good book. And you're right. Stories are the things that we remember. That's how we learn. And here's what I didn't do. I didn't tell the story of Apple and Netflix because, like, we already know they're innovative. No kidding. Duh. So I tried to find these unusual, weird things from around the world that nobody heard about. And those to me are the gems. So there's a handful of favorites. I mean, I talk about the creative habits of like, like Lady Gaga and Steven Spielberg and, you know, all kinds of cool, weird, Grammy Award winning people, but the ones, the unknown ones are the better ones. So here's an example that I met this guy who I interviewed for the book named Trewin Restorek. And Trowin, by the way, is not a celebrity. He's not a billionaire. He doesn't have a PhD in eight things. He's an average dude like you and me. Like, he just, he struggled in college. He wakes up every day trying to take care of his family and pay the bills. He's a normal guy. But Trowen, he grew up in the UK and he was always into the outdoors. He really cared about the environment. He learned that in central London, the single biggest environmental challenge is cigarette litter. I'm sure you've done this. You're in a beautiful city. I'm sure you see this in Raleigh. You look at the beautiful buildings and the hustle and bustle. Then you look down and you see cigarette litter in the streets. And not only does it look bad, it's actually terrible for the environment. It's a health hazard for kids and animals. Just bad. So over the years, maybe I could do something about this. Over the years, all these fancy people tried to figure this out and they issued fines or hired more police officers or tried to shame people into compliance. Nothing worked. So Trauma did something cool. He did a big little breakthrough. He came up with something that is a bright yellow metal box with a glass front. He calls it a ballot bin. These bright yellow metal boxes are mounted at eye level by areas where people smoke. And at the top of it there's a two part question like which is your favorite food? Pizza or hamburgers? And there's a little receptacle on each side where people basically vote with their butts, with their cigarette butts, there's a divider. So what happens is the cigarette butts, like for example, under the pizza column sort of stack up on one another. So it looks like you're looking at two bar charts made up of cigarette butts to see which one is in the lead. You can customize these with any two part question, like Trump's hair, real or fake? Or which is your favorite sport? Football or soccer, you know, Brexit, yes or no? And so in doing this though simple, low tech, low cost olution didn't require PhDs or you know, lightning bolt of inspiration from the gods. You know what happened? Cigarette litter was reduced by 80%.

Holy smokes.

So then Trauma said, hey, it's working. He now rolled it out. He's live in 27 countries, he's making a massive difference in the world. He's got his thriving business, all because an average guy decided to become an everyday innovator. So to me, those are the stories that I just love sharing. Because, you know, it's the thing, I look at Elon Musk and I say, good for him. That's. I could never do that. I'm probably not going to launch a space company. But when I look at TRO and restrict, I say, you know what, I got that. Like I can see myself in him. I could. This is within my grasp. And to me that's what this book is about. It's letting everyday people unlock this incredible superpower that we all have of human creativity.

I once heard that one of the best ways to become more and more innovative is to find a problem and try to solve it. You know, discover a problem, you know, when we're surrounded by problems. You know, to your degree, to your point about all humans are created to have a level of creativity and innovation. I also believe we're also here on this earth to provide solutions to the things that ail us on a regular basis. I love that story. Just because of that reason for sure. Let me ask you this. So we've got a. Let's assume we've got somebody watching right now and they feel stagnant. They feel like they haven't had a lot of creativity. They don't feel like they're adding innovation. They don't feel like, you know, they just don't feel like in this moment, right. And we, you know, at the time of this particular recording or taping, we're, you know, essentially, we're probably about a month away from actually getting our hands on this book, man. You know, so what can they do in the meantime to maybe kind of like, you know, just kind of kickstart their creativity and innovation and, you know, for their favor moving forward?

Yeah, that's a great question. What I recommend people do is just like what you and I do when we're learning music. So it's not about the one great guitar lesson that might be the equivalent of reading a book. It's more about the practice. You know, it's about doing little bits of practice with high frequency. So when you're playing guitar, you might play for 10 minutes a day, but you do it for six months in a row and boom, you're a really pretty good guitar player. So I encourage people to embrace creativity as a daily habit instead of a once a decade bet your career kind of thing I actually personally write about in the book, but I have a five minute a day daily ritual. I do this, that I did this morning. So basically I do a couple of quick, deep breaths. I have a little gratitude, and I do a couple of things. First thing I do is they always say, for example, in software engineering, if you want to change the outputs, you got to change the inputs. And creativity is kind of the same. So I literally do a one minute sprint. One minute where I guzzle in other people's creativity. I might watch a band playing on YouTube, I might stare at a painting, I might read a poem out loud. But all I do is I sort of like absorb the creative genius of others. Next thing I do. Back to your question about giving yourself a problem. I give myself a problem that isn't really applied to my own life. It's just. It's like jumping jacks for your creativity. I might say, what are 11 non traditional uses for a pencil? Or if I ran a professional sports team and I had to double the ticket price, what might I do to get there? And so I just, again, there's these abstract problems. Literally one minute. It's one minute of creative jumping jacks, but it really does. It helps you build problem solving skills and stay sharp. The other thing I do real quickly is I do a one minute Highlight reel.

Okay.

We see highlight reels all the time of sporting events. I take the first step and sort of replay in my mind like it's a highlight reel of me being creative. Previously, maybe I was playing music, maybe I was solving a problem in a business. But then the next 30 seconds, I think about a future highly reel. Like I picture myself solving a problem or coming up with a new idea in the future. And this connection to something, anchoring in something you've already done, combined with something you hope to do, just sort of makes these connections in your brain. A couple more deep breaths and I'm done. Five minutes in and out. And just the habit of doing that every day. You start to build creative muscle mass. And that's really the way I just want to real quickly mention that your creativity is much more like your weight than your height. Like, I'm a pretty short guy. There ain't no way I'm going to be 63 tomorrow, no matter how hard I try. But I can adjust my weight based on what I eat and if I exercise and such. Your creativity is exactly like that. Any one of us can build creative muscle mass. Any one of us can. Can build creative skillset if we just give it a little bit of time and energy.

Yeah. Well, also, you know, one of the things I've heard through our conversation is there's this element of having a muse. There's something that's, you know, whether you mentioned your highlight reel, there's this, hey, look, this spurs creative thought. You know, one of the things that I. That I've tried to tell people to do all the time and just trying to kind of resetting their brain is, you know, one of my routines is obviously after prayer and meditation, but I'm heading to the gym. I am doing very similar things that what you're describing that I didn't realize it was spurring creativity, but it does. I'm in the gym and I'm making notes in my iPhone about pieces of content I could create and everything like that. And that's listening to audiobooks. It's watching, you know, a YouTube clip that's going to inspire my mind, my heart, my soul, or a podcast that does the same thing. I love that. I really love that in a sense, like, there's a piece of muse there, right? All you're looking for is your daily museum, is that right?

That's really helpful. And we all can have our own ones. Like, I'm inspired by jazz music. Someone else might hate jazz music, and that's okay. There's no right or wrong. It's just whatever. Whatever inspires you. It could be a walk in nature. You know, it could be a certain type of food that you eat. But you're right, if you can connect with that, it really can serve as a catalyst for your creative output. You know, one thing I just want to touch on, you mentioned earlier this notion of finding problems. In the book, I cover what I call the eight obsessions of everyday innovators. These are patterns that I've discovered across hundreds and hundreds of interviews and a bunch of research. And one of them, which the reason I brought it up, is that it's called Fall in Love with the Problem, not the solution. So too often we think of innovation as coming up with the idea, like, what's the thing? But the actually best innovators don't do that. They really connect with the problem and then they kind of bathe in it. They study the problem from lots of angles and they don't actually care how they solve it as much as the. As the fact that they do solve it. So Trowman, it wasn't like he had some idea in London, like, hey, I got this idea for a ballot. Then first he really studied the problem and started thinking, like, why do people litter? And he got really involved in the problem. And then secondly, he was able to discover the solution. So again, in the book, I cover these eight core mindsets of everyday innovators, which are just really easy and accessible things that any one of us can do on a daily basis.

Yeah, I like that a lot. And I like. And I like it a lot for a lot of different reasons. You know, I was just thinking to myself, you know, going back to the butt story, for lack of a better word, you know, going back to that. It's even now spurring in me, like, okay, well, I like the concept of sitting in it. You know, one of the things that I've done is, you know, I'm the biggest believer of the greatest purpose in life you ever have as serving the person you used to be, which in elements you're doing with this book as well. But in doing so, I have myself sat and thought about how people think and feel. In fact, we got ready to do our first live event a few years ago and I was having a hard time articulating it to the, to the team saying, hey, look, we're going to put on this live event. This is what we're going to do. And they're like, okay, well, live events are done. Like, you know, people do Live events all the time. Wowzard. You know, and I went to a Starbucks at the time and I sat down for about two and a half hours and I wrote all the way down from how that person is introduced to our company and our brand, all the way through the total experience of the environment. So much so that I tied emotion to it that when I went to go read it back to my team, as I was talking about the personal transformation that that person experienced, I was actually weeping like a baby. And it made that dream and that vision like twice as real, twice as clear and twice as possible. So what do you think holds people back from actually doing that work of sitting in it? Because I just, I love that concept. In fact, I'm going to be thinking about that one concept the rest of the day, I think. So what do you think holds people back from that? I mean, is it fear as well?

Yeah, just for a second, honor what you did there. I mean, I think it's also really cool because if you said to me, I'm on your team, like, hey, I got this thing for a live event, we're going to make a bunch of money, we're going to take advantage of our customers, you'd be a selfish jerk. But you did the opposite. You had a noble intent. In other words, you probably talked about the transformation that you were going to create in people's lives and the impact this is going to have on your team. And what I've learned is that those that chase selfish gain rarely actually end up even getting it. Whereas those that choose purpose and impact, those are the ones that like the money and rewards come as a byproduct of doing great things. And I'm not surprised at all that you motivated your team that way because I love the way you characterize it. That's awesome.

Well, in that experience, you know what's funny? It was like, you know, even when I finished that.

Finished kind of communicating my vision, there was still a ton of things that had to be created from, from their skill set, you know, from, you know, my graphic artists had to go and create the pop ups. My graphic artists had to go and create the, the backdrops for taking pictures and stuff. We had to figure out what our brand identity was going to be for the various slides that may come up while we're presenting. I mean, there was a ton there that allowed them to be twice as creative. So it seems like creativity is almost like an acorn. It creates an oak tree that then creates more acorns, which is how innovation happens to Begin with right.

Yeah, that's so true. And, you know, like, too often we hire people on our teams. We hire these amazing creative people, and then we don't let them use it. You know, we shut it down. They just do what they're told and. And you really did. Sounds like a great, great thing there where you gave people the creative freedom, gave your graphic designer the freedom to go design it the way he or she felt, and that. That's that. You're right. You're cultivating the creativity in others. Anyway, you asked a question. I didn't mean to miss your question, which was how. How can. What's holding us back is a core of your question. One of the things it really does get back to fear. We tend to follow the herd. Like in nature, if you're a seagull or something, you know, if you flock with a bunch of other birds and that's safer. But actually, if you do that in business or in life in general, that's actually probably one of the most dangerous things that you can do. To me, the biggest insult in business is getting confused with a competitor. I'd rather focus on what makes me different than what makes me the same. And back to technique. And this technique, not only for creativity, but also other productivity things is. I call it the Judo flip. The Judo flip, which basically goes like this. Let's say you're trying to solve a problem or seize an opportunity. You make a list. How have you always done it before? What is your instinct telling you to do what? How does. What's conventional wisdom in your field? And then draw a line on the page. And then on the other side, ask yourself, what's the polar opposite? What would it look like if I did the exact opposite of what's expected? What would it look like if I judo flipped it? I know we were talking that you have many entrepreneurs on the show. I just want to share a quick personal story of I met, if I may, of this principle in action. So I built my company. At one point, I started a company in 99 called E Prize. We designed, built and ran digital promotions like half software company and half ad agency. Grew it to about 500 people, sold it in 2012. But anyway, early on, we had a chance to win a massive account like this giant account from a multinational corporation. And they're putting all their business single sourcing to one provider. So lots of companies competing. We made it to the finals. There's three companies remaining. My little shop from Detroit and two much larger companies. And all three of us were like, desperate to win the, win the business. The problem is that the buyer, in this case the decision maker, he was kind of mean. I hate to say it, he was like, kind of mean. So, you know, arrogant, condescending, non responsive. And what made it worse is he was dragging this process out. He kept setting a deadline to make a decision, blew every deadline. So at this point, we just wanted closure. Anyway, I bumped into this guy and his wife at an industry conference, and I'm trying everything I know, every obvious thing. So I'm running up to him at all the coffee breaks and begging him for the deal, and, you know, nothing worked. He was totally, totally dismissive. Yeah, well, here's the thing. I see him again at the airport. It turns out this guy and his wife were on the same outbound flight that I was. Here's what happens next. I can't even make this up if I tried. So, so the guy gets an upgrade to first class. He's a frequent traveler. Being the gentleman that he is, he takes the seat for himself, sends his wife on back to coach.

Serious, right?

Like, who does that? I mean.

If I did that with my wife Tia, like, I'd be sleeping in the doghouse for six months.

Months.

No way that's happening. But he does. Anyway. Next thing I hear is my own name. I also got an upgrade because I'm also a frequent traveler. So I walk on the plane and I look down and I have the seat next to him. Now, now think, Think what your instincts would be telling you. It's an important opportunity. I, I, and I thought about that. Seriously. I'm like, okay, two hours uninterrupted, I'm going in for the kill. I'm gonna land this baby. But then I stopped, and this, this pause is critical, is. It's that quick pause to recalibrate and say, okay, what's the judo flip? What's the opposite? What, what, what could I do that would be non conventional? So I said to him, I said, hey, man, I have the seat next to you. And he looks up, he says, yeah, that's cool. We could chat. I said, look, I'd love that, but I plan to catch up on a whole bunch of work on this flight. Also, I noticed that your wife is sitting in back. How about we switch seats? You two can enjoy some family time. I'll get my work done back in coach. And so after the pleasantries, I walked back and found his wife. Gave her my ticket. And I actually wasn't sure she was going to take it. You know, based on his behavior. But anyway, she took it. She was really happy. Flight takes off. I wasn't thinking about it too much until we landed. The first thing we all do when we land, we check our mobile device. I look down at mine, and I see an email from my office. Josh, deal signed.

Are you serious?

Here's what he later told me. He said, I was looking for a tiebreaker. The three remaining companies were all competent, but when you demonstrated some humanity, instead of only chasing the bottom line, when you showed a willingness to be innovative in the moment, he said, that's who I wanted on my team. So before the flight took off, he texted into his office. During the flight, his headquarters signed the deal, and we got the contract. $30 million.

Dude, I love that story. And it's so true that people that are chasing income seldom find it, and people that chase impact always do. It's. You know, a friend of mine, David Meltzer, and Evan Carmichael, we're all about serving, all about giving, all about trying to figure out ways to help help the world just be a little bit better place. And sometimes the greatest help you can do is actually illustrating and giving out that little bit of humanity in that moment. I love that story, man. I love it, dude.

Thank you. And by the way, I wasn't trying to be righteous. Like, I was trying to do the right thing and all that, and I wasn't trying to game it. But for. I know there's a lot of entrepreneurs out there listening, like, okay, how can I grow my business? How can I be more effective? How can I be more effective in my family or my community, the things that are important to us? And I just would encourage people to first identify, what is everybody else doing? And then ask yourself, how can I give it a judo flip?

Yeah. And you know what's funny is I love the judo flip technique because I've actually used it. When the 2008 downturn happened, my flagship company was a construction business. You know, it was the company that I started when I was sleeping in the car and all that kind of stuff back in the day. And I'd worked, gosh, probably 12 years or more trying to build it to where it was at. All of my competitors went into trying to garble up what they could mow kind of thing. Almost like, what's the word I'm looking for? Scarcity mentality. They kind of got scarce. And we got to protect this, we got to protect that. And in that moment, I did essentially what you just described, which was called your judo flip, which was I went to them and I said, hey, how can I help you survive? Like, what can I do? Can I give you extended terms? Can I give you a discount? That's awesome. And some of them were like, hey, we don't need that. But what we could really help with, and these are some smaller regional players, is maybe a little help with our marketing stuff. Meaning we got this marketing company we're using. You know, we had made sign these deals. Now we're, now we're, you know, kind of on fixed liquidity or fixed cash position that we have to kind of pay attention to. You know, what can you do? And what I did was I took my stickers off our box trucks that were our delivery vehicles and I paid to put their logos on my box trucks that were already driving around the city.

Wow.

That 10x my company within 2 years because of that one idea or that one difference. And it did. And I did. The same thing that you mentioned in that story is like, okay, what is their greatest need? How can I be a, how can I solve an intuitive need that they have that maybe they don't even know they have? Kind of scenario. I love, love it.

Well, that's such a, I love how you did that too because again, you think times are tight and you've got advertising space and of course you want to advertise yourself. And who would think to like pull your own logos off and put your customers logos on there? I mean, just brilliant. Those are the types of everyday innovations that I just love celebrating and we see them all the time. You know, we were talking earlier that you're, you're in Raleigh, North Carolina, Fascinating story there. Real quick, there's a guy named Chad Price. And Chad Price had an opportunity to take over a DMV in Holly Springs, North Carolina, right by DMV at Detroit Department of Motor Vehicles.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

All right, so when you, when you look at the dmv like that's, that ranks at the top of the hall of shame. It's the worst possible experience. Everyone hates going there. It's worse than your cable company, it's worse than your budget airlines. It's like a soul sucking experience. So Chad has the chance, I guess, that North Carolina was privatizing the DMVs. And Chad said, maybe I kind of can do this, but maybe I can do it like in a non traditional creative way. And so what they told him is, look, don't waste your money. Like there's a fixed set of customers that all live in that geography. You can't Mess with pricing, you're reimbursed by the state per transaction. So any ounce of creativity you add is just going to be wasting your limited profits. But Chad took a different approach, an abundance approach and this judo flip approach, and he got creative. So here's what happens if you go to Holly Springs. So the dmv, you open up the door, you're like, wait, I must be in the wrong place. Instead of bulletproof glass, there's like fresh cut flowers, and they hand you a cupcake and they ask you, would you like a fresh smoothie or a cold pressed juice? And there's like, comfortable seats and there's a play area for the kiddos. And you check in on an iPad and they text you so you can, like, go to the Starbucks and come back when it's your place in line. They're smiling. Workers like the entire, it's colorful and beautiful. You're like, what's going on? Am I on, like a prank or something? And here's what happened. They said again, his friends thought it was nuts, but he said, I believe I can do something different. And so today, here's what happens. People drive for miles to get to his DMV. He told me stories that people have driven 100 miles to go to his DMV because they said, the experience is so much better and I'm going to spend about the same duration all in, and I'd rather go to you. So what happened? He challenged the notion that his market size was fixed and he thought it was more expansive. And as a result, he's now doing double the throughput of any other DMV in the state of North Carolina. All because he took a creative, non traditional, everyday innovator approach.

Well, you can tell Chad that I'll be seeing him soon. Our office is located. Our live event center is about 30 minutes from Holly Springs. So he just got a new customer just with a simple story.

That's awesome. That's amazing. Love that.

I love it. Well, look, you know, as we kind of close out the show, if there was one thing that you had to add, one thing that you just felt like everybody needs to hear. Until we can get this book in our hands and get it, you know, get it in our brains and start reading it, what would it be?

I would say to take the pressure off yourself to become Beethoven overnight again. I really think that if we all gave ourselves just a 5% creativity upgrade and that just feels like it's within our grasp, we can all imagine that it really will lead to Great things. And in the competitive world that we're in, in the challenging times that we're in, again, we're all trying to get an edge to drive the outcomes forward that we want. And I really think that you. The dormant creative capacity is a great place to look, and I hope that we can provide some techniques to help you get there. But really think about this. No matter what your business card title may say, let's all add an unwritten title, that of artists or creator or innovator. And if we do that, if we realize that that's like part of the job, not just doing the mechanics of the job, but adding a little creativity to it. I mean, not only is the world a better place, not only is your career better, not only the results better, it actually feels better. It's intrinsically rewarding. It's just better for humanity, better for everybody. And I really hope that everyday people continue to be everyday innovators.

I'm sure they will, especially with your help. You're a great mentor and you definitely spur a lot of thought. And I'm looking forward to getting this book in my hands and tearing it apart with a highlighter. I know it's going to be awesome. I do have a bonus question. I just thought of it. So I'm innovating in the fly, so hope I can steal your couple minutes.

Sure, sure.

What do you think, the top three questions? If somebody has a notepad and a pen, what are three questions that you think that they could ask themselves to kick them into high gear, kickstart them?

Okay, so let's say you're tackling a particular challenge or opportunity. One question would be, what would. What would I do if I knew I couldn't fail?

Yeah.

So if you knew that every attempt that you would make, what would that look like? That's kind of a cool question. Another question might be, if. So one of my techniques is inventing your enemy. So instead of. Because if you think about how could I do it? Then you're like, who am I? It's my risk and who I'm going to come up with, the capital, all this stuff. So imagine this, whatever your business is. Imagine Warren Buffett and Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg each put a billion dollars in the pot and they opened up a shop just down the block from you, and they just wanted to. Their whole goal in life was to take you down. So now imagine they had unlimited money, unlimited resources, no flag of the past to salute. Now imagine you work over there. How do you think they would do it. What would they do to win a customer? What might their offering look like? How's their sales process? How do you think they recruit? And so when you put yourself in the shoes of an ideal enemy, it actually can really be transformational the way you look at it, because all the executional challenges and stuff just totally melts away. And the other last thing I would just say is we always talk about starting with the end in mind, but how does this lead to your broader objective? Something in the moment might be feel good, but that's not how we want to be remembered necessarily. So I think that the more crisp we can get on the longer term desired outcomes, hopefully it's making a positive change in the world or whatever that might be for someone. Then just ask yourself, how can I best proceed in service of the big thing as opposed to getting distracted by the small ones?

Dude, amazing. Amazing. I have loved this conversation. I've got a lot of notes. This is going to be fun. I can't wait for the book to come out. Which is April 20th, correct? That's our slated date, right?

It is April 20th. And you mentioned so many times. I really appreciate that. For me, it's not even about the economics. I'm not trying to sell books. I just want, I know this is valuable when it's in people's hands, but if anyone's listening and it's before that date, check out Big Little Breakthroughs dot com. There's a huge. It's all free, by the way, but tons of resources. There's like this whole toolkit. There's a free assessment that you can take to just sort of see how you're fit now and where your soft spots might be. So, you know, check out Big Little Breakthroughs dot com. There's a full book summary. You can download a chapter right now. There's a bunch of goodies available at this moment at Big Little Breakthroughs dot com.

Dude, I love it. Josh, thank you so much for spending some time with me. I know you're a very busy dude and I just, I can't tell you how much I appreciate you stopping by and sharing a little bit of wisdom with us. And yeah, everybody go check it out. Not just a book. He just offered a bunch of freebies. Go check out. Go check it out. Get it for yourself. Start Kickstart your innovation, your creativity, guys. You'll go a long way.

Hey, right back at you. Thank you for the privilege of being with you today and your guests. I just wish you all the continued success and thanks for making a real positive impact on the world.

My pleasure, my friend. All right, buddy. You take care. See you. I hope you love that interview as much as I did. Guys, if you want more information how to level up, check out this video right here. Seriously, check it out. This is a big lesson for entrepreneurs. Listen, if your business fails, you just got to move and start again. Yeah. You can't cry about it. Even though I was mortified that it had happened, you got to rebuild.