Write It or Regret It "Shtick to Business" Mini-series - Dr. Peter McGraw

Episode 406, Dr. Peter McGraw

Dr. Peter McGraw

Dr. Peter McGraw is a behavioral economist and global expert in the scientific study of humor. He directs The Humor Research Lab (HuRL), hosts the podcast I’M NOT JOKING, and is the co-author of The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny. Peter’s work has been covered by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, NPR, and CNN. He’s a sought-after speaker and professor who teaches MBA courses at the University of Colorado Boulder, University of California San Diego, and London Business School. A TV show based on his life is currently in development.

Below is a system-generated script of the interview:

Jess: This is part four of our Shtick to Business miniseries with dr. Peter McGraw, the author of the book, stick to business, which you can get on audible and Amazon, or go to his website, Peter mcgraw.org. maybe is the final one here. Let's talk about this principle of write it or regret it and, and just lessons from comedians and how you see that applying in the business world and, and your thoughts on this.

[00:00:24] Dr. Peter: Yeah, it'd be great. I actually want to turn this around and ask you a question. Okay. So you had said in a previous session that you've listened to 700 plus business books. So first of all, when I hear that I go, I shouldn't have written a business book. You know what I mean? Like, so talk about a saturated market.

[00:00:45] Now I worked very hard to create a book that was, but felt different. Do you know, I've read different and differently. And so on. You know, I leaned into the entertainment value in salon. I'm curious of your, what percentage of those 700 books had any substantial part of the writing dedicated to writing, to, to creating and developing a writing practice as a business professional?

[00:01:12] Jess: Well, So something you talked about on the first one, this idea of standing out and what advantage it can be, you know, I'm in business because you wrote that paper and then people started calling you, right? Like I started my, I got my first sales job when I was 15. I feel like for 25 years I've been a sales guy, even when I was CEO of a private equity fund, I'm just top sales guy.

[00:01:33] Right. And about a decade and some ago I realized like, man, if I was better at marketing, I wouldn't have to sell so much, you know? And so actually a significant portion of those books are about marketing content, marketing, things like this. And it's just become obvious to me. How, what an unfair advantage a great book is.

[00:01:55] And people get speaking gigs. So now they get access to huge audiences. Instead of one on one sales meetings, it's like a chance to pitch a few hundred or a few thousand people, right? I've landed some major clients for us in the past, you know, multibillion dollar clients. I got an $8 billion client because of a speaking gig.

[00:02:13] Right. So having a great book is a great way to get a great speaking gig. You know, it's a, I like books and I look up to so many authors that I want to be one, right. I have to be as cool as you one day and,

[00:02:26] Dr. Peter: careful what you wish for,

[00:02:28] Jess: but the, but the point is, I have intentionally. Looked for a number of books about writing.

[00:02:34] You know, I love Ryan holiday's book, perennial seller, or bird by bird or Stephen King's book or the war of art by Steven Pressfield or so I've intentionally pursued those ones. but there are so many other books where, you know, you look at somebody like Ben Horowitz, right? Guy founds, the Netscape billionaire Andreessen Horwitz is this big deal.

[00:02:54] And yet he has gotten a lot more coverage because he wrote such a great book. I mean, that, I feel like that. How do the hard thing about hard things gave me a little bit of PTSD because I just remembered how all my business failures and made them feel extra real. Okay.

[00:03:10] Jess: But I've heard that book referenced over and over and the guy is insanely impressive without the book.

[00:03:16] You know, Peter seal zero

[00:03:19] Dr. Peter: books I've ever ead

[00:03:19] Jess: you know, Peter seals, zero to one, right about, Hey, stand out. You know, you want a high probability business invent a monopoly, like forget about competition, invent a monopoly. If you want to make some money. Right. Don't be the best at doing something.

[00:03:34] One be the only one doing it. You know, PayPal Palentier is probably going to go public for billion plus this year, you know, like the guy is a highly impressive dude and yet he gets a lot of airtime for zero to one. So it is interesting to me. How few of them talk about their books? And I don't know if that's where you're going with it, but, so other than the books I intentionally looked for about writing or content marketing, and one of my favorites of all time is Joe Palooza.

[00:04:01] book killing marketing, the guy that invented the content marketing Institute. Right. Okay. So those ones will mention it a little bit. So there's the books on writing the content marketing books that will cover, Oh, you should write a book too. I mean, they're a little light on it, but the rest, I really don't.

[00:04:17] You know, I really don't hear that much.

[00:04:20] Dr. Peter: Yeah. And I, I felt the same way. And that's why I, dedicated entire chapter to writing in this book. Now, now the obvious connection to comics. So stick to business is this idea of. Don't be funny. Think funny that we can learn from the practices and perspectives of these incredibly creative people and that we can, we can translate them into places that, that don't have to do with laughs, but with the exception of improvisers or improvising, the comics most important, you know, kind of daily task has to do with a notebook and a pen.

[00:05:02] Okay. You know, or, or nowadays sometimes a phone, although I think a pen and notepad is much, much more important. That is that, that good writing underlies good comedy. It's the cheat code to success within, within comedy. I believe that writing underlies really outstanding business ideas and business communications, and the reason is.

[00:05:29] Creating a, a daily writing practice. Well, first of all, let's step back for a second. And, and I'll talk about the three ways that I think writing is important and comics, comics do all, all three of these. And, and I think we should do all three of them. The first one is record keeping that is that, that, that writing things down, help, they put it into a permanent place that you can be revisited.

[00:05:54] So thoughts are a femoral. But, but written word stands the test of time. And so a prac getting into a habit of journaling, writing down your ideas is incredibly useful. in part, because now you don't have to remember them. So when you write them down, now, you don't have to actually remember the irony is writing them down.

[00:06:15] Helps you remember them more. That's what the research suggests, which I think is fascinating. The other ones, now you can revisit it. And so I started journaling rather recently in part, because I was writing this book now, I wish I had started journaling when I was 15 years old, because wouldn't it be great to revisit what 15 year old Peter was like, as disturbing as that may be.

[00:06:36] And the other thing is when I look back at my journal from last year, I start to notice these themes, you know, like I've wrote about this idea six different times. I don't even remember writing about it six different times, but I did. That's something that's important. The second one is that writing helps us clarify ideas.

[00:06:57] There's a precision to writing that is important in terms of slowing eye, our thinking down and to getting the ideas. Correct. So it's, I think it's easy to be loose in our thinking when we're talking, but it's very difficult to be loose in our thinking when we're writing. Because also the person reading is thinking more slowly also that's there.

[00:07:23] And so I always talk about whenever someone comes to me, one of my students comes to me with a business idea. I always say, if you have a one pager, if you written one pager and they're like, what's a one pager and I'm like, ah, you got some work to do, you know, because I regularly write one pagers. I wrote a one pager for my first book with my coauthor, took a six weeks to write a one pager.

[00:07:47] It took us two weeks to write the book proposal because the one pager created the tone, the language, the, everything, you know what I mean? It was there. If you read the one pager for the humor code, I have a, I have a workbook that you can get@petermcgraw.org, where I have the one pager. For the humor code and the one pager for stick to business.

[00:08:08] If you read the one pager and then you read the book, you're just like, you would think the one pager was written after the book. You know, that's how valuable that that is. And so it clarifies your idea. I write one pagers all the time and then I throw them in the trash. I'm like, I'll never do that idea because once it's down on paper, I look at it.

[00:08:27] I go, eh, you know, and then the last one is the one that people think about when they think about right. And that's communication, right? So, so record keeping and clarification is for yourself, you know, but, but the third one is, is communication is when you write it for other people. And I think that, being able to put your ideas into words, you know, it has scalability, right?

[00:08:54] It can reach to the other side of the world. but then also, now it's working as a persuasive tool. When I give you my one pager. Or I give it to a lit agent or someone now it works as a tool to, to see is this the right fit for you or not? And, and so, I just think, I mean, it's incredibly difficult to do so in the books that you described, all the writing books, one of the themes in all the writing books is how hard it is to write.

[00:09:23] You know, what's the saying is, Oh, you want to write? You want to write, okay. Sit in front of a typewriter and open a vein. You know, like there's all these like, really pain related metaphors associated with writing. But again, if you work on it as a practice, it can start to become, it's never pleasurable, I would say, but it can become engaging and it can make your life more, more rich, you know, kind of emotionally,

[00:09:52] Jess: you know, the, the notes app on the iPhone has been a real benefit to me.

[00:09:57] Because that back to that Richard Kosch guy, the 80 20 principle, author, he talks about, you know, so I like him anyways, because he's a Boston consulting group guy who goes to Bain consulting. When that first starts to successful, then he starts, his own and sells it for some large amount of money.

[00:10:18] And his stake is like, 16 million bucks through this like 80, 20 principle type of investing. He turns that into like $300 million, right?

[00:10:28] Dr. Peter: Yeah. Wow.

[00:10:29] Jess: Working an hour a day to do it. And he, he makes this point that so often people are working too hard to have the space to think really hard. and yet in reality, well, execution is extremely important.

[00:10:46] There's far too many people are executing a plan that is not a superior plan. And, and that really, if you have a good enough plan, you can actually have other people execute it. You can hire them, you can motivate you, you can build in incentives for the other people to do the hard work.

[00:11:01] Dr. Peter: Right. Yes.

[00:11:02] Jess: And, and so this idea of like the dog walk, right.

[00:11:05] Get out and listen to my audio books and have my notes app on my phone with me. So I can just stop and do the talk to text thing into the note tab, right. Has been super helpful. Cause then, then I go home and I call my business partners and I'm like, You know, Monday mornings are kind of a joke because my one partner, he knows he's going to get firehosed by Jess from all the stuff I've been reading over the weekend and taking my notes.

[00:11:30] And he just like has to sit there and listen to like two and a half days worth of thoughts that have built up. Right. but, I guess that's interesting to me because I have told myself so often that's such a good point. We totally have to do that. And then later I'm like, what was that thing? I was trying to remember.

[00:11:47] And I almost have like a slight desperation now of like, I like turn off my audio books. Sometimes I'll even pull over a car and I'm like, okay, get this physically down before I lose it. Like, you know, like the default mode network and the connections getting together, we talked about from the book autopilot.

[00:12:02] Right. And it's like, there's been so many times that like I knew. This is, this is what I've been waiting for. This is why I listened to those last four books. This is why I turned off books and sat and drew drove in silence. This is why they went to that conference. I've been trying to come up with this right here. I can't forget that. And then I do forget it. It's like, you know,

[00:12:22] Dr. Peter: Jess, I think if I may, I'm going to put on my professor hat and give you some homework. Okay. So I, so I had mentioned in the previous one, I have this new, this new project. That's not humor related. So it's, so it's a podcast about, living remarkably as a single person, to be honest.

[00:12:46] Many of the things that I talk about in that podcast are relevant to singles or non signals. It's about living a remarkable life.

[00:12:55] One of the, one of the sort of founding ideas that I keep coming back to is this idea of creating more than you consume to create more than you consume. Now you create a lot of things, you know, you build businesses, you know what I mean?

[00:13:09] Like you have no lack of creation in your life. you also consume a lot, you consume a lot of, of books and by the way, I think that books are the best consumption experience. You know, it's superior to all the other consumption experiences with the exception of maybe going to a museum, you know? but I think you're ready to start writing.

[00:13:35] I think you've read enough books.

[00:13:36] Jess: So I'm 80% done. One book. And I'm about 10% done the book I'm going to finish instead of finishing that one. Oh, fascinating. Okay. And, it's Austin Kleon. My, my favorite creativity book of all time is Austin Cleveland's book steal like an artist.

[00:13:51] Dr. Peter: Oh yes. I love that.

[00:13:52] Jess: And the reason I'm switching books right now is this exact thing is he says, write the book that you want to read.

[00:14:00] And the book I'm 80% done is this a thing we developed in our other company, our consulting firm of all these, you know, CEOs I've been doing strategy work for the last decade. And it's like, it's the how-to manual of what we do. Right. And I just realized it wasn't a big enough, it wasn't as big a priority for me as like, you know, I would love to, Become a billionaire, so I can join the giving pledge and give, you know, somewhere between 50 to a hundred percent of my money to our charity child rescue to combat child trafficking. Right.

[00:14:34] Well, step one, in that to be allowed to sign the giving pledge, step one is a pretty big hurdle. Right.

[00:14:40]Jess: and so I thought, what if I, what if I tried to write, this is my, I mean, this could change, but my thought right now is what if I wrote the book kind of like you talked about your first book was an exploration.

[00:14:52] Dr. Peter: Yes.

[00:14:52] Jess: What if I wrote my next, what if I wrote my book as an exploration of not the, how to manual for other people, the how to manual for Jess of giving my talents, give my experiences, give my connections, given my what I'm good at what I'm not good at. What do I think is a reasonable like remix of the 700 bucks, the 400 episodes interviews, you know, episodes of this show, the, all this different things.

[00:15:17] What do I think my, how to manual should be. Yes for how to get there. So I think that's what it's going to be. I, my, my, a work in progress working title is, I'm calling it more with less. Okay. And, anyways,

[00:15:32] Dr. Peter: I think that's great. I think that's great. That also fits a thing we were talking about before is an audience of one, right?

[00:15:38] You write, you're writing a book. And the thing about it is when you start writing a book for others, You know, first of all, you don't know others as well as you know yourself. You know, I have, the reason I wrote stick to business was, for professional speaking reasons that I wanted to try to, to try to find a, a way to monetize some of my, my expertise and also to be able to relate to a group of people that I like to talk to.

[00:16:05] Obviously that's on hold right now because the world of speaking is, is on hold and who knows? That's uncertain. What, whether that half of the reason I bought, I wrote the book was exists. I'll tell you this, the other half, which was beautiful because I accomplished that the day that the book was published was that I knew that I'd be pissed off.

[00:16:24] If someone else wrote this book before I did, you know, I felt compelled to share these lessons. And so it was, I don't want to say it was easy to write the book because it wasn't, but boy, it was fun. You know, it was really, really fun. And, and again, you know, you and I are living in a space for different reasons where you don't have to write it to succeed financially.

[00:16:52] You know, you get to write it because it makes your life better because you can hopefully make other people's lives better. As a result of it, you know, so few people in the world ever get to make it to that space. And so I think it's exciting that you're willing to set aside a book that's near completion in order to spin up a new one that you, that you, that you personally are going to find more useful.

[00:17:20] And then who knows whether the world will find it more useful, but I will tell you this, it's going to be one of a kind.

[00:17:27] Jess: Well, yeah, I look at it, you know, hopefully these entrepreneurs we're trying to get for our fund. You know what I mean? We'll be, we'll be people that are wired like me. Hence the reason they're attracted to the way we're doing the fund, you know, and that there's at least some nuggets from it they can steal for, for themselves.

[00:17:45] And like, I mean, ideally it would be helpful enough that it makes them. That using that book can help them make enough extra money. They can afford to buy more passive income from me.

[00:17:55] Dr. Peter: Right.

[00:17:56] Jess: But, anyways, it's, it's a theory, but I figure if nobody else likes it well. So I used to be a, client of Bloomberg.

[00:18:05] And, I remember being at this big conference and asking a guy what's the best way to learn a new industry. We were looking at, building wind farms and solar farms, and he said, write a blog about it. Yeah. He's like the act of writing about it will force you to learn it well enough. So you don't look dumb and you know, everything Warren buffet says about writing his annual shareholder letter, how it forces him to clarify everything you just said, you know, you know, one other thing before I know we're kind of wrapping up here, but one, one thing that I kind of wanted to compliment you on is I have been super interested.

[00:18:34] There's a Harvard professor, her name's, I can't pronounce her last name correctly, but it's, I think it's Anita Elberse say,

[00:18:40] Dr. Peter: Oh yes. I know her,

[00:18:41]Jess: She wrote the book blockbusters.

[00:18:44] Dr. Peter: Yes, great book. Yeah.

[00:18:45] Jess: And, I thought her reasoning was, was fascinating. She said, you know, all my colleagues write these books about basically boring stuff.

[00:18:52] They were like, there they go, inch wide and a mile deep on something. That's not that interesting to a lot of folks. She's like, why not do something fun? You know, she's writing about like, why do the bet, why do the biggest movies outsell everyone else? And how does that work and whatever. And she gets so much.

[00:19:09] Extra attention for has been, you know, she picked a better system. We talked about like people who over execute with under thinking, you know, she picked a system researching, you know, how hits are made. That naturally gets tons of attention from the media. It gets her tons of press. Everybody's heard about it.

[00:19:25] She gets all sorts of, she gets all sorts of free benefit by having a hell of a different selection process upfront. You know, and for me, I think this is a compliment to your thinking that you chose this. Like, I like books, like, do you talk funny or other books about humor that makes me think, how can I bring it to a business application?

[00:19:44] So when Shane recommended this one, it was an easy, yes. Like, you know, guy had on the show, Daniel Harmon, he, they just finished their book poop to gold about making these funny YouTube videos. same thing, Jay Davis, from creatively we've had on the show. Does they make these funny YouTube videos, like a half million dollar.

[00:20:00] Video, that's an advertisement, but it's so funny that people don't click off it to watch the YouTube video they're trying to watch and they'll hit like jail, make a half million dollar video. And these consumer brand will sell an extra three, $4 million a month off of these things. Right. Because he's inter, he's paying people with entertainment, they're willing to endure his sales pitch, you know?

[00:20:22] And like, so anyways, I thought it was. I thought it was a credit to your thinking to have the guts, to do something not so serious, but which would, like you said, naturally, you talked about having the phone ring off the hook when people are calling you. Right. anyways, it is one thing I think about with, with entrepreneurs of like, you know, like I'm, I'm interested in a lot of different topics and I could have done instead of choosing innovation and leadership, I could have chosen something so narrow that.

[00:20:51]it would have drastically limited my audience that I could have been just as passionate about, you know what I mean? So that was my attempt of like, Hey, pick the people that pick the people, the media already wants to cover billionaires and pro athletes and bestselling authors and stuff, and kind of get to skip a bunch of work of trying to get attention for what I'm doing, because it's inherently attention getting, you know, anyway.

[00:21:14] Dr. Peter: Yeah, indeed. Thanks so much for saying that. I, You know, I look, you, you have is this cliche to say, but like, I, I wanna, I want to live my life. You know what I mean? I don't want to just chase some version of success that other people say is important. You know? Like I want to just get up every day without an alarm, excited to do the, the work that I'm going to do.

[00:21:39] And so to me, it was a worthy gamble. You know, and, and it has paid off with a tremendous amount of personal and professional growth. And I am, I'm just having fun. And, you know, it's, sometimes it's hard to have fun in life, you know, as you get older. And so, you know, who knows what this is going to turn into.

[00:22:00] You know, and so I'm, I'm just open to it. as you know, there's that, that kind of improv saying about yes. And, and so I'm just living a very yes and life at the moment.

[00:22:09] Jess: Well, I feel like you're, you're stacking the deck in your favor by taking enough time to think about, think this deeply about what you're doing and intentionally doing it that way, you know, choosing something that already has attention, instead of trying to push a Boulder up a Hill for getting attention, you know, like you look at the craft, the fact that.

[00:22:27] You know, how long ago was that Ted talk? You know, you, you've stuck with one thing to build a circle of competence around it. You know, like you look at how many principles that would apply regardless, you know, it's, it's working for you as an academic. It would definitely work for people as, as an entrepreneur as well, which, you know, I know you probably classify yourself as an entrepreneur, but as an author, as a speaker, like you are an entrepreneur at it, and it's obviously working, look, we're, we're doing this show together.

[00:22:55] You know, we, I, like, I turned down 95% of people trying to get on the show. I mean, when we made it to, you know, given you given the day where either the number one or the number two innovation show on all of iTunes, which kind of makes us in the world, right. cause it's number one source. So as a result, we just get flooded.

[00:23:14] You know, I mean, like I'll get, I'll get five people a day asking to be on the show. And when you do, you know, when you only really shows twice a week, you can, the math doesn't work there. Right. But what you've done, you've paid the price. You've thought hard about what you've done. And even though we're not, this is not the Tim Ferriss show or Joe Rogan or something big like that.

[00:23:33] You know what I mean? Hopefully somebody listening today, read your book and calls you, and it's a benefit for you.

[00:23:39] Dr. Peter: So. That'd be great. Well, Jess, I was on Joe Rogan and I had a better experience with you. So, he could take that

[00:23:48] Jess: Very kind of you to say. And I appreciate the encouragement on the book thing, because I am a yapper, not a writer.

[00:23:56] And I, I probably have some intimidation about being told you, just write, like you talk, Jess, you know, that's maybe not your gift. And I'm like, I that's, that's made me a little gun shy and then, I've just thought about it as like, you know what that's okay. Cause we can hire editors. Why don't I talk?

[00:24:16] Well, why don't we talk? And then when we do hire, why don't we hire a professional to make me sound good? You know,

[00:24:21] Dr. Peter: I think that's great. You know, I, I got a note when I was working on an early version of Shtick to Business, but a buddy of mine, who's an entrepreneur. He's like, Pete, this doesn't sound like you.

[00:24:32] This sounds like academic speak. He's like, I want to imagine you telling stories at a cocktail party. And so, I always remembered that. So I think this idea of you as a talker, you should lean into that. Hmm.

[00:24:47] Jess: Well, it's a chance to stand out, I guess, right?

[00:24:50] Dr. Peter: Yes. Lean into your, your, make it conversational.

[00:24:55] That's who you are. That's what people know you as.

[00:24:57] Jess: Yeah. I love it.

[00:24:59] Dr. Peter: I think that's great.

[00:25:00] Jess: I appreciate that. Okay, everybody, Petermcgraw.org, go get your copy of Schick to business on audible.com and I'm Peter. Thanks for making so much time for this. I really appreciated it.

[00:25:09] Dr. Peter: Oh, it was a great pleasure.

[00:25:12] Thanks so much, Jess. And I look forward to making millions of dollars and then investing in your new fund.

[00:25:19] Jess: Great. Okay. Bye everyone.