Building Cognitive Diversity, Multidiciplinary Range & Brain Trusts for Problem-solving: Smartcuts Mini-series with Shane Snow Part 7 Interview by Jess Larsen

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I’m extra excited about this one.

So a lot of you know that I have listened to Shane Snow’s audiobook Smartcuts many times and how much I was looking forward to having him on the show for the first time back in April. Well the only thing better was when he agreed to come back and do entire deep dive miniseries into the stories of those who have built these skills of avoiding unnecessary work and, instead of slowly climbing the “supposed to” ladder, building their own ladders to success faster, as well as how-tos of for how the rest of us can do the same thing.

A new episode of the miniseries will be out each Friday for the next 6 weeks.

If you missed the first time he was on the show you can listen to it here.

Thanks for Listening

Jess

P.S. If you like the episode please shoot me an email and let me know what you liked about it: Jess.Larsen@GraystokeMedia.com

Bio:

Shane Snow is an award-winning journalist, explorer, and entrepreneur, and the author. He speaks globally about innovation and teamwork, has performed comedy on Broadway, and been in the running for the Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism.

Snow has helped expose gun traffickers, explored abandoned buildings around the world, eaten only ice cream for weeks in the name of science, and taught hundreds of thousands of people to work better through his books, including the business bestseller Smartcuts.

Snow's writing has appeared in GQ, Fast Company, Wired, The New Yorker, and more. He is also a board member of the media technology company Contently, and the journalism nonprofit The Hatch Institute. Make sure to check out ShaneSnow.com. Follow him on LinkedIn.

Here is the auto-generated transcription of the interview:

Jess: Welcome to Innovation and Leadership, I'm Jess Larsen. This is part seven of our Smartcuts mini series with Shane Snow, author of the book Smartcuts, founder of Contently, all around genius. Shane, glad to have you back.

[00:00:15] Shane: I don't know if all around genius is the title that I've ever you know, had bestowed on me, but I will put that on my business cards now.

[00:00:23]

[00:00:25]Jess: Yeah. You heard it here first folks. It's my show. I can make up titles. I'm perfectly comfortable giving you all our own genius. Part seven, what do we, what are we going to cover this time?

[00:00:35] Shane: You know, actually around genius is kind of the topic of this. it's basically what I want to talk about is, the idea that if you can, all of the stuff we've discussed so far right about the scientific method did and about lateral thinking, all of that gets easier.

[00:00:56] And I think more interesting and more powerful. If you have a lot of cognitive diversity to draw from, or, you know, people use different terms for this, multidisciplinarity or range or being a polymath. These are all kind of synonyms, or this idea of having a lot of mental material to draw from.

[00:01:19] Some of it kind of implies a lot of expertise. Like the polymath they're seen as people with expertise in different areas, but the more you have to draw from, the more you can do this stuff. And so I guess all around genius, you know, to me, if you want to be good at lateral thinking, and you want to be a creative genius, you could say, then you want to work on the, all around part, if you want to get a lot of leverage, to do that.

[00:01:44] So that's what I think, we should dig into today.

[00:01:48] Jess: So thinking about this idea of like, digging a wide cognitive reservoir. What, why do you choose that analogy? And what's the emphasis on wide here?

[00:02:01] Shane: Yeah. So a reservoir is a manmade lake and I liked that as sort of the analogy on purpose because it's sort of a simple, intuitive analogy to say that a whatever's in your pool

[00:02:19] is what you have to draw from. So whatever's in your brain is what you have to work with. And you could call that a lake or a pool. I like the term reservoir because you can dig a reservoir. And so this kind of gets at this idea that if you can, I can dig more, room for you to put things in your brain.

[00:02:38] Then you can explore more. You can make more connections. And, you know, the reservoir thing was on my mind. As I was thinking about this episode, because the other day, my wife and I were in central park and there's a, a reservoir called the Eleanor Roosevelt reservoir, like the Memorial reservoir.

[00:02:55] And I, I asked the question, how many people have reservoirs named after them? And I think it's actually like a really small number, cause there's not that many. Reservoirs, certainly not named after people anyway. So it's, it's my new goal of mine is to achieve enough in my life that someone names a reservoir after me, like statues are everywhere.

[00:03:15] Reservoirs are rare. Anyway, that's a total aside, but I think it actually is just as rare, for people to, once they get to a point in life where they're good enough to accomplish what they need to do. No, you're good enough to do your job at work. You're good enough to hold things down as an adult. And so you stop expanding your cognitive reservoir, you stop digging new places.

[00:03:39] And, you know, it's kinda like once you can do the math to a, to figure out what's a good deal at Starbucks, it kinda stopped learning, man. Yeah. And, and yet, you know, there's certain fields of mathematics that can be really useful. So things outside of math, like if you were to study statistics and probabilities, you know, as an adult, when you don't need to, that could actually help you in other areas of your life.

[00:04:08] Understanding statistics and probabilities. You know, a friend of mine just came out with a book this week, actually about, poker. And, and her quest to, to understand the psychology of poker, as a psychology writer and in it, she talks a lot about how learning to understand how probabilities work in poker has helped her in other areas of life.

[00:04:29] So what this gets at basically is that once you're comfortable, it's a, it's easy to live your life without, digging further, but the more you dig, the more possibilities you give yourself. And I like the analogy of a wide reservoir. Because when we're talking about lateral thinking, a lot of what we're doing is making connections between things that haven't been connected before.

[00:04:51] We're drawing from one place and applying it to another place. And, And that is fundamental an act of going wide. It's an act of range rather than depth. There's a lot of value to specialization then too. Yeah. Going really deep in a topic. What you see historically is the people who make the biggest breakthroughs in a deep topic, go deep in that topic, but then explore it or other things, or they have other interests and pursuits.

[00:05:19] I've talked about Einstein a lot in this series, you know, I find played the violin. And he was forced to, by nature of his job as a patent clerk, explore lots of different fields, while going very deep into physics. So, you know, dig your deep well on the thing that you're working on, but then dig a wide reservoir so that you can play with things and, apply those to all the lateral thinking stuff that we're talking about.

[00:05:43]in order to, to make that breakthrough. So that's, that's the principle I think, is that you don't make breakthroughs by digging just the, well, you make breakthroughs by digging the reservoir and applying know this is where the analogy breaks down because cause analyses aren't perfect. But applying what you're learning in that wide reservoir to the deep well,

[00:06:03]Jess: that makes sense.

[00:06:04] And, Well, talk about this idea, kind of the old school ancient idea of the universal man, where does that fit in here for you?

[00:06:13] Shane: Yeah, so the, the story goes that universities come out of this idea from the Renaissance and, and kind of also from the golden era of Islam, of the universities came out of this idea that a universal man.

[00:06:28] Was a superior man. And of course back then it was only men, that, you know, that they were caring about when they were talking about this. But a universal man is someone who is knowledgeable and an expert in the sciences and the arts and politics. And, and other areas, you know, at one point it was economics and, you know, merchants, affairs.

[00:06:50] But the idea is that you're the best kind of man was the universal man. Who's an expert in all of those. And by being an expert in all of those, you were prepared to contribute to society. You could invent things. It was this sort of Leonardo DaVinci, ideal, you know, the artist and the scientist. Who's good at both now can help all of us get better.

[00:07:11] So, the story goes that universities are named that way because of that, in Latin homo universe,  I don't know how to pronounce things in Latin. but the universal man was the ideal. So you go to a university to learn broadly and to become an expert in a broad set of areas. Now, the way that universities have evolved is, You know, we, we specialize you, you go to the university for your major.

[00:07:38]but you do have these core classes, you know, in the beginning that are supposed to, they give you that thing only now, you know, the common university experiences, that's really why down you take a humanities class and a accounting class and a biology class. So you really, you don't become an expert in those things, but that education does actually, they have a lot more, application too.

[00:08:00] You know, the deep, well that you end up digging than people give credit to. the problem I think with the universities now is it's so surface level that you're not digging a reservoir with these other topics you're digging, you know, like a three inch, you know, kind of like pool in your backyard.

[00:08:16] And it's not that useful, but this idea of the university. and I think, you know, today it's the universal pick your gender, I think is really interesting. And you see this pattern, like I said, over and over and over again, it's actually, when you explore some of the work, from, people who are, who researched this.

[00:08:34] So like Jeffrey Epstein who wrote the book range, which I actually, I was, was rereading a little bit today. I have it in front of me. he talks about the different ways that, that generalists, kind of turn into superior problem solvers and, and there's different paths that people take. But, But people who study this idea, they show that it's a much more likely for someone who has two weeks areas of expertise, too, to make better decisions, to not have catastrophic things happen to them in their field and to make breakthroughs in their field.

[00:09:08] Then someone who has twice the expertise in one field. And there's, I think there's diminishing returns at a certain point. If you have a, like a tiny bit of expertise and a million fields and no deep expertise in any one field, then you're probably not going to be a good contributor. but it's, having a couple areas of deep expertise ends up being really interesting.

[00:09:28] And, and so I think this gives you an excuse to, to ignore the advice to sustain your lane. It gives you the excuse to try to develop a couple of things while also exploring a lot of things, which I think is a theme that we've, we've talked about quite a bit through this series,

[00:09:45] Jess: you know, I love any excuse to indulgence my add this is great.

[00:09:49] That's great for me. Yeah, it does make me think. I remember being in New York for a 99 year conference of Adobes and I got to go take a course at the New York office of IDEO. And that was the first time I was hearing about this idea of. T-shaped V-shaped U shaped individuals. This idea of, they want somebody who's got exposure to a lot of things and a specialist in at least one thing that they called that T-shaped right.

[00:10:13] And then once they could start getting deeper knowledge and a few things, you know, you have the deepest one in the middle and then the last deep ones going out, they called that a V-shaped. Expert where they have expertise in know varying depths. And that their ideal was somebody who is U shaped, who is actually deep in, in a number of things.

[00:10:31]and that they felt like that brought the most creativity and the most innovation, as they're, you know, solving these major problems for Apple and giant medical companies and all their clients.

[00:10:41] Shane: I like that. I like that because it also places an emphasis on the value of, of going wide of the wide reservoir.

[00:10:49] Where I, I think the cliche for a lot of, people is, you know, the value specialization, you know, and, and, and I, I like, you know, I also like thinking about what's the w shape, you know, is there a w shape. you know, is it, is there like a crazy, you know, cookie monster mouth shape is actually, you know, kind of the ideal, cause I mean, for me it's liberating, because it's, allows you to be curious and not feel like you're wasting your time.

[00:11:18]which I think is important to encourage curiosity. Yeah. But, yeah, there's, there's something really interesting about that and you know, it's no accident that IDEO. Is known for, you know, invention, right. And that's in many ways what we're talking about here with, you know, lateral thinking is a problem solving in an inventive way, you know, doing something new and different, that's better.

[00:11:46]rather than just improving on the current status quo.

[00:11:51] Jess: So I'm interested in. I can make a guess here, but I'm interested in how you think this applies to pattern recognition when you've, when you've, you know, you go wide, you've got a wide cognitive reservoir, you've got some range. You've, you know, you've chased some curiosity in multiple areas.

[00:12:09] How does that help with it? Intuition the non-conscious pattern recognition. How does that

[00:12:14] Shane: show up? Yeah. So, I'm glad, I'm glad you said it that way. because. A lot of, and we talked about this a little bit before, you know, a lot of people place a premium on what your gut tells you, you know, on intuition.

[00:12:29] And sometimes that I think is a, is you know, bad advice and it's misapplied. But, you know, we, we experienced the real feeling in our lives of intuition that ends up working out. Right. And, and it's a, it's also pretty clear that people who have a lot of expertise in things have a lot of it. Intuition in those areas that they have expertise, right?

[00:12:51]Malcolm Gladwell wrote the book, blink all about that. you know, about these people who don't know why they, they are able to do things, but it's just because they, they have intuition and, you know, and he wrote about how, what that is, is it's really pattern recognition that you're not conscious of.

[00:13:06] So I think in, in blink, he talks about, people who have to. Like on farms called chicken sectors. and they, they have to look at baby chicks and decide, is it a male or a female to sort them? Cause they've got to sort them real young, for whatever, whatever reason to not cause problems and to raise them right.

[00:13:23] And all that. And, and these chicken sectors can look at a newborn baby chick and know whether it's male or female, even before like it's developed to the point that you could actually tell. You know, by looking at its, its parts. And, and they're able to do this because they've seen so many millions of baby chicks that they can, their brain just picks up on the little tiny patterns.

[00:13:46]even before you can see if the, if the baby chick has male parts or female parts anyway. So it's sort of a crazy thing, but you see this all over the place with people who have expertise, that pattern recognition really is, or intuition really is non-conscious pattern recognition. And so the way that this, I think becomes really interesting from a lateral thinking point of view is if you have developed pattern recognition in one field, then you can often see patterns in another field that people in that field don't see.

[00:14:18] And, so that's really where, you know, you can do the conscious exploration of how would I apply my expertise or my vast interest in you know, formula one cars to you know, a hospital situation. You know, there's a real case study that I, you know, I write about in dream teams or not Dream teams in Smartcuts about that, that very thing.

[00:14:43]so you can, you can deliberately try to apply, you know, learnings from one field to another. But you can also have it kind of take place at this as this natural intuition you know, kind of what feels like creative inspiration, really what that is pattern recognition. And I think that is fascinating, cause you never know when it's going to strike, but, you know, the history of innovation is it's all about, basically taking.

[00:15:14] So, this is actually where that's a backup on that sentence. You know, we talk about before how I think analogies are dangerous because they, by definition are not a representation of the truth they're not exactly right. So you gotta be careful not to take them too, literally. They're great for persuasion, but, but they're not good for literal representations of other things.

[00:15:37] The other thing about analogies is in the history of innovation, analogies are how people have come up with breakthrough paradigm shifts. You take the patterns from one industry and you apply them to another industry. And it makes you realize that you can look at that industry differently. Now they won't map one-to-one, which is the analogies are a dangerous thing,

[00:15:58]cause all things are not the same, but that's where, you know, the long answer to your question about intuition becomes really interesting is analogies or patterns imported from one place to another are really where inspiration that changes a paradigm, comes from when you break down, what process is afoot?

[00:16:19] Jess: Well, I mean, to me,

[00:16:24] Jess: I hear what you're saying and I'm smiling on this end because I'm thinking about how many times that does make sense where you pursued this and you're having the conversation with business partners or whoever, and you start bringing up an example from a completely unrelated field, could be action,

[00:16:39] sports, could be art, could be whatever. And that analogy well not perfect for the complete version is a great conversation starter you know, to get far, you know, it's like something to sink their teeth into along the way, right. And, yeah, you can kind of speed up that pattern recognition for others to see what you've seen.

[00:16:59]you know, I'm interested, you brought up this guy before, Erik Dane of Rice University, but you didn't, but I don't know how he relates here. So that's my, this is my curiosity. Who's Erik Dane, and what does that have to do with this.

[00:17:14]Shane: so he's, he's the one, he has done some studies about, pattern recognition in particular.

[00:17:21] And he's the one where the direct quote intuition is non-conscious pattern recognition comes from. So he's the one that came out and said that I think it was like 2013 or something like that. But he actually, I was just looking at what he's been up to lately.

[00:17:41] His work is on, you know, on, on cognition and organizational behavior. but he, I want to say that some of the stuff that we talked about elastic thinking actually originates in his research. I'm going to get it wrong unless I spent some more time digging through, but I have a bunch of his research papers in my Evernote folder under Pattern recognition and, cause that's, basically he approaches organizational behavior from a, you know, why do people do what they do and why do they get stuck in what they think?

[00:18:17] So cognitive entrenchment is actually the, the main area that I've drawn from of his. So remember, a few episodes ago when we talked about cognitive and transmit the more of an expertise, you develop the harder it is to see other ways of doing that thing. And, you know, and really this is the downside of pattern recognition is that you notice this is the way things work, and this has succeeded.

[00:18:41] And, and you develop this expertise and this intuition, especially once it becomes like this, really ingrained that your expertise gives you valuable intuition. That's when cognitive entrenchment can and can really sort of kick in of have the intuition. And so you're not going to even be able to see or dream of another way of framing something,

[00:19:06] if that makes sense. So that's what a lot of, Erik Danes, you know, stuff that I've dug into two in particular has revolved around as the, you know, the pattern recognition and the cognitive entrenchment and really that's great irony. That it actually, it's exactly what, you know, what we've been talking about that once you become sufficiently good at whatever it is, then you not only kind of lose the motivation to get better at it,

[00:19:32] Cause you're sufficient at it, who you reinforce the recognition that your way of doing it is good. And then that leads to cognitive entrenchment.

[00:19:42] Jess: Well, I think about, I don't can't remember if we've talked about this, do you know the Kirby Ferguson series? Everything is a Remix.

[00:19:50] Shane: Yes,

[00:19:50] Jess: yes. Yes. I think about that.

[00:19:52] And I think about, this idea of it's like pattern recognition, but then applied in a new field is where these like shockingly awesome things seem to come up from, right. And like, yeah, I was listening to, I just started or I just finished Naveen Jain's book Moonshots the other day. And he's talking about like, at its most basic look at like the Gutenberg printing press, you know, this idea of the wine press and, you know, basically remixing it for literary use.

[00:20:24] Right. And, I know it's a really basic example, but this idea of connecting the dots, I guess, you know, you and I are both fans of Stephen Johnson and book like where good ideas come from, right. And I feel like this is like, so has so much overlap with that.

[00:20:38] Shane: yes.

[00:20:38] Jess: But what about in your own life when you guys were inventing stuff at Contently or other projects you've done, can you think of a time that they showed up for you?

[00:20:48] Shane: Yeah. Let me think of a good story. So it's funny. One of the other books on my desk right now is Steven Johnson's new one. It's about pirates and, The East India company. So it's, it's less of a business actually. There's a lot of business in it, but, that's funny that you bring him up. I think it just came out a week ago.

[00:21:02] It was really good. You know, and actually thinking about what he's done in there. He is, he's connecting dots in this, it's this story about the first global manhunt, this guy who stole a ship and then, and then became this notorious pirate and, and kind of led to England chasing him around the world and led to England taking over India.

[00:21:28]so this sort of crazy story, but he does a really good job of telling this story, and connecting the dots between what could be just like a crime story. And the, the impacts that it had and the things that we're going on, on business and on innovation and kind of the second order effects of, you know, England sending its Navy after this pirate.

[00:21:54]Hmm. So, it's really interesting, but for me, the one that I come back to, is a story of early in my career of kind of the, everything's a remix and stealing like an artist thing. Early in my career, I worked for an ad company, a pay-per-click management company. So early days of Google, it was like 2002.

[00:22:18] And, and I was, my job was to write copy for Google ads and you know, in our industries that our clients were, and even ads for our own services, you know, pay-per-click management, you know, the apps are pretty boring and, and everyone copied each other's ads and they were pretty straight forward and kind of all the same.

[00:22:41] And as soon as anyone did anything, you know, your competitors took note and copied you. And the thing that I ended up doing that was, like had the biggest results for us as a company is I started looking at ads for online dating. And I think maybe it was because like I was dating or something, but, I started ripping off online dating ads and replacing literally like the nouns, the noun online dating with pay-per-click management software, which, you know, it was pretty ridiculous.

[00:23:14] But, but I looked at, and actually a lot of it was, it was specifically looking at patterns. What are they doing in online dating ads that seems to work for them. And can I apply those things to our industry and, you know, the ironic thing that happened is we, those ads that I used based on online dating ads did so well for us that, you know, within three weeks, our competitors were copying those ads of ours.

[00:23:39] They didn't necessarily know that I was copying them from online dating or transposing them. But that's the story that comes to mind. You know the other story, that's specific to me is actually something that I wanted to get to in this conversation, which is something that I transposed or stole from Ben Franklin.

[00:24:01]this idea of studying in a very deliberate way. And I think, I can't remember if I've talked to you about my insane spreadsheeting. They brought this up. My spreadsheet, my spreadsheeting things that aren't spreadsheets. okay. So, well, Ben Franklin did, when he decided he wanted to become a great writer was really interesting.

[00:24:27]he, so, you know, he wasn't a writer, but he had, at some point he decided he wanted to be one. And instead of doing what's, most of us would do, which is take some writing classes, practice writing, you know, do a lot of deliberate practice. What he did was, was the deliberate kind of rip off of great writing.

[00:24:47] So he took the Spectator, which was kind of the New Yorker of the time, in the 1800s or 1700s getting my century right. And he would take great stories from this magazine and he would take notes on them at a sentence level. Like this is what the writer's doing in this sentence, in this paragraph, this is what the writer is doing this sentence of this paragraph and kind of basically take these really detailed notes.

[00:25:13] And then he would put the magazine away and he gives himself some time to sort of clear his mental palette. And then he'd take his notes and try to write the story based on his notes, recreate the story based on his notes. And then he'd compare his version of the story to the magazine version of the story.

[00:25:28] And he would take notes on that. So how does his story differ, where is it inferior? you know, what did the writer do? And this, as a way to this second pass, helped him to notice the details, and find the patterns in those details that he missed in the first pass. So this kind of deconstruction reconstruction, deep analysis, really deep analysis was how he credited his ability to become a good writer so quickly.

[00:25:55] And this has to do with what I write about in spark that's about it studying with masters and stealing from masters. you know, you want to learn a field, you study what the best in that field do, and you learn the patterns there. But this reconstruction method, I think is really interesting and he applied that same kind of thinking to other areas that he wanted to become good at.

[00:26:16]you know, he did all sorts of things, you know, physics and, now, and he was a statesman, all of these things, he didn't just study. He studied in a way that deconstructed the patterns. So when I wanted to write my first book Smartcuts, I did the same thing, two books that I really liked, I deconstructed them.

[00:26:38] And this is where my insane spreadsheets came from. I took, you know, I really liked Stephen Johnson and John Ronson and Malcolm Gladwell and these nonfiction authors that, that kind of explore humans and science and I spreadsheeted out their books. You know, chapter by chapter, sometimes paragraph by paragraph.

[00:26:58] And then, and I used that to play with basically formulas for how it could construct my ideas and frame my ideas for my book. But this was after I had kind of the raw material. But then even a step further in working on my chapters, I did the same thing, but from outside of the industry of nonfiction science and business writing, I'm obsessed with JJ Abrams as a filmmaker and a writer.

[00:27:28]you know, cause I like sci-fi and I like the mystery stuff that he does, but also his plots are so great. And I always think back to how, when I started watching Alias, did you watch Alias? I love Alias. Okay. Yeah. So Alias is great. Yeah, it's, it's super cheesy. And so my wife had never seen it and we started watching it and it's a it's cheesier than I remember, but it still holds up in this thing that I'm about to say about it.

[00:27:53] Alias is one of the greatest shows for getting you to binge. And I originally watched it with the DVDs. And, you know, now you can just binge it on Amazon or whatever. but every episode, yeah. And in a way that you look at your you're watching are like, can I stay up another 45 minutes? Yeah, we can do this.

[00:28:11] Okay. And you keep going from the pilot on like literally every episode makes you, you have to keep watching. And so that was in my head, but I love JJ Abrams stuff. But specifically, I love alias, you know, as a nonfiction writer, I, I think there's a lot of pressure. You should put a lot of pressure on yourself to keep people's attention and interest

[00:28:33]cause you are competing with Netflix and you know, the internet and everything else. So sustaining interests, making people want to keep going. And there's certain writers that I think do this really well in fiction. I think, Murakami, does this really well on fiction?

[00:28:47] Jess: So can you give us a quick example of, so, you know, I ended chapter three this way, so people would want to get to chapter four or what did that actually look like for you?

[00:28:57] Shane: Yes, yes. So I spreadsheeted out episodes at alias is basically the end of that story. And, and then, so let's see chapter three of,

[00:29:07] Jess: well, I'm just making something up. What's anything you did in Smartcuts because of all these crazy spreadsheets.

[00:29:13] Shane: Yeah. So there's two that come to mind really easily.

[00:29:16] But every chapter basically was based on some variation of one of these crazy spreadsheets. In chapter three, it opens with a story that then ends on a cliffhanger and then it goes to an unrelated story that then ends on a cliffhanger. And then it goes to another story you see has a tie in

[00:29:38] to the other two things that we were talking about. And that resolves the second story, which then sets up the third story to the original story to be resolved. So it's a, this kind of dream within a dream, within a dream sort of structure. And, and that was specifically from Alias. There's another chapter where the Skrillex chapter, where I have a, I juxtapose these two protagonists once.

[00:30:03] Oh, go ahead.

[00:30:05] Jess: What was the first chapter that you did that with the first chapter?

[00:30:09] Jess: Or where did you do the dream within a dream? Where's that? Do you remember?

[00:30:11] Shane: Yeah, that's chapter three. That's the one about rapid feedback. Okay. That's the one where I'm trying to remember which one is first, but it's the improv comedy kids that are trying to learn improv.

[00:30:23] It's a, Oh, I'm trying to remember. but I, I use that, that structure actually quite a bit, throughout my books, this, start with a story and then end on a cliffhanger in my more recent book, Dream teams, I can remember a little bit better than the actual pattern. So in chapter one of Dream teams, it's a, the story of necessitation attempts on Abraham Lincoln.

[00:30:48] And, and then that goes into a story about, modern FBI agents and trying to serve a subpoena to a mob boss. And that goes into kind of the story of how psychology learned to understand cognitive differences and cognitive diversity. And then that goes back into the law enforcement, women in law enforcement is specifically what it's about and how the subpoenas story wrapped up.

[00:31:15] And then that goes into the, you thought that the Abraham Lincoln story was over, but it turns out it's not over. It turns out that this is actually the story of how the secret service was started. and so. It's yeah. And, and that's really the initial observation that sent me off on actually spreadsheeting out JJ Abrams was the observation that he ends everything with a cliffhanger.

[00:31:38] So that you, you watch the next thing you want. And to me, it was like each section of a chapter should be the cliffhanger. Cause what I want you to get to is the, you know, the science or whatever it is. So each section ends with a cliffhanger and then the ones of the chapters should too. But the other observation was that he doesn't start his stories with the beginning.

[00:31:55] It's not like, you know, a man walks into the detective's office and you know, and says, Mr. Detective, sir, I have a problem and I need you to solve it. The story starts with Jennifer Garner being handcuffed to a chair, being interrogated. And they're the bad guys are pulling a tooth out and she's her, hair's dyed paint for some reason.

[00:32:15] And then it's like three months earlier and it's her at the university, you know? And, and you eventually get to that. Actually, another pattern of his that I really like is the one I've done this several times to the one where it's, that story, I believe the pilot of alias is actually exactly this, it starts with her in the chair and the pink hair, and she's getting her tooth pulled out and then there's some other plot.

[00:32:34] And then it's, you know, the next segment of, you know, we're continuing to her in the chair and like another tooth has been pulled out and then it's another story. And then finally all of those stories wrap up together to her ending up in the chair with her tooth getting pulled out and then, you know, she gets, she escapes and then the cliffhanger is after she escapes

[00:32:53] something bad has happened and Oh no, we have to find out more. Anyway, all of this is just to say that pulling from the patterns of sci-fi writing into nonfiction writing, has made a huge difference in people actually getting through my chapters, versus just pulling from you know, Gladwell or Steven Johnson.

[00:33:13] Jess: Okay. I'm so excited to tell my family about this recording, because besides that, I love all things spy movie inspired books and Jennifer Garner's got like the cutest dimples of any woman on earth, right.

[00:33:23] that is the TV show I was watching the first time I got my now wife to like put her arms around me and try and teach me guitar.

[00:33:33] Jess: A couple of years later we're married. It's Christmas time in Huntington beach and we're both sick. So we go to Walmart and buy a box set of Alias and binge watch it. So then the rest of my family, I think we gave it to my mom or something. All these other people in my family ended up watching it over the years. Our now 15 year old daughter, a year and a half ago found out about him and binged-watch them.

[00:33:52] And so we relived Alias last year. Right. so I'm very happy. I'm very happy to go tell everybody about, about, how one of my favorite books of all time is inspired by one of our favorite series of all time.

[00:34:04]Shane: That's awesome.

[00:34:06]Jess: well, I, I love it. You know, I think this is probably a good place to end for part one.

[00:34:10] Let's dive into the second main idea. This how to dig a smart cognitive reservoir.

[00:34:14] Shane: Sure. So the simplest kind of advice that you can give on this is consume widely, right? Learn about things that are outside of your field. But that's too simple and too easy of an answer. And the answer so can suffer from this problem of if you're going really wide, but not deep enough to find the patterns.

[00:34:39] And so I think the thing that's the most interesting about digging your own smart cognitive reservoir actually has some data behind it. And it's a principle that a buddy of mine named Allen Gannett who wrote a very good book about creativity called the creative curve, in which he actually tells the story of the Ben Franklin thing.

[00:34:59] Which, you know, I always remind him that he got from me and then, you know, he'll remind me that I got it from Ben Franklin's autobiography. So, you know, none of us is original here. but, he, in this book, The Creative Curve, he talks about something that he calls the 20% principle. And it's different than the 20% principle you might have heard of, you know, with Google and 3m saying devote some of 20% of your time to experimenting, but it is kind of related.

[00:35:25] So, what he found is that when you look at people who are consistently creative in their industry, and this is like, you didn't just have a one hit that was really successful and you didn't just have two hits that were hits, you every year or every week, putting out things that are creative, that are changing people's minds that are breaking through, they're changing the game or whatever that are,

[00:35:48] you're always making this. People that do this, whether we're talking about music or film or inventing like scientific contraptions or being an entrepreneur and having business after business, after business, they all have one thing in common and that's that they spend about 20% of their waking hours consuming information about their field.

[00:36:14] And, and so this is where I think I shared the story of the, the chief content officer of Netflix, Ted Sarandos, who, you know, he watched all the movies in the movie store when he was teenager. So he can make recommendations. He spends to this day, about four hours a day, watching movies and TV shows he, and, and often more than that, but he doesn't go a day without doing that.

[00:36:38] Because he needs to know what's out there in his industry. And you know, there's some of this reservoir versus well analogy that comes into play here too. He doesn't just consume, you know, like this month we need to make some deals, you know, for, you know, family comedies. He doesn't just consume family comedies.

[00:36:55] He watches horror movies. He watches, you know, foreign films. But he spends that much time of his waking day, not just consuming, but studying. So, you know, he's taking notes on these things. He's not just lazy watching, you know, whatever reality shows on a, at, when he's tired at the end of the day.

[00:37:13] The guy who is, has written the most, number one, it's in pop music, max, or I'm blanking on his last name now it's a Scandinavian guy. It'll come to me, but he's written, you know, every popular Carly Rae Jepsen and Backstreet boys, and Jennifer Lopez song. And he's still for like 25 years. He's been writing number one pop hits.

[00:37:37]and, Oh, I'm, I'm really blanking on his name. Anyway, he spends four hours a day studying music, listening to songs, but specifically studying. Patterns and figuring out what key these songs are in and where the key changes are. and basically what, what Alan did is he looked at all of these industries and found that the top, most consistently creative person tends to spend at least that much time studying, consuming content in their field.

[00:38:06] And then on top of that, they study and consume outside of their field. So that's the first bit of advice on digging. A smart cognitive reservoir is actually give yourself permission to consume. And, but don't speed read, you know, don't try to just get through a million books, actually try to look for patterns,

[00:38:23] take notes. And it's been a lot of, and you hear a lot of, of this advice from, you know, smart people, about, you know, reading lots of books, you know, so I'm pretty sure that Warren Buffett and his crew talk about reading lots of books, you know, get up in the morning and read a book and then spend an hour reading.

[00:38:38]there's, it's no accident, but really smart investors, really smart CEOs. They devote time to reading and it's pretty clear that they're not devoting time to reading so that they can brag about how many books they read. They take notes in the margins, you know, they highlight their Kindle and they revisit their Kindle notes and they try to apply those things.

[00:38:58] So there's a concept that I think is really useful here that I've been kind of hooked on lately. This is again drawing from one field to another, but in Iowasca ceremonies. So in kind of ancient, sacred plant medicine, from indigenous cultures and Mesoamerica and, and then Brazil, there's this, this part of this, the ceremony that happens after you have the experience.

[00:39:26] So you, you drink the plant medicine and, you are with the group or you're with the shaman and you, you know, you go on a trip, basically and you see all of these things, you experienced all of these things. And then afterwards, There's this step called Integration, where you are supposed to think about what you went through and think about the perspective shift that you had and think about how you can apply it to your life.

[00:39:55] And without that integration step, this is just recreational drug use. It's just going out into the forest and looking at the pretty colors. But with the integration part, it's actually really useful for changing your life for, you know, eliminating bad habits, for dealing with trauma. And this is, you know, something that's like thousands of years old and it's actually, you know, when scientists are now studying psychedelics in a laboratory setting and how to use like MBMA for getting people to stop smoking.

[00:40:26] A lot of this is about rewiring their brain, but really the rewiring part is after you have this experience that changes the way you see yourself and see the world, you then integrate it into your life. So if you are trying to dig your smart cognitive reservoir, you don't just consume lots of books or movies or content or whatever it is

[00:40:48] and look for patterns. You take this extra integration step of how could I fit this into the way I see the world, the way that I'm working now. So I, you know, a lot of people that, are really hooked on books, from a business standpoint that, you know, there's, there's some people like, Ryan Holiday's a friend of mine.

[00:41:09] He has this very popular book list where he, you know, he's like, here's the five books on ancient Greece that I just read and why you should read them. But he has this habit of cataloging. You know, what is it that he learned in the books and how he can apply his work and his life that how I can apply it step.

[00:41:25] Is, that's like the, the integration.

[00:41:30] Jess: So I'm, so I'm so happy you brought him up because the one comment I had here was, you know, this idea of reading lots of books, we can brag about them, like you were saying, like, I remember when I got to maybe. 600 business books, like leave out all the Jason Bourne genre.

[00:41:46] Right. The guy was pretty proud of myself. Yeah. And like, I guess it was like, people started being impressed with me and I'd read so many books or something. Right. So then it's like, it creates this thing where I'm like, well, maybe I should read more books. Maybe people will be more impressed or whatever.

[00:42:01] Right. Yeah. And like, it wasn't a conscious thing, but that's what ended up happening and, The obstacle is the way by Ryan Holiday has been one of the most influential books for me this decade. And I just, every time I get overwhelmed, like I just have that book on, repeat on my phone. And most days I listened to a little bit of it.

[00:42:18] Anytime I get overwhelmed, I listened to a lot of it, which is an entrepreneur happens pretty often. Right.

[00:42:24] Shane: That's a huge compliment by the way, like huge compliment to him for written a book that, that big of a deal in your daily routine.

[00:42:34] Jess: I've got so many people to read it. I give out copies. I recommend it to our consulting clients.

[00:42:40]But, it's to the point now where I can listen to the opening quote and his first sentence from any chapter. And like it comes, it all comes back to me. So like, I can quickly get through the, like, I can get a benefit of the whole book by just, you know, what, 11 seconds or 20 seconds chapter by chapter.

[00:42:58] And I've, it's been a few years now where I'm doing that, like multiple times in a week. so that's

[00:43:04] Shane: really interesting.

[00:43:06]Jess: So, the point though that I'm trying to make is, I'm such a fan of his I'm consuming, you know, three, four of new books a week, you know, cause I'm listening faster in Audible.

[00:43:14] Right. And he says something about, you know, maybe we should less on reading a lot of books and reading, the best books a lot. And it really struck me because I was getting through a lot of volume. Maybe it wasn't retaining as much of it as I could have or things like this. Right. And I kind of felt like, okay, I've checked the box of having read a lot of books.

[00:43:39] Jess: So now I've been going back and I'll, I'll listen to the same book, four and five times. and I'm listening fast, right. But I'll listen to it four and five times to get those meaningful repetitions and into try to like study it, as you say. And I'm consistently pushing, pause and opening up the notes app on my smartphone and just doing the talk to text thing.

[00:44:00] And it has become so much more helpful than just reading another book. yeah. And

[00:44:08] Shane: awesome. And I really like what you're saying,

[00:44:10] Jess: you know, and I've done another 150 or 200 books since then. Right. But, but it, you know, this additional 150 books doesn't count, like at least a hundred lessons of other books, a hundred, 150 listens of other books that I'm doing over again.

[00:44:28]you know, I've listened to Smart cuts twice this year. Do you know what I mean? Like that's awesome. and for me, and like, I listened to it the first time, almost like a librarian to figure out like what's in this book, is this book worth keeping? Is this book worth noting? You know, and plenty of books are like, yeah, that was okay.

[00:44:43] I've heard most of that stuff for more impactful authors elsewhere. Don't need to do that one again. Right. But, but a lot of them I finally did. Okay. When I have that problem, I need to pull that book back out and I may not relisten to the book for five years. But then when I come up against that, I know what book I'm looking for.

[00:45:02] And it's usually a handful in a genre. Right. And I'll go get. You know, the five, my five favorite books for this specific, you know, Hey, we're doing another website for our investment fund Greystoke let me go pull up. You know, They Ask You Answer by Marcus Sheridan. Let me get StoryBrand by Donald Miller.

[00:45:17] Let me go pull out a physical copy of, I think it's Steve Krug’s Don't make me Think. Okay. You know, anyways, and I just have these pockets. but I probably would have gone on listening to lots of books so I could have felt important. So that Ryan Holiday advice ended up being really valuable to me.

[00:45:34] Shane: I really liked that. I think there's, there's something else that is sort of a hidden benefit of that, of what you're saying. And it's that, you know, our memories are fickle and you know, how often do you, you read a book and then you can't remember what's in it. Even, even me saying, like, I can't quite remember the order of the stories in my own book that I wrote, you know, seven years ago, you know, our brains do that.

[00:45:58] And yet there are things that can help you to dredge up, you know, a memory. you know, you may, you will reinterpret that memory in light of who you are now in the world now and all that. So our memories aren't quite like hard drives, but it's there. you know, if you had the memory while you were an adult and you weren't intoxicated, the memory is there.

[00:46:19] And so, basically if you want to remember things that you've read or learned, the more hooks you have to help you to recall that information the better. And so what you're saying about the obstacle is the way that, you know, the opening quote and opening line triggers the memory of what's in that chapter.

[00:46:39] That's super interesting that, you know, going over reading something enough times that you can get to that point that you can actually recall and then use or integrate, you know what's in there. That's really interesting. I dare say that that's more useful than, than reading, you know, five books reading one book five times to the point that you can actually apply the stuff because you can remember it.

[00:46:59] Cause often I think that's the barrier to us. You know, integrating a lot of this stuff is actually not remembering what it is that we experienced. I mean, I could be wrong about that, but that it strikes me that that's kind of a hidden benefit of your recall is better because of that. Not just your repetitions.

[00:47:15] Jess: Yeah. I remember one of the things my dad kind of impressed upon me was that knowledge was like information acquisition, but wisdom was knowledge correctly applied. And so like another book that's been one of the most influential of this decade for me was, is Richard Koch’s book, The 80/20 Principle.

[00:47:34] And you know, since then I've read, you know, I don't know, six or eight more books on it. That I've done multiple times, some are Perry Marshall, some are other folks on The Pareto principle. Right. But that book, I go back to over and over. I read it probably at least every quarter, you know, because I feel like it's got the nuggets for what I'm looking for and I need, you know, I mean, the science of

[00:47:59] You know, how repetitions is a way to implant things into longterm memory, you know, emotional association, repetitions, like there's a few ways to cement things into longterm memory. But if I, I find if I just reread them, then I end up just the recency bias. I ended up applying it to whatever my current problem is.

[00:48:16] Shane: Right. Yeah. And it makes me think that, you know, at one point I decided I was going to read the entire Bible, so I could say I'd read the Bible and that's thousands of pages long. And a lot of it, you know, there's some greatest hits in the Bible that are a lot more interesting than like the boring parts of like second Kings or whatever.

[00:48:36] So, you know, I decided I was gonna read the whole thing, not very impactful in my life, having read the whole thing versus, you know, I think actually studying or whatever religion you are actually studying the wisdom. Right. You know, there's a few things that Jesus said that if you just study those will make a much more enormous impact on the way you treat people than if you just get through the whole thing.

[00:49:00] Right. And yet, you know, I did that so that I could say I did it. And then in fact, I went on to try and read every other Holy book is like, I'm going to read the Koran. I'm going to read, you know, like, and I didn't apply any of that. I would have applied some of it. Like, you know, I've had more of a spiritual practice than just that, but the act of just trying to do it so that I could say I did it.

[00:49:22] Actually may as well not have happened, you know, which is a, it's kind of a shame.

[00:49:29] Jess: Well, I know we could talk about a, a hundred other things on this idea, but what else do you want to cover this idea of not just a wide cognitive reservoir, but a smart cognitive reservoir? Any, any major points you want to hit here still?

[00:49:40] Shane: Yes. So in, when you look at the concept of cognitive diversity, which is, you know, the fancy way of saying this, you got a lot of things in your head and you can make connections. This, it breaks down into four specific things. So if you ask the question of what makes someone's brain different than someone else's brain, it's, you know, the information that they have, but there's actually four things that become really useful

[00:50:10] in a group setting in particular is what I studied, cognitive diversity for teamwork. Therefore the things inside someone's head that become real useful for turning problems around, and playing with them in different ways. So basically they become useful for lateral thinking and specifically mathematicians who study complex systems have found that these four things are the only things

[00:50:35] that actually can add up to increased intelligence in a group and they're pretty comprehensive. So saying no, the only things, you know, makes it sound like, you know, maybe there's not that much to cognitive diversity, but the thing, our perspectives, heuristics, interpretations and predictive models.

[00:50:56] So if you have a group of people that have a diversity of those things, that group has a chance of being smarter than the sum of their parts. And if you in your head have multiple perspectives, heuristics, interpretations, and predictive models, then you have a lot bigger chance of actually having lateral thinking of actually being creative of actually making breakthroughs, making yourself smarter.

[00:51:20] And so I think it'd be interesting to kind of break these things down. What do they mean? And how to develop them if you want to dig a smart cognitive reservoir. So how perspectives, what are perspectives and how do you develop perspectives? So, you know, the easiest solution to all of these is, you know, get people in your brain trusts that have these different things.

[00:51:42] Yeah. And it's, there's a high correlation between, you know, having lived a different life and having developed different perspectives. Right. And that means that people who have different identities probably have different perspectives too, because I didn't these lead you to live a different life, but have you want to work on it yourself?

[00:52:01] The question of what is perspective? Perspective and from the brain science standpoint is how you encode the world into your internal language. It's whatever you encounter, experience, see, hear, smell how you encode it into your brains parameter. and, and so it's, you know, it, it is like the angle at which you see things, but it's really how you interpret things.

[00:52:24]but from a coding standpoint, like you and I both hear the same word, we hear the word rock and you think music and I think geology, right that's perspective. So how do you increase your perspectives? There's three pretty reliable ways to do it according to research, and some of this is research , from Dream teams in particular, the travel, culture and stories.

[00:52:51] So traveling to new places changes your perspective on things like how to live, you know, culture, you know, being a kind of the underlying thing, but travel lets you see things that are different than the way the world is organized where you are, whether we're talking about mountains or buildings or, you know, economies. Cultures are the practices and the habits and the behaviors, you know, in the language and the ways of, you know, of, sort of living, when you experience different ways of living, it reinforces in your head that there's different, right

[00:53:31] ways to do things. But, but this basically it can help you to process what you're experiencing in the world from multiple perspectives. So if have I lived in a Meadowgreen in Columbia and New York City I will have multiple perspectives on a lot of things because of having lived those places, and then the other one is stories.

[00:53:53] So learning people's stories, the lives that they've lived, I think documentaries and biographies in particular are really interesting from a perspective standpoint. If you're going to understand and put yourself in the shoes of someone then that helps you to build multiple or add more perspectives to your life.

[00:54:11] I actually just watched the Flat Earther’s documentary Behind the Curve. I don't know if you've seen this one yet. Fascinating to learn where the flat earth theory, what it actually is. And so it's basically people that think the earth is flat and it's a, it's a round disk surrounded by an ice wall with a dome over it.

[00:54:29] And that the sun and the moon are basically like a, like a mobile, like a over a kid's crib. And, and you know, the conspiracy is that the government knows this and is trying to hide it from us. You watched the flat earth documentary and yeah,

[00:54:42] Jess: hold on. Are you saying that's not the way it is? What are we, what are you trying to say to me Shane?

[00:54:48] Shane: wait with pictures from, from space showing that the earth is around. but they, they believe those pictures are fake. Yeah. so, you know, you're taught from a kid that, that the earth is a sphere and that we've proven it with science. Which we have. But most people dismiss flat earthers as crazy people. Watching this documentary,

[00:55:07] He did a really good job in the documentary of humanizing, people who really believe that and making the case that you shouldn't, you make fun of them cause they are not dumb and they're not crazy. They are mis-applying science, actually a lot of them are using kind of bad science to prove. it, and, but like, like I have very different perspective now.

[00:55:33] Like these are the, actually a lot of these flat earthers are very sweet people, like really nice, and understanding why they believe the thing that to the rest of us seems absurd actually gives a perspective on other things in science that are a little bit less cut and dry and a little bit less absurd topics.

[00:55:53] So, anyway, you know, a documentary learning the story of a well-meaning person who converts to flat earthism, can give you a perspective, which you can then import to other things, such as, you know, something that's maybe more consequential. It doesn't, I think super matter for a lot of people's lives, whether the earth is flat or not.

[00:56:12] Which if you don't travel or whatever, you're not going anywhere, but it does matter if, whether or not the sea level is going to rise, you know, 40 years from now. And so understanding how someone can mistrust science on the flat earth thing can help you to understand how a well-meaning people can just trust science on the climate change thing too.

[00:56:31] So, so that's perspective stories, travel culture, heuristics is the second one. these are discrete skills. And really the way to learn them is it's to learn discreet skills, but here's six are our rules of thumb or mental tools for approaching problems. It's things we learn. I mean, it's basically like what they teach you in school, how to do, you know, bookkeeping, how to do long division, all the way, you know, to how to climb a mountain, how to clean a house.

[00:56:59] So the more heuristics you have for different things, the more you can explore, the more you can draw from for lateral thinking. So if you know, five different ways to clean a house with, you know, with things that you can find in under the cupboard, that is a, is more cognitive diversity and it's a wider reservoir.

[00:57:18] So, and this is where a lot of them, the examples of the analogies, kind of being the starting point for innovation come from. So the heuristics that JJ Abrams uses for formatting and narrative, are heuristics that I borrowed and then twist for formatting and narrative in my nonfiction books.

[00:57:39]so, really I think the best way to build a smart of smart cognitive reservoir when it comes to heuristics is learn discreet skills for things. So the one that I, I always think of when I tell people about this is, I went to a. like is the launch of Mr. Robot season two or something, some pop-up that they were doing for marketing.

[00:58:01] And, and in this popup was a lockpicking class where you basically have a really simple padlock and they teach you how to pick it. And then you get a slightly less simple padlock and you work on that. And then you work your way up to really hard locks, like real door locks. And so I spent an hour learning how to pick locks.

[00:58:19] And now I have this discrete skill of picking locks, which is actually quite useful. Sometimes I can get locked out, that even, you know, I could have to go back and practice to be really good at it, but I now understand how lockpicking works. I understand that few risks for picking a lock, which now is something that I could apply to other things.

[00:58:38]the approach to lock picking is useful in thinking through basically inventing hypothesis for problem solving. So learn discrete skills whenever you can, if the opportunity arises for you to, you know, to be taught how to crochet take it because of the reservoir. Not because you're like, I'm never going to crochet things,

[00:58:58] I'd rather buy things. No, take it because you're going to expand your reservoir. A third thing is interpretations. So this is, I kind of lumped this into perspectives, when I talk about this, but it is different from a cognitive standpoint. Interpretations are what you do with things once you encode them into your brain.

[00:59:18]and so, it's basically, we, we both experienced the same thing and if we have different perspectives, we're going to think about it differently. We have different interpretations. We're going to then twist it and toy with it differently in our heads. and so for me, what's interesting here, if you're trying to expand your reservoir is trying to understand why people interpret things differently than you.

[00:59:43] And actually exploring that specifically, trying to explore that, whenever you encounter a different interpretation of the same events and really this is I think a, this is, a call for learning and to get good at Socratic questioning or just asking questions in general, someone interprets the news totally differently than you do.

[01:00:04] And you notice this, ask questions about it and keep asking questions rather than arguing about which whose interpretation is right. A bigger reservoir by asking questions about that thing. I think this is also a really easy way to diffuse like intense political conversations that, you know, I, or recently we did a family zoom night where something about President Trump came up and, and my family, like, you know, one family member voted for Trump.

[01:00:33] One family member voted for Clinton. One family member didn't vote because she was so upset about the state of things. And one family member voted for, I forget what her name was, the third party candidate that's like kind of an, and, and so my family is really split on, you know, who they hope to would win the election.

[01:00:52] And so whenever Donald Trump comes up, it gets kind of tense. And, anyway, so if, instead of trying to like, interpret well, you know, Donald Trump did this thing. I think this, my interpretation is he did this thing because he's mean, and someone else is like, well, my interpretation is he did this thing because he's smart.

[01:01:09] And he's trying to draw in, you know, the people who are just picking on him for no reason, because the politics, instead of arguing about what's right, actually just asking the questions. What leads you to believe that what causes you to think this and why and why and why? not to solve the argument, but to understand their interpretation, that's super useful.

[01:01:31] And that's again, expanding your cognitive reservoir. Final thing is a predictive models. So models is how you basically predict the future, which we're doing every second of the day. You know, our brains on autopilot are using what we have in our reservoir to decide what to do based on what we think is going to happen.

[01:01:51] So you are about to cross the street, you look left, you look right, cause that's your heuristic, that you were taught, you know, look both ways before you cross the street and you see, you know, a motorcycle coming towards you. You're going to predict when it's going to cross your path and use that prediction to decide whether you should cross now or wait.

[01:02:10] And we do that all the time with everything, and this gets us in trouble a lot. But the more models you have for predicting things, the better chance you have of lateral thinking. So with the, you know, the motorcycle coming at you, if you actually know the math of how to predict, you know, oncoming traffic and speeds, then, you know, then you could use that if you just have the intuition of like, I've seen this, you know, before, you can do that.

[01:02:40] If you know about how fast things can break, then you can predict things a little bit better if you, you know, in this scenario, if you understand the logic of, or you actually understand what it's like to be a motorcycle rider and you know, the game theory, essentially, if you're on a motorcycle and Sunday comes out in front of you, you're more likely to hit the brakes than a car.

[01:03:05]because you know that if you go flying, it's going bad. Or actually don't know if that's true, you're more likely to swerve cause you can, you know, have more maneuverability. If you know more about riding motorcycles than you are building a predictive model for crossing the road. Anyway, that's not the most useful when I can, I can bring up, but the better you can do this,

[01:03:22] the better you can play with those hypothetical scenarios and hypothesis that we're talking about to actually do thought experiments. And once again, lateral thinking. So the best way, I think to learn models as to study history and to study science, and I think physics is actually pretty interesting too.

[01:03:42] Like one of the reasons why even if you're not a physicist studying physics is cool, is because physics is really good at predicting emotional things. But studying history, how have wars played out, you know, in history, how have events played out when things have happened, you start to see the patterns that starts to give you more ways to predict how things could play out for you.

[01:04:04] So the whole history repeats itself, you know, a lot about history, you know, the different ways it could repeat. So those are the four ways I think if you want to be deliberate about digging that reservoir, think about what are the things that you can consume that can help you to build those predictive models and interpretations and heuristics and perspectives.

[01:04:24] Jess: I love it. You know, I think, I've got the advantage because I'm looking at a written copy of that list. And so I think it's easier for me to connect those dots in certain ways, but it would be interesting for me to like actually set some goals or like to spend some time thinking like, you know, how can I systematically be doing these things?

[01:04:46] Cause as you're talking, I think about like, you know, I was lucky, like I have been a few places in the world and, you know, going from London in Australia that don't feel that different to the States versus Nigeria and Beijing and some other places. You're like, it can be pretty expanding into the way other people sort the world.

[01:05:09] Which can kind of spark some pretty great pattern recognition for other things, right? So I'm looking at these different things on your list, and it makes a ton of sense to me, but then I'm thinking, okay, now I've got to go for application of, you know, acknowledging shame smart. While I already had that done.

[01:05:28] You know, how do I turn this into systematic use of my time to increase my capacity and skill of lateral thinking to solve problems faster, make money faster, do more charity faster, you know, as a result of systematically making these a bigger part of my life.

[01:05:46] Shane: Yeah. So, I mean, you're, you need to allocate your time.

[01:05:49] Right. And, and the best way, it's kind of what you're asking, right? Like how do you, what do you allocate time for and how do you get the most out of it. I think that's, you know, that they answer that question is going to be customed to, you know, who you are and what you're working on and what your priorities are.

[01:06:05] You know, if family is a priority and you have a lot of family, then you're probably not going to spend four hours a day studying movies. Right. And maybe you can, but it's going to be at a trade off everything's on the floor.

[01:06:17] Jess: Right. You're going to bring them traveling while we practice our lockpicking and how some questions about what we're driving by.

[01:06:24] Yeah. Ask somebody to Google the history of it.

[01:06:27] Shane: I think that's, if there were two bits of advice I would give, that would be the first one, kill two birds with one stone whenever possible. Right? The more you can bring these things into the other areas of your life that are important or vice versa.

[01:06:42] You know, I, you know, when I was single, I would, bring dates all the time on kind of reporting excursions. Like I need to go interview. I, you know, I got the chance to interview Richard Branson at an event. I need to go interview Richard Branson at this event. To talk about his space company deal.

[01:07:00] Want to be my date. So it's like, I'm not sacrificing this career opportunity. And daily I'm actually, and it's also by the way, super impressive date to ask them on. So combine, yeah. you know, kill two birds with one stone whenever possible. but it leads into to the, the second bit of advice, which is for me, the way to kill two birds with one stone, no matter what you're doing in your life, because you're always having experiences that you could learn from.

[01:07:27]even if it's not as maximal as you know, going in and spending a month in Morocco, if you've never been there, you're still, you're encountering new people and new ideas and you're encountering stuff on the internet. Even you're having conversations that are new with people, most likely every day.

[01:07:42] Keep a journal and specifically keep a journal for integration. So I know a lot of people don't like journaling as a habit, they find it boring. But if journaling is journaling is one of the best mechanisms for integration. And if the excuse for you to spend a few minutes every day, or every couple days to journal is because it's going to make you smarter.

[01:08:06] That makes it easier versus like, I'm just documenting this for who cares. and, so basically know every morning I have a journaling ritual. But I try to specifically write about what I have learned because of the things that I've been through. So it's like yesterday, was a boring day and what I have learned from that is this, right.

[01:08:25] Or yesterday we watched this movie and I'm thinking about, you know, this thing that happened in and the movie. And you know, it's causing me to think about life and maybe specifically what it's caused me to think about, even if you just do it every once in a while, like an integration journaling session, you know, schedule yourself an hour.

[01:08:44] Once a month or something, you know, on a Sunday to think about what you've learned, what you've been through, what you've watched, what you've read this month and how it could integrate into your life, how it could apply to your life. And, that's I think the, the best advice that I could give it's like that, you know, post Iowasca session, like, did you just have a recreational month or are you actually going to, you know, change something about your life because of the perspectives that you might've picked up.

[01:09:10] And you know, I think if you can remember the four things, you know, perspectives here are six interpretations predictive models, and you know, how does this thing that I've experienced potentially change the way I predict the world. That might be a really hard question to answer, but in a journaling and a sort of a stream of consciousness, type it out or write it out, you'll be surprised how, how much does actually come up.

[01:09:32] But if you don't think it through, don't force yourself to think it through. You're going to be a lot less likely to integrate it. Even if you go on this amazing trip, you know, and yeah. If all you do is take pictures and show them off, that's all you'll have, is the memories. anything that you pick up that's integrative in expanding your cognitive pool will be, you know, kind of accidental or subconscious, which you know, it totally happens,

[01:09:56] they actually get a lot of that. But if you write about the trip and what you learned and how it makes you think differently now becomes really powerful. I recommend that for anytime you're traveling, you know, take the photos, but then add notes to them, you know, take the photos. And especially if you don't do a journal every day at the end of your trip, when you're in your hotel room or hostel or whatever, take some time to write about what you've learned and to think about that.

[01:10:21] That's, that's so fun actually. It's so much funner than a regular job. And, and that's really, I think the secret to being deliberate about this.

[01:10:32] Jess: That's great. Well, what should we cover next here?

[01:10:37] Shane: So I think the last thing on this, this is really, you know, trying to maximize our chances of succeeding at this lateral thinking stuff that we've talked about.

[01:10:51]and I think the final thing that I think about in terms of that maximizing our chances of breakthroughs of you know, changing the game is this idea of experimentation, which basically there's exceptions. But aside from being one off exceptions, all the research and stories in history points to one answer to the question of how can I increase my chances

[01:11:18] of having a genius breakthrough idea or improving my life. And that answer is experiment a lot. So, you know, we think of creative geniuses as a, you know, as just, having the answers and we often don't know about all of the work that's gone on behind the scenes, you know, that the 10 years that it took for the overnight success to happen.

[01:11:43] But we also often don't see all of the things that weren't hits, all of the things that made it to the cutting room that made it on the cutting room floor. And, you know, even Shakespeare wrote a lot of really bad stuff, just didn't end up getting published. A couple of them got published, but a lot of the stuff that he wrote did not get published.

[01:11:59] Now, Picasso drew a lot of stuff and Edison tested a lot of stuff. And so, whereas a few people strike gold the first time they dig, you know, they, there are one hit wonders and, you know, and we're jealous of them. It happens. But most of us aren't that lucky, Shakespeare was not lucky. He experimented a lot and he had a lot of stuff that didn't work out.

[01:12:20] So the final idea is if you want to, you've expanded your cognitive pool, now you want to, to really try, you use lateral thinking in your life. The first answer you come up with is probably not going to be the best to answer. And, and you're gonna fail a lot. And so I think the habit of experimentation becomes really important.

[01:12:43] And I think the best advice that I could give, for how to experiment other than, you know, spend time and don't be deterred, is understand the difference between. Kind of two types of genius level experimentation. So when you look at artists or like inventors, who obsess over what they do, and they do a lot of experiments and they eventually have the light bulb moment, right.

[01:13:11] Edison tried a lot of things and then eventually his team invented the light bulb. they found the right answer. There's two ways that a people who are obsessed with something, kind of go about experimentation. And one is what I would call obsessive experimentation. And the other is compulsive experimentation or, yeah, obsessive and compulsive.

[01:13:33] And, those are those two things are combined. When we talk about OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder, you have a problem. If you obsess over things and compulsively do them. but it's from a experimentation standpoint and innovation standpoint, it's not too much of a problem to have an obsession. It is a problem to have a compulsion.

[01:13:54] So an artist who paints the same thing over and over and over and over and over again, because they just can't get it out of their head because they need to do it. They're just doing variations on the same thing over and over again. It's a lot of artists that are like that. that's a compulsion.

[01:14:12] They're always doing the same thing. It's like the serial killer that draws like the stick figures in blood, like everywhere they go. Right. That's, that's being compulsive. It’s being hung up on the end thing and trying to make that work over and over again. Obsessive is being hung up on the goal and trying to make that work so experimenting over and over and over again, but with the right goal.

[01:14:38] So this circles us all the way back to the, making sure the observation is right. Making sure you're asking the right question. If that's in place, then obsessing is okay. And I think about entrepreneurs a lot. When I think about this entrepreneur who's obsessed with their idea to the point that it's actually a compulsive thing.

[01:14:57] They're just trying to make the idea work and they can't stop thinking about it. And they're like, no, but if I change this, then the idea will work. No, but if I change this, then people will just understand versus being obsessed with solving the problem, being obsessed with the thing that needs to be changed, not the thing, if that makes sense.

[01:15:18] So, so yeah, so experimentation taking time and taking cycles to try things is supremely important. And it's very rare that that's not part of the equation, but make sure that you're experimenting on the right thing. And you're not just trying to make the outcome that you want work, you know, I'm just trying to draw that same picture and get it right.

[01:15:40] But you're trying to solve the problem. Does that distinction make sense? Is it like splitting hairs too much?

[01:15:49] Jess: No, I think that there's a difference between like in business, right? Like Peter Drucker says the purpose of a business is to find and keep a customer. Right. And yet oftentimes business can be to prove that I'm a smart guy who invented a good business that can, you know, like when we stop adapting, when we stop listening to the voice of the customer, and it becomes more about us, our reputation that we well, when it becomes about us, when that selfishness or that self-focus shows up and it's about proving my idea or, you know, sometimes in the consulting world, you get folks who are so in love with their theory, their primary role is to teach you all how great they are and how great their theory is.

[01:16:37] And if it actually does anything good for your business is kind of like you eventually figured out that's really secondary to them. The usefulness of me making progress is actually much secondary to them and their love affair with this theory, this concept.

[01:16:54] Shane: Yeah. Or their framework or the yeah, whatever it is that they're selling.

[01:16:57] Jess: That might be someplace I've seen it.

[01:16:59]Shane:  Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. I think the focus on the customer becomes a really good heuristic of, you know, asking yourself, you know, what does the customer want or need in obsessing over that? That becomes agnostic of the solution where you know, obsessing over how to get the customer to like the solution.

[01:17:23] That's the compulsive kind of thing.  I was, I'm just trying to think of a good analogy from, or good case study from literature. And I couldn't really think of a good one to try and make this one stick. you know, I think the obsessive versus compulsive, you know, that, that evokes some imagery.

[01:17:42] But, but I was trying to think of, you know, the difference between, an explorer that's trying to discover something versus an explorer that's trying to prove that they're right. You know, and, actually the flat earth thing, anyone who listens to this, to this, that hasn't seen Behind the Curve, you need to watch it.

[01:18:02] Also my buddy, Tim Urban, the science writer who writes wait, but why he's. And, and it's, he's delightful in it, but the, the documentary is, is so good. But part of what, the point that they actually do, it makes in it is that in science you are, you don't care what the right answer is so long as you'd get to the right answer.

[01:18:25] So you experiment with the idea of finding out which one that is or what it is. And then pseudoscience, you start with the answer and then you experiment, or you try to find proof that helps you to prove that answer. And so this is basically like the thing that the flat earth society falls down on is they at, at some point they become convinced that the earth is flat.

[01:18:48] And so then they do, experiment some thought experiments, mostly that line up with that. And there's this fear actually, and you see it in the documentary. He's really, well-meaning, nice people that are actually kind of low key afraid of doing the kind of experiment that could prove them wrong. And, you know, so it's like, it starts out with a guy he's a, he's a cross, you know, the water from Seattle.

[01:19:16] And he's like, look over there, look at there Seattle. You can see Seattle at the earth was curved. Seattle would be behind that curve, but I can see Seattle. So they're at this flat, like that's the, you know, the, that experiment basically. And then, then once like, well, what if we, you know, flew a plane around the earth?

[01:19:37] Yeah. What if we got a weather balloon and put it up high enough so that we could see the curve or, you know, what if we devise an experiment to do that. Then it's like, ah, well, you know, like the government would interfere. They do this experiment. Actually, some engineers decide that they're going to get a gyroscope, to prove that the earth doesn't have a 15 degree tilt

[01:20:00]and therefore it doesn't spin. And they, they do this gyroscope thing to prove that the earth does not spin. And, and the gyroscope would get it out of the thing after the experiment. And they're like, huh? It says 15 degrees. Huh? Well maybe, you know, like, let's encase it in something. So they can't get like raise from, you know, the government's cell towers, and do it again and then they do it again and they're like, huh, it's 15 degrees again.

[01:20:25] Wow. This is gonna be harder than we thought. And it's like, no, you did the experiment anyway. yeah. So I think that's, that's like, you know, this compulsive need for the answer to be true versus trying to just discover what the answer is,

[01:20:42] Jess: you know? It's interesting this idea of the experimentation.

[01:20:45]do you know this book, The Formula by Albert Barbasi.

[01:20:49] Shane: I don't actually,

[01:20:50] Jess: he's a professor at Northwestern used to be at Notre Dame. He had a really failed paper about disasters that nobody wanted to publish. So they were just spitballing and they came up with this idea, Oh, well, we should write a, we should write a book.

[01:21:05]you know, if our formula for disasters paper won't get published, we should do a hundred formula for success. And so they took a very rigorous, scientific approach to success, like whether it's winning the Nobel prize or financial, or did your music get downloaded? It's really interesting. and it's very much about networks and how human interaction with each other and fame and perceived popularity impact the results of so many other things that you wouldn't necessarily just think as a popularity contest. But

[01:21:35] Jess: what he shows is when Einstein said, you know, if you haven't had your best ideas by 30, you're not going to have them. Kind of quote, he shows why statistically that's true. But that it has more to do with how many experiments these people do before they're 30, not with the age. So it's like it separates the correlation and causation and ends up showing how, you know, scientifically or statistically any one of these papers actually had a similar odds

[01:22:06] Of being like, you know, highly cited or a Nobel prize winning thing, but that the volume is so compacted early in the career whether they're trying to get tenure, they're trying to get a reputation, whatever, and going through other people who've won late in life. And who've had the great ideas that, you know, there's this guy who got forced out of Yale as a professor when he was 70, because they told us that he was too old, some secondary school in Virginia, let him work there

[01:22:33] And he makes his greatest discovery like eight years later. You know, and yeah, anyways, but it's fascinating about this idea of, can we have the discipline to get up and take more swings at bat and do these continued experiments? anyways, it was, it was, quite optimistic that the ship has not sailed for most of us.

[01:22:52] Shane: yeah, that's, that's great. And it's, I mean, it. It's also a reminder, right? That some of these things that are we take as truisms, or, you know, we take at face value because someone smart said it can be overturned. I mean, that's a paradigm shift. It actually, I mean, now that we, once you see it, it's like, Oh yeah, it was, we misdiagnosed the causation, you know, the papers that are successful, but, Yeah.

[01:23:22] Jess: The, the other aspect that makes me think about it is like sometimes experiments are great because it was like a intellectually superior experiment and idea. And now we're making more money because we thought that up and sometimes just having more swings at bat, you get lucky. Do you have any like the lateral thinking and the continue work and the continual explanation, you know, experiments.

[01:23:43]Could also just put you in the right place at the right time, which could be as big a factor as our like intellectual approach to something. You know, in the book, he goes through how, when Einstein, really started making it big, it started off with the being on the front page of some newspapers

[01:24:00] of thousands of people come to the docs, to greet, physicist Albert Einstein, right? But in all the Jewish newspaper, all the, all the Hebrew newspapers, it says, thousands gathered to meet the future president of Israel. It was the guy who was trying to get Israel started. Einstein was just the most recognizable name because he had a little bit of a name going for him in America.

[01:24:25] So these US newspapers mistakenly thought all these people were there to welcome Einstein when they're actually there to celebrate the idea of like having a Homeland where they can feel safe from the Nazis. Right. And, and he goes through and shows how, like really in many ways, others had as large, a contribution to physics and science as Einstein, but didn't have the recognition because of the network effects and the, this and that.

[01:24:49] Right. And like, obviously that wouldn't work. Had he not done the theory of relativity and some of these things. Right, right. But it does bring up the, like the other aspects of right place, right time, some of these kinds of things. And you have to get out there and try stuff to accidentally have that go in your favor as well.

[01:25:09] Shane: Yeah. So actually, speaking of chapter three of Smartcuts, that's the chapter where I talk about, the rapid feedback process that, Upwork, which at the time was the world's fastest growing media company in history. And they're still around, but Facebook changed some algorithms on them and they, they sunk, there's, you know, some much bigger, faster growing media companies have been now, but at the time they blew away every other media company in history during their first few years, because of specifically this, idea they would test

[01:25:43] headlines for their stories on Facebook. Dozens of times before they would send them out to a broad audience into their, their email list. And, and in doing so, they were basically running a bunch of experiments and they showed that the more experiments you ran, the higher chance of going viral, you had.

[01:26:01] That it was a, you know, the, the content had to meet a certain standard for people to want to share it, but then everything else was about the experiments and the headlines and the thumbnails. And, and it really, it was correlated to how many experiments,  they ran eight tests, it was going to be a different on average by reality, than if they run 24 tests.

[01:26:21]so doing that faster and really this is where, you know, the pattern thing is useful for a lot of stuff. But actually, you know, the breakthrough is when and you do something new and different. Sometimes that's applying someone else's pattern, but a lot of times it's random. And so experimenting a lot allows you to work in randomness.

[01:26:43] Yes. Or you know, things from places that seem random into your process. That's where it's the number of cycles of experiments you do as what is going to more reliably lead to the success. Otherwise it's like winning the lottery. This is like playing the lottery a lot, you know, your chances go up basically.

[01:27:05] Jess: you know, that book you recommended to me, Shtick to business.

[01:27:08] That's on your website, right? Peter McGraw we had him on the show yesterday and he just talks about how business schools, you know, he's a business professor, how they have it so wrong when they say like, stay home and write a 50 page perfect business. business, you know, business strategy plan. Right. and just the value of exactly what you're talking now.

[01:27:27] Like no, get out and experiment, you know? Yeah. Like have a thesis, but be open to feedback.

[01:27:34] Shane: Yeah. I mean, and as a writer, you know, the headline thing, I think, it applies to writing itself. I think we talked about the snowflake thing start small. Spread with the small, you know, the one liner, small concept for the business, or, you know, whatever the small unit atomic unit is and experiment with that over and over and over and over and over again, experiment with the business model before you've had to build anything, right.

[01:28:01]over and over again, and then do the thing that's bigger and experiment with that, that allows you to, you know, do the experimentation thing. In a, you know, a lot faster. So if it's like even writing, like write a 50 page business plan, why not write 50 versions of a one page business plan that I think would be much more useful to a business school students, you know, even write 20 versions of that.

[01:28:28] And then right. You know, the bigger business plan, it's going to be a better plan because you, you know, you did the experimentation or the iteration upfront when it was easier.

[01:28:39] Jess: I love it. Okay. Well, this is actually, this session has really made me think about, am I taking actions that increase my likelihood for this stuff?

[01:28:49]is there anything you want to cover to maybe close this one off ?

[01:28:54] Shane: in terms of taking actions?

[01:28:56] Jess: Not just in general. That's my takeaway is now I need to figure out how to take action. What's your takeaway? Or what, what do you wanna wrap up with?

[01:29:05] Shane: I think that a lot of what we've been talking about with lateral thinking and the scientific method and being really deliberate about problem solving and innovation sounds hard.

[01:29:20] And it is, and it sounds like a lot of work and a lot of thinking, and it is, and that's why it's worth it. I think the takeaway for me, from all we've been talking about today is that you make all of that easier if you build in learning and experiences and thinking about your experiences and journaling and integrating your experiences into your day to day life, you set it up to be less hard

[01:29:47]to see the thing that everyone else doesn't see if you allow yourself to explore and to consume and to experiment as a matter of course. So I would say that the next time someone suggests a movie that doesn't appeal to you say yes. So that you can write it down in your journal about what you thought about differently because of it not because you're going to enjoy it the next time someone invites you to learn something or to do an activity or to meet someone or go to something that you would say no, to say yes to it for the excuse of it, making your future problem solving

[01:30:30] and lateral thinking process easier because you've banked up more in your reservoir. So that, that would be the conclusion I'd say is make things easier on yourself later when you have hard problems to solve by turning life into more of a learning game. And, and then also we'll make kind of experiences that you're not looking forward to things that you can palate or even look forward to because you're going to have something to think about,

[01:30:55] talk about integrate, tell the story about later and it's going to make you better. That would be my conclusion to this.

[01:31:01] Jess: That's great. Well, thanks again for as always, thanks for spending so much time on this.

[01:31:08] Shane: Yeah. Thank you for, for digging in with me.

[01:31:12] Jess: Thanks everybody for listening.