Salespeople and Trusted Advisors

Discussion on Money and Values

“Well, is there something wrong with generating money? It’s like, well, it depends on what you’re going to do with the money, you know? Like if you’re going to spend it all on hookers and cocaine, then probably that’s reprehensible.”

Interview Introduction

“Well, thanks a lot Jordan for coming and doing the interview.”

“Yeah, um, no problem. It’s funny, I’d planned all these questions, and then we’ve just had a chat before rolling about, you know, your interest in entrepreneurship. And maybe that could be the angle we could use on the podcast because maybe it’s not what you’ve talked about on a lot of other podcasts. So, I might just shut the laptop, and we might go down there if that’s all right with you?”

“Yeah, um, so yeah, how does psychology temperament marry up and link with psychology? You’re obviously well known for psychology commentary in other areas, but maybe we could focus a bit on that domain.”

Factors Influencing Success

“Well, I mean, there’s lots known about what predicts success in different domains across the lifespan. Let’s say the first question is: what are the proper domains of category? And so if you’re trying to analyze something like business success or productive success, what are the proper domains of category?”

“And so if you’re trying to categorize jobs, for example, which turns out to be quite difficult, the simplest conceptual scheme that’s practical that gets you somewhere is like a two by two matrix. There are simple jobs and complex jobs. That’s the first thing that’s worth knowing. It’s a continuum, really. But a simple job is one where once you’re trained, you just repeat what you’re doing. So, factory line work would be an example of that. Or checking out people at a grocery store, restocking grocery shelves, or jobs like that.”

“The best predictors for success in those jobs is conscientiousness, trait conscientiousness. And conscientious people are orderly and industrious. And we don’t exactly know why they are. It seems like it’s associated, oddly enough, with such things as disgust sensitivity. So, maybe people are conscientious because they get disgusted with themselves if they’re not useful and guilty, you know, they get guilty if they’re not engaging in productive enterprise. And maybe that’s a marker for a kind of complex social responsibility, yeah, you know?”

“But, um, which sounds like the complete opposite of most entrepreneurs I know.”

“Well, that’s the thing. The entrepreneurs are different. So, for simple jobs, IQ, intelligence predicts how fast you learn the job but not how well you do it once you learn it. And what predicts there is conscientiousness. So, you basically, if you’re hiring people, you want conscientious people. That’s the most important thing. And then the second most important thing is you want people who are relatively low in trait neuroticism, which is a negative emotion dimension, because they’re less likely to be absentee, right, and so forth.”

“So, in complex jobs, a complex job is one where…”

Types of Jobs and Predictors of Success

“The demands change on a regular basis, and so most managerial administrative positions are complex jobs because you can’t learn the job once and for all. And then the best predictor for complex jobs, the first predictor is IQ, and the second predictor is conscientiousness. And IQ is about three times more powerful than conscientiousness as a predictor.”

“So, that’s the first simple versus complex. And then the second would be the second category scheme would be something like managerial/administrative versus entrepreneurial. And the entrepreneurial types, actually, they overlap with the artists. So, the best predictor for entrepreneurial success, first, is IQ, but second is trait openness, which is the creativity dimension. So, entrepreneurial types tend to be very high in trait openness. And so that sets them with the artists and also with the political liberals because the best predictor of political liberalism is trait openness, right? So, the managers and administrative types, they tend to be conservative, and the entrepreneurial and creative types tend to be liberal.”

“And so if you’re an entrepreneur, you’re going to be a lateral thinker. And so you’ll be the sort of person if they hear an idea that will trigger off a whole bunch of other ideas. And you’ll be motivated primarily by interest in pursuing your ideas, but your downfall is likely to be organizational administrative ability. So, it’s often useful for entrepreneurial types to pair themselves with managerial and administrative types.”

“Yeah, you are described. It’s like you are describing my soul here.”

“Yeah, well, there’s a tension. There’s this weird tension between doing one thing right, which is what you need to do if you’ve already decided what it is that you’re doing, and scanning the landscape for something new to do that would be worthwhile. Those aren’t the same enterprises. And so most companies are an uneasy marriage of entrepreneurial and managerial types. As the company gets more and more established, the managerial administrative types tend to dominate. But then that becomes problematic because it means it’s more and more difficult for the company to shift laterally when it has to. Which is again, I think why so many companies eventually fail because they lose the creative head. Is that what you mean?”

“Sure, they lose the flexibility. And it’s funny because they’re trying to maximize their ability to implement, but it’s very difficult to do that without also simultaneously bearing the cost of narrowing. Right? So, the thing is if you know what you’re doing, you want to hire a conservative. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you want to hire a liberal. That’s a way of thinking about it temperamentally. It’s also a way of parsing out the political landscape to understand, at least in part, why you need conservatives and liberals.”

“Yeah. Well, I mean, I find a business is like a family. And in the past in my company, I’ve had all under 25-year-old male entrepreneurs. Why did we hire them? Because that’s what we were like, right? And people, I’ve found entrepreneurs tend to hire versions of themselves at first instead of being more self-aware to go, actually, I’m chaotic disruptive. What I need is order. Yeah. And like you said, good administrative skills, conscientiousness. So, you go through that chaos of hiring people too much like you and having like too much male energy or too much creative energy. Then you maybe react and hire a lot of administration and conscientiousness. And then you maybe lose the soul in your company. Yeah. And then the creator is trying to drag the company forward, feels like he’s been getting held back by everybody. And it is, yes. But the funny thing is it’s needed to hold him back, but they’ve…”

The Importance of Letting Go and Innovation

“Got to let him go as well. Well, that’s the problem. The fundamental problem is most new ideas are stupid, dangerous, and counterproductive, and they’re the ones that change the world.”

“Well, they are sometimes, they are sometimes. But there’s a subset of new ideas that even though new ideas are dangerous and disruptive and often counterproductive and generally don’t result in a productive company, some of them are absolutely necessary and they’re the thing you need to do next. And so, and that’s a very difficult problem to solve because it’s the fundamental problem of innovation. It’s like most innovations aren’t justified or warranted, but some of them are absolutely crucial. So, how do you distinguish between them? And the answer is, well, we don’t know.”

“The part of the way that you do that in a dynamic economy is you let and encourage a whole host of entrepreneurs to produce their ideas, and you let almost all of them fail, which is kind of painful for the entrepreneurs. But limited company and all those kind of structures are set up to make that more safe, right? Right, yeah. Well, those are this is something that’s massively underappreciated on the liberal left end of the political spectrum is people just don’t understand how absolutely revolutionary the idea of a limited company is because what a limited company allows is a limited company allows your idea to die instead of you. And that’s a big deal. Otherwise, no one would take the risk, would they have created?”

“Well, that’s right. No one could bear the risk because if you failed, it would wipe you out permanently. It’s like, well, who the hell’s going to take that risk? And so the fact that the limited liability is one of the unbelievable tech, I can’t believe that we know it’s like an innovation that we all just forget about. Jesus, yeah, it’s it and it’s such a merciful innovation. Yeah, it’s like you mean I get to fail and no one’s gonna kill me? It’s it’s it’s no one’s going to throw me in debtors prison. It’s not going to hang around my neck for the rest of my life. I can actually take a risk.”

“So, because the other thing you see often with entrepreneurs is that they fail a lot before they succeed. And so, I mean, you have to be pretty damn spectacularly lucky to have your first idea when you don’t know what the hell you’re doing be a spectacular success or maybe it’s a good idea but you weren’t ready and you’re more ready for the marketplace isn’t ready. Or I mean, that’s the other thing that people don’t really understand is because if you’re a naive entrepreneur you think, well, all I have to do is make a great product. It’s like, no, that’s about five percent of it, you know? And that shocked the hell out of me when I started building software, for example, because we assumed that we developed software to help people select better employees and we never could sell it except in very rare circumstances. But we assumed that if we had a product that was validated, we could show that it had the effects that we wanted and that it was more efficient than other products in the marketplace, that selling it would be easy. It’s like, well, that’s just so wrong. Selling and marketing things is impossible. I love it when people say, oh, the product just sells itself. It’s just one of those things which are like you’ve not been in business a very long time. Yeah, because you’ve got market…”

Challenges in Selling Innovative Products

“Forces, you’ve got your skill set. You could have a great product. You’re just not ready to sell it because you haven’t got enough experience. One, you don’t know how to price it, yeah, and you don’t know who to talk to to sell it. You know, you can spend your whole life, especially if you’re selling to companies, which is virtually impossible, talking to the wrong people. And it feels like work, and it really is work, but you never end up contacting a real decision-maker. And then you can’t tolerate the excessive delay. Like, you think, well, I’m going to go sell this product to a big company because they can obviously provide me with a massive contract. It’s like, yeah, but there’s a relationship between the size of the company and the delay in the implementation. And the delay can be years.”

“And then what this is, this happened to us all the time, it was very painful. We’d get right to the point of signing with a large company, and there’d be an internal management transformation, and the person that we were dealing with would disappear. It’s like, oh no, it’s like now what? We actually had that happen with a really big company in New York. We were right on the verge of signing a contract for use of this self-authoring program that we designed, which helps people plan their lives. And the week that we were ready to sign the contract, the CEO resigned, gone. Two, was probably a year of sales and marketing work just evaporate, yeah, you know? And you don’t get paid for any of that. You get no reward for getting 364 days, 365 days. You certainly don’t.”

“Well, and it’s also really easy for one of the things that tech incubators do really badly, I think, is they do lots of things really badly, generally speaking, but one of the things they do that’s very counterproductive with the people that they train is they emphasize the development of the company, but they don’t force their entrepreneurs to find customers. Because your first customer is the most difficult thing you’ll ever do as a business person, in my experience, to find someone who will actually pay you that first time that isn’t your mom. Yeah, that’s right. Well, that’s right, that isn’t a family member. That’s an actual customer.”

“And the other problem that people face when they’re trying to sell a new product is one of the ways that people decide whether they’re going to buy something is whether or not a) they know anyone else who’s already bought it, or b) if there’s other people in their domain that are already using it. And if your sales pitch is, well, no, this is new and revolutionary, you think, well, that’s a wonderful sales pitch. It is if you’re talking to someone who’s entrepreneurial and risk-taking and interested in revolutionary ideas. But if you’re talking to a middle manager in a company, the last thing that person wants to hear is, well, you could be a risk-taker and introduce this into your company. The person’s thinking, I don’t want to put my job or reputation on the line for your product, even if it is revolutionary. In part because if it succeeds, I probably won’t be rewarded for its success. So, when we were selling our employee…”

Insights from Selling Innovative Products

“For example, we ran into, we were academics or, and so you know, there were lots of things we didn’t know about business. And one of the things we ran into, which was so funny, we talked to the people who were doing the hiring, and they had a certain budget, which was usually lower than because they had virtually no budget for hiring, weirdly enough. So, what we were charging for the product, which was still extremely modest, exceeded their budget.”

“He said, ‘Well, look, you’re going to make a 250-fold return on this. That’s pessimistically, it’s 50. Realistically, it’s 250. And the upper end was more like 500. So, it’s a no-brainer to implement this.’ It’s like, ‘Well, we’re budgeted on the cost side.’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Well, if we hire more productive employees, we won’t be rewarded for that. We’ll just be punished for spending more money on the old set.’ I thought, ‘Well, we can’t even talk to you because I’m trying to sell you something that will benefit your company, but for you as the decision-maker, there’s nothing but risk in implementing the new process.’ Yes, that just blew me away. It’s like, ‘Oh, I see. The hiring budget and the productivity budget aren’t associated. So, that’s like a fatal impediment to our sales process.’ So, that was well, we learned lots of things about…”

“And I came out of the whole enterprise with way more respect for people, especially for people who do sales. Jesus, that’s such a brutal job. Yeah. And, you know, when people are, they have a, what, it’s easy for people to, it’s even a popular trope to be somewhat contemptuous of salespeople, you know? All those salespeople, definitely in Britain, we’re very reserved when it comes to selling in Britain. But yeah, but I mean, I don’t put ads on my podcast. I mean, there’s ads on virtually every American podcast. Yeah. I don’t put ads. I don’t need the revenue. So, in a way, there’s the old creative artist side of me that doesn’t want to interrupt my work with ads. But like if I started putting ads on my podcast, you know, some people would be okay with it. There’d be a bit of a riot, yeah.”

“Well, and I think that’s a real mistake because it’s no, we’re not giving the devil his due. It’s really, really hard to be a good salesperson. And people like that are unbelievably rare and they’re unbelievably valuable. And nothing wrong with it, and it doesn’t make you a bad person, and you’re not selling your soul. Well, it’s also, it’s also how, how are you going to generate revenue? And without that economy, money even going to move in an economy.”

“The other thing that happens with the artistic and maybe the entrepreneurial types too is that they end up with contempt for the business end of the process. And that’s a real mistake. You know, I mean, one of the things that I tell people who are artistically oriented, let’s say, so they’re in the entrepreneurial category is look, um, it’s virtually impossible for you to monetize your product. That’s the first thing you have to understand. So maybe you’ll get lucky and you’ll figure out a strategy. But if you add contempt for the sales and marketing process to that impossibility, you can be bloody well sure that all you’re going to do is starve. So, you better drop your contempt for the sales and marketing end of this if you want to sustain yourself through your life. And that’s going to be a prerequisite for your creative endeavor.”

“And so, and art schools and establishments like that do an absolutely dreadful job of, well, they don’t teach it. I was an artist, I went through art school. Yeah, they don’t teach it. No, never once. No, I know. And it’s, it’s and I mean, how are you going to commercialize your venture? How are you going to pay for your mortgage? Just how are you going to buy food, yeah, with just a paintbrush and a camera? Oh, Jesus. And well, artists are in particularly dire position because as a visual artist, for example, you’re not only competing with all the visual artists that now exist, and there’s plenty of them, but you’re also competing with all the dead artists who were way, who already have an established reputation and a body of work that’s still being exchanged in the marketplace. And so, you don’t want to add contempt for the sales and marketing process to that. And you also probably have to understand that if you want to be an artist, that you’re also going to have to have, have to have another job, yeah, because it

Selling Direct to Consumer vs. Businesses

“I’ve always enjoyed selling straight to consumer, yeah, and not to businesses, yeah. I like that better too. I think that you’ve got more customers, you’re always at the decision-maker. Sometimes it’s the husband or the wife who owns the credit card streams, but other than that, you’re always at the decision-maker. You learn very intuitively and quickly, you get a quick feedback loop. Whereas like you said, if you’re dealing with a manager who’s got their own motives and then the company has got different motives, they’re not going to tell you the truth. You’ve got to unwrap. They don’t even know what the truth is necessarily because they can’t represent their business because they don’t embody it.”

“Straight to consumer is number one. I think the second thing is, I think probably it is fair to say that sales and marketing can be learned, but I think it’s also fair to say that sales and marketing are more likely to succeed in certain personality traits. Well, you need to be extroverted, sure, yeah, and assertive, yeah. And it also helps to be emotionally stable because what’s your failure rate as a salesperson? Oh, it’s like 50 to one, pick, yeah, it’s unbelievable. It’s like you have to have a constitution of bloody iron to tolerate that, you know? Because what’s the default answer to, ‘Do you want to buy something from me?’ ‘No.'”

“No, it’s no, go away, right? It’s worse than no, yeah, it’s like no, and you’re bothering me, yeah. And then even if the best you get is, ‘Well, that’s worse.’ That’s worse than no. I think about it, the middle ground, yeah. Well, at least with the no, you can move on. That’s right, you drown in that, that’s right. Well, that’s the problem with trying to sell to big companies, yeah, it’s like it’s never enough, maybe we’ll do this. It’s like, ‘When? Well, maybe in the next six months to a year.’ Which will be delayed absolutely 100%.”

“We’ve found selling direct to consumer way less stressful, yeah. And you know what the funny thing is, more rewarding. Sorry to jump into more rewarding. More rewarding because you can actually change an individual’s life, yes, yes. With a good product, yes, exactly, yeah. Well, the thing about, you know, you kind of have this idea that you could, you could let’s go for a big company, a couple of contracts, and we’re set. It’s like, yeah, but you’ll die in the interim waiting for the contracts, yeah.”

“So, and it is so interesting to think about that in terms of the error of Marxist criticisms of capitalism because the Marxist criticism was something like capital will accrue in the hands of a smaller and smaller number of individuals, which it does, but the individuals rotate. That’s the thing that Marx got wrong. Now with big companies, you think that, well, the big companies absorb all the capital, but the thing is, they fail.”

Failure due to Size and Complexity

“Yeah, the reason they fail is because they get so large they’re so ponderous that they, they move so slowly that eventually they make themselves extinct. And you experience that when you’re trying to sell to them. It’s like, ‘Oh, you have this rule, oh, you have this rule, or you also have this rule, oh, this rule means we have to completely rewrite our software.’ Yeah, you know? And then, then, then, well, and, and these special adaptations have to be made, then there’s 20 people to clear that with. Yeah, yeah, it’s, it’s brutally difficult, right? So this Marxist capitalism thing, that was one of the initial um, things I wanted to talk about. I want to come to that in a minute. Yep, I’m, I’m bursting now with questions and I know you’ve got to go at 12. So, okay, so the next summary then is something that worked for me and my business partner because, you know, we’re, I don’t like the word self-made because I don’t think anyone’s self-made. I think you need people around you, but self-made in the sense that we weren’t given money to start. We didn’t have family money. Oh yeah, that’s hard. And I think the gift in the business we’ve grown is I have a business partner who’s very conscientious, very analytical, very skeptical. His answer is always ‘enough’, right? Right. I have a partner like that, right? And then, so, and I’m the opposite, and so that allowed me to go and do the sales and the marketing and allowed him to clear up my mess. Yeah, accounts, finance, structure, organization. Yeah. So to anyone listening who isn’t really a natural sales or marketing person or doesn’t want to learn it, partner or align with someone who is, well, and you may probably make a great team. Well, and it’s also on it’s also really important to understand that these things, they can be learned to some degree, but there are temperamental proclivities and so if you’re, if you’re open technically, that’s a big five trait you can, your people who are listening I have a website understandmyself.com understandmyself.com and if you want to know your big five profile, it will provide that and it breaks each of the big five into the two sub-components and so it’s very useful so that you can go there and find out what temperamental pattern you have. If you’re high in openness then you’re oriented towards entrepreneurial activity. If you’re high in conscientiousness then you’re oriented towards managerial activity. If you’re high in agreeableness customer service, disagreeable people, well, disagree people are good for they’re also good for managerial positions if they’re not too disagreeable. If you’re extroverted that tilts you towards sales these things are and so if you’re going to hire someone for the job you should first of all understand that every person isn’t for every job and you might as well match the person and the temperament to the job and if you know your own temperament then you can think well I’m an entrepreneurial type, I’m high in con in openness it’s like well, Christ, you’re going to be an implementation catastrophe, you’re not going to do the paperwork, you’re not going to do the follow-up, you’re a mess. So find someone who’s orderly. Well, I can’t work with someone who’s orderly because they’ll constrain me it’s like, yeah, they will and you need it. Yeah. And so there’s that ten, you know, there’s something interesting about how your brain works so if you want to make a really fine adjustment with your finger the best way to do it is to push in one direction and then push against your finger with the other finger because then you can make unbelievably tiny corrections and so a system seems to work better this way you have a right and left hemisphere if there’s dynamic opposition which because you’d think well I’d move a lot faster if everything got the hell out of the way it’s like not necessarily crash and burn quickly that’s exactly it and so you know you said you partnered with someone who had traits that opposed yours my one of my partners is far more disagreeable than me and I would say more orderly and way more skeptical and I’m always out there going well we could do this we could do this we could do that here’s an opportunity here’s another opportunity and what he does is a lot a lot of it is yeah a lot of it is no and it’s frustrating of course yeah because we”

Tolerance of Opposing Views and Creative Clashes

“Take it personally, well, and because you, you see if you’re open, you see the landscape of opportunity but a quick death is better than a slow painful death and working with someone who says no offers you the opportunity to have a quick death and that’s actually preferable so you have to tolerate that tension of opposites if you’re going to build something that’s lasting and it’s actually implementable so I think this is vital to talk about and I think generally in the media, the world, our opinions, I think people are too extremist everything is good or bad black or white right or wrong up or down left or right and to sort of continue your analogy one of my favorite bands is Radiohead and they’re very big in the UK, yeah, I really like Radiohead and if you study them they’ve all got very different musical tastes and they often have clashes around the kind of music that they want to write so the drummer when they were big with ‘OK Computer’ was like why can’t we write three and a half minute pop songs that’s what’s made us massive and Tom York is like the antithesis of that and as soon as we’re big and well known and number one I want to do something completely different you know forget these are my words not his but you know disruptive and maybe you know a little bit more anti-pop um and then you’ve got Johnny Greenwood who’s classically trained whereas Tommy plays the piano completely unclassically trained if you have a classically trained pianist they’re like how does Tom York play the piano like that the timing everything it’s it’s wrong it’s all wrong but that makes his haunting melodies um and so I’m convinced that a five-piece with all of those push-pull creative clashes which they’ve probably had to learn to drive forward in like an arrow because they’ve probably had loads of falling outs I believe that is tantamount to them being the band that they are and I can say working with business partners and I have an MD and we have I mean we have about 75 staff because initially I wanted Progressive to be uh hire everyone like me and then I wanted to hire everyone the opposite of them yeah and then it was all men and then when we were too many men it’s like too much testosterone same we’re all women and then that brings a different energy and I’m convinced with families and companies there needs to be this balance well these all these different so that’s genuine diversity so that’s the first thing if you want genuine diversity you go for diversity of temperament right not diversity on the basis of ethnicity and that sort of thing you go for diversity of temperament and there wouldn’t be from a biological perspective all these different temperaments wouldn’t exist if they didn’t have their niches right so because there’d be no place for them and the thing is people actually are different and they’re different because differences are required in different circumstances and it’s well another reason to to do the personality testing I would say is well first of all it’s enlightening I had my kids do this personality test that I yeah told you about um howdy kids they’re in their mid-20s now I had them do it when they were in their teens and uh because they you know I tested out the things I was developing on them and and you know I know my kids pretty well or so I thought and when they did the personality test it revealed to me things about them that I had misconstrued it was really useful so I thought my daughter was far more disagreeable than she actually was a lot of the clashes I was having with her I was having because at that time anyway she had pretty high levels of negative emotion and I thought that she was disagreeable she wasn’t she’s very agreeable but she so she would get upset quite easily and so”

Understanding and Utilizing Personal Weaknesses

“I learned to some degree to comfort her when she was upset rather than argue with her and that was extremely extraordinarily helpful and I thought my son was easy to get along with and he’s unbelievably disagreeable but he’s very very low in negative emotion yeah so he would never get upset about anything so he’s easy to be around but trying to get him to do something he doesn’t want to do is impossible he just won’t do it and so that and it was quite shocking to me that that even though I knew my kids and even though I’m a trained psychologist I still had elements of their temperament wrong in my conceptualization so that was extremely useful to to to figure out and and to really develop an appreciation for the fact that those people who don’t think like you they’re actually different than you and me better than you well that’s the thing is that you know with with those differences come well your temperament is a set of strengths and their attendant weaknesses right and you don’t get the strengths without the weakness so the thing about open people is like well they’re creative but they’re all over the place and if you’re open and high in negative emotion it’s a it’s a rough combination because the openness destabilizes you right you don’t have a stable identity because you’re interested in this and then you’re interested in this and then you’re interested in that and and maybe you can handle that but if you’re also an anxious person and have some difficulty with uncertainty you basically undo yourself by being creative it’s like well how can you how can you stop being anxious if you’re never in the same place for more than one minute yeah and so lots of people who are really creative and high in neuroticism they just unglue themselves and so for people like that I recommend it’s like try to make a damn schedule yeah like try to hem yourself in a bit because you’ll just burn yourself out with nervous exhaustion otherwise yeah so and it’s useful to know all of that I think we’re trying to balance these paradoxes and ironies um because the paradox there is someone the person who least wants a diary and a structure probably needs it the most right well I didn’t have some advice about that okay so let’s say that you’re the person that that that procrastinates and you don’t get things done maybe you’re creative you have other things going for you I would say well learn to use a schedule anything I don’t want to be hemmed in by a damn schedule and it feels like a prison and fair enough man it is a form of prison but that’s a form of order well this this is this and it’s also a precondition for successful additional successful creative endeavors so one of the things I recommend for people to do is to use a calendar like Google calendar but not to design the day they should have use the calendar to design the day that you would want to have because you can make a calendar your friend if you don’t make it a tyrant yeah so you don’t want to build a tyrant into the system you want to be intelligent about it because if you’re going to schedule your time you have to understand that there are things that you need to do that you should do because if you don’t do them you’re going to fall behind and that will be counterproductive it isn’t because someone’s wagging their finger at you and saying that this is a moral imperative even though that might be part of it it’s because there are obligations that you have to fulfill or you fall farther behind and the obligations get bigger and that’s a bad pathway so you have to build some of that into the schedule but a lot of it can be well okay tomorrow I want to have the sort of day that I would really be pleased at having by the end of the day and I want to build in a schedule that I would stick to as well and so you have to have some appreciation for your own weaknesses you lay out a schedule and you think well would someone like me actually do that yeah and if the answer is no then you modify the schedule until you think that you would do it and that you would be pleased if you did do it and then then the schedule can start to become your friend and I think if you’re not a person who’s orderly by nature the schedule has to be your friend because otherwise you won’t use it so it’s funny you say that I just my most recent book that I launched is called Routine Equals Results and it’s a very short concise book um designed it to be because you don’t want war and peace on how to manage your diary in your life and it’s pretty much exactly that I think I just add a couple of little things the paradox again I’m obsessed by the paradox and everything um so you plan a schedule and I think your distinction of the end of the day you’ll know you’ll be pleased with that’s different from in how you feel in the moment yeah yes definitely because how can you you need to second guess yourself to know that you’re doing the right thing strategically but in the moment it might frustrate you but at the end of the day you’ll be pleased and so that requires discipline so I think if someone sees a diary schedule as an initial test so design the structure like you so try and end of the day I’m pleased test some things never see anything as permanent okay that worked for me at the end of the day you’ve also got to monitor your energy levels because we all eat at different times um and also this was really important once I created this because I tested for months what coffee to drink at what time what food did I eat at what time obviously wrapping in my kids and my vision work and all the things that were for me non-negotiables in the day doing some things I knew I’d wriggle out of that I hate doing but I knew like you said at the end of the day I’d be proud that I did because discipline while it’s hard is rewarding at the end when you you feel that sense of deeper happiness when you’ve gone through and those things that you want to wriggle out of if you do wriggle out of them yeah so you’ve got to you’ve got to get on top of those things and then I found this important let someone else manage your schedule because I know what I’m like and I’ll wriggle out the very things that I know are right for me because I can yeah and whereas if you have an assistant or even just a system yeah the the you follow your diary so you create the diary you test the diary and then you give it to someone else to manage it because the amount of times I’m saying to my assistant Louise I don’t want to do that and she’s like you’re doing it yeah because you know that’s the right thing well and you might need like it might actually be you say well you don’t want to do it it isn’t that all of you is saying that it’s like the child in my mind 51 of you doesn’t want to do it or decaffeinated me yeah it could could easily be but then if you have someone else come along and say no you need to do it then the 49 percent of you that wants to do it all of a sudden wins because it gets that little extra boost yeah and so it is very useful too to know where your weaknesses are and then to help and to institute people around you who will buttress you at your weak points so and everyone has their weak points they’re the comp they’re they what they’re the they’re the uh

Embracing Contradictions and Managing Ego

“the resistant marketplace right so if you if you have a scheme that you’re putting forward and you can’t sell it internally well those people are representative of at least in part of the people you’re going to try to sell to externally and so again that’s the advantage of quick failure if you can’t make the sale within your own organization it’s like well that’s possibly because what you’re selling isn’t going to sell so or that or you’re not very good at selling it you haven’t crafted your message properly the the one of the things you pointed out earlier with regards to the ability to tolerate strife and conflict and the paradoxes that’s absolutely crucially important because there really isn’t any more anything any different than that there’s nothing in that that’s any different from actually thinking because thinking actually is conflict it’s the pitting of opposing viewpoints against one another and it’s very stressful and and and and and produces a tremendous amount of tension but the question is in part do you want to figure that out in abstraction even though that’s very stressful or do you want to live that out in the world and the answer is man you better think it through because even though that’s stressful it’s way less stressful than than than living it out in the world so and it is so useful to be in that tension of opposing opinions so even though it’s hard yeah where much innovation much creativity many solutions to problems they’re like that that next stage beyond that tension aren’t they which of course emotionally none of us want to go through so we try and avoid it play safe or whatever put it off yeah so or not say what you think because then that conflict won’t emerge that’s another advantage to being around disagreeable people agreeable people say agreeable people won’t produce a lot of conflict yeah but disagreeable people tell you what they think and maybe it’s vital to have people around that yeah because the ego completely well that’s well that’s another thing especially you start to become successful like well you need some constraints on your egotism yes well so then you need disagreeable people around you because they’ll provide that constraint yeah and and you and you also pointed out that let’s say you’re successful and that makes you happy right and it might and and that’s part of that ego inflation process is positive emotion people that have a lot of positive emotion are impulsive because positive emotion says make hay while the sun shines yeah and fair enough but that can lead you down a very impulsive path you see that with people who are manic because they’re really really full of positive emotions which is sometimes the scariest but my dad has the manic depression um and sometimes when he’s the highest that’s the scariest oh definitely oh absolutely yeah yeah and you’ve sort of semi-relieved because he’s out of the depths yeah but it’s a big warning sign yeah yeah i’ve made some of my biggest mistakes in life when i’ve been whoa right right well that’s exactly it is that you have that motivational impetus but it’s unconstrained and so that’s that’s that you’re absolutely right that’s un and and of course depression is an absolute catastrophe for people but it’s in people in their manic phase that go and rack up fifty thousand dollars in credit card bills in one day because they have this brilliant idea that’s going to revolutionize the world and you know maybe it will but but then you end up with the 50 000 or the 500 000 in rapidly accrued debt yeah and and you can certainly see that in the explosive phase of development of of companies when everyone’s hyper enthusiastic it’s like fair enough and the enthusiasm also sells right because it’s hard to be a non-enthusiastic salesperson but but then there you know everyone says well shouldn’t we just be happy all the time it’s like well there’s another podcast on that yeah well no no because the first question is well what’s the downside to positive emotion well there’s no downside we should be just as happy as we can be it’s like no manic people humanity would be gone in a generation if there was no if there was just happy emotion nothing would get done nothing would get fixed and we’d make all sorts of we take all sorts of risks that would be catastrophic so yeah you think well you need people who say no god that’s painful you need people who get in the way you need people who are orderly and for people who are entrepreneurial and expansive in their temperaments that’s all like oh my god those are prison walls but no they’re not they’re necessary structure and protection and then again don’t be contemptuous of your damn sales and marketing people because you’re bloody lucky that you’ve got them and they’re rare people and that’s also true of that set of skills that you might that’s a set of skills you need to develop if you’re if you’re a creative person and an artist don’t be contemptuous of that with your false romanticism yeah i shouldn’t have to sell it it’s it’s it’s a great product in and of itself and all i’m doing is selling out yes like most people don’t sell out because they never have the damn opportunity and so if you can manage the sales and then you think well i’m going to maintain my artistic purity despite the fact that you could manage the sales well then you’re making an ethical decision but if you’re not selling out because no one wants what you’re doing that’s no moral victory yeah well i mean some of the most successful artists in the world because i wrote a book called money and i’ve studied this in depth being a previous artist myself so like commercially i made business work but commercially i couldn’t make artwork but my business commercially has really benefited from my artistic side right um and you know i could say it’s a shame i failed commercially in art but maybe that was brought me to who where i was but damien hirst tracey emin picasso um warhol all very commercially savvy yeah artists so you could argue till the cows come home if they’re better or worse artists than others that’s subjective isn’t it but they embraced the commercial side of art and they will probably go down in history so and well you know that’s the thing too is that the there isn’t a lot of difference or the boundaries between sales and marketing and communicating.”

Advertising and Creativity

Are, are blurry it’s like, well you know, people are also very skeptical, for example, of advertising and find it intrusive. But you know, if you actually want to buy something, an advertisement is quite helpful. So what people really don’t like are badly targeted ads. And you know, the advertising people are trying to solve that problem. But if you have done something brilliant and original and no one knows about it, and no one ever will, well, that might even be more of a catastrophe than never having done it at all because then you have this thing that’s actually of value and you have to suffer with the fact that no one knows about it, right? No, you have to conjoin that ability to produce creatively with the ability to communicate, yeah? And sales and marketing isn’t that common part, well, that’s the next complex problem.

Artists and Commercial World

And you know, people often who are artists, they’re, they’re also contemptuous of the commercial world. Well, everything has a price. It’s like, well, there’s actually some real advantage to everything having a price, you know, because it helps you, it helps you value your work in a cooperative endeavor. And it also puts a limitation of sorts on you because you need limitations. It’s like, well, if you have an idea, let’s say you’re creative, you have a whole bunch of ideas, it’s like, well, which ideas should you pursue? Well, one constraint you can use is something like if the idea that I’m interested in has absolutely no commercial viability, then maybe I should put it lower in the priority list because you need some mechanism to put things lower in the priority list.

Profit and Reinvestment

One of our rules for product development was that, well, we had to, we had to like the idea, it had to be compelling, we wanted it not to do harm to people, we wanted it to help people, we wanted it to be scalable. But then we also decided very early on that we weren’t going to make things that wouldn’t generate a profit because it was a constraint. It’s like, well, if we can’t do all those other things and make a profit, it’s a bad idea, yeah? And that’s, that’s helpful if you have too many ideas.

Money and Ethics

And what people don’t understand is, profit is required to reinvest back into infrastructure for growth and everything else, yeah? And I used to be an artist and I had to buy the cheapest canvases with the cheapest paint and the cheapest tools because I had no money, yeah? You know, Harry’s just bought, you’ve just upgraded these cameras, haven’t you? Well, if he was, you know, picking butts off the floor and going down KFC licking people’s fingers for food, no kidding, no kidding.

Utilizing Money

Well, the other thing too is, we could get the ethics about this right? It’s like, well, is there something wrong with generating money? It’s like, well, it depends on what you’re going to do with the money, you know? Like if you’re going to spend it all on hookers and cocaine, then probably that’s reprehensible. But if you’re going to still employ the hookers, well, commercials, right? The hookers might not think it’s reprehensible. I suppose neither do the cocaine growers. But, you know, you can argue that there are better and worse things that you could do with your money. If you’re guilty about making money, then maybe you should think harder about what the hell you’re going to do with the money because there’s some good things you can do.

Responsible Use of Wealth

Why you feel guilty about making money in the first place and where that comes from, yeah? And what’s productive about you say, “Well, I don’t want to be greedy.” It’s like, okay, don’t be greedy, good rule. But, you know, you have a family, you could support them, you could invest the money in the community, there’s all sorts of positive things that you could do with your money if you were very, very thoughtful about how you decided to spend it. People didn’t get it, to jump in, people don’t get that Mother Teresa was basically a money launderer. They just don’t get this. A lot of her money came from Robert Maxwell and, you know, a lot of people that would be reprehensibly evil to most of society. But she would take money, she didn’t mind where it came from, and then she would do her work with said money, yeah? Instead of being guilty about making money, you could think hard about what, yes, I’ll take the money, do with it, and do something useful with it and productive, yeah? That’s much, and I would say that’s also your response if you happen to be one of those people to whom money is disproportionately flowing, right? Because you’ve started to become successful and you’ve hit that acceleration point where you’re getting more because you already have. Then the ethical requirement isn’t to be guilty about that but to think, okay, how can I use this money which I have been bequeathed in the most responsible manner possible? And that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to think and you can do that with some error, yeah? So of course, so.

Reflections on Advertising and Creativity

Are are blurry it’s like, well you know, people are also very skeptical, for example, of advertising and find it intrusive. But you know, if you actually want to buy something, an advertisement is quite helpful. So what people really don’t like are badly targeted ads. And you know, the advertising people are trying to solve that problem. But if you have done something brilliant and original and no one knows about it and no one ever will, well, that might even be more of a catastrophe than never having done it at all because then you have this thing that’s actually of value, and you have to suffer with the fact that no one knows about it, right? No, you have to conjoin that ability to produce creatively with the ability to communicate, yeah? And sales and marketing isn’t that common part. Well, that’s the next complex problem. And you know, and people often who are artists, they’re also contemptuous of the commercial world. Well, everything has a price, it’s like, well, there’s actually some real advantage to everything having a price, you know, because it helps you, it helps you value your work in a cooperative endeavor, and it also puts a limitation of sorts on you because you need limitations. It’s like, well, if you have an idea, let’s say you’re creative, you have a whole bunch of ideas, it’s like, well, which ideas should you pursue? Well, one constraint you can use is something like if the idea that I’m interested in has absolutely no commercial viability, then maybe I should put it lower in the priority list because you need some mechanism to put things lower in the priority list. One of our rules for product development was that, well, we had to like the idea, it had to be compelling, we wanted it not to do harm to people, we wanted it to help people, we wanted it to be scalable, but then we also decided very early on that we weren’t going to make things that wouldn’t generate a profit because it was a constraint. It’s like, well, if we can’t do all those other things and make a profit, it’s a bad idea, yeah? And that’s helpful if you have too many ideas. And what people don’t understand is profit is required to reinvest back into infrastructure for growth and everything else, yeah? And I used to be an artist and I had to buy the cheapest canvases with the cheapest paint and the cheapest tools because I had no money, yeah? You know, Harry’s just bought, you’ve just upgraded these cameras, haven’t you? Well, if he was, you know, picking butts off the floor and going down KFC licking people’s fingers for food, no kidding, no kidding. Well, the other thing too is we could get the ethics about this right, it’s like, well, is there something wrong with generating money? It’s like, well, it depends on what you’re going to do with the money, you know? Like, if you’re going to spend it all on hookers and cocaine, then probably that’s reprehensible. But if you’re going to still employ the hookers, well, commercials, right? The hookers might not think it’s reprehensible, I suppose neither do the cocaine growers, but you know, you can argue that there are better and worse things that you could do with your money. If you’re guilty about making money, then maybe you should think harder about what the hell you’re going to do with the money because there’s some good things you can do. Why you feel guilty about making money in the first place and where that comes from, yeah? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And what’s productive about, you say, well, I don’t want to be greedy, it’s like, okay, don’t be greedy, good rule. But you know, you have a family, you could support them, you could invest the money in the community, there’s all sorts of positive things that you could do with your money if you were very, very thoughtful about how you decided to spend it. People didn’t get it, to jump in, people don’t get that Mother Teresa was basically a money launderer, they just don’t get this, a lot of her money came from Robert Maxwell and you know, a lot of people that would be reprehensibly evil to most of society, but she would take money, she didn’t mind where it came from, and then she would do her work with said money, yeah? Instead of being guilty about making money, you could think hard about what, yes, I’ll take the money, do with it, and do something useful with it and productive, yeah? That’s a much, and I would say that’s also your response if you happen to be one of those people to whom money is disproportionately flowing, right? Because you’ve started to become successful and you’ve hit that acceleration point where you’re getting more because you already have, then the ethical requirement isn’t to be guilty about that but to think, okay, how can I use this money which I have been bequeathed in the most responsible manner possible, and that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to think, and you can do that with some error, yeah? So of course, so.

Wrapping Up

We’ve got to start wrapping this up, we’ve got to sort of wrap it up now. All right then, yeah, sure, okay, okay, yep.

Finding Meaning in Responsibility

You need a meaning to sustain you through life, and most of that meaning is actually to be found, and this goes back to the idea of conscientiousness that we were talking about earlier, is it’s in the adoption of responsibility that most people find the fundamental meanings in their life. That’s really worth knowing because you might ask, well, why should I be responsible? The answer is, well, you need to do something meaningful because otherwise life suffering will make you bitter, and bitter is only where you start, it’s not where you end. So people might be interested in the book I also, I told you about understandmyself.com where you can get your personality assessed quite rapidly, that should be useful. I also have this other program that your viewers might be interested in at self authoring.com and that is three programs. One helps you write about your past life so that you can figure out how you got to where you are and where you are. One helps you do an assessment of your virtues and faults so that you can capitalize on your virtues and rectify your faults. And the last one, which we’ve most thoroughly tested, helps you develop a personal vision and create an implementable plan for that vision. And we know that if university students do that, for example, that they’re about 25 percent less likely to drop out of college. So and it’s really useful for people to have an articulated and consciously developed vision for their life and a plan because then you’re not buffeted around by the winds of fate to quite such a degree. And you need a plan, you need a plan because you need goals and you need goals because it’s in the pursuit of valued goals that almost everyone finds positive emotion. So and that’s a really useful thing to know. And so what that also means is the more noble your goals, which is the theme in “12 Rules for Life,” the higher