What's next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host of The Pivot Podcast and author of Pivot: The Only Move That Matters is Your Next One. For show notes from this episode, visit pivotmethod.com/podcast.
If change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go. Hello, friends. Welcome back.
I am so excited to be here today with my friend Ron Friedman. Ron is an award-winning social psychologist and professor. He specializes in human motivation. Today, we are talking about his awesome new book, Decoding Greatness: How the Best in the World Reverse Engineer Success, which was selected by Amazon's editors as one of the year's best nonfiction books and made it to USA Today.
Congrats, Ron. Welcome to the show. Thanks so much. It's great to be here.
You have a learner's mind because I could just tell how many notes you've taken, how many articles you've read, books you've read, podcasts you've listened to, masterclasses you've taken. Can we start by you telling us your process, which I learned from your book, to ask you about. Telling us about your process for harnessing this much research into a big idea. Yeah, absolutely.
So first of all, let me just say, I feel a little humbled to be sharing my process with you, given that you're the notion expert and have a much more thorough process than I do. But I am a kind of old school in the sense that I just like to consume a lot of information and input it, frankly, into Google Notes. And that's it. I just have a Google Doc that I utilize.
And then I just kind of organize it a million different ways until I see the commonalities and themes. And then I bridge those themes through cliffhangers and connections and sections. And so that process, I think, is one that obviously is applicable to writers, but regardless of what field you're in, there's a real value to capturing the anecdotes and the ideas that you encounter and not just simply relying on memory so that when it's time for you to produce, you have a wealth of information you can draw from. Do you have a big idea for a next book first, and then you start collecting this research?
or do you also have a way to reverse engineer into the next topic based on the collection, the treasure trove in your Google Doc? I start with a big idea and then I input. So in other words, I might input the same book multiple times depending on the window through which I'm looking at the idea. So if, for example, if I'm reading a classic book, you know, whatever it might be, let's say it's Dan Pink's Drive, and I've got, I'll read it the first time.
I'll underline the main points that I think are important. And then if I'm writing a book on relationships, I might see different connections than I would writing a book about creativity. One of the things I found most compelling in the description to Decoding Greatness is the flap copy, which says for generations, we've been taught there are two ways to succeed, either from talent or practice. And this book brings the third approach, reverse engineering.
Talk to us about this misconception that the ways to success, the paths to success are talent or practice, and where your book comes in. Yeah, this was a big idea for the book. And it's the idea that we have long been told two major stories about how people achieve great things and rise to the top of their profession. The first story is that greatness comes from talent.
And from this perspective, we all have our innate strengths and the key to finding your greatness, for example, Jenny, is to just identify a field that allows those inner strengths to shine. The second big story is that greatness comes from practice. This is the Malcolm Gladwell idea, the 10,000 hours, the idea that if you just have the right practice regiment and you have enough discipline to carry it through for years and years and years, eventually you will become great. But in doing the research for this book, Decoding Greatness, what I found is that there is a third story.
And it's one that people don't often talk about, yet it is the path through which an astonishing number of top performers, everyone from writers and artists to inventors and entrepreneurs, it's a path that they've been using for generations and it involves mastering a skill that people don't often talk about, and that's reverse engineering. And reverse engineering simply means studying the best in a field and then working backward to figure out how they did it. And in Silicon Valley, which I know is where you come from, it's an idea that's very well known. It's how we've got the personal computer and laptops and the iPhone.
There's a very long history of coders deconstructing winning products to figure out how they're made. But what's less well known is that reverse engineering also explains how authors like Stephen King and Malcolm Gladwell learned to write and how artists like Pablo Picasso and Claude Monet became groundbreaking painters and even how Judd Apatow became one of the most successful comedy minds of our generation. So studying the best in a field and then working backward to figure out how they were created turns out to be a lot more common than anyone has realized. Talk to us about your process as a writer.
Have you done this, like in terms of developing yourself as an author, have you reverse engineered from authors you admire? I do this all the time. And I really believe that reverse engineering isn't an activity, it's more of a mindset. And so anytime I encounter anything that I think is compelling, I will take a second and think about how did they pull that off?
What can I learn from this? How can I apply this to the thing I'm working on? And so as I'm reading books, often what I'll do is I will, at the end of a chapter, kind of just reverse outline what's happening in the different sections. How did this author do this?
What are they doing here? But then it goes a lot deeper than just the structure because what you can do as someone who is constantly trying to learn applying this reverse engineer mindset is become a collector, which is one of the key points that I raise in the book, which is the first step to becoming great is recognizing greatness in others and keeping tabs on the things that really move you. And so I mentioned the Google doc for ideas. I also have a Google doc for powerful words and a Google doc for compelling headlines and some strong transitions to sentences.
So I've got this collection that I can then go visit and then break down even further to understand what's happening in these particular examples and then comparing the items in my collection against the items that didn't make my collection. And in doing so, that's what helps you identify what it is that really resonates with you because now you're comparing the extraordinary against the ordinary, the things in your collection against the things that are not in your collection. And that's how you identify the themes that move you and are really resonant for you. And this is something that you can apply if you're a graphic designer, if you are a marketer, if you're a writer, you can apply this in so many different ways.
And I know that speakers collect presentation decks. And if you are a salesperson, you can collect proposals. And so having that collection that you can then go visit and deconstruct, that's the first step to really elevating your performance. I love that you have a powerful words bucket, collection bucket, and then transitions and good in terms of phrase, because I'll often highlight those in my Kindle, but that's where they stay.
And I just love that you actually pull out transition sentences that are compelling to you. And do you then draw from those, kind of borrow from them when you write your next thing, or are you mostly collecting them to learn from them and see why did this work so well? I definitely don't borrow them. What I do do is I will use them as inspiration.
So it's interesting because it's a lot of times if you can just read five compelling opening statements or transition statements in a row, that just stays in the forefront of your mind and then your transition becomes easier to identify. Does that make sense? So it's kind of like inspiration more than anything else. But I do go further in, for example, with opening sentences, what I will do is I will try to understand the pattern.
So here's an example of a powerful opening sentence. And what I did after reading this opening sentence is I then kind of identified what are the constituent parts. And this is actually taken from Jonah Lehrer in one of his, I think it was his book on creativity. I think it's called Imagine.
And here's an opening. Actually, you know what, this is a New Yorker article. So he writes, in the late 1940s, Alex Osborne, a partner in the advertising agency BBDO, decided to write a book in which he shared his creative secrets. So what's happening there?
So he starts off with a date, then he identifies an individual, then he provides the individual's title, and then he closes with an action. And it's kind of a cliffhanger at the end there where it's like decided to write a book in which he shared his creative secrets. Obviously you want to know what are the creative secrets. So that's the structure.
It's date, individual, title, action. Once you have that formula, you could apply it to another sentence quite easily, right? So in 2021, Jenny Blake, host of the Pivot podcast, interviewed an author she admired and I can apply it. And so have I, you know, are we copying Jonah Lehrer?
No. We have identified a formula that we can now apply in a new way. And the key is to take a formula that works and then modify it slightly to make it your own. So that was just the first crack at the sentence.
I'm sure we could make it a lot sexier if we wanted. The or accidentally copying someone without attribution. But of course, we know that's really hard to do. There's not so many totally original things, and there is such a thing as too original.
I know that when you started writing this book, you set out to write a different book. And your editor saw the first chapter, I believe, to correct me if I'm wrong, and said, this is the book. It's right here. It's just this.
Zoom in on this one thing, which is what we're talking about, decoding greatness. Was it difficult to pivot midstream while you had already started this project, thinking it was going to be something else and then ending up doing such a deep dive on just this one area? So when I set out to write this book, I wanted to do something that was a lot more ambitious and had a lot more components to help people achieve top performance. And so what it ended up being was a book about reverse engineering, which was focused on the mastery dimension of top performance, which is one of the components and factors that leads to top performance, but isn't the only thing.
This book was already, as I think you could tell, Jenny, reading it, it was fairly encyclopedic as on its own. You can only imagine. There's a lot. So the way I kind of think of it is, I believe that readers' attention span has shrunk considerably over the last 20 years.
And so my approach is I need to have fireworks on every page. There's got to be something that is exciting or interesting or unexpected all the time, basically within every five minutes. And if I'm not doing that for you as a writer, then I haven't done my job. So here, I felt like I did have enough to make that characteristic.
I think rather than it being a completely different book, I think what would have happened is that the book I set out to write probably would have been 1500 pages long. And so I think my editor just saved me from a lot of hard work. I consider Pivoter, certainly anyone who's here and sticking around, high net growth. TED Talks are probably in circulation.
You just did a fascinating thing midway through the book of illustrating algorithmic thinking by unpacking Sir Ken Robinson's 2006 TED Talk. And you break down, and this takes up many pages in the book, of the template for this and then the actual example with Sir Ken Robinson, analyzing the length, the duration, the word count, the structure, opening thesis, arguments, the content, biographical stories, anecdotes, arguments, jokes, data, cliffhangers, getting to the emotion, what arc, what emotional arc does the speaker take the audience on? And then to delivery, pace, body language, slides. First, I think it takes a lot of rigor.
I admire the rigor that you put into that. Take us through the steps of once we unpack something we really love, then what? Yeah, so first let me come in briefly on the TED Talk, which is that in doing so, in unpacking Sir Ken Robinson's TED Talk, what I discovered is that he's doing many things that I would not anticipate would make a TED Talk successful. So among them is that he shares a grand total of one fact throughout the entire talk.
Now, if I was sitting down to write a TED Talk and not having done this analysis, I would assume that I need to collect a whole bunch of persuasive facts in order to make my case. But that's not what he does. And in fact, what he does do is he tells a whole bunch of anecdotes, biographical stories that help the viewers relate to his experience. And at the same time, he's telling a lot of jokes.
I think it was something like 39 jokes within 18 minutes. So that I think is valuable in its own right, is by reverse engineering, having a methodical approach to unpacking the successful execution, you now have a better understanding of what resonates. So it's storytelling and telling jokes, not bombarding people with facts. That approach of reverse engineering a TED Talk is valuable in the case of Sir Ken Robinson, but it's more valuable if you can pinpoint three or five talks that you find resonant and then do the same thing for those talks, because you might find that there are completely different elements that resonate with you.
And so I mentioned in Decoding Greatness that this approach, the Sir Ken Robinson approach, would probably not work for me. I'm not going to sit there and give you 39 jokes in 18 minutes. That's not going to work for me. That's not my thing.
But what might work is if I took, I don't know, let's say Susan Cain's talk, which is very different than Sir Ken Robinson's talk, or maybe Dan Pink's talk. Again, very different. Often, as I mentioned earlier, one of the best things you can do is not simply to reproduce someone's successful formula, but to take elements from two or three different talks and to combine them into something that's completely unique. So in the case of Susan Cain, her talk where she's holding the suitcase, but she's doing a whole bunch of storytelling.
Some of it's personal. Some of it's about her grandfather. That is similar in the sense to Sir Ken Robinson, where he's telling a whole bunch of anecdotes. But in her case, she's using a very different emotional tone.
He's funny and she's kind of melancholy throughout. And that approach of combining those two things, maybe it's telling some jokes, but also being melancholy. That would be unique, right? So what you're looking for is to find elements that are distinct and to combine them into something that's both unique and feels genuine to you.
So it's not about reproducing somebody else's formula, but rather evolving it. And I think one of the reasons that TED Talks have become a little bit less, I don't know if they're less popular, but just, I think they've had their moment. And I think part of that is because we're seeing a lot of people reproducing the same formula. Do you think we ever misattribute our reverse engineering analysis?
For example, let's say Susan Cain, we reverse engineered her TED Talk. We mapped it all out and we think we know what made it such a mega hit. What if we attribute it to the melancholy tone? But meanwhile, it's the fact that nobody had taught this way about introverts before.
How do we guard against our own blind spots in this way, where we think we're reverse engineering it, but we're missing the point completely, or we're missing the actual role of talent? So like you said, the authors who might reverse engineer a Gladwell book, but kind of miss the fact that, well, this doesn't fit your strengths. This just isn't how, it's not going to work for you. Yeah, there are two things I would say.
That's a first. On whether or not we're missing it, I think this is a metrics-driven approach. So one of the things I talk about in the book is how you can identify metrics for elements. Let me start over.
You can identify metrics for exceptional works and then identify metrics for non-exceptional works and then compare the two to identify where the outliers are. So in political polling, what they will often, what pollsters will often do is look for differences between key groups to identify what it is that's driving their voting behaviors. So for example, you might find that women between the ages of 45 and 54 lean Democrat, whereas men between the ages of 45 and 54 lean Republican. That's a trend that is supported by the data.
And what I argue in Decoding Greatness is that you can create this metrics-driven approach to identify differences between works that stand out versus those that don't. So in the case of Susan Cain, if we compare her talk to 10 talks that are not in the most popular TED Talks of all time, and you identify that the emotional tone is different, then that gives you strong reason to believe that that is one of the key factors driving its success. Because now you've compared viewership of the different talks and you've looked at key features that are differences, different between her talk and everyone else's. So I think there's a mathematical reason to believe that that's true.
On top of that, there's also a timing issue, right? Because if you were to give that same talk today, I don't know, it would be nearly as successful, which is the same true for different podcasts. Like popular podcasts took off because they were presented at a certain period of time. And if you were to reproduce that formula today, it wouldn't take off.
What that argues for, I think, is not to, again, not to reproduce someone else's successful formula, because even if you managed to pull it off 100% accurately, the moment will have passed. Yeah, it's funny you bring that up because it's on my mind a lot as it relates to podcasts. In the example you're giving, I'm pretty sure, who knows when Joe Rogan started? Tim Ferriss was around 2015.
Jordan Harbinger, a good friend. He started 2005, I want to 2006. Anyway, the interview show was unique. It was helping launch podcasts.
Then came Serial. But now a large handful of celebrities have podcasts that are interview-based and they have access to just incredible guests. And then every major media platform now has a whole portfolio of podcasts, which wasn't the case five years ago, even when I started Pivot. And so now I feel like I'm the one stuck in that TED position in a way, like, okay, the interview, has the interview format jumped the shark?
Maybe, maybe not. Then it's really about finding some unique topic or audience. I mean, I don't see myself throwing out this interview format completely, but it is a very interesting moment in time and a kind of a conundrum of, well, shoot, you know, this just totally spiraled the quantity. And I'm not one to focus too much on competition and worry too