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Coming up next on Passion Struck.
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I think a lot of us get myopic vision around what we re doing right now, what we want to accomplish, our to-do list or our current goals.
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It s good to be goal oriented, but if we re so focused on that, we lose sight of things that might be in the periphery that might help us make greater progress toward our goals, but also opportunities that we might not have never even.
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thought about like for me becoming a public speaker or later writing a book was something that I wasn t planning to do.
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First is kind of stepping back and reflecting regularly.
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Remember what my highest goals are and think about what are some ways that I could pursue those highest level goals.
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How can I get better at that?
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So rather than
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get lost in like mid-level goals or low-level tasks.
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Thinking about, again, every once in a while, what do I care most about and how can I get better at that?
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Welcome to Passion Struck.
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Hi, I m your host, John R. Miles.
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And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world s most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you.
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Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself.
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If you re new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays.
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We have long form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes.
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Now let s go out there and become passion struck.
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Hello everyone and welcome back to episode 342 of Passion Struck, ranked by Apple as one of the top 10 most popular health podcasts in the world.
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Thank you to all of you who come back every week to listen and learn how to live better, be better, and impact the world.
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Passion Struck is now on syndicated radio and the Brushwood Media Network, and you can tune in
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every Monday and Friday from 5 to 6 p.m.
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Eastern Time during your evening commute.
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Links will be in the show notes.
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If you re new to the show, thank you so much for being here.
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Or you simply want to introduce us to a friend or a family member, we have episode starter packs, which are collections of our fans  favorite episodes that we organize into convenient topics that give any new listener a great way to get acclimated to everything we do here on the show.
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Either go to Spotify or PassionStruck.com slash starter packs to get started.
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In case you missed it, earlier in the week, I interviewed Todd Rogers, a behavioral scientist and professor of public policy at Harvard University.
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Todd, along with Jessica Lasky Fink, have spent over three decades studying the science of writing, and together they have authored the groundbreaking book, Writing for Busy Readers, Communicate More Effectively in the Real World.
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Throughout that episode, Todd and I unravel the psychology behind how busy people read and share six research-backed
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principles for impactful writing.
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Please check that episode out.
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And I also wanted to say thank you for your ratings and reviews.
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If you love either Todd s episode or the one I m doing today, we would so appreciate you giving it a five star review and sharing it with your friends and families.
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I know we and our guests love to see comments from our listeners.
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Today, we are deep diving into a subject that s so ingrained in our society.
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The belief that working harder automatically leads to greater success.
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But what if I told you that this notion is one of the biggest lies we tell ourselves?
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It s time to challenge this mindset and discover a new path to achievement.
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One that s rooted in intention, learning, and breaking free from the chronic performance trap.
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Our guest today is a true visionary in the field of personal and professional growth.
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He s a co-founder of Mindset Works alongside the renowned psychology professor, Carol Dweck.
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And he s been at the forefront of transforming even the most prominent Fortune 500 companies into environments that foster a growth mindset.
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His name is Eduardo Burcino, and he s here to share his groundbreaking insights on how to escape the performance paradox and embrace intentional living for higher level results.
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Eduardo has coined the term chronic performance trap to describe the counterintuitive phenomenon.
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that often occurs when we relentlessly work harder only to find ourselves exhausted and unfulfilled.
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But fear not, Eduardo brings a wealth of strategies from world-renowned individuals and companies that have cracked the code to peak performance while maintaining a sense of purpose and vitality.
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In our discussion, Eduardo and I discuss how we can shift our focus from simply doing to learning while doing.
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He ll provide you with five transformative tips for enhancing your skills even in high-pressure situations that seem devoid of solutions.
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And let s not forget the power of mistakes.
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Eduardo outlines four types of slip-ups and how each one can pave the way to your personal best.
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But that s not all.
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Eduardo has a treasure trove of wisdom to share, from reigniting childhood curiosity to unveiling the learning strategies employed
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By icons like Beyonce, the Foo Fighters, and Tom Brady, you re in for an episode that s guaranteed to take your talents to the next level.
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So my fellow Passionstruck seekers, get ready to unlock the secrets of intentional living and break free from the performance paradox.
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Let s dive into this enlightening conversation with Eduardo Racino.
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Thank you for choosing Passionstruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life.
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Now, let that journey begin.
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I am so excited today to welcome Edoardo Bressano to the Passion Strike.
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Welcome, Edoardo.
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Hey, John.
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Great to be here.
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Well, today we re going to be discussing your incredible brand new book, Performance Paradox, Turning the Power of Mindset into Action.
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Congratulations on its release.
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Thank you so much.
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Congratulations to you and your upcoming book.
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Well, thank you very much for that.
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I think we both know, especially in the world today, how much it takes to get one of these books out in the world.
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So that s why I always try to do my best to read the books for the people who come on the show, because I hope people will read my book as well.
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Yeah, I appreciate that about you.
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I ve noticed that in your podcast and it makes the conversation so much richer.
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So thanks for doing that.
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I worked really hard on this book for three years and it s a fun stage now when you can share it with readers and just put it out in the world.
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I completely agree.
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Well, Eduardo, I wanted to start by going back to a bit of your origin story and reflecting on your own journey from pursuing degrees in chemical engineering and finance, then transitioning into roles in investment banking and venture capital.
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You seem to have it all together.
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You seem to be going exactly where many people would dream to go in their careers.
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However, beneath the surface, you shared a feeling, a sense of emptiness, stress, and inauthenticity.
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And it s funny because my daughter is currently a sophomore.
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at the engineering school at the University of Florida studying chemical engineering.
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And I wanted to ask, what advice, given what you went through, would you offer to young individuals or listeners like her who are chasing conventional success but may be risking their well-being and authenticity in the process?
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Yes.
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So I like you re saying I was working in venture capital at the time and I wasn t aware of any real issue.
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I just thought this is what life is like and this is what I m supposed to be doing.
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I m supposed to be getting good grades and going to university and getting a high paying job.
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And I was working at night in venture capital, a little bit late in the office.
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And for some reason I did something that I had never done before and I have never done since, which is I start feeling angry and I started taking it out on the keyboard.
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I was just typing and I start typing hard and just like hitting the keyboard a little bit as I was doing my work.
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And my thumb started to hurt, which I felt a little silly that I injured myself.
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I finished my work for the night.
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I went home.
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And the next day, my forearm was flaring, which was fine.
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I thought, OK, I need to just let it be for a couple of days.
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but it kept getting worse and so I went to the doctor and they educated me on what a repetitive strain injury was and this was an orthopedist and I started doing physical therapy for twice a week and I didn t
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think twice about it.
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I just went to them and did whatever they did.
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They told me to do so that I would heal.
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I realize now that I used to see doctors as car mechanics.
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Like I can abuse my body.
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I go to the doctor.
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They tell me what to do and they fix me.
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But the problem here was that I didn t start getting better.
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And I was fine because I ve always been very persistent, resilient.
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So I was like, I ll do whatever it takes.
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Just tell me what else to do.
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But the doctor said, here s the bad news is that I really don t know what you have.
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So you should go to this orthopedic surgeon.
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So I went to the orthopedic surgeon and she evaluated me.
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And she said, a lot of orthopedic surgeons will tell you that you have carpal tunnel syndrome and they would operate on you.
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I can tell you for a hundred percent sure that you don t have carpal tunnel syndrome, but I don t know what you have.
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I m sorry.
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And so then I started freaking out because I was like, what s going on?
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I said, I was getting worse.
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In the process, I started meeting, I learned about ergonomics.
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So I started setting up my office in an ergonomic way.
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I started using speech recognition software, which I ended up using for three years to spare my hands.
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And in the training for the speech recognition software, I met
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Some people who had my same condition, who had gotten so deteriorated that they couldn t use their hands for more than 10 minutes a day.
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And that s when I realized, wow, like, I could become disabled, and nobody knows what I have or how to heal.
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What that gave me was a sense of mortality.
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Not that I was going to die, but that I might lose my ability to do things.
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And I realized, wow, I don t feel like I m doing anything with my life.
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I don t feel like I m using my hands to actually make a difference in anybody else s life.
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And what a waste.
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If I just die right now, I won t have made a dent in anybody s life.
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And that was depressing for me.
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And I realized that in addition to going on a journey to healing my body, I also needed to learn about how to live and how to live in a way that made me fulfilled and gave me meaning.
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And I realized that I needed to change my life.
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So I did.
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But now I feel like at the time I was in my late 20s and I thought,
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This is the worst thing that could be happening to me right now.
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Like you said, I was in Silicon Valley in a beautiful office with a mahogany desk and like meeting with these entrepreneurs every day who were creating new technologies.
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And so many people want to be in that situation.
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And yet now all of a sudden I was in this crisis and I thought it was a really bad thing that was happening to me.
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but now I realized looking back that kind of tempest that I went through was such a blessing because it led me to a journey of learning about health, learning about how to live intentionally to the theme of your podcast that now I m in such a better place spiritually in my life and also health-wise.
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For young people, I actually, I m not sure what I would advise because I did go through a big awakening through a personal experience that led me to a much bigger place.
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And I wonder if I had taken a path where I was following more of my passion from the beginning, where would I have landed?
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Would I have known that lesson so deeply?
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I don t know.
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So unfortunately, to answer your question, one amazing thing that happened from that experience is that I clarified what was important to me and I created a one page
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that I call my life foci, which is what I care most about in my life and what I pursue, everything that I do in my life, why do I do it?
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And I guess that s one thing that I would advise or suggest for anybody to do of any age is to just reflect on what is most important to you, put it up in one piece of paper, and how are you doing with regards to that?
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And what is one area that you wanna more intentionally work on to develop more on the things that you do care about?
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Thank you for sharing that and it sounds like you were lucky enough to get life s golden ticket and a restart for a second chance of the life that you ve created.
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And I also like something else that you brought up and that is our core values are so important and I think
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One of the things that we re going to be talking about today is actions.
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And I think people sometimes have these great ambitions or aspirations, but what ends up happening is they don t get the proper alignment between those aspirations, their ambition, and then the actions that they re taking.
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And they get into focusing so much, I think, on one of them that it skews the results in all of them, which we re going to explore further.
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But I wanted to go back to your story because you end up leaving venture capital to pursue social entrepreneurship, which I think is incredible because we need more people looking at the systems and changing the systems that are eroding many fabrics of society and climate, etc.
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But during that journey, you ended up going to Stanford and connecting with Professor Carol Dweck.
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And it was a remarkable shift that led you down this path that you re living today of a growth mindset and purpose.
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Can you share with us the pivotal moment when you met Professor Dweck and how that encounter shaped your perspective?
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Absolutely.
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I decided I needed to heal.
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I also needed to find a different path and develop a different path to do something that was going to make a difference in other people.
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And social entrepreneurship was something that intrigued me.
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My wife was a teacher and I saw what she was doing in her classroom and that inspired me.
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So I got an MBA and a master s in education.
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to explore.
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I was tinkering with different projects, different ideas, different teams.
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One day I got an email from a classmate of mine that he emailed five people and he said, hey, there s a professor in the School of Psychology who s looking for somebody with a business background to start an organization to put her work out in the world.
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And the way they described it intrigued me, so I responded and we were introduced.
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And I learned that Carol and a former student of her school, Lisa Blackwell, had developed a program to help middle school students develop a growth mindset.
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A growth mindset is the belief that people can change, that our abilities and qualities are things that we can develop rather than things that are fixed in us, like us being natural at things or inept at other things and not being able to change that.
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And that has a lot of kind of psychological implications.
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So when I met Dr. Dweck and
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I learned about her work, I read her book.
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It was absolutely life-changing for me because I realized how my fixed mindset had gotten in the way of my goals.
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For people who sometimes do well in school without effort, and school came relatively easy for me, especially like the quantitative topics, not the topics involving words.
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We do things
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quickly, without effort, and do well.
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And we re told that we are kind of natural or smart.
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And that has an unintended consequences, which is that we end up concluding that the reason people succeed is because they re smart.
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And smart is something that you have innate inside of you, and it s not something that you develop to improve.
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And so from then on, I was working to prove myself rather than improve myself.
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And I realized that in venture capital,
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I was the youngest person in my firm by decades.
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And yet I was acting like everybody else in the room.
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I was saying things as if I was sure of myself when I knew I wasn t sure of myself.
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I had no idea what I was talking about, but I was behaving like everybody else around me because they had a lot more experience and they were trying to make a good impression on the entrepreneurs or the fellow board members.
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And that was creating a lot of stress for me.
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And I had a lot of realizations about
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Why did I have all this stress?
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It was part meaning, it was part this faking, right?
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This constant pretending to know.
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And so my beliefs about myself had gotten in the way of my goals, was transformational for me.
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And I therefore wanted to partner with Dr. Dweck to bring the same insights and strategies to the rest of the world.
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So that s why we co-founded Mindset Works, which was an organization that helps schools foster a growth mindset culture.
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And that s the work that I ve been doing ever since.
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For the last 16 years now, I m more a public speaker for large companies that want to foster a culture of learning.
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Presser Dweck coined growth mindset decades ago, and so many people are familiar with it, but what are the common misunderstandings about a growth mindset?
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Growth mindset is something that is easy to distort.
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Even people who have read Carol Dweck s book or have done work on growth mindset for several years, often I start my keynotes or my workshops by asking people in my own words, what does growth mindset mean?
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If the listener here has a view of what a growth mindset is, I invite you to think about what does growth mindset mean to you.
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what we often hear is it means working hard or persevering.
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Being open-minded is probably the number one answer and a growth mindset is none of those things.
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A growth mindset is a perspective about the nature of humans, is specifically the perspective that humans can change, that we can change and that other people can change.
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The reason that s important is that
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What the research has shown is that this belief that we can change and develop ourselves is really critical for the behaviors to take place.
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The behaviors like asking questions, experimenting and examining our mistakes and being honest with ourselves about what we can improve.
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Persevering because when we fail, it doesn t mean that we are inept.
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It means that it s an opportunity for us to learn something from the failure.
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What a growth mindset is really important to be clear on in order to be able to develop it.
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Another common misunderstanding is that in order to improve, we just have to work hard.
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That is what my book is about.
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A big realization that I had along this work is that effort is not all created equal.
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The way to improve is not just to work hard at getting things done.
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Most of us are stuck in what I call chronic performance, which is just doing our best as we know how, trying to minimize mistakes, whether that s in our personal life or in our professional life.
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And the reality is that that leads to improvement while we are novices, while we are just starting out on a path.
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Because we re so bad that we don t have the skills yet, that just trying to do the activity, we get better at it.
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But then we stagnate once we become proficient.
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And there s a lot of research on that in different fields.
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Because we re working hard, but we re not getting substantially better,
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we end up concluding that we can t get further ahead.
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We can t continue to develop our skills.
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That s a fixed mindset.
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When the reality is that we re not using the effective strategies to continue to improve.
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And so to understand that, I make the differentiation between what I call the learning zone and the performance zone.
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The performance zone is when we re trying to get things done and
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best as we know how, and there s a place for that, and that s important.
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But the learning zone is when we go into the unknown, when we explore what other people think that we might not know, when we ask questions, when we listen, when we experiment, when we not just disregard our mistakes, but think about our mistakes and reflect on our mistakes, when we solicit feedback.
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Those are things that are not just about getting things done, and they re the things that lead us to improve, whether professionally or personally.
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Yeah, I love that answer.
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That whole concept of the learning zone and the performance zone goes all the way back to your TED Talk that you gave, which is how I first heard about you years ago.
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And your TED Talk was titled, How to Get Better at the Things You Care About.
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And it s incredible.
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It s been viewed now nine million times.
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And before we step further into the book, I wanted to ask you, how did you discover this passion that you had for speaking?
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And then how did you learn to perfect the art of speaking?
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It s really interesting.
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I would have never thought that I would like public speaking or that I would be good at it.
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I grew up an extreme introvert.
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I would get very nervous speaking one on one with anybody else, whether it was a peer or an adult or anybody else.
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I still love solitude, I love reflection, I love mindfulness, so I value introversion skills and I continue to work to develop them and to even get better and deeper at them.
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But I have also learned that I can also develop my extroversion skills and I have come to really enjoy being with people and asking questions and getting into conversations where
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we self-disclose and we learn more about each other and we explore.
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It s interesting because both of us care so much about being intentional, right?
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And being clear about what we care about.
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And at the same time, I have ended up doing things that I wasn t intentional about.
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I wasn t intentional about becoming a public speaker.
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I was intentional about doing something that had meaning and I became passionate about fostering a learning-oriented world.
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In doing that work of fostering a learning-oriented world,
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I started doing workshops.
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This happened because we had trainers, we had teachers who were experienced teachers and trainers and facilitators who did this work.
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And once we had a school district that needed somebody and we didn t have anybody else, I said, I ll fly to Philadelphia and I ll do this.
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I did it because they needed it.
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And it was a big failure.
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That first time I did it, I just spoke too much.
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I didn t facilitate.
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I was just lecturing and it didn t go well.
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That was the first time I did this.
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And I started doing more of it and I learned a lot from the experience.
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The real time where I started becoming a public speaker was I had a board member that said, hey, we re trying to evangelize growth mindset, let people know what a growth mindset is.
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At the time, nobody had heard of growth mindset before.
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And she said, in order to do this, you re the CEO of the organization, people need to know who you are.
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Like you live in Silicon Valley, nobody in the EdTech world knows who you are.
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You need to go out there, you need to network as part of championing growth mindset.
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I responded, I said, Ellen, I agree with you, but we have too much to do and I have too much to do in the office.
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I don t have time to go networking.
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But when I do, I will keep that in my radar.
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And I do want to find opportunities to go out and start getting to develop relationships and have people know who I am.
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And a couple of months later, Carol Dweck was asked to do a TEDx talk and she couldn t do it.
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So then I thought, okay, a TEDx talk is something that could be viewed by a lot of people.
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It could help us spread the message.
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It could also do what Ellen advised.
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I did the TEDx talk instead of Carol.
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Carol helped me prepare as well as all their colleagues.
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I practiced so much.
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It was a 10 minute TEDx talk.
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And I thought I would be a horrible public speaker right now.
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I don t have any skills.
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I would get so nervous, but I could practice, develop a really good script and practice so that I could get out on stage and just say the words for 10 minutes.
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I think that I can do that.
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It was six weeks away.
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I first worked on the script through many iterations, lots of feedback, and then tons of practice to memorize it, to be able to say it word for word.
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I wanted.
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every word to count.
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One of the strategies, for example, was when I got, I just looked at the back wall and the lights.
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I didn t look at people s eyes because I thought that I would get like just blank out and because I would get too nervous.
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And so I had strategies like that.
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I did the talk, it went well, and then it got it ended up being viral, it has over 4 million views now.
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But once the talk went out, then people started becoming interested in getting me to speak to their organizations.
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And so then I started doing that.
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And I realized, wow, like, I really love this, because
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there s a lot of creativity involved.
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You re starting with what situation are they in, what are they looking for, what is the best way to go from where they are now to where we want them to be after my talk.
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And that was a really creative endeavor where it can involve a lot of experimentation, a lot of the ideas I was passionate about, a lot of the conversations I was passionate about.
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And so I started doing it more and more.
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and to your point about how I ve become good at it, my sessions are very well rated now and I love what I do.
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And it s through always tinkering.
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Like right now, at this point, I know a lot of things that work really well, but I m usually tinkering and adding something different, changing something that I think will work specifically well for this particular group of people that I am speaking with.
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I think about what do these people need and what might be something that maybe I have never done before that might work well for them.
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I put that in and most of the time it works well because I have gotten good sense, good intuitions, because now I m an expert at what I do at this point.
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Sometimes it might not work great.
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So that s either way it s a learning opportunity.
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But that s how is I need to continue changing what I do a little bit and experimenting and seeing what works and what doesn t work.
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And the other huge strategy, I think, in most workplaces, including what I do, is feedback, right?
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In most of my sessions, I use at least live polling.
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I make them interactive in different ways.
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But most of the time, if it s a keynote, I do live polling where everybody s reflecting and capturing their thoughts and sharing it with each other.
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through live polling.
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When there s time at the end, I include two questions around feedback, where I make that also public.
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People are, we can see how well the session landed and also people s feedback on what I could do better next time, because I want to model being a learner and that feedback is something we can all benefit from and that shouldn t be scary.
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We don t need to be scared of it.
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Whether it s that type of feedback or feedback afterwards with people who were there to have conversations about what was helpful, what might I consider changing next time, that s how I ve continued to improve over time.
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Well, thank you for sharing that.
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And I think something that you highlighted underneath the surface that s extremely important is that when you re up there speaking, at first you wanted to look at the lights, but I m guessing now you really look at the audience because you re there to serve the people who are at the chairs, not yourself when you re giving these speeches, which I think is one of the most important things that a speaker needs to do.
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And speaking of prominent speakers.
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I had Juliette Funt and Dori Clark both on the show over the past year.
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Both of them share a common concept that in the workplace, especially, we need to create more white space in our working environments because we spend so much time, as you were talking about, in this performance paradox and just the busy work that we re not spending enough time on creativity, innovation, et cetera.
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And breaking free from this chronic performance trap requires a huge mindset shift, as you brought up.
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What are some of the common habits or mindsets that people need to challenge or let go of in order to fully embrace this creativity and innovation, not only in the workplace, but in their life as well?
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Yeah, so I think a lot of us get myopic vision around what we re doing right now, what we want to accomplish, our to-do list, or our current goals.
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And it s good to be goal-oriented, but if we re so focused on that, we lose sight of things that might be in the periphery that might help us make
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greater progress toward our goals, but also opportunities that we might not have never even thought about.
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For me, becoming a public speaker or later writing a book was something that I wasn t planning to do.
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And so first is stepping back and reflecting regularly.
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I have that my life book, right, which is a life pursuits is a one page.
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that I look at like about once a quarter in the year and helps me remember what my highest goals are and think about what are some ways that I could pursue those highest level goals that how can I get better at that.
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So rather than get lost in like mid-level goals or low-level tasks, thinking about again every once in a while what do I care most about and how can I get better at that.
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And then to your point about kind of white space, what are the daily habits that are going to lead to the things that I care about?
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And so when it comes to, for example, improvement, some daily habits that I treasure, the first thing that I do every morning is just express gratitude for the things that I value most, which are life, health, love, and peace.
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I want to observe and notice those things in my life.
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and in the world, because otherwise our attention tends to go to the negative, to what s absent about those things.
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I also at some point later in the morning, I remind myself what I m working to improve so that I remember every morning.
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Hey, here s my intention about something I m working on that allows me to see opportunities in my intention and take action on those opportunities.
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But to the point about kind of white space and creativity and innovation, there s so much value in exploring and playing and tinkering with things that are outside of our domain and that are just us following our curiosity, maybe for not a particular purpose other than just joy and curiosity and interest.
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And at the end, I m amazed by
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how much that later becomes relevant, either personally or professionally.
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But even just the process just brings joy and fulfillment to my life.
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So think about when am I going to be doing those things?
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What are the habits that are going to allow me to create the space to explore new things and then to let the brain wander or work in the background to make connections among things that are not usually connected?
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And that s what usually leads to creativity and innovation.
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Well, thank you for that, Eduardo.
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And one of the things I did want to bring up is just as you had to go through tons of iterations to perfect your public speaking, and you talked about being an introvert and now getting more exposed to being an extrovert.
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One of the people I always like to highlight is Susan Cain, who wrote the book Quiet.
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because she is another person who s got a very popular TED Talk, viewed by millions.
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But when people see her up there, they see it so effortlessly.
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And I remember talking to her about it one time.
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She said what they don t see is that I practiced that probably 150 times and the gazillion mistakes that I made before I got it to that point.
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And I bring this up because in Chapter 4, you talk about Beyonce, someone that all of us know about.
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And no matter
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how good a show she does, she feels that there s always room for improvement, which I love that you focused on her.
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Beyonce has spent a lot of time, obviously, in the learning zone to develop her skills.
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What can we learn from her about the six essential learning zone strategies?
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Yes, to your point, when we observe fantastic performers, people who are the best in the world at what they do, whether they re people like Beyonce or athletes, or we go watch Cirque du Soleil perform, often what we notice is almost like flawless performance, or they seem so fluid and so good at what they do, that we tend to get the impression that they re just naturals, right?
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That they are different than other people, and they re so good because of something they were born with.
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And what we don t see is what Susan Cain talked about, is their process, right?
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What they worked on when they re practicing, when they are behind curtains.
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Well, most of us have the view that what they do to become so good at it is to spend a lot of hours doing that thing.
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If we see a great tennis player, we might think that they re so good because they spend so many hours playing tennis.
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Or if we see a Cirque du Soleil performer, an acrobat, that they spend a lot of time doing the things that we re seeing them do.
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What my book is about, The Performance Paradox, is to realize that the reason they become so good is something that they spend a lot of time doing something very different from what we see.
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So if you think about somebody like a tennis player, if they re in a championship,
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and they re having trouble with a move like a top spin serve, they re going to avoid that move during the match because they re focused on winning.
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They re focused on doing the things that they know best and trying to minimize mistakes.
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But then after the match, when we re not seeing them, they re going to go to their coach and they re going to say, coach, I have to work on my top spin serve.
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Let s work on that.
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and just that for some time and figure out where the topspin serve is going and if I need to shift my wrist a little bit to the right or the left or like my torso or what and that s a very different activity than what we see them do on the match.
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The time that they spend focused on improvement is called the learning zone and the time they focus on performance is called the performance zone
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and what most of us are stuck in chronic performance, in the performance zone all the time.
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And so people like Beyonce, what they re doing after the show, they re reviewing the video, right?
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They re thinking about how things went, what went well so that they do more of it or they continue doing those things.
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what didn t go well and what can be changed.
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And she writes notes, she shares them with her colleagues and they practice the next day.
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They think about and they practice what they want to change before the next performance.
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That s how she becomes so good at what she does.
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One of the six strategies is called deliberate practice.
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It was coined by Florida State Professor Anders Ericsson.
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He noticed this, that for in certain domains like sports or performance arts,
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The people who become so good are people who engage in what s called deliberate practice, which is practicing a very specific skill at a level of challenge beyond what we have already mastered and doing lots of repetitions with feedback between repetitions to figure out what to adjust.
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And so that leads us to the difference between experience and expertise.
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Sometimes we re not clear that experience is having done an activity a lot, say a lot of years.
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Expertise is how good you are at it.
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And these are two different things.
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There s research that shows that a lot of people with a lot of experience
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don t have a lot of expertise.
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Sometimes expertise goes down over time as experience goes up if people are just performing and not engaging in the learning zone along the way.
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How to experiment is another of the strategies.
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Often people design the experiments or the experiments end up getting too performance oriented.
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So for example, there was a company, General Mills, that I talk about in the chapter that was very excited about a new type of yogurt.
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they were going to test it.
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And they realized that producing the chemical engineering, like your daughter and me, we learned that there s different ways to produce yogurt.
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And in this particular case, they could only produce kind of large quantities of yogurt.
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So small quantities or large quantities would be about the same cost.
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And so they reasoned, well, if we just produce a large quantity for about the same cost, we can just test it in more stores.
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And if it works, then we ll be further along of the competition and then we ll be able to get a greater market share.
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And what happened is that the yogurt was working well in some markets, in a small percentage of them, but not in most.
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And they quickly realized why that was.
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But it was then a lot harder and took a lot longer to make those changes.
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It was about 20% of the U.S.
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that they were testing this in.
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And as a result of that, the retailers lost
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interest in the yogurt because it was taking valuable shelf space and they were losing revenues from that.
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So they had to discontinue the product because they made their experiment too performance-oriented.
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They ve lost sight of the fact that the main thing that they wanted to be focused on
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was on learning, whether it works, how it works and how to make it better before scaling it.
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And that happens to us a lot of times that we lose sight of kind of the intention to learn and we make our goals to performance oriented and we end up not performing as a result of that.
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Yeah, I think another great example and you might know him is I had Jeremy Utley on the podcast and he teaches at your design school at Stanford and he was talking about ideal flow and he brought up the Taco Bell example and how when we see new products coming out from Taco Bell, what we haven t seen
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is that each one has probably gone through 1,000 to 2,000 iterations of testing and learning before they ever even introduce it into the marketplace, which I think is another key example of similar to the General Mills concept that you really need to learn.
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And it s not only about the food, it s how are people going to interact with it once you serve it to them.
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Absolutely.
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Yeah.
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And there s different ways of experimenting and iterating.
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In the book, I talk about another company called Scratch Labs, that they do energy foods for athletes, and they spend less time upfront with focus groups,
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and perfecting the food before putting it in the market.
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They do a bit of that for sure, but they put it into the market pretty quickly because they don t distribute their food through retailers, they do it directly through Amazon or their own website.
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And so it s very easy for them to make changes to the product or to produce new flavors if a particular product is doing well.
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And so different people and different organizations
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might come up with different ways of learning and performing, depending on what our situation is, how our systems work.
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But the important part is to be deliberate about what systems and habits are we building to not just perform, but also to learn and perform together.
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I used to be a senior executive at Dell.
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I told you about this before we got on the show, but one of the things at Dell that was great is Michael has an incredible network of fellow CEOs and he would bring them in to talk to us, especially the senior leadership team about what they were doing was working for them that we could understand and maybe think of how we could apply it at Dell.
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One of the people he brought in was Howard Schultz from Starbucks.
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and Howard actually talked to us about how Starbucks
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was a constant learning environment, at least the way he was leading it.
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And it s another company that you highlighted in the book.
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Can you talk about Starbucks and how they have built this learning culture?
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Absolutely.
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They constantly solicit feedback from their employees, from their customers.
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Soliciting feedback is such a powerful tool because we uncover things that we don t even are not aware of, right?
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And we re trying, as humans, we re social beings, so we re trying to produce an outcome on somebody else, whether it s our boss or our customer or our partner or friends.
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And so feedback on what effect we have on other people, what thoughts and emotions we re generating them, what s helpful, what s not helpful, is so precious.
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And so one of their baristas on the early days, her name is Tresa Sabbatago.
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She was going to college and she was very busy.
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She was involved in all kinds of extracurricular activities.
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And she had two jobs because she had to pay for college.
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And so she was starting her shifts at Starbucks at 4 30 in the morning.
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And she was very sleep deprived and she valued her work at Starbucks in part because it was what was giving her health insurance.
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Another thing that Starbucks is known for is for really taking good care of their people, providing health insurance for all the baristas and also supporting them in learning so that they can continue to progress in their careers.
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But so so trace out was very sleep deprived and she was having trouble remembering orders from customers.
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And it was a very chaotic environment where the person at the cash register would just shout what the order was and other people were supposed to remember what the order was.
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And they were operating okay, but for Tresa, I was having particular trouble remembering the order.
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So she was making a lot of mistakes.
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She was asking their colleagues, hey, what did that person order again?
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And that was frustrating to them.
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And at that point, Tresa might have concluded, okay, I m not good at this.
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I m really struggling and maybe being a barista is not a good thing for me.
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I m going to see what else, what other job I might be good at.
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But in her case, she said, OK, what if we order, what if we write the order on the side of the cup?
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And she asked her colleagues.
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hey, would that be okay with you if we did this and we can try it out?
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And luckily her colleagues were fine, were good with it.
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And in part, because they didn t want Tresa to continue asking them what the order was.
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So they were like, yeah, like you can look at it in the cup instead of asking me.
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And that worked really well there.
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It led to the Starbucks store being more quiet and to the cash register person to be able to focus on the customer more rather than yelling what the order was or with all this noise, which led to a better customer experience.
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And what Tresa said is that Starbucks was always asking for feedback from employees.
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And so that encouraged her to share her idea with Starbucks.
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Because what happened is she started getting shifts in other local Starbucks.
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And when she went there, they would say, no, we have been told to do our job in a certain way.
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And it s not to write the orders in the side of the cup.
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So we have to follow the procedure.
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But Trace have felt comfortable with Starbucks soliciting feedback all the time, saying, hey, this is something that we ve tried in our store.
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It s working really well.
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Why don t you consider this?
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And as a result of that, now orders are, Starbucks has improved that system since with, see, they have, they took Trace s idea and they have iterated and made it a lot better.
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And so now wherever you get a Starbucks in whatever way, the order is put in the side of the cup is now printed, regardless of whether it s through a partner like DoorDash or you order it online.
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And it is an example of the value of regularly and frequently soliciting feedback from your people and from the people that you serve.
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Yeah, I feel like we just did an episode of Paul Harvey because that was great.
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Now we know the rest of the story on why, when you go into Starbucks, the writing on the side of the cups and how and where it came from.
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And it s interesting because years ago I was on the advisory board for an Indian company called HCL and one of the other people on it was the CIO from Applebee s.
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And it was interesting because similar to what you re talking about here,
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They had this issue at Applebee s years ago where orders were not coming out together.
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The waitresses or waiter would bring one thing out, then another, and they couldn t get it down.
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How do you do this together?
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Because as anyone who cooks knows, vegetables take X amount of time, different proteins themselves take different amounts of time.
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potatoes or starches or whatever you re going to accompany them, have different amount of time.
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So they came up with this ingenious device called a bump bar that now I think most of the large scale restaurants use.
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But when orders come in, the computer actually tells the chef in what order they should be cooked.
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And then once they put an activity down, they hit the bump bar and it
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leads them to the next things that they have to do to then come out with the perfect timing, heat, etc.
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for the meal.
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So I think they re both great examples of a learning environment.
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Very cool.
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I didn t know that.
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That s a cool strategy.
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Thank you for sharing that.
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In Chapter 6, you bring up one of my favorite fables.
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That is of the tortoise and the hare.
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Can you dig a little bit deeper into that fable s meaning and the common misconceptions we can gain from it about learning?
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Yes, you know, I used to love that fable too.
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And a lot of parents or teachers might tell that fable thinking that they are promoting a growth mindset when in fact that s not the case.
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So the fable is about a tortoise and a hare that go on a race and the hare is so much faster than the tortoise.
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The hare stops to take a nap at some point.
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They re very confident, overconfident, cocky.
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and the tortoise perseveres and it s working the whole way and gets past the hare and wins the race.
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SPEAKER_00
It has a nice message of perseverance and the value of dedication, but it is not a story about growth mindset because nobody in the story gets better, right?
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The tortoise doesn t get faster.
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It s not a message that says that people can change, which is what a growth mindset is, right?
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A growth mindset means
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that we can develop our abilities and our qualities.
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Nobody develops their abilities and qualities, nobody s trying to develop their abilities and qualities and in fact it can reinforce the the ideas of a fixed mindset right that only people with low abilities need to work hard and the people who are naturally talented just need to not get too cocky.
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So those are the types of chapter six is about misconceptions about growth mindset and learning and how we can become clearer so that we can become more effective at it and more effective at promoting it.
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And that s one example of something that we do with our best intentions, but it actually sends a different message that we intend.
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Thank you for sharing that.
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One of the thing that really comes across throughout the book is the importance of curiosity and the significance that it plays in your approach.
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And I ve written a couple articles slash episodes on the importance of adult play.
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because I think so often we don t put ourselves in those situations that would ignite our natural curiosity.
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How can individuals reignite their childhood curiosity, particularly in the context of work, and why is that so important from a personal and professional development standpoint?
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Yeah, curiosity just adds so much to my life and to everybody s life when we can reconnect with it.
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And it s something that I had disconnected with, and I think I disconnected with in school.
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Like when I think about what was the most impactful lesson that I learned in school, what was the most impactful way that school affected me?
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In school, I learned that learning is irrelevant, is boring, is useless, because I was learning things that I wasn t interested in, I didn t relate to, and I didn t think I would ever use.
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And I haven t used a lot of the things that I learned in school.
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And one thing that I didn t learn
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is how to learn and how to be curious and how to pursue things that I was interested in instead of the things that the teacher was teaching me or that was in the standards or historical facts or people that I couldn t relate to.
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And so I think one step is to start to see how before we got to school, I think this is true of everybody, we were so curious and playful and experimenting and going beyond and asking questions.
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And there s a lot of research that shows that kids ask a ton of questions until they start getting to school.
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And so we start associating learning with something that s boring or irrelevant or something that you only do in school.
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And then from then on, we stop being lifelong learners and experiencing the joy of asking questions, exploring, discovering, experiencing awe.
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Getting to know other people better and how different people have different experiences, different perspectives, that is so interesting.
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If we just ask questions, we don t assume that we know.
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If I start with the assumption that I don t know what s in your mind, what your experiences are, what you believe, then it helps me get curious and ask questions.
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rather than see those things as hypotheses or things that I want to look into.
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And then when I ask questions and I learn and I realize that what I thought might be the case was totally wrong, which is the vast majority of the time, that makes me more curious to then ask more questions to other people and learn what their experience has been, what their perspectives are.
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And we live in a world where we label each other so much, whether it is the political parties, right?
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We have ideas that Republicans of Democrats, Democrats of Republicans, and we paint others in fixed ways when there s so much individual variation, individual experiences.
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And if we just look to try to uncover that, we make life a lot more interesting and richer.
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We develop a lot deeper relationship with each other, which makes life better.
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And so whether it is in asking more questions for people and discovering what we don t know, or in going into stimulating environments, like when I travel into a new city, I make it a point to go into a museum or two and things that I would have never gone to anyway.
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I wouldn t have gone to in choosing
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things that are related to what I do, right?
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They re things outside, like very distant from the type of work that I do.
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And I often just discover amazing things that just make life better, just the process of discovery.
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And they give me a greater sense of how systems work, how the world works, how society works, which then makes me more effective both at living, but also at working.
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Because then when there s challenges or opportunities, I can think more in terms of systems rather than silo problem solving.
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I think it s about exploring and tinkering.
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And the more we do that, the more we realize how much there is to learn.
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And then it s easier to do that more and more.
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Okay, so for the listener, I just want to give two great episodes that complement what Eduardo was just talking about.
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One of them, I can t remember the episode number because it was a long time ago, but it was with my friend Jeffrey Walker.
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Jeffrey, for many years, served as the vice chairman for JPMorgan Chase, but now has really been focused on systems change for the last decade.
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And our episode, if you want to go back and find it,
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was a great one on what are the components that are needed for systems change.
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And then another one I just wanted to call out just happened a few weeks ago from the time that this will air.
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And that s with Brian Lowry, who s a social psychologist at Stanford.
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And he has a great book out called Selfless, where we really explored this concept of self that Eduardo was just talking about.
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Well, I can t.
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get to the end of this episode without talking about the Foo Fighters because they re one of my favorite bands.
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And when I think of Curiosity, David Grohl definitely is top of mind when I think about that.
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But one of the things that I find so enduring about the Foo Fighters is just how much effort and love of music they put into their performances.
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And I remember
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going to see him play was four or five years ago.
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And it is the first time I ve ever been to a concert where the morning of we got a text from the venue saying that the concert has been moved up because the Foo Fighters realized they didn t have enough time to play their full set and wanted to play three and a half hours.
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So they actually moved the whole concert up because they realized that there was an 11 p.m.
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time limit so that they could actually play more.
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How many artists do that?
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I bring this up because I think that they re learning strategies that we can gain through the observation of the Foo Fighters.
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And I was hoping that you might talk about them and how individuals can take things that they do and apply it to their lives.
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That is so cool.
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And I remember, yeah, there s a curfew.
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I remember seeing that in the news, there was an 11 PM curfew.
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So they started their concert earlier, which I think also speaks to their passion, right?
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And they believe that the work they do makes a difference and it s important and it brings joy to people s lives.
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And that s so important for us to reconnect with that.
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Yeah.
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One of the things that I love also, Dave Grohl and the Food Fighters, one of the favorite stories that I like is during the pandemic,
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There was a 10-year-old drummer named Nandi Bushel, who lived in London.
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When she was five years old, she saw The Beatles on TV, and she somehow really liked Ringo Starr and what he did.
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She started playing the drums and she had her dad teach her because he used to play the drums.
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And pretty quickly after she was five years old, she was really passionate about it.
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She was practicing a lot.
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Her dad realized, okay, I m probably not the best teacher for her.
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And they got her a professional teacher and she became so good.
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If you have never seen Nandi Bushell play, you might want to search for her online and see some of her videos.
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But during the pandemic, her dream was to play with the Foo Fighters.
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And so in the pandemic, she reached out via Twitter.
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She just sent a tweet and mentioned Dave Grohl saying, hey, I want to do a drum battle with you.
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And she laughed, this 10-year-old wants to do a drum battle with him.
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But he engaged and this is part of going into the unknown and being playful.
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He s, oh, cool.
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I m going to engage.
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I m going to see where this goes.
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And it turns out like Nandi was really good and he started recording some drum sets and sending them to her as a challenge.
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and she would practice them and learn them and record them, even mimicking his own facial expressions.
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And it was so joyful to see.
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I was actually following them because it was so fun to see two of them and bring so much joy and so much expertise into this battle that they kept going.
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on.
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And so after the pandemic, when the Foo Fighters started playing again, one of the things they did is they surprised the people at the LA Forum.
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For the last song, they brought Nandi Beauchamp to stage and she played the drums, which was just so joyful to see.
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But it speaks to the difference between expertise and experience, because Nandi, if you see her, she s an expert drum player.
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And right now she s, I think, 11, maybe 12 now.
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But she s fantastic.
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She s super expert.
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She doesn t have a lot of experience.
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In fact, she had never played in a place like the LA Forum when she played that night.
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She was very inexperienced, but she was an expert.
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And so an expertise is something that we can all develop at any age.
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And it s something, regardless of how good we are and what our age is, something we can continue to develop.
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Well, thank you for sharing that.
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And I do remember not only seeing that, but I looked at some of those videos that you suggested as well, where she was imitating David.
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So great story.
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Well, I always like to end on some version of this question, Eduardo, but in your case, I m going to ask if you can share a personal antidote or story that illustrates the transformative power
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of looking at performance differently and what you hope people will take away from our discussion today or reading your book.
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Sure.
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Yeah.
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So I got into focusing on performance all the time from school because in school, when I went to school, like everything was graded.
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Most of the things that we did throughout the day
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got a letter or a number on them.
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I realize now what that leads us to think is that what we re supposed to do in school is to try to do everything perfectly, to try to get to as close to 100 as we can in everything we re doing.
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And that means we need to be in our performance zone all the time, just trying to do things that we already know how to do and minimize mistakes.
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rather than do things that we don t know how to do, that we re not expected to do at 100.
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And if we do something at 100, for most of the time when we re in the learning zone, it means too easy, right?
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We re not working on things that we re making mistakes and examining those mistakes and learning from them.
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And so I got into just trying to prove rather than improve.
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And also doing the things I was expected to do, do well in school or go to a good school or get a high paying job.
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and I was not leading life intentionally.
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I hadn t even realized and thought about what was important to me and so I ended up going to do jobs that were well-paying but that I didn t have a particular interest in and that I didn t feel were important.
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For me, I would say so the book is about kind of chronic performance and how to embed learning zone into our lives so that aspect of my story is what people can learn about
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in the book, whether we can include the learning zone in our habits as individuals or part two is in teams and organizations.
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Because we also think another misunderstanding around growth mindset is that we might think that it s all about what each of us does in our mind and the habits that we form as individuals.
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But a growth mindset is also about building cultures that are cultures of learning and growth and impact and doing meaningful things.
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Because
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The things that we believe and the habits that we form, the tools that we use, the systems we use, are largely impacted by the people around us.
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And when we do both learn and perform in collaboration with others, with our teammates, with the rest of our organization, then we can learn and perform a lot better.
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So think about one thing that I might suggest people to do is, how can you continue to embed the learning
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zone in your life, but also who can you bring along, right?
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Who can you partner with to share what you ll be working on and have them share what they ll be working on and regularly meet so you can support each other, share ideas and share feedback along the way.
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When we do things together, we can do it a lot more effectively and we can be a lot more resilient along the way.
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Yeah, thank you so much for sharing that with great advice.
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And Eduardo, last question would be, someone wants to learn more about you.
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Obviously we re going to have the book everywhere in the show notes, but where is a central place that they can do so?
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So my monthly newsletters at my website, which is brisegno.com, mylastname.com.
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And I m also very active on LinkedIn.
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Okay.
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Well, Eduardo, thank you so much for being here today.
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It was such an honor and thank you for all the work that you re doing to bring this important concept into the world.
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Thank you, John, for all you do.
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I love your podcast.
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Thanks for the important work.
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I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Eduardo Burcino, and I wanted to thank Eduardo, Ballantine Books, and Brooke Craven for the honor of having them appear on the show.
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Links to all things Eduardo will be in the show notes.
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Please use our website links if you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature here on the show.
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All proceeds go to supporting the show.
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Videos are on YouTube at both John R. Miles and PassionStruckClips.
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I have some exciting news that my new book, Passion Struck, which is all about the science of living an intentional life, is now ready for pre-order.
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Links will be in the show notes.
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We are also on the Brushwood Media Network, and you can catch our syndicated radio show every Monday and Friday from 5 to 6 p.m.
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Eastern Time.
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Links will also be in the show notes.
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Advertise or deals and discount codes are in one convenient place at passioninstruct.com slash deals.
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You can catch me on LinkedIn where you can subscribe to my LinkedIn newsletter.
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You can find me at John R. Miles on all the other social platforms, or you can sign up for my weekly newsletter at either passioninstruct.com or johnrmiles.com.
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You re about to hear a preview of the Passion Strike podcast interview that I did with Dr. Amy Edmondson, the respected Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School.
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We discuss Amy s new book, The Right Kind of Wrong, that released earlier this week.
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Her book challenges the way that we perceive failure, offering a nuanced perspective that goes beyond
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When you say failure is not an option, what you really mean is we are going to do our very best with what we have.
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to produce success.
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We re going to use best practices.
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We re going to use our skills.
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We re going to help each other.
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We re going to be a great team because that s what we truly need in this execution moment.
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When we say fail fast, fail often, we should be, I hope, referring to contexts in which there s no known solution yet.
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And the faster we get to some kind of viable solution, the better off we all are.
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Remember that we rise by lifting others.
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So share the show with those that you love and care about.
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And if you found today s episode useful with Eduardo Graceno, then please definitely share it with somebody who could use the advice that we gave here today.
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In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen.
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Now go out there and live your life passion struck.