0:00:02.4 Jillian: Welcome back Culture by Design listeners. It's Jillian, one of the producers of the podcast. This week, Tim and Junior are talking about the importance of doing the little things for a long time. Why? Because leaders sweat the small stuff. They know that over time, focusing on the little things plays a key part in sustaining goals, maintaining a sense of control, building momentum, and recognizing improvement. As you might expect, our hosts share a few actionable tips to help you put this theory into practice. I really hope you enjoy today's episode. Don't forget, transcripts, show notes, and important links can be found at leaderfactor.com/podcast.
0:00:46.5 Junior: Welcome back, everyone, to Culture by Design. I'm Junior, here with my co-host, Dr. Tim Clark, and today we'll be discussing the little things, the compound effect as it relates to leadership. Do little things for a long time. Tim, how you doing?
0:01:00.7 Tim: Doing great. Looking forward to this conversation. Very important part of leadership, well, leading yourself in particular.
0:01:08.6 Jillian: Yeah, there's a lot in here. There are a lot of different ways that we could take this. And I'm excited to see where we end up. I'm not quite sure where we're going to end up. And that's part of the beauty of podcasting. So looking forward to the conversation. I do want to call out that there's a surprise lurking somewhere in this episode. At least I think it's a bit of a surprise. A discussion about why you might choose 10 years of silence over overnight success. I'm interested to have that piece of the conversation with you, Tim, and I'm curious what you think. And our hope is that by the end of this conversation, you have additional perspective about what it is you do every day, the actions you take, the sacrifices you make, and the consistency with which you do things. What you do is important, and what you do today is important. Not least, just listening to a podcast like this one, might help give your mind space to go where it wants to go as it relates to these principles. Maybe you learned something today that's completely unrelated to what we're saying. Great. So with that, Tim, let's dive in.
0:02:07.5 Tim: Let's do it.
0:02:07.6 Junior: There's a quote that I want to start with. It's a quote that I recited every day of sixth grade. Sixth grade was a long time ago. Not so long that I can't remember this.
0:02:19.5 Tim: Yeah.
0:02:20.5 Junior: We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. Now, this may be an example of a famous misattribution. I don't know. But as far as I can tell, this is Aristotle. So, Tim, what does this quote mean to you?
0:02:36.7 Tim: It means that excellence can be found in the seemingly insignificant little things that we do every day. They just add up. And ultimately, they determine how successful we are in basically every area of our lives. That's what's at stake here. But yet on the face of it, you look at doing little things for a long time and you think, is that really such a big deal? I think we're going to be able to demonstrate that it's a huge deal. It makes all the difference. And why is that? We're going to talk about that.
0:03:12.9 Junior: I remember being in sixth grade reciting this. And to me, this quote is somewhat and was somewhat of a relief. I knew after this quote that I didn't have to wait for some single act that was going to define whether or not I was excellent, but I could go home and do my homework. I could show up on time. I could do these little things, even though I was in sixth grade. So this has stuck with me, and I'm excited to unpack it. The assumption that I'm taking away is that what you do matters. And that excellence is made up not of or not just of the big things you do, but the small things you do. Your habits, you are the sum of every decision you've made and every experience you've had. So if what you do matters, what should you do? There's a Zen proverb I found that I like a lot. Little by little, a little becomes a lot. What do you think of that one?
0:04:05.8 Tim: Well, I think it's the same thing. In Korean, we have a proverb that goes like this, tikel moa taesan, which means if you gather up a little bit of dust, and then you keep gathering up a little bit more dust, and a little bit more dust, and a little bit more dust, pretty soon you have a mountain.
0:04:24.9 Junior: I love that.
0:04:25.7 Tim: And I love that proverb. I remember I learned it years ago when I lived in Korea, tikel moa taesan, the little dust that we collect eventually adds up to a big mountain. I think there's something counterintuitive and paradoxical about success. And we tend to think of heroics. We tend to think of great deeds and big feats. But that's not how you arrive at success. That's not how you accomplish things that are meaningful. It's so counterintuitive. It really goes back to these mundane things that we do every day. And I think we're going to talk about the anatomy of this, Junior, aren't we?
0:05:11.4 Junior: Yeah. You may have surprised a few people speaking Korean. So for those of you listening who didn't know, yes, Tim speaks Korean. Surprise. So why are we focusing on the little things? We're going to answer that question. There are a few things that come to mind. One of the most important, in my opinion, is control. You have a lot of say in the little things and you have only a little say in the big things. So if we unpack this a layer deeper, the bigger the thing, the more affected it is by variables you can't control. You can control what goes in your mouth in the morning, but you can't control everything about a congenital heart defect. You can control whether or not you write a paragraph today, but you can't control whether you'll be nominated for a Pulitzer. There are so many examples. We could create a really long list of areas where this is true. Big things are difficult to control. So, Tim, I'm interested in understanding a little bit more about how you have seen this principle in your career.
0:06:19.0 Tim: In my career.
0:06:19.7 Junior: Yeah. How do you look at this little things for a long time as it relates to your own professional career?
0:06:27.4 Tim: Yeah. Well, it makes all the difference. And let me stress that it's doing the little things for a long, long time. Whatever you do, whatever you do do, not only can compound, but it will compound. So think about that. It's not a matter of this could possibly compound. This might add up to something. It will compound. Whatever you're doing, over time, it will ultimately determine who you have become as a person. Now, there's, I think, a massive deception and temptation that surrounds this principle of doing the little things for a long time. The deception is to look at doing little things and kid yourself that it's not going to add up, that it can't add up. Maybe you can't envision it, or you look at the meager efforts of a day, and you think, it doesn't matter. Look at this. This is pitiful. This doesn't add up. Or the deception is taking that bait and squandering your time and your attention and doing other things. I'll give you one example, Junior. So over the last 25 years, this is just a personal example, and it might be helpful to some of our listeners, I don't know. But I've done a lot of traveling for 25 years.
0:08:02.7 Tim: I've been on planes and just going to help clients, all over. And what I've noticed is that if you get on a plane and you're there with all the other passengers, and you're there for, could be a two-hour flight, four-hour flight, five-hour flight, it could be an international flight, watch what people do with their time. The vast majority of people are not doing much. And I'm not saying that it's great to watch a movie and do some things to unwind. That's fantastic. But what if that's your pattern? Do you see what I'm saying? What if that is your pattern that that's the way that you use your time, which is a precious, scarce resource? So for 25 years, that compounds. So when I get on a plane, I read, I study, and I write. That's what I've been doing for 25 years. Now, for one plane trip, it doesn't matter. It doesn't add up to anything. It's like, so what? No big deal. But after 25 years, it adds up. That's what we're talking about. Now, that may be a very simple example, and you may think, that doesn't matter.
0:09:22.2 Tim: But I'm telling you that over time, things matter. That's something that matters. I'll give you another example. And I'm just pulling examples from my personal life. You may have different habits and different patterns, and that's fine. Another thing that I started doing when I was very young in high school is that if I heard a word that I didn't know, I would write it down and then I would look it up. Or if I heard a phrase or some term, anything, I would write it down. Again, over in a day or over a week's time or a month's time or maybe even a year, maybe it doesn't matter. But over 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, it starts to matter. It starts to matter. There's a compounding effect. You start building your neural network and accelerating that. So those little things that you do for a long time, they start adding up one way or the other. There will be compounding. So those are a couple of examples. I think the reason, Junior, this topic doesn't grab headlines is because it's not glamorous. "Oh, we're going to talk about doing little things for a long time."
0:10:41.7 Tim: Isn't that exciting? No one's excited about that. It doesn't turn heads. It's not heroic. It's quite the contrary. It's mundane. It's ordinary. It's quiet. It's not fancy. It's not glittering, it's not show-stopping, there's no fanfare or celebration about this. Why? Because it doesn't lead to immediate gratification at a personal level, nor does it lead to immediate results that we can all look at and showcase. So it's easy to ignore this pattern and dismiss it out of hand. But we are talking about it. We are dedicating an episode to it. Because over the long haul, it's going to make an enormous difference. I'm going to add one more point. Let's talk about the research of Carol Dweck, perhaps the greatest living developmental psychologist on the planet today. She has a mantra that she preaches to parents. Junior, I think we've talked about this. She says, praise effort, not results. Praise effort, not results.
0:11:43.4 Tim: Why? Because as you said, the world is multivariate. Many of those variables you can't control, which means you can't control results or outcomes for a whole bunch of stuff. So focus on your locus of control. If you do the little things for a long time, you're still going to win some and lose some. You still will lose some. You still will fail to accomplish some of the things that you would like to accomplish. But let me clarify the most important thing here. You may not be able to control the outside world and all of that, but you can control everything about who you are becoming as a person. Isn't that interesting? That's not something that other factors can control. You have control over that variable. So in the end, this will be the most important thing. You can control your own character development. You can control your own competency development, your own skill development. You can control the person you become. So in the end, this will be the single most important outcome in your life, and that happens to be an outcome that you do control. So if you think about it long enough, you're going to say, "hmm, doing the little things for a long time, you got my attention."
0:13:06.3 Junior: Well, I appreciate you sharing those examples. They're poignant. I thought, I didn't know where you were going to take the flight when I thought you were going to say that your sky miles added up. That's certainly not true. But what do you think is different about your life today because you made the investment on the flights that you did? In other words, what do you think would be true if you hadn't done that?
0:13:29.1 Tim: We'd just be in a very different place. Well, let's take this last book, The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety. A lot of that was written on a plane or in a hotel room at night or taking an Uber drive. Just wherever, whenever. You're trying to make these small deposits. You're trying to be productive. You may not have big blocks of time, but you use what you have, you appreciate what you have and you try to be productive. Those things just simply add up. And after a few years, it makes all the difference in who you are and where you are. I don't know how else to say it, but if you look at it again from the lens of viewing a single day, you think, "That's insignificant. It doesn't matter." It adds up, it just does. It will for every person because time goes by. What did you do with that precious commodity that we call time? What did you do?
0:14:40.4 Junior: So here are a few more things, a few more reasons that the little things are important. I'm going to just rattle these off. Sustainability. This is a big one. Big heroic acts are often bursts of energy or they require specific circumstances. You can't do that type of work sustainably. Small things are sustainable. Big things are not. Progress over perfection. Small, consistent efforts lead to gradual improvement. This allows you to build on your successes and learn from your mistakes. If you wait for a grand outcome, you could very quickly be led to discouragement if you take a loss. Tim, you and I were talking earlier about the fact that any big thing is small things anyway. Tell me more about that.
0:15:25.3 Tim: Well, let's take another example, Junior, that I think both you and I can relate to. Learning a language. So I lived in Korea early in my life and had the chance to learn Korean. I don't know that anyone ever masters Korean because it's a Category 5, very hard language. You lived in Ecuador early in your life and you learned Spanish. So let's just take language acquisition as an example. How do you learn a language?
0:15:54.4 Junior: Slowly.
0:15:55.6 Tim: I mean, Junior, what do you think? Like, what did you do?
0:15:58.2 Junior: Well, I didn't just go speak Spanish in a day. I'll tell you that.
0:16:01.0 Tim: Yeah.
0:16:02.2 Junior: Same principle, piece by piece. You don't know much today. You'll know a tiny bit more tomorrow and a little bit more after that. And before you know it, you're fluent. And so day to day, there's no noticeable difference, but over a long enough time horizon, you look at the beginning of that segment and knows no Spanish, and then at some point in the future is fluent, then there's a lot of in-between. And the in-between is made up of a whole bunch of days, a whole bunch of discretionary effort, and a whole bunch of practice and failure. What was it like for you?
0:16:43.3 Tim: Same thing. I remember, and this was years ago, we didn't have smartphones. But I'd have little three-by-five cards, and I would have all these vocabulary words written down on these three-by-five cards. I can still see myself standing with my colleague at the bus stop in Downtown Seoul, waiting for the bus. And I've got my cards out, and I'm just drilling. I'm doing vocabulary drilling. I'm just going through words. [0:17:14.7] ____ Guembung hamnida. That means to study. Things like that. And you're just going through, you're drilling day after day. You're using the minutes that you have here or there. You're trying to talk. You're making a mess of things. You're making mistakes. You feel embarrassed, but you keep trying. And it's just a little day by day. And then I remember we went back to our apartment one night, and I'm a few months in, and my colleague is Korean, doesn't speak any English. And he spoke to me, and he just spoke to me in one long sentence. And like the light went on because I comprehended the whole entire sentence without re-translating into English, and I thought to myself, "Unbelievable, I'm getting this." That was a breakthrough moment that I think happens for all of us when we're learning a language, but what preceded that, just the daily grind of practicing and drilling and trying, and there was nothing fancy about that, Junior. That's just what it was.
0:18:31.4 Junior: Yeah, we'll talk more about fancy later. I'm excited to talk about that. I appreciate the example very much. Here are a couple more reasons, small is better: Compounding effect, habit formation, building momentum. Here's one for you, real work and more proof. Let me tell you what I mean. If you evaluate the small moves and the small wins, there's more of them. So you generate more evidence that you are who you say you are. You do more small things than you do big things. So stacking up small wins gives more durable confidence and motivation. So take the example of a game. The big picture is binary. You win, you lose. How useful is that information in preparing for your next game? The outcome level information is not useful at all. You have to break it down to the small things in order to get anything actionable. And here's where it gets interesting in my mind, maybe you did 90% of the things right, but you caught a bad break and you lost.
0:19:33.6 Junior: The loss doesn't define the quality of your performance. It's certainly an outcome and the outcome's important, but it does not define the quality of the performance. And the same is true for a win. This one's almost more interesting. Maybe you won but you didn't deserve to. So we're all happy about the fact that we got the W, but maybe there were some terrible mistakes made. Maybe there was some luck, some timing, some weird win, something that happened that ended in the win. What are we gonna do about that? A win would motivate us to not look back and excavate the performance and figure out what's going on. We may just move on.
0:20:06.9 Tim: Yeah, that's a good point.
0:20:08.6 Junior: That's tragic. So what we're saying is that good leaders do the small things. They read a few pages a day, maybe they hit inbox zero, they exercise and sleep. They say thank you. They celebrate small wins, they ask questions. They maybe have a three by five note card and write down words they don't know. There are all of these personal examples...
0:20:26.2 Tim: Yeah, that's right.
0:20:27.6 Junior: Of things that we can do that are small things. That's all well and good. But let's talk for a while about why it's hard. Why is this so hard? It doesn't seem revolutionary. Why is it difficult? Well, here's what fights against you. Here is the voice that tells you to do something different. You can't control the external environment. You can't, and this may lead you to believe that what you do doesn't matter. So if things bigger than you run the world and they run your world, you may as well just throw your hands up. So you may have a tendency to let the external environment dictate your behavior. And therein lies the problem. If the environment is uncontrollable, which at a macro level it absolutely is, and your behavior is dictated by the environment, then the only way that you can perceive your behavior is as ineffectual. And this is a really interesting thought. I think it's worth thinking about. It's worth time. If the environment is uncontrollable and you allow your behavior to be dictated by that uncontrollable environment, the only way you can perceive your behavior is as ineffectual. What do you think about that, Tim?
0:21:37.9 Tim: Well, you're being reactive. You're being an object and not an agent. You're not trying to impose order on the environment. It doesn't mean you can control it. We're not saying that, you can't. What did we say before? The premise is that the world is multivariate, but you're trying as much as you can to impose order and be an agent and act. And you can do that to some extent. You can't control everything, but there's a lot that you can do. I think that's what we're saying.
0:22:10.1 Junior: In light of that comment, can you achieve meaningful things or find consistent satisfaction if your perception of your own behavior is that it's all useless? Or that it's unpredictable or erratic or inconsistent, here's what will happen. Reduced motivation. And I've seen all of these in the lives of other people and in my own life. Or if you feel like your efforts don't matter, you're less likely to put in the hard work needed to achieve your goals. Increased stress, learned helplessness, lower self-esteem, passivity. These things will start to characterize our behavior, if we perceive it to be ineffectual.
0:22:48.4 Tim: Junior, not least, a loss of hope.
0:22:51.7 Junior: Absolutely.
0:22:52.0 Tim: A loss of hope.
0:22:53.2 Junior: Absolutely not least, that might be number one. So if we can't control the macro level environment, then why fight? Why fight against the powers that be? Well, here's why. You can't control everything, as Tim said, but you can influence almost anything. And how do you influence things? This is where we come full circle by doing the small things. So where have we been so far? Doing the small things is important. Doing the small things is hard. So now let's get into how do we do the small things? Let's talk practice. Let's talk technique. Let's talk about patterns and habits and things that we can do to make our job a little bit easier. So the first thing is to take responsibility for our current position. And there's some irony in this one. Are you exclusively responsible for your current position? Think about that in terms of your career, in terms of your life generally. Are you exclusively responsible? Of course not. Of course not. There are things that happened to you that were environmental, that were the effect of the behavior of other people, timing, dumb luck. You are not completely responsible, but the belief that you are is useful. It's certainly more useful than the belief that you're not responsible. So what do you think about the irony in there, Tim? We're not wholly responsible, but we should perceive ourselves to be.
0:24:23.8 Tim: I think it just facilitates the attitude of taking complete ownership. Any one of us could create a ledger and look at our own lives and say, I've been given advantage here, which I'm not responsible for. I've been given disadvantage here, which I'm not responsible for. And you could go down the line, but ultimately, as you say, you're better off if you just take responsibility for everything as much as possible. Because what are you doing? You're engendering this attitude of responsibility, of ownership of this is... I'm gonna own this. Even though as you said, we know that you can't control or take credit or blame for everything. That's just, that's not real. But that attitude means everything.
0:25:13.2 Junior: Well, I've seen some professional situations hinge on this, especially coaching engagements. It's pretty easy to predict how well a coaching engagement's gonna go if you understand the the person's perception of this idea and ask them, "Do you believe that you're responsible for your current position?" That's an interesting question. And the answer to that question will be indicative of how the rest of the coaching engagement will likely go. If the person says, "Absolutely, there are some things that I need to tune up. I know that there are some deficiencies that I have, some skills that I need to develop, and I'm confident that I can do it, but I need some help." Okay, now we're gonna go somewhere.
0:25:52.5 Tim: I wanna add a comment here. Junior. There's a book that Carl Rogers wrote, the noted American psychologist. It's called On Becoming a Person. And I just had this thought. There's a statement that he makes. It's a deep, rich insight. He says that from his, all of his clinical work working with patients over the years as a clinical psychologist, he said, "I've come to the conclusion that the facts," this is his statement, "The facts are always friendly."
0:26:28.3 Junior: I never heard that.
0:26:29.6 Tim: I was blown away by that insight. The facts are always friendly. What does he mean? The facts might indict you. The facts might convict you. [laughter] The facts might be painful. And he's acknowledging that. But what is he saying? He said, you're not gonna make any progress until you square up to the facts. And eventually, ultimately you will realize that those facts are friendly. They and only they will escort you to the next step of progress in your life. So while it's scary, frightening, vulnerable, as we begin the journey, I'm just gonna tell you upfront, the facts are always friendly. Don't you think that's an incredible insight?
0:27:25.9 Junior: It is. There's a lot behind that.
0:27:27.7 Tim: Yeah.
0:27:28.3 Junior: It makes me think, okay, well if the facts are friendly, what's not a fact? If it's not a fact, it's not reality. If it's not reality, it's a lie. And if facts are friendly, then lies are unfriendly. There are a lot of ways you could take that. I'm gonna be thinking about that.
0:27:44.4 Tim: We could spend an episode on that, Junior.
0:27:48.4 Junior: Yeah, no, I appreciate you bringing that up. I have never heard that and I'm gonna think about it. Okay, so that's number one is take responsibility for your current position. If you don't do that, doing any small thing is gonna be difficult. Next, disassociate your satisfaction from attaining the thing and associate it with the pursuit of the thing.
0:28:09.0 Tim: Well said.
0:28:10.6 Junior: So let's have a conversation here about pursuit versus achievement. Tim, have you ever achieved something that was anti-Climactic?
0:28:20.1 Tim: Yeah, probably a lot of things where when you finally get there, it's kind of a letdown and you look around and you think, oh, I got here, but oh, it's not all that great. So then you go searching for the source of satisfaction and it takes you backwards and you look back and you think, oh, I think I get it. I think it was the pursuit.
0:28:44.5 Junior: Or if the achievement wasn't anticlimactic, the next day probably was, right? You wake up, you say, okay, well that was great and what are we gonna do today? So I think each of us has some of those experiences. We've achieved something and then we were faced with, okay, well now what do we do? Even if that achievement was substantial, even though it was significant. How did you feel, Tim, when you finally achieved your doctorate. And they said, here you go, PhD. Was that the end of the road? Was that we've done it and now we can forever be satisfied?
0:29:28.2 Tim: No. What I've learned, Junior, is that the end is really the beginning.
0:29:32.3 Junior: Almost every end is a beginning.
0:29:34.4 Tim: It's always a beginning. It marks a new beginning. I think that's the way to frame it and the way to look at it. And that's what makes you excited because it's a beginning. There's not a lot of lasting satisfaction that comes from achieving the thing. I think that's what I learned from that.
0:29:56.5 Junior: Here's the next one. Break down the timeframe of performance evaluation away from the year or the decade or the lifetime and move to the day. This one's really interesting to me. I've thought a lot about this one. The cycle of the day is the smallest unit of measurement that makes sense to me. Partly because it has, I don't know if it's partly it might be entirely, because it has a biological stop start. It's hardwired.
0:30:25.9 Tim: You didn't choose that.
0:30:26.6 Junior: It's physical. You didn't choose this. You're just aligning to it. Daytime, nighttime, anything inside of that can be upset by so many other things. But what we know is true is that the sun will come up, the sun will go down, you can wake up and you can try again tomorrow. And that is a beautiful thing. I've tried other ways. I've tried the week. It's too long. I've tried the half day. I've even tried the hour, like, did I win the hour? That's not useful. What can you do in an hour? You can do a meaningful something in a day. You can do a lot of pursuit in a day. But that something about the sun goes down, I lay it down, I have to sleep at some point, right? Let's wake up and try again.
0:31:22.5 Tim: Isn't it interesting Junior, there's, as you say, renewal is built into that natural unit of performance or cycle of performance. I find that interesting. The renewal's built in.
0:31:36.7 Junior: Oh, there's separation, right?
0:31:38.2 Tim: Separation, yeah.
0:31:38.9 Junior: I've thought about this idea. What if, for whatever reason. This isn't a question of planetary function, but what if you just didn't have nighttime? Or what if you just didn't have to sleep? What if for whatever reason, evolutionarily there were no biological stop start, think about what that might be like, one perpetual day. That's interesting. That's fascinating to me. What would that be like? It's just this continuous, it ebbs and it flows, but it never stops. There's something beautiful about the fact that there is a nighttime that we can put it down. And what I also love is your whole orientation toward the day can change. You can have the worst day that anyone has ever had and wake up the next morning with a little bit more hope than you had with which you went to bed, right? And you could also have a great day the previous day and nuke the next one, right?
0:32:43.1 Junior: But then you can start again. And so we have all of these chances and that's kind of how I look at them. It's another chance, it's another go. It's another 24 hours and we're gonna get another one and another one. And we have enough 24 hour periods across a lifetime that you can do some pretty neat things with enough of those 24 hour blocks. What do you think about this? Do you find this true? Do you agree with that? Do you find it useful to have a 24 hour cycle? How do you measure your own performance? I'm curious.
0:33:12.3 Tim: Yeah, I completely agree with this, Junior. This is the natural rhythm cadence. The day becomes the unit of performance and then we get to rest and renew. This is built in, as you said. If we didn't have this, what would people do? Would they be more or less productive, more or less happy? It's a fascinating question to ask yourself. I completely agree with this. Sometimes you, and hopefully you come to the end of the day and you do a little evaluation, you examine how the day went and how you did and what went well and what didn't go so well, and how you used your time, what decisions you made. And if you're paying attention, then you can learn from that and you get a new start the next day. It's a glorious thing. [laughter]
0:34:07.0 Junior: I have a good friend and this is the way he marks a calendar. And his question is, did I win the day? And that's something that I love. And he has a a literal physical calendar and he will just put a W if overall he felt like he did what he could do that day. And I think that that's, I think it's relevant. So let's get a little bit more nuance. So here's a timeline distinction. 24 hours seems to be an appropriate measure of pursuit. You can't achieve a lot in 24 hours relative to a week, a month, a year. You can effectively evaluate your pursuit. Now, I would suggest that we have a different timeline for the evaluation of achievement. And I would say that it's 24 months. Now, does it need to be exactly 24 months? Maybe it could be 12. Maybe it's three years, five years, I don't know.
0:35:02.1 Junior: Think about what might work for you, but for me, this works. Pursuit evaluation, 24 hours, achievement evaluation, 24 months. There are too many peaks and valleys across a week, a month, and even a year to be able to see A to B. If we look out 24 months we can see a trend line because 24 months seems to be long enough, at least in my own experience, to smooth out the peaks and the troughs and to get a trend line or to see the distance covered. And so we can kind of, every once in a while, pick our heads up, look back 24 months and say, I'm in a different place than I was 24 months ago. You can absolutely move the needle in 24 months. So I thought that that was kind of an interesting way to look at this. What do you think?
0:35:47.8 Tim: You get enough compounding Junior in 24 months. You get enough accumulation of effort, you can learn a... So let's go back to some of these examples. You can learn a language in 24 months. You can write a book in 24 months. You can get in shape in 24 months. You can build a meaningful relationship in 24 months. You can establish or change a habit in 24 months, that's sustainable. You can become competent in your new job and get to the point where you're really hitting your stride and performing in 24 months. There's so much that you can do in 24 months. Now, as you said, it's not magic. And it could be less, it could be more. But that's a time horizon that helps us look at accumulated progress over time that's meaningful.
0:36:46.3 Junior: So tell me about suspense in between. We have the day, we have the 24 months. So in the meantime, how do you look at that?
0:36:55.6 Tim: You've got suspense in the middle, and so we need to talk about that for a minute. So if you win the day, you try to focus on the day as the basic unit of performance. But so right, you're measuring your pursuit. But if you're measuring your achievement over maybe 24 months or something like that, what about in between? Well, there's suspense. There's suspense in long-term results. And so I think a helpful thing to do is to try to define milestones in advance, and gauge progress over time using milestones. It's so interesting, Junior. So my wife and I went to Rome a little while back and we took a bike ride on the Appian Way. And the Appian Way is this like highway, ancient highway that goes out of Rome. And I believe we were going south on the Appian way. And there are portions of the Appian way that are preserved that are 2000 years old. And they have the cobblestones, they're still there. And as we were riding, we were on this biking tour, and as we're riding out of Rome on the Appian way, we look over to the side of the highway and what do we see? A milestone.
0:38:27.0 Tim: A real live milestone, big piece of granite, like a little column. And you couldn't read it. It was defaced a lot, but it still had, and I can't read the Latin, but it was a marker. It was a milestone telling you how far out of Rome you were, giving you a sense of your progress. That blew me away to look at a real milestone. I don't know, it was like a spiritual experience to see a real milestone and to understand where that comes from and to realize how helpful that is. So I think how do you put up with the suspense? Your ultimate objective is out in the offing. It's way out there. You still have a long ways to go. You're on the Appian way, you're headed outta Rome. You're going, maybe you're going all the way to Naples. How are you gonna get there? How do you chart your progress? How do you gauge progress? You've got to be able to identify milestones and then rejoice when you hit a milestone. It marks progress along the way. And you need to be able to find great satisfaction in that, because that's part of the journey. So let's celebrate, let's rejoice, let's be excited about what we've accomplished and about the journey so far.
0:39:50.4 Junior: I had no idea that was literal. It makes sense. So let's talk about renewal for a second inside of this vein. So you mentioned that every once in a while, maybe kick back, watch a movie, renew, wind down. That's fine. Watch your patterns. What do you do to renew? So is there anything that after a while you're like, "I cannot write one more word. I'm done. I need to take a break." What does that look like for you in the in-between, so winning the day, having milestones, a two year marker. How do you recharge to go at it again?
0:40:30.7 Tim: I think you switched gears, Junior. This happened to me last week. I think it was Friday and I was trying to get in, maybe it wasn't Friday, I can't remember which day, but I was trying to write a certain number of words and it just wasn't happening. And I was just burned out and nothing was coming. So sometimes you just gotta go switch gears. And so for me, and everyone's different, but for me, I think going and doing something physical helps me. So I got on the rowing machine, [laughter] And that just helps me. It's a type of therapy, it's a diversion. It's shifting gears. Gotta do something. Or you tackle a different kind of work. But you've got to shift gears. You've gotta do something different. Something that allows you to decompress in some way or shift gears. It's different for everyone. I get it. But that's what I did. I got on the rower.
0:41:29.3 Junior: Yeah. Awesome. Put the meters in. So that is break down the timeframe of our performance evaluation away from the year or the decade or the lifetime. Move to the day. Here's the next one. Don't look for recognition, period. This one's a shorter sentence. Don't look for recognition. Maybe you'll become famous. Maybe you won't become famous. Fame or not, if your opinion of yourself is based on doing what you can do and then leaving it be, chances are you'll end up a pretty secure person. So unpack this with me, Tim. Don't look for recognition.
0:42:10.9 Tim: I think some of our listeners probably just heard you and said, "What? Can you repeat that please? What did you just say? Did you say, don't look for recognition. Isn't recognition a good thing?" I think maybe that's what some people are thinking right now.
0:42:24.6 Junior: Probably.
0:42:27.9 Tim: But that's a little counterintuitive because we think of recognition as a good thing. We need to give recognition to each other. We do. It's an important part of being human. It's an important part of the way that we validate each other and connect with each other. So that's true. But what I've learned, Junior, is that this cannot be a primary source of fuel in the journey. What's the principle here? Do the little things for a long time. Do you need recognition to keep doing the little things for a long time? I hope not. That's not going to sustain you. So what you're trying to do is train or prepare yourself to operate in this mode of doing the little things for a long time. That will inevitably mean that you go without recognition or reward. So then if you don't have that coming from the outside, right?
0:43:20.8 Tim: Extrinsic sources of reward and validation, what do you do? You go inside, you go internal. You need private acknowledgement. You need to become your own coach. You've got to learn how to engage in self coaching. And you've got to be able to find privately the reward and recognition. So achievement becomes its own reward, but achievement in the course of a given day, as we said. So you execute a successful day, that becomes its own form of compensation. You cannot rely on the external sources of recognition because you know that they will not come consistently. So if you have to rely on those, then you're already sunk. You're already dead in the water. It's not gonna work.
0:44:16.5 Junior: As I think about this sentence, don't look for recognition. I think about, well, what would have to be true in order for it to be in my best interest to look for recognition, recognition would have to be proxy for the quality of my inputs. So we can ask the question, how good a proxy indicator is recognition for the quality of your inputs? It's not, it's not even close. So let's unpack that. So recognition, what would you get recognized for, generally speaking? A small thing or a big thing? We already explained, and we know that the bigger the thing, the less likely it is dependent entirely upon your own inputs. Okay. So we know that that's true. Next, what if the outcome of the big thing was favorable? You get recognition for it, but you did not put in the inputs accordingly. So you win the game, people pat you on the back, but inside you say, "Well, I didn't do what I was supposed to do, but we won anyway."
0:45:21.6 Junior: Okay, well how healthy is that recognition? How useful is that recognition? So in essence, what I'm saying is generally speaking, the recognition is no indicator of the quality of your inputs. Okay? So if that's true, then let's not look for it. If it's not indicative of the quality of our inputs, our lead indicators, which are the things that we can control, then let's not look for it. So to me, it becomes obvious after you peel back a few layers that this is not something we should search for. If you get recognized and you put in the inputs, you controlled the lead measures, and you had a good outcome, awesome. Gravy. Icing. Perfect. Great. Right? That should be 1%. That should be 1% of what's on our mind.
0:46:17.8 Tim: Someone told me a reliable source that you're training for a race, and I think we need to use that as an example. [laughter] of this very thing. Okay. Can we?
0:46:32.1 Junior: Sure.
0:46:32.8 Tim: Sure. So you're training for a race. What kind of race? This is not an ordinary race.
0:46:39.4 Junior: No, it's a trail ultra marathon.
0:46:40.8 Tim: A trail ultra marathon. So tell us a little bit about that.
0:46:47.0 Junior: So this is a race that's somewhat close to home in the Wasatch.
0:46:54.5 Tim: In the mountains.
0:46:55.9 Junior: It's a lot of vertical. It's 15,000 total feet of elevation change. It's 50 miles. The winning times from pro runners are like 10 hours. So it's a long race. It's probably, well, I won't rank it, but it's a difficult race as 50 milers go. It's a difficult one.
0:47:17.3 Tim: So let's apply this principle in the context of training, preparing for that Mountain Ultra marathon. What does recognition do for you in this process of preparation?
0:47:31.6 Junior: Nothing. Which is why...
0:47:33.2 Tim: Nothing [laughter]
0:47:34.6 Junior: To share this on the podcast. Hopefully I'm not getting some faux dopamine hit from announcing this on the podcast. I have not done the race yet. But even if I had, I would hope that the motivation or the satisfaction would come from, again, looking back at the quality of my inputs because only I on race day will know if I prepared, no one else will. Regardless of how close to home they were to the training, they won't know. Even if I finish, only I will know if I had more in the tank, if I was completely spent, if I prepared the best that I could. So really at the end of the day, and this goes for all of us in any endeavor, we have to be the judges. Why? The quality of a judge is dependent on the quality of the information available to them. So how well can you judge your performance? Only as well as you understand the inputs. So I'm keenly aware of my inputs. Why? 'Cause I'm in my own body. I can see my own thoughts. I know what's going on in here. I know whether I got up and I put in the miles. This race is not a race that you can just go and grind through tomorrow. You won't finish, straight up. You will not finish.
0:48:52.4 Tim: So Junior, given that, recognition becomes not just not helpful, but it's like immaterial.
0:49:00.0 Junior: Completely immaterial.
0:49:01.4 Tim: It does. So what?
0:49:04.1 Junior: Yeah, Well, and and again, like if there's some recognition at the end of the race, great.
0:49:09.8 Tim: Okay, great, great, great. Yeah.
0:49:12.3 Junior: Right. But that can't affect the way that I prepare for this. And I'll tell you what, here's another truth. The aspiration of recognition at the end will not pull you through the training necessary to do the thing. I'll tell you that.
0:49:27.0 Tim: Not even close.
0:49:28.1 Junior: It is 3:30 AM and raining last week and I have to go run hill repeats in the dark. There is no one out there. It's like the rocky cut scene. And everyone has...
0:49:42.8 Tim: The squirrels were applauding, Junior.
0:49:44.7 Junior: Yeah, maybe they were. Thank you, squirrels. But everyone has their own rocky cut scene, right? And for me, I love that. I love thinking about, okay, what are the things that we can do when the world is asleep, right? And sometimes literally, but no one's watching. And what motivation can we draw on to go and do that next thing that we know would make us better or that would benefit the team or that would benefit the people around us or benefit the organization? Those are the things that matter. And so at the end of the day, because it, again, it comes down to the day, did I get the training in today or not? Okay, I got the training in today. Great, that adds up. One day you can't run at all. Then someday in the future you can run a whole bunch. And there are days that happened in between those two and those are the ones that matter. The cumulative effect is really interesting. So in terms of total mileage, you can only increase your mileage about 10% a week. At the high end to do that sustainably.
0:50:56.4 Tim: That's all you can do. You can't cram.
0:51:00.7 Junior: Yeah, if you don't do that responsibly, you're gonna injure yourself. But before you know it, you can do pretty extraordinary things. And that's true for each of us. I think each of us can look back on some achievement and say, "Wow, that was something that I wasn't sure I was capable of. But I put in the inputs and I experienced the reward of the pursuit of getting better, of doing the thing." And probably the satisfaction that meant the most to you when you look backwards comes from those times where you did it yourself, you or your own audience. It meant something to you because you knew what you put into it. Maybe it's some feat that no one cares about at all. Couldn't care less. Even if they knew about it, they're like, "Oh yeah, that's nice. Don't care." Okay, well do you. Well then do it for you. Do it for you. And if you get recognition, that's gravy.
0:52:01.8 Tim: That's gravy. Junior I think maybe that you need to add that recognition is gravy. That's the way you need to frame it.
0:52:10.1 Junior: That's how we have to perceive it. I don't mean to say that it's not useful and that we shouldn't recognize each other, but let's... Okay, let's take that for a second. If recognition is important, then we might ask, what type of recognition should we give? Let's let it be informed by what you mentioned regarding Carol Dweck. Let's recognize the inputs.
0:52:33.5 Tim: The inputs.
0:52:35.2 Junior: Let's recognize the effort. So if you're going to give praise to someone else, don't praise the outcome. Because I'll tell you what, 99% of the recognition that I will get at the end of this race is going to be what? "Wow. I can't believe you did that race." Do you know how many people say, "Wow, I can't believe you did the training," not one person. And that's the hard part. And so whenever I see this with other people, I try to make it a point to praise the inputs.
0:53:06.3 Junior: So here's one, the 10 years of silence thing that I'm interested in your perspective, Tim. So recognition is this fickle thing because sometimes it comes to those who who don't perform and for some reason get the recognition. There are those who aren't good at something, get recognized anyway, those who are good and don't get recognized ever, and those who are good and who eventually get recognized. So which one of those would you choose? My opinion, I think that the ideal path is to work in anonymity or relative anonymity in the dark for a really long time. And then get a dose of recognition later. Why? 10 years of silence, and it's the proverbial 10 years of silence; not necessarily exactly that, gives you a better chance of holding up to the pressure of fame in the public eye if fame in the public eye ever come. Across a 10 year period, you have to persist long enough to get through the initial motivation burn. And then you have to figure out how to fuel your progress on nothing but your own discipline. Or on little, but your own discipline. What do you think about that idea of there's a little bit of anonymity, a little bit of silence you might have to work through.
0:54:16.9 Tim: I think that's going to happen. I think you need to assume that and expect that. It reminds me of the great writer William Defoe. He wrote Robinson Crusoe and he said, "Crowns are empty things." And I take a crown to mean a kind of a metaphor for recognition, or adulation. And it's going to be a very transitory experience. So I think if you know that going in, oh, it's just so helpful. And so then that helps redirect you back to what would you like to accomplish and can you toil in obscurity and enjoy that process. Van Gogh, he painted because he loved it. He loved it. He loved the process, he loved what he was doing. And people didn't even appreciate what he was doing in his lifetime. Maybe a little bit at the end, but not much. They didn't realize how he was shifting the paradigm and changing art and creating a new style that was so distinctive, but he didn't do it for that. So you've got to be able to find your private compensation. Yeah.
0:55:40.9 Junior: There are a lot of examples of that. So if you find yourself toiling away in obscurity, but you think you're doing meaningful work, keep toiling, good. Okay, last one. Look for magic in the mundane. This is a reframe, this is a repositioning. Glamor is not your friend. Consistency is your friend. The best things that we will achieve, the most meaningful things, the things from which we will derive the most satisfaction will come from consistency. If you search for glamor, if you search for fame, if you search for the shiny thing, when you achieve that, it will be an empty crown. I think we've all experienced this. I can speak to this. Tim, you can probably speak to this.
0:56:26.9 Tim: Yeah.
0:56:27.2 Junior: If that is the aspiration, it will be a letdown. And there is magic in the toil. There is magic in the daily input, in the small things. And if we can find that, if we can look at the rote work that is in front of us and say, "How is this magical?" You can find something in there, I guarantee it. So maybe a project you're working on, a paper you need to submit, some deliverable that's requiring a whole lot. There's magic in there somewhere. There's artistry somewhere in there. What do you think about this one?
0:57:02.2 Tim: I agree. I think there's nothing more beautiful than a tired smile at the end of a hard day.
0:57:11.2 Junior: Yeah, I love that. That should probably be the aspiration of all leaders. A tired smile at the end of the day, knowing that you put in what you could do. So that's the conversation for today. What did we learn? To summarize, what we do matters. It matters a whole lot. Annihilistic attitude makes no one's life better. What you do is important and there are things that only you can do. You can't control everything, but you can influence almost everything. So focus on pursuit, not achievement. Break down your unit of performance to 24 hours. Do what you can and then leave it be, look for magic in the mundane. Tim, any final thoughts?
0:57:51.8 Tim: This is what life comes down to. So let's find joy in that, in the daily journey.
0:57:57.0 Junior: Well, I appreciate your time today, Tim. I learned a whole lot, lots that I'm going to be thinking about. And for those listening, thank you. Thank you for your time, your attention. We appreciate your listenership very much, and we're grateful for the work that you do in the world. And we at LeaderFactor are here to support you. You can always reach out to us at leaderfactor.com. If you like today's episode, leave us a like a review and share with a friend. Take care everyone, we will see you next time. Bye-Bye.
0:58:21.6 S4: Hey, Culture by Design listeners, this is the end of today's episode. You can find all the important links from today's episode at leaderfactor.com/podcast. And if you found today's episode helpful and useful in any way, please share with a friend and leave a review. If you'd like to learn more about LeaderFactor and what we do, then please visit us at leaderfactor.com. Lastly, if you'd like to give any feedback to the Culture By Design podcast or even request a topic from Tim and Junior, then reach out to us at info@leaderfactor.com or find and tag us on LinkedIn. Thanks again for listening and making culture something you do by design, not by default.