Marcus Buckingham 0:00 You're supposed to just listen to what people say, and what people actually say when they're trying to describe spontaneously, top of mind, an extreme positive experience. The word they use is love, and when you push on that, you realize what they're saying is something categorically different than like. Love isn't just like turned up to 11. Kurt 0:20 And when you think about it, he's right. I mean, love isn't just like turned up to 11. I mean, you've probably said something to the tune of, I loved that day when the team had that fantastic brainstorm, or we just coalesced so great together, or I loved how that customer agreed with all of the fantastic recommendations that we made, that I just love that feeling that we had right. And once you recognize it, Tim, once you recognize that you already use the word love to describe all of these elements of your work, you start seeing it everywhere, and you start noticing that the people around you also use love all the time to talk about their work as well. Tim Houlihan 1:13 Yeah, you'll also notice that people don't like they don't say things like, Oh, I liked raising my kids, or I liked building something meaningful for my client, or I liked being part of a great team. They say they loved it. And when you begin to discover that there are things at work that you love, it's worth spending some time considering how to do more of it. Our question for you in this episode is this, how do you build more love into your days at work? Kurt 1:46 Now we all know that it's super common at work to be building systems that are efficient, that are effective, and we need that right Tim, we need that efficiency, we need that effectiveness. But those aren't necessarily the things that connect us with that memory of, oh yeah, I love that. I love that time when I was making that accounting system more effective. Oh, that was fantastic. I loved it. No, no. I mean that focus on efficient and effective are the things that can actually disconnect us from the very things that make us feel human, that make us feel that we love what we're doing, that work doesn't have to be a long list of things that we like, even if they're turned up to 11, right? But work could actually include some things that we love. It's such a cool idea. Tim Houlihan 2:45 Kurt and too often, we treat loving something as just a stronger version of liking it. But our guest, Marcus Buckingham, says loving something at work is fundamentally different. Marcus is the author of a new book called Design love in how to unleash the most powerful force in business. And his idea is that if people talk about products they love and certain aspects of their job that they love, we could do a better job of designing love into those products, into those processes and into those experiences. Kurt 3:20 And that has big implications for how we think about how we spend our time at work, and more importantly, how we actually go about doing that work and we and are we doing it because we love it or just because it's efficient? I Tim, welcome to behavioral grooves, the podcast that explores our groove at work. I'm Kurt Tim Houlihan 3:48 Nelson and I'm Tim Houlihan. We talk with researchers and other interesting people about using a behavioral science lens to help us find Kurt 3:57 our groove. And in this episode, we're going to spend some time talking with Marcus about his very cool idea designing love into the workplace. He's also going to open up, open us up to a bigger conversation about our strengths, and he'll challenge us with a powerful question, what if your strengths aren't what you're good at, but what you love, Tim Houlihan 4:22 and here's the deal, you're going to walk away from this conversation with Marcus with a totally fresh and completely novel understanding of your strengths. You're going to get this very cool, innovative perspective that trying to leverage what you're good at might not be the path to either a successful or enjoyable career. Kurt 4:44 Who that sounds good? So you'll get a clear picture of yourself and why you might be asking the wrong question, and you'll see that we often think that we should be doing what we're good at. So. So that's the question that we typically ask ourselves. Am I good at this? But the question that Marcus thinks we should be asking is, what gives me energy, what makes me feel more like myself? That's really where the power is. That's where the love is. Tim Houlihan 5:17 So with that, we invite you to sit back and relax with a fine pour of loving what you do and enjoy our conversation with Marcus Buckingham. Tim Houlihan 5:34 Marcus Buckingham, welcome to behavioral grooves. Very happy to be here. Thank you for joining us. We're going to loosen things up with a speed round just to get started. Get started. And would you first speed run question, would you prefer to learn a new instrument or a new language? Marcus Buckingham 5:50 Definitely a new language. I've tried learning new instruments. Even the first instrument was a struggle. Kurt 5:57 Trombone. We had that conversation prior to even getting on. So there you go. Yeah, fair enough. So language, what would you have a language in mind? Marcus Buckingham 6:08 Yeah. Well, I was, I studied French. Was my major, actually, in university. So I love, I love the process of and the art of translation, funnily enough. But the language I think that I would love to learn, mostly because of now, where I live, is Spanish, and I have not I mean, shame on me. I thought was like, Well, I know a bit of Italian, and I know that, you know, I know a lot of French, the Spanish, not me that hard. But those people who say it's just the same but with a slightly different accent, they're wrong. It's difficult. This fits Spanish. Tim Houlihan 6:43 I would love that shortcut. I would actually, that would be a great AI thing for my brain. I would love to have that shortcut with the ability, Marcus Buckingham 6:53 right, yes, like, forget about, like, AI to help you figure out patterns in your in your meeting notes, or making a PowerPoint deck, spontaneous, embedded translation, that would be so cool. Didn't they have that Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? Didn't they have? Didn't eat a fish? I think there was a fish. Yeah, you ate a fish, and it turned like that's, I need the Kurt 7:16 fish, internal AI fish. There you go. The translation fish. I love it all right? The Speed Round is never speedy. I don't know why we even call it a speed round. We always go down these rabbit holes with it. Marcus, are you a coffee drinker or a tea drinker? Marcus Buckingham 7:32 Well, I shouldn't say this outside of the UK, but I'm actually a coffee drinker. Kurt 7:39 I know you've gone to the dark side. Huh? You broadcast Marcus Buckingham 7:43 this, right? This isn't going out anywhere. No, no. Kurt 7:45 Any of your friends over in England? No, not at all. Okay, Tim Houlihan 7:52 okay, third speed round question, we'll try to get you out of that hot water. Pun intended, it's always Tim, oh, man, this is not going well so far, true or false, true or false, managers should just focus on their people's strengths and just manage around their weaknesses. Well, that'd be true. Marcus Buckingham 8:17 I mean, that's and that's not a moccasism. That's the research that we did 25 years ago now, first break all the rules was the first book I wrote, and that was a study of 80,000 really great managers. And of course, they're all different. They're all different styles of motivation and focus and so on. But if you were to say, what do they all have in common, it would be that one that they understand that humans. I think one of the managers line was, you don't try to put in what God left out. Try to draw out what God left in. And that's hard. That's hard enough. So they their notion of like, wow, humans are individual. Even if you got 10 people in the same job, they still do it differently, with different strengths and weaknesses. And so your choice as a manager is, where do you spend most of your time? And in chorus, they all said we spend most of our time focusing on people's strengths, which doesn't just mean praise. I mean, obviously it means asking you to step into those strengths and contribute them, and refine them and so forth, and then you manage around the weaknesses, because you're not going to, you're not going to rewire the entirety of a person's brain. You can get some change over time. We don't need to have a fixed mindset, to quote Carol Dweck, but, but the question really isn't, will you grow or not? The question is, where will you grow the most? And the best managers were all like, you know what people will grow the most? Counter intuitively, in their areas of greater strength? Kurt 9:34 Yeah, love that. And again, I think all these insights are fantastic, and you take this because you've done the research you you that's your your background. So I just would like to for the final speed round question, would you consider yourself a data nerd or a data geek, or would it be something else? Marcus Buckingham 9:59 Well, these are. Very Kurt 10:02 fine distinction. Yes, I know there's, there's that. Or you could just go, No, I'm a data scientist, and that's what I consider myself, or whatever you would consider that, that right answer to be. Marcus Buckingham 10:13 I think what I am generally is a person who I have a very I don't know. Like, what do you own in terms of truth? Yeah, like, what do you and I'm always leery of any sentence which begins with the with the phrase, I think, because while I appreciate my opinion or anyone else's opinion, on some level, I would like to know, not just what I think I'd like to know what's knowable. And there are many ways to knowledge. Not everything that is important can be measured, but there's a lot that can be measured. And as a psychometrician by training, I'm always trying to measure things that are very important, but you can't purely count, so strengths, engagement, satisfaction, sentiment of all kinds. How do you measure how happy someone is, how flourishing they are, but whether they have empathy or strategic thinking or growth orientation? Like, how do you measure those things for whatever daft reason? That's always been I've just always been intrigued by that. Like, if we say all leaders have these 10 competencies for whatever reason, my question is always, how do you know that? Have you reliably measured those 10 competencies? Have you proven, in some sort of concurrent validity study that the most successful leaders have statistically significantly more of those competencies than a control group? Have you proven that the people who identify which ones they lack then acquire them, and they get better, like for whatever reason, pushing on that and going, what do we really know about anything to do with, in this case, leadership competencies, my brain ends up going to data. Going, can you measure it? Can you see whether or not you're getting better at it, and whether you call that a data geek or date, I don't know whether it's geeky or nerdy. It's really just a reaching for truth in so far as we have access to it. And I'm not so crazy to think that we know everything, but we can measure some things reliably. And I think that's interesting and useful. Kurt 12:19 I love that, and I think it leads into the next area that I kind of wanted to go down before we get into the book itself. But I think many of our listeners are there. You know, behavioral science enthusiasts, they understand to a certain degree, some of the research, but the way that you're doing your your studies, your surveys isn't necessarily just taking the average of a population. You're actually looking at things in a different way. Can you explain? And I heard you do this in another podcast that you did, and just like the way that you actually dissect that that data, even before you start really looking at it, looking at the top, you know, you talked about 135, world in the book. So how do you actually slice and dice in order to get to that truth that you were talking about? Marcus Buckingham 13:12 The whole approach that I take as a researcher is, and I'm not suggesting by any means, that this is the only way to do research at all, but the approach that I took, and I was schooled in this by my mentor, Don Clifton, who was the chairman of Gallup when I joined in 87 when I was five, Tim Houlihan 13:36 there you go, Marcus, you Started Gallup. The same air you start kindergarten. Marcus Buckingham 13:41 Exactly, hey, hey, just a little precocious. But his whole thing, which I was just immediately fascinated by, was that that you have to take a differentiated approach to studying extreme positives, that if you understand want to understand health, don't study disease. If you want to understand happiness, don't study depression. And this was before Marty Seligman did the whole positive psychology thing in 1988 So Dan's whole thing, which is, I think, radical, but beautiful, is that excellence isn't the opposite of failure, it's just different, and you can't infer the patterns or the configurations of excellence, whatever excellence in customer experiences, excellence in leadership, excellence in sales, whatever it is. You can't infer it from studying pathological functionings or pathological examples of that, or even averages, and then just either inverting them if you're studying the pathological version of it, or just improving it slightly. If you're studying the average, his insight was no, no. Average doesn't tell you anything about excellence, and failure tells you nothing about excellence. All this stuff we talk about, you got to study failure. You learn so much more from failure. What you learn from failure is a really deep understanding of failure, which is okay. It helps you know what to avoid. But if you want to understand excellence, you got to study it, and it's got its own pattern. So you're not studying it because it's nicer to study it. You're not studying it because it's the tyranny of the positive. You're studying it because it's different. So in the case of first break all the rules, going back 25 years, you go study the world's best managers, because they've got weird configurations of insight and understanding, and you wouldn't get to those unless you have a study group that is an extreme positive and when you start with that sort of premise, you end up with, you know, interesting findings, like with the best managers they which is why we called it first. Break all the rules. They play favorites. They do not treat everyone the same. They get really close to their people. They do all sorts of things that, if you're not pretty careful, sound a lot like what the worst managers do. So you have to take an approach. If you're wanting to be curious about excellence, you've got to create what are called concurrent validity studies, where you take a study group of an excellent set of practitioners in that role, whether it's housekeepers or whether it's leaders or whether it's salespeople or generals or happy customers. You take an exact, an excellent or an example of excellent or extreme positive functioning, and you study that, and you basically then take a control group, and the control group isn't terrible, the control group is the averages. And the question that you're presented with is, what's the difference between excellence and average? And that's for whatever reason, always intrigued me that the pattern of excellence that we want to understand, because we want to repeat it, presumably, is only there to be discovered. If you go listen to do focus groups with do quantitative, primary quantitative research with people that are excellent. Excellence got its own pattern, and it's funny, we live in a world that pathologizes. I mean, we, we, we hold up studying failure as like an unalloyed good that we should all be doing, that we have businesses that spend a lot of time focused on the ones. And how do we move them to the threes, ones to threes, ones to threes. In school, you focus on the F, F to C, F to C, which is fine. I would not dream of suggesting we ignore that, but it doesn't. And this is the big sort of Aha, I think for folks, is you won't learn anything about excellence by doing the ones to threes, which is why, in the book, I was like, we live in a 135 world. We live in a 135 world. And that's the big mind shift that began the book really was, do you live in a 135, world? Then at some point you got to be super curious about the fives. And that's really what led to everything else that's in the book. What's in the fives? How do we get more of them? Where do they come from? What do they drive? What is a five experience for employees or for customers? Kurt 18:03 Hey, grooves, quick break from the conversation to talk about something we don't bring up enough on the show. Tim Houlihan 18:09 Yeah, that's right, when we're not behind the mic, we're working with organizations to apply behavioral science in ways that actually move the needle for leaders, teams and whole cultures. Kurt 18:20 So whether it's designing smarter incentives, boosting engagement, setting goals that actually stick, or helping teams navigate change, we bring real science to real workplace challenges, and we don't Tim Houlihan 18:32 just talk theory. Our approach blends research backed insights with hands on strategies that drive results, and we've seen small behavioral shifts lead to big wins in Fortune 500 companies and scrappy startups, and even in mission driven nonprofits, Kurt 18:49 yeah, and we bring the same curiosity, creativity and care to our client work that we bring to every episode of the show, really, Tim Houlihan 18:57 I think people might Want more than what we bring to the show you Kurt 19:03 you probably have a point there. You're probably right. Okay, so Tim Houlihan 19:06 we'll bring more care and creativity to our work with you and your teams than what we do on the show. Kurt 19:13 Yes, more care. So. So if you're ready to build stronger motivation, better team dynamics, and maybe even make your workplace a little more groovy? Tim Houlihan 19:23 Yeah, reach out to us. Grab us on LinkedIn or Facebook or just drop us a line. We'd love to help you and your team find your groove. I love that. I love hearing you say that because it's so meaningful in our world. It's such an important and counterintuitive insight that more managers need to pay attention to. I've spent a fair amount of time in leadership positions and very, very large financial institutions to working with clients at Fortune 50 organizations. Nations around the world. And I gotta say, when, when we started reading design love in your new book, I don't remember seeing any mentions of love in any of the PowerPoint presentations that were given. It was in none of the strategic plans. It didn't show up anywhere. How do we go? So, I mean, before we actually get to the sort of the solution, stuff, what, what's your, what's your argument for why we should be designing love in why should we be thinking about about love? And maybe, maybe you should talk about, actually, what love means in this multifaceted world. Marcus Buckingham 20:37 Yeah, well, as simply as one can say it, if you were talking to a CFO, a hard boiled CFO, and starting talking about design love, and they're full of love. They are just general counsels, you know, Oh, love, love, love, love, Kurt 21:01 suiting it like every universe. There you go, yeah. Marcus Buckingham 21:08 But if you, if you really look at successful businesses, they've got a couple of characteristics. Obviously they got they've got customers having extreme positive behaviors, customers come back, customers who advocate, customers who spread positive word of mouth. And you've got employees who work hard, they're retained, they're loyal, they tell friends and family to come work here. So if you look at extreme positive companies, there's some really obvious outcomes that we can see that any CFO, frankly, would go, Yeah, I want more productivity from people. I want more loyalty from people. I want from customers. I want more people like you. Want all those things. If you then study those things, you discover two characteristics of extreme, positive outcomes, which seem straightforward when I say them right? Now, it's going to be like, Duh. We don't. Tim Houlihan 22:04 We don't. Let's try. Marcus Buckingham 22:05 It'll be duh. Okay, so you want, again, imagine I'm talking to a CFO. You want these outcomes? Right? Yes, of course. We want those outcomes. We want extreme positive outcomes from customers and from employees. Well, if you look at what creates those extreme positive outcomes. The first discovery is that there's an equation behind outcomes. Experiences drive behaviors, drive outcomes. Experiences of the customers drive their behaviors, which drives their outcomes? The experiences of the employees drives their behaviors, which drive the outcomes? Which means, if you want to create extreme positive outcomes, you've got to take experiences stream. You have to go downstream and start designing extreme, positive experiences, which sounds obvious, although it raises the question, What the heck is an experience? But when you actually look out at most businesses, they don't try to drive outcomes by designing experiences. They try to drive outcomes by being directive. So if you want good outcomes from an employee, you set goals and then give coaching and feedback to to drive the behavior. And if you want good outcomes from customers, your directive, you set prices and then you have loyalty programs and you incent or incentivize which do work temporarily, they don't work sustainably. No one ties their their identity to a company as a customer because of some sort of loyalty program. You've got no no employee ties their identity and their passion to your company because how well you set the goals. So directives work temporarily. There's a slew of data which show that if you want to drive great outcomes, you've got to create great experiences, which means that really, for all leaders, you're an experience maker. You might not have said it that way, but you are making experiences about that email. That's not an email. It's an experience that meeting. It's not a meeting, it's an experience that coaching conversation. It's not a coaching it's an experience. You're making experiences. And the question for you as a leader, as I said in the book, is, the question isn't, are you one or not? The question is, are you a skilled one? And in fact, the whole focus of the book is, how do you build the skill of experience intelligence, which is the intentional shaping of experiences so you can drive outcomes? Well, that's interesting because that's nowhere. Let's talk about like, you know what's missing in C suites. It's real experience intelligence. So that's the first thing is, what underpins extreme positive outcomes, extreme positive experiences. Second is that when you pause extreme positive experiences and you just do focus groups or interviews, and you just get people, customers or employees, talking about, well, tell me about that extreme positive experience, whether it's at the grocery store or whether it's working for that mentor, or whether it's an extreme positive experience with a sunscreen, whatever the extreme positive experience is, the word you hear again and again and again and again is I love that I love that I love that I love that manager, I love that team. I love that sunscreen. I love that. Brandon, and as I said in the book Maya culpa, like shame on me, I kept changing it. As a stuffy British researcher, I kept going, well, I know they're saying love, but they mean joy, passion, strength, even you know, engagement, satisfaction. I just changed the word to make it more businessy palatable. And that's not right, if people that what you're supposed to do with primary qualitative research is you're supposed to ask open ended questions in focus groups and interviews and then shut up, and then whatever people say, you're supposed to just write it down and then use it in your primary quantitative research. That's how when you hear some teams say, I have a best friend at work, you know you hear the word best friend at work? Well, you write down best friend at work, and then you test that item to see whether or not the best teams have more best friends than the average teams. You're supposed to just listen to what people say and what people actually say when they're trying to describe spontaneously. Top of Mind, an extreme positive experience. The word they use is love, and when you push on that, you realize what they're saying is something categorically different than like. Love isn't just like, turned up to 11, and it's weird, because love is used in a lot of different content. I love my shoes. I love my mom. Well, initially, when you hear that, you're like, Oh, love is just a careless exaggeration of the word, like, right or my mom is a pair of shoes. Could be when you unpack that Tim to go to your question. And I know there's a lot in here, and we should get to the data behind this too at some point, because there is the whole hockey stick, the J co the Curva linear relationship between experiences and outcomes is interesting. But anyway, bottom line, people use the word love to describe it their extreme positive experiences in all sorts of different contexts, which pushes you then to go, what the heck do they mean around the world? By the way, this is true in Japan, as much as it is here in the US or anywhere else, and it feels as though what people are meaning when they reach for the word love Marcus Buckingham 27:02 is that they are looking for any experience that gives them an opportunity to feel more fully themselves over time, feel more fully yourself over time, that's flourishing. That's a really good description of what it means to flourish. And the feeling is that we humans go through life rolled up like an armadillo. We've got stuff inside of us that we want to put out. We don't want to get to 95 and sit on the porch and feel like we live some second rate version of someone else's life. But we know the world's scary, so we go through life armor plated, and then any experience that gives us a chance to take one little plate of armor off. It could be, I love those shoes. I don't know I put them on, and they just make me just open up a little bit. Or it could be something much more intimate, like that mentor, he or she saw the best in me and set me up way before I was ready, actually to really shine, whether it's the most trivial, like a pair of socks or a pair of shoes, or whether it's really meaty, like a mentor or a mom, whenever we bump into any experience that allows us to take off one or two layers of armor and feel more fully ourself, the Word we humans reach for to describe that feeling is love. And so when we push on it, we realize people aren't being careless. Of course, there's 8 billion definitions of the word love. I totally get it. There aren't five love languages, sorry, Greeks. There aren't eight definitions of love. There's 8 billion. But also, there's a common definition that we seem to be using when we reach for the word love, and it's got something very closely related to a chance to feel fully myself in that experience whenever as a whether we're a financial services institution or a hotel or a restaurant or a sunscreen or A car company whenever we bump into it, or working on a team whenever we bump into an experience that allows us to take off those little plates of armor. Kurt 29:08 We say, love that, duh. So Kurt 29:17 I want to dig into that, and I want to dig into the data behind it, but, but even before we go there, I think the the piece I the part of what Tim was getting at, I think, is this, businesses are just so reluctant to even use the word love. It is not in the vernacular within most organizations. It's, it seems like off, it's, it's something that you just would never talk about in a rational business organization. How do you overcome that? And maybe, maybe we go into the research to, you know, unpeel that, but, but how do you get. That leader to go, it's okay to talk about how we love what we do here, how we have we love the What Our Customers Are Saying, and use that actual word in all of its 8 billion connotations that you talked about. Marcus Buckingham 30:17 Yeah. No, it's, it is. I mean, let's face it, we live in a world where we're trying to drive the world love out of our vernacular. Actually, many CHROs are trying to drive love out of the workplace. There are many leaders, even of late, who are clearly treating their people, even since covid, in a much more extractive, transactional, confrontative way. And in fact, we're living in a world not just a directive leadership, but of chest thumping directive leadership, where it seems like the noble leader is the one who very assertively and brashly, kind of demands increasingly higher standards. And the moment we think that maybe it's AI is going to come down and reduce our costs. 4000 of you are gone, and you're then gone in an invisible sort of way. You're just gone. You're done. So we live in an increasingly love less world to I mean, the data would support this, trust is at all time lows, engagement is at all time. Lows, customers increasingly fickle. We've got lots of data that show that we're living in a world that feels increasingly loveless to us humans. So, so who cares? I mean, I guess if you were a CFO, I'm sorry, no knock on CFO. But I always go back to the data like it goes all the way back to your first question. Let's just look at what the data show us. And if you imagine that there's a sort of a common or garden understanding that if you want outcomes, you do have to create experiences. And I think on some level, most business executives would go, yeah, no, I know. I get that. I get that the experience of the product or the experience of the team or the experience of the service had better be high quality. Otherwise you won't get the outcomes. We won't get the repeat visits or the productivity or whatever. Marcus Buckingham 32:03 But if you look at the relationship between experiences at time one and outcomes at time two, we operate as though there's a linear relationship between those two variables, as though there's a one, three. Well, you know, 12345, on a scale of one to five for experiences, and we operate as though there's like a nice gradual line going from bottom left to top right, that if we move a two experience for a customer or an employee to a three, then we'll get the same increment of growth in our productivity or performance or outcomes. And if we move it from a three to a four I get a little bit better. We'll get a nice increase, or an associated amount of increase in our whatever the outcomes are that we're looking for, we just assume that moving below average to average and average to above average experiences is a jolly good thing, which is why we tend to put, by the way, the fours with the fives, and we call it top two box, or we call it percent favorable, because we sort of imagine it's a it's a linear relationship between experiences and outcomes. So let's put the fours with the fives, we'll call it percent favorable, and then we'll, as a company, we'll try to get more people in that top two box category. The unfortunate thing is, the data doesn't back that up at all, the data. So this is where I start Kurt with the data. I go Look, dear CFO or CEO. Let's look at the data. The data shows it's not a linear relationship between experiences and outcomes. It's curvilinear. It's a hockey stick, which basically means moving a two experience to a three doesn't drive any behavior at all. Moving a three experience to a four doesn't drive any behavior at all. It's only when you do something so, so significant, so impactful, that a customer or an employee rates that experience of five, that you see a behavioral change. So in a sense, fours aren't fives. Fours are threes. Threes are twos, twos are ones. You've got a much more binary world when you think about it. You got fives, and everything else is just not five and so what that suggests is, if you, dear CEO, are interested in predicting behavior which your shareholders want, by the way, you're supposed to be able to figure out how to change behavior. That's what a job of a leader is. Your job is just to change behavior of employees or customers. So if you're in the behavior change business, well, I'm sorry, there's only one thing that predicts behavior change, and it ain't moving threes to fours. Threes to fours is virtually useless. If you want to drive behaviors productive human behaviors for customers or employees, you got to get in the fives business. And so starting off with the data going, I'm sorry, it's a curvilinear relationship between experiences and outcomes, well, suddenly you've got people's attention, because it implies that an awful lot of what customers, sorry, an awful lot of what C suites talk about in terms of customers and employees, is a total waste of time. Moving twos to. Threes, threes to fours. I'm not suggesting it's useless. I'm suggesting it doesn't drive anything. Now, when you then dive into fives, so let's say you've got people's attention and you're like, Oh man, we should have been deeply interested in fives, because we're trying to drive more productive behaviors. Well, that's when you unpack the word five, and you go, I'm sorry, the word people use to describe the five is love. That means the two most important questions any C suite should be asking all the time is, can we have more customers love our company tomorrow? Can we have more employees love working here tomorrow? If you, dear C suite didn't know where those are the two most important questions, then I've got a whole bunch of shareholders, and you want to come in and talk to you, because the future value of this business will be determined to some huge extent by how intelligent you are about those two questions. Oh, you didn't know that well. Go look at the data. The data is unequivocal, and it's meta analytic. It's not one little study. It's across studies and industries. You go fives are materially different in terms of their ability to predict. And underpinning the fives is love, which means, final thought on this, love is the most powerful force in business, and you don't have a strategy for it. It's like you want to go time out everybody. You don't let me just wait. You don't have a strategy for unleashing the most powerful force in business. What are you doing with your C suite? Meet like it's that. So I've tried to put some hard edge data at the front going, what do you do? What do you think you're doing to add value to the future growth of our business, when the driver of that growth is love? And if you don't understand that, it's not because it's not true, it's because you don't understand that, and this book is trying to help you understand that. And then go, let's, let's figure out what to how to operationalize. As much, I know I weird this sounds operationalize love, not just because it's a jolly good thing to do, but because it's a really good business decision to make. Kurt 37:01 I kind of want to say, duh again, but there you go. Marcus Buckingham 37:06 Sorry. Data will set us free. Tim Houlihan 37:12 Data will set us free. I spent recently in my career at a very large financial institution, and you know, the whole it's not just them as an organization that is set up on this, this belief that there's this linear relationship between the ones and the twos and the threes and the fours. But the Consumer Protection Bureau is set up in the same way in the United States to monitor to say, you've got too many ones and twos. If you could just turn those into threes. We'll get off your back and to think that we've got this, this systematized belief system that if we just get those twos to go to threes will be so much better. We live in Marcus Buckingham 37:55 like a remedial world, don't we? Tim, we live in a remedial world. Tim Houlihan 37:59 And believe me, I know I live. I have to work with Kurt. Kurt 38:02 It is the Tim Show. Marcus Buckingham 38:08 It's, it's not daft. What you're talking about isn't daft. It's, it helps us. I mean, it's adaptive from an evolutionary standpoint, it's adaptive to figure out, Where are the ones in my life, I better fix them. It's like, if you're a parent and your kid does get the F, well, you're not going to ignore it. You're frightened of the F. Fear drives a lot. Fear focuses. We know that's what it does. That's what flight or fight, does it? The Kurt, the cortisol spikes, and we're like the adrenaline spikes. And it's like, narrow your choices, and so for us to be attentive to ones is, is sensible on some practical level, very much. What we're what we're saying here, though, is this, don't over, don't think that your remedial fix it nature is an explanation of the full range of the human experience, and therefore the full range of future possible outcomes. It isn't you are preventing a failure that is Jolly good. But if you want to have exponential growth of your business or of your people, of your customer loyalty, then there's a whole different area for you to be curious about, and that's the fives, and it's like, what's a very interesting thing for leaders or C suites to think about, where do we spend most of our time when we're looking at our charts and we have the greens and we have the reds? Where are we spending most of our time when we think about our struggles or we think about our superstars? Where are we spending most of our time? Because what your shareholders would want, frankly, is spend most of your time studying what works, not to be pleased with yourself, but because what works is going to be the raw material for you to refine and increase what what blows through the ceiling as you more, as you walk into the future, the raw material for your future excellence lies in your current excellence. Right? Why? Because it's different, and it's, you're right. The whole world we've lived in has sort of gone excellence. Yeah, fine, yeah, whatever, whatever. We don't. We don't need to focus on that, but we've lost sight of all the diamonds and all the jewels that you can find when you choose to have a disciplined, rigorous study of extreme positives. Kurt 40:20 Yeah, in the book Marcus, you talk about love as being multi dimensional, and you refer similar to the way light, right is anything but monolithic, and you actually come up with five distinct components that you outline. I think it would be good if we could talk a little bit about those, because I think if we dig down into the specifics, it can help in, you know, so somebody who's listening going, okay, all this love talk is great. It's fantastic. What do I do? What do I? How do I, how do I take and actually make my organization one where people are gonna go? I love these shoes that I buy from you, you know. So, so I think Marcus Buckingham 41:03 the first thing would be to say, if you're a leader, set that up as the goal. It's a high standard. It's absolutely a high standard. But we should be fascinated and fixated on fives in our organization, which means we're fascinated and fixated about how to get people to say, love that, love that. And we won't always reach it, but let's just set that up as a goal. So that's the first thing I would say, is claim it. We are going to reach for that, because that's the only thing that drives the behaviors we want. Then if you go look at let's imagine that's a that's an outcome, isn't it that the idea that a customer at some point is like, I love that, or it's an employee going, I love working. So that's an outcome. And the question for any leader is, if you're getting into the experience design business, how do I get people there? Is it just magical? Is it just warm and gooey? Is it right? How do you get them there? And so you can imagine a person at the other end of the of the journey, if you like, just starting a customer, just beginning with your service or product, a person, perhaps just joining a team, and you as a leader, thinking, Well, gosh, they're just starting with their journey over here. How do I move them all way to the extreme where they're now going? I love that they're carrying around with love in their heart for my company or for my service or product. Well, if you reverse engineer that, and I know that sounds like a weird thing to say, reverse engineer love, but if you reverse engineer love, you don't find chaos. You actually find a sequence of five feelings, which we play out in the book. And it's actually the reason I wanted to write the book is like, if you actually unpack that, that beautiful feeling of love in your heart, you get this sequence, and the sequence turns into a leadership blueprint. It's like a design blueprint. And if we play that out. I would ask your listeners to think about it like, imagine the person who's just starting with your company or customer just starting. They're like an armadillo. They are. We go through life protected. So each one of these five feelings, you're taking off one layer of armor, armor plating, the first feeling just sort of imagine this. You've got a person. They're just starting to work with your company, whether it's online or whether it's a real service experience or whatever, the first feeling they want is control. The first feeling they want is control. The question they're asking in their head is, what is this world and how do I work it? What are you asking me to move into some part of that? Could be mission. What's the mission of your company? What do you stand for? Some part of it could be operationally. How does it work? What are the tools here? How do I use them? If you don't give me that, I fall back and away, and I lean out, what Martin Seligman called learned helplessness. We lean way the heck out, and then you've lost me. So in this case, control doesn't mean control over someone else. Control means self efficacy, because control over myself, my own choice is my own decision. I need that from you, which Tim Houlihan 43:52 is, why has this agency? Right? This is, to some degree, is this my agency? This is, this is my own clarity that gives me some agency, right? Marcus Buckingham 44:00 Yes. And that causes me to lean in or in another met the you know, it causes you to take off one layer of protective armor and go, Okay, I know what this world stands for, and I know how to work it, which is why having somebody like Chick fil A say we're closed on Sunday? Man, that is a loving thing to do, because it defines very clearly. Here's the world, which is why, when Southwest Airlines used to they've just changed this, which I think is a mistake. When they said, We're not giving you a seat assignment, you're all going to line up here and talk to one another and figure out who's a 26 and who's a 27 and the experience will then build from that that's loving, even though it's a rule which some people hate it. Control is clarity. That's what your responsibility is. So many leaders miss this. The second feeling is harmony. Harmony is if you think about it, I've got to feel as though this experience knows what I'm feeling and cares about it. I. Have you in the tone of your email when you onboard me, in the way in which you communicate to me through your customer service center, in the way in which you give me an injection at a nurse's station? Have you shown that you know what I'm feeling and that you care if you don't the feeling that we humans have is what's called jarring, and when an experience doesn't meet us, we lean out because it's dangerous psychologically, and we keep our armor on. And the example I quoted in the book, which is the most, I think the most kind of compelling example of this is we found some nurses give painless injections, and we would then go and we went investigated how, why do some nurses give patients injections where they rate the pain lower. And we looked at all the different techniques, and it turns out, nothing to do with their technique, nothing to do with their nothing zero and it had nothing to do with their tone of voice or their affect. It wasn't like, oh, the friendly ones get lower pain raising. It was that right before they plunged the needle in, they all said some version of this is going to hurt a little bit. I'll try to make us hurt as little as I can. And just the saying, the vocalization of, I know what's going on in your head, dear patient, you're thinking this is going to hurt a little bit. Me just saying that almost had you share the pain and you leaned in, there are so many examples of companies who miss on the fact that we humans. Every experience is almost first and foremost, an emotional experience. You got to meet us before you can move us. Meet us before you could move us. That's harmony. Significance is the next one. It's not the first one, it's the next one. Significance is, do you know my story, and do you care? Because at some point along the way, the customer or the employee is going to go, do you know who I am? Does anything change? Because if you know, you know who I am, if I go to the doctor, I don't have the flu, I have my flu, and I need you to, I need you, dear doctor, to somehow tailor in an individualized way what my prescription might be, because of what you know about me, by the way, that's not the first feeling. The first feeling is control. So I don't want you to start with significance, because then I think there's no rules. Well, now it's now it now it's chaotic. I don't want that. So there is a sequence here. It's a bit maslowian. There's a sequence, control, harmony, then significance. And don't get that order wrong, because then I'll go right back to the beginning. The next one is warmth of others. So the next feeling at some point, not right away, not not initially, but at some point we pop our head up and go, who's here with me? And how can they help who's here with me? How can they help? Humans hate isolation, and so at some point I'm going to want to know whether or not there's anyone here who can help me keep moving through this experience, which might be initially, by the way, a guide. We've built a world of handoffs, where in a restaurant, in a hospital, calling your insurance agent, calling your airline, it's one darn hand off after another, which is daft for many reasons, but one of them is it means you're alone as you try to hold the coherence of your story from one hand off to there's no guide. The first thing I want in any experience is a guide. Give me the warmth of a guide. Then you could extend it more broadly. But gosh, give me the warmth of I own a jeep. I talked about this in the book, people keep putting ducks on my jeep, which is this natural occurring warmth of others, because some Canadian lady decided putting ducks was the Jolly good thing. Marcus Buckingham 48:37 Jeep doesn't tell me how to play. No one ever told me how to play. And it's like you could say, well, they don't want to get want to get in the way of a naturally organic, occurring warmth of others community, but there's so much they could do to nurture it in the really loving way. They don't do anything, I think because they're so many companies and leaders are blind to our human need for the warmth of others. And then the last one is growth. Love is a forward, facing emotion. If you love anyone, you never think they're finished. You are always aware that they're going to have to wake up tomorrow and face the world again. So growth is the feeling of, will this experience make me feel even a little more capable tomorrow? Because if you have a loving experience, it will in some way, it could be the tiniest way. Could be a little tip or a little trick or but some part of that experience communicates to me explicitly that I know you're going to have to wake up and face the world tomorrow, and I want you to be a little more capable. So there's this lovely link between love and learning and loyalty, which most companies don't exploit or maximize. So that's your that's your five feelings, and it is sequential. Don't try to teach me anything if you haven't landed control and army, because it's like helicoptering at 20,000 feet on Everest and then you rush to the summit. It's like that's not going to work if I haven't taken off the first three. Or four plates of armor. Teach me it, you know. So there is, that's what I tried to lay out in the book. Is there is a sequence, yeah, to the feelings of love and not to be too Phil Collins about it, but you can't hurry love. Sorry, that was, Tim Houlihan 50:17 that was actually, that was actually very Gordy. Yes, you're right. Kurt 50:23 Yes, you're talking to Tim, the musician guy here. Marcus Buckingham 50:26 So in my head, when I was I just Yeah, fair enough, yeah, long answer, a short question. But those are the five feelings, no, but I Kurt 50:34 think it's really important. And I loved how you talk about that. This isn't just five things that you can randomly pick and choose from. And there is a process for how we come to and I love this idea of a new employee or a new customer. You have to walk before you run, and you have to go through this sequence. And I think that's really important for our listeners to take in. Because if we miss that, if we think, Oh, well, I just have to show that that people matter and that they're significant. I mean, we've, we had Arleigh kurgansky on, who talks about motivation as being this, this, you know, ideal of trying to find significance in the world and, all right, that's great. But to get there from you know, what you're saying is we need to get these control component, we have to have that emotional aspect, the harmony part, because otherwise it doesn't land. Otherwise it's just going to be going backwards in what we're saying, Marcus Buckingham 51:35 Well, yes, and, and the visual is, if you are an armadillo and each one of those feelings is one big, thick coat of armor plating coming off. If you try to address significance before you've got me a feeling of control, or, as Tim said, agency, if you've created a jarring experience emotionally for me that I haven't taken off those those two armor plates, my significance and my craving for significance, my craving for mattering, isn't available to you. I'm not there. Man, you might try to get me and reach into me, but I've got so much armor plating before you do that, so you've got to, I mean, I'm sorry, but it's like there's a sequence to a human leaning in and leaning in and leaning into the point where you actually, you've taken off this heavy armor, and you've lent in so much now you're like, I've got love in my heart for these shoes. It's like, you know, if you look at Tom's shoes and you take any company that's done a really good job of moving people through, you'll see that it is a moving through. It's not an interjection of a moment. People like, oh, the moments matter. It's like, Oh, really. This isn't about moments. This is about a deliberate choreography of touch points that touch people in the right way at the right time, because that's how humans work. And if you're not aware of that, going back to our first question about CFOs, and so if you're not aware of that, that doesn't mean it's not true. It means you're not aware of it, which Kurt 53:13 is sad you should be. Anyway, I'm going to answer with another duh on that one. So there Tim Houlihan 53:21 we go. Kurt's racking up the does today. I got the Kurt 53:25 moniker going here i chart on the back wall. So Marcus, Tim Houlihan 53:28 I want to talk a little bit about red threads. I want to move the conversation forward a little bit, because it's a really great observation and a really cool idea. But I have to start with a rant for thinking about the number of times that I've been on customer service lines where they thought they were being amazing by saying, we can't. I can't answer that question, but I can transfer you to the Department that can help. And I'm thinking they think they're absolutely God sent heroes. I can see the halo around their head, and then they say, oh. And by the way, just in case we get disconnected, here's the here's the phone number again, like what you haven't even demonstrated that I matter. You don't even know what my problem is, and and so when I was reading through the book, all of that just resonated so perfectly in the number of customer service experiences that have just gone badly well, Marcus Buckingham 54:27 and we've all experienced that, haven't we, where you get handed off and you have to repeat your story again and again and again. There's even, I think you might have seen the article on this and coming which which magazine it was in, but the idea that we're living in an annoyance economy where there's actually money to be made out of creating difficulty and friction in your interaction with a company, I think, which originally began with the government, where they, I think they call it sludging, where we have these programs for you, but we actually want to make it difficult for you to sign up for these programs. Yeah, right. So we sludge you. You and, and there's, you know, probably there is money to be made in making it difficult for you to, you know, try to try to cancel one of your cable subscriptions, or try to to have a complaint, or get funds back from a Airbnb rental or a hotel that it's, there's, it very difficult for you to do any of that stuff. Maybe there's a reason for that, but the bottom line, from an emotional standpoint, is you have less love in the system. We're just deliberately creating situations where, going back to my first two questions, do we have more customers loving us tomorrow than today? Well, we've set up a whole bunch of systems where the answer is very clearly, no. We've designed love out. That's why I called the book design love in, because we designed it out. I mean, let's just not let's not beat around the bush. Love isn't about niceness. Love isn't about a coating of cordiality. Love is an ingredient. You design it in, or you design it out. And a lot of the stuff that you were just talking about, Tim the customer service experiences, we deliberately designed it out handing someone off from one person to another, where the second person doesn't know anything about your story and the third person knows even less. That is unloving. Let's call it what it is. It's unloving now, therefore that means it's bad business. Please don't say it's good business. It's bad business. Why? Because it means fewer people love you tomorrow than today. Your shareholders may like that in the short term, hate it in the long term, you haven't thought about that or talked about that properly through the lens of a loving lens, okay, well, then you need the loving lens on, because we've designed in general. We haven't even designed for experiences. We've designed for processes, yeah, and then we shove the human into the process. Handoffs from one person the next is a symptom of a company that hasn't thought about experience design. They've just thought about process efficiency. And for us humans, it feels and the word, I think we're reaching for Is It feels unloving. Yeah, and there's a living there's a part Kurt 57:02 of that too, and I don't want, we don't need to dig down this, but you're talking about the efficiency part, where on a customer service call, I enter in information about me. Here's my customer number, Here's my address, here's my whatever it is to hopefully impact that efficiency. And yet, every time I get passed over, I have to repeat that, which then even makes me more feeling of unloved, like, Why did I enter all of that in at the beginning if I, if you're not even going to have it where it's being used. So you think about those Marcus Buckingham 57:32 first two feelings of control and harmony if I keep pressing a button. And this is exactly what Seligman was studying in monkeys, if I dogs as well. If I keep pressing a button and the button doesn't shut off the electric shock, at some point, I'll stop pressing it. I'll cower in the corner, and I'll shiver with helplessness. Just shiver with the shock, shiver with the shock, right because I've tried to play with this tool to do something to make my life better, and it didn't work. It kept it says it's a tool. Doesn't work, doesn't work, doesn't work, doesn't work. Well, what you've just described is you keep telling me to put this stuff in. You keep telling me put my information in. But then almost every single person I talk to, it's like the C button was pressed on the calculator, and then all my stuff went away. Well, at some point I'm going to do the equivalent of shivering in the corner, because you've trained me to be helpless. I mean, if you think about it, like we really could write a book called Design love out, and a lot of the systems and processes wouldn't look too different. Go to try to open a bank account. Go to try to change your flight with with AI barreling down the track. And there's a lot of good that AI can do, but if we're not careful, I mean the real question when you put an AI into, let's say, a customer service center, have you brought more love into the system, or have you designed love out? Are you moving us more toward a loving end of the continuum, or more toward the unloving end? That is a very interesting question, because at the moment, that question isn't being asked at all. It's, I mean, we've got so much capability around efficiency and speed, and what you'd have to say is customer containment, yeah, and AI can really help with that. But when we think about it, the currency of future business growth is love. That's the currency. So you have to look at AI through the lens of, does it add value to that currency, or does it deplete it? And let's talk about it that boldly and that clearly, so that we can make intelligent business decisions if I if I'm calling my health insurer. And now I'm fraught, I'm worried, I'm nervous, I'm sick, I'm confused, and now I'm getting a eyed it. Have you added more love to my system or less? Now you might say, well, it's better than having a grumpy, tick tock sludging experience. Okay, that's true. We've gone from a one to a three. Yeah, we're Tim Houlihan 1:00:17 there. We did it. We don't have the Consumer Protection Bureau on our asses now, and that's not Marcus Buckingham 1:00:22 nothing, but it's not loving. Come on, yeah. So it's a very the more you unpack that word Love and how we humans flourish in the context of a loving world, the more you bump into some really prosaic, really sort of practical decisions that being made by businesses that are just stupid. Sorry to say it this way. So they're stupid decisions, and that's why I called the whole this capability the book tope is focused on. I just called it experience intelligence. This is an intelligence and most companies, frankly, are not prioritizing it, perhaps because they don't understand the importance of it. Yeah. Tim Houlihan 1:01:01 Importance of it. Okay, I want to get back to red threads here just before we before we get too deep into some a couple of specific things. But the red threads was a concept that you came up in the book Love and work, right? So, so you're coming back to that theme here in design, love in and I think, if I remember correctly, you talked about a red thread. What can you could have 20% of your day have have red threads, and it can still be a great day. And, and first of all, I'd like you to share exactly what a red thread is, because we also have what's playing through my mind when I was reading this was Roy baumeister's work on positive versus negative experience. We have a negative experience. We need five positive ones to sort of crowd out that one negative experience, in some ways, is the red thread. A different way of thinking about this Marcus Buckingham 1:02:00 well, so if you think about how to design love in there are two roles that you have to play in order to have that sort of experience intelligence. One of them is what we've been talking about, which I call maker. How do you make experiences for other people, for the people you work with, or the people you serve, where they lean into those experiences? This is the sort of thing that a leader would do, is they think about what kind of systems or processes that we have for our employees and customers. Have we designed love into that that's maker. You're an experienced maker. But the other side of that is mover, as in, how do I design love into my own work? How could I possibly make experiences for others that they love, if I hate what I do, or if what I do is a loveless, barren wasteland of activities. So think about, think about the experience intelligence skill as having two capabilities within it, mover and maker. Mover really is, how do I how do I love my work, which, of course, is tricky, because you never really find a job you love. And that's there's a ton of data on that no one loves everything they do. So the point of red threads was when you study again, this is like a study group of highly successful people. You study super successful people. They don't love all that they do, but they do find the love in what they do. So that's interesting. At some point, they start talking about some activity or some situation or interaction in their work that they love, whether it's housekeepers or salespeople or physicians or developers, you interview people that are really, really good at what they do. Number one, they'll all start talking at some point about something that they love about what they do. And number two, it's always different. So they don't all love the same stuff, but they all love something about it. Well, that's like, ooh, that's interesting. And so when you pull and pull and pull on that, you discover that something that we should have been, you know, this is the sort of thing that we should have been taught at 10 years old. But what you discover is that activities themselves have energy within them. And for some reason, but at the clash of the chromosomes, has nothing to do with your gender or your age. You might love a certain set of activities. You might love meeting people you don't know yet and winning them over. I might have no love for that. I might be actually drained by that. You might love color coding your sock jaw. I can't imagine, but what we don't often say is that activities themselves have energy within them. You can think of those as red threads, in the sense that your working day is a fabric of many 1000s of threads, many activities, moments, situations, interactions, and many of them are sort of emotionally neutral for you. You they're black or white or green or gray, whatever you just do them. But some of them are red. Some of them are activities that you really, really, really love. And what the data out of the Mayo Clinic was suggested is you look at the most successful people, they don't have a red quilt. They have two. 20% at least 20% red threads, which means they figured out two things. Number one, what are the particular activities that I love? Which sounds like an obvious thing to do, but really, very few of us do that at the level of granular detail, because it's Tim Houlihan 1:05:16 hard, right? It's not easy. It is. Marcus Buckingham 1:05:19 It is hard, because one of the clues to a red thread is what Mike Shelby high called flow. So one of the clues is that time speeds up and you vanish into it. So it's tricky, because we got to go, hey, hey, the vanishing is a clue, right? If you vanish into it, that's not nothing, dude. I know it feels like it was five minutes, but you look up, it's an hour. Okay, that's a clue. So the first thing is noticing what those red threads are. And the second thing is, well, can you deliberately tweak and iterate week by week to shape your job so that you have more red threads next week than this week? Can you do that? Because if you can't do that, by the way, no one will like it's that kind of it puts the responsibility on you to go shape your job, to have red threads in it, because you'll be more successful. Why? Well, we know when you're doing an activity that you love, you're not only more resilient, you're not only happier, you're more creative, more innovative, more collaborative, your brain. Barbara fredrickson's work on broadening and building positive emotions are designed so that they remove the fight or flight ness and they broaden you into being accepting of new information, new collaboration, new people, new everything. So red threads are your superpower, sorry to say it that way, but for you, being at your best and really the beautiful thing about love, sorry, but in terms of mover, is that love is a decoder your life. And this is why I wrote love and work originally was your life is your smartest, wisest, most loving friend. Your life is waking up with you every day and going, I'm going to show you 1000s of threads today. And my question to you is, which of them are red? I don't know. I'm just your life, but I'm going to keep showing them to you, and what I really want you to do is figure out which of them are red. You know, the best clue for which ones are red love? Which ones do you love? A red thread. Going back to short answer to your question, Tim, a red thread is an activity that you love. It's a situation that you love. It's a interaction that you love. It's something that when you you're doing it, time flies by, and when you're done with it, you kind of weirdly want to do it again. It's a red thread. You are the owner of those threads, because in the end, everyone else is colorblind to yours, and that even the people who love you are color, but your mom does not know what your red threads are when they praise you for something, Praise is a distraction from your strengths. A Strength isn't what you're good at. A weakness isn't what you're bad at, because you're good at some things you hate. A weakness is what weakens you. A strength is what strengthens you. A strength, the raw material, the DNA of a strength, is love. It's a red thread. And the person who knows that, the only person who knows that, is you. So that's a long answer to what is a red thread? A red thread is the source of your real life. It's massive, and we should be teaching it in schools. Tim Houlihan 1:08:21 That was beautifully said. Marcus, thank you. I so appreciate that. I'm not a big fan of this. We don't do this a lot in behavioral grooves, but occasionally there's some written words that really capture us in the PROLOG. Marcus, you wrote something one of, I thought the best descriptions of entrepreneurship I've ever read, and I just want to read it here that you said the building of a company is an exercise in positive self talk bordering on delusion. And it reminded me of relationships. It reminded me of being married. It struck me as something that is there some kind of odd correlation between being an entrepreneur and being in a successful relation, or a successful entrepreneur and being a in a successful relationship? Marcus Buckingham 1:09:11 You know, there's a that's a really interesting question, because when you study really successful relationships, and there's actually, you know, there's a lot of study on really bad relationships. We know quite a lot about divorce, but, you know, you study really bad relationships, and you learn a lot about those pathological patterns, but it doesn't really tell you that much about optimal functioning in relationships. But you study really happy relationships, one of the things you discover is a thing that the researchers who did most of this research, they were actually out of the University of Buffalo. They called it benevolent distortion. And benevolent distortion is a cousin of positive self delusion. Benevolent distortion is when you're looking. At your partner, always choose the most generous explanation for their behavior and believe it. Always choose the most generous explanation for their behavior and believe it. And that's not in service of them. It's actually just in service of the relationship, because if you actually do believe the most generous explanation of why they do what they do. You lean in, you give them greater intimacy, you take off some of the armor plating, frankly, and it serves the relationship. Now, objectively, are you, is your benevolent distortion a distortion, or is it true? The relationship would go, I don't care. It's just an adaptive thing to do in a relationship, to be benevolently distorted about why people do what they do, why? Because it makes you lean into the relationship. Yeah. And so to your point, probably there is a there's certainly a categorical connection. Entrepreneurs seem to have a very positive, opportunistic and optimistic view of the world, and so do relationships? Yeah, undoubtedly, there's some relationship there. Kurt 1:11:07 It reminded me Tim we interviewed Shankar vedantam about his useful illusion. What was it? Delusions? Useful delusional, delusions, and that's part of this, right? There's a useful delusion of like, all right, maybe that's not exactly the way the world works or the way the world is, but it's useful for me to just go on believing this way about it, because it, as you said, it makes you lean in. It is not a leaning out. And so I love that component. I do know that Tim is probably itching to get to some music question here, so I will, I will let him go. Maybe ask about a Coldplay concert. Tim Houlihan 1:11:49 I am going to ask about a Coldplay concert because it ties into music and it ties into your customer experience, to your your your true experience of the concert. And in the book, you write about how Coldplay does a fantastic job of curating the concert itself, but the your experience as a customer starts before the concert with buying the tickets and getting to the venue and struggling with parking and all that kind of crap. And then then it also goes through the concert, but and ends hours later, when you finally get out of the damn parking garage. And it was a story about outsourcing, but I am curious about you said I don't recommend people go to the concert. Marcus Buckingham 1:12:36 Well, yeah. I mean, I love Coldplay. I love Chris Martin's, yeah, and he's adorable, and I dancing around, Tim Houlihan 1:12:47 buzzing like a blue arse flying. My editor Marcus Buckingham 1:12:53 was like, I think we can take that out. I'm like, No, that's my mom, and I've had that expression since I was two years old, so I'm putting that in and and he does, Have either of you been to a Cold Play concert? Yes, I actually haven't. And he does, right? He buzzes around like, like a blue ass fly. But the the point of that story was he had curated, you know, an awful lot of the experience of the concert he had curated, yeah. So it was, you could see his intentionality as an experience maker. And some part of that was the Make Trade Fair products that were in all the concession stands. It was very carefully like, oh yeah, we're only going to put these products on sale. And then the actual concert itself was a very carefully curated experience, not just the flags and the big balloons and the but and the fireworks, but the, you know, the bracelets that glowed yellow when they played yellow, and him telling us to turn off our phones for the three or four songs. He clearly thought about it really carefully to create an emotional journey for people that was curated and coherent. And he even was saying like, thank you so much for making time out of your day to come here. So he was kind of aware that we had come from somewhere to come to this venue to see them perform, and it was, but by the end of the concert, you're just, he'd done a masterful job, because by the end of the concert, you're you're warm, and you're hugging your neighbor, and it's just, it really is Kumbaya. But they'd outsource the parking, and they'd outsource the parking because, as part of a symptom of the world we live in, we don't think about experiences. We think about vertical silos of process. And to be critical of Chris, you go, you basically thought about the make, trade, fair, product stuff and the actual choreography of the concert itself. At some point after that, though, you drew a line in your mind. And. You went, I'm not responsible for the parking and so we got into our cars, and it really wasn't five minutes before we were shouting at each other, honking, because the whole parking experience couldn't have been more jarring. Talk about control and harmony or lack of control, and a super jarring experience. It was like we're fighting our way. It really took almost as long to get out of the parking structures as it did to watch the concert. Oh, why is that? That's because Chris went that's not my job. And I'm not knocking Chris Martin. He's a jolly good chap, but we live in a world like it was an extreme example of I draw a line that says, beyond this line, I am not responsible for it. Insurers in health insurance do that, banks do that, airlines do that. You look around the companies just go, I'm going to outsource that. I'm not responsible for that. Government does that. And what that shows is we don't think of the human we don't, which is daft, because, by the way I quoted in there people like Taylor Swift, who what she's doing is expanding her structure of interpretation to say what she's responsible for. And that's why she launches Taylor Swift ticks.com and says, I'm going to try to get out of the scalping gouging business that happens when I outsource my ticket sales. Now I'm not suggesting everyone should do that. I'm not suggesting outsourcing is a no, no, I'm I'm suggesting that if you outsource as simply a oh, I've just, I've just forgotten about that entire domain of experience, which, in Chris Martin's case, is the parking then just please know that I'm still, I'm the person. I'm still having the experience, Dude, you just forgot about it, and that's not good business. That means that I've got to tell you, Tim Houlihan 1:16:49 yeah, there's this massive peak end effect, right, that you kind of alluded to, right? Yeah, it ends Marcus Buckingham 1:16:55 up with me going, Tim Kurt, I wouldn't, I don't know, man, you're gonna have to have such a great concert experience. You're not ending up coming home in the evening feeling cortisol spikage, which look, if you don't care and you so love music, it doesn't matter, then fine, you're one of those people. But as a symptom of a society in which the human going through the experience. I mean, I quoted a Cold Play concert, but check into a hospital, and we have designed hospitals in the same sort of way as in, we don't think about the human going through the experience. We think about a bunch of vertical silos and a bunch of handoffs or outsourcing from one silo to the next, and the pressure and the stress is on the patient to try to hold it all together. And because we know it is stressful, we end up with patient outcomes that are way lower than they should be given the amount of money we spend on healthcare in this country. Why are the outcomes so bad? Well, because the experiences are so bad, and we've designed love out of them. So it's like this whole world we're living in feels so alienating and weird. No, knock on Chris. This is why I said right at the start. It's like, you get more of what you accept. I mean, in the book, I was like, you get more of what you accept. If we think it's acceptable to have these sort of experiences, we're going to get more and more and more of them, and we're going to get sicker and we're going to have less productive businesses like all sorts of outcomes, because experiences drive behaviors, drive outcomes. You start being deleterious in the way you design experiences. You get bad outcomes, which is why I would tell you guys, don't go to a cult. Kurt 1:18:43 Yeah, it reminds it's not, it's not equivalent to, you know, apples to apples. But we had Rory Sutherland on and he was talking about the experience of taking the tunnel from, you know, England to France, right? And and about how they were talking about trying to spend multiple billions of dollars to decrease that by like, two minutes, and he's going don't do that just like, make my experience on the train that much better. Have have, you know, more entertainment, more different pieces in there that could cost much less, but would make me much happier with the over thing, not even, you know, save me two minutes. I don't really care if I'm enjoying that experience that I'm in. It's kind of what Disney does, I think, in their queue, in the lines of waiting to get on their their amusement lines, and all of those other things. I think that's a we disregard that experience, or we don't think about the the extent of the experience in the right way. Marcus Buckingham 1:19:43 So, well, we don't really value it, because we don't. I mean, the moment you start thinking about experience, you realize that it has a before, a during and after, yeah, you realize it progresses through time. It really is more of a symptom of experiences don't really matter. And if you think about Disney, I'm not saying Disney's. Perfect, but Josh tomorrow, who I interviewed and followed around for the book before he became the new CEO of Disney. I'm sitting in a room with him for the Millennium Falcon. There's 20 people in the room. The table is actually shaped like the Millennium Falcon, and there's imagine he is there, but there's also PR people and operations people and finance people and marketing people, and they're all there to spend three hours with. He was the, he was the chairman of Disney experiences at the time, which is, which is the theme parks and the resorts and the cruise lines. And he's spending three hours redesigning them, Lenin Falcon ride. And I'm, I said to Josh, I'm like, why are you doing that? Do you have not enough people queuing up for it. And he's like, No, we got two hour wait. I'm like, Well, what's what's the ROI? $40 million what's the ROI? And he's like, Well, we've got some data that suggests when people go off the ride, they give it a four, not a five. And that's not okay, Disney, this is his phrase. Disney's a delicate brand, and if it lives in the hearts of people, and if you got a bunch of people going, after two and a half hours of waiting and writing coming off going, Yeah, you know, it was fine. It was fine. It's a four, the three, it was a four, it's a 3.5 then we're breaking their hearts. So anything that I do to build love in their hearts is a really good use of my time. And the reason they're giving it a four, not a five, is because the experience we've designed. And I don't know either of you ever been on the Millennium Falcon ride? I have not, no, okay, well, this isn't to me. It's an example of a leader, because you are leaders at certain levels. They should be like, just thinking about strategy and and here's Josh going, wait, wait, so like, this exactly what happened in the meeting. He's like, here's the problem. We've got three riders on the Millennium Falcon ride. You've got a pilot, you've got a gunner, and you've got an engineer, and the pilot really controls almost all of the experience. Because if you wait for two hours and you got a seven year old in the pilot slot, then the gunner doesn't get to do much and the engineer doesn't get to do much because the pilot's not very good. The pilot's not very good. So we've created a ride where two out of the three people are sort of passengers. That's how we get in the four. So we got to read it. Hey everybody. We got to redesign this ride so that all three passengers have and then it was unbelievable how intelligent he was about it, because he followed those five feelings. He's we need to give them more agency. We need to hit them within a with a harmonious adventure that meets them right where they're at in their different roles significance. We need to give them a way to be able to keep track of their own unique scores as different participants in that he was just going through, just feeling by feeling and redesigning that Millennium Falcon ride to be exactly what you were just saying for the Channel Tunnel, to make the experience more loving. And what's interesting isn't that his ideas were right. I don't know it's going to reopen in May. Maybe people will say five or not. I don't know yet. The point to my mind that the thing that struck me was, here's a senior, senior senior leader taking the lens of experience design super duper seriously, and then taking love as his frame of reference, and he was sitting there for three hours, think about all the other things you could have been doing just going, Whoa, wait. What's the engineer doing now? Okay, cool. Now, what's the and realizing that unless you do that, unless you're a leader at that level of granularity, you're not really adding value to the business. You're not like, look at Mike nickel. Oh, is it? Is it Mike nickel, anyway, the CEO of Starbucks, who used to be the CEO of Chipotle, he should be at that level of granularity, really thinking through the experience. Don't tell the baristas to put words on a cup, because then they're just going to write literally words on a cup in a passive aggressive way, because you haven't really got into the granular detail of why would they write words on it to whom? For what reason? Getting into that, that level of granularity about experience design, that's experience intelligence, and that's the preoccupation of the best leaders, as as Josh evidence, and as you were just talking about Kurt, yeah, Kurt 1:24:15 it's again, I think just amazing when we can parcel this out. And I think you've done a fantastic job in the book, in outlining what leaders need to be doing and what we need to be doing just in every day. And again, I hope that, like you know, as we're doing a podcast, we're thinking about, how do we build love in to this podcast and how we do it. It feels like it's a very Marcus Buckingham 1:24:43 important time in society and in business, and it's really up to us, I think, to decide what's acceptable for us in terms of experiences and then how we raise our voice to reward companies or leaders who are choosing with intelligence and with intentionality to decide. Love into things. Because, frankly, we humans. We know enough about us to know we thrive where there's a lot of love around, and we tend to wither where there isn't look. I put Pablo nerudas quote in the book, and I know we were supposed to end, but I just Just a last thought, because I think it's so love doesn't die from being killed. Love dies from neglect, yeah, my own company, and when I sold it, love died in my own company, because we stopped talking about it anymore, because it turned into, how do you run the machine? And all the conversations are about, how do you run the machine? And that's okay, it wasn't bad. But what means? What happens then is you don't talk about love anymore. You don't you think it's stupid, or you think it's inappropriate, and then, of course, you lose customer love, you lose employee love, and pretty soon you can't even remember what was so great about it. And that's kind of where we if we're not careful, that's where we'll go as a society, where we'll have loveless schools and loveless colleges, and then loveless workplaces, and then loveless governments, and the whole thing will feel like it wasn't made for humans. And when we look at some of what's happening, I think what feels weird to us is in world of politics, it's like, where's the human in love's a human word. And this should a whole the society should be to allow our human flourishing, shouldn't it anyway. Kurt 1:26:21 Look, I think that's amazing. Marcus Buckingham 1:26:24 There's lots of ways to be tough, love, love. Love does not mean soft. It means love. Oh, you don't know what love means. Well, then stop there and investigate that interesting. Because we humans Love, Love Actually. I mean, I it's funny. I started, I started this new company, and I called it in the end, I ended up calling it love that, because I was like, let's I'm going to put the name Word In the Name. And if there's CFOs, going all the way back to beginning of our conversation, you know, Tim, that if there's CFOs the lean angle, I'm not spending any money on love, okay, then, then that's fine. I don't I can't help you anyway. But if you're interested in the most powerful human emotion, then let's Okay. Let's help you create more experiences where people say, Love that okay, now I'm now, I'm on the right channel with you. I'm not saying got all the right answers. Everybody's got to figure out their own activations. What is the right way to do immigration policy? Well, I don't know that's very tricky for sure, but if we ditch love as part of the equation as we think about that, or we ditch love as the lens through which we decide on what practices or operations we're going to endorse, well then we've done something inhuman, and we ought to call it like this. Isn't we're being inhuman here, and that's lazy. It's just lazy. And unfortunately, we don't really have a because we've lost the love language. We don't really have a language to go. Wait a minute. What's missing from this equation is love. Tim Houlihan 1:27:55 Yeah, yeah. You know, I reflecting back on the experience of reading first breaker all the rules years ago and just going, God, that Mark is Buckingham. He's just, he's just bold as shit. But I gotta, I gotta, like, having this conversation with you, just, it's just fantastic, let me I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. What to say. I'm, I'm at a bit of a loss for words, because I'm just really like all that boldness that you started with just you know, so many years ago, is just snowballing, right? And you're, I feel like what you're doing now is just even bigger and bolder and Brasher and more wonderful that our world needs it and grateful I Marcus Buckingham 1:28:43 felt Tim, I suppose my last thought would be, I've only got this one life, right? We all have just this one life. So I've got a unique I got to step into the responsibility of the unique contribution I might be able to make. I've got, you started off asking, you know, Kurt about data nerd, data geek, whatever it is, I've got a lot of data. And so if there was anybody that was going to bring legitimacy or rehabilitate in the business context as a driver of productive human behavior love, then it might be me, because I've got the data to describe things like the curvilinear relationship between experiences and outcomes. Well, that gets people's attention because it's it's backed up by tons of data. So if I think we all add our light to the sum of light, and I've got a little bit of light, and if this book can be my little bit of light in the face of a world which, in all sorts of ways, is becoming increasingly Loveless, then I'm going to try everything I can to do that. I don't know if my light will do everything that I would aspire for it to do, but it would be totally remiss of me, for me to hide the light or ignore the light and pretend it in there. Is there. I've got a contribution. I. I got to try to figure out ways to get that light out so that it can add its little bit, you know, to everyone else's. Tim Houlihan 1:30:07 Marcus Buckingham, thank you so much for being a guest today. Marcus Buckingham 1:30:10 I really appreciate it, guys, thank you for having Kurt 1:30:19 me. Welcome to our grooving session where Tim and I share ideas on what we learned from our discussion with Marcus. Have a free flowing conversation and groove on whatever else comes into our not liking but loving brains. Tim Houlihan 1:30:32 Tim, oh yeah, yeah, let's, let's get over the liking thing that's, Kurt 1:30:37 I mean, I like you and stuff, and I like working Tim Houlihan 1:30:40 with don't get sentimental on me. Kurt 1:30:42 But, you know, I mean, do we do? Do we love working with each other? Do we do this work? Tim Houlihan 1:30:50 This is the best day of the week. Kurt 1:30:51 It is, it is. That is true. This is always far. Yeah, best day, the best part of the week, the work week, for us, right? I mean, when we think about it, when we get to interview people like Marcus, when we get to have these grooving conversations, I love that. I love that is part of the work, I know. And I say that with 100% like full on. I say that all Tim Houlihan 1:31:16 the time. How often do we catch ourselves in conversations with our guests where one of us will say, Oh, I love what you just said there would yes, we're not talking to each other. We're talking to the guests because we don't say things that we love so much, but Kurt 1:31:31 none of us because we don't say things that are lovable. Let me say maybe likable things, but not we're not that smart, you know. No, no, we're trying. Well, yeah, we're learning. We're slowly we are slow learners, but we we are consistent. We keep trying. We we prod on. We're that turtle that keeps going and racing that air. Tim Houlihan 1:31:53 Right? Yes, that's right. Slow and steady wins the race. Kurt 1:31:56 Okay, there we go. What do you want to Tim Houlihan 1:31:58 what do you want to groove on with Marcus that this whole idea that you teed up in the introduction, this idea that strengths, we've always looked at strengths as this is what you should be doing. If this is what your strength is, you should just go and do that. Do more of that. Kurt 1:32:15 It's what strength finder says, right? Tim Houlihan 1:32:17 Yeah, and I like that, that Marcus kind of calls that out as maybe being bullshit. You know, I mean, this whole idea of, let's do, let's actually look for something that we love. Let's look for something that gives us energy. Kurt 1:32:31 I don't I think Marcus didn't call it bullshit, and I don't think it's necessarily 100% wrong to focus. Let me be a Tim Houlihan 1:32:38 little bit controversial here. Kurt 1:32:40 Well, you can be that. And I think that there is this aspect, though, that we can focus in on our strengths, but if that strength doesn't involve anything that you love, yeah, you're going to to have some difficulty with it, or at least finding what you can love in that, right? And that is the piece of this. And I think this is also one of those aspects that it's it's like our conversation, who do we talk about, where the relationship guy who is saying, you know that Tinder doesn't work, because it's like you, you end up loving the people, and you put more of those attributes that the people that you know that are around you, and it's like, Oh, I like that part of that person. I think it's the same thing with work. I think there is that aspect of finding those things at work that you might do well or you enjoy, and you put more emphasis and more focus on it, and then you can come to love those things. Tim Houlihan 1:33:40 So, yeah, I think that was Paul Eastwick. Is that who you're thinking of? Yeah, that was Paul. And there's, maybe there's a corollary there as well, because Paul also emphasized this idea that we don't always know exactly what the prescriptions of what's going to make a relationship work like we might not know what's going to make the work really wonderful. I think Kurt 1:34:02 that's, I think that is the best comparison. Because I know if you would have asked me, you know what I love, what will you love about the work that you're doing? Kurt, I don't know if I would have predicted that 20 years ago, right things that I love about my work versus the things that I might be good at, but just go by or that I like about my work. Yeah, yeah. Tim Houlihan 1:34:35 So something that Marcus teed up, that I wanted to start with, is this idea about energy as being like the true signal of strength to the true signal of what is it's not just a feeling. It's just not like, Oh, I love that. It's like, what gives you energy? Like, what? What supercharges you to get up in the morning and and maybe it's not as effervescent as per. Telling you out of bed, but it could certainly be the kind of thing that you feel good about. You actually take energy from it when you're doing it, or when you're done with doing it, when you end the day and you go, yeah, I feel good about that. Kurt 1:35:13 I think that's a really good part that end of the day piece, like when you are talking to your spouse or friends or your children, and they ask you, like, So, what, you know, what did you do today? And you can feel it's like, Oh, I did that. Your body raises up. You get that excitement in your voice. That's those are those things that that signal, because that's the energy you're even getting energy thinking about, you know, going, looking backwards at it, and I think those are really cool. Tim Houlihan 1:35:46 And isn't that an indicator of your it's to some degree, you're in your groove. Yeah, right. Like, like, this is, this is part of the rhythm that adds to this sense of, I'm in my groove. I'm I'm getting energy from this. Kurt 1:36:00 Yeah, exactly. It's interesting, right? If it's kind of the red threads that Marcus was talking about, right, it's those red threads that weave throughout now, Tim Houlihan 1:36:13 yeah, it absolutely is. It is it is definitely that, that heart, right? That bit of heart that's coming out and showing itself. You go, oh, I recognize that. I've seen that before. That is, that's my source of energy. That's my source of power. We've been talking a lot about Cialdini lately, but I love how he talks about seeing observations. You go, that's where the power is. And in our in our own lives, we need to be thinking about, where's the power? Where's the power in our own life? Yeah, and Kurt 1:36:45 it comes from love, and I will transition from from Cialdini, because one of the things that we talk about so we're doing this series on Cialdini, folks. It's coming out soon. Listen to it. It's gonna be fantastic. Lots of interviews with Bob and many other luminaries in the field talking about the impact of Bob's work. But one of the things that we realized with Bob is that his career took a whole bunch of fluctuations that he didn't follow, like step a, Step B, Step C, right. It was this, this transition, and I think too often, what I kind of got from from Marcus in this conversation is that we build our careers around the wrong signals that we look for those external, oh, this is what I'm supposed to do, right? And we just did. We have a college journal that we created at behavior shift. And so we were just at this conference for NASPA, which is the Nash I'm down even, yeah, it's National Association, like, it's like student counselors and and, you know, success teams and Student Success teams and all of those factors. And they're saying all these kids come in with these expectations, that oftentimes it's like they're not, you know, they're not theirs. It's their parents, it's their friends, it's the kind of what they see out on Tiktok, or whatever that would be, that I need to be this type of, I have to have this type of job to make this amount of money. And those aren't necessarily the things that are going to make people happy or feel like they love what they do and they get some of that app value out of it. Tim Houlihan 1:38:29 So yeah, it reminds me of people that I know who went into their college career saying, Well, I'm pretty analytical, and since I'm in a business school, I'm either going into finance or accounting, yeah, or economics. You know, it's like, okay, but do you love it? Like, does it actually produce energy in you? Did you feel a sense of, I can actually make something with that? Is it a red thread for you? And if it's not, I think that you got to think about, where could I use these skills that I have to actually find things that I love? Kurt 1:39:05 Well, I give I give kudos to my son, who's 20. He's a sophomore at the University of Minnesota, and he started with data science as his degree that he was going after, and last year as a freshman, he liked his data science courses, but he loved his earth science courses, and so at the beginning of this semester, or the first semester of sophomore year, we conversation, then he goes, I'm thinking of changing, but I don't know. I mean, that might put me back, you know, a little bit I have to go back and, you know, I didn't take all the courses I needed, and so I might have to extend, you know, and graduate in five years or four and a half years. And I said, Well, that's what you love. I mean, if you're finding those classes fascinating and that you really like that, then you need to follow that. Because your success is going to be around that, not not around things that you just like and that you're good at. I mean, he was good at the data science stuff, but didn't float his boat, as you might say, groove. Tim Houlihan 1:40:14 Yeah, that is exactly how I'd say it. The other thing that I wanted to mention is how growth in your career can be accelerated by doing those things that you love. So so your son might have that sense of, oh, I'm concerned, because I might be having to take a step back, yeah. And yet, it's the, it kind of reminds me of the sharpen, you know, twice cut once, or measure twice, cut once. It's like it will probably save time in the long run, if he has a clear view as to what he's loving. I love that word Kurt 1:40:50 accelerate, right because we joked about the we plot on as the as the slow turtle right and steady wins the race. But if that turtle can get an accelerator and have some turbo things on the back of its shell, it's gonna win that race a lot faster. And I think that's what this does it, it just it allows you. I mean, people realize it when you love the work that you're doing, and when you're in a in something, other people can see that. And, yep, they want to be around somebody who has that feeling. I mean, we all experienced Tim Houlihan 1:41:31 it, right? Yeah, we have. And if you're having a hard time just thinking about, well, what is it that I love? Well, ask yourself, what gives you energy and makes you feel more like yourself, like, what? What is that? Oh, I feel, I feel like my real, true self. Here. This is me, yeah. Kurt 1:41:48 Where do you get that? You know, at the end of the day, and you're the end of the week, and you're talking with your buddies, and you're going, oh, what? You know, work was just a drag this week, except, except this one piece, right? What was that one exception? Tim Houlihan 1:42:05 What is that right? And honestly, if you're if you're mid career, what would change in your career if you started to make decisions thinking more about what you love, rather than just where your skills are? Kurt 1:42:18 And one of the things, again, as we talk about this, the what we're talking from the conversation with Paul Eastwick and kind of finding those things. It doesn't necessarily mean that you have to do a 180 on your degree, you don't have to shift your major, you don't have to shift your career, but you can find things and move degrees so that you can start integrating more of this, more of the things you love, into what you're doing, and that will just help you accelerate that even faster. Tim Houlihan 1:42:51 So absolutely. Kurt, is there anything else that you want to close out with? Kurt 1:42:56 Yeah, I want people to join our behavioral grooves community page on Facebook. Yeah, it is. It's actually, it's really, I love that, no, but you we had this little thing out there, and I'm like, going, Oh, for all the people that the members that were there, we were, we were at about 240 members in the group. And I put out this thing. We want to get to 250 and Tim, you maybe we're at 238 or something. I want to get to 250 and you said 250 we're going for 300 and and we've we've grown. I mean, we're up. We're over 260 now. And so we on our way. It is growing fast. And I think it's growing because people are engaged. I mean, we have these conversations. We ask questions on a regular basis out there, and we talk a little bit about what we've maybe done on the show, but we asked different questions, like we were asking season questions last week, like, hey, spring is coming. What's your favorite season? Oh my gosh, the number of responses that we had around seasons was just crazy. And season, if you had to get rid of one, would you get rid of? Oh, my, the like, the that was a tough wrong opinions out there between summer, winter, spring and nobody. Nobody wants to get rid of fall. I think fall and fall was a lot of most people's favorite one too, Tim Houlihan 1:44:18 isn't I find that so interesting. I find it so interesting that there is, at least in North America, most of most of the people have been responding are from North America. But also, aside from the Facebook community group, you know, we also have a sub stack, and if you're not subscribed, you should. People are joining every week. We have people joining our sub stack group every week. And if you're not, you should jump in and be a part of our growth, like enjoy the the ride to the top with, with, with our substack. Kurt 1:44:49 You don't want to miss out on that sub stack and that cool. Again, again, right? The sub stack really digs into kind of some of the work that we did on each of the shows. Yes, but it goes beyond that, and it has some links to the different musical components it has it. So it's just a nice summary of that, along with some additional information. And every once in a while, you get a bonus sub stack, and we talk about something new and unique. So yeah. Tim Houlihan 1:45:17 So I just want to remind people that a well lived life may not be just doing what you're good at, but it's doing things that you love. Yes, that's my parting words. I think those Kurt 1:45:31 are great parting words, and my parting words are just that we hope that you loved this conversation that we had with Marcus, and that that conversation will help you this Week as you go out and find your group. You Transcribed by https://otter.ai