Hey guys welcome to the podcast super excited. I've got the author of decoding greatness uh, a book that i am digging into and i think you're going to get a lot of value out of ron friedman, psychologist uh and it sounds like he is doing a lot of different things, primarily because he likes to Research and write so we're gon na get into all this stuff, but if you're like me and you're listening this right now and you're like alright fairy, you know what are you bringing me next? What what immediately hooked me in this book is? How do i reverse engineer, success, and - and how do you truly, as we've all talked about for years, how do i model excellence, but but what he's done at least what i'm getting the sense of and ron? I can't wait to dig into this is there's more of a math equation to really dig in and figure out, if tristan's, an amazing videographer, if ron's an incredible writer, if laura's an incredible producer and tom's a you know a great speaker, how do they really do It, and can i truly model that success and maybe just maybe not have to be super creative in the process, but really r d rip off and duplicate, which i love. So here we go ron friedman. Welcome to the show man thanks so much it's great to be here, yeah, so for the people that you know like i'm.

Obviously, you know giving them some insight, but take a minute and just give them a little bit of your backstory before we get into this incredible book and there's so many nuggets, i've got a bunch of questions. I want to ask you to really help my clients. Do exactly what this book's about? Decode greatness. Absolutely! So i'm a social psychologist and my expertise is in human motivation and my first book the best place to work took over a thousand academic studies to teach people.

Here's how you apply this science to top performance, to creating a great workplace, but also elevating your performance, but there was something missing from that book and what was missing is that even within the best workplaces there's a range of performance levels right, some people are top Performers, some people are just middling, and so what i was curious to dig into in decoding greatness is what separates top performers from everyone else, and what i discovered was that the stories we've been told about greatness and success are wrong. Most of us have been taught two basic stories about how success happens. The first story is that greatness comes from talent. The idea that we're all born with certain inner strengths and the key to greatness is finding a field that allows your greatness to shine.

That's the first story: right greatness comes from talent. The second story is greatness, comes from practice. So if you want to be a top performing salesperson, it's all about practice. Practice practice put in your 10 000 hours and then you'll be great, but there's a third story and it's one that people don't often talk about, but it's the path that so many entrepreneurs and inventors go through and that path is reverse engineering.

Finding great examples in your field and then work backwards to figure out how they did it. That turns out to be the path that so many top performers have gone through everyone from claude monet to malcolm gladwell, to steve jobs. Reverse engineering is the path to finding your greatness. So you know what immediately goes to my mind is so are the first two a lie? Are they a myth or or is talent? A factor is practice a factor.

I mean you look at the you know the greatest nba players, the greatest actors and actresses the greatest writers like writer's right, like that's their former practice. So so are we saying that's a myth, or is it really about? Maybe the faster way is this reverse engineering? Modeling method, yeah. I appreciate the question and no they're, not myths they're. They there's no question that if you devote your uh time and energy, your entire life to to mastering a field you're going to be better than most people.

The challenge with those two stories is that people think that greatness is for someone else, i'm not born with tremendous talent. So that's not for me and i should just settle to a job that you know allows me to have my weekends off or i don't have 10 years to get grades. So i i should just give up and that's the story that bugs me and i think that bugs you too tom and i it's a story that i'm trying to push against, because i think that it's systematic you don't need to be hugely talented to achieve greatness. What you need is a system for getting there and that's what i've written about in decoding greatness.

I love it. So it's interesting i was thinking about. We were talking earlier about the late, great uh, kobe bryant, and one of the things that i always respected about him is he never took a shortcut like he would do the work and and there's no doubt that that was a story in his head about what It was going to take to become the most you know, like you know his uh, his trainer, who worked with michael jordan. The same thing hey see me at 3, 20 in the morning and bam he was there at 3 20, like whatever it took, and i i just i look at that and i'm obviously i mean you know, god bless him and i'm inspired by.

You know spending time with him and all that greatness. And yet, when i look back at my career, i spent all my time trying to figure out how in the world did that gal do that and if i can basically find out her process her math her abc equals d. Then i could do it way faster and hack. That right into my system is that is that, basically, the concept it is about, starting with great examples and then figuring out? What is it that made this successful? How do i apply this to my approach and i'll? Give it i'll give you just the practical strategy that anybody can use right now, and that is you know if you're a salesperson, if you come across a sales page or a landing page that really moves you, and you really are you're eager to understand what makes This different capture it become a collector right.

That's the first step to decoding greatness is collect great examples and treat it like your own private museum, so that when it's time for you to create your own landing page, you can start comparing the ordinary against the extraordinary and then pick out. What's the difference just like that game, when we played it as kids, we had two visuals side by side spot the difference. That's what you're trying to do here with anything whether it be a sales call that you recorded a ted talk that you watched. Look at the transcript a sales page or a landing page and then key in on those major differences and by identifying what separates the ordinary from extraordinary.

You can't help, but figure out. These are the ingredients that make something great and then the question becomes. How do i templatize this right? I don't know if that's a word, it should be. How do i and evolve it? So it's not just about copying, because if you simply copy chances are you're not going to execute quite as well and there's a reason for that.

One is there, there needs to be a match between your individual strengths and the formula that you've decoded and beyond that audience, expectations shift. So what might have been really sexy a year ago, probably is passe today. So it's all about finding those formulas and combining elements from different formulas to evolve your formula so that now you're actually contributing something novel and inventive yeah. I'm glad you brought that up, because you know in my in our culture right of the way we operate with our clients and our friends, we say: hey, look, you know if, if ron's doing something extraordinary well and we can get his script, the marketing piece, the Samples that if we can, we can decode, if you will ron's greatness, which we've done.

You know thousands of times with people. Someone will say yeah, but i i applied it, but it didn't get the same result right. So so, where is that disconnect right for people? Is it the market they're in? Is it their own? You, as you kind of mentioned, sounds like their own talent, level or skill and ability or is it? Could it have just been? They tried it versus i'm. You know, i'm decoding your greatness.

You have gone all in on this and that's why you did so well with it and someone says: well, it didn't really work all that well! Well, because you're half-past it am, i am i on the same page. Am i on the wrong page. Like you know, i think that's those you're pointing out you important elements, and i think that uh, one of the things that gets lost is the issue of authenticity. So if i take tom's formula and i apply it to my field and it doesn't seem authentic to me - people are going to see that, and so what it requires is finding the elements of executions that you admire and that feel right for you.

So i give the example in uh decoding greatness in chapter two, i reverse engineer the most popular ted talk of all time. So that's ken robinson's talk on creativity, and so in that talk he makes the case that schools beat creativity out of us because they teach us that failure is wrong and therefore undermine our creativity as children and lead us down the path of just following instructions. And so what i've done there is. I have uh looked at some of the key metrics.

So metrics is a scary word uh, but it doesn't have to be so. I just basically looked at how many uh, how many facts does he present? How many do you think he presents turns out one fact, 20 minutes he sends thirty uh. I don't know how many millions of people to his talk is worth sure. Yeah.

You know what he does. He does storytelling he's telling anecdotes and he does it in a way. That's funny. Now, if i wanted to reverse engineer and apply that template to my talk, i'd have to tell 40 jokes in 20 minutes.

I'd have to tell a whole bunch of anecdotes and i'd have to use one persuasive fact. That's not me that can work for him. Yes, but it's not me and it may not work for you, especially if you're not a phd in education. You can't pass off just getting away with stories as a persuasive ted talk.

So it's about finding the right, a ted talk that to reverse engineer for you and maybe it's an a factor of like taking parts of his talk and combining it with parts of angela duckworth's talk and parts of susan kane's. Talking now, all of a sudden you've got something new and inventive that leverages elements from these various examples that resonated with you and if they resonate with you chances are they resonate with other people as well. I'm really glad you brought that up, because i i i reflect back on my career and i would tell people all the time. I am a sum total of all the mentors that that i worked with the the men and women that coached me or gave me guidance.

So there's an element of me that is mike vance and this you know this super creative. You know work with walt disney and you know he really empowered me. I learned a lot of the decoded. If you will his greatness and then my dad, who is just hard driving, you know, grind it out, do every you know do whatever it takes.

You know. Tony robbins, who is a mentor for a long time all these teresa jabor my incredible speech coach. All these incredible people, i didn't take a hundred percent of them. I took the pieces that i needed that would drive me to the next level, so i've got kind of kind of two parts you mentioned.

It's not just that one talk, but it's angela duckworth's talk. It's all these different people. So it's okay to basically i'm gon na say this. You know in my world to steal everybody else's good stuff and fit it in where it applies to you yeah.

I would you know so. Here's how i would put it. I don't like the word steel, but i do think i do like the word import. So import feels a little better to me sure, okay, good but yeah, and let me tell you something greatness, yes, yeah.

Let me say something else: it's the people who do this consistently and intentionally that succeed, and it's not a secret, so uh i'll give you example from the book is barack obama. Not a lot of people know this, but barack obama got trounced his first time running for congress. He lost by a margin of two to one, in other words, for every two votes his opponent got. Barack obama got less than one yeah and for a time he considered leaving politics because he was so bad and - and you know what the problem was, he was a terrible speaker.

It was because he was a law school professor, so he was used to lecturing people and voters didn't appreciate being lectured to and they let him know at the ballot box, and so he thought about leaving politics until one of his consultants said: hey, you know what You should do you should go into the churches and observe what pastors are doing when they're giving their sermons yeah. When he came back to politics. His approach was transformed all of a sudden. He was telling stories.

He was pausing for effect. He was using repetition. He was quoting the bible and he became the legendary speaker. We now look to as the model for how to deliver uh a rousing speech, and so there what he did was he combined elements of what was working in a different field or he imported elements from a different field brought it into his own.

Another example. I give in the book is the doors so light. My fire amazing song right seems completely original. It's not you know what they did was they took a rock and roll chorus.

They layered on top of that, a john coltrane inspired solo and for the opening. It's all about johann sebastian bach, so they channeled that, and so they combined different elements from the musical genre and created something that feels completely new. But we don't the truth. Is we don't want something completely new? You know there's research on this, that i discussed in the coding greatness, which is that if you present some, you represent people with something that is completely original.

Okay hold on. I got i got ta hold on. I got ta slow, you down. Yeah people don't want something new, that's right because as a species, we are distrustful of the new.

We want something that we have some experience with. That has worked with before and there's research on this, showing that, if you show people a completely original idea, they will reject it. You know what they won't reject is something that is slightly new okay. So the formula as i describe it in the book is derivative with a twist.

If you could take an established formula and tweak it just a little bit, that's the thing. That's going to resonate and i'll. Give you an example. Another example from the book is: is the marvel movie a company right so every year, sometimes twice a year? They come out with a new blockbuster and what's remarkable about marvel is that their movies gain not just huge amounts of ticket sales, but they're also generally respected by movie critics people like their movies right and they all follow a formula right.

What's the formula formula is somebody gets their powers that doesn't know how to control them? Then there's uh they're sarcastic or they they have all these quips during moments of mortal danger. They there's the combination of the sassy and woman with the powerful but insecure man and there's a climactic cgi scene and there's a trailer at the end for the next movie. Every movie is the same movie, but we don't realize it why? Because they modify it. Just a little bit so the question becomes: how do they modify it and how do we apply their approach to our field so how they modify their formula? Is they deliberately get a director who has never worked in the superhero movie industry before so? Great example is if you watch thor thor ragnarok is hilarious.

The reason it's hilarious is because they got an improv comic to direct it. So there's a term for this. It's called inexperienced experience, so if you can bring in a team member who has experience in a completely different field, it will modify your formula without you even trying yeah okay, so i want to go back actually one of the stories that i loved in the book Was about judd abdul and it's it's very relatable. I think for my friends listening right now, you you've heard me say to you before uh.

You know. One of the things i've always encouraged is so hey ron is uh is a new residential, real estate professional he's in the mortgage business, whatever it is, and if ron goes and talks to the most legendary team leader, the most extraordinary broker on the planet. Yes, that person is going to share some wisdom, but but they're probably not ready to hear the message yet so you're always trying to level up and find that next great person who can help you go to that next level, right from rookie to rockstar from rockstar To team leader from team leader, you know to you, know: out of production and making a fortune, you know working and supporting your team. There's all these different levels in business um, but the judd aptos story.

What it really told me is it shattered. In my mind, the excuse that i'll get wrong which is well. How do i find these people and they don't want to spend any time with me and then i'm reading this story, and i'm like this guy was brilliant at 15. Would you would you just share that a little insight on that story yeah? I love this story too.

So so when judd apatow is 15 years old, he was obsessed with comedy, so he was doing dishes at the local comedy club he'd like to rearrange his schedule. Just to see who's on saturday night live that week and so one day he's in high school and he walks past the radio station and he sees that the high school dj is getting some pretty impressive bands to show up for interviews. So he gets this idea. Why don't? I start a comedy show on the high school radio network and start inviting comedians now, so he starts reaching out to the pr representatives for jerry, seinfeld and jay leno, and all of these legendary commentators gets them on the show and he gets them on the show, Because they don't realize that the school's signal doesn't go beyond the parking lot and so by the end of it, this kid's 15 he's interviewed the who's who, and he says he walked away with the bible of how to become a comedian.

He understood through those interviews. He understood how do i get an agent? What's the right, uh ratio of anecdotes to punch lines right, and how long do i need to be to take to be great? It was seven years. It's like you just want to be on stage for seven years before you hit your stride, because at that point you've dulled the stage fright so he's got all these great tips he walks away from and now of course, judd. Apatow legendary director he's a hollywood legend.

Some of my favorite movies of all time right exactly 40 year old virgin, like you know, it's legendary. The thing i love about. It too, is just the resourcefulness right to be able to connect the dots and say hey. If i'm on the radio show, then i could reach out these people and, like any, you know, you're right in the book that literally some of the agents were like when they're finally doing they'll be like wait.

Wait: you're a 15 year old kid right sitting in some. You know high school right like it's. This is not what we were expecting um think about it. For my for my friends that are listening right now that you know, i believe and clearly ron, believes and is synthesized beautifully in this book, is you got to go out of your way to find people that are doing extraordinary things and then help break down what It is they do so, maybe for you you're listening to this and you're like how do i do that, i'm a new agent, or how do i do that, i'm a i'm, a 30-year veteran and i'm trying to get better at all these new tools, social media, Video, etc, you sit down with those people and you ask them how they do it, but but ron there's a there's, a method to it.

You talk about sort of a process for for doing it, walk is like educate us walk us through the process. How do i decode greatness yeah? Well, so the first thing so here we're talking about the example of when you have the expert in the room. So the question is: how do you get the expert in the room right? So i think that it's really critical to remember that one of the best ways to get people on the phone and to do these interviews is to help them promote what they're trying to promote. So it starts with figuring out what's important to them.

So i can tell you in my field and tom, you know this too, is when you want to get uh someone who's a successful author to do something with you. You wait until their book's about to come out so here, if it's an expert of course, who's. Looking for new clients, if you can make the case that you will, your interview will appear somewhere where that will help them get new clients you're more likely to get their attention right. So that's one thing to start with and that could take the form of a podcast, a blog, a newsletter, whatever the case may be um so meet them with in terms of the goal that they're trying to achieve, but once you get them on the on the Call the thing to keep in mind is i talk about this as what is it that moderators focus group moderators? They do an um, a tremendous job of getting people to open up in a very short period of time.

How do they do it and how they do it number one is having extraordinary listening skills, but number two: is they adopt a mindset of naive curiosity, and so let me say what i mean by that, and that is you know. We've all heard the saying uh. If you're the smartest person in the room you're in the wrong room - and i love that saying because it suggests that you should always be learning - you want to surround yourself by people who are smarter than you well focus group moderators are never the smartest person in The room they uh allow they defer to the person they're interviewing and they don't care if they look stupid because they're going to get more insights and the last thing you want to do when you're trying to get someone to open up and reveal his or her Secrets is demonstrate how much you know. So it's all about asking lots of questions using repeat backs.

Moderators will often do this. The same thing that therapists will do, which is they'll, say. Let me see if i've got this right and they'll restate what the person just said, because if they got it wrong, then the person will correct them and elaborate, and so there are a ton of questions that i cite in the book that you can use to Get into the mind of an expert, but the key is ultimately it to channel this mindset of naive curiosity and let them drive the train now. The other thing to keep in mind is that experts often sadly, are terrible instructors and it's because of the curse of knowledge - and you wrote you wrote about this in the book and i thought it was fascinating.

The part about you know why was michael jordan would never be a great coach or magic johnson who tried to be a coach was wayne gretzky, and i thought i was going to bring that up. That's tell us more about that. I thought that was that. So this is the curse of knowledge.

There's research showing that simply knowing something makes it impossible to not know it. In other words, if i know how to tie my shoelaces, that does not make me a shoe tying expert in terms of instructing you on how to do it, because that requires a different level of skill being able to explain things correctly in a way that corresponds To how people learn, but more than that, the challenge that people have is that the more you know the more you automate, meaning that you're not even consciously thinking about it exactly so it's really. It's really difficult for me to explain to you all the steps, because i'm not even thinking about them. It's like me trying to explain to you how to drive a car when i'm barely paying attention to i'm listening to the podcast right, so yeah.

The the challenge here is that we all need to recognize that experts are not necessarily going to be great at explaining things and it's our job as the questioner to pose the correct question. Yep yep, my favorite is tell me more about that. Tell me more about that. Tell me more about un unpack that for me, i'm i get what you're saying i understand this is like something i say always i get all those words, but i don't know what you mean right and then and then you force them to say.

Well, okay, let me let me break it down. Let me compartmentalize it bing bing, bing bang, so i love it um. So we said it's about selection. It's about curiosity! It's about asking the right questions, any tips for people that are trying to synthesize.

So you know, like i'll, walk out of a meeting two nights ago with two legendary founders of these huge companies. You know billionaire type peeps and literally i'm i'm asking them a million questions, trying to discover like what what did they do at 50 now you know now these guys at 80, like what would they do? What were their steps? I have my process, but i'm curious like what do you recommend when i've interviewed somebody? How do i take that codified synthesize? It actually make it actionable for myself. Okay. So there are a couple of couple things i want to touch on there.

One is that i just want to point out that in the book there are all of these questions that i recommend asking one of the great questions that i love is, if you could do it again today, what would you do differently and the reason that's important Is because it forces the expert to think about how their field has changed from when they started yes, and it also forces them to compare their initial assumptions to their actual experience, so that's powerful, but in terms of how do i put it into action? That leads me to chapter four, the scoreboard principle and the scoreboard. I was gon na okay. I was gon na talk to you about scoreboard, but i literally just found all of the questions right in the book. I just i i'd mark that one and i also thought the interesting one was uh deconstructing people's websites.

I thought that was super interesting as well like or quantifying. If you will, the success of somebody's website not just saying oh ron's, very successful. His website must be great, not not always the case. Sometimes his brand is fantastic and the website is actually horrible, but getting that but talk about scoreboarding, because i am a huge fan of the four disciplines of execution uh measure.

What matters and everything in my business is scoreboarded. I'm i'm constantly encouraging my clients to look at their business as a math equation. So so, from your experience, talk about that scoreboard principle is simple. Measurement begets improvement.

Anything you measure you will likely improve on. So if you want to increase your water consumption measure, how much water, your intake, your everyday, your daily water intake, if you want to lose weight measure, how many calories you're consuming, if you want to increase your focus measure, the number of uninterrupted minutes, you have per Day anything you measure will improve. We know this from the research perspective and the reason is simple: is number one. You get an emotional boost anytime.

That number goes up so that instantly motivates you to do a better job. It makes you more mindful of your decisions, because you recognize that now you know. For example, we talked about focus going on youtube in the middle of the day. We've all done it and if you, if you keep a time tracking sheet, it becomes a lot less likely to happen, because it's painful to have to admit to yourself that you wasted 15 to 20 minutes to three hours on youtube, right, yeah and then your iphone.

Your iphone does that so much time. You're on you know, twitter, facebook instagram youtube. So yes exactly and then uh it also illuminates anything, that's not contributing to your success. So this is one of the things i talk about in the book is, amongst my coaching clients.

Many of them have moved from working within organizations to becoming entrepreneurs and, as an entrepreneur being part of a meeting, is it becomes painful. It truly becomes painful because you recognize it's not contributing to your bottom line when you work in an organization. Whatever you know, meetings placed on your calendar, you do it and uh, and you don't question it it's because people within organizations don't have scoreboards, they don't really have a recognition of what it is. They need to do in order to get their next uh raise or their next promotion, and if organizations were clearer about what it would take to get that next promotion, i bet you meetings would grind to a halt right.

So creating a scoreboard for the metrics that are important to you and one of the things i'll say about this. Is that there's an evolutionary reason why we're so obsessed with numbers? Why uh every app you download now has a score and why we're constantly? Looking at our follower account, even though that's not contributing to our bottom line or really just our enjoyment of life as a whole, and it's because evolutionarily, if you didn't pay attention to numbers, you were likely wiped out, and so there are examples of this in the Book where i talk about how um, if you weren't obsessed with a larger amount quantity of food, then you weren't motivated to go, find it if you weren't, obsessed with how large is that tribe, you weren't watching out for them or trying to befriend them uh? If you weren't obsessed with numbers, then if your mate was surrounded by competitors, you didn't pay close enough attention, so an obsession with numbers is evolutionarily advantageous and it's why? If we use those numbers to succeed, we can really drive our success in a way. That's very powerful and becomes automatic, so it's all about creating a scoreboard and starting out by identifying hey. What are the elements i need to be successful on in order to to drive my business upward and it starts with reverse engineering, your own success? What are the elements i need to do on a daily basis in order to be successful, keeping track of those metrics and then evolving them as your business grows? You're.

Definitely speaking, like all my coaches, that'll be listening to this and all my coaching clients like they're like yes, yes, it's like you know there are some people that still resist it. They don't they don't recognize that you know these obvious patterns of you know. One plus one equals two right. They know that right because they're, you know they're humans, they get it they're educated, but in business, it's all about the math.

It's all about the numbers and it's all about scoreboarding to know the way i describe it is how much fun would it be to watch your high school football right team, your kid playing in this sport and they turn the scoreboard off and they take the time Clock - and they put it away this - the second that happens, that game, that game is suddenly just 11 people on this side, 11 people outside just kind of banging each other - and you know screwing around and there's a ball somewhere in the middle. But the the moment you put the score up and that time clock now, i'm like okay, this is the score. I got this much time left. I said to people all the time.

What's the best two to five minutes of an nba game right, it's the it's! The two to five minutes before the end of the first, you know first half and it's the last two to five minutes, because now you're at that heated emotion, i say use that same thing in your business, but it sounds like going back to the original conversation. It's really about you want to track and measure hey. I just sat down with the top agent in my office and a top agent in my town and someone that i want to. You know glean decode that their greatness, but i've got to now put that into an action plan.

I've got to put that into whether it's the calls or the mailers or whatever it is that they were doing that they recommended that you're like oh, that's it. Then you got to track a measure to know: did it work or not, so you can actually say yes or no. Is there a time period? In your experience, one of the questions in the book is ask the expert. What metrics did you find were especially important to monitor, and so i think one of the challenges that people have with this and it's a very human challenge is the perfectionism of saying.

Unless i get the scoreboard perfect, you might even try - and i just really want to push back against that and say to folks. You know: choose three metrics: they don't have to be perfect, but just simply monitor three metrics. How many leads do you have? How many are you converting, and i don't know how many, how many, how many hours per month have you put into marketing those three metrics will put you miles ahead of your competitors, because now it's not it's not just about working hard. It's about working intelligently and you have a benchmark to compare against which is motivating you.

Can you can push past that past against yourself? You have some competition that you're introducing really key um. One of the things i would add, though - and this is also in um scoreboard principle chapter - is that it's important to have balance in your metrics and what i mean by that is. I give the story of wells fargo and wells fargo as you'll. All remember.

Listening to this is that wells fargo had this huge scandal and that huge scandal was caused by the fact that they became obsessed with metrics, but one metric in particular and that metric look. How many accounts do individual customers have and because they realize it did some analysis? They realized our most profitable. Customers are the ones with multiple accounts, so they started driving all their sales people to get existing customers to open up additional accounts and what happened in the process and and they incentivized them, they incentivized them too. Well.

It was more stick than carrot, fellow because they didn't right, they'd be fired and they were constantly being told you're gon na end up working mcdonald's. Unless you meet these numbers and so what here's? What happened is that folks would work overtime and not. There was no mechanism for them to get paid, they'd just work for free yeah. They would get their family members to open up multiple accounts.

They can meet the numbers and, at a certain point, when none of those things were helpful anymore, they started opening up big accounts, including some for homeless people who didn't have any financial uh bank accounts to play with, and folks were just the moral was decimated. They were drinking hand sanitizer during the day before meetings, because it was so stressful and they ended up meeting their goals, but then also getting fined in the process. And that just goes to show what happens when you become obsessed with a single metric and in their cases how many accounts do customers have, and so it's important to have balance between the desirable metric and an undesirable metric, because that ensures that you're, not just optimizing In a way that doesn't help, you meet your bottom line, so if you're optimizing for how many leads do i have you're going to get a lot of poor quality leads, and so it's about quality leads and also you know, so maybe it might be like how Many leads did we get this week and how many of those leads were poor right, because, if you're or how many, how many became an appointment, which is what you know my group should be like lead appointment, you know qualified appointment, you know, hey signed a contract, Got a yes moving forward, so 100 percent - it's also it's also reverse engineering, the the winning clients. What do the winning clients do differently than the ones that didn't and then what? What are those you know? Where are they hanging out? How do we optimize for that? How do we duplicate that winning client? It's all about reverse engineering, those successful examples and having that mindset of curiosity of what's different here, so i'm gon na go a totally different direction.

Are you married single kids, no kids and and what is it like in your household? That's that's kind of what i'm thinking like all right. If you want to wash dishes, if you this, is i decoded washing dishes? This is the most effective way like are. You are you operating like that. Like give me the give me the personal side yeah, i appreciate you asking so i am married uh.

My wife is a an eye surgeon. I've got two kids and in terms of optimizing at home, we optimize for free time. So i'm a big believer in buying time, and so we eat out more than we should good restaurants. You know, but i've just made the determination that if i spend thirty thousand dollars a year on great meals, never have to shop for food, never have to uh.

Spend time cooking i love cooking, but you know time is at a premium when you have young, kids and uh and so um yeah. That is, i don't know if that's where you're going but uh yeah. How old are your kids? I've got a 14 year old and an eight-year-old a 14 year old daughter named maddie, who uh is home right now for duty, we're now coming out of covet, but schools haven't opened yet, and let me tell you: 14 is the worst age to be at home. All day it turns out, i agree i got laura my producer over here is nodding.

Yes, my daughter just went to summer school. Thank goodness right, stay busy, stay busy, um and your wife's an eye surgeon, interesting, i mean so thinking about your work and thinking about your research. If we were to kind of just summarize this to to really drive the point home the person listening right now, they they've got a growth mindset they're in my ecosystem. You know there's a million podcasts that they can listen to and and we you know my my listener and i we've created this connection around you know, find what you love.

Do what you love, do it with people that you love and kind of get rid of all the nonsense and drama as much as you can right? So if you were to synthesize this it, you know into an again a phenomenal book into like the most important talking points for my friend listening. What do they have to do? The number one thing is become a collector right now start collecting great examples. The more sensitized you become to what makes things different the better off you'll be so i have a collection, i'm a writer. I've got a collection for great openings, not mine, other people, so i can figure out what they're doing there uh great transitions.

Great conclusions. These are on a google doc. For me, my designer friends, they collect logos, my copywriter friends, they collect headlines, my consultant friends, they collect presentation, decks so yeah. We think about collections.

We think about physical objects. We think about wines. We think about shoes. We think about artwork.

We need to broaden that uh definition and treat our collection as a private music museum that we go to in order to be inspired in order to think big and figure out. What is it the greats are doing play spot the difference. That's the other component and then look at elements in different fields and figure out. How can i apply this to my field? You know i talked about marvel.

I talked about the doors um. We talked about um, so many other examples, but really it is about finding the elements that work in other fields. So a great example of this is you know again, i'm a writer. So, for me, one of the things i noticed that works really well in shows is - and this is particularly true of modern shows - is that the scenes are quick right yeah.

It is unusual for a steam to go over a minute and if you can incorporate that into your writing, you may have noticed this when you read my book is that the stories are quick, i'm doing a lot of stories, i'm not telling you the same idea Over and over again, it's like there are, i think i counted uh, something like 80 to 90 celebrity stories in this book. It's all about finding that interesting nugget that people don't know about that person and then connecting it to an actionable insight. So this is an example for me of of how i use decoding greatness of finding elements in different fields and combining them. So i i noticed that you know i deconstruct malcolm gladwell, what he's doing differently, yeah and um.

If i tried to recreate gladwell's formula, it would work for me because it's not authentic for me and he spends a lot of time doing stories, i'm not interested in following a story for that long. So my attention span is short and i embrace that. So it's about figuring out what is it that works for you from other people's elements and then figuring out how to combine them in a unique way, because that leads to an original contribution. So he started off.

He said: hey uh. What was it replicate and duplicate or whatever it was right? We say you know r d, rip off and duplicate, but it's but it's rip off personalize, personalize and duplicate. The way that i put it is analyze, templatize and evolve, and i i really feel, like the evolution part, isn't just because you don't want to be caught for having stolen someone. It's because stealing's not going to work for you, it's just not so you know i.

I i really am a believer in that evolving step, because that'll enable you to create a novel contribution and it's more likely to lead to success. So if you're, someone who's great on camera, but um you're, not necessarily great at copywriting yeah use videos figure out. Who is doing this great and what are they doing if you're great at writing, but you're, not great on camera, find a way to make that work. So it's all about identifying hey what works for me and who can i study in either my field or someone else's field to make my job easier and make success just far far easier to achieve.

I love it. I love it. This has been an awesome podcast and i you know again for all my friends. Listening absolutely get.

The book comes out june, 15th june 15th right so coming right up, but then get it on amazon. If they go to amazon, they can buy a copy now and get it sent to them. You know you sent me this beautiful. I got the beautiful version, but it's like this is an advance proof not for publication right.

So you got to send me another copy partner. I want a signed copy of your book as i, as i always request, and by the way what you'll notice on the cover is you'll notice. There's a light bulb, that's painted on the left side by as van gogh would have uh applied it, because one of the stories in the book is about van gogh and how he got as great as he did. He only painted for 10 years.

He had no formal training. How did he get there was by applying the strategies we talked about in the book and on the right side is you'll see the code that the designer used to create that bulb within adobe. So it's all about thinking in formulas and coming up with the blueprint i love it. I love it blueprint's, one of my, like favorite words on the planet, figure out the blueprint figure out the blueprint, love it well ron.

Where does somebody reach you if they want to connect with you? I know you got a website. Uh. Are you active on social? Should they follow you on instagram facebook linkedin? Where do they find you? The best place to go is ron friedmanphd.com. I've got a website at uh for decoding decodinggreatnessbook.com, where you can get all kinds of bonuses.

If you get the book cool, not if not, if when when they buy the book, everyone on my list just wants to decode greatness. I, like your attitude, uh and uh yeah. So that's the way to find me and i'm on twitter at ron friedman, awesome man! Well, i really appreciate the time and listen, my friends, it's a killer book like i'm just pulling out like antidotes and stories and examples, and for me so much of it validates you know, 30 years, like you, you cut 30 years of me trying to figure all This stuff out and put it into a nice little book which is like those are my favorite kind of books, so congrats on your success man. I look forward to talking with you soon for all my friends that are listening check out.

The book decoding greatness, unbelievable. You can get it on amazon in every place. You could possibly imagine buying books, but it sounds like we should go to your website and get all the special goodies as well. So i encourage you to do so and ron.

Thank you so much for your time. My friend, you.