The Diary of a CEOWorld Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed | E84
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,349 words- 0:00 – 1:42
intro
- MSMatthew Syed
In a fixed mindset, people think that success is all about talent, having the gift. A growth mindset is saying, "Okay, talent obviously matters, it's a factor, but it's not enough. It's what we do with our talents." I wasn't the best table tennis player in the world, I never got into the top 20 of the world rankings. But with that attitude, I maximized my own potential. (air whooshing) I think leadership counts when it comes to innovation. W- I mean, the way Amazon conduct meetings, and then when they start talking, the most senior person always speaks last. You're getting unvarnished access to the insights of your brilliant team rather than speaking first and everyone basically converging on what you as the leader has just said. (air whooshing) There are a lot of people with truly brilliant ideas, huge potential, who never act on their dreams. But having the idea doesn't mean a thing. You've actually got to act on that idea. I- I- honestly, I think we shouldn't underestimate how damaging it can be if... (air whooshing)
- SBSteven Bartlett
(Instrumental music) Matthew Syed, he's written some of the most important, challenging, thought-provoking books in the self-development, self-improvement, team development, team building, company building, leadership space. And his ideas are original, they are challenging, they are fresh, they are important. He was an elite level sportsman, and his ideas come from the world of sport, but also the world of business, from politics, from writing, from culture, from society. He evangelizes about diverse thinking, about including more ideas, about
- 1:42 – 12:24
How do you define success
- SBSteven Bartlett
challenging leadership, about challenging yourself, about what it takes to start, and why most people spend their life sitting on ideas that could potentially change their life, but are seemingly imprisoned, trapped, and blocked by their own mindset. He talks about how some of the most talented people in the world can fall short of their potential, and how some people with seemingly no talent at all can achieve miraculous things. If you apply the learnings from this conversation, I have no doubt that it will make you a better person, it will make your teams more innovative, and it'll lead you to living a more fulfilled life. So without further ado, I'm Steven Bartlett, and this is the Diary of a CEO. I hope nobody's listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself. (Instrumental music) Matthew, everyone wants to be successful. Everybody. I don't know one person that doesn't want to be successful. So I think it's probably quite important to define what that word means under your own definition of that word. A holistic definition, not just a professional definition, but w- how would you define that?
- MSMatthew Syed
Well, look, it's great to be here, Steve. I, I think that's, er, quite a deep question-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm.
- MSMatthew Syed
... quite a philosophical one. Um-
- SBSteven Bartlett
We're only just getting started.
- MSMatthew Syed
I know-
- SBSteven Bartlett
(laughs)
- MSMatthew Syed
... what kind of opening question is this?
- SBSteven Bartlett
(laughs)
- MSMatthew Syed
I, I, I, um, obviously as, as a former sports person, I was a table tennis professional for, for a number of years, um, success was defined in terms of winning matches-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm.
- MSMatthew Syed
... and achieving very, uh, clear, tangible objectives, like winning the national championships or the, the Commonwealth. And so the- but I think when it comes to life beyond sport, you know, it's so objective in something like the 100-meter sprint, you wanna beat your PB-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm.
- MSMatthew Syed
... and you can see it on a digital readout at the end of a race how close you've come or whether you've achieved that objective. In the life beyond sport, I have to say, one of the things that is quite difficult, I think, for sportspeople to transition is it's more elusive, more subjective, um, more ephemeral. And I think it is a (laughs) really difficult thing to define what you personally mean by success. I'm not 100% sure that I've defined it for myself yet. (laughs) Have y- have you?
- SBSteven Bartlett
I, I, well, I th- I'm, I'm getting closer. On a prof- in a professional sense, I, what I would, how I would answer that question is I'd say I think I'm successful if, in my professional life, if I am striving, if I'm taking on a worthwhile challenge with people I love. So the key terms there are worthwhile, subjective, define it how you like-
- MSMatthew Syed
Mm-hmm.
- SBSteven Bartlett
... challenge, which I think is, um, in- integral to f- being motivated and getting up in the morning and, and, you know, all the emotions you need to be internally, uh, internally fulfilled and motivated, and then with people I love, which I think is just a really, which speaks to community and human interaction, which I think is part of our human...
- MSMatthew Syed
Yeah. And, and the, the... yeah, look, that, that makes a lot of sense to me. I, I have to say one, one thing that given what you've just said you'll probably agree with, I think the narrow way that success has sometimes been defined in Western capitalist societies has been deeply mistaken-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm.
- MSMatthew Syed
... that it's all about how much money you have in your bank account. And I think we all know... although, you know, it- it's a bit of a cliché to say that it doesn't provide happiness, certainly not of a sustained nature. Um, I think that that thing about social interaction, the thing that makes me happiest for sure is putting one's heart and soul into a project, like for example writing a book, and then getting a letter from somebody who explains in their own way how it has positively impacted their life. And there is no feeling like that for me-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm.
- MSMatthew Syed
... a- as a writer. Um, and that really is a powerful engine to motivate you to come up with a new idea for a new book, the fact that you know it's having, it has meaning for other people, not that they, they've paid money to buy it and that money has been transferred via a publisher into my bank account. That is much less significant.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm.
- MSMatthew Syed
I mean, it's great if you do get money for it, you know, you can look after your kids or you can d- do something with it, but it's that...... feedback, that sense of making some kind of a difference. I mean, in a funny kind of a way, that, that's why for a long time, um, as I came towards the end of my table tennis career, I wanted to go into politics. I thought, "That is the place where you can make the most difference," right? You've got the levers to do something interesting, and then I (laughs) realized it was not quite as fun a avenue perhaps as, as, uh, as writing.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Why, why is it that human beings seem to get so much intrinsic joy from helping others?
- MSMatthew Syed
I think this is of f- uh, gr- great and deep significance, and, you know, just to put a historical lens on this, after the Enlightenment, the idea was of human beings as individuals. Individualism was the great goal of political life, and I think we conceived of people as deciding, uh, to have... interact with other people, deciding to have families, and you might remember Margaret Thatcher once said, "There's no such thing as society. There are just individual men and women and families." I mean, she had more to say after that. It wouldn't be fair to say that was her entire philosophy by any means. I think she was a, a great prime minister in many ways. But, but if you actually go back deeper in human history, when we, uh, our ancestors lived at the same time as the Neanderthals, the Neanderthals had, had p- p- probably bigger brains than us. They may have been individually smarter, but humans lived in tighter, more socially connected groups. What does that mean? It means if somebody learns something useful, they can share it with one of their kin, and therefore, they can also share it with their children. They can get a cross-pollination of ideas. They can bring ideas together, and then it gets passed down the generations.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm.
- MSMatthew Syed
And it was that sociality that conferred a competitive advantage on our ancestors above Neanderthals. It's w- it is, I think, our distinctive quality. We are social beings to an extent greater, I think, than any others, except the insects like, uh, ants who-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm.
- MSMatthew Syed
... for, for slightly different, uh, evolutionary reasons cooperate at scale.
- 12:24 – 19:27
Mindset
- SBSteven Bartlett
us to the topic of mindset-
- MSMatthew Syed
Right.
- SBSteven Bartlett
... really nicely. You know, I've, I've heard you talk about having a growth mindset and a fixed mindset. What is the difference between the two?
- MSMatthew Syed
So I think f- for... Thank you. I th- For what it's worth, I think this contrast is, is so important. I mean, I can talk about it through my own life, but, you know, in a fixed mindset people think that success, however defined, is all about talent, having the gift, uh, having the genetic inheritance in order, you know, having the personality trait in order to excel. A growth mindset is saying, "Okay, talent obviously matters, it's a factor, but it's not enough. It's what we do with our talents." So people in a fixed mindset have two massive risks. One, they think they're so talented they don't even need to try.
- SBSteven Bartlett
(laughs)
- MSMatthew Syed
So think of a young person who's just been, um, invited to join the Manchester United Academy, and they're suddenly getting money into their bank account, they're able to buy the fast car, and they think, "I'm God's gift." And they... And the amount of academy coaches who have come to me and said, "We don't understand it. We had this hardworking youngster, we invited them into the academy, and then they just went off the rails." It's a fixed mindset. They think their success is assured, so they stop putting in the hard yards and don't transition into the first team. So that's one danger. The other danger is people who don't think they're God's gift, but w- Like me at Goldman Sachs, you make one failure and you interpret that as meaning, "I obviously don't have talent, therefore I'm just gonna give up."
- SBSteven Bartlett
Ah.
- MSMatthew Syed
Do you see what I mean?
- SBSteven Bartlett
Yeah. So that's the negative version of it.
- MSMatthew Syed
S- Yeah. So you've got the, "I'm super. Talent is everything and I've got it, so therefore I don't need to try." "Talent is everything, I don't have it, therefore I should give up." They're both terribly, uh, damaging-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Hmm.
- MSMatthew Syed
... I think. A growth mindset, it doesn't mean that we think we're all gonna be the best speaker in the world. I wasn't the best table tennis player in the world, I never got into the top 20 of the world rankings. But with that attitude, I maximized my own potential.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Hmm.
- MSMatthew Syed
And going back to your thing about success, that's not a bad definition, now I think about it. You know, to try and be the best that we can be in our own lives doesn't mean we're gonna be the best who ever lived. You know, not everyone can be Muhammad Ali or Serena Williams or, or who, or Albert Einstein. But to be the best we can be, I think there's something wonderful. And just from my own perspective, I think trying to fill one's own potential, going on a journey that has some meaning, there's something wonderfully, um, uplifting, something satisfying about that too.
- SBSteven Bartlett
I really like the combination of those two ideas. The, this idea of being the best you can be, but realizing that it's a pursuit towards something that you may never get to.
- MSMatthew Syed
Mm-hmm.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Right?
- MSMatthew Syed
Mm-hmm.
- SBSteven Bartlett
So the journey, and the journey towards being the best you can be at something which has a lot of meaning to you-
- MSMatthew Syed
Right.
- SBSteven Bartlett
May, maybe that's the definition we were looking for.
- MSMatthew Syed
No, I think the, that point you make about the journey is really, really important. What was it? I think it was Robert Louis Stevenson said, "To travel is a better thing than to arrive."
- SBSteven Bartlett
Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- MSMatthew Syed
In, in a weird kinda way, I can say I talked about trying to win the Nationals, but first time I won the Nationals, (laughs) I rem- remember winning, going home, I was living on my own in a flat in, in, in Richmond, and I got home and I thought, (laughs) "Is that it?" You know what I mean? It was... The, the, the fun was actually the, the training and the, the camaraderie with my practice partners and seeing those small improvements through time.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Uh, I mean, that's consistent with most high-performance athletes-
- MSMatthew Syed
Right.
- SBSteven Bartlett
... and, um, business people. And I was reading this piece in, I think it was in The Telegraph, about, um, o- o- olympic depression, where you have the Olympians who train for the Olympics, they... And whether they get a gold medal, like Michael Phelps, who fell into depression, or whether they lose, either way, the outcome is they just ha- lose orientation in their life.
- MSMatthew Syed
Yeah.
- SBSteven Bartlett
And, and this is why I, I st- I... And also I felt it myself when a company came along when I was 24 and offered to buy my company, and I go home, look at Rightmove, look at all the cars I can buy and everything, and I feel this sense of emptiness and like-
- MSMatthew Syed
Mm-hmm.
- 19:27 – 32:40
Failure & moving out of your comfort zone
- SBSteven Bartlett
I think, um... tend to believe that a lot of the reason why people don't reach their potential, however we define that, is because they are risk adverse.
- MSMatthew Syed
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
- SBSteven Bartlett
And, and failure is something they just can't, their self-esteem just can't bear.
- MSMatthew Syed
I think that's, I think that's true. Uh, my own sense is that this has been exacerbated by the social media. So you tell me how the social media... It may have changed a lot since I wrote my first book for young people. But at the time, psychologists had come up with this concept of the curse of perfectionism, and their, their thesis was that young people are obviously now, uh, on the social media a lot, and a lot of people, when they're putting together their social media posts, they do it in such a way as to make their lives look really good. You know, "This is the holiday I just had on this wonderfully sunny beach," and, um, you know, they might even airbrush photos to make themselves look better, and, "This is my wonderful performance on th- the piano." Um, and, and the problem is people then start to think that success is about looking and acting in a perfect way.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm.
- MSMatthew Syed
That's massively problematic, 'cause why would you want to try anything new, which is inherently a risk, 'cause if you're doing something the first time, you're obviously not gonna be perfect, um, and if you do mess up, you draw the con- it goes back to the fixed mindset. You draw the conclusion, "Well, I'm obviously not talented enough 'cause I haven't nailed it the first time around." I think this was also bolstered by, uh, and you're on reality television now, I think reality televis- the idea of instant success-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm.
- MSMatthew Syed
... instant gratification, overnight elevation into, in- into the heavens. And if y- you know, if particularly young people think that success is like that, they don't realize the incremental steps you need to take to fulfill your potential, because as you know, most businesses succeed because, you know... I don't know whether you're familiar with the American jargon, but, you know, you get a minimum viable product, you test the value proposition early, you find out the inevitable deficiencies in the prototype or the piece of software, and then you make adaptations. In Silicon Valley, they call it failing fast. In other words, they're failing fast in order to get to a better answer. If you stop the first time you fail, or if you don't try at all, you're never gonna get to an answer.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm.
- MSMatthew Syed
If you think of the history of science, science is a succes- the most successful human institution because scientists, by and large, are willing to test their hypotheses. You know, they test it, they look at the empirical evidence, and they change it in the light of what the evidence is telling them. That is the basic pattern of science. And, and I think the problem is, as you alluded to, is that if young people are like, "Goodness me, I don't wanna look anything other than perfect," it destroys their capacity to grow-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Yeah.
- MSMatthew Syed
... and, and to have an, uh, a life of fulfillment, because J.K. Rowling put it brilliantly. She said, "The only way never to fail is never to try," but then your life is a failure 'cause you've just stayed in your comfort zone the whole time.
- SBSteven Bartlett
I see that. I resonate with all of that so much, and this, specifically this, this idea. I love the science analogy because seeing it as a hypothesis-
- MSMatthew Syed
Right.
- SBSteven Bartlett
... you're right. In science, you, you start with a hypothesis, you're not romantic about it, and then you go in pursuit and you, you, you a- agnostically go and test it.
- MSMatthew Syed
Right.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Whereas y- you're, what you're saying is, you know, young people or ambitious people generally will start with a hypothesis, and they will long in need for it to be perfectly correct.
- MSMatthew Syed
Right. That's right.
- SBSteven Bartlett
And this is also why businesses fail, because founders just, they just do everything... And I, I, I failed in my first business for many years because of that, because I was obsessed, romantic about my ho- hypothesis being correct, not romantic about the outcome, which was trying to be a successful person, right?
- MSMatthew Syed
Right. I, I, uh, look, I, I think, I think that's really, really significant, and I think that it's a great, great way of framing it. Look... By the way, some scientists fall in love with their theories-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- MSMatthew Syed
... and they can't adapt to it. I mean, there's been a few examples during the pandemic. Um, and, and by the way, I mean, I don't know if listeners are interested in this, but there's a brilliant study by Philip Tetlock, who's an American psychologist, and he looked at forecasters, so people trying to predict next year's GDP or oil price or other things of this kind, and he found a really interesting pattern, that the highest reputation forecasters, who are on television the most, on average make the worst predictions.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm.
- MSMatthew Syed
And can you see what-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Ego.
- MSMatthew Syed
What is an error of... Ego. An error of prediction is an opportunity to adapt the model in order to make it more predictive in the long run. But if you've been on the TV and you're supposed to be the god of forecasting, you start defending your prior assumptions. And so people who have an ego that gets in the way of hypothesis testing, they are brilliant at creative self-justification. The... I think the people who are most dangerous to companies-... and innovation are intelligent, highly talented people in a fixed mindset. They're just inveterate obstacles-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm.
- MSMatthew Syed
... to making the changes you need to change in order to get the business to where you wanna go to or where you want the economic model to get to-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm.
- MSMatthew Syed
... and so on. So, I think it's the same in meetings. You know, I've, I've... As you know, I'm very interested in how, how businesses succeed and the, the form in which we take most key decisions on meetings, 'cause no one person has a monopoly on truth, so you wanna talk to other people, but these can be really ineffective if people think that when someone challenges you, they're, they're insulting you. They're not, they're testing your hypothesis. We should think of meetings as mutual hypothesis testing so that we can collectively get to the best, uh, strategy or idea. And I think when you frame it in that way, you take the stigma out of challenge and dissent and failure.
- 32:40 – 39:00
The importance of creating diversity
- MSMatthew Syed
um, innovations.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Talk to me about creating a culture of diversity in your, in your business, then. If you were starting a company, if you were running a, a company at scale, how would you increase the diversity of-
- MSMatthew Syed
Right.
- SBSteven Bartlett
... ideas?
- MSMatthew Syed
Yeah, so, um, so the, the most important... for me, the most important thing by far is landing the argument as to why it matters. A lot of people don't think it mat- I mean, I remember going to an HR conference and the, the speaker (laughs) was talking about diversity is a wonderful thing, you all need more of it, and it will always help you do better as an organization. And this really awkward customer at the back said, "Can I ask a question?" And then they were like, "Yeah, okay." Um, "Imagine I am the coach of an Olympic sprint relay team."
- SBSteven Bartlett
Yeah.
- MSMatthew Syed
"And suppose, um, I've got Usain," who was the, the fastest person in the world at the time was Usain Bolt. "Suppose I've got Usain Bolt on my team. And suppose, hypothetically, I had cloning technology so I could clone Usain Bolt to have four Usain Bolts in my 4x100 relay team. There's no diversity in that team, but they're all very fast," right?
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
- MSMatthew Syed
"If you said you need to diversify your team, that would mean hiring slow runners. I don't want to do that as an Olympic coach." And it was like the air in the room just, it was like it had been punctured and everyone was like, "That's an awful thing to say." But he was right.
- SBSteven Bartlett
(laughs)
- MSMatthew Syed
That question was right. You know, in simple activities, cognit- you know, diversity of opinion, cognitive diversity doesn't help you. If it's obvious what to do, why would you want diversity? If you've already got a solution, a canned solution, you just need to scale it, you don't need divers- But when there's a complex environment, that logic turns on its head. So if you imagine, for example, you've got five people, each one of whom has one brilliant idea, you might think you have five brilliant ideas. But if they all have the same idea, you've only got one.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Yeah.
- MSMatthew Syed
All you need is two different ideas, and suddenly you've tripled, 300% increase in the creativity of that group. That's where cognitive diversity matters. And if your mission is to solve complex problems, diversity is the cornerstone of how well you do it. And once you land that argument, people start to... at the moment, people say, too many people think diversity is a politically correct box-ticking exercise.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm.
- MSMatthew Syed
And when diverse voices come in, they're condescended to, they're not properly included. Once you realize it's a strength, organizations start to harness it to do the great things that they want to do.
- SBSteven Bartlett
I can imagine that organizations don't... typically, organizations don't know what they don't know, and they don't, they don't know what they don't have as well. So if you, do you know what I mean? It's like an unknown unknown.
- MSMatthew Syed
Great point. Great point.
- SBSteven Bartlett
So when the board, when these like... let's say we've got six white, 60-year-old board members sat around a table of a re- a company that's really successful.
- MSMatthew Syed
Mm-hmm.
- SBSteven Bartlett
And then they go, you know, "What's their incentive to hir- they think we've been doing great. We're all very smart. Are you smart? Yeah, I'm smart." "Yeah, are you smart?" "Yeah, I'm smart." Yeah. And like how would you make the case to them that they need to hire a Black woman-
- MSMatthew Syed
Right.
- SBSteven Bartlett
... and that's gonna help, when they've just been killing the game with these six white men?
- MSMatthew Syed
Right. Well, it depe- so, again, uh, uh, you're absolutely right to ask the question. It depends on the context.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Yeah.
- MSMatthew Syed
Let's say, for example, the organization is, uh, an advertising company-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm.
- MSMatthew Syed
... and they've traditionally been selling to white middle-aged men-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm.
- MSMatthew Syed
... who, uh, think rather as they do. The, the, a- if they only want to sell to white men, then there may be no advantage-... in hiring somebody with a different perspective. If they're seeking to broaden their capacity to sell to people from different demographics, they won't have the tacit knowledge that they need in order to do it. If you think of the CIA, they hired brilliant analysts in the post-war period, and they thought they were the best intelligence agency in the world. But a lot of the information was obviously confidential. It's only now we can see how awful they were, because almost everyone, almost 100% of their analytical team were white middle-class, West Coast, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, um, liberal arts graduates. Nothing wrong with that background, right? But if you're trying to assess threats emerging from around the world, the Soviet Union, how would you possibly understand the probability of a conglomeration of different nations falling apart if you've been brought up in a stable middle-class-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm.
- 39:00 – 43:12
How do we create innovation within teams?
- MSMatthew Syed
these blind spots.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Right. And on that point of, um, innovation which we touched on, what are the... So running a business, running a global business as it scaled, I could see that we were getting less innovative. You kind of get complacent, you build teams, you get, you know, your teams get more comfortable with how it's always been done and then dis- getting them to disrupt themselves becomes increasingly difficult, especially when more people get involved, things seem to slow down, someone goes on annual leave, and then you say you've got a new innovative idea, you put it on an email thread, it stumbles around the email th- thread for four months. Ev- nobody's incentivized to do that because they're all getting paid to do their current job-
- MSMatthew Syed
Mm.
- SBSteven Bartlett
... and you don't typically have, like, an innovation team.
- MSMatthew Syed
Mm.
- SBSteven Bartlett
So when it's everybody's job, it's nobody's job. These are all prob- you know, and then these are, and then you talk about failure as well, people aren't incentivized to fail in big o- organizations. What are the parameters or the factors or the dynamics of a team that does innovate?
- MSMatthew Syed
So I think... Uh, I, look, I think that's all right, and I, I think it's a bandwidth issue. I mean, you talked about a team that's been successful thus far. I mean, t- take the legal profession-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm.
- MSMatthew Syed
... which have, you know, used the billable hour for a very long time, have done a particular... and they're busy and they're making money. But I hope that it's not a particularly unique insight to say that many of these legal firms will be out of business in a decade if they don't leverage machine learning-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm.
- MSMatthew Syed
... right? And AI, uh, in all sorts of different ways and start to disrupt their own bus- So you can carry on being busy whilst your equity value is about to disappear, right? So unless one is able to say not just, "We need to be doing things well for our clients and doing what we've always done effectively, but we need to also be thinking about how we do things differently and better," you may well be busy, you may well have satisfied customers, but it just takes one competitor to innovate and you're out of the game.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm.
- MSMatthew Syed
So I think that, that is a good way to focus minds on sparing some bandwidth to that question of innovation, so it doesn't just get dropped.
- SBSteven Bartlett
It's tough, right? Because that often means a change in personnel-
- MSMatthew Syed
Yeah.
- SBSteven Bartlett
... and nobody likes that idea in big organizations. I think this about some of the big advertising groups, like, they call them the Big Six. And the Big Six have been around, some of them f- one of them in particular has been around for 100 years doing advertising, but-
- MSMatthew Syed
What are the Big Six?
- SBSteven Bartlett
Like, WPP, Publicis-
- MSMatthew Syed
Yeah, right, right, right.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Those kind of-
- MSMatthew Syed
Yeah. Yeah.
- SBSteven Bartlett
... those big... And I was thinking, you know, in their executive teams you've got people that have been there for 20, 30 years, then this thing called social media comes along-
- MSMatthew Syed
Mm.
- SBSteven Bartlett
... and they're thinking, "Oh my God, so it's not billboards anymore on TV? Um, where does that leave me? And I'm not gonna know what TikTok and Snapchat are?" And the threat of having to replace oneself, I think, often, and your ego often, um, means that you go down with the Titanic.
- MSMatthew Syed
Yeah. And, and, you know, for what it's worth, you see this in, in, um, in, in many different areas. So I think... I don't... Do you admire Amazon as a company?
- SBSteven Bartlett
Admire?
- MSMatthew Syed
Yeah.
- SBSteven Bartlett
I mean, in some ways. Not in others.
- MSMatthew Syed
Yeah. So they should pay more tax and-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Yeah, there, there're some-
- 43:12 – 56:22
Social media, how do I keep up?
- MSMatthew Syed
uh, but I, I've gotta say, honestly, one, one of the things (laughs) I'm most interested in is, you know, I mention I'm 50, I'm totally bewildered by social media.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm.
- MSMatthew Syed
And you obviously, you l- you inhabit, right?
- SBSteven Bartlett
Yes.
- MSMatthew Syed
That world. You know it.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Yes.
- MSMatthew Syed
You've got a nuanced-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Yeah.
- MSMatthew Syed
... granular understanding of the whole thing.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Yes.
- MSMatthew Syed
Imagine you're me, (laughs) right? So now, eh, what do... You know, I, uh, I don't know.
- SBSteven Bartlett
What do I do? (laughs)
- MSMatthew Syed
I don't think I have... I don't have the faintest idea of how to usefully engage with the social media. I came to Twitter late. My tweets are rubbish. I, I mean, look, if anyone's following me, thank you.
- SBSteven Bartlett
How did you learn to-
- MSMatthew Syed
But I know I'm not very good at it. But I, I... It's an alien world for me, and I'm not... I've never been on Facebook.
- SBSteven Bartlett
So is speaking.
- MSMatthew Syed
Sorry?
- SBSteven Bartlett
So is speaking.
- MSMatthew Syed
Right. So what should I do?
- SBSteven Bartlett
What did you learn?
- MSMatthew Syed
How do I learn this?
- SBSteven Bartlett
How did you learn to speak?
- MSMatthew Syed
Toastmasters.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Well, it's a similar thing. I-
- MSMatthew Syed
But it isn't though, because... Is it?
- SBSteven Bartlett
Yeah. It's... I... When I did my first public talk when I was 14, and I'm... I, I always say this, I was, I was speaking in front of, like, parents evening. My ha- I'm shaking. My hands are sweating so much and there's paper shaking so much, I realize I'm not gonna be able to read the piece of paper 'cause it's moving too much. So I just made up the speech, and it's a similar thing with Twitter. You just said I'd done my first tweet, awful tweets, and then you're like... It sounds like you quit, or you sto- or you were disincen-
- MSMatthew Syed
I'm still there but I don't do it very much.
- SBSteven Bartlett
This is it.
- MSMatthew Syed
I've kind of... I, I, I actually I say that. I've probably done a few thousand tweets, but I came to it late and I, I still feel that if you ha- Okay, let me ask you this, you d-... If you had to summarize what you know-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Yeah.
- 56:22 – 1:01:45
Human psychology
- MSMatthew Syed
funny kinda way, it's kinda like, as a parent, it's a bit like reverse psychology but-
- SBSteven Bartlett
(laughs) Oh, like, vegetables. Eh?
- MSMatthew Syed
Like, we're getting your kid to eat vegetables or something.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- MSMatthew Syed
(laughs)
- SBSteven Bartlett
(laughs)
- MSMatthew Syed
But- but, you know, I think the true, the truth of human psychology are probably, you know, I mean, you mention Asch... Hey, by the way, you know, on psychology and on, on the global reach of Twitter, you talked about Asch's conformity, uh, experiment. That's, that varies systematically around the world.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm.
- MSMatthew Syed
So, so, uh, in- in western countries, more individualistic countries, people deviate more from the herd...
- SBSteven Bartlett
Can you explain what that is because yeah.
- MSMatthew Syed
Yeah, so, so, um, if I- if you're thinking of the same experiment-
- SBSteven Bartlett
The lines.
- MSMatthew Syed
Yeah, yeah, so, so Solomon Asch, one of the most famous experiments in- in modern psychology, he, um, drew a number of vertical lines.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm.
- MSMatthew Syed
Um, uh, which were of the same length, and then a- a fifth line that was significantly different in length to the other four, and then he got people to answer the question, "Do you think these..." I think I've got this broadly right, "Do you think all of these lines are of the same length?" And if you have people answering that on their own, like, 99% say the fifth line is of a different length as the other four. But what Asch did is he got, you know, 10 confederates to come in and say, "Oh, they're the same."
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm.
- MSMatthew Syed
And then, "Oh, they're the same." And then the third person, "Oh yeah, they're the same length." Then the fourth person, "They're the same length." Then when it gets to the actual subject of the experiment, they're like, "Oh my goodness, if all these people think that-"
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm.
- MSMatthew Syed
"... they must be the same." And so they say, "Yeah, they're all the same." So they're effectively disbelieving the evidence of their own eyes in order to fit in with the crowd. Now, that conformity bias, which surprises a lot of people, is stronger in other parts of the world than it is in- in western.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Can I just add as well on these lines? When you see these lines, there is no possible way-
- MSMatthew Syed
(laughs)
- SBSteven Bartlett
... that that small line-
- MSMatthew Syed
Right.
- SBSteven Bartlett
... is anywhere near the size of the other lines. But as you say, because of conformity, these stu- these- these participants just go along with it and it just, it's just beggars belief that that's how human psychology works.
- MSMatthew Syed
But there is a good reason for it, if you think about it. I mean, every now... Well, is there a good... I mean, there's a number of different theories about why it happens, but one of them is that occasionally, um, one can get things wrong that seem obvious. And if there's a lot of people who are independently saying the same thing, that's very good evidence that what they're saying is true. Um, and so humans, I think that bias evolved probably to enable us to take advantage of the wisdom of the crowd. You know, crowds if they can... I mean, crowds can converge on things incorrectly, but not independently of each. So it's if you imagine the stock market bubble-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm.
- MSMatthew Syed
... that's one person buying, another one seeing that person buying, and then another person seeing those two buying, and they get a bandwagon effect.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm.
- MSMatthew Syed
Whereas if 10 people independently say that these two lines are different, and you have no reason to believe that they're lying, that's a good reason to start doubting. So I think there are... But- but, you know, the reason I mentioned it is there is this global systematic variation in psychology. So you may have heard of, uh, you know, something called the fundamental attribution error, um, where we tend to blame people for things that are, things have gone wrong because of the situation.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Right.
- 1:01:45 – 1:14:10
What stops people reaching their full potential?
- SBSteven Bartlett
One thing I, I, I certainly do want to talk to you about as well is how, as an individual, because we've talked a lot about companies, um, and teams, how as an individual one is to reach their- this is a super broad question and I hate asking broad questions because you tend to get broad answers, but how as an individual one could reach their potential, or what, what are the, some of the fundamental things that block people from reaching their potential? We've talked about fear of failure, um, we've, we've also touched on the idea that people don't start because of that fear of failure, and they don't get the feedback loops, but what are the other common sort of threads that you see and, and the reason why people never get near their potential in life?
- MSMatthew Syed
So, so in addition to those things, so fixed mindset, fear of failure, risk adversity, all the things we've addressed, the other thing I think is I've become more interested in, it's related to what we've said but I think it's different, is, is what you might call initiative or agency or proactivity. I remember having an idea, um, this is in the 1970s, early 1980s, I was going to table tennis competitions and carrying this very heavy bag, Blue Holdall, Ascot Holdall, and thinking, "My goodness, this is really doing my back in."
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm.
- MSMatthew Syed
And it was just retrospectively obvious that the solution to a problem that many people had who were traveling a lot is to put wheels on luggage, right? Wheeled suitcases, which we all have now. Um, but having the idea doesn't mean a thing. You've actually got to act on that idea, right? You've got to say, "Right, I'm gonna try and design something. I'm gonna try and sell it to a department store. I'm gonna try and market it. I'm gonna try and buy a shop. I'm gonna have to pay rent. I'm gonna have to go to the bank and get some debt." That is a ma- there is a massive difference between a dormant, passive idea and one that you act upon. Another example. I lived on Richmond, uh, on a road in Richmond when I first moved there in my mid-20s, and it had no off-street parking.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm.
- MSMatthew Syed
What I didn't realize is that in Richmond parking is a nightmare, because all the houses have less parking spaces than there are... Sorry, there are more- there are less parking spaces than there are houses, and so people park on the street and then they get taken up and you end up having to park 10 minutes away. A few doors down, I noticed at the top of the road there's a house with a parking space that is always empty, and I thought to myself, "You know, I should knock on the door, or I shou- I should write them a note and say I'm willing to pay rent or to, or to buy it from you." But I never got round to doing it. And, and then a few years later (laughs) I was at a house party and this person said, "Oh, I used to live on Montague Road." "Oh, really? That's interesting. I lived there too." He said, "Yeah, I had the house at the top." I said, "What, with the parking space?" And he said, "Yeah, well what I never understood is that no one ever came and asked whether they could rent it out." And I thought, "That idea was in my head and I never acted on it."
- SBSteven Bartlett
Why?
- MSMatthew Syed
Because there is a... There's a fundamental inertia in a lot of us betwe- you know, it's easy to have an idea. It takes a bit of... You know, I remember when I was injured in table tennis and, you know, I wasn't practicing, I wasn't doing anything and I was sat at home, you know, just posting a letter felt like an unbelievably tough thing to do. You have to go all the way to the post office.
- SBSteven Bartlett
What's the psychological-
- MSMatthew Syed
You have to buy a stamp. You know, oh, man, it was like, "Oh, I'm struggling." You know, this, this, uh, the psychologist I've got interested in recently is a guy called Michael Frasser. He's a German, really interesting guy, and he looked at the unification of Germany, right, after the fall-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm.
- MSMatthew Syed
... of the Berlin Wall, and, you know, the, the West German business were like, "This is fantastic. We're gonna have this pool of really keen workers," and it just didn't work out because the East German, um, generalizing a little, but the East German workers had wor- had worked in, in a communist system where all the decisions are taken by the party bosses. And so, if a machine broke down, instead of taking action to fix it, they would just wait for the boss person to come along and fix it for them. If they needed the telephone number, they would wait and they wouldn't act on it. And I think that being able to... Richard Branson, who, who you probably know, I mean, I, I got to know a little, you know, he talked about how, I mean, I think this is probably slight... Well, he, he, this is the way he tells it. You know, Virgin Atlantic, he, he was flying to the British Virgin Islands, uh, to meet his girlfriend, uh, he has a stopover in Miami, uh, they're bumped off the flight, they delay it till the next day and everyone's sat there going, "This, this is a disaster." Then he thought, "Well, hang on a second, I could charter a private plane," which were, which were in the airport. So he pho- he pho- you know, took the initiative. Probably a few people had that idea, "What about chartering a private plane?" But he actually picked up the phone and said, "Right, how much will it cost to charter a plane?" You know, $10,000. He then went round to all the people with a blackboard saying, "Virgin," you know, "flights, this is the amount per ticket." Some people bought it, they managed to take the flight, and then when he got home, he rented a, a Boeing and, and went from there. And I think that proactivity is f- absolutely critical. You, you go to school for all those years, you get to 16, but what about going out there and...You, you're about to take a decision about what your future career will be. You know, you know, in, in my day, when you came out of university, some people would be in the same career for life. And you take that decision without going and asking people, "What was it like in this job? Could I perhaps work for a day in this job?" A lot of people I went to university with took jobs without any of that proactive analysis of what it would be like. Now, you as an entrepreneur have this in spades.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Yeah.
- MSMatthew Syed
I want more entrepreneurship in schools. I want proactivity instead of learning business studies concepts. This is another experiment by Michael Fraser. Instead of people doing an MBA, he gave them a short course on converting ideas into action.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Hmm.
- MSMatthew Syed
He calls it the action cycle. Those entrepreneurs compared to a control group, uh, you know, had, had, you know, 25... I can't remember the exact amount, but, but five times more successful businesses or 20% higher profits. It was, uh, published in Science magazine, so, you know, I think that's a really, really big deal.
- SBSteven Bartlett
That's a mindset... I, I just can't get over this idea that you saw that, that car parking space and, you know, you didn't-
- MSMatthew Syed
Mm-hmm.
- SBSteven Bartlett
... you didn't knock on or send a letter. And I'm trying to understand, linked also to, um, what you then talked about with Richard Branson at that airport with the, with the blackboard, going around and trying to sell this airline that he'd c- just come up with, what is the mental, like, cultural mental, psychological difference between the people that sat there and thought, "I'm just gonna accept this situation as is," like you did with the driveway, or like the other passengers whose had just been canceled did, and the person that takes the initiative? What is it about them and what is blocking... I guess a better question is, what is blocking those that are sat there on the airport floor thinking, "Fuck, I'm, my life is over," um, or, "I can't find a car parking space"? What is blocking them? And is it, this is my hypothesis, there's some kind of mental equation we're all doing very, very quickly that's weighing up the effort it would take and also our perceived outcome of success, our perceived chance of success, in Endeavor, um, and, and coming to the conclusion that it's just not worth it or possible?
- MSMatthew Syed
I don't think that's what's ha-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Really?
- MSMatthew Syed
I, I, I, I would reject that hypothesis. I don't think people make a rational calculation. I think it's more habit. Once you're used to doing things, once... I- if you've been at a school where... And, and some people are lucky enough to go a school... Where, where you are encouraged to, to, to make things happen, to, y- you know, some schools, you know, they are actually asked to start a business-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm.
- MSMatthew Syed
... to pick up the phone, to, to, um, to engage with other people as they seek to do something. You begin to... It becomes a habit. The idea of writing a letter and dropping it, it's like no big deal. That isn't a barrier for me. It becomes a, it becomes second nature. I can tell you from this parking space, I was d- you know, I was just in a... It was just pure inertia. I hadn't learned that entrepreneurial mindset. I d- I mean, that took me a long time to learn as well.
- SBSteven Bartlett
And you think... I'm just thinking about how I would teach someone to h- to be proactive.
- MSMatthew Syed
I, I... So for... You know, I- I've thought a lot about this too, and I, you know, I- I- I think you get people to do it. So what Fraser does in his course is he keeps linking ideas to action. You're not allowed to have an idea without acting upon it. He calls it the, uh, the active ingredient. So you g- get into a habit of... So, so one, uh, uh, one of the entrepreneurs... So, so he's done these experiments in Europe and in Africa, um, but in one of... I mean, he tells great stories about it, but it's such a long time since I read the papers. Um, so I think habit. Doing it again and again and again, you begin to get into the routine of linking ideas to action. I, I honestly, I think we shouldn't underestimate how damaging it can be if we, if we just continue to go with the flow and we're not prepared to-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm.
- MSMatthew Syed
... to break it from time to time.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Then you're kind of just a, a puppet to the course of life, I guess, in some respects, right?
- MSMatthew Syed
Right. And I think, uh, yeah, I think there are a lot of people with truly brilliant ideas, huge potential, who never act on their dreams.
- 1:14:10 – 1:15:23
Whats the biggest things you're a contradiction on
- MSMatthew Syed
Episode duration: 1:42:13
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