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The Power Of Regret

The Power Of Regret written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Daniel Pink

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Daniel Pink. Daniel is the author of five New York Times bestsellers, including his latest, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward, published in February. His other books include the New York Times bestsellers When and A Whole New Mind — as well as the #1 New York Times bestsellers Drive and To Sell is Human. Dan’s books have won multiple awards, have been translated into 42 languages, and have sold millions of copies around the world. He lives in Washington, DC, with his family.

Key Takeaway:

Everybody has regrets — it’s human. Understanding how regret works can help us make smarter decisions, perform better at work and school, and bring greater meaning to our lives. In this episode, 5-time NYT best-selling author, Daniel Pink, joins me to talk about the power of regret and how looking backward can actually move us forward in life. Daniel debunks the myth of the “no regrets” philosophy of life through his research in social psychology, neuroscience, and biology.

Questions I ask Daniel Pink:

  • [2:37] How does one really conduct research on regret?
  • [3:44] Are there were differences between the world product and the American product?
  • [4:53] There are posters and tattoos around the world that say no regrets, so how is this a positive thing?
  • [6:49] Are you saying that people make mistakes and learn from them?
  • [7:42] How did you land on this particular topic?
  • [11:44] Could you define what regret is and how it differs from disappointment and guilt?
  • [16:51] Could you walk us through the four categories of regret: foundation, boldness, moral, and connection?
  • [19:35] Does the demographic data show that older people have different regrets or bigger regrets than younger people?
  • [22:41] How does the research you’ve done connect with or have a relationship with mental health?
  • [25:49] Where can people learn more about you, your book, and your work?

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John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by business made simple hosted by Donald Miller and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network business made simple, takes the mystery out of growing your business. A long time, listeners will know that Donald Miller’s been on this show at least a couple times. There’s a recent episode. I wanna point out how to make money with your current products, man, such an important lesson about leveraging what you’ve already done to get more from it. Listen to business made simple wherever you get your podcasts.

John Jantsch (00:45): Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Daniel Pink. He is the author of five New York times, best sellers, including his latest, the power of regret, how looking backward moves us forward. His other books include the New York times best sellers win and a whole new mind, as well as the number one New York times, best sellers drive and to sell is human. His books have won multiple awards have been translated into 42 languages and have sold millions of copies around the world. He lives in DC with his family. So welcome to the show, Dan, I should say

Daniel Pink (01:23): Welcome back. Yeah, no I don’t. How many times is this now? John? It’s like five

John Jantsch (01:27): Or five. I’m go. I’m gonna, yeah, at least. I mean, like, I didn’t mention Johnny Bunco, but you know, you were

Daniel Pink (01:31): . That was, yeah. I was thinking as I, as I was look putting together my to-do list for the day and like what kind of appointments I had, I was thinking, geez, Louis, I think this is like the fifth time I’ve been on Jan’s show. So yeah, I think the sixth time I get a free bagel. Isn’t how it works

John Jantsch (01:45): With you. That’s actually let’s I like that idea. Let’s not talk about your book then let’s just talk about politics in DC right now for the whole show.

Daniel Pink (01:52): Uh, I, Hey, go for it. Go for it. It is, you know, if you wanna bring tears to your audience’s eyes, that’s fine with me. It’s your show. Yeah,

John Jantsch (01:59): No, I will forego that, but some people may not know that you spent some time in politics and did some speech writing for at least one president, if not two.

Daniel Pink (02:09): Well, I have, I, I worked in the reason I live in Washington is that my wife and I came here as a very young people. I worked in politics. I sort of fell into becoming a speech writer. My wife was a litigator for the justice department, and then we both left those jobs, but we didn’t leave DC and ended up raising, um, ended up raising three kids here. DC is a lovely place to live. And the truth of the matter is that day to day, it is far less obsessed with politics and most people outside of the beltway think.

John Jantsch (02:37): Yeah. Yeah. I totally agree. So let’s, let’s get into the book regret, the power of regret you for most of your projects, you do a lot of research and you did something called the American regret project. I think you, I think I heard you talk about how does one really conduct research on regret?

Daniel Pink (02:53): Well, it’s a great question. And so actually there’s sort of three legs on which this book stands. One of them them is I looked at about 50 years of research that scientists did on this emotion of regret. And this is research done by developmental psychologists, uh, by social psychologists, by neuroscientists, by cognitive scientists and others. I also did, as you mentioned, the American regret project, which is just a gigantic public opinion survey, the largest public opinion survey of American attitudes about regret ever conducted to try to get some insights about this profoundly misunderstood emotion and then, but wait, there’s more. I also did a third piece of research, which is called the world regret survey, where I collected lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of regrets from all over the world. And so that, so I wanted, so that’s how I came out there. A lot of work involved trying to crack the code of this deeply misunderstood emotion.

John Jantsch (03:45): I’m curious, and you don’t have to answer this necessarily. I’m curious if there were differences between the world product and the American product. It’s an

Daniel Pink (03:52): Interesting question. And the answer is maybe yeah, and here’s why there, there are two different kinds of surveys. The American regret project was a public opinion survey. And so I can make very safe claims about, you know, are in America, are there demographic differences in regret? What are the sorts of things that people regret, et cetera, et cetera in the world, regret survey, it wasn’t a random sample. I just invited people around the world to submit a regret. Now I ended up with a lot of them. We now have a database of over 21,000 of them and my hunch. And I just wanna emphasize that it’s a hunch I’m willing to make certain claims about the American regret project and demographic differences and other things about American attitudes on regret, my hunch. And it’s just that is that looking at the 109 countries that were represented in the third piece of it, these regrets are pretty universal. Yeah. These regrets are pretty, a lot of ’em are pretty universal. Moral regrets are a little bit more complex because people have different notions about what it means to be moral. But overall there’s a kind of a stunning amount of universality to these regrets.

John Jantsch (04:53): Yeah. The human condition is the human condition. Yeah. Right.

Daniel Pink (04:55): Exactly. Exactly.

John Jantsch (04:57): So let’s get this out of the way. There are posters and tattoos around the world. that say no regrets. So like how is this a positive thing?

Daniel Pink (05:06): Well, I mean, no regrets is no regrets as a philosophy of life is not a particularly good idea for at least two reasons. I mean, truly one is that you you’re leaving a lot of capacity on the table and two you’re kidding yourself. Otherwise is a great idea. Cause because, because here’s what we know. Here’s what we know again, going to that first leg of this stool. Here’s what we know about regret from 50 years of of research. Everybody has regrets. It’s a universal emotion that, that everybody has regrets. Uh, truly the only people who don’t have regrets are people with some kind of problem, uh, sociopaths or people with brain damage or gen degenerative diseases or brain lesions that is like not having regrets is a sign of a disorder. Or it’s also a sign of that. You could be five years old too, cuz your brain hasn’t developed.

Daniel Pink (05:47): But the point is that not having regrets is a sign of a brain that isn’t fully mature and isn’t working properly. So that’s kind of weird, right? Cause I don’t, you know, you were joking around about, Hey, let’s have this fun conversation about regret and here’s the thing I don’t like regret. It doesn’t feel good. Yeah. I don’t like it. But here’s the thing. This unpleasant emotion is everywhere. It’s ubiquitous. It’s one of the most common emotions that human beings have. And so the question then becomes if something that’s so widespread, why you have this unpleasant thing, that’s widespread why and the answer is cause it’s useful if we treat it right and we haven’t been treating it. Right. And when we treat it right, not ignoring our regrets, like those ridiculous, no regrets posters and not wallowing in our regrets, but confronting ’em there’s evidence that confronting your regrets properly can help you become a better negotiator, a better strategist, uh, think more clearly avoid cognitive biases, find greater meaning in life, solve problems, faster, solve problems, more elegantly. There’s a whole array of benefits if we treat it right.

John Jantsch (06:49): Well, so in some ways you’re saying it’s like mistakes, did we learn from it? Right. I mean, is that kind of what

Daniel Pink (06:56): We’re saying? Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, so, but did, but let’s push that a little bit further. Okay. So what we want, you know, everybody makes mistakes, errors has failures. The question then becomes what do you do with them? And the idea that in the face of bad choices, in the face of stupid decisions and indecisions, you should simply never look backward. Ah, it’s in the past, it doesn’t matter or say, I don’t wanna deal with that. Cuz that makes me feel bad. And I only wanna be positive. That’s a bad idea. What we know is that if we treat a regret systematically, we can learn and grow. And so what’s perverse yeah. About this no regrets philosophy. And you mentioned people with tattoos that say no regrets, no one, but you might as well get a tattoo. This is no learning. no growth, no progress. Yeah.

John Jantsch (07:42): Yeah. So I want to veer here for a minute. I’m curious how you, I mean you’ve written a pretty eclectic set of books. I’m kind of curious how you find a topic that you say I’m gonna write a book about this and then how you landed on this particular topic.

Daniel Pink (07:57): Well, in general, I have to be really interested in the topic that was really, you know, this, you know, this John writing a book is a giant pain in the ass. You know, this it’s hard, it’s hard. Okay. It’s really hard. So you gotta pick something that you really are interested in and really care about deeply. And that is truly not most things. I mean, truly it’s like it’s most things I do writing a book about. It would be like a form of punishment for a white collar crime, you know, so, so, so what happened in this book was that I had regrets and I was at a point in my life where I was in and someone was trying to reckon with them. I was at a point in my life at the very least where, to my surprise, I had room to look back.

Daniel Pink (08:42): You know, I’d always thought of myself as this like young guy. And all of a sudden I realized I’ve been doing this for TW this book writing thing for 20 years, I had kids graduating from college, like what the hell’s going on. And so I had room to look back and, and as I look back, as many people do, I said, ah, if only I had done that or if only I hadn’t done that and I realized I’d made some screws and mistakes and things and I wanted to make sense of it. And the curious thing though, was when I came back and started, when I very sheep started talking to people about these, my regrets, instead of people recoiling in the way that I kind of expected people leaned in, they wanted to talk about it and that’s, and that was, it was very intriguing.

Daniel Pink (09:21): And so what I ended up doing to your question about books, I was actually working on a totally different book at the time when I started think, when I started encountering this, I was working on, I had a contract for an entirely different book, a book that had nothing to do with this. And I put it aside for nearly two months and I started doing some basic research on regret and ended up writing a brand new, maybe 30 page book proposal for an entirely new book and went to my editor and publisher and said, Hey, I know I’ve contractually obligated to write a book about X, but I think this book about Y that is regret is way better. And let me try to make the case to you that this is a better book. This is a book that I’m, that I like, I feel in some ways compelled to write

John Jantsch (10:07): And, and you of course said, can I keep the advance on the other book for a while too? well,

Daniel Pink (10:11): Yeah, what

John Jantsch (10:12): We did, we just swapped

Daniel Pink (10:13): It out, swapped it out, you know? Yeah, yeah. We just swapped it out. We just said, okay, so don’t do book, don’t do that original book, do this book. And you know, as long as you give us words in English that we can put on pages, we’ll be reasonably happy.

John Jantsch (10:27): It’ll all come out in the wash.

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John Jantsch (11:44): I bet you, some people struggle with like, what is regret. Exactly. Yeah. And I know I’ve had the advantage of hearing you talk about this book at, at a conference I attended and it was, I thought, thought it was interesting that you talked about disappointment and guilt and that’s not regret. And so I wonder if we could kind of sum that up for us.

Daniel Pink (12:00): Yeah. But that’s an important, that’s important. It’s important to understand what this emotion is. So let’s talk about, let’s talk about difference between regret and disappointment. What make triggers regret, what makes an emotion regret and not something else is typically, well, there’s a few things, but at the core of it is agency. That is regret is your fault. Regret is your fault. I’ll give you an example. All right. I li as you mentioned, I live here in Washington, DC. And as we speak here on a very overcast and steamy July day here in the nation’s capital are base. I’m a sports fan and I’m a Washington sports fan. The Washington nationals baseball team have the worst record in the major leagues. The Washington BA Washington nationals have won 32% of their games this season. I mean, in baseball. That’s unbelievable. All right. Okay. So can I, so, and I’m a fan, do I re I’m disappointed about that?

Daniel Pink (12:54): Right? Because I care. Okay. For whatever weird reason I care, whether the nationals win or lose, I could get hit by a bus tomorrow. The nationals aren’t gonna care, but if nationals lose, I feel bad. Right. But I can’t feel regret about that, cuz I’m not playing. I’m not managing the team. I don’t own the team. All right. So it’s not my fault. And so regret is our fault. Now let’s talk about guilt. Cause I think that’s another really good one. And let’s even talk about shame while we’re at it. Okay. So guilt to me is a subset of regret. Guilt is a guilt is your fault. I did something wrong and I have people in my database. I bullied somebody. I cheated on my spouse. I swindled a business partner and I feel guilty about that. All right. So guilt is a form of regret.

Daniel Pink (13:35): It’s a subset of regret. It’s essentially a moral regret typically from an action. But shame is very different. Shame is guilt is I did a bad thing. Shame is I’m a bad person. And shame is pretty debilitating, right? If you know, if you make a, if you do something and this is a big problem, why people shy away from regret? It’s like when we make a mistake, we say, oh, I screwed up that decision over there. Therefore I’m an complete idiot. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m the worst person in the world. We make these universe. We make these sort of broad lifetime attribution based on a single action. So, so shame is very debilitating. Guilt is a form of regret and disappointment is simply feeling bad about something. That’s not your fault. I mean, again, I’ll give you an even simpler example. Okay.

Daniel Pink (14:17): So it looks like, so I was, um, so I was thinking about my exercise plan for the rest of the day. And it turns out here in Washington, DC, it at about five o’clock there’s a 100% chance of thunderstorms. Okay. So here’s the thing I could be. I can’t regret that it’s going to rain. Right? If it’s five o’clock and I wanna go outside and exercise, I can’t say, oh, I regret that it’s raining. All right. I can be disappointed in that. But if I have to go to the walk to the grocery store and I don’t bring an, and I forget to bring an umbrella, I can regret that. Cuz that’s my fault.

John Jantsch (14:45): well, you can also regret that you didn’t go running at 7:00 AM this morning when you knew it was gonna rain. Right?

Daniel Pink (14:51): Yeah. You know what? I can’t run that early in the morning.

John Jantsch (14:54): So it’s interesting is I heard you talk about the debilitating aspect of shame. I can see people regretting that they made a poor business decision and that shaming them to the point where they won’t ever go out on a limb and make a decision again.

Daniel Pink (15:09): They’re exactly right. You’re absolutely right. And this is the, then this is, and that’s because people don’t know how to contend with that regret. Right? So, so they go the opposite direction of the no regrets, the no regrets brigade, they wallow in it. They ruminate over it. What you have to do is you have to the initial step here when you make a mistake or screw up is that you there’s a whole process that you can go through. But it really begins with something called self compassion, which is treating yourself with kindness rather than contempt. The person you’re describing there will often say to him or herself, their self talk will be brutal. You know, swearing it themselves, lacerating themselves. Don’t do, they would never talk to anybody else that way. So don’t talk to yourself that way. You don’t have to treat yourself better than anybody else, but you don’t need to treat yourself worse than anybody else. There’s no evidence that let lacerating self-criticism is in a, is a performance enhancer. Seriously, none. Zero zilch. Yeah. What you wanna do is treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt recognize that mistakes are part of the human condition. And as we were talking about earlier, that it’s a moment in your life, not the full measure of your life. And when we do that, we can open the way to making sense of our regrets and drawing lessons from them.

John Jantsch (16:17): So, so for all those people that have the poster or the tattoo we could, we can still be no regrets, just no regrets. I’m wallowing in. How’s that?

Daniel Pink (16:25): Okay. That’s fair. That’s fair. Yeah. That’s fair. I mean that’s, that’s actually a good, that’s a good way to, that’s a good way to do it again. What we have here is what we have here is this kind of performative courage of no regrets. We think that, I mean, people do it in this very assertive, bold way, right? They say no regrets. They announce it. They proclaim it. They enshrined it on their bodies as a show of courage. But that’s not what courage is John. I mean, courage is looking your regrets in the eye and doing something about that. Yeah.

John Jantsch (16:52): Yeah. Turns out there are categories of regret and you can talk about the types foundation, boldness moral and connection. But I have a favorite can I have, is it okay to have a favorite kind? So, and you can unpack what each of those are if you wish. But my favorite is boldness. I mean, I think,

Daniel Pink (17:07): Well, no surprise. Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:09): You know, so, so maybe, maybe give us a really quick definition of those four types and then we can get into yeah.

Daniel Pink (17:14): Yeah. So

John Jantsch (17:15): We talked diving into boldness.

Daniel Pink (17:17): We talked about moral regret are if only had done the right thing, right? So you’re at a juncture. You can do the right thing. You can do the wrong thing. You do the wrong thing. Most of us regret it because most of us are good and want to be good connection. Regrets have only had reached out. These are regrets about relationships that come apart. People want to do something, but they don’t. And it drifts apart. Even more foundation regrets are small decisions early in life that accumulate to nasty consequences. Later in life, I spent too much in save too little. I didn’t take care of my health. I didn’t work hard enough in school. And then finally boldness regrets, which are you’re at, at a juncture. You can play it safe. You can take the chance. And when people don’t take the chance, not always, but a lot of the time they regret it and it doesn’t matter the domain of life, but it could be asking somebody out on a date, it could be traveling. It could be speaking up or, and why I’m not surprised this comes into your world. Is it not starting a business?

John Jantsch (18:09): Yeah, yeah. Or not, you know, not taking a bold move. I mean, I look at my business and I can clearly think about maybe this is in comparison. You know, some other people that maybe started when I did or do a similar thing that, that I look at and go, wow, if I’d have like gone for it in a certain way, I’d be there too. But I have where I will say I have no regrets. I love where I am but I also do. I do also recognize sometimes when I could have been Boulder,

Daniel Pink (18:35): I think we all do. And I think that’s healthy. Yeah. Yeah. That’s the thing. So the question is John, what do you do with that? Okay. This is perfect example. I feel exactly the same way. Yeah. All right. So I, there were so many times in my life when I could have been Boulder. So here’s what I can do. I can go back there and say, you know what? There were times in my life when I couldn’t have been Boulder and thinking about that right now makes me a little uncomfortable. So I’m gonna plug my ears and never con consider it again. Bad idea. Or I can say, as we were talking about earlier, oh my God. There were times when I could have been Boulder. I’m such an idiot. I’m a moron. I just don’t know what I’m doing. That’s a bad idea too. What I should do is say, huh? What’s that telling me? That’s telling me, well, it’s telling me a few things. Number one. It’s or let’s say you and I similarly situated what it’s telling us, John is this one we value boldness. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Not everybody has to value boldness, but you it’s clarifying what we value and it’s instructing us and it’s instructing us to say, Hey, you know what, next time around, go

John Jantsch (19:34): For it. Take a bigger shot. yeah, yeah. Yeah. Because you have demographic information on the research. Do older people have different regrets, bigger regrets than younger people.

Daniel Pink (19:46): This is a B. Okay. So, so in the quantitative survey, the American the public opinion survey, I had a very large sample in order to try to make determinations like this. Do men have different regrets than women do?

John Jantsch (19:57): Right?

Daniel Pink (19:58): People with lots of formal education have different regrets from people with less formal etcetera, et cetera. There were not that many demographic differences except on this dimension, which is age. And it’s a huge difference. And it’s this, when we are young, we tend to have equal numbers of regrets, of action and inaction, equal numbers of regrets about what we did and what we didn’t do. But as we age and not even age that much mm-hmm thirties is to start to take over in the thirties, forties, and then certainly fifties and beyond regrets of inaction, swamp, regrets of action. When you get to be I’m in my fifties, when you get to be my age, it’s like two to one, sometimes three to one regrets of inaction versus action, which goes to your boldness point. Yeah. It suggests that what we’re gonna, we’re gonna over time, we are, are gonna regret the things we didn’t do. Not asking that person out on a date, not taking that trip, not speaking up, not starting that business, not reaching out to a friend. Those are the things that stick with us and bug us for a long time.

John Jantsch (21:03): Yeah. I think it’s EE comings line. I sort of remembering is we regret the sins of omission rather than the sins of commission, you know, as we get older, , you know, that did, but not didn’t do.

Daniel Pink (21:14): Yeah. But the thing about that is that’s not only, you know, that’s like, that might make intuitive sense for people, but we have a, but I have data from my own survey showing this very clearly. It’s basically the only demographic difference that I’m willing to like go to the ramp arts to defend because the finding was so strong, but it’s also very consistent with what 50 years, the 50 years of existing research are shown us. But

John Jantsch (21:35): I think it probably comes down to, we start thinking and I’m running out of time. right. I mean, whereas when we’re in our twenties, we’re like, eh, I got, I’ll get another shot at that. Right.

Daniel Pink (21:44): That could be, I think that’s part of it. I think the other thing is that action regrets. We can resolve over time in some way. So we can say, so if I bullied somebody or if I hurt somebody or, you know, cheated somebody, I can go and like apologize or make amends or make restitution. There are times where you can take some of the psychological sting out of a regret by finding the silver lining in it. So it’s so if I said, I mean, this is, you know, I said, you know, one point in my life, I thought about moving to California. I don’t regret not doing that. But suppose that I did, I, I said, if only I moved to California, right. And I can say, well, I lived in Washington. Well, at least I was able to send my kids to a great school. You know, I can find a silver lining in, I can find a silver lining in that, but in action regrets, you can’t undo. You can’t find a silver lining. That’s why they nod us. Whereas one poet says they lay eggs under our skin, which I think is a lovely and somewhat creepy way to put it. Yeah.

John Jantsch (22:41): Yeah. so at the beginning you were talking about research that was done in all these various fields that have some relationship to mental health. And I, you know, do you have an opinion or a view from the work you’ve done and now all the talks you’ve given and conversations you’ve had with individuals, how big of a mental health problem is this?

Daniel Pink (23:01): It’s an interesting question. Okay. So I think there’s some new, I think there’s some nuance to it. Yeah. Okay. So I think that the, I think mental health is a pretty significant issue. However, this is my view. Okay. And I just wanna emphasize I’m not a physician, right? I think that it is a little bit less of a medical issue than we make it out to be. And what I mean by that is that what I think the big issue here is that we haven’t taught people how to deal with negative emotions. Yeah. What we’ve sold them, a bill of goods we’ve said you should always be positive. And we don’t, and our lives are not uniformly positive and negative emotions have a place. We just haven’t taught people to deal with them. And so I think that we have a mental health crisis, perhaps even a me, you know, medical problem when people get so consumed by their regrets and their negative emotions that they, it ends up metastasizing to anxiety, depression, or something that is actually a medical ailment.

Daniel Pink (24:03): But, you know, but I don’t think that that every negative emotion is not a mental health crisis. It can become a mental health crisis. If we don’t tell people the truth, that negative emotions are part of life. That negative emotions are instructive. That negative emotions are in fact, in some ways more instructive than positive emotions and that we can deal with them in a systematic way. And when we deal with them in a systematic way, we can live better and work smarter. And so I, I think that among the young people, among younger people that this mental health problems we’re seeing in younger people are because they’ve somehow gotten the message from us that they need to be positive all the time. Yeah. And then, because they’re human beings, they sometimes don’t feel positive. They feel sad. They feel regret. They feel fear. They feel these negative emotions and they look around and say, oh my God, everybody else is so perfect. There must be something wrong with me. And I don’t know what to do with this feeling. And I think that’s the problem. We need to equip people to deal with negative emotions, harness them as a force for progress.

John Jantsch (25:04): So I regret that I didn’t lean in a lot harder to my baseball career, but it sounds to me like, uh, maybe I could still get a tryout with the NATS.

Daniel Pink (25:11): Well, yeah. This year you could, and you know, this year, this year you could, but that’s an interesting, that’s an interesting thing that, you know, it’s like the question then becomes like, what do you do with that kind of regret? Cuz that’s not an uncommon regret. Yeah. Yeah. I have a lot of sports related regrets, actually, John. And so, so the things like, okay, are you going to get an MLB contract? Probably not. Okay. But the question is like, what is it about that that you regret not leaning into? So you felt like, okay, I didn’t push myself to the hardest I could push myself. You know, I didn’t take a, I didn’t take a big shot and there are plenty of time and plenty of other realms in which you can push yourself hard and you can take a, you can take a big shot.

John Jantsch (25:47): Awesome. Always great catching up with you. Dan tell people where they can connect with you and the ways that you want to. And obviously the books are available everywhere you

Daniel Pink (25:55): Buy books. Yeah. The best other starting point is my website, which is Dan pink.com, D a N P I nnk.com. And there’s a newsletter. There are a lot of free resources, all the books, all, you know, unicorns, rainbows, cotton candy for everyone, all kinds of good stuff

John Jantsch (26:10): And no regrets posters. I can touch you. Dan. Thanks again. Uh, always great to catch up and uh, hopefully we’ll see you one of these days there on the road.

Daniel Pink (26:20): All right, John. Thanks for having me back. Look forward to my bagel next time. Hey,

John Jantsch (26:24): And one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it @ marketingassessment.co not.com.co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network and Zapier.

HubSpot Podcast Network is the audio destination for business professionals who seek the best education and inspiration on how to grow a business.

 

Do you ever wish there was some way to get all those apps you use at work to talk to each other? Or dreamed about automating routine tasks like following up with marketing leads or cross-posting on social channels—without having to hire a developer to build something for you? Then you’ll love Zapier. Zapier helps marketers make the most of the technology you already use. Connect all your apps, automate routine tasks, and streamline your workflow—so you can convert more, with less chaos. See for yourself why teams at Airtable, Dropbox, HubSpot, Zendesk, and thousands of other companies use Zapier every day to automate their businesses. Try Zapier for free today at zapier.com/DTM.

 

How To Grow Your Business Like A Weed

How To Grow Your Business Like A Weed written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Stu Heinecke

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Stu Heinecke. Stu is a bestselling business author, marketer, and Wall Street Journal cartoonist. His first book, How to Get a Meeting with Anyone, introduced the concept of Contact Marketing and was named one of the top 64 sales books of all time. His latest release, How to Grow Your Business Like a Weed, lays out a complete model for explosive business growth, based on the strategies, attributes, and tools weeds use to grow, expand, dominate and defend their turf. He is a twice-nominated hall of fame marketer, Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center author-in-residence, and was named the “Father of Contact Marketing” by the American Marketing Association. He lives on a beautiful island in Puget Sound, Washington.

Key Takeaway:

Anyone can grow their business into something resilient and unstoppable — just like weeds do. In this episode, best-selling author, Stu Heinecke, shares his model for business growth by using the successful strategies that ordinary weeds use to spread and prosper in almost any situation. We dive into the weed-based attributes you can use to get the job done quickly and effectively and increase your market share, prominence, and customer base.

Questions I ask Stu Heinecke:

  • [1:46] Why did you want to use the analogy of a weed and what was your thought process behind it?
  • [3:14] Why is a weed different than a prize-winning flower?
  • [4:27] The big premise of using the weed metaphor is really to tap into what you’re calling a weed mindset — can you unpack that idea for us?
  • [5:32] What are the unfair advantages that you think adopting this weed mindset gives a business?
  • [7:39] Can you break down the weed model for us?
  • [14:17] How do you apply this model to taking that next step and getting to the next level with your business?
  • [17:41] How do you win a weed award?
  • [19:27] Where can people buy your book and learn more about your work?

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

John Jantsch (00:01): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the MarTech podcast, hosted by Ben Shapiro and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network with episodes you can listen to in under 30 minutes, the MarTech podcast shares stories from world class marketers who use technology to generate growth and achieve business and career success all on your lunch break. And if you dig around, you might just find a show by yours. Truly. Ben’s a great host. Actually, I would tell you, check out a recent show on blending humans, AI, and automation. Download the MarTech podcast wherever you get your podcast.

John Jantsch (00:52): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Stu Heineke. He’s the best selling business author marketer and wall street journal cartoonist his first book, how to get a meeting with anyone, introduce concept of contact marketing was named one of the top 64 sales books of all time. We’re gonna talk about his latest book, how to grow your business like OED, which lays out a model for explosive business growth, based on the strategies, attributes, and tools weeds used to grow and expand, dominate, and defend their turfs. So Stu, welcome to the show.

Stu Heinecke (01:35): Thank you so much. What a, what a pleasure. And as I’m listening to it, I’m thinking, what the hell is he talking? Right? what must this guy be talking about?

John Jantsch (01:46): Well, I’m certain that the first question that many people have given our sort of negative view, typically negative view of weeds is like, wait a minute. You know, that’s like how to smell like a skunk, isn’t it? I mean, why, you know, why do I wanna used the analogy of weed? So help helps first go there.

Stu Heinecke (02:05): Sure. Well, you know, by the way I think the first thing they think of is you mean this kind of weed, the kind of weed you smoke? Nope. It’s not that good. That’s not what we’re talking about, but yeah. I mean, well, we all know what it means to grow like a weed. So the fact is that all of this whole logic is already built into our experience. We know what it looks like. We know what it means to grow like a weed. We also know what it looks like because we see it every spring and actually not just through, through the spring, but you see what they do all the way through the summer. And you see that they, you know, while blood of the plants have maybe a single season of growth dandelions, for example, just keep doing it. They keep running that process over and over again. So they, they are always running these unfair advantages, which is kind of a big part of the whole strategy of weed strategy.

John Jantsch (02:50): You know, it’s funny. I, I really I’m. I love all plants. I love all animals. I love trees so, you know, a lot of times I kinda laugh and say, weeds are just flowers with bad PR firms. I mean, it’s like what? I know why we call some things weeds, but their nature of taking over. And for whatever reason, they don’t look like what we want our yard to look like or something, but you know, who gets to call something a weed? I mean, why is a weed different than a prize winning flower?

Stu Heinecke (03:19): Well, you know, I guess the fact is that, well, if you look at let’s, it’s full of contradictions because if you look at, let’s say the state flower of California, it is a weed, you know, it’s the California poppy. So there are beautiful. I don’t think it’s really necessarily a function of beauty, but just are they, are they doing things that we don’t want them to do? Are they showing up or they’re not invited? And so dandelions are probably the great ex example. Everyone experiences them. And you, if you have lawns, you see them show up in your lawn. And by the way, if you see one, then you see you look up and you see hundreds of them. So they’re really, they’re tough to deal with they’re formidable. And so I guess wheat is probably just, I don’t know, just a, a nasty name for a plant. It’s a plant that some gardeners say is just a plant outta place, but that’s true only to a certain point because there are some weeds that seem like they’ve come from another planet. They’re just incredibly aggressive and noxious and we don’t really want them around.

John Jantsch (04:19): Yeah. And they’ll take out native species and things like that, that, you know, because of their ability to grow and spread talk a little bit, of course, the, you know, the big premise of the book or a big premise of using the weed metaphor is really to tap into what you’re calling the weed mindset. So maybe unpack that idea for us.

Stu Heinecke (04:38): Sure. Well, you know, you would, if you think about weed having a mindset, but first of all, to have a mindset, I guess you probably should have a brain and weeds don’t have brains. So how could that even be possible? But if you watch weeds at all, if you see what they do, if you see how they operate, then you can certainly, you can certainly see that there is some presence there that looks like a mindset because they’re aggressive and resilient and adaptive. And when you, when they’re owed down, they go right back to work building right back up again, they don’t stop. And, and so they have really admirable qualities that I guess in our experience are expressed as mindset. So that’s where the mindset, the weed mindset comes from.

John Jantsch (05:19): So one of the things I’ve talked about a long time is that having a real point of differentiation, one that matters to the client can be a way to almost make your make competition irrelevant. You call it an unfair advantage. So, you know, what are the unfair advantages that, that you think this MI weed mindset or adopting this weed mindset gives a business?

Stu Heinecke (05:40): Well, I would say that for if we’re well, so really the weeds model goes beyond just mindset, but it’s leveraging a fierce mindset and unfair advantages against collective scale and running it against a process. But I would say really, if you’re using any element of wheat strategy, you’re already creating unfair advantages for yourself. And when we’re looking at, let’s say the, let’s say the situation of many small businesses, the ones that have no unfair advantages are not gonna survive. So you have to have right. And I guess we could call them a lot of other things though. Certainly one is a differentiator. So, and one of the wall street journal cartoonists that helps me. When my cartoons show up in the journal, they reach an audience of a little over 2 million readers. That’s really, you know, no one’s, how is anyone gonna compete with that as a way to cause people to become aware of you and maybe, you know, say, well, you know what I know about Stew’s use of weeds, cuz I use weeds to help sales teams break through.

Stu Heinecke (06:34): It’s sort of like my day job. So when I get to have my, my, my, you know, my, my cartoon show up like that, then it’s just an advantage that is really tough to, to me. But an advantage could be a location. It could be, it could be a partner that you have. We’re gonna start up a, a new, a new award based on the book called the total wheat award. And my new partner in this is the NASDAQ entrepreneurial center. That’s an unfair advantage. So it’s all sorts of all manners of, of unfair advantages from ways to get a lot more, a lot more ER, to help with getting exposure, kind of like this is a seed pod strategy that we’re executing right here, but you’re my seed pod, essentially. I’m reaching your audience and you’re multiplying the, the reach of my seeds of these impressions that I get to create from the book and from interviews and talking about the book. And it goes all the way down through, through thorn strategy and segmentation strategy and Roset and vying and soil and root strategies. All of these are levels of strategies that help us gain unfair advantages.

John Jantsch (07:40): So I think you kind of were just doing it there, but I’m gonna ask you to kind of back up and say, and hopefully you can do justice in a couple minutes, you know, the weed model itself. I think you were ticking off elements of it there, but maybe kind of put it together for us.

Stu Heinecke (07:55): Yeah, well, so there are eight levels of strategy in that weed split in the weeds model, which is an acronym for weed inspired enterprise expansion and domination strategies. So that’s, that’s what it is. It’s an acronym, but what it really is standing for are eight levels of strategy. So the, and it really corresponds with the pieces of the, or elements of the weed plants themselves. So there’s seed strategy, which is analogous to anything that causes people to become aware of you and, and form the intent to transact with you. Hearing me on your podcast might hap that might cause people to say, I want to go buy the book or maybe I don’t, what else? I dunno, I’d like to have stew consult with me or something else. I don’t know, but, and seed pod strategy, seed pods. We see those. And for example, dandy lines, those geo geodesic domes of seeds are held up in the air and those seeds are so magnificently mobile. I mean, they just, they fly all over the place. They probe every possible opportunity to take roots. So holding them up in the air like that actually gives them a greater chance to travel and spread. So, and then,

John Jantsch (08:56): And get a couple, like get a couple five year olds and pull a few of those out and blow ’em too. That really makes a big

Stu Heinecke (09:02): Blow that’s true. They love, they look their kind of seat buds with stove, but then thorn strategy is interesting because that’s using all legal protections, for example, to protect your IP and really you’re turf, you’re really protecting your turf and the weeds do that. And we certainly need to do that in business as well, but not all of us do that or are oriented in that way. And then there’s segmentation strategy, which might, we could probably talk the rest of the, our time together on segmentation strategy because that’s, that is the, when you go out and you find a weed in your yard, you might have found some of these that you’ll pull on it. And all you get is you get a handful of stuff, but you didn’t get the plant. You certainly didn’t pull it up by the roots. And so that’s actually a defensive strategy it’s there to prevent, or let’s say mitigate loss.

Stu Heinecke (09:46): Well in business, we have the same things happening. We have disruptions that occur all the time. One of those that that occurs, every was just a regular cycle of years is recessions. And a lot of us are still caught UN unguarded for recessions. We just sort of dread when they show up and we don’t really have much of a much of a much of a strategy for dealing it. But what if you’re dealing with those things, there are ways to mitigate them. And that’s, we’re gonna be doing that probably soon if the press is correct, because they’re sort of beating the drum about recession again. And anyway, there are strategies to deal with that. And then roses strategies. Really. I put that into the model because I wanted Rose’s are those that well, in the example of dandelions, that radial fan of leaves that spreads out across the lawn, if you come over it with a, it seems like they evolved just to duck the mowers.

Stu Heinecke (10:38): It’s not really where it came from, but what they’re really doing is they’re covering the ground and they are denying the critical resources that plants around them need of the grass around them, needs to grow and really just to live so sunlight and water. And so how can we create those kinds of, it’s really about cultivating unfair advantages, looking for those and finding new ones that we can add. A lot of times we can add those by the partnerships and associations that we create and let’s mine strategies. So borrowing the infrastructure of others to, to gain dominant access to the sort of warm sunshine of sales and, and all the things that we’re looking for, just sales and exposure and so forth. And then finally, there’s root strategy in the plant. It’s the seed of all life force, but in business, it’s all of the, it’s where all of the value of the business is sort of stored and curated and maximized.

Stu Heinecke (11:28): So there are strategies for doing that. And then finally soil strategy. So seeds are rather, yeah, well at the weeds, they don’t get to, they don’t get to change the soil quality that they’re in. They just sort of, they just, wherever they land, they make a go of it. But we have the ability to change the substrate in which we grow our businesses. So the cultures within our businesses and with outside of our businesses, our communities and movements are really interesting. If we can grab hold of or start movements, those are amazing things to help change the sort of soil strategy or the conditions for us to grow in. So that’s the model of that’s the weeds model for creating unfair advantages.

John Jantsch (12:07): And now a word from our sponsor technology is awesome. Isn’t it? I mean, I talk about all kinds of technology on this show all the time. Did you ever wish there was a way to get some of the technology, some of the apps that you work with every day to talk to each other? There’s just that one little thing you wanted to do well for over 10 years, I’ve been using a tool called Zapier. In fact, longtime listeners might remember the founder, Wade, uh, foster on this show doing an episode when they were just getting started. Now they’ve blown up and it is an amazing tool. We use it to get our spreadsheets, to talk to other spreadsheets, our forms, to talk to spreadsheets, our forms, to talk to other forms, all kinds of magic. When it comes to our CRM tool, it’s really easy to get started.

John Jantsch (12:54): I mean, there’s no coding. I mean, there’s 4,000, I think apps that, that they now support and that can, you can get to talk to each other, look, see for yourself, why teams at air table Dropbox, HubSpot, Zen desks, thousands of other companies use Zapier every day to automate their business. And you can try it for free today. It’s at zapier.com/dtm that’s Zapier, which is Z a P I E r.com/dtm. Check it out.

John Jantsch (13:24): Yeah, it’s funny. You’ll be driving down the road and there’ll be, you know, a, a weed growing up, you know, between cracks and in pavement and, and things like that. I think it really kind of points to the tenacious nature of ’em. But when I hear you talk about the soil, I’m think I’m thinking very much in terms of like creating community and creating value for clients that they want to go out and, and refer you as the idea of soil, isn’t it?

Stu Heinecke (13:47): Yeah, absolutely. Yes. It’s all those cuz all of those create conditions that are much more favorable for our growth.

John Jantsch (13:56): So how then do we take that model? And if somebody goes through their business today and says, oh, I’m, you know, I can add this or I could add this or I could be better at this one. And so we get maybe our weed strategy put together, you know, what’s whatever, what many people wanna do then is really scale, grow that business beyond them or grow that business certainly from beyond where it is to today. So how do you apply this then to, to taking that next step, going to the next level with the business?

Stu Heinecke (14:22): Well, I think in fact, one of the first things that we can do to grow our businesses, I, we gotta be looking at them and making sure they’re VI, if there’s something that’s not viable about it, fix it, but assuming everything is viable and you’ve got a great concept. Then one of the first things we can do to grow our business is to root out one to one leverage and then jump to either multichannel or collective scale. That’s for the ultimate is collective scale. I should explain what that is though. Yeah. We’re sure. From just from early childhood, we’re all taught to become self-reliant and sort of self-sufficient I guess that sort of happens when we, I, the first time we played musical chairs and you got left without a chair, you say, well, wait a minute, where’s my chair. You know, I’m not gonna let that happen again.

Stu Heinecke (15:03): And I think that maybe it’s maybe that’s the first time we get, it’s get it instilled in our heads that we’re in a competitive world and you need to be proactive and you need to get things done. You need to be able to rely on yourself to get things done. So that continues when we’re told then to go to school and get good grades, study hard, then you’ll get into a great college. And from there, you’ll get a great job, maybe a really well paying job, but here’s the problem. The, all of that is wonderful. We need to be self-reliant. And I would say that the entrepreneurs around us are probably some of the most self-reliant people there are, but, but we can’t do it alone. And that’s the big realization we, and, and I think probably the more self-reliant and the mortality, the more easily you learn things, the harder it is for you to learn, to let go and say, well, some of the stuff I’ve just gotta let go of this and let somebody who’s either better ranted toward it or better at it than I am.

Stu Heinecke (15:56): I just let them do it for me so that I can move on to other things. And I would say one of the big telltale signs is if you labor is directly involved in your deliverables, you are at one to one leverage. And, or, and let’s say, if you discover that it’s really hard to take a vacation because the bus, the business stops because you’re not there, that’s one to one leverage and you need to root that out really quickly. So you do that, I think by jumping to multichannel leverage. And that really means just forming partnerships with, with people who could bring you to, to other to new clients, let’s say, or open up new sales channels. I was inviting you to, to, to join a group that I started a group of authors. And I guess in a way that’s multichannel leverage because we get together, we formulate ideas, we bring things together and, and you know, that that’s the way we’ve gotta, we’ve gotta find ways to collaborate with people as much as possible. I guess that’s really the, one of the big messages of we is that the more we collaborate, the stronger we become.

John Jantsch (16:55): So with an example of that, say a consultant or coach who is doing a lot of that, one to one work would be building a course or bringing, building a community or doing group work, or having, as you said, strategic partners who are going to, you know, send business his or her way. I mean, is that at a very simple example? What we’re talking about?

Stu Heinecke (17:14): Yeah. Yeah. I think so. I think productizing what you do as a consultant mm-hmm and turning that into a course is a great way to do that because once you’ve built it, and of course you’re promoting it, but other people could promote it, you can go on vacation, you can make money while you sleep. All those wonderful things that happen when you’re not right. That when you’re not the factory and you shouldn’t be the factory. Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:35): All right. So here’s the burning question. And I’m certain people are listening right now and on the edge of their seats, how do you win a weed award?

Stu Heinecke (17:44): you have to be, I was actually a total weed award, but you have to be

John Jantsch (17:50): Total word

Stu Heinecke (17:50): Would. Yeah. You have to be absolutely audacious in, in the way that you, that you approach your market and create unfair advantages and create scale. And you obviously, you need to be an example to the rest of us, but an example of weed, like growth.

John Jantsch (18:06): Yeah. So I’ve been, uh, doing interviews, you know, for years. And over the last few years, one of the things I’ve seen is title explosion in the Csuite, you know, you’ve got your chief people officer, you’ve got your chief revenue officer, and now I think you are probably going to introduce the chief weed officer.

Stu Heinecke (18:24): I am. I’m proposing one more. That’s right. the chief weed officer. I don’t know if you do know Dan Walch.

John Jantsch (18:30): I do. Yeah. I do know Dan. Yeah. He’s been on the show before he

Stu Heinecke (18:33): Has. Yeah. Dan he’s been amazing guy. He’s he has the bloggy conversations. I think he has a book out by the same name, but, and he is a turnaround specialist. Anyway, I interviewed him for the book and he, he gave a quote, by the way, the book has all these I’m so proud of these quotes at the beginning of the book, because they were, when I looked to research for the book, there were no positive quotes about weeds. So everybody I was interviewing, I was asking them, could you share some sort of like, now that we’ve talked about weeds as a positive, what thoughts come to mind? Yeah. And so Dan said, if you don’t have a chief weed officer, you lose . That was his quote

John Jantsch (19:07): .

Stu Heinecke (19:09): Um, and yeah, I think that there will be chief weed officers. I don’t know if they’ll be called that maybe they’ll be called chief strategy officers or weed strategy officers, but there will be people who will be responsible for growth of the company, through the execution of weed strategy that we can watch all around us.

John Jantsch (19:27): Yeah. Awesome. Let’s do I appreciate you taking time to stop by the duct tape marketing podcast. You wanna tell people where they can find out more about your work and obviously pick up a copy of the book.

Stu Heinecke (19:36): Sure. Well, you can buy the book anywhere, anywhere books are sold. Now it, it launches of course, June 1st, but that actually, well, yeah. Can I start that over? Yeah, of course do it. Okay. Yeah. You can buy the book anywhere that books are sold. Amazon, of course, and Barnes and noble bam and all that. Perhaps the airport soon you can come and visit me at my author site. That’s Stu henick.com. And when you come there, then you, one of the things you might wanna do is join my weed, my, my weed boot camp, sorry, my boot, my weed mindset boot camp. And you can join that from, from my site as well. So, yeah. And LinkedIn mention that, that you heard John and my, and myself talking on the, on the duct tape podcast, duct tape marketing podcast, and I will be happy to connect with you there.

John Jantsch (20:24): Awesome. Well, we’ll have all those links in the show notes as well, and Stu congrats on the new book. And again, appreciate you taking the time out to, to share with our listeners. And hopefully we’ll run into you again. Soon. One of these days out there on the road,

Stu Heinecke (20:37): I would love that, John. Thanks for having me on the show.

John Jantsch (20:39): Hey, and one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it be hard to understand where you stand in that what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it @ marketingassessment.co not .com .co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co I’d. Love to chat with you about the results that you get.

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network and Zapier.

HubSpot Podcast Network is the audio destination for business professionals who seek the best education and inspiration on how to grow a business.

 

Do you ever wish there was some way to get all those apps you use at work to talk to each other? Or dreamed about automating routine tasks like following up with marketing leads or cross-posting on social channels—without having to hire a developer to build something for you? Then you’ll love Zapier. Zapier helps marketers make the most of the technology you already use. Connect all your apps, automate routine tasks, and streamline your workflow—so you can convert more, with less chaos. See for yourself why teams at Airtable, Dropbox, HubSpot, Zendesk, and thousands of other companies use Zapier every day to automate their businesses. Try Zapier for free today at zapier.com/DTM.