[00:00:00] Daniel Greening: Welcome to the Mindful Agility podcast. If you're just joining us, this podcast explores success through the development of two uncommon skills, mindfulness and agile. Mindfulness skills produce deep insight. They help us see opportunities, dangers, and interdependencies around us, analyze the causes of what we see, and choose the things we can fix. Most of the time, it turns out to be us that needs some fixing. 

Agile skill produces rapid innovation. Sometimes we need to experiment to find things that work and agile practices emphasize fast effective experimentation. Neither of these skills are intuitive, so you have to practice to keep those skills alive. 

And this particular episode is a sub-chapter from a future book, with working title Mindful Agility, what a surprise, along with commentary by Mirela Petalli and Dan Dickson. We are agile, so we do some kooky things in pursuit of feedback. 

Here it is, subsection 1.1 of Mindful Agility: Work Smarter Without a Recipe. Let us know what you think. 

Are you ready, Mirela?

[00:01:26] Mirela P: Yes, let's do this. 

[00:01:28] Daniel Greening: What about you Dan Dickson 

[00:01:30] Dan Dickson: Let's give it a try!

[00:01:33] Daniel Greening: 1.1, work smarter without the recipe. 

Quote to teach how to live without certainty, and yet, without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy in our age can still do for those who study it. Bertrand Russell. 

You've probably dreamt of success, attaining excellence, finding fortune, achieving happiness. I have. You might have read lots of books on those topics, hoping to find a recipe that works. I did. 

And for at least part of your life, you were probably confused. You might be confused today. Everybody else has an idea of what we should do with our life, especially if we look confused. 

And they act like the most important thing we can do is pick something, anything, and stick to it. 

The Graduate is a famous movie from 1967. In that movie, the new college graduate, Benjamin Braddock, played by Dustin Hoffman, gets some advice from Mr. Maguire. 

[00:02:40] Mr Maguire: Ben.

[00:02:41] Benjamin: Mr. McGuire.

[00:02:43] Mr Maguire: Come with me for a minute. I wanna talk to you. Excuse us, Joanne. 

I just wanna say one word to you. Just one word. 

[00:02:54] Benjamin: Yes sir. 

[00:02:55] Mr Maguire: Are you listening? 

[00:02:56] Benjamin: Yes, I am. 

[00:02:57] Mr Maguire: Plastics.

[00:03:02] Benjamin: Exactly how do you mean? 

[00:03:04] Mr Maguire: There's a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it? 

[00:03:08] Benjamin: Yes, I will. 

[00:03:10] Mr Maguire: Nuff said .That's a deal. 

[00:03:11] Daniel Greening: If you're like most of us, a lot of your decisions that ultimately led to your current situation were arbitrary. 

Someone you trusted might've encouraged you to consider a career, a religion or relationship. We might've had a Mr. Maguire and picked plastics. How do we know that Mr. Maguire knows what he's talking about, before we invest a lot of time and money, perhaps a four year degree, in something he recommends? How do we know whether Mr. Maguire knows what kind of personality we have? 

We see a lot of advertising messages. Perhaps we shouldn't trust them, but it's hard to avoid paid advertising that tries to help us make decisions. 

I was graduating from high school towards the end of the Vietnam War. I was bombarded by messages from the U S military to consider joining an armed service, in High School and in Boy Scouts. 

I took the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, and I got a very high score. So I got lots of mail from the Air Force, the Army, the Navy, and the Marines. Somehow, I'm not even sure how, I filled out the form for Navy ROTC, the officer training program. They offered to pay for my education. I carried it around with me for days and I would pull it out of my back pocket and look at it. 

Ultimately, I didn't sign it. I don't know for sure why I didn't sign it. But it might've been because I realized it would lock me down, reduce my freedom. And people I respected did not support the Vietnam War. 

Had I signed it. I would have become a very different person. I might have become more disciplined than I am today. I bet I would have been less creative. I wasn't sure I was gay then. But at that time gays were discharged from the us armed services, dishonorably. I did think I might have to suppress my sexuality. I didn't realize then that suppressed gay men often got married, had kids, and then had a miserable divorce, hurting lots of people. 

Investment decisions we make, whether investing in a career, a relationship, real estate or stocks. Involve risk. And a decision in one area of your life, like the case of my potential Navy career, create risks in all other aspects of your life, like my relationships. I don't have regrets about my decision not to join the Navy. I later met an adventurous guy like me and we stayed married for 28 years. 

As you explore this risky world of decision-making, how do you make the perfect decision? You can't actually, but you can make decisions that are more likely to result in your happiness and the wellbeing of people around you. 

This book will talk about how you can learn important skills- the skills that lead to success- while keeping your risks low. These are meta-skills that help you approach almost all the opportunities and challenges you'll face. There are three. Imitation. Mindfulness and to agile. It turns out these metal skills are among the most important things you can learn, because with them, you can create something simple from a recipe, gain competence so you can incorporate different approaches, and innovate in any field you choose. 

I have taught the skills to armies of creative people in big companies. The goal of the executives that hired me was to accelerate the company's success and reduce its risk of failure. But these principles also apply to individual efforts, like yours. 

 Some of the folks paying attention to these lessons, applied them to their own lives. Let's look at the starting place for all this. Imitation

1.1.1. Imitate for traditional wisdom. 

Successful people sometimes write recipe books to help you succeed in their field. Investing, real estate, love, school, sports, sales, et cetera. They entice us with their clarity and simplicity. We don't have to think too much. It's our own fault they give us recipes, because recipes sell. We all want a simple, methodical way out of our predicament. We want the easy win.

[00:08:09] Mirela P: Right. Recipe's sell because they leave out the hard work, the day-to-day struggles, the failures and setbacks, the insecurities and doubts , the many times that successful people wanted to quit. We don't like being told that nobody's going to do the hard work for us. 

[00:08:26] Daniel Greening: Recipes don't drive serious success. First, you have to want to create the dish yourself. And if you aren't motivated by that field, probably you won't be able to sustain the discipline to learn more. 

Second, the authors probably didn't follow the recipe they gave you. They may have had more cash or freedom than you do. They may have discovered what they wanted to do in the process of doing something else. They likely made tons of mistakes, before discovering the path they took themselves. All those mistakes, though, helped them learn. 

Third, recipe authors assert if you imitate their success, it will work again today. But over time, competition has likely increased. Other people in the field likely read the success recipe you just read and applied its suggestions already. 

Fourth, you have a different personality, live in a different place, have different habits than the recipe author. All of that will make a difference in your success. 

You can start with a recipe. It's probably a good idea. And this book will help you with the rest. It will help you find a sustainable purpose. It will help you focus your efforts. It will help you become independently competent. And then it will help you blaze new trails. 

For me, no success recipes produced the promised dish. And some recipes produced a burned, inedible mess. I've lost money and gotten fired following promising recipes to the letter. But the recipes themselves usually have value. They can introduce you to a field, like sales or marketing or real estate. 

When I attempt something new, I often look for a recipe or someone to imitate. I'm not trying to become a success, but I am trying to learn the basics of a topic. 

[00:10:27] Mirela P: Imitation is the first step in learning a new skill. In healthcare, we say: "see one, do one, teach one" in order to master a skill. 

[00:10:37] Daniel Greening: If we want to learn something more deeply, that's a step we can add after imitating someone. Teaching it to someone else. I think many of us do this intuitively. After learning something new, we might discuss it with others. "Here's a cool thing I learned to do," or "did you know that if you do this, that thing happens?" 

The first time you make a salad with homemade salad dressing, someone taught you how to do it by rote, or you followed a recipe. You probably made the same salad a couple more times. You were imitating. 

[00:11:14] Dan Dickson: You know, it's funny that you use salad dressing as an example. I'm somewhat famous for my Caesar salad, which you, Dan Greening have tasted

[00:11:21] Daniel Greening: And it is really good. 

[00:11:23] Dan Dickson: but just like you said, it developed through a combination of following instructions, imitating and learning. I still remember my first tableside Caesar. I watched as the server added mixed all the ingredients. I thought this is really good. 

So I decided to try it out, using a recipe I found in the Joy of Cooking. But then i started modifying things based on the combination of my own experiments and learning from other tableside experiences. In the end, i've arrived at a pretty good solution which everybody seems to love.

[00:11:51] Daniel Greening: 1.1.2. Practice mindfulness for independent competence

Once we've gained traditional wisdom through imitation, we can consider variations. We need to observe the world to think about what variations are even possible. We face enormous challenges though in observing the world. 

For one thing, your attention is very valuable to others. And if you don't control your attention, they will own it, and own you. Unless you live in a remote cabin, advertising is blaring at you. That's one form of attracting your attention. Even when you pay for news or entertainment, you get advertising. Your attention to improving skills, overcoming problems and making progress is distracted and weakened by advertising. 

Your ancestors, thousands of years ago, lived in a much more violent world than today. Anxiety helped preserve their lives, helping them keep a fearful watch against predators and warring tribes. So your brain is wired to prioritize emotions. But when these emotions take over, they restrict your options. An irrational fear may prevent you from taking the most effective action. Elation may make failure seem impossible, so you don't cover your risk. Regret may fuel avoidance when engagement could reveal great opportunities. 

[00:13:28] Mirela P: The parts of our brains that helped our ancestors stay alive, respond to threats, find food and avoid danger did not evolve when our lives became easier, so we react instead of responding to situations. 

[00:13:42] Dan Dickson: You know, there's another way to consider this. Dan Greening, you said that original fear may prevent you from taking the most effective action. And that's true in multiple ways. But the one that immediately comes to mind is the danger of making a knee jerk response to an emergency, and committing to a solution that may preclude other better solutions. 

Here's an example. I'm an instrument rated pilot and one thing that was drilled in me during my training was it the first thing to do in case of emergency was nothing. That may seem counterintuitive, but the intent was to take a breath, assess the situation, then decide upon a course of action. 

[00:14:17] Daniel Greening: It's kind of interesting that mindfulness practices often do focus on breath. 

Career advisors will counsel you to focus on your goal, learn everything you can, or practice discipline, but until you learn to control your attention, these tasks are daunting. 

All of us enjoy distractions, whether watching the news, sports, or mindless TV, playing video games, listening to music, or consuming mind altering substances like alcohol. These activities can create a more complete life, help us develop relationships with folks that have similar interests, and generally blow off steam.

But with each of these distractions, there's a whole ecosystem of marketers that want to keep you in their grip. Many times they use emotions to do it. They stoke fear of missing out, anxiety about the news, or elation about your teams win. More mindfulness doesn't stop you from enjoying distractions, but it does provide awareness. You know when and why you're participating in these distractions -here's a hint. There's probably advertising involved- and can better control how you spend your time. 

Mindfulness practices restructure our neural connections to become aware of the distractions around us, and shape our attention intentionally. Mindfulness fuels integrity, discovery, and growth. It will help you discover your connections with others, and those connections will help you on your path.

Like Dan Dickson, if you were paying attention mindfully after you followed your first salad recipe. You learned the balance of oil, acid and water. You learned what spices worked. You learned when to use sweet and savory. And you probably started incorporating new variations, different cheeses, nuts, greens, fruits never mentioned in a recipe. You became independently competent. You don't need salad recipes anymore. 

1.1.3. Practice agility to blaze new trails 

independent competence can be sufficient for success. But you can go much further. People you admire likely did go much beyond competence. Great entrepreneurs, scientists, creators, humanitarians, athletes all explored beyond competence to bring unexpected wins. 

To do so, you need to become safely familiar with failure. Too many books on success pretend the hero's genius and foresight led to their successful outcome. But virtually all of those successes were preceded by failures, and a lot of them. 

Did those early failures deter our heroes? Perhaps, for a minute, but somehow our heroes overcame their damaged egos to keep trying. To keep looking. Do we do that? You know, there've been times when I didn't. 

One thing that trailblazers must learn early: a project failure is not a personal failure. When you explore new opportunities and challenges, failure is a risk. You can't really avoid risk, because the world around you is changing. And you can't perfectly prepare for it either. But you can improve your odds. And we'll talk about that later in the book. 

Some of the wealthiest people today lost all their money in bankruptcy beforehand. In the early 1980s, the U S Internal Revenue Service socked country singer Willie Nelson with a $16 million tax bill. When he didn't pay in 1990, they confiscated all his belongings and property. He negotiated a deal with the IRS to produce an album and share the profits. He then paid off his debt in 1993. And he's now worth about $25 million. 

There are many famous people who failed spectacularly ,and became successful later. Stan Lee, the famous animator. George Foreman, Walt Disney, Henry Ford. Abraham Lincoln, Debbie Reynolds, Ray Daleo, and many others. 

Instead of thinking that a person failed, we might instead think that a person's recent project failed. This provides a more realistic perspective, because when a person's project fails that failure can provide the seeds of a future success. 

Unfortunately, we have a natural aversion to thinking about or discussing our project failures. That aversion can reduce our ability to learn and succeed. Successful folks, however, seem to talk comfortably about their previous failures. We'll talk about how we can learn to do what they do, later in the book. 

Something we want to avoid, if we can, is expensive failures: those that take a lot of time, a lot of money, or damage our future significantly. How do we do that? This is the realm of something called agility, first formalized in software development, but applicable to virtually every creative endeavor. We could argue that all creative heroes use agility, whether they realize it or not. This book can accelerate your success by teaching you agile practices. 

1.1.4. Everyone defines success differently. 

How do I define success? Everyone has a different definition, but I'll tell you mine. I like freedom to be the most I can be. If you're familiar with Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you have to take care of physical needs, safety, love and belonging, and self-esteem, before you can worry about becoming self actualized, where we become the most we can be. I want to be the most I can be in friendship, professional achievement, and helping others succeed. 

Money takes care of some of that, but not everything. You can buy food, shelter, healthcare, and property. But love and belonging? Those components of success for me, come from friends I can count on. 

I have a colleague with a mansion in Napa Valley. It has a gate. It looks imposing. It demonstrates a focus on earning money. But I'm not sure it demonstrates success. Not my type of success anyway. I'm not sure my colleague is actually happy. And i'm not sure he has friends he can count on. He sort of stomped on a bunch of his friends to get where he is today. And that means he might not be able to count on them if he runs into trouble. 

Good friends are better than mansion's. Friends welcome you warmly, some have spare bedrooms, most make for great company, and many inspire you. If the concepts in this book help you get a mansion, might you lend me a spare bedroom for a visit? That's how your success passes on to me. Historically by helping friends, they have helped me back. 

A comfortable life, surrounded by people who love me, doing what I love to do, that is success for me. And if doing what you love to do means making a huge pile of cash. I want to help you get there. I want you to gain enough self-awareness to discover what you want and then innovate better toward that goal. 

I want to teach a practical philosophy you can use to create your own type of success rather than a recipe for creating my type of success. 

Success is defined by you. Since these practical philosophies are fundamental, they work pretty well, regardless of your definition. 

 1.1.5. Practical philosophies 

This book teaches you fundamentals that produce success in many situations. It focuses on two major practical philosophies, mindfulness and agile, which produce insight and innovation, respectively. 

Do these, "I" words make you think this book is about business? Bear with me because these practices can also improve your family, your love life and your health. I've seen mindfulness help kids having difficulty in school and I've seen agile help a nonprofit grant manager win awards. No matter who we are, more insight and innovation helps us live better lives. 

If you are familiar with mindfulness or agile, you may assume they narrowly apply to specific fields. 

For example, mindfulness helps with anxiety and depression and has been applied to pain control in medicine. Buddhists practice mindfulness to reduce suffering, which also includes grief, anger, reactivity, and unhealthy attachment. Mindfulness has been extended beyond its initial field to characterize mindful organizations which use high awareness and causal analysis to dramatically reduce accidents and improve outcomes. Mindful combat troops use situational awareness to win, and self-compassion to reduce post-traumatic stress disorder. Mindful parents react calmly to the typical stresses of family life and help their children learn and thrive. We'll talk about what shared characteristics all those mindful things have. 

Agile was first defined to manage software teams. Software developers are notoriously independent, infuriating, and creative. Agile helped organize and accelerate teams of software developers, and statistically has doubled project success rates. Software development is definitely creative work. Developers create recipes for computers to follow, rather than follow a recipe themselves. 

The most well-known guide is the Agile Manifesto, which focuses on software. But agile has been extended to agile businesses, agile research, agile families, et cetera. And my definition incorporates practices that were in use long before the term "agile" was even coined: in education, manufacturing, marketing, and other fields. 

Neither mindfulness nor agile are intuitive. Mindfulness suggests that you take time away from your busy life to broaden your awareness, consider causation and fix hidden causes of problems. Similarly agile suggests that every week is an experiment, with a hypothesis, a plan, some measurements, and time reserved to check the results. 

I don't know anyone who maintains high levels of mindfulness or agile practices without ongoing research, ritual, and renewal. 

[00:26:23] Mirela P: Mindfulness is a skill that when practiced regularly follows us outside of the formal practice, into the rest of our day and it can be the way we are and experience the world. 

[00:26:35] Daniel Greening: And agile practices. Get us comfortable with experimentation. As we gain agile skills, we use them not just in our work practices, but also at home, in challenges with our families, our sports ambitions or in developing good habits. After all, no one has done this before, that was you. So we're experimenting, because we're working with our own personalities, something new. 

In this work, I articulate the principles of both mindfulness and agile to be

One. General enough to appropriately use mindful or agile as adjectives in any field. 

Two. Specific enough to assess the relative mindfulness or agility of a person or organization and diagnose problems to fix. 

Three. Prescriptive enough to suggest improvements to someone attempting to practice mindfulness or agility. 

I hope these principle based definitions will help you deliver better results even in fields where rule-based guides already exist for mindfulness and agile. ,We will also discuss field specific frameworks, such as Scrum, Lean Manufacturing, and Lean Startup to show how their rules implement these principles. 

. 1.1.7 Exercises 

This book develops the skills of mindfulness and agile, and in order to do that, you have to practice. Here's a couple of exercises to practice mindfulness. 

Exercise one. 

Practice exploring your definition of success. Instead of creating an aspirational definition of success, start by defining success as your life is today. 

Maslow's classic hierarchy of needs shows a pyramid. At the bottom, are physiological needs like food. Above that are safety concerns. Above that are love and belonging. Above that is esteem. And finally above that is self actualization. 

It might help you define your current success to start at the bottom, physiological needs, and work your way up to the top. 

One. Thinking about family, financial assets, property, spirituality, friends, and safety, write down the achievements you've made. 

Two. What are some things you value that aren't on Maslow's Hierarchy?

You can pause here to complete this exercise. 

Exercise two. Practice a simple form of compassion. 

Write down the names or descriptions of three people. 

One person you interact with every day. 

One person you depend on every day, but with whom you don't often interact. 

One person who has made life more difficult for you in the last day or week. 

Now for each of these people, imagine their life. Where do they live? How do they start their day? What are their challenges? What gives them comfort? How do they experience you? 

Now that you know more, or at least, you know what you don't know, what might you ask each of these people the next time you meet them? Will you treat them differently? 

You can pause here to complete this exercise. 

[00:30:42] Daniel Greening: Thank you for joining us today. 

Send feedback to info@mindfulagility.com. If we use it, we will credit you in the book forward. Support us by sharing a link to Mindful Agility or this episode on social media. 

If you'd like to receive text and audio chapters of this book, as we produce them, head over to mindfulagility.substack.com and subscribe. Free subscribers will get temporary access to chapters as they're produced, in text form. Premium subscribers will get audio versions of the chapters, which you can listen to uninterrupted. We'll also make archives of previously released chapters available to premium subscribers, so you can read or listen to chapters as they become available, whenever you feel like it. 

By becoming a premium subscriber, you show your support for our work. And of course we are highly motivated to continue what we're doing, because you've supported us. 

 Many thanks to Mirela Petalli and Dan Dickson for co-hosting our show. 

Our beta reviewers were Amelia Hambrecht, Rob Coles, Jeff Stuit, Eve Rubell, and Divya Maez. Their feedback made this episode better. Thanks everybody.