May 25, 2020 • 25 mins
As we continue to navigate the changing landscape of this challenging time, we’re joined by Richard Nash, a coach who specializes in helping creatives become more entrepreneurial, business folks become more creative, and all types of professionals become more comfortable with transitions. No stranger to career zigs and zags, Richard brings his range of theater, publishing, and entrepreneurial experience to our conversation. We discuss doing versus being, why it’s smart to ask stupid questions, and how to rediscover the joy of discovery.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Limit Does Not Exist is a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, I'm Christina Wallace and I'm Kate Scott
Campbell and You're listening to the Limit does Not Exist.
A podcast for human then Diagrams, coming at you every
(00:21):
single week and hosted by us. Has this moment in
time caused you to wonder about a professional transition? Or
maybe you're just wondering if you should be doing more
than sitting on your couch eating cookie dough? Or is
that just me cookie dough? No matter what you're wondering,
this episode may lead you to some answers, or at
(00:44):
least help you ask the right questions. Yes, Today, we're
joined by Richard Nash, a coach who specializes in helping
creatives become more entrepreneurial, business folks become more creative, and
all types of professionals become more comfortable with transitions. No
stranger to your zigs and zags, Richard brings his range
of theater, publishing, an entrepreneurial experience to every coaching session
(01:07):
he leads. He also brings a lot of questions, which interestingly,
are often just as important as those answers were all seeking.
Here's a question Kate, what are we waiting for? Good one? Christina?
I don't know. Let's jump in, shall we? Let's do
it after my goodness a long career spanning theater, publishing,
(01:32):
media startups, and consulting for large fortunes, why have you
focused your work now on being a coach? Two years ago,
I was in a session with my shrank, with my psychotherapist,
and I was relating to her conversation. I had had
(01:54):
a few days before that with my then girlfriend, and
as I'm describing the conversation a shan, I stopped and
I say, I sound like a life coach, and she
looks at me and she says, that's what you should do.
And I said, absolutely not. And I spend the next
(02:19):
couple of months off and on researching in order to
prove her wrong, and instead I proved myself wrong. I
started googling about coaching and reading articles. Actually the best
article I read within Harper's magazine, and it was a
long article that was intended as a takedown of the
coaching industry. The journalist actually did the program that I
(02:46):
ended up doing myself, and she was doing it with
the fullest intention of snarking on the whole thing. I
don't know if you've ever experienced this, but I often
find that the best reviews in the world are the
reviews that are written from a standpoint of saying all
(03:08):
the things that this isn't good at, because you know,
when they're saying something good about it, it's real. I
try not to read reviews, but I like that it's true.
I forget who did this research. I feel like Adam
Grant might have written about this one of his books,
but I don't know if it was his researcher, he
was recapping someone else's But that basically winning over someone
(03:32):
who's already predisposed to like you is not that particularly compelling.
But winning over someone who started out anticipating not liking you,
someone who is opposed to your viewpoints, and having them
convert from negative to neutral and then neutral to positive,
(03:53):
that those are the best sort of transformative your words
reviews or cheerleaders that the person you want championing your work,
Which is why when you see like Amazon reviews and
you look at a book that has all five stars,
you're kind of like, but you see a bunch of
four stars or three stars and they have some really
great comments about what is working. You're like, that's what
(04:14):
I'm looking for. You're more likely to believe that. I
also realize, you know, coaching is an activity that all
the adjectives that get thrown in front of it matter
a lot less than what it's fundamentally doing, which is
using conversation to help people transform. So how do you
(04:35):
help creatives discover their entrepreneurial side and entrepreneurs find their
inner creative? Is it the same technique that works kind
of on both sides of that coin, or do you
find you have to go in through very different entryways.
From a broad standpoint, it is the same thing. It's
(04:56):
that you keep asking questions on hill they're forced to
confront that they're more entrepreneurial or more creative than they
thought they were. Its patients, it's persistence. It's the socratic
approach of asking questions that are genuine, not rhetorical questions.
(05:19):
I mean, I cheat all the time, I fail all
the time, but again and again and again. What makes
the biggest difference is when I don't cheat, when I
don't know the answer that I'm trying to elictit, I
am just they say something and I wonder what they mean,
(05:40):
or I wonder what that feels like, or I wonder why,
or I wonder when, and I wonder aloud, and through
that wondering allowed people discover things about themselves. I often
think about how so much of the time the questions
are as important, if not more important, than the answers.
(06:05):
Really finding that way in to sort of get to
the heart. Something else about your work, Richard that we
(06:28):
love is that you talk about helping creatives and entrepreneurs
navigate in ever shifting terrain, which, oh my gosh, could
not feel more apropos right now. So as much as
you're talking about how personal your work as a coach
(06:50):
is with each individual, are there any through lines, any
advice that you have to artists, writers, entrepreneurs that feels
very applicable to right now, and that so many of
us are experiencing quite a bit of uncertainty and potentially
some unplanned professional transitions, how might we be thinking about
the next week, month, or year beyond. I think right
(07:12):
now there is an opportunity to focus on being as
much as I'm doing. One of my sort of great
influences is the musician Nick Cave of the band Nick
Cave and the bad seeds, and he has it's a
kind of a newsletter, but it's a newsletter where basically
(07:34):
his fans email them questions, and every couple of weeks
he answers one of those questions. One of the questions
he opted to answer about a month ago was what
are you doing in the midst of all this insanity?
How are you dealing? And he said, well, usually I
respond to these sorts of things by working like crazy.
(07:56):
You know, they're being super active, he said, this time,
I'm not time. I'm just gonna witness. Now. Not all
of us have the privilege necessarily, and that's a complicated
word to use, But what I think he was getting
at is that we can hide through activity. We could
(08:18):
hide from ourselves, we could hide from the world through activity.
And what I have been seeing right now is that
the crutches we use to hide from ourselves are being
kicked out from under us, and we're being forced to
look at ourselves and listen to ourselves. And rather than
(08:41):
fight that, my inclination is to suggest to folks that
we try to own it by using this time to
focus on the kind of the being of who we are,
as opposed to the doing of what we do. I
just had a conversation earlier today with somebody who was
(09:05):
in a state of transition work wise, somebody who has
been laid off in August of last year at is
now like not even sure like how you go about
interviewing for things amidst this insanity. He's been doing everything
right in sort of like a career one oh one.
You know, he's got spreadsheets tracking who he's been talking to,
(09:27):
and he's redone his LinkedIn You know that the sort
of the pixie dust that's going to end up being
the difference between job and no job is not going
to come from fine tuning for the forty seventh time
the keywords the top of his LinkedIn profile to try
to make the AI think he's a square peg when
(09:49):
he's really around hole right right, there's deeper work than
there's deeper work to be done. And that's what feels
to me is the work of the present moment is
to do the deep work on yourself, to do the
stuff you've been hiding from through the busy work of before. Yeah,
(10:13):
and I think what you're saying is all of those
things that he's doing are are good and important and
It's also easy, like anything, to kind of let that
be somewhere, also to hide right or to let that
like take the forefront when it's really there to support
the main course. You've gone through several professional transitions of
your own. You started out as a theater director in
(10:35):
New York City, where you eventually founded and ran your
own theater company, and then after nearly a decade in theater,
you made a pretty big shift into publishing. So what
prompted that transition? I basically ended up in publishing because
I offered to help out and then fell in love.
(10:57):
I think, with hindsight, this was not something I was
at the time. With hindsight, I was falling out of
love with theater, although I didn't know it. I looked
at the audience of these productions I was doing, and
I kept seeing people I knew. How did you learn
the industry of publishing? Like you came in as an outsider,
(11:18):
and you know, you came in initially to kind of
run this one press, and then you started building your
own business models within that. At a certain point you
became you know, what what many people considered kind of
one of the foremost thinkers about what the future of
publishing could or should be. How do you go from
being a neophyte to the oracle of the future in
(11:41):
such a short period. You know, I'm being stupid enough,
areas right, and I'm going to be facetious back but
also serious back by being stupid and just asking the
questions that everyone's afraid to ask. Yeah, I had no
idea what to be afraid to ask. I just had
to ask the questions. I had no idea publishing work.
You just had to be stupid enough to ask the questions,
(12:04):
and again and again and again. In my life, I
have realized that a certain kind of these combinations of curiosity,
of not needing to be a person with the answers.
You know, In the end, I think I became a
coach because I was sick of being an oracle. I
didn't really believe I had answers. I believe that I
(12:27):
asked interesting questions about the history of publishing. Asking kind
of dumb questions about the present of publishing allows us
to see things that we might not otherwise see. But
once I asked the interesting questions, everybody can see what
the answers are. I feel like I was not somebody
(12:47):
who had answers. I felt like I was somebody who
was more productive asking questions. See, this is how coaching works.
You asked a question out of curiosity, and I made
a discovery in my self as a result of your curiosity. Brilliant.
I've got a backup career as a cop, and so
(13:07):
I learned because I took so little for granted. What
I love about your approach into publishing that you touched
on is that we talk about this and hear this
a lot on our show that one of the most
common lies of the mind when we're doing a transition,
particularly kind of after other people may have been in
the field, is that it's too late, or you're behind,
(13:30):
or you know, all of that chatter that can get
in the way. I think what you're talking about, which
is the power of that beginner's mind to just dive in.
(13:53):
We did do our Google stalking of you, and one
of my favorite blog posts that you wrote years ago
was on this idea of a filter versus a map
when it comes to content discovering things right. You say
that when there are too many choices all at once
to be able to take them in the typical reaction
(14:15):
these days is to filter them down to a manageable number,
and that's why people end up with the same top
five in their algorithms that either a computer or a
curator has chosen for them. But that eliminates the joy
of discovery, whereas the map way of organizing and displaying
(14:37):
options you can think of like a bookstore, where you
go to an area and then you go to a
specific shelf, and then you start going down the rows
on that shelf until you find the thing you're looking for,
and that's how you actually get to discover something unexpected.
You write that maps are fun in themselves, filters are not.
(14:59):
We love the analogies this Surely anyone who's ever tried
to find a new podcast beyond the top ten in
any category and iTunes probably feels that same way. So
I guess I just want to act like, how did
you first come up with it? I mean, it seems
so obvious now that we say it out loud, but
(15:19):
it really it struck me when I read this post
of like, oh my god, that is the problem with
the joy of discovery something unexpected. There is nothing unexpected
anymore on the Internet. Algorithms have taken that away from us,
so who is doing the map approach? Well, how do
we fix this? Oh boy? The reason I came up
(15:41):
with that is from a two thousand eleven to two
thousand thirteen I worked with a startup based out of
Los Angeles called Small Demons. The sort of filter versus
mop stuff is something that kind of very incrementally dawned
on me week after week, months after for months of
trying to explain what Small Demons was doing to the
(16:05):
world at large, because it looked like a cool rabbit hole,
and it was a cool rabbit hole, but you had
to kind of step back and said, what's really going
on here? You know, what is this that this is
really doing? And what helped me grasp that was reading
some article that I have never been able to find again.
(16:26):
It was in some science magazine which was talking about walking.
Was talking about how the brain, the human brain, is
at its richest when it is dealing with depth perception.
It's like you're in the jungle or some you know,
subtropical forest and you're looking for berries, but you also
have to be aware of like Russell's a hundred yards
(16:49):
away from the saber tooth tigers, and you also have
to have half an eye on the thunderheads that coming
over the horizon. The amount of visual information just in
that little sequence. No robot can do that right now.
The amount of data that you have to process to
(17:10):
do all that stuff simultaneously is mind boggling. Yet that's
that's what our brain does routinely. So what it suggested
to me is that we can absorb way, way, way,
way way more information when we're operating in three dimensions
than we're operating in two dimensions. And the reason we
have filter in a sense is you can only stick
(17:32):
like five or ten things on a screen because you
only have two dimensions. We can work with what our
brain offers us if we can operate in a much
richer three D environment, where we can use our ability
to process, to shift focus, to absorb ambient information. We're
(17:56):
do in so many way. I mean, the bookstore analogy
is a lovely analogy. Just you know, walk getting into
a plaza in a in a city you don't know,
trying to side what restaurant you're gonna go to. You
can spend ten minutes on Yelp trying to sort through
the reviews. Here, back here, we are back to reviews again, right,
decide is this reviewer somebody like me? Or is this
(18:16):
reviewer the opposite of me? But you know the other
thing we can do is you just scan the plausa.
You walk around. Hey, it's fun be you kind of
sort of look. You can see which one is busy.
You can read the men, the window, yeah, the menu,
(18:38):
even how people are dressed, the kind of music coming
out of there, how aggressive the waiter, you know, looks
like there's just so much and what are you in
the mood for. You don't even know you're in the
mood for that moment, and it doesn't even occur to
you that you wanted this sort of a thing until
you spose it as like, oh my god, yes, and
(18:58):
that this makes me wonder if this is even possible
on let's say the Instagram feed. Instagram and screens I
think are largely unfixable, although the phone as it moves
through space, the fact that the phone is maybe two
and a half d Yeah, I was thinking of that
as you were saying this idea. I was like, Okay,
(19:19):
how would we apply something like that to your example?
On the plause, I'm looking for a restaurant and one
version of augmented reality is. You know, we put the
phone up and we see layered on top of a
picture additional information right that that might tell us the
Yelp scores of each of the restaurants we're looking at.
But the other idea that's sort of using the real
(19:40):
world and the augmented reality layer as the output. But
one other way of doing this would be using the
real world as the input. And instead of having to say,
you know, Yelp, I'm looking for restaurants in this city.
By applying that layer, it knows what time of day
it isn't no, is your GEO tag. It has this,
(20:02):
and it uses that as an input so that it
then can suggest, hey, it's about eating time. Here are
some options nearby, but here are other things you might
want to consider. It's also almost time for this play
to start around the corner, and it's almost right, so
like I could see that as well of being able
(20:23):
to use three dimensions as the input to your search,
especially in ways that are less siloed. I just think
it's a brilliant framework for anyone who's in the business
of content of story of discover ability to really kind
of shift the angle that you're thinking about how do
(20:43):
I help my audience find this, you know, Christina, I
love Richard's point about being versus doing. It's a bold
idea that can feel very counterintuitive, and of course a
lot of things have to be done. It's not about
(21:05):
dodging meaningful responsibility or not taking ownership of what you
can in fact do. But what resonated with me was
this idea that doing can often be a coping mechanism
rather than something that will really move you forward. Ironically,
buzziness can often get in the way of true productivity,
and the kind of productivity I'm talking about is the
(21:28):
kind that emerges from that place that we can often
only access when we quiet down and just be Yeah.
I try to think about this that as an artist
and a writer right now, my job is not to
use this downtime to make a lot of things, but
rather to observe and take notes and actually experience this
(21:51):
really difficult experience so that later I might be able
to make things that reflect this time. If that makes
any sense. It makes so much sense. And actually, as
someone who has been creating during this time, really kind
of in these bursts, I've realized that the things I'm
creating are actually really things that are helping me process,
(22:15):
if that makes sense, Like they're not coming from an
intention of I need to do this, but rather from
I'm struggling with this, let me explore it through this
creative output. I have a new appreciation of how lately
my creativity has been a way of wrestling with these
unanswerable questions. And speaking of questions, I also loved Richard's
(22:37):
point that a great coach is simply someone who asks
them from a place of genuine curiosity. What I love
about that is that it keeps the focus on the
person who's being coached, and it encourages the idea that
answers truly come from within, not from whoever is coaching you. Yes,
(22:58):
and of course I'm now obsessed with this framework of
the filter and the map. I think it just really
gets me excited to look at products and experiences in
a whole new way and wonder, how could we replace
the filter that we've all kind of come to hate
with something like a map. You know, anything that helps
us recapture the joy and the delight of discovering new
(23:21):
things makes me really happy. Yeah, Christina, I love what
you propose During our conversation and the line of thinking
around it that you were going down. I don't remember
a topic that I feel like. I've just been left
with so much to chew on, just lots of questions
to ask. So we hope you all can take the
(23:41):
time and space to ask questions and really to just
be this week and turn off that little voice in
your head that says you should be doing. Let us
know how that feels, and as always, we love hearing
your updates and questions. All of the questions. You can
reach us on Twitter or Instagram at t L danny pod,
or you can email us at hello at t ldny
(24:02):
podcast dot com, or you can leave us a voicemail
potentially with your favorite cookie dough recipe at eight three
three high t L d n E. That's eight three
three eight five three six three, then dial eight oh three.
I've got a great chocolate chip cookie dough recipe, but
I could use peanut butter, Christina. I hope that you'll
(24:22):
link that in the show notes. If we get any
good ones, I will. Yes, let's link all of them
in the show notes, along with Richard's website and the
Filter versus Nap blog post, plus a few other episodes
that focus on creativity and entrepreneurship, all of which you
can find at t ld n E podcast dot com slash.
(24:48):
Thanks so much to our producer, Maya Coole and to
you for tuning in. As always, please subscribe, rate, and
review on Apple Podcasts If you like what you heard,
it really helps us get the word out to fell
Human ven diagrams. Until next time, remember the Limit does
not Exist. The Limit does Not Exist is a production
(25:12):
of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows. Yeah
The Limit Does Not Exist is a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, I'm Christina Wallace and I'm Kate Scott
Campbell and You're listening to the Limit does Not Exist.
A podcast for human then Diagrams, coming at you every
(00:21):
single week and hosted by us. Has this moment in
time caused you to wonder about a professional transition? Or
maybe you're just wondering if you should be doing more
than sitting on your couch eating cookie dough? Or is
that just me cookie dough? No matter what you're wondering,
this episode may lead you to some answers, or at
(00:44):
least help you ask the right questions. Yes, Today, we're
joined by Richard Nash, a coach who specializes in helping
creatives become more entrepreneurial, business folks become more creative, and
all types of professionals become more comfortable with transitions. No
stranger to your zigs and zags, Richard brings his range
of theater, publishing, an entrepreneurial experience to every coaching session
(01:07):
he leads. He also brings a lot of questions, which interestingly,
are often just as important as those answers were all seeking.
Here's a question Kate, what are we waiting for? Good one? Christina?
I don't know. Let's jump in, shall we? Let's do
it after my goodness a long career spanning theater, publishing,
(01:32):
media startups, and consulting for large fortunes, why have you
focused your work now on being a coach? Two years ago,
I was in a session with my shrank, with my psychotherapist,
and I was relating to her conversation. I had had
(01:54):
a few days before that with my then girlfriend, and
as I'm describing the conversation a shan, I stopped and
I say, I sound like a life coach, and she
looks at me and she says, that's what you should do.
And I said, absolutely not. And I spend the next
(02:19):
couple of months off and on researching in order to
prove her wrong, and instead I proved myself wrong. I
started googling about coaching and reading articles. Actually the best
article I read within Harper's magazine, and it was a
long article that was intended as a takedown of the
coaching industry. The journalist actually did the program that I
(02:46):
ended up doing myself, and she was doing it with
the fullest intention of snarking on the whole thing. I
don't know if you've ever experienced this, but I often
find that the best reviews in the world are the
reviews that are written from a standpoint of saying all
(03:08):
the things that this isn't good at, because you know,
when they're saying something good about it, it's real. I
try not to read reviews, but I like that it's true.
I forget who did this research. I feel like Adam
Grant might have written about this one of his books,
but I don't know if it was his researcher, he
was recapping someone else's But that basically winning over someone
(03:32):
who's already predisposed to like you is not that particularly compelling.
But winning over someone who started out anticipating not liking you,
someone who is opposed to your viewpoints, and having them
convert from negative to neutral and then neutral to positive,
(03:53):
that those are the best sort of transformative your words
reviews or cheerleaders that the person you want championing your work,
Which is why when you see like Amazon reviews and
you look at a book that has all five stars,
you're kind of like, but you see a bunch of
four stars or three stars and they have some really
great comments about what is working. You're like, that's what
(04:14):
I'm looking for. You're more likely to believe that. I
also realize, you know, coaching is an activity that all
the adjectives that get thrown in front of it matter
a lot less than what it's fundamentally doing, which is
using conversation to help people transform. So how do you
(04:35):
help creatives discover their entrepreneurial side and entrepreneurs find their
inner creative? Is it the same technique that works kind
of on both sides of that coin, or do you
find you have to go in through very different entryways.
From a broad standpoint, it is the same thing. It's
(04:56):
that you keep asking questions on hill they're forced to
confront that they're more entrepreneurial or more creative than they
thought they were. Its patients, it's persistence. It's the socratic
approach of asking questions that are genuine, not rhetorical questions.
(05:19):
I mean, I cheat all the time, I fail all
the time, but again and again and again. What makes
the biggest difference is when I don't cheat, when I
don't know the answer that I'm trying to elictit, I
am just they say something and I wonder what they mean,
(05:40):
or I wonder what that feels like, or I wonder why,
or I wonder when, and I wonder aloud, and through
that wondering allowed people discover things about themselves. I often
think about how so much of the time the questions
are as important, if not more important, than the answers.
(06:05):
Really finding that way in to sort of get to
the heart. Something else about your work, Richard that we
(06:28):
love is that you talk about helping creatives and entrepreneurs
navigate in ever shifting terrain, which, oh my gosh, could
not feel more apropos right now. So as much as
you're talking about how personal your work as a coach
(06:50):
is with each individual, are there any through lines, any
advice that you have to artists, writers, entrepreneurs that feels
very applicable to right now, and that so many of
us are experiencing quite a bit of uncertainty and potentially
some unplanned professional transitions, how might we be thinking about
the next week, month, or year beyond. I think right
(07:12):
now there is an opportunity to focus on being as
much as I'm doing. One of my sort of great
influences is the musician Nick Cave of the band Nick
Cave and the bad seeds, and he has it's a
kind of a newsletter, but it's a newsletter where basically
(07:34):
his fans email them questions, and every couple of weeks
he answers one of those questions. One of the questions
he opted to answer about a month ago was what
are you doing in the midst of all this insanity?
How are you dealing? And he said, well, usually I
respond to these sorts of things by working like crazy.
(07:56):
You know, they're being super active, he said, this time,
I'm not time. I'm just gonna witness. Now. Not all
of us have the privilege necessarily, and that's a complicated
word to use, But what I think he was getting
at is that we can hide through activity. We could
(08:18):
hide from ourselves, we could hide from the world through activity.
And what I have been seeing right now is that
the crutches we use to hide from ourselves are being
kicked out from under us, and we're being forced to
look at ourselves and listen to ourselves. And rather than
(08:41):
fight that, my inclination is to suggest to folks that
we try to own it by using this time to
focus on the kind of the being of who we are,
as opposed to the doing of what we do. I
just had a conversation earlier today with somebody who was
(09:05):
in a state of transition work wise, somebody who has
been laid off in August of last year at is
now like not even sure like how you go about
interviewing for things amidst this insanity. He's been doing everything
right in sort of like a career one oh one.
You know, he's got spreadsheets tracking who he's been talking to,
(09:27):
and he's redone his LinkedIn You know that the sort
of the pixie dust that's going to end up being
the difference between job and no job is not going
to come from fine tuning for the forty seventh time
the keywords the top of his LinkedIn profile to try
to make the AI think he's a square peg when
(09:49):
he's really around hole right right, there's deeper work than
there's deeper work to be done. And that's what feels
to me is the work of the present moment is
to do the deep work on yourself, to do the
stuff you've been hiding from through the busy work of before. Yeah,
(10:13):
and I think what you're saying is all of those
things that he's doing are are good and important and
It's also easy, like anything, to kind of let that
be somewhere, also to hide right or to let that
like take the forefront when it's really there to support
the main course. You've gone through several professional transitions of
your own. You started out as a theater director in
(10:35):
New York City, where you eventually founded and ran your
own theater company, and then after nearly a decade in theater,
you made a pretty big shift into publishing. So what
prompted that transition? I basically ended up in publishing because
I offered to help out and then fell in love.
(10:57):
I think, with hindsight, this was not something I was
at the time. With hindsight, I was falling out of
love with theater, although I didn't know it. I looked
at the audience of these productions I was doing, and
I kept seeing people I knew. How did you learn
the industry of publishing? Like you came in as an outsider,
(11:18):
and you know, you came in initially to kind of
run this one press, and then you started building your
own business models within that. At a certain point you
became you know, what what many people considered kind of
one of the foremost thinkers about what the future of
publishing could or should be. How do you go from
being a neophyte to the oracle of the future in
(11:41):
such a short period. You know, I'm being stupid enough,
areas right, and I'm going to be facetious back but
also serious back by being stupid and just asking the
questions that everyone's afraid to ask. Yeah, I had no
idea what to be afraid to ask. I just had
to ask the questions. I had no idea publishing work.
You just had to be stupid enough to ask the questions,
(12:04):
and again and again and again. In my life, I
have realized that a certain kind of these combinations of curiosity,
of not needing to be a person with the answers.
You know, In the end, I think I became a
coach because I was sick of being an oracle. I
didn't really believe I had answers. I believe that I
(12:27):
asked interesting questions about the history of publishing. Asking kind
of dumb questions about the present of publishing allows us
to see things that we might not otherwise see. But
once I asked the interesting questions, everybody can see what
the answers are. I feel like I was not somebody
(12:47):
who had answers. I felt like I was somebody who
was more productive asking questions. See, this is how coaching works.
You asked a question out of curiosity, and I made
a discovery in my self as a result of your curiosity. Brilliant.
I've got a backup career as a cop, and so
(13:07):
I learned because I took so little for granted. What
I love about your approach into publishing that you touched
on is that we talk about this and hear this
a lot on our show that one of the most
common lies of the mind when we're doing a transition,
particularly kind of after other people may have been in
the field, is that it's too late, or you're behind,
(13:30):
or you know, all of that chatter that can get
in the way. I think what you're talking about, which
is the power of that beginner's mind to just dive in.
(13:53):
We did do our Google stalking of you, and one
of my favorite blog posts that you wrote years ago
was on this idea of a filter versus a map
when it comes to content discovering things right. You say
that when there are too many choices all at once
to be able to take them in the typical reaction
(14:15):
these days is to filter them down to a manageable number,
and that's why people end up with the same top
five in their algorithms that either a computer or a
curator has chosen for them. But that eliminates the joy
of discovery, whereas the map way of organizing and displaying
(14:37):
options you can think of like a bookstore, where you
go to an area and then you go to a
specific shelf, and then you start going down the rows
on that shelf until you find the thing you're looking for,
and that's how you actually get to discover something unexpected.
You write that maps are fun in themselves, filters are not.
(14:59):
We love the analogies this Surely anyone who's ever tried
to find a new podcast beyond the top ten in
any category and iTunes probably feels that same way. So
I guess I just want to act like, how did
you first come up with it? I mean, it seems
so obvious now that we say it out loud, but
(15:19):
it really it struck me when I read this post
of like, oh my god, that is the problem with
the joy of discovery something unexpected. There is nothing unexpected
anymore on the Internet. Algorithms have taken that away from us,
so who is doing the map approach? Well, how do
we fix this? Oh boy? The reason I came up
(15:41):
with that is from a two thousand eleven to two
thousand thirteen I worked with a startup based out of
Los Angeles called Small Demons. The sort of filter versus
mop stuff is something that kind of very incrementally dawned
on me week after week, months after for months of
trying to explain what Small Demons was doing to the
(16:05):
world at large, because it looked like a cool rabbit hole,
and it was a cool rabbit hole, but you had
to kind of step back and said, what's really going
on here? You know, what is this that this is
really doing? And what helped me grasp that was reading
some article that I have never been able to find again.
(16:26):
It was in some science magazine which was talking about walking.
Was talking about how the brain, the human brain, is
at its richest when it is dealing with depth perception.
It's like you're in the jungle or some you know,
subtropical forest and you're looking for berries, but you also
have to be aware of like Russell's a hundred yards
(16:49):
away from the saber tooth tigers, and you also have
to have half an eye on the thunderheads that coming
over the horizon. The amount of visual information just in
that little sequence. No robot can do that right now.
The amount of data that you have to process to
(17:10):
do all that stuff simultaneously is mind boggling. Yet that's
that's what our brain does routinely. So what it suggested
to me is that we can absorb way, way, way,
way way more information when we're operating in three dimensions
than we're operating in two dimensions. And the reason we
have filter in a sense is you can only stick
(17:32):
like five or ten things on a screen because you
only have two dimensions. We can work with what our
brain offers us if we can operate in a much
richer three D environment, where we can use our ability
to process, to shift focus, to absorb ambient information. We're
(17:56):
do in so many way. I mean, the bookstore analogy
is a lovely analogy. Just you know, walk getting into
a plaza in a in a city you don't know,
trying to side what restaurant you're gonna go to. You
can spend ten minutes on Yelp trying to sort through
the reviews. Here, back here, we are back to reviews again, right,
decide is this reviewer somebody like me? Or is this
(18:16):
reviewer the opposite of me? But you know the other
thing we can do is you just scan the plausa.
You walk around. Hey, it's fun be you kind of
sort of look. You can see which one is busy.
You can read the men, the window, yeah, the menu,
(18:38):
even how people are dressed, the kind of music coming
out of there, how aggressive the waiter, you know, looks
like there's just so much and what are you in
the mood for. You don't even know you're in the
mood for that moment, and it doesn't even occur to
you that you wanted this sort of a thing until
you spose it as like, oh my god, yes, and
(18:58):
that this makes me wonder if this is even possible
on let's say the Instagram feed. Instagram and screens I
think are largely unfixable, although the phone as it moves
through space, the fact that the phone is maybe two
and a half d Yeah, I was thinking of that
as you were saying this idea. I was like, Okay,
(19:19):
how would we apply something like that to your example?
On the plause, I'm looking for a restaurant and one
version of augmented reality is. You know, we put the
phone up and we see layered on top of a
picture additional information right that that might tell us the
Yelp scores of each of the restaurants we're looking at.
But the other idea that's sort of using the real
(19:40):
world and the augmented reality layer as the output. But
one other way of doing this would be using the
real world as the input. And instead of having to say,
you know, Yelp, I'm looking for restaurants in this city.
By applying that layer, it knows what time of day
it isn't no, is your GEO tag. It has this,
(20:02):
and it uses that as an input so that it
then can suggest, hey, it's about eating time. Here are
some options nearby, but here are other things you might
want to consider. It's also almost time for this play
to start around the corner, and it's almost right, so
like I could see that as well of being able
(20:23):
to use three dimensions as the input to your search,
especially in ways that are less siloed. I just think
it's a brilliant framework for anyone who's in the business
of content of story of discover ability to really kind
of shift the angle that you're thinking about how do
(20:43):
I help my audience find this, you know, Christina, I
love Richard's point about being versus doing. It's a bold
idea that can feel very counterintuitive, and of course a
lot of things have to be done. It's not about
(21:05):
dodging meaningful responsibility or not taking ownership of what you
can in fact do. But what resonated with me was
this idea that doing can often be a coping mechanism
rather than something that will really move you forward. Ironically,
buzziness can often get in the way of true productivity,
and the kind of productivity I'm talking about is the
(21:28):
kind that emerges from that place that we can often
only access when we quiet down and just be Yeah.
I try to think about this that as an artist
and a writer right now, my job is not to
use this downtime to make a lot of things, but
rather to observe and take notes and actually experience this
(21:51):
really difficult experience so that later I might be able
to make things that reflect this time. If that makes
any sense. It makes so much sense. And actually, as
someone who has been creating during this time, really kind
of in these bursts, I've realized that the things I'm
creating are actually really things that are helping me process,
(22:15):
if that makes sense, Like they're not coming from an
intention of I need to do this, but rather from
I'm struggling with this, let me explore it through this
creative output. I have a new appreciation of how lately
my creativity has been a way of wrestling with these
unanswerable questions. And speaking of questions, I also loved Richard's
(22:37):
point that a great coach is simply someone who asks
them from a place of genuine curiosity. What I love
about that is that it keeps the focus on the
person who's being coached, and it encourages the idea that
answers truly come from within, not from whoever is coaching you. Yes,
(22:58):
and of course I'm now obsessed with this framework of
the filter and the map. I think it just really
gets me excited to look at products and experiences in
a whole new way and wonder, how could we replace
the filter that we've all kind of come to hate
with something like a map. You know, anything that helps
us recapture the joy and the delight of discovering new
(23:21):
things makes me really happy. Yeah, Christina, I love what
you propose During our conversation and the line of thinking
around it that you were going down. I don't remember
a topic that I feel like. I've just been left
with so much to chew on, just lots of questions
to ask. So we hope you all can take the
(23:41):
time and space to ask questions and really to just
be this week and turn off that little voice in
your head that says you should be doing. Let us
know how that feels, and as always, we love hearing
your updates and questions. All of the questions. You can
reach us on Twitter or Instagram at t L danny pod,
or you can email us at hello at t ldny
(24:02):
podcast dot com, or you can leave us a voicemail
potentially with your favorite cookie dough recipe at eight three
three high t L d n E. That's eight three
three eight five three six three, then dial eight oh three.
I've got a great chocolate chip cookie dough recipe, but
I could use peanut butter, Christina. I hope that you'll
(24:22):
link that in the show notes. If we get any
good ones, I will. Yes, let's link all of them
in the show notes, along with Richard's website and the
Filter versus Nap blog post, plus a few other episodes
that focus on creativity and entrepreneurship, all of which you
can find at t ld n E podcast dot com slash.
(24:48):
Thanks so much to our producer, Maya Coole and to
you for tuning in. As always, please subscribe, rate, and
review on Apple Podcasts If you like what you heard,
it really helps us get the word out to fell
Human ven diagrams. Until next time, remember the Limit does
not Exist. The Limit does Not Exist is a production
(25:12):
of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows. Yeah
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