Here are five big ideas I took away from the episode:

#1 People rarely set truly bold goals

While building Alinea, Grant decided he wanted to be “the best restaurant in the country.”  Anything else would be a failure.  This seems like a hard goal, but has two benefits:

1. Few people (if any) set such lofty goals, meaning you have less competition
2. It self-selects for the type of people that crave such challenges and brings a level of excitement to work every day

If you are creating something, ask yourself, “what is the most incredible, awe-inspiring version of this I could create?”

#2 Willingness to blow it up and “fix something that’s not broken”

When people reach a certain level of “success,” few have a desire to start over.  Yet, Grant craved this continuous reinvention throughout his career.  After being named “best restaurant in the world” he feared the complacency that came with success.  Although such accolades likely guaranteed he would never have to worry about his restaurant failing, it was about a deeper curiosity and energy that comes from creation.

This spirit was part of the original name of the restaurant, Alinea, which means “the beginning of a new train of thought”:

We are ripping apart a restaurant that is working incredibly well. It’s the busiest its ever been. Why fix something that is not broken? Well because if we wholeheartedly gonna uphold that philosophy that we started ten years ago “The beginning of a new train of thought. I feel like that’s our obligation. We have to just make it a clean slate.

Alinea now re-creates an entirely new restaurant every four months.  How could you embrace this spirit of re-invention in your own life?

#3 Courage to leave the path that made sense

In culinary school, Grant read chef Charlie Trotter’s book and was inspired by such an accomplished chef.  He ended up going to work for Trotter but was discouraged when his personal vision didn’t align with how Trotter led his kitchen.  Trotter has been described by the New York Times as a “control freak” and someone who is known for the “radical extent to which he takes his quest for excellence.”  While this approach has resulted in personal success for Trotter, it was a stifling environment for Achatz.

When Achatz was contemplating leaving, Trotter told him there would be no record of him working at the restaurant.  He left anyway.

Robert Greene has written about mastery and creativity and found that there is always a point when people must go out to carve their own path.  Greene finds that most people wait too long to start experimenting: “you must force yourself to initiate such actions or experiments before you think you are ready.”

Achatz left Trotter without any plan and ended up joining the French Laundry before it became famous.  There, he found the right environment to experiment and push his limits under Chef Thomas Keller.  The French Laundry was named best restaurant in the country in 2003.  Achatz could have stayed.  But again, he left a path that seemed to make sense.

When you talk to successful creative people, it is easy to simplify their path in a way that makes it seem logical or planned.  That is rarely the truth.

What path have you been on that doesn’t make sense anymore?

#4 You are never an “expert”: “Taste to leave taste”

While Achatz was building Alinea, he was diagnosed with cancer and the treatment made him lose his sense of taste.  For a chef, nothing could be more frustrating.  Yet as his taste slowly started to reappear, he looked at the experience with wonder and realized that his sense of taste was literally being reborn as if he were an infant.

…when you’re first born, newborns can only perceive sweet. They’re not, their palates haven’t developed yet. They can’t taste salt. They can’t taste bitter. They can’t taste acid. And obviously, the reason for that is so that they’re drawn to eat, tasting the natural sweetness in the milk. So the same thing happened to me. I started from zero and the first thing back was sweet. So my palate developed just as a newborn, but I was 32 years old. So I could understand how flavors were coming back and how they synergized together…

As he said, “I think it made me a better chef, because now I really, really understand how flavor works.”  In the book Art Of Learning, Joshua Waitzkin describes the challenge of learning as a continuous process of mastering the details to move to the next level, or “numbers to leave numbers”:

It is important to understand that by numbers to leave numbers, or form to leave form I am describing a process in which technical information is integrated into what feels like natural intelligence. Sometimes there will literally be numbers. Other times there will be principles, patterns, variations, techniques, ideas.

As Achatz notes in the show, “All chefs want to be known for using a knife.  Yet Achatz’s experience with cancer and his loss of taste forced him to think about how to convey his vision to others.  While sitting in the chair receiving chemotherapy, he drew out new dishes on a sketch pad and experimented with new types of language to communicate his vision with his team.  During this period he realized that he “can be a chef without being able to taste.”

Taste to leave taste.

Cancer is a terrible way to learn, but Achatz’s experience offers a lens into the limits of our thinking.  We are often too confident in our understanding of how the world works or get too comfortable with our own perceived competence. How can we question even the most fundamental realities of the way we perceive the world to open up new ways of looking at the world?

#5 Question everything: “Why can’t food float?”

When Achatz started his journey in food, he wanted to question everything.

We would go to art galleries and you would see these giant-scale pieces of art. And I would always say, “Why can’t we plate on that?” It frustrated me that, as chefs, we were limited to scale that was determined by plate manufacturers. Why not a tablecloth that we can eat off of? Why do you have to eat with a fork or a spoon? And why does it have to be served on a plate or in a bowl?

In his evolution to creating on his own to inspiring others to create, Achatz found that true success for him was “maybe the most important thing is taking that idea, that little nugget and handing it to someone else. And then next thing you know, someone is holding a ballon.”

In contrast to Trotter, Achatz asked bold questions and challenged his team to create.  The balloon he referenced is one of Alinea’s most famous creations that all started when he asked the question “how can we make food that floats?”  His executive chef Mike Bagale, likely knowing that Achatz would give him the space to experiment jumped at the challenge and simply said “I’ll do that.”

To question the fundamentals of your work or life is to invite criticism.  Yet the people that ask these questions are often the people we look to for inspiration or the ones that give us hope that we can unleash our own creativity and carve our own paths.  Achatz not only questioned the fundamentals in his own life, path, and pursuit of creativity but also created an environment where others leaped at the challenge of doing the impossible.

Here’s to finding a piece of Grant Achatz inside us all.

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

The post Five Lessons From Grant Achatz on Unleashing Creative Potential appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

While Shayne has built a successful marketing consulting firm, there was no “plan” to do this.  His first exposure to marketing was out of necessity – his professor let students boost their low economics grades by joining the marketing group he ran.  Shayne quickly applied the lessons to his DJ gigs on the side in college and became more interested in how to build real relationships with people through incredible experiences.  He brings this same passion to his work today.

Shayne has had many “dumb” ideas, but he would argue that most ideas (good and bad) start out as dumb ideas.  The difference is the people with the courage to keep moving and respond to feedback. He has called the entrepreneurship journey “one of the most humbling things he has done in his life.”  From this humility and willingness to stay vulnerable, Shayne has been able to build a successful digital marketing firm.  So what’s his secret?  He shares four key steps to turn your own “dumb idea” into something that might work:

1. Write down the ideas, make it real
2. Share your dumb idea as widely as possible (don’t worry if people steal it)
3. Get as much feedback as possible (even the negative!)
4. Continue to tweak and re-work the dumb idea (don’t get too tied to the original idea)

Shayne wants more people to follow their silly ideas and see what they can make of it.  In 2010, he decided to start his own business during a recession and with no money to his name.  Eight years later, he has no regrets and couldn’t imagine taking a different path. It may not have made sense at the time – but its the decisions that don’t make sense that often turn into something meaningful.  If it made sense, people would already be doing it!

• Dumb Idea Project
• Shayne Spencer (LinkedIn)

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41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

The post Shayne Spencer on the “dumb idea project” and how failing econ helped him start his firm appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

My first memory of greed was waiting in the line at a local crafts store called The Hoot. My blood was pumping as I looked at the clock and counted down the minutes until 9am when the store would open and a group of 10 of us, an odd collection of fathers, mothers and children, would walk calmly but with some urgency towards the back of the store. The goal was always the same — to acquire at least one plush, hopefully soon “retired” and artificially scarce PVC pellet-filled creation.

My first collection was of basketball cards, but it never turned into a full-blown obsession. Okay, I’m lying. I had a monthly price guide and organized my cards by team and by year. I had a dedicated box of Michael Jordan cards, which eventually held (and still holds) over 100 of his cards.

However, basketball cards were something I would pull out when I was old, sharing stories about sports with the next generation.

Beanie babies were my ticket to teenage retirement

The early internet was a wild playground. As a 13 year old, the banks had no interest in my services, so I got creative. I would buy basketball cards, beanie babies and beanie baby accessories on eBay. Instead of paying immediately, I would send the seller a self-addressed-stamped-envelope stuffed with cash. I was operating as an amateur drug dealer and beanie babies were my drug.

At one point, I orchestrated a complicated trade over a forum with a random person on the internet to acquire a rare “retired” seal that went by the name Seamore. This specific beanie baby I acquired came without the famous TY “hang tag” — probably ripped off by some child who had no idea what kind of treasure they were playing with. It was still a coup for me — price guides told me it was still worth $50 without the tag.

Seamore (pictured here without that valuable “hang tag”)

There were many of these price guides on the web which gave optimistic predictions. While there were some differences, most confirmed my conclusion that beanie babies would rise in value forever. I was mentally doing the math and it was quite clear that I would not have to worry about college. I was starting to imagine a future in which I was some sort of beanie baby lord, just swimming in my riches.

Preparing for my leap to the upper echelons of society, I started curating and obsessing over my collection like a collector of wine or fine art.

To protect my collection, I spent money on the finest cases and tag protectors that my self-addressed-stamped-envelopes could buy. There was an abbreviation MWMT that meant “mint with mint tags” — all was lost of the tags were not perfect.

Tag Protectors!!

Fueling The Fire

As I collected more PVC-filled bears, ghosts and animals, I would go to homepage of the maker of beanie babies TY.com.

As anyone with a dial-up connection remembers, you did not simply go to a website in the late 90s. You first typed in the address, hit enter and then slowly stared at the screen as the website loaded, line by line from the top to the bottom.

Like the drug fueled addict that I have already admitted to being, I would refresh the page several times per day. After a couple of minutes the latest news section of the website would finally load and I could read the latest product announcements.

TY was strategically introducing new beanie babies while simultaneously “retiring” the current collection — meaning you could no longer buy those sacred beanie babies in a store. Online price guides would adjust to reflect the scarcity everyone would lose their mind calculating their riches.

As I built my collection, I had no real strategic plan other than acquire beanie babies and to put them in cases

• Step 1: Obtain as many beanie babies as possible
• Step 2: Protect the good via tag protectors and cases
• Step 3: ?
• Step 4: Retire

MWMT!

Bitcoin Mania

This past year, the internet lost its collective mind acquiring cryptocurrencies. I was not immune from this contagion. At one point I was up a good chunk of change on a small amount of money I threw into the mix. Did I ever think about selling? No. Just like beanie babies, I got caught up in the story of the future potential payoff.

However, unlike beanie babies, the crypto-craze seemed solely about money. With beanie babies, there was something deeper — something playful and silly. Perhaps it was because I was a child or the absurdity of so many people hoarding $5 plush filled animals and other mythical creatures.

I still own several Princess Diana bears and over 100 other creations and store them MWMT in cases at my parent’s house. Within my family, there is an inside joke that my beanie babies will one day be worth millions once everyone else has thrown them away. Keeping them is more of an investment in humor than an actual investment.

Sure, it is fun to play with that dream and wonder “well, what if…” and to think that my PVC-filled creations could be one day still be worth a fortune. But even if they were, I’m not sure I’d sell. There is something about holding on to something from your childhood.

Peace & Travel

As I write this, I am looking at a tie-died PVC-filled bear and one of the most famous Beanie Babies named “Peace” staring at me with its small black circular black eyes. Every time I look at it, I crack up a little.

Imagining myself in front of the computer loading the ty.com website hoping for updates, convincing my mother to drive us to The Hoot, orchestrating trades with strangers on the internet, filling envelopes with cash, and protecting my goods in fine glass cases awakens my inner child.

Over the last few years, I have been getting rid of most of my possessions. Every time I throw or give something away, it is a bit painful, but every time it sharpens the mind towards which things are worth keeping.

Through each move, the tie-dyed bear has survived the purge. I wasn’t really sure why I kept it, but I now realize that it captures a moment in my life in which I was dreaming big and filled with life.

While it was likely one of my first tastes of greed, it was also a first taste of putting a lot of energy into something that didn’t make sense. Something that was filled with silliness and fun rather than payback.

Next month, I’m doing something on a larger scale that doesn’t make much sense — moving across the world and starting a journey of living nomadically. The first ten years after college, I followed a path that made too much sense. I pursued prestige, status, and success and by all accounts was good at it. However, I lost connection to who I was.

Taking the leap to self-employment and exploring my creative side over the past few years, I have unlocked that silly side of myself I didn’t realize was locked away. Creating things that don’t seem to make sense. Writing to see what comes out (like this piece). Creating things on the internet without any intent to “scale.” Helping people without any expectation of payback.

As I travel and continue to learn as an adult, I hope to never abandon the playful and silly mindset to do things I am drawn to and sometimes without reason. Creation for the joy of creation. Silliness for the sake of being silly.

As I set forth across the world, I will be accompanied by my friend Peace.

---

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

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The question “what do you do?” increasingly does not make sense. Five years ago, I would have said “I’m a consultant.” People really just want to know “how do you make money?”

Increasingly, that question is coming to mean “what do you work on?” For me the answer is complicated — I create a podcast, I interview people, I write, I read extensively, I coach people in their careers, I volunteer. Some of those things help me make money and some don’t.

In organizations and in the emerging freelance economy, I have seen a steady, but dramatic shift. The people that are able to thrive are the people that are able to create. The people that are energized and excited are the ones that are doing what matters to them.

Yet, we pretend that the old markers of success — climbing the ladder, getting a promotion, having a “good” job — are what matter.

They don’t.

The Nature Of Work Has Fundamentally Changed, Yet We Operate As If It Is Still 1995

Consider the following:

The decline of full-time work: There was no net increase in full-time employment from 2005 to 2015 — all employment growth was in “alternative work arrangements” such as on-call and temporary as well as contractors and freelancers.

Work continues to increase in complexity: BCG has measured “complicatedness” of work showing that it has steadily increased 6.7% a year for 50 years. This has dramatically outpaced productivity improvements.

Limited connection between traditional education and our work: Less than three out of ten people work in fields tied to their major.

Dream jobs don’t exist: In 1997, Amy Wrzesniewski found that work that is a “calling” is a result of a mindset, not our underlying skills.

People prefer autonomy over control: Researchers found that when power is framed as autonomy versus power over people, people were much more inclined to seek power positions. Autonomy is also highly linked to job satisfaction and performance.

Money is not a motivator: In 1949, Professor Harry Harlow introduced incentives to reward monkeys and ended up destroying their intrinsic motivation. We then found the same result in humans. Yet, almost 70 years later, in organizations, we still use the language of “carrots” and and “sticks”

People are meaner at work: McKinsey found that people experiencing rudeness at work increased from 49% to 62%from 1998 to 2015. YIKES!

Failure to understand these shifts means one thing:

People are stressed, miserable and fed up, playing a game with rules that no longer exist.

In my own career journey, I made multiple career changes and eventually carved my own path as a freelancer. At every step of the road, I encountered endless amounts of bad advice, pseudo-science and buckets of hogwash about the choices I was making. Despite this, I was quite happy and engaged.

That made me wonder, why do ignore science and reality when talking about careers? In the last year as I’ve been carving my own path as a freelancer and in my work as a career coach, I’ve become obsessed with one question:

How should someone think about navigating their life and career in a way that enables them to have freedom to do the things that matter to them?

The deeper I looked, the more good ideas I found. From Pryor and Bright’s “Chaos Theory of Careers” to Adam Grant’s work on original thinking to Ryan and Deci’s self-determination theory to the fascinating research on curiosity, creativity, and solitude.

Our Deep Attachment To Work

How did we get here?

We place so much emphasis on work, yet the labor force participation rate is still less than 65%. We live in a time where we have a belief that much of meaning, dignity and identity can be unlocked through work. This cultural meme runs so deep that we tend to value any work for work’s sake and leave unquestioned the deeper questions of what it means to live a good life. It also results in bizarre phrases like “working poor” being a commonly understood and accepted phenomenon.

We need a radical mindset shift in terms of how we think about work and how we are meant to do things that matter

At the core, we need to stop praising someone for merely being employed or dutifully going into an office every day and we need to embrace the ambiguity and reality of the world.

Let’s ask people instead:

• Does your work bring you alive?
• Are you creating value for other people?
• Are you doing things that matter to you?
• What can I do to support your life?

The Framework

Foundation: Perspective, Motivation & Compass

Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier. — Colin Powell

Perspective:

We are operating under the assumption that the default path is the only path. The reality is that the default path is mostly an illusion. Most people that end up doing something that energizes them end up there through serendipity. We need to shift our thinking to embrace optimism and think about work as a life-long journey that will be reinforced by continuous learning and a flexible and open mind to new experiences, ideas and opportunities. Too often, organizations stifle motivation they tell people what not to do — numbing them into a state of learned helplessness. The reality is, for organizations to thrive and for people to thrive, we will need to push people to think on their own, question the status quo and become “original thinkers.”

We are operating under the assumption that career paths still exist and that successful people are the ones with the most money or highest rank. There are jobs and industries with great paths, but these are increasingly reserved for people who know how to acquire the right degrees and credentials. The truth is, we need to destroy the idea that a “job hopper” is somehow a lesser qualified person. We need to encourage people to try more types of work and embrace planned happenstance theory putting emphasis on optimism, open-mindedness and flexibility rather than specialization or the illusion of career paths.

Motivation:

We are operating under the assumption that having a job is enough. Unfortunately, most jobs are not set up to enable you to thrive and at worst, they may also destroy you. You are also more at the whim of the success of your industry, the pace of change in your job, and the “strategic” moves of large companies than you realize. The truth is you will need to continually self-reflect on the work that motivates you intrinsically, prioritizing mastery, autonomy, and relatedness, and continually re-assess your values, definition of success, and a connection to doing work that matters to you.

Compass:

We are operating under the assumption that companies will take care of us. Deep down, many know this is not true — just google the word “layoff” and see who was axed today. Here, I’ll do it for you…and this is only in the last 24 hours:

The truth is, we need to shift instead to approaches like Stanford Professors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans “Designing Your Life” that starts with a focus on living a good life and then helps you find work to do that fits into that. This does not mean living paycheck to paycheck— it means being thoughtful about mitigating risk through lowering expenses and eliminating debt such that you can have the freedom and flexibility to spend time how you want across all aspects of your life.

#2 How You Create: Environment, Connection & Action

It’s the way I study — to understand something by trying to work it out or, in other words, to understand something by creating it. Not creating it one hundred percent, of course; but taking a hint as to which direction to go but not remembering the details. These you work out for yourself.

Professor Richard Feynman

Environment:

We are operating under the assumption that work means going to an office 260 days a year, 5 days a week, working from 9–5 (at least). The reality is, more and more people are not working this fixed schedule and that it is often impossible to do 40+ hours of the types of creative work we will need to do in the future. We need people who are more comfortable in diverse global, virtual and remote teams and understand how to optimize their environments to maximize flow and creativity.

Connection:

We are operating under the assumption that investing more in corporate culture will make us happier. The confusing reality of this is that many of these efforts backfire since they are not built on a foundation of meaningful work. We need to instead align our work and lives around communities that share our passions and values (which can be done in companies sometimes!). We also need to shift beyond the “transaction mindset” which pervades our world and look for ways to be generous and support each other in their work so more people do the work that matters to them.

Action:

We are operating under the assumption that work is easily understood and can be documented in a process. Not to mention that it should be done full-time! The reality is, work is increasingly happening in projects and the companies that thrive are the ones that think in this context instead of keeping employees from quitting. Workers and companies will need to think about experiments — especially ones that will fail. As Adam Grant showed, original thinkers often run enormous numbers of experiments (for example Edison has 1093 patents, but most of them likely had little impact).

#3 How You Adapt: Knowledge, Progress & Vitality

Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning. — Benjamin Franklin

Knowledge:

We are operating under the assumption that our employers and universities will train us and give us the skills we need. The data shows that most of the $150 billion spent on learning & development every year is wasted. Universities are failing to give people the skills to compete in the economy. The truth is, we need to embrace the mindset of learning through doing, thinking about learning as a lifelong project instead of something that happens from ages 5 to 22, and creating opportunities for apprenticing or projects as a way to continuously develop skills. Finally, we need to more quickly shift to and give more credibility and support to alternatives to on-campus learning.

Progress:

We are operating under the assumption that employers and managers should tell us what to do and that the hierarchy determines our value. The truth is, permission is increasingly an illusion and those who seek it are going to be left behind. Hierarchies are outdated and more concerned with power than helping us develop the skills and experience that will help us build a career and a life. This leads to unnecessary suffering, the lack of growth and people in the wrong jobs. We need to shift from external markers of success to internal ones — are we energized?, are we learning? — and think about our careers as a portfolio of different projects, connections and skills. As Marc Andreessen offers: “The first rule of career planning: Do not plan your career.”

“ Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Vitality:

We are operating under the assumption that two weeks of vacation a year is adequate and that “work-life balance” is a worthy goal. This mindset starts with the assumption that work is the most important thing and you need to be some sort of productivity ninja that carves out meaningful time for health, love, relationships and fun. We instead need to start with our work and time and think about how we can invest in other people and communities to get the best out of each other. Finally, we operate under the assumption that workplaces are the source of all dignity, meaning and energy. However, with this mindset, we avoid the solitude and reflection that will unleash our naturally creative spirits. We need to flip our thinking to ask ourselves what the conditions are for us to thrive!

Are You Ready For The Future Of Work? Take The Assessment Here

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

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I am curious about other people. I also spent a stint as a career coach where my role was to help people gain a better understanding of how they are driven and where they are going.

The easiest way to help people open up is to ask the right questions. Human of New York is a social media profile of random strangers around New York City. The creator often gets asked how he gets people to open up. He’s said his favorite questions is:

“What is your greatest struggle right now?”

I love this question — its almost as scary to ask as it is to answer. What I’ve found is that many people want to answer questions like this — they just are never asked. Conversations stay at the surface level and people are afraid to go deep.

Some of my favorite questions for helping people in their career are:

– What are you trying to cause?

– What brings you alive?

– What’s the best day of work you have ever had?

– Do you want your boss’ job?

– Who inspires you?

– What matters to you most?

These are just some of the questions I’ve used and also asked myself — what are your favorite questions?

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

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The post Asking Better Questions appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.