#293： How to Do More With Less
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Summary
Have you ever told yourself, "Man, if I only had more time, more money, or more connections, I could start putting into action those big plans I have for my life"? Well, my guest today on the show is here to tell you that those extra resources might actually hurt you more in the long run than if you just embraced and used what you already have at hand. In his new book, "Stretch: Unlock the Power of Less and Achieve More Than You Ever Imagined," Scott Sunenshine argues that companies that try to get more resources like money or employees actually have a higher failure rate than companies that make do with the resources they already have.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast have you ever
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told yourself man if i only had more time more money or more connections i could start putting
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into action those big plans i have for my life well my guest today on the podcast is here to
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tell you that those extra resources might actually hurt you more in the long run than if you just
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embraced and used what you already have at hand his name is scott sunenshine he's professor of
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business management at rice university and in his latest book stretch unlock the power of less and
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achieve more than you ever imagined he highlights case studies from the world of business that show
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that companies that try to get more resources like money or employees actually have a higher fail rate
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than companies that try to make do with the resources they already have at their disposal
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today on the show scott and i discuss why chasing more resources often leads to failure and why
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learning to stretch and use what you've already got scott then shares insights he's gleamed from
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the world of business and how this stretching principle help you achieve your personal goals
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we then dig into the science of why constraints makes us more creative and scrappy why planning
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is overrated and why you should put a premium on action and why it's so hard to stretch even though
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we intuitively know that it comes with lots of benefits great show filled with actionable insights
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after the show's over check out the show notes at aom.is slash stretch
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scott sunenshine welcome to the show thanks so much for having me you're the author of a book
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called stretch unlock the power of less and achieve more than you ever imagined and really it's one of
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the best books i've read this year just just packed with all this this useful information is just
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these interesting tidbits and case studies so it's all about how companies individuals go about
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being successful in their career or with their in their industry and you start off the book there
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there are two ways there's there's stretching which we'll talk about here in a bit and there's
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chasing and you argue that the way a lot of companies or individuals go about being productive in life
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getting the success they want is through chasing can you describe what are the traits of a chaser
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and yeah just kind of give us a walkthrough through that chasing is the idea that we need more
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resources in order to be successful so we orient our entire lives or entire business models about
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trying to suck up as many resources as fast as possible and i learned this firsthand during the
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dot-com boom and subsequent bust in silicon valley i went out there to join a startup and i was i was
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definitely chasing i was promised a lot of wealth everyone was going through these ipos and i got
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out there and organizations were doing the same thing because the entire model was let's just raise
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as much money as we can let's bring in as many employees as we can and instead of building something
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sustainable whether it be a sustainable business a sustainable career or even a sustainable life
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this whole model just worked as long as someone wrote the check and as people stopped writing
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checks and the market collapsed you were left with not much and so that's where i came up with
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the idea of chasing and chasing is driven largely through what we call social comparisons and that's
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the sense that you look around at your neighbors your friends your colleagues at work and you think that
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you need the same things in order to succeed so you focus so much of your efforts on trying to get
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these things meanwhile you overlook the most important goals right in front of you right and
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you still see the chasing model today in silicon valley with the the venture capital right like
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it's just companies who are just trying to get as much cash as they can like the whole mantra is there
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is like you know cash flow solves all problems spending it on high salaries perks for their employees but
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a lot of these companies they like what's the success rate for venture capital funded you know tech
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companies it's not that great is it well we'll see what well yeah we'll see we'll see what it is in
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in this most current cycle to kind of call the song it it does feel like 1999 all over again but back in
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the boom and bust that i was in roughly 50 percent of organizations that were founded went out of
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business like in around five years or so those that survived took this very different approach around
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stretching which is really about being resourceful and focusing on how do you get the most out of what you
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already have as opposed to trying to accumulate resources you have to remember that resources are
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instrumental they help us reach goals they're not the goal itself but people forget that and i mean
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how does chasing play itself out in our personal lives is it just like oh if only this thing was
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different or i had this thing i would be successful is that like a chasing mentality in our personal lives
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yeah absolutely if i only had more money or more connections i can do all of these things and then
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of course you see chasing a lot when it comes to how we set up our our households so a lot of people
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move into larger homes than they necessarily would because they think that it's a symbol of status and their
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neighbors have it and the problem is i like to think of this as you're on the treadmill and you're trying
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to get somewhere forward and that's what your goal is but with a treadmill of course you're not moving
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any forward you're working hard and your legs are moving but you're not making any progress and then
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as you chase you escalate those comparisons i talk about people in the book who are multi-millionaires
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who feel inadequate as they make comparisons to billionaires so you turn up that dial on the treadmill
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and you're running faster and faster and faster but you're still not making any more progress
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towards your goals and that's the challenge with chasing it's a rat race that people don't want to
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play but they end up playing it because they don't have the courage to recognize and have a conversation
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with themselves about what it is they're trying to accomplish in their lives and i think also chasing
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can be a roadblock to actually getting started with something because you use that as an excuse like well
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i mean i would get in shape but i just don't have time or the money for the gym so they just keep putting
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it off right yeah exactly it delays it delays reaching your goals and you have a whole chapter
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in the in the book about that and you take this it's an excuse it's a really convenient excuse to
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say oh you know i don't i don't have the gym membership or i have an inadequate set of weights
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in my in my house well just go for a walk or go for a jog or do something and the idea with stretching is
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you you reach your goals when you start doing something because our success comes not from what we
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think about or what we plan to do but from what we actually do and chasing is the ultimate
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distraction and excuse to do nothing all right let's talk about stretching you've mentioned some
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of the attributes of stretchers they're they use they see their resources and and that what they
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have and they they start there instead of thinking about what they don't have any other
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attributes of of a good stretcher a good stretcher is also going to embrace constraints i think when a
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lot of people think about constraints they want to run away from them because from the chasing
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mentality constraints are bad because we think of ourselves as worthy people if we have a lot that's
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what comes from chasing but with constraints stretchers embrace constraints and they recognize
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that when their backs are against the wall that's when we can unleash that inner macgyver that i think
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all of us have so i like to think of stretchers as macgyvering their entire life not just you know
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the physical things and not just in the way that he does it but to think about all of the problems
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that we face and ask not what i don't have but what do i have and how can i think about those
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more creatively and there's a whole whole host of research in psychology that shows that when we face
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constraints when we think about scarcity we can get really creative with what we have and it allows us
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to solve problems that we otherwise might need more resources for and with this constraints you know
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yeah you you talk a lot about a lot of research you highlight a lot of research how actually
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constraints can make us more creative i mean any specific um uh studies or experiments that uh that
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stood out to you that showed that constraints actually make us more creative yeah so i like this
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study that looks at simply thinking about constraints because the reality is is all of us probably face
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constraints in our lives at some time and that's often where we can get into the stretching mindset
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but i think the bigger challenge is most people in this country are relatively fortunate and how do we
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unleash this power of stretching when we're in these types of situations so in this research study they
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divided participants into two groups randomly one group was told simply think about a time when you
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were a child and you had a lot of things that's the abundance group then another group was told think
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about a time when you were a child and you didn't have a lot that's called the scarcity or constraint group
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then they were given a problem computer lab had some extra bubble wrap and they needed to solve a
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problem related to the bubble wrap and it turns out that simply just thinking about constraints allow
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people to come up with more creative and innovative ideas and that's one of the beauties of the stretching
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mindset is it's not that hard to get into first of all we have familiarity with stretching whenever we
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faced a real constraint that's where we can get into this and you know people who i profile billionaires who
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grew up during hard times and they were able to build really successful businesses by using the
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lessons of stretching that they gained when they were under hard times but even when we're relatively
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fortunate simply thinking about constraints can get us into a similar type of headspace so we too can find
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success at all times so yeah if you are in a fortune position you have to be more thoughtful about
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establishing those constraints for yourself i mean that takes a little bit of uh willpower i imagine
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it takes willpower and it also i think really takes a lot of courage because again if we think that
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most people are operating out of this chasing mindset by having constraints you're trying to say well maybe
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i'm inferior because i judge how valuable i am as a person or how important my business is based off of
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our resources why would i ever want to put myself under constraints you look at the way a lot of startup
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organizations evolve they start as the scrappy garage startup that's the classic hp in silicon
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valley and then they move into these really elaborate beautiful headquarters because i think they want
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to show themselves and the rest of the world that they've made it really big meanwhile they send all
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of these signals to their employees that says hey it's okay to squander resources look at all of the
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things that we have we live in the land of abundance and you know the the challenges and i'm talking
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about a lot of the unicorn startups you see right now they don't actually make any money they spend
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a lot of money but they don't make they don't make a lot of money and they send all of these
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signals and they create a culture of waste and when someone stops writing the check they're going to
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have a really hard time adapting i think there was there's a quote something i forgot who said it
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something along the lines that like great nations begin stoic and they die epicurean yeah they kind of
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begin very you know hearty and scrappy but then the reason they die is because the success they got
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from that scrappiness eventually kills them yeah they consider it inferior right so besides constraints
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any other attributes of a stretcher yeah so another another important part is this idea of ownership
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and how stretchers embrace what they have from a from a psychological sense of ownership so i've done
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some research that looks at retail employees and you wouldn't think of retail employees as those who have
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a lot of ownership they're barely paid above minimum wage and they don't have equity stakes
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or any of that stuff but what i found in this research of this large chain of stores is if
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employees can get into that headspace where they literally feel like they own the resources in their
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stores they're able to solve problems more creatively and effectively the challenge of course is
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we tend to strip away ownership from employees we like to put on a dunce cap on them we expect that
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people are not going to perform their best so we develop a lot of control mechanisms to monitor
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employees and take away discretion and as a result we end up getting employees who are controlled and
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don't take discretionary action that would help the organization so ownership when you feel like you own
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stuff around you and that's hard that's hard to grasp at work because most of us don't work for
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ourselves we work for other people and we don't own the desk we're working at we don't own the tools
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we're working at we don't own the computer we're working at but if you can get into that space where
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you feel like you own these types of things you're able to come up with more creative solutions and
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then another important aspect of the mindset is frugality and that's all about how do you use
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resources in effective ways being good stewards we tend to conflate frugality with cheapness and they're
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two very different things from a psychologist perspective when people are cheap they are
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pained from spending money they have this bad reaction in their gut so they can't part with money
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that is not the ticket to a successful life or a successful business because you're not going to
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make indulgences and we like to indulge sometimes there's nothing wrong with that you're also not
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going to invest in your business because you're afraid to spend money when we're frugal however it's a
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very different psychology we take pleasure in using money and other resources wisely so it's about
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getting a good deal it's about using resources efficiently and that's what tends to be the path
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to not only a good life but a successful business okay so let's backtrack to this idea of ownership so
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it's an important aspect of a stretcher and so if you're an employer or you're an employee and you're
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listening to this you're like i i want i want that because i i know it can make me more effective
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how do you go about creating that culture in a in a company that culture of ownership so it starts
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with trust and trusting the front line that they can make decisions because if you think about it
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the people who are closest to your products closest to your customers are your front line employees
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yet we take away so much of their ability to use that information because we don't trust them so
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starting a culture of ownership is really a leadership challenge it's a challenge that sets up an
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environment that says hey we're going to empower you we're going to trust you to make good decisions
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and we're going to give you the benefit of the doubt now some people of course will take advantage of
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that and that's always going to be a negative outcome and there's there's ways you can do that
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but most people want to make contributions to work they want to help their organizations but we don't
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trust them so in one one part of my my research i went to the most successful store manager in this
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in this chain of stores and it was a woman's fashion boutique and i i was asking him
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what is it that allows you to be so successful and he told me a story about the time when he got a
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piece of crap dress no one wanted to buy it the store had lots of it it was falling off the hangers
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and most people would resign themselves and say i can't be successful in this type of
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environment i have garbage to sell so i'm just going to wait until something better comes along
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well what this guy did is he took a pair of scissors he cut the straps off he rolled it up put a bow
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around and it made a sign that said beachwear and it went from a last seller to a best seller now a lot
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of companies that probably would get you fired that would be called damaging the products right
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but what this company did is it empowered people like him to make these types of decisions that were
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good for his store as well as the larger company so that ownership it sounds like gives the gives the
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person an internal locus of control right that they are in control of their exactly so going back to
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frugality i thought this was a really great section frugality is you enjoy spending money
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but you enjoy when it's spent wisely right and saving money so how do you avoid because i know
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when i've been in my frugal streaks it often slips into miserliness where i just get you know i'm just
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pinching every penny and it's not enjoyable but somehow i turn to this scrooge my duck where i enjoy
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counting my coins right how do you avoid frugality slipping into miserliness well i think you have
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to remind yourself of what your goals are and it's kind of ironic but if you think about it the cheap
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person is really not that much different than the than the chaser because the chaser is so worried
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about accumulation is going out and trying to acquire resources counting those resources well in many
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respects that's what the cheap person is doing they're hoarding their resources they're hoarding
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their money they're counting i mean you're literally counting counting those coins and meanwhile the
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numbers might be increasing you might have more money you might have more coins or more of whatever
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you're trying to maximize but you're not using those towards your goals and again at the end of the day
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what we care about is using our resources to achieve goals not just to get more resources that would be a
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pretty bizarre goal resources are instrumental so if we remind ourselves what their actual goals are
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we can get closer to the frugality part of this spectrum than the cheap part and you highlight i
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guess he's a hedge fund manager of some sort but he was super i mean he's a big penny pincher yeah
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you're talking about webbush this is a guy who's got millions and millions of dollars and he's a he has
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his own investment bank and he lives in this dilapidated house with a leaky roof he doesn't
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seem to want to get a professional to repair the roof he's been seen on his roof trying to repair it
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himself the house is in such disrepair that mold has started to infest in it so his wife doesn't
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want to spend the night in that home meanwhile this guy would easily be able to fix it his same business
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is run the same way where he didn't want to fix the carpet people were tripping all over the place
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one of his regulators fined his company for compliance issues not because there was any
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ill will done but because he was so cheap and didn't invest in compliance and so this is this is
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this is the classic example of someone being cheap he's counting his money he's not using it to focus on
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goals that i i would argue would be his more meaningful goals and it's completely displaced him
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from living i think the type of life that most of us would consider uh wanting to live i guess a
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contrast him would be someone like warren buffett i mean the guy's a billionaire but he seems pretty
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frugal like he doesn't mind spending money as so long as it's wisely spent yeah that's right and he
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of course is donating most of his money to charity and i think there's a lot we can learn from
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successful business people who take this approach there's a couple of others i profile in the book
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one is dick yingling who founded a very successful beer company it's actually the largest domestic beer
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producer in america right now with domestic production and he's he's really frugal he reuses
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styrofoam coffee cups and drives a very modest car he's one of the 500 richest men according to uh
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forbes magazine and he's instilled his culture in his whole company and the same thing for this guy by
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the name of bob kierlin who you know does some pretty pretty extreme things on the frugality side
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such as not reimbursing expenses when employees travel because or not reimbursing meals when they
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travel because of course they need to eat but the flip side of that is he takes that money and he
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invests it in his people he gives them better salaries bonuses lots of opportunities and he
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reasons look if if i'm paying the bill when they eat they're going to end up eating in ways that they
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wouldn't if it were their money so let them spend their money and i'll give it back to them in other
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ways and by the way this guy donates a lot of money to charity too although often anonymously
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and you can kind of compare that to people who want that you know glamour and they want all of
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the recognition they want to put up the fancy buildings and get their names on things you know
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it's a very different type of mindset about how you think about resources one is really about
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thinking about those goals and what you want to live the best life and the other i think is largely
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driven by this chasing mentality of of status so even gift giving becomes who can build the nicest
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building i want to one-up my friend who just donated a lot of money and i want to build an even nicer
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building so yeah there's some great case studies there about about frugality so folks need to check
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out the book get at that another attribute of stretchers you mentioned the book is they put a
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premium on input from outsiders so what makes an outsider an outsider first let's let's go there
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an outsider is someone who doesn't know a lot about a specific area that they're asked to solve
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a problem well then how can outsiders solve problems if they don't know very much about that
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area that they're working in well this again is one of the beauties of the power of the stretching
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framework because again you're right our intuitions would be you would want people who know the most
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to to be solving problems to be on your teams but it actually turns out that's not what the research
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shows so there's there's studies that look at 10 different countries 166 scientific labs and it was a
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very simple question the researchers were asking with a pretty straightforward prediction you would
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think how much scientific knowledge in a given domain does someone know how much does that
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knowledge predict how well they can solve a problem in that domain it turns out that there's a
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relationship it's a strong relationship but it's negative the more that someone knew about the
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domain the less likely they were to solve a problem so the biologists were more likely to solve
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the chemistry problems and vice versa and there's a reason for that the reason is when we have deep
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knowledge in an area we tend to focus and try and solve problems in traditional ways when we have
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less information we're able to import different perspectives and not be blinded by our expertise
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that's hard for people to grasp though you think about there's been a lot of popularity of
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malcolm gladwell's work in outliers and he talks about how you need 10 000 hours to gain proficiency
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in in doing something and what i'm finding in my work it's called the multi-c or multi-context rule
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and that the breadth of experience is what's most important when you have complex problems so if you look at
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research that shows the relationship between the number of hours you spend practicing something
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and performance so for games like chess that relationship is about 26 percent that's not bad
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but it's probably a lot less than you would have predicted when you get down to sports it's like 18
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percent work and education it's under five percent and the pattern is as we go from more structured
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activities where the rules of the game are always known to less structured activities but activities
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that we spend most of our lives doing learning and working the role of expertise and practice has
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less and less of an impact and it's that same reason why experts approach problems in such specific ways
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that when the rules are always changing they're applying frameworks that might no longer make sense
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and that's why we need outsiders on teams and this is like a really powerful idea because you know
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going back to the the chasing mentality oftentimes an excuse for we use to start a business or to do
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something is like well i just don't know enough i need to know more about this topic so i'm going
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to research it more a lot of people do that when they start a business i gotta i gotta look into this
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business more and more and more and what you're saying is that that actually might not be helpful
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and in fact it might be counterproductive that's right and i spent a few years doing a study of gourmet
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food trucks which was one of the funnest research projects i ever had to do i mean i did gain 15 pounds
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doing this uh research which i had to work really hard to lose but these are incredibly constrained
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organizations and you'd be surprised but most of them have very little experience cooking they have
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very little experience in the restaurant business a lot of them were trying to reinvent their careers
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they came from it i interviewed teachers people who were just serial entrepreneurs a whole diversity
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of people but a lot of them had zero restaurant experience but what they realized is that that
00:24:11.600
lack of experience but the knowledge that they had from other areas allowed them to come up with new
00:24:18.100
ways of thinking about their food new ways of operating their business so it's not that they don't
00:24:23.240
know a lot it's that they know a little things a little about lots of different things and that gives them
00:24:29.220
a very important perspective on not just starting a business but trying to solve any type of problem
00:24:35.220
and you also talk about in the book that bringing an outside perspective into your life or your
00:24:38.760
business doesn't require you necessarily to actually find physical beings who are outsiders right like
00:24:44.100
you can do that in your own life by just reading you know broadly from different domains different
00:24:49.600
perspectives traveling gaining new experiences yourself so you can bring that back to your own life yeah or
00:24:55.760
even at work i mean how many people would ever think about going to a conference in a different industry
00:25:00.340
but i mean a lot of the problems that we're solving at work there's similar and parallel problems in
00:25:05.840
neighboring industries but we never talk to people in those industries or go have lunch with someone
00:25:10.600
who has your same job in a different company imagine all the things you can learn but we we tend to
00:25:15.860
just like to talk to people who are just like us there's that big book about bell labs and all the
00:25:20.080
the productivity they had during the 50s and 60s and one of the the things they attributed that
00:25:25.440
productivity and all these developments like lasers i mean it was crazy with what they developed was
00:25:29.340
that there was this intermingling going on between different departments and they were able to combine
00:25:34.180
these ideas just within their own workforce yeah that's a great example so one of my favorite chapters
00:25:39.120
in your book is about taking action and not putting a premium on plans that's one of the attributes
00:25:45.540
of stretchers they don't actually plan all that much they just they start acting and then they
00:25:49.900
kind of figure things out after they've taken action but here's the thing i mean it's
00:25:53.920
counterintuitive because a lot of the the business advice out there is you need to sit down you need
00:25:58.840
to create this detailed business plan before you do a project you need to map out the the steps you're
00:26:04.400
going to take to complete the project so how how do plans actually prevent us from getting the success
00:26:12.060
that we want how can it stop us from making progress if you think where the stakes of planning are the
00:26:18.640
highest imagine you're a big business and you're going through your five-year plan strategic plan
00:26:24.240
the reality is is what the research shows is those plans have very little impact on performance and
00:26:30.300
depending on the study you look at sometimes they even harm performance the challenge is five years
00:26:35.760
is a long time it's really hard to imagine two years from now or the world that we live in right now
00:26:41.620
sometimes goes almost on an hourly basis in terms of what's what's unfolding so when you can't when
00:26:48.740
you when you live in a lot of uncertainty plans are really misleading because what happens is you make
00:26:54.540
assumptions about what the world is going to look like what your life is going to look like what your
00:26:59.000
market is going to look like what your competition is going to look like many many years down the road
00:27:03.800
and the odds of that world or that of those markets or so on looking like how you think they're going
00:27:09.980
to look are pretty slim but you trick yourself into thinking that's how the world will work because
00:27:15.760
that's what you put in your plan so you stick to your plan and you keep marching forward as if you're
00:27:21.120
living in a reality because you thought that reality is what's going to happen so when we're stretching
00:27:26.120
we're realizing that one planning in many respects is a large waste of time and two what we want to
00:27:33.780
focus on is more spontaneous action that allows us to learn about the present as opposed to going
00:27:40.180
through the frivolous activity of trying to predict the future i do a lot of planning i try to plan my
00:27:45.980
day out and it never goes according to plan ever one thing i found with planning is that the traffic
00:27:51.840
can lead you into is that it makes you feel like you're doing something even though you're not doing
00:27:56.880
something so you can pat yourself on the back because you made this awesome plan but then
00:28:00.260
you end up not doing anything about it because you already felt like you accomplished something
00:28:04.940
with your plan yeah and we tend to think that we're successful based off of our plans when the
00:28:09.320
reality is is we're successful because of what we do not what we plan to do but we forget that you do
00:28:14.020
need to do a little planning right you talk about in the book that you know one of the downsides of
00:28:17.720
this action over plans is like not having direction basically wandering around so how do you strike a
00:28:23.220
balance between taking action and doing a bit of planning so you're not wandering around in the
00:28:29.360
weeds yeah it's a really important balance to strike and obviously there are some things in life you
00:28:34.380
still need to plan for you need to plan for retirement you need to plan for your kids education
00:28:38.880
so these are these are things where planning is important the point of the stretching framework is
00:28:44.320
that we over plan in many different aspects so the way to really balance that is to make sure that
00:28:50.860
we're learning and what separates those people who can act spontaneously successfully from those who
00:28:56.480
don't is that they learn and that they make adjustments and what i mean by that is if you
00:29:02.100
think about whether it be your business or your life it's all about trying different things and then
00:29:07.900
reflecting on what just happened and then making adjustments so i talk about one company jc penny in
00:29:15.400
the book and ron johnson was their ceo he had come from apple and he was very successful
00:29:20.640
in the apple retail store he was the one who invented the genius bar and he was he was a very
00:29:27.180
improvisational actor he had this gut feeling about genius bar and he he went with it and it turned out
00:29:32.000
to be great well our instincts also could be wrong and in his case at jc penny he literally bet the farm
00:29:39.120
on a new strategy around getting rid of the traditional discounts that you would have in department stores
00:29:43.920
and going to everyday low pricing he then tested he turned it all on at the same time and as the day
00:29:49.940
they were coming in it clearly was not working and he doubled down and we do that a lot when we're
00:29:55.260
chasing is we just start throwing good money after bad ideas because we think if we spend enough money
00:30:01.300
on something we could eventually turn it around because he had this instinct that said everyday low
00:30:06.040
pricing is the way that we're going to go and as more and more and more data kept coming in he kept
00:30:10.900
sticking to that until finally he was fired and so that's you know what he was doing is leaping which i you
00:30:16.700
know leaping are kind of acting but not learning and if we're not going to learn when we're doing
00:30:21.560
the spontaneous action we're going to be in a lot of trouble so we've got to get into a learning
00:30:25.540
mindset if we're going to abandon the plant right i think one exercise you mentioned in the book that
00:30:30.220
you can do and you sort of alluded to it here in your answer was that you know keep a journal of what
00:30:34.840
you did and then write like what you learned from that right like i took these actions and then here's
00:30:41.220
what i learned from by taking those actions and then you can go you have basically have a record
00:30:45.000
it allows you to plan backwards in a way yeah it gives you that backwards looking plan and what i
00:30:50.580
like people to do is compare that backwards looking plan to what their forward looking plan would have
00:30:56.280
been and my sense is what usually happens is they don't look the same but you know what you see is
00:31:02.540
there still tends to be structure towards your day and that's an important point to make is that when
00:31:07.940
i'm saying you should act spontaneously i'm not saying you should fly by the seat of your pants
00:31:11.440
and you shouldn't have any structure and this backward looking plan is that structure if you
00:31:15.380
even look at jazz music music which is often held up as the classic example of improvisation there's
00:31:21.840
still a lot of structure that's going on in that music whether it be the rhythm the way that they
00:31:27.860
communicate and coordinate by looking at each other and all of those things so i'm not saying just kind
00:31:32.100
of get out there and and uh let things fly what i'm saying is you're going to learn that when you
00:31:38.560
go through your day and you're more spontaneous it's going to open you up to new experiences but
00:31:43.520
it's so critical that you learn from those experiences and make adjustments so you can
00:31:47.140
constantly be getting better and when you create this backward looking plan it disciplines us to reflect
00:31:52.500
on how our day just went what we learn by acting more improvisationally another attribute of stretch as you
00:31:58.500
talk about is having high expectations for yourself so what does the research say about having high
00:32:04.300
expectations for you your company or your employees expectations end up shaping a lot of our behavior
00:32:10.280
the challenge is we often set negative expectations so let's say we're late for work one day or actually
00:32:16.780
let's say one of our employees is late for work one day what do we immediately think well they're not
00:32:22.360
responsible they should have left early or if we're in the store and we see a stranger slip what do we
00:32:29.360
think we think well they're they're kind of clumsy now if we were in those same situations we were late
00:32:34.440
to work we would have known we got caught in the freeway in a bad accident or we would have known that
00:32:39.100
there was a puddle on the ground that we didn't look at the challenge is when we're looking at other
00:32:43.100
people's behaviors we don't have access to their situational uh their situations so we don't know
00:32:49.260
that they were stuck in traffic because of an accident we don't know that there was a puddle
00:32:54.800
on the floor and that's why they slipped so because we don't have access to this we explain
00:32:59.540
their behavior based off of individual attributes so when we're observing bad behavior they're
00:33:05.700
irresponsible and they're clumsy and that's what we do with expectations a lot at work is we assume
00:33:11.740
the worst in people we might hear oh this guy's a jerk haven't met him well what happens when we
00:33:17.620
meet him we're going to interact with him in ways that self-fulfill that prophecy that actually turn
00:33:23.620
him into a jerk whether it's our body language or the way we're looking at him or how curt we might be
00:33:28.800
when we talk to him so with stretching we want to replace these types of negative expectations with
00:33:35.520
what i call positive prophecies and positive prophecies are when we give people the benefit of the doubt
00:33:40.760
and we expect them to be able to perform at the highest levels and the important caveat here is
00:33:47.280
we want to make sure that those expectations are believable because there's a fine line that we can draw
00:33:52.920
between setting positive expectations that create this nice positive prophecy and creating performance
00:33:59.660
pressure so there's been a lot of interesting research in sports that have looked at the so-called
00:34:05.880
home field advantage and you often think wow the home team is gonna is gonna is gonna do better because
00:34:11.360
of this advantage but you know what tends to happen is those expectations create this performance
00:34:18.400
pressure so if you look at game seven of a world series it turns out that the home team usually doesn't
00:34:25.740
win those games or you can look at free throw percentage during the playoffs in the nba and the home the home team
00:34:33.680
tends to do better that well those those tend to be equal until game seven where the home team
00:34:37.520
actually does worse and it creates that performance pressure so we want to set credible and positive
00:34:42.320
expectations that are in that sweet spot where people feel capable that they can live up to those
00:34:46.900
expectations but they don't feel overburdened that it turns into pressure so how do you create
00:34:52.220
believable expectations positive prophecies well it starts with really knowing your employees and
00:34:58.060
getting to understand where they can grow and starting small you know if you go if you go and
00:35:03.600
start with someone and it's their first day at work and you tell them you're gonna be the absolute
00:35:10.120
superstar here that's you know people might say oh that's great i i love that they have such high
00:35:16.780
expectations of me and that's a really nice compliment but that creates an enormous pressure
00:35:20.600
so you want to start with what i call small wins so instead of that type of message you can come back with
00:35:26.380
something like i know you're going to do terrific on your first project and start with something
00:35:32.540
that's a less ambitious goal and then gradually over time you can amp up expectations as people
00:35:38.000
build up their confidence and then those expectations won't be seen as performance pressure
00:35:42.860
so start small is is the is the quick answer right this seems like this would be good parenting advice
00:35:48.000
too yeah it'd be absolutely good parenting advice i mean the way we i have two i have two daughters
00:35:52.360
four and nine years old and we put enormous burdens on our children right now i mean we're plotting
00:35:58.280
out you talk about planning we're not plotting out where they're going to college anymore we're
00:36:01.960
plotting out where they're going to pre-k i mean it's just it's absolutely crazy what's out there and
00:36:06.880
kids are smart they're like sponges they soak up this information and they see all of these enormous
00:36:11.880
expectations that their parents are putting on them and these kids i think tend to burn out as they
00:36:17.200
get older and eventually they they revolt because they just crack under the pressure and who wants to set up
00:36:23.480
set up a life of someone like that so again start small you want good positive expectations and a lot
00:36:30.380
of this research is in education and it shows that you can make children smarter by giving them
00:36:34.720
positive expectations but just don't overdo it we've been talking about the benefits of stretching right
00:36:39.560
putting premium actions over planning being frugal thinking about the resources you have at hand
00:36:45.440
right now instead of the resources you don't have there's all these benefits to stretching why
00:36:49.680
do so many people chase i think people intuitively understand that yeah like that's a great idea but
00:36:54.780
they don't do it why is that they don't do it because they have so many signals in our culture and in our
00:37:03.320
businesses that chasing is the and the only way to success and satisfaction you even think about
00:37:10.800
concepts like the american dream and what that means in terms of how you've got to move up to the house
00:37:17.960
with a white picket fence well you know maybe there's people that don't want to live in a house
00:37:21.800
and they rather live in in you know an apartment or something there's nothing wrong when you're
00:37:26.720
achieving your goals you just have to think what those goals are or social media plays a big role in
00:37:31.820
chasing too when we share information on social media about 75 of what we share tends to be good news
00:37:38.140
so we keep escalating our social comparisons as we're seeing all of these people it could be on networks
00:37:44.200
like linkedin you're always getting notices when people are getting promoted or when they're moving
00:37:48.640
to new jobs you never see the other side of it no one's posting on linkedin hey i just got canned
00:37:53.280
so it creates this this arms race where you feel like to have any meaningful impact and to have meaning
00:38:02.260
yourself in the world you need more resources because of all of these signals and people tend to
00:38:10.080
associate stretching as something that you do only when your backs are against the wall stretching is
00:38:17.360
something that is a necessity and we can get that you're a poor college student without any income
00:38:23.640
you understand ramen noodles and stretching you're an executive of the fortune 500 company you understand
00:38:30.000
mahogany furniture and corporate jets and that's the that's the kind of cultural signals we give to
00:38:35.840
people but the point of this book and why i think it's so valuable is when you dive down into the
00:38:42.660
research and you look at many of the most successful people and they're successful not just at work but
00:38:47.340
successful in life they're going at it in the complete opposite direction they're recognizing that
00:38:53.020
yeah we can achieve really high goals and yeah we can be really satisfied but we're getting there
00:38:58.740
not by chasing after resources but by embracing what's right in front of us and just thinking about them
00:39:04.440
much more creatively in better ways this has been a great conversation last question what do you think
00:39:10.220
is one thing that a person who's listening to this podcast right now that they can do today that will
00:39:14.620
provide the most roi and becoming a better stretcher is there like one thing you think they can do quick
00:39:19.660
and i'll give them a quick win the quick win is to start small with a project and impose some
00:39:26.800
artificial limitations on it and this i think is going to be a little counterintuitive also for people
00:39:31.220
if i said go to your boss and say you know what give me a little less money or a little less time
00:39:37.340
or one less person to deliver a project most people say that's the exact opposite thing but again we have
00:39:42.460
to link that dependence on chasing and what happens when they try this out they realize not only can they
00:39:48.040
get the job done but that those constraints help them do the job better and that's how you build up
00:39:53.680
your confidence and experience to start stretching fantastic well scott where can people learn more
00:39:57.640
about the book can go to my website which is www.scottsunenshine.com s-c-o-t-t-s-o-n-e-n-s-h-e-i-n
00:40:07.200
they've got great resources videos and articles that they can download and the book is available
00:40:11.720
wherever books are sold fantastic scott sunenshine thank you so much for your time it's been a pleasure
00:40:15.720
thanks so much for having me my guest is scott sunenshine his book is called stretch unlock the
00:40:20.260
power of less and achieve more than you ever imagined it's available on amazon.com and bookstores
00:40:24.760
everywhere you can also find more information about scott's work at scottsunenshine.com
00:40:29.560
also check out our show notes at aom.is slash stretch where you find links to resources where
00:40:35.040
you can delve deeper into this topic well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness
00:40:44.820
podcast for more manly tips and advice make sure to check out the art of manliness website at
00:40:48.620
artofmanliness.com if you enjoy the show and you've gotten something out of the podcast please
00:40:52.440
consider giving us a review on itunes or stitcher it helps us out a lot as always thank you for
00:40:56.460
your continued support and until next time this is brad mckay telling you to stay manly