#369： When — The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing
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Summary
In his latest book, "The Science of Perfect Timing," author Daniel Pink takes a look at how timing can affect everything from the way we make decisions, to how creative we are, and even if a group will be successful in a shared task.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast now when it comes
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to planning for success we tend to focus on the what and the how for example when we set out our
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workout goals we'll come up with detailed plans on what exercises we'll do or when we come up
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with a debt repayment plan we decide exactly how we're going to pay down the debt but what a success
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in any endeavor isn't only decided by the what or the how but also the when well that's what my guest
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today argues in his latest book his name is daniel pink he's the author of several books including
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drive a whole new mind and to sell as human in his latest book when he takes a look at how timing can
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affect everything from the way we make decisions to how creative we are and even if a group will be
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successful in a shared task daniel and i discuss how to use your internal clock to your advantage
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why you shouldn't get surgery done at 3 p.m in the afternoon if there's really such thing as night
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owls and why you should find more opportunities to sing in a group this is a fascinating discussion
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that will provide plenty of cocktail party fodder but more importantly also has actionable points you
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can put into practice today to make yourself more effective after the show's over check out the show
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notes at aom.is slash win where you can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this
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daniel pink welcome to the show thanks for having me bread great to be here so you got a new book out
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when the scientific secrets of perfect timing you've got interesting career as a writer because
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you've explored all sorts of things like you did a book to sell as human you talk about motivation
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your book drive what led you to to research and write about the science of timing when we do things
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well i realized that i was making all kinds of timing decisions myself about what literally about
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when to do things so everything from when in the day should i work out morning or evening when should
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i abandon a project that's not working all these kinds of when decisions and i realized i was making
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them in a pretty haphazard way and i wanted to make him in a better way i started looking around for
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a book that would allow me to be more informed about how to make those decisions that book unfortunately
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did not exist so i had to write it um so i wrote this book largely because i wanted to read it
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because i wanted to make better timing decisions myself well it's curious you talk about this you
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make this point in the book that when oftentimes we're trying to look at how to improve ourselves
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you always look at the how or the what and people never think about the wind why do you think that
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is you know that's a great question i'm not sure for some reason we've always given it short
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shrift we've always taken questions of what should i do very seriously where you know
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understandably i am too obsessed with learning and improvement so we want to know how to do
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things better we're very selective often about who we partner with so the the who but i don't
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know for some reason the when question has been sitting at the kids table and it really belongs
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at the grown-ups table and there's a huge amount of evidence even if you look at something like
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time of day just you know probably the one of the most powerful but but relatively mundane
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issues of timing when in the day should you do things it turns out that that time of day
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explains about 20 percent of the variance and how human beings perform on tasks that involve brain
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power so you know 20 percent i mean that doesn't mean timing is everything but it's a freaking big
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thing yeah so let's get into that because you look at timing from different perspectives and the
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first part you look at is the timing that our bodies have right we have this natural clock
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tell us about this natural clock how it works what's its average what's the average what does
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it look like throughout the day well it's great it's a really really great point because so much of
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timing at a on a daily level is biological is physical is scientific if you if you look at certain
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units of time seconds hours weeks those are things human beings have completely made up all right
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they're not real but a day is a real thing because we're on this planet that you know makes one
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spin around in in uh in 24 hours and our bodies also have not just a single biological clock but an
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array of biological clocks some people believe biological clocks in every cell and that has a
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big effect on our mood and our performance and the gist of it without getting too knee deep in the in
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the actual biology is is the following that most of us progress through the day in three stages we have
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a peak a trough and a recovery a peak a trough and a recovery most of us progress in that order peak
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trough recovery about a fifth of us do it in the reverse order recovery trough peak but what the
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science tells us is that there's certain kinds of work we should do in the peak certain kinds of work
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we should do in the trough and certain kinds of work that we should do in the recovery and if you
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simply reallocate what you do in these various time periods you're going to perform at a much higher
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level so what should you do during your peak okay so the peak the peak again which for most of us is
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the morning basically the the morning to the to around noon one o'clock what we should do there are
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analytic tasks those are tasks that require vigilance keeping out distractions heads down focus so you know
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you're writing a legal brief if you're a lawyer you're auditing columns of figures you are trying to
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you know find bugs in in software so heads down analytic work where you want to keep out distractions
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that is best done during our peak now the trough is for almost everybody the early to mid afternoon
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that's pretty much good for nothing if you look at it's actually kind of frightening i mean some of
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these numbers that i uncover were pretty alarming you have a much greater chance of anesthesia errors and
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surgery for surgeries that begin at three rather than at eight in the morning doctors and nurses
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much less likely to watch their hands in the mid-afternoon than earlier in the day if you look
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at and this is actually really blew me away the most common time period for auto accidents is between
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four and six a.m not a big surprise the second most common time between two and four p.m that trough at
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midday trough so the trough isn't good for much what you're better off doing is your administrative work
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answering your email you know doing your tps reports whatever kind of nonsense that we have
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to fill our days with and then the recovery is interesting because the recovery again which for
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most of us occurs in the early after the late afternoon and early evening that's a time when
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our mood is higher but our mood is better than during the trough but our vigilance isn't quite as
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great as during the peak and that combination is actually really interesting because when we're slightly
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less vigilant but in a somewhat elevated mood we're pretty good at creative stuff that's a good
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time for for for brainstorming sessions and things that require greater creativity where you actually
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want to let in a few distractions and to the extent it's possible if we can just alter our schedules a
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little bit have a little bit more control over when we do what we do people are going to be able to
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perform at a higher level with very little cost yeah i've i've done that with myself like sometimes
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i'll stay up really late to to write sort of like the initial draft of something and then use the
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morning the next day to edit because i feel like if i try to write create like you know right in the
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morning i tend to be nitpicky and i just backspace a lot and delete no that's not right but if i just
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if it's late at night i just let it let it rip and i'm surprised what i can get out yeah you're less
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inhibited i happen to be i happen to be a morning writer only because for me writing is it it so rarely
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flows that i have to be i have to shut out every kind of you know i i'm so easily distracted that
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i have to go to my peak low distractibility period in order to get any writing done so you talk about
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in the book these are the typical cycle is this peak trough recovery it starts in the morning goes
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what do you do if like you're a night owl is there such a thing as night owl people say i'm a night owl
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but is that really a thing totally it's a thing it's a it's actually it's an important thing what a
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night owl is is what there's a whole field of research called chronobiology chrono meaning clock
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biology meaning study of life and that is devoted to studying our daily mostly daily biological rhythms
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and each of us has what's known as a chronotype that is our proclivity on how you know do we wake
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early or have a lot of energy early and then fade as the day goes on or do we wake later in the day
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and need a lot more time to ramp up and actually hit our peak in the evening and it's pretty
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interesting area what it shows is that there's some big big differences based on age big differences
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based on age that people between say 14 and 24 are generally very very owly it has to do with
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largely with hormones that there's a period and it's often in a teenager's life that sometimes drives
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parents nuts where their teen is suddenly sleeping really late and staying up really late that's not
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a sign of they're being lazy people it's a sign that their biology is changing in a marked way
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so people between 14 and 24 are quite owly but um there are a decent number of people you know let's
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call it one-fifth of the population or so that regardless of their age are actually um have evening
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chronotypes and they wake later and go to sleep later and for those kinds of people the the general
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pattern is the opposite so they want to do their recovery first thing in the morning they want to
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you know do the trough at the same time the trough is for everybody else but they hit their peak for
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analytic work for work that requires focus diligence uh later in the day and i think one of the challenges
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is that you know the truth is the distribution is is that some of us are larks really morning types some
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of us are our owls really evening types the majority the vast majority of people are somewhere in
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between but most of the workplace is designed for people who are larks or in between and it really
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disadvantages the one out of five of us who are night owls so what do you do if you're night owl
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and you work at a job that has the you know the lark schedule can you adjust is it possible to adjust
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your schedule do you go to your boss and say look hey i have a chronotype that will allow me that'll
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allow me to perform better and this will help the bottom line is that the pitch i think that's
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actually a good pitch and i think that enlightened bosses will respect that there's some there's
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some research done there's a very famous chronobiologist named or as famous as a
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chronobiologist can be named till ronenberg who has done some work with companies in germany
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to help them adjust their schedules so that it fits people's chronotypes and geez not surprisingly they
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have fewer accidents greater job satisfaction higher productivity so i think that's one way to do i think
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that's one way to do it and you have to pitch it in terms of what's in it for the boss what's in it
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for the company to have this different kind of schedule on the other hand you know we have to be
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realistic that a lot of people can't simply dictate what their schedule is going to be and so
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there there's some opportunity to work the margin so let's take let's take night and let's take a
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night owl who has to go to a an 8 30 a.m meeting now that's miserable for some of these people
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understandably i have a lot of empathy for that and yet there's a meeting at 8 30 and they still
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have to do their job and perform what can they do well there are a few things number one is that
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the night before while they're in their peak they should maybe make a list of what they want to
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accomplish at the meeting what they need for that meeting and so put basically a checklist so they
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don't space out in the fog of the morning the other thing that we can do is there are ways to
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increase our focus and boost our mood and a lot of those happen through various kinds of breaks so
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what i would advise a night owl who's going to an 8 30 meeting is to before you go into the meeting
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you've got your checklist take a walk outside beforehand there's a lot of good evidence that
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movement and and nature can be very restorative another thing that actually is fairly restorative is
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doing a good deed for somebody so maybe on your way into that meeting if you stop at the local
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coffee place you know buy a cup of coffee for the person behind you and you know doing good boosts
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our mood a little bit so there are some things we can do to night owls can do to you know work the
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margins of it but i actually prefer that they do exactly what you suggested which is go to their boss
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explain what's going on and put it in terms of the company's interest yeah and you've also seen
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a movement with schools knowing you know recognizing that teenagers are tend to be night owls
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and they're you know adjusting the school day starting later and ending later absolutely and
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and that's a huge issue and if you look at the effects of of i mean starting school for at 7 15 a.m
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for teenagers is such an unbelievably bad idea it goes against everything we know about science
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and indeed everything we know about chronobiology at least in fact you have the american academy of
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pediatricians has issued a policy statement saying please school districts of america do not start
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school for teenagers before 8 30 in the morning and yet the average school start time in america is
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8 03 which again goes to your earlier point about hey we're just not taking these when issues seriously
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enough and then the schools that have adjusted like they've seen an increase in test scores and things
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like that i mean just making that adjustment that that can do a lot because there's all these schools
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are like you know they're they're strapped for cash they think we got to hire more teachers like just
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start your day later and that can do a lot it does a huge amount i mean it's such a great i mean
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first of all what what it shows is that you that that started the school later for teenagers we're not
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talking about for little kids but for teenagers starting the school later for teenagers the school
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districts that have done it have seen incredible results higher test scores lower dropout rates some
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really interesting evidence about a reduction in teenage auto accidents which is which is really
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important reduced uh depression i mean uh reduced obesity it's really quite extraordinary and to your
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point though there is there's a study out of out of wake forest that showed that or it's not out of
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wake forest but out of the wake county north carolina school district that showed that this is actually
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a very cost-effective remedy that other things that that school districts do to try to reduce the dropout
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rate or improve test scores you know end up being more costly and simply start school at nine you know
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don't start school for teenagers at 7 24 a.m all right so our bodies have this daily clock this peak
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trough recovery throughout the day does it have a similar rhythm throughout the week uh yes and no
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what you see is that when when people on weekends typically people who work during the weekend have
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the weekends off people who work during the week and have the weekends off they end up essentially
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rising uh falling asleep and awakening true to their chronotype because they don't have to get up to an
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alarm clock so so so figuring out what time you wake up and what time you go to sleep on weekends which
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are which are typically for people what are called free days um is a good way to figure out your
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your chronotype there's some other evidence to show though in in terms of behavior change
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that we're more likely to engage in behavior change say i'm going to finally go to the gym i'm going
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to start a new diet i'm going to buckle down at work we're more likely to pursue that and succeed at
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it if we do that say on a monday rather than a thursday it's something called the fresh start effect
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so and it goes beyond the week it goes to we're more likely to succeed if we do it on the first of the
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month rather than the 14th of a month if we do it on the day after a holiday rather than the day
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before a holiday so but again a week is a made-up thing a week is not a natural phenomenon just
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something that human beings came up with to try to corral time gotcha and but how about seasons
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right that's not a made-up thing right the we go through different seasons oh no not at all that's
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for real because that's for real because because we're we're we got we're on this little ball moving
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around the sun right so i mean do the seasons affect our you know our performance like do we
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behave in a different way during the winter than we say during the summer that's a yeah it's a really
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interesting question and some of the evidence on that is mixed i was a little bit skittish about
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pulling the trigger because i wasn't sure about some of those things one of the things that's really
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interesting though is that whether you're a night owl or a lark correlates to the season in which
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you're born if you can believe that so the season in which you're born seems to have a
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uh seems to have an effect on what your eventual adult chronotype is going to be which is kind of
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peculiar that is weird okay so we got this this rhythm throughout the day and there's things we
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can do to leverage that or work in the margins of that you'd mentioned this fresh start stuff and
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you talk about this in the book a section about you call them temporal landmarks yeah monday is a
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temporal landmark holidays can be temporal lot and landmarks tell us a little bit more about this idea
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of temporal landmarks and how we can use those to boost our performance yeah so that's not temporal
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landmarks isn't isn't my term it's a term that from some of the mostly social psychologists who have
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studied some of these issues and what it is is this it's really important i think it's a really
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important concept that is there's certain dates and here we're talking about days of the year
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there's certain days of the year that operate as landmarks in the same way that certain settings
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certain buildings or certain parks or whatever operate as physical landmarks and that is that let's
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say you're trying you know you're trying to drive to my house and i say look for there's a certain i live
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in washington dc and there's a restaurant near my house that everybody seems to know about called
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cactus cantina okay that's like the landmark to say hey you're close to my house and so what will
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happen is people will drive to my house they probably if i were to ask them what what did you pass by they
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have probably have no idea what they passed by but as soon as they see cactus cantina like oh oh i know
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you know so it's a landmark that gets us to do two things number one slow down and pay attention
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number two it has this really peculiar effect on the way we account for time in our heads that is
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we have a form of of temporal accounting too so on certain dates we feel like we're opening a fresh
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ledger in the same way a business would open a fresh ledger at the beginning of a fiscal year or at the
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beginning of a new quarter we say oh you know what i was a lazy i was a lazy slob during the month of
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march but on the first day of april i'm opening a fresh ledger and making a fresh start so and those
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end up being like the dates that i talked about so mondays are fresh start dates the day after your
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birthday is a good fresh start date the day after a federal holiday the first day of a semester
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the first day back from vacation that there are a bunch of dates that have this that operate like
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that those physical landmarks again they get us to slow down pay attention and open up a fresh ledger
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right and right now it's yesterday was new year's day for for us and uh that's a great landmark day
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that people take advantage of that is the king of fresh start day uh and it's one reason why we have
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you know it's one reason it's the it's the thinking behind new year's resolutions okay
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i was a complete slob during 2017 but in 2018 i'm gonna be you know i'm gonna have a vegan diet
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and go to the gym three times a day yeah so besides uh these temporal landmarks and this rhythm throughout
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the day that we have you also discuss the research behind how when we start things can have a huge
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impact on the outcome whether it's success or failure so give us some examples of when starting
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things can determine the outcome of something yeah and and this is one of those areas of timing that
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is often beyond our control and it's it's pretty alarming so we talked a little bit about school
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start times and and how much that has an effect on literally whether a kid is going to graduate from
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high school or not and and obviously the difference in life outcomes between a high school graduate and
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someone who's not a high school graduate is vast but one of the most alarming pieces of research that i
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uncovered was from uh yale university and what it showed is this imagine you take two people okay
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let's take well use you and me okay brett and dan we're gonna say you and i graduated from college
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let's say we graduated from the same college but the only difference is that you graduated in a
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recession you graduated in a boom time and i graduated in a recession okay so maybe we're five
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years apart but the circumstances into which we launched our career were different again through
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no fault of my own of our own you graduated in a boom time i graduated in a recession well this
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research from yale shows that that now not surprisingly you're probably going to earn more your first year
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because the economy is stronger i don't think that's a shocker to anybody i think what's a shocker is that
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that difference shows up in people's wages 20 years later so you graduate from college and you're 22
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when you're in your early 40s you might still be out earning me only because you graduated you began
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your career at a better and more suspicious moment that's just one of the dramatic ways that beginnings
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can can affect us that beginnings can often matter to the end and it's one of those situations where
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it's not like hey i can you know the other situation you mentioned where it's all go to my
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boss and explain that i'm a night owl it's like what do you do in that kind of circumstance that's a
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case where we need to reckon with the basically the unfairness of people starting at different points
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so and what what can are there any ideas of interventions you can do for that let's say you
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graduated in 2008 2009 i graduated i graduated from law school in 09 and that's when there was just this
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bloodbath in the legal field there's firms just laying things off it was like my can the uh the
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dean when she gave the uh commencement speech it was like so depressing which is like we know it's a
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tough time to graduate and even my parents they're like that was the most depressing commencement speech
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i ever heard in my entire life wow but i mean what do you what do you do uh are there any ideas of how
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we can counter that um i think what you have to do is you have to make it you have to make that kind of
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situation not your problem but but essentially everybody's problem and there's actually some
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interesting research from mba programs about that so so so somebody who graduates somebody who gets
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an mba in a down year versus an up year first of all someone who gets an mba in an up year is going
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to likely to out earn over the course of his or her lifetime someone who graduates in a down year
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what's also interesting is that the people who graduate in a in a down year those people are they do
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become ceos from once they graduate once they get their mba eventually after they get their mba degree but
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they become ceos of smaller firms i mean so it's pure happenstance so what do you do in that
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situation to get to your question you know i i think that it requires a a more of a kind of a group
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solution so let's let's take this at some level let's take 2008 as an example at some level that is
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akin to a natural disaster to me and so when there's an earthquake or something like that we don't say
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oh sorry bad luck earthquake nothing you can do about that we say hey wait a second that's unfair
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they had an earthquake no one else had an earthquake we're going to provide some loans
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we're going to provide some kind of assistance so what i think is an idea in that case is that if
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the unemployment rate goes above a certain level national unemployment rate or local unemployment
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is above a certain level in college graduation or or business school graduation or law school
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graduation or whatever then i think it should trigger perhaps some emergency funds or some
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loan payback programs so that people who through no fault of their own they've done everything right
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they've gone to school they've gotten good grades and just through circumstance have started their
00:24:11.160
career in a in a downturn they shouldn't be necessarily disadvantaged on that it hurts all of
00:24:16.160
us when those people suffer and you see a little bit i'll give you an example of this you see this a
00:24:19.780
little bit in medicine where you had um for a long time in medicine you had what was called the
00:24:24.420
july effect the july effect is when new residents started in teaching hospitals so they they leave
00:24:32.300
medical school in june and they start their residency in july and they're taking care of patients these
00:24:38.140
are people who are a month out of medical school and lo and behold there were a lot of problems with
00:24:43.900
that like people dying and getting sick because they're treated by people who are just at the
00:24:48.880
beginning of their career as a physician and so what the what the met teaching hospitals did is say okay
00:24:54.880
wait a second we can't just say oh that's just bad luck for those patients who are dying what they did is
00:24:59.760
they say let's start together let's make this more of a collective solution so instead of having
00:25:04.480
the doctors treat the patients individually they became part of teams they had greater monitoring and so
00:25:11.380
i think that when people have through no fault of their own a bad beginning we as a society as a matter of
00:25:17.580
fairness have to take collective action but the other thing is it's good for all of us like you know it's good
00:25:24.060
for me if you're not if you're earning a decent living but what we don't do is we don't recognize
00:25:29.740
how much these starts matter significantly to outcomes even two decades later right okay so if
00:25:35.880
it's a if it's a bad start because of no fault of your own because there's bad timing group solution
00:25:41.020
but if it's a bad start based on you know you just you didn't do well that's that's when you leverage
00:25:46.700
things like temporal landmarks and say i'm gonna get a fresh start okay gotcha okay precisely perfect
00:25:51.980
let's talk about the midpoint right i think you know it's too it's the new year everyone sets
00:25:57.540
goals the new year they're always really excited you have that dopamine hitting your brain it feels
00:26:02.800
good this is the this is the year everything changes and then about i mean i mean even like in
00:26:08.320
the middle of january the motivation fizzles what what's what's going on there whenever we reach a
00:26:13.740
midpoint with a goal or some task where that drive just seems like it just goes away yeah that's a
00:26:20.540
it's another great question and it's it's very characteristic of midpoints what happens when
00:26:24.560
we hit the mid midpoints are weird in that two very different things can happen when we reach a
00:26:30.200
midpoint sometimes they bring us down other times they fire us up so if you look at middle age there's
00:26:38.080
this whole you know notion of a midlife crisis which turns out not to be true at all but there is this
00:26:42.960
kind of midlife sag where people are generally happy in their 20s and 30s they start to dip a little
00:26:49.220
bit in their 40s by the early 50s they're at the bottom and then in their late 50s 60s 70s 80s they
00:26:54.940
start rising back up again and they're actually surprisingly they're surprisingly happy you see
00:27:00.160
it sometimes in terms of people's compliance with certain kinds of tasks that they're very compliant
00:27:05.160
at the beginning and at the end but they fade in the middle on the other hand there's also some
00:27:09.940
really good evidence about uh in teams where if you look at group projects we have this notion
00:27:15.920
that when people engage in a group project they start and they follow this linear progress
00:27:21.520
from the beginning to the end and what connie gersick who was at ucla and now as at yale has
00:27:27.520
found is that that's not how it is at all basically what happens is that during the first half of a
00:27:31.900
first part of a project people don't do anything they posture they waste time and it's really only at
00:27:38.720
the exact midpoint that they look up and say oh my god we've squandered half of our time we have to
00:27:43.760
get going and so um so the midpoint has these two different effects so what can you do about it i
00:27:50.220
think there are a couple of things number one is that you have to recognize that there are midpoints
00:27:54.180
something that was completely a mystery to me until i started doing this research i never even thought
00:27:58.620
about midpoints the second thing is that you do have a choice about when you hit a midpoint you can
00:28:03.640
say oh no or you can say uh-oh and you're better off saying uh-oh and one of the good ways to say uh-oh
00:28:09.300
is to imagine that at the midpoint you're a little bit behind there's some really interesting evidence
00:28:15.440
from the nba big data analysis of i think 20 000 or so nba games that showed that at halftime a team
00:28:24.620
that is ahead at halftime is more likely to win the game which makes sense because they have more
00:28:28.880
points i mean it's not you know complicated math but there's the exception is is that teams that are
00:28:34.380
down by one point at halftime are actually more likely to win the teams that are up by one point
00:28:40.740
there's something about being a little bit behind that is galvanizing so recognize midpoints use them
00:28:46.980
to wake up rather than roll over and then imagine you're a little bit behind and that's that's a way
00:28:51.820
to use a midpoint as a spark rather than let it bring you down i think that's what happened last
00:28:56.440
night with the rose bowl with the uh the soon my sooners in the in georgia they were georgia was like
00:29:02.160
behind or they tied it at halftime and then they just came out just decimated well you know what's
00:29:07.420
interesting is it's funny you said that because i i watched that game and i was thinking about that
00:29:11.200
and i was and they had an interview with the the freshman quarterback at georgia after the game
00:29:16.960
who was talking about what was going on at halftime and how they were behind and he kept saying well
00:29:22.340
we're a fourth quarter team we're a fourth quarter team so it is it is pretty interesting and again
00:29:28.440
with sports what we have is we have these very clearly delineated midpoints halftime or at least
00:29:35.560
in like basketball football and things like that but in other kinds of projects we often don't but
00:29:40.580
if we have a beginning and we have a deadline there is obviously a midpoint and what connie gersick found
00:29:46.760
weirdly and looking at a lot of these team projects is that you give a team 34 days to do something
00:29:52.120
they don't really get started until day 17 you give a team 11 days to do something they don't get
00:29:57.000
started until day six so the more we think about are conscious of midpoints the more we can use them
00:30:02.740
um do a little bit better than the sooners did in the rose bowl right right so i mean students can
00:30:07.800
take advantage of this um you know you might have a deadline for a paper that's you know months away
00:30:12.440
but like create your own artificial deadline that will create an artificial midpoint for you to have
00:30:16.800
that uh-oh moment to get started so you don't have to worry about turning your paper the last minute
00:30:22.080
great idea i like that all right so we talked about midpoints what about endings so we talked
00:30:27.800
about the beginning talked about midpoints how do endings influence you know the outcome of an event
00:30:33.140
yeah well endings have a huge effect on our behavior and i think in a pretty interesting way so there
00:30:38.300
are multiple things that endings do one of the things that they do is they they can galvanize us to
00:30:43.880
kick a little harder so there's some fascinating research from adam alter at nyu hal hershfield at ucla
00:30:50.580
about the age at which people are likely to run their first marathon and it turns out that the
00:30:56.720
most common age at which people are likely to run a first marathon is age 29 which is kind of a weird
00:31:03.080
age right 29 where did that come from and then you start unpacking it and you realize well wait a second
00:31:08.300
people who are 29 are twice as likely to run a marathon first marathon as people who are 28 and people
00:31:13.840
who are 30 okay that's kind of weird it's like there's not much of a physiological difference between
00:31:18.500
29 year olds and 28 year olds between 29 year olds and 30 year olds what's going on then you realize
00:31:23.300
hey people are likely to run marathons at age 39 age 49 age 59 and so this this artificial marker of a
00:31:30.520
decade when we get to the end of it getting to the end of something can can focus our attention it can
00:31:37.040
increase our motivation and it can also spark a pretty interesting search for meaning so one thing
00:31:44.680
endings do is they get us to kick a little harder get us to um pursue meaning more robustly gotcha and
00:31:52.920
you also talk about we typically remember things on by how they ended and the famous colonoscopy
00:31:59.080
oh yeah example talk about that one the famous colonoscopy because because i love talking about
00:32:04.980
colonoscopies in fact yeah yeah who doesn't yeah yeah actually there's some there's some interesting
00:32:09.320
research if you really want to go deep in colonoscopies no pun intended there's some interesting
00:32:13.640
research on um for those of your your your listeners who are 50 and older do not get a colonoscopy in the
00:32:19.660
afternoon afternoon colonoscopies find half as many polyps as morning colonoscopies i mean it's
00:32:25.800
terrifying so but anyway but but there is a there is as you said a famous piece of research in social
00:32:30.800
psychology from daniel kahneman barbara frederickson on colonoscopies that we found that a colonoscopy that
00:32:37.380
was that lasted a long time was seen as less uncomfortable than a colonoscopy that lasted a short
00:32:43.280
amount of time but that had a painful end and they and that phenomenon in behavioral economics is
00:32:50.020
known as duration neglect that is we don't focus so much on the duration of an event but often focus
00:32:56.360
on how it ends there's some other interesting evidence of that i mean really cool interesting
00:33:01.400
stuff about you know how we look at people the lives that somebody led so somebody who was a jerk
00:33:08.220
for most of their life but suddenly became a good guy his final year and then died is often remembered
00:33:14.700
as well as someone who was a good guy most of his life but became a jerk in his last year that is that
00:33:21.260
ending has this disproportionate effect on how we how we remember things you see it anecdotally in
00:33:26.460
something like yelp reviews i mean it's just uh you know you want to kill 15 minutes go on yelp look at
00:33:33.240
restaurant reviews and you'll see a disproportionate number of them evaluate the restaurant by what
00:33:38.800
happened at the end of the meal they gave me a check and it was wrong and they were jerks about
00:33:43.120
it they gave me a free dessert woohoo you know oh i left my keys and they ran after me in the parking
00:33:48.440
lot to retrieve my keys i love this place so um so it's i think it's really important in our personal
00:33:54.320
encounters and in our professional encounters uh that we're conscious of endings and and and try to get
00:34:00.840
endings to end on a positive i mean not only on a positive note but in a way that that elevates
00:34:06.000
uh human beings prefer endings that elevate we prefer rising sequences to declining sequences
00:34:11.140
and being conscious and intentional about that can improve our interactions gotcha so we've been
00:34:16.200
talking a lot about uh timing on the individual level a little bit of group level but let's talk
00:34:20.980
more about uh you know timing of a group because that seems i don't know like you said we talked
00:34:26.000
about earlier people think about the how of group dynamics the what of group dynamics but we never
00:34:30.120
think about the win everyone's got their own timing or their perception of of how the timing of of an
00:34:36.600
activity or a task they're trying to accomplish as a group how uh how can we how do we sync each other
00:34:41.500
up whenever we're working on a task together yeah there are certain um there are certain kinds of
00:34:47.840
endeavors where we want to be synchronized with other people and i looked at that by looking at
00:34:53.740
uh some lunch deliverers in mumbai india by looking at choirs by looking at rowing teams
00:35:00.440
and and there are some rules to how groups synchronize one of them is is that groups synchronize better when
00:35:06.700
they have a very clear boss so if you look at something like choirs choirs have a you know a chorus
00:35:15.120
master who stands in the front who is the clearly the person who everybody looks to and is in charge
00:35:23.600
and that seems to have a foster greater synchronization if you look at rowing rowing teams have a coxswain
00:35:30.100
the person that person's not even holding an oar but he or she is an essential part of that team
00:35:35.100
because that person is in charge of synchronization so having a boss uh people end up synchronizing
00:35:41.440
better when they have a sense of belonging when they feel uh which is one reason why very effectively
00:35:47.180
synced teams groups have sometimes sort of secret language gestures uh there's some interesting
00:35:54.240
research on touch that one piece of research shows that if you simply watch nba that they simply watch
00:36:01.900
nba games at the beginning of the season looked at how many how often players were touching each other
00:36:08.620
high fives low fives chest bumps whatever that that ended up being a fairly strong predictor of
00:36:13.680
whether the team was going to succeed because those groups seem to be synced up and also um you know
00:36:18.640
having a sense of purpose and mission helps synchronization too so some really interesting
00:36:23.200
things about and i think that for me the interesting part about the synchronization research is how much
00:36:30.300
synchronizing with others makes us feel good and do good there is something about being in sync with
00:36:36.880
others that is different uh that is that brings us to a higher level of satisfaction that is
00:36:44.840
somehow innately human i love it yeah you talk i love the example you talk about and i'll let people
00:36:50.680
buy the book so they can read this but the navy seals and why they carry logs and the power of log
00:36:56.720
carrying did you have that there was that another that's a difference that's that but it's the same
00:37:00.020
principle it's the exact same it's the exact same principle i i did something a little bit more tender
00:37:03.900
when talking about talk about about choirs uh if you look at like everybody knows physical exercises
00:37:09.140
incredibly good for you for your body for your soul for your heart whatever like you're crazy if you
00:37:14.100
don't exercise choral singing if you look at the research on choral singing not just singing but
00:37:21.300
singing in groups singing in groups is pretty much as good for you as physical exercise that's
00:37:26.340
awesome so we should sing what's the next time you're at the baseball game and they're singing take me
00:37:29.820
out the ball game instead of rolling your eyes you should sing i always sing take me out to the
00:37:35.340
ball game it's sacrilegious it's sacrilegious not to exactly well daniel this has been a great
00:37:41.080
conversation there's a lot more we could talk about where can people go to learn more about the book
00:37:44.980
and uh your work well you can find the book uh it's called when the scientific secrets of perfect
00:37:49.240
timing at any bookstore online or offline i also have a website which is dan pink
00:37:53.820
d-a-n-p-i-n-k.com dan pink thank you so much for your time it's been a pleasure thanks for having
00:37:59.020
me i enjoyed it my guest today was daniel pink he is the author of the book when the scientific
00:38:03.300
secrets of perfect timing it's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere also check
00:38:07.640
out his site danpink.com where you can find more information about the rest of his work also check
00:38:12.220
out our show notes at aom.is slash when where you can find links to resources where you can delve deeper
00:38:17.020
into this topic well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast for more manly tips
00:38:26.840
and advice make sure to check out the art of manliness website at artofmanliness.com if you
00:38:30.440
enjoy the podcast i've gotten something out of it i'd appreciate if you take one minute to give us
00:38:33.940
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00:38:37.720
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00:38:41.680
around here as always thank you for your continued support and until next time this is brett mckay