The Art of Manliness - How to Use Leverage Points to Get Unstuck in Work and Life

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here. Welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. When people

00:00:12.160 get stuck in their job or personal life, the common response is to either work harder or

00:00:16.000 shrug and accept that that's just the way things are. My guest today has a much better

00:00:20.260 solution to getting moving and making progress again. Dan Heath is a bestselling author whose

00:00:24.860 latest book is Reset, How to Change What's Not Working. Today on the show, Dan shares

00:00:29.440 how to escape from ineffective systems in the inertia of continuing to do things the

00:00:32.960 way they've always been done by pressing on leverage points, places where a little bit

00:00:36.860 of effort yields disproportionate returns. Dan explains why you need to go and see the

00:00:41.400 work, why meaningful change requires restacking resources, how short, focused bursts of effort

00:00:46.760 often accomplish more than prolonged campaigns, how sometimes being inefficient can actually

00:00:51.040 make us more effective, and more. Along the way, Dan shares plenty of stories and examples

00:00:55.720 that illustrate how to implement these principles into your work, relationships, and

00:00:59.320 family. After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash leverage.

00:01:14.920 All right, Dan Heath, welcome back to the show.

00:01:18.420 Hey, thanks for having me back, Brett.

00:01:19.960 So last time we had you on, we were talking about your book, Upstream. This was right at

00:01:23.680 the start of the pandemic. You got a new book out called Reset, which is all about how to solve

00:01:29.000 problems that seem like are unsolvable. And you start out the book talking about how just

00:01:35.420 a regular old trip through a Chick-fil-A drive-thru inspired you, basically inspired you to write

00:01:42.200 this book. So what happened in that Chick-fil-A drive-thru?

00:01:45.560 Yeah, so let me take you back in time. It was pandemic era. I had been sent out to fetch

00:01:50.940 Chick-fil-A for the family. I've got two young girls, and they eat about eight different foods,

00:01:57.320 and one of them is Chick-fil-A. So I log a lot of visits there. But this particular night,

00:02:02.820 it was terrifying what I saw when I arrived, because it was probably the longest line I've

00:02:07.880 ever in my life seen at a drive-thru. I mean, a minimum of 50 cars, like spilling out onto the

00:02:12.520 feeder road that approached the franchise. And oh, I was just, my soul was crushed because I hate long

00:02:18.600 lines. And I started trying to make up lies to tell my wife or why I came back without nuggets and

00:02:24.360 eventually put on my big boy pants, got in line. And what happened next completely flipped

00:02:30.940 my mindset, because this line was just insanely operationally sophisticated. Like it just

00:02:38.540 crept along steadily, like one of those automatic car washes that you get pulled through.

00:02:45.280 And by the time I finished, which took less than 15 minutes, I was totally captivated. And I

00:02:51.640 resolved to go and investigate this drive-thru later. And a couple of days after that, I just,

00:02:58.280 I found that I couldn't stop thinking about this drive-thru because the core mystery was,

00:03:03.400 we have this idea that in the business world, when one person's better at something than somebody else,

00:03:09.900 like everybody else catches on and copies them and the advantage is eroded away, you know,

00:03:14.180 that's competitive markets. And meanwhile, Chick-fil-A is doing the same thing that a dozen or more

00:03:19.260 other national franchises are trying to do, but they consistently do it better for a long period

00:03:26.220 of time. And why? Like, what is it that they're so good at? And so that became kind of the founding

00:03:32.020 question of this book is, is how do you run things better? And then we can get back to Chick-fil-A

00:03:37.700 later and kind of geek out about the fast food. But as I got into the research and probably a year in,

00:03:43.700 when I realized it's not so much, how do you run things better? That was appealing to me. It was

00:03:49.000 more like, how do you get out of a bad equilibrium? Like if you're Arby's and you, you don't do,

00:03:56.940 you know, majestic clockworks of drive-thrus and you aspire to that, like, how could you,

00:04:03.300 how do you get out of a stuck place and start moving in a positive direction? And that's when

00:04:08.400 this book really took off. How is this book a continuation of your previous work in Upstream?

00:04:13.960 So Upstream was about how do we get ahead of problems? How do we prevent problems before

00:04:19.560 they happen? This book is more about, okay, you're in a mediocre place. It's not even an emergency.

00:04:25.800 It's just like, I don't like where I am. I aspire to more. How do I get out of that rut?

00:04:31.260 So, so they're different in framing, but I'll tell you one, one point that they have in common

00:04:36.340 is a focus on leverage points. Leverage points being, you know, places where a little bit of

00:04:42.780 effort yields a disproportionate return. And so in Upstream, we were looking for leverage points,

00:04:49.360 like where can you poke in a complex system to try to prevent problems? In this book,

00:04:55.340 leverage points is actually one of the most important concepts because it's to say, when you're stuck,

00:05:00.600 you can't change everything at once. You've got to kind of place your bets in wise places.

00:05:07.040 And so literally half the book is about where do you go looking to find these magical leverage

00:05:12.960 points where a little bit goes a long way. And we're going to talk about some of those

00:05:16.780 leverage points today, but kind of give us an idea of some of the problems that you encountered as

00:05:23.100 you're researching this book that people find themselves in or groups or organizations where it

00:05:28.920 seems like, man, this is, this is a big problem. We can't solve this. It's always been this way.

00:05:33.300 It'll always be this way. What are some examples?

00:05:37.660 The very first story is about the Northwestern Memorial Hospital receiving area. So this is

00:05:43.960 the part of the hospital that takes in all the packages coming into the hospital and gets them

00:05:49.000 to their ultimate destination. And several years ago, they were in a situation where it was taking

00:05:55.420 them an average of three days to get packages delivered within the hospital, which just blew

00:06:01.440 my mind, right? A medicine or some surgical gloves might get across the country, you know, via FedEx or

00:06:08.260 UPS or whatever. And then to get from like the basement of the hospital to the third floor might

00:06:14.320 take another three days. But, but here's what's interesting about this. This equilibrium had

00:06:20.600 persisted for so long. It's like there were a bunch of people in the receiving area had been working

00:06:24.860 there five, 10, 20, even 30 years. And that was just the norm. You know, they came to work, they worked

00:06:31.760 a hard day. None of these people were lazy. None of these people were ignorant. They came to work,

00:06:36.200 they did their job, they went home and it took three days. And so after a while, you just kind

00:06:40.860 of shrug your shoulders and say, well, that's just what it takes. And, and that's what I mean by

00:06:46.380 being stuck. There's a quote that has just stuck in my brain from this healthcare expert named Paul

00:06:52.160 Betaldin, who said, every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets. And I think

00:07:00.640 that is such a brilliant quote because it makes it obvious. Like if you're in this receiving area,

00:07:04.720 you're not going to solve this by working a little harder, you know, staying, you know, 20 minutes

00:07:11.040 later, you know, working more frantically during the day. Like this is a systemic problem. You have

00:07:16.420 unwittingly designed a system that delivers packages in three days. And if you aspire to different and

00:07:22.060 better results, you've got to start tinkering with the system. I'm sure everyone who's listening

00:07:27.240 to this can probably think of something like that at their own work, where it's like, man, this thing

00:07:30.580 is terrible, but we just kind of shrug our shoulders. That's the way it is. And when you

00:07:34.540 also talk about it, this doesn't just happen in businesses or in bureaucracies, it can actually,

00:07:40.240 this whole getting stuck can happen in a relationship, a marriage or a family.

00:07:45.300 Absolutely. And one of the examples I came across was from this couples therapist named Laura Heck.

00:07:51.380 And I think this is a great symbol of stuckness. Just imagine her situation. So every day she looks

00:07:57.560 at her calendar and it's full of meetings with couples who are at the lowest ebb in their

00:08:03.700 relationship. And there is so much that is out of your control as a therapist, right? I mean,

00:08:10.120 essentially everything is out of your control, the history of the relationship, their current

00:08:14.420 conflicts, you know, their own childhoods, not to mention the fact that you might only have

00:08:19.620 their attention for one hour out of, you know, the 168 hours every week. And so in a situation

00:08:26.520 like that, your only hope is to look for a leverage point, you know, some little thing

00:08:31.920 that can have disproportionately positive consequences. So Laura Heck gave me this

00:08:36.540 beautiful example of something that she says she does with her clients. She calls it sticky

00:08:41.580 note appreciations. And the idea is that in the bathroom, she knows you're going to brush 0.98

00:08:48.340 your teeth twice a day. And so you put a post-it notepad right by your toothbrush holder.

00:08:52.300 And while you're brushing your teeth, you jot out some kind of compliment for your partner,

00:08:58.620 just something quick. You write it out while you're brushing your teeth. You put it on the

00:09:02.480 mirror for your partner to find it. You know, so later they come in the bathroom to brush their

00:09:06.100 teeth and they see, thanks for taking the time to talk with John about college. You know, he really

00:09:12.520 admires you and appreciates your calmness or whatever. And so let's just think about this on a

00:09:18.720 couple of levels. So the first level is just who doesn't like to get a compliment in life, right?

00:09:23.120 So it's fun to come in the bathroom and see something nice about yourself on the mirror on a

00:09:28.300 post-it note. But Laura Heck told me that the real significance of this is actually broader. She said,

00:09:35.180 what I'm trying to train these couples to do is to see their partner in a new way. You know,

00:09:42.300 that by the time they come to me, they're so used to just seeing the negative, what they don't like,

00:09:48.380 what annoys them, what makes them angry. And I need them to take off those glasses and put on a new set

00:09:54.820 of glasses where you're scanning for the positive. And so, you know, that just blew my mind when I

00:10:00.920 heard it because I thought, what a brilliant way to use just a little bit of time, a little bit of

00:10:06.920 effort to do something that has importance beyond that effort. You know, because if you can rewire

00:10:12.760 the way you're seeing your partner, like maybe that's the first ray of hope that you can get

00:10:19.120 your relationship back to the way it was. Right. It was a leverage point, right? Precisely.

00:10:23.920 Little effort, but huge ROI. Let's talk about some more of these leverage points that you discovered

00:10:29.380 in the research of this book and helping people in groups get unstuck. One of them, the first one you

00:10:35.200 talk about is the leverage point of go and see the work. What do you mean by that? Because I think a

00:10:40.360 lot of people, if they're in a system that's stuck, they think, well, of course I know how the thing

00:10:43.800 works. I'm in it every day. Why do I need to go and see the work? So this is a phrase, go and see the

00:10:49.820 work that I took from Nelson Repenning. He's an MIT professor. And the idea is a lot of times we are

00:10:58.260 dealing with our work at some kind of remove. Like if you're a leader, you know, maybe you're managing by

00:11:03.940 state financial statements or reports or memos. If you're a principal, you might, you know, stay in

00:11:10.220 your home office and, and, and over time we can kind of lose touch with the ground reality of our

00:11:16.960 work. So I'll give you an example from Repenning and some colleagues. They told the story of this

00:11:21.600 corrugated box factory and the owner of the factory was concerned because paper losses had been higher

00:11:29.980 during production than competitors in the industry, which of course costed him money. And so he,

00:11:35.640 inspired by Repenning's, you know, imperative to go and see the work, he goes out and he just starts

00:11:40.260 walking the halls in the factory and kind of following through production. He notices that

00:11:45.060 they have a main corrugator machine, sort of like the most expensive piece of capital equipment in the

00:11:51.280 factory that was stopped every day around lunchtime. And he was puzzled by that because the startup time and

00:11:59.220 the wind down time ended up wasting some paper. And so he started asking some questions. It turns

00:12:04.880 out the history was years prior, there had been some instability in the power provided by the local

00:12:11.580 utility. And so the manager at that time had kind of wisely started preemptively unplugging the

00:12:18.500 corrugator machine at lunchtime, which was seemingly the time with the most unstable power. And the idea

00:12:24.240 was we're going to preserve the lifespan of the machine because it's not good for the machine to have

00:12:27.820 this weird erratic power. Well, in the years since, the utility had long since fixed this problem,

00:12:34.640 but it had become entrenched as a habit in the factory. Like people had long since forgotten the

00:12:40.700 original intent of this. And it just became one of a hundred things that you have to do every day at

00:12:45.760 the factory. You know, it's like you unlock the doors, you come in, you flip on the lights. And at

00:12:49.780 lunchtime, you shut down the corrugator machine. And that's an example of the kind of thing that you see

00:12:55.100 when you go and see the work. And repenting, he says, you know, you might hear a story like that

00:12:59.880 and think, well, you know, that's just dumb. Of course, if you are doing dumb stuff, you can find 0.99

00:13:05.080 it and stamp it out. But his quote stuck with me. He said, if you aren't embarrassed by what you find 0.98

00:13:10.320 when you go and see the work, you probably aren't looking closely enough. Like all of us probably have

00:13:14.980 some equivalent to that corrugator machine story in our work or in our life.

00:13:20.580 Yeah. Yeah. So go and see the work. So if you're, you have a problem, you're like,

00:13:23.900 what is going on here? Like, why is this even a problem? Going back to the idea, you know,

00:13:28.460 the results we get are due to the system that we have. You have to actually go and see, okay,

00:13:34.500 what is causing? Like there's something in this, the way things are organized currently,

00:13:38.300 that's spitting out this system that it might not be obvious. But if I get down there on the front

00:13:42.840 lines and talk to people who are on the front lines, I can actually figure out, oh, this is why

00:13:48.760 they're doing it this way. Maybe if we make this small change, we can, we can solve the problem.

00:13:52.440 So that's right. I think this is a principle that really is most valuable when there's some

00:13:57.700 distance between you and the, the, the actual work product. Like in a relationship, it really

00:14:02.800 doesn't make sense. Like how do I go and see the work with my wife? Like we're in a relationship,

00:14:06.640 we're in it. But in the factory, you know, it's easy to be the boss and stay in your boss's office

00:14:11.820 the whole day and kind of, you know, lose track of what's going on on the factory floor. Or another

00:14:17.180 example that I gave was from a vice principal who decided to shadow a ninth grader all day,

00:14:24.140 you know, from when the ninth grader arrived at school to PE, like ate lunch with him in the

00:14:29.100 cafeteria, did the assignments that he was doing, sitting beside him in math class. And that's

00:14:34.760 something that's uncommon, right? I mean, you might think, well, how could a vice principal not

00:14:39.260 know what's going on at school? But that's not quite fair, right? Because the stuff that gets to a

00:14:43.740 vice principal's desk is plenty to fill up their day. It's discipline issues, it's administrative

00:14:48.760 issues, it's teacher evaluations. And you could go years easily without ever, you know, sitting next

00:14:55.960 to a student in class. Like it took an unnatural act to make that possible. But that one day of just

00:15:02.600 shadowing the student kind of unlocked all these ideas and inspirations for action.

00:15:07.500 Well, going back to relationships, that's one of the roles a therapist can play. You can add that 0.98

00:15:10.840 distance, right? Maybe the therapist in interacting with the couple can say, oh my gosh, you guys are

00:15:17.260 doing this, you might not even know it. So if you want to see the work with your relationship, maybe

00:15:21.620 go to a counselor or a therapist. Yeah, that's interesting, actually, that to sort of go and

00:15:27.160 see the work, you have to bring in someone else to see it because it's almost like you've lost

00:15:30.980 perspective from the inside. Yeah. Another leverage point is consider the goal of the goal. What do you

00:15:37.140 mean by that? So we're so used to setting goals in organizations. I mean, goals are sort of like

00:15:43.500 the language of organizations, that goals can actually take on a life of their own. And we can

00:15:50.620 think we're succeeding, even though we're actually failing. Like, let me give you an example. I met this

00:15:56.540 guy named Ryan Davidson, who told me about his experience buying a truck. He bought a Ram truck,

00:16:01.600 he'd been saving up for it. So he buys the truck. He decides to take the truck camping its first

00:16:07.820 weekend away. And sort of a couple of days after he buys this truck, the survey shakedown begins

00:16:14.040 where people from the dealership just start hounding him to fill out a survey. Probably we've all had

00:16:19.500 this experience in some domain or another. And not only are they trying to get him to fill out the

00:16:23.820 survey, they're kind of like pestering to give them really good scores. Like, we would really

00:16:27.740 appreciate your positive scores, underline bolded, on the survey. And so, you know, probably five

00:16:34.940 different people from the dealership reach out to him multiple times over a period of two weeks in

00:16:40.440 multiple media on the phone, via text message, via email. And so Ryan Davidson eventually realizes,

00:16:47.500 like, I'm never going to be able to live a normal life until I fill out this survey. And so he takes

00:16:53.920 the time, fills it out. And he says he gives them pretty much an A- level rating. Like, he was

00:16:59.600 generally okay with the experience, but thought that some things could have been better. And he

00:17:05.140 sends off the survey and clicks submit. Never hears from anyone again about the survey. After all the

00:17:12.380 pestering, just the line goes dead, except that his sales rep starts texting him complaining about not

00:17:18.120 having been given all 10 out of 10s on the survey. And so it's just kind of this silly charade that's

00:17:25.940 taking place that, if you think about it, probably had a really good origin. Like, at some point,

00:17:33.740 some of the leaders at RAM thought, hey, we would like our customers when they buy trucks from us to

00:17:40.600 have a good experience. Like, so far, so good. Okay, well, how are we going to know if we're succeeding at

00:17:45.760 that? Well, let's give a survey. After people buy a car, let's ask them some questions and see how

00:17:50.340 they respond. Okay, that's even better. Now we have what we have diagnosing, like, whether we're

00:17:55.480 succeeding or not. Okay, so you start collecting the survey. Well, then you start to get uncomfortable

00:18:00.080 because some of your dealerships aren't getting very good scores. And so you think, well, gosh,

00:18:04.180 we've got to boost those scores. And so it becomes a goal to boost the scores. You start layering on

00:18:09.400 incentives and potential punishments if the scores don't improve. And all of a sudden,

00:18:15.140 the survey, which was supposed to be a diagnostic, becomes its own target. In other words,

00:18:22.260 my contention is the people at this dealership that Davidson went to actually didn't care at all

00:18:28.160 what the experience was like. All that they cared about was that he bubbled in tens on this survey

00:18:34.640 that they sent. That was what they cared about because that was what their incentives were yoked to.

00:18:40.320 And so it becomes like this kind of perversion. And that's what I mean by the goal of the goal

00:18:45.220 is we can't be content in setting and chasing goals. We have to ask, what's the goal of the goal?

00:18:53.440 Like in this dealership example, why is it important that we get good scores on these customer

00:19:00.580 surveys? Well, because we actually care ultimately about whether people had a good experience with us,

00:19:05.780 would tell their friends, would come back and so forth. I think this can happen in groups like

00:19:11.240 churches. You see like a church, maybe they want to start a program of some sort for fellowship or

00:19:16.400 spiritual formation, but then the program becomes the focus and there's all this, it becomes a

00:19:22.100 problem. It's not implemented the right way. No one's coming to the thing. There's resentment that

00:19:26.480 builds up because people aren't doing what they're supposed to do. And then you have to step back.

00:19:30.820 I was like, wait, why are we doing this thing anyways? Like the original goal was maybe some

00:19:35.040 fellowship and rich people's lives. But here we are talking about just dumb stuff for this dumb 0.99

00:19:41.540 program. And so asking yourself, it's actually a Richard Rohr. He's a monk. It's a father, Richard 0.99

00:19:48.100 Rohr. He has this phrase. He says to ask yourself, what are we really doing when we are doing what we

00:19:54.620 are doing? Ooh, that's good. Yeah. Yeah. That's a very, very goal of the goal friendly. Yeah. I think

00:20:00.740 remembering or thinking about the goal of the goal can also keep you from a goal lock, right? So you

00:20:06.420 might figure out a better way to achieve your original aim doing something else, right? So for

00:20:12.620 example, let's say you're trying to make friends, but you're finding that hosting dinner parties, it

00:20:17.620 just stresses you out. All right, that's fine. Maybe you could just have people over for dessert and

00:20:22.140 games instead. There's more than one way to skin a cat when you're achieving your goals. Another leverage

00:20:28.020 point is to focus on what's working in a system or organization to find a leverage point. What does

00:20:33.980 that look like? This is the notion of studying bright spots, which I think is a really powerful

00:20:39.520 idea. It's actually an idea that my brother Chip and I wrote about in a previous book called Switch,

00:20:44.200 and it's kind of getting its second wind in this book. So the idea is very simple. It's to say,

00:20:50.180 so often in life, our attention is grabbed by what's not working. And if you think about employee

00:20:57.400 engagement, for instance, it's something a lot of businesses and organizations are thinking about,

00:21:01.440 how do you keep your employees happy? How do you keep them around? And so you imagine you get a

00:21:06.740 survey back, a pulse survey from your employees. And of course, every survey ever commissioned has

00:21:11.980 different results. Some people are unhappy, some people are in the middle, some people are happy.

00:21:17.000 And your attention immediately gravitates towards the employees who are unhappy.

00:21:20.980 And what studying bright spots says is, why don't you spend some time trying to understand the other

00:21:28.480 side of the spectrum? You know, for the employees who are really psyched to come to work every day,

00:21:34.320 why? What are they so jazzed about? What's keeping them happy? What's giving them a sense of purpose?

00:21:39.300 Because if you can understand that, it gives you the hope of reproducing that for everyone. You know,

00:21:45.600 could you boost everybody's engagement by harvesting and kind of replicating the factors that are making

00:21:51.100 your most satisfied employees that way? And that's the spirit of studying bright spots is sometimes we

00:21:56.640 can find leverage points by just understanding at a deeper level, the things that we're already doing

00:22:03.040 that we're succeeding at.

00:22:05.460 I was thinking about how you apply this to our family life. You know, my kids, like a lot of siblings,

00:22:10.000 they bicker a lot and it's annoying. She's always like, yeah, just leave your sister alone, 1.00

00:22:13.620 leave your brother. But every now and then they have moments where they don't. It's just awesome.

00:22:18.700 It's almost like a Norman Rockwell painting. It's like, wow, this is great. So I think finding the

00:22:23.000 bright spots would be like, okay, what's going on when they're just like super kind and nice to each

00:22:29.040 other and not bickering? Like what happened and how can we get more of that?

00:22:32.800 That is exactly the spirit. And in fact, this is actually kind of a methodology used in a branch of

00:22:38.860 therapy called solutions focused therapy. You know, in traditional therapy, it's very, very

00:22:44.080 problem driven. Like let's get to the source of the problem, the root and in solutions focused

00:22:49.440 therapy, they basically don't care about the problems. They want you to solve them, but they

00:22:53.600 don't want to kind of wallow in them. And so in the book, I shared this case from a therapist named

00:22:58.720 John J. Murphy's like a giant in the field. And he tells the story of this woman who comes,

00:23:03.980 she's been having a lot of behavioral issues with her daughter and she's been diagnosed with ADHD.

00:23:09.880 And there's just a lot of tension. They're reluctant to put her on medication. And so they

00:23:15.600 end up talking about the morning, which seems to be like the crux of where things really can boil

00:23:20.420 over sometimes. And this mother said, you know, sometimes I end up yelling and I feel terrible

00:23:24.380 about myself. And, you know, when I act out, it makes her act out. And so they start thinking about

00:23:30.760 the bright spots. And so Murphy, the counselor is like, well, when does this not happen? And the

00:23:36.360 mom starts thinking and she says, you know, sometimes when, when I have a little more time

00:23:42.320 in the morning, you know, and I could just have a cup of coffee and be in my own brain, it's like,

00:23:47.860 it kind of steals me in a way where, where I can absorb more and I don't immediately react. And then

00:23:54.300 when I don't react, my daughter doesn't react. And so it's, it's almost becomes this,

00:23:58.320 this kind of self-reinforcing positive system. And so Murphy kind of praised her. He said, well,

00:24:04.180 you know, despite all the things that are going on, despite all the stresses in your life, like

00:24:07.560 you've already figured out a way to manage this well. Like, do you think we could figure out a way

00:24:13.000 to replicate your own success? And so the woman kind of thinks about it. She realizes, hey,

00:24:19.840 you know, I, the days when I wake up earlier, the days when I don't stay up late with my husband,

00:24:24.880 and maybe I don't have too many drinks. And so she, she goes home after one therapy session,

00:24:30.060 it's like, she kind of cracks the system where she just gets up 15 or 20 minutes early, has a

00:24:34.840 little bit of, of me time and that prepares her for the day. And I just love stories like that because

00:24:40.500 it's, it's like the seeds of success were already there in her life. And it just took someone to kind

00:24:46.660 of point them out and say, even if you're failing sometimes, even if you're failing a lot of the time,

00:24:52.320 you're not always failing, you're succeeding sometimes. And, and, and what explains your

00:24:57.540 success? And can you do more of it? We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.

00:25:04.480 And now back to the show. Well, I want to talk about Chick-fil-A because like you, I'm always

00:25:09.020 impressed every time I go through the drive-through because it's just so efficient and use Chick-fil-A to

00:25:13.680 talk about the leverage point of constraints. Tell us about that. So constraints are the things

00:25:21.900 that are holding you back, the bottlenecks, the limiting factors. And so when we're looking for

00:25:26.760 leverage points, you know, we want to find somewhere where a little bit of work goes a long

00:25:30.300 way. Looking at a constraint can be really enlightening because if you can kind of whittle

00:25:34.600 down the number one thing that's holding you back, that can be magical. And to me, the Chick-fil-A

00:25:40.020 drive-through is a kind of brilliant example of this because the guy that ran the drive-through I

00:25:44.760 talked about earlier, a guy named Tony Fernandez is just a genius at managing constraints. This drive-through

00:25:50.960 I'm talking about can process 400 cars in an hour. I mean, that's a car every nine seconds,

00:25:58.280 which is just like Olympic level fast food drive-through. And he thinks very explicitly

00:26:04.320 about the constraints. He says, you know, one of the first things we realized was that the menu

00:26:10.480 board, you know, the thing where you drive up and you look at the menu is often a constraint. And,

00:26:15.340 you know, virtually all fast food places have one menu board and some of the busy ones have two

00:26:19.940 with two lanes. He said, we just thought, why do we need a menu board? I mean, Chick-fil-A menu,

00:26:26.420 it's like there's nuggets and fries. Like how, how hard is it? And, and so they just literally

00:26:32.160 eliminated the menu board and they pushed employees into the parking lot with iPads to take your order

00:26:38.180 at your window. And the beautiful thing about that is where before you were constrained with one path

00:26:44.360 to ordering or maybe two with the two menu board system. Now they can have five people in the parking

00:26:50.360 lot at the same time. And when they're not busy, they can scale it back to one person in the parking

00:26:55.920 lot. And so now you have eliminated the constraint of the ordering, but, but notice, and this is an

00:27:02.660 important theme is you always have a constraint. It's not like you just fix it and poof, it's gone.

00:27:08.220 No. What happens is when you eliminate one constraint, you've made the system better and the

00:27:13.460 constraint hops somewhere else. So if you've got five people taking orders on iPads in the parking

00:27:19.640 lot, like orders are flooding into the kitchen and then these poor people have to cook up, you know, 1.00

00:27:25.580 massive batches of nuggets and fries. And so now the kitchen's the bottleneck. And so you have to,

00:27:31.000 you know, staff up in the kitchen and create better systems so they can keep up. Well, once they're on

00:27:35.720 par, then maybe the bottleneck pops to what they call meal assembly, which is the people that bag

00:27:40.680 and box and pour your drinks and forth. And so he just had a very disciplined approach to this fast

00:27:47.200 food flow problem, which is to just chase one constraint at a time. And each time he eliminated

00:27:54.800 one constraint, the system improved and then it hopped to the next. And then he did it again and again and

00:28:00.280 again. So those are some leverage points. There's other ones you talk about in the book after leverage

00:28:05.120 points. You recommend people start doing what's called restacking resources. What do you mean by

00:28:10.140 that? Restacking resources just says leverage points is kind of about where do you aim? Like

00:28:16.140 we're trying to get unstuck. I'm saying you can't fix everything at once. You got to aim. You got to

00:28:20.580 find a place where a little bit goes a long way. Okay. Now that you've done that, you've got to find

00:28:25.160 some fuel. Like you've got to have a way to push on the leverage point. And so for that, you need

00:28:30.600 resources. That's what I mean by restacking resources. Like a lot of times, especially

00:28:35.620 in organizations, when people start talking about change, it's like one more thing to add to the

00:28:42.660 pile. It's like, we're going to do everything we did yesterday and this new thing that the boss is

00:28:47.300 excited about. But one of the themes in the book is that change is not about and, it's instead of.

00:28:55.260 So it's like, if something has become a priority, if we want to push toward that new priority, we've

00:29:01.860 got to give somewhere else. I mean, we're constrained to what we have probably. There's not just like

00:29:07.240 giant satchels of free cash in the supply cabinet that we can tap or, you know, there's not an army

00:29:12.260 of idle employees that we can bring to bear. We've got to figure out how to reconfigure what we have to

00:29:18.180 push in that new direction. That's what I mean by restack resources. Gotcha. And the first way you

00:29:23.080 recommend people restack resources to start improving things is to begin your action plan

00:29:29.140 or maybe the action plan on leveraging that leverage point with a burst. And you mentioned

00:29:34.560 earlier, a lot of people, when they have a problem, one of their first instincts is just to work

00:29:39.800 harder. If we just work harder, we'll solve it. How is doing a burst, which you describe as a

00:29:45.260 focused output of energy, different from the standard way of working hard?

00:29:50.280 That's a great question. So I think the notion of a burst is not necessarily work harder. It's like

00:29:57.600 work denser. Like what I mean is, if you've got some new priority, if you can work on it for 30

00:30:05.720 focused hours on that priority in one week, my contention is that's probably going to be the

00:30:12.640 equivalent of 100 hours that you scattered and fragmented across six months. So it's like you

00:30:20.720 want to push hard in a concentrated way, in a collaborative way, all at once, maybe leaving

00:30:26.360 other things on the wayside to focus on the new priority. It's almost like if you've ever pushed

00:30:32.120 up a stuck window, like the amount of effort to get the window moving at all, it's pretty dramatic.

00:30:37.740 And then once it starts moving, it becomes a lot easier to keep it moving. That's the idea of the

00:30:43.320 burst. And one thing it does too, there's a psychological impact, right? You actually start

00:30:48.860 seeing some progress. You're like, oh, maybe this problem is actually solvable. So that initial burst

00:30:54.100 creates sort of like a flywheel of motivation. Well said. And it reminds me, I met this guy,

00:31:01.420 Greg McLaughlin, who talked about how sometimes actually being inefficient can make us more

00:31:08.380 effective. Like he gave an example of, he was working on a gardening project for his wife. I

00:31:15.060 think I shouldn't call it a project. They were just trying to like add some irrigation to their

00:31:19.660 family garden or whatever. And he was put in charge of the run to Home Depot. And he had this great line.

00:31:26.060 And he said, the immutable law of the universe is that no project can ever be completed with one

00:31:31.620 trip to Home Depot. It's like, even if you go in search of one 60 watt light bulb, when you get

00:31:38.420 home, inevitably you discover, oh, actually it was supposed to be a 59 watt light bulb. And you have

00:31:42.460 to go back. And so this, this proves true for him. He has, he ends up with like the wrong splitter part

00:31:47.840 for the irrigation system or whatever. And he's an attorney. And so he said, you know, in his mind,

00:31:53.920 the efficient thing to do would be wait for the next trip to Home Depot, which would be, you know,

00:31:59.980 in a week or a couple of weeks or whatever, and just add it to the list rather than make a special

00:32:05.080 trip for this $5 part. And he was thinking in his mind, you know, it's going to cost me $200 in

00:32:10.460 billable hours and $6 in gas to go get this $5 part. Like that's crazy. But then he said, it's not crazy

00:32:17.060 because the definition of success to his wife is I can water the plants, right? And, and it doesn't 1.00

00:32:24.140 matter that we're 90% there absent one part, a hundred percent is what matters. And so he got

00:32:29.540 right back in his car, went to Home Depot, got the part and worked to completion. And he said,

00:32:35.080 it may have been inefficient, but it was effective. And he said, it made him realize that he was doing

00:32:40.760 some similar things in his law firm where, you know, in the guise of efficiency, maybe he would get

00:32:45.840 a bunch of documents to 90%, but 90% doesn't mean anything. Like you haven't solved problems for

00:32:52.040 clients. You haven't been able to bill for it because it's not done. And so he started trying

00:32:56.220 to kind of reconceptualize his work with effectiveness as the goal instead of efficiency.

00:33:02.620 And that's your point about how this burst of effort can get us to completion. You know, it's like

00:33:08.520 you want the burst to get the irrigation system done. And it doesn't matter whether it was efficient

00:33:13.760 or not. What matters is, can you water the plants? Yeah. And in this chapter, you talk about scrum

00:33:19.880 and scrum, they use sprints, which is basically a burst. And what you're doing with these bursts

00:33:25.340 or these sprints is like, you're not working hard all the time. You do some planning and then you

00:33:29.960 schedule an intense amount of activity. It's dense. Then you take another break, recalibrate,

00:33:36.380 see what needs to be done. And then you start up again. So you have a clear goal, which you're trying

00:33:39.660 to achieve. And then you work hard for a few hours and then you're done. That's it.

00:33:45.040 And it's an antidote to, you know, anybody who works in a large organization knows this problem of

00:33:51.320 just how mind numbing it can be to get something changed because you're working through

00:33:57.180 meetings and then to align calendars, you can't meet until two weeks from now. And then you start

00:34:02.000 an email chain and the email chain starts to spiral outward with more and more people on it. And then,

00:34:06.600 you know, it's like something that you all could have resolved if you'd been in the same room and

00:34:10.940 just put your heads together and done the work, not talked about it, but done the work

00:34:14.980 for eight hours in the same room. Like all of a sudden it can take six months just because of,

00:34:20.100 you know, asynchronous delays and so forth. And so I think that's the power of a burst is

00:34:25.300 it may be unnatural to try to clear your calendars and kind of get in the same room to work on the

00:34:31.580 same problem, but boy, does it pay off down the road.

00:34:34.040 Another way to restack resources is to recycle waste. And I think a lot of people understand

00:34:39.460 what waste is in a factory setting. So you gave that example of the box factory, they had a lot

00:34:43.620 of waste there. So if you have a lot of leftover material making a widget, that's waste. But let's

00:34:49.500 talk about how does waste appear in organizations not creating widgets or even in families? What does

00:34:55.420 that look like?

00:34:56.040 So I want to share the kind of operational definition of waste I'm using in the book,

00:35:01.460 which is taken from this guy named Taiichi Ono, who was one of the godfathers of the Toyota

00:35:06.420 production system. So if you've ever intersected with like people obsessed about operations,

00:35:11.920 they all talk about the Toyota production system.

00:35:13.960 Six Sigma, Black Belt. 1.00

00:35:14.960 Six Sigma, yeah, exactly. So the definition, waste is any activity that doesn't add value for the customer,

00:35:21.800 which I think is a really interesting thing to try to wrap your brain around. Like that receiving

00:35:27.340 area we've talked about a couple of times. Like here's a classic example. So, you know, nurses

00:35:32.120 in the hospital would get frustrated. You know, they ordered some medicine, hasn't shown up. They

00:35:37.080 would call the receiving area and there was a red phone in the receiving area. Somebody would have

00:35:40.660 to pick up, deal with the nurse's complaint. They'd have to go rushing around, looking for the box,

00:35:45.120 seeing if they had it. When was it going to be delivered? And so every one of those answered

00:35:51.560 calls to the red phone is waste. Even if the person handling the inquiry did it politely,

00:35:59.480 even if they did it efficiently, it was waste because the nurse never wanted to have to call

00:36:04.220 to check on the package, right? It was, it did not add value for the customer. And when you start to

00:36:09.840 think about it that way, you realize if you can change the way you work every time the nurse doesn't

00:36:15.700 have to call, that puts 15 minutes back in your pocket of, of the time you spent kind of noodling

00:36:22.000 around looking for the package. So anyway, I kind of got into the waste literature and yes, there is

00:36:27.980 such a thing. And it made me start thinking about family life. And, you know, I mentioned my, my girls.

00:36:34.860 And so every morning getting ready for school is like a thing. It's just like a, a mother load of waste,

00:36:40.660 all the things that we do and the pestering. And, and one kind of recurring source of pain was just

00:36:46.660 shoes and socks. Like you'd be able to find one shoe. Where's the other shoe? Oh, you know, it's by

00:36:52.220 the front door and okay, we got the shoes, but now we're socks. You got to go back upstairs and get

00:36:56.520 the socks. And so my wife has this kind of stroke of genius. We have this giant drawer by the back door 1.00

00:37:02.940 where we go out to walk to school. And she just piled all of their shoes, every pair and all of their

00:37:08.980 socks into this drawer. And so that's where they live and they never get beyond that room. So number

00:37:14.840 one, we always know where they are. And number two, it had these kind of unanticipated benefits of,

00:37:20.280 well, now they take their shoes and socks off by the back door. And so they don't track dirt through

00:37:23.740 the house. And, and I just had to smile at how, you know, with this kind of one idea, we've eliminated

00:37:30.520 this whole source of nagging and fussing and rushing around the house. And now we can use our time,

00:37:36.400 like arguing about whether you can eat the brown spot on the waffle or not. So it's, it's, it's been

00:37:42.160 a real breakthrough for us. Right. Your wife's got a Six Sigma black belt in home management. 1.00

00:37:46.400 Exactly. Exactly. I love it. By the way, I was remembering last time we talked,

00:37:50.660 you had a great like personal burst thing of the reset day. Oh, the reset. Yeah, that is, that's right.

00:37:57.100 Yeah. If you haven't talked about that in a while, you should share that with your listeners. Cause

00:37:59.840 that's a really, really good example. Yeah. We wrote an article about that and I'll, I'll put it in the

00:38:03.880 show notes. So a reset day is, it's basically a day we set aside where we're not working.

00:38:09.700 The kids are at school. So, you know, they're not in our business and my wife and I will just get done

00:38:15.600 all the life admin that's been piling up. So paying bills, you know, doing retirement stuff or estate

00:38:23.380 planning, planning vacations, all that stuff that just kind of gets pushed back and back. So we'll just

00:38:29.420 dedicate a day and get all of it done. And then it feels great to be done with it.

00:38:34.340 That's so good. I had a reader that talked about using a life crap month. I think yours is even

00:38:42.280 better cause it's more like punchy and focused, but it was exactly the kind of stuff you're talking

00:38:46.840 about. It's like updating the wills and making sure the address on your life insurance policy is

00:38:52.280 updated and all the stuff that's just like pulling teeth day to day. And they said, you know,

00:38:57.800 by the end of the month, it's just like, they felt like they were on cloud nine. They just felt

00:39:01.660 like such effective adults having checked all these boxes that have gone unchecked for so long.

00:39:07.460 Yeah, no, I highly recommend it. Another thing you talk about is if you have a problem that seems

00:39:13.020 intractable, look for ways you can do less, but you also have to do more at the same time. What do you

00:39:19.700 mean by that?

00:39:20.760 So this is back to the idea that change is not and it's instead of, and I had this, this very

00:39:26.620 provocative conversation with this guy who's a consultant. His name is David Philippi for the

00:39:31.200 consultancy Strategics and they're kind of obsessed with the Pareto principle, you know, the 80-20 rule,

00:39:38.020 80% of your revenue might come from 20% of your customers. But one of the methodologies they use

00:39:44.480 really stuck with me. So here's, here's what they do. They go into a client's, you know, financials

00:39:50.460 and they try to isolate each client and figure out how profitable they were by client, which

00:39:57.760 would seem obvious. I mean, you would like to know how profitable your different clients

00:40:01.300 are, but it's no trivial thing because even if you know, like, well, I sent this many

00:40:06.500 parts to this client and the parts cost this much, but you also have to balance in things

00:40:10.180 like how much relationship time does this client eat up? Like, are they, are they a needy

00:40:15.960 client? Are they an easy client? Do they eat up a lot of support time? And so you kind

00:40:20.220 of go through the ledger, try to come up with profitability by client, and then they force

00:40:24.700 rank the clients from best to worst in terms of profitability. And Philippi said that in

00:40:30.340 virtually every case when they've done this, what they find is that your very best clients

00:40:36.220 are undercoddled and your worst clients are overcoddled. Like here's an example of what he

00:40:42.960 meant by that. He said, repeatedly, they have found that the on-time delivery record. So

00:40:49.520 he works with a lot of manufacturers that are like shipping stuff out. The on-time delivery

00:40:53.940 record was better for the worst clients than it was for the best. And that just seems like

00:41:01.180 impossible. How could you ever treat your best clients that way? But he said, what happens

00:41:04.800 is a lot of times the worst clients are the ones that are buying like little nickel and

00:41:09.320 dime stuff. Maybe it's just one part that you have to stick in a box and ship out. And

00:41:13.500 so it's easy, it's quick. And if your shipping department is incentivized, for instance, on

00:41:19.580 percentage of on-time deliveries, well, you can just nail those like simple ones, boom,

00:41:25.420 boom, boom, boom, boom, and look like a genius. You've got a 96% on-time rate. But meanwhile,

00:41:31.520 the 4% might've been like your very best customers who had complicated assemblies that took some time

00:41:37.320 and took some planning. And so he kind of flips the lens and says, look, your best clients need

00:41:42.680 to have a perfect on-time rate every time, no matter what it means for the rest of the folks.

00:41:49.240 So all that's been about profitability so far. But let me kind of flip the script here.

00:41:54.480 Imagine that same idea applied to almost anything in your life. It might be how you're spending your

00:42:00.560 time across projects. It might be relationships. Like think about all the relationships you have in your

00:42:07.080 life. And imagine that you kind of ranked them according to the value and preciousness that

00:42:13.680 they have for you. And so obviously, probably your family's at the very top of the list. And then

00:42:18.680 if you zoom all the way to the bottom, it's going to be maybe old friendships that have grown

00:42:25.340 increasingly toxic or commitments that you made to some volunteer organization that just kind of

00:42:32.220 gone sideways and feels like a waste of time or whatever. But we all have a ranking. We all have

00:42:37.500 people who are more and less precious to us. And if you take this kind of logic and you think,

00:42:43.340 aren't I probably undercoddling the people most precious to me with all this time and energy I'm

00:42:49.900 expending on the people at the bottom of the ranking? And wouldn't it be smarter to kind of steal from

00:42:55.540 the overcoddled people at the bottom to give me more wherewithal, more availability to the people

00:43:02.380 I care most about? What was really seductive about that logic to me is, just to remind listeners where

00:43:09.440 we are, we're thinking about when you're trying to push in a new direction, where do you get the fuel

00:43:13.620 to push? And if you think about this kind of overcoddled, undercoddled logic, you realize

00:43:18.860 that's where you get the resources is you steal from the overcoddled and give to the undercoddled,

00:43:26.060 if that makes sense. That makes perfect sense. So if someone's feeling overwhelmed in their life,

00:43:30.780 it's usually because they have too many commitments. I think, yeah, ranking things can be really useful

00:43:35.980 and then focus more time. So you're going to do less with the people that aren't as important to you.

00:43:40.960 So you can do more with the people that are important to you or do... That's it. Yeah, I love that.

00:43:45.480 Exactly. A lot of times when organizations or groups get stuck, the typical approach to solve

00:43:51.120 the problem is there'll be like a sort of top-down, command and control type dictating. So there's

00:43:56.620 a manager that says, oh, here's the problem. And then they tell individual employees, here's what

00:44:01.280 you're going to do to solve the problem. But you argue that handing things off directly to

00:44:05.540 individuals in the group and just letting them come up with solutions can actually speed up

00:44:10.040 solutions to the problem. How so? This is a concept that I call let people drive. And the

00:44:15.420 idea is if you're looking for fuel to push in a new direction, one of the best sources of fuel is

00:44:20.340 motivation. And one of the most evergreen sources of motivation is autonomy, like letting people

00:44:27.300 drive, giving people some reins to act. I mean, there's basically no high-performing team in the

00:44:33.780 world that is micromanaged. Navy SEALs, Green Berets, not micromanaged. You've got to loosen the reins.

00:44:43.120 But this can be counterintuitive in organizations because when things aren't going well, a lot of

00:44:48.720 times our instinct, as you said, is to kind of clamp down. I took inspiration from, there's a great

00:44:55.160 video. You can find this on YouTube. It's from a consultant named Henrik Nieberg. And he talks about

00:45:01.520 how Spotify organizes itself. And he distinguishes autonomy from alignment. And he said, you might start

00:45:09.380 by thinking that these are kind of opposite ideas. Like, autonomy is like, I can do what I want. And

00:45:15.620 alignment means I'm doing what everybody else is doing. But he says, at Spotify, they're not in

00:45:20.840 opposition. Like, if you think about a two-by-two matrix, low autonomy and low alignment is the bad

00:45:27.880 one, right? That's like, it's an ineffective culture. It's like a call center, right? Everybody's

00:45:33.800 on their own. They're not really collaborating, but they're also being heavily micromanaged.

00:45:39.120 Where we really want to be is in the high autonomy, high alignment square of the two-by-two,

00:45:45.720 which means we know what the vision is. Like Nieberg in his video says, you know, management

00:45:51.780 says, we need a way to get across the river. Like, that's the strategic priority. Figure it out. That's

00:45:57.660 the autonomy piece. So, we're aligned on vision, but we trust our employees to figure out the

00:46:03.180 methodology. And I think that's a really enlightened way to look at it. You know, autonomy doesn't mean

00:46:09.680 like everybody just gets to do what they want willy-nilly. Autonomy means we trust people

00:46:14.760 enough to kind of let them figure things out. Yeah. So, it's about giving people maybe some

00:46:20.060 guardrails. Like, here, you know, here's what we don't want you to do. Like, we definitely don't want

00:46:25.220 you doing this. But anything within those guardrails is free game. You can do it if it gets

00:46:30.320 the job done. That's it. That's it. And I find myself making this mistake all the time as a

00:46:36.200 parent. You know, it's like even little dumb stuff like teaching kids how to use knives and cut up 0.96

00:46:43.620 their food at dinner. And it's like a hundred times out of a hundred, you're going to be better at that 0.80

00:46:49.480 than them. You know what I mean? And so, like, if you're in a hurry or whatever, it's like, oh, let me

00:46:54.700 just do it. Let me just cut up your steak or whatever. But that robs them of autonomy. And

00:46:59.940 it also kind of dooms you to being in the same role forevermore. Like, every time that you take,

00:47:06.340 you know, some task back from them is a time that they haven't built any personal capacity.

00:47:13.000 Well, let's workshop this. Maybe you and I can figure this out. One thing I've been

00:47:16.200 always getting on my kids about is just keeping things tidy. Just kind of dump things off everywhere

00:47:21.200 in the house. You're like, hey, why is this here? And typically, I actually just, I throw stuff

00:47:26.460 away. If I see it on the floor for longer than 12 hours, I'm like, oh, it must be trash. It's on the

00:47:30.920 floor. I like that.

00:47:32.840 I pick that up from my dad and my kids hate it. It's not a good habit. But what can we do? How can

00:47:37.000 we use this idea of giving maybe our kids autonomy to help us get the house tidy?

00:47:43.460 I'll tell you a story that I remember from years and years and years ago. So,

00:47:46.540 this woman emailed my brother and I and said, she was in exactly the situation you're in. She had a

00:47:52.620 kid and he would never, he liked to play with trucks. He was probably, I don't know, seven or

00:47:56.960 eight years old, maybe younger. Loved to play with trucks. Did not like to clean up the trucks. And so

00:48:01.500 it became a recurring source of tension. And then she said, one day I just kind of, I just realized

00:48:07.460 like motivation is the game here. It's not, it's not about instruction. It's about, I have to figure out

00:48:13.680 a way for him to want to do this. And so she said, I took an old bookcase. I took all the books off of

00:48:20.760 it. And then we painted parking stripes on it together. And then I let him assign a parking

00:48:27.020 space to every one of his trucks. And so he had some autonomy and it's like, well, this one's going

00:48:30.820 to go here and, and this one's the prime spot. So this is like where my best truck's going to go.

00:48:34.740 And then she said, she never again mentioned the idea of cleaning up his room or cleaning up his

00:48:40.460 truck. She said, have you, have you parked your trucks yet? And it was like part of the

00:48:43.660 play. And I think that's kind of brilliant. Jiu Jitsu is figuring out where's the motivation

00:48:49.460 here. Where does their motivation align with mine? And can I figure out a way to thread that

00:48:55.260 needle? So it's not just, you know, my order and their compliance.

00:48:59.780 Well, Dan, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book

00:49:02.800 and your work?

00:49:03.680 Well, I have a website at danheath.com that will tell you everything you ever wanted to know

00:49:08.920 about the book or my podcast or anything else.

00:49:11.840 Yeah. You do have a podcast. What's your podcast about?

00:49:14.360 The podcast is called what it's like to be. And the, uh, the conceit is in every episode.

00:49:19.880 I talk to someone from a different profession. So I've talked recently to a Christmas tree farmer,

00:49:26.080 an Olympic bobsledder, a London cabbie, a secret service agent, and more.

00:49:32.140 Sounds awesome. Well, Dan Heath, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.

00:49:34.360 Hey, thanks a million, Brett.

00:49:36.460 My guest today was Dan Heath. He's the author of the book Reset. It's available on

00:49:39.820 amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his

00:49:43.360 website, danheath.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash leverage. We find links

00:49:48.420 to resources. We delve deeper into this topic.

00:49:50.380 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at

00:50:01.640 artofmanless.com. We find our podcast archives and check out our new newsletter. It's called

00:50:05.720 Dying Breed. You can sign up at dyingbreed.net. And as always, thank you for the continued support.

00:50:10.440 Until next time, it's Brett McKay. Remind you to listen to AOM podcast, but put what you've heard

00:50:14.820 into action.

The Art of Manliness - January 21, 2025

How to Use Leverage Points to Get Unstuck in Work and Life

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