I'm joined by author David Hoffeld in today's episode to talk about the topic of science and how it affects the sales process. Today's episode is brought to you by Linode. Linode Provides superfast SSD based Linux servers in the cloud starting at $5 a month. Linode is offering Developer Tea listeners $20 worth of credit if you use the code DEVELOPERTEA2017 at checkout. Head over to spec.fm/linode to learn more about what Linode has to offer to Developer Tea listeners .
I'm joined by author David Hoffeld in today's episode to talk about the topic of science and how it affects the sales process.
Today's episode is brought to you by Linode. Linode Provides superfast SSD based Linux servers in the cloud starting at $5 a month. Linode is offering Developer Tea listeners $20 worth of credit if you use the code DEVELOPERTEA2017 at checkout. Head over to spec.fm/linode to learn more about what Linode has to offer to Developer Tea listeners !
Have you ever been so convinced that something was good for someone else that you just bought it for them? This is something that I actually admit that I have a problem doing this. I very often will buy a book or a piece of software or even something like a particular dish at a restaurant because I want someone to experience that thing. I get that sense from today's guest David Hoffeld. I get the sense that he would give you his book because he believes in it so much. Don't go on the record with that, obviously. But in this episode, you can really hear David's appreciation for this research that we discuss in today's episode. My name is Jonathan Cutrell you're listening to, Developer Tea. My goal on this show is to help you become a better developer. The way that I do that is by discussing things like behavioral science, discussing things like what you should put on your resume. How can you learn to be a better developer by honing your communication skills? These are all things that are relevant to your career. They're relevant to how good of a developer you actually can become. In today's episode, we're continuing part two of this interview. Part one, make sure you go back and listen to it. Maybe a little bit lost if you don't listen to that first. Thanks again for listening. I'm going to get out of the way. We're going to get into the interview with David Hoffeld. Who's going to pop in your mind? The guy Cole calling you blasting you with emails or the person that's giving you value at every interaction. We all know the answer. So be a someone that gives value relentlessly. Like I said, that's a principle at my firm. If you send an email or make a call and you don't have something of value to give, that's a problem. It can never be about us. It always must be about the client. And that's what'll get you a lot of wins and create a deep level of loyalty and referrals. This is one of the reasons why there are nearly 400 free episodes of this podcast on the internet right now. This podcast, I do it for free. It's obviously a free service to developers around the world. That's on purpose. It's not because I'm bored. There are reasons why I create this podcast. It is for free for developers. I want to create value in the world. And generally speaking, this is kind of a ethereal way of viewing it. But usually when you add value to a system, you will also receive value from that same system. This isn't always true. It's not like, you know, it's not something that you can just expect that you can go and start a podcast. And suddenly your whole life is going to change. That's not at all what it is. It still requires hard work. It still requires thinking. But this is absolutely a principle when dealing with other people that when you give them something, they will have that reciprocity effect. It's so powerful. I actually have a really cool story about this. My wife and I recently had our backyard redone. We needed to rip up the grass and put down a patio basically is what we did. So we searched around and we found a couple of really good options for people who were able to do this job. And relatively speaking, you know, this is not a hard thing to accomplish. We want it done well, but overall, you know, this isn't like a really high-end kind of job to accomplish. And the person that we ended up hiring, one of the things, as I was reading your book, this became so apparent to me, he uses, I don't even know if he knows that he's doing it, but he uses this concept of reciprocity. In the very beginning, first of all, he comes out, the owner of the company comes out and sees the property. He gives you his time, right? He gives you his time and he gives you his thoughts about the property. He talks about things that he's envisioning on the property. But then he does this really interesting thing. He tells me while he's standing on my property, he told me that he would be willing to design the entire project and it would be free if we chose to work with him. Right? So, if we choose to work with him, then the designs are totally free. If not, it's a fee of a couple hundred dollars for us to take those because obviously, you know, we can take those and work with someone else. But they're free. They're free today. If we wanted to see the designs, they're free today. So this is such a powerful motivator for me because it worked on two scales. One, it was reciprocity. He's going to start working on the designs for my backyard. He's standing here. He's got ideas. He's going to start working on them. That was thing number one. The second thing that was so powerful was loss of version. He created this situation where not only is he giving me something, but if I don't choose to work with him in the future, I now have to give up something of my own. I have to pay him to not work with him. It's just a very interesting prospect. He didn't trick me into that. It wasn't something that was a small line on a contract. It was just something that he presented as, I will do this. Then if you choose to go elsewhere, you'll pay for it. We did end up working with him. The work that he did was excellent. I don't regret a single step in that process. I found that to be an incredibly powerful step in that sales process that I thought. It pointed to another thing that you talk about in your book, the progressive commitments. I'd love for you to speak to that. Also, if you have any comments about that particular strategy, I'd love to hear them, but also this concept of progressive commitments. I'd love to hear a little bit more about how we can use progressive commitments. Even when we're dealing with, and this deals with other interpersonal relationships, how can we get buy-in of team members, for example, through progressive commitments? Yeah. Well, the first to go back to your comment. That's an example of reciprocity and progressive commitments. You're exactly right. It's much easier for you to make a decision on a small decision than a big one. Having him draw up plans is much easier for you to decide on than doing a large job. He knows if he gets the one, the other will follow. That's very, very predictive of how our brains make choices. We often think that we make them a big decision at the end of a persuasive message or after we've evaluated all kinds of products and services. That's not true. The research is pretty conclusive on this. Decades of it shows that small commitments are the building blocks of large decisions, meaning that small commitments, small decisions are our reference points that our brains use to build a large decision. In other words, the best way to get someone to make a big decision or a big commitment is to first guide them, making a series of small commitments that are consistent with the larger one. That's how our brains form choices. It's incredibly powerful. Trying to guide people through that process of those incremental commitments, in the book we talk about exactly how to do this, and really a key is, what do you do before you ask someone to make a choice? Before you ask for a commitment. This is often where people don't think about. It's a key predictor of how they're going to respond to a commitment or a choice is what comes directly before it. Why? Our decisions are made contextually. There's a whole study of this in behavioral economics called choice architecture, which says, how do we architect choices in wage, ways that are aligned with how our brain makes them? One of the key principles is something called priming, which basically says that what we hear before a choice, saves our perception of it. It kind of primes us to make a choice. The long and short event is this. Before you ask someone to embrace one of your ideas, guide them in affirming the idea that the commitment is based on, or the decision is based on. For example, we talk about science-based selling. That's what I'm selling. I'm talking about science-based sales training and consulting and so on. I present to you all about science and you go, ooh, and on, we talk about it. I might say something to the effect of, does it make sense why so many organizations just like yours, when they learn about science-based selling, that's kind of the option they decide to move forward with as far as for sales training? That makes sense, I guess. Then I can follow up with a commitment right there, such as, well, would you ever want to use any other type of sales training that wasn't based on hard scientific evidence? No, no, I guess I wouldn't. I'm much more likely to get a good commitment there because I primed you for it. You can use any area of life, not just in business, but anything. What comes before a commitment shapes the perception of it. Give thought to that. Instead of just asking for commitments, architect them. Instead of giving choices, architect them, and the way you do that is prepare people, help them, help their brains process the information, the ideas of value that the choice is based on, and when you do that, it makes it cognitively easy for them to take the next step and actually make the choice in your favor. That's so important. I want to clarify something with you here. Bion does not mean a buying decision, right? It doesn't mean a monetary decision. Bion or commitment doesn't necessarily, in exactly what you're saying, you're asking them to commit to ideas as much as you are asking. Really money, if you look at the reality of what an exchange of money is, the point isn't to get somebody to give you a bunch of paper. It's to get them to buy into an idea enough that they act on that buy-in, that commitment to a concept, enough that they act on that concept. And resources can be money. It can be time. It can be energy. It can be any number of resources. It can be somebody agreeing with you and having your back, for example, in a company's scenario and saying, hey, I actually think this person is the right person for this promotion or whatever it is that you're working on in your own career. This concept of commitment or progressive commitment, it's not just limited to getting somebody to write a check. The progressive commitment is about getting people to buy into one idea at a time. Yes, you're exactly right. And that's what all this is about. It's about influence. All this one of the more influential. Everyone, and what is influence real simply, it's getting people to take what you say seriously and then act on it. All of us want what our ideas are presented. Regardless of who we're talking to, we want people to listen and take what we say seriously, not to be very dismissive. Well, that's influence. We want them to act on it. We're constantly presenting ideas that we would love if people responded to in our personal and professional life. What makes someone act one way or not another? And that's what this science reveals. So really, it's all about just understanding ourselves and others more effectively and how we work so that we can present our ideas and ourselves in ways that are aligned with how our brains perceive value and form choices. And so that's what's really not about selling. We apply the science to selling. But you could apply it to education. We know I know people that apply it to marketing. I know people that apply this to marital counseling. That a marriage counselor. So the application can change. But the foundation is this wealth of data. And you can use this. I train salespeople and sales leaders and business people all the time who always say, oh yeah, I've used this to get my kids to clean the room. I use this in personal areas, even dating. I just had a salesperson tell me he was using some of the things for dating and was successful. So I'm like, well, good for you. Now, you know, there's so many ways you can apply it. And it's exciting because it's all based on human beings. So if you're curious about what makes people work and you want to become more influential, the good news is you don't have to guess. Not anymore. There's thousands of scientific studies. And the exciting thing is people like myself and many others have read these studies and kind of put them in layman's terms and given you actionable strategies that you can use to instantly become more effective. Yeah. And so this is actually really interesting to me. This field is very young. And David, you are among a smaller group of people in this field than what people may realize. The founders of behavioral economics are still alive. Right? So it's not like a, you know, for example, a lot of the science that we think about has been around for many, many years. We think about physics. It's been around for many, many years. But this is new. This is a very new and budding field. And there's new information that is clarifying and continuing to kind of bolster these arguments. And part of the reason you haven't heard a lot about science in selling or really science in things like dating is because of its newness, the novelty of it. People tend to not trust something that's new or they tend to dismiss something that's new or quite simply this is probably the most important factor. They just don't know it exists yet. Right? They don't know that it's a real and inviable thing. So highly recommend that people check out David's book, Science of Selling and also just get into this field in general, right? Go and find resources in this field because it is really compelling and eye opening. You will see it in yourself. I was actually going to ask you, David, do you have a story or an instance where you saw this stuff playing out and you realized intuitively that you couldn't have predicted it. But you saw it play out and you saw the proof of it right before your eyes and it blew your mind. Is there any story like that that you can share? Yeah, there's many of them where it's given me deeper understanding of why I've been successful. But I'll share with you actually this is interesting a principle that I use from science that I leveraged as I wrote the book, The Science of Selling and actually helped me get it done because I'm busy. And it's hard to find time to write, it's hard to find time to do most things, right? We're all busy people. So how do you do that? How do you find the time to do something like writing a book? And so what I did was using a powerful science of a principle that's been proven to radically increase the likelihood of doing a behavior. It's called an action trigger. This is fascinating. They're very simple to do. What action triggers do is they are pre-established decisions that link a behavior with its environment. So for example, for me in English, what that means is I decided I was going to write the majority of my writing would occur in the evenings after my children went to bed. So I created an action trigger, meaning after my children went to bed, I would go and write every single day. And that's what I did. So I linked rather than say, when do I feel like writing, when do I have the time to write and try to fit it in throughout the day because we all know that doesn't work, things come up unexpectedly. I created an action trigger, meaning as soon as my kids were in bed after I put them in the bed, I would write. And that took the decision out of it because all of us suffer from things called mental fatigue, meaning as a day gets on, we get more and more tired, I resolve weekends. In fact, behavioral scientists have found that our resolve is actually like a muscle that can become depleted. And so it's hard for us to do those things we want to do. All of us know that like exercising, right? So many people start out with good intentions at the beginning of the year and exercise or lose weight and we usually, most people they find fall away. Very few actually fall through one of New Year's resolutions. One way to radically increase that or any behavior you want to engage in is use an action trigger. Don't hope that you decide to exercise or write a book or whatever. Blinking up with an environment. So for example, if I want to start exercising, I'm going to say, oh, my way home from work, I go to the gym. Every day I'm going to drive home from work and that triggers me to go to the gym. I don't have to decide when I'm going to go to the gym today. I know when I come home from work, I'm going to the gym. And so doing that simple thing has been proven in many studies to radically by as much as 74% increase the likelihood of do a behavior. And it's one of the key reasons why I was saying when I get the book done is every day I wrote as soon as my kids went to bed. I never thought about it. I just did it because I had that linked up to that environmental stimulus that prompted me and then the right. It's funny, I actually implemented and talked about something very similar on this podcast. Before I really knew this study, I just kind of discovered it accidentally. And it's called useful defaults. And this concept was I wanted to go to the gym more often than not. That was kind of my goal. Is on more days than not, I want to end up at the gym, which puts me at the gym at least four days a week. We're falling off the bandwagon just for complete honesty on my own show. But at the time this was really effective. So what we did, my wife and I, we work at the same office. She works a whiteboard with me. And what we decided was we decided that value first. We said, we agree that this is something that we want to do. This is a goal. So let's align ourselves to make it happen. What we found ourselves doing was anytime we wanted to go to the gym, it was very easy for one person or the other to not feel like it and then talk the other person out of it. So we would ask towards the end of the day around 430 or 5 or whatever time that we finished work, we'd say, hey, do you feel like I wanted to go to the gym? Do you want to go to the gym today? Is that work for your plans? And a lot of the time we would end up saying no. So this was, we're set up for failure basically. So what we decided to do was ask instead of asking, do you want to go to the gym today, we would have to ask, do you not want to go to the gym today? We would have to ask the opposite question and assume that we would be going to the gym. So the effort was put into convincing not and figuring out if we weren't going to go to the gym. We didn't send that message, if we didn't address the subject, then the default was going to the gym and it made things so much simpler. We had our gym closing the car, we were ready every day to go to the gym and the day is that we chose not to, it felt like a little bit more of a reward, but it also was more difficult. It was not the default decision. We had to justify not going to the gym then. That's excellent. Yeah, there's something in, it's a powerful motivator behavior called the status quo bias. We talk about it in the book and this is the tendency the bias all of us have to do nothing. In fact, I tell such people that they have lost more business to nothing than to someone and it is, it's a reason why if you go to any gatherings on a regular basis, maybe it's a meeting at the office once a week or church or networking function or whatever it may be, you always, usually you sit in the same place every time and if someone sits in your seat, it just feels kind of odd. You're like, well, I'm using it on sit-over here. It kind of perturbs you a little bit. That's just one example of the status quo bias that we like what we like and so we usually stay in that same position. To your point, leveraging that in your favor. I know I have someone I know who, for example, wants to work out first thing in the morning, so what he'll do, at least at the beginning, when he was trying to really crank this habit and get this social norm, he'll sleep in his gym clothes at first. So now, if he doesn't work out, he has to change out of his gym clothes and he says, well, morning dress for this and then as well just do it. So he found it radically increased. Not only did he have an action trigger, but the more of the signs you can leverage in your favor, the more persuasive the behavior becomes and more likely you aren't going to do it. So now he leveraged a status quo bias in his favor rather than against himself. So that's a powerful thing. In fact, one example of this, my favorite one is they did a study recently on organ donations. And this is fascinating. We talk about this in the book too. They looked at why some countries have 85, 90, 95, some 97% organ donor rates and other countries like the United States have very low organ donor rates. They go, what's going on? Why are some countries so open to giving the organs and others pretty much almost hardly anyone is doing it. I mean, under 10% in most countries. And they said, what's the difference? So they looked at the socioeconomic status of the people, religion, all kind of factors. They found this. None of it mattered. What mattered was one thing. When the form when you're asked to be an organ donor, if you're asked to check if you want to donate your organs, like it is here in the United States, people will say, well, I don't know. That's a big commitment. I'm not sure about that. I'm probably going to pass. Let me think about that. I'll let you know. The countries where they had almost universal organ donation, the form said this, check if you don't want to donate your organs. And people said, well, I don't know about that. That's a big decision. I think I'll think about that. I'll let that go. I'll pass on that. And so they wouldn't check the box. And so that is the reason why some countries it's fascinating are almost everyone donates their organs and others almost no one donates their organs. It's simply choice architecture. It's how you ask the question. Yeah. And that's that is exactly what we found over and over in personal experience. And you'll probably, if you're listening to this episode and you've never heard of this stuff, it's probably blowing your mind a little bit. Hopefully it is blowing it enough that you can actually invest some time in a learning about it because it really is powerful, compelling stuff. And you know, the most educated economists know that this stuff applies not only to the people they're talking about, but also to themselves. Right? I heard a Daniel Coneman talking about the same discussion. And he talked about how he made a particular decision and he was kind of studying himself as a subject and trying to decide what biases were affecting him at that time. And I thought that was so interesting. So it's really important that we grasp this stuff not in terms of, you know, how we're observing the world around us, but how it affects us as well and how you can take this stuff and recognize how your brain works. Recognize, for example, how you can affect your health, how you can affect your job around you. It's not just, you know, figuring out other people's brains. It's figuring out your own. There's so much to learn about how you think through this stuff. And so influence, you know, we're not just talking about influencing other people. We're talking about influencing yourself and influencing yourself is sometimes the hardest job that we can have, right? People do things that they don't intend to do all the time. People do things that they, they cognitively don't want to do all the time. And this is certainly applicable to those kinds of things as well. Oh, absolutely. I think that's one of the things that gets people addicted to this. It's wonderful to help other people achieve their results and their goals. And that's what drives everything I do. But to your point, it works on all of us, including ourselves. And I know it's helped me a tremendous amount to understand why I do what I do, what biases I have, things I need to work on. Because all of us want to be, for example, more influential. All of us, at times, we don't feel confident. We don't feel good. We just, we're, we're in a negative, we call it emotional state. And how do I, how do I still perform effectively when I don't feel like it? And one of those days where you just don't feel like getting on a bed or you don't feel confident or something negative happens to you, but you have to go into that meaning and present, do that presentation. And you have five minutes to prepare yourself for that meaning and you just want to leave and go home and never come back. But that's not an option. So you have to go into the meaning. What do you do? And this science gives us insights on things you can do right away to up your performance and gives you ways to help foster confidence when you don't feel it. And so you're not just on this rollercoaster of feelings, but you can kind of start to be in control a little more and recognize what's going on in your own life and work on changing it and improving yourself. And so I think you're exactly right. This science is, I think it's a dicting and I can tell you're a dicting, first from the conversation we've had here. Once again, a little bit. That's what I found. I ran an academic journal many years ago now and I thought, wow, this is so applicable to what I do. And then I ran another another and then I came obsessed with it. And it was pretty much what I spent my evenings and weekends doing and I was applying in it work and in my own life. And I got results and then I just went overboard. Not that anyone needs to go that far. But it's a dicting. And so the good news is you don't have to anymore. There's so much of this research has been dusted off, taken out of the academic journals and applied into the real world that you can, you don't have to do what I did over a decade ago now and read these journals to figure this stuff out. Now it's a book away or it's a podcast away. So it's very, it's much more accessible now than ever before and that's really an exciting thing. And it's continuing to move and that's also what's exciting is following people like David if you follow his blog or you follow his Twitter account. And also even this show, we talk about development but we also are talking about this stuff because it's not, this isn't like a niche field. This is applicable in many very universal ways. So you're going to hear us talk about behavioral science for quite a while on this show, probably for the duration of the show because it is explaining like you said early in the show, science reveals reality and that's what we want to learn from. We want to learn from science. We want to learn from our experiences. We want to learn from people like David who have done the deeper dives on science, on these journals, on this research and really figure out ways that we can use that stuff. To make the world around us a better place, you know, that's a very lofty dream. But that starts with making ourselves better. It starts with making our clients better, making what they do more effective. And so that's such an important thing to understand that we can use science not just to learn principles but then to apply these principles. So David, thank you so much for coming to the show. I have two questions that I like to ask every guest who comes on the show if you have time for those. Absolutely, let's go. Question number one, if you could have people talk to you more about one thing and this could be anything, doesn't have to be related to anything professional necessarily, doesn't have to be related to behavioral science but behavioral economics or anything like that. If you could have them talk to you about one thing, if somebody meets you on the street, what do you want to talk about? This is an easy one and my answer will reveal how sad I am, which is exactly what we're talking about. Science-based selling is something I'm obsessed with. You mentioned it a while ago in our conversation how much selling hasn't been based on science and there's very few people even now that are doing it just because they don't know and exist and up until as far as applying it to selling, that hadn't been done for the reason that you'd have to re-knack in them in journals to do that. People have applied it in general areas but as far as to sales, very little has been done. So now my book and a few other people are getting into this and really starting to build on each other but I think this is such a, I see so many of the sales behaviors that we've already talked about, the bad feeling a lot of people have toward sales people. A lot of that is because the way people have been taught to sell violates how our brains create mind decisions and unfortunately it's not just one or two behaviors. It's so many across the board and so I think that people have been misled unintentionally but regardless of sales people and they want to present themselves effectively. They have not been given the tools to do that because literally the way they have been trained is based on ideas that are from decades and decades and decades ago and the problem with that is we now have this science that reveals reality. So I love talking about this. What I love about what I do is I get to. It's my favorite part of the day. It's what I think about. I dream about it and so someone will work up to me on the street and talk about this. I never have a hard time pulling myself away because I find it to be irresistible and because I think it's such an important topic. It has the impact people's lives. I have seen sales people and businesses literally turn around. Sales people that went down with the profession. Businesses that went the verge of bankruptcy, some small businesses we've worked with, that within months turn around. I mean radically where the owners are in debt, they're not taking paychecks and all of a sudden now they're making six-finger incomes and the lifestyle change, what it means for their families, what it means for customers, it gets addicting and so I love it. I have hobbies. Yeah, but my real hobby is what we're talking about now. So I'm extremely passionate about it and what's it's what I love, it's my passion and I don't want to say this too much but I would do it if no one was paying me. In fact, I was for many years. No one paid me in a research of stuff. I was addicted and doing it for free for years. Luckily I'm in a position where I don't have to do it for free. But I almost went because I love talking about it every day. Yeah, that's so cool. Developers who listen to this, you probably have something that you love that much and you know that buying into something like that is such a powerful thing. So I really appreciate the candidness of your appreciation for this and the fact that you're doing work in this area and helping people like me and other developers who are going to go and end up buying this book or following your stuff online. You're helping us understand this stuff but you're doing it from a perspective of real conviction and that it's not just you didn't go and write a book in order to write a book. It was you wrote a book because this topic was so compelling to you and that's such a powerful situation to be in. So thank you again for your contribution on this. The second question real quick that I love to ask people in this show because it really gets at the heart of what people think and want to contribute. If you had 30 seconds of advice to give to developers who are listening to this show, regardless of their background or experience, what would you tell them in that 30 seconds? The same thing that I say a lot now more and more and there's some really interesting research that bears this out but it's very practical advice in that oftentimes we assume success and what I've learned and what there's some really interesting science on as well is that there's a price for success and you pay that price up front. That if you want to become extremely successful as a developer or in anything, it doesn't matter if it's a hobby, you want to learn a musical instrument, you want to get to the sport, you want to whatever it is, it doesn't matter. You have a great relationship with your significant other, it doesn't matter. No matter what, there's a price for all that. You know, just get it, there's always a price and you pay it up front and it comes in time and energy and sacrifice. And I mean so many people now that one success, but they're not willing to sacrifice and I don't think I'm seriously and neither does the marketplace because to become successful, we're in a hyper-competitive marketplace. This is the reality. And to become successful, anyone can do it. That's the great thing about the world we live in right now. All of us have a shot, but there's still a price and you've got to pay that price. You have to ruin this sacrifice. So when I ask people, I never ask people, you know, if they want to be successful because when I go and talk to a room of 1,000 people, let's say, all of them want to be successful, everyone in hand will go up. When I ask them is this question, what are you willing to sacrifice to be successful? And that's what it's going to take. And the person that will sacrifice the most more often than not is the one who will be successful. And so that's what I have found in my life. That's what I've seen in so many others. There's some really interesting science that bears this out onto lane gratification and putting in the hard work now to get a payoff later. Some really interesting research. But that's what I would say. Don't assume success. Ask yourself, not do you want it. That doesn't mean anything. So too many people think that if they want something that the universe will just give that to them. And if they want to get a reality, you have to get it. What are you going to give up to get it? What are you going to do to get what you want? And for the man or woman who says I am willing to sacrifice to achieve this goal, I say, watch out. Because that's the person that will create ripples, right? That'll achieve some amazing things. So I would say, remember, there's a price for success and you pay it up front. It always comes up front. And that's the price. That's really, really strong advice. And I love this because it really gets at the heart of some more science. Because we've been talking about science on this whole episode, I want to continue with one more piece here. And that is that the people, the highest contributing factor to success over the years. And I can't remember exactly what study this is. But the highest contributing factor to success. And we're not talking about Facebook, overnight success. And we're not talking about the multi billionaires who hit the market just right or whatever, right? That is luck for the most part. The highest contributing factor to success is the number of tries taken. Right? Let's think about that for a second. The number of tries taken. That quite simply means that trying and failing and then doing it again and again and again, the number of iterations of that try and fail that you do is directly correlated with your overall success factor. Why is that? Up because ideas can come and go. Right? The way that the world is going to attach themselves to your idea or to your thing is not going to be necessarily directly in line. What you're saying is exactly right. Having success is one of the worst things you can do because if you assume that an idea is good, if you assume that an idea will be successful, if you act on it and it isn't and then you quit, then you just you just failed. You're done, right? And when you find out that I that success is not a given, when you find out that success is the result of a lot typically on the average case is the result of a lot of trying and failing. Then you'll recognize that the number of tries is directly correlated to your success factor. It's a very simple concept and that means that you're going to have to try again and that means that you're going to have to try as many times as it takes, which often leads to the fact that you need to sacrifice. This is a very simple fact of success, a very simple data related fact of success actually. It doesn't sound like it on its face, but it is. Yeah, so this is something that is a constant and it's something that you're going to see over and over. I did a little bit of studying on this during my master's degree and it's not a new idea. It's not a comfortable one. We like this story of success that is the result of some brilliant idea that we turn around and the developer codes all throughout the night and drinks 40 cups of coffee to stay awake and comes out of the other end with something that somebody is willing to invest a billion dollars in. This is something that we like thinking about, but really that's more of a movie than it is reality. Reality is trying and failing over and over and over. Absolutely. Yeah, for listeners that want to get more into that, there's some interesting research. The terms you want to look up is for perseverance. There's a lot of research on grit. Angela Duckworth is a well-known social psychologist on a great. A lot of research on it. She has some studies out there and a book as well with that same title grit that summarizes a lot of her research as well. You're exactly right about looking at failure not as an indictment against you, that you're a failure, but as feedback that shows you how to adapt and become successful. We talk about that in the book with what's called a growth mindset. Very, very important, successful people. It's very hard to become successful without a growth mindset because as you mentioned, failure is it's part of success. I mean, none of us get it right the first time. We're constantly, it's how our brains learn. We try things. It doesn't work. We adapt. We try again. It doesn't work. We adapt. We try and then eventually we unlock the combination of success. That growth mindset matters. Meaning in the context of whether it's being a developer or a salesperson, is it something you're born with or something you developed? Which side do you lean more towards? People that say it's something they weren't just born with. They either have it or they don't. They have a hard time with failure because when you fail, that means you don't have it. They take it personal and so they don't take that well. Whereas someone that says, I certainly have natural ability, but my success is like a muscle that I must continually develop. If you adopt that mindset, you look at failure as feedback, not an indictment against you, and it allows you to say, okay, what do I need to do? Do differently now. That question opens your mind and allows creativity really to flourish and allows you to really think around how to get to a higher level than someone that stops after a couple fails. Absolutely. That research from Angela Dockworth is fantastic, by the way. She wrote a book, ConGrit, I think. Another really good resource. Did you mention that book? I don't know if I'm... Yeah, I did. Yeah, yeah, yeah, really, really good stuff that she has done. She's also involved in another project that was mentioned on a free economics episode recently. I recommend listening to, well, really listening that podcast in general, but there's a couple of episodes related to grit on that podcast that are worth listening to. David, thank you so much for your time today. I know the listeners are going to appreciate you having taken the time to speak with me, and the ideas that you've presented and the challenge that you've presented to be willing to sacrifice for your success. Thank you so much for your time. Oh, thank you. It's been my pleasure. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. And thank you again to David for joining me on the show, David Hoffeld wrote the book, Science of Selling. Make sure you go and check it out. You can find out on Amazon pretty much anywhere really. I have the ebook copy, but of course, you can also get the physical copy as well. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. If you don't want to miss out on future episodes, make sure you subscribe in whatever podcasting app you use. Thanks so much for listening, and until next time, enjoy your tea.