Mike Pell, PDF Inventor & Microsoft’s Global Innovation Leader

today I’m excited to welcome Mike pel Mike is the inventor of PDF and acrobat

at Adobe with over 20 patents to his name he currently leads Microsoft’s Global Innovation program in New York

City and drives transformative projects in design and Technology he’s also the

author of visualizing business the age of smart information and envisioning

Holograms he’s also a tedex speaker and contributor Mike it’s great to have you today oh it’s great to be here can’t

wait to talk awesome well we have some great topics and questions uh for today um I I would

I would love to know a little bit about like uh the sort of story The ideas what sparked creating and building and

inventing PDF and acrobat at Adobe what was that like that’s a great story it’s

also a story of the exact opposite of all the business advice you ever get you

know people tell you you have to research your topic and get a lot of data and have market research and be

absolutely sure there’s Roi well many many many years ago John waro who was

the head of adobe had this crazy idea that he could solve an impossible problem at that time you could not send

a document between a Mac and a PC and a Unix machine and have it look the same

it literally was impossible they they looked completely horrible but John knew that he could solve it using some of the

technology that he had developed at Adobe for postcript which was a resolution independent language and so

uh I was part of a startup that was just acquired by Adobe and he asked us to go basically go sit in the corner for two

weeks and figure out how to do this impossible thing and uh the fact is we did figure out how to do it really well

and that turned into acrobat and PDF which went out to change Global business but it was against all of the business

you know principles that you always learn John believed that if you built a better mous trap people would come which

is you know usually terrible advice right uh when you’re trying to do something that is going to return and

you know shareholder value but we just did it and we figured out how to do it very very quickly and you know back then

we didn’t know that it was going to change the world in it in the way that it did uh but we sort of knew that we

could do something very very close to what his vision was and so we just went off and did

it well I I love I definitely love the products and it it’s funny how even uh

you said 20 plus years back even today like I I use Windows Mac iPad iPhone you

know my wife has a Chromebook at school where she’s a teacher and being able to like look at just just a a piece of

content it changes everywhere so anyway thanks thanks for making that product yeah well I literally hacked the very

first PDF file together over 30 years ago and and made a little viewer for it

but at that time it was really just an experiment that’s incredible um let’s

talk a little bit about your you know creative process uh um you know you you you’ve been granted over 20 us patents

which is 20 more than I have personally but I’d love to know a little bit about about your personal approach to

Innovation how you kind of get some of these ideas flowing where they come from where do you go you know is there like a

place kind of a mindset how do you get there well I I’ll tell you the truth I’m

that type of person who does my best work when um I’m right up against the

deadline so I will off often personally just you know do it just in time and I

find that I do my best work that way I wouldn’t suggest that for everybody necessarily but that’s what works for me

and you know I also found that you really cannot innovate on demand know you can’t be brilliant on demand all the

time you can try and what helps is practicing just like anything else you know learning a musical instrument doing

anything that requires uh a high degree of skill if you just try to do it every day you just try to practice in some way

it’ll be easier when you are up against those deadlines to really step in and

perform amazing that that definitely makes sense I mean I have you know a couple kids who are just starting to

learn how to play instruments and they find it very frustrating initially but over the course of a half a year or a

year they no longer are worried about the practice and they start to enjoy that journey of being able to play a new

song or show to their friend or something um so that’s that’s very interesting the practice part of it I think is is pretty cool yeah and they

you know maybe whether they realize it or not the failing is part of the learning right you know like I always

say I don’t like romanticizing failure I think when people say fail fast that’s ridiculous because nobody wants to fail

but the fact is if you pay attention you do learn a lot when things don’t turn out and hopefully that’s happening for

them and they’re getting some encouragement and things improve over time yeah for sure did did you find that

you know maybe in the beginning of your career as you’re kind of figuring out how to be creative or or or maybe you of

always um started there but as you were beginning this process did you have to have mentors or folks around you that

that helped ground you when you did have these failures or frustrations like how did you bounce back when you weren’t finding

creativity well I’ll take that in two parts first I was an artist when I was a little kid you know so I was always very

creative always had a great imagination love science fiction and and Science in general so I was always that curious kid

who would just try to figure things out out but as I got older and I realized that that I did need some help

professionally sort of shaping you know I I did go out and try to find some mentors that were the top of their field

people who were super accomplished that I felt like I really could learn from but also along the way I just found

inspiration in some of the most amazing people in the industry and whether it was Steve Jobs or you know George Lucas

or you know people out of the music industry you know I I was just so inspired by their ability to create and

to act at such a high level to be able to bring things to life in the ways that nobody else had ever done that was my

inspiration and my sort of uh Drive behind the

creativity um a as you progressed in your career you know you mentioned one of your startups was acquired uh you’ve

worked at some great companies um you’re you’re currently leading the global Innovation Pro Global Innovation program

in uh New York for Microsoft um can you walk us through a little bit about you know what that means for Microsoft what

kinds of projects you’ve shipped or failed and like what you’re kind of excited about working on or working

towards for the future the Microsoft garage is the company’s worldwide Innovation program

and it’s really meant for employees to be able to take their ideas and their passion and move them forward in some

way and so what we do is it’s not so much an accelerator or an incubator it’s really a program to support what people

are already doing which is being curious and experimenting and and just trying things out the garage team which is very

small we have 14 garages around the world but we’ run the world’s biggest hackathon which we just finished the

Microsoft Global hackathon is you know an incredible event for people to be able to do what they need to do to you

know try something out or learn or join a team of other people who have the same ideas as them and do something very very

quickly in two or three days they hack together some kind of a working prototype make a video and then uh we we

have had a tremendous amount of projects created every year for the last 10 years

and people love this type of event because they’re meeting folks that they would never work with normally from

different parts of the world and are getting experience and also exposure to

different uh ideas and thinking and cultures to be able to have that creative spark so that’s that’s pretty

amazing uh for us as a company to be able to keep growing that you know year after year after year to really get

every everybody uh accustomed to the idea that hacking is for everyone it’s not just for engineers or marketers or

or designers it’s really for everyone sales you know HR people who are out in the field to just take their best ideas

and try to move them forward so that’s been a lot of fun for us to be able to do that I love that because uh every every

time we do a hackathon you know whether it’s when I was at Facebook or um you

know my first company dine or even now at at uh zeit I find that the engineers

and developers often come sort of intuitively understanding what a hackathon is and like you know how to

approach it because they’ve done it before whether it’s in college or whatever but so many of our salespeople or customer support folks you kind of

have to spell it out initially and help guide them through some ideas or approaches one thing that I often do is

I will show them I’m like hey I might not be able to do this thing but I can certainly draw something and then work

with a designer and then work with an engineer or come up with a presentation and I think it really helps people

understand that like even if they feel like maybe they’re not creative or they’re not technical they can at least approach it in a way that gets them

closer to that outcome that you you want to have yeah absolutely you’re right hacking is for everyone and and most

people somehow think it’s only for the technical but it’s not some of the best ideas come from people who are close to

customers who are close to how the internal processes work and so that’s really the big Revelation is that you

know taking your idea and trying to move it forward in some way is for every single person in the

organization when you talk about it being one of the you know the biggest hackathons is this uh just to help me

understand just out of curiosity is it sort of a all the Microsoft campuses is it like uh Microsoft campuses plus I

don’t know um colleges come together how does that kind of work and function it’s

for Microsoft employees worldwide so we don’t limit it to our locations people

hack from their homes like wherever they happen to you know living around the world we do invite in some of our

customers and so we’ve been doing that probably the last five or six years and that’s a lot of fun for them to be able

to see you know behind the curtain and see how Microsoft innovates for themselves but no it it really spans uh

boundaries you know and borders and Facilities it’s really about getting every single employee to try to to get

involved and just you know to chase their passion I I think just just to kind of have you know additional one

additional thought there um my boss at Facebook he worked at

Microsoft for 10 15 years and one of my co-workers my peers um also was a

Microsoft guy and it was really interesting because they were so clearly so much more customer focused than I

felt like I I was and over time I became more focused you know in that direction

so it’s interesting to hear you talk about a hackathon with customers I I don’t remember any Facebook hackathon

ever having customers at it so anyway that’s that’s really cool I I love it’s it’s one of the best things because

employees often don’t get a chance to be that close to real customers you know so just exchange ideas and understand more

about their culture and what they’re trying to do that’s great for us and the same you know goes for them they love to

see behind the curtain and how Innovation really works in Microsoft right yeah absolutely um so you know we

we’ve talked a little bit about Innovation creation design obviously there’s technology um you know one of

one of the folks that I talked with with a couple weeks ago he was a Google engineer that I worked with for a while at one of our one of our startups he

talked about how early on in his career he felt like engineering was something

that was basically just um you you find the thing you got to fix and you go and

fix it and then you just keep fixing things and I think he he sort of adjusted his perspective over time to

understand that it’s more about helping uh customers you know all engineering is is helping customers just like product design and C in sales and all these

kinds of things um I I’d love to understand how you think about you know design creativity technology how they

kind of intersect and and because I think sometimes folus on I don’t know if

you want to call it either side uh whether they’re Technology and Engineering and product or design and

and and I don’t know uh creative kind of folks sometimes it seems like they’re at odds with each other not on purpose but

they just kind of get there um what’s been your experience and how do you kind of get them to drive towards the right

direction well the first thing is I’ll say we have data going back 10 years of running the Microsoft Global hackathon

showing that the teams who were you know the recognized as winners in their categories of our executive challenges

they’re all very diverse teams and I don’t mean diversity of race and gender I mean diversity of background and uh

their roles that they play and what disciplines they come from and what life experiences they have so we know that

the key to a successful team is having that diversity of thought you know so um

having different roles represented so all of our teams at Microsoft are cross-disciplinary on purpose right you

have to have you know different points of view to be successful in anything and what I found is when you really start to

talk to people from other disciplines nobody really has that different you know point of view than each other they

may look at it through a different lens but everybody’s working for the same company they all are trying to serve the

customer as you just said you know in some way you know whatever their business happens to be um whether it’s

even education right where you’re a university and or high school trying to get a better student to come out the

other end everybody’s working towards the same end the problem is that you know we sometimes get a bit too focused

and a bit too myopic on our own job and what we’ve tried to do over the years is

try to help other people to understand you know what the bigger goals are and I

always tell people you have to really understand from someone else’s perspective why they might share um you

know their views in a certain way or why they don’t share what you think is important you know so you just have to

put yourself on the other side of the table sometimes and to try to really understand in a non-judgmental way why

do they have that opinion or or why are they bringing this up why is this so important and once you can start to do

that you’ll realize that you know maybe there’s some things that you didn’t really take into consideration you know

so that’s at the heart of everything we’re doing these days is CL oration and to be a great collaborator it really

starts with listening and understanding what other people are are trying to communicate what is important to them

and then finding some way to get the right thing done you know for the customer while still sort of pulling in

everybody’s superpowers I I love the idea of pulling in everyone’s superpowers I I just went

to Comic-Con last week and I have uh 20 little figurine sitting right next to me it’s the Justice League and The

Fellowship of the Ring so it’s always on my mind cool I like that that yeah and

by the way that that is not that is not easy to do like it’s easy for me to say and I live through a lot of very

difficult situations and teams uh but if you like we were saying earlier if you practice you know talking

to people and listening and trying to get them to see your Viewpoint it gets easier over

time yeah I I 100% agree I think um one of the experiences I had just you know

early on in my career is I’m in sales I’m in account management I’m in business development and it felt you know going back it felt

like I didn’t know the engineering team but when we did these hackathons all of a sudden like exactly like you described

oh same company same team kind of objectively the same goals and uh you you find those those ways to work one

thing I started doing is I started running with my engineering team and we’d be running in San Francisco or New

Hampshire and you know we’d start talking about customer problems it was never like Scott tell me about your code he was it wasn’t like tell me about your

approach to sales but we started you know we got that focus on the customer um tell me a little bit about

you know you seem like you’ve got to be a pretty busy guy you know you you you mentioned early when we talked uh you’re

you’ve got family you’ve worked at Microsoft for quite a long time you know you’re innovating and creating great new

products and tools but you also write books uh you’ve written three and I

think I don’t know if you just work all the time or you just have infinite capacity or how that works so you’ve got a Time Turner like Hermione but uh you

know how you wrote this one book for example example um envisioning Holograms and uh you know I’d love to know some of

your views on some of the future of communication and how they’ve evolved through your writing because writing is

one of those things it’s very introspective and I think you you learn a lot about yourself and presumably the audience that you’re writing for but you

know love to hear a little bit about the book and some of the inspiration behind it and what you’ve learned yeah well the

first thing is when you write a book you learn that you don’t really like writing no no actually you have to like writing

or you would never finish a book uh I do and it’s funny the new book I wrote called visualizing business one of the

very first pages in the book says none of this book was written using chat GPT why because I like you’re smart yeah

H but you know in the future that doesn’t mean that people won’t write books using generative AI or other

things they’re certainly great tools and there’s nothing wrong with figuring out you know how the tools can help you in

that way but yeah for me um first on the time thing

you know many people uh have always told me that you know you have time for the

things that you want to have time for right you will make time you will find a way to do things that are really

important to you and I think that that’s true you know whether you realize it consciously or not we all make time for

the things that we care about whether that’s watching a game on TV or running or like spending time with your kids

like whatever it is we all subconsciously or consciously make the time for things that are really the most

important now a lot of us get stuck in a trap of feeling like we’re on this hamster wheel and we have to check our

email we have to you know do our our social media posts we have to do this we then you don’t really have to do those

you know you but you do have to think about what’s important and prioritize so that’s one thing you know for me um

writing envisioning Holograms is something I did in 2017 that’s right when the Microsoft Hall lens just came

out and I I’m not 3D guy I’ve always worked in 3D and I’ve always had a lot

of vision I’ve always known sort of what was coming next because I’ve always spent my career at the intersection of

Technology business and design you know so I’ve sort of see things from many different perspective so that book was

really to help other people to think about how they might get involved with spatial Computing as it’s called now or

or mixed reality you know coming from a a different background of maybe 2D design or marketing or engineering where

you don’t have access to that type of Hardware or that type of system it’s

just a different mindset and I wanted to write something which actually became a textbook U for a while to help people to

sort of go from the way that they see the world now and the tool sets that we use now to how it could be which will be

a much more immersive future you know not having to have everybody be in a a VR headset as you just saw recently

with the meta you know demonstration I mean we we will all have access to Technologies there’s also great

technology from a company called Leia um where you basically can see something that looks like an IMAX 3D with no

headset no glasses you know it breaks the plane and is very convincing for engineering and entertainment so we will

all be able to see things and utilize spatial Computing in our everyday

work I just just as a quick aside I love everything that comes out in IMAX for the most for the most part so the idea

of having a personalized IMAX sounds incredible um if we can go back just for a second I I would be you know super

interesting to hear your perspective on writing um one of the things that I I keep so I have um some nieces and

nephews that are just approaching College age you know my my mom lives in a college town so she she meets with hundreds of students and um you know

they they keep talking about how professors for example are are saying we’re not going to write an essay

outside of class because of some of these generative tools we’re going to do it in class and we’re going to do it

more manually and I I’d be you know interested as a as someone who’s written some books like How do you view um

generative AI in the context of those books is it like do you ever use it to help you ideate ideate on something or

to grammatically review or to propose some approach or are you like on a

typewriter just driving this book yeah well first I think that that’s a great

idea to to have students right in class I mean like I I think doing anything on

demand is incredibly useful it builds a lot of skills it helps you to understand how to manage time how to think on your

feet you know how to focus and get things done it may be super difficult for kids these days to be able to do

that but I think that’s a great idea but I think it’s a really bad idea for

educators to think that they can keep students away from chat GPT or generative AI Microsoft co-pilot by

making them right in class and not accepting things from outside that that’s ridiculous right because the kids

all have access we all have access to it uh I always make the example that when

the pocket calculator first came out people absolutely lost their minds they

thought this was the end of mathematics no one would ever know how to add or subtract or multiply ever again and the

truth is you know here we are whatever 40 50 years later it it would be silly

to not use a calculator to do something right like if you have something that’s non-trivial to figure out like why would

you not use a calculator I think that generative AI is exactly the same thing

it will be ridiculous to not utilize such a powerful and creative tool to do

some of the things that we need to do now that said there’s an incredible amount of value that people get from

reasoning and by researching and considering and reconsidering and arguing and and you know having to

defend points of view I mean these are all things you do as your right you may be doing it in your head or you may be

doing it with your editor or collaborators but that’s a very useful set of things just because you didn’t

physically write the first draft of something maybe you asked Microsoft co-pilot or chat GPT to do it for you it

doesn’t mean that you’re not involved in the writing process because now you become a reviewer and an editor and

someone who has to figure out how to communicate your ideas clearly and frankly if you’re you know any writer

worth their salt you have a point of view and you have a perspective and you have a voice and you do not want to give

that away to anything right you don’t want to give that to the machine the machine May learn your voice and your

attitude and your lens of looking at the world eventually and and maybe that’ll be a Time Savings over you know over the

uh the years that we start to really use this in our everyday work but for right now I I think it’s great

that anybody you know students or workers you know or you know people that are just trying it to experiment I think

it’s great that they have a new tool that can help them to see things that maybe they would have never thought of

you know we use that quite a bit in the design side of things to create what we used to call um you know like a mood

board right like just creating a bunch of ideas to just sort of inspire you from a color palette perspective or

layout or topography you know whatever it was you were going going for like a a basic feel that can be done in seconds

and where that used to take days you know or weeks to sort of pull that together so that’s an incredible help in

a lot of different fields is to get that jump start and in writing I think the same can be true you know hey co-pilot

um you know give me five examples of how we might use design you know moving forward with spatial Computing and guess

what 15 seconds later you have five ideas that that’s not a bad thing yeah

that’s yeah you’re absolutely right I I love I love the uh you know uh comparison to a mood board because I I I

think that’s that’s great because it’s a it’s very visual it takes a long time to pull together or it potentially could in

the past um and now you have the opportunity to to just jump right into um I I I’ve used uh you know for for

writing blog post content for example I’ll say hey I’m looking to write a blog

post today can you help me and I actually put in the last you know I don’t know 100 blog posts that I’ve written

and it’ll say well you’ve written about these six topics should we write about one of those today and then we kind of go through it and and it’s so great it’s

like having a friend there to talk to you yeah the the really interesting magic trick is that some of the models

can actually write in the voice of someone that’s you know that has a lot of work that it’s been trained on and so

you can ask you know like in a fun kind of experimental way it’s like hey could you could you give me this paragraph for

my blog post you know in a very Shakespearean type of way and you know you’ll get back something that that’s

you know pretty amusing but but also pretty good right yeah absolutely right

um you know based on some of the answers that you you’ve shared today and kind of your I don’t know pretty measured approach I I feel like you’d probably be

a great mentor and and I imagine that during your time at Microsoft and and other companies you’ve worked with you’ve had the opportunity to Mentor

some folks um what’s been your approach to to mentorship like how do you think about being a mentor helping others

around you MH I do a lot of mentoring and I enjoy it quite a bit I think

initially when you’re early in your career you think that you have to have a mentor because that’s how you’re going

to get ahead you know just to be honest right we all think oh I’m G to go find some VP to to Mentor me so I’ll become a

VP someday and and you know that works sometimes and you know very often you’re going to get great advice and great

examples and you know just you know I would say it’s a good it’s a good thing

for everybody to try out but I wouldn’t do it for that reason I would do it

because you actually want to try to learn something new not that you think it’s going to somehow get you ahead U

the second part of that is for me I’ve changed the way that I think about mentoring because I I used to just do it

because I sort of felt compelled to give back I was at a part of my career where I had a lot of experience and I had no

problem sharing those things good or bad you I had lots of failings and lots of things that didn’t work out and I would

share that with people who are interested but I didn’t really consider how important mentoring is and coaching

to the person that you’re doing it for you know so often I I wouldn’t necessarily give a lot of weight or you

know or gravity to the things I was saying I was just giving them advice I was just sharing my

experiences but it turns out uh it’s really important to them and and they’re listening very carefully and as a mentor

or coach you have a very big responsibility and you should take it really seriously not not that you

shouldn’t have fun and not that you shouldn’t enjoy the time together but just realize that that person is looking to you for career advice or like very

practical advice on how to proceed and just sort of think about it through that

lens I love that um I I was talking with the the uh the president of a company

called one password recently and he mentions that when it comes to mentoring he finds that his approach whatever it

is at the end of it he feels like it’s so important to him to pay it forward or

to share and to be a mentor because he received so much early on in his career

and in in all the times that he felt like he was sort of like waiting through Darkness or this like deep dark you know

scary place um all these folks who offered help to him he wants to be able to do the same which which I I feel like

I could definitely sense from you as well yeah I I wrote a post recently talking about how I think the mentor in

a lot of cases learns a lot more and gets a lot more out of the experience than the m and so there’s that part of

it too yeah absolutely um let’s let’s talk a little bit about uh you know working in Microsoft is a pretty big

company now um it’s it’s it’s been a bigger company for a while you guys are on a tear right now just it’s an

incredible business you have a great CEO um I’ve I’ve you know I’ve been um I’ve

owned shares of Microsoft I think since I was like 14 and well then why why are

you doing this podcast you should be likeing I should have put more money in I think I started doing more indexing

rather than direct investing um I’d love to know a little bit about you know how you think about um building shipping

maintaining a agility um speed within a a you know because I think everybody

thinks of a big business a corporate environment is slow and terrible um doesn’t seem like Microsoft’s that way

but how do you make sure you stay fast Nimble quick well um you’re right the

first time Microsoft used to be very slow and you know we we did things on

the yearly basis or or like multiple years it would take multiple years to create a new version of Windows or

office and we sort of learned over time that we really did have to speed up the

pace at which we worked and then the world started to accelerate the pace of what they were doing to be you know just

so fast that we had to go on to more of a you know a continuous cycle like you

find now on the cloud with with lots of cloud companies but what we did is uh 10

years ago we got a new CEO sa Nella and sa had been a longtime Microsoft guy and

he really knew that uh in order to do uh better work and for us to feel like we

were doing our best work we needed to change our culture and the change that had to happen had to go from us being uh

very focused and concerned with our own projects to really U picking our heads up and looking around and and looking

for opportunities to collaborate with other teams and so in the process of doing that our culture became one of U

being curious and experimental and so that really um at at its heart helped us

to go faster because we were all you know out you know not only looking at our own stuff but sort of looking around

and we were able to leverage what other teams were doing in a lot of cases and that’s what helped us I think ultimately

to become better at working uh much faster makes makes a lot of sense um you

know I I have I really have two more questions for you today U Mike um so one one is just sort of on um I

guess I think you you talked about the practice of creativity um I I’d be curious to know

do you ever feel exhausted you feel like you need to reuel you need to take a break from being creative or or like you

just feel at the low end of the energy that you might need for it and and how do you get it back may maybe that

question is sort of similar to what happens when you’re burnt out yeah okay so what are you saying Scott I look like

a wreck uh no definitely not well I know I

mean I I have been going morning and night for weeks now you know I’ve had so

many things the Microsoft Global hackathon un hackathon UN General Assembly it’s like all of these events

you know back to back and it gets to be a lot but honestly I have been quite fortunate to work in a job that I

absolutely love I love meeting people I love being out talking to our customers I get to be highly creative every day

I’m actually required to be highly creative every day and so I think when you have an opportunity to work in that

way it doesn’t really feel like work so like yes I’m tired and yes I would love to go off and and have a real vacation

somewhere and you know I do find times I’ll just tell you you know I love to

just sit sometimes like I don’t get to do it very often but there’s nothing more than I love than reading a magazine

just like sitting down and just relaxing like just you know or like watching you know a couple episodes on Netflix I love

to do nothing and as an artist as a creative person we have to somehow have

time to do nothing because you know very well that’s when a lot of your best ideas come right when you’re not on the

clock you know when you’re just off like running or or just you know doing something other than what you’re

supposed to be doing that’s when the real creativity so I guess the way that I recharge is trying my best to do

nothing for a little while and then get back to it totally totally makes sense I

I think you’re you’re totally right I think when I when I have my best ideas the ideas that I can really think

through it’s usually when I’m building something with my hands I love woodworking or playing ice hockey and I

take a breath after sprinting for you know a minute and a half um so th

sitting and doing nothing I feel like Jerry Seinfeld would love this idea you know yeah no it’s you know and the the

fact is even when you’re sitting there like walking or whatever you’re doing you’re always you know processing

something whether consciously or unconsciously so it’s um it’s just important to not be you know in the

grind of what you do all the time that that can’t be good for anyone yeah for sure um well last you know question for

you you I think it was a month ago you you spoke at uh Ted tedex and you talked

about what you call the Moment of clarity and uh you know I’d love to know a little bit more about that and what that also you know what what the

experience was like to speak at one of those and uh maybe ultimately what what

was the concept and and what did you hope that people left understanding or thinking or beginning to think

about the Moment of clarity is something that all of us experience it’s the exact

second when everything becomes super clear it’s as if you know you you

understood it for the first time and it was so clear that you knew exactly what to do about it and that happens across

the board it could be when you’re cooking and and you realize you know exactly like what temperature you had to

do this and how long you had to prepare something and and all of a sudden you’re like locked in and you will never make

any mistakes again because you you know it how it has to be or in mathematics or physics when a really difficult concept

all of a sudden it just makes sense like you now you know how to answer the problem now you know how to move forward

so I’ve always been fascinated with when that happens for people and it

turns out it’s it’s not completely random but it’s not predictable either

and so this book that I wrote visualizing business talks about how to engineer the Moment of clarity we have

the Technologies and approaches we know enough about brain science and learning to actually help people to the Moment of

clarity and you know it’s not it’s not rocket science it’s just a set of things that we have to do in a certain order so

as a communicator I always say I’m a professional Storyteller I like to be able to get people to the Moment of

clarity and so when I prepared to do the tedex talk I had to use my own techniques how am I going to get an

audience of people who probably have never read my book they don’t know anything about me I step on stage for 10

minutes and and how do I get them to the Moment of clarity really fast and the way that I structure I won’t ruin it if

anybody ever goes out to watch the video but I U did the whole talk trying to

illustrate you know what I was talking about trying to get the Moment of clarity to to happen for people so they

would get it and they go okay now I know what you’re talking about I’ll just tell you uh you know between us the tedex

format and the Ted format are very um exact you know Ted is a very successful

conference for a reason you know they have figured out you know how people can consume content very quickly in a

particular format and retain it and so tedex is you know half the amount of

time Ted is 18 minutes Ted X is 10 minutes you still have the same constraints you stand on the red circle

you speak they want you to be incredibly well practiced so that it feels um you

know like like you’re getting right to exactly what you’ve got to get to and that’s the exact opposite of what I

normally do I do a lot of speaking I do a lot of presentations but I love the

challenge of being in the moment you know I love not overpreparing and over practicing with things because I I just

personally enjoy being right there with the audience and and going back and forth and and just sort of doing what

feels right and in the moment and the Ted format is an excellent format but it is not that so it was a real challenge

for me I had to stretch myself and as sa would say use growth mindset to be open

to the idea of doing what I do in a very different way and so as always I think I

could have done a bit better but it turned out okay I I think I think going back to your your comment a minute ago

about uh Scott and my burned out it it sounds like you’re completely the opposite you’re someone who looks for

uncomfortable opportunities to do new things so anyway thanks for being here with me today and taking the time to uh

talk about your incredible career it’s it’s been a pleasure to talk with you well thank you Scott can’t wait to talk

again soon all right see you m see you