Jordan Peterson Reveals How to Sell Anything to Anyone

well is there something wrong with with generating money it's like well it depends on what you're going to do with the money you know like if you're going to spend it all on hookers and cocaine then probably that's reprehensible well thanks a lot jordan for coming and doing the interview yeah um no problem it's funny i'd planned all these questions and then we've just had a chat before rolling about um you know your interest in entrepreneurship and maybe that could be the angle we could use on the podcast because maybe it's not what you've talked

about on a lot of other podcasts so i might just shut the laptop and we might go down there if that's all right with you yeah um so yeah how does psychology temperament uh marry up and link with psychology you're obviously well known for psychology commentary in other areas but maybe we could focus a bit on that domain well i mean there's lots known about what predicts success in different domains across the lifespan let's say the first question is what are the if you're trying to analyze something like business success um or productive success what

what are the proper domains of category and so if you're trying to categorize jobs for example which turns out to be quite difficult the simplest conceptual scheme that's practical that gets you somewhere is like a two by two matrix they're simple jobs and complex jobs that's the first thing that's worth knowing it's a continuum really but a simple job is one where once you're trained you just repeat what you're doing so so factory line work would be would be an example of that or or checking out people at a grocery store restocking grocery shelves or

or jobs like that the best predictors for success in those jobs is conscientiousness trait conscientiousness and conscientious people are orderly and industrious and we don't exactly know why they are it seems like it's associated oddly enough with such things as disgust sensitivity so maybe people are conscientious because they get disgusted with themselves if they're not useful and guilty you know they get guilty if they're not engaging in productive enterprise and maybe that's a marker for for a kind of complex social responsibility yeah you know but um which sounds like the complete opposite of most entrepreneurs

i know well the or that's that's the thing the entrepreneurs are different so so for simple jobs iq intelligence predicts how fast you learn the job but not how well you do it once you learn it and what predicts there is conscientiousness so you basically if you're hiring people you want conscientious people who are that's the most important thing and then the second most important thing is you want people who are relatively low in trait neuroticism which is a negative emotion dimension because they're less likely to be absentee right and so forth so in complex

jobs complex job is one where the demands change on a regular basis and so most managerial administrative positions are complex jobs because you can't learn the job once and for all and then the best predictor for complex jobs the first predictor is iq and the second predictor is conscientiousness and iq is about three times more powerful than than conscientiousness as a predictor and then so that's the first simple versus complex and then the second would be the second category scheme would be something like managerial slash administrative versus entrepreneurial and the entrepreneurial types actually they're over

with the artists so the best predictor for entrepreneurial success first is iq but second is trade openness which is the creativity dimension so entrepreneurial types tend to be very high in trade openness and so that sets them with the artists and also with the political liberals because the best predictor of political liberalism is trade openness right so the managers and administrative types they tend to be conservative and the entrepreneurial and creative types tend to be liberal and so if you're an entrepreneur you're going to be a lateral thinker and so you'll be the sort of

person if they hear an idea if you hear an idea that will trigger off a whole bunch of other ideas and you'll be motivated primarily by interest in pursuing your ideas but your p your downfall is likely to be organizational administrative ability so it's often useful for entrepreneurial types to pair themselves with managerial and administrative types yeah you are described it's like you are describing my soul here yeah well there's there's a tension there's this weird tension between doing one thing right which is what you need to do if you're if you've already decided what

it is that you're doing and scanning the landscape for something new to do that would be worthwhile those aren't the same enterprises and so most companies are an uneasy marriage of entrepreneurial and managerial types as the company gets more and more established the managerial administrative types tend to dominate but then that becomes problematic because it means it's more and more difficult for the company to shift laterally when it has to which is again i think why so many companies eventually fail because they lose the creative head is that what you mean sure they lose the

flexibility yeah and it's it's funny because they're trying to maximize their ability to implement but it's very difficult to do that without also simultaneously bearing the cost of narrowing right so the thing is is if if you know what you're doing you want to hire a conservative if you don't know what you're doing you want to hire a liberal right right so that's that's a way of thinking about it temperamentally it's also a way of parsing out the political landscape to understand at least in part why you need conservatives and liberals yeah so well i

mean i find a business is like a family and in the past in my company i've had all under 25 year old male entrepreneurs why did we hire them because that's what we were like right and people i've found entrepreneurs tend to hire versions of themselves at first instead of being more self-aware to go actually i'm chaotic disruptive what i need is order yeah and um like you said good administrative skills conscientiousness so you go through that chaos of hiring people too much like you and having like too much male energy or too much creative

energy then you maybe react and hire a lot of administration and conscientiousness and then you maybe lose the soul in your company yeah and then the creator is trying to drag the company forward feels like he's been getting held back by everybody and it is yes but the funny thing is it's needed to hold him back but they've got to let him go as well well that's the that's that's that's the problem the fundamental problem is most new ideas are stupid dangerous and counterproductive and they're the ones that change the world well well well they

are sometimes they are sometimes but there's a subset of new ideas that even though new ideas are dangerous and disruptive and often counterproductive and generally don't result in a productive company some of them are absolutely necessary and they're the thing you need to do next and so and and that's a very difficult problem to solve because it's the sa it's the it's the fundamental problem of innovation it's like most innovations aren't justified or warranted but some of them are absolutely crucial so how do you distinguish between them and the answer is well we we don't

know the part of the way that you do that in a dynamic economy is you let and encourage a whole host of entrepreneurs to produce their ideas and you let almost all of them fail which is kind of painful for the entrepreneurs but limited company and all those kind of structures are set up to make that more safe right right yeah well those are those are this is something that's massively underappreciated on the liberal left end of the political spectrum is people just don't understand how absolutely revolutionary the idea of a limited company is because

what a limited company allows is a limited company allows your idea to die instead of you and that's a big deal otherwise no one would take the risk would they have created well that's right no no one could bear the risk because if you failed you it would wipe you out permanently it's like well who the hell's going to take that risk and so the fact that the limited liability is one of the the unbelievable tech i can't believe that we know it's like an innovation that we all just forget about jesus yeah it's it

and it's such a merciful innovation yeah it's like you mean i i get to fail and no one's gonna kill me it's it's it's no one's going to throw me in debtors prison it's not going to hang around my neck for the rest of my life i can actually take a risk so because the other thing you see often with entrepreneurs is that they fail a lot before they succeed and so i mean you have to be pretty damn spectacularly lucky to have your first idea when you don't know what the hell you're doing be

a spectacular success or maybe it's a good idea but you weren't ready and you're more ready for the marketplace isn't ready or i mean that's the other thing that people don't really understand is because if you're a naive entrepreneur you think well all i have to do is make a great product it's like no that's about five percent of it you know and and that shocked the hell out of me when i started building software for example because we assumed that we we developed software to help people um select better employees and we never could

sell it except in very rare circumstances but we assumed that if we had a product that was validated we could show that it had the effects that we wanted and that it was more efficient than other products in the marketplace that selling it would be easy it's like well that's just so wrong selling and marketing things is impossible i love it when people say oh the product just sells itself it's just one of those things which are like you've not been in business a very long time um yeah because you've got market forces you've got

your skill set you could have a great product you're just not ready to sell it because you haven't got enough experience one you don't know how to price it yeah and you don't know who to talk to to sell it you know you can spend your whole life especially if you're selling to companies which is virtually impossible talking to the wrong people and it feels like work and it really is work but you never end up contacting a real decision maker and then you can't tolerate the excessive delay like you think well i'm going to

go sell this product to a big company because because they can obviously provide me with a massive contract it's like yeah but there's a relationship between the size of the company and the delay in the implementation and the delay can be years and then what this is this happened to us all the time it was very painful um we'd get right to the point of signing with a large company and there'd be an internal management transformation and the person that we were dealing with would disappear it's like oh no it's like now what we actually

had that happened with a really big company in new york we were right on the verge of signing a contract for use of this self-authoring program that we designed which helps people plan their lives and the the week that we were ready to sign the contract the ceo resigned gone two was probably a year of sales and marketing work just evaporate yeah you know and and and you don't get paid for any of that you get you get no reward for getting 364 days 365 days you certainly don't well and it's also really easy for

um one of the things that tech incubators do really badly i think is they do lots of things really badly generally speaking but one of the things they do that's very counterproductive with the people that they train is they they emphasize the development of the company but they don't force their entrepreneurs to find customers because your first customer is the most difficult thing you'll ever do as a business person in in my experience to find someone who will actually pay you that first time that isn't your mom yeah that's right well that's right that isn't

a family member that's an actual customer and the the other problem that people face when they're trying to sell a new product is one of the reasons one of the ways that people decide whether they're going to buy something is whether or not a they know anyone else who's already bought it or b if there's other people in their domain that are already using it and if if your sales pitch is well no this is new and revolutionary you think well that's a wonderful sales pitch it's like it is if you're talking to someone who's

entrepreneurial and risk-taking and inter and interested in revolutionary ideas but if you're talking to a middle manager in a company the last thing that person wants to hear is well you could be a risk taker and introduce this into your company the person's thinking i don't want to put my job or reputation on the line for your product even if it is revolutionary in part because if it succeeds i probably won't be rewarded for its success so when we were selling our our employee selection software for example we ran into we were academics or and

so you know there was lots of things we didn't know about business and one of the things we ran into which was so funny we talked to the people who were doing the hiring and they had a certain budget which was usually lower than because they had virtually no budget for hiring weirdly enough so what we were charging for the product which was still extremely modest exceeded their budget he said well look you're going to make a 250 fold return on this that's that's the pessimistically it's 50. realistically it's 250 and the upper end was

more like 500. so it's a no-brainer to implement this it's like well we're budgeted on the cost side what do you mean well if we if we hire more productive employees we won't be rewarded for that we'll just be punished for spending more money on the old set i thought well we can't even talk to you because i'm trying to sell you something that will benefit your company but for you as the decision maker there's nothing but risk in implementing the new process yes that just blew me away it's like oh i see the hiring

budget and the productivity budget aren't associated so that's like a fatal impediment to to our sales process so that was well we learned lots of things about about and i came out of the whole enterprise with way more respect for people especially for people who do sales jesus that's such a brutal job yeah and you know when people are they have a what it's easy for people to it's even a popular trope to be somewhat contemptuous of salespeople you know all those salespeople definitely in britain we're very reserved when it comes to selling in britain

but yeah but i mean i don't put ads on my podcast i mean there's ads on virtually every american podcast yeah i don't put ads i don't need the revenue so i in a way there's the old creative artist side of me that doesn't want to interrupt my work with ads but like if i started putting ads on my podcast you know some people would be okay with it there'd be a bit of a riot yeah well and i think i think that's a real mistake because it it's no we're not giving the devil his

due it's really really hard to be a good salesperson and people like that are unbelievably rare and they're unbelievably valuable and nothing wrong with it and it doesn't make you a bad person and you're not selling your soul well it's also it's also how how are you going to generate revenue and without that economy money even going to move in an economy well the other thing that happens with the artistic and maybe the entrepreneurial types too is that they they end up with contempt for the business end of the process and that's a real mistake

you know i mean one of the things that i tell people who are artistically oriented let's say so they're in the entrepreneurial category is look um it's virtually impossible for you to monetize your product that's the first thing you have to understand so maybe you'll get lucky and you'll figure out a strategy but if you add contempt for the sales and marketing process to that impossibility you can be bloody well sure that all you're going to do is starve so so you better drop your contempt for the sales and marketing end of this if you

if you want to sustain yourself through your life and that's going to be a prerequisite for your creative endeavor yeah and so and art schools and and and establishments like that do an absolutely dreadful job of well they don't teach it i was an artist i was an artist i went through art school yeah they don't teach it no never once no i know i know and it's it's and i mean how are you going to commercialize your venture how are you going to pay for your mortgage what just how are you going to buy

food yeah with a just a paint brush and a camera oh jesus and and well an artists are in particularly dire position because as a visual artist for example you're not only competing with all the visual artists that now exist and there's plenty of them but you're also competing with all the dead artists who were way who already have an established reputation and a body of work that's that's being what still being exchanged in the marketplace and so you don't want to add contempt for the sales and marketing process to that and you also probably

have to understand that if you want to be an artist that you're also going to have to have have to have another job yeah because it's just unless you want to bang your head against the wall until it's bleeding it's so hard and i mean i've known some people who are outstanding artists and i've known very very few i don't know if i've ever met anyone who was able to make a living from the outset of their career as a as a non-commercial visual artist brutally difficult so and and adding contempt to that is not

helpful you should be very thankful that sales and marketing people exist even i know there's that what would you call it the mercantilist commercial element to it that is sort of in some sense you can consider it distasteful from the perspective of higher aesthetics but don't confuse your ignorance of something important sales and marketing with your moral purity that's a big mistake it's a big ethical mistake and you will pay for that yeah so so i think there's some simple solutions i almost like want to sort of summarize this part so far i've always enjoyed

selling straight to consumer yeah and not to businesses yeah i like that better too i think that you've got more customers you're always at the decision maker sometimes it's the husband or the wife who owns the credit card streams but other than that you're always at the decision maker you learn very intuitively and quickly you get a quick feedback loop whereas like you said if you're dealing with a manager's got their own motives and then the company has got different motives they're not going to tell you the truth you've got to unwrap they don't even

know what the truth is necessarily because they can't represent their business because they do well they don't embody it yeah so straight to consumer is number one i think the second thing is i think probably it is fair to say that sales and marketing can be learned but i think it's also fair to say that sales and marketing are more likely to succeed in certain personality traits well you need to be extroverted sure yeah so you and and assertive yeah and it also helps to be emotionally stable because what's your failure rate as a sales

person oh it's like 50 to one pick yeah it's unbelievable it's like you have to you have to have a constitution of bloody iron to tolerate that you know because the what's the default answer to do you want to buy something from me no no it's no go away right it's worse than no yeah it's like no and you're bothering me yeah and then even if the best you get is well that's worse that's worse than no i think about it the middle grounds yeah well at least with the no you cannot move on that's

right you drown in that's right well that's the problem with trying to sell to big companies yeah it's like it's never enough maybe maybe we'll do this it's like win well maybe in the next six months to a year which will be delayed absolutely 100 yeah we've found selling direct to consumer way less way less uh stressful yeah and and you know what the funny thing is more rewarding sorry to jump into more rewarding more rewarding because you can actually change an individual's life yes yes with a good product yes exactly yeah well the thing

about you know you kind of have this idea that you could you could let's go for a big company a couple of contracts and we're set it's like yeah but you'll die in the interim waiting for the contracts yeah so and it is so interesting to think about that in terms of the the error of marxist criticisms of capitalism because the marxist criticism was something like capital will accrue in the hands of a smaller and smaller number of individuals which it does but the individuals rotate that's the thing that marks got wrong now with big

companies you think that well the big companies absorb all the capital but the thing is they fail yeah the reason they fail is because they get so large they're so ponderous that they they move so slowly that eventually they make themselves extinct and you experience that when you're trying to sell to them it's like oh you have this rule oh you have this rule or you also have this rule oh this rule means we have to completely rewrite our software yeah you know and then then then well and and these special adaptations have to be

made then there's 20 people to clear that with yeah yeah it's it's brutally difficult right so this marxist capitalism thing that was one of the initial um things i wanted to talk about i want to come to that in a minute yep i'm i'm bursting now with questions and i know you've got to go at 12. so okay so the next summary then is something that worked for me and my business partner because you know we're i don't like the word self-made because i don't think anyone's self-made i think you need people around you but

self-made in the sense that we weren't given money to start we didn't have family money oh yeah that's hard and i think the gift in the business we've grown is i have a business partner who's very conscientious very analytical very skeptical his answer is always enough right right i have a partner like that right and then so and i'm the opposite and so that allowed me to go and do the sales and the marketing and allowed him to clear up my mess yeah accounts finance structure organization yeah so to anyone listening who isn't really a

natural sales or marketing person or doesn't want to learn it partner or align with someone well who is well and you may probably make a great team well and it's also on it's also really important to understand that these things they can be learned to some degree but there are temperamental proclivities and so if you're if you're open technically that's a big five trait you can your people who are listening i have a website understandmyself.com understandmyself.com and if you want to know your big five profile it will provide that and it breaks each of the

big five into the two sub components and so it's very useful so that you can go there and find out what temperamental pattern you have if you're high in openness then you're oriented towards entrepreneurial activity if you're high in conscientiousness then you're oriented towards managerial activity if you're high in agreeableness customer service disagreeable people well disagree people are good for they're also good for managerial positions if they're not too disagreeable if you're extroverted that tilts you towards sales these things are and so if you're going to hire someone for the job you should first of

all understand that every person isn't for every job and you might as well match the person and the temperament to the job and if you know your own temperament then you can think well i'm an entrepreneurial type i'm high in con in openness but low in conscientiousness it's like well christ you're going to be an implementation catastrophe you're not going to do the paperwork you're not going to do the follow-up you're a mess so find someone who's orderly well i can't work with someone who's orderly because they'll constrain me it's like yeah they will and

you need it yeah and so there's that ten you know there's something interesting about how your brain works so if you want to make a really fine adjustment with your finger the best way to do it is to push in one direction and then push against your finger with the other finger because then you can make unbelievably tiny corrections and so a system seems to work better this way you have a right and left hemisphere if there's dynamic opposition which because you'd think well i'd move a lot faster if everything got the hell out of

the way it's like not necessarily crash and burn quickly that's exactly it and so you know you said you partnered with someone who had traits that opposed yours my one of my partners is far more disagreeable than me and i would say more orderly and way more skeptical and i'm always out there going well we could do this we could do this we could do that here's an opportunity here's another opportunity and what he does is a lot a lot of it is yeah a lot of it is no and it's frustrating of course yeah

because we take it personally well and because you you see if you're open you see the landscape of opportunity but a quick death is better than a slow painful death and working with someone who says no offers you the opportunity to have a quick death and that's actually preferable so you have to tolerate that tension of opposites if you're going to build something that's that's lasting and it's actually implementable so i think this is vital to talk about and i i think generally in the media the world our opinions i think people are too extremist

everything is good or bad black or white right or wrong up or down left or right and to sort of continue your analogy one of my favorite bands is radiohead and they're very big in the uk yeah i really like radiohead and if you study them they've all got very different musical tastes and they often have clashes around the kind of music that they want to write so the drummer when they were big with okay computer was like why can't we write three and a half minute pop songs that's what's made us massive and tom

york is like the antithesis of that and as soon as we're big and well known and number one i want to do something completely different you know forget these are my words not his but you know disruptive and maybe you know a little bit more anti-pop um and then you've got johnny greenwood who's classically trained whereas tommy plays the piano completely unclassically trained if you have a classically trained pianist they're like how does tom york play the piano like that the timing everything it's it's wrong it's all wrong but that makes his haunting melodies um

and so i'm convinced that a five piece with all of those push pull creative clashes which they've probably had to learn to drive forward in like an arrow because they've probably had loads of falling outs i believe that is tantamount to them being the band that they are and i can say working with business partners and i have an md and we have i mean we have about 75 staff because initially i wanted progressive to be uh hire everyone like me and then i wanted to hire everyone the opposite of them yeah and then it

was all men and then when we were too many men it's like too much test their own testosterone same we're all women and then that brings a different energy and i'm convinced with families and companies there needs to be this balance well these all these different so that's genuine diversity so that's the first thing if you want genuine diversity you go for diversity of temperament right not diversity on the basis of ethnicity and that sort of thing you go for diversity of temperament and there wouldn't be from a biological perspective all these different temperaments wouldn't

exist if they didn't have their niches right so because there'd be no place for them and the thing is people actually are different and they're different because differences are required in different circumstances and it's well another reason to to do the personality testing i would say is well first of all it's enlightening i had my kids do this personality test that i yeah told you about um howdy kids they're in their mid-20s now i had them do it when they were in their teens and uh because they you know i tested out the things i

was developing on them and and you know i know my kids pretty well or so i thought and when they did the personality test it revealed to me things about them that i had misconstrued it was really useful so i thought my daughter was far more disagreeable than she actually was a lot of the clashes i was having with her i was having because at that time anyway she had pretty high levels of negative emotion and i thought that she was disagreeable she wasn't she's very agreeable but she so she would get upset quite easily

and so i learned to some degree to comfort her when she was upset rather than argue with her and that was extremely extraordinarily helpful and i thought my son was easy to get along with and he's unbelievably disagreeable but he's very very low in negative emotion yeah so he would never get upset about anything so he's easy to be around but trying to get him to do something he doesn't want to do is impossible he just won't do it and so that and it was quite shocking to me that that even though i knew my

kids and even though i'm a trained psychologist i still had elements of their temperament wrong in my conceptualization so that was extremely useful to to to figure out and and to really develop an appreciation for the fact that those people who don't think like you they're actually different than you and me better than you well that's the thing is that you know with with those differences come well your temperament is a set of strengths and their attendant weaknesses right and you don't get the strengths without the weakness so the thing about open people is like

well they're creative but they're all over the place and if you're open and high in negative emotion it's a it's a rough combination because the openness destabilizes you right you don't have a stable identity because you're interested in this and then you're interested in this and then you're interested in that and and maybe you can handle that but if you're also an anxious person and have some difficulty with uncertainty you basically undo yourself by being creative it's like well how can you how can you stop being anxious if you're never in the same place for

more than one minute yeah and so lots of people who are really creative and high in neuroticism they just unglue themselves and so for people like that i recommend it's like try to make a damn schedule yeah like try to hem yourself in a bit because you'll just burn yourself out with nervous exhaustion otherwise yeah so and it's useful to know all of that i think we're trying to balance these paradoxes and ironies um because the paradox there is someone the person who least wants a diary and a structure probably needs it the most right

well i didn't have some advice about that okay so let's say that you're the person that that that procrastinates and you don't get things done maybe you're creative you have other things going for you i would say well learn to use a schedule anything i don't want to be hemmed in by a damn schedule and it feels like a prison and fair enough man it is a form of prison but that's a form of order well this this is this and it's also a precondition for successful additional successful creative endeavors so one of the things

i recommend for people to do is to use a calendar like google calendar but not to design the day they should have use the calendar to design the day that you would want to have because you can make a calendar your friend if you don't make it a tyrant yeah so you don't want to build a tyrant into the system you want to be intelligent about it because if you're going to schedule your time you have to understand that there are things that you need to do that you should do because if you don't do

them you're going to fall behind and that will be counterproductive it isn't because someone's wagging their finger at you and saying that this is a moral imperative even though that might be part of it it's because there are obligations that you have to fulfill or you fall farther behind and the obligations get bigger and that's a bad pathway so you have to build some of that into the schedule but a lot of it can be well okay tomorrow i want to have the sort of day that i would really be pleased at having by the

end of the day and i want to build in a schedule that i would stick to as well and so you have to have some appreciation for your own weaknesses you lay out a schedule and you think well would someone like me actually do that yeah and if the answer is no then you modify the schedule until you think that you would do it and that you would be pleased if you did do it and then then the schedule can start to become your friend and i think if you're not a person who's orderly by

nature the schedule has to be your friend because otherwise you won't use it so it's funny you say that i just my most recent book that i launched is called routine equals results and it's a very short concise book um designed it to be because you don't want war and peace on how to manage your diary in your life and it's pretty much exactly that i think i just add a couple of little things the paradox again i'm obsessed by the paradox and everything um so you plan a schedule and i think your distinction of

the end of the day you'll know you'll be pleased with that's different from in how you feel in the moment yeah yes definitely because how can you you need to second guess yourself to know that you're doing the right thing strategically but in the moment it might frustrate you but at the end of the day you'll be pleased and so that requires discipline so i think if someone sees a diary schedule as an initial test so design the structure like you so try and end of the day i'm pleased test some things never see anything

as permanent okay that worked for me at the end of the day you've also got to monitor your energy levels because we all eat at different times um and also this was really important once i created this because i tested for months what coffee to drink at what time what food did i eat at what time obviously wrapping in my kids and my vision work and all the things that were for me non-negotiables in the day doing some things i knew i'd wriggle out of that i hate doing but i knew like you said at

the end of the day i'd be proud that i did because discipline while it's hard is rewarding at the end when you you feel that sense of deeper happiness when you've gone through and those things that you want to wriggle out of if you do wriggle out of them yeah so you've got to you've got to get on top of those things and then i found this important let someone else manage your schedule because i know what i'm like and i'll wriggle out the very things that i know are right for me because i can

yeah and whereas if you have an assistant or even just a system yeah the the you follow your diary so you create the diary you test the diary and then you give it to someone else to manage it because the amount of times i'm saying to my assistant louise i don't want to do that and she's like you're doing it yeah because you know that's the right thing well and you might need like it might actually be you say well you don't want to do it it isn't that all of you is saying that it's

like the child in my mind 51 of you doesn't want to do it or decaffeinated me yeah it could could easily be but then if you have someone else come along and say no you need to do it then the 49 percent of you that wants to do it all of a sudden wins because it gets that little extra boost yeah and so it is very useful too to know where your weaknesses are and then to help and to institute people around you who will buttress you at your weak points so and everyone has their

weak points they're the comp they're they what they're the they're the uh the counterpart to their strong points so this is again the paradox thing that like i really want to get this message out that you cannot have one without the other you can't have all the upside without the downside and i think most of us it's easy to see downside when it's there we're probably all focused on that and when we're feeling good it's easy to see upside and if i think of anything good in my life that's happened business financial whatever it's in

seeing the upside when all i initially would have seen is downside and vice versa so any team members around you that challenge you that you might ordinarily push away see the upside in their skill traits and their personality traits like the people who hold you back will actually they stop you making from a mistake make making mistakes and they pre-select your ideas for you and let you go with the ones that really are good yeah they're also they also sort of represent they also represent the resistant marketplace right so if you if you have a

scheme that you're putting forward and you can't sell it internally well those people are representative of at least in part of the people you're going to try to sell to externally and so again that's the advantage of quick failure if you can't make the sale within your own organization it's like well that's possibly because what you're selling isn't going to sell so or that or you're not very good at selling it you haven't crafted your message properly the the one of the things you pointed out earlier with regards to the ability to tolerate strife and

conflict and the paradoxes that's absolutely crucially important because there really isn't any more anything any different than that there's nothing in that that's any different from actually thinking because thinking actually is conflict it's the pitting of opposing viewpoints against one another and it's very stressful and and and and and produces a tremendous amount of tension but the question is in part do you want to figure that out in abstraction even though that's very stressful or do you want to live that out in the world and the answer is man you better think it through because

even though that's stressful it's way less stressful than than than living it out in the world so and it is so useful to be in that tension of opposing opinions so even though it's hard yeah where much innovation much creativity many solutions to problems they're like that that next stage beyond that tension aren't they which of course emotionally none of us want to go through so we try and avoid it play safe or whatever put it off yeah so or not say what you think because then that conflict won't emerge that's another advantage to being

around disagreeable people agreeable people say agreeable people won't produce a lot of conflict yeah but disagreeable people tell you what they think and maybe it's vital to have people around that yeah because the ego completely well that's well that's another thing especially you start to become successful like well you need some constraints on your egotism yes well so then you need disagreeable people around you because they'll provide that constraint yeah and and you and you also pointed out that let's say you're successful and that makes you happy right and it might and and that's part

of that ego inflation process is positive emotion people that have a lot of positive emotion are impulsive because positive emotion says make hay while the sun shines yeah and fair enough but that can lead you down a very impulsive path you see that with people who are manic because they're really really full of positive emotions which is sometimes the scariest but my dad has the manic depression um and sometimes when he's the highest that's the scariest oh definitely oh absolutely yeah yeah and you've sort of semi-relieved because he's out of the depths yeah but it's

a big warning sign yeah yeah i've made some of my biggest mistakes in life when i've been whoa right right well that's exactly it is that you have that motivational impetus but it's unconstrained and so that's that's that you're absolutely right that's un and and of course depression is an absolute catastrophe for people but it's in people in their manic phase that go and rack up fifty thousand dollars in credit card bills in one day because they have this brilliant idea that's going to revolutionize the world and you know maybe it will but but then

you end up with the 50 000 or the 500 000 in rapidly accrued debt yeah and and you can certainly see that in the explosive phase of development of of companies when everyone's hyper enthusiastic it's like fair enough and the enthusiasm also sells right because it's hard to be a non-enthusiastic salesperson but but then there you know everyone says well shouldn't we just be happy all the time it's like well there's another podcast on that yeah well no no because the first question is well what's the downside to positive emotion well there's no downside we

should be just as happy as we can be it's like no manic people humanity would be gone in a generation if there was no if there was just happy emotion nothing would get done nothing would get fixed and we'd make all sorts of we take all sorts of risks that would be catastrophic so yeah you think well you need people who say no god that's painful you need people who get in the way you need people who are orderly and for people who are entrepreneurial and expansive in their temperaments that's all like oh my god

those are prison walls but no they're not they're necessary structure and protection and then again don't be contemptuous of your damn sales and marketing people because you're bloody lucky that you've got them and they're rare people and that's also true of that set of skills that you might that's a set of skills you need to develop if you're if you're a creative person and an artist don't be contemptuous of that with your false romanticism yeah i shouldn't have to sell it it's it's it's a great product in and of itself and all i'm doing is

selling out yes like most people don't sell out because they never have the damn opportunity and so if you can manage the sales and then you think well i'm going to maintain my artistic purity despite the fact that you could manage the sales well then you're making an ethical decision but if you're not selling out because no one wants what you're doing that's no moral victory yeah well i mean some of the most successful artists in the world because i wrote a book called money and i've studied this in depth being a previous artist myself

so like commercially i made business work but commercially i couldn't make artwork but my business commercially has really benefited from my artistic side right um and you know i could say it's a shame i failed commercially in art but maybe that was brought me to who where i was but damien hirst tracey emin picasso um warhol all very commercially savvy yeah artists so you could argue till the cows come home if they're better or worse artists than others that's subjective isn't it but they embraced the commercial side of art and they will probably go down

in history so and well you know that's the thing too is that the there isn't a lot of difference or the boundaries between sales and marketing and communicating are are blurry it's like well you know people are also very skeptical for example of advertising and find it intrusive but you know if you actually want to buy something an advertisement is quite helpful so what people really don't like are badly targeted ads and you know the advertising people are trying to solve that problem but there but if you have done something brilliant and original and no

one knows about it and no one ever will well that might even be more of a catastrophe than never having done it at all because then you have this thing that's actually of value and you have to suffer with the fact that no one knows about it right no you have to conjoin that ability to produce creatively with the ability to communicate yeah and sales and marketing isn't that common part well that's the next complex problem and you know and people often who are artists they're they're also contemptuous of the commercial world well everything has

a price it's like well there's actually some real advantage to everything having a price you know because it helps you it helps you value your work in a in a cooperative endeavor and it also puts a limitation of sorts on you because you need limitations it's like well if you have an idea let's say you're creative you have a whole bunch of ideas it's like well which ideas should you pursue well one constraint you can use is something like if the idea that i'm interested in has absolutely no commercial viability then maybe i should put

it lower in the priority list because you need some mechanism to put things lower in the priority list one of our rules for for product development was that well we had to we had to like the idea it had to be compelling we had we wanted it not to do harm to people we wanted it to help people we wanted it to be scalable but then we also decided very early on that we weren't going to make things that wouldn't generate a profit because it was a constraint it's like well if we can't do all

those other things and make a profit it's a bad idea yeah so and and and that's that that's helpful if you have too many ideas and what people don't understand is profit is required to reinvest back into infrastructure for growth and everything else yeah and i used to be an artist and i had to buy the cheapest canvases with the cheapest paint and the cheapest tools because i had no money yeah you know harry's just bought you've just upgraded these cameras haven't you well if he was you know picking butts off off the floor and

going down kfc licking people's fingers for food no kidding no kidding well the other thing too is we could get the ethics about this right it's like well is there something wrong with with generating money it's like well it depends on what you're going to do with the money you know like if you're going to spend it all on hookers and cocaine then probably that's reprehensible but if you're going to still employs the hookers well commercials right the hookers might not think it's reprehensible i suppose neither do the cocaine growers but you know you can

you can argue that there are better and worse things that you could do with your money if you're guilty about making money then maybe you should think harder about what the hell you're going to do with the money because there's some good things you can do why you feel guilty about making money in the first place and where that comes from yeah yeah yeah and what's productive about you say well i don't want to be greedy it's like okay don't be greedy good rule but you know you have a family you could support them you

could invest the money in the community there's all sorts of positive things that you could do with your money if you were very very thoughtful about how you decided to spend it people didn't get it to jump in people don't get that mother teresa was basically a money launderer they just don't get this a lot of her money came from robert maxwell and you know a lot of people that would be reprehensibly evil to most of society but she would take money she didn't mind where it came from and then she would do her work

with said money yeah instead of being guilty about making money you could think hard about what yes i'll take the money do with it and do something useful with it and productive yeah that's a much and i would say that's also your response if you happen to be one of those people to whom money is disproportionately flowing right because you've started to become successful and you've hit that acceleration point where you're getting more because you already have then the ethical requirement isn't to be guilty about that but to think okay how can i use this

money which i have been bequeathed in the most responsible manner possible and that's a perfectly reasonable thing to think and you can do that with some error yeah so of course so we've got to start wrapping this up we've got to sort of wrap it up now all right then yeah sure okay okay yep you need a meaning to sustain you through life and most of that meaning is actually to be found and this goes back to the idea of of conscientiousness that we were talking about earlier is it's in the adoption of responsibility that

most people find the fundamental meanings in their life that's really worth knowing because you might ask well why should i be responsible the answer is well you need to do something meaningful because otherwise life suffering will make you bitter and bitter is only where you start it's not where you end so people might be interested in the book i also i told you about understandmyself.com where you can get your personality assessed quite rapidly that should be useful i also have this other program that your view listeners might be interested in at self authoring.com and that

is three programs one helps you write about your past life so that you can figure out how you got to where you are and where you are one helps you do an assessment of your virtues and and and faults so that you can capitalize on your virtues and rectify your faults and the last one which we've most thoroughly tested helps you develop a personal vision and create an implementable plan for that vision and we know that if university students do that for example that they're about 25 percent less likely to drop out of college so

and it's really useful for people to have a articulated and consciously developed vision for their life and a plan because then you're not buffeted around by the the winds of fate to quite such a degree and you need a plan you need a plan because you need goals and you need goals because it's in the pursuit of valued goals that almost everyone finds positive emotion so and that's a really useful thing to know and so what that also means is the more noble your goals which is the theme and 12 rules for life the higher

the probability that you'll be deeply engaged while you're pursuing them that's a justification for deep philosophy okay jordan thank you very much thanks a lot yeah you too thank you