Cut Out the Unproductive and Achieve Your Goals

Anita Brick: Hi, this is Anita Brick and welcome to CareerCast at Chicago Booth. To help you advance in your career. Today, we're delighted to be speaking to Peter Bregman. Peter is the author of many books. The one we're going to talk about today is called Four Seconds: All The Time You Need to Stop Counterproductive Habits and Get the Results You Want. Peter is the CEO of Bregman Partners, a firm that advises coaches leaders to take powerful and ambitious action.

His work is based on the notion that an organization, at its core, is a platform for talent. By unleashing that talent, focusing on business results, and aligning it with a compelling vision, both the individual and the organization thrive. Peter earned a B.A. from Princeton and an MBA from Columbia University, and there's lots of really great stuff on Peter's website, which is Peter bregman.com. Peter, thank you so much for making the time.

Peter Bregman: It's a real pleasure. It's nice to speak with you.

Anita Brick: And I must tell you, I love the fact that the book has 51 chapters and that I can get on the bus within the city and Chicago, and I can read a number of them before I get to my destination.

Peter Bregman: Glad that that was your experience on it. Thank you.

Anita Brick: Oh, yeah, it's funny because with each chapter I read, I'd like you more and more. So I'm really sorry.

Peter Bregman: That's a huge compliment. So thank you.

Anita Brick: So at a basic level, how can someone pause long enough in a world that never stops moving?

Peter Bregman: It's an interesting question because it's the only important question in a sense. The hardest part about it is the emotion of it. It's not that it's hard to pause. It's not hard to pause. The hard part is there are things moving past. And can we handle that? Meaning can you handle the feeling that there are things going on that you may not be participating in this disease?

That I joked about with my friends? FOMO the fear of missing out. You know, the sense that we don't have to move at the pace of the world. We do it because we're kind of running in that race. So, I mean, that's the first thing that I want to say is that the hardest part about pausing is the sort of emotional challenge of not running the race as fast as anybody else is in the race.

That's the hardest part. And then in terms of how you pause, I think it takes practice, actually. You know, I'm a big fan of meditation for a number of different reasons. But one of the reasons is because it gives me practice in pausing and not reacting. And so I'm practicing letting the world move without me and not jumping up and running to catch up. That turns out to be incredibly useful for helping us to be productive in the world.

Anita Brick: Got it. In addition to that, one of the executive MBA students said, thank you for writing the book. I have no time to think and I really mean it. What are 2 or 3? Maybe you give two more because you gave us one. Things that I can realistically do to create the time. By the way, in addition to school and work, I have two toddlers.

Peter Bregman: First of all, I like more power to you. It's great and your life is full. And you know, what I would say is make a decision and you make this decision up front. You know, in my book 18 minutes in that book, what I did was to offer people a way to regain their focus and reshape those around what matters most.

I asked people to basically be strategic and intentional about what they did in this book. In four seconds, I'm asking people to be strategic and intentional about how they do what they do. So I'm going to bring in a lesson for 18 minutes for this one, which is when you have 25 hours of things that you need to do and you only have, let's call it, if you're being smart and sleeping eight hours, which few of us do.

But let's say you have 16 hour waking hours in which you can schedule. Then you are basically going to a buffet with way more food than can fit in your stomach, and you have to make strategic and intentional decisions about what you're going to do and what you're going to not do. You know, one of the things I'm a big fan of is a not to do list.

I mean, you have to look at your life and you have to say yes. Time to think is important to me. I need to literally schedule that in. And there's a tremendous amount of evidence that points to the fact that if you decide when and where you're going to do something, you'll do it. And if you don't decide when and where you will do it, if there are important things for you to do instead of just hoping you get to it.

Be strategic and intentional and take them from your to do list and take them from your mind. In terms of saying like, I want time to think and schedule that time and put that on your calendar. In the end. There will be stuff left over. What I'm asking people to do is to be strategic and intentional about what's left over.

Do you want to leave stuff out that doesn't add value to your life? You will not get it all done. It's a big mess of time management. You won't get it all that. So you have to choose what's most important to get done and what you're willing to let go. And I would ask her or him to be strategic about what they're going to not do so that they have time to think.

Anita Brick: Got it. There was another question. This is a really interesting one. And I had a similar reaction when I was reading the book. And this person who is an evening student said in your book you differentiate between motivation and follow through. I see them as connected. How will separating them out make me more effective?

Peter Bregman: That's a great question. So here's the thing. They're connected, but they're complete opposites. Motivation is the conversation that goes on in your head because I really want to do this. This is important to me. I can do this. Or maybe motivation is thinking about why I care about this? Let me think about what I'm really getting.

This is a great example. I'm waking up and I'm running every morning because I'm motivated, because I really want to run a marathon, and that's important to me. I'm going to prove that to myself or whatever it is. You know, I'm coming to school, I'm doing my homework because I really want to get this degree, and I believe in what this degree is going to do for me eventually.

And that's motivation. Follow through is when you wake up in the morning and it's raining and it's 6:00 and you take a little look too much the night before and you're sitting there going, do I want to go for a run right now? And that's the point where I'm saying all of that talk that was going in your head, that was driving you to really want to do something.

This is the time. This is why I'm calling it the opposite. This is the time to shut down that you have already decided what you want to do in order to follow through on something. You can't be in the conversation about whether it's important to do it or not. If you've already decided it's important to do it or not, put that conversation to bed and then get out of bed and then go do your run. In some ways, motivation is great in terms of deciding on what you want to accomplish, but accomplishing it. It's all about solitude.

Anita Brick: Oh, I like that distinction. That's a really good distinction. Another one, and I had a similar reaction to this. One of our executive MBA students said, you have a pretty provocative stance on goal setting. I understand the incentives need to align to the outcomes you desire, but how can you not have goals to accomplish the important things in life?

Peter Bregman: There's a chapter in four seconds called Why the Pinto Blew Up. I'm guessing most of the students aren't going to remember Pinto. Pinto was this car that was the result of this big, hairy, audacious goal right behind Lee Iacocca that they would build a car under $20,000, under $2,000 by 1970. So they achieved that goal. Everyone worked super hard to achieve that goal, and everybody celebrated and champagne flowed into it.

But there was a cost, and the cost was when that car was rear ended, it blew up. It ignited. So why was that? Well, because they made their goal. But in order to make their goal, they had to submit a bunch of safety checks. Right? Or they chose to omit a bunch of safety checks. Otherwise we wouldn't have gotten it done in time and probably cost.

So there was a cost to that. There was a cost, a meeting that there's another example I give in the book to Ken O'Brien. He was a former New York Jets quarterback. He was throwing too many interceptions. He was given what seemed to be a pretty reasonable goal. Right? Throw fewer interceptions. And then, like what we often do with goals, he was incentive financially to throw fewer interceptions.

So what do you think he did? He threw fewer interceptions. It was great. It totally worked. And so you actually look at the specifics. The reason he threw fewer interceptions was because he threw fewer passes. Ultimately, his overall performance suffered even though we achieved this goal. We all know people and this is a good lesson. If you don't have a goal, they want to build their business.

You ask someone why they want to build their business. It's because you know they want free time. They want to have more freedom. They want to be connected to their families. They don't want to work for the man, whatever it is that they want to do. And they certainly want to create something really interesting and cool in the world.

But two years later, you talk to them and so many of them are miserable and they are distanced from their families. They're working too hard and yet they're achieving their business goals. What we often forget in pursuit of goals is the objective, that we're the driving force behind the goal in the first place. I don't think goals are terrible.

I don't think, you know, never set a goal. But I think we have to be so careful about how misleading we can be with our goals and how often we pursue the goals at the loss of everything else, even the reason we set the goals. So what I would say is, if you have a goal, I would put up a post-it note on your monitor. I would put the reason why that goal is so that you can look at that and go, wow, I'm achieving my goal, but I'm missing the whole point, and I want us to keep both of those things in mind. The why is super important.

Anita Brick: Absolutely. So another one, apparently you sparked a lot of things that people were like, really? You really mean this? So another person, this time a weekend MBA student, said, I don't really see the problem of expecting more of ourselves and others. It seems like setting lower expectations will lead to fewer achievements and a lower quality product overall. I'm interested in your thoughts on how to achieve the best without high expectations.

Peter Bregman: I think it's a great question and I understand the question. Like goals, I would look at what is the downside of high expectations? In my experience, the downside of high expectations is lack of productivity. So what happens when we pursue perfection? For example, with so many of us, I think we're going after perfection if we get paralyzed. So here's my question.

Back to that person, is it better to have a home run blog or an amazing blog? But because it's so amazing you're staying up all night, it's taking three weeks to produce it and you're putting all the pieces together to make sure it's really great. And then you put out what you think is a home blog, which, by the way, if there's something I've really learned in the world, it's that what you think is great is not necessarily what everybody else thinks is great.

And what you think isn't great isn't necessarily what other people think isn't great. So are we better off putting out one piece of work that we think is really the best thing we can put out there, or are we better off putting out 30 single, 30 good pieces? That maybe isn't the best thing we could possibly put out there, but we're learning and we're developing a world that doesn't reward perfection.

It rewards productivity. If you're going to be productive, you're going to be successful. And the more stuff you put out there in the world, the more willing you are to try something and experiment and maybe not have it be your best work, the more you'll discover what your best work really is, and the more chances you'll have to produce something that other people look at and say, wow, that's really amazing.

The answer is do 30 good ones in the amount of time you think you could do one that would meet your highest expectations, and by the 30th, it's going to be much better than the one you would have created in that amount of time. Good.

Anita Brick: So here's a related question. So the IT alum really liked your story about the kayak trip and preparation. That said, I have a tendency to over prepare. What are some guides to know that I have prepared enough?

Peter Bregman: It depends on what you're preparing for. I'm writing a speech. I could prepare days and I will feel unprepared. But if you said to me, you know what, you've got five minutes. Go out there and talk about it, and I promise you it will be better than if I prepare for it for a month. And it's kind of hard to know how to not over prepare.

I would say that if you look ahead of time, you know, if you pause just for a few moments to be able to say what's most important here, and am I prepared for that? But if you feel like you have the tendency to over prepare, I think you might want to just dial it down a little bit and see whether you feel better or worse, because maybe you think you're overprepared, but actually you're preparing just right for you.

Anita Brick: Got it? I think you only will know that after the fact. So you have to be courageous enough to experiment, too.

Peter Bregman: Yeah, and that's a huge belief that I have that we have to view our lives like an experiment. Failure happens and failure to scientists is great. That's great news. If the scientists have great news of an experiment failing. Why is it great? It's great news because it informs you. It gives you data. Now, if we just fail over and over and over and over again, and we don't take any data out of it, then it's kind of a useless exercise and just painful for no reason.

If we really live our lives like an experiment and we fail. And then after yourself, why? What went wrong? What would I do differently? We can ask those questions then. Failure is great because it's, you know, one step on the path to success.

Anita Brick: Okay, let's switch gears for a quick second. An MBA student asks, this is a very tricky one. I've been thinking about this too. I agree that we should be working from our sweet spot. That's what the person said. That said, I'm in a role that requires me to spend a growing amount of time turning around and potentially shrinking my organization and less about building a profitable business. I am much better at growing businesses than turning them around to that point, though. I can't quit my job and my company needs me to do the turnaround. How can I still work in my sweet spot within these constraints?

Peter Bregman: So there's a couple of things that come to mind for me. One is you might not be able to quit your job, but generally it's a bad idea to work too long outside of our sweet spot. This really is not your job. Then you have to either make it into your sweet spot, or you should find a way to do work.

That is a necessary step. But I would say that actually growing a business and shrinking your business is not that different. So if your sweet spot is really growing your business, remember the sweet spot is where you're really strong, where you show up most powerfully, the kinds of tasks that give you joy. Now there's a huge, vast emotional valley between growing a business and shrinking it.

No one is super exciting, fun aging. The other one is kind of depressing, potentially not necessarily the potential, but the skill to bear on that, to really know that people are engaged, harder to do in a shrinking business, and a great business, but they absolutely need to be engaged if you're going to make that work. The analytics of thinking about I have a strategy.

I pursue that strategy with specific tactics. I follow through other tactics in a way that has discipline to it. I look for the outcomes I'm trying to achieve and measure the current realistic activities that are going on against their potential to achieve those objectives. So all of that stuff, that's true whether you have a shrinking business or growing business, a lot of the sweet spot activity, you know, are the same are equally applied to growing a business or shrinking it.

The emotions of it are completely different. And that's where I would say, if that's what's driving you down, you really want to find ways to conduct in a way that builds your emotion. If you find it emotionally inspiring to grow a business inside and depressing to shrink it, then what are things that give you happy, inspiration?

Anita Brick: Engaged energy?.

Peter Bregman: And you have to do those things. Maybe it's going for a bike ride every day. Maybe it's connecting with other people. Maybe it's having real conversations, like not letting the fact that the business is shrinking get in the way of your ability to really connect and relate to the people in that business. You know, they're both elements of character.

I could say, look, I'm a fantastic parent when everything's going great, but when my kids are sad, I'm not such a good parent. So my sweet spot is being a parent to happy kids. You know, that's great. But actually the parent thing is kind of the same. The sweet spot of being a good parent is to really be attentive to the needs of those kids, and that flows whether they're, you know, happy or sad. And so some of that is a skill that needs to be learned as well.

Anita Brick: Well, and that's a really good point. The analogy you just use really has a nice parallel with a business. Whether you're growing a business or shrinking, turning around a business, you also need to know how to take care of the people, the business, and all the resources. And that's present in both. And maybe reorienting that way will, I mean, in addition to going on the bike ride, going on the run, having those condos maybe is a way to think about it. What's the bigger picture here? And in both cases, you have to take care of, again, the people, the resources, the strategy and all of that. And maybe that's a way to re-energize yourself. If you remember that you're doing that.

Peter Bregman: Exactly, exactly. Okay, cool.

Anita Brick: There was another question that I thought was kind of a fun one, and it came from an aging student. And he said, you seem to like the idea of being bored as a tool to spark creativity. I don't seem to have time for boredom. How would you suggest I sit it in?

Peter Bregman: So nobody has time for boredom? We live lives that do not have a lot of time for boredom, because we live lives that are completely packed. But I say like, do you ever watch television? If you work out, what are you doing at the same time as you are ready? Are you kind of watching a screen or you're reading or like, what are you doing when you drive for when you want, you immediately get on your phone and start doing something.

We kill our boredom in multitasking. That's how we kill boredom. And we know that multitasking doesn't work, right? I mean, literally it doesn't work. People switch, right? It does. Yeah. What I would suggest is look for those areas in your life where you're doing more than one thing at a time. And in those areas, that's probably the key to finding the kind of boredom I'm talking about. But we're very quick to waste that kind of boredom so that we're not for it. And yet it's in those moments that we have all of our brilliance comes out first.

Anita Brick: A really good point. And it made me think, this may sound really silly, but one of the ways I work out is I hula hoop. But hula hooping is kind of boring. I mean, can you just like, go around and around and around? I have a satellite and so I flit back and forth between music and programming, and I should probably just shut the TV off and just hula hoop, because I might get some inspiration from that.

Peter Bregman: Yeah. I'd like to think you'll soon learn about yourself, because as you start little things in the first minute, you're gonna be like, seriously, if I turn on the TV or do something, and then if you allow yourself to move through there, something else will be on the other side. But you have to go into that sort of slight state where your mind starts to wander. If your mind is totally focused on and latches onto this idea, well, this is boring. Rather boring than you call it. I can get here.

Anita Brick: All right, so I'll keep that in mind. And those of you listening, some good ideas, that goes along with a question from an alum. And he said, you talk about quote unquote doing nothing to solve a problem or issue. How does one filter out when someone should be doing nothing versus that? Maybe I'm avoiding an issue that should be addressed directly.

Peter Bregman: You know, it's a great question. These are all really good questions. I don't know that there's a particular rule of thumb to that. Meaning, I think that usually people try stuff anyway, and when it doesn't work, I tell the story in the book about I had tendinitis and I tried everything. And at that point, that was when my physician, who also happened to my brother, said, I think you should do nothing and I better get better at it.

And he was right. One sign that doing nothing might work is when everything else fails. All the other stuff that you're trying to do isn't giving you the outcome that you're looking for, that you want. Another is when you're thinking through the outcome factor, doing nothing into the process of outcome. I don't just think about how I could choose these three things. I could choose to have that conversation, or do that thing, or speak with that person, and then just choose one of those three. Throw in a fourth option as you think through your strategy about how to deal with something. And that fourth option is doing nothing and kind of evaluating that as a possibility and what it might get you.

Anita Brick: That sounds good. So an alarm set in my corporate culture and in my company's corporate culture, collaboration is all caps huge. This means getting a project to the entire team. While the team is very helpful, resourceful and smart, gathering all the feedback can be really challenging. What is your advice on how to include others in the process without losing myself and my point of view on how things should be implemented?

Peter Bregman: This is an important question, and it's an important question because we waste a tremendous amount of time on collaboration. I think collaboration is really important, but I also think we do it poorly oftentimes. And you know, the alarm is asking just the right question. The key to answering this is in the dynamic between freedom and boundaries. If you say, here's the project, what do you think?

You're going to waste a lot of time in collaboration because a lot of people are going to think about a lot of things. But if you say, here's the project, these are the things that we've decided we're doing this, this, and this and this. I would love your input in these two pieces. And this is what I want to know.

You create the boundaries you're basically defining and this is how I'm approaching it. These are the things that we're doing. And I want your perspective to enhance these pieces of it. You're basically directing and focusing the collaboration in a very kind of particular way that's going to draw out the kind of feedback that you're looking for, instead of opening up the whole thing and saying, everybody make it a free for all, which will suck up a lot of time, that's good.

Anita Brick: You're also big on failing, and the idea of failing. So an alum said, I am afraid of failing in my startup. You mentioned that failure can be a relief. How can I experience relief without tanking my business?

Peter Bregman: You don't put all your eggs in the particular risk that you're taking. On the one hand, if you're just starting out of business, don't put all your money in your business. I generally don't think that's a good idea. I think you should have a backup plan for pretty much everything. The problem is when we can no longer fail, when you feel so much pressure that failing would destroy you, you've taken too many risks that we need to use failure as part of our process of learning.

And what that means is that you have to have the opportunity to fail, which means that you can't get everything on the same course because then you have no opportunity to find it. You can be too stressed out in the fall anyway. Maybe I'm being disheartening and maybe there's a chance that you're going to succeed, but I think the more fearful you are at failure, the tighter you'll be, the more mistakes will end up making things more needy. You'll feel for other people, and they're not going to want to do business with you. My biggest suggestion is to create an environment that makes it less critical if you fail.

Anita Brick: Well, and it makes sense. I mean, I'm sure at Columbia you talked about this. You need to have diversity. You have to diversify whatever your portfolio is, whether it is your skill set or your financial portfolio. Time for at least two more quick questions.

Peter Bregman: Sure, absolutely.

Anita Brick: I'm not sure if the person read your book or not, but you talk about returning an iPad not because of the quality of the product, but it relates directly to this question. On the weekend, students said portable computing technologies such as the iPad are great tools for productivity activities, but sometimes they can create a distraction and for me, a distraction while I'm working other than exerting greater self-control. Do you have any tips on how to best utilize such technologies without being consumed by them?

Peter Bregman: I might be the wrong person to ask questions from. I'm just really bad at it. I am so easily seduced. It is so easy when I have something hard to do or even nothing to do. That's like super hard, which is kind of boring to turn on a device and watch an episode of scandal. I mean, it's just too tempting.

I should let readers know that I eventually bought an iPad mini, and I now keep that iPad mini just for my workouts, so I have my workouts on it. And by the way, what I mean by workouts is to watch television. I put my workouts on the iPad, and then I bring them down to my gym and I follow. The workout on the iPhone was.

Anita Brick: Good idea.

Peter Bregman: But ultimately, if you are someone who is weak like me and you are, get caught up in that kind of stuff. I think the best way to deal with it is not to use it.

Anita Brick: Finally, I like to wrap up with three takeaways. What are three things that a person can do beginning today? To cut out the unproductive and help them drive to achieve the important goals?

Peter Bregman: Let me give you a three step process. In terms of that, which is, you know, we haven't even talked about the idea of four seconds or the idea of four seconds. Is that enough time that it takes to take a deep breath and it's enough time for the stimulus that usually goes to your amygdala. So usually when something happens, someone yells at someone, you know, we're worried about something. We jump into a conversation as a stimulus to our amygdala.

It's the reptilian part of our brain. It's the emotional part that actually thinks that there's a sabertooth tiger in front of us when it's just really my boss yelling at me. And that's the part that I react to from the fight in flight. The stimulus goes there. After that, It's actually linear. After it goes there, it continues on. If it has enough time uninterrupted, it continues on to the prefrontal cortex, which is the part of my brain that thinks and it's rational and that's logical, and that's the part of the brain you want making decisions.

Well, it takes about 1 to 2 seconds for the stimulus to get to that part of your brain. I felt like I was being generous when I said for a second. So my three step process would be a moment of awareness. That's step one, just one moment of awareness. And you can get that from a deep breath, from slowing down, from asking your question like, what is the outcome I want in this situation?

That's one of the most productive things that you can do is to ask the question, what is the outcome I'm going for? So many of us just work without asking that question, but we just do what comes to us without thinking about the outcome that we're going for. So what is the outcome? Going for? One is a moment of awareness.

Two is the ability to resist urges. That's an incredibly productive skill. If you can resist urges, then you're going to make smarter decisions. And like I said, meditation really helps us to do that. It develops that muscle. And then there is a replacement behavior. So in the moment, if I have a moment of awareness, I resist my urge to do the thing that's unproductive.

And I have a replacement behavior. There's another behavior that I think of that will be more effective than the one. I just have a natural urge for knee jerk reactions. Do I have a replacement behavior that will be useful? So, for example, if I disagree with someone, my gut is to argue with them, right? That's a lot of our guts.

If we disagree with someone they may be depressed. Have a moment of awareness. Arguing with someone never works. Never ever, ever works. reinforces the position that the other person has. They get defensive. They entrenched themselves in what they believed before. So you pause for that moment of awareness, you resist the urge to argue, and then you replace it.

And the book is filled with replacements. Oh, yeah. I mean, the book is all about like, instead of this, do that and then replace that behavior in terms of arguing is to listen. Listening is actually counterintuitive if you're trying to change perspectives, but much more useful in changing your perspective, then speaking in some ways, eventually you speak, but you soften them.

You understand their perspective. You may actually shift your perspective, but you become much more productive. So that's what you want. You want a moment of awareness. You want an ability to resist urges, and then ultimately you want replacement behaviors that are going to end up being more productive in that moment.

Anita Brick: Great. And I would add a fourth not to insinuate what else, but I would add a fourth. Yeah. And you talk about a lot in the book is practice because all of this takes practice and it gets easier and easier over time if we practice a little bit at a time.

Peter Bregman: I agree, I think that's great.

Anita Brick: Okay, great. This was wonderful. Thank you so very much. Again. Wish you all the best with four seconds and I know you have a lot of stuff on your website. We appreciate the way you shared it. Peter Bregman is Peterbregman.com. Thanks again.

Peter Bregman: Anita, thank you so much. It's a pleasure speaking with you.

Anita Brick: And thank you all for listening. This is Anita Brick with CareerCast at Chicago Booth. Keep advancing.