Do you want to know the biggest mistake people have when
it comes to AI or AI tools?
I invited Silicon valley legend, Kevin cereus onto the show today.
He's the guy to help actually pioneer Siri.
Alexa and a whole bunch of other virtual agent
type software like that.
He holds a 94 patents.
What he's doing with AI is incredible in terms of productivity.
He breaks down how he's the most productive ever, and
the way that he does things.
But what he says is most of us are just playing around.
We're just playing around with all this stuff, but
here's a real shocker.
He actually claims that success, massive success.
Doesn't just come from the technology at all.
It actually comes from finding joy in everything
that you do every single day.
All the way, as far as like firing people, if you got to
do that, there is joy in that.
So he breaks down the balance of joy and technology and how you
can be the most productive, the most effective and the most joyful
throughout the whole process.
So let's get into it with Kevin.
All right, Kevin, we're doing this.
I appreciate you taking the time I don't know how you have the time but
uh Probably get that all the time.
You're kind of accomplished in in the number of patents He said
94 patents mainly in technology AI you've been what in the ground
floor with things like Siri and Alexa and one star like Before
AI and all this stuff really took off or, you know, this kind
of smart, intelligent software.
Um, how do you have the time?
Hmm.
Well, uh, it's, it's very interesting.
I, I, I meet a lot of people now who are really trying
to focus on monotasking and doing one thing at a time.
I actually multitask quite well.
Now I'm not going to do emails in the middle of A podcast, right?
Cause I got to be focused on this, but generally, uh, look,
there's only so many hours in the day and, um, uh, regardless
of what Elan says, that he can get by on three hours of sleep
or whatever, actually, you just don't think well on three hours
of sleep after a while, right?
And humans need.
Pick your poison seven or eight hours of sleep to actually function
well and have good brain health.
And so you've got to have good brain health.
You've got to sleep, but then you've got to make your working
hours, whatever those are, if it's four hours a day, if it's
eight hours a day, if it's 12 hours a day, they have to be
incredibly productive, right?
I get 350 emails a day.
By the end of the day, they have to be gone.
That's my filing system, right?
They have to be cleared out.
I have no choice.
And so, you know, if you think about that, each one can't get a
minute or there's not enough time, each one's got to have seconds
and you have to know what the response is and you have to be
quick, you have to use the tools.
I mean, there's no question AI, certainly LLMs, uh, transformers,
et cetera, chat, GPT, GPT, four.
Oh, Gemini, uh, co pilot has made me immensely more productive.
And, and I don't play with them.
I use them.
I use every tool at my disposal.
You know what?
Just like, um, why would I do math when I have Excel?
Like I, I have a tool here.
It does that.
Could I do long division of my head?
Yes.
Why would I want to, you know, let's, let's use
the tools that are given.
And so I look, you can't get the time back.
You got to use every hour and every minute.
To, to its fullest.
And, and I, um, that is what I do.
So I'm sort of just on absolute monger and I'm
multitasking three things.
And my poor wife, she'll come in and say, Hey, Kevin, I
need to ask you something.
No, I'm not quite like that, but you know, it's like, ah,
I
how, yeah,
there were eight things and I don't know where they are anymore.
Where do I restart?
Right.
And, um, so that's, what's hard on people around you is like the
interruptions are, are challenging.
yes, they are.
you're going to do a lot in life.
You're going to have to multitask or you will never get them done.
That is a good point because you hear the, the, yeah, the, the
sayings of like multitasking.
It doesn't work.
It's not good for you.
Not getting full attention, whatever it might be.
But yeah, look at folks like Elon, obviously you guys operate
differently, but, um, and I would love to get into that in a little
bit too, but the fact that.
Yeah, it's time.
It's, it's pure time and you're not getting that back.
You need to expand time and now we're living in this age with tools,
That's right.
Well, Elon and I probably operate, um, similarly in many, in many ways.
I've, I've met a lot, uh, many times and we've had great conversations.
Look, I don't necessarily agree with everything he's doing, and that
may be politically and other things and the way he's running Twitter,
and I might do that differently.
But that said, he is a heavy multitasker.
And, uh, and he is a multitasker across multiple fields, as you know.
And, um, he does one thing that I do, which is I am not afraid to
learn a new field regardless of age.
So I don't have to be a rocket scientist today, but if I was
hired to go in and run a team, a new team to get a rocket to
Pluto, I'm making it up, right?
I go, okay, well.
Let's, let's learn the physics around this, right?
I don't have to build every part of an engine myself, but
I can understand the physics, uh, literally in weeks.
I can understand the basic physics of how this works.
I can understand what people have done in the past.
I can understand that to get to Pluto, I need an
ion engine or something.
I need to, I need to get a lot closer to the speed of light than
we're, than we have been, right?
Because I don't want to take 28 years to get there.
That's not, not completely useful.
And, um, and then, you know, it's just math and don't
break the laws of physics.
So when I approached, um, you know, I have patents in AI.
I also have patents in soundproof drywall.
People go, you made soundproof drywall.
You invented some drywall.
I did and higher value windows and a bunch of other
things and auctions and.
How did you do that?
Well, there was a real problem and a real pain point.
The pain point was people could hear through walls in hotels and motels,
and they could hear through walls in apartments and in condos and in
townhomes, and that should be fixed.
How can we fix that?
So I did a lot of research on what had worked and what
hadn't worked, and virtually nothing practically had worked.
And then, uh, I stumbled upon some ways to convert Acoustic energy and
vibrational energy to heat energy.
Um, that's used for bridges and it's used for disc drives and it's
used for all kinds of other things.
I go, could I apply this concept to a wall and then it's just
physics, it's just math, and then you learn the math and you realize
that nobody else has ever done this before and there's no patents in
the field and so, okay, you invent soundproof drywall and it turns
out it works and nobody thinks it works because they go, well, it
weighs the same as regular drywall.
Yes, but it works.
Well, and then I had people say, well, you got these lab reports.
You must've paid off the lab.
Well, we paid the lab because they don't work for free.
Well, see, they took money.
Well, come on.
So these are nationally accredited labs that you go to, by the way, to.
To prove that, you know, you're reducing sound and we
built walls that could reduce sound by more than 20 DB going
from one side to the other.
I'm super proud of that, that work.
And today that's a multi billion dollar product line.
It goes in every hotel and motel and condo and town home, and
nobody would build without that.
Right.
Uh, so, so, uh, um, so, you know, solve real problems, uh,
and you have to, your mind has to be open to see the problems.
and open to solve the problem.
So I think in that way, you'll find a lot of people
like Ilan and others.
I think Bill Gates was this way, certainly Steve Jobs.
Find a real problem that people are willing to pay for
and then attempt to become a relative expert in that field.
You don't have to be the expert, but you're going to have to be
a relative expert in that field.
And Not be afraid of that polymath thing, you know, they use the term.
Oh polymath He knows so many things about so many fields.
Well, I just took the time to go learn it I you know, I can read
every patent in the field in probably, you know, three weeks.
So just go read them
what's your approach then?
Because so folks listening, you know, and, and they might be
having excuses of age or time or whatever, don't know the tools,
the tech as well as Kevin does, you know, what's your approach
to those folks or what would you
tell them?
look, I think people who say well i'm just too old to learn
anything new Someone's going to yell at me for saying this.
Probably you're too lazy to learn anything new or you don't want to
learn anything new and that's okay.
Like I'm not beating that up.
I think a lot would beat it up and say, wow, you know, but if
that's the life you want, great.
I mean, there are many people who say, look, the life I
want is to go play golf.
God bless.
I like, I have no judgment on that, right?
It's just not my thing.
My thing is to continuously learn.
I read technology stuff, right?
Voraciously, even to just keep up in the AI field.
I can't keep up.
There's too much, too many publications every single day
that I cannot read all of them.
Many of them are at such a technical depth that I would have to spend two
days to really dig into that, but I don't have two days for one paper.
I have to get a summary of it.
I have to understand what they did.
I don't need to understand all of the math.
I need to understand someone else does understand all that math,
and then I need to move the next thing and say, Okay, I understand
now that this is available to me and I can apply it right.
You can learn practically any field you want.
Now, I have a degree in engineering that helped me, right?
So I was all my brain was already thinking about physics and
electrons and computer science and coding and like from a young age.
So I mean, I think if you but if I had a degree in
business, what would I do?
I'd say great.
There are all kinds of business models, business methods,
marketing methods, marketing tools, sales tools that I could
learn throughout my life and get better at every single one.
So still there's value in learning.
You might not jump and learn physics.
That might be a big jump, but that's okay.
There's other things you can learn that are applicable to every field.
it's probably based off of your foundation, whatever understanding
you already have or interest.
Yeah.
Oh, or interest.
Right.
That's right.
But lifelong learning, it's a, it's a good thing.
It didn't stop when you went to college.
It didn't stop when you went to high school.
Um, it shouldn't stop, but I honor those who say not
for me, not my lifestyle.
Fine.
They're probably not listening to your show.
That's probably
not your audience, right?
Your audience says, I guess I have to be a lifelong learner.
Yes, you do.
And, and, and as much as you know, here's the interesting
thing, even like CEOs, right?
Well, I know so much about marketing because in my last company, great.
But every six months there are new tools and changes in the way
we market in the algorithms that are promoting or not promoting
your, your posts, et cetera.
I mean, look, if this was.
20 something years ago, the idea of building entire companies
around social media marketing online was on no such thing.
You, you'd still run newspaper ads and TV ads or something.
And today you wouldn't bother with that at all.
That's a, probably a waste of money.
And instead you're working the algorithms of Facebook or
Instagram or, or Tik TOK or, or LinkedIn, if it's a business,
the business sale, right?
Right.
And those are the tools you use.
And so you have to be a completely different marketer today and use a
set of technology tools to monitor all those and give you a B test and
give you the results every morning.
It changed the ads.
And that's what we do.
Or if they're not ads, their posts or their news articles
or their, their human interest stories, or however you're
going to market what you have
And, and staying up with the times in your domain and just
what data in really understanding what that is, synthesizing
and doing something about it.
or don't, or fall behind in your field.
And that's okay.
So I'm done.
I want to golf the rest of my
life.
I want
to.
that's totally,
And you know, they're not listening to your show, as I said.
So we have a, we have a great audience here that
wants to hear this stuff.
So
Yeah.
And there's, there's something that I've been, you know, it's
so fascinating because, you know, I coach, I train, do some
fractional work on AI for a lot of businesses and it's great
summer tapped in, but I know the large majority of people have no
clue what's even possible with.
AI or technology right now, let alone what's coming in
the next handful of years.
And, you know, I want to get your, your perspective of this because
I've really found, I'm like, one of the things that excites me with this
time is like, I can be the bridge.
And I think all of us who are tapped in can be the bridge to
others who might not be listening to the show or tapped in because
I genuinely think going into the future, there's articles published.
I was just reading one last night.
Um, from Financial Times, it was, it was about like the shrinking
population, but because of that, you know, the, the quality of life
and, and the value of things, it's just going to be like three X times
or more productivity required.
All these other things.
So I'm curious of your thoughts on
Yeah.
So people are always, you know, I'm a keynote speaker.
I do, I don't know, 40 plus keynotes a year, right.
All around the world.
A lot of them on AI and a lot of them on the choice success cycle.
So we'll talk about both a little bit.
But in the AI world, um, I've been in the applied AI
world for about 25 years.
That means I am applying the best algorithms to real
problems that is different than developing the best algorithms.
Uh, you know, I didn't develop the transformer, but I know how
to use the transformer variety of ways that other people
probably haven't thought of.
Right.
So when you project out.
I can see where we are in five years.
We are going to have humanoid robots.
These robots just in 20, in 2024 started to learn on their own,
uh, using reinforcement learning.
We did not have that before we were coding them with rules.
It was a rules based technology today.
They can learn to brew coffee on their own because they sit there for
three days and spill the coffee all over the place, but eventually they
learn how to do it right and they.
And they build a neural net around that, right?
And so we can see that there will be, of course, software agents
working for us, much agentic, a I much better than they have been
through, say, with, say, R. P. A. Robotic process automation.
We can see that we will want to interface with our physical world.
So humanoid robots Make complete sense.
The there are several companies really driving the cost of those
way down and again, training with reinforcement learning.
So I can see we're on a trajectory for kind of 2030.
You might have a humanoid robot in your home, and we all want
someone actually who at least Cleans and does the laundry, right?
I mean, and so some people would say, well, why does
it have to be humanoid?
Because we built our homes for humans.
They're not built for some other kind of thing.
They're like to open a refrigerator door.
If you look at where the handle is, you actually need
an arm and a hand to do so.
Without one.
It's, it's not, it's not possible.
You can't have some little robot on the floor, somehow open it.
You'd have to change every appliance, right?
Our ovens are at a certain, certain height.
Our stove is at a certain height.
So you need sort of a. Call it a five foot seven humanoid
robot that interfaces in your kitchen and with your laundry.
And so that's going to happen.
And if I miss this by a year or two, maybe it's not 2030
and maybe it's 2034, right?
Or maybe it's 2028.
That is an exciting thing, and some people are gonna be scared of it.
I am not scared.
I mean, I can't wait, right?
Do the tasks I don't want to do.
And this is what we're doing already with.
GPT 4, ChatGPT, Copilot, it's what we're doing at work, right?
We're starting to offload the tasks that we're not good at.
And by doing so, that is expanding our brain.
So, I use GPT 4.
0 for ideation.
All the time.
So I go, I have this problem.
I have three ideas about it.
Give me seven more.
Woom.
Not all of them are good, but all of them are interesting.
And some of them are go, Oh, I would have never thought of that.
I mean, I'm, I would have thought of it three days from
now when the project was over.
Right?
So all of a sudden I have a hundred brain power.
I can, I can multiply my brain by a hundred X. If I want to, I
can write 52 blog posts today.
Instead of writing them over the year.
And I'm done with that task for the year.
This is brilliant.
And with more people in the U S anyway, retiring that are coming
into the, then are coming in the workforce for us to double
the size of our revenue of our companies, it used to be, we
just hire twice as many people.
Well, there aren't twice as many to hire.
So now we're going to have to do it another way.
We all have to become probably twice as productive over the next
five to 10 years as we've been.
And we already have measurements showing that we can at least
achieve that if not more.
So I think it's the most exciting time to be alive.
It's the most exciting time to be in technology.
it's the most exciting time, arguably.
To start a company because you can start it with less people and you
can leverage, um, large language models and multimodals to do some of
the work, a lot of the work for you.
You don't, I mean.
Look my presentations in keynotes.
I used to hire out an illustrator who do these great illustrations
Now I just get that from a multimodal and it you know,
it draws for me It gives me six or eight of these things.
I put them in I'm done like in a minute not two weeks I'm done
in a minute and it didn't cost me fifteen hundred dollars.
It cost me a dollar
any style you want.
Yep,
any style you want
that's it.
And, and what you're talking about.
Yeah, it's awesome.
And I've done the whole 52 weeks of blog, pose, email, social.
It's so simple.
Once you get your head wrapped around the process.
Even in Riverside, we're on Riverside right now, which
is a podcasting platform for those who don't know.
And, uh, Riverside automatically, as you know, we'll transcribe this.
To the two of us, and then it will summarize it and it'll do
so in a matter of minutes, and it used to take you personally,
if you were doing it before they had that technology, to do it.
Hours, you know, hours and hours and hours was the painful, you
know, and I got to summarize it.
Here's the point.
Maybe you take notes through it.
I don't do any, nobody does that anymore.
It just does this for us.
So what a, what a great thing it took.
It lets you do what you want to do better and took away that
sort of grunt work that, or you were handing that off to someone.
We often handed it off
to,
you know, someone who worked for the producer.
Right.
Yeah.
So it's, it's crazy.
I mean, it wasn't even that long ago going to places like rev.
com to get everything done, you know, you're like, I can get it
done and, uh, you know, get it back tomorrow or in a few hours.
I thought that was quick.
Well, I used to go to Upwork before that because you'd hand it off to
someone in like Uruguay who, who would listen and try to summarize.
And you know, I, no, I have a machine that does it now for
free in a matter of minutes.
This is good.
So I'm sorry for the person Uruguay who isn't doing that work anymore.
And we like Uruguay.
I'm not picking a Uruguay, but,
but, but it, you know, it's done.
So these are great tools.
Just like Excel is a great tool.
And the point here is it's the person in Uruguay or elsewhere
is probably found something else.
And if they're staying up with the technology and what's
possible opportunity wise.
That's why I keep thinking of this concept of being a bridge,
like communicate what's possible to folks who will listen.
And hopefully that conspires other ideas or people that
keep talking about it.
So then, you know, the folks that might be out of work or a
little complacent, whatever it might be, rally them up, you
know, like get, get behind this.
So we can actually boost all that productivity.
one of the things I say to people, I think you'll
use this is stop playing.
So I'm doing keynote speeches.
How many people have used chat?
GBT, right?
Everybody raises their hand, right?
How many people have played with it?
Everybody raised their hand.
How many people have used it for real work on a
consistent daily basis?
Like three hands go up.
We go.
Stop playing.
Just stop playing.
Pick some tasks and say, I'm going to do this with
this as my assistant.
I'm going to get it done with this as my assistant.
Cause when you start doing real work and you do that real work every
single day, you start to find real work to do and expand your brain.
Otherwise you go, well, I played with it and I tried
this, that didn't like it.
You know, we don't play with our tools.
We work with these tools to get actual work done.
So go get actual tasks done.
Like let's write a blog post.
Let's write a blog post.
Okay.
What's it about?
What do I want it to be about?
Where can it get more information?
Well, there's some information on our website.
Great.
Tie it to your website, tie it to your page, you know, et cetera.
So do real work.
Stop
Well, there you go.
That's the homework for anyone watching or listening.
Go do, do that blog post, write that email, one of those two.
That's all
right.
By
the way.
You
use that to respond to an email, like you get an email from
a client or you get an email and you go, I could respond.
I'm going to spend a half an hour stewing on this and it's
not going to be that good.
Literally take this, put it in there and say, I need a response to that.
Keeps the customer happy, brings them back to me.
Uh, you know, it's in the voice of me and you know, blah, blah, blah.
And you go, Oh, I couldn't have written it that well.
It rhymed serious.
And then you may edit a few words or edit a few things.
You might take a sentence out, but still you go, I, I, I'm sorry.
I could not, I w I would have taken me a week to think of that.
There's a, there's a mental model that we train on a
buddy Brad Costanzo came up with it, but it's a 10 80 10.
It's like you start with the idea or whatever that initial
prompt thing, whatever it is.
Chad, GBT or said AI LLM will do the 80 percent heavy lift.
And then you're the, you're the human that takes
right.
That's right.
You see, it's still your look.
It's still your work.
That's the interesting thing.
You initiated it.
You read it, you edited it, and then you posted
it or sent it or whatever.
So it still reflects what you want to reflect.
But, like I like to say, unless you were, I was not,
I was not an English major.
Not an English major.
ChatGBT is an English major.
So I now have an English major helping me.
every moment of the day.
And so my English is much better.
My language is much better.
The, the fluidity, the meaning, you know, the, the emotion
that, that whatever I want to come out, I want this one to be
much more emotional because I want to show it from the heart.
So an English major would know how to write that kind of prose.
Now I can write like an English major.
It's still me.
I've still, these are the words I want to say, but I
couldn't have thought of them.
Without sitting there stewing for a week.
I'm not an English major, right?
So look at that's that's another way to look at it
I love it.
Yeah.
If you want to write like Hemingway, well, guess what?
Prompted to do such
Absolutely, right like Hemingway boom
done.
Well, all right.
So everybody stop playing, go do the, do the work
and just spend 10 minutes.
You'll, you'll figure it out.
Guaranteed.
And and the longer the prompt the larger the prompt the more
you give it the better, right?
Most of these can take in 2000 words now, right huge huge prompts
So the more you tell it the more you give it including hey, I wrote
this blog post It's 800 words.
Rewrite it for me to get more views.
Boom.
And you go, Oh, that's way better than what I wrote, but
it's still what, what you wrote sent through an English majors
brain that cleaned it up.
And by the way, we used to pay people to do that.
So I would always write a blog post and then I'd send it out
to a blog post expert who would rewrite it and use prose that I
couldn't write in sentences and you know, that I wouldn't have
thought of it's still my ideas.
But they were just really good at writing it in a better way.
Now I have a machine that does the same and that poor
person I know is out of work.
And I apologize for that.
Well, for now, you know, or maybe
Well, she's actually using the tools herself and selling.
You know, doing what she's doing now at a lower cost,
but doing more of them.
And you know, it all works out.
And that right there is the key.
You know, it's like she found a hack or not a hack, but just a
way to be more productive, give
more value.
That's
the point.
Yeah.
Love it.
Um, and not going to lie a lot of the podcast here, like
the, the hooks that I'll put at the front or the intros of
these, guess what I'm doing.
I'm putting the transcription into clod or chat GPT.
I have a whole template project on what are the best books.
It gives me like 10 to choose from.
I pick one and then modify and make it my own.
It's
Yeah.
Well, you have to, why would you, as you know, there's some formulas
to use on say LinkedIn that the algorithms right now are, are
they, they move to the top and they give you more views, right?
I cannot easily write within that formulaic.
Thing, but I can tell chat or GPT four to do it and they'll go, sure,
I'll take what you wrote and put it into that formula so that you
get the maximum number of views.
And when I use that, I actually get about four times the
number of views than if I did it myself, even though.
My English isn't too bad.
It's just not as good as the English major that knows the formula.
So I shouldn't bother to do what I shouldn't do.
All
And, uh, we can keep going into the rabbit hole here.
Cause I'm like,
But there's more, there's more to talk about in the joy success
cycle.
Absolutely.
And that's where I was going to pin it to is because everything that
you do, and this is where I think my takeaway I was, I was learning about
you, Kevin, and knowing that the joy of success is this piece of work
that you're working on currently.
Uh, maybe by the time someone finds this, it's already out.
You should go get it wherever that will be.
Um,
Someday there'll be a book.
This will probably be out before that, but
yeah.
So the joy of success.
I mean, so Why joy?
What is it in your eyes?
But also I'm thinking, you know, in the context of your career,
and I know I haven't even covered nearly everything you've done, but
the patents to the, the different companies you've been a part of
and technology and most fast moving places, you know, our industries.
How does joy wrap into all of that?
And
Well, look, there's plenty of books on happiness and how
to be happy and how to be, uh, that isn't this right.
What I've done is I've said in order to be the most
successful you can be, You need to have joy at every moment.
So joy is intimately tied to success.
And this really came out of people asking me, why is that
you're so bubbly and joyful.
And, and, and, and by the way, why is it that you have 94 pens?
And why is it that you can find all these, all these pain points?
And why is it that your mind is open enough to see those?
I go, well, it turns out they are tied together.
They're completely, and the joy success cycle is the more
joy, the more success, the less joy, the less success.
And once you tie those together and you realize they're important,
you start to look at every moment of your day in a different way.
Now, the way we score that in the book and we teach people
how to do this is what we call the positive quotient, right?
So how many positive thoughts did you have?
And you keep adding points for that and you want to stay at 10.
So great.
And anytime you have a negative thought or a complaint,
Internal or external complaint.
And humans love to complain.
So this is a very important thing.
You take the score away.
You take one point away, right?
So let's say you get up in the morning.
You go, Oh, my knees hurt.
Minus one.
You say you're starting with in from the day, the start
Why?
Even if you start at five, let's say you start at neutral
or you start in the middle.
All of a sudden you're minus one.
Now you're at four less, less chance of success that day.
Then you go and you get some breakfast.
You go, Oh, I'm out of cereal.
What an idiot I am.
Now you're at three and then you go, Oh, look at this.
They have to fire someone.
I hate that.
Okay.
Now you're at two.
Okay.
If you go tomorrow, here's, here's the goal for
your listeners tomorrow.
I want you to wake up and count.
The number of complaints or negatives you have internal or
external throughout the day, the number of everything, every
single one, right in a normal day.
And remember, we're not talking about, you know, a death
in the family and cancer.
That's not what we mean here.
We mean your normal day, right?
So the normal day we have a list of things to do and things come at you
and some of them are new and some of them are surprises and some, you
know, whatever weather, whatever.
So a normal day, if you count them, you're going to find most most
Americans have over 100 complaints.
Yeah.
All day, either external or internal.
It's very easy to get there.
It's a few an hour.
All of a sudden you add up to over a hundred a day.
And at the end of that day, you go, I had no idea I
had 112 complaints a day.
No wonder I'm not meeting all my goals.
And no wonder my mind isn't open to see some of these opportunities.
Well, because you're down in the gutter and you're trying to dig
yourself out of complaintville.
So
And once you're in complete, you know, too, like it
goes deeper, easier.
Right?
Like
well, you, you, yeah, you have these joy killers and it just
keeps killing you and killing you and killing you, right.
Just takes away and takes away and takes away.
So, um, that's fear and it's stress and burnout.
And you get all those things happening because you're
down in this Terrible cycle that took you into zero.
Now, what happens if you got up the next morning, the following morning,
right, two days from now, and you say, okay, Kevin said I have to
limit my complaints or negatives or whatever, right, to one a day.
You still get one, but only one, because I live by this.
I really try very hard to keep it at one.
So you get up.
Of course, you're not thinking yet.
You go, oh, oh, geez, my back hurts this morning.
that's your one.
That's your one.
Now, this is an exercise in mental control, is the whole point.
Because once you're counting, you go, I already used my one.
And I, and I blew it.
I gave it away on something stupid.
So, now I have none left for the entire day.
And so, All of my tasks.
So you look at your task list.
I like to make task list sometimes the night before,
often the night before.
I like to make a test.
They say, here's the 10 things I have to do today.
And numbers, you know, number three is fire bill, you know, whatever.
And because you do that as leaders, right?
You know, there's many ways to look at firing bill.
Of course, most of us say, Oh, this is gonna be hard.
I don't want to do it.
The conversation is gonna suck.
He's gonna cry, you know, whatever.
I'm hurting his family.
I mean, yeah.
No, that's not the way to look at it.
I want you to take every task and find the joy in that task.
Now, in some tasks, the only joy in the task is completing the task.
So an example might be, you know, I don't know, I have to
sweep the floor and maybe there's just no joy in cleaning for you.
So some people get great joy from cleaning just because they
love to see the place clean.
But you can look at that task and say, hey, the only joy in this
for me is completing the task.
And that's what I'm going to look at.
I can't wait to complete that task to check something off my list.
Cause once you make lists and you check things off, there's
great joy in checking things
off
Oh
yeah.
That physical action.
That is, it's a big deal.
It's a dopamine hit, right?
So, so here I got a fire bill.
And I like Bill and he's been my friend, but by the time
you get to letting someone go, usually it's because they're no
longer a match for your company.
And by the way, they might've been a match three years ago.
They might've been phenomenal, but they're no longer a match today.
And, um, and the fact is, is they're not doing great work for
you and you're actually not being great for them at this point.
It's cycled downward and it's not working right.
So here's the joy in that.
I know every time I've fired someone, every time I've had to
let someone go, sometimes it's layoffs, it's whatever it is,
they are going to be better off because they're going to end up in
a better position with someone who likes them more in a position that
works better for them and maybe a company that has more money for
that project, whatever it is, right?
It's going to end up better for them and better for me or
else I would have kept them.
It's actually better for both people.
This is a good thing.
And when you look at All jobs as temporary, which people tend
not to do, but they need to.
And Reid Hoffman said this actually, so I'm stealing it from Reid.
Um, when you look at every job as a temporary place that
you go, you drop some golden nuggets, pick up some golden
nuggets, and then your time's up.
If you think that way from day one, you know, you're only there
for a short period of time.
It could be a year or two or three, if it's Silicon Valley.
On average, it's three or four years.
You don't, you know, that's just how the cycles go.
And then you're not shocked when the boss calls you in and says, well,
it's going to be a tough discussion.
You go, no, it isn't.
I've been planning for this since day one.
I knew that my time here was a limited time.
I've enjoyed the limited time I've had.
I realized that today is the ending day of that and it's all good.
And now I get to go and do the same thing in another company.
Drop some golden nuggets, pick up some different golden nuggets,
and my time there will end also.
It'll be three years, or five years, or two years, or whatever it is.
Um, so when you, when everybody looks at it that way, there
is, this is a joyous occasion.
And I know people are going to be laughing at me listening
to this, but the point of this
is
over here.
No,
it's,
yeah, he's crazy.
There's, the point of this is, You control every moment of your
day and how much joy it brings you every moment of the day.
And if you want to be the most successful you can be in whatever
that is, it could be monetarily, it could be just a title, it
could simply be your company, it could be with family, it
could be any, if you want to be the most successful you can be.
Every moment of the day, you've got to find the joy in
that moment, the joy in that task, the joy in, in being on
this podcast with you, right?
Every single thing.
And I have great joy being on the podcast
with you.
Yeah.
Same.
I love having you here.
. Yeah.
So does that make sense?
So, so it is a mental exercise and you have to, now that you tie
joy to success, you go, okay, if I believe joy is absolutely drive
success and that cycle, you get success, you get more joy, you get
more joy, you get more success.
And that cycle is tied together.
Then once you live that way.
It changes why you're doing everything during the day, right?
So you look at everything with joy.
Hey, I found this great little cable that brings me joy, right?
Every single thing you have to find a little modicum of joy and joy
moments all the way through the day.
Changes your life.
And I'm assuming through, and I, I could see how it could change.
It is just like anything else negative.
You go down that negative spiral.
It is, at least, I believe you might have the better answer.
Humans just aimed to.
Naturally go to negative.
Yeah, but so we're training ourselves kind of an uphill
battle, but it's mental control, like you said, is it, that's
what this whole thing is.
No one else controls how you're going to look at this task.
So the task is to write a blog post.
I don't want to write a blog post about this thing.
I've written enough blog posts.
Well, that's one way to look at it.
Another way to look at it is, hey, I'm going to learn something new.
I may even use some new tools.
I'm going to edit it.
I'm going to try to beat my last week's speed of, you know, 12
minutes, whatever it is, right?
There's so many ways.
Look at this as joy and then check it off the list, right?
So that moment can bring you joy or it can bring you negative.
And people who are at their job go, well.
You know, they're Eeyore.
Well, I got to do this task.
Okay.
Do you think they're ever going to make it?
What, whatever success means to them, they're not going to have it.
Cause Eeyore doesn't lead the company.
Eeyore doesn't go up to lead the group.
Eeyore doesn't lead anything.
Just sits there in the basement going, well, I'm
going to complain today.
You know,
does spread though.
it's contagious.
you
contagious.
That's right.
So we want, I want you to rethink your life.
And say every moment I'm going to find the modicum
of joy in this moment.
And by the end of the day, I'm going to have 110 joyful
moments, tiny little ones, instead of 110 complaints.
And if I do that, I have a better opportunity where my
mind is open for success.
My mind is open to see other people's pain points
and how I might solve them.
My mind is open to listen to other people's.
Concerns or challenges or headaches or whatever it is, right?
My mind is open and I'm able and willing to deal with all the
things that come at me because no matter what, I'm going to
look at everything with, you know, those 110 points of
joy instead of 110 negatives.
Yes.
How are you tracking all of this?
Like, what's your personal process here?
Yeah, I don't need to keep track of them anymore because
I, I, you know, I'm at a point where in general I have.
Uh, one or zero complaints a day.
That's what I go for.
And, and look, it's easy for people to drag you into, you
know, it's sort of into that.
It's, it's, it's difficult for my, my, my wife, who is an amazing,
um, highly accomplished CEO herself, but, um, when, when we're
together and like something's gone wrong, like we were on some
flights and the flights got.
Delayed by many hours and you had to switch flights and then you got
put back in the back of the plane and sort of All these things happen
and and finally she's just angry at me because she goes why is it that
you can't see how terrible this is?
I don't know.
I got here.
Here's me.
I got an extra five hours to work on my notebook.
This
is great This is fabulous.
This is the best thing that's ever happened to me.
How dare you?
Yeah, I'm, I'm being a little physician, not that way, but,
but you know, the point is it can be a little, for those who don't
understand the process and are not trying to follow the process,
it can be a little nerve wracking that you're not wallowing in
the pain that they're wallowing.
I'll give you an example.
I recently spoke to a very large company, um,
the choice success cycle.
And, and one of the challenges they were having is, um, is that
they had reorganized a lot of the groups and all of these groups,
they didn't like the new groups and some people got laid off and
they didn't like the new people they were with and, and, and right.
And so everyone was wallowing in this negativity.
Well, I don't know why I got put in this group and this really sucks.
And I know I'm, I'm not going to hit my numbers now.
And there's this company and oh my God, you know, and the whole
thing was, everybody was at a zero.
Right.
And I came in and said, stop that crap.
Right?
If that's what you want to do, just get just leave, right?
I clearly this isn't for you, but reorganizations
are part of corporations.
They're part of corporate history.
It always happens every few years for lots of reasons.
Okay, so what I want you to do is instead of saying, but my buddies
are over there and I'm not part of that group, Here's a chance for
you to learn a whole new set of people and a whole new set of skills
and go have a beer with different people and learn their lives.
What a great opportunity for you to expand your mind because you were
no longer expanding over there.
You knew that group.
Now you have to start over and learn all new people
and all new idiosyncrasies and you all get to do this.
What a magical moment this company has given you.
And a whole, I heard later that lots of people took the joy success cycle
seriously and started living it.
And they changed the way they looked at that reorg instead
of, Oh, this is terrible.
All my friends, they started to look at it a different way and
say, wow, I'm going to find joyful moments all through this and realize
there's joy in the change, even though humans hate change, start to
enjoy change, start to love change.
can't stop it and things are changing faster than ever and
with, with joy, I can imagine it.
I mean, not just imagining, but you've experienced, I'm
sure much more than most.
There's a chain event, you know, like it just, it's almost like these
forking
cycle.
That's
the cycle.
Joy, success, cycle.
You get some success.
And by the way, the success could be I completed the task, which brought
me joy, which then brought me more success, which brought me joy.
You want to be, you're either on that cycle or you're on
the downward spiral, right?
The joy killers.
Do you really want to be on the joy killer cycle?
Do you want to be on the joy success cycle?
I want to be on the joy success cycle because where's it lead?
To success.
Do that.
Whatever success is, again, it, It's not always I'm going
to be a billionaire, right?
It could be a lot of things.
it could be whatever you want, but and to kind of wrap this up,
you know, Kevin, I'm thinking of, you said, stop playing
like that still stuck with me.
And I think so many people are in this play mode in
whatever part of their life.
If we're going to technology and AI, it's probably studying.
It's learning.
It's reading.
It's watching a bunch of YouTube videos and going
down the rabbit hole.
Great.
And what are you gonna do about it?
And it seems like that's, that's a big takeaway is like, there's
a lot of people that are very intellectual, you know, and
there's a lot of folks that are very hyper motivated to, but if
you're stuck in this middle part of, uh, I've seen a meme going
around like midwits, essentially the, the folks that just, Have all
the information, the energy, but they're not doing anything about
it, and they're just kind of stuck.
that's, that's right.
And, and, you know, Yoda sayings and memes are, are, are the best
because Yoda was an alien of few words, but when it said them, I
don't know what, if it's a male or female, that thing, but whatever,
when it said them, it meant I like to quote Yoda, which is, do.
Not play,
right?
So do or don't play, right?
Uh, so it's all about doing something, not playing,
right?
Uh, so it's not do not play.
It's do, comma, not play,
do play.
That's, we're gonna end it right there, Kevin.
Yeah.
I love it, man.
This is so cool Well, tell us where folks should go follow you.
I know you have stuff everywhere But, uh, you know,
home base for where they can get the book eventually
Yeah.
Kevin's race.
com.
It's just my first name, last name.
com.
Uh, so easy to find my LinkedIn is on there.
A bunch of stuff in my keynote talks, uh, is on there.
Some of the joy, success cycle stuff is on there.
When the book comes out, there'll be more about it there.
So, um, you can always find me there.
Kevin's race.
com.
got to give you a shout out because like the, the Ted,
Ted talks and all that stuff.
I mean, you were 10 plus years ago or something talking about AI
and all these things, essentially what's happening right now.
I'm like, you are so ahead of the curve.
I, it was 10 years ago.
I was, I, I, I gave, uh, uh, that was a TEDx talk actually.
I've done TED Talks and TEDx talks, TEDx to Orange County,
and um, I think it was 2014 and I gave that, and people are
going, what's he talking about?
He's crazy.
What, what?
That's our world.
I, I don't, it's AI thing.
But I had already been around it for enough years that I
could see where we were going.
You could see what was happening with neural nets.
Cause we got deep neural nets by 2012.
So we understood what might happen.
And in the end, you know, when we have transformers and LLMs and
all of that today, it is a result, as Sam Altman said, of, uh, of,
or it's a proof that neural nets work, deep neural nets work, deep
learning works, that's, that's a proof that deep learning works
because I, we can now go out and learn a trillion phrases.
And build a, you know, a deep neural net.
Right.
And it works as deep as you want, as big as you want.
I mean, you need 6 billion in compute power, but if you have
that, you can, you can build the world's most knowledgeable
thing in the English language.
Really fascinating.
man.
Yeah.
We need some nuclear power plants.
We need all these other, you know, cooling
We're bringing them back.
I look not, not to be political.
We should have never shut them down.
Right.
I mean, I mean, people talk about climate change and this and that.
And what's interesting is so many people protested and especially
in the seventies and eighties against nuclear power, because
they thought it was dangerous.
No, what that led to is more coal plants, which was far more dangerous
than nuclear power has ever been.
And we should have built, you know, 500 nuclear power plants.
And we would never, we would not have a climate change problem today.
But we met, we messed up,
we
did.
Hopefully that'll go back quicker than ever.
Uh, we'll see.
Yeah.
we're starting, we're
I'm excited.
Yeah.
Well, Kevin, I appreciate you.
We can keep going all day, I feel, but I'm going to go nerd
out with more of your keynotes too, just to get more of you.
Oh, thank you.
Thank you.
Well, well, uh, thanks.
Thanks so much for having me.
Hopefully, uh, hopefully people listen and share and get excited
about, uh, the joy, success cycle and AI and do not play.