Big Little Breakthroughs with Josh Linkner

Our guest this week is Josh Linkner, author of the book Big Little Breakthroughs. We talk about how to apply his principals of creative thinking for business to all areas of your life.

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Transcript

Unknown: 0:08

Josh, hello and welcome to another episode of intelligence for your life. The podcast. Our guest this week is Josh Linkner. He is the author of the new book, big, little bake breakthroughs, easy for me to say. We talk all about his principles for creative thinking, how to, how to, how to boost the creative thinking that you're doing in your own life. Just a fantastic, fantastically smart person has talked to all of the best people in in different areas for how to boost your creative thinking, how to make the little changes in your life that add up to the big changes to get you to the place you want to be. So very excited to bring that to you. Thank you guys so much for being part of it today, and here we go. Two quick pieces of intelligence. One, when someone with so many of us working and studying from home, Google data shows that searches for productivity and time management hit a five year high last year. It spawned a new type of social media influencer, productivity gurus, a simple search for the word productivity on YouTube or Instagram pops up content from influencers like time saving tips, life lessons and productivity hacks. Think we all need a little bit of that while working from home, rethinking our work schedule. How we make it work? I think that's great. Okay, here we go. One more to feel more energized in the morning and sleep better at night. Try this advice from Stanford University Medical Center. Medical Center, get a dose of natural light within five minutes of waking up and spend half an hour in it. You could walk your dog, do some stretches on your balcony, or just drink your coffee and check your email by a window outside. Is best, but just getting a dose of natural light tamps down the production of your sleep hormone melatonin, so you feel less groggy and more awake. And then once night comes, your melatonin will kick in into overdrive, helping you fall asleep faster. Just one more hack that says, basically, act like a caveman. You know, if you want to wake up, be outside, if you want to go to bed, turn off all your lights and go to bed like that's it's just more of that. You know, live, how we how we are designed to live. How are you evolved to live? All right, folks, that's enough of that, if you like that intelligence. Thank you guys so much. Here is my interview that I'm very excited to bring you with Josh Linkner. Josh Linkner, I mean, you are, you have, you have a lot of bona fides, bona fide days. I could go through them all. But most importantly, you were author of the new book, Big Little breakthroughs. It's not your first book, it was like your fifth one. This is number four, actually, four. It's incredible. All right, so first of all, thank you so much for making time for us today. I really appreciate it. Yeah, truly a pleasure to be with you. So your book, you've done a lot of coaching, a lot of speaking around the world. You've started businesses yourself, your book, Big Little breakthroughs. How small everyday innovations drive oversized results, the at its core? Well, why don't you tell me the thesis of it? So I'm not putting it what is, what is the core of Big Little breakthroughs? You know? So most of us think of innovation as these giant change the world, billions of dollars, kind of things, and in that that context, it's inaccessible. So big, little breakthroughs flips that upside down and has people focus on small, everyday innovations to drive meaningful results. And the notion is that these little, tiny, small, micro innovations, or small acts of creativity are way less risky. They're within the grasp of all of us. We can apply them to every area of life, and while we're enjoying them, by the way, we're cultivating the skill. So it's sort of a win all around it, and it's flipping traditional innovation upside down. This is more like innovation for the rest of us. You know, one things I really like about that is, I think so many of us look at innovation like, look, we look at the most innovative companies that are going right now, and you see them and you go, Well, yeah. I mean, I definitely think electric cars are going to be the future, but I don't have access to the capital or the engineering talent or the business talent required to begin to make a revolutionary, you know, electric car company. I don't have access to the kind of money and government contracts necessary to start a space company, or, or even, even, you know, even a logistics company, like, like, what Amazon's back end is. So what I like about this is it cuts out some of the excuses we have for making change in our lives, because we it gets rid of the, well, I don't have the resources, so I can't and it gets you into the world of, well, what can I do? What are the small things that I can do? It really does a good job of cultivating, or beginning to cultivate, a growth mindset, which I think is really important. Yeah, you're so right. And the thing is, you really don't need to be wearing a hoodie or a lab coat to be innovative. And the research, by the way, is crystal clear here that all of us as human beings have enormous reservoirs of creative capacity, and then think of it as dormant creativity, and we may apply in different ways, like I have actually background playing jazz guitar. So I play jazz guitar pretty well. I can't draw a stick figure if I tried. So let's get past the notion that you have to be painting with oil on canvas to be creative. We can be creative selling used cars. You could be creative work in a customer service desk. You could be creative. In a family, or in your church or in your community or with your kids. So creativity is a universal thing. We all have this capacity. And the book really helps people bring those skills to the surface and put them to use. You know, instead of Creativity only looking like, like you said, like inventing some new electric car, I'll tell you what's everyday creativity. You know, you warm up a glass of wine, if you put ice in it, it dilutes the wine. You know, what creative approaches a big little breakthrough, use a frozen breakthrough use a frozen grape. Yeah, yeah, I've seen that. I've seen that. It's genius. So my only point is that when we think of creativity as something that is within the grasp of all of us and we can apply it to the things that matter most to us in our daily lives, it really becomes liberating, and it gives us a whole new toolkit and framework to go for the things that we care about the most. So, okay, so, so baked into this notion is that we all have some sort of inherent creativity that we can apply, right? So we have this, these abilities. But, you know, are we changing the world by, are we changing even our lives by putting the frozen grape in the wine in order to keep our white wine cool, or, or, how does, how does the big little breakthrough drive, you know, how do we get to the back end of that? How does it drive the oversized results? Because I, I'll buy your idea that that we all have this inherent creativity. We don't need to swing as big as you're talking about. We can just do little changes. But do those little changes eventually become the big, the big things that will change our lives? Yeah, awesome question, and the answer is an emphatic yes. In fact, it's funny. Harvard did a study recently, and while we celebrate the Elon Musk's in the media, turns out, 72% of the United States gross domestic product comes from big, little breakthroughs, from from those small ideas, the ideas that are within, within the grasp of each of us. And a good way to think of it, perhaps, is the art form of pointillism. So if you ever seen pointillism, yeah, you basically use a single.of a primary color. Anyone could do it. A four year old could put it on the canvas. So the dot itself isn't that hard, but you put a couple more dots and a couple more dots, and before long, it cascades into something of meaning and substance. And so my introduction to point my introduction to pointillism, I think, like a lot of people, was from Ferris Bueller's Day Off, because there's Sunday in the Park with Sunday afternoon in the park is in the Chicago Museum, and it's in the it's in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. So just thanks, thanks to John Hughes for making that possible. Amazing. Well, you're so right. But that, you know, the idea is that these little things really do add up to big stuff and and, you know, it's true that that a Picasso will be remembered for generations, but if you come up with an idea that boosts your sales revenue by 4% like that means something or all of a sudden you reduce safety hazard than a factory by 4% awesome. And so, you know, get there are different flavors of innovation. I'm not saying that we should, should ignore the big stuff, but there's so much more opportunity for us cultivating the little stuff and having those stuff and having those little ones add up to big things. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so, I mean, I understand that those 4% changes in the law of large numbers applies, like, if you have, if you have a factory, and you're making and your work, you're operating a factory, 4080, hours a week with multiple shifts that maybe your boss there and switching that to four down, 4% that's lives that are going to be saved, that's arms that are going to remain attached. I mean, not to get overly dramatic about it, but that's that I get that. But if we're talking about it for the individual, how do we begin to see those 4% changes manifest into into larger changes in our lives. Because I think a lot of people, a lot of people go, Ah, what's the point of making, you know, having a 4% better marriage or having a 4% being a 4% better parent? Well, let's go, you and me on a trip over to London for a second. So one of the people that I interviewed in the book is a guy named trovan restorick and Troy, and someone you probably never heard of he's not fancy. He doesn't make covers of magazines. Sounds like a fictional character from from Sherlock Holmes novel. It absolutely does. And by the way, he looks like that. It's kind of like the sophisticated looking guy, but in ratty clothes. Anyway, British accent the whole deal. But trolling like he's a normal guy. He went to college, barely scraped by. He took a normal job after graduating, just trying to pay the bills, but, but trellin really was drawn to the environment. He just was like an outdoorsman, and so he learned that in central London, the single biggest litter problem is cigarette butts. So, you know, besides being unsightly, they're terrible for the environment. Little kids or animals can ingest them. It's bad all around. Cost millions of dollars a year to clean up. It's not effective. So they tried all these things. They tried these campaigns that would shame people into compliance. Nothing works until trial in one day. Has an idea, a big, little breakthrough. And what troen came up with is something called the ballot bin, which is like about two and a half feet tall. It's this bright yellow metal box with a glass front. It's mounted at eye level, and there's, there's a divider down the middle of it. And basically, there's a question at the top. It's a two part question. For example, which do you prefer pizza or hamburgers? And there's a little receptacle there that allows people to vote with their butts. So you take your cigarette butt, you stick it under the thing that says pizza, and you see it fall on top of the other cigarette butts. It's like two bar charts next to each other, and you can instantly see which one is in the lead. So. Look at this. This is non tech. It didn't require 14 PhDs. He didn't have a billion dollar budget. He didn't have, like, NASA Space materials. He came up with this a big little idea. You know what happened? Cigarette litter was reduced by 80% Yeah. So Trello went on to start this company now, and he's actually now, he's live in 27 countries. He's making a real dent in the environmental challenges, all because he's a normal dude that decided to come up with a big little breakthrough. Do you see us all being able to have that kind of stellar breakthrough? Because even though that's a small thing, it has a big impact. I don't know that I have that much innovation in me every day. Well, well, again, once again, the research is very clear that creativity is very much like your weight, not your height. So for me, I'm five, five on a good day, and there ain't no way I'm going to be six three tomorrow, but my weight, I can fluctuate based on my behavior. I can I can train and, you know, nutrition and such, and creativity is the same thing. It's like a language or a muscle. It's something you can learn and you can build. And so when we build that skill set, doesn't mean that we're all going to become the next Jimi Hendrix, but it does mean that we have a new tool to use for whatever the things that are important, whether it's getting a raise or or boosting your relationship with your spouse or or being a better parent or getting a you know, land in the Jones account at work. So whatever the things are that matter to you, this becomes an important and often the most important, differentiated asset to help you win in those in those tough scenarios. So I would argue that you actually do have that capability, and you can apply it again. You might have one big idea once a year, but you have, might have lots of little small ones too, and they all are good. We shouldn't we shouldn't be dismissive of an idea just because it's small. We should recognize that the small things add up to big stuff. So what, how do we begin to build in the feedback for ourselves into these small changes? Because like, like, exercise is a great example. So many people, they go to the gym, and the first week that you're the gym, it hurts, and you just have to motivate yourself to get over that. And eventually all of the secondary elements of exercise begin to take over and give you that, that push. How did we begin to get to that place with changes that are that are not necessarily So somatic? Well, one thing that's kind of cool is that creativity is a high leverage activity, and that a small tweak to creativity can yield a disproportionately larger gain. So there is sort of that feedback loop that will come certainly over time. But the thing I always recommend people to do is think about, you know, we upgrade all stuff, a lot of things in our lives. We upgrade our wardrobes or our cars or our tech or whatever. Why couldn't we think about giving ourselves a Creativity Upgrade. And so in that context, I'm not suggesting 100% or 1,000% Creativity Upgrade. I'm suggesting a 5% Creativity Upgrade. So 5% totally within the grasp of all of us. That seems reasonable, and with a little bit of deliberate effort, a little bit of cultivating that skill, a little bit of practice, we can start to really unlock great outcomes. Because often outcomes in our lives are binary. You know, you win the job or you lose it. You win the account, you lose it. And if this can be that little extra something that pushes you over the top again, it's a high leverage activity that I think people will very quickly start to see the gains. You know, once we can get past the myths, get past the Oh, I'm just not creative. I wasn't born that way, or I don't have enough money or time, by the way, one of the funniest things that I always hear is, hey, I just I want to be creative, but I don't have fill in the blank, right? I don't have enough money, I don't have enough time, I don't have enough bandwidth, I don't have enough raw materials, I don't have office space, whatever the what is, the thing is, but I would respectfully say this, if the amount of external resources somebody has equals the amount of creativity they have, the federal government would be the most creative organization on the planet, and startups, startups would be the least. And we know exactly the opposite is true. So I think we really can double down on this internal sense of of creative wonder. Look, we all had it as kids. You've never met a non creative four year old. So let's kind of reconnect to those roots and put them to use again, productively. I'm not suggesting people draw on the walls with crayons. I'm suggesting people use their creativity to drive the outcomes that they seek. How do you begin? I mean, I know you do you do some speaking and talk. How do you begin to unpack people who have ingrained self talk, negative self talk. You know, the longer we go, the longer we're separated from that four year old you were just talking about, the harder it is for us to engage in this kind of creativity. I think our sort of entrenched ideas of ourselves get in the way. So how do you begin to break that open and begin to make that first change? Well, the first thing is dispelling some myths around, you know, who's creative and who's not and such, but the best thing I would recommend is using techniques. So if think about this, let's say, in the backyard of your house you had, you had an oil well, and you want to get to that oil so ineffective way would be using a plastic shovel, a more effective way we'd be using, you know, commercial grade equipment. So most of us try to dig, essentially for our creativity, using a plastic shovel, we use outdated techniques like brainstorming, which are wildly get out of date and effective. Here's a simple example. There's a technique, and I have, like, I share a whole toolkit in the book and also online of better techniques. But one of them, it's pretty fun, is called Roll storming. So roll storming is brainstorming, but in character, here's the rub. Let's say, let's say you're trying to take on a real problem, like, hey, how do we. You know, grow revenue by 15% next quarter. So instead of everyone in the room sitting around sharing their safe answers, their puny answers because they don't want to say something foolish or look wrong or offend the boss, everybody picks a character. So maybe someone picks Steve Jobs. Well, there's no but no way that people in the room are going to laugh at Steve for coming up with a big idea. They might laugh at Steve for coming up with a small one. So now, in this example, you aka Steve. You're totally liberated. You're not responsible for the ideas you share. You're just role playing that you're Steve Jobs. So the way it works, you pick anybody you want. You could be an author, you could be a musician. You could be a villain or a hero, fictitious whatever a sports legend. And everyone in the room picks their own character and actually takes on the real world problem, as if they are somebody else. And I've seen this happen in real time, and the results are staggering. People who are all frozen up and uncomfortable being creative, they get into a different role, and the barriers come down, and the whiteboards are filled with ideas interesting. It gives you permission. Basically gives you permission to look stupid, because you don't look stupid. Steve Jobs looks stupid. Exactly. You don't look stupid. Bill Gates looks stupid. I mean, so you just really get to put that on its head. I like that. That's That's exactly right. And by the funny enough, I did this with a group of executives one time at Sony, Japan. I met this guy was a stiffest human being I've ever met in my life. You know, dark suit, white shirt, tie, stiff as a board. Anyway, we got him roll storming as Yoda, I have never seen personal transformation like this. This dude's jacket off, his ties undone. He's like, leaping around the room. And I didn't teach him to be creative. Those freshman year theater classes are really paying off for him, exactly, right? You know? And he had that inside all along. But the thing is that before it was restricted, and we gave a new framework, a new technology, new technique, and he was able to liberate that creative capacity. Hmm, why doesn't? Why doesn't brainstorming work? Or what is, what is the research there? Because I haven't heard that this idea that brainstorming is a bad move, I understand why this is better, but you mentioned that it doesn't work in general. So why? What is the downside, if you can unlock this to doing just standard brainstorming? Yeah, so brainstorming was invented in 1958 and one might say that a lot of things have changed since 1958 so it's just an outdated model, and it doesn't work for a couple reasons. The first reason is, by the way, the biggest blocker of creative output is not natural talent. The biggest reason brainstorming doesn't work is fear, and so fear, if you think about it, the poisonous force that holds us back. And so let's say you have this killer idea, but you're unsure of it. Again, do you want to risk your career? Do you want to look foolish? Do you want to be judged by your colleagues? So we tend to share again, our safe, puny ideas, our incremental ones, rather than our more profound ones. The second thing that happens is that we tend to co mingle two distinct parts of the creative process. One part of the creative process is ideation, which is jamming and coming up with new ideas. The second part of the creative process is execution related, like, Will this work? Well, who's going to fund it? How you know, where does it fit? The PowerPoint deck? And so the problem is, our brains are so well developed in Western thinking around execution, we have like, these big, giant execution brains and kind of puny creative brain sometimes. So the minute someone comes up with a creative idea, which, by the way, most often, they're not perfect, because it's just the start, there's one person in the room that has the idea, and everybody else becomes the instantly self appointed idea police, right? And they say, Oh, well, that's never going to work. We tried that back in 1987 that didn't work. And so everyone pounces on that idea, and they prematurely extinguish it. So when you really need to separate ideation, I call it idea jam, and I prefer that to brainstorming and let those ideas come out in full force, unregulated, without restriction, and then later, separately, part two, figure out how to best execute them. Okay, so we're gonna take a quick break. We come back. I want to come up with some more ways to unlock our creativity, as well as how to begin to filter out what how to actually be those, those executive thinkers that that you were just criticizing. But we eventually have to get to the practical. So when we come back, I want, I want to talk about both of those things. Take a quick break. Josh link there, before we took a break, we were talking about about, you know, role play, role storming, versus, versus brainstorming, and how that unlocks the creativity. Do you have other other ways of allowing us to tap into our natural creativity that the we normally that normally stop us? Yeah, I do. So in the new book, Big Little breakthroughs, I cover the eight obsessions of everyday innovators. And these are mindset shifts that are again within the grasp of all of us, that we can really put into practice. And then we go, you know, they're filled with lots of stories and examples, and they're fun, like one of them is called, using every drop of toothpaste, which is basically about getting kind of scrappy and when you're resource constrained. Another one is called, don't forget the dinner mint, where you're sort of plussing up an idea with a little creative something extra, but, but to answer your question, back on technique real fast, but you. Because, because I feel like the the every drop of toothpaste thing is the kind of stuff that that Google asks as part of their hiring because, you know, they get these people from all over, but they really, they really emphasize creative problem solving in their hiring process. I mean, they're famous for it, and because they believe it drives their innovation. So, like they would ask questions of, how do you get all of the, you know, they give you toothpaste and ask you to get all of the stuff out of it, things, things like that. Is that, is that kind of what you mean by that? Well, those are actually two different so creative problem solving. Totally agree and support the notion that the principle of using every drop of toothpaste is actually more about around being resourceful and scrap so it's around figuring out, like, like they think about MacGyver, you know, MacGyver didn't, didn't have superpowers. You couldn't use X ray vision, but, but, but he, he figured it out with the role of duct tape, yeah. And so that's really what it's more about, is being inventive in using ingenuity, but, but anyway, back to your question about technique. So I identified 13 techniques, like the like roll storming, that are very powerful for IDEA extraction. You might think of another one that's kind of fun is called the judo flip. So the way the judo flip works is it lets you're trying to accomplish something, you make a list of, how have you always done it before? What's the prevailing wisdom, what is the conventional approach? And then you start draw a line down the page, and next to each entry, you just ask yourself, What's the polar opposite? What would it look like if I did the total opposite? So just a quick example I just read about. Just read about this couple days ago. There's a 65,000 Chinese restaurants in North America, and they're all kind of like, very similar. And they also often have puffery, like the world's greatest egg roll or the best egg foo young in New York City, right? So there's all this puffery, and they all kind of look the same. So enter a non traditional Chinese restaurant in in Montreal, and the owner decided to judo flip that. So next every entry on the item on the menu, there's a little thing that says, owners comments, oh, I've seen this. I've seen this. Oh my gosh. I've seen Yes, go, go, go, yeah. It's hysterically funny. They're like, Oh, you want this dish. Honestly, that's not that good order the other dish instead, or this dish, it's just not that authentic or right? This one's a little soggy if you, if you wait too long. And so he's like, sort of criticizing his own thing instead of puffery. It's the opposite. He Judo flipped it, and as a result, here you and I are talking about this restaurant today. Yeah, oh yeah, that's, that's okay. That's genius. But now, okay, we know that that worked. We know that that idea of of judo flipping, so So, I mean, so far, the two techniques that we've the practical techniques we've given is, is the idea of of role, roll storming, where you where you put on someone else's persona, and brainstorm from their perspective. Solve the problem from their perspective. The uh, perspective. The this is, this is taking the the traditional model and and pushing back and doing the opposite, right, which is the judo flip. How do you begin to because I know that this, that the Montreal, the Montreal thing worked because I heard about it. You've heard about it, but also, how do you get over the fear that this is a bad idea I'm criticizing, I'm criticizing my meals that I want people to buy. You know what I mean? Like, how does, how do you get over that hump of the of the sort of, you know, either the executive function of the executives in the room, or the executive function of your own brain telling you this is a bad idea. Excellent question. So most often, when we think of deploying an idea, we think of it's all or nothing, like either do it or you don't do it. You bet your whole future, and it's scary and risky and all that. So the stakes are that high. You gravitate to doing nothing, right? The best suggestion I have in one of the principles, actually, it's called open a test kitchen. Funny enough, although it's not really food related, but the notion is getting getting getting around an experimentation mindset. So let's say you had that idea in your Chinese restaurant in Minneapolis, instead of just changing every menu and putting on a press release, you might say, what if I did it with one menu and I tried it in one lunch shift on a Tuesday afternoon, and then I asked customers afterwards what they thought of it. And so the notion is around taking lots of lots of bets, lots of swings, but keeping them in controlled experiments, small prototypes. You know, it's fixed time, fixed money, and so ideally, any one of us might be running five or 10 little mini experiments at any one time, recognizing full well that 80% are going to fail. So let's get those ones that aren't going to work out. If everyone hated it, great. Move on to the next idea. But let's say people thought, they chuckled, they thought it was great. They wanted to take a selfie with it, I still wouldn't roll it out permanently. Then I do a second test. I might test it for a week. I might test it for a month. And so by the time you roll something out, you de risk the creative process. So being being creative doesn't mean taking irresponsible risk. And I might argue that doing nothing is far riskier than trying new ideas in a disciplined way. I mean, look, I have been saying this a lot, especially since the pandemic that you know our our attachment to the secure is very clearly misplaced, right? We are. We are clearly walking around in a world where where the status quo is no longer the safe the safe bet. So we do have to be constantly changing. We do have to be constantly tapping into this career. Creative mindset. There's, there is no more being able to sit on the sidelines and let life happen. We have to be doing these things. I mean, I agree so, so firmly about that. You know, it's funny. I've been in business now 30 years, and I'll tell you, the one thing that I've learned is that too often people overestimate the risk of trying something new, but they underestimate the risk of standing still. Oof. Oof, oof. I mean, I think that's gonna, that's gonna, if it doesn't, that doesn't punch you in the gut right now, then, then maybe you don't really fully understand what he's saying. Because, yes, you're absolutely right. We, I think we, we think of that we, I think for a lot of us, we tend to be those people in the room that you were describing before where we just spend a lot of time batting down our own ideas, batting down our own finding out that coming up with the ways that it won't work, instead of engaging and making the sort of small changes like your like your book, suggests that will, that will we can check and make sure that they work. You know, like the Pixar did at the beginning, where they just were animating a little lamp as a proof of concept that computer animation could work. You know, these kinds of things are, how are, how big ideas eventually come. So I do love that. Wow. I do. I want to get into, I want to get into how we can begin applying this to some other areas of our life. Because I don't know that a lot of us are going to sit in a room and go, How would Steve Jobs approach repairing my marriage or my relationship with my teenage daughter? So you know, how do you how do you begin to apply this on in things other than business where, where the testing can be sort of done with multiple people, as opposed to you can't really test on your kids in the same way? Can you? That doesn't sound very good, does it? So, no, I wouldn't test on my kids, right? But here's but because this don't have another you don't have another group to try it on. So like the, you know, to go to the just to flesh settle, the more to go to the Chinese food example, you know, the people that come in the lunch on Tuesday are not going to be the same people that come in for the dinner rush on Friday. It's different people. So if you try something and failed, you're not killing the Friday night crowd. But when you have a kid, you know, the stakes are a lot higher for you to try something and fail. Well, that's true. I certainly not advising people you know, test life threatening ideas, threatening ideas, but even just relationship changing ideas, yeah, but you can still test stuff. I mean, you know, you could say, Hey, we're gonna we have an idea for a once a week family check in, you know, try it for a month and see how it works. If you don't like it, then discard it. So I think you can, you can apply testing in personal relationships. But a couple other principles I just want to share quickly. One of them, one of the principles in the book, we call it, start before you're ready. And so the notion of starting before you're ready is instead of waiting for a directive or for permission or until all conditions are perfect, it's getting after something knowing full well you don't have all the answers, and it's a willingness to be agile and course correct and sort of adapt and pivot as you go. What we find is you're better off just starting on something than waiting around until your plan is perfectly set in stone. So, you know, that's one thing. Another principle, though, that we talk about is called break it to fix it. So a good way you say, how do you do this in your personal lives? Mechanically? What you want to do is examine a system or process or whatever you happen to be doing and that might be working fine. You know, instead of waiting till something fails, let's say, let's say your something's working great. Well, let's examine it. So you sort of take it, put under the microscope and deconstruct it. Say, Okay, what are the individual components of this thing? And then you examine them and say, Okay, is there a way I could put them back together in a better way? Could I substitute something out? Could I add something to it? And so when you have this sort of break it to fix it approach, you're challenging the way things are, instead of just accepting them blindly. So a really funny example of this in action your personal life. So Halloween, time you ever carve a pumpkin? Yes. How do you do it? First thing I do is, I carve, I open up the top and I take out the guts, right? So that's what everybody does. And you just probably do that, because that's the way pumpkins are carved. Yes. The problem with that is that, first of all, you carve out this. You got to stick your hand in there. They get all full of goop, and then, and then, you know, you got to carry it around. It becomes all slippery, and it makes a mess, by the way, try lighting on candle. You got to stick your hand down that hole and get secondary burns. So here's, here's, here's a break it, to fix it, approach, carve it from the bottom. So this is going to blow your mind, but think, think about it. You carve a hole in the bottom. All the gunk falls out. You get to use gravity. You want to carry it around, use the handle on the top that nature intended. And you want to light the candle. You put the base down, put the stop on it, overlay the pump. Stop, this makes too much sense. Stop, game changer, right? Game Changer. Incidentally, no one listening today will ever carve a pumpkin the same way. No, yeah. And so again, the point isn't about pumpkins, per se, but it's around what let's challenge those things in our lives that we don't necessarily think are wrong. Necessarily think are wrong, but just say, Okay, is there a way we could be more creative with it, and that could be the way that we, you know, mow the lawn, or the way that we interact with our friends, or anywhere in between, yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah. So, so, yeah. You can. You can do those small things. You can then you can try them out. You can apply them and. And and see what's working, and then slowly roll them out into more areas of your life. And you've what, 13 different methods like this laid out in your in the book. Yeah. So the book covers, you know, big picture. There's eight core mindsets, which are, again, within the grasp of all of us think that we can focus on as a principle. And then there are these, these tactics, and so throughout the book. And of course, there's some online supplement that that are tactics, very practical tools like Judo flipping or or like roll storming. Another one's funny was called the bad idea brainstorm, where you start by brainstorming bad ideas and then examine them to see if there's any good ones in there. So yeah, they're fun, they're non traditional, and they're very effective in bringing creativity to the surface. Amazing. You talk about mindset. I want to wrap this up, but I do want to talk about the importance of mindset as we, as we begin to close, you know, you say eight core mindsets. Are you? Are you implying that we that there's sort of eight categories that we fall into in our perception of ourselves? Or, how does that? What does that? What does that? How does that reflect in this idea of big, little breakthroughs? Yeah, so I've had the chance, you know, in the research, I spent over 1000 hours in research and interviews with incredible people, you know, CEOs, billionaires, celebrity entrepreneurs, but also people like we mentioned, like trouble and restarek, who is an everyday person doing really incredible things. And what I found through this, and really through my body of work over the last many decades studying creativity, is that there are some common patterns, common mindsets of the most innovative people, and that's what we cover in the book. And so they're not necessarily taking people's existing mindsets. It's more sharing the commonalities among everyday innovators. And some of these, you know, which you covered. Another one real quickly, is called fall seven times stand eight, which is, you know, the phrase itself is part of a Zen proverb, but the notion is, basically, it's around understanding, how do you bounce back from adversity, which is inevitable when you have a setback or a challenge, you know, what do you do to get back after it? And it's sort of, it's the fusion of kind of creativity and resilience. So the mindsets themselves are pretty easy to understand, but then they're supported with a lot of, you know, sort of research driven data, but also stories of how people have put these ideas into action to drive great results for themselves and those around them. Yeah, yeah. The book Big Little breakthroughs linked to where you can buy it in the show notes. Josh Linkner, thank you so much for your time. Today, I'm gonna ask you two last things, first and foremost, aside from buying the book, which everybody needs to do, where, where can people follow up with you? Thank you for that. So I'm on social media, on all channels. Just my name at Josh Linker. You can also check me out at Josh linker.com or Big Little breakthroughs.com link to the website in the show notes, as well as Josh's social media accounts. One last question, and I ask it to everybody, what is one thing we can all start doing today that will make our lives a whole lot better. One thing today people can do is give yourself a time frame on this, like for the next 21 days. See if you can uncover one creative idea, a teeny, tiny, little one. You don't have to do it. Just think of it once a day. So I'm talking about little stuff. For example, next time you go to order a pizza, ask for the pepperoni under the cheese instead of on top. So just all you're doing is challenging yourself, sort of like creative jumping jacks, one little creative flip that you could do once a day. And what will happen, by the way, is you create momentum, and it starts to seep into you, and it becomes part of who you are, and then it starts to build. And that's, that's the exciting thing to me, one big little breakthrough at a time. Put the milk in before the cereal, like a weirdo, there you go. Love that. Oh man, Josh, thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate it and and, yeah, just, just a lot, a lot to ruminate over there. So thank you truly. My pleasure. Thanks again for having the opportunity to chat with you today. That's it for our show today. Thank you guys so much for being a part of it. If you like the show, please rate, comment and subscribe on Apple podcast, Spotify, Stitcher, wherever you get your podcast, helps us out a lot. Follow up with us, facebook.com/john, TASH, where we spend a lot of time. We go live there several times a week. We're always trying to interact with you guys. John is also on Instagram at John TASH, underscore, Ify L I am Gib Gerard. You can find me on Instagram and Twitter at Gib Gerard, or facebook.com/give, Gerard. I try to respond to every message, every comment, every DM about the show. I've even had guests on that you guys have recommended, because ultimately, I do the show for you guys. So thank you so much for listening. You.