YouSaid · the spoken record

Jeff Hunter

lines on the record: 120
first: 2020-01-21
most recent: 2020-01-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Sort of a scattershot stuff, but more as a means of drying experiments. And like any good experiment, you enter with a hypothesis, you see what happens, and then you make sense of what happens on the other side. And so if you go into a meeting and say, you know, I think if I speak last, this meeting will go better. Speak last and see if the meeting goes better. And if the meeting goes better, go, oh, that's an interesting piece of data. So now, and what this does, this method does is it makes you conscious in the moment. Most of us are in autopilot all day long. We're just going from thing to thing to thing. Our intuitions, our habits can really help us achieve whatever we want during the day. So it's like when you climb in the car in the morning and you drive to work and you get to work and you realize, oh my gosh, I wasn't present for any of that. I remember getting in the car and I remember arriving at work, but everything in between was sort of a blur.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From you that could be really seemingly daunting and intractable is really a great learning opportunity. It's a great learning opportunity to figure out like, what are you seeing? What do you think you're missing? What would be a great way to handle this? How are you handling this? What's the gap between those? It's just so much in every workday, so much information we can take from that about what we're really like. and what we're really like in different contexts, which is a big sort of thing for us and the way we think about things is, you know, I'm this way at home, but I'm another way at work, confronting very similar situations. Well, we are very context dependent the way we think about things. So Gil, put yourself in different meetings. Try different meetings. Try different approaches. Try different communication styles, not as a means of, hey, I'm just going to.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And figure out as we just described that means with regards to your talents and your purpose and those kinds of things. And so you design your workday as sort of in a series of experiments. It's a conscious decision. You know, often you should do it, I think, outside the office, but it's a conscious decision. You could be working with a coach or whatever, but you're trying to set a series of experiments to figure out where your greatness lies and how to unleash that. And if you think of your workdays as a series of experiments, as opposed to a series of tasks or a series of projects or have-dos or whatever, then you realize you orient because of the very word and nature of the word experiment, you realize that you're there to learn that the problem you're facing, the thing that's sitting across the”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So again, so let's use that work example. I think that's so great. So we go to work and let's say we're driving into work in the morning and we're just. So, what we believe is rather than adopting a new time, you know, I'm going to think about doing my creative work in the morning or whatever, all of which are great examples of stuff that people have come up with to try to improve the way you think at work, et cetera. We actually think that you should operate at the level of design. And what we mean by that is, first of all, if your goal is to get better. So if you want to unleash your potential, your goal has to be to get better by definition. Potential is unrealized. And so if you want to experience something or realize something that is unrealized, you actually have to improve something to get there in order to do that and unleash your potential. You have to set as a primary goal that you want to productively put yourself in situations.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then we're operating within that feeling. So you want to actually put yourself in different situations, see how you feel about it, and then start to decode the evidence of what you're really experiencing, owning that fully before you start divot down a path of the things you want to change or improve.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Say the special forces of the U.S. Armed Forces. And they are not only dutiful and honorable, but they are incredibly courageous. And you take that person who has unquestion bravery and you put them in an unfamiliar situation, say, presenting to a board or something. And it can be very disorienting, a place where I might feel very comfortable, but where they feel disoriented. Now, if you switch that situation and you put me under the live fire sort of situations that they've often had to live their life in, I would be a mess. And they would be valiant and distinguished. And so our mind is just trying to make sense unconsciously of the situation it's in. And it's sending us these signals about our level of comfort and how we're dealing with the situation, how we feel about the situation.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is you want to be checking in on how do you feel about those experiences? Do you feel engaged? Do you feel agitated? Do you feel under threat? Do you feel curious? These are feeling. These are expressions of feeling. These aren't just thoughts. And so those feelings become indications to you. They become almost like clues and evidence that you can use to decipher the puzzle of your brain. You can put yourself consciously in different situations and see how that feels. In that, you can start to decipher what your model is. So as an example, in many places I've been, we've hired individuals who have shown incredible amounts of courage in”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then I think what you have to do is you have to get beyond the rationalization to the physical experience. What I mean by that is when we are interacting with the world, we are having sort of whole body experience with that interaction. We feel things. So when somebody yells at us, it's not just that we're having a thought pattern of, hey, what a jerk. We're also feeling tense. We may have butterflies in our stomach. Our muscles may tighten or certain hormones get released into our system. And often what's happening is our intuition is the direct connection to that physical experience, much more so than the rational, the logical perception of what's going on. And so what you want to do is when you're having experience.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I don't think of it as correction or debugging. I think of it as just an ongoing learning process. So we have these mental models and we're filtering the world and we're making decisions unconsciously and we're acting them out. And then we sort of have post-hoc rationalizations of that. And so if you want to break that and you want to be, you want to think about how I can both learn about what my model is and how I'm viewing the world as well as try to update or improve that or expand it.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can't be tapped through rational reflection and through pure reflection. And so I think that's just the big underlying belief we have. We're walking around as an outcome of that, as an example. We walk around and we have these sort of unchallenged beliefs about ourselves, A, that we're perceiving reality accurately, B, that our perception is not only accurate but valid, C, that if it's obvious to us, it must be obvious to others. And all it takes is a moment of reflection to realize none of that's true. And none of that's really supported by science or even just critical thinking. And so then how are you going to unleash potential when those things aren't true? So that's how I would describe the underlying beliefs that I think are just insufficient to help us understand how to be our best.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oriented sort of thinking and behaviors. And then we've got this logical superpower that we can deploy, unlike our primate cousins. So that certainly distinguishes us. But most of the way we live our life is in that non-logical, non-rational sort of realm. We're making snap judgment. We have intuitions. We're taking in data and filtering it all the time without even knowing it. All these things are just, I think, scientifically validated reality of how the human mind works. And so if you're thinking about the potential of that kind of species and the potential of that kind of animal, then I don't think you're going to focus on the rational processes. You're going to focus on trying to discover what's in the mind that”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think about others. And so one of the outcomes of that is that But from my perspective in spending decades working with other individuals in commercial environments and enterprises and trying to build big things and bring big things to market, that's not actually what happens. People aren't lazy. They aren't stupid and they aren't bad. I mean, some human beings are, of course. But for the most part, that is an inaccurate description or diagnosis of when people are failing. And so this underlying belief of, you know, we're rational and we're doing this stuff just like in economics, it really isn't describing our motivations, how we make sense of things, et cetera. And to go back to that Darwin example, I think we're really fundamentally apes. We're fundamentally primates that have strong intuitive instinctual, fast processing.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think the way we think about education and the way we think about the way we order work and management leadership all sort of has this underlying it, this set of beliefs about us being unique, rational actors, making rational decisions. But I think what you see in the world of economics with their moving away from the insufficiency of classical economic models to describe what happens, what actually happens in an economy, especially at the microeconomic level, I think the same thing needs to happen in the world of potential, in the world of talent. We aren't rational actors. We aren't making rational decisions. We aren't picking goals for ourselves based on the available information and sort of weighing that information impartially. That's just not reality. But it's very deeply embedded in how we think about ourselves and how we think.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's such a great question. So I think, you know, we can go back to the Enlightenment and the theory of human beings being rational creatures. When Darwin was positing his theory of evolution, the elite within British society were incensed because he was saying that basically we were very similar to apes. And I think that that demonstrates how people actually think about themselves. We think about ourselves as sort of unique rational actors making rational decisions given logical and thoughtful. As Daniel Kahneman says, slow thinking processes and then we pick targets about what we want to do and then we build skills and then we go achieve that thing. And it's just very ordered. It's very logical.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In life. And then over time, you just get more practiced and hopefully masterful in how you help other people do it. But in the way we think about things, we talk about finding meaning as a part of purpose. And the way we describe meaning is when you do something, when you achieve something, when you have an outcome, you feel a sense of pride and a sense of self in that outcome, the way you help that outcome come to fruition. And for me, when I feel that sense of pride and for most of my life, when I felt that sense of pride is when I see another person who I have helped in some way uncover something in themselves that they didn't realize they had. And it's hard to understand why that psychology exists in any particular person. But I've had it from a very early age.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think most people who have a lifelong compulsion towards something or an obsession had started pretty early. And I didn't have the words for it or anything, but probably in junior high became obsessed with helping my mom run for office. It's something she had always wanted to do. I had heard her talk about it. And I just became something that was very, very important and meaningful to me. And from there, have tried to spend a good portion of my life helping other people find their greatness. So I think if you want to be in this field or if you want to be in the field of like helping others become great, you have to start with a fundamental assumption that people have greatness within them. And there's no proof for that. It's not scientific hypothesis. It's just a belief that you have to understand and hold. And I think I held that belief really early.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we talk both about the system that fails to unleash potential and then work with our clients to actually implement stuff in their organizations, implement different methods, et cetera, in their organizations so that they can unleash that potential, potential they're already paying for, but they're just not getting.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so we think that businesses have a big incentive to do that, unlike a lot of other institutions, for-profit institutions have a big incentive to actually uncover potential and unleash that. So on the potential side, that's what we think about it. why we think about or work with companies. But on the systematic side, we think that the reason most companies don't unleash the potential of their employees, the potential of their management, the potential of their leaders, is not because people don't have the right skills or they don't have the right knowledge. It's because the beliefs that underpin how we think about people and potential are broken. And it's a system of systemic failure.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I'm just sort of a junkie for the concept of human potential and that most of us don't find their potential during their lifetimes. And there's just therefore a huge untapped resource of potential excellence out there in the world. And most of that excellence can be found and grown inside of companies, inside of enterprises.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We walk around and we have these sort of unchallenged beliefs about ourselves. A, that we're perceiving reality accurately, B, that our perception is not only accurate, but valid, C, that if it's obvious to us, it must be obvious to others. And all it takes is a moment of reflection to realize none of that's true.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT