It's Not What You Think, It's HOW You Think

It's not what you think, but how you think that makes all the difference. Michael Odza and I were going to see a client on the 7th Avenue subway in New York. And as we trundled along on the subway, he we were both standing, I remember, and he turned to me and he said, "Give me the next number in this series." And he said, "14 18 23 28 34."

I immediately started thinking, wow, you know, six 14 to 18 is four and 18 to 23 is five and a sign. And nothing I could figure mathematically, arithmetically seemed to work. I racked my brains and racked my brains and finally we got to the place we were going to stop and get off. And I said, I give up. And Mike just looked at me and gave me this big grin and he pointed at a sign on the post right outside the subway and it said 42. And I thought, "Oh my god, the stops on the 7th Avenue subway are the 14th Street, 18th Street, 23rd Street, 28th Street, 34th, 42nd, 49th, on and on and on." I mean, and as we were going out the windows, as we passed these stops, all everything was in blazing. 34th Street, 23rd Street, the answer had been staring at me out the window the whole time.

I've never forgotten that greatness is not just in what you do. It starts with how you think. I've been working with Lewis R. Mobly, the IBM executive. He introduced me to the idea that there's convergent thinking and there's divergent thinking. The key to creativity is to learn how to think divergently. And there's all kinds of puzzles uh like the one that I just gave. One of my favorites is there's a little boy in grade school and the teacher says, "The baseball game started at 8 o'clock last night, Jimmy, and it ended at 10 o'clock. How long did the la the game last?" Johnny says, "Oh, that's easy one. I was at the game, teacher. Uh, it lasted nine innings." And of course, the way the story goes, he gets sent to the principal's officer being a wise ass when really he's thinking divergently. It's a whole other way of thinking. Yes, it was nine innings is just as valid an answer as so this is divergent thinking.

Most people converge. They want to converge down to an answer. They want a definition. They want they want a a specific goal, a specific thing. They don't want something that explodes their mind. Lou Mobly said he almost failed at the IBM Executive School back in 1956 because they were trying to turn leadership into a convergent process. Can we come up with 12 things that all leaders know? Then we just stamp people out. We teach them those 12 things and we can just stamp them out like we're sending them through a factory. He said it was a disaster. Nobody had ever had an executive school before. Nobody ever thought that leadership, how do we train leadership? Well, we found out you can't train leadership. One great thing that all leaders have in common is that they don't have anything in common. They all think differently. They all think creatively. They're all getting outside the box all the time and that's they think divergently rather than convergently.

I've come to the conclusion that the only way to do it is to get around people that constantly embarrass you. Somebody who's who's constantly got their finger in your eye. Especially if it's a really good mentor or like somebody like Richard Rose, you know, he didn't have to, you know, say I'll tell you how it felt. He didn't say it, but it's You're doing it again. You're doing it again. You're doing it again. You're doing it again. It is excruciatingly painful to be around somebody who's constantly saying that to you and not saying it, but witnessing it to you because they're living in a way that that demonstrates that they're thinking divergently and you're not thinking divergently. You know, I wish I could tell everybody watching this video, if they're watching it right now, that you can do this without getting your face slap. I don't think you can. You can get around to really, really creative people who are always getting out, you know, and the face slaps in that case will be, damn, how come they come up with these ideas and I can't come up with these ideas? You know, I do a lot of writing. I mean, I still get my face slapped. I watch movies and stuff. Quinton Tarantino, how does he write dialogue like that? God's got to be doing that for him, you know? How come I can't write dialogue? I mean, this is the only way. You got to get confronted. You get confronted by your own inadequacy. But you go back again and again and again. And when you least expect it, and of course, everybody talks about that, the eureka, the epiphany, the creative insight, you know, you know, they don't tell you about the two years of pain and suffering that you had to go through of of chasing banging your head against the wall and banging your head against the wall.

I ended up giving that riddle, the 1418 riddle to all people as part of an interviewing process. Only two people in my entire life have ever um gotten that riddle. The first one, Kavita Kapoor is her name. And she was just a sophom freshman or sophomore in college and she happened to be at our business office one day and I said, "Kita, what how you doing?" Hey, you know, hey, by the way, I said, "What? 14, 18, 23, 28, 34. What's the next number in that series?" And she looked at me and she said, "First of all, does it have anything to do with math?" I said, "Bingo." I mean, I knew the girl never been to New York City. She's never going to figure out it's 7th Avenue subway. The other person was Lumobly's son, Chris, is a brilliant guy. I asked him that riddle one day and he said, "Is it like street numbers on a street?" Street numbers on a street. And that gave me another insight.

What was the box that Kavita got out of? Kavita just didn't get out of the box that it was math. She got out of the box that you couldn't ask me questions. I never said you couldn't ask me questions. There was actually a a content answer to my riddle and there's a process answer to the riddle after they got stumped. I said, "So, the content answer is the next stop on this subway is 42nd Street." That's the content answer. But the more important answer is the process answer. Ask questions. Don't assume you can't ask questions. This is how wired we are. Who said that you couldn't ask questions? Asking questions is a process. There's not one specific question that you always have to ask. And it's a process to get to being a person who asks questions. Whereas content is 2 plus 2 is four. The content of the answer that is four. But if somebody says, "Does it have to be four?" So they're asking the question you know why is why is 2 plus two four is there any other way is there a way in which 2 plus two would actually lead to five or three or you know that's the questioning you mean the other riddle I used but it was amazing to me I would give that was to be the first riddle the second riddle is you have two houses they're identical houses they're 2,800 square ft same furnishings same yard same square footage everything is exactly the One is $100,000 and the other one is $200,000. Which one do you want? The vast vast majority of people would immediately say they're exactly the same house. I want the $100,000. The content answer is one's in the worst section of town and one's in the best section of town. Now, which one do you want? The process answer is where are they located? A question. The answer is a question. Where are they located? You get that question right, you can't go wrong. Cuz once I tell you where they're located, you'll know why one's 100,000, one's not 200,000.

I was interviewing a guy for sales job and I mean, his resume was incredible. And I ran him through these five or six riddles and he messed up each one. By the time I got to the fifth one, he erupted in rage. I mean, literally rage. He screamed at me, stormed out of my office, and slammed the door behind. And I said, "Wow, am I lucky I didn't hire that guy." Meanwhile, I always tell a wonderful story, a much younger guy right out of college or something. I ran him through the riddles and he made the same mistake. He didn't ask questions on each one of them. He went five riddles and five he went 0 for five. And at the end, he said, "Mr. Turk, I know I'm not going to get this job. I did a very very poor job on those rentals. He said, "But I want to tell you, I have learned more in the last 45 minutes than I think I learned in my whole college education." He said, "I'm going to walk out of here." He said, "You've given me something to think about for the next month." I said, "You're hired." And I hired him not because he blew smoke up my butt, but because this kid wants to learn. He's coachable. And so, and I hired him on the spot. He turned out to be a great employee.

Charlie Munger is one of my heroes and he wrote an article one time that was talking about models. When you have a model of the world, then you start seeing that what looks like is different stuff is actually not really different. Just because somebody has blue eyes and not brown eyes doesn't mean they're not human beings. They're both human beings regardless of the color of their. So that's a model. You start mapping. They call it mapping things onto the model. The biggest reason why I think people suffer so much and don't learn is they don't end up being able to model. And of course, you know, second to that is a lot of people suffer or don't never learn because they never learn self-control. So they consistently make bad decisions. You know, an alcoholic who continues to drink or a gambler who continues to gamble even though he knows it's it's it's costing his family is suffering because they're not learning that they need to stop gambling or they need to stop drinking. And so they're making this uh bad decisions over and over again despite themselves. So a lot of times they do know, but there's a lot of people who end up making wrong decisions because they don't see that it's the same thing. Whereas you have to have an overall plan and have a model. And when you start to see that people are model, you can see in people. And once you slot that person in and you know what that person's model is, then you know their future. you know, you know almost exactly what's going to happen to them, where they're headed.

I put on Facebook some years ago, I said, "I can forgive you almost any sin, but a lack of curiosity." I always feel the sorryest for people who are not curious. Lou Moby also said, "What do all great leaders share?" And he said, "It's not skills and knowledge, it's values and attitudes. They're all great thinkers. And all great thinkers are curious. The vast majority of the greatest leaders, the greatest executives he met in his career, whether at IBM or even other companies, where they were generalists, not specialists. They were omnivorous. They're interested in everything. You need broad. You need a lot of grist for your mill so that you can be creative. So you can grab something from here, a couple pieces from this puzzle, a couple pieces from that puzzle, and then you put together a whole different kind of picture. But it starts with you've got to be curious because you can't do this by just forcing yourself. But you can build a curiosity, but somehow or another you've got to be able to connect it to something that's um essential to your life.

St. John of the Cross is one of the most famous apohatic mystics. He was Spanish. He called it the via negativa. The the negative way, the way in which you subtract everything that's not God until you're not left with nothing but God. Richard Rose was apathetic. He said, "You retreat from untruth. If you knew the truth, you'd be there already. You retreat from the more absurd to the less absurd and you keep backing away and backing away." And that's the that's the negative the negative path. Questions are negative, right? You're asking something rather than telling something or saying something. Through humility, you're you're gradually puncturing the balloons of the little egos that you have until you reveal finally what's only that's left is the real the real you. What Benois said, which I loved, and it goes back to getting your face slapped. What people miss when they talk about humility and extol the virtues of humility is humility is bought and paid for with humiliation. It's one of the most painful things you can go through is to be humiliated. Humility, true authentic humility is bought and paid for humiliation. in my book business secrets with the Trappist monks when I finally come to the end of myself and I go to Baltimore to uh to this spiritual psychologist that I'd known 20 years earlier and really desperate for his help after telling him everything that was going on. I just said to him, I said, "Bill, I'm so ashamed. I'm just so ashamed." I got to the very very core of humiliation of just realizing, you know, all the crap and all the lies that I've been telling myself for so many years. This is the ultimate form of the subtractive rather than accretion is humility. It's the opinion of all all the the great saints and all the great religious it's you know the ego is the enemy and the only antidote to the ego is humility. You have to seek humility. That's subtraction not accretion.

Most of us are trying to fix ourselves, turn ourselves into the person we want or give ourselves the life we want to by rearranging the facts in our lives. If I just changed my job, if I just wasn't stuck with this wife that I remember again story, I had a a nextdoor neighbor that moved in when I was only 19 and he was like 29. His name was Charlie. He was a bus driver. He was married and had two kids. We became friends. He just complained all the time to be the he hated every minute of being a bus driver, but he had to be a bus driver because of his wife and kids. Long story short, you know, this went on for years. Finally, he divorced his wife and kids. And guess what he did? He stayed a bus driver. The idea was I, you know, I, if I was freed, then I would go and start a company. Then I would go and be Picasso and be an artist. You know, we see the external world as the place we can work out. Carl Jung and Freud and people like that, especially Carl Jung, he said, "We use projection. We project into the environment." And so we have this tendency to think if we rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic, the ship won't go down. The answer is to find out who you truly are. And this who who am I is the most important question there is. And so how do you find how do you learn who you are? Introspection is the reflection part of it. You really learn who you are by putting yourself in play and putting yourself under pressure. David Breers wrote this incred I thought a very good book about climbing Mount Everest and the inscription is the dangers of high altitude mountain climbing expose who you really are. There's no place to hide, no hiding behind games. He said you become who you really are. And I used to tell my college students all the time. I said, "We're not going to be the self-knowledge symposium is not just about introspection. We're going to do activities. We're going to go out and challenge ourselves and and and try to put on lectures or put on uh events and then we're going to watch ourselves in action." You know, it goes back. I love that line in Cheers where uh the waitress says to uh Ted Dansen's character, Sammy, if you want to know about what women are really like, don't listen to us when we're all dressed up on the Opal Winfrey show. Follow us around and watch what we do when you're when we don't know you're looking. If you want to know anything about other people, then don't listen to them when they're pontificating. Watch what they do. And if you want to know who you are, don't just introspect. Put yourself in play and watch how you behave and then surround yourself with other people who are going to be able to point out, you know, that's humility. When you really finally are able to look yourself in the mirror and say, you know, Nietze called it the hour of one's own great self-contempt. You're ready to start. Mr. Rose called it, you just get tired. He said, "Sometimes I think the greatest motivator there is for going on a spiritual sale," she says, "is you just get tired of the and most importantly your own. You get tired of your own BS." And when you really reach that level, I'm just way over my head. There's nothing I can do. I've tried everything. Just God help me. And that's a beautiful thing because it's exactly the place where the um you know when the alcoholic gets to when he's finally ready to ask the right questions.

I I probably have told this story before. It's one of my favorite favorite stories of all time though because it goes back to the whole mentoring idea and the idea of getting your face slapped and what you have to do and have to attempt to take. And I met this guy and he had all these pictures of himself with big shots. I remember Arm and Hammer. the guy started accidental petroleum was he was shaking hands with him he'd worked with him and I said wow I said you got all these and he said um yeah I said you look at all that he says yeah I've had something of a business career he said but you know my real career was being a drunk that's all I really was all those years I was just a drunk and he ends up telling me about you know how I got into alcoholic synonymous and I turned him around and everything he said now the most important thing in his life was working in alcoholic synonyms and helping other people and I met him for lunch he started immedately tell telling telling me about himself and and all of it was I think this and I think that and I think this about you know and I listened to him let him go on for about 5 minutes or 10 minutes he didn't say a word and I finally leaned across the table and I said shut the f up but of course he didn't say f shut the and he said the guy started talking shut the f up and the guy started talking shut the f Ah. And he finally guy just sat back and I said, "Now, let me tell you something. For the last 10 minutes, I've been hearing you talk about how you think this and you think that and you think this and you think that. Let me tell you something. You've been thinking for yourself for the last four, 30 years, and all it's done is turned you into a complete drunk. I got a better idea. For the foreseeable future, I do the thinking for the both of us. And if you allow me to do that, I'm going to save your job. I'm going to save your career. I'm going to save your reputation. I'm going to save your marriage. And I'm probably going to save your life. But if that ain't cool with you, you can get the f out of here right now. Man's been sober three years now. And that, you know, I get tears in my eyes thinking of that story. That is what we all need. That's an extreme example of what we talk about. It's not what you think, but how you think. And this guy's been doing all of his own thinking. He finally has to get to the point of being like Job. I am the I don't know. I don't know anything. I'm ready. I am an open vessel. I am the via negativa. I'm the subtraction. I've hit bottom intellectually or whatever it is. I'm ready to learn. I'm ready to change. I'm ready to be a different person.

Now, I used to do that with my college students a lot. I I just for a simple question, does your life work? The fact of the matter is the vast majority of people, if they're really honest with themselves, you're going to say, "No, their life doesn't work." But as soon as you start asking yourself how am I going to do this or where do I got to go? Whoa. You're overwhelmed with the possibility. How does one go about learning how to think for yourself? And if I ask somebody how to learn how to think for myself, am I not thinking for myself? Do I got to think for myself about how to learn how to think for myself or if I ask what's beautiful about it? But most people would react to that is you know you know that ain't no answer. I'm overwhelmed you know. No, this is this is the beauty beauty of it. So start living intentionally. Make a conscious choice to think like the great man you were born to be. Learning takes effort, but it's actually the easy part. Unlearning now, that's what separates the men from the boys. If you're seeking a little help along the way, I'm working on some mentoring opportunities in the near future. You can sign up for consideration using the link in the description. And if this video helped you in any way, please pass it on to someone else. Hope to see you next time. And meanwhile, thanks friend and God bless.