Your Ticket to Unleashing Your Own Genius: Learn the Secret Powers of Notable Achievers

0:00 The topics and opinions express in the following show are solely those of the hosts and their guests and not those of W FOURCY Radio. It's employees are affiliates. We make no recommendations or endorsements for radio show programs, services, or products mentioned on air or on our web. No liability, explicit or implied shall be extended to W FOURCY Radio or its employees are affiliates. Any questions or comments should be directed to those show hosts. Thank you for choosing W FOURCY Radio. What's working on Purpose? Anyway? Each week we ponder the answer to this question. People ache for meaning and purpose at work, to contribute their talents passionately and know their lives really matter. They crave being part of an organization that inspires them and helps them grow into realizing their highest potential.

0:45 Business can be such a force for good in the world, elevating humanity. In our program, we provide guidance and inspiration to help usher in this world we all want working on Purpose. Now here's your host, doctor Elise Cortes. Welcome back to the Working and Purpose Program. Thanks for arting again this week. Great to have you. This program has been on air since February of twenty fifteen. It is a pride and joy for me, happy to have you. I'm your host, Doctor Lee's Cortes. If we have not met before and you don't know me, I am an organizational logo therapist and an organizational psychologist. I'm a speaker and an author, and my team and I at Gusto Now help companies to enliven and fortify their operations by articulating their purpose and building inspirational leaders and cultures activated by meeting and purpose. There you can find people who are intrinsically motivated to perform at their best, grow into their fuller potential, and are committed to stay in dynamic deliver on the company's mission. You can learn more about us and now we can work together at Gusto, dashnow dot com or Alascortes dot com. Now. Getting into today's program with us today is Paulina Marinova Pompliano. She's the founder of The Profile, a new media company that features long form profiles of successful people and companies each week. Previously, she spent five years at Fortune, where she wrote more than thirteen hundred articles and earned the trust of prominent investors and entrepreneurs.

2:05 She's the author of Hidden Genius, The secret ways of thinking that power the world's most successful people. To be talking about today. She does today from New York City. Paulina, Welcome to Working on Purpose. Thank you so much for having me. I'm honored to be here. It's wonderful. And as we spoke what we got on air, I absolutely loved your book and I read it cover it to cover, as I'm prone to do, and I was just delighted by all the things that you taught me. So we're going to teach just a few of these things to our listeners and viewers today. Shall we do it? Let's do it? Okay? Well, so first I want to just dig in. I mean your background, you know, working with Fortune where you wrote all those articles. Amazing. I can't even imagine what went into all that, But I'm interested in, of course, why did you pursue a career in media as a journalist, Why not you know, accounting, architecture. Yeah, and it's a good question because both of my parents I grew up in Bulgaria. Both my parents were chemical engineers, So I just thought that I would be some sort of engineer or chemist or chemical engineer. So as you can imagine, all my birthday gifts as a kid were like a chemistry set. So I was really kind of moved towards that, and I thought that's what I would do because I didn't know anything different. So I went to a high school with a science program, and I took like organic chemistry and biochemistry as a freshman in high school. But I quickly learned that I was not good at doing the experiment.

3:34 I wasn't good at any of that stuff. What I was good at was the research aspect of it, in the writing, so the lab reports, Like, I love that stuff, So you know, everybody else would do the experiment and I would be in charge of writing the fifteen page lab report, which everybody in my group loved. But those two ingredients I knew I enjoyed, but science was not the thing. And then I was lucky in that in high school there was a newspaper's class and I joined that, and I quickly realized that journalism was research writing and talking to interesting people. And I was incredibly introverted, but knowing that that was my job as a reporter to interview strangers, that really helped me come out of my shell.

4:19 But it also helped me learn from the world's most interesting people. So once I started in high school, I became like a news editor of my high school paper. Then I went to the University of Georgia became editor in chief of that college paper, and then I went on to work at CNNA and USA Today and then fortune sounds good to me, Sign me up. Okay, Well, here's where it gets really interesting. This is where your world and my world beautifully collides. So one of the things that you say in your book that I just think is just yummy. You write, prior to founding the profile, that you realize something really important. You say, stories trigger emotion, and emotion triggers memory. And then you said, without I had stumbled upon something I like to call people focused learning, the notion that people and their stories are at the center of any learning pursuit. Yes, ma'am, I love that. Yeah, and that's That's. Another thing that I learned in school was that I was being taught like a very standard way of here are the facts, here's the historical event, here's what happened, memorize it, come back, take the test, and move on. The problem was that when the test came, I just could not remember the dates, the names, the places. So I was like, I need to teach myself another way to study this stuff, otherwise I'll fail. So it was I still remember it was the French Revolution, and that was something that I was like, Wow, this is an incredible time and history full of

5:49 drama. It read like a soap opera. So I was like, if I can take these characters and if I can turn the people into characters and create a story, maybe I can remember it better because there's emotion now when I'm invested. So I started thinking about Marie Antoinette. Okay, she was nineteen years old, this young queen that people, the regular people hated because she became a symbol of excess. But like the newspapers wrote things that maybe weren't true about her. How did she feel? And it was always like how did that person feel? That allowed me to empathize with them. That then triggered my emotion, and that triggered my memory. When people ask someone, hey, do you remember where you were on September eleventh, people normally say yes because there's so much raw emotion around that event that it sticks in your memory. So another thing that gets interesting too about us then, Polena is you talk about, of course, you know, triggering emotion and then triggering memory. Actually the Olympic brain is where that happens, and you probably know and that is the same place that that meaning is registered. Interest connected.

7:00 Yeah, it's connected. So it's just it's that's what makes it sticky as well. So I think all the more reason that I absolutely love this whole approach of you learning, going to go find somebody that really embodies what it is that you want to learn and their story and looking for their hidden genius. I just think that is just so compelling. So you know, your whole bit about that you've taught us that we can actually learn things to strengthen our relationships and prove our decision making by watching what these people do in their own genius way, And which is what we're going to We're going to share some of the some of the stories and some of the genius you have in your book. But that is such a fresh perspective, right I.

7:42 So the reason that I approach it like this is because most people when they want to learn about something, they look up that thing and then read the Wikipedia page. Right course, that's right. Yeah, but but there's no there's a real story, and it doesn't really stick into you in your memory. What I like to do is I like to say, Okay, well what I like to learn about this week. Let's say it's making good decisions in times of uncertainty. If that's the thing that I want to learn about, who is the best person who can teach me? And I don't necessarily have to know that person personally. Maybe I can just research them and find out how they navigated their life to get to this to make decisions in times of uncertainty. So the person that I found for that specific thing was Anny Duke. She's a poker player. She has to make decisions in times of uncertainty and how does she do that? And the reason that it's so much better to learn through a people focused lens is that facts and historical events don't exist in a vacuum of there's only one way to look at it. If you look at how the pandemic of twenty twenty affected you, me and a single mom with five kids, it's completely different. So it's like, yes, the facts are the same, but the context and the story and the emotion is totally different. Yeah, It was only when I got into college and started looking at history from a different perspective, and I had a fantastic professor who told stories about history that I actually learned it. I never learned the events and the dates either, because they didn't they didn't contextualize. So

9:15 I totally get that. Okay, So now I want to share some of the genius that you have in the book. And there's just a few. There's so many. Of course we can't talk about them all, but let's just talk about there's a chapter on unleashing creativity, and of course you talk about I'm not sure how to say his name, of Shots, it's actually pronounced Akts. But Aktz founded a restaurant called Alina, which is named the best restaurant in the world by a luxury travel magazine, Elite Traveler in twenty eighteen, almost twenty years ago. And you say it's one part laboratory on, one part censorium, and one part theater, and that a guest to serve anywhere from seventeen to nineteen courses, a meal that structures the echoes and effective chapters in a book. I love that. And then you go on and this just so got me so delicious this idea that Alinya's most iconic dishes over the years include ready for this Listeners of yours, a pillow of nutmeg air, a black truffle explosion, and an edible helium filled floating balloon.

10:15 That is so amazing that the human mind can come up with this right. And I really love Grant actcess story because, as you know if you've read the book, he was this genius chef, his restaurant became number one in the world, and then, just as fate would have it, he got he was diagnosed with stage four tongue cancer and people are like, oh, my goodness, you know, how will the best chef in the world continue to be creative if you lost a sense of taste? And what Grant learned in that process was that actually, a very small portion of your taste comes from your taste buds on your tongue, a very large portion comes from your eyes so visually, and your nos and the sense of smell. So he would experiment with things like, okay, what if I made a dish where the tomatoes or strawberries look like tomatoes, but then you taste them and you think you're eating a tomato, but it's actually a strawberry. What does that do to your senses? Your vision's failing you, things like that. So he in the process where he quote unquote lost his sense of taste, he actually became even more creative. And I found that fascinating. All the little things that you mentioned. He sees it as chapters in a book, because he sees the dining experience as a story to be told and not just you know, dishes to be served. I hope listeners of viewers that you listen to this and it opens something in your mind and your hearts in terms of

11:48 how you might go about creating. The other thing that you have in your book that I think is really interesting too, relative to creativity, as you talk about how if you can just look at two different things and try to see what connects them, that creativity can be sparked. I think that's really really like, Yeah, of course I can see how that pine cone is related to that thing of putting over there. Of course I can see that, right, And I think that is so enriching and so exciting. Yeah, there have been studies that have been done that a lot of creative people actually take two totally disparate and different items and draw links between them. But it's natural for the brain when you have two different things, for the brain to naturally draw connections between them, even if they're not related at all.

12:35 And maybe this goes back to creating meaning. Sometimes when something happens to you and then you go on to do something else, maybe there are two totally different things, but you're like, oh, you create the meaning and then there's a relationship between those things now. But a lot of like da Vinci would take a sponge of paint and throw it at the wall, and as the paint dripped down the wall, he would look and see different shapes and you know, creativity with spark from that, and it's like, why did he do that. It's because it's totally completely different things that he wouldn't normally put together that allowed him to exercise his creativity muscle. Oh, I'm so working on this. I'm so folding that into my into my practice. Thank you. Okay. So, then one of the other things that you said that I thought was pretty fascinating is you said original creators typically have three characters in common. You say, they have a unique point of view on the world. They are confident they can achieve an ambitious goal, and they are willing to fail spectacularly in the name of creating something revolutionary. M Yeah, in that chapter, I really learned that a lot of people think they're original creators, but they're they're really not. And I thought about this as I looked at truly original thinkers, people like Grant Akeets or Elon Musk, or people who are trying to revolutionize entire industries. It's really really hard to be

14:05 original because there's incumbents who will come for you and say this is nonsense. You know, very few people believe, if any, and then you have to be crazy enough and courageous enough to continue to see your vision through even in the face of all this. And so I remember reading Tim urban Is, a blogger. He wrote he has this blog called Wait but Why, and he wrote this four part series on Elon Musk and he said that in our society. Here's how he talked about originality. He said that there's the true original creators, who are the chefs. They create the recipes, they invent the methods of putting these ingredients together. It's completely new, and that's the blueprint. Everybody else is a cook in that kitchen. Who that then takes that recipe and maybe they won't a little bit, but it's still a derivative of that original recipe, So it's not that original, it's just maybe modified. So it's like it's worth asking yourself, you know, if I have this crazy idea, is it really truly original or is it just derivative of something that's already existed. I think that's an incredible distinction to make, and I certainly the other thing that I was getting present to as you were sharing that is, if you're going to persevere in that level, in my mind from the work that I do, you have got to be passionate.

15:31 You have got to fuel this energy in yourself to keep going. And I really admire that absolutely, And that's I think that passion is so so hard to do. When in the intro when I was listening, it said that you've been doing the show for nine years almost ten, And that's true consistency, and I actually think that discipline and consistency are the two hardest things to continue, even though consistency plus discipline over a long period of time is what equals trust. Oh, I remember you were reading writing about that in the book as well. Thank you for that. I really appreciate that. Yes, it is a labor of love, and it truly is a passion. So all right, let's let our listeners and viewers chew on a few things we were just talking about there pun intended. I'm your host, doctor at Least Cortez, who went on there with Paulina Marinova Pompano. She's the founder of The Profile, the new media company that features long form profiles of successful people and companies each week. She's the author of The Hidden Genius, The secret ways of thinking that power the world's most successful people. We've been talking a bit about some of the genius in her in her book. After the Break, we're going to cover mastering mental toughness and also unlocking healthy relationships.

16:42 Stay with us, we'll be right back. Doctor Elise Cortes is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author. She helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite alease to speak to your organization. Please visit her at Elisecortes dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose.

17:32 This is working on Purpose with doctor Elise Cortes. To reach our program today or to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to Alise A Lisee at Eliscortes dot com. Now back to working on Purpose. Thanks for staying with us and welcome back to working on Purpose. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortes, as I too, am dedicated to creating a world where people realize their potential work. They are led by inspirational leaders that help them find and contribute their greatness, and we do business of betters the world. My last book came out in March of twenty twenty three. It's called The Great Revitalization. How activating meeting and purpose can radically in life in your business. And I wrote it to help leaders understand the changed workforce that they find themselves in today and give them twenty two best practices to be able to address and create a destination workplace to attract them. You can find more at at least coquretest dot com or grab it on Amazon if you are just joining us today. My guest is Paulina Marinova Pampliano. She's the author of Hidden Genius, The Secret Ways of Thinking that power the world's most successful people, which is delightful in every way. Okay, so this next one, we're going to talk about pain, and pain is something I'm just going to say right out loud and directly. I'm not good at it. I've been good at pain, none of us are. I am not good at it. But I love your chapter on focusing on mastering mental toughness, and you you feature a person named Goggins who's an expert in self talk, and he's convinced himself

19:06 that pain is a gatekeeper that holds the key to the greatest things in life. Pain, he says, unlocks a secret doorway in the mind, one that leads to both peak performance and beautiful silence. Masters of suffering don't see pain as discomfort or torture that happens to them. They see it as a living being that lets their mind in on the secret that takes him to the next level. That's astounding. He's an astounding guy, I think so. For those of you who don't know David Goggins, he used to be severely overweight. He was working kind of at a dead end job. He didn't see any purpose or meaning in his life. One day, he came home, he sat on the couch and was drinking his like shape from sake and shake, watching TV. When he saw a program on the Navy Seals Hell Week, which is this one week. It's like a grueling mental and physical challenges that they have to undergo. Most of them don't pass. And he saw this program and he said, I'm going to become a Navy Seal.

20:12 And it's just like, at that point in his life, that was an insane statement. He went on to completely rewire his mind and his body, and he became an ultra runner. He runs distances of over one hundred miles. But he also became a Navy seal. And when you hear him talk or you read his book, you hear about all the different mental techniques that he's used, and they're so helpful. For example, he used something called the accountability mirror. So he's like, if you're just starting out, you have to look at yourself in the mirror and see your honest reflection. When he saw himself, he said to himself in the mirror. You're fat, you're lazy, and you lie all the time. And it may sound really harsh, but he's like, you have to say those things in order to change them, because the next question is, now, what are you going to do about it? And he posted all these sticky notes around the mirror saying, you know, I'm going to go one day without lying for external validation, or I'm going to go on a two mile run, or i will clean my house even when I don't want to. Things like that that forced him to create small new habits until he became the person that he wanted to be. There's just so much we can learn from that. And that's one of the other things that I really applaud about your book, Pauline, is that you really situated this. You situated the beginning of your book that this is not a book to idolize the people that you talk about, it's

21:44 to learn from them. And I really appreciate that. It's just a there's something for us all to learn that. I also really appreciate this notion that and you do it also with criticism in the book, where you make pain its own being that's well, not you, but the people that you're studying, and I think that's really really fascinating, and there's a lot of access to that too. I think for us to think about pain as this other being here like Goggins does, fascinating. Yeah, it's if You'll notice a lot of ultra athletes personify pain. So in the book, I highlight David Goggins for him, he personifies pain in a way where it's like, oh, I enter this dark room and it's me versus me, and then I come out on the other side and I'm a much stronger version of myself.

22:30 He sees pain as this place. Courtney Dalwalter, she's one of the most successful endurance athletes in the world. She personifies pain and that she sees it again as a place. She sees this pain cave. And the reason she sees a pain cave. She's like, I am equally is in control of like when I enter and when I leave. So she's in control that whole time. So as she's running over one hundred two hundred miles, she's like, I know I'm approaching it. I know I'm going to be in it. She's had bleeding head injuries, vomiting hallucinations and she's run through all of that, and she's like, I don't see pain as a sign that I should stop. I see it as something that it's going to happen. I expect it to happen. And then she comes out on the other side again, you know, having been through this pain cave. But sometimes it's not just athletes. It's people who all of us will at some point be shoved in the pain cave against our will involuntarily. And one person that I highlight his name is Anthony Ray Hinton, and he was wrongfully in prison for thirty years. He spent time on death row. He was you know, in solitary confinement for a period of time, but he remained his sanity and when people ask him how, he said that same thing. It's kind of like I knew that that cell, you know that that was my pain cave.

23:56 But he started thinking about day dreaming about you know, winning Wimbledon or having tea with the queen and things like that. He was able to personify this thing as a place that's temporary and have his mind to wander. So it's like these these places, these pain caves, solitary confinement cell or you know, your dark bathroom that Goggins refers to are almost places of metamorphosis. You go in as one type of person and then you come out the other side as somebody totally different. That is so powerful, and really what I want to celebrate in that is two things. One the power of the human mind the power of the human spirit. I think that is. If that doesn't just excite you, ladies and gentlemen, I don't know what's going to do it for you. All right, well, now let's talk about this notion of being able to unlock some healthy relationships. I really really was riveted by your story of talking about Chris Voss, who is the FBI's lead national kidnapping negotiator, the twenty four year career mastering the art of listening, and he used several strategies when talking with bank robbers and kidnappers that I thought were really interesting, And there were three of them in particular, if maybe you can just touch on they were listening, mirroring, and labeling. Even just the way he used his voice and lowered his voice was really fascinating. Yes, I really love this because when I was telling my friends, I was writing a book and one of the chapters was on relationships, and I was like,

25:29 and then I'm talking about this guy who's a hostage negotiator, and they're like, what kind of book is this? So, but it's truly amazing that you can learn so much about healthy relationships from hostage negotiation because it's those are extreme situations where you have to develop rapport quickly and you have to get the other party to trust you, and you have to build a relationship in a very short amount of time. So he Chris Voss, there was in the book I talk about this bank robbery excit sample. But he has three techniques like you mentioned. In one of them you'll like because he calls it the late night FM DJ voice. I love that he says, you basically have to sound like you're on a radio show and make your voice very even and downward inflecting and calm, calming to the listener, not how I'm talking right now, which is up and down, up and down. So and that kind of voice is applicable in every situation because basically, the calmer you sound, when it hits the other person's mirror neurons in their head, they tend to get calmer as well, and they tend to match your energy.

26:41 So that's that's that voice. Then he talks about listening. You have to actually listen to what the person is telling you, not plan on what you're gonna say before they finish talking. And then mirroring. Mirroring is a rapport building technique to basically get more information from the other person without giving any yourself. So, for example, if you're in a relationship and your partner says I'm really stressed out, instead of being like, well, you're always stressed out and blah blah, well what you can say instead is, oh, you're really stressed out. You're basically taking the end of their what they just said and turning it into a question. And that shows a that you're listening and b that you're curious enough to gather more information. So he used this in the bank robbery negotiation. He kept just whatever the person said, he kept turning it into a question. They would offer more information. It's just human nature to do that. Then there's labeling in the example Chris Voss tells the second bank robber, He's like, Oh, it seems like you got roped into this, or it feels like you're you're being wronged. This labeling is a technique used to give uh basically voice to the other person's feelings, and again it's a rapport building technique. It usually starts with something like it seems like it looks like it feels like you're making a statement, and letting

28:12 the other person either correct you or agree with you, and again, that helps strengthen relationship so much because again, you're trying to understand it, you're not inserting yourself and your own opinions into it. I think it's incredibly powerful and certainly what I know from the work that I do Paulina is helping leaders to really learn how to really listen and go looking for what's special and unique about someone. It's amazing to me how people literally melt when you really listen to them, because it's so unusual. It's so unusual. Yeah, it just a really quick note when I included this in the book, But it's a very small aside that's changed the way I look at things. When I was in college, in my journalism one on one class, we were supposed to write a profile on another student, and I chose somebody, and I wasn't really listening to what they were saying and I was just asking my questions and he wasn't really offering anything up. So when I went back to my professor and I said, hey, I need to switch my partner because I have chosen the most boring person alive. My professor said, Okay, I see what's going on here. Nobody's inherently boring. They're only boring because it means you haven't asked the right questions yet. So what he was telling me is, like you, it's not the other person's job to entertain you.

29:33 It's your job to come up with questions that are more probing, follow up and actually listen to what they're saying instead of have your list of questions. They don't. They didn't give me anything good, so I'm just gonna move on. I definitely I love talking with people and asking questions. I everywhere I go, I love doing that, So I really relate to that. So speaking of talk any people and asking good questions. Now I want to get to your notion of your chapter on telling better stories, and of course you feature al Pacino, who is a wonderful favorite actor of mine. I loved him in sent of a Woman. Oh about underrated movie. I think it's it is. It's genius in every way. Everything about that movie, the story, the actors who created it are genius. It's one of my favorite movies. And nobody has ever seen that al Pacino movie. So I have times, Well what I loved about what you shared in your book about him. I think I have trem midsusrespect for him. But you talk about you say his performances are believable because he seems so natural playing the role.

30:38 You say, that's because he doesn't pretend. He becomes the actor, finds a sliver of himself in the character he's about to embody, and steps into their inner world. When inhabiting a character, Pacino says, he looks for the thing that moves him on an emotional level. Like you've been talking about, it's not just that he knows what his character's saying, nor even why his character is saying it, but how he feels when saying it. Wow, that's intense. Yeah, al Patino is just I got chills when you were reading that because he's he's a master at his craft, because he's one of I think few actors that understands that, you know, acting, you have to become, you have to create this alter ego of this person, and al Patino understands very well that every character is kind of complicated. In every role, he brings kind of a part of himself that maybe wasn't in the script, but he made it up because he was like, nobody is inherently just good, and nobody's inherently just bad. So all his characters are kind of complicated and sentible. Woman. I mean, he's he's a he's a protagonist, but he's also very kind of complicated, and he's let this life of regrets. So so when he when he acts, he actually became.

32:00 And I took this technique into my own world when I was studying these people for my newsletter, The Profile, I would choose one person a week and I would just study everything. I would watch videos of them being interviewed. I would listen to podcasts. I would make notes of things that they repeated on multiple podcasts. I'm like, huh, that must be important to them, or I would. You would be amazed at how much you can learn just by watching someone. And the more interviews that I saw, I'd be like, Okay, look do they use their hands to communicate a lot? Do they lean in? Do they lean out very what are they trying to omit and what are they trying to emphasize? And I would make it a challenge for myself. For example, when I was studying David Goggins, I was like, what would it be like if I saw the world this week through his eyes? So I would quote unquote become by being like, all right, well it's raining outside. But I told myself I'd run three miles. David Goggins would go run three miles in the rain, So I would do that. And it's just like when you become you try on different identities and you're like, ooh, I like this. I do not like that. And like you mentioned, I said that this book is not about idolizing imperfect people. It's more about learning from them. Because al Pacino master, absolute master of his craft. He has pretty awful personal relationships. So it's like you can't there's trade offs to every level of success, and success doesn't exist in a vacuum, so you have to be very mindful that you

33:32 are selecting and choosing certain things to learn from these people, not idolizing them. One For one, I really like the idea of stepping into somebody's world like that. I'm gonna I'm gonna do that. Thank you, Paulina. Yeah, all right, let's love. Let's grab our last break. I'm your host, doctor release Cortez. We've been on the air with Paulina Marinova Pomplano. She's the founder of The Profile, a new media company that features long form profiles of successful people and companies each week. She's the author of Hidden Genius, The secret ways of thinking that power the world's most successful people. We'll be right back. Doctor Elise Cortes is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author, she helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite a lease to speak to your organization, please visit her at Elisecortes dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is working on purpose with doctor Elise Cortes. To reach our program today or to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to a lease Ali se at at least Coortes dot com now back to working on Purpose. Thanks for

35:10 stating with us, and welcome back to working on Purpose. I'm your host, doctor eur Lee's Cortes. As I mentioned in the last break, that latest book that I brought out in March of twenty twenty three, called The Great Vitalization. What I did for you to help you along in that journey is I gave you a three page assessment, organizational best practices assessment to see to what extent is your organization actually meeting the needs of today's workforce. So you can find it at Gustodashnow dot com or at least Coortes dot com if you are just joining me today. My guest is Paulina Marinova Pompliano. She's the author of Hidden Genius, The Secret Ways of Thinking that power the world's most successful people. So this next one I thought was really really fascinating. There were so many things in here that just really tickled me and thought, there's so much you could do with this if you even just if I just were to employ three or four the things that you have in your book, I believe my life would be change. That's how valuable I think your book is. So what I loved. Was this notion of you talk about the legendary investor Charlie Munger, and he has iron prescription, as you say, to make sure he doesn't become a slave to his beliefs, he says.

36:17 You quote him is saying, I'm not entitled to have an opinion on this subject unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people who are supporting it, he says, And then he goes on to say, I think only when I reach that stage am I qualified to speak. Wow, that is incredibly talk about discipline and thorough if I can actually state my opposer's views better than they can before I speak. What I said in my notes is how that would radically change politics in our country, oh Man, among other things. Yeah, well, Charlie. Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett are known to say when somebody asked them a question about something they don't know that well, they're known to say, you know, this is outside of my circle of competence. I cannot argue the other side better than the other person yet, so I don't have an opinion. I think. I think that's so rare in our society now, mainly because I as you'll know if you read the book. I'm like really obsessed with cults. And the reason I'm obsessed with colts, I'm like people always say, oh, never, I would never join a cult, and then you read these stories and you're like, this is a successful person who leads, you know, a huge company. How do they get roped into this? And it's very much because it's you know, the world starts being presented to them as black and white, zero context, zero nuance, and then you start seeing things as oh, of course, this is the only way. But if you employ this

37:49 iron prescription of there's always another side, there's always another layer. What can I learn and how can I argue that better than my own position? Maybe I'll learn something, Maybe I'll change my mind. I think the biggest travesty of our society today is that people just are unwilling to change their mind as new information comes in. That clinging to surety is one of the things that I also work on my programs with people is to help them just remove the surety. How do you know right? How do you what? What? What's the evidence that shows you that to be so? And so it's part of it is just slowly you know, decoupling from that surety which is so comforting. Yes, that's and it's so hard. That's a really good example of how to invite uncertainty in your life because most people are so sure because they're scared of uncertainty. But what if uncertainty can actually help you become more well rounded? So true, And again I just thought there was so much to that. Okay, so this is interesting. This next thing I want to talk about here, I'm going to be on a panel talking about the severity of loneliness here on Valentine's Day. So what I wanted to get to, Yeah, on Valentine's Day, perfect right, it's but you know that whole the loneliness thing, as you know, is is an epidemic and it's it's deadly. So I really liked what you wrote about in your book around building an engaged community and you talk about how and this is where this really starts to get into my world beautifully is you talk about how our culture sense contradictory messages because it doesn't know the difference between solitude and loneliness. You say,

39:22 solitude helps us regulate emotions, while loneliness dulls them. That's really interesting. So I want if you could speak a little bit to that, and then I want to have you well speak about what Steve Cole from UCLA is putting forth as well in your book. Yeah, so solitude. The difference between solitude and loneliness is almost about the perception you have between about the closeness of your ties. So you know how you've heard the phrase lonely in a room full of people. The reason that can happen is because we have so many, so many ties. But if our perception of those relationships are that they're weak and those people aren't really our friends, you can find yourself really, really lonely. Whereas if solitude is where you enjoy spending time alone, even if you only have two relationships, but they're really really strong and you perceive them to be that way, you don't feel lonely. And I thought it was really interesting. I read this profile of Elon Musk, and you know, he's the richest man on earth, he's very successful, and then the reporter is like, okay, well what about your relationships, And as you know, his relationships are all over the place, and he's like, I always I always have to have somebody next to me sleeping next to me.

40:40 I cannot be alone. It kills me. And he's like, what do you mean. You're surrounded by people all the time. And the reporter makes a note that if you're going to be lonely at the top, if you were lonely at the bottom, success and money and wealth and material possessions don't change your perception of your relationships with people. I think this is really really important, hugely important to talk about. I know, for me, I savor my solitude. I love my piece, I love my that's where I write and create and consider and ponder, et cetera. So and I really like I like my own company, especially when I talk back, when I ask questions. Right, yeah, exactly now, it's it's it's you know, the difference, you know if you're lonely and you know if you're in solitude, absolutely and I've certainly felt both over the years. Absolutely.

41:35 Well. There then this wonderful sort of antidote that you have here that I of course completely align with you talk about Steve Cole, the UCLA professor whose research suggests that one of the most effective ways to break the cycle of chronic loneliness is to pursue a goal or a sense of purpose larger than yourself, ideally one that requires you to interact and cooperate with other people. Yeah, it's all about I mean, it's all about purpose and meaning. Right. There's a story I tell in the book of this guy who was a successful baseball player and then and then he went to jail for a number of reasons. But it was actually when he was imprisoned that he found his purpose. And he was like, oh my gosh, you know I can work with these other people. I can help them read and learn and and all this stuff. And it's like, how can you find your purpose in prison?

42:28 That's how, because suddenly he has meaning, and that meaning can absolutely transform your life because you feel like you're working towards a greater good and it's not just about yourself, right, which is exactly of course, the definition of purpose. Purpose is always about serving other people. And then if we layer in like a logo therapeutic term, self transcendence, which is always about serving other people too, and that the second that you're serving other people, you're not focused on yourself anymore, and you start to feel like you matter. That's why it works that you feel like you're making a difference your person, your contribution makes makes a difference. Yes, And that's why you know, during this pandemic when a lot of people spent time alone and they're like, I have what am I working on? And it's that like, you have to be very intentional about finding things like this to do, because it's not just going to fall into your lap. You have to go out there and seek something out where you can make the world somewhat better in some unique way.

43:35 You're reminding me. I had occasion to pick up and meet meet and pick up a new friend named doctor Neha Sanguan and she and I'm I at the early part of the pandemic, and we decided to do something to try to help people. So we created this online community cafe. We had people from all over the globe literally signing in. It was free, and we were helping people to deal with that all the unknowns of the pandemic. And it was our way of trying to do something to be of service because frankly, we needed it for ourselves to be of service. And we met amazing people around the world that are still connected to us. That's amazing. That's exactly what it is. Yeah, it was great. So I highly recommend this. Who do you want to help and what do you want to help them with? Go find them and your life becomes instantaneously better. Okay, we're getting close to on it, and I got a couple more things I still want to get out of you. I love this whole idea of optimizing your content diet. I tried to be very, very mindful and intentional about everything. Where what am I reading, who am I hanging out with, what do I listen to when I'm getting ready in the morning, all those kind of things. So if you could speak a little bit to this content diet optimization, yes, So I first became aware that we have a content diet when I was had recently just moved to New York. I was working, but I was more in the stage of I love reality television and watch The Bachelor or The Bachelorette, like all the trashy TV shows I was consuming.

45:00 And then I started to notice how my thought patterns started changing, and I started seeing the world through this lens of relationships, and I was like, why is this happening? I would you know? I would my friend would say something and I'd be like, ooh, is she mad at me? Is this? And I would double guess everything because I was seeing the world through this like warped carnival mirror thing of relationships, and it was because I was consuming all this junk content. So I was like, what if I just improve the types of content that I'm putting into my brain. It's almost like I heard this once where they said that you're born with your hardware, which is your brain, but then all the software is all the content that you're putting into it constantly, which is why some people, if they have outdated software, seem like they're operating on iOS seven while everybody else is on iOS fourteen or whatever it is. It's because they stopped putting quality information into their brain. They're just like stuck in their old ways with their old way of thinking. And and it's again this like growth mindset type thing.

46:04 But the content diet, I'm like, Okay, if you're seeing the world through a lens of like negativity, or you feel like it's just gloomy all the time, make it a point to go through your day and just audit what you're listening to, what you're watching. You know, what you're browsing on the internet, how you're spending your time, and who you're spending your time with, because all of those information sources help shape and inform your outlook on the world, and you can dramatically improve that by starting to read difficult things, starting to read things that you don't necessarily agree with, and that that challenge is something that a lot of us are missing. Mm hmm.

46:45 Well that's why you know, after nine years, I still hosts in the show because I read the book cover to cover each week. It challenges my thinking, it stretches my mind, and I think it keeps me on going to go with that. Okay, we're almost to the closer, and I definitely want to I want you to speak to this that really really touches my heart about describing our own hidden genius. You say, all successful people bet on themselves, and there is no better time to start doing that. Create something that lets you tie your identity to something that actually matters your own name. Nothing is more liberating or more powerful. I can completely relate to that. That's what I have tried to do in my practice. Yeah, And isn't that It's so hard because once you work somewhere you start tying your identity to external things that you could lose, and you do this without thinking about it. You tie your identity to a job, to a job title, you know, to a relationship, status, to material wealth. Those are all things that you could lose. Well, you cannot lose is your own name, and that name carries a reputation, so you're very careful with it.

47:52 So when I left my full time job at Fortune to start the Profile, which is a newsletter that I was doing on the side, I decided to bet on myself because I knew that I had the skills to make it successful. And it's like, ask yourself, you know, what can I do today? In what area of my life can I truly take a risk and bet on myself? Mm hmm here here, Oh Paulina. I'm so very happy to know you, to have read your book, to be to be elevated by your thinking your research. I thank you so much for coming on to working a purpose and sharing your views with the rest of the world. Anything you want to leave our listeners with, that's it. I think I'll say. I'll say one thing. Uh, Beyonce once said, you know, I don't like to gamble, but if there's one thing I'm willing to bet on, it's myself. That's That's a fantastic way to close Polina.

48:43 Listeners and viewers. If you want to learn more about Paulina Maronova, Pampliano, the work that she is doing at the Profile, or her new book, Hidden Genius, there's a couple of places you can go. You can go to read Theprofile dot com or Hidden geniusbook dot com. We will see you next next week when we curl up over the mic with yet another author talking about their book to enrich and enliven our lives. See you there, and remember that work is one of the best adventures and means of realizing our potential and making the impact we crave. So let's work on Purpose. We hope you've enjoyed this week's program. Be sure to tune into Working on Purpose featuring your host, doctor Elise Cortes, each week on W four C.

49:24 Why Together, We'll create a world where business operates conscientiously, Leadership inspires and passion performance and employees are fulfilled in work that provides the meaning and purpose they crave. See you there, Let's work on Purpose.