Make your future self work | Michael Schrage | Big Think Edge

You you more and more of us are going to struggle to out-compete software artificial intelligence. We have to start evolving. If people want to stay ahead and gain the skills that they need to be on top of their game in their careers, they're gonna need to keep learning soft skills, how to deal with human behavior, and how to adjust to things that are changing in real-time. That's an area that's very, very difficult for computers, but humans have a huge advantage. There's power and confidence.

I'm on the other side of the table now. I produce and I direct and I write. I can really feel the difference when someone comes into a room with confidence. I'm such an advocate for everyone to think like an entrepreneur. Think about how you would be doing your job if nobody showed you how to do it. Through the study of analytics, I knew exactly what was going to win, what was going to lose. Anybody can look at their craft, their profession, their passion, and become better. It's about finding that edge.

More and more of us are going to see you. Oh, welcome to this Big Think Live webinar! I am Peter Hopkins, co-founder and president of Big Think. Today's topic is "Make Your Future Self Work: Pareto Performance in Pandemic Times and Beyond." It is my great pleasure to welcome Michael Schrage as our guest today. He is a research fellow with MIT Sloan School’s Initiative on the Digital Economy. Most importantly, he facilitates change beyond the important things and writes, teaches, and professes.

Today, we'll be discussing, among many other things, the concept of "selves", a term that he coined, and the idea of how to embrace new possibilities and new levels of performance in the midst of this, you know, really challenging and uncertain time. So, Michael, first, thank you so much for joining us. Near me, any of you fine? Can you hear me? Right? Yes, I can hear you!

Terrific! Exit stage for this conversation a little bit, you know, many of us now we've been in our homes for several weeks, over a month. Our lives have changed really dramatically. The things that we're used to, the way we go about doing things and getting things done in our lives – you think that this moment really presents release and that should be getting us to think about ourselves, our performance, our abilities in new ways. Why is that? Give us a sense of how you think this moment is.

Well, you know, I don't want to make as big as the pandemic is—I don't want to make something out to be more than, you know, this profound disruptive time. I've been doing work in this area for a number of years, and what is striking to me – by that I mean how can technology make people more valuable, not just more productive, but more valuable. So, I'm looking at these areas and this domain in the workplace. I work with a variety of different organizations, I work with students, I work with exec ed students, and so on.

Now, we're all in lockdown literally all over the world, and all of a sudden, you are forced – you're not asked, you're forced – to rethink what can you do meaningfully within the limitations and constraints of your living room, your bedroom, your mobile, or tablet. For some people, there’s a level of technological dependence that has never before existed. Is this a crutch, or is this an amplifier?

So, what I think is special about this time, particularly for those people who are trying to work with others and create value in collaboration or for customers and clients, is how should we become more introspective with and for these technologies? How can we boost our self-awareness and boost the odds of creating new value, of having a bigger impact and influence? Because what was something that was interesting and a source of curiosity has now become mandated. We don’t have a choice unless, of course, you leave and do see people face to face. So, that’s really what I want to push people to think differently about.

You've got these tools. You’ve got these technological ensembles. How do you want to use them to invest in yourself? How do you want to invest yourself in them? That really dovetails with a lot of the research you’ve done in recent years around the idea of individual performance and that we are not just one thing or another, but we’re really the composite of a range of abilities and disabilities, strengths, and weaknesses. Help the audience or set the stage in yours, selves—we're in multiple selves perspective on human performance.

I am very happy to answer that question and forgive me for just putting it for me. Research, historical context, or serious work that I did in this regard was on collaboration—Watson and Crick, Rock and Picasso, Wilbur and Orville Wright, Steve Wozniak, and Steve Jobs. How did great collaborators use tools and technologies to create something that was more than either one of them?

One of the fascinating things I observed—and I was very lucky because I got to talk with Francis Crick and James Watson—is that they became slight when they collaborated with each other. So, my book, my first book was really on shared space, but always back of my mind moving forward was what aspects of ourselves do we bring to creativity, to collaboration? What are the aspects and attributes of the self that adds value?

When you look at the psychology literature, the cognitive psychology literature, the social psychology literature—exactly when you look at stuff like from Herb Simon the Nobel laureate, or Tom Schelling the Nobel laureate, or Freud or Jonathan Haidt in social psychology, what you find is that in fact the notion of a single unified integrated holistic self is, if I may be permitted to use this technical phrase, [ __ ]—it's BS. You are not you, you are the ensemble of aspects. Jonathan Haidt used the analogy that your mind is like a committee—a competing committee or a task force.

So, the idea that I'm pushing is instead of becoming a more integrated holistic self—you know the old joke of the Zen hot dog maker: "Make me one with the universe!"—we should deconstruct and disaggregate into selves instead of self-discipline, selves-discipline. What if we thought about value creation and productivity as not how do I be my best self, but how do I effectively manage a portfolio of multiple selves? My influential self, my punctual self, my creative self—how do we do that?

Now here's the difference between now and Descartes, or now in vintage Stein, or now in Russell, or now in Herb Simon in the '70s. We can use—and we do use—technology to digitally disassemble, digitally deconstruct the self and amplify some aspects of ourselves versus others.

I have joked in public—and I'll repeat the joke here—that it would be really cool to be Kim Kardashian West's data scientist because her Instagram self clearly is a remarkable self. It’s been a remarkably successful self, but is that Kim Kardashian West? We'll leave that to better scholars than I to identify, but you get the point. Why you would almost argue—and that's a very interesting example—that that is perhaps a highly commercialized, capitalistic, strategic version of the underlying modification. Yes, commodification of self, Paul Ricœur, Manuel Castells—yes, absolutely!

That is a very pomo anarcho-syndicalist Marxist view of the self, but that's not what I'm talking about. What I'm really talking about is intentionality. Who do you want to be? How do you use technology to amplify those aspects of yourself? So, optimize me, I hope, is fundamentally different than optimizing around creativity or influence, or you're a good facilitator or a good mentor.

How can you use technology to amplify your mentoring capabilities, your coaching capabilities, your facilitative capabilities? How do you become a better cyborg, right? As we have discussed in our free webinar conversation, I think one of the big revelations in this is just to move from a binary perception of technology—it is either good or bad; I use it, I don't use it—to a more nuanced one that says how can I connect tools to my strengths and weaknesses, to augment my strengths and make them outperform and to mitigate my weaknesses and the things that I’m not so good at so they're less of an issue?

Which I think really feels to me like a very powerful response to the kind of natural impulse to shy away from it or to throw it away or to be Luddite about it. Well, I mean, there’s no Luddite aspect. I saw, and I was amused you know, that we put up the "Know Thyself." That's from the Oracle of Delphi—you know, "Know Thyself"—that's really going to be what self-knowledge and introspection means going forward.

I want to push back, though, on some of the way you framed it because the way you framed it is the classical way of framing it. The more I looked at the classical way of framing it, the more I realized it's not going to work for how human beings actually behave. What are my strengths? What are my weaknesses? How can I use technology to minimize my weaknesses? On the surface, that is a completely logical thing to do, but part of my background, in addition to Computer Sciences and economics, there was a famous economist by the name of Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian, and you know, for welfare theories, there's the Pareto optimum, but he's also very famous for the Pareto distribution, the Pareto principle—80/20 principle.

So, the essence of the 80/20 principle, the wonderful book by Richard Koch on that called the 80/20 Principle—but I assume that most people viewing this or listening to this know it—is that for the most part, overwhelmingly 20% of the inputs account for 80 percent of the outputs. That, in terms of impact, it's a tiny—it’s a relatively small portion of the contribution that has the biggest impact and influence on whatever it is you're seeking to accomplish.

So, what I ask people is when they talk about their multiple selves, I don't say what's your strength. I ask them a different question: what's the 20% of what you do that generates the 80% of the outcome? When you get in your way, what is the 20% of the stupid things that you do that is really responsible for 80% of the issue that you’re creating for yourself?

So, I am looking at the Pareto self. I think if you really want to think intelligently about investing in the notion of selves and digital fluency and value creation and productivity, identify the attributes of your Pareto self—your persuasive self. What's the twenty percent effort or initiative that is responsible for 80% of your persuasiveness? This forces, this demands, this requires a different level of introspection and a different way of assessing and analyzing your effectiveness. That’s the kind of issue that I'm really interested in.

You know, I’m also interested in what kind of selves do people choose to manage or disaggregate themselves? So, differently, for example, what is the title to frame you know having gone through this sort of Pareto inspection? What type of, you know, conclusion like somebody come to, and how might they frame up?

Well, I'll give you—and this is a horrible thing to do, and it makes me appear even more egocentric than I am—but I'll give you an example from me, and then I'll give you an example from somebody who I've worked with. An example for me is I did several years back an analysis as we began logging on networks of what was the one behavior I did that people most appreciated and led to the most valuable outcomes for me. I took this very seriously. I had very few analytical tools; it was more qualitative initially than quantitative, but to cut to the chase, it turns out the most valuable thing I did in my community of people was that I would forward interesting links, articles, reading clips—and this was in the early Facebook days, but I didn’t use Facebook or Twitter; this was just with people with whom I worked, and it was customized. You should look at this because I was looking at this stuff anyway, and it was just very easy for me to forward that.

So, that was my twenty—eighty—the biggest thing impact that I had was something that I did by leveraging socializing something that I did anyway. Then I began figuring out, “Okay, what one thing can I do to make that more valuable?” And here I'm getting feedback, asking them if they should forward it to somebody who I wanted to know, get to know, who I thought they would also appreciate.

So, to extend my network—very, very simple—but it’s trackable, it’s data, it’s a way of amplifying an aspect of the self. Somebody who I do executive coaching with is a CEO. He took this notion of "pareto selves" very, very seriously. Very smart guy—so smart that he's intimidating. And so the selves were a kind of thing that he did. It was a nudge; it was a prompt.

When I talk about behavioral economics, choice architecture—the whole Richard Thaler, Nobel laureate in economics, Cass Sunstein thing—he always included a question—not an intimidating question, a question designed to elicit information, as opposed to simply saying, "You need to look at this." He baked into this, "How do I leverage my curiosity in a way that creates engagement without intimidation?" Actually, that would have been a good slogan for him.

So, what am I talking about? I'm talking about minor changes that leverage the 20/80 impact. That's when—and what do digital networks do? What do digital marginal cost investments that literally scale to global impact? That’s a big deal; that’s a big honking deal. That’s why "selves," where I think is important. Sorry for my long-winded answer.

No, I love it! I love it! I mean, to reiterate, basically, you're suggesting that we should be looking at the system and the impact we're making as opposed to what—the distinction I drew earlier between strengths and weaknesses—it’s more about looking at the world as where your combination of things creates that most compact and then diving in exactly what aspect of yourself maps to the real world or the virtual world and what aspect of the world maps to what aspect of yourself.

And this is where, just to go back to the argument again earlier, I think viewing things as "how do I become my best self?" "How do I amplify and leverage my strengths?"—that’s a trap. That's a trap! I don’t mean to sound like the Star Wars caliber character, but it’s a trap!

I think we need to be more reductionist before we rethink how holistic or integrated we want to be. I think too many—there's a larger unit of analysis rather than the more leverageable and scalable unit of analysis. My big joke—very few people at MIT laugh at it—is that AI, what technology, the real meaning of AI in a digital world, is not artificial intelligence. It’s augmented introspection—our ability to understand ourselves, leverage ourselves, deconstruct ourselves, and recombine what we've deconstructed in a movable way. That’s incredibly powerful, and that’s probably the design and architecture and engineering path to be on going forward.

I have nothing against the integrated holistic self, but boy, I think people cheat themselves when they ignore the potential of their Pareto selves portfolio.

Now, it makes a lot of fencing. And, you know, I think as I have said to you in the past about this framework, it is the perfect [ __ ] elliptic visions of AI and the kind of us-versus-them dichotomy that so often draw, you know, drawn about—they're going to take over; it’s going to be "Terminator," when in fact the real issue is how do we evolve in tandem? And you know if we're in a competitive world, which we obviously are, the people who are able to do that with the most self-consciousness, self-awareness, sort of strategic intention are gonna end up on top.

I completely agree, although I would say "selves awareness" as opposed to "self-awareness." You don't alert. Yes, it's not no stinking question!

I ask you, Michael, going back to your example that you used of your own—you know, determining that you had this great organizational impact or network impact and sharing these valuable links, infuriating content, and providing using it as a basis for stimulating new thinking in your peers—how did you determine that?

You know, that obviously, you know, you came to realize that this body of people perceived you in this way relative to your other contributions and other forms of collaboration, you know, the extract smith at the—to get away from the strength and weakness model which is very self-determined and to get my model, you need a mechanism for understanding your value in context, which is something, you know, not easily gleaning from one where one stands.

You’re completely correct, and, you know, I don't want to go to any of science, but you know for all of the—and you know people who ever watched the show BIG BANG realized that one of the running themes was the schism, the rivalry, the tension between the theorists and the experimentalists. One of the most important ways that innovations that drove science was the rise of instruments—the telescope, the microscope, the linear accelerator, the semiconductor chip.

You know, the whole notion here is that what we now have with you—don't platforms—I mean, look, there’s Kodak went bankrupt. My roommate at MIT was on the board of Kodak, you know, who popularized photography? Polaroid! Again, Cambridge spinoff—you know, Edwin Land, instant photography. But now literally everybody takes a photograph. Everybody's phone is—what? You know, remember Kodak moment? Everybody has that capability. These instruments, they generate data. Now we can show that slide—the virtuous cycle slide.

We now have more data. Why did I focus on that thing about, you know, where I had impact? Of course I thought I had impact because I'm a reasonably smart guy and I bring things to people's attention, but I had no instrument to look at that. And then I realized you know what? I think, gee, where am I really being effective? I began looking at my email and my responses to the email, and I found that the people with whom I sent these forwards to and got interesting responses, I had the healthiest and best relationships with.

That was an indicator—that's a data point! That’s a data point that I designed that little experiment around and turned into a hypothesis that these kinds of people were prepared to engage with me in different ways than people who didn’t respond.

And what about, since you--productivity or value? If what is myself, what’s the data for it? How does it make me more productive? Do I want to be more productive? What kind of self would make that possible? What kind of data do I need? Oh, I have all this kind of data! What kind of selves should I consider exploring and what kind of productivity should I look at? What’s the single most important thing about this?

In front of that, people are looking at, it’s a virtuous cycle! It’s a virtuous cycle! How do you create virtuous cycles? How can your Pareto selves create and enable virtuous cycles of value creation? That’s it for me! If you talk about human capital, the future of human capital, that’s it! How do we create virtuous cycles? How can Pareto cells be platforms for virtuous cycles of value creation and greater productivity? Yes, we're going to be doing automation. Yes, we're going to leverage machine learning. Maybe the machines will be giving us advice! I've written a book on recommender systems. Maybe machines are going to give us advice.

It's about which selves would be most fair, most productive. We're back to the cyborg issue. What kind of cyborg do you want to be? What aspects of your Pareto selves does your cyborg amplification best amplify?

I can't hear you right now! Oh no, I haven't—I was just sort of beginning to formulate my question!

Okay, you often use a reference to people with personal trackers as a kind of example. This is a cautionary example you use because you say oftentimes people are trying to be rigorous. You know, they wear a personal tracker, they count how many steps they do all day. That would seem to me the logical and perfect instantiation of your ideas here, but you think that that model can be misapplied? Use that as a sort of counterpoint for us.

Well, of course, all day it can be misapplied! You know, I would use a vulgar but legitimate example—apologies to the gender issues here— you know, I would be loath to shave without a mirror. Many women I know would be loath to apply makeup or do some touch-ups without some sort of reflective surface.

The introspection is sort of built in there. You know, the question is how do we want to know? There’s an important—if there’s a blemish, do we want the mirror to magnify? What are the powers we want to imbue in our reflective media, or the media that enable reflection? You know, one is the visual, but we’re putting steps—the issue is not just how are we introspective. It’s introspection as a means to an end. What’s the end? What’s the end? Is it, you know, we can have the—by the way, you have a really nice reflective surface. You really look good! You turn into Narcissus, you know—that's the curse!

Or, you do 10,000 steps, let's do it 20,000 steps, and so you’re a little physically healthier, but your social life sucks! So what is the end? If we want to become a more—if we want to amplify our influential self, our persuasive self—to what end? To what end? A better collaboration? A better relationship?

By N't? And that's the real tension I've observed. I've observed a lot of people focusing on how can I do a better job of data capture, then assuming that I capture this data, what do I really want? What—who do I really want to be?

So, yeah, we’re right back to the Stoics, we’re right back to ancient Greece, we’re right back to ancient China. Who do I want to be? If I can see myself here, experience myself, model myself in different ways, how does that change purpose? How does that change the why in that I stretch me?

There’s a lesson for those who are reluctant to embrace these tools because perhaps, you know, you’re saying basically unless you know why you’re doing it, while you're wearing the personal step tracker, or why you're engaging in whatever technological amplification you might be—unless you have that even fully in your mind, then it will become potentially oppressive and things you off; you know, in the exact wrong direction.

I couldn’t be more—but it's like people who love to-do lists because they get pleasure ticking the box. Ironically, some of these you'll get more pleasure ticking the box than actually accomplishing the task!

Okay, I am—this is where I have to be careful. I'm not a therapist. I don't want to be a therapist. Sometimes in my coaching and mentoring role, I end up being a therapist, and it’s not a source of comfort or happiness for me. It is not the self-aspect of self I like. I'd prefer, if you'll forgive me, elaborating on this, I prefer to be a good listener, and I prefer to be somebody who helps people articulate what they're really trying to say, but I don't see my role or my purpose to heal them.

I see my role as helping them better articulate or understand what it is, you’ll forgive me—they think they’re thinking. But your point is the key one: to really take advantage of these technologies and tools, you really have to be more rigorous, more critical, more analytical about what you want the outcome to be.

That's pretty straightforward when you're putting on makeup or shaving! It’s not so straightforward when you’re collaborating with your colleagues to come up with a new marketing campaign or a new invention or, with full respect to Big Think, a disruptive breakthrough global educational and training platform.

Okay, the purpose is different for all of these things, and you have to really think this through. The future of Big Think isn’t just putting on great content; it’s getting and measuring how people use and get value from that content. That’s got to be the destiny here! That’s why I wrote a book called “Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become?” because you’re using your innovations to transform the capabilities of your customers.

“Selves” is how you transform the capability of the self. We’re going to move on to audience questions in a moment, but I just kind of reflect on what you're saying in another way. You know, as you’ve been speaking, you know, it really strikes me that what you’re advocating for is that we apply a certain level of scientific rigor to our own lives. That, you know, there is a way of evaluating and measuring and tracking that is more systematic and, you know, that we’re down to, you know, more probabilistic, we—the better outcomes. And at a moment where we’re supposed advocating for this as our society and we’re talking about science and leading with data and all of this, you’re sort of saying, “Wait a minute! You must also do that for yourself! This can't just be an external framework. This is actually an internal framework as well.”

Yes, and of course, I'm hardly original. Was it Socrates who said the unexamined life is not worth living? Right? You know, so this goes back to classical theory in classical times, antiquity. But what’s different is the technology—the way we can examine our lives, the way we can simulate our lives, the way we can deconstruct and analyze loyal aspects of the self that are of most interest to us or that we believe are most potentially valuable for our friends or, in my case, the way I view it in our workplace, in our work contacts. That’s remarkable!

That’s remarkable, and I think that that is what has gone undervalued and underappreciated. That is why I think the "selves" framework and the Pareto self framework is so important because it represents a twin point of view, a different sensibility—a different framework for the very points that you raised in your question.

We're going to segue now to audience questions. I just want to signpost that for those who are subscribers to our Edge platform, at the very end of the session toward the hour, we're going to be doing an exclusive lesson with Michael where we really get concrete about the steps you need to take to quit selves, where, and the idea of the Pareto self into action in your own life. But that’ll be coming up in about 15 minutes, but we’ve—I’ve been encouraged to move on so we can get to somebody's question.

The first asks the question, “Which selves do you prioritize there?” Boy, how do you allocate resources between oneself and another? You can add a little color so we can kind of understand that you got—

Yeah, you know, I love that question because the person is playing out the implications there. So, the exercise—just to foreshadow what we'll do at the end with the Edge group—you know, pick here’s what I would suggest: Pick five aspects of yourself that you would like, that you believe are Pareto selves. You know, your 20% of effort or time invested gets 80% of the impact.

Okay, create a portfolio—a portfolio word! Deliberately create a portfolio of five. Now here’s my suggestion: because you want a balanced portfolio, make sure that one of those selves is the self that gets in your own way! Okay?

I’ll tell you mine—you will not be surprised by what I’m about to tell you! One of the ways that I get in my own way is that in conversations—and in group conversations, I am an active listener—and I end up—I’m sorry, interrupting people. I’m not interrupting them to be rude, I’m just—you see, you mean this! Because I’m willing to engage, but other people, they’re a different tempo. They want to finish their third sentence, not just their second one. I get it!

So my Pareto—I literally put on my mobile phone for three days a flashing on the screen in a meeting. STFU! STFU! Okay, I won’t translate—you can figure it out, you can Google it later! And it was a nudge, it was a prompt to hold my horses—to restrain myself. Did I still interrupt? Of course I did, but it went down—it went down! People—I could tell people were less annoyed with me. Yes, that’s a qualitative judgment. Why am I saying this? Because when you talk about priorities in your Pareto self portfolio, make sure that you have symmetry between the things you want to amplify and the aspects do you want to rip or ameliorate.

How should you allocate resources between them? Like a stock portfolio—how do you want to balance and weight your Pareto selves portfolio? What a productive I think! I think you’ll learn a lot about yourself deciding how you want to invest in your Pareto selves portfolio.

Our next question is through the metal construction: How do I determine that my current goals are good enough for the person I become in pursuit of those goals? Sort of the idea of, you know, how do we manage the change in our calls as mine conjure?

Okay, that is—I do mean to sound like a suck-up, but that is also a great question! And I’ll give you a great reference. I have a collaborator, a gentleman who is at NYU, now is at UCLA. He’ll Hirschfeld—H-E-R-S-H-F-E-L-D. And he and I have done work—he’s done pioneering work in the future self and using technology. You know, you can see an image of what you will look like in 25 years.

So, the technique that many psychologists use is—you write a letter from your future self to your current self! The cheap, inexpensive exercise I encourage for this person is, you’re a decade older than you are now—write the letter from your—no, don’t! You may write the bloody thing out about how you’re spending your day, what you get the most satisfaction from, etc. Create a future self, okay?

Now, what do Pareto selves enable—a letter from that or a message from an aspect of yourself, your professional self versus your family self, however you want to do it—it’s up to you. But the way that you will detect discomfort or uncertainty is how good of a job you do and your future self communicate and share and inform your existing current self.

There’s a big literature on this! I urge you to check it out; it’s interesting! This—you know, as you’re talking, I keep going back to the sort of scientific method, you know, and how much that informed this. That if you were going to be a good student of yourself, if you’re not articulating things, if you’re just letting it be a sort of floating concept or nebulous cloud in your head, you’ll never have pinpoint and then measure from it.

Yes! So that my dirty little secret, Peter, is that I do a lot of reading on the history of science and scientific history, philosophy of science. I take that stuff very, very seriously! And you may recall I wrote a book on rapid experimentation—lean experimentation. We might even call it parameter experimentation! Yes, I take that very, very seriously!

And you know, it’s not unfair to say that in many contexts the scientific method—it doesn’t suck! It can add a lot of value! So, I believe that in terms of exploring the potential of the Pareto self, the scientific method, artfully applied, can generate a lot of value! And we have a fantastic laboratory! We have phones, we have laptops, we have the Internet, Instagram, Facebook, Google—they’re all meta! Calaca? Phi? We have all manner of little laboratories and instruments to do those experiments and learn from those experiments!

So yes, you’re exactly right!

This next question sort of gets at one topic I was interested in myself. An audience member asked, “Are you the best judge of your Pareto self?” and “How help incorporate others’ observations of you into your own analysis?”

And you touched on this, but let’s go read it head-on.

You know, this is horrible! These are like three great, great questions! There’s a wonderful gal, Tony Emily Pronin at Yale, so you guys know Kahneman, Tversky, cognitive biases, etc. You know, the Linda fallacy, you know, all the cognitive heuristic shortcuts that we take. You know, my colleague at MIT who’s now at Duke, Dan Ariely—predictably irrational, Emily Pronin has done excellent work on the introspection illusion, and the point is indeed exactly embedded in the questioner's point, which is it’s very hard to be a good judge of yourself.

On recommender systems, you may not be a good judge of yourself, but if you don’t click on the Amazon or Netflix recommendation, you know, you’re kidding yourself or you’re giving them bad data. So there’s an interesting tension—you’re getting the feedback of others; that is one of the most important research areas going on in psychology, cognitive psychology, neurophysiology right now.

So that’s how do you strike a balance between people who you trust’s critique of you and your own self-critique? I think that is a future vector for—I am looking at that area, so your question is spot on! My answer, I’m afraid, is that it’s a great question, and that’s the kind of thing that people need to become more self-aware about—whose advice do I trust?

Well, that’s the question! And that sort of raises the broader question—You clearly are applying this model in your own life. You have developed monix or milestones that cause you to stop and do kind of purposeful reflection. What are the sorts of—but what are the sorts of questions and what are the sort of intervals that you use to make sure this sort of self-reflection is a part of your life but not dominating it and not, you know, spiraling into the nihilistic, you know, indifference?

Well, I'm going to use myself as an example in this, but I will say that I track how much time I spend just browsing and going to various websites. So, I do the pie chart of time spent online. Every could be more regular, I look at my email communications, and I end my slack—all my stuff—and I see who am I spending the most and what groups am I spending the most time with? Am I doing business outreach? Am I doing support? How much of it is new? How much of it is initiated by me versus the insider?

So, I try to create, to use a good military phrase, more situational awareness! I try to become more situationally aware over time of how I spend my time. I want to be very clear about this: just because I have that, now doesn’t necessarily mean that I change my behavior. That’s a flaw of mine! Or maybe it’s not a flaw of mine—there’s a difference between my choosing not to do something and my choosing not to know something.

As a general rule, I choose to know things. I rarely choose ignorant! But I often choose not to act on what I know! And if any therapists in the audience, please do not reach out to me!

Another audience question dovetails with this, being, “How do you specifically, Michael, vectoring your goals to this analysis?” I guess first about—as you've just sort of touched on it a little bit—that you don’t not OP’s going to make changes or decisions in light of these analyses.

Yeah! How do your goals factor in where they sit, and how do you—how do they interact with these analyses that are ongoing?

That’s a very, you know, I don’t know how typical or how good of an example I set. I do believe, you know, I’m very old-fashioned in this regard. It should be clear throughout this entire a very much believed that actions speak louder than words!

That said, you know, to what extent do you see the words, read the words, to what extent do you understand the context that you’re in? I will say that I do—I’m older now. I am—I’ll tell you a good, bad thing about me: I am always looking for, like, in lean thinking, what are the ways that I can have big impacts at the margin? I don’t have the time to learn another computer language—can I do?

Do I have the time to learn how that language is used in certain contexts so that I can contribute or collaborate in that context and put people together who otherwise might not be put together? When you’re interconnected together when you’re at a place like MIT, you’ve got an environment where that kind of thing can pay off big time. So, I have become more opportunistic.

I think that one of my flaws is that there are a couple of big things I’m interested in, but I get distracted by high-impact opportunities that present, you know, a chance to work with a lot of really interesting and talented people. So that is one of my strengths. My greatest strength is also my weakness. I don’t think that’s unique in any way, shape, or form, but here’s the key—I make myself more aware of those trade-offs.

Self-knowledge matters! Excuse me, "selves knowledge" matters a lot to me! It matters more to me now than it did a decade ago, and I wish I had paid more attention a decade ago!

No, but it strikes me that this is a real model for getting to the heart of our goals and sort of what is going to enable us to achieve them— by not allowing, you know, a nebulous cloud of confusion to misassociate, you know, or lead us astray from why we’re not where we want to be or, you know, so you know, I think it’s incredibly powerful!

We have worked time for one or two more quick audience questions, and then we're going to segue into our exclusive. So we asked basically the question as: what sort of technologies, what sort of opportunities does this framework you're offering suggest? What do we know? Somebody wants to, you know, entrepreneurs who are looking to innovate in this environment, in light of this idea that technology can merely be addressing us at a disparate set, multi-self level.

What intuitive areas of innovation are you excited about, or might you point people to as on the horizon?

Well, that is also a very good question! Trippery! What I see happening? I’ll be very blunt—I have ended up being an advisor to organizations/startups that are trying to do, for want of phrase, the future of advice!

Okay, coaching and mentoring at work—what should I be reading to be more effective or successful? One organization is looking at LinkedIn profiles and how do you, using machine learning, etc., not because I want a different job, but I want to have different kinds of projects.

I want to be invited to different kinds of projects. So, what can I do on LinkedIn, and I’ll pick a name at random—GitHub—that will get me invited on these kinds of projects versus those kinds of projects? So anything that appeals to people's personal or professional development, the odds are pretty good we're going to be able to build a decent business case.

Challenge is getting the data, the algorithms, etc., but it really boils down to, again, I wrote a book with this: "Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become?" and it says the Pareto self portfolio of Pareto self framework is in the business of transformation! How do we transform our customer clients? How do we use our innovations to invest in the competencies, the capabilities, the creativity, the human capital nursing clients?

So instead of asking yourself what problem am I solving, how in the course of addressing this issue will we be transforming our best customers and our typical customers? I think that’s the framework I would bring to applying this in.

Well, Michael, thank you for that! We have hit our time for our public broadcast. My personal thanks to everyone.

Thank you, terrific! Now, and thank you to all of our public viewers on Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Big Think. I greatly appreciate your participation and for joining us. Also, thank you programming—our next Big Think Live webinar will be May 15th with education and innovative innovator and author Ryan Craig who’s really at the forefront of looking at new models of Education and how we can use B in this moment, we think the way we deliver the education.

So please join us there and on May 15th. Michael, thank you again! Hold on! We will be a segue to our Edge exclusive lesson after a couple of moments. Thank you again, everybody! Thank you so much! [Music]