Dan Heath: Ideas That Stick and Stories That Resonate

Guy Kawasaki:
I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is Remarkable People. We are on a mission to make you remarkable. Helping me in this episode is the one and only Dan Heath. He is a professor, author, and podcast host. With his brother Chip, he's written four books that have sold over three million copies.
Their works include Made To Stick, Switch, Decisive and The Power of Moments. His latest book is a solo effort. It's called Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen. We'll cover this book in an upcoming episode this fall.
Dan also hosts a podcast called What It's Like To Be…, and what he does in this podcast is he talks to people from all walks of life, and they explain what it's like to be what they are. He has, for example, a beer vendor and I open up this interview talking about the interview he had with a Secret Service agent.
If you are familiar with the work of Studs Terkel, you'll appreciate his approach, and I tell you it is quite fascinating. So I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. And now here is the remarkable Dan Heath. Are you going to re-interview the Secret Service after the Donald Trump assassination attempt?
Dan Heath:
That one was just uncannily timed. So we had just posted the episode about two or three weeks before the incident happened, and I had asked her about what had the Secret Service learned from the famous past failures, of course, the Kennedy assassination and the shooting of Ronald Reagan and some other near misses. And one of the things she highlighted specifically was not to let the bad guys get the high ground.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oops.
Dan Heath:
And so it was just painful to see what happened three weeks later.
Guy Kawasaki:
It would be so interesting to ask her, "Okay, so don't let the bad guys get the high ground and 150 yards away, they get the high ground. How does that fall through the cracks?"
Dan Heath:
My guess is, and obviously I'm no expert, I'm as much of an expert as you can be, having talked to a Secret Service agent for ninety minutes. My guess is though, that there was a clue in something else she said in the interview, which was she pointed out that the Secret Service, almost more than any other law enforcement agency, has to work through a ton of other law enforcement agencies.
When they take a candidate to the diner in New Hampshire, they're coordinating with the local police station and the sheriff and the airport authority because they have to cross all these different jurisdictions to ensure safety. And so my guess is that this was just a very tragic miscommunication among the soup of local agencies that were involved.
Guy Kawasaki:
You think the Secret Service has someone testing the doughnuts before candidates eat them?
Dan Heath:
Oh, that's a great question. I don't think they have any tasters on duty, but maybe if a candidate was sufficiently paranoid, they could be drafted into that.
Guy Kawasaki:
That's what interns are for. Now, I'm going to go backwards a little bit. So you have written some great books, books that I have cited in my own books, and you cover things like sticking and switching and decision-making and moments and preventing problems. Before we get into your podcast, which I also find fascinating, I got to just ask you for thirty seconds lightning round.
Could you give my listeners the gist of these various subjects? Here's a benefit for you. I think if they listen to your thirty second analysis of each of these subjects, they will be encouraged to read your book, which I really enjoyed your books, so give me the gist of how to make products stick.
Dan Heath:
It's not about products really. So the first book I wrote with my brother, chip is called Made to Stick and it's a communication book, plain and simple. It's about how do you communicate your ideas so that they stick with the audience, so that they're remembered, so that they change something. The way you make your ideas stick is you embrace six principles that characterize sticky ideas. It spells out an acronym, success minus the final S.
So if you can imagine those six letters, here we go. Simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional and stories. So if you think about something like JFK's call to put a man on the moon, it was simple, it was unexpected. Nobody thought we could travel to the moon in that era. It was concrete in the sense that you can imagine what success looks like in your mind. You can call up a picture of a human being on the moon.
Credibility is where it was difficult at first because no one was sure this was possible, but when the president is saying it, it adds a veneer of credibility. It was emotional in the sense that it's like the next frontier for mankind and what a magical thing it would be if we could pull it off.
And it was a story in miniature. We are the protagonist and the obstacles are set out in front of us. And so the book makes the claim that if you can layer on more of these traits of stickiness to your own messages, they'll be better received by the audience.
Guy Kawasaki:
Brilliant. Okay. Now, how do you make people switch?
Dan Heath:
Switch? Okay, this was book number two, and this is a book about behavior change. It's how do you get people to act differently? And our case was that even really big changes ultimately boil down to can you get people to behave a new way tomorrow that's different from what they were doing today. There's a three-part framework that involves an analogy that's a little bit to unpack, but it basically boils down to the three levers you can pull with behavior change are better clarity.
Can you understand more about which way you need to move? More desire, do you want to move in that direction? And ease meaning that your environment, your path has been shaped to allow for easier progress. And so the book talks about those three levers and how change leaders can make use of them.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, next topic is how to make better decisions.
Dan Heath:
I've never gotten to just do a rapid fire series of advertisements for all my books. This is fun. It's like a stroll down memory lane. So Decisive. Okay, this one's very simple. How do we make better choices in our life and in our work? And in the book our departure place is to say that that there are basically four key villains that afflict our decisions again and again. The villains are narrow framing, meaning that we tend to get fixated on one particular choice.
A lot of times in life we make whether or not decisions, whether I should do this, whether or I should buy that. That's villain one. Villain two is confirmation bias, which I'm sure all your listeners are familiar with. Just our tendency to collect information that flatters what we want to be true. There's short term emotion. I think it's wrong to say that emotional decisions are biased decisions.
I think emotions can be some of the most important information that we have in making decisions, but short-term emotion, when you fly off the handle, when you get angry, when you're outraged, when you're euphoric, those may be things we need to wait out.
And finally, overconfidence. Overconfidence not in the sense of being cocky, but in the sense of thinking that we know more than we do about how the future's going to unfold. And so in the book we lay out a process for helping to minimize or circumvent or avoid those four villains of decision making.
Guy Kawasaki:
I love this. This is Dan Heath for Dummies. Okay, so now, creating powerful moments.
Dan Heath:
The Power of Moments is a book about experience. I think we live in the era of experience where people are thinking about how do we craft a better customer experience or a better employee experience, a better patient experience. And the central point in the book that we make is that if you care about crafting great experiences, what you really care about is crafting peak moments that in our memories, certain moments come to stand above the rest.
If you think about a family vacation from three or four years ago, our memories are not like YouTube videos where we can just press play and watch the whole thing again. We all know they dissolve, and they fragment. And so if you think about a distant memory, it's like you've got these flashes and scenes and snippets.
And so in the book we go through what psychologists know about why the snippets we retain are the ones we retain, and then we flip around the lens, and we say, "Hey, if you want to create a memorable experience for a patient or a customer, how do you go about being intentional about creating those moments rather than just letting them happen serendipitously, how can you be the author of better experience?"
Guy Kawasaki:
And?
Dan Heath:
Number five is Upstream. Upstream is a book about preventing problems and it points out that so often in life, especially in organizations, we get caught in this trap of reaction. We're always rushing around and putting out fires and responding to emergencies, and we so rarely make the space to get upstream to tackle those problems at their root.
And so the book basically does two things. Number one is it tries to explain why reaction seems to be in the default state, why we constantly get pushed back into this reactive state. And there are a couple of forces that are responsible for that. And then it tries to help us evade that trap. There are some habits of mind and some principles that we can adopt to help us become better preventers and solvers of problems rather than reacting.
Guy Kawasaki:
Give us some principles here.
Dan Heath:
Let's do this. We double-clicked on book five. One of the principles is that in preventing problems, we often have to have micro understanding before we can draft macro principles or policy. So that's a little bit abstract. Let me explain what I mean. One of my favorite stories is about this homelessness campaign that's been undergoing for years led by community solutions where they'll go into cities.
Especially mid-size cities like one of the case studies in the book is about Rockford Illinois second biggest city in Illinois behind Chicago. And one of the key lessons they've learned is your tendency when you deal with a really complicated problem like homelessness, has many variables, many factors involved, big scale, is that you're going to have to think big. You're not going to have to stay in the sky. It's going to be some systemic policy lever.
And in fact, what they found is almost the opposite, that in places like Rockford that have succeeded, Rockford has actually eliminated veteran and chronic homelessness from their community after many, many, many years of just spinning their wheels. The key is to use what they call a by name list, meaning they literally have a real-time census of every homeless person in Rockford.
They know where they are, they know their name, they know as much as they can about their health history, any other important pieces of information. And then all the people involved with homelessness policy ranging from healthcare people to shelter people to police, state agencies, they all convene on a regular basis, and they don't talk about homelessness in quotes.
They talk about Steve. They're like, "Okay, who's seen Steve last? Where was he? He still had his tent under the bridge. All right, his health's really suffering. I think we should put him at the top of the list for housing. Who's going to make the outreach?"
And it was like that level of specificity and concreteness did two things. Number one, it is the natural motivator that brings people to this work. No one is motivated abstractly by homeless policy. They're motivated by helping human beings get into housing and live a better life. And number two, when you get that specific, when you see a problem in three dimensions, it helps people bring their respective skills to bear.
And so that to me was an example of this notion of micro comes before macro. It's not until you've housed Steve and Michael and Rodney and about twenty-five people, that you understand the problem well enough to even think about policy, right? That you have to earn your way into macro interventions. That's one of the ideas in the book.
Guy Kawasaki:
I got to tell you, Dan, if I were a guest on a podcast and they said, "Okay, Guy, give me the gist of all your books one at a time, I couldn't do it." So I'm so impressed by you.
Dan Heath:
No. Oh, come on.
Guy Kawasaki:
This will be the last question about your books. We're going to go move to your podcast. First of all, for the record people listening to this, if you are a Bob Cialdini fan, you'll love the work of Chip and Dan Heath. So if you read Influenced by Bob Cialdini and liked that you will love their books, and there's like five that we just discussed.
Dan Heath:
Thank you.
Guy Kawasaki:
So go buy those five books. Now that was the kiss up to lead to this question, which is let's suppose that the DNC calls you up and says, "My God, Dan, you're an expert in how to make Kamala stick and how to make people switch and how to make better decisions and how we can have powerful moments after the DNC and how we can prevent problems. So Dan, give us some advice. How do we do all these things to ensure that Kamala and Tim win?"
Dan Heath:
This is way above my pay bracket, man. I don't know. My observation is that they did anything. They did better than anything I would've proposed at the recent convention. I think there were a couple of things that you could glean about their strategy.
One of them was, remember back to the principles of sticky idea. Simplicity was one. And I think the simple messages that came out of that were joy and optimism, which is something very different. I think a Biden convention, it would've been hard to pull off that theme.
And so there was a very conscious altering of the tone, which shone through just the number of different people who literally used the word joy was striking and clearly part of their strategic moves. I think they were great at conjuring stories from the speakers. It's like the democrats of yesteryear from the Al Gore era used to be so bad about just doing laundry lists of policies and referencing obscure legislation and talking in bullet points.
And there's very few people that care about that stuff. Very few. The people watching a convention are people that may only tune into politics five or six times in a year. You've got to reach them with stories, with emotion that speak to the American narrative. So I thought it was brilliantly handled. That doesn't mean anything about the election, but as a platform for communication I thought it was excellent. What'd you think?
Guy Kawasaki:
I love them. They should get a Grammy or an Emmy or whatever, a war you can get for a convention. My goodness.
Dan Heath:
I saw James Fallows who was a speechwriter for Jimmy Carter and a political commentator for many years. He was commenting it. Just some of the simple execution was notably better. Even the balloon drops. He was saying it's almost comical how often people screw up the balloon drops. And he was saying the balloon drops at this convention were like an index that the professionals were in charge.
Guy Kawasaki:
And apparently those balloons were recyclable or something.
Dan Heath:
Oh, really? Double word score for Democrats. Organic recyclable balloons.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah, the balloon crisis is real. So we got to address that. Now we're going to leave books in the past and I want to talk about your podcast because one podcaster to another, I love your podcast.
Dan Heath:
Thanks. Back at you.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah, you mentioned it, but I was going to mention it before I even read it, but you're kind of the Studs Terkel of the modern age. I love what you're doing.
Dan Heath:
The elevator pitch for the show was literally Studs Terkel meets Ted Lasso meaning that we wanted to take the sociological or reporting instinct that Studs Terkel had ,because he opened this door for everybody in this space that's followed, and couple it with a really positive energy.
I think that so often in the media careers are covered in a negative way. It's about exploitation of workers or people struggling or people changing jobs. And it's not that stuff is untrue. I think it's all true, but I also think it's true that it's a lot more common and a lot more boring to simply point out that most people like their jobs. Survey after survey will tell you that. They find meaning in their jobs.
They don't dread going to work, they don't feel exploited. And so that's where the Ted Lasso energy comes from is on the show we talk to people who genuinely love what they do and they do very different things. We've talked to welders and dog trainers and summer camp directors and forensic accountants, and I can't count the number of times that somebody has said, "My job is the best thing in the world."
Guy Kawasaki:
And from the outside looking in, many people would say, "It's all about the money. How much money do you make?" But clearly, I think your podcast indicates that what defines people's relationships with their jobs is not the money.
Dan Heath:
Money hardly ever comes up. And in fact, my favorite episode is still the first one that we launched with. We launched with it for a reason. It's with a stadium beer vendor, a man named Howard Hart. He's spent his entire career, I'm talking thirty-five plus years, selling beer in a stadium, mostly Baltimore sports stadiums.
He saw some amazing things in his career. He was there for every home game during the Cal Ripken streak, the streak of continuous games. He saw Beyonce play, he saw Super Bowls. He saw event after event, met Muhammad Ali.
But anyway, what made me think of it was, here's a guy who is well below the median income. He made a living, but it was barely a living. And toward the end of the interview, he has this just beautiful riff where he talked about how some of his family members would get on him, "Howard, why are you doing this thing? This is just like a summer job guy. Why don't you go and get a proper career?" And he said, "No, I don't feel that way. I feel like I have a community at this stadium."
The fans that he saw week after week, sometimes for a period of decades, sometimes he'd be serving the children of people that he'd served for the decade prior. And he said, "I know that I bring something special to these people and that they bring something special to me. And could I take trips to Europe? Could I have a fancy car? No, but could I have a good life? Absolutely. I loved what I did."
And he was just passed when he had retired from the work, and it was obvious he really missed it. And when I had that interview, it convinced me that I needed to stay on this path because it was so powerful. I think coming into the interview, I thought it was going to be interesting. I thought it was going to be quirky.
I thought we'd learn a lot of interesting details about beer sales and fans and sports. But he showed me that there's this whole deeper level of meaning and purpose that everybody has. It's not just the one percenters with the fancy jobs, the high paying jobs. It's everybody can find meaning in their work.
Guy Kawasaki:
And what would happen if you were interviewing someone and they said, "Yeah, I'm a beer vendor, but I really get my satisfaction out of something outside of my job." It's not like you're doing a scientific survey, right? So would you just kill that episode?
Dan Heath:
We're casting on purpose. We're definitely putting our thumb on the scale. We're looking for people who do find satisfaction in their jobs, who enjoy talking about it, who've done it for a long time. So yeah, there's a lot of selection bias in the show.
Guy Kawasaki:
And speaking of selection bias, are we ever going to have a hedge fund manager? What's it like to be a hedge fund manager?
Dan Heath:
That is literally one of the jobs on our slate. We have a master slate of dream jobs that we're looking for. I would love to do that. And I think the hard part is going to be people in finance, especially the biggest money makers, are just notoriously private to the point where they obsess about even having their name pop up on Google searches and stuff. But I'm going to find someone, it may take some time, but I'm going to find someone to come on the show and talk about being a hedge fund manager.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, God help you.
Dan Heath:
I actually would be fascinated to hear about, we all know the stories of how much money they make and all that stuff, but what is it like from eleven to twelve in the morning in a hedge fund manager's day? I have no idea, what are they actually doing? What takes up their time, what stresses them out? There's a lot to learn.
Guy Kawasaki:
I think they're hunting down plagiarism and university presidents. That's the biggest concern they have.
Dan Heath:
Editorial comment.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah, listen, I don't hold myself out as a journalist who's supposed to represent both sides. I have a bias and I have my whole hand on the scale, not just my thumbs. So how do you explain how these people get so much satisfaction out of these jobs? What's the lesson for the listener here?
Dan Heath:
One of the things that's interested me is just hearing the sources of joy or purpose that people have because I think they can be quite different. Like the FBI special agent that we talked to this guy who had worked with MS-Thirteen, the gang, underworld. And what was so interesting about his job was he described it as putting together a 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle. It's painstaking, it's one piece of evidence at the time.
He said, "So much of what on TV about FBI cases is just hogwash. It's slow and it's laborious, and it's filing a request with Verizon for phone records. And then you get the phone records and you realize all of them are burners. So you go back to square one and it's one piece of the jigsaw puzzle at a time." So that's 90 percent of your job, and then 10 percent of your job is like the stuff on TV kicking down the door of a gang member and rushing in with guns drawn.
So it's such a fascinating phase shift between the different parts of the job. It reminded me in a weird way of the summer camp director, because he was saying for ten months a year, he sits in an office in Philadelphia with five or six colleagues and they're just staring at the computer all day, mostly doing recruiting.
A big part of the job is doing marketing to get campers, but a huge part of the job is finding one hundred qualified, responsible college age people to be the counselors. And that takes a ton of work and a lot of them flake out, so you've got to replace them. And so ten months a year, it's basically like he's in a staffing role and then two months of the year he goes into the wilderness in New England and basically becomes the mayor of a small town.
And everything is under his jurisdiction, like the childcare for over one hundred campers whose parents will not be there, and the healthcare needs that they have and full service food operations with three meals a day and a snack. And everything from keeping them safe on canoeing activities to attaching tether balls to poles is like everything rolls up to him.
And I just love learning stuff like that about these jobs that can look radically different from moment to moment. And then with other people, it's exactly the opposite. The nurse every week looks about the same. The patients are going to change, the severity of the problems are going to change, but the flow and the rhythms of the job are virtually the same from week to week. And so that's been one of the pleasures for me is just feeling what it's like in these different roles.
Guy Kawasaki:
Let's pretend that the HR Association of America is having a conference and they retain you to be the keynote speaker, and you stand up there and you say, "Okay, let me tell you, after this podcast and interviewing these people, let me tell you the key principles of making people happy and love their job," and what would you say?
Dan Heath:
Yeah, I don't know if I have those answers yet, Guy, just to be totally honest, because my books are all about how to. My books are, "Here are six things you can do to make change easier, make your ideas stick." And so I have that kind of practical hat on. With this podcast it's just more about tell me what your life is. Why do you like what you like? Why do you hate what you hate? What are the tensions in your job? What are the funny things that happen?
And yeah, I don't know if I have those answers yet. I know that part of the answer is how do we help people find these places where they have a profound fit? You can just tell when you talk to these people, they found the place that was for them.
The welder. One of my favorite episodes is with this welder has a personality that just jumps through the microphone. He's such a character, so funny, so colorful, and he loves welding. He fricking loves it. The way that you and I like writing and doing our podcasts, he loves welding. And so it's just gotten me thinking about how do you make sure people find that place where they click? And I don't know what the answer is yet, but it's definitely a source of dawning curiosity for me.
Guy Kawasaki:
It's interesting. There's this concept of Ikigai, this Japanese concept, and the way I think Americans define Ikigai is that you take a Venn diagram and you draw circles of what you're good at, what you like to do and what you can make money at. And what's ever in the middle of those three circles is your Ikigai.
But I would make the case, and I think your interviews may actually confirm this, that this third circle about what you can make money at is not necessarily the most important circle. I think you found your Ikigai when you're not good at something and you may not make a lot of money, but you still love it.
Dan Heath:
Amen. I've always thought of money as being a threshold variable, meaning I think money can be a really big irritant or more than an irritant, an obstacle if you're not making what you need to have the amount of freedom you want in your life, but above the threshold, I'm not sure it counts for much. I'm not sure it counts for nearly as much as getting to a better fit with people that you like more, with work that you like more.
One of the things I've started thinking about is we're so half-hearted with young people helping them see where they might potentially fit. We would always do these weird career inventories that were primarily skill-based, it was like, "If you're good at math, you should be a stockbroker, or if you like to read, you should be a librarian." It was this real kind of dumb matching stuff.
One of my nieces is just a huge animal lover, and she said that adults would always, when they discovered she loved animals, tell her she should be a veterinarian. And I just think that stuff is so clumsy and silly and that we need some way to start diagnosing are you better with short, playful, fun interactions or long deep ones? Which of those plays to a young person's strengths? Are they patient?
Could they assemble the 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle? Would that be intriguing to them? Would they have that kind of diligence or do they want something a little bit more transactional? Like the hair stylist that I interviewed where it's like every hour or two hours, someone leaves with a better look and that feels good, and it's not like there's a right or wrong direction. It's all about fit, but I just feel like nobody's talking about that layer of stuff.
Guy Kawasaki:
I am fascinated about this concept of casting calls. So how do you decide what kind of profession to cast for? And then when you issue the call, who do you get answers from? And walk me through the process of you want a beer vendor, you end up with this guy in Baltimore or something. How does this process work?
Dan Heath:
It is an incredibly messy and cumbersome and low probability process is the answer. It's finding stories as an author, there's just no elegant, efficient way to do it. So usually we start with a list of professions that we're scouting for. We never just do one at a time because it's too frustrating. We'll have five or six going at once, and we try to just keep a mix.
There's no science to this show, but we try to do some blue collar, some white collar, some that are fun to think about, like professional Santa Claus, and some that seem like they might be boring like a welder, but they actually turn out to be fascinating.
And then it's everything from asking our guests for help. Like we found the Cattle rancher thanks to one of our listeners, new somebody in Alpine, Texas, this woman named Chachi Hawkins, who was just brilliant. And so sometimes our listeners come through, sometimes it's a media search like Howard Hart, the stadium beer vendor.
The producer Matt Purdy found an old clip in I think the Baltimore Sun that was profiling him, and he sounded interesting. So we'll reach out. Sometimes people volunteer themselves. They'll say, "I listened to the show and I do such and such, interview me." So yeah, it's a real crap shoot. What do you guys do, do people just bombard you with pitches? Is that the way it works for you?
Guy Kawasaki:
Well, after listening to your podcast, I question our methodology because we do get bombarded. We turn down about ten people a day who want to be on our podcast.
Dan Heath:
Oh, wow. Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
And so if you figure we probably reject 2,500 people and we accept fifty-two people, so the odds are one out of fifty. So I tell people that it's easier to get into Stanford or Harvard than to get on my podcast.
Dan Heath:
I like that. That's good.
Guy Kawasaki:
But a lot of it is at the time that someone is writing a book, all bets are off because someone who was basically unreachable for fifty-one weeks a year, all of a sudden is trying to get as much publicity as they can. Now, you can get to Neil deGrasse Tyson because he has a new book coming out.
Dan Heath:
This is one of those little wormholes in the world.
Guy Kawasaki:
The rest of the year he won't answer your call, but I got to tell you maybe our methodology is flawed because we keep saying we want remarkable people, not necessarily famous or rich people, but remarkable people. But would we have gotten that beer vendor? There's no way. That hairdresser, no way. So maybe our methodology is flawed.
Dan Heath:
I wonder if it's just the kind of thing where every tenth episode or something you plug in somebody that you've hunted down because of that. So it doesn't have to be a night and day thing, but maybe it's like you've got your wild cards that you plug in from time to time.
Guy Kawasaki:
I got to tell you, every once in a while over the transom or from a listener, they bring up a name that we never would've heard of, and I've interviewed more people who are ex-cons than most podcasts. And let's just say that you had to do some work to get some of these ex-cons.
Dan Heath:
Who are your favorite interviews? What are the circumstances that make it a great interview?
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, I had a guy who at sixteen was sentenced to forty-five years or something for accessory to murder, and he got out after twenty-two years because of a law change in Maryland. And he became a very successful artist, and I love that kind of story. Yeah. And then we had people who are cattle whisperers, and I may not be as Studs Terkel as you, but I'm not elitist either.
Dan Heath:
What have you learned about finding more of your people? I imagine these days you're probably better at casting people than you were in the first season.
Guy Kawasaki:
Well, actually, I don't know if that's true. I think that as my podcast has gotten more and more visible and I've gotten more listeners, the listeners have come up with ideas that help me a lot. I'm trying to tap the wisdom of the crowd or at least the wisdom of the listener, and that has been very useful. I think we can now switch to the section called what it's like to be Dan Heath.
Dan Heath:
Oy, okay.
Guy Kawasaki:
Inspired by you. All right. First of all, what's your allocation of mind share between writing, teaching, podcasting, and speaking? How do you allocate your mind share?
Dan Heath:
For me, it's a very clear priority list. It's number one, writing, love, and writing, I mean that in the broadest possible sense. The hardest part of writing is researching, having something to say and having some stories to tell. So writing actually encompasses more research than writing, but still, I think of it all as the product is a book that I'm proud to ship out.
So that's number one for me these days. The podcast is number two. I just absolutely have loved working on this podcast. You and I were exchanging emails talking about how our podcasts are like hobbies for us. And I loved when you said that because it made me realize that basically is what it is.
Some people go and go canoeing and do CrossFit or whatever, and I like to do this podcast. It's fun for me, it's a joy. And then third is speaking and teaching. I love to talk about the ideas of my books and I love to travel around and I don't ever want that to take over my life, but I really like it as part of the master portfolio.
Guy Kawasaki:
What's the hardest part of writing for you?
Dan Heath:
Finding the stories. It's incredibly hard For those who haven't read my books, they're story-driven. What I'm trying to do is make some broad point, "Hey, you want to communicate your ideas." I go into a bunch of work and try to figure out, Hey, how do you sharpen up ideas? What are the important principles?
In the days when I was writing with Chip, we would just spend years going through research and comparing it with real-world stuff and try to come up with something to say, but that's not enough. No one wants to hear you just blab on about your perspective about communication. You have to find a vessel for those principles, and those are the stories I want to find stories of real people in real situations exemplifying those ideas and that is incredibly hard.
Guy Kawasaki:
I'll give you a little tip that helped me because your podcast is different and your stories are maybe different, but when I was writing my last book, Think Remarkable, with Madisun, I had this principle in my head that I wanted people to have embraced the growth mindset of Carol Dweck. And I think you can grow along two parameters. One is vertically, you start with loving animals, and you become Jane Goodall, but you can also make big career switches that are unforeseen.
And so I went to ChatGPT, and I said, "Give me successful cases of people who made dramatic career shifts." And it mentioned Julia Child because Julia Child was a spook until she was in her mid-thirties, and then she moved to Paris and fell in love with French cooking. And that's why Julia Child is the French chef. I never would've found that story without ChatGPT.
So you might want to quiz ChatGPT looking for stories, but now don't get me wrong, ChatGPT makes shit up. So then I have MadisunGPT go and verify that Julia child actually was a spook.
Dan Heath:
I'm just finishing up a book that's coming out next year, and I kept hearing all the hype about AI and so I'd constantly be trying things. Can it do this? Can it do that? At one point, I was trying to remember the name of this article or where I'd seen it, that was about the yips where athletes suddenly lose the ability to do something that was routine. There's a famous case of a baseball player who all of a sudden couldn't make a throw to first.
He would just throw it away every time he's a professional player, probably done it 100,000 times in his life and just some psychological thing flipped, and he couldn't do it, and I knew I'd read it in The New Yorker. And so I was like, "Okay, this is perfect for ChatGPT. So I go there, I'm like, "There was an article in New York a few years back, it was about the yips, blah, blah, blah."
It comes back, just boom, "Here's the article. Here's the author, here's the name of the piece. It's in this issue of The New Yorker." I'm like, "Yes, AI works." And I go and I type it in. None of that is real. The author is not real. Ten title of the article is not real, the date is not real. And so I'm like, "Oh, okay. So that's what we're dealing with."
I have found it to be the best at exactly what you described with the Julia Childs thing. I think it's a great, counter intuitively, at least for me, it's a great brainstorming partner. "Hey, if you're thinking about a phenomenon like this, what are seven examples of that?" And five of them will be garbage and two of them will be, "Oh, I wouldn't have thought of that." And then there you go.
Guy Kawasaki:
And while we're on the topic of AI, Madisun and I created KawasakiGPT and KawasakiGPT contains all my writing, speaking, blogs, videos, everything I have plus the transcript of every one of my podcasts.
Dan Heath:
Really?
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. So if people went to KawasakiGPT and after your episode comes out and if they ask, "How do we make ideas stick?" KawasakiGPT is going to cite you about how to make ideas stick.
Dan Heath:
Nice.
Guy Kawasaki:
So I think Dan, that you should do HeathGPT because you have these six books and you're going to have all these podcasts. So it is a standalone source of knowledge that you are creating.
Dan Heath:
You should have a Kawasaki chatbot. You could be like a virtual coach for millions of people.
Guy Kawasaki:
But, okay, you know who Marshall Goldsmith is?
Dan Heath:
Yeah, of course.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, so he has done that.
Dan Heath:
Oh, no way.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. So you can go and ask GoldsmithGPT these questions, and I tell you regularly when I am asked to make a foreword or a blurb or contribute to some kind of Harvard business review or even my Substack newsletter, we go to KawasakiGPT, and we ask Guy the question as the first draft.
Dan Heath:
Really?
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah.
Dan Heath:
So what kind of question would you ask and what kind of response would it give just generally?
Guy Kawasaki:
I'll give you a very good example. So a Substack newsletter we just put out was like, "What can you learn from Bob Cialdini?" And KawasakiGPT comes back with nine principles that you can learn from Bob Cialdini as the first draft.
Dan Heath:
I love that.
Guy Kawasaki:
Now push comes to shove after you do all the editing to the first draft. Maybe you didn't save any time, but I'm telling you, it sure helps you get started.
Dan Heath:
I tell you the number one use case for me of ChatGPT is ginning up stories from my daughters. They just love the idea. They'll just give me these crazy characters, "Okay, do one with us and our friends, Nina and Gabe, and we're in a forest, and it's a little bit spooky, but not too spooky." And damned if ChatGPT won't spit out like a perfect 1,000 word story with an arc. It is just astonishing.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, so let me ask you, back to the what's it like to be Dan Heath, what is your setup for writing? What kind of computer? What word processor? What do you use?
Dan Heath:
Only the fanciest stuff Guy. Only the best top of the line. Man, I don't think I have anything that's not going to bore you to tears on this front. I do most of my writing at coffee shops. It works for me. I go there, put my headphones in, try to get to it first thing in the morning. I try to block three or four hours. I think of it as shifts, writing shifts.
I only do one shift a day, unless it's crunch time and the book is due or something, and I try not to do anything else. I never schedule calls in the middle of that because I'm all about flow. It takes me a while to get in the groove. Even after all these years, I still have to fight the procrastination instinct and fight the instinct to check messages and email and check the news. And man, even after almost twenty years of this stuff, I still have to do it every time.
And then I'll get over the hump and then it feels great to just disappear into the flow state. Once you're in it, there's nothing better. Not in the sense that it's like euphoric. It is not, but it's just like the world disappears. It's just what you always hear about the flow state.
And I love that. And I love the feeling, I forget who said this, but there's a famous person who says, "I don't like writing, but I love having written." And that's the way that I feel about it. And so I try to keep that flow state going as long as I can. Just don't let it get broken up with a stray phone call or an email exchange or whatever. What do you do?
Guy Kawasaki:
Are you using what Macintosh and Microsoft for it?
Dan Heath:
I use Word on a PC. I've had a ThinkPad for years and years.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh you're killing me.
Dan Heath:
I know that wounds you. Yeah, but I tell you what, I was just reminiscing with a friend, you'll appreciate this. The first time we saw a Macintosh Classic, our journalism teacher had gotten it in high school. And man, it's one of probably my top five tech moments in my whole life. Just what that thing could do relative to what we were used to. Absolutely dazzling. What era were you evangelizing for Apple?
Guy Kawasaki:
I was the software evangelist from 1983 to 1987. So just as it came out.
Dan Heath:
That's right in the area.
Guy Kawasaki:
And 1995 to 1997 when Apple was supposed to die.
Dan Heath:
Boy, all the thought leaders were convinced Apple was toast, right? Windows was the market share leader, returns to scale. Yabba, yabba, yabba didn't work out that way.
Guy Kawasaki:
Nope. And I hope I had a little bit to do with that. So now what's your setup for podcasting?
Dan Heath:
Podcasting. The listener can't see you, but you can. I'm in my office right now and I have a very sophisticated setup. I use a Blue Yeti USB mic, which I love, and I've surrounded it with the best soundproofing that money can buy. I.E. a couple of pillows from Michael's that are positioned around me to deaden the sound a little bit.
And yeah, this is where I do my podcasts. I don't do video with my podcast. I really want to just immerse myself in the conversation. So I've got my headphones squeezed around my ears and I'm just trying to be as attentive and curious as I can be.
Guy Kawasaki:
And what software or platform are you recording on?
Dan Heath:
We use Cleanfeed and then do local recordings as a backup. And you sent me a courteously, a microphone just in case I didn't have one myself. And we do the same thing. Because I just cringe when I hear podcasts, and some of them with a lot more listeners than me that have people calling in on their cell phones and man, you can't do that. It's a podcast. You got to obsess about the audio.
Guy Kawasaki:
And from the time you record an episode to the time it actually goes live is how long?
Dan Heath:
That has varied a lot. Sometimes we really get productive and will get a bunch of episodes and inventory. I think we've had as many as six in inventory at once, which is a lot for us because we're every other week. So that's like three months’ worth of show in the can. And then we've been as narrow as the Thursday before it airs on Tuesday. But yeah, that's our cycle.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. And when you get the audio files, how do you do it and how much editing do you do of the file, removing filler words and moving things around?
Dan Heath:
I don't do any of that, but my genius producer, Matt Purdy, does a ton of editing and the reason is you're talking to a lot of people who communicate for a living. I'm really not. A lot of my people are good talkers and good storytellers, but they're not used to interviews.
They're not used to concise answers. And so we'll talk for ninety minutes and then Matt and I will edit it down to maybe twenty-seven, twenty-eight minutes. So we're really plucking out the best moments, the best stories, and that helps a lot.
Guy Kawasaki:
So you are literally sending a set up to the beer vendor or the Secret Service agent or the FBI agent and they're in their house. You don't do these in any of these in person.
Dan Heath:
None in person. We've done a couple in studio. The stadium beer vendor actually schlepped out to a local NPR station, and we just recorded maybe a month or two ago with some long-haul truckers that went to a station. That was the first time we had two people on an episode. It was a husband and wife team who drive in the truck together.
That's what they call team driving, like if you've got a cargo load full of fresh produce, you can't afford to just take ten hours to sleep off the time, so you got to be driving continuously. So you go back and forth. Not only do they team drive, they're married, and it was such a hoot to hear them finishing each other's sentences and complaining about the other person, talking about what it's like to be with your partner literally around the clock.
Guy Kawasaki:
Madisun is from Nebraska, so when they were talking about driving through Nebraska.
Dan Heath:
Oh, yeah, they kind of insulted Nebraska, didn't they Madisun, did you take Umbridge at that?
Madisun Nuismer:
Yeah, there's not much going on though, so I don't blame them.
Dan Heath:
She said driving through Nebraska was like being a steering wheel holder because it's so flat, there's no turns, there's no curves.
Madisun Nuismer:
Yep. It's a straight shot.
Guy Kawasaki:
I notice in your podcast format that the way you work that you do a snippet and then you do an intro, and then you do the interview and then you do an outro. Was that a really carefully architected A-B test that you figured out which way the better flow of a podcast?
Dan Heath:
No, is the short answer, but we did do some testing. In fact, we almost pulled the plug on the whole show because our initial format, this was before it went on the air, when we were still just figuring out how do we do this? We were doing roughly forty minute episodes, maybe forty-five minutes without much structure. It was like just go and people were pretty lukewarm about it.
We did some testing with listeners, and I had hired this market research consultant to try to keep us honest because the thing I was most worried about is so in love with this project, I was worried I wouldn't listen to feedback, and so I wanted someone outside to come and whisper in my ear and tell me what they saw. And she was not real encouraging after that first round.
She was like, "I'm seeing a couple of paths here. One is, could you make the jobs more interesting? Almost in the dirty jobs way of, could you have a, I don't know, a lion hunter and a ninja instead of welder and forensic accountant?"
And then Matt and I, the producer and I, went back through the data and we're like, "No, actually we're seeing some signs of hope here. Maybe we're diluting ourselves, but I think what people are telling us is they dig it, but it could be better."
And so we went back to the drawing board like, "It's got to be shorter." We set just a mandatory, the first twenty episodes, we did not allow ourselves to exceed thirty minutes. We would be obsessing at the last minute; it cannot go over thirty minutes no matter what. We have to cut, which is good discipline for us.
And then we added a bunch of structure before it was this formless conversation, and so we were like, "We got to have a beginning and a middle and an end," and so we added some structural elements like now we rip off This American Life like cold open thing.
We just want to get you into the conversation at an interesting point. I don't want to be in the first 30 seconds saying, "This is Dan Heath. This is my series of conversations with people in different jobs."
Guy Kawasaki:
That's exact what I do.
Dan Heath:
You do not. I've listened to your show. And then we ended it. We added an element at the end of every episode, we added what we call internally a reflection, which is just me musing on what I heard and what stood out to me and what I thought was super interesting.
And I try to broaden it out a little bit, find some themes where maybe the listener can learn something that matters for them from the dog trainer or whatever, and that made a huge difference. I was so glad that we suffered through that feedback because it was painful. Man, it's painful to hear that people are yawning at what you did, but it made us stronger and better for sure.
Guy Kawasaki:
It would be interesting if you took your raw transcript, shoved it in ChatGPT and asked, "What are the three main lessons from this episode?" That might help you at the end.
Dan Heath:
Yeah, it's a lot of work sometimes coming up with the reflection. I'm like, what are my reflections from this? Maybe I'll outsource that. You give me an inspiration, take it to AI. I love comparing notes because you're doing a similar thing with your podcast. It's a podcast about curiosity like mine.
Guy Kawasaki:
If you're telling me that people are interested in beer vendors and forensic accountants, they got to be interested in podcasting, my God.
Dan Heath:
Okay, that's true.
Guy Kawasaki:
My last podcast question is, and I'll tell you how I would answer this question too, but do you listen to the actual final product?
Dan Heath:
Of course, every time. Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
Huh? I never do.
Dan Heath:
You don't?
Guy Kawasaki:
No.
Dan Heath:
Wow. Why? You lived it once and that was enough?
Guy Kawasaki:
I never do because I know that I will listen to it and I will hear where I would've made an editing change. I would remove the filler word. I would've shortened the pause. I know that there will be things that I'll say, "We got to fix that."
Dan Heath:
Oh man.
Guy Kawasaki:
And so I record, I do editing, light editing, I give it to Madisun and Jeff Sieh, our sound design guys, and I never look at it again, or never listen to it.
Dan Heath:
I get that. I get that instinct. It's never pleasurable for me to do it. That's not true. I enjoy the parts with the guest, but when I hear myself, I'm always cringing because I'm like, just like I just did. I said "like" too much, or there was a more elegant way to ask a question, or I wish I'd followed up about that. There's always something I could have done better.
Guy Kawasaki:
I know.
Dan Heath:
But I feel like I have to rub my own nose in that stuff to get better over time.
Guy Kawasaki:
One of my guests once told me that you'll discover your love in life when you enjoy the shit sandwich. So there's a lot of shit sandwiches in podcasting and writing that I know you and I enjoy. Okay, so now once again, being inspired by your podcast, we're going to end with a lightning round.
Dan Heath:
Oh, okay.
Guy Kawasaki:
Question number one, what's a phrase that writers would know?
Dan Heath:
Oh, I got a good one. You'll know what this means, and most people won't. A galley. A galley, if you've got a book coming out, I have a book coming out as it happens, in January, and it'll come out as a hardcover along with the audio and eBook version. But about four or five months before the hardcover comes out, the publisher will print up a paperback version of that book.
They call it a galley, which is something you send around in advance to colleagues or media or other people. You're trying to get a little bit of word of mouth piling up so that something has happened before your book debut. So that's a galley.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. And what is the deepest insult to a writer?
Dan Heath:
Boring. I think that's the deepest insult. You pour so much of yourself into it. You try to make it snappy. You try to tell stories, you try to crack some jokes, and if people just find themselves too bored to flip the page, we've committed the cardinal sin because to have permission to really teach someone something, at least that's the point of my book, is to try to share tools, I have to earn that right by making the pages interesting enough to keep flipping.
Guy Kawasaki:
I'll tell you my deepest insult as a writer, it happens regularly. So people come up to me, Dan, and they say, "I was lost. I didn't have any direction in my life. I didn't know what to do, and I read your book, and it changed my life." And I say to them, "Which of my sixteen books changed your life?" And they always say, "Rich Dad Poor Dad." If you think you got problems.
Dan Heath:
Oh man, that's good. That's good. You should just claim it.
Guy Kawasaki:
What is your favorite writing tool?
Dan Heath:
My favorite writing tool is a cup of coffee. Always has been, always will be. I don't care if the media comes out with a story next year that coffee causes cancer. I'm in for the long haul. It's my writing co-pilot.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. And what phrase strikes fear in a writer's heart?
Dan Heath:
Ooh, I haven't thought about that one. Let me think. What strikes fear? Oh, I know what it is. And this happened before. Basically someone has written what you're writing and it's about to come out. The idea that somebody has been working on the same topic and might beat you to the punch. This happened with Made To Stick. The initial title of our book was What Sticks, more of a descriptive spin, What Sticks. We'd always called it that we were doing covers.
We find out there's another book coming out three months before our that's called What Sticks. I'm not making this up. We had the URL for whatsticks.com, and the authors reached out for us and they were like, "Hey, we've got a book coming out from a major publisher. I noticed you owned it. We're happy to you reimburse you."
And so we're freaking out, literally our exact same title, seemingly the same material, and so it's just a red alarm fire. We ended up changing the name to Made To Stick, which I think in retrospect is a better name.
Guy Kawasaki:
It is.
Dan Heath:
But we never would've gotten there. It's more kind of agentic, I think, which is better for the topic. But anyway, the happy ending is the book really wasn't that similar to what we were chasing. It was a little more advertising centric and anchored, and so it didn't ultimately feel competitive. But boy were we panicked for about forty-eight hours there.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, and this is my last question for the lightning round. Who is smarter, you or Chip?
Dan Heath:
Definitely Chip. Yeah, definitely Chip. He got the brains in the family. I don't know what I got. I got these pillows from Michaels.
Guy Kawasaki:
When you say Michael's, are you mean Michael's Art Supply?
Dan Heath:
Yeah. Only the best places, Guy. They're perfect for soundproofing your podcast. Yeah, testimonial right here.
Guy Kawasaki:
Dan, you can go to Etsy and you type out "sound deadening material." You get lot cooler stuff, I can tell you. That's what I did.
Dan Heath:
Yeah, Guy's looking at my setup right now and just shaking his head. But see, people would never know because it sounds good. We have to keep that behind the scenes.
Guy Kawasaki:
That's all that really counts. Okay, so now Dan, this is truly my last question because you brought it up, is we have now recorded one hour, four minutes and thirty-nine seconds. Are you telling me that your advice is to cut half an hour out of this?
Dan Heath:
Absolutely. 100 percent. It will be better if you cut out the worst half of this because, yeah, I'm not that good. I'm not an hour and four minutes good. I might be thirty-four minutes good, but I'll leave that up to you.
Guy Kawasaki:
I disagree.
Dan Heath:
Man, this has been such a treat. I feel like we used to see each other on the road. There was a period of about a year where I felt like every time I had a keynote it was either that Guy Kawasaki had spoken the day before or he had spoken last year. We were in the same orbit.
Guy Kawasaki:
I think that effect is twice as big as it truly is because a lot of people confuse me with Kiyosaki. So if you had Kiyosaki and Kawasaki speaking at conferences, you really might have had that experience of always following or preceding me.
Dan Heath:
It was like in Enchantment era. I always loved that cover, by the way.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, thank you.
Dan Heath:
That was a brilliant cover.
Guy Kawasaki:
The butterfly.
Dan Heath:
Yeah. Who did the origami?
Guy Kawasaki:
Believe it or not, there's this guy in Hawaii who was like Mr. Origami and he had a shop in the international marketplace and I went to his shop and I asked him to design me this butterfly. So he made a Kawasaki butterfly, and it was quite expensive actually.
Dan Heath:
Was it really?
Guy Kawasaki:
If you go back to Waikiki international marketplace, which used to be a real zoo, now it's all high-end Dolce & Gabbana and Hermes, I can't even pronounce it, and all that kind of stuff. And it's not exactly what it is anymore.
Dan Heath:
So you commissioned an origami butterfly. That is cool.
Guy Kawasaki:
That's me, yeah.
Dan Heath:
Yeah, that is really cool. And the cover is so distinctive. I love that one.
Guy Kawasaki:
All right, Dan Heath, this has been just wonderful and I'm not cutting out thirty minutes from this podcast. I don't give a shit if it's not optimal.
Dan Heath:
Listeners be damned. You're getting the whole thing and you're going to like it.
Guy Kawasaki:
And this whole transcript is going to go into KawasakiGPT, so you'll be immortal then.
Dan Heath:
I love it. My ideas will live on.
Guy Kawasaki:
I must admit that this episode has gone all over the map, from commissioning original butterflies for book covers and beer vendors and Secret Service agents, and how to make things stick and how to make decisions. But Dan, he's just that kind of guy. He has a lot of interesting things to talk about. So I hope you enjoyed this episode and there will be a follow-up episode coming this fall. Wait, I guess it's already October. So we are in the fall. We will cover his book, I promise you, maybe a bit of winter, not the fall.
So I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People and I hope you stick with this podcast. The team is made out of Madisun Nuismer, producer and co-author of Think Remarkable, Tessa Nuismer, our ace researcher. And then we have the incredible remarkable sound design team of Jeff Sieh and Shannon Hernandez. And finally, Luis Magaña, Alexis Nishimura and Fallon Yates.
Don't you forget it. We are the Remarkable People team, and we are on a mission to make you remarkable. That's what we do. Until next time, Mahalo and Aloha.