Ed’s Questions: Segment One

Welcome to The Soul of Enterprise: Business in the Knowledge Economy, sponsored by Sage, transforming the way people think and work so their organizations can thrive. I'm Ed Kless with my great friend and co-host, Ron Baker. And on today's show, folks, we are pleased to have with us author, Corey McComb. Ron, how's it going?

Ron

It's going great, Ed. And I'm so looking forward to this. You know, I read Corey’s book, about a month or two ago and I thought it was brilliant, so this is going to be a fun conversation.

It absolutely is. We're going to welcome him into what we lovingly refer to as the ‘Effing Debate. We'll explain that to him in a little bit. But let me bring him on. Corey McComb is a writer based in San Diego, California. And I love this bio guys, wait till you hear this. After being kidnapped by the rock and roll circus at the age of 16, he was forced to strum his way across the country and back again. He then toiled as a peon in parking garages and seedy telemarketing pits until becoming an international man of mystery (It's still classified by the way). In search of free concert tickets, he moved on to music journalism and began a steamy love affair with the blank page. Corey now helps people in companies validate ideas, tell their stories, and launch products. His own writing focuses on the sweet spots in life where human connection, creativity, and personal growth intersect. His book, which is the main topic of today's conversation, is Productivity Is For Robots: How to (Re)connect, Get Creative, And Stay Human In The New World. Welcome to The Soul of Enterprise Corey McComb.

I have to tell you, yours is the second best bio I think we’ve had. Our first guest ever is an economic historian named Deirdre McCloskey [Episode #6], who to this day still has the best bio. And we'll just mention that and you can read it at another time, and you can see if you agree, it's just absolutely fantastic. It ends with “who is a woman who once was a man.” So you really had a high bar. So it's all good. But Corey, I'm going to start with a meta question here, because your book is meta. I'm going to ask you to tell the story of the story of your book.

Yeah, I was reminded of a great line, as I was reading the early portion of your book, “One day on my way to bed, I passed myself on the way to work.” And when you alluded to it just a little bit in your answer there, but I want you to expand on this line, because this is, I think, the third highlight I made in your book, and this is a fantastic line, “Technology was meant to set us free. Instead, we've chosen to imitate it.”

Well, let's just do this if I could. One thing that struck me, the way that I would describe your book is that productivity and creativity are not the same thing. And for some reason, we seem to be letting them conflate in our minds—that being productive and being creative are the same thing. And it’s not.

My personal Why is “I believe that entrepreneurs continue the work of creation.” We're not going to be creative by having the latest apps. It's not all about the apps, we don't need apps for everything. And one thing that really struck me about your book was a quote that I had heard a number of years ago, that said, “If your job can be completely taken over by bots, your job pretty much sucks.” And we're trying to force ourselves to get our jobs to be taken over by bots, and then only to find more bots. It's a crazy rat race.

Pittman Magee, whom I believe is a business philosopher as well an ordained minister, said that “The opposite of love is not hate, but efficiency.” One of the lines that I love is “The same habits which make us flawed at efficiency can be turned into strengths and effectiveness.” And my note to myself in the book is you were having the internal ‘Effing Debate. So let me tee up what the ‘Effing Debate is. Ron founded a think tank called the VeraSage Institute a number of years ago, and one of the main threads of the original blog that we had was this ‘Effing Debate, efficiency versus effectiveness. And the whole notion is who cares if you're efficient if it's at the wrong thing? And what your book did for me is help to clarify that, am I spending too much time trying to be efficient on the wrong stuff? So anyway, really good there. I've got to leave it. I'm going to let Ron pick up from there because we're up against our first break.

Ron’s Questions: Segment Two

Welcome back, everybody. We're here with Corey McComb, the author of Productivity Is For Robots: How to (Re)connect, Get Creative, And Stay Human In The New World. And as I said, Corey, I just absolutely loved this book, and knew I had to get you on the show after I read it. Your book is divided into three parts: (re)connect, create, and flow, which you say is kind of a circle. And I really liked that as a metaphor. But let me just ask you about this. You wrote “Without purpose, what good is productivity?” And I know later on in the book you quote from Viktor Frankl, who said, “What good is freedom without purpose?” So what do you mean by, Without purpose, what good is productivity?

Right, it's really about not confusing being busy with being effective, or purposeful, or impactful, however you want to say it. The other thing that I really liked is you told Ed that we try to meet technology halfway, and that is so true as the bots and AI get better, we try to imitate it. And I think it was in The 8th Habit where Stephen Covey wrote, “We can be efficient with things, but not with people.” And I guess my question to you is, why do you think businesses have such a hard time understanding that; we all pay lip service to being a relationship business, but you can't be efficient with relationships? Nobody defines their marriage as efficient.

I think the two are mutually exclusive, because you can be highly efficient without being at all effective, but not the other way around. Usually, if you're effective, you also tend to be efficient.

You make another point about how time with other humans is a vital part of being creative. And the time we spend with others is not a luxury, it's actually a necessity. Do you think we understand that better now, after COVID? After being locked in our houses for a year?

You also talk about the importance of play, and I love how you cited Timothy Walker, who moved from Boston to Finland to become a fifth grade teacher, and he said that they have something like [two] hours a day of recess, where in the US it’s like 27 minutes. And that's why they're so much more relaxed [have behavioral issues] and all of that. And then you wrote this, and I absolutely love this, “In 401k adulthood, many people trade in their dreams for smart goals. Our inner child looks at this like a plate of vegetables.” And [then you quote] Dr. Seuss, “Adults are just obsolete children.” Explain that, because I love the concept of play and how important it is, and it's not the opposite of work?

Ricardo Semler, who's written a couple great books, asks why do we think the opposite of work is leisure when in fact, it's idleness? So play is just another form of work. The other thing I love that you talked about is the ability to change your mind, and have that open mind and be curious. And far be it for me to quote from Timothy Leary like you did, but he said, “You're only as young as the last time you changed your mind.” We did a whole episode on that [Episode #147]. Corey, what was it like for you? What was this process of going from this productivity paradox, or trap, you were in to the way you see the world now? Was it a slow, gradual process, or was it like a BFO, a blinding flash of the obvious?

It's so liberating, literally, to say, “I don't know.” And yet so many of us are afraid of saying that. Was it Richard Feynman who said, “It's so easy to fool people, and the easiest person to fool is yourself.” Corey, this is great. Unfortunately, we're up against our next break.

Ed’s Questions: Segment Three

The book is Productivity Is For Robots: How to (Re)connect, Get Creative, And Stay Human In The New World. The author is Corey McComb. Corey, I want to drill down a little bit more on the notion of creativity that you were talking about with Ron. During the break, we were mentioning that we had interviewed George Gilder [Episode #207] and this is a sentence from your book, you say, “Technology can never replicate human creativity, because codes and algorithms are built on predictions of what's expected to happen. Creativity is the unexpected.” That's in total alignment with what Gilder is saying; he says, “Creativity always comes as a surprise to us. Otherwise socialism would work.” Because it could be planned. But we can't plan creativity. And the other thing that I want to get your reaction to is the following quote from another mentor of mine who said, “Creativity and anxiety are always inversely proportional to each other.” So the more anxious you are, the less creative you can be. And you can't turn on creativity, you can only lower anxiety, that's the only thing that we have the ability to do. So talk a little bit about that. I think that's very much in alignment with your notion of creativity as well.

You quote Dave Chappelle who says, “Let the ideas drive.” Talk a little bit about that.

And Chappelle says, “Well, sometimes you're in the passenger seat, and sometimes the idea throws you in the trunk.” I thought this is an interesting transition, because I'm now teaching my 15-year-old son how to drive. And it's interesting to see how much brain power he has to apply to driving that I, myself as a 30 plus-year driver, don't have to do it. And I think in the book called Flow, a number of years ago, one of the examples of getting into flow that we all experience is driving, which I think is pretty interesting. Because we can do it without being fully conscious of it, yet be fully competent at it. And I'm always struck by that, that all of us are capable of flow, because we can do it while driving. We just have to now figure out a way to apply it to other places in our lives to get into that state of flow. So talk a little bit about flow.

I think that's a great point. Because not every day for us is the fifth, or sixth, or seventh game of the NBA Finals, where you have to leave it out there on the court, which makes sense. But we see that and have to take that with it. Recently, and I don't know if you saw this, but on Hemingway, there's a PBS special on Hemingway. And the other thing that struck me when watching that, he also said, “All I have to start out with every day is one true sentence.” And I just love the notion of one true sentence and go from there.

I'm not, I have to tell you. I like Hemingway, I don't like his writing. He's fascinating. Old Man and the Sea never did it for me, and I even read it as an adult. But we don't want to go down that rabbit hole. It is a great thing, I think, to never leave that well empty. That's such an important message for all of us. I want to talk to you a little bit about this one quote that you have. It's a first world dilemma, you say, to explore or to be productive? What do you mean by that?

Another quote that I just absolutely love is this, you say, “There's an important distinction to make between delusions of grandeur and delusions of possibility.” Unpack that for me.

Love that, great stuff, Corey. Thank you so much. Ron's going to take you the rest of the way home in the last segment.

Ron’s Questions: Segment Four

Welcome back, everybody. We're here with Corey McComb, he’s the author of Productivity Is For Robots: How to (Re)connect, Get Creative, And Stay Human In The New World. And Corey, I found this to be incredibly thought provoking. You say, “When I look back at the mindsets that crippled me into a burned out robot, lack of patience tops the list.” Why?

That's such a great point that we look at others, like you said, the highlight reel on social media, or look at somebody like Stephen King, and think, I'm a slouch. This guy writes 10 books a year, or something. It's amazing. The other thing that I really liked is when you said, “When we focus on competition too much, not only does that lead to things getting watered down, replicated versions of what we're competing against. But it's also a fast track toward another human nature land mind: Envy.” Explain that?

There's so many lessons in that. I think of market share, companies that are so focused on the competition, all they care about is their market share. And yet companies that don't really care about that, they are more customer focused, tend to do a lot better, because they're not, like you say, their stuff doesn't get watered down, they're actually different.

Such a good point. Envy is such a destructive thing. In fact, I've been threatening Ed for the last two years, we're going to do a show on envy because it's such a deleterious thing over time. So this is your your first book. How has it been received so far?

Have you gotten any emails? And let me just ask you this, this is really self-aggrandizing, are we your first interview on the book?

Yeah, no, we did read it. When you're an author, there's nothing more frustrating, because an author can tell right away if the person's read their book or not. You just know, because you've lived with it for so long. Ayn Rand used to say, “I'm with novel.” That is kind of how it feels. So you wrote towards the end, “You're a first time author with dreams of writing more.” What's next, if you're willing to talk about it?

Excellent. Well, hopefully you'll come back when that comes out. Thank you so much, Corey. This has been an honor. Ed, what do we have on store for next week?

Next week, Ron, our interview with Charlie Cooke. His book is The Conservatarian Manifesto.

Ron

Ah, the right honorable Charles CW Cooke, Ed.

Bonus Content is Available As Well

Did you know that each week after our live show, Ron and Ed take to the microphone for a bonus show? Typically, this bonus show is an extension of the live show topic (sometimes even with the same guest) and a few other pieces of news, current events, or things that have caught our attention.

This week is bonus episode 341 - Stealing Monkeys and Ron's UFO Theory

Here are some links discussed in the bonus episode: