How to Reverse Engineer Success with Ron Friedman: An EOFire Classic from 2021

0:01Light that spark fire nation JLD here and welcome to entrepreneurs on fire brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like I Digress. Today, we're pulling a classic episode from the archives, and we'll be breaking down how to reverse engineer success. To drop these value bombs, I brought to Ron Friedman into EO Fire Studios. Ron is a social psychologist who specializes in top performance. He's the author of The Best Place to Work and an amazing new book called Decoding Greatness, How the Best in the World Reverse Engineer Success.

0:33In today's foundation, we'll talk about reverse engineering. We'll talk about learning from the best, the contemporaries, and we'll also talk about studying somebody else's work. We'll help you so much when you want to hack what is working right now and oh, so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Ron and our sponsors. Nudge, hosted by Phil Agnew, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Ever notice how the smallest changes can have the biggest impact? On Nudge, you learn simple evidence-backed tips to help you kick bad habits, get a raise, and grow a business.

1:07Oh, and it's the UK's Fast-Growing Business Podcast. A recent episode on how to win any argument shares decade-long research into persuasion from a world-leading neuroscientist. Listen to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts. Are you looking to start or grow a successful business? Attend the world's highest-rated and most-reviewed business growth workshop taught personally by Clay Clark and football great Tim Tebow at thrivetimeshow.com slash EO fire. Again, request life-changing tickets today at thrivetimeshow.com slash EO fire. Ron, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people simply disagree with.

1:49What's up, Fire Nation? Well, thank you very much for the opportunity. And what I would say is that the thing that I believe and that I've come to discover over doing the research on top performance is that the stories that we've been taught about success are wrong. We've been taught two big stories about how people evolve to the top of their profession. One is that greatness comes from talent. This is the idea that we're all born with certain strengths and that the key to finding your greatness is to just find your talent and find a field that allows that talent to shine. The second big story is that greatness comes from practice.

2:21This is the Malcolm Gladwell idea. Practice, practice, practice. Eventually, you'll get to the top. But there's a third story, and it's one that people don't often talk about. But, John, I know that this is something that you're familiar with, and a lot of entrepreneurs and artists and inventors are familiar with, and that approach is reverse engineering. Let's talk about that reverse engineering because you are a psychologist. You study top performance, and you discover something that you really weren't expecting through that process. I'd love to hear more. Yeah, what I discovered is that most of the people who've gone to the top of their profession, they're not relying on talent.

2:55They're not relying on practice. In fact, there's a problem with the formula that practice will get you to the top. And that problem is that you can't practice an idea you've never considered. And so the best ideas don't come through hours and hours of practice. They come by looking at what the best in the field are doing and then working backward to figure out how they did it. And that turns out to be a remarkably common approach among top performers. So like, how would you, Ron, define reverse engineering? I mean, I think a lot of our listeners kind of understand it as a general term, but like, what is your definition?

3:31My definition is finding the best in a field and then working backward to figure out how they did it. Now, in Silicon Valley, the idea of reverse engineering is very well known. It's how we got the personal computer and laptops and even the iPhone. But what most people don't realize is that reverse engineering is also how Stephen King and Malcolm Gladwell learned to write and how painters like Claude Monet and Pablo Picasso learned to paint and even how Judd Apatow learned to write comedy. Reverse engineering turns out to be far more common than anyone realized. Well, that's kind of what I want to get into next because you wrote a book called Decoding Greatness.

4:09I got a little bit into it during the introduction. And you actually specifically wrote about the way that creative geniuses reverse engineer different works. And, you know, you admire it and they admire it. And like people that actually kind of go through that process are like, wow, this is pretty impressive. And I know we're going to get into some specific examples later about the Ritz and, you know, about different companies like Starbucks and Chipotle. But can you give us some examples about the way that creative geniuses reverse engineer? First of all, let me just say that there's a wide variety of strategies for reverse engineering.

4:43I cover them in Decoding Greatness, but let me just give you a taste of some of them. All of them, I would say, have to do with looking for clues that reveal how an object was created. So I'm a writer. I can tell you the nonfiction writers, often when they get a book, they don't look at the table of contents. You know what they look at first? They go to the bibliography at the end because that tells them the sources that went into creating that book. Photographers, when they look at images, they don't just look at the subject at the center of the image. They look for clues like the reflection in the eye of the subject, which tell them where the light source was placed.

5:17or they'll look at the length of the shadows, which tell them the intensity of the light source or the time of day in which the photo was shot. Chefs often order dishes to go so they can spread an intricate sauce across a white plate and parse out the ingredients. Sometimes there's a magnifying glass involved. But the critical thing is not just to enjoy an object passively, but to continuously think, how is this constructed? What can I learn from this? And how does this apply to a project I'm working on? So many fascinating things here at Fire Nation. And believe me, we're going to be talking about some specific examples, details.

5:53I mean, I already mentioned Chipotle and Starbucks. We're going to be talking about Barack Obama as well, the Ritz-Carlton, some really cool things. But first and foremost, how can we, Fire Nation, find the hidden patterns inside our favorite books or website or different TED Talks? Break that down for us. The first thing you want to do, and this is something that you can do in any profession, it doesn't matter what field you're in. First step is become a collector. Now, when we think about collections, we think about physical objects. We think about wine or artwork or stamps. That definition is too narrow.

6:27The best designers collect logos. The best copywriters collect headlines. I'm a writer. I collect academic articles. I collect stories. I collect powerful words. The more you have in your collection, the more you can start to play a game called Spot the Difference. Remember Spot the Difference you played as a kid where you had two images side by side and you look for discrepancies? That's what you want to do in your collection is you want to compare what's in your collection against what didn't make your collection. And then think about what's different about these examples. And by playing Spot the Difference, by continuing to collect great ideas, number one, you're much better at figuring out what it is that makes things resonate.

7:07But number two is you now have a museum you can visit for inspiration the next time you need to create. So if you're a marketer, start collecting websites, start collecting emails that are resonant for you. If you're a presenter, start collecting TED Talks or presentation decks. You can do this for anything. It's just compare what is unique about the items in your collection, start identifying what it is that's standing out, and then, this is the critical piece, John, is you want to templatize it. In other words, take what you have found, figure out what's working there, and then create a template for yourself so that when you need to create something, you can start by looking at that template.

7:43And you can do this for Facebook ads, too. I mean, really, the opportunities are limitless. Limitless, Fire Nation. And one thing I love about you, Ron, is that you really do your research. I mean, I did share a little bit in the introduction about your first book, The Best Place to Work. And of course, you know, now we're going to be diving into more details with what you were doing research on to write Decoding Greatness. But in your research, like you found that copying actually makes us more creative, not less creative, which I think is interesting on a lot of different levels. Can you tell us more about that?

8:16Yeah. So this was really this is the moment where I figured, OK, there's a real book here. There's research showing that when you copy somebody else's work, that opens your eyes up to new opportunities. Now, that's very counterintuitive, right? This is the problem with reverse engineering. I think this is why so many people don't talk about the fact that this is how they actually learned. And I can tell you when I was working on this book, I'd share the idea with some of my friends, some entrepreneurs and some creative professionals. And invariably, the reaction I'd get is, man, I do that all the time.

8:46I've never read about it. And I'd love to hear more. And this is why I wrote the book. So I think this is why this has gone under flown under the radar is people don't want to talk about it. They feel like they're doing something wrong if they're reverse engineering. But in fact, not only are you learning more quickly, you're actually elevating your creativity. So here's the study. This is a study conducted at the University of Tokyo by creative experts. And what they did was they had amateur artists come into the lab and they divided them into two groups. One group was asked to create original drawings for three days in a row, three original paintings three days in a row.

9:18Second group was asked to create original artwork. But then on the second day, they were asked to copy the work of an established artist. And then the third day, they had to resume creating their original work. And what the experimenters looked at was who was most creative on the third day? Was it the group that had just done original works the entire time or the group that had paused to copy? And by now, the answer should be obvious. You know that the people who paused to copy the established artist were more creative. And the question is, why is that? And it's because when you pause to compare somebody else's work to the work that you recreate when you copy them, you are forced to consider their choices against your instinctive inclinations.

9:59And that process of comparing what you want to do versus what they actually did opens your eyes up to new opportunities that lie within your work. And so the folks who became more creative on day three, they didn't just do it by copying the established artists. They went off completely different directions. So if you're worried that reverse engineering or studying somebody else's work is going to reduce you to a hack, on the contrary, it's going to make you more creative. Fire Nation, wow, this is fascinating stuff. And again, I just love the outside of the box thinking that Ron's putting us through and that he's actually showing is very beneficial for all the reasons he just talked about.

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13:51So Ron, what I love is that you actually did your own reverse engineering by searching for these hidden patterns in the world's most popular TED Talk. What was that TED Talk and what exactly did you learn? Okay, so this is Sir Ken Robinson. If you look up TED Talks and you look at the most popular ones, this is number one in world history, Sir Ken Robinson. And he did this talk on how creativity is beaten out of us when we're in elementary school. And it's because we're rewarded as students for getting the right answer. And creativity requires experimenting with some wrong answers before you find the right one.

14:24So what I did in Decoding Greatness is I reverse engineered for you. I show you exactly what he's doing in every paragraph of his talk. And then on top of that, I look to see what's unique about his talk versus everyone else's. So this is the spot the difference process that I talked about earlier. And what you find when you analyze Sir Ken Robinson's talk is that you know how many facts he has in this TED talk? He goes on for almost 20 minutes and he's got a grand total of one persuasive talk. What? One persuasive fact. Now, if I was writing a TED Talk from scratch, I would assume I've got to pummel you with a lot of persuasive facts.

15:01But on the contrary, he's got one. Now, what is he doing differently? Well, number one is he's telling you a lot of jokes. He's actually squeezed in 40 jokes in under 20 minutes. That's a rate of more than two to one. And he's got a ton of anecdotes. The anecdotes are relatable, emotional, personal. and that's the thing that makes his talk go viral. Now, you discover that when you reverse engineer his work. If you just watch it, you're like, oh, that guy was good. You know, great, but you don't learn anything. This is an approach that allows you to take any creative work and then work backward to figure out what it is that makes it unique.

15:34And now, of course, you can also templatize his work. And in fact, in Decoding Greatness, I show you the template. I say, here's what you do in paragraph one. Here's what you do in paragraph two. You got the whole template just by studying the talk in this way. Now, Fire Nation, this is all fascinating stuff. You can tell the theme today is reverse engineering for very obvious reasons. And I want to get to some of those things that I've been teasing throughout the interview, which is reverse engineering business strategies. You know, you shared that if you actually work backwards and reverse engineer, both Starbucks and Chipotle, which, you know, at face surface seem like completely different companies, completely different stories, they ultimately come down to the exact same strategy.

16:13What is that? This is one of the things that entrepreneurs do differently. So there's research on the way that entrepreneurs think conducted by the Harvard Business School. And what they found was, is that when you compare top performing entrepreneurs against average managers, you don't find many differences in terms of intelligence, or even risk taking. You know are the differences? It's in pattern recognition. Entrepreneurs, the really successful ones, are very good at identifying patterns that can be applied to different industries or different timeframes. So you might be reminded of something that worked in the 70s that might be worked that work today.

16:50They're very good at identifying those patterns and then trying to apply them in new ways. And an example of an underlying business pattern that you find when you start thinking in blueprints is that Starbucks and Chipotle are actually using the same model. Now, as you said, John, they're both kind of different, right? One is selling Mexican food, the other one serves coffee. But they were both founded on the same basic principle. And that principle is find something that is successful somewhere else, and then import it into your hometown. So in the case of Starbucks, Howard Schultz went off to visit Italy, saw that espresso bars were everywhere and thought, huh, I wonder if that can work in the US.

17:30In the case of Chipotle, Steve Ells was in San Francisco as working as a chef, and he saw burrito bars everywhere. And he took that idea, and he brought it to Denver. And that's how Chipotle was born, where it was able to take off and there was a just became a massive, obviously very successful company. And so in both of those cases, what ultimately is the is the powerful takeaway here is don't just study another business and think, man, I wish I could own that or I wish I was as lucky as them, but start thinking about the blueprint. What are they doing here and what can I learn from this and how do I apply it to the thing I'm working on?

18:06Okay, this is something that I've really wanted to get the answer to because to me it could go in so many different directions, but what can Barack Obama teach us about finding winning ideas? This is one of my favorite stories in the book. And so not a lot of people know this, but Barack Obama was not a great speaker when he first started. He was actually quite terrible. And he got trounced in his first race for Congress. He lost by a margin of more than two to one. And for a while, he was broke. He thought about leaving politics, wasn't sure what his next step was going to be until someone on his campaign staff said, hey, why don't you go take a look to see what pastors are doing in churches?

18:47And when he did that, he came back a few years later and he was transformed. His speaking style was completely different. And all of a sudden he was using storytelling. He was using repetition. He was modulating his tone. And it all came by observing how effectively pastors were communicating at the church. And what I love about that story is that Barack Obama didn't go and find his talent. He didn't go practice for 10 ,000 hours. He figured out what was working in a different industry. and he included it into his approach. And that's the power of reverse engineering is to figure out what it is that's working so that you can identify the ingredients and apply them in new ways to your field.

19:27Okay, like I mentioned, I was not sure where that was going to go, but I did not think it was going to go in that direction. So very fascinating stuff, Fire Nation. I hope this is really opening and expanding your mind and getting your thinking outside of the box. Now, a couple other things that I was teasing pre-interview, one specifically was about the Ritz-Carlton. So you actually wrote that the Ritz-Carlton Hotel chain knows the secrets to improving not just something, but anything. What do they know that most people just seem not to pick up? The first thing I would say is that this comes out of a chapter in my book called The Scoreboard Principle.

20:03And The Scoreboard Principle simply states that anything you measure, you will likely improve on. The Scoreboard Principle is simply defined as measurement begets improvement. Anything you measure, you are likely to improve on. And we know this from the research. We know that if you want to drink more water, keep score of your daily water intake. That is likely going to help you. If you want to lose weight, keep score of your daily caloric consumption. If you want to increase your focus at work, keep score of your uninterrupted minutes. Anything you score, you are likely to improve on. And we know that from all of these studies.

20:36And the Ritz-Carlton knows it too. And they have locked in on a particular metric that has empowered them to just transform their business. And that metric is net promoter scores, meaning when a customer leaves the Ritz-Carlton, how likely are they to recommend the Ritz-Carlton experience to a friend or a colleague? And the reason they focus on this is because they know that when you score high on this metrics, you haven't just identified a happy customer. You've created a raving fan, someone who's going to talk about it and gush about your hotel to everyone in their social circle. And they measure this consistently.

21:10Every single customer who leaves within 24 hours, they have to rate their net promoter. But critically, they don't just rate it. The team at the hotel in which they stayed review those numbers on a daily basis. And collecting the numbers hasn't just improved their performance. It's also led them to some fascinating insights, including the fact that the biggest driver of net promoter scores isn't how well the people in the hotel respond to expressed requests. Meaning, if I ask you, hey, does your hotel have a cafe? You might say, yeah, they have a cafe. That's responding to my expressed requests.

21:47At the Ritz-Carlton, they focused on unexpressed needs, meaning what's the reason he asked that question? So now instead of saying, yes, we have a cafe, they might say, yes, we have a cafe. Would you like me to text you the menu? There's thinking one step ahead. And that insight to focus on unexpressed needs rather than expressed requests came because they're dialed in to their net promoter score. So the key takeaway here is anything you want to improve, start collecting metrics because that is likely to improve your performance. So one thing that we've all heard before, and by the way, we've heard people recommend this on entrepreneurs on fire is the benefits of visualizing success.

22:25See yourself there and it will become, you know, see the, the Lamborghini in your driveway and it will appear, but your research shows this simply does not work. It actually makes you less likely to succeed. Why is this? And what should we do instead? I can hear the sadness in your voice as you're asking this question. because because this is we don't want to hear this we don't want to hear that the vision board doesn't help us but it actually hurts us and here's why okay it's because when you visualize success that feels good and you are temporarily sated you feel like okay i've kind of i've got got the thing i want to get and that leads you to work less hard than if you hadn't visualized it and this comes out of research that was conducted at ucla where they had introductory to psychology students.

23:12They took 100 of them and they divided them into three groups. Group number one had to visualize themselves getting 100 on the test. Group number two had to visualize themselves studying for the test. And group number three just had to track how long they studied for the exam. And what they found was that the group that had visualized themselves studying did the best out of any group. And why is that? It's because when you visualize process, now you're front-loading decisions. You have to think about where am I going to study? What books am I going to need? How much time am I going to need? Do I bring up my bottle of water?

23:45Where am I going to put my phone? And the more you front load those decisions, the more present you can be when the time comes for studying. In contrast, the group that had visualized success, the one that thought about getting that hundred on the exam, they did the worst out of any group. And it's because, again, temporarily stated, they feel like, all right, I've done, I've got it. Great. I don't have to do the work. So if you want to succeed, don't visualize outcome, visualize process. So I'm actually not that disappointed, to be honest, because this is something that I also agree and believe in.