Jaggedness Principle: Rethinking Talent & Success from Todd Rose

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1:28So what if I told you the smartest person that I know graduated or actually got a GED with a 0.9 GPA and went on to get a Harvard doctorate? You're about to listen to an amazing episode with my buddy Todd Rose, who's going to break down a lot of collective illusions that we have in society on leadership, on culture. We talk about all things New England Patriots, but at the end, we really break down what everything means to Todd and why he does the things that he does. Ladies and gentlemen, I present my really good friend, the esteemed, the honorable Todd Rose. You're listening to Mick Unplugged, hosted by the one and only Mick Hunt.

2:10This is where purpose meets power and stories spark transformation. Mick takes you beyond the motivation and into meaning, helping you discover your because and becoming unstoppable. I'm Rudy Rush, and trust me, you're in the right place. Let's get unplugged.

2:32Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another exciting episode of Mick Unplugged. And today, we are diving deep with the visionary who is reshaping our understanding of human potential, future leaders. He has a GED and several Harper degrees to back it up. But the most important part of this conversation to me is he is the New England Patriot diehard just as much as I am. So please join me and welcome the insider, the visionary, the incomparable, my guy, Mr. Ty Rose. Ty, how are you doing today, bro? Great. It's good to see you. Good to see you too, man. Ty, there's a lot I want to get into. I'm a huge fan of the work that you do.

3:13But I'm an even bigger fan of your corny, bro. And you have a story that only Ty Rose can tell. And I'm so proud of you, man. And I always start my conversations with my guests by asking them, what is there because? That thing that's deeper than your why, that's your true accountability. And it changes over time. So if I were to say, Ty Rose, today, 2026, what is your because? Why do you keep doing the things that you do?

3:38Todd Rose:Yeah, I love this about what you do. And it's made me think deeper than why, you know, as you taught us. You know, it's funny, I'd like to think that it's different than it's been, but actually, my because that still animates me, it's blossomed and grown. but it really came back to this moment in Layton, Utah, in a hospital room when I held my son for the very first time. And, you know, I was 19. I probably don't recommend that as a starting point. You know, you'd mentioned I have a GED. I didn't even have that yet. I had been kicked out of high school with a 0.9 GPA. I had had a string of minimum wage jobs.

4:19Todd Rose:And here I am sitting there and they hand me my son, Austin is his name. And I just realized, you know, it was one thing to mess up your own life. It's very different when you realize the responsibility you had to this person that didn't ask to be born, right? And, you know, the reason this became important to me is it kicked off. I didn't necessarily believe in myself then, but I knew I had to do right by my son. And so that became a really powerful because for me. And, you know, since then, and we can talk about that journey, Really, that because led to a series of other becauses along the way.

4:56Todd Rose:So, you know, here I am. I had like 10 minimum wage jobs in two years. Everybody was frustrated with me. I knew something had to change. And I decided I'd get my GED and I would try my hand at college, which is kind of funny. Since, you know, high school, literally 0.9 GPA. Like, I didn't even get socially promoted, right? Like, this was so bad. And, you know, my dad told me, hey, look, he said, I think you're really smart, but you have to be motivated. He's like, when you're not motivated, you're just not very good, which is so true. Like if I'm passionate, I'm on fire and I'm as good as anybody.

5:33Todd Rose:But the second I'm not, it's really hard. And so I decided, OK, I'm going to go to college. And I went to Weber State University in Ogden, Utah. That's where Dame Lillard went. That's our only claim to fame. And, you know, I was just, I knew that what I had done before hadn't worked, trying to learn the way everybody told me people were supposed to learn. And I really recognized there was something different about me and I needed to embrace that. And, you know, I was doing okay. And there was this really defining moment for me, which unlocked another because, and it was this. So I'm sitting in a really large auditorium for a history class, which I tried to avoid.

6:10Todd Rose:That kind of setup didn't work so well for me. And I was complaining to my friend, Steve, about it, that, you know, this was not a good setup. And he says, he goes, well, this is nothing compared to what I got myself into in the honors program. And I was like, I don't even know what that is. And he said, oh, it's so bad. He said, there aren't big auditoriums. They're just like 10 people in a class. And I was like, that's interesting. And he said, there are no tests. You just write stuff. That's interesting, too. And then he goes, I don't even think there are right answers. All we do is argue all the time.

6:40Todd Rose:And I was like, this sounds amazing. Like, I never in a million years thought that it could be that way, that learning could be. And so I immediately bolted up to the honors program. It was at the top of the hill, had its own little second floor of the library. And I went in and I said, I want to see the director of the program. And the secretary, who's one of the most important people in my life, and gave me a new because, her name was Marilyn Diamond. And she said, okay, let me get you in. And I sit down with the director of the honors program. And I said, I want to be in the program. And he said, that's great.

7:12Todd Rose:Just a few questions. He said, what was your high school GPA? And there's no kidding. I said, 0.9. And his response was, what 0.9? Like I left off the most important part. And I said, oh, and he was really nice about it. He said, you know, I'm sorry, you can't be in the honors program. You know, I was so mortified. I grabbed my stuff and I was just as fast as I could get out of there. go crawl in a hole. And as I'm walking out of his office, Marilyn Diamond, her desk was right next to the door. And I'm walking past and she reached out and grabbed my arm. And she said, listen, I overheard the conversation.

7:46Todd Rose:If you want this, don't take no for an answer. And I was like, wait, you can do that. And she said, sit on that couch and don't leave until he lets you in. So I did. And for a few hours, and finally he called me back in and he said, you know, look, why do you want to be an honors program? Like on paper, it makes no sense. And I started explaining that I'd learned a lot about myself in the first year or so I was there. And I knew what it took for me to do well. And this all seemed to be a perfect environment. And he said, OK, I'm going to let you in on a provisional basis. And he said, you take one class.

8:18Todd Rose:And if you do well, you can take another and another. Flash forward, I ended up graduating as the Honor Student of the Year three years later with a 3.97 GPA. And I had just gotten into Harvard for my doctorate. And I shared this because it taught me something really important that became not just personal, it's still personal because, but is driving everything I've done since, which was I was still the same kid. So the kid that had done so poorly, it taught me two things. One, the incredible value of fit, right? So we tend to think, I try something once, I don't do well, well, I'm not good enough at it.

8:53Todd Rose:That's not what I'm, like your strategy could be wrong. It could be the wrong environment. But getting that fit between you and your environment is so important. And things get a lot easier when you get that fit. The second thing was, you know, I had sort of thought about talent and potential as almost like this thing I do. There's something inside me. And if I work hard enough, it'll come out. It'll be fine. What it taught me, and I have a dozen other stories just like it, was, yeah, you got to work really hard. But there's a role for other people in your success that is so important. And again, it doesn't negate that I worked hard.

9:26Todd Rose:And I did. But Marilyn Diamond, you know, she changed my life. And here's what's really funny. Just a couple of years ago, Weber State invited me back and gave me an honor. Like, hey, look, you did good. And I'm sitting there in this auditorium. I'm speaking to all these people. And I found out that Marilyn Diamond was retiring. And she was there in the audience. I thought, well, what a great chance to really acknowledge the role she's played. So I told the crowd some version of the story I just told you. And the president of the university says, Marilyn, why don't you come up and say a few words?

9:56Todd Rose:she comes up, she's short, she adjusts the mic and she says, you know, Todd, it's good to see you. I have to admit, I don't remember this. And I thought, I thought she was saying I was lying or something. And I was like, Oh, it happened. She goes, No, no, I believe it happened. I just don't remember it. Well, it turns out everybody had a Marilyn Diamond story, because that's the kind of person she was. And it really dawned on me that when it comes to our role in other people's lives, we tend to think that it's going to be some Herculean effort, right? Like, like, when in reality, this thing that was life changing for me was so inconsequential, she didn't even remember it.

10:29Todd Rose:And, you know, so when we think about what what it means to develop our fullest potential, make our best contributions to society succeed, you know, there does involve other people. And we can be that for other people as well. And that story hearing you say it in that, just I've heard it before, but I've never heard it one directly from you. And the detail that you gave. It's so touching, man, because, you know, one of the things that I heard in that story is keep going, right? Like what happens, you got to keep going. But there's a couple of things I want to unplug because you and I have so many similarities in what we talk to business leaders about.

11:05And I want to start with this one right here. I think as leaders, a lot of times we ask our team members to do too much because of what the title says, right? And when there's a title, and I don't care how big the title is, it could be a small title, but we like to encompass a lot of responsibilities into one human. And we forget the gift or the actual skill set that was why we hired them or why we have them a part of the team in the first place. I love to get your take on that because I've heard you talk about it, but a lot of times I'm going to use salespeople as an example, right? We've got a salesperson or salespeople that are killing it, but then we want them to do admin work or we ask them to do things that aren't sales.

11:49And so then when they struggle, it's like, well, what do they struggle with? And it has nothing to do with sales, right? It's all the other things. Or we have people that we don't have sales roles. And I hate when people say, but everybody sells. But whatever, then pay them to do that or hire them for that specific thing. When they don't do that, it's not there. Or we have people that are designed to do research and development. But we also want them to do two or three things. And that dilutes who they actually are. And a lot of times forces people to leave. So we talk a lot about trends on this show.

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13:30Todd Rose:Listen, I'll just say amen to that. And I'll just push down on that a little bit. It's kind of remarkable, right? So first of all, my professional background early when I was a professor was in the methodologies that study science at an individual level. So things that give rise to like personalized medicine, personalized learning, personalized nutrition. And when we start looking at individuals instead of groups of individuals, what we find is this really cool idea. It's called the jaggedness principle, which is human beings are multidimensional, right? Makes sense. Like take body size. Size is not one dimension, right?

14:04Todd Rose:Height, weight, chest circumference, whatever. Same is true cognitively, all this stuff. And what we look at is we tend to think with body size. Well, there's a small, medium, large, extra large as if it just scales up. It's not how it works. It is. It's remarkable. So everyone's jagged is that is they're going to be on the high end on some things on the low end on others and in the middle on some things. every single human being. And the reason this is really important is the best, if I were king for a day, the best possible thing I would tell a leader to put people in positions where they're really going to thrive and contribute is if you could, I still believe in, you know, division of labor, great, and specialization.

14:41Todd Rose:But you really got to do two things. One, where's your comparative advantage, right? So like, I'm actually better at this thing because of my jaggedness. Two, I have to care about it. If I don't care, like, as you know, like, listen, I will tell you, like, if you can have all the talent in the world that you don't care about the work you're doing, it's not meaningful to you. There's only so far you're going to get. But what's so funny is this idea of like job titles and job descriptions is a relic of the age of standardization, where we thought first about like, literally, like Frederick Taylor is the guy that really implemented all this in society in the 90s.

15:14Todd Rose:And we're still living in his shadow today, where he really saw, he said, forget about talent, we just want people to be able to be interchangeable parts. And he really meant that. Like you just plug people in. And so in that case, the job description became everything and you just kind of wedged people in. Well, when you realize and take into account human jaggedness and the fact that everybody can be excellent at something, but no one's excellent at everything, you find you get people into that space where it's like, to your to your example, they might be like the best salesperson that you have.

15:43Todd Rose:And for whatever reason, you put more on their plate and doing things that at best, they're mediocre, like at best. And at worst, it's literally draining the passion that they have. And then they end up exiting and you get into this sort of like treadmill of like hire, rehire. And it's just, it's wild. You know, my dad who just retired, he designed airbags for a living. One of the, one literally has so many patents in that space to save so many people's lives. The president of the auto leave, which was the airbag company told me personally, if it weren't for my dad's inventions in this razor thin margin industry, they might be out of business.

16:18Todd Rose:Okay. Awesome. Congratulations. He loves it. Like he was built to be an engineer in this space. Well, as everything's succeeding and he's like, of course, I'd like to make a little more money and be recognized. And they're like, well, the only way you can do that is you have to get on the management track. And I'm like, listen, I love my dad. He would be a terrible manager, right? He just wants to get the job done. He doesn't want to deal with people like that. And it's like you structured something where the only way they can be acknowledged and rewarded for their contributions is to change what it is they're doing.

16:47Todd Rose:Like it makes sense. Now, to their credit, they made one carve out. My dad's name is Larry. They gave him the Larry carve out. So they let him have this path of an engineering path. And I'm like, why would that be specific to him? Like, let people do what they are good at and passionate about. And everybody's better off. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing, man. Totally amazing. And another thing that I've learned directly from you, and it's weird because I've been, I have this concept that I call get out of your bed, right? And it's B-E-D, the beliefs, the excuses, the decisions that limit you from becoming the best person.

17:21And then I got introduced to this book called Collective Illusion. And I sat there and said, not that it validated my thoughts on beliefs, excuses, and decisions, but it gave me a deeper way to look at how we do those exact things. And so I want to give you the floor to talk about Collective Illusions. You know, what was the framework that said, yep, I need to do this book and this is the book now. And then let's get into it a little bit, man, because it's changed my life.

17:50Todd Rose:Well, so I didn't like, it was not on my bingo card to be in this, this line of work. I just follow the things that matter to me. You know, it, a couple of things that I care deeply about that might qualify as my because now, um, I, because my own journey and like, I've been at the very bottom academically, I've been arguably at the top. And what I realized is all along the way, there were people with unbelievable potential. And, you know, for some lucky breaks or whatever. And you just realized we had a system that not only didn't try to cultivate it, it just didn't care. Right? It was about selection rather than development of people.

18:28Todd Rose:And in my wonky beliefs, like as an academic, I care a lot about positive sum systems, right? So we treat the world like a zero sum, like for me to win, you have to lose. And it's just not true. It's not true. The pie can grow, not just materially, but also psychologically, right? Like my thriving can benefit you and your thriving can benefit me. Well, so I was obsessed with like, okay, how do we create the conditions for that kind of positive sum society? And it was funny. It was in before the 2016 election. Like we were, we realized, oh, wow, hold on. We thought we were doing like polling to try to understand where people were.

19:08Todd Rose:And then it was like, what just happened? Like nobody saw this coming. And we realized what was like, what's going on? So we started digging in and it turned out that people just didn't feel comfortable being honest about their views. And it was shocking. Like, in fact, to this day, like right now, just a couple of months ago, our last stuff we did. Two thirds of Americans right now admit to self silencing, that they are not telling the truth. And every single demographic group in the country is outright lying on multiple issues that matter in ways that distort fundamentally what we think those groups believe.

19:39Todd Rose:So we were digging in and we're like, wait, why would people say things they don't agree with? And my background is in neuroscience and psychology. And I was like, okay, so there's groupthink. But like, so we thought, well, maybe that's it. Maybe they're just going along. But they kept agreeing to things, publicly that I was like, that's weird. And so we started asking a simple question in everything we were doing with polling back then. We said, what do you think most other people would say to this question? And that was a simple unlock because we had all the data on what people really believed.

20:11Todd Rose:And then they kept saying, well, I don't think anyone else agrees with this. I was like, you're just spectacularly wrong. So here's what it is. Elective illusions are simply groupthink, but you're wrong about the group. If you can imagine that, right? Group thinks bad enough. They don't just go along with the crowd to go along. But that's even if the crowd is right and you're just changing your mind. So collective illusions happen where like whole groups of people end up going along with something they don't personally agree with just because they incorrectly think that most everybody else agrees with it.

20:42Todd Rose:So therefore group think, but you're wrong about the group. And you might think like, this would be kind of rare. Like how often this happened? But because of social media, it's just everywhere everywhere like our my think tank populace is most famous now for this private opinion research right that can get around the distortions of social pressure it's it's just wild like you name anything that matters in this country right now it's a coin toss whether you're even right about what most americans believe yeah yeah and isn't it crazy when you really break that down it. What I appreciate about collective illusion is while you talk theory, there's a lot of research that backs up the things that you were actually countering a little bit, right?

21:24So again, it's why I love it. I'm a, I'm a research and history nut anyway. So there are a few things in there. I'm like, dang it. Why didn't I think of that? Right. So give us a couple examples of some of these collective illusions that, that we've had past recent, whatever.

21:39Todd Rose:So I'll give you a couple recently, one that was pretty politically charged and then one that's not, I think, is more important. And we could spend all day talking about these. Unfortunately, they're just all over the place. So remember the defund the police movement? Whatever true injustices that they're addressing, the idea that you're going to essentially defund the police, there was at its peak on that in 2020. Over 60 % of Democrats publicly said that they supported defunding the police. We had private opinion data on it that showed it was never more than 9%. Okay, this is a big problem. Because this is the problem with collective illusions is you think they're sort of harmless.

22:19Todd Rose:Well, I'm just going to say what I think I'm supposed to say. So I stay with my group. Well, okay, except for politicians implemented policies in places like San Francisco and Seattle and everything, because they thought that's what people wanted. And those were disastrous, not just in my opinion, they've since rolled back those policies, right? And it's bad enough when you get sort of bad policies because people actually wanted them. But it's pretty tragic when it's all done under a collective illusion. You just thought this is what you were supposed to say. Okay, but here's a more, I think a more profound one, is the biggest collective illusions we've ever identified have to do with success.