622: Alex Hutchinson - Why We Seek Big Challenges, Adding Texture To Time, The Explorers Gene, Working Through Uncertainty, Tom Hanks, and Pushing The Limits of Human Performance

26:49At least, you know, my kids are eight and ten now. So they have wants that they're able to express. when when our oldest daughter was six months old and we went on some backpacking and canoeing trips she didn't have any volition and we were making those decisions for her and those decisions were partly self-interested we wanted to be out in the wilderness and you know we couldn't leave our kids behind so we were modifying what we would do and it pretty severely because you know i one of my one of my fond memories is i think when our kids were like let's say two and four we went on a little backpacking trip.

27:23I hiked with a big backpack and strapped to the back of the backpack was one of those little porta potty things where you're toilet training kids because I didn't think our kids would be able to poop in a hole in the ground yet. So I was hiking along in this beautiful wilderness with a toilet strapped to my back and then we had to hike out with like a bag full of diapers, soiled diapers. So obviously we didn't cover a lot of ground on those hikes. But so it's really trying to understand what the kids want, especially because there's all sorts of unspoken, you know you can ask them but if they know that the right answer is i want to go hiking daddy because i want your approval uh then then you're not getting it right but my feeling is that they get a huge amount out of it a sort of feeling that they can do anything that they've been out in the rain hiking gotten cold gotten muddy gotten tired gotten hungry and with kids you can try and convince them that there's no choice they have to keep doing something out on a hike that you're not bluffing anymore it's like i'm sorry but we need to get to the place where we're going to camp because there's there's nothing here and yes they keep going and then they realize holy crap you know i can do that and it was fine and the one key thing is it's like adversity comes things go bad we get to camp or whatever half an hour later they're running around having a having a blast and then we're like okay phew we didn't overdo it this time they're okay I love that because I talk about this with friends all the time.

28:52We're figuring out ways to create voluntary hardship for children because life is built to be easy, especially if you have means and you can provide and live in a nice house and a great community. There's got to be hardship, and I'm thinking of all the possible ways to introduce that to life. Okay, I want to dig into the book, if you're cool, and maybe you can riff on some of my notes that I took. This is at the beginning, and it's in chapter four, but the explore slash exploit dilemma. What is that? And can you go deeper on this explore slash exploit dilemma? Yeah. So this is really the fundamental choice in a lot of contexts, right?

29:33You can either keep doing what you're doing, you can follow the path that you're on, or you can strike out into the unknown and figure out what's off the path. And so the terminology is most associated with a guy named James March, who was a Stanford business professor, very well known, who wrote a paper in 1991 about the explore exploit or explore exploit tradeoffs in business decision making. So he's thinking corporate direction. And so, you know, the easy example of that would be, are you going to, you know, invest resources in your existing product line, you know, marketing it more, doing that kind of thing?

30:10Or are you going to put resources into R &D? and say, you know what, we can build something better that's going to make our current product line obsolete. And the natural response is, well, those are both important. We should do both of those things. That's true, but you can't maximize both. You can't do everything in this world. You have to choose how you're going to allocate between this sort of exploration and exploitation. And one of March's main messages was that because the rewards of exploration are uncertain and they're distant, you don't find out for, let's say if it's R &D for a number of years, whether it's going to pay off.

30:48The feedback loop is much weaker. Whereas when you exploit and you pour more money into marketing, the current product line, you see a bump in sales next quarter. It's like, wow, that really worked. Let's keep doing that. So we tend to overinvest in exploitation rather than exploration in the corporate context. You can zoom out and think about that in the societal context? Are we investing enough in fundamental blue sky research? Or are we just trying to, you know, keep the current system going the way it is? And you can also zoom in and say, look in your personal life and explore exploit dilemmas are everywhere.

31:29It's like, the canonical example is you go to a restaurant, you know, your favorite restaurant, you always order the burger. Are you is it worth trying the meatloaf that you've never tried before? because it might suck, but it might be good. Maybe you should stick with the burger, which is pretty good. And so we're making these sorts of decisions. It's like dating, it's career choices. You're going to follow the path you're on or you're going to try launching that business you were considering. So they're everywhere. And the question is, how do you optimize the explore exploit, these explore exploit decisions?

31:59And that turns out to be a very complicated question. Okay, we got to answer it though. Can you give me your best shot? Okay, yeah. So it's easy. You just always, you know, if the day starts with a T, it's contextual, right? Like there's no right answer. The same two people might make the same different decisions under the same circumstances. And it's not necessarily that one of them is right or one of them is wrong. But you need to think very carefully about what it is you're trying to optimize, what the stakes are. And so you can, there's a sort of 60 year history of mathematical attempts to solve the explore exploit dilemma.

32:36and you can model it as basically you're walking into a casino. There's a bunch of slot machines. You don't know anything about them. How are you going to spend your money? And they each have a certain percentage probability or a certain payout function. And some of them might be really good. Maybe one slot machine pays out 90 % of the time and another one pays out 20 % of the time. The only way you're going to find out is by putting money into each of them. And eventually you're going to get a sense, this one seems better. This one seems okay. This one seems crappy. But you don't know for sure because it's all probabilistic.

33:04You don't know whether just because you've got two losses on one slot machine, whether it's just terrible or whether you just had some bad luck. And so the math on how to solve those is exceptionally complicated. But there's been a lot of attempts and algorithms that come out not to give you the right answer every time because life is life is probabilistic, right? Like, it's not like if you do something and it turns out well, it doesn't mean that was the right decision. You might have just got lucky, right? So there's no right answer. But what you want to be able to do is maximize your odds of a good outcome and minimize regret about missing out on what might have been even better.

33:39And I think maybe the most interesting and practical takeaway from this, there's something called the upper confidence bound algorithm, which is guaranteed mathematically to minimize the amount of regret you will experience in your choices. And what the upper confidence bound algorithm says is essentially you should look for the biggest potential upside, the biggest realistic upside. So if you buy a lottery ticket, the upside is you win$50 million, but that's not a realistic upside, right? You're very unlikely to win the lottery. But if you look at the sort of reasonable error bars, let's say the 90 % confidence, like the outcomes will be in a certain range, you should take the choice that gives the highest realistic upside.

34:20So in a career context, what that might mean is you're looking at two jobs. One of them has a good starting salary, stable, but not much prospects for advancement. That's the job and you'll be doing that indefinitely. Another job is maybe more aligned with what you hope to be doing. It has a pathway to your dream job, but it's less stable. The starting salary is worse. so the average like if you're just looking at like what is the the most likely good outcome it's like you should take the first job it's stable it's got a good starting salary blah blah but the second one has this upside which is not out of the question there's a reasonable pathway that you might get to the job you really wanted and what the upper confidence bound algorithm says is take a chance on the one with the realistic upside take take that's going to get you closer to where you really want to be.

35:13Another name for it is optimism in the face of uncertainty. When you're choosing between two uncertain choices, and most choices in life are uncertain, right? You generally don't know what you're going to get really. Be optimistic. Pick the one that actually will get you. And it won't always pan out. But if nothing else, you generally won't regret having given it a shot. And I think that's a kind of sentiment that you hear from a lot of people who've tried to do hard things. Like I spent most of my twenties trying to make the Olympics and I didn't, but I have no regret about that. That was a, it was a hard thing to try and it was worthwhile trying.

35:49And I'm, I have no regret about giving it a shot, even though it didn't pan out. When you look at the things that have produced the greatest moments or upside in your own life, anybody could run this audit right now. Look what preceded those moments, whether it's in sports or in your career to me there was there was risk involved there was some some bigger than others there was the risk of putting in all this effort to practice and lift weights and run and still lose the games and still have bad experiences and i've been on winning teams and losing teams there was a huge risk in leaving corporate america for me at the end of 2017 to start my own business because i thought but it's had by far the greatest upside in my life now is risky and you give up that nice VP salary at a Fortune 500 company.

36:40I don't know, man. I feel like if your gut instinct combined with some of the facts and some of the data align, it's almost always worth it to take that shot. And I think along the way, though, you should run small experiments. And maybe you have some data behind this. Run small experiments to see if that could happen. In my case, it was like, okay, the market's saying, yeah, come speak here, come work with our leaders here, come do this. Okay. It's not just me thinking like, well, I'm just going to quit and hope for the best. It's now the market and the world was speaking to you a little bit after you running these small experiments that maybe something is here.

37:18And that could go for a lot of different areas of your life. If you're dating, then go on dates, run experiments, go on as many as you need to give yourself a chance. If you're thinking of starting your business, start it. You don't have to quit everything. Run an experiment. See if the market likes what you have to offer. I feel like though the biggest rewards usually come by you taking some sort of risk. And let's take a little bit more measured risk and run experiments as opposed to just saying, I'm going all in and throwing everything else away. Yeah. I think there's a couple of really important things you said there.

37:55One is this idea of risk and uncertainty. outcomes that are foregone or that are obvious are just really uninteresting. I don't think this is just a personal thing for me. I think it's a general statement that I think of it in terms of, because I'm a running guy, in terms of running a marathon. Let's say if I want to run a marathon, I know I can run a marathon because I trained very seriously as a distance runner for many years. So it's uninteresting to me to find out whether I can run a marathon, which is not the case for someone else, someone who's never, you know, hasn't done much running. Finding out whether they can run a marathon might be full of uncertainty.

38:40So for me to make it interesting, it's like, can I run a marathon in a given time? And so I wrote an article once, probably I would say the only article I've ever written that my mother really didn't like. And then she let me know about the Marine Corps marathon. There was a controversy 15 years ago about some runners who had taken a shortcut to get to, cause they were not going to make it to the cutoff time because Marine Corps is all about participation, but it's as cutoff times, cause you can't keep these major arteries shut indefinitely. And so some people took a shortcut, got their finishers medal.

39:14They got found out it became a big thing in like runner's world and i wrote an article saying you know what even though the point of marine corps is participation it's not about going super fast there is something about these cutoff times that gives it meaning and it's not that there's anything magical about six hours versus seven hours for a marathon it's that if you know before you even start a challenge that you're going to complete it because there's no way you can fail That challenge loses all its meaning and all its interests. So if you want to complete the Marine Corps marathon, I don't remember what the cutoff times are exactly, whether it's six or seven hours, you have to be able to complete it in six hours.

39:55And there are other marathons. I read, there was a nice article in the Times about the last finisher in the Honolulu marathon this year. It was like, who finished it in 16 hours and something. And he was super thrilled because that was challenging for him. The point is, whatever challenge you are, it's not about the intrinsic level of the challenge. it's about if you want something to engage you to feel meaningful you have to not know what the outcome is the outcome has to be uncertain in some way um and so it doesn't mean you just go automatically certain you know like searching for things you don't know but when you're taking on a challenge uh if you're thinking i don't know about this i'm not sure how it's going to turn out that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it that like that's that's a part of anything that's worthwhile it's doing, there has to be some element of risk.

40:38And so I'm definitely on board with what you're saying about risk. Why are live sports the most valuable resource for TV networks today? Why? Well, because they have uncertainty because we don't know what's going to happen. We're really interested to watch and see because we don't know, especially if you're a fanatic, if you're a fan of a team and you really want them to win. It's funny, like when your team wins in a blowout, whether you're on the team or you're a fan of the team, you may remember it kind of, but when they win the close one or it's a comeback or a last second play, you remember those forever.

41:18It's amazing the difference. And that's because there was so much uncertainty. You were scared. You weren't sure. And then you made it happen. And I think that's a great metaphor for life. We shouldn't run away from those moments. In fact, we should probably run towards them, even though they're really scary and we're not sure how it's going to go. That makes a more interesting life. And I feel like that's you, man. I mean, this idea of running towards the uncertainty instead of running away from it. Yeah, there's a great interview. So there's a podcast on Scientific American by a journalist named Christy Ashwandan about uncertainty.

41:56It was all about the concept of uncertainty. And one of our interviews was with a scientist named David Krakauer. and I mean I'll skip the background details and just say he had this great line about we don't want to know the ending necessarily in fact we're willing to pay vast sums of money to not know the ending until it until it comes and I think that's the live sports thing you know he was making the comparison to you know basketball we don't watch basketball to know what the final score is we know what it is we want we watch it to follow that arc and that ties into for me at least to this idea of a hero's journey, which has become a kind of cliche.

42:31Joseph Campbell was this mythologist. I guess he was famous from like the 1930s through the 1980s. He had a very long career. What was interesting to me in digging into this idea of this hero's journey, which he defined in one place as a bold beginning of uncertain outcomes. So it's you're heading out on some mission where you don't know. It's essential that you don't know how it's going to turn out. Otherwise, it's not meaningful. And so I don't want to take a 40-minute digression here, but this hero's journey is basically the template for a ton of Hollywood movies. Most famously, George Lucas rewrote the first Star Wars movie after reading Joseph Campbell's book, and they became good friends.

43:10But Joseph Campbell was one of the world's fastest 800-meter runners in the 1920s. And so when I was digging up, trying to understand his hero's journey, I was like, yeah, He understood this idea of heading out on a mission where you don't know how it's going to turn out and where you're going to struggle. In the 80s, just before he died, he did give some interviews and they were like, oh, you've had this super interesting life. What were the highlights? He was like, oh, the 4x800 meter relay is at Penn Relays in 1925. He came from behind. Like you said, the outcome was uncertain. The other team was ahead.

43:43He was running the anchor. And he won two races with big come from behind victories. And that's 60 years later. He's like, that was the high point of my life. That was it. We're talking a lot about sports. How does this relate to regular everyday life for people who don't regularly play sports or don't care for sports? This is something I get criticized about from time to time, but it's my story. It's my background. So I talk about sports, but anyway, how does this relate to the non-sporting world of uncertainty risk getting out there? Right. How would you do that? Yeah. I mean, this is what, look, I'm also a person who everything, sports is a metaphor for everything.

44:22But in this case, I think the metaphor is perfect. It fits very easily onto all sorts of things. This sort of maybe an easy example is as a pretty shy guy, like I was always very hesitant to ask women out or to ask someone to dance. And it's like, I had lots of friends who were like, dude, you just, you have to accept that, you know, accept failure as an option. And it's like, it's okay. You have to explore. You have to try lots of things. You can't just wait for the perfect meteor to hit. I was like, well, I'm going to wait for the perfect meteor hit. And, you know, I had to wait another 10 years.

44:51But let's be honest. I would have, I want to be careful how I phrase this, but I would have had a good time, a much better time if I'd been a little more willing to take risks and to not wait until I was sure that someone liked me before asking them out. Just like, if I want to know whether they like me, why don't I just ask? If they don't want to go out with me, they don't want to go out with me. That's fine. And, you know, I guess the other obvious comparison is like, like you were saying, starting, you know, leaving a corporate life to start your own business or start as an entrepreneur. If you wait until you know that, I think your point about running small experiments is good.

45:28It's not about being irrationally optimistic or delusionally optimistic, but it's about looking for the bright side, being real in a realistic sense, and then being willing to accept the possibility of failure. And that's a hard, that's a hard and scary thing in, in whether it's in your personal life, in your business life, or in sports. But it really opens up a much wider field of possibilities if you're willing to fail sometimes. This is why if I speak with a recent college grad and they're not exactly sure what they want to do or what type of job they want, I push them to work in sales. Now, this comes from bias because that was my experience.

46:10But But the reason, and I never sold a thing in my life before I got my first real job in sales after I finished playing football. The reason that it was so helpful, though, was because I got rejected 60 times a day. And that is great practice for life. And it also makes you just go, all right, no means not yet. Go on to the next call. Go to the next one. Go to the next one. Go to the next one. And was it fun in the moment? Not. A lot of times it wasn't. And it was very fun when you broke through and you started doing well and exceeding goals and winning circle of excellence. That was cool. But part of what made it cool, Alex, and this goes back to what we spoke about earlier, was dealing with all of that rejection, dealing with all of that failure, going through all of the hard stuff to eventually, a couple years later, getting up on that stage in front of your entire company because you did so well.

47:02I wouldn't have appreciated if I would have started on stage. I had to go through all of that rejection, all of that failure of sounding like an idiot, being embarrassed in front of my colleagues because you're sitting in cubicles. You can all hear each other. That thing is an amazing practice. That's probably honestly why, man, now that I think about it, that's why I had the guts and maybe the stupidity to write you an email and asking you, can you edit my book? Can you make this book better? Because I'm so used to getting rejected. I don't care. What does it matter? And if you just said no or you ignore me, I'll just move on to the next.

47:35But I think that is a very useful skill to develop, right? Is being rejected, having people say no, because then you might be willing to ask or go for it the next time because it's not that big a deal if you lose or they say no or they ignore you. Yeah. And so my parallel experience would be that my first job out of J school was that a newspaper, I got an internship, a summer internship with the daily newspaper called the Ottawa Citizen. And then I got extended for a year after that. So I spent 16 months there as the lowest man on the totem pole, the general assignment intern. So if there's a car crash, like, you know, send Hutchinson to go knock on the door of the person who was killed, you know, the family of the person who was killed and ask how they feel about it.

48:15It's like, I think we can guess how they feel about it. I don't think I need to ask them, do I? You think you need to do that? Yeah, yeah. And so look, I'm not condoning all, you know, and I was also the guy getting sent to the dog fashion shows and just to all sorts of situations where people didn't necessarily want to talk to me. And as an introvert, you know, that was hell. But it was also the best possible training. And so I've enjoyed being a freelance journalist, calling my own shots for the last, whatever, 18 years. But that first year and a half of being forced out of my comfort zone day after day after day was invaluable.

48:52Because like you said, it's similar to you. It taught me, you know, if someone says, take off, I don't want to talk to you. That's okay. Like, it's not fun. Nobody likes it. There's a reason I don't do that kind of reporting anymore. But you learn that the world doesn't end and you move on and you write the next story, you knock on the next door. And sometimes people are actually really happy to talk to you. They're sad that something bad happened, but they want to tell their story. And you realize, you know what, until you ask, you never know. And if they don't want to talk, that's fine. But often they really do want to talk.

49:22And that's even better. The quote to open the book is, to say that we should not change wines is hearsay. The tongue becomes saturated, and after the third glass, even the best bottle yields, but an obtuse sensation. This comes from, it looks like, a potentially French person whose name I cannot pronounce. Can you go deeper on why you chose that quote to open the book? Yeah, I want it to seem really pretentious. It was the main reason, but Yeah, really what I wanted to get at, how I wanted people to open this book was to understand that I'm not just talking about like sailing across the Atlantic.

50:04And I'm not just talking, even though the introduction of the book is about me and my wife and my kids on a crazy hiking trip. It's not just about suffering or about physical exploration. It's about this idea that we want something new. And so it's like, I have this discussion with my kids all the time. So that quote is from a book called The Physiology of Taste, which was a really influential book in the 1800s, trying to understand how we experience food and drink and why we experience the way we experience. So my kids love waffles for breakfast. And I love waffles for breakfast. And ever since I was a kid, my parents used to make these protein waffles, which were a whole bunch of cottage cheese and eggs.

50:51Whatever. That's another story, I guess. But my parents would make these big batches of waffles, freeze them, and I would have them for breakfast. And so I started doing the same for my kids. And they want them every morning. And I keep having an argument with them. I'm like, trust me, if you have them every morning, you will lose the magic. You will not love them in six months or a year or whatever. And once you don't love them, they're gone. You can't bring back that feeling. It's like if you've listened to the same song 58 times, eventually you're going to not love that song anymore. And so I have this instinct of my own of like, so right now I don't let them have waffles more than twice a week.

51:27And it's not because I'm too lazy to make them. It's because I want them to still love those waffles in five years, the way I still love them 40 years later after I started eating them. So there's really something like fundamental about this idea of you lose the bloom comes off the rose if you go back to the well too often, or if you're having the same thing over and over again. So variety, maybe there's nutrition, nutritional arguments for having variety of diet. But for me, it's also about preserving the feeling that something is new. Love it. Alex, to close, I'm curious if you were meeting with somebody who was earlier in their career, maybe they just graduated from college and they were uncertain of what they want to do.

52:05What are some general pieces of life slash career advice you'd give to them? Yeah. So, I mean, the first thing I would say is going back to what we were saying earlier, which is to be optimistic in the face of uncertainty and to be willing to take risks. An insight that I found interesting in the research for the book is this idea of you have to have both exploring and exploiting in your life. And the best way to do that, ideally, the best way to combine them is to explore first and then exploit. So you want to, before you dig in, everyone loves grind culture. You want to be the first one up in the morning working hard, but you got to make sure you're working on the right thing.

52:42And the way to do that is to make sure you've explored widely before you settle on where you're going to dig in. So especially if I'm talking to a younger person, I encourage them. Some people know exactly what they want to do when they're eight years old, and congratulations to them. But most of us, we discover who we are by doing it, is something that David Epstein said in his book, Range. And I think that's really true. You got to try a lot of different things. You're not going to know what you love and what you would potentially great at unless you try a whole bunch of things rather than just settling on the first thing that seems fun to you.

53:13so good the book is called the explorer's gene why we seek big challenges new flavors and the blank spots on the map as mentioned at the beginning of this conversation i am a massive fan of your writing style and output and how you're so good at getting us inside the minds of your characters and the stories you write about all true stories that you write about so So huge fan. I would highly, highly recommend people read The Explorer's Gene, not only for the quality of the writing, but the actual output and what you will get from it to make your life better. Alex, thanks again, man. And I certainly would love to continue our dialogue as we both progress, man.

53:57Thanks, Ryan. It's really been a ton of fun to reconnect and to have a chance to chew over some of these ideas. Love it, man. Thank you. it is the end of the podcast club thank you for being a member of the end of the podcast club if you are send me a note ryan at learningleader.com let me know what you learned from this great conversation with alex hutchinson a few takeaways from my notes be optimistic in the face of uncertainty. We discover who we are by doing it. We learn who we are in practice, not in theory. The only way to know if we can do something is to do the thing. Take action, fail every once in a while, get up and keep going.

54:46Be optimistic in the face of uncertainty. And then the explore, Never exploit dilemma. Do we keep on the same path and stick to what we know works or do we go out into the unknown? Do we invest in R &D, research and development, with no guarantee that it will pay off? I don't know. This reminds me, though, of my conversation with Scott Galloway on episode number 578 when he said, in order to do anything of significance in your life, you must take an uncomfortable risk. Then, the hard is what makes it good. From Jimmy Dugan, Tom Hanks' character in A League of Their Own, the hard stuff adds texture to time.

55:36The effort needed is a source of meaning. It's similar to the Ikea paradox, where there is more meaning in the piece of furniture if you've assembled it yourself. We should not run away from the hard things like Dottie Henson was trying to do in A League of Their Own. We should run towards them. The effort is where we find a source of meaning. Once again, I would say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling a friend or two, hey, you should listen to this episode of The Learning Leader Show with Alex Hutchinson. I think he'll help you become a more effective leader because you continue to do that and you also go to Apple Podcasts and Spotify and you subscribe to the show, really important.

56:16And then you write a thoughtful review, rate the show five stars, hopefully. By doing all of that, you are giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much. Talk to you soon. Can't wait.