Fresh Take: Dan Heath on Fulfilling Careers, Better Decision Making, and What Kids Remember Most About Childhood

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0:35Laughing in the Face of Motherhood. This is Amy. Today, I'm talking to Dan Heath. He is the co-author, along with his brother Chip, of four New York Times bestsellers, including Switch, Made to Stick, and The Power of Moments, selling over 4 million copies worldwide. Dan is also a senior fellow at Duke University's Case Center, which supports social entrepreneurs. And Dan is also the host of the podcast, What It's Like to Be. In each episode, Dan interviews somebody from a different profession, a cattle rancher, a criminal defense attorney, a professional Santa Claus. And today we're going to find out what it's like to be Dan Heath.

1:13Welcome, Dan. Thanks so much, Amy. Glad to be here. I think your podcast and our podcast, even though they're in completely different categories, a similar lane, which is that elusive podcast that the entire family will be actually happy to listen to in the car. Well, this is actually a surprise to me. I mean, I might bring on a welder or a forensic accountant, and then I'll just ask them a bunch of nosy questions about their job. And the original inspiration was sort of in the Studs Terkel lane. Studs Terkel, who wrote a famous book called Working in the 70s, where it's just basically a compendium of these beautiful interviews with people, you know, ranging from bricklayers to flight attendants.

1:53And so I thought it was just going to be this sort of sociological, you know, adults listening for the sake of natural curiosity about what other people do. And then what happened is within the first few months, we started to get these notes from parents just saying, hey, I'm listening with my kids and they dig it. And I had never really thought about it as a podcast for kids, but the notices just kept rolling in. And like you said, we've had several reviews that say almost word for word, like this is the only podcast our family can agree on. One of them said, you know, my husband likes sports podcasts and I like true crime and my kids like, you know, YouTube.

2:30But when we're compromising, like this is it. So I'm not 100 % sure I can explain that, but it is definitely a thing. So one of our recent episodes was on parents helping kids find their passions. And is that really even something we're supposed to do? Are we supposed to stay out of the way? Or are we supposed to sign them up for 100 comic classes, whatever. I feel like listening to this podcast, getting ready to record with you. There was an episode with a flight attendant recently, and I found it incredibly insightful about the role of therapist. I see what people need in her job that I don't think an 11 year old is like, I want to be a flight attendant because I want to help people going through transitions.

3:07And yet that is what she does every day. Right. So the idea of finding your passion is you need to lock it down. You're going to be a pilot and you're going to lock it down. that the passion that these people find in their jobs is often not what you would even think it would be. Completely agree. And back to the surprises from the show. I mean, one of my earliest surprises was I would talk to people and they would use language like I have the best job in the world or I wouldn't give this up for anything or, you know, I think I'm the luckiest person in the world. They're using like the same language.

3:36I had Claude do an analysis of the transcripts the other day and it was like not just one or two or three, but like 50 of my 80 guests had used some kind of just extraordinary theme like that. And we're talking about jobs like welder, tennis coach, TV meteorologist. These are not the jobs that like your stereotypical parent are going to say, like, if we're lucky, we're going to groom little Sally to be a blank. Right. I feel like the effect it had for me is it's really stretched my sense of, I think I sort of naively or even obnoxiously had this mental image that there are good jobs in the world and there are bad jobs.

4:15Right. Good in quotes. And good is stable. Yeah. High paying, prestigious, the kind of jobs we're sort of grooming our kids to take someday. And I feel like after doing this show, it feels now more like, just like there's no such thing as a generically good spouse. Like you wouldn't point to a little boy. He's going to be a good husband. Like he's going to be a good husband for somebody. Not everybody. And it's like, welding is not a job that would have been good for me. I would have been terrible at it and I would have hated it. But it's perfect for Lucky Reed, the guy I interviewed. It's kind of rewired my brain to think more in terms of matching and less in terms of, no, there's this absolute hierarchy of goodness and badness.

4:58And we should just vault our kids as high on the hierarchy as we can. When you say that most of the people you interview say that they're lucky and they love their jobs, are they coming to you? Let me talk about being a welder because I love it so much. How do you find your guests? This is the trickiest part. I don't want to be deceptive about this. I am screening people that love their job. So I guess in that sense, it's not a surprise. That's the whole point of the show is we want people to be ambassadors for their professions. the hardest part is finding them because just think about the search problem of trying to find a mail carrier for instance which is something we've been trying to do for three years and we finally cracked the case you can't just go to google and say you know find me a charismatic mail carrier who can be an enthusiastic ambassador for his or her profession and is also good at telling stories on podcasts like it's not legible to most normal search engines and so we just have this very, very labor intensive process where in this world, one of the good things about it is a lot of times there will be a podcast for a profession.

6:04We were going through the archives for this like dental hygienist podcast. And so sometimes there'll be these vertical niche podcasts that are perfect for us because we can go through 40 people and see who we'd like to interview. Other times our listeners, this is one of our dreams from the beginning is to get enough of an audience where people could just reach out and tell us, hey, I have a friend who's amazing at such and such. And probably more than a third of our guests now come from our listeners, which is amazing. And sometimes it's just a real needle in a haystack thing. This mail carrier that we finally found, a listener had forwarded us an article about this guy who had retired in Los Angeles after 30 or 40 years on the job, serving the same neighborhood.

6:46And the whole neighborhood had kind of thrown him this amazing community party, like 200 people show up. Like he is a folk hero in this neighborhood and people are giving him gifts. And it's just kind of this beautiful, beautiful moment. And so we tracked him down and he was astonishing. What really delights me about a lot of the people I've featured is that what makes their job special in general is what they brought to it. It's not like a feature of the job. Like the very first First episode in the whole show is with a stadium beer vendor, a guy named Howard Hart, literally worked for 30, 40 years.

7:25The guy, you know, walking up and down the stands at the stadium saying cold beer. You would think this is the ultimate transactional job. Not much to say about this, right? I mean, there's not a lot of complexity. Someone raises their hand, he picks out a beer, takes their money, boom, that's it. But it wasn't for him. He worked essentially every home Baltimore Orioles game for decades. And he worked the same stands, which is not something that I knew, you know, that if you were a vendor, you get like a section of stands and that's yours. And so you can begin to get to know people over time because you're seeing them once or twice a week.

8:01And so you get to know them and you get to know their kids. And after a while, you see their kids grow up. And then, you know, 25 years later, you see the old kids have new kids in your stands. and he's exchanging Christmas cards with some of the people in his stands. And it was just beautiful the way he talked about his work. And he had this one quote that stuck with me ever since. This is just a paraphrase, but he said, my family used to tell me, Howard, you're wasting your life. You could have done so much more. And he said, no, I'm not. I didn't waste my life. I had an amazing life. And I worked hard and I kept my nose clean.

8:40and could I afford a fancy car? No. Could I afford a vacation to Europe? No. But I know that I brought something good to the people in those stands and that they brought something good back to me. And I remember after I recorded that interview, I was just thinking, man, was that a curve? Because I went into it thinking, this is going to be a fun, offbeat interview. I'm going to learn something about beer sales. Funny junk stories. That's what I was thinking. Maybe some sports trivia or something. And no, it turned out to be this kind of parable about what it means to do good work. And it just kind of completely changed my perspective on what this show could be.

9:22That's a testament to your interview skills, because I'm assuming that Howard did not come into that interview. I'm going to share why my work really matters. These are not professional, polished people with their talking points from their book prepared for interviews. Exactly. I'm showing up to do what? I've never done a podcast before. Sure, I'll tell you about my job. It must be real beginner's mind that you practice both preparing your questions and then also just going where the interview goes. How do you balance that? I took inspiration from Alan Alda, you know, the famous TV actor from MASH, but he has a podcast as well.

9:58And he's brilliant at it. And I found some interviews of him talking about what he did. And he said he kind of intentionally stayed ignorant before he went into the interviews because he wanted to be able to channel the minds of the viewers. He didn't want to do his homework enough where he could seem smart to the scientists. That was really the enemy of the show. He needed to be naive so he could be a proxy for the audience. And so for better or worse, that's kind of my strategy with the show. I do a lot of prep in terms of thinking about what would I like to know? What were the different TERFs we could explore?

10:35But I don't try to get smart about welding or Christmas tree farming because I don't want to have that thing happen in my brain where I'm trying to audition what I know to the guest. I don't want to seem like I know their work and we're just kind of riffing. No, I want to come fresh. I want to hear them explain the joys of the work and what's annoying about it. And when they say something surprising, like, I want to be surprised because I think that makes it fun for the listener is to know that I'm just surprised about what I just heard as they are. I'm going back to that flight attendant episode recently.

11:09She tells this incredible story about seeing a woman on the plane. I think the boarding process is still happening. And she just sees something in this woman's eyes. And she said to you, you know, the ones who are drowning, you always know, and tells the story of how this person was having an anxiety attack and how she helped this person. So profound. And I just was blown away by, has this flight attendant thought about this before? Or is this something that she's coming to understand about her job for the first time while she's talking to you? And just how cool that was to hear that sort of uncovered during the conversation.

11:43Yeah, it's always fun for me to hear. I feel like because the people I'm talking to have been in their job often for decades, I get to understand something about what expertise means. And so for a flight attendant, I mean, you deal with fresh crowds of people multiple times a day, every day for years. And so what she was saying was, I can just find the issue, you know, and sometimes it's the bad issue, like somebody's acting a fool. In this case, it was someone that was basically having a panic attack and she could just read it. I was thinking of a conductor for an orchestra that I interviewed.

12:23I was asking him about some moments that he remembered, and he brought up this memory of a mistake from a performance in the orchestra. I think they had maybe three performances of the same symphonies. symphonies. And the second, one of the orchestra members, I think it was one of the horns, came in a measure too early. And because they came in too early, it kind of triggered this sort of avalanche, like other people were taking their lead. And so some other people followed them in early, but then other people were sticking to the core rhythm. And so he's in this pickle as a conductor, like, how do I, how do I get us back in sync?

13:03How do I get people aware? Because I think people were immediately aware something was different and wrong, but it's probably only the conductor that kind of instantly knows this is what's wrong. And this is what I have to do to get it back. And so he tells the story and, you know, he has so much experience that just with a couple of like facial expressions and hand gestures, he kind of like gets them back in sync. But I just found it so striking that I'm just fishing for memorable nights. And the memorable night for him was the mistake. It was almost like excellence was too ordinary for him. And that this was a night where he really, he had to do something very challenging.

13:43Because he's dealing with these pros who hardly ever make a mistake. And so it was like the time when he had to show his stuff, that's what stuck out in his mind. I have acted in my past and I did a Broadway play and I did it 200 times. Oh, wow. There was the cue like knock, knock, knock. And the person on stage with me opens the door and this young man is standing there at the door. And I remember the performance when he opened the door and the guy wasn't standing there. He was down in the dressing room. He had missed his cue. We just, you drop in, right? You immediately get really attentive.

14:17When you do a play 200 times, you can start to think about what's for dinner while your mouth is moving. Right. But that, you know, like the actor turned and looked at me and he said, maybe he forgot something in the car. And I said, you think so? And then he stuck his head out the door like, I don't see anybody coming. Meanwhile, we know, of course, the stage manager is like, boom, boom, boom, boom, running down the stairs like, you smash me on stage right now. That is terrifying. And eventually he showed up. But that's the moment you remember, the moment, not the ordinary day at your job, but the day when something goes wrong.

14:49So when I hear that, I just think panic. But I bet you didn't feel panic in the moment. I mean, what were your emotions? You get really alive, right? Like, oh boy, I'm feeling myself standing here. I'm feeling the air moving across my face. I'm feeling this seconds of silence ticking. Yeah. And it just was a good story later. But yeah, those moments in which you're on the high wire, like what's going to happen? I was trying to make a joke. I was trying to come up with a joke in my head, but then I was deciding my character wouldn't say that. Ooh, that's a good one. The tension between acknowledging what's happened in the room, but also keeping true to the story.

15:28Yeah. So I was doing all that in the two and a half seconds before the other person said something. I just saw, I think it was in the Times or somewhere, there was a production of Romeo and Juliet recently where it's toward the end and Romeo's already died. And this night, a cat, a stray cat got on stage and was like pawing and gnawing on Romeo's head as Juliet, you know, tearfully hung over him. And so this Juliet, I was so impressed. Like she, of course, notices the cat eating her castmate and she like grabs his legs in sort of a faux loving way and like physically drags him away from the cat.

16:10And I was just thinking that's good improv right there. You know you're a pro when you can handle the straight cat problem. I'm talking to Dan Heath, host of the podcast, What It's Like to Be, and we'll be right back. Amy, let me tell you about a magical place that is so exactly designed to be enclosed space, year-round fun for the whole family, that I bet you already know what I'm going to say before I even say the name. Let's say it together on three. One, two, three. Great Wolf Lodge. You got it, Amy. My kids loved Great Wolf Lodge when we went. You probably already know that it has a huge indoor water park with a wave pool, lazy river, a bunch of massive water slides.

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20:20So tell us about when kids design their perfect day. Oh, yeah. So this is kind of going in the direction of one of my books that I wrote with my brother Chip. It's called The Power of Moments. So I have kind of two things. I write business-ish books and I do this podcast. Those are my two daily activities. So this book called The Power of Moments is about how do we enrich experience for the people we care about. And it ranges from thinking about customers or patients or students, but there's also a fair amount of parenting stuff in the book. And so this notion of the perfect day actually came from one of my readers.

20:58So I met a guy at a conference and he said, Hey, I read, I read your book and it inspired me to try something with my kids. And my memory is his kids were like maybe five and eight. He told them, I want you to design your perfect day from, you know, first thing you wake up in the morning till you go to bed. And if you keep it real, like not, I'm going to have a picnic on the moon. Like if you keep it anchored in reality, like your mom and I are going to try to make this happen for you. work. We're going to produce your perfect day. And he said, I wanted them to put some real thought and care into this.

21:32So he had them draw up an agenda on paper. Like that was part of the assignment, like kind of mapping out this happens and then this happens. And I was just so struck by this idea. I said, you got to send me these agendas that they create because I knew he would have kept them. And he said, okay, okay. So a couple of days later, he emails me these scans of what they created. And they're just unbelievable. Like the five-year-old was a little girl and she wanted to get up in the morning and have Krispy Kreme donuts because whose perfect day does not include that, let's be honest. And then she wants to go on a family walk with their dog and then have Chipotle for lunch.

22:11And then after dinner, she wants to watch something called the Emoji Movie, which I'd never heard of, but it has one of the worst scores ever recorded on rotten tomatoes, but this is her perfect day. The little boys, it was similar. It's like he wanted to go to his favorite breakfast restaurant, Rise. And then he had hot dogs and french fries for lunch. Board games in the afternoon. That was part of his perfect day. Board games with the family. And then the most brilliant part of it was in the evening, sort of the culmination of this boy's perfect day, he said specifically, no showers. And I was just so kind of taken by this whole thing because I think sometimes as parents, we tend to just over inflate the drama of things.

22:58You know, well, if it's going to be a memorable day, it's got to be a bounce house or, you know, a pony rental or a face painter or whatever. And when you just ask these kids like, hey, tell me what your perfect day is. It's not that stuff. It's take a walk with the family dog. It's play board games. It's give me a break from a shower for one night. And I thought that was so beautiful. I hope those kids got their perfect days. Those sound not so unachievable. Exactly. We too get things from our listeners that we carry with us and think about all the time. And somebody told us once that when she was growing up, once in a while, her mom would let her and her sibling have plate of little things for dinner and plate of little things was some cheese, some ham, some carrots, like in a dip and this, and it was a plate of little things.

23:47Yeah. And plate of little things dinner was like the best night of the year, right? As she recalled it. And it was only when she was much older that her mother was like, we had plate of little things when I didn't have anything else to give you. Oh, that's brilliant. Lean times, you know, shoot, what am and I give these kids for dinner. It's plate of little things night. But in the child's mind, it was the very best night. That's so good. You just sparked a memory. A friend of mine told me that her dad, like maybe once a year, once every two years, would wake her up in the middle of the night, like two or three in the morning, and they would come downstairs and like light a candle and have like a little snack and play a game or watch a TV show or just something random just to have a moment in the middle of the night and be up while everybody else was asleep.

24:35And she said, like, those are some of her fondest memories from her childhood. Isn't that sweet? It's so sweet. And it's so important to keep in mind when I think we have this pressure to sort of optimize and maximize. And as parents and as, you know, 22-year-olds, I just went to my college reunion and the kids that were there checking us in or whatever, they were all very interested. I went to college a long time ago. They were all very interested in who we were, what we do. And I'm standing there with my friend who's a movie producer. This other person has been on a TV show. I have a podcast.

25:09And they were like, how did you do that? What did you major in? And of course, none of us majored in podcasting or movie producing. And we're old. So how did you get on that path and lock it down really early? And we're like, we didn't. We did a hundred things. We could never have seen where we'd end up. Relax and just get started. I felt like that was what I needed to do at this reunion was tell all the undergraduates scanning our badges that they did not have to know what they were doing and set the perfect next foot. And then another one. Yeah. I mean, that really comes through with my guests.

25:44I would say maybe like a quarter of my guests had it locked in early, often because it's a family business. like I've had for whatever reason I've had a bunch of people who were third generation in a certain business like life insurance agent and something called a custom harvester which I didn't even know was a thing but it's somebody who kind of rolls in to harvest wheat or corn when it's harvest time and and he has such a big crew that it's a lot more efficient for the farmers to hire him and his crew than somebody else but anyway he was like a third generation of that but the vast majority of the people I'm interviewing are people who had to kind of fumble around, you know, to figure out what they wanted to your point.