Ep. 223: Dan Heath's "Unnatural" Curiosity Provides a Feast of Revelatory Insights

Dan Heath, author (or co-author) of bestselling books like Made to Stick and most recently, Reset: How to Change What’s Not Working, and host of the podcast What It’s Like to Be has a self-described “unnatural curiosity” that leads him head-first into his work. A Thanksgiving dinner caused him to wonder what his relatives' daily lives were really like and sparked the podcast What It’s Like to Be. He’s since talked to everyone from brain surgeon to stadium beer vendor – and in the process turned up some surprising universal themes on relationships, purpose, and the meaning of work. Combine that with his talent for turning a hyper-efficient drive-through trip into Reset, a book full of actionable systems-design logic that will help you get unstuck and make meaningful progress in any endeavor. Toss it all together with some vivid examples and  illustrative word-smithery and the result is a smorgasbord of revelatory insight and inspiration. Bon appetit!

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Read the Transcript

Dan Heath: We’re trying to find ways to get more meaning out of our work and we’re thinking about what does it mean to age and do the work and the pride we take in craft.

Amy Devers: Hi everyone, this is Clever and I’m Amy Devers. Today I’m talking to Dan Heath. You know him as a best-selling author (or co-author w/ his brother Chip) of 6 beloved business books including Made to Stick, Switch, the Power of Moments, Upstream, and most recently Reset: How to Change What’s Not Working. His books have been translated into 35 languages and have sold over 4 million copies worldwide. He’s also the host of the award-winning podcast, What It’s Like to Be… where he explores the world of work, one profession at a time - from a brain surgeon, to a welder, to a couples therapist, to a city manager… and In doing so, he reveals a beautiful high-definition portrait of humanity through stories are genuinely fascinating, and utterly enjoyable. As you’ll hear, Dan has a penchant for turning his innate curiosity into projects that show you how to shift your mindset, craft stickier ideas, prevent problems before they happen, get yourself unstuck, or walk in someone else's shoes…And his gift for verbal illustration - means he’s an artist at distilling it all into vivid mental diagrams, and digestible insights that leave you feeling both satisfied, and enlightened. Here’s Dan…

Dan: My name is Dan Heath, I live in Durham, North Carolina. I am a writer and a podcast host. I write how to business-ish books that help people do different things differently, whether that’s make better decisions or make ideas stick with their audiences. And the podcast is called What It’s Like To Be, and it’s a podcast that explores work and people who love their work and in every episode I talk to someone from a different profession, like a cattle ranchers or a forensic accountant or a city manager. And just ask them what it’s like to do what they do. And why do I do it? I love bringing the principles of psychology to bear for people in a useful way where they can do something different in their lives. I love hearing the principles of frameworks from the books kind of connect with people and let them be more effective. And the podcast is a little less ‘how-to,’ I’m not sure there’s anything you would do differently in your life after listening to the cattle rancher episode or whatever. But I think it helps us to see other people in three dimensions, in a useful way. I think it helps expand our curiosity about other people in a way that might be useful in this very tribal world.

Amy: I do think that a lot of what you do is about helping transmit insights through to people in useful ways. Your latest book, Reset: How to Change What’s Not Working, it’s all about systems design and getting unstuck. You guide people through how to find leverage points and strategically restack their resources in order to get those leverage points to budge. I have to say, you are speaking my love language when it comes to systems design. (Laughs)

Dan: Good! Good! Good!

Amy: I know you say it’s a business book, but honestly, it’s transferable to every area of life and you make this point yourself by surfacing examples from all over, like from hospital receiving rooms to couples therapy, to your own parenting methods. Can you walk me through some of the examples from the book that illustrate the ideas you’re talking about? 

Dan: I’ll actually take you back to the original example that got me on this trail, which was a trip to Chick-fil-A of all things. I never thought I would come home from Chick-fil-A with a book idea. But I was there during the pandemic era when all drive-thru lines were just heinously long and this one in particular was just probably the worst line I’d ever seen, I mean 50 cars minimum. And so I just felt my soul shrinking inside me because I hate long lines and I hate waiting. But this line flipped my emotions in about 30 seconds because it just kinda crept along. Like I rarely had to tap the brakes in this line and I got so interested in what they were doing that made this line so different from the other drive-thru lines that we’ve all encountered. I later found out, because I was determined to unpack this mystery of what made them so effective, I talked to the owner/operator, a guy named Tony Fernandez and learned that they could process over 400 cars in an hour, which is about a car every nine seconds…

Amy: Holy… geez!

Dan: It was just fascinating to treat this like a kind of performance. And what I learned from Tony was that he is very attentive to the bottlenecks in the process, so he’s thinking about, okay, we have all these different things that we have to do in order to ultimately give people the nuggets and fries that they want, first we have to take their order and then we have to take their payment and then we have to cook the food and then we have to do what they call ‘meal assembly,’ which is where you box and bag up the food and then you deliver it to the person. And these are all discreet steps that are performed by different people, partially or entirely in parallel and so he was almost scientific about it. Going around with a stopwatch and figuring out, okay, it takes us this long to do this, what if we put more people here because that’s what’s holding us back. And that was how over time he kinda steadily accelerated the process. To circle around to your question, when I first started chasing this book idea, I thought the book was going to be about how do you make things run better. And so I had Chick-fil-A as this almost platonic ideal of making things run better. Because there’s a million drive-thru’s in the world, but nobody does them as well as Chick-fil-A, why? What’s their secret sauce. 

And so I probably spent six months doing that, chasing that in a variety of different forms. And then later I realized that what I was really interested in was not… I mean who wants to read a book about the student who raises their GPA from a 3.9 to a 4.0? (Laughter) You know what I mean? Or Like Michael Phelps shaving a millionth of a second off of his time. I was more interested in what if you’re somebody like Arby’s that is looking at Chick-fil-A with sad envious eyes and you’re sort of like, I wish I could be better when I grow up. And that feeling in a variety of forms and organizations in our lives, in our relationships, like how do you get unstuck and vault forward? And when I got to that point, that’s when the topic really opened up for me and I got super excited. 

Amy: Well, and so it’s the unsticking yourself part, it’s really interesting, because one of the topics you bring up in the book is the importance of progress, all humans really value the idea of progress and when you thwart that progress or somehow you’re prevented from making meaningful progress, it really impacts your quality of experience. And so this concept of getting unstuck is universal, but the practical ways that you present doing it, it’s just so beautiful to me because it’s so well illustrated verbally, I listened to the audio book, it’s so well illustrated verbally that I can almost see the parts moving. 

Dan: Oh, thanks!

Amy: Yeah! And I can also see how this concept of finding the leverage points, a lot of the opportunities you present for doing that are ways for anyone to get a perspective shift. I had a revelatory experience when you brought up the Miracle Question, that is so beautiful. Can you tell us about some of these ways that you look for leverage points and maybe even dive into the Miracle Question to explain to our listeners? 

Dan: Yeah, totally. Let me do just one bit of housekeeping first. This idea of leverage points is like an absolute foundational point to the book, so you’re going to hear us use this phrase a million times and what I’m getting at is any time we’re trying to change something in our work or in our lives, there’s going to be a hundred different variables that’s going to seem really complex at any given moment in time, we can’t change everything. We probably can’t change most things, but we can pick something, we can do something and that puts a lot of premium on what something we pick. And what we’re looking for are areas where a little bit of effort can go a long way, and that’s the inspiration for leverage points. Those are the places where we’re looking, and so fully half the book is about okay, well all of us would like to find places where a little bit goes a long way, how do you do that? And so half the book is about where do you go looking for these leverage points? And one sub-theme of finding leverage points is about this Miracle Question which is a term that comes from solutions focused therapy, a branch of therapy that’s obsessed with how to do more of what’s working. So the question goes like this. Imagine you come into therapy, maybe it’s couples therapy, your marriage is struggling. And the therapist poses the following question: You both go to sleep tonight and as you’re sleeping a miracle happens and the problem that you’ve come to therapy to address is resolved during the night because of the miracle. The second you open your eyes and you wake up you have no idea the miracle has happened. What are the first things that you observe that start to clue you in that it’s happened?

You might say, “My wife made coffee and poured a cup for me and we had a second to chat,” and maybe that’s unusual because you’ve been avoiding each other in the morning. The wife says, “My husband would smile at me when I came through the door after work and he’d ask me how my day went.” And what’s so beautiful to me about this question is again, back to the idea of change is hard and you think about all the variables and all the dissatisfactions and all the drama that has gone into the life of a couple that would be coming to therapy, it’s really hard to see your way forward in that, it’s like being in a sandstorm or something. And then the Miracle Question is forcing you to articulate these little, visible, behavioral things, like making a pot of coffee or smiling when someone comes through the door. And all of a sudden you kind of realize, hey, what if we just did those things and sort of acted our way into the miracle? I can make a pot of coffee; I can smile when my spouse comes through the door. And so those early small things can become your leverage points for moving forward. 

Amy: What’s so revelatory about that too is it understands the daunting level of how you’re looking at the problem. But it invites you to reverse engineer it from these tiny actions that you’re already familiar with because they’re probably part of your history. And so it becomes much more achievable in your own mind to just take that first step. It also breaks down the problem from this giant boulder to smaller pebbles that need to be moved. 

Dan: That’s it and I think one thing that I hope is kind of inspiring or motivating about the book is just the notion that for things to improve, you don’t have to fix everything. One of the other themes in finding leverage points that’s related to this Miracle Question is the idea of finding bright spots in your life or in your work, which is nothing more profound than paying careful attention to what’s already working, even if it’s in limited circumstances. I use this all the time, just as a personal testimonial, practically everything that I do now in my craft as a writer is a result of bright spots analysis. Years ago I struggled terribly with procrastination and people that are procrastinators know exactly what I’m talking about, people that aren’t will never understand it. (Laughs) For writers it’s kind of a career hazard. And so rather than go through this constant exhausting emotional cycle of you procrastinate around and then you feel guilty about it and then you feel shame, then you wake up the next day and you’re worried it’s going to happen and it does… I started thinking about okay, when are the times when I’m not procrastinating? That’s the bright spots, that’s the terminology. And what distinguishes them? It’s not enough to identify them, you’ve got to do the reverse engineering part and say okay, what are the conditions that seem to predispose me to succeed? 

And for me, probably different for different people, but for me it’s starting early in the morning, I’ve got to deactivate all devices, turn the phone off or keep it at home. This was in an era when I actually took the wireless card out of my laptop so that I was physically incapable of getting on the internet. (Laughs) And I would get up and I would go to a coffee shop, I wouldn’t have any calls, any meetings, I’d just have four hours of unbroken time, uninterrupted and in those conditions I had a pretty good hit rate. Not perfect, but pretty good. Once you have solved the mystery that opens the door for you to do more of that and that’s a habit of mine that you can use again and again and again, at work, with your relationships, with your exercise plans. Any time we’re tempted to sag our shoulders and be depressed about something that’s not happening, flip it around and say okay, even given that it’s not going like we want, when is it working and what can we learn from those successes?

Amy: That is also, I think, a really powerful mindset shift, when you feel stuck you tend to zero in on the roadblocks or on the problem and that itself can be demoralizing, just spending your mind there all day. But focusing on the bright spots and what’s working and amplifying that or magnifying that, I mean mathematically it makes perfect sense that you’d get a lot more progress doing more of what’s working. But it also seems like then once you’re on that path to progress, now you’ve getting that satisfaction from the making of the progress, that’s like compounding. 

Dan: Yeah, that’s right, that’s right. And I think psychologists have articulated really clearly that we have a bias for the negative and in study after study it’s like we remember criticisms more, if we keep a journal we’re going to write more about bad things that happen or conflicts or dramas, negative judgements about other people stick longer and on and on and on. And so that manifests as a kind of obsession with problems. If you’re given a mixed set of data as a manager, as a leader, maybe it’s employee engagement scores, and so like all data of that kind, it’s going to be a mixed story, there are probably a lot of employees that are pretty engaged and some of the employees that are super engaged and some other employees who are quite disengaged. And so naturally your radar goes immediately to the problem, the disengaged employees, and you start trying to understand, okay, what’s going on, what’s missing and how can we keep them here? We don’t want them to leave. But the notion of bright spots is that we should be applying that same obsessiveness to understanding what is working rather than what’s not. And it’s my contention that if long term what you really care about is making all the employees a little bit more engaged rather than just putting out a fire for the 12 people who are really disengaged, then you’re going to find more seeds of improvement in the most positive end of the curve, those super engaged employees, than you are by putting out fires on the other end. And that’s the entire conceit of bright spots. Is that while problem solving and bright spot investigation are exactly symmetrical, any time you have mixed data or mixed outcomes, you can do both, our instincts are going to make us lean 99% of the time towards the problem solving. But there’s just as much to learn, and I would argue more, from doing the opposite. 

Amy: And I do think that one of the things that can thwart the creative process, is getting in a downward spiral from focus on too much problem solving and too much negativity and feeling like you are the damage that needs to be controlled. 

Dan: Right. (Laughter)

Amy: As opposed to let me just pass out my process a little bit and really lean into the stuff that’s working. You talked about your own procrastination and giving yourself the conditions for success, like understanding when you are most productive and setting yourself up for that. And even in a four hour start to the day that also mirrors another topic in the book which is ‘starting with a burst.’ And this gets into the restacking of your resources, but giving yourself the conditions to actually make some momentum, to build some momentum and make that progress so that you can start to feel the satisfaction. Talk to me about ‘starting with a burst,’ because sometimes it is counterintuitive because you do have to maybe make some efficiency trade-offs.

Dan: I think the notion of ‘starting with a burst’ is to say… it’s almost like if you’ve ever tried to push open a stuck window, you have to just strain and push to get it to move even a micron. And then once you’ve kind of get past the seal and it starts to move, it’s a lot easier to keep it in motion. And the analogy there is to any kind of organizational change, especially where it can be quite hard to get anything at all in motion, and so as a response to that, what I’m suggesting in the book is if you can get some dense clustered time at the start of a change effort, in days or weeks or what have you, where what you’re doing is you’re trading asynchronous delays for synchronous collaboration. In a dream example what you would do at the start of some major organizational change is you would all, you being the team, you would all get in a room together and you would work in the same room for a week on whatever new thing you’re doing. And that may seem like a lot of time, but I think it’s actually the opposite. I think 40 hours in a week, synchronously, where you have that tight collaboration, and if I need your help I just turn around and I say, “Hey Amy, what do you think of this?” It short circuits a million rounds of slack and organization and 118 email chains and meetings and study sessions. It’s just like you’re doing stuff together. And I know there’s a million people listening, I can’t do that, I have to work from home and remote and we’re on Zoom, and I get that, and I think there are a lot of ways to degrade from that dream scenario of everybody in a room for a week. The trick being, the absolute prime directive here is to trade asynchronous for synchronous in the start so that you kind of move past some of those delays and you get to lift off velocity with the change. 

Amy: ‘Lift off velocity,’ that sounds dreamy. (Laughter)

Dan: And by the way, I found that true with writing as well, that there’s just a certain momentum that I find, maybe other people are different. If I can write 20 out of 25 days, it’s probably more productive than if I write 40 out of 200 days, you know what I mean? It’s actually fewer hours spent, but because of the natural momentum from session to session, it actually amounts to more and that’s what this is about. It’s not so much more raw work, it’s just can you get that giant boulder rolling? 

Amy: Right and then once it’s in motion, it picks up speed on its own, because what happens is you start to develop a new habit, a new habit with your cohort or with your colleagues, new shorthand, you start to anticipate each other in ways and all of that incrementally accumulates into a new, smooth operation, a fluid movement that feeds into the momentum. 

Dan: Yeah and I think this has been in the background of our conversation, is this is another big theme in the book, the centrality of progress, as what keeps us motivated to change. And I cite in the book this wonderful research from Theresa Amabile and Steven Kramer where they followed a group, a couple of hundred employees and they had them keep work journals of what they did and how they felt about their work. So they had thousands and thousands of these journal entries and what they’re interested in is what are the biggest motivators of employees? What keeps people engaged in their work, passionate about it? And they found that the number one motivator was the feeling of progress on meaningful work. It was striking to me when I came across this because I don’t think that’s on the radar of most managers? In fact they proved that in the book that they wrote called The Progress Principle. They went to managers and then they had them rank some of the greatest hits of employee motivation, things like recognition and financial incentives and challenge and other things… there’s no question those things are motivating, the question is how would they rank them? They put progress dead last. So it’s like this thing that is actually the number one hook that keeps people on the road, the feeling that you’re getting somewhere. 

Amy: Yeah. 

Dan: It’s not really part of their day-to-day MO. And again, I think we can kind of see this same phenomenon in our personal lives. Anybody who has ever been on a diet, seeing the number go down on the scale is what keeps you motivated, right? 

Amy: Yes!

Dan: That is the hook. And as long as you see ounces being shed off, it feels pretty good to be on the diet. It’s just when the numbers start to plateau that your will is really tested. 

Amy: Why do you think there’s that disconnect? I mean all the managers in the world were workers at some point, when did they lose sight of that? 

Dan: My brother did some research years ago, my brother Chip who I wrote four books with and was a professor at Stanford Business School. He wrote loosely on the topic of Maslow’s Hierarchy. And it was sort of like he would ask people questions like, okay, for you personally, would you rather take the new job because it’s really challenging work and people think you’ll be great at it. Or would you rather take the new job because it offers a financial incentive or because it offers you more job security? And most people are like, I’m going to do it because it’s a challenge and people think I’m going to be great at it, I think it’s going to be a really good opportunity for me. And then he sort of turned it around and said, okay, what do you think would be most motivating for other people? Would it be the sense of challenge and opportunity or would it be the financial incentives or the job security? And people put the challenge opportunity thing last. (Laughs) For ourselves, we’re like peaking out on Maslow’s Hierarchy and other people are more motivated by money and security. And I think there’s some of that at stake that maybe implicitly, subconsciously, some managers are thinking, oh, you know, people are motivated by raises and plaques and rewards, when they themselves probably would recognize more of the progress principle. 

Amy: Hmm, that’s really interesting. I think that’s actually a really nice segue into your podcast, What It’s Like To Be. Because… well, I’ll get into why I say ‘because,’ but first in a few words, how would you describe it to someone you just met on an airplane or at a rodeo or in a hot air balloon? 

Dan: (Laughs) I would say in every episode of the show I interview somebody from a different profession. A couple of the recent ones I’ve been… a homicide detective, a barman, a brain surgeon, one is coming out soon, a veterinarian, and we just ask them a bunch of nosy questions about what it’s like to walk in their shoes? What are the highs of the work and what are the stresses and how has it changed their life? And for me it’s just kind of a beautiful excuse to be curious about what other people do. 

Amy: Well, I love it, it’s my favourite kind of show because it humanizes the systems of the world and it offers this really vivid window into the mechanics, the perils and the motivations behind some of the aspects of daily life that otherwise we might not look too deeply into. One story at a time, it’s like an animated, fascinating, exploded view of all the people who are keeping the modern world humming day-in and day-out. And I said this was a segue because as you’re talking about all of these different professions, there’s some clear through lines through all of them, which is that this is their contribution to the world. This is how they spend their days; this is what they have to offer humanity. And so they put a lot of care and heart and creativity and agency into what they’re doing and in that way it’s so clear to me that the barman is not motivated by a raise… (Laughter)

Dan: Yeah, you’re not in that profession for the money. I think that’s very well said, I think especially in the top 10% world, people that have been to college and graduate school, we have this very entrenched, clear kind of status hierarchy of jobs and I think all you have to do is listen to five or 10 people who are outside that hierarchy to realize it ain’t that simple. It’s not all about the intellectual status or the money, most people really like their jobs. There’s a huge survey that found the majority of people, I mean over 50% rate themselves extremely satisfied with their job. 

Amy: Wow!

Dan: Or very satisfied, I should say. 

Amy: That’s heartening. 

Dan: Extremely or very. Only 12% of people said they’re not too satisfied or not at all satisfied. And if you listen to the way people talk about their work… one funny thing that struck me was I’ve had multiple people just unsolicited tell me in interviews that they have the best job in the world. And the people that told me that included a tennis coach, a welder, a professional Santa Claus and an ocean lifeguard. None of those being high dollar, high status positions, right? But they found meaning and purpose in the work. And so for me it’s just been like this opportunity kind of peak through the window and see what is it about people that predisposes them to like certain jobs and what is it that the jobs bring out of people in turn. 

Amy: I listened to handful of them now and whether I think I’m going to be interested in it to start doesn’t matter because I’m always pulled in right away once I start hearing the mechanics of their day-to-day and what matters to them and how they navigate these sometimes mundane moments. I think the barman gave this really great example of how he handles somebody who needs to be cut-off and sent home. And understanding the performance of that and the diplomacy of that was just so nuanced and it primes the mind and it primes you to start looking at the world for more of these moments of beautiful craft that people are bringing to their everyday jobs. 

Dan: Amen. Gosh, there have been just so many moments like that where I came to appreciate something I wouldn’t have even realized existed. Like last fall I talked to a Christmas tree farmer who had been working this farm for literally decades. We’re talking about thousands and thousands and thousands of trees that he hand sculpts every one, he shears them with this long 18 inch blade…

Amy: Oh my gosh! 

Dan: Think about the work and the obsessiveness. I mean he sculpts them by hand, every single one that is sold and the amazing thing was, I was asking him about injuries because it just seems intuitive that slinging a long sharp blade around would inevitably result in some kind of injury. And he had like this freakish 50 year streak where he had gone without an injury. And I think he was just starting to get to the age where he wasn’t quite as just relentlessly effective and he’d had his first major wound. And one of the sub-plots of the interview was, he had just done his last planting because it takes like six/seven years for the trees to fully grow into themselves and he was worried that at this point the clock is ticking for him and the ones he just planted he’ll be harvesting when he’s in his mid-70s and you just can’t sling long blades your whole life. 

Amy: Got to train the next generation. 

Dan: Exactly. And so that’s what I love about doing this is I think I have an unnatural curiosity in the mechanics of what people do. I’m interested in the shearing knife, and I talked to a hair stylist about their fancy Japanese scissors and I want to know how the meteorologist gets ready for her spot on TV. So the details matter disproportionately to me because of whatever weird quirks I have. But, it’s like in every one of these it just goes in some universal direction that I think brings other people in. What it is that you really savor about your work or the strain of feeling close to retirement and in some ways that’s great and in some ways it’s losing part of your identity and these universal themes that I think we can all relate to. 

Amy: Absolutely and I for one totally appreciate your obsession with the tools and the mechanics because that hooks me in too. Hearing the brain surgeon talk about the microscope that he operates with his mouth…

Dan: With his mouth. That was crazy. This guy, his name is Dr Q, he is just a dynamo. So he’s using in a brain surgery, he’s using both hands, in ways you can probably imagine, using tiny tools, but he’s also using this super-powered microscope that he adjusts with his mouth and then he’s got both of his feet doing different things, I think with the seat and the table and kind of being able to shift himself into position. And I was asking him, I mean think about just the sheer sensory absorption that would result from using all of those tools at once and knowing if you make one tiny mistake you could kill someone right in front of you. Not an exaggeration, right? 

Amy: Right.

Dan: You’re operating on the brain. 

Amy: Yeah!

Dan: I was asking, does regular life just feel like a bummer after that? (Laughs) It must just seem so dry and boring after that absorption. But anyway, those are the kinds of moments that I really live for on the show. 

Amy: Well, I appreciate it too because it makes it so tangible. But also I just had a colleague who had a brain tumor removed, so hearing that story gave me all the colorful detail of what she’s been through and how that brain surgeon needed to carefully separate the tumor from her actual brain tissue that’s helping her speak and function as a human. 

Dan: This was the craziest thing to me, I have    to share this real quick. The brain surgeon is presenting challenges; you want to cut out the tumor but the tumor is not like bright orange… the tumor looks like brain. And so how do you figure out what to cut and what not to cut, given that the stakes are very, very high if you cut the wrong part. And it ends up being this kind of absurdly manual process where they take this little electrical probe and they kind of zap different parts of your brain and then the question is, how do they know if they’ve zapped a part that you need? And the answer is, you’re awake during the surgery. 

Amy: Yes!

Dan: And they just start giving you little questions, like they’ll zap a part of your brain and then they’ll see if you can formulate a sentence or can you tell me what the cow says, what is 6+6, can you count up from one? And if you fail on your ability to do one of these rudimentary tasks, then they know, don’t cut that. (Laughs) And the craziest thing to me was they actually designed different tests for different people. Like Dr Q was talking about, this person that was a financial advisor, an accountant or something and he had told Dr Q, my mathematical and analytical abilities are precious to me. And so they had designed these custom math problems to be given during the exam to make sure they didn’t unwittingly undermine this guys living. And man, I just found that fascinating. 

Amy: It’s so fascinating and also, first of all, Dr Q has got both feet, both hands, his mouth and he’s talking to the patient the whole time, so that’s all the faculties. But in addition it speaks to the level of customization and bespoke care that needs to go into… and that relationship, and you could hear, you could hear how important his work is to him, which also serves as a listener, serves to reaffirm your faith in humanity, serves to reaffirm your faith in even the medical community a bit. His particular back story serves to reaffirm your faith in the American dream and the pathways that are possible and I agree, there’s so many universal heartening themes that come up. And your curiosity and fascination and appreciation for these people is palpable, which also gives the show its gravitas, but also some levity and it really travels. It’s an easy and fun listen, even when we’re talking about hard subjects. But I’m wondering underneath it all… this sounds like a dream job to me, why are you so compelled to have these conversations and what is your ultimate goal with putting this show out into the world? 

Dan: I think it started in a very simple and unprofound place which was, I just felt like I kept having these moments where I was unnaturally curious about what other people do. 

Amy: You keep saying ‘unnaturally,’ but is it really unnatural? (Laughter)

Dan: Maybe not, I hope not, I hope there’s a lot of other people like me, I hope they’ll listen to the show. I just felt a little weird, I’d have a plumber come over to deal with some problem and then I would just find myself wondering what is the grossest thing they’ve ever had to deal with? I am so ignorant of these issues; I don’t even understand how a toilet works and does that offend them or am I like a dream customer because that’s… they need dummies like me to make a living? And I’m just kind of too chicken in the normal world to ask all these questions, but I thought man, wouldn’t it be great if I had a forum or I had an excuse to just go crazy? The other thing that I remember is, it was one Thanksgiving dinner and I was sitting around the table with all these relatives and obviously I know a ton about everybody at the table, including their employer and what they do for a living. But I found that that knowledge was so shallow. It’s like I could say i know you’re a such and such, but if I had to formulate what did they actually do in a given day, it was just like a blank slate, like nothing. These are people that I know what kind of breakfast cereal they like and what teams they root for and their childhood traumas and I couldn’t even articulate what they do in a day? It just seemed weird.  And so that was the original hook for me. And then I think what I kind of grew into, as I started working on it, is I just realized, at least for me, it was bigger than that. 

That maybe that was the spark that got me into it, but what I appreciated was just the extra empathy it gave me for other people and finding a dimension to engage with people that’s not tribal, everything is so polarized now. And I think what you’ll find is… I mean there’s a bunch of people I’ve interviewed that probably voted differently than me in the last presidential election and it kind of doesn’t matter. There’s something for us to talk about that’s outside that, that’s universal. And also like we’ve talked about, these kind of emotional themes of even when what they’re doing is so different than what I do, it’s like we have these things in common, that we’re trying to find ways to get more meaning out of our work and we’re thinking about what does it mean to age and do the work and the pride we take in craft and so forth. It just seems, for me at least, I can’t speak for the listeners, but for me it’s kind of taken on more meaning as its evolved. 

Amy: I can see that as a host of a podcast, I can see how it would take on more meaning for you. I can also see as a listener of that show how there’s something really intimate about hearing a single person’s personal story. But when you do that over and over again and these stories are different but yet you find the universal patterns in them, it does take on greater meaning. And one of the things that stuck out to me, I went back and listened to the, I think it was the first episode with the stadium beer vendor, that that particular job, the satisfaction was all… I mean a little bit in the mechanics of it, but all in the relationships and those relationships were 30 years sometimes with the same customers and that particular vendor really valued his life and his job and his work because of those relationships. And yet we mostly don’t think of relationship capital as part of the perks of a job.

Dan: That interview in particular was, I think, what changed my mental model of what this show could be. Because I have to admit, my producer found this gentleman, Howard Hart, who had been a lifetime stadium beer vendor, primarily in the Baltimore baseball stadium, if memory serves, he was there for the entirety of Cal Ripkins’ famous streak. And so I thought oh, this is going to be kind of quirky and fun and I’ll get to learn what are the microeconomics of beer sales and schlepping the giant tub around the stadium and dealing with drunks. And instead it was just this beautiful reflection on meaning and purpose and work. And like you said, one thing that I had no idea would come up is he worked the same stands for all those years. And so at one point I asked him, “How many people do you think, if you saw them on the street, you would recognize and know their names?” And he said, “Easily, over a hundred.” Over a hundred people! He was on Christmas cards with some of these people, some of them he saw their kids grow up. 

Some of them he may have made them mad because he cut them off, because he didn’t like to serve people that were intoxicated. And then they would go into AA and come back and thank him later, it just blows your mind. Like this is so much deeper and richer than I originally gave it credit for. And he had this beautiful moment where he talked about in his family they would sometimes give him grief, like you wasted your life and you did this thing and you could have been something better or fancier. And he said, no, I did not waste my life, I did something that had meaning for the people I served and I brought something good to the stadium and yeah, I couldn’t take fancy European vacations or have a brand new car, but I did something that mattered. And I find myself literally shedding tears as I’m talking to this guy and I am like, I am balling right now as I talk to a stadium beer vendor and that was when I knew, I’m hooked. I have to keep doing this. 

Amy: Yes! Well good for you, and I’m thinking back on my life and I studied furniture design and I’m a designer by trade, but I spent 15-20 years hosting television shows. 

Dan: Oh wow, really? Cool, what kind of shows?

Amy: Mostly low budget cable TV, a lot in the home improvement/design makeover space, but also some international high design and architecture, some lifestyle stuff and food and culture. And the TV industry is its own weird-assed parallel reality (laughter) that is bizarre in so many ways. But it’s also punctuated by many intense, but very short term relationships. And you don’t get to choose who you work with a lot of times. Like you’re cast in a show and then you’re put with a crew and whoever is your co-host is somebody that has been chosen by somebody else. 

Dan: Oh really? Oh wow. 

Amy: Yeah, so there’s this motley crew of people, frequently away from home, travelling, staying in hotels, working your ass off on these crazy deadlines. For me it was very physical because I’m usually building something, doing construction or renovation. Work hard, play hard, you have your only downtime with these other displaced individuals who are in this remote town, living in a hotel. And then it all evaporates. Either the show doesn’t get renewed or it goes on hiatus and then it comes back for a new season with all new people. And it took me a lot of years to look back on that and feel the deficit of no real long term relationships in my professional world. 

Dan: Did you change what you were doing because of that insight? 

Amy: I changed what I was doing for a number of reasons, but I can tell you that hosting this podcast is very much a product of really wanting to connect more deeply with people and wanting to have conversations that demonstrated a kind of food for the connective tissues, between the disparate creative areas, you know? To sort of foster social connection…

Dan: I feel like our podcasts are pretty similar, what’s in the spotlight of our obsessive curiosity is slightly different. 

Amy: Yeah, lots of overlap, I was totally feeling kindred as I was listening to your show. I agree with you and I think one of the things that I really appreciated about your show too is I can see how people are deploying their creative agency in all of these different industries or trades that we wouldn’t necessarily consider creative. Like the barman for instance, he’s got a level of performance and ‘crack,’ as he calls it, but there’s like a real showmanship to that.

Dan: Yeah, on that front, you should hear the welder talk, I mean he is… some of the people I talk to, I might as well just turn the recording on and just sit and listen because they have so much charisma…

Amy: Oh wow!

Dan: I just let them go. And he is like the best sales person for welding you’ll ever hear. But he talks about just what it feels like to just nail the perfect weld, which is no trivial feat, there’s just a million variables and it’s very physical and of course there’s blazing heat involved. But he used the phrase, ‘rocking the cup,’ and I didn’t even know what that means, but I just loved it, it was just so evocative, ‘rocking the cup,’ and it’s like man, I did that. It’s so good. 

Amy: What are some of the professions or occupations you hope to interview in the future? 

Dan: Oh, there’s a million of them. If you’re listening right now… let me just reel off some we’ve been trying to get an air traffic controller since the very beginning, it turns out it’s hard to find the right person there. I’ve had this kind of ridiculous juvenile idea for a series about under-jobs, just jobs that start with the word ‘under,’ like undertaker, underwriter, undersea diver, or under sea cable installer or something, underwear model, understudy on Broadway. So if you know any of those ‘under’ professions, let me know. 

Amy: Okay, I will hook you up. I would love for you to talk to a nose…

Dan: Say what? 

Amy: A nose, like a perfumer. 

Dan: Oh, is that what they’re called? 

Amy: Yeah. 

Dan: Oh man, I would love to have an episode called ‘A Nose.’

Amy: Zeroing in on you a little bit, I mean you describe yourself as an author and the host of a podcast, but those are your outputs. In terms of your process, you do a lot of research, you do a lot of synthesis, gleaning of insights, distillation, wordsmithery, designing of communications, books and podcasts in order to disseminate the message. If you had to characterize the work that you do, not the output, but the process, you seem a little bit more like an ethnographer, how would you describe it? 

Dan: I think it’s less sexy than that. I think it’s just a lot of reading, a lot of research, a lot of reporting and then a lot of thinking. So it’s very solitary, although I’ve figured out ways over time of making it more social in a productive way. 

Amy: Ooh, tell me about that. 

Dan: Well…

Amy: As I speak to you from my solitary podcast studio. (Laughs)

Dan: For the last two book projects I’ve worked on, Reset, which we talked about and the one before that which was called Upstream: How to Solve Problems Before They Happen. I played around with this format where I’ll hire like two or three or four part time researchers, they may only be spending 10 hours a week, and most of them have other things that they’re doing and this is kind of moonlighting for them, and we’ll just get into this rhythm and I’ve come to really respect this rhythm. I kind of stumbled and experimented into it, but it really seems to work, where every week we’ll talk one-on-one, the researchers and I, for maybe an hour. And then we have a team call every Friday to just make sure everybody still sees the whole, because it’s easy to get lost, like in whatever wormhole you’re chasing individually. We talked about the power of progress earlier, and I didn’t know that’s what I was doing when I was messing around with this, but now I clearly recognize these weekly check-ins are really an engine of progress. And we get to see how stories unfold and you chase down new leads and many of them don’t work out, but some of them do and just enough do to kind of keep you hooked. And for me personally, it just makes it more fun because I’ve got some smart people to bounce ideas off and I’m getting their perspectives. Like with Reset, not by design but just by coincidence we had somebody who was like 26 years old and somebody who was 36 and somebody who was 50 and somebody was 62…

Amy: Oh, that’s awesome!

Dan: We had this kind of cross-generational team. 

Amy: Yeah!

Dan: Anyway, that’s the rhythm that helps bring alive some of the solitary work. 

Amy: It sounds like it also kind of helps you to keep recalibrating.

Dan: That’s actually a really good word for what it does, and even beyond that, Reset was my sixth book and I tried something totally different in terms of process, which is I was inspired by ‘agile,’ which is best known in the software world. Basically it’s just the idea of doing something iteratively. So don’t sit in your attic and write a book for three years and then unveil it, just spend five months and get a short draft and get some feedback and then do another draft and get some more feedback and do another draft. And that’s what I did. I had literally five full rounds of feedback, which was just… in past books I had one round of feedback and at the most two. This time I had five full rounds, the version I turned into my publisher was version six. And it kind of just changed everything in terms of the way I worked, it made me less precious about trying to get the perfect idea or the thought on the page and instead it was just like, let me get enough on paper that people can kind of recognize what I’m going for and telling me whether it works for them or not. 

Amy: Yeah!

Dan: Because I’m not writing literature, right? My books are supposed to help people with something. And people will tell you if you’re being helpful or not, just ask them. (Laughs) And so there’s no incentive for me to just go off into the wilderness and come back with the perfect thing, I just need to check in. And so it made me feel like sort of a dummy for not doing this before. 

Amy: Well, I mean don’t judge your former self, look at the bright spot with your current self. 

Dan: Hey, I like what you did there! (Laughter) You boomeranged that right back to me, that’s exactly it, I have a bright spot now. 

Amy: Yeah, and you did your own little reset there, but you also, in terms of building this team and this rhythm, you now have camaraderie and also in iterating five times in this book, you never really had a middle, you just… you had all these bursts of progress. 

Dan: I hadn’t thought about the burst aspect, but you’re totally right. I think what deadlines always do is compel a burst towards the end. And so like multiplying those intermediate finish lines probably harnessed a whole different energy than… it’s the same thing with software, right? It used to be that you spent four years creating the new operating system and then you launch it and then you start another four year project. And these days it’s all super-duper iterative, in some cases every day they’re doing new releases of apps and so forth. So it wasn’t 100% positive, but it was enough positive that I think I would want to keep it going forward. 

Amy: I’m putting your books together with… which it does sound kind of solitary, podcasting is maybe a small team, but nice conversations. I guess what I’m getting at is the relationships that made the beer vendor so satisfied, where do those come from in your work? 

Dan: That’s a good question. Yeah, I think for me, certainly with my brother, my brother and I wrote four books together over 10 years and so that was huge. And we both really enjoyed having something big and meaty to work on and it gave us an excuse to talk a lot more than we would have otherwise. So that was a big one for me. And of course there are people that even if I’m not working with them every day, they’re just critical collaborators, like my editor and my publisher, Ben Lanin and my agent and various partners. And some of these researchers have been with me, like Evan who I was just talking to today, has been working with me since, gosh, 2017, there’s a lot of years on the clock at this point. 

Amy: Yeah. When you look at your career as a whole, what is meaningful for you? 

Dan: I think to me I have always… the tangibility of working on a book project, I’m not an influencer, I’m not someone who is posting on social media…like I’m kind of a, I like the long slow burn. I like to just go into my cave for 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 years and come out with something that I’m proud of. And I like the tangibility of it, like I’m looking at one of the books on a shelf right now and I realize people are motivated about 100 different things, that’s why I do my podcast, but for me it feels good to like work on something hard, for a long time but not decades, and then have something tangible that I can look back on. Like that feels really satisfying to me.

Amy: And I can imagine having that body of work continue to do the work for you is also kind of satisfying. It’s not just something that lives in static, it’s something that people can continue to discover and benefit from. 

Dan: Yeah, I’m kind of amazed, like I still… my first book with Chip was called Made to Stick, it was released in 2007 and I still hear from people all the time who just discovered it and are reading it and want to share something that they did differently, that really makes a huge difference, is just hearing from people who have benefitted in some way from the work. 

Amy: That’s really satisfying One last question is a quick one, in a parallel universe who is Dan Heath? What’s your profession? 

Dan: (Laughs) It’s funny, having the podcast gives me a glimpse of what other people do and 90% of the time I think to myself, I would never want to do that, but I appreciate what you do. And then every now and then I’d find myself just a little bit envious and I remember, I had two envy moments in a row, which was the forensic accountant and the mystery novelist. 

Amy: Ooh!

Dan: I kind of envied both of the things that they did, to the point where I was like, could I have a mystery series built around a forensic accountant? (Laughs) Anyway, that’s what I’m going to go with for my alternate reality. 

Amy: I love that! Okay, last question, what have you got for us to look forward to? What should we be looking out for on the horizon? 

Dan: Well, there are a lot of great episodes of the podcast to come. One of my soon to be favorites is the veterinarian episode, so keep an eye out for that. And then on the book front I don’t know. I’m in the wilderness part of the cycle where I’m trying to figure out what is the next topic, what’s something that’s big enough and interesting enough to keep me hooked for three/four years. And I’ve got a couple of irons in the fire, but nothing that’s kind of baked enough to really talk about yet. 

Amy: Ooh, all right, we’ll stay tuned. Dan, this has been delightful, this has been such a pleasure, thank you for sharing so much about your work and your mind and your thought processes with me. 

Dan: Thanks so much, this has been so much fun. 

Amy: Hey, thanks so much for listening. If you like Clever, there are a number of ways you can support us: Complete our listener survey at the link in the description. Share Clever with your friends, leave us a 5 star rating, or a kind review, hit the follow or subscribe button in your podcast app so that our new episodes will turn up in your feed. For a transcript of this episode and more about Dan, including links and images of his work, head to our website. Cleverpodcast. com. While you're there, check out our resources page for books, info, and special offers from our guests, partners, and sponsors, and sign up for our free sub stack newsletter, which includes news announcements and a bonus Q and a from our guests. If you like clever, we could really use your support. You can share Clevver with your friends, leave us a five star rating or a kind review, support our sponsors, and definitely hit the follow or subscribe button in your podcast app so that our new episodes will turn up in your feed. We love to hear from you on LinkedIn, Instagram, and X. You can find us Us at Clever Podcast, and you can find me at Amy Devers. Clever is hosted and produced by me, Amy Devers, with editing by Mark Zurowinski, production assistance from Ilana Nevins and Anoushka Stefan, and music by El Ten Eleven. Clever is a proud member of the Surround Podcast Network. Visit surroundpodcasts. com to discover more of the architecture and design industry's premier shows.

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Reset: How to Change What’s Not Working by Dan Heath.

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip and Dan Heath

Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen by Dan Heath.

What It’s Like To Be…With Dan Heath

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Clever is produced and hosted by Amy Devers with editing by Mark Zurawinski, production assistance from Ilana Nevins and Anouchka Stephan, and music by El Ten Eleven.

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