Lean Learning

Todd Henry [00:00:03]:
In the early 1990s, visitors to the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C. one of America's most iconic structures, were seeing something they weren't supposed to decay. The white marble was eroding faster than expected, stained by mysterious blotches that no one could quite explain. Cleaning crews were scrubbing constantly, but the more they cleaned, the more damage they caused. The maintenance budget was ballooning, and behind the scenes, frustration mounted. Something was wrong, but no one could agree on the cause. So the experts did what experts do. They brought in more experts.

Todd Henry [00:00:37]:
Engineers, entomologists, conservationists, each with theories, data and reports. And there was talk of chemical erosion, pollution, faulty materials. One theory even blamed the nearby tidal Basin. It was, in a word, overwhelming. Each possible explanation spawned a new investigation, a new recommendation, a new spreadsheet. But with all that information, the problem only got murkier. Then someone asked a deceptively simple. Why are we cleaning the monument so often? Well, they said, because of the bird droppings.

Todd Henry [00:01:13]:
And why are there so many birds? Well, because they eat the spiders. And why are there so many spiders? Because they eat the midges, the little insects that swarm the memorial at night. And why are there so many midges? A pause, then. Well, because of the lights. We turn them on in the evening, and it draws the insects from across the basin. That one question and a willingness to ask why five times cut through the noise. Instead of launching another task force or dumping money into cleaning and pest control, they tried something radical. They turned the lights on.

Todd Henry [00:01:47]:
Just a little bit later in the evening, the midges stopped swarming. The spiders left. The birds found other places to perch. And the Jefferson Memorial, well, it started to recover. No fancy treatments, no special chemicals. Just one small change based on a clearer understanding of the system. Sometimes we don't need more information. We need better focus.

Todd Henry [00:02:11]:
The lesson here isn't just about monument maintenance. It's about how we approach problems, especially as creative pros and as leaders. Because, let's be honest, in our work, we're often buried under a mound mountain of information, strategies, advice to do, lists. We chase the next piece of insight, hoping it'll unlock clarity, when really we're just adding more noise to an already loud room. And all the while, the real issue, the core challenge, goes untouched. Creative work demands clarity. Leadership requires focus. But those things don't come from doing more.

Todd Henry [00:02:44]:
They come from cutting through the clutter, from asking better questions, and from doing less, more, intentionally. On today's show, we're going to talk about exactly that. How to minimize unnecessary work, get to the heart of the information we actually need and create systems that help us do our best work, stay focused and lead with clarity each day. This is Daily Creative. Since 2005, we've served up weekly ideas for creative pros and leaders who want to be brave, focused and brilliant every day. My name is Todd Henry. Welcome to the show.

Pat Flynn [00:03:21]:
I am not where I thought I was to be. And when I was in my early 20s, my life was set to become an architect. That's what I wanted to be. And I got a great job coming out of school.

Todd Henry [00:03:30]:
That's Pat Flynn, entrepreneur and author of the new book called Lean learning.

Pat Flynn [00:03:35]:
And in 2008, I was let go like many other people during that time. And I was lost because I had done everything the way I was supposed to. I was a overachiever, I was an over learner, 4.2 GPA, all the things, and yet still it was all taken away from me and my path was no longer. And so I scrambled for a bit. I fell into a state of depression and was just trying to find myself. And I ended up finding the world of podcasting and more specifically the world of online business. And I eventually started a business to help architects pass an exam called the lead exam that blew up and I was generating more revenue doing that than I was as an architect. And I said, wow, this is incredible.

Pat Flynn [00:04:09]:
I have to share what I'm learning here. Started writing books in 2013, started speaking on stages, and lo and behold, I've been, I've become known as somebody who, at one point I was known as the crash test dummy of online business. Somebody who continued to try all kinds of different things, from niche websites to software companies. Sometimes it goes well, sometimes I fail. And either way, it's always a lesson for people. And what I've learned along the way is that the way that I approach the things that I'm trying to figure out has been pretty unique for a lot of people.

Todd Henry [00:04:38]:
That uniqueness is what compelled Pat to write his new book, which is called Lean Learning. It's about getting through all of the unnecessary and overwhelming information to the heart of what it is you're actually trying to do.

Pat Flynn [00:04:50]:
Yes, when we think about our consumption habits and with how much access we have to all different kinds of things. Back in the day, information was valuable because it didn't exist or it was hard to find or hard to get. In fact, you could pay for information like an Encyclopedia Britannica and you were immediately like, seen as, like, smarter because you had access to it where other people didn't. Now we all have access to the same information. We're literally at a buffet line of info at all times. And because we, our brains aren't evolved to learn how to consume all of this and organize it as it's coming in, we are now obese with information. We're moving slower. We feel not more inspired, but sometimes even less inspired or more deflated.

Pat Flynn [00:05:29]:
As a result of that, we're moving much more slowly. Since the concept of lean learning is a number of principles that allow you to know when to say no to certain things, to learn where to lean into certain things. One of the first principles is the difference between just in case learning, which is what we do, right? It's we almost treat information like food. If you're growing up in the caveman days or whatever, and you came across some food you like, you hoard it, because you might not come across that food again in the future. And so you take it all. And now, with access to all the information, we still want to take it all. And I remember running a survey once at a podcasting event, and I asked the audience, like, how many of you are subscribed to more than five podcasts? Everybody's hand went up. How many of you are subscribed to 10? Nobody's hands went down.

Pat Flynn [00:06:11]:
They were still up. 20, 30. Some people were subscribed to 50 different podcasts. And I love podcasts. They're great. But if you're always consuming, not only do you not have time, but you're going to be pulled and pushed into all kinds of different directions and pretty much stay stagnant or worse. And so the concept of lean learning, again, is not just in case information, but just in time information, Figuring out what your next step is. You don't want to aim aimlessly.

Pat Flynn [00:06:40]:
You don't want to be aimless in what it is you do. You still need direction. But what's that next step? You learn about that next step and then you implement getting to implementation. Getting to action is going to teach you more than trying to learn the entire process and then likely not even taking any action at all because you're overwhelmed. And this idea of trusting that information that you need on the next step is going to be there, and it will likely be better by the time you're ready for it. And that's one of the main principles behind lean learning.

Todd Henry [00:07:14]:
One of my favorite illustrations to use when I'm giving keynotes, especially when I'm talking about creativity or leadership, is that of Dee Hawk and his hierarchy of information. De Hawk said there's a lot of noise in our world, but noise is not very useful. Noise becomes useful when it achieves a cognitive pattern, when it's combined with other noise and forms data. So data can be useful, but data really isn't all that useful unless it's combined with other data. If I just said 10 to you, that's not very useful. But if I said it's 10 minutes until this episode is over, then you suddenly have information. That's what you get. When you combine data with other data, you get information.

Todd Henry [00:07:55]:
But information itself is not all that useful because it can't help you make decisions. Information only becomes useful when combined with other information in a way that forms knowled knowledge. When combined with other knowledge becomes understanding. And understanding is what allows you to be able to see around corners. It's what enables you to be able to intuit, to be able to make decisions. But understanding itself is not the ultimate end. What we're aiming for is wisdom. Wisdom is knowledge guided by some kind of ethical framework, some sort of decision making framework.

Todd Henry [00:08:33]:
So while knowledge can tell you which corners you might be able to go around, wisdom is what tells you which corners you should go around. Wisdom is closely aligned with creative intuition. And so if we want to be brilliant at what we do, we have to figure out how to get all of that noise that's in our world into some kind of meaningful system that allows us to choose which noise to pay attention to, to turn into data, to turn into information, to turn into knowledge, to turn into understand, and ultimately to turn into wisdom. But like Pat said, that's not easy to do.

Pat Flynn [00:09:10]:
It's all about the results. So when you start to consider, okay, what do you want to actually see from this information that you are gathering and what might be the easiest way to get there? That's another principle in the book. It's actually a question that Tim Ferriss once asked me that has now become a part of my DNA of how I approach things is just to ask myself, if this were easy, what would it look like? And that way you can often remove most of the things that you are thinking about getting involved with to just get to that action piece. A lot of business owners might call it a minimum viable product. So like in the sense of learning, the minimum viable result, or at least first tangible milestone is what you're looking towards. So just learning enough that you might need, and it depends on what it is that you're trying to learn about, but even giving yourself some deadlines around that, okay, I'm going to Spend a week to learn about just this little thing that I'm going to do next, and then I'm going to assess whether or not that worked or it didn't, or whether I should persist or I should pivot.

Todd Henry [00:10:03]:
Pat says one of the biggest mistakes that creative pros and leaders make is they try to go alone.

Pat Flynn [00:10:08]:
Getting some help around that is also really key. The understanding that we only know what we know, and we often can't read the label when we are inside the bottle. So that's why one of the first chapters in the book is about surrounding yourself with peers and colleagues and mentors and people who have gone down those paths before, because they can guide you through the experiences that they've had and mistakes that they've made as well. Thinking about the why behind it and what you're looking to get out of it, you can often reverse engineer, okay, I'm going to give myself a little bit of time. And then you just commit to it, right? You put it in your calendar to learn about and. Or take action on those things and you just commit to it. For example, recently I was learning how to do shorts, YouTube shorts, not so shorts or anything like that, reels, TikToks, that kind of short form format, which I had never really done before. So I said, okay, I'm going to find people who have done it well and see what they're teaching.

Pat Flynn [00:10:56]:
I'm going to find one format that I'm just going to work on and experiment with, and I'm going to do it for 60 days straight and that's it. And I am going to start on this date and I'm going to end on this date. And that gave me parameters. I only had so much time to learn about this until I finally had to take action. It's similar to something in the book that I call Voluntary Force Functions. Putting yourself in a situation where there is a date where you have to show up. And day 30 came around and I was only getting about 300 to 400 views per video, which isn't much in the grand scheme of things. And normally I would have given up.

Pat Flynn [00:11:27]:
I would have said, you know, I've given myself enough time and I probably, this isn't going to work. But I said, no, 60 days is what I'm going to give myself. That's what I've been told from others, that it might take that much time. So again, getting guidance from the outside. Day 35 comes around. Todd in one of those videos, hit 750,000 views. And ever since then I can pump out a video now on on that channel, which is a Pokemon related opening a pack every day channel and a million views per day on on every new video, pretty much guaranteed at this point. It's turned into two and a half billion views in 300 days.

Pat Flynn [00:12:01]:
It's turned into a separate five figure income and it's also led to incredible brand deals and opportunities like getting to get invited to a Detroit Lions game to open packs on their field and other collaborations that are in the works that I can't even share yet. All because I started and I gave myself enough time. And even if the Shorts experiment didn't work out, even if I didn't find success from it, it would have still been a win for me because I gave it a shot. I started, I gave it enough time to see and then assess and thankfully it worked out this time.

Todd Henry [00:12:34]:
I've used that phrase force function a lot with my clients. I'll tell people that frameworks are force functions, right? So when I come in, I teach a framework, I'm forcing you to have the conversation. I can't tell you the answers, but I'm forcing you to have the conversations that will lead to the answers. And I realized I've used force functions in my own life. Like when I write a book, like really committing to writing a book is a force function, because as much as maybe I have the research and the ideas and the framework for a book, there's so much that goes into a book. There's so much additional research and thinking that has to go into it. So like committing to the book channels your curiosity in a way that just letting your curiosity dry out on the plane won't do across a bunch of different projects. So what are some other examples? Like for people listening, what are some other examples of force functions that can help them direct their curiosity in a helpful way?

Pat Flynn [00:13:22]:
Yes, this is great. So let's say you are going to. You want to learn a language, right? Which is a very common thing that people want to learn. And oftentimes we go, okay, what's the best app? And we get the app and we have Duolingo and we are increasing our streak, but we're not really applying these things nor have any reason to make sure that we do the work other than we want to continue the streak. I think Tim Ferriss has practiced this. He's done something similar. He takes this kind of learning to the extreme, but it's still based on the same principles. It might be a conversation with somebody who speaks that language and only that language that you're going to have a month from now, you're going to be inclined to just not waste time and find out, okay, if I'm going to have a conversation, what are the words and phrases I need to know to at least kind of hold my ground for a little bit.

Pat Flynn [00:14:04]:
He used to have a show on Apple TV back in the day. One of the first episodes was he was trying to learn Tagalog, which is the Filipino language. And he created a force function by being inter. He knew he was going to be interviewed on the news, like, within a certain period of time. So he knew he was going to be on Filipino television and have to speak Tagalog. So he didn't try to learn all the words. He just tried to learn the right ones that would make sense for that situation. But he did the work and he helped himself also by putting him in a position where he couldn't help but learn it.

Pat Flynn [00:14:35]:
That's the other part of voluntary force functions. He lived with a Filipino family and just tried to absorb it in real time because he couldn't do anything unless he actually had to figure it out. A more recent example from my own personal life relates to fishing. In fact, I wanted to learn how to fish with a particular lure called a jig. And a jig is like a hook with a skirt on it. And it's an artificial lure. It's often very difficult to learn, but it can yield the biggest fish and the most fun bites. Really, we're talking largemouth bass.

Pat Flynn [00:15:04]:
And I used to tie on a jig, and I'd cast out a few casts, and I would just feel not confident with it at all. So much so that I'd often put it down after a few casts and go back to Old Reliable, the drop shot. And I'd catch fish using my old Reliable. And I'd be like, yeah, cp, I probably don't even need the jig. And even though I really want it to learn. So one day I knew that I had to force myself to learn it. So I went out on a boat and took nothing with me except jigs. Literally, the only thing I could fish if I wanted to fish was a jig.

Pat Flynn [00:15:33]:
And I wasn't going to go home, right, because a bad day of fishing is still better than a day working. But I cast out a number of casts, and in that same moment where I wanted to give up on that and move on to something else that was more confident with, I couldn't. So I just kept going. And eventually, around 2pm hours of fishing, practicing, trying different casts, trying different motions, et cetera. I finally got a bite. I didn't get a fish yet, but I got a bite. And my confidence levels shot through the roof. Even I didn't.

Pat Flynn [00:15:57]:
Even though I didn't get the result yet, I was seeing some progress, which was incredible. And by the time I finished the day, I ended up catching two and forever. Now I start with the jig because I am now very confident with it and it wouldn't have happened if I didn't force myself. So that's like a more environmental forcing of you having to do the thing that you want to do. And that. That worked really well for me there.

Todd Henry [00:16:18]:
Yeah, I love that. We had a researcher on a while back who talked about the importance of strategic failure, that failure is actually a very productive. We should not just tolerate failure, we should aim for failure. And it feels like that's the process you're describing because you're throwing yourself into something you're learning as you go, you're trying to figure it out as you go. And you know you're going to fail, but that's okay because each of those failures are going to propel you toward ultimate success. Is that descriptive of.

Pat Flynn [00:16:46]:
That's spot on. There's a lot of mental barriers we have to go through to be able to achieve that, like imposter syndrome or procrastination or the fear of failure. All those kinds of things are weighing in our decision to continue on the thing that's. That begins to be difficult. But absolutely, it's the mistakes that you make that actually become the guide rails for you. Right. Oftentimes we think the mistakes are the things that are going to derail us, but that they actually become the guidelines the guide rails through, that you can move back this way or move back that way, or begin to understand things more from the doing. I, no offense to Berkeley, the school I went to to graduate with an architecture degree.

Pat Flynn [00:17:23]:
But I learned more in my first week at like, in an actual architecture firm and how to apply those things than I did in five years of school. Those baseline foundational items were still key. However, what I really needed to learn I picked up so quickly because I didn't have a choice. I had a deadline and I had a boss and I needed to get these things done. And just if we look back on our lives, oftentimes we think about the things we've achieved and learn how to do, and it's not from just reading a book. And all of a sudden we understand it again. Those things that we learn are important that we know what to expect. However, at some point you eventually have to take action and do and fail and fail fast, as they often say.

Pat Flynn [00:18:03]:
Or fail forward at least. And I think I once heard that fail is an acronym. First attempt in learning, as some people say, which I do agree with. A little cheesy, but I'm all about the cheesy because I like dad jokes, so I'll take it.

Todd Henry [00:18:14]:
Everything's better with cheese, right?

Pat Flynn [00:18:15]:
Yeah, for sure.

Todd Henry [00:18:22]:
Pat Flynn's new book is called Lean Learning. We only scratch the surface of our conversation in this episode, so if you want to hear the full interview, you can do so for free at dailycreativeplus.com just enter your info and we'll send you a private link where you can listen to all of our full interviews. Hey, thank you so much for listening. Again, if you'd like full interviews, all of our full interviews, bonus episodes, and much, much more, you can get them at dailycreativeplus.com just enter your name and email and we'll send you a private feed. My name is Todd Henry. If you want to know more about my keynotes, about my books, and all of my work, you can do so at ToddHenry. Until next time, may you be brave, focused and brilliant. We'll see you then.