Shop Different: Lessons From How Apple Reinvented Retail

Todd Henry [00:00:00]:

Hey everyone, welcome to Daily Creative.

Todd Henry [00:00:03]:

My name is Todd Henry.

Todd Henry [00:00:05]:

In 1964, 2 young radio astronomers in New Jersey had a problem they could not solve. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson worked for Bell Labs, and they had been handed something extraordinary: a 20-foot horn antenna originally built for satellite communication, one of the most sensitive instruments of its kind anywhere in the world. They wanted to use it to map faint radio signals from the Milky Way. But to do that, they needed the instrument to be perfectly quiet. It was not quiet. In fact, there was a hiss. There was a faint, steady hiss everywhere on their reception. So they went looking for the source.

Todd Henry [00:00:40]:

They aimed the antenna at New York City to rule out interference of the city, you know, just all the various radio signals coming out of the city. They ruled out the Milky Way itself and radio sources beyond it, and the lingering effects of nuclear testing was a possibility. They discovered that a pair of pigeons had nested in the throat of the antenna, so they evicted the birds and scrubbed the mess out by hand. They taped over the riveted seams of the horn, and a year went by and the hiss was still there. The same in every direction, day and night, through every season. Then, in early 1965, Penzias picked up the phone to call a fellow radio astronomer named Bernard Burke about something else entirely. The conversation wandered, as conversations often do, and Burke was asked how the work was going. Penzias mentioned the noise that he could not get rid of, and it turned out that Burke had recently heard about a group of physicists at Princeton led by Robert Dicke who were building an instrument to look for something very specific: the leftover heat from the birth of the universe.

Todd Henry [00:01:44]:

So Penzias called Dicke. Dicke listened, hung up the phone, turned to his team who were sitting in his office eating lunch, and he said, well? I think we've been scooped. The hiss that they were picking up was not a defect in the equipment. It was the cosmic microwave background, the afterglow of the Big Bang falling on a horn of aluminum in a field in New Jersey after almost 14 billion years of travel. Penzias and Wilson were awarded the Nobel Prize for it in 1978. They had detected the remnants of the Big Bang. So this discovery was not made by the team that was searching for the signal. It was made by the 2 men who had spent a year trying to eliminate it.

Todd Henry [00:02:29]:

Think about that. And what finally revealed it was not some deep analysis. It was a seemingly random phone call about something else entirely. So I want you to think about this for just a second. We spend an enormous amount of energy cleaning up our days. We try to eliminate the interruptions, tighten the calendar, and fill every remaining With a podcast or a playlist or a feed, we fill our world with noise. And underneath all of that scrubbing, the scrubbing that we try to eliminate, there's usually a faint signal that will not go away. The pull that you feel into a certain kind of room, the question that you keep circling back to, the work that you would do, even if nobody were assigning you anything at all.

Todd Henry [00:03:13]:

We often treat those faint signals as interference because they're inconvenient, because they're not on the schedule, because they get in the way of the other things that make us more comfortable. In The Accidental Creative, I made the argument that brilliance is not something that strikes you. It's the product of practices that protect your attention over time. Most people never even hear their best ideas. I often say, I said this in a presentation yesterday, many leaders never know what's on their mind because they never spend time alone with their thoughts. So most people never hear their best ideas, not because the best ideas aren't there, but because they never get quiet enough for something faint and persistent to register. Whatever is still there after you've eliminated everything else is not noise. It is the signal.

Todd Henry [00:03:58]:

That's some of what we're going to talk about today. My guest spent his career listening for that kind of signal and then built one of the most recognizable spaces in the world around what he heard. Ron Johnson is the retail leader who worked alongside Steve Jobs to create the Apple Store and the Genius Bar. He arrived at Apple in 2000, When the accepted wisdom was that the internet was about to put physical stores out of business. And by the time he left in 2011, he and his team had built the most respected and profitable retail store in the world. It's going to be an interesting journey for all of us to go on today as we listen to Ron talk about how he ended up at Apple, what he learned there, what it was like working alongside Steve Jobs, and the innovation that came along the way. Ron is generous, he's humble, and he keeps handing the credit to everybody else in the room. Pay attention to that as well.

Todd Henry [00:04:47]:

Listen, the signal for Ron Johnson was faint, And it was his, and he was the only one who could hear it. Nobody else is going to hear yours either. This is Daily Creative. Since 2005, we've served up weekly tips to help you be brave, focused, and brilliant every day. My name is Todd Henry. Welcome to the show.

Ron Johnson [00:05:09]:

At some point, you have to choose what you want to do for a career.

Todd Henry [00:05:12]:

That's Ron Johnson, legendary retail leader and author of the new book, Shop Different.

Ron Johnson [00:05:18]:

And there's the easy path or the common path where you're really relying on what I say are external voices. People say, you ought to go into banking, you ought to go into consulting. You're basically deferring a decision for a lot of people. And it's an easy choice because it's got status and money and you get to live in great cities and all that stuff. On the other hand, if you really look at a career over a lifetime, If you can figure out what you really want to become great at and start doing that as young as you can, you're going to be better off. And so, when I was at Harvard Business School, I'd gone to Stanford, Harvard Business School, I'd worked at Salomon Brothers on summer. I, like many, got many offers. And one I came down to was to go in the M&A group at Goldman Sachs, very lucrative.

Ron Johnson [00:06:09]:

But the other, the thing I wanted to do, I wanted to be a retailer. I just love being in stores and retail reminded me of playing sports. I played college soccer and every day you get a report card, you can change things, you work with people, you're on a team. And somehow that just had a pull for me. And so I turned down Goldman to go work in a store in the San Fernando Valley. And I started in the stockroom unloading trucks. And then I got to go on the floor and straighten merchandise and I got to be a cashier and But I literally started my retail career at the bottom, but I had confidence that if I put my head down and did good work, it was a young person's business, that it would all take care of itself. And looking back, that was the most valuable thing because when I led the Apple Stores, I'd walk the store, people just knew that I'd walked in their shoes.

Ron Johnson [00:07:03]:

They could tell. And there's value in that. And so that's kind of the story.

Todd Henry [00:07:08]:

But what was it about retail that drew you in?

Todd Henry [00:07:10]:

Again, with all the experience and all the education, everything you had, like what was it specifically about retail that made you think, okay, this is the path I want to choose?

Ron Johnson [00:07:17]:

I just felt energy being in stores. When I was working after Stanford, I went to work in a consulting firm in Minneapolis and Minneapolis gets really cold in the winter and they built these skyways that you walk between buildings and My path took me right through Dayton's Department Store, the second floor. And I'd walk through every day and I'd notice the merchandise was changing and there was something there. The store had a heartbeat where an office building didn't have a heartbeat to me. And as I watched that happen, then I'd go through as a customer and I'd go back through at lunch and I just felt an energy there that I didn't feel doing other things. And I said, I want to do this. And then at Harvard Business School, the CEOs would come talk and the retail cases were all very interesting to me. And I just kind of concluded, I want to do something I could love for a lifetime.

Ron Johnson [00:08:14]:

And I want to be really good at something if I can. I want to be really good at something. And all the people I admired had started at the bottom and worked their way up. And I said, why not just work your way up? And so I did that.

Todd Henry [00:08:26]:

I think so many people at that age, I know I have 3 children who are just emerging adults. So they're either in college or just out of college. And that's similar advice I'm giving them is just pay attention to how you react to what's around you. You're gonna, you're gonna try a lot of things, but some things that you try are just going to resonate more deeply.

Todd Henry [00:08:45]:

And that's what I hear in your story is that you were just, your antenna were up.

Ron Johnson [00:08:48]:

I totally agree. And that's your inner voice. And the sad thing is a lot of young people today, they're so Multitasking, connected to social media all the time. They never have time to truly listen to themselves. And there's an art to that, to really understand what your intuition is telling you. And I've worked really hard to tune that over time. And it's the biggest strength we bring to the world, especially in AI world. General knowledge is a period away.

Ron Johnson [00:09:18]:

The only thing I bring to a meeting To business, to creativity, is my own personal geography. That's where I grew up, what kind of family I had, where I went to school, my friends, my work experiences, and how I see the world or see a business problem through that lens. And the first conversation I have is not with you or someone else, it's with myself. We're constantly in conversation with ourselves. And we've just gotta make sure we don't crowd that out.

Todd Henry [00:09:52]:

So I wanna talk about that because you quote David Whyte in the book. Let me see if I can find this quote. I've got it here in my notes somewhere where you talk about the concept that reality is a conversation.

Ron Johnson [00:10:01]:

Yeah.

Todd Henry [00:10:01]:

And you talk about the nature of genius. I, boy, I really wanna get to your initial conversation with Steve Jobs, but before it, I just, this is a natural place to ask you about that, the concept that reality is a conversation. Why do you believe that David Whyte's comment is true, and how does that affect our understanding of what genius actually is?

Ron Johnson [00:10:19]:

What David really said is he thinks of reality as being conversational, and I look at commerce as being conversational. And what I think he means by that is everything we do, every decision we make, is built on a conversation. And the quality of conversations we have impacts how we think and how we see the world. We don't live on our own, you know what I mean? And so when I look at Steve Jobs, Steve had a handful of people that he was very close to, but he never looked at a PowerPoint. He never looked at a keynote. He delivered keynotes, obviously, but he wanted to have conversations with a really tight selected group of people. And in those conversations with Steve, nobody brought an agenda. They were unscripted.

Ron Johnson [00:11:21]:

They were generally dedicated to a single issue we were trying to solve. And we debate and debate until we got to a point where we all agreed that was the inevitable path forward. And Steve believed if you thought through any problem hard enough, you'd come to the inevitable decision that we'd all agree is the right way to go. Right? And so when you look at the iPhone, for example, Steve would meet regularly every week with, at that time, Jony was doing the industrial design and Phil Schiller was doing the marketing and on and on. But he had a small team that met together and the path forward revealed itself through conversations. And so I'm a believer that individuals get credit. I get credit for the Apple Stores because I was hired to do that, but I didn't do that myself. The Apple Store revealed itself through all the conversations I had with the people I brought together.

Ron Johnson [00:12:15]:

Same with the iPhone. Steve gets credit for inventing the iPhone, but the reality, it was the outcome of the team he worked with. And I'm not saying that with humility. I'm saying it's because it's true. But every idea they created was a result of a conversation. And so that's just the way the world works. I had to meet with you today. I had a conversation with myself.

Ron Johnson [00:12:37]:

What time do I have to get home? How do I prepare? Okay, that sounds good. And I know how to talk to myself and I know when I'll be ready. Right? That's a conversation. And before I talked to you, I've had a conversation with myself. Now I'm talking to you. I'm going to learn from you. People learn from our conversation. That's how I view the world.

Ron Johnson [00:12:56]:

And I think it's really important because in today's world, so many people just drown themselves with outer voices, external voices. When I walk, going for a walk, most people wearing headphones, they're listening to music, they're listening to a podcast. That's crowding out their ability to see the world, what they see, what they hear, what they smell, what they think.

Todd Henry [00:13:20]:

Yeah.

Ron Johnson [00:13:21]:

And I think it's a real dangerous thing. I really wish people found a way to slow down and listen to themselves more frequently.

Todd Henry [00:13:28]:

I completely agree with you about the nature of intuition. And the unfortunate dynamic I see in so many leaders is they don't even know what's on their mind because they're never alone with their thoughts. They never spend time alone with their own thoughts. So there are all kinds of things bubbling beneath the surface and they can't connect the dots, right? Interesting side story. I, For that very reason, I told my wife, tomorrow I have a day where I have no meetings. I said, I'm going on a long walk. And when I say a long walk, I live in Cincinnati, Ohio. I walk from our little home in the suburbs to downtown and back, which is about 22 miles round trip.

Todd Henry [00:14:00]:

But no AirPods, no anything. It's just time to think. And I have this little AI note-taker that I carry with me that I'm gonna just talk into every so often. But to your point, it really is a, a mind-clearing, presence-building experiment for me, right? It's so nice.

Ron Johnson [00:14:18]:

Really on my mind because in a perfect world, you'll find time to live your entire life that way if you can. Yeah, like I ran the Apple Stores, I'd drive my kids to school, I had a lot of responsibility. I was at zero inbox every morning. I used to go to— believe it's a great little story in the book, but I'd go to 7-Eleven in the morning because I get up really early and I always got inspired by a conversation. And there was a 75, 76-year-old guy who ran the store. And I'd get to go there just to say good morning to him and get on with my day. And we'd chat for a little bit. And if he had gotten slammed overnight and the merchandise hadn't made it, I would literally stock the shelves for him in the morning and put stuff up so he didn't have to do it.

Ron Johnson [00:15:05]:

It would take 10 or 15 minutes, but it was a great way to start the day. And, but being—

Todd Henry [00:15:11]:

Yeah.

Ron Johnson [00:15:12]:

When you can somehow stay ahead of your schedule, you, it allows you to be present with people, to be in the moment, to listen very carefully and attentively, because that's what conversations take. They take real intentional focus. And you can't do that when you're overwhelmed.

Todd Henry [00:15:30]:

Yeah. I often think about that season of Apple and the Apple Store and the product design that emerged from it and just the revolutionary nature of what happened over the course of about a decade when Apple had been given up for dead, basically.

Ron Johnson [00:15:43]:

Right.

Todd Henry [00:15:44]:

And not only came back from the dead, but literally became the most dominant force in the tech world. And so much of that was product design, marketing, so much of it was retail and the experience of the customer. I remember walking into an Apple Store for the first time, Ron, and I'd read an article about you and about this collaboration. I thought, I someday, I have got to meet this guy, Ron Johnson. And here we are, which is crazy, 20-something years later. But It's almost like the Beatles. You think, how does that collective of people get together at that point in time at just the right moment with the right opportunity where you had you and Steve Jobs and Jony Ive and many others who are part of that season? But it is very much like you wonder if any one of those elements wasn't there, what might have happened. But that experience, the Apple Store experience that you were able to translate something like it felt like walking into an Apple product, right? Like an experience.

Todd Henry [00:16:43]:

Talk to us about what those initial conversations were like. Well, how did that emerge?

Ron Johnson [00:16:48]:

Give all the credit for this, and I mean this sincerely, to Steve Jobs. Because Steve put, as you would say, if it's the Beatles, the band together. He handpicked everyone he got to work with. Some he brought from the outside, like Tim Cook, like myself. Others were at Apple, like Phil Schiller and Jony Ive, but they all— he put the team together, right? And Steve had an ability to pick people who were truly passionate about what their expertise was. They were subject matter experts, but they loved to push the envelope and to do things that had never been done before, right? And Steve hired people he could learn from. Not people that would do what he wanted to do, people that would really challenge him. And so Steve put the team together and he brought out the best in each of us because his standards were so high.

Ron Johnson [00:17:46]:

And no matter what the topic was, he had an intuition that was almost always right. And I think we all were inspired to work with Steve. And so it was really the thread through all this was Steve. And I think Steve had come back to Apple after a tough decade, having had to leave the company. He was gone for 12 years, I think it was. He came back much more mature, much wiser, and he knew his priorities. And Steve knew, for example, we could— Apple couldn't win on innovation unless it controlled the customer experience. So he wanted to build stores.

Ron Johnson [00:18:23]:

And he came and he took a huge risk hiring me. I wasn't near as senior as all the other people he interviewed. I had just done something great at Target with design.

Todd Henry [00:18:33]:

Yeah.

Ron Johnson [00:18:34]:

And I was young. I had never picked a real estate site. I'd never designed the store. I'd never run a store. I was a merchandising guy who was really good at developing merchandise and good branding. And it helped Target become Target along with other people. But Steve met me. We spent 2 hours together in our first conversation.

Ron Johnson [00:18:57]:

It flew by. It was like a conversation I didn't want to end. And he said, when can you come back? I said, 2 weeks. And he said, can you send me an email on what you'd do if I offered you this job? And I said, I would, but I don't have a computer, so I can't send you an email. Because this was 2000. Half of them didn't use computers for work.

Todd Henry [00:19:21]:

Really?

Ron Johnson [00:19:22]:

But we didn't have, we weren't an email culture. But Steve, that didn't bother Steve. He said, look, I'll send you a computer and if you need help setting it up, we'll set it up and then send me an email. And the next time I met him, he said, hey, by the way, I got your note. Didn't really matter. I'm going to offer you a job. I'd like you to join us. I don't think he did any reference checks.

Ron Johnson [00:19:43]:

He trusted his intuition. He said, I can work with this person. I can learn from this person. I trust my ability to pick people. And Steve put his whole team together like that. And then he let us, he operated the company functionally. I didn't, I'd go down to the design lab and Steve would take me, but he didn't have any matrices where Johnny worked with Ron on store design.

Todd Henry [00:20:06]:

No.

Ron Johnson [00:20:06]:

Johnny does product design. Ron does store design and store service. Phil does marketing for the company, but Steve glued it all together and had an ability to do that like nobody else.

Todd Henry [00:20:20]:

To play the orchestra, right?

Ron Johnson [00:20:21]:

To be the conductor. He was the absolute conductor of— and had a huge capacity for detail, a love for detail. The other thing he did, it's— I talk about in the book. I said to him, Steve, I said, I hope you understand this. I'm not saying this From an arrogant perspective, but we've got, as you like to think, 5% market share. If we're gonna go after the 95% we don't have, their first impression of Apple's gonna be what they experience in a store. And once the stores are out there, that's where people are gonna discover Apple. So these stores, whether you like it or not, they're not, they're here to build a business, but they're gonna be a big representation of the brand.

Todd Henry [00:21:04]:

Yes.

Ron Johnson [00:21:05]:

And he said, I don't need the story to build the brand. I said, I'm not saying that's my job, but you can't run from the fact that this is gonna be the first impression people have of Apple. And he called me that day and he said, Ron, what time do your kids go to bed? I said, about 8 o'clock. So I had a 2 and a 4-year-old at the time. And he said, can I call you? I said, sure, I'll have 'em to bed by 8 o'clock. He goes, every night, I said, every night? He goes, for about a year. And he goes, because everything else at Apple I can have control over. I review the television ads, I review the print ads, I work with Johnny in the studio every day.

Ron Johnson [00:21:45]:

But you're gonna be making decisions on where to put stores, who to hire. I'm not gonna be able to do all of that. So you have to know how I think. And so we're gonna chat every night. About everything we can talk about, whatever it is. It won't just be Apple. But once you know how I think, you'll be free as a butterfly to do what you think is right. I'll trust you.

Ron Johnson [00:22:06]:

And you only come to me if you don't know how I think. And that was such a privilege, a gift to have all that time with Steve, to learn from someone who's that special.

Todd Henry [00:22:18]:

You've been very humble and generous in sharing insights about Steve Jobs. I want to talk about you and your leadership style because you have some very specific advice Or just learned experience in the book where you talk about, I think you were sharing a story of a run that you took through the Singapore Botanic Gardens and you realized that teams are kind of like a garden where every plant needs something there. Could you share with us that philosophy?

Ron Johnson [00:22:41]:

I was, I got some feedback as a young kid when I had my first big team, 25 people, and my manager called me and said, Ron, this isn't working. I said, what's not working? She goes, you. And I said, why? I talk to my team every day. No, she goes, you're not leading them. You're smothering them. Because every time I talked to them, they'd say, here's what I think is what I want to do. And I'd say, have you thought about this? And I was just trying to help, but I really wasn't a good leader. And I was on my way to Singapore when I was with Target in the children's area and doing merchandise and developing content.

Ron Johnson [00:23:20]:

And I picked up a book, A Return to Love by Marianne Williamson. I read this book and there was this one section where it said, we're all assigned a garden that is ours to transform. And our garden is our own lives. It's our people at work, our families. And she talked about how people were kind of like plants. They all had to be treated differently. They had to be— some needed water, some needed fertilizers. And it was an analogy.

Ron Johnson [00:23:47]:

And then I got to the hotel in Singapore and I went, stopped by with a friend at the bar. I said, where do you go work out here? They said, there's this bus that takes you to the beautiful botanical garden. And literally the next morning I went to this, the most beautiful garden I'd ever been in at that time. And I ran through it and all of the book that I had read came together. And I said, that's the leadership style. And I realized at that point in time, That a leader's only as good as the people they work for. And the reality, you've gotta wake up every day thinking, who are my direct reports? What can I, what do they need today? What can I do for you today? Not what can they do for me? What can I do for them? And it's amazing. You have that thought, you'll become a great leader, a great manager, Immediately, because at the end of the day, we're put on this planet to secure the good of other people.

Ron Johnson [00:24:45]:

That's what kindness is. That's what love is. It's how do I secure the good of somebody else? And that starts with the people in your life, especially the people who work for you. And once I had that change, immediately people— I became like the Pied Piper. People really loved to work for me. And so that's part of why I'm writing this book is I've just happened to learn a lot through the years and books were transformative to my young leadership journey. And I'm hoping people that read Shop Different will read a story that will connect with them and they'll say, boy, I'm gonna try that. And it has the impact that some of these lessons I learned had for me.

Todd Henry [00:25:27]:

I love that. And that's one of the, well, first of all, thank you for the generosity of writing this story because I do think that's one of the benefits is that everyone can see something of themselves and their own experience in your journey. I think everyone can relate to some element of what you shared. And you mentioned securing the good. I really wanted to ask you about the Antennagate crisis and what happened during it, but I don't, I want to honor your time and maybe we'll let people read the book to find out.

Ron Johnson [00:25:50]:

Anything you want to talk about, we can talk about.

Todd Henry [00:25:52]:

If you would be willing to share, because I thought that was such a moment of decisive leadership where it was, it costs something in the short term, but you were so dedicated to securing the good of people who were shopping. Could you share what happened during that period?

Ron Johnson [00:26:07]:

iPhone, I think 4. It was the 3rd or 4th generation iPhone. And Johnny—

Todd Henry [00:26:12]:

It was the 4 because I had, I was a victim of the, uh, of Intelligate.

Ron Johnson [00:26:15]:

Remember, 4 was the first one with a glass front and a glass back. And the beauty of having these stores, and at that time we had lots of stores, right? And most people bought their first, their phone through our physical stores. You could get them at the carriers. But you knew at launch they'd come to the store. We also had a place called the Genius Bar where people would come to get help. And so the moment it launched, people were coming in saying, my phone's dropping calls. And there we had a new feature called FaceTime you could use on the phone. And people were doing these video calls and they would drop all the time.

Ron Johnson [00:26:52]:

And then it turned out the way the phone had been designed is the way you would naturally hold it. You'd put your hand on the antenna and that would force it to drop calls. But if we put a case on it, like a bumper, well, it's actually what I, I have the iPhone Air. I love this phone, by the way. It's my favorite iPhone ever. And it's the least seller, but it's got a bumper. That bumper, calls didn't drop when you put a bumper on. Right.

Ron Johnson [00:27:19]:

So I said to Steve, let's not recall the phone.

Todd Henry [00:27:22]:

All right.

Ron Johnson [00:27:23]:

I said, Let's just give them away for free at the Jeeps bar. Just send people to the store. Good things happen when they come to the store, no matter where they bought it— AT&T, Best Buy, Apple. Just send them to the store and we'll take care of it. And that was the first issue with that phone. But the second thing that happened with that phone is the screens started to crack like they'd never broken before. And even though the glass was supposedly 30 times stronger than any glass that had ever been created, the screens were breaking. And our Genius Bar was packed with people.

Ron Johnson [00:28:00]:

And that led to the second decision. I just decided, this is on Apple. If you're going to get a new iPhone and you're going to drop it from 3 or 4 feet and it cracks, Apple should replace that for free. So I started doing that. And it wasn't very popular within the finance teams, the product marketing teams. They said, you can't do it. But Steve came and asked me, I said, Steve, this is a long-term battle for market share. Android's out there.

Ron Johnson [00:28:29]:

Samsung's got phones. Android's got phones. If we have a phone that drops a call and people have to spend $199 to replace the screen, this is not good. Trust me, we're going to replace these for free. And eventually Johnny will figure out how to how to solve this problem. And today you could drop your iPhone all the time and it rarely cracks. But we did that. And it was one of the best things I ever did because that phone did great.

Ron Johnson [00:28:58]:

Apple seems to have a pretty good profit formula these days. I don't think cash is a real problem, but in the early days—

Todd Henry [00:29:03]:

No, no.

Ron Johnson [00:29:04]:

In the early days of the smartphone, you had to do everything to make it right for the customer. And that's to secure their good. And we did that for a long time. And, but the nice thing, Steve supported me. There are other members of ETU might not have agreed with that, but Steve 100% supported that decision. And I'm really proud we did that at the time.

Todd Henry [00:29:30]:

Just one of the many, I think, important lessons in the book and examples of, like you said, doing what's right, even when it might cost you something for the sake of kindness and securing the good of customers.

Ron Johnson [00:29:39]:

Yeah, and we had to just do it. We could have studied this to oblivion. done financial analysis and what's the return rate and let's get some stores and test fixing screens for free and let's others, let's charge for it. And what does it cost? Yeah. At the end of the day, you gotta do the right thing.

Todd Henry [00:29:55]:

Yeah.

Ron Johnson [00:29:56]:

And that's, you just have to do the right thing. Someone just bought a new phone. It's the most important device. We all use them 6, 8 hours a day. Do you want a customer all, all day long looking through a cracked screen? What's broken is their relationship, their trust in Apple. It's not their phone. And long-term, all a brand has is trust, right? And so you gotta do the right thing when you have things like that. In my opinion.

Ron Johnson [00:30:27]:

So good.

Todd Henry [00:30:28]:

Ron Johnson's new book, Shop Different, is available now wherever books are sold. Let's go back to that antenna in New Jersey for just a moment. What's most interesting is not that Penzias and Wilson got lucky, it's that they were rigorous. They did the unglamorous work of trying to eliminate one possibility at a time for more than a year. They removed everything that could be removed, and what remained turned out to be the oldest light in the universe. That's very close to the practice that Ron was describing, and I don't think you would put it in those terms, so let me. No headphones on the walk. An empty inbox before the day starts.

Todd Henry [00:31:05]:

15 minutes in the convenience store at dawn, restocking shelves for a 75-year-old man talking about nothing in particular. None of that is optimization. All of it is elimination. He's trying to clear out the external voices so he can hear what is actually there. So here's the challenge this week. It comes in 2 parts. First, take a walk with nothing in your ears. No music, no podcast, including this one.

Todd Henry [00:31:29]:

Hey, say that, but don't even listen to this one. 30 minutes will do it. A longer walk is better, but don't bring a problem to solve. Just notice what keeps coming back because something will. Second, have one conversation that you would not otherwise have had. Ask a person who works with you for what they need from you right now. Not what they owe you. Not what you want from them, but what they need from you.

Todd Henry [00:31:51]:

And then get quiet enough to actually hear the answer. In my book, The Accidental Creative, the core argument is that great work is the product of practices rather than moods. So build practices, protect the conversation with yourself, have better conversations with others, do the right thing when it costs you something. Repeat that for a very long time and you end up with a career like Ron Johnson worth writing a book about. Hey, thanks so much for listening. If you like all of our interviews in full, including our interview with Ron Johnson, you can get them at dailycreativeplus.com. absolutely free. Just send your name and email address, and we'll send you a private feed where you can listen to our interviews in full.

Todd Henry [00:32:32]:

My name is Todd Henry. If you want more information about my books and my speaking events, you can find them at toddhenry.com. Until next time, may you be brave, focused, and brilliant. We'll see you then.