Dave Rendall: Why "Eat That Frog" Terrible Productivity Advice

Dave Rendall: Let's look at the reality of that advice. Then you're responsible for the admin, and then what are you going to have to do tomorrow? Admin. And then what are you going to have to do tomorrow? And then as the business gets bigger you have to do more admin and more accounting or more of the whatever. And at some point, you're not going to even want to go sit at your desk because the first three, four hours is misery, and then even if you have the discipline to do that, all you've done as a business owner is create a terrible job that's going to grind you down for the rest of your life. So yeah, you won it. You ate the frog.

Ray J Green: That is Dave Rendall on why the popular productivity advice of "eat that frog" from Brian Tracy is actually terrible advice. Dave's got a PhD in organizational leadership; he's spoken at virtually every inhabited continent on the planet for Microsoft, AT&T, the US Air Force, you name it. He's an author of four books including The Freak Factor, and he's a former stand-up comedian now turned public speaker.

And his argument is really simple: if you're waking up and you're eating frogs every single morning, you probably haven't built a business that you love. You've probably built a job that you hate. And the solution isn't developing more discipline to eat more frogs. The solution is delegating those frogs to people who don't see them as frogs. We also got into why your weaknesses are your strengths, why most companies are accidentally destroying the people with the most potential in their business, and what my family learned last year when some of us in the house learned that we were wired just a little bit differently. This is a really good one. Let's dive in.

Before we get into this, I do want to say... you, I've shared this with you, but last year in our household there was like a lot of learning about neurodiversity and stuff. Like, we learned that my son has dyslexia and ADHD. We learned that I have Level 1 Autism—like they used to call it Asperger’s—and it wasn't a shocker to me that I had ADHD, like I kind of knew that. But we were doing a lot of this learning with my son, and as we did, it's kind of funny because I've known you for a long time—you've been MC at the events I speak at for a really long time—and I remember thinking, "Dave has some stuff about this." And for kids, you know, because we're thinking about how do we message this to our son? Because I want to frame it as a superpower.

And I went to your website, I watched one of your videos—it’s an older video, I think it’s like eight years old or something. It’s a 30-minute video, we’ll link to it in the notes.

Dave Rendall: Yeah, Conscious Capitalism. It was in Philadelphia. I was doing like a 25-minute keynote for the Conscious Capitalism conference.

Ray J Green: It was so good. It was so impactful. I want to call it out because the message is about your weaknesses are your strengths. But you list very specific examples and you talk about even the relationship with you and your wife and how kind of $1 + 1 = 3$. And I had my kids watch it. And by the end of it, my other son was like, "I want ADHD!" And I just wanted to say, before we even dive in, thanks for putting that out there. That message... there’s some vulnerability with it, but it was really impactful for us and the timeliness of it was good. We shared it with so many people and it’s just a killer video. So I just wanted to start by saying thanks, man, for putting that out there.

Dave Rendall: Well, and it’s funny that you know, "I wish I had ADHD" for him to say that because that's actually one of the quotes from Paul Orfalea, the guy who founded Kinkos. He's got dyslexia and ADHD, and one of his quotes is, "I wish everyone had dyslexia like I do. I want this for you." I want you to have this wonderful "disability" that's made my life so much better. So it’s almost so much of an outrageous quote that if I said it, it would seem like I'm making things up. But when a person with that disability says, "I see the upside so strongly, I wish you had the opportunity to experience this like I do," that’s exactly where we’re trying to get to. You know, people try to criticize you with "you're so weird," and instead of like, "no, I'm not," just being able to go, "Thank you." Just a total mind switch. "You're not normal" or "you have ADHD"—yep!

Peter Shankman has a book called Faster Than Normal, which is about ADHD, and look at the title: Faster Than Normal. Not worse than normal, not less than normal, not below average. And like the first line is, "You're not afflicted with ADHD, you don't have cancer. You have a superpower." And certainly it has a downside, but even that's a mistake people make all the time online. They'll try to counter some of this and be like, "I have ADHD and it sucks and it’s not a superpower." And it’s like, well, no, everybody knows there’s a downside—that’s all they’ve known. All we’re saying is there’s also an upside. We’re not saying there is not a downside.

And a good way to think about that is—and I'm a nerd so I've thought about this—all the superheroes. If you watch the movie, there’s a downside to being Batman. If you watch the movie, there’s a downside to being Superman. If you watch the movie, there’s a downside to being Spider-Man—in fact, that’s the most obvious one. He can’t have regular decent relationships because A) it puts everybody at risk, but also B) he's tortured being Spider-Man knowing that if he sleeps, some people might die because he didn’t save them. He's on constant lookout, he’s got "spidey sense" hearing and all that. Well, that’s nice, except how do you relax when you can hear everything that’s going on in a 50-mile radius and you hear every time somebody’s crying or screaming? Every superpower does have a downside. That’s exactly the point. So saying my ADHD isn't a superpower because there’s a downside, it's like—no, that's what superpowers are. They're blessings and curses simultaneously.

I'm not, to be clear—and I know you weren't saying this—but I'm not saying there's no downside. I'm saying there's no reason to talk about the downside because the school counselors have already talked about the downside. The teachers have already talked about the downside. The psychologists have already talked about the downside. The psychiatrists who give away the medication have talked about the downside. Nobody's wondering if there's a downside to ADHD—that’s what it's called: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. You don't need to advertise the downsides when you're talking about the upside. The pendulum's been so far to the negative for so long, we're just trying to say, "And also..."

This is just a different way. And that's what I like too—there's more and more schools, and I've gotten to speak to them, where they call them "learning differences," not "learning disorders." So autism isn't a disorder, it’s a learning difference. Dyslexia isn't a disorder, it’s a learning difference. ADHD isn't a disorder, it’s a learning difference. So how do these kids learn? Don't stigmatize it. Adapt to them instead of forcing them to adapt to a system that doesn't work for them. Because they're going to be dealing with this for the rest of their lives, and it isn't just a negative—it’s also, you know, there’s strengths to it. So check that out: Faster Than Normal by Peter Shankman. It's a podcast and a book. I think that would be a good follow-up, especially as your kids get older, but for you even right now to just kind of see that mindset specifically for ADHD.

Basically, the books behind me are... I've got The Freak Factor: Your Weaknesses Might Also Be Strengths. And then there's a whole bunch of books that say, "Are you supersensitive and you've been told that's a weakness? Here's a strength." "Are you super introverted and you've been told that's a weakness?" And so there's whole books about specific weaknesses that match up with specific strengths. And so I like to recommend those when someone's like, "Well, I've got ADHD," check up Peter Shankman. "I'm super introverted," check out Quiet by Susan Cain. Check out The Introvert Advantage by Marti Olsen Laney. If you're supersensitive and everybody tells you you need to toughen up, check out Sensitive by Jenn Granneman. If you're messy, check out the book Messy by Tim Harford that talks about all the upsides of being messy and disorganized. There's always a specific resource for whatever somebody's specific weakness is if they want to see the upside.

Ray J Green: The interesting thing you said about like "normal" and "average"... one of the things that we learned with the doctor as we were going through this was she said, "Hey, here's average." And she showed us this chart. And what she did was she drew a line across the middle and she said, "This is average." She said words matter here—that's not normal. This is average. This is the statistical average of people who are here and people who are here. No one, almost no one, is actually across this line. Almost no one is technically "normal." We're all in some variance of all of the things that they're testing for, up here, right here, right off the line. I couldn't unsee that because I was like, you know, "normal" is like... this is an average. That's all we're looking at, the numbers. And no one is basically on the line across the point. Is that something that you come across or how do you look at that?

Dave Rendall: Yeah, I mean, that's another book I'd recommend—it's also a TED Talk if somebody wants the shorter version—but it’s by Todd Rose and it’s called The End of Average. And yeah, he makes that point. I mean, there's a funny one where years ago they made a sculpture—I think it was in Ohio at the State Fair—and they took the body measurements of like 2,000 women and the body measurements of 2,000 men. And they took the average, and then they turned it into a sculpture. And then you could go to the fair and you could win a huge prize if you were the closest to the average. So now tens of thousands of people are going to the fair, and no one was even close. They couldn't find a single person! Right? So that's what I tell people: if you were actually average, you'd be the weirdest person on Earth.

And the story Todd tells in his TED Talk, which is really interesting, is the Air Force did the same thing. Thousands of pilots... they used to only hire them at a certain size because the cockpit wasn't adjustable. So they only hired short guys who were thin and light and just all these things. It was just, you only hired a certain kind of person because you couldn't have a big guy in the cockpit because the cockpit... you know, and they only had one size helmet and all this kind of stuff. But they tested thousands of people again for arm length, neck length, leg length, hand size, head size, height, weight, all this kind of stuff. And then there wasn't one person who even matched the average on like three elements. Like the lady who won the fair contest was like average on four of the thirteen things they measured. Like not even close, not even close to the "average of average."

And once you know that, I mean, it affects so many things. They say, "Well, the average American reads one book a year." Well, I read fifty. So that means 49 people read zero. So what a lot of people think is, well, some people read zero, some people read one, some people read two and it averages out to one. It's like—no! Or the average income in America... well, that includes Bill Gates' 89 billion or whatever. Or this is what I was talking about the other day—the average life expectancy for a man is 76. Well, not really. If you're still alive over the age of like 30, your average life expectancy now is 80, 85, 90 because you didn't die when you were 18 to 30 in some kind of accident.

And people think that people didn't use to live past 40 because life expectancy was 40 150 years ago. No, that's because everybody died when they were born—infants died at just a tragic rate, and then two-year-olds, three-year-olds, four-year-olds died of basic infections. You'd have six kids and only one of them would live to adulthood. So that takes the average—people are dying at 1, 2, 3, 4, then other people are living to 80, the average is 40. But nobody's living to 40—most of the people are dying as a baby or living to 80, very few people are doing... right? So averages are misleading.

And then that's hard because that requires people to understand certain math, which isn't everybody's strength. But I remember from school it's the median you want to know—where are 50% of people above this and 50% of people are below this? And that really gives you a real number in a lot of situations. What Todd Rose talks about is what he calls a "jagged profile." So like you take that average, and every average person comes from people being both above and below that line on just so many different dimensions. So the person's above average in height but below average in weight, but above average arm length but below average leg length, and on and on it goes. And above average at art but below average in math, and above average with organization but... you know, nobody's, like you said, the middle.

So once we understand that, you know, we start treating everybody like an individual, and we don't assume that A) normal is good, or even to your point, normal doesn't actually exist in any real way that we understand it. We think there's this mass of bell-curve sort of normal people in the middle who go to work, wear khakis, drive a Honda, live in the suburbs, and whatever. And that's actually a very unusual person. Most people don't go to college, most people don't own a home. I mean, just on and on it goes. If you were a normal person, you'd be the weirdest person on Earth, right? And so that's hard for people to take in, and so we're always comparing ourselves to "good," which is "normal," and that actually isn't real either—and we're getting kind of technical here, but that's the reality of it.

Ray J Green: Yeah, it's like a fake target. I mean, so you're just going to disappoint yourself because you're never in the middle.

Dave Rendall: It's fake and unachievable. It's not only there—it's not out there—and yeah, it's impossible, right?

Ray J Green: And it sounds boring, you know? Like khakis and a 9-to-5, it just doesn't sound right. You mentioned the Paul Orfalea thing. So as I was getting ready for this, I went through that and that quote stuck out to me. And it was because on the one hand I completely get it, right? Because if I look around my life, you know, we're expats living in Cabo, we have a lot of things that aren't normal.

Dave Rendall: You're gigantic weirdos.

Ray J Green: Yes, we're gigantic weirdos. And we've embraced it. And to the point where in my personal life, like my wife and I are just on so many things polar opposites. Kind of like you and your wife—like there are things that I lean all the way into my strengths, she leans all the way into hers, and together it's phenomenal. So I experience it. I even experience it on our street. Almost everybody on our street's an entrepreneur and has a little bit of a wacky idea because you don't get to Cabo raising a family doing the normal shit.

The flip side of that, though, is—is there some survivorship bias? Because statistically, you take like dyslexia or ADHD, there's a flip side to that, like you were saying, there is a downside. And is there an element of survivorship bias to it? And if so, what have you seen be the differences between people who are really able to leverage that disability or that weakness into a strength and the people who don't?

Dave Rendall: Yeah, that's a great question. Two things. I think not only... I don't think we're overestimating the upside, I think we're underestimating it. And here's why. Maybe there's some survivorship bias and, you know, for people who don't know what he means by that, it means we recognize the people who win, right? We recognize the people who succeed, and we don't see all the people who end up failing because they're living in their mom's basement and you don't hear stories about them, right? And they disappear from the even maybe government statistics because they're maybe not in the workforce and they just, you know, they don't have a bank account and we literally don't know who those people are sometimes.

I think it's actually the reverse. We have to take responsibility for a bunch of self-fulfilling prophecies. We see a kid with dyslexia as a parent, and teachers do this and school systems do this—we tell them their whole life that they're disabled and they're damaged and they're less than. And then we rate them against a standard that they can never achieve to. We focus completely on their weaknesses and none of their strengths. And at some point, they say, "I'm a failure, I have no choice but to fail, I might as well not even try. The world isn't built for me. I'm less than." Everyone's telling me I can't do it, so I probably can't do it, right? And then we say, "See, I told you they couldn't do it." And so we created an outcome and we said it's because we were right. And it's like—no, it's because that's what you caused.

I mean, a friend of mine read my book 20 years after getting kicked out of high school, and he said, "I wish I would have read this 20 years ago because they told me that I was going to be a failure. And they told my friends that we were going to be failures, and we believed them and we stopped trying to do the things successful people do." Understanding this principle and giving those people support and encouragement would have a dramatic impact.

Now, there is a good answer to your questions. I mean, obviously a super smart person who has dyslexia is going to be able to figure out ways around it that a really unintelligent person with a low IQ isn't going to be able to, right? A person with significant family support... you talk about discovering that you have autism. There's a Notre Dame player, a college football player this year who has autism, and when his parents finally figured that out, they accepted him for who he was, supported him the way he was, did not expect him to be "quote-unquote" normal, typical. Helped him find things that matched who he was, and one of them was sports—there's structure, there's routine, there's all these kinds of things. Didn't ask him for a bunch of eye contact, didn't ask him for a bunch of hugs, didn't push him to do all the quote-unquote normal social things that other people do. Gave him an environment where he could be himself and thrive, and then he did.

So certainly family support is a big part of it. Someone telling you—a teacher... but these are also the things that make "regular" people, you know, again, which don't exist, but you understand what I mean. This is what helps anyone be successful: family support instead of having your family tell you you're a piece of garbage; a good teacher encouraging you instead of all your teachers telling you you stink and you're never going to succeed; having some level of intelligence to navigate a difficult and complicated world, right? I used to work with people with developmental disabilities—it's hard to navigate the world when you don't have the intellectual horsepower. And then if you combine "I don't have the intellectual horsepower" and "no one's helping me" and "I'm being told that I'm worthless," you know, it becomes a pretty steep hill to climb.

And unless someone else from the outside—a teacher or a coach or somebody—comes along and tries to help, or there's some kind of system that reaches in and reaches out to you. So I think those... that's definitely true. It's not that every person with dyslexia could be Richard Branson and be a multi-billionaire business owner.

Ray J Green: Statistically no, right?

Dave Rendall: Right. But that's not true for anyone. It's not statistically likely that anyone's going to be a billionaire business owner. So certainly he has other character... but that's what doesn't disqualify it. It's like—oh, so you don't have to be able to read and write at all, much less well, to be really successful? So that undermines the narrative of the traditional education system. And if we could acknowledge that and start adapting to the student sooner instead of forcing the students to adapt to the "real world"—whatever we think that is—Paul Orfalea lives in the real world. Richard Branson lives in the real world. Successful people with all sorts of quote-unquote disabilities exist in the real world.

So that has to... I mean, that's one of my favorite quotes from Paul Orfalea: "One of my biggest successes in life is speaking at colleges that wouldn't accept me as a student," right? So he got rejected from all sorts of colleges and then as an adult he's successful and they're like, "Oh, come talk about success." Well, part of success is you don't have to go to college to be actually super successful. I'm super successful and nobody would take me.

Which is another problem—and I just talked about this at an event where they were talking about potential—is most of the time we recognize potential in reverse. Then that's not potential anymore—that's actual. So we're bad at predicting who's going to make it and who isn't, and then those predictions turn into self-fulfilling prophecies sometimes because we don't give the support to people that we have decided aren't going to make it because they don't fit into our traditional business system, school systems, stuff like that. So I think that's what I'm trying to change—is what if we gave more people a chance? What if we assumed that more people had potential? What if we looked for the upside in people that only seem to have diagnosable downside? And what would happen is we'd find more of it and we'd help more people achieve their potential instead of potentially stifling it.

Ray J Green: I wonder if Orfalea's gotten any honorary degrees from places that originally rejected him?

Dave Rendall: Oh, I want to check that out now. "Here's your honorary business degree. 20 years ago we said no, you can't come."

Ray J Green: You make a really good point because there was one point last year where as we were working with the school and trying to figure it out with my son, I said—it was like the third or fourth meeting—and I left and my wife said, "How do you think it went?" And I said, "You know, I just feel like all we do is talk about his weak... like what he can't do." I know for a fact—personal, this is even before your video—and I'm like, "I know for a fact that for every one of these things, there's a flip side to it. And we're not seeing it." All we've done is talk to him about what he's not good at. All he's hearing about is the special things that need to be done. Nobody's looking for the strength. Like it's almost not ingrained into the system to go identify the strength. "Let's go fix all the weaknesses."

Dave Rendall: It's almost not—it is completely not. And it's based on a belief that negatives are more important than positives. If a kid—I use this example all the time in my speeches—if a kid gets all A's and a D on their report card, you're going to talk to them about the D. You're going to go to talk to the teacher who teaches the class where they earned the D (D-minus, D-plus, whatever). You're going to send them to a terrible camp like math camp about the class where they got the bad grade. And you're going to also do absolutely nothing related to every single one of the classes where they got an A. You're not going to meet with that teacher, you're not going to try to find them a camp to make them even better at the thing they already seem to have some aptitude and interest in.

Because the belief is: this is the most important thing, you're only as strong as your weakest link, you got to watch out for your Achilles heel, all these kinds of things. That is ingrained in everything. It's ingrained in psychology—therapy is rarely about "what are you doing well and what's going well," it's almost always about "what's wrong." All these diagnoses focus just on that. And the really insidious part is—and I noticed this because my job used to be to help people with disabilities to get job opportunities—when we can see or we know that someone has a disability, it actually triggers us not to ask "is there an upside," it triggers us to go "I wonder what else is wrong with that person."

And then we just go looking for it. And again, if you go looking for it, you find it. If I... I could talk to any person on Earth, and if I can ask them enough questions, I can find them a diagnosis from the DSM. I can give them something. "Hmm, a little anxious there, let's talk about that," you know? And I can make them anxious about the fact that they might be anxious. And everybody probably does have something that maybe it hasn't bothered them enough yet or maybe they think it's normal. I took a bunch of tests for a lady that I was doing some work for—like I spoke to one of her clients and she was a consultant and she does a bunch of assessments. She had me take a bunch of assessments just for fun, and I like doing that kind of stuff—I've created my own assessment—and she's like, "Wow." She's like, "Your anxiety numbers are off the chart." I'm like, "What do you mean? I'm not anxious, I'm the happiest, most grateful, positive... I take naps on the plane, I'm not up all night worrying about stuff."

But I realized anxiety is the ability to say: "Is there a potential negative outcome in the future and is there something I can do about it?" And that's been my whole life. If I get a master's degree, it'll make me more employable. If I get a doctorate then if something went wrong I could do some teaching. If I put money in the bank, then it'll make it less likely that I'll have problems. If I work two jobs, then if I lose one of them, I won't be bankrupt. My whole life is based on a certain level of—and apparently a significant level compared to whatever normal is—hey, there are negative potential outcomes in the future. The difference, the reason it's not I think an anxiety disorder, is anxiety usually paralyzes and then that's what makes it a problem, right? "I'm worried," and then I shut down. For me, I just go, "Yeah, that's a very realistic possibility. I watched my dad become unemployed, so I'll make myself more marketable. I'll make myself more employable. I'll start my own business. I'll save money. I'll be smart with the money that I spend. I won't take on a bunch of debt."

But it turns out, you know, I'm above average with anxiety, but I didn't know that until I had a discussion with somebody who knows where the "line" is. And it might even be a disorder that somebody would give me some medicine for, but I don't need the medicine because I think I'm benefiting from it more than I'm bothered by it, right? So that's the other—I mean, that's the other part of any of these things. Who's to say that what you have is a problem and who are we comparing it to? And again, you're comparing it to a fake line, and sometimes it's just up to you. "I have more anxiety than I'd like to have and I would like some help with it." But you might actually have less anxiety than quote-unquote most people, but if it's ruining your life, that's actually one of the measures: is this messing up your life?

But sometimes it's only messing up our life because we believe that we shouldn't be this way, right? Or this isn't normal or this isn't good. And so that's where I try to help people with some of those beliefs because sometimes, you know, again, if you've got anxiety, you get more anxiety from being anxious about your anxiety and it becomes a spiral, you kind of can't pull yourself out of it. But statistics show—because anxiety is one of the things that the Big Five personality stuff measures—your best employees have a higher level of anxiety than your worst employees. And why is that? Because your bad employees go, "I don't care, it'll probably be fine, I don't need to stay late, I don't need to work on this, I can probably do this tomorrow, I probably won't get in trouble, this probably isn't necessary." And a person with higher anxiety goes, "I don't want Ray... I don't want to get in trouble with Ray. I don't want to let my coworkers down. I don't want to get in trouble. I don't want to get fired. I don't want to lose my job. I want to get a promotion. I don't want to get demoted." Anxiety is just the ability to be concerned about the future outcomes of your behavior. Productive employees are concerned about the outcomes of their behavior, and people with low-level anxiety, you're like, "I'd like to give you some anxiety, I'd like you to have some anxiety." And they don't, then they get fired from the job and they tell everyone it wasn't fair and it wasn't their fault, and they either go unemployed for a while or they go get another job.

Now, you might be saying, "Oh, Dave, so you're saying everyone should be like that?" No. Low-anxiety people tend to be happier as they are less successful, and high-anxiety people tend to be more successful but then have lower levels of happiness than their less successful peers because... you know. So who's to say, right, what success is? If you... some people could choose, "I'll take less success if it comes with more happiness," but if you have enough anxiety like I do, those two things don't go together. You can't have more happiness with less success because the less success would make you less happy. But that's the tradeoff.

Some people—and this is the Dunning-Kruger effect—some people are so incompetent and unintelligent that they think they're super competent and super intelligent because they're too dumb and too incompetent to know what real competence looks like. And the downside of having competence and intelligence is you know that there's people smarter and better than you, and you know you're not as good as you could be, and so you keep working on that. Everything, even seemingly negative things, have an upside in those situations. So anxiety is another one of those things where you don't want average levels of anxiety, for example, in your employees—you want people who have a pretty good instinct for how do my actions lead to future consequences and they take action to make sure that they do things well.

Ray J Green: Yeah, it reminds me of in sales—I was in a sales role where I hit the number every month for three years in a row. There were only a couple of us that did it. And it's because every month started with an anxiety of "Shit, I'm not going to make it this month! I got to...!" And it was the same thing and it got so repetitive it was like a running joke. Because I'd hit my number for two... and every month I'd start the same: "I don't know, man, my leads this month, they seem a little..." And I would do it again and start... and I'm not saying it's healthy, but it does kind of corroborate what you're saying. Yeah, I continued to have success at least by that measure because of that thing, you know?

Dave Rendall: If you went on Instagram or TikTok right now—and I don't know what search function or what search term you would use—but I've seen them once a day. There's somebody saying, "That one kid at school who always tells you they probably failed the test and then they get 100% on it." "That one kid at school who gets perfect grades but is always convinced that this is the one that they're not going to pass." And it's the same thing with work goals, it's the same thing with... but that's Dunning-Kruger again. One person gets called into the office and they go, "I bet it's promotion time. I've been doing pretty good." And they get fired because they're too stupid to know how bad they are, right?

Another person gets called into the office and they're like, "Oh, I was meeting my goals but I knew I wasn't exceeding them and they probably have people better than me and they're probably going to ask me to leave." And they're like, "Ray, you ready to run the whole show?" And that's another example of something negative looking like a positive. Denmark consistently is the happiest country on Earth. Why? Because they're more pessimistic. And when you're pessimistic and things go even remotely well, you're super happy because you expected the worst and you got something that wasn't the worst. If you're optimistic, that's great, but you're going to be disappointed a lot because if you say everything's going to be great, oftentimes it isn't.

Lawyers are more pessimistic than your average person. So to be a good lawyer you kind of have to find the downside and sort of naturally so, right? You have to naturally kind of... so, you know, we could do this all day. There's so many different seemingly obvious negative things that have a function. And that's—I mean, if you believe in evolutionary psychology—certain characteristics wouldn't continue on through society if they didn't have some kind of function, if they didn't have some kind of value. Optimistic people go to bed in a back old-school village and go, "No one's going to attack us and murder our families and steal our children." Pessimistic people go, "We should probably have a couple lookouts because there's bad people out there who want to take what we have and kill us." And that's also true, right? And so some people lock their doors and set their alarms and other people say it's going to be fine and... that's why those people survive, because pessimism seems negative but it serves a function. And optimism seems great but there's a downside. Everything's like that.

And once we see that, there's no "be good, don't be bad." Certainly there's some moral stuff that's good and bad, but it's not "have these good characteristics, don't have these bad characteristics." It's just everybody has a mix of characteristics that are good and bad simultaneously. Success in life is finding situations that reward us for who we are instead of punishing us for who we not—who we are not. And then to your point, partnering with people who are strong where we're weak. In our marriages, in our relationships, in our businesses. It's not being everything and having all of the right characteristics and having all of the good skills and having all of the good personality. It's about putting a team together where you have a really conscientious person, but you also have somebody who's just a big-idea person but they're not a big-execution person. It's having a really organized person, it's having a real "people" person but having a real cerebral kind of introverted person, having a really calm person, having a really intense person. That's where success comes. But it isn't from—back to your point about the middle—going "I'm going to push myself in every area of life to some fake balance average point where I never get too happy but I never get too sad, I'm never too intense but I'm never too calm." I'm all of the "best things" all wrapped into one, and that's just not reality. And then you're also not the best because now you're the average—you're not the best at anything because you're not the worst at anything, and now you've lost that value. You're not the best salesperson, but you're fine, right? You're not the most organized, but you're okay. Well, sometimes as a business you want a pretty organized person to be handling the organization, right? You want a really good salesperson doing the sales. You're not hoping to hire a bunch of middle-of-the-road folks who don't have any weaknesses but don't have any real strengths either.

Ray J Green: What made me think as you're talking about the anxiety piece and somebody saying, "Hey, you're off the... not off the charts but you're really high on anxiety," and you could take a pill for that, right? But the flip side, I guess—and I'm thinking aloud—is you take the pill and maybe it blunts some of the perceived weakness.

Dave Rendall: Not maybe, absolutely it does.

Ray J Green: Right. So it fixes the weakness and it takes away the strength simultaneously, right?

Dave Rendall: So a good way to think about this is think about a medal, either top to bottom or left to right. And as the strength increases, the corresponding weakness increases. And so if you eliminate that weakness, you also... I'm not anxious anymore! So when people go, "Well, Dave, aren't you going to go jump on Ray's podcast? You said you would." I'm too Xanaxed-deep, I'm like, "It'll be fine, we'll reschedule." I don't feel the emotion that causes me to say... and in fact I'm physiologically blunting those things.

Now, I'm not saying people shouldn't take medicine for the anxiety, that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is, but it does have an effect. There was a guy on the airplane one time we were talking about his son's ADHD, and his friends would tell him, "On the weekends don't take your medicine when you hang out with us, when we're not at school, because we want to interact with the real you." So medication can blunt the effects of the weaknesses, but then the downside is it also reduces the strength that you have.

Right, if I could eliminate my anxiety, I would eliminate most of my behavior because I'd be like, "I'll just spend whatever money I have because things will probably be fine in the future, and I'll just show up late because they probably won't fire me, and maybe I won't show up at all and I hope they give me a second chance. But I kind of don't care because I'm just kind of chill and I feel real good right now." And so I'm not seeking out any kind of achievement that would make me feel good because I already feel fine and I feel real relaxed and real calm and real okay. I don't have any... where's the motivation, right? The motivation comes from a legitimate fear of bad things happening in the future and also a legitimate hope that something good could happen in the future that you care about. Change requires dissatisfaction with the current state. But if everything's fine right now, then why would I do anything different, right? I'm just hoping to keep going on that.

Statistics show—because anxiety is one of the things that the Big Five personality stuff measures—your best employees have a higher level of anxiety than your worst employees. And why is that? Because your bad employees go, "I don't care, it'll probably be fine, I don't need to stay late, I don't need to work on this, I can probably do this tomorrow, I probably won't get in trouble, this probably isn't necessary." And a person with higher anxiety goes, "I don't want to get in trouble with Ray, I don't want to let my coworkers down, I don't want to get in trouble, I don't want to get fired, I don't want to lose my job, I want to get a promotion, I don't want to get demoted." Anxiety is just the ability to be concerned about the future outcomes of your behavior. Productive employees are concerned about the outcomes of their behavior, and people with low-level anxiety, you're like, "I'd like to give you some anxiety, I'd like you to have some anxiety." And they don't, then they get fired from the job and they tell everyone it wasn't fair and it wasn't their fault, and they either go unemployed for a while or they go get another job. Now, you might be saying, "Oh, Dave, so you're saying everyone should be like that?" No. Low-anxiety people tend to be happier as they are less successful, and high-anxiety people tend to be more successful but then have lower levels of happiness than their less successful peers because... you know. So who's to say, right, what success is? If you... some people could choose, "I'll take less success if it comes with more happiness," but if you have enough anxiety like I do, those two things don't go together. You can't have more happiness with less success because the less success would make you less happy. But that's the tradeoff.

Ray J Green: Your PhD is in management and leadership?

Dave Rendall: Management and leadership, yeah.

Ray J Green: And I think this whole principle not only from family life, but you think about it in work life. And really early in my career, one of my first managers said, "Hey, we're promoting you to manager, by the way read this book," and it was StrengthsFinder. It was I think the Marcus Buckingham book. And that was one of my first management books—so that was kind of the foundation that I went into it with. Oh, it was a... it really changed the entire paradigm for me because I was a blank slate, like that was my first management book. So, you know, I have a top-performing salesperson, he's killing it, and he's completely disorganized, doesn't fill out stuff in the CRM, doesn't do all this stuff. And most managers—one of my managers is saying, "Well, hey, we should fix that, like he needs to do X, Y, Z." Or, or we could just hire him an admin and he never has to do any of that shit again and he sells more stuff.

Dave Rendall: Because he has more time, but he also has more energy because he's not doing things that drain him, and he's not getting in trouble and having to deal with the emotional problems of being harassed all the time and filling out the reports. It's funny because that's actually... you just told—and again, it's a classic story if you understand it—that's a real story from my life. This woman was in one of my college classes, I was complaining about my insurance company, she raised her hand during class and said, "You should go with our insurance company instead, it's easy to transfer, I'll bring the paperwork next week." She sold me insurance during class. She becomes my insurance agent... I give her a reference for like graduate school, whatever. We stay in touch, I think we're friends on Facebook. She... I get hit by a truck while I'm running and she tells me there's some part of my policy where I can get some money even though I wasn't driving since I got hit by a car, like there's like a stipend, whatever. So we just stay in touch and then finally she contacts me and she goes, "I'm going to get fired." And I was like, "What's wrong?" And she goes, "I'm good at the people work but I'm bad at the paperwork." I'm good at sales, but I'm bad at all the admin. She said, "My boss tried incentives and they tried threatening me and they tried this and that and I think it's over."

And we worked through it a little bit, but finally the solution was her boss hired an admin. And guess what? There's more people who are good at admin—that's easier to hire for than people that are good at sales. And you can pay them less! And so now she had, to your point, more time to sell, more energy to sell, would then get more rewards from selling, which would then motivate her to do even more, and the sales went like this and the costs went like this. Because admin is admin. But that's what people don't do—no, that's just the job. Well, who made the job?

Right, so let's talk to business owners for a second. You wrote the job description and you can take that part out. Organizations exist to make people's strengths effective and their weaknesses irrelevant. So if somebody's weakness is relevant, what could you do as an organization to make it irrelevant? And that's the one we talked about earlier—I call it affiliation. Partner with people who are strong where you're weak. So the two main applications of "weaknesses are also strengths" is: the way to have success for yourself and for others is to find situations that reward you for who you are instead of punishing you for who you're not. And then, some things do need... the taxes have to be done sooner or later. Accounting has to be done. But then that's the last one: find situations that fit and then partner with people who are strong where you're weak. So instead of saying "I need to be better at admin," you hire an admin. "I need to be better at accounting," you hire an accountant. "I need to be better at sales," you hire a salesperson. You build relationships. "I need to be more charismatic"—you can even hire a CEO. "I need to be more technical"—you can hire a CTO, a CIO. You don't need to be anything other than the strengths that you have. Everything—and that's the Paul Orfalea story—when you're literally hiring people who can read and write because you can't, I hope it sort of proves that everything is hireable.

There's a great book by a guy—I'll remember his name in a minute here—but he does these little challenges and then he writes books about them. And he was researching about outsourcing or something like that, and he said, "I outsourced my anxiety. And I hired somebody in India to worry about my kids' health and to worry about my wife's job and to worry about..." and he said it actually did make me feel better. But that's how far he took outsourcing—he was like, "I'm going to outsource worrying about things and I'm going to delegate it to somebody else."

Ray J Green: That was the challenge—like the first five years where I left corporate and I said, "I'm going to go into business for myself." The first five years of it was... I was successful by financial standards, but man, it was an ass-whoop. It was so difficult and part of it was because I insisted on being solo—I didn't want a team, I just wanted to be a "solopreneur," right? And I now realize in hindsight that was just a mistake for me, given my makeup and my profile. Because I was the whole thing, by definition I was required to spend a significant portion of my day doing shit that I didn't want to do and I sucked at it! I wasn't even good at it. And that means less time to do the stuff that I was really good at, which actually makes the money to pay for the people. So it was a good lesson in hindsight. But I'm curious because it kind of ties into I was listening to something that you did—a podcast on procrastination. And it kind of took on the Brian Tracy methodology of "eat the frog," right? Like you start the day, do the shit that you don't want to do, just get it out of the way, and then you can go do the stuff you want to do. And your thought was—or the way that you approached it was—or, another is you could just design a life where you don't have to eat frogs. Like that's one thing you could do. Let's look at the reality of that advice.

Dave Rendall: Then you're responsible for the admin, and then what are you going to have to do tomorrow? Admin. And then what are you going to have to do tomorrow? And then as the business gets bigger you have to do more admin and more accounting or more of the whatever. And at some point, you're not going to even want to go sit at your desk because the first three, four hours is misery, and then even if you have the discipline to do that, all you've done as a business owner is create a terrible job that's going to grind you down for the rest of your life. So yeah, you won it. You ate the frog. And so now every day for the rest of your life you will eat an increasing number of frogs. And you hate frogs and they make you sick every single morning. So pretty soon you go, "I don't want to go to the frog-eating job anymore." And so you throw away your whole business because you think the business is doing those things.

So the total terrible thinking, terrible reasoning of the "eat that frog" methodology is: it assumes frogs have to be eaten by you. And so do it first. Instead of undermining the whole thing and going, "Why do I have to do this?" It has to be done, but it doesn't have to be done by me. There is somebody who... and also for people who are like, "Oh, Dave, I do want to be a solopreneur." You can, but you just don't hire employees, you outsource. You have contractors. You can have very loose connections to people who... I had... my accountant isn't an employee, they're an accounting firm and they have a whole group of people and they handle stuff for me. But I... it’s a couple emails a year. It's not, you know, it’s not—oh, I don't have time to be managing these accountants. I mean, that's the beauty of outsourcing—you're not managing those people most of the time. You know, when I hire a graphic designer I'm not managing them, I'm telling them what... when I hire somebody to do my website, sure I have to have some meetings, but I'm still an independent person who does most of what I want to do most of the time and I'm working with this other person temporarily to handle a project for me. So solopreneur is still something you can sort of do, but again, even if you don't want employees, you do have to delegate things to professionals who can do it for you so that you can spend your time doing what you do best. And so literally to your point, you can create the work for them to do, right? Unless you have a business, there's no website to design. Unless you... you're the one creating the work for those other people to do by doing the thing that you do best.

Ray J Green: And I would, I mean, I've worked with a lot of business owners. I would say probably the most common reason that I see businesses going under is the founder or the owner gets tired of the shit, right? Like they just get tired. They've created a frog-eating business and they get tired of it.

Dave Rendall: They've created a bad job for themselves. But a lot of people think that's what adulthood is. They go, "Well, that's just... I need to be the CEO now, I need to wear suits, get excited about spreadsheets, go to board meetings." And it's like—you never have to get to that point. You don't have to scale your business. You don't have to "grow up," whatever you think those things are. You never have to be the person who does that. And if you do, that's where burnout comes from. Burnout isn't how much work you're doing. It's what the work does to you, right? When you do more of what you love it fuels you, when you build on your strengths. So you could almost work indefinitely. If you told me, "Dave, we've got to do this for four hours today," I wouldn't be like, "I don't have four hours in me." I like this enough, I have more energy when I'm done than I had when I started. So the only difference between burnout and what I say—the only difference between burnout and burning desire or passion—is just what it is. It's not about how long or how much, it's about: is it who I am or is it me grinding away with discipline? And again, the danger of that is: okay, then you need to then have an increasing amount of that for the rest of your life. And great, is that what you were hoping to do by starting a business—create a job that you hate but that you created for yourself? That's not my version of success. That creates a successful business and a miserable life. And I think most people are hoping their business or their work is going to be part of a happy, fulfilled, meaningful life. And that requires focusing on strengths.

Ray J Green: If you focus almost exclusively on strengths and stuff that you want, do you potentially miss out on building elements of your character that come from doing things that... like resilience and some of the other characteristics? Like if you do establish some discipline or you build some resilience or you... like, are you missing out on anything by only seeking things that you liked and that you enjoyed?

Dave Rendall: I wrote an article about this once. People tell you to get outside of your comfort zone, and I list a bunch of things that I'm comfortable with that are good for me. I like to move, I like to get outside, I like to exercise, I like to be active. I like to travel. I like to get up in front of people. There's a lot of very productive, good things—that's what strengths are, right? And also, life is going to be challenge even when you're building on your strengths. When I was doing what my strengths were and COVID hit, I couldn't do my job. I couldn't travel, I couldn't speak. My life was hard even though I was doing what I do best.

So life is going to kick you in the teeth. You're going to get sick, your spouse is going to get a terminal illness or a chronic illness, one of your kids is going to have some kind of difficulty or some kind of problem, you're going to get punched in the mouth financially. Something bad's going to happen to somebody that you care about. You're going to end up with some kind of permanent disability. And then it's going to be more important for you to then have your work or whatever not be sucking the life out of you, draining your energy, making you miserable, because you need it to be a source of strength to help you handle those other things. So life's going to be tough in so many ways, we don't have to make it difficult. And again, even if we think we need to build that, I think there's always ways to do that with your strength. I have a certain amount of physical resilience because I like to be active and I like to be outside. I'm not making my life miserable, I'm doing what I love when I run long races and I do that kind of stuff. I'd rather do that than not. If you told me I had to sit on the couch all day, that would make me upset, that would make me unhappy. So I think you can find ways to build resilience within the constellation of your strengths. The other worry people have is you become one-dimensional. But we always have more than one strength, and they can also be combined in a lot of unique ways. So I think there's an endless sort of set of possibilities with the way that we can combine and recombine our strengths and our interests and our characteristics that can create a tremendous amount of resilience. And if we have that goal of resilience, even that... part of resilience comes from the confidence that we can take on the challenge. If you've spent a life having success because you've built on strengths and you've seen that you have the competence to accomplish the things you set out to do, then when you get punched in the mouth you're like, "I can come back from this." And I'm going to use my strengths to do it, not I have to become a completely different kind of person in order to do that.

So I used my same set of strengths to handle the pandemic. I focused more on my family. I'm an achiever, so I set different goals—family goals, relationship goals. But also I had more time and energy to work on my running and my eating and my nutrition and my physical fitness. So I got super fit and I ran seven marathons in seven days, I ran a 100-mile race, I did the things I could do during that time that would have been harder to do during the other times. But I didn't have to not have my strengths or throw them all away or fix my weaknesses in order to have resilience during that time.

Ray J Green: Right, there are other ways to accomplish that same goal. Well, I know from a time standpoint I want to respect your schedule. I appreciate you hopping on. I’d love to jam some more. Before we go, where can people find you? I know that you've got plenty of books out there, good website... where's your preferred place for people to find you?

Dave Rendall: Yeah, I mean, drendall.com is my website. It’s got links to all the books, free videos, all the resources. The assessments are on there—free assessment for kids, free assessment for adults. Short versions of the video, videos of the actual kids' book—you don't even have to buy it, you can just watch it right there, especially if your kid has a learning difference that makes it hard for them to read, they can just watch the video right on there. But yeah, all my books are on Audible, they're on Amazon, and all the videos are on there. So yeah, check out drendall.com—my first initial because some David Rendall out there has had the website for 20 years and hasn't done anything with it, but I can't get my hands on it. So some people think it's "Dr. Rendall," which is unfortunate—I don't offer euthanasia services. But drendall.com is the website.

Ray J Green: But you are a doctor.

Dave Rendall: I am a doctor, so that actually hurts it a little bit more because they're like, "Are you sure, Dave, that you're not secretly... is there a button somewhere that takes me to the dark web?" and there isn't. But maybe check it out to see if there is and then buy a book while you're there.

Ray J Green: Buy a book. I can personally vouch for the content you've been putting out—we continue to go through it. I just... pleasure to talk to you, would love to follow up and do this again. Thanks for your time.

Dave Rendall: Absolutely, I mean let's put another one on the calendar, I'd love to do it.