Episodes

  • Habit three: be the signal, not the noise. EP.1: The constructive clash of human emotions.

    Habit three: be the signal, not the noise. EP.1: The constructive clash of human emotions.
    Oct 3 2023
    The trendy advice on psychological “safety” feels like an emotional bomb shelter from debate, emotional clash, and negativity. In reality, it’s a creative dead end where the truth stays buried. Ask creators. Ask science. Safety—creative safety—is a little countercultural, even counterintuitive.There are thousands of articles on expressing emotions at work. Silencing “negative” emotions outnumbers expressing them, three to one. The champions of the ratio? Coaches and consultants. And the rebel backing the underdog? Science. This episode is dedicated to rebels.At the right intensity and intent, negative emotions fix what’s broken, dig up the truth, ignite revolutions. They spark friendly friction and beneficial “battles.” It’s how creators and leaders turn teams around, shatter conventions, and shock people out of assumptions into the truth. All while building trust and unity without washing away individuality.Learn more about the work we do and the elements of gravity at https://schoolofgravity.com/our-work. You can reach us at hello@schoolofgravity.com.Steven Titus Smith, coauthor of I Am Gravity, presented this episode. You can read more about the authors here.Here’s the episode transcript:Teams that disrupt industries, create uncontested marketspace, or cure the disease of mediocrity have unorthodox communication habits. The kind that would make most soft-skill communication courses squirm. That’s because truth-telling, truth-hunting conversations are not soft:“Create dissension and disagreement rather than consensus. Decisions…are made well only if based on the clash of conflicting views…It is…the only safeguard against the decision-maker’s becoming the prisoner of the organization.” Peter F. Drucker, The Essential Drucker“You need storms…if every day is sunny and it doesn’t rain, things don’t grow. And if it’s sunny all the time—if, in fact, we don’t even ever have night—all kinds of things don’t happen and the planet dries up.” Brad Bird, Pixar, via Ed Catmull’s Creativity Inc.“You need executives …who argue and debate—sometimes violently—in pursuit of the best answers…Phrases like ‘loud debate, ‘heated discussions,’ and ‘healthy conflict’ peppered the articles and interview transcripts…The entire management team would lay itself open to searing questions and challenges.” Jim Collins, Good to Great“…[depart] from the conventional logic…robustly scrutinize every factor…” W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, Blue Ocean Strategy“If your disruptive product or service is not yet good enough and your team seems enthralled…raise a big red flag. If your team assures you that you’ll succeed because a new venture fits your company’s core competence, tell them that you can’t deal in fuzzy concepts.” Clayton M. Christensen and Michael E. Raynor, The Innovators Solution[Emphases added.]Heating things up doesn’t come naturally to most of us. Culturally, we spend a lot of training time and educational ceremonies cooling down conversations and keeping things upbeat. No one wants to make waves in the “pool of shared meaning.” Sixty-one percent of the people in one of our surveys said they need a lightning rod to get a little debate started and a surge protector once it starts. The balance is hard to strike.Let’s be clear about psychological safety, which at first appears to be the haven from debate, conflict and emotional clash. Doesn’t true safety mean it’s okay to be annoyed with bureaucracy, bored by average products, frustrated when we fail, aggravated by bad policy, alarmed by contentment, uneasy with company politics or impatient with slow budget approval when an opportunity is slipping away—and to passionately express it? Aren’t those emotions sometimes precisely how broken things get fixed and revolutions start? Activists don’t march on Washington with picket signs of mild irritation. No one breaks the grip of good with a gentle tug. Going home at night unresolved and a little irritated with each other isn’t the end of the world if everyone knows it’s not the end of the conversation or the relationship. In the name of progress, the goal isn’t always to lower the tension. You may need to raise it. And yet it’s talked down.There are thousands of articles on emotion in the workplace. We randomly sampled 100. Eliminating negative emotions wins by a 3:1 margin. Who’s behind the three? Consultants and coaches. Who’s on the side of the one? Science. “Trying to impose happy thoughts is extremely difficult, if not impossible, because few people can just turn off negative thoughts and replace them with more pleasant ones. Also, this advice fails to consider an essential truth: Your so called ‘negative’ emotions are actually working in your favor,” wrote Harvard Medical School psychologist Susan David. “In fact, negativity is normal. This is a fundamental fact. We are wired to ...
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    15 mins
  • Habit two: see what they can’t, say what they won’t. EP.2: Cure-iosity.

    Habit two: see what they can’t, say what they won’t. EP.2: Cure-iosity.
    Nov 1 2023
    Learn more about our work and new book at https://schoolofgravity.com/. You can reach us at hello@schoolofgravity.com.This episode was presented by the author, Steven Titus Smith. Here’s the transcript (copyrighted): Straight out of college with his Ph.D., on his first project with his first team at his first job that happened to be a Fortune 100 aerospace company, John was, in every -way- possible, --new. and That was his only advantage.To learn the ropes, the company placed John on a team trying to fix a major problem with a satellite in orbit. The satellite cost $1.2 billion to build and $200 million to launch. Bringing it back to Earth and sending it up again would cost a few hundred million dollars. The engineers—all experienced, all with the company for at least a decade—had worked on a fix for weeks. When John arrived they were still at square one.After a few days of listening and asking few (very few) questions, John couldn’t sit on the sidelines any longer. He spoke up. Maybe they were thinking about the problem all wrong. The team courteously listened. And then ignored him.On the face of it, square one seems the perfect place for curiosity to thrive. It is—sometimes. But the pressure to do something fast and “right” weighs so heavily on the souls of the people inside the square that skipping along the surface of curiosity substitutes for diving. John decided to dive.Tenaciously curious, John experimented, --talked to engineers one by one, dug into details and fine-tuned his ideas. Armed with a proposed solution, John entered the next big meeting, shared his ideas and got a response: Highly improbable. Won’t work. One engineer told John to ease into the culture before debuting rookie solutions to complicated problems. Whatever John was pitching, the straight-edge puzzle-people weren’t buying. The work of a 1950s sociologist helps us understand why.The resistance.Sociologist Everett Rogers developed an adoption curve of new ideas that’s used in everything from technology to farming. The phrase “early adopter” comes from his theory. The adoption curve spans from innovators and early adopters (16%) who are open to new thinking or trying something new—initial flaws and all—to laggards (16%) who adopt an idea only when everyone else is using it and they can no longer avoid adoption without complete withdrawal from civilization. No surprise that 84 percent of adopters (from early majority to laggards) lean toward the less open, incurious, secure side of the curve. Certainty is a security wall to keep new away. “Throughout the history of scientific thought,” wrote the late Stephen R. Covey, “most laymen have been so anxious for certainty and have had such a low tolerance for ambiguity and change that they have been eager to say that a theory is a fact.”The danger of quick resistance to new thinking is that the resistance may sound intelligent. Maybe it is. But it comes too early to be constructive. All it does is keep new ideas and new people cornered. In the face of certainty and resistance, or when you’re under pressure to fit in and say nothing, curious human beings—the perceptive ones—have to listen to opponents (not our first instinct, especially if we’re cliquing), argue for and against their own ideas so others aren’t afraid to speak, inspire provocative questions, switch perspectives, walk away from the tide of opinion, resist rigidity, cut to the chase, ask questions that seem obvious but are not, be fascinated by views outside their private universe (not just tolerate them or pretend to pay attention), lean on their tribe(s) and teams for camaraderie but not as a crutch, make the uncomfortable comfortable, the comfortable uncomfortable, and spark the incurious to be curious. John leaned on all the above to start a right-to-left migration to his idea.Finally, one senior engineer, Kim, looked more closely at John’s concept. Maybe his second look was sincere, or a covert tactic to shut John up. Either way, Kim gave John one-on-one time to explain his solution again. In the next meeting, Kim gave John the floor. John plunged into the details. He exposed and examined every angle of the problem. It would cost $50 million to fix, not a few hundred million. They wouldn’t have to bring the satellite back or launch a new one. John’s idea won. It saved the satellite and a stack of cash for the company, not to mention downtime for the government agency relying on the satellite for national defense.The engineers asked questions during the project, but questions don’t always convey interest. Curiosity was gridlocked by the VERY coveted thing every engineer and rocket scientist in every meeting had: experience and expertise. John wanted the truth. Everyone else wanted to be right. We can’t ignore expertise, but we can’t worship it either. Breaking the hypnotic habit of idolizing expertise begins with an advantage psychologist E. Paul Torrance ...
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    15 mins
  • Habit one: play big, stay small. EP.4: We is greater.

    Habit one: play big, stay small. EP.4: We is greater.
    Nov 2 2023
    Learn more about our work and new book at https://schoolofgravity.com/. You can reach us at hello@schoolofgravity.com.This episode was presented by the author, Steven Titus Smith. Here’s the transcript (copyrighted):As with every episode, this episode assumes you’ve read or listened to chapter one.Moral codes have been a vague, volatile topic for a long time. The “blank-slate” theory of moral identity is a long-standing tradition—that we arrive in the world empty-minded, waiting for society to write morality into our brand new brains. As it turns out, that theory isn’t entirely correct. “The initial organization of the brain does not depend that much on experience,” wrote NYU (New York University) cognitive scientist Gary Marcus. “Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises. Built-in doesn’t mean unmalleable [or finished]; it means organized in advance of experience.” Or in the words of Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, “Nothing comes out of nothing, and the complexity of the brain has to come from somewhere. It cannot come from the environment alone because the whole point of having a brain is to accomplish certain goals, and the environment has no idea what those goals are.”Curious to uncover the first moral draft of the human mind if there was one, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and social scientist Craig Joseph reviewed decades of literature ranging from anthropology to evolutionary psychology. Searching for both cross-cultural differences and similarities, Haidt and Joseph found five foundational morals—now six, Haidt added one later—as the best candidates for what’s morally instinctive for every one of us from day one:CareConcern and compassion for the harm or care of others, especially those whom we perceive as weak or vulnerable.FairnessReciprocity, justice.LoyaltySelf-sacrifice, patriotism.AuthorityRespect, voluntary deference, even elements of love.SanctityVirtue derived from controlling what you do with your body and what you put into it.LibertyResistance to oppression and tyrants.Here’s a personal story of how the foundational morals come into play, often without thinking twice—or even once—about it.Not on the menu.A few years ago we left the office for a non-working, life-shortening lunch of burgers and fries at a locally famous grill. As we ordered, a couple behind us seemed to be arguing, but it soon became clear that the two-way argument was one-way abuse. The boyfriend was insisting that because of his partner’s stupidity and indecisiveness, he would order for her. The restaurant has only nine small tables, so everyone felt the social uneasiness. Not caring if anyone else heard or not, the man kept the abusive pressure on, saying that she should put on some makeup because she “looked like crap.” She apologized.As we sat down, the man pressed on with his verbal assault. He slid his car keys across the table at her. She tried to catch them but missed. They flew into her chest. From only three feet away, I turned and asked the man what the problem was. “You know how they [women] are,” he replied flippantly. I told him he shouldn’t be talking to her that way. Dave and I both tried to persuade him to adopt any moral to end the verbal abuse. That didn’t come without a risk. What would happen to her later if he got even angrier or felt embarrassed by what we were doing? What would happen to her right now if we escalated the abuse?Then, the man went to the bathroom. Dave turned to the woman and asked how he could help, offering advice and an escape. Meanwhile, fearing the possibility of violence and wanting protection for the woman, I asked the owner to call the police. She declined, saying it wasn’t her business. So I dialed 911 myself. A few men from another table joined the discussion, warning the woman that her boyfriend was a bad man.Returning from the bathroom, the boyfriend sat down and picked up the insults where he left off. While I talked to the 911 operator, a man from another table walked over and slammed his fist on their table and threatened the boyfriend, complete with colorful adjectives to make it clear that he was ready to intervene. Everyone else in the restaurant, like the owner, stayed out of it. The boyfriend left the restaurant to get something from the car. I asked his girlfriend if he owned a gun (yes) and if the gun was in the car (she wasn’t sure). I wondered if we were going to leave the restaurant alive.Still on the phone with 911, I looked out the restaurant’s glass door, waiting for the boyfriend’s return. Dave continued to talk with the woman. I wondered if the police would arrive before the boyfriend made his way back in. Soon a group of people dressed mostly in black walked toward the door. Was it the police? The SWAT team? Wait, why are they holding cameras? How did the media arrive before the police, or even know what was happening? Then John Quiñones from ABC News walked ...
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    21 mins
  • Habit one: play big, stay small. EP.3: Feeling powerful?

    Habit one: play big, stay small. EP.3: Feeling powerful?
    Nov 4 2023
    The part of our brain that detects human need—the “we-circuitry”—is fragile. Even a tiny dose of power causes it to short-circuit. In the psychology of power, sometimes power is subtraction by addition.This episode is about the unexpected science that regulates power, enabling us to erase irrelevance, unify the divided, and move the masses.You can get the first, full five chapters (PDF) of our new, upcoming book, I Am Gravity, plus a strengths and counterfeits fitness check, at https://schoolofgravity.com/. Just tap the purple button at the top of the home page.Learn more about the work we do and the elements of gravity at https://schoolofgravity.com/our-work. You can reach us at hello@schoolofgravity.com. Steven Titus Smith, coauthor of I Am Gravity, presented this episode. You can read more about the authors here.Here’s the episode transcript:If you failed project after project for six straight years, it may be time to quit. Or take a long, hard look in the mirror. Unless, of course, a mirror is the least helpful place to look for the answer. Ernesto Sirolli arrived in Africa at age 21 to help grow food near the Zambezi River as part of a team sent by an Italian non-government organization (NGO). The natives weren’t anxious to help. Instead of asking why the locals weren’t interested in agriculture, his team thought, “Thank God we’re here. Just in the nick of time to save the Zambian people from­ starvation!” After planting seeds and nurturing farms, the team watched the land produce magnificent produce, especially Italian tomatoes. And as soon as the tomatoes were ripe, a herd of hippos emerged from the river and devoured the crop. Bewildered, Sirolli asked the Zambians why they didn’t speak up before the hippos turned into harvesters. “You never asked.” Even good intentions may be the wrong intentions. Forty-one years later Sirolli delivered an impassioned TED talk in Christchurch, New Zealand describing his six years of failure despite long days and nights, noble intentions, and the mental shift that changed his fortunes: I decided when I was 27 years old to only respond to people, and I invented a system called Enterprise Facilitation, where you never initiate anything. You never motivate anybody, but you become a servant of the local passion, the servant of local people who have a dream to become better. So what do you do? You shut up. You never arrive in a community with any [preconceived] ideas, and you sit with the local people. And we become friends, and we find out what that person wants to do. Sirolli’s institute has since helped civic leaders start over 40,000 businesses in 300 communities across the world. Advising you to shut up and motivate no one may seem like the least inspiring way to start. Actually, it’s exactly what the science of inspiration begs us to believe.Nancy Duarte is a communication expert who cracked the code of inspiration after analyzing hundreds of talks dating back decades. The first line of that code has more to do with gravity than the magic of stepping on stage and working a crowd. She said, “Power springs from the presenter’s ability to make a deep human connection with others. Instead of connecting with others, presentations tend to be self-centered, which alienates audiences. Audience insights and resonance only occur when a presenter takes a stance of humility.” TED curator Chris Anderson lines up the sequence of inspiration in five steps: connection, narration, explanation, persuasion and revelation. The final four steps of Chris’s sequence hinge not on your words, your ideas, or your pursuit of the perfect presentation. They hinge on your connection to the audience. “You can only understand people,” wrote 1962 Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck, “if you feel them in yourself.” Moving people hinges on your ability to sync with the way they think and feel what they feel. As empathy goes, that seems straightforward. And it is, kind of. Ironically, the first thing you get as a leader is the main thing that disconnects you from empathy—power. Everyone craves power. It feels a little self-centered and subversive to vocalize, but it’s true. At least its effects. The freedom that money can fund. The control a degree or job title grants. The credibility knowledge brings. Life improves when you have the power to control it.[1] So, crave away. Except that power has such a potent effect on your brain that if you so much as feel powerful, even a little, the neurological process for empathy—the key that unlocks inspiration—starts shutting down. “Smart” cells in your brain, called mirror neurons, fire when you experience an emotion like happiness, fear, or sadness. Those same mirror neurons also fire when you see someone else experiencing emotion. If someone is sad, those neurons let you experience sadness firsthand rather than just imagine it. It may not be the same sadness, but it’s close enough to ...
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    10 mins
  • Habit one: play big, stay small. EP. 2: The competitors.

    Habit one: play big, stay small. EP. 2: The competitors.
    Nov 4 2023
    In a world loaded with titles, power, prejudices and ladder climbing, it’s hard to picture true equality. Bosses command, politicians divide, and CEOs oversee the hive of worker bees. And the widely-held belief? Take competition and hierarchy out of the equation and business morphs into a soft, semi-profitable love-in. Maybe you’re a believer. It’s a large, competitive congregation. And they’re losing.On the surface, there’s not much reason to reject the competitive creed. In fact, we keep inequality alive seduced by the illusion that it somehow makes us better when it actually hurts us. And the evidence speaks. A meta-analysis of 265 studies found competition almost never wins. When competition is absent, creative output surges by thirty-percent, communication improves by fifty-percent, and time to market increases by thirty-five percent. The good news? Ingenuity and progress thrive despite competition, not because of it.This episode is an illuminating exploration of competition and equality. We uncover why and where a competitive mentality trips (spoiler: almost always,) where it prevails, what fuels our tribal instincts (us v. them), and how shifting from a competitive mentality to an equalizing one uplifts the human spirit and boosts every metric that matters.You can get the first, full two chapters (PDF) of our new, upcoming book, I Am Gravity, plus a strengths and counterfeits fitness check, at https://schoolofgravity.com/. Just tap the purple button at the top of the home page.Learn more about the work we do and the elements of gravity at https://schoolofgravity.com/our-work. You can reach us at hello@schoolofgravity.com. Steven Titus Smith, coauthor of I Am Gravity, presented this episode. You can read more about the authors here.Here’s the episode transcript:From the time your alarm clock rings tomorrow morning, you will compete and compare. Depending on how much of a hurry you’re in, you will race for the fastest lane or slip ahead of the next person off the subway. You will compare the idea you shared in your meeting and decide how good it was versus someone else’s. You may hear what salary someone is making and decide how much you’re worth (for everyone, it’s more of course). But it isn’t just at work. You’ve been doing this your entire life. Born, raised, surrounded and submerged in competition and comparison, it isn’t going to stop anytime soon. Bigger house, quicker commute, higher IQ, chicer clothes, better physique, faster car, larger salary, nicer neighborhood, cuter kids, greater market share, bigger titles, bigger promotions, more exotic vacations—it never ends. It’s the current structure of society. There’s no clear case against competition on the surface. Except that the people who race solely to win inevitably lose. The fierce competitor inside you, or one you undoubtedly know, may counter that argument: some people can’t handle competitive pressure. The cutthroat world of competition is the real world we’re in and they better deal with it or deal out. If that’s your belief, grip it tight. Just make sure you know the rules of the game you’re playing and how the score is kept. If you do straightforward, by-the-numbers work that never changes then board the competition ship and sail away. (Sorry, speed away.) However, if you do deeply creative work, or are up against tough intellectual problems where you have to think your way out of questions that don’t always come with scripted answers, then competition fails. Drive author Daniel Pink lays out decades of science that features three elements of creative achievement, none of which have anything to do with competition: autonomy, or the desire to be self-directed; mastery, or the itch to keep working at something that’s meaningful to you; and purpose, creating something transcendent or serves a purpose beyond me. The less-is-more competition story isn’t simply a nice theory that fits only in the land of Weville. A meta-analysis of 265 studies over 56 years found almost no task on which competition beat collaboration. On nearly every financial or performance measure, competition loses. Psychologists Robert Franken’s and Douglas Brown’s work on competitive motivation and achievement found that competitive factors of work tend to be ego-oriented, and clash with traits like hope, optimism and ingenuity. Creative output is 30% higher when a competitive mindset isn’t the center of what drives us. Communication improves by 50%, time to market increases by 35%, and people are 20% more creative. But even staring at the bottom-line data, competition is still standard issue business mentality. “War metaphors invade our everyday business language: we use headhunters to build up a sales force that will enable us to take a captive market and make a killing,” wrote PayPal cofounder and venture capitalist Peter Theil. “But really it’s competition, not business, that is like war: allegedly ...
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    15 mins
  • Habit one: play big, stay small. EP.1.

    Habit one: play big, stay small. EP.1.
    Nov 6 2023
    Learn more about our work and new book at https://schoolofgravity.com/. You can reach us at hello@schoolofgravity.com.This episode was presented by the author, Steven Titus Smith. Here’s the transcript (copyrighted):This is part one of the book, I Am Gravity: radical humility. It assumes you’ve read or listened to the intro, the center of human gravity. this is a little more impromptu than everything else you’ve heard (or will listen to) in part because a piece of our work on humility is still under construction (for the book), so, this isn’t everything, but it is something.The epigraph for part one is from French philosopher, political activist and teacher Simone Weil. “Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought.”After taking the presidential oath of office in 1969-- amid the atmosphere of the Vietnam War, civil unrest, and assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, --Richard Nixon turned his attention to the economy and the war. In his first budget, Nixon proposed slashing government funding for National Educational Television, a cut that would jeopardize what would later be the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). At the request of PBS executives, and in response to the budget of a newly elected president, a 41-year-old Fred McFeely Rogers (the children’s television personality better known as Mr. Rogers) sat down at a table on May 1, 1969, before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Communications in Washington, D.C., to bargain for his future and PBS.The hearing was chaired by the smart, abrupt, stubborn, connected and slightly egotistical Senator John Pastore of Rhode Island. The Senator had, as one politician put it, made his “congressional bones,” by attacking public television. Rogers and his PBS colleagues had to make their case to a committee under pressure to slash PBS funding. Money meant viability. PBS wasn’t even “PBS” yet. It was the two-year-old Corporation for Public Broadcasting.Fred’s first job in television came as an assistant (which he said meant getting “coffee and Coke’s” for everyone) and floor manager of music programs for NBC in New York. In 1953 he was hired to work in programming by the new, chaotic, underfunded WQED TV in Pittsburgh. “All they had,” wrote Rogers’s biographer Maxwell King, “was their imaginations.” The next year he co-produced The Children’s Corner with Josie Carey, a new show allowing Rogers to reach his young audience. Rogers worked the puppets, Carey talked to the puppets and hosted the show. Then in the early 60s, Fred made his first appearance as “Mister Rogers” on a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation show called Neighborhood. As his experience grew, so did his aspirations. He earned his divinity degree in 1962. At his ordination, the Presbyterian Church asked him to serve children and families through television. Soon, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood on PBS was born. For Rogers, funding meant children’s mental health, a chance to heal issues of the day for a wider audience, and his own creative ambitions.As the hearing wrapped up its final day—according to Pastore a disappointing waste of time—and with less than ten minutes left in the meeting, the lead PBS executive finished his opening statement and slid the microphone across the table to Rogers.“In Boston, they prefer Fred Rogers to Superman, I Spy, Batman, Thunderbird, even Perry Mason and Merv Griffin. Mr. Rogers estimated 99,600 homes with kids 2 to 11 represents a third of that audience. The show reaches an estimated 113, 000 homes for an overall rating of 4 and a share of 10. Mr. Rogers is produced by Pittsburgh WQED TV.Now, Mr. Rogers is certainly one of the best things that’s ever happened to public television, and his Peabody Award is testament to that fact. We in public television are proud of Fred Rogers, and I’m proud to present Mr. Rogers to you now. All right, Rogers, you’ve got the floor.Senator Pastore, this is a philosophical statement. And would take about 10 minutes to read, so I’ll not do that. Uh, one of the first things that a child learns in a healthy family is trust. And I trust what you have said, that you will read this. It’s very important to me. I care deeply about children. My first children...Will it make you happy if you read it?”In nine words and two seconds, Pastore story changed the entire atmosphere of the room and the trajectory of the conversation.Pastore lived by a law of social physics: an object at rest stays at rest, or if in motion stays in motion, unless acted on by an outside force. He knew exactly how to use political force to change the speed and trajectory of people like Rogers and their proposals. Competence alone couldn’t prepare Rogers for this moment. His B.A. in music composition and day-to-day focus of songs, puppets, and children—brilliant as it was-- wouldn’t be enough for budget-shifting discussions with D.C. ...
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    44 mins
  • I AM GRAVITY, CH. ONE, THE ROOM WHERE IT HAPPENS.

    I AM GRAVITY, CH. ONE, THE ROOM WHERE IT HAPPENS.
    Jun 29 2024

    Peek inside the meeting rooms, hallways or garages for the ones who bend the arc of ideas or culture toward better and beautiful and you see some, well, unorthodox habits. The clash of conflicting views and violent disagreement in storms. Leap-of-faith assumptions that make no logical business sense. Naïve, piercing questions to jolt people out of preconceived ideas. Feeling disequilibrium in a crisisof confidence. And it’s good.

    Wait, what?

    How do confidence-shaking crises and disequilibrium not cause emotional vertigo? Why does the allegedly anti-soft-skill behavior make people feel alive and relevant instead of spiraling on a surge of cortisol? In a word, gravity, aka, gravitas.

    Gravity doesn’t run on type-a, hypercompetitive intensity. It runs on relevance, not status. It is captivating by insight, not charisma. Gravity is influence that pulls people out of certainty into curiosity, cuts through ego with a machete, flips the script on status by equalizing everyone in the room, balances us emotionally—if even by a thread—in disequilibrium.

    When a message is starved for meaning, a project lacks life, a startup needs a clue more than capital, or conversation is skipping along the surface, this book isn’t a self-help quadrant or communication model that looks like quantum mechanics. It changes your instincts.

    From science-shifting discoveries in the jungles of Tanzania to the whiplash of pivots in Silicon Valley, Smith and Marcum’s ten-year study makes us witnesses to the indispensable forces of gravity that shape who we are in a brave new world. This is the science and soul of, “Oh the places you’ll go.”
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    42 mins
  • THE BELIEVERS: I AM GRAVITY

    THE BELIEVERS: I AM GRAVITY
    Sep 13 2024
    11 mins