Light that spark fire nation JLD here and welcome to entrepreneurs on fire brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network with great shows like the MarTech podcast today we'll be focusing on how to reverse engineer success to drop these

bombs I brought Ron Friedman into EO fire studios doctor Friedman is a social psychologist who specializes in top performance he's the author of the best place to work in an amazing new book called decoding greatness how the best in the world reverse

engineer success in fire nation we're talking all about reverse engineering from Starbucks to the Ritz to Chipotle and so much more when we get back from thinking our sponsors in today's on demand digital world our ideal customers have more good content and products to choose from every hour then they could consume in a lifetime being good is no longer good enough the solution passion marketing download your free passion marketing ebook to learn how to become a top priority for your idea.

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hub spot podcast network hosts have your back listen learn and grow with the hub spot podcast network at hub spot dot com slash podcast network. Ron say what's up to fire nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people simply disagree with

what's up fire nation well thank you very much for the opportunity and what I would say is that the thing that I believe and that I've come to discover over doing the research on top performance is that the stories that we've been taught about success are wrong we've been taught two big stories about how people vault to the top of their profession

one is that greatness comes from talent this is the idea that we're all born with certain strengths and that the key to finding your greatness is to just find your talent and find a field that allows that talent to shine.

The second big story is that greatness comes from practice this is the Malcolm Gladwell idea practice practice practice eventually you'll get to the top but there's a third story and it's one that people don't often talk about but John I know that this is something that you're familiar with

and a lot of entrepreneurs and artists and inventors are familiar with and that approach is reverse engineering let's talk about that reverse engineering because you are a psychologist you study top performance and you discover something that you really weren't expecting through that process I'd love to hear more yeah what I discovered is that most of the people have gone to the top of their profession they're not relying on talent they're not relying on practice in fact there's a problem with the formula that practice will get you to the top of the top.

And that problem is that you can practice an idea you've never considered and so the best ideas don't come through hours and hours of practice they come by looking at what the best in the field are doing and then working backward to figure out how they did it and that turns out to be a remarkably common approach among top performers.

So like how would you run define reverse engineering I mean I think a lot of our listeners kind of understand it as a general term but like what is your definition my definition is finding the best in a field and then working backward to figure out how they did it now in Silicon Valley the idea of reverse engineering is very well known it's how we got the personal computer and laptops and even the iPhone but what most people don't realize is that reverse engineering is also house Stephen King and Malcolm.

Gladwell learn to write and how painters like Claude Monet and Pablo Picasso learn to paint and even how Judd Apatau learn to write comedy reverse engineering turns out to be far more common than anyone realized well that's kind of what I want to get into next because you wrote a book called decoding greatness I got a little bit into it during the introduction and you actually specifically wrote about the way that creative genius is reverse engineer different works and you know you admire it and then you know you're going to be able to do that.

You admire it and they admire it and like people that actually kind of go through that process are like wow this is pretty impressive and I know when you get in some specific examples later about the ritz and you know about different companies like Starbucks and Chipotle but can you give us some examples about the way that creative genius is reverse engineer first of all let me just say that there's a wide variety of strategies for reverse engineering I cover them in decoding greatness but let me just give you a taste of some of them.

All of them I would say have to do with looking for clues that reveal how an object was created so I'm a writer I can tell you the nonfiction writers often when they get a book they don't look at the table of contents you know what they look at first they go to the bibliography at the end because that tells them the sources that went into creating that book.

Photographers when they look at images they don't just look at the subject at the center of the image they look for clues like the reflection in the eye of the subject which tell them where the light source was placed or they'll look at the length of the shadows which tell them the intensity of the light the light source or the time of day in which the photo was shot.

The chef often ordered dishes to go so they can spread an intricate sauce across a white plate and parse out the ingredients sometimes there's a magnifying glass involved but the critical thing is not just to enjoy an object passively but to continuously think how was this constructed what can I learn from this and how does this apply to a project I'm working on.

So many fascinating things here fire nation believe me we're going to be talking about some specific examples details I mean I already mentioned Chipotle and star bucks when we talking about Barack Obama as well the risk Carlton some really cool things but first and foremost like how can we fire nation find the hidden patterns inside like our favorite books or website or different Ted talks like break that down for us.

The first thing you want to do and this is something that you can do in any profession doesn't matter what field you're in first step is become a collector now when we think about collections we think about physical objects we think about wine or artwork or stamps that definition is too narrow.

The best designers collect logos the best copy writers collect headlines I'm a writer I collect academic articles I collect stories I collect powerful words the more you have in your collection the more you can start to play a game called spot the difference remember spot the difference you played as a kid where you had two images side by side you look for discrepancies that's what you want to do in your collection is you want to compare what's in your collection against what didn't make your collection and then think about what's different.

And think about what's different about these examples and by playing spot the difference by continuing to collect great ideas number one you're much better at figuring out what it is that makes things resonate but number two is you now have a museum you can visit for inspiration the next time you need to create so if you're a marketer start collecting websites start collecting emails that are resident for you if you're a presenter start collecting Ted talks or presentation decks you can do this for anything is just compare what is unique about the product.

What is unique about the items in your collection start identifying what it is that's standing out and then this is the critical piece john is you want to templatize it in other words take what you have found figure out what's working there and then create a template for yourself so that when you need to create something you can start by looking at that template and you can do this for Facebook ads to I mean really the opportunities are limitless limits less fire nation and one thing I love about you are on is that you really do your research I mean I did share a little bit in the end of the day.

I did share a little bit in the introduction about your first book the best place to work and of course you know now we're going to be diving into more details with what you were doing research on to write decoding greatness but in your research like you found that copying actually makes us more creative not less creative which I think is

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