Welcome to Nobody Told Me.

I'm Laura Owens.

And I'm Jan Black.

And on this episode, we'll get some expert insight into what it takes to succeed at the

highest levels.

Our guest is social psychologist Ron Friedman, who's developed a game-changing approach to transform

the way you learn new skills, generate creative ideas, and think about success.

He's written about it in the new book, Decoding Greatness, How the Best in the World

reverse engineer success.

Rodney, thank you so much for joining us, and there are so many questions I hardly know where to begin.

But tell us what inspired you to write decoding greatness.

I'm a social psychologist who studies top performance.

And as a social psychologist who studies top performance, one topic that

fascinates me is how people achieve great things. In other words, how did those at the top of their

fields, whether they be artists, athletes, inventors, or entrepreneurs, how do they get there? And what I

discovered while doing some of the research is that in many cases, the stories

we've been told about success are wrong.

You say that a lot of these success stories come from people following what you call

reverse engineering.

How do you define that?

Reverse engineering simply means studying the best in a field and then working backward to

figure out how they did it. In Silicon Valley, it's well known. There's a long history of coders

...