Hi folks, this is Mike Jay. I’m producing a video here that basically will become part of our TPOV [series], which stands for Teachable Point of View series. Because I had some questions in the R&D process, I thought it might be better to take more time to kind of go through this idea of actionable advice, which you’ll see on the webpage. I put a lot of information there for you.

I’m choosing this as an example. It just makes a good example because it’s really a well-done book. And anybody who wrote 65 Lessons to Their Kids is a hero in my book.

So don’t take it that I’m going to be taking this apart. Don’t take it as criticism of the quality and the value of this book. At the same time, you can read about the author, Anthony Pompliano, I think that’s how you say his name.

And the book is called How to Live an Extraordinary Life, which really attracted my attention. And what I did was, after I read the book jacket and stuff, I developed this process. You’ll see it down there.

It says, My Process Using AI. So there was the book, and then there was a professional firm that does abstracts and summarizes the book down to like, I don’t know, sometimes five to eight pages. I wasn’t exactly sure on this one.

And what I did was… I dropped that in chat GPT, and I said, look, you know, just give me the takeaways. And I just wanted this as an example. In fact, I’m promoting the book.

It’s actually a good book. I’m just going to show you how different the LeadU Way is contrasted with general ways of doing things and how we have grown up versus what we’re trying to shift in much more of a paradigmatic way. This whole idea of things are much more natural than people would assume.

I’m still finding ways to talk about this, just like Robert Sapolsky (Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will) is finding ways to talk about the fact that there’s no free will. So we both have a heck of a job in front of us.

In his recent book, a summary by }Get Abstract of How to Live an Extraordinary Life, which is then summarized by chat GPT 4.0 into takeaways for my lecture on living an ordinary but generative life.

The idea is, is that we don’t have to live extraordinarily. We don’t have to be great. What we really do is just have to stay on purpose.

And that means finding out what that purpose is. And that means using natural (helping functions) cues, scaffolding, support, and lift to get there. And what I’m going to do is I’m going to walk you through this process of how I look at and begin to show you that most of this falls under what Argyris calls and in a probably not as well read book as it should have been called Flawed Advice in the Management Trap (2000).

At the end or during this process, I’ve given you some quotes that he made, some ideas that he made, and I’ll talk about our abbreviations of his criteria and stuff for creating actionable versus flawed advice. But Flawed Advice and the Management Trap 2000, by Chris Argyris. He’s gone now.

But wow, what a legacy. What a legacy. Here’s the summary.

The thing about AI, which I’m going to continue to stress that people learn to use. It’s like the first time word processors came out. I’m that old.

People would not use them. It’s like typing and keyboarding. You know, my mother, when I was in eighth grade, my mother forced me to go to typing class, you know, and that for boys, that was just not something that you did.

In fact, the class I went to in the summer of, I don’t know, maybe, (19) Sixty two or three, somewhere around there. They were all girls.

It was absolutely the best idea my mother has ever had. And the best summer I ever had being the only boy with all those girls. It was really a wonderful, wonderful process, as you might imagine.

So I learned to type and type pretty fast. But most of the rest of people weren’t learning to type at that time. Just like when keyboarding came around, people weren’t learning keyboarding.

And now AI comes and people are saying, oh, you know, it’s different. We are to use, you know, chat. They say it hallucinates and it’s crazy and all that sort of stuff.

And yes, and that’s all true. But you should try to use it because, you know, I whipped that book down into a few takeaways and I looked at them and I said, well, you know, those are really great takeaways, but they only fit three, four or five percent of the population. So what can we… what can we do to up that ante? Well, that’s what I want to talk about.

So before I slice and dice these takeaways for illustration of how the LeadU Way is different because of… A fundamental, paradigmatic assumptional analysis.

In other words, what’s happening… Is a paradigm shift and it’s going to be like Jerry Clower said, it’s going to cook us mostly in the squat and we’re not… we’re not ready for it. So we’re not ready. We don’t have enough stuff to bake this baby.

And a lot of us are going to go by the wayside. So what I’m telling you, for those of you of my vintage and certainly anybody who’s listening to this, start using AI, start figuring it out, start making it help you as an expert. Now, it’s best when you know what it is you’re doing and you put that into AI and let it confirm it, because if you don’t know what you’re doing and you’re asking AI to come up with an answer, it will hallucinate.

It will tell you things that are not true and it lies. So you have to be careful about that. At the same time, it’s an extremely valuable tool that everybody has to get used to because… (e.g.) it’s speeded up this process that I did.

Like, I don’t know, I would have never done it otherwise. It would have been too hard. You know, take too much time.

We don’t have time. AI is going to shorten that time investment and really going to help as long as we check it, make sure it’s OK.

So here are the takeaways.
[From How To Live An Extraordinary Live by Andrew Pompliano]

We’ll try to get a space in there so we can see the takeaways. Living an extraordinary life begins with paying attention to small details. OK, if it’s not natural, then energy and information, which are details, are required to cope and adapt with unnatural CCR.

OK, what am I saying?

Well, basically, we have these requirements that are given to us because we breathe, essentially. As you get older, requirements are different. You breathe the same, but you have different requirements.

So what we’re talking about, CCR [Credence Clearwater Revival] was a favorite band of mine way back in the days. So I keep using that to remember Culture Conditions and Requirements. It’s extremely important that you remember that because our nature continuously faces requirements that are created by the conditions in the culture.

You have to understand that. In other words, the reasons why we do cope and adapt are not because of will, not because of discipline, but because of our nature. Because you got to remember, a lot of people do not cope.

A lot of people do not adapt. Why don’t they see the culture conditions and requirements and the gap that’s being produced between their nature and them? Well, they… they won’t do it because they’re not wound like that. And once we get to this idea of attributing cause and effect differently in terms of the nature of things versus what we could do….

In other words, it’s not what we can do. It’s what we will do over and over and over again. That takes an ordinary life and makes it into a life worth living, a generative life.

So that’s the important thing. The next thing he says, build good habits to help you. And I’ll put together this kind of composite as I go through these things, just pointing out some few things, because we don’t want to take a lot of time doing this.

But I did want to spend more time than just saying, hey, look at these takeaways. Doesn’t make sense for most of the people. So don’t follow it.

OK, I’m not saying that to some people [these takeaways] will make a lot of sense… to a few, these will make a lot of sense. But most of them, nobody’s going to follow. Just like Stephen Covey wasn’t able to do anything with his seven habits.

They talked the heck out of that thing. And today, kids don’t even know that existed. What happened? Well, because it wasn’t natural.

He did a composite. He researched 200 years of the wisdom literature. And found these [7 Habits] things to be true.

And they are. The only thing is they’re [a] composite. A composite means that things put together [artificially as a construct], they’re not natural.

They’re only natural for some people. And therefore, if you try to teach them to other people to [the] “be like Mike game,” you can’t do it because they’re not motivated and they won’t stay motivated. And while they can show competence; they can show expertise.

They won’t, over a period of time, do the necessary things for the compounding of the learning to cause them to be able to monetize it. That’s the important thing as we go forward today. It’s going to be very difficult, folks.

I hate to say it. I hate to be… this Christmas season and all that sort of stuff. I hate to be the Grinch.

But it’s going to be difficult to monetize much because AI is going to come in and change everything. And consequently, the demand for you without AI is going to be very low unless you’re a real skilled guy.

I met some guys at Electric Boat one time.

They’re the ones who build our submarines. And those guys can weld anything. They can weld underwater, weld upside down, weld anything.

And there’s a demand for those guys. Trust me. That’s why we can’t make submarines and boats very fast is because we lost all those guys and we didn’t retrain the new ones.

And we told them that. But at the same time, that’s what’s happened. So consequently, we’re losing a tremendous amount of wisdom in a lot of areas.

But AI is picking up the slack and all the things that you used to be able to do, including sweeping out a garage or being a janitor at the prison or all those kind of things, that’s all going to be done by robots and AI. So you’re going to have to change your thinking in terms of what you’re going to be able to offer in terms of monetizing. And while you’re doing that, one of my pet projects is to get people on purpose because you want to live your life on purpose. [It’s Natural] You do have a wired in purpose from nature.

You got to figure out what that is. Do some self-knowledge work, do some other work, and then you’ll figure out what to say yes or no to, which I wrote a book about… 10, 12 years ago, the idea of saying yes or no are the most important things. That’s what selects you into these issues where you need more money or you made a loan and it didn’t work out and all those. And now you’re under pressure and all that kind of stuff. So that stuff’s coming along.

Build good habits to help you complete essential tasks every day.

Well, Covey tried this and like I said, was found wanting due to the composite nature of these kinds of habits.

You might do one really well. That might be in your nature. The rest of them [might] be really hard.

So you can’t do all the things that you need. That’s the same thing with the extraordinary life.

Forget about an extraordinary life.

Lead an ordinary life on purpose. You’ll be extraordinary. I don’t know if you can get that nuance, that counterintuitive shift, but that [is where] everybody’s leading us, not everybody, most people are leading us down the wrong path because it’s marketing, because it’s neuroscience, because it’s all this stuff [people have learned over time from marketing to monetize].

They will not. And there is a problem with recognizing the fact that we are by nature wired a particular way to both select stimuli and have particular emotions, do certain kinds of reasoning; all that sort of stuff. Got to figure out what that is.

[In my mind, I was remembering and referencing the diagram here influenced by Damasio… http://www.leadu.com/damasio/]

And that… that’s the idea.

Don’t settle for being better than the worst. Instead, strive to be the best.

Well, I just don’t agree with that at all. My traveling experience led to an entirely different conclusion. So what that person [book’s author via AI Chat summary) is showing is they’re showing a lot of bias.

And… and that’s one of my paradigmatics—bias.

[There are “7” paradigmatics: capability, bias, style, level, role, valu, system dynamics.]

And you’ve got to understand when it’s about you… when it’s not about you. So don’t settle for being better than the worst, instead, strive to be the best. Only if you’re an achiever. Only 30 percent of us in America are achievers in the rest of the world it’s a lot lower percentage because we’ve gathered achievers in America… [where] people didn’t… couldn’t get what they wanted. [Where they immigrated from]

So they all came here [USA] and [are] still coming here. We’re bringing achievement, motivation naturally into the United States more and more and more. That’s why we’re exceptional in a lot of ways… [related to achievement motivation as outlined by David McClelland in his book HUMAN MOTIVATION].

At the same time, it doesn’t help anybody who’s not [achieving]. So the idea of being best, don’t worry about that. Just… just be… be yourself.

That’s the key. I’ve told the story many times about a natural predisposition to non ambition in talking…. In an interview one time with Michael Commons, who I think is still alive and just did all kinds of wonderful things at Harvard.

One of the three big ones, Keagan, Commons and Fischer worked development from three different angles. And the idea was… is that he basically said to me one time, he says, Mike, what controls all that [achievement] stuff is just ambition. You could test for ambition and you could tell whether or not people were going to be achievement-oriented or whether they were going to just let the world go by or float down a river with no paddle or all that sort of stuff.

That was a really important comment, because until that time, being an achiever and having ambition, you project that. And it took me a long time, especially the last 15 years in the Philippines to understand, oh, there are people that are naturally not ambitious. What’s that like? And and watching those people and studying them, you know what? They’re pretty happy.

In fact, I would guess they’re [non-achievement motivated] more happy than most of us and they don’t have any “ambition.” So that being the better, best, great, extraordinary stuff doesn’t really work a lot… depending on environment, sports, the goals.

I missed a couple.

Communicate immediately when things have gone wrong.

I really like that, though there’s only one problem.

Well, at least half of us are introverts and they don’t do that. They don’t have a need to express. They… it’s just like the other day somebody said something to me.

Oh, yeah, I saw my grandson. He was… got a new air rifle shooting BBs at a target like like most of us in my generation did. And he wasn’t holding the air rifle correct.

And I thought maybe I should say something, you know, to my daughter and son-in-law. But I said, no, if I say something now, you know, they’ll think grandpa’s this and grandpa’s that. And I just didn’t say it.

I just said, hey, great that he’s practicing, you know, practicing wrong, but great. So I didn’t say anything about it. So I don’t think that you should communicate immediately when things have gone wrong that you see because some of us tend to be so critical that we communicate things [too critically].

And we…we we nip growth and relationships at the bud. So you want to be careful what you communicate in my view. So I don’t agree with that just from my experience.

And of course, some people won’t do it. So I ask introverts all the time who work with me. Why don’t you say something? “I don’t know”….

Is it a good idea to do that if you enter into a business relationship and the business purpose is about that [relying on communicating wrong things quickly]? Sure, but that’s back to CCR again, you know, culture, conditions and requirements. And that should be specified. And that’s where our nature has to go up and cope and adapt with those kinds of new rules, quote—unquote, when you’re working, they’re renting you for labor.

[Please keep in mind the author may have explained this differently and the AI hallucinated—this review is merely for illustrative purposes to make a point about the “nature of people, places and things! It is not a book review or a critique on the author’s experience… as hard as that may seem to keep separated!]

You got to do what they say or they won’t rent you.

Ensure the environment supports your goals.

That’s… that’s one of the important things that Argyris said in his in one of his four points. [Actionable Advice!]

And that… is so critical and important. I just want to agree 100 percent. But at the same time, some people don’t need the environment to support their goals because 15 percent of us don’t listen… don’t pay attention, won’t do what we’re told. I mean, you know… I are one, so I resemble that. So I can tell you that the least thing that we pay attention to is our environment.

That’s why we innovate, because we don’t care what other people think. You know, we don’t… we don’t care what people say.

Some of us are like that.

Not a lot. Thank goodness. But again, we don’t need an environment that supports our goals to do well.

So, again, I agree. At the same time, point out that nature has a lot to say about each one of these things [Takeaways]. And that’s was what I was trying to get across to the people that I was working with, the teachable point of view, because most of us will. [pay attention to the environment… Ubuntu!]

This is not actionable advice. It’s a great book. It’s not actionable advice because it’s like the seven habits.

It’s not actionable. It’s a composite. It means that if you’re like this person who wrote all these things, saw all these things, process these things from his bias, this is going to work for you.

But that’s only three, four, five percent. And a lot of you are going to be disappointed…. And say, I did all those things and it didn’t work.

Well, that’s not really what you did. What you did is what you thought you did. And you didn’t do them in the way that obviously this person does.

Because if you look at the jacket of the book and the way they do things, this is a special person. Well, give up trying to be special and just be ordinary, but have a purpose and be generative. That’s the idea.

Generally care about the people in your life and the things you do.

Again, this is very nature specific. Some of us just don’t like people.

They get in the way of the ideas. They get in the way of getting things done. They get in the way of that.

Is that bad advice? That’s great advice, just not actionable for a lot of people. So people will, you know, they say if you got five friends when you die, you’ve had a great life. And I’m still working on that myself.

But at the same time, that’s about the way it goes. So should you do that? Yes. But the shoulds [are] all over us… all of our lives… are what’s creating the stress and bad mental health in a lot of cases and all the problems with people not being able to live ordinary but purposeful and generative lives.

What makes a great “con” or narrative is that it’s partly true. In other words, the point is, is that if something’s partly true, you can make a great “con” or you can get other people to believe… if you just repeat it enough. But it’s not true, not a fact.

It’s only partly true. And this one [caring] is true. If you’re naturally empathetic, compassionate, caring, otherwise it’s back to that free will again and discipline.

Oh, you know, and I just say, oh my gosh, I mean, discipline for some of us, not going to happen. I mean, how many people are too fat and know it and don’t lose weight? I mean, we’ve got a whole drug industry that says yes to that. So I don’t know.

Some stuff we do, some stuff we don’t. It’s best to align the stuff we do, try to figure out the design from there. Acquiring as much [self] knowledge as you can helps you make the best decisions.

[A note on design… I’m under the impression that designing with the nature of things in mind produces SEE (Sustainable, Efficient and Effective) outcomes… rather than to continue to keep “pretending”… you’re going to lose weight if you eat everything in sight and don’t exercise!;)]

Acquiring as much knowledge as you can helps you make the best decisions.

This is the best attribute for curiosity. The only problem is very few people are curious. Most people just want to learn what they need to learn and go on.

They’re not curious. They’re not worried about rabbit holes. They’re not worried about going here, going there… [thinking about their thinking = curious in Reiss Profile]

Yeah, there’s…Hayek said, Frederick Hayek wrote in economics, you got to keep things free. So 15% of the people who are curious can do and innovate and raise society up. I do believe that.

At the same time, telling most people to learn is boring. That’s why I’m telling you to do AI, if you’re not already motivated or don’t understand the reason, you’re not going to do it. Is it a good idea? Probably.

Will you do it? No. Just like eating better food will make you skinny. True.

Exercise is good for you. Yeah. But, you know, if you don’t have to, and you’re not motivated to do it, you won’t.

So let’s… let’s be real.

You know… I had a friend [Mahan Kalsa] one time… developed a program said, you know, if you can’t be real, let’s not do it. [Lets Get Real or Let’s Not Play, 1999]

There’s a lot more to say as we add other paradigmatic, metasystematic, systematic, formal, [anstract] and concrete assumptions about the way you lead.

Just back those (previous list) down from most complex to least complex. If you’re looking at hierarchical complexity. But that’s the thing that we need to do and need to also leave a space right there.

Because we basically, I sourced this on the professional edge, which I wrote, I don’t know, 30. No, it wasn’t 30. It’s 20 something years ago about Argyris because this book came out in 2000.

So what’s 24 years now? I… I read it right when it came out. Fortunate. Two people really fortunate in 2000 for me.

Well, I guess maybe a few more, but Stephen Reiss with the Reiss [Motivation Profile [RMP] and wrote the book, Who Am I? And I ran across that in a place where we stopped to kill some time and flawed advice in the management trap because I read the 1974 book, How to Be a Professional or something like that, which is mostly out of print.

[https://archive.org/details/theoryinpractice0000argy/page/n7/mode/1up]

I think Georgetown has copies of it that have been reprinted. I remember getting one there a dozen years ago or so.

But Chris Argyris, FLAWED ADVICE IN THE MANAGEMENT TRAP. He was the first person to help me understand why this [advice business and coaching] is… [was] not working. And so actionability, actionable advice is so important because so many of us are trusted advisors.

Well, and that’s what we built up. I built a whole set of models in LeadU that we can coach and advise and teach and help people sort of not go down the path that most people are going. And that is going to be contrary to their own purpose and probably [following] somebody else’s purpose.

Although three to five percent of people want to do that; they want to use somebody else’s purpose, not their own. But that’s… that’s natural also. So the teachable point of view now summarized with BDKS, I call it “Bee Dicks”.

[Behaviors, Design, Knowkedge, System]

For some reason, I can remember that it [BDKS] just starts out with…you have to specify the right kind of behaviors that get things done. So if he says, you know, if you go back up here and says and he probably does in the book something like acquiring as much knowledge as you can helps you make the best decision. I’m sure he tells you how to do that, but I bet he doesn’t tell you how to do that… if you don’t want to do it!

So you got to figure out another different design. That’s the second one. So you’ve got the behaviors… know what they are.

It’s like they specify behaviors and processes and things in the gap between CCR and you as an individual and what you need to get done to cope and adapt to that gap.

Well, those are the behaviors. Then you need a design because the design is important because if you aren’t naturally wound in that particular way, you won’t do it.

You can do it and they can test you and you can do it just fine, but you won’t keep doing it because you’re not motivated to do that. You’re motivated to watch TikTok or, you know, talk to people on the phone or whatever. So the design has to be there to make sure that the behaviors that you will do that are required are in sufficient quantity that competence yields productivity.

You know, it’s just that simple. Now, knowledge, skills and experience. You got to have that.

We all can pick that up if we’re really motivated to do something like I’m motivated to do this video for you. So I figured out all kinds of things that I have to do to do this video for you, even though 99% of them and 99% of the people around me don’t want to do [them]. But you have to do them if you want to do a video.

So the thing is, that’s knowledge, skills and experience. And then back to his environment, the system or what I would call a step up. The metasystem.

And of course, the paradigm signals what the metasystems in that paradigm are going to do. So once you get to paradigm, you’re kind of at a bounded, finite place, you know, where you can dissipate the energy and information and stay pretty much organizationally closed, but energetically open. Our friend Prigogine.

[Won Nobel Prize for theory of “dissipative structures”].

But the idea… there in the metasystem, that’s got to support the rest of that process. And if it doesn’t support it, you’re going to get what the system supports. What gets rewarded gets done.

That’s from our friend Michael LaBeouf way back in the 90s, talking about THE GREATEST MANAGEMENT PRINCIPLE. So you have to understand that. Now, what I did as we close this… is essentially [there] are four basic assumptions which exist to guide the formation of dynamic inquiry.

That’s the inquiry that we use with this system. And these came from Chris Argyris. And I try to give you the resources there so you can find them. [Argyris notes are on: https://www.leadu.com/news/current/the-leadu-way/actionable-advice/]

What I did was, is I basically took exact quotes from his material and then a couple of massaged quotes that I had from Professional Edge that I’d sort of changed a few of the words. But I wanted you to see his exact words so that you really see that he did say this. And it was important because nobody that I’m aware of or that I’m coaching, unless I’ve been coaching them for a long time or advising them for a long time, gets this stuff.

It’s just counterintuitive. It’s hard because people think that we can be all we can be. And so everybody is figuring out your dream list and your bucket list and all these things, and they’re using that to [try to] be happy.

And it’s not going to make you happy because that’s what you want, not what you need. So we at LeadU are attempting to climb the biggest hill right along that “free will” hill with Sapolsky. And it’s a 500-year track.

At the same time, somebody’s got to start it somewhere. And we’ve got to show how it works. And we’ve got to show how you can do it.

And we’ve got to show all those things. And that’s part of how this teachable point of view on actionable advice fits into in terms of where we’re going with this process of saying, hey, the reason why we do X, Y, and Z is to create actionable advice. Actionable advice is good because people not only can do it, they will do it time and time again, which makes them better, which gets you into mastery that the person who wrote that book, Gladwell wrote about 10,000 Hours of Mastery… [In OUTLIERS:
https://thehardestscience.com/2014/03/25/what-did-malcolm-gladwell-actually-say-about-the-10000-hour-rule/]

Well, it’s just because you keep doing the same things over and over and better and better. And sooner or later, you sort of know how to do it like those welders making our submarines and aircraft carriers. They know how to weld everything. The same thing, most of them are retired now. And we didn’t spend enough time teaching people because we taught them these other new fangled ways. And when you come to a problem, it slows down because somebody didn’t know how to do it.

And that’s why the Chinese can build a boat in one tenth the time that the U.S. can now because they’ve spent time looking at these things, these basic things and understanding how to get them done. So we’re going to have to catch up. How do we catch up? Well, we’re going to have to find people who like to weld and give them a whole lot of experience pretty fast.

[Or] We ain’t going to have any boats. Of course, we may not need it if we develop some missiles. So I guess, you know, that could happen.

But at the same time, that’s the teachable point of view. That’s actionable advice before I get off the reservation here too far. I appreciate [you].

This is Leadership University. I’m Mike Jay. talking to you here from my holidays in the Philippines. And I thought this was important enough to make a separate video.

Hope you enjoy it. Talk to you later.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

Edited by the speaker.

Join us,
Our team at Living & Loving Inquiry

Mike R Jay & Gary Gile
Founders @ The NEW LeadU

Subscribe @ leadu.com/news

PS: For clarification

1. If you just want notice of the LeadU blog posts subscribe @  leadu.blog
2. If you want the blog content by email, our weekly newsletter, and breaking news, subscribe @ leadu.com/news.
3. Disclaimer

Notice: To pre-order a copy of Mike’s latest book mentioned in some of his posts in e-book format for $6.97 (available early 2025 and/or $39.98 hardcover (preorder) with autograph which will ship by the 2nd quarter 2025, visit HERE to make your selection.