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Daniel Goleman, "Focus: the Hidden

Driver of Excellence" | Talks at Google.

MENG TAN: My dear friend Daniel Goleman

is one of the world's most recognized experts on topics
relating to emotion intelligence.
He is also an amazing author.
He has written more than ten books, and his book "Emotional
Intelligence," that one book alone,
sold more than 5 million copies.
He has received many awards, and he
has been nominated twice for the Pulitzer prize.
On a personal level, Dan is also the person most responsible
for me becoming an author.
So back in 2007, Dan and I, with a bunch
of distinguished friends, co-created something
called "Search Inside Yourself," which is
became a very popular curriculum in Google and beyond.
And I remember in 2009, Dan and I
were taking a walk right there.
I remember the exact place and exact time.
We were taking a walk where I was
trying to convince him to write a book on "Search
Inside Yourself."
And what he told me was, he said, I'd love to do it.
I just don't have the time.
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And then he looked at me, he pointed his finger at me,

and said, Meng, why don't you write the book?
I was like, me?
I'm an engineer, not a doctor.
Dammit, Jim.
Eventually, because of Dan's support and his confidence
in me, I did end up writing a book.
So thank you so much, Danny.
I'm really excited about Dan's new book,
"Focus-- the Hidden Driver of Excellence."
Skillfulness over attention is the foundation
of all higher cognitive and emotional abilities.
Attention creates the conditions for personal excellence.
Attention is so important that in "Search Inside Yourself,"
it is the first thing we train.
The first thing we train is attention.
Yet I think the subject of attention
itself is not getting enough attention, ironically.
And I cannot think of anybody better to write a book
on an important topic as Dan.
So my dear friends-- my dear friend, Danny,
I'm delighted that you wrote this book.
And I'm delighted that you didn't
ask me to write the book.
My friends, please welcome my friend,
and Google's friend, Dan Goleman.
DANIEL GOLEMAN: Thank you.
That's sweet.
I'm always happy to come to Google.
2007, that reminded me of something.
In 2007, there was a short squib in "Time" magazine.
And it said, there's a new word in the English language.
The word is "pizzled."
It's a combination of "puzzled" and "pissed off."
And it describes how you feel when the person you're with
takes out their BlackBerry and starts talking to someone else.
Think about that.
Both things have died.
That word and BlackBerry too.
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Things change quickly.

That says something.
I remember when I went around to publishers and said,
I'd like to write a book about attention.
One of them said, that's great.
Keep it short.
Because I think attention is a capacity-- a vital capacity,
as Meng was hinting-- that's really under siege today.
I'm most worried about our kids, actually,
but I think we all are kind of victims.
Here's something rather provocative.
Herbert Simon, Nobel Prize winner,
said, "What information consumes is
the attention of its recipients.
Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty
of attention"-- to the extent that you understand
that there are two kinds of attention.
There's the attention that we voluntarily direct,
and there's the attention that seduces us.
There are actually different systems in the brain.
One is a top down system from the prefrontal area.
This is when we decide to concentrate on our work.
We're applying that kind of attention.
But then there are the little seduction--
the endless seductions.
And there are more and more and more of them.
I get-- I'm writing away on my book and I get a little pop-up,
you've got an email.
That's a seduction.
That's an intrusion in sustained focus.
And because of the excellence of our technology
and the cleverness of people who design technology--
some of whom are right in this room,
I just realized-- our attention needs
to be paid more attention to if we're going to maintain or even
increase our capacity for it.
This also-- the fact that attention is threatened,
along with the fact that there-- in the last two or three years,
there's been an explosion of neuroscience findings
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about the attentional circuitry, which

has vast implications for us.
This has really, since I'm a science journalist,
enticed me to write the book that Meng refused to write,
perhaps luckily, now that I think about it.
And as I got into it, I realized I
had to rethink emotional intelligence.
You didn't mention that "Harvard Business Review" art--
yeah, the next issue of "Harvard Business Review," which
will be out next week, has a cover article by me
on the leader's focus, the kind of focus,
intentional capacities, that anyone who's a leader needs.
And we're actually all leaders.
I think of leaders as anyone with a sphere of influence--
not people on the chart, necessarily.
But to the extent that we all need
to get more control over our attention,
and it makes us good at the things that
matter in performance these days,
it's led me to revise emotional intelligence,
or my thinking about it.
And I'll share that with you.
There's an effect called-- in statistics, many of you
are probably familiar with it-- the floor effect.
It occurs at a place like Google.
It occurs at an Ivy League college.
It occurs anywhere, for example, that there's
a premium put for admission on IQ.
And it's an interesting phenomenon,
because it's rather paradoxical.
What it means is that IQ, which is a fantastic predictor
of the level of cognitive complexity that you can manage,
and that you can understand-- and therefore sorts
people into job roles and so on-- abilities.
Once you get selected for IQ, then excellence
becomes defined largely by things other than IQ.
And it's because of the floor effect.
And are you all familiar with the floor effect?
OK.
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So a little statistic-- so if you were to plot, say--

how's this going to be?-- IQ and emotional intelligence
into a scatter plot, you get a fairly random distribution,
because those are largely independent aspects of ability,
and they partake of different parts of the brain, largely.
So you have this pool of people.
And if this is the IQ axis, and you select the 99th percentile,
and this is the emotional intelligence access,
there's much less range of variation for IQ
than there is for emotional intelligence.
And the way this manifests in the organizational world more
generally is that if you look at what's called
a competence model-- does anyone know
what a competence model is?
Another term I should explain.
So when I was a graduate student,
my professor at Harvard, David McClellan, wrote an article.
It was very controversial.
He said, if you want to hire the best
person for a job, any job in any organization,
don't look at their IQ.
Don't look at their GPA.
Don't look at their personality profile.
Look at people in your own organization who
hold the role you're hiring for.
Identify the top 10% by whatever metric makes
sense for that job, compare them systematically
to people who are only average in that role,
and determine the competencies or ability
set that you find in the stars that you
don't find in the average.
That's now called competence modeling.
And it's done by world class organizations,
pretty much worldwide.
And what's interesting about competence model-- at least
what interests me-- is if you aggregate many different models
and they're all independently derived-- they're proprietary,
actually, because a company or organization wants
to know for competitive reasons, what
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should we look for in our hires?

What should we promote for?
What should we develop in people?
And they want to hold that closely.
But I aggregated 100 or 200 models
after I wrote "Emotional Intelligence," the follow-up
book.
And I only looked at two dimensions
in the competence models.
One was, if you look at the distinguishing competencies--
not the entry level competencies,
but distinguishing, the ones that mark the stars--
and you separate them in terms of purely cognitive abilities,
like IQ or technical skills, and on the other side of the ledger
you have emotional intelligence--
which is how we manage ourselves and how
we manage our relationships-- it turns out
that for leadership, about 80% to 90%
of the competencies independently identified
are on the emotional intelligence side.
Well, that makes sense, because leadership is not
about being the smartest person in the room.
It's about helping other people be as smart as they can,
which is a people skill.
And so emotional intelligence has four parts-- self
awareness, self management, empathy, and social skill.
And when I looked at that through the lens of attention,
I realized that the first and third components, self
awareness and empathy, are varieties of attention.
And social skill, actually, is a combination
of how we manage ourselves and what
we read in the other person.
So managing ourselves turns out to be
based on how aware we are of ourselves.
So I revised the model.
I'll walk you through some of that in looking at-- well,
I'm going to share with you this article that is coming out
next week in the "Harvard Business Review,"
so you don't have to buy it because you got
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the "Reader's Digest" version already.

So the first ability, or set of abilities-- inner focus,
I call it, which is being aware of what's going on inside you.
And that's exactly what you're teaching, Meng,
in "Search Inside Yourself."
You're teaching self-awareness.
And by the way, I see every variety of meditation,
including mindfulness, as a retraining of attention.
If you strip away the belief system
of any meditation from any tradition in the world,
you find an attentional mechanism
is being strengthened.
Would you do agree with that?
Yeah?
Yeah, exactly.
So for self-awareness, self-awareness
is really important in many rather surprising areas
of life, I think.
I have a friend-- I grew up in the Central
Valley of California, in the horrible midwest of California.
Don't stop there.
Just keep going to Lake Tahoe, really.
And there was a guy who lived down
the road in the next town who I got to know pretty well.
He was a really bad student.
He almost flunked out of high school.
He managed to go to a community college, found
his way to a film course.
He loved film.
So he got into a film school.
He did pretty well-- did a student film that
caught the attention of a director, got
hired by the director.
The director liked his work so much
that he let him direct a film.
He did so well with that that they let him--
a studio actually backed him to direct a script that he had
written before, when he was much younger.
That one did so well that a studio
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wanted to back him to do another script.

But he hated the fact that the studio had final cut.
That meant-- he considered himself a creative artist,
and he hated what they did in the final edit.
So he said, no way am I going to take that money.
I'm going to use the money that I got from the film,
finance it myself.
Everyone he knew in Hollywood said, you are crazy.
You do not risk your own money on a film.
He did it anyway, ran out of money.
Only the 11th bank he went to gave him the money to finish.
You have seen that film.
"Star Wars."
George Lucas is someone who considers himself,
and considers himself, first an artist.
The factory he stumbled into Lucas Film
was an accident of his living by his values.
And one of the strengths of good self-awareness
is that it helps us answer the question,
is what I'm about to do in keeping
with my sense of purpose, value, and meaning or not?
And the way it does it is by tuning us
into subtle signals that come from the bottom-up part
of the brain-- which is involuntary, automatic, and out
of awareness for the most part-- which also holds much
more information than the top-down.
And parts of that brain as we go through life
extract decision rules-- when I did
that, that worked pretty well.
When I said that, that bombed.
And when we face a decision point,
it summates that information for us and presents its advice.
Problem.
It has no direct circuitry to the part
of the brain thinks in words.
It has extensive circuitry to the gastrointestinal tract.
You get a gut feeling-- feels right or doesn't feel right.
Then we put it in words, after we get the gut feeling.
So George, I assume, had a very strong gut
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feeling-- I just can't do it that way.

This is an ethical rudder for us.
Howard Gardner, a friend of mine at Harvard,
studies what's called "good work."
Good work combines our best skills--
what we're excellent at-- with what we love doing,
what engages us, and what we believe
in-- our sense of ethics, values, purpose, and meaning.
In good work, when you align excellence, engagement,
and ethics, you have something to do that you love doing,
that it's a pleasure to do.
In fact, it gets you in an attentional state
which is the state where-- it's called
the state of maximal cognitive efficiency,
or maximum neural harmony.
Simple schematic.
This is performance.
And this is stress hormones in the brain.
And the relationship between stress and performance
is very well known in psychology.
It's curvilinear.
It's an inverted "u."
If you have good work, you're very likely to be up here.
This is the state some of you may know literature on.
It's called flow.
The flow state was determined to-- was actually identified
by researchers at the University of Chicago who asked people
in many, many areas of competence and of work
to describe a time you outdid yourself-- you were absolutely
at your best.
And they asked chess champions and they
asked basketball player and they asked neurosurgeons.
It didn't matter who they asked.
They're all describing the same phenomenological state.
There was a neurosurgeon who described
a very difficult, challenging piece of surgery he had to do.
He didn't know if he could pull it off before he started,
but he did it brilliantly.
At the end of the surgery, he looked around
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and there was a little rubble in the corner.

He said to the nurse, what happened?
She said, well, while you were operating,
the ceiling caved in over there, but you didn't notice.
You were so concentrated.
It's 200% concentration in a flow state.
And one of the pathways to flow is
through developing and enhancing concentration.
Other elements of concentration--
it calls on your best skills.
You're challenged at the top of your skill set.
Another, you're totally adaptable.
You're very flexible.
Whatever happens, you can change.
You're not set in some rigid behavior pattern.
Another element of flow that's very important-- it feels good.
The things we choose to do in life
generally are things that get us in some kind of flow
or micro-flow.
Flow is also where people work at their best.
Now, the state down here is basically boredom.
Because you're under-- you have a skill
set-- you may be a fantastic programmer,
but you're driving a taxi or whatever it is.
So you're under-challenged.
You're disinterested at what you're doing.
Actually, I doubt that it's true here at Google,
but in the working world at large,
disengagement-- which is what this is called by HR people--
is an enormous problem.
People will just do enough to keep their job.
They're not interested.
They're not engaged.
It's not good work.
However, what they do here is daydream.
And daydreaming is another attentional state
that has value.
Every kind of attention has a purpose and a place.
It's when they're out of place they're a problem.
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Daydreaming, it turns out, is what

the brain chooses to do 50% of the time.
There was a study-- psychologists at Harvard
gave people an iPhone app that called them
at random times of the day and asked them two things,
what are you doing now, and what are you thinking about?
In other words, is your mind somewhere else?
Are you daydreaming?
That's the 50% data.
The most daydreaming was when people are commuting, sitting
at a computer terminal-- I'm sure it's not true
of the people in this room, but other people.
And work, generally.
The most focused?
When people are making love.
Who would answer an app at a time like that?
This is just totally puzzling to me.
It happens.
So these are two different attentional states.
The third is when people are stressed out.
There's actually an article about this.
By the way, this axis-- the metric
for this is the levels of stress hormones,
particularly adrenaline and cortisol, in the brain.
So if you're way up here, it means
you're having what's called an amygdala hijack.
The amygdala is the part of the emotional brain
which is the radar for threat.
Our amygdalas right now are answering the question
amygdalas have asked all through evolution.
And it is, am I safe?
Is there a danger?
That's what the amygdala cares about.
The brain, you have to remember, was designed for survival.
The neocortex, the part of the brain that we use all the time,
that was like a later-- it's still a beta.
That was added way later in evolutionary history.
And in fact, the brain is designed still
to give precedence to the survival mechanisms.
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So if the amygdala thinks there's a threat,

it can hijack the rest of the brain, particularly
the prefrontal area, the part of the brain we take pride
in-- the part of the brain that manages attention.
And the amygdala has a privileged position
in the brain.
One neuron-long connection from the ear, from the eye,
from the senses.
So if gets an instant picture of what's going on.
There's a problem.
I don't know if many people in this room
are old enough to remember when television had static.
AUDIENCE: Yes.
DANIEL GOLEMAN: You remember the non-digital era.
Some people do.
OK.
So that's what the amygdala's looking at.
It has a staticky picture, because most of the signal
actually does go up to the top of the brain.
But the amygdala has a hair-trigger mechanism.
It has a kind of "rather be safe than sorry" point of view.
So it calls emergencies when actually there's not really
an emergency.
And just to complicate it, we now
live not in the biological reality, where there are saber
toothed tiger type threats, but we
live in a complex social reality.
So the amygdala is misinterpreting
social signals-- or interpreting them.
That guy's not treating me right.
That's unfair.
The amygdala is very childlike too.
So the amygdala might have a reaction
like, this guy's not treating me fair.
I'd like to slug him.
That's the way the amygdala thinks.
So the good news is that that signal
goes from the midbrain up to the prefrontal area.
And the prefrontal area brings together information
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from all parts of the brain.

So it might add something like, oh, but this is your boss.
So you don't hit him.
You smile and change the subject or something.
That's called emotional intelligence.
So people who are in this state-- which, were there
was an article in "Science" about that state called
"The Neurobiology of Frazzle."
People who are frazzled have an attentional hijack going on,
because one thing the amygdala does
is redirect attention to whatever's upsetting us.
If you're having a problem in a relationship,
you're going to be thinking about that problem at times
that you might want to be thinking about something
else-- like 2 AM, when you want to be sleeping.
That's the amygdala.
It forces our attention away from where
it might be if we were here to what it is that's upsetting us.
It also reshuffles memory.
Memory is in a hierarchy.
So when you're having a fight with your partner,
you can't really remember so well why am I with this person.
That's how the amygdala works.
So this is an attentional state which is very inefficient,
particularly when people ruminate.
There's a difference between constructive worry
and rumination.
Rumination is thought loops you can't stop thinking about that
are upsetting, and you go over the same thing over and over.
Constructive worry is when you think about it--
the amygdala wants you to think about it--
and you come up with something you can do.
And then you stop the thought.
You can go back to having more voluntary control
over attention.
So those are three very important kinds of attention.
I want to call your attention to one aspect of this
that I think is really crucial, particularly for kids today.
And that is the voluntary ability to get here.
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It's called "cognitive control."

When you do mindfulness, you're amping up cognitive control.
Just mainly for your information,
yesterday I was in Chicago.
And I gave a talk, and Roger Weissberg
was there from the Collaborative for Social Emotional Learning.
And he said he really sees this as a next step, the integration
of, basically, attentional training
with emotional intelligence.
So cognitive control is talked about,
depending on people's point of view,
in a lot of interesting ways.
Sometimes it's called the delay of gratification,
the allocation of attention, working memory, the resistance
to distractions, impulse inhibition, goal focus,
and learning readiness.
The level of cognitive control in a young child
determines how well he or she can pay attention
to what the teacher is saying, to the textbook, to the lesson.
It's absolutely essential for comprehension.
And there's a bell curve for this.
One of the first tests of cognitive control-- actually,
the most famous-- was done very near
here, at Stanford, in the Bing Preschool
there, which is on campus.
And they brought four-year-olds in, sat them down
at a little table, put a big, juicy marshmallow on the table,
and experimenter says, you can have this marshmallow
now if you want, but if you don't
need it till I run an errand and come back,
you can have two then.
And then she leaves the room.
This is a predicament that tries the soul of any four-year-old,
I promise you.
I've seen videos.
Some go and lick it and then jump back,
like it's a dangerous thing.
Some just sing and dance-- you know,
sing to themselves to distract themselves.
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About a third can't stand it.

They just gobble it down on the spot.
Another third wait the endless 10 minutes or whatever and they
get the two.
The payoff finding comes 14 years later,
when they're tracked down and the two groups are compared,
the ones who grabbed and the ones who waited.
And it turns out the ones who waited still
can delay gratification in pursuit of their goals,
which is what that's a test of.
But more interestingly, they have a 210 point advantage
out of 1600 points on the SAT.
Now the SAT is an achievement test,
it's a test of what you have learned.
It's not an IQ test.
And when I told this to the people
at Princeton that make the SAT, they were stunned.
Because they said, that's bigger than the difference
that we see between kids who come from a family where
parents have only an elementary school education and those
where one parent at least has a graduate degree.
But these are all children of people at Stanford University.
So what's emerging is that cognitive control
is an independent asset-- the ability to pay attention well.
This was really nailed by a study done
in New Zealand, where they took every child born in a city-- I
think 1,037 children-- over one year,
between ages four and eight.
They tested them rigorously for cognitive control.
And then they tracked them down when they were 32.
You can only do this in New Zealand.
Do not try this in Silicon Valley, I assure you.
And what they found was that a child's cognitive control
between four and eight predicted that child's financial success
and health in their mid 30s better than IQ
or the socioeconomic status of the family they grew up in.
Think about that.
It's very, very compelling.
And it's made me feel-- that and many other findings--
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that we should be paying more attention

to this aspect of attention for children.
It should be part of education.
Because in the study in New Zealand,
they found that children who between foreign eight
managed to boost their cognitive control had the same benefits.
And one of the conclusions was that, yes,
we should teach this to kids.
And in fact, if we taught it to all kids,
it would help the productivity of the economy.
People would be much more effective in their work.
So there are a number of ways to do it.
One of them I find really interesting.
I visited Sesame Workshop.
Sesame Workshop is where they put together "Sesame Street."
The day I visited, they're having a meeting
where all the writers were meeting
with two cognitive scientists.
Because it turns out that every segment of Sesame Street
is the translation of a finding in developmental science
wrapped in entertainment.
So they told me about one that's aimed specifically
at cognitive control in preschoolers.
It's called "the cookie connoisseur club."
I don't know if you've ever seen Sesame--
how many people have seen "Sesame Street?"
So you may remember Alan.
He has the store on Sesame Street.
Alan wanted to establish the cookie connoisseur
club, just like a wine club.
You take a cookie.
You examine it to see if there are any defects.
Then you sniff it.
And then you take a nibble.
Cookie Monster, of course-- this was meant for him.
He wanted to be in the cookie club.
But he could not manage to nibble.
He only could gobble.
So Alan used several reframes for him.
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And the one that worked was like the marshmallow test.
"Cookie, if you can just nibble now,
you'll get a lot of good cookies to eat later."
And that was the one that did it for him.
That is a lesson in cognitive control
that's aimed at toddlers, because the way toddlers learn
is through modeling.
When little kids watch other kids or grownups operate,
their brain is taking that all in.
So if they see someone manifest cognitive control,
that helps them a little bit.
Older kids.
I was in PS 112 in Spanish Harlem in New York City.
And I watched the kids who are from a really
impoverished neighborhood.
Is East Palo Alto still poor?
Sort of?
Not like it used to be?
OK.
So-- anyway, in New York, it's a-- the kids
there live in a huge housing project next to the school.
The teacher in this classroom said, you know,
the other week, a child came in really upset.
And I said, what's wrong?
And she said, I saw someone who was shot.
And she said to the class, how many of you
know someone who's been shot?
Every hand went up.
That kind of childhood-- very traumatic, very difficult.
And typically you would find that kids
who come from such a chaotic background
manifest that in classroom.
But this classroom was absolutely calm and focused.
And I realized why when I saw them
do what they call "breathing buddies."
Breathing buddies happens every day.
Each child goes to their cubby and gets
their favorite little stuffed animal,
finds a place to lie down on the floor,
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puts the animal on their belly, and watches

it rise and watches it fall.
And they count one, two, three on the inhalation and one,
two, three on the exhalation.
Basically, it's training in attention.
When you train the circuitry for sustained attention,
you get a "two for," because it's
the same circuitry-- it's intertwined
with the circuitry the brain uses
to manage distributing emotions and impulse.
So that's why you get the calm along with the focused.
There's another way to do this.
Meng might know about it.
It's from SEL.
It was developed by a friend of mine named Roger Weissberg.
It's called "the stoplight."
SEL is Social Emotional Learning.
Many schools now across the country
have a curriculum in emotional intelligence.
Basically in managing emotions, being
aware of them, in empathy, in getting along
and collaborating.
The stoplight is on the wall of every room.
It's a traffic light that says, when you're upset,
remember the stoplight.
Red light, stop.
Calm down.
Think before you act.
Yellow light, think of a range of things you could do
and what the consequence would be.
Green light, pick the best one and try it out.
And that's another way to teach cognitive control.
Yet another way, I had my grandchildren
play the beta version of a video game that's
being developed for the iPad at-- a group at Wisconsin.
Every time you breathe out, you tap the screen once.
And on the fifth breath out, you tap it twice.
And if you keep doing that, it gets
more difficult-- in other words, the challenge gets better
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and you learn more and more.

And secondly, you get a visual reward--
like if it's a desert scene, flowers will bloom.
They loved it.
But that is also explicitly designed
to teach-- to enhance cognitive control.
And then, of course, the best way
is what Meng has developed for us.
What's that?
MENG TAN: We developed together.
DANIEL GOLEMAN: We developed together.
I'll give you the credit.
So that's inner focus.
Inner focus is both self-awareness
and managing our inner world, particularly
our distressing emotions.
The second kind of focus is other focus--
knowing what's going on with people around us.
There are three kinds of empathy.
The first is-- what time is it now?
MENG TAN: It's 3:40.
DANIEL GOLEMAN: When am I supposed to stop?
MENG TAN: 4:00.
DANIEL GOLEMAN: You mean I have 20 minutes?
Is that right?
Well, forget other empathy.
OK.
So there are three kinds; cognitive,
understanding how a person thinks;
emotional, understanding and feeling what the person feels,
and feeling with; and empathic concern.
Empathic concern is not, I understand
what's going on in you, but if you're in pain, if you're
suffering, if you have a need that I can help you with,
I'm inclined to help you with it.
It's the basis of compassion.
And compassion, by the way, starts
with noticing what's going on with the other person.
There's a spectrum that runs from noticing the person
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to tuning in to registering what's happening

within them, empathizing, and then, if you can help,
doing so.
And I have a lot more to say, but it's all in my book.
Because what I wanted to get to is the third kind of focus,
because I think it's very salient here.
And there's a real problem in the world
that I think Google, or the talents in this room
and in this valley, could really help with.
Outer focus is a systems awareness.
And I think we all need to be aware of systems.
It could be organizational systems.
In an organization, who do you need
to influence to get a decision made
that you are trying to put through?
That's a kind of systems awareness.
There are family systems too.
Family dynamics are systemic.
And then there are the broader systems.
And it's the broader systems I want talk about,
because it's really a mess.
And I don't know if you know the terms
"wicked problem" and "mess."
They're actually technical terms.
A wicked problem is not understood
until after the formulation of a solution.
It has no stopping rule.
You don't know when you're done.
Solutions to wicked problems are not right or wrong.
Every wicked problem is essentially novel and unique.
Every solution to a wicked problem
is a one-shot operation.
There's no chance for a learning curve.
Now, to compound a wicked problem,
you have to look at what's technically called a mess.
A mess is a wicked problem that interacts
with other wicked problems.
Another characteristic, there's no authority
in charge of solving the problem.
 21

The people trying to solve the problem

are also creating the problem.
And time is running out.
Welcome to the Anthropocene dilemma.
The Anthropocene Age started with the Industrial Revolution
and has been increasing in ferocity ever since.
Geologists use this term for the current epoch where
we exist now to describe the fact that one species is
altering the global systems that support
life in the wrong direction.
That's the Anthropocene dilemma.
The real dilemma is that there are three systems operating
that don't mesh.
One system is-- one domain, rather,
is human systems-- systems of energy, transportation,
construction, industry, and commerce on the one hand--
are systematically degrading the eight global systems that
support life on the planet.
The poster boy, of course, is carbon.
But that's just one of many, many different kinds
of problems.
The real problem is that the human brain is not
designed to notice the problem.
The human brain does not have any perceptual apparatus
that lets us directly perceive this,
because it's too macro or too micro.
I mean, we're-- the human brain is designed to register, honey,
we have to talk-- that's threat--
but not what's actually happening to the planet.
The amygdala doesn't care.
It shrugs.
So this is a big, big problem.
And, you know, it puts us all in the predicament
of collectively doing evil, just by living.
Because everything we use has a footprint.
And a footprint is another way of saying
it has some level of destructiveness
for natural systems.
So there's actually a metric for this.
 22

It's called life cycle assessment.

Some of you may have heard of it.
It looks at, for example, these glasses.
And it says, well, glass.
In making-- glass is not a product.
It's a process.
You could start the history of glass when you get some sand.
And you're going to mix it with chemicals.
And you're going to transport it.
You're going to bring it to a place
where you cook it at a high temperature
for many, many hours, all of that.
At every step along the way, you can break down what's going on.
And life cycle assessment does it in a very fine-tuned way.
It says there are almost 2000 discrete steps
in glass, from beginning to end.
And at each step, you can analyze
an array of emissions and impacts on the environment,
on the health of the people who are connected with it,
and on the social well being of the people that
are connected with it.
And the metric-- there's a science.
It's called industrial ecology.
It's a combination of physics, chemistry, biology,
environmental science, industrial design,
and industrial engineering.
They are the ones who have this metric.
So now there is a way to analyze precisely
the damage we do just by living.
So I have-- this, by the way, is the depressing, guilt-provoking
part of my talk.
Sorry.
I have a friend who teaches life cycle assessment at the Harvard
School of Public Health.
He has his students analyze their footprint.
And they say to him after, and it's a very depressing thing
to do, the world would have been better off
if I hadn't been born.
Isn't that right?
 23

And he says, that's the wrong conclusion.

He says, instead of just looking at the footprint,
we should look at our handprint.
The handprint takes the footprinted baseline
and then calculates the metric for everything
good we do, everything that reduces our footprint.
He says, instead of just moping around about the footprint,
think about how you can keep building your handprint.
People can do it.
Families can do it.
Schools can do it.
Companies can do it.
There's an aggregate handprint as well as
an aggregate footprint.
If we're really responsible to the generations who
will bear the cost of how we're living now,
we would take this pretty seriously.
And I'm hoping somebody will.
My job is to tell you about it and to tell you
what I think some fixes might be.
But really, I don't have the answer.
There's a group at Berkeley and in San Francisco that
built something called Good Guide.
It's a website.
G-O-O-D-G-U-I-D-E. goodguide.com evaluates consumer products
in terms of their footprint using LCA,
and compares products against each other so you can make
a better choice.
There's one called "Skin Deep" just for personal care
products.
Personal care products might have 50 different ingredients
you never heard of.
They look in medical databases to see, well,
is this a carcinogen?
Is it an endocrine disruptor?
And it ranks lipsticks, eye gloss, according to toxicity.
Toxicity is one of the dimensions in this.
And that gives people choice.
I feel it's great that these exist,
 24

but you have to look them up.

I would like to see the cognitive cost of finding out
the impact of what we do and buy reduced to zero.
The cognitive cost is the effort you
have to make to find out the data.
So the cognitive cost is high now,
even though the metric exists, because people
have to look it up somehow.
It should be-- ideally, it would be there and evident the moment
that we are about to engage in the activity
or about to buy the product, or B2B if we're going to purchase
for an organization from another organization.
So one solution is transparency-- at least,
a partial solution.
The second is handprints.
The third-- I think we're in this predicament
because most of the platforms that are used-- chemically,
industrial, and so on-- were invented
before we knew about LCA, before we thought about consequences,
before it was really a factor.
The chemicals we used are largely
based on petrochemicals.
Well, petrochemicals, excuse me, suck.
The reason is that oil and water don't mix.
They never die.
Plastics, bad idea.
Styrofoam, bad idea.
Better idea?
Two students at Rensselaer Polytech
invented a styrofoam, which also never dies,
that is made out of rice husks and mushroom roots.
And it works just as well.
In fact, General Motors is using in the dashboard of cars.
Who knew there was styrofoam in the dashboard of you car?
But still, better they use this than the other kind,
because it decomposes.
And we really need to start thinking along
the terms of bio mimicry.
How does nature do it so elegantly?
 25

We do it so crudely.
We could be much better at it.
There are wonderful models everywhere.
So that's another thought I had about what we could do,
reinvent everything.
Another thing I'd like to see is systems education
for kids in school, so that this way of thinkingcame naturally to kids
because it's
embedded in the curriculum, K through 12.
And LCA is part of your math.
You could be-- this whole science
could be part of all kinds of courses.
And the other solution, I don't know.
What do you think?
I'm just leaving you with a question.
Because, just to wrap it up, I went to a conference at MIT
on global systems.
And I struck by two things.
One was John Sterman, who's the head of the systems dynamic
unit at MIT, said, our biggest problem is system blindness.
And the other was what the Dalai Lama said.
He said, whenever we face a decision,
we should ask ourselves, who benefits?
Is it just me, or a group?
Just my group, or everyone?
Is it just for now, or for the future?
Thank you.
MENG TAN: OK, we have about ten minutes for questions.
Jordan, do you have the mic?
OK.
So Jordan has access to Dory.
He can ask the first couple questions.
And then the rest, if you have questions,
you can queue up behind Jordan.
JORDAN: Hello.
What's the relationship between focus and creativity?
Often, if I pour all my focus into a problem,
I fail to see better solutions that
are obvious when stepping back a bit.
 26

DANIEL GOLEMAN: Yeah, you named the solution.

Actually, it's the good side of this state.
It's daydreaming.
Because the classical stages in solving a creative problem
are begin with focusing, with effort, and gatheringall the information,
trying out all the solutions
you can think of.
And if you're still baffled, you let it go.
And you daydream.
You go for a walk.
You take a shower.
The annals of science and math are
full of instants where-- for example, a mathematician
grappled with an equation for years, could not solve it,
and the answer came to him as he was getting on a bus.
Because in that day-dreamy state where your mind is wandering,
you have more access to the bottom-up part
of the mind, which, remember, registers everything you know.
And that can put together two discrete elements that
have never been combined, but that
operates in a useful way, which is a creative product.
Then, of course, you have to focus again to execute.
That's another-- I mean, then you need venture capital
and oh my god, it's like a headache.
Did you have another question, Jordan?
JORDAN: Yeah.
Can you give us the top three points
from the "Harvard Business Review"
article on leadership and focus, please?
DANIEL GOLEMAN: That's what my whole talk was.
It was that leaders need the three kinds of focus--
inner focus to manage yourself and lead yourself,
other focus to read other people effectively
and to be able to communicate in a way which is persuasive,
and that motivates and that has the right impact-- I mean,
you could say the art of leadership
is helping people get and stay in this state.
And the third is the systems awareness,
because you need that for strategic thinking,
 27

for example.
You need to understand what's happening
with the technologies.
You need to understand what's happening with the economy.
You need to understand the larger systems
that your organization operates in.
And so, for example, with the economic problem,
a lot of companies promoted people
who were very good at getting the numbers
but really trampled on people.
And now they're realizing that that lack of empathy
is costing organizations.
So what I'm arguing is that leaders need all three
in balance.
Will that do?
JORDAN: One more.
People with ADD are told that they are most effective when
they follow their impulses, instead of forcing themselves
to control their attention in a top-down manner.
How does this fit into your model?
DANIEL GOLEMAN: So ADD is a big problem during the school
years, when there's a premium on being
able to focus on what the teacher's saying and so on.
ADD also means that people's minds
wander more, which is why it's a problem during the school
years.
But it turns out that people with ADD tend on,
average, to be more creative than other people.
They are more naturally entrepreneurs, for example.
JORDAN: Does anyone else have questions?
DANIEL GOLEMAN: Someone's behind you here.
AUDIENCE: So my question is about cognitive control.
And you mentioned a lot of studies
where certain children or certain people
had better cognitive control than others.
And my question is, what factors affect that?
Do you think it's something people are born with?
And is it affected by things like their socioeconomic
situation, by culture, by the education
 28

they've already received?

DANIEL GOLEMAN: All of it.
In other words, it's both something
that people have some level of naturally-- it's innate.
It's genetic.
But you know, the brain is plastic through life.
And the centers for cognitive control
are part of the brain that's the last to develop anatomically--
doesn't mature fully till mid 20s.
And during that period of plasticity, roughly childhood
and adolescence, what you learn, and systematic training,
has enormous effect.
So the basic repetition for cognitive control
is you focus on one thing, your mind wanders,
you notice it wandered, and you bring it back.
Does that sound familiar?
And every time you do that, the neurons for that circuitry
strengthen in their connectivity.
It's exactly analogous to being in a gym and lifting weights.
And every time you do a repetition,
that muscle gets a little stronger.
So the more we can help children and teens
do that-- which reminds me, I actually
have some instructional CDs for kids and teens on this,
from morethansound.net, if anybody's interested.
Because I think it's very important
that parents do this for kids and that schools do it
for kids.
The more you do it, the better you get at cognitive control.
Then you asked about chaotic childhood and all of that.
And that is a negative factor.
That's why I was so impressed by the school in Spanish Harlem.
AUDIENCE: Hi there.
I'm one of the fortunate Googlers that has teens.
And I would like to know a little bit about the amygdala
hijack and the response that different teens may have.
I have one team when I think they're
hijacked that goes angry, and I have another that goes tearful.
Is that a relationship to the amygdala hijack
 29

or something else?
DANIEL GOLEMAN: Angry and tearful, I don't know.
There's a wonderful book coming out
by Dan Siegel called "Brainstorms."
It'll be out December 26.
And it's about the adolescent brain.
It's actually written for teenagers and their parents
to read together.
But one of the things he talks about
is the phenomenon that during adolescence, there's
a wider discrepancy than at any other point in life
between two neural systems.
One is the system for instant gratification, which
surges ahead, and the other is for delaying gratification,
which lags a little behind.
And so individual teens may differ
in the gap between that circuitry,
but I've heard a definition of maturity
as widening the gap between impulse and action.
AUDIENCE: Thank you very much, Mr. Goleman,
for this incredible lecture.
I'm wondering with this structure
that you have here and traditional medicine
and what they look at in the mind.
And as far as I can tell, being an epileptic,
this really doesn't apply much to us.
We have cognitive problems that cannot be corrected and have
been heavily-- heavy medication has been used.
I'm on medications that are very dangerous.
And I'm working with a couple neuros,
a Jim Fallon-- I don't know if you know Jim, he's a guy--
and I'm told that I don't have much
of a chance of doing a lot of this stuff.
And for me to focus actually takes a lot of work.
And I was wondering if you have any suggestions for epilepsy?
DANIEL GOLEMAN: I'm not a neurologist, not a specialist.
I have friends who are in the same situation.
But I think that-- one of the things I didn't mention
is that there's a decline in cognitive control with aging.
 30

And they've developed a set of training tools

which are web-based to reverse or slow that process,
and you might try those, because the medications are
like a shotgun in the brain.
They hit many different systems.
And the brain still remains plastic.
So you can go to the mental gym and see--
that just might help you keep that focus.
AUDIENCE: Thank you very much.
DANIEL GOLEMAN: Good luck
MENG TAN: With that, for those of you interested
in [INAUDIBLE], the CEO, [INAUDIBLE]
is sitting right here.
Feel free to talk to him.
The book is "Focus, The Hidden Driver of Excellence,"
for those in the room, you can buy
it fom the back of the room.
Danny will do a book signing after this.
For those not in the room, it's available where books are sold.
So with this, "Focus," Danny Goleman.
Thank you, my friends.
DANIEL GOLEMAN: Thanks, Meng.