Learning—and Unlearning—With Intent

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Barry O'Reilly: Just like a product has features and you have to constantly innovate the features of your products, humans have behavior. So if I'm not constantly innovating my behavior to adapt to the market that I'm in, essentially, I'm going to get disrupted. So it's not really companies to get disrupted, it's people. Because we get stuck operating in a legacy world that no longer exists.

Jill Finlayson: Welcome to the Future of Work podcast with Berkeley Extension and the Edge in Tech initiative at the University of California, focused on expanding diversity and gender equity in tech. Edge in Tech is part of Citrus the Center for IT Research in the Interest of Society and the Banatao Institute.

In this episode, we look at intentionality and the future of work. The World Economic Forum recently declared a reskilling emergency, as the world faces more than 1 billion jobs transformed by technology. No longer an ideal but an expectation, executives and employees must continually refresh their skills to keep up.

To do so, continuous professional education is the key. But are you learning with intent? Do you need to unlearn? Intentional learners are experiencing all the same daily moments as anyone else might. But they get more out of those opportunities, because everything, every experience, conversation, meeting, and deliverable carries with it the opportunity to develop and grow.

To help us figure out how to learn with intent, today we chat with Barry O'Reilly. Barry is a business advisor, entrepreneur, and author who has pioneered the intersection of business model innovation, product development, and culture transformation. Barry works with business leaders and teams from global organizations that seek to invent the future, not fear it.

Barry is the author of Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results and coauthor of the international bestseller, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale. As a speaker, writer, and contributor to publications like The Economist, Strategy and Business, and MIT Sloan Management Review, Barry also contributes to executive programs at Singularity University and founded Exec Camp, an entrepreneurial experience for executives, and co-founded Nobody Studios with the goal to launch 100 companies over the next five years.

His mission is to help purposeful innovation. And that starts with the individual. Welcome, Barry, and thank you for joining us. Can you share with us a little bit about yourself and what brought you to your work, driving purposeful innovation at scale?

Barry O'Reilly: Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Jill. It's a real pleasure. A lot of my mission, really, I suppose, over time, for myself, as much as anything, is to find and contribute to things that have real meaning to me. Interestingly, how you and I met, actually, was in the early days of Singularity, where we were working on one of the accelerator programs, essentially, that Singularity offered.
And the company that I got assigned to was Calorie Cloud. And it was a fantastic idea and business, where the notion was that there's obesity problem in some parts of the world and malnutrition problem in other parts of the world. And they created a system so where people who could burn calories, they would replace those burned calories with food that they would distribute around the world.
And so, it just resonated with me so much about the business, that innovation involved the cross-incentivization, but then, actually, having a real impact, both in making people's lives healthier by losing weight and by making people's lives better by giving them nutrition so they can grow and live a fulfilling life.

So that really sort of encapsulated, for me, actually, what I'm all about. And trying to find opportunities to do that today, whether it's with large companies that I work with or some of these businesses that we're trying to create in Nobody Studios over the next five years, is all about purpose, meaning, and impact. And I think when you get those things down, it's a joy to have those experiences and work on those projects.

Jill Finlayson: And it's funny you should mention Singularity University, they're often seen as being at the forefront of talking about the future. And I want to ask the question of you, what does future of work mean to you? There's always been a future of work. But now we're talking about it as if it's something new and different. What does it mean to you?

Barry O'Reilly: Yeah. I think it's one of these words that was coined at the right time for when, I think, people really recognize that the way we are working is changing, right? And I think if you go back to from the days where the majority of folks were probably out working in fields in agricultural-based world, cities transitions to the first factories, to people recognizing the difficulties about factories and the way people are managed.

Now that we have these, for the majority, highly-educated, highly-skilled, highly-disciplined people with really great talent that, really, all they need is direction. And if you can align them to a direction that matters, make them feel part of a community that they want to contribute to, and has real meaning and purpose, amazing things can happen.

And I think that people are starting to recognize that before, in ways that we've probably never experienced, that we're actually at another inflection point about how work is going to get done. COVID and the remote work has been another accelerant to that. We probably jumped, in the space of two years, we probably have done another 20 years of transition to technology-enabled working all over the globe.

For me, when we're building Nobody Studios at the moment, I'm not looking for engineers based in California. I'm looking for them all over the world. We have teams in London, with teams in Italy, with teams in Philippines, with teams all across America, South America, Hong Kong. It's like the world is our oyster for talent.

And that is the norm now, very quickly. Where two years ago, if I walked into a VC and said, yeah, my engineering teams in the Philippines have got some designers in North America. I've got developers, actually, in Italy, as well, they'd look at you like you were crazy and go, we're never going to invest in that business.

So these things happen slowly and then really quickly, exponential curves as you and I are very familiar with. So I think this is sort of the things to think about. What the future of work really means now is it's always going to be evolving. But I think people have noticed the inflection point more so than ever.

And I think it's just brought that topic to the surface about really being intentional, to point to your show, about how do we want to create companies, systems, and structures that allow people to flourish, regardless of where they are, who they are, when they're working, how they're working, their discipline. It's a really fascinating time. And, yeah, looking forward to sharing some of the examples and stories I've learnt along the way.

Jill Finlayson: So I'm hearing from you, future of work is accelerated change, technological change, distributed workforce. But I also hear you talking about purpose and the great resignation. So how does that fit into kind of defining what that means for individual jobs, and roles, and learning.

Barry O'Reilly: Yeah, well, I think the great resignation is just another good encapsulation of people recognizing that they're fed up with, let's just say, the current. But I would say the legacy industrial era mindset towards work, that you have one job, that you go to work from 9:00 to 5:00, you're in the factory, or office, whatever you prefer. And you stay there and you complete your task. And don't talk about being part of a music band on the weekend or anything that might distract you from putting your full energy towards the corporation, right?

People have just said, this is rubbish. I don't believe in this anymore. And they've walked out of those companies. And I think this is one of the things that's really missing from the whole narrative around the great resignation. People haven't left the workforce. They're not like leaving and just going to sit at home.

Most people are actually starting businesses. They're starting things. They're joining or forming communities, whether it's distributed autonomous organizations and devs in the web, where people rally together to try and build businesses or do everything to try and buy a copy of the US Constitution, to solve different ways that they're going to tackle climate change, right through to folks leaving companies that they don't feel affinity for.

Why do I want to work for a high-frequency trading firm to make uber-wealthy people even more wealthier? Or I could actually work on something that really matters to me. Or turning your side hustle project, where you like to enjoy making kombucha, into an online business that you could actually spend more of your time doing things that you're really passionate about.

That is what the great resignation is about. People have refocused where they're putting their energy. They haven't left the workforce. They've just left jobs that they didn't enjoy, they felt were just transactional, that they felt they were just in this industrial factory mindset, not in this purpose-driven where they can bring their creativity, or they can bring them full selves, and have multiple opportunities to do that.

I recently wrote a blog about this, where I think the future of work is actually fractional, that you will have a portfolio career, that people will have many different interests, and hobbies, or pursuits, or areas that they focus on, not just one thing. And I think that's fascinating for me, and we're really seeing it start to happen.

Jill Finlayson: I really like that idea of they're not just walking out of a job, they're walking into some other job. Or they're creating, as you said, a portfolio and they're having different jobs throughout their day, not just throughout their career, which is really interesting. So what does that mean, if you're thinking about your career, what does intentionality have to do with making better decisions? Or what do you need in order to have the skills to do those things you're passionate about?

Barry O'Reilly: Well, it's funny that you mentioned the World Economic Forum, in terms of calling out this crisis about skills development. They actually published an article that referenced unlearn. Because they, too, recognize this ability to adapt to changing circumstances for us to constantly recognize that the world is changing, technology is changing. And, therefore, if we're not adapting at the same pace of the world is, you're going to struggle, right?

And it's not that you have to adapt. to everything in the world. But what you need to start diving into, I suppose, is the things that matter to you, the intentionality and focus about, what do you want to get better at? What do you want to try and improve? What do you want to pursue? What do you want to do, right?

And I think it's a hard question when you say to a lot of people, what's your purpose? Find your purpose. Most people really struggle with understanding why they're even here, never mind why they can deeply connect to the meaning of their work. It's a huge question to ask. But what they can do quite quickly is try things, things that they're interested in.

I've always been interested to understand how to make kombucha. I've always been interested about how to create content and teach people topics that I'm passionate about and create a YouTube channel. I've always been interested to share my thoughts on an industry and how it's progressing. Maybe I'll blog about it.

People are starting to do these things now. Tools make it very easy for people to operate and even easier to monetize them now. So, suddenly, you have this explosion of creativity where people, they can have a day job. They can go work at a high-flying tech company, Monday to Friday. But in their evening and weekends, I guarantee you they're hacking and building a startup. They're writing a blog. They're doing more.

And I think that's this kind of interesting thing about the intentionality of this, is that you can start to pursue, and that you can de-risk leaving the big, comfortable, safe paycheck job and build up your podcast and keep doing great shows. And suddenly you know, who knows, Jill, you might just become a full-time podcast artist, who knows. You've got the skills to do it.

Jill Finlayson: That's funny. And I like what you're saying about leading with curiosity, following those things that you just want to share or things you want to learn more about and making that part of the intentional journey. I think where people sometimes struggle is not knowing what their career path could look like. Because since people don't stay at one company, there isn't a very clear ladder to climb in your career path.

So when you think about being intentional about figuring out your career and next steps, that's that much harder if you don't know what the pathway looks like. So I don't know if you have any thoughts on how to help people be intentional about figuring out career paths.

Barry O'Reilly: Yeah. And again, this is a great capture of, I think, what the industrial world, our work era, was like. You grew up, you went to school. And if you were lucky, you went to college. And you chose at the age of 17 what you're going to do for the rest of your life. But you're locking yourself into this very rigid system. I study, I do four years in some university. Then I have to go out and get a job as a junior widget maker. And then I'll become a senior widget maker.

This was the mentality, that's almost been sort of bred into many of us, which needs to be unlearned, I would argue. And really, now, we're in this world where what you need to learn as an individual is the ability to take in new information, to actually experiment, to try things, to see what works and what doesn't. This notion of learning and unlearning, that's what inspired me to write the book.
Because I spent time with some of the most gifted, competent people in the world, like executives of some of these Fortune 500 companies, amazingly talented people. And what I kept finding was the significant inhibitor in helping these people get better was not their ability to learn new things, it was actually their inability to unlearn mindsets and behaviors that were once effective, now limit their success.

So even this notion of a logical career ladder, for them, they were like, oh, I'm the CEO now I've played the game. I was a junior, now I'm a senior, then I was a VP. I'm the CEO now, Am I finished? Is the game over? What am I meant to do with my life now, right? And you had these people conditioned in that way, where try to get people to think about what interests you? Where's is your curiosity? How do you start to learn about these spaces?

And I think that's one thing that maybe it was unintentional for me, but was made visible to me through coaching and feedback that I got from people is that whenever I see something I'm interested in, I'll always do something small to start exploring it. So, cryptocurrency, simple example, I looked at it and was like, what the hell is this thing? I don't understand it. It Seems kind of interesting, just seems to be a buzz about it. So what's the smallest thing I could do?

Well, I literally got 10 bucks and I bought some Bitcoin, found out how to do that, and learned the process you have to go through to do that. And then, by going through that process, it starts unveiling itself more. What's involved in doing it? What's hard about it? What's difficult? What's the potential utility of this when it accelerates and is useful and lower barriers to entry?

And the only way you can experience these things is you have to take action, right? You have to try these things. It's all these small steps into the unknown that gives you confidence to keep going, or information to say, you know what, actually, I don't like this. Actually, I do like this. Actually, what I thought I liked about is something different. That's the experimentation process that follows your initial curiosity, I find.

Jill Finlayson: I love the experimenting. I wanted to tie that back to the unlearning, though. Why do you have to unlearn something to learn something new?

Barry O'Reilly: Well, even the notion of unlearning was fascinating to me, even when I was spending time with these Fortune 500 execs. There's two things that are always really important when you're looking for inspiration about an idea. One is biology, because, guaranteed, it's happened in biology before, if you observe something interesting. Or history is always good. And for me, I loved history in school. I loved learning from different choices people made over time.

And one of the unique innovations that I found about the Roman Empire was that it covered about 20% of the world's population, nearly 2 million square miles at one stage at the peak of its power. Now, when I ask people, what was unique about the Roman Empire, they'll always say, oh, they built roads, or aqueducts, or their systems of governance.

But the true unique innovation to them was whenever they engage other cultures and they found practices that were better than their own, they let go of their existing practices and incorporated those new practices into their systems of operation. So, in essence, they created a culture that allowed them to both learn new things and unlearn their old behaviors that allowed them to grow, right?

So this was fascinating to me about, like this has existed and we've never really been intentional about it, to your point. Then I started to research even more about learning organizations, which is a huge part of management theory. When Peter Senge wrote The Fifth Discipline, everyone wanted to be a learning organization. I think if you asked anyone, are they, would say they are.

But at the same time, a paper was written by a person called Bo Hedberg in 1981. And he talked about this notion that as our knowledge grows, simultaneously it becomes obsolete as our reality changes. So, really, understanding involves both learning new knowledge and discarding obsolete or misleading knowledge, simple things, like as a child.

The lessons we're taught as a child are simple to help us understand what we can at that stage. But roll forward into your adulthood, they don't make sense anymore. So, some of the stories and the ideas that we're told are naive, initially, until we really experience them and recognize what's real and true in the world and they have to be unlearned, right? Not all the lessons we learn are good ones, or we're conditioned to.

So all this stuff got me really, really excited about, actually, this is a thing, this is a way to think about the world. And for me, with my inspiration around product innovation. I often would think, well, just like a product has features and you have to constantly innervate the features of your product for it to stay relevant in its market, humans have behavior.

So if I'm not constantly innovating my behavior to adapt to the market that I'm in, essentially, I'm going to get disrupted. So it's not really companies to get disrupted, it's people. Because we get stuck operating in a legacy world that no longer exists. And we're using behaviors that may have worked for us in the past, but are no longer do, because the world has changed, technology's changed, et cetera.
So that was really a huge inspiration for me with unlearning. And even when people ask me about unlearning, they often get quite upset. They're like saying, hey, Barry, is everything that you know is wrong? Everything I've done is wrong? And again, nothing could be further from the truth. I think of unlearning as a system, a process of letting go, reframing or moving away from once-youthful mindsets and acquired behaviors that were effective in the past but now limit our success.

So it's not forgetting, removing, or discarding your knowledge or experience. It's the conscious act of letting go of outdated information and then actively engaging and taking in new information to inform your decision making and action.

Jill Finlayson: So maybe give us an example. You talked about crypto. How did you have to unlearn, or what did you have to unlearn, to be able to be open to the ideas that crypto is presenting?

Barry O'Reilly: Cryptocurrency in itself is just a myriad of fascinating convergence of multiple technologies happening at the same time. But for me, a very personal example was actually writing the book. Writing a book I think is one of these things where many people would have an aspiration of, right? It's sort of, God, one day, I'll sit down and do this.

And I had that very aspiration. I would never tell anyone about it, because I'd be afraid to sort of sound too egotistical or something like this. But it sits in the back of my mind. But I have a solid history of D-pluses in English literature. I'm dyslexic. There's a million obstacles I put in front of myself to say why I would never do that.

And this was a huge reminder for me about unlearning, right? Because my vision of what a writer looked like is they'd sit in a perfect velvet jacket by a roaring fire with a glass of wine with Hemingway just writing hundreds of pages a day. That wasn't me. I even bought a purple Velvet jacket and tried to write. It didn't work.

So, and this idea of sitting at the keyboard and typing, I just was not getting any breakthroughs. And it was that sort of moment, then, where I sort of sat there and reflected and said, maybe I'm not a writer. But then I started to think about, well, this obstacle I'm having, the real outcome I want is different.

And the outcome is that I want to be creating content, that I want to be waking up every day and just rapidly creating lots and lots of content that I could potentially use to create a book. And typing was just one way to create content, it's one behavior. And what I actually started to think about is, what behaviors do I enjoy myself for creating things?

And, actually, talking was much more my style of way of communicating are more comfortable for me, are more natural. So I had the idea to say, well, instead of typing the book, why don't I talk it? Or even better, why don't I get a journalist to interview me and ask questions, or map out what I want to talk about in each chapter? And this journalist would interview me, and we would record it, and then transcribe it with an AI, instantaneously, almost.

And then the journalist would sort of take that raw, unedited version and edit it for me and send me the early draft of each chapter. So straight away, we were into this iteration loop very quickly, rather than the challenge of trying to create the 10,000 words to start with. I had like 15,000 words that I needed to edit down, from just talking to them for 45 minutes.

It was a huge breakthrough for me, right? And so, for years when I thought I'd never be a writer, I actually had to unlearn that and say, well, typing mightn't be the way to create content, talking is. And that was a huge breakthrough for me personally and what I had to unlearn. And, luckily enough, it worked, and today, the book is all over the world. It's just getting translated into Korean this week. It's amazing, 14 languages all around the world. People are reading and using this system. And it's amazing what can happen if you unlearn.

Jill Finlayson: And it came from this one simple thing that you needed to unlearn. So how do you help other people get started? How do they diagnose what they need to unlearn?

Barry O'Reilly: Yeah. So the questions I try to help people ask themselves is, just like when I was sitting there struggling to write, is ask these questions of themselves. How do I know what I need to unlearn? So I'd encourage your listeners, grab a piece of paper or jot down a few notes when I ask you these questions.

So the first one I always say is, can you think of a situation where you're not achieving the outcomes that you desire? Maybe you're not living up to the expectations that you have for yourself. Or, maybe there's a situation that you're struggling to resolve or a challenge you're avoiding altogether. Or, maybe you've tried everything you could think of, and you're still not getting the breakthrough that you're looking for.

So not achieving the outcomes you desire, not living up to your expectations of yourself, situations you're struggling to resolve or avoiding altogether, or you've tried everything you can think of and you're not getting a breakthrough. What pops into your mind, Jill, when I ask those questions?

Jill Finlayson: That's a tough one. I think, trying to figure out who to partner with to make things a reality.

Barry O'Reilly: Great. Great, right, really good one, right? So it's a great challenge, right? What's the obstacle there? When I ask people this question, straight away, it's not like a case of, it's hard to come up with one. But if you think about it for more than 30 seconds then a gave you, you can probably come up with five or six, right?

And then, the fascinating thing, then, is now you've identified this obstacle. Who's a partner, when you're creating things? So I would always say to you like, how do we reframe it? So while partnering is the obstacle, what's the real outcome you want? What's the thing that you want to do? What is partnering going to enable you to do? If you found an amazing person to partner with, what is it going to help you do?

Jill Finlayson: I think it comes back to your mission, innovation at scale. You can do much more with a partner than you can alone.

Barry O'Reilly: Right, OK, right. So then you start digging into these things, right? It's like you want to build something bigger, that one person than yourself. And partnering could be just one way to do that, as an example, right? As you start to dig into these things, or start a company, or find people who care similar passions of you, or write it down, distribute an autonomous organization manifesto for a company and see what people join us?

There's all these options start to emerge about how you can innovate at scale, if that's the outcome that you're aiming for, ultimately. And I think there are simple little ways to just get people thinking about finding the alternative approaches that might be obvious or familiar to them or their focus.

Because we tend to just keep banging our head against the obstacle that we often put in front of ourself at the beginning. The reason it is an obstacle is because maybe it's not the right thing to do. It's not easy for us to do. It's hard. It's OK, sometimes things are hard. But finding the path of least resistance and doing things that get you really excited and you want to be part of, is also a massive accelerator.
And just like for me, writing the book, I'd sit at the keyboard and bash my head against the keyboard for hours and not make progress. But when I reframed it and thought about content creation and ways to create content, and tried a few different things, talking just became almost like a flow state for me, where I was just like, oh, this is the way I need to do it. Why didn't I think of this before? Or, why I didn't ever try to do this before? And sometimes, it's just making those things more visible to yourself and intentionally trying to do.

Jill Finlayson: How do you see unlearning unfolding in different roles? If you're a leader versus an individual contributor. If you're an introvert versus an extrovert. If you're a startup founder versus a lower-level employee. How does this play out differently depending on your role, or does it?

Barry O'Reilly: Yeah. Well, I'm a big believer that unlearning really starts with yourself. I tend to tie it less to your role in the company and more to you as an individual. Because what inspires people is seeing your actions and behavior. I'll give you two examples.

One is a guy called Christian Metzger he's the CIO of Volkswagen Financial Services. And his team used to sort of joke with him and say, oh, you know, Christian, it's easy to be a CIO. You just sit in meetings all day. You don't really have to do anything. To take up the challenge, he offered his team the opportunity to do his job for the day.

So he was like, hey, all right, anyone can apply for my job. He can do it for the day and see what it's like to be me. And I'll just follow you around for the day and pretend to be you see what that's like. And loads of the company applied for his job. And an engineer who had been with the company for two years won. He had to go out and buy himself a suit, literally had to get himself a suit, and was the CIO for the day.

And Christian sat in the back of the room and just watched her the team operated, without him making decisions, with this, basically, new person in the role. And they even had an outage of one of their most key systems that day. And Christian still persisted with the two-year engineer being the CIO for the day, just to see how the team responds, right?

So he's role modeling this unlearning. And I did a podcast with him, as well. And he said it was one of the days that he'd learnt the most about his job, by observing how the team responded to dealing with difficult situations without him being there, or without him being this sort of pivotal character. How did they respond? He thought he was a better leader as a result of that.

But also, his team were like, wow. So he's role modeling as an individual. Another great person is Joe Norena, who used to be the head of Capital Markets for HSBC. And what he would do is whenever graduates came into the company, he would sit down with them and he'd give them problems to work on that he was working on, to see what tools, and technologies, and techniques that they would use to try and solve problems that he's working on.

So he would sort of learn and unlearn from, essentially, these very junior people, and opened himself up to curiosity to these new ways of doing things. And you can imagine in a company like HSBC, which is naturally very hierarchical. When you have one of the most senior people in the business sitting down with the most junior people to learn from them, it's a great cultural artifact.

But the thing is, when you see people who act like that, who behave like that, that sort of inspires others to go, shoot, you know what do I need to unlearn? These very senior people are learning from these junior people. Or look at these junior people, they're teaching other people. Then you start to think about as individuals and teams. Teams start to ask themselves, as a team, what do we need to unlearn?

And then, as you get the team starting to talk about what they're unlearning, you get this organizational shift. So that's how I tend to try and get people to think about it, is it's think big but start small. Start with yourself, something you need to unlearn and role model that for other people.

And people will see like, hi, I'm working on this. Can you help me? They'll see it. And that inspires them to go, wow, maybe I need to unlearn something. And I think that's the way I tend to try these things.

Jill Finlayson: I like that role modeling and the idea that if you are unlearning, other people will see it's OK to question how things have been done. Maybe there's a better way. Maybe there wasn't a justification in the first place for what you were doing. And I think it is a really critical line of inquiry. So whose job is it to kind of drive this unlearning or upskilling in companies? And how do we make sure everybody can participate?

Barry O'Reilly: I think it has to happen at both levels, right? I think, as an individual, there's an ownership that everybody has to recognize that the world is changing. If you do not change, you will be disrupted. It's that simple, right? So I'm constantly encouraging, when it's 2 year old or a 200 year old, which will be around soon, sure enough.

I think that always be trying new things. The minute you stop trying new things, you're shutting yourself down to learning. So I think that's the individual part and the ownership that needs to happen there. But at the same time, if the systems and structures that are in place, whether it's in the companies you operate in or even at a government and societal level, if we're not actively creating opportunities for people to try new experiences to have the opportunity to test out a new way of working or a new way of doing something in the company, we're limiting their potential, right?

So whether that's you're a designer and you'd love to try and test out to be an engineer, great. Could you work as an engineer on one project for three months to see how you get on with it? Did you like it? Did you not like it? What was different about it? Creating these sort of opportunities, I think, is really important, both in companies and, obviously, in governmental .systems, and as a society.

So the more we do that, the more we're actively creating opportunities for people. and encouraging them to take these small, little experiences to figure out if they like something and want to double-down on it or they don't like it and they want to move on, also a great result. That is really, really important.

Jill Finlayson: So that's a great way to kind of bring us to a close here, as we start to think about any final words or tips for those who are interested in becoming more intentional about their career path, more intentional about unlearning. And what are the best investments they can make for their own future of work?

Barry O'Reilly: Yeah. Well, I always say to them, unlearning has nothing to do with being smart or being-- it's just really down to being you. It's your ability and focus to actually pick something that you think you want to tackle and try and unlearn it, or learn it, whichever works for you.

I often say, the little bit of homework I always give people is, find somebody that you really trust or you know, friend, colleague, whatever it might be, family member. And ask then the question, is there anything that you think that I'm struggling with or challenge that you think I could be better at? Or even volunteer one to say that you want to work on that you're interested in, something that you personally would really like to get better at. Maybe it's writing. Maybe it's presentations. Maybe it's podcasts, whatever it is.

And ask somebody you trust to candidly give you feedback on the scale of 1 to 10, how good they think you are at that thing. And maybe you ask public speaking. And they're kind enough and they say, Barry, you suck, you're a four. Thank them, first of all, you go, thank you.

And then ask them, what could I do in the next week to get half a point better? How could I go from a 4 to a 4.5? Can you give me some ideas of things to try? And they'll be kind enough, I'm sure enough, for a few tips. I want you to pick one that's sort of slightly uncomfortable, not that you would naturally do, something that's a little bit outside your comfort zone, and just try it for a week.

And then, at the end of the week, if you go back to that person, says, hey, you know, I've been practicing some of these ideas and trying to unlearn public speaking or how I'd approach it. Can you give me another score. And I guarantee you won't go from four to four and 1/2. You'll probably go four to six, you might even go to seven.

And then, if you get into that habit of just trying to get half a point better every week, do something small just to sort of tweak what you're doing week on week, you'll literally become undefeatable by the end of this. And I think that's one of the little ways you can start to unlearn.

Jill Finlayson: So this idea of being comfortable being uncomfortable pushing the edges of what you know and what you don't know, and this opportunity, then, to unlearn what is the next thing you want to unlearn? Where are you going to push your edges in your comfort zone?

Barry O'Reilly: Well, it's one of the reasons I started Nobody Studios, in a way. I just believe we're in such a fabulous time to support entrepreneurialism, the explosion of global talent and opportunity. And I just felt like I wanted to be building things. I wanted to be building meaningful companies that will have impact in the world.

And the most uncomfortable thing I could think of was not just building one company, was try to build hundreds of companies in a short period of time, support lots of entrepreneurs to build their businesses. And that's really what inspired us to build Nobody Studios. And we're just about to launch an equity crowdfunding. It will be the first venture studio to ever offer that, where anyone with a few hundred bucks will be able to own a piece of the studio and see upside from every company we ever create ever.

So it's super exciting to sort of disrupt the venture capital space and make it more venture-human, in a way, and give more people opportunity in that space. So that's uncomfortable. It keeps me awake at 3:00 AM. It gets me up at 6:00 AM. I'm having fun. And, yeah, If you're interested, you can follow along on my website, or my newsletters, or nobodystudios.com.

Jill Finlayson: Thank you, Barry, for joining us today. It's been a pleasure having Barry O'Reilly on our podcast. Barry is not new to podcasting, so I will be taking him up on his tips for 4.5 improvement. And you can listen to Barry at barryoreilly.com/podcast.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

And with that, I hope you enjoyed this latest in the long series of podcasts that we'll be sending your way every month. Please share with friends and colleagues who may be interested in taking this future of work journey with us. And make sure to check out extension.berkeley.edu to find courses that meet your academic and professional needs, and your unlearning needs, as well.
And to see what's coming up at EDGE in tech, visit edge.berkeley.edu. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll be back next month to talk about the value of post-degree learning. Until next time.

[MUSIC PLAYING]