 Hello, good morning. I'm so excited to be here. There's nothing I love more than being in person with other people that kind of love technology as much as I do. So I think I'm going to preface my presentation to a little bit of an explanation, because as a digital anthropologist, I run a think tank based in Paris. I specialize in research about emerging technologies or artificial intelligence. But today I'm going to talk to you about something a little bit different, which is a whole other field that I've fallen into. And that is the subject of the book, a book that I had written earlier this year called Hustle and Float. So a couple of years ago, I experienced an episode of burnout that was so severe and so debilitating that I couldn't work for several months. And this experience was absolutely terrifying. Hair loss, insomnia, depression. And this experience as I recovered, which took months, really forced me to rethink everything that I thought I knew about work and about success and about productivity. And one of the things and one of the questions that kept coming around and back around was why did this happen to me? Because as a researcher, as a technologist, I was somebody that was quite aware of all the things that we needed to do in order to work better. I wasn't one of those people that didn't understand what breaks were or what rest was. But I kept coming back to this question, like I knew better, so why did this happen to me? And in trying to answer that question, I realized that instead of asking myself what could I be doing to work better? Because there's no shortage of apps and strategies and frameworks that what I actually needed to be asking myself was why wasn't I doing it? And trying to answer this question led me on a three-year research project that ended up unpackaging the cultural heritage that we all have created around the ideas of work, but with specific focus on knowledge workers and our very complicated history with hustle culture, especially for those of us that like to embody much of the values that are embedded in startup culture and some of the things that we read in the media, which I'll go into today. So I wanna talk to you a little bit about this research and about what our relationship with work means for the tools that we're building and the digital culture we're creating, as well as what it means for our ability as professionals to produce our best quality of work. And in order to do that, we kind of have to go back in history and look at how our thinking around concepts of productivity and creativity have changed over the years. And people always get surprised when I'm at a technology conference, we wanna be forward-looking, why are we gonna talk about the past? And I think in order to know where we're going, we have to understand how our past has shaped us in the way that we live and work today. So I mean, this is gonna be very quick, a very quick historical overview, but productivity as a discipline, the way that we talk about it in our work context today was originally created by armies and governments that had to manage large groups of people that were doing highly standardized tasks. Many of these methodologies were adapted by businesses during the Industrial Revolution where people went into factories and assembly lines and they were also doing highly repeatable tasks. Our work today looks a little bit different, but what's interesting is that today it's individuals that have adopted many of these philosophies of what it means to be a productive worker. And today, culturally, productivity has become an individual pursuit. When we surveyed people during the research for this book, people told us that productivity was one of the highest ranked skill sets that they wanted to improve. And more importantly, people said that productivity or a person's level of productivity was a key indicator to their future success, meaning if you were considered to be highly productive, people thought you had a much higher chance of being successful. So put that aside for a second. While all of this productivity thinking was changing and becoming into the domain of the individual, our thinking about creativity has gone fundamental changes that might actually surprise you. So I'm gonna try to cram in about 400 years worth of history in about 90 seconds. So you might be surprised to note that during the ancient Greek and Roman empires, people didn't think that human beings could be creative. Being creative was something that was seen as outside of our skill set, outside of our ability. If you had an idea, if you created art, if you built a statue or built a structure, that wasn't you. That was the gods that were working through you. It was divine inspiration. So creativity was seen as a gift, a gift from a divine source. And we see a lot of that remnants, a lot of the traces of that thinking today, especially when we talk about things like the muses or finding that creative inspiration or having content or information that's being downloaded to us from another source. So that view persisted for hundreds of years up until the Enlightenment during the 17th or 18th century. And the romantics, they said, wait a minute, actually we believe that every human being can be creative. That being creative is an inherent human trait. So suddenly, after years of thinking that creativity was this external factor, people started to believe that creativity was just something that you are, was just simply a part of your identity. And that view persisted until the 20th century when social psychologists came on the scene and they said, okay, if everyone is creative, then that means we should be able to measure it. So they started doing experiments about how quickly you could solve problems, where you would divergent thinker, all sorts of things like that. And creativity became something, a skill set that you possess, something that you had. And finally, today, creativity has now become a part of our job. It is a unit of economic output. It is now something that we do. And the reason I mentioned that it's something that we do and why it's so important is because for the first time in our economic history, being creative is something that is a skill set that employers want in their employees. Now, this is a huge shift because traditionally, productivity and creativity were considered two unrelated concepts, things that they didn't really have to intersect. So when you worked in a factory, your boss didn't care if you were creative. In fact, they didn't want you to be creative. They just wanted you to come in, punch in, punch out and do your work. But now that we're in a knowledge economy, everyone is under incredible pressure to be innovative. And I hear companies all the time talk about how they want their workers to find new products, new ideas, new markets, new solutions. And we always say we want our workers to be innovative. What we often forget is that if you break down the definition of innovation and why I spent so much time talking about productivity and creativity, is that innovation just simply means that you have to be productive and creative within a specific economic context. So you can't really be innovative without being creative and you can't really be innovative from a business perspective if it's not also a productive endeavor. Now, we force these two things together, productivity and creativity, but there's one huge problem, which is that these two concepts are fundamentally incompatible. And this explains some of the tensions that we face today. You see productivity, as we learned from the assembly line work, is based on this idea of continuous productivity, of continuous output. Meaning you have to justify what you're doing every second that you're at work to prove that you're adding value, to prove that you're being productive, to prove that you're working. And we see many of these ideologies that are embedded in high tech systems like time sheets and task tracking and a lot of these different technologies that we use in offices today. The problem is that creativity is not something that you can always continuously measure. Psychology and neuroscience has shown us that creativity is a messy and disjointed process. A lot of it is intangible, a lot of it happens in the background. This is why you often get these ideas, your breakthrough ideas, when you are in the shower or walking your dog or when you're driving home or on your commute. It's because it's not, you don't always see somebody actively being creative. Somebody could be solving a very complicated coding problem as they're lying on a couch staring at their ceiling and they're still kind of working, even if you can't see it. So there's this clear and competing tension between these two ideologies that is creating a lot of stress. You can start to see why now we expect employees to solve these increasingly complicated problems, to build new technologies. So we want them to be creative, but we're putting them in an organizational culture that has methodologies that are left over from the Industrial Revolution. And this is the fact that many people ignore when looking at their organizational culture, right? They forget that based on the shared history, we all work for organizations, especially some of the older companies that are productivity centric. And the reason this is so important to think about when thinking about how do you create spaces for people to thrive is that you can't hire creative people if you don't have a culture where that creativity can take root and where they can be creative. I talk to organizations, multinational organizations, where they tell me that they hire incredible thinkers, creative people, but they have a hard time keeping them because you take creative thinkers and then you force them into a system of work that was never intended or made for the type of work that they are expected to do. So something to think about there. The second thing I wanna talk to you about is our biology and the ways that our brains are wired right now for work. So I want you to think about the data abundance that we are all surrounded by on a daily basis. And I think there's nobody else other than this room that truly understands the sheer amount of information and data that we are expected to consume and interact with on a daily basis. So raise your hand if just since waking up in the morning you have used your phone or your device to email, text message, access a social network, play a game, do anything like that. So obviously everyone in this room, I would expect nothing less. So we are actually creating a massive amount of information. This is a slide that shows how much information is produced every 30 seconds on the web. Now what I wanna focus on in terms of the expectation of how much information we are meant to consume is what this is doing to our brains on a cognitive level. So before I even finish talking about the slide, there will be almost 12,000 hours of Netflix footage watch and almost 102 million emails that are sent and this is just business as usual. So what are these devices and what is all this information doing to our brains? Well, as many of you might know, when any of your devices, if they ping or ding or vibrate or they make any sort of notification at all, your brain actually releases pleasure hormones. It releases dopamine. It makes you feel good. And what's happening because there's a never ending flow of information is we are conditioning ourselves like Pavlov's dogs to always be seeking these micro doses of stimulation. We are becoming addicted to constant stimulation. There was this research project that I read about which really made me laugh and it was they took, researchers took an individual. They put them in a room. They took everything else out of the room except for a table and a chair and on the table was this little machine and if you touched it, it gave you an electric shock. And researchers found out that people would rather electrocute themselves than be bored for 20 minutes. Now you might laugh but think about this. We have created a culture of constant distraction and constant distraction makes it difficult to focus, to concentrate, to get into states of flow, to do the deep work that we need to do in order to be creative and in order to solve these problems. Now let me ask you this. When was the last time that you were bored? Don't say now but should have prefaced this but you know think about the last time other than now that you were actually bored and you might be surprised to find that you can't remember. We have devices in our hands all the time. We have stimulation all the time. You're waiting for your train or your plane. You're on your phone. You're waiting for your coffee order. You're on your phone. You're waiting for your meeting to start. You're on your phone. The person that you're with that dinner gets up for two seconds to go to the washroom. You're immediately on your phone. This is the type of cultural behaviors that we're building with our devices and with our technology and it's having an impact on our ability to be creative and creativity needs space and time so how can you be innovative? How can you solve all these big problems? How can you build all these technologies if you never give your brain the actual thing that it needs on a biological and a physiological level in order to help you do that? And this is particularly concerning when we see that a lot of the technology that we are using today are built for both addiction and urgency. They're built on engagement. It's built on trying to get you to use these technologies as often as possible but more than that on a social level we've created social norms where we expect each other to be always available and always responsive. This is why one of my most hated features are red receipts or those dreaded blue checkmarks that let somebody else know that you've read their message. What is the purpose of that other than to create social anxiety and potentially create problems and conflicts and relationships when you're like why did you leave me on red? Why did it take you so long to respond to my message? So we're creating social norms that reinforce this idea that we have to be constantly connected but constant connection equals constant distraction which can prevent us from being creative which is a key part of being innovative. So some of the most innovative tools that we use can actually get in the way of innovation and I mentioned this point because again when I talk to people, when I talk to teams they always tell me there's a new tool a new methodology, we're gonna have a Slack channel we're gonna use this new app we're gonna track our time this way and they think that they need new technology in order to improve the way that they work and while technology can improve the way that we work we have to be very careful that the way that we apply it is in a way that respects the natural process of how our brains need to function which means we don't need to be constantly getting endless notifications and endless interruptions. The last big piece is looking at our culture and looking at how our culture treats success what success looks like and who deserves to be successful. So we live in a culture today where we idolize creativity we think creativity is amazing we think it's the best thing ever and we worship and we idolize creative people but when we actually worship productivity and we have this really strange relationship between these two concepts and I'll show you what I mean. For hustle and flow one of the things that I did was I looked at who are some of the people that were most often googled or most often searched for being really innovative and creative in their field and then I looked at what was the fact about them that was most often repeated when we looked up stories about them. So Tim Cook leading one of the most innovative companies on the planet, the most often repeated fact that I found about him was the fact that he sends emails to his team at 4.30 a.m. in the morning. Jeff Bezos works 12 hours, seven days a week Elon Musk spends 100 hours a week for the past 15 years. So even though we admire these people for their visionary creative abilities for leading creative companies for trying to build creative cultures when we talk about their success and we talk about why they're worth admiring we often talk about how hard they work and these types of beliefs are always reinforced no matter where we go. Take a look at some of these business magazines behind me. So you have Oprah, a creative professional and yet she's on the list of the most productive people Pharrell, a musician who's known for his creative outputs for his music, for his art and yet we have him on a list of most productive people. And then there's the never ending cover stories about getting more done, getting more done, right? It's always about trying to fit in as much as you can in the day. And the reason why we're so obsessed with how hard people are working is because it's actually keys in to one of the most powerful ideologies that we have seen in this technological revolution which is the American dream. And I talk about the American dream because even though it exists in its different variations the German dream, the British dream, the French dream, et cetera the American dream has been one of the most powerful ideologies because it is very much embodied in the startup boom the tech boom, the Silicon Valley culture and that is one of the things that people aspire and want to be like so we've kind of absorbed it. Now the American dream very simply one that we're all familiar with is this idea that if you work hard enough you will be successful which sounds really simple, right? But it's a little bit more complicated than that. You see the American dream also includes a hidden thing which I call the shadow dream, a hidden aspect to it. And the shadow dream is this. If you believe that if you work hard enough you will be successful, right? If you're really productive you'll be successful then a part of you also believes that if you're not successful then it must be because you're not working hard enough. And this is why people don't take vacation days don't take breaks, this is why they don't stop because if they feel like they are inherently responsible for their lack of success due to a lack of effort they will do everything they can to compensate for that. Now you might think okay well this can't really be a thing, the shadow dream well let me show you what it looks like when we look at digital culture. This is a quote by Bill Gates that gets circulated all the time he says if you are born poor then it's not your fault but if you die poor then it is. So again you are responsible for your lack of success, right? And this is a message that's delivered by a technology phenomenon, a creative genius somebody who was known for his regs to riches story this is a person that embodies all of the benefits that we think culturally are tied to success and this is what he's telling us. Except there's just one problem with this quote which is Bill Gates never actually said this and yet the internet insists that he did. And when I looked into this when I clicked on these images to see what were people talking about with this misattributed quote, do you know what I saw? Hashtag five AM club, hashtag team never sleep, hashtag hustle hard, hashtag never stop working, hashtag last one in the office. This quote which was not true was being used as an aspirational quote to justify people working over time people doing things and working against their own creative best interest. So what's happening is that we're creating this cultural narrative that celebrates overwork. We're sending messages to people that overwork is this ideal state. Look at this tote bag, this innocent looking tote bag it says you have as many hours in the day as Beyonce. Not as creative as Beyonce, not you can make music like Beyonce, not like you too can express yourself artistically like Beyonce, no, you too can be as productive as Beyonce because even though she's a creative visionary she also works really hard and we also admire her productivity. So the problem with this is that overwork kills creativity and this is the fundamental root of a lot of the tensions we see at work but these messages still get sent to us. This is an ad that was put up all over New York from Fiverr, look at the copy for this ad. It says you eat a coffee for lunch, you follow through on your follow through sleep deprivation is a drug of choice. You might be a doer and in doers we trust because doers are productive, doers are successful. So you know what would be really great if you wanna be successful to not sleep and to skip meals. Look at her face, would you trust her to make the critical decision on your project? Would you trust her to do the last quality control to check the code before you ship that project out or would you be like go home, take a nap, eat a sandwich and come back later? But these are the messages that are packaged to us as archetypes of success and they're quite problematic. Now I wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about culture because culture is an incredibly powerful force and it can't be solved and it can't be addressed simply by policies because Netflix, a very innovative company, they tried to combat this by giving people unlimited paid vacation days as a policy and people didn't take it. And when they asked them why, they said they weren't afraid of what their managers would think, they were afraid of what their colleagues would think of them. Remember, productivity is seen as a key to success. So if your colleagues don't think you're being productive enough, then will that damage their recommendations of your performance and future advancements? So all of this to say that when policies come up and technology comes up against these deeply held belief systems, then the deeply held belief systems always win. And I think in the rush of talking about technology, we are missing these deep forces that are influencing how we work and influencing our ability to be creative. So I hope I've given you some stuff to think about in terms of challenging our beliefs about work. I believe that this is, we need to talk about our history, we need to talk about the technologies that are shaping our behaviors, we need to talk about our cultural beliefs around success and self-worth. And I believe that we need to create systems and technologies that were built for us, for the type of work that we were meant to do. I think that is the most important challenge we're gonna face as we enter this new technological boom, this next level of the technological revolution, but I am sure that we are all up for the challenge. Thank you very much. Thank you, hold on one second. So I wanna ask you a quick question. Oh, quick question. So we, some of you may remember, we had a speaker near, I all, a couple years ago at our event. When I was watching your talk, I love it. So he, does anyone remember this guy? He wrote a book named Hooked. Hooked, yeah. And Hooked was how do you create these habit-forming products for digital, so this is the like button for Facebook and how you get addicted. So I don't know if you know, he recently released another book just this year. Unhooked. Unhooked, so it's called Indistractable. Okay. And it's sort of the cure for being hooked on these digital products and services. So it's refreshing to see like people are thinking about this. Well, we have to, because I think it's gonna stop us from doing the work that we all wanna do. And that's the crazy part. I think technology can help us be incredibly creative. I think it can help us focus. I think it can give us information, contacts, community, but we have to do it. We have to build technology on an ideology that supports creative work, not just time tracking and time tracking methodologies that used to measure factory workers that don't make sense to measure creative performers. Yeah, yeah. Very cool. Thank you so much. Thank you.