 We say to people, like, be yourself, right? Go, if you're going into an interview, just be yourself. Or if you're pitching a venture capitalist, just be yourself. Or, you know, you're going on a date with somebody new. Like, just be yourself, right? But the thing is, be yourself is actually horrible advice. All right, and welcome to the show. Johnny and I were laughing earlier about some of your work and this concept of quantifying the unquantifiable. Share with our audience how you got started and the work that led to this fantastic book, Edge. Yeah, I mean, I didn't know where you were going with that. For a second, we were like, Johnny and I were laughing at your work. No. No, absolutely, it's funny because there were lots of people who were saying to me when I first started doing this work, you know, I said, I want to study gut feel. I want to study how people make decisions and how they use their gut feel and their intuition and people were like, you can't study that. You're not going to be able to convince people that this is rigorous, in-depth research. How are you ever going to run statistical analyses and quantify this? And I said to them, I'm going to quantify what gut feel is. And so a lot of my earliest work was looking at how, examining how people make decisions, looking for patterns and experiences and how they use their intuition to make decisions. And of course, looking at angel investing as a way to use this gut feel, obviously, to make wealth and create these fantastic companies, how do we go about quantifying something like that? Yeah, I mean, I started studying investors for a number of reasons. I mean, one of the reasons was because this is a scenario where there's so much risk, there's so much uncertainty, that it's almost unquantifiably unknowable. And this is where even the hard data, the things that we think are very analytical numbers, and those are just hopes and dreams and guesses. These are projections. And so people are making decisions all the time based on their intuition. And the thing that I started finding as I dug into this research more and more and started doing more studies was that we tend to think that gut feel and intuition is something that's quick and subconscious and biased and emotional. But actually it's very cognitive in nature. It's a blend of the emotional and the cognitive and it takes into account people's experiences and backgrounds and the things that they've done. And in fact, in the investments ecosystem, in the investment sphere, those who use their gut feel actually make better decisions. And so that led me to another line of research that looked at when are there contexts in which we should be using our intuition? Are there contexts in which it's better to be more analytical? And I found that, yeah, it totally depends. There's absolutely situations where you wanna be very analytically driven and some where you don't wanna be analytical at all. And just by riding by the seat of your pants and sort of making decisions based on how you feel and what your intuition is, part of intuition is knowing the difference, knowing which contexts in which you want to be more analytical and when you wanna be more intuitive. And the tricky thing is that you change one variable. You change the industry or you change the mix of people that you're interacting with and everything changes. So there's this nuance that is involved with knowing how to act, how to perceive, how to use your intuition in different situations because we're social creatures and we're always interacting with other people. And so when we're all in our heads, we're not taking into account what's happening on the other end. When I hear this, one of the things I think about is card games, poker. And did you find that when you were interviewing these investors where you're talking to them that gambling, the poker, that any of these sort of strategic games come into play, did they mention this? You know where that comes into play is honing your ability to read other people, honing your ability to perceive others and knowing the standpoint that they come from, like where they're coming from because everyone else has their own background, their own experiences, their own perspectives. And so we talk a lot about self-awareness and self-awareness is certainly a part of it, but self-awareness only makes sense in relation to who that other self is, who that other person is. And so we do need to have a baseline understanding of who we are, but that baseline understanding only takes us so far because so much of success and outcomes and the interaction we have with other people are based on that space between, the space between ourself and that other person. Now, obviously when it comes to angel investing, it self-selects for a level of success to have the capital to invest and a successful network to have the deals to even invest in. And for those of us who may not trust our intuition or our gut, you mentioned earlier experience being a big part of it, how can we develop a stronger intuition to utilize to our advantage? Yeah, I mean, I think that honing piece, like how do you hone that intuition is so critical? And what you're saying is absolutely true, right? You don't have deep pockets. If you're not able to cut lots of checks, it's harder to hone that because you don't have the chance to make the mistakes. Someone, when I first started doing angel investing, one of the first pieces of advice that I got was never write a check for an amount that you're not willing to burn, right? So if you're gonna write a check for $10,000, you need to be ready to burn $10,000 in cash because that is ultimately what is going to happen. So you need to be able to have those experiences and be able to make those mistakes over and over and over again to learn and develop. So when you don't have that and how do you actually develop that? Well, a lot of it goes to, this is something that people can absolutely learn. You can learn how to be better at interpersonal perception. You can be better at investing. You can be better at using your intuition. You can learn it, but not everybody is willing to do it because even though you can learn it, you have to be willing to do the one thing that a lot of people aren't willing to do. And that is embarrass yourself. You have to be willing to embarrass yourself. That's how you hone your intuition by putting yourself out there, taking these massive chances, not taking small chances where you learn very little at a time, but taking huge leaps where you learn a lot at a time. And the problem is a lot of times when we do that, we'll face that one big embarrassment or that one big instance of backlash. And then all of a sudden we're like, oh no, I don't ever wanna have that feeling again. That was terrifying or that didn't sit well with me. And that prevents us from learning and developing our intuition. So it takes a level of humility. It takes a willingness to be embarrassed. It takes a willingness to approach situations that even though you know the deck is stacked against you, that you still go for it anyways. Now for the last decade plus, we've been beating this drum very heavily that social skills are that opportunity for an unfair advantage where everyone else is working really hard and we've heard the age old adage, hey, work harder than everyone else. But what are the biggest social skills deficits in the workplace today? Because the book starts with this fantastic graph showing just how many jobs now no longer rely on basic tasks and automation is replacing them but social skills are now at a premium. So what are they and where are the deficits that you found? Yeah, totally. I mean, this is the thing, right? We've been taught from a really young age that hard work is the secret to success, right? You ask people who are Olympians, you ask people who are CEOs, top executives of companies, you know, you ask anybody who has achieved these indicators of success and you say, how did you achieve your success? And they're like, hard work, just keep working hard, put in the time, put in the hard. And the issue is that we teach our kids this, we teach people to put in the hard work but we find that very quickly, we're sort of disenchanted, finding that hard work doesn't always speak for itself, that you can take two different people who work equally as hard and one person will inevitably be more successful than the other. And that's because the world is driven by signals and perceptions and stereotypes and all of these sorts of things. And so those are the types of social skills that we need to, number one, understand are important. And number two, be able to develop in ourselves. And number three, be able to tailor it to the right situations that we're going to be in. These are skills like knowing ourselves but also being able to know the counterpart, knowing how the counterpart is going to be perceiving us because different people are gonna perceive us in different ways. Some people are going to see those stereotypes, some people are going to see those stereotypes and try and go beyond, some people are not going to see those stereotypes at all. And so it's really up to us to guide those perceptions and be able to interact with people in a way that will make our hard work work harder for us. So that it's not just your hard work speaking for itself, it's your hard work speaks, but you're also helping to amplify and have it speak on behalf of what you're doing. And what I found so fascinating is looking at what are our weaknesses and turning them into an advantage which I think is very intimidating for a lot of people. Obviously what we're talking about here are perceptions and biases that happen regardless of our abilities that are natural to all of us. Socialization is such a huge part of our career and our ability to persuade others is gonna influence how far we go. And at the same time, we're working against stereotypes and things that are completely out of our control. So it's easy to fall back to, well, I'm the victim, I'm not outgoing, I don't have a great first impression, I don't have a network or maybe I'm an ethnicity that's judged in a certain manner, I don't have privilege. And your book focuses on turning that into an advantage, creating your own privilege. What do you mean by creating your own privilege? Yeah, there's a number of things that you're sort of touching on there, right? I mean, the first is we talk about, some people naturally have an advantage and other people have to make one for themselves. And that can change based on the situation that you're in. And when we talk about privilege, it almost has this like, it's almost this loaded term now, it's like this negative word. We don't wanna be associated with the word privilege because there's something around that word. And it doesn't have to be that it's this negative. You guys talk a lot about unfair advantage, right? And we're okay with the word advantage, we're not okay with the word unfair. And what privilege really is, is unfair advantage, right? And so why is that? And what is it about the advantage piece that's okay? And when we tie it with unfair, but it's warranted, it's a meritocratic thing, then all of a sudden we're okay with it. And so, the premise that a lot of my research builds on is that you can make your own privilege and that privilege doesn't have to be this dirty word that you say. You can flip things in your favor to get the sort of outcomes that you're looking for and that you deserve. The second piece of what you're sort of saying that I think is really interesting is a lot of people don't do this because when we talk about changing people, like turning people's stereotypes to work in our favor or switching things so that it gives us an advantage, people start to think like it feels strategic. It feels like I'm managing impressions or that I'm, you know, that it feels almost gross. Like I'm manipulating or something. And, you know, in fact, the thing is people are gonna have impressions of you. They're gonna have first impressions of you regardless of whether you guide them and to your impressions or not, right? They're going to have an impression of you. And if they have the wrong impression of you, it's a lot more work and a lot more, it's less authentic for you to then have to change their impressions back to who you authentically are. If you start with knowing who you are and being unapologetic about who you are and guiding those perceptions, it's actually better off. It's not strategic at all. You're showing them who you authentically are and giving them that information, the information about the value you provide, the information about who you are. You know, I always talk about how, you know, people, we say to people like be yourself, right? Go, if you're going into an interview, just be yourself. Or if you're pitching a venture capitalist, just be yourself or, you know, you're going on a date with somebody new. Like just be yourself, right? But the thing is, be yourself is actually horrible advice. There are so many versions of yourself, right? It's really like be yourselves. It's like a diamond, right? And each person is a diamond, but you can look at that diamond from different angles and it's gonna sparkle in different ways, right? And under certain lighting, it's gonna maybe shine more or in certain rooms or in certain, like, you know, like different contexts in different situations. You're gonna see that diamond differently. And when you guide those perceptions, it's not strategic. Instead, it's showing them that angle of your diamond that's gonna shine the brightest and is gonna show them how you enrich and provide value. It's still the same diamond. You're still yourself. You're still authentically that diamond, but you're just positioning it and showing it at that angle in which it's going to give you the most, the richest sort of experience with that other person. One of the things that I loved is this idea. If you were walking into a meeting and let's say that there's gonna be an obvious stereotype or a bias going against you or working with you to go ahead and call that out and have some fun with it. Right now, we're in a place, we get letters all the time of guys, girls, everyone's afraid to say the wrong thing. Everyone is on tiptoes. Everyone is walking on eggshells 24-7 and now going into trying to do some business, trying to work and to call out the bias or the stereotype or whatever's going on to make light of it just puts everyone in a position of that's now out of the way. Now in doing this, did you encounter any pushback or any issues in viewing it and stating this and putting it out like that? It's amazing. I mean, there's so much backlash now. It's like we say something and immediately instead of that message, we're thinking like, did we say it in the right way? Did we go too far? Did that person interpret it in the right way? We're in this world where we no longer think about the intent versus the impact. This is something that I talk about with my students all the time, which is like, if somebody says something, are we interpreting the intent behind that or are we interpreting the impact of that? Is it the impact that I felt affronted by that comment even though that person didn't intend to do that? And when you lose that element of it, you start going off of some really dangerous cues and it sort of prevents conversations from progressing in all different directions. So, I mean, there's number one, I think we also forget that everybody has something. What I mean by that is like we, there's like the typical, like we talk about gender and race and class and the typical cast of characters, but everybody has something. You go into a situation and everyone feels either self-conscious about something that might be more of a hidden thing or something that they're thinking in their head. Everyone's being judged regardless of what you have. And like we've gotten into this bias Olympics to some extent of who has it worse. And it's not to say that some people don't face tons and tons of disadvantage and tons and tons of experiences of being underestimated. But I think, you know, we have to realize that it's an imperfect system. We're trying to change the system and in order to change the system, we have to be able to do it from the inside out as well as the outside in. And so doing it from the inside out means that we do try and understand people's impact and their intent. And if those two things don't jive, trying to figure out what happened and the second piece of this is figuring out what happened by evaluating the statement and the person as two completely different things, right? Imagine one person says something and it comes off completely wrong. If you switch that person's gender, race, whatever and had that same person saying that same comment, does that sit differently, right? Is it somehow now going to be interpreted differently? Is it somehow going to like, would you now laugh rather than being upset, you know? And so it's thinking about those types of things and not calling out the person. Like you said this, so now every single fiber of your being is associated with that comment and the type of person that I visualize that person as being. So, you know, it's very much like going back, I feel like, to these roots and understanding. And, you know, honestly, who has not, who in this world hasn't said something wrong at some point? Like, who hasn't said something and been- Daily. Oh man. Have you been listening? Yeah. Daily. Right, like, we all do that. We say things and we're like, oh, we totally didn't mean it like that, right? And so if we go back to like those situations that we've been in and we're like, and then we allow ourselves to see that in the people who maybe have said something that we take a friend with, I think it just creates this different level of understanding. In the investment space, especially angel investing, the obvious bias that everyone is aware of is female founders tend to get investment at a lower rate than male counterparts. And then there's even a little adage of the more attractive the male is, the more likely he is to get funding. Somebody's reading my research, I'm so impressed. So going along with that, what have you found that the successful female founders do to give themselves an advantage against that bias that allows them to get funding? Yeah, I mean, what you're kind of saying, right, is that, is absolutely true, right? Women are getting 2% of the venture capital, all of the venture capital financing that's out there, right? So it's abysmally low. And there are lots of different things that we've shown that have impacted, that have been, that have shown to predict why this might be. Things like, when you're more attractive, men that are more attractive get more funding than men that are unattractive. But both of those are higher than both attractive and unattractive females. So it's sort of a depressing kind of finding, but the thing to realize is that it's both male and female investors that are doing the biasing, right? So in some of my other work, I find, for example, that men and women, male and female entrepreneurs are getting asked different types of questions, right? So male entrepreneurs are more likely to get asked questions about potential. Like, how big could you take this? Where do you see this going? What's your vision? And women are more likely to get asked questions about risk. Like, how are you preventing against this? Have you controlled against these risk factors? And that leads to men being able to respond in bigger, more promotional ways, and women responding in more risk-focused ways and then the men get the funding, right? But both male and female investors are asking these questions. It's not just male investors that are doing the biasing. It's female investors that are also doing it. And so the solutions, we've got lots of sort of solutions that we're playing with which involve things like having more women investors, having more women mentors, and that's certainly gonna help, but that can't be it, right? It has to be something, there has to be other solutions if we know that women are doing this just as much as their male investor counterparts. So what I found in my research is that the best way to sort of counteract these effects and the last couple of years I've been studying almost exclusively, how do we inoculate against these sort of biases? Because it's sort of depressing to hear about all of these negative findings. And it's really around guiding how you're being seen and it's about stopping and redirecting and constantly redirecting how the message is unfolding, redirecting that trajectory. And so for example, when you recognize that you're getting asked a question that's very much about risk and your competitors, you answer the question quickly, but then you say something like, and because we're able to go head to head with these competitors, it opens up this opportunity, all of these other opportunities and you very quickly bring it to your vision and how big it is and how scalable the company is and all of these really big opportunistic types of things. And so then you're back on sort of level playing ground if not better off. So lots of different examples of how you can stop and redirect to counteract these effects. So knowing that your first impression is something you can improve, knowing that perceptions are something that are gonna be universal going in, both sexes do it, these biases exist and fighting against it or putting your hands over your ears and pretending they're not there is not helpful. And it sounds like there's a lot of prep here and Johnny and I love a great acronym. The book is all about this acronym of EDGE. So let's break down what you mean by EDGE and go through how our listeners can start building these advantages against these biases that we all face. You've got the acronym. I'm so ex, I'm thrilled that you got it because the book is about how do you gain an EDGE? But I don't ever explicitly say that EDGE stands for these four things. And so that was my little way of kind of putting in trying to delight people who kind of read it and were like, whoa, it stands for something. So gaining an EDGE is based on four components, EDGE. So the E, the first E is about enrich. It's about how do you enrich? How do you provide value? Your message, your ability to achieve success, it's all based on your ability to provide value and enrich what you're working on, enrich what others are working on and so it goes back to knowing what are the ways in which you enrich? What are your superpowers? Now, it, well, just, there was one point that I wanted to clear up there and it was that you mentioned that there was two parts for enrich, two parts for value, knowing the value that you're bringing but also it doesn't really matter all that much if the other party doesn't understand or know your value. Yeah, that's right. Well, I mean, enrich is one of those things where like you might know you provide a lot of value but other people need to know that too. And the problem is that there are definitely people who have that second part which is other people think that they provide value but there's no substance behind it. That's where we get so frustrated because those are the people that are really good at posturing and catering and giving the semblance of having value but they don't actually have anything to back it up. And the unfortunate thing is there's people who go on that for a really long time. Like you can ride that wave for a pretty long time but where it really sustains is when you have both pieces that you actually do provide value and that other people know it as well. The problem is that we don't always have the opportunity to show people how we enrich because maybe we don't belong to the right circles or people are not giving us those opportunities. And so D, the D of edge is for delight which is in order to be given that opportunity you need to get that entree. You need to get that entrance and you get that entrance by people who have written you off but you surprise them in some small way. You do something that's counterintuitive or slightly off putting or slightly unexpected and then it makes them sort of say, like I didn't expect that and it makes them take notice and that's when you can then start to show how you enrich. And that delight, that feeling that I'm trying to bottle and encapsulate. Like people are like, how do you know? Like what is that? It's like the first time you took Uber, right? Forget all the other stuff about Uber and all of the subsequent things and the management and all of that. But like think back to the very first time. I remember it very clearly. And I remember hearing about it. I wrote on Twitter. I said, house is different than a cab. Okay. And they said, use it and find out. Here's a code. Yep. And I took it to the airport and I was like, I'm delighted. I'm delighted. Right? Like I'm delighted. Like it's this weird, like you had, I mean, a lot of people, I mean, I have this weird feeling of like, oh my gosh, this is sort of cool. I'm in some stranger's car and they know where they're, so it's like simultaneously terrifying but also really cool. And you know, all these questions are going through your head. Like, so I don't pay them cash. Like it just takes care of itself and they know where I'm going and I just get out and say thanks and bye. Like there's all of these sort of emotions and feelings and like that's delight. You're intrigued. You're surprised. You've got this simultaneous feeling of being terrified and impressed and delighted all at the same time. That's when you get the opportunity to show how you provide value. Now, I just want to jump back to Enrich because I do feel like both sides of the coin, there are very few that master and a lot of us get struggle, a lot of us struggle around the idea of being an advocate for ourself and demonstrating that value because we don't want to be the bragger. We don't want to be the brown-noser. And what ends up happening is realistically, whether it's an investor or your boss, they're not paying attention to everything that you're doing and all the value you bring. You're a cog in a process that's running and unless you're advocating for yourself, no one else is running in there and saying AJ did this fantastic job. You need to promote him or you need to invest in him. And for those of us who feel weird around this idea of, hey, I get bringing value, but it's the showing it and allowing other people to see it that I struggle with, do you have some tips or some strategies that you've seen work in the investment space or in the corporate world? Yeah, such a great question, right? Because the point of this, right, is that we do want to be showing our best selves and we do want to be advocating for ourselves, but it can go horribly wrong, right? It can go horribly wrong where we are seen as bragging or not sort of sharing the credit and so it's like this fine line between how you do it and I think that's where it, even though these are four different pieces of the framework, they all intersect and go together, right? You're not just delighting and then all of a sudden you move on to G, which is guiding, you're not just delighting and then all of a sudden you're done delighting because now you can enrich and they're totally on board with everything. As you're enriching, you have to continue to guide and be guiding that message and guiding how they see you and a big part of this is not being over-prepared, right? We, just like we sort of say, like work hard, work hard, work hard, we're always like prepare, make sure that you're so prepared that you know this thing cold. Well, actually that prevents us from having a lot of these authentic opportunities to delight and show how we enrich, right? It means, it doesn't mean don't prepare at all, but like have a couple of bullet points, like know what your two or three superpowers are and we're not cognitively set up where our brains are not big enough to remember 16 things at once and when we try to, it makes us stiff, it makes us seem like we're braggarts, it makes us seem like we're trying too hard or that we're trying to game the system, like be confident, be willing to embarrass yourself, be willing to have humility, know a couple of things that you wanna be saying and then dynamically sort of improvise off of those things because you've got loose guidelines and when you do that in a sort of general sense, it allows you to really achieve these perceptions and these authentic perceptions of yourself in a much more holistic and realistic way. It also helps you, it's the people who do this the best and it's something that's so hard, it's like realizing this is not a zero sum game, it's not that when I win, somebody else has to lose or when somebody else wins, I lose. It's realizing that this universe is huge, there's a really big pie and there's lots to be shared and when we're showing a version of ourself that is something that we're really proud of, it doesn't mean that we can't also be showcasing other people and doing it with the best interests of other people at heart, right? The people who do this the best are the ones who don't ever sacrifice other people, they're not willing to step on other people for their own gain. Well, this quote that you have, I just love it and I think it works really well because with a lot of our clients, they are afraid to promote themselves or to show their skills or to put out that story and this quote of, if you don't give your own story of who you are, that story will be given to you and that, if that doesn't present the urgency of why you need to learn this skill and have it in your pocket and put it together, then I don't know how have anything else to tell you but I mean that sums it up. Yeah, we love telling stories about other people, like we meet somebody once and be like, oh, they must have like, they must have had a rough childhood or they must have like this or like in college, they must have been such a jock or like we tell these stories about people based on, we love inventing stories about other people and in actuality, people have such fascinating stories and everyone, you should be sharing your stories, you should be giving them this sort of, I was talking to somebody today and we were talking about like how we were in high school and he was saying, and he was sort of laughing at me because I was talking about how, he was like, well, what were you good at in high school? What were you good at? And I'm like, I was good at math and it's like, that's not like, and I was like, you know, it's, you know, it's soundly like, people hate, you know, you don't hate me for that because I wasn't very good at other things, like I wasn't good at sports and I was so painfully shy that I didn't really, you know, that's what I was good at. I loved how orderly it was, it was so dependable, like it was really good at math and he was like, I was horrible at school. You know, I played every single sport, I was like a solid C student and we were laughing about like our trajectories and our stories and how like today, you know, fast forward, you know, 20, 30 years later that we're able to like really connect on this level that we wouldn't have been able to, you know, years and years ago and, you know, if he had just heard me say like, I'm really good at math, he would have written me off and like painted my whole trajectory from the age of like 13 to the age I am now of this story of, you know, and not gotten like who I am and, you know, sort of the parts of me that are really provocative and outspoken because it would have been replaced with these stories about how I was really shy and introverted and so it's just amazing how you can have these connections with people when you do tell your own story. And unashamedly, unabashedly share that story, you know. Now, it's one of those things that we laugh about in our course that you can own the narrative around embarrassment and shame as a youth. You can own that story of, yeah, I was a little dorky or I was a little nerdy based on conventions but look at who I am now. That's what matters. The flip side of this going back to delight, you know, for us we've talked ad nauseam about humor and how important it is. And everyone gets it in a social setting but whenever we say, hey, no, we want you to be humorous at work. We want you to be humorous in a pitch. Bringing humor actually helps. They always scrunch their face, shake their head, no, that's not gonna work. You actually dig into a study in the book about how humor can manage impressions and actually project competence and higher status. I found that so fascinating because we've been saying it without knowing the science and it's something that's counterintuitive because most of us go into those very professional settings and think the only part of my diamond to borrow your analogy that I can show is the non-humorous, serious AJ. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the humor part of it is tricky because we sort of all are like, yeah, we know that humor is good, people respond to it but when you say to someone like, be funny. It's really hard to be like, be funny, right? If someone says to me, be funny, I'm like, oh, I don't know what to say. Because humor is, it's a reciprocal thing, right? It's something that, again, you're funniest when you're sort of improvising. You're funny when you're reading what's happening and you're reading the context and it's almost like an off-handed thing that you sort of say that's really funny, right? I love to sort of share the example of when I met Hassan Minaj, who is, you know, for his job, he has to be fun. Like, that's his job to be funny. And I tell this story about how I, within like a couple of seconds, made him laugh and I was like, that is like, you know, that is weird. Like, how did I? But he was like, he, you know, but it was really this thing where it was sort of like, how do comedians be funny? How do comedians stay funny? How do professors stay educated? Like, we were making these jokes and going back and forth based on who he was as a comedian and who I was as a professor. And I was able to be funny because I know what being a professor is like and I was giving sort of off-handed comments about something that I knew, something that was really me and was one of my like basics, right? Like one of my basic goods that I talk about, like when you enrich, think about like, what really authentically makes you you, right? It would never work for me to go out there and try and, you know, and I've tried this, right? Like when I first, one of my earliest jobs, people like, you need to network. Like you need to meet some of the top executives, like go out to lunch with them, go out to drinks with them. And I was like, okay, okay, I need to like network. I need to meet these people. And I feel like, I'd be like, can we go to lunch together? Like, can we grab after, like drinks after, like it's so weird, right? Like I'm sitting there with this executive and then the whole time the conversation is forced. He doesn't want to be there. I'm like feeling uncomfortable because I'm like, I'm wasting this person's time. But when you find those authentic opportunities to do that, and one of these executives that I share the story of is how we ended up on the same airplane at one point at this conference. And as we were leaving the plane, he was like, oh, do you have a ride to the conference hotel? My driver is here to pick me up. And I was like, my private driver is here to pick me up. And I'm like, oh yeah, my private driver is here to pick me up too, you know, my private Uber driver. And then he sort of chuckled and he was like, come, why don't you come and ride in my private car? And we had this 45 minute chat through, you know, from the airport to the hotel where it was not forced. It was not me saying like, give up an hour of your time to have lunch with me and let me try and wow you so that you like me so that now I've networked. It was like, we're going to this conference hotel. There was no pressure for me to talk about anything in particular. So we were able to talk about like, you know, our dogs and our childhoods and you know, what we think about, you know, how the Yankees are gonna do this year. And like we formed this authentic connection. And then to this day, he's still one of my, you know, one of my champions that people like go to because we were able to do that. And it was based on this premise of like real humor of him seeing the nature of my funny rather than the nature of a funny that I was trying to attribute to myself falsely. So it's understanding the pitch inside and out and being prepared, but that should give you the freedom then to be situational, be observational and call out the obvious to break that tension. And of course, whether it's a pitch or whether it's a job interview or performance review, everyone knows what's going to happen. Everyone knows exactly what to expect. It's when you zig and everyone's expecting you to zag that you stand out and that gives you that edge and delight is a big part of that. Now, of course, guide is the meat. Guides is the project because it's ongoing. You have to keep honing this story. It's not just tell your story once and assume the world knows it and they're just gonna cheer you on. How do we continue to guide and form this edge and advantage that we're looking for? Yeah, you have to have lots of degrees of freedom, right? When you are prepared and you're able to, and you know, I mean, the trickiest part is having that self-awareness of who you are and that awareness of how the other person is seeing you. Being able to have those experiences where you can be in front of different people and being like, this person's gonna see me differently than that person. And when you have that sort of awareness, then you're able to build in more freedom for yourself to go in different directions, try out different things and be able to sort of delight. And it is really hard because people ask me often, you study how to turn disadvantage into an advantage and you study how to take obstacles and constraints and flip them in your favor. So what are the 10 steps? What are the three steps? Or what are the steps that I need to do to get there? How do I gain an edge? And the thing is, I mean, like I would love to be able to give everybody a recipe and be like, here's what you do, you mix a little of this and a little of that. But it's not a recipe, it's not like the 10 steps to gaining an edge because if I did give that to you, it wouldn't work as well, right? Really what it is, it's a perspective. It's a perspective for thinking it through so that you can develop your own unique edge. That's where you get the unfair piece because when you've taken that perspective and making it yours and making it your unique edge is when it becomes a much sharper edge and a much more refined and a much more useful and effective edge than if you're just going to import it from somebody else. So taking that perspective and then continuously developing it and honing it and practicing it, that's where, and I offer lots of different strategies for ways that you can hone it, right? So being able to practice doing this in a variety of different situations. So happy to give you, I'll give you one example of this just to kind of illustrate what I'm talking about. There's one exercise that I do with my students which is called the 10 knows exercise. And the goal of it is in one week, they have to get 10 people to say no to them. And so, and the point of this is sort of number one, when we're asking people, we're not really ever in situations where we're thinking like I'm trying to get a no, we're always trying to ask for things by trying to get a yes, right? Getting them to agree to something. And when you're trying to get actively get a no, when your homework assignment is to get a no, it changes the way you interact with people. So you start to learn like, hey, like you start to see patterns and see differences that you didn't normally see throughout the course of your life. The second thing you learn is that it's actually a lot harder to get people to say no than you think, right? People are not equipped to say no. If you get at somebody hedging or some sort of a yes, but no, but I'll do this for you instead. Like if they, that doesn't count, right? It has a full fledged no. It can't be a concession, right? So it only counts as a full fledged no. And so you realize like how extreme some of these requests have to get before you actually get a no. And then going through this exercise, you learn like the whole goal is to sort of embarrass yourself and get a no. The whole point of this is for you to get a no. So you have permission now to go and do these sort of things that you never would have done before. And so there's all sorts of exercises and strategies that I talk about in developing this intuition and developing your ability to interact with others. And everyone's intuition of the no tends to, especially with inexperience, tends to create this box around yourself that's completely invisible. And we assume that the no is gonna happen rapidly and people are gonna be comfortable saying no to us when in fact the opposite is true. And we've been doing this exercise for decades with our clients. And one of our favorite examples is we were out one night and we said, okay, same thing, go get 10 no. Since you're so afraid of getting a no and being rejected, let's push through this and see what you can get away with. And he was chatting up this gentleman at the bar and he's trying to get a no, actively trying to get a no. And he walks back over to us with a key to a Porsche 911 and his face is white. And he's like, I don't know how to drive a stick. And we're like, what are you talking about? He's like, well, I did the exercise. I'm trying to ask for a no. So I asked if I could drive this guy's car. And he's like, yeah, here you go. Here's my keys. Where do you need to go? And now he's holding this guy's keys. And he's like, I thought for sure I would get a no asking if I could borrow a stranger's car. We create these bounds, these limiting beliefs around ourselves that unless we are actively testing them, we can't build that intuition behind the edge. I want to add to that your worldview and how important it is, how you go out into the world and what you can do and what's acceptable, that is all placed on you. And if you haven't done the work to meticulously test all these ideas, then you've adopted one that somebody has handed to you. And if it was a worldview that was handed to you by CNN or Fox News or you're gonna have some crazy ideas about what's going on. And the only way to pierce through that is an exercise like that, where you all of a sudden you just, you just through this experience have now have went from everyone's mean and cold and unfriendly to actually, everyone is actually really nice and very friendly and actually accommodating. And that shift can only happen through your own personal experience. I could tell you that all day long, but if you don't go and do the exercise, you won't believe it. You won't believe it. Absolutely. And everyone's being viewed in different ways too, right? Yes. I were to ask somebody to drive their Porsche 911. They'd be like, you know, there might be person, like what? You're Asian, you're a woman, you're a horrible driver. Why would I drive my Porsche 911, right? But if I was like, let me take your child for 24 hours. Right? And they might be like, yeah, you look dependable. Like you're a professor, you teach at Harvard. Like, yeah, of course. Take my child for 24 hours, right? It really changes based on who you are and who they kind of see you as. And you know, some of it's sort of sad, right? It's sad that like there are these sort of stereotypes, but because there are these stereotypes, it also gives you the power to flip them. Like because you know about them, because I know that I'm gonna be interpreted in certain ways, that's powerful. It's powerful to know the negative perceptions that people have of me too. Because that gives me information that I can use if I choose to use it in a way that can put me back into a position where I do have advantages. So it's an important thing to sort of remember that the very thing that is poisoning what we experience is the anecdote to what can fix it as well. So. Now, one of the things that I found in coaching a lot of our clients who are starting out in their career as top performers, they're pretty much thrown into the deep end. And in these situations, they feel the need to ask a ton of questions. And unfortunately when we ask a ton of questions, we're also then perceived as lacking in competence and unable to do our job. So then the flip happens and they don't ask any questions. And then they can't even achieve the results that they're looking for because they're totally lost. So for those who are starting out in their career who are feeling this imbalance and wanting to turn that perception from being someone who's lacking in competence to someone who's a top performer, what can we do knowing that that's going to be the perception put on us as a beginner or a junior at a company? Yeah, you know what's so interesting there is that there's two different types of questions, right? There's the questions that we ask and there's the questions that others ask of us. And we don't often effectively use either of those in the right ways or in the most effective ways, right? So you spoke first about asking lots of questions and seeming not competence and other sorts of interpretations that people might have of us. It's asking the right questions, right? It's asking questions like, what's the point of your question, right? Is it to inform? Is it to learn? Is it to, you know, there's all of these different reasons why we ask questions and the most effective types of questions are the ones that indicate that, you know, there's research that's been done that shows that the best type of question is one that simultaneously shows that you've listened and you're building on, right? So somebody says something and you ask a question that acknowledges that you heard and then takes it one layer, one layer further. And that sort of shows that not only are you competent because you listened and understood, but that you're inquisitive and curious and wanna continue learning because you take it that one layer further. The part that we forget a lot is the questions that are asked of us, right? And we don't use those opportunities in well enough. Like we sort of like, we're thinking about what we wanna say to the net. We were thinking about the next question we wanna ask or we're thinking about like, our to-do list or the next thing that we're gonna be doing. And we don't take advantage of the questions that other people have. When other people are asking questions, like that is your opportunity to shine, right? That is your way of like, that's when you can really wow them. You know, especially like I, when I study pitches, so a lot of my data and a lot of the studies that I've done have been looking at, have looked at pitch competitions and the way in which people present themselves to investors and overwhelmingly entrepreneurs think of pitching as selling. Like they give a pitch and they think about selling, but it's not selling. Pitching is about starting a conversation. So when you pitch, instead of like going out there and trying to wow them through your pitch, your pitch should instead be little cues of questions that people will then ask of you, right? So you'll say something like, this product has, you know, this product is top of the line, the technology is blah, blah, blah, whatever. As soon as you say something like top of the line, people will ask you about the technology behind it, the engineering behind it. You don't need to say that in your pitch. They'll ask you that question. And then that's when you wow them with your like, and I have a PhD in physics and I developed this algorithm through the 10 years and it works through this and that not only has not wasted your pitch time, but you're actually wowing them through the questions and engaging them in a dialogue and use the conversation of interest. So effectively using both the questions you ask and the questions you receive can really allow you to prevent from a lot of those initial perceptions that may be leading to the subpar outcomes. I think it's funny. I mean, a lot of that is in copy as well. Like you don't want to give them all the information. You want to give them just enough for them to get curious to peer further. And then you have the open door of here's everything you've just asked for. And they're happy because they are the ones that asked for. But if you give them that all up front, they're like, what is this? I can't make heads or tails. This is too much. I don't know where to begin. I'm out of here. Absolutely. And they also don't understand everything that you're saying in the pitch. And so they don't want to look like idiots. So they like latch on to like one small thing that they do understand, which is maybe so tangential to what you're actually doing. And then the questions go off on this completely different thing. And you're not able to actually impress them with what you're actually doing. So you're absolutely right. Now, not to leave the audience hanging. The last letter in our acronym here, EDGE, is effort. And we talked about this at the start. Hard work isn't enough. Everyone is working hard. Everyone is trying to prove their worth. So what is that extra effort that we need to be putting in to stand out to get that advantage? Yeah, so that E, that effort, that effort and hard work comes last, right? It's last in the EDGE in gaining an edge. We tend to think that hard work and effort comes first, right? You put in the hard work, you'll get the rewards. You put in the hard work, you'll see the success. But in fact, actually, hard work should come last. You should be thinking about how you enrich and provide value and how you delight and how you guide. Because when you do all of those things, then when you put in the hard work, your hard work goes that much farther for you. That's when the hard work speaks for itself because you've already positioned yourself in a way that you're showing how you enrich, delight and guide, and then your hard work really does work harder for you. So that's why that last E is effort and it comes last. This is so funny to me. So I'm 46, growing up in the 80s, and especially in the late 80s, early 90s. I can't remember the company, but there was a commercial and it was a bunch of young folk who are getting job interviews and they were out and they just graduated, they're in the field and they're interviewing for jobs. And they kept saying, well, I'm a people person. I'm a people person. And the whole point of the commercial was everyone's a people person. You need more skills, you need to get it together. And now we have gotten to a place where, hey, let's get back to people skills. Does anyone have people skills anymore? I mean, that's, it is fully swung the other way and it cracks me up. I mean, there's like ebbs and flows, right? I mean, I think we all know that, you know, you need substance, right? Like that's the enriched part. You need substance, but you also need people to know that value you provide, right? So there's the people part of it, as well as the real like enriching substance bees of it. And so like we are going, we were like toggling back and forth, but I think it's important to sort of understand how the two operate, right? In conjunction with each other. So yeah, yeah, totally. And in studying angel investment, the buzzword is always passion. Entrepreneurs think they're passionate, investors are looking for passion, but that's such a subjective metric. What exactly is the passion that leads to investment? And how can we showcase that, whether we're pitching our ideas for investment or we're just trying to show that passion at work to get promoted? Yeah, passion is such a funny word, right? So like passion was a big like predictor. So as passion was one of the things that I looked for when I was studying intuition and gut feel, right? The extent to which people value passion as this positive, like it elicits positive gut feels gut feel from investors when somebody's passionate. And it's so funny because like your definition of passion is going to be different from my passion, definition of passion is going to be different from somebody else's definition of passion. So like we all have different definitions of passion, but what's even more interesting is that even within a single person, people are confused about what passion means. So I had this one investor who I was interviewing and he was talking about how he never invests in any entrepreneurs who aren't passionate, right? They've got to be passionate about their company. They, you know, I only invest in people who really just show me passion. And then this same investor, like five minutes later in the same interview was like, oh, and then there's this other guy that I just, I couldn't invest in him because it was like he drank way too much coffee. He was way too passionate. And it just got me the wrong way, right? So even within the same person, we have all of these different conceptualizations of what, what something is, right? And so it really goes back to, yes, there are qualities that we look for in people, but it's so dependent on that particular interaction and that space between you and I and what's happening in that space, where we are, the context that we're in, right? Are we in an interview situation? Are we in a social situation? Are we traveling together? Are we, you know, you, again, you know, I always say like you switch one variable, right? You switch the industry you're in, you switch the location, you switch the mix of people and everything changes, right? Your definition of passion changes, the metrics by which you evaluate passion changes, even the extent to which passion matters that changes. I think the important lesson in all of this is increasing your emotional intelligence through experience, through that trial and error and not being embarrassed or ashamed of gaining the experience that leads to this emotional intelligence. So you can pick up the context, you can know that being passionate at a social event about your idea is a lot different than being passionate in a boardroom about your idea. And being able to dial it into your audience and read those cues just as much as you're managing your own is where that emotional intelligence lies. Thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate the book. It's phenomenal. And of course, giving us some actual tips here on the show. Where can our audience find more about the work that you do and obviously pick up your book? Yeah, so my website, laurahuang.net. So my first name, last name, H-U-A-N-G, dot net. Lots of sort of tips there. There's also a downloadable guide to finding your edge and that has lots of sort of how-tos and strategies for honing and working on your edge. And then, of course, all of the normal cast of characters. I'm on Twitter, laurahuang.la. Same with Instagram, laurahuang.la. My Instagram is slightly weaker than my Twitter game. So I'm working on, I'm aspirationally. I'm working on Instagram, but I'm also on Facebook, LinkedIn. One video on TikTok, so we're getting there. You're officially an influencer. I'm trying, it's hard, it's a hard medium. All right, well thank you again for joining us. We really appreciate it. Thanks so much. It was such a pleasure chatting with you guys. But I feel alive.