Rory Sutherland - Success Secrets

Full transcript: Rory Sutherland on London Real

0:12 Rory, I just wanted to ask you some about your own success secret, some of your personal habits that kind of got you where you are today for good or bad. Is there any part of your daily routine that you just make sure you repeat every day, something in the morning or something you make sure you do or don’t do? Weirdly, I have a very deliberate non-routine, which is I’ll vary my journey to work deliberately. And I kind of know the best way to get to work, but sometimes I choose something else. And Nassim explains this, which is it makes you convex to luck. First of all, it anti-fragilizes you, small areas of variation. If you experiment with a route to work, then when the trains aren’t running from seven oaks, I’ve got an immediate plan B. So this is the problem. The business obsession with efficiency leads businesses to over-optimize. And the problem of over-optimizing is two things happen when you over-optimize, one of which is you fragileize yourself, because a small change in the environment can leave you very, very exposed, because you’ve optimized to exist in condition A. But once you find yourself in condition B, this probably happened to Tesco, by the way, you’re totally unsuited to it. So that’s the first one. The second thing is, if you don’t randomize and sub-optimize a bit, you never get lucky. And the slight element of randomness in your life is really, really important if you ever want to have… Now, a lot of people came to

1:42 Me and said, you lucky bastard, how did you get to do a TED talk? I wanted to do a TED talk all my bloody life, and you got to do that bloody TED talk. You blasted it. It’s back in 09, the first one. Yeah, this is back… I guess it must have been, yeah, 09, about right, yeah. And I said, can I get… I’ll tell you a very simple thing. I gave a load of talks that I shouldn’t have really done. I was somewhere where I didn’t have to go, and I kind of committed someone to do it, and then I only won a competing bit of business, so it was slightly embarrassing going, and I still did it. And the way to some extent, I’ve got a friend, Paul Craven, who’s a great behavioral finance and behavioral economics expert. He was for a long time at Goldman Sachs Asset Management. I don’t know, you may have sold to him in the past, I’m not sure.

2:28 No comment, no comment. So it was really dodgy, collateralized debt, maybe. But the interesting thing he said is that there’s a weird relationship between the number of talks you do and the quality of talks you get invited to give. And if you want to go to great events, do lots. Okay.

2:48 And I don’t know what the mathematics behind this are, but if you try and be really, really selective, you won’t get the really good invitations. The really interesting… If you look back on your own life, what you’ll probably say is that, I don’t like to call it success, because that’s a bit self-serving. You luck out, it’s evolutionary, it’s accidental. Huge amount of luck in this whole thing, okay? But the big breaks you had in your life probably came from moments when you were doing something you didn’t strictly have to do.

3:18 Right, or didn’t want to do. Or didn’t even want to do. And you’ll think, I don’t actually need to do this. I always look back on absolute horror, which is we have a fantastic creative director team, husband and wife team, Charlie Wilson and Emma de la Fauce and Ogilvie. And I interviewed them as a very young creative team, and they’re god-like individuals. I mean, they’ve transformed the business far more than I ever could have done. And their interview was on a Friday. And they were a relatively young team coming from a relatively obscure age. And it was Friday, and I was bloody knackered. And I always looked back on this with a shiver. I was within ten seconds of going, actually, can you postpone them to next Wednesday, please? Now, within the second they came in, I thought, jeez, these people are brilliant. You know, this is kind of like the great white whale. These are the people I’ve been waiting for all my life.

4:12 But nonetheless, I always look back with that shiver of horror, which is that if I hadn’t just sort of dragged myself out of the chair and gone to the meeting room. And quite a lot of life is really like that. The really lucky things really sit on the edge, you know, on the edge of what you should be doing. And I always say to people in Ogilvy, look, if we only spend our time doing what our clients pay us to do, OK, we’ll be perfectly fine, but we’ll never do anything really, really great, because we’re just doing what we’re asked. The things we do that are really, really great come out of an accidental meeting in a pub with a guy from Shoreditch. They come out of freak occurrence, which bees understand this. I talk to my talk. The five or ten percent of bees who don’t obey the waggle dance, or maybe it’s that bees ten percent of their time don’t obey the waggle dance. But they build in a certain degree of randomness into their existence to enable you to capture the upside from freak luck. Right. So try to do that in your own life. I’ll tell you the truth about the ad industry. When it was at its perfect level, there was an unwritten rule. This was being about in the early 90s, early to mid 90s. There was still a kind of unwritten rule that in the creative department, if you’d done all your work and you’d done a good job that week by Friday lunchtime, you went to the pub on Friday afternoon and didn’t really come back. Okay. Now, blah,

5:34 Blah, blah, billable hours, blah, blah, blah, shareholder value, blah, blah, blah, you know, all this stuff about needing to be billable and efficient, kill that off. Now, most of those afternoons in the pub were a total waste of time. But one in eight of them was more valuable than two weeks of conventional work. Somebody came up with a crazy idea. Somebody met somebody else who was working on something else or they said, well, we’ve just discovered this thing. And it was it’s, it’s run like Twitter, it Twitter is the new afternoon in the pub. It’s your chance to enjoy serendipitous good fortune. I suppose Twitter has replaced it. It’s not as good as an afternoon in the pub, maybe, but it is a very, very acceptable replacement. But we made a mistake there. Actually, we we, as I said, this business of over optimizing things is something that accountants don’t understand, because they operate numerically system one is really good at this stuff. System one, our instinctive, instinctive instinct is right, which is satisfies, choose something that’s pretty good. And then add a little extra in where I can get lucky, maybe, but also don’t choose anything that’s catastrophically bad either. Right. So system one uses a different kind of optimizing equation or algorithm, which is millions of years old, time tested, and therefore, probably better than the kind of equation you’ll come up with if you’re using Microsoft Excel. Right. Trust your gut. Trust your gut to an

6:55 Extent, actually, because it’s it’s really, really old. You know, I mean, okay, you know, your system two brain only has the kind of shit you’ve learned in your pathetic sort of 50 year existence. System one has a lot of wisdom, which has actually kept us alive and my ancestors alive, you know, you know, right across the savannah. Right. Trust that guy. Don’t diss it. Yeah. But people criticized the last election. They said fear mongering. I said, I’m not dissing fear. I said it keeps me alive every day. What’s the one aspect of your game that you changed that that raised that raised you the most? Is there something when you look back and you say when I stopped doing this, or when I started doing this, that that things started happening? No, I mean, very lucky because Ogilvy is big, and I stayed in a big agency, partly because very fashionable and shortage to go around dissing big. Okay, but it’s worth remembering that big is actually a lot of small, quite often, where the next big thing comes from, it might come from a garage, or it might come from IBM.

7:57 Don’t don’t ever knock those large organizations entirely. But the other thing it’s enabled me to do, which I think is good, is sort of reinvent myself every 10 years as a kind of pathetic fat version of David Bowie. But the large place has enabled me one of the things you can do in a large place is you can specialize quite a lot. It does allow, you know, it does allow for the creation of niches, if you like, because, you know, Ogilvy change has this wonderful ecosystem of 1500 people around it. Now, if we can’t help 1500 people with behavioral science, we don’t really deserve to exist.

8:34 Whereas if we’re in a place with only 10, well, you don’t need all five of us. So there is there is provided the big place is kind of fractal and variegated. I think it’s kind of okay. And Ogilvy is, you know, Ogilvy has done pretty well by that it’s adapted well to the new digital world by and large. We were lucky and that as well we had a good client mix which allowed us to do it faster than most IBM being instrumental actually American Express being another one, we weren’t entirely in the traditional area of clients. And so quite a lot of our clients were the clients who would profit from adopting digital advertising disproportionately early, which gave us a kind of head start. So that’s luck as well. I mean, let’s be candid about this. And we have quite a lot of clients who are quite helpful in the behavioral science space, you know, it’s, you know, there’s quite a lot about behavioral change in some of the briefs that come into the business every day.

9:23 How do you measure your own success? I don’t really, I don’t really have a plan. I’m kind of an opportunist, to be absolutely honest. You know, it was interesting, let’s bugger off over there. So I don’t really have a kind of a, encourage you to do that. So they’ve been very intelligent as well. I don’t have to say that, you know, let’s be absolutely candid. But pluck me. The first thing is try not to fuck up wrongly. Okay, that’s probably, I mean, actually, you know, even though you’re saying you should do stupid things.

10:06 Respect your system one, actually, you know, try and avoid monumental cock up is the first thing. And interesting. I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you, the other thing is, I like to be in an environment where I can kind of decide, you know, I was earlier criticizing those publications for the super wealthy. Yes. And I went to the Caribbean recently, I went to one sort of old fashioned Caribbean hotel. I went to a sort of suit just to visit for I was staying in a villa, but I went to visit a kind of super high end Caribbean hotel.

10:47 And the first one, which was kind of a tiny little bit shabby and a little bit run down, little bit old fashioned. But you have the feeling there, okay, that here we are, you decide what a good life is. And you use the hotel to enjoy it, you know, enjoy that as much as you like, according to your own definition of what a nice day is. And the other one was what I call kind of high end fascism, which is this hotel has a very clear idea of what the good life consists of, you know, there’s magazines where everything’s about sunnasyhi yachts and watches, okay, and golf. Okay. Well, the great thing, the great thing about I mean, the great thing about being a creative person, this actually wraps the conversation very nicely is that once you realize that value is subjective, and you also realize that there’s a huge risk, interview Peter Teal about this, if you get the chance, of what’s called mimetic desire, that you want things simply because other people want them. And what you notice in the financial industry, which was always a problem was that there was huge mimetic desire, which is everybody wanted the shit that other rich bankers wanted. And it became a very dangerous metric because you’re allowing other people’s I mean, it wasn’t even clear who originated these ideas of the good life. What the hell is a bloody 50,000 pound watch doing? What a crock of shit. You know, a lot of bollocks, honestly. Okay, don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty

12:13 Materialistic. Okay, but I look at certain things, you know, I just get this is just total toss. And the nice thing about working in advertising is that although you earn less than banking, you are much, much richer in one way, because you can kind of decide what your idea of, of a good life is because you know the game being played, because you can see the game and first of all, you don’t get trapped in an awful thing of I must have, you know, yacht, I must have watch, I must have suit, which is what’s the point of being rich if actually the the area of your expenditure is entirely constrained by the needs of the people around you and the idea of the people around you about what constitutes a good thing. You’re not making choices. A very, very interesting one is one of the things that you know, I live, I suddenly decided that everybody had got property wrong and that the best thing to spend money on in property which has enduring value, okay, isn’t an extra bedroom. It’s quality architecture. So when I moved out of London to the countryside, I said, okay, I’m going to reverse the usual location, location, location thing, it’s going to be architect, architect, architect. Now, look at it like this, okay, the ability to actually reframe and determine your own idea of value rather than allowing what is what is success to be imposed upon you by the kind of weird consensus of other people as you would get if you read the FT’s

13:33 What to Spend It, okay. What to Spend It If You’re a Wanker would be the full title, okay, is that I moved out. I sold a two bedroom flat in Bayswater, which was itself a grade two listed Sir Kenneth Frampton 1960s building and I bought the roof four bedroom flat for not much more. It was 300 and something thousand when I bought it, okay, of a Robert Adam grade one building with grounds by capability brand. Now, let me tell you this, okay, you go your flash bastard, former home of Napoleon the third, all that stuff, which is where you are now. Okay, stay there for 13 years.

14:11 The architecture still gives me pleasure every time I go home. Okay, if I had bought a flat of identically the same size, but by an indifferent architect in the same location, it would have cost me about 20,000 quid less. That’s all. Literally, I mean, a few percentage points less. Now, if you buy a painting that’s six foot by four by a shit artist, it costs you 50 quid. If you buy the same thing like Picasso, it’s 160 million.

14:38 The same rule does not apply an architecture. Don’t ask me why it’s basically it’s memetic desire or some sort of crap like that. Okay, which is a property by a brilliant architect only costs 5% more than property by crap architect. Don’t ask me to explain this, just exploit it. Right. So if you get the one great thing about working this business is that advertising people in natural kind of property developers, they want to see something that’s underrated by other people. Okay, that’s the natural entrepreneurial urge.

15:07 It’s it’s finding something that someone else underrates. If you make a huge amount of money, but your idea of what success is, is fundamentally constrained by the opinions of other highly conventional and homogeneous people, you’re not rich, you just have a lot of money, but you’re actually quite poor. And you’re not even making your own decisions. You’re only making your own decisions because oh shit, I’m going to buy. By the way, I met a guy in the high end luxury yacht business who’d worked in high end yacht brokerage for years and he said it was a very, very valuable experience because it taught me however rich I am in the future, I will never buy a high end yacht. The first yacht apparently does give you a bit of fun. Okay. What people then do is they assume that the yacht that’s twice as big will be twice as much fun. It’s actually, it’s probably 5% more fun and 500% more grief. Last part of that series is who comes to mind when you think of the word successful? Oh God, you’re being a bit American there because, you know, blimey. Who would I really, I suppose actually, it’s weird people, weird people who are, I suppose I’ll kind of refer to my previous answer, which is people who’ve been highly successful while carving entirely their own path, I guess. And, you know, there are quite a lot of those. You know, someone who died recently who you have to regard as remarkable. It would be Felix Dennis, you know, the, the

16:41 Creative, but, you know, he was kind of a poet and he created Oz and he created a fortune in future publishing and he, you know, just, just someone who effectively was remarkable. There is one other criterion, by the way, which I think I look at. Now, I don’t have any knowledge of football at all or much interest in it, but I’m always kind of weirdly impressed by Gary Lineker. It’s a very strange answer coming from me. Not interested in soccer at all, because he was a really good footballer, but he’s also a really good commentator. Right, yeah. He is very good. Now, someone, now, okay, weirdly, you know, I don’t know anything about your apologies. I have a strange fetish for Ronald Reagan, because he was actually pretty good at four different things. And there is a thing which I really admire, which is someone who does something pretty interesting in two areas, whether closely related or unrelated. I kind of rank higher than the specialist, and it’s the bit of advice I give our young graduates, which is try, okay, if you want to be the best in the world at one thing, like soccer, you’ll almost certainly fail, because there are millions of people trying to be the world’s best soccer player. But if you want to be the best chess player at boxing, or whatever it is, if you can actually be, that’s probably not, there is actually a sport, isn’t there, chess boxing?

17:58 But if you can actually combine two things that are related, and try and be pretty good at both of them, then the, I mean, you know, in a sense, you know, that wonderful thing of behavioral economics came out of an economics faculty that happened to be next to a psychology faculty. And the real progress now doesn’t come from over-optimizing in one field, it’s discovering the overlap between two. Right. And I think there’s, that’s my weird Ronald Reagan fetish. I mean, you know, he’s a pretty good sport commentator. What sort of things did he do well? I mean, he was an actor, okay, he was governor of California, and president, and did them brilliantly, fantastic speaker, but he kind of parlayed, and actually, I mean, he was TV, of course, he took every single medium that you could have taken from radio when he was a baseball commentator, and he kind of was pretty damn good at all of them, and then became president. And there’s something there, I’m just, I know it’s not a conventional view, but I’m kind of in awe of people who can do kind of two things, right? That’s kind of what I’d expect to hear from you.