Episode Notes
Yancey Strickler (@ystrickler) is an entrepreneur and writer, co-founder of Kickstarter, The Creative Independent, and the author of This Could Be our Future, A Manifesto for a More Generous World. He’s a Distinguished Fellow at the Drucker Institute, one of Fast Company’s Most Creative People, and an angel investor in startups, including Hopin, Mati, Organise, Realtime, Supercritical, System, and Wren.
Host Anne Mühlethaler met Yancey over Zoom, with 50 or so others, curious after hearing him speak of his Bentoism project on the James Altucher show in Spring 2020. Having gotten to know each other over the past few months via the Bento Society, Anne starts the conversation by asking Yancey about his upbringing in rural Virginia, his passion for reading, writing and the early days of his career as a music critic in New York City. Yancey talks Anne through the inception of Kickstarter and shares what he learnt about manifesting ideas during the years he spent supporting thousands of creative projects launched on the crowdfunding platform.
He explains how he came up with the Bento (Beyond Near Term Orientation), a tool he designed while he was in the process of writing his book. After pondering on the meaning of value and the Self, Yancey was in need of a metaphor as he explored how to balance decision making between near and long-term, and going beyond the ‘now me’ of the present self’s needs. The two also chat about data, reputation and identity in the digital age, tribes,post-individualism and self-interest. They finish the discussion on whether the Bento can be helpful in building a better future for the planet, or as per Yancey’s original idea, how it could lead us on an intentional path to a better 2050.
A fascinating and fun conversation, happy listening!
Selected Links from Episode
You can find Yancey @Ystrickler on Twitter or via his website Ystrickler.com
The Creative Independent – https://thecreativeindependent.com/
Bentoism & The Bento Society – https://bentoism.org/join
Yancey interviewed on the James Altucher’s Podcast – https://omny.fm/shows/the-james-altucher-show/589-yancey-strickler
The Trouser Press Record Guide – https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/899268.The_Trouser_Press_Record_Guide
Kickstarter’s Stats page – https://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats
Adam Smith – Wealth of Nations – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations
Jerry Colonna Reboot – https://www.reboot.io/podcast/
Don Cherry – Relativity Suite 2 – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_Suite
The Weirdest People in the World – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WEIRDest_People_in_the_World
Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering – https://www.priyaparker.com/thebook
Peter Hook – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Hook
Joy Division – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_Division
Our Band Could Be Your Life – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Band_Could_Be_Your_Life
Not for Bread Alone – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_by_Bread_Alone
Full Episode Transcript
Anne Muhlethaler:
Hi, hello, bonjour, and namaste. This is Out of the Clouds, a podcast at the crossroads between business and mindfulness. And I’m your host, Anne Muhlethaler. Today, I am thrilled because I am bringing you an interview I did over the summer with an amazing, amazing mind. My guest is Yancey Strickler. Yancey is an author and entrepreneur, very well-known to be the co-founder of Kickstarter. He is also the founder of The Bento Society and the author of This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World. I got to know Yancey on a podcast actually. I was listening in spring 2020 to The James Altucher Show, and something about the projects that was at the time the development of Bentoism and The Bento Society really struck a chord with me. A couple of weeks later, I found myself on a Zoom call and drawing my first Bento, discovering the concept.
Anne Muhlethaler:
In this conversation, I ask Yancey first about his start as a young writer in New York City. I was very curious to hear from him about ideas. He was so hands-on at Kickstarter and was privy to so many ideas being developed and taking root as real things in the world. We also talk about value and the self or self-interest. Of course, we talk about the Bento as a tool to help us go BEyond near term orientation. And then we touched on lots of other subjects, including the beauty of learning from other people and much more. I’m going to leave it here. So without further ado, I am delighted to share with you this conversation with Yancey Strickler. Enjoy.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Hey, Yancey, it’s so good to see you. Welcome to Out of the Clouds.
Yancey Strickler:
Hey, Anne, great to be with you as always.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Thanks so much. I was really excited for us to have a conversation. I’ve actually wanted to invite you on the podcast for a bit, but I also wanted to have another read of your book, which I read last summer after first discovering Bento. I wanted to start by asking you about the very candid, the very honest introduction that you had to the book, which I thought was very… It was wonderfully contextual. It felt very far from the perception that I had of you since we’ve gotten to know each other over the past few months. So I wanted to find out from you a little bit more about who you were when you were kid and what your environment was like when you were growing up.
Yancey Strickler:
Sure. I mean, it makes me immediately want to know what your perception of me was, but maybe we’ll get into that later.
Anne Muhlethaler:
We can get to that too.
Yancey Strickler:
Yeah. My name is Yancey, that is my real name. I’m 42 years old and grew up in the United States but in the South, in Southern Virginia, border of Virginia, West Virginia. I grew up mainly on a farm. My parents divorced when I was three. My dad was a traveling waterbed salesman. My mom was a secretary. They split when I was about three, and then my mom became Christian, and the rest of my childhood was as an evangelical Christian with the man she remarried. I was living in the farm and in the middle of nowhere, going to very rural schools where I very much did not fit in and really struggled until I was able to leave. Yeah, I was just a country boy. I was just a country boy. But what was interesting was that I loved books and I loved culture. And so, I had a great yearning for the world, just because I read absolutely everything I could find. I loved music, listened to anything I could find. Both my parents are very worldly. Didn’t graduate from college at that time, but had taste. But, yeah, I was this boy in the middle of nowhere dreaming of the larger world and living in a place where no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t fit in.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I think that in the way that I reread it I must have really blanked on that last year. I think that one of the reasons, selfishly, I was drawn to this is that I grew up in rural Switzerland in the middle of nowhere. And despite the fact that my family wasn’t particularly evangelical Christian, we did get a couple of years of a taste of that with my brother. For sure, very much like you, I did not fit in at all. So I’d love to find out what were you reading and what were you listening to? Yeah, because I feel like a lot of our early readings can sort of define a lot of the world that we want to explore and potentially the path beyond that.
Yancey Strickler:
Yeah. Well, I went to a Christian school through fifth grade, so that’s through age 11 or so. The first half of the day at this Christian school, and this was for all students together, kindergarten through high school, the first half of the day was Bible study. And so, we would have to break down and analyze Bible verses, memorize them, understand them. And so, I think of that as being a first reading experience that I think still influences me in all kinds of ways that I probably am barely aware of.
Yancey Strickler:
And then once I was reading on my own, I was just such an excited reader. I remember reading every single Hardy Boys book multiple times, every Nancy Drew book multiple times. Roald Dahl, Matilda was probably my favorite book. Yeah, I just read everything. I remember reading To Kill a Mockingbird maybe fourth grade. That was very affecting. I would just go to the library, just read everything I could. My mom talks about how her image of me as a kid was just a book in front of my face, like the top of my head above it. That’s just what I loved. It’s just fun.
Yancey Strickler:
Musically, my dad is a musician. So is my mom too, but my dad played in bands and was quite serious about it. The band would practice in the house, and I even played in a band with my dad briefly. He had played, initially, bluegrass and country music and country rock because we’re in the South. I didn’t really like that music, but it’s what I was surrounded by. I loved the Beatles and The Beach Boys. And then Nirvana happened. And then I went deep into alternative and then indie rock and then punk and hardcore. That was a gateway drug to really a life that has been devoted to music.
Yancey Strickler:
But from the age of, I think, five or six, my father started teaching me how to play guitar. And I was always told like, “You are going to be a musician.” I think that was kind of the profession my father wanted for me. Yeah, so just music was very, very present. And so, my very first few jobs combined these things where I made a living writing about music. That was great because I got to put what had become a very deep knowledge of a lot of things because my reading attack, I brought that to music. I would buy music encyclopedias, and I would just read them front to cover repeatedly, just to learn about every artist. Because then how to hear someone or how to discover something you’ve never heard about before was the big challenge. And so, I just read everything I could just looking for a name I hadn’t seen before. And then I would try to, you know, how could I hear them?
Yancey Strickler:
And so, yeah, just bringing those things together was very much a natural culmination of really what a lot of my childhood and a lot of my energy has always been devoted to.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I’d love to know at which point did you decide that you wanted to become a writer?
Yancey Strickler:
I don’t think I decided, I think I was. I believe it’s fourth grade I started writing a series of science fiction stories and all these composition books. There’s many of them, they’re all about the same set of characters. So, that was something that was just fun. I loved doing that. I even remember in sixth grade I was going to a public school, so no longer a Christian school, now a school with a lot of kids, and this is in the very rural area. This is when I started getting bullied and beat up a fair amount. One morning while I was waiting for the school bus, the bottom of my driveway, I saw a deer come stumbling out of the woods across the street. And then it fell down in the ditch across the road from me. It’d been shot, and it fell down tangled in the barbed wire.
Yancey Strickler:
I went to it while I was waiting for the school bus and just watched this deer die and just like touched it, tried to like comfort it, be there, cried. And then the hunter didn’t show up while I was there, the school bus came, and then I went to school. In the school bus on the way to school, I wrote a poem about it. I wrote a poem about it. So that just shows where my instincts were of what I did with things. But I wrote a poem about it that I ended up sharing with the teacher. Then they had me read out to the school the next day something. I can vaguely remember it, but it was I ended up reading this poem I’d written.
Yancey Strickler:
So just the point of that is to say that here I had a pretty significant moment of being with something as it’s dying, and my immediate response is to turn it into a piece of writing to try to reflect on it in that way. So I think that that was not premeditated, that was not like I’m trying to get some likes on Instagram. This is just a boy alone in the country and that’s what I did. So I think a bit that’s just always been there.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That’s amazing. So, yeah, your first job in New York, by the time you made it to New York, was to work for The Village voice, which to me as someone who came to New York, I think I was… The first time I went I was 14, and then I came back I was maybe 21, 22. It sounds like the dream. The young me is majorly jealous of your first job. Just tell me a little bit about it. Was it as much fun as I’m making it up in my head?
Yancey Strickler:
Definitely not as much fun.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Okay.
Yancey Strickler:
Well, The Village Voice was my first… There were freelance writing gigs, so I didn’t have a full-time job there. But I had been writing for Pitchfork and a few other places. My day job was in a radio news provider that’s now a clear channel in the United States. My job was to rewrite news stories so that they could be little 15-second news blurbs, news briefs that a DJ would read out on the air. Yeah, my job was to rewrite entertainment and music news according to every genre, country, hip hop, pop, rock and, yeah, and turn those into little things DJs could read every day. And so I did that for three years, and it was excellent. It was excellent. It was a great job.
Yancey Strickler:
One of the music encyclopedias that I had studied and memorized, when I ended up starting working there, I find out the person who created that was the editor-in-chief of the whole thing. Yeah, he became a great mentor to this day, Ira Robbins, Trouser Press.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Amazing. What’s the name of the encyclopedia?
Yancey Strickler:
The Trouser Press Record Guide. It’s fantastic.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Cool.
Yancey Strickler:
Fantastic. But so I had this day job, but I was going to see a lot of shows. This is New York in early 2000s, so this is The Strokes are about to happen, The White Stripes are about to happen. It’s about to be that kind of moment. New York had The Strokes, a lot of things. I was a member of some online music communities and one of which had, which is still around, has a lot of amazing, great writers, and it was very small. One of the people in it is the editor-in-chief of The Village Voice music section, the head of The Village Voice music section. And so, one day I just sent him a piece on spec where I wrote a review, an album I liked, and physically mailed it to him, because this is how you would do things, along with a little letter about me. A few weeks, I get a phone call saying, “Hey, we’re running the piece. It’s going up next week.” This was Chuck Eddie is his name, wonderful person. “This is going up next week. Give your address, we’ll send you your check. You’re getting 75 bucks.”
Yancey Strickler:
Yeah, and so then I started writing more regularly for The Voice. There were several years where I was in a full-time music writer, music journalist, very poorly paid, never making more than $30,000 a year. And that’s even with having a full-time editorial job at Times too. But I was in New York, I was going to see shows. I was friends with bands. I was doing my dream. I wasn’t the best person at it by any stretch. Other people were much better connected, but I had a weird name, and I was excited. At the same time I was doing this, I was also blogging every day. So that also just kept a writing regimen, kept a bit of a profile, kept a conversation with other music writers. And this is all 2000 to 2005, something like that.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That’s so interesting. I find it fascinating to hear the early beginnings of people’s careers. So you famously co-founded then later on became CEO of Kickstarter, which is a company that essentially defined a new concept in the world that is crowdfunding. And it’s something that everyone is now really familiar with. So I would love for you to tell me what you learned about the world of ideas and how ideas come to life from your experience over the course of your career there.
Yancey Strickler:
That’s a nice question. So it was my friend and co-founder, Perry Chen, who first had the idea for Kickstarter. He had had the idea about three or four years before we had met. He had wanted to throw a concert in New Orleans and didn’t have the money to do it, but had the idea of what if he proposed the idea for the concert online, people put up their credit cards but no one is charged unless the show sells out. That way, he wouldn’t have to decide whether or not to front the money, the public together could. But he didn’t know what to do with that idea, he wasn’t a technical person.
Yancey Strickler:
And so, we met in 2005 and started talking about it and dreaming about it and imagining what it could be. Up until that point, I had never been involved in anything that was, and neither had he, that was a purely entrepreneurial effort or really putting a new idea of this caliber into the world. And so, one thing I learned was that it’s really hard to explain new things to people. We had years, it was four years in between our starting to collaborate and the site launching. During those years, we were working diligently on it, and a lot of that was speaking to artists and creative people and trying to explain the idea. Trying to explain a totally new concept without anything to point to, without a visual, without clear analogs was extremely difficult. We ended up finding a way to explain it, and it really came from just iteration of talking to someone and being able to see the moment in which you bored them, in which you confuse them, and just realizing, “This is not the right way to talk about this.”
Yancey Strickler:
What the end of that ended up being was that you really just can only introduce maybe one new idea at a time. So Kickstarter needed to be about a lot of people coming together to fund a creative thing. Now, there’s a lot of smaller pieces of that that we could talk about or that were important or whatever and other ideas we had, but we ended up stripping away because we were just like, “That, we think it might be too complicated. We’ve already seen just people getting this model of a conditional purchase, even that is a tough concept so just needs to be as simple as possible.” So a real clear takeaway was that it needed to be as simple as possible.
Yancey Strickler:
And then I saw how during the first two years that Kickstarter existed in the world, basically every Kickstarter project video is someone explaining to their community how Kickstarter works and using skits, using animations, using a simple explanation. It really took all of those iterations of probably 5,000 people explaining the model in their own words and doing how many countless conversations one on one at these funding parties and launch parties and things, I think that’s what it took for it to become something that people really understood.
Yancey Strickler:
So how did it spread? It spread because the idea was simple. It spread because other people were incentivized to tell the story in their own words. Yeah, and then other people were then incentivized to share that person’s story in their own words. We knew that there was a built-in virality to the idea that people would want to share their projects. But I think it also really helped for making the idea something that became very ubiquitous. And so, what I ended up seeing in this course of this five-year span was how something that seemed totally speculative and people were extremely skeptical of for that to go to so normal you barely even think about it. And if you were to say to that person, “You were really skeptical of this five years ago,” they would deny it and they would feel completely disconnected from that truth.
Yancey Strickler:
And so, the feeling I had from seeing that was one of amazement. And then a secondary feeling I had was one of alarm because I thought, “Wait, this is happening with everything, isn’t it? This wasn’t a special case, everything around me is like this.” I was raised within the comfort of my society that I still in my mind in that first year of Kickstarter. I think a part of me was waiting for the team of five people that showed up with their clipboards to make sure it was okay for us to exist. I had still some sense of there’s a permission structure like that. I really experienced firsthand how not true that was and how the world rearranged itself around how this idea spread. I’m sure someone told me maybe before that’s how things worked, but I certainly have never felt it or seen it until that experience.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Recently, I reread the book, I don’t know whether you’ve seen or you’ve heard of it or read it, The Art of Possibility by Benjamin and Ros Zander. There’s one chapter that’s called It’s All Invented. When I read you, I thought there was an echo to a quote that I’m going to read. You said, “The truth is that everything is made up. The same way Kickstarter was made up. Some people think something and try to bring it into existence. If other people start believing in this idea, it becomes real.” How long did you stay at Kickstarter? Over 10 years, right?
Yancey Strickler:
Yeah, 12 years.
Anne Muhlethaler:
12 years. So then you had 12 years of experience of seeing other people’s ideas come to life. I mean, I can’t even imagine what you end up doing with this kind of knowledge. Tell me what it was like for you to work with these artists and creatives.
Yancey Strickler:
It’s interesting to reflect on because, yeah, I was always the community person, the community-focused person, the person who was friends with the creators, who sought people out, who looked at every project. Probably the first 10,000 projects, I would guess, I looked at all of. And so, I’m most motivated by the creative project part of Kickstarter. That’s the most interesting part. The business-
Anne Muhlethaler:
I side with you.
Yancey Strickler:
Yeah. Yeah. The business part I’m like, “Cool.” These are things that have to exist for this other part to work well. I really fan out on those things. I’ve been fortunate to have a front-row seat in a lot of different kinds of creative processes with a lot of different types of artists and creative people. And through that, you learn different ways of thinking, you get to watch how someone else deals with a problem. You just get to be in a place of constant learning mode. And you get to meet your heroes and have great conversations with your heroes.
Yancey Strickler:
If I think about those feelings, those feelings encompass the first four years we were live. So then if I think about the next four years, which was the years I was CEO, I felt extremely disconnected from that creator experience. I knew it was happening, I still talked to creators, I still met with creators, but so much of my experience was about the organization, about managing a reputation, about staff. So the connection to the product definitely for me just became more distant because my day-to-day reality was no longer the wider creative universe. It was the operational and executional and strategic challenges of operating a business that serves that, which makes all kinds of sense. Yeah, I felt a much greater connection to what was happening on the ground early on.
Yancey Strickler:
And just last week, I saw someone… earlier this week maybe, I saw someone tweet something about how their project was the 20th most funded of all time, and they’re like, “And that’s out of 500,000 Kickstarter projects.” I thought, “Is that at 500,000, is that true?” And so I went to the stats page, kickstarter/help/stats, to look at the live numbers, and yeah, it’s like 530,000 projects that have launched. Not all have been funded, about 40% are funded.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That’s huge.
Yancey Strickler:
So if I think about 500,000 people, a lot of people are repeat creators, but say 500,000 ideas took the chance at existence through this tool, I felt really great about that. I thought, “Wow, this is not a number I would think to celebrate, but this really does in a way feel like maybe the number to celebrate, just people feeling empowered to take their shot.” So seeing that little stat the other day just sort of re-grounded me in what it really is about. While I was there full time, I had periods of feeling very connected and periods where there’s this other stuff that was more in the forefront of my experience.
Anne Muhlethaler:
But you were an ideas enabler essentially, and you had a front-row seat to understand how ideas should be presented, communicated, potentially can be manifested, which really feels very fitted to where we are in our Bento Groups by the way, about manifesting ideas. So that’s why I felt very connected to this.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I first heard you on The James Altucher Show, and I really wanted to re-listen to it this week but I really did not have time. I love context. I find that context really helps everyone place things. You explain in the introduction of your book about how you were walking around in New York with your family and you read an article about how China was making plans for something to happen in 2050. And at the time, the US government could not agree to foot the bill for the nation that same month. That was a trigger for you to think about the future. Can you tell us about that?
Yancey Strickler:
Yeah, I mean, as you put it, it was just a moment on the street of seeing a headline at the moment. The US was locked in another political slog fight, and that was a moment that just really… I feel like it kind of extended my horizon line. I knew that 2050 existed, but here I was finding out that, to whatever degree it’s propaganda, which it almost certainly is to some degree, but that here are people that are… 2050 is on their horizon, and they have a path that’s fairly laid out to get there. And again, maybe an obvious observation that other people would already be thinking about, but it was just a feeling I just couldn’t stop thinking about and thinking about it for myself personally, but more generally just thinking about it for this broader journey that we’re all on of society itself. Like to what degree are we thinking in this way, and what happens when we do, and what are ways that we might?
Yancey Strickler:
I saw that headline during a period where I was also reading and thinking a lot about the history of value and the self. I was very interested in these two topics. Part of it was thinking about in Wealth of Nations, which I had just read, an abridged version of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. He talks about the power of self-interest and how people are motivated by their own desires and needs, and that felt very true to me. But it just struck me that how do we define self? How do we define where we start and stop? I was reading philosophy and trying to get a history of that idea, which is actually something I’m going even deeper into at the moment for a different project. At the same time, I was also doing reading about value, like how have we thought about how value is described, and found a number of interesting books and text on that.
Yancey Strickler:
I’d just be using my reading power, my curiosity to just, “I want to understand something.” And I think I was interested in that, or I knew I was interested because I had stepped down as the CEO of Kickstarter about four or five months before. The last four years of my time at Kickstarter had been a lot of it focused on Kickstarter becoming a public benefit corporation. So reclassifying away from being a traditional for-profit company and instead becoming a company that’s legally required to produce a positive public benefit for society. And so, I saw that choice by us as being an important one and one that I feel like should become the norm, but I wanted to understand how is it that financial value has been ascribed, the gold standard of value? There’s other kinds of things that Kickstarter is trying to manifest, other values, creative values, community values, values of freedom and liberty for artists, aren’t those values also worth a business or a group of people collaborating to grow?
Yancey Strickler:
And so, I was just looking for what is the philosophical underpinnings of the ground that we’re standing on right now, how did we get to this place of understanding. That research and that thinking ended up being a foundation for the book This Could Be Our Future. I think that that 2050 prompt really led me to think about this question of, in the next 30 years, in the next 70 years, in what ways might these things evolve? In what ways might this self-evolve? How has it even evolved in my life? What have I seen about where I define the limits of myself as an individual versus how I interact with others? And also to say that the focus on financial value has been a dominant thing in society for at least 100 years, but in a world of climate change or in a world of a lot more digital values and sensors, that also seems like something that’s changing. So what are ways that we can understand this?
Yancey Strickler:
I had been curious about these areas, I find this headline, and I had to return to it to really find it later, but I felt like there’s this undefined space that opened up for me, that I just became intensely curious about and wanted to understand.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I was listening earlier today to an abridged version of the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, whatever it’s called, Stephen Covey, and I think I’m on number four and number five, something that’s very Bento-like. He says, “Effective people start with the end goal in mind.” And so I feel like that extension of your timeline by looking at 2050, or whenever we do start at looking at what are the potential goals that we can set for ourselves, then, like you said, we can build a plan or a roadmap towards that. But if we just advance working from day to day, what’s possible, right?
Yancey Strickler:
Yeah. Then you’re working and iterating on the existing paradigm, which is something you have to do, but you’re not doing with any destination. So yeah, I think it was very helpful because my experience with Kickstarter said, “This model of the PDC feels like an improvement. It’s still challenging. This should be more normal.” But also a feeling like you can’t force companies to do that and that there’s something deeper here. What is it that made this an obvious choice for us? How could other people, no matter what they thought or believed, how could they similarly have a feeling of, “You know what it’s really about? It’s about this.” And how could people come to that honestly?
Yancey Strickler:
So I think that was something I was just thinking about. And the thing that emerged, the Bento, that came I was halfway through writing this book. I’d written all about the recent history, and then the second half of the book was about, “Here’s my better way.” I knew the better way was about expansion of value in self. I’d done all this research. I knew the philosophers I was going to cite, but what I lacked was what’s the metaphor? The metaphor I was using at the time was the idea that there was thin and thick value, a thin and thick self. I had this thin/thick metaphor. I have a lot of mood boards around thin and thick, but I knew it wasn’t sticky enough, wasn’t good enough. And then one day, I reached a halfway point of the book, and I had built into my schedule a month break. I put this month break in, and I’d said, “During that month, I’m going to do zero writing.” Because I had been working eight hours a day, every day on this for many months.
Yancey Strickler:
I was going to do zero writing, and I didn’t have my metaphor yet, but I thought, “I’m just going to be, and it’s going to happen.” That’s what I told myself, “I’m just going to be, and it’s going to happen.” And so, I spent the first week reading other things, doing more research, and the second week I thought, “I’m just going to try working on paper. I’m not letting myself write, I’m not doing the same grind, but I just want to work on paper.” I spent a day trying to storyboard my book. I just have this idea, “What if I storyboarded it?” So here’s the first chapter, and I did each one, and I got to the big question, how am I explaining my idea? As I tried to explain what it was I was impacting, I thought, “Well, the way we tend to picture self-interest now is as the hockey stick graph, a chart where a line just going to the moon.” So I drew that on a piece of paper and labeled the X-axis time and labeled the Y-axis, because of the things I’ve been thinking about, self-interest. And I thought, “Okay, so this is the Y is your self-interest.”
Yancey Strickler:
And as I did that, I just had this instinct try extending the lines of both these axes. And suddenly, this picture that had been this big hockey stick graph instead was just like this big open expanse with a tiny little up arrow in the bottom left corner and the rest of it just totally open. That was the moment where I looked at it and thought, “Oh, this is that undefined space. This is that path to 2050. This is all these things. This is what that is.” I quickly just drew two lines to turn it into a two by two where I had these four boxes. The language wasn’t exactly this at the start, it was slightly different, but it was I had now me, when the bottom left, where hot stick graphs live, what I want and need right now. But in the bottom right, it was huge for me, that person I am trying to become, want to become. The top left is now us. So as my self-interest extends and grows, so do my responsibilities for other people. And then in the top right, future us, of thinking about the next generation.
Yancey Strickler:
All of this, this flash of drawing the self-interest chart to that, was probably maybe three minutes. After I drew that, I was looking at it and thinking about it, and it felt true to me. Yeah, it felt real. I wrote a simple description next to it that just said, “BEyond near term orientation.” I just wanted to label this idea in my notebook. Yeah, BEyond near term orientation. This was a simple tool to help you see beyond your near term. And as I looked at BEyond near term orientation, I saw that the first letters made an acronym for Bento. I had recently read a book about Bento boxes, had recently read about hara hachi bu, this idea that a Japanese meal was trying to make you 80% full to make room for tomorrow.
Yancey Strickler:
The Bento, it was destined, this is exactly what this is. This is exactly what this is. And so, I looked at that and thought, “This is a Bento. This is a Bento.” Later that same day, couple of hours later, I kept noodling on it. I have a whole notebook of different ways I tried to take it, but the end of that afternoon, I made a video where I drew it on a piece of paper, shot it with my phone, and had myself narrate it because I thought, “I just want to record this idea.”
Yancey Strickler:
Yeah, I liked it. My wife really liked it. She thought it was awesome. My book editor, when I shared it with her, she was like, “This is way more than I was expecting for your metaphor.” But I wasn’t totally sure, and so I reached out to a friend of mine, I was living in LA, who hosted salons in her home often. I asked her if I could do an event, because I wanted to share an idea. And so, she invited about 30 people who I didn’t know to her house. I stood in front of them and I gave a talk, and then I showed them the little video I’d made of the Bento, the video of me explaining, because I couldn’t stand there and explain it. I just watched people’s faces as they watched the video, and then I invited them to ask questions. I just wanted to see what would happen.
Yancey Strickler:
I could see by people’s faces that it was a real aha realization. The questions people asked, I have an audio recording of this somewhere, but even in the first few questions, it made me see the Bento so differently because people were seeing things of themselves in this form and were asking questions from that perspective. And of course, I’m seeing it from my perspective, which is totally different. And so, in that very first conversation, it is becoming an even more rounded three-dimensional space because I’m hearing from other people the meaning that it has for them. And so, I left that event feeling as certain as I could for having invented a totally made-up thing, that there was something here, that there was something here.
Yancey Strickler:
I’d forgotten about this, at the very end, this very macho guy came up and slapped me on the back and said, “You got some balls, kid.” Which is, I mean, the worst thing someone could have said as I was leaving.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Hilarious.
Yancey Strickler:
But yeah. But I needed that moment of other people because otherwise, how do I know I’m not talking to myself? And so that was such a confidence boost. I finished the book in the next three or four months, and I really continued from that point on making a point of doing living room talks where I taught people the Bento. A lot of it, I would bring a whiteboard or a big sketch pad and I would make people’s Bentos for them. I would ask them questions, we’d build it, we’d ask a question in front of everybody. People would pair up. And all that was just happening from just me being in people’s living rooms in LA and just wanted to test it out. I would label the start, the very first one was called experiment number one, next one was experiment number two. I told people, “You are here as an experiment. I don’t know what this is going to do for you, but I’m just trying something. Thank you for participating.” Through that just iterated and listened and yeah, and a lot of the form and structure that it is today came out of those initial explorations.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That’s really wonderful. So when did the book come out? I forgot to ask you.
Yancey Strickler:
October 29th, 2019.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Okay. And so when did you take Bento online?
Yancey Strickler:
I did a pretty intense book tour that I was still in the midst of in March when COVID happened.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Okay.
Yancey Strickler:
During that, when I would fly to cities, I would do living room talks as well as more formal things. But the first online Bento came in April. So it was about a month into lockdown. Back in the fall, my wife and I had started a weekly ritual together where we would draw a blank Bento, so the four boxes, now me, future me, now us, future us, and we would make a to-do list for the week using those forms. So we would sit down together, we’d go, “All right, what are the now me things to do week,” which was errands, go to the bank, do these things for work. Here’s the big stuff happening this week.’
Yancey Strickler:
Then you’d ask now us, “What should I do this week?” And your now us would tell you, “Hey, here’s this friend you should talk to. Oh, make sure you call this person back. Oh, hey, as a partner, know that your wife is needing this this week.” You’re talking to yourself. You ask your future me, “What should I do this week?” And future me, who’s voice you have to learn to listen to, but future me is the person you hope you become. That person ended up, for me, gives me a lot of mantra type stuff. “Be chilled. Relax. It’s going to be all right. It doesn’t all have to happen at once.” And then future us, future us is maybe is the hardest but maybe my favorite because future us invites you to say, “What can you practically and tangibly do with your time that will positively impact a next generation?”
Yancey Strickler:
I’m a parent, so there’s a fair amount there that I can do as a parent, but there’s also a lot that comes up there around volunteering, giving time or money, learning about something, and making space for that. And so, my wife and I were just using this as just what we did to organize our weeks, and it became a to-do list, and it’s just powerful, really powerful. And so when COVID happened in April, I thought, “Maybe I’ll just do that on Zoom. We’ll just try.” And so, I sent out an email to my newsletter saying, “Here’s an experiment.” Once again, always using the experiment language. That first one, 30 people showed up, probably 20 of whom still come frequently. And every week since then it’s happened, since April. So it’s 60-some straight weeks of people coming together.
Yancey Strickler:
The core function is to use this as a tool to plan their weeks, to ground their time, but it’s also turned into community and space to explore and other things as well. It started for me because it was just a useful way to use my time. I love how quick it is. Making my Bento is 10 minutes at most, five minutes. But it’s a high value five minutes. That just became another way to manifest the utility of this idea and to put it in people’s hands.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I’m still surprised that I signed up to join you, guys, because I think I did my first one is end of June 2020. I was also very surprised that there were dyads, like breakout groups. I was like, “Damn, I’m on Zoom with strangers, and now it’s intimate.” Actually, one of them is in our Bento Group today, it’s Daniel. How did you decide to bridge this format to make it an hour-long weekly thing? Where did that come from? I’d love to know.
Yancey Strickler:
Experimenting. I mean, I’d say the first 12 were all 20 minutes. I had a 20-minute clock in front of me.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Oh wow.
Yancey Strickler:
The former CEO in me hates being in meetings that don’t end when they should, so I was very focused on that. But then I just started using it as a space to think even more about experimentation, and I started designing things for people to do together. What if we all imagined this? What if we tried this? What if we role-play this? To me, that was just fun. That was me being an artist and being a writer. Once again, when we did these things, people loved them. It was different. It’s like, “Whoa, I spent the last hour pretending I was the CEO of Facebook.” What? But that’s an experience I designed for people. And so things like that were just… For me, it was fun. I was just getting the feedback in the room of seeing other people enjoying it, getting something out of it.
Yancey Strickler:
It was all in this place of you could think of the underlying motivations of everything is expanding how people see where their selves are, where they end, where they begin and end, change that, push that, create space for people to explore that. And also, create space for people to explore the idea that the spectrum of value is something larger that they think, than a life solely in pursuit of money, as we all know is very thin and fragile, but it’s possible to become even more clear about the values that are important to you and to be a part of a community or use your life in a way to grow those things in addition to making sure that you have enough money you need to survive and to feel secure.
Yancey Strickler:
And so, all of these experiments and exercise and all the times together were always meant to open up that space for people. What happens in the community, and what I’ve learned over time, is that people learn from each other, right? People are inspired by each other. I take a big step forward and other people come with me because we’re just together. Just the other day, I was writing down what are some of the case studies of The Bento Society, and there are several people who I thought of about who have had major leaps and gains in their lives and who I know were inspired by seeing other people in the community take a bold step. And I heard from people saying that, “Oh, seeing so many other people trying to do something, I felt like, ‘Why am I not trying to do something?’ And I did, and now here I am.”
Yancey Strickler:
As these experiments kept going and as people kept joining and as it became stickier, there was just a lot of positive feedback that said, “This is valuable. This is not about you.” The Bento is a good idea, but this is about all these things that are happening as a result of them.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I would love to see if you remember, you did a great role-play exercise last year that we did in the first season of Bento Groups. Do you remember which one it was? Because I remember there was the voice.
Yancey Strickler:
Yeah, the voices.
Anne Muhlethaler:
The voices. The voice of the ancestors. There you go.
Yancey Strickler:
Yeah. Yeah.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I remember that I wasn’t in the right group but there was someone who was very powerful with the voices of the ancestors.
Yancey Strickler:
Yes. Yes. Keisha. Yes. Yes.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Keisha. Do you mind telling our listeners what that was like? Because it was such a powerful, interesting exercise.
Yancey Strickler:
Yeah. T an exercise I stole from my wife who’s also a-
Anne Muhlethaler:
Congratulations.
Yancey Strickler:
Yeah. Yeah. Who’s also a great designer. Yeah, so you get a group of four people and they’re each assigned roles. One is a voice of commitment, and they voice something that they want to do in their lives. And then another person then speaks next and they are the voice of doubt. So they will immediately say out loud all the things you say in your head when you’re trying to talk to yourself down. “You’re not good enough. You always start things that fail. They’re going to laugh at you or whatever.” And someone actually says those things out loud and you have to sit there and hear it. The next person that speaks is the voice of ancestors, and this is someone instructed to speak as the past generations of this person, speak of what they have already fulfilled by being here, put them in a larger context. And that person then is meant to speak extemporaneous addressing the voice of commitment.
Yancey Strickler:
And finally is the voice of possibility, which is a person who just highlights all that could happen. And so this simple process happens in just five minutes. Someone says something they’re committed to, someone else speaks a doubtful voice, someone else speaks an ancient, someone else speaks a here’s what could be voice. What’s interesting is just through that indirect dialogue, you go through the whole emotional journey that we experience in our heads about anything we try to do, to where by the end you’re like, “Oh man, like I need a break.” You really do go through that process of, “Oh my God, I’m terrible. I’ll never be good enough,” and you find your way out. Just that exposure and that feeling of embodiment and that ability to dialogue with those feelings, yeah, it’s like an accelerant. It’s an emotional accelerant.
Yancey Strickler:
So yeah, that’s a good example of the kind of thing that we do.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Oh, yeah.
Yancey Strickler:
There’s one in the second season of Bento Groups where I wrote a script for people to pretend they’re at Davos and to represent all the major governments and climate activists and Wall Street and-
Anne Muhlethaler:
Oh, yeah, I remember that very well because you were the voice of the next generation. It was you and Michelle being 16, right?
Yancey Strickler:
Yeah.
Anne Muhlethaler:
You were really unruly. Yeah.
Yancey Strickler:
Yeah. For sure. But again, I’m very much a believer in embodiment, but the point of those exercises, those were two weeks of exercise we follow, but it’s to put us in a place of simulating group disagreement, to put us in a place of trying to resolve something that feels unresolvable. What’s wild is that that ended up being quite an emotionally charged experience for a number of groups. Several groups have had people that had to apologize to everyone afterwards because they’re like, “I got too into it.” I heard from a lot of groups that once they were encouraged to go into those different roles in the same way I became an unruly teenager, people really embodied them to a degree that it was at times almost problematic. But the experience is designed to then help you unwind that into a resolution. So again, this is just an experiment having fun, and the core goal is to give people that opportunity to expand their selves, explore these other lenses, gain this power of seeing their lives from different angles and having the tools to navigate these kinds of situations. To me, the people that have those kinds of social and strategic skills are people who can affect change and who can get where they want to go.
Anne Muhlethaler:
So let’s go back to the book for a second. You called it This Could Be Our Future: a Manifesto for a More Generous World. And so you talk about measuring value outside of the society’s long-term best interests. I wanted to ask you, what does a more generous world look like to you? And what’s the ideal scene for 2050?
Yancey Strickler:
Number one, I think that the world is more generous than we give it credit for.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Yancey Strickler:
I feel lucky to be alive when I’m alive, and I think the long journey that humanity has made to this point is tremendously commendable. There’s a pessimism you get especially on progressives or the left that the world would be great if it weren’t for human beings. There is true that there’s the [inaudible 00:52:17] in human beings, there’s the greed and selfishness that is absolutely there, but that often works to our advantage too. But I don’t have a fundamentally bad story about people or the world. I mean, I think that… I lost my train of thought, what was the question?
Anne Muhlethaler:
I was wondering what’s a more generous world.
Yancey Strickler:
Oh, yeah, what’s a more generous world.
Anne Muhlethaler:
And so if we project into the 2050 that you’ve been exploring since you started this process, what does the ideal scene look like?
Yancey Strickler:
Yeah, so-
Anne Muhlethaler:
I know that it’s yours, but I just love the idea of projecting ourselves in there.
Yancey Strickler:
To me, a more generous world, it’s not saying reaching a state of absolute righteousness. It’s just saying more than where we are now. But I think that is simply a matter of self-understanding and self-perception. When I first made the Bento, I had this thought of, “Who is us?” As I think about now us, that now us, does that include every living thing on the planet? Does that include my sworn enemy? Who is my us? There is definitely the case to be made, and I’m very open to the case, that yes, all those things should be our us, that that is the way to behave. But I also don’t believe that that is an honest or reasonable expectation to put on somebody. And truly, what is an honest and appropriate expectation is to say, “Are us, are the people that we have some cause to have an emotional feeling about, people that we’re responsible for, who care about us?”
Yancey Strickler:
And to me, a more generous world is one where we’re even just more aware of those people and their needs and where we are simply more aware of our future selves and our future collective selves. Today, we operate with the passive awareness of the world where we see the next 48 hours or even the next week fairly clearly. But beyond that, or even beyond our own personal needs, it becomes much cloudier. And so, to me, a more generous world is one where people agree that there is a collective interest that they are a part of, that they are bound to, and where people see themselves as connected to a future person and/or a future set of people. That’s just language and spaces that enter the rational domain of just how people think, how we all understand things, that’s quite obvious.
Yancey Strickler:
And there’s a lot of historical parallels to say that past humans did think more that way, certainly in an us orientation. So we’re absolutely capable of these kinds of changes. What does that world look like in 2050? To me, that world looks like a pluralistic world, a world with a lot of different types of people who are working on the things that feel most important to them and that in the same way that we rely on the biodiversity of an ecosystem to create a balance as it works its way out, I think that that is exactly what we should be hoping for in a society where, say, the survival needs or financial needs are not the single most important thing. And where, say, there’s a society that’s able to provide more of a foundation for its citizens to where these other parts of life, the us, the future, can be there.
Yancey Strickler:
It could look like a lot of really small communities. It could look like a world that is potentially more fragmented. I mean, I think that there are also reasons to be pessimistic about 2050, or other ways that this could go. I mean, I believe that where we are now is people are becoming more group-oriented after a century of hyper individualism. The internet or the network has made us more group-oriented, and we’re more clan oriented, actually, the way we were in our ancient times, like 500 AD times where people would define truth according to what their families or clan defined as truth. And disagreements or arguments, they would slide with clan. There wasn’t the idea of a clear moral truth or a right of law that wasn’t as clearly established or understood. Instead, people opted for localized beliefs and localized loyalties, and that was how the world functioned and then it broke down over the course of 1,000 years until now.
Yancey Strickler:
But the internet is regrouping us again, and it’s re-clanning us, and it’s changing what it means to be an individual. We are no longer defined by our physical selves, like I as an individual am defined by my reputation. I’m defined by my networks. I’m defined by algorithmic measurements. I’m defined by interests. I’m defined by the tribes I’m a part of. There’s many facets to being an individual. People are now bringing all of these parts of themselves to the table and our existing systems and institutions really don’t know what to do with it, and they feel quite mismatched with how people are evolving. What I see it as is we are turning into tribes again. We’re going through some process of that. The phrase I used to think about this space where we are now is post-individualism, where we’ve had this century of the self, as Adam Curtis called it, the 20th century where advertising taught us we were all special snowflakes and we learned to love ourselves.
Yancey Strickler:
And then we reached the point the beginning of the 21st century where our individualization causes breakdown, causes an inability to cooperate. The externality of climate change becomes something that can’t be solved by personal consumer choices. There’s a need for new collective movements that seems impossible, according to our mentality of who we are as people. But the internet and phones and COVID have re-made really how we relate to each other.
Yancey Strickler:
And so, as I think about the next 30 years, I think we’re in a process of forming new kinds of clans and groups online that will be extremely useful and will accelerate a lot of social change and will accelerate a lot of knowledge and things like that. But the one thing I keep thinking about, and this is for a project I’m working on now, but there’s a few periods in the past where there have been similar dynamics of now and this grouping happening. In these past instances, this normally ultimately leads to war of some kind. The creation of a collective energy leads to integration of civic groups, which ultimately leads to some forms of nationalism, which ultimately leads to conflict. And so, a little bit what I’ve been thinking about is, is that the digital world? Is that the next 20 years of the digital world, heading towards some sort of conflict?
Yancey Strickler:
But, so, I personally just believe that we are in a moment where humanity is really being reborn by circumstance, by circumstance of the network, by circumstance of climate change, by circumstance of COVID, and we are fundamentally changing in different kinds of ways. As I think about what we’re changing to, to me, the Bento is a map to that space, and it gives a sense of we’re not arriving at a place that’s totally foreign. We can actually apply some crude instruments to assess where we are. Certainly, we will get better at this. This is more of the reality that we’re moving into. This past world where we can all just be now me and only worry about ourselves and nothing else mattered clearly doesn’t work anymore. And so, to me, the transition is to a reality of a wider spectrum of self and just different social arrangements in all kinds of ways as a result of that.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Thank you so much, I really appreciate that you also very honestly explored the negative potential. So one of the words I want to pick up on that you talked about as to what Bento can do is the word accelerant. Because I think that Bento is an accelerant, is a flammable, it feels very true to me. I really enjoyed the sense of the field of possibilities that we can get if we do spend time to think about future me and future us. The one thing that I would love to explore with you is the sense of disconnection that I think a lot of us have felt in that individualist era, and as we move into what you’re calling, aptly, post-individualism, what are some of the ways that you’ve managed to bridge that sense of disconnection in your own life?
Yancey Strickler:
Well, I’m in the fight every day for myself and for my attention, for sure. I think that the degree to which we are externally defined and validated, especially for always online people, is really hard to underestimate. I mean, there are obvious things, you have to be selective about the voices you listen to, you have to create space where you don’t listen to those voices. You try to listen to yourself. I think, for me, a lot of making the weekly Bento has been about creating an ongoing dialogue with myself and to where I have my Bento right next to me right now, to where during my day, as I’m sitting at my computer and as social media is prone to pull me into any number of moods or feelings or feelings of just being not good enough, I look at my Bento, and that just re-grounds me in how I define my identity.
Yancey Strickler:
There’s something interesting because I’m defining my identity according to a broader picture of myself too. I’m defining my identity according to my relationships. I’m doing it according to who I want to be. It’s not disconnected from how the network and social media makes me feel, but instead of all of that data being informed by the feed and by algorithms and by metrics and by comparison with others, which is inevitably, I think, what the network brings, instead it is a more of a private self. I think a lot about the degree to which we express our feelings through social media rather than to ourselves as really interesting. We use our feelings to find connections with others but even our feelings, we somehow feel like if we’re keeping them to ourselves, we’re not optimizing them fully. There’s like reputational or relationship gains to be made by publicly sharing your feelings versus privately sharing them.
Yancey Strickler:
And so, that’s this challenge of where we are defined by something larger than just our physical being. We are defined by our footprints. We’re defined by all these things. I think teenagers, especially, have a really good sense of this, the degree of work and stress people put into their Instagrams. I can’t tell you how many times I go to a park and just see a group of teenagers taking pictures of each other over and over, and that’s all they you all day. But I don’t think that what they’re doing is irrational. I think they’re trying to strengthen their reputations. They’re trying to strengthen their networks when the only tool that seems available for doing that is a product released by Facebook that everyone else is on. That’s the tool people will use, and will use the language and the metrics of that to define our senses of self.
Yancey Strickler:
So I think there’s a lot of truth in the sense of self that comes from Instagram. But I think that that’s something that we should personally hold and that we should define according to our own things that we believe are important rather than just blindly opting into a set of assumptions that really have your self-interest nowhere in them. I feel like the bridge is to think about the health of your relationships as being a core part of who you are, is to think about your reputation as being a core part of who you are, is to think about legacy being a core part of who you are, but then actually taking the time to think for yourself, “Oh, what do you want those things to be? What do you want those things to be?”
Anne Muhlethaler:
But that’s hard, and I think that’s the thing that most people don’t do. We’re not taught this. It’s never talked about when you’re in school. It’s not encouraged when you’re at university. I mean, it’s a wonder why the few of us actually do it at all.
Yancey Strickler:
Well, people give you all kinds of advice to do this, but it’s often cheap advice. I think that, to some degree, these are thing that life prepares you for, makes you ready for.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Sure. I tend to believe that advice also is something that’s not necessarily that helpful.
Yancey Strickler:
For sure.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Because when it comes from external sources, we tend not to listen.
Yancey Strickler:
I even think that there is a progression of awareness of the Bento that happens in life. One of the big moments in a child’s life I believe is around nine months, which is when they first become aware that they and their mother are separate. I think of that moment as being their awareness of now me. So then now me comes online for the first time. And then the child within the next year or two develops that relationship with their parents. They have the sense of us that becomes true. And then the child begins to move out of only the present. They begin to understand that there is a past and a future. I watched this with my own kid as those concepts start to come, that future me starts to become apparent.
Yancey Strickler:
And then I think as a child goes to school, sees himself among a generation of other kids, puts themself as not an individual but a part of this larger group of everyone that’s in second grade or whatever school, this future us also starts to come online. And then what happens as we age is that these places become more clear. The challenge of adolescence is us realizing that this now me and future me are different, right? There’s this transition we’re going to have to go through. That’s the same challenge of adulthood, becoming an adult. It’s like future me and now me are aging. It’s future me and now me coming together. The degree of your us, the importance of that, often reflects the level of importance of relationships in your life. And so, to some degree, I think these things, there might be ages where these spaces become more predominant or certain experiences that would bring them out.
Yancey Strickler:
I was 39 when I came up with the Bento. I think probably around then is probably the period for men, I think for women it’s earlier, that those spaces maybe actually become important. You’ve made some commitments. There’s a few things happening. I think that these things become revealed to us over time. And so for someone that’s younger, they just need a sense that these things exist, just a hint. They don’t need to know everything, but just allow me to, yeah, to just see this a little bit more clearly. But the older you get, you really see these things as being true, and you can begin to even understand past situations from this lens.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yeah. I would say the spirit of creation, the amount to which we do create our lives. Wonderful. I wanted to ask you shortly before we do a few quick fire around questions about one particular aspect of the research that I’ve read in The Ideaspace, that is your blog, questions that you’ve asked about what gets measured and what doesn’t get measured and why that matter. Would you indulge me in talking about that?
Yancey Strickler:
Yeah, so I’ve helped two round tables with between them 25 amazing people, head of research scientists at Pew Research, Columbia law professor, a leader of the Tlingit indigenous tribe, a CEO of a data company, many different practitioners. I brought together these different voices to have these conversations about what we measure and what we don’t measure. These come straight from my CEO experience of seeing that if you’re measuring something, it’s a lot easier to make progress on it. It’s easy to justify making a decision to others. It’s a natural language of an organization. I also came to see through a lot of attempts made to measuring different things that a lot of the opportunity and challenges that comes with trying to identify other metrics.
Yancey Strickler:
To me, the way of evolving the business world is for everyone to get equally woke, it’s to create rational, numeric-based targets and ways of understanding what a good decision and what a bad decision is because businesses are prone to want to succeed and to perform well, will follow. If they’re made well, if they make sense, if they can be demonstrated to have a positive impact, it can create the level of impact they promise, then people will follow them. It’s not a political debate when you’re getting into, “It’s better for your business when this happens, and this the metric that shows you whether or not you’re doing that.” So to me, expressing values in numerical form, there are dangers with it to be sure, but that is a path by which you can create large-scale behavior change. And you can do it without coercion. You can do it without forcing anybody, without twisting any arms, without disrespecting anyone’s beliefs. You could just simply say, “There’s an outcome that is agreed upon that is better, and this is a number by which should do it.”
Yancey Strickler:
As I think about the big wheels turning of, say, the world’s largest businesses changing how they operate, to me, you’re going to have to produce a metric or a goal that is in their self-interest but that can compete with money, that makes sense, that is compatible with their financial aims, that still isn’t totally changing the story but is improving the outcomes. Yeah, the way to get there is through defining what those ideal outcomes are and creating tools that let us get there.
Yancey Strickler:
I look at a challenge now, and one that I see The Bento Society I want to be a key voice in, is in applying a lot of the amazing skills we’ve developed to analyze and grow financial value and to bring those same tools and skills to grow or protecting social values or natural values or certain kinds of outcomes, trying to protect against the downsides of some of the products we’re doing or elevating carbon as something that’s just as ubiquitous as calories, CO2 emissions being as ubiquitous as calories in the world around us. To me, that process happens through, and having done a fair amount of research on this, through a consensus building in a lot of different fields and coming up with pretty tight formulas and math and arguments and case studies. And so I think that that is a key unsexy part of how the world gets better.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I laugh, yes, but it does sound like you’re completely right. Final question. I read that you were guided by a great coach at some specific times in your life, and you quote him on your website, called Jerry Colonna. And today, you yourself also coach some CEOs and leaders as you do your research and write your next project and lead Bento. So I’d love to hear how this experience of being coached has informed you in how you lead us in Bento Groups as well and your approach to the world.
Yancey Strickler:
Well, yeah, Jerry Colonna, author of a book called Reboot and the founder and CEO of a Reboot coaching firm, well, I was fortunate to work with Jerry for many years, and we spoke just a couple of weeks ago. The first benefit of a coach is just you have a place to emotionally process your experiences and being able to do it there means you’re not doing it other places. It means you’re not distracting your teammates or whatever, pulling people into your emotional tribulations, which are always there. And so I think I really in a room with Jerry, I think I really matured. Especially the past four years, I think I’ve really matured even more.
Yancey Strickler:
But I think when I’m coaching people, when I think about when I was in the seat, when I was a CEO, the conversations that were most meaningful to me were conversations with peers, other people who had the job, because it’s such a specific job. You want to process it and you want to complain about it with other people who get it, right? Those would be conversations that at times would move me to tears just from feeling less isolated with something that was difficult.
Yancey Strickler:
So that is the main thing I want to give people I work with, is just perspective. What I always wanted was someone that could say, “This happens. It happens. This situation’s probably not going to work out the way you want, but it’s okay.” Just like that voice that just lets you know you’re not uniquely broken, you’re normal broken. And so that’s what I want. To me, that emotional resonance did a lot. For other people, maybe that’s not everything, but for me that’s a lot of it. So I focus on that. And then the thing that I’m able to bring and where I blur the line, Jerry and I have talked a lot about this, but I also can be an advisor where people will come with situations that I have been in before. What I’ve learned from Jerry and I’ve learned from my clients, they want me to speak up in those moments to say, “Hey, here’s what happened.” In those moments to say, “Hey, just to speak not as your coach, but just to speak from experience, when I’ve been in this, this is how it’s been before.”
Yancey Strickler:
And so bringing a bit of that more direct advice and advisement into the conversations at times. Not all the time. Predominantly, I just want to make people feel seen, ask good questions. But I think part of also why people come to me is just the job of being a CEO or a founder of a product in a new space growing fast, it just brings a lot of very specifics experiences. People I work with now are people who go through similar things, and I love it. Several of the CEOs I’m working with, their products are doing amazingly, amazingly, and I feel so proud of them. The process of leadership, it’s not particularly celebrated right now I feel. Leaders just get a lot of shit and not a lot of praise. It’s like, “Well, you’re already rich, or you’re already doing whatever, whatever.” We yada yada yada what it means to be a leader, but leadership is extremely difficult and extremely trying and challenging and requires a real emotional and personal resilience that you have to nurture.
Yancey Strickler:
And so, I always want to honor the people who take on that responsibility and who aren’t afraid of it and who lean into it. And so those are the people I want to support and for whom I have great compassion and love.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That’s awesome. Thanks so much. So now moving on to a few questions that I like to ask all of my guests. So here’s one that I tend to forget, well, every other time but I would like to know, what kind of mindfulness, meditation, or any other rituals do you have in your life that you feel have kept you balanced particularly in hard times?
Yancey Strickler:
The Bento might be the most ritualistic thing I’ve ever done. I have work rituals, how I use my time, Mondays and Fridays no meetings, every morning devoted solely to writing with exceptions like this. I think that a lot of my grounding just comes from naturally being quite self-reflective and asking myself a lot of questions. I’m always processing myself, whether I want to or not. I’m still learning how to work with myself. I’d say only in the last two years have I found that time of day where I’m just pushing mud. All my work is pretty low quality, but I’m just sitting in the Google Doc anyway or sitting in my inbox. Only recently have I learned that at that moment, that’s where I get up and just go run in the woods or just go lift some weights and just stop, just letting go and letting my body process to the next thing.
Yancey Strickler:
I think that a lot of my earlier life was spent, especially as a CEO, you’re always working, and anytime I wasn’t working, I was dealing with anxiety for I should be working. That leads you to really discount time with friends and time with family. And it makes what I now see as the now us space seem valueless, right? And instead, I’ve just come to see that when I do things with family and friends, I am fulfilling my purpose, I am creating value for myself. I am. It’s a facet of myself, and they’re all facets.
Yancey Strickler:
So I think the Bento is the most effective thing I’ve done in terms of self-care. I think otherwise it’s just been a naturally neurotic mind. And to someone who probably learns through reading all the time, they’re just synthesizing other people’s ideas into my own brain.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That works.
Yancey Strickler:
I think the Bento is good as I got. I think it’s about as good as I got.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That’s awesome. I’d love for you to tell me about an act of kindness that’s touched your life.
Yancey Strickler:
I’ll say the first thing that came to mind, which is when I was in 10th grade, I was going to this rural school where I was really struggling, and then I applied and got into this thing called a governor school, which was like a magnet school where they picked two kids from each school. And went to school a couple of hours away for half the day. But I get into that, but then we couldn’t afford it. It wasn’t a lot of money, it was $3,000 a year or something, but we really didn’t have much money at the time, so we couldn’t afford it. My mom’s boss, who is a geology professor at a university, paid for it. He paid for my school and my first year of college too, this man, Dr. Ribey.
Yancey Strickler:
As a 15-year-old, can you even appreciate what an act of kindness that is? But yeah, he did that. That has to be, if I think about what all came as a result of that, that has to be one of the most impactful things anyone ever did for me.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Wow, that’s beautiful. One of my favorite questions is what is your favorite word? Oh, context, what is a word that is your favorite word that you’d be willing to tattoo on yourself for at least a period of time?
Yancey Strickler:
I mean, probably some Bento-related word, I guess. I mean, I’ve had a thought of like, “Do I have to get a Bento tattoo at some point?”
Anne Muhlethaler:
Oh, yeah.
Yancey Strickler:
“Is it trending towards that?” Yeah, I don’t know, I think that’s as close as I would get.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Okay, cool. What song best represents you?
Yancey Strickler:
I have an answer. It’s a piece by a musician, Don Cherry, who’s a jazz musician. He has a piece called Relativity Suite II. Yeah, it’s an amazing piece of music. It’s multifaceted and has him chanting a lot of interesting things about prayer. It’s wild.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I’m totally going to check it out. When you were a tiny little kid, what did you want to be as a grown up?
Yancey Strickler:
A writer, always a writer.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Okay. Early. What would you say to your younger self if you could send yourself a message?
Yancey Strickler:
You’re going to do it.
Anne Muhlethaler:
What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given?
Yancey Strickler:
My older self needs to give my current self that advice too. What is the best advice I’ve ever been given? I’m thinking of something my father told me about kissing girls that I’m not going to share, but yes, some fatherly to a teenager.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That’s awesome. What book is next to your bed or is currently on your desk?
Yancey Strickler:
Well, this is a good question because I have five books stacked up in front of me that I’m reading all of right now.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Good for you. I’m also a multitasking reader.
Yancey Strickler:
So I’m currently reading The Free World by Louis Menand, which is a history of art and ideas in the 20th century. Super fascinating. I’m reading The WEIRDest People in the World by Joseph Henrich, which is the history of individualism and people in the West. It’s incredibly brilliant, like amazing anthropological research that came out last year. I’m reading Priya Parker’s The Art of Gathering. I am reading the memoir by Peter Hook from Joy Division called Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division. And I’m also reading a book by my former boss, Michael Azerrad called Our Band Could Be Your Life, that’s a history of ’80s American indie rock. All five of these books are research for two current projects I’m working on. These all have very specific purposes in my mind.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Okay. Do you ever read fiction just to relax? Yeah?
Yancey Strickler:
Yeah, yeah, I actually spent most of this year reading a lot of fiction, mainly sci-fi but also going-
Anne Muhlethaler:
Oh, cool.
Yancey Strickler:
But also going back to Milan Kundera who’s my all-time favorite writer.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Oh, I love him. The Unbearable Likeness of Being, yes, absolutely. Who’s one person that you think we should all know about, a politician, a writer, a musician, artist, activist?
Yancey Strickler:
I really am inspired by a man named Konosuke Matsushita, who is the founder of Matsushita and Panasonic. He was the first founder of a electrical company in Japan in 1920 when he was a teenager and became one of the most celebrated entrepreneurs in Japanese history. But what makes him amazing is that he just always had this broader view of the purpose of a firm, of a company. At the time when Japanese companies had a six-day work week, he made his company work less, because he said that was the only way to compete. They became a five-day work week. He was always very just willing to take the riskier choice because he saw this bigger picture. He has a book that hugely influenced me called Not for Bread Alone, which is just a collection of observations, things he’s gone through, that for me he became a leadership role model. My only leadership role models in the past were artists. But he’s someone that I think has a lot to offer.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That’s wonderful. And coming to my last question, what brings you happiness?
Yancey Strickler:
Running in the woods, a great basketball game, being with the people in my life who I love, learning anything. The phrase in my mind for it is idea sandwiches, when two disparate ideas come together and make something new. My best thinking moments happen when that happens. So I’ve learned to look for those.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Oh, I love that, idea sandwiches. Thank you so much. So where can people find you and get in touch with you online?
Yancey Strickler:
ystrickler.com is my email address… or my website. You can email me there. And then there’s bentoism.org is where you could find all the Bento things, and I’m on the other internet places. But, yeah, my website has all my writing and stuff.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yeah. And it’s got links to your podcast as well, which is really wonderful. Yancey, thank you so much. I will put links to all of the books and things in the show notes. I appreciate the time that you spent with me, which is a little bit longer than planned. I want to wish you a lovely 20 minutes until I see you again in Bento Groups very soon.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Thanks again to Yancey for being my guest on the show. You can find him online at ystrickler.com and on Twitter, @ystrickler. Of course, you will find all of the details to connect with him and maybe The Bento Society or discover the rest of his work in the show notes. So friends and listeners, thank you so much for joining us again today. If you want to hear more, take yourself to your favorite podcast app and subscribe, or even leave us a review. It would be wonderful to hear from you.
Anne Muhlethaler:
If you want to connect, you can get in touch with me, @annvi on Twitter or on LinkedIn and at _outoftheclouds on Instagram, where I also share guided meditations and other inspirations and daily musings about mindfulness. You can soon find all of my episodes and find out more about my projects at annemuhlethaler.com. If you don’t know how to spell it, that’s fine, it’s also in the show notes. You can sign up to receive email updates. I promise I won’t spam you. And that’s it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening again, and I hope you’ll join us again next time. Until then, be well and be safe. Thank you.