nir-bashan.mp3

Nir Bashan: [00:00:00] In order for us to really be fully evolved human beings, I think we need to balance our analytical drive with the creative drive. And in that balance comes a certain intelligence that cannot just come from quantification. It cannot just come from spreadsheets or whatnot, an intelligence that comes from empathy and intelligence, that comes from humor, from courage. It's an intelligence that comes from soft skill and intelligence, that comes from happiness and positivity. We don't talk about positivity and happiness in business, and we don't introduce into the dialog a certain joy of doing thing and a certain joy of accomplishing those things that we're doing.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:00:56] What's up, everybody? Welcome to the artists Data Science podcast, the only self development podcast for Data scientists. You're going to learn from and be inspired by the people, ideas and conversations that'll encourage creativity and innovation in yourself so that you can do the same for others. I also hosted Open Office Hours. You can register to attend by going to Bitly dot com forward. Slash a d. S o h. I look forward to seeing you all there. Let's ride this beat out into another awesome episode and don't forget to subscribe to the show and leave a five star review.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:01:52] Our guest today is an expert on creativity.He's taught thousands of leaders and individuals around the globe how to harness the power of creativity and ultimately create more meaning in their work. He was one of the youngest professors ever selected to teach graduate courses at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and has taught undergraduate courses at the University of California at Los Angeles over his career. He's held countless workshops consulting, coaching and keynote speeches at conferences and corporate events over the last two decades. He's worked on numerous albums and movies and advertisements with famous actors and musicians and has distilled and codified the formula to creativity. So please help me in welcoming our guests today, author of The Creative Mindset and CEO of the Creative Mind Set LLC Nir Bashan Nir,Thank you so much for taking time out of schedule to be here today. I really appreciate you coming here.

Nir Bashan: [00:02:50] Yeah, cool, man. Thanks for having me. This is going to be fun, I hope.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:02:53] Oh, absolutely, man. I know your book is really awesome and I'm really, really excited to dig into it. But before we do that, man, talk to us a little bit about where you grew up and what was it like there?

Nir Bashan: [00:03:03] Yes, sir. So I and I was born in Israel and raised in Los Angeles. And I started my first business when I was nine years old, going door to door, washing cars. And it was, you know, Los Angeles during the early eighties. And so people would buy like a shiny brand new hot 1981 Ford Taurus and be like, yeah, you know, that's my Taurus right there. And I'd go nine years old with my voice. Kind of I had knock on the door, I'd like to watch your car. And people were like, no way. It's my Ford Taurus. You know, I worked my whole life to buy my Taurus. I got to watch that. And so I learned from a very early age that in order to be successful in business, you got to be creative. You had to start selling. People have stuff that they'll buy. Right. And if they won't buy a car wash and maybe I can clean out their trash cans or something, I get a lot of that. And I eventually watched a few cars and I learned to be creative. I learned that in order to be successful, I had to be creative. And that's my background, man. That's just from day one, from my first job or whatever. I've just been being creative in order to be successful.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:04:15] It's quite the enterprising youth man. I like hearing stories like that. 

Nir Bashan: [00:04:18] Right, right

Harpreet Sahota: [00:04:19] As you're growing up, you making your way through high school like how did you do this this. How did you imagine your future would be when you're when you're coming up and growing up? What did you think you'd end up doing?

Nir Bashan: [00:04:31] I thought I was going to end up in music. Right. I thought for sure that I'd be like a touring musician. I mean, I've had bands my whole childhood, right, from, what, 12 on. And, you know, I was playing clubs around Los Angeles at like 14 bars, bartering with the club owner, like, you know, give us, you know, a dollar out of the five dollar door charge. They'd be like, well, now, you know. And then I'd be like, OK, so here's the deal right on one of the Fridays when we play, if you give us a dollar from the door, I'll throw in two more gigs for free. Right. And and like, they were like, OK, I'm in. So it it's just from an early age, man. I've always been, you know, thinking about a way to make money and be effective. And I you know, I thought for sure that I end up being a musician or making music or something like that. But that just wasn't the that's just not how it panned out.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:05:31] So when you're coming up as a musician and entering that younger portion of your life, like we heard creative, did it always just mean something that was like a musician or an artist? Was it, like synonymous with that?

Nir Bashan: [00:05:42] Totally. And I thought that, you know, you're born with it and that's it. You know, you're if you want to be creative, good luck. You can't because, you know, you're either born with it or you're not. And it's in those very recording studios where I learned that that is completely not true. I've worked on a bunch of albums I started and hip hop. I was you know, I worked on KRS One albums. I know if you remember that guy, but that worked on Cypress Hill. You remember them. Yeah. And like, what I saw was two things, right? I worked in Hollywood later, too, and I thought the same thing. I thought they were either people who had it together and they had a replenishable instant creativity. They pull it out whenever they needed it. And it was awesome. And then I saw some people, which were very few, the media and everybody makes it seem like it's a lot, but it's very few. They're the ones that make the news, though, that were drug addicts and alcoholics. And that's how they got creative from a bottle. Right. And so. I learned that, you know, who wanted to do that, I wanted to be insanely creative, like some of my heroes and and I noticed that they had a technique, all of them a little bit different, but they all had some technique. And it turns out that that technique makes them no different than you or I or anybody listening to this podcast. And it makes them no different. It's all about coming up with that creativity and learning how to harness it and repeating it and pulling it out whenever you need. And then fast forward to the business sector. I've worked in advertising and I've ran a furniture refinishing company for a while. And all of these different field that I've worked in and there are no different than music or Hollywood. It's all about coming up with a predictable creativity that you can pull out whenever you need it and applying it to problem solving. And so that's kind of that's kind of how I came up.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:07:42] I like them as really interesting. I've always held that same belief that creativity is what I used to think. It was only something that only a certain few select gifted people had. But over time, I realized that it is something that you can develop and cultivate. And that's why I really, really enjoyed your book, the way that you really give us actionable tips that really are for free in our heads and in our mindset that we can use to start becoming more creative. So let's dig into this entire book. So it's kind of starting from a very early concept. In your book, you talk about being analytical isn't always the best thing to do, right? Like Data scientist, we're super logical, a highly analytical thinkers. But why is it that just having logic alone is not going to be enough to propel us to that next level?

Nir Bashan: [00:08:32] You know, it really is about understanding that the Data makes no sense unless it's turned into information that is actionable. We live in a society in a day and an age where we can get data on just about anything. Right. We can get data on how many Zoome calls. People are on a day. We can get data on how many steps it takes, you know, to go four miles to McDonald's. Right. I just dial it up. But what does it do to have that data? If we're not able to make that information, it's meaningless. And so for me, it really is about, you know, combining the analytical and the creative in the best way humanly possible. It's not about ditching the analytics and becoming really, really creative. And it's not about ditching creativity and becoming really, really analytical. It's about coming to the middle and combining it into the best optimal blend that humanity can do. And right now, we're so busy being analytical about everything that we've lost our way with creativity. And we tend to do things just to do them because someone is willing to pay us to do it. And we've lost sense of what doing really means without creativity. We're just cogs in a in a sort of endless cycle of doing and the creativity that attaches meaning to that work.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:10:09] So how can a non creative person then kind of discover their creativity and put that to work?

Nir Bashan: [00:10:18] Anybody can discover there. So listen, I feel like we're born with it. Everybody was born being creative and it started, you know, fifty, sixty thousand years ago with Harriet. You know, she was the early cavewoman and like, kind of a badass, like the first, like, superhero badass. Right.

Nir Bashan: [00:10:36] And she was being attacked by like a lion or a saber tooth, whatever animal. And the animal was bigger in the paws were like the size of your head. And, you know, she she was like, oh, man, what do I do? And she had the world's first creative idea, which was to take a stick that she saw floating and to take a sharp rock. And she put the rock on the top of the set and use it to fight the beast. And she won. And that creativity had been embedded in us since, you know, early our earliest ancestors. And so we use it for survival. And that is how ingrained it is in our day to day existence. And we've gone so far away from that today, man. We're just like, what are we doing? You know, we're worried about our reputation. We're worried about what people might say. And and what we're missing is the, you know, 20, 20 equivalent of a stick and a rock on the end, you know, the the spaceship that'll take us to Mars. Right. We're missing the cure for cancer. We're missing all of these amazing modern day equivalent of creativity that. Modern day Harriet can put together because we're worried about what people might think or we're worried that we're not being taken seriously or that we don't have the numbers or the data to support this type of thing. So we all lose in that event. And we have to we have to get back to a more balanced, a balanced sort of humanity.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:12:12] You mentioned that, that the creative mindset is a correction in the way that our brain has been functioning. So is that because coming up from those early days, getting chased by saber tooth tigers in the jungle and all that, we had really one basic concern. Are we going to survive to the next day? Right. And now it's a lot of that a lot of that has been taken away where we're able to live much more comfortable lives. And is that why that this has become a correction, I guess?

Nir Bashan: [00:12:42] Absolutely. We've gotten so comfortable in modernity that we're looking for problems that don't exist. I did a talk for a software company. Oh, my God, a convention. And I went on stage and I basically said most people in the room are designing software for problems that don't exist. And people are pretty ticked off, to say the least. But my point was that, you know, we've become so comfortable, we're comfortable. We've become so good at, you know, differentiating our food supply like we don't we don't even know that like that turkey meat in our Subway sandwich or, you know, Jersey Mike's sub is like a real animal. Like we're so disconnected from our reality of even how our food comes into into play. And so I feel like we're overly comfortable. And in that abundance of over comfort is the lack of ingenuity, of innovation, of creativity that takes us to the next level. I feel like to many of us in our businesses and in our careers have just arrived at a stale point. And like we've arrived at a stale sort of plateau and we're like, yeah, it's good enough. Let's you stay here. And the problem with that is that we don't get ahead of the society. We don't get ahead as people when we're just lavishing all of this love on technology and and taking it away in every other sector. I think we need to we need to get better at it. And I think society will do better once we're more attuned to our creative DNA.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:14:29] And you mentioned this new unorthodox approach to business leadership. Is being creative CEOs mentioned that's good leadership relies on on sound business acumen. So talk to us about how that works out. Right. How is how is creativity impacted business acumen?

Nir Bashan: [00:14:49] You know, it is the companies that are doing it right. It is the difference between them being incredibly successful and out of business. Look, the pandemic and you have some companies that are doing wonderful out there, Amazon, Elon Musk companies, you know, and then you have some companies that are struggling and going out of business.

Nir Bashan: [00:15:10] Look at retail, look at some of the Gap brands, at least in the US are struggling. And it didn't have to be that way. But a lot of people got super comfortable and stop being creative and stopped reinventing. They figured it'll be like this yesterday. So it'll be like this tomorrow. You know, it's really interesting. Humans are dying to look for patterns and stuff. We love to think that we're in control of randomness, but we're not.

Nir Bashan: [00:15:38] And I like to talk about a story of casinos right out at the roulette wheel. They started I'm sure your listeners know this, but they started putting in screens that show the last 20 or so spins of the wheel. Right. And they're hoping that and they're they're actually incredibly successful at people going by and seeing, oh, you know, it went black four times and red four times. So it's going to go black again. And they bet on these things. But the history is meaningless when it comes to the next decision point. Right. It's meaningless. And yet businesses and careers that are no different, what happened yesterday is frickin meaningless. So what will happen tomorrow? Right. You could have look almost to the date, what, March 13th, 14th in the US at least, where like everything changed overnight, right on the 13th, you were like, yeah, OK, I'm a little worried about this pandemic, but whatever. And then on the fourteenth all hell broke loose. So it happens time and time again in history. It happened, you know, at the Gulf War. It happened at 9/11. The world changed in like ten minutes. You see it over and over again, yet for some reason, we like to feel that we're in control of the chaos and we're in control of the randomness when we're not there is no such thing as control of that.

Nir Bashan: [00:17:00] But what we can control is how we come up with ideas to deal with ifs and buts and all of the fringe elements that may or may not happen. A good company and a good person on a career path is armed with creativity to be able to solve problems as they occur in new and different ways. And that really is the most important thing that we can do today to become relevant and to stay relevant and to stay successful. And that's what I've dedicated my life to doing, is to breaking down the barriers for people to be creative, whether it's they don't want to be embarrassed or they don't want their reputation tarnished or whatever, and breaking those mentalities down so that people get excited about coming up with new ideas and people take that leap of faith and go out and do things that will benefit humanity as a whole.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:17:54] We love them and absolutely love that. So the world give. 

Nir Bashan: [00:17:57] Were you a bit of a roulette player?

Harpreet Sahota: [00:17:58] Oh, man. No, no.

Nir Bashan: [00:18:00] You put some money black before?

Harpreet Sahota: [00:18:02]  No, no. I mean back in the day. Yes,

Nir Bashan: [00:18:05] Right. (laughs)

Harpreet Sahota: [00:18:06]  After a few drinks. Three three o'clock in the morning. Welcome in Las Vegas. Yeah. This black comes up.

Nir Bashan: [00:18:11] Yeah. You, me and everyone else, trust me.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:18:14] But yeah, the rules completely changed, like you mentioned, like last seven months.What are some of the practices of the of yesteryear that we need to get rid of to really be successful in the business of tomorrow?

Nir Bashan: [00:18:29] I think quantification is now taken a whole new meaning, like Data sets are taking a whole new meaning. It does not, you know, A equals B and B will see any more. I'll give you an example from my own business. I spend a lot of time doing free work that doesn't equal a particular goal or particular sales item.

Nir Bashan: [00:18:52] And what ends up happening is I'll do a podcast like this one and somebody will be like, oh, that guy's really funny. Or he said something really interesting and they'll call me and they'll say, You know what, why don't you come aboard and help us with something? We're a nonprofit and we don't pay. But like, it's a really good opportunity. And I'll say, OK, if I had the time I had a school asked me to be on their board of directors this way, same way. And so I said yes. And now I'm on the board of directors. And I met somebody who was working alongside me doing the same thing. They need some training. So I ended up doing a month of training for their company and so on and so forth. Right. Twenty years ago, fifty years ago, that kind of stuff didn't exist. There were no podcasts. There were no different sort of modalities. You went to work somewhere, you clocked in and if you work six hours, you get paid for six hours, you work eight hours, you get paid for eight hours. And things have completely changed. And what we're going through now is a real big state of change. And how we react to that change is more important than what's happened in the first place. covid it's hit, whether you agree with it or not, or think that it you know, the most horrible thing ever to hit humanity or whether you think it's no big deal doesn't really matter.

Nir Bashan: [00:20:14] The only thing that matters is what you do with that. And so I think that we're seeing the world all around this change. The billing models of yesteryear are being replaced with non-linearity of today, the gentle relationships of what it means to look at a data set and apply it towards something. It's not really one to one anymore.

Nir Bashan: [00:20:37] And I argue that it's never been. So I think what you're going to see is a sort of a push back to quantification of things. I think companies and careers that are going to do really well are going to intelligently push back, not just say, oh, you know, I think it sucks. It's like, that's not enough. You can't you have to really sort of make an argument as to why, you know, why quantification is not exactly working, because parts of it are brilliant. And again, I'm not saying throw it away. I'm saying to combine it with a different modality. So if we're able to do that, I think we're going to see what a successful company of tomorrow is going to look like. But, yeah, everything everything is really in a state of constant change and crisis and stuff like that really exasperates the the the speed of it.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:21:30] So talking about quantification, can you just kind of make that concept concrete for us? What is it that that you mean? When you say quantification?

Nir Bashan: [00:21:40] What do I mean by quantification?

Harpreet Sahota: [00:21:41] Yeah.

Nir Bashan: [00:21:42] You know, attaching a number to something we love, attaching numbers to anything we. I feel that in our quest to try and understand the universe, if we attach a number to something, then it makes sense, right? You are six four, right? You're tall, you're tall, a guy, and, you know, five, eight. And somehow that means something to us. Well, what does that mean? I don't even know what that means. It doesn't really mean anything. It's just something we agreed upon that we say, OK, you know, this has some value for us to describe something. And if we look at our business or a product or service or our careers in terms of, you know, I put an X amount of work and I get Y amount of pay, then we'll never get ahead. We're we're already in an outdated modality. But if we look at our product or service or our work and say I put an X amount of work and then Z happens and a little bit of J pops and with some A, and then I met somebody who was a vendor, introduce C, you know, now you're really thinking like somebody who is creative and somebody who is looking at the world in a different way.

Nir Bashan: [00:22:49] So I feel that quantification is just the mere act of assigning a number to something and that is just not good enough anymore. It's not. And look, I do a lot of work with financial services people, right? You think those people would hate me, but they love me because it's a if you look at a pencil sheet and if you look at your quarterly or whatever, are you seeing the full story? Absolutely not. You're not. And you're seeing at best, at best, 50 percent of the problem at best and 50 percent of the situation. But you're missing out on so many amazing detail and amazing drivers behind the numbers that that you can't just rely on that anymore. I think we're going to see a movement of of people, of businesses start to really understand that there's a holistic approach to running a business, a soft skills, and all of these amazing intangibles that, you know, you can't quite put your finger on but, you know, affect the bottom line in a very robust way. And that, for me is creativity, and that's understanding the nature of creativity and how it plays into a business.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:24:00] That's absolutely wonderful. Thank you for that. So quantification, just reducing things down to numbers seems just like a figure in a spreadsheet. But then when you think about more creatively, kind of step back and see, OK, how does this fit into the overall picture? And you're kind of making connections between different ideas to see how this number is being impacted by different things, right?

Nir Bashan: [00:24:20] Yup, absolutely.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:24:22] You mentioned earlier that you're on a board of directors for school. I think that's really cool. And you talk about this in your book that, you know, as we get older, we lose that curiosity and that creativity that we have as children. Why is it that that happens?

Nir Bashan: [00:24:38] You know, I don't know. I don't know. I'm on the board for two schools, like two colleges. I, I, I don't. So I don't know if it's school. I don't know that society. I don't know if it's pressure. But as we get older, know you read the book. Right. So I did some research in it and we saw that babies learn how to be creative before even the language skills take place. Right. And somewhere along the way we lose it. I really don't know where, but I know that schools are not in the business of encouraging creativity. We have a school system and a school structure that has not changed in over one hundred years. Right. There is a teacher in the front of the room. There is a rose. You you absorb the material.

Nir Bashan: [00:25:24] If you absorb it, you know, you do a test to show that you've learned something and you move on. Well, if that the best way to do it and that capturing creativity at all, you know, there's countless stories that I've had it happen to myself where, you know, you're in kindergarten or whatever and you're drawing a tree in your tree. It's pink. You know, the teacher comes along well you know Nir,trees aren't pink. They're actually green or whatever. And you're like, damn it, know, OK, cool, I'll get it right the next time.

Nir Bashan: [00:25:51] And so you kind of are educated out of a creator mindset, out of thinking about problems in creative ways. And you're ushered into a love of quantification of spreadsheet logic and numbers that sometimes lie to you. Yet we love those numbers so much because we feel like there are almost like a long lost friend. And yet the the friend is not really long lost and the the numbers aren't really telling us all that we need to know. There's got to be a different way. There's got to be a new way to look at those things. And that way is creativity.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:26:32] What's up, artists? I would love to hear from you. Feel free to send me an email to the artists of Data Science at Gmail dot com. Let me know what you love about the show. Let me. What you don't love about the show and let me know what you would like to see in the future. I absolutely would love to hear from you. I've also got open office hours that I will be hosting and you can register by going to Bitly dot com forward, slash a d. S o h. I look forward to hearing from you all and I look forward to seeing you in the office hours.Let's get back to the episode. 

Harpreet Sahota: [00:27:16] And you talk about this really cool framework for creativity in your book, The Trinity of Creativity. Can you walk us through that?

Nir Bashan: [00:27:24] Totally. So I believe that anybody can be creative. That just takes the tool to learn how to do it. And so my tool to manufacture creativity and to pull out incent creativity whenever you need it is called the Trinity. It's the concept, the idea and the execution, the concept of the largest sort of view that you can have on any item. And it is just the biggest way to view something. And then the idea is kind of the middle level view or the street level view and the execution of the exact product or service. You know, if you're a car manufacturer, the execution is the Honda CRV model, number 18 dash twenty two with leather seats and a backup camera, you know, and the push button star, that's the execution.

Nir Bashan: [00:28:16] And then, you know, once you are able to establish these things, you grab a pen and a paper again writing stuff down. It's like super duper important. Grab a pen and a paper and you start to write down what these things are. And as you start to expand up and down the chart from the wide view to the very specific execution, you're able to generate creativity by just doing the act of going through the exercise.

Nir Bashan: [00:28:41] And when you go through the act of the exercise, you start to realize, hey, you know, maybe I could add this option and become more successful. Maybe I could change or tweak this and become more profitable, so on and so forth. So it is literally a technique that anybody can learn. I've done it with one person, one on one. I've done it with fifteen hundred people in a conference before you just get out of pen, it takes five minutes to learn how to do in a lifetime the master. And it's one of those things where you are empowering yourself to create creativity whenever you want it.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:29:15] And during this process, why is it crucial that we shut out the analytical part of our mind?

Nir Bashan: [00:29:24] It's critical that we start to develop a different way of looking at things so that our analytical mind can take a break. Listen, there's nobody who's writing books and out there sort of going, you know what? We need to be more analytical. Why? Because everybody is analytical already. That's what we're set up as a society, not only in the US or in Canada, but global society. That's what we do. And I've studied it from Africa to to the Far East. Doesn't matter where you are. Like, we love the kind of try to control our world with what we feel gives us predictability, which is analytics. And that is a wonderful thing up to a certain point.

Nir Bashan: [00:30:08] But as your listeners know, the analytics don't capture the entire story. They never will. And we need a better and we need a different way. And so I'm advocating to combine those two things together. And so when you're doing the concept, the idea, the execution, I want you to be free in thinking about as many ideas and the many combination of ideas as possible so that creativity can can manifest and spread. 

Harpreet Sahota: [00:30:35] That framework like we don't even need to limit it just to Problem-Solving at work.You can kind of use that framework for for your life. Right. Let's see if you're trying to pick your career path. The concept could be OK. I want to be a data scientist at Data professional. And then the middle part could be OK. Well, I want to be a data scientist working on in an e-commerce industry. And then even further, it could be OK, data scientist, e commerce industry working on specific types of problems, right?

Nir Bashan: [00:31:04] Yeah, definitely. I mean, it really is about getting kind of creative about it and, you know, figuring out where your spot is. And that is listen, I love this show, right? You're the artist Data science, right? You're you're thinking about combining the two and you're already and your listeners are already sort of receptive to that modality.

Nir Bashan: [00:31:26] And I think you guys are like light years ahead of the competition right now. You know, most people who deal with Data subsets are sort of worshiping their no, they love them. They want to pet them, you know, give them little kisses and and kind of stroke them gently and give them little hugs. These are my numbers. And all of this was studious. This came about through incredible amounts of data set and six hundred and twenty three hours of this and a pool of nine hundred and twenty two participants and thirty two countries we fall in love with, like the value and of the numbers. But, you know, they just aren't really the full story. And so for me, it is about understanding that, you know, there's a certain fallacy in understanding that we think we know kind of everything and and adding that intangible to it is not only not only build humility, but it allows you to look at that data set in a way that the next guy or the next gal won't. And if you're able to do that, then you add value to your client, to your customer who is paying you to come up with this or who is you know, your business is engaged to produce that for somebody. You're adding an insane amount of value by stepping out of the box and stepping out of the sort of prescribed area you're allowed to play in in order to give people value.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:32:56] Absolutely. 100 percent agree with that. To me, creativity's, and especially how I see it in Data sciences, just the ability to take disparate ideas that look like they don't belong together or smash them together and apply it to solving a problem you have in front of you. The way I most commonly see it is just looking at different industries and different problem statements like I'm looking at problem statement that somebody is using in economics or using this particular model to solve this particular problem. And I'm over here in a completely unrelated industry, but I could kind of see the parallels between that and use that as inspiration to solve what it is I'm working on.

Nir Bashan: [00:33:34] no doubt, you know, when I was in yeah, I agree with you 100 percent. When I was in grad school, we had a teacher, I got a film master's, but an advertising of an advertising program the whole time. And you can imagine I went to the chair of the program and I said, listen, I'm looking at a few different schools and whatnot, but I want flexibility. And he was like, just the fact that you're meeting with me and telling me that I will let you do whatever you want if you take this class and that class are the only requirements that state of California gives me to give you a degree, just take the basics and then do whatever you want. So I did and I took a little bit of advertising. I took science classes in different, different things. And one of the teachers in the science class was a JPL Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist, and he worked on a string theories and all of these really smart things. And he would like by far the smartest guy I've ever met and far smarter than me. And I you know, we were looking at his his work. And there's no way that I can ever contribute anything valuable to an entity like that because I don't know exactly what they're doing. But sometimes having an idea from somewhere else in to a place that is like literally with their blinders on, I mean, are surrounded by a bunch of PhDs and they're so far down the rabbit hole, they don't know where they are anymore.

Nir Bashan: [00:35:06] And so, you know, we became friends and I went into the lab a few times and and I just asked a question. I asked a really stupid question for the most part. But I could tell once in a while I asked something that was so stupid that, like, I could see a light going off in the group and they were like, wow, we've never really looked at it that way. I'm like, great. You know, that's kind of my creative take on it, if that have any value. And they're like, well, you know, if we do the if we repeat the experiment this way and so on and so forth, maybe there'll be something there that we've never looked at before. And just having that little crack of a door open is an amazing thing. I feel like we've spent our lives specializing so far down the rabbit hole that we're not open to ideas that would help us broaden ourselves in that particular rabbit hole and to look at things in a bit of a different and bigger light. And so I think it's critical that we that we from time to time kind of check ourselves in that mentality and see if, you know, if we're maybe too far down that rabbit hole.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:36:11] So talk about a couple of ways here to to increase our creativity, turn up the volume a little bit. That's not focusing so much on the quantification of things, kind of letting go of logic a little bit, getting out of that rabbit hole. What else what are a couple of other things that we could do to to turn up the volume on the creative side of our thinking process.

Nir Bashan: [00:36:31] So I think a lot of it is listening to and looking at our little victories. I think that we spend our life setting a goal. Right. We're going to generate this data set by this date and so on and so forth, and we march toward that. That's our three year right that. Our five year or whatever, but what we miss is all of the wonderful little breadcrumbs and the things that happen along the way that could be far more powerful than just setting that main goal. There's a famous story about an ice cream machine salesman who wanted to sell a bunch of machines. His approach with analytical, I'm going to get a sales list and I'm going to set up the country by region and I'm going to go for these things and that, you know, what ended up happening was he sold the machine. But like any analytical only business, soon he was faltering. He couldn't grow. And he noticed that there was a restaurant in California that kept buying machines. So he showed up one day there was a line out the door and they were using the machine to make milkshakes right in line at the door. And, you know, people like milling about the whole deal. He finally got to the line and he had the best cheeseburger I've had in its entire life. Best cheeseburger ever. Right. And the guy's name was Ray Kroc. And the restaurant was McDonel. Had he have stayed on his main goal, dude, who knows what would have happened? But because he he decided to look at little victories, those little victories ended up leading to a much better spot.

Nir Bashan: [00:37:58] And so what I urge your listeners to do is look around and see what little victories have been occurring. And are you capitalizing on them or are you just steamrolling past them on your way towards that big goal in the sky?

Harpreet Sahota: [00:38:12] You absolutely love them. And because I mean, you could have a big goal of, oh, I want to get, you know, be a data scientist at Facebook, Amazon, Netflix or Google. Right. But if you just focus only on that, you're going to shut yourself off to opportunities where you can be a bigger fish in a smaller pond, making an eagle an even bigger, meaningful contribution to the organization that you can potentially be hired at. But you just got to be open and receptive to it and be willing to wander off the path that you've kind of paid for yourself, right?

Nir Bashan: [00:38:39] Yeah. And it's looking at what's been working right. So if you want to work at Netflix. Right. And you know, you're really good at other types of Data and you're trying to kill yourself, right? You're like, oh, man. But no, that's what I want to do. It's about looking at what life has been telling you in a creative way and then adjusting towards that goal so that things come easier to you, so that it's easier for you to make money, easier for you to sell that product or service that you're offering. It really it's about piecing a little thing together creatively to allow you to succeed.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:39:17] I love the man talks about the relationship now between emotional intelligence and creativity and how does one influence the other?

Nir Bashan: [00:39:25] I believe that creativity is a component of our DNA and who we are. And in order for us to really be fully evolved human beings, I think we need to balance our analytical drive with the creative drive. And in that balance comes a certain intelligence that cannot just come from quantification. It cannot just come from, you know, spreadsheets or whatnot. It is an intelligence that comes from empathy and intelligence, that comes from humor, from courage. It's an intelligence that comes from soft skill and an intelligence that comes from happiness and positivity. We don't talk about positivity and happiness in business, and we don't. We're always talking about profits and margins and stuff like that, which is super important. But we also need to start to introduce into the dialog a certain joy of doing things and a certain joy of accomplishing those things that we're doing. And in that is a emotional intelligence that allows us the ability to say, OK, yeah, we're armed with the data, we're armed with the numbers. And that is the emotional sort of intelligence. That's the the driver that takes that data and makes it into information. And then unless we're able to do that holistically and and in a repeatable way, all we're doing is what everyone else is doing, which is just producing.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:41:04] And speaking of emotions, you know, the positive emotions, right? Being positive, being optimistic. These correlates nicely in a positive direction with creativity. Right. Why is it that that these two kind of go together?

Nir Bashan: [00:41:19] You know, it's one of those things where negativity kills creativity. It is the recipe for an idea that's kind of dead in the water before it even has a chance to kind of grow. Listen, I just wrote an article. I forgot what magazine it's in. But it it's called Bad Words, right. And it's about the fact that the English language has more negative. Ways to describe something negative then it does way to describe something in a positive way, and I dug and did a little research and I found that that's not just true for English, it's true for every language on Earth, every single language on Earth in English.

Nir Bashan: [00:42:03] I think it's something like 10 times more negative words than her positive words. And so our sort of DNA, again, going back to the Harriette days, depended on us being sarcastic and pessimistic about the future, because while a lot of people didn't live to see their 10th birthday disease and starvation and all this stuff ravaged us as people and, you know, there wasn't a lot to be happy about. Yet today we still carry those same things right in our DNA and and we're like not more mismatched towards what today's society has become. It's just the way that our brains are haven't quickly evolved enough into the realities of what's going on today. And to me, it's crazy, right? And we see sort of people being negative and and and carrying these sort of attributes that used to help us. Now they destroy us. And so what we need to do is we need to become positive in order for creativity to grow and for creativity to get out. And that's why it's so important for us to have optimism and to have a sense of hope and a vision for the future that is not bleak because then creativity is able to flow from that. From pessimism comes analytical sort of solution with analytical solutions are devoid of any kind of emotional, intelligent and devoid of any kind of psychological safety that is necessary in the workplace and in businesses to really do well.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:43:44] Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. Actually. I read something that said something we have between or up to like sixty thousand thoughts per day and like 80 percent of them are negative. And I thought that was just mind boggling.

Nir Bashan: [00:43:56] Isn't that crazy.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:43:58] Yeah. I mean what can we do. Like what questions can we ask ourselves. Were coming up to a problem to make sure like how do we frame these problems in more positive ways?

Nir Bashan: [00:44:09] You know, it really is about just shifting our mentality and willing that response. It is that easy. It's one of those things that is that easy to do. We just have to want it. We are born with the world's most incredible device ever, and that's our human brain. It spent a long time getting it as good as it is, and it has the ability to physically rewire itself based on input. That's new. It's called neuroplasticity. It's been studied. It's legit. It's not like you can't teach an old dog new tricks and you can change your brain up to the day that you die and it just takes the will to do it. So next time you or your listeners are faced with a problem, you you literally make a choice right then and there how you want to deal with it. You can deal with it with what most people do, which is look at it negatively and sarcastically and, you know, sort of get down about it.

Nir Bashan: [00:45:09] Or you can say, you know what, I'm going to try to come up with some creative principles, some humor or empathy or courage or some soft skills to look at this problem and and hope that it creates ideas for solutions that were never there before.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:45:23] Yeah, that concept of neuroplasticity, I wish I'd come across it when I was much younger. I'm like in my late thirties now and I unfortunately came across that idea. I mean, I feel like a way to live my life just a few years ago and ever since I've embraced that idea built into my belief system and just started to to do what? You just get new ideas into my head, because for the longest time, it was just like the same twelve songs on repeat week after week after week, you know what I mean? And then just being able to recognize that, yeah, you can learn new things and you know, thoughts like a garden. You can grow flowers can grow weeds, right?

Nir Bashan: [00:46:02] That's right.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:46:04] So you mentioned some of creativity's personality traits. Let's dig into that a little bit more. What are these personality traits mentioned? Humor and courage. Yeah. What what are the personality traits of creativity? How do we cultivate those traits for ourselves?

Nir Bashan: [00:46:20] I think yeah, I think humor is incredibly important. Looking at a situation with humor allows us to see it differently and it allows us to see potential problem solving tools that were never there before. When we're able to look at things in a funny or humorous way, it elicits a response and somebody that goes, oh, wow, you know, let's come up with this way or that way to solve it.

Nir Bashan: [00:46:44] So those are incredibly brilliant. And effective, effective tool empathy is incredibly important. We spend a lot of our life not really understanding what other people are going through and understanding what other people are going through is incredibly important today. And not just understanding kind of, oh, I'm empathetic, but really, like really walking a mile in their shoes and living and breathing what that person is going through in order to understand them better. I think it's incredibly important. And then finally, what the other thing I think is really important is having the courage to actually implement this stuff and go for that courage is the grit that it takes to get stuff done. Listen, there's a million people out there that will sell you a million solutions for anything, right? And they're usually get rich quick, sort of snakeskin oil salesmen and stuff like that. And my my approach is not that at all. It's really about, you know, slow but steady growth and understanding that there is no get rich quick. There is no arrival. It's really part of of a journey. And those three tools are absolutely free. They cost nothing. It just takes your ability to say, you know what, I'm going to start to look at something with a little bit more humor. I'm going to inject some empathy into something when something goes wrong or one of my employees or a vendor makes a mistake. And I'm going to have the courage to stick by those convictions because I know that it will make me a more creative person in the long run.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:48:24] A lot of this, I think, has to do with the self talk, the internal dialog that you have as well. Right. How do we catch ourselves when we're having these negative internal dialogs so that we can shift ourselves to have more of the cultivated personality traits for creativity?

Nir Bashan: [00:48:41] You know, it really is about banishing the self-doubt monster and taking that weight off of our shoulders. We are told that we have to get it right all the time. And that creates anxiety and incredible pressure upon us that are very, very hard to shake. And we need to get better as people, as a humanity in dealing with failure and accepting that we are our own worst enemy. So one thing that I like to do that your listeners can do now, if they wanted, was to grab a piece of paper and a pen and start to write down ideas that they have. And what ends up happening is you might write down one idea or two and then get kind of stuck. But if you stick to it and you keep going, you'll you'll notice that you start to like purge this stuff out.

Nir Bashan: [00:49:34] And instead of, like, trying to hold on to one little thing that you might think is good if you just do it, there's a change in the brain. When you pick up a pen and a piece of paper, it it's been studied. And really that change allowed you to shift the mentality of thinking into doing and what you're doing. You're able to sort of create the list of potential ideas, but really they're purging your system of keeping that self-doubt in there. And that's, you know, a very powerful tool that that can help you get rid of that self-doubt. The byproduct is the side effect is that later when you come and look at what you've written down, not just then, but an hour later, a day later, a week later, whatever, you might see that you might have an idea or two in there that can be used somewhere else. So it's kind of a wonderful thing.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:50:24] And then having ideas is is like a muscle. Like I've got a journal that I write every morning and 10 ideas. And the first four seven they come to that last three or four men. That's like the hardest ideas to get out and agree with just writing stuff out and like journaling.

Nir Bashan: [00:50:41] It's what I saw those musicians in the studio do what I thought. Those actors in Hollywood, everybody had something to write down. Some drew pictures, some real words. Some were out like their thoughts that didn't connect and so on and so forth. I've seen people write in the margins of something and have a book or a script or whatever it is. And doing that is is an incredibly important thing, because once you write something down, you change the mentality of thinking into a thought that can fester in your mind and that you can, you know, think and overthink and think and think about it turns it into something tangible that you can just cross right out. Try it, 

Harpreet Sahota: [00:51:25] Dope, Absolutely. You got to do it. So you talked a little bit earlier about this this idea of psychological safety and you mentioned the personality traits of creativity, those personality traits. I feel like they work amazingly well when you're on a team. But to be on a team that is really going to be effective and creative ideas need that psychological safety. What if we find ourselves on a team? That we don't really feel psychologically safe, how can we start kind of encouraging that in our environment? Is there anything that we could do?

Nir Bashan: [00:51:53] Yes, it really is about the individual tapping into who they are as a creative person and letting that out. There is no secret recipe to you know, you're on a shitty team somewhere with a bunch of people who are willing to take a leap on an idea. What ends up happening is that if you are truly in touch with this creative side and you're able to fuze that creative and the analytical, then Waterfind that level, and eventually you'll find where you need to be and where you need to go. And the thing is, a lot of businesses aren't much different than that scenario. They want to change to to some degree, but they don't know how it's going to be perceived. How are the customers going to perceive it? And, you know, it really is a fear based sort of decision. And so there is no secret recipe to enabling that that psychological safety. You have to build those systems in and it starts from the ground up. But it really is about understanding that your ideas and who you are is really important. And eventually that will lead you to where you need to go and might not be today and it might not be tomorrow, might not be next week, but maybe in a couple of months, maybe in a year or two, as things sort of pan out, you will naturally gravitate towards those who are of the same wavelength and that sort of same mentality to solve problems in a different way. And you'll find your way eventually.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:53:29] And a lot of that, I think, takes takes some skill in pushing the ego out of the way a little bit. Right. So talk to us about what the dangers are of an inflated ego when it comes to creativity.

Nir Bashan: [00:53:41] So egos kill creativity, just like the self-doubt or perhaps even more. We develop egos when we think that we know what will happen and when we think that we have some advantage that other people don't have.

Nir Bashan: [00:53:56] We developed these egos that are able to really just kill ideas before they they start. I've worked with several companies. That leadership team had incredibly bad egos and they had ways that of approaching problems that killed creativity and they killed the possible solution of it.

Nir Bashan: [00:54:20] So really, an ego is something that is an entirely destructive force in creativity, and it is something that takes away the humanity of different type of problem solving.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:54:33] fighting that evil that kind of goes against nature for for a lot of people.Right. Because, you know, just thinking about where we came from, ancient human being days, how do we fight that? How do we fight something that comes naturally to us?

Nir Bashan: [00:54:47] Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. I think we have to we have to realize that these things are no longer there, no longer doing what they were designed to do. I mean, ego, in a way, was designed to protect us and to keep us alive. And today it's more destructive because it killed collaboration. We're not able to come up with ideas. The thing is, a lot of times I like to have someone else come up with the ideas, not me, because it empowers other people to to to really take ownership of the process. And when you're able to tie some of these elusive creative concepts to the bottom line, I think people start to get it and they start to realize, OK, I don't need to be doing it. I don't need to be the one driving the ship all the time. It's OK to hand the keys over because it is improving the bottom line. If you're able to tie the creative objective to a analytical sort of success, I think people start to realize that, yeah, this is the direction we need to go.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:55:51] You talk about the four P's that we need for growth in the book. Can you walk us through that?

Nir Bashan: [00:55:57] Yeah, definitely. So I have four P's that people process product and profit in that order. People are the most important thing that you have in any organization, whether you're on a career path or the owner of a company getting the right people and letting them do what they're good at is incredibly important and letting them take ownership of the process process, then it's really important to it's about setting up a structure for creativity to be able to grow. And a lot of people think creativity is, oh, you know, you work from 11:00 p.m. to four a.m. and that's not what it's about at all. I mean, you can that's what you want. But you have to do that every night and repeatably. It is about getting in. That rhythm, executing your product and service, you know, if you're able to do that, you're able to then come up with ideas for the product that is new and different and exciting in the marketplace. Then finally, you're able to realize profit from those four channels being set up in that way. Again, it's really about infusing all of these things with creativity and not just the analytics.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:57:10] It's pretty interesting, like the people would think that having a routine, a structure in place, having discipline, these things are dampers on creativity, but they're really not. Are they like having discipline in the structure? All that in place enables you to be more creative. Why is that?

Nir Bashan: [00:57:26] Absolutely because creativity needs those boundaries in order to survive. People when I told them that I was working on albums, they'd be like, oh, is it a party? Is it like a music video? I'd be like, no. If we start at 9:00, sometimes at 8:00 in the morning. And we worked about four or five. Right. We take a break at noon and they're like, oh, that that's like my job. Boring. I'll get some of it's boring. It's just it's work like anything else. And then later, when I worked on movies, you know, movie set starts at six a.m., five thirty a.m. people get their, you know, actors and, you know, we work till three or four in the afternoon depending on the scene and depending on what's going on that day. Yeah, creativity needs the confinement in order to be successful.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:58:10] Something about constraints that force you to think more creatively. It's kind of paradoxical, right?

Nir Bashan: [00:58:16] Yeah, it's amazing, but it's true.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:58:18] So talk to us about how we can use a creative mindset then to be more creative with our time management.

Nir Bashan: [00:58:25] Yeah. So time management is one of those really interesting things that touch about in the book. Sometimes it's good and it's it's weird because we're on a podcast right now. But I'm usually not the talker. I'm usually the listener. And there are amazing creative things that can happen if you just learn to shut up from time to time, you know, and listen and do really, really good listening. Not just, you know. Well, yeah, I kind of heard what they said or whatever, but you're in a meeting. You do really, really good listening and empathize with that person and really try to understand where it is that they're coming from. There's amazing creative wealth that is often left on the table. People are busy trying to talk or they're just waiting to talk. They're literally waiting while someone else is saying something to say what they're going to say and not listening and building that conversation. So that's a wonderful time management skill from the book that can make you almost instantly creative. Just just zip it from time to time.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:59:26] I like that. So. Just zip it. From time to time.

Nir Bashan: [00:59:31] Yeah, I'm going to get a T-shirt instead of just do it. Just zip it.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:59:36] Just the lips would like it would with a zipper.It's interesting just to to be quiet and listen. So it's like Matemwe time management. It's time you spend talking management. That's really interesting. Yeah. Let's do our last formal question before we jump to a quick random round here. It's one hundred years in the future. What do you want to be remembered for?

Nir Bashan: [00:59:59] Oh, that's a good one. You know, I think I'd be happy if I were able to make an impact and sort of help people understand that there's another modality that our brains are set up to work and then that's creativity. I would be happy if someone were to discover a particular medical thing that would help or, you know, some advancement in science or, you know, I don't know, data analytics, data science. I would enable, you know, the betterment of society. I'd be very, very happy if somebody were to think a bit creatively and then apply that to their given trade or vocation. And in order to make the world a bit of a better place.

Harpreet Sahota: [01:00:50] I love a man and absolutely encourage everyone here by ten copies of this book. Give one to everybody on your team. It's that good. I really enjoyed it. I'm really looking forward to a slicing and dicing and putting little mini episodes on the podcast, talking about bits and pieces of the book and how I've applied some of it in my own life. I'm really looking forward to doing that.

Harpreet Sahota: [01:01:10] So jumping into the round around here, what do you currently most excited about or what are you currently exploring?

Nir Bashan: [01:01:17] I am most excited about the fact if I if I can answer this honestly, the fact that my team in England, my football team has just won two games in a row for the first time in like ten years, I like so excited about it.

Harpreet Sahota: [01:01:33] What team is that?

Nir Bashan: [01:01:34] West Ham United. Come on, you. We're going to win the league. Yeah. You know, you have to have the distraction. Like, you can't you know, you can't be all business all the time. And for me, that's my. Like, I'm embarrassed to admit how much time I spend watching football, and then I am embarrassed to admit how much time I spend, like reading about the transfers and like what a player said in the locker room about the former coach or whatever. That manager doesn't like this guy. I'm like so into it, it's just like it's like a wonderful escape for me. So I'm very excited about the next game. We're playing Tottenham and I hope that we beat them like 10 nil because I hate them and I feel like really excited about the first season in recent memory. I'm talking ten plus years where we've won more games and we've lost. So that's a good thing. Yeah, that's kind of what I'm really excited about right now as huge.

Harpreet Sahota: [01:02:34] So what are you inspired by? Inspired by the same thing.You're inspired by some different right now?

Nir Bashan: [01:02:39]  You know, so I read a lot. I'm like you. I read probably a book a week and I'm reading a really great book right now called The Hot Hand. I forgot the guy whose name I think John Cohen or Ben Cohen. And it's about statistics and probability. So good. It's so good. Before that, I read Amy Hamilton, the fearless organization. Before that I read Emily about this book, Clearer, Closer, Better. There is a renaissance in book cities and I'm so inspired by what people are doing out there, behavioral psychology of becoming like a boom right now. Right. Everybody wants to know why it is that we're doing what we're doing. And some of the books that are being generated in that field know Adam Grant books and you know Adam Atler and Wayne Baker stuff. I mean, it's just so good. I, I encourage your listeners to pick up some of these books, whether they're audible or a hard copy or whatever, and just just see the amazing amount, the wealth of information that's out there. You ought to be able to go through one of these books every week, you know, and it enriches your life in untold ways.

Harpreet Sahota: [01:03:58] Absolutely. 100 percent definitely to get that book "The Hot Hand" And that sounds like something they'll be right up my audiences alley for sure.

Nir Bashan: [01:04:06] Yeah have him on the show.

Harpreet Sahota: [01:04:07] Yeah, I'll try to, man. I'll try. So in terms of books like the asides from your book, which is absolutely amazing, I was reading this this week. I'm also interviewing the guy that wrote Serendipity Mindset and I think you'd enjoy.

Nir Bashan: [01:04:21] Oh cool.

Harpreet Sahota: [01:04:22] This is one that I think you really, really enjoy. So if you get a chance to pick that up,

Nir Bashan: [01:04:26] I'll pick it up. I need a next book.

Harpreet Sahota: [01:04:29] Yeah, that's that's a good one, man. Then you can listen to the interview I did with him if you listen. So what do you believe that other people think is crazy?

Nir Bashan: [01:04:38] I believe that we're all creative. We're all born this way and we just need a technique and a methodology to get it out. So that's what I believe. And people think I'm nuts. They think that you're either born with it, you either have it or you don't. And they don't feel like you can learn it. But I feel like you can learn it just like you can riding a bike or anything else. And for me, that that gets a lot of controversy sometimes.

Harpreet Sahota: [01:05:05] What song do you currently have on repeat?

Nir Bashan: [01:05:08] In my mind?

Harpreet Sahota: [01:05:09] Yeah, that works.

Nir Bashan: [01:05:12] My wife's been listening to a lot of soft rock, so it's like journey in like Boston.It's just like in my head. 

Harpreet Sahota: [01:05:21] It could be worse.

Nir Bashan: [01:05:23] I mean, you know,

Harpreet Sahota: [01:05:25] We're going to jump into the random question generator now for a few questions. Go ahead and pull this up.

Nir Bashan: [01:05:30] I love it. Is this a real random thing?

Harpreet Sahota: [01:05:33] Yeah.

Nir Bashan: [01:05:34] Oh wow,

Harpreet Sahota: [01:05:34] Right. What's an unpopular opinion you have?

Nir Bashan: [01:05:39] I like the rubber ducky school, the floating. We're looking on a floating rubber ducky with a random question generator Harp an unpopular opinion that I have. Um, let's see. I think that Westham's is going to win the league. That's unpopular. Trust me, the odds on that are like if you put a dollar on that, you make, you know, twenty five hundred. 

Harpreet Sahota: [01:06:04] It's not bad, man.

Nir Bashan: [01:06:05] Yeah. Put a buck on it. Go ahead.

Nir Bashan: [01:06:08] What's the last book you gave up on and stop reading?

Nir Bashan: [01:06:11] Wow. Wow. There was a book called The Chesapeake Something experiment or something. It was awful. It was about a fading piece of land. I only read nonfiction. I don't read any any fiction at all. I just read nonfiction. And it was about the last family that lives on a spit of land and just outside of Virginia. And I going to make it past the first seventy pages, which is super rare because I'll read anything like I just like to read I like. Words on a page like flipping it, and I like my eyes scanning, but this one was so bad it looks like it just had no redeeming value. It was kind of negative. And the subjects in the book were viewed, in my opinion, they were viewed as, you know, inferior to the author's intellect. I just hate that kind of stuff. So I stop reading that right. Right, right away.

Harpreet Sahota: [01:07:09] But then on top, top three books to avoid what's going to get to that one wit. What was your best birthday?

Nir Bashan: [01:07:17] It was called "the Chesapeake Requiem, a year with the Waterman, a vanishing Tangier Island".I don't recommend it. I don't know. Maybe maybe you'll love it. You know what? My best birthday ever. Yeah. Uh, I had like probably my fifth or sixth birthday when we went to the fire station.

Nir Bashan: [01:07:36] Can't top it due to illness and top it.

Harpreet Sahota: [01:07:39] That is awesome. Have you ever save someone's life?

Nir Bashan: [01:07:43] Have I ever save someone's life? Wow. That's a good one. No, I don't think so.

Nir Bashan: [01:07:48] Have you?

Harpreet Sahota: [01:07:50] I haven't. No, I don't think I have. Yeah. Unless I count to just keep my son alive. He's five months old, so there you go. His life every day.

[01:07:59] Hey, believe me, I get it at that age.

Harpreet Sahota: [01:08:02] What's your earliest memory?

Nir Bashan: [01:08:05] My earliest memory is finding a parking spot in Los Angeles, going to the grocery store, finding parking in L.A. is like a really, really big deal. And it's seared into my memory. Just finding, like somewhere to put the car was like such a victory. Like it was, you know, it's like the best thing that's ever happened. And so that is my earliest memory. I think I was three.

Harpreet Sahota: [01:08:29] Wow. Last random question here. What makes you cry?

Nir Bashan: [01:08:34] Wow. You know, not much and makes me cry But I would have to say, you know, when I think of my son and his accomplishments and, you know, the things that he's able to solve on his own and that that gets the emotion going and he's three and a half and being able to see how he kind of deals with the world and seeing him solve problems in ways that, you know, I wouldn't think of in a million years just gives me so much hope for humanity.

Harpreet Sahota: [01:09:08] That's awesome. That's awesome. So where can people find your books?

Nir Bashan: [01:09:12] So, yes, on Amazon, Barnes Noble, some stores in stores and yes, pretty much available everywhere.

Harpreet Sahota: [01:09:20] You definitely give me include a link to that in the show. Notes for people to check out as well.

Nir Bashan: [01:09:24] Sweet.

Harpreet Sahota: [01:09:25] How can people connect with you and where can they find you online.

Nir Bashan: [01:09:28] So I have a website Nir Bashan Dot com, N i r B a s h a n dotcom. I have a community on there. If you'd like to join, we'd love to have you and your listeners basically, you know, you we talk about creativity. We have C suite all the way to students in there and everybody's asking questions and getting help. It's actually Adam Grant and Wayne Baker is a platform called Give a Toss where it's all free and nobody selling anything. You sign up, it's free, free to ask questions, to try to engage everything. It's free and it's kind of a cool thing. So I would love to see you guys on there. And I'd love to listen to what your listeners have to say on the on the community website.

Harpreet Sahota: [01:10:13] Awesome. Yeah, definitely a link to that. And you'll see more on that as well. Where to join that.  Nir thank you so much for taking time on your schedule to talk about your book today.I really appreciate you coming on to the show.

Nir Bashan: [01:10:23] Thanks for having me. It's been fun.