The behavioral question

If you want to succeed at something or be a certain kind of person, what should you do?

This must be a hard question, since most people get it wrong, at least at first. But we can modify it to make it easier.

Try this:

If I were trying to fail, what things would I do?

Be honest with yourself. Make a list. And then follow it with:

How many of those things am I currently doing?

This is the behavioral question. It’s effective because it asks you to ignore the stories you tell yourself—the stuff that’s only happening in your head—and focus on your literal actions.

Let’s say you’re trying to write a novel. How do you succeed? This should be a solved problem by now, but most aspiring novelists never finish the first draft. So let’s flip it around. How do you fail at writing a novel?

• Don’t read novels.
• Don’t write on a regular basis.
• Wait for the right idea.
• Worry about the quality of your writing.
• Keep changing the plot and starting over.
• Decide you’ve got “writer’s block.”
• Obsessively edit what you’ve already written instead of working on the next chapter.

This list comes from my own expertise. I’m very good at not writing a novel. Anyone who watches me do it would agree. It doesn’t matter how much I want to write one; until I stop doing all the things on this list, I might as well be trying to fail. It’s a hard pill to swallow.

The behavioral question helps you hold yourself and others accountable. Consider it in another form:

You can’t say “I’m not a bully” while doing everything a bully would do.

If you do everything a bully would do, then you’re a bully, whether you think you are or not.

This is incredibly obvious to some of you. To others, it feels unfair. What if you act like a bully, not because you want to, but because you have to? What if you have good reasons? What if it’s not your intent? What if the situation is complex? What if it’s really everyone else’s fault? What if it’s your job, and you’ll get fired if you don’t?

My answer comes in two parts:

• Okay.
• Still a bully.

The behavioral question doesn’t ask why. It asks what an onlooker would conclude you’re trying to do, based on what you’re actually doing.

I’m not saying context and intent don’t matter. Sure they do. But context and intent won’t get you from point A to point B, and they’re not get-out-of-jail-free cards. At most, they can justify a rare slip-up. Patterns are demonstrative: the purpose of a system is what it does, not what it wants to do, not what it says it’s doing, not what it puts in vinyl letters on the wall of its kitchen. And everything is a system, even your day-to-day life.

If what I’m saying is obvious, maybe it’s too obvious, because it gets overlooked all the time. Sometimes we get so busy justifying our own actions that we never stop to consider them for the naked things they are. A third framing of the behavioral question is:

Everyone can see what you’re doing. (Except maybe you.)

The stories you tell yourself about yourself are utterly unconvincing to anyone who’s not living in your head. People are quick to judge, and they’re not always wrong.

As an example: a couple months ago I yelled a curse word at a kids’ soccer game. I felt terrible about it afterward, and it wasn’t without cause—I’d just been accidentally whipped in the face with a rope—but all the other parents at the game didn’t know that. All they saw, when they turned to stare, was a grown man swearing at his son, loudly enough for two teams of six-year-olds to hear, because that’s what literally happened. They were embarrassed for me and they were right to be. I should have kept a better handle on myself.

Part of me wanted to justify the situation. How could I have known I was going to get whipped in the face? That’s never happened to me before. Swearing after you’ve been whipped in the face is regular, normal adult behavior. It’s not like I was kicking over chairs and breaking equipment.

But that’s all context. I had to accept what I’d done, in and of itself, without all the justifications and explanations and comparisons. There’s room for forgiveness, but it has to be built on a foundation of accountability. And I did hold myself accountable. I apologized to my family, explored the issue with my therapist, and committed to behave more appropriately in the future.

I’m not asking for a medal or anything. The point of this story is to illustrate, in the way only a public faux pas can, that actions speak for themselves. An act may be acceptable in one situation and unacceptable in another, but it also has a literal side, a character all its own. And the more often you do it, the less the situation will excuse.

My objective is to close the gap between what we want and what we do, between the idea and the act, between the press release and the footage. Humans are storytellers, but there’s something in us that cares about the truth.

Take this concept to work. Ask yourself what it looks like your team is doing, without all the jargon and process and TED Talks. Are you building products? Are you solving problems? Or are you using corporate rituals to pass the time and showing each other how many acronyms you know? It’s not an either-or situation, but most teams have room to improve, if they can find the ingenuity and courage to do so.

If the dogma runs too deep and you can’t make a clear assessment, flip the question around. Ask, “What would we do if we wanted to avoid shipping a useful product?” Ask someone who works in a different field. Ask a teenager. Get some perspective. A process may be useful for non-obvious reasons, but if no one ever challenges it, it will inevitably make itself useless.

The behavioral question is simple. It has to be, because so much of human activity is intended to distract from the simple. Some of these distractions are the finer things in life. But the ability to put them aside and identify what you’re actually doing—or not doing—is essential to getting anything done.