https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRW7eY6K4Jo

1 00:00:00.000 --\> 00:01:00.000 in this video i'm going to talk to you
about incentives how to get people to do the things you want and if you
don't know what the definition of power is by the way the definition of
power is how to influence events or people all right so the ability to
direct or influence events or people that is the definition of power and
so most people hopefully if you're watching this you want to become more
powerful and the thing is that word makes you feel queasy on the inside
it's because you have a very poor definition of power power is neither
good nor bad what you do with it can be good or bad right it's just it
is just raw potential so in this video and if you don't know who i am by
the way my name is alex ramose on acquisition.com it's a portfolio of
companies over 100 million dollars a year and i have nothing to sell you
and i make these videos because a lot of people are broke and i don't
want you to be one of them all right i also have a lot of fun doing this
and so that is why i make them all right like i said nothing to sell you
except hopefully just these lovely watch times on these vids and the
skills that come with it that were relatively hard earned okay so you
want people to do stuff right there's the component of persuasion in
getting them to believe that it is in their best interest that is
fundamentally what leadership is to get someone to believe that doing
the

2 00:01:00.000 --\> 00:02:00.000 thing that you want them to do is
really just get them to want to do that right that is what it is and so
a lot of leadership is power which and a lot of power if you sign the
definition is selling but today i'm not talking about selling i'm
talking about incentives right so this is like kind of the the brass
tack side there's the persuasion the soft side which is still very
important the psychology side the other side is kind of the behavioral
side and so this is adapted from a conversation that i had with my
closest friend dr trevor cashy and we were talking about behavior and
getting humans to comply and so what i want to talk to you about is the
ways to do that and so a big part of that if my my little my little
doodad will start working that's what she said um here we go and we're
gonna make a little boxy do boxy do fantastic boxy do completed okay so
it's not a perfect box deal with it you've got pluses and you've got
minuses and you can add them or you could subtract them what this means
is that we have a combination of both punishment and we have reward
stuff that people don't want and stuff

3 00:02:00.000 --\> 00:03:00.000 that people do want all right so for
example and i'm going to give a simplistic reasoning to get someone to
do something so we'll use a simple one which is how do you get your kid
to clean their room this is a simple example that you can extrapolate to
whatever it is that you want someone else to do you can add a good thing
i can give you a cookie that is something that i can do i can if you do
the chore i will give you a cookie simple you do the thing you get the
reward awesome the next thing that we could do is we could subtract a
negative you get no cookies all right so they don't get to have dessert
anymore which would be impossible because you can never skip dessert
right like not in this family right and so we could subtract something
that they do have that they like right so if you don't do your chores i
will remove video games or you don't get to eat dessert makes sense so
those are two things that we can do with a positive or a reward on the
reverse of this is that we can add a negative so we can say i will spank
your ass i'm going to add a negative i'm going to spank your ass if you
don't if you don't do your chores oh no that sucks right but i'm going
to add

4 00:03:00.000 --\> 00:04:00.000 something that wasn't currently in your
life that you will not like all right as we add a negative the fourth
thing that we can do and i'll get to how you can think through these in
a second we can subtract a negative okay so i can uh i plan on speaking
every day and i i can remove spanking or let's say there's something
that you uh that you don't like doing which might be like you're
expected to do the dishes right you don't have to do the dishes or let's
say you don't like it you know you don't like riding the bus right so
you're only riding the bus i'll drive you to school that's kind of like
taking away native and adding a positive ah right and so we can do no
dishes which would be subtracting a negative think about these in this
way these are things that people want to avoid and these are people
things that they want here's what's kind of interesting about all of
this stuff incentives drive behavior there's tremendous amount of
documentation on that hopefully you're not going to fight that point
with me all right but here's what's interesting when you create
punishments for people people do anything to avoid the punishment which
may not mean doing the thing that you want them to do so for example if
your child sneaks out at night and then you

5 00:04:00.000 --\> 00:05:00.000 punish them for sneaking out the
incentive is not necessarily stop sneaking out the incentives to stop
getting caught right it encourages criminal behavior it encourages
people to find new and ingenuitive ways to do the thing they want to do
which is their incentive their plus side and figure out a ways to avoid
the downside here's what is kind of interesting about this is that with
punishments in general you get people to avoid the behavior but you
don't get them necessarily to do what you want them to do so if you want
someone to do something it's much easier to incentivize that if you do
the thing right you get this right because incentives direct behavior
punishments force people to avoid anything that will give them the
punishment it's subtle but hopefully you're picking up what i'm putting
down the reason this i think is very interesting is that when you look
at so jim collins uh wrote a lot of the best management books that are
out there and what's interesting if you if you follow his career it
seems like he's he went from super super quantitative to more
qualitative now he still did quantitative to arrive at his qualitative
decisions but he talks about how leadership is such an important part of
building great businesses and we know that great people build great
companies

6 00:05:00.000 --\> 00:06:00.000 okay and so we as entrepreneurs must be
leaders and good people so that we can attract good people so we can
build good companies now a big part of that is figuring out how to get
people to do stuff and so based on the research that he had that he had
presented which i thought was really fascinating is that over time if
you have negative reinforcement performance degrades right it's always
critical feedback always critical feedback always negative only only
talk to somebody when they do something wrong on the flip side if you
have positive feedback by large majority of the time performance
improves isn't that interesting and so i saw that through this lens
which is we can we can direct people's behavior far more effectively
with positive incentives than we do with negative stuff which has huge
implications for like the jail system and the punitive system and all
that stuff is like people just find ways to avoid punishment they don't
necessarily do what people want them to do because it's much because
punishment it just people can the the the activity sprays in any
direction that's just away from the thing whereas incentives directs it
towards what you want all right and so we think about this this within
the context of managing people and getting

7 00:06:00.000 --\> 00:07:00.000 to do the things that we want them to
do then it makes more sense for us to add to to think about an activity
rather than a single outcome into as many many many many incremental
steps as we possibly can and then incentivize those many steps and the
incentives don't necessarily need to be monetary in fact most times they
don't need to be monetary they need to be things that people can
perceive as positive outcomes which many times is just status and
feedback which is just great job awesome stuff you did that thing
yesterday and it was great you just reinforce the things that they are
doing that are good and we reinforce and then now that they've realized
i did this one thing not anything to avoid something but i did this one
thing and i got this cookie well i want to do that one thing again and
then get another cookie right and we reinforce behavior and so i like
this this process of thinking and trevor and i talk about this a lot
because it gets around the hullabaloo of trying to figure out what's
going on inside of people's heads right and what we have instead are
circumstances and the outcomes right and then we have our incentives and
all of these things we can measure we can say i

8 00:07:00.000 --\> 00:08:00.000 saw that this person we were in this
circumstance which we measure we inserted uh this incentive and then
they did this outcome yes or no right whether they felt inspired or
whether they psychologically loved we don't know and we never will know
because not everyone even knows how they're feeling and whether they
answer questions is not necessarily even true we have no idea but if we
can just measure the conditions then we can start directing behavior in
the right ways and so i thought this was a fascinating topic for getting
others and this applies to spouses how do you get your spouse to do the
stuff that you want them to do it certainly doesn't come from nagging
them all the time all they're going to do is try to avoid being nagged
interesting right and so this gives you four boxes to look at the the
these two you can't really see them but anyways this one this box over
here this guy and this guy those are things that you can't really direct
people's behavior as much whereas this guy and this guy you can direct
people's behavior to the singular outcome that you're looking for and
you continuously reinforce those behaviors such that they start doing
them without even thinking about it because it has been so reinforced
right and so instead of trying to think how do i how do i

9 00:08:00.000 --\> 00:09:00.000 have an amazing marriage it's how can i
condition this person to stay married to me kind of interesting little
flip for you so anyways mosey nation this is the kind of stuff that i do
geek out on and i think it's really interesting um i hope you enjoyed it
as much as i enjoyed making this for you this is how you get people to
do you can think about it in the terms of soft side in terms of
persuasion but you can also think about in terms of the hard side of
what are the the reinforcements that we're going to use either positive
or negative and we're going to add positives we're going to remove
positives we're going to add negatives we're going to remove negatives
so that we can accomplish what we want together so lots of buzzy nation
let me know if you like the stuff in the comments and keeping awesome
i'll see you guys next video bye
