School of Gravity

By: Steven Titus Smith and David Lynn Marcum
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  • Summary

  • The future is fantastic and scary as hell. Revolutions move like freight trains. Learning curves feel like Everest. The only way up is flying straight into the teeth of it.

    The ones fit for a brave new world are different at their core.

    Curiosity in your bones to awake the incurious, power under pressure only humility holds, symptoms only veracity—the truth-telling, truth-hunting, truth-loving ones—cure, equality in your bloodstream that supersedes status.

    It’s the science of human gravity. Here’s our ten-year-study, 8,000-survey, 250-interview how.

    The deepest power in hypercompetitive, hyperconnected, hypercreative work. The origin of insight, root of your relevance, building block of confidence, influence that supersedes visibility and volume. It’s elemental. And no one is fit for the future without it.

    Welcome to the school of gravity.
    2003 Steven Titus Smith and David Lynn Marcum
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Career Success Economics Education Personal Success
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Episodes
  • Habit three: be the signal, not the noise. EP.1: The constructive clash of human emotions.

    Habit three: be the signal, not the noise. EP.1: The constructive clash of human emotions.
    Oct 3 2023
    The trendy advice on psychological “safety” feels like an emotional bomb shelter from debate, emotional clash, and negativity. In reality, it’s a creative dead end where the truth stays buried. Ask creators. Ask science. Safety—creative safety—is a little countercultural, even counterintuitive.There are thousands of articles on expressing emotions at work. Silencing “negative” emotions outnumbers expressing them, three to one. The champions of the ratio? Coaches and consultants. And the rebel backing the underdog? Science. This episode is dedicated to rebels.At the right intensity and intent, negative emotions fix what’s broken, dig up the truth, ignite revolutions. They spark friendly friction and beneficial “battles.” It’s how creators and leaders turn teams around, shatter conventions, and shock people out of assumptions into the truth. All while building trust and unity without washing away individuality.Learn more about the work we do and the elements of gravity at https://schoolofgravity.com/our-work. You can reach us at hello@schoolofgravity.com.Steven Titus Smith, coauthor of I Am Gravity, presented this episode. You can read more about the authors here.Here’s the episode transcript:Teams that disrupt industries, create uncontested marketspace, or cure the disease of mediocrity have unorthodox communication habits. The kind that would make most soft-skill communication courses squirm. That’s because truth-telling, truth-hunting conversations are not soft:“Create dissension and disagreement rather than consensus. Decisions…are made well only if based on the clash of conflicting views…It is…the only safeguard against the decision-maker’s becoming the prisoner of the organization.” Peter F. Drucker, The Essential Drucker“You need storms…if every day is sunny and it doesn’t rain, things don’t grow. And if it’s sunny all the time—if, in fact, we don’t even ever have night—all kinds of things don’t happen and the planet dries up.” Brad Bird, Pixar, via Ed Catmull’s Creativity Inc.“You need executives …who argue and debate—sometimes violently—in pursuit of the best answers…Phrases like ‘loud debate, ‘heated discussions,’ and ‘healthy conflict’ peppered the articles and interview transcripts…The entire management team would lay itself open to searing questions and challenges.” Jim Collins, Good to Great“…[depart] from the conventional logic…robustly scrutinize every factor…” W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, Blue Ocean Strategy“If your disruptive product or service is not yet good enough and your team seems enthralled…raise a big red flag. If your team assures you that you’ll succeed because a new venture fits your company’s core competence, tell them that you can’t deal in fuzzy concepts.” Clayton M. Christensen and Michael E. Raynor, The Innovators Solution[Emphases added.]Heating things up doesn’t come naturally to most of us. Culturally, we spend a lot of training time and educational ceremonies cooling down conversations and keeping things upbeat. No one wants to make waves in the “pool of shared meaning.” Sixty-one percent of the people in one of our surveys said they need a lightning rod to get a little debate started and a surge protector once it starts. The balance is hard to strike.Let’s be clear about psychological safety, which at first appears to be the haven from debate, conflict and emotional clash. Doesn’t true safety mean it’s okay to be annoyed with bureaucracy, bored by average products, frustrated when we fail, aggravated by bad policy, alarmed by contentment, uneasy with company politics or impatient with slow budget approval when an opportunity is slipping away—and to passionately express it? Aren’t those emotions sometimes precisely how broken things get fixed and revolutions start? Activists don’t march on Washington with picket signs of mild irritation. No one breaks the grip of good with a gentle tug. Going home at night unresolved and a little irritated with each other isn’t the end of the world if everyone knows it’s not the end of the conversation or the relationship. In the name of progress, the goal isn’t always to lower the tension. You may need to raise it. And yet it’s talked down.There are thousands of articles on emotion in the workplace. We randomly sampled 100. Eliminating negative emotions wins by a 3:1 margin. Who’s behind the three? Consultants and coaches. Who’s on the side of the one? Science. “Trying to impose happy thoughts is extremely difficult, if not impossible, because few people can just turn off negative thoughts and replace them with more pleasant ones. Also, this advice fails to consider an essential truth: Your so called ‘negative’ emotions are actually working in your favor,” wrote Harvard Medical School psychologist Susan David. “In fact, negativity is normal. This is a fundamental fact. We are wired to ...
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    15 mins
  • Habit two: see what they can’t, say what they won’t. EP.2: Cure-iosity.

    Habit two: see what they can’t, say what they won’t. EP.2: Cure-iosity.
    Nov 1 2023
    Learn more about our work and new book at https://schoolofgravity.com/. You can reach us at hello@schoolofgravity.com.This episode was presented by the author, Steven Titus Smith. Here’s the transcript (copyrighted): Straight out of college with his Ph.D., on his first project with his first team at his first job that happened to be a Fortune 100 aerospace company, John was, in every -way- possible, --new. and That was his only advantage.To learn the ropes, the company placed John on a team trying to fix a major problem with a satellite in orbit. The satellite cost $1.2 billion to build and $200 million to launch. Bringing it back to Earth and sending it up again would cost a few hundred million dollars. The engineers—all experienced, all with the company for at least a decade—had worked on a fix for weeks. When John arrived they were still at square one.After a few days of listening and asking few (very few) questions, John couldn’t sit on the sidelines any longer. He spoke up. Maybe they were thinking about the problem all wrong. The team courteously listened. And then ignored him.On the face of it, square one seems the perfect place for curiosity to thrive. It is—sometimes. But the pressure to do something fast and “right” weighs so heavily on the souls of the people inside the square that skipping along the surface of curiosity substitutes for diving. John decided to dive.Tenaciously curious, John experimented, --talked to engineers one by one, dug into details and fine-tuned his ideas. Armed with a proposed solution, John entered the next big meeting, shared his ideas and got a response: Highly improbable. Won’t work. One engineer told John to ease into the culture before debuting rookie solutions to complicated problems. Whatever John was pitching, the straight-edge puzzle-people weren’t buying. The work of a 1950s sociologist helps us understand why.The resistance.Sociologist Everett Rogers developed an adoption curve of new ideas that’s used in everything from technology to farming. The phrase “early adopter” comes from his theory. The adoption curve spans from innovators and early adopters (16%) who are open to new thinking or trying something new—initial flaws and all—to laggards (16%) who adopt an idea only when everyone else is using it and they can no longer avoid adoption without complete withdrawal from civilization. No surprise that 84 percent of adopters (from early majority to laggards) lean toward the less open, incurious, secure side of the curve. Certainty is a security wall to keep new away. “Throughout the history of scientific thought,” wrote the late Stephen R. Covey, “most laymen have been so anxious for certainty and have had such a low tolerance for ambiguity and change that they have been eager to say that a theory is a fact.”The danger of quick resistance to new thinking is that the resistance may sound intelligent. Maybe it is. But it comes too early to be constructive. All it does is keep new ideas and new people cornered. In the face of certainty and resistance, or when you’re under pressure to fit in and say nothing, curious human beings—the perceptive ones—have to listen to opponents (not our first instinct, especially if we’re cliquing), argue for and against their own ideas so others aren’t afraid to speak, inspire provocative questions, switch perspectives, walk away from the tide of opinion, resist rigidity, cut to the chase, ask questions that seem obvious but are not, be fascinated by views outside their private universe (not just tolerate them or pretend to pay attention), lean on their tribe(s) and teams for camaraderie but not as a crutch, make the uncomfortable comfortable, the comfortable uncomfortable, and spark the incurious to be curious. John leaned on all the above to start a right-to-left migration to his idea.Finally, one senior engineer, Kim, looked more closely at John’s concept. Maybe his second look was sincere, or a covert tactic to shut John up. Either way, Kim gave John one-on-one time to explain his solution again. In the next meeting, Kim gave John the floor. John plunged into the details. He exposed and examined every angle of the problem. It would cost $50 million to fix, not a few hundred million. They wouldn’t have to bring the satellite back or launch a new one. John’s idea won. It saved the satellite and a stack of cash for the company, not to mention downtime for the government agency relying on the satellite for national defense.The engineers asked questions during the project, but questions don’t always convey interest. Curiosity was gridlocked by the VERY coveted thing every engineer and rocket scientist in every meeting had: experience and expertise. John wanted the truth. Everyone else wanted to be right. We can’t ignore expertise, but we can’t worship it either. Breaking the hypnotic habit of idolizing expertise begins with an advantage psychologist E. Paul Torrance ...
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    15 mins
  • Habit one: play big, stay small. EP.4: We is greater.

    Habit one: play big, stay small. EP.4: We is greater.
    Nov 2 2023
    Learn more about our work and new book at https://schoolofgravity.com/. You can reach us at hello@schoolofgravity.com.This episode was presented by the author, Steven Titus Smith. Here’s the transcript (copyrighted):As with every episode, this episode assumes you’ve read or listened to chapter one.Moral codes have been a vague, volatile topic for a long time. The “blank-slate” theory of moral identity is a long-standing tradition—that we arrive in the world empty-minded, waiting for society to write morality into our brand new brains. As it turns out, that theory isn’t entirely correct. “The initial organization of the brain does not depend that much on experience,” wrote NYU (New York University) cognitive scientist Gary Marcus. “Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises. Built-in doesn’t mean unmalleable [or finished]; it means organized in advance of experience.” Or in the words of Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, “Nothing comes out of nothing, and the complexity of the brain has to come from somewhere. It cannot come from the environment alone because the whole point of having a brain is to accomplish certain goals, and the environment has no idea what those goals are.”Curious to uncover the first moral draft of the human mind if there was one, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and social scientist Craig Joseph reviewed decades of literature ranging from anthropology to evolutionary psychology. Searching for both cross-cultural differences and similarities, Haidt and Joseph found five foundational morals—now six, Haidt added one later—as the best candidates for what’s morally instinctive for every one of us from day one:CareConcern and compassion for the harm or care of others, especially those whom we perceive as weak or vulnerable.FairnessReciprocity, justice.LoyaltySelf-sacrifice, patriotism.AuthorityRespect, voluntary deference, even elements of love.SanctityVirtue derived from controlling what you do with your body and what you put into it.LibertyResistance to oppression and tyrants.Here’s a personal story of how the foundational morals come into play, often without thinking twice—or even once—about it.Not on the menu.A few years ago we left the office for a non-working, life-shortening lunch of burgers and fries at a locally famous grill. As we ordered, a couple behind us seemed to be arguing, but it soon became clear that the two-way argument was one-way abuse. The boyfriend was insisting that because of his partner’s stupidity and indecisiveness, he would order for her. The restaurant has only nine small tables, so everyone felt the social uneasiness. Not caring if anyone else heard or not, the man kept the abusive pressure on, saying that she should put on some makeup because she “looked like crap.” She apologized.As we sat down, the man pressed on with his verbal assault. He slid his car keys across the table at her. She tried to catch them but missed. They flew into her chest. From only three feet away, I turned and asked the man what the problem was. “You know how they [women] are,” he replied flippantly. I told him he shouldn’t be talking to her that way. Dave and I both tried to persuade him to adopt any moral to end the verbal abuse. That didn’t come without a risk. What would happen to her later if he got even angrier or felt embarrassed by what we were doing? What would happen to her right now if we escalated the abuse?Then, the man went to the bathroom. Dave turned to the woman and asked how he could help, offering advice and an escape. Meanwhile, fearing the possibility of violence and wanting protection for the woman, I asked the owner to call the police. She declined, saying it wasn’t her business. So I dialed 911 myself. A few men from another table joined the discussion, warning the woman that her boyfriend was a bad man.Returning from the bathroom, the boyfriend sat down and picked up the insults where he left off. While I talked to the 911 operator, a man from another table walked over and slammed his fist on their table and threatened the boyfriend, complete with colorful adjectives to make it clear that he was ready to intervene. Everyone else in the restaurant, like the owner, stayed out of it. The boyfriend left the restaurant to get something from the car. I asked his girlfriend if he owned a gun (yes) and if the gun was in the car (she wasn’t sure). I wondered if we were going to leave the restaurant alive.Still on the phone with 911, I looked out the restaurant’s glass door, waiting for the boyfriend’s return. Dave continued to talk with the woman. I wondered if the police would arrive before the boyfriend made his way back in. Soon a group of people dressed mostly in black walked toward the door. Was it the police? The SWAT team? Wait, why are they holding cameras? How did the media arrive before the police, or even know what was happening? Then John Quiñones from ABC News walked ...
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    21 mins

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