My guest today is Vicki Tan who is an associate principal product designer working at Spotify. In this episode, we discuss Vicki's favorite travel destinations, crazy astrology stories, immigrant mentality, getting a job at Google, separating work identity from self identity, cognitive biases that affect us daily, writing a book on cognitive biases, getting a literary agent, self employed journey, and much more! For show notes, guest bio, and more, please visit: www.designmba.show Level Up Your Design Career (Free Email Course): https://levelup.designmba.show/
Vicki is a Principal Designer for Spotify Podcasts based in Stockholm. She is currently working on an illustrated book to make it easier to learn about cognitive bias. Previously, she was designing at Headspace, Lyft, and Google. She holds a degree in Behavioral Psychology from the University of California, San Diego.
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Jayneil Dalal: Today's amazing guest is Vicki Tan. Vicki is a principal designer for Spotify Podcasts based in Stockholm. She's currently working on an illustrated book to make it easier to learn about cognitive bias. Previously she was designing at Headspace, Lyft, and Google. She owns a degree in Behavioral Psychology from the University of California San Diego.
Hey, Vicki, super excited to be chatting with you. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Vicki Tan: Of course, I’m so excited to be here. So, thanks for having me.
Jayneil: And you're right now in San Francisco. Is that correct?
Vicki: Yep, I’m in San Francisco and it's 77 degrees today.
Jayneil: Not bad. Is swing bed going to be your new home or are you planning to venture out at some point?
Vicki: Well, that's a big question. I don't know. So, we're sort of in the middle of the pandemic still. And so, for the near future, San Francisco is my home but before this all happened, I was planning to move to Stockholm to work at Spotify. So, I am still working at Spotify but I have delayed the move until we know more about what makes sense.
Jayneil: And you're a very well-traveled person. What are some of your top places you've been to?
Vicki: Oh, oh my gosh! I mean, just in the last few months right before we got locked down, I was in Amsterdam, I was up and down the coast of Portugal, which is beautiful and I also went to Stockholm because I’ll be moving there but favorite places? I think I love visiting Asia. I mean, my family is from Taiwan and I have some friends in Tokyo and South Korea was so cool. I mean, Southeast Asia is amazing for diving and kind of like jungle adventures and anything like that. So, I love that whole region. I’ve been on a motorcycle ride in the Himalayas. That was amazing. And then separately, there's something really like culturally lovely and warm about Italy and Spain, like any of those cultures. Their personalities are so big and welcoming and I feel like you just feel like enveloped in a hug by them. So, I love that.
Jayneil: Absolutely. And I think you just gave me so many bucket list ideas, especially with driving a motorcycle in Himalayas.
Vicki: Oh yeah, it was just an idea that a couple of friends had. So, a while ago, I had done the Vietnam ride which is just up and down the span of the country on a little, I don't know, it had to be like a 100 cc small motorcycle and that was fun but I think a lot of it was just riding straight. There was a couple of rickety bridges but a lot of it was just kind of making it through. And the Himalayas ride, it was just one friend. You know, people do this. They send you a link and they're like “This would be cool.” I’m the type of person to actually do it. And so, someone sent that link and I looked it up and I was like “Sure, why not?” like there's no reason why not. And so, I gathered, I think, it was maybe six friends. Actually, we had never traveled before outside of just having … They were actually all design friends that happened to ride. One of them didn't ride at all and that was their first ride. We had a guide and we're on these Royal Enfields and we flew into Delhi, took a train to Chandigarh. I don't know if you're familiar with that.
Jayneil: Yeah, I am.
Vicki: Yeah. And then we kind of just rode from there. It was hard. It was not pleasant but amazing. I think if that interests you at all, you should definitely do that.
Jayneil: I was actually in India in December and I got back right before all this stuff happened. And like you, I’m actually big about traveling because I feel something about traveling helps me grow as a person but in this case, I believe you also believe in astrology, correct?
Vicki: Not necessarily. I have mixed feelings about it and I’d love to talk with you more about it.
Jayneil: So, my family is very big into these kinds of things. Go figure Indian families. So, my dad used to believe in this guru that we would call Kumar Dada. Dada means like a way of saying respect, like an elder. And he passed away but the thing is that he was a monk and then he decided to quit being a monk and got married and came back into life. So, he was like really frowned upon by society. And then what happened is in India everybody gets a, it's like a red book, and it's called the Kundali which is basically a book with just a bunch of numbers that are made after they figure out your place of birth and your time of birth.
Vicki: Wow!
Jayneil: So, everybody gets one made. And then even when they get married in India, they match the red books like “Does your book match with mine?” and kind of thing. So, he did that for our family and in some cases, he's come so close. So, to just tell you one example. My mom took one of her friends to see this guru Kumar Dada. And then what happened was he told my mom's friend that the girl you're in love with, if you marry her, you're never going to be able to conceive a baby of your own. And that is true. The couple don't have their own baby. Then my dad took one of his business partners there. Same thing for love stuff. And he looked at the girl's photo in her red book and said to my dad's business partner “If you marry her, she's going to die. She's going to die soon. So, don't do it is my advice” but then my dad's business partner is like “This is bogus. I’m still going to do it.” And it is true right now. He's married again because his first wife passed away pretty quickly after their marriage.
Vicki: Oh no! Yeah, that's crazy. I feel like there's definitely something like that as well for Chinese people. It's not in a book but I think that they do believe in a lot of these like deterministic factors or sort of fortune tellers. I don't know the translation but to me, I think of them as like scalp readers like they read your scalp. Sounds weird but yeah, I think that's interesting. I think when I hear astrology, I think of what we think of in modern day, as you know, what's your sign or like tarot cards and some of these. Especially when you're in LA, you hear a lot about like crystals and energy and things like that. And I think the reason why I was originally off put by some of them is it isn't sort of what's at the core of it but it's sort of how people have started using some of these frameworks where instead of a way to kind of look at themselves and/or examine how they might be feeling or things in their lives, I think they … Look, living in this modern world is hard. It can be overwhelming. There's a lot of information and decisions and things like that and I think I was starting to see a little of, and this is the off-putting part is, is where people just offload their decisions onto these things, so “Oh, you're a Sagittarius. We don't get along. And I’m not going to get to know you” or like “Oh you're not compatible.” And I think that is not helpful but I think if it's something like “Oh, I read my horoscope this weekend. It said something was troubling me” like if you use that as a prompt to think about if something was, then sure, I think it's harmless and it can be useful. It's the flipside where I think we can get into hot water where you decide you don't have to think about or give care to things anymore.
Jayneil: I absolutely agree with you. I was chatting with my dad a couple of days ago and I asked him point blank “What was your take on the whole thing about your guru?” and you know what he said to me was that “Jayneil, I really liked having a guru like him that helped me in my darkest time” but he said that it came with a huge price which is it kind of cripples you as a person because now that you see that this guy's so accurate or this lady who can see your hand is so accurate, you suddenly, like you said, offload your decisions to them and then you don't no longer trust your own gut or your own instinct.
Vicki: Right. And, yeah, do your actions have consequences? If not, then why would you put care into them. And so, yeah, it is a little bit dangerous.
Jayneil: Absolutely. So, you are also an immigrant like me if, I’m not mistaken.
Vicki: Yeah. Well, I’m American in that I was born here but my parents were immigrants. So, I’m a first-generation Asian-American.
Jayneil: Oh, so that probably makes me what is it like I’m second generation because, I guess, my parents came here then I came with them but I was still born in India?
Vicki: It depends on who's counting. I think Japanese people count the generations differently but that would make you half because you came in your teens or something.
Jayneil: I came just eight years ago.
Vicki: Okay. Yeah, I mean, you would just be a full immigrant.
Jayneil: Okay but now I’m thankfully a US citizen.
Vicki: Yeah, naturalized.
Jayneil: So, what is the immigrant mentality like for you? I’m sure you have Asian parents just like I do. So, it definitely comes with a lot of responsibilities.
Vicki: I think, for me, the difference between say someone like you who was raised in India, I’m assuming, and then came over versus me where my parents were born and lived most of their lives there and then came over and I was born here and grew up with largely American surroundings, I think, there was a big difference in how we were raised. So, my parents, they came over here from Taiwan to America with no other family. They were like the only ones to immigrate, very little money because for some reason they had so many kids back then, there was like three or four siblings on my dad’s side. Why? I don't know. A language barrier like they didn't really speak English and they sort of just made it happen, right? They got into just a sort of average grad school but they sort of found this niche which is like computer programming. You don't need to know English. There's not that many people, maybe at the time, that were very good at it and like they just sort of grinded it out. I think both my mom and dad did computer engineering and neither of them were really interested in it. Later on after that first round of jobs, they ended up doing other stuff but I think it's really cool that they were just able to get it done to get the sort of immigration done or that was what enabled them to have us and to have children and to have a home and sort of things like that. And so, I think what's interesting is then we grow up here with everything, me and my brother, not wanting for anything and we have this other layer of like wants and desires and it's sometimes hard for them to relate to like “Well, why can't you just do it? Why do you need more?” Say you're full-time employed at a good job and you've got everything you could ask for. I think it does seem very counterintuitive to them that I would quit something like that.
Jayneil: I know. It's so funny but the Indian dream is like you come to the US and you have a nice job at a big company, you make good money and you either have two Audis or two BMWs in your front yard or in the driveway. Then you’ve made it.
Vicki: Right. Have you seen that Netflix show The Half of It? It’s like an Indian-American girl in high school or something.
Jayneil: No, I have to check it out.
Vicki: It's kind of teeny baffle but it's funny because they make fun of all those things like the Indian moms keep commenting like “Oh, so what kind of car does he have?” and like just all these … It's not even superficial. It's not even that they're superficial. It's that at some point they understood that these are the things that convey that we are secure, our status and that we've sort of made it in America.
Jayneil: Absolutely. I remember very vividly that a lot of my friends, when they graduate from universities when they come here for Masters, one of the first purchases that they make really big is they get either a Mercedes or a BMW or an Audi car and they usually post it on social media because the same car that you buy in the US, in India, you have to pay a huge import duty. So, it's almost kind of like twice the price in India. So, I’ve seen posts like a photo with the steering wheel of a Mercedes-Benz titled “Monday Morning Motivations”.
Vicki: What? Oh, man. And it's just crazy because in many other ways these same people are not superficial at all. My mom, growing up, it was funny, they would have, like you're saying Mercedes, and it's important to have a house, a significant, a big enough house but they would just wear the tech T-shirts, they would wear them until there was holes. They would look for clipped coupons. My mom still does this. She clips coupons for like sprouts and I’m just like “Mom!”
Jayneil: Mine too. I’m like “Mom, it’s so embarrassing. Don't do it.”
Vicki: Right or they're saving like the Tupperware, it's not even good for you to reheat things in the Tupperware. It blows my mind. There's so many little like …
Jayneil: I took my mom to Whole Foods and she had a sticker shock whereas I’m like “Oh my God!”
Vicki: Right. And in the same way, I’m aware that us as this millennial generation, we also have some strange quirks as well. So, it's just worth noting. I think none of it is good or bad. It's just that each generation has their idiosyncratic kind of quirks but one thing I will say in terms of immigrant mentality, helping, me going back to your original question, I think one thing specifically for Chinese-Americans, I don't know if this is the case for Indian-American or people in general, is that I feel like there's been more movies about this lately whether it's someone with Aquafina or whatever but there is this attitude of just like “Get it done. Grin and bear. Keep your mouth shut. Work hard. Don't complain. Don't cry. Don't show weakness.” I feel like this topic has also been resurfaced recently in terms of the pandemic and how Asian-Americans are being treated but that overarching mentality of like if you want something, it's not about can you do it but it's just about finding a way to get it done. I feel like that was drilled into me early on just by example, that's what my parents had done and just that's their expectation that you would be able to do it too because really nothing is that hard that it is not achievable. It's just about putting in the work to do it.
Jayneil: I absolutely have seen that same behavior and sometimes I feel sad because this expectation that … So, I’m a designer now and that makes me the black sheep in the family because my parents are like “You're either going to be a doctor an engineer.” So, just like either one, you have to follow the path and go with it. I don't think everyone is cut to follow that specific mold.
Vicki: I don't think so either. I mean I think it'll get you somewhere. I don't know if you'll have the satisfaction or the sort of self-actualization that you'd hoped for. I think you will optimize for certain things like you'll probably be financially secure and you'll probably have some other securities like a home and things like that but what you're doing is you're sort of optimizing those things at the cost of others. And I think that's hard but it's totally reasonable. I think there's just a more balanced place that some of us have found like you and I. We have good jobs but we're designers. So, we found like a middle ground. I think for other people, that middle ground could be say being self-employed or could be working a part-time job or could be living abroad and working or something like that. So, I think that's a really interesting topic.
Jayneil: And you're the perfect example of that. You did not go to a traditional design route meaning you went to four years of undergrad for design and then maybe did a Masters. You majored in psychology.
Vicki: Yeah, I majored in Behavioral Psychology at UCSD.
Jayneil: What was that like through those years going through that and learning about human psychology or what made you even want to choose that?
Vicki: Yeah. I mean, honestly, I think it was back to the immigrant mentality. Like your mom my mom was like “Okay. So, you're going to be a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer.” So, the things you study are Biology or, I don't know, Poli-Sci or Engineering. And I liked none of those things. I think a little bit of becoming a doctor interested me but the schooling around that like Organic Chemistry like “Come on!” like “What!” I still don't understand. Even when you get into like yet Advanced Calculus, I’m just like “What? Is this real?”
Jayneil: The only time it made sense was when I watched Breaking Bad.
Vicki: Right. I mean, wrap it in a story and it's good. So, I think, to me, majoring in a social science like that, so Behavioral Psychology was the only way I could do something that had science in the title that wasn't like “Just quit.” You know what I mean? I couldn't do the hard science thing that they wanted. I knew that they wouldn't ever … not that I was an artist or anything but I had certainly taken art classes in high school. I think this felt to me like an acceptable medium which is somewhat legitimate, I guess, but it was a Bachelor's of Science. And so, yeah, in that sense, it was the only … Those intro Psychology classes were the ones that were interesting. I enjoyed the way that they were applicable to real life but there was still scientific rigor behind them. I think, in some ways they explained a lot of the mysteries about life like the way people interact, the way people act, the way things … A lot of day-to-day mysteries are in some ways uncovered with Psychology or behavior or Behavioral Economics and things like that. So, I loved that, how applicable it was.
Jayneil: How did you end up to Google from there? So, you finished your Behavioral Psychology undergrad. And so, from there, what happened?
Vicki: Yeah. So, I was just like doing nothing for a while. I was like “Man …” I graduated” and it was the recession. It was 2008 and no one had jobs really, even people with good degrees and I had what felt like a fairly useless degree at that time. There wasn't a job you could do with that degree. The options were to go back to school for a Master's or PhD or to maybe work in mental health or work in research. And so, I thought “Okay, I’m okay at school. I’m actually not that good at working. I don't love waking up early. I’m not very kind of good with detail like paperwork and like organization.” So, I was like “Okay, I’ll just do the research stuff and then I’ll go back to school. So, for maybe three or four years I worked in hospitals in more of the academia side. So, most hospitals, they see patients but there's an academic research arm that is looking at like “Okay. So, we're treating people like this. What are other ways we can improve this therapy?” And I thought that was cool. Even though I had no kind of medical training, I worked in Pulmonology and in Oncology and just random kind of whoever would take me and it was cool. I learned a lot about research but anything with a standard operating procedure which is what they call, it's like the research protocols that you would follow, anything like that is just going to be boring, by definition. You're there executing a set of rules over and over and over and that's just machine’s work. I want the machines to be good enough to do that stuff so we can do the interesting stuff. So, I was doing that for a couple years and I started to apply to go back to school. I think I was hoping to do my Social Psychology Masters at NYU. And it was a weird note that I just didn't love New York but that was the university that I got into. And so, I think, at that point, I was like “Oh shit! What else can I do?” And being in the Bay Area, of course, you've got tons of people working in tech and I had a friend at the time, he was working at Ideo but he suggested like “Have you thought about working at Google or Facebook?” And I laughed. I was like “Google or Facebook? First of all, they hire genius people who have so many accolades and PhDs and they run marathons and weird shit like that like they do amazing but also quirky things and that is not me. Also, I don't know anything about computers and computer programming and technical stuff.” And so, I thought it was a ridiculous idea but he sort of planted the seed of the idea and was kind enough to put in a referral. And I think one thing led to another, a lot of luck with that. They found this niche position for me, which only Google would have, which was looking at like … So, Google is a huge organization that has the luxury of choosing the sort of best of the best. And a lot of people have heard of this research by now but they were interested in looking at “How we can hire the very best for the long term, how we can predict performance, how we can build better teams, how leaders can kind of manage better” and all of that what you would consider maybe in organizational design. Yeah, somehow, they were like “We're going to find random people who studied Psychology and different sort of facets of Psychology to help us run this research at Google to hopefully improve how we hire and how we evaluate.” So, that was my first job at Google.
Jayneil: That is an amazing career path story. I’m wondering if they actually asked you the question how many tennis balls can you fit in a Prius in the interview.
Vicki: That's funny because, they called them brain teasers, those are the questions that we were replacing. What they found was the brain teasers, while they are kind of fun and interesting maybe as like party topics or even like interesting one-on-one conversation topics and it's fun to think of these, I think, they call them fermi problems because it does examine how you think and if you can extrapolate and if you can kind of … It has a lot of parallels to what we consider to be good cognitive thinking. However, the problem with those types of questions are that you can just learn how to do it. And so, in that way, they aren't good predictors of your actual success on the job.
Jayneil: You can kind of hack the process.
Vicki: Exactly. You can yield a false positive which is you can answer the questions but you can't solve good problems on the job. So, that' what they want to do. They wanted to replace the brain teasers with something a little more reliable and a little less intimidating. I think the dangerous side of those brain teasers … A false positive is fine. You'll find out eventually and you can fire that person or give them a chance if not fire them but a false negative is worse because if there are a lot of qualified people who maybe just don't know, have access, you could be very good at your job and just not know about these questions and that is where you lose out on … It tends to be like the underrepresented groups or the less outgoing folks or the less bullshitty folks like that is where you lose in terms of diversity and inclusion. So, one really cool side effect of this type of research, when we think about structured interviewing and kind of predicting success and being better evaluators, is that we end up removing bias and we end up kind of becoming more inclusive with our hiring processes. So, that was a silver lining of that whole thing.
Jayneil: You worked on Laszlo Bocks team, right? The one who wrote the legendary book Work Rules.
Vicki: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I didn't know at the time it would become this kind of well-known research. I mean, at the time, it was …
Jayneil: It was the making kind of thing.
Vicki: Yeah, it was an experiment. To be honest, again, this is where the immigrant like questioning “What are you doing?”, so I didn't join Google like they didn't ask me the brain teasers because I joined through the back door. They were like “We have this experimental idea. Do you want to come on for three months to help us do it?” And that required me leaving a full-time job at Stanford running research. And so, my mom was like, again, “Why would you leave a full-time job to do this three-month thing? Granted it's Google” but here are a lot of questions around like “What happens after the third month? Can you get a full-time job there?”, a lot of um uncertainty. And I was into it. I wanted to kind of see where that went but I think that made my mom a little bit uncomfortable, which is the story to come every few years, I think, I do something that makes her wildly uncomfortable.
Jayneil: So, while you were working there, I’m wondering if you guys ever or you in particular were curious about this idea why people get frustrated in their jobs. I know Google had the 80-20, if I’m not mistaken, 80% of time you spend on your actual work and then 20% on side projects. And I think that was a good way because if somebody wanted to like dabble in new technology side project, they could do it and that's how a lot of their successful products were born. And what I see now is a lot of people job hopping because they're just tired of doing the same thing. So, what is your take on all that based on what you've seen?
Vicki: Yeah. I mean, one, I think, yeah, the 20% thing is so cool. I mean, that's how the second half of that story is. that's kind of how I transitioned into design while at Google but I think there are a lot of things that need to be satisfied, to feel satisfied for you to want to stay at a job. And that is just not easy. It's not easy. There are so many things to think about as a manager, as an organization, as a company. I think the 20% thing can certainly help but if you are not say clear on what you would do with that 20% or how you would execute that 20% or even sort of philosophically if you can see yourself as a person who would do that 20%, then there's so many other things that are in the way of … It's not as simple as “Here's some extra time. Make it happen.” I think that's worth saying but for a lot of people, just having that extra time and then having just enough motivation, that's enough to kind of dabble and find your whatever it is that delights you, that you love to spend your free time doing but under the auspices of Google is it's just really cool. Does that answer your question?
Jayneil: In a way, yeah, you did because what I found working at behemoth companies is that at certain point, I personally got burned out by the bureaucracy and the politics and it adversely affected my personal relationships until this person told me that “You need to have some of your side hustle or side projects where you have more control and autonomy.” And this way, what happened was previously I was tying what I was doing at work with my identity but now, I had something on the side which I could explore and that helped me differentiate the two.
Vicki: Yeah. And I think we take that one step further and even think about what does that mean if it's not tied to work at all. I think that the trick with the 20% is that in some way it must tie back to Google and what they're trying to achieve or whatever company you're at. If you can have truly personal 20% time and you are able to explore whatever it is like if you're into Marine Biology or gardening or like just singing, I think that would be cool.
Jayneil: Wow! Sign me up for that company …
Vicki: Yeah. I just think it's a little tricky when it's like 20% with the caveat that it must still contribute to the company. I mean, that makes sense in business terms but I think if companies were willing to loosen the lens on what makes sense in terms of business, I think we would see better retention and, I think, inadvertently that would just lead back to something for the business, whether it's employee happiness or whether it's like an idea for the business, for the product that is inspired by this completely unrelated tangent of the world or of interest or of life that then feeds back into whatever this person is working on. I think it's when those things are separated by several degrees, it becomes hard for people to see the return. And so, it's not like an obvious thing that is allowed but we become so focused on our one thing like designers, they have side projects that are designed and they redesign, design podcasts and it's all that is the world of design. And I don't know if you've read that book by David Epstein, it's called Range. He kind of goes on about just the power of generalists. And I think that, for example, if 20% time was whatever you wanted to do in the world, which sounds crazy to pay someone to garden or whatever, I think it's going to be so cool because we need those connections, we need to have these way out there, connections and I think we'll all be better off for them.
Jayneil: I think it might help the company bottom line by making sure that the employee stays there longer compared to forcing them that “Yeah, the 20% has to tie into the company bottom line somehow.”
Vicki: Yeah. And I think recently I’ve been thinking about this double bottom line. I don't think shareholder profits are the only bottom line. I think there are like “Are you doing good in the world?” and if this employee is happier and they're contributing to society, that should be part of your bottom line because that's what's going to keep us as a society healthy for longer. It feels so automatic to just defer to the financial bottom line nowadays.
Jayneil: It is. And talking about these side projects, you have got a side project going on with your book that you're writing. So, tell me about it.
Vicki: Yeah. So, it is a book. I hate to say book because it's just a project right now but, yeah, I’m writing a book to teach people about cognitive biases. And it started off more as an illustrated book, an illustrated movable book and it's now evolved a little bit more to like a book with words with illustrations. The idea sort of in the quick version was that like, okay, as a product designer, what I do all day is I take these abstract concepts, sometimes they're like things that haven't been invented yet, sometimes they're things that are hard for people to understand or they have misconceptions and what I do is I make them easy to understand. That's what we do with our tool. To me, cognitive biases have been very well covered in terms of … Well, not well covered but there are many books about them, people know about them but I don't feel like people actively consider them or use that knowledge in their everyday decision making. And so, for how much we know about them or how much sort of the average person knows about them, it doesn't feel like they know how to use them. So, what I wanted was just something that kind of removes the cognitive load from using that information. The original conception of the book were these very visual scenario-based layouts. So, if you imagine someone sitting on a couch, an illustration of them watching the news, it might be that you pull out a panel or rotate a panel very similar to a children's book and the scene changes such that it reveals the bias of you in that scene. So, maybe you're watching the news and you're reacting to like a terrorist attack or a global pandemic and you rotate it and the scene would just change in a way where your bias is to kind of put extra weight on these bizarre events in that one scenario that the TV kind of turned off to then reveal a reflection of that person eating fast food and sort of just being sedentary on the couch. And so, in that case, a more dangerous threat would have been obesity or sort of the risk of heart disease which is a bigger killer than a terrorist threat. And so, it was meant to be that where you're supposed to have this very low … we're not asking a lot from the reader. It's just asking them to kind of look and take it in versus reading a book, a long form kind of non-fiction book with a lot of terminology that might be hard to understand.
Jayneil: I love the idea.
Vicki: Yeah. The illustrated scenarios turned out to be a little bit harder than anticipated. I think that type of book appeals to a niche. I think it's hard to find a lot of adults who want to read an illustrated say picture book about cognitive bias. Maybe you and I but not like someone in Michigan, who I think should learn about, not that there's anything weird with Michigan, just somewhere else maybe not working in tech, not working, not a millennial, not kind of already thinking about these things.
Jayneil: I think there's a strong need for it. For example, I have the Daniel Kahneman book Thinking Fast Thinking Slow and reading it, I learned a lot but it's still a struggle, meaning it's not so easy. It's like a dry read. It's not like Harry Potter. So, you're trying to make it into fun where I just see these pictures which we used to see when we were kids. It's like “Ah, I get it.”
Vicki: Yeah, that's it. I mean, it's a little bit of a meta strategy because we have a cognitive bias in that like this stuff is complicated like it's not easy to digest, it's not easy to apply. What I wanted to do was to make the comprehension much easier with scenarios, with real life kind of examples, things that you can relate to immediately. And then the second part would be once you understand it, how do you use it. And I’m working on a lot of ideas around whether it's a two-person kind of card game or something like that where other people are a little bit better at asking of you than you would be asking of yourself. And so, I think there's something really interesting there of making it like a thing, not a game but like an activity you would do with someone to help you kind of illuminate or get clarity on how you might be biased. So, I don't know how fun of a game that would be but that's sort of the direction that I’m going in now as sort of like a partner or a kind of add-on to the book.
Jayneil: I personally think that having this two-way narrative whether it's in a story form, it just helps explain the concept better than trying to tell the story just through one person.
Vicki: Yeah, definitely. It's almost like a conversational guide.
Jayneil: Exactly.
Vicki: If you had a big [inaudible] coming up and I was able to kind of ask you a series of questions that didn't require a lot of me but it required some thinking from you, I think the answers you would give me would be much more honest and forthcoming than if you were to ask them yourself. And I think that's really cool. So, that's sort of what this framework looks like right now, which is around understanding what type of question you're asking yourself, what type of decision you need to make and how important it is. And then from there, there's a series of checks that you can do that are directly related to the biases. And it's kind of cool, it's kind of convoluted right now but that's the core of what I’m trying to get at, a process for reducing bias in decision making.
Jayneil: Can you give examples of some common biases that affect us in our daily lives?
Vicki: Yeah, sure. I mean, so many. It's funny, the other day I read that there was bias about biases like seeing cognitive biases everywhere, which I think is kind of true but there's a lot of them. I’m trying to think of the most common ones sort of anecdotally might be …
Jayneil: Or maybe some that you face personally.
Vicki: Yeah. I was going to say the most common ones feel like hindsight or confirmation bias. Things always look clear in hindsight. We think like “Oh man, why didn't I see that?” and that's just a bias. Confirmation bias is the same. We tend to look for information that matches our point of view already – “This one's kind of dangerous” – but the ones that I’ve been thinking about recently are with regards to the pandemic, I think. Especially that month when I was at home, there was this whole period of like “Something is happening but we don't know what to do” and it felt like … even now, the responses were quite split. It was like “Do nothing” or “Do everything.” And there were people like end-of-world prepping and people continuing to go to the gym and bars. And these are two sort of biases. One of them is just like a normalcy bias and one of them is an overreaction bias. And I think what's crazy is in this situation, these two were kind of pulling at each other where people just didn't know what to do. I think that the cost of the normalcy bias is much higher. So, most of the time when it feels like something really big, it's not. You can look like you've overreacted. So, we really want to believe that most of the time it's an abnormal sort of blip. And I think that was what was happening. It seemed like it wasn't a big deal when we kind of saw some of the numbers or understood it to be similar to the flu or understood the population that was at risk. Sorry, that wasn't a good explanation of the two but I had thought like “Oh, why does it seem like there's a tension here?” And I think part of what I came to understand was that there were two opposing biases at play. Other ones are, there's a lot around mental math, around how we kind of think about probabilities, how we estimate things especially around finance and making good decisions around money. I think that's why it's good to have other people handle your money.
Jayneil: Yes. I’m glad I do that. Even the companies that exploit this phenomenon like the weighed-in number, the price was always like 39.99, never 40 or giving these deals. And I don't know exactly which biases these activate but I’ve always seen that you need to buy a shampoo for 10 bucks but then you need to have a minimum order of 35, so then you end up buying things you don't need to get that discount. And I’m like this is stupid for me to do that.
Vicki: Right. Yeah, it's like things like that. And I’m trying to think of what one that is as well. There's a denomination bias which is when you have like a dollar in your pocket or some change you're like “Yeah, yeah, take it” but the sum of that, it can actually be nominal over enough like yeah, you'll buy that like 3-dollar coffee, 4-dollar coffee cappuccino and that's a classic example but if someone were to ask you to pay in advance for all your coffee that year, you’d probably take a second look like “No, I don't want to give you 500 for these cappuccinos.” So, it's interesting and I think a lot of people know about a lot of these things. And, again, what we were talking about was like beyond them being interesting topics of discussion, good, like I think if we can do more of that, they'll become more common, well-known terminology and more people will understand them but it's more important to think about what we can do with that information. My friend Buster who's one of the reasons why am working with, the literary agent that I have, he wrote a book about productive disagreements and that was one very practical and sort of widely applicable way of applying the knowledge of cognitive biases. I think that was really cool because he makes the case that … He uses them and a lot of examples for some of our misunderstandings about how we communicate and how we kind of resolve disagreements. So, I highly recommend that for anyone that's interested in these types of topics. It's called Why Are We Yelling: The Art of Productive Disagreement.
Jayneil: I love the title. I’m actually going to add it to the show notes. What made you pursue the route of getting a literary agent instead of, let's say, just putting it up for free or trying to sell that or self-publish it on Amazon?
Vicki: Yeah, good question because I had started this Patreon and I think some people kind of had thought that I was going to self-publish because of the Patreon but, in the end, I think my goal was to have some impact to materially change how the general population understands cognitive bias so that we would see a change in how people are making decisions like if it's easy enough to do and if enough people do it, we'll see a sea change like the Marie Kondo, thing literally two words. They're like does it spark the light.
Jayneil: Yes.
Vicki: The concept is so easy for you to understand that it's very accessible and even though it might just be right now, I think something like that was compelling to me. It wasn't about making a cool design book or even like an illustrative artifact or something like that. It wasn't really about the design artifact. It was about the utility that something like this would serve. And so, what the literary agent and sort of the standard publishing route does is that both of those people have this lens of what is the general population going to buy and consume. And I think if I had self-published, I wouldn't have had the same constraints put on me, which is will this sell in the mass market, does this have mass market appeal. That is also honestly what I’m struggling with right now is that what I aim to do is not easy, I’m not a writer and I’m not a behavioral scientist like none of the things that I kind of believe I need. And so, maybe it's going to require some help. Yeah, I wanted to make sure that a lot of people would read it, not to make money, but so that if you want to make the changes to be significant, it needs to have scale, be at scale.
Jayneil: So, with your Patreon, what were your stats like how many people subscribed to you? And Patreon, for everybody who don't know about it, it's a way for you to raise money for your creative endeavor similar to Kickstarter. So, how much money did you raise from it or how much were you getting monthly to do that, if you don't mind sharing?
Vicki: Yeah, I was just looking at how many subscribers I have. It's not very many. I think I was trying not to spam. I think it's about 50, which I know a lot of podcasters and sort of writers have many more. Comic people have a lot. These are just people that happen to maybe follow me on twitter that wanted to support me. It's maybe 500 dollars a month. It's not enough to live off of but, again, when I decided to leave my job, it wasn't that I thought “Oh, I need to make up this income by creating a Patreon.” The Patreon specifically was to like say I needed to pay an illustrator, say I needed to buy a Wacom or like a tablet or say I needed a book-related expense. That was what that was for. When I decided to leave my job, I gave myself six months of salary as runway to experiment with. And it very specifically wasn't a timeframe but was the amount of money because it just incentivized myself to make that money last longer whether it was lifestyle or shopping or travel or whatever. The more disciplined I was with how I spent all money that came in, the longer time I would give myself to work on these projects, which is why, at the same time, I think partially due to financial stuff, partially due to curiosity and sanity, I worked on a couple other things at once like I wanted to write a new talk, I wanted to do some mentoring, I wanted to see how it might be to be like advisor, so I advise a couple of startups now. So, it was very much like a lot of things at once thing but I think it worked because there was always several days where there's nothing to write about. And so, when there's other things to work on, I think that's really important.
Jayneil: Would you say that now you have like a full-time stable job with Spotify, it eases the pressure on you to now peacefully work when you have free time on the book?
Vicki: Yes and no. I think now that I have a full-time job, it's very much back to how it was when I had a full-time job at Headspace. You lose the luxury of having nothing else kind of taking up your creative energy. Especially now when I’m onboarding into a new and large organization with big problems to solve and big questions to answer, there is no … To me with the book, a lot of the good kind of writing and ideas came in like just early mornings or walks or in the shower like you need to have this luxury of letting your mind kind of wander and that requires time and kind of some amount of comfort. There can't be a pressure to like “must answer this question now.” And so, in some ways, when I decided to go back full time, it was that I decided this new way of working, I tried it and it wasn't what I thought it would be. And so, yeah, I’m happy to talk more about that because I haven't written about it yet. I think I wanted to and then the whole pandemic thing happened and then I started working and I was just like “Oh no, it's too late” but I think I thought that being self-employed would be one way. And when it came down to it, at this moment in time when I tried it, it was a different way. And I’ll say two things. I think, one, there was a lot of focus on what we're talking about, about money, about making money, hourly money, how am I going to kind of reach that same level. And there was this weird thing that happened where I felt like I was paying myself. So, say, I made however much a year, I could extrapolate this is how much I made per hour. This is not the right way to think about it but it started feeling like I was paying myself that much per hour to work on the book, which is very backwards, but in some ways, I was because I was not making that money. And so, all that to say there was this weird focus on money that I had never had at the granular level before whether that's billing clients or asking for patrons or kind of negotiating speaking fees or anything like that. There were all these detailed accounting things that I did not enjoy doing and not just because they're a pain but because they take up that precious kind of space in your thinking that you want reserved for other stuff.
Jayneil: The reason I’m asking you this question is you said you had set like a six-month or runway to write the book or work on this project and then figure out the next step. So, I’m in a similar boat where I’ve been laid off at AT&T and my last day is June 12th and much to the chagrin of my Indian mom who's like “Why don't you have a job ASAP?”, my thinking currently is that I have some ideas that I want to knock out, one being I want to build an online course on design, I have some few ideas. So, my thinking is that, just like you, if I do the runway and actually execute on that and then go back to working, it would at least give me the full, like you said, 100% creative energy to focus just on that but if I take another job, I don't know how I’m going to do that. So, my question for you again is could you have delayed let's say joining Spotify a little bit longer and just focus on the book or it was just one of those things you had to do it.
Vicki: Oh yeah, no. So, I think what I found … Sorry if I didn’t say this clearly. The runway didn't run out like I found that I was able to make enough money. I didn't enjoy it as much as I thought in the end. I think there was no, and this could have been because I also chose to move as well at the same time, but even if I was making the same or more money, I didn't enjoy having to think about money on a daily, weekly basis. So, that was significant to me and it sounds very kind of spoiled to say “I didn't enjoy thinking about money” but that's something that I noticed. And secondly, I missed working with people, working deeply and over sustained periods with people. I think that's something that you can't really get … I mean, you get it a little bit with the book like I’m chatting with the agent regularly and I’m getting feedback from people but there isn't like kind of collaboration that happens regularly that a lot of designers get to do on a regular basis. So, there were things that were missing in this self-employed kind of setup. There are certainly things that I gained, a lot of freedom and autonomy like I could have become a marine biologist or something, I could have explored anything. And so, I think that was worth experiencing but I missed some of those other things that I think were present when I was working full-time. There's very little impact, I think, when you're just advising a company or just working on your side project. That's sort of the thing that I still need to fully wrap my mind around but I think after nine months of it, I did feel like I wanted to work again. And, to me, that was all that was important. And it's not to say the book is stopping but I needed more than what the book and sort of the self-employed lifestyle was providing.
Jayneil: So, you tried the self-employed lifestyle for nine months, correct?
Vicki: Yeah, nine months. I also moved to New York and I spent some of it in Europe, I think, because towards the end, I was evaluating Spotify in Stockholm.
Jayneil: How does it work with a literary agent and what are the fees or what value do they bring to the table aside from just giving you input on what are mass market needs of the customers?
Vicki: Yeah, working with an agent is interesting. I mean, at this moment or until you sign with a publisher, it's just a contract that you and the agent have between yourselves about future fees. So, to me, it's really cool and probably to her it's really cool because we're both in some ways doing free work with the hope that it will pay off later. So, I get her advice. In some way she's like an editor right now. She provides feedback about the content and sort of ideas about the direction we're headed in but I don't pay her anything and she doesn't pay me anything and I provide her material and sort of responses to her feedback. So, for me, it's an authority that I can turn to and ask for time from regularly without feeling like anyone's doing me a favor.
Jayneil: And how did you find her?
Vicki: Yeah. So, my friend Buster who had recently published a book, that Why Are We Yelling book, I think he published it on Penguin Random House, he worked with her. And I’m trying to think how he found her but maybe some other way. And since our books, they aren't related but they're both sort of … his is loosely about cognitive biases, mine is a different angle on it, his is a written book about disagreement, I think he was just mentioning my idea to her one day and she was just interested in it. And so, we had had maybe three or four meetings where I showed her my work in progress, the illustrated versions and this idea for this big spinning wheel thing and it was like all paper and cutouts. And she was like “I really like what you want to do with this. I don't think the format will sell in bookstores.” There's no corner of a bookstore reserved for adult interactive illustrative books. There's no audience for that per se. People want to feel … You know what I mean? They don't want to feel like they're reading a book for kids.
Jayneil: Yeah, it'd be like “What do I do with this? Why am I paying this much money?”
Vicki: Right. And so, I think that was one big reason why I pivoted on the direction of the book. It was based on her feedback and I felt a little conflicted about it for a while because I believed that the original idea was just so kind of simple and pure in some ways but going back to the goal of the book, if people aren't going to buy it, I found myself explaining these scenarios beyond what they look like. If I’m having to explain it, then they don't actually do what I set out to do. And so, I needed to let go of what I thought was cool about the form factor and realize like “Oh yeah, it's not doing it.”
Jayneil: A crazy outlandish idea and, maybe stupid, is you worked in research, like you mentioned, at Stanford. There are probably connections you have or already know people that could reach out to some of the people that have wrote top selling books like Thinking Fast Thinking Slow and others like that. Would it make sense to reach out to those folks and just collaborate with them for like a field guide version of the book, something like that, where you kind of, I guess, borrow their name for publicity and then you add your stuff to it?
Vicki: Yeah, I think I could. I actually don't think that part of it is the hard part. I think it would be more partnering with someone who's really good at writing for everyday people. And so, it would more be the other end of translating that dense kind of hard to grasp information into something that is appealing to like our parent. I think, the stuff that we would want to translate is known. It's about making it much more appealing and consumable. And that's what I’ve been trying to do. I’ve been trying to think about what are good metaphors for this stuff, what are good examples, what are appealing ways to frame it. I don't think I’m quite there yet. So, yeah, just talking with you about it makes me think I need help on the other end of it. It's almost like the same thing with teaching maybe like how can you get students interested in these topics.
Jayneil: Absolutely. And you've had such an illustrious career working at Google, Lyft, Headspace, now Spotify and I believe you've had, I’m going to use the word therapist/career coach. How has that helped you?
Vicki: Yeah. So, I’ve had both. I saw a therapist regularly when I was in LA for maybe a year and a half or something like that mostly because in LA that is what is just a lot of people do that. I think in San Francisco too now but I think, I don't know about you, but coming from that Asian immigrant background, that wasn't super accepted. I was just talking to my friends in Singapore the other day and he was just saying he was trying to find a therapist in Singapore and there's like one-tenth of them. He had cited something very specific like here maybe for every hundred people, there's seven therapists. There, for every thousand people, there's … it was something like that where I was like “Damn! So, it's going to be hard to find one.” And that just kind of indicates how we might think about it, our families might think about it. And so, I think what it took was it took for me moving to LA and being surrounded by people who normalized that and it made me think “You know what, my insurance covers it. I’m not super stressed. I’m going to do it.” And I found it was great and we talked about work and relationships and family and stuff. And I think that was just healthy for me to even understand some of the things that … When you think about work, especially at work I should say because we're talking about work, you think about some of the surface level things like interactions with coworkers and maybe career goals that aren't being met and maybe responsibilities and things on the surface but I think when you sit down with a therapist, what's cool is you can start to examine where is that coming from like what in your past might be contributing to that or what in your family dynamic or what in your history has to do with that. And I happened to see a psychotherapist, so there might have been more emphasis on that but, to me, it was something I hadn't given a lot of thought to and it was very illuminating.
Jayneil: I have also been to a therapist. When I broke up with my ex, that year, I had so many things going on. I was speaking at three to four conferences, I had things I was doing and one of my friends asked me “How did you pull through?” and I said the only thing that kept me sane was talking to my therapist and her helping me release those emotions instead of just as a guy like ‘Oh, just fight through the pain.” That was really calming for me at that time.
Vicki: Right. It's so cool when you kind of realize that like that is a tool that you have. One time I saw a chiropractor and they were like “Just think of me as like a body housekeeper like you just need to sort these things out every once in a while.” I was like “Okay.” It kind of feels like the therapist is your like mental housekeeper. You just need to go through every once in a while, and like, yes, tidy things up, check what's going on but separately, I think, that served a very specific kind of inward looking like patience building kind of introspective purpose with regards to family and things I’d never thought about. When I left Headspace though, I specifically started seeing a life coach or you could consider her a life or career coach. And she's different than a therapist in that she's trained in coaching. She's not trained in say psychotherapy. And I would say the tools for that sort of thing are just a different set of tools with different goals in mind. And so, when I left, I had this goal of finding a new way to work and potentially writing a book and I had these things that I wanted to get to and I wasn't sure how to get to them. And so, for her, I kind of see her as like a blend between a career coach and a therapist. So, I’ll call her a life coach. What she does is she uses a couple different frameworks around values and I think one of them was called saboteurs. And these tools kind of help you understand, as you're running towards these goals, what might be getting in your way or why might you be feeling tension or why might you be feeling fulfilled, which hopefully helps unblock you or sort of helps you feel like you're doing the right thing. And so, it was a great time to switch over, one, because I think when therapy isn't covered by insurance, it's very hard to continue doing. So, the life coach, it was just more of a flat fee that I took out of this six-month allotment. And what's cool about the live coach is you can say like “This is my goal for this session. I want to come up with a plan to write the outline of the book” or “I want to figure out how to find the right agent” or something. I remember very specifically with therapy you couldn't do that. I remember one time telling the therapist “Well, I want to resolve this” and you just can't do that in there. It's about walking around and exploring and seeing what's there but it's not about going somewhere.
Jayneil: Yeah, if I said that, she would say “Why do you say that? Let's explore that.”
Vicki: Exactly. And you're just like “Well, fuck’s sake.” It's good, I think, for those things but when you're trying to accomplish a goal, it's really cool that with a life coach, you can put that down and say “This is what I want to get at.” And her framing is always like “You're the expert” whereas often I think, in therapy, the expert is the expert and she kind of is the authority and kind of guides you. In life coaching, you're the guide. And so, if at some point it doesn't feel like you're discussing the right things or making progress or whatever, you can say that and you can reshape, you can redesign kind of the session.
Jayneil: I am blessed that I have a career coach who goes with the name of David Burns. He's also come on the show. And what he does is that he is my bullshit filter. So, anytime I say “I’m going to do this or do that,” he's going to say straight to my face “Jayneil, no, you're not because of this reason” or “This is your strategy but these are the holes in it.” One of the things he helped me do by launching this podcast is, I like to call it, the email accountability framework. So, what he did is he figured out that through conversations that I was kind of dilly-dallying around launching the podcast. So, in January he had me do this where every Sunday I would write an email to myself, cc DAVID or bcc him and the thing would be what is the one thing I’m going to work on for that week, write down that goal and then next Sunday reply to myself that “Hey, Jayneil, you know, this is what you did” or “This is what you didn't do.” So, you kind of hold your own self accountable. So, I can definitely agree that having a career coach, life coach and therapist can definitely help you when the days are dark and the nights are long.
Vicki: Yeah, yeah. And I love that accountability thing. I mean, we would do very much the same except that we would come up with maybe what that mechanism was each time. We would quite often have homework. We would have check-ins like. One big perk, at least for me and mine, I don't know about your career coach, is that I could message her during the week like in between sessions and I think in terms of just getting a quick gut check on something I’d written or something I wanted to do or a response or anything like, to have someone that's not your friend, again, that you're not worried about bothering whose job it is to do that, I think, was super important, especially when you've lost like a colleague community that you have at work.
Jayneil: I love that. Any parting words to designers who are looking to follow your path of having a side project or something like that? What would you advise them?
Vicki: Yeah. Well, one exercise that I did with the coach was around these core values. And I felt a little tedious at the time but since then I’ve sort of thought about them and referenced them quite often. And I would say this is a worthwhile exercise for anyone because it really helps you get clear about what drives you, what motivates you, what matters, and I think if they're helpful just like you might create design principles or anything for a work thing, these are like your own levers. And so, when you feel like something isn't being fulfilled, you can examine these values. And the short version of the process we went through to get to them was think about what are your peak experiences like when do you really feel alive and fulfilled, who are your heroes like who do you admire and look up to and/or aspire to be like and what are your pet peeves like what are the things that really bother you and kind of grind your gears, disproportionately annoy you. And I think if you were to write down the longer exercise of writing those things down and abstracting kind of the values that are at play there and then consolidating them yourself to like a short list of phrases that encapsulate those things, that to me is a list and a thing that I’ve gone back to several times. So, that would be my piece of advice.
Jayneil: Oh my God! That is amazing. Thank you so much, Vicki, for sharing your wisdom and coming on the show.
Vicki: Of course. Thanks so much for having me. It was fun talking to you.
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