Video Transcript: Main Lesson - Week 2 Page 1 of 2

Welcome to week two! Now, if you’re here, I’m going to assume that you’ve already accomplished the
goal of week one, which was to set up an appointment with an expert in your field. In this week, we
want to teach you how to get the most out of the interview you have with this expert. Now, here’s the
reality. Conducting a good advice interview is not hard. But at the same time, it’s not obvious how to
do this right. Now, this is something I know from personal experience.

The first two books I wrote were advice books. They were student advice books. And they required
me to interview very successful students and extract from them advice about how they do what they
do so well. Well, this process gave me a very rapid education in how to ask questions to experts
and, more importantly, how not to ask these questions. For example, for my second book, I was
interviewing students who had straight A’s. And I was trying to understand what study habits were
allowing them to consistently get those high marks. When I did my initial interviews for this book,
I made the mistake of asking simply, OK, tell me how I should study. The type of answers I got to
that general question turned out to be not at all useful. And the reason was there’s a couple different
biases at effect during this interview process.

The first is what I call the colored folder effect. You see, when you ask someone, hey, give me your
advice on this topic, in this social context, you’ve just put them on the spot. There is now an awkward
silence which they need to fill as quickly as possible by saying something that sounds smart about
the topic you’re discussing. The effect of these social dynamics is that it tends to drive people to glom
onto the first clear, distinctive, relevant thing that comes to mind. And then start talking about that
just so they can fill the silence and have something to say. So I called this the colored folder effect
because there’s one student I talked to who kept going on about the folders that she used to actually
organize her notes and the colors, the bright colors, that these folders had. Now, I don’t doubt that she
liked those color folders. But I also don’t doubt that they had very little to do with her actual grades. It
was probably just the first thing that popped to mind when I put her on the spot.

The other problem with just asking someone, hey, what’s your advice on this topic is what I call
the kids these days effect. And that is, perhaps surprisingly, when you ask people for their advice,
especially experts, they will often use this as an occasion to make a point about a broader issue that
they feel strongly about. So maybe when interviewing a student, for example, instead of getting the
real tactics that made the most difference in their grades, you get a commentary about how people
are using social media too much or about how people don’t work hard enough or some other type of
issue that’s on their mind. This is very common. Again, this might be an interesting discussion. But
it’s not giving you the information that you actually need. Now, this is going to be a problem in the
interviews you do with your career experts, as well. These type of biases will be in place, if you ask
them general questions. So what we need to figure out is how to get around this issue. And in this
week’s lesson, this is exactly what we’re going to teach you how to do.

Now, the basic idea for how you do this is actually quite simple. Instead of asking someone what
their general advice is on a topic, you should instead ask them to walk you through their personal
experience. And then you can filter what they say. And you can extract the advice from this
information. So for example, in the context of straight-A students, the right way, it turns out, to ask
a student about their study habits is not to say, how should I study. Instead, it’s to say, I want you to
think about the last test that you scored a good grade on. And then I want you to walk me through
step by step how you studied for that test. That turns out to be the right way to get the reality of how
 Video Transcript: Main Lesson - Week 2 Page 2 of 2

straight-A students study versus other students. This same thing applies for the experts you’re going
to interview.

Don’t say, hey, what skills matter? How did you become so good in your field? Instead, say, I want
you to walk me through your career step by step. Treat this like you’re a journalist trying to do fact
checking for a biography. OK. What job came next? What promotion came after that? Get the dates
right. Get the locations right. Get the timing right. Once you have these facts, then dive deeper into
the connecting steps. OK. Well, how did you get this promotion? What was it that you did that allowed
you to get this promotion, even though other people also wanted it? What were you doing differently?
What was valuable? Again, you’re just gathering information about the reality of their successful
career. Later on, we’ll show you how to extract from this information the advice that really matters.

So what does success look like for this week? Well, success looks like having conducted a smart
advice interview and extracted from this interview exactly the information you need to figure out what
skills matter in your field and how you’re going to improve them.