1 00:00:00,870 --> 00:00:07,881 There's interesting company called Zappos. Zappos is a shoe company. 2 00:00:07,881 --> 00:00:14,050 They actually ship shoes. Somebody else makes the shoes and they 3 00:00:14,050 --> 00:00:16,360 ship them. And they do a nice job. 4 00:00:16,360 --> 00:00:19,760 And they have a really wonderful website. And they're owned by Amazon. 5 00:00:19,760 --> 00:00:22,664 It's a really nice company. And one of the interesting thing about 6 00:00:22,664 --> 00:00:26,694 Zappos, they have lots of interesting things about them, but one of them Is the 7 00:00:26,694 --> 00:00:29,436 hiring process. And what they do is they bring people in 8 00:00:29,436 --> 00:00:32,401 for training. And they train them for quite a few days, 9 00:00:32,401 --> 00:00:35,533 more or less a week. And at the end of this training, they say 10 00:00:35,533 --> 00:00:38,764 to people, we would love for you to be part of the Zappos family. 11 00:00:38,764 --> 00:00:41,687 We would love for you to start working for here. 12 00:00:41,688 --> 00:00:43,530 But this is not the right place for everybody. 13 00:00:43,530 --> 00:00:49,024 And if this is not the right place for you, we don't want, we don't think this is 14 00:00:49,024 --> 00:00:53,356 something good for you. And therefore, we will pay you to not take 15 00:00:53,356 --> 00:00:56,656 the job. And they started by offering people $500 16 00:00:56,656 --> 00:00:59,750 and now they've increased up to $2000. Now think about it. 17 00:00:59,750 --> 00:01:03,000 What a crazy idea. You come, you do a week of training. 18 00:01:03,000 --> 00:01:07,614 At the end of week of training they say we'll pay you $2000 not to take the job. 19 00:01:07,615 --> 00:01:13,090 Now these are not highly paid people, these are people who are going to get paid 20 00:01:13,090 --> 00:01:16,697 12, 14, $15 an hour to do customer service on the phone. 21 00:01:16,698 --> 00:01:19,518 Why would Zappos pay people not to take the job? 22 00:01:19,519 --> 00:01:23,414 And they're are basically two reasons. The first reason, if you think about the 23 00:01:23,414 --> 00:01:27,444 distribution of people, the people who love the job and the people who okay and 24 00:01:27,444 --> 00:01:31,358 people who don't like it so much. You actually don't want the people who 25 00:01:31,358 --> 00:01:34,976 don't like their jobs so much to be around because not only are they not going to do 26 00:01:34,976 --> 00:01:37,378 a good job, they're going to pollute other people. 27 00:01:37,378 --> 00:01:42,294 And Zappos is a customer service company. They have fantastic customer service. 28 00:01:42,294 --> 00:01:46,368 It's delightful to call them every time. But you can imagine if they had people at 29 00:01:46,368 --> 00:01:51,054 the negative tail, those people would give customers a bad experience and they might 30 00:01:51,054 --> 00:01:54,574 pollute other people. So, one thing is the moving up and up on 31 00:01:54,574 --> 00:01:58,530 trying to eliminate the tail. People who are not that happy or don't 32 00:01:58,530 --> 00:02:01,477 think they'll be that happy, they don't want them. 33 00:02:01,477 --> 00:02:04,527 The second thing, I think, has to do with cognitive dissonance. 34 00:02:04,527 --> 00:02:07,356 Cognitive dissonance is a really interesting phenomena. 35 00:02:07,356 --> 00:02:12,364 Cognitive dissonance is about the fact that if we behave one way but don't 36 00:02:12,364 --> 00:02:18,150 believe in the same way, this creates a tension, what Festinger called dissonance. 37 00:02:18,150 --> 00:02:20,465 Can we change what we've done? No. 38 00:02:20,465 --> 00:02:24,240 We've done it already. Maybe we can change what we believe. 39 00:02:24,240 --> 00:02:28,413 And that actually happen quite a lot. You behave a certain way, and then you 40 00:02:28,413 --> 00:02:33,408 shift your belief to, to fit with that. In some of the earlier demonstrations, 41 00:02:33,408 --> 00:02:38,302 they would get people and they would get them to screw screws on a big board. 42 00:02:38,303 --> 00:02:42,311 Really boring task. And they would do it for a very, very long 43 00:02:42,311 --> 00:02:45,198 time. And some people, they paid very well and 44 00:02:45,198 --> 00:02:48,360 some people they paid $1.00. And then they basically looked whether 45 00:02:48,360 --> 00:02:50,364 people would recommend this to other people. 46 00:02:50,365 --> 00:02:54,982 People who got paid very well said, you know, this was a boring task. 47 00:02:54,982 --> 00:02:57,628 I got paid well and this was a boring task. 48 00:02:57,628 --> 00:03:00,890 If you're going to do it, I think the task is boring. 49 00:03:00,890 --> 00:03:03,921 The people who got paid a dollar, had a dissonance. 50 00:03:03,921 --> 00:03:07,250 They worked on it for a long time but was really boring. 51 00:03:07,250 --> 00:03:10,454 Can they say that? No, because they only got paid $1. 52 00:03:10,454 --> 00:03:12,973 They can't justify. They can't say to themselves, ooh I work 53 00:03:12,973 --> 00:03:15,004 for really long time on this boring task for $1. 54 00:03:15,004 --> 00:03:17,890 So what did they do? They shift it. 55 00:03:17,890 --> 00:03:21,892 How interesting they found the task. And now all of a sudden the task was too, 56 00:03:21,892 --> 00:03:25,754 was more interesting, for them. They, and they reported it to other people 57 00:03:25,754 --> 00:03:29,557 as being more interesting. This is, by the way, one of the, the 58 00:03:29,557 --> 00:03:33,346 theory of why playing hard to get is a good idea, right? 59 00:03:33,346 --> 00:03:37,185 Because if you think that if people work harder for something, they shift your 60 00:03:37,185 --> 00:03:40,334 opinions for it. So, if somebody is easy to get people can 61 00:03:40,334 --> 00:03:44,510 say, oh, you know, I don't chase them very hard and I don't like them very much. 62 00:03:44,510 --> 00:03:48,128 But if you chase somebody and your efforts show that you've chased them for a long 63 00:03:48,128 --> 00:03:51,638 time, you spent lots of effort to it, you can't think to yourself you don't like 64 00:03:51,638 --> 00:03:54,395 them that much because there's a dissonance between them. 65 00:03:54,395 --> 00:03:58,395 So you have to increase your opinion. Oh, they must be really fantastic because 66 00:03:58,395 --> 00:04:02,616 I wouldn't have worked so hard if that person was not such a fantastic person 67 00:04:02,616 --> 00:04:05,460 that they want so much. Now, let's go back to Zappos. 68 00:04:06,490 --> 00:04:09,429 What happened to Zappos? You have these $2,000. 69 00:04:09,429 --> 00:04:12,930 Now, it's not as if Zappos is telling you, you know what, for the rest of your life 70 00:04:12,930 --> 00:04:16,428 every morning you could wake up and decide if you want to take the money or stay on 71 00:04:16,428 --> 00:04:17,612 the job. No, no. 72 00:04:17,612 --> 00:04:21,518 You have 48 hours. And if the end of 48 hours you decide not 73 00:04:21,518 --> 00:04:25,958 to take the money, you wake up every morning for the rest of your career at 74 00:04:25,958 --> 00:04:30,990 Zappos and you'll tell yourself, I could have gotten $2000 but I decided to work at 75 00:04:30,990 --> 00:04:33,989 Zappos. That must mean that I really love Zappos, 76 00:04:33,989 --> 00:04:36,252 right? Otherwise, why would I do that? 77 00:04:36,252 --> 00:04:39,964 And because of that, you go to work much more excited and so on. 78 00:04:39,964 --> 00:04:43,731 And from what I hear, the atmosphere there is really like kind of a wonderful cult. 79 00:04:43,731 --> 00:04:47,341 People are really happy with each other. They celebrate birthdays. 80 00:04:47,341 --> 00:04:50,445 People live together. There's all kind of wonderful things 81 00:04:50,445 --> 00:04:53,338 happening. And I'm sure there's lots of reasons for 82 00:04:53,338 --> 00:04:57,622 it but one of them is that now people convince themselves that they must love 83 00:04:57,622 --> 00:05:00,448 the place because they gave up so much to be there.