1

The Path to Success Runs through Cognitive Science

If you’re like most people, your formal education served many functions. You may have learned technical skills to prepare you for a particular career. You may have been given a chance to develop broad critical thinking. Perhaps you focused on your communication abilities. But your education did not prepare you for your career—at least not entirely—because so many factors determine how well things go for you at work.

As a college professor, I spend a lot of time around people who are thinking about their careers. Undergrads worry about getting a first job after college. Graduate students are often deciding between an academic career and work in industry, government, or nonprofits. I helped create the master’s program in Human Dimensions of Organizations, which teaches mid-career professionals about people. The students use the program as a means of career advancement—some to transition from one career to another, and others to enhance the work they already do.

Over time, I realized that a lot of psychology research is relevant to the way people think about their careers, but few people have been exposed to it. I was thinking about that while on the phone with my oldest son, who was twenty-three at the time. He was describing a difficult day he’d had at work. Someone in the office had yelled at him for revealing a piece of information to a client that the angry colleague didn’t think ought to have been said.

What should my son do in that situation? Go to his boss and tell her what happened? Try to remedy the situation with the client? Have a conversation with the offended colleague? How could he even begin to figure out what he did wrong and how to fix it? What would you do in this situation? Take a moment to think about it.

Now ask yourself, What class did I take to learn how to deal with a work situation like this one? You probably can’t think of one.

The need for such lessons doesn’t end after your first job. Suppose you were the supervisor of a young employee who’d just been yelled at by a colleague. How would you handle the situation? Would you punish the new employee for divulging the information? Would you get angry at the colleague for yelling? Would you try to get the two of them to handle this tiff themselves? Is there another alternative?

So much of what happens in your work life, starting with when you look for your first job, falls outside what you spent the first two decades of your life learning. College students may hear about careers that follow from their major, but they don’t learn much about how to actually get that first job. Writing classes focus on how to create well-crafted paragraphs, but not on how to talk to an irate colleague or to motivate coworkers to rally around a project. Studying for exams helps you correct mistakes in material you are learning, but it doesn’t tell you how to fix problems with a project that is about to be delivered to a client. In the education system, your progress is mapped out from grade to grade and from class to class. But how do you know when it’s time to move on to the next job, or even what steps to take to turn a collection of jobs into a career?

Many people manage to muddle through these situations. They make some mistakes and (one hopes) learn from them. They impress some colleagues and make mortal enemies of others. And when they look back on their years of work, they can tell a story about the factors that (they believe) led to their success.

Some of these people even go on to write books about how to succeed at work and be a leader in the workplace. They elevate the philosophy underlying their particular career choices to the level of advice that everyone should follow. Unfortunately, it’s hard to separate out the truly crucial choices people made from the many other factors (which we sometimes call luck or chance) that affected their paths. It would be much better to draw advice from looking across the experiences of many people.

That is where cognitive science—the study of minds and brains—comes in. Cognitive science includes psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, computer science, and philosophy. As a thriving area of research, it has a lot to say about the way people think, feel, and act that has practical implications for how you should live your life—particularly at work.

This research says a lot about how to motivate yourself to get work done, to learn the new skills that are required for your job, and to deal with your colleagues, clients, and customers. It can explain why you work the way you do. It can also suggest strategies to help you avoid blind alleys at work and recover faster from your mistakes.

So, let’s get started.

Making the Most of Your Career

A big problem with the word success is that it’s a noun.

When you say someone is a success, you’re placing them in the category of successful people. Psychologists have found that when you categorize someone like this, you assume that they have some essence that makes them belong in that category. This may make sense for some categories, such as animals. It’s reasonable to assume that something is a cat if it has some essence of cat—cat DNA, for example. It makes less sense when applied to people, but we still do it. We assume that Fran is a painter not just because she paints, but because she has some deep quality that makes her fit that category. Jesse is anxious because he has some quality that makes him an anxious person.

Likewise, when you think of someone as a success, you assume that they have an essential quality that makes them successful. You may worry that you don’t have that quality, and thus that you may not be able to excel.

If you leave behind the noun and move to a verb—succeed—everything changes.

The primary function of verbs is to refer to actions. Success is a series of actions that culminate in achieving desired outcomes. It requires continual effort to improve. It involves growth that supports the transition from one position to another across the length of a career. Success demands the motivation to excel over a long time span. The same is true for other categories, such as leader and innovator. There are a few qualities that help someone succeed, lead, or innovate, but it is the process of working, rather than the qualities of the individual, that creates the most desirable outcomes.

The idea that you have to put in effort to develop a career is not news. That said, many people put their effort into the wrong activities. They worry about things that are out of their control, but fail to act on things that they can influence. They neglect crucial tasks that lead to good outcomes.

This book aims to help you understand how to develop your career using cognitive science. To do this effectively, you need to do two things. First, you must appreciate the three phases that define a career path: getting a job, excelling, and moving on. Second, you should become acquainted with the three brain systems that will help you achieve your goals: the motivational brain, the social brain, and the cognitive brain.

The Career Cycle

What exactly is a career? Ask around, and some consensus emerges. Careers are bigger than particular jobs. They involve building a skill set that enables you to contribute to an organization, an industry, or a field. Not every job someone holds is part of their career. A premed college student who works as a short-order cook while in school is not developing a career. A budding chef who spends three years as a line cook is doing a similar job, but is developing career-level experience.

Although people can often identify the threads of their careers, it’s actually quite difficult to precisely define what a career entails. In fact, the Bureau of Labor Statistics keeps track of the number of jobs people have over a lifetime, but not the number of careers.

Part of the problem in defining your career is that often it becomes clear only when you look back over your life. As you are moving forward, living your life, it may not be obvious that you have switched careers.

For example, after going to graduate school in psychology at the University of Illinois, I was a faculty member at Northwestern University, at Columbia University, and finally at the University of Texas, where I am today. From this standpoint, it might seem that I had three jobs, but one career—as a professor.

Yet there are other ways of looking at this same situation. From the start of graduate school until about my tenth year at the University of Texas, my primary focus was on doing basic research for publication in academic journals. Starting in my tenth year, I began trying to communicate research in my field to a broader public, through blogs, books (like this one), and a radio show called Two Guys on Your Head. I also did outreach to companies that wanted to learn more about cognitive science and to use it in their businesses and began consulting for them. So is this a second career or part of the first one? Is the external communication part of the same aspect of my career as the consulting, or are they separate?

To complicate the story further, in my twelfth year at UT, I became the director of the Human Dimensions of Organizations program, which teaches undergraduates and master’s students about the people they encounter in the workplace. Is this administrative role part of my teaching career? Part of my communication/consulting career? Separate from both? They all feel like some part of my career trajectory—certainly more so than the time I spend as a saxophone player in a ska band. For example, without having spent time consulting for companies, I would have had difficulty running a master’s program aimed at working professionals.

Because it’s so hard to define a career, I’ll focus primarily on jobs and positions in this book, although in chapter 10 I return to the idea of managing a career rather than just thinking about particular jobs.

A job is somewhat easier to define. The Bureau of Labor Statistics deems it an uninterrupted period of work for a particular employer. A position is a role that someone takes on for an employer. A person may hold many positions within an organization over a number of years, but a period of working for the same employer consists of one job.

A survey by the Bureau of Labor Statistics released in 2015 looked at a subset of Baby Boomers born from 1957 to 1964. These people held an average of 11.7 jobs between the ages of eighteen and forty-eight. That means that the people in this survey changed jobs, on average, every two to three years over the first thirty years they were in the workforce. That’s a lot of movement. If anything, this trend is accelerating.

The job cycle has three phases: seeking a job, doing the job, and moving on. These phases are not always completely separate. You might seek another position (with the same company or another one) while you’re working. You might choose to get education for a career change without leaving your current job. But they are separate enough that it’s worth treating them independently.

Most people recognize the three phases of the job cycle, but they may be unfamiliar with specific aspects of them. Ask yourself which of the following things you’re sure you already know.

•  The process recruiters go through to evaluate applications.

•  The best way to communicate what you don’t know in a job interview.

•  What you learn about a potential employer from the interview.

•  How to recover from a big mistake at work.

•  How to deal with a supervisor who seems not to have your best interests at heart.

•  Why your workplace is stressful and what to do about it.

•  Whether you should compare your performance with that of your colleagues.

•  How to deal with becoming a supervisor of your friends.

•  What causes dissatisfaction with your job.

•  What to tell your current employer about applying for a new job.

•  When it’s time to think about getting another degree.

One item on this list came out of a conversation I had with a participant in a seminar I taught. She had worked for several years at a medium-size tech company that strives for a collegial work environment. She entered the organization with eight other people about her age, and the group bonded over long work hours and drinks after work. When I met her, she had been put on a fast track for promotion to supervisor.

After the promotion, some of her friends would be her direct reports, and she was struggling with the implications. Over drinks, her friends often complained about managers. Now she was about to go from being one of “us” to being one of “them.” Some of the reason for her stress was obvious—she worried about the prospect of having to give a negative evaluation to a friend. But—somewhat less obviously—she couldn’t decide whether she should still go to happy hour with her cohort.

As this example demonstrates, the specific situations you face at work bring up all kinds of issues that can be hard to envision and to prepare for. But plenty of research exists that can help you manage your positions, your jobs, and your career cycle as a whole.

First you need to understand your own brain.

Your Brain(s)

President George H. W. Bush named the decade 1990–1999 “The Decade of the Brain” to motivate continued investment in our understanding of that wondrous organ. Fascination with the human brain has only grown since then. Evidence exists that people believe more strongly in findings from psychology if the research includes some discussion of how the brain brought about those results. More recently, using the prefix “neuro-” has become a surefire way to generate excitement about a field (or at least to pump up interest from the market). Specialists now exist in neuroeconomics and neuromarketing, for example.

I’m guilty of taking advantage of this interest in the way I’ve written this book. My field of specialty is cognitive science—the interdisciplinary field I mentioned earlier in this chapter. I’ve done most of my research using the methods of psychology, though I have ventured into many of the other disciplines of cognitive science, including neuroscience, over the course of my career.

That said, most of what I’m going to present comes out of the field of psychology. Often, when we use the language of psychology and talk about concepts such as memory, attention, motivation, and language, we are talking about the mind. Those concepts are implemented by the human brain just as the programming concepts underlying word processors and web browsers are implemented by the particular hardware you use.

On a few occasions, I will dip down to the level of neuroscience to talk about a key feature of the brain that’s important for understanding the mind. But science has learned little about brain function that suggests different ways we should engage complex aspects of thinking such as understanding how to work more effectively or how to market products to people. Anyone who attempts to persuade you otherwise is really selling you psychology by dressing it up in language they hope you’ll find more “scientific.”

In this book, I focus on three important mental systems that are crucial for success at work: the motivational brain, the social brain, and the cognitive brain. I’m using these terms loosely. You don’t really have three separate brains. In fact, the parts of the brain that serve motivational, social, and cognitive functions are physiologically intertwined. But these aspects of the way the mind/brain works are often studied independently and explained with different theories. So I find it valuable to give them different names. And by treating them separately, I can help you understand how to apply the suggestions in this book to your work.

Your motivational brain is the set of mechanisms that get you to do something (or sometimes avoid doing something). The core brain regions that are part of the motivational brain are evolutionarily very old. They are the areas you would also find in the brains of rats, mice, and deer—creatures from which the human branch of evolution split off a long time ago. Knowing what motivates you, your colleagues, and your supervisors is important for managing your own work and for understanding the sources of stress and satisfaction in the tasks you do.

Your social brain is the collection of systems that help you deal with other people. Much of your education through college is an individual sport, but work is most often a team sport. You have to recognize how people will evaluate you. You have to devote effort to getting groups to work together to achieve collective goals. You have to do a good job of predicting how other people will react in order to achieve your goals and to help them achieve theirs. The human brain evolved to help you work with others. After all, humans dominate the planet because of our ability to coordinate activity, not because of our fearsome physical prowess. The social brain is what that participant in my seminar needed to use to deal with becoming a supervisor. I’ll take up her story again in chapter 8.

Your cognitive brain is the elaborate set of structures that permit you to communicate, make excellent snap judgments on the basis of your experience, and engage in complex reasoning. You’ve probably heard the cliché that in business it’s not what you know that matters, it’s who you know. Who you know matters a lot. But if you don’t actually know a lot, people are likely to think you’re incompetent. It’s probably better to say that both what you know and who you know allow you to succeed.

Over the course of this book, I’ll introduce you to a lot of details about your brain(s). Sometimes I’ll call out these brains by name, sometimes not. What is most important is that you have to draw on motivational, social, and cognitive factors to succeed over the course of your career. The more you learn about how you think, the easier it will be to work in a way that fits naturally with how your brain wants to function.

The Plan

This book brings together research on your brain with the kinds of situations you may encounter across the three stages of the job cycle. Getting a job, excelling at it, and moving on to a new one all involve your motivational, social, and cognitive brains.

If you’ve picked up this book, chances are good that you’re primarily concerned with one of the three stages of the job cycle. If so, feel free to start reading in the section most pertinent to your current goals. The sections and chapters are written to be as self-contained as possible. I point forward and back to related material as well, in case you started in the middle. That said, you never know when you might find a nugget that is useful to you now from a section focused primarily on another stage of your career.

You might also be wondering whether this book is for you. If you’re fairly new to the workplace, a lot of what I discuss here will probably be unfamiliar. Even if you are in the middle of your career, you may have developed ideas about how to manage your work life without thinking about the psychology underlying it. If you’re already embedded in your career, you might want to focus on part 2 first and explore ways to improve your performance at work. Finally, even if you’re not actively searching for a job or even looking to move to a new position, you’ll probably have to give advice to colleagues, friends, and mentees who are. This book will give you a vocabulary for talking with others about how to manage their work life.

You should know up front that this is going to take some effort on your part. You spent years in school developing the expertise that would help you get your first job. You’re going to have to put in some time to optimize your motivational, social, and cognitive brains to develop your career. Someday, perhaps, we’ll be able to upload all those skills the way Neo learned kung fu in The Matrix.

But for now, my aim is to help you understand the functioning of your brain (and the brains of your colleagues, clients, and customers). I want you to have enough knowledge to make effective decisions about complicated work situations. I’ll illustrate these principles with stories drawn from interviews and gathered from contacts on social media. There is no one-size-fits-all answer to complicated problems. The better able you are to bring your brain to work, the more options you give yourself for solving difficult problems.

Throughout this book, I base my recommendations on studies and conclusions drawn from the literature in psychology. At times, I’ll name a particular researcher or study in the text. Sometimes, to keep things conversational, I won’t provide much more information in the text itself. At the end of the book, though, my sources are listed by chapter.

I also try to illustrate key points with stories about people at different stages of their careers. Unless I note otherwise, these stories were sent to me by people in my social media network who volunteered information about their experiences in response to one of many inquiries I made as I was writing the book. They are identified by first name only, and some details have been omitted to protect their anonymity.

Each of the following chapters ends with two lists of takeaways. One focuses on the core cognitive science concepts in the chapter, the other on specific tips. You can use these sections to find things you want to revisit.

To return to my opening anecdote: My son went back to his desk and spent some time thinking about what he had done that led his colleague to yell at him. Then he approached his boss and explained the situation. He apologized for what he had told the client and gave his best idea for what he might have done differently. Then he asked his boss for advice about how to deal with such a situation better should it happen again.

Was that the right thing for him to do?

Read on.