You Don’t Have to Monetize Your Passion (Tamsen Webster)
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Tamsen Webster, author, speaker, and message designer, shares how a career spanning the arts, marketing, fundraising, and advertising led to her obsession with how people understand and adopt new ideas. We discuss over-communication, separating passion from profession, sense-giving versus persuasion and why the how behind an idea can matter just as much as the why.
Key Takeaways
More communication is often better than leaving people to fill in the blanks. What you say still needs to account for the relationship, context, and how the other person will receive it.
Your passion does not necessarily have to become your profession. You can stay connected to something you love without forcing it to become the way you make money.
Before trying to persuade someone, make the idea understandable. Lasting change is more likely when people can make sense of something and choose it for themselves.
The why matters, but so does the why behind the how. Explaining why you chose a particular approach can completely change how someone understands and appreciates the work.
The finished product is only part of the creative process. Whether it is art, music, writing, or AI-generated work, understanding what went into something can deepen appreciation for the result.
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Transcript:
00:00 Introduction
Mike Zimmerlich: Hey, Tamsen, how are you?
Tamsen Webster: Good, Michael. How are you?
Mike Zimmerlich: I'm doing good. Thank you so much for asking.
Tamsen Webster: Excellent.
Mike Zimmerlich: I appreciate you being on the show. I do want to do a quick shout-out to our good friend Matt, who's been on the podcast a number of times before. So I'm very excited to have you on.
We don't get a number of people like yourself on the show that often, so it's always exciting to have somebody like you on board because you come at things at a very different level, which is great because I think it applies to everybody.
As we're going into these different aspects of your career, the through line that I found is communication. Very big word. So what does communication mean?
Tamsen Webster: Okay, I'm glad you gave me a little time to think about this as we were going, because the best I can come up with on the spot is successfully transferring the content and intent of an idea from one person to another, and in such a way that it continues if that's part of the intent.
Mike Zimmerlich: I like that. It's funny because I think a perfect example of this, and I do sometimes talk on the podcast about how the sausage is made behind the scenes of even creating this show, is one of the things we discussed was the fact that I went over with you what the talking points are going to be and how this process is going to work.
Obviously, that is a form of communication. I'm conveying these ideas of how this conversation is going to go so that you are better prepared for it and hopefully we're going to have a better conversation because of that.
Tamsen Webster: Yes, and you do a wonderful job of both of those things.
It's part of my own philosophy that, particularly in our current world, and I would say this has less to do with politics and ideologies and much more to do with just how many of us there are, which is a lot. That means we have that many people with truly unique experiences and points of view.
The more that we're explicit about not only what we say, and I always forget the name of the guy who came up with The Four Agreements, but the more that we are impeccable with our words, and also explicit in why we're talking about that, the better.
Sometimes the words that come out in the moment don't actually match our intent, and we don't realize it until you're like, "Oh, nuts. That is, yikes."
But when you pair them both and say, "Listen, this is what I'm trying to do, and so let me give you that," I think it helps. Just as you did, it gives our brains a lot of what we need from each other in order for successful communication to happen.
So I'm a big fan. High marks already, Michael. Gold star.
Mike Zimmerlich: Thank you. I want to jump off of this a little bit here. Are you a believer in over-communication? Do you feel like it's possible to over-communicate, or is that a misnomer?
Tamsen Webster: Classic consultant response: it depends.
Personally, for me and how I choose to move through the world, no, I don't. I really don't. I think more problems are caused by under-sharing than over-sharing. I think more problems are caused by things being left unsaid than being said.
That said, I think there are times when, for the sake of the relationship, not being aware of how you say something, how much you say, or what you say could have an effect on the relationship.
In those situations, where it's situation-specific or context-specific, is it possible? Yes. Is it globally a problem? I would say the opposite. It's the lack of communication that causes far more problems than over-communication.
Mike Zimmerlich: Yeah, I would completely agree with that.
I always tell people when they're giving me things or information and they mention, "I don't want to give you too much information," I say, "No, the more the merrier."
I'd rather have too much information than not enough. Always give me more than what you even feel is needed because then I can discern for myself what I feel is important and what's not important. If you don't, then that's less for me to make a decision from.
Tamsen Webster: Absolutely. Or I have to do more work, or I have to fill in more blanks.
Particularly given the nature of the work that I do and like to do, I think the more that we leave people to fill in the blanks, the more risk we're taking about whether or not successful communication will take place.
Again, to me, it's this idea of lossless transfer. Given how many music folks you have on, that's really what I'm trying to get at. To me, that's the definition of successful communication: lossless transfer.
It doesn't mean that I may want something to happen as a result and that it will, because I also take a very strong anti-coercive stance in communication. But I think the content needs to come across.
I am very aware that I am delightfully neurodivergent in certain ways, and so I know that I tend toward info dumping and way too much because, to me, everything is connected.
So I also try to start with a perspective of letting people know that and say, "Listen, I know that I can just go. So if you ever need me to stop, skip to the end, draw the point, let me know." I say that to people. I'm saying that to you, Michael, as well.
Matt and I talk about this a lot. To me, ideas are so important and all the different ways that they show up.
My medium happens to be words because it's the most common one that we all end up relying on in one way or another, written, spoken, however. Are there other ways? Absolutely.
There's one of my favorite authors, I think it's Mick Herron. It's either Mick Herron or Rex Stout, who wrote Nero Wolfe, who talks about how we've got to mistrust words because they can mean multiple things to multiple people.
So, very long way of illustrating my point. More is better as far as I'm concerned.
08:00 Finding a Creative Career
Mike Zimmerlich: It's interesting because, as I'm hearing you talk, I find it interesting that you went to Boston University and your major was in marketing and communications, but also a minor in art as well. Was this something you were always fascinated with?
Tamsen Webster: Oh, yeah. I was an arts kid. I was a theater kid. I was a choral singer. Creative writing, won awards for that. I fancied myself a visual artist as well. Really not talented on that front.
Part of the reason why I studied marketing, or chose to study marketing, was I could see other folks in my friend group, and my sister, by the way, who is an Emmy Award-winning screenwriter, brag, who had the hustle, as I like to call it. They had the will and the endurance to suffer for their art, and I did not have that.
I may have had talent. I did not have the grit and the resilience in that way for that, and I knew it.
Part of the reason why I wanted to study marketing was that it felt like the most creative side of an employable thing. So, in the choice between suffering artist and employed creative, I decided to go employed creative.
Then I added the second degree because I was bored out of my skull.
The business side of things was very track and professional and, "This is the way things are," and I'm like, "Who are you people?" I came at it from all of my arts kids, and the people who were studying business were just a whole different group of people.
So I escaped back to liberal arts and ended up studying American studies with an art history minor because, at the time, I thought I wanted to run an art museum someday. Loved art museums.
And I wanted to do all of this because I literally went to school thinking that I wanted to make it easier for people of deep passions to survive.
In other words, in my own way, however I could do it, I didn't know what that was going to be. I just didn't want other people to have to make the choice that I did, which is, "I don't want to have to suffer, and why is it that artists have to? Why is it such a difficult thing?"
So, yeah, I wanted to be in a position where I could shine the light on the great work of others who chose to put their dedication and their focus in that standpoint.
I'm very aware of the fact that I have been obsessed with a single question for 35 years, so I didn't lack resilience, perseverance, and endurance. But I didn't have it for the art, for living the art.
You may notice that I didn't stay in the arts, though I know we'll talk about the times that I did, because I found that particularly when I was working in an art museum, it killed my love for it.
I found that I needed to separate them. I didn't want the thing that I loved, that part of what I loved, to be my job, because the intersection of vocation and avocation was too tight for me.
So, yeah, that was part of why I studied marketing and then added art history and American studies on top of it.
Mike Zimmerlich: That's really fascinating that you mentioned the fact that you went in feeling like you would run your own art museum someday. Right after college, you did start working at an art museum yourself and found out that was actually not something that resonated with you specifically.
I find that really interesting because it was one of those areas where you're taking your passion, which is in the arts, and then that question, as you mentioned, is, "How do I make a living from this?"
That was one of the ways, to work at an art museum, and then you found out that was not the case.
Tamsen Webster: No. Yep.
Mike Zimmerlich: I bring that up because that's something I know I talk about quite often. Just because you're passionate about something doesn't necessarily mean that's how you make your living.
It doesn't have to mean that you make any money from it.
I feel like there is almost an obligation, or a sense of self-worth when it comes to these things, that you have to make money from it to justify even putting the effort into it.
In some art forms, I find this a little bit more acceptable. People who paint, for example. You don't expect right away that if you paint, you must be selling your paintings at art galleries or whatever.
Tamsen Webster: Thank goodness for Van Gogh, right? Everyone can be like, "Van Gogh didn't sell any. I don't have to either."
Mike Zimmerlich: Exactly. It's fine. I'll just make money after I'm dead.
Tamsen Webster: That's right. That's fine. It's all good.
Mike Zimmerlich: Especially music, I think music is a big example of this. There are other examples as well, but specifically making music, there's this expectation that if I'm going to make music, even to the point of recording music, that I'm going to have to sell it.
I'm going to have to make money from this to justify me doing this.
I think it's important to make that realization that, no, you don't have to. If this is something that you're passionate about and you love doing, and you hate doing all the other aspects of it, or maybe "hate" is a strong word, if you don't feel it's worth it for all the other aspects of the business side and everything else you have to do to make money from it, you don't have to.
If you have a job that you're satisfied with and you're doing this for your own enjoyment, for fun, and for your own satisfaction...
Tamsen Webster: That's enough.
Mike Zimmerlich: Honestly, sometimes more power to you.
Tamsen Webster: Yeah. What's so interesting is I was thinking about what it was about working in the museum that made me go, "Yeah, this isn't it."
I actually worked in a museum while I was in college. I started out volunteering and then worked, so I felt like I had tested this out. I figured, "Yeah, this is good."
Side note, I also worked in the nightclubs in Boston while I was in college. I've always lived this double life where there are two very opposed kinds of audiences that I'm working with simultaneously. That hasn't stopped, by the way.
But what occurred to me as you were talking was so much about art, visual art in particular, is the moment of first experience of it. It's that, "Oh, there's a thing I've never seen before."
What I found was that you end up looking at it and looking at it and looking at it and talking about it. The thing that I discovered I loved was not possible if I was also working there.
I wasn't an art historian. I didn't find it endlessly fascinating to go deep into the lives of Vermeer or how he painted. Speaking of which, there's this amazing documentary called Tim's Vermeer, but we won't go there.
That was part of it.
To some extent, I think I benefited from the fact that, as a singer, I was also a ranked mezzo-soprano, second soprano, whatever, in Virginia.
I always had enough understanding of what popular culture was looking for or what the scholarly versions of things were looking for, and I could tell you at the time I was coming up that my voice didn't fit any of it.
Nor do I love the type of music my voice is best at as a soloist. Honestly, I would be a spectacular, tone-wise, country or bluegrass artist. Don't love it.
Choral music was kind of where I went, and everybody knows you do not make a living as a choral singer. So that kind of made the choice for me.
My sister was the actress. My sister was the screenwriter. Just with sibling dynamics, I stayed away from writing, screenwriting, drama.
What's interesting is my sister went through a similar evolution. Right out of school, and she went to school for theater, she was doing dramaturgy at Williamstown Theatre Festival and working at Portland Stage.
The same thing happened. She hated it.
So she ended up going back to school and doing game design for quite a long time, building the story of interactive games in the early days. We're talking late '90s, early 2000s.
That slowly brought her back to playwriting, screenwriting, those kinds of things.
Eventually she decided to go back. She found the angle on it that was really the thing she loved, and she's now been quite a successful screenwriter for the last 15 or 20 years.
This is an N of two, I get it, but I think there's something about allowing yourself to have permission to say, "I got the nature of my passion for this wrong."
There's still something I love, and I've never been far from the arts, from the creatives, et cetera.
It just happened that, by that discovery and going, "Okay, I don't love this," the next branch after working in the museum was to go work as the head of marketing communications for a performing arts college.
So now I could get back to the theater kids, the musicians, the opera singers, the dancers, and all of that.
This is where I started to figure out, "Ah, okay. I love the spirit of being around creatives and people of deep passions."
Because I happen to have this way with words, I happen to be somebody who travels between groups and can figure out how to take what one group is talking about and talk about it to another one.
Maybe I can really do something in helping people, in the case of the conservatory, understand what it is about this place that makes it amazing.
How can we talk about this place in such a way that the creatives, the artists who would fit best here, see that as early as possible, and we make that choice as easy as possible?
This is where it started to evolve a little bit.
I feel this way about ideas. If you love something enough, I believe you're willing to subsume your own ego attachment to it.
Could I have been successful as an artist in some way? I don't know. I don't think I could have been without the grit, and I didn't have the grit for it.
But I think it's about allowing yourself to consider that there might be another way.
If you're passionate enough about it or it's important to you, keep trying something until you're like, "Oh, this is the way I can do it."
Eventually, I found the thing that allowed me to stay connected to the kinds of people that I like, that gave me the freedom to engage with the creatives, artists, and art in the ways I wanted to, and feel like I was able to bring this different talent that didn't seem to be something everybody necessarily had.
By my deep development of that particular talent, I could help these people. That is still at the heart and soul of what I do.
Mike Zimmerlich: I can definitely see that, especially with what you're doing now. I can tell that you're so passionate about helping people and conveying information, and helping them not only be more productive, but have a better perspective on things.
I can definitely see how, throughout your entire career, that was very much a thread.
I also find it interesting because you mentioned being associated with other creatives and artists, but you also worked at an ad agency. So it was still in the creative field, but in a very different way.
Tamsen Webster: That's the thing.
Even when I was an arts kid, I was also the manager of the varsity boys baseball team.
I don't know if it's because I was a military kid or my mother was an anthropologist. I'm just super interested in people.
I'm interested in what makes them tick, not necessarily psychologically. I feel this way about places and spaces too.
I'm so interested in what makes this person special. They've got something. I've come to believe that everybody has something like that, so I engage any conversation, any time I meet someone, with, "Oh, I can't wait to figure out what it's going to be."
24:00 Communication and New Ideas
Tamsen Webster: Not that I'm trying to put them in a thing. I literally believe that everybody has something from which I can learn.
They've got something special. They've got some different way that they see the world. They've got some talent that could help unlock something for somebody somewhere.
I just love that.
How I ended up in arts higher education is more complex than the story we tell about it.
By this time, I felt like I had a tiger by the tail. There's an aspect of marketing and communications, which is a lot of the nature of where I started. When I was at the museum and at the conservatory, I was still very much focused on marketing.
Then that started to bridge into fundraising. When I was at Harvard Medical School, that was all fundraising communication strategy.
I kept seeing, back to that original definition of successful communication, I kept seeing it breaking.
In marketing and branding, I would see this gap between what a company or organization said it was and what my eyes and lived experience of it was.
I'm like, "You can't." People notice when what you say does not match with what you do.
So I was like, "Okay, let me figure that out."
I figured out a way when I was at the conservatory that felt like it was quite successful.
Even as I left the conservatory, I still had this idea that I wanted to stay in the arts or higher education. I knew I couldn't do that without understanding how to raise money.
So I was like, "Okay, I've figured out this piece of the puzzle. Let me move it over here."
How could I translate the power of this organization to somebody, not just in a, "Hey, here's what we're doing," way, but as an opening to, "Do you believe genuinely enough in us to literally put your money where your heart is?"
Eventually, I ended up at an advertising agency because I felt like I had figured pieces and parts of this out.
When I ended up at Allen & Gerritsen, this was very much the early days of social, community, those kinds of things. It was the late 2000s, and we were all trying to figure it out.
What I saw there, and what I was really interested in figuring out, was that these big brand messages were lovely when the primary mode of communication and helping people understand an organization was paid advertisement and PR.
But when you now had to sustain a content program day in and day out, these big monolithic statements did not translate into daily status updates.
So I was really curious. How do we connect those things?
How do we now take an idea and make it have enough built into it so that all the previous conditions apply? It's genuine, there's no gap, et cetera.
But now, how could we think about and understand that idea and these communications in a way that would sustain daily atomization and evolution of these ideas?
I don't know that that's necessarily where you thought we were going with that, but this one question I've been obsessed with for 35 years has been: How do we accelerate the understanding and adoption of new ideas?
New can be truly new and novel, which is how my work at Harvard Medical School, which was about the very cutting edge of scientific research and medicine, evolved into work with founders and startups, particularly in highly complex areas like green tech, regenerative agriculture, and things like that.
That question, every place that I've been and everything I've done has really been an opportunity to explore and test another angle on it.
Sometimes it's something that gets opened up because I felt like I solved one piece of it, and that led to another question.
Or sometimes it was, "Okay, I feel like I've got a working solution here. Now let me turn my attention over here."
I love this. This is the thing that I have been so passionate about in a way that I wish I had been about me as an artist, because it is the gift that keeps on giving.
I love it, and I love that it helps other people.
Something that Matt and I share is that, to me, the idea is the center of everything. People are channels for these other things.
That, to me, is everything. It never stops. Finding new and interesting ways to learn about it, help other people with it, translate what I know into something they can use, and just keep on going.
My wish is that everybody could find something like that for themselves.
I'm frankly envious of people who have that with their art. But I've come to understand that I just have a different art, and that's good.
Do I still have my other things? Sure. But this is the thing that gives me the most sustainable joy.
Mike Zimmerlich: I will say that I feel strongly that public speaking is a form of art itself.
You're conveying information, you have to be creative, you have to adapt. There are a lot of things involved when it comes to public speaking to really get your message across.
At the end of the day, what is public speaking? We'll get into this, but it's persuading others. That's the whole point, persuading others through your specific words and how you're conveying information.
It's how you're doing it and when you're doing it. It's all those things combined to make yourself an effective public speaker.
Tamsen Webster: Yes. Almost.
A couple different things.
My early exposure to marketing and to change management, which was my first job out of business school, gave me such a strong anti-coercive stance, and it just got stronger and stronger.
A lot of marketing and sales, either consciously or unconsciously, devolves into some form of coercion or manipulation.
My experience, and increasingly my research and understanding of the research that exists, is that that is counterproductive for long-term change.
My focus as a human, and it's another thing where Matt and I align, is on transformational change, by which I mean lasting change, not just, "Can I get someone to do something?"
There are lots of ways to do that. That, to me, doesn't set the bar high enough.
I don't wanna just get someone to do something. I want to enable and empower someone to do something themselves and to choose it, for it to be internally motivated.
As somebody who spent the first part of my career in wildly resource-constrained organizations, it didn't make business sense for me to do stuff that was focused on short-term action rather than long-term change.
If I could get someone to the conservatory, but under false pretenses, there's a whole story with that.
I'll skip it. Okay, I can't skip it.
Before I got there, there was a picture on the materials we'd send out to students that was the interior of a theater, but it was the interior of a theater that did not belong to the conservatory.
I'm like, "What? How was that okay?"
So what I would say, and this is where a lot of my research and study is now, is I became convinced as a practitioner that there was an avenue of communication that was missing, had disappeared, or was under-resourced or under-attended to.
It was a form of communication that gave people the right kind of information, enough information, in the right ways for that person to, with free and full agency, make a decision on their own that aligned with their desires and values.
34:00 Sense-Giving vs. Persuasion
Tamsen Webster: It turns out it exists.
It goes by a number of different names, but I am now a deep, deep believer in the one that I think is most intuitive for people to understand, which is known as sense-giving.
The way to back into what I mean by that is that sense-making is exactly what you think it is. How do I make sense of something?
The research shows, and I think a lot of us would agree, you can't be persuaded of anything that you don't understand.
If I can't make sense of it, then it's done. Dead.
Just understanding that helped me understand why I felt like so much advertising fails.
So much of it is trying to be so mysterious that if I literally can't make sense of what you are trying to sell me, I'm just gonna move on.
The research supports that too. When people can't make sense of something, they're repelled by it. They're not attracted to it.
So, again, back to this idea of how do we accelerate the genuine adoption of new ideas.
Sense-giving is: How do you make new information make sense to somebody else? Just make sense.
I am of the opinion, and this is where my doctoral research is focused, that there is, in fact, such a thing as transformational sense-giving.
Sometimes the right conditions exist between where somebody is and the information that's presented in such a way that they hear just the right thing.
In that moment, the process of making sense of what I am saying as a speaker, boom, instantly changes how they see not only that thing, but a lot of things.
I am obsessed with that because I think the world needs that.
I think the world needs information, if for no other reason than there are a lot of us who just don't like the idea of, "I'm here to persuade you. I'm here to get you to agree with me."
No. I don't wanna do that if it's just some form of compliance.
If I believe in something so strongly that I would be willing to stand up on stage when I had a panic disorder for 17 years and still talk to you about it, then I want you to believe in that as much as I do.
Not because you have to or you feel like you should, but because you cannot imagine anything that would make more sense to you.
So, to me, that is the highest bar that not just a speaker, but a communicator of any sort, is sense-giving.
To me, that is the great unexplored territory of communication, and I fully intend to explore it.
Because, to me, that is the central puzzle of creatives.
How do I take this thing that, in so many ways, I feel like I produce art out of my body?
For many artists, there are not words. Words come after the fact.
How do you make sense of that? How do you make that make sense to somebody else?
Well, first of all, you eventually have to put it into words.
To me, it's the last frontier of this question that has driven me from the beginning, because it is the hardest thing.
How do you take something that is not only new to somebody, but even something that didn't start with words?
Words will always kill it to some extent. Words will never be able to capture exactly what this is.
But goodness, we can try.
Words are often the way that someone hears something and goes, "Oh, I wanna go see that. I wanna go look at that. I wanna go experience that. I wanna go hear that."
It's the words that start it, and that's why I'm obsessed with it.
Mike Zimmerlich: I can see why.
It's very interesting because I feel like there's that balance. Again, I think it applies to everything.
When you're talking about the why, why should I care, or anything along those lines, I can talk to you all day about selling something.
If I'm selling you a product or trying to convince you to pay attention to what I'm doing, even the why part is challenging because, if you're pushing too hard as far as the why is concerned, that takes away that sense-giving aspect of it.
It still has to make sense to me.
Even if you tried to explain to me that it makes sense, I'm the only one at the end of the day who's going to say if this makes sense to me or not.
Tamsen Webster: That's right. Exactly right.
The why, it's not my why that matters. It's yours.
I can be coercive about that and say, "Okay, I'm gonna figure out what Michael wants about this, and I'm gonna anchor it to that."
But as humans, we can't sustain dishonest signals over time. We really can't.
Fellow humans are really attuned to those gaps, even instantly.
We know this from research that studies charisma because some of what drives the perception of charisma is actually no perceived gap. You just feel like this person is right there all the time.
One of my most foundational, formative jobs was actually a moonlighting job where I was a Weight Watchers leader for 13 years.
This is where so many of these ideas that I'm still chasing started because I can't shame you or coerce you into long-term behaviors that help you achieve whatever health goals you might have.
This may work for the short term, but if we actually want this to work, that's a whole different set of things.
What's more, the instant you think I'm trying to persuade you, all these additional defenses go up.
So part of me is just like, can we then just not even try?
Part of it is to say, "Listen, I'm gonna present what I believe as a belief, and I'm going to tell you why I think it makes sense to me. And if I would love for you to share that belief, I'm going to do the work to frame it in my best guess about why it might make sense to you as well."
That means I have to acknowledge that, if you're not doing that right now, if you're not on that side with me, I actually have to understand why whatever you are doing makes sense to you.
There's no way you are going to do anything that I believe in unless it makes more sense to you than whatever you're doing now.
That includes more sense in the fact that it doesn't feel like it's going to be a risk for you. It feels familiar enough that you think it's plausible. You don't feel like I am trying to do this to you.
There's so much about persuasion and a lot of those techniques, call it behavioral economics or whatever, and not all of it is bad, let me be clear.
But a lot of it has been co-opted in ways that, absent a non-coercive stance, we just don't have another alternative.
This is why I'm super passionate about it.
Honestly, it's all a belief.
One little personal hack that I use myself, and it helps keep me from getting too fired up about stuff too easily, is anytime somebody says something out of their mouth as if it's a fact, I just insert in my head, "I believe," in front of whatever they've just told me.
It doesn't mean that it is that way, but I also have to hold myself to the same standard or else it's not fair.
True sense-giving requires what's known as cognitive empathy, which is a skill. That's not an inborn thing.
It requires figuring out how you are thinking about something.
To your point about a why not being enough, a why needs to be there.
This comes down to how we make sense of the world.
One of the basic building blocks of making sense of the world is what we perceive to be causal relationships.
If this happens, then this happens. Or when this happens, then this happens.
Understanding a why is important because it's one part of that cause-and-effect relationship.
If I want this effect, then it brings whatever I might be recommending as the cause to create that effect, the action, into play.
But it's not enough.
With all respect for the people who've studied purpose and the Simon Sineks of the world, I can agree with the ends, but I can wildly disagree with the means.
There are some ends that may be wildly important to me, but they still do not justify certain means, in my point of view.
45:00 Why the How Matters
Tamsen Webster: In my practitioner work, my operating theory right now, my current view, is that it's as important that people understand the why behind the how.
Not just, "Why do I do this?" but, "Why do I do it this particular way?"
I think this is something that creatives are particularly in tune with for themselves.
They're particularly in tune with why this form and not that one, why this genre and not that one, why this approach and not that one.
There's something about the production of that art that is so deeply part of how they see the world that it's critical.
To me, that's the heart and soul not only of every idea, but particularly of getting the creation to make sense to someone.
I may not understand exactly what you did, but if I can understand why you approached it that way, I have a whole different appreciation for it.
People will look at a Mark Rothko painting, the color blocks on the wall, and they're like, "I could do that."
I'm like, "Well, actually, research shows that you really can't."
Or Jackson Pollock. People are like, "Oh, I could do that."
I'm like, "No, you can't. It's actually a fractal thing, and you as a human recognize the fractals, and you can tell when it's not a fractal."
When you understand what Rothko was interested in, he was interested in the play of color and the subtlety and how little you could put in there and still evoke a recognition of something.
What did it create in the viewer to have these subtle differences? What moods did it create?
Again, you don't have to like it.
But you can say, "Oh, I see what you were doing there."
Now you have a far different appreciation for it than you did before.
Last thing on this.
I had the unique and wonderful opportunity to see a private concert at Preservation Hall in New Orleans.
Oh my gosh.
They had someone who was a gorgeous sense-giver because he was able to describe how jazz works.
Someone asked him, "How did you figure out how to explain it?"
He's like, "I just learned over time what connected to people and what didn't."
He went around and explained, what's the role of the percussionist? What's the role of the piano player? What's the role of this horn? What's the role of this horn?
People listening could then understand how it is that these players don't have music in front of them and can play it differently every time, and still figure out together, without a conductor in front of them, when to move from one person to another and how to make it all make sense together.
I was just like, "Oh, gorgeous."
I happen to love New Orleans jazz. There are other forms of jazz I don't love as much to listen to.
But when I understand why someone does it that way, I have a different appreciation, and I can separate my own personal affection for it from appreciation.
Those are two different things.
When it comes to creatives, I think that's also interesting.
Sometimes all we want as creatives is respect.
Just respect my approach. Just respect my art.
You don't actually even have to like the output. Just respect that I went at it my way.
That's ultimately, no matter who I'm working with, what I'm trying to help them do.
What I'm trying to help do in my work is equip people to be able to do that sense-giving for themselves.
I don't think it's a gift. I think it's a skill.
That's important to me, particularly with people whose true talents lie outside of conventional words, that they have those tools so that more people connect with, respect, and appreciate their art.
Mike Zimmerlich: I really appreciate this because of combining the how and the why.
I was thinking about a common denominator amongst all of us.
You mentioned how attracted you were when someone was up on stage talking about jazz, conveying why it matters and explaining the roles that are in place.
It's not just that you like the medium. Because you're passionate about the medium, you want to understand how everything works.
To me, it's also like when you watch the behind-the-scenes of your favorite film, a concert being made, an event, a video game being made, or going into the recording studio.
There's a difference between liking something and having that passion aspect where I want to know not just why things are getting created, but how they're being made and the process involved.
Tamsen Webster: Yes. Me too.
51:00 AI and the Work Behind the Output
Tamsen Webster: I'm impressed that we got this far into the conversation without ever mentioning AI, but here it comes.
I'm fascinated by this because I think the tendency is to copy the outputs of things without understanding all that went into it.
When we just look at the production of something and say, "Well, here it is," you can be like, "Oh, I can reverse engineer from this and create something that's just like that."
I'm like, "Yeah, and there's still gonna be something kind of missing from it."
My husband has a deep appreciation for all kinds of music, which has been fun because it's introduced me to music I didn't know.
There's even a story he tells about one time I'm like, "This is Boards of Canada."
He was like, "Yes, it is."
It was on a channel with a lot of groups trying to sound like Boards of Canada.
But you can tell Boards of Canada from a group that's trying to sound like Boards of Canada.
It's kind of fascinating to me.
I see this particularly right now as I'm doing research for my doctorate.
There's a difference between reading a book chapter that someone wrote about their idea versus reading their whole book about why they do this this way.
You realize that the final product is so little of the actual product.
The part that you can see is so little of it.
I am of the opinion that you cannot get that same, quote-unquote, product without the same approach.
I think that's part of the reason why we're so fascinated by the behind-the-scenes stuff.
It gives us a better understanding of that unseen part that resulted in that thing, and you can start to see these other things from that perspective.
I mentioned it in passing, but that cool documentary called Tim's Vermeer, which I found out about through all the ways that random things connect.
Simon Sinek had posted something recently about how he'd seen it, and it made him have to rethink his love of Vermeer.
The documentary is produced by Penn and Teller, so I'm already like, "Sign me up. I'm very interested here."
And, B, Vermeer, whom I love.
It was about this friend of theirs who had made a lot of money as an artist, a videographer, and an inventor around videography.
He chased down this idea that Vermeer used mirrors and lenses to paint his paintings.
This guy came up with the idea that if he could recreate the mirrors and the lens setup, he could paint a Vermeer.
Spoiler, he does.
I don't even care that I can tell you that because what's so fascinating is, how did he do it? How was this guy passionate about it?
I may look at a Vermeer differently, but I have an even greater respect for it because, oh my gosh, that guy was an inventor.
This early use of technology to create a different kind of output that other people were making a certain way, I'm just like, "Ah, so interesting."
I love being able to understand, when it comes to ideas, why people hold a position.
Why do you hold that position?
I'm gonna start from the perspective always that it makes sense to you.
I know enough to know that it is one of the most common fallacies to believe that my view of the world is more informed or objective than yours.
That if we just gave you the right information, or if you don't share my opinion, somehow you must be lesser than in some way, less informed, less moral, less developed cognitively.
BS. That's complete BS in my mind.
This is why I'm endlessly fascinated by ideas and how we map that in a way that is visible to other people.
So much of our attachment to things, our understanding, our appreciation, our alignment, our advocacy for it, comes because of what I think are those deeper drivers.
They're not just motivational. Increasingly, I think they're principle-based.
I love a good why. You've already picked up on that.
I know that's partly associated with my particular blend of neurodivergence.
One of the things that I learned when I was a Weight Watchers leader was that this was part of the skill set I developed over time, over those 13 years, over those 3,000 sense-giving events.
How I thought about things, when I could articulate it, helped people of all sorts of persuasions and cognitive development understand the same idea.
Even complex ones. Even highly sophisticated ones. Even totally novel ones.
Even ones that would mean they would need to change something really different and difficult about what they did or how they saw the world.
But I saw it happen over and over and over again.
This is what drives my obsession with testing these hypotheses, because that's all I can call them at this point.
I can, quote-unquote, "know it," but again, I have to insert that I believe this is what happens.
This has been part of the joy of going back to school, which is understanding what I need to do to get something that, another favorite show, MythBusters, would call plausible, because I'll never prove it.
I can only say that it has not yet been disconfirmed.
Mike Zimmerlich: I really like that a lot. I love MythBusters.
They don't say confirmed. They say plausible.
It's possible. They can definitely disprove it and say, "Yeah, no, this can't happen."
Tamsen Webster: Absolutely.
They can say, "Disconfirmed. That absolutely can't happen."
But they can say, "It worked in this scenario. It seems to be possible."
That's all you can say.
I think that's simultaneously one of the most frustrating and empowering things we can understand about this wildly complex world that we live in.
That really is all you can say.
Even the facts are just facts based on how much we know right now.
I'm not talking about alternative facts. I'm talking about scientific facts, like the moon revolves around the Earth, those kinds of things.
They are facts.
But then there are people who question it. Whatevs.
I still wanna know why someone who doesn't believe that, why? How? How does that make sense to you?
Not necessarily because I know enough at this point to know that if I try to say, "No, no, no, you're wrong," that is a really good way to cement that belief within that person.
I really need to understand why they hold it first.
That's the only way.
Part of it sometimes is understanding the degree to which I am willing to exert effort to try to talk about why I believe something else.
I run into this a lot when I'm working with clients, particularly when you're dealing with folks of deep passions.
There was this woman whom I know and respect very much who is a PhD.
She was in academia. She left academia so that she could have more impact in the world.
To some extent, I think she tells the story that she became an entrepreneur on a dare because she studies reinvention and one of her students said to her, "How dare you talk to us about this and not do it yourself?"
Respect.
She recently talked to a professional speaker about how that speaker became successful.
She was seeking outside opinions, as scientists and academics tend to do, about how she could do what she does better.
This person said, "Well, you can't talk about your idea that way. You need to dumb it down."
There is very little way to get me more furious more quickly than to tell anybody, A, using an ableist expression, I've got a problem with that.
B, telling somebody who has a truly novel, sophisticated idea, "No, no, it needs to be different."
And then I really have a problem with it when you're a man saying that to a woman.
I'm not gonna go there.
The point is, sure, she could simplify the idea so that, in one perspective, you could say more people could understand it.
But those are different people.
The point that I made to her was that the difference was in the choice between using a word like "volatility," which is her word, and a word like "change," which was his word.
I was like, "Okay, yeah. You could go talk about volatility to people where change is about as sophisticated as they understand it, and you're gonna spend a lot of time trying to educate the market to understand volatility before you even get to start talking about your idea for addressing it.
"And there's a group of people who are already aware of the volatility aspect of change and driver of change, who are struggling with what to do with it, and they are looking for someone talking about volatility."
That's a choice.
When you understand that somebody holds a different opinion or point of view than I do, or they're not ready for the idea yet, you get to choose.
Sometimes I work with people whose calling, their art, is to educate the market up to the point of, "Hey, you think it's change. It's really volatility."
And there are people who are like, "Oh my gosh, I need to talk to the people who are like, 'It's about volatility. We gotta talk about that.'"
Just the way that ideas move through this world, there are already people who go, "I get what you're talking about with volatility, and I think these people who are thinking of it as change right now need to do that."
There's almost always somebody willing to take it up.
I think we see this in any kind of innovation in the arts or all sorts of different kinds of creativity, where somebody has that first novel idea, and they are rarely also the person who brings it out to the widespread.
We need degrees, not necessarily of creativity, but of amplification.
To me, the bridge is always the words in between.
01:03:00 Books, Research, and Final Advice
Tamsen Webster: This gets back to the words and back to where we started with communication. This is why I'm so obsessed with it.
Mike Zimmerlich: Speaking of which, I did want to make sure that we talk about the two books that you've written.
Tamsen Webster: Oh, yeah. Speaking of words.
Speaking of sense-making and sense-giving, I now realize in retrospect that the first one is definitely my attempt to externalize my own sense-making structure, a sense-making structure so that other people could use it.
Find Your Red Thread is about taking an idea, deconstructing it back into its narrative parts, since we use narrative as humans to make sense of things, so that you can express that idea, no matter what it is, to somebody else.
It starts with the why.
What were you trying to do? What was the question you're trying to answer? What did other people do? What did you think the problem was? What was the big realization that you had? How did that lead to the change and the novelty, the creative thing that you did? And then how does that show up?
The second book was a detour from what has become my doctoral research.
The second book was originally intended to be another sense-making structure that was more focused on reasoning.
How do we decide to agree with something in the first place?
I wasn't ready to write that book.
But I was frustrated enough with this whole bent toward persuasion, which, again, in the wrong hands can go to manipulation and coercion, that I wanted to plant a flag in the ground for another approach.
That was backed, at least at that point, by my level of understanding of the research. I understand it way more now.
So Say What They Can't Unhear, the second book, is really about the nine principles for, I would call it now, the nine arguments for sense-giving.
The nine things that we know to be true about humans, communication, motivation, and decision-making that warrant, that justify, a sense-making approach rather than a persuasive one.
It doesn't mean you can't still have a persuasive effect. Let me make sure that's clear.
The second book is really those principles.
It's meant to be an airplane book, as I like to say. You can pick it up, put it down. It doesn't take long to read.
But I really wanted to say, "Hey, this is, in a lot of ways, my manifesto to say there's another way. I don't think I'm wrong about this because there's a lot to support why this would work."
That has been part of the fuel that has taken me to my doctoral research, which is about what a novel idea requires to make an aha moment possible.
Mike Zimmerlich: That's truly amazing.
All right, so we can start wrapping things up here. I do have a couple of fun questions for you.
What was the last concert or film that you saw?
Tamsen Webster: Oh, geez. Oh my gosh.
The last actual concert that I saw was Elbow, I think. Yeah, I think the last concert I saw was Elbow here in Boston.
Mike Zimmerlich: Nice. Do you have a guilty pleasure? That can be a movie, a food, a television show.
Tamsen Webster: Oh my gosh. So many guilty pleasures.
Food guilty pleasure, ice cream. Oh, I still love ice cream so much.
And then guilty pleasure, I still love a good trashy romance novel.
I have read over 400 of them.
I try to be a little bit more sophisticated these days and read thrillers, but I've also discovered that my standard for writing is so much higher now that I need super high-quality chase thrillers.
When I get a crappy one, I'm like, "Ugh, you're wasting my time."
But yeah, I still love a good historical romance novel. It's good stuff.
Mike Zimmerlich: Last question for you. If you were only able to give one piece of advice, what would that one piece of advice be?
Tamsen Webster: Make it make sense.
Mike Zimmerlich: I love that.
Tamsen Webster: That's it. That's everything to me.
You just gotta make it make sense.
And I mean every interpretation of the word "sense."
I think one of the biggest discoveries, which in retrospect was not a discovery at all, but was kind of a removal of a block in my head, honestly came because I went to grad school and studied adult learning and the different perspectives that people have about how we come to know things, and how things eventually get converted into words and actions and things like that.
It's the role of the felt experience.
The way that I have summarized that lesson for myself is that there is nothing that the mind knows that the body didn't experience first.
One of the ways that we judge anything that comes to us new, experience, image, music, idea, person, is as much a felt thing as a known thing.
So when I say make it make sense, it's gotta make sense at every level, instantaneously, with nothing conflicting.
That sounds hard, but when you understand how things work and interact with each other, it's actually not that hard.
Which is, again, part of the reason why I'm so passionate about testing my working theories about these things and getting it out there.
But make it make sense.
It's the secret to a lot.
Mike Zimmerlich: Well, thank you so much, Tamsen, for being on the show. I really do appreciate it.
We'll make sure in the show notes there are links to your books and everything like that.
It's been an absolute pleasure. I love this conversation so much. It's just so fascinating talking about this.
Thank you so much for being on the show.
Tamsen Webster: Oh, my pleasure. What a lovely, lovely conversation it was, and that's a testament to you, Michael, so thank you for that.
Mike Zimmerlich: Oh, thank you.