Steve was hard-charging - relentless, even - but a conversation with him took you places you didn’t expect. It forced you not just to defend but also to engage. And that in itself, I came to believe, had value.

One thing that struck me about Bob was that he preferred asking questions to holding forth - and his queries were incisive and straightforward. Something unusual had been built at Pixar, he said, and he wanted to understand it. For the first time in all the years that Pixar and Disney had worked together, someone from Disney was asking what we were doing that made our company different.

These days, I’m wary of seemingly simple incentive rules that promise amazing results. They are rarely simple, and often leave collateral damage. Usually, a better option is to have a frank discussion about what we should value and why. Why should we care about exploring more designs early on? Why should we aim to speed up engineering velocity? Once people understand and buy into those values, they can make the best decisions on how to apply them.

Rather than taking the default approach, or thinking about what one should do, the researchers asked them to think about what they could do instead.

This simple shift made a big difference. People who thought about what they could do came up with much better solutions. They were higher quality and three times as creative. Rather than getting bogged down in which of two imperfect options was best, asking people to think

about what they could do encouraged them to bring a different mindset to the problem.

Lots of people will be ready to give you advice on your life. Be very careful about that. Counsel is entirely different. Counsel is always helpful. You can never be too clear on your own thinking. You can never get too good a grasp of your own best wisdom and insights. Finding someone who can give you good counsel and who regularly leaves you in a clearer and more settled state of mind is a great asset. This is where good mentors shine. We would say that all legitimate mentoring is centered on giving counsel. Counsel invariably begins with lots of questions aimed at accurately understanding you, what you’re saying, and what you’re going through. Good counselors will often seem to ask the same question a couple of times from different points of view, to be sure they’re getting it. They will often try to summarize or restate something you’ve said and ask, “Did I get that right?” This approach tells you that they’re focused on you—not on themselves.

The value of mentors’ life experience when they are giving counsel lies not in borrowing what facts or answers they know but in accessing the breadth of their experience and their objectivity, which helps them to help you to see your own reality in a new way.