#256 Nicole F. Roberts: From Neuroscience to Generosity—Changing Lives, One Detour at a Time — Part Two

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Hi everyone! Well... Hi, everyone.

Welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer.

I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host.

Our show is a modernist community for change progressives in organizational and human transformation

from around the world. Today, we are diving into the No Strict Lines journey of Nicole Roberts.
Nicole is a doctor of public health, co-authoring a business book called Generosity Wins with a seasoned CEO, Monty Wood, who happens to be one of our guests on the show. Nicole once paused her PhD to start a human rights firm.
Just to give you a sense of how things go, in this two-part series, we talk about what happens when you let purpose guide your work instead of a perfect plan. We get into the science behind generosity.

How real human stories shaped her book.

And why the best leaders know when to ditch the rule book.

And she also helps run a brain summit every year during the Super Bowl.

So this conversation goes places. Let's jump in.
Now, going back to your book, Generosity Wins. what brought you in the very first place to write something like this and with Monty as your co-author? So I had always wanted to write a book and not for the sake of writing a book.
It's because I just I had ideas. I've actually outlined, I think, three books at this point, like full outlines.
And I took one of them. So I've written healthcare for Forbes, maybe like 14 years now.
I feel like that really ages me, but I've written for Forbes for a very long time. And it started with Forbes because they launched a book line.
And of course, they started with some of their longest running writers who they had written columns and columns. And so, you know, would you be interested in writing a book? Here's our book line.
Here's what we're going to do. And so I submitted my first big idea to them.
And they were very helpful, helped with my my first outline we started the process and i was told then no one buys health care books for all of them and it's true the data validates that people will buy books that are like longevity right because it's a bit more in the self-help category but books on on actual like health care, how to fix the system, our social determinants of health. People are not interested.
And so I had always wanted to do it. But I had I won't say I got rejected because we now live in a space where you can self-publish.
You can pay to play. Right.
Like you can pay and someone will publish for you. I could have pushed it forward, but I just thought if there's not an appetite for it, why spend time and money? I really, especially because I was in graduate school, didn't have to force something.
It just didn't feel right. And then I had this wonderful experience where actually one of those people that I had known from the Forbes world was no longer there they were working for a different publisher and they reached out and said there's someone I really want you to meet he's writing a book he's thinking about a co-author because he wants someone who has a different perspective.

And he said, I'm going to put a few people in front of him.

And he probably said this to everybody, but he said, I'm going to put a few people in front of him that I know.

But I think you're one.

I think you two just would work so well together.

And he said, I know you're deeply passionate about what he wants to do and that was it he said can I

just make an introduction and set up a zoom call and I said okay but I had no idea I was like what I want to do what does that mean and I met Monty Wood and Monty he had me not at hello but about five minutes in he had me and he had this premise for a book that he was calling Attract Success. I don't know if he told you this part.
I actually intentionally, I was going to listen to his episode. And then I thought, no, I don't want to because I don't want to.
It's like being biased. But he had this book idea.
It was called Attract Success. But his premise was when you put good out into the world, when you are generous, particularly because he is a business expert.
Monty is the go to guy and mentor for business.

and but that when you genuinely hear about and give of yourself to your colleagues to your teams to your family to people they will give back to you and what they will give back to you

will propel your success, whether it's in the business or it's in your family life. And so the premise for him was to attract success.
To be successful, you actually have to give. And that was the key.
To receive, you must give and you should give first and freely of yourself. It can't be transactional.
Otherwise, it's not really giving. And so he had me right at that premise.
I'm like, absolutely. And I said, there's plenty of science to back this up.
I said, what you're not going to be able to find that I know of is real literature and data to show the ROI.

You can't show in data points. You can't show karma.
Yep. Yep.
And so I say, this is a really tough thing to think about from a science perspective. And I slept on it.
We talked. And then it hit me that I needed to stop thinking about all these different things.
I was like, public health is what I know, and, you know, neuroscience. And so I took this different lens, and I said, someone we have to talk to is named Beth, and I told them all about Beth, and I said, she's the person I would go to ask a bunch of these neuroscience questions about.
It's not just job, career, business. It starts in here.
When we give, what happens? We know the dopamine, the oxytocin. You get like a runner's pie, like those sorts of things.
But then that cascade event, because it actually improves your health. People who are truly generous have marriages that last longer.
Like they're literally healthier and happier. The Harvard study is almost 100 years old now.
The happiness study, it shows consistently, right? People who are kind and few live longer. And so I said, okay, there's something here.
Let me live in my space. And Monty and I each brought our parts of the equation together.
And then something really cool happened. We worked on what does the outline look like? What does the book read? Is it a self-help thing? Is it like a business? climb the mountain the things felt exactly right they all felt like they were circling around the answer but none of them were like that's it we got it and then it bent and the idea was presented to us and we went yeah we get it and it was let's do something that i don't think has ever been done before, which is always scary, especially in the publishing world.

They don't love the let's do this.

They love fake.

They love fake.

Yes.

Yeah.

And it said, why don't we write a business fable?

Who moved my cheese?

Some of those classics.

But you keep talking about all these people that you want to talk to and interview. So why don't we use the real people? And it's an easy read.
In fact, I've had multiple people tell me they knocked it out in two days. Yeah.
Like they'd started on a plane and then they'd finish it last day. Because it's a story.
It's a story about a woman named Emily and she thinks things are great in her career. They're not going going.
She thought it's a hard lesson, but she's sent on this sort of work mission. And along the way, she is tasked with interviewing people and she then discovers what like her real purpose is.
And anyway, I won't give away at the ending. So it's an easy read, but every person that Emily meets along the way is a real person.
And what we did is we added a QR code at the end of each chapter. So you can, it literally takes you to their LinkedIn page.
So you can actually meet, talk to all the people who are in our book. It's a little longer than 15 chapters, but 12 interviews.
I had actually played around as well with the idea that there are 12 months in the year maybe we do like a curriculum and each month is grounded in one person's because we have a neuroscientist a behavioral scientist we have an educator we have right a philanthropist we like the people interview, we chose them specifically because they are the most, I really can't underscore this.

They are the most thoughtful, talented, generous individuals.

Some we knew before, which is why we said, oh, I know.

I know the neuroscientists we need to talk to. Mon said i know the philanthropists we need to talk to others were brought to us others we went out seeking because i treated it again this monty and i approached it very differently in the end i treated it like my dissertation i had a whiteboardboard and I had a spreadsheet and I had every chapter's name and I had chosen one or two themes that I thought were so unique to that interview.
Things that no one else said or did. And then I had things that everyone said or did.
And so earlier I used the word karma. every interview people used i think only one or two people actually used the word karma but they

used a synonym of like how things come back to you. The ripple effect of like people.
And so that I knew we were really onto something there. And so that would then send me on the next sort of iteration of my quest, which is if every person, people who do not know each other, people who are all wildly successful in their very different definitions of success and lives, all say these same five things, I need to learn more about those five things.
Let's dig into those things. And so for me, even laying out the interview process, because we wanted Emily to grow and learn and so it was that part I also found fun because we had sticky notes and we were moving them around but well she meets this person wouldn't it be fun if she then got to take that lesson and go talk to so-and-so and yeah that part even now thinking about it like it brings a smile to face.
I really enjoyed that creative part of how do we tell this story through a young woman's eyes as she's learning and growing and at times feeling really disappointed and let down. and that was it was a very fun way to do the book i think are very very happy with the outcome

and the number of people who reach out, send emails, they've brought me to tears of someone saying, I want to start doing X every day or Y every day. Or one of them, a man emailed and he works in a hospital.
And he said, I started saying thank you every day to someone different. And he was saying the most impactful were especially the janitorial, the cleaning staff at the hospital.
He would stop people he had never met. Like a woman one day was washing the windows and he just said thank you.
And he stood and talked to her and she was like, no one says thank you for that. you for that he said people are scared many times they're nervous when they come to the hospital especially in this hospital and he said you keep it clean the light shines through these windows like by what you do it makes their lives better it makes what we have to do here better, easier.
And he said they both ended up in tears because someone had noticed what might look like a menial task, but that it had a huge impact on the hospital, on the staff, on the patients. And for him to then learn about her and her family.
Anyway, it was just this email I was just in tears and he was like it's because every day I've decided to just say thank you it's a small act but I just stop one person and say thank you for doing this thank you for doing that and he said it led to some wonderful relationships and he now feels like he knows everybody in the hospital and he knows about them and their children.

And it's just, he said his life is better.

Let me say this.

When I interviewed Monty,

he shared a lot from his business background.

His work with some major players,

real tech titans.

And he said things like, Vince, I saw them literally do this, build that.

You could really feel impact through his stories.

What's due out was how he brought a business lens to everything.

And now, with you bringing in the science angle, I think the two of you really complement each other.

Thank you. everything.
And now, with you bringing in the science angle, I think the two of you really complement each other. Since Monty had that business focus, and I come from a business background too, having studied at Chicago Booth, I naturally asked him about something really the serpent the ROI of generosity.
Love it. Ever since I first learned the term ROI, it was in a finance class, of course.
We did all the usual calculations. But generosity, that isn't something you can pluck into a formula.
You can't always measure it. Or maybe you can somehow monitor it in a different way.
That's why when Monty bought it off, this idea of generosity having a ripple effect, it really landed for me. Honestly, I buy that concept.
I've seen it play out in my own life and career. Doing things with no expectation, and then somehow more opportunities, more trust, more value come back around.
So I definitely believe in it. But putting it into a business context, trying to tie generosity to metrics, that's where it gets tricky.
I asked Monty about it directly. If ROI is what we track in business, how do you track or even explain the ROI of generosity? You are not coming from the business world, but you know how strong this concept is in business.
How do you think about measuring or recognizing the return on generosity? That's a great question, by the way. And I love when people do ask us the same question, because this gets to what we started the conversation about, which is you'll never get the same answer.
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You did bring up something very quickly, and I'm answering your question, but you brought up something, and thank you, which is we, when we were looking at the definition of generosity, so often, particularly here in the United States where we live, it was the definitions and examples were related to donor dollars, philanthropy, giving, writing of a check. Yep.
And that is not, you can be very generous with your treasurer, but your time is certainly the most valuable thing that you have. Talent, your skills, mentorship.
What we found is those are much more rewarding in terms of being generous. But you said you do it with no expectation.
And so I just wanted to quickly say when we wrote the book, we redefined generosity. And the definition that we had is any act of kindness or support given with no expectation of exchange or return from the recipient.
It truly is a gift. If you give it, it is then out of your hands.
If you give expecting something, one, you're probably going to be disappointed. Two, you've now made it transactional.
And as humans, we know when something is transactional. Our BS meter can be hit and miss sometimes, but for the most part, we inherently know when someone is being authentic or genuine.
And we know when someone is listening because they care about us versus I'm going to listen to you for a minute and then I need you to do this for me. I'm only doing this because I want something from you.
We know when people aren't being authentic and we don't engage in the same way. We don't build trust.
You have to trust and relationships come from being generous, even if it's as simple as listening, giving someone your time, giving them your energy. And so I just wanted to bring up that definition, but it also brings me to that ROI.
What I have found is, and we heard this from a lot of people that we interviewed, and I've heard it from a lot of people since, but again, in different ways. Everyone has different examples.
But when you truly invest in others, their successes become your successes their work ethic their relationships the relationship you have with them all these things grow I can tell you in my experience there's work there's one particular example that comes to mind immediately but I I won't use names, but I knew someone very not well at all. And it was a husband and wife and they were older.
And there were things that I did and volunteered and said yes to that were a giant pain in the butt. But I felt like it was the right thing to do.
And I worked well past what I should have. And I really thought like nothing came of it.
And I was like, that's okay. I want to say five or six years later, one of them reached out and said, hey, there's an opportunity.
And we recall not only the way that you stepped up and gave of yourself when you were needed, and it wasn't expected, but we've also through LinkedIn or what, like, we've monitored your career.

We've been so impressed by this and this. And when someone told us about this opportunity, you were the first person we thought of to recommend, would you be open to?

And it led to the next thing.

It opened this door that I didn't even know existed,

but it was because I put good out and it was honest and I didn't expect anything. Thought it was a complete waste of time.
Not a waste of time, but you know what I'm saying? Like in terms of, there was no tangible ROI. There was no, I did this, I got this in return.
I was compensated in this way.

I was, but what it did is it put what we call a spirit, like a spirit of generosity. And I tried to live that way before we even defined it in the book.
And I have found that it does come back. It comes back in ways you don't expect.
You cannot measure it with, I gave $5, so I expect $10 back. It may look like volunteering for something and a job opportunity comes out of it or a recommendation or I met this person and you two need to meet.
and it may become the person you marry you build a business with with, you just become friends with. I don't know.
I think network and introductions are some of the greatest forms of ROI. Speaking from my own experience, there are so many stories like that.
One great example is actually this show. I've never asked any guest to refer someone else, not once.
Every guest who comes on, either I invited them or they reached out to me. My only focus is creating the best possible experience for them, making sure the episode is meaningful, smooth, and enjoyable.
What happened? More and more guests have told me they genuinely enjoyed the experience. Afterwards, they will say, hey Vince, I actually know someone who would be a great fit for your show.
One guest even referred five new guests, completely unfronted. No commission, no referral fee, no expectations.
It's not transactional. It's just a natural return, if I can use this word, that comes from being a generous, thoughtful host.
That's the ripple effect you were talking about. You put forth yourself.
You ask thoughtful questions. You give, I can now say 50 minutes in, a fun, great experience, that speaks volumes.

And people naturally, and Montu did it. He chatted with you and he said, I had the most delightful conversation and told me all about it from his perspective.
And so that's why, again, as you said, when you reached, I was like, heck yeah, I want to talk. Cool.
Great. I heard such wonderful things about you.
It's absolutely, I think that's a good point to make because it can be hard to say, I did this and then they gave back. That doesn't make it transactional.
It genuinely came from a place of interest and passion and that person received it and they gave it to someone else. It really is just a series then of generous acts.
The approach you talk with the book is unusual for a business book. Interviewed real people, experts from different areas.
But then you built a story around a fictional character, Emily. Why that choice? Why bring in a fictional element in a nonfiction-based setting? And I'm also curious, why Emily? Why a female character, not a male one? Was there a particular reason behind that decision? Her boss, who becomes her mentor, isn't real real either and the hotel chain isn't real we chose emily works in hotels very high-end hotels and the reason for that was we thought hospitality was the place to set this because it is about giving and meeting people's needs and doing it selflessly and so we chose hospitality.
Anyway, when we created Emily, there wasn't a discussion about gender or anything like that. I think, I wonder how much was subconscious in a sense because Monty's a little older than I am.
And I now certainly think of him as not only a friend and colleague, but a mentor. And I think there was maybe an inherent bias in both of us of that dynamic of someone older and someone younger learning.
We did have a couple of discussions about her age. And that I think, again, I don't think gender had anything to do with it.
I think it was more of, we want someone who is at a place in their career where they are respectable, they're believable, they've worked hard, they're ready to advance so they have enough experience that they want to, they're eager to learn and still do, but they're not so far along in their career that it doesn't make sense to go on this learning journey. And so we decided it needed to be someone about 30, late 20s to early 30s.
So that she had gone to hospitality school. She had worked for five or six years in this company and then so we actually we spent i think more time thinking about where she would be in that trajectory of her life and what made sense of how long would she have been working here because you can't give someone like an svp title and they've been out of school for four years.
No, we didn't.

But she is a, we'll say, ballpark 30, 30-year-old woman. And her mentor is an older gentleman.
I don't think we gave him an age person. But he's president of a major hotel experience and very wise.
and is in a position to give thoughtful people opportunities, but also to tell her where she's misstepped and where she didn't put people first. And our interviewees, we made sure we're all over the place in terms of, like I said, even how they measure success is very different.
In the end, I saw two gaps and those are two people we went in search of and I think we found the right two people. But one was, and I know we are short on time, but the two areas that I saw that we needed to hear from someone was in education.
And the reason I say education is because one question that we asked everyone, and I didn't feel like we had gotten a really good answer, was about can you teach someone to be generous? Especially people who have not grown up in an environment that was generous to them. And they lived in families or households or communities where people aren't working from a place of generosity.
Can you teach that? And so it was wonderful to find, we told people what we were looking for and it took a look going, I know exactly. And it's someone who had built schools for boys.
And most of these boys come from cities and neighborhoods where generosity was not a way of life for them or the people that were raising them. And the remarkable stories about the unity and the brotherhood and the kindness and the generosity that these boys exhibited really showed us that you can teach people.
But they have to see it. You have to demonstrate.
and you have to give them grace and be generous with them to help foster that. And so that one, and then one in, they came from a place of grief.
And I said, it's easy for people who haven't lost everything to talk about being able to give. And I said, I really want to sit with someone who the well was just dry.
And how did you find, because to me, that's when you really have a spirit of generosity. If you can find a place in you to be truly genuine and generous with people when you are packed out, then it's natural to you.
It's not something you can use when you've got it. And so we did

talk to a woman who I just adore, who had suffered great loss. And her story was so touching.
And in

fact, her story is the one, I think it was the very last interview we did. And it is the one I've

gotten the most outreach and feedback on. Let's come full circle to end our conversation.
You mentioned that your longtime interest has been neuroscience. And every year, you produce a summit focused on brain health.
I'll admit, I don't know much about this event, so I'd love for you to walk us through it. It's called Brain Summit.
It happens around the Super Bowl weekend, which is interesting. And yes, athletes deal with serious brain health issues due to the nature of the sport.
But it's not just about them. Brain health is something that matters to everyone.
So tell us more. What's the role in this event? What are you hoping to achieve, not just with the summit, but overall? What's the bigger mission behind your work in this space? Yeah, I do this annual event that is, for me, it fits perfectly under the umbrella of things, but it is a little off the wall.
So I, 12 years ago, along with Lee Steinberg, and I'll tell you briefly about Lee, but started the Brain Health Summit at the Super Bowl. So every year in the host city, I get to live there for a week and host the day before the Super Bowl, this Brain Health Summit.
So essentially, speaking of generosity, so Lee Steinberg is an agent and he is, people call him the real Jerry Maguire, his basis for the movie Jerry Maguire. I think at one point he had half the starting quarterbacks in the NFL.
So it's basically just like his team's playing his team or his clients playing his clients. Anyway, Lee is one of the literally the most generous human beings on this earth.
And he and I met at the UN many years ago. And I didn't know who he was.
And of all silly things, we found out we had the same birthday, which in our book, we were like, oh, so we're friends. Great.
Yeah. Yeah.
Birthday to him. And what we ended up doing is he did, again, the most generous thing, especially to someone younger in their career, not in sports.
He said, I used to do these concussion summits and I'd bring my athletes. And he called it his crisis of conscience.
He said, I have guys who have won the Super Bowl and don't remember being in the host city. And these are our clients, our friends, like our colleagues.
And we have to have honest and hard conversations because we love the sport of football. It's not going away.
So how do we make it safer for the people we love? It came from such a genuine place and concern for the people he loves. And he gave me, literally gave, he gave me the opening hour of his annual Super Bowl party and said, do good.
He challenged me to do good. And so I created the Brain Health Summit is what I call it.
It's vague enough that every year in the host city, we can lean into the city and what's going on in the world. And so every year, the theme changes, the city changes.
This year, the Super Bowl is in new orleans and so our entire party the brain summit and the broader steinberg super bowl party theme is music and the mind oh we have rented out the new orleans jazz museum wow and so everyone who comes to the party not only gets to be in a very haunted by the way museum in new orleans the birthplace of jazz but they also get to do a full array of programming from super cool like hutchy like exhibits and activations of neuroscience and music and the power of music to literally change your brain to a party.

It is a party. And then to the red carpet, the celebrity, all this stuff.
And we do humanitarian awards and recognize people who are truly having an impact in the world. And this year, obviously, we'll be honoring people in sport, but people in music.
And what it does is, to me, it essentially is the ultimate culmination of my dissertation. Honestly, going back to, I wrote a dissertation on how to build public-private partnerships.
And we, to me, that is what this is. We get to bring people together, as I see it, that would otherwise never have an opportunity to be together, to talk, to mingle, to ask questions.
and so you have retired NFL players showing up to ask these neuroscientists questions to try out new technologies we have cool startup companies with big ideas that may get in front of somebody who says we want to fund that clinical trial or we love the work you're doing we'd love to see x or y and it gets a lot of these people with big ideas in front of media which for better or worse it makes a difference because you can have all the big ideas in the world if you can't explain it if you can't get the message out it doesn't go anywhere and so the power of what lee and his platform can do for people in healthcare and science and philanthropy is just, it's undeniable.

And I still 12 years in have a hard time wrapping my head around it.

But it's fun.

It's a pain.

It's hard.

As Lee says, we have 5,000 of our closest friends come.

It's a big lift, but we have a wonderful production team. Lee knocks it out of the park every year.
It's invitation only, but you can find me. You can find me.
Next year is San Francisco, and we are going to use the power of sport and neuroscience. And next year's theme is going to be around the environment.
Great. Then I need to start planning for this trip for next year.
The good news is the NFL has a very predictable schedule. Second week of February, San Francisco.
That would be, by the way, that would be my birthday because my birthday is the middle of February. Then that's a birthday treat for you.
Absolutely. Next year, I'll lock down and thank And thank you again, Nicole.
Both you and Monty have been incredibly generous with your time, your energy, your honesty. It really means a lot.
And I genuinely appreciate how open and thoughtful you've been throughout this entire conversation. him.
And yes, we overran a bit, but it was totally worth it. This was such a fun and inspiring conversation.
And anything else you need, just ask how to reach me. And that brings us to the end of this series.
Nicole's journey is proof that you don't need a perfect plan to make a real impact. You just need purpose, a little courage, and a lot of listen.
Whether it's neuroscience, generosity, or hospitality, her work reminds us that generosity isn't fluff. It's the talk and the work in life and career.
Thank you so much for joining us today. If you like what you heard, don't forget, subscribe to our show, leave us top-rated reviews, check out our website, and follow me on social media.
I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host.

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