Manu Kapoor (6:08)

Thank you, Dan. It's lovely to be here.

Dan Harris (6:10)

It's lovely to have you here. I think it's probably appropriate to start with your personal story. What brought you to this notion of productive failure?

Manu Kapoor (6:21)

Well, life basically was, as I said, the dots connect looking back. So I wasn't thinking of doing something like that. But you know, as a teenager I wanted to play football, which is soccer, right? So not American football, the real football. And I was, you know, training to become a professional player, but a knee injury got in the way and then I had to completely pivot my plans to doing, you know, my bachelor's degree, engineering. And by the end of that, I was sure that that's not something I wanted to do. And then I delved in the startup world. This was back at the turn of the millennia where it was the dot com boom, which very quickly turned into dot com doom, as you may remember. A quick stint in the industry and then I started teaching math to low income students. And that's where I really fell in. Not just, I mean, I could always do math, but more on mathematical cognition. So how do people understand math concepts and so on and so forth. And that led me to pursue my doctorate in the learning sciences to really think about the mechanisms of how a mind comes to understand something new. And that's when I started connecting with literature. And something didn't add up because everybody was saying if you don't know something, so if, Dan, you don't know something, a concept in math or something, then I should just explain it to you very clearly, very logically. And that's the best way to teach you what that new concept is. Except there was a fair enough body of Research suggesting that may not be the most optimal way of learning something new. And so I just turned it on its head and said, well, if success is not the way to learn something new, then maybe failure is. And that finally led me to the question, well, if failure can be compelling for learning, if it's so intuitive that we can learn from our errors and mistakes, then why should we wait for failure to happen? What if we could deliberately design for it when you're about to learn something new in a safe way, and then bootstrap that for deep learning? And that's how the whole program started in productive failure.

Dan Harris (8:22)

So it required some failure in your own life that landed you in this position to have this insight.

Manu Kapoor (8:30)

Yeah, I mean, looking back, that definitely seems to be the case. One explanation for why I landed on something like productive failure was my journey itself. At each point, it punctuates it, and therefore it makes you even more primed to pick up something like that or conceptualize something like that, but not going forward. I mean, the forward journey was anything but as designed. Yeah.

Dan Harris (8:52)

So the basic thesis of productive failure is instead of what's, I think, called direct instruction, where I'm explaining something to you, if I'm trying to teach you.

Manu Kapoor (9:03)

Yeah.

Dan Harris (9:03)

And which is the traditional mode of teaching and learning, you design an experience so somebody can mess something up. And in the process of messing something up, then you really learn.

Manu Kapoor (9:16)

Yeah. That prepares you to learn. Productive failure is only for the initial learning, when you first come to understand a new concept or an idea or a strategy or something like that. Right. And there the idea, as you said, instead of just telling you what it is, direct instruction, we design challenging activities that are intuitive yet inaccessible. So you feel that you can attack them, you can do something, you can generate some ideas, some solutions and so on, but the way that we design them is that none of your ideas or solutions are going to work. In other words, you will try something and you say, oh, that doesn't work. And you try something else and you say, oh, that doesn't work either. And if you do three, four, five or such things, five failures. And having explored that, then when you are given the correct knowledge, the correct explanation or the correct feedback, that contrast between your failed methods and the correct information, that's what creates powerful learning, as opposed to just giving you the correct information without this initial exploration, that leads to failure.

Dan Harris (10:25)

So it's important that you design, and we'll get into how we can apply this in our own lives, but it's important that you design experiences that are guaranteed to lead to failure. Because if you design an experience where I succeed, I'll actually learn less.

Manu Kapoor (10:41)

Not so much as learn less. I guess you could say learn less because the power of learning from the suboptimal or the failed solutions is greater. So, yes, if you have an early convergence towards success, your desire to go beyond just basically goes down. It's like, okay, I've got it already. There's nothing else to do. Right. Whereas if you are constantly trying to figure out because things, your methods are not working, that's what's setting you up to learn the correct method.

Dan Harris (11:08)

Well, I teach people basic meditation all the time. And basic meditation is failure is built in or quote, unquote, failure is built in. People feel like they're failing. And I try to reframe that as success. You try to focus on something, you get distracted. That getting distracted doesn't mean you suck at meditation. That is meditation. So how would I apply this insight around productive failure to my instructions around meditation?

Manu Kapoor (11:37)

Yeah. So again, I don't know. If you give your students, you know, an instruction first in how to meditate and then you get them to do it, then you're probably following some kind of, okay, here's a scheme to follow, and then this is what you do. Whereas maybe you can just start them off with, okay, let's try to meditate as best you know, and without giving them any pointers or tips initially. And then you see what they do. And different people may come up with different strategies, they may reach different roadblocks, they may have different kinds of distractions that they have to deal with. And once you've gathered all of that, then you introduce the tips to somehow mediate or navigate those roadblocks or distractions. And chances are they will then pick those up or understand or be able to learn how to meditate in the right way a lot faster. But there's one thing that you said that you already do is in the moment when people are engaging in productive failure, we don't tell them that you suck or you fail. The goal is to normalize that struggle, is to normalize that failure and say, this is what's going to happen because you're trying something that you haven't mastered yet. If you had already mastered it, you wouldn't need to learn it. But because you're in that zone where whatever you're trying is above your current skill sets and abilities, you're going to be frustrated, you're going to be distracted, you're going to feel failure, and all of that is normal. The important thing is that you keep trying.

Dan Harris (13:03)

So in specifically as it pertains to meditation, you're saying that I might tell people, hey, for a minute, whatever you think meditation is, do that. And then they're likely to struggle. And then I'll say, okay, so tell me about what you experienced. And now try this.

Manu Kapoor (13:20)

Yeah, exactly.

Dan Harris (13:22)

And there's something about failing and overcoming, you say, that leads to, and these are your words, a mastery orientation.

Manu Kapoor (13:29)

Yeah. Because once you try something by yourself, as long as it's a safe space within which you can try, and I imagine your meditation studios are exactly those safe spaces. Right. Once you try something and it doesn't work, your motivation to understand why that thing didn't work and what is the correct way to make it work. Those two things happen at the same time. And you want to know not just that something works, but why does it work? And that's mastery orientation. Achievement orientation is, I just want to get it done. You know, I don't need to understand it, I just want to get it done. Whereas mastery is, no, no, just getting it done is not important. Just going out your meditation studio, having done it is not important. I need to understand why dance strategies or dance tips actually worked. And when I tried it myself, it did not. It's that question, why that leads to mastery orientation.

Dan Harris (14:25)

You write a lot about the neuroscience of curiosity. Why is curiosity such a powerful mental factor?

Manu Kapoor (14:33)

Yeah, because it's tied to emotions. And there are many ways of, you know, raising curiosity. And of course, many people think that curiosity is something that people have or don't have or have it to different degrees. And I tend to think curiosity as an interaction between a person and the environment. So in some environments, the same person would be a lot more curious because there are things that intrigue them. And one of the very powerful ways of designing for curiosity is to give people failure experiences. Because when you fail again, you want. You're curious, then why did my method does not work so that curiosity and it's then tied to emotion, so your limbic system gets activated, because emotionally you're feeling frustrated or a little stressed or even a little anxious, even though it's a safe space. You may even feel bad about yourself that you were not able to carry it out or produce anything that worked. But that activation of the limbic system is very important because that then tells your attentional networks, hey, pay attention here. This is important. I couldn't do it. I felt bad for not being able to do it, and I want to know why. So attentional networks are activated which then tell your processing power to overcompensate. Please process this information that comes up next to deeply understand what is it and why is it the way it is. And so you just emotionally supercharge your attention and processing to learn from that failure because you experienced it yourself. And curiosity drives that experience.

Dan Harris (16:06)

Is all failure good?

Manu Kapoor (16:08)

Great question. No, so we're only talking about failure, that is in the initial learning. So when you first come to, you know, learn something new, we are not saying failure in high stakes situations such as exams or tests or other places where you really at work, where you really need to perform or get that project out or perform that surgery, land a plane, whatever, right? Where failure in those situations is not desirable. But here's the logic of productive failure. It's the idea that if you use failure in a safe way when you first learn something new, then it helps you learn that thing in deep ways. That when you apply it later, when the stakes are high, the possibility of failure is lower. So use early and a safe way to learn deeply so that you can reduce the likelihood failure when it really matters. So no, all failure is not the same. One is desirable, the other one is not. Right.

Dan Harris (17:04)

So with this kind of failure, the productive failure, it's almost like an inoculation.

Manu Kapoor (17:08)

Yeah, and inoculation is a great analogy because if you look at the vaccination logic, it's exactly that. You deliberately introduce a small piece of foreign germs, small quantity of foreign germs into your body. The body tries to fight it, but it is not able to. So temporarily there's a dip in your, you know, you feel unwell or feel sick a little bit. But that gives the body a time to learn and adapt, to build copies of this new germ and come out stronger with rest and nutrition. So the next time the attack is better prepared. It's exactly that. It's introducing failure in a very deliberate, safe way so that you can learn how to adapt deeply.

Dan Harris (17:49)

Another comparison you make for productive failure is exercise.

Manu Kapoor (17:53)

Yeah, yeah. Strength training is exactly one of the others. It's called super compensation and strength training. And as an athlete, we used to do that all the time, we just didn't know it was productive failure. So try, you know, if you want to do your push ups or pull ups, and if you really want to become strong at doing it, the idea is that you do it. Suppose you're able to do 10 pushups or 10 pull ups, the real effort starts at 8, 9, 10. And just when you can't do any more. If you do that one extra one in a safe way, as long as you don't injure yourself, what really happens is that your microfibers, the muscle fibers, start to rupture, and then you've got to stop, right? You've got to stop. You got to give your body 24 to 48 hours to recover with nutrition. And then when you come out, you come out above your baseline strength that you started. So again, you take your body deliberately through failure, rupture, give it the nutrition and rest and the chance to adapt and consolidate, and you come out stronger. So the same thing happens there.

Dan Harris (18:55)

Another thing I promise, and I'm promising to the listener here, that we will get pretty practical in a second, but just on a. On a high level. Another comparison you make is play. Can you talk about the power of play in this context?

Manu Kapoor (19:10)

Yeah. So people have studied how children play with toys or play with particularly new toys that they don't understand. Right. Some of the experiments that I've described in the book, Suppose you give a child a toy which is new, and they've never seen or heard or played with it, and you say, well, if you want to play, just play with it. And I observe how you play, try to figure out how the toy works. Or if you give the child a toy and say, here's a new toy. You've never played with it, but I want you to learn from me. I will show you how to play with this toy. Here's how it works, and then you play as you like. So in one case, you've given the child the freedom to figure out how the toy works, and the other one, you've showed them exactly how it works and then said, play it as you like. And experiments show that children are more engaged in the former. In the case where they're not told how to play with the toy, they invent more strategies to figure out how the toy works. And these strategies are very close to scientific strategies, hypothetical deductive strategies. They're predicting constantly, if I do this, this happens, and so on and so forth. Whereas students who are children who were actually shown how to play with the tower toy, they get limited, they get framed, they get put in a box that, oh, the adult here has showed me exactly what to do, then I'm just going to do that. Now you can start thinking of knowledge and ideas not just as these tangible toys, but conceptual toys. And part of deep learning, creativity, application comes from your experiences that allow you to, you know, tinker with this knowledge, try different things. Try to figure it out and then learn from it.

Dan Harris (20:46)

What are the barriers that you see people encountering in embracing this idea of productive failure? One thing that comes to mind for me is my understanding is that perfectionism is on the rise, especially among young people. Failure is. You can put a positive spin on it as much as you want, but a lot of people are really reluctant to engage in any kind of failure. Is that a barrier, in your view, for people?

Manu Kapoor (21:15)

Yeah. I mean, if you want to get things perfect all the time from the get go, you will never learn anything new. Because the whole idea of learning something new is that means you don't know that thing yet. And therefore, the first time you try this, you will necessarily fail or not be able to do it completely. And so if you actually. The paradox is, if you actually want to get to high levels of perfection, try to leverage failure early on. Because the more you do it, the steeper your curve to perfection, the faster you get there. The other way to think is if you always want perfection, then you'll always be very safe, which means you're not going to try very many things beyond your current capabilities.

Dan Harris (21:58)

One of your expressions is, if it's too easy, it's not teaching you.

Manu Kapoor (22:02)

Exactly. Yeah. We think that making learning easy eases learning, whereas everything we know from science, that learning something new is hard, it is intentional, it is effortful, and that should be the norm. So when I tell my students and my colleagues, if you are learning something new and you feel that you're struggling and you're not getting it, instead of telling yourself that this is not for you, you know, like, math is not for me. This is not my cup of tea. Tell yourself this is exactly what a person who's learning something new is supposed to feel like. Which means this is normal.

Dan Harris (22:40)

Yes.

Manu Kapoor (22:41)

Yeah. Yes.

Dan Harris (22:42)

This goes back to when I'm giving people meditation instructions. And I don't own any meditation studios, but I'm often speaking to either large groups on video or I give a lot of speeches in corporate settings. And I hear from people all the time that I've tried it and I'm not good at it. But it's like one of the things I say to people is, if I handed you a violin and you'd never played it before, you're not going to be awesome at it. Like learning if you're struggling. That's what's supposed to happen. Do you care? I mean, you're not going to be willing to go through the violin thing if you don't care. About learning how to play the violin. Similarly with meditation, do you care about being happy, less anxious, less distracted? If that goal is attractive to you, then a certain amount of struggle and suffering in the meantime is totally normal and should be completely acceptable.

Manu Kapoor (23:35)

Absolutely. And desirable. And struggle alone is not sufficient because that should make you reflect on what is it that you're doing right. What is it that you're not getting? Because the reflecting upon your struggle actually sets you up for the potential of learning something deeply. And then if there's feedback like an expert from you when you're teaching or a teacher or somebody, the contrast and I think that's where people start to see things. Contrasts help us see what is critical. Something did not work and something works. If I compare those two in the comparison is what I see. Oh aye, now I get it. Why my method was not working and why the experts method does. And contrasts help you turn your failure into insight into deep learning.

Dan Harris (24:21)

Say that again. The contrast between.

Manu Kapoor (24:25)

So reflection on your struggle sets up the potential to learn deeply. And contrasting with expert knowledge. So contrasting your own failed methods with the expert methods turns that failure into deep insight. Yes.

Dan Harris (24:40)

I don't know if this is deep insight, but I exercise with a group of friends and they're all much more experienced at this kind of exercise we're doing. It's sort of strength training in a circuit and I'm, you know, of a certain age so I, I, the form is really important to me because I get hurt easily and so I spend a non trivial amount of time in these workouts trying something even as simple as a push up. Like a push up is actually quite complex. You do need to do it correctly and most people don't do it correctly. And I'm trying it and then getting a little feedback and then watching other people and over time I really get it. But I do have to be willing to kind of look like a schmuck compared to everybody else.

Manu Kapoor (25:27)

Exactly. And have feedback in that environment so that you can contrast it.

Dan Harris (25:35)

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Manu Kapoor (29:55)

So I see this as a capability development. As children, we learn to speak so that we can use speech to learn. It accelerates same. You learn to read so we can use reading to learn. And it's the same with failure. We have to learn to fail so that you can use failure to learn. So what does learning to fail then mean? What does that mean? Because it's learning to speak and reading is easy. We all understand it. So learning to failure actually means a few things. First, you need to know how to get into your failure zone. So if you take on a task and you can do it, that's great, you've got success, but you've not entered the failure zone. You try on a harder task and you're still able to do it, you're still not in your failure zone. You've got to try a task that is either totally new or challenging enough compared to what you know, that when you take on that challenge and say, oh no, I can't do this, that's when you've entered. So failure gives you information that you've now entered the failure zone, right? That's the first thing. Whether you're learning how to code, to learn a new language, to write an elevator pitch, or to cook eggs or whatever you're doing, right? Anything that is new, you've got to learn how to enter the failure zone. And then when you're in the failure zone. You have to normalize the failure. And this is a mindset shift that I'm going to struggle. It's going to be frustrating at times. I'm going to feel like just completely giving it up. This does not mean that I should actually give up. It just means that this is the normal process of learning that new thing. And if I can persist through it, it's good for me. And the third part is to design the resources or the expert knowledge or the feedback in your system, because if you just keep failing and nothing happens, it leads to unproductive failure. You never learned anything. You just tried a bunch of things that didn't work out and oops, there's no feedback on your. On what you did. So you need experts, you need expert knowledge, expert ways of thinking and doing to contrast, as we spoke earlier, to contrast with what you. Your own ways. And that contrast then helps you. So that's the broad framework of learning how to fail, entering the zone, normalizing the mindset and failure, and then designing, being resourceful about having the contrast with experts to help you gain that insight and knowledge.

Dan Harris (32:19)

And the zone again. Okay, I'm just gonna. I'm gonna go back to exercise for a second.

Manu Kapoor (32:23)

Yeah.

Dan Harris (32:24)

Pull ups. Pull ups are not easy for me. I can maybe do four or five. I probably, if I was just doing one set, I could probably do a little bit more than that. But as part of a rotation, I can probably do four or five. What I'm describing is I'm in the zone. I'm. When I get to five and I've got the right form, I'm in the zone. And I just need to not feel like shit about the fact that I can't get the six yet. But keep trying.

Manu Kapoor (32:48)

Yeah, or you could give yourself a little bit of weight discount. If you have those machines where you can discount your weight, then you can try a few more at a slightly lighter weight so that you keep remaining in that zone, which is beyond even a slight discount, that helps you go for it. And I think that's when you start to really burn off the muscles again, only until the time that it's safe. So how much you want to enter the zone, you have to know your body and use this example and keep it safe. But there are ways to just. Instead of just one last pushup, you can do many things. So that. Or you can get somebody to assist you a little bit. Just provide a little bit of that weight discount and see. Can you do one or two more that's where the growth is.

Dan Harris (33:36)

Just wondering about the order of operations here because you start with the zone, then you talk about normalizing and being okay with quote, unquote, failure. And then finally it's about finding the right contrasts, like between the way you're doing it and the way a master would do it. I'm just wondering, should we maybe start with normalizing failure?

Manu Kapoor (33:58)

Yeah. So I guess it helps. So when we work in the learning context in education, the schools or workplace, it always helps to have a conversation about why we are changing the way we are learning new things. Right. So if you at the workplace or in school are used to just from direct instruction, then people would be curious, why are you doing it this way? So, yeah, it definitely helps to talk about it and explain to them the logic of it and of course set the expectations. And the expectations we set for students at least is that you know we're going to give you something challenging. You're not expected to be able to solve it correctly. What I care is you try different ideas without worrying about getting it right or wrong. That's the message.

Dan Harris (34:44)

You write about something called the looking back hack. Is that relevant to this conversation?

Manu Kapoor (34:49)

That's a motivation kind of a thing. You want to do your 20 laps, for example, if you're early on, if you've just started, you've done first two or three laps, and if you look back how much you've come, it helps you see that, ah, you've actually made some progress. You had one and then now you're three times. At one or four times, what we end up doing is we look to the goal and we say, we've got 16, my God, I've got 18 left and now 17 left. So if you look forward to the goal, then it's very demotivating. But if you look back from where you came from, then it's a bit more motivated. It's just hacking your psychology to do a comparison in a way that motivates you to keep going.

Dan Harris (35:38)

But it strikes me that maybe there's a balance here because it's also important to move the goalposts in order to grow.

Manu Kapoor (35:44)

Yeah, yeah. So as you go from in the early stages of trying, so if you're in the first few laps, it's good to look back and then something happens in the middle that the more you do it, the more motivated you get towards the goals. It's called the goal gradient effect. So the more laps you've had, the more motivated you are to complete it and then something happens. As you near the completion of the goal, that motivates you even more. I'm almost there. That's why you find the last. You find second wind. Athletes find some ways of just finishing out very strong. And a lot of that has to do with mental strength and motivation. So at different stages of achieving the goal, you have that. And you're right that many times, if you can break the big goals into smaller goals. Let me just do the first five. Once I've done the first five, then I'll worry about the next. Chances are when you get to the first five, you already want to do the next one, but then you only focus on fives at a time. So breaking it down also helps a lot.

Dan Harris (36:43)

So if I'm hearing you correctly, there's a toggling back and forth that we might want to do if we're tackling something new. The looking back hack, which allows us to give ourselves some credit since we are prone to, you know, judging ourselves against the ultimate goal, which we haven't yet achieved and which other people may have achieved. And we're stuck in a comparing mindset that's helpful and can provide some motivation and make us feel good about ourselves simultaneously. There or at other times, it may be smart to look forward strategically and move the goalpost so we continue to grow and we move back and forth between these two worldviews.

Manu Kapoor (37:22)

Exactly. And knowing yourself well enough, and this again is an ability you train because it's. You're hacking your own motivation. Knowing how often to toggle back and forth or when to toggle back and forth is itself a skill that you need to develop.

Dan Harris (37:37)

Yes.

Manu Kapoor (37:38)

No matter what you're trying. Yeah.

Dan Harris (37:39)

Yes.

Manu Kapoor (37:40)

Yes.

Dan Harris (37:41)

Okay, so let's talk about some specific use cases for this model. One of them that you right about, I believe is difficult conversations.

Manu Kapoor (37:52)

You know, having a conversation, say, with your partner or with your peer is much harder. Or even with your boss, for example, is much harder than having a conversation with your subordinate or your junior, and so on. And I think designing a safe space within which you can have that conversation, when you do that, you're actually putting yourself in a zone where it's unfamiliar, it's uncomfortable. You may struggle to explain, even string sentences in a way that communicate what you're trying to mean. That sets up the stage where if you have an expert or somebody who can guide you through that process as a contrast, then that helps you learn, reflect back on what you did and how you communicated with the experts. And then in the contrast, you learn how to make Those conversations better.

Dan Harris (38:41)

So if I'm hearing you correctly, what you're saying is, okay, I've got a big conversation coming up with either my romantic partner or my boss or maybe a kid. Somebody important to me am worried about it because the stakes are high, either for my livelihood or for my day to day life, or both. And so what you're saying is practice it. Find somebody with whom you can practice this conversation where you can safely screw it up and get feedback so that when you go into it, you feel reasonably confident.

Manu Kapoor (39:12)

Exactly. And you can try different things. I mean, the multiplicity also matters that you don't try one way of conversing, you try multiple ways. And nowadays with these large language models and your chatbots, I mean, they're very well trained and you can even prompt them to behave in certain ways or behave in difficult ways, or behave in emotional ways, or behave in very logical ways and to see how you respond. So have that conversation without learning the recipe. I guess we are so used to seeking out examples as the start of learning something new. We are so used to doing that that we lose this initial power that maybe we should try it ourselves before we seek the example.

Dan Harris (39:57)

Right.

Manu Kapoor (39:58)

And it's what you do. So seeking the example is perfectly all right, but exploring a little bit, making it a little bit harder for yourself, if you can, before that as preparation to learn from the example is the critical point.

Dan Harris (40:14)

But it's counterintuitive. I mean, I'll speak for myself. It's not my instinct. My instinct is to go look at somebody acing it and then immediately wallow in the massive delta between my capacities and theirs.

Manu Kapoor (40:28)

Yeah, it's intuitive, but it's not optimal. That's the. It's an illusion that just by seeing the expert or the perfect example or somebody who's acing it, that you will learn how to. And I talk about this in the book, and it's the concept of seeing and the idea that just because you can look at something does not mean you see what is critical. If you're, you know, an art novice like me giving you different paintings by experts, you and I will see very different things in those paintings than an expert in art who'd be able to look at the brushstroke and the color and angles and blah, blah, blah, it's right in front of us. So seeing is not just a perceptual thing. Oh, I looked at how you did it, or I read what you wrote. No, seeing is a cognitive exercise. You need knowledge. You need some background knowledge. To actually see what is critical and failure. When you try multiple things by yourself, that builds up the knowledge and the experience that prepares you to then see what is important. So if you did this initial exploration and failure and then saw the perfect example, then you immediately start to see, ah, now I see it. The same example up front. You will not see it. And I think that's the key, right?

Dan Harris (41:47)

That's the key. But it does. I mean, we need to normalize this idea that it's okay to try. It's actually optimal to try and fail and then do some healthy comparison to other people.

Manu Kapoor (42:00)

Exactly.

Dan Harris (42:00)

But this does feel, and this is why I keep coming back to it, it does feel like a real barrier amongst the Homo sapiens right now that we need to like. And I guess it's your job on the planet right now to gently nudge people in this direction.

Manu Kapoor (42:14)

Exactly. Imitation is such a powerful learning mechanism. I'm not denying that. Right. You see monkey, see monkey. Do you learn from the experience and expertise you is a very powerful learning method. I'm just giving it an extra amp by saying, you get there, use that example, learn from others. But if you want to derive even better bang for the buck, do something yourself first in this particular way, and then you'll derive even more from the same thing.

Dan Harris (42:44)

I do want to emphasize something you said earlier about chatbots. I'm a regular user of ChatGPT. I'm not sponsor of this show, so I'm not advertising for Chat GPT or any LLM. I'm just saying I've just to back up. I have been behind the curve on every technological revolution of my lifetime. So when everybody started talking about AI, I was like, I'm going to use this right now. So I've gotten very much into the habit of using Chat GPT. That's just because it's the best known. So again, I'm not advertising for that particular company. But this idea, I can imagine people listening to this with me saying, you know, find somebody who's a good conversation partner to practice your upcoming conversation with. And I can imagine people thinking, well, I don't have that person. You know, everybody I know is a moron or I don't know that many people or whatever it is, or I'm not comfortable enough to be vulnerable. I mean, it's a great piece of advice to use a chatbot. There's so many problems with AI. Yeah, but this is a really good use case for AI.

Manu Kapoor (43:44)

Exactly. And you use it in a way that it doesn't give you the answer, it supports your exploration, it supports your messing up in a safe way. The goal is preparation for learning, not just getting to the answer.

Dan Harris (43:57)

I think it can do both. I think you can start by saying, I want to practice a conversation with you, but then give me some feedback later.

Manu Kapoor (44:03)

Exactly, exactly.

Dan Harris (44:05)

Okay, so other ways to apply productive failure in our own lives. What about with creative pursuits?

Manu Kapoor (44:12)

Yeah, I mean, in creativity, for example. I mean, creativity is the idea of connecting two things that seem disconnected or you don't see the link. And one of my favorite methods in, you know, creativity is to use the counterfactuals or to use methods. So, for example, I would ask my students or even my own children, you know, if they're exploring something, if they're trying to build using blocks, or if they're trying to solve a math problem, I will always ask them, okay, show me how you've done it. And say, when they get stuck, instead of telling them the right answer, I'll give them another method that is known not to work. And so the idea is that you can try multiple things, and in trying the things that do not work, it gives you insight into what does not work, and that sets the basis for new novel ideas, insights. It's very powerful. And this is how some of the brilliant insights in science have also come about quite naturally. That thinking deeply about things that do not work sometimes forces us to question or see the underlying assumptions of that entire paradigm. And some of the biggest breakthroughs then come from questioning that paradigm, questioning those assumptions. That's what big C creativity is. But even the small C creativity in context, situational creativity, is also really good when you actually deliberately give people things that do not work because they derive insights. So it's like my professor in college, you know, when I was doing my final year thesis in engineering school, and I had to solve, to model, solve this particular math differential equation. And he said, okay, go and solve it mathematically. I tried, you know, a month, many, many different ways, it didn't work. I came back to him and he said, oh, okay, you tried this. Very good. Now you go and try this method. And I tried that. And again, after a month, I said, no. Prof. This doesn't work. I said, oh, okay, all right. But have you tried this another method? And this goes on for a few months. And after about five or six months, I'm getting a bit panicked because my scholarship's running out and I need to graduate. And the guy tells me, oh, don't worry about it. All the methods I've Shared with. You are known not to work. Right. And that was like at the time I was so angry with him. I was livid with. But then it. Yeah, he was right. I understood the problem that I was trying to solve in a way through those failed methods in a way that I just never understood it. And that understanding of the problem itself gives you very deep insights. So how creatively you can solve it in other ways.

Dan Harris (46:50)

Okay, let's talk about how we can nudge others toward productive failure. There are some very specific questions I want to ask you, but just broadly speaking, how can we think about this? Just one last thing before I let you talk. I think about this in two ways. As a boss, a very small little company, about 10 people. But I want people to feel comfortable taking risks and failing. And also as a parent.

Manu Kapoor (47:17)

Yeah. So let's talk about as a boss. Right. And you're looking at your team. I think it's good to. When you're thinking about others, actually also for yourself, it applies, I draw a distinction between learning and performance. So when you're in the learning zone we talked all about, you have to experience that initial failure. By definition, you're in the zone where your current skill sets and capabilities are not enough to do the task correctly. The performance zone is different. Performance zone is you already have the expertise and the goal is to apply it successfully. So you know, you want to meditate, you meditate successfully. You want to drive the car, you drive the car without getting into an accident, you want to operate, you operate with perfection, you know, and so on. So you have a project or you need to give a talk, you do it because you have the expertise to deliver. That's performance zone. And at work, especially when you're working with teams, if the bulk of the team's work is in the performance zone, then you're basically setting up a team that is very high productivity. I mean, they can deliver a lot of good, but they're not learning new things over time. Whereas if you also balance this performance zone with learning or growth tasks, so give them a project, for example, that you know, they can't do it by themselves or their current skill sets and abilities, or give them a cross functional task across the organization, which they will definitely fail to perform, or give them your own sort of suboptimal strategic plan and say, well, can you criticize it as though it has already failed? Can you poke holes at it? Again, all of these are examples of designing these deep learning tasks or challenges that are beyond their skill sets and abilities. And if you design them into the portfolio, you have a better balance.

Dan Harris (49:05)

My hesitation as I'm listening to you is like, all right, my team already has plenty of shit to do, so if I start assigning them stuff that I know they can't do, I'm going to burn them out.

Manu Kapoor (49:15)

And that's the role of a leader, to design the space in a way that you don't burn them out. I mean, your responsibility as a leader, me as a leader, my own team, is not just to exploit their capabilities to end, is for them to grow as well. So I would do a task audit and say, well, if all your time is going into performance and high performance tasks, that's great, you have the capabilities, but I also need to help you grow and build new capabilities. That's a question that you have to decide with your team how much of the time you spend on learning a growth task and how much of it is on performance tasks. If a company does its entire work in high productivity, high performance, it's a short term game, it's a short term strategy. Somebody else innovates and builds new things, it can completely undercut you. So you need to design that dynamic, the growth dynamic, the innovation dynamic, as a balance to your performance and exploitation dynamic.

Dan Harris (50:17)

I completely buy that. I think where I was going with this is when I hear you talk. What I'm tempted to do as a way to operationalize your ideas is to allow people on the team, we already do a little bit of this, to take on new things that are risky and we don't know if it's going to work and to create the space for them to do that, as opposed to what I thought I was hearing you say was, I'm going to design some unwinnable tasks for you on top of all the other shit I'm asking you to do. And so to me, those feel like distinct approaches.

Manu Kapoor (50:49)

To me, it's a matter of degree. Right. So one is really challenging them to the extreme. The other one is nudging them just a little bit beyond where they are. And in a given context, you can decide one or the other. So how far you want to push people. I think in science we push pretty hard because you really do take on challenging tasks. But maybe at other times, a little nudge beyond your current space is also good.

Dan Harris (51:15)

This is going to sound like a statement, but I really mean it as a question. In my mind, it could be a nudge or just rewarding people who have creative ideas and saying, all right, go try it, we'll create the Space for you to go try this thing.

Manu Kapoor (51:26)

Yeah. And I call it looking for the failure signal. So one of some of the things that I do with my team is, okay, when you're doing a performance evaluation or appraisal, taking stock of the work, just tell me the things you tried that didn't work out. And here we're not talking about things not working out because of laziness or incompetence or stupidity. We're talking about things not working out because they were genuinely hard things, genuinely challenging things or crazy ideas that they tried. And if they can't point to things like that in their portfolio, then you start to question, where's your failure signal? Are you pushing beyond the boundaries of your current thinking? Because innovation, if you think about it, if everything that you tried and if it succeeds, then chances are there's no innovation there. It's only when you can tell me, hey, I tried 10 things this year, 10 projects. Five of them worked wonderfully, three absolutely crashed, and two, we are still struggling to make sense. To me, that's a good balance. That's a good, healthy portfolio that shows at some points you were really exploiting your capabilities. Other points you were really pushing beyond boundaries and things don't work out. And some are in the middle. Just last week I was at a fireside chat with a very successful investment professional and he said, oh, that reminds me of our investment portfolio analysis. And we say that if all your assets are performing very well, it means your portfolio is not very well designed. You're not pushing the envelope. So you have to have some assets that are not performing not because of laziness or stupidity or something like that. It's because you're genuinely designing new, innovative products and that leaves you open to some level of failure.

Dan Harris (53:15)

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Manu Kapoor (57:09)

Well, it's the as an idea, as a construct is more than 70 years old. It came in the 1950s. And basically the idea is that you need to create a context or a culture where people feel safe enough to talk about their errors and mistakes and that they wouldn't be penalized for it. It's not about avoiding difficult conversations. It's about feeling safe that you can have those difficult conversations with people. And when you create those kinds of safe spaces, also by modeling it yourself, if you're the leader, then those are the spaces with which you create these cultures. And these can be very powerful. The associated idea is that of growth mindset. And there the idea is that not everything initially leads to high performance. Sometimes just struggling and failing and persisting in these challenging tasks leads to a lot of growth. You learn how to stay in these zones that lead to deep learning. So if you focus on your personal growth or your team's growth over time, that effort matters. That with effort, with persistent effort, you can grow and learn deeply, then that's more important than the early successes because that undercuts the need for persistent efforts. Sometimes very bright people or very talented people have that problem as well, because things come so easy to them that they never learn how to persist through tough, tough things.

Dan Harris (58:41)

It becomes an issue of identity. If you tell yourself a story that I'm in a process of growth, well, then failure is allowed. But if you tell yourself a story that I need to ace it every time, which I believe is called a performance mindset, well, the first failure undercuts your ego.

Manu Kapoor (58:57)

Exactly. And then you just say, oh, maybe this is not for me, or you don't try. So when you're in the growth mindset, you naturally take on tougher tasks, more challenging tasks. If you don't have the growth mindset, you always seek out tasks that you know you can succeed at.

Dan Harris (59:11)

So how do we, as leaders in a Professional context. And we'll talk about parenting in a second. How do we inculcate in people a growth mindset, and how do we create psychological safety?

Manu Kapoor (59:23)

Part of it is, of course, you know, talking about it. So I think people come into any workplace or any learning situation with certain assumptions they make about what is valued in that space. Right. So I make go into a classroom thinking the teachers always want the correct answers. And if I. And if I think my boss always wants the correct answers to things, then I better make sure that I give him or her the correct answer. And if I don't have the correct answer, I just stay put. Well, that would basically take all ideation and exploration out, because you're always limited by getting to the correct answer. So talking about the values and, you know, reinforcing the values that you want people to. To enculturate or to internalize, I think that's definitely a very good starting point. Then modeling it as a leader. You have a power differential, so your modeling matters a lot more than anybody else. So if you're not matching your words with action, then it's not going to happen. You always, when you do your project reviews or after action reviews and so on and so forth, if you want to criticize or give feedback on the work, on the idea and not the person, so that you're critiquing the act, not the actor, that also becomes a very important aspect of making people safe in that space. Yeah. And then rewarding people who actually take on tough challenges or rewarding people who ask difficult questions. People can see. Like when people who are congratulated or said that I appreciated your asking such a difficult question and must not have been easy for you to ask me this question because of a power differential or I'm your boss, but please know that I appreciate and do more of this, because that's only good for all of us. And if everybody sees that, that, again, creates a very safe space. It's a system of values again, that gets reinforced again. You can do this not just at the work. You said parenting. You can do the same thing with your child as well. So the principles are the same across different contexts, and they are very powerful.

Dan Harris (61:30)

I heard my son, he's 10, he started playing lacrosse this year, and he was talking to one of his friends about how, you know, I'm not good at defense, I'm good at being a midi or a midfielder or whatever it is. And I was like, bro, you just started this thing. You're telling yourself this concrete story about what you're good at what you're not. You don't know anything. Like, I'm not sure that was the right parenting move, but I did notice that he was stuck in a fixed story about himself.

Manu Kapoor (61:56)

Yeah, yeah. And we tell these stories to ourselves, and those are not good for growth mindset. Right. So if you have a growth mindset, you can. You should probably tell him. Just try it. Just try playing in a different position. Don't tell yourself. Don't do any early convergence. Put yourself in a box yourself. Children need that a lot. Actually. Everybody needs that a lot. We're always putting ourselves in different boxes all the time, limiting our capacities to grow.

Dan Harris (62:23)

So I think what you're saying here is, if you want to be a good leader, parent, friend, partner, just be listening for when people in your orbit or even your own inner narrator might be offering up stories that seem fixed and conclusive and just get in the habit of challenging those stories, both your own stories and those of the people you know.

Manu Kapoor (62:46)

That's very well said. Yeah.

Dan Harris (62:48)

Let's close on another of your aphorisms. Don't just do hard things, design hard things.

Manu Kapoor (62:56)

Yeah. I want people to feel that they have the power. Not feel, but know that they have the power. Because what we do is we wait for life to throw us these challenges, to put us in these hard times. And till now, for the most part, our way of learning, some of the deepest learning happens is when life throws us these, you know, curveballs that take us through challenging times, hard times. And the logic in productive failure that I want people to think and understand and perhaps act upon is that we don't have to wait for these things and these things happen and the stakes are high and it really hurts. But what if we could use them more powerfully by designing for them early on so that we are better prepared? For example, if I embody productive failure as a way of learning and growth, then I'm not just learning the thing that I'm learning in a deep way, whether it's chess or math or communication skills or writing. I'm also learning how to deal and manage failure. So when there's failure that I didn't design for happens in my life, you develop a confidence over time that, yeah, I know this is going to suck. I'm going to be really, really hurt. But I have the capability, I have the tools that I've developed over time to be able to deal with even this failure that is not designed. And life is thrown at me. And that's a very powerful feeling. And I have that right now that no matter what happens, I know I can deal with it, even though it will hurt.

Dan Harris (64:28)

It's a training in grit and resilience.

Manu Kapoor (64:31)

Exactly. We say a lot of the people, resilience is a perfect word, right? We say some people are just resilient because life has given them those tough cards. And it's true in countries in the world where life is a little harsher, people are more resilient. No doubt. But is that the only way? I mean, must I wish really hard things on from life on you? Is that the only way of building resilience? No, you can do it in a smaller, very safe ways over time as well. And that's what the logic of productive failure is.

Dan Harris (65:01)

I have two questions I ask toward the end of an interview. The first is, is there something you were hoping to get to that we didn't get to? Is there any malpractice we've committed here by leaving something out?

Manu Kapoor (65:13)

No, not really malpractice, but I think, I don't know to what extent your readers, and I'm a scientist, so I'm biased. So you can just tell me. Manu, that's not going to fly with my audience. But we didn't really quite go into as to why it works. What are the mechanisms? Why does failure, productive failure work so powerfully? So that's one thing we didn't go into, and I'm happy to go into.

Dan Harris (65:32)

I would love to go into that. Please. I want to hear more.

Manu Kapoor (65:36)

All right. The reason why productive failure is so powerful is what I call like the four A umbrella mechanisms, the four A's that really turn failure into something that is productive and deep learning. The first A is activation. And this is the idea that if you're learning something new, the only way for you to learn that thing is to activate your own resources so that you can process the new information, so you can read new things, because you have the resources that you've learned how to read and you can use those resources to read that new thing, provided it's the same language. Right. If it's a different language, it's suddenly very different. So what failure does is it activates relevant knowledge in you that you already have and that helps you process the new information better. If you go directly to the new information, you don't have this deliberate activation. You're doing two things at the same time. You're listening and then you're trying to make sense of what is it. So failure activates very nicely your cognitive system, and it Also then shows you it makes. And that's the second, a awareness of a gap. It shows you, well, here's what I can do, here's the limits of my knowledge. And then there's a gap. So there's something that I do not know. It makes it very clear to you that you do not know that. And you will say, well, yeah, if I want to learn something new, I want to watch a video on something. I also know that I do not know that thing, and that's why I'm watching the video. But this awareness of a gap is in a very specific sense. When you've actually tried multiple ways, you don't just have this general sense that I don't know this concept or idea. You have knowledge in a very specific sense that I tried all these different things and it didn't work. There is this specific gap. It's very precise, it's very punctuate. Okay, so there's an awareness of gap. Psychologically, if you've activated and you're aware that there is a gap, you have an affect. Your interest in finding out what the correct way or correct knowledge is actually spikes. Your curiosity spikes, your engagement with the material spikes. Your motivation to understand that thing, why it is the way it is actually also spikes. And at the same time you are dealing with frustration and a bit of stress. And all of these are positive things because as I said earlier in the talk, when we talked about how the limbic system activates and the tensional processes come into the picture and so on and so forth, the affect is this complex. Positive and negative things happen to your body, to yourself, that prepare you to then receive or process the correct information. And that's the fourth one, the assembly. The assembly is key because if you don't have assembly, and by assembly I mean when correct knowledge or skill or ideas are incorporated into your knowledge structure. So you tried your ways, it didn't work. You know that there's a gap. You have the positive. You have the correct affective state that has primed you for learning. When the expert knowledge comes in, you can assemble it a lot better. So these four sort of mechanisms, activation, awareness, affect and assembly, come together to turn failure into something that is productive. If there is no assembly, it can go sideways. It's just failure. So again, I said expert knowledge is key. Listening to that example or expert way of doing things is key. But first, can you activate, can you become aware that in a very specific way that there is a gap and can you build the affective state that is primed you to encode deeply. That's when you bring the expert in and assemble it.

Dan Harris (69:20)

So it really sounds like we're working with the brain's natural reward systems to set us up for success through failure.

Manu Kapoor (69:29)

Supercharging the knowing. Exactly. You're hacking it, right? Yeah. And that's the paradox. The ways you optimize those systems are through failure in a safe way.

Dan Harris (69:38)

Anything else that we should have talked about that we haven't?

Manu Kapoor (69:42)

Yeah, that's about everything. Yep.

Dan Harris (69:44)

So that leads me to my final question, which is can you just remind everybody of the name of your book and also talk about any other resources you've put out into the world, digitally or otherwise, that we should access?

Manu Kapoor (69:57)

All right, so my book is called Productive Failure. It's available widely, wherever booksellers are. And of course people are free to Google. Google me, my website, Manu Kapoor.com or the book's website, Productive Failure.com if you're interested in ideas through a TED Talks. I have a couple of TED talks as well. If you were to google Productive Failure TED Talk, you would get one of my seminal TED talks that actually is the basis for the book. So if you want to get a brief insight into the book within 15 to 18 minutes, that's where you can go and watch. And if you're interested in the science behind it, go to my website and all my papers and talks are there as well.

Dan Harris (70:33)

We'll drop some links in the show notes Dear listener. In the meantime, Manu Kapoor, thank you very much for coming on.

Manu Kapoor (70:40)

Thank you, dad. It was a pleasure enjoyed.

Dan Harris (70:47)

Thanks again to Manu Kapoor. Awesome to talk to him. Don't forget we've got a guided meditation that is designed to help you operationalize in your mind and in your life what we learned on the show today. It comes from our teacher of the month Kaira Jewelry lingo and it's all about how to handle discomfort. Discomfort is obviously a huge and a non negotiable part of failure. So if you want to get better at failing or failing productively, you got to learn how to handle your discomfort. She's going to walk you through that. Kyra Jewel is designing meditations for all of our Monday Wednesday episodes this month. We're now really doing this on the regular. If you want those guided meditations, head on over to danharris.com where you can sign up. And if you sign up, you also get live guided meditations and question and answer sessions with me. We've got one coming up Thursday, August 14th at 4:00 Eastern. Finally, thank you very much to everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan and Eleanor Vasily. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer, DJ Cashmere and is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.