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- [00:01]
Darina
Hello everyone. We heard you loud and clear that you wanted advice on a special topic and we have some exciting news for you. We're now planning a series on Fixable to help you with your confidence at work, and we need your help to make it happen. What are your most pressing questions and problems when it comes to building and maintaining confidence in your job? Please give us a call at 234 Fixable. That's 234-349-2253 and let us know what's on your mind. We can't wait to hear from you. Hi, I'm Darina, co founder of OpenPhone. My dad is a business owner and growing up. I'll never forget his old ringtone. He made it as loud as it could go because he could not afford to miss a single customer call. That stuck with me when we started OpenPhone. Our mission was to help businesses not just stay in touch, but make every customer feel valued to no matter when they might call. OpenPhone gives your team business phone numbers to call and text customers, all through an app on your phone or computer. Your calls, messages and contacts live in one workspace so your team can stay fully aligned and reply faster. And with our AI agent answering 24. 7, you'll really never miss a customer. Over 60,000 businesses use OpenPhone. Try it now and get 20% off your first six months@openphone.com tech and we can port your existing numbers over for free. OpenPhone no missed calls no missed Customers.
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Jared Cohen
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Adam Grant
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Jared Cohen
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Adam Grant
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Jared Cohen
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- [02:12]
Darina
Customers with qualifying bundle. Current customer eligibility varies by service and area. Guaranteed rate applies to monthly service charge excluding taxes and fees. Other restrictions apply. Hey listeners. Annan Francis here. We want to share with you a podcast we know you'll love. It's called Rethinking with Adam Grant. Adam is an organizational psychologist who's exploring the science of what makes us Tick. Each week he talks to some of the world's most fascinating and influential people to uncover new thoughts and new ways of thinking. In this episode, he's talking to Jared Cohen, a historian who spent years working on a book about seven different presidents and and their perceptions of meaning, purpose, and legacy. Jared has worked with some of the world's top leaders to tackle humanity's biggest problems, and we think this conversation has a lot to offer for our fixers. If you enjoy this episode, you can find more episodes of Rethinking with Adam Grant wherever you get your podcasts. Now onto the show.
- [03:12]
Adam Grant
Hey, everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to Rethinking my podcast on the science of what makes us Tick with the TED Audio Collective. I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking. My guest today is Jared Cohen. He was a Rhodes Scholar and has been named one of Times 100 Most Influential People. He worked in the State Department under both Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton, then fought extremism as founder and CEO of Jigsaw at Google. Today, he leads global affairs and innovation at Goldman Sachs. In his spare time, Jarrett is a history buff, and his new book, Life After Power is a riveting look at who seven American presidents became after they left the Oval Office. It's brimming with insights for anyone who's ever wondered what's next. Hey, Jared Cohen.
- [04:12]
Jared Cohen
Hello, Adam Grant.
- [04:13]
Adam Grant
I want to talk to you about a lot of things, but I have to start at when did you become obsessed with American presidents? Because you've been into them as long as I've known you, and I know a lot longer than that.
- [04:25]
Jared Cohen
So, look, my career has spanned foreign policy, technology, and now finance. And the only thing that's consistent in my life is an unhealthy obsession with the US Presidency. I suppose it started when I was eight years old. My parents bought me this children's book called the Buck Stops Here. And it had rhymes that went with each president. So I remember, you know, 10 and 7, Johnson A. They almost took his job away. And it was kind of very catchy for a precocious young kid. And presidents, you know, when I was growing up, they were the most famous people in the world. My early memories are of, you know, George H.W. bush going on TV announcing the war in Panama, Desert Storm. And so for me, these were the Most visible figures that I remember. And I just developed an obsession with it. One of the big interests that I had was what happens when presidents die in office and these abrupt transfers of power and how they change the course of history. And my last book, Accidental Presidents, kind of captured that. And when that book was done, I asked myself the question, what else am I interested in? And I got really consumed by this question of, okay, I focused on what happens when presidents die in office, But. But what happens when they survive the office and they come down from the stratosphere and there's years and sometimes decades that they still have to live and exist in a world where they're constrained and in a much lower station.
- [05:45]
Adam Grant
It's such a fascinating topic, I think, not just for heads of state, but for all of us, because there comes a point in our career, in our lives, when we decide we're going to step back from our positions of greatest influence. And the question is, now what? And I want to talk about what you learned about the now what. But before we do that, I'm struck by the fact that you said unhealthy obsession. How have you suffered from being interested in presidents?
- [06:09]
Jared Cohen
I would describe the unhealthy part of my interest in presidents as manifesting itself in strange ways. Somebody can ask me about anything, and I can take it on a tangent into some seriously obscure, geeky presidential history that people may or may not be interested in. I collect presidential oddities as well. I like owning these pieces of history that make you feel like you exist in the past. So I have the vial of poison that Charles Guiteau's sister sent to him when he was in prison after he murdered President Garfield. You know, I have the. One of the few surviving champagne glasses from the John Adams White House. You know, it's these artifacts or these things owned by presidents or that touch different parts of presidential history.
- [06:54]
Adam Grant
You picked a series of presidents. You obviously weren't going to write a book about all of them. But I think one of the things you did was you chose presidents who were archetypes for different choices that you can make about what to do once you were. You were done leading the country. Whose. Whose choices surprised you the most?
- [07:10]
Jared Cohen
So the first thing that I'll say, Adam, is, look, there's no more dramatic retirement or firing than leaving the presidency of the United States. I mean, you go from having more power than anybody else in the world to living with a muzzle on your mouth and being constrained with a sense that there's nothing left to achieve. So the question Itself was very interesting. And as you mentioned, all of us at different stages of life are asking this question of what's next. We ask it in microwaves throughout the course of our life, and then we eventually get to this thing that we call retirement, which is really more of a mirage and a transition and a milestone than anything else. And what I was struck by is very few presidents of the United States after leaving office, had a good experience in, quote, the political afterlife. For a lot of them, they got stuck and bogged down in settling old scores. And they were grumpy. Some were alcoholics. One of them joined the Confederacy. One of them, you know, was a Northerner who became a Southern sympathizer during the Civil War. But the combination of health, finances, broken relationships, lack of purpose, all these things aggregate in the post presidency to create conditions for a pretty unpleasant life for a lot of them. So the question is, who's left standing? I focus on Thomas Jefferson and the founding of the University of Virginia. John Quincy Adams, who became the leader of the abolitionists in the House of Representatives. Grover Cleveland, who mounted a successful comeback to the presidency. William Howard Taft, who finally got his dream job of being Chief justice of the Supreme Court. Herbert Hoover, who was on a long path to recover, a path to serving the world after being broken by the Great Depression. Jimmy Carter, who found a way to create a never ending presidency as a former president. And George W. Bush, who found a way to completely move on. He stood out in the sense that his popularity has gone up and he's done less to invest in it than any others. And that, for me, was worthy of a study. But what's interesting is there really were only seven that I thought warranted a deeper look. And they had some things in common, but each of them pursued life after power in a very different way. And they, they do represent seven different archetypes. And, and what I find fascinating about that is there's not a perfect monolithic blueprint or playbook for how, when we are going through transitions in our lives, whether it's towards the end, in the early stages of life or the middle of life, there's not a playbook or perfect blueprint for how to do that. Right.
- [09:45]
Darina
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- [11:13]
Adam Grant
I think the one that I found most interesting in the book was John Quincy Adams. What was powerful for me about his story was he had higher impact from a lower seat. Talk to me about what he did and what you took away from it.
- [11:26]
Jared Cohen
Here's a man who began his career appointed by George Washington to serve in his administration. And then he dies serving in the House of Representatives alongside a freshman congressman from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln. I mean, talk about a living connection between the past and the future. His presidency was the least eventful part of his life. It was basically an intermission between two of the greatest acts in American history. The first act of his life was a series of steps and jobs that led him on the path to be president. And that was largely architected for him by his famous parents, John and Abigail Adams. But his presidency is a political stillborn and cries of corrupt bargain basically make it impossible for him to achieve anything as president. And so then, much like his father, he's defeated for reelection in 1828 and he's completely distraught. I mean, I got really, really deep into reading his diaries and I would say I sort of appropriated some of his melancholy in the process. I mean, it's hard to imagine a more self loathing, self pitying, miserable human being than John Quincy Adams after he's defeated.
- [12:33]
Adam Grant
Okay, you actually just explained why this is an unhealthy obsession because you went into the depths of somebody else's despair.
- [12:40]
Jared Cohen
His writings in his diary, they describe a man just completely destroyed. And so he goes back home to Quincy, Massachusetts, and he annoys his wife, he's annoying his kids, he's annoying his friends. He's spending all of his time fighting with people who wronged him at every stage of his life. And finally, everybody sort of gravitates around this idea that, like, just get back into service so you stop annoying the rest of us. And the only thing that John Quincy Adams knew was a life of service. And he'd already been Secretary of State, he'd been president, he served in the US Senate, he'd been an ambassador to multiple countries. And the only thing left was, like, the lowest station of all, which is a mere representative in the House of Representatives. And he basically agrees to run, he's elected, and he ends up as this sort of ex presidential novelty and sort of a joke in the lowest station he's ever had in his career. For his first year and a half, he does what a member of the House does in the late 1820s, early 1830s, which is you get petitions and you read them. And what happens is some of these petitions are petitions to abolish the slave trade in D.C. petitions to emancipate the slaves. And then the reaction from the Slavocracy in the House of Representatives really astonishes him. And he realizes, wait a minute, they don't want me to read these petitions. That's an abomination to the right to petition. So then he starts reading more of them. And as he reads more of them, the Slavocracy gets increasingly agitated and they end up gagging him. And so then it's the right to petition is curbed, then the right to speech is curbed. And, you know, it all sort of culminates when he fights to rescind the gag order and defends the Amistad slaves before the Supreme Court. And what he realizes is that without searching for it, the cause of abolition found him. And in a much lower station, he found a much greater calling. And he stumbled into this mission that, frankly, he had never championed at any other stage in his life. And he gets elected to nine terms in the House of Representatives. And before John Quincy Adams, the abolitionist cause was viewed largely as a fringe movement or a radical movement. And we know that Abraham Lincoln was inspired by what he saw from John Quincy Adams, and that the intellectual architecture around the need for a constitutional amendment to get to emancipation inspired that young congressman who would go on to become one of the great presidents of the United States.
- [15:05]
Adam Grant
That's an extreme example of not just bouncing back, but bouncing forward to go from complete despair, an unsuccessful presidency, to helping to plant the seeds of the Emancipation Proclamation. Pretty extraordinary.
- [15:20]
Jared Cohen
His story tells you that if you're patient and you just kind of let things play out, you may actually find the greatest cause of your life. I wouldn't describe him as an open minded person. I would describe him as an impatient person. He was meandering at the right moment, but had he leaned into some sort of deliberate cause, he may never have become the champion for the abolitionist movement that changed the course of history.
- [15:47]
Adam Grant
It's a strong case for patience. It also makes me think about something that developmental psychologists have been interested in ever since Erik Erickson first coined the the distinction between generativity and stagnation. The question that I think all of us face around am I going to contribute to the next generation or am I going to basically let my knowledge kind of ossify and not not share it with others? And it seems to me that in some ways John Quincy Adams confronted the. The tension between happiness and meaning. He could have done lots of things that were personally pleasurable and enjoyable, but a little bit devoid of purpose. And through seeking something that was more meaningful, he found what might have been a little bit less fun work, but ultimately more enjoyable contributions to make.
- [16:37]
Jared Cohen
I think that's right. There's something else about John Quincy Adams that's worse worth calling out. And this won't be relatable to everybody, but he had a fighting spirit. He loved fighting with people and quarreling with people and intellectually out foxing people. And you know, he shows up in the House of Representatives and he just thinks these members are just the epitome of mediocrity. His success in the House was a combination of being motivated by this cause, but it was gradual. What keeps him going is just the day to day, play by play of winning and outsmarting. And it's what drives him. At the end of the day, he's a political and an intellectual animal.
- [17:19]
Adam Grant
There's so many sayings about how power affects people, right? So we think about Lord Acton. Power corrupts. I found that to be oversimplified. And I feel like a lot of the research in psychology says actually power doesn't corrupt so much as reveal. It amplifies the values and traits that you might have, you might have hidden when you were on your way up the ladder. But once you've gained enough influence and status and authority, you feel like now you can kind of show your true colors without major risk. I'm interested in how these dynamics play out when people lose power. So I guess the question for you, Jared, is does losing power uncorrupt people or does it also have a way of revealing or concealing who they really are?
- [18:01]
Jared Cohen
If I reflect on the seven presidents that I write about, the only one that I think really enjoyed being president and reveled in the power of the office was Jimmy Carter. And I think therefore it's fitting that what Jimmy Carter did that's different from any of the others is he was the first one to really build infrastructure around being a former president. He basically built a former presidential administration. But I think for the rest of them, the power of the presidency, in a lot of respects, it actually got in the way of, of what they wanted to do. And the architecture of the presidency ended up hindering the areas where they were most passionate. Right. Jefferson, his entire life was very clear about what he wanted to do. All he wanted to do was create the very first arts and sciences university. But he had this founder's obligation where he had to keep coming back and serving. He had to be vice president, he had to be Secretary of State, then he had to be president twice. And all did was cut years off his life and delay what he actually wanted to do, which was found a university. Herbert Hoover, before he became president, was one of the most revered men in not just the United States, but the world. He was the man who fed the world after World War I. He was the hero of the recovery after the Mississippi floods. He was an orphan who rose to be a self made millionaire. He's a man, he lived 90 years and he's defined by three and a half of the Great Depression. I think his view is one, democracy is a harsh employer, something that he had said. But I think that he would have been a very happy man had he never had to be President because he would have been the great humanitarian for his whole life. And so at least for the seven presidents or six of the seven that I focus on, I think what's fascinating is once they move to life after power, once they leave the presidency behind, there's a period of time where they work to kind of rediscover who they were before they were president, they almost have to exercise out of them all of the sort of poison of the office and the politics and the baggage of the presidency. And each of them got to that pretty quickly and rediscovered their raison d'. Etre. And it looked a little bit different. And it evolved from the time from before they were president. It's kind of a tale of two Types of power, the power of the office, which is intoxicating for some, but the power of purpose, which I think defined a lot of these men that I write about.
- [20:31]
Adam Grant
It also makes me think about the, the classic triad of implicit motives that, that David McClellan put on the map in psychology. The idea that, that some people are driven by achievement, they want to succeed, others are primarily guided by a desire for power. They want to have influence and control. And then some are drawn to affiliation, they want to, they want to connect and belong. As I hear you talk about the six that were not that happy as presidents, they sound like they follow the arc that David Winter has captured in some of his research, where it's almost misplaced ambition. You're an achievement motivated person, and the highest form of success is to become president. But then the process of having to campaign and also to govern is not about achievement, it's about power. And if you're not somebody who's power motivated, it's extremely frustrating to be blocked from achieving your goals. To be, you know, constantly having to wheel and deal with the amount of schmoozing that's required is really counterproductive and annoying for an achievement motivated person. And then you leave the office and you have to recalibrate. You're freed from having to accumulate and exercise power, but your achievements seem really small or what you're capable of achieving seems really small. And so then trying to figure out how do you express that motivation? It's a bit of an adjustment at some level. What do you make of all that?
- [21:48]
Jared Cohen
With each of the presidents that I write about, each of them either enters the post presidency or discover something in the post presidency that they become dogmatic about in terms of some kind of cause or motivation. And whether they realize it at the beginning of their post presidency or later in their post presidency, they come to discover that unshackled from the office and all the politics and constraints, they're better positioned to do something about it than they were in office. Look, even Jimmy Carter, who loved the presidency more than anything. Over time he came to appreciate the fact that, wait a minute, what I care about is human rights, free and fair elections, curing disease, and the post presidency. And being a former president that's willing to criticize my Democratic and Republican successors means that I can basically do all the things with the presidency that I loved, and I don't have to deal with any of the garbage that bogged me down. We all know people, they got offered the dream job that they wanted, and the timing wasn't right, maybe they had a challenge with one of their kids, or they didn't want to move somewhere and they had to turn down something that they really lusted after. That was William Howard Taft. Except it's because he chose to basically be subservient to his wife and his three brothers and his mentor, Theodore Roosevelt. And he basically turned down the court multiple times because everybody else wanted him to be president. But he never lost this sort of desire or this sense of purpose to one day serve on the court. And William Howard taft, his final 10 years of life were the happiest years of his life because he served as Chief justice of the Supreme Court. Each of these presidents, what's fascinating is as they get older, as their legs give out, as their health fails, as all their friends start dying, they actually accelerate their activities. Herbert Hoover was the most busy from the ages of 80 to 90. William Howard Taft was most busy in his last, you know, 10 years. And I have a theory on this, that because those first years out of office are such a challenging transition and because they reflect back on the presidency sometimes as lost years, which is interesting, that towards the end of life they become conscious of their own mortality and they accelerate their activities because they feel like they have to make up for lost time.
- [24:05]
Adam Grant
And that brings us to your presidential outlier, George W. Bush, who you spend a lot of time with and who is just a complete enigma to me when I think about the motive profiles. The research I've read scores him low in both achievement and power compared to affiliation, and I guess that sheds some light on his choices. But it's just so hard for me to fathom going from the enormous station of president and also the complicated legacy, the guilt of an Iraq war that didn't need to be fought, to saying, I'm just going to paint. I can't imagine it. Can you help make sense of this?
- [24:45]
Jared Cohen
If you look at the active post presidents, Bush's popularity has gone up more than any of them. And so among the living ex presidents or the active living ex presidents, he's the outlier. It's also true that he has probably done less to proactively invest in his legacy than any of the other active living presidents. So I think we can all agree that that's worthy of a study. A Journey into George W. Bush's brain is like a psychological thriller into things that for most of us are impossible to understand. Right. When I sat down with him, the first thing that he said, he said, look, when it. When it's over, it's Over. I don't miss it. He lives his life in chapters, right? So once the political chapter was over, he just completely moved on. That's one aspect that I think just makes him unique to the other presidents. He's just able to do that. So that's point one.
- [25:38]
Adam Grant
Yeah, I would. I would maybe add low tolerance for ambiguity to that puzzle.
- [25:42]
Jared Cohen
Very, very low tolerance for ambiguity. And he didn't just sort of stop being an ambitious person. So the question is, where does all of that go? So the way Bush ends up painting is after he raises money for the Bush center and has this nervous energy. Just by happenstance, he's meeting with historian John Lewis Gaddis. And Gaddis basically says to him, you seem kind of bored. You should paint. Churchill painted. And the way Bush describes it is he got sort of historically competitive, that if Churchill could paint, he could paint. Also, he didn't embark on painting for any esoteric, deep reason. It was just like, oh, I'll try this. And the more he did it, the more he realized, you know what? This is giving him an endless learning experience. It's something that he will never master through painting. He can, you know, actually embrace a post presidential voice around things that he cares about and categories of people that he cares about and push an agenda without undermining his successor. And that's what it's become. It did not start that way. And he has a very quarrelsome view about legacy. I mean, he said over and over again that this idea of spending the present investing in when you're dead, it just doesn't make any sense to him. Right. His view is that they're still writing books about George Washington. By the time they get to him, he's going to be long dead. And so he really just has this adversarial view of spending any time investing in legacy. And yet he's conscious of and sort of amused by the fact that by basically not doing that, you know, the joke's sort of on everybody else because his legacy seems to be the one that's actually gone up.
- [27:12]
Adam Grant
I was going to ask you, and you've shifted already. My thinking about the answer about does he not care about his legacy? But I think what you're saying is he's not indifferent to it. He just knows it's mostly out of his control.
- [27:24]
Jared Cohen
I asked him if he paints out of guilt. I said, a lot of people think you paint out of guilt. And there's no evidence of deviation from the decisions that he made. Other than that he acknowledges they were controversial and he just has this view that decisions are made and it takes decades upon decades to understand whether those decisions were worth it. And he thinks that legacy is something that gets written about in the history books and life is meant to be lived. And he's invested so much in his faith and in his family. I mean, the one thing that I'll say about him, a lot of these presidents that I write about, they leave the presidency with their family just in complete tatters. He is authentically close to his family, authentically close. It's something that he did before he was president, invested in when he was president. And as soon as he had more time at his disposal, he made sure that he doubled down on that. And I think that that's also a pretty important set of things that kind of keep him grounded because his view is like the history books will write about me as president, but when I'm kind of old and frail, it's a question of do my daughters love me, does my family love me, do they want to be around me? The ambition that takes one to be governor and president not once but twice doesn't lend itself towards somebody who can live in the present. And yet he's like totally at and he doesn't think about the future, he doesn't think about the past. And this is bothersome to people who want him to kind of have a reckoning about his legacy and, you know, decisions that they disagree with.
- [29:00]
Darina
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- [30:01]
Jared Cohen
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- [30:07]
Adam Grant
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- [30:10]
Jared Cohen
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- [30:12]
Adam Grant
Learn more@ambetterhealth.com Ichra I want to do the lightning round through the lens of your presidential history obsessions. Most Overrated President John F. Kennedy Worst Advice a President Has Ever Given I.
- [30:32]
Jared Cohen
Would say the worst advice a president has ever given is some combination of the multiple slave owning, civil rights, obstructing presidents that through the platform of the presidency have slowed social and racial progress in this country.
- [30:54]
Adam Grant
Best advice a president has Given I.
- [30:56]
Jared Cohen
Always love Theodore Roosevelt's advice to get in the arena.
- [30:59]
Adam Grant
Hard to argue with that one. What's the presidential biography that most people haven't read but should?
- [31:04]
Jared Cohen
Ooh, that's a good one. There's a book called Destiny of the Republic by Candace Millard that is like a thriller into how James Garfield's doctors, in an attempt to try to save him from a non lethal wound, ended up killing the president.
- [31:20]
Adam Grant
Wow. All right. Putting it at the top of my thriller list. What's something you've rethought in your life from studying presidents?
- [31:28]
Jared Cohen
I think that there's this assumption that we all have that you can wait until later on in life to figure out the last chapter. And I think what's striking from each of these presidents is the investments that make for a good final chapter in life. They start at the middle of life, the people you have around you, the relationships, the family, the hobbies, the intellectual interests, the ability to detach from the burdens of the past. I think what I've learned is if you defer all of that until later, it's too much. And what you really want towards the end of life is to have something purposeful that keeps you going, something that you can keep learning and people around you who love you despite any of the things that you've achieved in your life.
- [32:19]
Adam Grant
What's a question you have for me?
- [32:21]
Jared Cohen
Out of all of the seven presidents and all the different paths that they've taken from a behavioral psychology perspective, what surprises you most?
- [32:34]
Adam Grant
I think for me the biggest surprise is that more of them aren't like Jefferson. I really would have thought that a successful post presidency is about doing something bigger than and more, more meaningful and lasting. And I guess I expected them to be more grandiose and the sort of walking out of the office like you described it, you're giving up some of your power, but you're also free of all kinds of constraints. So you have enormous status. You have a world class network and now you can, you can pursue your vision. And so I Guess I'm surprised that not every one of them sat down and said, okay, I'm going to build a great university and change the face of education in America. And that it was. That their, their ambitions were so much more diffuse and kind of. I don't know, I don't want to say pedestrian, but ordinary, I guess. I'm curious, Jared. I think you know more heads of state than anyone in our generation on Earth. You're in frequent communication with many presidents and prime ministers around the world. It seems to me so narcissistic to even think that you could be capable of doing a job that complex. What do you make of them?
- [33:44]
Jared Cohen
It's a very lonely job and it's a very isolating job. And the longer you are in a role, the more isolated you become, the lonelier you become. Trust becomes very difficult. Information flow changes. And so I think what I'm struck by with a lot of these leaders, I get to know them in a very personal. Like, I spend big chunks of my day joking around with them and sending each other memes and engaging them on a very informal way. There's plenty of substantive engagement as well. But when you break down those barriers of formality, I'm struck by how little space they have for just regular friendship and emotion and the value that they feel when they can let their guard down and when they know they can really trust somebody. Right. So things like trust and informality and friendship become really, really sought after, rarefied things. And the walls and the barriers only get higher as they accumulate more power. And so what's interesting is when they eventually leave office, and I found this also with the presidents in my book, they lose the power and they lose the platform. But all those barriers are still up and the transition comes. They may be the same person, but they're psychologically discombobulated because the guardrails are still up. And the presidents who are able to break that down end up, I think, being the happiest.
- [35:12]
Adam Grant
I love the point you made earlier about how sometimes it's a mistake to rush into finding your purpose. That actually sitting in a transition and sort of allowing your peripheral vision to kick in can prevent you from diving headfirst into something that might not end up being aligned with your values or interests. Are there any other life lessons that you've taken away from this project that we should be aware of? Because now would be the time to tell us.
- [35:38]
Jared Cohen
I think whether you're a President of the United States or a CEO, one of the most important things to do and I would argue it's a necessary step in order to be able to have a successful life after power, which is to unburden yourself from what your successor is doing. Whether it's your chosen successor or a successor you don't want, you're going to have to watch them dismantle some portion of your legacy. You can completely detach from it and move on. And that clears a lot of brush for you. You can say, you know what? My thing is going to be that whether it's this successor or another successor, I'm going to be completely unchecked. And that's the Carter principle. And it worked for him. The problem is most people end up in this, in between, which is a bad place to be, where you say that you want to move on, but you can't resist the urge to settle scores of the past and press rewind and undermine your successor. And by the way, whether you do that in public or private doesn't matter, because the interesting thing with a lot of the presidents that I write about, their biggest obstacle is their own head, right? They mentally just have a hard time getting past what's happening to things that they created and what's happening to their reputation and what's happening to their legacy. And so that limbo, or that hybrid of intellectually telling yourself you've moved on but impulsively not moving on is, I believe, the greatest obstacle that prevents people from making a proper transition.
- [37:19]
Adam Grant
It's obvious how that applies to job transitions. I think anybody who's going through a transition at work can make a commitment to giving up the reins and actually moving on and not interfering with the person who's filled their shoes. I also think this applies generationally in families that it would be really nice if parents stop telling their kids how to parent.
- [37:40]
Jared Cohen
Right.
- [37:40]
Adam Grant
It's a version of the same mistake. I remember saying to my mom, at some point, if you wanted me to learn this lesson, you should have taught it to me when I was growing up. Your window has passed. Now it's my job to figure out how I want to raise my kids. And I wonder if you think this lesson applies to that kind of transition too.
- [37:58]
Jared Cohen
Yeah, absolutely. On the surface, it shouldn't seem like learning about and reading about the lives of seven presidents and their search for meaning and purpose after the White House could be applied to something like the relationship between a parent and a child over how the next generation parents. And I think it's an extraordinary story that something so kind of other stratosphere would have so many prescriptions for something that in some respects seems so relatively mundane when compared to like things we read about in the history books. And I think that's an amazing part of behavioral psychology, which is, look, at the end of the day, you know this better than anyone else, Adam. There's only so many different types of human beings or archetypes of human beings. And whether they're presidents or parents or CEOs or middle managers, human beings are complicated in only a certain number of ways. And the prescriptions for how they navigate their complicated brains and their complicated lives, they kind of transcend whether one is at the pinnacle of power or whether one's power is simply a matter of the fact that this is my child, mom and dad, not yours. So leave me alone.
- [39:05]
Adam Grant
Well put, Jared. As always, this has been a lot of fun. I've learned a lot.
- [39:10]
Jared Cohen
Thank you, Adam. I really enjoyed it.
- [39:15]
Adam Grant
This conversation got me thinking about the arc of success over the course of a lifetime. It's good to plan your path up a mountain, but it's also important to consider consider what you'll do once you reach the summit and who you want to become on the way back down. Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant. This show is part of the TED Audio Collective and this episode was produced and mixed by Cosmic Standard. Our producers are Hannah Kingsley, Ma and Asia Simpson. Our editor is Alejandro Salazar. Our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Original music by Hansdale Stu and Alison Layton Brown. Our team includes Eliza Smith, Jacob Winick, Samaya Adams, Michelle Quint, Ban Chang, Julia Dickerson and Whitney Pennington Rogers.
- [40:07]
Jared Cohen
I collect locks of presidential hair, which I'm no longer shy about because if you're a lock of hair collector, you need to kind of own it and lean into it. Somebody can ask me what the weather is and I could say it's so interesting. That reminds me of when John Quincy Adams was defeated for for reelection and ended up serving nine terms in the House of Representatives as an ex president. When my three daughters and my wife tell me it's unhealthy, that's sort of the vote of the majority and I deem my obsession unhealthy.
- [40:33]
Adam Grant
That's fair. About once a week our 10 year old hears me talking about something and says dad, stop nerd talking.
- [40:42]
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Adam Grant
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