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Modern Wisdom
#885 - Adam Grant - How To Overcome Your Fear Of Failure & Unlock Your Potential
01:13:42
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- [00:00]
A
What look like differences in natural ability are often differences in opportunity and motivation. What does that mean?
- [00:08]
B
Well, I did write that and I think I believe it. So if you look at the history of great talent, we tend to see people at their peak and we assume that they were just naturals. Steph Curry could always drain three pointers. Mozart was a natural musician. And in some cases if you trace back, these people were child prodigies. And Mozart I think was a great example. But for every Mozart, it turns out that there are multiple Bachs and Beethovens who actually bloom blade and took a long time to improve. And I guess the study that really opened my eyes to this was Benjamin Bloom looked at world class athletes, musicians, scientists, artists, and he went back to their childhoods and wanted to know were they innately just brilliant at these skills from day one? And the consistent answer was no. That very often their early teachers and coaches, even their own parents, had no idea how great they were going to become. And when they did stand out, it wasn't for natural ability. It was because they were unusually passionate. They loved to learn and they had early opportunities to get lots of practice in. And I think what that suggests to me is that sometimes we overestimate the importance of raw talent and we underestimate the importance of creating opportunities that open doors for people and then giving them a chance to actually showcase their enthusiasm.
- [01:41]
A
What about motivation? Where does that come from in this context?
- [01:48]
B
I think in a lot of the cases, if you look at the Bloom study, at least the world class performers tended to have an early teacher or coach who may made learning fun. And I think that's, that's not common for a lot of us. Right. Like learning to do scales. If you're a musician, doing drills, if you're an athlete, it can be a slog. And the idea that this, this boring task that, that might just lose your interest or might exhaust you could actually be exciting. It draws you in and it makes you want to keep learning. And, and over time that becomes self reinforcing because after all, it's hard to like something that you, that you just suck at. Right. As you, as you gain skill and build up mastery, that's when your motivation begins to really soar.
- [02:29]
A
Yeah. When you turn any task into, or any, I guess, activity into a task that needs to be ticked off, it sort of takes one step toward drudgery, which just doesn't sound fun.
- [02:41]
B
Well put.
- [02:43]
A
I think. I wonder whether people will be uncomfortable to think about motivation as something that's almost bestowed on them by the environment, because, you know, highly agentic, meritocratic world. I can make my own way. I can, yes. But as the other part of it, differences in opportunity and motivation. And it seems like motivation can quite often be brought about by the right opportunity too. It's very much out of our hands also.
- [03:16]
B
I think that's bad news and good news. I think you're right. The bad news is it makes it feel like your motivation is a little bit out of your control. The good news is that motivation is malleable. And if you don't find it on day one from within, it can actually be sparked or stimulated from the outside. And I think what a great coach or teacher does is they help you find your own motivation. So I've lived this personally. I loved sports when I was a kid, and unfortunately, I wasn't any good at all the ones that I became passionate about. I love shooting hoops. I got cut from the middle school basketball team in sixth grade, seventh grade, and eighth grade. I was a big fan of playing soccer, or what you probably call football. Did not make my ninth grade team. And basically the last sport that I thought to try was springboard diving. That summer, my mom dragged me to a local pool and there was a lifeguard who was an all state diver, and he was doing flips and twists on his break. And I watched him and I was mesmerized, and I wanted to learn how to do it, but diving did not come naturally to me. I actually was nicknamed by my first coach, Frankenstein, because I was so stiff that I couldn't even. I couldn't touch my toes without bending my knees. And I actually walked like Frankenstein. Um, and I didn't jump very high, and I was not graceful at all. And I didn't have much explosive power. All the things that you want in diving. I go to my first tryout and the coach says, do you want the. The good news or the bad news? And I say, definitely the bad news. And he tells me that his grandmother and his grandfather can both out jump me. That, you know, I don't have the flexibility or explosive power or grace that you look for in a typical diver. I'm like, is there good news? And he says, yes. Diving is a nerd sport. It attracted all the people who are too short for basketball and too slow for track and too weak for football. If you want to be good at this, if you pour yourself into this, then I think by the time you graduate from high school, you're going to be an all state diver. And that just lit A fire in me. The idea that this coach who had actually trained an Olympian by that point saw more potential in me than I saw in myself. It made me want to get better. And every time I hit the water and Eric gave me, he'd be like, Adam, that was bad. How bad? And he'd say, ah, I'd give that a three, three and a half. We talk about how can I get a four and how can I get a four and a half? And that just made me more and more excited to learn. And I ended up making the state finals, not my senior year, but my junior year. And by that point, when I graduated from high school, I couldn't believe it. I was a two time Junior Olympic national qualifier and I made the All American list. And I was being recruited to dive at the NCAA Division 1 level, which I had no business doing. But none of it would have ever happened if Eric Best didn't look at me and say, Adam, you're not any good today, but I believe you can be much better tomorrow.
- [06:13]
A
It's fascinating, the idea of somebody who believes that your potential is greater than you do. You know, it's such a beautiful idea to have for a friend, for a partner, for a coach. Just. I'm thinking about potential as an interesting concept because what do we mean when we talk about somebody fulfilling their potential? It's kind of arbitrary, right? You don't know what your potential is. And if you assume that people get as good as they're going to get and they don't get any better than they're going to get, given that we don't get to split test the world and run it back and try harder or do more or start with a different coach or do whatever the idea of fulfilling potential, everybody ultimately does fulfill their potential. It's, is there more potential, potential that could have been fulfilled?
- [06:57]
B
Potential, potential. I love this idea. Chris. I think, you know, a lot of people, I think experience, they feel pressure around this or regret or both. Like I'm not living up to my potential. And what they forget is that potential is not fixed. Right. Yeah, you, you have a floor that's determined by your current level of skill and you have a ceiling. But that ceiling is not set in stone. It's dependent on changes in your skill and shifts in your motivation and the opportunities that are put in front of you. And I think what's striking to me is that what I lived as a diver is true for all of us. We all have hidden potential, which is a capacity for growth that might be invisible to you. And it might also be invisible to some of the people around you, and you just haven't recognized it yet. And I think that, you know, so many of us, we confront people who are critics who basically attack the worst version of ourselves, or cheerleaders who applaud the best version of ourselves. And what we want are those coaches who see our hidden potential and help us become a better version of ourselves. And so I think the question is less am I living up to my potential and more what is my hidden potential and how do I realize it?
- [08:10]
A
Yeah, the compliments versus criticisms thing is super interesting to me. I think I would identify myself as a criticism hyper responder that I weight the value of somebody who doesn't like my work significantly higher than a lot of people who do like my work. And over time, that can cause you to take more heed from people who don't have your best interests at heart, as opposed to the ones that do, which, you know, in the cold, harsh light of day, unemotionally is awful. It's a poor strategy. Right? Like, let's face it, that's, that's not optimal. But there is, There is something about that. And then I guess on the other side, somebody who, somebody who is takes too much heed from the compliments is never going to have an accurate assessment of where the competence level is at. They're not going to work on the things that they need to. Perhaps the basics, perhaps going back to the start, perhaps realizing why it is that they're failing. I'm great. I've never encountered any problems. Why does this keep on happening to me? This is unfair. And maybe that's where a victim mindset comes from. I'm not sure.
- [09:11]
B
Yeah, I think that's right. I think you're being a little too hard on yourself when you talk about the. The perils of being a criticism junkie, which I guess is it's on brand. Right. I'm even going to criticize myself for the fact that I'm too obsessed.
- [09:26]
A
Respond to criticism. Yep. Correct.
- [09:28]
B
So you're a medic.
- [09:29]
A
Permeates deep. Permeates deep.
- [09:31]
B
Well, I get it, but I want to defend it a little bit. I'm thinking about some research that I'll let Fishbach did where she finds that novices are more drawn to and motivated by praise because they need to believe that they're capable of getting better. Otherwise it's just too discouraging to be bad at something. But that experts are more interested in criticism. Like, okay, I don't need Somebody to convince me that I can be good. I just want to know how I can get better. And so I think that that is a mark of being somebody who's truly driven to master a craft. I think where maybe you get yourself in trouble, from what I'm hearing is you're not filtering out. Well, let me back up a step and say not all critics are actually thinking critically and not all critics are speaking constructively. So there needs to be a finely tuned filter around. You said, does this person have my best interests at heart endorsed? I agree wholeheartedly with that. I also want to ask, does this person have incredible knowledge about the domain you're trying to improve in, and do they have credible knowledge about you? Because somebody who doesn't know your world or doesn't know your potential is not a good judge of what you need to work on.
- [10:48]
A
Yeah. What do you think most people don't realize about where meaning comes from? Because it seems here like we're talking about this sort of grander sense of purpose, something that pulls us forward. It's kind of structural in the beliefs that we have and the people that are around us, but it's also a little bit more transcendent. It's kind of out there. So from a scientific perspective, when it comes to performance and potential, what do people miss about meaning?
- [11:15]
B
I think that meaning is, is ultimately about mattering. It's about knowing that you're valued by others and you have value to add to others. And I think in a lot of cases, it's pretty abstract and people don't really know, okay, what is my contribution? Why do people appreciate me? So I studied this early in my career. I was studying fundraising callers at the University of Michigan, and they were basically calling alumni and trying to convince them to make donations. And it was a hard, stressful job. You're interrupting somebody's dinner, they yell at you. They're like, I already donated to this school. It's called my tuition. Why are you asking me for more? And I went in to try to motivate these callers, and I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when I saw this sign on the wall that one of the callers had posted. It said, doing a good job here is like wetting your pants in a dark suit. You get a warm feeling, but no one else notices. I mean, talk about a crisis of meaning.
- [12:16]
A
Yeah.
- [12:17]
B
So I design a simple experiment. It takes five minutes. Some of the callers are randomly assigned to a five minute interaction. A month later, the average caller is spending 142% more time on the phone per week and bringing in 171% more weekly revenue. So to make that more concrete, a month later, after a five minute interaction, the average caller has more than doubled in weekly phone time and nearly tripled in weekly revenue. What happened in that five minute interaction? All I did was bring in one scholarship student who said, because of the money you raise, I am able to afford school. And here's how it's changed my life and here's how I'm trying to pay it forward. And all of a sudden the meaning of the work changes. This job is not a job where I'm harassing people and ruining their night. It's a job where I'm enabling students to go to school. And I think that, you know, this is something we could probably all do more of, right? I think it's, you know, it's, it's easy in a job to lose sight of what your impact is. It's worth asking, if my work didn't exist, if I weren't doing this job, who would be worse off? And the people who come to mind, they are the ones who make your work matter. They're the reason that you have meaning in your job. And you could apply this to any role, right? You could ask that question as a parent, you could ask that question as a community member or a family or a friend, right? Who'd be worse off if I weren't playing this role. That's where meaning comes from.
- [13:42]
A
I wonder if in the world of dashboards and analytics and quantified KPIs, I wonder if much of this particular motivating factor coming from meaning is being missed.
- [13:57]
B
I think it is. And one of the things that I found in some follow up experiments was it didn't help to bring in nine scholarship students and pretty soon they were no longer stories, they were statistics. And I think, I think you're onto something there that, like the, the more that we try to quantify, like here, here are all the metrics we need you to hit, the more you lose sight of, well, this is why I'm doing this work. And you know, here's, here's the way that it might be, if not changing other people's lives, at least affecting their lives.
- [14:28]
A
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- [16:08]
B
I think that's a practice that we should all adopt. And one of the questions is, how often should you do it? There's some research on doing random acts of kindness and also gratitude lists which suggests that daily is less effective than weekly.
- [16:25]
A
Wow. Why would that be the case?
- [16:27]
B
So I think what's going on is that if you start to do it daily, it becomes a little bit mundane and routine. And also it's hard to find those examples that stop you in your tracks. So you're doing your gratitude list and you're like, I'm grateful for my microphone, I'm grateful for my earbuds.
- [16:45]
A
Right.
- [16:45]
B
Whereas you do it weekly and you've accumulated, you've got some shit. Yeah, you've got something worthwhile to, you know, to really mark the moment. And I think with random acts of kindness, it's similar. You help one person a day and it feels like just a drop in the Bucket. You make Thursday your generosity day, and you say, I'm going to help five people that day. You really feel like you counted that day.
- [17:10]
A
Okay, so one of the other elements here when we're talking about becoming better in really any form is the ability to deal with uncertainty, the ability to grapple with the fact that you don't know how the outcome is going to go. And that open loop is going to plague you while it's still like that. And it may cause you to not even begin to take a step toward closing the loop. What have you learned about becoming better at dealing with uncertainty?
- [17:36]
B
It's hard. Good luck. It's really hard. I just study this. I don't know. No, I think when I think about dealing with uncertainty around progress, I think the best thing you can do is you can get in touch with your past self. So I'll give you a personal example on this one. I remember I was getting ready to launch my second book. So we're going back almost a decade now. And a friend called and asked me what I was doing to celebrate. And I said, nothing. And she said, why? I said, well, I'm an author. That's what we do. We write books. It's part of my routine. And she said, yeah, but it's not like you write a book every day. Publishing a book is a milestone. What are you doing to savor that? And I thought about it, and I realized I had completely taken for granted the idea that, like, I was just going to write a book every few years. And I had no sense of whether my second book was better than my first book. I had no way to gauge whether I had improved in the areas I was trying to grow. And I realized that I had to do some mental time travel and think back to, you know, a younger, earlier version of myself. So I went back five years earlier, and I said, okay, if that version of me knew that I was going to publish one book, let alone two, like, that would have been. That would have been nirvana. That would have been a career milestone. And also that version of me would have been really impressed with the, you know, the progress I'd made in a couple areas that. That I thought I hadn't improved at all in the short term. And I think that that. That's one way of managing uncertainty, right, is. Is to say, okay, like, if a younger version of me is proud of where I am right now, that is a sign that I've grown. And if that earlier version of me isn't proud of the progress that I've made it might be time to change courses.
- [19:39]
A
Yeah, it's fascinating. I wonder how many people would have loved to have had themselves now as a role model when they were a kid, and they're just totally blind to it.
- [19:54]
B
I think that's a beautiful way to frame it. And I think that if you are at a point where you're a great role model for your younger self, I think that is a sign that you've not only achieved something worth doing, but you've probably developed a set of values and demonstrated a level of character that is worth appreciating. And I think that in the moment, it's really hard to know whether you're moving in the right direction. I think a lot of us get frustrated when you talk about uncertainty. It's frustrating to feel like, well, I don't have a map because the challenge I'm trying to take on is amorphous, or the goals that I'm setting, they're ambitious enough that I don't know exactly what the steps are to get from where I am today to where I want to be in the future. And I think it's not realistic to have a map in a dynamic and uncertain world. What's much more plausible is to have a compass, which is to ask, is this the right next step? Does it feel directionally correct? Is it taking me closer to my values and my goals, or is it moving me away from those? Is it making me more like the people that I admire or less like them? And I think that compass is frankly all we need. And it's much more realistic than the perfect map.
- [21:21]
A
Is there a line between this comfort with uncertainty and comfort with the idea of failing, of taking risk, of being a little bit more daring?
- [21:33]
B
I think so. I think that the fear of failure stops a lot of people from growing. Right. What happens is you don't want to embarrass yourself and you don't want to take a blow to your self esteem. So you basically start to keep doing the things you're already good at. And over time, you become more and more concerned about making a mistake. You become increasingly perfectionistic, your comfort zone gets smaller, and you don't benefit from trial and error. So one of the ways that I've tried to navigate this recently is I actually have a goal of having three things fail every year.
- [22:11]
A
Okay, how have you got on this year?
- [22:15]
B
I've only had two so far, so I need to step on the gas. I don't set out trying to fail at anything. Let's be clear right I'm not like, all right, let me take on a project that is deliberately going to bomb. Rather, what I'm trying to do is set the expectation that if I don't have three projects fail, it means that I'm not aiming high enough and I'm not stretching myself far enough. And the upside of that then is that when something does crash and burn, I can say, okay, that checks off one of the failures for 2024 or 2025. And I think that, look, we're all gonna. We're all gonna fail in a few things if we are pushing ourselves. And I think expecting that makes it a lot easier to stomach.
- [22:59]
A
Is not failing regularly or at least not fail, not failing intermittently, Is that an indication that you could be taking a little bit more risk?
- [23:08]
B
I think so. I think if at first you don't succeed, it's a sign that you're actually aiming high enough. And if you are consistently either hitting your goals or exceeding your expectations, it probably means you could be pushing yourself a little bit farther or you could be at least trying something that's a little bit less familiar and easy for you.
- [23:33]
A
How debilitating is failure if we encounter it versus how we feel about it when fearing it in advance? I don't know if there's been any studies done on this. The fear of failure versus the sensation of failure or the experience of failure.
- [23:48]
B
Yeah, I think you've already anticipated where my favorite research on this goes. So this is Dan Gilbert and his colleagues, group of psychologists. Gilbert and Wilson, I think, are two of the best. What they show is they study what's called affective forecasting, which is you make a prediction about how you're going to feel if something bad happens, and then you wait for some of those bad things to happen, and then you follow people and ask them, how do you actually feel? And most of us dramatically overestimate how much failure is going to sting and also how long that sting is going to last. So one of the places where Dan and his colleagues studied this was. Was with professors who are about to go up for tenure. And this is like. This is the ultimate gauntlet as an academic. If you succeed, you get to keep your job, and you also have lifetime job security. If you fail, you probably have to move your. Your reputation is in tatters, and you feel like you just couldn't cut it in your field, and maybe you should choose an entirely different career. And now you don't know if you'll ever have that permanent job security. So, not surprisingly, people think on Average, it's going to take five years for them to recover from that blow. But within six months, most people have bounced back. And I think this is a general finding in research on resilience more broadly. George Bonanno and his colleagues have shown that the default response to adversity is not ptsd. It's not chronic stress. It's actually resilience that most people take most setbacks in stride. Because we have what's called a psychological immune system. Just like a physical immune system, our minds generate antibodies to help us make sense, find meaning, and move forward. And that doesn't mean these things don't hurt, but it also means that we're less broken by our own mistakes and setbacks than we think we are.
- [25:46]
A
Adam Mastroianni says that tragedy plus time equals comedy is as close to an equation that the human brain has got, that psychological immune system. The fact as well, that in advance of a thing, you can cause yourself to ruminate so much that you're terrified of it happening, but the actual pain of the thing occurring lasts for way shorter than the story that you told yourself before and the rumination that you have afterwards, you know, so you very much are, like, optimizing for this microcosm peak that isn't as high as you think and doesn't last for as long as you think and isn't as bad as you think. And then even after that, maybe, you know, six months, couple of years down the line, you can laugh about it. But yeah, you've got this great quote. The attitude that helps most with intense stress is not mindfulness, it's hope. In hard times, it's overwhelming to live only in the present. What brings strength is anticipating a brighter future. Resilience lies in remembering that today's burdens may be lighter tomorrow.
- [26:46]
B
Yeah, I mean, look, Adam would know. Dan Gilbert was his mentor. I love his blog, Experimental History.
- [26:52]
A
He's phenomenal. Dude, I love that guy.
- [26:55]
B
Yeah. His insights are fascinating and the writing is just so engaging and entertaining. And, you know, I think this, this is a fundamental truth, right? Which is we are really bad at mental time travel. So we talked about, you know, going backward to get in touch with your past self. The other thing you can do is you can fast forward and think about your future self. And what most people realize when they think about, okay, how much will 20, like, 20 years in the future me really care about, like, the presentation that I'm giving tomorrow or, you know, the bad performance review that I got yesterday? It gives you a little bit of perspective Right. That distance allows you to say, you know what? I'm probably not going to care that much. And you can do it moving sort of back and forth between the past and the present. Think about the failure that you just agonized over a year ago or three years ago. How often do you think about it now? Does it eat away at you every day? For the most part, the answer is no. Although, just in the spirit of candor, the dive I missed my senior year state meet still bothers me.
- [28:03]
A
Still haunts you.
- [28:04]
B
Yeah. God damn it, yeah, it was my best dive. I can't believe I missed my front two and a half. But it's also a really good reminder that unpleasant emotions are teachable moments, that that pain is there to teach me a lesson. Right. It's like a lute. It's a tutorial in better preparation. It's a seminar in, you know, in sort of managing pressure. And the lessons that I learned missing my best dive and the biggest meat of my life have helped me avoid making much bigger mistakes when the stakes are much higher.
- [28:40]
A
So bizarre that sometimes things that were the worst thing that ever happened to you in retrospect were the springboard or diving board that or the kindling, the spark that sort of lights something that causes you to make a change. That, in retrospect, was the inflection point or one of the big inflection points in your entire life.
- [29:02]
B
If it's not, I think you probably haven't done justice to the opportunity to grow from what went wrong. I think that I'm a big fan of learning from success, not just from failure, but empirically. Failure is a better teacher, on average, than success. There's a Madsen and Desai study of the orbital launch industry that I think puts a point on this, where they basically study every organization that has ever launched a rocket into space over half a century. And what they want to know is, when do you make a leap forward in your success rate? And the answer is, it's after a really big fail. Because, you know, and like a small failure, you can explain it away. You can move on really quickly. A big failure forces you. It stops you in your tracks to do the postmortem and to ask yourself, okay, what went wrong there? And how are we going to prevent that moving forward? And I think, obviously we all need to do these when. When we, you know, when we flop. But I've become a big fan also of doing pre mortems, which Gary Klein has studied. So the idea of a pre. Pre mortem is you say, okay, we're about to make a big decision as a group, or, you know, I've got a big choice in front of me. And let's assume in the next few years, with the benefit of hindsight, we conclude this was an unmitigated disaster. What are the most likely causes of that failure? When you have that conversation up front or when you do that reflection upfront, you get better at seeing around corners and anticipating what might go wrong and then you can actually prevent it from happening in the first place. And I think there's a version of that that's a little bit like the opposite of what psychologists call post traumatic growth, where something awful happens to you and you're not grateful that it happened, but you damn well commit that you're going to grow from it. Well, I don't think we always have to go through trauma to get the growth. You could have pre traumatic growth where you anticipate the things that could go horribly and then try to prepare yourself for the lessons that those events might teach you.
- [31:10]
A
This episode is brought to you by Nomatic. Traveling should be about the journey, not the chaos of packing, which is why I've partnered with Nomatic. Their backpack and Carry On Pro have genuinely made the travel process almost enjoyable. They've got compartments for everything, your laptop, your shoes, your sunglasses. It's so well organized that even your toothbrush will feel important. It's like the Marie Kondo of luggage. Everything has its place and if you're still on the fence, their products will last you literally a lifetime with a lifetime guarantee. And you can return or exchange anything within 30 days for any reason. So you can buy your new bag, try it for a month, and if you don't like it, I'll just give you your money back and you can get a 20% discount and see everything that I use and recommend by going to the link in the description below or heading to nomatic.com modernwisdom that's nomatic.com modernwisdom I suppose the danger, the fear that people get stuck in who have that fear of failure is the pre mortem. But without the lessons it's just ruminating on all of the things that could go wrong without using them as a. Well, they haven't gone wrong yet. And the fact that I've become aware of the fact that they might go wrong and potentially identified them and broken them down hopefully makes them less likely that they're going to. This is a cause for celebration, not one for concern.
- [32:29]
B
That's the plan. So in psychology, my favorite definition of worrying is attempted problem solving. And I think the attempted is the part that sometimes we forget. Right. You don't always solve your problem by worrying, but you are able to see it more clearly as you worry about it. And then the goal is to make a distinction between reflection and rumination. I think for a lot of people this is a slippery slope. You do the pre, mortem, you start to imagine all the things that could go wrong, and then pretty soon you're staying up all night just in a panic, in a cold sweat, that all of your fears are going to come true. And I think the difference between that and reflection is in reflection, you're actually having new thoughts as opposed to recycling the same old ones. And so one of my heuristics on rumination is if you're thinking about a future event that might go wrong and you haven't had a new idea for how to prevent it or address it in the last five to 10 minutes, it is time to either move on or talk to somebody else about it. And I like one of the things that psychologists have studied is the idea of just creating worry time windows where you put a, you know, a 30 minute block on your calendar. I do not like these right before bedtime, but maybe mid afternoon, when you feel like you're in that post lunch food coma, you block out a 30 minute worry time window. And any worries that come to you, either before that or after that, you write them down and you give yourself permission to revisit them during a worry time window. And that basically clears your mental deck to focus your attention and your energy on the things that matter. And then you figure out, okay, how am I going to use that worry time productively? Is there somebody who's a good problem solver with me? Is there somebody who's good at helping me manage my emotions? And I think that might be the intervention that more people ought to try. That sounds like it's just for kids, but actually works for adults. In a lot of cases.
- [34:31]
A
It feels like vulnerability sort of has a role to play here, this stark awareness of our own shortcomings. I think you talk about being secure enough in your strengths to show your weaknesses. What's the role there of vulnerability?
- [34:48]
B
Well, I think we need people to tell us how we can improve. Right. This goes back to let's turn our critics and our cheerleaders into coaches. And one of the things I've found in research with Konstantinos Koutiferos is a lot of people, even if you ask them for Feedback or for advice. They do not tell you the truth. They're afraid of hurting your feelings. They don't want to damage the relationship. It's uncomfortable. And so they end up either, you know, biting their tongues or sugarcoating. And they're doing you a disservice. They're depriving you of a chance to learn. So what we found is that one of the ways you can get people to open up and be candid with you is actually to criticize yourself out loud and say, okay, here are the things that I think I need to get better at. And it feels a little vulnerable. I had a leader tell me after I was describing some of the results of our experiments and how helpful it was for a boss just to say, here's the stuff I've been told I'm bad at that I'm working on. This leader said, well, I don't want to do that because I don't want the people around me to find out what I'm bad at. And I'm like, I have some news for you. They already know. Like the people in your orbit, they already know what you're bad at. You can't hide it from them. You might as well get credit for having the self awareness to see it and the humility and integrity to admit it out loud. And that's one of the interesting findings in our data, is that when you talk about your own shortcomings and your opportunities for improvement, you're not just claiming that you can handle the truth, you're actually proving you can take it. And so that gives other people the psychological safety to tell you the things that you may not want to hear, but you actually need to hear. And you don't lose anything by doing that. They don't see you as less competent. They actually in some cases see it as a sign of confidence. Like, wow, you must be really secure in what you're already good at and in your ability to grow that you're willing to talk about what you're bad at.
- [36:48]
A
Yeah, you had a tweet the other day where you were talking about how people think that you save time by shortening down words. But the subtext of what it actually tells people is that you just didn't care about them enough to write something out more verbatim. And this is kind of the same that on the surface, maybe it feels like an admission of your shortcomings, but what it actually comes across as is comfort and acceptance in your strengths. So much so that you can talk about the things that you know, that you're bad at or that you think that you need to work on so important.
- [37:24]
B
And I think it's something that we don't do often enough. And so it feels scary and it really hurts when somebody does level with us. If you only have a quarterly performance review, or if you only find out how you're letting your partner or your spouse down, when you're in the middle of a rare, nasty fight, this is the kind of thing that you never really build thick enough skin to handle. And I don't want to over index on my diving experience, but one of the most valuable things that happened in diving is you do 40 or 50 dives in a practice, and every single one of them you can get a score on. And when you get 40 or 50, two and a half, four, five, nowhere near, you're barely cracking the upper half of the scale on that 0 to 10. In diving, no individual score really bothers you. And so this is actually a habit that I've adopted. I do a lot of public speaking, and as a shy introvert, this is not something that came naturally to me at all. And so early on, I would get off stage and I would immediately ask anybody I encountered, what's your 0 to 10? And no matter what score they gave, whether they gave me a six or a three and a half, I would just ask them, how can I get closer to 10? And I found that very rarely did anyone say 10. And then, you know, they would give me a tip or two, and then I could use that and work on it to improve my score. And anytime I talk to people about this, they're like, ah, but I don't want to be scored like that. That's devastating. I'm like, yeah, if you only do it once a year, but if you're getting dozens of scores a week, then it just becomes second nature and you're actually building your resilience to handle the tough scores and gaining more knowledge to avoid the tough scores. Why, like, people are, are. Are evaluating you all the time. Don't you want to know what they're thinking? And don't you want them to help you grow?
- [39:20]
A
You are evaluating yourself all the time, and you're also evaluating what you think other people are evaluating you on all the time. You know, I wonder. I bet that he thinks that I did well or badly in that thing. It's like, put a. Put a score on it. Ask them, and they can tell you. Yeah, another great prompt for giving a presentation or a talk or whatever and asking people for feedback. Because again, the desirability for people to not hurt your feelings sort of holds strong, typically is. If you had to cut 20% from this talk, just tell me, what would you get rid of? What would be top of the list? What would be the. Because for the most part, your good stuff's probably gonna be good, but it's the really weak stuff that needs to go first. That's what should be triaged to be thrown out.
- [40:04]
B
Oh, I love that you pointed this out, Chris. It reminds me of Lady Klotz and Gabrielle Adams research where they show that when you ask people how to change, how can I improve? How can our team improve? What most people do is they add, they give you more things to do and they forget that our plates are already pretty full. And one of the best ways to improve something is to cut away what's not working, to subtract to subtract. And this sort of addition bias or addiction to always adding things, it doesn't help us as often as it seems like it would. And so I love your prompt to say, okay, if you were going to cut 20%, what is the fat that could be trimmed in this presentation? And that creates room then for the gems to actually be polished.
- [40:57]
A
I'm thinking about the role of emotions in all of this. So much of what we've been talking about have been strategies to compensate or ways that we see ourselves. And it's this sort of degree of rationality. I'm stepping out a little bit. I'm sort of above looking down on the situation, but the felt sense day to day is you're just swimming in your own hormones and neurochemistry. So what? Well, actually, I mean, you talk about pessimism not being an effective strategy for protecting emotions. That's obviously one compensatory mechanism. People become cynical, they try to believe that the. What they insulate themselves from having to feel the pain of failure by never just trying in the first place. What do you think about the role of emotions and how people can treat them with the respect but objectivity that they probably need to.
- [41:46]
B
Well, let's try to bring this to life. What's a. What's an emotion that you often struggle to manage? Or what's the situation where you, where you struggle to manage your emotions, let's.
- [41:58]
A
Say worry, let's say fear, in advance of a project happening, the concern that it's not going to go well.
- [42:05]
B
Okay, give me an upcoming project that you're worried about.
- [42:08]
A
Right now, three and a half thousand people on stage in London In a week and a half's time.
- [42:13]
B
Perfect. Okay, so what are you afraid of, specifically?
- [42:18]
A
Looking silly, not performing well, thinking less of myself because things don't go well, damaging my credibility, proving critics right, not proving myself right.
- [42:34]
B
Huh. That's. That's a pretty solid list of fears. Maybe you shouldn't do the talk.
- [42:40]
A
I sold the tickets. I can't not do that.
- [42:44]
B
Why did you agree to do it in the first place?
- [42:46]
A
Because it's exciting and thrilling and something that, in retrospect, I'll be proud that I did.
- [42:52]
B
Okay, and let me ask you a couple other questions just to understand your perspective a little bit more. How often have the fears that you have come true?
- [43:06]
A
Very rarely.
- [43:09]
B
When they have. What's different about those. Those events?
- [43:15]
A
Hmm. I probably haven't prepared fully, or there was some unseen factor that kind of came out of nowhere. I was underslept. I was in a bad mood. I was stressed about something. Typically, the lovely, flat, clear water that I was supposed to be performing in got disrupted.
- [43:43]
B
There we go. All right, so I think there's a ton of material to work with here. I think the first thing you could do is you could say, okay, there are things that could go wrong, but there are also things that could go right. Let's not forget that. And I think asking, why did I commit to this? You had a clear answer to that. Right. It's exciting, it's thrilling. There's some upside for you, presumably, in connecting with your audience and also connecting with a new audience and creating more opportunities for you to get your ideas out there. I think that that's gotta be balanced. So that's one option for emotion regulation is okay. When you're feeling anxiety, it's a sign that you care about something that is beyond your control. And let's talk about then what the things are that you can control. And so you then went to preparation. And so you are potentially a defensive pessimist, somebody who worries about the worst case scenario and then harnesses that anxiety as motivation to prepare. Which is why I think we have to remember we don't want you to be in a great mood for the next week and a half before you get on stage, because that might actually quell your anxiety prematurely. And then you get complacent and you don't do the preparation necessary. And then you're more likely to disappoint yourself or others. And then I think the last thing here is like, let's, you know, let's get some psychological distance and ask yourself, okay, you've been in this situation before. What is the base rate of failure? It's actually pretty low. That means you're fairly good at this and you're also mostly prepared. And so that's a reason to be confident that you're capable of, you know, of controlling enough to, to have a high probability of success. So I guess those are the range of emotion regulation strategies I would try here. Which ones resonate with you? Which ones are more of a struggle for you?
- [45:34]
A
I don't actually think that I'm that driven by the fear of failure to go and do the preparation. Maybe that was it in the beginning and this sort of goes back to what you were talking about before that. People may need compliments at the start of their journey, but criticisms are more salient the further down that they get. I think that a lot of people are driven, they're activated by this need to prove themselves, to prove their fears wrong to. But after a while, at least for me, you're just so balls deep in these habits and routines and the way that you see the world. And this is how I show up and this is what my day looks like and this is how I prepare and so on and so forth. So I actually think that that as a fuel is something that largely has sort of been let go of for me. Even if some of the fears still persist, the motivation to fix the things that will stop the fears, I think is as changed a little.
- [46:26]
B
That makes sense. And so then I think what, what drives you is wanting to live up to your own standards and wanting to make sure that you don't fall short of other people's expectations of you.
- [46:41]
A
Yeah, I think that would be, that would probably be not far off.
- [46:45]
B
I think that's a, that's, that's a reasonable way to look at it. I think the other thing I would say though is this episode is brought.
- [46:51]
A
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- [47:44]
B
Like, let's go back to your idea of what if you were going to cut 20%, what would you cut? I think one of my biggest frustrations on stage is like, it's really easy to just do your greatest hits and then stagnate. And so in every talk, I try to do 20% new material. And that's the zone of acceptable failure. Right. I'm, I'm expecting that, that's, that some of that content is not going to land. And I'm like, there's a, there's a line drawn on that. Right? We're not doing 50% new material because I want to make sure that 80% of, of what I'm covering has been audience tested and, you know, is going to deliver something of value for them. But the other 20%, like, that's my playground. That's where I'm experimenting, where I'm learning, where often, you know, the most, the most exciting improvisation happens and where we take those random walks and unexpected leaps. And so I, I wonder if part of the way, if another strategy for managing the fear of failure is to say there's going to be an element of your performance that is riskier and so you're going to assume not everything is going to go right.
- [48:53]
A
Yeah. Again, it comes back to that desire for control that if you're trying to do something that you've run 50,000 times before and it goes wrong, it shouldn't have gone wrong. So there's no acceptable play baked into the system. There's no tolerance for things to be a little bit more unpredictable. But if you do it and you say, well, look, part of this, that was the entire point of it, the entire point of it was to find a little bit more playfulness. I love that data that you talked about. You said we feel worse when our negative expectations are confirmed than when our positive expectations bring disappointment. A recipe perhaps for happiness is planning for the Worst while continuing to hope for the best. I think that's a lovely juxtaposition.
- [49:35]
B
I think it's something that we forget. So I'll give you another favorite equation from my favorite blogger. This is Tim Urban, who writes that happiness is reality minus expectations.
- [49:46]
A
Yep.
- [49:48]
B
I think that might be the single greatest line in the history of weight. But why happiness is reality minus expectations and what that drives home for all of us, and it's supported by a lot of research in psychology, is that if you are disappointed, it means that you are expecting too much, but wait, you don't want to lower your expectations. So you have a paradox here. On the one hand, to be successful, you have to aim really high. On the other hand, to be satisfied, you have to temper your expectations. Well, guess what? The only solution I know of to that paradox is to have two targets instead of one. You have an aspiration which is extremely high. It's the best case scenario that you're hoping for and shooting for. You also have an. A minimum acceptable outcome, which is the. If I clear this standard, I will feel like it is good enough. And that creates for you this range in which, like, if I'm between my minimum acceptable and my aspirational, I can be happy. And most of us don't do that. Right. We either set the acceptable target and then I'm satisfied, but I'm not growing that much and I'm not excelling, or we set the ambitious goal, we don't have the acceptable result, and then we're successful and miserable.
- [51:06]
A
Yeah. Yeah. One of the lines in the talk is, congratulations, you might be successful, but you're also very miserable. And it's talking about.
- [51:15]
B
I'm preaching to the choir here then.
- [51:16]
A
Exactly. Yeah. It's talking. We read the same stuff, it seems. Yeah. There's this sense that being happy is kind of unsophisticated in some ways. Areas of the Internet that I try and stay away from, but that. No. Or maybe that negativity is more refined in some way because you see the true way of the world. It's sort of turning your affect into a protective strategy against appearing naive. People hate to appear naive.
- [51:44]
B
They do. And I think that. Look, there's a. There's a long history of evidence that people think that you can be brilliant but cruel and that, you know, being a critic actually makes you smarter than people who are uncritical because Cynical.
- [52:01]
A
Genius. Illusion.
- [52:03]
B
Yeah, exactly. You've been. You've been reading Jimmy Ozaki, I imagine, recently. And what's fascinating to me about this Is these are completely independent qualities. You could do a very incisive, thoughtful analysis of why something works, and you could also do a lazy, uninformed critique of why something doesn't work. And so I think we need to separate the quality of analysis and the depth of, you know, of evaluation that somebody does from the valence. Right. Is the, is the assessment positive or negative? I think one of the, maybe one of the best ways to land in this place, and I'm thinking out loud here, but I actually think that it should be a discipline to. If you're going to criticize something, you also have to try to create it. Because having been in both roles, a diver and a diving judge, an author and a book reviewer, a teacher and speaker and a student and an audience member, one of the overwhelming lessons from juxtaposing those two hats is that criticizing is easy and creating is hard. You can trash a book I wrote in two hours. You didn't spend two years creating it. And I think that the real test of whether somebody is intelligent is not whether they can tear down somebody else's ideas, it's whether they can build an idea of their own.
- [53:40]
A
Yeah. There is this sense that people sit in the stands and throw stones and I don't know, it feels unfair as a person who regularly gets hit in the head by stones, uh, you know, you kind of want to scream out about man in the arena and blah, blah, blah. But I do think that it's important to remember it and that's, you know, do the people criticizing you or that have negative opinions or that you fear the judgment of, do these people have your best interests at heart? And I think that's the best way to sort of scythe through all of the bullshit that you receive. It's like, does this person have my best interests at heart? And if they do, then that's a gift from them. Thank you for telling me this thing. And if they don't, it doesn't matter what they say.
- [54:26]
B
Yeah. So so often people, they, they try to remind us to listen to feedback by saying feedback is a gift. And sometimes I just want to ask, well, like, where's the, where's the returns department? I didn't. This, this is not the gift that I wanted. You. You don't know my taste and my preferences at all. I have no use for this. Like it's garbage. But I think that pre committing is also really helpful here. So think in advance about who are the people whose opinions of your work and your ideas are really important to you. And then Seek their input. And if they're supportive, that means a lot. And it kind of buffers you against whatever criticism comes in. And if they're not supportive, you've got some work to do. And you know it's coming from a place of wanting to help you.
- [55:17]
A
Mm. Yeah, this is a. I loved you said Misery is exhausting, fosters a sense of scarcity. Generosity seems like a sacrifice. Joy is invigorating. It promotes an attitude of abundance. Giving feels gratifying. Vitality is kinder than melancholy. But people, what is it? Misery loves its company. That you just get used to the way that you feel and it's scary to do anything else.
- [55:41]
B
I forgot I wrote that one. But yeah, these attitudes are self fulfilling prophecies in a sense, and I think I see this all the time in my research on generosity, that people who expect the worst in others not only see the worst in others through confirmation bias, they actually elicit the worst in others. And I guess it's an extension of the cynical genius illusion. If you're cynical about other people's motives all the time, you distrust them and you bring out a version of them that has their guard up and that is not willing to share their knowledge freely with you, that's not willing to open up their network to you. You start from the assumption that most people do not want to screw you, and suddenly you see a kinder, more helpful, more collaborative version of other people.
- [56:36]
A
It feels to me like the most important skill in becoming smarter is just trying to be less dumb. It does. You know so much of the stuff from your work, from other psychologists that I speak to. Maybe it's not the entirety of the case, but at least the first order, the first meal that you're supposed to eat is avoid destruction as opposed to expedite success.
- [57:03]
B
I think that's accurate. And I think probably what gets in the way more than anything else is what Emily Cronin has called the bias blind spot, which I like to think of as the I'm not biased bias, where you walk around thinking other people have flaws in their reasoning, other people have holes in their judgment. But me, I'm neutral, I'm objective, I see things accurately, I'm rational. And if you walk around believing that, then that blinds you to seeing all the limitations in your own cognitive processing. And the scariest thing is if you read the research on this, turns out that the higher you score in intelligence, the smarter you are, the more likely you are to fall victim to the I'm not bias bias because you have A lifetime of positive reinforcement, of people rewarding you for being a genius and for being fast at processing information and for always knowing the answer. And that can make you overconfident to the point of arrogant, that you are now ignorant of your own ignorance. And I think it's one of the reasons why so many intelligent people fall victim to the Dunning Kruger effect. You should know better. Like, you should know that when you're not an expert at something, you're going to overestimate, on average, your knowledge and skill in that area. But if you've been told for years or decades that you are better than other people, it is hard to recognize when you're actually worse.
- [58:36]
A
Yeah, I. I realized that you wrote something much more beautiful than I'd done. But on the same topic, about how the hallmark of expertise is not how much you know, it's how well you synthesize. And I've had this idea for a while that one day in sort of late 2010, there was the optimal amount of information available to humans.
- [59:02]
B
It only lasted a day, though.
- [59:04]
A
Yes, correct. We had a scarcity. We had scarcity, Scarcity, scarcity, scarcity. For all of human history, all the way back, we knew far less than we wanted. We had no idea what the weather was going to be like tomorrow and whether or not there was going to be earthquake. And. And then we get to this one day two is 2010 or something like that, and then immediately blew through it. And then we just ended up in the world that we're in now. And, you know, I love this idea of information foraging. I'm not sure if you've come across that. Yeah, it's so cool, this analogy. They can do some sort of. Sort of quantitative analysis of squirrels collecting nuts in trees and then the distance from this tree to the next tree and how many nuts are left. And the squirrels have this weird sort of inventory in their mind where they say, well, I've reached a point where each unit of time in this tree is diminishing in terms of its nut return.
- [59:55]
B
But.
- [59:56]
A
And that tree, based on its distance and my estimated number of nuts in that tree is this amount, and then eventually it breaches the threshold and it moves from one tree to the next tree.
- [60:04]
B
Typical squirrel cognition, by the way.
- [60:07]
A
Right, okay. Classic squirrel cognition. I think that humans are the same information foragers, you know, are always on the lookout. I need to find more things. Wouldn't this be interesting? Wouldn't this be interesting? Especially if you're sort of curiously driven, and then we enter into this world where we're at a permanent 24 hour buffet that extends into eternity in all directions and we can essentially never leave. And yes, for a long time we were information scavengers and scourers. And now it's much more about being discerning. It's about what do I need to take from this and how does it tie into my bigger web of things? Because if you just take whatever you can get and permanently do that, you're just going to be distracted. Distracted, Distracted.
- [60:53]
B
That's profound. That is modern wisdom personified. I think you've nailed it. And Chris, I think the. I think you're right. There was a really limited period of time where optimal information was available. And now that that is clearly behind us, I think our ability to set boundaries on what we consume, right. I think to raise our attentional filters and block out information that is actually redundant or overwhelming or poor quality, that is a vital skill. I think that filtering out is actually in some ways more important than taking in. So my colleague Dan Leventhal writes a lot about absorptive capacity, which is a person or an organization's capability to take in new information. And I think we're all now drowning in information. And I want to know how finely tuned is your filter to know what to ignore and what to avoid. There's actually now a body of research on what's called critical ignoring, which is do you have the discernment like you're talking about to know what to immediately not pay attention to or discount or dismiss? And we have to do that faster and faster now as we're bombarded with more information. And then I think the, the other skill here, just to build on the, the synthesis point. Dan Pink wrote about this. I think his most prescient book was A Whole New Mind, which is now two decades ago, where he argued that in a left brain world, right brainers were actually going to dominate the future. And he named a particular right brain scale that I think now there's a premium on, which he called symphony. And it's the ability to take a bunch of different musical notes and arrange them into a harmony or a melody and a pleasing. I shouldn't even do this metaphor because I'm completely clueless about music. But that idea of symphony is something now that gets rewarded in a big way. Right? Can you not only cut through all the noise, but then zoom in on what's really important and connect those dots in a way that other people can understand? And I think that maybe this is just a variation on Your scavenger forager analogy. But I think that it used to be the DOT collectors who were rewarded. The more stuff you knew, the more impressive you were. And people saw that as a mark of expertise. And now it's the DOT connectors who are going to rule the world because they can spot the patterns that are invisible to others and then anticipate those. And I think that means you have to see the problems in order to solve them. And in order to see the problems in a complex world, you have to connect dots and synthesize.
- [63:35]
A
Yeah, yeah. It's a very odd scenario to be in, you know, in such a short space of time for the primary driving advantage that we were supposed to rely on, to have been flipped from one thing to another thing. And, you know, it doesn't surprise me that people are struggling with their attention, that they're distracted a lot of the time, that they feel frustrated at the fact that they can't hold on to. Nico, for the first time in human history, we are swimming in an abundance of. Of information. We're swimming in an abundance of food, of sloth, of anything you want to have an abundance of, you can have it. Apart from, like, peace. And. Yeah, it doesn't surprise me. It doesn't surprise me. Adaptively, we're not built for it. And culturally, in terms of archetypes, we don't have any tools to be able to use.
- [64:24]
B
Well, this is fascinating, and in some ways, it takes us full circle to the beginning of our conversation because a lot of people are, you know, are, I would say, fretting that our struggles with attention are a problem of ability. Like, people. I hear people say all the time, I can't focus. Kids do not have the capacity to pay attention anymore like they used to. Well, guess what? There was a meta analysis that came out this year looking at every study that's been done over several decades where both kids and adults are tested on attention. And it turns out that kids are no worse than they were 10 and 20 and 30 years ago, and adults are actually better. So we have not lost the ability to pay attention. What I think is in short supply is the motivation to pay attention. To your point, when there are a million distractions, you're not going to focus on any one thing for a long period of time? Like, why would you read a whole book when there are lots of interesting articles on the Internet? But when you find something that grabs your attention or piques your interest, your capacity to hold, it has not been diminished.
- [65:36]
A
One other element I really wanted to touch on was people taking satisfaction from a job well done. I found a quote that said, I still find myself with this sense that success has to be earned and the only way to earn it is to inflict pain on yourself. And if you're not in pain, you didn't try hard enough and it would have been better if you'd suffered more. And I think that's a lie, and I want to find out if it's true. I think that, you know, I've been doing these live shows. I was in Australia recently, and we have a Q and a portion at the end. And a lot of the questions, you know, the most common questions, how do I know that the thing that I'm doing is the right thing? The path that I'm on is the right one. I struggle to feel motivated because the people around me aren't into the things that I'm into. And it makes me feel lonely and broken and I don't know if I'm going to end up finding a tribe that's into the new stuff. And I'm tempted to go back to the old life. And then the third one, no matter how hard I work, I really struggle to ever give myself enough credit for a job well done.
- [66:43]
B
Yeah, I mean, this is a perpetual struggle. It seems to be especially pronounced in knowledge work where people feel like my work is never done. When have I done enough? And I think, yeah, I guess I'd say a couple things on this. The first one is my all time favorite experimental history piece is the article Adam wrote on how there's a place for everyone on how to find your niche. I think it's a must read. Secondly, when have I done it enough? Like, how do I know I've made it? I think there is, there's there's sort of an endless like, well, let me, let, let me, let me try to characterize this with a, with a little bit of an analogy, which is, I think, and I don't know if this is going to land or not, but you can be the judge. I think that I see this a ton with my students. I see them like they get into Wharton and like they now are going to have an Ivy League degree to carry with them their whole lives. And what that means is every time they meet somebody who finds out where they went to college, that person is going to assume they're smart or they're motivated or both. And that could be enough. But pretty soon, like they start to worry about having the most prestigious job and, and they think they have to work for McKinsey or Goldman Sachs. And if they don't get one of those jobs, they have failed. And so then they take one of those jobs. And then the question is, but, like, did I make partner? Like, have I been promoted to managing director? And the question that I ask them is, how many of those will you have to achieve? Like, how many of those badges of honor, those merit badges will you need on your resume before you conclude that other people are going to be impressed by you? Like, how many times are you going to be seduced by the status of the next opportunity to say, well, I've got to, like, I've got to suffer in order to, you know, to reach that next peak? And at some point, you're going to decide, either I've done enough or it's no longer worth it. And what I want to know is, how do you get to that point sooner? So I had a really interesting conversation once with the author, Michael Lewis, of Moneyball and the Blind side and the Big Short. And I asked him, I said, michael, you've spent your whole career studying people who achieve extraordinary success. Which ones are grounded, which ones know how to appreciate the distance they've traveled? And he said, I don't see a lot of humility in the worlds that I occupy. He said, but the people who stay grounded, they have one thing in common. They all have friends from when they're 10 years old. And I don't know whether that's causal. Maybe just the kinds of people who are inclined to be grounded are the ones who keep their friends. But I've got to believe, Chris, that there is a component of this that sort of, you know, keeps you human and also makes you realize, like, you are pushing yourself too hard and you don't need to suffer in these ways, which is your friends from 10 years old. They don't value you by your achievements. They don't define your worth by your success. Like, your relationship predates all of that nonsense. And so I think those are the best people to keep you honest. And I don't think it has to be your friends from when you were 10. I think it could be your friends from when you were eight. It could be your friends from when you were 14. It might be people you've met who actually don't know anything about your career or your accomplishments or your goals and aspirations. And I think we all need those people in our lives who value us for our character, not for our success.
- [70:39]
A
Yeah, I think your mum is probably usually a good place to look as well. What does your mum want for you in life? Wants you to be content and happy and she loved you whether you were number one or it didn't matter too.
- [70:52]
B
So maybe, maybe, I mean.
- [70:55]
A
Oh, yeah, the tyrannical tiger mom that wants you to be. Yes, true. Good point.
- [71:00]
B
Well, no, I was gonna say that that is more common than I. I would have believed there was a. There's a making caring, common study where you ask parents what they want most for their kids. And most parents say, I want my kid to be happy and kind. Then you ask their children, what do your parents want for you? And their kids think that achievement is number one, that their success matters more to their parents than their happiness or their kindness. And I think, I don't believe, by the way, that the kids are right, per se, or the parents are right. I think that what happens is parents want all these things. We want our kids to be successful and happy and kind. And we think that, you know, if they're successful, they're going to be happier, which is obviously not always true. We think that success is going to allow them to do more for others. Maybe, maybe not. What happens, though, is that parents only end up talking about achievement, or they primarily talk about achievement.
- [71:55]
A
Yep.
- [71:55]
B
Like how, how many dinner table conversations are. What grade did you get on the test? How many goals did you score in the. In the game? And when you do that, you send an implicit message that what matters above all else is what your kids accomplish. And so one of the. One of the ways that my wife, Allison and I have tried to. Tried to change that equation is we ask our kids every week, who did you help this week and who helped you? And we're trying to make it really clear to them. We don't just want you to be successful. We want you to care about others. We want you to be givers, not takers. And we want you to pay attention to which kids in your class. You know, not just who are the popular kids or the cool kids, but who are the kind and caring kids. And when you notice who helped you, you realize who are the people who have others best interests at heart. And I think we need to have more of those kinds of conversations with people, not just with kids, probably with adults too, because we convey what we value through what we pay attention to.
- [73:03]
A
I love it. Adam Grant, ladies and gentlemen. Adam, where should people go they want to keep up to date with all of your work online?
- [73:09]
B
Oh, I guess. I don't know. Adam Grant.net I have a substack newsletter and a bunch of assessments you can take to gauge your generosity, your mental flexibility, your hidden potential, and I guess also rethinking. I host a podcast where I try to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.
- [73:34]
A
Dude, I appreciate you. I love the fact that you're really knee deep in all of the literature and all of the research.
- [73:39]
B
It's in the job description. It's literally. It's what I know.
- [73:43]
A
Yeah.
- [73:44]
B
But I love how much research you read for fun, clearly, and also how practical you make it.
- [73:50]
A
Trying to, man, trying to bridge that gap. Dude, I really love this. I've been looking forward to bringing you on for a long time. And whenever the next book's out, I'd love to bring you back on as well.
- [73:58]
B
Well, I'm honored to be here. I would love to know. Give me your 0 to 10 and what I can do better as a guest because you're a pro at this.
- [74:05]
A
Get the headphones to work before we start. That was the biggest one. What would be better if it was 20% of anything? Yeah. What would you feel? Honestly, dude, you know, citing the studies very quickly, moving through them, not lingering in the boring reference y parts, explaining this happened, and just giving people enough of a reference is really, really great. The personal anecdotes also fantastic. Maybe just a tiny. Maybe just a tiny little bit more in terms of the tactical side, but we even got a lot of that. You did fucking awesome. So I'll have to reflect and I'll email you afterward. But bro, I've loved this. I've been wanting to bring you on literally for years. And yeah, you're fantastic. Your work's brilliant. Even your Instagram and your Twitter are like high signal places to be. So I'm very glad that we managed to finally find a time.
- [75:07]
B
Well, I really appreciate that and it's a lot of pressure to live up to now. I think I feel like I could have been a little punchier on a couple of the questions, particularly the opening question. And I think some of the most interesting parts of the conversation were like, kind of you, you sharing a perspective or an experience and then us riffing on that. And so I think one of my notes for me is I need to. I need to be off kind of my usual topics enough that the information foraging idea comes up that the, like, okay, well, what are you. What are you worried about failing at? Comes up. Because I think those moments of like, let's play with an idea together or let's think about, you know, a problem to solve or like, what, what would the the concrete action step be in this situation. I feel like those. Those are the moments that crackle, and I think we had a number of great ones. I'm like, oh, now, in retrospect, we could have had more of that. Damn it. I'm looking forward to the next conversation.
- [76:06]
A
Me too, man. Me too. Let's. Let's not leave it quite so long. Look, I'll. I'll love you and leave you. Thank you so much for a day, dude.