Dr. Adam Grant: How to Unlock Your Potential, Motivation & Unique Abilities

00:00:00.000 | Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools

00:00:04.780 | for everyday life.

00:00:09.080 | I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford

00:00:13.660 | School of Medicine.

00:00:15.200 | My guest today is Dr. Adam Grant.

00:00:17.580 | Adam Grant is a professor of organizational psychology at the Wharton School at University

00:00:21.820 | of Pennsylvania.

00:00:22.980 | He has authored five bestselling books and most recently has authored a new book entitled

00:00:27.420 | Hidden Potential.

00:00:28.680 | He received his bachelor's degree from Harvard University and his doctorate from the University

00:00:33.400 | of Michigan.

00:00:34.560 | Today we discuss peer-reviewed studies and tools based on the data from those studies

00:00:39.520 | that can enable people to meet their goals and overcome significant challenges, including

00:00:44.360 | how to overcome procrastination, as well as how to see around or through blind spots,

00:00:50.240 | as well as how to overcome sticking points in motivation and creativity.

00:00:54.440 | We also discuss the research on and practical tools related to the underpinnings of performance

00:00:59.020 | in any endeavor, including how to increase one's confidence and how to have a persistent

00:01:03.880 | growth mindset.

00:01:05.220 | By the end of today's episode, it will be clear to you that Dr. Adam Grant has an absolutely

00:01:10.120 | spectacular depth and breadth of knowledge, and that knowledge is both practical, it is

00:01:15.640 | based on peer-reviewed research, and he conveys those tools with the utmost clarity and generosity.

00:01:22.040 | Indeed, by the end of today's episode, you will have more than a dozen new tools never

00:01:27.060 | discussed before on the Huberman Lab podcast that you can apply in your academic endeavors,

00:01:31.840 | in athletic endeavors, in creative endeavors, in fact, in any area of life.

00:01:37.320 | Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching

00:01:40.800 | and research roles at Stanford.

00:01:42.440 | It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information

00:01:46.200 | about science and science-related tools to the general public.

00:01:49.580 | In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

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00:05:53.700 | And now for my discussion with Dr. Adam Grant.

00:05:56.280 | - Adam, welcome.

00:05:57.280 | - Excited to be here.

00:05:59.680 | - We're very excited to have you here.

00:06:01.800 | Your career, both public facing and academic career have covered an enormous range of topics.

00:06:06.860 | So we have a lot to cover.

00:06:08.760 | - Look who's talking.

00:06:11.140 | - And anytime two professors sit down or even one professor says, we have a lot to cover.

00:06:16.600 | I think everyone listening braces themselves like, oh no, but these topics, I assure everyone

00:06:21.700 | are of the utmost interest and you cover them in such both fabulous detail and you make

00:06:27.740 | it very clear.

00:06:28.740 | So I'm really looking forward to this.

00:06:30.660 | I'd like to start off by talking about something that I'm obsessed by and I know a lot of people

00:06:38.040 | are obsessed with and struggle with.

00:06:40.240 | And I know you also have a recent publication on this topic, which is procrastination.

00:06:46.940 | I am a bit of a procrastinator, but a different way of stating that is that I love deadlines.

00:06:53.200 | I learned in college that I love, love, love deadlines because it seems to harness my focus

00:07:00.680 | and my attention.

00:07:01.680 | I like just enough, I guess you call it anxiety or autonomic arousal for the neuroscience

00:07:08.100 | or physiology oriented folks.

00:07:10.300 | For me, just brings about a total elimination of all of the distractors.

00:07:16.700 | And it seems to both slow and accelerate my perception of time and it seems to bring out

00:07:24.980 | my best to have deadlines.

00:07:27.320 | But I would prefer to not have to procrastinate in order to self-impose deadlines, I prefer

00:07:31.120 | that other people impose those deadlines in fact.

00:07:33.980 | So what do we know about procrastination?

00:07:37.180 | Why do some people complete things well in advance?

00:07:40.180 | Why do other people procrastinate?

00:07:42.080 | Is it that they're seeking deadlines as I believe I am?

00:07:47.020 | And interestingly, and sort of alluding to this recent paper, viewers, what is the relationship

00:07:54.240 | between procrastination and creativity?

00:07:57.320 | - I feel like we should just deal with all that later.

00:07:59.300 | Let's put it off.

00:08:00.940 | No.

00:08:01.940 | - Good one.

00:08:02.940 | By the way, there's extra credit for science funds on here, so nicely done.

00:08:08.100 | One of the best articles on procrastination ever written was titled at last my article

00:08:12.660 | on procrastination.

00:08:13.660 | - Fantastic.

00:08:14.660 | I love it.

00:08:15.660 | - Yeah.

00:08:16.660 | It just made me smile.

00:08:18.220 | So I think the basic question I think to start with is why do we procrastinate?

00:08:23.980 | And I thought I was immune actually when I came into this topic.

00:08:28.140 | I was the person who annoyed my college roommates by finishing my thesis a couple of months

00:08:32.180 | early.

00:08:33.180 | I found out there was a term for me.

00:08:34.740 | I'm a pre-crastinator.

00:08:35.740 | So the focus and the pressure that you get from a deadline, I get that the moment the

00:08:41.340 | project starts.

00:08:43.340 | And sometimes months or years in advance.

00:08:46.140 | And so I was really proud of finishing everything early.

00:08:48.980 | And then I discovered there are things that I procrastinate on too, which was a little

00:08:53.180 | bit disappointing.

00:08:54.180 | - Are you willing to share what some of those--

00:08:55.860 | - I am.

00:08:57.020 | So I procrastinate on anything that's administrative.

00:09:01.840 | So--

00:09:02.840 | - I'm right there with you.

00:09:03.840 | - You want to get time on my calendar?

00:09:04.840 | - Yeah.

00:09:05.840 | - Okay.

00:09:06.840 | - So I procrastinate on things to respond.

00:09:07.840 | You asked me a question about social science.

00:09:08.840 | I will be back to you in a minute.

00:09:10.620 | I procrastinate on grading.

00:09:13.420 | Takes me forever.

00:09:15.420 | I basically put off a whole bunch of tasks that I thought had nothing in common.

00:09:20.260 | It turns out that I procrastinate when I'm bored.

00:09:24.140 | Boredom is, I guess it's probably my most hated emotion.

00:09:27.820 | And so I will do anything to avoid a boring task.

00:09:30.920 | And I think this goes to why people procrastinate, which is a lot of people think it's laziness

00:09:34.620 | or you're not disciplined enough.

00:09:36.260 | But actually, the research on this is really clear that you're not avoiding work when you

00:09:39.400 | procrastinate.

00:09:40.400 | In fact, a lot of our procrastination is focused on doing things that involve a lot of energy.

00:09:45.660 | You've seen people probably clean their entire houses when they're putting off a task.

00:09:50.500 | So it's not that you're being lazy.

00:09:52.100 | It's that you're avoiding negative emotions, that a task stirs up.

00:09:55.580 | So for me, it's boredom.

00:09:57.100 | For a lot of people, it's fear or anxiety.

00:09:59.460 | I don't know if I can pull this off.

00:10:01.460 | I have an extreme case of imposter syndrome in this role.

00:10:05.560 | The challenge in front of me is too daunting.

00:10:07.940 | For some people, it's confusion.

00:10:08.940 | I haven't figured it out yet.

00:10:10.380 | And so I can't work on this because I feel like I'm stuck.

00:10:14.940 | So I guess the big question for you then, Andrew, is what's the emotion that causes

00:10:18.220 | you to procrastinate?

00:10:21.000 | It's hard for me to identify the stick here.

00:10:24.160 | I think of it more as the carrot that comes with deadlines.

00:10:28.940 | And again, I don't consider myself a procrastinator per se.

00:10:32.540 | I just really love deadlines and procrastination is a terrific way to simulate the deadline.

00:10:38.520 | So for me...

00:10:39.520 | So you wait, so you delay starting or finishing a task in order to have a sense of time pressure?

00:10:45.660 | That's right.

00:10:46.660 | It builds a certain amount of internal arousal in me to know, "Okay, I've got 72 hours to

00:10:51.920 | complete something and it's now game time."

00:10:55.340 | I like the game time before the game time.

00:10:58.340 | For a podcast, I'll put in anywhere from several days to weeks or even months in preparation.

00:11:04.420 | So it's really elastic depending on the topic.

00:11:07.180 | But when it came to exams in school, or if it comes to writing deadlines, I consider

00:11:15.640 | the shipping of the product or the presentation of the live event that I happened to be doing

00:11:20.420 | as the second game or event.

00:11:23.920 | The first event is the pressure and the excitement of getting into the groove of doing focused

00:11:29.660 | work.

00:11:30.660 | Because for me, that's such a drug.

00:11:31.660 | I mean, it feels like having all the systems of my brain and body oriented towards one

00:11:37.060 | specific thing is just sheer bliss for me.

00:11:41.100 | So it sounds like then you're actually not a chronic procrastinator.

00:11:45.560 | Thank you.

00:11:46.900 | That's never been the way I viewed myself, but now I'll take that.

00:11:50.800 | It's a strategy for you.

00:11:52.300 | It is a strategy.

00:11:53.540 | That's right.

00:11:54.540 | And I was fairly wayward youth, barely finished high school, et cetera.

00:11:58.500 | So by the time I got serious about school, which was my second year of university, when

00:12:03.600 | deadlines were presented, like there's a midterm exam on a given date, that was exciting to

00:12:09.220 | me.

00:12:10.220 | That was exciting.

00:12:11.220 | It was like, "Okay, that's the big thing.

00:12:12.220 | That's my opportunity to prove myself to myself," because I was really coming from behind.

00:12:17.100 | And then the opportunity to, or I should say the feeling of dropping into that groove,

00:12:22.800 | like this is the exciting part, is the preparation.

00:12:25.980 | Likewise with podcasting, for our solo podcast, I love the research as much as I love presenting

00:12:31.380 | the material.

00:12:32.380 | Maybe more.

00:12:33.380 | Maybe more.

00:12:34.380 | Right.

00:12:35.380 | Likewise for university lectures or for traveling and giving seminars as a traditional academic.

00:12:39.780 | I'm sure you're familiar with that, right?

00:12:41.340 | Of course.

00:12:42.340 | Preparation is where you realize it's almost like, I think of it as somebody like a miner

00:12:46.080 | in a mine and just finding a gem.

00:12:48.980 | And of course, then there are all the thoughts of what you can do with that later and you're

00:12:52.340 | going to show people it has a certain value to the world, et cetera.

00:12:56.100 | But it's the searching and finding those gems that is like...

00:13:00.640 | Even as I talk about it, I feel like my body's going to float out of the chair a little bit.

00:13:03.680 | I have the same experience.

00:13:05.680 | It's the unleashed curiosity and then the rush of discovery.

00:13:10.480 | And by the time you're teaching it or explaining it, "But I already know this.

00:13:13.700 | I'm not learning anything anymore.

00:13:15.420 | And yes, I'm excited to share it and I hope it's helpful to other people."

00:13:19.540 | So I think as you talk about what your process looks like, I don't even think what you do

00:13:24.660 | qualifies as procrastination technically.

00:13:26.660 | This is getting better and better.

00:13:28.980 | Seriously, if you think about how procrastination is defined, it's delaying despite an expected

00:13:35.520 | cost.

00:13:36.860 | And you don't think there's a cost.

00:13:37.940 | You actually see a benefit.

00:13:39.380 | That's right.

00:13:40.380 | And I've tried starting...

00:13:41.380 | That's not procrastination.

00:13:42.380 | That's just delay.

00:13:43.380 | Yeah.

00:13:44.380 | I've tried starting things earlier and I should say that my process often begins much earlier

00:13:49.300 | than the physical process.

00:13:51.260 | If I was being observed in an experiment, it'd be, "Okay, Andrew's finally sitting down to

00:13:55.320 | write this book chapter or finally sitting down to research some papers for an episode."

00:14:02.280 | But I'm thinking about it all the time, much to the dismay of people in my life.

00:14:07.140 | I'm constantly thinking about these things.

00:14:08.900 | I mean, walking to take out the recycle, I'll have ideas and then I'll write them down.

00:14:14.020 | I'm constantly writing things down, voice memos into my phone.

00:14:17.180 | I have a method of capture where I basically try and just grab everything and then filter

00:14:21.460 | out what's useful.

00:14:22.580 | Do you have a process like that for gleaning ideas?

00:14:25.420 | A little bit.

00:14:26.420 | I do now.

00:14:27.420 | So when Jiaxin and I started this research on procrastination, she had come to me.

00:14:33.340 | She was a very creative doctoral student and she said, "I have my best ideas when I'm procrastinating."

00:14:39.500 | And it was one of those moments where I didn't believe her, but I thought it was an interesting

00:14:44.940 | enough idea that it was worth exploring and I said, "Show me.

00:14:48.240 | Let's get some data.

00:14:49.240 | Let's see if we can test this."

00:14:51.180 | And she ended up gathering data in a Korean company where she surveyed people on how often

00:14:55.900 | they procrastinate and then got their supervisors to rate their creativity.

00:15:00.440 | And sure enough, found that people who procrastinate sometimes were rated as more creative than

00:15:05.500 | people who rarely do, like me, the procrastinators.

00:15:08.460 | And I remember asking her, "What about the chronic procrastinators?"

00:15:12.460 | And she was like, "I don't know, they never filled out my survey."

00:15:15.180 | Yeah.

00:15:16.180 | As I recall from that paper, there's an inverted U-shape function with procrastination on the

00:15:20.980 | vertical axis and creativity on the horizontal axis.

00:15:26.900 | Flipped.

00:15:27.900 | Flipped, sorry.

00:15:28.900 | Okay.

00:15:29.900 | So explain to me then the relationship between procrastination and creativity.

00:15:33.620 | Yeah.

00:15:34.620 | So basically the peak of creativity is in the middle of procrastination.

00:15:37.300 | Ah, okay.

00:15:38.300 | Got it.

00:15:39.300 | And yeah, there's an upside down U curve there.

00:15:41.620 | And so then, I thought this was fascinating, so then we go into the lab to say, "Can we

00:15:46.060 | replicate this?

00:15:47.060 | Can we control it in an experiment?"

00:15:48.620 | And the hardest part of that was, "How do you randomly assign people to procrastinate?"

00:15:53.760 | To my knowledge, never been done before.

00:15:55.300 | And we eventually figured out that we could give people a bunch of tasks to do and then

00:16:00.040 | tempt them with highly entertaining YouTube videos that were placed on their screen.

00:16:04.700 | And we put different numbers of YouTube videos there so that if there's only one, you're

00:16:09.260 | not tempted to procrastinate much.

00:16:11.580 | If there are four, you're probably gonna get sucked into a little bit of a YouTube spiral.

00:16:15.360 | If there are eight, you might be putting off the task that's much less exciting than watching

00:16:21.280 | Jimmy Kimball's mean tweets, for example.

00:16:23.740 | And this was done in a fairly naturalistic environment for these folks?

00:16:27.060 | Yeah.

00:16:28.060 | People are on a computer, they're asked to solve some creative problems that look pretty

00:16:32.020 | similar to what you might do in your job.

00:16:34.180 | And then we're gonna score your creativity later.

00:16:37.060 | And it turned out that the people who were tempted to procrastinate moderately ended

00:16:41.300 | up generating the most creative ideas.

00:16:43.560 | So why is that?

00:16:44.560 | There are a couple of things that happen and you have to look at both sides of the curve.

00:16:47.740 | So what's wrong with the procrastinators and also what happens to the extreme procrastinators?

00:16:53.980 | And in both cases, what happens is you end up with a little bit of tunnel vision.

00:16:58.100 | So when I dive right into a task, I'm stuck with my first ideas.

00:17:02.840 | And I don't wait long enough to incubate and get my best ideas.

00:17:06.100 | I'm less likely to reframe the problem.

00:17:08.660 | I'm less likely to access remote knowledge because I'm just diving right in.

00:17:12.980 | And meanwhile, the chronic procrastinators end up in the same boat because they don't

00:17:17.420 | get started until the last minute.

00:17:18.740 | And so they have to rush ahead with the easiest idea to implement as opposed to really developing

00:17:23.080 | the most novel idea.

00:17:24.700 | And meanwhile, the people in the middle who are starting to feel that pressure of like,

00:17:29.380 | "Wow, I spun my wheels for 10 minutes watching a bunch of YouTube videos, I'm running out

00:17:33.860 | of time for this task," they still have enough time to work on the ideas that were active

00:17:38.120 | in the back of their minds.

00:17:39.460 | And that gives them a shot at more novel ideas.

00:17:41.700 | So I've tried to adopt this, to answer your question, I've tried to adopt this as my process

00:17:45.420 | now to say I will still dive into a project ahead of schedule, but I will not commit to

00:17:50.220 | an idea until I've let it incubate for a few weeks and I'm working on other things.

00:17:55.020 | Whereas an earlier version of me, like when I'd sit down to write a book, as soon as I

00:17:58.740 | had the book idea, I would start writing on day one.

00:18:01.160 | Now I have the idea.

00:18:02.160 | I file it away and I give myself at least a month before I begin drafting.

00:18:06.980 | And I think it feels less productive, but it's far more creative.

00:18:11.440 | - What are your thoughts about some of what you described being an unconscious way of

00:18:17.400 | seeding the mind and the unconscious with an idea?

00:18:21.020 | So for instance, let's take a school academic scenario where students get an assignment

00:18:27.240 | and the assignment is contained within a folder and it just says, "Assignment."

00:18:31.680 | And it's due in a particular date and it says due on that particular date and they're given

00:18:36.440 | the folder, but they have no sense of what the assignment is.

00:18:39.720 | You can imagine one category of procrastinator that will take that thing and put it down

00:18:44.580 | and avoid looking at it entirely versus another category of procrastinator that will flip

00:18:49.920 | it open and take a look at, okay, this is going to be an essay on, I don't know, something

00:18:55.100 | about economic theory in the late 1700s.

00:18:59.020 | Close it and then procrastinate.

00:19:01.560 | There is an idea, which frankly I subscribe to a little bit because we recently did this

00:19:06.800 | series on mental health, not mental illness, but mental health with Dr. Paul Conte, where

00:19:11.260 | he talked extensively about the unconscious and how the unconscious mind is always working

00:19:16.080 | with ideas, things that we are concerned about, performance, these sorts of things, even if

00:19:20.240 | we're not aware of them.

00:19:22.960 | What are your thoughts about the creativity that's seeded by slight procrastination being

00:19:28.400 | related to actually knowing what you're procrastinating on specifically?

00:19:32.140 | I think it turns out to be, I don't want to say essential, but critical.

00:19:36.620 | So one of the things we found is in order for moderate procrastination to fuel creativity,

00:19:42.540 | you have to be intrinsically motivated by the thing you're procrastinating on.

00:19:45.840 | Interesting.

00:19:46.840 | And so what happens is if you're bored, for example, by the topic, you're not going to

00:19:52.240 | open the folder.

00:19:53.400 | You're not going to start thinking about it at all.

00:19:55.360 | It's not going to begin, you're not going to do any subconscious processing.

00:19:58.800 | You're not going to have any unexpected connections between this topic and something else you've

00:20:03.400 | learned about or been curious about.

00:20:06.520 | If you're interested in the problem, then when you put it off, you're much more likely

00:20:10.960 | to still keep it active in the back of your mind.

00:20:13.400 | And that's when you begin to see, I imagine you could explain the biology of this.

00:20:20.080 | I imagine, for example, there are probably more neural networks that are connecting.

00:20:30.680 | You get access to ideas that previously would have been sort of separate nodes.

00:20:36.640 | And so I think that you want to know what the topic is, you don't want to just see the

00:20:40.520 | blank assignment, but you also have to find a reason that this is exciting to you.

00:20:44.800 | Otherwise you're going to avoid it as opposed to letting it percolate.

00:20:48.640 | That brings us to the topic of intrinsic motivation.

00:20:52.480 | And I'd like to link that up with the topic of performance.

00:20:55.680 | So when I was in university, there were many topics that I was excited to learn about,

00:21:00.720 | some more than others, of course.

00:21:02.800 | But occasionally I'd be in a class or I'd get an assignment that frankly I had minimal

00:21:08.700 | interest in, never zero, but minimal interest.

00:21:11.800 | And as a way of dealing with that, I embarked on a process of literally lying to myself

00:21:17.700 | and just telling myself, okay, I'm super interested in reading this, and I'm going to force myself

00:21:22.040 | to be interested in reading it.

00:21:23.420 | And lo and behold, I would start falling in love with certain things.

00:21:27.220 | Maybe it was even the arrival of a word that I didn't recognize.

00:21:32.900 | And then I would go look it up, and I knew I was studying for the GRE at that time.

00:21:35.940 | So I had to file that away.

00:21:36.940 | I still have my notebooks of all the vocabulary words that I learned in the course of my university

00:21:41.980 | courses that frankly made the verbal portion of the GRE pretty easy, which if you ever

00:21:48.300 | try and study for that at the end, it's pretty tough to commit all those new words to memory

00:21:53.060 | and context.

00:21:54.200 | So I could find little hooks, and through those hooks, I could kind of ratchet my way

00:21:59.020 | into a larger interest.

00:22:00.300 | And then lo and behold, I'm really interested in Greek mythology, or I actually liked that

00:22:05.020 | one at first, but I didn't have to trick myself.

00:22:07.860 | But maybe we could spend a little bit of time talking about what is true intrinsic motivation?

00:22:14.880 | Is it always reflexive?

00:22:17.480 | Can we make ourselves intrinsically motivated about a given topic, or scenario, or group

00:22:24.980 | of people?

00:22:26.680 | And then let's talk about how intrinsic motivation links to performance, because there's a rich

00:22:29.940 | literature on this, as I recall, and I remember the Stanford study of rewarding kids for things

00:22:34.140 | they were already intrinsically motivated to do.

00:22:35.860 | Maybe we could touch on that a little bit and remind people who haven't heard about

00:22:38.500 | it.

00:22:39.500 | But I'm fascinated by this topic, because I feel like so much of life is about doing

00:22:43.420 | things that initially we don't feel that excited to do, and yet succeeding in life until you

00:22:49.380 | can afford to offload your administrative work to somebody else, which hopefully by

00:22:54.500 | now you have.

00:22:55.500 | - Have to find a way to get it done.

00:22:57.620 | - Right.

00:22:58.620 | This is fundamental to being a functional human being, frankly.

00:23:01.700 | Not just successful in air quotes, but functional.

00:23:05.460 | We gotta do stuff that we don't enjoy doing.

00:23:07.540 | - Yeah, so I think we can talk about a couple different ways to nurture intrinsic motivation.

00:23:12.160 | We can think about how the task itself is designed.

00:23:14.580 | We can think about reward systems, and then we can think about also the things we say

00:23:17.880 | to ourselves and others, which I hope are not lies, but rather persuasive attempts.

00:23:25.740 | Let's start on that one, actually.

00:23:26.900 | I don't know a lot of people who are that good at deliberate self-deception.

00:23:30.260 | - Well, I like to think it was only around a particular set of goal-motivated pursuits,

00:23:37.980 | but at that time, for me also, it was survival.

00:23:39.860 | As I mentioned, I didn't do well in high school.

00:23:42.020 | I really wanted to perform well in university, but I knew that working just for the grade

00:23:47.580 | wasn't going to carry me.

00:23:49.640 | It felt catabolic, and I don't know.

00:23:53.740 | Maybe at that age, I was still in the window of heightened neuroplasticity.

00:23:58.060 | We know it never closes, but I think I also fell in love with the process of learning

00:24:03.920 | how to do what I just described.

00:24:05.540 | - Yeah, so I think for most people, the best method of self-persuasion is actually to convince

00:24:10.220 | somebody else.

00:24:11.220 | I'm thinking of Elliot Aronson's classic research on cognitive dissonance, where he would ask

00:24:16.620 | you to go and tell somebody else a task you hated is really interesting, and if he paid

00:24:22.720 | you a lot to do it, you still hated the task because you had a justification.

00:24:27.180 | I got 20 bucks to kind of fib a little bit about this task.

00:24:32.640 | The task is bad, but I did it for the payment.

00:24:36.220 | When he paid you $1 to go and tell somebody that you loved a task that you didn't, you

00:24:40.860 | ended up liking it more.

00:24:42.380 | - Wow, and maybe I shouldn't be surprised, but maybe you should tell me why I shouldn't

00:24:47.060 | be surprised, because I hope people got what you just said very clearly.

00:24:51.620 | If they didn't, if you don't like doing something, going and reporting to somebody else how great

00:24:56.080 | that thing is, so lying about it to somebody else, is one way to increase the degree to

00:25:02.500 | which you like or enjoy that behavior or topic, and if you're paid $20 to go lie to somebody

00:25:09.780 | in the positive direction, so against your true belief, it's less effective in shifting

00:25:15.360 | your underlying affect about that thing, your emotions, than if you're paid less, correct?

00:25:20.200 | - Yeah, exactly.

00:25:21.200 | I think obviously in the experiment, lying was an easy way to show the effect, but in

00:25:26.900 | real life, I think the way that you want to apply this is to say, "All right, I've got

00:25:30.460 | to find something about this task that's interesting to me, and then in the process of explaining

00:25:35.300 | it to somebody else, I'm going to convince myself because I'm hearing the argument from

00:25:39.420 | somebody I already like and trust."

00:25:40.860 | I've also chosen the reasons that I find compelling as opposed to hearing somebody else's reasons,

00:25:49.740 | and so I think this goes to the point that you were making, which is if you're trying

00:25:55.320 | to find a hook to make a topic intriguing, you've got to figure out, "Okay, what is it

00:25:59.600 | that would make this fascinating to me?"

00:26:02.140 | And in a lot of cases, what you're looking for is a curiosity gap.

00:26:05.580 | I think social scientists like to talk about curiosity as an itch that you have to scratch.

00:26:11.000 | So there's something you want to know, and you don't know it yet.

00:26:13.960 | So I would say, I tell my students often, "Take your least favorite class and find a

00:26:19.100 | mystery or a puzzle, something that you just do not know the answer to.

00:26:23.660 | Actually, I've talked with our kids about this.

00:26:26.880 | What really happened to King Tut?

00:26:29.180 | Do you know?

00:26:30.180 | Can you get to the bottom of that?"

00:26:31.340 | And all of a sudden, you're like, "I wonder.

00:26:32.840 | I need to Google it, and then I need to see if Wikipedia has credible information on this."

00:26:37.100 | And the more you learn about that, the more intriguing it becomes, and I think that's

00:26:40.700 | the beginning of the process of finding intrinsic motivation.

00:26:43.580 | I see.

00:26:44.620 | So inherent in your answer is the idea that there's something wired into our neural circuits

00:26:52.820 | and therefore psychology, that curiosity as a verb, the act of being curious and seeking

00:27:00.860 | information where, well, and I should say, I define curiosity, and hopefully you'll disagree

00:27:05.980 | with me or agree either way, it doesn't matter as long as we can get a deeper understanding.

00:27:09.940 | I define curiosity as a desire to find something out where you are not attached to a particular

00:27:15.500 | outcome.

00:27:16.500 | Yes.

00:27:17.500 | Is that right?

00:27:18.500 | Yeah.

00:27:19.500 | In psychology, it's typically defined as just wanting to know, and that means you're driven

00:27:22.660 | by the question, not a particular answer, which is exactly what you're driving at.

00:27:26.300 | Okay, great.

00:27:27.300 | And I think it was Dorothy Parker that said, "The cure for boredom is curiosity.

00:27:32.440 | There's no cure for curiosity."

00:27:34.420 | As there shouldn't be a cure for curiosity.

00:27:38.340 | And by the way, folks, we don't know what neural circuits subserve curiosity in the

00:27:42.940 | brain.

00:27:43.940 | It's got to be a distributed network.

00:27:44.940 | There's no brain area for curiosity, but it's got to be linked up with the reward systems

00:27:48.760 | of dopamine, et cetera, in some way, because when one discovers something new that satisfies

00:27:53.820 | some curiosity, clearly there's an internal reward there.

00:27:58.940 | Okay, let me back up.

00:28:00.100 | So if your child or an adult is dreading working, exploring a topic or going about an assignment

00:28:10.180 | of any kind, you will give them a question that they then need to resolve.

00:28:15.140 | What if the assignment is like rake the leaves off the front lawn?

00:28:19.380 | Do you say, "Count the leaves," or I mean, how does one get past the sort of procrastination

00:28:27.900 | and generate some intrinsic motivation for things that one dreads where it's unlikely

00:28:32.840 | that they're going to discover some knowledge that's exceedingly useful for the future?

00:28:37.220 | You always start with, "Okay, what's the first experiment I can run?

00:28:41.040 | Find the most interesting looking leaf for your favorite leaf, and then that lasts for

00:28:44.100 | about two minutes.

00:28:45.100 | Okay, now what?

00:28:46.100 | We still have a lot of leaves there."

00:28:47.860 | I think not all tasks can be made intrinsically motivating to everyone.

00:28:51.480 | And so when intrinsic motivation is difficult to find, what you want to substitute with

00:28:55.780 | is a sense of purpose.

00:28:57.620 | Maybe a better way to say that is when the process is not interesting to you, you need

00:29:01.700 | to find a meaningful outcome.

00:29:03.660 | So there's some research on the boring but important effect where kids who have a purpose

00:29:11.400 | for learning, this goes through high school, and think, "This is not just interesting to

00:29:16.340 | me, but I'm going to be able to use this knowledge to help other people one day."

00:29:21.920 | They're more persistent in their studying, they end up getting better grades.

00:29:24.940 | And so I think intrinsic motivation is often driven by curiosity about the how.

00:29:29.860 | A sense of purpose comes from really thinking hard about the why.

00:29:32.740 | Why does this matter?

00:29:34.140 | And so I'd say with the raking leaves, let's try to connect that task to something else

00:29:38.820 | that you care about.

00:29:40.440 | Are you going to pleasantly surprise your parents when they get home?

00:29:45.180 | Are you going to have a place to play soccer that you didn't before?

00:29:51.340 | And I think then the process of getting to that, I guess what I'd say is, if you're trying

00:29:57.260 | to motivate yourself, it's a little bit harder than if you're trying to motivate somebody

00:30:01.760 | else on this.

00:30:02.760 | If I was going to motivate somebody else, I would take a page out of the Motivational

00:30:05.980 | Interviewing Playbook, where I would say, "Okay, Andrew, actually let's place that for a second.

00:30:09.820 | So you're going to rake a pile of leaves, it's a two hour task, zero to 10, how excited

00:30:13.900 | are you about that?"

00:30:14.900 | - A three.

00:30:15.900 | - Three?

00:30:16.900 | Really?

00:30:17.900 | - Mm-hmm.

00:30:18.900 | - I'm surprised.

00:30:19.900 | Is it zero or one?

00:30:21.560 | Why is it not lower?

00:30:22.560 | - I like any sort of physical activity because it allows me to move and I just like moving

00:30:27.620 | my body.

00:30:28.620 | - There we go.

00:30:29.620 | Okay, so you just identified a potential source of purpose for that activity.

00:30:34.460 | And I don't have a vested interest in convincing you to do this task.

00:30:37.920 | I am genuinely curious about what would motivate you to want to do it.

00:30:42.580 | And as you start to articulate it, boom, self-persuasion kicks in.

00:30:45.180 | - Mm-hmm.

00:30:46.180 | Love it.

00:30:47.180 | - I'm going to start using these approaches.

00:30:50.180 | - Try it at your own risk.

00:30:53.340 | - As we all know, quality nutrition influences, of course, our physical health, but also our

00:30:57.480 | mental health and our cognitive functioning, our memory, our ability to learn new things

00:31:01.600 | and to focus.

00:31:02.740 | And we know that one of the most important features of high quality nutrition is making

00:31:06.520 | sure that we get enough vitamins and minerals from high quality unprocessed or minimally

00:31:10.940 | processed sources, as well as enough probiotics and prebiotics and fiber to support basically

00:31:16.620 | all the cellular functions in our body, including the gut microbiome.

00:31:20.500 | Now I, like most everybody, try to get optimal nutrition from whole foods, ideally, mostly

00:31:26.800 | from minimally processed or non-processed foods.

00:31:29.820 | However, one of the challenges that I and so many other people face is getting enough

00:31:33.280 | servings of high quality fruits and vegetables per day, as well as fiber and probiotics that

00:31:37.780 | often accompany those fruits and vegetables.

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00:31:46.020 | And so I'm delighted that AG1 is sponsoring the Huberman Lab Podcast.

00:31:49.640 | The reason I started taking AG1 and the reason I still drink AG1 once or twice a day is that

00:31:54.900 | it provides all of my foundational nutritional needs.

00:31:57.500 | That is, it provides insurance that I get the proper amounts of those vitamins, minerals,

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00:32:23.580 | - I have a question about extrinsic motivation.

00:32:28.860 | So if we grow up being incentivized by extrinsic things, you'll get your allowance if you blank.

00:32:40.620 | You can spend the money that you make on your paper route doing the things you really want

00:32:45.780 | to do.

00:32:47.780 | Is there any value in those kinds of learning based incentives for kids and for adults?

00:32:53.960 | Because I mean, that's the real world as well.

00:32:55.900 | I know plenty of people, I have family members that only work for a paycheck and they're

00:33:00.980 | pretty okay because they like spending their paycheck.

00:33:04.020 | Probably more than, I'm not intrinsically attached to money.

00:33:07.100 | I mean, I certainly have needs in life, but I don't enjoy spending money for the sake

00:33:12.100 | of spending it or for gaining more possessions.

00:33:14.860 | But I know people that do and I certainly don't judge.

00:33:18.340 | Are they somehow existing in a diminished landscape of happiness?

00:33:24.700 | Because they seem pretty happy to me, but they seem to have also worked out this relationship.

00:33:28.940 | They do certain things to get the extrinsic rewards and they really enjoy what they can

00:33:33.280 | do with those extrinsic rewards.

00:33:36.360 | So there's a huge body of evidence on what are the effects of extrinsic rewards on motivation

00:33:41.700 | and performance.

00:33:43.340 | And I think the latest conclusions, if you look at the latest meta-analyses, so huge

00:33:47.380 | study of studies trying to accumulate, what's the average effect of adding a financial incentive

00:33:52.160 | to a task that wasn't incentivized before or to a job where you were paid salary and

00:33:57.300 | now we're going to give you incentive compensation.

00:34:00.280 | There is a boost.

00:34:01.280 | So in general, people are more productive when they're incentivized for their output.

00:34:08.580 | But these incentives are better for motivating quantity than quality.

00:34:12.940 | So you see people get more done, but they're not necessarily more careful or more thorough.

00:34:17.260 | Are they less careful and less thorough?

00:34:19.820 | No, actually, there's still positive effects on average.

00:34:22.580 | They're just weaker.

00:34:23.580 | And of course, you could then start to say, well, how do I incentivize being fast and

00:34:27.660 | careful?

00:34:30.300 | And I think where we do have to be really cautious is there's an undermining effect

00:34:36.380 | of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation.

00:34:38.360 | And you were alluding to this earlier, dating back to the early '70s, where we know that

00:34:42.200 | if we take an interesting task and then we pay you for it, you might conclude that you're

00:34:46.080 | only doing it for the outcome and you lose interest in the task.

00:34:48.720 | So the classic demonstration, Mark Lepper and colleagues, is kids playing video games.

00:34:53.800 | And they're playing them because they're fun.

00:34:56.280 | And then you start to add in an incentive.

00:34:59.440 | And then when the incentive is taken away, they don't want to play anymore because the

00:35:03.020 | meaning of the task has changed.

00:35:04.600 | And now I'm doing it because I want to get something out of it, as opposed to I love

00:35:07.180 | the process.

00:35:08.840 | I think that that phenomenon does not have to exist.

00:35:13.940 | So we know, for example, at work, if managers, as long as they give people autonomy, they

00:35:19.440 | don't present the rewards in a controlling way.

00:35:22.400 | So instead of saying, you know, Andrew, in order to earn this, you need to do the following

00:35:27.160 | work, if they say, hey, look, you know, I'd really love it if you, you know, if you would

00:35:32.920 | deliver the following.

00:35:33.920 | And in order to make that worth your while, I'm offering this incentive.

00:35:37.620 | People react very differently when they have a sense of choice and control.

00:35:41.720 | So I think that that's, I guess, the starting point.

00:35:44.360 | In the presence of autonomy, I don't I don't think there's a major downside of extrinsic

00:35:48.720 | rewards.

00:35:49.720 | I think you also have to be careful that, yeah, I guess that you're not over justifying

00:35:54.760 | the task.

00:35:55.760 | In other words, you're not you're not swamping people's intrinsic reason for doing it, but

00:36:00.560 | you're adding a reason to try it.

00:36:02.480 | So actually, if we if we go to a different domain for a second.

00:36:06.840 | So look at kids who don't want to eat their vegetables.

00:36:10.940 | Extrinsic incentives are very effective to get kids to try vegetables for the first time.

00:36:15.880 | But then the hope is that they discover a vegetable or two that they don't mind.

00:36:20.000 | And then they find reasons to keep doing it.

00:36:24.280 | And I think that that's how I want a lot of rewards to work.

00:36:27.280 | I don't think that rewards should be carrots that we dangle to try to control people's

00:36:32.360 | behavior.

00:36:33.360 | I think they should be symbols of how much we appreciate and value a particular behavior.

00:36:37.520 | If you frame them that way, it's a lot easier for people to say, yeah, you know what, I'm

00:36:42.280 | that reward is something that I really want, but I'm not only doing the task for that reward.

00:36:47.560 | Yeah, that you basically answered the question I was going to ask, which is and your risk

00:36:52.280 | of sounding new agey, but we are sitting in California.

00:36:57.880 | I could imagine that when one is focused on the extrinsic rewards, so physical task or

00:37:03.840 | cognitive task for an extrinsic reward, if I'm focusing on the extrinsic reward, I'm

00:37:08.680 | also air quotes again, not present, right?

00:37:12.760 | I'm thinking about the outcome.

00:37:14.620 | I'm not thinking about process.

00:37:16.960 | And I think there's, perhaps you can flesh out some of what this is exactly.

00:37:21.000 | But I think there's a fairly extensive data to support the idea that when we are physically

00:37:27.040 | mentally present to the task that we're going to perform better and presumably our intrinsic

00:37:32.400 | liking of that task or performing that task increases as well.

00:37:36.280 | Is that true?

00:37:37.280 | Yeah, I think so.

00:37:38.280 | I think so.

00:37:39.280 | If we want to break down the mechanisms for why intrinsic motivation is useful for performance,

00:37:43.600 | one you touched on earlier, it's focus of attention.

00:37:46.400 | It's much easier to find flow when you're intrinsically motivated.

00:37:48.720 | You get into that state of deep absorption where time melts away.

00:37:52.520 | So you mentioned sort of either speeding up or slowing down your sense of time.

00:37:57.480 | You forget where you are.

00:37:58.640 | Sometimes you even lose track of your identity and you're just merged into the task.

00:38:03.360 | And so that concentration is helpful.

00:38:06.280 | There's also a greater persistence effect that when you enjoy what you're doing, you're

00:38:10.120 | less likely to give up in the face of obstacles.

00:38:12.660 | You're more likely to think about it when you're not doing the task and come up with

00:38:15.700 | great ideas.

00:38:16.700 | And so I think there's a working harder, there's a working longer, there's a working smarter,

00:38:21.960 | and there's also a thinking more clearly effect.

00:38:26.960 | This is a brief but related tangent.

00:38:30.960 | One of the things that I've found incredibly difficult in recent years is that most of

00:38:36.760 | my life, really since I was a small kid, I was forging for things and then I used to

00:38:40.640 | give lectures on Monday in class if they let me until they eventually stopped me about

00:38:44.360 | the stuff I was reading about all weekend.

00:38:46.100 | So got an early start in the professorial front.

00:38:50.360 | But now if I'm reading something and I discover what I think is a really valuable piece of

00:38:57.340 | information or a tool or a protocol, I'm like, wow, this is really cool.

00:39:01.560 | These findings are oh so cool.

00:39:03.440 | There's a problem, which is that now I have an opportunity to cast that out to the world

00:39:09.100 | through social media.

00:39:11.160 | We all do.

00:39:12.460 | This could be-

00:39:13.460 | - Wait, I'm sorry, you're on social media?

00:39:15.920 | - From time to time.

00:39:16.920 | - You're all over my feeds.

00:39:18.420 | - You and I both do our own social media, by the way, which I really appreciate.

00:39:22.580 | I think one can always detect if someone else is handling someone's social media.

00:39:26.320 | So yes, I'm on social media and I love that I have the opportunity to both send out ideas

00:39:32.280 | and information and also receive feedback.

00:39:34.220 | I really love the comment section and always encourage comments.

00:39:37.940 | I learned from it, frankly.

00:39:39.600 | - Love is a strong word.

00:39:40.600 | - I learned from it.

00:39:41.920 | And you and I were weaned in the academic culture where frankly, the kind of hazing

00:39:45.920 | that one receives in academic culture is very different than the kind of hazing that one

00:39:49.540 | receives on social media.

00:39:51.160 | But let's just say that if you come up through academia, you develop a pretty thick skin.

00:39:56.100 | - I agree with that.

00:39:57.100 | I do have to say though that there was a part of me that was really surprised when I started

00:40:00.480 | posting on social that I love constructive criticism.

00:40:04.720 | I was unprepared for the number of people who will knee jerk criticize a study without

00:40:08.860 | even looking at whether the methods are rigorous.

00:40:10.780 | I'm like, come on, if I posted this, surely it's at least worth considering the possibility

00:40:15.300 | that there's strong evidence behind it.

00:40:16.980 | - Well, that's where a brief, I want to call it a retort, but a response of, clearly you

00:40:26.420 | should read the study further because I think you'll be satisfied with the answer or something.

00:40:30.160 | I don't know.

00:40:31.740 | But I agree.

00:40:32.740 | It can be a little bit harsh in there sometimes.

00:40:34.440 | But the social media channels are, I think, it's a double-edged blade that obviously have

00:40:42.240 | their issues, but it can be a wonderful opportunity to share information and share it quickly.

00:40:46.960 | The problem is that it takes me out of what I was doing initially, which was learning,

00:40:51.880 | searching for those gems which to share later.

00:40:55.320 | And I think there's a broader landscape to consider this where people, for instance,

00:40:59.240 | are, I was at the beach yesterday.

00:41:01.280 | It was just absolutely spectacular day at the beach, especially for this time of year.

00:41:07.340 | And everyone was taking pictures of that experience on their phone and probably sharing that experience

00:41:11.900 | either social media or with friends.

00:41:15.120 | This is very different than taking a photograph and not seeing that photograph until later

00:41:19.340 | or not sending it out.

00:41:20.860 | And so there are now near infinite number of circumstances where we are taken out of

00:41:27.700 | the rewarding experience.

00:41:28.980 | I should rephrase that.

00:41:30.320 | We are taking ourselves out of the rewarding experience and focusing on a different rewarding

00:41:35.900 | experience that I think by definition is an extrinsic reward.

00:41:39.520 | So we are taking ourselves out of our intrinsically rewarding experiences and activating these

00:41:45.400 | extrinsic rewards.

00:41:46.400 | And do you think in any way that's undermining our experience of things that we really enjoy?

00:41:51.320 | Again, not to demonize social media or these channels, but I've personally found it difficult

00:41:57.120 | to refrain from sharing this knowledge that I'm so excited to share, but I deliberately

00:42:02.160 | delay.

00:42:03.160 | And I have a deep list of folders full of things that I want to post, but I'm just doing

00:42:08.840 | it systematically over time because I really fight the temptation to do this, mostly because

00:42:13.960 | I want to continue to enjoy this learning process and this seeking process so much.

00:42:18.800 | Yeah, I feel the same.

00:42:22.000 | I feel torn.

00:42:23.000 | I think it was E.B. White who said, "I rise in the morning torn between the desire to

00:42:29.480 | enjoy the world and the desire to improve the world.

00:42:32.040 | And this makes it difficult to plan the day."

00:42:34.520 | And I feel that every day.

00:42:36.600 | I think, I mean, I even, I felt it this morning.

00:42:39.680 | I was like, "Okay, it's time to leave to come to the Huberman podcast."

00:42:44.320 | I'm like, "Wait, but I didn't hit my minimum sunlight viewing.

00:42:49.120 | So what do I do?

00:42:50.280 | Do I show up on time for you or do I meet your criteria?"

00:42:53.920 | The explanation I was getting my morning sunlight and therefore I'm X number of minutes or even

00:42:59.080 | hours late would have been completely fine.

00:43:01.840 | I figured as much.

00:43:02.840 | Yes, absolutely.

00:43:03.840 | That's a built-in acceptable excuse with you.

00:43:06.280 | I think, I mean, I think everybody experiences a version of this and it's definitely gotten

00:43:11.360 | worse with social media and with smartphones.

00:43:15.080 | I think, so one of the most startling data points for me was Gloria Mark first put the

00:43:20.260 | process on my radar before COVID, the average person was checking email 72 times a day.

00:43:27.440 | How do you ever concentrate for more than a couple of minutes if you're self-interrupting

00:43:31.180 | that often?

00:43:32.180 | You can't.

00:43:33.180 | Brigitte Schulte has a great term for this.

00:43:35.540 | She calls it time confetti.

00:43:37.580 | And she says, "We're taking these meaningful blocks of time and we're slicing them up into

00:43:41.380 | these tiny little dots of confetti.

00:43:44.360 | And not only can we not accomplish anything, we're also eroding our own sense of joy because

00:43:51.500 | it's really hard to enjoy the 30 second blip of time that you get on a task."

00:43:57.780 | And I think we know a lot more about the existence of these problems than how to solve them.

00:44:02.360 | But one thing we do know is blocking out uninterrupted time is meaningful.

00:44:07.560 | There's a great Leslie Perlow experiment where she takes engineers and she has them, she

00:44:12.580 | sets a quiet time policy.

00:44:14.380 | No interruptions, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday before noon, 65% above average productivity.

00:44:20.360 | Could you repeat the protocol again?

00:44:23.100 | Yeah.

00:44:24.100 | So quiet time, there are a couple of iterations of it, but I think the most effective one

00:44:26.720 | was Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, no meetings, no interruptions, no Slack, no emails before

00:44:32.280 | noon.

00:44:33.700 | And during those periods of no interruptions, one could tend to whatever their primary purpose

00:44:38.980 | is at work.

00:44:39.980 | Yeah.

00:44:40.980 | So for me, it might be podcasting.

00:44:41.980 | I don't have my phone in here, I never do.

00:44:45.240 | But it doesn't mean no interaction with anyone else.

00:44:48.200 | It just means focusing on the major task.

00:44:50.560 | The task, exactly.

00:44:51.560 | And you come in with a clear sense of priority and purpose.

00:44:54.540 | And I don't think there's anything magical about Tuesday, Thursday, Friday before noon.

00:44:58.240 | It's just the idea of setting a boundary and collectively committing to it that seems to

00:45:01.800 | be important.

00:45:03.640 | And I think when I think about this, I'd be really curious about your take on chronotypes

00:45:09.360 | here, because I think one thing I've learned in the last couple of years is that if you're

00:45:13.780 | a morning person, you do your best analytical and creative thinking in the morning.

00:45:18.260 | And so the quiet time block would work very well for me as a morning person.

00:45:21.700 | If you're a night owl, you probably want that block in the late afternoon.

00:45:26.260 | And I was encouraged, there was some evidence during COVID that people have their best meetings

00:45:30.860 | right after lunch, that they're something like 30% less likely to multitask in an after

00:45:36.660 | lunch meeting.

00:45:37.660 | And I guess you could probably unpack the food coma, getting re-energized by other people.

00:45:45.720 | But it's led me to wonder if we should all be protecting the first few hours and the

00:45:50.140 | last few hours of the day for deep work, and then doing our core meetings and interactions

00:45:55.140 | and kind of off-task activities in the middle.

00:45:57.340 | What do you think about that as a sequence?

00:45:58.860 | Yeah.

00:45:59.860 | Well, I have a lot of questions about this for you, but I love that sequence.

00:46:03.640 | It certainly fits with my natural rhythms.

00:46:06.560 | I think there's ample evidence to support the fact that provided one is sleeping well

00:46:11.060 | at night and is on a more or less a standard schedule.

00:46:13.320 | When I say standard, I mean going to bed somewhere between let's say 9.30 and 11.30 PM, waking

00:46:18.620 | up sometime between let's say 6.00 AM and 8.00 AM, maybe 5.30 or 7.30, something like

00:46:26.460 | that.

00:46:27.460 | So not highly unusual night owl or super early bird.

00:46:32.500 | For people that are following that sort of schedule, the first, let's just say from zero

00:46:37.220 | to eight hours after waking, there tends to be a fairly robust increase in all the catecholamines,

00:46:44.940 | so dopamine, norepinephrine, epinephrine, which generally, okay, generally speaking,

00:46:49.180 | lead to increases in alertness, attention, and focus that are great for analytic work,

00:46:55.700 | great for implementation of strategies that you already understand, and you need to churn

00:46:59.820 | through a lot of stuff.

00:47:03.100 | And of course there's a big increase in the morning, especially if you view morning sunlight,

00:47:07.060 | a healthy increase, I should say, in cortisol.

00:47:09.300 | Cortisol is not bad, folks.

00:47:10.740 | You want cortisol, but you want that peak early in the day.

00:47:12.680 | We know that.

00:47:13.680 | Okay, so for most people, it seems, at least my understanding is that that period of time,

00:47:21.060 | zero to eight hours after waking or so, is best devoted to the quote unquote most critical

00:47:28.300 | tasks, but one of the common problems is that people take that ability to implement a known

00:47:32.860 | strategy and they start battering back all the emails.

00:47:37.900 | Or talking to all, by the way, talking to coworkers is great and it's often required,

00:47:42.380 | but the question is whether or not it's a productive conversation or whether or not

00:47:46.100 | it's just conversation.

00:47:47.100 | And we tend to have a lot of energy early in the day, and I'm obsessed with the idea

00:47:50.420 | of neural energy as opposed to just caloric energy.

00:47:53.600 | So there we're talking about neural energy.

00:47:55.100 | And then post-lunch, so really as we get to this sort of nine to 17 hours after waking,

00:48:02.420 | there is a dip in autonomic arousal that during the middle of the day, that post-perendial

00:48:06.100 | dip, there's a post-lunch sleepiness that can be partially offset by delaying your morning

00:48:10.680 | caffeine a bit if you have the afternoon crash.

00:48:12.840 | But it's interesting that you know that more productive meetings and less task switching

00:48:17.540 | and distraction occurred in meetings set after lunch, because that makes me think that perhaps

00:48:23.760 | being a little bit less alert is going to lend itself to more focus.

00:48:29.820 | And indeed, that's the sort of optimal state, relaxed but focused.

00:48:33.740 | You're not sleepy, but you also don't have so much intrinsic energy that you're tending

00:48:39.580 | to a bunch of things, because I think a lot of people do feel that way.

00:48:42.420 | And I'm drinking double espresso right now, late mid-morning, late morning.

00:48:48.900 | And I can sit still, but I think certain Zoom meetings, how do I say this?

00:48:54.040 | I don't want to offend any of my colleagues.

00:48:55.380 | I mean, they are boring enough.

00:48:57.600 | They are not content rich enough to grab all my attention.

00:49:01.360 | And nowadays, of course, there are multiple screens.

00:49:03.000 | Typically, I've got two phones and a computer, and you have to really spend some work to

00:49:06.980 | flip over those phones while I'm on a Zoom and things like that.

00:49:09.800 | So maybe-

00:49:10.800 | I'm sorry, what were you saying?

00:49:11.800 | I was going to say.

00:49:12.800 | So it's maybe the reduction in autonomic arousal that supports what you just described.

00:49:17.100 | But I don't know.

00:49:18.740 | My thinking or my understanding, rather, was that creative work and kind of brainstorming

00:49:25.120 | was best accomplished in the late afternoon.

00:49:28.920 | I've noticed when lecturing, I'd be curious what your experience is with in university

00:49:33.400 | lectures when I held courses in the evening.

00:49:36.420 | I used to like to hold my courses 5 to 7 p.m. or even 7 to 930 p.m. when I was teaching

00:49:42.220 | undergraduates that people were much looser and more relaxed.

00:49:46.220 | And I always thought that that might have something to do with an increase in GABA transmission

00:49:51.180 | that's known to happen in late evening, that people are just kind of more relaxed and less

00:49:56.340 | social anxiety.

00:49:57.340 | They've been around people for much of the day.

00:49:59.860 | I send back more reflections than answers.

00:50:02.300 | I don't have any firm neuroscience explanations for what you described.

00:50:04.980 | But there are some emerging theories about how that might work.

00:50:07.620 | And it has this 0 to 9 hours phase 1, 9 to 17 hours phase 2.

00:50:12.460 | And then, of course, from 17 to 24 hours, I'll call it phase 3.

00:50:16.940 | You should be asleep.

00:50:17.940 | Yeah.

00:50:18.940 | Ideally.

00:50:19.940 | Well, I think there's a confound in your teaching experience, which is undergrads often sleep

00:50:25.260 | in until, what, noon.

00:50:27.060 | Or they might be up until 4 a.m.

00:50:28.540 | Or at least 10 a.m. seems to be a typical rise time for the undergrad.

00:50:32.620 | So a morning class might be too early for them to be fully awake.

00:50:35.860 | But there is some brand new evidence that, at least on creativity at work, I read a series

00:50:40.540 | of three studies recently showing that early birds actually did do more creative work in

00:50:45.940 | the morning.

00:50:47.340 | And in part, I think, again, I don't think any neuroscientist has touched the mechanisms

00:50:53.580 | on this yet.

00:50:54.580 | But in terms of the psychological processes, early on, there seems to be a benefit of the

00:51:00.420 | energy level.

00:51:01.780 | And some of that energy leads to more divergent thinking.

00:51:05.180 | And later, if you're a morning person, you might lose the ability to diverge quite as

00:51:09.220 | much.

00:51:10.220 | You're in a more conventional space of thought.

00:51:13.020 | Does that track at all with your understanding of how it might play out in the brain?

00:51:16.420 | My understanding is it would be individual, but there is something to these liminal states

00:51:22.120 | between sleep and waking.

00:51:23.640 | So maybe we can wrap a convenient bow around what I said and what you just said, which

00:51:28.860 | is that we know that in the transition states into and out of sleep, and it doesn't necessarily

00:51:36.460 | have to be within the first half hour in and out of sleep, that there seems to be more

00:51:41.780 | divergent thinking, or at least activation of neural networks that are not as constrained

00:51:47.080 | as one observes when they're in a sheer task and strategy implementation mode.

00:51:51.460 | Right?

00:51:52.460 | I mean, I think-

00:51:53.460 | Is that similar to the shower effect?

00:51:54.940 | The shower effect?

00:51:55.940 | So people have ideas in the shower, or while running, or while falling asleep, or my best

00:52:01.060 | ideas always come within the first hour after waking.

00:52:03.320 | That's why I carry a notebook around, and to the dismay of people in my life, oftentimes

00:52:07.420 | I don't want to hear or talk to anyone first thing in the morning.

00:52:12.280 | This is problematic, and I had to make adjustments.

00:52:14.460 | We'll talk about adjustments between productivity and control and family interactions.

00:52:22.200 | This is something I know you've worked on and written about.

00:52:25.940 | But those liminal states are interesting, and I'd love your thoughts on this.

00:52:30.500 | I've had several guests on this podcast talk about their creative process, namely Rick

00:52:35.380 | Rubin, who's famous for his work in music producing, also has a great podcast, Tetris

00:52:40.100 | Grammaton, as well as Carl Deisseroth, a colleague of mine who's really in the 0.0001% of super

00:52:48.220 | talented bioengineers, neuroscientists, who also happens to be a full-time clinical psychiatrist,

00:52:53.760 | and has five children.

00:52:55.620 | Okay.

00:52:56.940 | And I asked them about their creative process, because both of them are very creative.

00:53:01.980 | Carl's process involves the following.

00:53:04.500 | Late at night for him, but it could really be any time of day, deliberately making his

00:53:08.220 | body as still as possible and forcing himself to think in complete sentences.

00:53:14.260 | Rick's creative process, although it includes a lot of different things, has a lot to do

00:53:18.860 | with also getting very still, lying down.

00:53:23.820 | Okay.

00:53:24.820 | So many folks that I've spoken to, academics and artists, have referred to getting their

00:53:29.540 | body into motion, but quieting their mind.

00:53:31.980 | So these are two opposite processes.

00:53:34.140 | One case, the body is still, but the mind is deliberately very active.

00:53:37.960 | In the other scenario, the body is very active, but they're making their mind in free association.

00:53:44.100 | Not still, but they're not deliberately thinking about any one thing.

00:53:47.180 | Fascinating.

00:53:48.180 | And I'm obsessed with this.

00:53:49.180 | Maybe you and I could work on this.

00:53:50.180 | I'm due for a sabbatical.

00:53:51.180 | Maybe we could figure this out, because I think-

00:53:52.700 | I've never seen anyone study this before.

00:53:54.220 | Right.

00:53:55.220 | Because the nervous system, no, the nervous system, I'm not aware of anyone has done it

00:53:59.140 | formally either.

00:54:00.380 | The nervous system, of course, is a brain body phenomenon.

00:54:03.720 | And so what happens when we sort of cut off the deliberate operations of brain or body?

00:54:09.280 | And it doesn't seem to matter whether or not it's brain or body, as long as one is deliberately

00:54:13.300 | shut off.

00:54:14.680 | And so anyway, I'd love your thoughts on this.

00:54:16.640 | I don't consider myself like an ultra creative or creative type to any great degree, but-

00:54:22.020 | Me neither.

00:54:23.020 | Yeah.

00:54:24.020 | That's why I've been studying it.

00:54:25.020 | Right, but I'm fascinated by these deliberate tactics that highly creative people have undertaken

00:54:32.660 | in order to bring about ideas.

00:54:34.340 | I certainly have some of my best ideas when I'm running, and I'll just be running along

00:54:38.620 | like, "My goodness, I wasn't even thinking.

00:54:40.700 | Now I need to write this down, okay, and then continue."

00:54:43.580 | I tried the Diceroth approach and the Rubin approach, I actually just spent a week with

00:54:48.100 | Rick overseas, and indeed he spends a lot of time just still thinking.

00:54:55.500 | And it's a very hard practice to get consistent with.

00:54:59.140 | I wonder if there are individual differences here on which needs to be stable or steady.

00:55:04.780 | I'm thinking about a huge part of creativity is overriding your default instincts.

00:55:12.060 | And if you're somebody whose default is to have your mind constantly going, then quieting

00:55:17.500 | would probably shift your train of thought to something more original or unconventional.

00:55:22.960 | The opposite might be true.

00:55:23.960 | If you have a naturally quiet mind, I would imagine you need to jolt yourself out of that

00:55:30.180 | with lots of access to free ranging thoughts.

00:55:33.920 | And so it'd be interesting actually to study whether we can predict what you should still

00:55:38.180 | based on your personality.

00:55:40.960 | And maybe what we could do with that study, I think we have a collaboration brewing.

00:55:44.240 | Here's a joke, two scientists walk into a room and what comes out is a collaboration.

00:55:48.560 | So I'd want to put people in a scanner.

00:55:52.660 | It's hard to get people treadmilling in a scanner because of movement artifact, and

00:55:56.440 | just look at resting network activation and compare that to resting network activation

00:56:02.720 | when people are completely still and forcing themselves to think in deliberate sense, and

00:56:06.900 | then look at the overlap in that Venn diagram.

00:56:09.660 | That's what's of interest to me.

00:56:10.840 | They may be completely different brain states.

00:56:12.920 | They might actually have more similarity than differences.

00:56:16.180 | I wonder then if you can tie that to differences in the quality and quantity of output.

00:56:20.620 | So I would imagine that one of the benefits of either kind of movement is that you end

00:56:26.640 | up increasing the volume of ideas, which we know is good for variety and ultimately increases

00:56:31.160 | the probability that you stumble onto something new.

00:56:33.860 | But then I think the being still part is probably better for the filtering process of...

00:56:41.000 | I think one of the hardest parts of creativity is actually judging your own ideas.

00:56:45.380 | Most creative people have many terrible ideas.

00:56:47.120 | In fact, the most creative people have the most horrible ideas because they just have

00:56:51.120 | a lot of ideas.

00:56:52.760 | And I think that maybe there's a way in which quieting either your body or your mind allows

00:57:00.120 | you to gain some distance from the idea and see whether it's boneheaded or promising.

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00:58:13.840 | - Along those lines, when one is trying to gauge the quality of their ideas, how do you

00:58:21.760 | cope with, or how does one cope with not placing a judge on that that causes some false negatives

00:58:29.920 | where you're wiping out great ideas because Rick Rubin talks a lot about don't give the

00:58:36.640 | audience what they want.

00:58:37.640 | They don't know what they want.

00:58:38.640 | They haven't seen it yet.

00:58:39.640 | If it's a truly creative idea, they haven't seen it, but of course we all have to develop

00:58:44.720 | our own sense of taste.

00:58:47.640 | How does this process work for you?

00:58:49.200 | You've written about and worked on a tremendous range of topics and always, I must say with

00:58:55.200 | such rigor and such clarity of communication about those topics.

00:58:58.760 | - Thank you.

00:58:59.760 | That's absolutely true.

00:59:00.760 | I mean, like 100%.

00:59:01.760 | So we say around here, no weak sauce, you know, and there's no weak sauce in your game.

00:59:09.360 | It's incredible.

00:59:10.360 | So when do you get your ideas and how do you filter those ideas?

00:59:15.360 | - I feel like the when could be anytime.

00:59:17.440 | I think the, I mean, you've clearly experienced this too.

00:59:20.720 | For me, the best thing about hosting a podcast is I have an excuse to learn about anything

00:59:25.240 | I want from almost anyone I want and I get to call that part of my job.

00:59:29.500 | And so I feel like, you know, that having that built in mechanism for learning means

00:59:34.380 | ideas could come at any moment.

00:59:38.120 | The filtering process for me is it's evolved over the last few years.

00:59:42.200 | What I do now is if I'm, let's say I'm starting a new book, I'll write a draft of the first

00:59:47.520 | chapter and I send it to five to eight people whose judgment I trust.

00:59:51.840 | And by design, some of those people are in my field, they're, you know, deep seated in

00:59:55.700 | organizational psychology.

00:59:57.840 | Those are, you know, very far outside, but curious about the topics I'm interested in.

01:00:03.720 | And I asked them for a zero to 10 score.

01:00:07.520 | This is something I've learned to do as a springboard diver where, you know, I would

01:00:12.020 | take off and, you know, I'm doing a few flips or twists and I think my dive is good, but

01:00:17.520 | I can't see it because I'm hurling in midair and it's, everything's a blur.

01:00:21.160 | And so I have to rely on my coach to tell me if it was any good.

01:00:24.260 | I feel like creative work is the same way.

01:00:25.820 | You're too close to it to know how the audience is going to react to it.

01:00:29.140 | And yes, you don't want to create it just for the audience, but at the end of the day,

01:00:33.620 | you want it to be, you know, interesting or useful to them.

01:00:37.000 | So I asked for the zero to 10 and no one ever says 10.

01:00:41.880 | And then I use that as a calibration mechanism.

01:00:44.320 | So if everybody is in the seven or eight range, I know that I'm onto something promising and

01:00:48.720 | now I need to refine it.

01:00:49.720 | If I get a bunch of twos, threes, three and a halfs, I either need to rethink the idea

01:00:55.980 | or dramatically rewrite how I'm positioning it.

01:01:00.200 | And I think one of the mistakes a lot of people make is they know they need feedback on their

01:01:04.780 | ideas.

01:01:05.780 | They go to one or two people and they start to feel a little bit defensive or threatened

01:01:10.280 | and their ego gets involved and then they don't ask for any more.

01:01:13.640 | What they don't realize is it's actually less painful if you get more feedback.

01:01:18.400 | Because when eight different people critique your work, you start to realize that a few

01:01:21.560 | of the comments that sort of bruise you a little bit, we're just idiosyncratic and no

01:01:25.380 | one else cared about those issues.

01:01:27.720 | But then five people had the same problem like that is not taste.

01:01:31.960 | That is a quality issue and I've got to focus on that.

01:01:34.680 | And so it really helps to filter what are the, what are the revisions I need to make?

01:01:38.700 | What are the problems and complaints I need to pay attention to versus what can I ignore?

01:01:42.560 | Because maybe this product was not for that person.

01:01:45.520 | I'm recalling when I was a postdoc, I had a manuscript fully prepared and I worked in

01:01:50.600 | a laboratory where I didn't work on the same thing as my postdoc advisor.

01:01:53.960 | He was very gracious in letting me be the outlier.

01:01:58.860 | And he said, well, I don't know anything about this topic.

01:02:00.680 | So before you submit it to this fairly prestigious, very frankly, very prestigious journal, I'll

01:02:06.200 | be honest.

01:02:07.200 | You should probably go down the hall and hand it to so-and-so.

01:02:09.240 | I don't want to mention who it was because I'm still in the same department.

01:02:13.540 | And I gave it to him, this individual.

01:02:16.020 | And he looked at it and he said, yeah, you know, it looks interesting, but I don't think

01:02:18.700 | there's going to be a whole lot of interest in this.

01:02:20.800 | It's just like not, I was like, no way like this, I think this is really cool.

01:02:25.580 | But I was pretty dismayed.

01:02:26.580 | So I was like, oh God, so what do I do?

01:02:28.180 | So I went back to my advisor and thankfully he's a bit of an iconoclast and he said, that's

01:02:32.920 | the best feedback you could have gotten.

01:02:35.560 | Definitely submit it to that particular journal.

01:02:38.140 | And I must say that paper got accepted faster than any other paper.

01:02:42.040 | I've never had an experience like that.

01:02:43.520 | I mean, it required some revisions.

01:02:44.920 | I remember thinking like, wow, what an unusual response to after having instructed me to

01:02:50.660 | go ask a more senior colleague at that time, assistant professor, and then to get the essentially

01:02:57.240 | negative response and then to take that as like, you should definitely send it out.

01:03:01.400 | Really taught me a lesson that sometimes one needs to invert their action according to

01:03:07.760 | the negative feedback they get.

01:03:09.080 | Not always, but that was an N of one, okay?

01:03:11.960 | So it's not, shouldn't be extrapolated to too many circumstances, but basically led

01:03:16.680 | me to not seek out feedback prior to submission of things terribly often.

01:03:23.720 | I mean, I check information obviously prior to podcasts.

01:03:27.160 | I check the validity of the information in podcasts and papers, but it made me realize

01:03:32.120 | that people's opinions can be like highly idiosyncratic and in some cases outright wrong

01:03:38.900 | and really the opinion of the journal is what mattered most in terms of getting it accepted

01:03:44.160 | or not.

01:03:45.160 | So how do you, you said give it to the greatest number of people, but if it's anything like

01:03:50.520 | comments on social media, there's a salience to negative comments.

01:03:54.980 | So how should we filter positive versus negative feedback?

01:03:58.480 | Well there's a meta-analysis here.

01:04:00.520 | This is Kluger and Dinesi looking at 100 years of feedback research and they found that what

01:04:05.560 | drives the utility of feedback is not whether it's positive or negative.

01:04:09.420 | It's whether it focuses on the task or on the self.

01:04:14.020 | So if I tell you that your work is terrible, you're going to get defensive.

01:04:19.800 | If I tell you that your work is great, you're going to get complacent.

01:04:23.980 | If I tell you here's the specific thing that I liked about your work, you're going to try

01:04:27.760 | to learn to repeat that.

01:04:28.940 | And if I tell you here's the thing I didn't like, you're going to try to see if you can

01:04:32.460 | fix it.

01:04:33.980 | So I actually think we should worry less about whether the feedback is encouraging or discouraging

01:04:39.020 | and more about how do I make sure that I get input that's going to allow me to learn from

01:04:43.540 | my strengths and also overcome my weaknesses.

01:04:47.100 | And actually one of the things I've learned recently is there's some, I would say a growing

01:04:51.780 | body of evidence at this point that asking for feedback is not the best way to get people

01:04:56.020 | to help you.

01:04:57.660 | Because when you ask for feedback, you end up getting two groups of people.

01:05:00.420 | You get cheerleaders and you get critics.

01:05:02.620 | And cheerleaders are basically applauding your best self.

01:05:05.420 | Critics are attacking your worst self.

01:05:07.060 | What you want is a coach, which is somebody who helps you become a better version of yourself.

01:05:11.460 | And the way you get people to coach you is not to say, "Give me feedback," because they

01:05:14.660 | will then look at the past and tell you what you screwed up or what you did right.

01:05:19.260 | What you want is to say, "Can you give me advice for next time?"

01:05:22.760 | And then they look at the future and they'll give you either a note on something to repeat

01:05:26.200 | or something to correct.

01:05:27.800 | And this is such a subtle shift that it can make a big difference.

01:05:30.300 | Andrew, one of the things I guess I found myself applying this to a lot is after giving

01:05:36.140 | speeches.

01:05:37.140 | I used to get off stage and say, "I would love some feedback."

01:05:40.460 | And you get back a bunch of, "Oh, you know, I really enjoyed that.

01:05:43.660 | Thanks.

01:05:44.660 | What do I do with that information?

01:05:46.140 | I'm trying to learn how to get better."

01:05:48.120 | And when I shift the question to say, "What's the one thing I could do better next time?"

01:05:51.380 | It's like, "Oh, don't open with a joke.

01:05:53.200 | The audience couldn't tell you were joking."

01:05:57.020 | Frequently it's, "Give me a little bit more of a through line.

01:06:00.720 | You focused a lot on a bunch of interesting points, but I lost the connective tissue."

01:06:06.180 | And those actionable suggestions are much more likely to come when you just ask for

01:06:09.500 | a tip as opposed to an evaluation.

01:06:11.860 | - Oh, that's so good.

01:06:13.460 | I'm going to just pause for a second.

01:06:17.180 | I've never taken a pause.

01:06:19.180 | I've taken occasional pause to be honest, but they're very rare as the audience knows.

01:06:25.780 | So, that's just gazillion dollar advice because I think that everyone has an ego.

01:06:35.100 | We all want to perform well.

01:06:37.500 | We'd like to perform better over time and negative feedback hurts and it can hurt a

01:06:42.220 | little or a lot depending on how defensive we are, but a tool like you just described

01:06:47.420 | to remove some of that defensive armor that we all have and actually let the information

01:06:54.260 | in in a way that's constructive is really great.

01:06:56.920 | What you described I think is a way to create constructive criticism, but the constructive

01:07:02.880 | part is really coming from within as opposed to saying, "I'd like some constructive criticism,"

01:07:08.020 | and then hoping that the criticism is actually constructive.

01:07:10.820 | So you're taking control over the process in a healthy way, in a benevolent way.

01:07:15.340 | - That's the goal and I think the big question that comes up for a lot of people at this

01:07:18.500 | point is, "Okay, so I get somebody to give me advice, but it might still sting.

01:07:23.380 | How do I get better at taking it constructively?"

01:07:26.420 | And I think probably my favorite technique on this I learned from Sheila Heen, she calls

01:07:30.880 | it the second score, and the idea is that when somebody gives you a piece of criticism,

01:07:36.500 | that's your first score.

01:07:37.500 | So let's say in my world they gave me a three and a half and I want to know how I can do

01:07:43.380 | better next time.

01:07:44.380 | How do I get myself to focus on that?

01:07:46.260 | What I do is say, "I want to get a 10 for how well I took the three and a half," and

01:07:50.740 | that's the second score.

01:07:51.740 | I want to evaluate myself on how well I took the first score.

01:07:55.620 | I think about this almost every day.

01:07:57.940 | There was, actually, can I tell you a quick story?

01:08:01.420 | So when I was right out of my doctorate, I got asked to teach a motivation class for

01:08:07.460 | Air Force generals and colonels.

01:08:09.900 | I was 25, I think, 25, 26.

01:08:16.220 | They're all twice my age.

01:08:17.760 | They've got thousands of flying hours, they've got billion dollar budgets, they've got, well,

01:08:23.940 | you know this community well, their nicknames are Stryker and Sandoon.

01:08:27.860 | And I was extremely intimidated.

01:08:29.900 | So I walked in there and I thought I had to impress them, and I started talking about

01:08:33.420 | my credentials and all my research experience, and the feedback at the end of the four hour

01:08:38.880 | session was brutal.

01:08:40.920 | I remember reading the feedback forums and one person had written, "More knowledge in

01:08:45.740 | the audience than on the podium."

01:08:47.840 | I was like, "True, I can't argue with that."

01:08:51.240 | And then another wrote, "I gain nothing from this session, but I trust the instructor gained

01:08:55.480 | useful insight."

01:08:57.980 | And that was devastating.

01:08:58.980 | I was like, can I, I would really like to transform into an actual bear and hibernate

01:09:04.820 | for the next four months, and then maybe I'll come out of a hole ready to hear this.

01:09:09.020 | I didn't have that option.

01:09:10.320 | I had committed to teach a second session a week later.

01:09:13.560 | So all I could do was figure out how am I going to hear this feedback and really take

01:09:18.200 | it seriously?

01:09:19.200 | And I guess I applied a version of the second score and I said, "All right, there's some

01:09:23.420 | generals that are going to come back and see me again, and I've got to prove to them that

01:09:28.420 | I was open to feedback."

01:09:30.540 | And one of the things I heard loud and clear was that they valued humility, and I had led

01:09:36.100 | with too much confidence, which was just insecurity massed.

01:09:40.580 | And so I thought, "Okay, how do I change the equation?"

01:09:44.520 | And walked in, looked at the room, and I said, "I know what you're all thinking right now.

01:09:49.300 | What can I possibly learn from a professor who's 12 years old?"

01:09:53.600 | Dead silence.

01:09:54.600 | I'm like, "Oh no, this is going to go horribly wrong."

01:09:59.160 | And then one of the guys in the audience jumps in and is like, "Oh, that's ridiculous.

01:10:02.680 | You got to be at least 13."

01:10:05.600 | Everybody started laughing.

01:10:06.600 | It broke the ice, and I think what I was trying to do was to take myself off the pedestal

01:10:11.240 | and say, "Look, I heard your feedback.

01:10:13.780 | You told me that you didn't think I had anything to teach you, and I've got to acknowledge

01:10:17.900 | that right up front and be open to the fact that that's true.

01:10:20.860 | And so I want to come in here and learn from you, and I want to see if I can curate a conversation

01:10:24.560 | where we all end up learning."

01:10:26.820 | And the feedback was night and day different.

01:10:28.460 | Afterward, one person wrote, "Although junior in experience, the professor dealt with the

01:10:32.540 | evidence in an interesting way."

01:10:33.860 | I was like, "All right, I'll take it."

01:10:36.300 | And there was something really powerful about saying, "Look, I can't change the fact that

01:10:40.700 | they hated my session.

01:10:42.080 | What I can do is convince them that I was motivated to learn from their criticism."

01:10:46.620 | - I love this concept of the second score, and thank you for sharing that story.

01:10:51.880 | I think very often we hear about people like you who, if people didn't catch the math in

01:10:58.220 | there, you were a PhD by age 25.

01:11:02.040 | And as far as I know, the youngest tenured professor at Penn at 28.

01:11:05.900 | So these are outrageously impressive metrics of accomplishment.

01:11:11.260 | But for you to share a story about less than optimal performance and how you adjusted to

01:11:17.380 | it and the incorporation of the second score that you're referring to, I think is really

01:11:23.940 | appreciated because I think that as much as we hear, "Oh, Jordan took many more free throws

01:11:31.900 | and everyone just thinks about all the ones he made," people think about all the ones

01:11:35.100 | he made.

01:11:36.100 | That's the way the game works.

01:11:37.100 | That's the way the mind works, I should say.

01:11:39.100 | So I appreciate that you've fleshed it out with a personal example.

01:11:42.620 | I too would want to turn into a bear and disappear, but I think that it's really impressive what

01:11:47.880 | you did.

01:11:48.880 | And it makes me think that the second score of getting a ten at bringing the three and

01:11:52.900 | a half up, as it were, is really about turning a score into a verb process.

01:12:03.020 | Over and over again, as I do this podcast and as I've taught in the classroom, what

01:12:06.540 | I keep coming back to is this idea that we should be focusing more on verbs and less

01:12:09.800 | on nouns.

01:12:11.060 | We love to name things and categorize them, but when we start living life through a lot

01:12:16.220 | of verb processes, so instead of being fit or running as a thing, we really think about

01:12:23.700 | just running.

01:12:24.700 | It becomes less daunting and we accomplish far more.

01:12:27.860 | But the idea that, and there are mathematical models of this, I'm sure, but what you're

01:12:32.220 | basically talking about, you know, like an integral, right, as opposed to just some value,

01:12:35.380 | right?

01:12:36.380 | You're talking about the slope of the line, right?

01:12:38.100 | So you're a three and a half.

01:12:39.660 | How are you going to get to a ten?

01:12:40.660 | Gosh, that's a huge gap and you're dealing with being back on your heels psychologically

01:12:44.620 | from getting all this, you know, battering feedback from these, you know, these highly

01:12:48.920 | accomplished individuals, all these instruments and, you know, literally wearing them presumably

01:12:52.980 | on their body for you to see.

01:12:55.740 | And it's really about creating, it's about taking control of the slope of that line from

01:13:00.620 | the three onward.

01:13:01.620 | And it's really a forward-looking perspective.

01:13:03.940 | So I don't think we're being unduly psychological here or analytic.

01:13:07.700 | I mean, I think it's really about taking a moment state and a noun and turning it into

01:13:13.520 | a verb.

01:13:14.520 | Yeah, I think that's right.

01:13:15.520 | I reminded a great philosopher, Homer Simpson, who said that verbing weirds language.

01:13:21.660 | So it's harder to talk about this stuff in verbs.

01:13:23.260 | I swear I didn't steal it from the Simpsons, but if it came from Homer Simpson, like I'm

01:13:26.700 | all for it.

01:13:27.700 | You have to, I mean, that's incredible.

01:13:28.940 | Small brain, but, you know, given the size of his brain and people have seen the image,

01:13:34.420 | you know, fairly robust knowledge.

01:13:36.580 | No, I think you're onto something.

01:13:38.100 | I think verbs are active and we're drawn to them.

01:13:41.660 | I think, yeah, a lot of times people review their past work and they just like, they end

01:13:46.100 | up shaming an earlier version of themselves and they wallow in rumination.

01:13:50.380 | And what we want to try to do in that situation, which is easier said than done, is to say,

01:13:55.060 | like the purpose of getting feedback or advice is not to shame my past self, it's to educate

01:14:00.620 | my future self.

01:14:02.480 | Which I think is very connected to a lot of the work on growth mindset that you've been

01:14:05.580 | talking about.

01:14:06.580 | And there's been a firestorm of controversy around can we teach growth mindset in schools

01:14:11.340 | lately?

01:14:12.340 | And I think what that has underscored for me is, like, you can't expect someone to listen

01:14:18.300 | to one podcast episode or go through one workshop and magically believe that they're capable

01:14:23.400 | of learning anything at any moment.

01:14:25.620 | This is something we have to actively work on on a daily basis.

01:14:28.240 | And part of doing that, exactly as you said, is thinking about this loop and saying, all

01:14:32.720 | right, the person that I'm, you know, I'm competing with is my past self and I want

01:14:36.780 | to get a little bit better today than I was yesterday.

01:14:39.140 | Yeah, I think along the lines of growth mindset, obviously we both know Carol Dweck and I respect

01:14:45.980 | her tremendously.

01:14:46.980 | And I realized there is some controversy now around how readily one can teach growth mindset

01:14:52.860 | or incorporate growth mindset.

01:14:53.980 | My understanding, and I'd love to know your thoughts on this, is that when the Dweck work

01:14:59.360 | is combined with some of the Ali Krum work, that is, growth mindset is combined with a

01:15:07.000 | knowledge, just a basic and true understanding that stress and the feelings of anxiety and

01:15:13.160 | tension that can actually be performance enhancing.

01:15:17.000 | When those two things are combined, I think this is the work of David Yeager and colleagues

01:15:20.360 | at UT Austin, that indeed growth mindset becomes more visible in our mindsets and performance.

01:15:29.480 | And are there other aspects to growth mindset and other mindsets that are now being woven

01:15:35.780 | into that framework that can be helpful?

01:15:38.060 | Because I know, gosh, if ever there was a great name for a area of psychology, growth

01:15:42.460 | mindset tells you everything you want, everything you need and everything you sort of need to

01:15:46.500 | know in just the name, but we all find it difficult to implement.

01:15:53.360 | Just telling myself I'm not as good as something as I could be yet, it sounds great.

01:15:58.520 | But in moments of receiving feedback that's harsh, sometimes it's hard to access.

01:16:04.960 | Yeah, it is.

01:16:05.960 | I think so the latest, there's a McNamara et al meta-analysis.

01:16:10.060 | And then I think sort of that camp versus the Carol and David camp have very different

01:16:15.640 | views on how big the effects are.

01:16:18.340 | But I think one thing they seem to agree on is growth mindset is more important in circumstances

01:16:23.940 | where people are more likely to need it.

01:16:27.180 | So if you think about, for example, kids who are impoverished or marginalized communities,

01:16:34.260 | the message that you are capable of evolving your skills to the point that something you're

01:16:42.600 | bad at today, you could be good at next year, is really important when you've never heard

01:16:47.140 | that before.

01:16:48.420 | And when you don't have a single person believing in you.

01:16:51.360 | I think where we're often missing the boat is we think, all right, I'm just gonna instill

01:16:56.520 | this idea in a person's head and my work is done.

01:17:00.300 | And we know that the context around you really matters.

01:17:02.140 | So actually Carol's done some research showing that growth mindset is more likely to have

01:17:06.780 | an impact when your classroom culture and your teacher has the belief that kids are

01:17:13.040 | capable of learning and growing, that your starting ability is not fixed in any subject.

01:17:19.480 | And I think probably for all of us as individuals, what that means is we need to think about

01:17:24.040 | the micro environment that we put ourselves in.

01:17:27.200 | I think one of the things I've been thinking a lot about lately is scaffolding and the

01:17:32.880 | idea that when you're trying to improve at something, you don't need a permanent teacher

01:17:37.420 | necessarily.

01:17:38.540 | You don't need one mentor guiding you for nine years.

01:17:42.720 | What you need is somebody who can give you the temporary support that allows you to scale

01:17:46.840 | to a new height, just like a scaffold would on a building.

01:17:50.460 | And in learning theory, basically the idea behind scaffolding is we're gonna initially

01:17:53.800 | give you the support you need to solve a problem.

01:17:56.060 | And then we're gonna slowly remove the support so that you learn to do it on your own.

01:18:00.380 | And I think that those kinds of scaffolds are often missing.

01:18:03.120 | So we instill the growth mindset, like I've got this belief in my head, but I don't know

01:18:06.020 | what I need to do to put that belief into action.

01:18:10.320 | And that's where I guess that to me is, we have to go beyond mindset.

01:18:14.560 | We have to think about how do we put people in a context that allows them to put their

01:18:18.760 | beliefs into practice.

01:18:21.320 | You were asking me, what else do we need to support growth mindset and make it effective,

01:18:26.000 | right?

01:18:27.000 | - Yeah, I mean, we know when people learn what growth mindset is, it's the idea that

01:18:29.380 | you're not as good at something yet.

01:18:31.440 | Okay, terrific, but it's very hard to implement in real time.

01:18:35.540 | There are, I have to presume, additional tools that one can bolster the growth mindset with,

01:18:39.880 | make it more accessible and benefit from it.

01:18:44.080 | - Yes.

01:18:45.080 | So Justin Berg and Amy Rezneski and I studied this actually.

01:18:49.480 | We were looking at growth mindset at work.

01:18:52.680 | And Justin's, well, he's at Stanford, I don't know if you've met him yet.

01:18:56.160 | - I have not, but big place.

01:18:58.240 | - He'll be on the list soon.

01:19:01.580 | - Brilliant creativity researcher and Amy just joined us at Wharton and has fundamentally

01:19:07.060 | changed the way that I think about ideas in the way that she studied how we can shape

01:19:12.640 | our context and just done pathbreaking work there.

01:19:16.180 | And we were interested in growth mindset and we designed an intervention where people could

01:19:20.740 | learn growth mindset at work.

01:19:23.180 | So we taught them to think about how their skills were malleable, how they could stretch

01:19:27.000 | their knowledge into new areas.

01:19:29.240 | And we found that teaching them that was not enough to boost their happiness or their performance.

01:19:33.700 | What we needed to also do was give them a growth mindset, not just about themselves,

01:19:38.820 | but also about their jobs.

01:19:41.300 | In other words, to teach them that your job is a set of flexible building blocks, that

01:19:45.820 | you've got a whole bunch of tasks that make up your job.

01:19:48.220 | Some of those are things to do, others might be interactions that you need to have.

01:19:53.860 | And if you break down your job into all these tasks, you might have some tasks that you

01:19:57.560 | want to accentuate and make a bigger part of your job.

01:20:00.160 | Others that you want to try to subtract, others that you might swap with a colleague.

01:20:04.820 | And a lot of people, it turns out, think their jobs are fixed by their job descriptions.

01:20:08.760 | But in fact, you have a ton of opportunity to say, "Wait a minute, there's a strength

01:20:13.200 | I have, but I'm not using it right now.

01:20:15.500 | Is there a way we can bring that into my work?"

01:20:17.580 | And so in these couple of experiments we did, when we randomly assigned people to learn

01:20:21.140 | both that their jobs were malleable and that their skills were malleable, they got a sustainable

01:20:25.820 | boost to their happiness that lasted at least six months.

01:20:28.740 | There was no cost to their performance, meaning you could redesign your own job to be more

01:20:33.420 | enjoyable without a drop in the effectiveness of your contributions to your workplace.

01:20:40.580 | And I think what I came away from that research realizing is, it's not enough to just say,

01:20:44.980 | "Well, I can get better, I can improve."

01:20:47.860 | Because very often you feel like your environment is limited, like, "Great, I can grow, but

01:20:52.500 | I'm stuck in a dead-end job."

01:20:54.140 | And so what we need to do there is open up the opportunity for people to innovate on

01:20:59.340 | their own job description, and then the growth mindset can begin to have an impact.

01:21:04.060 | - I love it, it sounds a bit like adding a S to growth mindset.

01:21:10.820 | So it's not growth mindset, it's growth mindsets.

01:21:14.080 | Because earlier you mentioned that in the classroom environment, if the teacher adopts

01:21:17.580 | a growth mindset, as well as the students, well then you have a culture of growth mindset.

01:21:22.140 | So it's the interconnectedness of this and the context in which the individual's growth

01:21:27.380 | mindset exists.

01:21:28.380 | Do I have that right?

01:21:29.380 | - Well put.

01:21:30.380 | Yeah, we ended up calling it dual mindset.

01:21:31.380 | But I think making it a plural is good, because it's not, I have this image of, you put a

01:21:39.020 | person in a cage and then tell them they're capable of growing, they're still stuck in

01:21:43.900 | a cage.

01:21:44.900 | And so we need to give them a chance to bust through those walls.

01:21:49.500 | - Super important.

01:21:50.500 | I hate to take us back to an earlier topic, but there's something that I meant to ask

01:21:55.760 | you that I didn't, and I'm absolutely needing to ask you.

01:22:00.100 | Which is your recent work, or recent-ish work, it was a few years back now, and you're so

01:22:05.260 | prolific that I have to call it a few years back.

01:22:10.740 | The relationship between intrinsic motivation and performance on other tasks.

01:22:16.800 | And the reason I asked this is several fold.

01:22:20.420 | I did two episodes of the podcast on ADHD.

01:22:24.420 | And one of the things that I learned in talking to experts on ADHD, people with ADHD, as well

01:22:30.180 | as looking at some of the novel treatments, everything from behavioral to prescription

01:22:35.500 | to even nutrition-based, was that kids and adults with clinically diagnosed ADHD are

01:22:43.340 | actually terrific at paying attention to things that they really enjoy, or that they're super

01:22:48.460 | interested in.

01:22:49.460 | So clearly they have the capacity, it's just that they have deficits, if you will, in attending

01:22:56.060 | to things that are less exciting to them, less intriguing to them.

01:23:01.260 | - So if I recall correctly, you have a publication that explored the relationship between intrinsic

01:23:07.180 | motivation and performance in other stuff, and one of the major conclusions was that

01:23:13.100 | having a deep, deep interest in one thing might not be the best condition for performing

01:23:19.580 | well at other less interesting tasks.

01:23:21.780 | Could you tell us about that study, what motivated you to carry out that study, and what some

01:23:27.820 | of the major takeaways were?

01:23:29.020 | - Yeah, definitely.

01:23:30.400 | You summarized it really well.

01:23:32.040 | I think the original impetus, so this was another project with Ji-He Shin, and Ji-He

01:23:36.820 | came to me wanting to study intrinsic motivation.

01:23:40.060 | And we were talking about what do we know about intrinsic motivation, and what are the

01:23:43.200 | gaps in our knowledge?

01:23:44.740 | And one thing that has always bothered me is when psychologists study something that

01:23:49.180 | sounds positive, and they only study the benefits of it.

01:23:51.740 | I'm like, there's no such thing as an unmitigated good, right?

01:23:54.660 | All sort of enjoyable experiences have costs, all unpleasant experiences can have benefits.

01:24:02.460 | We need to fill out this two by two of good thing, bad thing, good outcome, bad outcome.

01:24:09.120 | And so my challenge to her was, can you show me the dark side of intrinsic motivation?

01:24:14.760 | And she came back and she said, what if there's a cost of loving a task, leading you to hate

01:24:20.140 | a task that you don't like even more than you did before?

01:24:22.900 | It's like, oh, that's an interesting idea, it tracks with the basic psychology of contrast

01:24:26.340 | effects, where if you eat something delicious, then your least favorite food tastes a little

01:24:33.220 | bit worse afterward.

01:24:35.420 | And so I said, let's study this.

01:24:36.940 | So she ended up getting data from people at work.

01:24:40.480 | And then we also designed an experiment, and sure enough, the more passionate you are in

01:24:45.380 | task one, the more your performance suffers if task two is really boring.

01:24:50.580 | And I guess what this did for me is it made me think differently about task sequencing.

01:24:54.220 | I used to wake up in the morning and do my most interesting task first.

01:24:58.740 | And then the grading was hell.

01:25:01.900 | And what I do now is I start with a moderately interesting task.

01:25:04.700 | It's a little bit of a warm up for me.

01:25:06.060 | And then I have an exciting one to look forward to.

01:25:08.500 | And if I do have a task that's boring but important, I think the performance is going

01:25:11.740 | to suffer less.

01:25:13.700 | Interesting.

01:25:15.100 | I normally don't ask about morning routines and how one structures a day because it's

01:25:20.940 | highly individual.

01:25:21.940 | Completely agree.

01:25:22.940 | Yeah.

01:25:23.940 | And it depends on whether or not people have kids and their pets and other, but I'll just

01:25:30.200 | share with you a brief anecdote.

01:25:31.200 | I have a friend who's a very accomplished musician and has been for several decades

01:25:34.860 | now.

01:25:35.860 | And he told me that he has a practice of after he gets off stage and he's like stadium, stadium

01:25:40.520 | sellout level musician has been for a long time and it shows no signs of stopping.

01:25:48.280 | Just incredible.

01:25:49.280 | But a very down to earth person.

01:25:51.100 | And he said, one of the first things he does when he gets off stage is to go do some menial

01:25:55.860 | task.

01:25:56.860 | I thought there's no way that's true, but I've known his wife since college.

01:25:59.540 | And she, she verified that statement.

01:26:01.880 | I was like, what, what sorts of menial tasks you're talking about?

01:26:04.380 | He's like, oh, like cleaning up some of the cans and things that are there.

01:26:07.400 | He's even cleaning a toilet at a venue.

01:26:10.780 | And I thought, no chance, but it turns out to be true.

01:26:13.340 | And I said, what, what's this about?

01:26:14.460 | Is this about humility?

01:26:15.460 | He said, well, maybe a little bit, but he said it actually makes it a lot easier for

01:26:19.660 | him to return home and deal with the kind of little things that just are out of scale

01:26:27.220 | with the experiences that he just had.

01:26:29.300 | He's tapering.

01:26:30.300 | Oh, okay.

01:26:31.300 | I think.

01:26:32.300 | Yeah.

01:26:33.300 | Yeah.

01:26:34.300 | So first of all, I was so struck by the fact that he had created this process for himself

01:26:38.440 | so long ago.

01:26:39.440 | And he's also somebody who's, you know, he's maintained and he's like been the same marriage

01:26:42.680 | for an extremely long time.

01:26:44.200 | He's he's extremely happy in that and his family.

01:26:46.520 | I mean, one of these people that seems to thrive in all domains of life, and I'm certain

01:26:50.180 | that he struggles in some domain of life because everybody does, but it sounds to me like a

01:26:55.600 | very unusual practice, but it seems to kind of relate to this, that, you know, he has

01:26:59.320 | this thing that he loves doing, playing music and performing in particular.

01:27:02.720 | And he's just, you know, you know, 0.01 percent at doing that and just like bring himself

01:27:08.960 | back down to earth because so much of life and especially family life is like dealing

01:27:13.880 | with the schmutz and the inconvenience of everyday life.

01:27:17.680 | Yeah.

01:27:18.680 | It actually sounds like what he's doing is he's resetting his frame of reference to say,

01:27:22.800 | if you know, if I go right home, then the contrast between this high octane experience

01:27:28.080 | I'm having and sort of muddling through everyday life is going to be extreme.

01:27:34.520 | If I do something really small, then family time is going to seem a lot bigger.

01:27:39.560 | Yeah.

01:27:40.560 | So I realize I'm taking a bit of a leap from your study on intrinsic motivation and low

01:27:45.080 | performance in other domains.

01:27:47.360 | But you know, to me, cleaning up, cleaning a toilet is, you know, it's it's it's boring

01:27:53.560 | for all the wrong reasons.

01:27:55.040 | Right.

01:27:56.040 | You do not want that to be an exciting task.

01:27:58.360 | No.

01:27:59.360 | And listen, I mean, if I had to do it for a living, I would.

01:28:01.160 | And I would try and do as well as possible.

01:28:04.480 | But right.

01:28:06.200 | So well, I found that study to be particularly interesting because I think that these days

01:28:12.560 | we glorify high performance, even quote unquote peak performance, something we can talk about.

01:28:19.560 | And we forget that, yes, oftentimes people who are ultra high performers can afford to

01:28:24.760 | pay other people to do all the other stuff.

01:28:27.040 | But I have to say, in knowing some ultra high performers and in knowing some people in the

01:28:31.960 | billionaire bracket, you know, there's a high incidence of of mental health issues, frankly,

01:28:39.400 | and lack of satisfaction with life that maybe even comes from not having to do anything

01:28:45.820 | besides the things that you find most intrinsically rewarding.

01:28:50.100 | We all think that, oh, if I could, I would spend all day doing the things that I find

01:28:54.000 | most intrinsically rewarding.

01:28:55.280 | But maybe there's something about this push pull.

01:28:57.360 | We know the brain works in push pull with almost everything that having some experiences

01:29:01.520 | each day that are kind of like this thing again, do you think that heightens our level

01:29:06.440 | of satisfaction for the things we really enjoy?

01:29:08.640 | I would be surprised if it didn't.

01:29:11.760 | I think I think contrast effects are very powerful.

01:29:14.600 | And we know I mean, there's half a century of research on happiness suggesting that the

01:29:21.980 | comparisons we make are what matter.

01:29:25.560 | You know, I think I think Tim Urban probably put it best when he said happiness is reality

01:29:29.420 | minus expectations.

01:29:32.260 | And if you only have enjoyable experiences, your expectations are rising into perpetuity.

01:29:40.320 | So it doesn't matter how good your reality is.

01:29:42.400 | You wanted it to be better and better.

01:29:44.880 | I think one of the things that mundane experiences manage to do for us or maybe a better way

01:29:50.560 | to say it is I think one of the benefits of mundane experiences is they keep our expectations

01:29:54.880 | on the ground and allow us to be pleasantly surprised by a task that was more interesting

01:30:00.520 | than we expected, even though we didn't love it.

01:30:02.820 | What are your thoughts on what I call momentum, which is when I have an experience I particularly

01:30:10.180 | like, like if we record a podcast and I'm really excited to get it out into the world,

01:30:13.940 | or if I have some experience that I'm left very excited by at the end, that oftentimes

01:30:18.200 | is the energy, again, I'm obsessed with this concept of neural energy, the energy that

01:30:23.680 | I glean from that experience seems to have carry over into other things.

01:30:28.920 | You know, I'm going to be much more excited to just go across the street and get a cup

01:30:32.760 | of coffee.

01:30:33.760 | Feels like a bigger thing than it normally would.

01:30:37.500 | And I would think that one could kind of ride the wake of a prior accomplishment, even a

01:30:42.000 | small accomplishment each day and make the, you know, tidying up or doing things that

01:30:46.600 | one would normally find more boring, less boring.

01:30:49.360 | Is that true?

01:30:50.520 | The way you're describing contrast effects makes it seem like it's more of a cliff, like

01:30:53.860 | that thing was great and now this thing.

01:30:56.080 | But I also can kind of ride high on something that happened two, three days ago, maybe even

01:31:00.080 | two, three months ago.

01:31:02.240 | So feeling good equates to feeling good or feeling good accentuates the bad stuff.

01:31:09.280 | This is the tension between contrast and spillover.

01:31:12.560 | And you can see both under different conditions.

01:31:14.480 | I think this is a brand new sort of, I don't think anybody has reconciled those two perspectives

01:31:20.680 | yet.

01:31:21.680 | But my hunch from having worked on the contrast part of it is we found that it was only extreme

01:31:25.640 | intrinsic motivation that had the performance cost on other tasks.

01:31:29.360 | So if you're enjoying something, if you like it, that will give you a lift for other tasks.

01:31:36.440 | It's where this is the best thing you've ever done and now other things suck by comparison.

01:31:43.000 | That's where we start to see run into a problem.

01:31:45.120 | I also wonder if there's a domain switching effect here.

01:31:49.320 | I think you're alluding to this.

01:31:51.680 | I read some research that just came out this year showing that one of the surprising benefits

01:31:56.760 | of morning workouts is you actually have more confidence in your job because you get that

01:32:01.960 | small win, like I accomplished something this morning and that gives you a sense of efficacy

01:32:06.300 | that you can carry over into the start of your workday.

01:32:10.480 | Not to suggest that everyone should work out in the morning because I'm with you.

01:32:12.940 | I think everybody should both work and work out at a time that works for them.

01:32:18.440 | But I think there's something to be said for something went really well in one realm of

01:32:24.280 | my life and that boosts my belief and my capability to tackle challenges in a different realm.

01:32:29.960 | What about in the opposite direction?

01:32:32.480 | You were a competitive diver.

01:32:35.040 | I have to presume that there were days when you had lousy dives.

01:32:39.360 | It must have been that one day.

01:32:41.440 | It felt like every day.

01:32:44.120 | Then you leave, you shower up, dry off, head into the rest of your day.

01:32:51.760 | How do we segment away from the negative thought spirals of something went really poorly?

01:32:57.520 | Now you're off into the domain of life where you know how to do the things that you're

01:33:01.120 | required to do, but maybe there's some challenge and some learning involved.

01:33:04.280 | How do we cut moats between negative experiences?

01:33:08.760 | I think the Ted Lasso strategy is ideal.

01:33:12.160 | Become a goldfish, 10 second memory, and then you don't even recall the practice you had

01:33:17.280 | earlier today.

01:33:18.520 | I think that I don't know anybody who can do that consistently.

01:33:23.640 | And I think the more disappointing the experience is, the more you tend to dwell on it.

01:33:28.960 | I think when you talk about segmenting negative experiences, I think probably the research

01:33:37.040 | that I've liked best on this, and I just want to make sure I capture this clearly.

01:33:45.200 | Research on emotion regulation says there are two strategies that tend to be effective.

01:33:49.320 | One is distraction, the other is reframing.

01:33:53.600 | Distraction is find something else that will consume your attention that's unrelated to

01:33:58.440 | the thing that you just bombed at, and the hope is that that fades into the background.

01:34:04.560 | Diving is a lot of what you were talking about a few minutes ago, which is, "Okay, let me

01:34:08.440 | focus not on the level of my performance, but the slope."

01:34:11.880 | My diving coach, Eric Best, has a really great set of questions that he asks, and I remember

01:34:18.840 | I had finished practice, I'm like, "This is a terrible day.

01:34:22.080 | I just feel like I'm worthless as a diver, and now diving was a big part of my identity.

01:34:26.920 | I'm going to let my team down, now I'm a bad teammate too.

01:34:29.600 | My coach is wasting his time, and now he could have been training somebody much better.

01:34:35.760 | Why am I doing this?"

01:34:37.700 | And Eric would ask, "Did you make yourself better today?"

01:34:42.280 | And even if it was a bad practice, there is something that improved, yes, okay.

01:34:47.520 | And sometimes the answer feels like no, and then he would ask, "Did you make someone else

01:34:51.640 | better today?"

01:34:52.640 | I'm like, "Yeah, I gave a little tip to a teammate.

01:34:58.840 | I made a joke that made everybody laugh, and he was like, "Great, then it wasn't a bad day."

01:35:05.200 | And I think this is an example of what good reframing looks like, to say, "Okay, the goal

01:35:09.920 | wasn't to be great, it was to be better.

01:35:12.360 | The goal wasn't necessarily just to make myself better, it was also to make other people better."

01:35:17.580 | And I think those are the kinds of questions that seem to segment pretty well.

01:35:21.640 | I love that feedback, because I think we all get stuck in those thought spirals.

01:35:27.040 | And again, not to demonize smartphones, because they are wonderful tools, but I have to remember

01:35:32.400 | the time, I'm 48 years old, as of tomorrow, and I have to remember a time in which negative

01:35:39.720 | stuff was probably happening in the background, but I didn't hear about it, because no one

01:35:43.280 | was texting it to me.

01:35:44.280 | So I'd find out at the end of the day, when I still had time to do other things in the

01:35:47.280 | meantime.

01:35:49.900 | That said, I would also get negative experiences early in the day, and then carry them throughout

01:35:53.460 | the entire day when nowadays you can get a positive text message that says, "Okay, it

01:35:56.920 | wasn't so bad," or something like that.

01:35:59.440 | But I do think, as is probably becoming apparent about, these channels of communication are

01:36:08.240 | either boons or disruptions to our positive psychology.

01:36:12.040 | It's clear that we're just being bombarded all the time.

01:36:14.640 | So just as a practical question, what is your relationship to your phone?

01:36:21.600 | Do you set boundaries around your phone use, or the types of communications and activities

01:36:27.060 | that you engage with on your phone?

01:36:29.260 | I do.

01:36:30.260 | So I think everyone I know has a to-do list.

01:36:33.300 | I also have a to-don't list.

01:36:35.820 | And on my to-don't list includes, I don't scroll on social media, and I don't pick up

01:36:40.860 | my phone past 9 p.m.

01:36:43.700 | And those two habits are enormously helpful, particularly the not scrolling.

01:36:47.440 | I pick up my phone when I have something to post or when I want to see what the comments

01:36:52.680 | are and then see if there's something interesting to learn or somebody that I want to respond

01:36:56.880 | to.

01:36:58.340 | And that becomes a really healthy boundary because I don't get stuck in one of these

01:37:01.780 | rabbit holes where all of a sudden two hours have gone by and I feel like I wasted my time.

01:37:08.620 | Where do you post or keep your to-do and your to-don't list?

01:37:12.360 | Do you keep them on your phone?

01:37:13.920 | No, it's a Word document on my computer.

01:37:16.200 | Okay.

01:37:17.200 | So you're still at the computer screen quite a bit each day?

01:37:19.480 | Yeah.

01:37:20.480 | Okay.

01:37:21.480 | I feel like that's where most of my good thinking and writing happens.

01:37:24.080 | Yeah.

01:37:25.080 | I carry a small notebook around with me now and write things down.

01:37:27.920 | I was just curious.

01:37:28.920 | Like one of these?

01:37:29.920 | Yeah.

01:37:30.920 | Well, like one of those.

01:37:31.920 | Yeah.

01:37:32.920 | Yeah.

01:37:33.920 | I try not to take notes on my phone ever.

01:37:34.920 | Right.

01:37:35.920 | Yeah.

01:37:36.920 | It can be problematic for me, especially with voice recognition now because you just, it's

01:37:40.900 | hard to go back to that in a systematic way for me, but I'm a big believer in these things

01:37:45.400 | that for those listening and not watching, I'm holding up a pen, pencils work too.

01:37:49.980 | You've probably read some of the research also showing that you have a better memory

01:37:53.280 | for information when you take notes by hand than by keyboard.

01:37:56.600 | I didn't know that, but I'm very, very gratified to hear that.

01:38:01.440 | And I suppose if you don't have a pen and you don't have a pencil handy, then blood

01:38:05.840 | always works.

01:38:06.840 | Just kidding.

01:38:07.840 | I'm just kidding.

01:38:08.840 | Don't make yourself or anyone else bleed just to get an idea down.

01:38:12.120 | But it is amazing how sometimes we will have ideas while running, walking, showering out

01:38:16.240 | and about, and then later try and recall those ideas.

01:38:18.680 | And if we don't write them down, they're gone.

01:38:20.180 | The great Joe Strummer from The Clash talked about the critical importance of carrying

01:38:23.760 | around a small notebook such as you did, because he said that the ideas fall down like rain.

01:38:28.800 | And if you catch them, they're there.

01:38:30.520 | But if you miss them, they truly won't be there later.

01:38:33.440 | And that's, there's something kind of eerie about that.

01:38:35.840 | Like why wouldn't we be able to remember these potential gems of ideas?

01:38:39.440 | All right.

01:38:40.840 | The geysering up of the mind.

01:38:43.000 | We had a guest on this podcast for a series, Dr. Paul Conte, a psychiatrist, and he talked

01:38:49.840 | extensively about the unconscious mind.

01:38:51.720 | I mentioned this a little earlier, but one of the things that really stuck with me is

01:38:55.000 | he said, "Everyone thinks that the prefrontal cortex and the frontal cortex is the supercomputer

01:38:59.920 | of the human brain.

01:39:02.000 | Sets context, planning, strategy switching, et cetera, et cetera, certainly it's valuable

01:39:07.120 | real estate to our intellect and all our abilities."

01:39:11.380 | But he said, "The real supercomputer is the unconscious mind.

01:39:16.520 | However, that unconscious mind that lives below the surface of our awareness is also

01:39:21.160 | what drives a lot of our unconscious defenses."

01:39:23.440 | So our so-called blind spots, so projection, projective identification, I mean, these can

01:39:28.800 | be both good or bad.

01:39:29.800 | They can serve us well or poorly and so on and so forth.

01:39:34.300 | But implied in this notion of the unconscious and blind spots is that we can't become aware

01:39:40.240 | of things unless we either do dedicated work to become aware of them, or even better would

01:39:46.000 | be dedicated work where we are asking other people to say, "Hey, listen, you have a blind

01:39:51.520 | spot and it is blank, blank, and blank.

01:39:53.720 | So tell us about the role of blind spots, maybe even some positive aspects of having

01:39:59.240 | blind spots," but more importantly, what we can do to fill in those blind spots and perhaps

01:40:06.180 | also explain how they can limit us.

01:40:08.100 | And if you have any examples from the research where people overcoming their blind spots

01:40:13.420 | has benefited them, that would be amazing.

01:40:15.200 | Yeah.

01:40:16.200 | Wow.

01:40:17.200 | There's a lot there.

01:40:18.200 | Well, let me start by saying, I think a lot of people think about blind spots in terms

01:40:22.580 | of heuristics and biases.

01:40:24.440 | So you think about confirmation bias, you think about the classic Kahneman-Tversky work

01:40:29.560 | that ended up winning Danny a Nobel Prize on the way in which our intuitive judgments

01:40:36.100 | often get anchored in the way we've done things before, or we focus on the information that's

01:40:41.840 | salient and available to us and overlook less obvious information.

01:40:46.040 | I've come to think that the mother of all biases is what I think of as the I'm not biased

01:40:52.160 | bias.

01:40:53.160 | It's technically called the bias blind spot in Emily Prone and colleagues' research, but

01:40:58.320 | the idea is that I think I'm more objective than other people.

01:41:01.640 | And you may have flaws in your thinking, Andrew, but me, I see things clearly and rationally.

01:41:08.320 | And I think that it's a really dangerous meta bias because the moment you believe you're

01:41:12.780 | not biased, you are incapable of seeing any of your biases.

01:41:17.640 | So in some of the research on the bias blind spot, you see that people who score high in

01:41:24.460 | cognitive ability tests, so high IQ, are actually more likely to fall victim to the I'm not

01:41:29.480 | biased bias because they've been reinforced for a lifetime that they're really smart and

01:41:35.760 | they're good at thinking.

01:41:36.760 | - Oh, goodness.

01:41:37.760 | This explains some, we don't talk about current events on this podcast much, but this explains

01:41:41.860 | some current events of people that were told their entire careers that they are perfect

01:41:45.540 | or near perfect and circumstances eventually came to slam them hard into the concrete on

01:41:52.220 | that one.

01:41:53.960 | - Or in some cases it hasn't happened yet, but we watch them hurtling toward earth.

01:42:01.440 | So I worry a lot about that.

01:42:02.940 | So I think the beginning of seeing any blind spot is recognizing that we all have blind

01:42:07.160 | spots as part of being human.

01:42:09.560 | I think that the brighter side of that is that we're not just blind to weaknesses, we're

01:42:13.440 | also blind to our strengths.

01:42:16.120 | So Jane Dutton and Laura Morgan Roberts and colleagues did some research on the reflected

01:42:21.620 | best self portrait.

01:42:22.620 | This is one of my favorite exercises to do in the classroom, but also to do in workplaces,

01:42:26.960 | sometimes even people end up doing it with their kids at home.

01:42:30.500 | The idea is that you do have strengths that you're not that aware of.

01:42:34.040 | They may be things that come naturally to you that you don't even realize are hard for

01:42:36.640 | other people.

01:42:37.640 | They may be things that are struggles for you.

01:42:40.120 | And so you think it's hard to do and therefore I'm bad at it, but other people watch you

01:42:44.460 | do it and realize you're actually quite good at it.

01:42:47.720 | So you need other people to hold up a mirror to see what these invisible strengths are.

01:42:52.840 | So the way the reflected best self exercise works is you're asked to contact 10 to 20

01:42:56.760 | people who know you well in different walks of life.

01:42:58.840 | Might be a family member, a couple of friends, some colleagues, and then you ask them to

01:43:02.940 | tell a story about a time when you were at your best.

01:43:06.520 | And you collect these stories, it's the most exciting week of email you will ever get.

01:43:10.840 | 20 notes, let me tell you how great you are.

01:43:14.200 | But what's key, this goes back to our discussion of feedback earlier, is they're really specific

01:43:18.000 | about a moment when you were at your best.

01:43:20.840 | And then your job is to collect all the stories and do the pattern recognition exercise and

01:43:24.840 | ask what are the common themes that I've seen through these stories?

01:43:28.880 | And it's a really powerful and vivid way of getting a sense of what are those strengths.

01:43:33.760 | And it's not surprising that in some of the research when people go through this process,

01:43:38.520 | they end up with much more clarity, not only about what they're good at and where their

01:43:42.700 | potential lies, but also what do those situations have in common where I was able to use my

01:43:48.020 | strengths and how do I get myself in those situations more often?

01:43:51.040 | How do I create those situations more often?

01:43:53.160 | I'll give you a personal example on this.

01:43:55.240 | So I got a bunch of feedback that I was good at helping other people see their strengths.

01:44:03.120 | And I thought, okay, I don't feel like I have enough opportunities to use that strength

01:44:07.600 | in my daily life.

01:44:08.640 | So what am I going to do about this?

01:44:10.800 | And I ended up flipping the exercise upside down.

01:44:12.760 | And I picked 100 people who really mattered to me.

01:44:17.220 | And I wrote a story to each of them about a time when they were at their best.

01:44:21.400 | And there's no reason I can't make this part of my day.

01:44:27.640 | It was probably one of the best weeks of my life.

01:44:29.800 | It was better than getting the stories I was giving them.

01:44:33.480 | And I got these notes back from people saying, I didn't realize, I don't even remember that

01:44:38.040 | thing that happened.

01:44:40.960 | But I think for me, it was an example of saying, okay, I've always enjoyed trying to bring

01:44:48.160 | out the best in others.

01:44:49.840 | I don't feel like, at the time I was a first year doctoral student, I didn't feel like

01:44:54.040 | I had anything to contribute to others.

01:44:56.740 | I'm trying to learn how to understand this field and do a worthwhile study and write

01:45:02.280 | a paper.

01:45:03.280 | I'm not teaching yet.

01:45:04.280 | I have no value to add.

01:45:06.360 | And getting this feedback like, oh, you're somebody who helps other people see their

01:45:09.600 | potential.

01:45:10.600 | I'm like, all right, let me take some people that I already recognize really amazing things

01:45:15.340 | in and let me just tell them that.

01:45:18.400 | And it took me about a week to write the 100 emails and I can't think of a week I've spent

01:45:25.120 | better.

01:45:26.120 | - Wow.

01:45:27.120 | It's so interesting that you flipped the process on its head a bit or a lot and that ended

01:45:34.620 | up being the reward.

01:45:35.620 | Do you think you learned anything about, given that it was early in your academic career,

01:45:39.740 | do you think you learned anything about your particular talent or desire to do what you

01:45:46.720 | do now?

01:45:47.720 | I mean, so much of what you described seems to map well to what you do now.

01:45:51.180 | I mean, you could be, if you were to choose or have chosen just, not just, but a laboratory

01:45:58.140 | scientist doing experiments.

01:46:00.000 | You're clearly still doing that with tremendous productivity, but you've also decided to tell

01:46:06.520 | the world about the information that you're gathering and the work of a lot of other people

01:46:10.460 | as well.

01:46:11.460 | I guess I feel a kinship here because we both do this.

01:46:14.380 | - Much more interesting to cite other people's work than talk about what you already know.

01:46:17.460 | - It is indeed.

01:46:18.860 | - And it's fun to be able to weave one's understanding of the process into what are other people

01:46:24.040 | doing and know how hard it is to do really good experiments and be able to spot really

01:46:28.540 | good experiments.

01:46:29.700 | But did you learn in that early stage of your career that like, I think I want to do this

01:46:35.860 | later because what you do now is it maps pretty well onto what you just described.

01:46:40.660 | - I don't think it was, it wasn't crystallized at the time, but it was definitely one of

01:46:44.860 | those seeds that was planted that must have grown because I remember right after I got

01:46:52.460 | tenure a wonderful colleague of mine asked if I would write a book with him and I was

01:46:58.060 | so flattered and I went in to talk to my undergrad research lab later that day and I mentioned

01:47:02.780 | offhand, I was like, hey, I got this invite, I'm gonna write this book and they freaked

01:47:08.420 | out.

01:47:09.420 | Like, no, you cannot write somebody else's book.

01:47:11.220 | You have to write about your ideas first.

01:47:13.780 | If you're gonna write a book, write your own book.

01:47:16.600 | And I was very resistant because I love other people's ideas.

01:47:22.340 | I feel like what I do best, I think it was Boyer who wrote about the scholarship of discovery

01:47:28.960 | versus the scholarship of integration.

01:47:32.180 | And I never felt like I was a Eureka, blindingly original insight person.

01:47:38.420 | I felt like what I was good at was synthesizing ideas and kind of taking a bunch of pieces

01:47:45.700 | of cloth and sewing them into a quilt and allowing people to see the big picture in

01:47:49.340 | a way they hadn't before.

01:47:50.340 | And I felt like I could do that with a colleague who was already a successful author.

01:47:54.020 | And my students basically held me hostage and they said, you've been doing this research

01:47:57.860 | for over a decade now and you have a responsibility to share that outside your classroom.

01:48:04.340 | And it reminded me of that experience of saying, okay, there's something I see in other people.

01:48:10.300 | I wanna share it with them and maybe I could do that on a broader scale.

01:48:15.440 | So yeah, I think there were definitely dots that connected there.

01:48:19.520 | - When I was a master's student at Berkeley, there was a guy who's now moved to Michigan

01:48:23.340 | State, Mark Breedlove, who I hope to host on the podcast actually does really interesting

01:48:27.880 | work on the biology of sexual differentiation.

01:48:30.940 | And-

01:48:31.940 | - Mark, I think that's an invite if you're listening.

01:48:32.940 | - Yeah, right.

01:48:34.520 | And he, it is indeed.

01:48:37.200 | And he said to me, he said, you know, review articles provided they are written by people

01:48:43.080 | who are credentialed in a given field are cited at, you know, a hundred X, any one particular

01:48:50.840 | paper.

01:48:51.840 | Now at the time I wasn't interested in impact factors.

01:48:56.060 | In fact, I've never paid any attention to impact factors.

01:48:59.100 | Their importance varies in different countries and in the U.S. they play some role more so

01:49:05.400 | in Europe, but I could care less about impact factor, frankly, because those metrics aren't

01:49:11.360 | what it's going to carry you through the difficulty of designing and carrying out a hard experiment.

01:49:15.580 | You have to be intrinsically curious about the answer, right?

01:49:18.180 | You know this and I know this, but he basically said something that really supports your point,

01:49:25.780 | which is that ultimately the ability to synthesize information can feel really good.

01:49:31.180 | And he started talking about the feeling that he got from doing that.

01:49:34.620 | He's also a tremendous bench scientist as well.

01:49:36.940 | In any event, I'm so glad that you flipped that exercise on its head because now the

01:49:41.120 | world gets to benefit from you doing that for us all the time.

01:49:43.600 | Because I realize now that much of what you do is to help people identify and erase their

01:49:49.220 | blind spots by, and I love your social media channels.

01:49:54.020 | And I noted on Instagram and I do scroll, but I scroll through and to your channel too,

01:50:01.900 | you'll put up in short form content that really highlights the key importance of people embarking

01:50:08.340 | on strategies that they wouldn't reflexively take.

01:50:11.380 | I see that over and over again.

01:50:12.880 | It's like, we think that the best leaders do blank, but actually the research says they

01:50:16.880 | do exactly the opposite and you have a vast kit of those.

01:50:22.080 | So along those lines, what are some of the most common blind spots that you observe and

01:50:28.100 | that people could benefit from understanding and doing contrary action around as it relates

01:50:34.920 | to, let's say interpersonal relations in the workplace or at home.

01:50:39.800 | And maybe we could seed this with a finding that you've also written about, which is that

01:50:45.220 | people who have and exert a lot of proficiency and even control in their professional life

01:50:51.060 | will sometimes bring that to their relationship life and that doesn't work, right?

01:50:55.360 | The idea that being in charge and being confident is a great set of attributes, but it can really

01:51:01.940 | fail us in other domains.

01:51:03.840 | Can we weave that in with blind spots?

01:51:05.760 | - Yeah, we can.

01:51:07.220 | So I think that, so one of the things I found over the past few years is that, and this

01:51:13.400 | was inspired by a Phil Tetlock framework.

01:51:16.040 | A lot of us spend a lot of our time thinking like preachers, prosecutors, or politicians.

01:51:20.640 | - Yeah, so you can think about these as three mental modes that even if you've never worked

01:51:26.400 | in any of these careers, you will watch your thinking colored by at least one of them more

01:51:31.320 | often than you would like.

01:51:32.860 | So in preacher mode, you're basically proselytizing your own views.

01:51:36.900 | And I mean, Andrew, in some situations I think of you as a highly effective professional

01:51:43.560 | debunker of preachers of certain kinds of snake oil when it comes to health and biology.

01:51:53.180 | Sometimes you take that too far and people might accuse you of being a prosecutor where

01:51:57.200 | you're attacking other people's views.

01:52:00.000 | And then the third mode, politician mode, is basically you don't even bother to listen

01:52:04.560 | to people unless they already agree with your views.

01:52:07.320 | - What I think is interesting is these modes of thinking are adaptive in certain roles.

01:52:12.720 | So preachers make great salespeople.

01:52:14.340 | They're often visionary leaders.

01:52:17.160 | Prosecutors are often highly effective scientists, right?

01:52:19.400 | We excel at criticizing other people's work and finding what's wrong with it.

01:52:24.280 | Politicians are great at currying favor.

01:52:26.040 | They do a lot of lobbying, they win approval.

01:52:28.680 | The problem is that all of these modes stop you from questioning your own assumptions

01:52:32.940 | and beliefs.

01:52:34.640 | So I'll tell you my biggest vice is prosecutor mode.

01:52:37.940 | I've been called a logic bully.

01:52:39.740 | My wife had to explain to me that was not a compliment.

01:52:43.800 | - Oh my goodness.

01:52:46.000 | - I mean, I know you've experienced this too, if I feel confident that there's strong evidence

01:52:51.760 | that somebody is wrong, I believe it's my moral responsibility to correct them.

01:52:56.220 | And that never goes well.

01:52:58.660 | - Amazing.

01:53:00.500 | I won't reflect on my own experience, I'll just say yes and yes.

01:53:05.100 | - Right, right, the logic word ninja mode is one that I think we're trained in as academics.

01:53:16.240 | Or if you're a lawyer or many other professions as well.

01:53:21.040 | And I think it holds value and it can be very effective in certain domains, but less effective

01:53:25.360 | in other domains.

01:53:26.360 | - Yes.

01:53:27.360 | And I think part of the problem is, actually, whether you're preaching, prosecuting or politicking,

01:53:34.200 | you look like you're not open.

01:53:36.540 | Because you've already, in all cases, you think you're right and other people are wrong.

01:53:40.400 | And so that makes it really hard for other people to reason with you, to disagree thoughtfully

01:53:45.420 | with you.

01:53:46.420 | So my favorite alternative, and this is at the heart of what you do for a living and

01:53:51.340 | for fun, is thinking like a scientist.

01:53:55.120 | And when I say thinking like a scientist, I do not mean that you need to buy a microscope

01:53:58.360 | or invest in a telescope.

01:53:59.800 | What I mean is, as you model so effectively, a good scientist has the humility to know

01:54:04.200 | what they don't know and the curiosity to constantly seek out new knowledge.

01:54:08.520 | There have been multiple experiments showing that when people are taught to think like

01:54:11.460 | scientists, their judgment improves and so do their decisions.

01:54:15.200 | And I think a lot of that stems from when you go into scientist mode, you realize that

01:54:20.380 | all of your opinions are just hypotheses waiting to be tested.

01:54:23.880 | All of your decisions are experiments.

01:54:25.800 | And so, well, I'm not trying to prove that I'm right, I'm trying to find out if I might

01:54:30.460 | be wrong.

01:54:31.460 | And then if I find out I am wrong, it's easier to pivot.

01:54:34.240 | And instead of being really invested in being right, I can try to get it right.

01:54:39.460 | And I think in some ways that's the meta message that I'm trying to communicate to people with

01:54:43.920 | my work is assumptions are meant to be pressure tested.

01:54:47.500 | They're meant to be questioned and challenged.

01:54:49.040 | And if you're not open to rethinking your views, then you basically turn thinking into

01:54:53.960 | a religion.

01:54:55.860 | And I don't know about you, but I prefer to base my views on good data as opposed to blind

01:55:02.120 | faith.

01:55:03.120 | And I think that's been a huge part of your contribution in the last three or so years

01:55:06.480 | to public discourse is you've helped people think more scientifically and talk more scientifically

01:55:12.420 | about their daily habits and behaviors.

01:55:14.080 | And I guess my big question is how do we help people do that more often, even in domains

01:55:19.000 | where they don't have access to scientific knowledge and they don't read journals?

01:55:22.360 | - First of all, thanks for the kind of words of feedback.

01:55:24.940 | I think my goal is always to identify who's coming to the podcast for health tools and

01:55:31.080 | protocols and hopefully teach them some science and scientific thinking.

01:55:34.520 | And for those that are coming to the podcast for science and scientific thinking, hopefully

01:55:37.440 | they get some health tools and protocols also.

01:55:39.760 | But because I fell in love with science for the exact reason that you're describing, which

01:55:43.280 | is that I grew up in a family that was very divided politically along religious lines

01:55:49.200 | along essentially every line of like what foods to eat, what was healthy, what wasn't.

01:55:53.800 | And the only way I could reconcile these very frankly polarized views was to embark on the

01:56:00.080 | scientific method, pose a hypothesis, and then try and disprove one's hypothesis.

01:56:04.680 | And some things get through the filter and it's a constant learning.

01:56:07.520 | So I should just ask when you teach people how to be a scientist in order to try and

01:56:14.960 | overcome some of their blind spots and be better thinkers, better meaning it serves

01:56:19.460 | themselves and the people around them better, is that teaching them what a hypothesis is,

01:56:25.680 | that a hypothesis is not a question, it's sort of you wager on an idea with the understanding

01:56:32.060 | that you very well could be wrong and then you try and disprove that idea.

01:56:35.320 | That's sort of the crux of what in these experiments you're describing as teaching people how to

01:56:41.240 | be scientists.

01:56:42.240 | Like if they just do that, then they'll, they're going to benefit.

01:56:46.000 | I think that's, that's at the very heart of the lens is I want to just double click on

01:56:50.080 | the idea of disproving your hypothesis because most people live in a land of confirmation

01:56:54.760 | bias where they're, they're basically just looking for support for their preexisting

01:56:58.020 | beliefs.

01:56:59.020 | That's right.

01:57:00.020 | They're click foraging.

01:57:01.020 | We all do this, by the way, I'm not criticizing here.

01:57:02.760 | We all will have an idea and then we will click forage online to support the idea that

01:57:09.760 | we disagree with them.

01:57:10.960 | They disagree with us, ah, here's somebody I agree with and that agrees with me.

01:57:15.880 | I think, and do you think this has roots in our you know, in the neural circuit underpinnings

01:57:20.720 | of of just wanting to have affiliation, that affiliation feels good, having people that

01:57:28.880 | are like us knowing that we're kind of protected in that.

01:57:32.320 | Yeah, I think that's a big part of it.

01:57:33.920 | I think one of the reasons that we, we encase ourselves in echo chambers and hide and filter

01:57:39.160 | bubbles is there's a, there's a strong evolutionary pressure to avoid social exclusion.

01:57:44.880 | And so, you know, it's not, it's not just the, you know, being drawn to affiliation.

01:57:48.280 | It's also, um, I, I really want, I'm afraid of being excommunicated from my group and

01:57:54.320 | if I challenge the orthodoxy of the community that I belong to, I might be an outcast.

01:57:58.760 | Um, and I don't think, I don't think every day people think through that logic, but I

01:58:02.560 | think there's a, there's a deep seated, um, visceral tendency to avoid that.

01:58:07.400 | And, you know, I think the, when we think about teaching people to see their blind spots

01:58:13.160 | more clearly, um, a lot of that is, is recognizing it's hard to do that on your own.

01:58:17.440 | Um, because by definition, your blind spots are invisible to you.

01:58:20.600 | And so this is why other people's input is so important.

01:58:23.760 | And I think, you know, I'm, I know this makes a lot of people uncomfortable, but I think

01:58:28.780 | everybody on social media should follow people that they disagree with, but not just for

01:58:33.520 | the sake of it.

01:58:34.600 | You want people who reach different conclusions from you, but where you respect the integrity

01:58:38.880 | of their thought process.

01:58:39.880 | Those are the people who really stretch your thinking.

01:58:42.680 | And I think that's what we were trained to do.

01:58:44.160 | Um, it's what I was trained to do as a social science, a social scientist is to listen to

01:58:48.120 | the ideas that made me think hard, not just the ones that made me feel good and to surround

01:58:52.200 | myself with people who challenged my thought process, not just the ones who validated my

01:58:55.520 | conclusions.

01:58:56.520 | And I think, you know, a lot of people hear that message and they're like, no, but I don't

01:58:59.480 | want to let that like that awful perspective into my world.

01:59:02.440 | I'm like, no, you, you want to be more nuanced in saying who are the people where before

01:59:08.160 | I knew what their answer was, I would be impressed with the depth and the thoroughness of their

01:59:14.520 | reflection and their analysis.

01:59:16.680 | I should be following those people and learning from them regardless of the, the hypotheses

01:59:23.000 | that they generate and the results that they share.

01:59:27.320 | I'm so glad that you mentioned the importance of following people that you disagree with.

01:59:31.680 | I think one thing that we have to highlight and I'm hoping will maybe even emerge from

01:59:36.400 | this conversation is that follows are not endorsements.

01:59:40.500 | And this is actually a real problem.

01:59:41.500 | I mean, there are academics who have lost their jobs, not necessarily for following

01:59:45.240 | certain accounts, but for, um, commenting on certain common threads, maybe even alike

01:59:50.480 | is a, is a slightly different category because it's, as the name suggests, it's a like it's

01:59:54.280 | a, it sounds like, and it's thought of as a vote of approval of what's there.

01:59:59.040 | But when one's options are just, um, you know, a heart, uh, a follow or no heart, no follow.

02:00:05.520 | Um, you know, I was a big fan of the thumbs up, thumbs down.

02:00:08.440 | I kind of like the thumbs up, thumbs down because at least you have the, you have an

02:00:12.040 | option to, to, um, to dissent, um, without getting into online, uh, comment battles and

02:00:18.200 | things of that sort.

02:00:19.200 | But, um, listen, I've, I've had, um, uh, people ask me, why do you follow so and so?

02:00:24.760 | Because follows are also seen as a sign of support because you're adding, adding followers

02:00:28.540 | and presumably, uh, in the algorithm raising prominence to a channel, but I'm right there

02:00:32.860 | with you.

02:00:33.860 | I follow lots of accounts, um, of people who I fundamentally disagree with, but I'm trying

02:00:37.940 | to learn and I'm also trying to understand what, what their capture points are.

02:00:41.780 | Like, like why people find them so intriguing.

02:00:43.720 | Yes.

02:00:44.720 | Um, anyway, I'm, I'm a learner, I'm a forager like you.

02:00:47.600 | So I, I'm in the same boat and every once in a while I think like it, it's stunning

02:00:53.400 | to me.

02:00:54.400 | I looked at your, your Instagram statistics, um, but somebody, um, a colleague of mine actually

02:01:00.980 | showed me as I didn't, I didn't realize you could look at the effect of each post on follows

02:01:05.740 | and unfollows.

02:01:06.740 | Oh, I didn't realize that.

02:01:07.740 | And you know, the, I think that my typical ratio might be two or three to one for a post.

02:01:13.020 | So, you know, gaining two or three to two or three followers to every one that I lose.

02:01:17.480 | The idea that I could post anything that would cause someone to unfollow me, like if I said

02:01:21.840 | something interesting enough that you thought I was worth following, how could, how could

02:01:26.020 | one post change your mind about that?

02:01:27.980 | I think you're too focused on what I think and maybe not paying attention to how I think,

02:01:33.460 | um, was my, my first reaction to that.

02:01:35.900 | And then my second, my second thought was, well, maybe, maybe what's happening here is

02:01:43.420 | like people show up and they don't realize the foundation of evidence behind the total

02:01:48.240 | body of work.

02:01:49.860 | And so one post strikes them wrong and they think this person is not credible or they

02:01:54.900 | think that this person has, um, you know, lost sight of, you know, of what rigorous

02:02:00.800 | science is.

02:02:02.080 | I wonder if you've, you've had that experience too of like, I think I make the mistake of

02:02:06.760 | taking for granted that anybody who followed me knows that if I post something, I think

02:02:12.680 | it's worth thinking about and, um, you know, it's, it's been carefully studied and I didn't

02:02:17.040 | have a, you know, I didn't have a dog in the fight.

02:02:19.140 | I read this research and said this cleared the bar not only of an academic journal, um,

02:02:23.580 | but I read the methods and I found them sound enough that we ought to be discussing this

02:02:27.200 | idea.

02:02:28.200 | Um, have you had that experience too?

02:02:30.000 | Um, I certainly have.

02:02:31.780 | And I should say that, you know, I was weaned in an academic culture, three separate mentors,

02:02:36.060 | very different styles, all of whom, um, were excellent mentors, but all of whom taught

02:02:44.400 | me that, you know, there are phenomenal papers where every bit of information in the paper

02:02:50.340 | and indeed how it's written from start to finish is just watertight and incredible.

02:02:55.540 | And there are other papers that are less watertight, but occasionally there will be papers where

02:03:01.380 | one data point in a figure is intriguing enough to consider following that scent trail in

02:03:07.860 | your own work.

02:03:09.440 | Even if the rest of the paper is kind of eh, I mean one data point.

02:03:14.220 | Now that doesn't mean taking one data point and casting it out to millions of people on

02:03:18.620 | social media as an actionable item is, is, is valid.

02:03:21.660 | That's certainly not what I'm saying.

02:03:22.720 | But what I do realize, and I'm realizing again now after what you just said, is that indeed

02:03:28.700 | people don't know the context near which, like what, like what filters are we working

02:03:32.760 | with before we bring things forward?

02:03:35.060 | And I think that, um, you know, my belief is that if it's grounded firmly in the scientific

02:03:39.820 | method that, um, that's the best starting place, we were talking about that earlier.

02:03:44.800 | And I also understand that scientists differ tremendously in how they look at even the

02:03:48.780 | same data and the same paper.

02:03:50.280 | So there is no governing body that says, okay, this paper means blank.

02:03:55.140 | The authors have their interpretation.

02:03:57.400 | The students have their interpretation.

02:03:58.820 | In fact, the course I used to teach, um, to undergraduates, which grew into a very large

02:04:02.420 | course, we learned to ask four questions.

02:04:04.820 | What's the question that the authors were asking?

02:04:07.500 | There's a sub question, what methods did they use?

02:04:10.220 | What did they find?

02:04:11.440 | And then what did they conclude?

02:04:12.700 | And does it relate back to the original question?

02:04:14.700 | And that simple, um, breaking out of four questions of studies, essentially what I do

02:04:18.820 | for all studies.

02:04:19.940 | Um, but I have my way of doing it and it's going to differ from the way that other people

02:04:23.780 | do it.

02:04:24.780 | Um, social media, uh, I think what's interesting is that I think there's always going to be

02:04:29.060 | a core following of a, of a given person, like your, your followers that they're going

02:04:33.300 | to trust, you know, not necessarily cross the board, but there's a general acceptance of

02:04:37.300 | ideas coming through.

02:04:38.300 | I think that on social media, it's hard to strike a balance between setting the whole

02:04:42.380 | context and the actual takeaways.

02:04:45.620 | I get criticized a lot for not being concise enough and I agree, but, but I also get criticized

02:04:49.940 | for putting things, taking things out of context.

02:04:52.060 | So, uh, it's a tight rope walk and it's always going to be a tight rope walk.

02:04:56.460 | And so I'm going to just, you know, keep going and I know you will too.

02:04:59.860 | Um, and, and listen, I, I'm, there's, there's some kids out there.

02:05:04.820 | It's surely not going to be one that are going to take our jobs eventually and, um, and we'll

02:05:09.600 | find a way to do it much better.

02:05:10.740 | Who knows?

02:05:11.740 | Through AI or something like that.

02:05:12.740 | It might be robots.

02:05:13.740 | Um, I feel like this is an appropriate place to ask about something else since we're talking

02:05:17.860 | about sort of perception of, uh, of others and, and gleaning information, overcoming

02:05:22.300 | blind spots.

02:05:23.300 | It's something that you've written about some years ago now, I guess it would be almost

02:05:26.600 | eight years ago now, um, about authenticity.

02:05:30.240 | Um, you know, the word authenticity is, is such a minefield, such a minefield.

02:05:34.920 | I was going to say such a, has such a gravitate, positive gravitational pull, like, Oh, they're

02:05:38.920 | really authentic as opposed to what's the opposite of authentic fake, right?

02:05:43.320 | But um, I think we could all learn to draw some lines between authenticity and oversharing,

02:05:49.840 | right?

02:05:50.840 | Well, how do we gauge authenticity and we can refer people to that article you wrote

02:05:55.040 | some years ago.

02:05:56.040 | Um, you may have written it differently where to be written today, but you talked in that

02:06:00.720 | article about somebody who essentially decided to tell everyone that he worked with all the

02:06:05.900 | things that he was interested in, um, uh, doing with them, relating to them and it did

02:06:10.940 | not serve him well.

02:06:11.940 | Okay.

02:06:12.940 | So that's authentic.

02:06:13.940 | Right.

02:06:14.940 | And so then there's this, um, this notion of benevolent deception in order to preserve

02:06:19.280 | relationship and importantly, um, it brought about a word that we don't hear about very

02:06:24.560 | often, but that I rather like, which is etiquette.

02:06:27.720 | Like there's, so for social media, by the way, I apply classroom rules.

02:06:31.200 | I'll tolerate any comment in the comment section, but not the sort of comment that I wouldn't

02:06:34.760 | tolerate in a classroom.

02:06:35.760 | If you started insulting other, you can insult me, but if you want to insult other people,

02:06:40.960 | I'm not going to tolerate that.

02:06:42.700 | So, um, that's where I draw the line classroom rules.

02:06:46.000 | There's an etiquette and I think that, um, etiquette is important.

02:06:50.240 | So how do we balance authenticity with etiquette and also with preserving one's, uh, uh, one's

02:06:59.280 | public life or private or private life, right?

02:07:02.780 | Authenticity at home seems important.

02:07:04.440 | You could be your complete self at home except when you want to, you know, physically hit

02:07:10.520 | your sister or brother because they, your ice cream, that's not the right kind of authenticity.

02:07:16.040 | No, no, it isn't.

02:07:17.620 | I think, well, I think it's such a rich and complicated topic.

02:07:22.580 | I think first thing is I, I don't want people to be disingenuous ever, but I have a real

02:07:30.060 | problem with people saying as an excuse for disrespectful behavior, well, I was just being

02:07:35.640 | myself.

02:07:36.640 | Um, I think David Sedaris said, yes, but yourself is an asshole.

02:07:42.620 | So good.

02:07:43.680 | So good.

02:07:44.680 | I think, I think what people forget is that we have, we all have multiple selves, right?

02:07:47.780 | You, you, I mean, you've, you've, you've known this your whole career.

02:07:51.100 | Um, we all have multiple identities.

02:07:53.580 | We also could think about yourself as your thoughts, your emotions, um, your values,

02:08:00.280 | your personality.

02:08:01.280 | So which facet of yourself are you trying to be true to?

02:08:04.280 | Um, I would argue that authenticity without boundaries is careless.

02:08:11.260 | Authenticity without empathy is selfish.

02:08:14.060 | And part of being authentic is caring about other people's values.

02:08:18.240 | That should be one of your values.

02:08:20.260 | So what that means concretely is I don't think we should worry about being authentic to what

02:08:23.560 | we're thinking and feeling in any given moment.

02:08:25.920 | I think what we want to ask is what I'm about to do or say consistent with my principles.

02:08:31.400 | And sometimes that means you will be false to your personality in order to be true to

02:08:35.160 | your values.

02:08:36.640 | Sometimes that means you will, you will feel like you're not honoring your thought or your

02:08:41.120 | emotion in the moment, but you're doing that with a broader view toward who is the person

02:08:45.620 | that I want to be.

02:08:46.620 | There was a cultural critic, Lionel Trilling, who wrote about the idea of sincerity as opposed

02:08:51.960 | to authenticity.

02:08:53.480 | And I really liked this distinction.

02:08:54.780 | He said, when, when you, when you try to think about being authentic, you're trying to bring

02:08:58.040 | the inside out.

02:08:59.820 | And to your point, Andrew, that's not always appropriate or effective.

02:09:03.200 | He said, sincerity is a little bit more about bringing the outside in.

02:09:07.100 | So pay attention to the person you claim to be and then try to become that person.

02:09:12.660 | And that was a little bit of an aha moment for me.

02:09:14.400 | I realized, you know, there are all these people who say, well, you should, you know,

02:09:19.260 | you should, you should walk your talk.

02:09:23.000 | And I think that's good advice.

02:09:24.240 | I might even go a step further and say, you know, maybe you should only talk it if you're

02:09:28.680 | already walking it.

02:09:30.640 | Maybe, maybe that would help us avoid hypocrisy.

02:09:33.580 | But I think the fundamental message here is that we all, we all could be authentic to

02:09:39.700 | one part of ourselves and inauthentic to another part.

02:09:43.040 | And I think the most important part is to ask, what do I stand for?

02:09:47.480 | And if I'm, what I'm about to communicate is not consistent with that, then maybe, maybe

02:09:52.160 | I could self-censor.

02:09:55.520 | Such great advice.

02:09:56.680 | And I suppose one has to wonder about the role of emotional states.

02:10:03.100 | You know, I think there are career ending mistakes that people make in a moment, especially

02:10:09.580 | online nowadays.

02:10:10.580 | And by the way, this is not just for people who are already established in their career.

02:10:15.180 | I've heard stories and there seem to be more and more of these in the news of, for instance,

02:10:20.200 | you know, videos of things that people said some years earlier, getting them ejected from

02:10:23.980 | college.

02:10:26.300 | A guest on Lex Friedman's podcast who works in the securities world said that one of the

02:10:30.360 | lessons that he teaches his kids is to not film themselves doing bad things, but in,

02:10:35.000 | and of course also not to do bad things, but in general to just not film themselves doing

02:10:39.360 | anything because of his understanding of the risk of doing that.

02:10:43.720 | And we don't want to create a paranoia, but gosh, I mean, who you are when you're 14 is

02:10:49.620 | a very different person than who you are when you're 27 and when you're 50, so I hope so.

02:10:55.300 | So, you know, and so, yeah, I think, you know, balancing authenticity across the lifespan

02:11:02.840 | and we're expecting young minds to do this and clearly older minds can't do it either.

02:11:06.820 | I mean, this is a pretty well known case of a chair of a major psych, the major psychiatry

02:11:11.940 | department.

02:11:12.940 | We won't name the university, but basically lost his job for a single tweet.

02:11:18.740 | He just was not being thoughtful.

02:11:20.240 | In fact, he was being really like numb to, to other people and lost his job.

02:11:28.900 | And I think he, I don't know him and it was obvious why he lost it.

02:11:33.560 | I don't think it was debatable, but gosh, you think about somebody who's a chair of

02:11:38.080 | psychiatry, which means they're a psychiatrist, which means they're trying to think about

02:11:41.440 | thinking.

02:11:42.440 | And there you go.

02:11:45.320 | It's amazing how common this is.

02:11:46.520 | And I think one of the things that's fascinating to me is, I guess this goes back to something

02:11:53.020 | we were talking about a moment ago, but I think that when we communicate, we have access

02:11:59.220 | to the sum total of all of our thoughts and everything we've ever, ever said that we can

02:12:04.420 | remember.

02:12:05.420 | And we forget that other people only have a snapshot.

02:12:08.260 | And so one of the questions I like to ask is if this was the only post that somebody

02:12:12.680 | saw of mine, would I be proud of it?

02:12:15.620 | Would it communicate who I am and who I aspire to be?

02:12:18.680 | So good.

02:12:19.680 | If the answer is no, maybe I should pause before I put that out there, that that is

02:12:24.000 | excellent advice.

02:12:25.720 | If it were the only post like your one and only representing you, Oh, fantastic.

02:12:30.720 | Now that could be paralyzing.

02:12:33.040 | If you're a perfectionist, you'll never post.

02:12:35.480 | But I think for somebody who's posting regularly it's a good filter to just ask am I, you know,

02:12:41.520 | am I being thoughtful enough?

02:12:43.960 | So good.

02:12:44.960 | I won't add anything to that.

02:12:46.100 | Just say, I'll just say so, so good.

02:12:49.380 | Let's talk about potential.

02:12:51.340 | I was in junior high school and I remember having a social studies teacher who she just

02:12:55.460 | would go on and on about potential.

02:12:57.420 | She has a special program after school.

02:12:59.340 | You could get involved potential, potential, potential.

02:13:02.740 | And we hear about this and, you know, we have untapped potential.

02:13:06.980 | You hear we're only operating at 40% of our abilities.

02:13:09.960 | You know, people will say that the implication is that we have reservoirs of potential.

02:13:14.940 | That we're just not accessing because we're not doing the right things, thinking the right

02:13:18.700 | things.

02:13:19.700 | I know you've now researched this topic extensively.

02:13:22.360 | You have a new book on this topic.

02:13:26.620 | Tell us about potential.

02:13:27.900 | Like do we all have huge reservoirs of potential that we are not accessing?

02:13:31.900 | And of course I and everyone else wants to know how can we access those?

02:13:35.420 | But maybe you could also tell us some of the myths around potential and tell us about potential.

02:13:41.980 | Such a sticky topic for all the right reasons.

02:13:45.580 | Thank you.

02:13:46.580 | I, you know, it's one of those things where you've had this experience I'm sure many times

02:13:50.880 | where you start thinking and talking about a topic and you realize it's been your whole

02:13:56.660 | life but you didn't see it until then.

02:13:59.260 | And I feel that way about potential.

02:14:01.100 | I think that I've been passionate about helping people achieve their potential as long as

02:14:05.060 | I can remember.

02:14:06.060 | I think every goal I've ever set has been about stretching my potential in one way or

02:14:10.500 | another or at least realizing it.

02:14:13.140 | And what I've become so struck by as I've studied this topic is we all have hidden potential

02:14:18.260 | but we don't know how to unlock it.

02:14:20.220 | So why do we often underestimate our own potential?

02:14:24.300 | We judge ourselves by our starting abilities.

02:14:27.340 | And this is more common for people with fixed mindsets but even people with growth mindsets,

02:14:31.820 | you try a new skill, it doesn't go well and you think this is not for me.

02:14:35.580 | I'm not cut out for this.

02:14:37.860 | And then it gets worse when other people also, you know, you're not just underestimating

02:14:42.940 | yourself.

02:14:43.940 | You're also being underestimated by others.

02:14:45.340 | Other people watch you and say, yeah, you don't have the, you know, you're not a prodigy.

02:14:49.900 | You're not a natural.

02:14:50.960 | You don't have the talent that it takes.

02:14:52.780 | And I think the big myth there is that raw talent is the most important driver of how

02:14:57.760 | high people climb.

02:14:59.420 | It's not.

02:15:00.420 | Motivation and opportunity matter more than raw ability for growth.

02:15:05.500 | Motivation and opportunity.

02:15:08.060 | Yeah.

02:15:09.060 | Obviously, everybody starts at a different point.

02:15:11.820 | But how close you come to your potential is much more about the character skills you cultivate

02:15:18.900 | to improve and improving over time.

02:15:21.020 | And then whether you're in a situation where you have access to the knowledge that you

02:15:25.660 | need and the tools you need to keep growing.

02:15:27.540 | And so a concrete example of this for me is when I started diving, I was way too late.

02:15:33.660 | I picked it up as a teenager.

02:15:36.080 | A lot of the elite divers in the world start by five.

02:15:40.260 | Goodness.

02:15:41.260 | And actually, in China, they're handpicked for body type and sent to a version of diving

02:15:46.980 | boarding school where they don't even teach kids how to swim.

02:15:49.500 | They tie a rope around them so that they can just pull them back after they hit the water

02:15:53.540 | in the deep end.

02:15:54.540 | What part of their body they tie a rope around?

02:15:56.460 | I think it's their waist.

02:15:58.100 | So they're diving with a rope so that when they get in the water, they're not wasting

02:16:03.000 | any energy.

02:16:04.000 | Exactly.

02:16:05.000 | They're just being dragged through the water and out.

02:16:07.740 | That's my understanding of it.

02:16:09.380 | Wow.

02:16:10.380 | But Brazil, they have to walk, they have to climb.

02:16:12.260 | Yeah.

02:16:13.260 | Okay.

02:16:14.260 | So there are a bunch of other things they have to do.

02:16:15.260 | Yeah.

02:16:16.260 | But the swimming apparently is very secondary.

02:16:17.900 | Anyway, so I started really late and I lacked most of the things that you would want as

02:16:24.240 | a diver.

02:16:26.180 | I couldn't touch my toes without bending my knees.

02:16:29.440 | My teammates called me Frankenstein because I was so stiff when I walked.

02:16:32.960 | So lacking the flexibility, I have no rhythm.

02:16:35.240 | My coach brought a metronome to practice one day and I couldn't even keep the beat.

02:16:39.560 | So you think about diving as a sport of grace, nope.

02:16:43.320 | And then I also couldn't jump and I couldn't twist either.

02:16:47.740 | And it's like you're missing the explosive power.

02:16:49.480 | You don't have the athleticism.

02:16:53.200 | And I think if I had just looked at those abilities, I had no business being a diver.

02:16:58.140 | And in fact, no business being an athlete.

02:16:59.580 | I'd already been cut from the middle school basketball team three times.

02:17:02.100 | I didn't make the high school soccer team.

02:17:03.820 | Those were the two sports I had poured a decade into.

02:17:07.020 | This is going nowhere.

02:17:08.960 | Eric, just the most incredible coach I could ever imagine.

02:17:13.600 | He said to me on the first day of practice, he said, "Yes, you're missing all these things.

02:17:22.440 | But I believe if you pour yourself into this sport that you could be a state finalist by

02:17:28.160 | the time you finish high school."

02:17:30.620 | And he saw more potential in me than I saw in myself and that just lit a fire under me.

02:17:35.960 | And what that translated into is a lot of the behaviors that you and I both studied,

02:17:42.120 | setting specific, difficult goals for I want to learn these dives that seem out of reach,

02:17:47.240 | for I want to increase my score over the next three meets by 10 points, for I want to learn

02:17:53.400 | how to-- all my limitations notwithstanding, one thing that I can master that I have total

02:17:57.680 | control over is how clean I go into the water.

02:18:00.080 | I can get a rip entry so that there's no splash, and that's the most important part of a dive.

02:18:04.380 | And one of the greatest compliments I ever got as a diver was I came out of a meet in--

02:18:07.820 | it was a couple of years in, I think I was maybe a junior in high school, and one of

02:18:12.740 | the judges turned to Eric and said, "All he can do is rip."

02:18:16.600 | And Eric said, "So?"

02:18:17.600 | I was like, "Yes!"

02:18:18.600 | It's awesome.

02:18:19.600 | It's almost like saying, "All he can do is win," you know?

02:18:22.680 | Yeah, it was a great backhanded compliment, but Eric was like, "Listen, he made the dive.

02:18:27.440 | It has a degree of difficulty.

02:18:28.760 | Maybe he didn't jump as high as he wanted.

02:18:30.400 | Maybe his tuck wasn't as tight as he wanted.

02:18:33.100 | But at the end of the day, that dive disappeared straight up and down into the water.

02:18:36.920 | You can't not give that a seven."

02:18:39.080 | And that ended up serving me really well, and so I think the broader lesson here for

02:18:42.880 | me was Eric said to me-- actually, last year I never thought about this.

02:18:48.560 | He said-- I never got close to even qualifying for Olympic trials.

02:18:53.840 | I did not have the talent to be that good, but I got way better than I ever expected.

02:18:59.120 | Eric said to me, he said-- looking back, he said, "You got further with less talent than

02:19:04.000 | any diver I've ever coached."

02:19:05.920 | And that was so meaningful to me, and what it reminded me was my proudest accomplishments

02:19:09.660 | were not in the areas where I started out with the most talent.

02:19:13.120 | They were in the areas where I had overcome the most obstacles, and I think that, to me,

02:19:18.080 | is really what drives people around potential, is to say it's not performance that's motivating.

02:19:24.840 | It's a sense of progress.

02:19:27.240 | - I love that story, and I couldn't agree more.

02:19:30.320 | I mean, I think, Lord knows, my favorite topic in science is the course I performed, at least

02:19:36.080 | after my freshman year, which was abysmal, least well in the phase when I was doing well

02:19:41.520 | in--

02:19:42.520 | - What class was it?

02:19:43.520 | - Neural development.

02:19:44.520 | I now teach neural development.

02:19:45.520 | - I'm sorry, what?

02:19:46.520 | - Neural development.

02:19:47.520 | - You said it at first.

02:19:48.520 | - Okay, well, I have to put it in context.

02:19:51.000 | My high school and freshman year of college were abysmal, right?

02:19:56.040 | Basically no place being there.

02:19:57.040 | I can only thank my high school girlfriend for being so wonderful that I followed her

02:20:01.240 | off to college and ended up there.

02:20:04.040 | Left after my freshman year, came back, and then at that point, it was like a step function.

02:20:07.240 | I worked out of fear and excitement and love of the material.

02:20:12.360 | I was a straight-A student thereafter, but in my senior year, excuse me, I took a course

02:20:17.040 | in neural development, which was extremely challenging, and I got a B plus, and that

02:20:21.820 | B plus still gets me, but it's a topic that I love the most.

02:20:26.000 | It's what I did my graduate thesis on, it's what I teach at Stanford, among other topics,

02:20:31.000 | and I like to think now I have, I guess, humility side, considerable mastery over the material,

02:20:36.320 | but it's because I didn't do as well as I would have liked, and I applied myself so

02:20:39.720 | much, and I think that it just didn't come naturally to me, and then eventually over

02:20:43.200 | time you kind of get it, or you get it.

02:20:49.160 | But it's still my favorite topic because it was that friction point, right?

02:20:52.500 | It's the ratcheting through, and there's something, I don't know, that's just so intrinsically

02:20:56.960 | satisfying to me.

02:20:58.000 | I used to watch my bulldog, Mastiff Costello, chewing on a bone, or when he was a little

02:21:02.160 | on a brick, because he had a Homer Simpson brain about his object choice to chew on,

02:21:07.680 | and he just looked like he was in just total bliss.

02:21:09.720 | It was like this effort combined with some intrinsic pleasure of the process.

02:21:15.280 | And so I think that when one is ratcheting through something that's hard, it feels so

02:21:19.620 | good that it's almost better than the outcome.

02:21:23.340 | It is better than the outcome.

02:21:24.600 | I think it is, and it's fascinating because this is why I'm always bothered by people

02:21:30.760 | saying play to your strengths, because if you do that, you will gravitate toward the

02:21:34.740 | things that come naturally to you, and you're going to miss out on, very often, the skill

02:21:39.240 | that was hard for you to learn.

02:21:40.600 | To your point, is one that you end up with greater mastery over, because you had to put

02:21:44.780 | in the extra effort, and you end up deriving more satisfaction out of the fact that this

02:21:50.560 | was really tough, and I figured it out.

02:21:54.480 | Implicit in your story, and maybe partially explicit in some parts, when I was looking

02:21:59.920 | at the character skills that helped people realize their potential and really fuel unexpected

02:22:04.840 | growth, I ended up finding three that I think are under discussed and well supported by

02:22:13.400 | science.

02:22:14.400 | I think that basically if you want to reach your potential or achieve more than you think

02:22:18.720 | you're capable of, we're looking at becoming a creature of discomfort and embracing things

02:22:23.520 | that are unpleasant or awkward for you.

02:22:25.360 | That'll be the first thing.

02:22:26.920 | The second is being a sponge and soaking up new information and also filtering out what

02:22:33.500 | might not be useful.

02:22:35.220 | And then the third is being an imperfectionist, which is knowing when to aim for excellence

02:22:40.420 | and when to settle for good.

02:22:43.120 | And I hear all of those themes in your story.

02:22:46.380 | That was obviously uncomfortable.

02:22:48.660 | You got to be plus.

02:22:49.660 | You don't want to do any more neural development, not at all.

02:22:53.460 | - It was so frustrating and so exciting to me at the same time.

02:22:56.600 | And then I went, everything I did in the five or seven years that followed was all about

02:23:00.680 | learning more about this topic because it wasn't about performing well or proving myself.

02:23:04.900 | I just, I love the material so much more because of how challenging it was.

02:23:09.740 | And I'm grateful to you, Ben Reese, the professor at UC Santa Barbara, incredible neuroanatomist

02:23:14.320 | and teacher of neural development and laboratory scientists.

02:23:18.080 | Because I think had I gotten an A, I don't know that I would have fallen in love with

02:23:23.960 | it in the same way.

02:23:24.960 | Isn't that weird?

02:23:25.960 | You wouldn't have had to work at it to discover what was fun about it, I imagine.

02:23:30.700 | - No, absolutely.

02:23:32.020 | And it's still one of my favorite topics to teach and learn about.

02:23:35.980 | So you mentioned discomfort, being a sponge slash filter, if I got that right, and an

02:23:42.140 | imperfectionist.

02:23:45.140 | Tell me more about the imperfectionist piece, because I feel like I've had students in my

02:23:49.860 | lab and I've known people in other domains of life that they're absolutely paranoid about

02:23:54.180 | shipping something out for the world to see it.

02:23:56.360 | And of course, no one wants to put stuff out into the world that isn't right and God forbid

02:24:00.600 | could be wrong, or that's going to embarrass us.

02:24:05.740 | So you can understand why people are perfectionists, but I never really understood the extreme

02:24:12.200 | perfectionist.

02:24:13.200 | How do they ever do anything?

02:24:15.040 | And are they happy people?

02:24:16.640 | Because I can't imagine that they are.

02:24:18.880 | - No, I mean, this is, so Thomas Curran, I think is the world's leading psychologist

02:24:22.760 | studying perfectionism.

02:24:23.760 | And if you look at his meta-analyses, perfectionism is a recipe for burnout and depression and

02:24:29.040 | anxiety because you're constantly comparing yourself to an ideal that's unachievable.

02:24:34.760 | Perfectionists are not, they do get better grades in school slightly, but they don't

02:24:38.860 | do any better at work than their peers because I think in school you have a predictable outcome.

02:24:45.000 | You have a general sense of what's going to be on a test.

02:24:47.020 | And if you study hard enough, you can come closer to the A plus, whereas at work performance

02:24:51.720 | is much more nebulous.

02:24:53.120 | And so what happens to perfectionists a lot of times is they end up optimizing the things

02:24:57.780 | that are predictable and controllable, and then sort of missing the forest and the trees.

02:25:03.000 | And I think the antidotes, as far as I know, really have to do with calibration.

02:25:09.080 | So I talked earlier about how I like to ask for a zero to 10 to find out am I in the ballpark

02:25:15.200 | or not?

02:25:16.200 | Well, one of my biggest liabilities as a diver was I was never satisfied with my score.

02:25:21.860 | And one day Eric said to me, "You hear Olympic judges or commentators talk about the perfect

02:25:26.860 | 10?

02:25:27.860 | That's a misnomer.

02:25:29.200 | If you look at the diving rule book, a 10 is for excellence, not for perfection.

02:25:32.920 | There's no such thing as a flawless dive.

02:25:35.040 | I can look at dives that have gotten straight 10s and point out 19 things that were wrong

02:25:38.600 | with them, but they were excellent."

02:25:40.900 | And so then we had to define the standards of excellence.

02:25:42.860 | So what I have as a recovering perfectionist, somebody who just beat myself up constantly,

02:25:48.120 | in fact, we did paper plate awards on my swim team.

02:25:52.720 | And one year I was given the if only award, and there's a little cartoon in me and it

02:25:57.500 | says, "If only I had pointed my left pinky toe, I would have gotten an eight and a half

02:26:01.160 | instead of an eight."

02:26:02.700 | And that was the story of my diving career, and I did not want to be that person anymore.

02:26:07.820 | And so one of the things I've learned to do is when I start anything, if I sit down to

02:26:12.520 | write a book, I'm aiming for a nine.

02:26:15.820 | And the reason for that is I'm going to pour a couple years of my work life into this topic.

02:26:22.760 | Hopefully a lot of people are going to read it, and I want to make sure it's truly the

02:26:25.740 | best work I can produce.

02:26:28.180 | Social media posts, I'm okay with a seven.

02:26:30.680 | If I'm only shooting for a nine, I'm not going to post very often.

02:26:34.820 | Because your nine, your ceiling for nine, or your threshold for nine is so exceedingly

02:26:39.140 | high.

02:26:40.140 | It's high.

02:26:41.140 | Yeah.

02:26:42.140 | And I want it to keep getting higher over time.

02:26:43.140 | It's much more challenging than it was 10 years ago.

02:26:46.220 | And I think this is what people probably don't do enough, especially if you're an extreme

02:26:51.380 | perfectionist is they don't realize, "Okay, let me figure out how important this task

02:26:56.300 | is.

02:26:57.300 | And then for this task, a six is sufficient so that then I can pour my energy into pulling

02:27:03.100 | the seven and a half toward a nine where it really matters."

02:27:07.100 | And inevitably, if you don't do that, what you will do is you will get a bunch of nines

02:27:10.920 | on things that are completely trivial.

02:27:13.640 | - I went to a high school where we had a couple of kids get perfect on the SAT.

02:27:18.600 | They would have the big centerfold list of all the early admissions to all the fancy

02:27:22.840 | Ivy League schools.

02:27:24.500 | Definitely was not on that list.

02:27:25.500 | I don't even know if I, yeah, I don't even know if I was anywhere near that list.

02:27:31.600 | Probably not.

02:27:34.260 | And some of them have gone on to have terrific lives and seem pretty happy.

02:27:38.480 | And I know a number of them and in contact with them.

02:27:41.220 | I think for some of them that performed exceedingly well on standardized tests early on, I hear

02:27:47.660 | a bit more dismay in their current life.

02:27:50.420 | Not all, but I have to imagine there are data on early high performance being a seed for

02:28:00.060 | challenges later on.

02:28:01.060 | Obviously, you don't want the opposite, what I guess they refer to now as a complete failure

02:28:06.920 | to launch, people not meeting the milestones toward being self-sufficient adults.

02:28:14.160 | But what are some of the dangers of success when thinking about realizing one's larger

02:28:19.800 | potential?

02:28:20.800 | - Oh, that's such an interesting question.

02:28:23.500 | I think, yeah, I think the data on this go both ways.

02:28:27.500 | So some early success is, it's a motivator, it builds the kind of momentum you were talking

02:28:32.900 | about earlier.

02:28:35.200 | There's a goal setting researchers like Locke and Latham have talked about the high performance

02:28:39.060 | cycle where you hit a goal and then that builds your confidence and then you set a more ambitious

02:28:45.340 | goal and then you reach it and there's this upward spiral over time.

02:28:48.680 | But there's also a mountain of evidence that achieving your goals can make you complacent.

02:28:54.100 | And sometimes it's called the fat cat syndrome where you end up resting on your laurels.

02:28:58.980 | And then there are also competency traps where you get good at something and then you keep

02:29:03.320 | doing it the way you've always done it and you don't realize the world has changed around

02:29:06.720 | you.

02:29:07.720 | I'm allergic to the idea of best practices.

02:29:10.100 | The moment you call a practice best, you've created an illusion that you're done.

02:29:14.440 | And the moment, think about pre-COVID, a lot of companies had really what they thought

02:29:19.500 | were effective models for collaboration and all of a sudden their best practices are not

02:29:23.820 | feasible because everybody's working remotely and they've got to throw that out the window

02:29:27.600 | and look for better practices for an evolved world.

02:29:31.020 | So I think those are the things I worry about most with early success.

02:29:37.380 | I think that one of the things I would love to see more people do when it comes to reaching

02:29:41.920 | potential is to figure out what does my failure budget look like?

02:29:49.500 | So I'll tell you my experience on this.

02:29:53.100 | I wrote a first book, gave a TED talk and pretty soon felt like I was spending 80% of

02:30:01.540 | my time saying things I already knew and I was getting typecast.

02:30:06.580 | I'm like, "I'm not learning and growing, but I don't feel like I'm contributing new knowledge

02:30:10.220 | to the world.

02:30:11.220 | What am I going to do about that?"

02:30:13.700 | And 2018 rolls around and I'm like, "You know what?

02:30:16.140 | I'm going to start a podcast and that will be my learning mechanism."

02:30:20.640 | And I didn't know if it was going to work.

02:30:21.860 | I didn't know how the medium would work for me.

02:30:23.700 | I didn't know if people were going to want to listen to my voice.

02:30:25.780 | I certainly don't.

02:30:27.540 | Maybe Morgan Freeman likes the sound of his own voice.

02:30:30.500 | I like listening to your podcast.

02:30:31.860 | Thank you.

02:30:32.860 | I also enjoy listening to yours, but I think everybody hates the sound of their voice.

02:30:38.540 | I just wasn't sure for a lot of reasons whether it was going to work.

02:30:42.740 | And then I thought about it and I realized, well, all of the pivotal moments in my career

02:30:49.660 | have come from taking a risk.

02:30:52.260 | And I thought that I needed to build the confidence in order to do it.

02:30:57.440 | And I was reflecting on goal-setting research as one does and realized, you know, like the

02:31:04.220 | confidence is going to come through doing it.

02:31:07.460 | And so let me try it.

02:31:08.620 | And I guess what I took away was if I never fail, it means I'm not challenging myself.

02:31:15.060 | I'm not embracing discomfort.

02:31:17.340 | I'm not being enough of an imperfectionist.

02:31:19.920 | So I actually set a goal that I would start at least one project every year that didn't

02:31:24.700 | succeed.

02:31:25.700 | And let's be clear, I'm not aiming for failure.

02:31:27.980 | What I'm doing is creating an acceptable zone of failure to know that that's going to motivate

02:31:32.400 | some risk-taking and some experimentation and hopefully some growth.

02:31:36.300 | And I know it's hard for a lot of people to do this in their lives, especially if you

02:31:38.820 | have a super demanding boss, but I think we're all better off from a growth and potential

02:31:45.220 | standpoint if we've got, you know, if you succeed on 90% of your projects, that should

02:31:49.940 | be a hugely successful year.

02:31:51.980 | If you succeed on 100%, I think you're aiming too low.

02:31:56.180 | - What are some of the projects that you are currently spinning in the back of your mind

02:32:00.060 | that would be fun, but if you're willing to share that for you still strike a little bit

02:32:06.680 | of an anxiety chord, like, oh no, like, are you, I don't know, are you a musician?

02:32:12.900 | - Not at all.

02:32:13.900 | Can't carry a tune, can't keep a beat.

02:32:16.580 | - Are you thinking about becoming a musician or exploring, playing music?

02:32:21.700 | The reason I ask it that way is how far into your discomfort zone do you reach in order

02:32:27.820 | to challenge yourself?

02:32:30.720 | Because I think that everyone needs to have thresholds.

02:32:33.060 | There are a lot of things that, yeah, I wish I could play a musical instrument, frankly,

02:32:36.140 | but I'm not that motivated to do it, mostly because I enjoy hearing other people play

02:32:40.260 | music so much that I'm perfectly happy.

02:32:42.500 | I'm sated.

02:32:43.500 | - Yeah, there's also enough good music out there you don't have to create.

02:32:46.280 | - There's definitely a lot of great music, yeah.

02:32:48.700 | - So I think there's a micro to macro version of this.

02:32:51.180 | So on the micro side, in the past year, I did this Work Life podcast for five years

02:32:57.300 | where I was taking the core of my organizational psychology work and trying to take on a topic

02:33:02.380 | and make it interesting and useful to people, and then realizing I was feeling constrained

02:33:06.700 | just to focus on work, and as a psychologist, there's lots of other things I want to take

02:33:10.140 | on, and so we expanded into the second show, Rethinking, and I have some experiments I'm

02:33:15.420 | tempted to try, but I've been really hesitant to do them.

02:33:18.460 | So did you watch wrestling growing up ever?

02:33:20.900 | - Professional wrestling?

02:33:21.900 | - Yeah.

02:33:22.900 | - I did watch a little bit of it, and then for whatever reason, in the last year, my

02:33:27.740 | good friend Rick Rubin, who's, he's not obsessed, but he is a real devotee, he's a fan of professional

02:33:34.660 | wrestling.

02:33:35.660 | He had me watch some WWE, but even AEW.

02:33:38.960 | He was explaining that it's basically physical drama, he's explaining why it's so intriguing

02:33:43.620 | to him and so informative to him, and then I'm a big fan of a certain genre of music,

02:33:49.300 | and Lars Fredricksen from Rancid is a huge wrestling fan, so now I've got multiple people

02:33:53.940 | that I've come into contact with who are like telling me all this stuff about wrestling,

02:33:56.900 | so wrestling seems to be cropping up more and more.

02:33:59.020 | - All right, so I don't know the first thing about wrestling, I think I caught it a few

02:34:01.940 | times as a kid.

02:34:02.940 | - Likewise, Hulk Hogan and a few others passed across the screen, yeah.

02:34:08.060 | - But the thing that I remember was loving the tag team matches, where somebody would

02:34:12.700 | get overpowered and then they pull in somebody to help.

02:34:15.980 | I think it would be so interesting if there was a podcast where you take issues that people

02:34:20.400 | fundamentally disagree on and you start a debate, and then somebody can tag in if they

02:34:25.000 | wanna challenge an argument, and so instead of concentrating on the particular guess,

02:34:31.080 | you basically have a problem you're trying to get to the roots of, and you're gonna have

02:34:35.440 | all these people jump in and hopefully build toward a more insightful perspective on it.

02:34:39.860 | I have no idea if this is gonna work, I'd really love to try it, and this is the first

02:34:44.280 | time I've spoken out loud about it, because I'm like, I don't know that I wanna see that

02:34:50.140 | crash and burn, and yet, why not, what's the risk?

02:34:52.540 | - I think it's so cool.

02:34:53.540 | - It'll be fun, right?

02:34:54.940 | - Yeah, what topics are you thinking about covering?

02:34:58.620 | 'Cause I can think of some pretty controversial topics, but I wanna know what the ones you're

02:35:02.620 | thinking about.

02:35:03.620 | - Well, I mean, I literally just, I mean, I'm thinking out loud here, but one that I

02:35:07.840 | think on the controversial front that could be really rich is to think about policies

02:35:13.500 | for trans athletes in sports.

02:35:16.140 | - That's a controversial topic.

02:35:17.140 | - It's hugely controversial, but also, I've talked to some experts on this, I've talked

02:35:21.060 | to some trans athletes, and the people who are deep in this do not know what they think

02:35:25.480 | the policy should be, and so I think actually hearing them talk and understanding the complexity

02:35:31.800 | of those issues and then maybe hammering out, what's a policy you would propose for schools,

02:35:37.280 | what would you want for Olympic events, I just think that would be fascinating, and

02:35:42.060 | I'd love to moderate that discussion.

02:35:44.500 | - Goodness.

02:35:45.500 | - Maybe I wouldn't.

02:35:46.780 | - I wouldn't.

02:35:47.780 | - I don't wanna get into that one.

02:35:48.780 | - I'm glad you would, I wouldn't, that seems like one of the most barbed wire topics one

02:35:52.700 | could ever embark on, which is exactly why I'm gonna put in my vote, you absolutely should

02:35:57.900 | do this podcast.

02:35:59.220 | I think it's an amazing idea, actually folks, put in the comment section on YouTube whether

02:36:02.560 | or not Adam should do this podcast and that topic in particular, I think it would be amazing

02:36:07.820 | because one thing that I keep coming back to in my own mind is that a lot of the controversies

02:36:13.340 | out there stem from the fact that we very often have individuals pitted against individuals,

02:36:21.320 | and there's so much lost in that, and I think about science and going back to the scientific

02:36:26.460 | method where we have subfields pitted against subfields when you talk about a field, like

02:36:32.820 | there was huge controversy over the structure of DNA, and it wasn't one individual against

02:36:36.980 | another, what you had are small groups, different camps, and there was some partial overlap,

02:36:40.940 | there's also, if you read the double helix, there was also a lot of complicated behavior,

02:36:47.500 | people entering romantic relationships just to glean information from the other side,

02:36:51.660 | human beings not at their finest, but in any event, small panels arguing, competing, teams

02:36:59.860 | competing I think is far more interesting and informative than individuals butting heads.

02:37:06.980 | - I think so too, and I think another one that I think would be really interesting,

02:37:11.180 | I mean people always say great minds think alike, no, great minds challenge each other

02:37:15.820 | to think differently, and we just don't do enough of that, so I've been thinking a lot

02:37:21.780 | politically, what if we brought together a bunch of people who are not ideologues but

02:37:28.820 | are really interested in pragmatic policy solutions to rewrite the constitution if we

02:37:33.660 | were going to build one today?

02:37:35.140 | - You'd like to tackle big stuff, no I love it, I love it, it's a compliment, it's a compliment.

02:37:41.540 | - Like I said earlier, no weak sauce, no weak sauce, you go right for it, listen these are

02:37:47.980 | the issues that people are really activated by because these are really core issues, they

02:37:55.820 | get down to the autonomic nervous system, they're in the hypothalamus as we say.

02:37:59.620 | - But I don't think they should be, I look at these topics and think, I just want to

02:38:03.060 | get it right, I don't have a vested interest in what the model should be, I just know that

02:38:07.620 | even the wisest people of 250 years ago were not prepared to anticipate the world we live

02:38:13.500 | in today, and we ought to be constantly, I don't know, I don't think you should live

02:38:17.780 | in a world where you affirm your beliefs, I think the only way you learn is by continually

02:38:21.480 | evolving your beliefs, and so I guess I'm trying to figure out more ways to catalyze

02:38:25.760 | that around issues people care about, but I don't care about the issues, I care about

02:38:30.060 | the stretching of thinking and the improving the way that the world works.

02:38:33.220 | - Well I'll tell you, if you decide to do this podcast with a tag team format, I love

02:38:37.260 | that you gleaned it from watching wrestling a couple of times around these very controversial

02:38:43.300 | issues, I promise you that will be one of the most popular and important podcasts on

02:38:49.060 | the planet Earth, it might be podcasts on other planets, I hear that there are galaxies

02:38:53.000 | far far away, they may have podcasts too, may have had them for much longer than we

02:38:57.020 | have, but that's a winner.

02:39:01.500 | - Well maybe I'll try it as a little experiment on the rethinking feed and see if it's an

02:39:05.300 | unmitigated disaster.

02:39:08.560 | - Well you know where my vote lies.

02:39:09.700 | - I appreciate that, so to go back to your question for a second, on the macro side,

02:39:14.540 | I've always thought it would be fun to try to write a sci-fi novel, and the question

02:39:18.300 | I'm wrestling with right now is is that a good use of my time, there are great sci-fi

02:39:21.940 | writers out there, there aren't that many social scientists communicating about the

02:39:26.340 | topics that I do, and it feels like it might be, I don't know, it might be too much of

02:39:34.940 | a diversion.

02:39:35.940 | - Then again, according to your words, you had no talent in diving, but you exceeded

02:39:43.940 | all performance metrics by a considerable amount through motivation and opportunity,

02:39:52.180 | I got that right, I vote yes, I haven't read much sci-fi, maybe I need to read more sci-fi,

02:39:59.220 | are you a fan of sci-fi?

02:40:00.220 | - I love sci-fi, it's one of my favorite ways to imagine a better world, and also prevent

02:40:06.780 | a worse one from emerging, but I don't know, there's a part of me that thinks, all right,

02:40:14.380 | Ruth Bernstein and colleagues did this, do you know this research on Nobel Prize winning

02:40:18.020 | scientists and what differentiates them from their peers?

02:40:20.740 | - No, but being the son of a physicist and having been surrounded by, just by circumstance,

02:40:26.540 | a number of Nobel Prize winners when I was a kid, young kid, I'm very curious to know

02:40:31.500 | what this research says.

02:40:33.580 | - I mean, there are many themes you could glean from it, but the thing that really jumped

02:40:38.020 | out at me is the Nobel Prize winners are more likely to have artistic hobbies.

02:40:43.460 | - Feynman certainly did.

02:40:44.460 | - Yep, I mean, there's a long list of them, but if you break it down in the data, it was,

02:40:49.420 | they're twice as likely as their peers to play a musical instrument, they're seven times

02:40:53.780 | as likely to draw or paint, they're 12 times as likely to do poetry or fiction, creative

02:41:00.020 | writing, and get this, 22 times as likely as their peers, 22 to dance, act or yes, perform

02:41:06.820 | as magicians.

02:41:07.820 | - As a former magician, I was very excited about this right now.

02:41:11.740 | - Yeah, well, I wasn't going to ask you about magic, but let's talk about it.

02:41:14.620 | I was on vacation with, every year I take my sister in New York for her birthday and

02:41:18.740 | my birthday, 'cause our birthdays are close together, and we went and saw a magician mentalist

02:41:23.100 | by the name of Ozzy Wind, Ozzy, I think is the correct pronunciation, who just like the

02:41:30.820 | last time I saw him, absolutely blew my mind.

02:41:33.580 | There's no way, it's not magic, of course I know it's not magic, but my understanding

02:41:40.500 | is that there are some things that he and other great mentalists and magicians do where

02:41:44.980 | they are not absolutely certain of the outcome, they're playing, it's probabilistic.

02:41:49.960 | And so there's a risk and a thrill for them too, and that they're also creating memories

02:41:54.180 | and erasing memories.

02:41:55.360 | And that's something that I may host Ozzy on the podcast because he's very effective

02:42:00.080 | at creating memories and erasing memories.

02:42:02.820 | That's a lot of what he does and he has tactics to do that.

02:42:05.720 | In any event, I wasn't going to ask about magic, but I know that you were a professional

02:42:11.400 | magician at one point in your life and that you did this presumably 'cause you enjoy doing

02:42:16.760 | it.

02:42:17.760 | So getting beyond the sort of pull the rabbit out of the hat or identify the card that the

02:42:22.540 | person picked out of the shuffled stack, what is it and what was it about magic that intrigues

02:42:28.200 | you?

02:42:29.200 | Does it inform anything about the work that you do now?

02:42:31.960 | It does, yeah.

02:42:32.960 | I think when I started, I was 12 and it was just fun and I was looking for a way to entertain

02:42:39.280 | other people and entertain myself in the process and then it became a challenge, can I learn

02:42:43.300 | this new skill and can I master this trick?

02:42:46.760 | I think nerdiest thing I did in college was I started a magic club with David Kwong, who

02:42:52.440 | is a stellar magician and cruciverbalist, as he calls it.

02:42:57.480 | Cruciverbalist?

02:42:58.480 | He does magic crossword puzzles, essentially, that I can't do it justice, you have to see

02:43:04.000 | it.

02:43:05.000 | It's unreal.

02:43:06.000 | And I watched him for our first performance together and realized one of us is going to

02:43:10.560 | make it as a magician and it's not me.

02:43:12.960 | He's outstanding.

02:43:14.680 | Anyway, the way it figures in my work now is I think so much of good science communication

02:43:19.360 | is misdirection and it's the same skill I used as a magician.

02:43:23.600 | If I told you that the card you picked was about to disappear from the deck and appear

02:43:29.300 | on the window, you would not be nearly as intrigued as if it happened by surprise.

02:43:35.200 | And I think the same is true when we communicate knowledge.

02:43:37.800 | I think it's actually why so many of my posts, you flagged this earlier, so many of my posts

02:43:41.800 | start with this thing is not what you think, it's actually this other thing.

02:43:47.080 | I think that challenging conventional wisdom, questioning assumptions is what surprises

02:43:51.960 | people and then leads them to think either I have something to learn or, oh no, I got

02:43:56.720 | to put up a shield because my beliefs are being challenged or attacked.

02:44:01.600 | And I think the art form of magic was always about creating a surprise that would delight

02:44:05.420 | people as opposed to leading people to feel like they were tricked or duped or manipulated.

02:44:11.280 | And so I think the challenge for me is to say, okay, I want to figure out what do we

02:44:15.320 | know from behavioral science, mostly focusing on psychology because that's my core expertise.

02:44:22.200 | What do we know that's actually different from most intuition and then how do I explain

02:44:27.040 | that in a way that surprises people but leads them to say, oh, that's so interesting as

02:44:31.520 | opposed to that's wrong and then want to fight about it.

02:44:35.360 | It's almost as if you give them the experience of what you're trying to teach them so that

02:44:41.040 | the, oh, that's wrong can't be the available response because in magic, everyone knows

02:44:50.860 | it's magic just like with professional wrestling folks, by the way, there's some prior understanding

02:44:57.480 | of what's going to happen.

02:44:58.720 | Maybe they go off script, but I think that's actually, I think part of the interest in

02:45:03.400 | professional wrestling for those that are extreme fans of professional wrestling is

02:45:06.960 | that they almost want to wonder about whether or not some of it is not in the plan.

02:45:13.640 | It's a suspension of reality that they seem to enjoy, right?

02:45:17.520 | Because if you know something's fake or, well, I should be more careful about my language

02:45:24.160 | with magic.

02:45:25.160 | Like when I went to see Aussie, I mean, I don't think it's actual magic, but he's able

02:45:29.520 | to give the illusion of magic.

02:45:31.880 | The real illusion is that it's magic, right?

02:45:34.680 | It's not the illusion of making the card hop to somewhere else in the room.

02:45:39.480 | And he is phenomenal.

02:45:40.480 | And I highly recommend people go see his show if they get the opportunity.

02:45:43.940 | But I think they're doing a documentary about him now, actually, there'll be some Netflix

02:45:47.680 | stuff as well.

02:45:49.600 | But it's the illusion that magic exists that's so exciting.

02:45:55.240 | So with science communication, I always aim for four things.

02:45:59.320 | I don't always achieve them, but, and I think you do as well, if I may, that a topic be

02:46:04.280 | interesting, clear, ideally actionable, but not always.

02:46:09.720 | And the quad facta is when it's also surprising.

02:46:12.380 | So interesting, clear, actionable, and surprising sort of is the ultimate if there's sort of

02:46:16.080 | a, like, oh, I didn't realize that.

02:46:18.380 | But it's hard to find data points that satisfy all four criteria.

02:46:22.120 | And the surprising is the least important by far.

02:46:24.920 | I assume table stakes is it's rigorous.

02:46:28.000 | Oh, well, OK, sitting underneath all four of those points are that it's science, that

02:46:34.360 | it's actual science.

02:46:35.360 | Right.

02:46:36.360 | Someone didn't just say it.

02:46:37.360 | Right.

02:46:38.360 | It's not conjecture or theory.

02:46:39.360 | So that means that there's data to support it and that the data were collected with the

02:46:41.720 | appropriate amount of rigor.

02:46:42.720 | Right.

02:46:43.720 | So there's a there's a reservoir of stuff that sits underneath as a foundation.

02:46:46.320 | So given the baseline of rigor, how do I find what's interesting, clear, actionable and

02:46:52.320 | hopefully surprising?

02:46:53.320 | Although I would.

02:46:54.320 | OK, I would make a case.

02:46:55.320 | There's a classic article that Murray Davis wrote, one of my all time favorites is a sociologist

02:46:59.880 | who wrote a paper called That's Interesting.

02:47:01.360 | And he opened the paper by saying ideas live not because they're true, but because they're

02:47:07.160 | interesting.

02:47:09.060 | Which decimated one of my core beliefs.

02:47:12.320 | I thought it was accuracy that drove people's beliefs.

02:47:15.360 | And he said, no, ideas live because they're interesting.

02:47:19.600 | And then he goes to build an index of the interesting to explain when people are intrigued.

02:47:24.680 | And his case is that most of interest is surprise.

02:47:27.720 | And he breaks down all the ways that you can turn conventional wisdom upside down.

02:47:31.320 | You can say that something you thought was bad was actually good or vice versa.

02:47:36.180 | You can argue that something you thought was homogeneous is actually heterogeneous.

02:47:41.440 | You could argue that something you thought was individual was actually a collective phenomenon

02:47:44.720 | or vice versa.

02:47:45.720 | And he's got this wonderful breakdown of of all the ways of being interesting.

02:47:49.160 | And he's the one who made the distinction between ideas that challenge weakly held assumptions

02:47:53.260 | intriguing you and strongly held assumptions sort of offending you.

02:47:57.920 | But I think from Davis's view, and I think he's right, a huge amount of interest is surprise.

02:48:03.680 | But I don't think it's the only driver of interest.

02:48:05.660 | So I might take your criteria and say, OK, we start with rigor.

02:48:09.080 | We want to go to interest, clarity, and actionability.

02:48:12.280 | How do we get to interest?

02:48:13.280 | Let's build a sub model of the factors that drive interest.

02:48:15.940 | And surprise might have the biggest beta weight in the regression equation.

02:48:20.920 | But what else?

02:48:21.920 | What else drives interest?

02:48:22.920 | A couple hypotheses.

02:48:23.920 | I want to hear yours.

02:48:24.920 | You've been doing this actively and highly effectively beyond surprise.

02:48:29.540 | What else interests people in your content?

02:48:33.220 | Anything that draws on self-reflection for them, I think we all have an innate desire

02:48:39.260 | to better understand ourselves, why we work the way we do, why we don't work as well as

02:48:43.980 | we would like to in certain domains like some and cast understanding on our experiences

02:48:48.800 | of others to like, oh, now it makes sense.

02:48:51.820 | Like I've been going back to the Conti episodes, but we did several of them.

02:48:55.320 | So I think it's appropriate to learn from him that narcissism is envy.

02:49:01.540 | It represents an extreme deficiency in the pleasure that narcissists can have an extreme

02:49:08.720 | pleasure drive, but they always feel like they have far less than they would like to

02:49:12.960 | have and that others have far more of it because they don't have that same yearning for it.

02:49:17.280 | And so that narcissism at its core is deep envy.

02:49:21.420 | That to me it was like, wow, you know, and to realize that and to now understand that

02:49:25.600 | all this discussion that you hear out there about narcissists, everyone calling other

02:49:28.320 | people narcissists, that there are genuine narcissists out there and what they really

02:49:32.720 | suffer from is an extreme deficit in pleasure and they're constantly envious of others.

02:49:39.480 | It reframed everything I thought about narcissists, about them being overbearing, which they can

02:49:43.860 | be and often are, et cetera, et cetera.

02:49:46.300 | So I think it's also anything that leads to like, oh, I can navigate narcissists better

02:49:53.120 | with that.

02:49:54.120 | Well, I mean, that checks all your boxes.

02:49:55.920 | It's very surprising because it's not the way we normally understand narcissism.

02:49:59.040 | But I think you hit on, for me, what's the maybe even it's at least as important as surprise,

02:50:04.840 | maybe more so is self relevance.

02:50:07.760 | And it doesn't have to be actionable, right?

02:50:09.680 | It has to, in a lot of cases, just help you understand or make sense of something that's

02:50:13.560 | been puzzling or that's sort of I think I'm almost always surprised when I say something

02:50:21.440 | from here's a synthesis of research, here's a meta analysis.

02:50:26.880 | And I think it's kind of obvious and people get excited about it because it gave them

02:50:30.740 | language to describe something they had felt but they didn't know how to articulate or

02:50:34.440 | talk about.

02:50:36.040 | And I think that, I mean, I think this is why most of the most popular TED Talks are

02:50:41.920 | about human behavior because people are interested in people.

02:50:46.080 | And if you learn something about you or about others, you don't have to immediately do anything

02:50:50.400 | with that to find it intriguing and even useful because it enriched your worldview.

02:50:56.760 | - A recent guest on this podcast, we haven't aired it yet, but maybe it'll be out by time

02:51:00.440 | this airs was with Lisa Feldman Barrett.

02:51:03.040 | She's a psychologist.

02:51:04.040 | - Psychologist turned neuroscientist.

02:51:05.460 | - Right, studies emotion.

02:51:06.460 | - Emotion, of course.

02:51:07.460 | - And she described how in certain cultures there's a language for subcategories of emotions.

02:51:14.220 | - Emotional granularity.

02:51:15.220 | - Right, so she described a word in Japanese, I don't recall what the word was, that describes

02:51:20.700 | the feeling of sadness that one has after getting a particularly bad haircut.

02:51:25.420 | Something that I don't think you or I are familiar with but I'm familiar with from my

02:51:29.220 | experience of romantic partners being like really unhappy about their haircut and you're

02:51:33.300 | like, you're sad, but by having a specific word for a specific experience, people feel

02:51:39.200 | less alone and the feeling passes more quickly in time.

02:51:43.780 | And then she gave some other examples from German and from Scandinavian languages and

02:51:49.900 | so forth.

02:51:50.900 | And I find this so interesting.

02:51:51.900 | It's like the moment people hear that they are not alone in an experience, there's nothing

02:51:57.300 | actionable about it but it creates a cognitive shift thereafter in which they suffer less

02:52:03.640 | or maybe feel more connected to others.

02:52:06.140 | I think it's really a beautiful example of exactly what you're referring to.

02:52:09.940 | When we learn about something and we identify with it, it's powerful.

02:52:14.180 | - It's very powerful and I think psychologists often say name it to tame it.

02:52:20.900 | Affect labeling is one of the most effective emotion regulation strategies and when we

02:52:24.420 | talked about distraction and reframing earlier, I should have said there's a third strategy

02:52:28.380 | which is literally just to describe what you're feeling.

02:52:33.840 | It seems to allow people then to reason with and process whatever they're feeling as opposed

02:52:39.140 | to allowing the feeling to control them.

02:52:42.500 | And I probably got the clearest sense of this in 2021.

02:52:47.100 | I read a New York Times article on languishing, the feeling of meh or blah.

02:52:53.540 | And I have never had anything, any article I wrote resonate like this and all the posts

02:53:01.540 | that tagged me were just like, "It me, it me, it us."

02:53:05.300 | And it was like one and two word reactions and I don't think it was the content that

02:53:12.060 | mattered to people, it was just having the term.

02:53:15.700 | All of a sudden people realize, this is originally Corey Keyes' research that I was referencing,

02:53:20.140 | but it had been a light bulb for me to say, if you think about the spectrum of well-being,

02:53:24.660 | this is related to your mental illness versus mental health distinction, those are two extremes

02:53:29.020 | of the continuum.

02:53:30.020 | And on one end we have depression and burnout, on another end we have well-being and flourishing.

02:53:35.700 | Languishing lives right in the middle, as Corey describes it, it's the absence of well-being.

02:53:39.220 | So you're not depressed, you still have hope, you're not burned out, you still have energy,

02:53:44.980 | but you're not at peak functioning, you're missing a sense of purpose, you feel like

02:53:49.620 | you're stagnating and you're empty.

02:53:52.420 | And there was something about just saying the word languishing that led people to realize,

02:53:57.180 | yeah, that's a thing.

02:53:59.820 | And of course we're languishing, we're standing still in the middle of a global experiment

02:54:03.400 | that no one opted into, which violates all rules of consent by science last time I checked.

02:54:10.560 | But I think that that's something that probably is underrepresented when we're trained to

02:54:15.800 | communicate as scientists, to say one of the most valuable things we do is we give people

02:54:19.980 | language to talk about things.

02:54:20.980 | And I think that's a massive part of your impact is, this is one of the big things I've

02:54:26.180 | learned from you, Andrew, is I used to be a little bit dismissive of cognitive neuroscience

02:54:32.160 | in particular.

02:54:33.380 | I thought understanding the brain has not taught me that much about the mind.

02:54:37.760 | Being able to trace, let's take a simple example, like when I read Joe Ledoux's research, being

02:54:45.500 | able to trace certain amygdala responses as the root of how people deal with fight or

02:54:54.480 | flight and threat, I'm like, I don't know that that helped me that much.

02:54:58.340 | If I could just describe fight or flight, do I need the amygdala?

02:55:01.700 | And you've convinced me I was wrong about that, because when people have, when they

02:55:05.120 | understand the neurological substrates of their thoughts, feelings, and actions, they

02:55:10.880 | believe them more.

02:55:11.880 | They're like, oh, there is a mechanism for this.

02:55:14.160 | It's being produced inside my head, and even though I can't see it, it's there and it can

02:55:18.400 | be studied with the tools of science.

02:55:20.460 | I think that's a really big deal, and I really regret the fact that I didn't spend more time

02:55:25.160 | on cognitive neuroscience, because I think I'd be a better psychologist today.

02:55:28.720 | Well, again, thanks for the kind words.

02:55:31.040 | I think that a fortunate evolution in our fields, or even field, if I may, over the

02:55:38.760 | last 10 years is that, whereas neuroscience itself even needs to be subdivided into neuroanatomy

02:55:44.040 | and neurophysiology, it's lumped into all neuroscience, but it now includes psychology,

02:55:49.960 | computational neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, it's all, you know, I consider us, you know,

02:55:55.080 | we have different perspectives and different training, obviously, but doing a lot of the

02:55:58.760 | same things, just using different dissection tools, and different language-based tools.

02:56:05.320 | And listen, what you've done, I wouldn't even say masterfully, I mean, just with like extreme

02:56:10.640 | virtuosity is to wrap your hands around such an enormous literature related to psychology,

02:56:15.840 | I mean, the human mind and behavior and thought processes and emotions and potential and,

02:56:21.160 | you know, so many topics, and to extract the most valuable gems from that literature and

02:56:29.000 | communicate them in a way that anyone can understand.

02:56:31.400 | And it's an extreme gift to be able to do that, and it's clear it's working, because

02:56:38.780 | like, you mentioned this article on languishing, which we will provide a reference or a link

02:56:42.460 | to in our caption, 'cause I want to go read that now, I mean, I'm always struck by this

02:56:46.120 | feeling of like, am I, I'm not tired, but you know, like I've got tons to do, but like,

02:56:52.760 | why do I just want to like sit here for, and I'm like, maybe I need to sit here, but then

02:56:57.080 | you get into all the like the, well, okay, but you know, I need to, there's a lot to do,

02:57:01.440 | there's a lot to get up and go, I don't want to waste my life, and yeah, rest is good too,

02:57:04.920 | but I think languishing is something that like, I definitely can resonate with that.

02:57:09.760 | So when I had a bulldog, it felt a lot easier to do, 'cause he was always languishing, but

02:57:14.800 | do you ever just languish or are you busy enough that you just feel like you're always

02:57:18.920 | a forward center of mass?

02:57:20.320 | - I think everybody languishes, I think it's part of the human condition, and I think it

02:57:23.640 | might even be evolutionarily adaptive, because I remember another sort of mind-altering idea,

02:57:31.640 | I remember reading Randy Nessie's argument that mild depression could be evolutionarily

02:57:36.160 | functional, that you know, obviously clinical depression is debilitating in a lot of ways,

02:57:42.760 | but low-grade sadness, Lincoln's melancholy, we know one of the things it can do is broaden

02:57:49.120 | your field of vision, and you know, for many people, sadness is a signal that something

02:57:54.400 | is not working, and it can motivate problem solving, it can in some cases open access

02:58:00.080 | to new perspectives, unfortunately those potential benefits of sadness are often overridden by

02:58:05.960 | the motivational cost, and also the fact that you now spend all this time regulating your

02:58:10.400 | sadness and wondering why you're sad, right, and so it's hard to harness, but I had a similar

02:58:16.080 | thought about languishing from this perspective, to say that, you know, maybe moments of languishing

02:58:20.760 | open us up to change, when we get stuck, sometimes we realize you have to move backward in order

02:58:26.660 | to make progress, sometimes you have to unlearn things that you thought you knew in order

02:58:33.480 | to keep growing, and you know, I don't, a friend of mine said, he read my languishing

02:58:41.120 | piece, he's like, you're not the languishing type, I'm like, okay, maybe everybody's baseline

02:58:44.900 | is different, I think one of the things I'm really lucky to have is high reserves of energy,

02:58:51.580 | but for me, languishing is, I felt like I did nothing today, and you know, in a typical

02:58:58.200 | day, if I'm writing a book, I should be able to write a thousand words I'm proud of, and

02:59:03.080 | I don't like a single word that I produced, or I sat at my blinking cursor, like staring

02:59:07.960 | at the computer screen, and for the umpteenth time, wondered, did they call it a cursor

02:59:12.920 | because of all the writers who've cursed it, and then I end up googling, what's the, like,

02:59:18.340 | what are the Latin roots of the word cursor, where did this come from, and like, that is

02:59:21.920 | not a good use of time, that's like, that's not forward mass, that's like, I'm spinning,

02:59:26.740 | so yeah, I think everybody languishes, and I aspire to do it less often, but not never.

02:59:33.060 | - Love it, what does cursor, what is the root of cursor?

02:59:36.940 | People look it up, put, hey folks, put it in the comments on YouTube.

02:59:41.720 | - I did look it up.

02:59:42.720 | - Oh, good, okay, you'll tell us now.

02:59:44.240 | - No, I feel like there's a footnote in Hidden Potential, and I'm trying to remember, it comes

02:59:48.440 | from Courreray, I think, and the cursor originally came, nope, I don't wanna do it, I'm gonna

02:59:56.920 | skip it, I don't remember, captured it.

02:59:59.200 | - Your hippocampus is smart enough to have discarded that information, and you have more

03:00:03.880 | important things to do, forgive me for asking the question, folks, put it in the comments

03:00:07.080 | on YouTube, so good.

03:00:09.480 | I have one more question about potential, you have children, correct?

03:00:14.200 | - Three.

03:00:15.200 | - And a lot of our listeners either are children, or have children, and even for those that

03:00:21.360 | don't have children, I'm curious, with the vast array of knowledge that you now have

03:00:27.360 | about potential, and the fact that kids are these incredible sponges, right, I mean, they

03:00:34.080 | certainly experienced discomfort, we know that, they are sponges, we absolutely know

03:00:39.480 | that, sometimes they're filters, we try and teach them to be filters, and hopefully they

03:00:44.920 | are imperfectionists, maybe there are kids that are just perfectionists by default, but

03:00:49.440 | I have to imagine that they are, because standards come about when we become aware of other people's

03:00:54.520 | performance, right?

03:00:57.120 | What sorts of messages do you recommend parents give their kids, and what sorts of messages

03:01:04.880 | are you actually implementing that perhaps are different than you were prior to researching

03:01:10.020 | and writing your book on potential?

03:01:11.920 | - Ooh, interesting, well the first thing I should say is, Becky Kennedy, Dr. Becky, is

03:01:16.840 | my favorite source of insight on parenting, and she's changed the way I think of, the

03:01:23.440 | way I think about a lot of what I do with our kids, but my wife Allison is, her instincts

03:01:32.160 | about effective parenting are so sophisticated, I feel like every day I learn something from

03:01:38.440 | watching her communicate with our kids, and so I came in thinking, all right, I'm gonna

03:01:43.820 | write this book about potential, I'm not gonna do a parenting chapter, because I want everything

03:01:47.900 | to be relevant to parents, and sure enough, there's a chapter that had nothing to do with

03:01:54.220 | parenting, where I was like, oh, actually, I'm reading this research, and there was a

03:01:59.500 | moment where I did something well, and I didn't even mean to do it, and this is something

03:02:04.140 | that I think everyone probably underutilizes, I don't wanna actually, that's an overstatement,

03:02:10.040 | I think a lot of people don't appreciate the importance of this approach to parenting,

03:02:14.960 | and I am trying to do it more often, so quick story, and then I'll back up into the principle,

03:02:20.540 | so I was getting ready to give my first TED Talk a number of years ago, extremely nervous,

03:02:27.360 | I'm a shy introvert, I was for a long time afraid of public speaking, I remember in college,

03:02:32.920 | literally shaking to raise my hand, being that nervous, and now I'm supposed to get

03:02:38.780 | in the red circle, not my idea of comfort zone, and happened to mention to our oldest

03:02:45.380 | daughter that I was nervous, and I asked her for advice on what I should do, and she said,

03:02:52.220 | I think at the time, let's see, she must have been, she was seven maybe, I think seven,

03:02:59.420 | maybe six, anyway, she said, look for a smiling face in the audience, so it was one of those

03:03:08.860 | moments where I'm like, oh, that's such a good idea, why didn't I think of that, yes,

03:03:13.940 | I can do that, I know people who are gonna be in the audience, so I asked a couple of

03:03:17.140 | friends to sit in the front rows, and I locked eyes with a couple of them, and my nerves

03:03:23.580 | went down a little bit, so a couple weeks later, Joanna's getting ready to be in a school

03:03:30.340 | play, and she's also shy and introverted, and she's nervous, and she asks us for advice,

03:03:36.820 | and instead of telling her what to do, I said, well, what did you suggest to me a few weeks

03:03:41.740 | ago, and she remembered, and she said, look for a smiling face, and it was one of the

03:03:52.260 | most moving moments of my life, like Allison and I got to the play, and she looked at us,

03:03:59.020 | and she beamed, and I just, I think what I learned from that experience was kids need

03:04:08.280 | to feel that they matter, and most of us think about mattering as showing kids that they're

03:04:14.620 | unconditionally loved, and giving them the support they need, but we forget that part

03:04:19.780 | of feeling that you matter is feeling that you make a difference, so as a kid, feeling

03:04:23.820 | like you have something to contribute, as a parent asking my daughter for advice, that

03:04:29.380 | boosted her confidence, and I think that this is, I've come to call this the coach effect,

03:04:35.660 | it's one of my favorite recent findings in psychology, that when you're struggling with

03:04:40.260 | something, your instinct is to go to somebody else for advice, and say, I need guidance,

03:04:45.460 | the problem is that keeps you in a passive frame of mind, it makes you feel like you're

03:04:49.300 | dependent on others, what you're better off doing is finding somebody else with a similar

03:04:54.020 | challenge and giving them advice, and what that does is it shows you that you have something

03:04:58.580 | to give, it boosts your efficacy, the research on this by Lauren Escris Winkler and colleagues

03:05:04.580 | is fascinating, so people who give advice instead of receiving it, randomly assigned,

03:05:10.100 | end up more motivated and more confident, and I think this is something every parent

03:05:14.860 | could do, right, whatever challenge you think your kid is going to face, find a version

03:05:18.840 | of it that you're grappling with, and seek their guidance on it, and when they run into

03:05:22.940 | that same challenge, they will have confidence that they can begin to figure it out on their

03:05:26.820 | own, and you can be a coach in that process, as opposed to just telling them what to do,

03:05:31.000 | which they may feel like is not relevant, or they may resist because they don't want

03:05:35.640 | to be told what to do by a parent, so that is my favorite parenting lesson from Hidden

03:05:40.540 | Potential.

03:05:41.540 | - I love that, and I love your statement that kids, like adults, want to matter, that being

03:05:48.680 | it, we hear, make them feel important, but so often that's tied to performance metrics,

03:05:54.260 | and those performance metrics are the very things that are making them nervous, or that

03:05:57.940 | are creating anxiety, I love it.

03:06:02.460 | Are you taking additional kids for adoption, 'cause I'm raising my hand.

03:06:07.340 | - I think there'd be a lot more developmental psychologists in the world if we chose our

03:06:11.180 | careers later.

03:06:14.540 | - Super interesting topic, and by the way, I'm very much looking forward to reading your

03:06:17.780 | book, Hidden Potential, clearly I have a lot to resolve around that issue, because I still

03:06:24.520 | hear Ms. Rolf in middle school just telling me how much potential we have, and that I

03:06:31.160 | wasn't accessing mine, oh no, it's like a voice in the back of my head all the time,

03:06:36.280 | and even though I feel very happy with many aspects of my life, that there are a lot of

03:06:41.360 | things that I want to do that I haven't done, and I think it's through limited, what do

03:06:48.060 | they call it, limiting self beliefs, or things of that sort.

03:06:50.780 | - Self limiting beliefs.

03:06:51.780 | - Self limiting beliefs, there you go, I can't even say the phrase.

03:06:55.380 | - I do think all your fans are like, yeah, that Andrew Huberman, he hasn't really tapped

03:07:00.940 | his potential at all, he's squandering it all.

03:07:03.420 | - Well keep in mind, I've lived in a fairly narrow trench of pursuit, at 19 I got into

03:07:08.340 | this, and I've been doing this, researching and teaching, it's pretty much all I've done

03:07:13.760 | for almost, you're heading into 30 years, and you too, you've been in this game for

03:07:18.580 | a long time, and it's where we like to play, but what I've learned from you today, in addition

03:07:23.860 | to many other things, is that realizing our potential has so much to do with reaching

03:07:30.640 | outside, we hear about our comfort zone, but it's also reaching into our deeper wishes

03:07:36.440 | and thoughts, and I keep coming back to this idea of the tag team podcast, and the origins

03:07:42.300 | of that in your mind, it's like, I never would have expected that, but it also reveals something

03:07:46.440 | that sounds kind of intrinsic to you, like maybe you like to see things play out the

03:07:52.440 | way you think they should be played out, as opposed to what's clearly a intractable battle

03:07:57.700 | of loggerheads these days.

03:07:59.160 | - Yes, that's a core value, I think, I can't imagine an unsolvable problem.

03:08:05.420 | Oh, I love that, man, I want your brain, listen, Adam, I want to thank you, first of all, for

03:08:14.120 | taking the time today to come talk to us, certainly not just about your book, but we

03:08:17.700 | covered an enormous range of topics, I mean, you talked to us about procrastination, which

03:08:22.980 | is sort of the third rail of life for so many people, creativity, intrinsic, extrinsic motivation,

03:08:29.420 | and blind spots, authenticity, and so much more, but also I want to thank you for being

03:08:34.440 | such an active teacher on social media in the classroom, you still run a research program,

03:08:42.200 | you're doing TED Talks, you're writing multiple books, you're an absolute phenom in terms

03:08:46.520 | of the amount of information that you're putting out into the world, and I must say, I always,

03:08:51.520 | always, always learn from your posts, your podcasts, your books, like there are certain

03:08:55.640 | people in the world, they're exceedingly rare, but you're one of them, that when they open

03:08:59.040 | their mouth, people learn, and they learn valuable knowledge, and it's an incredible

03:09:04.140 | thing to be on the receiving end, and so I just want to say, on behalf of myself and

03:09:09.340 | everyone else, thank you ever so much for what you do, and please keep going.

03:09:14.140 | - Well, thank you, that means a lot to me, considering the source, 'cause the sentiments

03:09:18.400 | are mutual, I think, every time, whether it's reading one of your posts, or seeing one of

03:09:24.760 | your reels, my overwhelming thought is, that as a master teacher, and if I had been lucky

03:09:30.960 | enough to take one of your classes, I might've gone more of the neuroscience direction, and

03:09:36.980 | then failed.

03:09:37.980 | - No, no.

03:09:38.980 | - But it would've been interesting to learn more about at minimum, and I just have tremendous

03:09:42.600 | admiration for your commitment to making science interesting, clear, and useful to people.

03:09:48.500 | - Thank you, well, I consider us on the same team in that regard, and I probably will tap

03:09:55.660 | you about a potential collaboration, it'd be so much fun--

03:09:58.360 | - Sounds like a blast.

03:09:59.360 | - To work together, meanwhile, again, thank you for everything you're doing, and like

03:10:05.740 | I said, just keep going, and please come back again, I feel like there are a thousand other

03:10:09.820 | topics we could talk about, and that we should.

03:10:12.020 | - Honored, we'll try not to make you regret that.

03:10:15.260 | - Thank you.

03:10:16.260 | Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Adam Grant.

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03:12:05.280 | Once again, thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Adam Grant.

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03:12:17.000 | [MUSIC ENDS]

03:12:19.000 | (upbeat music)

Dr. Adam Grant: How to Unlock Your Potential, Motivation & Unique Abilities

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