Dr. David Yeager: How to Master Growth Mindset to Improve Performance

00:00:00.000 | - Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,

00:00:02.240 | where we discuss science

00:00:03.660 | and science-based tools for everyday life.

00:00:05.900 | I'm Andrew Huberman,

00:00:10.180 | and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology

00:00:13.240 | at Stanford School of Medicine.

00:00:15.300 | My guest today is Dr. David Yeager.

00:00:17.880 | Dr. David Yeager is a professor of psychology

00:00:20.280 | at the University of Texas at Austin,

00:00:22.560 | and one of the world's leading researchers into mindsets,

00:00:25.440 | in particular, growth mindset,

00:00:27.640 | which is a mindset that enables people of all ages

00:00:30.480 | to improve their abilities at essentially anything.

00:00:33.400 | He is also a world expert

00:00:35.120 | into the stress-is-performance-enhancing mindset,

00:00:38.420 | which is a mindset that allows people

00:00:40.020 | to cognitively reframe stress,

00:00:42.240 | and that when combined with growth mindset

00:00:44.440 | can lead to dramatic improvements in performance

00:00:46.880 | in cognitive and physical endeavors.

00:00:49.040 | Dr. Yeager is also the author

00:00:50.540 | of an important and extremely useful new book

00:00:53.140 | entitled "10 to 25, the Science of Motivating Young People."

00:00:57.580 | The book is scheduled for release this summer,

00:00:59.480 | that is the summer of 2024,

00:01:01.520 | and we've provided a link to the book

00:01:03.100 | in the show note captions.

00:01:04.540 | During today's discussion,

00:01:05.600 | Dr. Yeager explains to us exactly what growth mindset is

00:01:09.240 | through the lens of the research into growth mindset,

00:01:11.840 | and he explains also how to apply growth mindset

00:01:14.960 | in our lives.

00:01:16.040 | He also shares the research from his and other laboratories

00:01:18.700 | on the stress-can-be-performance-enhancing mindset

00:01:21.400 | and how that can be combined with growth mindset

00:01:24.000 | to achieve the maximum results.

00:01:25.920 | So while I assume that most people

00:01:27.060 | have heard of growth mindset,

00:01:28.540 | today's discussion will allow you

00:01:30.180 | to really apply it in your life,

00:01:32.100 | not just from the perspective of you,

00:01:34.220 | the person trying to learn,

00:01:35.660 | but also for teachers and coaches.

00:01:38.020 | In fact, Dr. Yeager shares

00:01:39.180 | not just the optimal learning environments

00:01:40.860 | for us as individuals,

00:01:42.180 | but also between individuals and in the classroom,

00:01:44.700 | in families, in sports teams,

00:01:46.820 | and in groups of all sizes and kinds.

00:01:49.260 | Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast

00:01:52.020 | is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

00:01:54.700 | It is, however, part of my desire and effort

00:01:56.600 | to bring zero cost to consumer information about science

00:01:59.120 | and science-related tools to the general public.

00:02:01.760 | In keeping with that theme,

00:02:02.840 | I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

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00:04:17.260 | And now for my discussion with Dr. David Yeager.

00:04:20.500 | Dr. David Yeager, welcome.

00:04:22.540 | - Thanks for having me.

00:04:24.040 | - Can you tell us your definition of growth mindset?

00:04:27.740 | I think most people have heard of it.

00:04:29.260 | They have some sense of what it is,

00:04:31.180 | but you've worked very intensely on growth mindset

00:04:35.060 | for a number of years.

00:04:36.760 | So I'd love to know how you define it.

00:04:39.260 | - Yeah, so it's simply the belief that your abilities

00:04:42.860 | or your potential in some domain can change.

00:04:46.700 | A huge confusion is people think it means

00:04:49.420 | if you try hard, then you can do anything,

00:04:52.060 | but that's not really the idea.

00:04:54.340 | It's simply that under the right conditions

00:04:57.640 | with the right support, change is possible.

00:05:00.500 | And that ends up being a pretty powerful idea

00:05:03.340 | because the opposite is so stressful, right?

00:05:06.300 | The idea that you are static,

00:05:09.860 | nothing about you can change

00:05:11.380 | is really kind of a stressful idea.

00:05:15.020 | - Of all the studies on growth mindset,

00:05:18.300 | including yours, the ones that you've participated in,

00:05:21.660 | what one or two kind of high-level results

00:05:26.580 | stand out to you as the most striking,

00:05:30.500 | surprising, exciting, or meaningful?

00:05:33.220 | And here, I will encourage you to discard with attribution.

00:05:36.900 | We know that, or everyone should know,

00:05:39.380 | that Carol Dweck is the originator

00:05:41.280 | of the growth mindset idea as a field,

00:05:45.320 | and she deserves tremendous credit for that.

00:05:48.040 | So when you stand back from the field,

00:05:51.080 | given that it's mushroomed into this very large field now,

00:05:54.520 | and you look at that research,

00:05:56.960 | which results kind of stand out as like,

00:05:58.800 | wow, that's really cool, really meaningful.

00:06:01.200 | People should know about that.

00:06:02.680 | - What stands out to me a lot, first of all,

00:06:05.160 | is just the field experiments,

00:06:06.800 | that the idea that you can distill a complex idea

00:06:10.800 | about the brain, about malleability,

00:06:13.080 | you can give it to a young person

00:06:14.840 | at a time when they're vulnerable,

00:06:16.840 | and that that can give them hope,

00:06:18.840 | and then they can do better at school or whatever.

00:06:21.520 | So our 2019 paper in "Nature"

00:06:24.520 | that Carol, Greg Walton, Angela Duckworth,

00:06:27.280 | a lot of us collaborated on,

00:06:29.060 | took a very short growth mindset intervention,

00:06:32.480 | two sessions, about 25 minutes each, for ninth graders,

00:06:36.440 | and we found kids were, eight, nine months later,

00:06:39.940 | more likely to get good grades.

00:06:41.560 | By 10th grade, more likely to be in the hard math classes,

00:06:45.700 | and the unpublished results find effects four years later

00:06:49.240 | on graduating high school with college-ready courses

00:06:53.180 | from a short intervention that happened

00:06:55.800 | just one or two times, no reinforcement.

00:06:59.400 | So there's a lot of reasons why that's true.

00:07:01.540 | That sounds magical and outrageous,

00:07:03.720 | and there are a lot of mechanisms,

00:07:05.760 | but that just demonstrates the overall value

00:07:08.920 | of the phenomenon, and in that study,

00:07:12.040 | we did everything we possibly could

00:07:13.940 | to address legitimate skepticism, right?

00:07:17.640 | Are we collecting and processing the data

00:07:19.480 | in ways that could bias it?

00:07:20.520 | No, third party.

00:07:21.800 | Is it, are we handpicking schools

00:07:23.500 | where you could get the best effects?

00:07:25.180 | No, random sample of schools.

00:07:27.320 | Did we post-talk, decide on the analyses

00:07:29.440 | that would make the results look the greatest?

00:07:30.960 | No, preregistered.

00:07:32.640 | So that's a good, like, okay,

00:07:34.640 | this phenomenon is not something

00:07:38.640 | that falls apart in the hands of anyone else

00:07:40.900 | besides a select few researchers.

00:07:43.620 | That's really, and we can go into that,

00:07:45.760 | but that doesn't explain the mechanisms,

00:07:48.300 | and I think that there are a lot

00:07:50.360 | of interesting growth mindset mechanism studies.

00:07:52.120 | My personal favorite is a very underappreciated,

00:07:55.840 | kind of like indie rock study by David Nussbaum

00:07:59.440 | and Carol Dweck that David did

00:08:02.600 | when he was a graduate student at Stanford,

00:08:04.760 | and it's on defensiveness versus remediation.

00:08:09.880 | And the basic idea is, in a fixed mindset,

00:08:12.800 | the idea that your intelligence cannot change,

00:08:15.760 | you are the way you are, it can't change.

00:08:17.800 | Your goal in that fixed mindset is to defend your ego,

00:08:24.160 | to, like, hide your deficiencies or any flaws,

00:08:28.000 | because if they're fixed and then they're revealed,

00:08:30.380 | then it labels you for life in some way

00:08:33.360 | as less than, shameworthy, et cetera, right?

00:08:36.340 | In a growth mindset, though,

00:08:38.320 | a mistake is, like, part of the process.

00:08:40.840 | It's just an opportunity to grow.

00:08:43.360 | So David took that idea and then set up a study,

00:08:47.880 | and I think I have the details right,

00:08:50.520 | where undergraduates did a task.

00:08:53.300 | They all did poorly.

00:08:54.600 | They were getting 20, 30% correct on this task,

00:08:58.640 | and the question is, what do you do

00:09:00.820 | before you do your second try?

00:09:02.780 | How do you cope with that initial failure?

00:09:06.060 | And he found that both fixed-in-mindset participants

00:09:10.060 | wanted to recover their self-esteem.

00:09:12.220 | So you do poorly, you feel like crap,

00:09:14.180 | what am I gonna do to feel better about myself?

00:09:16.620 | In a fixed mindset, they looked downward.

00:09:19.460 | So the people getting a 25,

00:09:21.420 | look at the people who got a 12.

00:09:23.480 | Like, I'm twice as good as these losers, right?

00:09:26.200 | In a growth mindset, they look at the people

00:09:27.680 | getting an 85 or 90.

00:09:29.240 | What are they doing?

00:09:30.080 | What are their strategies?

00:09:30.900 | How can I improve?

00:09:31.960 | Both of them then recovered self-esteem

00:09:34.620 | and looked the same at post-test.

00:09:36.780 | And I think about that a lot.

00:09:37.980 | Like, how often in our society does something happen to us

00:09:42.180 | and we feel like garbage, and you have a choice?

00:09:45.300 | Like, am I gonna look down on other people

00:09:47.500 | and say, at least I'm not as bad as these losers?

00:09:51.100 | Or am I gonna say, like, how am I gonna get better?

00:09:54.900 | And I love that because think of a ninth grader

00:09:57.600 | who bombs their algebra test.

00:09:59.820 | Am I like a no-good, dumb-at-math loser

00:10:02.660 | who's not going anywhere in life?

00:10:04.080 | Well, at least I'm not that burnout, right?

00:10:06.780 | Or is it like, how is anyone getting an A in this class?

00:10:10.320 | I'm not getting an A.

00:10:11.160 | What's happening?

00:10:11.980 | What can I learn from them?

00:10:13.580 | So the openness and willingness to self-improve,

00:10:18.580 | I think, is the underwriting mechanism.

00:10:21.740 | And hardly anyone cites that study,

00:10:23.820 | but I think about it all the time.

00:10:25.220 | And it's the kind of thing that I like,

00:10:27.580 | if I'm being honest,

00:10:28.420 | that's the mindset I want my kids to have

00:10:30.020 | as they go through life.

00:10:31.840 | - Very interesting.

00:10:32.720 | I'm gonna ask you more about this looking down

00:10:34.660 | or looking up in terms of performance.

00:10:37.740 | But before I do that,

00:10:38.900 | I have questions about these brief 25-minute,

00:10:43.340 | I think you said, interventions.

00:10:44.660 | - Yeah, sometimes 25.

00:10:45.560 | Sometimes we do two sessions, each about 20, 25, yeah.

00:10:48.580 | - Can you give us a sense

00:10:49.620 | of what those interventions look like?

00:10:51.540 | I mean, it's incredible.

00:10:52.940 | These two sessions have positive effects

00:10:55.800 | lasting up to four years and perhaps even beyond.

00:10:58.920 | Maybe just a top contour of some of what these kids hear

00:11:03.380 | during those sessions.

00:11:05.520 | - Yeah, I mean, so the first thing to realize

00:11:08.100 | is that they're short and they have to do two things

00:11:13.100 | in order to have long-lasting effects.

00:11:16.340 | One is I have to convince you to think differently

00:11:20.860 | at the end of the session.

00:11:22.500 | So I just have to persuade you over the course of 25 minutes

00:11:25.300 | to have a different mindset.

00:11:26.740 | That's sometimes hard.

00:11:28.460 | But then even if I do that,

00:11:30.460 | you then might have months or years

00:11:32.940 | between when I did that and when the outcome is measured.

00:11:35.340 | So how could you remember it and apply it?

00:11:38.540 | And how many 25-minute experiences in your life

00:11:41.260 | do you have no recollection of, right?

00:11:42.980 | I have lots.

00:11:44.240 | So I think people are skeptical

00:11:47.740 | of the mindset style of interventions

00:11:49.460 | for two different, I think, legitimate reasons.

00:11:52.940 | Like, I remember a very famous statistician

00:11:54.700 | came to my office at UT Austin and was like,

00:11:57.500 | "I just don't understand these interventions.

00:11:59.300 | "I mean, the other day I spent 25 minutes

00:12:02.100 | "telling my son all the things he has to change

00:12:04.580 | "and like, oh, he's doing everything wrong.

00:12:06.260 | "And he didn't remember it five minutes later.

00:12:08.300 | "How could someone remember your thing four years later?"

00:12:10.980 | And I was like, "Did you hear yourself talking?

00:12:13.340 | "Like, I'm sure the way you talked to your son

00:12:15.220 | "was like totally condescending and bad."

00:12:18.220 | So the first step is, in that 25 minutes,

00:12:22.740 | how are you communicating in a way

00:12:25.140 | where someone's ears are open,

00:12:27.940 | where they're not feeling talked down to,

00:12:29.620 | ashamed, humiliated, et cetera?

00:12:31.520 | But then the second step is saying that to you at a time

00:12:35.940 | when it's possible for there to be

00:12:38.020 | what we call a recursive process or a snowball effect

00:12:41.580 | that's gonna happen over time.

00:12:43.080 | So that's the stage setting.

00:12:44.380 | Okay, so now let's take the first part.

00:12:46.380 | 25 minutes, what am I gonna say to you, right?

00:12:49.540 | There are three big things that are in every intervention.

00:12:53.900 | And the term that Greg Walton,

00:12:55.580 | the Stanford professor, colleague, collaborator,

00:12:58.420 | uses is wise interventions.

00:13:01.220 | That's the umbrella term of which growth mindset is one.

00:13:04.660 | And a good one, but it's just one of many.

00:13:08.260 | For wise interventions,

00:13:09.500 | we often do the following three things.

00:13:12.620 | First is we present some new scientific information,

00:13:15.540 | some idea that almost in like a Gladwell way

00:13:20.300 | is not obvious and intuitive to the reader,

00:13:24.340 | but feels like new information and useful information.

00:13:29.000 | So the first is a scientific.

00:13:30.440 | The second is we present participants with stories

00:13:34.180 | from people like them who've used those ideas

00:13:37.200 | in their lives and found them useful.

00:13:39.260 | So in the concrete case of ninth graders

00:13:40.880 | getting growth mindset,

00:13:42.220 | it's like 10th, 11th, 12th graders

00:13:44.940 | who previously felt dumb,

00:13:47.940 | learned a growth mindset, then felt better.

00:13:51.220 | It's more complicated than that.

00:13:52.060 | That's the basic idea.

00:13:53.980 | And last, we don't just tell them the stories,

00:13:55.780 | we ask third for participants to author a story.

00:14:00.780 | So they write a narrative about a time when they struggled,

00:14:06.540 | a time when they doubted themselves,

00:14:09.580 | and then remembered this idea that people can change,

00:14:13.140 | like my brain can grow, et cetera.

00:14:14.820 | So the three points are like scientific information,

00:14:16.860 | stories, or the technical term is descriptive norms.

00:14:20.800 | So you're giving people information

00:14:23.740 | about what's normal for people like you.

00:14:25.700 | And then the third is the writing,

00:14:28.340 | which we call saying is believing,

00:14:30.040 | which is a term that's a popularized version

00:14:33.980 | of the term that came from classic social psychologists,

00:14:36.940 | Josh Aaronson, Elliot Aaronson,

00:14:39.180 | who found in the work on cognitive dissonance

00:14:42.860 | 30, 40 years ago, that one of the best ways

00:14:45.780 | to change someone's mind about something

00:14:47.700 | is to ask them to try to persuade somebody else,

00:14:50.100 | so that we do those sort of things.

00:14:52.020 | So what is the science in the growth mindset?

00:14:54.260 | That's where we draw on the metaphor

00:14:56.900 | that the brain is like a muscle,

00:14:59.120 | that just like muscles get stronger

00:15:02.660 | when they're challenged and can recover,

00:15:06.920 | so too does the brain get smarter

00:15:08.460 | when it's pushed and challenged in a certain way.

00:15:12.200 | This idea that writing a story about oneself

00:15:15.600 | or about others in which one succeeds

00:15:18.860 | can be useful toward building growth mindset

00:15:20.900 | in basic terms, I think that's what you're referring to,

00:15:25.820 | I think is interesting.

00:15:26.660 | It sort of suggests that we have brain circuits

00:15:29.180 | that underlie growth mindset type behaviors and thinking,

00:15:33.140 | and that just storing into those

00:15:35.840 | can potentially lead to better decision-making and behavior.

00:15:40.220 | I mean, obviously it can't create new skills

00:15:42.600 | simply because I can't write a story

00:15:46.400 | about me being able to dunk a basketball

00:15:48.680 | and then expect that I can dunk a basketball

00:15:51.120 | because at present I can't,

00:15:53.020 | but the idea of writing a story

00:15:55.440 | about the effort going into dunking a basketball

00:15:59.520 | and learning how, and then translating that

00:16:02.720 | to a more realistic sense of ability

00:16:07.140 | that allows me to then go practice more,

00:16:09.800 | is that sort of what you're referring to?

00:16:11.640 | - Yeah, so in a 2016 paper in PNAS,

00:16:16.640 | Greg Walton and I explained these types of interventions

00:16:20.900 | as a, we call them a lay theory intervention.

00:16:23.940 | And the idea there is that lay people,

00:16:28.180 | like not scientific theories,

00:16:30.140 | but just our intuitive theories for explaining the world

00:16:34.080 | help us anticipate what something means.

00:16:38.120 | So the idea from basic developmental psychology

00:16:41.240 | is that human beings are walking around

00:16:42.960 | with kind of prior belief about objects,

00:16:46.160 | about motion, about number,

00:16:49.520 | and then later about complex social structures

00:16:51.900 | like whether people are looking down on me,

00:16:54.280 | how, where I stand relative to others,

00:16:56.600 | and also little lay theories about adversity.

00:17:00.240 | What does it mean when I have to put in effort?

00:17:01.960 | What does it mean when I fail?

00:17:03.460 | So the idea is that if you understand the theory

00:17:07.020 | someone has, then you'll understand the meaning

00:17:09.280 | they'll make about a future experience.

00:17:11.240 | And therefore, well, and the reason meaning matters

00:17:15.680 | is because the way you interpret something

00:17:18.200 | then affects how you respond to it, right?

00:17:21.000 | So if I see someone and they're doing something innocuous,

00:17:24.940 | but I interpret it as a threat, do I call the police?

00:17:27.720 | You know, do I run away?

00:17:29.560 | That's my interpretation, that's causing it, right?

00:17:32.860 | And so there's a long way of saying,

00:17:36.180 | it turns out one of the best ways

00:17:37.480 | to preset someone's meaning and give them a different theory

00:17:41.180 | is to give them a different story.

00:17:43.800 | Stories are kind of like theories in motion.

00:17:46.160 | This is why, you know,

00:17:48.560 | like what's the point of war and peace, right?

00:17:50.280 | War and peace is really a theory of great leaders

00:17:54.080 | in the war, and if there's any English PhDs,

00:17:58.160 | I'm sure they'll tell me that's an oversimplified version

00:18:00.040 | of what Tolstoy was doing,

00:18:01.720 | but you learn the theory in a narrative way, right?

00:18:05.000 | So this is the classic idea throughout human history.

00:18:07.860 | Great writers and authors

00:18:10.220 | give us theories through narrative, right?

00:18:12.500 | And so we're just taking that simple human fact

00:18:15.540 | and doing it in a 10-minute activity.

00:18:19.020 | And the lay theory in a person's mind

00:18:21.300 | that when things are difficult, it can change,

00:18:23.920 | can be taught with a very simple narrative,

00:18:27.580 | which is this person or even I experienced difficulty

00:18:32.300 | in something that mattered to me.

00:18:34.440 | That difficulty didn't determine my entire future

00:18:36.980 | because actually there were steps that I could take

00:18:38.900 | in order to like make a difference.

00:18:41.980 | Here are the steps that I took, and then it improved.

00:18:43.980 | So it's a very, it's like the simplest Freytag's pyramid.

00:18:47.420 | And even though that simple story

00:18:49.160 | is available to all of us,

00:18:50.220 | you could look in culture and see it,

00:18:53.300 | you also see the opposite lay theory all the time.

00:18:56.500 | And so without, absent our intervention,

00:18:59.260 | it's not like people couldn't end up with a growth mindset,

00:19:02.340 | but they wouldn't kind of know what to sort for

00:19:04.620 | or what to look for.

00:19:05.940 | So we give them some touch points

00:19:07.540 | for a very simple of like frustration,

00:19:10.380 | things can change, then they got better.

00:19:13.180 | And we think that once people do that

00:19:15.820 | in our writing exercises,

00:19:17.040 | they're more likely to see that pattern out in the world.

00:19:20.580 | And if you see that enough,

00:19:22.420 | and then you take the actual steps to get better,

00:19:24.640 | then it starts becoming true for you.

00:19:27.220 | And that's what I call the recursive process

00:19:29.600 | that you, we give people a starting hypothesis

00:19:32.620 | about the world.

00:19:33.900 | They go out, try things, struggle, fail, it improves.

00:19:37.140 | Then they see that that's true,

00:19:39.780 | and then they can keep acting on that over time.

00:19:42.700 | - I feel like so much of getting better at things

00:19:45.620 | involves reappraising the stress or anxiety response.

00:19:50.620 | You know, the friction that one feels

00:19:56.340 | when they can't perform something well,

00:19:58.120 | or when things feel overwhelming or confusing.

00:20:01.980 | And I think the analogies to physical exercise apply,

00:20:06.700 | but I feel like they're limited

00:20:07.740 | in the sense that I like the idea

00:20:09.600 | that the brain is like a muscle,

00:20:11.220 | that it can grow and get stronger.

00:20:13.020 | I think the key difference to my mind

00:20:16.500 | is that, you know, like working out with weights,

00:20:19.200 | you get some sense of the result you're going to get

00:20:22.680 | because there's like a lot of blood flow into the muscle.

00:20:24.820 | So it's like a hint of what's possible.

00:20:27.060 | - Right.

00:20:28.060 | - With cardiovascular exercise,

00:20:29.400 | like if we run hard up a hill,

00:20:31.440 | there's that moment where your lungs are burning, et cetera.

00:20:33.620 | And anyone who understands exercise

00:20:35.660 | knows that that's the signal for adaptation,

00:20:37.560 | such that the next time you can do the same thing

00:20:39.360 | without the burning of the lungs.

00:20:40.780 | - Right.

00:20:41.660 | - When it comes to mental work and learning,

00:20:43.940 | I think we immediately assume

00:20:47.080 | that if we're not performing well,

00:20:48.900 | if we're getting confused or overwhelmed,

00:20:50.660 | that somehow we're doing it wrong.

00:20:53.140 | - Yeah.

00:20:54.160 | - As opposed to stimulating the growth.

00:20:56.300 | - Right.

00:20:57.580 | - Are there any studies that point to

00:20:59.700 | bridging the relationship between the physiology,

00:21:02.300 | you know, the stress response and the mindset

00:21:05.320 | that allows one to say, okay, this is really hard

00:21:08.260 | and I keep failing and failing and failing,

00:21:10.260 | at this math, at this language learning,

00:21:12.140 | at writing this essay, whatever it is.

00:21:15.200 | And that's exactly what I'm supposed to be doing.

00:21:16.940 | It's like the burning of the lungs

00:21:18.060 | or it's like the failure to complete

00:21:19.780 | another repetition in the gym.

00:21:24.300 | - Yeah, I mean, I think that you're right.

00:21:27.500 | You know, the standard growth mindset message

00:21:31.780 | does have reappraisal components,

00:21:33.580 | specifically around something

00:21:35.160 | Carol Dweck has called effort beliefs,

00:21:37.400 | which is very simply the belief that

00:21:39.340 | if it's hard, it means you're doing the wrong thing.

00:21:41.620 | And that follows naturally from the fixed mindset idea

00:21:45.700 | that ability can't change.

00:21:48.180 | And I think it's very important to point out

00:21:50.980 | the centrality of that effort belief

00:21:54.500 | because people have tried to apply growth mindset,

00:21:58.340 | but simplified it in a way of just saying

00:22:01.220 | basically try harder, right?

00:22:03.100 | Or I believe in you.

00:22:03.940 | If you try hard enough, you can do anything, right?

00:22:06.820 | But if your natural inclination is to view

00:22:10.060 | the need for effort as a sign

00:22:12.460 | that you are doing the wrong thing,

00:22:14.460 | which is that's the default interpretation,

00:22:16.620 | then people are gonna quit, right?

00:22:19.860 | If you believe effort out to you as lacking potential,

00:22:24.860 | and then I say, you need to try hard,

00:22:28.420 | I'm saying you don't have potential.

00:22:30.780 | That basic insight is very poorly misunderstood

00:22:33.620 | in the field, and it's led to tons of misapplications

00:22:36.420 | of Carol's work.

00:22:37.940 | And then people are like, well, this thing doesn't work.

00:22:39.620 | Well, okay, but you haven't addressed the effort belief.

00:22:43.220 | So I think that the first type of response

00:22:46.500 | to what you've said is you can't just abstractly

00:22:51.060 | tell someone your brain is a muscle

00:22:52.580 | and assume that magically,

00:22:53.980 | then in the midst of stress and frustration and confusion

00:22:57.420 | and all those negative experiences

00:22:59.740 | that you're gonna immediately say,

00:23:00.820 | yes, I love doing this and this is great.

00:23:02.860 | But then there's also the physiological component,

00:23:06.740 | as you're saying.

00:23:07.740 | So when we're stressed, frustrated, confused,

00:23:12.740 | your heart starts racing.

00:23:13.860 | Maybe your palms get sweaty, right?

00:23:15.820 | You start, your breathing starts getting heavier.

00:23:19.540 | My daughter is 13 before like a cello audition.

00:23:24.140 | It's like, I have butterflies in my stomach.

00:23:25.620 | I don't, what does this mean?

00:23:28.300 | And I think that growth mindset research

00:23:31.940 | didn't always deal with the visceral experience

00:23:36.940 | of stress and frustration.

00:23:39.420 | And I think in a world in which someone

00:23:43.020 | hears the growth mindset message and says,

00:23:44.620 | "Yes, now I'm gonna go challenge myself.

00:23:46.340 | "I'm gonna be, I'm gonna embrace stress and frustration,

00:23:48.700 | "do the mental equivalent of running ladders

00:23:51.060 | "or running up a hill."

00:23:53.020 | Then they feel that stress,

00:23:54.340 | but if they don't know how to interpret that,

00:23:56.460 | it's like growth mindset isn't gonna get them

00:23:59.780 | to the skill development, right?

00:24:01.500 | Or at least to the mental wellbeing

00:24:03.940 | of feeling like they have confidence and can do well.

00:24:07.260 | So in some research that we've done in the last few years,

00:24:11.780 | what we've tried to do is to marry together

00:24:14.140 | the growth mindset idea with great work

00:24:16.900 | originally coming out of Ali Crum and Jeremy Jamison's labs

00:24:20.380 | who were building on lots of great appraisal psychologists,

00:24:23.140 | Wendy Mendez and others, to say,

00:24:26.020 | "Okay, in the inevitable experience

00:24:27.740 | "where if you fully believe our growth mindset

00:24:31.700 | "and then now you load your plate with challenges,

00:24:33.980 | "but now you've got a physiological stress response,

00:24:37.140 | "how are you gonna appraise that better?"

00:24:39.140 | And that's kind of been the new frontier

00:24:40.940 | of growth mindset work in the last four or five years.

00:24:44.660 | - Yeah, could you tell us more

00:24:45.580 | about this stress is enhancing mindset?

00:24:48.260 | I think it's a really interesting one,

00:24:49.580 | especially when it's woven in with the growth mindset.

00:24:52.100 | - Yeah, so let me tell you kind of that on its own

00:24:56.620 | and then the story of how we had this insight

00:24:59.780 | is actually kind of interesting too.

00:25:01.780 | But just the basic idea as people who've heard

00:25:06.220 | about Ali Crum would know and Jeremy Jamison

00:25:09.260 | is that an experience of your heart racing,

00:25:13.820 | your palms sweating, anxiety in your stomach,

00:25:17.060 | that is itself a new stressor

00:25:20.500 | that then needs to be interpreted and appraised

00:25:23.140 | by the person experiencing it.

00:25:25.180 | That idea on its own is kind of revolutionary for people.

00:25:29.940 | People tend to think that your physiological arousal

00:25:35.380 | is this objective experience that is universally bad.

00:25:39.020 | Ali Crum calls that a stress is debilitating belief.

00:25:43.260 | And I think that's a good label for it.

00:25:47.300 | It's this idea that heart racing, palms sweaty,

00:25:52.300 | butterflies in your stomach

00:25:54.260 | is a sign of your impending failure and doom

00:25:58.100 | and it will always interfere with your performance.

00:26:00.940 | And the implication therefore is if you were about

00:26:04.580 | to do well on whatever you're gonna do,

00:26:06.420 | then you wouldn't feel that way.

00:26:08.020 | Ali Crum calls this being stressed about being stressed.

00:26:14.060 | And that, I think it's a really common experience right now

00:26:17.780 | where people are like, wow, if I was a confident,

00:26:20.180 | good person who was about to do well,

00:26:21.740 | I wouldn't be sitting here feeling so stressed

00:26:23.700 | about how stressed I am.

00:26:25.060 | And it becomes this metacognitive layered loop

00:26:28.260 | of just being stuck in your own mind

00:26:30.580 | and interpreting your arousal

00:26:33.020 | in the most negative possible light.

00:26:35.060 | So that stress is debilitating belief doesn't,

00:26:38.580 | people aren't like wrong for having come to that belief

00:26:43.140 | because it's everywhere in our culture.

00:26:45.420 | One thing I do in my class a lot

00:26:46.860 | is I just have people Google image search

00:26:48.980 | stress management means.

00:26:52.380 | And first of all, a surprising number about cats.

00:26:56.020 | I don't know why people think cat pictures

00:26:58.340 | are like the way to convey complex scientific ideas.

00:27:01.500 | Like it would be like a cat with like a cookie jar

00:27:04.180 | and it'll be like growth mindset.

00:27:06.340 | I don't understand what that, what the point of that is.

00:27:09.540 | But you know, page two or three after all the cats,

00:27:11.780 | then you get to a lot of things that are,

00:27:14.580 | you'll see a person with a battery that's empty

00:27:17.260 | and it's like, they didn't de-stress

00:27:19.300 | or 10 tips for de-stressing.

00:27:21.820 | And it'll be like, go on a walk, drink chamomile tea.

00:27:24.460 | Like, and the underlying implication

00:27:27.700 | is that if you're stressed,

00:27:28.700 | then you need to distract yourself.

00:27:30.220 | You need to get rid of that stress.

00:27:32.180 | But alternative explanation in the growth mindset world

00:27:34.580 | is well, maybe you have something that's very important

00:27:36.980 | to you and you've pushed yourself to embrace some challenge

00:27:40.220 | in a really admirable way.

00:27:42.380 | And that has filled your plate in some way.

00:27:46.420 | Like if I was about to give a presentation

00:27:48.260 | to a senior vice president at work

00:27:50.660 | and I'm stressed about it,

00:27:52.180 | I should not like go take a bubble bath

00:27:55.740 | and like go for a walk.

00:27:57.180 | Like I should get ready to kick ass at the presentation.

00:28:00.300 | And so I think what Ali Crum and others have identified

00:28:05.580 | is that you can think differently about that stress.

00:28:08.260 | You can say, this is actually a sign

00:28:10.020 | that I'm preparing to optimize my performance.

00:28:13.980 | And maybe the heart racing isn't my body

00:28:18.340 | being afraid of damage.

00:28:20.180 | Maybe it's my body getting more oxygenated blood

00:28:23.100 | to my brain and my muscles to like help me do really well.

00:28:26.420 | And that's called a stress can be enhancing belief.

00:28:29.660 | And what's so interesting I think about this work

00:28:34.380 | and I wanna give credit to lots of other people

00:28:37.220 | is that if you're in the stress is debilitating mindset,

00:28:40.900 | you don't realize that there's an alternative.

00:28:42.700 | You just think that that's the way it is.

00:28:44.900 | So it never occurs to you to say,

00:28:46.700 | oh, this stress is helping me, right?

00:28:49.140 | But once you tell people this,

00:28:51.260 | what happens is in our studies,

00:28:55.180 | we actually see a change in stress physiology.

00:28:58.260 | Changing your mindset about stress in turn

00:29:01.300 | changes how your body reacts,

00:29:02.540 | which then becomes a different stressor

00:29:04.340 | that you can interpret.

00:29:05.500 | And so the big insight was pairing these ideas

00:29:11.260 | about reframing stress as an inevitable force

00:29:16.020 | that's gonna destroy your goal pursuit

00:29:18.220 | into a resource to be cultivated

00:29:20.540 | and pairing that together with the first step,

00:29:23.260 | which was the growth mindset that causes you to like

00:29:26.300 | be open to the challenge in the first place.

00:29:28.140 | - I'd like to take a brief break

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00:30:59.060 | I feel like so much of what human beings struggle with

00:31:03.140 | such as learning and performance,

00:31:07.360 | our relationship to stress, et cetera,

00:31:09.220 | could be resolved if we could overcome

00:31:12.500 | the deficit in language.

00:31:14.820 | Here's what I'm thinking.

00:31:16.380 | We're talking about reframing stress

00:31:18.300 | to make it performance-enhancing

00:31:19.920 | as opposed to performance-diminishing.

00:31:22.880 | I wonder if we replace the word stress

00:31:25.120 | with just like levels of arousal.

00:31:27.720 | But then people hear arousal

00:31:28.840 | and they think certain kinds of arousal.

00:31:30.500 | So what we want to do is,

00:31:32.080 | the way I think about it is like a continuum of readiness.

00:31:35.360 | But then that doesn't work

00:31:36.400 | because readiness can be readiness for sleep,

00:31:38.320 | which is a low level of arousal.

00:31:39.680 | You don't want to be highly alert,

00:31:41.560 | then you're not ready for sleep, right?

00:31:43.440 | So there's a real deficit of language

00:31:45.720 | where I think if there was some other word,

00:31:48.120 | I can't come up with it on the fly,

00:31:50.260 | where one's internal level of readiness

00:31:54.220 | as opposed to stress,

00:31:57.240 | and maybe it looks a lot like autonomic arousal

00:31:59.500 | where heart rate is increased

00:32:00.980 | and blood pressure is increased,

00:32:02.020 | and people would say, "Oh yeah,

00:32:02.860 | that's my body being ready for something

00:32:04.780 | as opposed to stressed about doing it."

00:32:07.380 | And it's kind of a trivial recasting of stress

00:32:12.380 | on the one hand,

00:32:14.780 | but in terms of kids learning about life

00:32:18.180 | and stress and arousal and these internal signals

00:32:21.140 | and adults learning about those

00:32:22.600 | and incorporating those into their life goals,

00:32:25.060 | I think it would be pretty meaningful.

00:32:26.700 | And again, I don't have a solution to this,

00:32:28.800 | but I feel like everyone here, stress is bad.

00:32:31.740 | You hear stress is enhancing, okay, great.

00:32:34.380 | But I think it's really about developing a language

00:32:37.080 | that lets us interpret what's going on in our bodies

00:32:40.140 | and compare that to what we are facing in the moment

00:32:42.820 | and just decide is this well-matched

00:32:44.460 | or poorly matched to what we need to do?

00:32:45.920 | Is it great for going to sleep?

00:32:47.540 | Is it great for learning?

00:32:48.420 | Is it great for catching that train

00:32:50.420 | that's soon to leave the station?

00:32:52.700 | And I just wonder why the deficit in language?

00:32:57.500 | - Yeah, I think that's a profound question

00:32:59.700 | because small changes in language

00:33:03.380 | perpetuate problematically theories

00:33:07.140 | because they have the baggage on them.

00:33:09.500 | And I think that, let's think this through.

00:33:11.900 | So what the psychophysiologists like to point out

00:33:16.300 | is that there's a distinction between the stressor,

00:33:18.500 | which is the, let's call it the internally

00:33:20.980 | or externally imposed demand.

00:33:23.300 | It could be something that's thwarting your goals or--

00:33:25.500 | - The exam, the difficult conversation,

00:33:28.300 | for some people going to the doctor or the dentist.

00:33:33.300 | - The hard conversation with somebody you care about.

00:33:37.100 | It could be, or a physical stressor, right?

00:33:40.940 | Like a football game or running a marathon, right?

00:33:44.020 | So anything that imposes demands on your body and mind

00:33:48.460 | and therefore will require resources,

00:33:51.580 | whether like metabolic resources to do well,

00:33:54.340 | that's a stressor, okay?

00:33:56.620 | Then there's your appraisal of it.

00:33:59.700 | That's what you name it, how you interpret it,

00:34:01.700 | how you frame it in your mind.

00:34:03.260 | And then there's your response.

00:34:05.820 | People in general conflate the stressor

00:34:08.220 | with a stress response.

00:34:10.140 | When they say stress,

00:34:11.460 | they're like, "I'm really stressed right now."

00:34:12.940 | Well, really what you mean is that there were stressors,

00:34:15.660 | you appraised them as more than you can handle,

00:34:18.060 | and then you had a threat type stress response,

00:34:20.860 | which means that your body

00:34:22.540 | is preparing for damage and defeat.

00:34:25.340 | And that is like an inheritance

00:34:27.220 | of how the sympathetic nervous system evolved,

00:34:31.580 | which was to keep us alive from threats,

00:34:33.980 | mainly physical threats.

00:34:35.900 | And so if you have a stressor,

00:34:37.820 | some demand, praise is something you cannot handle.

00:34:41.540 | And then your threat type response,

00:34:43.180 | your body's basically assuming you're gonna lose

00:34:46.380 | whatever physical fight you're in,

00:34:48.020 | like the bear is gonna tear you apart.

00:34:50.780 | And then your main goal at that point is to stay alive

00:34:53.420 | and like bleed out more slowly, right?

00:34:55.860 | So you end up with more blood kept centrally

00:34:58.180 | in the body cavity, less in the extremities, right?

00:35:01.380 | The body releases cortisol

00:35:02.580 | because it's an anti-inflammatory.

00:35:04.180 | It's gonna like help with tissue repair

00:35:06.220 | 45 minutes down the road.

00:35:07.860 | So there's a whole like cascade of physiological responses

00:35:11.060 | that come in part from the mental appraisal

00:35:15.260 | that this stressor is more than you can handle.

00:35:17.740 | Now, we're very rarely confronted

00:35:22.860 | with those kinds of physical stressors these days.

00:35:24.700 | It's often social stressors,

00:35:26.660 | but a lot of these social stressors

00:35:28.500 | are the threat of social death, right?

00:35:30.740 | Like a ninth grader coming into high school,

00:35:32.660 | getting bullied by all their friends

00:35:34.300 | or excluded because their friends in eighth grade

00:35:36.660 | now treat you like you don't exist, right?

00:35:39.900 | The threat of social death is pretty bad, right?

00:35:42.580 | Or you're a new legal associate

00:35:44.500 | and you've filed your first brief

00:35:46.140 | and all the partners are like, this is garbage.

00:35:48.260 | We're not gonna send it to the client, right?

00:35:50.660 | Like all of a sudden you're on trial socially

00:35:54.220 | in front of these people who could cut you loose at any time.

00:35:57.220 | That's a very vibrant social stressor

00:36:00.020 | that evokes the same kind of physiological response

00:36:03.020 | as we suppose a physical one would, right?

00:36:06.340 | And so we're very careful to distinguish in our studies

00:36:09.220 | a stressor from the stress response

00:36:10.980 | because often the stressor isn't really a bad thing.

00:36:15.100 | Like getting critical feedback on your first legal brief

00:36:19.260 | as a junior associate, well, that could be awesome.

00:36:21.940 | It could be like, oh, great.

00:36:22.940 | I have these awesome partners at my great law firm

00:36:25.260 | are now giving me personalized feedback.

00:36:27.580 | That's useful.

00:36:28.780 | Or I'm a ninth grader and I have to make new friends,

00:36:32.140 | but I don't know, maybe you need new friends.

00:36:34.660 | Like that could be a good thing, right?

00:36:36.780 | And same with a test, same with a presentation

00:36:40.300 | to senior vice president, whatever it is.

00:36:42.340 | Stressors often in our daily lives are not good or bad.

00:36:46.700 | Now, of course, there's traumatic stressors

00:36:48.180 | that are really bad for people.

00:36:50.060 | But then the appraisal is really

00:36:54.740 | where there's a lot of leverage.

00:36:56.980 | And if you think that the stressor is inevitably bad

00:37:01.220 | and that your response to it is always harmful,

00:37:04.260 | then it's really hard for you to think

00:37:05.820 | that you have the resources to meet the demand

00:37:08.060 | that you're facing.

00:37:09.660 | And you end up in this threat cycle.

00:37:12.300 | So in a lot of our research, what we try to do

00:37:14.820 | is give people a different story to tell themselves

00:37:19.500 | about a stressor and about their response.

00:37:22.740 | So that way they end up in a better place.

00:37:25.180 | And I don't know what that better language is,

00:37:26.780 | but I will say, I once gave a talk at a middle school

00:37:30.780 | and a high school.

00:37:32.300 | And I used slides that Jeremy Jameson, who's

00:37:34.940 | my collaborator, had sent me that had the word "arousal"

00:37:37.460 | on it on every single slide.

00:37:39.380 | And that was a big mistake in a room of middle school kids.

00:37:44.100 | I'd strongly recommend different terminology.

00:37:47.900 | And I was a middle school teacher.

00:37:49.380 | I should have known that you can't say

00:37:50.940 | that word in a high school.

00:37:54.100 | Right, yeah, I think that there needs to be a better language.

00:37:57.620 | I think if people of all ages understood

00:38:00.700 | the autonomic nervous system,

00:38:02.100 | this aspect of our nervous system that is on a continuum

00:38:05.620 | that leads us to either be, I guess, at the extremes,

00:38:08.260 | you would say coma would be the deepest state

00:38:12.540 | of parasympathetic- - Right, total non-arousal.

00:38:14.740 | - Yeah, non-arousal.

00:38:16.020 | Then ascending from very deeply asleep, lightly asleep,

00:38:20.540 | groggy, awake, awake and alert, awake and alert

00:38:25.540 | to the point of being highly alert.

00:38:29.020 | And then you get into kind of low-level panic

00:38:32.420 | and then all out panic attack, right?

00:38:34.220 | I mean, that's kind of the continuum,

00:38:35.500 | the autonomic continuum.

00:38:37.260 | I feel like if people understood that

00:38:39.660 | and they could simply ask,

00:38:41.700 | okay, where's my body and mind along that continuum,

00:38:44.540 | and then compare it to whatever it is they face,

00:38:46.860 | then we'd have a better sense of whether or not

00:38:50.480 | we were in the correct, maybe even optimal state

00:38:54.100 | for dealing with challenge or not.

00:38:57.340 | And along those lines, what is the optimal internal state

00:39:00.780 | for dealing with challenge

00:39:01.900 | that is just outside our ability?

00:39:05.420 | You know, maybe in an exam where I can naturally

00:39:07.900 | get 85% of the answers correct, but maybe 15%.

00:39:11.500 | I think this is what the machine learning and AI tells us

00:39:13.740 | is probably the appropriate level of difficulty

00:39:15.660 | for something in order to best learn.

00:39:17.460 | I know that's probably too broad.

00:39:18.620 | - Yeah, it depends on if you're motivated

00:39:20.140 | and if, you know, a lot of things, but yeah.

00:39:22.940 | I mean, I think if you think of the autonomic arousal

00:39:26.060 | on just one axis,

00:39:27.740 | where you start running into problems, we find,

00:39:33.840 | is that I think you're right that there's like, you know,

00:39:36.700 | coma to like some arousal or meaningful arousal,

00:39:41.020 | but it's the middle to the end part

00:39:43.140 | where there's two different tracks.

00:39:44.940 | And one track is very high arousal,

00:39:47.660 | but you're terrified of the damage and defeat

00:39:52.220 | and the humiliation and the failure.

00:39:54.380 | And so that's demanding all your attention.

00:39:58.980 | That's what we call a threat type stress.

00:40:01.580 | There's another version that is, again, very high arousal,

00:40:05.620 | but that's like you're stoked and you feel confident

00:40:08.860 | you're gonna do well.

00:40:10.060 | And that's also very high arousal.

00:40:11.420 | And if you just look at arousal measures

00:40:14.300 | like pre-ejection period, right?

00:40:16.460 | - Could you explain pre-ejection period?

00:40:19.720 | - It's just a, it's a simple measure

00:40:22.300 | of just the sympathetic nervous system

00:40:24.980 | that we use in all of our studies.

00:40:26.460 | - So sympathetic, just to remind folks,

00:40:28.260 | is one aspect of the autonomic nervous system,

00:40:30.820 | has nothing to do with sympathy,

00:40:33.260 | just the more alert means more contribution

00:40:37.160 | of the sympathetic arm of the autonomic nervous system.

00:40:39.460 | Sorry, it's a mouthful.

00:40:40.740 | And then less alert would be more contribution

00:40:44.060 | of the parasympathetic arm of the autonomic nervous system.

00:40:46.780 | - And PEP is just a measure that we use

00:40:48.940 | in our laboratory studies.

00:40:51.180 | And another could have been like skin conductance,

00:40:55.540 | which is about the sweat coming out of your skin.

00:40:58.660 | And then we use an electrode to figure out how much is there

00:41:01.700 | that those kinds of measures can't distinguish

00:41:05.900 | what we call a challenge type state.

00:41:08.220 | That's almost like people have heard of flow

00:41:10.620 | where you're optimally balanced

00:41:13.780 | between important challenge you care about

00:41:16.340 | and resources and ability to, you know,

00:41:18.860 | overcome or at least deal with that challenge

00:41:21.580 | on the positive side.

00:41:23.340 | And the other high arousal state, which is threat.

00:41:25.980 | And that's, again, everything's highly engaged,

00:41:29.780 | your whole stress system,

00:41:30.680 | but you don't think you can deal with it.

00:41:33.340 | So that becomes really important

00:41:35.260 | because here's a very practical example.

00:41:38.940 | If you look at devices people are wearing

00:41:40.860 | to detect their stress,

00:41:42.780 | that might say high or low arousal,

00:41:45.220 | but it can't distinguish

00:41:46.220 | between super good positive challenge type stress

00:41:49.420 | and really negative threat type stress.

00:41:51.740 | One of the examples that psychophysiologists

00:41:54.380 | like to say a lot,

00:41:55.220 | I got this from Jeremy Jameson,

00:41:56.900 | is imagine you're at the top of a double black diamond

00:42:00.060 | about to ski down.

00:42:01.980 | If you are a good skier,

00:42:05.380 | your heart rate isn't probably low.

00:42:07.500 | You're probably amped up.

00:42:09.180 | You're stoked.

00:42:10.020 | You're like, this is awesome.

00:42:10.840 | I can't wait to do this.

00:42:11.680 | If you're fully confident,

00:42:12.660 | you're gonna make all the turns and have a blast.

00:42:16.140 | If you're a terrible skier,

00:42:17.420 | you're just imagining the yard sale that's about to happen.

00:42:19.420 | You're about to crash.

00:42:20.340 | You're gonna fall down the mountain.

00:42:21.460 | You might die.

00:42:22.600 | Also high arousal.

00:42:23.820 | If you're wearing like the regular watch

00:42:25.680 | that will just detect sympathetic nervous system activation,

00:42:28.780 | it wouldn't be able to tell the difference

00:42:30.300 | between really stoked to do something positive

00:42:34.020 | and terrified of like crashing and dying.

00:42:37.980 | And so I like that example

00:42:40.020 | because often in social situations

00:42:41.780 | or performance situations,

00:42:43.700 | you wanna be high arousal to perform your best,

00:42:46.900 | but you want your perception of that demand,

00:42:49.700 | the demand that's requiring your body to respond

00:42:52.100 | to be matched with an equal belief

00:42:55.140 | or what we call appraisal of your resources

00:42:57.440 | to meet that demand.

00:42:58.440 | So I think my answer to the question is,

00:43:01.500 | well, I think it's not so much about

00:43:04.560 | what's the optimal amount of demand, right?

00:43:06.880 | So that the 85% likelihood of success rate problems,

00:43:11.980 | that's titrating demand.

00:43:14.060 | I think it's how do you pair a necessary level of demand

00:43:19.060 | for whatever goal you have

00:43:21.420 | with the perceptions of the resources.

00:43:24.820 | And sometimes those resources are your internal,

00:43:28.040 | like just confidence,

00:43:29.940 | or sometimes it's your ability to reappraise

00:43:32.820 | and other times it's material resources.

00:43:34.620 | Like do you have a, it could be in real life,

00:43:38.660 | do you have a friend that you could turn to?

00:43:40.060 | Or it might be, have you been trained in a way

00:43:42.680 | where you're able to overcome this?

00:43:44.380 | Do you have enough time?

00:43:45.700 | So resources can be a big bucket.

00:43:47.940 | And that's kind of the magic is

00:43:50.060 | because resources are appraised by the mind

00:43:53.220 | in our interventions,

00:43:54.100 | we can give you a different way of viewing your resources

00:43:57.460 | so that way people feel like they can meet the demand.

00:44:00.180 | And that pushes them from a threat type response

00:44:03.580 | into a more challenge type response.

00:44:06.220 | - It makes sense if I think that the stress,

00:44:10.140 | for lack of a better term,

00:44:11.220 | and the effort is going to get me where I need to go,

00:44:14.020 | eventually I'm going to be far more willing

00:44:16.260 | to invest the effort.

00:44:17.700 | Especially if I'm motivated,

00:44:18.820 | I want the thing that lies at the finish line.

00:44:22.620 | - You basically take the demand,

00:44:24.220 | which was your intense stress and worry,

00:44:26.020 | and turn it into a resource in your own mind.

00:44:28.820 | And it turns out that that actually helps people cope

00:44:31.120 | at a physiological level.

00:44:32.700 | - Got it, got it.

00:44:34.580 | - So, we've been talking a lot about kind of the nuts

00:44:39.580 | and bolts of growth mindset

00:44:41.740 | and stress is performance enhancing mindset.

00:44:46.060 | Maybe we could shift a little bit to the discussion

00:44:50.340 | about what you call the mentor mindset.

00:44:52.700 | And as we do that,

00:44:53.700 | maybe we'll weave back in some of these concepts.

00:44:57.380 | Your book, "10 to 25" focuses heavily on social appraisal,

00:45:02.380 | self appraisal.

00:45:03.700 | Basically the idea that we want to be liked

00:45:05.540 | and we don't want to be disliked,

00:45:06.660 | and it hurts when people say mean things about us,

00:45:10.280 | or when we hear negative feedback,

00:45:12.540 | especially if it's provided publicly.

00:45:14.620 | But ultimately what we do with that information

00:45:17.260 | is what determines whether or not we grow and move forward.

00:45:20.260 | Everyone loves a great report card.

00:45:24.060 | Nobody likes a poor report card.

00:45:26.740 | So, tell us about mentor mindset,

00:45:30.740 | and both for folks in the 10 to 25 age range,

00:45:35.740 | but also for everybody,

00:45:38.540 | because it's clear that this impacts us

00:45:40.100 | throughout our lifespan.

00:45:41.260 | - Yeah, so the work I write about

00:45:44.180 | comes out of a dissertation led by Jeff Cohen

00:45:47.500 | at Stanford in the '90s with Claude Steele.

00:45:50.340 | And they coined a term that they called

00:45:51.980 | the mentor's dilemma.

00:45:53.900 | And the mentor's dilemma is the idea

00:45:55.980 | that if you're a leader, a manager, a coach, teacher,

00:45:59.780 | whatever it is, parent,

00:46:01.460 | it's very hard to simultaneously criticize somebody's work

00:46:05.580 | and motivate them to overcome and embrace that criticism.

00:46:10.060 | And the reason it's a dilemma is because

00:46:13.660 | the leader on the one hand

00:46:16.340 | wants to maintain high standards by being critical,

00:46:20.800 | maybe in order to help the person grow,

00:46:23.260 | but that could crush the person's motivation.

00:46:26.080 | The alternative is withhold your criticism.

00:46:27.900 | Don't say the truth.

00:46:28.980 | Hide all the critical feedback

00:46:31.060 | and be nice and super supportive.

00:46:32.700 | But, and that meets your goal of being friendly and caring,

00:46:37.520 | but it doesn't help the person grow.

00:46:39.700 | So it feels like we have to walk through the world

00:46:42.700 | we're stuck between two bad choices.

00:46:45.260 | Either you're a demanding autocratic dictator

00:46:49.300 | who doesn't care about human feelings,

00:46:51.740 | or you are a low standards wimp pushover

00:46:56.620 | that's giving in to the wimpy demands

00:47:00.900 | of the weak next generation.

00:47:02.580 | And neither of those have uniformly positive connotations.

00:47:06.500 | And the classic example in Jeff's work

00:47:09.820 | was a student at Stanford

00:47:12.100 | who writes the first draft of an essay

00:47:14.140 | and then gets really harsh critical feedback

00:47:15.740 | from a professor.

00:47:17.500 | Are they willing to revise their work?

00:47:19.760 | Or do they say, this teacher hates me, they're biased,

00:47:24.020 | I dislike them, and leave the comments unaddressed.

00:47:29.020 | So the solution to that in that research

00:47:32.740 | on the mentor's dilemma has been to say two things.

00:47:37.180 | One is appeal to the very high standard you have

00:47:40.520 | for someone's work,

00:47:43.480 | but also always accompany that appeal to the high standard

00:47:46.420 | with an assurance that if they implement the feedback

00:47:50.880 | and use the support,

00:47:51.980 | that they're capable of meeting the high standard.

00:47:54.260 | I like to think of it as,

00:47:55.900 | like if you go to the rollercoaster

00:47:58.020 | and they say you have to be this tall to ride, right?

00:48:01.260 | So just saying you have to be this tall

00:48:03.740 | and you're not, see you later,

00:48:05.100 | isn't reassuring to somebody, right?

00:48:07.800 | But if you can say, here's the standard

00:48:09.620 | and I believe you can meet it, but it's gonna be hard,

00:48:12.180 | that means a lot.

00:48:13.740 | It means I'm taking you seriously.

00:48:15.500 | It means I believe in your growth.

00:48:19.420 | And it's a kind of leadership practice

00:48:21.220 | that makes growth mindset be something that comes to life

00:48:25.460 | and feel true.

00:48:26.840 | It's not just an idea in your head that you're growing.

00:48:29.460 | It's like, I live in a social world

00:48:31.100 | where people are gonna push me to grow

00:48:32.980 | and not leave me alone.

00:48:34.680 | - Are you familiar with the book of the late,

00:48:37.120 | I think the pronunciation is Randy Pausch

00:48:39.340 | for the last lecture?

00:48:40.700 | - No.

00:48:41.540 | - He was a computer scientist.

00:48:42.380 | He developed a lot of early online portals for kids,

00:48:47.300 | in particular, young women to learn programming.

00:48:51.380 | I think it was called Alice.

00:48:52.780 | And he is known for what's called the last lecture.

00:48:57.660 | He was diagnosed with cancer.

00:48:58.740 | He eventually passed away,

00:48:59.680 | but he talked about in his book,

00:49:02.140 | lessons that were important for life.

00:49:04.100 | And one of the things that he said was,

00:49:06.640 | the thing to worry about is not when your mentors

00:49:09.580 | and coaches are pushing you,

00:49:12.080 | it's when they stop pushing you,

00:49:13.500 | that you should really worry

00:49:14.420 | because that means they've basically given up on you.

00:49:16.820 | So that always rung in my mind.

00:49:19.260 | - Yeah, what I call the person

00:49:21.660 | who just is no longer maintaining high standards for you,

00:49:25.620 | I call that a protector mindset.

00:49:28.020 | That it's almost like it's gonna be too much trouble

00:49:31.460 | to see you dealing with stress from being pushed

00:49:34.260 | that I am gonna protect you from that stress.

00:49:37.000 | Maybe I care about you,

00:49:40.020 | but I'm not gonna hold you to a high standard.

00:49:43.260 | And I see that a lot in coaches.

00:49:46.340 | I see it in teachers, I see it in parents.

00:49:49.140 | For me, the opposite problematic version

00:49:51.420 | is what I call an enforcer mindset.

00:49:53.640 | This is like, here's the standard,

00:49:55.340 | and I'm gonna hold you to it,

00:49:58.340 | and it's up to you to meet it or not.

00:50:01.180 | That's kind of like the college professor

00:50:02.940 | that says, look to your left, look to your right,

00:50:04.620 | half of you are gonna be gone by the end of this.

00:50:07.320 | For me, the solution is to think about

00:50:13.540 | taking the best parts of both of those two.

00:50:16.500 | What's the high standards, high support?

00:50:18.380 | So enforcer, great, you've got the standards,

00:50:20.580 | let's add your support.

00:50:22.180 | Protector, you care a lot, great, let's add the standards.

00:50:26.060 | And what Jeff Cohen and Claude Steele found

00:50:28.020 | in their initial study is that students

00:50:30.780 | were far more likely to view negative criticism

00:50:34.680 | as a sign that the teacher cared for them

00:50:38.140 | if it was accompanied by a transparent

00:50:40.620 | and clear communication of these two elements

00:50:43.060 | of high standards and high support.

00:50:45.140 | If it was just the critical feedback,

00:50:46.780 | the professor could have meant the same positive thing,

00:50:48.760 | I'm caring about you,

00:50:49.600 | but if they didn't make it clear to the person,

00:50:52.060 | then participants were less likely to think

00:50:56.580 | that the professor was on their side.

00:50:58.780 | And in our work, in some small studies,

00:51:00.820 | we showed that even seventh graders,

00:51:04.360 | when they get critical feedback on their essays,

00:51:06.480 | are about twice as likely to implement

00:51:09.040 | the teacher's critical feedback

00:51:11.880 | with even a very short invocation

00:51:14.780 | of the high standards and the high support.

00:51:16.940 | So to get to your question about mentor mindset,

00:51:20.540 | at some point, I got worried that our experiment

00:51:25.420 | on high standards, high support messages,

00:51:28.300 | which we called wise feedback in those studies,

00:51:30.740 | would be viewed as, I don't know, like a magic phrase.

00:51:35.260 | Like my joke, my laugh line, this is a lame laugh line,

00:51:38.700 | but I'm a professor, so that's the best I can do.

00:51:40.940 | My laugh line was always, I just live in fear

00:51:42.800 | that Pearson and other textbook companies

00:51:44.460 | are gonna sell wise feedback posted notes

00:51:46.400 | and say they can magically erase the achievement gap.

00:51:49.100 | And I always said that as a joke,

00:51:51.400 | and then two things happened.

00:51:52.320 | One is a popular author, a guy named Dan Coyle,

00:51:55.280 | literally called it magic feedback in his book,

00:51:57.640 | didn't cite us, but like--

00:51:59.240 | - You didn't cite us? - No.

00:52:00.600 | - Dan.

00:52:01.440 | - But also like magic feedback--

00:52:03.480 | - I'll say it so you don't have to, not cool.

00:52:05.440 | Attribution is important.

00:52:06.600 | - It's just not, it's not magic at all.

00:52:10.080 | The magic of high standards and high support

00:52:12.880 | is not the 18 words, it's I'm taking you seriously

00:52:17.880 | when a moment when you're vulnerable

00:52:19.720 | and I have power over you.

00:52:21.020 | That is just so deeply human and so powerful.

00:52:26.740 | But there's nothing about the magic words.

00:52:28.680 | It's the experience of dignity and respect

00:52:33.420 | when you are questioning whether you're either worthy of it

00:52:36.020 | or are going to be given it by authorities.

00:52:38.640 | - It's interesting, we had Dr. Becky Kennedy on here

00:52:41.760 | to talk about parenting and she said many important things,

00:52:45.520 | but among them was the fact that children,

00:52:49.500 | perhaps all people, want to feel real

00:52:52.680 | and they want to feel safe.

00:52:56.240 | An important concept that I think many people heard

00:52:59.280 | and are really internalizing.

00:53:01.120 | I know I am for sure.

00:53:03.760 | And this idea of feeling real has to do with

00:53:07.920 | not just feeling seen, but that people believe us,

00:53:11.240 | even if they disagree with us, like they believe us.

00:53:14.840 | - She has another thing that's super profound

00:53:16.720 | is the kind of two things argument,

00:53:19.640 | that I can both have high expectations for my kids

00:53:22.960 | and love my kids.

00:53:24.540 | And I think that's a very good version

00:53:26.480 | of wise feedback mentor mindset.

00:53:29.040 | That as parents, it either feels like

00:53:32.160 | I can expect a lot of my kids,

00:53:34.600 | but then I'm a monster and they're gonna yell at me

00:53:37.000 | or I'm gonna be a pushover

00:53:38.720 | and then they're gonna be unruly.

00:53:41.360 | And I think part of her wisdom is to help explain to parents

00:53:45.700 | how you can do both of those things.

00:53:48.280 | - And indeed one can, right?

00:53:49.660 | I think, but it requires having a kind of dynamic stance

00:53:53.040 | or dynamic mindset as the teacher, the leader, the coach,

00:53:56.880 | the parent.

00:53:58.360 | I'd like to take a brief break

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00:54:13.240 | is that sometimes it was very easy for me

00:54:15.320 | to do my daily meditation practice.

00:54:17.040 | I was just really diligent.

00:54:18.680 | But then as things would get more stressful,

00:54:20.440 | which of course is exactly

00:54:21.480 | when I should have been meditating more,

00:54:23.460 | my meditation practice would fall off.

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00:54:35.700 | or five minutes to meditate,

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00:54:38.440 | which research shows is still highly beneficial.

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00:54:53.160 | I tend to do a yoga nidra lasting anywhere

00:54:55.300 | from 10 to 20 minutes, at least once a day.

00:54:57.680 | And if I ever wake up in the middle of the night

00:54:59.800 | and I need to fall back asleep,

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00:55:10.740 | Again, that's wakingup.com/huberman.

00:55:14.580 | I want to get back to some of the mechanics

00:55:16.340 | of how to go about that.

00:55:17.700 | But why do you think this stuff is so hard?

00:55:20.040 | Like if we think about, I don't know,

00:55:23.700 | kind of a curbside evolutionary theory,

00:55:28.380 | meaning I don't have any formal training

00:55:31.580 | in evolutionary psychology.

00:55:32.780 | You could step back and say, like, I don't know,

00:55:34.820 | maybe we just used to be so busy from morning to sleep

00:55:37.800 | that we didn't really have time to do anything

00:55:39.500 | except the stuff we needed to complete

00:55:41.580 | in order to feed our families

00:55:42.900 | and take care of our communities, et cetera.

00:55:46.180 | And now a number of things are outsourced.

00:55:47.980 | And so here we have this notion of strivings.

00:55:51.700 | But then again, we went from hunter-gatherer cultures

00:55:56.540 | to writing "War and Peace" and everything else,

00:56:00.200 | technologies of all kinds.

00:56:01.740 | So, you know, there must be something in the human brain

00:56:05.220 | that causes us to strive.

00:56:08.540 | And what we're really talking about here is striving

00:56:10.780 | and our relationship with striving.

00:56:12.540 | So if we were to step back and just say,

00:56:15.900 | okay, what do you think determines

00:56:20.380 | whether or not someone feels they can do better?

00:56:23.220 | Is it early success?

00:56:24.660 | You know, they tried at something.

00:56:26.120 | I mean, everyone, most everyone, I assume,

00:56:28.340 | who tries to learn to walk walks, learns to speak speaks.

00:56:32.540 | You know, they're rare exceptions.

00:56:33.720 | But, you know, what do you think this whole thing

00:56:37.940 | about strivings is about?

00:56:39.760 | And when we talk about growth mindset,

00:56:41.300 | stress enhancing mindset, the mentor mindset,

00:56:43.860 | I mean, are we trying to get back to activating systems

00:56:50.580 | that are hardwired within us

00:56:53.620 | and that have been kind of masked by daily life?

00:56:57.820 | Or are we trying to kind of better ourselves

00:57:00.660 | and our species through, you know,

00:57:02.060 | like really trying to do something

00:57:03.380 | that's never been done in human history before?

00:57:05.800 | - Right.

00:57:07.180 | - It's a big question.

00:57:08.020 | - It's a big question.

00:57:08.840 | But I mean, I think that all I can do is conjecture,

00:57:10.860 | you know, as a scientist.

00:57:11.700 | But I'm often reminded of something I heard from Ron Dahl,

00:57:16.060 | who's a neuroscientist at Berkeley.

00:57:17.940 | - Not Ronald Dahl, the children's book author.

00:57:19.260 | - Not Rald Dahl, Ron Dahl.

00:57:21.540 | Although Ron is just so, he's an awesome guy.

00:57:25.380 | It's like polymath, he can do everything.

00:57:27.740 | And just so curious and generous.

00:57:29.440 | What he always says to me, he's like,

00:57:32.820 | "Look," he's like, "David, what do you think

00:57:34.140 | the human brain wants to do?"

00:57:35.500 | Like, "I don't know, feel good."

00:57:37.140 | He's like, "No, it wants to feel better."

00:57:39.940 | And I think what he was trying to get me to see

00:57:42.940 | is that it's the kind of pursuit of some kind of delta.

00:57:46.880 | - A change.

00:57:49.200 | - Yeah, a change from the state.

00:57:50.620 | And I think the argument is that even if you are,

00:57:55.220 | if what you thought was your biggest need,

00:57:57.560 | if that was satisfied, then there's always another thing,

00:58:00.420 | I think is part of the argument.

00:58:02.020 | But it's also this idea that if you think of the human brain

00:58:08.140 | as trying to learn at all times,

00:58:10.620 | like, what is it trying to learn?

00:58:12.780 | And at least in the animal studies, as you know,

00:58:16.100 | often it's like, how do I either feel better

00:58:18.540 | or avoid feeling worse in a lot of ways?

00:58:21.780 | And I think that, as I think about adolescence,

00:58:25.740 | that's a period where your theory of how to feel better

00:58:29.920 | is dramatically changing

00:58:31.040 | because you're no longer fully cared for by adults, right?

00:58:34.680 | All of a sudden, your criteria

00:58:36.500 | for feeling good about yourself is your social standing,

00:58:40.360 | not just in your parents' eyes,

00:58:41.760 | but in the eyes of the community

00:58:43.240 | and the milieu you're a part of.

00:58:45.440 | And that comes a lot from your contribution value.

00:58:48.880 | If you think in our evolutionary history,

00:58:51.120 | like, being ostracized and alone is certain death

00:58:54.940 | in ancient human cultures, right?

00:58:56.800 | I mean, you can't, the tribe's wandering around

00:58:59.200 | in the savanna, you're alone.

00:59:01.280 | At a minimum, you have no one to watch out for you

00:59:02.880 | when you fall asleep.

00:59:04.120 | And so, and humans can't sleep in trees

00:59:06.880 | 'cause our muscles don't contract

00:59:08.520 | when we're asleep, unlike animals.

00:59:11.160 | And so you're just exposed on the ground.

00:59:13.380 | If you're alone, eventually you're gonna die, right?

00:59:16.120 | So the fear of moving from parents

00:59:20.360 | taking care of your safety all night

00:59:22.360 | to now you have to trust peers to take care of you

00:59:25.380 | and watch over you, that comes to the forefront

00:59:28.580 | of young people's minds,

00:59:29.980 | the kind of the minute puberty strikes.

00:59:32.380 | And so what it means to feel better often

00:59:34.140 | is that I'm socially valued by the group.

00:59:35.820 | There's something, they're gonna keep me around

00:59:38.180 | for some reason.

00:59:39.580 | Now, they don't often keep score in an explicit way.

00:59:42.480 | I mean, now things are in social media,

00:59:43.980 | maybe they're kind of keeping score,

00:59:45.700 | but like the rules of how you're doing socially

00:59:48.340 | are so implicit, you have to read between the lines,

00:59:51.380 | they're inferred.

00:59:52.460 | Social hierarchy is very complex for adolescents.

00:59:56.700 | And so they overdo it thinking through,

01:00:01.460 | like, how am I standing?

01:00:03.420 | Like, where am I relative to others?

01:00:05.700 | Now, that process is started by puberty.

01:00:08.280 | And we know from lots of species work

01:00:09.860 | that it then leads to changes in the brain.

01:00:13.440 | So the dopaminergic system, of course,

01:00:15.340 | it's like driven in part by changes

01:00:18.520 | in going out on maturation.

01:00:20.860 | Ron likes to talk about these great studies of songbirds,

01:00:23.780 | of how do they learn the mating calls.

01:00:26.200 | And if songbirds don't have testosterone

01:00:30.380 | when they are learning the mating calls,

01:00:33.300 | they don't do the like over the top obsessive practice,

01:00:36.700 | so they don't master them.

01:00:38.180 | And then they don't mate and they die alone.

01:00:40.100 | - Interesting, yeah, I'm familiar with that literature.

01:00:42.660 | There's a great, unfortunately now passed away biologist

01:00:46.540 | who was first in the UK and then was up at UC Davis,

01:00:50.240 | Peter Marler, who studied the bird song learning.

01:00:54.580 | And it's- - It's amazing work.

01:00:56.220 | - Yeah, it's amazing work.

01:00:57.300 | And it mimics a lot of the development of human speech,

01:01:00.580 | although not exactly, like there's this babbling phase

01:01:03.320 | where babies and birds experiment with different tones

01:01:06.940 | and they're learning to use the pharynx and larynx

01:01:08.980 | or in birds, it's a slightly different system.

01:01:11.980 | And some birds are seasonal singers,

01:01:13.680 | but I wasn't familiar with this result

01:01:15.900 | that the testosterone drives a kind of obsessive practice.

01:01:19.860 | - Yeah, it's an obsessive practice

01:01:21.020 | in order to demonstrate status, but really your value.

01:01:24.700 | I mean, there it's mate value, right?

01:01:26.620 | But I think the same thing is true for lots of things

01:01:29.100 | that teenagers try, it could be playing guitar,

01:01:32.220 | you know, could be gymnastics.

01:01:34.820 | I mean, think about how many of their Olympic athletes

01:01:37.020 | are like 14, right?

01:01:38.460 | And they're waking up at four in the morning,

01:01:39.860 | they're practicing obsessively.

01:01:41.780 | How many like pro-social hackers

01:01:43.900 | who take down evil foreign governments, right,

01:01:46.100 | are teenagers, right?

01:01:47.780 | They're things that take so much practice

01:01:51.100 | and so much learning happen at the exact same age

01:01:55.180 | as adults are saying these kids are lazy

01:01:57.300 | and don't wanna work, right?

01:01:59.220 | So I tend to focus on,

01:02:01.620 | let's get to your question about

01:02:02.580 | why do people strive to get better?

01:02:04.740 | I think in adolescence,

01:02:07.500 | you look around in your social milieu

01:02:09.740 | and see what counts for status,

01:02:11.540 | not in a superficial way, it sometimes happens,

01:02:14.100 | but often in a deeply meaningful way.

01:02:16.180 | What am I gonna bring to the table?

01:02:17.900 | - One would hope.

01:02:18.820 | - And then, well--

01:02:19.660 | - I remember junior high school being far more superficial,

01:02:22.060 | but I'm 48, so I remember it in kind of the

01:02:24.500 | John Hughes film era where people were very divided

01:02:26.980 | in terms of jocks and skateboarders and rockers and nerds.

01:02:30.700 | Now, it seems a little bit more mishmashed.

01:02:33.660 | But I think also people will, in adolescence,

01:02:36.340 | I feel like kids find their niche

01:02:38.420 | and then try and excel within that niche.

01:02:40.820 | - Yeah.

01:02:41.660 | - You know, as opposed to high school

01:02:42.740 | or junior high school being one huge hierarchy.

01:02:46.540 | - Yeah.

01:02:47.380 | - You know, there's kind of these sub-hierarchies.

01:02:48.580 | - Yeah, Dan McFarland is a sociologist at Stanford,

01:02:51.620 | did this really interesting study with the ad health data.

01:02:54.340 | And it turns out you could characterize

01:02:56.220 | the social hierarchies in different high schools

01:02:58.060 | by kind of single pyramid high schools

01:03:00.460 | versus multi-pyramid high schools.

01:03:03.020 | And there's way better adjustment

01:03:05.380 | in the multi-pyramid high schools,

01:03:07.100 | because there's many routes to status.

01:03:09.300 | The evolutionary psychologist, Bruce Ellis,

01:03:11.980 | talks about having many roles.

01:03:14.500 | And I like that because in the old model,

01:03:17.180 | you know, if there's one pyramid

01:03:18.740 | and you're kind of near the top, but not at the top,

01:03:21.060 | you've got a lot of incentive to destroy reputations,

01:03:23.980 | be, you know, mean girls type of behavior.

01:03:26.260 | Bob Ferris, sociologist at Davis,

01:03:29.860 | finds that the most bullying in high school

01:03:32.020 | is the people that are like the 60th,

01:03:34.180 | the 85th percentile on popularity.

01:03:36.580 | It's like you're near the top,

01:03:37.460 | but not all the way at the top.

01:03:38.780 | - Yeah, this maps very well to Robert Sapolsky's work

01:03:41.380 | on primate troops.

01:03:42.500 | - Yeah.

01:03:43.340 | - Yeah, the alphas are stressed,

01:03:44.700 | but the sub alphas are, they have options.

01:03:48.020 | - Yeah.

01:03:49.140 | - And this is true for female and male animals.

01:03:51.500 | Just as it's true, we were talking about testosterone

01:03:54.380 | a few minutes ago in obsessive practice.

01:03:56.260 | I'll remind people that in women,

01:04:00.200 | they actually have more,

01:04:02.460 | adult women have more testosterone than they do estrogen.

01:04:04.760 | If you look at a pure nanogram per deciliter comparison,

01:04:07.260 | it's just that overall,

01:04:08.140 | it tends to be on average less than in men.

01:04:10.040 | - So the statement about testosterone

01:04:12.200 | and obsessive learning or efforts to learn,

01:04:17.200 | I have to imagine is not restricted to males or females.

01:04:19.580 | - Yeah, and I think, I understand as a man praising

01:04:22.420 | testosterone that I could come across,

01:04:24.180 | but I, so I always need to remember

01:04:27.480 | that the research is very interesting on T.

01:04:30.180 | Eveline Krohn's lab did these great studies

01:04:34.340 | where they had kids starting age 10 to like 25,

01:04:37.780 | and they had them come in the lab twice,

01:04:39.760 | and they took testosterone levels,

01:04:41.380 | but also had them do a bunch of tasks in the scanner.

01:04:44.380 | And you can look at nucleus accumbens,

01:04:45.780 | prefrontal cortex, et cetera.

01:04:47.020 | - Areas associated with reward and pursuit motivation.

01:04:50.580 | - Yeah, and they also had them do risk-taking tasks.

01:04:54.760 | And what they find is that in both boys and girls,

01:04:58.020 | testosterone goes up over time.

01:05:00.500 | Starts a little earlier in girls because gonadarchies

01:05:03.220 | one or two years before boys,

01:05:05.420 | but the change score from one point to the next

01:05:08.340 | was equally predictive of neural reactivity

01:05:11.660 | during risk-taking tasks for both boys and girls.

01:05:14.740 | So although boys end up with higher T throughout adolescence,

01:05:19.380 | the increase is equally predictive,

01:05:23.300 | which is another way of saying it's just as important

01:05:25.180 | for these social learning things in girls.

01:05:26.980 | And T, by the way, is just a really good--

01:05:29.980 | - Testosterone.

01:05:30.820 | - Testosterone's a really good proxy.

01:05:32.820 | Other hormones are involved too.

01:05:34.100 | They're just more complicated.

01:05:35.140 | Like DHEA, you could study as well,

01:05:39.060 | but that's part of the same metabolic pathway

01:05:41.060 | of cortisol and testosterone,

01:05:42.420 | so it's just messier and harder to interpret.

01:05:44.660 | So we're not making claims specifically about testosterone.

01:05:48.620 | It's just like a really good proxy

01:05:50.180 | for where you are in gonadal maturation.

01:05:52.500 | In both boys and girls, gonadal maturation really matters

01:05:55.380 | for this kind of status, social-seeking part of your brain.

01:05:59.820 | - Yeah, so if I understand correctly,

01:06:01.220 | the slope of the line of one's testosterone increase

01:06:04.700 | for both boys and girls is predictive of striving.

01:06:08.220 | If it's a steep upward line,

01:06:11.820 | then that's associated with more striving

01:06:14.500 | in a given practice.

01:06:15.820 | - To the extent that neural activation

01:06:18.420 | during a social reward task or a risk-taking task

01:06:21.220 | is a proxy for striving,

01:06:24.100 | and that's what a lot of people have argued, yeah.

01:06:27.780 | - Do you think that striving reflects the action

01:06:30.100 | of kind of a basic neural circuit

01:06:32.300 | that then can be applied to other things

01:06:35.420 | or lots of different things?

01:06:36.340 | The reason I ask is that the notion of growth mindset

01:06:39.140 | is so attractive.

01:06:39.980 | It's such a sticky idea,

01:06:42.020 | or I think because one imagines,

01:06:46.340 | okay, if I can get really good at one thing, chess,

01:06:48.900 | then I can apply the same kind of relationship

01:06:51.580 | to the internal state of stress or arousal, what have you,

01:06:55.780 | when trying to navigate a new environment of another kind,

01:07:00.140 | a physical practice or a relationship challenge

01:07:02.780 | or something of that sort.

01:07:04.700 | You know, what we're really talking about here

01:07:06.100 | is an algorithm that can be directed at different pursuits,

01:07:10.140 | as opposed to growth mindset is applied in one context

01:07:14.020 | and not another.

01:07:15.640 | So what of that?

01:07:18.580 | People who are incredibly good at accessing growth mindset

01:07:23.180 | in one domain of life,

01:07:25.140 | does that mean that they'll be good

01:07:26.180 | at accessing growth mindset in another domain of life?

01:07:28.900 | What's the carryover or the spillover?

01:07:31.700 | - It's a great question.

01:07:32.540 | It comes up a lot.

01:07:33.380 | The Michigan State psychologist, Jason Moser, studied this,

01:07:39.100 | and they measured growth mindset about your intelligence,

01:07:42.740 | the classic one, your personality, your morality,

01:07:46.420 | your social relationships, your emotions, et cetera.

01:07:50.000 | And the question is,

01:07:50.980 | is there kind of like one growth mindset

01:07:53.180 | that applies in all the different ways,

01:07:56.260 | or are there totally narrow mindsets

01:08:00.740 | that have nothing to do with each other,

01:08:03.040 | or is it something in between?

01:08:05.140 | And the finding was that there is an overall association.

01:08:08.580 | If you think one trait can change and be developed,

01:08:12.200 | you tend to think another trait can be changed and developed.

01:08:14.420 | And just empirically, it's hard to separate that

01:08:17.540 | from people's general tendency to disagree

01:08:20.060 | or agree with items.

01:08:21.300 | That could be what the common factor is,

01:08:23.260 | but it kind of makes sense.

01:08:24.960 | However, there's also very domain-specific mindsets.

01:08:29.460 | So there are people who think,

01:08:31.500 | yeah, I can get smarter, but I can't change my shyness.

01:08:35.260 | And other people would think,

01:08:36.700 | my relationships are never gonna get better,

01:08:39.420 | but I can learn to play the cello, and vice versa.

01:08:43.460 | And when you wanna predict behavior,

01:08:46.260 | turns out that the closer you are to that domain,

01:08:48.620 | the better the prediction is gonna be.

01:08:50.820 | So if I wanna know if you're gonna quit

01:08:52.740 | playing the cello or not,

01:08:54.000 | I'm gonna ask you your cello mindset.

01:08:56.140 | That's gonna do way better than,

01:08:58.340 | in general, can human qualities change?

01:09:00.400 | But if I'm gonna intervene,

01:09:03.460 | at what level should the intervention happen?

01:09:05.180 | If I only change your cello mindset,

01:09:07.460 | well, you're right.

01:09:08.300 | Like, what if cello isn't your thing in life?

01:09:09.800 | Now are you gonna be fixed mindset

01:09:11.240 | for your relationships in school,

01:09:12.740 | and did I not really help you?

01:09:14.740 | So kind of the empirical answer currently

01:09:20.980 | is if it's a domain

01:09:23.840 | that someone could be really defensive about,

01:09:26.040 | it's better to be a little vaguer about it.

01:09:29.320 | Classic example is Aron Halperin's work

01:09:32.280 | on the Israel-Palestine conflict,

01:09:34.600 | which is obviously a big issue right now.

01:09:36.400 | Their science paper in 2011

01:09:38.480 | changed mindsets about group conflict in general.

01:09:43.180 | Can an ethnic group or a national group ever change?

01:09:48.360 | They didn't go to people in Israel

01:09:50.980 | and say, "Palestinians can change,"

01:09:53.020 | 'cause they're like, "No, they can't.

01:09:54.140 | "That's not possible."

01:09:55.980 | But if they said, "You know, sometimes leaders change,

01:09:58.660 | "and then when leaders change,

01:09:59.600 | "the group's priorities change,

01:10:00.980 | "and they become more amenable to negotiation,

01:10:03.780 | "and when that happens, things can change."

01:10:06.020 | If that was done at a more general level,

01:10:08.540 | then both Israelis and Palestinians

01:10:11.500 | were more open to a peace process.

01:10:13.580 | So I think if it's something you're very defensive about,

01:10:18.240 | I tend to think back up and do the more abstract mindset.

01:10:23.240 | Another example is,

01:10:24.200 | I remember I was in graduate school at Stanford,

01:10:26.100 | and one of my RAs was so excited about our work,

01:10:28.860 | and he went to a party and talked about it.

01:10:30.460 | It's like that very Stanford thing to do

01:10:33.020 | is talk about research at a party,

01:10:34.900 | and he's like, "Oh, yeah, math ability can change.

01:10:36.860 | "You don't have to be dumb at math forever."

01:10:38.760 | And the person he talked to was so offended.

01:10:41.720 | She was like, "Are you telling me

01:10:42.760 | "I could've done better in high school math,

01:10:44.220 | "and I just didn't try hard enough?

01:10:46.060 | "And my life could be different?

01:10:47.980 | "So I could be an engineer right now?

01:10:49.320 | "Like, I like my life.

01:10:50.280 | "Why are you telling?"

01:10:51.660 | It went down this road of,

01:10:53.460 | like, how dare you tell me it could've been different?

01:10:56.620 | And who knows, maybe he had bad delivery

01:10:59.940 | and had 14 margaritas, and who knows what happened.

01:11:03.240 | But I think the idea is like,

01:11:05.220 | if someone's got a reason to think about that fixed mindset

01:11:10.220 | as comforting in some way,

01:11:15.060 | that they don't have to feel bad about something

01:11:16.740 | that could've been different,

01:11:18.660 | it's probably not smart to go after that

01:11:21.440 | in a very specific way.

01:11:23.220 | But if someone's not defensive,

01:11:24.700 | generally the closer to the domain, the better,

01:11:28.540 | because they're gonna see the application.

01:11:30.260 | Otherwise, they have to use it by analogy,

01:11:31.900 | and we know analogic reasoning is tough,

01:11:34.380 | 'cause it's hit or miss.

01:11:36.360 | - We love stories of people that have come from a place

01:11:38.900 | of being really back on their heels,

01:11:40.740 | or even just dissolved into a puddle of their own tears,

01:11:44.220 | to doing well again, maybe even soaring again.

01:11:48.100 | It's sort of the common thing

01:11:50.380 | is that this is the classic American story,

01:11:53.400 | although it's true of people all over the world, I imagine.

01:11:56.660 | - Right, it's not always true in America either,

01:11:58.460 | but yeah, we love the story.

01:12:00.380 | - Yeah, some people crash and burn,

01:12:01.580 | but it seems like everybody loves a comeback story.

01:12:04.260 | I don't know, something about that.

01:12:06.700 | The hero's journey, the hero of a thousand faces,

01:12:11.580 | is that the book, Joseph Campbell?

01:12:13.380 | - Yeah. - Yeah.

01:12:14.220 | And it's written into so many movies and books

01:12:17.780 | and real-life stories.

01:12:20.980 | I can't help but superimpose today's discussion

01:12:24.100 | onto something like that, that life is a series

01:12:28.980 | of efforts to apply growth mindset

01:12:32.480 | from learning how to walk, presumably as part of that.

01:12:35.940 | I don't know any child

01:12:36.780 | that just stands up and walks early on,

01:12:38.780 | to the things that we really think we can perform well at,

01:12:43.020 | to finding ourselves really back on our heels.

01:12:46.400 | And so are there any data or theories even

01:12:50.800 | that point to the use of growth mindset

01:12:52.980 | and stress-enhancing mindset

01:12:55.220 | in coming from a real place of deficit?

01:12:57.660 | Not just from trying to do better and learn new things,

01:13:00.460 | but from a real place of deficit, a real place of challenge.

01:13:03.380 | I think it's important for our audience to hear

01:13:05.320 | because I think a number of people

01:13:06.500 | do feel back on their heels in one or more domains of life.

01:13:11.260 | - Yeah, it's a good question.

01:13:12.100 | I mean, I think that the data suggests

01:13:14.420 | that growth mindset becomes most relevant

01:13:17.300 | to your next behavior, the more challenge you face.

01:13:20.700 | And so for a long time, what that meant is

01:13:24.540 | if you maybe were a low-achieving student,

01:13:27.900 | and we're gonna evaluate growth mindset

01:13:29.780 | by looking at your grades, you should see bigger gains

01:13:32.900 | for low-achieving students

01:13:34.260 | compared to high-achieving students.

01:13:36.440 | Part of that could be an artifact.

01:13:37.380 | If you already have straight As,

01:13:38.420 | we can't give you more As, it's impossible, right?

01:13:41.240 | But in general, psychological treatments

01:13:46.240 | like a growth mindset tend to work better

01:13:48.820 | for people who counterfactually wouldn't have them

01:13:51.500 | and could plausibly benefit from them.

01:13:54.060 | Where the story becomes more interesting

01:13:56.300 | is that often your kind of own individual difficulties

01:14:00.460 | are associated with your environment.

01:14:03.140 | And the environment is really what allows you

01:14:05.440 | to apply your growth mindset over time.

01:14:07.900 | So it might make you right now need a growth mindset more,

01:14:11.380 | but it might make it harder for you to act on it.

01:14:14.460 | And so for people who like complex three-way interactions,

01:14:18.580 | the idea is that a treatment for growth mindset

01:14:21.500 | should work best for individuals

01:14:24.620 | who face the most challenges

01:14:26.460 | but are in the most supportive environments.

01:14:28.980 | And one is like baseline, why do you need it?

01:14:30.900 | And the other is over time,

01:14:32.620 | what's gonna help you keep using it?

01:14:34.660 | So to be very concrete about this,

01:14:36.860 | in one paper we published in 2019,

01:14:40.760 | the National Study of Learning Mindsets,

01:14:42.340 | it was published in Nature.

01:14:43.980 | We evaluated growth mindset in this large national sample

01:14:48.980 | and the question wasn't, does it work on average?

01:14:51.780 | The question was, where does it work and for whom?

01:14:54.660 | 'Cause there were lots of replications already

01:14:56.620 | and sometimes people tried it and like,

01:14:58.740 | well, it didn't work here.

01:14:59.720 | Okay, well, that's a puzzle, how do we figure that out?

01:15:02.800 | And the finding was low-achieving students in high schools

01:15:07.220 | that had more supportive classroom culture

01:15:11.220 | where you got the long run effects.

01:15:14.100 | And in the four-year results,

01:15:16.580 | it's low-achieving students in high schools

01:15:19.060 | that offered more advanced courses.

01:15:21.540 | So if you're a low-achieving student,

01:15:22.820 | you get with mindset, it's like, great, give me pre-calculus.

01:15:25.780 | Oh, we don't offer that here, right?

01:15:27.840 | Or it's a toxic environment in some way.

01:15:29.900 | Their teachers are untrained, they're first-year teachers.

01:15:32.220 | There's lots of poverty in the school.

01:15:34.620 | If you don't have the structure to support the striving,

01:15:38.060 | you don't get the long run effects,

01:15:39.580 | especially if the effects you're looking at

01:15:41.260 | are increases in equality of opportunity.

01:15:43.940 | So for me, the message is like,

01:15:47.500 | you think about growth mindset

01:15:50.100 | and psychological interventions as one tool in a toolkit

01:15:53.420 | to help people achieve their goals,

01:15:55.860 | but we can't forget about the entire field of sociology

01:15:58.660 | that tells us a lot about the allocation of resources

01:16:01.340 | through which people can even be afforded

01:16:04.740 | the chance to pursue their goals.

01:16:06.440 | And so what I like about that finding,

01:16:09.660 | which by the way came from a collaboration with sociologists

01:16:12.580 | who thought, you psychologists are absurd.

01:16:15.380 | They're like, you think your little mindset

01:16:17.860 | is gonna change inequality?

01:16:19.860 | Like, you're gonna make an argument to 15-year-olds

01:16:21.820 | and that's your plan for improving the American economy.

01:16:24.500 | That's absurd.

01:16:25.620 | I was like, well, I don't know, you could do something.

01:16:28.380 | And psychologists are skeptical of sociologists.

01:16:31.740 | They're like, look, how often do we have huge changes

01:16:34.860 | in law and policy, but people don't take advantage

01:16:37.740 | of the resources that are available to them?

01:16:40.000 | Let's change the behavior so they take advantage.

01:16:42.580 | We kind of came together and said,

01:16:44.700 | what does it look like to consider both the structure

01:16:47.300 | and the internal psychology?

01:16:48.820 | And I think this was a very important point

01:16:52.280 | because people tend to choose one or the other.

01:16:55.460 | Either we're gonna lobby for new laws

01:16:57.020 | to reallocate resources, or we're gonna optimize

01:16:59.260 | the psychology of the individual.

01:17:01.100 | And I think our perspective is to find ways

01:17:04.660 | to bring those two together and kind of do both.

01:17:08.420 | And ultimately, it's not a deficit-based perspective

01:17:13.580 | of you have a deficit and we're fixing that.

01:17:16.540 | Growth mindset's more like,

01:17:18.340 | well, it's an asset-based perspective.

01:17:19.540 | What I mean by that is we're not giving someone motivation

01:17:24.260 | in growth mindset.

01:17:25.820 | We're presuming people already kind of wanna do well.

01:17:29.560 | They wanna impress others, they wanna be meaningful,

01:17:33.140 | they wanna contribute, but there's a barrier.

01:17:35.460 | The barrier is when you strive and then inevitably struggle,

01:17:40.420 | if you're pushing yourself beyond your abilities,

01:17:42.920 | people make you feel dumb for that struggle.

01:17:45.420 | So we're trying to remove that cultural and social barrier

01:17:51.140 | that's preventing people from their natural goal pursuit.

01:17:54.700 | And that comes deeply from Carol Dweck's original work

01:17:56.900 | at the intersection of developmental and social psychology.

01:17:59.620 | The basic claim in developmental psychology

01:18:01.980 | is the human being is an active learner

01:18:04.260 | who's trying to figure out the world.

01:18:06.140 | This is classic Alison Gopnik, Susan Gellman.

01:18:09.140 | Infants are meaning makers trying to interpret the world

01:18:13.540 | and wanting to do well.

01:18:15.900 | And eventually, they're socialized into beliefs

01:18:19.180 | that prevent them from acting on that basic neural desire

01:18:23.100 | to learn and grow, develop, et cetera.

01:18:25.580 | And growth mindset is really,

01:18:27.620 | it's not trying to be a magic pill

01:18:29.500 | to give an unmotivated, disaffected kid

01:18:33.060 | a shot in the arm of adrenaline so they go out and learn.

01:18:36.100 | No, it presumes agency and love of learning

01:18:39.980 | and kind of like Dr. Beck, he said,

01:18:41.900 | presumes the goodness in kids

01:18:44.640 | and tries to remove whatever kind of garbage beliefs

01:18:47.300 | they've learned from social context.

01:18:50.540 | And then our long-term studies then show how

01:18:54.220 | once you do that, if you're also in a context

01:18:58.700 | where you can act on that love of learning,

01:19:01.220 | then you can see long-run effects

01:19:02.580 | that are far more than what a lot of people

01:19:04.580 | have said you could get even in a disadvantaged context.

01:19:08.140 | - It's so interesting because what we're talking about here

01:19:11.260 | is psychological theory playing out in the real world,

01:19:13.660 | but also kind of like deep notions of the human spirit.

01:19:18.160 | Like we are a species that seems to organize our experience

01:19:23.160 | in terms of stories of ourselves and others,

01:19:27.800 | but that when it comes to things like strivings and learning,

01:19:31.920 | are really always in a constant state of either being more,

01:19:37.880 | to borrow the words of a friend of mine,

01:19:39.480 | either back on our heels, flat-footed,

01:19:41.120 | or forward center of mass, right?

01:19:43.220 | And what we're talking about today

01:19:46.080 | as being forward center of mass,

01:19:48.160 | at least in certain areas of life.

01:19:49.760 | I mean, the fact that the reward systems of the brain,

01:19:53.400 | whether you mentioned them earlier,

01:19:54.800 | these mesolimbic reward pathways

01:19:56.360 | that basically deploy dopamine and other things, of course,

01:20:00.320 | are so associated with striving and achieving,

01:20:03.840 | striving and achieving, and presumably underlie

01:20:06.640 | much if not all of our human evolution,

01:20:08.880 | assuming we're still evolving.

01:20:10.120 | Lately, sometimes I wonder,

01:20:11.440 | but some people would argue we're devolving,

01:20:13.880 | but I would argue we're still evolving,

01:20:15.880 | especially with this new burst in AI.

01:20:18.800 | It's all about math nowadays, folks.

01:20:20.440 | A few years ago, it was all about neuroscience,

01:20:22.000 | and neuroscience is still really important,

01:20:23.440 | and the two share, but it's all about math lately.

01:20:26.200 | So I like to just think of the human animal

01:20:30.160 | as so different than the other animals of the planet.

01:20:32.600 | Like we're the curators of the planet.

01:20:34.280 | The house cats might be striving,

01:20:35.680 | but they're clearly not doing as well as we are

01:20:37.700 | in terms of managing the way the world goes.

01:20:40.020 | So do you think that this is like a basic algorithm

01:20:43.840 | within human beings to look at ourselves,

01:20:47.240 | look at the environment, see challenges,

01:20:48.840 | overcome challenges, develop technologies?

01:20:50.760 | It's just kind of like a,

01:20:52.000 | it's like the same way my bulldog

01:20:54.600 | used to like to gnaw on things.

01:20:56.280 | You know, you like to chew and pull.

01:20:57.960 | We just want to learn and grow.

01:20:59.960 | Do you think it's inherent to who we are as a species,

01:21:02.360 | maybe even what sets our species apart from all the others?

01:21:05.160 | - I mean, that's a profound question,

01:21:06.560 | and I think that's a good one to debate.

01:21:08.740 | What I've been really taken by recently

01:21:12.240 | is Carol Dweck's "Secret Life as a Neuroscientist."

01:21:16.280 | She has this great psych review paper

01:21:19.120 | that contradicts a lot of received wisdom

01:21:24.120 | about the prefrontal planning regions of the brain

01:21:28.400 | and the kind of amygdala and the hippocampus,

01:21:30.920 | the, you know, the affective regions

01:21:33.360 | and the memory creation regions.

01:21:35.400 | And the classic argument,

01:21:37.640 | and going back to Plato and the Phaedrus, right,

01:21:42.020 | is that the rational acting part of the brain

01:21:44.580 | plans out what it wants, makes all these calculations,

01:21:48.440 | and then has to tame the emotional part

01:21:51.680 | in order to make those goals into a reality.

01:21:55.240 | And so the emotion, you know, the amygdala, the mesolimbic,

01:21:59.760 | that's this unruly horse

01:22:02.040 | that the charioteer has to harness, you know?

01:22:05.720 | And I think that Carol argued,

01:22:08.200 | and I think other people have argued too.

01:22:09.660 | I've seen Adriana Galvan and Ron Dahl and others argue this,

01:22:13.360 | that the affective regions are often the teacher

01:22:18.280 | and the prefrontal is the student.

01:22:19.880 | And that makes sense if you think

01:22:21.720 | about how humans are goal-directed.

01:22:24.160 | Think about how a kid learns to walk.

01:22:26.420 | They don't do that for theoretical reasons.

01:22:29.440 | They don't just like look at people walking

01:22:31.840 | and be like, "I wanna learn how to do that."

01:22:33.240 | - Right.

01:22:34.080 | - I have four kids.

01:22:36.000 | It's usually because there's a toy

01:22:37.360 | at the other side of the room that they really, really want

01:22:39.700 | and that I don't want them to have.

01:22:40.980 | And the only way for them to go get it,

01:22:42.540 | 'cause I won't get it for them,

01:22:43.500 | is for them to learn how to walk.

01:22:44.940 | So the motor learning is the effect of the desire

01:22:49.300 | in the goal pursuit.

01:22:50.700 | And what Carol argued is that

01:22:54.260 | Phaedra's Hat is totally wrong.

01:22:56.520 | It's not that the prefrontal charioteer

01:22:58.540 | is taming the emotional.

01:22:59.860 | It's really that the affective part

01:23:02.280 | is training the prefrontal to be better

01:23:04.220 | at pursuing the goals that matter

01:23:05.820 | in the social milieu that you have.

01:23:07.780 | And a lot of people like Adriana Galvan and Jen Pfeiffer

01:23:12.420 | and Nim Tottenham in the adolescent space

01:23:15.660 | have shown this, and I don't understand

01:23:18.580 | all the details fully, but the argument that I've heard

01:23:22.480 | is that once the scanning studies were able to switch

01:23:25.660 | from fMRI focused on simple activation

01:23:30.020 | to studies looking at connectivity,

01:23:31.820 | and where you could get temporal ordering,

01:23:35.060 | then you could start seeing actually that,

01:23:37.260 | especially in adolescence, it's the affective regions

01:23:41.260 | are training or teaching or telling

01:23:43.380 | the prefrontal regions what to do.

01:23:45.420 | So I guess that's a long way of answering the question

01:23:48.380 | of I think that, I think goal pursuit

01:23:52.220 | is fundamental to human nature.

01:23:54.560 | And I think that the brain and our adaptation

01:23:57.020 | is designed to help us learn how to be a lot better

01:24:00.120 | at pursuing whatever goals will help us survive

01:24:03.080 | in our environment.

01:24:04.500 | And the brain has to be adaptive

01:24:06.300 | to that environmental input

01:24:07.620 | because the environment's always changing.

01:24:09.300 | If it had only one way of pursuing its goals,

01:24:11.420 | then we would never survive.

01:24:13.500 | So it has to be the case that the planning, rational,

01:24:16.380 | observing part of the brain is actually responsive

01:24:19.180 | to what works in your context for goal pursuit.

01:24:22.740 | So again, I'm summarizing other people's work here,

01:24:24.680 | but that's how I see it, yeah.

01:24:27.940 | - I completely agree that emotions drive the more,

01:24:32.820 | let's call tactical circuitry of the prefrontal cortex.

01:24:36.860 | Of course, we should be fair to the neuroscience.

01:24:39.140 | The prefrontal cortex is part of the limbic system.

01:24:41.100 | People often think because it's in the cortex,

01:24:43.020 | it's higher order, and that's simply not true.

01:24:45.620 | But well, if we both agree, and it sounds like we do,

01:24:49.640 | that emotions drive tactical decisions

01:24:52.600 | that drive action and learning,

01:24:54.580 | maybe we could talk about the two major types of emotions

01:24:59.860 | that one could imagine.

01:25:01.580 | One is I really want the toy.

01:25:04.040 | I really want the piece of food.

01:25:05.340 | I really need something for survival or for wellbeing,

01:25:09.540 | and so I'm going to be motivated,

01:25:11.140 | and then the prefrontal cortex will work out the strategies

01:25:14.220 | and balance out the relationship to stress, et cetera,

01:25:18.660 | and remind ourselves that stress

01:25:20.100 | can be performance enhancing,

01:25:21.220 | and eventually we get the thing or the skill or the whatever.

01:25:25.420 | The other would be fear, fear of social shame,

01:25:29.480 | fear of staying in a place that's not good for us

01:25:31.700 | financially, emotionally, socially, et cetera.

01:25:34.180 | Is there any work that identifies whether or not

01:25:38.780 | that the core emotion driving motivation is relevant,

01:25:42.340 | and is there a role for growth mindset there?

01:25:44.580 | - That's interesting.

01:25:47.640 | - I guess put simply, take it out of the ivory tower

01:25:51.740 | a little bit, which is what we're doing here anyway.

01:25:54.780 | You can do things out of love.

01:25:56.220 | You can do things out of fear.

01:25:57.580 | You do for both reasons too.

01:25:59.080 | - Yeah.

01:25:59.920 | - You can do things to please yourself.

01:26:02.480 | You can do things to please others.

01:26:03.600 | You can do things to avoid others being disappointed in you,

01:26:06.560 | you being disappointed in yourself.

01:26:08.120 | Presumably it's both.

01:26:09.520 | - Yeah.

01:26:10.360 | - But is there any, I'm dying for you to tell me

01:26:12.860 | that when we do things out of love, we learn faster,

01:26:15.680 | but maybe that's not the case.

01:26:17.160 | - Well, I don't know.

01:26:17.980 | I mean, so two thoughts.

01:26:20.080 | One is just honoring Danny Kahneman, who just passed away.

01:26:24.600 | His work with Amos Tversky took on a version

01:26:27.660 | of this question in prospect theory,

01:26:29.980 | and it's the idea of does the fear of a loss

01:26:33.700 | motivate us more than the prospect of a gain, right?

01:26:37.360 | And their argument is that both can be motivating

01:26:41.580 | as well as the possibility of a loss,

01:26:44.780 | but that loss is loomed larger,

01:26:47.160 | that people are more willing to take a risky gamble

01:26:50.080 | to prevent a loss than they are to get a numerically equal,

01:26:55.080 | like a mathematically equal gain.

01:26:58.720 | And so a lot of people have used that information

01:27:01.940 | in various ways, and I think that that has led people

01:27:05.040 | to conclude that the prospect of a gain

01:27:09.020 | doesn't mean anything.

01:27:10.740 | But that really wasn't ever the point in prospect theory.

01:27:12.900 | It's just that it's a little more powerful

01:27:14.380 | to avoid, to be afraid of a loss.

01:27:17.540 | I don't see a problem with thinking like,

01:27:19.880 | yeah, losses are a little worse.

01:27:21.760 | If I already had $1,000 and you took it away,

01:27:25.580 | feels a little worse than the chance to win 1,000

01:27:28.920 | that I didn't win.

01:27:30.320 | Mathematically, it's the same delta.

01:27:32.460 | But I think that the way that behavioral economic work

01:27:38.960 | gets applied is to appeal to people's kind of basis

01:27:43.580 | and most fearful responses to things.

01:27:47.640 | And if you think about what drives a lot of excellence,

01:27:52.340 | in moral exemplars too,

01:27:55.160 | it's this chance to feel like you've made

01:27:59.280 | a big contribution to others.

01:28:01.960 | And I don't think people are afraid

01:28:04.600 | that they didn't help as many people as they could have.

01:28:08.680 | And maybe that drives some people.

01:28:09.820 | But I think just the affective forecasting

01:28:13.500 | of one day I'll feel good

01:28:16.260 | because of the meaningful work I did for others,

01:28:20.100 | that was high integrity when no one else would have seen it.

01:28:23.100 | I think that's really motivating for a lot of people.

01:28:26.220 | And I think we underappreciate that.

01:28:28.020 | And therefore, we appeal to very narrow self-interest.

01:28:32.460 | And my favorite theorist on this is Dale Millers

01:28:35.180 | at the Stanford Business School.

01:28:36.900 | And he calls it the norm of self-interest.

01:28:39.460 | That if you look around,

01:28:40.440 | it looks like everyone's behaving

01:28:42.280 | for only very narrow short-term self-interested reasons.

01:28:46.940 | And because you think that's the norm,

01:28:49.100 | then you yourself kind of respond to those incentives.

01:28:52.660 | And then you then in turn create that norm

01:28:54.900 | even more than other people see.

01:28:56.780 | But it's not a state of affairs that anybody really likes.

01:28:59.180 | Everybody kinds of prefers a pro-social world

01:29:01.960 | where people are helping others.

01:29:03.460 | But if you think that's just a really weird thing to do

01:29:05.980 | and not normal, then people conform to the wrong norm.

01:29:10.040 | So in my work, what I try to emphasize

01:29:13.180 | is not that we're not afraid of losses

01:29:15.380 | and the narrow short-term gain that we're avoiding,

01:29:19.420 | or the short-term loss we're avoiding.

01:29:21.060 | But I really do think that people are capable

01:29:25.220 | of far more beautiful contributions to the world

01:29:29.000 | when we assume that that's what they want

01:29:32.220 | and we create opportunities for them to do that.

01:29:35.100 | - Yeah, I've seen that so much.

01:29:37.540 | You look at some of the best managers, right?

01:29:39.460 | It's not just if you screw up,

01:29:42.420 | you're gonna lose your bonus.

01:29:43.940 | Like that's not what the best managers

01:29:46.580 | in the world are doing, right?

01:29:48.180 | They're like, let's do something no one's ever done before.

01:29:51.500 | Let me support you to do it.

01:29:53.100 | And then let me make sure that you look awesome

01:29:55.100 | in front of all the senior vice presidents

01:29:56.640 | because you did that.

01:29:58.460 | Like that's what the best managers do.

01:30:00.300 | And coaches too.

01:30:03.060 | - For my book, I interviewed the NBA's best shooting coach.

01:30:06.340 | This basketball player named Shane Battier

01:30:10.220 | who played college and pro basketball told me about him.

01:30:14.080 | And I interviewed Chip, England is his name.

01:30:17.660 | And he was at the San Antonio Spurs,

01:30:20.180 | which they had a 17 year run of being a perennial contender

01:30:23.700 | for the NBA championships.

01:30:25.460 | And constantly drafted players who were talented

01:30:29.700 | but had a bad jump shot.

01:30:30.980 | So Kawhi Leonard is an example

01:30:32.700 | where it fell late in the first round

01:30:34.340 | because people thought couldn't shoot.

01:30:35.780 | Tony Parker is another example.

01:30:37.780 | When Tony Parker used to shoot, Greg Popovich would say,

01:30:40.140 | that's a turnover every time.

01:30:41.700 | Chip England is a great shooting coach, worked with them.

01:30:46.580 | There's lots of Bill Barnwell had a great story about him,

01:30:48.780 | called him the shot doctor.

01:30:50.580 | And I interviewed Chip and I was like,

01:30:54.300 | Chip, how do you sell the vision to these players

01:30:57.220 | who are 18 to 21, are newfound millionaires.

01:31:01.860 | Everyone's saying you're the best, you're a first rounder.

01:31:04.660 | And they don't wanna change their shot

01:31:07.060 | because if they do, they could mess it up, make it worse.

01:31:10.900 | Like a golfer is superstitious about their shot.

01:31:13.700 | And he's like, the number one thing I have to do

01:31:15.820 | is build trust.

01:31:16.980 | 'Cause I can't critique a player's shot

01:31:19.020 | and make them change it

01:31:21.020 | if they think they're gonna sacrifice more.

01:31:24.440 | So he's like, Dave, the first thing you have to do

01:31:26.740 | is sell your vision.

01:31:27.580 | I was like, well, what's your vision?

01:31:28.420 | He's like, he doesn't say, if you don't change your shot,

01:31:33.220 | you are gonna lose millions of dollars

01:31:34.660 | and be out of the league.

01:31:36.180 | So he doesn't motivate with a fear of loss.

01:31:39.860 | He says, the average time in the league

01:31:43.100 | is two and a half years, right?

01:31:44.880 | If you develop a great reliable jump shot

01:31:47.940 | where even as your athletic talents decline,

01:31:50.700 | you're still reliable.

01:31:52.420 | You're talking about a 10 year career.

01:31:54.340 | And then you're not just helping you,

01:31:55.740 | you're not just helping your family,

01:31:56.700 | you're helping your family's family.

01:31:59.060 | So even in the like money obsessed throat world

01:32:02.340 | or professional sports,

01:32:03.740 | the single best coach working with the top players

01:32:07.740 | appeals to the prospect of what you could do for others,

01:32:11.180 | not the fear of loss.

01:32:13.340 | And to me, that's really telling.

01:32:14.660 | Like if it works to just motivate with the fear of loss,

01:32:18.180 | that's what he would do.

01:32:19.020 | 'Cause they would do whatever's effective.

01:32:20.220 | It's like at some level an efficient market,

01:32:23.340 | but that's not what Chip England does.

01:32:25.300 | And I think the same is true

01:32:26.380 | for a lot of other great mentors and leaders.

01:32:28.940 | - So if I understand correctly,

01:32:30.500 | when we find ourselves

01:32:33.540 | back on our heels or flat footed,

01:32:39.220 | we want to focus on the prospect

01:32:42.500 | of what we can do for others.

01:32:43.660 | Like ultimately that's going to be the best.

01:32:46.820 | - Or the world, yeah.

01:32:47.660 | - Or the world, yeah.

01:32:49.180 | I guess, yeah, pick your, pick your scope of impact.

01:32:52.300 | - Yeah, could be for art, for intellectual history.

01:32:54.900 | It's a classic Viktor Frankl argument

01:32:57.140 | of man's search for meaning, right?

01:32:59.220 | As Viktor Frankl's leaving the concentration camps,

01:33:03.060 | what helps him survive?

01:33:05.180 | And it's the debt that he owes to the future work

01:33:10.180 | that he wants to write to share with the world.

01:33:12.900 | And it's not the fear of death.

01:33:16.100 | It's the meaning of the work he could do for the world

01:33:19.900 | if he survives.

01:33:22.340 | - Yeah, I think I'd like to hover on this for a minute or two

01:33:25.860 | 'cause I think it's really important.

01:33:26.900 | I realized we're getting more philosophical

01:33:28.900 | than operational, but--

01:33:30.460 | - We have data on this, it's a--

01:33:32.620 | - Yeah, I'd love to hear it.

01:33:33.860 | That's one of the things I'm really enjoying

01:33:35.300 | about this conversation at the moment.

01:33:36.420 | I think it's going to be abstract

01:33:37.860 | or that you've got it all there in that brain.

01:33:41.920 | Yeah, let's talk about this,

01:33:44.740 | that when we feel back on our heels or we're flat footed,

01:33:48.420 | meaning we're not doing well,

01:33:50.220 | maybe hard things have happened,

01:33:51.740 | focusing on the prospect of what we can do for others,

01:33:53.980 | not just trying to avoid loss or further shame

01:33:56.180 | or just diminishment is going to be the best thing.

01:34:00.180 | So what are the data on this?

01:34:03.460 | - Yeah, so we'll first just look at correlational studies

01:34:06.800 | in these global surveys of happiness.

01:34:09.520 | In almost anyone you can think of,

01:34:12.900 | the best predictor of life satisfaction and wellbeing

01:34:15.660 | is going to be the meaning of your life,

01:34:18.540 | in particular, the feeling like you're connected to others,

01:34:22.520 | you've contributed to others.

01:34:24.380 | - That your life mattered.

01:34:25.540 | - That your life, there was something of value

01:34:27.900 | in your life to others or to the world, right?

01:34:30.940 | And so just anecdotally, the advice I always give to people

01:34:36.100 | like going through depression or the risk of that

01:34:38.580 | is to focus on what you can do for others

01:34:41.240 | or what you have done, right?

01:34:43.180 | So that's just correlationally.

01:34:46.660 | Now, experimentally, what we did in some work,

01:34:50.540 | this was started with my first advisor at Stanford,

01:34:53.060 | Bill Damon, who studies purpose in life,

01:34:55.620 | is we asked the question of when you're going through

01:34:59.140 | something tedious, boring, frustrating,

01:35:01.600 | what motivates you to keep going?

01:35:04.900 | And there are many possible answers to that,

01:35:08.180 | but we compared two different ones.

01:35:10.760 | One is the potential benefit you get out of that striving.

01:35:16.760 | So for a student in school,

01:35:18.920 | it's like the money you would get one day

01:35:21.440 | from working hard and doing well.

01:35:23.200 | An alternative though, is what you could do

01:35:27.840 | with the knowledge that you gained

01:35:29.620 | by going through the hard learning.

01:35:32.520 | How could you contribute to others, make a difference,

01:35:35.480 | et cetera, with the knowledge and skills?

01:35:38.200 | We call that our purpose condition.

01:35:40.720 | A couple of things make that different

01:35:43.680 | from the standard narrative,

01:35:46.280 | but I think ultimately intuitive.

01:35:48.000 | One is the standard narrative is if you try hard in school

01:35:51.960 | or at work or whatever it is and suffer now,

01:35:55.360 | then one day there will be a kind of financial compensation.

01:35:59.160 | So you're suffering now in a way

01:36:02.180 | that will bring material reward in the future.

01:36:04.440 | The brain's not really designed

01:36:06.480 | to make that kind of calculation, right?

01:36:07.640 | It's like, well, how certain is the reward in the future?

01:36:09.680 | How far into the future?

01:36:10.880 | And how bad is the punishment right now?

01:36:13.120 | So there's all kinds of affective trade-offs

01:36:14.840 | that are hard for anyone

01:36:16.880 | or especially hard for 13-year-olds, right?

01:36:19.640 | So what a lot of school comes down to is an adult saying,

01:36:23.480 | "You need to suffer through 40 minutes per day

01:36:26.760 | "of factoring trinomials because I said so,

01:36:29.640 | "and I said it's good for your long-term future

01:36:32.240 | "so that one day in your 30s,

01:36:33.560 | "you can barely afford a mortgage," right?

01:36:35.820 | This is not a compelling argument

01:36:37.060 | for most of America's youth, my opinion.

01:36:39.880 | The purpose condition though,

01:36:41.360 | is not about the exchange value of a credential

01:36:44.000 | some long time in the future.

01:36:46.000 | It's more like right now,

01:36:49.040 | you're getting a hard and kind of admirable skill

01:36:51.980 | that not everyone's gonna get.

01:36:53.760 | And you're gonna then be prepared when the moment arises

01:36:57.000 | to do something of significance for others.

01:36:59.760 | Now that also is uncertain and in the future,

01:37:02.120 | but for things that are contributions,

01:37:04.840 | you kind of get to feel like a good person right now.

01:37:08.240 | The analogy I often use is if I'm gonna like make lunch

01:37:10.700 | for the homeless,

01:37:12.200 | I don't have to wait until they actually eat the food

01:37:14.160 | to feel like a good person.

01:37:15.200 | I feel like a good person when I'm putting it in the bag,

01:37:17.720 | or even when I'm driving to the homeless shelter, right?

01:37:20.600 | And I think our idea was you can move up the reward

01:37:24.560 | by making it a social reward right now,

01:37:27.860 | rather than a material reward years into the future.

01:37:31.280 | - Because then the pursuit itself becomes the reward.

01:37:33.660 | - Right, right now my,

01:37:35.200 | and actually the more frustrating it is right now,

01:37:37.000 | the more I'm being a good person

01:37:38.680 | because it means it was a hard skill to acquire

01:37:40.520 | that'll prepare me to make a difference later.

01:37:43.480 | And so we framed super tedious math.

01:37:47.860 | This is with Angela Duckworth and Sidney D'Mello

01:37:50.440 | and Dave Ponescu and others as Marlon Henderson,

01:37:54.060 | as a chance to gain a skill that helps you contribute

01:37:57.680 | versus a chance to learn how to get an A

01:38:01.440 | and make money in the future versus a control.

01:38:04.200 | And what we found was that the contribute to others version

01:38:09.840 | led to deeper learning, greater persistence,

01:38:13.540 | higher grades over time.

01:38:16.220 | And in one of our experiments,

01:38:20.080 | we gave them a choice of either doing super boring math

01:38:22.680 | or goofing off on the internet.

01:38:24.200 | And we were secretly tracking

01:38:25.480 | what the websites they were going to.

01:38:27.480 | And we found that teenagers did more very boring math

01:38:32.480 | and watched fewer videos and played less Tetris

01:38:37.200 | when they were given this purpose message before the task.

01:38:41.280 | It's in our 2014 paper.

01:38:42.820 | And what I always think about,

01:38:45.300 | that's the kind of paper I wanted to go to graduate school

01:38:47.560 | to work on.

01:38:48.680 | But I think about it because if you think about

01:38:52.640 | Dale Miller's norm of self-interest,

01:38:54.900 | nobody thinks to do the purpose argument.

01:38:57.920 | They're like, of course, teenagers are short-sighted

01:39:00.000 | and think about material rewards

01:39:01.440 | and all they wanna do is either look cool

01:39:03.040 | or make money or whatever.

01:39:04.560 | But no, like in our studies,

01:39:06.520 | if you appeal to the chance to make a contribution right now,

01:39:11.220 | then they did the behaviors that adults want them to do.

01:39:14.520 | They didn't goof off online and instead chose boring math.

01:39:19.200 | And adults think the only way you could ever get that

01:39:23.680 | is by imposing our will

01:39:25.520 | and was this kind of authoritarian set of rules.

01:39:30.160 | But if you instead just appeal to the love of learning

01:39:32.800 | for the sake of others,

01:39:34.840 | then they're willing to kind of go through the suffering.

01:39:38.720 | And in the paper, we cite Viktor Frankl,

01:39:41.280 | where the person who knows the why for their existence

01:39:45.440 | is able to bear any how.

01:39:47.560 | And I think about that a lot,

01:39:50.660 | that we underestimate how willing young people are,

01:39:53.280 | really anyone is, to bear through things

01:39:55.580 | that are hard and difficult if they have a strong why.

01:39:58.340 | - I think this is one of the most important concepts,

01:40:01.820 | frankly, ever discussed on this podcast,

01:40:03.720 | if I'm really honest.

01:40:04.880 | I think that we've parsed dopamine circuits

01:40:09.280 | and we've talked about motivation and reward.

01:40:11.160 | We've talked a little bit about growth mindset

01:40:12.680 | in a solo episode,

01:40:13.560 | but never before have I really understood

01:40:16.840 | the why component, the meaning component.

01:40:20.200 | And I love how it marries so much of what we hear

01:40:22.440 | in kind of like pop culture psychology with real data.

01:40:26.820 | Like we're finally, thanks to you being here,

01:40:29.560 | meaning we're finally in the guts of it.

01:40:32.660 | Because we hear this like,

01:40:35.620 | oh, it feels so good to make a contribution,

01:40:38.200 | but you know, people are also self-interested.

01:40:40.220 | - Yeah. - People want money.

01:40:41.420 | Then people say, well, past a certain amount of money,

01:40:43.860 | you don't get any happier.

01:40:44.860 | And I would argue that it's true,

01:40:48.000 | money can't buy happiness,

01:40:49.080 | but it can definitely buffer stress.

01:40:50.820 | - Yeah. - Not all forms of stress.

01:40:52.980 | And money itself can get people into more stress.

01:40:54.900 | But anyone that says, you know,

01:40:56.660 | past blank number of dollars,

01:40:58.700 | there's no incremental increase in happiness.

01:41:00.660 | I just don't see how that could be given inflation.

01:41:04.780 | - No, that treats humans like linear functions.

01:41:06.860 | - Right. - I think that's

01:41:07.700 | a simplification. - Right.

01:41:09.220 | If higher purpose is best defined

01:41:10.740 | as making a meaningful contribution to the world,

01:41:13.300 | to a community, or maybe at the scale of the world,

01:41:16.860 | maybe at the scale of a family or what have you,

01:41:19.980 | a classroom.

01:41:21.460 | And the thing that you said before that seems so important

01:41:24.340 | is that the moment that you attach your goal

01:41:28.100 | to something that's for others,

01:41:31.100 | it makes the effort involved its own form of reward.

01:41:35.260 | - Yeah.

01:41:36.100 | - That to me is so important.

01:41:38.060 | - Yeah. - So, so important.

01:41:39.520 | I kind of want to highlight bold, underline,

01:41:41.340 | and put a big exclamation mark after it,

01:41:43.740 | because that's so different than like,

01:41:45.820 | oh, you know, I want to be the top player on the team.

01:41:48.080 | - Yeah.

01:41:48.920 | - Which means that every bit of effort you put in,

01:41:50.340 | you're like thinking, I'm going to be the best,

01:41:51.980 | I'm going to be the best, I'm going to be the best.

01:41:53.980 | But, and one perhaps can then feel that progress

01:41:58.300 | when one is making it,

01:41:59.820 | and feel like they're ascending that staircase.

01:42:02.980 | But something additional must come about

01:42:06.620 | when we're invoking this feeling of contribution.

01:42:11.340 | And I think this is essential to our evolution as a species,

01:42:15.180 | 'cause we didn't develop in isolation.

01:42:16.780 | - Yeah, I mean, we had to show our value to the group

01:42:18.700 | or else they would get rid of us, right?

01:42:20.100 | I mean, that's what it meant to go from being a child

01:42:22.140 | to being an adult.

01:42:23.560 | And the, think about what it,

01:42:27.060 | let's take basketball or whatever, right?

01:42:29.260 | If I'm trying super, super hard

01:42:30.900 | and it feels impossible to me and I'm not getting better,

01:42:34.820 | and it's purely for me, then I feel like a failure.

01:42:39.820 | It feels like my goals are not being met

01:42:41.940 | and they never will be met, right?

01:42:43.460 | The effort feels terrible

01:42:45.060 | because it means something really bad about me, right?

01:42:48.820 | Now imagine you're putting in effort for others.

01:42:51.660 | The harder it is, the more awesome it is

01:42:54.160 | because it's more noble, right?

01:42:56.160 | You've done something that's super impressive

01:42:58.960 | and sacrificed your own happiness for others, right?

01:43:02.320 | The social status of trying hard and failing for yourself

01:43:07.320 | is net negative because it's about shame, humiliation,

01:43:13.400 | I'm not good enough.

01:43:14.760 | The status of trying hard and failing

01:43:16.640 | and keeping going for others is like super net positive,

01:43:20.840 | right?

01:43:21.680 | And I think that's what people fail to appreciate

01:43:24.120 | is especially someone young

01:43:26.660 | or even just early in a career, right?

01:43:28.660 | Starting out, if you can reframe difficulty and failure

01:43:33.100 | as part of the process of doing something

01:43:35.380 | with high integrity for others,

01:43:37.120 | like it changes the meaning of effort totally.

01:43:40.880 | And once you have a different meaning,

01:43:42.440 | then something that previously felt bad

01:43:45.480 | can instead be motivating.

01:43:47.220 | Whether it's the stress,

01:43:48.400 | like in our stress enhancing work,

01:43:50.720 | or the boredom you're undergoing,

01:43:52.760 | it's doing something super tedious or anything like that.

01:43:56.920 | I remember when I was at Stanford as a graduate student,

01:44:00.520 | I worked in the lab of John Krasnick,

01:44:02.480 | who is famously detail-oriented.

01:44:06.520 | Whenever we wanna go in really deep into something

01:44:10.800 | and go beyond what any other scientists would do,

01:44:13.360 | our joke name for that is giving it the full Krasnick

01:44:16.520 | because he's in communications and political science.

01:44:19.480 | And there was one project I was supervising

01:44:23.040 | where this will sound ridiculous,

01:44:24.880 | but it was what is the best adjective

01:44:27.880 | to use in a survey item?

01:44:30.640 | So say you wanna go like, how hungry are you?

01:44:33.680 | Not at all, very, extremely,

01:44:36.080 | like what adjectives should you pick

01:44:37.840 | to label those in a survey item?

01:44:40.000 | And so the task was to find every time

01:44:42.640 | that human beings have rated adjectives

01:44:44.520 | on a zero to 100 scale in the history of science,

01:44:47.680 | and then average across all those

01:44:49.640 | to choose optimally spaced adjectives,

01:44:52.520 | like not at all, a lot, little.

01:44:55.840 | So we had a lab full of undergraduates at Stanford

01:44:59.160 | who are used to creating startups and running nonprofits,

01:45:03.040 | and this is very tedious work for them.

01:45:05.800 | So how do you get them to super pay attention

01:45:07.440 | to all the details and not get it wrong?

01:45:09.360 | Where are we really gonna trust their work?

01:45:12.360 | It's not by saying you're gonna get into law school

01:45:15.560 | if you do this, because it's not really true.

01:45:18.160 | And they'd be like, there's a lot of other ways

01:45:19.600 | for me to get into law school

01:45:20.800 | that don't involve going to journals from the 1920s

01:45:23.720 | to rate adjectives, right?

01:45:26.000 | Instead, what I started doing

01:45:28.520 | was give them what I call the save the world speech,

01:45:31.120 | which is like, look, we're gonna write this paper,

01:45:34.720 | and it's gonna be the kind of paper

01:45:36.480 | that no one would have done 'cause it's so tedious.

01:45:40.200 | But if it's trustworthy, thousands of people

01:45:43.160 | would know how to have more accurate measurement,

01:45:45.880 | and they're gonna be so grateful for that.

01:45:47.840 | But not only that, there'll be skeptics,

01:45:49.840 | and the skeptics are gonna look in our supplement,

01:45:52.000 | they're gonna find mistakes,

01:45:53.680 | and then they're gonna email the editor,

01:45:54.920 | and they're gonna say,

01:45:55.760 | why did you let this sloppy work into the journal?

01:45:58.560 | And that happens all the time.

01:46:00.280 | I mean, I don't know how much you follow

01:46:02.120 | what's happening to behavioral scientists these days,

01:46:06.040 | but if you have an influential finding, that's the norm,

01:46:09.940 | is people should scrutinize it, they should kick the tires,

01:46:12.040 | and they're gonna find it, and they're gonna out you.

01:46:14.540 | - And they're doing more of that now, like with PubPeer,

01:46:17.280 | which I think is great.

01:46:18.120 | PubPeer is awesome.

01:46:19.600 | PubPeer, folks, is where papers are evaluated online.

01:46:23.920 | People find sometimes outright errors,

01:46:27.280 | and sure, there are those like sleuthing for-

01:46:30.720 | - Yeah, you find fraud.

01:46:31.560 | - For fraud, but most of what's put there

01:46:33.520 | is stuff like differences in interpretation,

01:46:37.280 | or somebody will suggest that the authors

01:46:39.560 | could have done a better analysis,

01:46:40.920 | or that maybe their conclusions

01:46:42.120 | were a little too far-reaching

01:46:43.200 | based on a particular set of methods.

01:46:45.660 | - And I think it's good for science.

01:46:47.240 | I mean, there's a lot of bad-intentioned sleuthing

01:46:50.880 | that is trying to find circumstantial evidence

01:46:53.160 | to make someone look bad.

01:46:54.340 | - Is that true? - Yeah.

01:46:55.800 | - Really? - Yeah.

01:46:56.640 | - That's a shame, because the whole purpose of it

01:46:58.640 | is to better the work, not to...

01:47:01.560 | I'm assuming the whole purpose of PubPeer

01:47:03.320 | is to better the work, and of course,

01:47:05.560 | point out where there are real errors

01:47:08.880 | in the historical literature.

01:47:11.040 | - Right, well, I think that the...

01:47:13.640 | Yes, there's a new way to become famous in science,

01:47:16.840 | which is to find errors, which, again,

01:47:21.000 | is really valuable if you successfully do it,

01:47:23.080 | but there's enough room for interpretation

01:47:25.400 | that someone can, with circumstantial evidence only,

01:47:30.080 | make it look like something's really bad,

01:47:31.860 | and then cause an alarm,

01:47:33.800 | and it causes all kinds of problems.

01:47:36.120 | However, for me, at least in our lab,

01:47:40.040 | that if you always assume

01:47:42.000 | that someone will look at your work

01:47:43.320 | with the worst possible intentions,

01:47:45.040 | and will ask for every file,

01:47:47.840 | how did it get from Qualtrics into your paper,

01:47:51.200 | just assume that all the time,

01:47:52.680 | then that means you need to pay as much attention

01:47:55.680 | to the file that was downloaded,

01:47:57.980 | and how it was processed,

01:47:59.040 | and every part of the pipeline has to be documented.

01:48:02.080 | You just have to do that.

01:48:04.960 | And so, working with Crosnic's lab,

01:48:07.180 | that's the process that we adopted,

01:48:09.080 | and there's all kinds...

01:48:09.920 | People email, they're like, wait, show me this finding.

01:48:12.200 | I'm like, okay, here's the link to the server,

01:48:14.000 | here's the syntax, you can go find it, et cetera, et cetera.

01:48:16.800 | So, good scientists should do that,

01:48:19.920 | and so the possibility of scrutiny and catching fraud

01:48:24.260 | should motivate everyone to treat it

01:48:26.040 | as though it's an inevitability,

01:48:27.200 | and therefore, be careful in your process.

01:48:30.520 | Convincing 19-year-old Stanford undergraduates

01:48:34.040 | that that is likely to happen,

01:48:35.600 | and that therefore, you need to pay super close attention

01:48:38.800 | to the details, that was my task as a lab manager.

01:48:42.400 | And so, there, it was a mix of the fear

01:48:44.960 | of shame and humiliation,

01:48:47.400 | but also, ideally, the contribution that our work will make.

01:48:51.200 | And we had the hardest working RAs

01:48:52.680 | we've ever had that summer,

01:48:54.320 | and that's not an empirical claim.

01:48:56.280 | I say that, I didn't randomize the undergrads to that,

01:48:59.240 | but that experience kind of gave me the idea

01:49:01.100 | for the purpose studies,

01:49:02.800 | was assume people wanna do good work,

01:49:06.600 | but all else equal,

01:49:08.400 | they might find an easier way to do it,

01:49:10.440 | and then motivate with an appeal

01:49:12.760 | to how this work could make a difference,

01:49:14.720 | how other people could be influenced by it,

01:49:17.040 | and also, if you don't take it seriously,

01:49:19.200 | it'd be a really big deal, it'd be really bad.

01:49:21.680 | And I think about that a lot,

01:49:23.600 | because we don't often appeal

01:49:26.520 | to the contribution value of the work,

01:49:28.440 | we appeal to getting a good grade and impressing people.

01:49:33.440 | And that's less important for me than did I get a skill

01:49:37.800 | and did I do high-quality, high-integrity work.

01:49:40.160 | - So, what you're basically saying

01:49:42.360 | is that if we attach our motivation to the give,

01:49:44.960 | to the contribution that we're going to make,

01:49:47.080 | it actually makes the process much easier,

01:49:50.020 | or at least more rewarding along the way,

01:49:53.260 | as well as, by definition,

01:49:56.520 | contributing more positively to society.

01:50:00.160 | It's causing me to reflect on what we normally perceive

01:50:05.940 | as high-achieving individuals.

01:50:08.720 | So often, it seems like we hear the stories

01:50:10.480 | of the Steve Jobses,

01:50:12.080 | I really enjoyed that book by Walter Isaacson,

01:50:14.400 | and that story, I'm very impressed by his contributions,

01:50:18.720 | although he's a complicated person,

01:50:20.120 | as is often the case with people

01:50:21.560 | that make big contributions, it seems.

01:50:24.120 | Or people in the political sphere,

01:50:26.600 | or people in the academic sphere, or the sports sphere,

01:50:29.360 | you know, most often, we think of them

01:50:32.640 | as striving for themselves,

01:50:34.000 | maybe for themselves and their family.

01:50:35.840 | And then there are these people that really stand out

01:50:37.680 | as these shining examples, like Martin Luther King,

01:50:41.800 | or, you know, and others where we just are kind of in awe

01:50:45.760 | of how mission-driven they were for the greater good.

01:50:50.900 | - What sort of work is being done

01:50:53.300 | to encourage that kind of mindset,

01:50:55.020 | the contribution mindset?

01:50:57.020 | Growth mindset through contribution mindset.

01:50:59.640 | I just coined that, contribution mindset.

01:51:02.060 | - Add some more words in there.

01:51:03.380 | - Right, exactly, that's all it needs, more mindsets.

01:51:06.220 | But the contribution mindset,

01:51:07.420 | because I think, at least in this country,

01:51:09.520 | we are often raised to revere people

01:51:13.820 | that make big contributions,

01:51:14.980 | but then we get really absorbed into that person's story.

01:51:18.780 | Right, it's like the story of the person

01:51:20.260 | and what made them tick.

01:51:21.100 | And then there's a lot of ego in it, you know,

01:51:23.740 | or they have a kind of obsessive nature to them.

01:51:26.220 | And we don't know what goes on in other people's minds.

01:51:29.460 | You know, we're so, I must say,

01:51:31.020 | there's a certain arrogance in all of our perceptions

01:51:34.620 | of others, like that we know why they're doing

01:51:37.220 | what they're doing.

01:51:38.300 | Half the time, we don't even know

01:51:39.260 | why we're doing what we're doing.

01:51:41.660 | But I think you get the idea here.

01:51:42.860 | What I'm imagining is a more benevolent world

01:51:46.100 | where people also enjoy striving more,

01:51:48.300 | and the striving process itself, while hard, has meaning,

01:51:52.020 | and people are not egoless,

01:51:54.240 | but where there's a bit more balance.

01:51:56.420 | Like, are we getting a little bit like,

01:51:59.500 | we, you know, kind of looking at this

01:52:01.420 | through rose-colored glasses?

01:52:03.420 | Or I think it's possible.

01:52:04.740 | I like to think it's possible.

01:52:05.820 | - Yeah, I mean, I think that the version

01:52:09.340 | that in which people are purely pro-social,

01:52:14.100 | self-transcendent, and have no self-interest,

01:52:17.060 | you know, is not super realistic,

01:52:19.260 | and it's not actually what our data are finding.

01:52:21.740 | So what we find is that adding

01:52:23.300 | this pro-social contribution argument has a big effect,

01:52:27.300 | but if you do it absent any plausible benefit

01:52:31.020 | the person would get, it tends to not be motivating.

01:52:34.420 | So it's the combination of, let's just take the school case.

01:52:38.100 | I'm gonna learn something, gain a new skill.

01:52:40.660 | I'm gonna get a job that I enjoy and that gives me freedom,

01:52:44.260 | and make a contribution to others.

01:52:47.020 | We found it was the addition of the pro-social part

01:52:49.740 | to the self-interested part.

01:52:52.140 | Now, if it was do X, Y, Z,

01:52:54.820 | and, you know, make lots of money far in the future,

01:52:57.260 | and then give that money away, that didn't work,

01:53:00.020 | 'cause that's still the same logic

01:53:01.740 | of sacrifice now for later financial reward,

01:53:04.220 | which then has an exchange value

01:53:05.660 | of some ambiguous, you know, amount in the future.

01:53:09.060 | That one didn't motivate kids or students

01:53:11.980 | to want to deeply learn that. - Don't tell the philanthropists that.

01:53:14.740 | - Universities depend heavily on philanthropy,

01:53:16.580 | especially nowadays, and we're grateful to them

01:53:19.820 | that they support so much good work.

01:53:21.340 | So you're saying that it makes sense

01:53:23.460 | that there needs to be some component of self-interest,

01:53:25.660 | right, like Jobs loved design, right?

01:53:29.020 | Presumably folks like Elon and others

01:53:34.020 | love the mechanics of what they do,

01:53:36.260 | building rockets, building electric cars,

01:53:38.860 | and things like that.

01:53:39.780 | But then this pro-social thing,

01:53:41.340 | the idea that the world could be better and different

01:53:44.780 | with these things in them.

01:53:46.500 | - Yeah, if you did the work right.

01:53:48.540 | I mean, a good example is my friend, Danielle Kretik,

01:53:51.740 | who ran Empathy Lab at Google for a while,

01:53:54.660 | and before that worked at Apple and other places.

01:53:58.420 | You know, you could think that designing products

01:54:00.740 | at a large tech company is purely about

01:54:02.700 | is that product gonna sell a lot,

01:54:04.540 | make a lot of money, et cetera,

01:54:05.740 | and that's obviously part of the value

01:54:07.260 | for the shareholders and so on.

01:54:09.180 | But, you know, her philosophy was always,

01:54:11.420 | okay, well, what's gonna happen with the user?

01:54:14.100 | What does the user need?

01:54:16.060 | Is their life gonna be better with this product?

01:54:18.380 | And that often led to design choices

01:54:20.820 | that made the product even better and more profitable.

01:54:24.220 | And I think there are a lot of examples of that

01:54:25.860 | where, you know, when the team is trying

01:54:30.020 | to create something that is high quality,

01:54:32.780 | but with integrity and ethics

01:54:34.220 | that are gonna benefit people,

01:54:36.060 | people are willing to put in extra hours.

01:54:38.140 | They're willing to solve a puzzle, do better work.

01:54:41.980 | I think there are a lot of examples of that.

01:54:45.140 | That's on the product design side.

01:54:46.660 | I also wanna talk about the management side.

01:54:48.300 | So one of the people I followed for my book

01:54:50.300 | is a manager at a company, she was at Microsoft,

01:54:53.020 | now she's at a place called ServiceNow,

01:54:55.380 | and I just studied how she mentored young employees.

01:54:58.380 | Her name is Steph Okamoto,

01:55:00.620 | and she has this great story

01:55:03.540 | about a really awesome 25-ish employee,

01:55:08.540 | 25-year-old-ish employee showed up

01:55:11.500 | and had come from teaching, Teach for America,

01:55:13.780 | and now is in HR at Microsoft.

01:55:16.300 | And Steph could immediately tell, her name is Saloni,

01:55:20.940 | she's gonna be bored by her regular job.

01:55:22.860 | She's gonna be able to do more than what she had to do.

01:55:26.460 | But as a manager, you can't say as the first thing,

01:55:29.140 | you need to do twice your job for the same amount of pay.

01:55:31.140 | That's like not a good management philosophy.

01:55:33.260 | So instead, it was a conversation.

01:55:34.700 | All right, what's a contribution you wanna make

01:55:37.380 | to the company, where in making that, above and beyond,

01:55:40.980 | you're gonna learn a new skill

01:55:42.100 | that's gonna help you move up the ladder, right?

01:55:44.900 | So that in your next performance review,

01:55:46.940 | you're gonna look like a superstar,

01:55:48.780 | like a total over-performer.

01:55:50.780 | And so at the time,

01:55:51.620 | they were running global manager development.

01:55:53.740 | And so what they decided was,

01:55:57.140 | don't just deliver the programs well,

01:56:00.260 | which Steph thought she could do well,

01:56:03.740 | but also create a dashboard to track everyone's progress.

01:56:06.900 | So every new hire,

01:56:08.700 | they would know where they are in the management process.

01:56:10.580 | And it was global during the pandemic,

01:56:12.580 | so kind of a complicated time.

01:56:14.540 | Anyway, she did her regular job really well

01:56:16.860 | and created this whole dashboard,

01:56:18.220 | which brought value to the company, big contribution.

01:56:21.480 | But then when it came time for performance evaluations,

01:56:24.420 | she could say, you're already performing

01:56:26.100 | at a level, two levels up.

01:56:27.820 | That gave her promotional velocity.

01:56:29.740 | She moved up, she left the company for a while,

01:56:31.820 | now is the chief of staff HR at Microsoft, right?

01:56:34.460 | Kind of in line to lead Microsoft.

01:56:37.360 | And then what about Steph?

01:56:38.900 | Well, Steph's team overperformed, which was incentivized.

01:56:42.140 | But then she gets to go home saying like,

01:56:44.100 | I use my time as a manager to change someone's life.

01:56:47.180 | And that brings her so much joy.

01:56:49.500 | And it's just so much fun as a teacher

01:56:53.860 | to have some of our time with young people

01:56:58.340 | lead them on a path they wouldn't have been on otherwise.

01:57:01.400 | It is a total blast to mentor someone

01:57:04.060 | and change their lives.

01:57:05.620 | So I think that's a good example of,

01:57:07.760 | it's in everyone's long-term self-interest

01:57:10.140 | to contribute to both the company and the people around you.

01:57:13.500 | But no one's being a martyr.

01:57:15.700 | They're not really, also everyone's compensated.

01:57:19.340 | So you need to think about, of course,

01:57:20.600 | is the company gonna pay you if you help others improve?

01:57:24.640 | And there's important questions that we asked there.

01:57:27.160 | But I just think that's a good example

01:57:28.340 | where we have a false psychotomy

01:57:30.420 | of it's either good for me or I'm a martyr helping others.

01:57:34.220 | But like the best work is both.

01:57:36.580 | And then it feels awesome

01:57:38.300 | 'cause you both change people's lives

01:57:40.420 | and you're compensated for it.

01:57:41.820 | And that's great.

01:57:42.660 | Certainly has been my experience

01:57:46.740 | that doing things that I love,

01:57:49.060 | like learning and organizing and distributing information

01:57:53.840 | with the specific intention of people benefiting from it,

01:57:57.440 | should they choose to use it or apply it or think about it,

01:58:01.900 | is the best of both worlds.

01:58:03.820 | - Yeah. - Certainly.

01:58:04.860 | Let's talk about this other phenotype,

01:58:06.820 | the people that, and they do serve a role in the world,

01:58:12.820 | folks whose sole purpose seems to be to critique,

01:58:18.520 | to identify errors.

01:58:19.860 | And I think in the case of catching

01:58:22.060 | real fundamental flaws and stuff play a key role.

01:58:26.560 | We need those, right?

01:58:27.400 | - Yeah, and it's kind of unfair that as a scientific field,

01:58:30.560 | we force a small group of people

01:58:32.640 | to have to police everybody else's work.

01:58:34.320 | Ideally, they wouldn't have to do that job.

01:58:36.440 | And so there's a lot of value in the people

01:58:38.320 | who have developed very honest

01:58:40.000 | and high integrity tools to find mistakes.

01:58:42.000 | - Yeah, I think some of the AI tools

01:58:43.660 | for finding errors, at least in data sets.

01:58:48.560 | - Right, like the images in a neuroscience study

01:58:50.500 | where you can tell that the images have been altered.

01:58:52.560 | - Or plots. - Yeah.

01:58:53.640 | - Like I remember a few years back,

01:58:55.120 | the Reinhard Schoen cases of the,

01:58:57.200 | he was like this wunderkind who published,

01:58:59.440 | I was like crazy numbers,

01:59:00.720 | like eight or 10 papers in science and nature per year.

01:59:04.920 | And then I think it was actually similarities

01:59:07.760 | in the noise, the random, in quotes, noise plots.

01:59:11.000 | - Oh, the error bars.

01:59:11.840 | - That eventually led to the understanding

01:59:15.480 | that there was data duplication or something.

01:59:18.840 | Anyway, I don't remember how it went.

01:59:20.540 | Yeah, it's important to correct

01:59:21.740 | the literature that way, right?

01:59:23.540 | But then there seems to be, at least online,

01:59:26.420 | and on social media, there seems to be

01:59:28.300 | a kind of a short-term incentive,

01:59:30.580 | I have to imagine there's some incentive,

01:59:31.900 | for people just being really critical.

01:59:33.780 | Like I was thinking about this the other day,

01:59:36.080 | what kind of mindset would one have

01:59:40.060 | to just randomly go put a nasty comment on social media?

01:59:44.180 | Like if you just think about it,

01:59:45.100 | not about an issue you're particularly vexed by

01:59:47.600 | or somebody's stance on, like that makes sense, right?

01:59:49.740 | People get aggravated and they're like, there they were.

01:59:52.920 | But just think about the mindset there.

01:59:55.200 | Like, oh, you've got your life, you have time,

01:59:58.060 | and you're going to go like say mean things, right?

02:00:01.740 | Like to me, it's just inconceivable to do that online,

02:00:05.900 | like to go and just post that stuff.

02:00:07.260 | But clearly there's something,

02:00:09.500 | there's some incentive built there.

02:00:11.820 | And I don't think this is a new thing.

02:00:13.220 | I'm guessing that before we had online culture

02:00:16.220 | within medieval societies,

02:00:17.800 | and these elements exist within us,

02:00:20.860 | and that there must be some reward,

02:00:25.520 | they must feel some reward.

02:00:27.680 | But it's not generative, it's not building society.

02:00:31.220 | When appropriately placed, I guess we're saying,

02:00:33.700 | it provides a corrective mechanism.

02:00:36.920 | But what do you think that's about?

02:00:39.260 | And is there any literature on this kind of thing?

02:00:42.240 | - Yeah, well, not the exact example

02:00:45.160 | of being a total jerk online.

02:00:49.960 | I mean, I can't imagine doing that 'cause who has the time?

02:00:54.960 | I mean, I have four kids and like coach baseball.

02:00:58.440 | I don't know how I'm gonna like police other people,

02:01:01.760 | unless it's relevant to my work.

02:01:03.240 | And I think someone's like not having integrity

02:01:05.920 | in what they're doing.

02:01:06.740 | And I'm like, you guys are being sloppy.

02:01:07.980 | And I might say that.

02:01:09.560 | But what I find compelling is a beautiful new book

02:01:14.560 | by Mary Murphy called "Cultures of Growth,"

02:01:16.800 | who was trained at Stanford under Claude Steele,

02:01:19.880 | was also trained by Carol Dweck,

02:01:21.760 | just came out a week ago,

02:01:23.840 | and it's getting tons of great press.

02:01:26.200 | And in her work, what she finds is that fixed mindset

02:01:29.600 | can be a cultural variable, like a more leadership variable,

02:01:34.600 | not just in the mind of the individual.

02:01:36.640 | And when that's the culture,

02:01:38.720 | then she finds people are more willing to try

02:01:42.320 | to make everyone else look like an idiot

02:01:47.080 | so that you don't get attacked.

02:01:49.540 | That's the summary finding.

02:01:51.720 | And there's a kind of deflection strategy

02:01:54.920 | that if I trash other people for being idiots,

02:01:58.760 | then it'll make other people think twice

02:02:01.500 | before they mess with me.

02:02:03.480 | And so, but it creates the very toxic culture

02:02:06.160 | that they're trying to escape,

02:02:07.480 | which is the threat of their own intelligence being attacked.

02:02:11.160 | So it's totally counterproductive.

02:02:12.920 | And she uses the example of Microsoft

02:02:15.720 | under the Ballmer era,

02:02:17.120 | where you'd go into meetings and you'd get yelled at

02:02:19.880 | if you made any mistake and you weren't allowed to talk,

02:02:22.160 | and they would literally flip over a table and yell at you,

02:02:25.120 | and people would leave the room crying.

02:02:27.080 | And there's a lot of accounts of this

02:02:31.680 | as a very public information.

02:02:33.200 | And one of the things Satya Nadella did when he came in

02:02:36.560 | was to change what he said.

02:02:39.760 | He said, "We have a culture of know-it-alls,

02:02:42.200 | "and we need a culture of learn-it-alls."

02:02:44.680 | And has the virtue of ending in the same word,

02:02:48.520 | so it's pithy, but I kind of like that idea.

02:02:52.040 | And so Mary describes how,

02:02:54.200 | in this culture of genius, she calls it,

02:02:58.880 | you don't just get the hypercriticism,

02:03:00.720 | you then, the consequence of that is unethical behavior

02:03:04.640 | where you hide mistakes or lie about things

02:03:07.320 | because you're worried about being outed as not a genius.

02:03:10.880 | So the culture of fearing mistakes gives rise

02:03:14.240 | to the kind of unethical hiding type of culture.

02:03:17.520 | Now, the layperson could draw a line between that

02:03:21.160 | and like the Zune and Bing and other like failed products.

02:03:24.160 | You know, I'll leave that to organizational scholars

02:03:26.720 | to decide if that's the story.

02:03:28.320 | But at least the cautionary tale is like Boeing

02:03:31.320 | is another example where Calhoun, when he came in as a CEO,

02:03:36.160 | changed the incentive scheme at Boeing

02:03:38.880 | to be something called stack ranking,

02:03:41.080 | which is where you fire the bottom 10%

02:03:42.960 | every six months or a year within your group.

02:03:45.760 | So if your group might be higher performing on average

02:03:50.280 | than some other group,

02:03:51.240 | but the bottom 10% of your group are getting fired.

02:03:53.960 | Okay, and this goes back to GE, it's a Jack Welch policy.

02:03:58.000 | Anyway, so that happened two years ago,

02:04:00.640 | and look what's happened in the last two years.

02:04:01.880 | Now he's out, right?

02:04:02.720 | You have all these mistakes

02:04:04.160 | where people aren't going and finding the problems.

02:04:08.120 | Now, again, I'm not at Boeing.

02:04:09.400 | I can't, you know, as a scientist,

02:04:12.000 | I can't say that that is the cause.

02:04:13.980 | But the argument in Mary's book

02:04:16.260 | is that when you have organizations

02:04:17.760 | like that culture of genius, you hide mistakes,

02:04:21.280 | and then you have unethical behavior

02:04:23.840 | in order to conceal those, and then you don't fix them.

02:04:28.360 | But in what she calls a culture of growth,

02:04:30.780 | you're like willing to examine mistakes

02:04:33.440 | because they're not indicative of a sign that,

02:04:36.040 | they're not indicative of your overall inability to do well.

02:04:38.920 | They're like part of the process of growing as a group.

02:04:41.880 | - Super interesting.

02:04:43.640 | You said Mary Murphy cultures of growth?

02:04:45.600 | - Yeah.

02:04:46.440 | - Interesting.

02:04:47.260 | It seems everybody worked with Carol Dweck,

02:04:48.960 | you, Claude Steele, Mary Murphy.

02:04:51.200 | - I have a small friendship group.

02:04:52.680 | - That's an amazing group.

02:04:54.040 | - By that, I mean I have no friends

02:04:55.160 | except people I work with.

02:04:57.640 | - You've clearly landed in a great group, nonetheless.

02:05:01.380 | This is very interesting.

02:05:03.840 | So people who are hypercritical

02:05:07.120 | or spend an enormous amount of time being critical

02:05:09.200 | just for being critical sake are masking,

02:05:12.760 | they're cloaking themselves.

02:05:14.720 | It's a form of self-protection, yeah.

02:05:17.100 | - That's their SR, that's the claim.

02:05:19.800 | And I think there's some pretty good

02:05:21.320 | suggestive evidence of that.

02:05:22.600 | - Yeah, it'd be interesting if online,

02:05:24.580 | like everyone had to put some of their CV

02:05:26.480 | in their masthead, you know?

02:05:27.640 | It's sort of like what have you done as you're attacking?

02:05:30.520 | Because that would differentiate the people

02:05:32.680 | like Elizabeth Bick, for instance,

02:05:34.220 | who I think that's her name,

02:05:35.260 | who's considered one of the best data evaluation people,

02:05:40.260 | right, she runs her Twitter account,

02:05:44.320 | is they essentially, she shows errors in papers.

02:05:46.440 | And I think the goal there is to offer people

02:05:49.160 | the opportunity to not necessarily retract,

02:05:51.220 | although in some cases retract,

02:05:52.280 | but to alter the papers, write errata and addendums

02:05:55.200 | and things that to say, you know,

02:05:57.400 | so that's like the appropriate use of critique, right?

02:06:01.160 | She's not doing it to cloak anything else, presumably.

02:06:04.080 | As opposed to people that just run around

02:06:06.080 | trying to poke holes in everything that they see.

02:06:08.360 | It's cynicism, really.

02:06:09.320 | It's kind of an like online cynicism.

02:06:12.000 | - Well, I think it's easier to be skeptical

02:06:14.560 | than it is to like eventually believe in something

02:06:18.640 | after being convinced.

02:06:20.480 | And so I think there's a default toward,

02:06:23.640 | well, I don't believe that.

02:06:25.080 | And we get that sometimes with growth mindset.

02:06:27.960 | They're like, well, what do you mean

02:06:28.800 | a 50 minute intervention has effect?

02:06:30.360 | Well, okay, but all the things you're complaining about

02:06:33.160 | are things that we addressed in the study.

02:06:35.340 | So at some point you have to just say

02:06:38.040 | that you believe in the process of science or you don't.

02:06:40.960 | And I understand if there were additional studies

02:06:43.800 | that didn't follow the process of science

02:06:45.360 | or left big holes to be addressed.

02:06:46.840 | But at some point it's like, well, we did what you asked for.

02:06:49.520 | So I don't know what to tell you, I'm sorry.

02:06:52.120 | - Yeah, I know the growth mindset field

02:06:53.600 | has come under a bit of, not attack, but critique.

02:06:58.120 | I know this 'cause in researching the solo episode

02:07:00.240 | and this one, one always has to be careful

02:07:03.320 | about relying on Wikipedia too much

02:07:04.880 | because it's the use of editors, legacy editors.

02:07:06.960 | And I'll go on record saying that there's a ton of bias

02:07:09.400 | in even within the legacy editors.

02:07:11.160 | I just, by the way, I'm not,

02:07:12.200 | just got my page vandalized even more,

02:07:13.860 | but I've sort of given up at this point

02:07:15.760 | because things are kludged together out of context.

02:07:18.280 | And so I like, if I look at growth mindset on Wikipedia,

02:07:21.120 | there's a lot of supportive evidence

02:07:22.480 | and then you can get like two paragraphs of critique.

02:07:25.880 | And so for the uninformed, they don't know how to weigh that

02:07:29.320 | which is why we basically need a new system.

02:07:31.080 | - Well, they kind of want to say on one hand,

02:07:32.780 | on the other hand, but then-

02:07:35.160 | - Yeah, and there's no real weighting.

02:07:37.100 | We don't know the expertise of these people

02:07:38.760 | where they're gleaning from blogs or whatnot.

02:07:40.680 | And look, I think it's a great concept.

02:07:42.280 | I think that it's just, to me at least,

02:07:47.200 | it seems that there's an overwhelming amount of evidence

02:07:49.060 | that growth mindset and related mindsets

02:07:51.280 | that we've talked about today have immense value.

02:07:53.320 | I think it's also good to have competing opinions

02:07:56.000 | in any field, but I think as we're kind of parsing

02:08:01.000 | motivation for people that really want to make it,

02:08:06.480 | I don't know, feel their best, do their best,

02:08:09.900 | make a contribution to the world.

02:08:11.600 | It seems like the default state that the fast food,

02:08:14.000 | the junk food, the Slurpee, the Twizzlers

02:08:17.840 | and the Snickers bar there, I just got myself

02:08:19.840 | in more trouble by naming name brands.

02:08:21.720 | The junk food is in hiding by critiquing.

02:08:26.720 | There's, I think, maybe there's the man in the arena thing,

02:08:33.560 | that it's easy to be a spectator.

02:08:36.320 | It's hard to try and do something real.

02:08:38.920 | - Yeah, I think that going back to this question of like,

02:08:41.640 | are you willing to reveal your mistakes or not?

02:08:44.240 | Mary writes a lot about great exemplars in her book,

02:08:48.480 | Jennifer Doudna, who's developed CRISPR,

02:08:52.160 | famously has a lab that's hypercritical in the lab,

02:08:55.400 | but then the work stands well in public.

02:08:58.560 | And it's someone who could have every incentive

02:09:01.920 | to just churn out as many papers as possible

02:09:04.400 | and for profit, et cetera.

02:09:06.080 | But instead, and I've actually interviewed

02:09:08.240 | one of the postdocs from that lab,

02:09:09.660 | and it's just like an amazing scientific enterprise,

02:09:12.420 | that I write about this astrophysics lab at Vanderbilt

02:09:18.120 | with a guy named Kayvon Stassen, who is just a legend.

02:09:23.120 | He is, as you know, a lot of people would be thrilled

02:09:26.520 | to have one nature paper in their lives,

02:09:28.480 | like he had five last year, right?

02:09:30.560 | But what he does is mentor

02:09:35.560 | probably the most diverse group of physicists

02:09:38.360 | in all of America.

02:09:40.200 | And he developed what are called bridge programs,

02:09:42.860 | where students, often graduate students of color,

02:09:45.480 | students who had low GRE scores, low socioeconomic status,

02:09:49.560 | they're pre-admitted to a master's program in physics

02:09:52.680 | at a local HBCU, Historically Black College University.

02:09:56.080 | And then if they do well,

02:09:57.160 | then they're pre-admitted to the physics PhD program.

02:10:00.320 | And it's a now well-known idea,

02:10:02.520 | but the basic concept is in the old days,

02:10:05.520 | you look at just your GRE scores and say,

02:10:08.320 | are you smart enough to be a physicist or not?

02:10:11.160 | And what he argued was that the coin of the realm

02:10:13.440 | for professional physics is publishing professional physics.

02:10:16.480 | And if you come into a lab and you can analyze data

02:10:19.040 | and write a paper and publish it in a journal,

02:10:21.280 | then you're a physicist.

02:10:22.720 | So he has people come for two years,

02:10:24.560 | regardless of your GREs,

02:10:26.080 | but as long as you have kind of grit and resilience

02:10:28.360 | and a drive, as you're saying, and let's them work in labs.

02:10:31.640 | And it turns out about 85% of students

02:10:34.920 | end up getting admitted to the PhD program,

02:10:37.680 | and then they do well.

02:10:39.360 | So the first ever black first author

02:10:41.160 | on a nature paper in physics is his student, right?

02:10:44.400 | So like a ridiculously high proportion

02:10:46.240 | of racial diversity at NASA

02:10:47.840 | are graduates of his program, his laboratory, right?

02:10:50.920 | - And his lab is at Vanderbilt?

02:10:52.160 | - His lab's at Vanderbilt.

02:10:53.280 | It's called the Vanderbilt-Fisk Graduate Program,

02:10:58.160 | interesting bridge program.

02:10:59.480 | At any rate, for my book, I interviewed him

02:11:01.880 | and I was like, well, that's your admission.

02:11:04.160 | So what happens, there's still five years

02:11:06.360 | when people have to learn to be a physicist.

02:11:08.520 | And every day they have a different thing they do.

02:11:10.840 | So Monday's a journal club, Tuesday's a coffee,

02:11:13.640 | but the lifeblood of the lab is Wednesday's lab meetings,

02:11:18.160 | where you, as a trainee,

02:11:20.040 | put up your figures in your paper in Overleaf,

02:11:22.840 | which is like a WYSIWYG editor for scientific papers,

02:11:26.680 | and everyone critiques your stats, your tables,

02:11:29.760 | your figures, your narrative,

02:11:31.840 | and everyone's just looking at your work and critiquing it.

02:11:33.760 | And these are all top physicists in the lab.

02:11:36.160 | And that sounds terrifying, and it kind of is initially,

02:11:39.560 | but then by the time they present at the conference,

02:11:42.240 | they've heard everything.

02:11:44.000 | And they're doing that far before

02:11:46.760 | they're spending three months doubting themselves,

02:11:49.840 | unable to complete the paper, et cetera, et cetera.

02:11:52.000 | It's like, you just have to do that.

02:11:54.040 | You have to face that fear.

02:11:55.680 | So it's very demanding, but it's super supportive.

02:11:59.040 | And they don't pull punches

02:12:00.400 | in terms of the critique of the content,

02:12:03.360 | but it's never in question

02:12:05.480 | whether the comments are coming from a place

02:12:07.760 | of believing your potential to be a great physicist.

02:12:11.440 | And what I like about that is that you're not like,

02:12:13.920 | it doesn't feel good at that time

02:12:15.600 | to be critiqued publicly, but it feels necessary.

02:12:19.920 | And you kind of know that you will measure up

02:12:21.720 | at the end of that process and that it's formative.

02:12:24.840 | I think that's fundamentally what a lot of people,

02:12:27.600 | I think, misunderstand about what it takes

02:12:29.320 | to help someone become better.

02:12:30.840 | They think either I have to be a monster to critique you,

02:12:34.360 | or I just have to pull my punches.

02:12:36.360 | But you can be like Stassen's lab

02:12:38.560 | and be super demanding and super supportive,

02:12:40.400 | and then people grow.

02:12:42.120 | - Sounds like the key thing is to make sure

02:12:43.880 | that one is gleaning critique from the correct sources.

02:12:48.880 | And this is one of the major issues

02:12:51.160 | with kind of just open online critique.

02:12:54.160 | While attractive because of the lack of barriers,

02:12:57.800 | it means that you have to be a selective filter, right?

02:13:02.800 | I mean, you can see this in online comments.

02:13:06.240 | People, some people are very impacted by them.

02:13:09.300 | And then other people say,

02:13:10.140 | "Oh yeah, well, that's some person in a basement."

02:13:11.880 | Or that's a, you know, like, "What have they done?"

02:13:14.080 | And, you know, but some people just have

02:13:15.640 | a thinner skin than others.

02:13:17.800 | And, but when you're in a community

02:13:21.320 | where clearly everyone cares about the mission,

02:13:23.500 | the outcome, the physics, et cetera,

02:13:25.380 | then you can put trust in the critique.

02:13:30.360 | By the way, I find it really interesting

02:13:31.720 | that this lab at Vanderbilt is focused mainly

02:13:35.440 | on motivation and drive as the key thing,

02:13:38.920 | as opposed to some standardized score metric

02:13:42.680 | or something or prior experience.

02:13:45.040 | When I was starting my lab as a junior professor

02:13:47.520 | back before being at Stanford at UCSD,

02:13:50.120 | UC San Diego, a senior colleague of mine said,

02:13:52.480 | "When picking students,

02:13:53.960 | "you have to really evaluate many things, right?

02:13:59.920 | "Ethics, how they do the work, et cetera."

02:14:01.760 | But the main thing is just drive.

02:14:05.760 | Are they driven?

02:14:06.600 | - Yeah.

02:14:07.440 | - And yeah, that turned out to be the case.

02:14:10.080 | - Yeah, I think it's hard.

02:14:11.000 | I mean, it's just a case by case decision.

02:14:13.440 | You know, like you don't pick that many students

02:14:16.480 | over your career, so you don't get to really learn.

02:14:19.240 | But I think, I had a colleague when I started

02:14:21.920 | who was like, just told me they just sort by GRE right away.

02:14:26.920 | - Just by standardized score.

02:14:28.440 | - By standardized test score.

02:14:29.280 | I was like, "Well, I would never do that."

02:14:30.880 | He's like, "How about this?

02:14:32.440 | "How about you take all the low GRE students

02:14:35.600 | "and I take all the high ones

02:14:36.600 | "and see whose students do better?"

02:14:38.400 | - Yeah, I feel like standardized tests in some cases

02:14:41.680 | are necessary but not sufficient.

02:14:43.480 | - Yeah.

02:14:44.320 | - That there's this other thing that's like nuance

02:14:46.080 | and I mean, coming up with great experimental ideas

02:14:49.320 | or I mean, there's just so many examples of people

02:14:51.160 | that just weren't good at standardized tests

02:14:52.760 | that just kicked ass in their various fields.

02:14:55.560 | - Yeah.

02:14:56.400 | - But there is a correlation there, typically.

02:14:58.000 | - I mean, I think my issue, in a perfect world,

02:15:02.000 | standardized test scores would be great for equity

02:15:04.400 | because there would be people

02:15:05.840 | who didn't get great information in high school

02:15:09.000 | about where to go to college

02:15:10.600 | or started out in the wrong major

02:15:12.720 | and eventually figured out, don't have great GPAs

02:15:15.040 | or didn't go to a great college

02:15:16.560 | but they have tremendous ability and they deserve a shot.

02:15:20.400 | And so I think that argument for GREs makes a ton of sense.

02:15:24.960 | The problem is that you can just pay

02:15:27.120 | to have someone teach you how to take the GRE

02:15:28.960 | and your scores can go up a huge percentage.

02:15:31.280 | And so the GREs end up being a proxy

02:15:35.400 | either for the training you got now

02:15:37.640 | or it's a proxy for how good

02:15:39.000 | your 10th grade math teacher was

02:15:40.280 | 'cause it's mostly testing 10th grade geometry.

02:15:42.800 | And so again, that's gonna be a function

02:15:44.600 | of what neighborhood you grew up in

02:15:45.640 | and how good your high school teachers were.

02:15:47.480 | So what I don't love is like,

02:15:49.680 | I would love test scores if they were about

02:15:53.160 | meritocracy and equality or opportunity

02:15:56.360 | but they often end up being just a proxy

02:15:59.320 | for kind of advantages you already had.

02:16:02.280 | So ultimately though for Kavon,

02:16:05.400 | setting aside the GRE in physics was like a hypothesis.

02:16:11.560 | Ultimately the proof that needed to be in the pudding was,

02:16:15.600 | did the students admitted under an alternative means

02:16:18.000 | end up producing great physics?

02:16:20.160 | And in that case, the answer is absolutely yes.

02:16:23.240 | And so for me, it's like, yes, consider it or not.

02:16:26.280 | For admissions,

02:16:27.280 | but what are you doing with the students when they arrive?

02:16:29.400 | How are you mentoring and how are you training?

02:16:31.520 | And how are you breaking the link

02:16:32.880 | between whatever advantages might've had in the past

02:16:36.040 | and the work that they can do in the future

02:16:37.680 | if they're driven?

02:16:39.040 | - We've been talking a lot about data and other people.

02:16:44.440 | I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you a little bit about you.

02:16:47.320 | - Sure.

02:16:48.280 | - No pressure to share anything you don't wanna share,

02:16:50.880 | but of all the things you could study,

02:16:54.160 | of all the contributions you could make,

02:16:55.580 | you decided to focus on this notion of mindsets

02:16:58.760 | and essentially trying to figure out

02:17:02.520 | how people can be their best

02:17:04.640 | for the greatest good of the world.

02:17:07.160 | This would be the way I would describe it.

02:17:09.260 | Is that just inherent in your wiring

02:17:12.840 | or was there something about your experience coming up

02:17:15.380 | that makes you value that in particular?

02:17:18.240 | Or did you happen to just resonate with Carol and folks

02:17:25.480 | and feel like, "Hey, this would be a great place

02:17:26.900 | "to place my efforts?"

02:17:27.860 | - Yeah, well, that's an impossible question to answer

02:17:30.340 | 'cause I have no counterfactuals.

02:17:32.500 | So a real causal inference person wouldn't allow me.

02:17:35.060 | This is a digression, but so my only real precocious skill

02:17:42.020 | is that I can do the splits,

02:17:43.940 | which sounds like a weird thing to do,

02:17:45.100 | but it's my party trick at weddings.

02:17:47.660 | - You always could?

02:17:49.260 | Or you did gymnastics as a kid?

02:17:51.140 | - I did, but not seriously, not for very long.

02:17:54.300 | And one time someone, another academic,

02:17:57.600 | he was like, "You can do the splits, that's super weird."

02:17:59.160 | I'm like, "Yes, it is weird."

02:18:00.660 | And he was like, "How can you do that?"

02:18:03.360 | I was like, "Well, as a kid, I was in gymnastics

02:18:05.060 | "and then I stretched all the time."

02:18:07.040 | And he was like, "That is the dumbest causal story

02:18:10.600 | "I've ever heard in my life.

02:18:11.600 | "There's no way that that is the single,

02:18:13.140 | "even the most important cause."

02:18:15.520 | And I think about that as like,

02:18:18.160 | my whole life I've been posed with this puzzle

02:18:20.760 | of why can I do this weird thing?

02:18:22.920 | And I had told myself that.

02:18:24.120 | And I don't think that's even remotely true.

02:18:25.980 | I think that's for whatever reason,

02:18:27.360 | it's just kind of developed.

02:18:28.680 | So I can't fully answer your question

02:18:30.200 | about why I got super interested in this work.

02:18:33.740 | But I will say that out of college,

02:18:37.520 | I thought I was gonna be a lawyer.

02:18:39.760 | And that's because my college major

02:18:42.160 | was something called the Program of Liberal Studies,

02:18:44.480 | which is a great books major

02:18:46.560 | where you read the great works of history and philosophy

02:18:48.960 | and stuff. - Amazing.

02:18:49.880 | - Yeah, and then you read them in order.

02:18:51.800 | And so, and there's no lectures allowed.

02:18:54.840 | And you can't even read the introduction to the book.

02:18:57.200 | So you just have to like read Hume

02:18:59.040 | and pretend like you can understand it

02:19:00.800 | and Kant and stuff like that.

02:19:02.180 | And you argue with other 19 year olds

02:19:04.120 | about what it might mean.

02:19:05.580 | And I loved it, it was great.

02:19:08.500 | I still don't know what Kant was talking about,

02:19:10.360 | but I'll figure that out at some point.

02:19:12.520 | But then PLS, the joke is probably law school,

02:19:16.640 | which is the answer to the question of

02:19:17.880 | what are you gonna do with this liberal arts major?

02:19:20.920 | And so I thought that's what I'll do.

02:19:22.720 | But at the last second, I just had a change of heart.

02:19:25.960 | And so I went and taught in a really low income school

02:19:28.980 | in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

02:19:30.800 | And I ended up being the six through eight English teacher,

02:19:34.280 | the K through eight basketball coach.

02:19:36.080 | I coached, or K through eight PE coach,

02:19:39.800 | and then I coached basketball and ran the book club.

02:19:41.760 | And I like ran the cat five cables

02:19:44.860 | to fix the internet in the attic, you know.

02:19:47.560 | And it was great.

02:19:48.840 | I worked like 100 hours a week.

02:19:50.200 | I made $12,000 a year.

02:19:52.120 | It's a lot of fun, had a great time.

02:19:53.920 | And at the end of it, I thought,

02:19:56.000 | now I'm gonna go to law school.

02:19:57.520 | And when I was doing my applications,

02:20:00.340 | a friend of mine died of cancer.

02:20:04.120 | They got sarcoma.

02:20:04.940 | It was real quick, it was like six months.

02:20:06.960 | And we all went back to college

02:20:10.640 | and were there for a service.

02:20:13.040 | And I remember being in the airport

02:20:15.840 | and I picked up Jeffrey Sachs' "End of Poverty,"

02:20:20.480 | which is a popular book at the time.

02:20:22.840 | And just thinking like, here's a guy who like,

02:20:25.360 | I don't know, was doing something pretty mundane,

02:20:26.960 | macroeconomics, but he was spending all his time

02:20:30.040 | talking world leaders in other countries

02:20:33.400 | out of crushing debt that was causing poverty.

02:20:36.520 | And it's like taking whatever precocious skill he had

02:20:39.400 | and using it for others.

02:20:41.440 | And I thought, law's not my Jeff Sachs skill.

02:20:45.200 | What I do know how to do is motivate teenagers.

02:20:48.640 | Like that's how I spend all my time.

02:20:50.840 | And so I thought I just wanna do,

02:20:52.920 | I wanna do the science of motivating young people

02:20:55.640 | like as much as possible.

02:20:57.480 | So then I went to Stanford.

02:20:58.440 | I'd never taken stats before, never taken psychology,

02:21:01.520 | but I just like tried to become like a wild man

02:21:05.080 | learning as much as I could.

02:21:06.760 | And thankfully in my third year,

02:21:08.420 | Carol started working with me

02:21:10.360 | and like, and we kind of haven't looked back since.

02:21:13.560 | - What an awesome story.

02:21:15.080 | So totally mission-driven and-

02:21:17.920 | - And post-hoc causal inference.

02:21:19.280 | So who knows if that's actually the story,

02:21:20.840 | but those sequence of events did occur though.

02:21:23.160 | - Post-hoc causal inference.

02:21:24.560 | I guess you can map onto that famous Steve Jobs

02:21:27.360 | commencement speech at Stanford

02:21:28.640 | where he's basically saying you can't connect the dots

02:21:31.680 | going forward only backwards.

02:21:33.080 | So it all makes sense looking back.

02:21:34.600 | - Exactly.

02:21:35.440 | - This led to that, led to this, led to that.

02:21:37.200 | But going forward, we're kind of stumbling in the dark.

02:21:41.680 | - Well, I must say I and everyone else's are so grateful

02:21:46.420 | that you made that choice or those choices.

02:21:49.620 | Clearly the work you're doing is having a huge impact.

02:21:53.400 | I covered a few of your papers on the solo episode

02:21:55.700 | on growth mindset and you mentioned nature

02:21:58.480 | and the fact that most people don't publish there at all,

02:22:02.360 | let alone once or twice or several times in their career.

02:22:04.720 | You've had an amazing run lately

02:22:06.040 | and you just had this incredible arc of papers

02:22:10.500 | in this area of which can be distilled down to, I think,

02:22:14.080 | forgive me if this doesn't capture it all,

02:22:16.840 | but figuring out how people can be the best version

02:22:21.840 | of themselves for their own lives and for the world, right?

02:22:25.920 | I mean, that's essentially what we're talking about here.

02:22:27.960 | And I love the way you incorporate the neuroscience

02:22:29.940 | and the motivation literature

02:22:32.160 | and you're so good at attribution

02:22:34.440 | as something that we should all model ourselves around.

02:22:37.840 | It's really an incredible literature

02:22:40.200 | and I'm excited to read the book, 10 to 25.

02:22:43.960 | Genuinely excited.

02:22:45.040 | This notion of a mentor mindset

02:22:47.200 | and how we can bring out the best in ourselves and others.

02:22:50.240 | It's phenomenal that you're doing this work.

02:22:53.260 | Please keep going.

02:22:54.400 | And I'm speaking on behalf of myself and everyone else.

02:22:57.960 | I say, thanks for taking time

02:22:59.640 | out of your busy research schedule and teaching schedule

02:23:01.760 | to come here and teach millions of people

02:23:04.360 | about what you do and what they can do to be their best.

02:23:06.880 | So thank you so much.

02:23:08.440 | - Well, thanks.

02:23:09.280 | Well, we're just getting started and it was great to be here.

02:23:12.820 | I did, I missed baseball practice tonight.

02:23:15.720 | So not for me, but for nine-year-olds.

02:23:18.480 | - An apology to your nine-year-olds, plural?

02:23:20.800 | - Yeah.

02:23:21.620 | - Okay.

02:23:22.460 | Oh, 'cause there are many of them on the team.

02:23:23.840 | - Yeah, yeah.

02:23:24.680 | - Oh, okay.

02:23:25.500 | This is back in Austin.

02:23:26.340 | - Yeah.

02:23:27.160 | - Okay.

02:23:28.000 | When's the next game?

02:23:29.200 | - A couple, three or four weeks.

02:23:30.920 | So we have plenty of time.

02:23:32.320 | We're still learning how to throw and hit.

02:23:33.580 | We'll get there.

02:23:34.420 | - Well, depending on when this episode comes out,

02:23:35.680 | you can let me know if they won or lost and-

02:23:38.080 | - Doesn't matter. - My apologies to the team.

02:23:38.920 | - It's about the process.

02:23:39.740 | - That's right.

02:23:40.580 | That game is important.

02:23:43.000 | But I can assure you that the information

02:23:46.760 | that you've given us today is sure to make a huge difference

02:23:50.000 | in people's lives.

02:23:50.820 | So thank you so much.

02:23:51.840 | - Thanks for having me.

02:23:53.280 | - Thank you for joining me for today's discussion

02:23:55.200 | with Dr. David Yeager.

02:23:56.640 | To learn more about his research,

02:23:58.120 | to find links to his social media accounts,

02:24:00.320 | and to learn more about his upcoming book,

02:24:02.480 | "10 to 25, The Science of Motivating Young People,"

02:24:05.640 | simply go to the links in our show note captions.

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02:24:37.960 | Not so much on today's episode,

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02:25:53.000 | Thank you once again for joining me

02:25:54.320 | for today's discussion all about growth mindset

02:25:56.800 | and the stress can be performance-enhancing mindset

02:25:59.760 | with Dr. David Yeager.

02:26:01.280 | And last, but certainly not least,

02:26:03.520 | thank you for your interest in science.

02:26:05.460 | (upbeat music)

02:26:08.040 | (upbeat music)

Dr. David Yeager: How to Master Growth Mindset to Improve Performance

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